Bobby froze as he glimpsed the figures on the bed. He held the hammer high.
Ecky slowly made his way to the bed and shook his head.
The couple had been dead for decades. All that remained were their bones and moth-eaten clothes. A vast swath of fly carcasses dotted the bed and base of the massive window, some hung limply from a long abandoned web. The couple’s empty sockets, propped up to better see the window by pillows, starred into oblivion.
At that moment Bobby felt a great peace settle over him. He lowered his head and said a silent prayer. He knew these people had made the ultimate decision, the ultimate sin the Pastor had called it, to take their own lives rather than face the reality of their world. But Bobby didn’t see it as a sin, and he could understand it completely, which scared him.
“Long rest far from the Creepers breast,” Bobby said. Though he refrained from spitting in such a sacred place.
“We should all be so lucky to die in peace. To die happy." Ecky put his hand on Bobby’s shoulder and said, “Come, we clear basement now.”
“Ecky, nobody has been in this place for a long time. How come the Folks didn’t take anything from this place?” Bobby asked with a sniffle. Even out of the biting wind the chill was impossible to shake.
“Perhaps, whoever had this house saw them and left it alone." Ecky shrugged. “But nothing really here that would entice scavengers. Us on the other hand . . . we can make due through winter."
Bobby looked to the peaceful couple once more, then headed with Ecky to the basement.
The space below offered up no demons, no undead, no surprises with one exception. Buried among the rotting reminders of the lives past, and the lives lost, Ecky found a dusty old CB radio. But with no solar chargers, or rigged components it would remain dead, however, he cleaned it and kept it near. It might come in handy when dealing with Baylor.
One of the first orders of business was to block the windows. With the tools they had on them, and the box of rusty nails they found in the basement, the engineer and the boy went to work. They started by cutting up huge chunks of carpet and used it to black out the windows before covering them with every available, and reclaimed piece of wood. When at last only a few patches of carpet in the great room remained Ecky gathered all the pots, pans and dishes and put stacks in front of every door and window, even the ones they’d barricaded with furniture. If anyone, or anything planned on breaking in they’d know. Ecky left one window draped, but not barricaded completely. They needed an egress to hunt and to gather what they could.
Using old bottles and cloth, Ecky did the best he could to craft a silencer of sorts. The elk were wandering just a few yards from the windows, and just one could provide enough food for him and Bobby for a good stretch. Although the seals were damaged on the refrigerator, Ecky managed to rig it with pliable pieces of silicon he found in the basement. With the seal able to hold, he gathered a few chunks of ice. It wasn’t perfect, but it would get them through winter.
In the back of his mind three things daunted on him. The sound of the gunshot that provided them food, the possibility of encountering wild men, and Ol’ Randy’s journal. Ecky still had not delved into the notebook. And while it was at the forefront of his mind, the cannibal soldier’s dead stare was right before him. He could barely sleep when he switched posts with Bobby. Every time he saw a shadow stir in the trees he tensed. Every creak of the aged home sent shivers up his spine. The night Bobby bagged the elk with the improvised silencer was the longest night he’d had since escaping the Settlement. The crack of the shot, though muffled, might as well have been an atomic bomb in the silent new world.
Spooked. He was spooked. Being on edge was good, but the fear that ravaged his mind was debilitating. Whenever his back was turned towards a door, even the barricaded ones, he felt himself on the edge of a cringe, as if someone were about to kick in the doors and windows.
The days turned into weeks, and the air grew colder, cold enough that Ecky dared to clean the chimney out as best he could. After clearing dead leaves and the mummified carcasses of a family of opossums he lit the first fire. The scent of burning pine carried far on the cold crisp air, but he had no choice. He wasn’t about to let them freeze to death, but the act of getting warm added another level to his paranoia.
When he wasn’t freaking out, he kept busy by using dead technology around the house to teach Bobby how to take advantage of it. There were valuable materials to be salvaged from the old televisions and stereos like glass and copper wire. Ecky didn’t get too complex but he kept the increasingly distant Bobby occupied. He worried about the boy.
