by Norman Dixon
Ol’ Randy felt that bullet tear a hole in the very fabric of him. He cursed the Lord again and again—and then, he cursed his maker some more. But in that moment he didn’t have the time to contemplate the actions of Heaven. He had to act, or perish.
As he barked commands at this men, and sent them out into the fire, the valley folded over on him. The great blue sky tumbled down as if God cast it aside without so much as an afterthought. He never heard the explosion, he never felt the shockwave, all he knew was an unending ringing, a whine that enveloped him.
Dust drifted over him, filling his nostrils with a tangy, earthy scent, and it was so thick it nearly blocked out all light. Only a moment ago it had been broad daylight, clear, blue skies, but now everything seemed trapped in an eerie dusk. Mumbled words, the vibrations of many boots on the ground, shadowy figures moved around him. Black hands, shrouded faces descended upon him, clutching and pulling at his vest, at his gear, his hair, and they were not gentle. The voices were not those of his men. They were not speaking English.
Ol’ Randy tried to move, but his muscles, like his ears, were in state of frozen shock from the concussion of the blast. He had the vague sense of motion, sailing through that murky dust in the rough hands of his enemies. Before he even had a chance to gather himself further, something heavy crashed against the back of his skull.
The dusty world fell into darkness.
* * * * *
Someone was yelling at him. His hands were bound painfully behind his back. Figures moved in front of him. He counted three through the thin blindfold. His rudimentary Farsi was no help at all. He couldn’t even concentrate as more angry voices joined in the barrage.
Fear did not enter the equation. He could only think of his men. What had happened to them? Were they all dead? Had he, somehow in a miscalculation, caused the whole mess? No, he told himself. These types of attacks were common place in the valley. Smash and grab. Smoke, sand, explosions, covering fire, move in on a target, move out like ghosts.
He cursed himself for not anticipating the call signs.
The voices died down and his blindfold was removed.
He was sitting in the middle of a mud-walled room. Bits of straw and small pebbles lay scattered on the floor. Two Afghani men in olive green garb stood guard on either side of the lone door, Kalishnikovs strapped across their chests. A white-robed man sat cross-legged directly in front of him. And just behind the sitting man stood a child holding a fist-sized chunk of Afghan bedrock.
“Allah has shined on you this day, American,” the sitting man said, as the child stirred nervously behind him. “You seem shocked . . . we are not all bangers of rocks in these lands. What is your name?”
Ol’ Randy spat on the floor.
The man’s hand lashed out, smacking Ol’ Randy across the cheek.
“This is my home, you will show respect as I did in the homes of your New York City. Now, what is your name?" The man straightened his sleeve and said something to the men at the door.
They chuckled.
“What difference does it make? Ya’ll gonna’ get on with killin’ me . . . go’ead and do it. I made my peace with God years ago. Pain’ll only last a few days at best. Get to it, Haji.”
If the man felt the sting of the insults he did not show it. A great mask of patience descended on his face, so calm, it was almost peaceful. But the man’s eyes betrayed his nervousness.
“His name is Jack,” the man told the guards in their native tongue.
“What’re you about?”
“You want to live? Then,” the man slapped him again, “tell me your name.”
Ol’ Randy tested the rope binding his hands. He wasn’t going to have his moment of glory. “Why ya’ care? To you I’m nothin’ but some damn outsider . . . infidel, ain’t that right, Haji?”
The man shook his head. “Some of us want to be left alone. Not all of us want to be part of something." He stirred the dirt floor with his fingertip. “Or want it forced on us. You must understand. I saw the world . . . had my fill, but in the end I wanted to make my own way. To raise my family in peace. Not so much to ask, but it seems I demanded a king’s ransom, for now, here we sit.”
“You speak fancier’n a tap dancin’ lawyer. Where’d you learn?" Ol’ Randy shifted his weight which drew another slap. “I don’t know what yer at, Haji, but ya’ better hope I don’t get loose.”
“Fool, if you will not give me your name then, Fool, it shall be." The man pulled the boy close, kissed his forehead. “This is my son, he was born in this valley. This is all he knows. Imagine that for a second. All he has known in his short life is war.”
