Children Of Fiends - Part 2 A Nation By Another Name: An Of Sudden Origin Novella (3 page)

BOOK: Children Of Fiends - Part 2 A Nation By Another Name: An Of Sudden Origin Novella
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“Thanks.” MacAfee bit into the offered biscuit and smiled at the flavor before grimacing. “Food is going to be boring from now on – nutrition bars and whatever we can scrounge.”

“Whatever we find sounds interesting enough.” She took note of his journal. “May I ask what you’re writing?”

“A log of our mission. The president felt that a record should exist. Actually, it’s more than a log. He asked me to make notes on our observations, the state of the countryside and what not. Even more important since we lost the radios.” He nodded at the crew, who without much to do, stood along the rails and stared at the passing shore. The twins were staring too. They had been good to their word and stayed out of people’s heads. Already, most of the crew had taken to not wearing their helmets. They could be felt and occasionally one could taste something they ate or have a sudden flash of what the two were seeing. It was unsettling, but they were getting used to it. MacAfee said, “So odd to look at that shore. Those homes, docks, towns – time almost stands still. So much up north, at home, already different. For your pucks… I can’t imagine what they think.”

Eliza said, “They are thinking that there were so many of us. They know the history. They know how it was. We have shown them videos from before. But now they are seeing it.”

As planned, Dean brought the cruiser along the vast pumping array that had pulled water from the James River for the Contex Power plant outside of Richmond. It was a coal fired plant and the last available satellite image of it showed a long line of coal cars sitting along the plant’s rail spur. The plan was to drop a team led by Hernandez to confirm that the coal cars were mobile and ready for the engine farther up river. It was decided to split the twins so that each party could benefit from their theoretical protection.

MacAfee joined Hernandez and Sergeant Green on the riverbank in full battle gear. With them were Jamesbonds, Wen Blakely, Abner Lee and Maggie Tender who had sim-trained for the coal car operation. At 50 years old, Abner was everything MacAfee could hope for in his stereotyped image of a salty dog sailor, right down to the man’s thick whitening beard and leathery skin. Maggie, on the other hand, was about the last person that he would have taken as a seaman. Surprisingly attractive, she spoke with a gentle voice and carried herself in the slump shouldered manner of a woman who was trying to hide her womanhood rather than display it. Other than her appropriate clothing, the only giveaway that she worked at sea at all was her hands. They were strong hands with thick calluses, sharp tendons, the skin red and chapped. Then there was Hansel, a gangly creature. Each time MacAfee looked at one of the pucks he felt his heart slightly seize with surprise. Hansel was human looking after all and a brief glance would inform the peripheral vision as much, but he was only human in the way that the Greek god Pan looked human. More than once, he had asked himself if the Ancient Greeks had been on to something. The pucks weren’t some chimera of goat and man, but their gait, built for extraordinary speed, was of a hoofed animal. And those faces, like something from a Grimm Fairytale. Demons walked the Earth. That’s what the headlines had read, before they finished the Terminus, when the country was almost lost. He felt so very grateful for the Terminus. If his countrymen saw what he was looking at right now… He’d been told about how the FNDz bacteria had invaded the human genome, inserting itself via something called horizontal gene transfer into the living DNA of people, rewriting the code and forever altering the evolutionary future of the infected person’s offspring. Seeing those offspring up close only served to crush his understanding of science and reinforce his understanding of the unseen world. MacAfee offered up a brief prayer.

Hansel wasn’t happy about leaving his sister’s side, but he was also excited. It would be the first time being away from her. He decided to try an experiment and close his mind off to her as he stepped ashore. She blasted him with several primal pleas for attention that only served to make him smile as he remembered that it wasn’t that long ago that he would close her off all the time to punish or tease her. She rarely did it to him, and when she did, it made him feel bad. That didn’t stop him from doing it again today. Today was about Hansel being on his own – or at least without his sister.

Dean was also geared up. Besides wanting to get a lay of the land, the notion of waiting around on a cabin cruiser while people were exploring the shore was not something he was willing to accept. Sanders would handle overseeing the base. As Dean stepped down the gangway, Eliza stepped to the rail. “Captain?” He paused. “I know I’m overstepping, but wouldn’t it make sense for you to stay here, with your ship? We don’t know what might be out there. If there’s trouble, wouldn’t your leadership be better served here?”

