by Norman Dixon
I forgot how to breathe, wasn’t even really aware that I was breathin’ at all. I think my heart beat, or that could’ve been Shirley’s rhythmic sobs. Pa, Thorton Crannen, knelt on that rooftop and prayed, but for thanks or what else I can’t rightfully say. For myself I could think only of those babies with that thing in the room with them. . . .
0800HRS: ROOF OF THE CAPITOL RECORDS BUILDING
This mornin’ I stood before the graves of the most amazin’ women this world’ll ever know. I watched the sun come up with them, with Bobby, Silvia’s son, cradled in my arms. I still can’t believe the depth of human will. I even question God’s motives, his sanity even, for making such a series of events come about. This ain’t right, but it’s life, it’s our lot in it, and I’ll do my part. These kids is special.
After we met with the rest of these folks it was clear what needed to be done. We are the only ones to answer this last call, and we have the means to bring these kids to a home, a permanent one. But I’m afraid of what might happen when we come back with them. Unlike this boy’s mother I can’t see that far ahead, but Ma and Pa always could and they’re ‘isscussin it while I commit this to paper.
“We left three and we are comin’ back eight. Boys, you listen here now. I hope we’re sharing something stronger than each others’ company, but if not, the world got the better of me and I am with the Lord, so think of this’n here collection of scrawls to be yer birth certificates. Now they ain’t tell me about your fathers but here are your mothers.
Silvia Abernathy – Bobby’s mom.
Beth W. – Peter’s mom.
Caramia Chanen – Ryan’s mom.
Deliah Parker – Paul’s mom.
Anna Blank – Bryan’s mom.
May they rest in peace. They died for you . . . for us. Let us never forget.
I feel sorry for you boys. I truly do. But I’ll do my best to see you through this craziness. And one day, maybe your children’s, children will have conquered the dead once and for all. It’s important to know where you come from and I hope this helps you all. What a world we live in . . . what a world.
Now we got a long trip back, and my hands’a hurtin’ from all this scribblin’ and stuff. Besides it ain’t gonna be easy treckin’ east with five littl’uns . . . Beckenridge out.
CHAPTER 15
Bobby read her name again, as was his routine over the last few months. His fingers still shook when they traced Ol’ Randy’s faded handwriting despite the complacency of repetition, as if he were touching her cold cheek all those years ago.
He tried to remember.
He couldn’t recall a single feature of her. Not a scent, a sound, a texture . . . there was nothing there. His mother existed only in Ol’ Randy’s notebook, a phantom flurry of smoke that haunted him with something he would never know. He knew only the darkness of the ink in which her name was written, and the emptiness of years between.
At least he had something.
Bobby closed the notebook. He looked to the couple for sympathy, but they remained ever silent.
Many nights he cried himself to sleep, grinding his teeth in the agony of loss and anger. As the nights grew shorter, somewhere in the daily shift, he had a birthday. Another winter survived. As if that was some kind of badge of honor.
It wasn’t.
Ecky was not oblivious to Bobby’s torment. He mentioned something called survivor’s guilt and he tried, really tried to ease Bobby’s suffering through stories, through tasks that kept the boy’s mind occupied.
Bobby would be forever in the man’s debt for that, but nothing helped. Sometimes, though, Bobby envisioned his rifle punching a hole through Pastor Craven’s skull, and at other times, he imagined his fingers gouging out those terrible old eyes.
He ran his hands along the cold steel of his rifle. The black metal and dark synthetic stock resonated on a primal level with him. He had used it to take a life, justly, but a life none-the-less. He had used it to hunt, to survive, it had become an extension of his being, and it never left his side. In a way the Remington had become his friend. Another silent companion, dead to him on a human level, but still occupying space in his life . . . like the couple, and the body of the wild man in the trunk.
He still didn’t know what to make of that rotting man. One thing was certain. There long winter in the couple’s house had not gone without incident.
They were being watched.
