Storm Horizon

by Brian Switzer

  Danny continued. “You can’t help it. You’re just doing what instinct tells you to do- there’s nothing personal about it. And hell, you have to eat, right?” He lunged forward, drove the knife in under its armpit, and jerked it down, opening a yawning slit from its underarm to its waist. Blood mixed with black ichor poured from the wound; the creeper snapped its teeth and reached for Danny but it moved too slowly and its grasping hands closed on nothing but air.

  Danny’s tone remained placid and friendly, as if he were discussing the merits of no-till planting with a neighboring farmer over beers. “But here’s what I don’t get. Every other predator walking God’s green earth manages to kill without causing unnecessary suffering.” The razor-sharp blade came down in a powerful arc and sliced through the creeper’s extended arm; a burst of blood arced from its wrist and its hand landed in a pile of dead leaves on the forest floor. The creeper didn’t notice and continued to reach for him with its bloody stump. “A quick suffocation, or drowning, or paralysis, and that’s all there is to it.” He pushed the side of its head with the heel of his boot, causing it to topple over and land on its side. He used his boot again, this time to push it onto its stomach.

  “Not you guys, though. You don’t bash a guy over the head, or rip his throat out. No, you like to go in through the belly and let your victim watch you eat his liver. You guys can’t give a quick kill, let your prey die with some dignity.” He pinned it to the ground with a knee between its shoulder blades, then grabbed a handful of its hair just above each ear and yanked its head back. A tree root, thick as a man’s bicep and hard as a baseball bat, protruded from the ground where the creeper fell. With each word, Danny smashed the creeper’s face into the root and pulled it back up again. “How-long-did-that-poor-kid-lay-there-and-suffer-you-son-of-a-bitch.” He flipped it over and stepped back.

  Its face resembled raw hamburger- its nose was pulped and its mouth a bloody crater. An eye dangled from its socket and bounced against its cheek.

  Off to the side, Coy pressed his lips together. "Come on, Danny. That's a king-hell ass whipping, but I don't think you're accomplishing anything."

  Danny whirled and advanced on him, his eyes wild and his fists clenched at his sides. "I'M ACCOMPLISHING SOMETHING! I'M MAKING MYSELF FEEL BETTER!"

  Coy held up both hands in an appeasing gesture. "Okay, brother. Breathe, man. Settle down." He watched Danny with a wary eye. They'd fought once in the years they'd known each other, a brutal and bloody affair that would have ended with one of them in the hospital had Will not wandered in and broken it up. Danny had five years and thirty-five pounds on him but Coy was a state champion wrestler and possessor of a blinding, murderous rage when pushed too far.

  Danny glared at him, breathing hard, for another few seconds, then lowered his gaze. He fought to control his breathing and when he looked back up the fury and madness had left his eyes. "Sorry, buddy," he said, extending his hand.

  Coy grasped it and pulled him in for a brief bro-hug. "Don't worry about it. It's a wonder we don't all lose our minds on a weekly basis."

  They walked side-by-side in silence. About halfway to the spot where they found the boy’s remains, Danny cleared his throat. "I need ask you something."

  "What's up?"

  "We you help me bury that kid?"

  "I'd fight you if you tried to leave without giving him a proper burial."

  Danny raised and lowered his head one time. Together they took care of what needed doing.

  Fifteen

  * * *

  An electronic musical tone generated by a wristwatch under Coy’s pillow woke him at 5:30 the next morning. He silenced the alarm and swung his feet over the edge of his bed. He sat there a moment, his chin in his hands, bleary-eyed and bone-stiff. It had been early morning, after one o'clock, when he and Danny had returned the night before. He gave himself three brisk slaps to the left side of his head. "Get up. Work is waiting." He clicked on a lantern and froze when he heard his Dad mutter and roll over in his bed on the other side of the thin wall. When ten seconds passed with no other noise from the next room, he resumed his routine.

