A Congress of Angels (The Collective)

by Fore, Jon

  There was little here for the horses to graze on, but as tired as Gabriel was, this is where they were stopping. His body ached and cramped along its entire length, and his head swam with the unreasonable thoughts of the sleep-deprived. He dismounted, and as soon as his feet hit the ground, he was working on the straps of Lance's saddle.

  Amelia slid down on her own, making a nearly noiseless landing, and began looking over the straps for Big Guy's luggage saddle. By the time Gabriel came, she had most of them undone, but a couple was just too hard for her tiny fingers. Gabriel released the last couple of wide buckles, and drew the carriage off Big Guy. Fug just sat there, waiting patiently.

  There was no obvious source of water, but he still had roughly a gallon in different containers, along with a few cans of soda and juice. Again, the horses would have to suffer without. Gabriel didn't like it, but he was simply at the end of his strength. There was nothing else he could do tonight. He had to have sleep, and when he felt like this, sleep always came. Tonight, he was sure it was going to come on him in a big way.

  He unpacked the two wool blankets from Lance's saddle, and laid right there, wool blanket covering him entirely. He watched Amelia take over his responsibilities, such as feeding Fug, and even brushed down Big Guy as Gabriel fell asleep.

  * * *

  When Gabriel woke, he found that daytime glow in the ruddy brown and black sky, and Amelia asleep on his belly, spooned up close to Fug. He felt like a piece of furniture. But that didn't matter at the moment. He had slept. Again. Twice now he had slept the night through, but unlike the last, he had slept without the nightmares of a life spent killing. Instead, he dreamt of the flame headed girl, but even these were slipping back into forgetfulness. Why this girl was suddenly appearing in his head, he didn't know, but hoped she would return. She was as lovely a girl as his imagination could create. Still, he had not woken out of discomfort or noise or anything. His body had simply decided he'd had enough, and it was time to wake. So he did. And he felt entirely rested.

  Fug lifted his head and looked at him. When he saw his master's eyes opened, he began to wag his tail, thumping the girl's legs lightly. Gabriel reached down and scratched the dog's neck, just below the jawline, his favorite spot. It dawned on him he hadn't done this in a few days, which was awful. Fuggly needed his attention just like Amelia.

  Then Amelia lifted her head and looked at him over top of Fug's outstretched head. Her face held no emotion, but Gabriel could tell she was rested, which meant she slept. 'God a McDonald's breakfast would be awesome right now,' he thought, and then realized he was starving. He didn't eat last night. Actually, he didn't eat at all yesterday, and it was a long day. "Hungry?"

  "Uh huh," Amelia said softly.

  "Let's see what we have left. I feel a lot better this morning, thanks for letting sleep."

  "Uh huh."

  Amelia let him get up and he went to the packs and began rummaging around until he pulled out a can of creamed corn, two bags of corn chips, and the last package of snack cakes. It wasn't much in the way of substance to fill the unreasonable gap in his gut, but the calories would give them the fuel they needed.

  He grabbed a couple of meat sticks and the camping spoon they shared and returned to where Amelia waited. "We need to find some more food soon.” He said, and offered her a meat stick. She shook her head and reached for the corn.

  "We don't really have enough to say no to anything. I know you don't like them much, but its protein.” What would a child her age know about protein?

  "I'm not that hungry. I keep remembering the dead person on the road, and it makes me want to barf," she said as if embarrassed.

  "Yeah, me too.” Gabriel said. "Try not to think about it.” He opened the can of corn and passed it to her with the spoon. Then ate one of the spicy meat sticks.

  After a while she passed the corn back and began on her snack cake. Gabriel passed her both cakes and ate her meat stick. Jerky, or so the wrapper promised. 'Jerky my ass,' Gabriel thought. "We have to find something for the horses to eat. I think we are about ten miles from a race track, a place where they used to race horses, and we should find something there."

  Amelia didn't respond, her mouth full of sugar covered sponge.

  He saddled both horses while she finished eating, then they split a can of coke and Gabriel cleaned the spoon as best as he could and packed that with the dwindled food supply. Then they began down the Parkway again.

