“Hey there,” said the man with the gun. He brushed his dirty blond hair over his scalp and spat on the ground. “Where you headed?”
Jeanie didn’t answer. She kept the shotgun pointed square at his chest.
“We don’t mean no harm,” said the blond man. “Just wonderin’ if you got any food or water to share.”
The other man turned to the van. He was older than the blond man, with a bushy black beard.
Cora curled into a ball in the passenger seat, peeking from beneath her hands.
“Don’t look at her,” said Jeanie.
“Earl don’t mean nothin’ by it,” said the blond man. “He just ain’t seen no young’uns in a month er so.”
“Earl,” said Jeanie. Her eyes shifted back and forth between the two men. “If you look at my daughter one more time I’m going to kill you.”
Earl’s eyes were large and wild. He flicked at the stubble on his throat with the blade and then patted it against his palm and spat.
The blond man took a step toward Jeanie.
“I can’t be responsible for what Earl does, ma’am,” he said. “Since the world ended he’s been high every day. Not much else to do.”
“You tell him to stop looking,” said Jeanie. “I don’t care what he’s on.”
The blond man laughed, and Earl laughed too.
“You can’t blame us. I’m sure you’ve seen ’em too. All them bodies wrapped in vines and growin’ mushrooms out their eyes. It’s every man for himself.”
“Just let us through,” said Jeanie. “We’ve got family down the road.”
“You talkin’ about Kelso Station?” said the blond man. “We’ve been tryin’ to get to Kelso for weeks. They ain’t lettin’ nobody through.”
Earl took another tentative step toward the van.
“Don’t fucking look at her, Earl!” yelled Jeanie.
“Or what?” The blond man grinned. “There’s two of us. I’ve got a gun too.”
“I’ve got a bigger one,” said Jeanie.
“Don’t listen to her, Earl. I got this.”
Earl was fidgety. He looked at the blond man and then at Jeanie. He licked at the patch of hair below his mouth, took a long, hard look at Cora and then took another step toward the van.
Jeanie swung the shotgun in his direction and pulled the trigger. The shot sent him tumbling into the sage. She brought the barrel back toward the blond man but he fired twice and she fell to the road.
“Mommy!” Cora screamed.
The blond man stood over Jeanie and squeezed the trigger again. The gun clicked on an empty chamber and he looked at it and thumbed the hammer and it clicked again. He cussed and kicked Jeanie where she lay, ran to Earl and yanked the blade from the sagebrush beside him. He stomped across the road with the blade in his hand and kneeled over Jeanie, but there was another blast and he fell backward in a mist of blood.
Jeanie appeared in the driver window and pounded on the glass. Cora reached across and pulled the handle and Jeanie hauled herself onto the seat and locked the door. She groaned and choked, and a dark stain bloomed from the belly of her shirt.
“The gun,” said Jeanie. Her voice was nothing more than a raspy whisper. “Give it to me.”
Cora handed her the Beretta, but it dropped from her weak hands and clattered on the floorboards.
The blond man was righting himself against the barricade, his leg a mess of exposed flesh and bone. He had the long blade in his hand and turned to the van, his eyes like a feral dog. He teetered on his good leg and then wheeled at the van with the blade in the air.
“Pick up … the gun,” said Jeanie, barely.
Cora was already fishing for the pistol before Jeanie finished speaking. She found it underneath the brake pedal and pulled it up with the barrel pointing the wrong way.
“No,” said Jeanie, and pawed at the gun. “Careful.”
The blond man was now banging at the window with the hilt of the blade.
“Let’s get this over with, ladies,” he shouted through the glass. He spat when he talked, and the blood on his hands smeared wide, red streaks on the window. “See this knife? It ain’t just fer killin’. I’m gonna carve you into steaks and fuckin’ eat you.” He banged on the window again and a crack forked out in a star pattern.
