Moriah

by Monchinski, Tony

  It was amazing he had survived the battle. Amazing any of them had.

  Tris, Carrie and Victor. Even the Bishop. Gone, all of them. Just like that. But now there was Riley. You’re not going to ask me to marry you. That’s what she’d said to him back in the tent, this woman at his back. That’d been a good one.

  She was special, Riley was. Dee recognized this. Special in general, in her own right, and—Dee could admit it to himself—special to himself. More so with every passing hour. The way she’d handled herself out on the battlefield. She’d gone for the redhead and was not pleased when Tris wouldn’t let her have her. The way she’d helped Dee out of there before the bomb went off. Riley was tough enough to survive out here, when all her friends had fallen. Tough enough to avenge her brother. She’d even stood up to Tris and never backed down. Like she’d stood up to him when they’d first met. He thought about that stance she’d assumed, how he could tell in her mind she was going to mess him up if she had to.

  When those people had chased her—the little redhead and her friends, the ones who’d taken Victor—Riley had stood her ground. When forced, she’d retreated, but she’d done so to fight again. She’d escaped with every intention of bringing the fight back to the ones who had it coming to them. Dee smiled under his goggles, thinking about the first time he’d seen her: Riley pulling herself out of the river and across the field, in the shirt and jacket of a man she’d killed, looking like she’d been to hell and back. Because she had.

  Dee had gone out alone, as he did each year. He’d gone out hoping to find his father, but also hoping he would not. The thing he was most afraid of, each year when he set out, was finding his father’s remains, bones stacked like some ancient cairn. Worse to find his father alive, emaciated and rawboned, wasted and alone. Instead, he’d found Riley. Or she’d found him. Or, Dee granted, some combination of the two.

  If he had to die one day, and Dee knew they were all going to die one day, he wanted to die with someone like Riley at his side. Someone like Riley. Friends like Bruce and Kevin. If that was how he checked out, Dee thought, he’d probably be able to go peacefully enough, not fighting it. He liked to think he’d be satisfied.

  The front wheels of the quad dipped in a rut and Riley tightened her grip around his waist. Dee gripped the handlebars tightly until they came up out of it and thumbed the accelerator, roaring along on their way, his leg and foot screaming at him. Kevin and Bruce followed on their respective four-wheelers.

  * * *

  They’d arrived to find a sacrilege.

  “What do you think she’s thinking?” Kevin tossed a branch down into the fire they had going in the pit.

  Riley sat on the ground, her arms crossed on knees drawn up to her chin. She stared straight ahead, her eyes occasionally blinking, deep in thought. She was aware of the three men busying themselves around her, Kevin and Dee collecting the remains that were collectable, Bruce scanning the earth for clues.

  “She’s sad,” pronounced Dee. “Sad and mad.”

  Reaching the place where Riley’s brother had died, they’d found nothing recognizable as her sibling. Dismembered human parts were strewn around the area, most in chunks and pieces so miniscule to be unidentifiable. The sheer amount of dismantled human material and the grounds they covered spoke to more than one body.

  Riley had told them about Thomas in the pit, but all that was in the pit were two zombies, each headshot. Even more puzzling was the intact male body that lay off to the side, naked from the waist up. Its face and head were crushed, and its torso was split where natural gases had built up and burst, but aside from this it appeared unmolested.

  “This is the one she killed,” Dee remarked of Dalton’s body, recalling Riley’s story. He looked down on the body, oddly fascinated. She’d done that to the man’s face. Yeah, Riley was tough enough all right.

  She was aware of their conversing about her, but Riley did not comprehend their words. She remembered mornings at the kitchen nook with her brother, each of them getting ready for work, he to school, she to the dojang, both sipping their juice. She recalled camping trips when they were kids, their dad taking them to parts of New Harmony that felt as foreign and desolate as she’d then imagined the Outlands. Now she knew better.

  “Someone came back.” Bruce was down on one knee above an imprint in the earth. “Someone came back and did this.”

