The Veil (Testaments I and II)

by Joseph D'lacey

  The park is alive. In the greenish phosphorescence of the night, we see it swaying. Once again I feel like we’re all underwater. It saps your strength. You doubt your ability to run. The night is a dream; the air is so thick it holds you. When the chase begins, you’ll never get away.

  And there will be a chase because the park is full of Commuters. Like sea-grass, they bend in some invisible current down here at the bottom of the ocean. The seven of us – the sacred, ordained, blessed seven – stop and stare. The Commuters undulate as one and we know they will not come for us yet. Each of us knows from the movement we’re seeing that the Commuters are stuck for the moment. They have grown roots deep into the park’s soil and, perhaps below its surface, they are one. One mind. One body. One intent.

  This intelligence of theirs dwarfs us. Everyone feels it. All along we’ve felt as though the Commuters were stupid, lumbering shells. The remains of the people they once were. Now we know that’s not true. They are greater than the sum of their parts and we, by comparison, are not. We are the last healthy cells to succumb to a virus, our macrophagic days of head-popping, of Commuter stopping, are coming to an end. Our enemy has ceased to be an army of unthinking particles; it has become an organism. A leviathan. We no longer have the equipment with which to fight it off.

  Running? No.

  Sprinting.

  Backs to them, not even bothering to fire over our shoulders or turn and be more accurate. There isn’t time. We’re routed, panicking, no formation. This is no dream. What seemed like molasses has become wind on our faces. Our boots batter the streets as we try to escape them. Someone trips, I don’t even look to see who it is. I know they won’t get up again. The whole city of Commuters, numbering thousands I can’t even attempt to count, are coming for us. I do not want to be taken while I still have a chance.

  There’s a single gunshot behind me followed by the sound of a body hitting the blacktop and the clatter of an orphaned gun. I know what happened without looking.

  Five of us keep running.

  All I can see are the roots that the Commuters are using as legs now, roots like the legs of spiders, roots like the spindly digits of a too-many-fingered hand. They are very, very fast. They poured through the gates of the memorial park like an insect army. They scaled its iron fences just as easily. Their suits and skirts are torn and filthy and still they weep the pleading tears of the damned.

  I drop Cain.

  I unstrap Abel and my ammo pack and abandon them in favor of greater speed.

  At the Station, the ladders are already over the wall. I’m first to arrive and I hit the ladder hard. Then I’m climbing. Gunfire erupts from every window on this side of the wall. They’ve all seen. They’re all there.

  “I need a gun. Give me a fucking gun.”

  Someone hands me an AK. Not my kind of weapon but there’s no time to be picky. I find a free step, aim over the wall and open up. Whatever’s inside the Commuters’ heads it isn’t brains anymore. But they still stop when you hit them there. The gunfire is painful, pushes my eardrums in. Gunpowder turns the air bitter. The smoke blurs my vision.

  Me and Viktor Lockwood are the only ones to return from tonight’s crew. The Commuters have plucked Stoppers out from behind the wall for the first time ever. They used their roots to do it.

  Dawn is coming. No one speaks yet.

  Monty Spence is gone.

  I suspect it was he who took matters into his own hands out there tonight, the one who let a gun speak his final word.

  We lost thirty Stoppers tonight. The Station’s helm is torn away. Rudderless, we arrive drifting on the morning.

  For Ike, Trixie and me, a moment has come. Perhaps a moment we should have exploited days ago. I can’t help but think we’ve left it too long. Everything has changed. Maybe the three of us are suicides when you come right down to it.

  Perhaps they think it’s odd, the other Stoppers. Odd that the three of us are out with our shopping carts again the day after a massacre. We go armed – I insist Ike and Trixie take weapons too because everything is different now. As we push our empty carts away from the walls of the Station I feel like running. It’s obvious Ike and Trixie are making a real effort to slow their pace too but they aren’t doing a great job. I hope anyone watching will assume we’re walking fast because we’re terrified.

