"I know, I know. I'm sorry."
"Now listen to me, you idiot," she said, turning full toward him, her hands on his chest, one fussing with his tie. "You promised me you would see a doctor, all right? You promised me, Ed. Those black-outs aren't funny, and you're not a superman."
"Damnit, they'll go away if I'm careful."
"Sure they will, and trees will learn to walk. Confound it, Ed, am I going to have to postpone—"
He held up his hands in easy surrender. "No, no, don't be silly. You go ahead and take that trip. You need it. And I promise you that I will see Doc Foster the first thing in the morning. And if he wants to put me into the hospital, I'll do it. All right? Does that make you happy?"
She smiled and shook her head slowly. "You need a babysitter, you know that, don't you?"
"I know what I need," he said.
Attendants moved at their own pace from the ambulance, one of them lighting a cigarette for a cop. With Rob between them they chatted, and laughed, until one of the patrolmen looked over to Cyd and winced his embarrassment.
Cyd tried to steer the talk away from his proposal, suddenly remembered a gift in the car. She told Ed to wait and hurried to the car and reached in through the open window and pulled out the saber that had hung on her brother's wall. It was polished now and gleaming, with a garish red bow tied at the hilt. She saw the police staring in frank admiration, saw one of the attendants take Rob's chair and push it toward the back.
"No," Ed said, backing away.
"Yes," she insisted, and handed it to him, poking at him with it until, reluctantly, he grabbed hold of the blade. "You've loved this thing for years, and you might as well have it. I've sold just about everything out of the house, and the realtor told me he may have a buyer for the place and the land." She stared blindly at the sunlight glinting off the hilt. "I don't want anything left, Ed. I don't want anything left at all."
She dropped it suddenly as though it had burned her. Ed grabbed for the hilt before it struck the ground, gripping the blade tighter, then cursing loudly as he dropped it. She bent, but he yawned her away, wiping his hand on his coat gingerly.
"Damn, woman," he said. "You want to call me lefty from now on?"
She grabbed at his wrist and turned the hand over. There was a deep crease across the palm.
"I'm fine," he said. "Stop fussing."
The ambulance pulled slowly away from the curb.
"Damnit, Cyd, what's the matter with you?"
The skin had been broken.
"Cyd?"
She watched, turning, the ambulance pick up speed. Her brother's face was in the back window.
"Cyd, listen, I just want you to know that I'll be waiting for you when you get back. I know it sounds like something Sandy would say, but damnit, I love you, and I'll be waiting when you get back."
On Ed's hand there was no blood . . .
"Cyd, I'll be waiting."
. . . and Rob was smiling.
SPECIAL SNEAK PEAK
BLAZE OF GLORY – BY WESTON OCHSE
CHAPTER 1
There are things that run through a person’s mind right before they murder someone. Crazy things. Insane things. Among the many thoughts that ran through Buckley Adamski’s mind were two that crouched like Chinese Lion Dogs intercepting and interrogating every intuition and postulate --
Why had God allowed this?
Was He doing anything to change it?
Maggot-shaped pixels on the screen of the old-fashioned floor model television coalesced into recognizable images as Buckley lurched to his feet. He'd been watching television for hours, staring at the devastation and willing it all to be fiction. He stepped back farther to better see the screen, wobbly from both the vodka and the bombardment of doom presented in Technicolor perfection by the network. Scenes of destruction flipped and flowed past computer-racked commercials and ads for shows that would never be seen. From toilet paper teddy bears to the Eiffel Tower crashing into the Paris skyline to the panic of ten-thousand Chinese rushing madly into the ocean, the scenes merged into one other until he could only believe that it was truly an End Time, perhaps even the end of the world.
Buckley fell back a step as a line of a hundred Russian tanks fired, then exploded. Airplanes slammed into the ground. Roads became collections of abandoned cars. And the more he watched, the fewer people he saw.
