by Doug Goodman
The baby was on the floor, and it was being dragged along by one of the puppy wargs. Aidan and Alyssa charged the puppy. He stabbed it with the Exacto he used to end Riley’s life, and she kicked the oversized dog. It howled in pain and limped away. Alyssa lifted the baby and checked it. She thought it would be okay. The beasts had only grabbed it by the blanket.
Aidan tapped her on the shoulder. Two wargs approached, one from either side. There was no way to run. He tried to lift her and the bay up to the ceiling, hoping that maybe she could push the ceiling tiles to the side and escape up there, but the battle had taken its toll on his strength. All he had was the Exacto. He dropped it and kissed her, really kissed her.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you,” he responded, and he kissed her as long as he could before the teeth tore him away from her.
Peter waited in the Humvee.
“Maybe we should go in. Go check on them.”
“I don’t know,” Val said. “They probably need a minute.”
Colt screamed in alarm before the mostly hairless bear ripped his door off its hinges. The grey grizzly showed its split mouth to Colt as it reached for him.
Peter was a young man trained with the heightened reflexes of someone who has to handle pommel horses and parallel bars while spinning and leaping. This was the abilities he tapped when he jumped over to Colt’s side of the Humvee without thinking. He grabbed a gun and fired directly into the bear’s open mouth. The bear rose up out of the ash as big as a small tank. As the bear lifted Peter out of the Humvee, Peter yelled to Colt and Val, “Go!”
While Val hit the gas pedal, he glanced into the side view mirror and cringed.
Val drove the Humvee north. Colt sat twisted and moaning in the backseat.
Epilogue
Colt sat in the cabin wearing fleece and wool clothes. His parka hung from a hook on the far wall. The coals in the large fire pit in the middle of the room guarded him against the vast army of cold that constantly fought a war to invade the cabin.
The cabin had a small table and two chairs. There was a case of food – mostly Raman noodles – in one corner of the room. A stack of books lay on the table where Colt sat. He thumbed over the spines dejectedly. Monster’s Manual. Dungeon Master’s Manual. Some Reader’s Digests that Alyssa always found a way to keep around. The Hunter, which Aidan picked up in Austin. The Best of Alan Moore, which they had scavenged in some small town in Kansas. He had read them all a hundred times, even parts of the Reader’s Digest. He had to be REALLY bored to read those.
There was another book there, a dirty notebook with a black spine and a faux-granite cover, not unlike the kind of notebook found in every classroom in America. That was a book Colt had not read. It was a book he dared not read.
The walls were decorated with pencil sketchings of all the lost boys. Aidan and Alyssa with their faces close together. Peter with a broad smile on his face, a smile as big as the earth. Jax standing in a military uniform. Riley with her hair pulled back, smiling at the camera, but only half her face showing. Val looking over his shoulder back at him. They were not great drawings, but it was kind of obvious who they were, if you knew them.
Colt went to the boxes and pulled out one. A small phone was inside. He turned the phone on and looked at the photos. Aidan and Alyssa close together. Jax in military uniform. Riley, with only half her face showing. Colt checked the battery – 46%. He turned off the phone and returned it to the box.
From another box, he pulled out the HAM radio. He turned it on, checked the battery and channel information, then said into the speaker, “This is the top of the world. Anyone there? Please respond.” He clicked off the talk button and waited. Then he said again, “This is top of the world. Anyone there? Please respond.” He waited a bit more. Then he pulled out the sheet of paper and pencil that were kept with the radio, and he wrote down the number. He wrote a giant X over it, then switched the radio dial to the next channel and turned the radio off.
He exhaled deeply and completely, as if all the world’s doldrums could be exorcised with that one breath. Then he picked up the Monster Manual and began flipping through it again.
He heard something approaching. It was coming on foot and it was coming fast. Colt didn’t have time to grab a rifle or anything. Suddenly, the door opened. It was Val, and he looked distressed.
“You’ve got to come see this,” he said through icy breaths. Val was wearing dark sunglasses that covered most of the scars on his face. Colt had similar scars etched across his forehead and cheek.
“What is it?” he asked, excited at the prospect of anything that wasn’t reading or radioing. He hoped maybe it was a carcass or a downed plane.
“I found tracks. Come on. I’ll show them to you.”
Colt got up, placed his crooked arm into the parka, and then followed Val in his sideways gait out the door.
Val led Colt across the icy tundra, far from their warm shack, past the Humvee, past the rise, and into the bleak white where they had to use a compass to find their way. And even the compass was problematic.
The long evening hung at the horizon. Supposedly, summer was coming, and bringing with it lots of sunshine. Until then, it was just dimness teasing them from a distant shore. It wasn’t all bad, though. The northern lights danced above them.
Colt followed Val into the dark, his rifle slung over his back. He pulled his scarf down.
“Is it wargs?” he called out.
“No!” Val shouted back.
“Bears?” They had seen polar bears out on the ice. Always from a distance, bears were some of the only creatures they had seen since arriving here over three months ago.
“No,” he said with a hint of laughter in his voice. “This is much better.”
“Then what is it?”
“You’ll see!”
