The End The Beginning (Humanity's New Dawn Book 1)

by Ryan Horvath

“Yes, and you are…?” Jack answered.

  “My name is Dr. Simon Shepherd,” the stranger said. “I heard about your remarkable recovery. I was hoping we could talk.”

  Great Jack thought. A doctor. Just who I don’t want to talk to right now.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I really don’t have time for this.”

  “Please,” Dr. Shepherd pleaded. “I’m not a medical doctor. I’m an astrophysicist.”

  Jack paused. “So?” he queried. Then it occurred to Jack. “A doctor? You? How did you manage to pull that one? What are you, eighteen?”

  “Actually, I’m twenty-eight. You see, you aren’t the only one who has undergone… changes,” the new arrival revealed.

  Jack thought about this, eyeing Shepherd on the stoop, wondering what this man could possibly have to say. Finally he conceded.

  “Come in,” Jack said and opened the storm door for his visitor. “You’ll find it’s not just you and me who have undergone some changes lately,” he added.

  42

  KAREN AND BLAZE

  Karen and Blaze left Delightful, Ohio in the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday morning. They took a side road that, before long, met up with I-80 which they used to sneak between the highly polluted cities of Cleveland and Akron. Lake Erie, on the north side of Cleveland was plagued by massive algae blooms. Karen had read a few years ago that it nearly earned the nickname North America’s Dead Sea. Akron, to the south, had an air quality index usually listed as moderate in regards to air pollutants.

  Blaze sat erect in his seat, his eyes alert and his ears cocked forward. Every so often he would move and press his nose to the crack Karen kept for him in the passenger side window. They entered Cuyahoga National Park and Blaze still had the bad smelling man’s malicious odor of gunpowder in his sights, or smells as it was.

  Even being in this overpopulated and heavily polluted corridor of the eastern Midwest, Karen was surprised to find the air quality much better than she suspected. She’d been to Akron and Cleveland and the stretch of I-77 between them years ago when she and Jack had been in their first year of dating because he’d wanted to visit the Football Hall of Fame, in Canton, Ohio, just south of Akron, and she’d wanted to visit The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland so they’d made a trip of it. She vividly remembered the smell of burnt rubber and the brownish haze that hung over this stretch of road. Even the national park wasn’t safe from the stench back then.

  But now, Karen could only detect the faintest hint of pollutants, as if the EPA had literally scrubbed the air when they enacted new pollution control laws in the area. The air almost smelled downright clean here in the forest and Karen thought she could smell the pine trees.

  “How are you doing, Blaze?” she asked the Dalmatian. “Still have the trail?”

  Blaze’s outstretched tail wagged and he looked at Karen with his dual colored eyes.

  To Karen, his eyes almost looked human.

  “Yes, Master Karen. I can still smell him. They are definitely still going in this direction,” the dog reported with a series of barks.

  “Good. That’s very good, Blaze.” Karen fiddled with her GPS. She knew staying on the interstate much longer would put them in the heart of Cleveland’s western suburbs and a lot of people and a lot of smells. True, Blaze had gotten faster at catching the scent when he lost it but Karen thought it better to help him not to lose it in the first place and that meant staying off the interstates as much as possible.

  She found an alternate route on the western edge of Cuyahoga National Park and exited on to Highway 303 just as the faintest glimmers of daylight were crossing the eastern horizon behind them.

  She looked at Blaze after being on the new road for a little over a mile with a look Blaze had come to recognize and he anticipated her question.

  “Yes, still got it. Keep going,” he barked.

  A few hours later, they left Highway 303 for Highway 20, which continued to parallel the interstate. Karen took it easy on the gas pedal, being sure to stay below the speed limit to help Blaze keep on to the bad smelling man. The sun had long since won the battle with the night and it blazed in the sky to the east, burning off the chill of the mid-autumn morning. Karen and Blaze talked a little on the drive but also found no discomfort in their silences.

  Around 1:00 that afternoon, after a gas, fast food, and bathroom stop they were approaching South Bend, Indiana.

