V.J. Chambers - Jason&Azazel Apocalypse 01 (9 page)

“Well,” I said, “we heard they got power on the other side of the river. That’s where we’re headed.” How would Jason’s people field that? What kind of lies was Jason telling them?

The boys crossed their arms over their chests. “You don’t want to go on the other side of the river, ma’am.”

I cocked my head to the side. “Why not? Ain’t they got power?”

“They have power all right,” said one of the boys, “but they’ve all gone crazy over there.”

“There’s a dictator,” added the other boy. “He won’t let anybody do anything. It’s like communist Russia or something.”

Inwardly, I groaned. Trust Jason to cook up a story like that.

“You all might just want to head back with us,” said the first boy. “We got a nice little camp out in the park. It’s real nice. We’re all real friendly folk. People have been showing up at our camp from all over too. You’d be welcome.”

“Yeah?” said Kieran, who couldn’t fake an accent at all and wasn’t even trying, “then how come you guys have guns?”

People had been showing up, huh? And Jason was taking them in? What did Jason want with all these people? It didn’t make sense.

“Well, for the same reason you got a gun, mister, I reckon,” said one of the boys. “Because you never can tell about outsiders.”

“But you all seem nice,” said the other boy. “In Columbus, we all take care of each other. This power outage thing wasn’t nearly as big a deal to us as it was to some. See, back in 2010, we had such a bad ice storm that we were out of power for over a month. And nobody got out of line then.”

“Exactly,” agreed the other boy, “here in Columbus, we’ve got each other’s backs. We gave to other people what they needed, and they helped us out too. No rioting or shooting each other here, no sir.”

I guessed I believed that. Small towns tended to work in more subtle ways. For instance, here in Columbus, no one was shooting each other, but they were all following Jason around and doing his bidding. I bet that there wasn’t an easy way to get out of that either. Small towns were good at creating all kinds of peer pressure. Heck, my hometown had been jam-packed full of Satanists.

Nicest people on the outside, though, really. It also explained why the store I’d been in hadn’t shown any signs of looting. Probably, the store owner had just shared with the community.

I looked at Kieran. “I don’t know, honey. I’m not sure if I don’t want to see the other side of the river for myself.” How would they react to that? Were they going to force us to come with them?

If they did, I was going to have to hurt them. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t be Jason’s prisoner either.

“Ma’am,” said one of the boys. “We’re not letting anybody across that river. It’s for your own safety.”

“You heard the man, Ella,” said Kieran. “We might as well just head back on home.”

I steeled myself, waiting for them to insist that we come back with them.

But instead, one boy just said, “If that’s what you folks want to do, we ain’t gonna stop you.”

“You might want to come by our camp just to see it, if you’d like.”

“No thanks,” said Kieran. “We’re just going to feed the baby and be on our way.”

“Okay, then,” said a boy. “Just you folks watch out. There’s those crazy witch ladies that live out here, pretty close by, and once you get into town there are some meddling government folk.

They shouldn’t come out this far, but if they do, you just watch yourselves.”

We thanked them. The boys shook Kieran’s hand and ambled off into the distance. Weird. So, Jason was patrolling the area, and he was actively trying to recruit people to his encampment. He wasn’t forcing people, though.

“They never would have believed us if it wasn’t for the baby,” said Kieran. “I don’t know. I think babies are lucky.”

Guy started screaming again. I raised my eyebrows. “Lucky, huh?”

* * *

After breakfast, Kieran and I started back for the church. It had been a lot easier on the way in, because we hadn’t had to carry Guy or all his stuff. Even switching the baby back and forth, we found ourselves taking more breaks. We were sitting down on one of these little breaks and had perched on a fallen down tree. I was feeding Guy. Kieran was rubbing his arm and complaining that babies sure were heavier than they looked, when a woman’s yell interrupted us.

“It’s them!” cried the female voice from behind us.

We got up in a hurry, Kieran pulling his gun. (I was pretty annoyed that the baby kept me from having a gun out at any time.)

Two women were approaching us from behind. They were both wearing jeans and t-shirts. One had a short, pixie hair cut. The other wore her long hair in a ponytail. The ponytail chick waved at us like we were long lost relatives. “You’re here,” she said, as she approached. “I can’t believe it.”

