"This is insane," Wesley said.
"I know," I said. I could feel my clan's confusion and intellectual struggle to wrap their minds around this. "It sounds crazy. Believe me, the thought that a belief in some kind of god could be so strong, especially the collective belief being so great...that it could make it appear in the flesh...it just flies in the face of everything that I believe in, but I have to take it into consideration. After all, it's happening."
"You're just making an educated guess at this, right?" Lori asked me. "I mean, whatever this thing is...this god...it couldn't have actually existed thousands of years ago—"
"But it did," I interrupted her. "It existed in the collective minds of primitive man."
"And now that they're back, those old beliefs have been reawakened," Wesley said, finally on my wavelength. "And there's more of them now than there have ever been. That's made their belief in it stronger." His eyes met mine across the table in the darkness. I could make them out in his dark silhouette.
"Yes," I said, nodding. I squeezed Tracy's hand. "Their collective belief has reawakened it and it's seeking its believers out. It's drawing them together to make it even stronger than it ever was before."
"And it's possessing its followers for the same reason," Wesley said, his features grave. "The more of its followers it can possess, the stronger a grip it has in the world."
I nodded, feeling the weight of dread settle over me. "Yeah," I said. "Now comes the next question. How to stop it."
Thirteen
The following day several things of importance occurred.
I headed to town, accompanied by Martin and several rifles and handguns, in order to find some books on primitive man and ancient superstitious beliefs. It was during our absence that most of the important things occurred, so I'll deal with the retelling of those events in due time.
Martin and I left fairly early—about eight o'clock—and drove to town. We were silent most of the way over. Martin drove. We'd gone to bed the night before tired, confused, scared, wondering what to do with the newfound information we'd learned. It was my idea to try to find books to research the subject of primitive man. Surely there had to be a library in town that would have books on the subject. The few books we'd picked up on an earlier excursion to town—medical books, guides to herbs and plants, volumes on childcare—had been secured from a ransacked Wal-Mart.
The town of Haversville is a dot on the map, but it once boasted a population of ten thousand. Most of our food and other sundries had been acquired from the shopping center at the northeast end of town. This time, as we drove through town, we headed through the downtown business district, looking for any indications of a library or bookstore. We thought there would be at least a library.
We were rewarded midway through town with a sign that pointed the direction to the Haversville Library. Martin steered the SUV in the right direction and a moment later we were circling the lot, scoping it out for any primitives.
I'd noticed a smell the moment we crossed into town. It was the smell of rotting flesh. Hundreds of bodies lying dead and maimed in their homes, in their cars, on the street; or dead from being attacked by primitives. It was hard to tell who had been primitive and who hadn't.
In the few times we'd been to Haversville I probably saw no more than fifty dead bodies. I assume most of the other ten thousand or so people who turned primitive had either fled to wherever it was they were gathering, or those who'd been spared the flipping of the DNA strain (like us) left town and scattered. Or they were killed.
Martin pulled the SUV into the library's parking lot, and as we exited the vehicle I got the feeling we were being watched.
I held the M4 rifle in my hands, muzzle pointing skyward. Martin tensed up beside me, weapon ready. He felt it too.
We weren't alone.
Martin and I exchanged a glance.
"Behind us," I whispered.
We whirled around in unison and squeezed off a volley of shots the minute we saw the primitive come rushing at us from a mass of shrubbery that bordered the lot. It yelled a war cry, and as it ran I saw it was naked. Its penis flopped uselessly between its legs and I caught a brief glimpse of a dirt and blood encrusted face, a wild look of mad intent in those eyes before it was cut down in a burst of gunfire.
It went down, legs twitching spastically, and was still.
Martin and I paused, eyes and ears alert for anything else.
All I could hear was the twitter of birds hopping among the trees. The sun was out, beating down on us, and the sky was bright blue.
The perfect summer day. In a dead town.
I tried to listen for human movement. The crunching of leaves beneath human tread, the harsh breathing of somebody making their way through side streets, the excited cries of primitives at the sound of gunfire. Even the sound of a real person shouting "Hey, I heard gunfire over there! Somebody else is out there! Maybe it's the National Guard or something! Hey, help us!" But there was none of that. There was only the silence of a near-perfect summer day.
Martin and I approached the corpse. A waft of foul body odor and excrement wafted up at me. I grimaced. "It's dead."
"Come on," Martin said, turning a grim countenance to the library. "Let's get this over with."
As we entered the library we were once again greeted by the foul stench of rotting flesh. A woman lay face down near the check out desk, her hair matted with flies and maggots, her business suit dusty. A once-portly man in a wheelchair was slouched over a computer desk, his throat ripped out. The expanding gases in his belly had distended his abdomen grotesquely and his T-shirt was ripped from the strain. I held a hand up to my nose and mouth, wondering if I'd be sick before I could get started in my search, when Martin pointed to our left. "Here we go," he said. "History and Anthropology. You go check it out, I'll stand watch here."
"Okay," I stepped toward the section, brandishing my weapon.
