by Joe Schlegel
They neared the courthouse, and they treaded into Trapper’s window of sight.
He tracked the unarmed cult leader and grumbled quietly, “Grab a gun or get out of the way, asshole!”
His finger twitched near the trigger.
“Grab a gun or get out of the shot!”
But Aaron and his armed guards marched out of Trapper’s range, obscured by the courthouse.
“Damn!”
Jake led half of the bar’s contingent near the central intersection. From Main Street, they marched around the overgrown front lawn—
They halted.
And they raised their rifles, unexpectedly confronted with more of the armed cult.
Emily and Edward aimed into the group.
Aaron, however, raised his hands in haughty resistance and bellowed his voice for all to hear, “Hold your fire! Breathe! Everyone hear me now! The uninfected must be spared! This is not the time for rash actions or misguided fears! For the vibrant future of Xenia, please lay down your weapons, my children! Let us sort out this unfortunate turn of events!”
“How can YOU talk about our future,” Jake snarled, “or lecture US about misguided fear?! You have robbed us of our futures, you and your ENTIRE cult! The very foundation of this town has been shattered!”
He peered up at the courthouse.
And he schemed.
Aaron quickly defended, “That’s not wholly accurate, I’m afraid! We have preserved our society! The infection cannot be allowed to survive! It can’t be given a chance to spread! That is what we have ensured!”
Jake lowered his gaze back down to the armed cult.
He surreptitiously gauged their distance...
“To hell with your bullshit,” he thundered. “You’ve been killing innocent people in the shadows! Fear and paranoia have warped all your gullible minds!”
Aaron attempted again to explain. He stepped away from his armed guard, but only by a few feet.
The armed contingent behind Jake proved as intransigent as their spokesman and refused to budge or retreat.
“We seek only to protect the interests of the untainted community!” Aaron kept his hands out in front of him, “If someone turned in the midst of a community meeting, in close-quarters, our numbers would be decimated in seconds! The damage would be absolutely irreparable! We’ve prevented this catastrophe for months now!”
“It is YOU who decimated our numbers! Everything has been secretly falling apart at your order! The thing you feared the most has happened BECAUSE OF YOU!”
Jake charged forward several steps.
His finger hovered just over the trigger of his rifle, aimed at Aaron’s chest.
The contingent advanced with him.
Reactively, Emily and Edward retreated several, hesitant steps.
But when they noticed that Aaron stood tall and proud against the imposing flock, they dug in their heels. They raised their rifles up to their shoulders and aimed into Jake’s chest.
The contingent split in half, each sighted one of the cult leader’s guards.
Jake eyed the angle of the courthouse’s edge, then he examined the believers’ position. He smirked.
Aaron pled, “No innocent blood has been spilled! You must understand the express Divinity of our intentions—”
Gunfire echoed overtop the stand-off.
Yet no one in the street touched their triggers.
A torrent of bullets traced up from Edward’s feet, through the side of his head, and up through Emily beside him.
Their polo-shirted bodies tumbled lifeless to the asphalt.
From the jail-top basketball court’s cage, Trapper studied the fallen guards through his rifle sights. But they never moved, never reached for their guns.
Aaron peered behind him.
His face slackened, mortified to find his most faithful servants so abruptly fallen. Blood poured to the ground beneath their wounds.
Then he pounced for one of the assault rifles.
He picked it up and swung it around—
Jake rushed forward, smacked the barrel aside, and threw a right hook into the cult leader’s jaw.
Aaron dropped the assault rifle numbly.
He stumbled into Trapper’s view.
Trapper centered him in his sights, “Pick that gun back up. Please give me justification.”
Instead, Aaron turned from Jake, and he ran.
He only managed a few strides before he slowed again.
Anika and a couple others pedaled up the street. Near the confrontation, they dismounted from their bikes. They shrugged the rifles from their backs and held them in their hands, poised.