Jeanie’s head slumped against the headrest and her eyes rolled back for a second. Blood was gathering in the corners of her mouth. She snapped her eyes open as if awakening from a dream.
“Shoot,” said Jeanie. “Now!”
Cora raised the Beretta at the man in the window, her hand shaking. She closed her eyes and cried.
“Both hands,” said Jeanie. “Do it.”
Cora put her other hand on the grip and looped her finger over the trigger.
Something dark filled the windshield.
“Mommy, look!”
A turkey vulture had landed on the hood. Its talons clacked on the metal as it bent its bald head over the windshield and peered in. There was a sound on the roof as though another had landed. Then another.
The blond man had stopped pounding and was now waving his knife at the birds.
“Mommy, over there!”
There were more vultures perched along the barricade, maybe a dozen. Some waddled across the road and pecked at Earl’s corpse, but most seemed interested in the blond man.
“Go away,” he yelled. He swiped at one that was eyeing him from the roof.
A few more gathered behind him, and one took a brave nip at the blond man’s wound. He screamed and stabbed at the bird, but it only launched into the air as another one landed beside him and gobbled at a hanging piece of flesh. The man swiped again, and this time he lost his balance and fell hard onto the road. This was the signal the others had been waiting for. The birds from the barricade hopped to the ground and hustled over to the man, hissing and growling at each other for a spot on the kill. The man tried to crawl underneath the van, screaming and weeping, but was quickly enveloped by a writhing dome of black feathers.
“Oh god, my eyes!” he screamed.
Cora dropped the gun in Jeanie’s lap and lay against her chest. Jeanie rested her hand weakly on the girl’s shoulder.
“Cora,” said Jeanie. Her voice was low and wet.
“Mommy, no,” she cried. “You can’t die too.”
There was another thud on the roof as more vultures arrived. The man was now shrieking hysterically.
“Listen,” said Jeanie. “After they’re g-gone,” she choked the last word. “Clear the road.”
“I’m not doing it without you. No!”
“Listen. Shhh. Twenty m-miles.”
“No!” Cora screamed into Jeanie’s chest.
“Twenty m-miles to Uncle Vernon.”
“I can’t drive, Mommy, I’ll crash! I can’t do it!”
“Yes you c-can. I love y—”
Jeanie made a choking sound, and her eyes fell to the window as if she were staring thoughtfully across the plains toward the dark and faraway hills.
Cora lay on her mother’s hard and silent chest until sweat began to stream from her forehead. The temperature was rising inside the van, and Cora was feeling faint. She drank the rest of the water from her canteen and refilled it with the water they had scavenged. She fiddled with the air conditioning knob, but realized she would need to turn the engine on for it to work. She searched Jeanie’s blood-soaked pockets for the keys, and found one that matched the emblem on the back of the van. She placed it in the ignition, turned it and the engine started. Cool air began to blow through the vents.
“I did it, Mommy,” she said.
After an hour the turkey vultures began to lose interest in Earl and the blond man. One by one they launched into the sky, their bald heads matted with gore. Cora picked up the Beretta and opened the van door, pointing the gun all around her with her arms fully outstretched like in a TV cop drama. She saw what was left of the blond man and quickly squeezed her eyes shut.
She tu
cked the gun into her pants like her mother had done and began to tug at the fence posts blocking the road. She managed to drag one out into the desert, but when she let go, it left a painful splinter in her palm. She pulled the next one and her hand slipped. Another splinter. Cora shook her hand painfully and narrowed her eyes at the barricade.
“Stupid woodpile,” she said.
She untied the gas can from the back of the van and shook out what remained on top of the bone-dry wood. She found the cigarette lighter in her mother’s pocket and lit a spot where the gas had soaked in. Cora stumbled back as the fire roared to life, and soon she was standing in front of the biggest bonfire she had ever seen.
