Dominion

by Doug Goodman

  “No.”

  “I thought I saw Mom and Dad. I led Kirk straight into trouble because I thought I saw our parents going into the woods. I was that desperate for them. The funny thing is that before all this happened, before Black Friday, I couldn’t wait to get away from them. To get away from all of y’all. I just wanted to escape. Go to college. See new people and have any kind of experience that wasn’t from my hometown. Then after that night when the animals changed, all I could think of was keeping us together. Keeping us safe..”

  “It was my fault,” Peter said, his voice steeled.

  “It was no more your fault than our parents. They couldn’t do anything to help Michael, and neither could you or I. It’s not your fault Michael died. I’m sorry if I led you to think otherwise.”

  Peter nodded and turned away. Rubbed a tear before Aidan could see it.

  “But it is my fault for keeping with this charade. We need to bury our dead.”

  “But we don’t know for sure,” Peter allowed.

  “No, we do. You do. I do. Colt knows better than the rest of us. I think tomorrow we need to have a ceremony.”

  Peter went to bed after that, and Aidan stayed up. He stared at the ceiling and watched his breath turn to clouds in the cold. He had not felt so safe in a long time – not since they left Lakewood. He hadn’t liked living out in the open, so exposed. Here in the Tooth he could hide or take a stand as he decided.

  Chapter Twelve – Revenant

  Aidan stood over the small hole in the ground. The rest of the lost boys formed a circle around the hole, Alyssa to his right and Peter and Colt to his left. He held the photo of his parents in his hands. They looked so happy.

  He started to say something, but the words would not come. He had been up the rest of the night trying to think of what to say. He could read a list of the people he knew were dead. There were over two hundred. He had their names written down on a sheet of paper in his pocket. He pulled out the wrinkled paper, but thought against it.

  Aidan took a second to study the features of the down-turned faces of his friends. They were older beyond their years, even Colt. They were broken, scarred, and missing ears, but they were still here.

  He thought maybe then he should say something uplifting. Maybe talk about the struggle to keep going and keep living, but that didn’t feel right either. Everybody here knew that they couldn’t give up.

  Alyssa held his hand in hers, and it felt warm to his skin.

  “I need to let go,” he finally said. “I need to move forward. I think that’s what counselors would say if I were talking to them right now. But counselors are from the old world, just like this photo in my hand. People were truly happy back then with only small cares and small worries. But the world turned upside down on us, and I think the world that created this picture can never come back. So yeah, I need to let go of my parents. Let go of my brother. I need to bury the dead. But more importantly, I need to stop trying to preserve everything tied to that world.”

  He kissed the wedding photo of his parents and their dog and placed it in the hole in the ground. He was about to leave when Alyssa came forward with a similar picture – a family photo she kept folded up in her pocket. She kissed, it, too, and placed it in the ground. Peter held up a wallet-sized photo of Michael. He smiled, tears streaming freely down his cheeks, and placed it in the ground. “I’m sorry, Michael,” he mumbled. Colt and Aidan and Alyssa held him. Jax had an old picture of him and his parents at the zoo when he was a kid. It went into the hole, too. Riley pulled out her cellphone, then put it back in her pocket. Instead, she took off a locket she wore. She opened the locket and looked at the photos of her parents, kissed it, and placed it gently in the ground. Val took out a photo of him and his dad from when he was younger.

  “You know, you’re going to find this weird, but being with you all,” Val said. “My life is actually less complicated than before. I’m not who I want to be, but people either don’t know or don’t care. And you guys are probably all weirder than me,” he said with a laugh, and then placed the photo in the ground. Alyssa wrapped her other arm around him.

  “Almost forgot,” Jax said. He had a guitar pick. He held it up for everyone to see. “Love ya, buddy,” he said, and placed it, too, in the hole.

  Then Jax and Riley walked over and held the others.

  “Hey, Boy Scout,” one of the soldiers said while they were sitting in the conference room they had come to call home. “The Colonel wants to see you.”

  Aidan hugged Alyssa, and then stood up from their encampment in the conference room. He followed the soldier up to the fourth story of the Tooth. The soldier escorted him to Colonel Weatherford’s quarters, and then waited outside.

  “What can I do for you, Colonel?” Aidan asked. “Is it time to hand us over?”

  “I have four flamethrower turrets. One on every side of the building. They are manned 24-7. I have four hundred and one soldiers protecting three hundred and eighty civilians. My weapons cache boasts RPGs, automatic rifles, and about a ton of bullets.

  “We have nine rings protecting us from the outside world. You saw them when you came in?”

  “Yes, sir.” He felt awkward saying sir, but he knew he would feel more awkward not using the term of respect. “But two of the rings are completely empty.”

  The old man’s eyes twinkled. “Oh, are they? To you and me, they are empty, but they are loaded with pepper spray. Any of those god-damn things try to get a whiff of us, and they’ll be blowing snot out their nose for the next week.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Cause I want to know what is so damned important about a bunch of kids. I’ve developed the best chance of man’s survival, but the monsters aren’t sneezing at it. They want you. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know, or don’t want to tell?”