Outnumbered, Aaron sought to escape down by the library—
He halted immediately. Ben stood firm in the middle of the crosswalk, a metal baseball bat in his hands. Behind him, the rest of the contingent provided support.
Anika shouted, “Where the fuck you think you’re going?”
“This is all a misunderstanding,” Aaron pled.
She marched toward him, “No, I understand perfectly, because your people just shot up the walls at the bar! They were going to line us up, weren’t they? Execute us like vermin if we so much as had a nose bleed? And my sister,” she croaked, “and all the others, they had a chance to enjoy their lives, to regain their identities!”
Anika charged to within a few feet of him and wound up her left hand.
She punched Aaron opposite of the reddened bruise that Jake gave him.
His face contorted into embarrassment and rage.
“Petulant child,” he seethed, “and insubordinate BITCH!”
He reached out, and he gripped her throat.
She wrapped her hands around his wrists and tried to pry his fingers from her neck. Her eyes bulged as the breath halted in her lungs.
A single gunshot rang out over their heads.
Aaron’s head jerked sideways on his shoulders.
His grip slackened and his eyes clouded.
Then his body crumbled to the street. Trapper studied him through his rifle sights.
Anika hurriedly stepped backward and wiped the spattered blood from her face with her shirt.
The bar’s full contingent checked around, desperately silent and attentive. They listened for them, but they searched for any wayward believer of the executed leader.
A moment passed.
And then several more moments cascaded out from the rallied survivors.
Lowering their rifles, a few of the contingent rushed to Anika’s side. They peeled off their own clothes to replace her blood splashed attire, and they provided a human wall for utmost privacy in the middle of Detroit Street.
A faint babble rippled overtop the survivors.
It sounded distant, yet frantic.
Ben jogged over to Jake, and the contingent reunited and gathered close, ever vigilant around them. He consulted, “What about the rest of the cult? Are they all accounted for?”
“I got two of them outside the old bar,” Anika replied.
Mohammad motioned beyond the city trucks and past the sheriff’s office, “Two more will soon be piles of coyote shit.”
“Plus the suicide at Kil-Kare,” Jake sneered.
Ben rattled off, “And the bitch Conrad tagged who shot at us, and the one he took out at my place.”
Jake surveyed the faces of all the battle-worn survivors around him. Alarmed, tense expressions gazed back, and several of them winced with pain from fresh injuries.
“Does anyone know how many there were total? Was this really Aaron’s whole cult?”
The distant babble echoed again.
Everyone raised their rifles and checked around, each in a different direction.
It originated no closer than it had earlier.
Led by curiosity, Jake treaded away from the contingent. He wandered around the weather-worn dregs strewn about the road and strafed into the central intersection.
Down Main Street, on the roof of the old jeweler, C
onrad stood and waved his arms above his head.
“We got some activity less than a block away,” Jake called to the survivors. “We should check it out before we start head-counting psychopaths.”
29.
An Uncertain Prospect
Dusk concluded with deep greens and dark purples. The sun briefly painted the underside of the remaining clouds with a vibrant orange.
The light then faded into the west horizon.
Jake led a few others into the industrial park. Moonlight observed their victorious trek, one not mired by beast, demon, or human monster. They navigated the turns to his rooftop abode.
An exhausted numbness gripped the survivors, a group smaller than ever. No one spoke, no one whispered. The damage to Xenia and its prospects for survival resonated deeply.
Jake stopped beside the duct tape ladder. They all dismounted their bikes, and the liquor bottles harnessed to their frames splashed and gurgled.
Anika climbed the ladder first, and a despondent Trapper followed.
As they emerged on the roof, Seven examined each face.
Jake ascended the rungs, and Mohammad trailed behind him. Then Conrad appeared over the edge of the roof.
Finally—
Ben climbed into view.
Seven sprang up from her lawn chair. She ran to Ben.
She threw her arms around him and hugged him tightly.
“It’s over,” he whispered and hugged her, too. “We’re safe from that retched cult now.”
