Terminus: A Novella of the Apocalypse (5 page)

Without a sound, the Terminal collapses at our feet.  We drag him through the doorway to stash his corpse beneath a bit of equipment.  Then we kick sand and pebbly debris onto the gelling pool of his blood, concealing it.

Immediately thereafter, she starts through the doorway and into the alley, but I stop her with an undeniable grip around her left upper arm, thus staying her knife hand.  Hissing, she spins to confront me.  Though her face remains flat, I can see question, anger and resentment in her eyes.  Once I bring her to a halt, I let go my grip before she changes her mind about gutting me with that big hunting blade.  I press my right forefinger to my lips and motion her close.

Into her ear, I whisper, “Something about that one bothers me.  He’s ragged.  Too ragged, even for The Clan.  He’s at the end of his tether.  Terminus would have killed him in another day, no matter what happened here.  No, he’s not a lead.  He’s bait.”  Her eyes widen.  She understands.  She nods.  “More will be coming through that doorway now, because the one we killed will never return to signal them all is well.  We messed up.  Time to move.”

We selected that doorway because the wall it penetrated is long and otherwise unbroken.  It would have made a nice barricade to put between us and them; we could have watched for followers along fifty meters in either direction.  Now, it will work against us the same way.  I point to the roof.

Overhead, the ceiling scrawls with catwalks.  We see an ascending ladder three open floors above.  It points to a closed hatch, which can only be a roof access.  So we climb breathlessly.

Before I drop the hatch behind us, watching the empty doorway three flights below, I see a shadow fall across it.  Lowering the lid until a thumb-width crack remains, I observe silently.  A mince of stabbing weapons proceed their rush, lashing out to either side of the opening.  Had we been standing there, we would be full of holes now.  Afterwards, perhaps a half dozen crows push through.  Like well-trained dogs, they pour into the maze of machinery and equipment inside the building to search every crevasse.  Cleverly, they leave one non-Terminal handler behind to guard the exit.

I drop the lid.  On cat-quiet feet, I make my way across the roof.

She has already started sliding along a high cable that crosses the alleyway like a zip line.  She hangs upside down from the bends of her elbows and knees.  She is fast.  I follow.  Nobody lingers within the alleyway below us.  This is a tactical mistake on the part of The Clan.  After all, few of them are professional Pre-Terminus soldiers or peace officers.  Most are accountants, dentists and clerks.  Housewives.  While they are now quite proficient trackers and killers, they are far from professional.

The cable dangles me perhaps ten meters above the pavement.  Three full floors.  At this height, I could survive the fall, but not without broken bones.

Halfway across the gap, movement in the doorway catches my attention.  The non-Terminal steps outside to turn his head both ways along the alley, scanning for evasion.  On an unspoken signal, we both halt our movement and silently watch the outcome of this intervention.  Once more, the crow scans the alleyway.  He or she pauses to read a colorful bit of Pre-Terminus graffiti etched across the brick wall behind the building.  That hooded head cocks curiously.  Another scan both ways.  Then back inside the structure.

Breathing easier now, we finish the traverse.  We clamor onto the opposite roof.  To my surprise and delight, she waits for me there behind the cover of a large ventilator.  Two heads are better than one, after all, and I am happy to see she understands this.

The Girl points across the rooftop in the same direction we had been headed.  She silently indicates we have successfully escaped the plant, and she insists we take advantage of this good fortune to disappear into the city.

I set my jaw.  I shake my head.

“I came here so The Priest could kill me, Girl,” I growl, suddenly enraged by the complete and utter disintegration of the world and, with it, my former happy life.  “That he failed pisses me off to no end.  Now I intend to kill The Guide.  He’s a maggot.  I want to crush him under my boot.  Go or stay.  Makes no matter to me, but I’m going that way.”  I point toward the entryway to the plant behind us, where I believe I will find the target in question.

Her eyes sparkle meanly.  She glances this way and that.  She ponders her choices.  Then, with a single curt dip of her chin, she acquiesces.  She will go with me.

I grin.  “I’m starting to like you, I think.”

