“Neither am I, but the prospect of having a roof over my head sounds wonderful.” He stopped and held out his free hand. A single snowflake floated down and landed on his palm. “It didn’t really snow in Tennessee.”
“It hardly ever snows in Oregon either.”
“What I don’t get,” Mare said, shaking the droplet of water from his hand and walking again, “is why everyone is so convinced that we’re going to be attacked at all. I mean, I’ve seen these creatures—my dad even turned into one—but why would anyone think these things are capable of organizing into some kind of army? And marching on us? Please.”
“I’m more worried about what will happen if the mosquitoes come back.”
“Once winter hits and everything starts to freeze, they’ll be dead anyway.”
“But what about Spring? Don’t you think it’s possible that they could have bred and laid eggs? Or maybe they’re already in a warmer climate where they can wait out the cold. Will they come back then?”
“I don’t know,” Mare said, shrugging. “We’ll just have to be prepared by then, I guess.”
They slowed even more as they came upon the camp. Several people had managed to climb up onto the mountain and were hurling down small trees they’d been able to uproot from the crevasses, and any other stray pieces of wood they could find. Others were gathering and stacking them in the middle of the beach with the half-charred logs from the bonfire formerly in the cave, and anything else that looked potentially flammable. It was strange to see the opening to the cave without smoke pouring out of it, exposing those tortured souls who were where they had been since their arrival, huddled against the walls with their knees to their chests. Some shuddered as they sobbed, their anguished cries drowned out from this distance by the crashing waves, while others tried to sleep or stared blankly out into space.
“What’s going on?” Mare asked a man in a leather jacket as he passed with an armful of collected limbs that looked too green to burn.
“We’re having a meeting,” he said, barely slowing. “Everyone needs to be there.”
“About what?” Mare asked, but the man was already past him and focused on his task.
Someone had dragged a chair from inside the camper, as evidenced by the thin trails through the sand, and set it up so it faced the growing stack of wood. A man neither had seen before emptied a can of gasoline onto the pile and dropped to one knee just barely within arm’s reach. He took a lighter from his pocket and stretched as far as he could toward the fuming fluid. One snap of the flint and a blue flame raced across the mound.
The sky was starting to darken, deep black smoke billowing from the wood, the pile more smoke than fire. The wind arose with a howl, chasing frigid air across the lake, assaulting them with sheets of small snowflakes.
“Feels like the temperature just dropped ten degrees,” Jill said, stealing her hand back from Mare’s elbow to again wrap both arms around her chest.
The clusters of people up and down the beach worked their way toward the bonfire. There had to be more than a hundred of them now. Jill hadn’t seen any of the newcomers arrive, but as they gathered around the sole source of heat, she could see an old school bus that had been painted baby blue with the words Calvary Adventist Youth Group stenciled onto the side, a collection of bikes, both motorized and not, and several new tents.
“Hey, little brother,” Missy said from Mare’s right, ruffling his hair.
“Hiya, Miss. So what’s the word here?”
“They’re calling it a town meeting.”
“What happened to that creepy albino kid?”
Missy socked him in the shoulder. “Phoenix went up on the mountain to help gather wood. Besides, he’s just about the nicest person here.”
“I’m hurt.”
“You know I love you, Mare, but sometimes you can be a real—”
“Everyone gather ’round!” Richard shouted, climbing atop the lone chair so that everyone could see him.
“What’s all this?” April whispered into Jill’s ear, startling her.
“I’m not really sure…”
“The time has come to organize,” Richard bellowed, spreading his arms out to his sides. “As you can all clearly see, winter’s already here. We can’t afford to waste any more time here in the middle of nowhere. What are we supposed to do when it gets really cold? What happens when we run out of our pathetic supply of food and water?”
Jill watched Richard, his presence positively commanding. He was across the fire from her, the rising flames giving him the impression of burning, his features aglow with an orange-yellow glare. His face flirted in and out of the smoke as the wind whipped it in changing directions.
“We need to find shelter before the elements kill us all, before…” Richard paused for dramatic effect, his eyes covering the crowd to draw each and every one of them to him. “They come for us.”
A cloud of smoke obscured him from Jill’s sight. The crowd grumbled like thunder as somewhere behind the roiling storm clouds the sun set unnoticed. A gust of freezing wind raced inland, chasing the smoke and flames sideways toward the cave.
Jill screamed.
Richard’s face had become transparent, his skull clearly visible. His eyes were empty black sockets, teeth without lips chattering around his impassioned speech. Those bared teeth closed and even without eyes she could tell he was looking directly at her.
Her head started to spin and her knees gave out, dropping her to the ground on her back. She looked up into the rapidly darkening sky as people began to lean over her from all sides. April’s face was the closest; Mare’s and Darren’s staring down at her as well. There were a couple others she didn’t recognize, but the majority no longer wore their faces at all, only exposed skulls leering at her.
Screaming, she kicked at the sand to propel herself away from them, but all she could see were those animated skeletons advancing toward her.
Pinching her eyes shut, she wailed at the top of her lungs until she heard a loud slap and her head was knocked sideways. When she opened her eyes again, she was looking directly into Richard’s regular fleshy face.