  “We have a theory.” Aidan hesitated to say anything more. It would sound ridiculous.

  “Go on.”

  “You guys get visions and things when the monsters talk to you on the international psychic hell hotline, right? Well, I don’t. None of us do. We’re not sure why. Maybe we missed the mind-meld day of the conference or we didn’t breathe in the right air at the right time, but we don’t hear from them. We’re kind of a black hole to them.”

  The Colonel did not say anything. He just waited and listened. Aidan held up his hand to show his missing finger.

  “But then in Bridgetown, the people there did something. They sacrificed my flesh and blood to a creature there called Malifax. We killed Malifax, I’m pretty sure, and then we ran for it. But ever since then, I’ve been able to know where the monsters are.”

  Colonel Weatherford folded his hands behind his back and went to one of the windows. He stood there quiet and alone. All Aidan could do was look around the office. Obviously it was some lower management office with a faux-mahogany desk and lots of old-world stock photos. A young man in a button-up shirt and tie, but no jacket, was smiling broadly to a group of people he was giving a presentation to. A chisel-chinned man with new gray who could afford a full suit was pointing out something on a piece of paper to a young Asian woman. Aidan thought to himself, are they studying Bene Gesserit writings? They look so damn serious.

  “Do you have any idea what these people did?” Aidan asked aloud. “Were they lawyers, sales people, what? All I can tell is they were photogenic and standardized.”

  “I think it was a temp agency,” Colonel Weatherford said. “Aidan, do you know how powerful a weapon you are? Have you seen some of my soldiers with the M-H badge? I created it. It means Monster Hunters. It sounds pretty pulpy if you ask me, but they get into it, and I think it is appropriate. These things out there are dogs and wolves that have turned human. They are werewolves, Aidan. And my monster hunters fight the weres. Guns are not much use. Explosives will stun them, but fire still works best, just like in the old Universal movies. You ever see the old black and white
s? You’re probably too young.”

  “No, I get it,” Aidan said. “Fire bad. How do you think Black Fang got that scar on his face? I Molotov-cocktailed him.”

  “You are a boy after my own heart, Aidan. See, we can use you in the M-H. You could lead my soldiers to the weres, and we could burn them. For once, we’d be going after them. That’s why they want you dead. You are a threat to their dominion.”

  “Maybe, but all I want to do is go north and find a place as far away from these monsters as I can.”

  “Of course you can, and nobody can say anything about it. Self-preservation is the first instinct. The most base and animalistic of our instincts, some would say. Altruism is a call for something higher and nobler.”

  “You aren’t going to convince me to stay. People I love haven’t been able to convince me, and frankly, I don’t know you.”

  “You’re not one of my soldiers, so I won’t force you to stay. When do you plan to leave?”

  “We will leave the day after Christmas.”

  “Good plan. Get some rest and food, and once the spirits are up, move them out. It’s what I’d do. But when you are up north, as free of the wild as one can get except for the occasional polar bear or sea otter, you are going to think of what is was to be an Eagle Scout. Oh, yeah. I heard you were one. The Boy Scout. I was an Eagle, too. I still abide by its laws. To be honest and trustworthy and obedient and cheerful, sure. But I think the one that will bother you the most is loyal. Are you being loyal to humanity by leaving us to die when you had the chance to stop all this? Will your oaths mean anything when you have to say them over the bones of the dead? On my honor, to do my best, for God and my country? To help other people at all times. Have you done your best, Aidan? Or are you tucking tail and running for self-preservation?”

  “Anything else?”

  Colonel Weatherford approached him, hands still behind his back.

  “I spent the better part of the last ten years hunting cowards in the Middle East. They ran and hid behind women and children. They dug holes in the ground. They wore disguises. They put up great barriers to keep us out. But eventually, we got them all. You can run and you can hide, and you may live for a decade behind your great white curtain, but eventually the wolves will come for you, Aidan. And when they come for you, you’re going to wish you were dead. They will make you watch everyone you know die. All you will have left are the bodies of the people you loved and the oaths you broke. Leave my office.”

  He turned his back on Aidan.

  “Before I go, can you tell me something, sir?”

  Colonel Weatherford arched his eyebrow, reminding himself he was working with a civilian. “What is it?”

  “I was hoping you could help us piece together some of the puzzle. I have seen so many things that make no sense to me. I’ve seen jelly fish that fly and elephants with tentacles instead of trunks. I’ve seen wargs riding rocs. Back in Texas, we came across a giant wall of cars that to this day we still don’t know who built it or why. I’ve seen cars squashed by some giant – thing – that I’ve never seen. Does any of this make any sense to you?”