Bent low, using our toes and the balls of our feet, we patter perhaps half a mile across the sprawling rooftop, climbing up and down to its various levels as required, until we achieve the far end of it all.  This abuts the same street servicing the plant we had just escaped, and we can see the gateway arch rising perhaps three blocks to our right.  I realize now how we missed it.  The top of it has torn away from one side so it dangles vertically along the farthest vertical support, taking the plant’s welcoming sign with it.  Even from here it seems like just another tangled bit of destruction leaned against the wall.

As expected, parked in the gap, I spy the panel truck that had stalked us from The Priest’s ruined cathedral.  I wonder what I will find within its cargo space.

Again, overconfidence will be The Guide’s ruination.  Only four Stranglers linger to keep guard, and these are all burn-outs, too exhausted from the Terminus agent to make proper work of the search.  I figure the Clan believes they have me trapped inside those walls, and they want me badly enough to commit every viable resource on hand to run me down.

They won’t stick with it forever, though.  By nightfall, they’ll decide I have escaped the sack, and they’ll disperse into the city again.

Using a standpipe, I climb down to the street.  The Girl follows.

Relying on afternoon shadows and the deteriorated minds of those four Terminal cases, we creep along until we stand less than five meters from the truck in the crux of the gateway support and the corner angle of a wall.  We wait, breathless, as I size the competition and determine our approach.

While I ponder, I admire the artwork spray-painted onto the sides of the truck.  It is circus-like and colorful.  In fact, replacing the garrotes and nooses for sparklers and tight-ropes, it might have been a circus truck.  Rather than indicate the approach of pleasant family entertainment, however, those images threaten with a ghoulish army of bloodthirsty Stranglers.  They would not distract happy children with baton-twirlers, dancers, and magicians; instead, they would capture, torture and murder any hapless victim caught before them.  Their joyful promises of violence and mayhem are proudly etched across the panels of the truck in all the colors of the rainbow.  Along the top of the display in a brilliant ribbon, they have emblazoned the title of their wicked troupe, “The Clan of the Immaculate Strangulation”.

Now I notice something odd.  For some strange reason, the nearest crow seems not to see us, though he stands facing us almost directly.  I notice something funny about his posture, too.

He stands feet slightly apart, knees crooked, hooded head tossed slightly backward, mouth open, eyes closed, and hands unseen.  Near his crotch, his tattered black robe agitates with an obvious reciprocating motion.  I smile.  I turn to The Girl, make a circle of my right fist and then jack it back and forth.

Without interrupting this obscene display, we simply stalk around this obviously distracted guard and then peer into the back of the truck.  Its rear door has been modified.  It is no longer of the sort that rolls up into the ceiling of the cargo bay.  Rather, it presents a flat panel with a standard hinged door set into it.  A permanent stair services it, climbing to a brief porch offering sufficient room for two men to stand shoulder to shoulder before the threshold.  I don’t have to wonder if the door is locked or not, because it’s cracked open.

THE GUIDE

On a motion, she follows me up the little stairway and through the door.  I push this open silently and enter into the darkened chamber beyond.  At my back, The Girl pushes the portal partially closed again, though she keeps her cautious eye to the crack for a time.

Inside, the cargo bay of the truck has been transformed into a sizeable office, replete with two smaller rooms, one clearly configured as a sleeping chamber and the other as a bathroom.  Sitting at a small desk positioned along the driver’s side wall of the cargo area, The Guide stares into a half dozen lighted monitors.  His fingers work a keyboard and the views change.  Apparently, he has outfitted all his trucks with an array of high-def cameras, and the non-Terminal cases in his command wear body cameras, mics and headphones.  With that same low, pinched voice I heard reciting poetry earlier, he instructs this one and that one to go here or there.

I touch The Girl’s left shoulder and point.  We creep across the carpeted floor.

Once I wrap my hands around the little man’s head, stifling his mouth and lifting his chin, she thrusts that impossibly huge knife across his throat and presses it close until a rivulet of blood runs along its edge.  The Guide’s eyes bulge.  He struggles to shake his head within my grip, and I hesitate to break his neck.  Something about his expression and his body language, which remains curiously relaxed, hints restraint.

