by James Axler
“Fireblast!” Ryan cursed as his fingers closed around empty air, the bird fluttering past his shoulder and up to the ceiling. Ryan swung the flaming candle around, keeping track of the little bird.
“What is it?” Krysty asked, and then she saw. “A bird?”
“Carnivorous or hungry,” Ryan said, walking to stand beneath the fluttering bird as its wings brushed repeatedly against the ceiling. “Doesn’t matter much which.”
The bird flew this way and that as Ryan and Krysty watched. Ryan stood very still and let the bird expend its energy until it flew back toward the cot, alighting on the crossbar beside Ryan’s discarded blaster. Then, Ryan’s hand snapped out and grabbed the bird. It chirruped excitedly for a moment, and then Ryan had crushed it, feeling its tiny bones snap in his hand.
“Was that necessary?” Krysty asked, an edge of irritation to her voice.
Ryan held her gaze with his single eye. “Don’t look in the cot,” was all he said, tossing the bird’s carcass aside. Then he picked up his blaster and urged her from the room, pulling the door closed behind him.
Outside on the landing, Krysty looked at Ryan, a frown creasing her brow. “A baby?” she asked.
“Not anymore,” Ryan told her, striding warily across the corridor toward the other closed door.
Krysty raised her Smith & Wesson, covering her partner once more.
THE OTHERS SAT THERE, in the wreckage of the old house, listening to the wind rushing through the eaves. Across the room, Mildred was helping Paul Witterson build a fire in the old fireplace, snapping off pieces from the pile of dilapidated furniture and thick branches that had been gathered by Annie and Mitch and stored here. In the flickering flames, the walls were a mottled charcoal-black. The room was large, running the full length of the house across one side, and several of the party of travelers had already bedded down here with blankets brought from the wags. While Ryan, Krysty, Jak and J.B. were checking the house, securing the boarded windows with the help of Croxton and the old-young Daisy, Doc had remained here with Mildred—safety in numbers.
The occupants of the room were mostly silent, just a few hushed snippets of conversation coming from across the way as Patrick and his wife, Sara, discussed the day’s events with their son, Neil. Neil was raising concerns about the health of the horses, especially his favorite, Charlotte, and their conversation had an irritated, familial buzz. There was a howling from outside, the noise of the building winds as they raced across the moonlit fields. And then, another noise, too; the noise of howling from a human throat; cursing and howling and screaming, the sound of an enraged mob venting its anger. It was the scalies, of course. They had followed Ryan’s band here, or perhaps they simply patrolled the area every night, looking for stragglers to do who knew what to.
Doc shivered. Despite the rising heat of the fire, he felt the cold hands of the grave running along his spine. After a moment, he stood and walked past the fire, past Mildred and Paul, until he was at the windows at the front of the house. He stood there, examining the window frames that had been reinforced with metal, dull crisscross lines riveted to the sides, and, between the metal, heavy wooden boards, oak and ash and beech, stippled here and there with the trace of woodworm.
Doc reached forward and ran his hand across the boarded window, putting pressure there as he tried to force the thing open to see what it could take. It seemed solid enough. There was a draft, a needle-thin breeze that whistled through the tiny gap where two boards met, blowing against Doc’s tired face like a fan. He ran his index finger along the line, feeling the freezing cold bite of the air, stopping as he reached the hardened putty mixture that had been used by the previous owners to presumably block the draft.
From outside, seemingly just beyond the window, the sounds of movement, of running feet and snarled cries, came.
“You okay?” The voice came from over Doc’s shoulder, low and quiet.
Doc turned to see Mildred peering up at him quizzically, her face a picture of concern.
“Mildred,” he said, hearing his own voice so loud in the quiet room. “It is nothing, just an old fool worrying about sleeping in a draft.”
Mildred’s expression didn’t change. She turned to the boarded window, as though looking through the glass pane that had once been there, and waited a moment, listening. “They sound close,” she said finally. “The scalies.”
“At play in the fields of the Lord,” Doc said with apparent good humor he evidently didn’t feel.
