Transcendence: Chronicles from the Long Apocalypse: Book One

by Benjamin Wilkins

  “I don’t know,” Jen said. “I’m sure they will be soon enough.”

  Meanwhile, Brennachecke was using all his strength to appear better off than he felt, and fighting the pain was so distracting that he didn’t hear the question or the answer. But if he had, he wouldn’t have had anything better to say that Jen did, though he might have added something along the lines of it being a wise idea not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  With a girl under each arm to shoulder his weight, the trio took their first steps through the deep snow toward a lightening sky in the east.

  * * *

  They only had a little over five miles to go, but the going was slow. It took them almost an hour just to get out of sight of the Raj. In that hour the sun had risen and suddenly seemed to have remembered that it wasn’t supposed to be winter. The temperature quickly rose from below freezing into the fifties, but that good news was a double-edged sword. The melting snow had started soaking them from the bottom up and running them through with cold. The girls were wrapped in blankets, just like Brennachecke, but all of their shoes were totally inadequate for this kind of adventure. To make matters worse, the old man seemed to be getting heavier and heavier with each step. He was clearly more hurt than he was letting on.

  “My feet are fucking freezing off, dude,” Jen said to Bobby-Leigh. “I think I’m getting frostbite.”

  “Me too.”

  Brennachecke said nothing. It was all the man could do to put one foot in front of the other at this point. He barely even heard the girls talking, but if he had been able to focus on anything outside of the burning in his chest, he’d have only agreed with them. His feet were numb with cold too.

  The temperature hung in the sixties like a vulture once it got there—still cool for a July morning in Iowa by any kind of normal standards, but nonetheless a significant improvement over the day before when the freak snowstorm had begun. They didn’t really need the blankets they were all wrapped in, except that somehow being too hot up top seemed to balance out their feet being so cold below. Jen and Bobby-Leigh were both annoyed by the fact that the melting snow didn’t actually make things any easier for them. Had the weather stayed cold, the snow would have just fallen off their feet like dust without turning instantly to ice water against their skin. The idea of getting frostbite on their feet while they sweat through their shirts was so utterly ridiculous that the only thing that kept them from howling with laughter was that it was a real possibility, and that nothing really felt funny carrying Brennachecke through the snow like they were.

  “We need to stop, get our feet dry,” Jen said, gesturing toward an abandoned decrepit farmhouse off to the right with a tired-looking wooden swing hanging off an ancient white oak.

  “Okay.”

  The door was already broken in when they got there. A half-eaten long-dead body, the sex of which could no longer be easily determined, lay nearly mummified in the kitchen. The house had been ransacked at least once, but even at first glance seemed like it may not have been cleaned out completely. It was a good place to stop and catch their breath and warm their feet.

  The girls put Brennachecke in the living room on a torn old love seat and stripped off their wet shoes and socks. Barefoot they set about searching the house for food and better things to wear. Bobby-Leigh found a hatchet in the kitchen, where somebody had been chopping the cabinetry up for firewood. She picked it up with a nostalgic smile. Then she went upstairs, where she discovered the family that had ounce lived there had had a girl her age. When she saw what was in the girl’s closet, she burst out in a laugh that carried all the way down the stairs to Brennachecke, who, even in the fog of his pain and discomfort, couldn’t help but smile.

  Jen for her part found a box of winter clothes in the basement that had a plethora of snow boots, wool socks, pants, and jackets. The boots were all either too big or too small to fit her comfortably, but given a choice between blisters and frostbite, she’d go for blisters every day of the week and twice on Sunday. She was about to drag the box upstairs when her eye fell on something in the shadows in the back of the damp room. A sled.

  “Motherfucking jackpot, dude!” she said quietly to herself, thinking they could drag Brennachecke and maybe even some supplies in it. That was going to make things so much easier! She hauled her load upstairs with a smile and continued on with the search. There were some cans of garbanzo beans and pumpkin pie filling still in the back of one of the cupboards in the kitchen. She even found a can opener.

