The Messenger (After Days Shorts Book 1)

by Medbury, Scott

  A half hour after he passed Big Red, he looked back and a feeling of joy swept over him. In the distance, through the shimmering heat of the blacktop, he could see the figure of his father. He waved and called out, “Dad!”

  The figure waved back and Kane began to run towards him. He ran hard, the happiness fuelling his fatigued body. He ran for a couple of hundred feet until the shimmering figure suddenly morphed into two. Kane, confused, slowed to a walk. Who was that with his dad? A little closer and then the two turned into four and he stopped in shock. The bad men. The tallest of the figures waved again and he heard a distant call. Piggy…!

  Terror struck the boy and sobbing he turned and ran.

  “Dad, where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” he half-cried, half-chanted as he ran for his life.

  The leader cackled as the boy turned and fled. They slowed to a jog. Now that the boy was in sight, he was content to let him run ahead and lead them to his home and what he hoped were fat little brothers and sisters. The moaning behind him instantly soured his good mood.

  “Come on Lind,” he snapped, over his shoulder. “Stop your mewling and keep up or I will put a knife through your eye too.”

  The Messenger followed the gang. He had also spotted the boy ahead of them and had kept up his speed as they had slowed theirs. He had again entered the trees to the side of the road and closed the gap between them slowly but surely. His plan was to take out the injured one at the back first. He was well behind the others and a throwing knife would be quick and quiet. If luck was on his side, they would be unaware of their comrade’s demise for a while, allowing him time to get ahead of them and launch an attack from the front when they turned to investigate.

  Five minutes later he was ready. Still in the tree line, he was now tracking parallel to the man at the tail as the road veered closer to the trees. He pulled one of the black, flat bladed knives from his belt and hefted it in his hand without taking his eyes of his mark. He pulled slightly ahead and then halted, barely 15 feet away from his target. He waited until the man was forward of him, then cocked his right hand over his shoulder and tensed…

  “Go!”

  At the shout of the leader, all four of the cannibals took off at a run. Cursing under his breath the Messenger darted out of the trees. A quarter mile further on he saw the overgrown brick entrance of a housing estate. The cannibals were now running for it, obviously the kid had gone that way and they didn’t want to lose him. He sprinted after them.

  “SU_NYSIDE SP_INGS” the weathered letters on the entrance announced. He ran up the long sweeping drive and curved to the left, passing the first overgrown yards and their dilapidated, once proud homes. Ahead, the cannibals turned a corner. He pursued them, still carrying the throwing knife he had drawn just minutes ago.

  Kane sprinted as hard as he could, but he could hear the men gaining on him. Try as he might, he couldn’t get far enough ahead to get out of their line of sight, something that might have allowed him to lose them with a few quick turns. He sobbed as the pounding footsteps closed in on him…

  The cannibals could have caught him anytime, but the leader hadn’t wanted that. Not yet. Hell if it was only about the boy, he could have brought him down with an arrow a mile back. No, after the pain his father had caused, Logan was hell-bent on finding the rest of his family and inflicting some pain of his own, as such, he was more than happy to stick close enough to scare the bejesus out of the kid and ensure they didn’t lose him in the maze of houses.

  Kane managed to outrun them without it ever occurring to him that they were allowing him to do just that. Finally after many twists and turns, with his lungs and legs burning, he tore onto the street that led to his home.

  He ran for the barricade of old cars, metal and wire that his dad had constructed at the end of their cul-de-sac and climbed over it like a monkey, avoiding the metal points and barbed wire with ease before scrambling down the other side. He didn’t waste time looking back, he sprinted up the hill towards his home screaming out to his mom.

  6

  Kane’s mother, her blonde hair in a ponytail, bent over the sink scrubbing dishes as she listened to her other children playing in the backyard. At first glance she would have looked like any housewife from ‘before’ however, closer inspection would have shown her to be thinner than she should be. It was a consequence of always making sure that the kids had full bellies. Sometimes that meant she went without—that’s the way it was.

  Her jeans and threadbare shirt hung loosely on her frame and when she smiled at a particularly boisterous laugh from one of her children, her missing front tooth jarred against the pale prettiness of her face.

  She was young. Perhaps only 26 or 27, but her face was careworn.

  Tracey Rand blew a strand of hair from her brow as she glanced through the curtains. The three of them were wrestling on the grass under the kitchen window, eight year old Rachel getting the better of her younger siblings.

  “Don’t be too rough you kids!” she called out, putting the last of the dishes onto the rack to dry.

  She wiped her hands on a faded towel and walked upstairs to her bedroom. The house was clean and sparsely furnished. They had found it seven years ago after Daniel’s father, one of the few original adult survivors of the Pyongyang flu, had died.

  Daniel hadn’t wanted to stay in the old apartment after that. Too many memories, too many gangs in the city, too much danger. He had wanted to give her and Kane and any more kids they might have, a fresh start. She didn’t mind, she would have followed him to the ends of the Earth.

