“I cannot tell you,” Baphomet said.
“You can’t or you won’t?” Perry asked.
“I… wont,” Baphomet admitted. “It would affect the decisions you’re about to make, which would alter the sequence of events that follow those decisions. I do not wish to alter that future.”
“So no such thing as fate?” Perry said. “God doesn’t have a plan for all of us? It’s all just happenstance?”
Baphomet smiled. It was a condescending, slightly sympathetic grin, as if he were a hoary old professor amused by an obstinate student. “The future is not set in stone, Perry Clark,” he said. “Fate and free will cannot coexist in the same universe. And yet, it does. It is a contradiction, I know. Or so it seems to us. But we are corporeal beings. We do not see time as God sees time. For us, time is linear, a chain of events, cause and effect, adamantium links that cannot be prized apart. We perceive time that way because we are material beings and that is how our brains function. But God has no such constraints. God is not a material being. For Him, time exists all at once, and not at all.”
Perry smirked. “Metaphysical mumbo jumbo.”
Soma shot him an anxious look, afraid he might anger their host.
But Baphomet only laughed. “You’re right. But it’s the best -- the only way I can explain it.”
“So if you’re not going to ask us to stay, why did you want to see us?” Soma asked.
“But I do want you to stay,” Baphomet answered. He saw their objections rising to their lips and held up a hand. “Only a little while! A couple days! Just until the herd has passed. They’re nearly upon us now.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I think we’ll take off before they get here,” Perry said. “If they’re coming from the north, we can head east or west and detour around them. I don’t see what the problem is, unless we actually are being held prisoner here, in which case you better just nail me up on one of those utility poles now, because I’m not going to be a very cooperative inmate.”
Perry put his hands on his hips as he spoke, setting his feet apart.
Sarge rose with a sigh and the young, gray-skinned man looked nervously to Baphomet.
Baphomet stared at Perry, and Perry glared back. Finally, the tattooed man spoke. “You are quite welcome to leave, of course, any time you wish,” he said. “Sarge will return your weapons and your vehicle if you insist on going now, but I warn you, if you leave before the herd has passed, there are very few timelines in which either of you survive the next three days.”
“All seeing and all knowing, huh?” Perry smirked.
Baphomet inclined his head, staring up at Perry from beneath his eyebrows. “All I see for you is darkness,” he intoned. “Unless you wait out the herd.”
The man’s tone froze the derisive grin on Perry’s face. Soma realized she was holding her breath and let it out, then remembered she didn’t have to breathe anyway. For a moment, the space inside the preacher’s office seemed to hum, as if some powerful generator was cycling up in the next room. The universe contracted around her. She could feel it bending, squeezing in on her, pressing in from all sides. At the same time, ghostly images flitted through her mind like the splinters of some half-remembered nightmare: their truck overturned, Perry dragged through the broken windshield and ripped apart by a mob of the mindless dead. She saw him screaming, coming apart at the seams, insides spilling out in gory freshets. She realized Baphomet was projecting the images into her mind, sharing his precognitive vision with her in much the same way that she had shared her sensual dream with Perry -- some aspect of the hive mind the talking dead could access.
Perry must have seen it, too, for he took an unsteady step backward. “Let… let us think about it,” he stammered, and then he looked at Soma with an expression very close to horror on his face.
“I’m sorry,” Baphomet said. “It was the only way that you’d believe me.”
Even Sarge and the little nervous fellow seemed affected. Sarge looked mournfully at the pair, as if they were already zombie chow. The little PA shuddered, eyes downcast.
“Please stay,” Baphomet implored. He looked genuinely concerned for their safety, almost desperate. “Just until the herd has passed.”
That shivering sense of unseen power – as if the very molecules of the air were dancing -- had faded. The atmosphere in the room, in its absence, seemed markedly heavy, and there was a smell, sharp and metallic, like the air gets right before a thunderstorm. Ozone, Soma thought. That, and the sickly sweet odor of decaying flesh, but Soma was so used to that smell she barely noticed it anymore. Even Perry, as fastidious as he was about his personal hygiene, smelled like rotten meat.
