Transcendence: Chronicles from the Long Apocalypse: Book One

by Benjamin Wilkins

  “Why are you counting?” he asked.

  Bobby-Leigh put her finger to her lips to tell him to shut the fuck up.

  He got the message.

  Once she’d gotten through the requisite count to sixty, she dropped to her knees beside her sister and started trying to bring her around. Brennachecke watched and bled in silence on the floor as patiently as he could.

  “Why the counting?”

  “They’re not always really out when they first collapse in exhaustion. You want to make sure they’re really down and the person inside is coming back before you . . . get too close.”

  The old soldier nodded.

  “She’s going to be really hungry when she wakes up. Any ideas on a safe place we can find some serious calories?”

  “There’s a kitchen downstairs, but I wouldn’t call it a safe place.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Language, missy.”

  “Are you being serious?”

  Brennachecke smiled. He was being serious, but he’d let it go for once, at least for a while. Jen’s eyes opened and she quickly took in the damage she’d caused and that Brennachecke had survived. Tears welled up almost instantly as she met his tired old gaze. She opened her mouth to say something, but ended up coughing instead. Jen hacked and hacked until two of her back teeth came up from where they’d slipped down her throat. She spit them into her hands and looked at them, disgusted, then back to the father figure who had spent the last three days hell-bent on killing her. The teeth dropped out of her hands as she raised them to cover her face as she sobbed.

  “I’m sorry,” she managed to get out between her tears. “I didn’t . . .” She tried to continue, but there wasn’t really anything she could say. She was exhausted. Her whole body ached from extreme exertion. Her stomach growled long and loud. She met Brennachecke’s eyes again and smiled the most pathetic, humiliated, and miserable smile the old man had ever seen.

  Then suddenly, to everybody’s surprise, Jen’s hands wrapped around one of the blood-covered AR-15s strewn about with the bodies, and she tossed it to Brennachecke.

  “I can’t bring him back, so . . . I know you need to balance the scales, or whatever.”

  Brennachecke picked up the assault weapon she’d tossed to him and used it as a crutch to get himself painfully up onto his feet. Bobby-Leigh’s eyes widened, but before she could protest, the old man spoke.

  “You just balanced the scales, sweetheart. That monster inside you that took . . . Jimmy away . . .” It was hard for him to speak, but he knew she needed to hear the absolution in its entirety, so he choked on. “You saved my life. You didn’t have to, but you did. My life for my son’s balances things just as well as yours would.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Plus there is the fact that I’d have to fucking kill you—with my bare hands, if it came to that—if you ever actually tried to hurt her,” Bobby-Leigh said. She was not joking, but all three of them laughed just the same.

  “What can we do for you?” Jen asked.

  “Nothing, until we get to a safe place.”

  Jen’s stomach growled again even louder than it had before. She closed her eyes and looked like she might faint.

  “I need to eat. I’m sorry . . .”

  “Restaurant is on the lower level.”

  “This place is going to be crawling with dudes any minute. I don’t think we’re going to have time to get—”

  “I’ll go. You stay here and play dead if anybody comes,” Bobby-Leigh said.

  “That’s never going to—” Jen started to say, but then changed her mind. They didn’t have much of a viable alternative.

  “You’d be surprised how effective a survival strategy playing dead is,” the little girl said quietly, the fact that she knew this from personal experience painfully evident in her tone. Then before anybody could say or do anything else, she jumped to her feet, grabbed an AR-15 in each hand, and ran for the stairwell.

  Neither Jen nor Brennachecke could have stopped her if they wanted to.

  * * *

  The Raj was eerily quiet now that the majority of the people in it were dead. The lights were off downstairs to conserve what power they had, which was fine by her, but it slowed her down. The distance between the second-floor hall and the lower-floor dining area, which would have taken thirty seconds during the day under normal conditions to traverse, took her almost two minutes to get through. As she moved through the darkness as quickly as she dared, she realized she wasn’t even sure if she knew how to fire the guns in her hands. Was it as simple as just pointing the barrel and pulling the trigger? Or was there a safety or something she had to switch off first?

