He looked over to the others. They were now gathered at the entrance to the cave around the roaring bonfire.
By the time he raised his gaze to the heavens again, he could clearly see the white shape, which now resembled a great cross. Another scream erupted from the thing, which began to descend as it circled around him. Lower and lower it dropped until he could clearly discern the long white feathers curled from the tips of the wings and a tail filled with streaming feathers like a peacock’s. There was a sparkle of gold from its head as it released another cry. Talons unfurled from its downy belly and its wings pointed straight up into the sky. It plummeted toward the lake as though preparing to snatch a fish from the waves, but opened those enormous wings at the very last moment and swooped upward before folding them to its sides and dropping onto its feet in the sand directly in front of Phoenix.
It was the most beautiful bird he could imagine, its silky feathers so white they generated an aura around it. The feathers were so thick it looked almost like a mammal in fresh winter growth, its beak appearing as a wide golden V in a scruff of snowy down. Its eyes were rimmed with black crescents, but it was the orbs themselves that drew his focus. They were nearly as white as the shimmering feathers, but cloudy as though made of crystal balls containing a thick mist.
It stood there, more than two feet tall with those long feathers trailing along the ground behind it. Cocking its head first one way and then the other, it opened that golden beak and let out a skree.
“Hi there,” Phoenix said, taking a tentative step forward. “What brings you to see me?”
The great white bird cocked its head again as though weighing his question. Slowly, the feathers on its crown rose like so many knives. It hopped forward in long strides until it was barely outside of his reach and looked directly up at him.
“Are you hungry?” Phoenix asked, looking back down at where he’d set his plate. There were only a couple stray beans on the tacky plate, but he would gladly share them. He was just about to head back for it when the bird let out a savage cry and opened its wings like a threatened goose.
Phoenix turned his head and brought his arms up in front of his face. Pinching his eyes shut, he prepared to throw himself to the ground.
Sharp pain lanced through his left forearm, forcing his eyes wide and a scream to his lips.
The large bird sat on his forearm. Talons curled nearly all the way around his arm just below the elbow, poking through the skin, which issued dribbling freshets of blood. It was so heavy he could barely keep his arm raised, but even the slightest movement made those wickedly sharp claws feel like they were sinking deeper into his flesh to carve through the bone. He looked up, his eyes matching the bird’s, and was drawn inside. The white mist swirled as though he’d stepped into a fog, gently peeling back until it revealed itself to be a blizzard of snow assaulting him from everywhere at once. Far below, the pine trees were beginning to don their winter coat of snow, the fields now splotchy with accumulation. The lush foothills faded away, replaced by well-spaced houses that grew closer and closer together as the eastern plains of the Rocky Mountains spread out to the horizon. The snow had quenched the last of the rampant fires, leaving only the smoldering, charred skeletons of the suburbs. Wafting smoke was the only thing moving about in the piles of rubble, the snowflakes turning to rain with the dwindling heat to muddy the earth with a paste of black soot.
With a scream resonating in his ears, he banked to the north, following the ragged edge of the crater surrounding downtown. Ponds formed where businesses had once stood, black as tar pits and steaming from the trapped heat of the earth underneath. The ground was scorched, though patches still glimmered from the melted glass fused to the piles of destruction. Following the line where complete vaporization faded to mere haphazard demolition, his vision soared continually eastward until what remained of the city was behind him and fields of thorny briars covered the ground. A small fire captured his gaze and he began to descend toward it. As it came into focus, he began to decipher the details. The flames crackled from a skull turned upside down and staked atop a length of wood, funneled into a thin stream of fire by the hole in the base through which the spinal cord had once passed. Beside it, the ground was trampled into a choppy mud crusted into what looked like frozen waves by the sheer amount of footprints marring it. In the vision, he swooped down until he was skimming over the ground, staring straight ahead to where a slanting tower of darkness rose from the rubble against the backdrop of the snowcapped mountains. Tangible waves of pain and suffering emanated from it, hitting him in the face with concussive force, drawing tears from the corners of his eyes.
More of the skull lanterns whizzed by to either side, illuminating the path every hundred yards or so like runway lights. The massive black tower grew taller and taller against the skyline, the night all-but-impregnable to the light of the moon, which was unable to permeate the churning masses of clouds and smoke. Reaching the eastern edge of the crater, this time they proceeded directly ahead, weaving through the maze of solid walls that had withstood the atomic blast, under collapsed overpasses and through channels formed by fallen buildings crumbled against each other. A sound like a leaking gas pipe reached his ears, growing louder and louder by the second until it overwhelmed him.
The closer they came to the tower, the darker the ground became beneath them until a ring of bonfires appeared around the base of the monolith, churning ash up into the atmosphere. It wasn’t until the flames began to cast their flickering light onto the ground that he realized it hadn’t been charcoaled earth they had been cruising over, but black bodies packed shoulder to shoulder. Thousands of them, all gathered around the building, cold amber eyes staring anxiously up at the structure.
Phoenix saw the sky as the bird soared higher and then landed on a mangled girder jutting from the wreckage of the adjacent building. From this vantage, he could see the minions stretching off to his right, swarming beneath him, and the face of the tower to his left. The deafening hissing ceased at once, leaving in its stead a silence that descended upon them like cellophane.
