Halfway across the field, Simon was soaked with sweat. The dark and twisted metal of destroyed machinery rose from the earth like the claws of a thousand demons, scratching through the land from the netherworlds. A line of transport vehicles lay in ruins, crisp and rusted, many still holding the remains of the passengers they had carried. Some were blown apart, with scraps of metal and bone fragments fanning out in circular arrays.
Simon looked at Winston.
“You okay, buddy?” Winston stayed at Simon’s heels, panting with his ears pinned back. “We’re almost across, boy. Stay with me.” Winston dared not venture off. This was a poisoned land.
As Simon neared the northern border of town, the field of war diminished. They would have to pass through a small portion of Monticello to enter the wooded park on the far side. Once there, they would be able to stop to eat and take a break before continuing onward. Simon’s stomach was grumbling and his mouth was parched. He was certain Winston felt the same.
He took a long drink from his canteen and poured some water in the cup of his palm for Winston to lap up, before crossing a desolate highway. A strip of businesses lined the other side of the road—a truck stop, the White Wheel Diner, and the Monticello Park Motel. He and Winston walked along the expansive paved lots before the truck stop, scanning the windows and shadows for movement, but there was nothing to be seen. Past the truck stop were several blocks of homes. Winston’s head was low and troubled.
“Come on, boy. We’re almost out. I can see the trees.”
This was true. In the distance, Simon could see a wall of green that bordered the town from the wilderness.
They neared the edge of a tall building, constructed in a semicircular shape. It rose three stories high, and just beyond was the wilderness. The dozen or so abandoned ambulances at the rear entrance indicated that this had once been a hospital.
As they neared the corner toward the front of the building, Winston began whimpering.
“What? What’s the matter? Let’s move, buddy.”
Winston slowed and sat. Simon walked on a few yards and then stopped to survey the land with his binoculars. “Winston … come on, man. There’s nothing there.” Winston sat panting with his big tongue hanging from the corner of his mouth. He whimpered and even barked a low bark.
“You all right, buddy?”
Simon walked back to him and ruffled his head. Winston stood and started walking back in the direction they came. “No, Winston. We’re not going back.” Simon looked in the direction of the hospital. He again scanned the windows, the park in the back, and what he could see of the field in front of the building. “There’s nothing, Winston.” He put the binoculars away and gripped his rifle. “Come on, let’s go.”
Simon walked, and reluctantly, Winston followed, lingering behind.
As they neared the edge of the building, Simon kept his distance—and then he saw the front of the hospital. He stopped midstride.
“Oh, Christ …”
Piled high in the semicircular space before the entrance were bodies in such volume that Simon could not venture to guess the number. Many were in body bags and some were wrapped in sheets. Others lay where they had been tossed, heaped in piles. Three ambulances were stranded among the sea of death along with two garbage trucks and several flatbed pickup trucks. Corpses were everywhere. Bodies burst from the parked vehicles, spilling out. Dozens of wheelbarrows and carts were heaped in overflowing piles. The corpses covering the sidewalk were piled so high that the wheels and license plates of the vehicles could not be seen. They had been brought here like garbage at the dump.
Simon quickened his pace.
He couldn’t help but stare, though he tried to steal his gaze away. The large double doors of the hospital entrance had stretchers jammed into the doorway like corks, disappearing into the total blackness beyond. Above the door was a sign, spray-painted on a large board and nailed over the entrance:
Monticello Fields Hospital
Quarantined
Bring Your Sick Only
His stomach turned, and Simon fell to a knee and heaved. He tried to stand, wanting to be far away from this awful place, but his stomach cramped.
“Winston …” Winston was far to his side, his tail between his legs. Never had they witnessed such death. Simon tried not to imagine what the inside of the hospital looked like—the corridors, rooms, and the morgue in the basement. But his mind produced images nonetheless.
Simon got to his feet and moved, jogging. Then he started running, and so did Winston. Winston passed him in a rush, and he did not stop until he reached the woods. Simon gritted his teeth and sprinted, not looking back, not wanting to see or know the reality of the world that he faced—the reality that he knew was only going to get worse.
Chapter 21
Aurora
The town of Aurora sprawled beneath his feet.
I’m here. I’m finally here.
Fever had developed fast after Brian continued on his trek, and was worsening as he entered the town. First, he felt like his flesh was burning. Then his head felt scorched—the skin on his face, his nose, and ears stinging. And now his brain seemed to be boiling in his skull.
It’s just so damn hot … .
He passed building after building, one burnt-out shell after the next. Piles of debris sat where homes had once thrived, and the roads were jumbles of craters with large sections of pavement strewn about. The town was like a scattered jigsaw puzzle, with factories, businesses, and whole city blocks reduced to rubble.
Brian’s mind swam in a realm of delusion. His feet stumbled over the ground, seeming to move on their own. His vision was choppy and bright, and when he looked from one thing to the next, pings of panic and pain surged through his body and mind.
