The Dead Road

by Seth Patrick

  Philip nodded. ‘Never. Sly. Kids these days . . .’

  ‘Ha!’ said Never, smiling at last. ‘Kids, he says.’

  ‘Son, when you reach eighty, you’ll realize I meant it. We need to watch you both, but Sly especially. Most important thing is to rest.’

  ‘Thanks, Philip,’ said Annabel. There was something else she wanted from him, though. ‘Look, uh, I was going to ask you for some advice.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  ‘Something big happened,’ she said. ‘In DC. But I don’t know what to tell everyone. I don’t want to give people more than they can handle.’

  Sly looked at her. ‘What do they know already?’ she said.

  ‘They, huh?’ said Philip, raising his eyebrow. ‘Well, Cathy already told us that the power cuts are widespread, and there have been attacks of some kind on cities near the coast in Russia and Europe.’ ‘She did?’ said Annabel.

  ‘While you were asleep,’ said Philip. ‘The kids were sleeping too. Of everyone, I think they’re the ones we should be most careful about.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Annabel. ‘What else did Cathy say?’

  ‘That we’re taking shelter, just in case. We’ve tried to limit speculation, and with the kids awake we’ve agreed not to talk about it.’ He looked from Sly to Never, and back. ‘A good doctor can see the ghosts in a patient’s eyes. Fear can’t hide when you really look at someone. I’m guessing that things have taken a turn for the worse.’

  ‘We owe you the full story,’ said Sly. ‘You can—’

  ‘Not so fast,’ he said, interrupting her. He gave her a kind smile. ‘Look, I’m not a religious person. My wife was, even when she was being eaten alive by cancer. Not even fifty, and she still thought God was the bee’s knees.’ He shook his head. ‘It made me angry, the injustice, but I hid it because I knew it would just be toxic if I didn’t. You see, I don’t think a lack of God would have done her any good.

  Sometimes ignorance is a terrible thing, the worst of things, but there are times when it’s a blessing.’

  ‘You don’t want to know what happened?’ said Sly.

  He nodded. ‘If you think knowing what’s out there will help, then by all means tell us. Otherwise, keeping it vague suits me fine. And for God’s sake, we all have to pretend everything will come out good in the end. Kids pick up on more than you think.’

  *

  ‘So what do we do next?’ said Annabel. Philip had gone, and nobody had spoken for an uncomfortably long time – Never and Sly seemed a little shell-shocked, naturally, but Jonah had an air of dismay about him that she didn’t like, partly because she could feel that same dismay herself. If she succumbed to it now, she didn’t know if she’d recover.

  She looked at Jonah, silently begging him. Pull it together, she thought. For me. For all of us.

  ‘We move everyone into the tunnels,’ said Jonah. ‘The upper cavern. We shutter the house at night, go into the cavern and lock the door. The security systems will tell us if anything comes near, but we’ll be safe either way.’

  Sly shook her head. ‘This can’t be it,’ she muttered. ‘Hiding.’

  ‘Survival is what comes first,’ said Jonah. ‘Today we move all our supplies down below. We stay safe.’

  Sly looked exhausted. ‘And then what?’ she said.

  ‘Then?’ said Jonah. ‘Then I find a way to win.’

  He smiled and slapped Sly gently on the back, and gave Annabel the briefest of looks. Of all of them, Annabel hadn’t pegged Sly as the one to need false hope, but Jonah was trying his best.

  *

  Letting Sly and Never rest, Annabel and Jonah got on with some basic preparations. They fed the cable from the radio aerial downstairs and into the cavern, and brought the receiver into the little wine cellar so that they could monitor it overnight. The narrow frequency range that had been typically static-free was noisier than ever, and local traffic was all they had been able to get since the night before. Even then, most of it tended to be unintelligible.

  There was a single remote unit they could use to monitor the house security and control the shutters, which Jonah left beside the radio. He also brought in the two sunlamps he’d bought, old models that had long been discontinued because the light they produced was above legal limits. They were the same type which Kendrick had used in the safe house he’d kept Tess in, and although they’d not proved as effective as had been hoped, they’d certainly been useful when the safe house had been attacked, and had bought precious time. The parasites could physically detach from their hosts and attack, but sunlight severely damaged them.

