Every noise sounded mental alarms. A gentle breeze or the breath of a gigantic beast? The coolers downstairs humming away or the flapping wings of a nocturnal predator? The crunch of canine footpads on patrol, or an extraterrestrial hunter stalking the estate?
Richard fidgeted and rolled. He flipped the pillow over and over. He drifted into drowsiness only to jump awake at the thought of approaching horror.
Long after midnight but hours before dawn, barking dogs kept him awake. First one, then a second, then a chorus of growls and snarls from outside. His eyes popped open and he lay still in the bed, listening.
Tyr hurried into the bedroom. A communication came clearly: something trying to get in.
"Chase it away," he said as much a hope as an order.
Too big.
Whatever threatened the grounds needed to be dispatched by Richard's arsenal.
The dogs outside yapped and howled yet Rich did not move. He did not want to move. He would stay in bed and hope for the best.
Then something else caught his attention. A sound? A tremor? Not the dogs barking or the monster prowling: this came from inside the mansion and he knew-instinctively knew-it to be different.
Energy? No, that was not quite right although as his brain tried to categorize this sensation it translated the feeling into growing noise or increasing power. The source? Again, inside. Somewhere…somewhere below.
Yes, that was it. The place beneath the basement. The place where the key led.
Down there under the heavy stone foundation and deep beneath the ground lived the third gift from the Old Man: the thing that gave Richard the memories of the professor studying UV rays, the experiences of the soldier wielding a carbine, the plans of the man who had owned the mansion before him, and many other memories that would take months- years — to fully know.
His mind's translation of that sensation tuned finer; he understood the sensation grew not because it became louder or increased in power, but because it moved closer. Closer to him.
This time, the third gift did not wait for him to use the key. It reached from the depths beyond the locked door, rising into the basement and toward the stairs.
Richard sat up. The dogs continued to bark and growl. He heard shrubs and trees ruffle as something big probed the perimeter fence for a means of entry.
And still the third gift rose through the mansion: the first floor hallway…the steps to the second floor…up it came…
He shivered and sweat. It was supposed to stay down there until he needed it! Why did it come out? It had no business leaving its hiding place.
…the top of the stairs…into the library…
"Go away!"
The power of the third gift poured into his room like a gust of wind. He grabbed his head with both hands and shut his eyes, refusing its invasion but he stood no chance.
The Old Man's voice said, "What, Trevor, you thought this gift came for free? You didn't think there'd be a price to pay?"
Memories and experiences blasted into his mind: the soldier lugging his M4 on patrol under an African sun, the big man who owned the mansion driving a luxury sedan with a cigar dangling from his lips.
"You think you can just hold up here until the cavalry arrives? Oh, now Trevor, don't you get it? You ARE the cavalry. Everything in here, it's for you but it comes with a price, Trev. Now let's settle up that bill, shall we?"
Richard left the bedroom behind for a bright hot day on a dusty street where a column of soldiers darted between buildings, threatened by mobs of ragtag militia.
"Two skinnies on the roof!"
"Chalk Four, get your asses to the crash site!"
"Move, move, move."
As he jogged around a burned-out car, something bounced off what metal remained on the frame. Something else exploded in the dirt near his heavy boots. Those somethings were bullets.
He raised his carbine and returned fire.
"Keep moving! Go! Go! Go!"
A "Little Bird" MH-6 helicopter flew fast and low overhead, sweeping its mini-guns across an intersection and blowing a tornadic swirl around the advancing soldiers.
More bullets came from open windows and from behind burning tires serving as makeshift barricades. One of the 'skinnies' poked his head around a corner and shot. Rich raised his rifle but found no strength. His arms simply would not rise. Then he fell backwards as if someone swept his feet out.
The pain came next. A hot, searing sensation around his collarbone.
What is this?
His limp body bounced against the hard dirty ground. He felt his Kevlar helmet roll away.
A voice hollered, "Man down! Medic!"
Rich could not feel the tips of his fingers or his toes but he did feel the terrible burning near his neck. He wanted to put a hand on the hot spot but his arms would not respond.
Then he was moving again, dragged by the straps of his assault vest.
"Hey! Hey, stay with us! You hear me?"
The voice faded.
He no longer felt his arms or his legs. Something funny about his breathing, too. It felt…his breaths felt… wet. He coughed. Something warm tickled over his lips.
I am dying. All for what? Did I make a difference?
One last shiver traveled his spine and his body twitched. The numbness moved inward, sweeping over his chest and covering his eyes…
…Richard-sitting in bed on sweat-soaked sheets-gasped as if he had been holding his breath. A feeling like static electricity hung all around. A balance remained…
…The man stood at an office window gazing at the eclectic mix of old and new buildings in downtown Wilkes-Barre. The remains of a loaded Philadelphia Style Cheese Steak-his favorite-lay half-eaten on a massive leather-trimmed desk.
Rich felt the sadness in the man as he thought about all the preparations at the mansion. The man knew those preparations were not for him. He served as a tool. After everything he had accomplished in his life, all the jobs he created, all the investments that paid big dividends, he found that, in the end, he was merely an implement of something far greater than himself.