Bobby spent most of his days, and some nights, beside the couple’s bed. He stared out at the distant, wintry sunrise with them. Though Ecky had yet to hear him speak to the bones he had his suspicions. The confinement of winter did things to the mind, and it was something he knew all too well.
When the weeks turned into months, his beard insanely long and scratchy, Ecky’s paranoia settled somewhat, but Bobby moved further and further into the solitary confinement of his own mind. Ecky decided to dig into Ol’ Randy’s notebook, but he would read it along with Bobby. He wanted no part of the secret keeping that brought them both to such an extreme state of existence.
Bobby prayed every day. He prayed to Jesus. He prayed to the stars. He prayed silently from within to any being that would hear him. He prayed with the couple. He prayed that they were at peace. He prayed that their souls were in Heaven. And while he prayed for them, and for Ecky, and the elk he’d taken until his head hurt, he prayed for something else even harder. He prayed for vengeance.
Every night, before Bobby turned in, he said his brothers’ names over and over in his head again. He captured the ghostly images of their memories for, he didn’t want to forget them. If he lapsed one day he was sure their images would be lost to him. As the nights grew longer and longer he found it harder and harder to hear their voices, their laughter. He prayed they were with the angels, with God, far from the terrible world of the dead. But above all else he prayed for vengeance.
Bobby shook with rage that started low in his growling belly. His hands trembled as he imagined his fingers closing around the Pastor’s throat. Every waking hour, minute by minute, his childish fears were being replaced by unbridled hatred for those that shifted the axis of his world. He actually smiled when he relived Lyda’s death at his hand. In fact, it was one of the only things keeping him from completely unhinging. The way he looked at it . . . at least he got one of them.
He imagined himself storming the Settlement, imagined himself killing them all, all of those that wronged him and his brothers, their blood melting the snow at his feet. But then the reality of the situation hit him, and hit harder than Pastor Craven’s backhand. With a handful of bullets, a half-empty stomach, numb fingers, and one tired engineer, he wasn’t going to be settling any scores.
He still didn’t know what had become of Ol’ Randy, and his boyish imagination did little to paint a pretty picture. Which only fueled his rage further. In the deepest darkness of night he kept telling himself, one day. One day he’d set things right. All he had to do was survive.
On a clear morning, sometime early in the new year, he watched the sunrise with the couple like he did every morning. Golden light played weird shadows on their bones, sparkled on the spider’s web in the man’s eye socket. But this morning was different, though, in appearance it looked like all the others. It felt different. The rays of the sun didn’t seem so distant, there were no clouds in the sky, not even a hint of a wisp, and for the first time in months, Bobby felt the sun’s warmth on his cheek. He smiled. So foreign to him had the simple act become that it hurt his face.
He wondered if the day the couple passed on was similar. Did they feel that life? Did they feel that energy? Did they feel it now on their brittle bones? Bobby liked to believe they did. He liked to believe that they basked in an endless warmth.
“It is good day, no?” Ecky sai
d from behind him.
Bobby didn’t turn. He nodded and closed his eyes, letting the sun’s light wash over him.
“Bobby, there is something we need to do . . ." Ecky stumbled over the right words. He wasn’t sure what was inside the notebook, and all he had to go by were the words Randy spoke to him the night they fled. He hadn’t even told Bobby what the man said to him, and he wasn’t sure he should, for they didn’t make complete sense to him. “Bobby, before we left Randy said to protect you, that you were special. He said,” Ecky stopped. He wasn’t a believer like the Folks. Sure, he had faith, but it was his own, unique and personal, a mixture of morals born from the harsh Catholicism of his childhood, and his own discoveries, found and developed over the years.
“What did he say, Yannek?" Bobby asked in a death whisper.
Something in that whisper made it impossible for him to hide the truth. “He said you were the hand of God, Bobby.”
Bobby absorbed the words. The hand of God . . . what did Ol’ Randy mean by that?