Mildred reached her hand across, touching Doc gently on the upper arm, reassuring him. “I’d guess that the people who lived here,” she said, “did so for a long time. It may look like a flea pit but this place is sturdy enough. They reinforced it all over.”
“What about the wags?” Doc inquired. “What if they touch them? Burn them or break them apart?”
“What if, what if,” Mildred said dismissively. “We’ll deal with it, is ‘what if.’”
Doc nodded sagely to himself, turning the thoughts over in his head. It wasn’t the wags that he was thinking about, he knew; not really. Mildred turned, indicating the fire and Doc nodded once again. “You must forgive my restlessness,” Doc said.
Mildred nodded, flashing him her broad smile. “Of course,” she assured him.
Doc stood there for a few minutes, listening to the wind howling by, the abating sounds of scalies or maybe just wild animals, his eyes glued to the flickering shadows playing across the wooden boards over the windows. After a while, Doc became aware that someone else had walked across the room to stand beside him. Doc turned and saw Alec, the young man who had been in Croxton’s original party with Daisy. Alec offered a thin smile as their eyes met. He was perhaps nineteen or twenty years old, still more a lad in Doc’s eyes than a man. Thin, but wiry, with strong, weather-beaten hands poking from the ragged sleeves of the dark jacket he wore, the fingers jutting from the ends of his woollen gloves. In the half-light from the fire, Doc saw that Alec had pale blue eyes and light hair of a blond so pale as to appear silver. He had ruddy cheeks, too, the color showing there in his otherwise pale skin, just a hint of beard on his chin. His coloring was the same as Daisy, the young-again girl who had first convinced Doc to go on this strange quest. Perhaps he’s her son, Doc pondered, before he remembered something that old man Croxton had said—that Alec was a miracle, just like the girl.
“Alec, isn’t it?” Doc began, endeavoring to be sociable.
“Yeah.” The young man nodded, his eyes fixed on Doc’s.
After a few moments, Doc turned away and gestured to the boarded windows. “Do you think that they will hold?” he asked, really just to make conversation.
Alec frowned, then shrugged, dismissing the query.
They stood there once more in companionable silence, watching the flickering shadows on the boarded-up windows, feeling the drafts as they penetrated the tiniest gaps in the wood and metal shield.
Finally, Alec spoke again, his words interrupting Doc’s thoughts. “You ever think about superpowers, Mr. Tanner?” he asked.
Doc turned to peer at the young man, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “I cannot say as I have,” Doc admitted.
“That’s what it’s like,” Alec told him, his voice low. “Being reborn like this.”
“You were regenerated,” Doc asked, “like Daisy?”
Alec nodded. “I was dipped in the waters by the spring out there in Babyville and I was reborn like you see me,” he said. “Fifty years just fell from me, like it was nothing. Like dieting the years away.”
“Incredible,” Doc breathed. “Absolutely incredible.”
“You say that,” Alec said, “because you don’t gone seen it yet. It’s a miracle. And now everything is different. Everything.”
With a few words, Doc led the young man out of the room and, so as not to wake the others, they continued the conversation in the hallway beyond the main lounge. In the light coming from the flickering fireplace in the room beyond, Doc saw now
that the hallway was wide with peeling scars of wallpaper.
“Would you explain it to me,” Doc requested, “this process? How it feels.”
Alec nodded, his expression serious. “You get old,” he said, “and you forget. That’s the way I understand it, Mr. Tanner.”
“My friends call me Doc,” he told the young man, genuine affection in his voice.
“Doc then,” Alec continued. “When you get old it’s like something in you slows down and you don’t even notice. Your eyesight—that’s the one everyone always notices. That and hearing. They fade, like they have someplace better to go. Oh, you’ll deny it at first, pretend it’s just the same as it always was. ‘Mebbe I couldn’t read from this distance, right across the room,’ you say, ‘maybe faces were always kind of blurry and indistink-looking.’” The old-and-young-again man had said it like that instead of indistinct, but Doc didn’t correct him now; he just waited for the old-and-young-again man to continue. “Or you miss words,” Alec said, “like when your good miss calls you for grub and you don’t hear her—you have a miss, Doc?”
