Five Days Dead (17 page)

“Scuttle this.” Harley flashed his sidearm and fired and the blast tore through Orrin’s left shoulder and the Wrynd king tumbled from the truck. He took aim at the closest zombies, who were dangerously close by now, and ducked as two more blasts from the armed Wrynd went wild. “Old man,” he screamed. “I don’t know if you have a Jedi mind trick up your sleeve or can make lightning come out of your fingertips, or your arse or any other orifice in your crackin’ body, but I’d appreciate any help you could give about now.”  A Wrynd dove at Harley and he kicked it hard in the groin. Zombie or not, a groin kick was always effective.

He bent down to pull Edward to his feet and the old man stared at him. His eyes were far away and full of sorrow and pain and dark anger. “The end is coming,” Edward whispered.

And then Harley heard it. A thunder all around him and he felt the earth tremble beneath his feet and when he cast his eyes to the east and west there was a cloud of dust racing toward them.

“Oh shit.”

Orrin heard it as well and he clambered back on top of the truck and fired at Harley. His aim was much better than the others and he missed him by mere inches. Harley shot back wildly and then the Rages hit and he dove under his truck.

The herd of elk came first, 30 or more of them and he counted 10 great bulls among them, their horns in velvet, and they ran over the attacking Wrynd. Behind the elk came cattle and coyote and antelope. There were groundhogs and field mice and lizards and creatures Harley couldn’t even recognize. Crows dove from the sky like a black rain and a dozen or more horses trampled down the zombies in their path. But the Wrynd didn’t stop and Harley watched while six of them tackled a great bull elk, biting and scratching and hitting. These new Wrynd had no teeth filed into daggers or nails filed into claws, but the ink gave them strength and the elk fell bleeding.

But it was of little consequence. In a matter of minutes, it was over and the Wrynd army Orrin had unleashed lay dead or dying on the road. Orrin stood on the hood of his truck staring in disbelief and he aimed his blaster at the head of the old man and screamed. A swarm of crows enveloped him and his scye went to work trying to cut them away. Ralph and the other armed Wrynd clambered on top of the semi and helped Orrin escape the attack of the black birds. Harley could see no other zombie standing.

During the Rages, the old man had knelt on the ground beside Harley’s truck and he knelt there still, the empty water bottle lay on the ground in front of him. He was unharmed. It was as if the Rages had made a wide berth around him, purposely avoided putting him in harm’s way.

When the last of the zombies on the ground had been stomped to a grisly death, the animals turned their attention to Orrin and the other two on the semi and surrounded them. Harley lay very still under his truck and even the ground hogs and field mice did not look his way. As they surrounded the three surviving Wrynd, Edward Toll finally lifted his head as if he had awakened from a dream. He looked at the carnage around him and then he slowly climbed to his feet. All of the mass of wildlife turned his way.

“Stay down!” Harley hissed, but the old man paid him no mind. 

The wildlife came to Edward and encircled the old man. A great elk, possibly the largest elk Harley had ever seen in his life, stepped toward Edward.  The bull looked like a king, like a king of all nature. Edward caressed its muzzle with one of his gnarled hands and the elk bowed his head. A painted horse weaved her way through the other animals toward Edward. It nuzzled him for a moment and then knelt before him and the old man draped his arms over the horse’s mane and let himself fall. The horse stood and the old man lay on top of her. He sat up and looked directly at Harley.

The look he exchanged with Harley then was a look that stretched back through time, to when he was but a small boy holding out his hand as a kindly old woman tried to give him an apple from an orchard that could not possibly be real. It was a look of denial. A look of deep and everlasting hatred.

“The end is coming.”

The animals turned as one and ran to the north in a thundering mass of nature, except for the horse that carried the old man. She turned her great mane and trotted to the south and Harley twisted his body to watch her as she picked up speed and galloped away with Edward clinging to her back. Harley stayed that way for several minutes, just staring. Then he remembered Orrin and his two zombies and he scrambled to his feet.

Orrin sat on the hood of his truck and the other two Wrynd sat beside him. They were bleeding from the attack of the crows and when Orrin looked toward Harley there was blood pouring into his right eye from a deep gash in his forehead. Harley holstered his weapon and rushed for the driver’s seat. It was most definitely time to go.

A Wrynd screamed and leapt from the bed of Harley’s truck and ran at him, so fast that Harley couldn’t react. Something black and cold flashed before Harley’s eyes and hit the Wrynd in the chest and Harley jumped back in horror. There was a shadow, or what appeared to be a shadow, and it fell upon the zombie and the Wrynd shrieked. There was no sound except for the sound of the zombie as the shadow fed. Harley watched while the shadow ripped the Wrynd apart, reminding him of a dog or a wolf tearing at its prey, but not a dog or a wolf Harley ever hoped to meet. When it was done the Wrynd was a horror he could not gaze upon and the shadow turned to him and from the blackness there he thought he saw eyes, pink glowing eyes. Then it was gone in an instant, dashing to the east and Harley fell inside the cab and closed the door.