  At the memorial park, apart from the drab colors, nothing has been disturbed. We could have imagined thousands of people dancing beneath the trees, their legs taproots that stretched who knows how far down into that welcoming soil. The thought of it makes me gag. I put a fist to my mouth and swallow back the spasm.

  We trundle our carts to the toy store, open the doors and push them inside.

  I’m so much happier carrying nothing but guns even if they are unfamiliar. Cain and Abel are no more, taken by the Commuters. I was sure I’d find them outside the walls along with the other dropped or abandoned weapons but they were gone. I’m concerned that the Commuters have taken an interest in firearms. If they ever attacked in that way, the Station would be finished within a day. Half a day.

  Or maybe just an hour. Perhaps every remaining Stopper would end their own lives, like the Jews at Masada. I can’t see it ever happening that way though; the Commuters are too interested in taking us alive. They’ll do it one by one if they have to – they’d rather do that than kill us off.

  Past the deli we find the entrance to the underground car park, and walk into the gloom. The hi-lux is parked on the second level down but already we can see the Commuters that line the walls and the floors and ceilings, woven there by their own roots and branches. This was how we saw them that first time, though the growth of plant-like tendrils was less obvious that day. Each Commuter had the beginnings of fine filament-like rootlets sprouting from the edges of their clothes. We thought it was some kind of hair or mold to begin with. But each time we returned the growth had continued until the resemblance to roots was too obvious to ignore.

  We were terrified that first day. We needed to get farther down into the car park but the Commuters’ bodies covered every surface. We tested their response with a sharpened broom handle first, poking harder and harder until the shaft of wood penetrated a Zegna suit and the tissue beneath without eliciting a response. We kicked them then, half-heartedly at first – the way you might nudge a body discovered in the woods – but soon it became kicking, and the three of us were booting into the first row of bodies and letting out cries created by months of pent-up frustration. Swearing and cursing the Commuters and their miserable, endless onslaught upon the Station. Hating them for wrecking our world and taking all the good things away from us. Particularly satisfying was steel-toe-capping a Commuter’s head until the skull gave way, because then you knew they wouldn’t stand up again. Ever.

  Laughing, crying, exhausted, we jumped into the hi-lux and drove it over the bodies, almost feeling through the tires the tearing and snapping of flesh and bone beneath us. It was more satisfying than driving over giant bubble wrap. Ike put the headlights on and we descended to the second sublevel. He parked around a corner where even someone looking for the car might not have seen it straight away. The truck had left ruts in the bodies and that was the way we walked back out of there into the light of day.

  We’ve been back many times since, watching the progressive changes in the Commuters and wondering over our timing. The back of the truck is full now, so full that its high suspension has dipped right down to obscure the top of the rear wheels.

  What we got:

  Water, canned and dried foods, fuel, tents and survival gear, warm clothes for the outdoors, guns and ammo enough to last a year of skirmishing, games, cigarettes. Best of all, we got wheels.

  What they got:

  Disposable numbers, unpredictable requirements, insomnia.

  And in the Station all they got is the suicide blues. We can’t stay there anymore.

  It would be the ultimate fuck-you for Ike to drive within earshot of the Statio
n. Ever since the first day that engine started up, we’ve been paranoid someone heard it and has been looking for it behind our backs. We were far enough away from the Station that no one did. Maybe we should drive past. If this car works, maybe others do now. Maybe it would give them a reason to go and search for their own vehicles and make a break for the country. Or maybe they’d just come after us for what we’ve done. I could understand them doing that.

  The driving isn’t as simple as I thought it would be. Ike has to maneuver in and out of plenty of abandoned cars and trucks in many parts of the city. Even on the freeway, there’s no easy route through. But I don’t care so much about the speed. Even like this, we’ll be far outside the city come nightfall. Far away from the Commuters and into the country where, I pray, things will be different. Normal again, or as normal as they can be.

