by Norman Dixon
Bobby moaned, cried out, whimpered.
Ecky wiped the cold mop of hair and sweat form the boy’s brow. His lips were blue. He had to get the fire going. The blizzard ruled out any dead wood, and with his hands beyond numb, he didn’t dare to cut any for risk of injury. The Settlement’s medicine could not help them now. Even a simple scratch could be enough to kill. He managed to find several shelves, though, they were coated with vinyl paint and weren’t exactly real wood. The rest of the offices had been pilfered long ago for fuel. Ecky picked through the corpses for rags of clothing and added them to the fire pit. As a last resort he ripped down several ceiling tiles. It wouldn’t be a nice pine-scented fire, and the smoke would carry a toxicity, but it would do.
The flames burned an eerie greenish-blue and bits of burnt plastic floated in the air, but it provided warmth. He couldn’t help but notice how much Bobby looked like a corpse under the light of the fire, like one of them, fighting inside a nightmare, twitching. Ecky felt deeply for the boy, and there were many questions, but they would have to wait. Survival first, everything else . . . after.
Ecky opened his pack and checked their supplies: a moth-eaten bedroll, second set of clothes, two canteens, Bobby’s scoped R700 with thirty rounds. . . Ecky whistled low and silently thanked the grizzled old veteran who had handed him the pack.
“Randy, son of bitch,” Ecky said, moving the clothes aside to reveal a CAR-15 with four loaded clips. He said a prayer for his friend. There was no telling what had been his fate, but he couldn’t dwell on that now. He continued to rummage through the packs: hammer, crowbar, a week’s worth of smoked beef, another week’s worth of MREs, one magnesium bar, M-9 Bayonet Knife, hatchet, twenty five feet of nylon rope, and the Benchmade Auto Stryker that he knew Bobby never parted with. It could be worse. The supplies were a good starting point, and could get them through a small encounter, but soon they’d need ammunition and medical supplies. If they didn’t get lucky pilfering then they’d have to hit the roads and soon. The thought did not sit well with Ecky.
Something clattered in the hall.
Ecky froze, listened, nothing. “Could be wind,” he whispered. He knew better, otherwise he wouldn’t have made it this far into hell in one piece. With decades of practice he had the gear re-stowed, in better order, in seconds. He slapped a magazine into the CAR-15, put the others in his pockets and adjusted the strap. Dropping the packs near the chemical fire, he checked Bobby’s rifle. Without hesitation he tapped the boy’s cheek.
“Time to get up,” he said, hating himself for doing it. “Bobby, get up.”
Bobby snapped to attention. Face distraught, eyes swollen, he fell into the cadence of the moment. He could read the urgency clearly on Ecky’s face. Like a computer, he rearranged the thoughts in his mind, putting the horror of loss under many layers, not forgetting, but moving them far enough away to keep him frosty.
“Here,” Ecky said, handing him the rifle. “Not ideal quarters for that weapon, but stay here, get warm, if anything other than me walks through door . . . you know what to do.”
The rifle looked massive in Bobby’s small hands, though, he handled it with expert skill, taking a position at the back of the room with a clear line of sight on the door. It was most certainly not an ideal position. There was only one way out of the room and the smoke from the fire didn’t help matters.
“I clear out place, and then we figure out course of action." Ecky pinched Bobby’s cheek and slapped him on the shoulder. He had nothing to offer the boy in the consoling department. His knowledge and determination would have to do instead.
He cleared the doorway and moved down the hall, pausing every few steps to listen. The exit-button-pusher stared at him with empty sockets. He wondered how bad things got at the end. Ecky could never end it that way, at least, as long as he was not infected. If the Fection took him he’d end it without a second’s thought. He kept moving.
The hall ended abruptly. To the left, furniture was piled high, along with more filing cabinets, containing bills that would never be paid. The debris completely blocked the door, that Ecky guessed, led to the bells and whistles of the plant. To the right, another long, dark throat of a hall.
Thump . . . thump-thump.
