“Drive it in!” she yelled. “Drive the spear in!”
The man heard her and looked to the spear, awaiting his own chance. When it came, he took it, grabbing the haft of the spear, and pushing it deeper into the orb. She could see his muscles bunching, but could not see the spear moving any deeper. She dodged in to the other side of the beast, stabbing at it to keep up the distraction, as did Bait, the Mule, and the dog. When she spun back out, she could see the man still with his hands on the spear, still pushing as he danced to one side or another to dodge the legs of the beast, but the spear was going no further.
Then from the other side she heard the Mule yell “Hold it!” as he came running around the beast. The man saw him coming too, and must have divined the Mule’s intent, for he held the spear steady for a moment, aiming the butt end at the Mule as he came running around the beast. The Mule ran onto the spear full speed, hitting it with his chest and trusting in the armored plates of his jacket to protect him. As he struck, there was a cracking sound and the spear was driven a good three feet into the beast. The Mule fell, clutching his chest and moaning as he rolled away from the area where the beast’s legs continued to come down.
The beast spun wildly, reacting to this new jab, and threw the man off his feet. He rolled away as Mule had, but kept hold of the spear, which made a squelching pop as it was pulled from the beast’s side. At this, the beast gave it’s greatest shudder of all, thrashing wildly, now no longer aiming at the people that still circled it, but seemingly driven mad by this latest assault.
From the hole torn by the spear, a dark liquid spurted, as if from a hose under great pressure. As the beast turned, this liquid squirted across each one of the people around it, as well as liberally coating the trees and bushes.
When the spray washed across her she learned that not only did it smell even fouler than the liquid behind the beast’s eyes, but it wasn’t all liquid, either. It was more the consistency of cottage cheese, with some larger chunks and some smaller ones in it. She had to work to hold down the contents of her own stomach as she backed off, wiping the disgusting mess off of her face.
They all backed off, watching the beast in what now seemed to be its death throes. Having had its armor pierced by the spear, it seemed like most of its insides were being forced out the resulting hole, most likely pushed by the pressure of the beast’s own massive body, like an above-ground swimming pool that spills its contents through a rip in its side. The hole soon grew larger under pressure, growing to the full eight-inch size that the original orb had been.
And as the flow continued, the beast slowed. Each of its steps was more sluggish, until finally, still leaking fluids from the wound in its side, its legs collapsed and it settled to the ground with a great thump. It lay there for some time, its legs kicking ever slower and the flow from the wound slowing to more of an ooze than a stream, until finally the flow stopped altogether, as did the beast’s kicking and shuddering.
It finished its violent, gory death throes, still never having made a sound. She wondered what it would be like to die without being able to scream or groan, or call out your last, defiant words. She hoped she would never find out.
When the beast finally settled into stillness, seemingly dead, they all gathered about the corpse. They shared looks between them, each wondering at what they had accomplished, and each with a different emotion on their face. It was the man that had helped kill the beast who broke the silence.
“Hah, haaa! Got you, bitch!” He gave a whoop and climbed atop the body of the beast, drawing the attention of all that were gathered. Without another word or any acknowledgement of his audience, he knelt on the beast’s carapace and began sawing at it with his knife. Everyone watched, wondering what he was about.
The man was digging away at one of the black orbs higher up on the beast’s body, where their stabbing knives had been unable to reach while the beast was alive. In a few minutes, it became obvious that he was trying to extract it without popping it. Unfortunately, as he worked to pry it out he accidentally pierced it with his knife, releasing another spurt of the same foul-smelling goo that had been in the other orbs. He gave a muttered curse, but finished pulling the ruined orb from the beast’s body and proceeded to wring out all the foul goo he could, then rinse the deflated orb with water from a canteen strapped to the back of his belt.
When he was done he had a brown, floppy sack in his hands. Still crouched on the beast’s body held it up triumphantly to show the others.
“How’s that, huh?” he asked.
For a moment nobody responded. Eventually, as the man kept looking around the group and waving his grisly prize, the Mule spoke up.
“So what are you doing with that?” They all could hear the disgust in his voice.
“It’s my prize, man! My trophy!” He smiled around the group, then pointed at the crude necklace around his neck, and the several dangling things tied onto his vest as well. The necklace and bracelets each had a variety of objects tied onto them.
“Look at these,” he said proudly. “Each one of these came off from something I’ve killed since the world went to shit. Something that tried to kill me, but I got it first. Each one is proof that we don’t have to lay down and die for these monsters. Each one, proof that we can fight back.
“And now one more prize, from the biggest monster yet.” His grin was huge. “We killed it! Yes!”
She understood his triumph, though she felt no desire to decorate her own self with bits of dead monsters. The others displayed various degrees of acceptance or disgust on their faces. Bait was laughing, and the Mule seemed to have a certain degree of awed admiration on his face. The Professor looked plainly disgusted—she could have guessed that this joy in violence and death would not be his thing. The dog just looked on, as all dogs do, inscrutable, and Medic…
Where was Medic? She was not in the group around the beast’s body, and she did not remember seeing Medic at all during the fight.