Ecky called Bobby to the main room in a panic. He had been with the couple reading the story of his life between watch shifts. Ecky stood next to the covered window and pulled it back ever so slightly, pointing with his chin for Bobby to take a look.
She wasn’t hard to miss.
A woman stood in the clearing between the edge of the town and the tree line. Her arms were covered with strange, bright red patterns. Spirals, stars, and angles ran the length of her thin arms, covered her bare neck and feet. Her leaf-littered hair jutted out in wild, gnarled spikes. Bobby noticed that the dirty woman shared a similarity with the dead fake-soldier in the trunk.
She wore no shoes.
Bobby was about to ask Ecky how long she’d been there, but her screams stopped him short.
She fell to her knees in the tall grass and cried out, shouted to any and all that would hear. Her voice was like the call of an animal, a high-pitched growl filled with yips and hoots.
“We got problem,” Ecky said as he began to pace.
“Maybe she’s in trouble." But Bobby knew better, he could read the signs the same as Ecky. The engineer had taught him about the wild people and the potential dangers they posed.
They were living and breathing like him, but that is where the similarities stopped. The reality of their existence was hard for Bobby to imagine. He had been born into a micro society that possessed knowledge, but the same couldn’t be said for those that were born in others. Wrapping his young mind around the idea was like trying to run ten miles after he had already ran twenty.
Due to the diligence of Ol’ Randy and the Folks, he knew what cars and airplanes were, even though he’d never been in either one. He knew what the ocean was, what it looked like, even what it smelled like. These people, these wild people, had surely come across the ruined, rusted husks of such things, but to them they were fallen gods, temples, a past that personified the truth of their self-induced fiction.
The woman continued her strange cries. Bobby wondered if they were, to her at least, actual words. Did those growls and hoots mean, help me, or were they a warning, we know you’re in there, perhaps?
A shadow flitted through the tall grass in front of the house across the street. It moved too fast for a Creeper. Bobby, sure it wasn’t an animal, closed the curtain.
“There’s something out there." He stared at Ecky’s wide eyes for answers.
“Get upstairs, cover from window. We let them make first move." Yannek checked the CAR-15. He’d kept it clean and ready, but he hadn’t fired it in a very long time.
Shattering glass stopped Bobby’s quick steps. It wasn’t very far off, a few houses away. More breaking glass, further this time.
“Get moving,” Ecky whispered. He waved his hand frantically.
Bobby bolted through the kitchen and up the stairs. He grabbed his rucksack, checking and counting his ammo as he went. Five shots, three kills . . . it had been a light and long winter. His ill-fitting pants a testament to the cold hungry nights. Bobby gathered the few remaining tools, and lastly the notebook, tucking it safely into the inside pouch. And just like that, the couple’s house ceased to be home.
Home . . . by dropping a few meager possessions within these walls it had become what the Settlement could not, but no matter what kind of normal life he prayed for, it wasn’t meant to be. He understood that, deep in the recess of his young mind, he knew he would roam forever.
Bobby knelt beside the couple one last time. He looked over their bones, said a silent goodbye, and crept up to the window.
The woman
was still screaming, but she was cut off from his view on this side of the house. Most of the town was behind him and only a few houses dotted the slope of the hillside in front of him, and beyond that, the steady green forest and the clear bright day.
A man stood watching him from across the way.
Bobby froze.
The man wore the same army fatigues as the wild man they laid to rest in the trunk. His hair hung in one massive series of knots all down his back. Rusted bits of wire were woven in his rank black beard. He held a wicked looking curved piece of metal crossed by a thinner, straighter piece that sat on a tensed strand of wire or cord. It looked like a crude hunting bow, but even through the scope Bobby couldn’t be sure.
Bobby thought about shooting. His finger dancing above the trigger nervously, he trained the scope on the man’s chest. He breathed in, settled. . . .
“Nyet, Bobby,” Ecky said from behind him.
The strange word slapped Bobby’s focus away.
“No, sorry,” Ecky apologized. “Is nerves . . . haven’t spoken my native tongue in long time. Listen.”