  Fuck.

  As she arrived at the dining area of the restaurant, she was grateful for the light coming through rows of windows all along the outer walls. The snow, it seemed, had stopped. The moon was out, and it was full, or close to it. But when she pushed through the swinging doors to the kitchen, which had no windows, that wonderfully soft blue light was simply gone. She couldn’t see six inches in front of her face. She groped along the wall for a light switch, but found nothing.

  Double fuck.

  She thought about firing one of the guns to see if the muzzle flash would reveal anything (and just to make sure they were really that easy to use) but that would surely draw attention to herself. Groaning softly, she turned around toward the dining room to see if she could find matches or something at a host station, but a sound froze her in place.

  Clank!

  Her mind raced to place the familiar sound in context. The results came in fast: Metal. Lightweight. A can. Being set down. Quietly. Somebody was in the kitchen with her.

  Fuckity-fuck fuck.

  But whoever was in there with her didn’t seem to want to be discovered, so maybe that meant they weren’t a threat. Or maybe that meant they were even more of one. Double fuckity-fuck fuck. She just didn’t know.

  Again she groped for the light switch.

  Again she came up empty-handed.

  Pitter-pat. Pitter-pat.

  Feet. Small. Maybe barefoot. A child. It had to be a child. Relief flooded through her, as she felt the adrenaline drain away—no part of her ever considering that she too was a child, that she had killed more than once in her life, and that she was more than prepared to do it again.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said quietly, still feeling for the light switch.

  Squeak. Thump! Pitter-patter.

  Pitter-patter.

  She wondered, trying to place the sounds in the totally black and unfamiliar environment with little success, if maybe there was more than one child with her in the dark kitchen space. The hairs on the back of her neck slowly stood up as a chill found its way up her spine.

  Why are there kids in the kitchen in the dark?

  Why are there kids (free ones, anyway) in Vedic City at all?

  Thump! Tee-he-he!

  The childish giggle sounded wet against the tiled kitchen, and worse, it didn’t sound like it was coming from the same place as the other sounds were.

  “I’m not going to hurt you!” Bobby-Leigh repeated, this time plenty loud enough to be heard. “I just need to get food for my sister.”

  “I not gonna ’urt ya!” a high voice answered her from the dark, followed by a round of laughter that was picked up first by one, then another, then another, and then another voice.

  “Na’ gonna ’urt ya!” the children in the dark chanted. Bobby-Leigh wasn’t sure they understood what they were saying, much less what she was. Then all of a sudden, the chanting just stopped. It was so abruptly cut off that it almost seemed like a switch had been thrown.

  Where the fuck is that light switch!

  No sooner than she had thought the question did she find the answer. It was rig
ht where it should have been the whole time. How did I miss it? she wondered as her fingers closed over the protruding plastic nub and flipped it up.

  Blinding white light filled the space instantly. Bobby-Leigh winced and squeezed her eyes shut against it, but she wasn’t the only one. Eight kids between the ages of four and twelve responded the same way, and then scurried like cockroaches for cover. They were dirty and all seemed to have never had a haircut in their lives. Bobby-Leigh couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls. Several of them had sores from what she thought must be malnourishment, judging by how sickly thin they all were. Cuts and bruises and other signs of physical abuse also covered their bodies. But their eyes were huge and bright. Mongrel, almost feral, children born of rape and sexual assault, but still loved by their mothers and kept alive (if barely) in secret.

  One raised its hand and waved. It was a girl, probably, but no one would be able to tell for sure without checking, and Bobby-Leigh wasn’t about to do that. She was smaller than most of the others. Not more innocent, but somehow softer. More fragile.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Bobby-Leigh repeated for a third time as she returned the wave.

  “Na’ gonna ’urt ya!” the children chanted back as one.

