by Norman Dixon
Even Ecky believed in something in his own way. And in the aftermath of the battle, with the train surrounded by death and debris, many of the crew bowed their heads, crossed themselves, some even prayed out loud. Were they all wrong? Was he right? But the urge to continue the mental debate left him then. The Creepers lingered on the fringes but they seemed confused by his intrusion.
The door slid open.
Bobby couldn’t see who it was in the darkness. His hand instinctively went for his knife. He rolled onto his elbow for better leverage. Knife in hand, he listened. Soft breath, quick but not out of control, whoever stood just feet in front of him was nervous . . . and they smelled of honey. Bobby put his knife away.
“Sophie,” he whispered. He knew it was her. The smells of the kitchen and the silence solidified it. He reached out with his hand, finding hers in the darkness. She pressed it to her chest. Her heart beat beneath her ribcage like a terrified mouse hiding from the swiping claw of a cat.
She did not speak as she slipped onto the bed next to him. Her silence remained a mystery to him. Jamie tried to explain it, and he tried to understand it. He’d suffered a terrible trauma, too, and he still chose to speak. Maybe it was a girl thing. They were still a riddle to him, though, he had not known very many. One thing he knew for sure: it felt good to have a warm body next to him.
Her soft lips kissed his ear and it tickled, but he did not laugh. Her breath soothed his wandering mind. Her long legs wrapped around his. Her hand cupped his face. He tried to mirror her movements because it felt right, it felt good, but he had a hard time trying to focus.
Under Sophie’s careful touch Bobby learned much that night. He learned that the world was filled with a great many mysteries. Untold, uncharted lands and they needed no questions to be understood. They simply needed to be experienced. He lay with her until the sun finally cracked the night’s thick armor.
“Come back,” she whispered. She slipped away from his grasp and moved through the cabin like a ghost, a wash of pale skin and light.
* * * * *
Bobby sat on top of the car with Baylor, watching the land come to life. The stranger walked among the corpses carrying his laptop, a diffuse bluish glow lighted the edge of his nose. After inspecting each body the stranger would stop and type on the keypad before moving on.
“You sure, sure about this, kid?" Baylor was picking at this teeth with a blade of grass.
“It’s time for me to go, Mr. Baylor. When I put my past to rest I will come back." Bobby checked his gear for the fifth time. He hadn’t seen Sophie since she left him hours before. He had hoped to see her one last time before he left, but time was growing short he had to get going.
“Kid, I hate to leave you here, but progress is important. Each year, each day we beat the dead back. We get some of the world back. Another few years and I’ll see the coast. We took a lickin’ but we’ll come back. The world will come back." Baylor turned to Bobby and extended his hand.
Bobby welcomed the simple handshake, and when Baylor’s much larger hand enveloped his, he knew true friendship. Which only seemed to crack the dam of regret further, but he locked those feelings away like he shackled the voices of the undead.
“Thank you, Mr. Baylor. Keep my spot open."
“Take care, Bobby." The Mad Conductor found it hard to keep his eyes dry, and he only managed to do so after turning away from Bobby’s wide smile and wild hair.
As Bobby climbed down and stepped out among the bodies he felt strangely optimistic. Perhaps it was the new beginnings that spring offered up in all its fresh glory, or it might be, that for the first time, Baylor had called him by his name. That simple recognition stirred memories of Ol’ Randy within him. He quickly moved towards the back of the train where several of the crew were gathered.
Price held a length of brightly colored rope that looped around Jackson’s arms and up his back and around his neck. He tugged hard, drawing the sole surviving Crannen twin to his knees. The implementation was simple, and it would allow Bobby to control his prisoner on the long road to the Settlement.
“He won’t give you much trouble as long as you keep this end close. I suggest you tie it up high when you sleep. It’ll hurt him like hell, but it will keep him from slitting your throat while you sleep." The giant man mussed Bobby’s hair and handed him the rope. “Keep safe now . . . and good luck.”
