The Pure: Book Three of the Oz Chronicles

by R. W. Ridley

  “‘None taken,’ I said. ‘We’re not exactly sure ourselves.’ “Tank stood, leaving Bobby writhing in pain on the road.

  ‘Look here, I know a thing or two about taking care of myself, if you know what I mean.’

  “‘Please,’ I said, ‘We found you crying in a fetal position in a Wal-Mart bathroom in Athens.’

  “‘That’s not true,’ he barked. He hesitated, mulling over some fanciful lie, I’m sure, but instead cleared his throat and said, ‘It was a Sam’s Club.’

  “‘Fine! Great!’ Wes threw up his arms in disgust. ‘This is just great!’

  “A young girl of about ten stepped out of the darkness followed by a boy of the same age. They smiled the first friendly smiles I had seen in a long, long time. They approached Bobby and knelt down beside him.

  “‘Skinner dead got a hold of this one,’ the boy said pointing to Bobby’s mangled shoulder.

  “Wes stepped in their direction and quickly assessed Bobby’s condition. ‘Is that true?’ he asked Lou.

  “She nodded.

  “‘And you brought him here?’

  “‘I didn’t,’ she said. “The big one carried him.’

  “‘Huh?’ Tank said. ‘You told me to.’

  “‘Is he going to become a zombie?’ April asked.

  “‘Zombie?’ Wes shook his head. ‘Lord, this ain’t Dawn of the Dead.’

  “‘Ha,’ Tank screamed. ‘Told you.’

  “Wes shot Tank a puzzled, irritated look. ‘He ain’t going to turn into a zombie, but he’s got a smell on him now that will attract every skinner dead within a twenty-mile radius.’ He stomped the cracked highway pavement. ‘Lou, you know better.’

  “She shrugged her shoulders.

  “‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ I asked.

  “‘You would have left him,’ she said.

  “I would have offered an argument, but she was right. We would have left him behind or worse to save our own hides.

  “‘Roses,’ the little girl said.

  “‘What are you carrying on about?’ Wes asked.

  “‘If we pack the wound with roses, the dead won’t come. They can’t stand the smell of roses.’

  “I was about to ask her how she knew this, but I realized it wasn’t important. How does anyone know anything in this world? You learn by trial and error. And you don’t want to hear the trials and errors in this place.

  “‘Roses?’ April said. ‘Where do we get roses?’

  “‘We passed a landscaping sign a couple miles back,’ the little girl said. ‘Said something about a greenhouse and orchard. We might find some there.’

  “Wes breathed deeply. “‘You happy?’ he asked Lou. ‘Now we got to backtrack cause you decided to pick up company.’

  “‘They’re called survivors, Wes,’ Lou said walking past him. ‘Just like you and me.’

  “He scanned our group. ‘Darling, they ain’t nothing like you and me.’”

  ***

  “The greenhouse did have roses. The little girl, Valerie, trimmed the bloom off a couple of red roses and tore the petals off. She packed Bobby’s wound and wrapped it with a sheet that the boy, Tyrone, had cut into bandage-sized strips. They worked together as well as any medical team I had ever seen on TV. It was obvious they had dressed wounds before. My guess was they had seen and done a lot of things kids their age should have never had to see or do. I wondered how many people they had seen die. Worse, how many had they seen killed... or killed themselves?

  “We sat inside the greenhouse. It was amazing to see that the cycle of life had continued in this artificial environment without the benefit of a caretaker. Somehow the plants grew and thrived on their own. With no background in horticulture, I had no idea if that sort of thing was unusual or not. I imagined it wasn’t. After all, plants grew just fine without human interference for billions of years.

  “The gorilla awkwardly knuckle-walked over to our group with one arm tucked up to its chest and dumped three bottles of water at my feet. It tilted its powerful head, gave a garbled hoot-grunt and slowly sauntered away. I had no idea if gorillas could get depressed, but that ape looked about as depressed as I had ever seen.

  “I handed the waters to April and Tank. They were fixated on the new group of survivors, too. I sensed they were just as fascinated and frightened by them as I was. There was something different about this crew. They were more than just survivors. I could tell by their attitude, the way they communicated that they’d been through battles together. I mean battles you willingly participate in. Not like my group. We had been in battles, but only because we ran out of places to run. This new group, they looked for fights.