  She moved forward deeper into the kitchen, and the secret children shrank back like the abused animals they were. Moving slowly, looking them in the eye one at a time as she did so, Bobby-Leigh gave each of them a smile. She saw the metal can she’d heard in the dark. It was on the floor, next to a prep station. Enchilada sauce, licked clean. Bobby-Leigh couldn’t imagine that anybody at the Raj had ever made enchiladas while it was still operating as an Ayurveda health spa, which was a good sign. It meant the pirates were keeping the place stocked. She spotted the boy who must have been eating the sauce. She knew it was a boy because he held his penis in his hand like a security blanket through his pants, and she knew he was the one who had been eating the sauce because it ringed his mouth and covered one of his hands.

  “Good?” she asked him with a smile.

  He didn’t answer.

  She wondered if these kids even knew what they were eating, but guessed they probably didn’t because they’d bashed open and eaten a can of enchilada sauce instead of one of the four family-sized jars of Jif peanut butter that were in plain sight on a shelf behind them, which would have been a significantly better food choice both on a nutritional level and just a plain taste level. Moving fast, she grabbed two of the jars of peanut butter, opened one, and tossed it to the biggest of the kids. He was probably a boy, she thought, but she really couldn’t tell. The boy caught the jar with surprisingly quick and steady hands. He looked at it, then looked at her, then set it on the table next to him with a frown.

  “It’s good,” Bobby-Leigh said encouragingly.

  “No!” the kid yelled.

  Whatever, Bobby-Leigh thought. She didn’t have time for this shit. Tucking the other big jar under her arm, she turned to go.

  “NO!” the big kid yelled again.

  She felt a small hand close around her wrist and looked down to see the little girl who had waved at her.

  “No,” she whimpered.

  “No what?” Bobby-Leigh asked as she pulled her hand free. Instinctive alarm bells had started ringing in her head.

  “No!” another kid said sharply.

  “No!” said another. Then another.

  A boy’s hand closed on her arm. “No,” he told her, like she was a dog that had just tried to snatch a hot dog off the table at a family picnic. Suddenly, another hand from another kid reached in and actually tried to pull the jar of Jif from her hands. Fuck, these little kids are strong, she thought as she twisted and wrenched herself away from them for a second time. Not berserker strong, but significantly stronger than their pint-sized, emaciated bodies suggested.

  “No,” the big one scolded her again.

  The pack of feral kids was slowly moving in and surrounding her, but Bobby-Leigh couldn’t understand why. What’s the big deal about the stupid peanut butter anyway? she almost had time to wonder, before one of the feral kids hit the light switch and plunged the whole room back into darkness.

  “Motherfucker,” Bobby-Leigh said mostly to herself as she felt a dozen small hands grabbing at her, trying to wrestle the peanut butter out of her arms. One of the AR-15s she’d slung over her shoulder was pulled off. She heard it clatter heavily to the ground, just as she felt a set of tiny teeth sink into her arm. She kicked and twisted and punched. She got a hold of the other AR-15 she had slung over the other shoulder and swung it wildly like a club, cringing at the hollow smack it made as it connected with the tiny bodies of her attackers.

  Then suddenly one of the kids wrapped himself around her legs, and Bobby-Leigh went down. As she fell, the peanut butter flew from her hands and rolled toward the kitchen door that led to the restaurant. There was a mad scramble to get it, but Bobby-Leigh wasn’t playing around anymore. As the little girl who had waved got her hands on the jar and stood up with it, triumphantly silhouetted by the light in the small window of the swinging door, Bobby-Leigh turned to face her. With her back to the rest of the brood, the little fuckers continued trying to drag her down, though with less zeal and ferocity now that the prize was back in their collective possession.

  “Get the fuck off me!”

  She managed to shake herself loose from their little grips. Without another thought, Bobby-Leigh pointed the AR-15 toward the little girl holding the jar of Jif and pulled the trigger. Her miss was intentional, but only she knew that.

