by Darst, Matt
Death and cornfields.
They shoot up I65, stopping short of Indianapolis.
Gerome has learned to stay out of the cities. From there it is straight east toward the setting sun, towards Champaign-Urbana, the home of the University of Illinois and what was once the Fighting Illini.
One day, Gerome thinks, he will head further still, to the real West. He wants to see the Pacific again before he dies. Maybe in just a few years, once Van has served and is able to accompany him. He dreams of camping on the Utah plains, in Yellowstone National Park, and on the beaches of California.
He fantasizes about a father and son finally sharing quality time together.
This is Gerome’s first time venturing north beyond Evansville, Indiana, in all the years he’s been leading excursions, twelve in all.
Twelve years? Has it been that long? He’s almost forgotten who he is, and how it all began…
Medieval.
That’s the only way to explain conditions in the first years of the New Order. Gerome and his family lived in a hamlet southwest of Louisville, a farm on the banks of the Ohio River.
With the collapse of, basically, everything, people drew together by the need to share resources. Settlements arose near mills, mines, and farms.
Farming. It’s a far cry from what Gerome does now. It’s a far cry from what he used to do twenty years ago: information technology at Humana, specifically WAN and LAN support.
The transition from geek to farmhand was difficult. He wasn’t used to physical labor. He was soft in the middle…too many Krispy Kremes. “Cuddle pudge,” his wife, Bethany (nee Allen), used to say on those nights before the plague as they snuggled before a Star Trek movie on the flat screen, their son Van fast asleep in his crib.
Thank God for Bethany and her family. Without the Allens and their farm, he and Van would have been lost at the beginning.
Conditions for farming were less than opportune. Where they could, the Allens and others relied on existing infrastructure. But the worsening winters—a legacy of global warming (and the politicians called it a myth)—took their toll, hastening the disintegration of roads and bridges. The expansion and contraction of water turning to and from ice excavated giant potholes, some large enough to swallow a compact, and splintered wooden planks.
Summers were no better. The intense heat and droughts withered crops and left the fields barren. The survivors borrowed a page from the Aztecs, building vast systems of canals linked to the river. For two years Gerome wielded a shovel instead of a laptop.
Little by little the canals brought water to the fields. Little by little the crops recovered as the river’s fingers stroked areas where rain would not. Little by little Gerome’s body became lean, shedding flab as his nearly atrophied muscles flexed.
Better times, full of light, seemed ahead, but portents of hard luck lurked in the shadows.
As food became abundant, so did disease.
It started innocently enough.
Settlers used the canals for unintended purposes, like bathing or washing their clothes. Eventually the canals became a reservoir for trash, waste of all types: vegetable, animal, and human.
The river was the lifeblood of the struggling church-state…at least, that is, at the beginning of the New Order. But in year six, the Ohio River quietly went bad like some frozen dinner that’s lived past its expiration date. There was no outward sign that the river had turned poisonous. The river didn’t froth and boil like some witch’s brew. It didn’t smoke or catch fire. There were no outward signs at all…until the people started dying.
First came malaria, literally “bad air” in Latin, a term coined from the smell of stagnant water that accompanied the disease and the swarms of mosquitoes upon which it rode. It decimated but was contained. Defeating malaria proved fairly simple: avoid going out at dusk, keep windows closed, sleep under netting, etc. Worse than malaria was what came next: vibrio cholerae.
Cholera is difficult to hold at bay without water filtration or treatment systems. Because everyone has to drink water, and the river, the main source, the only source for most, was infected with the cholera bacterium.
Vibrio cholerae causes exhaustive diarrhea. It’s like the stomach flu…times 1,000. Untreated, cholera leads to death more quickly than any other illness known. Bethany Gerome bore witness to this.
Roger Gerome would usually leave to work the fields early while it was still dark, especially in the summer months. Bethany would follow, Van in tow. She liked seeing Roger off. He would always kiss her and pat Van’s head as they approached the bridge that served as the gateway to the farm. Then Bethany and Van would drink deeply from the channel while the water was still cool. She would then return to their home and work the farm with her mother until Roger came home.
One morning, her routine changed slightly. She kissed her husband and saw him off and drank from the channel. That morning, she could not convince Van to drink, too. He just wasn’t thirsty.
Sixty minutes later Bethany was bent over with horrible cramps. She soiled herself as she fled to the bathroom. Her stool was liquid, changing from brown to pale, something doctors call “rice water.” Her blood pressure dropped to hypotensive levels, and she passed out on the bathroom floor.
When she failed to show to feed the hogs, Bethany’s mother went searching for her. Instead, she found a crying Van, rocking himself, alone in the family room.
“Mommy’s sick,” he bawled.
Calls for Bethany went unanswered, as did knocks on the bathroom door. Bethany’s father knocked the door in. They found Bethany unresponsive, in shock, her pulse rapid and her nose bleeding. They instantly sent for Roger.
There was no time to call for Doctor Bosco. He was two counties away. It wouldn’t have mattered. He would have diagnosed her illness, but he couldn’t have treated her. He didn’t have Tetracycline or Erythromycin to prescribe. All he could have done is care for her symptoms.