“Where’s Medic?” she asked, giving voice to her concern.
All the others looked at each other, mumbling things about how they hadn’t seen her.
“Spread out,” she ordered. “Find her.”
They spread out and began to hunt through the bushes, the joy of the kill evaporating in the mystery of Medic’s whereabouts.
The man hopped down from the beast and walked next to her as she searched.
“Who’s Medic?” he asked.
“Another woman who was with us. I heard…”
And suddenly she knew. She ran to the bushes she had heard Medic’s scream come from earlier. She thought she had seen Medic run out of those bushes, but she now knew it had been Bait she had seen running so quickly. She should have recognized it sooner.
After a few false starts at different sets of trampled bushes, she found the right ones, and was proven correct. Medic lay there—at least what was left of her did. At first Medic looked to be in peaceful repose, but when she looked closer, she could see that Medic’s body was off, somehow—it was wrong. She had been crushed, obviously by one of the legs of the beast as it thrashed through the forest. She was lying on her side, arms thrown out in front of her and legs looking as if they might still kick, but her body was flat, as if she were lying on her back. Her head looked in the same direction her arms were pointed in, but it was longer and flatter than any living person’s head should be, with the tongue protruding and the eyes bulging as if they might pop out at any moment. It was too dark to see the blood, but she could smell it, the coppery tang coming up from the ground where it must be soaking in a great pool.
It was obvious right away that there was nothing to do for the woman.
“Found her!” she called, turning away. The others turned and began to move towards her, but she held up her hands.
“You should not look,” she said.
“Is she…” began Mule, with big eyes and a catch in his voice, almost whispering.
“Dead,” she replied. �
�Crushed. There is nothing you can do.”
---
It was a solemn group that left the beast’s carcass behind. There had been some desultory discussion of burying Medic, but nobody had a shovel, and after their fight none of them were up to digging a grave with sticks or bare hands.
The Professor made a half-hearted attempt at scavenging Medic’s bag for useful supplies, but all the liquids had been crushed and broken, and had soaked into the bandages and dressings. After a few minutes he gave it up as a lost cause and moved away with the rest of the group.
They left her behind, walking back to the road they had come from and moving on eastward. They were all tired, all wanting to stop, to sit, to eat, and to sleep, but none of them felt safe enough where they were. Who knew if there were more of those giant beasts close by?
And so they walked. They walked, strung out in a line, tired, with no one, not even Bait, making conversation. They walked alone through the darkness at the edge of the Mount Hood National Forest.
5[13]
As the sun was starting to lighten the sky, but before it was high enough to be seen over the trees surrounding the road, they came to a town called Zigzag.[14] A strange name for a town, she thought, but those things didn’t much matter anymore.
At the edge of town, she turned off the road, stepped up to one of the first houses she saw. After only a quick peek into the front window she decided this would be their resting place. She saw nothing special inside. It was a small house, single story, with maybe four or five rooms total, and looked rather run-down. But they were tired—she was tired—and at some point one source of shelter is the same as another.
After a struggle with the lock that required the use of the Mule’s baseball bat to solve, they spilled into the front room of the house. It was dark and dreary inside, with the shades mostly drawn down across the windows, only partially hiding the fading wallpaper and ratty, dusty furniture. The house suited her mood.
Silently, without needing to discuss it, they each separated, moving through the various rooms of the house and making a cursory check to be sure it was unoccupied by both man and beast. Finding nothing, they all found themselves back in the front room, the only room in the house with a couch and chairs, staring at each other—staring at her.
Why would they not make their own decisions? Why must she be in charge?
“It is time to rest,” she said, turning away, lowering her pack from her shoulders, and beginning to dig for something to eat.
The others all began to do the same, some plopping onto the couch or chairs, and others just kneeling or sitting where they were, too tired and hungry to make more comfortable choices.
The Professor, after a few minutes of his own rustling about, seated on the floor and eating from a bag of nuts he had pulled from his pack, spoke up.
“Shouldn’t we talk about what happened?” he asked. No one answered right away.
“Talk if you must,” she said, still rummaging for her own food. “She is going to eat and then sleep.”
The man who had helped them kill the beast looked at her with a question on his face and began to open his mouth to ask that question. She caught his look and gave him one of her own. Less quizzical, more unfriendly.
Bait picked up on the interaction and guessed what the question might be. “She is her,” he said, pointing to her to be sure he was clear.
“Her?” asked the man.
“Yup. She,” he responded, still pointing at her. “Coyote talks that way.” He finished with a shrug, as if that explained everything, and maybe it did, well enough.
“Coyote?”
“That’s what we call her. Don’t know her real name. Don’t use any of our real names. It’s a group thing, I guess. I’m Bait,” he said, putting out his hand to be engulfed by the hand of the other man.
After they shook he continued, pointing out the others as he mentioned them.
“The sweaty one with the big pack over there is the Mule. Sometimes we call him Ass.” the Mule paused in his own rummaging to raise his middle finger in Bait’s direction. “And this is the Professor. Coyote, you’ve met, and finally, over there’s the dog.”
