Authors: Norman Dixon
Now we got a long trip back, and my
hands’a hurtin’ from all this scribblin’ and stuff. Besides it ain’t gonna be
easy treckin’ east with five littl’uns . . . Beckenridge out.
Bobby read her name again, as was his
routine over the last few months. His fingers still shook when they traced Ol’ Randy’s
faded handwriting despite the complacency of repetition, as if he were touching
her cold cheek all those years ago.
He tried to remember.
He couldn’t recall a single feature of
her. Not a scent, a sound, a texture . . . there was nothing there. His mother
existed only in Ol’ Randy’s notebook, a phantom flurry of smoke that haunted
him with something he would never know. He knew only the darkness of the ink in
which her name was written, and the emptiness of years between.
At least he had something.
Bobby closed the notebook. He looked to
the couple for sympathy, but they remained ever silent.
Many nights he cried himself to sleep,
grinding his teeth in the agony of loss and anger. As the nights grew shorter,
somewhere in the daily shift, he had a birthday. Another winter survived. As if
that was some kind of badge of honor.
It wasn’t.
Ecky was not oblivious to Bobby’s
torment. He mentioned something called survivor’s guilt and he tried, really
tried to ease Bobby’s suffering through stories, through tasks that kept the
boy’s mind occupied.
Bobby would be forever in the man’s debt
for that, but nothing helped. Sometimes, though, Bobby envisioned his rifle
punching a hole through Pastor Craven’s skull, and at other times, he imagined
his fingers gouging out those terrible old eyes.
He ran his hands along the cold steel of
his rifle. The black metal and dark synthetic stock resonated on a primal level
with him. He had used it to take a life, justly, but a life none-the-less. He
had used it to hunt, to survive, it had become an extension of his being, and
it never left his side. In a way the Remington had become his friend. Another
silent companion, dead to him on a human level, but still occupying space in
his life . . . like the couple, and the body of the wild man in the trunk.
He still didn’t know what to make of
that rotting man. One thing was certain. There long winter in the couple’s
house had not gone without incident.
They were being watched.
Ecky called Bobby to the main room in a
panic. He had been with the couple reading the story of his life between watch
shifts. Ecky stood next to the covered window and pulled it back ever so
slightly, pointing with his chin for Bobby to take a look.
She wasn’t hard to miss.
A woman stood in the clearing between
the edge of the town and the tree line. Her arms were covered with strange,
bright red patterns. Spirals, stars, and angles ran the length of her thin
arms, covered her bare neck and feet. Her leaf-littered hair jutted out in
wild, gnarled spikes. Bobby noticed that the dirty woman shared a similarity
with the dead fake-soldier in the trunk.
She wore no shoes.
Bobby was about to ask Ecky how long
she’d been there, but her screams stopped him short.
She fell to her knees in the tall grass
and cried out, shouted to any and all that would hear. Her voice was like the
call of an animal, a high-pitched growl filled with yips and hoots.
“We got problem,” Ecky said as he began
to pace.
“Maybe she’s in trouble." But Bobby
knew better, he could read the signs the same as Ecky. The engineer had taught
him about the wild people and the potential dangers they posed.
They were living and breathing like him,
but that is where the similarities stopped. The reality of their existence was
hard for Bobby to imagine. He had been born into a micro society that possessed
knowledge, but the same couldn’t be said for those that were born in others.
Wrapping his young mind around the idea was like trying to run ten miles after
he had already ran twenty.
Due to the diligence of Ol’ Randy and
the Folks, he knew what cars and airplanes were, even though he’d never been in
either one. He knew what the ocean was, what it looked like, even what it
smelled like. These people, these
wild
people, had surely come across
the ruined, rusted husks of such things, but to them they were fallen gods,
temples, a past that personified the truth of their self-induced fiction.
The woman continued her strange cries.
Bobby wondered if they were, to her at least, actual words. Did those growls
and hoots mean, help me, or were they a warning, we know you’re in there,
perhaps?
A shadow flitted through the tall grass
in front of the house across the street. It moved too fast for a Creeper.
Bobby, sure it wasn’t an animal, closed the curtain.
“There’s something out there." He
stared at Ecky’s wide eyes for answers.
“Get upstairs, cover from window. We let
them make first move." Yannek checked the CAR-15. He’d kept it clean and
ready, but he hadn’t fired it in a very long time.
Shattering glass stopped Bobby’s quick
steps. It wasn’t very far off, a few houses away. More breaking glass, further
this time.
“Get moving,” Ecky whispered. He waved
his hand frantically.
Bobby bolted through the kitchen and up
the stairs. He grabbed his rucksack, checking and counting his ammo as he went.
Five shots, three kills . . . it had been a light and long winter. His
ill-fitting pants a testament to the cold hungry nights. Bobby gathered the few
remaining tools, and lastly the notebook, tucking it safely into the inside
pouch. And just like that, the couple’s house ceased to be home.
Home . . .
by dropping a
few meager possessions within these walls it had become what the Settlement
could not, but no matter what kind of
normal
life he prayed for, it
wasn’t meant to be. He understood that, deep in the recess of his young mind,
he knew he would roam forever.
Bobby knelt beside the couple one last
time. He looked over their bones, said a silent goodbye, and crept up to the
window.
The woman was still screaming, but she
was cut off from his view on this side of the house. Most of the town was
behind him and only a few houses dotted the slope of the hillside in front of
him, and beyond that, the steady green forest and the clear bright day.
A man stood watching him from across the
way.
Bobby froze.
