As she stood in the doorway, enjoying the breeze, she noticed a flatbed truck turning from one of the side streets onto the main avenue. The truck rumbled down to the gates, where it parked and disgorged a small group of men. The men moved to the bed of the truck and began to unload what looked to be lengths of lumber. Two-by-fours or four-by-fours, she couldn’t tell for sure which it was. As she watched, the workers angled the lumber against the fences and hammered stakes into the ground at their bases to support them.
“Come look at this,” she called when Perry returned from the bathroom.
“What is it?”
They stepped out onto the balcony and watched the men labor. The crew worked swiftly, buttressing the inner fence every four feet or so.
“They’re reinforcing the fences for the herd,” Perry said.
“Is that good or bad?” Soma asked.
“I don’t know,” Perry said.
Someone rapped on the front door then and the two of them returned inside. Soma walked to the door and opened it.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” Sarge said. He had changed into civilian duds: jeans and a gray button up shirt.
“Not at all. Come in.”
Sarge glanced toward the open balcony doors. “You’ve probably noticed,” he said. “We’ve begun reinforcing the fences. Don’t worry. It’s just a precaution.”
“Faith is good, but lumber’s better,” Perry said.
“Despite what you think, faith and common sense can co-exist,” Sarge responded. “But I’m not here to debate you on spiritual matters. I just came to ascertain whether you’ve decided to wait out the herd here or not. Baphomet is very concerned for your safety.”
“We’ve decided to stay,” Soma said. “Just until the herd has passed.”
Sarge nodded quickly, his relief obvious. “Good. Good. I’ll let him know.”
“Shouldn’t he know already?” Perry asked.
“I do not presume to know what a being like Baphomet is or is not aware of,” Sarge said with a mild smile, refusing to rise to Perry’s bait. “I simply assist him to the best of my abilities.”
“You have a lot of trust in him,” Soma said soothingly, and the military man nodded, his filmy eyes flicking back and forth between them.
“Yes, I do,” he said, almost defensively. “Baphomet has never failed us.”
“We’ll probably leave as soon as the herd passes,” Perry said. “Hope your boss doesn’t mind.”
“He has said already,” Sarge replied tersely. “You are free to go anytime you wish. He only asked you to stay for your own sakes. We are not what you think we are.”
“And what do you think we think you are?” Perry asked.
“Some sort of paramilitary theocracy,” Sarge said.
“And you’re not?”
“Well… yeah, but in a good way,” Sarge said, looking surprised by his own response, and for some reason (which eluded Soma completely) the two men laughed simultaneously. All the tension seemed to drain out of Perry then and the two men parted amicably. Sarge bid them a good night, then withdrew from the apartment.
“I just wanted someone to admit it,” Perry said, as Soma looked at him wonderingly. “I don’t like it when people treat me like an idiot. Now… where are my binoculars? I want to make sure those guys are propping up the fences right.”
42
Soma was lighting the candles when Perry returned from the balcony for the last time that night. He had been watching the work crews all afternoon, but it had finally gotten too dark to see what they were doing, even with the binoculars. Looked like he was calling it a day.
“Think they’ll be ready for the herd?” Soma asked.
“I hope so,” Perry said distractedly, closing the balcony doors behind him. “I’d angle those boards a little shallower if I were them. They have ‘em pointed up at too steep an angle. They’ll bear more weight if they’re down lower, closer to forty-five degrees. But I ain’t the boss. I’m just glad we’re up high where it’s safe. Or safer.”
Soma was reminded of the way the neighborhood guys would gather at her house whenever Nandi was working on a home improvement project. Nandi had called them the Clan of the Handymen, but he was as bad as the rest of them. It never failed to amuse her the way the men gathered when Nandi stained a cabinet in the driveway or cleaned the gutters or worked on the car. Sometimes they would pitch in and help, but mostly they just argued over the best way to fix whatever was currently being fixed. Once, Soma had stepped outside to offer them some iced tea – it was a blisteringly hot July afternoon -- and had actually heard the Clan doing the Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor grunt in unison. She started giggling so hard she’d had to run back inside the house to pee.