  His father had told Daniel about Sunnyside Springs when he was young, and over the years, it had become a symbol of hope and a new life for the boy. His parents had purchased a house in the new estate during the Fall of that year. The year that everything had gone to Hell. They had been scheduled to move in the weekend after Christmas. The Flu and the subsequent invasion meant it never happened. His mother had died on Christmas night and they had bunkered down in their old apartment building to ride out Armageddon.

  His father had done a good job of keeping Daniel safe in the years that followed. He had been a marine and his skills and weapons training had stood him in good stead during the invasion and as the remnants of American society crumbled into chaos afterwards. A year and a half after it all went to Hell, Daniel’s father had found Tracey cowering from a pack of dogs and had rescued her, taking her back to live with them. They had lived together, one small happy family, until the two kids fell for each other in their mid-teens, little Kane the byproduct of their union.

  Daniel’s dad had been angry. “What sort of a life is a kid gonna have in this shitty world!” But when he laid eyes on little Kane, he fell in love with his grandson.

  Kane had been four when his grandfather died suddenly. He just dropped dead one morning as he was cleaning the breakfast dishes. Perfectly fine one minute. Face down on the floor the next. He had survived the Pyongyang Flu, the Chinese occupation and numerous scrapes and battles since, only to be brought down by a heart attack in his own kitchen. Life was unjust.

  Not long after that, the family of three had packed up their things and left, making the fourteen mile journey to their new home.

  The home they settled upon was a big, brick double storey house at the top of a cul-de-sac, as far from the entrance to the estate as they could get. They had made it their very own in the first few months, Daniel scrounging furniture from the houses around them until it was furnished just as she wanted.

  Tracey sat in front of her dresser and began to brush her hair out. Daniel would be home soon and she wanted to look pretty for him. She was excited to hear how Kane had gone on his first excursion too. It never occurred to her that they wouldn’t come back. Daniel was the strongest man she had ever known, even stronger than his father.

  She didn’t worry too much when he was gone. The house was fortified. The downstairs windows and doors were boarded up and reinforced, and the only way in or
out was through the sliding door at the back of the house. It had been reinforced with sheet metal and would take some breaking down. If it did happen to fail or they were pursued before it could be secured, they could retreat to the second floor where Daniel had constructed a moveable barricade of scrap metal and barbed wire at the top of the stairs.

  That day, trouble was the last thing on her mind. It had been so long since they had even seen a person within miles of the house that Tracey tended to relax almost completely during daylight hours. Of course Daniel always pestered her about being more vigilant, but then he wasn’t the one who had to be cooped up with four screaming kids all on his own.

  As she pulled the brush through her hair, she daydreamed about the surprise she would give Daniel that night after the kids were in bed. Her smile faded as she heard one of the kids.

  “Mom!”

  Damn kids, she thought. All I want is a few minutes of peace.

  She began another brush stroke, pausing when the distressed voice shouted again. It was coming from down the hill, not the backyard. Kane!

  She shot to her feet and snatched up the shotgun that was standing against the wall beside the dresser and ran down the stairs. She quickly went to one of the front windows and was peeking through a spyhole when the shrill scream of her youngest, Suzy, cut through her like a scythe through dry grass. She ran to the back of the house and flew through the open door, pumping the shotgun.

  7

  The sight that greeted her was almost beyond her comprehension. There were four strangers in her backyard. Men. They were the stuff of nightmares and she screamed at the sight of them. One, the tallest, balanced on the pile of firewood that was stacked against the back fence. In his hands was a hunting bow. He had nocked an arrow and was pointing it at the grass. The whole side of his head was a mess of blood and a carved upside down cross marred the pale skin of his forehead. He smiled, baring his teeth and tipping an imaginary hat to her.

  Cannibals.

  A man to his right held Kane, his hand clamped over the boy’s mouth, effortlessly restraining the struggling 11 year old. He held a machete by his side.

  The three smaller children were huddled on the grass at the feet of the other two men. One had a carving knife, and the other, a pale and sweaty creature with a blood soaked rag around his hand, held a claw hammer over the heads of her precious children. The one holding the carving knife whistled at her, his sharpened teeth exposed in a lecherous grin.

  “Please… don’t hurt them. You can take anything you want.”

  Even though she held the shotgun, Tracey knew she was beaten, the fact that Kane was here without Daniel meant that her husband was dead. She kept her tears at bay. She could grieve later—right now, as hopeless as the situation looked, she had to try and save her children.

  Her mind worked furiously at the problem but the only two solutions she thought of were not solutions at all. One, she could try blasting them away and might manage to take out one or two of them before she was killed, but that would leave the kids alone with the freaks. The second was to kill the children herself, to spare them whatever torture the bastards had in mind. She remembered Daniel once saying to her that he would kill them all before he let them fall into the hands of anyone in this savage world.

  Now here she was in just that predicament, but it wasn’t so cut and dried. At best she would only be able to kill one or perhaps two of them before she was cut down herself, again leaving the surviving kids at the mercy of the cannibals.

  No, for now it was best to try and reason with them.

  “Please...” She said to the one on the woodpile. She had seen the others looking to him and made the correct assumption that he was calling the shots.

  He laughed at her, and the others joined in, all except the one with the bandaged hand.