The gold alarm clock his father had been given for retirement for thirty years in the Public Works Department chimed the top of the hour. The screen blanked, then was replaced by a torso-shot of a blond-haired news announcer. He'd seen this look a dozen times and each time he wished it would change. Maybe if he watched the broadcast one more time it would be different.
"This morning at 8:00 AM, the President declared a national disaster and is, even as we speak, somewhere overhead in Air Force One while below him on this great planet Earth, chaos reigns supreme. Borders are being fortified. Commercial planes are grounded. Ships are being halted off the coasts. Even in Iowa, a thousand miles from danger, neighbors are shooting each other over the tall corn. From Afghanistan to Alabama the world is in a panic."
His mother's body began to quake on the couch. She'd been unconscious for about an hour, long enough for the transformation. Buckley knew what was about to happen and was powerless to stop it. He watched the television instead, praying for the man to grin and yell 'Gotcha!'
"The Governor had seemed poised to handle events until the press conference yesterday," the announcer continued. "When he spoke, his confident words carried the day, making people sit up and feel better. He’d had ideas. He’d said everything was going to be okay. He’d said the creatures could be defeated. Scientists had almost figured it all out, he’d said. Then he began to twitch and sing as if something was in his brain. All he’d said before could have been true. Everyone could have been safe. The human race might have actually made it."
Suddenly Buckley’s mother sat up. She coughed and gagged. "Help me," she begged. So, like the good boy he'd always been, he did as she begged by placing the cool barrel of the 9mm pistol against her temple and pulling the trigger. She fell back on the couch, better for it.
"But as the Governor sank into the longing strains of an old BB King song on national television,” the announcer continued, “a single creature pierced the slick cover of his pupil and a million households watched as the small maggot tasted the air and began its dance. And the song continued on as the Presidential hopeful sang The Thrill is Gone.”
The announcer sobbed once as he pulled his own pistol from where he'd had it hidden in his lap. His slightly embarrassed smile was followed by a loud report as his brain splattered the blue screen behind him. Then the television cut to commercial.
If Buckley wanted to see it again, he only had to wait an hour, because this was all that had been playing since yesterday, over and over and over.
CHAPTER 2
That’d been two days ago.
Two days of an Uber-Dantean Hell where everyone was a demon and everyone was damned. Buckley had run and killed— his flight or fight instinct working simultaneously within his spinning mind. Everyone he’d known, everyone he’d yet to meet, was a threat.
He tried not to kill. He really tried. Deep down, smothered in swathes of terror, Buckley’s humanity struggled with the necessities of his murders. Like the twenty-three year old private he’d once been in Lebanon, however, he understood as no suburban protestor ever could, that absolutely, positively, without a fucking doubt, everyone was a threat.
Everyone.
Like the shopkeeper who sold him his daily pack of menthols he’d found price-tagging the bodies of dead customers and placing them beside warm beer and hot dog relish.
Or the cat lady who lived next door, who he’d found feeding on a particularly large calico from her once prodigious collection of fifty-seven felines.
Or the crossing guard who was embattled with a herd of school children in an abattoir of pigtails, gnashing teeth, a
nd freckled screams between two thin yellow lines that had once meant safety.
Buckley had known and loved them all. He was a Christian and had tried to live his life by the complicated precepts of a sometimes-confused God. He did not covet his neighbor’s wife, he did not lie, neither did he cheat or steal. Even when it hurt, Buckley had been known to turn the other cheek.
Now, however, as when he’d been in Lebanon just before the Barrack's Bombing that killed 299 Marines, Buckley understood that turning the other cheek was akin to allowing a bright-eyed, young Arab boy with an AK and no sense in the world to take pot shots at his convoy when they went out on their thrice weekly trip to the coast. And like the neighborhood paperboy who’d chased him for six blocks on a bicycle, the cards in the spokes a continuous clackity-clack warning of what could be, Buckley had tried to avoid the killing.
But just like in Lebanon, killing became necessary and Buckley had tired before the child. With resignation he’d spun, aimed and fired. When the empty bike tumbled past, he felt defeat in his victory. Buckley would have cried if he could, but he was too dried up inside.