  “Gun!” Bobby-Leigh screamed, excited. They still had one of the pirate AR-15s with them, of course, but more firepower was always a good thing. Jen smiled at Brennachecke, who tried to smile back but only ended up snarling.

  “How you doing?” she asked him, painfully aware of how stupid the question was.

  “Still . . . alive,” he croaked.

  “Let’s go! Bobby-Leigh!” she yelled up the stairs.

  Bobby-Leigh came down a changed girl. In the ten minutes she’d been upstairs, she’d found a Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment (the primary and secondary school attached to MUM) plaid uniform skirt. She’d folded it up at the top, making it scandalously short. She’d then added a girl’s dress shirt that was too small in a perfect way and a plaid tie, which she wore just under her ever-present dog collars. Then she’d gone to the bathroom and rimmed her eyes with heavy eyeliner and thick mascara. Blood-red lipstick now lined her mouth. Her red-streaked raven-black hair was now up in pigtails, Pippi Longstocking style. Her legs were clad in knee-high stockings, and her feet were blessed with the pièce de résistance—a pair of neon-blue Doc Martins. Her Lolita-goth image was restored and her confidence had clearly been restored with it. As she pranced down the stairs, she held a huge nickel-plated Colt .45 in one hand and carried three boxes of ammo and her new ax pressed against her chest with the other.

  “Holy shit, dude!” Jen squealed.

  “I know, right?”

  “Brennachecke is fading pretty fast. We better go. I found a sled, though, so we should have a fucking easier time of it.”

  “Can I try the swing before we go?”

  “What?”

  “I want to try the swing.” This was the first time, since Walmart at least, that Bobby-Leigh had ever expressed a desire to do a normal kid thing. Jen smiled. Dog collars notwithstanding, maybe her little sister wasn’t a lost cause after all.

  “Sorry, dude.” The words broke her heart to say, but they just didn’t have time to waste. By now the blood pirates would be up, and the three of them would be pretty easy to track through the snow. Plus Brennachecke was, like, fucking dying.

  “Just five minutes.”

  Jen shook her head, no.

  Bobby-Leigh nodded, her bright smile dampening into a disappointed one. She knew the pirates would probably be coming after them. She knew Brennachecke was literally dying in front of them. This just wasn’t a good time to catch up on her childhood innocence. She understood.

  Brennachecke grunted and cleared his throat, trying to speak but failing at first. Jen and Bobby-Leigh moved to his side so all he would have to do was whisper if he did manage to get the words out.

  “Let her . . . swing,” he croaked at last. “Give me . . . the AR-15. Stand . . . watch with the . . . Colt.”

  “But—” Jen began, then changed her mind and simply nodded to her sister to go ahead. “Five minutes!” she said, and as the next couple hundred seconds passed, Jen stood watch in the snow, Brennachecke bled on the couch, and Bobby-Leigh pumped her legs and transcended it all on the swing.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Army Marching through the Snow

  From the broken balcony doors of the library on the second floor of the Raj, the Man-in-Charge watched the two Kessler twats support his flight instructor as the three of them struggled out through the snow. He stood there in silence, favoring the leg that
did not have a bullet in it. The regenerative power of the berserker blood in his system was already working its magic, but he’d need to find the doc anyway just to be safe, because even through the intoxicating fog of berserker blood, he knew the pain from the wound would be intense when he finally felt it. As he stood there alone, the cold morning air rubbing up against him like an annoying cat he’d forgotten to feed, he smiled.

  All the kidnapping, rape, and murder, while certainly entertaining to him and the pirates he ruled over, just didn’t have any real purpose behind it. Sure, they were harvesting blood, but milking monsters was actually pretty fucking boring once you got them penned. The constant blood high for the most part distracted him from the transient pointlessness of his army’s endeavors, but like the missing dull, steady ache that should have been in his leg, he was still aware there was something absent from his experience. Something important.

