A rocky shoreline appeared through the window a heartbeat before the right wing snapped free and flew past. He pinched his eyes shut again and tensed in preparation of the impact, imagining the monstrous rock formations, evergreens, and scrub they were about to slam into.
The scream of their descent became deafening, the ground echoing the sound back up at them.
Bang!
The remainder of the left wing folded back into the plane before launching into the wilderness. Pine needles clawed at the metal shell.
It sounded like a million hammers were pounding the plane under their feet. There was a crash of shattering glass from the cockpit. With a hideous wrenching sound, the seats tore from the wall across from Adam, slamming forward into the steel wall separating the cargo from the cabin. The sudden jolt threw Adam sideways, but the harness held despite the moaning of the bolts trying to free themselves from their moorings. Glass blasted the back of his head and then there were branches and needles slashing at his face.
The belly of the plane slammed into the rocky ground with an angry grumbling like an avalanche. Metal shrieked and was torn away; tree trunks banged against the side of the plane as the tail kicked out, sending them skidding sideways.
Adam clenched the harness and prayed.
With one final bang, the plane tipped, dropping them onto their backs to stare up into the roiling sky through the shattered windows opposite them.
One final impact tried to rip Adam’s shoulders through the belts.
The silence that washed over them was worse even than the battering of the plane.
He opened his eyes, the blood pooling in his head. The wall across from him bowed inward like it had been repeatedly rammed by a semi, the row of seats formerly attached to it crumpled to his left with black boots standing from it like so many headstones. Blood pooled around it, draining slowly toward the men beside him still latched in their seats.
Adam unfastened his harness and slid onto his shoulders onto what remained of the window frames. He rested there a moment, watching the flaring azure lightning snapping back and forth from the jet-black clouds.
Someone groaned from the left.
“Sound off,” Norman said, his voice shaking.
“Merton.”
“Samuels.”
“Peckham.”
“Carter.”
“Newman,” Adam said.
“Anyone else?” Norman asked.
Buckles clicked and bodies rolled onto the warped metal. Footsteps pounded on the steel shell and Adam felt hands beneath his armpits. He coughed as he was pulled to his feet, his head swimming as the blood drained back toward his feet.
Samuels stood well over six feet tall with a cleanly shaven head, smeared with blood from the gash that ran from above his left eye clear past his ear. With a neck like a sycamore and the shoulders of an ox, he appeared to lumber more than walk to the front of the cargo bay. He grabbed the exposed underside of the row of seats smashed against the wall, braced himself, and pulled with all of his might. A dozen lower legs dropped to the floor pouring blood from the severed knees like so many overturned glasses.
“God,” he gasped, whirling away and pursing his lips. He pinched his eyes shut as the warm rush of fluid covered his feet.
The seats thudded back down, their cargo flopping forward. All that was left of the men were so many purple sacks of skin in crimson uniforms, bones shattered to chalk, their payload gushing out onto the ground with a wet slap.
“All dead,” Samuels said, vocalizing what was painfully apparent to all.
He gingerly skirted the crumpled jump seats and piles of humanity, placed his left foot on the end seat, and propelled himself upward. Grasping the door frame, he pulled himself up and balanced there a moment before finally reaching up and tugging the latch on the door. It fell away from him into the cockpit, banging loudly against the wall behind.
“Pilots are dead,” he called back over his shoulder before dropping out of sight.
“I can’t be in here another second,” Carter said, on the verge of hyperventilating. He was much thinner than his compatriots: all arms and legs with a neck like a turtle. Bounding up onto the seats, his boots squishing in his former battalion mates’ blood, he clambered over the side of the door and flopped with a thud into the cockpit.
“Wait a minute,” Peckham said, his bloody hand holding the ragged lips of a laceration closed on his forehead. Blood ran from beneath his fingers down his face like rain on a window. “Without Jefferson, I’m in charge.”
