Dominion

by Doug Goodman

  “We’re like the kids from Jurassic Park, holing up in an SUV and hoping it will keep us safe from the T-Rex,” Kirk said.

  “Think on the bright side,” Peter said, “At least we haven’t seen any dinosaurs yet.”

  “I wouldn’t put it beyond them,” Alyssa added.

  “Who’s them?” Riley asked as she handed Charlie a Clif Bar. Charlie didn’t eat it.

  “Them are the people responsible for this clusterfuck of a world we live in now,” Aidan interjected while he chewed on his own bar.

  “You don’t have to cuss,” Peter said. Aidan ignored him.

  “Okay, but you don’t know who did it, right?” Riley said.

  “Sure I do. It was Mr. Johnson, my chemistry teacher. I think he did something with one of his chemistry experiments.”

  “No, it was Republicans,” Kirk said.

  “UIL,” Peter suggested.

  “Justin Bieber,” Alyssa said while rolling her eyes.

  “You?” Riley said to Colt.

  “Lex Luthor.”

  “And what about you, Jaxon? Who do you blame for this mess?”

  “I don’t see a point in blaming anyone. I just want to survive it and protect the family.”

  They were all nodding together at this. Talking helped. Somehow, it created a barrier against the mysteries of the night and the woods. Then a long howl broke their comfort, and despite the heat, they all shuddered.

  They tried to sleep with the windows closed, which would reduce the amount of scent being sent out into the world, but the heat was oppressive. They had to open the windows, which made them that much more vulnerable to detection. Aidan elected to take the first watch. He was too hot to sleep, anyways.

  As he sat in the minivan, he felt little rivers of hives exploding along his sweat-soaked back, arms, and legs. So he left the van and climbed on top of an overturned RV, which gave him a little wind and allowed him to see farther. A moment later, Alyssa climbed up with him.

  “I didn’t like being away from you,” she told him. A minute later, Peter brought Colt up there, too. Riley, Jaxon, and the rest followed behind.

  None of them slept that night. There was a time when they used to listen to crickets chirping and owls hooting and it was a good thing that reminded them of the simple things in life. Now they wondered if the crickets were somehow communicating to wargs or rocs about the location of the teens. A long time ago, lightning bugs were a welcome sight. Now they all sat and wondered if the bugs were up to something, like the maggots in the houses. They watched the roadside for any sign of an animal. From time to time, they would hear twigs snapping or footsteps in the trees, but they never saw anything, and nothing came on the road.

  Sometime around dawn, they fell asleep.

  Aidan woke later in the morning. He was hot and thirsty, the sun was in his eyes, and something was tugging at his leg. He looked down and saw an oversized blackbird picking at his boots. He swung the rifle like a club and knocked the bird off the RV. The others were waking to the same predicament. They shooed the blackbirds away, but the greedy little rats flew to the roadside and watched. Aidan said a little prayer of thanks that even in the apocalypse, blackbirds were nothing more than annoyances.

  “Every day it’s something new,” Kirk growled.

  “Where’s Charlie?” Riley cried out. They looked around. Everybody was accounted for except the linebacker. Charlie was nowhere. Aidan looked over the side, expecting to see Charlie being devoured by blackbirds, but he was not there and there were no signs of an attack.

  They spread out across the four-lane state road and began to search. Jaxon with the shotgun took one side of the road, and Aidan the other. Ten minutes later, Aidan found a path leading away from the road and a fresh footprint.

  “Oh, God. What was he thinking?” Riley said when everyone came over.

  Slowly, carefully, they entered the path. Aidan saw him first and tried to tell the group to keep Riley away, but it was too late. Riley saw Charlie strung up on jumper cables and gagged.

  The next few nights Riley would sleep close to Jaxon.

  Within hours, the wake disappeared and the scrap-metal waters flooded the state road.

