Brink of Extinction

by Nicholas Ryan

  “I’m hit.”

  The man was sure it was Walter Penn. He thumbed the mic button. “McGraw, Simkins, we need you at the back exit. Pronto!”

  There were two quick squelches of sound like Morse code acknowledgements and then the speaker came to life again. It was the voice of the boy.

  “What about me?”

  The man was confident there would be no more attacks on the front entrance of the Museum. The gang was concentrating on breaching the exit door and the ragged hole blown into the wall of the building.

  “You’re going to have to hold the front doors all on your own,” the man said.

  The man threw down the walkie-talkie and took up a firing position. In the sudden eerie lull he could hear the voice of the gruesomely deformed man, barking furious orders. The man peered over the sight of the M4 until he pinpointed the location of the sound. He was still crouched, hidden, in the bed of a truck. Through the tint of the windshield the man could see the body in profile; the shoulder, neck and the disfigured head, made blurred and out of focus by the layers of glass in between. The man clenched his jaw and his eyes became dark and dispassionate. The fight would go on until the head of the snake was severed.

  He sighted carefully down the stubbed muzzle of his weapon.

  * * *

  Gideon Silver snarled at the gang members around him who were all cowering behind the cover of the nearby vehicles, waving his arms and threatening them with the force of his fury and desperation. The attack on the Museum had withered into a pitched firefight, and the dead bodies lying on the road were mounting. But he sensed the defenders were on the brink of surrender. It needed just one last determined assault and the Museum’s walls would be breached.

  He glared down at the nearest man whose face was covered in mud, his eyes red and wild within the drawn terror of his face. He was lying in the dirt and gravel, firing at the darkened doorway.

  “Get up!” Gideon howled at the man. “Make a run for the hole in the wall. Everyone will cover you.”

  The man didn’t move. He lifted his face towards where Gideon crouched and his eyes were wide with horror. He shook his head, the fear thick and writhing oily in his guts.

  “Do it!” Gideon slammed his fist against the side of the truck. “Do what I fucking tell you!” His fury brought him towering to his feet, his face swelling and darkening with red rage. Spittle flung from his mouth, his hideous features wrenched into a nightmarish mask. He had a pistol in his hand and he aimed into the gang member’s face.

  “Fucking do it, or I will kill you!”

  * * *

  Perched high above on the rooftop, the man watched grimly as the figure on the back of the truck suddenly pounced to his feet and stood in profile. His chest was thrust out, one hand clenched into a fist and the other pointing a handgun down at the ground. The face was grossly disfigured and monstrous on the body’s neck.

  The man took a long deep breath, then let half the air escape from his lips in a slow whisper of sound.

  He aimed for the hideous head, and pulled the trigger…

  * * *

  Gideon Silver did not hear the whip crack of the shot, for the bullet had struck him long before the sound was able to carry on the faint morning breeze. He felt the impact strike him in the neck and then he was thrown from his feet and knocked to the ground. He fell from the truck and lay on the cold earth.

  He was staring up at the sky, watching a cloud drift slowly by and there was a numbing wet pain in his side, somewhere near his shoulder. He tried to feel for the pain – to press his hand against it – but his body would not move. He could feel the wetness spreading, spilling onto the ground around him, soaking warm against the back of his head.

  He made a croaking sound, tried to call for help, but there came just a long wheeze of breath, like a weary gasp. Suddenly it began to get dark, closing in from the edges of his eyes, and then a great wave of pain overwhelmed him so that his vision blurred with the tears of shock and great horror.

  Yet his eyes were still open – still staring misted and blank as the light became just a pinprick, and the icy cold darkness came rushing down upon him.

  He heard a voice then, rough and gravelly from somewhere close by. “He’s dead.”

  Gideon tried to smile, but the ravaged ruined lips became a grimace and would not move. “Yes,” he thought. “I’m dead.” He tried once more to smile – to laugh defiantly in the face of death, but his body had left him and the eyes went on staring blankly…

  * * *

  “He’s dead,” the gang member grunted, overcome with a bewildered sense of despair and confusion. “Gideon’s fucking dead.”

  The man kneeling in the gravel on the far side of the truck came and crouched over the body. He stared down at the ghastly wound in the man’s neck and did not bother to feel for a pulse.

