2136: A Post-Apocalyptic Novel

by Matthew Thrush

  ‘Looks like someone never finished putting these babies back together,’ Parker said. He was leaning inside one of the rusted Hondas examining its roof. He walked around to the front and lifted the hood. He buried his head and hands into the engine as he fiddled with the wiring and gadgets.

  I've read a lot of books about quite a few things, but I never got around to understanding how cars worked. I mean, I knew the basics about gasoline and diesel, and that the piston walls required an oil lubricant to keep them from seizing, as well as a coolant to keep the engine from overheating, but I couldn't begin to tell you what was wrong with the engine if the car broke down. Considering I had never ridden in a car, and didn't expect to any time soon, knowing much about their mechanics wasn't really high on my priorities, or anyone's for that matter. And from the looks of it, these cars were gutted for their scrap metal, not for their repair or driving capabilities.

  While Parker was playing around beneath the hoods of the Hondas and the pickup, I investigated the rest of the warehouse. I had hoped there would be more to it, but the warehouse was mostly vacant of anything salvable. Roxx must have cleaned it out when the town moved over to the new location of buildings. Besides the carcasses of the vehicles, there wasn't much else, unless you counted the surplus of spider webs dangling and crisscrossing through the rafters and along the walls. Everything was covered in dust or dirt. I brushed a large web from my face and shook my hand to pry the sticky silver string off of my fingers. I ended up wiping them on my pants. As I made my way further into the interior the warehouse became cluttered and full of boxes and plastic barrel tubs, very similar to the ones that housed the fuel back at Roxx's shop, except these didn't have lids on them. I peered into one of them and found it to be full of gloves. I looked into another and it was stocked high with wires; another with screw bolts, nails, and plastic wires. The more I looked, the more there was. The warehouse was a stockpile of supplies. Why Roxx had so much of it here, I couldn't tell you. They hadn't been touched in quite some time. My fingers came away black when I scooped up some of the nails and let them tumble through my fingertips into the barrel. I ransacked the glove barrel and found a pair that fit me and ACTUALLY had the ends for the fingers. I ripped off my beat-up gloves and tossed them in the barrel with the others. I slid my fingers into their new homes. The leather was rough and gritty, but it felt good. I flexed my fingers into fists to tease the leather. I grabbed a few more pairs I thought would fit me and tossed them in my sack.

  I found a barrel of bottles and took a few of those too. When I stumbled upon the barrels of linens I had hit the jackpot. My sac wasn't big enough to carry everything so I looked around to see if one of these bins might not supply those too. Lo and behold, they did! I tore out the large military duffel bag. I stuffed a few extra into the one and then began filling it with linens from the barrel. Roxx had his very own convenience store here tucked away in perfect camouflage. No one would ever think that this old building housed all these treasures. It was the perfect hideout. Well, the second best only after the underground tunneling system he had showed me a week ago.

  I worked my way through the barrels grabbing anything and everything that could be of use back in town, when I stopped.

  ‘Parker!’ I yelled. ‘Come have a look at this.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the back,’ I said. ‘Walk around all the barrels. You won't believe what I've found.’

  Parker wiped his hands on his pants as he walked back to where I was. I heard his respirator gurgling as he inhaled and exhaled through the filter when he was within arm's length.

  ‘What do you make of this?’ I asked. I pulled out one of the objects in the bin I was bending over and held it out to Parker. His greasy hands took it and held it up to the circular orbs of his mask to have a look.

  His respirator fluttered again. My mouth was hanging open too.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked me. ‘I haven't seen any of these since—’

  ‘Since the war,’ I interjected.

  ‘Precisely.’ He took a few steps closer and reached into the barrel with his own arms. He pulled out another of the small black objects and held it in his other hand.

  ‘Why do you think all of these are here?’ I asked.

  ‘I don't know, but it's not good.’

  He placed them back into the barrel and started checking the remaining plastic cylinders.

  ‘Do any of these have them?’ He got his answer soon enough.