  ‘Do you think the things Never saw are the same?’ asked Annabel. ‘Are they like the parasites?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Jonah. ‘When they have a human host to draw from, they can get much bigger.’ He plugged the lamps in and gave them a brief test, wincing at the heat and light that came from them. ‘They’ll drain the power pretty fast,’ he said. ‘But in the morning I’ll feel a lot better if I can put these on before I open the tunnel entrance and come out into the basement.’

  Soon, Never came down to the basement and insisted on helping.

  ‘You should be resting,’ Annabel told him.

  ‘I tried to rest,’ he said. ‘Sly’s out for the count, but I can’t sit still.’

  Annabel left them to it and went back upstairs. She insisted on giving Cathy and Petro the option of hearing what had happened in DC, telling them both how Philip had felt. Cathy decided that she also didn’t want to know, and as a result opted out of listening for any more radio transmissions. ‘If I don’t stop, I’ll hear something bad,’ she said. ‘Something I won’t be able to keep off my face, and Remy will pick up on it. That’s the last thing she needs.’

  ‘What about Remy’s mom and dad?’ asked Annabel. ‘Should we talk to them?’

  Cathy shook her head. ‘They’re hurting so much right now.’ She leaned over and gripped Annabel’s arm. ‘If this is going to be the end of it all, I’d rather they had no idea. If they thought it was . . . They need hope, Annabel. Hope for their daughter.’ She thought for a moment, then added: ‘Jansin is Sara’s best friend, too, and the same applies to their kids. You don’t tell her or her husband, not yet.’

  When Annabel spoke to Petro, he was keen to know everything. At his request, she took him to Jonah’s office and showed him the footage from Never and Sly’s road trip. Grey-faced, he turned away from the screen when it was over and looked her in the eye. ‘Don’t they say, “Share a burden, lose a burden”?’ he said.

  ‘Something like that,’ said Annabel.

  ‘Well, I’m glad to help take some burden. Perhaps we’ll listen to the radio, and hear something good soon.’

  She hoped he was right.

  She returned to the basement and discovered Jonah and Never unboxing half a dozen tents she’d had no idea existed. Jonah had had a proactive phase of buying all kinds of equipment early on, before sinking into the depression that had dragged him down.

  It became something of an adventure for the children, and for their parents, taking the tents into the cavern, placing the cushioning mats Jonah had bought, working out the baffling intricacies of the fibreglass poles and the tent material. The stone of the cavern echoed with laughter, and laughter hadn’t been something she and Jonah had had much of in the last year. She couldn’t have imagined old Harlan, the house’s previous occupant, ever having been one for laughter either.

  With food supplies and quarts of water, airbeds and sleeping bags, blankets and flashlights, there was a feeling of readiness for the night. Down here, things would be the same, whatever the sky contained, be it bright sun or flickering aurora.

  Or the blackening veins, and the flood.

  *

  By late afternoon, preparations were almost complete. The three children were chased out of the courtyard garden by Never, anxious about the solar panels and their less-than-robust mountings. In the wine cellar, Petro was taking a turn listenin
g to the radio, a duty he shared with Never, Jonah and Annabel. Sly was still asleep on one of the games-room couches, exhausted, with Never popping his head in from time to time to make sure she was OK.

  Jonah, meanwhile, shut himself in his office and looked at the footage Never had captured. The first time he’d viewed it, he’d thought he’d noticed something but hadn’t been sure. Now, he knew he’d not been mistaken.

  Just as Never had been about to shut the van door, the camera happened to sweep up and capture several frames of the distant sky. And there, silhouetted against the green-tinted clouds, was a shape from Jonah’s nightmares.

  It was tiny in the shot, but he knew how far away it had to be, and hence how vast it really was. A dark figure, arms reaching to the sky.

  The Beast itself.