  The first sign of the massacre was a station wagon squashed in the middle of the road like a smashed cockroach, its guts hanging out of the side like Mr. Whittenberg’s bowels and its carapace paper-thin against the floor. If there were people in that station wagon, nobody would ever know. The station wagon was pointed in the opposite direction they were traveling.

  “That’s not a good sign,” Peter said.

  “What is that up ahead?” Kirk added. Nobody had brought the binoculars from the house, so they pressed on, but the mini-van was driving less than 10 miles per hour now, weaving back and forth through a maze of smashed cars and scavenged bodies.

  The wall looked like giant child’s car toys stacked all over each other. At the center of it lay a tanker truck with the tank collapsed in the middle. At least a dozen junkyard cars shadowed the truck.

  Aidan stopped the mini-van, and everyone got out.

  “I don’t know if it’s comforting that I can no longer smell the fumes from the tanker,” Aidan said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Jaxon told him. He helped Riley out of the car.

  Aidan slung the rifle over his shoulder and wandered into the carnage.

  “What are you doing?” Alyssa whispered to him.

  “I’m going to check it out and see if there is a way around this. Why are you whispering?”

  “I don’t know. Be careful.” She kissed him again, and he climbed onto the first car. It was a sedan, but he couldn’t tell what kind. Metal plates had been bolted to its sides before it was smashed.

  Peter and the other boys came up behind him, and they quickly passed him up. Peter quickly ascended to the top of the tanker and began walking along its top with cat-like ease. Not for the first time, Aidan wished he had the balance of his brother. Aidan came last, walking slowly along the tanker.

  “Dude, you gotta see this,” Kirk told Aidan from atop the rubble pile.

  “That’s new,” Peter added.

  When Aidan finally caught up to them, he was shocked, too. From the roof of the big rig, they could see a ladder truck had been leading the caravan when it came to its eventual end. A bulldozer’s blade had been mounted to the front of the ladder truck. The ladder truck had been doing a good job of creating the wake of cars they had passed through all of yesterday, but now it was smashed between a wall of cars and the front of the big rig the boys stood on.

  “Why didn’t we think of that?” Colt asked.

  “First thing we do next town we come to, we’re getting a ladder truck,” Peter said.

  “Fuck that. Let’s get an army truck or a tank,” Jaxon countered.

  Aidan looked at the wall of cars that the ladder truck was imbedded in. The wall was at least three or four cars thick, and it went off into the trees and then stopped.

  “Didn’t help them much,” Aidan said.

  “Well, whoever did this, they wanted to keep cars out. You can walk around it,” Kirk said.

  “Do you think it was the monsters?” Aidan asked him.

  “I don’t know.”

  On the other side of the wall, the road was clear of cars for about a mile, and then the stream of cars on the road started up again. Aidan imagined the road had looked like this soon after Black Friday.

  “All these cars lined up for evacuation. Then they killed everyone. Like cattle waiting for the slaughter.”

  The corpses inside the caravan had been dead for no more than a week or two by everyone’s guess. Since Black Friday they had become amazingly adept at determining how long a body had been dead. Most of the bodies in the caravan had been so horribly disfigured by scavengers, it was impossible to tell how they had originally died.

  “So what do you think happened here?” Alyssa asked when they returned from the wall.

  “Best I can piece
it together this wall was built to keep people out. What I don’t know is if it was built to keep people on this side or on the other side. But this caravan, must have got to here, then something slaughtered them. I don’t think that was people.”

  “So what I’m hearing is we shouldn’t stay here.”

  “Go back or press on?” Peter asked.

  Aidan looked at everyone. The other six were looking at him.

  “Press on. I saw an opening on the side that I think we can get the van through.”

  “North, still?” Kirk growled.

  “Yep,” Aidan said.

  As the others began planning how exactly to get the mini-van to the other side of the wall, Jaxon went to examine a Jeep Wrangler with railroad spikes welded to its roll cage. Riley followed.

  The car lay on its side like a dead cow with its guts eaten out and only the roll cage and ribs remaining. The body inside had been ripped into so many pieces that only shredded clothes remained.