I pulled Guy close, protectively. Kieran showed the women his gun.

“You guys want to stop right there,” he said.

Ponytail waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, you don’t need the gun. We’re not going to hurt you.” She kept right on walking, even though the other woman trailed behind her, looking a little concerned. Once she was right up on us, she offered her hand. “I’m Nancy,” she said.

Kieran and I both stared down at her hand. Kieran switched his gun to his other hand and shook her hand. “I’m—”

“Kieran, right?” she said, grinning.

Kieran dropped her hand. “How do you know that?”

“Carol, I told you they were real, and that they were coming,” Nancy said excitedly to her companion. “I told you!”

Carol stopped a few paces behind Nancy, putting her hands in the air. “Don’t shoot us, please.

Nancy’s a little nuts, but she’s harmless, I swear.”

Nancy turned to me. “You’re Azazel, right?” She put a hand on the back of Guy’s head. “And this is little Guy?”

The lady was creeping me out. “Do you work for Jason?” I asked, even though that wouldn’t explain why she knew who Guy was.

“The Wodden guy?” asked Carol. “Oh, no. The rest of the community would never have stood for us camping out at the park with them. They’ve been calling us witches for years.”

The boys had said we needed to watch out for “the witch ladies.” Was this them? Why did people think they were witches? How did they know our names?

“You don’t have to worry,” said Nancy. “We’re going to help you. And we’ve been waiting for Guy for ages. It seems like ages, anyway.” To Carol, “Come over and look at him. He is so precious.”

“I’ll keep my distance until he puts his gun away, thanks,” said Carol.

“Kieran, put the gun away,” I said. “They seem harmless.”

“Except she knows our names,” said Kieran.

“She’s right about that?” Carol said. She looked surprised. “Nancy thinks she can see the future.

She’s been babbling about people bringing us a baby for the past two months.”

Kieran put his gun away. “Azazel can see the future too. She has dreams.”

Oh, God, seriously? That’s what made him feel at ease? Some chick claiming to have powers?

What was the world coming to? Anything was believable these days, it seemed. The world was screwed up without electricity.

Nancy and Carol invited us to lunch. Their house was an old farmhouse. All the windows were open. They had pink curtains fluttering in the breeze. They had a few chickens and two goats. I could also see that they’d planted a garden recently. I guess they’d be okay here, even without power. For lunch, we drank goat’s milk and ate fried eggs. It was amazing to have fresh food besides meat.

Nancy and Carol said that Columbus had never been the most welcoming of communities to them. They were lesbians. Before the power outage, people had mostly left them alone. After the power outage, they said that people got downright hostile.

“They were convinced that we were witches because we grew herbs and did a lot of natural homeopathic medicine,” said Carol. “Sounds like something out of the middle ages, right?”

Before the power had gone out, Nancy had used a sperm donor to get pregnant. Unfortunately, she’d lost the baby sometime in November. She credited it to stress. It had been hard for both of them, especially Nancy. But then, she’d started having dreams.

“I saw him in my dreams all the time,” said Nancy. She was holding Guy now, feeding him his bottle. He seemed very content. “I knew his name was Guy. I knew he was our baby. And I knew he was coming to us.”

“I thought she was nuts,” said Carol. “I thought it was some kind of coping mechanism to deal with the miscarriage.”

“But he is ours, isn’t he?” Nancy asked. “You are going to leave him with us, aren’t you?”

It made sense. How would we take care of a baby back at the camp? We weren’t equipped to do that. And we were all a little busy trying to get west. Nancy and Carol were the best fit. I thought they’d be good mothers.

“So, the dreams started after the power outage?” I asked them.

They had. And something else strange had started at that point too. Carol recounted to me a story about cutting herself while chopping some vegetables (some of the few fresh ones left from the stores at that point). Nancy had been able to heal her, somehow. She’d done it twice now.

“I don’t know why this is happening to me,” said Nancy. “It’s almost like the fact they started calling us witches came true or something.”

“You said Azazel has dreams,” said Carol.

“They don’t make any sense,” I said. “Last night I dreamed about talking flies.”

“You did?” said Kieran.

I shrugged.

Kieran took another long swig of goat’s milk. “Azazel has more powers than that, though. She can influence people’s minds. Huge groups of them.”

“I don’t like to do it,” I muttered.