“Not even the dog has a name?” The man sounded genuinely perplexed.
“Nope. Just ‘the dog,’ or maybe ‘Dog,’ like with a capital letter, you know? I’m not sure—we’re still kind of making this up. Most of us have only been along for the ride for a few days. Honestly, I don’t know why nobody uses their real name here.”
“Maybe so it’ll be easier to leave you dead in the forest when your time comes,” suggested the Professor with a sarcastic snarl in his voice.
“What the hell, man?” It was the Mule that spoke up.
“We just left her, dammit!” yelled the Professor, suddenly standing. “No burial, no last words, just rifle through her stuff a little and then walk away. What kind of people are we? Maybe we don’t deserve names.”
“What were you going to do? Nobody here has a shovel to dig with. Nobody here is a preacher, far as I know, to give any last words. Hell, man, we don’t even know if Medic was religious! We’d just got done killing that giant thing, and I, for one, didn’t want to hang around and see if another one, or something else, had been attracted by all the noise we made.”
“Professor,” added Bait, “there was nothing to do. She was dead. We weren’t. Time for the survivors to get on surviving.”
“That’s disgusting. Is this why we don’t give each other our names, or why we don’t really talk about our pasts or what we think is going on? Is it because we all just want to live a few days more, and make it easier to leave the bodies of the dead behind? People can’t survive that way. We need something more.”
The big man spoke up, not shy to jump into the group’s argument. “You kill. You fight back. That’s your something more.”
“Is that it? Killing? More violence?” asked the Professor, looking around the group. All he got was blank looks and a few shrugs. This seemed to irritate him more than anything so far.
“Come on people! Wake up! Don’t you see what’s going on out there? It’s not the monsters that are taking away what we are. It’s us!”
Suddenly he rounded on the man, taking in his muscles, the primitive trophies hanging from his wrists and neck, and the aura of ferocity he was radiating. He pointed to the man while speaking to the group as a whole.
“Who knows what these things are that we’re killing, but I know what he is. He’s the beast, not the things that he’s killing.”
The huge man took a step forward, making the Professor’s outstretched finger bend against his chest, a frown beginning to darken his face.
“Yes I am, Professor-man. I am the beast in this world. We all are. And we need to teach that to these monsters. We need to teach them there are worse things than them here, and this isn’t their place. It’s my place. More than you know, it’s my place.”
The Professor threw up his hands, looking done and disgusted. “This world is ‘your place’? Jesus, can you hear yourself? This is nobody’s place, this violent, chaotic shell of our former world. We should be working to hold up what we can, maybe even put things back together, not finding our personal glory in adding more violence to what’s already out there.” With this last he gestured to the trophies that adorned the man.
For his part, the man stood with his enormous arms crossed, cords of muscle running up his forearms and into his vest. The scowl on his face should have intimidated anyone, but the Professor plowed ahead, buoyed by his own passion.
“This isn’t ‘your place’,” continued the Professor. “This is nobody’s place. It’s a ghost, a memory of what once was. And the more people do what you’re doing, adapting to this new world, even reveling in it, the further our society falls. These are the hard times, get it? We need to persevere through the hard times without losing our basic decency, even our humanity. If you become some sort of beast, and if you lead others down that path, then you�
�re no better than what’s already out there, trying to kill us. If you become like them, then all hope of putting a civil society back together is lost.”
She expected the man to tear into the Professor at that point, living up to the violence he was being accused of. In fact, she was crouching, readying herself, preparing to spring into the middle and do what she could to save the Professor. But the man surprised her. His scowl had turned to a look of puzzlement, and he squinted his eyes and cocked his head, as if really seeing the Professor for the first time.
“So you were an actual professor before the Fall, right?” She never knew how, but somehow most everyone she met, even in the early days, was calling it the Fall. Some things are just too right to be denied. “I mean a real one,” he continued. “A real professor, giving lectures, smoking your pipe, and all that.”
The Professor seemed taken aback. “Well, I never smoked a pipe, but…”
“Then you don’t know me, Professor,” snarled the man, his bad mood returning. “I guarantee you don’t know me. I come from the real world. The world that mostly sucks, that’s about fighting for what you get, and about being kept down by people like you. Shit, Professor. I’m the guy your college co-eds turn the other way from when they see me walking down the street—the guy your college security rent-a-cops come out to hustle off the campus if I walk too close to the carefully-trimmed lawn.”
He flexed one arm, making the muscles jump and writhe, pointing to them with his other hand. “You know where muscles like this come from, Professor? From prison, man. Hard time. The kind of time where you got nothin’ else to do but pump iron and read a bible.”
Next, he turned over the arm that had been flexing, displaying three dots tattooed on the back of his hand, between his thumb and forefinger. “See this?” he asked. “This is the vida loca. All the Mexicans have it in the can, and shit they were pissed when I got it on me. It means ‘my crazy life’. The dots are the three things they expect out of life: gangs, drugs, death. And this one?” now he was pointing to three solid teardrops tattooed at the outside corner of one eye. “These ones you get if you’ve killed somebody. A tear for every death.”
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