  “It’s over,” he said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  The battle had ended.

  * * *

  “Come with me,” Bill the tour guide took the boy’s arm. “There is something you need to see in the next room.”

  It was afternoon. The snow had begun to fall again, drifting lazily down from a white sky like soft powder.

  The bodies of the bandits killed during the attack had been heaped onto the sidewalk where the flies and rats were already gathered in swarming, heaving packs. The carrion birds had joined the gruesome feast, squabbling and squawking over the cadavers, fouling the mound with loose feathers and their droppings. The birds had used the open wounds to peck away at the victims’ internal organs and tugged at the fingers so that the limbs twitched as though the bodies were still alive. The stench of death was heavy in the air.

  The breach in the museum’s wall had been temporarily boarded over and the rubble cleared away. Bill’s face was coated in powdered dust, his face streaked with rivulets of sweat and his hands were raw and blistered.

  The man looked up from where he was checking on Walter Penn’s injury. It was a shoulder hit, little more than a flesh wound.

  “You too,” Bill pointed at him. “You both should see this last exhibit.”

  * * *

  The room was not large, nor was it impressively set out in an interactive display. It was a simple room with photographs of people’s faces along each of the walls.

  The man was overcome by a strange sense of reverence as he stepped into the well-lit area.

  It was a shrine. A tribute. He felt his skin shiver with goose bumps.

  A flagpole stood in the center of the area with the American flag hanging proudly. Around the base of the pole was a cairn of carefully whitewashed rocks.

  “Take a look around,” Bill swept his arms in an expansive gesture. “The photographs on these walls are images of our nation’s heroes – the men and women who were the bravest of the brave throughout the zombie apocalypse. This room honors them and their sacrifice.”

  The man and the boy drifted in different directions. Bill followed the boy at a respectful distance as he stopped and studied each black-and-white image and then read the neatly typed description underneath.

  After several minutes the boy came to a small alcove – an area that was set apart from the rest of the room. Here was a monitor and a small sitting bench. The boy stared at the screen and after a few seconds it burst into a shaky black and white video.

  The film showed a section of soldiers in a trench when suddenly one of them threw down his weapon and leaped, panicking, out of the defensive ditch and towards a rushing horde of undead who were trapped and entangled in the barbed wire. The boy could imagine the young soldier’s panic, the terror in the face of such horror. Yet in his confusion, the soldier had leaped out into no-man’s land – towards the undead.

  A split-second later another soldier leaped out of the trench and went after the first man. They tumbled to the ground together but the second man became entangled in the wire. He was stranded with the zombie horde overwhelming the line, threatening t
o crash across the wire and into the thin line of defense. Somehow, the tangled man managed to tear himself free from the wire and then carry the first soldier back into the trenches. It was an act of breathtaking heroism that – even all these years later watched on film – left the boy filled with a sense of profound awe.

  The film faded to black and for a long moment the boy stayed watching the screen, hoping there would be more of the footage. There was not.

  “What did you think of that?” Bill asked quietly.

  “Incredible,” the boy confessed. “Who was he?”

  Bill shrugged his shoulders. “Officially he was labeled ‘the unknown hero’,” Bill explained, “and for many years that footage was shown as an inspiration to the millions who survived the apocalypse. The government, to typify the heroism of all our fighting men and women, used that man’s bravery. His name was never published, never officially recognized.”

  “Who was he?” the boy asked again.

  “Him,” Bill said and pointed to the man. He was standing silently in the center of the room, his features ravaged as though he had just come face-to-face with the haunting ghost of his past. “Your father.”

  The boy turned his eyes wide with incomprehension and disbelief.

  “You?”

  The man nodded, and suddenly he was very sad and agonized.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to,” the torment came into his eyes, the terrible torture. He made a placating helpless gesture with his hands. “But I just could never find the words. I was doing my duty. My time throughout the war wasn’t a memory I wanted to re-live. I wanted to leave it behind me…”

  The boy stood up and the incredulity on his face changed to something deeper and more profound – some instinctive sense of new understanding. He turned back to Bill curiously.

  “How did you know it was my father in that footage?” he asked.

  “Because I shot the film,” he said. “And because I was the man who stitched your father back together once he came back to the lines. I knew who he was the moment you both arrived here at the museum.”

