by Sean Shake
“Then not long after that, they somehow send these creatures down all over the world. And they start attacking us. They start attacking each other too. Which is confusing. When I was getting the hell out of Dodge, one was about to attack me, then two others crashed into it and they started fighting, losing interest in me.
“Fuckin strange.
“Yeah I said fuckin, FTC. What you gonna do, fine me?
“Anyway, so those creatures started going around attackin things. Attackin each other, attackin people. Even sometimes attackin structures, although not with anything you could rightly call reason. They don’t look to be trying to take out resources. They just seem to have something against buildings. Especially concrete ones. No one knows why. They seem to leave the brick ones alone. That’s weird. Unfortunately my little hideaway here isn’t made of brick.
“It’s made a fucking concrete.
“Like I said, didn’t exactly prepare for this scenario.
“So, you’re pretty much caught up to what the rest of us know.
“There’s ships in New York, probably aliens, maybe demons, maybe angels, who knows. Anyway, and they sent these things out to fight us and to fight each other. Oh yeah, and we tried to nuke the ships above New York, of course, being true red-blooded Americans.
“It didn’t work.
“On the plus side, the aliens didn’t retaliate. They just kept on floating there like nothing had happened. Fuckin weird if you ask me.
“But no one did.
“So there you go, that’s the short of it. And pretty much the long of it, come to think of it.”
“Oh,” the caller said simply, stunned.
“Yeah, ‘oh’. My recommendation? Go find someplace to hide. Hell if you been safe out on some lake or wherever the hell you were fishing for this long, you might want to go back there.”
“I was fishing out around Manitou Island.”
“Island? Where the hell you calling from?”
“Leland. In Michigan.”
“Well mister, I’d suggest getting somewhere safe as soon as you can. Back on your boat, maybe.”
Silence.
“Hello?” the host, Mark, said.
After another several seconds, “Looks like we lost our friend from Michigan. Hope he’s okay. Makes me wonder what the hell kind of radio he was using to pick me up. Leland’s at least two hundred miles from here. Shit, maybe I have this power jacked up too high. Don’t want to fry my own brain with microwaves. In fact, let me turn it down a bit.”
The station turned to static.
The sudden cessation of voices filling the truck’s cabin was stunning. I looked over at Emma, and she looked at me.
Somehow her look unnerved me even more.
“Why was that so creepy?” Abigail asked.
I scanned through more channels, but found nothing. “How are there no other people broadcasting?” I grunted.
“At least we know those ships are only over New York,” Abigail said.
“What does that matter?” I said. “The ships may only be there, but those ships haven’t attacked anyone. It’s the creatures that have attacked people. And they’re apparently everywhere. Apparently turning us into them.”
“I was just trying to cheer us up,” she said sharply.
“False cheer can get you killed.”
“And what exactly are you, anyway?” Abigail asked.
My eyes involuntarily flicked down to my blackened hands. Before I could reply, she went on.
“Special forces? Navy seal? Assassin? Or hell, are you a ninja?”
“Do I look like a ninja?” I said, only remembering I was wearing a ninja suit after the words already left my lips.
“No,” Abigail replied.
I glanced back at her.
She was trying to suppress a grin.
“Funny,” I said.
“And we’re heading toward Cleveland,” she added worriedly. “Do we really want to go toward population centers? It seems like a bad idea. It sounded like that guy who was broadcasting was a prepper on a mountain in the wilderness somewhere. Maybe we should find someplace like that, away from everyone.”
The idea of running and hiding didn’t appeal to me. But, I wasn’t used to fighting aliens or demons, or whatever they were. So maybe that was the smartest course of action. Find somewhere to wait it out.
I looked to my hands again.
But wait it out for what?
The military already gave it their all, and hadn’t made a dent.
On the radio, the guy, Mark—for some reason his name stuck in my head—had said shotgun slugs hadn’t hurt the machine ones.
And yet I had killed one of those things. With my bare hands.
True, it had been—I think—a hellspawn, but I had seen a hellspawn hurt a— what had he called it? A terminator?
A terminator which had seemed unfazed by our truck running into it.
I thought back to the prison infirmary, stabbing the splintered mop handle into that guard’s eye; that slit that mimicked an eye.
I tried to think if I’d seen the aliens injured in any other way.
I had seen them fighting and injuring each other in the prison, as I stood in the stairwell, looking through the window in the door into A-wing.
The alien elephant back at the prison looked like it had killed a few of the hellspawns, but it hadn’t been injured by plowing down the prison gate.
Stymied, yes. Injured, no, not at all.
So they could hurt us, and they could hurt each other, but we couldn’t hurt them.
Except, from my experience, it seemed I could hurt them.
It was always dangerous to think yourself special, above everyone else, but I had impossible-to-ignore evidence that something was different about me.