Some power consumed him-perhaps for longer than he realized-consumed him to the point of chasing away family and friends. The irregular pounding in his chest suggested that the time to discard the tool fast arrived.
The man knew something bad was coming to the world; a thousand horrible ways to die waited on the doorstep. The growing pain in his chest would be his reward, sparing him a more horrible fate.
A sense of purpose drove him for years; a purpose he could not explain to his partners or family because he could not explain that purpose to himself. Like an addict in the throws of addiction, that purpose forced him to inexplicable behavior. He bought guns and generators, tons of food for people and dogs, constructed fuel tanks into the beautiful grounds of his multi-million dollar estate, built a helicopter pad for a man who owned no helicopter, sold a classic Porsche for military Humvees and a modified RV. The list went on and on.
He stood at the window and felt his heart chug. The last pinholes of circulation in an artery filled and closed. A strain grew in his chest and caused fire to race through his veins. A soft gasp puffed from his lungs; he hunched over and rolled to the floor.
Whoever you are, the man thought in his dying moments, make it all mean something…
…Richard clutched his chest and felt the fast beat of his own healthy heart.
Yet a balance remained. More memories flooded in, memories stretching hundreds of years, generation after generation of Americans, Europeans, Africans, Asians, and more. Each contributing skills to help him fight and survive in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. Dying moments and shattered dreams; the anguish of great hopes dashed by a twist of fate; the collective triumphs and failures of his race, he made them all his own.
The third gift gave Richard-no, Trevor — everything he needed to fight on behalf of his people, and a charge to give it meaning. The weight of the world, the Old Man had warne
d, was coming down on Trevor Stone's shoulders. Now he carried that weight.
He had never felt so responsible. Indeed, he had never truly understood the word 'responsibility' before. Not like this. Not the way in which Presidents and Doctors felt responsibility. The responsibility of life and death; of nations and cultures; for things much greater than any one person.
For a species.
After a while, he fell out of bed. Tyr stood and watched stoically, relaying the need for help. The dogs still barked. The intruder still searched for a point of entry.
Trevor paused on his hands and knees on the thick rug. His stomach tied into a knot, his arms quivered, beads of sweat covered his body, his breath came in bursts.
The weight of the world.
He hauled himself to his feet, wavered, and then found his strength.
The first night at the estate he had not known what to think or do. By the second night, he accepted his gifts but, arrogantly, thought there no consequences. Now he realized he had much to learn. And much to do.
It would take time and it would take change. Just as the knowledge imparted to him by the third gift gave him confidence and strength, the price of that knowledge and the responsibility to be worthy of receiving it, sat inside his belly like a seed of things to come; a cold seed he would nurture with commitment, patience, and focus. A seed that would sprout and grow and swallow whole the man who had been Richard and give life to Trevor. There could be nothing other than the one purpose.
He grabbed the carbine bought for him by the man who had once owned the estate. He marched from his bedroom armed with the expertise to make that weapon precise and lethal; knowledge granted by a dead soldier.
Outside waited the first of many nightmares he must face; nightmares that haunted the long night into which he and his people descended.
6. Fugitive
Late June turned into the deep heat of July and August followed by the shorter days and chilly nights of mid September.
There should have been pep rallies and football games, back-to-school sales and a new fall schedule of prime time TV.
Instead, insects swarmed the streets drawn to and born from a legion of bloated cadavers. The airwaves offered only static and no electricity lived in the wires between power poles. Smoke drifted over disintegrated neighborhoods, the result of block fires burning unchallenged. Flipped cars littered the overpasses and silent swing sets swayed on empty playgrounds.
Mankind’s machinery and vehicles, buzzing electronic transformers and humming streetlights, made no sound. The combined chorus of humanity’s footprint had been silenced and that silence roared.
Strange creatures lived on the streets, no longer interlopers but part of an altered ecosystem of new predators and new prey. Some organized, many not.
The world of man had been cut, diced, and scattered.
– A red Corvette sped west on the Cross Valley Expressway, swerving first to avoid an abandoned SUV, then again to dodge a jack-knifed 18-wheeler, but it dared not slow.
Four smaller vehicles that could have been the bastard offspring of a Jet Ski and snow mobile pairing pursued the Corvette. These strange craft rode on cushions of air, each piloted by rugged humanoids hooting and hollering as they gave chase.
The swarm and the swarmed raced along the expressway across the Susquehanna, through the rock cut in the western wall of the valley, and into the "Back Mountain." They passed a bank and a gas station, fast food restaurants, strip malls, and a soft ice cream stand that suffered its worst summer in years.
The pursuers wore a material resembling leather. They worked their rides close to the ‘Vette, swinging and jabbing with their collection of primitive weapons: oblong maces, cone-shaped daggers, and straps lined with blades.
The Corvette swooped around a bend at high speed and entered an intersection linking four small roads. A mound of junked cars woven together by a sticky secretion blocked that intersection. Dusty bones lay on the pavement around what had once been a predator's nest. Vacant or not, that nest threatened to claim another victim.
Rubber smoked from the tires as the brakes struggled to slow the car and the driver fought with the wheel for control. The ‘Vette missed the mound…almost: the front quarter panel clipped the grille of a late 70’s Mercury Marquis jutting from the mountain of captured cars.