“We’ll think about it!” Perry said roughly, and he hustled Soma toward the door.
No one moved to stop them, but Soma broke away from her companion before Perry could get her out of Baphomet’s office.
“My family!” she exclaimed, wheeling suddenly toward the man. She had to yank her arm from Perry’s grasp to do it -- did it without thinking -- but it had suddenly occurred to her that their host might have the answer. If he could really see the future, he might know what had become of her family. He might be able to tell her! “Are they alive? Will I find them? My daughter, Aishani -- is she safe?”
Perry looked at her in shock -- and, truth be told, a little bit of disgust.
“Please, tell me,” she said to the preacher.
Baphomet smiled sadly and shook his head.
“They’re dead? Or you can’t tell me? ” Soma asked, her eyes large and grave.
“I don’t know,” Baphomet said. “God has not revealed that knowledge to me.”
“Not all-knowing then,” Perry sneered, and then he put his arm around Soma’s shoulders and steered her toward the door. Soma glanced from Baphomet to Perry, brow furrowed, but she allowed herself to be steered. Perry opened the door, pushed her through the exit, then called back, a little less scornfully, “We’ll think about it.”
40
They spent the remainder of the afternoon exploring the campus.
Perry wanted to examine the fences up close -- with a mind to escape, she knew, if the necessity arose. So they walked the inner perimeter of the compound’s protective walls. Not the whole thing. It was a big complex, with lots of people scurrying about, and they didn’t want to draw too much attention to themselves. But they walked most of the east fence and committed to memory the layout of the sprawling facility.
The security fences were very solidly built, Perry concluded. There were coils of razor wire at the top, like a high security prison, and the wire mesh and posts were set in a concrete skirting, also like a prison.
“About the only thing that’s getting past these fences would be a tank, or a really massive herd,” he opined.
Soma nodded in agreement, looking nervously toward the nearest guard tower. The guard manning the tower was armed with what looked to be a high-powered rifle -- or maybe a machine gun, she couldn’t tell -- but he seemed to have no objection to their very obvious snooping. He just watched from above, face bland, eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. None of the guards seemed to care that they were investigating the fence, not even when Perry curled his fingers in the links and shook it.
They spotted several deadheads as they walked the perimeter.
The denizens of Siloam called them Innocents, but they looked far from innocent. Although their faces were bereft of sentient awareness, they unerringly evinced fearsome expressions of desperate hunger or frustration. They shuffled past like the ghosts of some long extinct warrior race, moonstone eyes glinting in the dark caverns of their eye sockets, lips peeled back from chipped and rotten teeth. Their bodies were ravaged by violence. Clothes tattered. Flesh riddled with bullet holes and horrific wounds. To Soma, they looked like refugees from hell. They were refugees from hell, she thought, and not so long ago she had wandered the same hopeless paths, neither dead nor alive, and aware of nothing but her immediate surrou
ndings. That and the hunger. The constant, maddening hunger.
There was maybe a dozen of the mindless dead in the open field surrounding the compound. They just shambled along north to south, limbs moving in stops and jerks, like marionettes operated by a spastic puppeteer. Most took no notice of their reawakened cousins, who bustled about the fortified community just yards away. Only a couple went into the feeding frenzy, so desperate for sustenance they were compelled to attack their own kind.
The emaciated creatures howled and rushed the fences, only to topple into the dry moat that encircled the compound, impaling themselves on the spikes that toothed the ditch. There they twitched like insects on pins, snarling and clawing at the stakes they were impaled upon -- until a shot rang out from the nearest guard tower and put them out of their misery.
It was a mercy, she knew, but it cast a pall on the fairness of the afternoon, and it wasn’t long before she wanted to retreat to their suite. She needed to process everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. She had to decide if she wanted to stay, or continue in search of her family.
