by C A Gleason
Do not discount the resiliency of human beings.
Sven, the doctor at Henrytown, had told him that. Jonah couldn’t agree more. That was when he heard something familiar. It sounded very far away but still got his heart racing.
“Doreen . . . Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
Jonah rose up. “That.”
Suddenly, outside the cabin, somewhere above in the sky, there was an explosion of sound, and it sounded like an engine. For a brief moment, he considered grabbing one of the loaded flare guns but thought better of it. He had to make sure he wasn’t mistaken, which wasn’t likely, considering his military background. Whatever it was out there, it could be a symbol of civilization, that there still was one, and as it had been, but it could also mean so much more.
“Where are you going?” she said.
He was already up and getting dressed. “No wonder I was dreaming about an airplane.”
“That’s a flight I never want to be on.”
Jonah loved the joke and chuckled. It was just what he needed to hear. He grabbed his 9mm off the dresser and was quickly outside.
Peering up at the night sky, he saw only dark clouds, and even though he was barefoot and standing in the snow, he was warm. It had gotten so much warmer. Even from the day before. What he heard while inside the cabin was gone apparently, and what he expected to see, and was hoping to, wasn’t there anymore.
He still stood there for a while listening anyway, searching the clouds, hoping he would spot an aircraft of some sort, thinking about what it could mean if he saw the blinking red lights of a plane so high up it wouldn’t be possible to see clearly during the day, as he’d done throughout his life.
When he was young, he would hear the sound of an engine only to find that the aircraft responsible was well ahead of where it sounded like it was due to its speed, leaving a long, cloudy trail of exhaust gases behind it. The memory brought him back twenty years, when he had been just a normal kid during normal times.
Just as he had then, naively, he hoped to hear even the slightest distinctive echo, as he thought he had while lying in bed. If he saw anything close to what he hoped, then it meant that moving was actually possible. They could not just move; they could also resume life as they knew it.
Instead he was slowly pelted with light raindrops. It had only been wishful thinking. He’d made a mistake but only because of his optimism. Even he was subject to mistaken identity as he had just awoken from tumultuous sleep, something that—according to Doreen—happened often. Lightning spit across the sky then, and thunder cracked, then rolled, diminishing miles away into a powerful echo, sounding very much like the aircraft he’d mistaken it for.
More rain droplets, fat ones, plopped on top of his head, and the area around the cabin, his territory, was suddenly immersed in a very powerful rainstorm. Lightning tendrils flashed and reached, disappearing instantly, briefly illuminating shadowy mountaintops in the distance, and then thunder took its place as if it were the one in charge of the sky.
Doreen leaned out the door. “It’s just a storm.”
“I know.”
“Did you think it was an airplane?”
“Yes,” he said, as rain droplets drenched his hair and streaked down his forehead and cheeks, absorbing into his beard.
“Come inside. You’re getting soaked.”
He walked onto the porch but turned back, staring out at the surrounding forest.
“What’s got you spooked?”
Jonah turned to her. “There’s something I have to do.”
“The sun will rise in a few hours. Come lie down with me.”
He wiped the wet from his beard. “All right.”
Then he followed her inside, closed the door behind him, and locked it.
CHAPTER 16
There was something in there he’d missed. Ever since he’d left, a mysterious blip kept popping up on his radar. What was confusing was he was aware of everything that was inside. He couldn’t shake it, which was why he was going back. Giving the cave another look. Maybe it was nothing, but he suspected something was in there that might answer a question or two. Or it might be a wasted effort. Either way at least he would know and then could put it behind him.
Even though the weather seemed like it was getting warmer every day, he told Doreen what she needed to do in case there was another snowfall. There likely would be. Heike had made many last snowmen during the previous winter. The temperature would undoubtedly rise and fall, but there probably would be another blizzard or two, given it had practically been winter since their arrival almost two years ago, and if there were another storm, the opening to the cave might be buried as it had been before. He needed to examine it once more before that happened.
His people would stay put, be heavily armed, and wait for his return. They knew where he was going, so his whereabouts weren’t an issue, especially after Doreen reminded him to take a radio. That wasn’t all the new equipment he was bringing along. He wasn’t going to be caught off guard again like he had been before going down the hill behind the cabin. He was heading out ready for battle, maintaining that mind-set, as he always should.
Other than the pistol in its holster under his arm, he also slung an automatic rifle and carried a shotgun. Both were equipped with silencers, and he could always attach the one to his pistol if he needed to. His black backpack was half-full of shotgun shells and loaded magazines.
Although Doreen had attempted to talk him out of spontaneous missions in the past, she didn’t do it this time. She understood there was no stopping him when something nagged at his mind because she also knew, as he did, it wouldn’t go away until he figured it out and most of the time it benefited them. When he’d first begun doing that—going on spontaneous missions—she’d thought it was because of cabin fever. She understood him better now.
Before Jonah left, he did a radio check, kissed Doreen, and told Heike to be good. She was intensely playing one of her many games. He noticed she was making the moves of other players, too, but in a way that made it seem as if she were pretending to be someone else—as if her other moves were by a playmate.