“You think now’s the time for a power trip, Peck?” Merton asked. He had the thick brows and heavy stubble of an Italian, but spoke with a soft southern accent.
“I’m just saying we need to stop and think,” Peckham said, stealing his hand from the weeping wound long enough to tear a long strap from the bottom of his shirt. He tied it tightly around his head, though it became quickly saturated. “We’re at war. We don’t abandon this bird without weapons and a com-link. Lord only knows what’s waiting for us out there.”
“We can’t wait for the fuel tank to catch fire either,” Norman said, tasting the black smoke slowly filtering through the shattered windows.
“Agreed,” Peckham said. “Norman, help get the new guy out. Merton… you and I will grab as much as we can carry, and then we’re out of here.”
“That’s a plan, boss,” Merton said, hurrying toward the storage compartments at the rear while Norman guided Adam to the front of the plane, kicking one of the corpses to the side and helping Adam up onto the seat.
“I can make it on own my own,” Adam said, hoping his voice sounded more confident than he felt.
“You sure?”
“I’m fine.”
Adam used the wall to steady himself, rising until he was able to prop both forearms on the doorframe. His arms trembled, but he pulled himself up, crawling over the door and falling onto a wall of computer components before once again pushing himself to his hands and knees.
The cockpit opened ahead past the end of a narrowed hallway. Even with their backs to him and still strapped into their seats, there was no doubt that the pilots were dead. Heads leaning awkwardly to the left with gravity, blood drained rapidly from the multitude of deep gouges torn through their faces from the implosion of balled glass from the smashed windshield.
He could barely see Samuels and Carter through the churning black smoke swirling around the plane, but he was able to make out rugged rocks jutting from the hard earth and dense pines flirting in and out of the fuel-rich cloud. There was only one place in the world where the loam was so rich and black, yet rife with stones…only one place where the deep green pine forests mingled with thick elms and maples. He’d spent the first decade of his life exploring woods just like this one.
It may have been an auspicious arrival, but they were home.
Chapter 5
I
Virginia Beach, Virginia
GUS RANGLE SAT ON THE SAME PARK BENCH THAT HE SAT ON EVERY afternoon, staring dreamily out across the Atlantic, looking for the life he had once led. He’d been a seaman all his life, from the fishing boats he’d worked on as a fourteen year-old boy to his first naval battleship as a seventeen year-old enlistee. He’d seen Pearl Harbor beneath a sky filled with kamikazes, and worked his life away as a customs inspector on this very stretch of coast. He’d met his Lorna on this beach and given his daughter away in nearly the exact same spot. He didn’t know exactly what he waited out here for day after day, watching the children dashing in and out of the distant surf, the gulls his only companions, but he knew he’d recognize it when he saw it. Lorna had always said that he only had that sparkle in his eye when he was near the sea. Maybe that’s all he was waiting for: his lost sparkle. He hadn’t felt it since the day the cancer took her from him.
Five years ago today.
Perhaps that’s why it felt like such an abnormal day, darker than usual with an oppressive weight in the air, settling on him like
a lead drape. Or maybe it was because there were no children playing in the waves, no lovers walking hand in hand. There was no one out at all. It was as though the world had ended and completely forgotten about him, which wouldn’t have surprised Gus a bit. People strolled past him all day, but never even spared him a glance. He was a spectral vision he assumed, and almost began to think of himself as haunting the park, waiting for something magical to roll in with the tide.
He coughed, the fluid rattling in his lungs. Usually, that spooked the gulls, but today there wasn’t a single bird circling in the dark sky or rummaging through the piles of refuse by the trash barrel. There wasn’t a sign of life at all but the scrabbling of the dead leaves across the grass and their brethren rustling overhead.
His chest was heavy with pneumonia, but the way he saw it, it was simply one more nail in his coffin. He couldn’t hear without the hearing aids, couldn’t see without the glasses, and couldn’t walk without the cane. What did that leave? Without Lorna’s divine cooking, everything tasted bland and gray. He was simply marking time by the ticking of his pacemaker.