The religious called it The Day of Doom. The environmentalists called it the inevitable effect of sunspots on the hole in the ozone layer created by greedy industrialists who’d never listened to their warnings. The conspiracy theorists called it a military experiment gone awry. The liberals called it a purposeful assault on humanity by the conservatives as if a roomful of right-wing extremists had cooked up the entire event after a round of eighteen holes at a whites-only golf club, followed by drive-by lynchings of the losing player’s caddies. The conservatives called it an attempt by California tree-huggers to hijack the news with tales to scare children at bedtime. Even the Trekkies were heard spouting “I come in peace” crap about terraforming or terracotta or whatever. When the Governor of North Carolina, presidential hopeful and the anointed savior of the Democratic Party, was eaten alive on national TV, people stopped caring who was responsible.
It was a fucking disaster, pure and simple.
And in the top floor of the Franklin Hotel where Buckley had managed to find brick and mortar safe harbor, he wallowed in the dregs of charcoal filtered salvation watching it all. As a citizen of Wilmington, he was a veteran of seven hurricanes, an earthquake and two tornadoes. He couldn’t help but wonder how FEMA would classify this. It wasn't as if no one believed, just that the event was too much. Maggies were one thing, but a sentient herd was another.
CHAPTER 3
"Close the fucking door!" Buckley shouted, rushing across the room.
Lashawna ignored him and pulled the door wide enough so that everyone got a view of Sally Struthers, her hair matted with blood, her face pock-marked by maggot holes and her skin undulating as the tiny beasts tasted the air.
"Open up and let me in or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow the house in." Sally coughed, then gagged as a hundred maggies erupted from her throat and showered Lashawna in the face.
Both women screamed.
Buckley hit the door with his shoulder, slamming it shut. Lashawna screamed again as she raised her hands to bat the maggies from her face. But she hadn't the time. Buckley shoved the barrel of the shotgun into the girl's chest and pulled the trigger. Her eyes flew wide as her chest plastered the door behind her. She fell to the floor, a look of surprise still on her face. Buckley began to stomp on the maggies that had fallen to the ground. He had to get every one of them. To miss even one meant their deaths.
"What the fuck! What the fuck did you kill her for," Samuel screamed. "She was my girl, you son of a bitch. I'm gonna—"
“Do nothing,” Buckley said slapping the barrel of the shotgun across the boy's nose, knocking him to the floor. "Sissy, give me a hand. We need salt. A full bucket."
Sissy stared at the body of Lashawna, who’d been until just now, a vibrant dark-skinned girl whose only fault seemed to be a constant need to defy authority. The two of them had been friends, if only for a short while. Sissy had enjoyed the presence of someone her age. Lashawna's intelligence, masked by her inner-city façade, had shone and the girls spent most of their time talking.
"Sissy! Get the Goddamned salt. She's infected." Samuel pulled himself along the floor to Lashawna, but was sent reeling back by a shove of Buckley’s boot. "Are you deaf? Do you have a fucking death wish? She's infected."
Buckley had his back to the door to not only hold it shut, but to keep the others from making the same mistake Lashawna had made. If he went to get the salt, one of the others would open it for sure and then all their planning and defenses would be for not.
"Open up and let me in," cackled Sally in a man's voice from the hallway, "or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow the house in."
"Not by the hair on our chinny chin chins," Grandma Riggs cried from her wheelchair in the center of the living room.
Sally Struthers started to scream, as if a small part of her mind remembered that she was human and realized the irrevocable damage that had been done to her body.
"Will somebody get me a fucking bucket of salt!"
"Here you go, Mr. Adamski," came a small, knee-high voice.
It was Little Rashad. Through the boy’s tears, Buckley saw fierce determination. As brave as the boy was trying to be, each of Sally's screams from the hall outside produced a flinch in the kid’s small thin frame.
Buckley grabbed the bucket and poured half of the contents on Lashawna’s face and the other half along her body. No more than five seconds passed before a tiny plume of smoke escaped from her nose.
