by Lukens, Mark
The long walk through the woods had been tiring. Even though Luke had rested for two days at the camp he’d been brought to after Wilma had died, he still wasn’t fully recovered from his battle with the Dark Angels and the retribution he had handed out to them for what they had done to Wilma.
He knew Wilma’s death wasn’t his fault—there was no way he could have seen it coming—yet he still felt responsible. He felt guilty. He should have been watching out for her. He and Wilma had been so excited a few days ago after their long journey south through Ohio, excited to be so close to the Ohio River, so close to Wilma’s new home, so close to her reuniting with her stepbrother Matt—the only family she had left now.
Yes, they had been so close, and they had let their guard down. He had let his guard down. And now Wilma was dead.
Wilma still haunted his dreams, but he saw other people in those dreams: the man with his son, the beautiful blind woman with dark glasses, the scrawny man with the long hair and tattoos. And there was also the Dragon Lord, as his dark army of followers called him—he haunted Luke’s dreams, too.
Luke remembered his dream of Wilma when he’d been locked in the cell in the camp that first night after her death. He’d seen her in the cell with him as if she was still alive, and for a moment he thought she was alive. But then she had faded away into the darkness, her likeness dissolving to nothing. And then Luke had seen the blind woman who had been frequenting his dreams of the previous nights, the woman with the warm angelic glow all around her. “Come south and find us,” the blind woman had said to him in his dream, and then she had faded away, just like Wilma.
Last night Luke had dreamed of the beautiful blind woman again, and the others who were with her. But last night he’d seen two new people, a woman and a girl. He’d only caught a glimpse of them. The woman looked to be in her late twenties. She had dark hair tied back in a ponytail. The girl with her was younger than the man’s son, maybe she was eight or nine years old. She had blond hair and large blue eyes. Terrified eyes. Shell-shocked eyes. Haunted eyes.
Luke had spent that first night at the camp locked in the cell, in and out of consciousness. But when he was fully awake, Matt and an older man named Chandler talked with him. They believed his story about the Dark Angels attacking them. They had asked him to stay at the camp, but Luke couldn’t stay there. Everything there would be a constant reminder of Wilma, a constant reminder of his failure to save her. They seemed to understand his need to leave. They returned his weapons, backpack, and even gave him a few MREs and other supplies.
At the gates of the camp, they had asked him where he planned on going.
“South,” he had told them and left it at that. He hadn’t felt like explaining himself or talking about his dreams and the people he’d seen in them, people who might not even be real.
And maybe those people in his dreams weren’t real. Maybe his mind had cracked from the constant stress of the last week. It had all started last Friday with the collapse, as Wilma had called it. Vincent wanted to kill him. Vincent had asked Luke to protect his brother when the collapse began, but when Luke had gotten to Howard’s house, he discovered that Howard had slaughtered his wife and daughters. Howard had begun to eat parts of them. Luke had no choice but to kill the man. And after that, he had no choice but to run.
Vincent sent Jacob after him, but Luke got away from the assassin. And after traveling away from Cleveland, working his way south, he’d found a dog named Sandy. He and Sandy had holed up in an empty house. That’s where he had met Wilma—she had pointed a gun at him and tried to rob him, but he ended up saving her life. He went with her to a safe house that was part of a militia group her family was involved with. After a few days, they rode dirt bikes down to the state line. But that’s as far as they had made it before a bullet from one of the Dark Angels had taken Wilma out.
But Luke had killed that group of Dark Angels—he had killed every last one of them.
He tried not to think about Wilma as he traveled south through the woods, but his thoughts kept drifting back to her. He’d had many girlfriends through the years, but he’d never felt anything like he’d had with Wilma, nothing that deep.
She’s gone now. There’s nothing you can do about it.