“That’s not the only thing that’ll keep him from getting his throat cut,” the stranger said boastingly. “I’m going with him. I’m not much cut out for track laying anyway.”
“Does the boss know about this?” Hoss asked.
“Yeah, he knows,” the stranger adjusted his hood, pulling it down further, “he said good riddance. Called me a leech on his resources. Imagine that? And this after I helped fend off the attackers.”
“Sounds about right,” Price chuckled.
“Your company is welcomed, but I cannot guarantee your safety, stranger." Bobby wondered why the scarred man wanted to tag along. He didn’t like the idea of getting someone else hurt by proxy, but the stranger was free to make his own choices.
After saying their goodbyes Bobby and the stranger began the long trek. Jackson didn’t cooperate at first. He dragged his feet then fell on his knees, but this did not last long. With the train beginning to come to life the stranger jabbed the barrel of his assault rifle into the man’s ribs. The act brought a cheer from the men working on the train.
“Get moving. I won’t be as nice next time,” the stranger spat.
Bobby gave the beast of a train one last look. He searched those dark windows for a glimpse of her and was not disappointed. Even though he was pretty far away he could still make out those reddish locks and there was no mistaking that pale, ghostly skin. He made a promise to himself then. He would come back to her. He would come back to this girl he did not know, but with whom he had shared the most special of moments with. With one last look he turned away and started towards the Settlement.
The train and its crew quickly faded from view and the day dipped towards noon. A warm breeze hissed through the flowering trees, sending them into a to and fro sway. They found the cracked blacktop of a four lane highway and they followed its course. Sometimes they had to leave the relative flatness to circumvent clusters of rusted cars.
As they walked Bobby searched for the undead. They were all around them. Many of the Creepers were beyond comprehension, having been in the state of rot for untold years. Their voices nothing more than garbled sounds. Still, Bobby asked them to follow. He sent out clear, simple thoughts that he repeated over and over again, a mantra of marching orders. He spoke of staying close but not close enough for his companions to notice.
He kept his feet moving and his mind working to gather any and every Creeper that he sensed. Unbeknownst to the stranger, who was well aware of his gift, Bobby began to assemble a wall of protection around them. Just as he used the Creepers to bring an end to the battle around the train, so too, would he use the undead to keep them safe on their journey. But he had another motive for gathering the Creepers. He needed bodies if he had any chance of getting close to the Settlement. The town was built with defense in mind. It functioned around keeping invaders out. Whether they were Creepers or savages or even coordinated raiders didn’t matter. The Settlement was a bulwark against any potential enemy tide. If he had any hope of getting to Ol’ Randy, let alone freeing him, he would need more than bodies.
He needed an army.
However, he wasn’t sure his head could handle all of those voices. The sheer weight of what he intended to do was more than enough to break him, and it was only an idea. Even now, with maybe ten or so Creepers shambling along, their mindless chatter drowned out the stranger’s whistling, and they added tremendous pressure behind his eyes. How would he handle hundreds . . . thousands? There was only one way to find out. He had to keep gathering members of his undead army.
“What’s eating you?" The stranger asked. He had removed
his hood to bask in the sweet afternoon air.
Bobby eyed the scars curiously, but he dared not to ask about them. He liked the stranger’s company and he didn’t want to offend the man. “I still don’t know your name. You know all of my secrets and I know none of yours. Doesn’t seem fair.”
“Life’s not fair,” Jackson shrieked.
Bobby yanked on the rope sending Jackson into a grunting stumble.
“No, no you don’t, Bobby." The stranger adjusted the leather bag that held his laptop. “It was the first thing I ever gave up. Didn’t seem necessary anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What you asked me about, Bobby . . . my name. It was the first thing I gave up. Have you ever given anything up?”
“I’ve given plenty of things up.”
“Really?" The stranger whistled a low uneven tune. “Such as?”
“Once, I gave up my winter coat during a punishment so my brother Peter wouldn’t freeze. Another time I gave up myself, so that I could be punished in Ryan’s place." Bobby stopped beside an overturned tractor trailer. Most of it had rotted away, but a small portion of it formed a good shelter for, what appeared to be, a mild night. “Let’s set camp here.”
