Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  Eventually folks from one branch of the military or another would get their hands on nukes and take out New York, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and of course Washington, DC, not to mention London, Geneva, Tel Aviv, Paris, Munich, Beijing, Tokyo, Calgary, Perth, and Sydney outside the US. There may have been more nukes set off in other places, but communication would break down once the bombs started popping off, and those would be all that made it into the historical records before folks stopped bothering to keep them anymore.

  At some point in the chaos the God-fearing folk would start referring to berserkers as demons. And why not? It was the apocalypse after all. Demonic possession was an explanation that fit just as much as any of the other idiot theories out there. Besides, all the really cool apocalypses had demons at the center of them. Folks would have been disappointed if the language hadn’t taken on a more fire-and-brimstone undertone.

  Not that any of this mattered to Emmett as he sat in his cell and replayed the murder of his wife in his head. In fact, the only thing that happened for years after the verdict came in that would have mattered to the man was when the girls’ yogi uncle was killed over a case of Diet Coke and three Twinkies.

  He’d have wanted to know about that.

  Likewise, he’d have been relieved to learn that the girls found shelter with a man named Brennachecke, one of his brother’s friends, who led a small band of scavengers who had remained in that nutball town of Fairfield after the lights went out for good. He might have even been proud of how the apocalypse ended up looking pretty good on Jennifer as she blossomed into a dead ringer of her mother—a fiery redheaded mess of hard muscles, soft curves, and emerald eyes. He’d have even probably been understanding of the fact that his older daughter to this day simultaneously hated him for taking away her mother and resented him even more for just rolling over without an appeal and sending her and her sister away.

  Bobby-Leigh, on the other hand, hadn’t really been old enough to understand what had happened in the car that night, or in the courtroom later. She felt only love for her father; in fact, she used to cry most nights because she missed him so much. Emmett would have probably wanted to know that as well, though it would have taken another chunk out of his heart.

  Had he known about it, he’d probably have forgiven Jen for insisting that he was dead by now and that even if he wasn’t yet, she hoped he would be soon. Just as he’d probably have been crushed to discover that Bobby-Leigh would always have a secret longing for a reunion with her father in spite of her sister’s declaration of war on his memory—though he probably would have been dismayed to know that, just like she did with all the secrets the sisters would accumulate while he was in prison and time marched on, she would almost always keep that wish to herself.

  By the time he would see them again, he’d want to hear about every experience his girls had had: good, bad, or otherwise. But that would have to wait until the father and his daughters once again shared the same space in time. For the majority of the years Emmett was locked away, he just didn’t have the emotional resources left to allow any of that shit to matter to him. Not until he stumbled onto the truth about what—or, more importantly, who—had created berserkers. Once he knew that, gears clicked and his stalled motivation rumbled back to life. Suddenly, something not only mattered. It consumed him.

  Not the thought of his daughters, but a chance at revenge.

  Part One

  Love Hurts

  Life’s unfairness is not irrevocable;

  we can help balance the scales for others,

  if not always for ourselves.

  - Hubert H. Humphrey

  The darkness drops again but now I know

  That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  - William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

  Find what you love and let it kill you . . .

  For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly,

  but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

  - Charles Bukowski (or maybe Kinky Friedman)

  Chapter One

  The Sisters in the Heartland

  Jennifer gripped the edge of the crappy nightstand for support. The single candle on it flickered, sending shadows dancing across the room as the old wood creaked in response to her rutting. Her red hair hung down over her face in sweaty tangles. Her cheek was pressed down hard against the dirty bare mattress. The boy inside her thrusted jerkily from behind. Teenage sex in post-apocalyptic America was just like teenage sex before the world ended, except that nowadays, kids fucked without regard for their parents’ morality, fear of disease, or social stigma.

  Jennifer groaned. Mostly in pleasure, which was as good as she’d come to expect from Jimmy Brennachecke. Every once in a while he’d managed to shift his hips, arch his back, or lean—she wasn’t sure exactly how it happened—in a way that placed him in the exact right spot and her body would light up in ecstasy. But so far today he’d missed the mark entirely and now his thrusts were getting faster and more erratic, which meant he was getting close, so if he was going to send her over the moon, time was running out.

  She shoved her weight back into him and moved her hand from the nightstand to the headboard. And there, suddenly and out of nowhere, he hit it. Jennifer’s back arched involuntarily as pleasure consumed her. A howl exploded from her, as if her orgasm was an animal that had just been trapped.

  “Fuuuuuuck!” she breathed, seeing stars and starting to shake from the intensity.

  Jimmy, who like Jennifer had come of age after the power had gone out for good, was a lean piece of meat. A nice enough kid, sweet, but too inexperienced with women to know when he was doing it right, and when he was just doing it. Hearing the f-word come out of her like that sprouted an ear-to-ear grin across his face. Embarrassed and turned on even more at the same time, Jimmy just prayed his father hadn’t heard them, hadn’t heard her. Nobody would care about the sex, but his dad was a real stickler for language and hated the f-word like it stung him when he heard it.

  Thump.

