Last Contact

by Geoff North

  She heard a car pull in down below and her heart sped up. Sheila wasn’t afraid of visitors—she was far more terrified of what Allan would do to them. She peered around the window curtain and saw a middle-aged man and woman step out of a car with a rental plate on the front. They weren’t people Sheila recognized.

  Her stomach heaved at the thought of more salespeople stopping in. They were the worst. The last one had been instructed to drive his car into the river and walk through town naked. The one before that simply disappeared. She hadn’t been selling anything. She just wanted to leave pamphlets about the upcoming Apocalypse—the 2012 one. Sheila remembered Allan asking the woman why she believed in bullshit and the look on her face when he stepped out of the shadows of the darkened house. She fled, screaming, and Allan followed. Becky had run into the kitchen and covered her ears. She never heard the car leave. She didn’t hear anything after that. The screaming stopped and the car disappeared. The only trace left behind was the discarded leaflets lying on the porch steps.

  I should go downstairs and make sure things don’t get out of hand. I have to humor him and play along just enough so no one gets murdered. Like when those kids came over on Halloween night… He wanted to eat one of them.

  But Allan was too far gone, and Sheila no longer had the strength or courage to watch anymore human degradation. What would Abe think of me now?

  She wept silently into her hands and listened as the front door opened and closed. There were no screams. Sheila held her breath and listened harder. Muffled voices. They were talking.

  She jumped when Allan called her name.

  No! I can’t go down there. Please leave me alone. Do what you have to do to them and leave me out of it.

  “Sheila! Come downstairs. You’ll never guess in a million years who’s come to visit!”

  She dried her face on the curtain and took a shuddering breath. Maybe I can stop him. Maybe my powers are greater than his. Sheila had thought of trying to rein Allan in more than once—especially in the last couple of years. His body had deteriorated so badly she couldn’t understand what was keeping him alive. He rarely ate, and when he did it was usually something rotten. Sheila was a mess, too, but compared to Allan—

  “Sheila! Get down here… now!”

  The strangers were sitting on the same couch where Stewart Weibe and his two friends had eaten scrambled eggs. The man sat with his hands folded over his lap, the fingers shaking. He’d obviously been given the command to keep his mouth shut—one of Allan’s favorites—judging from the tears streaming down his face and the snot bubbling out of his right nostril. The woman beside him didn’t look much calmer. There was something about her eyes that caught Sheila’s attention and held it. They were the lightest shade of blue, grey almost. She was somewhere between forty and fifty, a beautiful woman at any age. But that wasn’t her most striking feature. She seemed familiar to Sheila. I’ve never seen her before in my life. She looks like someone I know… that I used to know.

  “It’s my Mom, Sheila… Can you believe it? It’s my Mom.”

  “How…Why did you come here?”

  The woman remained quiet.

  “You can talk now, Mom. It’s okay to talk in front of Sheila. She’s like my wife.”

  Kathy Bagara—Kathy whatever last name she went by now—inhaled deeply and started to whimper. Talking was the last thing on her mind.

  Allan reached across the coffee table from the armchair he was sitting in and patted his mother’s knee. “The internet’s an amazing thing, Sheila. I typed in her name and came up with over a hundred results. Most were dead ends and links that no longer worked, but I ended up finding the right one eventually. Good old internet. It led me to a website for Mr. Dipshit here and his steel door manufacturing business. My Mom’s a partner apparently. Is she a full partner, Mr. Dipshit—as in fifty-fifty, or did you only add her name for appearances because you’re such a generous son of a bitch?”

  He made a squeaking noise that sounded like a kitten trapped in his throat.

  “Whoops, forgot you can’t talk.” The brown peg-toothed smile dropped from Allan’s face. “Think I’ll leave him like that. I bet there’s nothing much useful you could say at this point is there, Vern?” Allan looked up at Sheila. “His name’s Vernon. Can you believe that? Who names their kid Vernon?”