  His tiny room consisted of a bed on one wall and a beat up desk and a chair on another; piles of clothes lined the other two walls. Clean clothes against the east wall, dirty on the west. When pickings grew slim in the clean pile he gathered up the dirty ones and delivered them to his Mom. Two days later, as if by magic, they materialized back in the clean pile. He liked the system.

  He pulled off the sweats he wore to bed, causing goose pimples to break out on his arms, thighs, and back. He rubbed his bicep's for warmth and set the lantern where it would shine on the clean clothes. The tunnels were deep enough in the ground to provide a year-round sixty-two degree ambient temperature. That might be nice in the summer, but when the thermometer outside read below freezing, sixty-two degrees felt pretty chilly.

  He found a clean pair of sweats and pulled them on over a pair of insulated underwear. It took a long moment to tug his blue jeans over the sweat bottoms, then he put a thick, warm hoodie on over the sweatshirt. He wiggled his feet into a regular pair of socks and pulled an insulated pair on over those. Warm, waterproof, steel-toed boots went over the socks. He topped it all off with a thick Carhardtt jacket pulled off a hook on the wall. Growing up on a ranch in Northern Kansas taught him the importance of layers during cold weather.

  He slid the makeshift door to the side, looked back, and snapped his fingers. Sally, a golden retriever of indeterminate age, jumped off the foot of the bed and stretched in a languorous fashion. They'd come across the dog and a single surviving pup in an old barn outside Bolivar. She bonded with him at once; her pup with a teenager, Meghan.

  A trio of tables lined the wall near the front of the tunnel and provided a space for snacks and drinks. He emptied a bottle of water into a Styrofoam cup and stirred in some powdered juice mix for him and set a bowl of water down for Sally. He drained the juice in one long drink, wincing at the taste, and waited for the dog to finish quenching her morning thirst.

  Finished, she looked up at him expectantly; water dripped from her muzzle and made little puddles by her feet. Coy scratched her between the ears; her tail thumped a bass line on the tunnels smooth, straight floor.

  His last stop was at a long table across the tunnel from where it had his drink. It held a mishmash of firearms and ammo. An armory in tunnel six held most of the camp’s weapons. But they stored arms in both shafts that people lived in, too, plus the dining room and the meeting hall. Will laid out the reasoning at a community-wide gathering. "The last thing we want is to lose people because they couldn’t get to the armory when a threat materialized."

  Coy went straight to his hunting weapon of choice- a semi-automatic.30/06 Remington 750 Woodmaster. He snapped in a full magazine and placed a second one in a zippered pouch in his coat. He grabbed two mags for the .9mm Beretta he always carried in a holster on his hip and poured two bottles of water into a bladder and hung it over his shoulder. Two soft snaps of his finger got Sally's attention and he stepped out onto the quarry bottom with the dog at his heels.

  The morning sun peeked over the mine wall in bright prisms that stung his eyes. It was cold, but not the bitter cold of the last few months. This cold bore the promise of spring. The wind wasn't an issue at the bottom of the mine no matter how hard it buffeted the pine trees that grew along the rim. But he knew as he marched up the long, steep road that led from the bottom to the world above the wind would make its presence known.

  He plodded up the hill, taking in the morning as it broke over the quarry and the surrounding land. Sally ranged ahead, her nose working furiously as she bounded from spot to spot, taking in the scents left behind from the night before. The walls on either side grew shorter the longer he walked until they disappeared and he stood even ground. He exchanged pleasantries with the two men and a woman on guard duty, walked twenty more paces to the intersection of the entrance and the county road.

  He c
alled to Sally, who was exploring a gopher hole with great curiosity. It took three calls to get her attention; once he had it, she approached him sadness, stopping several times to cast longing looks back at the hole.

  "You better get over here," he growled at her in mock anger as he slapped his glove Palm against his thigh. She arrived and gave his outstretched hand a lick, sat down, and looked at him with an expectant air.