  Jaxon stepped over the roll cage and entered the Wrangler’s cab. He pushed aside the remains.

  “What you doing, Jax?”

  Jaxon looked up. He had soft eyes and a wide forehead. His thick lips hooked mischievously. Jaxon held up the curved blade of a parang for her to see.

  “Wicked.”

  “You got no idea. I can do a lot of damage with this baby.”

  When Riley and he returned to the others, Jaxon handed Kirk the shotgun.

  “I shouldn’t hold something this deadly,” Kirk said. “If I get in the wrong mood…” He gave the weapon to Peter.

  “Gee, for me? You shouldn’t have. But why give up the shotgun?”

  Jaxon said, “That shotgun was almost useless against the wargs. But get me close enough to one of those sons of bitches with this,” and he showed them the parang, “and it is going to be a crazy-ass night.”

  It took them most of the afternoon to move the mini-van to the other side of the wall. Aidan was right. There was an opening, hidden to most, but getting there meant that the mini-van had to drive off the road to get to it, and the mini-van – as useful as it was on the road – was not an off-road vehicle. It got stuck once, and then they had to search for something to prop under the wheel. Finally, Alyssa found a sun-bleached keyboard pushed against the back window of someone’s car. They were able to jimmy the keyboard under the tire and free the van in a plume of QWERTY. Then they had to make the hole a little wider, which meant they all had to push a couple of cars off the wall. This was very tiring activity, and had to be pushed carefully. It was like a Jenga of cars, each heavy enough squash whoever was underneath them if they fell. The cars bounced and jostled until they came to a rest in the ditch. The van was able to push through the remaining cars to get to the other side of the wall, but on the other side of the wall was a sea of abandoned vehicles. They didn’t get very far because they had to get out and push the cars out of the van’s way.

  Most days, they traveled less than a mile or two in the van. Moving cars off the state road took most of their time. Colt suggested they find a monster truck. Besides moving cars, they also took the chance to scavenge stores and houses as they passed, but they stayed away from all subdivisions, no matter how welcoming and inviting they looked.

  “We need a map,” Alyssa declared one day.

  “For what?” Aidan asked. “We go north. We don’t need a map to tell us which way north is.”

  “I got one better for you,” Kirk said. “First, we gotta find a map, and I’m telling you. There ain’t no fucking maps. People don’t make them anymore, and the ones they did make, people snatched them up and lost them before they died. Maps are as extinct as cappuccino lattés. Everything went electronic. Fucking GPS. And now they don’t even work.”

  “Still, we need a map,” Alyssa said.

  They did not really sleep at night until one night Kirk announced a solid, “Fuck it.” He climbed down off the big rig trailer that they were sleeping on, laid his sleeping bag out on the pavement, and curled up to sleep. Within half an hour, everyone but Aidan was sleeping on the ground.

  “Tired of this shit,” Kirk said to the first person who went down with him. “We can’t do anything about it, and nothing’s happened, so why fight it? Gotta sleep.”

  Nothing attacked them that night or the next. They were always on their guard, though. Months of playing hide and seek with monsters in Lakewood had left them all leery of trusting their surroundings. At any moment, they expected an army of men or wargs would charge them from the woods.

  The front pushed through in the morning while they were eating Pop-Tarts and stale cereal. It lowered the temperature enough that they all got out of their bathing suits for the first time since they left the subdivision and put on jeans and rain gear. Thanks to some keen scavenging from Alyssa, even Riley had new clothes.

  Once the rain started, they climbed into an overturned trailer and waited out the rain.

  “It’s not that bad,” Aidan yelled over the drumming of the rain.

  “Fine, you go push the cars and I will stay here out of the rain,” Alyssa suggested.

  “No, that isn’t what I’m thinking,” Aidan replied. He picked up his gun. “I want to see about some meat.”

  “Are you crazy?” Alyssa asked. “There are monsters out there. And it’s raining!”

  “And I’m getting tired of granola bars and soup. I want some meat. The rain will keep me from being detected. I won’t go far.”