I got a sudden flash of Gabriel, my cellmate, dying in my arms, his bloody lips as he said, ‘Be the sword and shield.’
I thought of swallowing the stone to keep it away from the guards.
I thought of the blade extending from my fist, the small disc on my other hand appearing and disappearing as I clenched the steering wheel.
‘Be the sword and shield,’ he had said.
And that wasn’t all, was it? What else was it that he had said? ‘Be the defender and the…’
And the something.
“Gage?” Abigail asked, since I hadn’t answered her question.
Be the sword and shield, I thought.
“We’re going to get supplies.”
20
The parking lot was full.
Abigail had directed me toward a nearby Walmart, complaining that we were too close to the city, and that there’d be too many people.
She was apparently right.
“Wow,” Abigail said sarcastically. “Looks pretty empty.”
“But I don’t see any people,” I said. “Just vehicles.”
I guided the monster truck through the parking lot, feeling uncomfortable, and not just because of the tight confines.
There was something about this place that set alarm bells off in my mind.
Everything looked too predictably chaotic. Like a movie set.
There’s something called the clustering illusion. If you ask a person to draw a random sequence of dots on a piece of paper, what they actually end up drawing isn’t random at all, it just looks random to them.
True randomness, you get clusters, not an even distribution.
And this was an even distribution.
“What are you doing?” Abigail asked from the backseat, as I pulled the truck to a stop and shifted into reverse.
“Something isn’t right. We’re getting out of here.” I’d learned to trust my instincts in situations like this, lacking any other source of intel.
“We haven’t gotten supplies yet,” she whined.
“What do you see?” Emma asked.
I looked over my shoulder and backed the truck up, having to go slow. Never having piloted something so tall,
I was afraid I was gonna run over one of the cars and get stuck. “There’s something off about this place. It feels like a set-up. Like a trap.”
That’s when the man with the gun appeared.
21
“Shit!” I shouted, slamming on my brakes, partially to avoid running him over, mostly so he didn’t open fire.
He trained his AR-15 on the truck, and shouted something that—with the windows up and engine rumble—I couldn’t make out.
“What is he saying?” Emma asked.
Abigail started to roll down her window.
“Don’t!” I scolded.
“But maybe he’s—”
“I don’t care. Keep the windows up and the doors shut and locked.” I put the truck in drive and started to go forward.
Like ants from a flooded nest, more people with guns started appearing. From inside and under cars, from bushes and hopping down from trees.
They came from everywhere.
They were shouting at me, and I heard some of them yelling stop.
But you don’t stop. You never stop. Not if you can still go.
I took a corner near the front of the Walmart, and came to a blockade of three cars spanning across the road and all the way up to the chain-link fence of the garden center.
Behind it several men had their guns trained on us.
Behind us, two cars pulled up side-by-side, boxing us in.
If this Walmart had had weapons, they were likely all gone now.
I revved the engine, waiting to see what the men behind the cars would do.
“Maybe they just want to be friends,” Abigail said.
I laughed bitterly. “Great way to make friends. Ambush them and hold them at gunpoint.”
“But—”
Then there was a gunshot.
I didn’t know where it came from, or if they’d hit us, but that was my cue to get the hell out of here.
I slammed the gas and went straight for the line of cars, praying we didn’t get thrown sideways into the garden center.
Its fence was no prison fence, but this truck was no alien elephant.
Abigail shrieked from the back, throwing herself against the seat and grabbing the seatbelt, trying to get it on herself before we collided with the line of cars.
From beside me Emma cursed and braced herself.
And then we hit the barricade of cars—and they were cars, luckily, not SUVs or trucks—the men who had been guarding them diving to the side and out of the way.
We ran up them like a ramp and flew briefly into the air—straight and true, thankfully—then landed hard on our front wheels, a brief scraping sound as the fender collided with the pavement.
But the truck kept going.
I floored it toward the exit, which was unobstructed.
More gunshots went off, and these ones did hit us.
I felt one of the rear tires go flat, and I cursed.
They were damn big targets.
I made it out of the parking lot and onto the street, and turned left, heading back the way we’d come.
“Where now?” Emma asked.
I didn’t answer, looking behind in the mirrors to see if we were being pursued.
“Shit,” I muttered.
We were being pursued all right. A convoy of at least twenty cars poured out of the parking lot behind us. There were even five or six people on motorcycles, which I thought was rather stupid. Unless you happened to be a super sexy superhuman who loved to get naked while ridding the world of zombies, riding a motorcycle in the apocalypse seemed like a bad idea.
One of the motorcycles, a sport bike, sped past all the other bikes and cars and caught up to us almost instantly, the rider training his gun on us and firing into one of the tires.
Bad idea or not, they were fast as hell.
And also vulnerable.
I swerved the truck into the motorcycle, which seemed to take him by surprise.
But as we collided, instead of knocking him off, he leapt from his bike and onto the driver-side running board, grabbing with his left hand onto the side mirror.