Ecky clicked the flashlight towards the sound. He nearly dropped it. Midway down the hall the body of a plant worker hung from the ceiling by a length of wire. One of its legs had been gnawed off, most of the lower jaw was gone, the eyes were gone, a rat taunted Ecky’s light from the dead man’s shoulder. The wind had picked up, and it whistled down the hall, causing the body to sway. The remaining foot bumped an empty water cooler . . . thump . . . thump-thump.
Beyond the body a set of stairs rose into the darkness. Leaving the rat to its meal Ecky shined the flashlight up the stairs. Bits of dried leaves coated everything, he had to be careful where he stepped. It was clear to him what had transpired on the first floor of the plant. He had seen similar events over the years. The man hanging from the rafter went well before the other men, and most likely didn’t want them to waste the bullet on him. The world had become a hell, each little pocket of death, an epitaph to the lives lost.
Ecky fought with the unwieldy flashlight. It was too big to mount on the carbine, and would make firing the weapon, awkward at best. Once he cleared the place he needed to concoct something to keep his hands free.
The second floor was completely open, with a row of shattered windows on the far wall. The tail end of the blizzard howled, sending gusts of snow into the open area. Rows of server banks were piled against the back wall. Something flapped out of the cone of the flashlight. Ecky snapped to it. Fluttering in the wind was a white sheet. Each blast of winter wind revealed the body it covered. There were at least a dozen more alongside it. Each sheet-covered corpse had a deep crimson stain about the head area. Judging from the exposed body and its lack of blue coveralls Ecky guessed these were the plant’s office workers. No sign of Creeper of activity was present. Ecky left the tomb and double timed it down the stairs. As he hit the last step a single shot disrupted the eerie sounds.
Ecky ran around the hanging corpse and turned down the hall gun raised.
“Clear, I shot us dinner,” Bobby said, waving him to lower his weapon.
“Bobby—”
“I know, but I couldn’t let it get it away. We need food." Bobby held up a fat raccoon by its tail.
Ecky breathed a little easier, but he still wasn’t satisfied with their shelter. They were too exposed, and there was a lot of night left to get through.
While Bobby cleaned and prepped the raccoon Ecky went about setting up a feeble blockade at the door. It wouldn’t really stop anything that wanted in, but it would give them warning, and enough time to fall back to the second floor if need be.
They took shifts throughout the night. Ecky never really sleeping. His stomach turned. He wondered what exactly the raccoon had been eating all this time.
CHAPTER 11
Bobby pretended to wake from sleep as Ecky patted his shoulder. It was his turn for watch duty. Ecky added some broken furniture and paper to fuel the dying fire, and then turned in. The engineer fell asleep the second his eyes closed.
Bobby watched the shadows dance to the musical bellows and howls of the wind. The raccoon had his stomach feeling greasy, and he feared that at any moment he’d throw up. The last thing he needed on top of a shattered existence was dehydration.
What do I do now? He thought. There had been tears, however brief, but that had been the extent of his grieving. A strange numbness dominated him now, even though the gruesome deaths of his brothers played on the big screen of his memory, he did not feel rage, or hate, or pain . . . he felt nothing. Was that because he, like his brothers, was different? He didn’t understand any of it. He only knew that he had been bitten, and yet, he did not turn. A freak. A useless freak. A brother-less freak.
Bobby moved his stiff legs, standing over the fire, breathing the acrid smoke, he warmed his h
ands and tried to let it all out, but the boy forced to become a man too soon didn’t know how, and lacking the traditional familial structure, he’d never know. He checked his rifle, rechecked it, and listened to the strange sounds of the plant.
The night was cold, and a sharp wind ripped through the hallway, stirring leaves, creaking doors, making a ruckus. So unlike the Settlement’s perpetual quiet. Bobby realized then, amid those new sounds, that he was in another world. He had entered the world of stories, of tall tales from grizzly veterans, he had entered the very pages of history. It was then that numbness left him and the fear settled in. He knew, had it drilled into him, what lurked beyond the walls. And it wasn’t the Creepers that scared him . . . it was the people.