Leaning close to his right ear, away from The Girl’s knife, I hiss, “One unhappy note from you, little bird, and she’ll cut off your head.  Got it?”

The Guide responds with a tremulous nod.  To pontificate, he lifts his hands away from the keyboard and raises them non-threateningly.  I relax my grips, but only slightly.  This is a trial run.  Likewise, she eases back with the blade.  When The Guide refrains from shouting the alarm, I take a step backward.  Though she clearly disapproves, The Girl follows.

We confront him this way when he turns in his chair to put the desk at his back, his hands clearly visible and relaxed atop the armrests.  The Guide smiles slyly while his right eye ticks.  I estimated correctly.  The Asian is psychotic, but lucid.

He chuckles through his nose, a noise I find disturbing.  He says, “Ha, you said ‘little bird’.  That’s proper.  That’s righteous.  You like my poetry?  ‘Little Bird’ is one of my favorites.  These days, we are all of us little birds, tossed from the nest, left to the mercy of a predatory planet.  Don’t you agree?”  He turns a lecherous leer on The Girl.  “And who is this little bird?  Huh?  A lover?  A girlfriend?  A wife, perhaps?”

At the mention of this taboo word, I strike him hard across his mouth.  The gesture is too fast even for me to stop it.

Rather than angering him, the blow seems to delight The Guide after it snaps his head to one side.  He smiles with bloody teeth.  “Right.  Right.  Right.  It’s a bad word for most men these days.  I get it.  My apologies to The Scientist.  You are The Scientist, aren’t you?  Of course you are.  The Scientist and his… Protégé.  Yes?  A better word, I think.  Safer.  Smarter.  You’re really smart, too.  Just like they say you are.  Oh, I’m not surprised.  Not really.  We’re all smart these days, but most of us have a different kind of smart.”  The Guide pauses his rattle and his eyes roll strangely back and forth between me and The Girl.  His already impossibly broad grin broadens.  I can see his blood-outlined back molars now.  Slyly, he adds, “I’m smart, too, you know.  Smarter, maybe.  Look behind me.”

I have already been watching.  That his Clan has returned to encircle the truck means nothing to me.  I have not come here for them.  I came for him.

He sees this in my eyes, I think, for his smile droops a bit.  His eyes bulge again, and his Asiatic face pales.  Pre-Terminus, The Guide was probably a low-echelon gang member, a foot soldier in one of those Chinese organizations that had once plagued the state since the nineteenth century.  Had the world kept turning as before, by now he would probably be dead or incarcerated, a sacrificial lamb cut short in a hit gone wrong or a failed drug deal.  He doesn’t seem so smart to me, really, because I could kill him easily, no matter what else happened next.

This thought has not occurred to him, perhaps.  Then that same broad grin returns to his face and he leans backward into his leather office chair.

“Oh, I get it.  You’re the suicidal type.  I guess that’s my mistake.  I thought you were the crusader type, instead.  We’ve been following you up the coast for months, you know.  Not that we had much trouble tracking your trail of dead bodies.  Like bread crumbs in the forest.  Ha!  I should write a poem about that!  Maybe I already did.  Did I?  I write so many, I sometimes have difficulty keeping them all organized.  Up here.”  The Guide taps the side of his head.  He sucks his tongue to clear his mouth of his own blood.  He swallows pointedly.  “Maybe it’s a good thing we took on extra work this year.  You know.  To pay the bills.  Oh?  You didn’t know The Clan of the Immaculate Strangulation has branched out into other enterprises.  Your ignorance is no surprise, really.  It’s something of a secret.  Do you mind?”  He gestures behind him at the array of monitors, keyboards and other controls.

