by Bob Williams
“I honestly don’t know.”
My mind is on so many different topics as I approach the Jeep. Where is Malcolm? What are we getting ourselves into? Where did Chaos escape to? Where the hell is our next meal going to come from?
I am exhausted. Emotionally and physically spent. We are about ten feet from the Jeep when I see the tips of her ears slowly rising up from the front seat. Then I see her eyes, and her muzzle.
Lexi.
She sees me. Our eyes meet. I weep.
***
We all file into the Comanche and I fire it up. My Jeep must be a Point of Light as well. It feels indestructible. We continue down Eighth Avenue and turn left onto Wedgewood. Signs for Interstate 65 glare in the early morning sunlight and we veer right, onto the ramp. It’s unclear where we’re heading. The fight was only just beginning. But my friends and I are ready. And we’re in it for the long haul.
I turn the radio on and press the preset button for Doctor Midnite. He might tell us where to go next. He seems to be in the know. All I get is static, fuzzy static, like when I first drove into Nashville. It’s fading in and out. A female’s voice cuts in and out, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. My head starts to pound. No, worse. It’s like a screw is tightening in my skull. Dammit!
“What are you listening to, Pres—”
“Shut up!” I scream.
The voice is beginning to break through the static. Clearer. Oh my God, my fucking head!
Suddenly, coming out of the radio as if a clearer voice never existed, I hear:
“Go to work, brother. You are protected.”
I slam on the brakes in the middle of the Interstate in post-apocalyptic Nashville, Tennessee.
“Emily?”
THE END
Pops:
A Low Lying Lands Story
The Watcher
Jonathon Gregor Poplovitch sits upon the floor of the Seventh Son Brewery, his back planted firmly against the bar stand. A mixture of cold beer and warm blood drips consistently from the slab overhead.
He is dying.
The battle was fought with all he could muster. He suffered a number of minor and nagging injuries, but he kept fighting. What was left of freedom was at stake. Or what anyone could even remotely consider freedom after the Descent. Unfortunately for Pops, his injury is not minor, nor is it nagging. It is lethal. This is tremendously difficult for me to watch.
Pops hears the calm yet confident stride of his killer, Admiral Shen, as he vacates the establishment. The bell that is heard upon entry and exit to the brewery in actuality sounds the funeral dirge for dear John. He attempts to adjust his position, but the knife buried to the hilt in his side causes him to scream in agony. No one hears. Nobody is coming. Pops knows this. He doesn’t really think anyone wished to die alone. But he’s okay with it. Not his first choice, mind you. He’d fought with many brave soldiers in his long, war-filled life. He’d held the hands of countless others as they drew their final breath. He didn’t wish that responsibility upon anyone.
Pops had been in one conflict or another for most of his sixty-seven years of life. I suppose you could call him a mercenary, but he’d prefer the term contractor. Now, when one thinks of mercenaries, they of course think of shady, violent characters with a moral compass pointing straight towards Hell. Thank you so much, big cinema.
Pops, however, worked to help others in need. To use a reference a Low Lyer would understand, he worked for an outfit kind of like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s in Predator. Good people. Talented soldiers. Ethical. He did on occasion scream, “Get to the choppa!!” It was the 1990s, and Pops was having fun. I must admit, I enjoyed watching him. After a while nobody got the joke, and Pops started to feel old. In mind and in body.
He’d seen so much cruelty in his life. Dead children, evil men, scores of bodies. The ones he couldn’t save still danced through his dreams like a wickedly evil Mardi Gras parade. One thing is for sure. When the Collapse began and Chaos took hold the world he was living in, he was not ready. So many times I wished to assist him, but alas, I cannot interfere. Pops initially felt the BH-2014 virus was not worthy of the terror it was causing. He figured the danger would get sorted out long before it was a threat to him. Yes, John Poplovitch does have a weakness. He trusts too much. In the end, the BH-2014 virus would break not only his heart, but his spirit.