  Dee looked up from gathering remains. Bruce was speaking of the mutilation of Riley’s brother and what must have been Thomas’ body. Whoever had torn these bodies apart had thrown the pieces far and wide, into the trees and bushes, out of sight.

  “I’m no Tris...” A look of consternation gripped Bruce’s face. “…but these tracks look fresh.”

  “How fresh?”

  Bruce shook his head. He had an idea that he wasn’t sharing, and it was apparently an idea he didn’t like. “I don’t know.” When he answered, he spoke too loudly because of his hearing. “Someone got here before we did.”

  When she’d lost the second baby—the second for goodness’ sake, a part of Riley’s mind beseeched her and she immediately felt guilty for it. Other women Riley knew had lost so many more than two. When she’d lost the second one, she’d gone to the wall, staring into the Outlands, pondering not so much on what the barren wastelands held as on the contents of her own body. Why did that seem so long in the past?

  Riley couldn’t kid herself; she’d known coming out here wasn’t a good idea. She couldn’t revise the past, even if it was less than two weeks gone. She’d come along because she didn’t want Anthony to go alone, yes, but also because she’d felt she needed to get away.

  “It doesn’t make sense.” Kevin was genuinely perplexed.

  “Who’d have done this to either of them?” Dee picked up what might have been part of a lower leg. “And not to him?” Dalton’s body lay where it had for days.

  “Something doesn’t sit right with me about this.” Bruce thought he was mumbling when in fact he was loud and clear.

  “Imagine how she feels.” Kevin threw something that was recognizable as part of a hand into the flames.

  Camping. They’d been planning on going camping like when they’d been kids. Before Mickey and Gary wandered into their lives. What if the autistic man and the plague victim hadn’t walked right up to Evan? Evan of all people. What if they hadn’t had the picture on them or if Anthony hadn’t looked exactly like his father, exactly like the man Mickey had known? What if Gary hadn’t been there to communicate, to translate, for his rotting friend? So many what if’s.

  “Talk to us, Bruce.”

  “Okay, follow me on this.” Bruce laid it out as he saw it. “I’m a munt, what’s my motivation?”

  “Your motivation?” asked Kevin. “You’re pissed.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re pissed,” Kevin nearly shouted.

  “I’m more than pissed. Remember what Riley told us. When those people ‘rescued’ her and her friends from them, they were effectively declaring war on the munts. So if I’m a munt, and I come across this scene, I drag the old man’s body out of the pit—sure it’s chewed up good from Zed, but there’s still something left for me to take my anger out on, and I do.”

  “The old man’s body, okay.” Dee could see it. “But what about her brother’s?”

  “Yeah, I know. So our munt leaves, but it’s going to come back later to do the same thing.”

  Growing up in New Harmony, you knew you had to be wary of those from the Outlands. Krieger, for one, Riley thought. He’d been damaged worse than any of them could imagine. She didn’t think the old tracker had purposefully sent them astray. In fact, Riley was fairly certain they’d misunderstood his directions, blindly wandering into the territory of that savage family. The mutants. Has anybody seen my sister Mergatroid? one of them had asked when they’d lined up on the river bank, looking to deliver the coup de grace to Riley, Dee and Kevin. Mergatroid had been the name of the female.

  Whi
ch reminded Riley of something Gary had said in passing in the hospital. Gotta watch out for Mergatroid. Gary said it when she and Anthony were standing over Mickey’s bed. You don’t want to meet Mergatroid. She’d thought it was just Gary rambling, trading old movie or television lines back and forth with his rotting friend. But no, now she understood that Gary and Mickey must have had some kind of contact with the mutants in their journeys. For some reason, the munts hadn’t harmed the two, or, if they had, the evidence of such hadn’t been obvious.

  “Why would it come back?” Kevin had one hand resting on top of his AK’s barrel. “Why would it do this to Riley’s brother?”

  “Can you say that again?” Bruce touched his ear. Kevin repeated his questions, louder.

