Bobby staggered along the muddy path,
his mouth dry and arm numb. The pain in it was long since forgotten. Busy faces
passed him by without second glances. Horses drawing carts moved ahead, people
on foot with large tents strapped to their backs sung songs, and all around the
camp ceased to be. The army was in motion. Bobby avoided eye contact, but he
couldn’t avoid those faces, dripping like candle wax in his blurred vision. The
faces of those responsible.
Belief.
It was happening to him all over again.
No matter how hard he vowed against it, no matter how hard he fought against
it, someone else’s belief found a way to rally against him. The injury was
beginning to take its toll. The strength he found within himself when facing
Baylor in the pit had invigorated him. The hope it gave him was quickly waning.
He rubbed his eyes and was lifted for a
second by the sight of Baylor’s train. The beast hissed long and loud,
signaling motion.
Bobby ran towards hope. The looks of his
enemies became a smear of disconnected faces. The train became the only thing
in his world at that moment. So close, yet so far away from him. He weaved
between a pair of horses, moved around an old school bus converted to a wagon,
wooden wheels and all. The steam from the beast rose higher and higher. He cut
between a covered wagon made from an old motor home and a litter carried by
four squat men in togas.
The train’s pistons pumped slowly,
squealing, hissing to life, and Bobby ran to them, to the last bit of hope they
had left. He didn’t hear the thundering of hooves behind him. Barely felt the
small, but strong arm that encircled him, lifting him off the ground mid-run.
He tried to twist away but he was too
weak. Red hair whipped past his face as his abductor changed direction. The
horse bolted away from the train. Bobby tried to fight, but those hands were so
strong and the injury exacted now took its true toll on his body. He held the
Auto Stryker in a loose grip, but he was so tired. The blade slipped from his
grasp and he was defenseless in the arms of the enemy. Somewhere far away, the
train sighed in defeat.
* * * * *
Moya kissed the boy’s head. She hugged
him tight as she charged through the wet field, thick with her followers. The
train wailed, announcing their departure. Her heart thundered right along with
her mount’s pounding hooves. Her heart felt as if it were about to burst with
joy. Tears streamed down her face. A satisfying warmth spread over her body.
It couldn’t be, but it was. She always
knew there were more than her precious Josh, but never did she imagine one in
her midst. The boy should be turned by now. She’d watched him shot by Keaton.
She’d watched him bitten by them. She’d watched him shot again, or so she
thought. Yet, despite all that, here he was, alive and breathing.
Her army moved ever closer to the future
she’d dreamed about all those years ago. They spread out before her in a
tapestry of the triumph of her will. She hugged the boy, wiped the sweat from
his pale brow, and squeezed him tight.
She slowed the mount to a trot. Her
followers called out to her, patted her powerful thighs, blew her kisses,
tossed flowers as they worshipped their queen. Moya soaked it in. If they could
procure the weapons of old, none they might encounter in the east would be able
to challenge them. None in the new world would be able to take the children
ever again. None would be able to stand against them.
She rode beside the Creeper pen. The moaning
dead reached through the bars for her. They reached for the boy, reached for
their new master. The boy’s presence rendered them silent.
Moya pulled to the front of the pen. A
tattooed woman wearing the skin of the man that raped her took the reins of
Moya’s horse.
“It has come,” the woman said. Her short
hair glistened with sweat. The hard work required to maneuver the pen had given
her broad shoulders and a deep tan. The tattoos looked like faded reminders.
Moya carefully moved from her horse to the
jostling platform with the boy in her arms. “It has, Feriah. It has.”
“Do you expect resistance?”
“Part of me always does, but in this
area, nothing more than mountain hermits.” Moya took the uneven staircase, made
from repurposed wood and scrap metal, to the top of the wagons.
“We’ll be ready, no matter what,” Feriah
called after her.
Moya looked back and gave Feriah a quick
nod. The guards bowed as she approached. Below, the dead groped the air. Their
cloudy eyes followed her every step.
The sun burned away the morning dew and
the perfect blue stretched on forever. The train pulled ahead, sending up
clouds of steam. The march was in full swing, and soon the great black band of
river joined them as a silent slithering companion.
The man in the harness awoke screaming
as Feriah lowered him closer to the dead. The pen picked up speed.
“It is here, Josh,” Moya said, hugging
the boy, kissing his burning cheeks.
* * * * *
Bobby looked at himself through their
eyes, through thousands of sketchy monitors. He saw himself through one eye,
through milky eyes, through broken eyes. He saw himself as the flies above the
horde saw him—through a thousand different windows. He felt the movement, felt
her ropey arms under his body, but his mind was so far away. He couldn’t return
to his eyes. He tried to slip back.
The Creepers wouldn’t let him.
Somewhere behind the monitors, in the
deep black space inside of him, he heard his heart beat slow until it sounded
like intermittent thunder on a southern horizon. He felt his life slipping
away. He felt the Creepers drawing him, beckoning him home. Their rotten
fingers grabbed for him. Cold dead hands latched onto the tiny invaders in his
blood, coursing slowly with each dying heartbeat.