The man wore the same army fatigues as
the wild man they laid to rest in the trunk. His hair hung in one massive series
of knots all down his back. Rusted bits of wire were woven in his rank black
beard. He held a wicked looking curved piece of metal crossed by a thinner,
straighter piece that sat on a tensed strand of wire or cord. It looked like a
crude hunting bow, but even through the scope Bobby couldn’t be sure.
Bobby thought about shooting. His finger
dancing above the trigger nervously, he trained the scope on the man’s chest.
He breathed in, settled. . . .
“Nyet, Bobby,” Ecky said from behind
him.
The strange word slapped Bobby’s focus
away.
“No, sorry,” Ecky apologized. “Is nerves
. . . haven’t spoken my native tongue in long time. Listen.”
The woman stopped screaming.
The man with the long black hair broke
his stare on the house and began to move out of their line of sight. Bobby
followed him with the rifle barrel until he no longer had the shot. “I could
have hit him.”
“What would be point? Besides, you’d
give away position get us killed anyway. There are more than him and her. Saw
two near front of house. All wearing army fatigues.”
What could it mean? Bobby thought.
Nothing about the strange people made any sense to him. Had they come in search
of their fallen friend, or something else?
“If we can avoid conflict, we avoid it
like plague. We do not want fight with these . . .
people,
” the word
left Ecky’s lips as if he were spitting away filth. “We don’t have too many
days before Baylor comes through, and I told Randy we’d meet him there."
Ecky opened a pocket on his pack and pulled out a beat up map. He laid it out
as flat as he could, pointing with his finger and saying, “We are here. You see
town down here to south and west, Dostero?”
“Yes,” Bobby said, nodding at Ecky’s
tobacco stained finger with its gnawed fingernail.
“There is train tracks that run along
this road at base of volcano. You know tracks, yes?" Ecky cleared his
throat quietly. His eyes kept wandering to the window, but the man had not
returned.
“Yes—”
The woman’s voice, accompanied by a
gruff male growl echoed through the town. They were soon joined by more.
“Downstairs, quickly now." Ecky
folded the map and jammed it in his pocket.
They descended the stairs to a raging
chorus of animalistic shouts.
Bobby reached the window first. He
peeked out from an angle. At first he didn’t see the source of shouting, but he
looked upon the car, and the open trunk, his breath caught in his throat. There
were at least fifteen fatigue-clad wild men surrounding the car. They swayed
back and forth, waving their crude rusty blades and rough wooden clubs. The
woman stood atop the car bouncing in what seemed like a measured dance. What
Bobby had mistaken for ragged clothing was nothing of the sort.
The woman was smeared from head to toe
in mud, or some kind of blackish-brown grease that made the red symbols almost
burn on her skin. Her floppy breasts swayed as she rocked back and forth. Her
hands brushed bits of dry leaves from her pubic thatch. She raised her hands
and screamed, her body shaking, as if racked by fever. Then she stopped, and
with a wave of her hand, the men, too, ceased their growls.
“Ecky, what’s going on?” Bobby said from
the corner of his mouth.
“Fucking stone age madness." Ecky
wondered if they knew about the trunk, or if they had uncovered it by accident.
But then, as he watched all of them gathered in their uniforms, noticing how
all of them, with the exception of the man with long black hair, had close
cropped hair, he knew what they were up to. There was no denying the timing of
their appearance.
“They mean to attack the train."
Ecky stomped his foot down in frustration. Shit like this was why he gave up
believing in god a long time ago. “Fuck and shit at same time.”
Bobby followed the engineer’s logic. But
he couldn’t quite make the same leap. “If that is true than why did they stop
in the town? How did they know about the trunk?”
The woman began to sob, clutching at her
belly and grabbing her face, smearing the red symbols. She looked around
wide-eyed, searching. She pointed to the house across the street from the
couple’s and hissed.
The horde of armed wild men charged the
home with weapon’s held high. They crashed through the door, breaking windows,
destroying everything in their way.
“Fucking random act of universe, Bobby,
I don’t know." Ecky thumbed off the safety. “Can you run with that pack,
really run?”
“Yes." Bobby tugged at the strap.
“Take map,” Ecky offered it to Bobby but
the boy froze.
“No, can’t we just hide? Can’t we just
let them go their own way?"
“Take the map!”
Bobby backed away a step. He shouldered
his rifle. “We have guns. We can take them while they aren’t looking.”
“And what about ones we don’t see? What
if there are more of them? Going to shoot them all with limited ammunition?
Going to alert every thawed out Creeper for miles? Nyet, Bobby, we run, we make
for train. We only fight if we have to. Take the map!" Ecky shoved it in
Bobby’s face.
He took it, reluctantly, afraid of what
they were about to do. He tried to calm himself. But the terror swept over him
like an avalanche. He became the little boy, the little boy afraid to venture
beyond the fence with Ryan, to explore, to dare. With his knees knocking, he
remembered what his last act of boyhood bravado had gotten him . . . it had
gotten his brothers killed, and forced him from one painful existence into another.
If he’d only—if he’d only what? Was his life supposed to be one of stagnation
and constant ridicule? Was his life supposed to be under the threat of death?
No. He decided then. He could not
succumb to those thoughts. Too many people had sacrificed their lives so that
he could live. He wasn’t about to disappoint them. There was no more
pretending, it was time to grow up and be a man.
With the thought of reuniting with Ol’
Randy burning like a fire in his heart, Bobby tightened the strap on his rifle
saying, “Okay." Bobby slipped his rifle to his back. If he was going to
run it would only get in the way and it wouldn’t be of much use if he needed to
act quickly. He pulled his knife, put it back, pulled again, checking the
action.
“I wish bitch would shut up." Ecky
closed his eyes. His lips moved but no actual words left them.
“What are you doing?”