“Just a few more minutes,” Perry said when she suggested they return to their apartment. “I’d like to have a look at the gates before we go back.”
Soma considered returning without him. He was a big boy. He could take care of himself. But the thought of being separated from him made her nervous. She was afraid something might happen, to one of both of them, if they lost track of one another.
She followed him grudgingly, paying more attention to the inhabitants of the compound than the structures. She observed their body language and expressions, not sure what she was looking for exactly. Suspicious behavior, she supposed. Some sign that they were being plotted against. Conspiracy. Concern.
Despite her paranoia, no one seemed unhappy to be there, or to bear them any ill will. Every Resurrect they passed greeted them in a friendly or neutral manner, no hint of subterfuge in their demeanor.
At the northeast corner of the fences, a woman in an ankle-length denim skirt was calling out to the deadheads tromping by.
“Hello!” she shouted through the chain-link, making a megaphone with her hands. “Can you hear me? What’s your name?”
She had long straight brown hair and a pudgy, shapeless figure. She turned as they approached, revealing a round, earnest face with very large blue eyes, slightly cataract from the Phage.
“Oh! Hello!” she said with a self-conscious titter.
“Hi,” Soma returned.
“Whatcha doing?” Perry asked, hands in his pockets.
The woman in the denim skirt gestured toward a nearby deadhead. The zombie had paused on the other side of the moat, face slack, filmy eyes rolled back in its skull.
“Sometimes, when they’re close to awakening, you can draw them out of the fugue state by talking to them, asking them questions -- what’s your name, where do you live, that sort of thing,” the woman said. “I guess it reminds them of who they used to be. Gives their brain a little jumpstart.”
Intrigued, Soma examined the nearby deadhead. “How often does it work?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s very rare,” Denim Skirt said. “I’ve only brought back one so far. He was stumbling across the field, just like that one. I called out to him, asked him what his name was and he stopped and said ‘Jim’, just as plain as day. I thought I would pass out, I was so surprised. We hustled him into the compound before any of the other Innocents could hurt him. Fed him. Got him cleaned up. He works in the maintenance department now. His name’s Jim Meadows. Really nice man. He came and thanked me personally a couple days later, though I didn’t really do anything special. He was probably going to wake up soon anyway.”
Soma walked to the fence. Curling her fingers in the links, she shouted, “Hey! Hey, you! What’s your name?” She remembered her own awakening then, and because Nandi was the first thing she had thought of -- his face, his fine surgeon’s hands -- she called, “Are you married? What’s your wife’s name?”
The zombie standing on the other side of the moat shifted a little, and then its face contorted, and it made a hissing sound and stumbled rapidly away.
Soma looked back at Denim Skirt.
The chubby gal shrugged. “Sometimes it makes them mad, too,” she said.
Perry fidgeted impatiently. He wanted to look at the gates. Soma said goodbye to Denim Skirt Lady and they continued on their way.
“You think this moat goes all the way around the complex?” he asked, and then he answered his own question: “I’m sure it does. It would be pointless to have one if it didn’t.” They hiked to the main gate and looked out at the drawbridge. “We’re not leaving by truck unless they let us,” he sighed. “And we can’t climb over the fences. Not with all that razor wire. It would cut us to pieces. We’re not going anywhere without a by your leave. Not unless there’s a drainage pipe somewhere. Something we can crawl through.”
“Let’s see if they’ll let us leave,” Soma said.
“What do you mean?” Perry asked.
Soma turned to the guard manning the nearest tower. “Hey!” she shouted up to the fellow. “Will you open the gates for us?”
The guard had been leaning against the railing that encircled the elevated booth, smoking and staring toward the westering sun. He leaned over the rail when Soma shouted at him and yelled down, “What?”
“Will you open the gates for us?”
The man scowled. “Why?”
“We want to leave!”