  “I admired them, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. They were going to die in a grand show of bravery and pride. That wasn’t the way I wanted to go. In fact, I didn’t want to go at all.

  “As if she were reading my mind, April said, ‘We aren’t staying with them, are we?’

  “I sipped my water and shook my head.

  “‘Good,’ she said. ‘They scare me.’

  “The old man of the group, Wes, walked in from outside. He maintained an impossible paunch given the shortage of food in this world. A few dozen Twinkies wrappers on the floor of the green and yellow VW bus we traveled in to get here hinted as to his main source of food, but still, a man would have to eat an awful lot of the fat-filled treats to maintain the girth he sported.

  “He approached us. ‘You folks settling in all right?’

  “‘Fine,’ I said. ‘We’ll be out of your hair soon.’

  “He spotted a five-gallon tub of weed killer and sat his rather sizeable rear end on it. ‘I want you all to know most of my goings on back there was just cause I wasn’t expectin’ Lou to come back with guests. It’s nothing against you personally. Understand?’

  “I nodded my head. ‘Sure.’

  “‘What’s your story, anyhow?’

  “‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  “‘I mean where do you come from?’

  “‘Come from?’ I said. ‘Well, last place before this was Athens...’

  “‘No, no,’ he interrupted. ‘I mean where you from? You know, your people, your kin. Me, I from a little town off I-24 in Tennessee called Manchester.’

  “‘Bonaroo!’ April said with a shout.

  “Wes smiled. ‘That’s right. They had that Bonaroo music festival there every year. You been?’ he asked April.

  “‘Once,’ she said nervously. ‘I’ve never seen so many people.’

  “‘Me, neither,’ Wes laughed. ‘Lord help us, but you folks used to drive us locals crazy. You damn near doubled the population of the entire county every festival, and we didn’t know what to do with you all.’

  “‘God, I had so much fun,’ she said, and we all fell silent. Never before had something so frivolous and relatively recent seemed so meaningful and so far away.

  “‘I’m from Kansas City,’ Tank said breaking the awkward silence. ‘Lived there my whole life.’

  “‘The Chiefs,’ Wes responded.

  “Tank smiled. ‘Don’t get me started.’

  “‘Please, you’re talking to a Titans fan. We were a foot away from winning the Super Bowl.’

  “I looked around, and they all had smiles. I didn’t know why, but it made me angry. How could they smile and reminisce in the face of where we were and what we had been through?

  “‘You?’ Wes asked. ‘What about you?’

  “‘What about me?’

  “‘Who was your team?’

  “‘My team?’ I said.

  “‘Yeah, who did you pull for?’

  “I looked him in the eyes and said, ‘I can’t see how that could possibly matter.’ There was an audible gasp from April, and Tank looked at me slack jawed.

  “Wes squinted his left eye and thought of a thousand different ways he could rearrange the nose on my face, but he didn’t act on his anger. Instead, he breathed deeply and stood up. ‘
You folks are welcome to tag along as long as you want.’ He gave me an accommodating nod and walked back outside.

  “April and Tank didn’t speak.

  “‘Ignorant red neck,’ I said.

  “‘I don’t know,’ April said. ‘Seemed nice enough.’

  “‘Ahhh,’ I said waving her off. I stood and exited the greenhouse. I was beginning to feel trapped by the small space and the conversation was irritating the hell out of me.

  “I couldn’t believe the fat-ass had asked me what my story was. My story was my family was gone. Why the hell would I want to chitchat about something like that? I was married. So what? Got married right out of high school. Had a kid, a boy. So what? It didn’t matter anymore. They were gone. Lost them to this punk-crap world, if you must know.

  “I quickly walked away from the others. I knew what was coming. I got like this every once in awhile. When I would remember. Think about them. I would cry like a baby. The others didn’t need to see how much I missed them. They didn’t need to know that it felt like my heart was being pricked with pins whenever I faced the fact that they were gone. Dead, at least I hoped they were. I wished them dead. I didn’t want them to be one of those purple jerks, or the skinner dead, or any of the other monster-freaks that had taken over the world. I didn’t want that for them.

