Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  At long last she and Jason began to look to the south.

  The Sunbird was the only thing that appeared to have a ghost of a chance of moving again. Of the trucks, three were demolished across the highway, another lay overturned in the grass, and the last was riddled with bullets, resting on flattened tires.

  Diane helped Jason carry Erika out from the underbrush, and they laid her across the back seat. A few minutes later they pulled Rich from the wreckage of the overpass and laid him on the floorboard.

  No way could they just leave these two out here. They deserved better. They still deserved their little piece of the promised land.

  As the sun reached its zenith in the sky, a pall of oily smoke wafting overhead, Diane thunked her hand against the Sunbird’s fender. “Think this thing’ll get us there?”

  Jason looked at the New Madrid exit ramp, more or less intact. He hoped the descending ramp on the other side was still good. It was their only way of bypassing the blockade formed by the collapsed overpass.

  Beyond that? No telling what they’d find. And the Sunbird was hardly cut out to hack it as an all-terrain vehicle.

  But they would make it. Somehow, some way.

  They’d make it.

  8

  Heywood, Texas, still made a good place to heal. Jason was rooming and boarding with Molly Silva again, back in the same room with the blue gingham curtains and the cheerful wallpaper and the stoneware water pitcher and bowl. He sometimes found himself staring across at the high-backed chair where he’d found Tomahawk waiting for him to awaken the first time. Tomahawk…he could’ve used a little of that guy right about now.

  Molly Silva worked her herbal wonders on him and Diane, to shift their healing processes into high gear. She didn’t seem bothered by the swollen cheek, the bruises left by the rifle butt days ago. It was business as usual for Molly.

  The journey from New Madrid had been long and hard, keeping their speed slow for the next hundred miles or more to avoid running into earthquake damage. They steered around debris, weaved past buckled stretches of highway that looked like giant washboards. They backtracked to find other paths when the road proved unpassable, took detours to hunt out gasoline here and there. They never managed to catch up with Jack Mitchell and the others, but he didn’t care. The less he had to speak, the better, and he was sure Diane felt the same.

  Meanwhile, the two bodies they carried began to smell. At times the odor rising from the back was so bad Jason was tempted to put them in the trunk, but they were not cargo, and so he never worked up enough nerve to suggest the idea to Diane. And the urge would pass.

  Heywood, Texas.

  The impromptu funeral for Erika and Rich was held within three hours after they arrived late Wednesday morning. A pair of graves was hurriedly dug in the town’s cemetery, a place so mockingly picturesque that Jason would’ve sworn it couldn’t possibly exist. White picket fences, shady trees, shiny headstones. The entire town turned out, and the dogs roamed freely. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Jason refused to look at Erika until she was shrouded in a blanket, could not bring himself to see what two summer days in the back of the Sunbird had done to her. There was no reason to taint the memories of what she’d been, not when memories were all he had.

  Heywood, Texas.

  Jason soon lost track of the days, couldn’t tell a Friday from a Sunday from a Wednesday. No need anymore, though. In this place each day was much the same as any other, twenty-four-hour cycles that repeated endlessly, an infinite loop.

  He spent the days sleeping late, then sitting in the closed-up room staring out the window, or watching the soft, silent dance of the gingham curtains in the breeze. He would lazily stroke the broad head of T Rex whenever the dog came moping around for a visit.

  The dog seemed to understand better than any person here.

  Heywood, Texas.

  The double funeral was the last time he saw the group from Brannigan’s all together since his arrival. They all had a mountain of work to climb, settling in and setting up house, watering the seeds of a new life that he’d sown for them at the expense of his own. Meanwhile, all he had to do was heal.

  And one day he looked in the mirror, fresh from a shower under a barrel with a pull-handle that opened a nozzle. One day…he knew nothing more specific than that. He knew only that the purple bruises had faded from his face, that his muscles were loose again, that the cuts and scrapes were phantoms of their former selves and would soon disappear altogether.

  No more pain. He felt nothing. He had nothing.

  Except, he realized as he stared at the eyes in the mirror, a burning itch to get away from all the reminders of why he’d wanted to find this town in the first place.

  * *

  Diane found him packing a few odds and ends into a knapsack when she came over to get some tea leaves from Molly Silva. Molly was out helping tend someone’s garden, but the tea leaves no longer mattered when she saw Jason turn his back and thrust a box of shotgun shells into the knapsack with a terrible air of finality and inevitability.

  “You’re not,” she said, her voice coming out less firm than she’d intended, and more of a plea.

  He nodded without looking at her, still bending over his bed to jam a few pairs of socks beside the shells.

  “After all it took to get here? That doesn’t matter to you anymore? After all it took for you to find this place?”

  “Too many hopes invested here, Diane. What I put into it already doesn’t come close to what I thought I could get out of it.” He looked at her in the doorway, over his shoulder. “Too many dreams that got pissed away in Missouri. And you know, I don’t even remember anybody saying thank you.”

  Diane leaned heavily against the doorjamb, knees going weak with the old familiar feeling of loss. She shut her eyes to the warm, earthy wood tones of this room that seemed so beckoning to her, but which obviously fell on stonier soil within Jason. A hundred pleas crossed her mind and she rejected them all.

