Dead Things

by Darst, Matt

  Burt finally strikes a nerve.

  “Don’t you dare talk about my father,” Van growls. He’s up, chest puffed out. His father is Roger Gerome. He’s a hero. He risks his life every day so that insignificant people like Burt can live. Who does Burt think leads the way into the wilderness, locating medicines, supplies, technologies, fuel, and even survivors? Who does he think braved the bay sharks and discovered the colony on South Padre, as well as other islands, spared from the chaos on the mainland? “Fuck you! You should be reading comic books about real heroes. Like my dad!”

  Anne calls for help.

  Burt goes for Van. “You spoiled little—”

  He doesn’t finish his sentence. As he takes a stride towards Van, he feels an explosion in his stomach. He drops to his knees, gasping, to find Wright standing above him.

  Van is emboldened by Wright’s intervention. “Yeah, take that, you—”

  Wright, still facing Burt, drops low and delivers a blow to Van with her elbow. He goes down hard, holding his groin with a groan reminiscent of a falling tree.

  “You want a fight?” Wright hisses. “I’ll give you psychos a fight. Don’t you remember where we are?”

  “He started it,” Van groans, clutching his balls.

  Burt says, “You little—”

  “What was that?” Anne asks, her eyes wild.

  They all heard it. A sound not so distant. A sound from the bluff above them. A sound just above the whisper of the wind.

  Ian watches the horizon. It glimmers, backlit by the high and ample moon. Nothing but the profile of trees, their leafless branches groping like a witch’s skeletal fingers across the night sky.

  Ian exhales heavily, a freeing release. Nothing but the contours of trees. He thinks they are safe…until the creatures shamble out like apparitions from the shadow forest’s columns.

  They must flee again.

  “I thought you said you lost them!” Van yells at Ian as they dash off.

  Ian thought he had, yet it is Wright who answers for him. “No,” she defends. They arrived too quickly to have followed Ian. “They followed us.”

  She tells Van to move.

  The horrible moans are lost within a few hours, but their echoes resonate in Wright’s head.

  She pushes on.

  They find their way to the highway once more. The moon is low, and darkness once again masks their trail. Yet it hides their path forward, as well. Near daybreak, they slow to a walk. They are exhausted. As they lean on their knees, they discover they have stumbled into an immense clearing.

  A giant cement structure stands before them, guarded by four turrets. Twenty-foot-high fencing and razor wire—and dozens of monsters—stand between them and the building.

  It is a prison.

  Wright sees someone on the ramparts, but she does not call for his attention. He already sees her, and he is already signaling to someone outside her view.

  She knows they’re exhausted, knows they’re running on fumes. But they need to make their way to the gate, and they need to do it now.

  Wright leads them single file. They start off at a brisk walk, but the creatures key on them promptly. The monsters leave the fence’s perimeter, setting a beeline for them. The protagonists make a dash for the gate.

  Wright draws her firearm. She waits for the monsters to get close. She shoots when the first gets too near their flank. The thing takes a scalping shot to the top of its head. Anne screams, pulling Van close, as the dead thing falls. Its legs go out from underneath it. It writhes, but not in agony. Its motor cortex has been destroyed, and it no longer has control of its limbs.

  The second stands directly in her way. Wright comes straight at it and fast, almost too fast. As her heart rate increases, her mind starts limiting the range and amount of information it can process. Her senses narrow. Her world slows. The sound dies down around her. Her vision goes dark at the sides.

  Everything becomes crystal clear.

  It takes her three shots to bring this monstrosity down. She sees each discharge: the bullet to the shoulder, the second to the cheek, the third striking the spinal cord just below the skull. It falls forward, its mandibles working furiously. She catches it at the chest with a forearm, just avoiding its broken teeth—sharp like a vampire’s—and shoves it away fiercely.

  Another approaches from her right, and she puts two rounds into its chest. It slows, but the caliber is too small to drop it. It lunges at Burt, the last in line, and he avoids it with a shrill sob.

  They are thirty feet from the gate when it opens. Four men in riot gear emerge, shotguns extended. Police officers, Wright thinks.

  They signal them to enter and fan out. They fire at the creatures. Their weapons are devastating. Cartridges explode and go wide, spinning the things by the shoulder, mowing them down at the knees, tearing their heads from their torsos.

  The group collapses in a pile in the courtyard, shaking and quivering, withered by starvation and fatigue. They hold each other, weeping as the gate closes behind them.

  They are safe.

  Chapter Twenty: History Lesson

  Their rescuers are not police officers. They are prisoners, and they feed Wright and her team from the bounty of their garden. There are tomatoes, carrots, beans, and corn. And there’s more: chicken!

  The survivors gorge themselves, or at least attempt to, each realizing in turn that their stomachs have shriveled, deprived of true sustenance for so long.

  Afterward, they are shown to cells, rooms where they can sleep. And they do, long and hard.

  When they awake, there is a fresh change of clothes for each, prisoner garb to wear while their clothes are washed. They are split up, the women shown one shower, the men another.

  Once rested and bathed, they are asked to join the residents—they prefer to be called residents rather than inmates—in the gymnasium.