  ‘Blimey!!’ he echoed through his mask. He held up two oval shaped eggs for me to see.

  ‘Grenades?’ I breathed. I ran over and went through the others. ‘There's rifles too and ammo. LOTS of ammo!’

  ‘I haven't seen this much weaponry in one place since I was in Camp Grayling,’ he said.

  ‘What do you think it means?’ I asked. ‘Why would Roxx have all of this here?’

  We both stopped our rummaging and turned.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I whispered.

  He held up his finger to the filter of his mask where his lips would be. I heard a silent click as he snapped one of the ammo magazines into the butt of the pistol and cocked the slide to load a bullet into the chamber. He had done it all so fast I didn't even realize he had taken one of the clips from the bin and popped it into one of the 9mm Glocks. Parker raised the pistol's sights to where the noise had come from. I followed close behind. I dropped the gun I was holding back into its holding container. Guns made me nervous; like I was holding a dead man's hand. Instead, I stayed close to Parker's side as he crept silently towards the back of the warehouse.

  There were blacked-out windows and a door that led to an office. Parker shushed me again with that raised finger as he quietly gripped the handle of the door and squeezed it open. The door squeaked as he led with the gun. He peaked the head of the gun into the dark room before thrusting the door completely open and charging in. His hands swooped back and forth over the entire room with the gun before he lowered it to his side.

  I started gagging the moment I entered.

  ‘What's that smell?’ I gasped.

  Parker flicked on a flashlight and walked around the desk and looked up at me.

  ‘Dead bodies,’ he said.

  WHAT!?

  I scurried over to his location and almost threw up into my mask. My chest was heaving as tried to breathe, my filter rasping noisily.

  ‘How long have they been dead?’ I asked.

  Parker was kneeling beside the three rotting bodies and poking with the gun's face. How was he not affected by the stench? I was nearly dying from the smell just by standing near the door, and he was crouched down hovering inches from them.

  ‘From the level of tissue degeneration and decay, I'd say three years. Give or take. But without the proper tools, I'd just be guessing.’

  ‘Three years! Who killed them?’

  ‘I don't know, but whoever it was, they must have had a good reason.’

  Parker withdrew something from behind his back and used it to examine the bodies further. So it was a knife.

  ‘Where did that noise come from?’ I asked.

  Parker shined his flashlight into the dark of the office.

  ‘There's your mysterious suspect,’ he said. He held the light on the greasy black bodies of the biggest rats I've ever seen. I screamed despite myself.

  ‘They're just rats,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘I hate rats. They're gross.’ I wiped my palms along my thighs as if ridding them of the germs in the air. Parker picked up a pen from the ground and tossed it into the corner. The rats squeaked and scurried off through a crack in the wall.

  I felt my body quiver as they moved.

  The flashlight fell back onto the dead bodies as Parker cut open their jackets with the sharp edge of the foot-long blade and pointed with the tip.

  ‘See these?’ he asked, shining the flashlight over the lifeless bodies. ‘These are the entry wounds. If you lo
ok at the corners you can get an idea of the order they were shot.’ He said. ‘You see how this one's a bit more rotted on the fringes?’

  I managed to take a few steps closer, but that was it.

  ‘Uh huh,’ I said, not wanting to go any closer.

  ‘He was shot here, here, then here.’ He pointed at the hole located just right-center of the sternum, then the lower abdomen, and the neck. He rolled each of them on their side then let them fall back down.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.

  ‘Exit wounds.’ He traced the knife on the other two bodies and said, ‘And these two unlucky souls did not die immediately from the gun shot wounds. They bled to death.’

  ‘Bled to death? How would they not die right away if they were shot?’

  ‘There are several key locations on the body that we call “kill zones”,’ he said.

  ‘Kill zones?’ I asked.

  ‘Vital arteries, organs, and places that if injured will result in instantaneous death or near-immediate termination.’

  Parker maneuvered his crouch to face the two other bodies.