  “That was the hell of it. I was a husband and a father whose only real hope was that his wife and kid were dead. That’s the kind of world I was left with.

  “I found a stump on the edge of the orchard and sat down. A legion of withered trees stretched out before me. It was acres of evidence of the fragile and feeble nature of our old world. Skeletons of trees that once bore blossoms and fruit and fluttering leaves were now dry, hulking, twisted pieces of wood that were just waiting to fall. I realized sitting there that I was one of them. I was waiting to fall, too.

  “I rubbed my hands together and fought not to cry. I tried to tell myself that it served no purpose. I wouldn’t feel better afterward. I wouldn’t get a great sense of relief out of it. My family would still be gone, but my throat would hurt and my eyes would burn. But I couldn’t talk myself out of it. The tears came. The snot dripped. And the hurt engulfed me. I sniffed and snorted. I asked the alien sky why, but got no answer. My story. This was my story. Is this what Wes wanted to know, that I was a coward for letting my family die?

  “I stopped mid-sob when I heard a rustling in the trees to my right. A shadow of a figure approached. An animal. A gorilla. It plodded towards me. Its sad eyes fixated on me from under its scarred brow. It stopped at my feet and sat down. It sighed deeply and turned and looked out to the orchard. It had lost something, too. It had come here for the same reason I had. It dropped its powerful head and picked at the infertile ground in front of it. I reached out slowly and patted its shoulder. I chuckled at the absurdity of it, me crying at the edge of a dead orchard patting the shoulder of the saddest gorilla on the planet. This was the world I lived in, the world without my wife and son.”

  FIVE

  “I slept at the foot of the tree stump next to the dead orchard. My choice for a place to sleep is not as unusual as the fact that I slept at all. Sleep is a rare commodity when you are prey. That’s what we humans were now, prey. We were other creatures’ food and slave labor. They even hunted us for sport.

  “Most of the reason I was able to nod off is because of the 400-pound gorilla named Ajax that decided to sleep next to me. The gentle sound of his breathing lulled me to a point where I couldn’t help but nod off. I felt... at ease. A feeling I didn’t think was possible in this world.

  “If I slept at ease that is not how I woke up. I awoke to Ajax’s panicked growling. Startled, I popped up from my slumped over position and wiped the drool from my chin. The dog, Kimball, barked frantically toward the orchard. What passed for a day in this world had broken. Everything was cast in violet hue. I scrambled to my feet facing the direction the two animals faced. I saw nothing, but heard a low, steady chatter in my head that grew in intensity with every passing minute. I backed away, stumbling over exposed roots, but never falling.

  “‘What?’ I asked Ajax and Kimball. They, of course, did not answer. They simply continued their hysterics. Ajax pounded his chest, pock-pock-pock, pock-pock-pock.

  “I saw the branches of the dead trees in the back of the orchard move. An animal, scratch that, a herd of animals was slowly heading towards us. An animal I had never seen before. The chatter intensified. I covered my ears, but the noise was inside my head.

  “‘Silencers,’ I barely heard a voice say. I turned to see Lou standing at the ready with her sword.

  “‘What?’

  “‘Silencers,’ she repeated. ‘Nothing to worry about. They’re working with us.’

  “I shook my head. ‘You mean you. I’m not working with anybody.’

  “She shrugged her shoulders. ‘If that’s the way you want it.’

  “‘I do,’ I said. Ajax was growing more and more agitated. He huffed and gritted his massive teeth. ‘Your gorilla doesn’t seem too thrilled,’ I said.

  “‘I don’t blame him,’ she said. ‘They cut out his tongue.’

  “She said it with such a nonchalant tone that I couldn’t believe she’d actually said it. I must have heard her wrong. I had to have. ‘His tongue?’

  “She nodded. ‘They didn’t eat it though.’

  “She said this as if it was a great gesture of goodwill by the Silencers.