“See? I fucking told you. Now, no more messing around. One more mistake like that could mean all of our deaths." It’d been too close.
"Fuck this. This shit is gonna stop," murmured Samuel, reacting to the helpless stares of his companions. The screaming from the other side of the stout wooden door had gone on for far too long and was making everyone a little weak in the knees. "Those things killed my girl, so I'm gonna kill them."
"I got yer back," a slim Italian kid added, gesturing aggressively with a set of matching pistols he jerked from the waist band of his nylon pants.
“You know what? I don’t care,” Buckley said. “You two wanna die, go ahead."
Bennie, until recently an upwardly-mobile crack salesman, gave in to the instincts that had kept him out of jail and invisible during a dozen drive-bys. He sagged against the wall, his courage smothered by Buckley’s logic. He was dead, but not yet. There seemed to be no consoling Samuel, however. Unless he was given something to keep him busy, he’d end up joining his dead girlfriend.
"Samuel," Buckley said to the other boy, "go check the windows. Gotta make sure we ain't being flanked."
"Damn, Adamski," came a gravel voice from behind him. "Them things aren’t gonna get in. We took care of the windows. Hell, my hands still hurt from all the hammering."
Buckley stared hard at the old man sitting on the edge of the couch. His name was Travis MacHenry and on a used car lot he was a god. But they weren’t on a used car lot. This was a war zone and here, sales acumen meant little to nothing. When they'd arrived, one of Buckley’s first moves was to remove all the interior doors except the one to the master bedroom and nail them over the windows. Although the doors were still wood and wouldn't last forever with the maggies constant gnawing, they'd at least delay the little bastards enough to provide the group a fighting chance. Buckley blinked slowly at the old man, a look he’d perfected on the streets. The blink said more than a thousand words.
You mean shit to me.
MacHenry read it right and dropped his eyes to the floor.
Buckley repeated himself. "Like I said, Samuel, get your fat ass down the hall and check on the windows."
Samuel looked longingly at Lashawna's body. They’d known each other since high school. He was the football player and she’d been the cheerleader. They’d been lovers. They’d been friends. Now, along with every other dream he’d held dear, she was gone. Buckley ordered him again. Finally,
the boy lowered his head and ambled his three-hundred pounds down the hall, the barrel of his own Mossberg shotgun guiding the way.
With the exception of Grandma Riggs smoking the hell out of Bennie's crack in the middle of the living room and cackling at the antics of non-existent actors on the blank TV screen, the rest were silent, their eyes on Buckley, their ears attuned to the screams.
Their immediate problem was a simple one. Sally Struthers was infected. That wasn't her real name, but that's what everyone called her. A plump, saggy blonde, she’d been attempting to round up the children, trying in vain to save them. So far she’d only found one, Little Rashad, a lean ten-year-old who was now sitting with his back to the wall trying to act tough. Sally, who’d braved the streets way past the point of suicide, was now being digested by the maggies and all Buckley could do was wait for the screaming to end.
And in all honesty, that's all he intended to do.
There was just no way to fight them.
Within the decaying miles of his native state were a billion billion writhing forms in search of the living to promote their single-minded existence. No one really knew what they were. The smaller ones looked like maggots and during the first few days, when there were still newspapers and television, the term maggie became the popular name. Demons, aliens, maggots, miniature pink fucking elephants with an attitude, the name really didn't matter. What did matter was that there were different kinds, now. No longer were they just the common tiny white motes of wiggly nastiness.
There were the smokers—as long as a finger and smoky gray. Inching like slugs along the ground they were slow, but their slime was an acid that seemed able to eat through most anything, especially wood.
There were the swimmers-- amphibious beasts that were all mouth and had depleted the fresh water fish supply along the Cape Fear within days and were best known to slide through the sewers, injecting themselves into unprotected asses.
The Last Call of Mourning - An Oxrun Station Novel (Oxrun Station Novels) Page 20