He started the truck and turned south and stopped when he saw a flash of light. A wall of black clouds was rushing his way from the south and within them lightning flashed angrily. Another Rages was upon them.

“The end is coming.” 

Harley turned around and headed north. He nodded at Orrin as he passed and then picked up speed and drove away from the storm.

“It never rains.”

The old mare carried the shepherd easily as she galloped south. Once, long ago, before the Rages, she had been a young filly on a ranch outside of Huntington.  She was born there and Man had cared for her and she had felt loved by them. But then the Rages came and she knew that she must hunt humanity. She must hunt and she must kill, even though it was not of her nature.

But the old man riding on her back was outside of the Rages and as she carried him she could feel the sorrow inside him but did not know how to lift it. She rushed him toward his orchard and she felt him caress her side and her mane and she hoped that in some small way she might help ease his pain.

As the storm rushed toward them, full of lightning and thunder and vengeance, it parted for the mare and she took the old man home.

The man with the gray eyes squatted on his haunches on a hill overlooking the highway. He wore a faded duster that kissed the ground as he bent low. He let fine grains of sand rush from his left hand to his right, from his right hand to his left as he watched the Wrynd attack the drifter and the old man. When the animals came he smiled in spite of himself and when the old man rode away on a beautiful painted horse he found himself grinning happily. Harley Nearwater was right. It was an “intrestin. World.”

Harley drove north, racing away from the storm. The surviving Wrynd chased after and the man with the gray eyes watched them flee and let the sand fall from his hands. The shadow slinked forward, looking at him with its pink eyes and he nodded with approval and opened his coat. It faded inside and its eyes were lost in a sea of eyes staring out from the gray man’s duster, like stars on a cloudless night.

Eye of the Storm

The Rages wrapped dark and deadly arms around the deserts of Castle Valley, blotting out the midday sun, swirling dust into the heavens faster and faster until it cut like glass everything it touched. Harley drove north, pushing the pickup he had begun to think of as his own as fast as it would go, but the storm already encircled him, trapping him in its baleful eye. 

What used to be called State Route 10, back when roads lead to somewhere worth going, made a meandering path through the deserts of Castle Valley. When it was built the road cut through a number of hills that looked very much as the colonies of monstrous ants. Driving through these cuts on a blustery day, which was an everyday kind of day in the spring and early summer, cross winds would pummel your vehicle and try to rip the steering wheel from your hand. Flying through these same cuts at more than 90 miles an hour while fleeing hurricane strength winds was something else entirely. Harley cursed as the truck was thrown first to the right and then the left and ended up off the road, its nose buried in the soft embankment of a hill. 

He threw the truck into reverse and started to back onto the road, but when he looked out on the valley and saw one and then two and then three tornadoes touch down he thought better of it. He put the truck in park, hunkered down and decided to wait it out. If there was a safer place to be while the storm raged, it was beyond his reach.

Before the Rages, when the world did not seem so intent on humanity’s destruction, tornadoes were almost unheard of in Castle Valley or anywhere else in Utah. They were an oddity and seldom had any real strength to them when they did touch down. Of course, so were swarms of locust, rivers of blood, disease, pestilence and any of the other highlights of the apocalypse, but they were all fairly commonplace now. The world was ending and humanity thought they were living in paradise. Harley reclined his seat and pulled a beer out of the center console refrigerator.

“Welcome to the future.”

He caught a glimpse of Orrin pass in the big truck. They had unhooked the cattle trailer and were crawling back toward the city. They did not see Harley half buried in the side of the hill and he raised his beer in a silent toast as they passed. The storm continued to rage; the wind still howled, and the rains came down in horizontal sheets that blurred his vision. Thunder rumbled across the desert like some angry beast. The Wrynd would be hard pressed to make it through and he counted himself lucky that the wind had pushed him off the road within the cut of the hillside. It offered more protection than he would find anywhere else on the road. Sometimes, even the damned had a good day.

He fell asleep to the sound of the thunder and the wind and the rain hitting the windshield and dreamed of his mother and in his dream he was a little boy again and when he smiled it seemed like it was real. They lived in a singlewide trailer in Kayenta, AZ., and his mother worked at the Conoco convenience store in town, where they still sold gasoline but mostly natural gas. He remembered they had a dog; a yellow lab Harley named Spot for some ridiculous reason only a small boy could understand. The dog loved everyone except Harley. Spot would snap at him whenever he tried to pet him and he wondered now, some 32 years later while sleeping in a dead man’s pickup with a storm raging around him and people looking to kill him, if the dog hated him because he had named him Spot. He didn’t think so. Harley’s mother told him he had a way of bringing out the worst in people and he guessed the talent extended to dogs as well.

His father was a roughneck for the gas fields in North Dakota. He would come home only rarely, but when he did Harley remembered his mother would smile and be happy and he would be happy as well because his father had been kind to them and would bring them presents. He remembered a baseball his father had brought him and a glove to go with it and even though he couldn’t catch or throw very well, his father took him outside and tried to teach him and laughed because he said Harley threw like a little girl. Come to think of it, he guessed he had.