  “You were a doctor?”

  “USAMRIID, retired” Bill introduced himself. “William Mitchell.”

  The boy frowned for a long moment, searching the dark recesses of his memory. The man had sounded familiar and as the dawning realization came across his face he saw Bill nod. “Yes,” he said. “My team and I invented Debex-343, the hybrid anticoagulant we immunized our soldiers with.”

  “And you were at the front lines on the day of the attack?”

  “Filming,” William Mitchell said. “I wanted research footage to document the effects of the immunization. Yes,” he said, his memory making his voice heavy. “I was there. I saw what your father did and when he was brought back behind the lines, I operated on him in the field.”

  The boy took a tentative step towards his father, still trying to reconcile all he now knew against all he had thought and believed.

  “And my mother? Me?”

  The man’s shoulders sagged and the lines of weariness and fatigue etched into his face seemed to deepen. For an instant his features began to blur as though the hard stone of his face had been eroded.

  “I was in love with your mother,” the man said. “When she was evacuated to the camps, I didn’t even know she was pregnant. I didn’t even know you were born until three years after she went away. All that time I was with the army as we fell back from one defensive line to the next, day after day retreating before the zombies. When her letter finally reached me you would already have been four years old.” He shrugged helpless and hopeless for a moment. “I guess that was the summer she died,” he said at last, very softly. “But I was with the army – I couldn’t get to you until after the attack on Chicago… when I was no longer fit for combat. My wounds...” he pointed at the blank screen. “That’s when I came north to find you.”

  “I… I thought…” the boy’s eyes brimmed with unashamed tears. They ran down his cheek and he sobbed. In just a few moments the perception of his tumultuous world had teetered off balance and then come back to become more stable, more solid, more grounded.

  The man nodded. “I know,” he said. “And there was nothing I could say – nothing I could tell you that you would believe. That’s why I brought you to this museum. I thought it would help you to understand and help me to explain…”

  “You knew about this room – this footage of you?”

  “I knew the footage existed,” he said. “But I didn’t know about this room, or that the footage was part of the Museum’s exhibition. I was just hoping that bringing you here would help me to find a way to reach out to you…”

  * * *

  The man and the boy stood very close, talking in hushed tones inside the foyer of the museum. Outside the afternoon was darkening and soon it would be dusk. The boy swayed towards him and the man threw his arms around his son and they embraced for long moments. When they drew apart, they were both tearful, their faces mirroring each other’s emotions.

  “You’re going, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” the boy said.

  “Where?”

  “I’m going north,” the boy squared his shoulders and lifted his chin a little. “I’m going to find the Army and join up. One day we’ll take Chicago back from the gangs and bandits.”

  The man nodded. He let out a deep breath. “I’ll wait for you,” he said. “I’m going to stay here at the museum. They need more volunteers and we have some rebuilding to do…”

  They both lapsed into heavy silence again, neither wanting to draw away and break this new-formed bond. Finally the man reached into his jacket pocket and handed the boy a small book.

  “Take this,” he said. “I’ve carried it around in the bottom of my bag for long enough. Now it’s yours.”

  It was a small bible, maybe four inches long and just a couple of inches wide, the size of a cigarette packet. The interior pages were cracked off the spine and the gold edging had faded. The pages were well thumbed and worn, the corners folded down in many places. Slipped over the back cover of the book was a metal plate, scratched and scarred with the words ‘May this comfort and protect you’ etched into the metal.

  “Your mother gave me this on the day the train took her away to the camps,” the man explained, his voice raw and choked with emotion that threatened to spill over. “When she handed it to me she said something I will never forget – something I want to say to you now…”

  The boy held the bible lightly in his hands, turning it over and sensing the history of the little book that seemed to come off the pages. He looked up into his father’s face and saw something there he had never recognized before.

  He saw pride.

  “Take this with you and hold it over your heart so that you will come back to me alive.”

  The man watched the boy all the way to the distant corner of the street. There were tears in his eyes and he cuffed them away gruffly with the back of his hand. The boy reached the intersection and turned north with a determination in his stance – and then stopped suddenly – just at the moment he would disappear from sight.

  The boy turned, straightened his back and flung up a salute to his father.

  The man returned the salute, and then he walked slowly back inside the Museum.

  The End.