Dean jerked a thumb at the boat and spoke over his shoulder. “Not my ship, Ms Sherr.” He knew he was being an ass, but he was still irked by her stubbornness about protecting herself. Now she was talking prudence? Heck with her.

The team marched away and KK, the remaining soldier, set up a perimeter guard with Bill Wall and Tom Murphy. With little else to do, the rest settled in to wait.
 

The shore team followed the pipe system that led from the pumps, while their heads-up displays offered a map showing a short hike of about a mile along an icy trench. The trench led directly beneath Interstate 95 and like another snapshot of time, the major highway remained clogged with the relics of mass hysteria.
 

As the scout team left the road behind them, Dean was reminded of his younger days as a volunteer firefighter and shuddered at the memory of a rural honky-tonk where he had spent many a boozy night. A band without a permit for its pyrotechnics had accidentally set the building ablaze. In their panic, the patrons all rushed for the exits as one. Until Omega caused all such events to pale, Dean and the other firefighters witnessed one of the most surreal acts of mob mentality in American history. Perhaps 24 people had tried to run out of the club’s front door at once. They had instantly clogged the exit with too much massed flesh and had become wedged in a way that no one could move an inch forward. All they had to do was agree to step backward to untangle themselves, but in their terror to escape the flames not one could gather the sense to do so. As more people bunched up behind them, those wedged in front screamed and pleaded with the firefighters to pull them free. It was hopeless. No amount of tugging would dislodge them. Dean and his compatriots watched in horror as the flames took the people from behind, burning their legs and backsides while their arms, heads and chests remained in fresher air. Putting a hose on them only proved to prolong their agony, the water unable to reach the flames inside. This scenario took place in several of the building’s windows and also at the back door. Scores died horribly by only getting halfway to freedom. Such were the Interstates during Omega.

As they walked, a mountain of coal that had been dug out of the hills of West Virginia more than a decade before began to appear. This was the first time that the group had moved as a team outside of the sim and Hernandez was pleased with their pace. They had been trained after a fashion to be jumped at any moment (the sim had them fighting Fiends and their kids nearly the whole way). It was nerve racking and she checked in with each of them separately by using the com-link built into their helmets. So far everyone was holding up.
 

The weak summer sun fought through the clouds just enough to cast shadows behind four huge idle smoke stacks. A vast train yard held five parallel rows of tracks filled head to tail with empty coal cars. When they reached the main line, a long row of cars snaked for a quarter of a mile to where they remained hooked up to a rust covered engine. Jamesbonds climbed to the top of one and confirmed that eight cars beyond the Transfer station remained full. It was exactly what they had hoped for; more than enough to get them across the country. The diesel engine, on the other hand, was a wreck. The weather had not been kind these many harsh years and a fuel line had become detached allowing the diesel to flow out and seep into the ground. Even if they had the battery capacity to start the big machine, the empty fuel tank made it a heap of useless metal standing in their way.

“Piece of cake,” said Wen. “The thing is parked right next to this side line. We detach it, and back it out of the way with our steamer, hook up our coal and off we go.”

“I like your optimism, Marshal,” said MacAfee. “Let’s go get our steamer.”

“Even the weather is nice, sort of,” said Maggie Tender, which took Dean by surprise because the woman had never spoken out loud in front of him.

Thirty minutes later they were back aboard the cabin cruiser and heading up the James.

A ruined Richmond dredged up a cesspool of bad memories. Only a handful of hearty birds provided any relief from the mournful landscape. They tied up between the shore and one of the railroad trestles that spanned the tracks across from Old Town Manchester to the city center. The same scout team disembarked and followed the tracks past a large oil storage facility. They checked the tanks, found them to be empty, then stopped cold when they noticed that the rusted tracks nearby had a fresh sheen on them, the only explanation the passing wheels of a train. Someone had come down here and salvaged the oil. MacAfee felt certain that he’d know about any such mission. If it was the Delmarva raiders, they were set up better than they thought. Speculation was pointless, but they kept their guard up against more than just zombies. Wen said, “Shit. Pardon my French. You think they took the engine?”