  “Maybe it saw what we did to its brothers and sister.” Bruce thought about the way the mutant’s bodies had flown apart when he’d laid into them with the Hawk MM-1. “To its father.”

  “That still doesn’t tell us why it would come back here.”

  “Yes it does if you’re listening to me, Dee. I think it was listening to us. I think it was close enough to hear us.”

  “What?” Kevin started in disbelief. “We would have—”

  “No, we wouldn’t have.”

  “He’s right.” Dee didn’t want to sound spooked, though he eyed the woods about them warily. “Remember the dosimeter.”

  Not for the first time in several days, Riley wished Mickey and Gary had never come to New Harmony, that Evan had not been on the wall when they did. She wished that Anthony hadn’t gotten it into his head to come out here and look for whatever he thought he was going to find. That her father had forbidden them to go, that he had physically disallowed their exit. That she hadn’t been so foolish as to accompany and encourage Anthony. She’d lost his beanie in the river and that, for some inexplicable reason, bothered her more than a lot of the other stuff. The fact of its loss irritated her and her irritation brought her back to their present reality.

  “Bruce, if you’re right…” Kevin checked the dosimeter as they spoke. If Bruce was right, the mutant might still be around. The radiation detector read normal now. “It’s not.”

  “It could be watching us,” Bruce ventured.

  Dee agreed. “It could be.”

  “We are being watched.” Riley had spoken. “It’s watching us.” They turned to her and she was standing, brushing the dirt and twigs from her legs and backside. “I can feel it. I felt this way when we destroyed their house. Their barn.”

  Kevin took his hand from the top of his AK’s barrel and wrapped it around the foregrip.

  “If it was going to attack us,” she continued, “it would have already.”

  “How do we know there’s only the one?”

  “More than one, it would have attacked us,” wagered Dee. “You saw the ones on the battlefield.”

  “Yeah, I did.” Kevin didn’t look reassured. “Did that one really have a foot growing out of the side of its head?”

  “What?”

  “It did,” Riley declared.

  “Nothing,” Kevin told Bruce.

  “I can’t imagine it can keep up with us on the quads,” said Dee.

  “I’m telling you, I think it got here before we did.” Bruce scanned the surrounding countryside through the scope mounted on the M40A3 he’d appropriated. “It’s got to have some kind of transportation.”

  “Wouldn’t we have heard it?”

  Kevin answered. “We didn’t know to listen, Dee.”

  “Yeah, well,” Riley stared into the trees about them, “now we do.”

  “Isn’t it possible…” Bruce had the side of his face pressed to the saddle-type cheek piece. “…that there’s another explanation for this?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Something we’re not thinking of?” Bruce said it but he didn’t sound like he bought it.

  “Something.”

  “I’m spooked.” Bruce lowered the sniper rifle. “I’m shot.” He tapped his chest beneath the bandages taped to his shoulder, under his shirt and vest. “My imagination could be running away with me.”

  “Could be.”

  “I’m a little deaf, too. What’d you say?”

  “She said it could be,” Kevin repeated.

  “Oh.” Bruce nodded, understanding. “Could be, right?”

  “But it’s not,” stated Riley.

  “Well, that isn’t good.”

  Dee looked at the woman. “We stick together. We stay alert. We’re okay.”

  “We’re a week away from New Harmony, at least.”

  “I was that thing,” Dee speculated. “This isn’t over…”

  “This—” Kevin referred to the remains afire in the pit, to the blood stained earth around them “—was just the warm-up.”

  “It is,” Riley confirmed.

  “…I’d be watching us now,” Dee finished his thought.

  “It is.”

  “Riley’s right.” Bruce made a conscious effort to lower his voice. “But if it was going to attack us, it would have already.”

  “That’s what Riley said before.”

  “What, Kev?”

  “It’ll wait for night,” Dee speculated. “Wait until we’re not on our guard.”

  “We’re forgetting one thing,” Riley reminded them.

  “Which is?”

  “It doesn’t know we know about it.”