  In two hours, he saw a sign that read "Freehold, 289" and he suddenly remembered the brochures that used to come to his dad in the mail. Freehold Race Track. That's where they were going. "Getting close.” He said just loud enough for Amelia to hear.

  At this point, both horses walked with their heads downcast, clearly exhausted. The dry scrub on the side of the road was just not appetizing anymore. That, and they didn't have enough water to process the dry affair anyway. Who would have thought the Garden State would be so barren and dry?

  In another half an hour, he curved their path for the off-ramp, riding slouching horses towards a town called Freehold.

  Chapter 24

  They all put on their packs, but Jackson refused to put his shoes back on.

  "They just swollen and hurt. Them boots won’t fit no more."

  Vega knew she had to get him warmed up, but short of a fire, all they had was body heat. With that, they would need a place out of the elements. Jackson was clearly still hurting, his core temperature had to be low, and his feet were a screaming red, and the darker skin an ashen grey.

  Looking along the boardwalk, she picked a house at random. It was a single story beach house, like all the others. Its paint was weathered, or made to look weathered, like the others. A large portion of the back yard, even though it was the yard facing the street, was filled with outdoor furniture. Whoever lived in these houses expected to spend a large portion of their day outside. Across the street from a beach, in the sunlight, who could blame them. How she missed sunlight. "Let’s get in the house there and warm up before we go on.” Vega said to Maria, avoiding Jackson's eyes. She didn't want him to think she pitied him or anything. One thing that man was filled with was pride.

  "Yeah, I could use something to eat, maybe take a nap for sure," Maria agreed and put her arm around Jackson's hips to begin leading him towards the house.

  He walked steady but slow, his face wincing lightly with each step. God love him, he didn't complain once. The back of the house, on the other side of some rather gaudy lawn furniture was a wide sliding glass door with vertical blinds hanging down and closed. Vega knocked, feeling stupid. There wasn't a living soul within a hundred miles of here, and she knew it.

  After a second knock, she tried the door and found it locked.

  "Here, let me," Jacksons said, and grasped the door on both sides and began lifting it over and over until it came off its tracks. It took a bit of physical convincing, but the door finally came free on one end, rendering the locking mechanism useless by raising the opposite side, and sliding the door free.

  "How did you know how to do that?” Maria asked him in her steamy voice.

  "I always lock myself out of my house. It didn't break nothing, I promise."

  "Impressive," Maria cooed.

  Vega drew her weapon, more out of a force of habit than anything, and stepped through the vertical blinds. Inside was a sea-themed living room with a half wall separating the attached kitchen, and little else.

  Jackson followed behind her, stripped his backpack off, and sat heavily on the couch. He kicked his feet up on the coffee table with another stifled wince, and sighed contentedly. "Now this is nice, boy-howdy. Never thought I'd see myself another couch as nice as this."

  "It's nice to be in America again, huh?” Maria said and dropped her own pack. She went to the coffee table and climb on like a cat. She crawled to his feet, then sat Indian style before them. She lifted both, butt-walked forward a bit, and set them down on her lap. She brushed them off, which made Jacks
on giggled girlishly, then began to massage them with her hands.

  "Careful now, lady. They hurt something fierce."

  "Sorry," she said and lightened her grip while Vega went into the kitchen.

  "That's still too hard, they need to warm up a bit first, boy-howdy. They feel like they dead."

  Maria lifted the front of both of her shirts, and put the hem overtop of his feet, then she inched forward until the soles where pressed cold against her ribs. Then she rested her breasts overtop of his toes. His feet were colder than death itself. When Maria looked back up at him, he was grinning a ridiculous grin.

  "Now that feel right nice, Maria. Still hurts, but like they coming back now."

  "For sure, Big Guy.” She said, the smile evident in her voice.

  Vega began opening cabinets and finding a decent amount of dry goods still sealed and fresh. Most of it was high fiber cereals, and figured this was a retiree’s home, or used to be. That was fine because it meant there might be some good painkillers around here somewhere, and that's something they should take with them. Pain could really take a person out of the game, regardless of how desperate the situation.

