by Angela White
The pole shifted suddenly and tilted, and then he could breathe again as the first tall wave rolled by.
Coughing, spitting, and sliding in the gelatinous slop, Marc cut himself free, and moved to safety as quickly as he could. Yet another lesson learned in this harsh new homeland–bridges are not safe.
Marc made it to higher ground, shivering in the cold wind as Dog danced in the mud around his ankles. Lungs aching, Marc stumbled away from the crumbling bank. Quickly jerking on his long coat from his kit, he watched the fast-moving water. With the barrier gone, it would now flow downstream and rise up to spill over weakened banks before seeping into the next town, the way it had been in nearly every other place he’d come through. Nature was quickly reclaiming her property.
Marc took a long glance around as he got his breath back, deciding where he would make camp and wait out the water. The Blue Ridge Mountains were east, rolling peaks of foggy blue under a wide purple and yellow sunset that was marred by angry gray layers that never faded. South was dipping valleys, hills full of tobacco fields, and Virginia white pines. That was where he had come from and those empty, snowbound towns had given him nothing to take hope from.
West was another community whose name he couldn’t recall, and the newly released water was already overwhelming it. He saw no one fleeing the filling houses and businesses, though, and grunted unhappily. The Sitrep was bleak. A situation report from the North, then.
Maybe a full click above him, a small white building with a large silver cross beckoned in the dim distance, pristinely perched on top of a large, muddy hill. The building was backdropped by cherry and wild crabapple trees, and again, only the gritty sky spoiled the perfect picture of safety in the wilderness.
Shrugging at the irony–Marc hadn’t been in a church since being robbed of his dreams–he strode that way searching for anything that might be trouble. Seeming empty didn’t make it so.
Dog, who came almost to his hip, stayed close, occasionally growling his dislike at the now softer rumble of the river.
Head starting to hurt, Marc foraged in his kit for a pain pill, and swept the small town around him. The outskirts of Franklin (identified by the sign on a nearby street corner) looked mostly untainted. Surrounded by neat white homes and white picket fences, his gaze flicked from untouched manger scenes to the Christmas lights that still decorated most of the area. Not much damage. Were there people here?
Marc listened intently but heard only wind. The silence pressed in as if something was wrong, but other than the river trying to kill him, it was the same here as in every small town he had passed through since the war–empty, over.
He scouted the next intersection, attention caught by a charred metro bus still full of rotting corpses, and he was thrown back in time to his escape, to his first brush with the walking dead…and to what he’d encountered when he rolled out from under the bus.
“Help!”
“Oh my God!”
“Aahhh!”
Marc stared in horror at the people stumbling past the bus as he stood up. Soldiers and civilians alike, faces bloody, stumbling blindly…some shooting at random.
“Help!”
“No!”
The screams were deafening and there were other noises too, ones that made him want to sick his guts up, but the gunfire was the clearest to his trained mind.
Marc eased away from the walking corpses who were now firing out of reflex, mowing down others like themselves.
Eyes wide and feet unsteady, Marc scanned for even one other survivor, but found only more breathing dead.
He turned suddenly, sensing movement.
“Uuhh!” Marc threw himself away from the outstretched fingers of a uniformed man tightly gripping a pistol.
He tripped over a bloody pile and landed hard on his ass.
“Please, what happened?”
The soldier’s deadened orbs dripped blood. It ran over his lashes and cheeks in small torrents, and Marc hesitated, almost overcome with his first ever case of panic. This wasn’t a foreign land–it was America!
“I can hear you breathing, you know,” the Army man stated almost casually.
Marc watched the scarlet drops roll from his dead sockets, creeping down his cheeks to hit the dirt before disappearing–all of it seeming to be happening in slow motion. “W-war…a bomb.”
“But where? North or south?”
Marc considered, aware that a muscle in the blind man’s jaw had begun to twitch erratically while he waited for the answer.
“South.”
“I thought so,” the soldier’s voice was without emotion. “Thank you.”
Calmly, without any indication he was going to, the wounded man raised the gun to his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Blood sprayed wildly, raining across Marc’s face, and he took off running, trying not to scream and not sure if he was succeeding.
Crunchhh!
The sound of the water further destroying the debris it had collected pulled Marc from the flashback, and he wished the images would go away. He had begun moving carefully on foot after that, trekking determinedly to the family home, only to discover no one there despite the funeral being set for that very day. The house had no signs of a hasty retreat, no letters of explanation, and there were no fresh graves at the family plot. What had happened?
Marc swept the city limits of Franklin, drawn to the hills. He lingered on the cemetery, its iron gates surrounded by decaying bodies, few of them wrapped. No one had known what to do with their dead. Neither had Marc. He almost hadn’t come home at all…
“I’m sorry, Marine.” The base commander clapped him on the shoulder sympathetically.
Marc stuffed the legal letter into the garbage can they were standing next to as other men moved by. Drill calls and mess bells echoed throughout the brick halls of the base.
“Thank you, sir.”
His superior regarded him for a long moment, clearly unsure of his man’s mood. “I’ve scheduled your leave for the funeral. Starts ASAP.”
