by Ryan Horvath
“Let’s hit it,” Jack said. “Hoover Dam! Here we come!”
They loaded into the vehicles. Jack, Brian, Karen, and Simon piled into Jack’s SUV. River sat on Brian’s lap in the shot gun seat while Blaze sat between the bucket seats occupied by Simon and Karen. Ian and Amanda climbed into Ian’s Honda. They started the engines and pulled away from the house in Orono they had temporarily called home as well as the man they had buried there thinking they would never see either one again.
They were half right.
72
AWAKENING
Ugh.
Silence.
Urrghh.
Silence.
Gruurrghhh.
Slowly, Art Spektor came to. Something was trying to invade his eyes and he snapped them shut. He found that didn’t really help. Whatever it was, it had formed a film over his eye balls and it stung him as if salt had been sprinkled in his face.
At almost the same time, Art tried to inhale and immediately stopped when he detected a cool earthy odor.
His mind raced while he tried to remember what happened to him. The thoughts flashed across his darkened eyelids.
The abandoned farm house.
The bitch woman in the basement.
They escaped.
The fucking cat and the beshitting ball-biting mongrel.
The man.
He shot me! Many times.
Art tried to move his right arm and found resistance in all directions. Time was running out. He needed to breathe. He didn’t know how he had survived so many gunshot wounds to his torso but he also didn’t know how long he could go without oxygen. He tried to move his other arm and found the same resistance.
He had to inhale. He didn’t have any choice. He moved the fingers on his right hand; wiggled them and found them mobile.
The sensation he experienced was instantly recognizable.
Digging?
Those fuckers buried me! I’m underground.
Rage coursed through him. He felt blood throbbing in his temples as his lungs burned. He instantly gathered his strength and tried moving his arms again. They moved this time. Art tried again, harder and they moved more. He felt soil sliding over the exposed flesh of his hands and wrists. Within seconds, he was making progress through the earth, fighting his way to level ground and the sweet kiss of oxygen.
A horrible thought occurred to him.
What if I’m going the wrong way? He had no idea if the fucking bitch woman and her cohorts had buried him face up or down.
Too late to turn back now.
A second later, he heard something and knew he was going in the right direction. It was muffled by the surrounding earth but he immediately knew what it was. A voice.
“Wha…t…at”
Art kept pushing himself upward and heard a different voice and clearer.
“What about it… got every… from it… don’t have enough g… three cars… leave it…”
It was them. Art was sure it was the group that had buried him; the bitch woman and her entourage. He tried to dig faster. His eyes and lungs were on fire but he desperately wanted to see the look on their faces when they saw him emerge from the ground very much alive.
A third voice told him he was getting even closer to the surface.
“Ready…roll…” the male voice said. He recognized the voice as Shepherd’s, though he’d only heard the man speak the one time. The God damn pissant scientist who had kept him from engaging in the rape and torture of the bitch woman. Art found he was angry with himself for not raping the bitch woman immediately, instead following his professional credo of no recreational homicides while on a government ordered assassination assignment. That wouldn’t happen next time. When he surfaced in the next few seconds, he would tear through the group, catch them off guard and tear them to shreds before they could react. All of them except the bitch woman. She was going to feel him violate her over and over again before she died.
Then he heard, as clear as if he’d been on the surface, one of the males shout.
“Let’s hit it. Hoover Dam, here we come!” This was rapidly followed by car doors closing, engines starting, and wheels crunching over gravel.
They are leaving! Damn it! Art struggled harder against the soil but he knew he was too late. The sound of the cars was quickly fading.
Sonofabitch! Art’s eyes were spewing tears and he found relief as the gritty soil leaked out of his eyes with them but if he didn’t breathe…
And then, he felt it. A breeze against his hand. The surface. The cold soil against his skin replaced with chilly air.
Art struggled with the surface and pulled his head above the ground. He inhaled deeply and savored the fresh air as it rejuvenated the toxic gas in his chest. He opened his eyes and the bright sunlight stabbed at his retinas but he didn’t care. He slowly pulled the rest of his body out of the hole and lay on his back gasping on the dusty ground.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Art said to no one. “Alive. I’m fucking alive.” He started to laugh, a sound that would have been called maniacal by another person.
When his insane laughter subsided, Art sat up and said, “But how?” He vividly recalled the attack from the hateful cat and dog. He distinctly remembered feeling bullets tearing into his back and even some exiting his chest. He recollected seeing the face of the man who must have shot him as the life went out of him.
Art’s exposed flesh was covered in dirt and his clothing was streaked as well. He looked down at the front of himself. He found three bullet holes on the front of his shirt where some of the shots had exited. Blood was visible under the soil smears. One of the bullets had exited his shoulder. A second had come out of his stomach which would have been fatal by itself but the third bullet hole was just left of his sternum. That bullet had to have ravaged his heart. Art hurriedly pulled off his shirt and found only smooth, unmarked flesh on his torso with three spots of his dried blood. He tried to feel his back as best he could for any signs of the cat’s attack or any entry wounds from the bullets but could only connect with unmarred skin.