  “I was at Buckley Air Force Base on Black Friday. 460th Space Wing. We have eyes and ears all over the globe. When this went supernova, it wasn’t just an isolated incident, it was everywhere and all at once. The way I see it, when you invade, you scale up your R&D to develop new weapons, the kind your opponent won’t see coming because they lack the knowledge or the intuition. We’ve done it successfully time and time again when we went to war. I guess it was our turn to get the surprise. Within minutes, we saw bases ripped apart by unimaginable monsters. In fact, we were so busy trying to support everywhere else, we didn’t keep as good an eye on our front door as we should have. We have preparations, implementations, but there was no procedure for this. Buckley was overrun by the ugliest bison scumdogs you have ever seen. They rammed our F-16Cs before we could scramble. Then came the fire ants and the werewolves. We didn’t have a chance. It was a damn massacre. I barely escaped with my life. You put a hundred horror writers in a room, and in a week, they won’t be able to come up with the kind of shit I’ve fought. Maybe in your lifetime, if we live long enough, we will understand it, but I don’t expect to live that long.”

  The soldier escorted Aidan downstairs to the parking garage where there was a line of Humvees. Fenced in was a wall of gasoline in barrels and cans.

  “The Colonel wants you to take three. He thinks that will be enough for the seven of you to make it north.”

  “This is too much,” Aidan said.

  “The Colonel wants to ensure that you get where you are going and you have the ability to return, should you change your mind. You will have gas, weapons, maps, radios, and food supplies. You will be treated like a king leaving on a royal expedition,” he said, derision laced like arsenic on his words.

  Aidan returned to the lost boys.

  “What did the Colonel want?” Jax asked.

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m leaving after Christmas to go north. I’m not going to be an ass again and draw a line in the sand or anything. If you want to go, I would love to have you with me, but if you want to stay or go somewhere else, I understand.”

  “And if we decide to stay,” Peter asked. “If we all decide to stay, what will you do?”

  Aidan looked at them all. He thought of the people he had buried and the people he had met and traveled with. “I guess I will stay with my family.”

  “Good answer! You’re finally learning! And I’m coming with you,” Peter said.

  Aidan breathed a sigh of relief. “I was hoping you wouldn’t call me on that.”

  “Look, we believe you are doing the right thing. We just don’t need a dictator forcing us down the right path,” Val said.

  “I’m going with my family,” Riley said. “Lead the way.”

  Jax stared at the ground.

  “It’s up to you, brother,” Aidan said. “I was wrong for what I said to you out in West Texas. I don’t want you to follow me blindly, and I’m not going to tell you how to live your life or what to do with it. If you want to stay, I understand. You have a good thing going here, helping the soldiers and teaching martial arts.”

  Jax considered what Aidan said for a moment, then said, “I can’t leave you guys alone. You need somebody to keep you alive. You might meet another giant bat and then Peter will be waving a damn steak knife at it.”

  There wasn’t much to pack. The soldiers made sure they had wool blankets, extra winter clothes and snow gear, MREs, gasoline, backpacks, high-powered Remington 700s with military scopes, hatchets, and survival gear.

  “I think we’ve got everything we could want,” Aidan said.

  That night, almost all seven hundred eighty people packed the atrium or watched from floor balconies. Only a small handful of soldiers remained at their posts outside the tower. Colonel Weatherford, Mr. Seward, and a few other people who Aidan did not recognize but assumed to be the leaders of the Tooth sat on folding chairs behind the podium.

  A woman stood on the erected stage and opened the ceremony by singing “Silent Night.” After the song ended, Mr. Seward walked up to the podium. He held a Bible nervously in his hand. He placed the leathered book on the podium in front of him. He opened the book to the marked page said, “Revelations, Chapter 13,” then read aloud:

  And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. And he had power to give life unto the image of the bea
st, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

  “I know,” Seward said, almost apologetically. “Not good Christmas stuff. I’ve got one better. Luke, Chapter 2.”

  He turned to another passage and read again:

  And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

  He closed the book and looked across the atrium. “I’m no preacher, but tonight I will try to be one. For you. For me. The metaphor, or course, has always been that a preacher is the shepherd keeping watch over his flock. Tonight, we celebrate the birth of the king of kings born meekly in a manger surrounded by cows and chickens and donkeys and sheep. I don’t know what we did or if it’s something we could have done different. Maybe God is mad at us. Maybe this is retribution or penance. I sometimes think he has taken dominion from man and given it back to the animals. I don’t know. What I do know is that we have a duty to our loved ones and our neighbors – our community – to act as shepherds for each other. Cause we sure can’t be shepherds like the ones in that book. I think that is what I take away tonight. We should try to be more like the one true shepherd, at least for a day. Let us not forget the power of today. The power of brotherly love. The power of compassion and forgiveness. So if you go back to your rooms and you see someone who needs a blanket and you have some extra…maybe you will be a shepherd. Maybe somebody you see is sad or lonely, and I hope you will share a few kind words to keep them going. It doesn’t have to be a grand deed, but do one thing tonight to be better shepherds for each other, and maybe in the morning we can work on being better shepherds to the world.”