VII
ADAM WALKED OUT OF THE CAVE AND ONTO THE BEACH WITH NORMAN AT his side and Ray behind. He was surprised to find that the fire had been moved out into the open and closer to the water with everyone gathered around it. There were easily twice as many people now as there had been when they went into the mountain and the snow-spotted sky was darkening before their very eyes. How long had they been down there?
“Well…” Richard said, climbing back up onto the chair. He smiled for the crowd and laughed. “Now that we’re all feeling better, shall we proceed?”
Phoenix appeared at Adam’s side from the crowd to tug at his arm.
“What’s going on here?” Adam asked.
“You have to stop them,” Phoenix said, his eyes frantic. His hands shook as he pulled Adam forward into the masses. “They’ll all die if they go. All of them.”
“Who’s going anywhere?”
“That man. He’s trying to convince them to leave with him.”
“We can’t force anyone to stay here, Phoenix.”
“You’re supposed to lead us. You have to make them stay!”
“I’ll do what I can, but I’m still not entirely convinced that it’s a bad idea.”
Phoenix took Adam by the shoulders and turned him so that their eyes locked. It was disconcerting staring through those long dirty bangs and into the boy’s pinkish irises, but Adam was too surprised to resist.
“You saw the painting in the cave, didn’t you? The house of mud and straw? How can you still not understand?”
“How did you—?”
“You are the one who will lead us. You can’t let them follow him!”
Adam broke eye contact and looked to the right of the fire where Richard stood higher than the rest, preaching down at them.
“We need every available vehicle ready to head out by sunrise,
” Richard shouted. “We can’t afford to burn a single minute of daylight, especially if this storm starts to worsen. I’ll need everyone with any sort of carpentry experience ready to begin construction on our fortifications and anyone with electrical expertise setting up generators and making sure that the heating works. The women and children will need to gather food and supplies.”
“Adam, please,” Phoenix said.
Adam looked at the boy again, tears streaming down his cheeks from his strange eyes, and sighed.
“Excuse me!” he shouted, raising his hand.
Richard flashed with anger, but hurriedly softened his expression.
“This is an open forum,” he said, forcing a smile. “Please introduce yourself first.”
The crowd parted to allow Adam to approach the fire.
“I’m Adam Newman,” he said, raising his voice to be heard.
“We will need people like you, people of strength, if we are to rebuild,” Richard said.
“People like me?”
“Soldiers,” Richard said levelly.
Adam looked down at his fatigues. “I’m a doctor. I was just serving my time to pay back my education.”
“Excellent. We will need physicians in our New World Order.” New World Order? Adam didn’t like the choice of words. It sounded positively fascist. “What issue would you like to address, Dr. Newman?”
“I don’t think leaving is the right thing to do. We were all drawn here for a reason—”
“And now that we’re here, we need to organize so that we can survive. What would you propose? Hmm? Pitch tents on the beach and freeze to death? Or maybe you’d prefer we wait around until we starve?”
“There’s a big cave under the mountain with a pueblo—”
“You’re a physician, Dr. Newman. To what kind of diseases would you have us all exposed? How will you even treat something as ordinarily benign as frostbite? Amputating with your teeth? Even the common cold could prove lethal out here. In town we will have access to heat and medications—”
“We can bring those things out here.”
“And live in your cave? In the city we can live in actual indoor dwellings designed to accommodate human beings rather than bats. With doors that lock. We’ll be able to actually defend ourselves against the coming attack.”
“We can do that here. All we need—”
“With what? Sticks and stones? The one shotgun we have between us? Surely you learned a little more about defense strategies than that during your tenure in the service. I can’t imagine the Army didn’t teach you that we need to build a perimeter and fortify it, make our fortress impregnable. How would you defend this cave of yours?”
“These mountains form a natural bottleneck. The only access to this shoreline for miles is the way we all came in.”
“Tell him they’re all going to die if they leave!” Phoenix shouted from the crowd.
“I see,” Richard said, allowing himself a predatory smile. “You’re with Chicken Little back there. Well, if the sky’s falling, I’d much rather have a roof over my head.”
Laughter rippled through the crowd.
“That kid led us here. I don’t know where we would be right now without him. If he says not to go, then by God I’m not going anywhere. And I hope you won’t either.”
“Look at these faces around you, doctor. Look into their eyes. These brave men and women have survived hell to gather here from all across the country. Would you really ask them to stay here, out in the elements, away from food and water and the benefits of modern medicine—all of the things we need to live—when they’re readily available just on the other side of this very lake?”
“If we leave, we will die.”
“How do you know that for sure? What is your justification?”
Adam turned and looked at Phoenix, the boy’s stark white facing staring back at him, lighted by the flickering flames. The crowd fell silent.
“I’ve seen it in my dreams,” Phoenix said.
“Your dreams?” Richard bellowed. “Well I have dreams, too. And in my dreams I’ve seen an armada of evil coming for us under the cover of a blizzard. Maybe even this exact storm rolling in right now.”
