Coyote

by David L. Foster

  I looked up, and I could see more of these bugs, kind of falling all over the place, and that’s the thumping we’ve been hearing. Some go click on the sidewalk or the pavement, or make a loud thunk as they crash onto the hoods or roofs of cars. It’s not like it was raining bugs or anything, but I can see maybe ten or twelve of em’ when I look out from the porch. I can hear a few thumps as the things land on the roof of the house, too.

  Then all of a sudden I see this bloom of light out of the corner of my eye, and the second broken down car, the one with the dude still trying to start it, it’s on fire now. The fire looks like it starts right in the middle of the car, in the back seat. The dude in there must have felt the heat, because he turned around and his eyes got big, and he whipped back around and started yanking on his seatbelt and openin’ the door. It was too late though.

  Just like the tree, the fire in the car spread so quick there was nothing the dude could do. It moved to the front of the car, and back towards the trunk. The dude let out a few short screams as the fire started to eat at him, but they were cut off when the car just went all up in a ball of flame. That’s when I guess the fire got to the gas tank.

  Down the street, we could see more fires starting, all over the place. There were people running and screaming, too, down there. It was like everything was turning to fire, and it was coming our way.

  Then Sean spoke up for the first time. He said “For the lord will execute judgment by fire and by His sword on all of us, and those slain by the Lord will be many,” or at least, it was something like that. I don’t know the bible well. A lot of folks got religion in prison, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I did, too, but I was never much for reading. But Sean was a preacher’s son and his daddy made him memorize just about the whole thing.

  I looked back at him like “what the fuck?” but he wasn’t even looking at me. He was just staring out at the street at what was coming. I think right then he knew it was over for him. Me, I was just stuck trying to understand what I was seeing.

  By now the kids are sreamin’ their heads off and runnin’ around, ‘cause this car just went up like ten feet from them, and the mom’s trying to gather them all together and get them moving away from the flames at the same time, when one… one of the kids suddenly catches fire, going up in flames, right in the middle of the family.

  That was the worst. That… Shit.

  One of the kids catches fire, they’re all screaming, and I can see the fire starting to spread onto the mom as she rushes at the kid, hoping to put him out or something.

  Shit, I don’t want to remember this.

  He looked out at the group, all spell-bound, waiting for what came next—waiting for the inevitable horror. It was plain on each of their faces: each of them had witnessed scenes like this. No story was exactly the same in the details, but all followed the same general storyline. Shock, horror, death.

  No one spoke.

  Shit. OK, man. I’m almost done.

  So the kid’s on fire, and the mom’s frantic, with fire catching on to her clothes, too, and the rest of the family’s in an absolute panic. I started to turn aside, thinking I was gonna run inside and grab some blankets or something. Just as I turn, though, I see movement up close to me, and it’s that beetle on the porch rail. It somehow launches itself, straight as a bullet, and hits Sean right in the shoulder.

  He lets out kind of a grunt, like he’s just surprised, and then his eyes go big and he starts to scream, cause at that same time the spot the beetle hit glows with this bright orange light and then there’s flames shooting out of the wound, and I can tell their shooting right into Sean, too. He’s burning up just like the tree, the car, and the kid, and he’s screaming and starts to take a step. I don’t know where he was goin’, but then he collapses, and the screaming stops, because his lungs, most of his chest, is just gone. The fire’s not like anything I’ve seen before. It’s not burning up his clothes or his skin first, but it’s inside him, burning him up from the inside, out.

  That beetle, I don’t know what the fuck that thing was, but it’s like it ignited, it turned into a little sun inside him or something, and burned him up from the inside out.

  I didn’t have time to do anything, and neither did Sean’s buddy. We each just took two steps back, then kind of looked at each other, and by then it was all over, and Sean was gone, man. He twitched his arms a few times, but he was just gone after that, man. Dead, and now the fire that was on him, that was in him, is burning into the floor boards of the porch, too.

  I’m still hearing these beetles drop, and I can see them all over now, maybe a hundred or so scattered across all the area I can see. I see two of them launch themselves straight at the porch we’re on. They miss me and they miss Sean’s buddy, but they slam into the wall of the house, punching through the wood. Then they do the same thing, igniting themselves, and all of a sudden the front wall of the porch is goin’ up, “whoosh” just like everything else is.

  The flames are between Sean’s buddy and I, and the last I see him, he’s backed up against the porch railing looking at Sean and the flames, still with this “what the fuck?” expression on his face.

  I back up from the flames on the porch too, and kind of stumble through the front door and into the house. Then I turn around, thinking I’d head out the back, but that’s all up in flames, too, even more than the front of the house.

  I turn around one more time, but now the whole front of the house is on fire and there’s no escape that way. There’s no upstairs in this house either. You either go out the front or out the back, or you stay inside.

  Right then, I was thinking I was fucked. I was stunned, I’d just seen Sean die, but what I mostly couldn’t get out of my head was the image of that kid burning up, just out of nowhere. I gotta tell you, that made me scared, but it made me mad, too.

  So the house is on fire at both ends, and the inside is starting to fill up with smoke too, and suddenly I got pissed, and I’m like “Fuck no, man, I’m not burning up here in this shithole house.”