Around midday Luke had stopped at a stream to check his map and his compass. He was still on course, working his way south, and that was good. He filled up his canteen with water from the stream. He wasn’t sure if the water was safe to drink, but he popped a water purification tablet into it and hoped for the best. If he got sick and died, who cared? He didn’t care much about anything anymore.
His plan was to head south. The woman in the dream had told him to head south, but he would have headed south anyway. When he’d gone back to his rental house to grab his go-bag after Vincent wanted him dead, Luke had planned on going down to Florida. He had a friend in Jacksonville who could get him to the Florida Keys, or maybe even the Caribbean islands. And now maybe he’d still go down there. Find some small island down in the Keys, find a small boat. He could fish for his dinner and bask in the warm sun.
And then what?
Just survive. He hadn’t really planned much after the destination.
Ever since Wilma had died Luke had felt a crushing depression. He was depressed, but not so apathetic that he was ready to lie down and die. No, he still wanted to live, to survive, and right now there was one thing that kept him going—an anger that fueled him as much as food and water. Even though he had killed the seven men responsible for Wilma’s death, it wasn’t enough. He wanted to kill every one of the Dark Angels, and then he wanted to find their leader, the Dragon Lord, the shadowy man in his dreams with the shining eyes, and he wanted to kill him too. Maybe when the Dragon was dead, it would be enough to appease his guilt and anger.
The rippers had been infected with a disease that boiled their brains, turning them into savage animals. They attacked and killed, tore and ripped at flesh, consumed it, but they couldn’t help it. The Dark Angels were different; they were still able to make choices, and they had chosen to follow their master. For that reason Luke vowed to kill every Dark Angel he came across, and it was easy to spot them since they had marked themselves on their foreheads.
The anger had driven Luke away from Wilma’s camp. It drove him through the woods all day. It drove him south towards the eventual warmer weather, and that anger was all he really had to live for anymore.
And now Luke had emerged from the woods, standing behind the barbed-wire fence, staring out at the field of grass where the rippers had surrounded their victim in the distance.
CHAPTER 16
Luke
The victim the rippers had surrounded was a horse, a brown one. Luke didn’t know what kind of horse it was; he really didn’t know anything about horses. He didn’t know if this was a racehorse, or a work horse, or if it had been someone’s pet. But he knew one thing, the horse was scared; it was backing up, rearing up on its hind legs as the group of rippers closed in. The horse was snorting and screeching, trying to fight back, eyes wild.
Luke jumped the fence with his backpack on. He was across the field in seconds, his gun already aimed at the rippers thirty yards away. He ran a few more steps closer—he didn’t want to accidentally hit the horse.
Three of the rippers tried to tackle the horse. One of the rippers, either a woman or a man with long hair (it was hard to tell with the layers of clothes the person was wearing, clothing that looked more like strips of rags now). The person swung a stick at the horse while another ripper sliced at it with a knife, but he had missed the horse’s front leg. The horse kicked and knocked the ripper back for his trouble. But Luke knew that the rippers, like a pride of lions, would eventually wear down and overtake the frightened animal.
The horse backed up and reared up again. One of its hooves connected with a ripper swinging a stick. The smack from the horse’s hoof hadn’t seemed that hard, but the ripper went down immediately, the stick falling out of
his numb hand. The ripper was out cold on the ground, maybe even dead.
Another point scored for the horse. Maybe Luke was wrong, maybe this horse could survive—it had already taken out two of the eight rippers so far. But now it was backed up towards the fence, its brown coat shiny with perspiration even though it was cold.
Luke shot the other six rippers on the run, hitting all six of them, the bullets from his gun knocking them down like a kick from the horse. He stopped running when he was within twenty feet of the horse.
The horse looked like it was about to bolt, but he waited, snorting, eyeing Luke like he could tell Luke had just saved him. And maybe the horse could tell in a way; Luke wasn’t familiar enough with horses, so he couldn’t be sure.