The first cases were in Chicago, but it spread like a wildfire at Yosemite, and before he could stop his head from spinning, the infected, who had been dubbed ‘Freaks’ by the general public, were on his doorstep.
Forgive me. I’ve been watching John so long I’ve inadvertently adopted some of his terminology.
The Descent came, and no one could stop it, and life as Pops knew it was over. John suffered greatly through the Descent, but he never stopped fighting. I mentioned he lost his spirit. Perhaps that was not the most accurate of statements. When it happened, John no longer cared if he died, just as long as others lived. Other Regulars. That is, the uninfected. Pops cared for them.
It is what a Point of Light does. They continue to fight in the face of great personal loss and tragedy. When conditions are not ideal, or even if they are. A Point of Light always strives for the good. Pops made the lives of those he intersected with better. He gave others hope when there was seemingly none. I will miss watching him work upon the Low Lying Lands. However, there is still work to be done by Jonathon Gregor Poplovitch.
Pops
“Shen!!”
Son of a bitch.
I watch him walk away; the smug bastard doesn’t even bother to look back. He knows he’s won. This battle, anyway. I blame Midnite. I was minding my own damn business in Toledo when his crazy ass came on the radio. Screaming about how some fool who called himself Admiral Shen had landed on Columbus.
“Cow Town is fucked,” he’d said. I listened intently. Doctor Midnite had been appointment listening since the Descent. He surfaced after about six months and had been spreading his “message” ever since. He said Admiral Shen had started out in Tiffin with a small army and was making his way towards Columbus. Midnite said that he’d received reports from his contacts.
“That rotten motherfucker Kendrick Kade has been zeroed out!”
But before his corpse was even cold, whispers of Shen had already creeped out of Discovery City.
Initially he’d only been preaching survival. But I guess after two years he finally got fed up.
I don’t even know why I’m thinking about this. I’m fucking dying. There’s a knife in my damn side. Keep talking, Pops. Stay alive.
Like I said, his message changed. He started preaching for us to “take it back.” Take it back was all he talked about. Well…rasped. The man’s gone hoarse by now.
Midnite is the fairly eccentric, crazy, irrational, yet sensible voice of reason for the Regulars. The ones who have not been converted into bloodthirsty Freaks by the BH-2014 virus. The Freaks... God help us. They look like us, but if they break, if their eyes go bloodshot, you better run like hell. Either that or have a sharp weapon or a loaded gun. I’ve had plenty of run-ins with the Freaks since it all went to shit. But everybody checks out eventually. I’ve managed to survive much longer than I anticipated. Especially in my line of work.
I’m what’s called an exterminator. Well, was. After the Descent I had to find a use for my certain set of skills. I’ve been killing bad guys since Judas took the thirty pieces of silver, or at least it feels that way. My buddies and I would go into some war-torn country and rescue child soldiers from the life. Rescue refugees from oppressive warlords. In some cases we stayed for extended periods and trained civilians in hand-to-hand combat and weaponry. I like to think we never left anywhere we visited worse off than the way found it.
After the Descent, obviously things got hairy and I was able to use my skills for a new kind of purpose. Why am I doing this, you ask? I don’t have to justify my life before God?
Keep talking Pops...just...keep talking.
Exterminators, by name, have been around for about as long as the safe zones. But you’d be a fool if you thought these types of characters haven’t been operating on both sides of the fence since well before everything went to shit.
Exterminators are part of a five-man team. We are heavily armed, we are focused, and we can’t be deterred once we enter a property. Exterminators clear out prospective safe zones. This is a three-fold operation.
Step One: Search the property from top to bottom and exterminate any and all Freaks.
Step Two: Locate any Regulars on the grounds. Immediately administer a blood test. Have the field medic administer a general checkup. Secure for transport back to SZ.