I passed one more body on my way, a boy of about twelve with brown collar-length hair. A chunk of flesh had been ripped from his throat and his blood had soaked into the carpet in a wide arc. I couldn't help but step through that dried blood as I made my way to the shelves, although once I realized why the carpet was so hard and crinkly beneath my footfalls I changed my path to skirt around it.
I finally came to the section I was interested in and tried to read the titles on the spines in the darkness. While the blinds had been open when the madness hit, this section of the library was toward the center of the building, and in between the shelves it was darker than usual. I quickly determined how the volumes were arranged and tried to run through the sub-headings as fast as I could: US History, European History, Asian History, the Middle Ages, Ancient History...
I paused at this section, paying closer attention to each title as I scanned through them. Sure enough, it was written ancient history: Mesopotamia, Babylonian History, and Egyptian History. On the shelf immediately following Ancient History was a placard that read Anthropology. It was there where I struck pay dirt with the first title I came across: Primitive Man.
I pulled the volume out without even bothering to flip it open and scan the chapter headings and quickly selected five more, including a coffee table sized volume that included photographs of cave paintings and artifacts that had to have been religious in nature. I gave the section one more pass to make sure I'd gotten everything the library had on primitive man—all the other volumes were on primitive mammals and dinosaurs, as well as various geology books on the formation of the earth—then made my way back to where Martin was waiting.
When Martin saw me he nodded. "Found some?"
"Yeah," I said. "Let's get the hell out of here."
We approached the glass door of the library. Nothing lurked outside. Martin stepped outside first, pronounced the lot clear of danger, and we quickly made our way to the SUV and piled in.
We didn't relax fully until we were back on the highway heading toward the cabin. While Martin drove, I wa
s able to turn my full attention to the volumes I'd pilfered from the library.
"Find anything that could be useful to us?" Martin asked.
"I hope so," I said, leafing through a section called Ancient Man's Spiritual Beliefs. "I have a feeling I have a few nights of research ahead of me."
Martin was silent for a moment as he drove. I skimmed the text. It was fascinating stuff, and the subject deserved my full undivided attention. I closed the volume and selected another one. There was no guarantee I'd find anything useful in these books. Even if the God of the New World, or whatever it was, had been written about and documented by anthropologists, it might be in a volume I didn't have. I couldn't think about that now, though. I had to plow ahead, learn what I could with what I had. Perhaps even the scant information I picked up from several sources could give us enough information to deal with this.
"Do you think that guy Stuart was telling us the truth last night?" Martin said finally, breaking the silence.
"I think so," I said. I closed the book I was purusing. "He sure sounded happy to be talking to us."
Martin said nothing as he piloted the SUV north. I could sense Martin hadn't made up his mind yet about Stuart and he confirmed it to me a minute later. "I don't know," he said, his voice giving a sort of sigh as he admitted this, a confused guilty tone. "Part of me wants to believe him. But I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God or the Devil, and to believe that an old god of primitive man has reawakened... that's very hard for me to swallow."
"I know what you mean," I said. "But we've seen the drawings. We've felt the presence. Surely you can't deny that you felt it."
Martin sighed. "You're right. I did feel something. I just..." His voice faltered. He was at a complete loss for what to say.
"I'm keeping an open mind about this," I said. The books rested in my lap. "I've learned to trust my instincts and feelings. I felt that presence back in California and Nevada. I saw those drawings. I saw how the primitives have been behaving, and I've heard anecdotal evidence from Wesley, and now from Stuart. That all tells me something's out there. I don't know if it's a god, or an alien creature. But it's there. It's there, and it's real, and we have to learn as much as we can about it if we want to stop it."
"Stop it?" Martin cast a curious glance my way. "How are we going to stop it?"
"I don't know," I said, feeling the weight of those implications crash down on me. Indeed, how could we stop it? "But we have to do something."
We were silent for twenty minutes or so, each of us digesting our own thoughts. It was true that even then I was thinking of ways to defeat this thing, whatever it was. My mind raced with a thousand scenarios. Maybe the thing was a real anthropomorphic being that could be killed. If so, all we had to do is blast it with a rocket launcher and be done with it. Maybe there was more than one of them. In that case, we'd have to communicate with others of our own kind, possibly through ham radio, to encourage them to take up arms and kill as many of the creatures as we could. I wondered if the thing was some kind of prehistoric creature modern anthropology never discovered and, for some weird reason, had been regenerated through means still unknown. I imagined organizing large masses of hunting parties via ham radio and killing hundreds of these things. I imagined things ten years in the future, where society was beginning to rebuild after killing the creatures and doing something about the primitive problem—either mass executions or imprisonments in laboratories to study them, to find a possible cure to flip the Neanderthal DNA strain back. Yes, I wanted things back the way they were. I wanted to unfuck what had been fucked up. I wanted to go back to the political bullshit, the wars, the economic instability and insecurity, the polluting of the air and water by large corporations; I wanted to go back to my career as a writer of screenplays and novels which really wasn't as glamorous as most people used to think it was, nor always financially stable. I wanted my life as father and husband, family nights at the house watching some Disney movie with Emily and Eric and Tracy, all snuggled up on the sofa together, quiet dinners with Tracy while the kids spent the evening at my parents house, then a night of slow lovemaking while the evening sky stretched on outside our bedroom window.
