by M. C. Norris
Then there was Quebra, who was always good for a joke unless he’d been “activated.” That was what Chia called it when Quebra’s training kicked in and he went rigid. Frank had found the comparison akin to a hunting dog but had said nothing. When he wasn’t activated, Quebra and Chia could sit around a fire for a solid hour and trade one-liners until everyone was struggling to keep from laughing at the tops of their lungs. That was good, if a little unsafe, because Frank was certain that if they didn’t all laugh once in a while, they never could have gotten this far. Quebra, their trained killer, knew that perhaps better than anyone did.
The final member of their octet was Ethan Dodgman. Dodger, he preferred to be called. Twenty-six, the son of a governor and the nephew of a U.S. Senator, and wealthy. These were the things Dodger wanted everyone to know about him, things that no longer mattered in the real world. Frank had no reason to doubt any of Dodger’s claims, but like everyone else, he didn’t give a shit either. The only compelling part of Dodger’s story was that he’d been cast out of his family’s state-of-the-art doomsday shelter when he’d drawn the short straw. “I’m sorry son, we just don’t have enough for all twelve of us, but you’re young. You’ll have a better go of it out there than your old man will. America needs your old man, son. They need him down here in the war room.” Frank imagined Dodger’s father had delivered this icy farewell from behind a tumbler of scotch. A mad aristocrat who believed that the American government still existed and that there was a seat of power with his name on it. Then again, Dodger also seemed to believe these things. Even though he’d been out here in the shit for a good three years - had watched civil unrest become civil war, and then civil nothing - he still talked like Mr. Class President gunning for an internship with a Congressman.
They were waiting to see a dead giant. Them’s the facts.
#
When it was light enough for Quebra to use his binoculars, he stood with his elbows on the roof of a stripped sedan and took a look.
“There it is,” he breathed, and his whole body tensed. “It’s right there, compadres.”
Dodger rose immediately to his feet. “Let’s have a look.”
Without removing the binoculars from his eyes, Quebra said, “Go ahead.”
They each stood and approached Quebra’s back slowly, as if he could shield them if the thing suddenly became undead and spotted their position. Frank had never, ever heard of such a thing, even in the craziest ramblings of fellow nomads, but he half-expected it just the same. His knees creaked and groaned as he left his seat in the road and stood beside the soldier.
Lord God, it was only a hundred yards away. The great, fearsome head lay in a crater of asphalt in a fast-food parking lot. It was right there.
Frank had never been this close, and as the sun proper finally rose, he saw the so-called Little One in such gruesome, startling detail that he nearly jumped. It was like realizing one had been sleepwalking, just as one’s hands reached for the orange-hot oven range. Similarly, he saw Dodger and Autumn jerk away. The latter clamped a hand on Caitlin’s elbow.
The Little One’s head was long, narrow, the entire thing beak-shaped, and made up on sharp, offensive angles. It was like a giant pair of jagged pliers, only these pliers were made of a smooth, bone-like matter, a sort of armor, or an exoskeleton, Frank supposed. He’d seen them before on TV back when there was TV. He’d seen photos back when there was photography. Some people called them bone giants, but now, this close, he saw that the creature’s substance resembled petrified wood more than bone. There were subtle grains running along the sharp snout, a snout which ended in grasping hooks. The mouth was closed, but Frank had seen footage of the open maw. Rather than opening into top and bottom halves, it split into four splaying mandibles that clawed at the air like the fingers of a hungry hand. In the palm of that hand, Frank had glimpsed the great wet wound that was the actual throat. They had eaten people. That was fact. It didn’t seem that they needed to. They didn’t seem to subsist on anything other than wanton destruction. Long, barbed arms with clubby fists plowed into vehicles and buildings. Frank had seen the film. Their curiously bowed legs rammed straight into bridges as if the structures had no right to be there – and the bridges would disintegrate, throwing cars, cables, and people. That was what they did, the Little Ones, when they were alive. This thing was completely unmoving and the blood-red orb of its eye was covered by what looked like a sheet of bone. It looked dead as dead could possibly be, what Frank could see of it anyway. Beyond its shoulders, the rest of the body was hidden behind a strip mall blackened by old fire.
“How long is it?” Caitlin asked. She was talking to Chia.
He said, “Never got any bigger than a few hundred feet, not as far as I know.” Three hundred feet, though – that was fifty men, an office tower, the end of the goddamn world if it stepped on you. It was marvelous to behold for all the terror it inspired. To think of the moment when this beast had collapsed here. How the earth must have quaked, how any unbroken windows in the vicinity must have shattered, how junked cars must have jumped and blast walls crumbled. When a Little One moved with will and intent, it was worse, of that Frank was sure. He never wanted to glimpse another of these things alive again, not after the last one.
“If that’s a Little One,” Caitlin asked, “how big is the big one?”
In moments like these, it seemed everyone turned to Frank. He wanted to tell them he was a copy guy, not a poet, certainly not a journalist, but they wanted to hear him tell it. Even though he’d only ever seen it on the news – just like the rest of the group, so far as he knew – he was considered to be the resident wordsmith. Caitlin followed the others’ gazes to him and her questioning eyes threw glints of sunrise at him. He turned from her for a moment, clearing his throat, and then spoke.
“It’s – did you ever go on an airplane, Cate?”