  Kathy finally spoke. “We didn’t want to come… wanted to stay away. He-he phoned us in Seattle… told me to come straight here… made me put Vern on the phone and said the same thing…” She broke into tears.

  “And like any loving mother you came right away,” Allan said. “I’m such a lucky kid, wouldn’t you say, Sheila? I had an alcoholic father and a mother that abandoned me. But she came back! She must have loved me sooo much to come all this way and bring her Dipshit second husband with her.”

  Sheila wanted it to stop but didn’t know what to say. A single thought kept repeating in her mind. How will this end? How will this end? How will this end?

  “Can I call Vern Dad, Mom? Is that what he is now? I don’t have a Dad anymore. You know your first husband blew his brains out, right? You must have heard it from someone.”

  Kathy nodded and continued to weep.

  “Would you be a good Dad, Vern? Would you steal my heart like you stole my Mom all those years ago?”

  Vern strained to answer but his lips remained sealed.

  “Yeah… Keep your mouth shut. I think you’d make a worse father than Ted. At least he didn’t run out on me.”

  “You’re not Allan,” Kathy gasped. “He was a beautiful boy. You’re not even human… you’re a monster.”

  Sheila saw something in Allan’s black eyes she hadn’t seen before. He didn’t offer any comeback. He simply sat there looking hurt.

  Kathy drove the point further. “You’re not my son.”

  Sheila turned away and waited for the commands. Long moments passed.

  “Go,” Allan whispered.

  Sheila looked at him, believing the command was for her. But he was staring directly at his mother. A big yellow tear was running into the hollow of his cheek.

  “Go,” he repeated, louder this time. “And take my dipshit stepfather with you.”

  Kathy and Vern stumbled through the garbage and made it to the door without looking back. Sheila heard the rental car start thirty seconds later. And then they were gone. Allan’s mother had left for a second time.

  Sheila knew they’d never see her again. Allan would never phone out to Seattle and command her to come back. Fourteen days later she read online that Vernon and Kathy Cusack had been killed in a car accident thirty miles south of Minot, North Dakota.

  If Allan had whispered the command, Sheila never heard it, and she never asked.

  Chapter 17

  The four had followed the ocean’s edge for half a year. Some days they ran out of shoreline and had to venture further inland. Some of those days led into weeks—hard-walking through ancient boreal forests, and climbing over mountain ranges encased for the most part in snow carved by wind. The sky had gone from brown to grey stealing whatever somber color was left in the freezing world. And it was getting colder. Not cold for Abe and Becky, but Boo and Ann were clothed from head to foot in heavy furs, unable to walk very long on their own. Food was getting hard to come by. Whatever starving animals they could find were dying, the meager meat on their bones hardly worth hunting. Half the animal carcasses they fed off of were already dead and frozen.

  Abe didn’t argue when Becky said she was turning back and taking the children with her. He should’ve made the same decision weeks earlier. They had talked it through one long, cold night, huddled behind a bank of snow as the wind howled above their heads. They hadn’t found any more humans during their journey north to take the children. And even if they had, Boo and Ann would likely infect them with the virus they all carried now. Without Abe and Becky, the children would die. They would all perish if they continued north.

  But turning around didn�
��t guarantee survival. They had come far, depleted resources, and it would be six more grueling months back—harder months since temperatures continued to plummet worldwide, the water supply was freezing over, and there was little animal life or vegetation left to sustain them. Their best option was hardly an option at all. They had crawled out of their snow fort the following morning and started back south. By early evening they ended up at the edge of a dead forest they’d trudged by two days before.

  Abe said the animal foraging in a clearing through the trees was just dumb luck. Becky thought it was a miracle. Whether it was random chance or divine intervention, both knew the massive elk would keep them fed for weeks.

  “We’ll never bring it down,” Becky whispered. “It’s too big. Once it smells us, it’ll run.”

  “We’ll run faster.”

  “And then what? Look at those antlers.”