The spotted mongrel had bitten Art. Art switched from sitting to kneeling and he undid and opened up his pants. The fucking beast had ruptured one if not both of Art’s testicles when it bit him. Art couldn’t forget the agonizing sensation of popping when the teeth sank into his scrotum. He slowly pulled the front waistband of his briefs open and looked down at what he expected to be ruination. His penis was as it should be, large, thick, and circumcised. His scrotum looked undamaged as well. To be sure, he thrust a dirty hand into his briefs and inspected his scrotum, not believing that it was undamaged but his hand confirmed what his eyes told him. Whatever damage the dog had caused was not there now.
Art let go of himself, withdrew his hand from his briefs, and let go of the waistband and it snapped against his rock hard lower abdomen. He re-closed his pants, picked up his shirt and got to his feet. He pulled up the leg of his pants and inspected the ankle that the canine had attacked. Aside from the blood crusted to his sock, there was no evidence that he’d been bitten.
“Unreal! Un-fucking-real!” he shouted and chuckled maliciously. “I can’t be killed.” Art deduced this must be related to his youth and heightened strength. “I don’t know how all this is possible, but I’ll take it!”
Art looked down at his body and attire. He wondered how long he had been in the ground. Hours? Days? Weeks? Judging by the temperature, it couldn’t have been long. It was still warm enough to not be wearing a jacket and, obviously, there was no snow so Art believed it had to be a couple days at the most.
Art looked around and spied his car. He raced over to it and threw open the driver’s door. He climbed in the car and snatched his smart phone from the center console but it was dead. Unbelievably, the keys were still in the car and he turned on the battery and then turned up the radio.
Static. He tuned the dial across the band and received nothing but static or dead air. He switched over to the FM b
and and found more of the same.
“What the hell?” he questioned in the empty car as he stared out the windshield. He looked at the house that Voight and his friends had come to. Art felt under his seat, searching for the gun he kept there but came up empty handed. The HK was gone and he’d dropped his Sig Sauer when he had been… killed. The thought of being dead and buried sent shivers up his spine, a sensation he was not used to feeling.
Art got out of his car and strode confidently to the front door of the house. He kicked the door and it flew off the hinges and landed with a crash, taking out an end table and shattering a lamp with it. He barged into the house and flipped the light switch. No light came on. He spied a radio in the kitchen and went to it but found it useless. Several other flipped switches proved the electricity was out.
No power? No radio? What’s going on? Art thought.
There wasn’t anything here that was going to help him figure out how long he’d been dead. After a few moments, he decided it didn’t matter.
Now that he was indoors, he noticed his smell. He smelled of dirt and blood but, in death, he’d apparently shit and pissed his pants. Revolted, Art kicked off his shoes and stripped off his pants and underwear and socks. He used them to get the worst of his backside cleaned up and tossed them in a shit covered heap on the floor exactly where, hours before, Blaze had sat between Karen and Simon. He found a bathroom and turned on the shower. He was pleased to find the water still could get hot though the pressure wasn’t the greatest.
Art stepped under the stream and quickly proceeded to wash off the soil, dried blood, and feces that adhered to his skin. When he was clean, he stayed under the hot spray and stretched his muscles. While he did, his thoughts turned to the bitch woman: the look of defiant fear on her face while she lay in the dank basement; the firmness of her naked breasts; the smell of her sweat when Art had licked and pinched her nipple; the way he was going to make her feel when he thrust his cock into her while she resisted him.
He found himself with a throbbing erection and masturbated to thoughts of raping the bitch woman. It didn’t take long before semen jettisoned from him nearly two feet and splattered on the shower floor. The orgasm was one of the most forceful he’d ever had and it caused him to lean back against the wall and curl his toes. But when the waves of pleasure subsided, his erection did not. Nor did the thoughts of degrading the bitch woman.
But Art was not going to spend any more time here masturbating to thoughts of her humiliation and resistance.
He was going to find her. He was going to get the real thing.
Art turned off the shower, which had slowed to a cool trickle, dried himself with a towel he found on a shelf and stepped out of the enclosure. He tossed the towel on the floor and walked into the bedroom that, unknown to Art, had most recently been occupied by the woman he continued to fantasize about and the man Art had believed was his most recent kill. He found clothes in the closet that would have properly fit his frame before his physical changes. The shirt he donned stretched across his pectoral muscles, making them look even bigger. He couldn’t find any underpants that would come close to containing him so he slid trousers that must have belonged to the overweight man of the house. They fit at the waist but were about five inches too short and were tight, leaving very little of Art’s anatomy to the imagination.
He checked himself in the mirror. He looked a little silly but it was better than being blood soaked and shit stained as well as nothing at all, which really would draw attention.
Art stepped out of the Orono house via the front door. He returned to his car and opened the trunk. He discovered that his stash there had been taken. It didn’t matter. He’d thought it before.
I am the weapon.
And I know where they’re going.
Art didn’t know why the group had chosen the Hoover Dam or even why they had decided to leave at all. He wondered what was going on. He’d seen the bizarre thing in the sky while he’d been chasing the bitch woman, her meddling sister, and the cock gobbling dog during the eclipse. Did it have something to do with that? No radio and no power.
