Enter the Rebirth (Enter the... Book 3)

by Thomas Gondolfi

  Bill twisted off the cap.

  With monumental effort, Ed grabbed the bottle with one hand. He pushed it to his lips so hard, the bottle clanked against his teeth. His Adam’s apple bobbed. Bubbles swirled. The liquor drained away. He gasped for air, and from relief.

  “Joe!”

  Bill heard the woman’s voice and followed it into the dark to find the child paralyzed with fear and clinging on an outcrop at the beginning of the cliff. A smoking heap of Targhoul, no longer a threat, lay just inches away. Bill pulled the boy up to the lady, and they all cried with gratitude.

  Bill rocked back and forth with his arms around the pair of them.

  He looked around and listened. No screams. The living kept in front of the bus in the comforting light. Some climbed back on board and hid.

  An engine rattled past the bus.

  One of the survivors in the headlights called out, “What the hell, man? Ain’t you going to stop?

  Headlights caught the tail of a green truck. The red brake lights seemed just a little off level, like one had been knocked askew before accelerating away.

  Measured footsteps cracked the gravel behind Bill. He startled.

  Ed loomed over him. “I got your coat back.”

  The brown canvas coat’s sleeve had been singed to stubble. Bill looked at it and figured what the hell. He pulled it on.

  “Thanks.”

  The state police galloped up sometime later. The electric police van followed them. After corralling the remaining bus patrons into a small group, easy to protect, the remaining officers scoured the area for survivors. Hours later, another bus drove up. The survivors climbed on, silent, exhausted, staring in shock.

  The bus roared and eased from the shoulder. The sighs could have lifted the roof.

  Bill whispered to Ed, “If they ask anything, we lit them on fire with a lighter. We lost the lighter. We get to the station, we move on and find an exit and keep walking.”

  There was no way Edward should be under lock and key, not with Whatever rode his soul.

  The sky grayed with dawn when they pulled into the bus terminal. The police and Red Cross had set up a table with sandwiches and hot coffee. Bill hadn’t eaten in almost a day, and the white bread and cheese was the best meal he had ever had. He sneaked a couple of sandwiches into his pocket. Made sure Ed ate something, because the man was asleep on his feet.

  Bill got the feeling something was up, and he looked around. The state cops and some guys in suits were doing interviews.

  Potato Lady held the boy as they sat on a rolling stretcher. Other townswomen stood by, relatives or friends. She waved her hand as she spoke to a cop. The cop turned with a look that said what-is-this-bullshit story you’re telling me? He looked around and waved another cop over. Both of them looked at the people, searching.

  Bill got his and Ed’s bag.

  He pushed Ed’s luggage behind Ed’s elbow. “I’m doing both of us a favor.”

  They slipped out a side door without too much problem. In the city, the dawn air warmed them. Ed took his bag as Bill led him along from the crowded downtown into a quiet neighborhood of rowhomes.

  Bill kept pulling Edward along until he himself lost count of the streets.

  “It isn’t right. They’ll lock you up and that isn’t right. You saved my ass. It wouldn’t be right.”

  Ed looked up at the frost-studded dawn and breathed deep. Bounced on his feet as he walked.

  Good footwork, Bill noted. Ed must have done some boxing at some point.

  “You feeling better?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Ed seemed relieved by his sudden good health.

  Bill pushed past some branches. “You’re not really a priest.”

  “My studies fell by the wayside.”

  “My study has been in being a screw-up. I’m getting my post-doctoral.”

  Ed sniffed. “I have been informed . . . there is a place for you. If you choose.”

  Bill’s gut dropped. Is he making stuff up or is the Salamander talking to him?

  Bill did not want to be on anyone’s itinerary, much less a Salamander’s.

  “Well, let’s see if we can get you back on your way, wherever you are go—”

  “We are at my destination.”

  “Titusville?”

  “There is corruption here, William. We have only seen the grime under its fingernails.”

  “You crazy? There’s no way we can stay here now! Who knows what cops are going to do here after all that?”