  Wright notices there isn’t a single person dressed in a guard’s uniform. No police. Maybe they are wearing prison clothes too? Or maybe prisoners saved them?

  Yes, the guards had indeed cut and run at the outset of the epidemic.

  But the residents have many questions, too. There’s nearly twenty years of history that has yet to be catalogued.

  Wright takes it upon herself to detail a lost past.

  The condition spread far and wide, touching every town in every county in every state in every nation of every continent with its dark and sickly finger.

  “Chicago?” someone asks her.

  “Gone,” Wright replies. Places like Chicago witnessed the worst of the plague’s ravages. Unlike southern towns, cities in the north had largely illegalized not just the mere possession but also the ownership of firearms. Only the police carried handguns. But Chicago’s police force of 13,000 could do little more than witness the carnage. Within two weeks of the plague’s emergence, the city was dead. Its great towers, its renowned museums, and its magnificent mile of shops were nothing more than catacombs for millions of ghouls.

  The federal government, obviously, failed. It should not come as a surprise. After all, this is the same government that couldn’t stop a plane from hitting a tower, let alone two; couldn’t find a single terrorist in the middle east in an area no bigger than New Jersey; couldn’t determine whether an impoverished country had weapons of mass destruction; couldn’t prevent the financial collapse of the greatest economy in the world; and couldn’t do anything, really, that governments are supposed to do.

  That’s what happens when leaders are chosen less for their intelligence and more for whether they’ll have a couple of beers (and maybe a shot of whiskey or two) with some good ol’ boys down at the local tap.

  How odd then that these good ol’ boys, the very people who ensured federal failure and the deaths of 250 million through the ignorance of their votes, ultimately became the salvation of humanity. How odd that their conviction in an inalienable right to hunt with AK-47s, in a definition of marriage limited to a single man and woman, an
d in a single absolute Christ would turn the tide and ensure the continuation of the human species.

  The tide turned in the Bible belt. It only makes sense. The south had everything in its favor. The residents were able to defend themselves (it is a land where guns outnumber people); steadily repopulate (it is a land where children marry and beget more children); fortify and expand their boundaries by ten or more miles each year (it is a land that exists to export God’s word); and begin a new civilization.

  But Wright suspects they had something else, something she will keep to herself for now: an evolutionary advantage.

  The human body has evolved a magnificent defensive array, an immune system built over millions of years. Natural selection—mutation, cellular diversification, and evolution—allowed the forebears to humanity to fight viruses, bacteria, and parasites in succession. Yet, as highly refined as the human body is, it cannot fight all infections. Some bugs are too fast. Others can go under cover. And sometimes the human immune system overreacts, using such force that it causes collateral damage, destroying the very cells it is assigned to protect. Avoidance, in the end, is the most effective method of controlling diseases.

  Behavior plays a significant component in avoiding illness in all animals. Creatures big and small are driven by instinct to shun others who show signs of illness. Humans, though, can go it one better. Humans not only know to avoid others who are sick, but to steer clear of those who might be sick.

  But here, too, the immuno-response can be excessive, triggered by a belief that people who are somehow different harbor diseases. The response can be so strong that it supplants all reason. Here, racism can wear the mask of patriotism. The Nazis linked the Jews to leprosy, typhus, cholera, and dysentery. Neo-Cons, the “new” breed of conservative, blamed the swine flu epidemic of 2009 on Mexican immigrants.

  But this fear of others, Wright expects, helped the Bible belt. Their suspicions of outsiders served them well, limiting their exposure to strangers and the disease that might come with them. Xenophobia, strangely enough, may have helped save the human race.

  As the United States fell away, in its vacuum rose a federation; not a federation of states, but a federation of churches. Christian leaders assumed the mantle of power, spreading the gospel that the plague was the harbinger of the final days of man. The holy compact grew to stretch across the middle south.

  The church assumed authority of law enforcement and the judiciary. What was left of the city and state tribunals did not contest the move. How could they? So few of them remained intact at the beginning of the New Order. They needed the church.

  Commerce—a barter system at first, but commerce still—grew steadily, subsidized by in part by scouting parties to the wild, scouting parties led by Roger Gerome. Employment comes easily to those who are citizens. The price for citizenship is conscription. Four years of border duty, or two years in Gerome’s service, will buy someone a substitute for the American dream. Most opt for border duty.

  Students are now taught a mixture of hard academics and fundamentalism, constantly reminded of God’s ability to punish and destroy any modern day Sodom and Gomorra. The students are drilled, just like their elders serving in the armed forces, to combat and survive incursions. Although fewer and farther between, their tales still instill terror.

  Wright stops. “Are there questions?” She expects a flood from this group of thirty, but there is only one hand raised. Wright nods. “Yes?”

  “My name is Connor. I’m, I guess, what you might call the leader here.”

  “Hi, Connor. Thank you for your hospitality.”

  “Oh, yes. So, what can you tell us about it—I think you called it a condition?”

  Funny, Wright thinks. They want answers just as I do. But she must tread carefully. She’s aware that the chaplain and a group of prisoners near him are shifting in their seats uncomfortably. “We’ll never know for sure,” she says. “There is no government-sponsored work on this, although there is a rumor in certain circles that a group of scientists is holed up in a missile silo working on this. But it is only a rumor.”

