Treaters: Book One of the Divine Conflict.

by CJ Rutherford

  After climbing a couple of flights, the stench eased and we selected a vacant, blood-free bedroom. I was prepared to shoot out the doorknob, but Jennifer merely raised an eyebrow and opened the door by the handle. Apparently, the electronic locks had disengaged when the power went out. Huh. Go figure.

  I’d plundered a downtown pharmacy and picked up a couple of clockwork alarm clocks as well as extra supplies. I wasn’t about to trust my phone, even if it was, mysteriously, holding charge again. I had also parked the pickup about a block away, facing downhill on a wide lengthy boulevard. Setting both alarms for 5:30p.m., Jennifer and I snuggled beneath the luxurious covers and slept the sleep of the dead, with Tray curled up in a ball snoring contentedly at our feet.

  ***

  Jennifer

  The pattern of driving and sleeping continued for a week, long enough for us to reach the California state line… long enough for us to think we were going to make it.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, starting from a light doze to Jaz cursing loudly and profanely. He usually toned it down in front of me and reserved the really spicy curses for moments of extreme stress. It was the middle of the day, and the sun was high overhead in a cloudless blue sky. Tray was digging up some dead flowers in search of God knew what. This was one of those increasingly frequent bad news moments, then.

  Jaz looked up from where he was half buried under the hood of the pickup, a wrench in his grimy hand. He wiped the back of it over his sweat-stained forehead, leaving a dark smear of oil. “That’s just it. There’s isn’t anything wrong.” He stepped back from the engine and threw the wrench into the toolbox with more violence and frustration than I’d ever seen him display. “The fuel flow is fine. Electronics are all good. I can’t see what’s wrong, goddammit.”

  From habit, I mentally apologized to the Big Three.

  The pickup had been acting up – that was about the limit to my technical knowledge of motor vehicles – and today, Jaz had decided to find out what was wrong before it got worse. We still had over eighty miles to drive – he calculated we’d reach the outskirts of San Francisco by tomorrow evening – but if the truck cut out and stranded us in the middle of nowhere? I shuddered. I didn’t want to think about that.

  “Maybe try another car?” It wasn’t like there was a shortage, after all, and I doubted anyone would object, given the whole being dead thing. I hadn’t said the words out loud, but I knew Jaz got it. Instead of smiling ruefully as he usually would, he grimaced.

  “I already did.” He indicated the raised hoods of two SUV’s and a station wagon in the parking lot. “They turn over fine with the jump leads attached, but they won’t start…at all.”

  He rubbed his head, and I smiled slightly, not totally following the conversation. He’d need a good wash later, and since the water was always cold now, I looked forward to his curses.

  “It’s almost like the tanks were full of water, not…” His words trailed off, and he retrieved the wrench, running to one of the abandoned vehicles. Tray thought it was a game and ran after him, jumping up on his thighs, but Jaz ignored her. This, in itself, told me how worried he was.

  A stream of expletives filled the air a moment later, and as I walked up to him, I saw his expression as grim as I’d ever seen it.

  “Jennifer,” he said, “we’re in trouble, honey.”

  “Since when haven’t we been in trouble?” That was true. The trip from the lodge had been one disaster after another. First, we’d almost died and lost Tray. Then we’d narrowly escaped being butchered by the Treaters when the car tire had a blow out on a back-country lane. I hadn’t needed Tray’s heightened senses to know we’d barely made it out of that one with seconds to spare. Then the truck had started sputtering, occasionally even stalling out. If I were the superstitious type, I’d swear some deity didn’t want us to survive.

  Jaz jerked a finger to the old station wagon he’d just inspected. “I don’t know what’s in that gas tank, but it sure as hell ain’t gasoline.”

  I was about to ask a snarky question about who would fill a gas tank with something other than gas, when his earlier words hit me. He’d tried three cars…at random. And now our truck was having problems. “Oh…shit.”

  He nodded. “Oh, shit is right.”

