Under a Broken Sun

by Kevin P Sheridan

  The torches disappeared, sure that their job was done. How many mother, walked away satisfied that they killed Satan’s child, instead of two innocent people? How many kids would hear stories of false heroism, their fathers' acting so bold and brave in the face of faceless danger? Fuck you, I wanted to yell. Fuck you all.

  The boat drifted closer. I could make out the image of a man rowing frantically. I could feel the occasional sting of a flame stabbing my bare skin behind me. Ashley wanted to jump in after them, but I held her back. We were already close to hypothermia, saved only by the fire our enemies lit to kill us. If we jumped in, we’d fall into shock for sure.

  We inched towards the edge of the platform, all but out of room entirely. I nearly toppled over as the board underneath me gave way. That shifted the whole platform, which danced on the waves like the earthquake in Pittsburgh. We held our balance as best we could, arms waving frantically, flailing for support that wasn’t there.

  Ashley fell over first.

  Bill caught her just as the boat pulled up next to the diving platform. I turned and tried to balance and get into the boat as carefully as I could. Too much jostling and we’d all go over.

  Tommy and Louie balanced it. I took Bill’s hand, crouched as low as I could on what seemed like the last few floating boards, and stepped into the boat. The board underneath my feet snapped in two, and flames wrapped themselves around my ankle. I brought the other leg in with a grunt, and practically fell on the boat. It bobbed from side to side, but it didn’t tip over.

  Bill started rowing like a madman. He got us away from the platform, then turned back north in the direction he was originally heading. We were safe.

  “Thought that was you,” Bill said.

  I smiled, shaking, huddled close to Ashley.

  “Water cold?” Tommy asked. Ashley elbowed him. He wrapped his arms around her and started rubbing vigorously. She folded herself into his arms.

  “You ok to go on?” Bill asked.

  I nodded, and said between chattering teeth, “Can’t stop. They’ll find you…missing…any minute…now.” We had to get ourselves away from here sooner than soon as possible.

  After about ten more minutes the boat scraped on the shore with a harsh metallic sound. Up ahead we saw the dark shadow outlines of huge houses – plastic McMansions, cushy little hovels for executives without companies to work for.

  The other three got out, pulled the boat to shore, and helped Ashley and I out. We hurried in the comparatively warm air, still just above freezing, and me with no protection except my boxers.

  We knocked on the door of the first house we came to. No answer. No shuffling, nothing. Tommy went to the side of the house, picked up a large stone, and threw it through the basement window. The sound would’ve alerted anyone no matter how deeply they slept. A couple of neighbors seemed to stir - I could see the dim light of candles dancing in upstairs windows. People staying home to wait this thing out.

  We went around to the other side and kicked open the door to the garage. Inside, we could just barely make out the neatly organized, symmetric lines of shelves in a spotless garage. Daddy probably drove his kids into servitude keeping this thing clean.

  If he had kids.

  The answer hunt on the wall of the garage behind us: four bikes; two adult and two kid-sized. One of the adult bikes had a kid seat in the back. Bill grabbed Tommy, saying, "Run inside and find dry clothes for Adam and Ashley. Grab any thick coats or sweatshirts you can for the rest of us. Louie, you go with him.

  Bill took the bikes down. “Here’s how we get out of here. We’ve only got a couple of hours until daytime. We'll get as far as we can. Can you ride?” He stood the one bike up, then took down the other. I nodded. I could feel my strength returning already.

  Tommy and Louie bolted out of the door to the house with a bundle each. They threw it on the ground and Ashley and I changed. The other three put on whatever sweatshirt or sweater or jacket they could find. The warmth of the clothes loosened me up a ton.

  “There’s only four bikes,” Ashley observed.

  Tommy pointed to the kid seat, “Um-”

  Ashley pushed him again before he could finish. “Don’t even think about it. I’m not that small.”

  Bill grabbed her hand. “Ride with me. I can stand up most of the way.”