  There was a knock on the door. Jonah hid the image as Never looked in. ‘Petro’s heard something on the radio,’ said Never, and Jonah followed him down. Annabel was there already, and they kept their voices low. The occasional excited yelp from the children playing in the cavern filtered into the wine cellar.

  ‘The transmissions have become crowded,’ said Petro. ‘Overnight there was just too much static, presumably an effect of . . . of what came. Someone managed to bring a kind of order to the chaos, basically by bossing everyone around to take turns on what little space there was. Making people use identifying handles, time allocation and emergency call-outs. So, I’ve heard plenty from the neighbourhood, nothing much to add to what we know except that Baltimore was affected, and people are advising everyone to stay out of the cities. Nobody who goes into them comes back.’

  Annabel nodded. ‘The Gatchina broadcast said the same thing. Could be all kinds of bedlam there, panic and looting.’

  ‘And other things,’ said Never. They looked at him. ‘I don’t know . . . I saw people this morning acting the way you’d expect, distraught and scared. But there were others who just seemed to be getting on with something. Too purposeful, given what had happened.’ He turned to Jonah. ‘How fast can they take someone? How fast can the shadows take hold?’

  Jonah shook his head. In Winnerden Flats, one of the parasites had tried to attach itself to Kendrick after its host had been killed. It had been a move of desperation, as the creature couldn’t survive long without a human to drain life-force from – given Kendrick’s sheer stubbornness, he was always going to put up a hell of a fight. Yet even with that challenge, Jonah had come to realize that it would either be a matter of time, or end up in the death of them both. The natural revulsion a person felt was the most important factor in preventing the creatures getting a foothold, but the revulsion would fade. He thought back to Lucas Silva, a man who had been a target Kendrick had selected when they were still trying to get some idea of what was really going on at Winnerden Flats. He’d been identified as someone who possibly carried one of the shadow parasites, so Kendrick had taken Jonah to get a good look at him, and verify it one way or the other.

  And Silva did indeed have that pulsating grotesque creature clinging to him, its tendrils like ancient dead fingers digging deep into his breastbone, its central mass pulsating like a dead heart, its skin the colours of a diseased slug.

  Then Silva’s wife and child had shown up, and Jonah had panicked when he’d seen that they too had something clinging to them – the smallest of buds, something they were surely unaware of, burrowing its way into their souls.

  But how fast could it be done?

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jonah. ‘But it’s the bodies I’ve been haunted by since I saw them on that footage. Those people weren’t being sought as hosts for the shadows. They were fodder, pure and simple.’ The Beast had gone by many names; Eater of Souls was one of them. Was that what the ripped-out faces lying in Washington DC indicated? That the Soul Eater was feasting?

  ‘There was something else I heard,’ said Petro. ‘Rumours, that’s all, but . . .’

  ‘Isn’t everything?’ said Annabel.

  ‘I guess,’ said Petro. ‘An explosion in St Petersburg. A massive one, the size of the city itself.’

  ‘Nuclear?’ said Annabel.

  ‘That’s what people seem to think.’

  A nuclear explosion, thought Jonah. Given the way the shadows reacted to intense light, it was surely something the Beast would fear. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘When was this?’

  ‘Overnight, for us,’ said Petro. ‘Daytime for them. Reports say that someone had planned it for when the darkness that attacked them came back, but it went off during the day.’

  ‘Why did they think it was coming back?’ said Jonah. ‘If it was like DC, it had been decimated. Better to move on to untouched cities, right?’

  Petro shook his head. ‘I don’t know why they thought it was going to return, or when, but that’s the story I heard.’

  Jonah frowned. ‘Perhaps it makes sense that it would come back,’ he said. ‘No resistance. No rush. It could enjoy itself with those left behind.’ Part of him wondered if the mutilated victims would have given it much satisfaction; if, indeed, it hadn’t just killed those it sensed it couldn’t drink from, the way it had surely drunk from Silva and the others.

  ‘So the people of St Petersburg were ready to hit back,’ said Annabel. ‘And their bomb went off too soon. What does that say to you?’