  Well, I think I went a little nuts after that. I was pissed, man. Pissed off, scared, and hopped-up all that the same time, so that stomping something seemed like the solution to all my troubles. I bring up one foot and kick into the wall at the side of the room. My foot goes right through the wall, hits some insulation on the inside, and thumps up against the outside wall of the house. I kick again and again. and pound it with my fists, too, sometimes grabbing off chunks of plaster, bits of board, and pieces of insulation, until I’m looking at the back of the boards that made up the outside wall of the house. A few good kicks and the first of those pops off. A little more kicking and grunting after that, and I’m squeezing out through my own brand new custom doorway.

  I got stuck for a second, because the two by fours that made up the frame of the house were kinda close together and I couldn’t break them, but I shoved myself through with nothing more than some scrapes and cuts.

  After that, I’m kind of fuzzy on the details. I’d breathed so much smoke and fumes that I almost didn’t know which way was up. I know the whole street seemed to be on fire by the time I was out of the house, and I know there were people pouring out of all the houses, running in every which direction.

  I just remember there was a lot of running, and smoke and fire all over the place. I stopped seeing people pretty soon—live ones at least. There were a lot of bodies on the ground, though, burned up from the inside, like Sean. I kept going, and eventually I was out of the burned-up area, maybe thirty or more blocks from where I started, and night was falling. I could see the glow of the fires behind me, though. Looked like the whole town was burning, but I guess that’s probably not what really happened.

  The neighborhood I ended up in was deserted, though, and there was junk in the street, and crashed cars and everything. There was no fire in that neighborhood, but something bad had sure happened, and now all the people were gone, just like every other neighborhood I’ve been thro
ugh since.

  Anyway, I spent the night in a house that had the door standing open and nobody home, and I’ve been on the move ever since.

  He looked up then, finished with his tale. No one said anything at first. There was never much to say after a person finished their tale. No sympathy was appropriate, because they had all been through the same kind of experience. No platitudes about how things would get better with time seemed right, because there was no sign that things would be getting better.

  She had just decided that they were done with this and had begun to turn for the door when the Professor spoke up.

  “For the Lord will execute judgment by fire / And by His sword on all flesh, / And those slain by the Lord will be many.”

  “Amen,” said Beast, looking at him. “You know the bible?”

  “Not really, no,” said the Professor. “But that’s a pretty common one, I think. Anyway, I’ve heard it before. It’s about the apocalypse. The day of judgment.”

  “So the Bible predicted all this?” asked Bait.

  “Pretty much,” replied Beast.

  The Professor held up his hands in a calming gesture. “I wouldn’t go that far. All I know is the bible has whole sections devoted to the end of the world, as does just about every religion. I think in the Bible a lot of it is in the book of revelations.”

  Beast stared at him, considering his words.

  “What do you think happened?” he asked.

  “Me?” responded the Professor. “I haven’t a clue. But I don’t think that some priests from a couple thousand years ago knew either.”

  Beast frowned. He obviously didn’t agree, but maybe he didn’t want to start an argument after just meeting these people. Instead he turned to Bait and asked him. “What about you?”

  “Shit, that’s obvious. Government conspiracy, man. They cooked up some new experiment, tested some new weapon in a lab someplace, and let all this shit loose on us. Get rid of all the dirty, poor folks while the rich ones hide in their bunkers.”

  She looked at Bait closely. Bait had never expressed these ideas before now. In fact, none of them had ever discussed the causes of the Fall. Why not?

  “Explains the zombies, too,” added Bait.

  “There are zombies?” asked Beast.

  “Yup, seen ‘em.”

  “No there aren’t,” said the Mule at exactly the same time. He looked sidelong at Bait. “He saw something moving in this pile of dead bodies. We all did. But none of us saw what was in there. He says zombies, but it’s just wishful thinking.”

  Bait rolled his eyes. This was a debate they would not settle today.

  “So what about you? What do you think is happening?” asked Beast, his attention now on the Mule.

  The Mule gave a self-depreciating smile. “Well, I guess I’ll go with aliens. Nobody’s picked that yet.”

  “Aliens.”

  “Hey, why not?” said the Mule with a shrug.

  Then Beast turned to her, the same question on his lips. What did she think had happened?

  She answered before he asked. “She thinks something killed everyone that each of you knew. Now you work to survive. Or,” she added as an afterthought, “to kill.”

  With that, she was out the door, the dog on her heels, headed back for the highway.

  That ended the discussion for the rest of the group as well, as they were soon traipsing out of the house behind her.

  ---

  Soon, the group was on the road again. As before, the dog scouted ahead, and she led the group of people. The Professor and Beast came next, walking next to each other even though the mistrust sewn by their argument the previous night was still evident. The Mule brought up the rear, sweating and huffing under his still-overloaded backpack.

  Bait, for his part, moved up and down the line depending on who he was conversing with, sometimes at the back talking idly with the Mule, sometimes in the middle, in conversation with the Professor or Beast, and much more occasionally coming to the front to pester her with questions or conversation starters. She responded with terse answers that should have been enough to let Bait know she wasn’t interested in idle chatter, but still he would be back a little later, trying out something else.