Sophie’s smiling face rose in the
darkness. Her pale freckled face hung before that endless cold. She lifted
little Randal, held him out for Bobby to love, but he had no arms. His body was
so far away. A terrible hunger found him, burning in his guts, begging him to
fill it, but it wasn’t something he could do. This time it was different.
He was dying.
* * * * *
With the boy cradled in her arms and the
dead below her, Moya watched the train struggle up the steep hill while the
great black river chose to bend around it. They were almost there. Less than a
mile, but the boy was keeping her from fully savoring the moment. He was
terribly pale and his brow was slick with sweat.
“Feriah!” Moya called.
The tattooed woman rushed atop the
swaying platforms. She knelt beside Moya.
“Bring Pathos Two here.”
Feriah looked perplexed, but she did not
question the order. She scanned the swath of moving pieces, searching for the
fat man’s moving garden among their full number.
“Go, now,” Moya said, rolling the boy’s
shirt up to reveal the blood soaked bandage. His lips barely moved. The bites
would not take him, but Keaton’s handiwork surely would if she didn’t
intervene.
Part of her wanted to squeeze the life
from him. Her fingers were dangerously close to his throat at that moment. He
was in a weakened state and of no use, but Josh—his face swam close to the
surface of her pool of memory, keeping her from acting on that impulse.
Flowers drifted on the wind. Josh’s
blood soaked her clothes, traced the cracks in her sundried fingers. Delicate innocent
crimson. Her world fell apart. Everything changed. She shook the terrible
memory away, but she could still hear her own scream. The moment relived at a
time of great importance. She was not one to shuck what her mind was allowing
her to feel once more.
The boy spoke in unintelligible
whispers. The dead below moaned louder and louder, fighting against the pull of
the great pen and the draw of the hanging man. Moya held the boy to her chest.
He was burning hot, hotter than any human should ever burn. A star scorching a
hole in her bosom.
The train crested the hill—a powerful
silhouette of her achievements. Her army followed, lining the hilltop on both
sides of the train. People from all walks of life. The truest of true
survivors.
“It’s okay, Josh. It’s going to be
okay.” She existed on two planes of reality. She shed tears on both, a
vulnerability she thought dead inside her. She rocked back and forth, cooing to
the boy like she did to Josh’s lifeless body all those years ago. Then the
horns started to blare far and wide.
* * * * *
Bobby’s brothers waited for him at the
edge of everything. Ryan quipped and punched Paul in the arm, while Peter tried
to quell the argument that would surely follow, and Bryan sat legless and
bloodied. Pure white snow like stars drifted in the deep darkness all around
them. Phantom gunfire echoed through the timeless space with no beginning and
no end—a series of slightly repeating images rolling over unto infinity.
Bobby staggered along, moving his body,
though he could not see it. His brothers were whisked away by a cloud of
blinding snow. Somewhere in the sudden whiteout, Ecky cursed furiously in his
native tongue. Sprays of red and then black again, then nothing but the deep
echo of Ol’ Randy’s dying breath. Pages from the notebook flitted by, along
with his mother’s crumbling tombstone.
He tried to fight against the flood, but
he was helpless in that vastness. Just another child lost. A child lost to
superstition and circumstance. He’d become just another unforgivable doomed
repetition, a casualty of war. The faces of those he’d ended came to him then,
drifting up out of the darkness like Creepers from the depths of a black
mountain lake.
He felt his heart stop, a sudden flash
of red-yellow in the darkness, and then nothing. The images ceased. The sounds
silenced. Everything stopped. He felt it all slip away until only the cold
remained. The spark of his consciousness, the last bit of warmth in all the
universe, and it was fading, thinking its last thought. He didn’t want to let
go, didn’t want to let go…
* * * * *
She felt him go. Moya laid the boy down
in disbelief. The horns sounded in quick staccato blasts all around as the army
spread the word of the horde on the other side of the hill.
“This is not our first rodeo,” Moya
shouted. She motioned for the guards to keep moving. “If we can’t clear them,
we have no right to what we’ve come for, or to a future.”
She stood over his frail corpse. Had it
all been some kind of great joke? Payback for the lives she’d shattered over
the years? Was there some great invisible deity prodding her with the sins of
the past? She allowed her moment of weakness to pass.
No
, she told
herself.
No this is nothing more than the frailty of human emotions. You are
better than this.
She cracked her knuckles.
“Miss Moya, I’ve found him!” Feriah
shouted as she dragged the huffing fat man up the stairs.
Moya stood with arms crossed. “It’s too
late. He’s passed.”
Feriah drew a blade from her belt. “Then
allow me.”
“That won’t be necessary, Feriah.”
Pathos Two stumbled to the boy’s corpse.
He fumbled with his leather bound bag. He plugged a stethoscope into his ears
and pressed it against the boy’s bloody chest.
“He’s not dead.”
Moya’s eyes widened. “Keep us moving,
Feriah. I want on that hill.”
“Will do, but I don’t think the pen can
hold anymore of them.”
“Then kill them all.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“He’s in bad shape. I don’t know if I
can save him.”
“You’d better find a way, or you can
make quite the meal for them below.” Moya squeezed Pathos Two’s shoulder until
he winced. “And quickly.”
“Do you hear that?”
Moya leaned closer. “Hear what?”