Rachel was squeezing Bootsy so tight that her fingers were on the brink of stabbing through the bear’s fur. Her knuckles were chalk white.
“She didn’t say anything,” Rachel said, looking at the ground. “I felt cold. Really cold. Sleepy too. I fell asleep for like a second and when I opened my eyes, she was there sitting beside me. And she was staring at me again – I don’t like the way she stares at me Dad.”
Cody checked both sides of the highway and was satisfied that no other traffic was coming their way. He should have flipped his hazards on when they stopped but that was the last thing he’d been thinking about. It didn’t matter – they weren’t staying long.
He kneeled beside Rachel.
“I don’t like the way she stares at me either,” he said. “But she’s gone now. It’s just you and me little lady. And we’ve got a plane to catch.” He looked up at the black sky and felt darkness wrap itself around them. “It all looks the same now doesn’t it?” he said, pointing a finger at the sky. “You’d never believe it was morning right now, huh?”
“I miss the sunshine,” Rachel said, not looking up. “The feel of the sun.”
“That’s your Californian blood talking,” Cody said with a smile. “We’d better go kid. Now if you see anything else in the car or if it starts to get cold like that again, you tell me. Got it?”
She nodded. In the gloomy haze cast by the Dodge’s taillights, Cody saw Kate in her eyes and felt like he couldn’t love his daughter any more. Of all the people in Cody’s rollercoaster life that had come and gone – and there had been a lot of people – Rachel was the one good thing that had lasted.
The Black Widow wasn’t going to take her away from him.
Rachel smiled. “We could pretend all this is just a movie,” she said. “That it’s make-believe.”
Cody raised an eyebrow. “You think that’d help?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, that’s the spirit,” Cody said. “Clan MacLeod. The immortals.”
“And we’re the good guys?”
“Of course,” Cody said. “What else? And the good guys always make it. Hey, you know what else kid?”
She shrugged. “What?”
Cody leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “All movies end,” he said, standing up and checking the highway for traffic again.
Rachel looked up. Her blue eyes roamed the sky, as if searching for the lost stars. “Where will this movie end?” she asked. “Up there?”
Cody shook his head. “No,” he said. “When we find a new home.”
“You really think there’s somewhere?” she said.
“There’s always somewhere.”
Cody pointed to a small dot of yellowish-white light in the black sky. It was nothing and yet it was everything. It was a freckle of hope. It was a chink in the armor of the Black Storm and a hint that the sun, stars and the moon were still up there. The old things hadn’t been eradicated. The Black Storm had locked them out.
Rachel looked up at the faint speck of light, her eyes wide with hope.
They stood there for a few seconds, both of them hypnotized and looking towards the sky.
“Thirsty?” he said, scratching at the stubble on his face.
Rachel nodded. “Yep.”
Cody went over to the car and opened up the trunk. There were eight multipacks of bottled water in the back, sitting next to a huddle of reusable shopping bags full of food. Canned food mostly, along with the water and several large bottles of multivitamins.
Bullets were another priority taking up space in the trunk. Cody had stocked up at the local arms supplier when things had gotten worse and he wasn’t the only one. What a day that was. It was like Black Friday for gun fanatics. People were grabbing guns and bullets off the shelves like they were reaching for life preservers on a sinking ship. The events of that day only fell short of anarchy because almost everyone appeared to be paying for their goods before leaving the store. Cody had grabbed as many boxes of 9mm ammo as he could carry and he’d gotten the hell out of there before stocks ran out.
He pulled out a small bottle of water, unscrewed the cap and handed it to Rachel. She took a long drink, wiped her mouth dry and handed it back to him. Cody finished the bottle and felt a little better. He tossed the trash back into the trunk and looked at the food bags stacked up in the corner. His stomach grumbled, despite all the excitement. It had been at least ten hours since he’d last eaten anything. There was a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter sticking out the top of the nearest bag. He could always rustle them up a quick roadside breakfast. The bread wouldn’t last long – it had been in the freezer until the electricity went off. Maybe this was a good time to use it up. Cody didn’t know how long it would be until their next meal.
“Hungry?” he said, turning to Rachel. “Want to me fix you something quick?”
She shook her head. “No.”
He nodded and looked down both sides of the highway. Best to keep moving. It wasn’t safe stopping on the side of the road, not for too long. When he was on the plane he would sit back and eat as much as he wanted – a mountain of bread and peanut butter and whatever else he could get his hands on. Shit, it was something to look forward to. That and sleep.
“How far to the airport?” Rachel said.
“Didn’t you ask me that already?” Cody said.
“I asked how long it would take to get there.”
Cody laughed. “Alright smart ass,” he said. “From home, it’s about twenty-five miles to San Antonio airport. We’ve chopped off a couple of miles already. Won’t be long now. We’re doing okay.”
Rachel looked up at him. “But we can’t drive too fast?”
“No. It’s too dark. It’s dangerous.”
“Let’s go then.”
Cody looked at her, his eyebrows standing up.
“Who made you captain of this expedition?”
She smiled and walked over to the car. Cody slammed the trunk shut and slid back into the driver’s seat. He looked at the road that stretched towards the San Antonio. It looked like the Northern Lights had settled over the city, except this colorful display was violent and man-made.