The woman stopped screaming.
The man with the long black hair broke his stare on the house and began to move out of their line of sight. Bobby followed him with the rifle barrel until he no longer had the shot. “I could have hit him.”
“What would be point? Besides, you’d give away position get us killed anyway. There are more than him and her. Saw two near front of house. All wearing army fatigues.”
What could it mean? Bobby thought. Nothing about the strange people made any sense to him. Had they come in search of their fallen friend, or something else?
“If we can avoid conflict, we avoid it like plague. We do not want fight with these . . . people,” the word left Ecky’s lips as if he were spitting away filth. “We don’t have too many days before Baylor comes through, and I told Randy we’d meet him there." Ecky opened a pocket on his pack and pulled out a beat up map. He laid it out as flat as he could, pointing with his finger and saying, “We are here. You see town down here to south and west, Dostero?”
“Yes,” Bobby said, nodding at Ecky’s tobacco stained finger with its gnawed fingernail.
“There is train tracks that run along this road at base of volcano. You know tracks, yes?" Ecky cleared his throat quietly. His eyes kept wandering to the window, but the man had not returned.
“Yes—”
The woman’s voice, accompanied by a gruff male growl echoed through the town. They were soon joined by more.
“Downstairs, quickly now." Ecky folded the map and jammed it in his pocket.
They descended the stairs to a raging chorus of animalistic shouts.
Bobby reached the window first. He peeked out from an angle. At first he didn’t see the source of shouting, but he looked upon the car, and the open trunk, his breath caught in his throat. There were at least fifteen fatigue-clad wild men surrounding the car. They swayed back and forth, waving their crude rusty blades and rough wooden clubs. The woman stood atop the car bouncing in what seemed like a measured dance. What Bobby had mistaken for ragged clothing was nothing of the sort.
The woman was smeared from head to toe in mud, or some kind of blackish-brown grease that made the red symbols almost burn on her skin. Her floppy breasts swayed as she rocked back and forth. Her hands brushed bits of dry leaves from her pubic thatch. She raised her hands and screamed, her body shaking, as if racked by fever. Then she stopped, and with a wave of her hand, the men, too, ceased their growls.
“Ecky, what’s going on?” Bobby said from the corner of his mouth.
“Fucking stone age madness." Ecky wondered if they knew about the trunk, or if they had uncovered it by accident. But then, as he watched all of them gathered in their uniforms, noticing how all of them, with the exception of the man with long black hair, had close cropped hair, he knew what they were up to. There was no denying the timing of their appearance.
“They mean to attack the train." Ecky stomped his foot down in frustration. Shit like this was why he gave up believing in god a long time ago. “Fuck and shit at same time.”
Bobby followed the engineer’s logic. But he couldn’t quite make the same leap. “If that is true than why did they stop in the town? How did they know about the trunk?”
The woman began to sob, clutching at her belly and grabbing her face, smearing the red symbols. She looked around wide-eyed, searching. She pointed to the house across the street from the couple’s and hissed.
The horde of armed wild men charged the home with weapon’s held high. They crashed through the door, breaking windows, destroying everything in their way.
“Fucking random act of universe, Bobby, I don’t know." Ecky thumbed off the safety. “Can you run with that pack, really run?”
“Yes." Bobby tugged at the strap.
“Take map,” Ecky offered it to Bobby but the boy froze.
“No, can’t we just hide? Can’t we just let them go their own way?"
“Take the map!”
Bobby backed away a step. He shouldered his rifle. “We have guns. We can take them while they aren’t looking.”
“And what about ones we don’t see? What if there are more of them? Going to shoot them all with limited ammunition? Going to alert every thawed out Creeper for miles? Nyet, Bobby, we run, we make for train. We only fight if we have to. Take the map!" Ecky shoved it in Bobby’s face.