  They were hard not to look at. They spanned fourteen feet from tip to tip. Its head and thick neck were supported by a powerful body covered in light brown fur. Abe watched the muscle ripple across its back and legs as it dipped its snout in the shallow snow for a taste of dead grass beneath. It was too big to take down, three or four thousand pounds too big.

  Boo poked Abe in the rear end with the end of a spear. Abe looked back at him, hunched down in a drift next to Ann. Ann held another spear out to Becky.

  “I don’t think these two are going to take no for an answer,” Abe said, taking the weapon in hand.

  Becky took the other one. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll circle round to the far side of the clearing and run it into the trees towards you. Aim for the chest, find its heart.”

  Abe watched her leave and marveled again at her strength. She had never given up on him—even as he’d pushed them further north, away from their best chance of survival. If anything, Becky had become more driven, more determined. She wouldn’t have had to push herself to such extremes if he’d agreed to turn back weeks before. He looked at Boo and Ann, huddled beneath their furs, shivering and silent. Hungry. “I’m sorry,” he mouthed the words without making any sound. Boo lifted a single thumb towards him. It was a simple gesture Becky had taught them to show that things were alright. A-Okay… Cool. It only made Abe feel worse.

  He sat there in the cold watching the children and feeling guilty. When the screams started it took a few moments to remember where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. Something was thundering through the trees behind him, crashing through deadfall and shaking the ground. The elk. He spun around and saw the animal bearing down on them. Abe yelled at Boo and Ann but they were already scrambling away through the snow. Something hit him hard in the head—a hoof, a front leg, Abe wasn’t sure. The spear fell from his fingers and his face was pushed into snow. One of the elk’s back legs ground into his calf as it continued to punch its way over him and through the trees.

  Abe could still hear Becky screaming. He got onto his knees and searched desperately for the spear. The elk was getting away. Why won’t she stop yelling? There was a cold sting in his lower back. Something shot out of his stomach in front of him. A rock spear point, covered in blood. My spear didn’t have a stone tip.

  His dazed brain tried to catch up. Why was Becky still screaming? Had she speared him through the back by accident? Abe staggered up and a Neanderthal slammed into his side, forcing him back into the snow. Powerful fingers wrapped around Abe’s throat pushing his face into the dead grass and frozen dirt beneath. The spear through his gut drove into the ground pinning him further. A foot struck him in the face—someone running past—another set of feet kicked snow into his eyes. They were surrounded. Abe reached back and found a handful of greasy hair. He pulled, the Neanderthal grunted, but the fingers around his neck held firm. Abe pulled harder, twisting his body to the right. The spear shaft snapped somewhere inside of him and the two-hundred plus pounds of writhing, stinking muscle toppled over. Abe ground an elbow into his throat and twisted. The Neanderthal’s back was now pressed against the ground and Abe was on top. He applied more pressure and watched the savage’s eyes bulge out from beneath the heavy ridge of skull brow. He felt something give, heard a low cracking sound, and then the Neanderthal’s eyes rolled up into its skull, the fingers around Abe’s neck fell away.

  The quarter length piece of spear was still skewered into the ground beside him. He grabbed the stone end sticking out of his gut and pulled. Another Neanderthal lunged and Abe planted the spear into its chest. He threw the still-twitching body into another. They were everywhere. Abe pushed through a tangle of hairy limbs trying to find Becky, smashing flat noses flatter, kicking legs and snapping them at the knees as he went.

  He spotted her in the trees running north. She would never abandon him, Abe knew that. Only one thing could have drawn her away—Boo and Ann. A hammer head with a sharp rock end was headed between his eyes. Abe caught it by the handle and drove it back into the wielder’s face. There were half a dozen more Neanderthals running ahead of Becky. Abe could see their dark forms weaving through the dead branches, searching. The children would be ahead of them somewhere.

  How long have they been planning this? How could we let them get this close?

  Two Neanderthals had wrapped themselves around his left leg. It slowed him down enough for another to grab onto his right.

  Smarter than we gave them credit for. They planned it perfectly. Waited until we separated.