They picked up their pace to a jog, running past a vast electricity substation. The route and the landscape deviated little from the sim, and, just as the dated satellite photo had shown, they came upon a rusted out commuter train with heaps of human skeletons both inside and out. The massacre was clearly the result of a Fiend attack, as most of the remains were separated from their clothes. A positively huge feeding had taken place. None of the sailors and soldiers who now observed it could escape his or her own flashback to the Exodus. Dean recalled scenes of horror playing out in shocking detail on TV, the anchor people hardly able to grasp what they were seeing. One woman anchor repeating: “This is really happening. This is really happening.”

The commuter train had derailed across from the Old Dominion Railway Museum, the main building of which was built from brick with a shallow asphalt roof and partially surrounded by cobblestone streets, giving the Nantucket explorers a quick taste of home. To their collective relief, the antique prize locomotive sat on its own set of tracks still inside a clashing modern enclosure. The huge windows, though covered in grime, showed the tank engine perfectly intact. A colossal pair of glass doors opened with ease as Wen pulled on them. The group entered with a small sense of awe, the massive machine towering above them. The glossy black paint still gleamed on the 1218. Strong smells of oiled steel and creosote filled the room. Like a kid with a new toy, Wen climbed into the engineer’s compartment and glanced around. “Definitely in good shape up here. You can tell it’s gotten some use but, shit, pardon my French, somebody liked to make sweet love to this baby.” He stuck his head back out at Kita, Tender and Lee. “Well, what you standing around for? Let’s get this baby up and running.” He turned to MacAfee, “Fuel. Just like the sim, we’ll need a crap load of wood to get us down to that coal. Oh, and water.”

MacAfee said, “We were all there for the sim, Wen.” He turned to the others. “Snap to!”
 

Dean headed off at a jog to collect the rest of the crew for wood detail. MacAfee watched the man disappear around a bend and his eyes fell on Hansel who was staring across the river. “Anything out there?” Hansel’s ears moved in the direction of MacAfee’s voice, but his eyes remained fixed on a window on a squat building that looked onto the 14
th
Street Bridge. MacAfee used his helmet to scan the building: no movement, no heat signatures. “What do you see?” He gently touched Hansel’s elbow to get the puck’s attention only to have the creature offer a hiss through his pointy teeth. “There is something,” said the puck. “I can’t say what it is.”

“You mean like other pucks?”

Hansel turned and let his enormous eyes settle on the colonel, then repeated the sentence. “I – can’t – say - what – it – is. Would you like to remove your helmet so I can say that to you without words?”

MacAfee offered a thin smile to the strange creature. “You will let me know if there’s anything we need to worry about.”

The puck responded with a quick insincere smile of his own and turned to stare back at the window.
 

MacAfee removed his helmet and tried reaching out to the puck. Don’t fuck with me. What are you sensing? He felt nothing in return. I know you can hear me. Suddenly, he felt utterly immobilized. His body wanted to collapse to the ground, but he found himself standing at rigid attention instead. His head swirled with the sounds of garbled whispers, howls and grunts. One thought broke through over and over. COME, COME, COME. He wanted to. He so very much wanted to find those voices and offer himself up to them. Then Hansel’s voice through the chatter - Satisfied, Dusty MacAfee? I cannot tell how close, but that window over there disturbs me. You need to put your helmet back on. Without it you will leave us. I can only tell you that they are.

They are what?

Are.

Can you be more specific?

Are! They are! What don’t you get?

They are?

Yes. Very much so.
 

Hansel didn’t release his mental grip on the Colonel until he made the man put his helmet back on. Several of the people working to get the train going noticed MacAfee suddenly sitting and holding his hands to his helmet. After a moment, MacAfee gathered himself and quietly said, “If you ever do that again, I will shoot you.”

Hansel laughed and kept watching the window.

CHAPTER THREE
BOOK: Children Of Fiends - Part 2 A Nation By Another Name: An Of Sudden Origin Novella
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