  On the far side of the kitchen she found a door that led out into a one car garage, and she found it unoccupied. Some gardening tools hung on a wall and a jet-ski filled the center of the space. Vega smiled at the image of two older people ripping around the water on the thing. Then she saw the old kerosene heater sitting next to a two gallon red container. "No way," she said, and approached it as if it might vanish.

  It was just like the one her father used to have for camping. It was difficult to find kerosene now-a-days, but back then, it went on every camping trip. She lifted the red can and it was mostly full. She opened the lid and the fond memories of camping wafted up from the can.

  She took the glass and metal heater back to the living room with the gas can, "Look what I found."

  "That's a heater," Jackson said, sounding as though he was not entirely happy it had been found.

  "It is?” Maria asked.

  "Yeah, watch.” Vega unscrewed the fuel cap and sniffed again, figuring it should smell like what is in the red can, and it did. Mostly. Close enough to try. She opened the red can and poured fuel in until it was about half empty. She closed the heater and turned the knob to 'start', and then pushed the red button next to it. A ticking sound repeated for a second and then a whooping sound came from the thing. A blue and orange glow appeared in its center. Using the lever knob, she dropped the glass cylinder overtop of the flame, and it turned to a solid blue color. Then she twisted the knob to eight.

  The heat coming off the thing was worth sobbing for. Maria ejected Jackson's feet, then slinked off the table and settled just to one side of center. She sighed and then shivered violently. "I'd forgotten what it was like to be warm," She said, her voice warped in either sorrow or ecstasy, Vega couldn't tell.

  She went to the sliding glass door, unlocked it, then worked it back on its track again while Jackson climbed off the couch to sit next to Maria, his feet closest to the heater.

  "Ah, that hurts," he said, hissing between his teeth as the feeling really began to flow back into his feet. He could remember his hands being this cold during a snowball fight. They had turned bright red, then eventually gray before he couldn't stand it anymore. He went inside and his Ma gave him a cup of hot chocolate to hold in his hands, which hurt at first, then was simply too hot to hold anymore.

  Vega closed the door and locked it, letting the blinds fall over the glass shutting out the outside. She could still see was the boat, hung up on the sand bar, and she didn't want to ever see it again. "I'm going to explore the rest of the house, I'll be back in a few minutes."

  She waited for a response, but the other two just cuddled and sighed their comfort at the heater.

  Vega took the hallway beside the kitchen that led towards the front of the house. There was a foyer at its end and a nice smoked-glass front door. To either side was a door, the first opening onto a bathroom. She pilfered this for shampoo and bar soap, which you really couldn't have enough of. Not during the apocalypse.

  When she opened the door, she found a master bedroom filled with a large four post bed. On the bed was an elderly couple, laying side by side, holding hands. The male of the pair held a gun to his temple. Beyond the woman, on the far side of her head was a stain of both brain and blood, dried and graying. While holding hands, the man had ended their lives with a single shot, dying in the same instant.

  As Vega realized what she was looking at, her eyes filled with tears. Not for the horror of it, but for the love, if such a thing could be found in shared death. She wrestled the tears away. This was something her mother had done, but done alone. She didn't include her father, which Vega was thankful for, but to Vega, there was no romance in self-murder. This here was the very semblance of commitment and dedication. Terrible and tragic but somehow beautiful, and Vega couldn't stand the conflict of it in her head.

  She shut the door, stood there in the hall a moment, then walked back to the living room. She dropped three bars of Ivory soap next to the discarded packs, and came to sit with her friends in the warmth of the heater.

  They had backed up a bit, the heat becoming too intense, which gave Vega all the room she needed to get right in there and cuddle the thing.

  "Find anything else?” Maria asked.

  "Nothing you would want to see," Vega said, trying not to look at the girl, but she could feel Maria's eyes studying her face.

  "Okay," Maria said after a long moment.