  Bill remembered the feeling of helping Potato Lady and the boy. It did his heart good to keep those folks in one piece. They seemed the type to help others along as well and keep the whole circle of kindness going.

  He looked up at Ed’s face. This man’s gaze held steady on the sidewalk before them. The man wanted to do good, Bill was certain.

  How the hell’s he going to get along without help? Bill looked back to the sidewalk and kept pace with Ed’s long, purposeful stride.

  Bill imagined under the sidewalk, the ancient hills underneath teemed yearning and greedy. Above them the city shone with sinful life waiting to be saved. Maybe it wasn’t too late to be saved himself.

  Mynah Bird

  Mark Wolf

  Editor: New ideas are not always readily accepted.

  “Ready?” Lei said, whispering.

  I nodded.

  “One, two, three . . .”

  At the ‘th’ of three, we both fired—I, my BB gun, her—her custom-made slingshot. I could see my BB barely graze the top feathers of the mynah bird’s head above us, some twenty feet in the towering old-growth eucalyptus tree along the hedgerow fronting Mud Lane near our farm.

  The mynah lifted its head, suddenly alerted by the very slightest displacement of the air above its head, the “poof” sound of my air gun—and the parting of its feathers. It reared back to launch itself from its perch and caught one right in the center of its chest as Lei’s pebble struck home with a sharp “thwack.”

  The bird let out a plaintive squawk, folding up on itself. It fell from the branch, tumbling through a couple of others on its plunge to the ground. Lei turned to me and stuck her tongue out. Three for three.

  She clapped her hands and jumped up and down fetchingly before she walked over to retrieve her kill. She took a few seconds to wring the bird’s neck, putting any lingering doubt of the bird’s survival from its tumble to rest. She held it upside down by its feet and slipped another shoelace loop from her belt over the bird’s feet and snugged it up tight. Three birds now hung there on her belt—two mynahs and a larger Spotted Dove. I was zero for three attempts.

  My ego was taking a thrashing. “Let me see that thing,” I said.

  She handed her slingshot to me without a word, I handed my BB gun over to her, grumbling a little bit—and not helping but noticing the mischievous glint in her warm, brown eyes. In Hawaii we call that look kolohe. It means something like rascally. I had a feeling I was about to get schooled again.

  We weren’t hunting for sport even if it could be fun. Lei’s whole near-family from Captain Cook had just dropped in on us about a half hour before. We were sent out to add whatever we could kill to the stewpot. That’s why we both shot at the same bird at the same time—double the chance of hitting our target. So along with about six young mongooses, a couple of stew hens, and a few hutch bunnies, which Dad probably had already killed, cleaned, and cut up into our stewpot back at our farm, we now had three birds. Still, it wouldn’t be enough for our guests and families. We had to do even better.

  I test-pulled on the wrist-sling’s rubbery surgical tubing straps. It had four straps in place of the usual two. The frame wasn’t the stock aluminum you usually see on these either, more like . . .

  “Your dad made this, didn’t he?” I said, suddenly realizing where I’d seen such metal tubing before. Condenser coils for the big air-conditioning units, and Lei’s dad is—well, used to be—an HVAC guy before the apocalypse.<
br />
  Lei nodded and grinned.

  The rubber surgical tubing was familiar enough, though. For years it had been standard issue on nearly all the aluminum and fiberglass Hawaiian-sling spears one went spear-fishing with. Maybe not so common now that no one was making the stuff anymore since the apocalypse.

  The slingshot had a nice feel to it. More solid than the ones I used to play with as a younger kid. Those couldn’t be taken seriously as a hunting weapon. This one felt more balanced and I already knew of its deadliness. I squelched my ego down a few notches.

  “Mind if I try it?”

  “Go ahead,” Lei said, bending my BB gun over her leg to steady it for pumping it up. I felt a sudden slight sting of jealousy. She obviously knew what she was doing, had shot a BB gun like this before—and with no older brothers to show her how.