The cave was wide open. On his way out the last time, he’d done a thorough job of digging through the debris that had fallen. Turning on the flashlight he’d taped to the silencer-equipped shotgun, he painted the walls with it.
What am I missing?
Besides the stench of rotting Molters, nothing jumped out at him—thankfully literally—but he was hoping an answer would. Something as obvious as a painted message on one of the rock walls, like the message back at the military base in Oberstein, the one that had first warned them about the Molters and Behemoths. He was thankful to whoever had done that. They had been selfless.
It was only a feeling, but his gut was telling him that the Molters had evolved substantially. With the different strains, it was possible there were many more things about them that had changed also. As of right now, he was unaware of what that may be. It was why he was in there.
Upon closer inspection—he wasn’t so anxious to leave as before—the walls were still frozen, coated with thick ice, and some of it was so deep that it looked a light blue due to its depth. It was almost beautiful the way it distorted images, like art.
Out of nowhere he felt the throb of a familiar headache. His last cup of coffee had been from early in the morning the day before, when he took Heike out hunting. He would need to make some when he got back, or he could radio Doreen when he was on his way. No reason to wait on it, though.
Jonah switched on the radio. “Base, this is One.”
He waited. One was his call sign when he was out on his own, and Two was for when he and Heike were out together.
“Go ahead, One.”
“Will you put on some coffee?”
“Sure. Anything else?”
“Not right now, thanks.”
“OK. Nice to hear your voice.”
“Yours too. Love you.�
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“Love you too. Over and out.”
Lately he wondered if coffee was the cause of his nightmares, if drinking it throughout the day was the culprit. Even if it was, it was worth it. He was addicted to caffeine, but he didn’t care because he’d kicked his worst habits; he was sober, hadn’t had a drink in years except for that one time he’d screwed up, didn’t do drugs anymore, and he didn’t smoke cigarettes either. That energy needed to go somewhere so coffee was the perfect vice.
There weren’t any more Molters alive that he could see, just the corpses of the ones he’d already killed. They had fallen onto the ground. Instead of shining the light toward the rear of the cave and heading there immediately as he had the other day, he walked the entirety of it more closely, carefully examining the ground and the sleeping bags and chairs that had been moved in there for mysterious reasons.
With the cabin so close, why did people choose to be in here? he wondered. There were better places to live or even hide. It was as if whoever called this place home had expected to die. He could only guess. One reason could be—similar to when Daisy had molted, before anyone understood the Molter’s lifecycle—that they were quarantining someone who was unconscious and expected to molt. That way they could keep the others—who likely lived at the cabin—safe. The more he thought about it, the more that made sense.
Inside the boxes he’d meant to go through, he found a few board games, ones Heike already owned, so he wouldn’t bring them back with him, but it was an answer to a question; it meant there had been at least one child kept in there. He hoped it hadn’t been the child who had molted, which was a strange thought. So many children had been killed, fed upon, or had molted themselves, that it wasn’t rare, but no one liked the idea of a child suffering.
Chills suddenly ran up his spine, and it wasn’t because of the temperature. What a terrible end for anyone, especially a child, whether he or she molted or was fed upon. When humans were without proper weapons to defend themselves, one Molter could feed on as many humans as it could sink its teeth into. Their predatory instinct to feed and kill was the dominant one. With all Jonah knew, he still couldn’t make sense of why the Molters had remained hidden in the cave. It wasn’t as if others were afraid of dipping their clawed feet in the snow.
Unless . . .
Jonah hoped he was wrong about his latest hypothesis, but how often was he mistaken? Exhaling and getting mentally ready, he walked back over to the corpses. He set the shotgun and automatic rifle butts down and leaned them against the cave wall, then reached to his waist, unsnapped the clasp that held his machete securely in its sheath, and pulled it free.
Kneeling, he stabbed into the torso of the nearest corpse, the Molter that looked different than the others with its green skin and teeth sprouting all around its mouth, and sawed it open. The flesh was frozen but hardly any trouble for a sharpened machete or the strength of a determined wielder. The stench of death emanated even more with it cut open, distinct from the human it had been born from but still potent enough that Jonah wasn’t quite ready for it.
Removing his gloves and sinking his fingers inside, the temperature of his hands immediately changed the density of the flesh, from icy to the beginnings of warmth, causing it to be more pliable. Ignoring the sudden surge of nausea that stung the depth of his stomach, causing him to want to turn his head and wretch, he firmly grasped both sides of the gash and pried it open.
“Fuckin’ hell.”
There had been no reason to stay after that. Not after what he’d discovered. What he had been dreading. Along with that came the answers he was looking for. As he made his way home, he thought about what it all meant.
Except he needed to start at the beginning, when they first arrived at the cabin—similar to when he studied the growth of the Behemoth cocoon and learned they could form out of thin air—because today he learned something about the enemy that was even more frightening.
Behemoths would have dominated the territory if he weren’t so thorough about killing them as soon as they started to mature in their cocoons. He also knew that even if he didn’t follow through with his exterminations, some Behemoths would die naturally, from age, whatever happened to them after spreading to other territories, or fights with one another. Jonah had seen what happened when Behemoths confronted each other; they fought to the death. It was basic survival.
