Alejandro chuckled again beside me. I glanced at him and gave him a sour face. “You can’t go back by yourself, it would be dark before you made it back,” I replied.
“Yes!” he held up his hand for a high-five and out of the corner of my eye I saw Alejandro shake his head no. Jackson’s smile faltered and he dropped his hand. “Am I in trouble?”
“Of course you’re in trouble,” I said. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. I mean, what am I gonna do, put you in time out on your horse? Let’s get going.” I turned around and took the lead heading westward. I grinned a little to myself when I heard Jackson’s hand softly slap Alejandro’s.
* * *
We reached the town of Van Horn around dusk the next day. It was far enough away from El Paso and the army base outside the city that it shouldn’t have taken a direct hit, but the town looked like it had been wiped out by a nuclear bomb. More than half of the buildings were nothing but skeletal remains and almost no structures that weren’t made of brick remained. There weren’t very many cars of any kind, and those that did remain had been stripped of most of their parts.
“What in the hell?” I muttered.
“Scavengers I’d bet,” Alejandro answered. “We’re only about a hundred miles or so from El Paso. If the people trying to scrape out a life in the wasteland over there didn’t take the stuff, I’d bet it was scooped up by the people from New El Paso. We’re only about ninety miles from there. With a few hundred workers and some flatbed trucks, they could have easily stripped this place of all the building material.”
I tried to think back to what Jason had said about the size of New El Paso, but I couldn’t remember how large it was. The old Road Atlas that we were using said that Dell City only had a population of about six hundred people. Its pre-war size was hardly big enough for a large trading post, so it would make sense that they would need construction material for housing. If there had been readily accessible water in Van Horn, it would have made more sense to set up the trading post here, but the underground water that was available at Dell City must have forced the decision. That or circumstances that we had no way of knowing put the people there.
“I hope it was only the people from New El Paso and not something else that did this,” I grumbled aloud.
“We need to find a place to shelter for the night,” Alejandro replied. “It looks like there might be some brick buildings near the center of town that haven’t been torn down.”
I pulled out the binoculars and examined where Alejandro was pointing. Sure enough there were several brick buildings that still had all four walls, but it looked like the roofs had already been taken. “Okay, let’s go up there and hope no one is home,” I answered.
We slowly walked the horses towards the nearest brick structure, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being watched. I told my traveling companions what I felt and Alejandro tried to make mental contact with anyone in the area. He shook his head and said, “If there is someone around who can hear me, they’re not answering back. But I’m still new to this telepathy thing, so I may be doing it wrong or there may be some type of range limit that I don’t know about.”
We decided to make camp in an old convenience store and we circled around it a couple of times to make sure that we weren’t missing anything. When we were satisfied, Alejandro and I dismounted and went to the empty doorway while Jackson held onto our horses’ reins. Whoever had picked this place apart had already taken the door so it was only a matter of stepping inside. I powered on my mini flashlight and shone it inside. A quick glance skyward showed that they’d taken parts of the roof and not others.
The little light illuminated the area immediately in front of me, but not much else. “Hello?” I called softly into the gloom. “Is anyone in here?”
I called out a few more times without any answers so Alejandro and I split up. He went to the right and I went to the left. His night vision was good enough that he didn’t need the flashlight, but he still picked his way very cautiously through the store. Broken glass from the refrigerated section crunched underfoot as I walked around examining the place to make sure that no one else was in there with us.
They’d taken almost everything from the store. The only things that I could tell that remained were the ATM box, the cash register and the metal shelves for displaying products. Everything else was either missing or smashed on the ground. What I could only imagine to be feces was smeared along the hallway walls leading to the bathrooms, but thankfully the smell had long since dissipated. I could make out three massive handprints and all four fingers as the trail ran from the handprints to the back door.
I pushed on the door, but was rewarded with a rattling of chains. The previous owner had the foresight to chain the back door before all hell broke loose in this town. I cautiously opened the doors to both the men and women’s restrooms and was rewarded with a smell unlike any I’ve ever known. It was both foul and yet slightly sweet at the same time. I’m sure the smell was everywhere early on, but we wore our gas masks almost twenty-four hours a day back then so I didn’t actually smell it.
There was a completely decomposed body in the men’s room. He had on clothing that identified him as an employee of the store and the entire left side of his head was caved in. He—hell maybe she, I couldn’t tell—probably died defending the store’s supplies from hungry travelers and then the body was dragged in the bathroom to avoid discovery. It had been here so long that very little skin remained attached; it was mostly just bones held together by the clothing. There wasn’t anything else in the bathrooms so I pulled the doors closed tightly and hoped that the smell stayed in there.
“The place is empty,” whispered Alejandro.
“Yeah, I thought so,” I replied as I relaxed my death-grip on the handle of my baseball bat. “Dead body in the men’s room though. Stinks pretty bad back there, whoever’s been in the town tearing it apart is still using the toilet. That means it’s not zombies, which is a good thing I guess.”
“Okay, go get Jackson and I’ll see if I can find anything to block off the doorway.”