  “Be careful, or I will come after you,” Alyssa warned while she kissed him.

  “I’m comin’ with,” Kirk said.

  “Sounds good. Let’s go.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were running for their lives.

  Aidan and Kirk walked down the side of the road looking for a break in the barbwire fencing. While Kirk checked out some damaged fencing, Aidan turned and strode to a nearby Cadillac that had been t-boned during an accident. It was dark navy blue and the side was crumpled like a skull of a rat bashed in. He tried to read the plates, but they were damaged, too. He checked the front and back seats, then saw where the impact car had crashed through the barbed wire where Kirk stood. Aidan entered the mess that was East Texas scrub pine woods and found an animal path. Kirk followed him as Aidan wandered down the path and came into a clearing. While they wandered, the rain regressed into a sprinkle, then into a spit.

  “Aidan,” Kirk said. “Aidan!”

  “What?”

  “What are we hunting for? Really?”

  “I told you, meat.”

  “No.”

  “Why would I lie about that?”

  “Cause as soon as we left everyone, you went straight to that Cadillac that looks just like the kind your parents had, and now you’re running up and down game paths looking for them, aren’t you?”

  “I just thought there might be a chance. I couldn’t make out the license plate. It could’ve been them.”

  “You’ve got to give it up, man.”

  “Would you?”

  “I already have. I lost my mom, too. Haven’t heard a word from her since Black Friday. But you have to trust the chaos, Aidan.”

  “What do you mean, trust the chaos?”

  “Chaos rules everything, as was proven on Black Friday. And chaos means our parents are lost forever. Millions of people were killed, and those that haven’t been killed are probably holed up somewhere waiting for death. What are the odds that you will actually find your mom and dad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Exactly. That’s chaos. You can’t fight it. Look, if it is meant to be, you will find them, but you are going to drive yourself crazy if you search every blue Cadillac between here and the rest of your life. You got to give up looking for them.”

  “They could still be out there.”

  “What if they are? What can you realistically do about it? You can spend the rest of your days going John Walsh, but that won’t guarantee that you find them. You have to give into chaos. I want
you to say something, right here. Just between you, me, and your God, I want you to say, ‘I give up looking for you, Mom and Dad.’”

  Aidan scanned Kirk for some understanding of his predicament, but he found none.

  “We are in the same boat, Aidan, but if you are not focused on our survival, then you are a risk. Say it. Say, ‘I give up looking for you, Mom and Dad.’”

  “I…I…See a deer.”

  A single white tail mule deer entered the meadow through some scrub not fifty yards away. They had been lucky, and the doe did not hear Kirk and Aidan arguing. Its back was turned as it sniffed at some leaves.

  From behind him, Aidan heard another wave of rain approaching. Good, he thought. This will keep the deer from hearing me. He raised the barrel of the Winchester and sighted the crosshairs on the back of the animal’s neck.

  “Oh, shit,” Kirk said. “Run.” He charged towards the deer.

  “You’re ruining my shot!” Aidan yelled at Kirk. “It’s just rain!”

  Then Aidan started to get that ‘I should be hiding in an attic somewhere instead of out in the open where any monster could kill me’ feeling. He glanced behind him in time to see that the sound he thought was a wave or rain was actually a cluster of hornets, each the size of a Chihuahua.

  Aidan ran, too.

  At the trailer, the rain dribbled on the black asphalt, smearing the edges of the road. Without much to do, Peter and the rest of the boys had begun re-enacting video games. Riley went over to Alyssa. Riley was smiling.

  “You’re a lot cheerier,” Alyssa said.

  “I like it here.”

  “They like you,” Alyssa said.

  “What about you?” Riley asked. “Do you like me?”

  “You are good for Jaxon. That sounds a lot worse out loud than it did in my head.” Then she added, “But I like having you here to break up the testosterone.”

  “Yeah, what is that they are re-enacting? Some video game about elves and princesses and swords?”