  “It’s them? But…how is that even possible? It’s gas, for God’s sake. How can they drain gas…?” My sentence tailed off. Gas provided energy. If whoever…whatever oversaw all this wanted to drain every single atom of energy from our world, would gas, and oil as well, be the next things to go after? And then what? My spine chilled. Would they go as far as the molten core of the Earth itself? Were they capable of that level of destruction? As I looked out at the wilting palm trees lining the roadside, their bark hanging off in huge swaths, I knew they were. It might take them a year, maybe a decade, but by the end of it, this world would be a barren rock floating in space. One more dead rock in the middle of the asteroid cluster for Han Solo to contend with when he broke from hyperspace.

  Jaz seemed to catch my thoughts, and a small part of me wondered at that, too. Over the past few weeks, we’d grown closer in a way I’d never thought possible. Sometimes, we’d finish each other’s sentences. Other times – like now – we knew what the other was thinking without speaking at all.

  He poked his head back under the hood of our truck, and after a few moments of tinkering, he cursed again. “It’s not as bad as them, but the gas in here is going to shit. I don’t know how long we have left before the pickup won’t drive at all.” His face was ashen under the grime.

  The chill in my spine reached for the base of my neck, gradually growing until it constricted my airway. I was on the edge of a panic attack.

  Jaz was there in a moment, enveloping me in his arms, trying to settle my rattling nerves with his stoic strength. It didn’t work this time. My arms shook and my legs were like jelly, but I managed to get my hands up to push a bit at his chest; not enough to push him away. I didn’t want that. I needed his strength right now; I couldn’t go on without it. No, I just wanted him to see my eyes.

  “I never thought it would end like this.” Tears were on my face again. “I never thought we’d die in Sacramento.” Even as the words came out of my mouth, I wondered if anyone had ever written a similar song lyric or a cheesy line in a B-movie, and I giggled, maybe a bit hysterically.

  Jaz smiled too, tuned into my thoughts as usual. “No one’s dying in Sacramento.” Then he winced too, as both of us imagined a couple of C-class actors reciting these lines.

  “Should I shoot all of us now?” he asked.

  “Probably,” I replied, smirking.

  He pulled me close again, and I marveled in our intimacy, the scent of oil and sweat clinging to his skin. I tried to look back to the first time I’d seen him, to remember the sheer terror I’d felt when he’d run after me as I sprinted for the forest. I couldn’t. Any feelings I had for him now made my heart thump and my pulse race in a completely different way.

  “Even when the worst happens,” I looked up at him as he graced me with another crooked grin, “I’ll always feel like the luckiest girl in the world.”

  There was a long silence, broken only when Jaz chuckled gently.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Last time I heard words that squeezed my heart so much, Rose was promising Jack she’d never let go.”

  Titanic. Yeah. That was a great analogy. The Earth had struck a cosmic iceberg and was slowly slipping under the sea into oblivion.

  But I didn’t want that. I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t going to let go, so I stiffened and steeled my nerves. “What’s the plan, Jaz? And don’t even suggest some screwy ‘hole up and make a last stand’ sort of crap.”

  My words made him take a step back, and it were as if that single step took him back into his own body, like he’d momentarily deserted it in an instant of despair. His features hardened, and his spine straightened. He was a Marine again, just that quick.

  He gr
itted his teeth. “We get as far away from here as the truck will take us, then we go to ground during the night and move in the day.” He moved to the bed of the truck and began sorting through supplies, discarding all nonessential items. “Extra weight will only slow us down, and waste whatever energy is left in the gas tank.” I smiled as I helped sort. We were a team again, relying on each other to survive. Even Tray trotted alongside, jumping up and encouraging us in this wonderful new game we were playing purely for her enjoyment.

  An hour later, the pickup limped to a shuddering halt outside Davis, California. The flickering GPS display showed we had 67 miles to go to reach San Francisco, and it was 1:45p.m.

  We were so screwed.

  ***

  Jaz

  We were so screwed.

