Dominion

by Doug Goodman

  “But there were enough resources during the ice ages,” Alyssa said.

  “But he’s on to something. You ever notice how some animals just seem to be more intelligent, like the grackles. Other animals are still nothing more than what they were, like the oversized blackbirds we met or those cows back there. Nothing really different. The ground squirrels have also been nothing new. Other creatures like rabbits and dogs and cats were horribly monstrous, but they were all domesticized creatures.”

  “What about Malifax? “ Alyssa asked. “What about that large bat or the dryder? I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “Well, he’s on to something with holes in it, but I still think he’s on to something,” Aidan said.

  They drove north all day, only stopping to change direction when they came to towns with upside down elevation signs. (Only in Texas do they give population signs). They had no desire for a repeat of what happened in Austin.

  Ulysses was one such town. Seeing the upside down sign, they didn’t need to investigate why smoke was rising from within the city limits. Colt, who was now driving, and driving pretty well, put the Taurus in reverse, turned around, and headed back south to Hugotown. They headed northeast.

  They stayed in farmhouses if they could. Mostly these were quintessential two-story clapboard farmhouses with rustic furniture and chicken statuary. They checked for living people, but never found any. They checked the silo only once, to a disastrous end that nearly took Colt’s life. After that, they left the silos alone. Sometimes the houses had food that hadn’t spoiled. Soup was good, tuna better. Vienna sausages and deviled ham was like finding gold.

  They slept together in the same room at night. If they could find one, they carried an extra bed into the master bedroom so that Colt could sleep with them. Since losing Mike, and then later Peter leaving, Colt never wanted to be out of eyesight of his only remaining family anymore. This was becoming less tolerable to Aidan and Alyssa, who wanted some privacy.

  Val slept in his own room.

  Before Kansas, the Taurus ran out of gas, and they couldn’t find more to scavenge. They left it on the side of a ditch and out of the way of other potential traffic. Alyssa wrote “NO GAS” in lipstick on the front and rear windows.

  In the plains states, they often passed entire fields full of crops that had been devoured by locusts or rotted in the husk. On one road, they walked past a mile of burning fields. In the cold winter wearing scavenged clothes, the heat from the flames felt good. Eventually, the heat got too intense, though, and they had to turn around.

  One evening, they came to a farm with corn that was still edible. The owners also had a small garden with gourds of squash and pumpkin that had somehow survived. Since the oven was missing from the house, for reasons none could fathom, they took a cooking pan and placed it on the linoleum, which they turned into their cook pit.

  Colt grimaced when he looked at the cooked squash and pumpkin.

  “Do I have to?”

  “You do if you want corn,” Alyssa chided him.

  “Creamed asparagus, canned beats, squash, and pumpkin. It’s like all the Moms in the world created the apocalypse just to make me eat my vegetables. I’m not a kid anymore!” he yelled to nobody in particular. “I want to eat what I want!”

  Aidan smiled at his younger brother and wondered that the mention of parents did not sting him. It was like this after all tragedies, he supposed. There was a time period when everyone mourned, and then there came a time when people accepted the reality of the world as forever changed. Then true acceptance came when you realized you didn’t think about how different life was without them and you didn’t think about the empty spaces they should be taking up anymore. They had blurred into the background. Was he “getting over” the loss of his parents? The thought made him feel guilty.

  Eventually, Colt went along with Alyssa and Aidan’s prodding him to eat the vegetables, although not without throwing a few moans, and pretending like eating cooked squash was worse than being fed to roc chicks.

  Val came into the kitchen with thick curtains in his hands. “Somebody must have stolen the blankets from this house. I took the liberty of pulling the curtains. We can use them for blankets tonight.”

  With full bellies, they fell sound asleep under the curtains.

  Early in the night, Val, who had the first watch, knocked quietly on the bedroom door and came inside.

  “You gotta see this,” he said.