The wood burned hot and fast, and it wasn’t long before most of it was reduced to a chalky ash, stirring in the desert wind. She folded a blanket over Jeanie’s bloody lap so she could sit there and see over the dashboard. She knew she had to pull the shifter, but she wasn’t sure where to land it and what the letters stood for. She pulled it down one stop and the van began to roll backward. She shrieked and shifted it back into park and the van jolted to a halt.
“Mommy, how do I get it to go?” she said, pointing down the road.
She saw the “D” three stops down and tugged it all the way. The van rolled forward, and she gripped the steering wheel with both hands like a racecar driver and steered the van over the smoldering ashes.
“I did it, Mommy. Just like you said.” She held her mother’s hand, but the van began to veer off the road so she let go and righted the wheel again. She couldn’t reach the pedals though, and the van simply rolled by the power of its own torque.
The sun was now low in the sky, and Cora passed along an interminable straightaway so scoured and pitted by the desert sand that the tires whined and shook beneath her. The wind began to shift the van in the lane, and she sometimes drove down the broken yellow line to keep herself straight. She wondered if she had run the car too long back at the barricade and would run out of gas soon. She also wondered if there was anyone at the end of the road, or if they had just given up waiting.
She curled her mother’s arms around her lap, and the weight reassured her, as if she might wake up any moment and praise her for driving so far.
“Should I honk the horn, Mommy?”
She pressed the steering wheel and a short bleat rolled out into the desert. Cora smiled, but it faded quickly. She held her mother’s hand again, as if suddenly realizing she was alone and there was nobody around to hear the horn if she pressed it. There was a curve in the road, and when she made the turn it opened up into another straightaway, this one longer, flatter and sandier than the last.
The girl drove on. The sun shrank and faltered over the dried-out basin and a light blinked on the dash next to a symbol of a gas pump, but there were no gas pumps as far as she could see. She didn’t really know what twenty miles felt like, but she thought maybe with each sandy washout or brambling Joshua tree or crumbling rock formation that maybe a new mile had been reached.
Soon she began to cry. But as she did so, an object appeared in the distance: two white silos standing together like factory exhausts, piercing the desert monotony. There was a dark patch on the road and as she drew nearer, she saw it was another barricade like the one from before.
She could see at least four people scouting the line in the road, hurrying from their positions. She heard a shot, and then another, as if they were warning her to stop the van. Cora kept the wheel steady, but as the barricade drew closer she panicked and chucked the wheel toward the open desert and the van bounced into the sand and scrub and halted quickly in a shallow wash not more than a few feet from the road. She grabbed the Beretta and stood in the back of the van, watching as the people ran up the road with their weapons drawn. A young man’s face appeared in the driver’s window and then fell back. He looked confused at the corpse behind the wheel. He looked through the side window and disappeared once more.
“She’s got a gun,” he shouted.
Other faces popped into the side windows. A woman with braided red hair took a long look and then called out to the others.
“It’s a girl,” she said. “A young girl. Stand down.”
They backed off for a moment, and Cora sat in the back seat, petting the sides of the Beretta like a security blanket. The red-haired woman appeared again and called through the window.
“Honey, you need to put the gun down.”
Cora looked at the Beretta and shook her head.
“Are you like the people from before?” she said.
The woman turned and waved at the others.
“I don’t know what people you’re talking about. Are you alone?”
Cora’s face drew tight.
“No, my mommy is there, in the seat.”
The woman sidestepped to the driver window and stood there for a moment, looking in. Then she returned.
“Did your mommy bring you here?”
“Yes,” said Cora. “My daddy too, but he died in Badger. We’re looking for Uncle Vernon.”
The woman’s eyes widened.
“You said Vernon?”
“Yeah,” said Cora, “He’s a ranger. He’s my uncle.”
The woman backed away, and for a few minutes Cora was alone in the van. She kneeled by the console and held Jeanie’s limp hand, watching out at the people circling the barricade. After a while, a golf cart zipped down the road and over the sandy wash. A man stepped off the cart and ran to the van, unarmed except for a bottle of water. He peered inside with his hand cupped over his brow.
