by J. Thorn
“It caught my eye a few hours ago. Of course, no thunder coming with it, but the lightning came, and each flash drenched that black place with a burst of light.”
Samuel looked at Major, and then back to Mara. Kole continued to sit on the floor, using his finger to draw concentric circles in the dust.
“There.”
Major shook his head in frustration as he looked outside a second too late, but Samuel saw it. At first, he chuckled to himself. He held his breath, withholding judgment until he could take a better look. What felt like hours passed before the next strike, but Samuel was ready. His initial curiosity washed away with the surging rain.
The bright bolt illuminated a form standing twenty yards from the cabin, facing east. Samuel kept telling himself it was an ape, but he knew better. Mara reached down and grasped his hand, squeezing hard. She continued to stare out the window, her breathing erratic and muffled.
“Did you see it?” she asked.
Samuel gave her hand a return squeeze and looked at Major.
“I did,” Samuel said.
The storm tossed another round of lightning down from the sky. Samuel wondered whether the dark cloud eating this place sent the storm or if it happened naturally. Either way, the darkness and the downpour seemed to conspire against his sanity. The concurrent blasts of soundless light fastened to the shape like a spotlight.
Samuel held that image in his mind like a photograph, a single frame of time frozen in memory. The rain matted the man’s hair to his head, covering the gray, exposed scalp. Water dripped at an angle as it ran from his chin. Ragged flaps of flesh lay exposed on the man’s face, bloodless and rotten. Samuel noticed the man wore tattered remnants of clothing that fell in strips about his body. His arm jutted inward at an unnatural angle. Artifacts of pants came toward the ground to meet bare feet that sank into the cold mud left exposed by the melting snow. Nothing on the creature mattered to Samuel more than its eyes. Samuel looked into the lifeless, black orbs and felt a whimper crushed within his chest.
“Who could it be?” Mara asked.
Another round of bolts crashed through the forest as Major stood. He looked over Mara’s tousled, black hair at Samuel.
“There’s more.”
Samuel heard the words enter his ears as if they came from outside of his own head. He shuddered and felt the muscles in his abdomen cramp. He could no longer feel Mara’s vise grip on his fingers.
Two more stood behind the first.
“Are they people?” Mara asked, still hopeful in her heart, but not in her mind.
“They used to be,” Major said.
Samuel looked at him, tilting his head to one side, awaiting elaboration.
“When I first saw them, I thought they were reflections, but they’re not. When they appear, the wolves get real skittish.”
“Undead?” Samuel asked.
“That’s one way to describe them. I think they’re more like warnings. They come just before the final phases of reversion. Canaries in the coal mine.”
“Ha,” Kole said, still sitting on the floor drawing in the dust. “Zombie birds.”
Mara crinkled her face and shook her head at Kole.
“What do they do?” Samuel asked.
“Not sure,” Major said, shaking his head. “I’ve only come across them a few times. They don’t do much but draw more of their kind, like moths to the flame.”
“For fuck’s sake, dude. Are they canaries or are they moths?” Kole asked. “Tell it like it is, and quit being a fucking drama queen.”
“He’s just trying to explain what’s happening, you asshole.”
The outburst from Mara grabbed Samuel’s attention. He saw her shake her head and heard Kole laugh in response.
“It doesn’t matter, does it, hon? This place is heading to the shitter with zombie tour guides. Your prince charming there can slip, but he’s got no way of controlling it and we don’t know if he can do it without us. Probably has a small pecker, too.”
Samuel shifted and turned his shoulders toward Kole.
“Everyone quiet down.” Major rubbed his forehead, trying to think and de-escalate the situation at the same time.
“Tell the bitch to quit her yapping,” Kole said.
Samuel took a step toward him, and Kole stood at the same time. The men faced each other, nose to nose. Kole flexed his biceps.
“Go ahead, Sammy. You want a crack at me, go ahead.”
Samuel balled both fists. He had eased the right one back to his hip when he felt Mara grip his wrist.
“Let it be. Don’t give the prick the fight he wants. Save your strength.”