Colt grunted with frustration. Val was as stubborn as Aidan.
The night wind was cold and full of teeth. No matter how many layers Colt wore, there was never enough, especially when he was out this long. For instance, there was the part around his face that was hooded and warm. There was also a thin area of flesh just inside the hood – maybe half a centimeter wide – and it tingled from the biting wind. The rest of his exposed face, though, felt raw and abused, like somebody had been trying to cut his face open with paper cuts, but it wasn’t quite at the proper angle to make him bleed. It was just angled enough to really hurt.
The adrenaline rush was leaving, and so was the fun factor.
“How much further?”
Val turned and looked down at him with his warm smile. “If you start asking me ‘are we there yet,’ I’m going to leave you for the bears.”
“You could try, but I’d find my way home.”
“I’ll bet you would. It’s not that much farther. And the word is farther, not further.”
Colt rolled his eyes, and Val laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing, but I see them in you, all of them. C’mon on now. Don’t make me have to drag you. You know I will.”
Colt’s leg began to throb, but mostly it was his hip that hurt. It didn’t hurt all the time. Val had said he was sure it was broken, but they had no materials with which to bind it, and even if they did, how would you splint a broken hip? So instead, they found a place to hole up for six to eight weeks while Colt lay in bed. He was never allowed to leave the bed, and after everything that had happened…that bed was the worst place on earth for him. Nothing to do but feel pain, not move, and reminisce about everything that went so horribly, horribly wrong.
Eventually, life got better, and once his hip had healed to the point where Val thought he could travel, they left their hiding spot to go to the Arctic. But even after all this time, his legs still did not want to cooperate with his hip, which caused him to sort of amble with his legs as he walked. He had to relearn how to walk. At first, he couldn’t move ten paces without getting tired. Weeks of bedrest had reduced his muscles to nothi
ng. To build endurance, he would walk in circles in the cabin until he was too tired to move, and then he slept. He slept a lot in the cabin.
They were not ten more minutes on the ice when Val stopped and kneeled down. They had been following footprints all through the dark, and the footprints had come to an end.
“Look!” Val said, excitedly.
Colt leaned down next to him, which was always a little difficult to do. He looked at the ice, but he really didn’t see it until he glanced sideways across the tundra. The tracks were clear as day. And they were human.
Val and Colt followed the single set of footprints out into the ice. They were maybe a day or two old. He wasn’t really certain.
“Do you think we will be able to catch up?” Colt asked.
“Sure. They are walking slow. I’m not sure why I know that, but something about the footprints makes me think they are going slow.”
Colt trusted Val on this. He had a way of picking up things he had never done before, like when he decided to make origami one day. He didn’t have a book to learn it, and nobody had ever taught him how to fold the paper properly. He just folded the paper until he had crafted a duck. Then he built other animals, like tiny bears and wargs, and then they gleefully burned them all in the fire. They had liked that.
Alone, just the two of them in the cold and the dark, they talked a lot about everyone they left behind or lost. It was good to do it, Val said, because in a way it kept them alive even if they weren’t. It also filled up the cabin with people, even if they were only memories of people.
Now there was a new person.
“Do you think it’s one of them? Somebody from the Tooth?”
“I think it is someone out on the ice, and they will at least add dialogue outside of comic book debates. Not that I don’t love comic book debate night.”
They found the crude ice cabin the person had made in the ground. There was a lot of disturbance in the natural lines of the world. Mashed ice and snow clumped together. A shallow pit where the person had been in the ground. And fresh tracks in the snow.
“This all new,” Val said. “Whoever was here couldn’t have left more than an hour or two ago. They must have had to stop for some reason. But why?”
A gunshot cracked in the distance. The bullet zinged in the air above them. Val and Colt dropped to the ground. After a few seconds, they saw a figure approaching from afar.
Val stood up and made clear that he was putting his rifle down.
“Drop your gun, and do it slowly, and let him see you do it,” Val urged Colt.
Colt did just as Val said.
The figure stopped about fifty feet in front of them. It was wrapped in multiple scarves and parkas and all sorts of winter clothing. So many, in fact, that it was hard to tell the shape and size or even sex of the wearer.
Out from behind the figure stepped another person, away from the tracks she had been carefully stepping into to hide their numbers. It was clear who this one was. Colt could not mistake the crooked smile or the baby in her arms.
The End
Read on for a free sample of The Swarm
CHAPTER ONE
Meg slowed, braked her bike, and put a foot firmly on the ground. She looked behind her to the south and saw nothing. With one pedal forward and the other back, she put all the weight of her body on her right foot, starting the bike into motion.
It was the second day, and she’d put almost fifty miles between her and Dallas. The first had been spent getting out of the city.
She rode a twelve gear bike on a four lane highway. The bike was old, it’s color faded to a deep shade of red. She weaved in and out of two lanes on northbound side of the road, unafraid of traffic. There was no traffic.
She focused on the small details in the road ahead, the cracks and bumps in the concrete, the obstructions that would trip her up if she didn’t see them in time. She carried little with her. All she had were the things she’d managed to grab from her college dorm room in the last minutes before Dallas was a blur at her back. That included the clothes she wore, the bicycle, and the contents of her backpack. The backpack was stuffed with more clothes, a few packages of food, and a single bottle of water.