“Goddammit! Fucking monkey!”
He started to raise his gun and without thinking I clenched my right fist and punched the glass.
The black blade pierced the glass and into his left shoulder.
I thought I heard a high-pitched scream of pain, then he fell from the truck and slammed into the blacktop and went rolling.
One of the other cars tried to swerve around him but it looked like they didn’t quite manage it.
That’s what you got for fucking with me.
I returned both hands to the wheel, 9 and 3, and focused on the road ahead.
Unfortunately, now both tires on the left side of the truck were flat, and it was getting hard to keep the truck going in a straight line.
“You have really bad luck with vehicles,” Abigail said from the backseat.
“No shit.” I was just waiting for them to hit the gas tank next.
Still, I kept the pedal to the floor, increasing our speed as the caravan pursued us.
“How are we gonna get away from them?” Emma asked.
“I’m open to ideas.”
“We could steal a boat!” Abigail said. “Go to Lake Erie.”
“And then what?” I asked. “We’d be sitting ducks.”
“Not if we crossed into Canada. My grandparents live there.”
“It’s—” Emma began, but then something slammed into us from behind.
In my side-view mirror, I saw a truck nearly as tall as ours behind us.
It was getting damn hard to keep our truck steady, not being able to grip the wheel tightly for fear of a blade shooting out of my fist.
Already the disc was hovering above my left hand as I white-knuckled the steering wheel, but that at least seemed harmless.
The truck rammed us again, and we started to go sideways.
The girls screamed, I cursed, gripping the wheel hard with both hands, the blade shooting out from my fist and into the instrument cluster again, and as I tried to right us that blade slashed through the overhang above the gauges and cut off a bit more of the shifter.
But for all that, we were done for.
Instead of righting, we went fully sideways, and instead of skidding, the truck caught on its wheels and all our forward momentum propelled us into the air and a roll.
There was a moment of peace, of weightlessness, as up became down, and we spun through the night.
Then we slammed hard onto the blacktop on the roof of the truck and everything went black.
22
When I came to, I was in a vehicle, though not our vehicle.
I tried to keep my body relaxed, like it would’ve been while I was unconscious, and slowly let my eyes open to slits, keeping tension out, not letting myself squint, not giving any signs that I was no longer unconscious.
A blurry picture appeared, and I saw I was in the back of a van.
I opened my eyes a little wider, as it was dark enough back here that no one would be able to see this.
There didn’t seem to be anyone with me.
I was facing the back doors, so I couldn’t see the driver, or if there was a passenger, but I didn’t sense anyone else in the back with me.
I let my head fall to the side, and then slowly moved it so I could see the front of the van, scanning the back of the van in the process and confirming I was alone back here.
The passenger seat was also empty.
That was pretty ballsy of them, to take me alone.
Then I realized that my hands and feet were bound.
To my surprise, the person driving the van was a woman. A big burly woman, but still a woman. Perhaps her size and butchness prevented her from becoming a sex toy for these bastards.
The truck took a turn, and then several more slow speed ones, and I felt we must be back in the Walmart parking lot.
That meant I couldn’t have been out too long, unless they lingered at
the crash site, which seemed unlikely given the aliens that were out there.
Where were Emma and Abigail? I wondered.
If they’d hurt them, if they’d laid a finger on them…
I clenched my fists and there was a sudden pressure on my lower back from the disc on my left hand followed by a vague sound as the blade extended from my right fist and pierced the van’s floor.
I quickly unclenched my fists, and wondered if I could impale myself with that blade, wondered if the disc—the shield—would have protected me, seeing as it was closer to my body.
Luckily my fist had been angled away from me and into the floor, so I didn’t have to find out.
The van came to a stop, the woman in the front got out and shut the door, and I began to hear voices.
Then the back doors opened, and I let my eyes shut before they could see me.
An instant later I felt a light shined onto my face.
“He’s still out. Keep your gun trained on him in case he wakes up.”
“That a ninja outfit he’s wearing?” a different voice asked.
“Just help me get him out of here.”
Hands grabbed my ankles and pulled me from the van.
I kept myself limp, hoping like hell they didn’t just let me fall and slam my head into the pavement.
I had something like that happen to me before, but that time I had been wearing a helmet.
Luckily I soon felt hands on my shoulders, and I was carried from the back of the van.
I heard more people talking, and what sounded like a woman crying.
I wanted to open my eyes, to see if it was Emma or Abigail, but didn’t dare take the chance.
I wasn’t going to give up the advantage I had right now of them thinking I was unconscious.
“How’s Hunter?” someone asked from nearby.
It sounded like it came from one of the ones who was carrying me.
In answer there was only silence, and in my mind’s eye I saw someone shaking their head.
Perhaps Hunter was the one on the motorcycle who’d tried to kill us, the one who I’d stabbed.