  Four more had taken hold of his arms. One of them was biting into his wrist, snarling and drooling.

  Saw opportunity when our attention was focused on something else. We wouldn’t hear or smell them coming until they were on top of us.

  More bodies pressed down on his back and head. Abe fell to his knees. He half-expected his intestines to burst free from the spear wound, but instinctively he knew the wound had already begun to heal. They could send a hundred against him, a thousand. They could skewer him with spears and pummel him with hammers and axes. His wounds would heal.

  He drove his forehead into the face of one directly in front. Abe’s face was spattered with blood as the bridge of the Neanderthal’s nose splintered up into its brain. He bit a sizeable chunk from the side of another’s thick neck. His hands found fingers and wrists. He squeezed and felt ligament snap, bones crack. The bodies clinging to him began to break away, crawling and howling. Abe was on his feet again.

  Others rushed in and circled; they hoisted their brutal weapons and jabbed with their spears. Abe snarled. He would go down fighting and kill as many as he could on the way. Over their heads he could see the elk smashing its way through the remaining forest, its antlers more than a match for the dead branches. Good for you, Abe thought. At least one of them would get away. He turned slowly, still growling, and saw Becky once again. Something was stuck in the meat of her upper leg. Another goddamn spear. She would never reach Boo and Ann before the Neanderthals ahead of her.

  I won’t let them kill her. I won’t let it end like this.

  Abe grabbed at one of the longer spears poking his ribs and pulled. The brute still attached to the other end was yanked off his feet toward Abe’s fist. It shattered all of his teeth and ground his jaw down into his chest. The other Neanderthals hesitated, some stepped back fearfully, giving Abe room to drive the stone end of the spear into the ground and jump. He shot up like a pole-vaulter and aimed his body in Becky’s direction. He felt the wood begin to crack and released. Abe landed on his feet over twenty feet from the ring of savages and waited for them to come. Another spear was thrown and he stepped lithely to the right. Two more—Abe jumped to the left and batted the other away. More spears flew and Abe dodged easily, almost unfairly, he thought.

  We should’ve stood our ground in the beginning—back when we met Edwin Greely—Becky and me together. We should’ve slaughtered them all.

  He moved in with speed and agility his adversaries knew nothing about. They defended slowly—as if fighting in a sea of clear molasses. Abe weaved in among them, breaking ar
ms and necks, crushing thick skulls and turning their own weapons back on them. The majority of spears had already been thrown, those left unable to find a target through the mounting pile of dead and mangled bodies.

  He punched the last one standing and felt the cheekbone turn to jelly under his fist.

  Abe stood at the center of forty dead Neanderthals, his limbs shaking, his chest heaving. He wanted to cry, and laugh, and throw up at the same time.

  “Abe! They’re after the kids!” Becky was crawling on her hands and knees through the trees, the spear still sticking out from the back of her leg.

  Abe worked his way out of the dead bodies and rushed to her. “Stop trying to move until I get this damn thing out.” He held her in place and snapped the spear in two. Becky gritted her teeth and hissed. He grabbed the spear point sticking out from the other side of her leg and pulled it free. She tried to stand but Abe forced her back down. “Stay put until it’s had a few minutes to heal. I’ll go after them.”

  Becky pushed him away and started moving anyway. “I saw where Boo and Ann were headed… maybe they found somewhere to hide.” She limped along, her leg and pace recovering as they moved through the trees.

  They searched the confusion of tracks in clumps of snow and about rotted stumps. There were too many of them. If Boo and Ann had gone this way, their tracks had been covered by the heavier footfalls of the Neanderthals. There was a coppery scent in the air, something both Abe and Becky recognized. Abe stepped over a fallen tree and his foot slipped into something wet and pink. “Becky—over here.”

  The decapitated head of a Neanderthal was propped up in the snow a little ways ahead of Abe’s foot. Becky picked her way around and found the body a few seconds later. “Come on,” she said and headed north into thicker woods. “The body fell in this direction. If he was running when he lost his head, chances are the kids went this way first.”