He turned the key in the ignition. At the same time, he could feel the heat travelling up the highway towards him, scalding his face from afar.
The next few miles were quiet. There were no other cars on the road and no further disturbances over San Antonio.
Cody kept both hands on the wheel. Drowsiness was creeping in fast. He tried to shake it off, to stay sharp. Sleep later, he told himself. But for now, get to the airport and get on that plane. In a normal world it was the simplest of tasks and this time he didn’t even have to remember their passports or paperwork or worry about putting their liquids into a little quart-sized bag and taking it through security.
He looked in the rearview mirror. Rachel’s head was resting on the back of the seat. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open a little. Cody smiled – she always fell asleep in the car without fail and nothing, not even the end of the world was going to stop that.
A cool breeze crept up Cody’s arms.
“That’s nice,” he said.
The constant muggy temperatures had been wearing him down all morning and it wasn’t helping him to stay awake. The breeze was welcome but it got colder quickly. Cody rolled up the window and pulled the crumpled sleeves of his black shirt over his forearms.
He saw something out of the corner of his eye. A shape, emerging in the passenger seat.
“Cody it’s me.”
Cody’s fingers clamped down on the steering wheel. He was paralyzed by a sudden onslaught of fear.
She was sitting in the passenger seat.
Cody shook his head.
“No,” he said. Don’t speak to her. Don’t look at her.
“Cody it’s me.”
Something about the voice. It was familiar.
“Cody it’s me.”
He looked in the rearview mi
rror and saw that Rachel was still asleep in the back. Thank God.
“Cody.”
He felt his foot sliding off the gas pedal. The car was slowing down. A moment later, they were crawling down the highway at about 15-miles-per-hour.
“You’re dead,” he said. “You’re not real.”
“It’s me,” she said.
Cody plucked up the courage to look at what had appeared in the car.
Kate MacLeod, his deceased wife and the love of his life was sitting in the passenger seat. She looked like she’d done in the last year of her life – beautiful, but damaged like a flower in the early stages of wilting. Her long blonde hair had lost its youthful shine but her magnificent face – the broad forehead, almond-shaped eyes and full lips – they were still exceptional. As it had been in those last years, her cheekbones were so prominent that the word ‘addict’ might as well have been tattooed onto her forehead.
She’d sat in the same passenger seat many times before. So many warm evenings spent racing along Mulholland Drive in the Dodge Challenger, speeding past the Santa Monica Mountains and glorious orange-red sunsets to die for. Those were some of Cody’s happiest memories of his life with Kate.
“What’s happening?” Cody said. He spoke quietly, desperate not to wake Rachel up. “It can’t be you. You’re dead.”
“Of course it’s me,” Kate said, staring at him. She blinked slowly, like a reptile. “It’s so good to see you again Cody.”
God how he’d missed her. It felt so much longer than ten years.
“It’s you?” he said.
He looked at her and she nodded.
“I’m here for you. Only you.”
“Only me?”
“That’s right.”
Cody gave a little snort of disgust and snapped out of whatever daze he’d been in.
“You’re forgetting something,” he said. “Aren’t you? You haven’t even looked at Rachel once. You haven’t asked about our daughter, not once. That’s her sitting in the back seat by the way. She’s ten years old now and she’s spent her entire life trying to understand why her Mom wasn’t there for her when she was growing up. Thanks for leaving me with that problem.”
“I’m so lonely,” Kate said. “Over here, on the other side – it gets so lonely. Won’t you come back with me?”
“Bullshit,” Cody said.
He glanced at her. Her marble-like eyes were empty.
“I know who you are,” Cody said. “I know what you do. Sometimes you come to people disguised as friends and family members – even dead ones because people want to see their loved ones so much that they’ll believe it. Then you whisper in their ear, do your sweet-talking and they off themselves. Sometimes you convince them to take others with them. Burn the house, burn the street, burn everything. Right? You sick, twisted bitch. Get the fuck out of my car.”
“You don’t know what it’s like over here Cody,” Kate said. “It’s so beautiful.”
“Well I know one thing,” Cody said. “I know that I’ve sunk about as far as any human being could sink in life without dying or going insane. I know that I fought off a hundred Black Storms in my head when you died. But I learned to live with it. I had to for Rachel. So why don’t you just fuck off? Please.”
A massive explosion lit up the sky behind them. Cody gasped and looked over his shoulder.
A towering fireball was shooting towards the stratosphere.
He looked at Kate, his eyes wide open in horror.
“Was that…?” he said.
“Spring Branch,” she said. “Is that what you were going to say?”
Cody’s voice was shaking. “Did you just do that?”
Kate’s face was expressionless. Doll-like.
“You did it,” she said.
She vanished like a ghost. The bitter cold disappeared with her and everything inside the car felt normal again – at least as normal as could be expected.
Cody sat in stunned silence, looking at the smoke plumes billowing in the north. The black sky had lit up under the wreckage of Spring Branch; it looked like a fireworks display that had gotten out of hand.
“What did you do?” he whispered.
