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

by Thomas Gondolfi

  “Keep this up, they’ll be more tape than glove,” he said, to no one.

  He spooned half the can of beans into his mouth, trying to eat slowly despite his hunger. He rounded out the meal with the last of his crackers, and water. If there was one thing there was plenty of, it was water. Stepping outside, Ricky scooped snow into his water bottle, and shivering pulled the door closed.

  He lay down on the floor. The old shed was dry, but not much else. Ricky had arranged some dusty carpets into a bed, and despite the cold, he slept.

  * * *

  The path to the boat had been a gauntlet, an alley surrounded by the parts of humanity that had been cast aside. Ricky considered himself a liberal, but when confronted with the screaming mass, covered in dirt and demanding things from him in a language he couldn’t understand, he had felt his fear begin to rise, and with it, contempt.

  Rows of police stood facing away, either side of him, their hands on their guns. They had stared into the maelstrom, as gaunt faces shouted through chain link, which bulged and shook as if alive. The officers tensed, knowing that if the fences gave, they were vulnerable.

  From the gangplank, an overweight man in a navy jacket waved people along. As Ricky approached him, he yelled something in French. Even without the din of the crowd, Ricky would have struggled to understand him.

  “Avez-vous l’argent?”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  “Argent, argent!” The man looked down at his own hand, where he rubbed his thumb against the other fingers.

  Fumbling with a pocket, Ricky drew out a wad of euros. The man took it, holding it low, then stashed it in an inside pocket. He pointed to the boat, waving the next person on with his other hand. Ricky shuffled forward, made his way inside, and looked for a seat.

  There was none. Ricky wondered how many more people would come filing on to this thing before it left. Not too many, he hoped. He listened, trying to find anyone speaking in the familiar tones of home, but the voices were a blur. He dumped his pack near a window, and sat on it.

  The port was rocking, waves of people pushing back and forth, police yelling, occasionally bringing a baton down against the fence wire. The crowd jumped back for a moment, and then surged forward again. The queue for the boat was barely visible, swallowed in a sea of people.

  To his left, Ricky had seen the fat man waving both arms in the air. The boat sounded its horn, and began to move. As one, the people on the shore cried and surged forward, breaking the fence and overwhelming the police. The mob moved past them, scrambling for the gangplanks, which were being pulled away.

  Ricky had watched, enthralled, horrified. Humans were trampled underfoot, while others ran and jumped with all their might, sailing through the air; the more athletic of them made the side of the boat and clung on, or scrambled over the side. Still others struck and fell, or missed altogether and plunged into the freezing water. The boat moved, achingly slow, away from the dock. The tiny fraction of people who had made it stared down at those still on the pier, or at the dark bodies bobbing in the water, now moving, now still.

  In the crowd, a woman held a young child. She stood on the edge of the dock, calling to someone on the boat. She swung with her arms, once, twice. Realising what she was about to do, Ricky tensed, but he could do little more than watch as the woman brought her arms around and threw the child through the air. From where he was, Ricky couldn’t tell if the child had made it, but judging from the angle . . .

  * * *

  In the morning he walked, trying to forget the recurring nightmare of his past travels. He’d considered walking through the night, now that he was so close, but he’d learned the hard way, travelling at night was foolish, and he’d been so tired. Home was only an hour away when he stopped for breakfast—the second half of the can of beans. He thought about what he would do if his family weren’t home, but couldn’t stomach the thought, and pushed it aside, focusing instead on what it would be like when life was back the way it had been.

  He’d found himself wondering why he was so sure things would go back to normal, but it was a thread he wasn’t keen to pull at. As he walked, he’d worried mainly about rationing food, and finding more when supplies got low. Beyond that, there was still a lot of room for thinking, during all those footsteps.

  As dark thoughts came so easily to his mind, Ricky trained himself to think of the trivial. Family and normal life were acceptable in a general sense, useful for hope, but thoughts of anything or any specific person important to him led to what ifs and other gloomy speculation. He focused instead on lists of his favourite foods, the best goals he’d ever seen, the girls he’d had the courage to talk to. As the days passed he developed a routine, both of body and of mind. His footsteps lay behind him on the road.