This is it … Do I have the disease? I must … This is the end …
He fell, collapsed on the ground, feeling the warm earth on the side of his face. Comfort overtook him. Numb tremors vibrated down his spine, making his hands and feet tingle. It felt good. It was warm and inviting on the ground. He could feel stress pour out of his body, exiting through his hands and feet. He could stay there forever.
I wonder if I’ll see a white light …
But no white light came, just darkness, pure black—an all-encompassing void of reality and time. When Brian’s eyes fluttered back open and he remembered where he was, who he was, and what he was doing, he got to his feet and stumbled forward. He could not account for the fact that he was still alive; some otherworldly force kept his legs moving and prevented his eyes from closing permanently.
How long have I been out of food?
The last thing he had eaten was a packet of cheese sauce belonging to some military rations from some meal long ago. Brian had found the packet while scrounging for crumbs in the backpack, going from pocket to pocket repeatedly as if food would magically appear. He sucked the neon-yellow paste straight from the packet. As the cheese sauce digested, his stomach cramped, and soon he was vomiting. A shaking developed deep in his core, and he twisted and turned on the ground, clenching his stomach, rife with pain. A severe case of diarrhea followed.
Somewhere along the way, along the dreamlike walk that felt like a distant memory, the weight of the backpack became heavier and heavier, pulling him backward toward the earth. He let it drop to the ground. There was nothing much left in it anyway. All he had now was his rifle, his pistol, spare ammunition, a few sips of water, a knife, and the clothes on his back.
He looked to the sky and could see the clouds thinning. No rain in sight. His soiled clothes were plastered to his skin, soaked with sweat despite the constant chills and the uncontrollable trembling in his core.
A large field lay before him, beside a structure that must have been a school. Two soccer goals stood out from the overgrown grass. Military vehicles lined the ground bumper to bumper. The procession of parked vehicles was pockmarked by craters, blackened from old explosions, and covered in grit. Small tents were co
nstructed on a separate turf adjacent to the soccer field, a running track bordering the edge. One tent remained intact, its white canvas walls torn open and flapping in the wind, a red cross still visible on the side. The others had been burned down to their metal frames.
The school looked sinister, deviant. This scene of destruction before him, mixed with his conjured images of children playing in an environment intended for education, made anger boil up in his chest.
Why … Why did this have to happen?
It was the eternal question. The one everyone had asked at some stage or another. The question without an answer. Why?
Brian inspected the intact medical tent, but it had been wiped clean. He skirted the field, stopping at a shady patch of grass to catch his breath, and unfolded his map, now weathered and frayed to something illegible. The fever that was raging inside his body brought with it confusion and disorientation. He squinted, trying to decipher the path he’d marked before leaving the bunker. The map looked fuzzy, unreadable—a jumble of lines, shapes, and some colorful patches that seemed to leap out from the pages. Brian read the town names, but it was difficult and the words didn’t register any specific meaning. He wiped the sweat from his brow and watched his finger tremble over the page. Overhead, the overcast sky was boiling, blindingly white.
He closed his eyes. His mind was swimming in a sea of disease, going a hundred miles an hour.
Images flashed through his mind: Steven staring down at him … hot blood dripping over his face and in his eyes … the reverberation traveling down his forearm as the rock hit skull … Steven’s body, lifeless … his own body, lifeless …
He shook these thoughts out of his head.
I deserve to die. I deserve to have the disease … Now I understand why humanity was wiped from the face of the planet. Humans are awful. We do horrible things. We don’t deserve to live on this earth.
Despite these feelings, Brian stood and continued walking. Bethany was only a few blocks away.
He tried to walk with stealth, in the shadows, cautious of his environment, but he was loosing control of his feet and hands. As he neared Bethany’s home, with the piles of debris encompassing whole city blocks, he fell and tripped often over the irregular terrain.
Carpet bombed, he thought. Aurora looks like it was carpet bombed.
The outlines of the buildings left intact were blurry, and the glimmering of shattered glass was blinding. Everything was so bright, it hurt to keep his eyes open.
At some stage, he unbuttoned and peeled off his sweat-soaked shirt, letting it fall to the rubble, making a wet sound as it hit the ground. He saw the street sign for Park Avenue and took a left. Several streets with fruity names followed—Apple, Pear, Cherry, and Orange—and he made it all the way to Elm Street. Through the rubble, he counted what house numbers he could decipher: Twelve, fourteen … twenty. He crossed the road. Twenty-four …
He climbed a mound of fallen bricks, using the side of the house’s foundation for support. Past the house, the backyard had some property to it. Nothing like Steven’s home in Nelson—or any of the homes in Nelson—but it was a large parcel of land for Aurora.
Then Brian saw what he was looking for.
In the corner of the yard was a shed identical to the one in Steven’s backyard. A flimsy wooden structure a little bigger than an outhouse.
He felt like he was walking in a dream as he shuffled toward it, each footstep an eternity.
Then he was standing before the door. He touched the splintering wooden planks.