“When I was a baby,” she replied. “I don’t remember.” At nineteen, she would have been born right after all this started. Wouldn’t have been long after that when commercial airlines began closing up shop. Frank thought for a few seconds. “Well, airplanes, the kind you and me would travel on, used to get up to about thirty, thirty-five thousand feet. Up there in the clouds, if you can imagine. You would fly above the clouds sometimes and stare down at them from your window seat. It was really kind of fantastic.” It had been. The sky had belonged to Man then and far above it, the exosphere with its unthinkable litter of satellites and junk, but this was about the Big One who stood now in Chicago, dormant for years. What dormant meant was anyone’s guess. Most knew to leave it at that, lest their recurring nightmares got worse.
“The Big One,” Frank said, “stands about seven miles tall. That’s around thirty-seven thousand feet. Its head is literally in the clouds.” Caitlin didn’t acknowledge the turn of phrase and Frank went on. “The highest peak in the world is Mount Everest. The Big One has it beat by eight thousand feet. They never did figure out how something that big and that heavy managed to walk at all.”
“Most people don’t call it the Big One,” Quebra said, his eyes still in the binoculars. “They call it the Dragon and things like that. Doesn’t really look like one though, especially now. Hard to make out any features on anything that big. It always was just like a giant mountain.”
“I prefer the German Hölle geht,” Chia said quietly. “Hell Walks.” He looked at the others and said, “Very theatrical – Biblical, I guess - but I’ve ever seen some Biblical shit, it’s that thing.”
The Beast, some others called it, and there were other variations based upon language and religion but Chia was right, Hell Walks pretty much summed it up. Except it didn’t walk anymore, and if there was a God, it never would again.
Unless He’d sent it, of course.
Autumn pointed at the Little One lying in the parking lot. “We saw one once. Not quite this close, but...” she trailed off and held Caitlin close. She’d almost said something personal, had almost given away so
me backstory.
Caitlin did. “I remember. I didn’t get to see it because I was under a bunch of crap in the back of a van, but it was when we were in Tornado Alley. I saw the tornadoes, three of ‘em chasing us, before my head got shoved under a bunch of luggage.” She glanced sideways at Autumn to indicate that her big sister had done the shoving. “We grew up there. They say the storms got worse and worse and worse because of the monsters. That’s how Mom and Dad died.”
“Caitlin,” Autumn said sharply.
“It is, and we were trying to outrun these three tornadoes with the Gunderson family and their van, and Autumn saw a Little One behind the storms and pushed me down before I could see. She said she saw it clear as day and it was running.”
Frank didn’t say anything, just watched the air between the two sisters, but Duckie spoke up. “It ranned away from the twisters? That’s what tornadoes are. Twisters.”
“Right,” Caitlin said, her eyes distant, “but no, it was running after us.”
“They target people,” Quebra said. “We learned that early on. That’s why they’ve stuck mostly to the cities, even ones like this that’ve been flattened. Because new people always show up.”
“People like us,” Chia grunted, “but we were tricked. Otherwise, we would’ve never come here.”
“Then you would never have saved Duckie and me,” O’Brien said. No one said anything to that.
“You did save us,” she went on, “and we’d like to go with you. I know we don’t seem like anything other than dead weight, but we’ll both work hard. Duckie’s a helluva lot stronger than he looks.”
“I am,” Duckie agreed. “Helluva.”
“Well,” Chia said, “we don’t exactly put it to a vote or anything, but I guess we ought to make it official. Anyone got any problem with these two nice folks?”
Dodger’s silence was deafening. As if he carried even half his own weight, but at least he did the decent thing now and kept his stupid spoiled mouth shut.
It was as if the Little One lying dead across the thoroughfare had lost all its novelty. Funny how a genuine human moment could do that, thought Frank.
It occurred to him then that, even though they were downwind of the corpse, there was no smell of rot. There wasn’t really any distinctive odor at all. He tapped Quebra’s shoulder.
“Yeah, boss,” Quebra muttered.
“Any way to be absolutely – I mean two hundred percent – sure that thing’s dead?”
“It’s been there for a week at least,” said O’Brien.
Dodger shoved his hands in his slacks and began pacing. “Yeah. Maybe we ought to fall back. Plus, there’s the sickness. Wouldn’t want anyone to get infected.”
“We’re not touching it, Dodgman,” Quebra said.
“Who knows what it’s touched?” Dodger snapped. “You know the infection comes from those things! What if it bled or spat or shit all over the place when it died?”
“Okay, okay,” said Chia. “The man’s got a point. I think we’ve seen enough. Let’s count our blessings and move along.”
There was a low, rumbling sound, like a fart, and Duckie laughed. Frank’s eyes fell upon the Little One and for a second he was sure, two hundred percent sure that it had shifted in the rubble. O’Brien pinched Duckie to silence him and they all stared at the giant.
Little Ones had been felled by multiple missile strikes. That was a long time ago. Frank had never seen anything less work. This seemingly unblemished creature...had it just died of old age? Could such a miracle be possible that all this was going to come to an end? Due to age, stress? Or maybe this one had caught the goddamn common cold just like The War of the Worlds.
Maybe it wasn’t dead.
Maybe it had moved.
Everyone had stopped breathing again, Frank noticed. His lungs screamed and he let out a too-loud gasp. Quebra shot a glare at him.
Quebra’s eyes quickly changed and he pointed the binoculars over Frank’s shoulder. “Shit.”
Hell Walks is available from Amazon here