“I’ve dreamed about flies too,” said Nancy. “There were a bunch of them. They were carrying a big book on their backs. They were grunting. They were trying to hide it from the vessel.”

“Not the vessel again,” Carol groaned.

The vessel? I felt a little twinge of nervousness. It couldn’t mean me, could it?

“Yes,” Nancy said. “The vessel. The book was called the Key of Ashes or something.”

“The Key of Asher?” I said. “You dreamed about the Key of Asher?”

Suddenly Nancy looked at me in an odd way. “Yes,” she said. “They took it to the park, where the Wodden guy is. To keep it from you.” She paused. “You’re the vessel.”

The twinge deepened. Nobody had called me the vessel in a long time. “What do you mean?” I asked.

Nancy’s eyes seemed to glaze over. “I have dreams sometimes, about things… They don’t make sense to me. There’s a sun, and the sun is inside a vessel, something that contains its fury. Then the vessel tips over. The sun spills out. And the sun is so bright, it dries up everything. All the grass gets burnt and curly.” Guy started crying. Nancy shook herself, as if trying to bring herself back to reality. She handed Guy to Carol and got up. She went to the sink. The window over it was open. The breeze made her ponytail flutter. “You’re the vessel aren’t you?”

I went over to her. “No one’s called me the vessel in a long time,” I said. “And it isn’t true, anyway. My grandmother made it all up. She forced people to think bad things about Jason and me.”

“Jason.” Nancy turned to me sharply. “That’s the Wodden guy, isn’t it? The one in the park?

He’s the sun.”

“The Rising Sun,” I said softly. “But it isn’t true, what you’re saying. It can’t be. You’re saying that I caused the solar flare? That breaking up with Jason made him bad?” If I was the vessel, and I was covering Jason up while we were together, then it seemed her dream stated that when I left him Jason was free to burn up the world. Like a solar flare. But that was silly, because Jason couldn’t cause solar flares. I mean, could he?

“I don’t know what the dream means,” she said. “I have other dreams though. Like the flies.”

“It’s stress,” said Carol. “They’re nightmares. She can’t sleep. I don’t like them.”

I took her hand. “They don’t always come true,” I told her. “Sometimes, I think they’re just possibilities. We dream them so we can stop them.”

But Nancy didn’t look comforted. Instead, her eyes bulged and she dug her fingernails into the palm of my hand. Her mouth opened, and she started to speak, but her voice didn’t sound like her own anymore. It sounded a little older, and a little deeper. I knew the voice, just like I knew the words. “Your power feeds his. Together, the things you will do. The terrible, terrible things you will do. Do you know what he is capable of?”

Michaela Weem. Michaela goddamned fucking Weem! I tried to yank my hand away from Nancy’s. I didn’t want to hear the rest of it. I’d heard it before. I didn’t need to hear it again.

But she didn’t stop. “Ah, I see that you do. I see that you have seen his face. His true face. Do you think it will stop, Azazel? No! It will only get worse. Soon it will be thousands upon thousands of bodies heaped on a pyre. And you will lie dead as he feasts on your guts!”

I pulled harder on my hand, trying to make her let go, trying to get away from her. “No,” I said.

“None of that is true. My grandmother put those visions in Michaela’s head. She made all that happen.”

Nancy’s fingers dug in tighter. Her eyes burned into mine. And her voice wasn’t Michaela’s anymore, but it wasn’t quite her own either. “It doesn’t matter where the visions come from. If enough people believe them, they are true. You will find him sitting alone. He will be crying, like a little boy. You will put your hand on his forehead, and you will reach inside with your mind. You’ll squeeze something in there. Something vital. He’ll look up at you for that last moment, wondering why. He’ll whisper that he loves you. And then…he’ll die.”

I swallowed hard. I put my hand against Nancy’s forehead in much the same way she’d just described. I reached inside. And I made her
let go of me!

We broke apart, both stumbling and gasping. Nancy clutched her head. “Augh!” she screamed.

I started swearing. I wanted to run for the door, but I didn’t. I couldn’t because, suddenly all around me, the world was buzzing with flies. They blocked me. They stopped me. I blinked once. Hard. And they were gone.

Nancy was shaking herself again. She rubbed her face. “Like a brain freeze,” she muttered. “Like too much slushy, too quick.”