Doc shook his head. “Not here,” he said. “I did—once.” He was thinking of Emily, of course, but, just for a second, another face flashed before him—flawless, inquisitive features framed by a swathe of blond hair. It was Lori Quint, he thought, but then he realized it wasn’t. Somehow, in his imagining, Lori had become someone else: the girl, Daisy. Unconsciously, Doc shivered, recalling the strange dream he had had on the road, wondering at his fascination.
“She’ll say something over dinner,” Alec was saying, “and you’ll miss it and you’ll ask her to repeat it. Mebbe you wasn’t listening properly, right? That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
Doc laughed knowingly before he encouraged the man to continue.
“You seem like a smart fella, Doc Tanner,” Alec explained, “so you don’t need me telling you that that ain’t how listening works. Nobody ever missed nothing because they wasn’t switching their ears on in time. You get old and these things stop working right, and mebbe you kid yourself they did like this always, or you forget enough that you think they did. But they didn’t.
“That’s what it is, Doc—being old.”
Doc was captivated, and Alec could see that now in the old man’s expression.
“You forget,” Alec said quietly, “until it comes back. I dipped in that spring, out west in Babyville, day after day. And I wanted to disbelieve, Doc, just like you do, I think. But it worked, man, it worked. Look at me.”
Doc looked at the man as though with fresh eyes, trying to imagine the changes that had been made to his body. He seemed young, strong. And yet, his words were the words of an old man, an old man who had shaken off the regrets of age like a dog shaking off raindrops from a storm.
“I was old,” Alec told him. “Seventy-one. Couldn’t always sleep a whole night, sometimes not even an hour. Needing to piss, to stretch out the cramps in my arms and legs, or just to lie there and feel all the aches that my muscles surely held in place. Wore eyeglasses, too, like your friend Mr. Dix. Didn’t do much after a while, needed to get them changed I guess, but I never did. You get old and you start to think it don’t matter no more. You’ll do it tomorrow or the day after. Or you’ll be dead mebbe, the way things are, and then it won’t matter anyhow.”
“Life can be hard,” Doc agreed, sensing the familiarity in this old-young man’s burden.
“Used to run in the fields as kids,” Alec continued. “Me and Daisy and some others. Don’t know what happened to them. Mostly they died, I guess. But me and Daisy, we grew old and cantankerous and I guess we bickered enough to keep each other from just up and dying like most old folks.”
“You’re related?” Doc asked.
“Brother and sister,” Alec said. “She used to be older than me, can you believe that? Now look at her. She’s like some kid. Hurts the brain thinking like that.”
“It surely does,” Doc agreed, trying to fathom how their relationship had to have changed.
“We went to Baby because we had heard the stories. It wasn’t far from the ville we come from, just a day’s trek on foot,” Alec explained. “Gave the people there their toll, their fee. You know about the fee?”
Doc shook his head. “Mr. Croxton said that it was high, everything a person owned. But that maybe, as sec men…”
Alec brushed a hand through his blond hair, shaking his head. “Yeah, sure,” he said, “that could work. I mean, I couldn’t say for certain.”
Doc watched as the apparently old man stood there, peering up the wrecked staircase, glancing at the boarded-up front door. “Was it worth it?” he asked finally, already feeling the flush of embarrassment at asking such a foolish question.
“I stepped in that pool an old man,” Alec said. “Older than you are now. I waited and I felt the waters washing over me, saw them washing over my sister. For days we did that, bathing there in these springs that smelled of fire and shit knows what else. But I could feel it, both of us could, even after that very first dip. A tingling. It was changing something, deep inside of us. Changing it, making it back the way it was. Making us alive again.”
“Lazarus,” Doc said, the word bursting from his lips no louder than a breath.
“What’s that?” Alec inquired, eyeing the old man suspiciously.
“Lazarus, the reborn man,” Doc explained. “His story is in the New Testament.” At Alec’s furrowed brow, Doc elaborated. “An old, old book, older than you or I. After his death, Lazarus is reborn. He needed only faith to do this. Only belief.”
Alec looked stunned and, unable to mask his interest, a question tumbled from his mouth in a rush of words. “Died? You said this Lazarus guy died? And he came back? To life?”