She was somewhere past Denton on the 77 stretch of I-35. It was a bleak road. Four lanes of traffic were closed in on either side by concrete supports, about three feet tall. Immediately past the supports were endless rows of trees, planted right up against the edge of the highway. There wasn’t a soul in sight, despite the fact that she was headed away from one of the biggest cities in the United States. Where one would normally expect to see a heavy flow of interstate traffic there was little more than the leavings of those that’d come before her. The highway was packed with abandoned cars, all pointed in the same direction, the way she was headed; north.
There were so many things. Things everywhere. Cars, motorcycles, trucks, SUV’s. Articles of clothing half spilled out of suitcases. Overstuffed station wagons abandoned in ditches by the highway, full of forgotten provisions, food, water, camping tents, family photographs, books, Bibles, all the things that either had an obvious use, or a secret one; the things only their gone owners would understand. The highway held the tattered things that human beings needed to survive, when emergencies drove them out of their homes and into the unknowable.
There were bodies too. On that second day, all bodies were new, though not necessarily fresh. Some held the tell-tale signs of the strange sort of horror Meg had known in Dallas. Where people should have been, there were sometimes only clean, white bones and a few strands of ligaments holding them together. Worse than these were the bodies that hadn’t been fully consumed. Meg saw every one. If they faced her as she passed on the highway, she stared them down eye to eye. If there were no eyes, as it was often the case, she’d stare straight through the sockets of their exposed skulls. She never failed to see them, couldn’t ignore them, and didn’t want to. Her bike didn’t go fast enough to make them a blur, and for that, she was glad. The dead around her kept her going. If she stopped pedaling that bike, it would be her bones gleaming in the sunlight. She knew that…somehow.
She wasn’t afraid of dead people anymore. Once in her life skeletons and corpses had creeped her out to no end. Now she knew better. There were worse things.
***
The road stretched onward as the sun rose into midday. Meg kept pedaling, unaware of herself, or the details in the passing and changing world, only the road. The road didn’t change, and for that, she was also thankful. Small details might need to be dealt with, a highway exit overstuffed with cars blocking her lane, or a spill on the road of some sort, but unless there was anything in particular to pay attention to, anything that would require her to be fully there, she wasn’t. She gave herself as much as she needed to pedal the bike and weave through lanes in the road. Everything else went and hid.
Memories of the city would come occasionally, and she’d hold them back as long as she could, as if her mind was a retaining wall on the edge of a shoreline, and with the rising of the tides her memories would flood over into a sensitive area that she wanted to protect. Every time this happened, she’d bite her lip hard and pedal furiously, forcing her brain to focus on something not tied to memory. Then the tide would recede. Whilst she was still this close, still a day away from Dallas, it was best for Meg to ignore everything that didn’t directly deal with moving that bicycle north.
She weaved her way through car pileups and wrecked heaps in the road. She was the only thing that moved. Everything else was frozen in place. A huge semi-truck was overturned on one section of the highway. Its cargo container badly smashed through the interstate’s center divide, spilling the truck’s contents into every lane, both north and south. The truck had been full of furniture. Parts of tables and ornate cabinets were reduced to splinters on the asphalt. An overturned armchair had caved in the windshield of a nearby station wagon. The area wasn’t safe for her bicycle, because there were far too many splinte
rs for its soft tires to safely move through. Meg picked up her bike and carried it around the semi-truck. As she passed by the front door, she saw the driver, his body halfway out of the windshield. He was still in one piece, but the journey through the glass had dissected him down the middle. His head was resting face down on the hood of the truck, in a stream of blood that dripped all the way down to the road in small droplets from his shredded neck. There weren’t any flies near his body to lay eggs in his exposed insides, as might be expected. Not yet, Meg reminded herself. They’ll come.
The body reassured her in a sickening way. So far, on her trek north, all the bodies had been picked over, down to the bone. This one wasn’t. She hoped it meant that she’d gone beyond the danger zone, that she’d outrun it.
As she got back on her bike, skidding the pedals backward so she could get a leaning start, Meg remembered why she was on I-35 in the first place, and why she was heading north. There had been a number of different options available to her once she’d managed to escape the city. Go west or east on twenty. Loop around and head south, aim for San Antonio, why not? Maybe the military was set up down there, near the base. It was as good of a plan as any. Why north?
North was home.
North was her mom and dad. Her brother. Her house, with its two stories of yellow painted homeness. North was Wellington, Kansas, the town with the post office on one corner of Main Street and grocery on the other. Stuck somewhere between was Meg’s entire life, the life she’d left behind a year and a half ago to move to Texas for college.
She’d had this thought, this intuition, that’d rooted itself in her mind since the moment she woken up the day after Dallas. She’d known something that she had no basis of knowing, but knew anyway, not as belief nor faith, but as a natural conclusion reached from a part of her mind Meg hadn’t been aware of. The fact that she knew it made no sense to her. It scared her, like a mirror reflection she didn’t recognize.