“He left something in his pack,” Ecky held up the notebook. “I haven’t opened it, but I think we should take a look together. It may shed some light on your condition.”
Bobby rubbed at his stomach, the bite had long since healed, but the reminder of what he did not become stayed with him.
“Open it,” Bobby said.
In the light of the new day, with the couple listening in, Bobby and Ecky read the words of their friend.
BOOK II
THE MAD CONDUCTOR
CHAPTER 14
0800HRS: NEAR NEVADA BORDER
I ain’t never been this far west since the fall. Contact has been light but old Ma and Pa aren’t being straight with me. They keep telling me that God spoke to ’em and he is guiding ’em, guiding us west. But if he’s talkin’ he sure as shit ain’t talkin’ to me. But for now I’ll let them do the pointing.
It’s strange . . . ever since leavin’ the Settlement they are different. Heck, I’m different when I’m not around some of the others. Funny how you think you know people, know ’em better’en their own mothers. That is, until you bunk up wit ’em and stand shoulder to shoulder on a daily basis, and in that cramped space you see you didn’t know jack shit about ’em. It was then that I realized somethin’ and I think Ma and Pa already came to this conclusion before setting out.
We started the Settlement with our friends, our fellow worshippers, but fact of the matter is we didn’t know these people. We lived around them for years but we didn’t know ’em. Not to say they’re bad folks, not at all . . . just they’re views is different, and as the years pass they get more and more removed.
It’s like the techno cults that sprung up when the First War really got going. When it was nasty and we were losing ground. When we started to turn on each other. What started out as honest to goodness religion turned into something else, something dark, the damn devil’s work if you ask me. I feel that the same thing is happening to our folks, maybe this little excursion will be the break I need, the break we need.
We can’t afford to turn on each other. Not after we’ve worked so hard. But truth be told there were many that ain’t agree with our trip this far west. Ma and Pa’s sons included. But it’s God’s will, and God’s word . . . I just hope they’re right.
0600HRS: MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
Old habits die hard, I suppose, it’s early. Pa Thorton is running a perimeter check, Shirley is sleeping and I should be too, but I can’t shake that funny feeling. We passed the town we were supposed to pilfer two days ago. I don’t know how much longer I can be led along like a good doggie. I mean to confront them.
0600HRS: NEVADA CALIFORNIA BORDER
Craziest shit I ever seen. Dunno how to even describe this. My damn hands are shaking, God is bat shit crazy, and we’re all fucking cursed . . . even the animals. Cats, cats, thousands, tens of thousands of ’em, and the sound, the noise is breakin’ my ears. It’s like all the domesticated cats, that didn’t wind up in some poor man’s stomach, or starved, locked inside a home, have gathered here in this patch of fucking sand.
The sand, the heat, it’s like Iraq all over again. One big fucking dustbowl filled with cats and fucking sun-baked, bone-white Creepers. Even from our vantage point I can smell ’em, both of ‘ em, a wash of ammonia and rot like some shitbag Lambeau-sized litter box. It ain’t hard to see what’s happened here, but it’s sure as shit hard to put out of my mind.
Damn swath of Creepers hit the desert headed east and mother nature met ’em head on. She dried their skin, hardened ’em and they slowed, like the cold slows ’em and then the carrion moved in. The line of bodies of the fuckin’ undead feast stretches over to Cali and beyond the range of my binoculars. Bugs, birds, and cats all eating, scraping a living from the undead. Hell I can see ’em trying to move, twitchin and clawin. It’s damn awful. Where the fuck did the cats come from?
Shit, before the First War everyone knew a crazy cat lady and most people had ’em as pets. Used to get emails with stupid pictures of ’em . . . I guess it’s no surprise they’re everywhere now that their instincts have resurfaced. Great hunters. Survivors. Lot like us, those that hung on.
God Almighty, what a Hell you’ve tested us with.