  They walked out under the porch. All the lights were out in the world, so the stars shone brightly. Orion was still not up yet. Val pointed to the wide, flat horizon. Small glowing objects were floating across the sky. They were going too slow to scare, and as they approached, it became obvious what they were: jellyfish, so light they were carried by air currents.

  Soon the sky was lit up with dozens of soft-glowing effervescent lights with long tentacles that drifted through the air, too high up to reach anyone. Most of the jellyfish bodies were no bigger than a full-backed office chair, though some were as large as cars, and the smallest ones were as small as baseballs. They grabbed their phones and started taking pictures.

  “They’re beautiful,” Alyssa said as she snapped her photo. Most of the creatures she had seen over the past six months were demonic or at least zombie-like. These animals were almost angelic.

  “They are so low to the ground, it’s like I could grab them,” Val said.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Aidan said.

  “What do you think they’re doing?” Colt wanted to know.

  “Hell if I know. There is so little we know about this new world. Case in point: jellyfish fly,” Aidan said. After a second of thinking about Colt’s question, he said, “Migrating? Like birds?”

  The jellyfish drifted along like peaceful bubbles swept along by air currents. In that way, they were like a living aurora borealis, and just as mesmerizing.

  That night they slept together in the same room. They slept peacefully in awe and wonder at the beautiful miracle they had witnessed.

  The early morning sun felt good on Val’s face, even if it was a cold winter’s blaze. He picked an ear of corn off a broken stalk and ripped off the husk. The corn was good.

  “Not everything is bad, I guess,” Val said to himself as he dropped the golden ear of corn into his pack. He looked from the middle of the cornfield to the farmhouse and thought of Alyssa, Aidan, and Colt still asleep. He didn’t care for Aidan very much. He could lead fine, and he was great for apocalyptic events, but he was too grim. The guy needed to lighten up. But Alyssa was still very much the girl he had always dreamed about, though he was certain she did not share those feelings.

  The stalks here were broken up, as if somebody tried to drive a pick-up through the corn. Mashed stalks and husks were flattened in the mud. Val kneeled down to examine some of the stalks. The corn was a waste. That much was obvious.

  Then he saw something printed in the mud that made his heart start beating like a piston. He inhaled sharply and jumped into the corn stalks.

  Once in the stalks, Val froze and listened intently. Then he heard what was driving his fear. It was the footfall of something heavy. It had stopped, too.

  Val dropped his pack and ran for the house, stepping over the fresh warg tracks as he ran.

  Aidan had woken up with his head full of white hot light. From the first floor, he heard the door slam open and Val coming running up the stairs.

  “Let’s go!”

  Aidan looked at Val darkly as he picked up his pack.

  “Your head’s hurting,” Val said as he went to the windows.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “We have to hurry. We must leave immediately.” Val looked out the window to the cornfield.

  “What are you doing?” Alyssa said.

  “Searching for a confirmation I hoped never to find.” Then a few stalks of corn waved.

  “They’re in the corn,” Val said. “They’re coming. We must b
e leaving.”

  The rest went to the windows, too. Something was definitely moving in the corn, brushing against some stalks and knocking down others. Two separate trails of trampled corn curled through the field.

  “They finally found us,” Aidan said.

  “Who?” Alyssa asked.

  “Wargs.” The word sent a shiver down Alyssa’s spine.

  As one of the black beasts left the cornfield and neared the farmhouse, he stood up into bipedal form. His knees and spine seemed to lock into place for the different range of movement required for walking upright. Out from behind him stepped a man who was dressed in camouflage and a vest that at one time had been bright orange but was now faded and covered in blood and shit. For a brief second, the warg stared at the man, then pointed to the house.

  “What is it with us and wargs and houses?” Aidan growled. “C’mon, it’s time to go.”

  They grabbed their packs and rushed downstairs. By the time they got to the foyer, they could see the hunter approaching the front porch.

  “We could kill him,” Val said.

  “We kill him, and the warg will know.”

  “Maybe we could reason with him.”