  The magnitude of the muzzle flash and boom from the single exploded shell caught everybody, including Bobby-Leigh, completely off guard. Nobody moved for several seconds. The ringing in their ears felt like it might be the only sound they’d ever hear again, but that fear was short-lived and quickly replaced by more realistic ones as the deafening roar of silence jingle-jangled its way out of their heads.

  The little feral girl still held the peanut butter, but her cohorts had backed off into the shadowy pitch of the dark kitchen.

  “That’s mine,” Bobby-Leigh said.

  The little feral girl started to sob, but she put the jar of Jif down and took a step away from it.

  “No. Peas. No ache,” a voice said from the darkness behind her.

  Bobby-Leigh thought it probably belonged to the biggest of the kids, the one who had instigated this whole ridiculous battle over a jar of peanut butter that he didn’t even seem to want. But she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t understand what he meant, but she didn’t care. Picking up the jar of high-calorie fuel, Bobby-Leigh turned and left.

  The feral kids didn’t follow her out.

  They knew the master of the kitchen would notice the peanut butter was missing—it was one of the foods he kept track of, unlike the enchilada sauce. They knew he’d blame them for taking it. They knew punishment was coming. They knew they better hide.

  * * *

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t just pull it out?” Jen asked, still starving even after eating the entire sixty-four ounces of peanut butter (nearly eleven thousand calories’ worth) Bobby-Leigh had brought her. She’d not been this hungry last time. Or felt this exhausted. The idea of dragging a wounded dude God knows how many miles to wherever they ended up going made her want to puke. She never thought she’d experience two berserker episodes so close together—it was just over seventy-two hours ago that she’d murdered Jimmy—and she was a little afraid of what she might have done to her body.

  “I’m sure. This is fine for now,” Brennachecke said.

  Bobby-Leigh had wrapped the protruding sides of the arrow with towels to stem the bleeding while her sister had shoveled peanut butter into her mouth. For now it was all that could be done. Pulling the arrow out would open the wound, and opening a wound like his was like opening Pandora’s box. It would have to be done eventually, but Bre
nnachecke hoped to be in a safe, preferably sterile, place and in the company of some kind of medical professional when they did it, though he’d settle for any one of the three.

  The Kessler girls gathered as many blankets as they could and the threesome moved downstairs expecting to see reinforcements arriving any second, but there didn’t seem to be any movement anywhere in the Raj or outside it. The sun would be rising soon, but for now the sandman ruled the white land.

  Brennachecke had hoped they’d be able to get their hands on a vehicle of some kind, but as soon as he saw how much snow had fallen during the night he scrapped that idea. Their whole world was buried under nearly a foot and a half of heavy snow. They didn’t have the kind of time it would take to find a four-wheel-drive vehicle that would be able to drive through it, though he was sure the pirates had at least one or two trucks, plus tractors, that would be able to traverse it. And that meant they were not going to be pursued by men on foot. They needed to get a solid head start before the place woke up and somebody decided to come after them.

  At least they can’t fly yet, Brennachecke thought to himself with a dry laugh that turned into a hacking cough, drawing a concerned look from both of the Kessler girls.

  “Where do we go?” Jen asked, a little disturbed by how much relief she felt not being the one in charge anymore.

  “To your uncle’s.”

  “Good fucking luck. That’s been our plan this whole time.” Bobby-Leigh laughed.

  “Language, missy.”

  “Sorry,” Bobby-Leigh too was glad to have Brennachecke back in charge. Even though the man was severely wounded and pretty much useless in a fight at the moment, she still felt protected just being around him. It was a feeling she hadn’t thought she’d feel again, and the weight of her relief was almost crushing. Fighting back tears, she helped her sister bundle their surrogate father up in stolen blankets and do what they could to keep him warm.

  “Why is nobody coming after us?” Bobby-Leigh whispered to her sister. She could have asked Brennachecke, but she didn’t really want to know what the answer was, and something told her the old man might actually know.