When I nod, without fully turning he reaches behind him to zoom one of the cameras.  He says, “Look at them, Scientist.  My lovely Terminals.  Burn-outs, every one of them.  By the end of the year, most of them will be dead from brain-fry, and nothing I can do about it.  Oh, sure, I could hunt up replacements, but they’re hard to find these days, what with all the competition.  In fact, I’m no longer sure they’re worth the trouble.  The quality of available offerings has plunged.  I’ve been scraping the gutter for months just to keep the ranks filled.  No,” sighs The Guide authoritatively, returning his attention fully to me, “the future is in non-Terminals.  After all, there are enough broken minds out there to fit the need.  Most of them are suicidals like you, of course, and that makes them a bit difficult to handle.  No leverage, you understand.”

Again, he motions for freedom of movement.  Again, I nod.

This time, he reaches into a box resting atop the desk.  To my delight, The Girl has the knife under his chin again before he can thrust his fingers beneath the lid.  The Guide chuckles blackly, continues forward with this hand, though more thoughtfully now, and then he extracts a fat cigar, waggling this between his fingers to show how harmless it is.  Hissing angrily, The Girl retracts the knife and then rifles the remains of the desk.  Unsurprisingly, she finds no weapons.  As I said earlier, something about the Terminus agent drives us to use our hands.

After he offers me a cigar and I refuse, The Guide shakes his round Asian head with its close-cropped bang of hair, and he says, “A c-note.  That’s what this brand cost before the end of the world.  Now?  Free!  Not a bad deal, I suppose, but it takes the fun out of life, not having to hustle for it.  Don’t you agree?  Oh!  You don’t mind if I smoke.  Do you?  Of course you don’t!  No more worrying about cancer!  No more worrying about the mortgage!  The car payment!  Insurance!  Tuition for the k-,” he starts to say the k-word, but remembers that savage rap across the lips and catches himself with a smile.

Instead, he clips the rounded end of the butt, then puffs the cigar behind a lighter until its flat-end glows.  “Ah, that’s fine.  Are you thirsty?  No?  I have a hundred-thousand-dollar case of Burgundy stacked over there, along with a case of five-hundred-dollar-per-bottle Scotch.  Caviar.  Smoked oysters.  Buttered king crab.  Lobster.  The best.”  The Guide tips his head, conceding, “All of it canned or bottled, of course.  Still, it’s very good.  Won’t you join me for dinner?”

I growl.  My impatience shows.

“Of course, of course!  Get down to business!  No time for frivolities.  No time for fun!  Ah, it reminds me of the old-world!  Work!  Work!  Work!  Now, where were we?  Oh, yes.  Expanding the business.  Growing The Clan for the future.  Now that’s a funny thought, isn’t it?  The future!  I know you suicidal types don’t much care for the future.  You don’t believe in it.  Nevertheless, the future exists!  It’s coming!  They want you to be a part of it, Scientist.  A big part of it!  That’s why they hired me.  To find you.  To bring you into the fold, so to speak!”

Here, he puffs the cigar and then slides along the desk to a cabinet standing at its end.  Gingerly, ever mindful of The Girl standing danger close with her big knife ready, he reaches into one of its drawers and extracts a crystalline bottle of fine whiskey, using his other hand to retrieve three tumblers while he clenches the stogy between his teeth.

“A bit of celebration is in order, that’s all.  It’s been a long time coming, our first meeting.  Did you know?  How could you?  Drink?  Drink?”  He turns first to me and then The Girl.  We both refuse, but he pours all three glasses a third full, lifting the last to his lips.  “A toast!  To The Scientist and his lovely protégé!  To the future!”

He sips.  He puffs.  He cocks his head to ponder.

“Of course, that was a tricky bit of business.  The hiring process.  Naturally, I came among them to kill them all, to choke them all to death and finish the glorious work of Terminus!  Yes, indeed!  An empty planet!  That’s what I wanted for so many years afterward.  For a long time, I believed the process had failed.  Imperfect!  Why leave so few of us alive?  It didn’t make sense to me, so I thought it must have fizzled somehow.  I thought it needed a bit of tidying at the end.  I’m still not so sure.  Then again, how do you pay a man who has everything?  Everything!  Diamonds.  Sapphires.  Gold.  Platinum.  Fine cars.  Big houses.  That’s what it means to hire someone.  Doesn’t it?  Pay?  How to pay me, the head of a Clan?  A god!  Oh, I’m not a megalomaniac.  I recognize the fact that I’m not THE god, just A god.  Still.  A god!  What could a god possibly need?”