Step Three: Have team inspector survey the property and assess if it is viable for a future safe zone.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the work. Is it wrong to say I liked putting down Freaks? Probably. But I did. I also had a great deal of respect for my brothers in SZ-1. Toledo Safe Zone, which operated out of the Savage Arena on the campus of the University of Toledo, had five SZ squads. Kurtis Swope, commander of the Toledo Safe Zone, had a thing for the old Stargate SG-1 show back in the day. You know, the one with MacGuyver. Anyway, the prospective safe zone teams were called SZs.
Have I mentioned that I got my friends killed? Jess Nelson, William Belle, Dave Swindler, and John Pickering all perished in Operation Take Back Columbus. After the Midnite broadcast I went to Swope and debriefed him on Shen. That basically we, as in the TSZ, didn’t know shit about this Shen character. Midnite, however, had said he started in Tiffin and had been adding bodies to his army all along I-75 to C-Bus. He needed to be stopped.
Kurtis Swope was a man of few words. However, when he spoke, like E.F. Hutton, we listened. He wasn’t having any of this Midnite crap. Say what you will about Doc Midnite—he has his lovers and most assuredly has his haters. Commander Swope was one of the haters.
“Pops, listen. I hear you. I do. But there is entirely too much work to be done here. SZs two and three are out right now securing grounds for expansion. The Freak count is up—who the hell knows why—and the Detroit SZ has already sent word they are getting overrun. They requested assistance.
Midnite is a crazy son of a bitch. He stirs the pot, gets everybody riled up, and gets a bunch of people dead. I can’t authorize any of our Toledo Safe Zone personnel to go off on a witch hunt for this Admiral Shen. Who, might I add, we’d never heard of before the broadcast. I’m sorry, Pops, but no.”
As it turns out, I should’ve listened. Not only did we not achieve a victory here, we all died.
Shit. I’m coughing up blood. I knew I was going down the second that blade went in. Honestly I can’t fathom why I’m still alive. So I can, what, give my testimonial? To whom? Who the hell’s listening to me? The last people that listened to me are picking banjos in Heaven and throwing divine tennis balls to their dead dogs.
I’m scared. I need you, Gen. Why did you leave me?
In over thirty years of doing contract work, in nearly every corner of the world, I had never laid eyes on a woman more beautiful than Genevieve Ely. She was in Mozambique, in her third term with the Peace Corps, when divine intervention insisted our paths should cross in 1998.
Gen was the in-the-trenches leader of an ambitious project to bring clean water to Mozambique, among other nations. The outfit I was with had run into trouble on our assignment and it had gone tits up. Two of my friends punched out and the regime we were attempting to depose in a small corner of Zimbabwe was still continuing their ethnic cleansing.
I was sick with grief and God knows what. An ancient strain of Montezuma’s revenge? I know, geographically incorrect, but I was in a bad way. It was without a doubt caused by the poor drinking water. You take steps, boil it, we even had these packets that you poured into the water to kill bacteria, but it wasn’t good enough. I had to get away.
I refused my cut because I wasn’t going to take money when the asshole was still there killing women and children. I secured transport from the first person who didn’t think I’d die in their bus and ended up in Mozambique. It was there I ran into Genevieve. I had been asking around and finally been told where I could find the American woman.
Over the next week to ten days she nursed me back to health while diligently continuing her work with the Peace Corps. It took nearly no time at all for me to open my heart to her and basically testify my life to her. Yes, I had killed many people. Yes, I had done some pretty horrendous things. But it had all been in the name of good. In service to others who couldn’t stand up for themselves.
“For Willy,” she said.
“What?”
“That movie. A Few Good Men. Remember it? The black guy, Harold, he says that to the short white kid. You know, the one from Twin Peaks?”
“Yes. Downey.”
“Right! He says to Downey, ‘We are supposed to fight those who couldn’t fight for themselves. We were supposed to fight for Willy.’”
For the rest of the time I served in my outfit Gen always called out “For Willy.” It’s how she stole my heart. We were bound by a connection I thought would never be broken. We continued to serve our causes and a great deal of the time over the next ten years we were completely across the world from each other. But love won out. We survived.