Clop.
Clop.
A figure appeared at the edge of the third story floor, his body the color of blood beneath a brown cloak. He sat high upon a steed draped with that same brown material, skeletal legs emerging from the tatters. The beast bucked beneath him, blasting twin plumes of fire from its nostrils. The rider held up his right fist, and a fervent hissing erupted from the Swarm, so loud Phoenix’s vision shook with the girder beneath the bird’s feet. Every one of the creatures beneath him came to frenzied life, moshing chaotically in a flurry of slashing claws, snapping jaws, and trilling dewlaps.
He averted his eyes in horror, his gaze rising toward the heavens until it reached the top floor of the skyscraper, where a pair of glowing golden eyes stared directly at him from under a black cowl that trapped the rest of the face in shadow.
Phoenix screamed and again he was standing on the beach with the enormous bird on his arm, talons carving through his flesh in search of solid footing. Their eyes parted and the mutated falcon leapt into the air, flapping with those long wings until it reached an outcropping on the stone face of the mountain, where it perched to stare out across the lake, nearly vanishing against the pale gray rock.
“They’re coming,” Phoenix whispered, allowing his bloody arm to fall to his side, ribbons of life spiraling around his wrist and over the back of his hand to drip from his fingertips.
Sprinting back toward the others down the shoreline, the wounds in his arm sealed themselves up like mouths closing over a secret.
“They’re coming!” he screamed, watching as their startled faces turned in his direction. “We’re out of time! They’re coming!”
V
ADAM STARED INTO HIS OWN FACE, LOOKING BACK AT HIM FROM THE WALL through hundreds of years of dust. It wasn’t a precise replica as though painted by a Renaissance master, but there was no denying the resemblance. The chalk had faded ov
er time, and he feared brushing away the dust on it might take the faint powdery residue with it, but he could still see it clearly enough. The eyes were a match. The hair, the skin. Everything, right down to the camouflaged fatigues. In each hand, the drawing held a long spear taller than his likeness, crossing in front of his knees, sharpened ends pointing at angles toward the cavern roof. A woman had been drawn beside him, in her hands a basket full of what looked like lettuce. Her face was familiar, but not enough so that he immediately recognized her.
Raising his torch, he inspected the rest of the mural. It was massive, covering the wall to the furthest reaches of the firelight. Higher up on the wall, Phoenix hovered in midair, arms stretched out to either side and engulfed by a ball of light. It was strangely beautiful, yet at the same time disconcerting, as the boy looked like he’d been crucified.
“Jesus,” Norman whispered from beside Adam, who turned in time to see all of the color drain from the medic’s face. “That’s me.”
Adam followed his stare to the wall. There was an uncanny image of Norman looking back at him from where he’d been drawn onto the stone, only his eyes had been filled with black charcoal. He held what looked like an axe by the handle, reminding Adam of a lumberjack.
“How could someone have drawn me so…perfectly…so long ago?” Norman whispered.
“I don’t know,” Adam said, following the flow of the design. There were other faces he had seen outside on the beach. Many had the same black eyes as Norman, while others were normal shades of blue, green, and brown. And surrounding them all like a backdrop were yellow- and black-marbled eyes recessed into blackness.
“What’s it supposed to mean? Why are my eyes like that?” Norman asked.
“I wish I knew,” Adam said, unnerved by how much the eyes in the background reminded him of how it had looked in the house where they had found Phoenix.
“I’ve got to be honest, man. This is scaring the crap out of me.”
“You and me both,” Adam said, watching as Ray paused at the wall farther down to the right, bringing his burning branch closer to the wall so he could see more clearly.
There was an image of the young man there as well, left arm across his chest with a knife held high as though preparing to slash it sideways in front of him. Unlike all of the others, his eyelids were closed.
Self-consciously, Ray reached into the front pouch of the hooded sweatshirt and patted the knife.
Use this when the time is right, Tina’s spectral voice whispered in his mind.
“How did you know this was here?” Adam asked.
Ray nearly jumped at the sound of Adam’s voice. He’d been so mesmerized by the picture that he’d lost track of everything around him.
“I…I didn’t,” Ray said, walking back toward the pueblo where Norman was already climbing up one of the ladders, bouncing on the first couple of rungs to make sure it would hold his weight before continuing upward, holding the torch away from his body in his left hand while using his right to steady himself.
“Do you see any way in?” Adam called to him as Norman eased forward onto the roof, wary of the cracking sound of the mud-fused thatch beneath him.
“It looks like there’s a hatch up here.” Norman knelt, grabbed the wooden square by the edge, and raised it. A gust of dust belched out into his face, forcing him to cough and swat away the dry cloud. He lowered the burning end of the stick into the darkness, partially illuminating a small square room. There were no doors or windows of any kind, only a hand-woven rug on the floor, thick with centuries of dust, and what looked like hundreds of corn stalks corded together and tied off with rope made from reeds.
“You want to give me a hand?” he yelled back over his shoulder, his voice echoing throughout the cavern.