  But now he had a game afoot. A hunt. A mission of reprisal. A reason to get out of bed in the morning. He looked at Beverly’s body lying almost naked and grotesquely exposed on the library floor. He looked at the arrow sticking out of her like a flagpole staking Brennachecke’s claim on her. He didn’t really care that she was dead. But he did care that the old soldier had had the audacity to think he could get away with killing her. It would have made no difference to him at all that Dan had actually been the one who put the arrow into his whore’s heart. To the MIC, that man was just an extension of Brennachecke. Likewise, it didn’t matter to him that it had been the older of the two bitches who’d slaughtered his men in the hallway. The little cunt was just an extension of the soldier as well. His only interest in Jen was for her blood, and maybe for her body if he was feeling adventurous. He’d fucked a couple of berserkers since he’d taken control of Vedic City, but the amount of preparation and manpower needed to not be hurt in the process took most of the fun out of it. Bragging rights had motivated him, but he’d earned those rights already, so he’d just bleed the bitch, and if he wanted to fuck something he’d just take her little sister instead. He’d be sure to make Brennachecke watch it too, he thought, his cruel smile widening as he finally shut the door against the cold.

  He really needed to put a stop to the running and hiding his men did whenever there was a shooting. He’d been alone now for almost an hour, maybe even longer. He’d have thought the jackals would have been all over the place. Not to help, of course—he knew it wasn’t loyalty that kept them here, only fear and greed—but he’d have thought his men would have been aching to confirm his death and begin the infighting over who would take control. Beverly would have already had the whole lot of them under her thumb by now if it had been his body lying on the ground with an arrow to the chest and her with just the superficial bullet wound to the leg. With that thought, he came as close as he’d ever come to mourning her death. Her treacherousness was part of what had made her so attractive to him in the first place. Unpredictable, cruel, vicious, and utterly driven by her desire for power—she’d been like that from day one. It had been seriously fucking hot.

  Not that it mattered now.

  Not that he really cared about her.

  The Man-in-Charge had cowered with his eyes closed under the oozing, dripping, twitching corpses of his men, trying not to make a sound or even breathe, the entire time Jen had tended to Brennachecke’s arrow wound and waited for Bobby-Leigh to return with food. He’d heard every word of their reconciliation, their planning—that bitch berserker’s pathetic little tears. Stuck there playing dead, not daring for one second to reveal himself until the coast was indisputably clear, he had just waited, willing himself not to move. The lengths he’d have gone to to avoid losing his precious flight instructor were endless in his mind, but actually putting himself in danger was always where he drew the line. So, as he listened to Jennifer’s lips smacking as she crammed peanut butter down her cunt throat, he’d made a plan B.

  The plan was simple. As soon as they were gone, he’d find Beverly, who was undoubtedly dead—she’d been a fighter, not a pragmatist like him, which had certainly sealed her fate—then he would take her to the doc, run blood lines to her veins, hook her up to a battery, cut her chest open, and manually stimulate her heart until enough of the curative berserker blood circulated through her brain to wake her up. He’d seen the procedure done a number of times while he was still in the army, before he’d gone AWOL and come to Fairfield. His platoon leader used it for intelligence extraction. It was super messy, but it had always gotten the interrogator almost five extra minutes with the man in question after he’d been pushed too far and died on them.

  But it’d turned out he didn’t need to resurrect the whore after all. It didn’t matter that she knew where the Kessler farm was. God was smiling on him today. The storm had passed. The snow had stopped. The sky was blue. And Brennachecke’s stupid treasonous threesome was now leaving enough tracks behind them in the snow for a blind man to follow.