Samuel looked into Mara’s eyes, and his fingers eased back from inside his palms. He shook his head at Kole, who hadn’t moved.
“Why here?” Samuel asked Major as he stepped away from the confrontation. Kole winked at Mara, and she glared back.
“It could be that the Barren draws them somehow, like magnets. It drew us here, didn’t it?”
“You told me to come here,” Samuel said.
Major shrugged. “Semantics. You would have ended up here, regardless.”
“What do we do?” Mara asked.
“There isn’t much we can do. Nobody is planning a Sunday hike any time soon. We stay here for now.”
“Genius,” Kole said.
“Man, you’re not helping,” Samuel said, snapping.
“Look,” Mara said.
In the flashes of electricity filling the sky, the handful of motionless figures had turned into dozens.
***
Although Major passed through many reversions, he did not have a memory of the horde and did not remember their function, which was to keep the talisman from being used and to immobilize anyone who could use it.
As the undead stood shoulder to shoulder, surrounding the cabin, Major ordered a watch. Samuel and Mara agreed, while Kole refused to cooperate. His dust drawings had evolved into charcoal portraits, which he drew on the walls using the ash from the fire. During Major’s shift, Samuel felt the pull of sleep. He curled into a ball with his head on the hardwood floor. The image of a train returned as a new dream seeped into his subconscious.
The track extended to the horizon in one long, loping stride. It curled like a tail around to the east, where the setting sun tore a flaming path in the sky on its descent in a bizarre retrograded motion. A wind moaned outside the cabin car, the noise signifying to Samuel that he was dreaming. The landscape lay as a flat expanse with an occasional pile of scree left like crumbs on a table. The dream-world contained no trees or manmade structures as far as Samuel could see.
He turned his dreaming eye inward to the passenger cabin. Two rows of seats sat divided by an aisle, two chairs in each row. The dark cloth on the seats hid stains left by thousands of riders covering thousands of miles. Samuel looked up and noticed a single, glowing bulb above his seat. The car rattled and hitched as the train pulled it through a slight curve in the track, still bearing east on its unknown, eternal voyage.
“I’m not leaving here.”
Samuel turned to his right and saw Kole in the seat across the aisle, smiling and flipping through a pornographic magazine.
“I’m dreaming,” Samuel said.
Kole shook his head and chuckled. “No shit.”
Samuel sat forward and raised his head above the seats. He looked to the front of the car and then toward the back.
“Just the two of us.”
Samuel turned back to face Kole with a look of disgust.
“I’ve always hated that song.”
The single reading light flickered and died, leaving Samuel’s dream self with nothing but the silhouette of empty seats and Kole’s voice.
“I don’t care, because I die with this place.” The sentence drained the remaining frivolity from Kole’s voice.
“What about me?” Samuel asked.
“What about you? I don’t know what your trip is, man. I don’t know what punched your
hole or how you slipped. But I know why I ain’t going home.”
Samuel slid from the window to the aisle seat. He looked into Kole’s face and saw a line of moisture under one eye, the darkness concealing everything else.
“I can’t give you absolution, but I can listen.”
Kole nodded and began. “Always shot my mouth off before my brain could catch up. Guess they woulda labeled me ADHD these days, shoved drugs down my throat to cure me. Back in the late ’70s I was a simple troublemaker. Knew early on college was not in my future. My older bro got the brains, I got the brawn.”
Samuel saw Kole glance down at his left bicep.
“After high school, I started to unravel. Hung out in the wrong places with the wrong people, and sooner or later, that shit catches up to you. My dad warned me. I always knew he liked me the best. Well, the best out of the boys. My youngest sister was definitely his favorite kid. Anyway, he knew where I was headed. He never told us stories of his childhood, but I had a feeling he’d been up to the same shit, which is why him and I bonded.
“I ran numbers for a while, and scored a stash with low-level dealers, mostly street thugs who would sell you a vial of rat poison and let you die an agonizing death for ten bucks. I found out selling drugs required much less time than running numbers, and if you skimmed the inventory, you could get high for free. That’s when I lost control.”