  “Do you feel sorry?”

  Trixie doesn’t seem to have addressed the question to anyone in particular. I’m about to answer but Ike doesn’t give me the chance.

  “Sorry about what?”

  “For leaving them all back there?”

  “We’ve already talked about this.”

  “Yeah, but now we’re doing it.”

  “You know what, Trixie, it comes down to one very simple fact. If we wanted to stay alive, we had to do this.”

  “Maybe sometimes it’s better to make a sacrifice.”

  We must both hear the note of self-destruction that this idea rings with.

  “If there was something worth saving, if there was something it was possible to save, then maybe. But in this case, we are what it is worth saving.” Ike places his hand on Trixie’s bare knee. At the same time, he smiles at me in the rear-view mirror. She looks over at him with a kind of resigned neutrality. His hand squeezes her flesh for several moments, like someone testing the ripeness of fruit, then withdraws. Again the rear-view smile to me.

  I stare out the window at what we’ve been missing all these months.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Whatever happened to the city happened to the suburbs. It happened to some of the countryside too.

  But when we get forty miles or so beyond the city limits, the foliage and grass ceases to be the brown of stale menses. Gradually, the green of the earth returns like color to a sickly face. In spite of everything, I begin to relax. Only a little – I’m sitting back here with a fucking shotgun across my lap so I’m not, like, all peace and love or whatever – but some of the tension that has made its lair in every muscle of my body releases. Like someone unpicking stitches that hold a wound too tightly closed.

  Surely, now, my period will start. Now that we’ve escaped. But I don’t yet believe we have escaped. Which of us can say what will happen after nightfall? Nothing is any more certain than it was before the massacre. All we’ve done is change location.

  Oh yeah, and reduce our numbers. And leave the sanctuary of our walls.

  It’s so easy to forget what freedom means when you’re a prisoner. All you see is the romance of being unfettered the way you think you used to be. But you were guarded in your incarceration, protected by the mundane and the routine. Freedom’s twin is uncertainty and she is at our sides now the city lies behind us.

  “Ike?”

  “What?”

  “You still been marking off the days on your calendar?”

  “Sure.”

  “So what day is it today?”

  “I guess it’s Wednesday, the sixth of May.”

  “May? Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. I looked this morning before we left.”

  Trixie cranes around to take a look at me. Ike’s missed the tightness in my throat or maybe I just covered it well. But not well enough to fool Trixie. She doesn’t ask me anything. She just looks for a few seconds and then turns away.

  In the late afternoon we wind our way up into the hills. The roads are clear now with occasional vehicles abandoned on the soft shoulder – they look like they ran out of gas but who really knows?

  The world looks completely normal out here. Except it’s real silent and unmoving. I notice this whenever we stop to go to the ‘bathroom’. I haven’t seen a single bird or animal. There’s no wind. No traffic noise. No humming power lines. So it’s all wrong, it’s more silent than it ought to be. There’s certainly been no sign at all of other people. Was that what I’d expected? Or had I hoped to find others out here? People like us, clinging on, waiting for something, letting the animal inside them keep them alive.

  I can’t say if I’m disappointed or glad. It’s not confusion. It’s blankness. I’m unable to respond to normality. If this is normal.

  Before the sun sets, Ike pulls over in a broad car park that was once a lookout point and we get out. For a while we stand in silence, gazing across the flat plain to the city far behind us.

  “We’ll camp here.”

  “Outdoors?”

  Trixie is incredulous. We’ve explained this but she hasn’t taken it in.

  “In a tent,” I tell her.

  “Right. A tent outdoors.”

  “Yes. A tent outdoors.”

  “Will we be safe?”

  “We’ll take turns keeping watch until morning.”

  “Not me.”

  “No. Not you,” I say.

  And I think about that. There’s only three of us now. Sooner or later, she’ll have to learn. Ike is putting up the tent, a really spacious one that can be moved and re-anchored once it’s up. He going to place it in the L-shape made by the hi-lux and a practically vertical rock face where machines cut out the car park.