  She wasn’t sure, today, whether she was looking for things to kill or still hiding to try and survive. Fortunately, the decision didn’t have to be made right away, as nothing perked the dog’s interest before they reached the next town.

  The town was called Rhododendron,[16] or at least that was what she guessed from the half-charred sign at the edge of town. All she could make out was “Rhododend—”. It was a small, skinny roadside town, consisting of a set of stores and restaurants along the main road and a few houses dispersed back from the highway. At least, that’s what it had been.

  Much of the town was ashes now, with only a few buildings left standing. What looked like it had been about the middle of the town was completely flattened, with charred two-by-fours and bits of roofing radiating out from a center point. It looked as if an enormous explosion had happened here, destroying all the buildings, cars and trees in the immediate area. A little over a hundred yards away from the center of destruction they began to see the occasional burned wall still standing, where she guessed the buildings hadn’t been knocked down by the explosion but had still burned in the resulting fire. It was only at the very edges of the town that things started looking just moderately singed instead of entirely burnt out.

  None of them could imagine what might cause an explosion of such magnitude in a small, Oregon town.

  At the near edge of town, a few houses and half a restaurant were all that was left. They searched these briefly but most everything they found was singed or smoke-filled. Even a bag of rice that might have had some potential broke into dried flakes of paper when the Mule picked it up, crispy, brown flakes of rice cascading through his fingers.

  At the other edge of town, incongruously, stood a Dairy Queen[17]. From a distance it looked whole, although when they approached they could see some smoke-stains on the walls. Coming closer, they saw that the windows had been blown out by the force of the explosion. Otherwise, the Dairy Queen seemed untouched.

  “Ice cream!” yelled Bait, almost skipping toward the store. The others increased their pace, lured by his yell.

  “You know that whatever’s in there has been without refrigeration since the Fall, right?” called the Professor.

  Bait slowed, looking crushed. “Shit, I forgot.”

  “Yeah, it’s so hard to remember the collapse of civilization and all,” added the Mule, grinning.

  Bait looked to the Mule. “Screw you, man.” Then he thought for a moment. “So no ice cream, but… maybe just cream?” He asked this with a hopeful look to the Professor.

  The Professor gave his own laugh. “Or whatever it is that Dairy Queen used instead of cream to make their soft-serve. I’m guessing some kind of chemical powder or something. But they served lots of other stuff, too. It might be worth looking into.”

  There was a lot of nodding to this, and it did make some sense. She unslung her rifle and approached the building with the dog at her heels.

  The doors, once made of glass but now just empty metal frames sitting in a dusty pile of broken safety glass, swung open at her touch. Taking one step in, she saw nothing moving, though she did smell the sour odor of rotting dairy products, layered with an almost sickly-sweet odor. That second smell must have represented whatever happened to soft serve ice cream if you left it lying around without refrigeration for about a month. She looked down at the dog, who was sticking its nose into the store at her knee. He looked up to her, as if to report that he smelled nothing more dangerous than rotten imitation ice cream.

  She stepped in, with the rest of the group following her.

  Inside, the store looked as if it was open for business. There were a few desiccated meals sitting in their wrappers on one table, but the rest was spic and span. Moving past the counter to the rear of
the restaurant, she saw that things were still tidy but looked less ready for business. The fryers were a congealed tub of solid grease with something green and fuzzy starting to grow out of them. The cheese in the bins, ready to put on burgers, was covered in its own green mold and the lettuce and onion tubs had both decomposed to a dark brown sludge. However, there were a number of food items in plastic packaging, probably enough to make a few hodge-podge meals out of.

  The dog gave a low growl on entering the kitchen area, setting everyone’s nerves on edge. They all froze, looking about suspiciously, but after the dog had sniffed around a bit, it left the kitchen with another low growl. Perhaps it was smelling something that had been here but had now left. After nervously checking the corners for anything lurking, the group spread out across the restaurant to begin their scavenging.

  She was going through the drawers of cooking knives and pondering whether any of them could be useful when an explosion of noise and yelling from the back jerked her out of her reveries.

  Turning, she saw the Mule standing in front of the now-open walk-in freezer doors, waving his arms and mixing incoherent yelling with cries of “Get it off! Get it off!”

  Bait was next to the Mule, ineffectually slapping at something on the Mule’s chest and adding his own cries to the noise, while the dog was barking madly at the whole scene.

  She ran to the commotion, as did the Professor and Beast. Coming closer, she saw something latched to the Mule’s chest, rapidly twitching and dodging the Mule’s swipes. The thing was dark colored, insectile-looking and perhaps as big as the Mule’s forearm. As he swatted at it, the thing slammed a single, sharp appendage into his chest again and again, making a quick thumping sound, almost like a woodpecker. The speed of the blows at it pistoned its heavy claw into the Mule’s chest was astounding, making the thing’s arm blur, and almost melding the thuds of its blows against the Mule’s armored chest into a low, thumping buzz. The blows didn’t seem to be penetrating the armor in the Mule’s jacket, but they had to hurt.