Marc wasn’t sure if he would go, wasn’t sure why he suddenly felt like a little kid afraid of the dark. It was just his mother.
“Thank you, sir,” he repeated automatically.
“She the visitor you refused last month?”
“Yes, sir.”
Marc didn’t offer any details, even though he knew the Base Commander didn’t take a personal interest in just anyone. He had refused Mary’s visit every time she came, hadn’t spoken to her, even by mail, in over a decade, and now that she was dead, he still hated her. Because of what she’d cost him. The last time they’d seen each other was right before his first hitch was up. Thanks to the threat of charges being filed, he hadn’t been allowed to leave the base before then, and that final conversation had been short and cold.
“So, you can come home now,” Mary said as she viewed him.
Marc was silent as he sat stiffly across from her.
“The harlot ran to the heathen city right after you…came here, so she won’t be a temptation, but you’ll have to–”
“No.”
Her age-lined face flew to his and then to the hands on the table that were clenching in anger.
“No, what?”
Marc leaned closer, loathing her. She hadn’t changed. Her glasses were still crooked, her face just as indifferent. He read no regret or even understanding in her cold blue depths, no caring for the life that she had taken, denied him. “I’m not coming home. Ever.”
Her expression stunned, Mary’s hand fell to the worn Bible in her lap, and Marc stood up. “You put me here, took away what I loved, and now that I’m twenty-one, I don’t need you or have to listen to you. Forget my name. You’re dead to me.”
Crack!
Marc spun, .45 in hand, and the wolf bristled alertly at his side.
The reeking water was destroying more debris that was flowing downstream and Marc shook his head at his jumpiness. He got moving again toward the white c
hurch that was a mile away. He had taken the leave to attend his mother’s funeral and instead found himself alone in the place that had never been his home. The only living thing he’d encountered was Dog curled up on the front porch, the blood in his fur still tacky.
As if he knew I was coming. Marc thought of the window the wolf had broken through. The torn-up basement was the only damage he’d found in the whole house. Not even the door had been kicked in, so he didn’t think his family had been taken in the Draft. The fact that they had put Dog in the basement suggested something darker, but he pushed the renegade thoughts away, not feeling the urge to search for any of them. They hadn’t been true family in a long time. If they had found safety and hadn’t wanted him there, so be it. They were the last group of people he would want to survive with anyway.
Guilt and awful loneliness reared its head, reminding him it hadn’t yet gone away, and Marc forced himself to lock down on those thoughts as he taught others to do. For them, it was to keep from being distracted and blowing their mission. He did it now to keep from drowning under a tide of guilt.
Fresh waves of emotion threatened, and Marc forced his mind away again, hating that tiny, ashamed part of him that was glad she had died unhappy. He had spent more than a decade living that way, and it was only fair his mother should feel some of it, since she was the one responsible.
Marc had wandered a little after discovering nothing at home, but it hadn’t taken long for him to become restless and start hunting for people, for his own kind. He had once been sworn to his country, and while he still wore his tag beneath his fatigue shirt and long black leather trench coat, the America he had served was busy dying. It was crushing that there was nothing he could do to stop it. Marc had no real desire to return to his base in New Mexico, either, and now that the future was so grim, he was sure he wouldn’t. The whole world was FUBAR. Everything and everyone he had ever known was gone.
Are you sure?
The cold wind pushed against him, mocked him as they proceeded up the last quarter mile of steep hillside at a quick pace. He looked down at the big wolf. “Hell of a start to the day, Dog.”
The animal peered up at the sound of Marc’s voice, and then resumed smelling the bare, damp ground. The wolf didn’t follow any of the scents he picked up, though, and kept heeling as if he were a well-trained pet, though one could tell at first glance that he wasn’t.
Where to go next was the most pressing choice now. Marc wasn’t worried about losing his supplies and transportation, though he would miss the thick sleeper tonight. The rest of his preferred loadout was in the kit slung over his shoulder. Physically, he could do fine alone. He always had. Mentally, things were more complicated. He didn’t like people, didn’t need them most of the time, but he did need a goal. The urge to serve his country was still there, and he couldn’t do it by himself. He had a good idea where many of the survivors had gone; the heartbreaking notes and letters on cars, on doors, and blowing with the wind were everywhere–and they pulled at him. After the first dozen, Marc had forced himself not to read anymore, knowing if he did, he would spend the rest of his life trying to reunite these broken families.
Most survivors had gone to ground. Caves and sewers were the most mentioned, but flooding and collapses made that feel like a bad choice. Even if the flooding missed them and the cold didn’t freeze or starve them, the poisons now circling the globe were as big a threat below, as above the surface. How long would a contaminated planet allow them to survive no matter where they were?
Marc had slowly traveled northwest, checking places like White Sulphur Springs and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, hoping to discover recent signs of normal (what a joke!) life, but he no longer expected to find large groups of people trying to rebuild together. It was more than the awful devastation that made him think so–it was what was missing that worried him the most.