I nodded and stepped outside. “Hey, buddy, it’s Chuck,” I said as a warning so that I didn’t spook him when I came out.
I didn’t want the horses wandering off in the middle of the night or something taking them and leaving us stranded, so we guided them into the building and tied them to a shelf. I decided to leave the saddles on the horses until we could get the place secure. That didn’t go over well with my horse. Rusty jerked his head like crazy in an attempt to release the reins but he settled down quickly when he realized that they weren’t going to come off easily.
The next twenty minutes were spent man-handling one of the big shelves into place in front of the door. Any hope that we had of sneaking in and then sneaking out of the town ended with the screeching of metal against concrete as the shelves dug tiny divots into the floor. By the time we’d finally gotten one shelf into position in front of the door we were glistening with sweat, despite the slight chill in the air.
“That’s probably enough of a barrier,” Alejandro stated. “The damned thing weighs nine hundred pounds, if something can move that, we’re in trouble.”
I wiped my forehead with the sleeve of my jacket. “Agreed,” I responded. “I just wish it was a little taller,” I continued as I rested my elbow on the top shelf. There was still at least three feet of open space above the shelving unit that we’d have to keep an eye on.
Next we set about preparing a space to sleep as well as defend. We slid shelves into place to create a long corridor from the entry to the wall and then a ninety degree angle to where we would sleep. It was a lot of work, but it should keep us from getting rolled up from the side if anything happened.
We were finally able to prepare dinner, so a precious can of tuna was opened and put into a pot with green beans and potatoes. Soon enough there was a nice little stew cooked up for us to eat. We talked quietly about our uneventful
trip and what the next few days would hold. Sleep quickly beckoned us after the warm food settled in our bellies and the conversation died down. I tried to resist, to stay awake, but the urge to fall asleep was too much and one by one we succumbed to its lure at last.
* * *
The stillness of the night was shattered by a piercing scream. It sounded like a woman crying out in terror. Alejandro was on his feet and running towards the front door barrier long before I had even pulled my legs out of the jumbled mess of my sleeping bag. After I untangled my legs, I followed Alejandro to the doorway and peered into the darkness.
The woman cried out again and in the faint moonlight I could see her sprinting full speed down the street. I turned to see what she was running from and five men materialized out of the darkness only fifty feet behind her. The look on her face was unmistakable, even from this distance. She was terrified of the men chasing her. I hesitated for a moment and then decided to call out to her.
“What are you doing?” Alejandro hissed.
“I’m doing what’s right,” I replied. The woman changed course immediately and when she reached our shelf barrier she struggled to climb over the slick metal surface of the shelf. The men on the road began to shout at us but I tuned them out while Alejandro made a show of waiving his rifle at the men to warn them off.
I turned on the flashlight and when I shone it onto her face, her features twisted into a wicked sneer. The men outside yelled something about a demon and without warning the woman attacked me. “Fuck! Get her off of me,” I shouted as my back was slammed up against the back side of the shelving unit. Her lips curled back into a huge grin, revealing grossly misshapen and sharpened teeth.
I recoiled in horror as she snapped forward and took the end of my nose in her teeth. I screamed in pain when she jerked her head back and ripped part of my nose away. I brought my knee up and hit her as hard as I could in her stomach. Her backhand caught me square across my cheekbone and sent me flying into the opposite wall. My vision blurred as I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn’t respond.
The world exploded around me and through bleary eyes I saw the woman crumple to the ground. I attempted to focus my eyes, but something was wrong. Jesse’s pistol was floating a few feet off of the ground and smoke poured from the barrel. I shook my head to make the image clear up, but the pain that caused made me whimper like a little boy. Gingerly, I probed my face and didn’t think that any bones were broken, but my fingers came away bloody.
“Are you okay, Chuck?” Jackson asked as he knelt beside me. My eyes focused on Jesse’s pistol and I realized that the boy was holding it. Jackson had saved my life yet again.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. I felt a few of my upper molars dangling down across my tongue and I reached in and yanked two teeth from the skin that they barely clung to. I cried out in pain again, but the worst of it subsided quickly. “Thank you for saving me, again.”
“No problem,” he said as he cried softly. I knew he was thinking the same thing that I was. Sooner or later, they’d have to kill me before I turned into a freak and attacked them too. What a shitty way to die.
An ear shattering squeal pulled my attention from my own self-pity to the front door. Shit, I’d forgotten about the men outside and they were pushing the barrier aside. I tried to stand up, but my legs still weren’t working properly and my head rolled uselessly to the side as fatigue set in.
I sensed someone crouched down in front of me, but they were too blurry to clearly make out. “Yeah, he’s alive, the lucky bastard,” the person crouched in front of me said. “Good shooting, kid.”
“Thanks,” I heard Jackson mutter.
The form in front of me shifted and I could see by his profile that he was looking over his shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “That bitch wasn’t a mutie, so it’s not a death sentence for your old man. This is gonna hurt like hell though. Hold ‘em down, fellas.”