A low, rumbling whistle emerged as the train continued toward the horizon, now dotted with the first stars of the evening. A sliver of moon poked up from the underworld. Samuel looked at Kole.
“Drugs make you do shit. They make you do things you couldn’t imagine doing. The system is broke. I did three stints in county, and none of them were long enough to straighten me out. All they did was make me that much more hungry for the good shit, the drugs you can’t get from dealing with the prison guards. The third time I got out is when it happened.”
Samuel leaned in closer to Kole. The floor of the train vibrated underneath his feet and began to rattle his teeth.
“Got hopped up on the synthetic shit. Some redneck in a trailer probably cooked it up in a bathtub. It was really bad. I probably woulda been better off if it made my heart explode, but it didn’t. Nope, just shut my brain down to the point where I was more animal than man.
“I never did deals in a park or in crowded places. Sure, it was safer and less of a chance of eating a bullet, but I didn’t give a shit about my own safety by then. That deal in the park shoulda never gone down, for many reasons.
“My sidekick, Hoppy, set it up with one of the local street gangs. These thugs got their hands on a crate of Russian assault rifles, and all of a sudden they were rolling through town with their cocks swinging. I told Hoppy we didn’t need the score, that we could move it without dealing with these assholes. But the money was too tempting, and the drugs fuck with your ability to make rational decisions.”
Kole paused. He knew most of the story was procrastination. He pushed through, without a choice. “I never saw her. Well, that’s not true. I stood over her dying body punched with seventeen bullet holes, but I never saw her before that. Was it my gun? Hoppy’s gun? The motherfucking puta that emptied his clip in the park? It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Samuel waited, understanding Kole wasn’t looking for an answer.
“Her mom was in shock. She kept tugging at the girl’s backpack, trying to brush the blood off of it like it was dirt. She brushed her daughter’s hair back and ignored the hole that oozed black blood from her forehead. The scum that tried ripping us off bolted, and that’s probably what kept Hoppy and me from getting pinched for it. Everyone in the park fingered the dark-skinned fellas with machine guns strapped to their backs, fleeing the park at a full sprint. Hoppy and me, we just kinda walked out. We shoved our handguns into our waistbands and shuffled through the crowd with the same look of terror everyone else had.
“The court never got a chance to put them, or us, on trial. That mom never got a chance to speak her mind on her dead daughter’s behalf. Is it justice? Maybe. The cops caught up to them three blocks and ten minutes later. Put over sixty rounds in each of the thugs.”
The train accelerated. Samuel felt the windows vibrate, and looked down at the rock piles now blurring past in the darkness. Hundreds of white pinpoints appeared in the otherwise-black canvas.
“I think Hoppy met his match under a bridge about a year later. He thought he was getting a ten-dollar blowjob, but it turned into a switchblade to the gut. They say it takes a long time to bleed out that way. That it’s painful. I hope it was. That fucker deserved to die like a pig.”
“Something is happening with the train,” Samuel said. “It’s speeding up.”
Kole shook his head. “We ain’t got much time. I think you know all you need to know about me.”
“Except how you got here,” Samuel said.
“C’mon, man. Do I have to spell it all out for you?”
Samuel waited.
“After the deal went south and I parted ways with Hoppy, I went from King Shit to your average street junkie. I tried killing myself with that stuff. Man, did I try. But I ran out of money before I could finish the job. I got real low, as if having that little girl’s blood on my hands wasn’t low enough. I started doing shit for money, shit I’m not proud of.”
Samuel raised his eyebrows.
“Sucking dick, okay? Not like it matters I’m telling you this now. You don’t even know me. But yeah, that’s what I had to do to get my money for blow. Blow for blow.” Kole watched Samuel stifle a snicker. “It’s cool, man. I was making a joke.”
Kole waited for Samuel to stop smiling before he continued. “It’s never across, always with. The movies get it wrong. Slicing with the vein will almost always guarantee a tub full of blood.”
The train jerked to the left and then to the right. Kole extended both arms toward Samuel, turning his forearms upside down.
“So you pulled it off, the tub full of blood?” Samuel asked.