The guard frowned down at them a moment, then headed for the ladder.
Perry and Soma watched tensely as the guard climbed down. He was a big man in a tight olive uniform, almost as big as Sarge himself. A high-powered rifle with a scope was strapped across one bulging shoulder. He climbed to the ground, tucked his uniform blouse back into the waistband of his pants, then marched toward them.
“You want to leave?” he asked. “On foot?”
Soma could tell by the tone of his voice that he thought they were the biggest fools he had ever met. He gawped from the zombies stumbling around outside the fences -- whose numbers had been steadily increasing all afternoon -- to the idiots who wanted to go for a stroll with them.
“Will you open the gates?” Soma asked.
“I guess,” he said reluctantly. “This is an open community. You’re free to go whenever you want. Everyone is. But you know those things will attack you if they’re hungry enough. And if one attacks, they all come running.”
Soma smiled at Perry. “Well?”
Perry looked at the gates thoughtfully. Nearly a minute passed as he mulled things over in his head. Finally, he said, “It would probably be wise to wait until the herd has passed. Like Baphomet said.”
The guard’s lips tightened. “Do you want to leave or not?”
Soma touched his arm apologetically. “I guess not. We’ll stay until the herd passes.”
The muscles in the guard’s jaw twitched. She actually saw some of them twitch. He had no skin on the right side of his face. He turned abruptly and stomped back to his post without saying another word.
Perry put his hands on his hips, grinning down at her in admiration. “You cut right to the chase, don’t you?”
Soma smiled faintly back at him. “I’m tired, Perry. I’ve had enough excitement for one day. Let’s go back to the suite and get some rest.”
Sarge came to see them shortly after.
41
The lobby was deserted when they returned, the service desk unmanned. The quiet lay so thick in the common areas and corridors that Soma felt as if her head had been wrapped in wool batting. “Reminds me of that TV show that was so popular just before the Phage,” she said as they climbed through the stairwell, the clomp of their feet echoing up and down its concrete throat.
“Which one?” Perry asked.
“That ghost hunting show,” Soma said vaguely, trying to remember the name of the program. She and Nandi used to watch it on Friday
nights, curled up together on the sofa. The paranormal investigators never seemed to catch any solid proof of the afterlife on video, but they certainly did a lot of yelling and running around. “Oh, you know the one,” she said. “All the actors died in that fire. It was on all the news channels. It happened just before the outbreak.”
Perry chuckled. “Oh, yeah. The Ghost Scouts. We watched it once or twice. Seemed pretty hokey to me.”
They exited the stairwell into a long, empty corridor.
“They were always investigating hotels like this,” Soma said. “Running around in the dark with their night vision cameras. We used to make fun of it but we watched it every week.”
“I guess we’re the ghosts now,” Perry said.
She looked at him sharply. “That’s kind of creepy.”
On the rare occasions she thought about it when she was alive, Soma had always imagined the afterlife to be a sort of protean dream world, a psychic simulacrum the untethered soul constructed around itself upon death, each person’s afterlife unique to itself and mostly separate. Although she did not believe in a literal heaven or hell, she did believe that human consciousness persisted after death. There was just too much anecdotal evidence to dismiss the notion completely. Yet she had never imagined her afterlife would be like this -- this state of animated corruption, of suspended dissolution. But they were ghosts in a way, weren’t they? They had died and come back. They haunted a world that had moved on, indifferent to their suffering. They were like termites trundling through the walls of a derelict house.
Perry used a key to unlock the door -- an actual physical key, as the card-swiper didn’t work without electricity. Their room was uncomfortably warm and musty-smelling, the light coming through the windows gold and guttering. It did not look as if anything had been disturbed in their absence. Their belongings were still stacked neatly beside the sofa: clothes, coolers, supplies. Soma moved to the balcony doors and opened them while Perry went to the bathroom to wash up.
Soma (The Fearlanders) Page 24