  Petro shrugged. ‘It says sabotage. It says there were collaborators.’

  *

  An hour before dark, they got everyone into the cavern and closed the heavy entry door, which locked from the inside with long-armed metal latches. The lighting, strung along the cavern walls, was bright enough to see by without draining too much power. The kids were reading by flashlight. Sly had remained in a low mood since she’d roused from her earlier sleep, but Philip had given her another check and was confident she would improve, albeit slowly.

  Meanwhile, Jonah had transferred almost all of the smorgasbord of equipment into the cavern, including significant medical supplies. He showed them to Philip, who was a little taken aback.

  ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That defibrillator might prove handy for an old goat like me.’ He smiled. ‘You got yourself a basic field hospital right here.’

  Jonah felt oddly proud.

  As midnight approached, people started to settle down to sleep. Jonah went to relieve Petro from his most recent stint on the radio. Petro almost jumped out of his skin when Jonah put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Jonah. ‘My turn. You should get some sleep.’

  ‘You scared the Jesus out of me,’ said Petro, taking off his headphones. ‘So I heard your friend Never say, when I took his turn. Not heard that before.’

  ‘It’s bejesus,’ said Jonah. He smiled. ‘And if you hang around Never, you’ll hear plenty you’ve not heard before. Anything to report?’

  Petro shook his head. ‘No more to add to the list,’ he said. On the pad by the radio, they’d been writing down a list of suspected attack sites, but it had been impossible to tell rumour from fact. Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Mumbai, Cape Town . . . The list went on. The only thing they had much certainty about was that only DC and Baltimore were being mentioned as far as North America went. So far, it seemed, the country had been spared a second catastrophe.

  The earlier report about St Petersburg, and the idea that they’d been expecting a return of the destructive forces, played on Jonah’s mind as he listened to the static-laden fragments. He wondered again why they would expect it to come back. He wondered also about his assumption that a blast of any kind, even nuclear, would really cause that much damage to the Beast, but another thought occurred to him: it simply might know if there was something like that waiting for it, and go elsewhere.

  Or have one of its puppets deal with the situation.

  The static hiss lulled him into a doze.

  He woke with a start, immediately realizing that he’d been asleep. For how long, he didn’t know.

  He was in darkness. There was no hiss from the radio now, but it wasn�
�t because the static had cleared – the radio was off, just as the tunnel lights were. He realized he’d not brought a flashlight with him. He was about to stand when he was sure he sensed movement nearby.

  ‘Hello?’ he whispered. He heard no sound, but he was sure something was there with him. For a moment he couldn’t move. Then, slowly, he edged out into the main corridor, feeling his way past the wine bottles protruding from their drill-holes in the wall. He could hear voices ahead of him now, people waking perhaps, or who hadn’t been sleeping; they were too far away for him to hear what was being said, but he couldn’t hear any panic. Anxiety, perhaps, but no panic.

  He could see a dim light ahead, enough for him to navigate to the cavern. As he reached it, someone was walking towards him with a flashlight.

  ‘Jonah?’ It was Sly. She seemed a little groggy. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, but something occurred to him. ‘We should check the door.’

  He turned back and down the tunnel and got to the main entryway, Sly close behind him. The door was closed, the lever latches still in place, but something about it didn’t sit well with him. He stared at the latches. He’d been the one who had locked the door, and he was certain he’d pulled the levers fully into position. Now, they weren’t quite pulled all the way. Secure, yes, but . . .

  He put a finger on the locking edge of the lever, where it crossed the narrow gap at the edge of the door. A sudden image came to him, of a blade coming through that gap and lifting, shoving the lock out of place. He reached to the lever and put it into its fully locked position.

  ‘What?’ said Sly. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Jonah leaned forward, putting his eye to the crack at the edge of the door, closer, closer . . .

  He had that same sense of movement again and backed away. He fetched the chair from beside the radio and brought it out, lodging the headrest tight under the door lever.

  ‘I think something might have tried to open the door,’ he said. Was he imagining things? Maybe someone else had adjusted the levers after him, that was all . . .