“Cora?” said the man.
He had a gray beard and large bushy eyebrows. He eyed the driver seat and his face washed of expression. Cora squinted at him, and then dropped the pistol. He looked like an older version of her father, but still hard to make out in the dim gloom of evening.
“Uncle Vernon?”
The man didn’t answer. He pulled the van door open and kneeled in the sand. He reached out and Cora stared, and seeing his face she tumbled toward him and wrapped her arms around his neck as if he were her own father.
“You made it,” he said softly. “You did great, Cora. You made it.”
Cora wept and held Vernon tight.
“Is it safe here?” She asked.
“Yes, you’re safe.”
“No vines or animals?”
Vernon lifted the girl and handed her the bottle of water.
“You’re safe here,” he repeated.
“Cross your heart?”
“Yes. Cross my heart.”
Vernon set the girl in the golf cart and drove around the barricade toward a wide two-story villa painted the same color as the dunes. The palm trees were cut down to stumps and the rose garden had been plowed under the dry and sterile sand. A man in a yellow coat was swiping at the ground with a drip torch, and in the air was the smell of burnt grass and freshly baked bread.
C.W. Blackwell was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, where he still lives today with his wife and two children. His passion is to blend poetic narratives with pulp dialogue to create strange and rhythmic genre fiction. He writes mostly dark fiction and weird westerns.
Nature’s Promise
by
Daniel Conyers
Man is not separate from nature. An entitled species will rot on a web of privilege.
The doe’s body was a speed bump in the desolate road. Eve begged Lawrence to stop the car, but the college polo champ responded with a chuckle and took another swig of cheap beer. The rest of the college kids in the car laughed as Eve protested. “Please, Lawrence. We might be able to help it.”
“We’re almost there. It’ll die and become food for something else,” Lawrence said.
Eve looked out the rear of the car. The sight of the doe’s limp body tightened her stomach. She could faintly make out its stomach rising and falling.
“I think it’s still alive,” she said.
“Lawrence, please stop,” Kathy said from the back s
eat.
Lawrence glanced at his roommate, Sam, sitting next to him. Sam shrugged his shoulders.
“Wouldn’t hurt,” Sam said.
Lawrence slammed his foot on the brake and put the car in reverse. The vehicle swayed on the dirt road, tumbling through mud and over mountains of dead leaves.
Tearful, Eve stumbled out of the car and knelt by the doe. Kathy and Sam appeared more eager to see the body than Lawrence was. Kathy squeezed Sam’s hand as they approached. Lawrence rolled his eyes and followed, dragging his feet through the mud.
The doe’s stomach had caved in where Lawrence’s tires had hit it. The animal stared into Eve’s eyes as she stroked its head. Its raspy breathing pierced her ears and echoed through the silent forest.
“Can we go now?” Lawrence asked.
“We can’t just leave it,” Eve said.
“Look at it this way: We did a predator a favor. Saved it a step.” Lawrence slipped back into the car and honked the horn.
Kathy put her hand on Eve’s shoulder. “There’s nothing we can do.”
The doe’s dying eyes followed Eve to the car. She watched the doe fade into the forest as Lawrence sped along the road as if late for a game.
Eve tried getting the image of the dying doe out of her head by flipping through her journal. She read through passages about the camping trip she was on, college, and her hopes for what she’d do after graduating.
“Anything interesting in there?” Kathy asked.
Sam took a sip of beer as he turned around from the front seat. “Probably just thinking about Professor Holton,” he said with a smile.
Eve smiled back and shut the journal. “How long till we get to the campground?”
“About that,” Lawrence said, “I thought we’d find our own.”
“Off road!” Sam cheered and tossed his empty beer can out the window.
“Are you sure that’s okay? Won’t the park rangers be looking?” Eve asked.
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