“It’s all part of God’s plan.”
“Allah has nothing to do with this. This is the work of confused men . . . on both sides, bringing war to my home. I didn’t ask for this, I wanted no part in this, but if this is really Allah’s plan, His will, then I know my part.”
“Just get it over with.”
“This will hurt, but I must prove to them that I am willing to kill an infidel in order to protect my family. When they leave I will see to it you are returned to your men, Fool.”
The man shouted at the boy.
Ol’ Randy recoiled at the sight of those tiny hands clutching the rock. He closed his eyes and prayed. The first blow sounded like a crashing wave inside his skull as the bones of his cheek collapsed. His flesh ripped apart, the world turned white with foreign laughter, and the stone fell again.
* * * * *
Even now, in a half-demented daze, he wondered if the man and his boy knew the legend their act of kindness spurned. He hoped they were alive, safe in the thin air, so far away. But he knew that circumstance always had a way of finding you and using you in whatever way they saw fit.
“He has a plan,” Ol’ Randy screamed. Scratching at the walls of the pit, he screamed until his voice was nothing more than a series of ragged breaths. He had to believe his own words. To an extent he did, but at the back of his mind, always lingering, was the impetus of doubt. Doubt of his own belief system, of his maker, of everything.
Hope, however slimming in these dark days, was all he had left. Well . . . that wasn’t exactly true, there was always the madness, and it was as constant as the flies.
CHAPTER 25
A week after they left the comfort of Baylor’s train they found themselves at the mercy of Mother Nature. The spring rain would not relent. She would not stop her harrying either. She hammered the small diner with a torrent that poured through the hole in the roof like a waterfall.
Bobby busied himself, creating a bridge with several Formica-topped tables over the counter, and what was left of the prep area. It was far from ideal, but at least it kept them dry. He kicked at a pile of remains that he could not identify.
“Be mindful of the dead,” Pathos said.
“Animal bones.”
“No, human. Look at the ribs and the absence of a skull.”
“An animal could have run off with it.”
“Unless that animal had an axe for teeth, I highly doubt it. It is my job to understand the dead, to catalogue them." Pathos jotted something into the small notebook he kept in his pocket. He didn’t want to risk the laptop in this weather.
“Why not put it with the rest of your list?” Bobby asked, though, he still was unsure of what exactly that list represented. Pathos had been very quiet after revealing his identity. The idea of keeping a list of names and numbers, each representing a member of the deceased, boggled Bobby’s mind. The idea of a census was utterly alien to him.
“Look at your young mind working,” Pathos said, wiping the water from his brow. “I can see your questions. Don’t be afraid to ask them. Even our prisoner here has the same questions. What, where, why, how . . . all valid.”
“Yer a crazy bastard. I’ma kill you first, then the demon next to you." Jackson squirmed against the restraints. His face carried a rough bruise across his left cheek. Pathos had to set him straight once alrea
dy.
“Isn’t that pleasant? I’m amazed you made it away from these barbarians with your mind intact, Bobby." Pathos nodded at the boy, keeping his weapon close in case Jackson wanted to act up again.
“They’re not all like him and he knows it. They may not like me, but they’re not bad people . . . they’re not like the savages." Bobby stared up into the gray sky. He welcomed the knifing rain. It gave him pause, but more importantly, it gave him time to formulate a plan to free Ol’ Randy and minimize the damage. There were many that needed to die, that deserved to die, and for a time he thought that contained everyone in the Settlement, but the long winter, coupled with new friends, new thoughts, changed his perspective on things, though, it did not change the powerful need to avenge his brothers.
“I know very well that not all humans are so . . . barbaric,” Pathos said as he touched his face. His eyes welled with tears.
“Is that what happened to your face?”
“Like your brothers, I too, was a victim of the reptilian brain. And so,” Pathos slid his notebooks in a pocket, “was my wife." He laid his AK47 across his knees and tucked them in, as if trying to shrink himself into non-existence.
“Fuckin’ serves you right. God’s punishment.”