  She watched my reaction, seeing much more there than I could quickly hide. Rather than grinning at my obvious jealousy, she hid a very small smile under a lot of determination. She looked resolved to make the next kill also—and probably would, unless I managed to calm myself down.

  She put about seven pumps in my BB gun—enough to penetrate through bird feathers and hide, but not so much as to put a strain on the gun’s seals. Respect—yes, she knew what she was doing. She went ahead and jacked another BB into the firing tube. “I’m ready,” she said, handing me the small leather pouch she took off her belt. I took it from her and peeked inside.

  “Ele ‘ele stones,” she said, stating the obvious. The tiny little gray-black basaltic lava rocks were from a beach somewhere. They were nearly perfectly round from tumbling around in the surf. They would fly true if the person shooting them knew what they were doing. Unfortunately for me, it had been a while since I’d shot my own wrist rocket. I wasn’t about to use these stones just for practice rounds—my own respect, right back at ya. I could understand the difficulty of gathering them. Instead I looked to the small base coarse gravel pebbles lying right at my feet along the lane. I bent over and picked up a few likely, rounder ones.

  I put a stone in the leather of the slingshot, extended my arm and sighted down the slingshot at a nearby metal fence post sporting a short fence line length of broken-down and rusting fencing.

  “It shoots hard . . .”

  I released the pouch of the slingshot. The stone flew well over the head of the post—the spot I was aiming at.

  “. . . er than you’d think,” Lei finished.

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised at how very powerful and accurate this little weapon would be now that I’d taken its measure. I put another stone into the pouch, drew back and adjusted my aim, and snap-shot it to hit the fence post with a “ka-whang” before Lei had the opportunity to comment on how to adjust downward from my first shot. Just because my old wrist rocket hadn’t been all that powerful, it didn’t mean I hadn’t spent thousands of hours honing my aim. I hit what I aimed for usually. This stone hit exactly the spot I aimed it, at the top of the fence post.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  This time, Lei allowed the full force of her dazzling smile to light up her face and make my heart skip a beat.

  * * *

  About an hour later we had another dozen birds between us and were walking back down the lane to my family’s farm holding hands.

  Lei still had the lion’s share of the bird kills—her aim on my BB gun was just as good as mine on her slingshot—even better, I suspect. I had acquitted myself well enough on her slingshot to recapture some of my pride and I determined not to pry into how she’d gotten so good on BB guns. In some things, I was already learning at a young age that it was better to allow young women their mysteries. For Lei’s part, she was the one that rather boldly took my hand and squeezed it, not allowing us to part along our walk back to the farm. For my part I walked on clouds. Lei talked about what led her and her family back to their ancestral lands.

  “It was all right for the first year or so back home after the start of the apocalypse. Almost everybody knows everybody or is related on the coffee lands around Captain Cook,” she said.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “The local people started getting greedy and fighting among themselves. Then the townies used our dissention to divide us. They moved in with their gangs and guns and started taking over our farms wherever they wanted. By the time we quit fighting among ourselves long enough to organize, it was too late. We barely got our family out in time before the thugs took over our farm, too.”

  What she said didn’t surprise me at all. Hawaiians came across as one big family to off-islander outsiders, but they had generations of griefs against one another—a lot of it tied to the old separation between commoners and the Ali’i, their chiefly class. Even in school as a kid I sometimes saw that kind of thing come up among the different local kids and their families.

  “It was the killings that finally made Daddy pack us up,” Lei said.

  “Killings?”

  She nodded. “Some farmhouses were attacked at night and whole families burned out—sometimes without anyone able to make it outside. No one knew for sure who was doing what. Things turned so ugly with everybody suspecting everyone else.” She stopped walking and pointed her chin at the fence line. A mynah bird sat there squawking its ugly, raucous call. I nodded. We let go of each other’s hand. A few seconds later we had another bird for the pot—this one, tied to my belt. We continued walking. This time, I reached for her hand. She smiled and slipped it into mine. It felt soft and both warm and cool to the touch at the same time.