Lazy lobes flagging on the rising breeze, he tipped his nose to the wind and inhaled the salty air, taking in as much as his sickly lungs could hold before coughing it back out. Something wasn’t quite right. While his sense of smell certainly wasn’t what it once was, he’d smelled this exact same air for so long that he quickly recognized that something had changed. At first he couldn’t place it, closing his wrinkled eyelids and savoring it, feeling the long gray hair combed across his bald pate flopping against his forehead. He smacked his lips a couple of times, tasting it, jiggling his jowls.
It was a familiar scent, though the last time he’d encountered it had been lifetimes ago. He’d been a nineteen year-old boy at the time, green as an aspen sapling, loading drums of fuel from the dock onto pallets that would find their way onto the battleships filling the harbor. The smell had come, carried inland on the humid air. He could clearly remember standing tall, wiping the back of his work glove across his forehead, and staring out across the turquoise water. Sweat had glistened from his bare, tanned chest, puddling in the waistband of his trousers. None of the others had noticed, it seemed, as they still labored around him, obliviously moving in and out of the warehouse. At first he’d thought it might have been a distant fire, but it didn’t smell of wood, but more like…burnt motor oil. There’d been a bitterness to it, almost like inhaling aspirin powder. While he stood there deciphering it, he’d heard the distant roar of engines, the first sounds of prattling gunfire, but it wasn’t until the gates of hell flew wide and unleashed their wrath on that Hawaiian bay that he truly knew what the smell was.
Death.
Gus tugged up the collar of his plaid wool coat, buttoning it with arthritic claws. Tucking his chin under the warm lining, he looked up from beneath wild white caterpillar eyebrows to the horizon through glasses as thick as storm windows. The wind battered his face, assaulting him with clouds of sand.
Lightning as blue as a Bunsen burner’s flame flashed from one roiling black cloud to the next, grumbling inland like a landslide atop the increasingly choppy sea. The clouds rose like a wall to the heavens, swirling and churning as they expanded. Leaves were torn from their branches and garbage bounded past him across the rippling grass.
After five long years, he finally knew what he’d been waiting for.
Another cloud, impossibly darker than even the storm front, appeared like a massive flock of geese from the heart of it, stretching from one side of the horizon clear to the other. It moved faster than the other clouds, fueled by the now raging torrent.
Gus rose from the bench, leaning into the stiff gale, stabbing his cane into the earth. He raised a hand to shield his face, sand tagging him as though fired from a shotgun. He took one uneasy step forward, and then another, his knees knocking.
A faint hint of white bloomed from the midst of the low-lying cloud, rushing straight toward him like a Mack truck. As he watched, the shape drew contour, emerging from within the cloud, a ship through the fog. It was still small in the distance, but growing steadily as it sped toward him. He could almost make out a constant banging, like a hammer on an anvil, beneath the relentless roll of thunder.
His eyes were old, but they’d never played tricks on him in the eighty years they’d shared a head. For an instant, though, he thought maybe they were trying to deceive him.
It sounded as though someone was humming in his ear.
The form came into focus: a long skeletal head with mirrors for eyes, flashing with the same intensity as the lightning. Enormous hoofed front legs pounded through the sky, supported by nothing at all, and with each footfall the hammer fell. The rider was a pale gray blur, the black cloud swirling to either side as though she was its origin.
The humming intensified, growing louder in pitch until it sounded like an electronic scream.
Gus staggered forward despite his body’s protests, dragging himself into the ferocious wind by the cane.
The horse’s hooves descended from the swirling cloud, alighting on the beach with force enough to shake the earth. An immense wave rose behind the rider, taller than any building along the beach, crashing down behind the beast’s advancing stride. Piers shattered to toothpicks and the backs of warehouses and markets were knocked in by the giant swell of water, another immediately rising behind to fill the void.