  Vega felt the cold leaving her flesh for the first time in weeks. Funny how the cold can become a companion when you've no choice. The numbing fifty something degrees outside, everywhere outside so far, was enough to sting the skin into submission, but it also went deeper, and dwelled within the bones. This heater, it was chasing it from her flesh and her bones at the same time, and she sighed audibly. First it hurt, almost like a cramped muscle, then it stung as the cold fought to keep the flesh, then it eased into a wonderful comfort. Nerves began to awaken, long lost to the cold, and she began to feel alive again. Gently, it became too warm, then hot, and she scooted back with the others, completing a quarter-moon shape in front of the heater.

  None of them spoke, each trying to trap the warmth within themselves, and lost in their own thoughts. Vega didn't know what was going through the other's minds, but that murderous romantic visage was still floating through hers, and she couldn't shake it. She wasn't even sure if she wanted to shake it. It was so hauntingly beautiful, so violently passionate, so achingly painful.

  Maria rose and went to the packs, retrieving the wet pants and socks she had peeled off of Jackson, and laid them on the table to dry, then she went to the kitchen, and began opening cabinets.

  Jackson was wiggling his toes, then rubbing his feet in a series of attempts to get the blood back to where it belonged. "We should only be about twenty miles from my house, you know?"

  Vega shook herself, again trying to knock the image of the elderly couple out of her head, "That close, huh?"

  "Yeah. I don't know where the book's at."

  "South part of Newark, in the slums.” Maria said as she sat with a box of Captain Crunch's Peanut Butter Crunch.

  What an odd cereal for older folks, Vega thought, then decided grandkids might come and enjoy a weekend or two at the beach. "Pass that this way.” She said, her mouth flooding with the memory of a favorite cereal.

  Maria cupped the front of her shirt in her lap, and poured a healthy portion of the cereal there, then passed the box.

  Jackson pinched a handful and tossed them in his mouth. "I always liked this Peanut Butter Crunch."

  "Me too. Isn't it funny how we forgot things like that, huh?” Maria said as she filled her mouth with the salty sweet cereal.

  "What do you mean? It's always been my favorite.” Jackson said, pinching another mouthful from Maria's lap.

  "When was the last time you had
it?” Vega asked, filling her mouth with the sweetly salty cereal.

  "Oh, I don't know, long time. When I was a youngster, boy-howdy."

  "Why did you forget this was your favorite cereal?"

  Jackson seemed to think for a moment, then shrugged.

  "We seem to forget this kind of thing. We probably forgot a lot of things. Why don't we enjoy the life we have? Why do we avoid those things that give us pleasure, like this kid's cereal?” Vega mused

  "That's a good question," Jackson mumbled around a mouthful.

  "Well, if we had it all the time, it wouldn't be so special, for sure," Maria said.

  "Yeah, I guess. Just now, the way things are now... we should have paid more attention to this. I would kill for a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on Wonder bread with a cold glass of whole milk."

  "Oh, yeah. I know what you mean. For me, it’s a ham and cheese Hot Pocket. That's what I grew up on.” Maria sounded dreamy.

  Jackson gave her an odd look, which she failed to see. "For me, it was Ma's home-made baked macaroni and cheese. That was some good eating. Bread crumbs toasted on the top, with just a hint of garlic.” It was Jackson's turn to sound dreamy.

  It suddenly dawned on Vega that right here, right now, with these people, a box of cereal and a kerosene heater was one of the finest moments of her life.

  Chapter 25

  The raceway turned out to be a rather massive complex. The people of New Jersey must really like their horse racing. The sign over the parking area read "Freehold Raceway" and had a picture of a jockey in one of those wheeled carts with speed lines sprouting from it. The parking lot was large, like the complex, but the stables were obvious, and Gabriel steered Lance towards the off-set structure.

  They came to chain link fencing, some ten feet high. Gabriel imagined it was to allow people a view of the horses being exercised or rubbed down or with a pair of binoculars, watch them race. Beyond was a well maintained track of soft brown sand and an ornamental orchestration of flowers and bushes intended to spell out 'Freehold Raceway,' but were now scorched to a withered brown. The track, though, was clear of any hoof prints, as if they shut racing down and swept the sand in preparation for opening day. Gabriel was pretty sure opening day would never come again.