“Are there many more of them out there?” Soma asked, meaning the mindless zombies outside the fences. What had Sarge called them? The outriders of the herd. She lit the last of the candles and shook out the match.
“Oh, yeah,” Perry said, crossing the room to the sofa, where their belongings were stacked. He put the binoculars in a rucksack and looked around for something else to do. He was as jumpy as a cat that had been kicked one too many times. “It’s hard to see them now,” he said. “The moon isn’t very bright tonight, but I’d say there are at least a hundred or so out in the field now. They just keep schlubbing out of the woods to the north of the facility. I’d say the herd is going to pass late tonight or early in the morning.”
Soma moved the candle to the coffee table beside the couch and sat, making the flame dance. Perry took off his cowboy hat, tossed it on top of their cooler and flopped down beside her. His hair was molded to the shape of his hat. She smiled, leaned toward him and brushed her fingers through his hair. Perry inclined his head toward her, closing his eyes.
“You know,” he sighed, as she feathered his shaggy gray hair, “if anything should happen to me after we leave…”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you after we leave,” Soma cut him off.
“If it does,” Perry went on, “this wouldn’t be a terrible place for you to come and live. I don’t think I’d get along too well here. I’ve never been very good at following the rules. I’ve always been a bit of an outsider.”
“A bit?”
“But it would be a good place for you. It’s secure. Orderly.”
“Are you calling me a conformist?”
He chuckled. “That’s not such a bad thing, is it? You can’t have a society without reliable people to keep it running, and you’re a nurse. You’re smart, dependable, industrious. They could really use you here.”
“How do you know Baphomet wasn’t talking about you?” Soma asked. She tucked her feet beneath her rump, pulled a pillow into her lap. “I mean, I don’t know if I even really believe he can see the future. There’s a big difference between sharing dreams and seeing the future. But even if he can see the future, he might have been talking about you, not me.”
Perry looked at her balefully. “He was talking about you,” he said. “He wants you here. I saw the way he was staring at you.”
“How was he staring at me?” Soma asked.
“The same way a dog stares at a bone,” Perry answered.
She started to scoff, then her smile faded and she shivered. “Let’s talk about something else,” she said after a moment. “That creeps me out.”
Perry nodded soberly.
When she was going to college, pursuing her nursing degree, a boy had become obsessed with her. His name was Mark Stevens. He had asked her out on multiple occasions, usually in the cafeteria, sometimes in the library or in one of the hallways should their paths chance to cross en route to classes. He was handsome enough -- slim, well-made face, gray eyes and a thick mop of sandy blond hair -- but he simply wasn’t her type, and there was something about the way he looked at her that set off some instinctive alarm in the back of her head. He didn’t look at her with appreciation; he looked at her like he wanted to possess her. It was a greedy look
, like a thief eyeballing a diamond necklace in a display case. Somehow, he got her phone number and began to call her at all hours of the day. This was before cell phones and social media. Luckily, her parents had caller ID and she was able to avoid talking to him. His invitations to dinner and a movie grew more and more insistent, and then he began to threaten her, saying things like “I’m going crazy thinking about you” and “if I can’t have you no one will”. Finally, her father went to the local police department and talked to an officer about the boy’s obsessive behavior, and that officer had gone to the boy’s house and had a long sit down with the lad and his parents. Shortly after that, the harassment had stopped. For a while, she had feared he would do something crazy, like kidnap and rape her, but the cop’s visit must have thrown enough of a scare into the boy to make him give up any notions of romancing her. Ever since then, she got nervous when men showed just a little too much interest in her. She nearly had a panic attack when Nandi asked her out a few months later, but she had nodded yes, too nervous to speak it aloud, and she was glad that she had. Nandi never stared at her the way Mark had, like a tiger drooling over a steak. He had always looked at her as if she were fragile and precious, like a Ming vase, something that needed to be protected. He always looked as if he were prepared to leap in front of a bullet for her, or push her out of the way of a falling piano or a runaway bus. It was annoying sometimes, being coddled like that, but it was also part of the reason she had fallen in love with him.