What Jonah accomplished was a contingency in case those things didn’t occur. That way a Behemoth wouldn’t have the opportunity to pry open their rooftop. When he’d first begun destroying the cocoons, he’d used rocket launchers. It was the easiest way. It wasn’t as if they were a moving target. It was also his favorite method because it satisfied the part of his male brain that was delighted by explosions and also the part that confused most women.
Except that had been before he realized how many of them actually formed and because most of the rocket launchers were the one-shot, fire-and-forget kind, and when Behemoth cocoons had kept forming, he’d selected the most effective method—rifle shot from a distance—and saved the rockets for more appropriate trouble. Still, whenever he saw a rocket launcher, he considered it a future Behemoth kill.
With multiple gunshots to the tops of the cocoons, he discovered, it would eventually fall and the impact would kill the maturing Behemoth. Back then, before he accomplished it all from the ridges and with his high-powered bolt-action rifle, he would find and douse the cocoons with fuel and burn them up on the ground just to be sure. The Behemoth within would never be born, and the slimy Infectors died easily at that stage in their development. Their bodies were still forming and very delicate. Fire practically melted them, similar to pouring hot, steaming water over ice cubes.
Close-quarters extermination took up too much of his day, though. Had he continued to destroy them by that method, he would have had to have been out all day and night, every day and night. Eventually he’d settled on killing them from a distance. He had plenty of bullets for his many rifles. One shot, one kill, and if he happened to miss—which he rarely did—then that second shot would do the job if the cocoon was still growing later.
On rare occasions he needed to squeeze the trigger a third time, but he was a damn good shot. Not the greatest. He’d met a few fellow soldiers who qualified for that description when he’d served, and he wasn’t as good as them but good enough to deserve an M-K or B-K tattoo. Maybe he’d get both tattoos one day.
Jonah’s interference in the enemy population was inconsequential in relation to elsewhere. He was sure of it. The only place he affected was the territory surrounding the cabin. Except deep down he also knew that what he was capable of was rare because there were only so many people alive and only so many men and women like him: well trained, painstakingly meticulous, and armed to the teeth.
That meant there was a high probability that Molters dominated the planet. A hard truth but their lifecycle ensured it. They were born by killing humans, so it was better just to accept it. That way he could be ready for anything thrown at them. And one of the facts was there was still much about them that he didn’t know. In all likelihood he would never learn it all, even though he needed to. Remembering that would keep them safer.
The green one in the cave had been different than the others and wasn’t of the same strain he’d faced years ago at Oberstein, a few years later in Henrytown, or even days ago down the slope from the cabin. It was unusual. Even when he’d first seen it hanging there, he’d known there was something different about it. Perhaps it was its shape or size or perhaps it possessed a trait so imperceptible that it was practically invisible and only his subconscious had recognized it as unlike the others. He couldn’t be sure, but it’d just seemed enhanced. Streamlined. Better.
The obvious differences were its teeth placement—all around its mouth, like a sea anemone with teeth—and its skin color. That was probably why Jonah had decided to cut into it first. Just as no human was exactly the same—even identical twins were distinct in many
ways—and there were different races, when it came to the animal kingdom, there were similarities in the behaviors of beasts but differences in appearances. Molters grew as they fed, and their eyes were sometimes different sizes, but they all seemed to be the same on the inside.
Unless it was a Behemoth bomb, which Jonah had never encountered—Sven had claimed he had—or an Infector bomb.
After cutting open the second two, Jonah panicked because he’d discovered the same thing; there were Infectors inside all of them. All three were Infector bombs, even though they were different in appearance. Jonah had made sure there was nothing else to be discovered—except unrecognizable organs—by cutting even deeper and had pulled the small creatures from cold, gooey sacs of fluid to see that they were frozen and dead. They were slightly underdeveloped and not moving, but he still used his boot heels to make sure.
During the battle of Henrytown, Jonah had killed over thirty Infectors, all trying to get to Heike, which likely meant other Infector bombs had exploded out of sight, sending many Infectors scurrying ahead like the first wave of an attack. Infector bombs had hardly existed before Henrytown as far as Jonah knew, but as he’d learned from those events, Molters could adapt, change, and also, apparently, evolve.
Maybe the ones in the cave had gotten trapped and had had no choice but to hibernate to survive. No, Jonah thought. If anything, they were waiting in a safe hiding place until the Infectors matured enough to be born. It wouldn’t have been a coincidence. Then the Molters would have clawed themselves out to search for humans and, when they did, violently split open to spew forth all the spindly creatures living inside them. That likely would have happened at the cabin.
Jonah was thankful he’d discovered the cave, eliminated the threats, and learned what had been nagging his subconscious. He’d been correct to think there was a secret in there. Those Molters hadn’t been newborns. They’d been alive for a while, which meant they should have cocooned themselves to become a meal for a Behemoth, but they hadn’t. They’d been born as Infector bombs. It meant Infector bombs were independent from Behemoths.