  “He’s just a beagle chasing foxes. Let’s go out the back. Maybe we can avoid him there.”

  They stepped quietly, yet urgently across the linoleum. Aidan was the last to exit the house, closing the back door just as the hunter entered through the front.

  The hunter walked slowly up the stairs and saw the mattress that had been added to the room. He put his hand on it, then went back downstairs, where he could see last night’s fire on the kitchen floor.

  The hunter walked back out front and pointed the warg to the back. The warg lifted its nose in the wind. It took a step, extended its nose into the air, and took a second sniff. Then it howled balefully. The sound seemed to fill the open Kansas sky.

  “Shit!” Aidan cursed. They were running towards the barn.

  Please let there be a fast car in the barn, he thought as they crossed the dirt driveway. And please let it be automatic. Val reached the barn first. He flung open the door and ran inside. The barn was empty save for a giant John Deere.

  “Damnit!” Aidan cursed again. He could hear Peter in his ear telling him there was no need to swear. Fuck you, he yelled back to the Peter who only existed in his head.

  A long warehouse building extended from behind the barn. They ran inside, but not before the hunter saw Aidan closing the door. As the hunter made for the barn, the warg came up along the side of the house. The warg looked at the hunter and then kept running towards the far side of the building.

  Slowly, the hunter entered the warehouse.

  The inside of the warehouse showed it to have been a giant pig farming operation. Four rows of pens stretched to the opposite side of the warehouse. The air was fetid with six-month-old pig crap.

  “I don’t want no trouble,” the hunter yelled into the warehouse through a thick drawl. “Come out, and we kin help each other.”

  He took a few more steps into the warehouse. When nobody answered, he cursed, then started checking methodically through all the pens.

  “Here, piggy, piggy, piggy,” the hunter cooed. “You cain’t run forever,” he added. “Eventually, if they want you, they’ll get you.”

  He was searching at a brisk pace now. He could see into the surrounding pens pretty easily.

  “You’s just kids,” he said. “Rightly scared because of all that’s happened. Come with us, and we kin end the fear. You no longer gotta hide in abandoned farmhouses and pigshit.”

  He finished the row and started down the next aisle. “Fucking kids,” he mumbled.

  A giant boot came swinging down from above and landed in the hunter’s face. Then Aidan helped Alyssa down. The other two jumped off the support beams.

  They started running towards the back, but then a shadow of a warg appeared against the far wall. They ran out the way they came.

  Alyssa was the first outside. A warg grabbed her in its paws.

  “No!” Aidan shouted. The warg raised its open jaw to her head, but it did not bite down. It watched to see their reaction.

  “Put your pack down,” Val translated for the visions in his head. “It wants us to put our packs down.”

  Aidan dropped his where he stood while the others unbuckled their packs. The second warg came up behind them.

  “Now follow me, single-file,” Val instructed, and he walked slowly towards the road. Aidan and Colt, who could not see what Val saw, followed him down the driveway and to the road. In the road stood a box that was made of crisscrossed pine nailed together. It was tall on the ends and not big enough to hold more than a few people.

  A hand reached out from one of the holes and spread its fingers. Alyssa jumped when she saw the hand. “Aidan, I’m claustrophobic.”

  “I know. Me, too.”

  The wargs lifted each of the lost boys and dropped them into the cell. Colt nearly cracked his skull against the boards. The rest were flung on top of him. There was barely enough room to move around in the narrow cell. There was less room once the hunter with his black eye was placed inside the cell with them.

  “You try anything,” he told them, “and they’ll know. They’ll kill you. I’m important to them cause I help them find low-lifes like you. They won’t hesitate to kill you to save me.”

  “We get it,” Aidan snapped back, stopping the hunter from saying anything more.

  There was a small blond man in the back of the cell. His face was ashen and his eyes drawn tight, like he had been in a constant battle with death for weeks or months. He didn’t say anything. Only maneuvered himself so that they could get more room.