  It took us thirty minutes to pack as much gear as we could into the two rucksacks I’d brought along, and an hour to walk in to Davis. I figured the only chance we had was to find a house or business with a basement, but I didn’t hold out much hope. Unlike the colder states, basements in California were rare to non-existent. There would be an underground parking garage in the city center, but I’d never been to Davis and I didn’t have a clue how big a town it was. On foot, I had no idea how long it’d take us to walk in, and it was after 3 already.

  “Are we there yet?” Jennifer asked impertinently, as she reached down to give Tray a treat from the stash she carried in her pocket. She was trying her best to remain upbeat. So was I, but I knew she was on the edge of losing it. So was I.

  “Know any good road songs?” I replied.

  “Maybe you should teach me some of those marching songs the Marines are famous for.”

  I snorted. “You mean infamous, don’t you?” We’d entered the outskirts of the city a few minutes earlier, and we were walking down what was once a leafy suburban street. The devastation was starkly familiar and had ceased to chill me to the bone.

  After a few feet, I realized Jennifer wasn’t following me, so I stopped and turned around. “Need a rest?” She had to be tired. She was carrying half her body weight in supplies.

  She pointed to the garage beside one of the houses. “You see what I see?”

  I did, and my heart skipped. The garage door was open, and inside, along with all the other junk people kept in their garages, were two adult bicycles. “Princess, have I ever told you I love you?”

  She smiled, and that was enough to lighten her face. She seemed to be glowing these past few days, and even with what was happening around us, she put out an aura of strength, vitality, and hope that I clung to. I crossed to give her a hug before walking over to explore the garage and bikes. They were rugged mountain bikes, just what we needed, and a few minutes of rummaging around rewarded us with a double set of saddle bags. They weren’t big enough to carry everything in the rucksacks, but as we were going to be a lot more mobile now we didn’t need to pack as much food. We could top up along the way. There was a front basket for one of the bikes – the woman's model – and Jennifer promptly fitted it, screwing it on properly without a hitch. I found the appropriately sized pillow, shaking my head only a bit.

  Thirty minutes later, we were squealing like a couple of school kids as we raced down a hill to the city center, Tray running alongside. She liked the basket – she had tried it out, sniffed, and pronounced it satisfactory – but she liked running more. She was fast, and more than once I squeezed the hand brake in alarm as she zipped in front of me to run beside Jennifer, who laughed at me for my concern.

  I had a greater concern, though. This entire thing was a risk – if we didn’t find what we needed before it got dark, we wouldn’t survive the night – but I figured downtown would be the best place to find a parking garage. Thankfully, I was right. There were several streets of skyscraper-height buildings and one of the hotels had an underground lot. It only went down two levels, but by now it was close to 5:00 p.m., and we didn’t have a choice.

  Jennifer swung off her bike and surveyed her surroundings, all concrete floor and pillars. There were even a few dozen dead vehicles but not as many as you might expect in a hotel. Then again, it had all happened on Halloween night, and I supposed most people would have been at home with their kids, prowling the streets and grubbing for candy. These cars had probably belonged to travelling businessmen who either had no children or whose bosses had made them work on the holiday.

  Survivor’s guilt hadn’t paid a visit in a while, at least not with the ferocity that wracked me now.

  “Hey, it’s not so bad.” Jennifer deliberately didn’t touch on what was going through my mind. “We have the air beds, lights, food....” There was a wicked glint in her eye. “Each other.”

  Tray barked her agreement.

  I pushed down the kickstand on my bike and got off, tugging her into an embrace. “So, how do you wanna do this, your worship? Just down and dirty on the cold concrete? I doubt the single air beds will last long, what with your…enthusiasm.”

  She bit her bottom lip and something inside me flipped around. “I haven’t made out in the back seat of a car in…oh, ages.” She turned around, indicating the dozen or so abandoned vehicles, before her eyes settled on a large minivan. “And I’ll just bet those seats go all the way back.”

  Two minutes later, I discovered she was right.