  “‘That’s great...’ I stopped mid-thought. I got my first glimpse of a Silencer. It had a human torso and head, only the head was upside down. The mouth (where the forehead should be) appeared to be sewn shut in a dreadful frown. The bottom half of the creature was a four-legged crab. It bore a single spike at the end of each leg and five deadly spikes at the end of each hand.

  “‘A new one,’ I heard in my head.

  “I breathed in and almost choked.

  “‘Relax,’ Lou said. ‘I told you they’re working with us.’

  “‘A fresh, delicious tongue,’ a raspy voice said in my head. ‘I just need a little taste.’

  “‘Do they know that?’ I said to Lou, backing away.

  “‘Most of them,’ she smiled.

  “If she was joking, I didn’t get it.

  “She rolled her eyes. ‘You see that one?’ She pointed to a Silencer in the middle of the orchard. He looked no different from the others except for a chain with a tongue hanging around his neck.

  “‘Ye-Yeah,’ I said.

  “‘That’s Canter. He’s the leader. He’s the only one that matters. The rest of them do what he says.’

  “The group of about twenty Silencers reached us. They swayed and sniffed the air. One broke from the pack and stepped forward. Ajax roared and leapt toward it. Another Silencer advanced. Ajax pounded the ground, and Kimball’s hackles were up. He barked incessantly.

  “‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Y’all work really well together.’

  “‘Ajax! Kimball!’ Lou screamed. ‘Back!’

  “Wes and the others (including my crew) approached from behind us.

  “The one Lou called Canter looked me up and down.

  “‘Picked them up last night. Following your dead-end lead,’ she said with no attempt to hide the irritation in her voice. “Canter glared at her.

  “‘Every lead you’ve given me has been a dead-end. I’m starting to think you don’t want me to find him.’

  “Canter moved forward.

  “‘It’s getting harder and harder to believe you.’

  “It was obvious they were having a conversation, but I couldn’t hear Canter’s half. I turned to others to see if they could hear the ugly crab-thingy.

  “‘None of that,’ Wes said. ‘Damn it now. Pipe us all in or don’t talk at all.’

  “Canter and Wes exchanged a stern look. The ugly creature then focused on Lou.

  “‘Do it,’ she said. There was a pause. ‘Just do it!’

  “‘Do not take that ton
e with me,’ a voice said in my head. ‘This alliance is held together with the thinnest of threads. You would be advised not to push me too far.’

  “Lou took a deep breath. ‘I... I’m sorry. It’s just that we need all ears on this. It’s too important.’

  “Canter stepped forward, eyes still zeroed in on Lou. ‘Very well. Keep in mind, General Roy and his swarm are still officially ruling this world. I can’t guarantee they can’t pick up on this transmission.’

  “‘I haven’t seen a Délon in two weeks,’ Wes said. ‘Word is they’ve lost control of the north and most of the west.’

  “‘Wrong,’ Canter replied sharply. ‘Not lost. Losing. General Roy’s never been more dangerous.’

  “Kimball sniffed the ground and approached the group of Silencers to the right of Canter. They nervously scampered from him. They looked like a group of fiddler crabs darting across the beach.

  “‘You’re running out of time,’ Canter said. ‘They’ve captured two more Storytellers. And they hold two Keepers.’

  “I turned to Tank and April to see if they understood the nonsense we were hearing. They both shrugged and then their eyes widened as if they were suddenly terrified. I turned back to find Canter’s upside down face just inches from mine.

  “‘The new one is a liability,’ he said fixated on my mouth. “‘I-I-I,’ is all I managed to say.

  “‘It’s none of your concern,’ Lou said.

  “Canter shifted his attention to her. ‘Everything you do is my concern. You don’t seem to appreciate what I’m risking.’

  “She laughed.

  “‘You dare laugh at me,’ he barked advancing on her. Ajax grunted and stepped in front of her.

  “Canter faltered. He examined the ape’s face and then chuckled hideously. He held out the tongue hanging around his neck. ‘Missing something?’

  “Ajax roared and leapt forward. Kimball turned and bounded toward them. All hell was about to break loose.

  “‘Enough!’ Lou screamed. Ajax and Kimball instantly heeded her command. ‘We don’t have time for this!’

  “Canter chuckled again. ‘Take your orders, ape.’