This was what he’d been waiting for.
He had to stop and brace himself against the shuddering of the ground beneath him for fear of falling. The rider thundered straight toward him, the cloud dissolving to black static. Finally realizing that the cloud was the source of the humming, Gus closed his eyes and tried to picture his Lorna, not the lifeless, blue-lipped woman in the hospice bed, but the vibrant teenager he’d fallen for the moment he first saw her.
The cloud of insects hit him with enough force to cleave him from his feet and slam him onto his back. His breath exploded past his lips, replaced by a mouthful of mosquitoes, which flooded down his trachea. Hundreds of needles lanced through his flesh and he felt his life leaving him in fluid ounces.
The muscles in his back pulled so tight that he nearly folded in half, bones grinding through cartilage. His fingers curled so tightly that the nails peeled away from the cuticles and carved into his palms. Neck snapping violently back and forth, the last sound he heard was a popping in his head, and then everything went black.
A skin of mosquitoes seethed over every inch of his bruised flesh before rising as one and rejoining the cloud of their species as it pushed inland, passing through open windows and beneath doors, down chimneys and through swamp coolers and air conditioner ducts. The cloud rolled like a tide across the city, bathing everything in a wash of winged insects.
The demon horse paused beside where Gus’s body rested, staring up into the sky through sunken eyelids. His skin had taken on a necrotic black and midnight blue appearance like a diabetic’s dead toes.
Pestilence watched him for a moment, waiting for the muscles to start twitching, the eyes to flutter, anything…but nothing happened. The corpse just sat there atop its evacuated bowels. This man was one of the chosen. There would be plenty of others who weren’t, Pestilence knew. This one she would leave to rot into the grass to fertilize famine’s wrath. He was of no use to her at all.
Curling her fists tighter into the serpentine mane, she jerked and brought Harvester to its hind legs. She opened her mouth in what looked like an agonized wail, but all that came out was another flume of mosquitoes to thicken the cloud.
The creature’s front legs slammed to the ground, rippling the sand, crocodilian tail thrashing from side to side.
Screams erupted from the city all around her, a mystical cacophony of pain and suffering, blended with the frenetic humming of the mosquitoes.
Harvester raced forward, throwing a plume of sand from its heels, black insects swirling in its slipstream.
II
Bethlehem, Pe
nnsylvania
WHEN THE NEWS OF THE NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST IN THE MIDDLE EAST BROKE on CNN, her father and the others had been lost in prayer, sitting in a large circle, holding hands and pleading for the spirit to take them. This was the day they’d both been fearing and dreaming of their entire lives, the day when the Father would reach down from heaven and summon them home. They’d spent the morning anointing one another, slathering balms and oils over their flesh to purge all but their initial sins. They would be pure of body and mind when the Lord set The Rapture into motion. The entire house reeked of feces and vomit from the massive amounts of castor oil, ipecac syrup, and laxatives ingested and then purged. Toxic sweat seeped from their glistening pores, but even that was far better than the rage to follow.
Sarah hadn’t partaken of the ritual, as it was her lot to usher the others into God’s graces before being allowed to do so herself. She’d always known this, and thus felt no bitterness. It simply was what it was. She would continue baking the unleavened bread, the body of Christ, for their continuous communion until she found herself alone in the house.
The others had knelt in a circle in the middle of the room, clasping hands and writhing as the spirit possessed them. That had gone on forever it seemed, as she watched discretely through the greasy bangs that hid her face. The twisting, contorting, and shouting in tongues had grown to a fever pitch, until as one, they ceased. All had looked to her father, waiting for him to give the good word, but he had been without answers. She had seen the fear in his eyes, but it had quickly been replaced by anger. That was the hour when God fulfilled the prophesy and called the souls of the chosen to his side. Why hadn’t He called them? Why were they still on the mortal plane of sin’s wages? Why had He forsaken them?
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