Authors: Brian Hodge
“Hey,” she said quietly, for Solomon’s ears only.
“What?” he grunted.
“
I
could love you,” Erika said, with as much feeling and sincerity as she could fake for the moment, and the smooth, gliding rhythm of his steps faltered. “What is it about me that reminds you of her so much?” He stopped in his tracks, as if all else around them were forgotten. “Do I look like her, is that it? Your mother?”
His grip around her waist loosened. When she turned around to face him, smiling sweetly, he was nearly devoid of expression, just a whisper of bemusement.
And then she struck. With the lighter in hand, clamped between her fingers to stick out like a spike on a pair of brass knuckles, she swung her fist. Straight at his left eye. Its branding iron tip found a home, punching into the socket with a squelch like the popping of a tough grape.
Peter Solomon screamed in pain. He reeled backward, clawing at the blue plastic peg jutting from his skull. Erika pushed away, sprinting toward Jason and Diane at the truck, but Solomon’s recovery was nothing short of incredible. By the time he’d yanked the lighter from his eye socket and flung it aside, she was only two-thirds of the way toward cover. By the time she reached the front of the truck, he’d already regained use of his Uzi and was firing after her. But the loss of an eye had surely distorted his depth perception, and the burst of fire rattled along the grill, blowing out fountains of radiator steam. Then she sprawled behind cover, safe now, hugging Jason and Diane as Caleb got off a shot at the now-vulnerable Solomon.
Still, nothing short of incredible. Solomon ducked and ran, firing one-handed as slugs pinged off the top of truck four, then sending Caleb dropping to the ground with a burst that whizzed close overhead.
Solomon’s gun emptied just as he dodged behind the fifth truck, and he tossed it aside. Ignoring everyone clustered around him, he reached into a pocket on the thigh of his jungle pants and withdrew a small plastic rectangle, half the size of a TV remote. He activated the unit by thumbing a slide switch recessed into its side.
Then depressed the single button centered on top.
* *
Two sides, two barricades, and a whole lot of killing field in between. Travis tried to figure out how to close the distance without losing body parts. The bullets he could deal with, as he and his men could shoot back, but they dared not get in range of those pipe bombs. Trying to get their truck rolling like a battering ram wasn’t much of an option; its flattened tires would slow down their takeoff.
Until someone came up with an idea, it looked like a standoff.
And then things got weird, with Solomon and Erika wandering right out into the open. Solomon—
damn
him!—was letting a dozen chances at wasting Jason and the old man just slip past. It looked as if he’d forgotten every objective they’d agreed upon in favor of his own agenda…so much, in fact, that he somehow let Erika turn the tables on him.
Solomon’s losing it.
When he came sprinting back to them, his left eye was a pulpy ruin. Muttering to himself, he toyed with something he’d pulled from a pocket, which looked like a miniature garage door opener.
Their truck’s windshield exploded from its frame; pebbles of glass avalanched down as Travis crouched by the rear tire. Solomon appeared not to have even noticed, despite a half-dozen nicks the glass made on his face and hands. Travis lunged at him, letting his riot gun hang by its strap for a moment as he latched onto Solomon’s shoulders to shove him to the ground.
“Solomon, you fucking idiot, get your ass dow—”
He’d never been hit so hard in his life. Solomon sucked air and swatted him away with a backhand that nearly unhinged his jaw. He flopped to the ground—upright one second, flat on his back the next—the side of his face like one huge aching tooth.
He could only watch what happened next.
Pit Bull shot upright, living up to his name and moving so fast he could probably outrun bullets. If Travis had had ten Pit Bulls instead of thirty losers, the battle would be long over, and by now they’d be kicking back, watching Diane and Jason and the rest roasting over open fires.
Pit Bull swung his stained, smelly club in a vicious arc, the rat trap whickering in the air, and despite Solomon’s dodge, it still glanced off the side of his head. Red bloomed in the platinum of his hair. Pit Bull drew the club back as Solomon buckled, then thrust it forward like a spear. The steel jaws snapped shut over Solomon’s left collarbone.