“You tell me, hotshot. I’m here with you, the old man and the skinny emo chick. This place ain’t home, and it’s being eaten by a fucking cloud while zombies parade around the cabin that wild wolves left to rot. Did I pull it off?”
Samuel stared at Kole’s face until he blinked.
When his eyes reopened, he saw the crusty, hardwood floor of the cabin and the wall he faced on his makeshift bunk.
***
Major stood at the window, his back facing the others in a cabin that felt more cramped with each passing hour. He shifted from one leg to the next, muttering underneath his breath. Samuel looked at Mara. She smiled, legs crossed on the chair. He felt the twinge in his chest as their eyes met. She was so young. It wouldn’t matter unless he was a college professor and she was a second-semester freshman. He could see Mara, dreamy-eyed and optimistic. But this was not a campus and he was not a professor. He let go of her gaze and turned to face Kole. He had run out of charcoal and so resumed drawing figures in the dust. Kole winked at Samuel and dropped his chin. Samuel raised his eyebrows and turned away.
“Thousands, probably,” Major said.
Samuel stood and walked over to him. He used his elbow to smear more grease from the windowpane and stooped to look out.
The human forms clumped like cattle in anticipation of a thunderstorm. They stood underneath trees and out in the open. The lonely figures canted to one side, always leaning toward the west and the oncoming force of destruction. Others grouped together, huddled in their rags, with colorless faces. Samuel stared, thinking the creatures could be confused for statues. He didn’t see them move but realized they had to have arrived there somehow. The Barren no longer stretched open and clear to the tree line. The silent forms hid the ground from view.
“Are they planning an attack?” Mara asked from the chair, one hand circling and rubbing her other wrist.
“I think they’re guardians. Going to keep us in here, stand guard until the cloud can consume
it all.”
Samuel looked at Major’s face and grimaced at his response. “Pinning us down with sheer numbers?” he asked.
“Could be.”
Kole stood and threw a piece of kindling into the corner of the cabin. “I’m out,” he said, walking toward the door.
Samuel stepped in front of him and spun so his back rested on the cool wood of the door.
“Nobody’s leaving,” Samuel said.
“Outta my way, cowboy.”
Samuel looked at Mara, then Major. Neither moved.
“I can’t let you do that. If you go out there, who knows what they’ll do.”
“Looks to me like they aren’t doing anything but making you shit your pants,” Kole said. “Get out of my way before I knock you out.”
Major nodded at Samuel, who stepped to the side and turned a palm up toward the doorknob.
“Fine. Go right ahead.”
Kole snickered. He bent his right arm at an angle and lifted it to kiss the bicep. “Smackdown.”
Kole turned the knob and Samuel heard the gasp from Major.
The thousands of faces that had been staring at the ground turned up to the door in one motion. Every form revealed a blank, dead gaze, their eyes nothing but eternal black marks, mouths open with tongues protruding like baby serpents.
“Don’t,” Samuel said to Kole.
Kole pulled the door the rest of the way open and stepped out on the porch. The creatures groaned in unison. Legs moved toward the cabin with the sounds of brittle bones snapping under the strain. The creatures shifted forward in a mass of grey, decaying flesh.
Mara lunged for the door and slammed it shut behind Kole. She threw herself against it, her chest rising and falling in rapid succession.
“He’s sparked some interest,” Major said.
Samuel moved back to the window and watched Kole take two steps off the porch. The bodies continued moving toward him. They marched at a slow pace, but with the certainty their prey would never escape. Samuel looked deeper, toward the tree line, and saw wave after wave of the creatures coming out of the forest and making their way to Kole.
Kole crouched, bent his knees and raised his fist. He yelled something, but the sound was swallowed by the dying locality. The first two undead who came close to Kole wore men’s clothing. They extended their arms, thumbs touching. Their eyes locked on Kole and their mouths opened and closed at irregular intervals. Kole cocked his right arm behind his ear and stepped into the punch. The form closest absorbed the strike with his cheek, its head twisting with the force of it. The creature’s legs continued to propel it toward Kole.