Now, as she sat talking to Perry, she recalled the way Baphomet had looked at her during the services, and later during their interview in his private chambers. She was only ever able to meet the man’s gaze for a second or two at a time, but each time she felt his scrutiny she had glanced up to see his bulging eyes gleaming intently at her. Into her. The force of personality behind those silvery eyes was paralyzing.
Well, if Perry had noticed it then it wasn’t just her imagination running away with her.
But why is he so interested in me? she wondered. I’m nobody special.
Feeling suddenly vulnerable and frightened, Soma scooted across the couch to Perry. He opened his arms and brought her in. For some reason, perhaps to distract her (or perhaps to distract himself), he started talking about his dead wife.
They had been sweethearts, off and on, all through school, he said. Both grammar school and high school. At one point, her family had even lived next door to his. They were neighbors for several years. More than that, they were friends. Just about every night after supper, their dads would sit out on the back deck, drinking beer and telling dirty jokes while their moms gossiped in the kitchen or helped one another with chores. For a few golden years, it was as if their two families were blended into a sort of unofficial hippy commune. “Dad used to call us kids the Oak Street Hooligans,” Perry said, “but it was really both families, their and ours. Our moms and dads got along better than us kids did sometimes.” He spent more time at her house than he did his own during the summers, he said, sometimes even staying the night, sleeping on a pallet in the living room, all the kids staying up watching horror movies on the VCR until they dropped off from sheer exhaustion. She was his first real kiss – during one of those late night horror movie marathons – and the first real girl he had ever seen naked.
“It started out as a game of truth or dare,” he recalled. “Me and my brother had stayed the night to watch the creature feature on channel 23. Her mom and dad had gone to bed early and left us to our own devices. Not exactly a smart thing to do, maybe, ‘cause truth or dare ended up being doctor in the laundry room before Bride of Frankenstein was halfway over.”
“Doctor?” Soma said, laughing softly. “How old were you?”
“Eleven or twelve,” he said. He nuzzled her head with his chin, arms wrapped around her. “Too young to do anything serious, really, but her mom caught us in the utility room and that was the last of the sleepovers. Her father got a good job at the glove factory not long after that and they moved to a better neighborhood on the other side of town. But for the longest time, I thought it was my fault they moved away. You know, for playing doctor. You ever play doctor when you were a kid?”
“I think everyone does,” she said.
“Who with?”
“My cousin Billy,” she admitted, somewhat embarrassed. “I was twelve. Seventh grade. He was just a few months older. It was my idea. I found one of my dad’s girlie magazines in his sock drawer when I was looking for some money for the book club and it had pictures of a naked man in it. A really hot naked man. I decided I wanted to see one of those things for real.”
“You never saw your dad naked?”
“No, he was a very private man. He never ran around the house naked or left the bathroom door open.”
“So what did you think?”
Soma snickered. “Gross! That’s what I thought. I thought his thing was terribly strange looking. Like a little pink worm. It didn’t look like the one in the magazine, that’s for sure!”
“They rarely do,” Perry laughed.
“I still think they’re strange looking,” she confessed, laughing along with him, “like mushrooms with really long stalks. But I’ve learned to like them since then.”
“That’s good.”
Soma nodded in agreement, still smiling.
“Except the really veiny ones,” Soma added after a beat, and she shuddered. “Ick!”