  * * *

  Tiny looked at the video screen and wondered how far down he could get the drone before the folks with the sled noticed it. In broad daylight he liked to fly at least eight hundred feet above the ground. The angry wasp-like hum of the little electric motors was almost imperceptible at that altitude. Although, most people these days wouldn’t be able to recognize a drone for what it was if they saw one. It’d been years and years since they’d been used commercially or recreationally. The military factions still had some, of course, but those were mostly old Predators and Blackjacks, which were so far beyond what his little JPLs could do specs wise that he always made the distinction of calling them UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and not drones. But just because folks didn’t really know they were out there anymore wouldn’t stop them from taking a shot at one if they saw it hovering above them. Folks who wasted the time it took to wonder what something was before blowing it to hell had died out pretty fast in the US. Tiny couldn’t speak for the rest of the world, but he was pretty sure that nugget was just as true wherever you were.

  So why the hell do we always have to risk identifying folks before we do anything? he wondered with his usual level of internal frustration at everything he wasn’t directly involved in. With a flick of his finger, he sent the imagery to Anoona and Hamm’s glasses.

  “I think it’s the Kessler girls,” he added, and though he spoke the words, the message was sent as text superimposed over the video feed.

  “What’s the ETA?”

  “I can’t get close enough to do facial rec, but just look at it. It’s got to be them.”

  “ETA, Tiny.”

  “I don’t know. Whatever’s in the sled is heavy and slowing them down. I’d say we have at least thirty before they hit the perimeter. Want me to take it down and confirm?”

  “No. Let the perimeter cams do that. Let’s bring everybody in and get a welcome party ready.”

  Tiny took a bite of his Star Crunch patty and sent the alert out over the network. Across the farm, various devices buzzed and chimed. It only took a few minutes for everybody to wrap up what they were doing and gather around Tiny’s control station. Eric imagined this was more or less exactly what Anoona’s people had done when Tiny’s drones had spotted them coming up Mahogany Avenue in the middle of the night, except that then there had been an entire discussion about whether or not Hamm and Rodney should just put bullets in each of their heads. A serious discussion. Eric secretly wished he’d been able to listen in on it.

  Anoona’s people were nothing but gracious to his people’s faces. In fact they’d gone out of their way to make them feel at home, but nothing they could ever say or do would ever change the fact that they’d all stood here, just like he was right now, and made a choice to let them all live. He had no idea why, but it bothered him—a lot. If he could just hear what they’d said and how they’d said it, if he were just able to watch them make the decision, he thought he’d be able to put it behind him. He wasn’t sure why h
e needed to know so badly, but he did have an idea of how he might be able to be the fly on the wall he so wished to be.

  “They made it,” Eric said.

  “It’s not confirmed,” Tiny responded.

  “That’s them. Who’s in the sled?”

  “I think it’s your dad.”

  “Are you recording these video feeds?” Eric asked.

  “Yeah, but the archives get recorded over as they fill up the drive,” Tiny said, not at all thrown by the non sequitur. Any chance to show off what his tech could do made him happy. Plus he was really excited about being Eric’s friend. The kid was spunky and made him laugh.

  “How hard is it to get access to the archives?” Eric asked, but before Tiny had a chance to tell him the answer, Anoona and the rest of the folks showed up.

  * * *

  Jen was so hungry she was shaking, or maybe she was just shaking from fatigue, she couldn’t tell anymore. She couldn’t understand why each time, the aftermath of berserking out got exponentially harder to physically deal with than the last time. The rapid and massive increase in muscle mass from all the hormone-enhanced exertion that accompanied tearing into people and smashing things apart had seemed like a blessing when it had left her more and more beautifully toned and allowed her to eat anything she ever wanted, twice over. But after this last episode, she was pretty sure she didn’t just have a ripped physique anymore. The fact was she was now probably past the point of making an eighties East German Olympic swimmer look scrawny. If the demon got out again, she was pretty sure she’d have to relocate to the land of the freaks, if there was such a place. Plus, there was that little detail of her teeth starting to fall out, which was just fucking creepy.

  Can you even get dentures anymore? she wondered absently, as she pulled the sled side by side with her sister, consumed by the arbitrary vain and self-indulgent thoughts of an American teenager that even the end of the world couldn’t stop.