  I pick up my backpack and shotgun.

  “Come here, Trix. I’ve got something I want you to see.”

  I walk to the railings and look out over the grassy plain. Out there are windmills and farms and power lines and the freeway that turned into the road that brought us here. Hazy in the distance and purpling in the early evening light, the city looks almost normal. Nothing moves but us. The urge is to move very quietly, not to go whooping and hollering. I place my pack beside me and show Trixie how I like to hold a shotgun, like a girl who got a giant cock for her birthday.

  “A gun like this could be the best friend you ever have. It’ll do exactly what you tell it to. And, if you treat it with respect, it will save your life again and again.”

  “I don’t want to do this.”

  “I know you don’t. But if you want to stay alive, you’ve got to grow up. Real fast.”

  Knowing there’s nowhere else to go and knowing darn well I’m right in what I’m telling her, Trixie watches as I show her what’s what. As the minutes go by, she forgets her reluctance. It becomes inquisitiveness. Once or twice she giggles. From the back door of the hi-lux I see Ike watching and smoking quietly.

  The first time she fires the shotgun I can see her eyes glisten with shock and realization. Trixie has discovered power. There’s no point in me hoping she’ll use it wisely. Out here we’re way beyond the importance of wisdom. We are ruled by the whiteness of survival and the blackness of suicide. In such a world, guns become our lovers. Trixie’s got a big crush.

  Once I’m happy she’s safe to fire the shotgun, I take an empty soda can from the garbage bucket people would have used when stopping here to take in the view. I set it up on one of the posts of the safety railing. I take her back ten feet but she wants to go back twenty. I shrug. From the hip, she fires and the soda can disappears in a ripple of torn aluminum. I set up eight more cans. Trixie reloads and pumps. Shot after shot cracks off the hillside behind us and booms out across the plain. She hits five out of eight. Not bad. Certainly good enough to pop heads at close range if the need arises.

  By the truck, Ike crushes out his butt and resumes unloading.

  Through the night Ike and I sleep two hours and watch two hours until dawn.

  I’m the one out there when the light rises. It takes a long time to happen.

  There’s been no moon and no stars – cloudy and disappointing. It m
eant neither of us could see our hands in front of our faces. Sitting on a fold-out camping chair with a brand new shotgun – I haven’t even named him yet – it’s so dark you keep watch with your ears. You turn your head like a radar dish trying to catch sounds before anything can come too close. But there’s no sound. Soon you are nothing but your own thoughts in the blackness, unsure even if you are awake or dreaming. The first thing dawn does is fill your vision with the spirits of shapes so faint you don’t believe they’re real. You don’t understand what you’re seeing.

  Over an hour or more the ghosts become familiar things. Rocks and trees, the tent and truck. They come to life slowly and you realize the value of time. Even as slowly as this, nothing stays the same. You realize you ought never to sleep. Every moment should be observed in its precious uniqueness. By the time the sun rises I’m glad to be alive. I don’t remember the last time I could honestly say that to anyone.

  Regardless of everything, I have hope. It lives inside me.

  ***

  In the tent, warm in his sleeping bag, the slender man thinks about the girl.

  She is not far away from him. He can hear her breathing in the darkness. He shares her exhalations. For now that’s as much of her as he can possess but it’s enough. He asks himself, can he really be considering the same things he’s always considered? Everything in the world has changed but he has not. He seems not to have responded. He wonders if that’s why he’s survived this long. Maybe it’s because he has not accepted the new world.

  He is honest with himself. There is no denying his true feelings. He could lock them down, use his will against himself, true. But why? Why, in this new time when there is no longer any certainty that such self-control matters? Restrain himself for what reason? For what future? He suspects the world has ended, that until his own death comes there is nothing for him but the tiny anarchy of doing whatever he wishes.