Dead Things
Page 22
The chaplain agrees. He never imagined such a final request, but he is obliged to honor it. He asks them to come forward now. They don’t have much time.
“Wait,” Van says, “wait one second.” He runs to the corner, starts rummaging through his bag. “Aha!” he exclaims. He tugs at something out, beige and navy, and strides to Ian to present it.
It is Ian’s father’s necktie. Van rescued it from the pile of belongings left behind in a tree bow.
Wright takes it, wraps it around Ian’s neck, quickly tying it. She murmurs a rhyme about a rabbit as she does it, going around the tree, through a hole. The tie hangs evenly, ending at the belt buckle at his waist. Perfect on the first try.
The “I do’s” are exchanged quickly. The chaplain does not need to tell Ian he can kiss the bride. They are kissing before he can even pronounce them husband and wife. Van, Anne, and Burt, still stunned, clap enthusiastically.
“Enjoy your meals,” the chaplain says. “The pies are homemade, special. I think you’ll be surprised by them.”
And with that, the prison’s former residents were gone.
Wright and Ian forego their meals. They sit in the corner, holding hands.
I’m giggling, Kari thinks. I’m actually giggling!
“Are you going to eat your desserts?” Van asks.
Neither of them answers.
“Okay, then I’m going to help myself.” He digs in. It’s pumpkin pie, and he is loving it.
In the midst of shoveling in his third piece, Van feels a pain in his jaw. “Fuck!” he exclaims. He spits, the bits of pie landing on the floor. But there’s no splat.
There’s a clink.
It’s a key. No, the key. The key to the cell.
The chaplain may have been a man of God after all.
Chapter Twenty-Three: The End…Well, Almost
They could wait until daylight, but it is best they go now.
The diesel engine drew the revenants from the prison, like witless children following the sounds of an ice cream truck.
In fact, the bus should attract monsters from every home, hotel, church, school, field, pitch, baseball diamond, food court, strip mall, Starbuck’s, Target, tavern, bar, museum, zoo, pet store, hospital, gas station, dealership, fire department and police station—anywhere where people used to live their lives—right up the interstate.
So they need a different plan. Wright decides to cut east, forgoing the highway as a guide.
She watches the tree line as they exit. She won’t look at the wall. She doesn’t dare. She doesn’t want to see Creedy, or what he’s become, hanging from a tether.
But, Ian can’t help but look. Creedy’s no longer living. Still, he’s not quite dead, either. He has turned, and he jerks spastically, bouncing off of the prison wall. Ian can’t help but stare.
In a couple of years, the rope will rot, and Creedy will plummet to the ground. He’ll get up again, even though his limbs will be shattered, and his crooked body will limp about, searching in vain to quench a craving that can never be satiated no matter how he tries.
Ian has a notion as he watches Creedy. Maybe the belief that vampires can fly took flight itself when someone mistook a ghoul’s terrible fall from some lofty precipice for actual flight? Conceivably, but Ian doesn’t want to stick around and recreate history.
**
When the bus breaks down, grinding to a stop less than two hours away, Ira Ridge goes insane. He screams at the driver to fix it. The chaplain says a prayer.
The driver ventures out, returning with a dire conclusion. He thinks the front axel is broken.
Ridge, in a rage, tells him again, “Fix it.” And don’t come back until it’s done.
The driver hesitates. He has doubts: doubts about his diagnosis, doubts about his ability to make the necessary repairs, doubts about this excursion. But he has no doubt that Ridge will kill him if he doesn’t try. Or at least look busy.
So he goes back to something approximating work, whistling to keep himself company and banging away on the undercarriage. So he does not hear the creatures when they crawl under the bus. His screams are muffled by the weight of them as they clamor over him looking for a piece.
Minutes later, there’s a knock on the bus door. Ridge opens it, yelling, “I thought I told you not to come back until—”
Ridge screams as the demons claw their way in. The gunfire only assures that more will come…
…and that this bus will become a coffin.
**
Exhausted, twelve hours of ground beneath and behind them, the party collapses in a heap in the thick grass. They fall like dark dominoes upon each other in the twilight.
Wright uses Ian’s chest as a pillow. He strokes her hair, and she wraps an arm around his waist. But as tired as Ian is, sleep eludes him. He stares into the sky, the constellations above reminding him of the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree.
Suddenly a pinpoint streaks through the sky, drawing a reddish line east to west.
“A shooting star,” says Ian. Not the type of star you wish upon. It’s a “grazer,” a meteor that grazes the atmosphere instead of entering it. He remembers what Anne said about comets and the discord they bring.
In spite of what astrologists believed, scientists tried to quell the mass terror associated with comets and meteors. They tried to dissuade the belief in a death zone, a zone of poisonous gas in the comet’s tail suffocating all planets passing through its wake. If the tail did indeed contain cyanogens, they would be too diluted to hurt Earth’s creatures. But science did not stop farmers from letting their lands go fallow or cultists from taking their own lives. Even popular culture bucked science. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of deadly zones in space, and Hollywood made films about people turning to zombies upon breathing gas from the comet’s train...