  ‘This one was shot in the stomach, and this one’—he pointed to the second corpse—‘was shot twice in the lungs, just missing the heart. Chances are, he suffocated before he bled to death.’

  ‘How do you know all of this?’

  Parker's face looked like a wraith draped in his black gas mask. The flashlight's florescence cast a grim hue on his features.

  ‘We all have our secrets, Willow,’ he said. ‘You, me, your parents—’

  I heard it too.

  ‘Blackhawks,’ he said, jumping to his feet and sprinting to the front of the warehouse where the door was hanging half open. Parker held out his arm to keep me from skidding off the concrete and into the dusty world as my body crashed into his.

  ‘What are military helicopters doing out here?’

  I could feel Parker's body tense as we saw the tiny black specks in the horizon coming our way.

  ‘We need to get back to town, NOW!’ he ordered, and pushed me out of the warehouse, grabbed the handle of the door, and started dragging it down.

  ‘WAIT!’ I yelled. ‘My bags are in there.’

  ‘Get it later. We have to get out of here PRONTO! Before they see us.’

  The warehouse door slammed shut launching powdered brown dirt into the air. Parker ripped his mask off, and I soon did the same. He looped the chains through the handles and snapped the lock on.

  ‘Let's move!’

  I could hear the swooshing of the Blackhawks building in intensity as their mighty rotor blades cut through the air. The reverberations in the airwaves was electrifying and terrifying all at once as we ran back to town.

  ≈ Chapter 19 ≈

  I wasn't sure why we were running, but I ran anyway.

  Parker dove down the trench feet first and was already climbing frantically onto the other side when I made it to the ravine. I slid down and managed to keep my balance this time and not fall face first into the black mud. I crawled up the other side and met Parker's extended hand. He yanked me the last remaining meters to my feet. We walked as casually as we could back to the center of town just as the first Blackhawk flew overhead. Four more soon followed. I watched as their black underbellies arched towards the sky and circled back.

  I was calm until the Humvees rolled in. All ten of them. Fear is a slippery fellow that slides his hand into your pocket when you're not looking and steals your wallet. It's the icicles hanging from your dreams and hopes when you're waiting for them to shatter. I thought I knew what fear was, but I didn't know anything.

  Fear wasn't government corruption and a failed system. It wasn't living in a world where the sun burned all day and the night stung with its icy fingers, nor was it the halo hovering over the ozone that seeped its radiated pollution like rice through a valve into your pumping lungs. No; fear was none of these. It was black lizards of steel hovering over your head as their sharp blades churned up the dust and puddles of oil into your eyes. It was the thunderous sound as their engines lowered their rubber tires onto the concrete and continued to swoosh their blades. And worse than that, fear is not knowing why they were here until they opened the hatch and poured out their cargo, wrapped in black hoods with plastic ropes tied to their wrists and ankles.

  I didn't know what true fear was until I saw Roxx among the tied up cargo as he was thrust out of the helicopter and landed on his face. His black hood had fallen off and revealed his identity. I felt my heart lurch and I tried to run to him, but Parker grabbed me by the arm and held me back.

  ‘Don't,’ he said.

  ‘But they have Roxx—’

  ‘Don't,’ he repeated.

  I felt the firm squeeze on my arm as Parker's grey eyes glared at me.

  I watched as two of the Pavers grabbed Roxx by the elbows and violently lifted him to his knees. Roxx looked over in my direction and my breath seized. His face was distorted and covered in blood. His left eye was swollen shut and black pus leaked at the cracks. His remaining working eye locked with mine but didn't show any life or recognition.

  ‘Roxx...’ I found myself whispering. ‘It's me, your goddaughter. I'm here.’

  But that eye drifted back down to the ground as the hood went back over his head. I heard him grunt as they yanked him to his feet and pushed him forward along with the other prisoners. The Pavers herded the five hooded bodies towards the center of the Market where the majority of the crowd had congregated.

  I felt a tug on my arm.

  ‘Follow me,’ Parker said, and I obeyed immediately.