  Karen’s body was beginning to protest the long drive she was putting it through. She’d been in the driver’s seat for almost twenty-one of the last twenty-four hours and she needed a break. And a longer break than just a leg stretcher at a gas station.

  “Blaze, I need to stop. For a while this time again. I think it’s a safe bet they went west, on the interstate. That’s probably why you haven’t lost the scent for so long, which, by the way, makes you a very good boy.” She reached out and scratched him between the ears.

  Blaze’s tail wagged enthusiastically, slapping loudly against the passenger door.

  Scratch ears! he thought. Seems like forever since I got scratch ears.

  “Master Karen, I absolutely love scratch ears. You could do that forever,” Blaze chuffed in a matter of fact manner.

  Karen paused the scratching for a second and was seized by a giggle. With er laughter and attention on the dog, she was startled by an approaching car horn blaring at her. She had drifted just a little into the wrong lane and was nearing a collision with an oncoming vehicle.

  With a gasp, she quickly grabbed her steering wheel with both hands and jerked her car back into its own lane just in time to avoid disaster. She slowed and pulled over to the shoulder breathing hard. Her heart pounded in her chest. She rested her head on the steering wheel. After that, she looked up in the rearview mirror. The other car was rapidly disappearing to the east, clearly not rattled by the potential collision as much as she was.

  “Are you okay?” Blaze barked form his seat. “That was close!”

  Karen calmed herself. “Yes, it was very close. And yes, I am okay. As I was saying, I really need to take a break for a while. I’m starting to feel road blinded. But…” Karen didn’t want to continue but she knew she had to. “If we stop for a while, will you lose the trail?” Worry was clearly evident in her voice. Then she added, “But I’m also afraid that if we keep at this much longer, I’m going to drive us off the road, or into another car, like I almost just did.”

  “Something’s weird,” Blaze woofed. “Different.”

  Karen looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like the air is different somehow. Less cluttered with smells. The bad smelling man’s smell has been easy for me to keep up with because a lot of the other bad smells made by stuff are either not as strong, or gone. The air smells more pure I think,” Blaze explained.

  Karen remembered how hours ago, she had thought the Akron area had smelled scrubbed clean of manmade pollutants.

  “I think we can stop for a while. His scent feels kind of stuck with me. We know his general direction so I should be able to pick him up again even if we make a longer stop,” Blaze reported.

  Karen smiled at Blaze and felt a few tears of pride welling in her eyes. With the car still stopped, she reached over and gave Blaze his scratch ears with both hands and he whimpered in pleasure. His tail wagged with maddening speed. Karen scratched him for a little bit longer. She then put the car in drive, checked her mirrors and pulled back onto the highway.

  A short while later, she left South Bend in her wake and found a small roadside motel whose marquee advertised cheap rates, clean beds, and free HBO. To top it off, there was a smaller sign below the marquee that read “Pets Welcome.” Karen pulled into the motel’s parking lot and stopped the car a few spaces from the office. She got out of the car and Blaze followed. He walked obediently next to her as she approached the office.

  There was a woman behind the counter in the office with wavy blonde hair. Karen guessed the woman was within
a few years of her own age. The woman had been reading a heavily worn paperback with a muscle-bound shirtless hunk and a buxom scantily-clad brunette on the cover.

  “Gracious, you look exhausted,” the clerk, whose nametag simply read “Kim”, read. “Can I get you a room?”

  “Yes, please,” was Karen’s reply.

  Kim looked at Karen’s side and noticed Blaze. Her face brightened. “Well, hello fellow. Aren’t you just a beautiful Dalmatian?”

  “Thank you,” Blaze barked proudly but, of course, Kim only heard a bark.

  “Normally there’s a twenty dollar charge for pets,” she started to tell Karen without taking her eyes off Blaze. “But, I think we can make an exception for this guy. He looks so well behaved.”