  “I call this bike,” Louie said, taking the smaller boy’s bike. I had my hand on the other adult bike, so that left Tommy with a tiny, pink, Hello Kitty bike.

  I patted him on the back. “Hey, at least it doesn’t have training wheels.”

  Bill rolled up the garage door. “We best be going.” He climbed on his bike, and Ashley climbed onto the seat, holding his waist. The three boys mounted our mechanical steeds, and shoved off.

  25.

  We rode around the state for three days, riding at night, sleeping during the day with someone always on watch. Our hiding places became less obvious – no more homes, we slept in barns or under blankets of camouflage. Bill turned about to be an expert in how not to be seen. The temperature seemed to stabilize: really fucking hot during the day and really fucking cold during the night.

  One day, at dawn, Bill and I sat talking around the fire we had built, while the others got ready for bed. I had the first watch. I asked Bill a question that’d been burning in my mind since my time with the nutjobs. Colonel Reynolds.

  “What about him?” Bill asked.

  “When he stared at me, I could tell he really believed what he was fighting for. But I couldn’t believe that he would kill for this idea, something so...I dunno. Whacked out. How could he look at me like that? Like I was subhuman?”

  Bill tore a leg off a well-done rabbit we’d caught. “We’re trained to dehumanize the enemy. Doesn’t matter who they are.”

  “Yeah, but who told him I was the enemy? How could he be convinced of that so easily?” I refused a bite when he offered it to me.

  “Look around you. It’s the way of man – explain the inexplicable by Gods. And if there are Gods, there are always anti-Gods. It’s human nature.” He spit out a huge chunk of fat into the fire. The fire sizzled in response.

  “Yeah, but it was different than that. With him, it looked like he was…”

  “Enjoying himself?” Bill added, tossing away the bone, wiping his hands on his pants.

  “Yeah.”

  Bill poked a stick into the fire like he was remembering something he didn’t really want to. “Soldiers come in two types, Adam. Those who want to fight, and those who have to fight."

  “Which were you? You had to fight, right?”

  “No. I wanted to fight. It’s not like you think. Those who want to fight want to fight the good fight. They want a victory over some evil: a real, present danger. When they’ve achieved their objective, they stop. They’re glad to go home. Those who need to fight will find a war where none exist. They’ll make shit up to fight a war over. That’s why so many of my friends got out. There was never going to be a victory. The people in power, making the decisions, they needed to fight. They wanted a world that would never know peace. Your Colonel Reynolds is one of those men. I could tell just from our brief interaction. Religion, God, the Devil, he doesn’t give a shit why he’s fighting, as long as he has an enemy to kill. That’s what this war is going to be about. Hell, that’s what all wars are about. A struggle by those who want to fight to stop those who need to fight."

  He sighed and tossed aside the stick, leaning back against the wooden slats of the barn we were in. “Keep a sharp eye out, son,” he said. “Wake me if you see anything.”

  For the next three hours I got to think about what he said. And what lie ahead. I thought about Tolbert, how they used his wife as a hostage. Was this really about redemption, or just a power grab? The more I thought about it, the less inclined I was to believe a God would set all this up. Like Noah's Ark. Genocide turned into a bedtime story. What will some moron write about this?

  My stomach rumbled at the end of
my shift. Our water supply ran low, so I could only afford a few sips from the small plastic water bottle. Breakfast devolved into a cracker or two. Whatever food people left around in the homes had long rotted away, or their owners guarded their own rations with guns. Many folks boarded up their homes like small forts. The last hope for them, I guess. Soon their food would run out though. Soon they’d be on the move somewhere else. Suburban nomads.

  I sipped the water, then nudged Tommy for his turn. He shuffled, rolled over, slept some more. I felt like his fucking mom, waking him for school. I shoved him again. Still nothing. I put a little something extra in it, and flipped him off his makeshift bed of two wooden boxes and hay. He landed on the floor with a thud.

  “What the fuck, man?” he said as he stood up to face me.