The snowflakes reinforced their numbers as if to illustrate his point.
“Then why would you want to leave here and risk getting caught in the worst of it?” Adam asked.
“I can offer these people food. Shelter. Protection. What can you offer? Oh yeah, that’s right, a cave. And how many months’ worth of food do you have stockpiled in this cave? How much potable water? All I’ve heard to support your argument is that the sky is falling.”
“Don’t divide us. There’s safety in numbers.”
“You are the one who would divide us. Come with us. Be saved.”
“You can always stay.”
“Let’s put it to a vote, shall we?” Richard raised his voice even higher. “Do you all want to eat?”
There was a booming chorus of approval.
“Do you want to live like human beings? Inside and out of the cold?”
The cheers grew even louder.
“Or would you rather stay here in Dr. Newman’s cave with no food or water?”
The clamor of dissention was deafening.
“So I ask you, you who have already survived this nightmare… Would you rather come with me and have a chance to truly live or stay here and slowly die?”
The response was a roar of excited voices and applause. Fists pumped in the air. Richard leaned his head back to the sky and reveled in every moment of it.
Adam tried to shout, but even he couldn’t hear his own voice. He turned and looked at Phoenix, catching just the shimmer of firelight on the tears trailing down his cheeks before the boy hung his head.
They were all going to die.
VIII
The Ruins of Denver, Colorado
WAR CRESTED THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE CRATER ASTRIDE THE BEHEMOTH Thunder. Trotting his powerful steed in a half-circle, he inspected his army. There were fluorescent yellow eyes as far as he could see, trailing nearly to the tower where Death stood atop the roof, watching them march from that vantage until they vanished into the mountains.
The night had finally descended, blacker than sin, nearly invisible snowflakes filling the air around them, freezing like television static with each strobe of lightning. Atmospheric electricity flashed back into the sky, reflecting from slick black reptilian skin and the hardened coating of molten metal fused to their scales. The ground trembled beneath their advance, their clawed feet hardened into steel-reinforced killing implements. Torches blazed from where the flanks carried them at the periphery, nearly out of sight through the suffocating storm.
He tugged his cowl down to keep the snow out of his fiery eyes and gave the long spines of Thunder’s mane a sharp jerk. The beast’s skeletal head snapped from side to side and it blasted fire from its nostrils as it turned back to the west. The snowstorm obscured the jagged crests of the Rocky Mountains, the foothills already white with snow.
Movement to his left drew War’s eye, and while at first he could see nothing of import through the snow, his keen stare finally settled upon the source of the motion. A large white falcon sat atop the windowsill in the middle of a brick wall, the only standing remnant of the building now lying in rubble around it. He cocked his head at it and watched as it did the same. Without betraying his intent, War brought his hand beneath his cloak of dried flesh and took hold of the hilt of a thin bone crafted into a serrated blade. In one swift motion, he snapped back his wrist and launched the dagger at the bird, striking it right in the center of the chest before it could even leap from the ledge. The momentum carried it backward out of sight, the air filled with its dying scream and bloody white feathers.
Several more of those ivory birds rose from where they hid and flew into the storm, only now giving away the fact that they had even been there at all. Before he could reach under his cloak again, the storm swallowed th
em whole.
Guiding Thunder toward where he had felled the falcon, he leapt down to the ground and snatched the fuzzy white corpse from atop the blackened carcass of a sport utility vehicle. He held it upside down by the long claws, blood rushing from the wound to stain the feathers crimson like roses against lace.
In his mind he saw the surface of a choppy lake speeding past mere inches beneath him. A wall of smooth stone arose from the distant horizon, coming right at him. People took shape on the shore of the lake, gathered around a bonfire taller than any of them. One man stood above the others, the focus of their attention.
War smiled a lipless grin beneath his armored mask. Cut off the head and the body will die. Lancing his fingertips through the bird’s breast, he tore it apart, throwing splashes of blood all around him before launching the tattered chunks of flesh back over his shoulder. With a frenetic hissing, the Swarm battled each other over the remains, filling the air with a momentary cloud of feathers and each others’ sloppy blood. The sound of crunching in his ears, War hauled himself back up onto Thunder and clopped around the building. The same reptilian creature was behind him as it had been since they had first begun their march. It stood apart from the others, as it had a ferocious scar across its forehead, splitting its brow, and diagonally down its cheek with a frill beneath its chin the color of spilled blood. It stayed just behind the right flank of his steed, eyes affixed to the horizon while the others fought like the animals they were for their place in the pack.
Lowering a hand covered in the falcon’s blood and a clump of feathers, he allowed that creature to approach and slather the mess from his palm with its purple tongue. Contented, it backed away again and issued a violent hiss, its crimson dewlap expanding to shiver like a flag in a stiff gale.
Turning his focus back to the mountain range, the only obstacle in his way, he raised his right fist and let out a war cry that sounded like boulders slamming together. A riotous hissing answered his call, shaking the accumulating snow from the rubble. The horse charged forward, the ground catching fire behind its stomping hooves. The Swarm ran through the flames behind, their rising voices the sound of the night being torn in two.
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