“I have plenty of extra chairs,” Jake offered aloud to the group, “and sleeping bags and pillows and air mattresses. And there’s definitely no shortage of room to sprawl out.”
“And don’t worry about the kids,” Seven urged as she humbly released Ben, “they’ll sleep through a thunderstorm. They won’t hear a thing.”
They all gathered their lawn chairs, and they pointed them toward the bright, full moon as it rose a quarter of the way up from the east, evening horizon.
Liquor bottles surfaced and caps twisted open. Every spirit traveled between the survivors who impetuously mixed their varied contents.
Anika asked the group, “So what do we do now? What’s the plan to salvage what we can?”
“We definitely have enough supplies to last for the rest of us,” Conrad speculated, “but we’ll still have to scavenge the city as much as possible.”
“To what end?” Grief and sadness undercut Trapper’s reflection, “If you want to be perfectly honest, we lost a gene pool large enough to repopulate the area several weeks ago. We won’t last beyond a couple generations without poisoning our own DNA well.”
Several of the survivors shifted nervously, and they punctuated their discomfort with sips and gulps of whatever clutched in their hands.
No one fretted more than Seven.
“So you think we should ...leave?”
“Unless we can start to assimilate travelers and outsiders,” Trapper ventured, “we simply do not have enough of a population to build onto. We’d be passing on to our children or grandchildren the same questions we’re asking tonight.”
Ben reminded the group bracingly yet encouragingly, “We all know about the communities that have grown into the thousands. If we gas up some cars and move like a caravan, we can knock a few days off of the travel time to get to one of them.”
“But then after we run out of gas,” Mohammad feared, “and if we can’t score some more wheels, then we’re walking. We have some freshly wounded among us. Some of them simply cannot commit to that much stress, not yet.”
Another silent moment pervaded the survivors. Some took sips from their bottles. Everyone stared at the ascending moon.
Crickets and owls and critters crooned and caterwauled in the late evening meeting.
Ben predicted, “Even if we wait until everyone is healed up enough to travel, that will only give us a few weeks before the weather starts to get colder at night – a few weeks until it gets too cold to camp outside, at least.”
“You’re all assuming that these magical destinations still exist.” Seven cautioned, “It seems just as likely that they could have decimated other populations just as they’ve done here. I’m just saying, what if we have to search for a second magical destination? Or even a third?”
“We need contingency time, I agree. We’ll need at least a few additional weeks just in case. Eventually Winter will make travel impossible.”
Mohammad shook his head, skeptical. “With our injured, our elderly, our children...”
“And we need to haul our supplies,” Anika noted, “because we can’t count on other towns being as plentiful as home. Who knows how many people have pillaged the world beyond our borders.”
Conrad, ever the town moderator, cleared his throat.
“So we need time for the injured, and we need time for our travel, and we need extra time in case of unforeseen accidents – but we have very little of that with Winter only a few months away. We can either face the arctic chill here, or face it on the road if a community is compromised. My heedful preference is to worry about braving the cold in a familiar setting, and then plan Xenia’s future once spring starts to thaw the area. Do we rebuild our town, or do we take it with us as a fading memory? This is, of course, pending the vote of the entire community.”
No one answered.
Everyone drank.
And everyone prayed the brutal, Midwest chill spared them the worst that the season might conjure.
Table of Contents
The City of Hospitality
Aaron’s Benediction
A Holy Crusade
The Gathering of Survivors
Ben and Seven
Maddox
How Far to Search
Approaching the Flock
A Naive Suicide
Seven and Rhea
An Unfortunate Gust
David Serves the Crusade
The D.O.T. Nightmare
Surviving the Nightmare
Ben Arrives
The Detroit Chase
Scramble
The Generators
The Rescue
Jake and Ben Go to Church
Aaron Serves His Crusade
Full Disclosure
Norman’s Allegiance
Containment
From All Sides
Containment, Breached
A Bid for Purgatory
The Complacent Flock
An Uncertain Prospect