  “The worst is over, Jay,” she finally said. “Don’t you feel that? Now that we’re here, the worst is over?”

  He straightened to his full height, and she noticed just how good he was looking again, healthy and whole and in one piece. Fresh jeans, fresh denim shirt. Hair clean and cut short for a change.

  Same battered running shoes, though.

  “I don’t know. Maybe so.” He mulled it over a bit longer. “Yeah, I bet the worst is over. But you’re naive if you think the bad stuff won’t keep coming.”

  “We can face it, you know that.”

  “Maybe you can, together…but count me out. I don’t want the risks anymore. Everybody I’ve ever loved and needed has ended up getting taken away from me.”

  “You think you’re the only one?” she cried. Her voice was edgy with anger and this time she meant every bit of it. “Forget there’s a whole townful of people out there who’ve probably been no better off! Forget that! What about me, huh? How do you think I feel, after my daughter, after Farrah, after Caleb?”

  Jason nodded, eyes too empathetic to accuse him of indifference to her losses. “You know, with me, it started before the plague ever showed up.” He zipped the knapsack shut with a quick jerk of his arm. “I just want to call it quits to the hurting. I don’t want the responsibility of looking out for anyone else. I don’t want to keep seeing what I should’ve been here. If I have to keep feeling numb to avoid all that, fine. That much I can handle.”

  She blinked away tears while watching him sling the pack over one shoulder, grab his shotgun, pluck the car keys off the dresser.

  “Are you going to say goodbye to anyone else?” she asked.

  A terse shake of his head. “Why don’t you do it for me? And explain, okay? That’s what I really want to avoid this morning. Explanations. You’re the only one I could hash this over with.”

  She nodde
d, swiped at her eyes. “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. Find some mountains, maybe. Or an ocean. They both sound pretty good.”

  She nodded again, swallowing the lump creeping up her throat. “Jason,” she whispered, because a whisper was all she could manage, “if you don’t find a way to open yourself up again, you won’t really be living anymore. You’ll just be surviving. At best.”

  He turned away to watch the fluttering curtains for a moment, rocking on his heels, then turned back, a hard-edged smile on his lips.

  “I’ve got this theory,” he said. “Some of us quit living a long time ago. Only our bodies didn’t catch on. And we’re just too chickenshit to finish the job.”

  Minutes later, after they’d hugged, fiercely, after he’d left the room and his footsteps had faded and the front door had latched and his latest car outside had started and its engine had droned away to nothing, after she’d sunk onto his bed, Diane burst into tears. A flood of tears, hot and bitter. For herself. For Jason. For all the lost ones.

  But mostly, for all of them who were still alive.

  SEVENTH EPOCH

  AND A NEW DAY WILL DAWN

  October 1990

  He couldn’t say what made him decide to return to Southern Illinois, back to his hometown of Mt. Vernon. Curiosity, maybe. Obligation. Heeding the call of the one place on earth that he could say harbored his roots.

  Or maybe it was just because he’d run out of everyplace else to go.

  The two-plus years since he’d turned his back on Heywood, Texas, had been filled with little more than travel. Sometimes by foot, sometimes by car. He found the sons and the daughters of the earth scattered far and wide, and for the most part they had grouped themselves together out of both longing and necessity. Whether in the heart of an urban metropolis or in a small town or carving out life in the most desolate countryside, they were there…conclaves of humanity doing the best they could with what they had. Some places had restored electrical power, and life wasn’t all that different from before. Others appeared as frontier towns of the Old West. Still others seemed to have regressed by centuries. Neo-Iron Age.

  Sometimes he would stop, sometimes not. Sometimes he would be welcomed, and other times he would be led to believe that he’d be better off to keep moving, nothing personal, pal.

  But then, he was always moving.

  Jason found his mountains, his oceans. Forests. Cities. Plains. He made his first trip to Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, stared at the giant stone faces looking out over a dead nation. He visited the Rockies, traveling the road his parents had taken so long ago and stopping at the place where they’d gone over the side, or at least as near as he could judge based on a conversation with a disembodied telephone voice. He spent a few nights in the Las Vegas Hilton just to say he’d been there. He traveled through Virginia and on into Washington, D.C., where he met a woman on her own who wanted no exchanges of names, and so, as strangers, they’d coupled on the desk in the Oval Office of the White House. Neither of them had any illusions that they were making love; that certainly wasn’t the name for it.

  He’d visited a dilapidated truck stop called the Roadrunner in Oklahoma. He spent a full day strolling about the lot, the restaurant, the surrounding grounds. Tomahawk had died far from here, but since Jason didn’t know where, or what had happened to his body, he thought of this as the final resting place for Tomahawk’s spirit. The beginning of the man’s end. After all, had they not met here, he wouldn’t have died. Jason drank several bottles of warm beer, sometimes pouring it into the earth as an offering to his friend’s spirit.

  In hopes of feeling orenda in the air.

  Later, much later, he’d gone to rural New York in hopes of finding the remnants of an Iroquois community who’d sent one of their sons off to be a steelworker in the city, so he could tell them of what a brave and courageous man they’d raised. But nothing and no one turned up.