  The streets echoed only silence, or the squeaky crunch of his boots on snow. No lights shined through the windows. Ricky realised how lucky he had been. He’d landed from France as the world was going crazy. Portsmouth was a trek from Dover, but it was certainly more walkable than from Paris.

  There’d been reports when he landed, spilling across TVs: the IPCC releasing their device in the Arctic, a last-ditch attempt to prevent global temperatures rising beyond the critical two-degree mark. It had worked a little too well. A bitter laugh escaped Ricky and spun into the atmosphere, white breath against a white sky as he remembered all the time his father had made him spend rinsing and sorting glass and plastic, to save the planet. All the times he had ridden his bike rather than drive had come to nought.

  Was it months he’d been away? He couldn’t remember. All his memories felt like the numbness of walking, and the bitter cold of snow. He would have been home sooner had it been a straight trek, but encounters with other people hadn’t gone his way. He’d used back roads wherever possible, scavenging for food where he could. Part of his brain refused to accept that things had got so bad so fast, while the automatic part just kept putting one foot in front of the other. Thoughts of his family drove him onward, Mum and Dad, Mark and Vicky; but he did not allow any specific memories to surface, scared of the emotion they might produce.

  Ricky’s heart began to thump. He rounded the corner, and pulled up short. His home stood before him, windows shattered, snow collecting in gutters and on the floor of the front room. “Not promising,” he admitted, moving in to take a closer look.

  He still had his key, but the front door had been kicked in. Inside, the rooms oozed darkness and the stench of mildew. Broken ornaments and books littered the floor. He stood for a moment, knowing his dream just died. His family weren’t huddled around a warm fire waiting for him to arrive. It drove cold into his soul.

  Ever practical, he scoured the kitchen; no food. Ricky pushed away thoughts of warm winter nights, the room full of light and the smell of cooking as he returned from football practice. He wiped the tears from his cheeks with the back of his glove.

  A crunch of glass alerted him. Ricky spun. For a time he could not speak. Then he rushed forward.

  “Dad!”

  His father hugged him, and for a long time they simply stood there.

  “We . . . didn’t know if you’d made it—” his father began. Tears were forming in his eyes as his gripped his son by the shoulders.

  “I made it,” Ricky said. “Though it was a bit of a journey. Where are the others? How’s Mum?”

  “Your mother and Victoria are both OK,” his father said. He always called her Victoria, even though she hated it. “We’ve all been staying over at Uncle John’s, since it’s much bigger, and he liked to hoard supplies. Your Mum’s eyesight is as bad as ever; we came back here to look for her spare pair of glasses.”

  “We?”

  “Hey, bro.”

  “Mark!”

  Ricky stepped forward and hugged his brother, something he hadn’t done in what seemed like lifetimes. He looked at them both, and couldn’t stop smiling.

  “I don’t think much is left,” Ricky said, looking around.


  “I have a stash.” His father walked through the house, out to the garage. The door hung open, and they stepped through, Mark shining a torch.

  “I’m glad your mother didn’t see the house like that. It would’ve broken her heart.”

  Ricky helped his father move an old box of books. Beneath it was a hatch, similar to a manhole cover.

  “Down here I kept a few bits and pieces. Emergency supplies, family heirlooms. And spare glasses.” He looked at Ricky and winked, then slapped him on the shoulder, again. “It’s damn good to see you, son. You can help with some of the heavy lifting.”

  Ricky laughed, a strange sound swallowed by the snow.

  “Look what we found. Sniffing around the old house.”

  “What’s that D—oh. Oh, Ricky, my boy.”

  Ricky wrapped his arms around his mother as she did the same, and allowed himself to feel the joy of the moment. They hugged for a long time, and his mother took his face in her hands as she always did, looking into his eyes.

  “I’m so glad you’re back,” she said.

  “Me too, Mum.”

  He hugged his sister, his uncle and aunt. Then, Ricky sat down on the couch next to his mother, and rested his head on her shoulder.