“It’s okay,” Luke said in what he hoped was a soothing voice. Trying to soothe the horse reminded him of trying to soothe Sandy when she’d been scared. He wasn’t an animal lover at all, and maybe the horse could sense that, too. Animals, or any kind of pet, were a liability in his business. Maybe Sandy, the dog he’d found in the looted-out store a few nights ago, had sensed that and that’s why she had run from him when Wilma had entered that house the next day.
He couldn’t think about Wilma right now.
“It’s okay,” Luke said again in a softer voice. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
The horse still hadn’t run, but he was eyeing Luke like he might charge like a bull. Luke hoped the horse wasn’t going to do that; the last thing Luke wanted to do was shoot the animal he had just saved.
But the horse wasn’t charging, and he still wasn’t running. He kept looking down at the two rippers he had kicked.
And then Luke saw why—one of the rippers was moving, starting to moan in pain, his face smeared with blood. It was like the horse didn’t want to leave until he was sure all of the rippers were dead, until they were all wiped out.
Luke walked cautiously towards the writhing ripper on the ground.
The horse backed up a few steps and snorted, but still watching, curious even.
Spit. Spit. Luke put a bullet in the ripper’s head as he started to sit up, and then he shot the other ripper the horse had kicked just to make sure he was dead. He looked around at the other rippers lying all over the ground, watching them for a moment. They were all dead.
Now the horse took off like he was satisfied the threat had been taken care of, trotting towards a building that must be the stables.
Luke walked across the field to the building and peeked inside the open door. There were only a few stalls. One of the stall doors was wide open. The horse had gone back inside the open stall. Luke just stood there for a moment. He wasn’t sure if the rippers had opened the stall door or the horse had kicked it open in panic, or maybe the owners had just left the doors open for him when they left.
He thought about trying to find some feed, but he was sure the horse could eat the grass in the field. There was a trough of water at the end of the stalls, closer to the door. Luke didn’t know what else he could do, so he walked away.
He climbed the fence into the back yard of the farmhouse. The rippers hadn’t opened the corral gate, so they had to have climbed the gate like he was doing. The back yard was huge. There was a two-story farmhouse in the distance, standing in a clearing, the woods all around. But this part of the field was open. There was a barn off to the right and a big garage, and also a pole barn with only a metal roof over it and lawn cutting equipment inside.
Luke stood there for a moment, watching and listening, his gun still in his hand. There could be more rippers around. He didn’t hear anything so he began walking towards the farmhouse.
The back door of the house was open, the little panes of glass in the door shattered, the door pried open.
Luke stepped inside, moving cautiously and quietly. The house was a mess, the typical aftermath from rippers scavenging for food, but at least he couldn’t smell any dead bodies or half-eaten corpses. He checked every room of the house, just to be sure. The family that had lived here, an older couple judging from a few of the framed photos on the wall, must have packed up and left like the older couple in the RV back in Cleveland. They had gotten out, taken a vehicle packed with the necessities and they had gone, leaving their horse behind.
He managed to bar the back door shut, nailing a few pieces of wood over it to keep it closed. It wasn’t a bank vault door by any means, but it would have to do for the night. It was getting dark quickly and Luke needed to get settled in before it was too dark to see. He didn’t want to use his flashlight unless he absolutely had to.
Twenty minutes later Luke made a bed on the couch with a few spare blankets. He opened an MRE and mixed it with water, eating it slowly as the room turned almost completely dark. He drank the rest of his water down and then pulled the coffee table up close to the couch, laying his gun on top of it, within easy reach.
It was getting really cold, and the blankets weren’t warming him up completely, but they would have to do. He was tired from walking through the woods all day, but he was also restless. He wondered if he should have opened the corral gate and let the horse leave. What if more rippers came back tonight? He couldn’t go out there in the dark to save the horse.
He decided he would open the gate tomorrow morning. He couldn’t help what happened tonight, so he decided to push the thoughts out of his mind.