Bethany never woke. She succumbed to the illness the next day. Gerome could not bear to complete the preparations. The settlers took it upon themselves to remove her head for him.
Within a week, half the settlers were suffering. The waterways and the fish were loaded with bacteria. Although few germs survive the acid of the stomach, it doesn’t take many to kill the host by attaching to the wall of the small intestine where they start to produce their toxins.
Rains finally broke the draught, washing the disease down stream, and saving the fledgling theocracy. But the church recognized the risks disease posed to their control. So it created an academy, taught by people like Heston, for the purpose of training medical personnel. Their job was not to research or develop new medicines or practices, but to exercise those already known, and approved, by the church.
The church took another step. It asked for emissaries—missionaries and explorers—for the express purpose of locating essentials, like medicines and fuel, in the wilderness. There were just eight volunteers. Each was given a team and allowed to pick twenty persons from a pool of prisoners, conscripts, and non-citizens. Roger was one of the eight.
All eight had different reasons for volunteering. Some volunteered because they had nothing left. Some volunteered for the power. But not Roger. He volunteered out of love.
Roger Gerome vowed never to let another epidemic infect a loved one. He left to find medicine. He left to secure Van’s future.
But he stays in the wilds for another reason. He stays because he misses the world he once knew. He stays because he can’t stand the regime. Staying in the forbidden zone is the only way for him to maintain some form of freedom.
Gerome knew the wilderness was his destiny the very day he returned from his first mission. From a hundred miles out, he saw the smoke, great pillars of it, turning the sky charcoal grey. As his team approached Louisville and the iron viaduct on I65 spanning the Ohio River, once a welcoming gateway turned into a drawbridge, ash fell on his face.
Oh my God, he thought in horror,
the town is burning.
He was wrong. The town was not burning. Books were burning. Hundreds of thousands of books collected from every corner of the church state. Pastor Statten was burning books, eradicating knowledge, and eliminating individual thought.
Gerome felt for the hollow of his back where he kept a copy of Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, a faithful companion during the last days of his journey. He pushed it deep into his waistband, hiding it from sight.
No, the town was not burning. The home he knew was burning.
At the start, there were eight volunteers selected to lead. They met their ends through mutiny, insanity, and the walking dead; inner and outer monsters took them all.
All but one.
Today, Roger Gerome is the last of their rank.
Gerome finds it odd that his work, the very work that frees him, actually strengthens the church’s stranglehold. It is a incongruity that he has yet to work out.
Chapter Twelve: Escape
Peter falls fifteen feet and lands on the service walk, just inches from the electrified third rail. He rolls away from it, and certain death, in a panic. Above him, dark figures enter the car. Riders stop moaning and begin to shriek.
He tries to blink the pain away and starts to inch forward on his elbows and knees, squeezing underneath the wreckage of the engineer’s car. He feels the heat of the flames lapping at his back. The fire illuminates the walls of the subterranean tunnel, but he focuses beyond that, into the darkness where he will escape.
Then he feels the grip on his shoe, strong like an eagle’s talon, catching him just as he clears the hulking knot of burning metal.
The creature approached silently. Shambling and scuttling, it made little more noise than the raking of dry leaves, its advance masked by the crackle and snap of the blaze.
At first Peter thinks he’s snagged on a bit of debris. But when he shakes he realizes in horror that his foot will not loose. He flips on his back and sees this monster—and it is a monster, an aberration, for God would surely have mercy on a someone so wickedly torn, so treacherously scarred—and unleashes a furious kick directly into its face.
The ghoul’s nose goes with a crunch, its eyes crossing, but just momentarily. It does not retreat. Instead, it speeds its pursuit.
Peter panics, pushes away from the thing, walking crablike. But it is quicker, unaware of the risk and pain, and it grabs hold again, this time of Peter’s pants leg, its teeth grating.
Peter lashes out again, dislodging the monster’s hold. He looks about for a weapon, anything he can use to attack, to fight. He looks to the right, then above, then to the left…
The third rail. It is just below him, below the service way, on the tracks.
He whirls to his belly, using all his strength to jettison from the causeway to the tracks beneath. The thing chases, sensing its prey is cornered in the depths of the pit. It plunges after him.
But the monster is not cognizant of the third rail. It falls upon it.
Blue energy courses through its body, making it shudder grotesquely. It’s just like the movies, Peter thinks, just like in the Lost Boys when a vampire is electrocuted by a sound system. “Death by stereo,” one of the Frogs had said. But then the episode steers away from script, and Peter notices details absent from film. An electric arc shoots from the creature’s head, feeling its way spasmodically, searching for a ground. The creature’s hair catches fire.
Peter scoots away, starts to run, into the darkness. He does not see—and cares not see—the monster’s eyes explode.
He sprints, his breath laboring hard, as he moves south. He considers trying a maintenance stairwell, deciding not to. He wants to get as far as he can from the Hell behind him. He makes his way deeper into the system, passing under the Chicago River, the Chicago Theater, and Macy’s—until he sees the light of the Randolph Street station.