  The warmth in the room seemed to drive out the memories of the past months, the cold and the fear. Ricky looked up to see his family there, his father smiling at him, Mark and Vicky getting along, for once. Images floated up unbidden, people he’d seen along the way, violent, desperate. Here, in this house, things were calm, and safe. However it went from now on, Ricky knew he could face it, knew that fortune hadn’t failed him, even if it had failed the world. They’d work together, survive, rebuild.

  His mother ran her fingers through his hair the way she had when he was a boy, and the place began to feel like home.

  For it Waits

  David M. Hoenig

  Editor: Being a man of God doesn’t define one’s entire character.

  Having survived the apocalypse, one thing I could say with absolute certainty was that the Bible served as a very helpful guide as far as setting expectations went. Twelve hunger- and pain-filled years later, however, I was equally sure that it sucked cold demon shit as a survival manual.

  I coughed to clear my throat, and hawked a gob out over the gunwale into the murky sea.

  “Preacher-man, quit rocking the fuckin’ boat!”

  That’s so not good. I looked over at Jebediah Tate, the young man who’d been challenging me as leader as he stood in the bow of the eighteen-foot rowboat. At twenty years old his shirtless body seemed as hard as a whipping post. I held his angry gaze. The rest of the town folk of Kedesh—named for a biblical city of refuge, though the signs still proclaimed it to be Kittery, Maine—fell into an uneasy silence. Finally, Jebediah looked away, and I figured that he wasn’t going to gut up enough to try and kill me today. Again. Asshole.

  Instead, standing in the prow of our small boat, he snarled at Evangelina Reyes, who knelt beside him. “Make the net ready, and if the lines foul again like they did the last time, I’m tossing you in to fix it.”

  Only a few years older than Jebediah but not one whit softer, she answered with slitted eyes and only the barest spitting sound before moving to the task. Her hands moved quickly and efficiently along the furled net. Around us, only the ripples caused by our boat as it bobbed marred the surface. The red-tinted moon overhead reflected off it like a sullen smear. The others sat quietly and said nothing. My guess was that they didn’t want to attract Jebediah’s feral anger; having been the focus of it during the months since his father had been killed. I couldn’t blame them. As a result, the quietude hung on the night as thick as the meaty-smelling air.

  I felt the faintest thrum of the keel against my bare feet, and the darkness seemed to condense around us like gelatin. Others tensed, but I saw Jebediah’s eyes come alight. He nodded brusquely to Evangelina, then hissed: “Now!”

  She and two others let slip the ties which held the barbed wire ‘net’ in a roll. The net fell into the water unspooling as it dropped beneath the surface. At the stern, Abner Coolidge, his gray-fringed, balding head easily the brightest thing around for miles, fumbled with the wrappings on the elongated package in his lap. Jebediah picked up two poles with oversized, barbed hooks from inside the gunwale, and handed one to Evangelina.

  When I looked again to the stern, Abner held a bare, amputated human leg in his outstretched hands. The burlap it had been wrapped in lay in the bottom of the boat. Its bloodless skin glowed pale in the moonlight. Coarse dark hair covered it from just below the kneecap to the ankle. Fat, muscle, and white bone showed at the end, which had been disarticulated from the hip it had been born connected to. Thawed this morning, it had been frozen since the day that Jebediah’s father had died. Soundlessly, Abner passed it to one of the net-crew who then passed it to me.

  I accepted it and closed my eyes. “Lord, our Father . . .”

  Jebediah interrupted with an angry slash of his hand through the heavy air. “Just get on with it, Preacher-man! It ain’t going to get any safer with you mumbling shit over that thing.”

  Expecting death to come at any moment in this fragile, broken world had taught me a great deal of calm, so when I spoke my tone was even. “Your father’s soul might give a fuck, even if you don’t, Jebediah. Now, can I get a God-damned ‘amen’ or not?”

  He scowled at me. “He’d want us to eat, and this pissing around is getting us nowhere . . .”

  Fuck him. I didn’t wait to hear him out. I tossed the gruesome relic of Caleb Tate at him.