The air inside was stagnant, stifling, and thick with dust. The room was barren. He went to the corner and felt along the ground for the loose floorboards. Sweat poured from his face, leaving dark droplets on the dry wood. His mind was racing, like his brain was being swept away in heavy gusts of wind. When he closed his eyes it was like being on a roller coaster.
The loose floorboards came up with a gentle pry … then he stared down at the etching of the octopus on the hatch door. He tried the handle, but it was locked. Brian unholstered his pistol, holding it like a hammer in his palm.
This is it.
This was the end of his journey and the beginning of a new one. Either Bethany was inside or she was not. Either way, he could not go on any farther. Brian would either be saved or this flimsy shed would become his tomb.
His eyes began to shut while kneeling there and he snapped them open.
He brought the butt of the pistol down, crashing it against the metal of the door, and the familiar pattern played out.
Bang … bang, bang, bang, bang … bang … bang, bang
The handle did not move.
Several minutes passed, then he repeated the knock.
It was becoming hard to hold the pistol; his grip was weakening. He put the gun down and rested on his side, curling his knees to his chest, watching the hatch door through narrow eyes. The floor underneath him was cool.
Brian closed his eyes, and all went black.
Chapter 22
Sullivan
There was no longer a singular nightmare that tormented Simon’s mind, but rather a conglomerate of several that made his time since leaving the cabin an assortment of terror.
Flashes of memories plagued his thoughts—images of the Mexican soldiers kneeling with machine guns and the terrible feeling of fleeing from gunfire, the piles of bodies on the sides of roads, buried en masse under stretches of land, and piled high before the doors of the Monticello Fields Hospital.
Then, there was the boy.
The boy at the gas station and his friends in the woods. Images from that day, those minutes, were forever frozen in Simon’s mind—the cloud of red mist and cotton fiber that hung stagnant in the air as the boy’s feet left the ground, the bullet intended for Simon whizzing by, the other children dragging away the body …
It seemed like such a long time ago. Or like a dream that had never happened.
One horrible experience replaced another, and the nightmares were now overlapping.
Sometimes at night, Simon cried. He tried not to. He tried to keep it bottled up, but he couldn’t. He cried for himself. He cried for all of humanity. He told himself, like the millions before him and the few who even now still had tears to cry, This just isn’t fair … Why?
There was no answer to that question. Unlike a koan—a question or phrase made to test a person’s mind during meditation—this koan would never be resolved. It was the universal why. It went through everyone’s mind, time and time again in endless loops. It could not be settled, even with years of meditation. There was no single answer. And if there was an answer, if someone out there knew why humanity was forced to suffer and face extinction to leave only a small fraction to endure, starve, fight, and commit atrocities against their fellow man, that person was not talking.
After leaving Monticello, Simon began seeing other survivors, and their numbers were increasing. They were easy to spot from a distance, giving him time to evade them. He could hear them whisper and see the flight of birds and the scurrying of squirrels off in the brush well before the travelers were close enough to see him.
Most people he saw traveled in groups, two to four, along with the occasional solo traveler. They all looked the same—filthy, vile, skinny. They wore dirty rags and all were armed. They were death. They were destruction and decay, and they left the earth a contaminated place as they passed. Simon dared not utter a sound until they were out of sight.
Parks and shadowy corners of backyards became his campgrounds. He had to be aware, cautious of every corner, dark window, and shadow.
Simon’s biggest concern, however, was not running into a random stranger—they were still few and far between. His biggest concern was that he had not seen a single animal track—anything much larger than a squirrel—in quite some time. Not since leaving the cabin. This frightened him. He had enough food to complete his journey as long as he could still scavenge plants and herbs in parks and lawns, but his rations of dried mea
t would run out soon, and he would have to start hunting. He could survive indefinitely on foraged plants, but feeding Winston was another matter.
But hunting could wait, because the end of his journey was within sight. In a few days, he would arrive at Ridgeline Road, with its majestic views of the Ridgeline River in the distance past the houses and estates bordering the road. He would see the mansions dotting the opposite bank, the familiar businesses that he had observed countless times growing up.
Simon was almost home.
At present, he was in a town named Sullivan—a large town connecting to other large towns with little parks and fields in between. The map showed a park not far from where Simon stood, the name on the map reading Livingston Park.
He made his way through Sullivan, past the many once-ornate homes that now sat in decay and ruin.
Signs of more recent life were evident—piles of shiny litter blown about, the occasional bullet shells, and several steel drums used to hold fire, all charred, rusted, and decomposing. Sullivan was lucky because the town was still intact. Corpses were littered about, but the buildings had evaded damage from the war. This gave Simon some hope. If Sullivan had survived, then maybe his own hometown had survived as well.
“This is a good sign,” he told Winston as they walked. “Better chance Mom and Dad will be waiting for us when we get there. They gotta be.”
Simon and Winston entered Livingston Park and passed the scattered campfire circles dotting the field. Most were old and overgrown with grass. He passed a parking lot, a pair of tennis courts, a single basketball court, and a soccer field before entering the shade of the thick woods. The farther he walked, the less trampled the trails became, and traces of garbage diminished.
The After War Page 17