  The sound of someone, or something, bumping into furniture cleared his head of concerns over his girlfriend’s language. The room was dark except for the splash of light from the candle. Jimmy couldn’t remember what was in the space beside what he could see, which was the bed and the nightstand. He thought there was a chair, or maybe it was a sofa. A coffee table? The Landmark Inn had at one point been restored into a chic small-town boutique hotel, but that was before the lack of power drove most of the people of Fairfield, Iowa, away in search of electric outlets that still worked.

  They should have cleared the room before they had started making out. Oh, man. They were so stupid! Why hadn’t they cleared the freaking room?

  He turned his head over his shoulder and tried to make out details in the flickering shadows. It was a pretty standard hotel room, or at least it had been back when the hotel was still operating—not that Jimmy had ever stayed there back then. He could see a dresser, a desk, a love seat, a window covered by dark blackout curtains. The love seat had to have been what had moved, but he didn’t see anybody in there with them. Maybe it hadn’t been the sound of something moving after all. The place was old and falling apart, maybe it was—

  “Hey, where are you?” Jen asked.

  Jimmy shook off the feeling of being watched and smiled at her.

  “I’m here.”

  She smiled at him lovingly. Encouragingly.

  You hit my special spot, for fuck’s sake, don’t lose focus now!

  He slowly began to move inside her again. Jen moaned to encourage him as the stars began to explode once more. But Jimmy’s intuitive muscle was stronger than he gave it credit for. The two barely teenagers were not alone.

  In the flickering candlelight a pair o
f eyes appeared above the back of the love seat and watched hungrily. Staying in the shadows as if it was one itself, the thing watching them slipped around the room toward the bed. For a second the candlelight caught the stealthy form and revealed its human shape against the wall, but neither Jennifer nor Jimmy caught it, sex being the powerful diversion that it is.

  Jimmy suddenly groaned involuntarily as his orgasm, short and sputtering, squeezed out of him and into her. It had come out of nowhere and caught him by surprise. He’d always pulled out of her to come before that instant, just to be safe (and because he kind of liked to see it coming out of him), so now he wasn’t sure what to do. He wasn’t entirely sure if she knew what had just happened. Maybe she just didn’t care that he’d ejaculated inside her. He thought she had to have felt it, so he guessed it was okay. Spent, but not really satisfied, he collapsed onto her, his mind going back to the feeling that they were not alone. He tried to be completely still so he could listen, but Jen pushed her hips back, keeping him inside her and knocking them over from doggy-style to a spooning position on their sides. Then she started rocking her hips, keeping him stimulated inside her so that his barely existent refractory period wouldn’t kill his boner. Sure enough, less than a minute later, his body flipped the switch back to the on position, and he started to match her movements, ready for round two.

  The eyes observing them had positioned themselves just out of the light’s reach. They watched as Jimmy reached back and grabbed the nightstand for support, knocking the candle precariously around as he did and sending flickering shadows everywhere. They watched as Jimmy turned his head suddenly, his neck hairs tingling, trying to catch whatever was giving him the feeling he was being watched. But by the time he was actually looking in the right direction, they’d moved under the bed. As the springs creaked and rocked rhythmically, Jimmy was left only with the view that they were alone.

  The young lovers jackhammered away at each other, headboard banging, Jimmy’s ironclad grip on the nightstand knocking the candle closer and closer to the edge with each thrust.

  Back in the troughs of pre-orgasm starbursts, Jen’s leg flipped over the end of the bed and hung there, like a piece of fruit on a low-hanging branch of a tree. The owner of the eyes could have reached out and grabbed her if it wanted to, but for the moment it only continued to observe. Jen’s toes curled and flexed, her orgasm so close she could taste it hot and oily in her mouth. Still the eyes just watched and waited. But if the watcher was waiting for a better opportunity to grab the young woman, it waited too long. Jen’s leg flipped back up onto the bed and into relative safety as Jimmy continued to thrust and knock the candle on the nightstand closer and closer to the edge.

  The silent observer slipped out from under the bed and watched as Jen maneuvered on top and grabbed the headboard with both hands, rocking Jimmy’s world as he felt himself no longer moving in and out as much as moving forward and back inside her. Then, moments before he was about to come for a second time, it watched the candle fall from the nightstand and its light snuff out upon contact with the floor.

  The darkness was instantaneous, thick and suffocating.

  The sex stopped immediately.

  Both Jen and Jimmy were frozen by a terror only a child of the apocalypse can feel for the dark. They tried to listen in the pitch, but only heard their own breathing. Jen dismounted. The sound of the bed groaning under her movement was impossibly loud to her ears. She and Jimmy waited, ears open, eyes bulging. As if communicating telepathically, they both held their breath at the same time. The silence bloomed as thick as the dark, suffocatingly so, until all of a sudden, it was broken.

  Click, click click-clicky click.

  A scampering sound on the hardwood. They were not alone. The sound was claws. Neither of them had heard claws on hardwood before, at least not that they could remember, but they still knew it instantly.

  In the black, the sounds of movement on the bed erupted and were joined by frantic fumbling and the distinct sound of a lighter.

  Phhhhhft. Nothing.