“All admirable things to give up, but they’re not exactly what I’m talking about." The stranger removed his bag and set it inside the broken trailer. “I’m talking about truly abandoning something meaningful, something beyond material.”
Bobby dropped the weight of his pack and surveyed the length of road. It curved up and over a hill and had very few rusty tombs left on it. Much of the countryside had come back to reclaim what rightfully belonged to it. Creeping brush and tall, wild grass covered almost all of the old road. A bullet-hole-riddled sign, nothing more than rusty paper waiting to be blown away, poked out of a thick stand of weeds. Words frozen in dripping black letters, a nervous spray painted scrawl read:
THE END IS THE BEGINNING
REPENT ALL YOU SINNERS
“I gave up hope . . . once,” Bobby said as he climbed on top of the rear axle. He double-knotted the rope at a good height. Jackson’s shriek told him that he’d placed it properly. The man was on his knees, his arms pulled up at a sharp angle.
“Ah . . . and how did it feel?”
Bobby hopped down and dug the hatchet out of his pack. He found a rotted trunk buried under nature’s growth a few yards from the trailer. “It was one of the worst things I’ve ever done. It hurt . . . hurt bad.”
The stranger busied himself with gathering clusters of dried grass for kindling. “That is how it was for me. I ceased to be Gabriel.”
“That’s your name . . . Gabriel. Like the archangel? The messenger from God?” Bobby questioned. Pastor Craven’s voice drilled the names of the Heaven’s angels into his head from somewhere in his past. He remembered ruler-smashed knuckles for forgetting the who and whats of Heaven’s hierarchy. He never forgot again.
“It was my name,” the stranger said rather painfully. “Now, it’s just another such thing on the growing list I carry." He scratched at the small tuft of hair that clung to his burned scalp.
Bobby chopped several chunks of earthy wood from the trunk. He cradled them in his arms saying, “You can take it back. Just because you gave it up doesn’t mean you can’t take it back.”
“There is no taking it back. Gabriel no longer exists. He’s, how can I put it, a dead man, a discarded individual who crumbled along with the rest of humanity.”
As Bobby arranged the pieces of wood in a rough circle he became worried. The tone of the stranger’s voice, and his words, tumbled down a dark mountain of memory. “Well, what am I supposed to call you?”
The knotty scars around the stranger’s eyes moved ever-so-slightly. “I suppose you could call me by my professional name.”
“And what is that?" Bobby took the kindling from the stranger and stuffed it beneath the thinner branches. He used Ecky’s Zippo to ignite the flames.
“Pathos One.”
Bobby plopped down to ease the tension in his legs. He didn’t know what to make of the stranger. “And, Pathos, what exactly is your profession?”
“It’s quite simple really,” Pathos held his arms out wide and bowed, “I’m a traveling historian of the dead.”
BOOK III
OUR FATHER
CHAPTER 24
Pastor Craven tilled the soil around Lyda’s tombstone. During the long winter the constant snow and ice and melting, and then freezing again, had left it a mess. In between sips of whiskey that stung his rotten gums he cast nature’s debris aside. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to plant in her honor, or why he even felt the urge to mourn anew. Perhaps, it was the Settlement’s dire need for a more capable doctor. In recent weeks the pain in his severed leg had become unbearable, and several of the young ones came down with the Chicken Pox, they’d even lost Teddy Miller to Pneumonia. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the Crannen Twins, along with several other men, had yet to return from their annual supply run.
People were beginning to ask questions, and the Pastor was running out of assurances. Some were even beginning to question his treatment of Randal. The once proud veteran of three wars spent the better part of early spring wallowing in his own filth at the bottom of the Corral’s pit. But what they didn’t know, what they could not see, was the Lord’s hand in it all. Pastor Craven, though, knew the path he walked was the most righteous of all.