He took it, reluctantly, afraid of what they were about to do. He tried to calm himself. But the terror swept over him like an avalanche. He became the little boy, the little boy afraid to venture beyond the fence with Ryan, to explore, to dare. With his knees knocking, he remembered what his last act of boyhood bravado had gotten him . . . it had gotten his brothers killed, and forced him from one painful existence into another. If he’d only—if he’d only what? Was his life supposed to be one of stagnation and constant ridicule? Was his life supposed to be under the threat of death?
No. He decided then. He could not succumb to those thoughts. Too many people had sacrificed their lives so that he could live. He wasn’t about to disappoint them. There was no more pretending, it was time to grow up and be a man.
With the thought of reuniting with Ol’ Randy burning like a fire in his heart, Bobby tightened the strap on his rifle saying, “Okay." Bobby slipped his rifle to his back. If he was going to run it would only get in the way and it wouldn’t be of much use if he needed to act quickly. He pulled his knife, put it back, pulled again, checking the action.
“I wish bitch would shut up." Ecky closed his eyes. His lips moved but no actual words left them.
“What are you doing?”
“Praying.”
“But I thought you said you didn’t believe in God?" Bobby’s flop of dirty hair covered his inquisitive eyes.
“Better safe than sorry. If he’s listening, he owes me."
The wild men began to filter out of the house and gather around the woman once again. She kept to her perch on top of the car and the long-haired man joined her. He began to bark at the men, gesturing with his weapon in several directions. The horde broke into three smaller groups and fanned out.
Ecky didn’t like their chances but he didn’t have a choice. They had to get to the station, and they had to get their ahead of these lunatics. Too many lives were at stake if they failed. He tapped his forehead in frustration. If they didn’t cut loose soon they’d be trapped.
“We leave out back window. Head north into woods.”
“But I thought you said we had to go south.”
“I did, but we have to circle round, or would you rather go through them?”
Bobby shook his head. His small fists balled up, jaw tense, waiting for Ecky to give the word.
“What I thought. We go, and we go now." Ecky took point and opened the window without a squeak. He dropped down into the thick brush, weapon ready, eyes searching. “Clear, Bobby, hurry.”
Bobby hopped down and cr
ouched low beside Ecky.
“I will cover you from here. You see house across way?” Ecky nodded towards the wooden house about a hundred yards away.
Bobby acknowledged the nod with one of his own.
“You run, run faster than wind, faster than ever, and get behind house and run straight to woods. I will be about fifty yards behind. Go, go now!”
Bobby took a deep breath and bolted. The rifle and pack thumping against his back as he drove his legs harder than ever. Halfway to the house his foot caught on something hidden beneath the grass and he stumbled, but he righted himself, and kept going. He could only hope that nothing else lay in wait near his ankles, a half-rotted farmer clawing, biting—he pushed the thoughts away. He was within ten feet of the house when he heard the first shot.
He dared a look over his shoulder but didn’t stop running. Ecky was backing away from the house, his weapon moving from side to side to cover every possible angle of attack. Bobby couldn’t see what he shot. As Bobby came to the side of the house Ecky turned to him and started to run.
Bobby’s heart beat, his lungs burned, his legs felt wrong, wobbly. The lack of proper food had taken its toll on his body, and now he was paying the price. He had to override the urge to drop to the ground. He kept telling himself if he could get to the woods he could cover Ecky with the rifle. All he had to do was make it there without collapsing. He was well past the house. The woods bobbed in front of him, as if someone had upset the Earth’s axis. Bobby stumbled, fell forward onto his stomach. It took every ounce of his will to get back up.
He fell into the sticky bark of a swaying pine. His legs trembled. The over exertion sent spasms through them, but he worked his rifle free, dropped low and sighted towards the wooden house.
Ecky came tearing around the house with legs pumping, weapon held high.
Two wild men were not far behind.
Everything the engineer warned him about went out the window, besides, Ecky had already fired a shot. Bobby thumbed the safety off and steadied himself. The wild men moved fast, having already closed half the distance to Ecky. Bobby took a breath, let it out, as he pulled the trigger.