After an hour of tossing and turning, and drifting in and out of sleep, Luke finally fell into a deep sleep, and he began to dream.
CHAPTER 17
Luke
In the dream Luke stood in the corral—the darkness all around him. The horse was inside the stables. Luke could hear him snorting and moving around in there, agitated and scared. There was something out here in the corral that was frightening the horse.
Maybe it’s me, Luke thought.
He thought he heard a noise behind him, but it wasn’t a noise—it was more of a feeling. He knew someone was watching him. He turned and saw Wilma standing twenty feet away. She wore the same clothes she’d had on when she’d been shot, but there was no bullet hole now, no blood staining her clothes. She just stood there, somehow barely illuminated in the night, a sly smile on her face.
“Wilma,” Luke whispered.
She raised her hand, crooking her finger, signaling him to come closer.
Luke walked towards her, but the closer he got, the farther away she seemed to move. Her legs weren’t moving. She wasn’t walking backwards, but it seemed like she was fading back into the darkness.
He was losing her again.
“No, Wilma. Wait!”
He ran towards her, trying to get to her before she faded away completely. And then she wasn’t there anymore. He stopped and looked around, realizing he wasn’t in the corral anymore. Now he was in the parking lot of what looked like a roadside motel. He looked out at the lonely road running through the woods, the mountains all around them. He looked back at the strip of motel rooms, the big parking lot in front of them. There was a separate building for the office; it had a high, steeply pitched roof with the motel’s name advertised right on the side of it. The daylight was murky, like a cloudy afternoon just before it stormed. A car was parked behind the office, a small white car.
And then Luke was inside the office. He saw a dark-haired woman and a little girl. They sat behind the office desk, huddled together around a beacon of light. They were cold and scared. The woman was beautiful, and she was strong even though she was scared, stronger than she ever thought she was. And so was the girl.
But there was something coming for them, a terrible danger approaching from outside. Luke turned and looked out through the window. He saw a black van driving by outside. There was evil in that van. Dark Angels? He didn’t think so, but something just as bad.
He looked back at the woman and the girl. They were both asleep now, dead asleep, both of them curled up in the blankets.
“Hey,” he shouted at them. “Hey, wake up!”
They didn
’t stir.
“Hey, you need to get up! You need to run! They’re coming for you!”
They weren’t waking up.
Luke tried to go to them, to push on the woman and wake her up, but he couldn’t move. His shoes were rooted to the floor. He glanced down at his black hiking boots, trying to pull his feet up from the floor. All he could do was stand there, frozen. A sense of helplessness washed over him, the same feeling he’d had when Wilma had been shot. There hadn’t been anything he could do for Wilma as she’d laid bleeding and dying, and there was nothing he could do for this woman and girl, even though he knew something terrible was coming.
He was still frozen, rooted to the spot when he heard the door to the office open from behind him.
Luke wasn’t in the motel office anymore. Now he was on a road. He saw a man and a woman. They were traveling together, but they weren’t married or a couple. Luke had the feeling that even though they trusted each other, they didn’t really like each other. They were traveling together out of necessity.
Luke wanted to go back to the motel office so he could help the woman and the girl, but the dreams had turned to fragments of other people. He saw the man and his son, and the blind woman they were traveling with. Now there was another man with the three of them, a guy Luke had seen in his dreams before, the guy with the long hair, scraggily beard, and tattoos. Luke called out to them, but they couldn’t hear him. They couldn’t see him. Not even the blind woman this time.
And then Luke was somewhere else in the dream. Now he was in a small town with gray skies overhead. The town was half-destroyed, like bombs had landed there and battles had been fought. Some of the buildings were crumbling, but others were untouched by damage. Dead and dying people hung from light poles, signs, front porch roofs, and tree branches. Some were clothed, but many were naked. A few of them had been spiked to the sides of wood buildings. There were dozens of them, maybe over a hundred. Some of the dead were rippers, Luke could tell, but others weren’t.