  "Which way do you want to go today, girl?" The road ran north and south. North followed the quarry to its far side and proceeded into miles of farmland. South took them down a steep and hill, ran alongside a river for a half-mile, and then led into the nearby town of Carthage.

  He pulled a piece of jerky from his pouch and cut off a small chunk. “If you catch it we go south and if you miss we head north.” She watched his every move with rapt attention. Her tail swung like a metronome and she licked her lips, her eyes glued to his hands. "Here we go, old girl. Catch!" He threw the jerky underhanded six feet in the air. Sally watched, drifted to her right, and snapped at the morsel when it was just above eye level. She chewed three times, swallowed, sat back down, and eyed him, hopeful for a second treat.

  He gave the top of her head a rough rub. “South it is, then.” He patted his leg for her to follow and walked down the big hill toward the river.

  Sixteen

  * * *

  Coy, Will and Becky's only child, often felt he'd been born into the wrong time period. He should have been a man of the 1800s when how well a man's family ate depended on his skill as a hunter and fisherman. When success was something attainable to any man, regardless of his education or family background.

  He was a natural outdoorsman. His legend started in his hometown of Marysville before his tenth birthday. It advanced to surrounding towns when he was eleven and surrounding counties in his mid-teens. By the time of his eighteenth birthday, not long before the outbreak, hunters and fishermen across northern Kansas knew his name and talked about his exploits.

  He won turkey shoots and skeet competitions in the fall and winter and fishing tournaments in the spring and summer. He was a master trapper who knew more woodcraft than men three times his age and an expert marksman with a handgun, long gun, and bow. Danny liked to say Coy could track a housefly across the ocean during a hurricane.

  Coy enjoyed life on the ranch and working cattle. But he had a dream of one day owning a sprawling hunting reserve with a grand lodge and cabins for ten visitors. Men from the Midwest with more money than skill would pay top dollar to spend a week under his tutelage, hunting, fishing, and living off the land. They’d go home at the end of their stay with trophy bass and ten point bucks, counting down the days until they returned.

  The outbreak changed all that. A herd of creepers over a thousand strong had shuffled out of the woods and overrun their home. By the time the Crandall's fled, their house had burned, the ranch was destroyed, two people had died, and they found themselves on the road with the clothes on their backs and nothing else.

  Fifteen months later his Dad led a group of seventeen people to The Underground. Once there, they discovered the hundred or so people already living in the tunnels didn't understand the new scope of things. They had no security, lacked the ability to fight the creepers, and lived on junk food from the warehouses with no plan for what do when that ran out. They waiting in vain for the government to restore order and send the military in to save them. The Originals, as Will’s group called them, were ripe targets for the roving gangs that preyed on people everywhere.

  Will and Jiri assumed control of the quarry, in practice if not in principle. They made improvements, ramrodded projects through, taught, trained, and instilled a new mindset. The community now revolved around two principles- safety and security.

  Early on, Coy noticed The Originals complained wistfully about their lack of fresh meat. Everybody complained but nobody took a gun out in the woods to do something about it. So he set out to change the situation. He and Sally went out every morning and hunted. They brought back deer, turkeys (both wild and feral), and rabbits. The pair tracked down hogs, poultry, and cattle that escaped area farms. They fished the nearby river and a big underground lake for bass, catfish, and turtles. Game was plentiful and an abundance of farm animals survived in the wild if you knew how to track them and where to look for them.

  One of The Originals, an old hillbilly woman, was skilled in the science of preserving meat. Coy spent hours with her every day for two months, learning how to dry beef, venison, and poultry for jerky. He learned how to salt pork and beef so it lasted for months in the tunnel’s cool, dry air.

  It became a big daily event for a lot of the community members to watch for Coy and Sally and see what sort of bounty they returned with.

  A few days into the new year, Will sat Coy down with an idea for another way to take advantage of his daily excursions. He’d always had an eye for detail, and his Dad had a plan that made use of that.