The world felt and sounded empty. There were no noises other than the wind and the water, not a single human voice or life continuing in the same tradition, and there was no signs of the bastards who let it all happen, either. The government was still not in attendance, and the people Marc had served for all those years would never sit idly by and let the survivors have control of the topside, poisoned or not.
There should have been emergency broadcasts; signs; flyers; and people taking pictures, measuring, and monitoring, all dressed in little white space suits, and yet there was nothing. There should have been soldiers in jeeps, all with itchy trigger fingers and bullhorns, giving orders and not really helping…but there was only silence.
There should have been aid stations set up, Red Cross units overloaded with patients to be examined, tested, recorded, and left to die. The healthier ones would be kept close enough to force them to beg for handouts, so the scientists could keep studying the effects, and Marc was suddenly sure he couldn’t ever do that, would die first. Not that it mattered now. The government that had killed so many had likely died with them.
“Where to?” He ran a hand over soaked black hair. Where would normal people gather? In stadiums or maybe even malls…
Marc tensed suddenly, some part of him registering the change, a note to the wind that hadn’t been there before. Almost as if someone was calling for him, hunting.
“Marcus…”
He swung around, drawing drenched leather as he searched in surprise for whoever he’d let sneak up on him. He frowned when he saw nothing but dogwood flowers and the decaying bodies of two songbirds lying in the yellowish grass. He could have sworn… His heart thumped as his mind matched the face to the voice, coming up with the one he had banished to his dreams so long ago.
“You’ll love me forever?” the girl asked as she let go of the blanket, terrified to trust.
The boy grinned as he pushed gently between her long legs. “Just that long. Not a second more.”
The girl smiled happily, leaning up to meet his thrust. As he kissed her, teenage body on fire, the boy knew instinctively nothing in his adult life would ever be this good. She was perfect…his. He would never let her go!
Marc’s heart clenched with old longing, and the wolf whined uneasily at his master’s pain. It was a wound that time hadn’t healed.
2
Finally reaching the small building on the hill, Marc fell into Marine mode as he squared away the small church (empty, thankfully) and tiny shed that was attached. Once satisfied he was alone, he put down alarms. A Marine always carried an emergency kit, and Marc was aware that his training would make this new world easier for him than for most. He’d been playing wars for years.
Marc exchanged fresh fatigues for his soaked, torn clothes and tied his holsters snugly over his thighs. While he changed, Marc listened, but heard nothing except the river that was already several feet deep around distant maple trees and column-supported buildings. He hadn’t thought to miss the sound of another human voice, and it was a surprise to the loner inside.
Changed and warming up, he scanned the water still rushing downstream, evaluating. His breathing was normal, heart in his chest where it belonged, and other than a couple of bruises and scratches, he was unharmed–hadn’t even swallowed any of the nasty liquid. He also still had his hat–the string around his neck had kept it from being washed away, and Marc tried hard not to dwell on what could have been. Had he reacted a little slower on the bridge, he would be dead. It was a hard, new world, one where some days were harder than the others were.
He had come one hundred thirty miles in the seven weeks since finding the family home deserted, and the bodies were what bothered him more than even the constant reek of smoke and rot. They were in every place he’d been: stores, stations, cars, and homes. Men, women, kids, elderly–all shocking to glimpse in even one American city, let alone all of them. Marc fought the urge to give them the burials they deserved, knowing that, as with the letters and notes, if he buried even one, he would spend the rest of his life on it.
The realist inside knew that
gradually, terribly, Mother Nature would run her course. The cadavers would all disappear into the ground, into dens and burrows, and then into hungry stomachs. But it would always be obvious that a harsh and violent struggle for survival had swept this country from coast to coast. So much death and destruction, even in places that had no actual bomb damage!
Fires were the most common cause of this devastation: town after town reduced to darkened, shadowy frames, the victims of arson. This new world is a bed pisser’s wet dream and a King horror novel, all mixed, Marc thought.
He hated the helpless feeling it gave him to roll through these places. They reminded him of his nightmares of the walking dead from the bus, and the soldier who’d killed himself. In his dreams, the dead followed him relentlessly with their not so funny, stumbling walk–pushing until the cold ocean waves lapped at his feet, the water the only place left to go.
Marc sighed and lit a Winston with hands that stank of fish rot. Where was he supposed to go? Even the radiation was already showing up. The mice in West Virginia were twice their normal size, and–
Marcus…
He didn’t draw his drenched gun this time. There was no one around here. Marc waved a finger at the softly growling wolf to quiet him.
“Is someone there?” he called anyway, feeling foolish. There was a hint of vanilla, sweet and never forgotten, floating by on the wind. “Angie?”
There was only silence, and Marc grinned sadly. He’d been alone too long. He was the last person she would call. There was no…
Marcus! I need you!
The words seemed to go right by his ear this time, searching, making his breath catch.
“Must be going nuts,” he muttered, heart screaming in joyful recognition.
You owe me!
Marc winced at the accusation, the reminder, and stopped denying, understanding that the time he had feared (and longed for!) was here. Angie was finally calling in his marker, and that debt could never be repaid.