  ***

  We spent that night huddled together on the single mattress inside the mini-van, our sleeping bags providing a top layer of warmth. Neither of us slept much beyond a fitful doze – except for Tray, who spent most of the night on her back with her paws in the air. Jennifer shook me awake and my hand went instinctively to the shotgun I’d laid beside our makeshift bed. The tension left my body when I saw her face. It was glowing; glowing with a soft pink light. My heart skipped a merry tune. It was dawn. We’d made it again.

  “Welcome to tomorrow,” she said, kissing me lightly. She wrapped herself up in a sleeping bag and stepped out of the van heading to the stairwell. Things hadn’t gotten so bad we’d had to resort to primitive toilet habits…yet.

  I felt safe enough to let her and Tray go alone. At least, this time I’d get to have a piss without the damn dog watching, head cocked inquiringly. The worst Jennifer could expect to encounter would be dried blood and gore. Hotels, it turned out, were the worst places to be on Halloween night when the Treaters came. They were charnel houses, and unlike most of the suburban homes, the carnage had taken place on multiple floors. With the requirement for below-ground living our top priority, it looked like our days of luxury living were over, for now, at least. As the old saying went, “Location! Location! Location!”

  The bikes didn’t have the speed to outrun the monsters, so we’d be travelling during the day now and holing up somewhere each night.

  Jennifer took longer than usual, and by the time she returned I was already dressed and had breakfast cooking on the gas stove. She clung to the sleeping bag, and I thought she looked a little green around the gills. “You okay, honey? Breakfast is almost ready. Why don’t you get dressed and I can…”

  I didn’t get to finish the sentence as Jennifer leaned against the minivan and retched. I would have said thrown up, but there was clearly nothing left in her stomach to expel. I went to her side, doing my best to soothe her, but only succeeding in feeling completely useless. Tray whimpered, her feet tapping a nervous little dance around Jennifer.

  The retching only lasted a moment before Jennifer raised herself up on unsteady legs. I took her by the waist and helped her to sit on the floor of the minivan.

  She was still green, but she looked a little better as she indicated the door to the upper floors and shook her head. “You do not want to go up there.”

  Her statement was off somehow. Jennifer had seen a ton of blood and gore along the way and had never reacted like this, but I decided not to push it this time. I hoped she wasn't ill; I didn't see how she could have contacted any type of virus, since no one was around to share. She managed to pick at her plate of pork an
d beans, and washed it down with coffee. By the end of the meal, she looked much better.

  “Pretty sure we can make San Francisco by Wednesday, tomorrow if we hustle,” I said.

  “Hustling sounds good. I just gotta get dressed.”

  “Why?” I chuckled. “I get to ride behind you and look at your ass for sixty miles.”

  She stuck her tongue out and gave me the finger as she ducked into the minivan to get dressed and pack up. We were on the road ten minutes later.

  ***

  Two days, it turned out, had been a grossly optimistic estimate. On the way out of Davis we ran into the traffic jam to end all traffic jams, and if I thought the slaughter in the hotels had been bad, this outstripped it by a factor of ten.

  Hundreds…no, thousands…of cars lay in haphazard lanes, their windows smashed in and doors either torn away or swinging by a hair. The Treaters must have washed over them like a wave of ripping claws and teeth. My heart lurched as I saw baby seats strewn amongst the ruined vehicles, and I heard Jennifer’s gasp as she saw them, too. Tray stayed close and whined almost constantly.

  Arguably worse was that navigation, even using the bikes, became next to impossible. There were too many obstacles blocking the way, and even the ramps were congested.

  By lunchtime, we decided to abandon the highways, but it wasn’t much better on the smaller roads. Once the highways had become blocked, the spillover had screwed up the entire infrastructure of the city’s roads. We resorted to following side roads, carrying the bikes over blocked streets to the next side street that allowed whatever meager progress we could get.

  By the time we cleared Davis it was almost 4 p.m.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Jennifer, finishing the last of the canned chili and rice. “We’re too far out to find another parking garage, and it’s too late to go back.” Her voice shook with barely restrained terror.