There were those, he remembered from an eleventh winter lesson, that chose to abandon all hope, those that treated human and Creeper with equal malice. They killed to get what they wanted and needed, savages, pillagers of the just, Pastor Craven had called them. As Bobby warmed his hands over the fire he recalled the story of the Snowman.
The Snowman had been a doctor before the Fection hit, and he wasn’t one of those profiteering doctors. He was a genuine human being, out to help the sick, the poor, and he continued along this course of action well after the world collapsed. The Snowman became a legend, a traveling executor of the twice-dead, and a savior of the ill. He traveled the country on horseback like some tale from the old west come to life, dispensing justice and medicine. He wanted no part in letting the world slip back into the dark ages. But fate is a cruel thing indeed.
As the legend goes . . . the Snowman was somewhere on the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Wary of the horde of undead swarming the city, the Snowman was observing from afar when he caught sight of the woman. She was dirty, ragged clothes, scabby knees, wild hair and terrified eyes. She looked like so many of the refugees he’d encountered along the derelict highways across America, barely hanging on. She was surrounded by several Creepers, and all she had to defend herself was her wits, and piece of rotted tree trunk. She began to tire from her efforts of self preservation.
The Snowman, ever the purveyor of good in such dark times, intervened. On horseback he came in, rifle firing, the newly dead becoming eternally dead, but he should have kept his attention on the woman and the shadows, instead of the obvious threat of the undead.
Several armed men stepped out from their hiding places and the woman produced a small handgun from under her shirt. Their trap worked to perfection and all that was left of the Snowman was legend, stories told to teach a lesson, to create a warning, a parable to help shape decisions, if in fact, he existed at all.
Ecky snored loudly, snapping Bobby out of the memory. Exhaustion was a powerful thing, for even surrounded by danger, such as they were, surrounded by the unsure, the blind circumstances that had yet to greet them; sound sleep was easily found. The stress of high tension did not take time outs, it did not take breaks to catch its breath, it hammered the body into submission, and either you listened to it, and grabbed sleep when you were able, or you’d eventually succumb to it . . . with death close behind.
Bobby watched the flames dance and die as the embers struggled to retain the last of their warmth. With stiff fingers he added a plastic-coated shelf to the lame heat source. Thick black smoke hung in the air, bits of burnt plastic sailing on the streams like miniature ships on dark seas. The smell was wrong, sticky, acrid, and it made the back of his throat itch, his eyes water, and his nostrils flare.
Bobby moved to the doorway and leaned into the dark and listened. The world was quiet and loud at the same time. Sure there were sounds, trees swaying in the post-storm breeze, an owl hooted, stalking prey, dead leaves rustled the black halls, something thumped upstairs. Bobby waited, craned his neck, but nothing followed the thump save for that same brilliantly loud silence. It was nothing like the routine sounds of the Settlement that had dominated his life for years. It was scary, like the world, and future that now awaited him.
He quietly removed his knife from the rucksack. Testing its weight, he held it up to the light of the fire. The black metal blade reflected no light. Bobby sat cross-legged just inside the doorframe. He wiped away years of dirt and grit to reveal the cracked, black linoleum. With the tip of the knife he began to carve the names of his brothers, followed by the winters they had lived.
“Remembering them in mind and heart is enough. Dull blade make tool useless, useless tool, one less life saver on hand.”
“You should be sleeping.”
“I got hour, maybe two, enough for now. We have to move." Ecky slid a bag of brittle tobacco from his pocket, and a sheet of yellow ledger paper marked with a grocery list that never made it home. He rolled a cigarette and smoked in silence for a moment. “At first light we move. Have to put distance between here and there.”
“Where do we go? What about Randy?” Bobby slumped forward.
“We find shelter for winter. We wait it out and meet Randy in spring at Baylor’s pass. If we make it that long. This is not Settlement . . . this is,” Ecky eyed Bobby with a sharp scowl and continued, “this is real world now.”
“I’m not a child. I know.”
“You have knowledge of what to expect, yes. More than any pre-war child would’ve ever known, but what you know, and what you’ve lived, two different things. Not a training exercise, or target practice, not farms, or working technology, or order. This, Bobby, is chaos, is survival, is brutal,” Ecky finished with a shiver.