If they only knew how wrong, yet how right, they all were.
Wright feels Ian tense beneath her. “It’s probably just another satellite,” she says, reading his thoughts, “or space junk.” Before the New Order, NORAD tracked nearly 900 satellites and 13,000 other items, mostly defunct satellites, booster rocket parts, and fragments of both. Without NASA, a military, or news stations to operate, maintain, or track them, satellites changed orbit or collided with junk, begetting more junk exponentially (a phenomenon known as the Kessler Syndrome) and falling from the sky. This happens all the time.
This brings Ian some comfort. He tries to sleep.
They listen to their own breathing for an hour or more, too tired and too scared to drift into REM sleep. They waver between alertness and slumber, hovering in a semi-consciousness. Their breathing is rhythmic, almost like a song, like row-row-row-your-boat in round, a trance-like incantation.
But Burt stirs. He breaks the rhythmic progression, blurting something utterly odd. “A transvestite,” he says.
Van chuckles groggily, nearly delirious with exhaustion. So that’s how it is with Burt…
“Van, a transvestite!” Burt repeats.
Van rolls over, staring at Burt the face. “Dreaming again?”
Burt meets his gaze straight on. “You said that clowns were the only thing you can become simply by putting on the costume. I’ve got another. Transvestites.”
Van reasons for a moment. If you dress like a transvestite, meaning, if you cross-dress, you become, in essence, a transvestite, at least for the duration you’re dressed like one. Burt’s actually right. Van nods his approval. “Good one, Burt. Now, go back to sleep.”
Burt smiles and drifts off to a world where deceased cannibals don’t exist and heroes, like Brom Sybal, always win.
**
It is two months since the crash.
Van regularly shares point with Ian. He’s getting adept at it. His eyes are always moving, always inspecting his surroundings. He vows never to be surprised again.
Still, Ian thinks, Van can’t seem to keep his mouth shut. Today he’s decided to critique some of the finer points of the English langu
age.
“Do you think,” he asks, “there are Chinese people anymore? I mean, actual living, breathing, Chinese people?”
“I don’t know,” Ian responds flatly. “There were a lot of them, I hear.”
“If there are, I hope we don’t ever meet them.”
And why is that, Van?
“Because English would be too difficult to learn.”
More difficult than Chinese?
“Probably.” Van rationalizes. “We don’t spell words phonetically. If I’m Chinese, I’m thinking a word like ‘ghoul,’ G-H-O-U-L is spelled G-O-O-L, may be even G-U-L. I mean, it’s bullshit that so many combinations of letters can make the same sounds.”
GH can sound like a G or an F.
X can sound like a Z or a CKS.
C can sound like an S or a K.
T can sound like an ED, etcetera.
“We even have silent letters, for crying out loud! Ks, Gs, Ps, Hs, even Ts. Why? Letters don’t want to be quiet!” There’re too many letters, too many blends. “I bet we could cut the alphabet down to twenty letters or fewer if we tried. I bet the people who invented our alphabet made it so hard just to keep foreigners out. You know, making certain words secrets, like a password.”
Ian grunts. He’s not really listening, but that’s not going to stop Van. It never has. It never will.
“And what about the plural form of some words? Why can’t we just add an S to everything? But you’ve got things like deer and fish that don’t get an S. Mostly, wildfowl, some hoofed mammals. Why not ‘gooses’ instead of ‘geese,’ ‘mouses’ instead of ‘mice?’ Or, if we’re going to have special rules, let’s apply them uniformly. If the plural of goose is geese, shouldn’t multiple moose be called meese? And if the plural of mouse is mice, and louse is lice, shouldn’t house be hice? So many rules, so many exceptions. It must drive non-English speakers crazy.”
Ian just grunts. He wishes he was in the back, holding Kari’s hand.
Then he hears something. He puts a hand on Van’s shoulder, halting him. He shushes. “Listen.”
There’s a noise, the sound of fuzz, akin to breaking waves.
Radio static.
And then the undeniable sound of a voice.
There’s someone ahead.
Van and Ian look at each other, their faces mirroring expressions of surprise. But then one of the reflections disappears as Van breaks Ian’s hold and runs ahead.
“Van, no!”
“Hey!” Van shouts. “Hey, we’re here!”
Van gets thirty feet before he feels the thud to his chest. Only then does he hear the gunshot. He touches his heart, raises his fingers to his face.
There’s blood, lots of blood. It stains the fabric of the red polo.
He frowns and looks up, searching for the shooter.
The second bullet hits him in the forehead.
Everything goes black for Van.
Forever.
Ian is first there, Kari a moment behind.
There’s nothing they can do but cry in anguish.
From his roost in a deer stand, just two dozen feet from the protected area, the soldier sees the rush of people to their fallen comrade and realizes his mistake. Ghouls don’t cry.