He reaches the platform, shocked to find it abandoned. There isn’t a soul around. They’ve evacuated the tube.
Peter knows the pedway like the wrinkles and veins on the back of his hand. But the pedway, a system of tunnels connecting restaurants, shops, businesses, and government offices, is empty.
It is dead.
The fluorescent lights cast a yellow-green glow. It makes him that much more nauseous. Still, he chooses to stay below ground, and he strikes out for City Hall.
Soon he is underneath the Daley Plaza, the Starbuck’s and the court information desks vacant. He can hear his own footsteps falling thunderously on the linoleum, echoing throughout the emptiness. He slows, quieting his progress. He almost cries out, almost calls, “Hello? Is there anyone here? Can anyone hear me?”
Then a rattle, somewhere in front of him to the right.
Peter considers stopping. Should he turn back, head toward street level? He reasons it will cost him valuable seconds. Instead he moves quickly to the information booth, where long lines used to form and questions were asked about speeding violations and small claims, and divorce proceedings, and things that will never matter again.
He gently unhooks a red velvet rope from a stanchion. He picks up the copper post. It is heavy at the base. He flips it, holds it with both hands like a club, and goes forward.
The rattle again, but closer. He’s nearing it. Then he sees movement.
A bank of phone booths is built into the wall. One of the doors, hinged in the middle, bounces slightly, creating the clatter. Someone is shifting inside it, perhaps someone needing help.
Peter moves quickly to the door. He places the stanchion in his left hand, moving his right to pull the door open. He jerks his hand back suddenly, disgusted, at the realization of what’s before him.
There are two people in the booth. One is dead. The other is dead, yet alive, too. She’s a ghoul, kneeling before the former, her back to Peter, chewing.
Peter drops the stanchion as he shifts to run. It hits the floor with a piercing clang.
The ghoul twists forcefully, sees Peter, and tries to push its way out of the booth.
To Peter’s horror, the door starts to slide open.
It opens an inch…then another.
Peter gropes for the post, panicked.
But then…a break: the decedent’s leg slides, foot and knee now buttressing the doors. The thing cannot open the door further, and it shakes the frame furiously. It gropes at Peter through the gap.
Yes, a very lucky break.
Peter darts toward City Hall.
**
Almost a thousand miles away, Warden Wayne Shepherd’s skull fractures bit by bit. As his braincase bounces off the cement floor of Cell Block B, his mind struggles to come to grips with the events leading to the moment of his impending death.
Shepherd had dealt with prison riots before, and they were as noisy and predictable as the comings and goings of July cicadas.
Uprisings always start the same, the dirty bugs working their way out of the filth of their behavioral sink. The jailhouse lawyers emerge first, preaching about the food, the beatings, the rapes. Buttressed by the insects below them, they shed their fear of the guards like an old skin. They make a lot of noise, beating their tymbals and demanding the attention of the warden or the state board of corrections.
Ignore it as you may, some days the racket gets pretty bad. Some days the noise is loud enough that a good man can barely pray for patience. And some days, it’s bad enough that God can’t hear that prayer.
Those are the days when Shepherd would lose his cool, crushing exoskeletons under his jackboot. He’d add shifts, bringing on guards from the neighboring county. Then he’d order body bags. His guards would make a few examples of the troublemakers, sending one or two to the hospital, or maybe the morgue. Then the bugs would go silent like some great, stinking die-off. Peace would be his again, at least until the next cycle.
Yes, the raucous lifecycle of these insects was always the same…except this time. This time things were different.
There were no requests for reform
, no complaints. There were no acts of disobedience. There was just a level of escalating panic and violence, starting with some of the Bloods being attacked, bitten, specifically, in the showers. Shepherd blew it off, true to plan, reasoning it was just some kinky fad.
Within a day, though, all out warfare had broken out in the yard. The instigators were obviously hopped up on something, chewing on and tearing at the other inmates. It took the guards several rounds to bring some these crackheads down. Messy fucking business, too, guts and brains and paperwork everywhere.
But the locusts didn’t crawl back into their holes. Even Creedy and Chili One Nut, generally smart jailbirds who kept to themselves, raised a ruckus, screaming wide-eyed about the devil and demanding release.
Events went from bad to worse. The guards got jittery. Some of them stopped showing for their shifts. The county couldn’t lend him staff. Neither could the National Guard. They were faced with shortages of their own. Everyone was calling in sick.
Shepherd was forced to operate with a skeleton crew. Short-staffed, he ended visiting hours and began sleeping nights in his office. Frustrated friends and family members congregated outside the prison walls.
The prison break came at dawn just three days before. The guards, waiting to be spelled by a morning shift that was long overdue, were exhausted. They were easily overrun. The lucky ones had their throats cut straightaway. Some weren’t so lucky. They were carried off into the bowels of the beast, turned into human pin cushions. The prisoners took their keys and the guns and used them to get more keys and guns. They passed through the checkpoints unabated. Not a single alarm sounded.
When Shepherd woke that morning, he immediately knew something was wrong. He checked the video monitors and stared in disbelief. The prisoners were running rampant. They were destroying the facility, fighting each other, beating the guards.