In 2008, we both decided to quit our jobs. I’d been saving up for a while, and the decision to cash out was actually pretty simple. We moved back to Gen’s hometown of Toledo, Ohio, where she became an environmental science teacher and I took a job at a transitional living home for teenage boys.
“Still doing it for Willy,” she’d say. We were happy, we were safe, and we were in love. For six years. Then came the Descent.
What fueled Genevieve was her overwhelming desire to help others. In the Peace Corps, it was the villagers. Helping people in ways they could never imagine. Her drug of choice was hope. It was what she provided her students. An education was an avenue that a great many of her underprivileged students were able to use to rise above their socio-economic stations. In other words, she gave them hope.
In the early stages of the Descent, what was called the Collapse, society as we knew it was still doing its best to function but was failing rapidly. When the first containment breach occurred in Chicago and the BH-2014 virus started spreading, it was basically over at that point. As I said, Gen thrived on hope. And before we knew it, all hope was lost.
It became a full-time job, trying encourage Gen to “Do it for Willy.” When it came to those of us, the uninfected, who were now being called Regulars, her despair overwhelmed her almost as quickly as the virus took hold of the infected. When you were exposed, it was over for you, for your soul. Gen would wake at night screaming, covered in sweat, crying, “I can’t become a Freak! I can’t, John!” It was clear she had lost her hope.
I returned home one evening—it’s a day I’ll never forget—and the house was empty. We weren’t in a safe zone by any means. The concepts of safe zones were in their infancy at this point, but we were relatively out of the city proper. I called for her repeatedly as my worry grew stronger. Dread was overcoming me.
I ran into the master bedroom and stopped cold. The door to the bathroom was cracked open and I could hear the tub water running. Heat escaped from behind the door but all I felt was a devastating chill. I crossed the room, knowing that when I opened that door my heart would break. I hadn’t taken but a step or two when I noticed a small piece of paper in the middle of the bed. It was a sheet of her personal stationery:
From the desk of Genevieve Poplovitch:
John-
My Love. I sleep perchance to dream.
Gen
She was, of course, making a reference to the “dreamers.” Dreamers were the ones who took their own lives out fear and despair instead of facing the truth of the matter. They were cowards. I nudged open the door with my boot, approached the tub, and confirmed it was Gen. I needed to see her. I wanted to be looking he
r in the eyes when I told her.
“Gen, I will never forgive you this. You have broken my heart. For as long as I live, I will never forgive you.”
I went down to the basement and retrieved the oversized durable backpack I had for camping and returned to the bedroom. I packed it with as much clothing as I could and the toiletries I couldn’t live without. I walked out the front door without bothering to shut it. I never shed a single tear.
It turns out “as long I live” was only a year and half. I essentially erased her from my memory when I left the house. I hadn’t said her name aloud or otherwise since. Until now.
I’m coming home, Gen. I’ve made peace with it. I forgive you, Gen. Shouldn’t be too long now.
A Final Battle
The front door dings, an announcement that someone has entered. Or something. I’m basically fucked. Unless this is my lucky day I’d say there aren’t too many ways this doesn’t go sideways. Everybody I came with is long dead. I’m almost there. Maybe it’s Shen. Maybe he felt a little bit of pity on the “acceptable challenger” that came to face him. Maybe he came back to cut my fucking head off and stick it on a pike for any other lambs that Midnite sends to the slaughter. All I can do is wait, but it’s a fairly short hallway.
Right away I know it isn’t Shen. Shen strides with confidence. Not quite a march, but close. These steps are more like something out of a Bella Lugosi movie.
Step...thud...draaag. Step...thud...draaag. Step...thud...draaag.
It’s a Freak. Shit. It has some sort of tool or weapon it’s started scraping along the wall. A knife? Screwdriver?
“Helloooo, meat,” it croaks. He—I think it’s a he—sounds kinda like that little gray monster thing in that movie. Something of the Rings? “Admiral Shen mentioned on his way out that the buffet was open at the Seventh Suuun. And I’m REEEAAALL HUUUUNGRY, BOSSSSSS!!!”