There are four of them now. The youngest, a woman, strokes the dead man’s face. She buries her head in his chest.
He radios in, both the good and bad news, as a ginger-bearded man starts to berate him from below.
**
Eighteen years after it all started, Peter is a hermit.
The weather turned bitterly cold that November eighteen years back, too cold to continue his trek. Peter needed to find shelter. He needed to hole up.
He blamed global warming for the early freeze. He cursed the government for not taking Al Gore seriously, then he cursed them for the plague.
Peter had studied the Gaia hypothesis in college and believed the Earth to be a complex system, almost like giant watch. When the watch’s gears spin in synchronization, when all elements are in harmony, the time it keeps is precise and would make the Swiss proud. But when a gear spins too fast or too slowly, it can wreak havoc on the system, no matter its size.
Humans were a cog out of time, propelling the Earth to a cataclysm predestined by their decades of misuse of natural resources, pollution, overpopulation, and deforestation. A good watchmaker simply removes the defective gear and replaces it with one that works. And that, Peter assumed, is what Mother Earth had done.
He often wonders about how “they” got here. Global warming could have been the culprit. As the Earth heated, the glaciers thawed. Perhaps they unleashed bacteria encased in ice for millions of years and previously unknown to man. Peter read an article twenty years back or more about a core sampling taken from the Beacon Valley of Antarctica. It had contained dozens of bacteria. When defrosted, the bacteria sprung back to life, creating proteins and reproducing. While they constitute the oldest known life forms to mankind, they also constitute the life forms man knows least about. Scientists sequenced their various genomes, finding that 46% of the strand was unique, unlike anything they had ever seen.
Bacteria transfer genes, a significant factor in evolution. But, maybe, with the melting of the ice caps, genes were transferred across time, visiting a prehistoric pestilence on man.
Peter has lots of time to think about this and other things here in this cabin hidden deep in the woods.
He found this cottage near I-57. Unfortunately, he found the inhabitants, too, and he finished off what the plague had started. He barely survived the winter there, his canine companion his only anchor to sanity. In those short, dark days, days filled alternatively with hunger and the destruction of dozens of demons, Peter resolved that he was alone, likely the last of his kind.
So he spent the next winter there, and the winter after that, and every winter since. Finder’s keepers.
This afternoon, as Peter stokes a warm fire, he is alarmed by the sounds of his dogs barking. “Jack, Molly,” he calls to the descendents of his rescued boxer as he stokes embers in his fireplace. “Take it easy.”
There hasn’t been an incident in almost a year. They grow fewer and farther between, convincing Peter that his isolation is nearly absolute.
It’s probably a raccoon outside the cabin again. Maybe a possum. Still, you can never be too sure.
The barking continues. They scratch at the door trying to get out. “Back,” Peter says to them, and they quiet and clear the door for him.
They are an odd mix, something between a boxer and a wolf, the result of one of Addison’s escapes—yes, the name of his old train station stuck—while in the throes of heat. These dogs are much too precious to be risked. They are the last of Addison’s litter, the ones that chose to stay.
Most of the others ran off with the wolf pack.
They must have liked their chances better in the wild.
He occasionally sees them tracking him as he hunts, making sure he’s still safe. He leaves them a bit of every kill.
But the risk of losing Jack or Molly to the pack is nothing. There’s a bigger risk.
The dead things don’t care what they eat.
So he goes alone. With a baseball bat. A baseball bat is about all it takes nowadays. Sure it requires a lot more patience, but that’s okay. What else has he got but time?
He steps out cautiously, bat cocked. He takes a few strides forward.
He has cleared the trees for forty feet on all sides, and he watches the perimeter for movement.
Well, he thinks, at least I might get some exercise.
There’s a rustling directly in front of him. He readies himself, but then there’s movement to the left. Then from another position, even farther to the left, and then from the right.
Oh my God, he thinks. They’re everywhere.
One directly before him steps into the clearing.
Peter readies his bat. He’s not ready to die. Or worse. Not just yet. “Bring it,” he mutters.
Peter looks at his bat.
This is going to take a lot longer than he thought.
Then the others step out.
They are dressed in similar camouflaged gear, each with a rifle drawn. Just what is going on here?
The one in front flips up his mask. He’s human still, probably around Peter’s age. He offers his hands, palms up, a symbolic gesture that says they mean no harm. He tells the others to lower their weapons.
They immediately comply.
Then he addresses Peter. “Easy, easy.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Roger Gerome,” the man says. “What’s yours?”
**
Roger Gerome’s arrival is always trumpeted as an “event.” Statten and the elders just can’t wait to don their golden robes and glittering crowns.
Gerome’s audience with them goes well, as well as these excuses for formality can go. They are pleased with Roger’s most important discovery: antibiotics, both human antibiotics recovered from Swift Labs and animal antibiotics found at the University of Illinois. They are less pleased about this man Gerome has found.