  “He is,” Karen confirmed. “Thank you.” She rummaged through her purse and produced her wallet. From it, she took out a credit card and handed it to Kim. With the room paid for, Kim handed Karen a key with a numbered fob attached and directed her to the right end of the motel. Karen thanked Kim and she and Blaze left the office.

  Clouds were rolling in overhead. They were grey and ominous looking. Karen silently hoped they weren’t a portent of what this stop could cost them in the quest to find her sister. She found her room and she let herself and Blaze in. Her mind was tired and her body was stiff. She drew the room’s drapes and stripped down to her thin undershirt and panties. Her breasts were not too large or too small and she found herself able to get away without a bra in most casual situations. Blaze had already hopped up on to one of the double beds and was doing his coil walk to flatten out a space to lie down but before Karen could join the dog on the bed he barked a request.

  “Would you please crack a window, Master Karen? I want to make sure I can still smell the outdoors.”

  “Sure,” Karen replied. She walked over and cracked the front window. She turned around and looked at Blaze. “Does that work for you?”

  “Yes, thank you, Master Karen,” he chuffed and then rested his head on his hind leg.

  Karen walked back to the bed and slid in between the sheets of the bed Blaze was on. She turned the TV on but on no particular program. In seconds, she was asleep. She slept so deeply that when the thunderstorms began to brightly and loudly let loose as they passed overhead, she did not rouse from her slumber with any of the electric blue flashes of lightning or long rolling rumbles of thunder.

  Hours later, she was startled awake by a bad dream; something involving Amanda and a spider. She knew her sister hated spiders with a passion but as quickly as the dream woke her, it fleeted away. She lied back down, rolled over and looked at the clock by the bed.

  “Oh my God!” she gasped.

  Blaze was up in an instant and jumped to the floor, his hackles raised and a low growl in his throat.

  Karen saw his agitation and said, “Calm down, Blaze. I didn’t mean to startle you. We’ve just been asleep a lot longer that I intended.” The clock on the nightstand said 10:10 PM in digital numbers.

  Karen threw the sheets off of herself and quickly dressed in clothes that were starting to feel stale to her.

  “We should get back on the road,” she said when Blaze calmed down. She opened the door to a rain washed landscape. She didn’t even know it had rained. Blaze bounced out the door into the freshly cleansed world and crossed the narrow parking lot to a strip of grass and bushes and relieved himself.

  When he came back in the room he barked, a silly dog grin on his face. “You’ll be happy to know, I can still smell him.”

  Karen smiled at him and said, “Come here then. You deserve some scratch ears.”

  Blaze happily obliged.

  After a few minutes, Karen quickly freshened up in the small bathroom and then gathered her things and returned the room key to the office. There was no one visible in the office so she simply set the key on the desk and walked out. Blaze was waiting by the car. Then they were on the road again.

  As the hours rolled by on the small state and county highways, their travels led them around the giant metropolis that was Chicago, a city soon to be host to an incendiary spark in the change of humanity. They paralleled I-39 on Highway 251 and were out of Illinois and into Wisconsin. Hours later they were crossing the Wisconsin border into Minnesota.

  The sun had only shortly been up on Thursday morning.

  43

  ART

  Art stood in front of his toilet staring out the window down to the street below. His bathroom window was the only window in his apartment that faced the street that his building and the Hyatt and Carlton Hotels shared. He had already tried calling both hotels and asking for Simon Shepherd but neither hotel had a guest registered in that name. Art had a good view of both the cab stand and both hotel drive ups and a pair of binoculars sat lens side down on the window sill; but that was not his problem.

  His problem was the man, who Art was by now almost convinced was Simon Shepherd, had yet to return. Art had been standing here waiting and watching for over two hours now and he had skipped eating earlier when he had intended to. His stomach gave a low grumble. Art did not want to leave his post in the bathroom for fear that he would miss the man’s return. He guessed there might be a nice bonus in his paycheck if he could locate Shepherd before his compensator did.