  I handed him the water bottle. “Your watch.”

  He took the water bottle and took two sips. I took his place on the bed. Wasn’t the best, but at least I was lying down.

  I thought I had purged the nightmares from my head through sheer exhaustion, but I was wrong. This one was fuzzy, harder to remember. I was swimming in the lake with Ashley, struggling like before to keep my breath in the freezing water. As we swam closer to the dock, we had to push through floating, bloated bodies. Their faces stared up at the night sky with open eyes, purple lips, and ash-colored faces. We didn’t swim so much as tread water through them, they were that thick.

  I didn’t recognize the faces, until we finally got to the dock. Then a hand reached down to help me out, and I took it, with Ashley yelling from behind me not to. The thin, feminine hand lifted me up easily. Once on the dock, I saw my rescuer: the rotting flesh on the face, the hair dripping with water, the empty eye sockets. The yellow goo dripping from the nose over the impossibly wide smiling mouth. Somehow I knew her, though I recognized nothing. I knew her. Marilyn.

  I shot awake with a gasp in the early dusk. Bill pulled me up and thrust my new .45 pistol into my hands. “Gotta move,” he said.

  I looked around at the gang staring at me as they moved rapidly, getting ready. I knew them. Ashley. Young Ashley, who wasn’t so young. Tommy, still looking pissed and ready to kill me. Louie, completely lost of his innocence and video game addiction. I rubbed my eyes.

  “Let’s go!” Bill said.

  We climbed down out of the top part of the barn, down a thirty foot wooden ladder. “What’s going on?” I asked Bill.

  “They’re coming. Half mile away,” he said as he pulled the bikes out from a small wooden closet.

  We left the barn, and to my right I could see the smoke and dust rising from the southeast. The sun set to my left, and the temperature approached normalcy. We had about two hours before it hit freezing.

  “C’mon,” Bill stood on his bike, the other four of us doing the same. We pedaled as fast as we could, on a rocky dirt road in the middle of Indiana farm country. Soon we hit solid asphalt, turned right, and headed north.

  26.

  We arrived at the outskirts of Gary, Indiana around six in the morning. The smoke stacks of refineries and factories rose up to the dawn sky like upright, unlit cigarettes. Most of the other buildings stood above mounds of rubble, heaps of brick and steel leveled by the same earthquake that hit us in Pittsburgh. Clearly Gary, Indiana hadn't built their homes with earthquakes in mind.

  On the way we kept low, ducking in and out of abandoned houses, staying in the basements, avoiding being seen by anyone. We had to assume everyone we met would be an enemy.

  Outside the city, streets lined up straight and long like the steel Gary once produced. But as we got nearer the shoreline, that fifties look gave way to something more surreal: tents rising everywhere we looked. People mingled in their white clothes – some in robes, some in T-shirts, whatever they could find. But everyone – every single person we saw, wore only white.

  We didn't.

  Posters with my face and name littered the telephone poles, drifted on the street, plastered the doors of houses. I tore one off as we entered a tall abandoned house that morning. Horrible picture. I went from classic nerd at sixteen to a buzz-cut, goatee-wearing cutter in only five years. Now the goatee had been promoted to beard, and the buzz cut became bangs. I laughed while looking like at my smiling young face. I probably now looked more like Jesus than any of these fuckers wanted me to.

  Once inside, Bill lit a match and held onto a candle, illuminating what was probably the spookiest house I’ve ever been in. It must've been empty for a while.

  I brushed cobwebs out of my hair and felt Ashley’s hand on my arm. “Think this place is haunted?” she said.

  Bill stepped forward into the main entrance hall, with Tommy close behind. “I don’t think there are any ghosts left,” Bill said.

  I followed, with Ashley on my arm and Louie holding her hand. “At least it’s not a zombie apocalypse,” he said.

  I looked at him, then looked outside. “Who needs zombies?”

  We sat in a living room with no furniture and a huge hole in the corner of the rotting floor. Some of the ceiling boards had fallen through the floor and lay like giant sticks out of the hole. The candle stood upright in the middle of our shivering circle.