Both front tires burst as the fleeing coupe ricocheted into the curb, spun across the front lot of a gas station, through the empty pumps, and smashed sideways into the boarded storefront.
Meanwhile, the hover bikes easily dodged the nest and coasted to a stop behind the disabled Chevy.
A woman staggered from the driver's side and fell to the pavement; her hand splashed in a stream of hot lime-green anti-freeze from the split radiator.
Last spring she wore the best designer clothes, made reservations at $50-an-entree restaurants, and hung on the arm of a boyfriend who bought her a Corvette from Edgar Chevrolet.
Those designer clothes were gone, exchanged for rough jeans and muddy tennis shoes. The $50 entrees had been supplanted by cans of tuna fish and worse. The boyfriend who bought the Corvette had met his fate as lunch for something big and slithery that had battered open the door to his townhouse last July.
In the months since the world disintegrated, Sheila Evans dropped twenty-five pounds on the Milky Way and Pepsi diet. Her once well-groomed hair now lice-infested; her formerly manicured nails now jagged from nervous biting.
Her pursuers dismounted and approached.
Similar in some ways to human beings, these aliens sported two arms and two legs. They had heads, too, but their heads were less round and more oval, almost egg-shaped. A massive, oversized mouth dominated their pale faces. Tiny little eyes rested above small flaps that might have been nostrils.
"Stay back!" she held a hand aloft as if to shoo them away.
She had seen what these things do to people.
She had seen what these things do to women.
Sheila slumped against her car and cried while the gang approached with horrifying grins on their oversized mouths. The leader licked its forked tongue over serrated teeth.
That leader…fell to the ground.
No, the leader’s chest exploded, pushing it to the ground.
The other three produced bulky firearms akin to flintlock pistols.
A second creature fell as half its head exploded.
Sheila scampered on her hands and knees to the front of the Corvette and coincidentally gained a better view and a better understanding of the situation.
Catty-corner from the crash site in a bank parking lot someone-an honest-to-God-human being- propped a rifle on the hood of an abandoned car and sniped her attackers.
The big-mouthed mutants scrambled for shelter behind the rear hatch of the Corvette and returned fire, their pistols booming like cannons. The Mutants’ flintlocks delivered a powerful punch, but only fired one round at a time. Sheila heard the ugly things grumble as they reloaded.
Bullets and flintlock fire exchanged; a metallic-smelling cloud of smoke gathered overhead but she quickly realized that the man confronting the Mutants consistently fired high.
Suddenly, a series of new sounds displaced the chaotic chorus of bullets and blasts: a fierce growl, a bark, and a scream from one of the hover bike riders, then grunts of pain and a disturbing tearing noise. The gunfire ceased. The growls and shredding slowed then stopped.
A breeze blew through the gas station, dissipating the cloud of gunpowder.
The sniper left cover and crossed the street toward her.
Sheila realized the intentionality of his poor marksmanship: to keep the monsters pinned and distracted. But distracted from what?
Curiosity overcame fear. She stood and walked slowly toward the rear of the car. There she found the remains of the Mutants; arms torn off, throats ripped, and legs lacerated.
Four dogs hovered over the dead monsters. She recognized two as German Shepherds. The other two wore heavy black
and gray coats with curly tails and white underbellies.
Sheila, terrified, hastily withdrew but tripped over a dead Mutant and fell to the pavement again. Her savior’s shadow cast across her prone form.
Stubble adorned his cheeks but no outright beard. Long but kempt hair rested on his shoulders. He wore heavy gray pants and a black T-shirt underneath a military vest. A black baseball cap topped the ensemble with a thigh rig and holster strapped to his legs.
For a moment, Sheila wondered if she had exchanged inhuman attackers for a human one.
He asked, "Are you hurt?"
She was malnourished. She had cuts that would not heal and bruises that would not fade because her body was vitamin-deprived. Bugs lived in her hair and cold sores lined her mouth. Yet she answered, "I'm fine."
Sheila tensed as the dogs approached.
The man said to them, "All dead?"
It appeared he listened to unspoken words before responding, "Good. Sweep the rear of the building quick, then we’re out of here."
Amazingly, the dogs moved off in haphazard formation.
The man returned his attention to Sheila.
"I’m Trevor. You got lucky. This was my first day out this far. If this had happened yesterday you’d be dinner or worse for those Mutants."
"Do I…Do I know you?"
"No. No one knows me."
She did not bother wondering what that meant.
"Listen," he explained in a tone that bordered on indifference. "I’ve got a safe place. You can come with me if you’d like. I’ve got food and you can get cleaned up."
Demeanor notwithstanding, she saw something in him she had not seen in a long, long time: confidence and strength.
He slung the assault rifle over his shoulder, held a hand to Sheila, and then lifted her easily as if she were a paper doll.
The two walked across the street to the bank parking lot. Trevor guided her to a camouflage-painted Humvee. After helping her inside, he whistled to his dogs. They galloped across the intersection to the car.
One of the black and gray canines approached him directly while the other three jumped in the rear cargo bed.
Disintegration ba-1 Page 8