  Aidan watched the warg through the breaks in the wood. It pulled a cart out of the woods and lifted the wooden prison up onto the cart. Then the warg went back into its four-legged position and began pulling the cart.

  A minute later, the companion warg emerged from a line of crops with a second cart with an additional box on top of it. Aidan saw one pale hand hanging out of the prison, but it didn’t move.

  Even in the cold of winter, the cell was poorly ventilated and steaming hot from all the body perspiration. The lost boys stuck their hands out just for the chance to feel flowing air.

  The cart bumped and bounced as the wargs took them west, stopping at every farmhouse to look for more people. The hunter helped them find two more people in another abandoned farmhouse. Every time, he walked out to the house, tried to placate the people, try to convince them to come out. If they did, the wargs snatched them. It was easier for the wargs that way.

  “I really hate that guy,” Aidan said as the hunter yelled to the wargs that he had found more people.

  If the cell was crowded before, they were packed as smuggled parrots in the back of a delivery truck once the additional two were dropped into the cell. As they were flung into the cage, they landed on the lost boys. Aidan and Val pushed them up on their feet. The two new people were an older couple in their thirties that looked in pretty bad shape. The way their clothes drooped off their emaciated bodies, the way they were covered in wounds, and the way their jaws kind of hung from their heads – Aidan thought they looked like zombies.

  After the zombies were upright, the hunter was placed back inside. Alyssa stood between him and Aidan. Then things got bad.

  About two hours later, Aidan somehow started to drowse off despite the cramped quarters and the pain in his head, leaning against the side of the cell. He awoke to Alyssa elbowing him and saying, “Get off me!”

  Aidan saw the hunter with his arm around Alyssa. Aidan didn’t think. He reached around her and wrapped his fingers around the hunter’s throat. Suddenly, the cart stopped.

  “Aidan, stop!” Alyssa shouted. She pulled his hands off the man’s throat. His face was already starting to turn blue.

  The warg opened the top of the crate and looked around. Nobody moved except the hunter, who was gasping for air. The wa
rg growled and snapped at Aidan.

  “That’s one,” Val said as the top of the cell was slammed shut and the door locked. “There won’t be a two.”

  “You punk ass kid,” the hunter gasped. Red marks blotted his neck once the blue went away. “You punk ass kid,” he said again once the cart started off. “I own this place, and if I want some hot, young, Latin pussy, it’s mine. Try to stop me, and they’ll kill you.”

  “I don’t mind dying,” Aidan said, “but I will kill you first.”

  Aidan glared at the hunter with such extreme hatred, the hunter had to look away, but not before saying, “You’ll learn. Wait till we get back. You’ll learn.”

  Aidan, Val, and Colt maneuvered themselves into a wall between Alyssa and the hunter. The hunter turned away and stretched his hand out into the open air. Aidan didn’t stop burning two eyeholes through the hunter’s head.

  Eventually, they all turned to face forward again. It just seemed natural to look forward. They peeked through the cracks and watched the land pass them as they bounced and jittered across the open plains.

  At nightfall, the wargs came together and dropped the carts. They fell asleep on the ground. Aidan and the others had to sleep pretty much leaning against each other. The cell stunk really badly. The new couple had yet to make a sound. Through a seam in the crowded cell, he noticed they were at least holding hands now.

  Aidan woke in the middle of the night to the feel of warm wetness running down his leg. When he looked up, the hunter sneered down at him and said, “Fuck. You.” Then he zipped his pants back up. Aidan started to kick him, but the glint in the hunter’s eye made him think better.

  “C’mon, hot head. Try to take me. The dogs’ll get you, and then I’ll get me that nice Latin pussy you got. I been dreaming ‘bout her. I bet she’s tight, ain’t she?”

  Val put his hand on the hunter’s shoulder and looked down at him. He said, “There are four of us and one of you. If the first one doesn’t get you, the others will. That’s not a threat. I’m just telling you how it is. Your days are numbered.”