  “I won’t hurt them pretty one… one quick nick on the neck and your little sweetmeats will bleed out nice and quiet. All except your oldest boy, unfortunately, thanks to your dead fucking husband, I have to make him suffer.”

  “Yeah!” spat the bloody handed one in agreement.

  Kane began to cry. Until that moment, he had still expected his father to come and save them from the bad men.

  Tracey’s vision darkened and she swayed dangerously before regaining control of herself. Confirmation that Daniel was dead and the fact that they would kill the children regardless of how much she pleaded, changed things. There would be no bargaining with these men. No mercy. She took matters into her own hands and without saying a word, ran at the cannibal with the injured hand, ramming the barrel of the shotgun hard into his belly. Winded, he raised his hands in submission.

  “Leave my kids the fuck alone, or this asshole gets it!”

  The leader laughed and jumped lightly to the grass, his arrow still pointing at the ground. Tracey half turned so she could see him while keeping her gun hard against the belly of the other. He stopped a dozen paces away. In another life and another time he would have been a handsome young man. Now though, with his teeth filed to points and the bloody flipped cross carved into his forehead, he was a walking freak show.

  “Do it.” The leader shrugged. “Shoot him if you want. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

  “Logan! No…please…”

  The leader ignored the pleas of his comrade.

  “Go on shoot,” he encouraged her. “It won’t help. Shoot him or don’t. Either way we’ll have full bellies tonight.”

  He ran his tongue along the points of his teeth and Tracey’s resolve faded, the muzzle of her gun still in the belly of the whimpering cannibal.

  “Can’t do it huh?” asked the leader, mock empathy in his voice. “It’s okay, it’s hard to kill…the first time. Well we really wanted to be getting back to camp tonight, but I guess we’ll be having a sleepover with you and the kids.”

  Tracey couldn’t speak, and her hands began to tremble. She was frozen by indecision and fear.

  The leader looked at the three of her children huddled together on the grass. “By the way, do you have a really big saucepan?”

  Tears sprang to Tracey’s eyes.

  He took another step.

  “Put down the gun Mom.”

  Tracey shook her head.

  “Let me make it easy for you then. Bill!”

  “Yes Boss?” The one holding Kane asked.

  “Put that very sharp blade against his throat.”

  The cannibal obeyed and brought his machete up to the 11 year old’s throat. Tracey began to sob at the sight of the filed blade pressing against her son’s vulnerable flesh.

  “Mom, I’m going to give you to three to put down the gun, if you don’t he’s going to bleed out right here, in front of you and the other kids.”

  She sensed the men around her tense as the countdown began.

  “One…”

  Sobs wracked Tracey’s body. She shook her head and her finger tightened on the trigger.

  “Two…”

  She took a deep breath, blinking rapidly to clear the tears from her eyes.

  “Three…”

  “I love you kids…”

  Before Tracey was able to pull the trigger there was a muffled groan to her right. The man holding Kane was slowly sinking to his knees, a black object protruding from his left eye as numb fingers dropped the machete and tried to find purchase on her son’s clothing.

  The boy shrugged off the weight of his erstwhile captor and bent down, quickly snatching up the machete and holding it in front of him. The leader spun around, his hunting bow raised and searching for a target as he backed away towards the house.

  Tracey saw an opening and acted.

  BOOOOM!!

  The force of the shotgun blast caused her to lose her footing and fall onto her backside. The man she shot, a look of surprise on his face, flew backwards into the timber fence, his belly a ruined mess. He slid lifelessly down the timber, his back leaving an obscene trail of blood and guts as he went.

  The
children screamed as the other cannibal knelt over them, using them for cover and waving his carving knife wildly this way and that. Tracey clambered to her feet and turned the shotgun towards him. She froze as she felt the cold point of an arrowhead against the side of her neck.

  “Don’t fucking move bitch,” the leader said quietly. “Drop the shotgun…”

  There were only two cannibals left now and Tracey, even while knowing the odds were against her, understood that they were better than they had been a minute before. She relaxed her grip on the shotgun and held it out one handed to show she was complying before dropping it onto the grass.

  The other cannibal was still panicked and trying to look everywhere at once.

  “Calm down Joel,” his leader snapped.

  “That’s right, calm down Joel,” said a voice behind him.

  Tracey found herself swung around violently as the leader positioned her between him and the man standing near the fence on the other side of the yard. The cannibal relaxed the tension on the string of the bow and dropped it to the ground, deftly catching the arrow in his hand and jamming the point against her unprotected throat.

  The man in front of the fence was big and rangy with hair that might have been red when it was clean, and a beard of a darker hue. The great coat and clothes he wore were worn with use and over his shoulder she could see a wooden handle. The expression on his face made her feel cold inside and she was glad it wasn’t directed at her.

  He held a flat, bladed object in one hand. She could tell it was the same as the one embedded in the eye of the man who had been holding Kane. Throwing knives. There was another in the belt under his greatcoat and she could also see something silver in his other hand but couldn’t make it out.

  Tracey didn’t know if he was there to help her or help himself, but she decided to worry about that if he managed to take down the cannibals.

  “Well, well, well… what do we have here?” The leader asked.