Bobby snapped his fist out, catching Jackson on the chin. “Keep your mouth shut.”
“What’re you gonna do? You lil’demon, you can’t kill me, ya’ll need me,” he spat.
Bobby picked up a piece of broken glass and said, “we don’t need your tongue. My brothers were murdered, carving you up wouldn’t even begin to set things straight." Bobby didn’t even feel the glass cut into the flesh of his palm. The shear rage masked it.
Pathos’s hand on his shoulder made him stop. He dropped the shard of glass and applied pressure to the wound. “Open it again,” he hissed, “and it’ll be the last time you speak.”
“Don’t give in to it yet, Bobby. There is a time and place for revenge, but not now. To do so would sully the freedom of your friend." Pathos chambered a round. “Don’t worry about this slovenly gentleman.”
Bobby tore a piece of his shirt off and wrapped it around the wound.
“I always felt a great disaster was coming. And the day the dead didn’t stay dead, well . . . I thought that was it. Here was something oft fantasized about in movies, in books, and now it was unfolding on my flat screen. But I was wrong, so wrong." Pathos One traced the scars, following the many crags, peaks and valleys that had once been soft, supple skin.
“No, that wasn’t the great disaster of my life. When I found the depths of human depravity I knew the disaster on a personal level. Or should I say when it found me." Pathos One cleared his throat. The pain of distant memory sticking like the dry precursor of a horrible cough. “We’d been drifting from shelter to shelter, moving with the food, always staying ahead of collapse. Back east, Bobby, you have no idea the concentration of people.”
“But I—”
“—I know,” Pathos shouted, “You’ve seen pictures, but you do not know. You can’t even imagine the feeling. One day I was going about my business shoulder to shoulder with the world. So close at times I could smell last night’s supper, a culture, a favorite fragrance, a hard day, within the confines of a commuter train I could use my sense of smell to know all of those things. That’s how close we were. How physically close we were.
“When it happened, when the cases started to spread . . . we were told to keep indoors, to lock up and stay safe. Which was fine while we had power and food and water, but when those necessities started to fail, the lights went first, everything started to collapse. Small fires, breaking windows, shouting, we were living in the end of things. It was both a marvel and an absolute horror to behold." Pathos One cried. His weapon rattled in his bony hands.
“My wife and I left our home for the last time. They were broadcasting on loudspeakers. They shouted directions for us to find safety in the camps. And so we did, eating rice, huddling behind crude barbed wire, no toilets, no true shelter, but how could life last like that? The answer is, it didn’t. It started with gangs within the barbed wire cities . . . thugs really, demanding food and water, taking women at their leisure. The military had given up their posts, and who could blame them? They had families too.
“Doesn’t take much, sometimes it doesn’t take anything at all, to send our reptilian tongues flickering. Once that floodgate to the past is open there is no stopping it. No matter how hard you try. We were in a rural town somewhere in Northern New Jersey. We’d been several weeks on the road, surviving on what we could, avoiding contact with the dead, avoiding contact with anyone. We didn’t know much about survival, but millions of years of evolution had supplied the answers in our DNA. We only needed to be pushed into a corner to unlock them. The Creepers were that corner.
“Sibohan and I found shelter in a farm house. The owner’s had taken their own lives on the front porch. It was as romantic as it was pathetic. Did they not know they could have made it? I was a doctor of human evolution and I had become a survivalist. My wife, a baker, and yet, there we were, surviving, while the rest of the world spiraled out of control. We stayed there too long . . . we broke the first rule of survival. We grew complacent.
“One night, while we slept, a roaming band of . . . of,” Pathos shook furiously, “of human filth, a band ripped from the our ancestral past.”
“Savages,” Bobby said, trying to wrap his head around Pathos’s words.
“No, not yet, these men were only months removed from civil society . . . just months but they may as well have broken into that farm house wearing the skins of animals. Just months before, these men were lawyers, police officers, office workers, how quickly we lose rational thought. How quickly we replace a little hardship with what comes easy. It’s easier to take by force than to stop a second and formulate a more beneficial partnership. Survival in a nutshell, a relatively easy concept, something I taught to my first year students many times over. But no matter how well read I was on the subject, I was a mere child when it came to the actual experience. Life it seems . . . has a way of making us soft.