Solomon’s one eye blazed with so much rage, so much madness, that Travis, just now picking himself up, feared to look into it. Solomon twisted at the end of the club like a fish on a gaff, his chest and shirt collar a spill of red. With a roar he pulled away, leaving scraps of skin and tatters of cloth dangling from the trap’s jaws.
Tireless, Pit Bull swung again, but this time Solomon caught the end of the club with both hands, yanking it from his grasp as easily as taking a stick from a child, then booting him away with a stomp to the belly.
Dropping into a wrestler’s crouch, Pit Bull charged.
Solomon reversed his grip and took a murderous swing at the truck.
The fender staved in, into a crude V-shape, and with a splintering sound the club cracked in two. He whirled and held the jagged handle in his right hand, shoving it forward.
As Travis watched, everything else forgotten, he realized with a sick dread that he didn’t know which of them to root for.
Solomon punched the stake into Pit Bull’s middle, shattering ribs and skewering the liver and bathing his hand in blood. Pit Bull, sunlight reflecting from his sweat-slick head, howled, battered at Solomon with his fists as Solomon stooped to retrieve the club’s heavier half. Blood drenched the ground beneath their feet, and Solomon gave an airy grunt, straining, lifting Pit Bull up until his boot tips barely touched the ground. Solomon drove the other half of the club home, ramming it into his belly, until the tip burst through Pit Bull’s back and he gave one last agonized yelp and fell still.
Solomon pitched him aside, and he collapsed to the ground with a thud. His head rolled to one side, scalp speckled red, and his eyes focused, focused, seeking Travis. Finding him.
“Travis,” he whispered as his eyes dulled. Remaining open.
Ah fuck,
Travis thought, and wished he could crawl over and shut those horribly staring eyes, too loyal to be accusing, too childlike to exhibit the anger of an adult. But he dared not move. Even their enemies behind the other truck had stopped plinking at them, seeming to realize that something heavy duty had just gone down over here.
He risked a look up at Solomon and wished he hadn’t.
Then felt the ground tremble beneath him.
* *
The summer air felt as edgy as a December gale in the raw, open pits of his wounds. Not a problem, though. Wounds would heal, and men of valor always got along fine with one eye. Gods, too. Odin, the one-eyed god who’d traded the other for wisdom…? He could identify.
Flesh and blood and the weakness of mercy…it was time to shed the last of everything that held him back. He felt the inhibitions collapsing within him, like the walls of a building undergoing demolition, clouds of dust billowing from the rubble from which he would rise. In the beginning was darkness, and it was good. Dust, blotting out the sun. Good. Darkness. Good. Without sunlight, everything died. Good. He was the god of war and
the angel of death. He had the tools, the talent, the vision and the will.
Solomon was popping another magazine into his Uzi when the air fell still.
He would find
her
first, and then—
The ground.
* *
Her relief at finding sanctuary behind the truck lasted only until Solomon ducked behind his own. Erika had hugged and kissed Jason, thrown an arm around Diane, and glanced back at Caleb, who, from the ground, gave her a thumbs-up.
“That was beautiful,” Jason said. “Crazy dangerous, but beautiful.”
“I was sooo scared,” she said, catching her breath.
Then it hit her—a quick, searing pain deep in her belly. She gasped and bent double, clutching her hands over the spot, thinking for a moment that it was just a cramp. Then she knew better. Knew that Solomon really
had
left something inside her with that hateful metal probe. Because Peter Solomon didn’t bluff.
Jason was clutching her shoulders, his dirtied and bloodied face in hers. “Erika? What is
it?”
“Don’t know,” she gasped, then winced as another quasar of pain settled in the pit of her stomach.
Don’t let him worry, or we’ll
all
die in another minute.
“Just cramps or something. I’ll be okay. Just let me get back to those trees…”
Doubled over on her knees, tears welling in her eyes, Erika began to crab over to her original hiding place. She swatted Jason’s hands away when he tried to help her. The pain of doing that was even worse than the pain in her womb.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, even this soon knowing it to be a lie. But she’d kept Solomon’s violation of her a secret this long, and there would be no good to come from sharing it now. “Jay, just see this through.”