Cody thought about the everyday faces he’d encountered in Spring Branch – good people, big hearts and friendly Texan greetings. He envisioned them all, caught up in the Black Fever, driving around town in their cars, pouring a trail of gasoline in their wake and destroying everything that they’d helped build.
He thought about their home.
In a daze, Cody reached for the radio. With any luck, it would at least distract him from the carnage that was unfolding in the rearview mirror.
His trembling hand found the dial.
4
I saw her at the start – a tall woman dressed in mourning clothes.
The Black Storm was in its early days back then. There was no Black Fever, no black rain, and the sky was still kinda blue. We were living a normal day to day routine. Work, jobs, life – you know?
I was on my way to work in Bismarck, North Dakota. I’m in marketing. I was standing at the train station, not far from the platform edge when I heard a woman’s voice whisper in my ear – I heard it as clear as I can hear my own voice now. Jump, she said. You have nothing to live for. That voice pushed me forward, taking me closer to the edge of the platform. A train was coming – my train. And the closer the train got to the station, the louder the voice in my ear was.
Jump.
And I nearly did because you know what? She was right, I didn’t have anything to live for. Have you ever heard of something the French call L’appel du vide – the call of the void? That’s what they call it. It’s a strange phenomenon where we feel the urge to do terrible things to ourselves. You might be holding onto a kitchen knife and think what would it be like to stab myself with this? What if I crashed the car? What if I leaned over the cliff just a little further? That sort of thing. The call of the void.
She kept whispering in my ear. I don’t know how I fought her off that day. Others haven’t been so fortunate. She’s already taken my wife and children and grandchildren so I know she’s coming back someday.
I won’t resist next time. When she comes…
Cody turned off the radio. It sounded like another private broadcast from somebody holed up in a house somewhere. It was like listening to the last ramblings of the doomed.
Wasn’t there any hope left?
The horizon to the south was on fire. Cody leaned forward in his seat, taking in the view with both fascination and horror. San Antonio looked like it was under attack. Looking at the city reminded Cody of an old Second World War newsreel that he’d seen about the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945. The German city had been turned into a firestorm by the Allied bombs over the course of several nights and it looked like something similar was happening in San Antonio. Cody looked up to the sky, half-expecting to see a fleet of fighter jets flying overhead and making towards the city.
A voice in his head told him to turn around. Take Rachel back north, the voice said. Take her into the less populous areas where the destruction wasn’t so intense. Where there were less people. Spring Branch might be gone but there were other places they could try.
No, he couldn’t do that. Nick was waiting for them at the airport. The plane was waiting. They had to get off this sinking ship somehow, even if there were no guarantees that it would work out once they took off.
They had to at least try.
Cody’s eyes followed a distant plume of smoke as it drifted towards the black sky. “Just let me get her to the airport.”
He was distracted by a tapping noise at the windshield. Seconds later, the black rain came down in buckets and Cody, cursing quietly, knew what he had to do. He pulled the car to a halt at the side of the road as the sudden downpour of black rain laid siege to the Dodge Challenger.
The heavy oil-like drops crashed to Earth in a furious, machine-gun rhythm. The windows were covered in running blac
k liquid and in a matter of seconds it was impossible to see anything outside the car.
Cody wasn’t too concerned about being off the road for long. He knew that as ferocious as these downpours were, they didn’t tend to last more than a few minutes. This was sprinter rain, not marathon rain. It was a pain in the ass though, forcing him to take precious minutes out of their journey while they sat on the side of the highway. On top of that he’d have to wipe the car down when it was over and that would eat into their time even more.
“Shit,” he said.
He looked behind him. Rachel was still asleep in the backseat. Not even the Spring Branch explosion had woken her up so a little black rain wasn’t going to disturb her. She was getting used to the chaos.
“Good for you kid,” Cody said quietly.
The rain lasted for about three or four minutes. When it was over, Cody opened the door, stepped into a thick black puddle and ran towards the trunk. Opening it up, he took out one of the large bottles of water and walked around the car, pouring it over the windows. He emptied the bottle onto the roof and doors of the Dodge too, trying to soak through as much of the black rain as possible.
When he was finished, he put the empty bottle back into the trunk. Back inside the car, he turned on the windshield wipers at full speed, clearing the murky glass screen as quickly as he could. When he was satisfied he could see okay, he put his foot to the floor, turned the steering wheel to the right and rolled the Dodge onto the highway.
After the fury of the black rain it was quiet. It was so quiet that Cody flipped on the radio. It was a habit he couldn’t seem to break. Not the worst habit he’d ever acquired by a long shot. As he turned the dial, Cody was greeted with blaring static and he brought the volume down to a whisper. He glanced over his shoulder. Rachel was still fast asleep.
Turning the dial a little more carefully, a familiar voice came floating out of the speakers.
“It’s so lonely over here Cody,” Kate said. “We can be a family again – you, me and Rachel. It doesn’t matter, none of this matters anymore. Look at San Antonio and tell me that you’re not scared. Well you don’t have to be scared. You don’t have to go there. There’s only pain and death waiting for you if you go there. There’s no pain here Cody – only love.”
Mega Post-Apocalyptic Double Bill Page 47