They talked for a long time that night, the sort of meandering conversations she had enjoyed with Nandi during their marriage. Leaning back against him, wrapped in his arms, she realized Perry even felt like Nandi -- tall, lean, a little bony but strong. So wonderfully, comfortingly strong! Eventually her thoughts drifted. Perry rambled about his boyhood adventures in rural Southern Illinois, a few teenage hijinks. Before she knew it, they were spooning on the couch, Perry holding her from behind, and she let him hold her, let her thoughts drift. She did not bother to put up any mental barriers, or guard her mind for intimate thoughts. Nandi might be alive. It might be cheating in a way, but Perry was here, and he was helping her get to her family. He was putting himself in danger for her sake, and if Baphomet was right, and one of them would not survive much longer, what really did it matter if they made love again in their dreams? It was all they had left in this cold dead decaying world.
Dreams of love. Such insubstantial things!
“Soma,” he murmured, his lips brushing her ear. She knew she was dreaming because his touch was soft and warm. The chest against her back, the hand on her belly, sliding slowly up to cup a breast, were as soft and warm as his lips. “Can we…? Will you let me…?”
“Yes,” she whispered back, and it was. He deserved this. She deserved this. What’s more, she wanted it. Needed it.
She rolled over to face him and met his lips with her own. The flesh of his face was ruddy and plump. His eyes were faded denim blue. His stubble lightly scraped her cheek. His soft silver whiskers tickled her nose.
“I love you,” he breathed into her mouth. A single exhalation, like a penitent’s confession.
“I love you, too,” Soma sighed. She closed her eyes and made him naked in her imagination, and when she opened her eyes again he was, like magic.
“Neat trick,” Perry said with a chuckle. “Let’s see if it works on you.”
It only seemed to last a few minutes, half an hour at most, Perry atop her, between her legs, moving slowly inside her, gouging her in the most delightful way, but night passed as they made love in their dreams, and with the dawn, the herd arrived.
43
“Holy shit!” Perry gasped.
With the southern twang, his exclamation sounded comically prolonged: “holeee sheee-it”.
Mutual orgasm had discharged them from the shared dream, and they woke belly to belly, wrapped in one another’s arms on the sofa. An apology had risen quickly, almost automatically, to Perry’s lips, but Soma arrested it with a kiss, telling him when the kiss had broken, “No, don’t sa
y you’re sorry.” He ogled her in surprise for a moment, then kissed her back, and they lay like that for several minutes, kissing lightly and stroking one another -- what her dad used to call heavy petting. His lips were cold and strangely inflexible, like kissing a mannequin, but it didn’t matter. His touch burned away the anxieties that had been growing inside her like a malignant tumor. Her fears fell to smoking dust at his caresses.
It didn’t go any further than that, not in the real world. Later, he arose, grabbed his binoculars and strutted over to the balcony. “Let’s see what’s shaking down in Hallelujahtown,” he said, and that was when he spouted his Kentucky fried expletive.
Soma was going through her bags, looking for something nice to wear -- and weighing her heart against a feather for her indiscretions with Perry. Surprisingly, she didn’t feel guilty at all, unlike the first time they had Shared. Perhaps it was because she had given herself to him purposely this time and she had no misgivings about it. Perhaps it was simply satisfaction and the guilt would come nagging along later.
When Perry shouted, however, she forgot all about her lack thereof. Clutching a blouse to her chest, she stammered, “What? What is it?” and trotted across the apartment to see.
“You might not want to see this,” he said as she approached the door.
“What?” she asked again, slightly annoyed by his cosseting. “How many are there?”
“A lot,” he said, passing the binoculars to her.
But she didn’t need binoculars. In fact, she could have seen the herd from twice as far away. Maybe even a mile, if she had a high enough vantage.
There was no other way to express her awe, so she repeated what Perry had said, minus the twang.
“Holy shit!”
Thousand of mindless deadheads -- maybe even tens of thousands – completely encircled the fenced community. The shifting multitude carpeted the open field that surrounded Siloam, stretching all the way to the distant hills. With nary a gap to be seen, the herd was like an inland sea, one composed of rotten, undead flesh, a near uniform gray that even seemed to surge like a body of water, flowing unrelentingly around the complex.
Soma (The Fearlanders) Page 25