“To life,” Doc agreed wistfully. “But it’s just a story, Alec. A legend. Whatever basis there is for it is lost to the passing of time. Though I wonder if, mayhap, this spring at Babyville is a similar proposition. All legends must begin somewhere, mustn’t they?” he mused.
Alec was shaking his head in disbelief. “Bringing dead folks back to life,” he muttered. “That sure as hell is some serious shit you read.”
“Well,” Doc said with a grin, “it does not compare, really, with the things you are telling me.”
Alec’s eyes rolled off to the left as he thought, as though he was trying to find his place in a script, before he picked up his train of thought once again. “At first,” he told Doc, quietly, “I thought mebbe it was hurting. That tingling sensation, it stung, you know? Like the way rain can sting sometimes and you just have to keep out of its way until it’s gone.”
Doc nodded in response. The rains could be poisonous in the Deathlands.
“But even then,” Alec continued, “I kind of knew. There was something going on, just under the skin. This feeling I’d not felt in a long, long time. A good burn, like when your skin tans too fast in the sun. And my breath was coming easier and I was, I don’t know, more alive. I was still an old guy then, all wrinkles and aches, like you are.”
Doc snorted, amused.
“Took, I don’t know, three days,” Alec said. “Then we started to really see the effects of this magic pond. The effects it was having on me and Daisy and the others that had come with us.” Alec stopped, and his pale blue eyes locked with Doc’s. “We were all getting younger, Doc. Really younger, the years just melting off. We felt like kids again. When we left Baby we were different people.”
“Why did you leave?” Doc inquired.
“Ha!” Alec laughed. “No good getting a second chance at life if you don’t go and live it, is there? First thing I did, first ville we got to, I got myself two gaudies and I screwed their brains out. I felt so damn alive.”
Doc laughed once more, amused. “Then why are you going back now, Alec?” Doc asked.
Alec smiled. “I realized that I don’t want it to fade, man,” he said. “I want to go back and live there. Keep right where I am, nineteen years old, I gues
s. I don’t want it to go away. I want it to stay just the way it is.”
Leaning on his ebony cane, Doc nodded, appreciating the young man’s honesty.
“We had to tell others,” Alec continued after a moment. “We had to let others know about this, me and Daisy. Had to share the wonder we had found.”
Doc turned suddenly, looking at the man with a penetrating gaze. “Did you find it?” he inquired. “Were you the first?”
“No,” Alec said, “but I wish I was. The people that have it, they built a wall around it so no one could get in without paying their toll. In return they keep it clean, keep it pure, I guess. And they give you places to stay, lodgings while you’re there. They were building them when we left.”
Doc drew his eyes away from Alec, conflicting thoughts churning in his mind. Outside, the wind was picking up, howling across the fields with a low, spectral note. The front door shook in its frame, but it held solid. J.B. had nailed five heavy boards across it, and Doc knew the door wouldn’t move until they had been removed from inside. Sounds were coming from up the darkened stairs, the noises of voices and of doors being opened where the others checked the house. In the vast lounge, Mildred was sitting on the floor beside the fireplace, playing a hand of cards with Paul and Mary by the light from the flames.
Having turned a full circle, Doc’s eyes fell once more on the ash-blond young man. “Is it really worth it?” he asked. “Youth, I mean.”
Alec smiled. “It’s like a drug. You just keep going faster and faster. You never stop.”
Doc looked at the man thoughtfully as he continued.
“My eyes are better,” Alec said. “I’m stronger, I can do so much more. This world’s a latrine of crap, and only the fittest survive. Me and Daisy, we’re the fittest, Doc. We’re the fittest by a long way. Ain’t nothing going to take that from me now.”
Alec turned and made his way back to his sleeping arrangement on the floor of the main room, a little way from the sparking fire. Alone in the hallway, Doc glanced down and a smile appeared on his face, as though seeing his walking cane for the first time. From behind him, Doc felt the icy draft coming through the slightest gap in the wood of the heavy front door, its touch like the skeletal fingers of the grave, clawing for him, reaching for one of their own.