  “What about you guys,” Lei said. “It seems like you’re doing well enough for yourselves without too much hoo-hoo.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, we are. I guess the real baddies over in Hilo and Puna shot it out with one another before they got organized enough to give us trouble.” We both knew the bad reputation of the heroin and ice gangs, even the Hell’s Angels from that side of the island. “The smaller gangs that tried to muscle in on the farms and townies around Waimea got a warm welcome. We already had an organized community militia, thanks in part to Dad’s efforts.”

  “He served over in Afghanistan, didn’t he?” Lei said.

  I shook my head. “Northern Iraq. He went in to keep ISIS from getting too comfortable after the Russians and the U.S. quit squabbling long enough to join forces and make air strikes in Syria.”

  “Yeah, and we know how that turned out,” Lei said. I kept my peace but thought a bit as we neared home.

  No one will be able to say for sure just how things escalated so quickly. Russia and the U.S. had been squabbling over Syria, the Ukraine, and the Crimean—China and the U.S. over International Right of Passage through the South China Sea. It wasn’t like you could turn on the tube and pick up Fox News or MSNBC any more to get a talking head analysis.

  And as far as I knew, no one could say who fired the first missile, or at least the ones who could were vaporized in that first nuclear exchange. Whether it had started in Syria, the Crimean region, or the South China Sea, I guess it didn’t matter, now. We were all now living in the aftermath of those days.

  A few minutes later, just a short distance from our farm’s driveway, Lei brought me out of my aftermath musing.

  “Stop,” Lei whispered.

  I stopped and let go of her hand and looked around me. Not a mynah bird or any other kind of bird in sight.

  “What do you see?” I whispered back.

  “You,” Lei said.

  “Me?” Not quite reading her intentions.

  “Yes, you. You do realize that this is our first date, don’t you?”

  I hadn’t really thought of our time together that way, but I wasn’t dumb enough to say so. I allowed myself to blush and nodded, gulping.

  “Well, aren’t you going to kiss me?” Lei said.

  I nodded again, this time fervently. I leaned in close to her. She took it from there.

  * * *

  I picked out a piece of mynah bird breast from the stew a
nd took my fork to pry the BB out of it. I guess Lei managed to distract me more than I let on while we were cleaning them.

  We—Mom, Dad, Paula, my kid sister, and I, and Lei’s family, all sat outside on and around the porch eating our critter stew—well, it had some carrots, cabbage, onions, and other vegetables from our garden too. The main thing was, there was enough to go around and fill everyone up.

  I know Dad and Mom didn’t bring it up, but I could see that Lei’s family had experienced a rough slog the sixty-some miles from their old farm to ours.

  Lei had said that they’d taken five days—taking the time for their grandparents to travel at their own pace, stopping along the way to visit other family members between there and here, but I knew it couldn’t have been easy. It’s a hot, windy journey even in a car—and for the greater part, it’s an uphill grunt.

  Uncle Kaipo, Lei’s dad—in Hawaii it is traditional to call older men Uncle, and older women Auntie—sat his plate aside and brought out his ukulele. He played a few songs and sang. We all joined in with him.

  We had a great night singing and “talking story.” Nobody made a move to wash the dishes—we just got them out from underfoot before it got dark and stacked them on the table for the morning. Visiting is what you did whenever you could. These days, you never knew if or when you’d see each other again. We relished one another’s company.

  After a time, we all went off to our separate sleeping areas. Lei made sure I would have something good to dream about before we parted company. Unfortunately, she slept with her family.

  * * *

  I woke the next morning to the disorderly calls of a whole flock of mynah birds outside my bedroom window at oh-dark-thirty. I guess Lei and I hadn’t managed to put a very deep dent in their population. I lay in my bed for a time thinking about yesterday—about Lei’s obvious interest.

  She was as good a kisser as she was with a slingshot and BB gun. I could let that bug me, and I admit, it did. But I also knew that even before the apocalypse local kids grew up too quick. Teenage pregnancies in high school weren’t even much remarked upon and quite a few girls in their late teens and early twenties had kids from multiple fathers.