  “So, do we blend in? Try to sneak around? We can find some white sheets somewhere,” I said.

  “No. We go total camo,” Bill replied. “Total. Face and everything. Move only at night. We can sneak right through their lines and pickets easier. Trying to blend in only gets you caught when you can’t act the part.”

  I drifted off to sleep. After a while an empty house, even with its musty odor and odd creaks and groans, becomes just another hiding place.

  I dreamt of my mother, clearer this time. No nightmare, just her standing in front of me in the same room in which I slept. She smiled and looked like she could’ve gone dancing if she wanted. I barely remember seeing her like that as a kid. She got sick after I turned twelve, and never really improved. Dad was never around to help out. I hated him for that.

  In my dream Mom faded out like a movie changing scenes. Then someone or something in the corner shuffled around. I could see everyone else still on the floor, and none of them woke up. I pulled myself to a stand, then walked to the corner in the way that dreams force you to - like your feet are slugging through drying cement.

  A giggle. Like a child. Ashley mumbled in her sleep.

  The kid made a noise, like a gurgle, and something that sounded like ‘dada’.

  I felt myself step forward, my gun drawn. I looked behind me and saw my sleeping self, "Go on," my subconscious said. "It's just a dream." That didn't help.

  I took a torch, and lit up the room. In the corner sat a small boy - couldn’t be more than a year or two old - sitting on his plump diaper butt, playing with a headless action figure.

  Something about him looked familiar.

  I barely got out a “what the” before a fist leveled me across the face. My legs flipped out from under me, and my head landed on the floor with a thud. I turned and saw a man with smiling fangs and fire-red skin fire automatic weapons at my friends. They never woke up. Their bodies convulsed as bullets thudded into them. The man looked at me and screamed a high pitch wail of victory and triumph, firing rounds into the air. He walked over to me, pointing his shotgun at my face. He fired.

  Someone grabbed my shirt, shook me hard. That didn’t help the throbbing. The room slowly came into focus. Soft, rotting wood underneath me. Timber ceiling. Green camouflage uniform standing above me. A face.

  Focus.

  Like twisting a lens, the face morphed from a hazy blob to a recognizable human. The light behind him, over his head like a halo, burned through my eyes. The face.

  Focus.

  I know that face.

  Bill. He looked away to someone somewhere else. “He’s up.”

  Ashley bent over me, grabbing my hand. “You were having a nightmare.”

  I pushed myself up. “Yeah, no shit.”

  Tommy stood at a window looking th
rough a crack between the boards. “Someone’s coming,” he said in a whisper.

  “Upstairs,” Bill said, hoisting me up.

  My nightmare had played fifty-two card pickup with my brain. I didn’t have time to get the cards back in order. Bill guided me up the stairs.

  The top floor had a narrow hallway, two rooms in the back, one small room in the middle of the house facing the street, and another bigger room on the right side. We went to the room in the middle.

  The roar of a riot can be heard blocks away. We first heard it in Philadelphia when the riots started. This one sounded different, though. I checked to our left, past a courthouse-looking building on the other side of a round thoroughfare. A crowd had already gathered there. A check to our right showed the parade coming their way. I did a double check to left to make sure what I thought I saw I really saw: scaffolding, with a noose.

  A public hanging.

  I scrambled to the room on the left to get a better look at the circle. On the platform stood four people. Reynolds, looking smug and self-important on the right. In the middle stood Reverend Hill, trying to look grave and serious, but something about him stood out as almost sexual: it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he was sportin’ a woody in his pants over all this.

  To his right, holding a small child and looking very uncomfortable with the proceedings, stood Marilyn.

  My breathing got quicker. I closed my eyes, thankful she was alive, then opened them again so I could stare at her. Take her in like a photograph in my mind. I wanted to leap through the window and snatch her, then make a break for it. But I knew how that scene ended, and only one of us would come out alive.