0600HRS: CALIFORNIA
This is damn crazy. We’re headed towards one of the biggest clusters of Creepers on the continent. The fall of L.A was just as bad as New York and any other major populated city for that matter. City folk didn’t have the means, or the land, to survive when it went sour. They were too packed together . . . hell most of ’em didn’t even have guns. It was a mess and I don’t expect much has changed. I doubt that there are even any survivors in the cities, just a Creeper cluster fuck and the garbage of days gone by. At least I can’t hear the fuckin cats anymore. But now it’s unseasonably cold, cold as a witches titty in’a brass bra. Or maybe that’s me, chilled to the bone. Tomorrow mornin’ I ask ’em, no matter what.
I love both of ’em to death but they can’t fool me, no sir, can’t fool me no longer. I actually think they’re waiting to see how far I’ll go without question. I’m sure they’re testin’ me but it sure as shit ain’t my loyalty. Tomorrow I get answers.
0600HRS: ON THE EDGE OF HELL
They wanted me to write this down—said it was ‘portant to matters that would arise once we get inside the city. THE CITY! I still don’t believe it. Lord have mercy on our crazy souls. I’ve always done right by you . . . never ate nobody, even when times were tough, never hit a woman, drank more than my share, but I’ve always done right by you. So I beg of you now, watch over us, watch over us that we may get through this insanity.
I suppose I should just get to writin her all out. This crazy thing, this mad dream. We was sitting round a fire in a busted up Shell station. Out of the wind, and out of sight they laid it on me.
I said, “What are you two at? Lied to everyone, cludin’ me, and Lord knows I don’t take too kindly to liars. I’ve always been straight with you all . . . it’s time you’re straight with me.”
Thorton, in all his grizzled, gray-haired glory, lookin’ like Willie Nelson, only skinnier, if ya can imagine that, but muscle like steel cables, spoke first. He said, “Randy, been years since we heard much of anything from the outside, ten years . . . hell, maybe more. Baylor brings some promise from the east but we’re all scattered, all different.
“Even in our own house there is disorder. Some folks gettin’ caught up in the spirit, forgot that it just wasn’t God that saw them through the madness. My own boys." Thorton got all teary eyed then. Can’t say I blame him.
“What my husband is tryin’ to say is,” Shirley cleared her throat. “Is that God works in many ways . . . some may seem strange, but make no mistake it is God. Even in science." Shirley stood straight up as she spoke the word. Her hair still clinging to the flaming red of her youth, but most of it was gray now. Lines of wrinkles at the corners of her mouth spoke of all the sadness such a strong woman had
seen. In those green eyes I saw hope, just as I heard it in that word . . . science.
See some of the Folks been blamin’ the whole disaster on science, some on sin, some on technology, but no one knows. Hell, still a mystery how they couldn’t see that science, and the skills of the good doctor were keepin’em alive through all these winters. You just can’t change some people’s minds I reckon.
Just look at the techno cults, crazy bastards worshiping broken televisions and computers, bowing before black screens, the sacrifices . . . how had we gotten so far away from what was? But I can babble all day about the things I’ve seen. Let me get back to old Ma and Pa.
“Shirley speaks true, Randy, it’s science, by the grace of God that will save us. Science is a gift from the Almighty.”
I cut him off, “Don’t you preach to me, Thorton Crannen, I speak with God on a personal level. So quit stallin and stumbling round yer words and have ’em out.”
“Fair enough. You know we’ve been scanning the short waves, the satellites, hell when the solars are charged we’ve even been scanning the television waves. For years the only things we’ve heard were lost souls at their ends, pleading to any that would hear. Then, even those stopped. And for many winters, nothing . . . We were beginning to lose hope."
Thorton pulled a small recorder out of his pocket. I ain’t seen one of ’em in years, maybe ten winters. He handed it to me.
“I take it you haven’t gone to banging rocks on things and howling at the moon just yet, Randy, so I think you know how to use one. Go ahead.”
I looked at him and back at that battered recorder. We had power back at the Settlement thanks to one commie bastard and some very reliable wood-burning generators, but batteries was out the question. Batteries?
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