  One day in Pennsylvania, he looked up to see a lingering vapor trail soaring across the sky, the wake of a recent jet. He stared at it for more than an hour, watching until it dissipated into nothingness.

  What would happen if he could follow it, he wondered, like searching for gold at the end of a rainbow? What would he find at the other end of that line of man-made cloud? The question nearly drove him out of his mind, then he pushed it from thought.

  In Oregon, he’d made a friend and traveled with him for a while, an affable and sometimes even goofy fellow named Joey Palmer. Joey’s favorite garment had been an old gray sweatshirt sporting a mock college seal and the words psychotic state. But the Pacific Northwest is bad about rain, and one day Joey had to change a tire on a road slick with mud, and, in what seemed like a karmic echo of the first person he’d ever killed, Joey had been crushed underneath the car when the jack slipped.

  Jason had watched, feeling only the vaguest emptiness, and wondering if his tear glands had dried up and withered into wizened little husks.

  The summer after their final confrontation with Peter Solomon and Travis Lane and the rest, he returned to the devastated stretch of I-55 where it had all come together to fall apart. Mostly it was to pay his respects to Caleb. The old man had earned that much, many times over.

  The earth was still scarred, though beginning to heal over with grass, and while Diane’s makeshift cross was gone, he found the entombing fissure easily enough. Strange, to kneel over a spot that held such polar extremes of good and evil. Strange, as well, to realize that Peter Solomon had been just a man, as mortal as any of them were. That he was dead was of no comfort. Because, being just a man, he wasn’t necessarily one of a kind.

  Jason spared one long moment to stare toward the scrubby trees along the roadside. And remember, in love.

  But, as had once been said, all roads lead home again, and Jason found the adage still held true.

  Mt. Vernon, Illinois.

  There was no celebration, no welcome home for a returning son, only the stately indifference of the trees that had inherited it all. They blazed with color, red and orange and yellow and a thousand combinations of all three. Autumn. The air felt cool and crisp and clean at midday now.

  Just as he’d begun by losing track of the days, now he didn’t even know when the months changed, but he could make good guesses based on the turn of seasons. And now it felt like October.

  Jason spent the first night in his old apartment. He looked at ancient pictures until it grew too dark to see them anymore, flat rectangles of stiff paper showing him a younger Jason, at college, with a girl named Lora, or with dead friends, extinct family. A different Jason. A Jason who, along with the rest, had died a long time ago.

  A Jason who, if he listened just right, still called out from the grave, because he didn’t want to be exiled there just yet.

  * *

  Eventually the food he’d brought with him ran out. Always did.

  He set out on foot one morning, a cool sun shining through the remaining leaves still clinging to the trees. He slung the shotgun over one shoulder, carried a wooden crate in one hand. Behold the hunter, stalking the wild tin can.

  Midafternoon had rolled around before he found anything.

  The house sat on the western fringes of town. It was dim inside, as if the last people to live and die here had drawn the drapes and pulled the shades to discourage peepers. The house must have been quite nice in its day. Split level, Early American furniture. A hallway full of smiling portraits: Mom, Dad, three kids with braces. Jason would have bet a dozen cans of food he’d find a big barbecue grill out back if he looked.

  And in the kitchen, finally, cupboards that weren’t quite bare. He set the crate on a granite countertop. Even though it was still empty, the crate felt heavier now than when he’d set out this morning. He began stocking up. Dinty Moore beef stew. Jolly Green Giant green beans. Musselman’s apple s
auce.

  Jason sensed movement behind him even before he heard the noise, the faintest of footsteps. He spun, one hand gripping the shotgun’s sawed-off handle, the other dropping a can and going for the pump. He jacked a shell into the chamber, its sound sharp and loud in the small kitchen. He swung the barrel around and pointed it at a face three feet away. His reflexes had gotten exceedingly good these past two years, quick as a rattlesnake’s.

  They froze, locked into still-life.

  The woman hadn’t even flinched.

  There passed a long moment of recognition, and Jason’s mind reached back, back, dredging her up from a memory over three years old, past everything that had come between then and now. He remembered a hot night in another world, early that final summer before everything had careened off-course. He remembered the two of them sweating in each other’s frantic grip, locked together in the back seat of his red Mustang. He remembered the taste of cherry lip gloss, her blond hair in big loose waves, brushing her shoulders and his face. The moonlight, and how it highlighted her flawless skin, as if she’d never heard the word pimple. Her unappealing materialism, relying on Daddy to buy whatever this little debutante-in-the-making had a whim for. Most of all, he remembered her face. The face of a seductive child, he’d thought at the time. Somehow innocent and wanton in the same moment.

  Lilly Dannon was a child no longer.

  There was no Daddy anymore, he knew that by looking into her eyes. How those eyes had matured. No, matured was too gentle a word. Aged. Her hair, like Jason’s, was longer than it had been in those days, and had lost its cheerleader perk. Now it reached nearly to her waist, wild and unfettered. Her hips looked wider now, under dirty jeans, and beneath a threadbare flannel shirt her breasts were fuller.