She had no way of knowing what he’d done, but the remote unit Solomon had triggered was the companion of the piece he’d used on her in the Omni. A microwave pulse activated the microchip circuitry in a disc the size of a watch battery that clung within her body. This, in turn, detonated a small explosion, infinitesimal compared to those that had been going off all around, but of sufficient strength to rip a hole the size of a quarter in her uterine wall. Quack abortionists often managed the same result with crude tools and ignorance: severe internal bleeding.
Erika waved off Caleb’s attempts to aid her and made it to the shade of the trees and underbrush just as the lap of her jeans began to stain with blood. She curled onto her side, hoping against hope that she could squeeze herself tightly enough to hold it all together inside. But she felt herself going, draining from within.
The ground trembled then, and even the thoughts of death were stayed. Because it all made sense, at long last. The pieces of the puzzle her life had become for the past year clicked together. She felt a bittersweet sense of peace in knowing that she hadn’t gotten it wrong after all, that this was the place they were all meant to be. Her life had been directed toward it, aimed at it.
The power of the land, the New Madrid Fault.
If they all had to die here, consumed by the land, to make sure the world to come was scrubbed of Peter Solomon and Travis Lane and the worst of their followers, so be it. It wouldn’t have been her first choice, but some things were beyond her. She could live with it. Die by it.
Feeling cold, she spread one hand over the earth and curled her fingers until they pierced the grass, the soil. It trembled again in response, and she kissed the ground.
The big one was coming…and I knew about it all along.
The tensions building up over the nearly two centuries since the faultline’s last great outburst; rifts of earth and fractures of rock, grinding against one another miles below the surface…
Their time had come at last.
* *
A million birds exploded from the tops of trees, as far as he could see, dark clouds winging to the sky, then the ground shuddered as if it could no longer tolerate what had happened upon it.
It
had
to be the ground. Because, as Jason glanced around, everyone seemed to have felt it. Everything, even the air, came to an abrupt halt.
Silence, epic and pregnant.
Then the rumbling, like a far-off train, and the thunder of a summer storm miles away and rolling across the plains. Distant. Faint. Then growing in volume, swelling in intensity, rushing in like a runaway locomotive powered by a tornado. It overtook the world and worlds beyond, unbearable.
The earth, always so solid before, became a malevolent beast beneath him, rising like an awakening dragon disturbed in its lair. Trees near and far swayed, and he pitched to the ground, along with everyone else. He clung to the land while it heaved beneath him, and there was nothing else.
A tremendous rending deafened him, like a sharp crack of thunder overhead. He looked up in time to see the overpass split across its width, clouds of concrete dust fogging the air, and then the entire structure collapsed with the roar of a bomb blast.
Far across both lanes of I-55, a fissure opened in the earth. He heard a piercing whistle; water, then sand, spewed into the air in a filthy geyser. Another rent opened far across the fields to the right, this one disgorging a volcano of black steaming mud.
Everything he looked at was a quivering blur, as the fury of an enraged earth seemed to possess no limits. Another fissure appeared, this one running a parallel path between his position and that of Travis and his men. It began on the highway, ripping the asphalt apart, then cutting a jagged path across the open ground. Walls of earth pulled apart, clots of soil tumbling down their sides as escaping gasses hissed from its depths.
Jason hugged the ground. You’d have to be crazy to try moving around during this. And yet he looked back at the sound of a loud grunt and saw Caleb…
* *
He must have been pitched off his feet once for every yard closer he got to the underbrush. Finally he found that by doubling over like an ape and keeping his hands near the ground, he could scrabble along without tumbling around too badly.
Caleb slipped and slid his way back to where he’d seen Erika crawl in and collapse. Leaves fluttered down from the shivering branches as she lay on her side, the front and back of her pants coated a bright and terrible red. It had soaked down as far as mid-thigh. Caleb dropped beside her, cradling her in his arms and stroking a callused hand across one damp cheek.
“Aw girl,” he moaned, “what’s happened to you?” He felt the hot squeeze of fear locking his throat up. “You been shot?”
Erika opened her eyes, full of pain, so much pain, so much loss. She twitched her head no. “But he got me anyway, Caleb…love you, Caleb.”