Another sip.  Another puff.

He asks, “Give up?  Nothing!  That’s what!  Nothing at all!  They couldn’t offer me anything in the here and now, BUT they could offer me something that’s not in the here and now.  They could offer me the future!”  He hisses this last word like a gameshow host, his cigar-laden right hand sweeping wide.  “It’s a brand new world!”  More showmanship.  “As I slipped the garrote around the headwoman’s throat, she started talking so fast I could barely understand her.  Lucky for her, though, I just managed to keep up.  By then, I was already thinking about some of the same things, myself.”

Again, with that smoking right hand, he sweeps the monitors, all filled with his monstrous horde, which mills psychotically back and forth in the space surrounding the truck, occasionally erupting in violence when one of them kills another and is attacked by the remainder, in turn.  “Look at them!  They’re falling apart!  Ah, it was fun while it lasted, but then nothing lasts forever.  Does it?  No.  It does not.  A smart businessman plans for the future while the present provides, not after everything has failed.  So I decided to branch-out.  I decided to diversify.  Bounty hunting is the next big thing.

“Actually, that presents a bit of a problem, doesn’t it?  I mean, nobody will hire a bounty hunting firm that calls itself ‘The Clan of the Immaculate Strangulation’, will they?  No.  It’s too… Terminal.  Ha ha ha.  That’s a good one.  Terminal.  So now I need a new name.  I’ve been picking through a short list.  What do you think of ‘The Clan of the Not-So-Immaculate but Sometimes-Necessary Kidnapping’?  No?  Yeah, me neither.  It’s too long.  A good name is short.  To the point.”

Now I step forward threateningly.  I growl, “If you don’t come to the point soon, I’m going to make a point of my own by breaking your neck and having The Girl run that big blade of hers through all the little holes in your head, one at a time!”

The Guide giggles.  “Right!  Right!  Right!  To work!  To work!  And no time for play!  And the point is,” he chimes, again imitating a gameshow host about to reveal the hidden prize behind curtain number one, “you have a hot date with a very important lady!  We can be there before nightfall, you know, and I am so glad you decided to come in from the cold when you did!  It’s been a long and difficult chase, but now it’s over and all is well!  So let’s get going!”

He has apparently taken for granted my desire to entertain him.  Gritting my teeth, I refuse to admit my curiosity.  Instead, I say, “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Ah, don’t do that, Scientist!  Don’t do that!  Not that!  Don’t play hard to get!  I might be a crazy god, but I’m not a stupid one.  Or blind!  I see a spark of interest in your eyes!  Who wouldn’t be interested?  Huh?  Who?  Even I must admit my interest in putting the world back together again.  I mean, it’s fun running The Clan and all, but not nearly as much fun as I thought it would be.  There’s no challenge in it, not really.  Most of the people we strangle already have a death wish.  It’s like we’re doing them a favor, Scientist!  Sometimes I get to feeling all warm and snuggly like a goody-two-shoe, or something.  Like I’m some kind of saint, bringing peace to the tortured mind or giving closure to the unresolved sin!  I mean, YUCK!  Right?  That’s no good!”

The Guide sips and smokes and pouts, his expression suddenly crestfallen.  Like a petulant child, he whines, “I want the old world back.  I know it’s probably hard to believe, but I miss the cops-and-robbers bit.  You have no idea how many people we’ve choked-out, Scientist.  No idea.  In the old world, I’d be public enemy number one!  I’d be the subject of endless documentaries and newscasts.  I’d be the world’s most sought-after anti-celebrity!  Wouldn’t I?  You bet I would!  But here?  Today?  In this place?  Nothing!  Hell, most folks don’t even run from us!  They just sit and wait while we slip the cord around their neck and pull!  It got to be a fulltime job!  Imagine that, will you?  Me!  Working for a living!  There’s something basically wrong with that!”