  Phhhhft. Phhhft. No spark. No light. Nothing.

  “It’s okay. We’re just . . .” Jimmy started, but without light it didn’t matter what he said and he knew it.

  Phhhhft. Phhhhft. Phhhft. Spark.

  Phhhhft-phhhhft. Spark.

  Light!

  Jen expected to see a berserker-demon or something worse looming over them, but she didn’t. In fact, as she scanned the room, she saw nothing out of place. Just Jimmy doing the same thing, with the same results. The room was empty. Or at least appeared to be. The clicky-click must have been in their heads.

  Jimmy snatched the candle from the floor and relit the wick, adding its flame to the light being produced by his father’s Special Forces Zippo, effectively doubling it. Still, they seemed to be alone.

  “You must’ve knocked it over,” Jimmy said.

  “I must’ve knocked it over? Fuck you, dude.”

  They both laughed. It was a desperate, forced, almost manic giggle, like some kind of verbal talisman against the raw nerves and sense of impending doom that had crawled inside their hearts and laid its toxic eggs.

  “You got to watch your mouth, babe.”

  “Seriously? You’re taking up that crusade now too?”

  “No,” Jimmy insisted. “I just . . . I want my dad to like you. More.”

  “You like me enough. And he’s not here . . . so fucking relax.”

  Somehow the teasing, lighthearted way she said it did make him relax. What’s Dad’s freaking problem anyway? he thought to himself, turned on by his rebellion of having sex with a girl who so wantonly swore and cursed, while at the core of his heart he was unable to shake the distaste for profanity he’d been instilled with from birth. Then again, Jimmy was a healthy teenage boy; a suggestively shaped rock could have turned him on. He never stood a chance against the beautiful redheaded potty mouth.

  Wishing he hadn’t said anything, Jimmy reached his hand over the edge of the bed to where a half-empty bottle of booze and an unopened box of condoms lay in wait. His hand found the condoms first and he pulled them up with a grin.

  “A little late for that, dude,” Jen said with a wink. Then, seeing the much more mundane fear in his eyes, she added, “I’m about to get my period. You’re fine.”

  It didn’t even occur to Jimmy to question if that really meant she couldn’t get pregnant. Nor did it occur to him to wonder, with her mom dead and her dad left for dead in some prison two thousand miles away, where she’d learned the birds and bees from. Those kinds of questions didn’t matter much to adults anymore, much less horny teenagers.

  He reached back down for the booze, knowing the bottle was there, but not its location specifically enough to just grab it. His hand searched blindly. Had he known what was under the bed, lying in wait, inches from his probing fingers . . . Had he known that even the most docile of animals could get you killed in this post-apocalyptic nightmare he was growing up in . . . Had he known that his life was about to end, he might not have been as thirsty. But he didn’t know. So when his hand finally found the bottle and he pulled it up, he didn’t thank his lucky stars or shed tears of relief at the gift he’d been given of a few more moments of naked stupidity with the girl he loved. He just took a sip, grimaced at the taste, and ogled Jen’s naked body.

  “Where were we?” he asked suggestively.

  “I’m done.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Seriously. My heart is racing. I’m, like, freaked out, dude.”

  Jimmy rolled his eyes. “With all the crap that we’ve seen, babe, you’re telling me you’re afraid of the dark?”

  “Ah, it’s exactly because of all the crap we’ve seen that I’m afraid of the dark, you fucking prick.”

  Jimmy slid off the bed.

  “Where are you going?” Jen asked.

  “Relax, I’m just draining the weasel,” he said as he walked into the darkness, toward the toilet that was in a little alcov
e near the door to the room.

  Pffffft.

  This time the Zippo ignited on the first try. Jimmy saw that he was in the closet space that separated the main room from the bathroom. He saw the box of emergency candles they’d left next to the sink. He saw that Jen had flushed the toilet after she peed (something she always did before sex, but not something he’d ever asked her about) and now there was no water in the bowl. But what he did not see was the little girl who was standing in the back of the closet, watching him.

  She was eleven, maybe twelve years old, with unnaturally black hair, the bangs of which almost completely covered her eyes. She wore a dirty bone-white lace petticoat under a Lolita-gothic jumper-skirt, elegantly embellished with ruffles and bustles. Her slim-fitting tailored white blouse had embellishments on the cuffs and neckline. The opaque white stockings that ran up her legs to just over her knees were held in place with frilly garters. She wore black Mary Janes on her feet, and she held a hand ax tightly in her hands like she was some kind of crazed anime lumberjack a blow away from yelling Timber! The expression on her painted red lips as she stared up at him, with her black shadowed eyes hidden behind her bangs, suggested she was not happy. But since he didn’t see her, Jimmy never got the chance to wonder why.

  His attempt to light one of the candles in the bathroom instead extinguished the flame of the lighter and plunged him into darkness again. Crap, he thought as the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stood straight up. Doom pressed in on him as he felt sure the stupid Zippo wouldn’t light again, but it ignited without a problem. A half second later the candle was lit as well. But even in the light, the sense of impending doom remained. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder, this time directly into the closet. But the little girl with the ax was gone.