“The Snowman.”
“Worse. Think about world as you’ve been taught. It’s been more than decade since last signs of civilization existed. Over a decade . . . think about that, Bobby. Think about how lucky you are.”
Bobby wanted to lash out at the words, but looking into those gentle, weary eyes he realized those words were not meant as a slight. They were words of wisdom from a man, who had only a short time ago, gave up everything so that he could survive. The engineer’s blue-gray eyes carried the look of love with a seriousness for the situation that demanded a response.
“There are those that were less fortunate than me—”
“—No! Don’t think of sermon, Bobby, think of what matters.”
“But God.”
“God is not in bullets, in trigger, in aim. God is not around when stomach growls with hunger and throat is parched dry. No, survival, and only two ways to survive, Bobby. Those with enough power to survive by strength, and those with enough knowledge to survive on what the world presents them. You have education. You have knowledge. You have a chance. But those raised in wilds, on outside, without semblance of order, survive on sheer strength. They survive by taking.”
“But we’re smarter.”
“Maybe with making things work in our favor, but they will not make the moral choice . . . we might, when all is said and done. We might think like orderly humans, they will not. Could you kill someone you perceived as innocent, Bobby, if need be? Could you commit murder?" Ecky was so caught in the moment he couldn’t stop the words.
“I already have . . . if you want to call it that,” Bobby said in a whisper.
“That was different. Self defense. You did what you had to do?”
“Is it, Yannek?” Bobby asked, using the engineer’s full first name, something he never did.
Ecky pulled hard on his cigarette.
“She was human . . .”
“She was not innocent. Not even close. Remember the Snowman always, Bobby. Things will come up when you need to act, not think. Your very life may depend on it. Do not hesitate in that moment. If we are to make it through winter . . . and beyond, you must act first and think later. Promise me that." Ecky rolled the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, eyeing the boy, measuring him up.
“I promise,” Bobby said with a shudder. A pressing weight settled around his temples, between his eyes, on his shoulders. The world took up its perch, chasing away the last remnants of boyhood.
“Good, at first light we move
out." Ecky stubbed out his cigarette and went to his pack.
“Where will we go?”
“North. There is small town. Gainer, we cleared years ago. Houses were in good shape, elevation higher, not much activity . . . human, or otherwise. We wait out winter,” Ecky paused. His eye caught something he had missed upon his first inspection. He peeled back a bit of liner to reveal a small spiral notebook. Randy, what did you leave me? The sight of the teal colored notebook filled him with dread.
“Then what?”
Ecky covered the notebook again. He’d check it once they were settled. Randy’s details, the hint of what he whispered to Ecky before they left, were buried in there. Ecky wasn’t ready to hear it though. He had to stay focused. He had to give Bobby, and himself for that matter, a chance to make it to spring.
“Then, well, Bobby, we meet Baylor.”
The name inspired a sense of awe in Bobby. He, like anyone in the Settlement with a set of ears, had heard, and heard well, of the famous Baylor. The Mad Conductor, as he was sometimes known, held imaginations captive, as if he were some kind of post-apocalyptic Santa Claus. In a way Baylor was, albeit a more practical, and far more heroic version of the long lost legend. Bobby always imagined what his train looked like, wondering if it held the sleek curves and shiny surfaces he’d learned about from the Folks. If he made it through the winter he’d finally find out. It wasn’t much, but it was something to look forward to, something to occupy his thoughts, and he would welcome it with open arms.
“You okay, Bobby,” Ecky said, snapping his fingers in Bobby’s face.
“Yeah, I was just thinking,” Bobby rubbed at his weary eyes.
“You do a lot." Ecky checked the CAR-15, making sure the safety was set.
“I guess. It’s hard to stop. It . . . just happens. I can’t help it." Bobby shrugged. He didn’t know how to explain it. Yet, it always happened to him. He’d fall back into a memory and everything in the present ceased to be, it fell away, and suddenly he was in the past, oblivious to everything. It was a dangerous flaw, but one he’d lived with as far back as he could remember.