Some of the younger men, boys really, were talking of trekking out on their own to find any extra supplies they could. They were becoming unruly in the absence of so many strong male figures within the fence. The Pastor was beginning to lose his power, his papal grip slipping from the yoke, but all was not lost to him yet. He still had God, and he still had many of their hearts and minds. However, he didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to maintain control.
“Dear Lyda, how I miss you." Pastor Craven sipped from the bottle, letting the whiskey sting his cracked lips. He admired and examined every nuance of pain spread across his tired face. “The Lord took you from us too soon. You deserved better.”
Using his cane for support, the Pastor eased onto his good leg and headed back to his home. There was much to contemplate.
* * * * *
Time. Passing time. Fading sun. Dark night. How many such cycles had he witnessed from the bottom of the pit? He tried hard to keep track by scratching lines in the dirt walls, but he was certain he’d missed a few . . . maybe more than a few.
Somewhere between meals of stale bread and rank meat the forward passage of time no longer mattered to him. To go forward meant only pain. Each second that passed his body weakened, degenerating cells, voracious, cancerous things he didn’t quite understand, with time as their platform, used the meat of him, the death of him, to preserve their own existence. It was a scary thought, and quite a thought at that, for such a mind as Ol’ Randy’s.
The future was as dead to him as the vast majority of humanity. So, it was then, in those dark days, that he sought the wisdom of his past. Besides, there was little for him to do but just that, after all, his only visitor was the food being thrown down to him.
Distant echoing gunfire caused him to shrink further into a ball. The earthen walls filled his flaring nostrils with the tang of his own urine. He pressed his knees into his frail chest, making the stabbing pain that accompanied each breath bearable. He shook, not in terror, but in simple, healthy fear. He shook as the battle came rushing back to him.
* * * * *
Rattle . . . rattle . . . boom. He couldn’t pinpoint where the fire was coming from. It didn’t even sound close, in fact, it didn’t seem real, but he knew better. He’d been too long in the desert and now he’d been too long in the thin mountain air. Before deployment, despite of what he’d read about the place, he was certain scorching desert heat awaited him. But the snow-covered, surprisingly green, mountains of Afghanistan debunked all his misconceptions.
The sni
per opened fire again, another RPG boomed. Fire discipline was something the enemy did not understand . . . well, most of them at least. He thanked the Lord for that. With the mountains leaning over him like a scolding teacher the fire echoed far and wide. He couldn’t locate the source. Bullets pocked the ground, skipped off boulders, hissed through the air. All the while his men shouted frantically . . . something they never did, but they’d taken three casualties in two days . . . something that never happened to them.
“Wild fire—nothing more! Keep yer damn heads down! Ya’ll actin’ like a bunch of yellow-bellied yankees facin’ a Southe’n charge!”
“I think we won that war, Sarge!”
“You shut yer yankee mouth, Suarez, and get me a position on that fuckin’ sniper!” Ol’ Randy roared. The effort had him gasping for breath. They told him he’d get used to it, but two months in, and he still felt the mysterious weight of thin air.
“Sir!" The squat Marine scurried on his belly, removed his helmet, and propped it on the collapsible baton (non-regulation) he kept in his boot. “Get some, terrorist motherfucker!" Suarez set his helmet above the dry river bed they were using for cover.
The sniper opened fire again, a few single shots, full auto, sloppy and stupid. It took the sniper nearly a clip to hit the helmet, sending it flipping off the baton and clattering among the rocks. “Shit, these fuckers are all this dumb we’ll be home in time for the Super bowl! Right, Sarge?!”
“COVERING FIRE, EAST RIDGE, ABOUT A FOUR CLICKS UP!" Ol’ Randy pretended he didn’t hear Suarez’s boast. He had an ill feeling they were going to be in for the long haul. “FRANKLIN!”
“SIR!”
“SON, THAT BASTARD PUTS HIS ‘EAD UP ONE MORE TIME—TAKE IT THE FUCK OFF!”
As Franklin adjusted his sights he turned to Sergeant Beckinridge to respond to the order given, but he never got the chance. A second sniper’s bullet put a hole in his neck, severing his spine. He died instantly.