  “Is it a virus, like the cold?” Connor asks.

  There’s grumbling, then someone near the chaplain calls, “Heresy!”

  The more things change the more they stay the same, Wright reflects.

  A man stands, pushing his chair aside. “What we are witnessing is a perversion of the transubstantiation—the symbolic act of eating the body of Christ, the bread, and drinking of his blood, the wine. It is God’s revenge. Plain and simple.” He is a balding, grey little creature. He is a murderer.

  Ian regards him, thinking, Gollum. God’s will? He’s heard this all before.

  “Mr. Ridge,” Connor says, “that’s enough.” Then he says something that sends a chill up Ian’s spine. “I want to remind everyone this party is under my protection. They are not to be harmed. Should any hurt come to them, I will personally see to it that you hang from the southeast turret. I’ll push you from the gallows myself. Understood?”

  He barely has control, if he has any at all, Ian thinks.

  There is no response from the residents. A mountain of a man rises, and Ian thinks Connor is going to be challenged. Instead, the man says, “Connor asked you question. Do you understand?”

  The room nods in unison, even Van. All nod, except Gollum.

  Gollum stomps off, the chaplain and a handful of others following him from the room.

  “Thank you, Mr. Creedy,” Connor says, then to Wright, “My apologies for Ira’s outburst. Please continue.”

  Wright decides she has nothing left to say. It’s best that way.

  They retreat to their cells.

  **

  “Are you awake?” It comes in a whisper, soft, but intense.

  Wright opens her eyes, hand at her firearm. Creedy kneels at the side of her bunk. “Can I talk to you a moment?” he says.

  “What is it?” Wright asks.

  “Not here,” Creedy replies, nodding toward Ian’s cell across the corridor. “Alone.”

  She studies Creedy, then nods her assent.

  “This way,” Creedy says, exiting the cell. “Follow me.”

  The springs groan gently as Wright shifts her weight from the mattress. She regards Ian through the bars, then moves on. She pursues Creedy down C Block’s narrow passage…completely unaware that Ian has overheard every word.

  Creedy’s hulking frame fills the width of the passage. Despite twenty years of squats, presses, lifts, and curls, Creedy still maintains a gazelle-like grace and fluidity. He moves quickly and silently through the labyrinth until he arrives at a pair of glass doors engraved “Library, Suite 107.”

  “We’re here.” He ushers Wright into the room with a giant hand.

  She brushes by him into the darkness. She feels him follow, hears him flip switches on the wall. The fluorescents flicker, row upon row winking to life.

  They stand before a cavernous room. Row after row of shelves, each brimming with books, span the expanse. Novels, nonfiction, magazines, treatises, journals and other tomes of varying size, color, and subject matter. Wright hasn’t seen anything like this in a long time. She parts her lips to speak—

  “Thirty-thousand, nine-hundred and three,” Creedy says, anticipatorily.

  Wright regards him, stunned.

  He blushes. It goes without saying. He has had a lot of time on his hands.

  “At least I know where our tax dollars were going,” Wright muses.

  “Look, I’ve brought you here for a reason.” He’s nervous. There’s sweat on his lip. It must be good. “Connor and I don’t necessarily agree with the others about the plague, but it’s pretty dangerous for us to talk about it. I’m a big guy, a guy who can defend himself, but no amount of size or strength is going to protect you when someone puts a shiv in your ribs during your sleep, you know?”

  Wright’s eyes are wide.

  “Okay,” he chuckles, “maybe you don’t know. Let me just say
this: I’m not so sure we’re facing Armageddon. I’m not agnostic, but I just don’t think the epidemic is of, well, divine origin.”

  “So,” Wright toys, “you think this is an epidemic?”

  “Don’t you?” he asks, offering a quick smile. “I’m no doctor, so I can’t say this is a pathogen. But I’m pretty sure it is. But we have to view this in broader terms. We need to think more expansively.”

  Her earlier discussion with Burt tugs at Wright’s subconscious again. Here, an opportunity is presented to clear the air a bit and brainstorm. “I’m glad you said that, because I’d like to ask you a question.”

  “Please do. Ask me anything.” Creedy misses being able to have a dialog with someone, especially a woman.

  Wright hesitates, studying Creedy a full second as an internal debate rages. “Okay,” she resolves, “but you have to promise me you won’t tell anyone else.” What she is going to ask is heresy.

  Creedy’s never been one to bend to another’s will, even when it’s been in his best interest to do so. “That, in a nutshell, explains why I’m here. But it also explains why I can’t just accept that this”—he indicates the space around him, beyond the confines of the prison, with upturned palms—“as God’s will. I mean, why would God spare inmates? We’re a bunch of murderers, thieves, rapists, and drug dealers. We’re the original monsters that society hid away and forgot. But God doesn’t forget. And if God was concerned about heresy, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be one of those things outside. So, yeah, I promise not to say a word. Fire away.”

  “Do you have any books about the occult?” she asks. “Specifically, vampires.”