  In his waterproof pouch, along with replacement mags, dried fruit, and beef jerky, he kept a 5 x 8 journal pad and a pen. Each day while out on his hunt, he stopped a handful of times to take detailed notes and make drawings of his surroundings. In the evening he sat down with Justin, the group's unofficial recording secretary, data keeper, and mapmaker. Together, they developed a meticulous and accurate layout of the land surrounding the quarry.

  Carthage, a pretty town of 12,000 before the outbreak, sat a mile and a half to the north. Per Will's instructions, the town was off-limits. But they had recorded the location of every house, business, stream, field, and pasture for almost three miles in every other direction..

  On sheet after sheet of graph paper pilfered from an underground office, they plotted their surroundings and planned for the future. The grids told them what houses had been cleared and scavenged and warned of places where the dead still roamed. They told them which fields the farmers planted the previous spring with what crops, and which pastures still contained livestock.

  The scavenging crews used the maps to plan their daily runs and keep track of locations where fuel was stored. The maps showed Will and Danny the best places to go in a few months when the time came to raise livestock and plant crops. If Jiri or Cyrus needed a truckload of truckload a project, they consulted the maps.

  Sometimes at night, when Coy lie on his cot drifting off to sleep, the disconnect that was his life came to mind. Two years ago, he was a state champion wrestler, a good high school football player, and one of the most popular boys at his small consolidated school.

  Back then, if someone had told him there would come a time when he spent his days hunting and fishing and his evenings studying the surrounding land he would have thought his dream life had come to fruition. It was funny how God, or life, or whoever ran the universe showed him that it was possible to get what you thought you wanted, but in a way so fucked up you’d rather not have it. It was like biting into a birthday cake and finding dog turds underneath all the pretty frosting.

  He fished around in his pouch and pulled out another hunk of beef jerky. He cut a piece off for Sally, sitting nearby and staring at him with that earnest expression only possessed by good dogs waiting for a treat. He tossed the hunk of meat and she snapped it out of the air, chewed noisily, and looked at him with a hopeful expression.

  "That's all for now, girl," he said. He scratched her between her ears and gave her a pat on the head. "Time to focus now. Let's go see what we can find."

  Seventeen

  * * *

  Three hours later, Coy slogged up a ridge on the way back to camp, dragging the choicest parts of a pair of feral hogs behind him.

  The hunt had frustrated him. He spent most of it tracking a deer along a well-used game trail. It was a good-sized buck, judging from the depth of its footprints. Only a big male or pregnant female weighed enough to leave tracks as deep as the ones he trailed, and it was too early in the year for a doe to be giving birth anytime soon.

  Coy tracked it for two hou
rs without making a bit of progress. He had an imaginary boundary line, a radius around camp he was comfortable traveling in. He’d pursued the deer beyond that line and was just about to call off the hunt when Sally caught his attention.

  She had padded along behind or beside him the entire time he stalked the deer, as silent and unobtrusive as smoke. Off to his right, she stopped and pointed- pulled her front right paw off the ground and straightened her tail into a line behind her. The dog stood stiff and straight as an arrow, one with a nose instead of a barb. She raised her hackles; the hair along her spine from her neck to her haunches stood straight.

  Coy froze. Only his eyes moved, searching the woods in the direction she faced, needing to find what she pointed on before it found him. It took three passes for his eyes to pick up the motion in the trees sixty yards ahead and to the right of where they stood. He made out a hog, and then a second one, rooting in piles of dead leaves alongside a fallen tree.

  The pigs looked as big as two barn doors Through the Trijicon scope on his Woodmaster. A pair of Hampshire's, they were no doubt escapees from a local farm or hog operation. The winter took its toll on them. Full grown sows, they should have been nice and fat, tipping the scales somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 pounds. These two weren’t emaciated but it would surprise him if either of them weighed an ounce over 275.

  The hogs rooted side-by-side, nosing through the leaves for acorns, worms, roots, and anything else they could fit in their mouths. Coy shouldered the rifle and zeroed in on the nearest pig. He centered his sights on her side, just above her front leg, and waited for her to be still.