  Unfortunately for Art, there were no restaurants on the street he could go to and still see both hotels and the cab stand. He could order food but he’d have to leave the window and interact with the delivery person and that could also cost him a glimpse of Shepherd. Furthermore, Art knew that both of the hotels had restaurants off their lobbies and he could not have gone to one of them for fear he would be at the wrong one when the look-alike, who probably was the real thing, returned. Art seldom kept much food in this residence and the banana and Powerbars he had eaten yesterday morning were the last things he had had left here.

  Art finally decided that he could pry himself away from his surveillance long enough to dash to the front door and unlock it. This way he could have food delivered and direct them to have the delivery person just enter upon arrival. Art took one last good glance up and down the street below looking for any approaching taxi cabs. When he saw none, he quickly dashed to the front door and turned the knob lock with his right hand while turning the first of two deadbolts simultaneously with his left. He quickly moved both hands up the door and his right unlocked the second deadbolt while his left adeptly unhooked an elaborate security bolt that made the kind one sees in a hotel room look ridiculously inadequate. When he was finished, he raced back into the bathroom, slipped on the bathmat and nearly smashed his head on the edge of the toilet. He only caught himself by splashing his right arm into the toilet which was open as it was always just him.

  He righted himself quickly and yanked a towel off the ring on the wall while he stepped back to the window. Staring hard up and down the street, Art did not see any cabs on this block or either of the two adjacent blocks. He guessed that his travel to and from the front door was no more than fifty seconds, fall included. He hoped he had not missed his quarry.

  On the vigil again, Art took his smart phone from his pocket and looked up the phone number for an Italian restaurant that was close and delivered. He dialed their number. The call was connected in two rings.

  “Thank you for calling Mama Santini’s. May I help you?” the woman on the other end of the lane said. To Art, she sounded young and pretty and there was innocence in her voice that aroused a stir in his crotch. She sounded like a virgin to him. He thought about things he might do to that woman if he could get his hands on her. He would torture and rape her and torture and rape her again and again exploiting her in ways her virginal voice suggested she had no idea existed.

  “Hello?” the voice asked. “Is there anyone there?”

  Art hadn’t realized he’d spaced out and when he came back, he was aware of a throbbing erection in his pants. He was very excited to have his rape initiation with his captive in the farmhouse and he licked his lips s
alaciously. Then his rumbling stomach turned over again and Art spoke into the phone.

  “Yes, I’d like to make a delivery order but I have a specific instruction,” he informed.

  “What would that be, sir?” the virgin replied, her sweet inexperienced voice teased his ear.

  “I’m kind of stuck monitoring something right now and I can’t get away from it. My door is not locked. Would your delivery person be able to bring my order inside to me please? There would, of course, be an extra tip in it for him or her,” Art answered the young woman.

  “Sure,” the woman responded. “We do that kind of thing a lot. Some of our elderly patrons can’t always get to the door too quick.”

  “That’s great,” Art said with disinterest. “And I’d like to pay now with my credit card if that’s possible. I don’t have any cash.”

  “Not a problem, sir,” the woman confirmed perkily.

  “Great,” Art said. “I’d like a large Cesar salad, a bowl of minestrone soup, mozzarella sticks, stuffed mushrooms, and chicken parmesan with an extra breast and served with penne, not spaghetti.” Art hated spaghetti, having eaten so much of it in the boys’ home all those years ago. “Did you get that?”

  “Yes, I think so.” The virginal girl on the other end of the line repeated the order back to Art. “Would you like anything for dessert?”

  Art though he’d like to have her for dessert and said, “Is there anything on the menu as sweet as you sound?” He licked his lips as if he tasted her.

  The woman chuckled uneasily and answered, “The death-by-chocolate cake is pretty good. So is the carrot cake. Our guests love our tiramisu but it’s not my thing. I don’t like coffee.”

  “Well, then, I’ll stick with what you do like,” Art said in such a way that a chill ran up the woman’s spine and she felt suddenly grateful she did not have to deliver this order. “Send me both the chocolate and carrot cakes please.”

  “Very good, sir,” the woman said. “May I have the address for the delivery and your payment information please?”