But then came fusion and there was no more need to go to North Dakota because nothing was being done there. But his father left anyway. He knelt on the ground outside of their trailer and took Harley by his skinny arms to say goodbye for the last time. He remembered there was no lawn in the yard, just dirt, everywhere was dirt, dirt and rock and little else. His mother had planted an apple tree, but it had died and it stood like a skeleton in front of the porch.

“I’ve gotta go Har.” He said, holding onto his skinny arms. He had called him Har all the time and would laugh and say “Har Har Har” and Harley would laugh back. Wade was his name. His father’s name was Wade. Sometimes he forgot that, but he remembered in his dream. He had the most unusual eyes, Harley remembered. They would change colors, sometimes green, sometimes brown, sometimes gray, depending on whether he was happy or sad, angry or glad.

“Why do you have to go?” Harley had asked and he wasn’t crying because even then he did not cry, even when the dog bit him, even when the bigger boys beat him at school, he did not cry.

“For work. I need to go for work.”

“But Mom says there’s not any work anymore ‘cause of the fusion.”

“I’ve still gotta go. Gotta find something.” His father had said.

“Will you come back?”

“I will. Will you watch after your Mom for me?”

“I will.”

They had both lied.

Before Harley’s father left (whose name was Wade), he reached behind him and pulled a pistol. It was a 9mm. He held it before Harley as an offering. “To protect your Mom. Do you remember how to use it?”

Harley nodded and took the gun and his father left and never came back. The first thing Harley did with the gun was kill the dog. He was nine.

Then came the Energy Wars and even though the war never came to America you heard about it often enough and he remembered his Mom watching the news on an old fashioned television in the front room. Even when he was a boy she had been suspicious of technology and didn’t even own a computer.

He was 13 when the United States passed the Right to Income law and he remembered the awe and wonder he felt when he learned that RTI extended to anyone 14 and older. He would be old enough in a year. He would have an income. He would be free. The day after he received his first RTI funds he packed his bags and told his mother goodbye. She was getting ready to go to work when he came into the front room; the pack strapped to his skinny back and his father’s pistol tucked in the back of his jeans. She was going to work even though she received her RTI funds every week. It was more than two weeks’ worth of pay from the country store she had started working at when the Conoco closed down. But she was going to work anyway. He remembered thinking she was a crazy woman, his mother.

“Will you come back?” She had asked him. She didn’t look surprised that he was leaving; he thought she almost looked grateful to be done with him.

“I’ll come back.”

He had come back, but not for some time. He made his way to Phoenix, which was in the midst of a construction boom, transforming into a Hub and he rode his first HSP train east, hopping from one rail line to the next until he ended up in Minnesota. The Minnesota Hub was as close as he could get. All of North Dakota was being returned to the Wilderness. The Exodus had begun and everyone was moving to a Hub. He walked the rest of the way, catching rides when he could and spent the next year crisscrossing the state, looking for any sign of his father (his name was Wade). He never found him.

When he saw his mother again he was 17 and his mother looked like she had aged 20 years in the three he was gone. There had been a man living with her and he saw the bruises on her arms and he pointed the gun at the man’s head. He left without argument. He had seen her twice more since then; the last time was four years earlier. 

“She’ll be dead soon enough.” The voice was a harsh slap in his dream and his dark eyes opened. They were bloodshot and weary. The voice sounded like the rasp of Orrin and even though it had only been a voice in a dream he knew it was telling the truth. If his mother still lived in her trailer in Kayenta, she would be dead soon. The Wrynd would either push her to a Hub or devour her. And his mother would not be pushed.

The storm still raged outside and Harley popped his last beer and drank slowly. He was hungry, but there was no food. He smoked a cigarette instead, cracking the window just enough to let the smoke out and a bit of the wind and rain inside.

His thoughts turned to the old man and the animals who had rushed to his rescue and he puzzled for answers but could find none. The world was a marvelous place, he knew. Man could do so much. You could replace one body part for another with a simple visit to a Medprint. Bad heart? No problem, just print another one and a quick surgery later you were on your way home, good as new. Didn’t like the world the way you saw it? Slip into the Link and create your own world in the digiverse. You could request to live at any Hub in the world or even the Wheel circling the planet and you at least had a chance of getting a relocate permit. Even if you didn’t, what did it matter? In the digiverse, you could live there without being there. Humanity had solved most of its ills and if the world had turned against them, it was a problem, but not an insurmountable one. But despite all of that, despite all of the wonder and glory at mankind’s fingertips, there was nothing Harley had seen or heard of that could describe what the old man kneeling on the pavement of SR-10 had done.

He flicked his cigarette butt out the crack in the window. It would be nice to have some answers and since he wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, he could at least see if he could find some. He slipped on his eyeset and entered the Link.