“They held me down, made me watch as they gave in to their ancestors. They made me watch my love be . . . be . . .” Pathos sobbed. He banged his head against his weapon.
Even Jackson was not immune to the professor-turned-survivalist’s words. The rugged Settlement man could not wipe away the tears.
“She begged, I begged them to stop, but they continued on and on. And when they had their fill, they ended her like an animal they did not want to waste bullets on. They beat the life from her on the floor of the farmhouse and then they set fire to me. The whole of my life was gone . . . survival had become meaningless. I did not even have the will to put the flames out.
“But life is full of partnerships. Many of them we set out to develop on our own. We make friends, we find love, or it finds us, but sometimes, others of like minds are within earshot, within shouting distance and new partnerships are born. I could not tell you their names . . . those that saved me from the fires, but I can tell you that they displayed the same reptilian chill when they set upon the men that had taken everything from me. The night Dr. Gabriel Demark died, Pathos One became the founding father of another partnership.
“They wanted no part at first. They chalked it up as delusions of a man on the verge of death. But even in the throes of pain all my knowledge began to adapt, much as your strange blood has begun to adapt. For you see, that is what life does. I knew if we let go of our history we’d be right back around the fire, hooting at the beasts, waving brands to keep them at bay. I decided I would take no part in such an end of humanity. And I wasn’t the only one.”
“I’m sorry for your wife,” Bobby bowed his head, “may she rest in peace.”
“Thank you, Bobby. I too, am sorry for the loss of your brothers and your friend and your innocence, but, like I said, partnerships.”
“It stopped raining,” Bobby said, holding
his hand in a beam of warm light. The water sluiced like honey along the floor and the last remnants of gray clouds were being taken apart by the wind.
“I seem to have rambled on.”
“Not at all." Bobby welcomed the history—good, bad, and downright horrifying. “But what happened next?”
Pathos One found a dry baking pan in a rusty cabinet. He set it on the counter in the sunlight then he laid the laptop, along with its rolled up solar charger, atop it. “I’ve never told anyone what happened. I think it was time to let it go." Pathos One powered the laptop on. The patchwork machine thrummed and clicked as it came to life at his touch. “You wanted to know what happened next. I’ve read the story of you, in that journal . . . it seems only fair that you read what happened next. Here,” Pathos One said, turning the black and green screen towards Bobby.
Bobby blinked at the wall of numbers and names as Pathos One scrolled through them.
“Here we are,” Pathos One said, tapping the thumb pad. “When you want to keep reading run your finger down like so. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“It won’t win the Nobel Prize anytime soon, but it’s important.”
“The what?”
Pathos One shook his head, slipped his hood back over the scars and said, “Nothing. I’m going to take Jackson here for a walk. We’ll be needing firewood that isn’t soaked through. Won’t be easy but we’ll manage.”
“I ain’t going nowhere with you.”
“You don’t have a choice." Pathos One yanked the rope, drawing Jackson to his feet.
Bobby was too absorbed in the words to notice their departure. He read:
Pathos I – Journal Entry [00001]
January 1st, 2020
Stillwater, New Jersey
It will be a wonder if the five of us survive what is to come. We have undertaken a dangerous, but necessary task. I often think if I was crazy in coming up with it. Are we really to be the historians of the future? Does that even make sense? We must recover what information we can, from whatever it can be recovered from. The quill and ink, the typewriter, the PC; replaced now, by a jury-rigged laptop with a small, reverse-engineered battery pack and solar panel charger. I feel strangely optimistic and yet, at the same time, I feel terrible unease. Not because I am leaving the safety of these parts, but because of what I will find. Make no mistake, I do not fear them, the living dead, the Creepers, no, for I am smarter than they. Their only advantage is in number. I will kill them when I can, but their end is not our top priority . . . ours is. The soft scar tissue is rather bothersome. Must keep them out of the sun.