Sitting, he dangled his legs down through the ceiling of the room beneath and waved the torch through a tangle of cobwebs before dropping down to the earthen floor. He swung the torch side to side to clear away the dusty filaments connecting the walls, giving him the impression that spiders were crawling all over his skin. At just over six feet tall, he wasn’t an incredibly large man, but he still had to stoop under the low ceiling. Pulling his shirt up over his mouth and nose to keep from inhaling the dust, he kicked through half an inch of grime on the floor until he reached the first bound stack. They weren’t cornstalks as he had originally thought, but thin lengths of wooden dowels. He gave the reeds binding them a tug and they snapped with hardly any pressure, an avalanche of wooden posts clattering around his feet.
“What was that?” Adam asked, leaning over the hole in the roof.
“There are a ton of these things down here.” Norman grabbed a couple of the poles and held them up through the hatch.
Adam set down his torch so that the burning end hung out over the side of the building and took the wooden rods from Norman. Grasping one in each hand, he leaned them out to either side so that he could get a better look at the ends, which tapered into sharp points.
His heart stalled in his chest.
Looking down at the mural where Ray still perused it by torchlight, he saw himself painted on the wall exactly as he stood at that very moment.
VI
JILL WAS STARTING TO FEEL MORE LIKE HERSELF. THE BEANS SHE’D consumed for breakfast, which had actually been around lunch time, had helped, but it was really the fact that she’d been able to just sit on the beach with April and Darren, watching the waves roll in from the eastern horizon, that helped establish at least a few precious moments of normalcy. Her thoughts continued to drift back to Tina, especially with Ray’s conspicuous absence. Nothing about her death seemed real, as though at any moment, Tina would just come bouncing down the beach, so full of life as she’d always been. At least Jill hoped it was the feeling of surreality, rather than having become so anesthetized to all of the death that even the loss of a close friend didn’t affect her. She had loved Tina, almost like a sister, so it truly bothered her that even thinking about her horrible death couldn’t summon a single tear.
They had wandered well away from the camp so that they could barely see the others to the south. Without all of the unfamiliar faces, it felt almost like a vacation. Just the three of them sitting on the sand, watching the strange red birds and the inland ocean. April and Darren hadn’t allowed their hands to part for more than a few minutes at a time and their once uncomfortable flirting was gone. In a matter of days they’d gone from furtive glances to being almost an extension of each other. Jill was genuinely happy for both of them, but she couldn’t help feeling as though the more they grew together, the further apart they drew from her. Darren turned to kiss April and Jill had to look away. A lone figure walked in their direction, so far off that she couldn’t see who it was, but she had a pretty good idea.
“I’m going to head back,” she said, listening to the wet caress of lips and tongues. “I’ll meet you guys back by the fire, okay?”
Those last words turned to mist as they blew from her mouth. Goosebumps prickled up the backs of her arms. The air was crisp and cold as it entered her chest, and while it rarely snowed in Oregon, some part of her nature knew that without a doubt the flakes would soon fall. Wrapping her arms across her chest to preserve her warmth, she struck off down the beach.
“Are you all right, Jill?” April asked, leaning her head onto Darren’s shoulder.
“Yeah…I’m fine. Just starting to get cold is all.”
“Do you want us to walk back with you?” Darren asked.
Jill shook her head, but didn’t look back. “No thanks. You guys just try to enjoy a little time alone.”
“You’d better believe we will,” Darren said.
April slid her hand down his thigh and gave him a good pinch.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“You’d better believe we will,” April said, doing a terrible job of imitating his voice.
“I was just joking, for crying out—”
April cut him off by pressing her mouth to
his.
Jill smiled as she walked away, partially because she knew that April and Darren were good for each other, but mainly because the person heading along the shore toward her was finally close enough to recognize.
Mare’s face lit up when he saw her smile.
“There you are,” he said as soon as he was within earshot.
“You were looking for me?”
“With all of the fun going on back there, I figured it would be a shame if you missed out.”
“What fun?”
Mare pulled up in front of her and offered his elbow. Jill took it, despite how the cold air froze her chest in her arm’s absence. They continued strolling back toward the cave slowly, alternately looking ahead and then at each other until they were caught staring and averted their eyes bashfully.
“That kid my sister’s been hanging around with started freaking out, screaming about how ‘the Swarm’ is coming.”
“It does feel like it might snow.”
“Not storm,” Mare chuckled. “Swarm.”
“Oh…” Jill said, blushing. “There is a big difference between the two, isn’t there? What are we supposed to do if those mosquitoes come back?”
“Everyone else thinks he’s out of his gourd. He keeps saying that the Swarm is preparing to march against us.”
“March?”
“Yeah… You see what I’m saying.”
“We’re all under a lot of stress.”
“I guess. Richard says we’ll be gone long before anything can march anywhere. He’s planning on leaving in the morning.”
“Where’s he going to go?”
“Not ‘he,’ Jill. We. He thinks we should all go into the city to find someplace where we can try to live. Someplace where we can actually hope to defend ourselves if something does want to attack us.”
“That makes sense, but I’m really not looking forward to heading back out on the road.”
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