  “It could be hearing our every word…”

  “It’s not.” Kevin referred to the dosimeter. “Unless it’s got hearing none of us can imagine. I think it’s watching us, but it can’t hear what we’re saying. Even you,” he remarked to Bruce. “It doesn’t know we know.”

  “So we have some kind of advantage?”

  “Maybe, Dee.”

  “What do we do now?” Kevin looked down at the fire in the pit.

  “The coast is three, maybe four days on the quads,” Dee offered.

  “We have enough gas for that?” Riley didn’t know much about the four-wheelers and had no idea how far the fuel in the red metal cans strapped to the chassis would take them.

  “They’d have left resupply points.” Dee spoke of army. “Best idea,” he looked at Riley, urging, “we stick together.”

  “Let’s get to the coast,” she consented, “ and put this thing—whatever it is—behind us. Then I can get back to New Harmony. Get—”

  “To Africa.” Dee’s tone lacked luster.

  “Out of here,” Riley amended.

  * * *

  Dee let Riley drive their quad. She was hesitant on the handlebars, learning her way, but they were in no particular rush. They rolled through foothills long reclaimed by nature, low, rolling hills gone to russet with autumn. The hillocks they crested and dipped were all that was left of ancient mountain chains, worn and weathered. Sticking to the open grasses, they skirted pine and hickory forests, the soil beneath their four-wheeler a brown sandy loam.

  “What’s that?” Riley called back to Dee, her head nodding towards a field overgrown with wild, dark-leaved flowers.

  “Tobacco.”

  They went by a train stalled on tracks covered over with grasses, a skein of long abandoned railcars, now no more than empty rectangles, civilization quitclaim. They passed what had been a pig farm, the piggery long untouched by trotters. Fresh, green growth sprouted from its former waste lagoon. The plateau region let out onto flat, low-lying lands, a vast coastal plain. Beneath their feet, igneous rocks yielded to sedimentary.

  Kevin wore the dosimeter but Dee rarely called a halt to consult the device, this terrain familiar to the three men. A relatively narrow strait of land was open to them, free of the worst excesses of radiation.

  About them, the signs of a congregation’s pilgrimage, the land and grasses trod under by many feet. Bear’s Army had passed this way. As now did these wayfarers, hosting injuries bodily and emotional, limbs bound and forced inflexible with jerry-rigged splints, their spirits contuse.

  Th
ey stopped for the evening at what remained of a cache left for them by their comrades. Freeze-dried provisions, ammunition, and medicines were scattered and pilfered, torn open and pawed through by hands human or humanoid, impossible to tell.

  “Who would have done this?” Riley asked. They spread out, cautiously watchful, gathering what was salvageable.

  “We always had stragglers.” Bruce thumbed through some medications. His hearing was returning and he spoke in a more normal tone. “Groups of people would follow us.” He meant the army. “Never wanted to do the fighting, but they were always there for the clean up.”

  “Human hyenas,” Dee added disdainfully, settling himself to the ground.

  “Why’d they leave any ammo?”

  “Lot of it is useless to them.” Kevin held up a round. “Us too.” He tossed it aside, puffing his cheeks and exhaling.

  “They took most of the food,” Bruce mentioned, to which Kevin interjected “All of the gas” before Bruce finished, “But we’ve still got some. And they left these.” He held up freeze-dried packages that had not been tampered with.

  “Do you think they’ll be back?” Riley scanned the horizon about them.

  “No,” Dee pronounced with finality.

  “We should have a fire,” said Kevin. “Got to get some wood. Something that will burn.”

  “I’ll go,” Riley volunteered. They looked at her. “I’m the most able-bodied. Look at you.” The three men looked each other over, an assortment of lacerations and bullet punctures, their bodies testament to her words.

  “Don’t go far,” Bruce cautioned.

  The CTME destroyed in the bomb blast, Riley held up an AR-15 she had taken. “You hear this,” she looked at Dee, “you come hopping.” She wandered off from them, clearly visible to their eyes as she went about her foraging, this cool day ebbing unto a chill evening. The three men sat together and considered the packages they had reclaimed.