I wanted our old world back with all its beauty and horrible flaws.
Forty minutes away from the cabin, Martin interrupted my thoughts. "We need to warn Stuart to be careful in his communications to us. Wesley has a point about not being entirely trustworthy of the radio bands. If there's Stuart, and us, there's bound to be other survivors. And some of them might be hostile. Some might be run by little tin pot dictators with delusions of sweeping through the country and taking over just because they think they can."
"You're right, and I agree," I said. "We'll bring this up to him when we get back."
Little did we know that when we arrived back at the cabin we'd learn there really were more people like us. And they were closer than we thought.
Fourteen
We had just pulled the SUV up to the cabin when Lori rushed out on to the porch. "We've got a visitor," she said. She looked excited and scared.
"A visitor?" Martin asked as he stepped out of the driver's side.
"We've got him tied up in the garage," Lori said. Her face was flush with adrenaline. She was a bundle of energy as she stepped toward us and grabbed Martin by the arm. "Come."
"Is everything okay?" I asked, instantly worried about Tracy and Emily.
"We're okay, Tracy and I got him," Lori said. She smiled. "I think I may have hit him over the head too hard, but he was fucking trespassing as far as I'm concerned."
With that, Martin and I sprinted toward the garage where Tracy and Emily met us outside the side door. Tracy looked worried, too, and we were led inside the spacious garage, which housed a Hummer that Wesley had jump started and driven once. Martin and I kept asking what was going on. Emily had a confused look on her face and I could see Wesley standing near the corner talking to somebody who was sitting on the floor. Through the excited babble coming from Lori and Tracy, I managed to decipher the following: a young man had come across the cabin grounds, actually managing to get on the front porch before being tackled by Lori. During the ensuing fight, Tracy joined in when she heard the ruckus (Tracy had been in the kitchen with Emily and was no doubt acting on the instinct to protect our daughter when she went out to assist Lori). Together, the two women managed to subdue the man and Wesley ran out of the radio room a moment later. The three of them got the man tied up, and he'd been in the garage ever since, where he was undergoing questioning by Wesley.
As we stepped closer to the man in the corner I got my first good look at him. He was in his mid to late twenties with a slight build, about five foot four, shoulder length dirty blonde hair and a beard framing his face. He was a good-looking guy, yet rugged enough to pass for an outdoorsman type. He was dressed in knee-length shorts, hiking boots, and a tan tank top. The left side of his head was caked in blood and he was beginning to sport a large bruise near his temple where Lori had smacked him. He was sitting on the floor, his wrists bound behind his back, his ankles lashed together with rope. Wesley stood over him, hands on hips, a figure of authority.
"What's going on?" I asked.
Wesley turned to us, then turned back to the guy on the floor. "Let me go into the house and get you a washcloth to clean that blood up and find some first aid stuff for you, okay? I'll be back in fifteen minutes." Then Wesley turned and gestured for us to step outside. "Come on, let's go."
As he herded us out of the garage I made sure Emily was in tow and Lori closed the side door to the garage behind us as we exited. "Okay, what the hell happened?" Martin asked. "Who is he?"
Wesley said nothing as he led us to the porch. "Tracy, can you get the first aid kit and bring it to the porch? We'll need a damp cloth to clean him up before we go back to the garage."
"I didn't hurt him that badly, did I?" Lori asked as we stepped onto the porch.
Wesley shook his head. "Scalp wounds bleed like a
bitch. He's fine, just a little banged up."
We found our way to our respective favorite seats. Emily sat on my lap while Tracy went into the house for the first aid kit. Emily had a more mature look about her as she listened to us grownups talk. She'd had to grow up a lot in the past month, and I felt bad about that.
Tracy returned a moment later with the first aid kit and sat down in the wicker chair. "Okay, who is he?"
"He says his name is Alex," Wesley said, looking pensive as he addressed us all. "Last name Haskins. He claims he lives about five miles northeast of here, on the outskirts of a very small town called Manning."
"What's he doing here?" Tracy asked. She still looked and sounded shaken up by everything.
"He says he's trying to find other people," Wesley said.
A reasonable enough answer. Part of me felt that need, too. Yet another part of me was wary of hooking up with more people.
"So he's been living by himself for the past month in Manning?" I asked.
"So he says," Wesley said, his eyes lighting on each of us. "He said he lives in a small house about a mile or so outside of town and that he's stayed put ever since learning what happened from watching TV the day the virus hit."
"He looked pretty well fed and groomed," Martin said, immediately looking suspicious. "Somehow I don't buy that."
"I didn't either at first, and when I brought that up to him he said he'd been out once to gather provisions from Manning's one general store." It was hard to read Wesley's features. Something told me that he didn't entirely trust what Alex had told him. "Again, that sounds reasonable enough. I started a pride and ego up interrogation on him and he immediately opened up to me. Told me that aside from that one trip into town, he hasn't been out of his immediate living area, and has been essentially holed up by himself in his home. Says he has a couple rifles and ammunition, has been washing his clothes in a creek near his home, and that he decided to head west to see if anybody else was still alive."
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