Rough hands grabbed my arms and someone sat on my legs. I tried to resist but my head was too fuzzy to make my body do what I wanted it to. Right above my head I heard what sounded like someone ripping a box in two or maybe tearing off a strip of duct tape. “It’s to keep the solution out of his mouth. Don’t worry, we’ve done this more times than I want to admit.”
Something warm and sticky was placed over my lips and my strength returned as I tried to fight for my life. I felt someone push in behind me and the wall, then, a pair of hands wrapped my head in a sleeper hold. They covered my eyes and I couldn’t move at all.
“Ready?” the voice queried. Several grunts of approval sounded from all around me and then the pain that I’d experienced from getting half of my nose bitten off and beaten up by a woman disappeared. It was replaced by the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life, even worse than when I lost my finger. I felt some liquid splash onto my cheek and then that began to burn too.
“Whoops,” the voice said as he wiped the liquid off of my cheek. I continued to thrash as the stuff on my nose and cheek burned like crazy. Then a powder of some kind was liberally applied to my face. The burning stopped, but there was a dull, residual pain that throbbed with every beat of my heart.
“Almost done, chap,” the voice continued. More liquid was splashed onto my nose and cheek and then my face was dried with a cloth of some type. Then more of the powder was applied and the excess was brushed off.
“Alright,” the man said as he jerked the tape off of my face. “We’re done, boys. You can let the fellow go.”
Everyone relaxed their grip on me and then finally released me altogether. “What the hell did you just do to me?” I asked through tear-blurred eyes.
“Saved your life, that’s what,” the man replied. “First we used boric acid liquid to clear out the shit from that harpy’s mouth and then used baking soda to neutralize the acid.”
“So, he’s not going to turn into a zombie?” Jackson asked hopefully.
“A zombie? Oh, you mean a mutant? No, we haven’t seen any of those in a while—legitimate ones I mean. Of course we have the Changed like your friend here, but they’re civilized folks as long as you treat them with respect.
“Is this your first time in the wasteland or something?” he continued, not pausing for answers. “You invited a damned harpy into your camp and you didn’t expect to get attacked? You’re lucky to be alive.”
I wiped my eyes with my fingers to clear away the sludge that had built up. “Actually, this is our first time out of our community in almost two years,” I replied. “We made the trip to our home during those first few months after the bombs.”
“Hell, you haven’t been outside since the start of the apocalypse?”
“We’ve been inside a compound with walls,” Alejandro stated. “What’s a harpy?”
The man glanced at Alejandro and replied, “It’s not the literal harpy from legend, but there’s a whole bunch of crazies out there. They’ve gone insane from the radiation or from all the death that we’ve seen, but they’re smart enough to find food, unlike the mutants. The problem is that for the most part they appear just like you and me, but they’re bat-shit crazy. Most of them are harmless, but some, like that bitch over there,” he gestured towards the woman who’d bitten my nose off, “are dangerous as fuck.”
“Yeah, I figured that part out,” I replied as I pointed at my nose.
“She ambushed our patrol and killed one of my men before we chased her off. Must have moved into the town after the work crews left,” he trailed off for a moment. “What are you guys doing out here?”
I briefly considered lying to him, but decided against it. “We just found out about New El Paso from some passing merchants and were heading there to see about establishing a direct trading partnership with them instead of through a third party.”
“Well, if I was you, I would’ve stayed in my nice little compound and trusted the traders. Besides us, they’re the only ones who are crazy enough to stay outside of towns overnight.”
I rubbed
my eyes again to clear them. “I’m sorry, who are you?” I asked.
“Sergeant Chris Murphy, US Army. We patrol the wastes between New El Paso and the feeder communities.”
“Feeder communities?” Alejandro interjected.
“Oh, that’s just what we call ‘em since most of the people left alive have moved to the bigger towns like New El Paso. Then, once there’s no one left there, we send out work crews to salvage all the construction material that we can. New El Paso is only as safe as the walls surrounding it, what with all the giant mutants running around.”
“What?” Alejandro and I both exclaimed.
“Radioactive gigantism. Come on, tell me you guys have heard of this stuff,” Sergeant Murphy laughed. “Wow, you guys are totally like the hillbilly in the big city. The radiation has done all sorts of stuff to the wildlife out here. There are creatures with extra arms, some pathetic, others dangerous. There are things that don’t live any longer than a few days because of the radiation, so their life cycle has changed drastically. Then, there’s the nasties. Bugs mostly, but the radiation has caused some creatures to grow huge. We have a doctor that used to work over in Alamogordo who says the radiation changed their growth regulation genes. We’re talking scorpions the size of a car here.”
“Shit,” was all I could think of to say.
“Right? Luckily, the big ones are rare, but it’s only been a couple of years and we’re worried that they might start mating. Besides protecting folks dumb enough to travel out here, one of our missions is to seek out and kill any of those things that we find.”
“You said that you’re with the US Army? Is the government active down here?” I asked hopefully.
“Well, no, we work for New El Paso. But most of us were in the army at Fort Bliss before the war and the town needed a security force, so we organized ourselves into the wasteland’s guardians.”
Enduring Armageddon Page 26