Art decided to drive into the city before pursuing the bitch woman. There was time after all. He didn’t know which route they were taking but the destination was all that mattered. He’d find them, kill them, and take her exactly when he wanted to.
Art got into his car and drove out of the house Jack Voight had taken his group to. He pulled onto Homestead Trail and then onto Highway 12.
When Highway 12 turned into I-394, Art had to slow to around fifteen miles an hour. The highway was littered with vehicles parked in all kinds of haphazard ways. Not an overwhelming amount but enough to merit extra caution. The vehicles contained corpses. The corpses had drying blood coming from ears, eyes, noses, and mouths. The roadway also contained the bodies of the dead and Art noticed that in addition to the facial bleeding, some people had bled from their torsos and groin areas. And when he looked closer, he saw it wasn’t just blood he saw but there was also what looked like internal tissue mixed in with it. For the second time in less than an hour, shivers tickled Art’s backbone. The cars contained lone people, couples, families with small dead children, elderly people, and people of all ethnicities.
What the hell happened? Art wondered. Before long, he caught sight of the downtown Minneapolis skyline, or what was left of it anyway. The three tallest buildings, the IDS, Wells Fargo, and Capella towers were all partially collapsed. Smoke rose from several of the buildings, and other skyscrapers Art would have recognized in the skyline were simply gone.
Art’s initial thought was perhaps a nuclear strike had occurred but there was no sign on any of the corpses of radiation burns. Furthermore, the trees and grass were unmarred.
He slowly guided his car east bound until he couldn’t go any farther. A semi-trailer had collided with a fuel truck and the debris and flames blocked the highway. Art turned around and drove west until he came to the Park Place exit. It was tricky taking the exit from the wrong direction but, since he wasn’t worried about getting caught for his moving violations, Art navigated it easily enough and worked his way through the streets of St. Louis Park. He found the store he was looking for and parked. It was a hunting and sporting goods store and it happened to be the same store Jack, Brian, and Ian had shopped at days before, though Art had no way of knowing that.
Art burst through the secured front door with a powerful kick. He strode through the darkened space until he found the counter with the hand guns and smaller weapons displayed inside. He discovered a dead man sprawled across a section of the display case, the blood on and around his body was still drying. Whatever had happened to the city and its inhabitants happened recently.
Art moved away from the dead man. He found a baseball bat nearby and, with minimal effort, smashed open one of the gun cases. He secured another Sig Sauer. It wasn’t as nice as his old one but it would do. He found bullets and a couple magazines and left the store. He walked next door and found a deserted grocery store. There wasn’t much left but Art was able to make a meal out of some crackers and jarred salsa. After he ate, he bagged up two bags of miscellaneous food items and also left that store. He returned to his car and proceeded back to the freeway, moving in the proper direction this time.
He rolled his window down and found the silence of what was once a bustling metropolitan area unsettling. He tried the radio but it still gave him no sound.
Really… Fuck… What the hell happened here? He thought to himself as he crawled down the highway amid the concrete river of the dead.
73
THE ROAD THE STATION WAGON
“How you doing?” Jack said and looked over at Brian. They had just made the turn off Homestead Trail onto Highway 12. The house was about a mile behind them as the crow flies but Jack noticed Brian kept looking behind them in the side view mirror.
“I guess,” Brian replied after another glance in the mirror. “I’m glad we’re out of there. Felt lik
e not a moment too soon, too.”
“I agree,” River meowed.
“I still don’t think we had anything to worry about. I’m certain the man is dead,” Simon said, sounding a little irritated. “I mean, even if by some chance, I messed up reading his vital signs, I think a couple days in the ground would have finished the job.”
“Right,” Jack agreed, looking at Simon in the rearview mirror. He turned his head sideways and looked at Brian. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Jack! Watch out!” Karen’s hand was between the two front seats and she pointed out the windshield.
Jack turned sharply forward and saw the stopped car that was mostly blocking his lane of the road. He swerved to the left and missed rear ending the other car by inches. “Jesus!” he spat out.
“Why are they sitting on the road like that?” Brian said, trying to help River right herself after the sudden effects of inertia.
Karen was turned around in her seat, trying to see the other car. “I don’t think… I don’t think it was on purpose. The driver… no one was moving.”
Just then, the walkie talkie that was affixed to the dashboard crackled to life. The walkies had been Ian’s idea and he bought them when they got their supplies on Thursday.
“Guys? Did you see that?” The speaker was Amanda.
Brian grabbed the walkie before Jack could get to it. “You watch the road,” he directed with a smart ass grin. Brian pushed the button and said, “No, not really. What was it?”
“The driver of that car,” Amanda started. “My God! He’s dead. Jesus!”
Brian took a moment before responding. “We’re probably going to see a lot of dead people. Remember, a billion people died in one day.” He paused. “Hell, maybe another billion by now.”
“But… well, it looked like his chest exploded. And there was blood and bits of… stuff,” they heard Amanda stifle a gag, “coming from his nose and mouth. What does that? Who does that?”