  I followed Parker as he weaved in and out of the growing crowd as more people came out of the buildings to see what the commotion was all about. We positioned ourselves near one of the columns of the alehouse and I climbed up onto the porch to try and peer over the bobbing heads in the street.

  The Humvees circled behind the helicopters just as they shot back into the air and flew off in the direction they had come. They quickly became black specks in the horizon until they all but disappeared.

  I saw the familiar lean, muscular frame of the Enoch jump out of one of the Humvees and walk towards the crowd and felt my heart quiver. More Pavers in full battle dress swarmed out of the Humvees like angry bees from a squished beehive protecting their queen. I could feel my pulse in my neck and found it hard to swallow as that knot in my stomach worked its way up my windpipe with each step the Enoch took towards us. The Pavers had their weapons raised waist high and scanned the crowd. The Enoch waved his finger in the air and they dispersed into threes and circled the town. Some climbed up onto the roofs, others took position near the Humvees, while more submerged into the crowd, and behind us. They had us surrounded. Every exit for escape was covered and blocked by a P57-Stun Gun or it's smaller brother, MissUp 488. They glowed blue as the electricity pulsated within the barrel, ready to release and filter into the first unlucky soul that tried to run. At their lowest setting, 50,000 volts, they would cause you to seize. At setting two, the shock waves would turn those convulsions into screams, flip your insides around, and cause internal burns and cell loss. At the maximum setting...yeah, you guessed it—death. Catastrophic failure was imminent. The first thing to go would be the brain. Its electrical neurotransmitters would fire off instantaneously in a chaotic fashion and cause the brain to have one massive seizure. The organs within the body would burst and you'd bleed internally as your lungs filled with dark blood which then oozed from your mouth, eyes, and ears. With the jolt of electricity coursing through your body the heart would continue beating at 250–400 bpm, depending on how strong your heart was, for an additional two minutes even after death before it too would go silent. Sudden cardiac death.

  As your body spent the next five to ten minutes twitching, the organs underneath the flesh would continue to implode and malfunction from the electric residue in the blood stream. Your lifeless corpse would spasm and twirl like a snake whose muscles continue to puls
ate long after its head is severed from its body. The twitching of the muscles and tendons as your body flinches acts as the deterrent to any others who might appose authority and fight back. I had only seen it happen once and it was when I was ten. Some nights I still saw the woman’s face contorting in agony as they shot again and again with the pulses until she stopped fighting. My nostrils still burn from the stench of burnt flesh and charred bone and blood. She had lay there smoking like hot embers for a long time before the heat dissipated enough for us to pick her up and bury her in the ground.

  The metal barrel of a MissUp 488 suddenly appeared beside me. I swung to the other end of the column I was perched up against to use it as a barrier between me and the Paver who had decided to set up perimeter right by me. My heart only quickened its pulse as I tried to breathe.

  The Enoch jumped up on the fountain's concrete lip to elevate himself several feet above the crowd and raised his voice so all could hear.

  ‘It seems there is a thief living among you,’ he said. ‘Have we not shown you mercy in your struggles? Have we not aided you in rebuilding your lives that you may enjoy living once more? We are not the enemy. They are.’ He pointed to the five hooded bodies kneeling at gunpoint by the fountain. ‘These five would have you suffer for their treasonous acts. They steal, lie, and destroy the very thing holding life together. Do you all want to go back to the way things were before?’

  Some people muttered amongst themselves.

  ‘Do you wish you were back in the time when nukes fell from the sky as easily as rain? Such violence, such darkness, such death...’ A spray of spit shot from his mouth as he hissed the words.

  ‘If you desire such things,’ he continued, ‘we can make that happen.’

  Someone in the front yelled, ‘No!’ Soon others were muttering the same proclamation.

  The Enoch raised both hands in the air to calm the crowd.

  ‘Neither do we,’ he said. ‘Do you see these traitors?’

  His eyes narrowed and his face contorted beneath the rage that was boiling up within him. Any semblance of beauty he possessed was washed away with a flick of emotion. He was hideous!