  He ducked, falling to the keel of the boat with a thud, and the dead man’s leg went past him and fell into the sea near where the net had unwound. People gasped and froze in surprise for a moment, then scrambled to their positions. Jebediah inhaled sharply and jumped up. His gaze promised a brutal reckoning with me before he spun to look over the side of the boat. I finished the damn prayer under my breath as he and the young woman next to him scanned the water in silence.

  The leg sank immediately, of course. A sudden hush captured our fishing crew, as if everybody held their breath at the same moment. The water in front of the boat began to churn violently, and a horrid chittering filled the air around us like shards of glass.

  Evangelina and Jebediah screamed in unison, “PULL!”

  The boat lurched as Garrett and the other man on the net—Kendall Perkins—hauled on the ropes, and the sound suddenly changed to a crescendoing shriek of pain and rage which felt like knives shoved into my ears. The water frothed violently and something sinuous broke the surface. Ruddy moonlight gleamed hesitantly over dark scales, before it dropped back beneath the churned surface.

  But Kendall and Garrett heaved again, and the thing trapped in the net came into view. It had a face like a beautiful teenaged girl, at least until it screamed and its horrific mouth opened. Its teeth were needles and its tongue black with suckers like an octopus had on its arms. Its eyes, lidless like a shark’s, never blinked. Where it wasn’t scaled it had alabaster skin. Whatever passed for its blood slicked from lacerations caused by the barbed net. At nearly nine feet in length, it wielded jagged claws of bone at the end of asymmetric limbs, and a lashing tail with sharp ridges which flailed at the water and at us.

  With wordless cries, Evangelina and Jebediah swung their gaffs in perfect unison over the side of the boat at the thing, and the hooks sank deep into its chest and side. It bellowed, thrashed, and spit as they wrestled the monstrous thing they’d impaled. A gray gobbet of spittle flew from its mouth through the air and struck Garrett in the face. His scream of pain split the viscous air. He let go of the rope as he fell back into the bottom of the boat, and his feet drummed there. I fell on him to hold him down as the others continued their fight with the thing in the water.

  Although the net was loose at one end, the gaff-hooks impaled the creature. Kendall, Evangelina, and Jebediah finally wrestled it alongside the boat. Those who could reach it began
to bludgeon it with oars, clubs, or whatever they had to hand, as it howled and screeched its malignant hatred for all this damaged world to hear.

  Garrett went rigid under me, his eyes rolled back in their sockets and making small grunting noises. I used the water which had collected in the bottom of the boat to scrub at the poison on his face. He screeched in a high, keening voice as I peeled the gray spittle, and some underlying skin away with it.

  I missed a grab on one of his wrists and took a swing of his arm against my cheek. I twisted and pinned him in the bottom of the boat. He struggled, and I panted, but I managed to hang on until he weakened and finally stopped moving.

  Without Garret screaming I noticed silence. I looked around to see the others had stopped fighting. They now stared at me and Garrett. Blood streaked several of their faces where cuts bled freely and everyone’s breath heaved, but they were all there.

  Predictably, it was Jebediah who spoke first. “Will he live, Preacher?”

  I glanced down at Garrett, and nodded. “Got the poison off pretty quick. He’s burned, but should survive.” I looked around the boat, but aside from the folk of Kedesh, it was otherwise empty. “What happened? Did it get away?”

  “Too big to get it in the boat,” Evangelina hissed, wiping at a cut on her brow. “We’ll float it in.”

  Jebediah came and knelt by me to look briefly at the wounded man beneath me. “We got it. You did shit-all, Preacher-man. Maybe you don’t even get none of the meat when the time comes.”

  My cheek felt hot and sore where Garrett had struck me, and sudden anger and frustration eclipsed the fear I should have felt. Stupid fuckwit!

  Almost without conscious decision, I smashed my elbow into his face. His nose spurted blood. He fell backwards with a grunt. I surged after him. My left hand closed around his throat. I squeezed. Jebediah brought his hands up, but my right fist crashed through them, mashing his lips and skewing his jaw to one side. It felt so good and joyful that I hit him again, then again, until he finally lay limp and bloodied along the keel.