Five Days Dead (8 page)

She glared at him with her black eyes and something like a growl bubbled up from her throat to pass between her bloody lips.

“Mom!” Noah and Raizor were standing outside of the truck, both crying as they looked at their father kneeling beside the thing that used to be their mother.

Vania’s eyes danced their way and when they did something inside the blackness changed for a fraction of a second and beneath the blood and the gore Harley saw the woman she had once been. She was lovely. She looked at Quinlan and her eyes looked lost, confused.

“Quin?” She squeaked, and Harley used that moment to bury his cutlass in her heart. A sigh escaped her lips as the life ran out of her and Quinlan folded her into his arms. He sobbed and tried to wipe the deputy’s blood from her mouth and his children rushed to their father’s side. But there was no wiping away the blood. She had been baptized in it.

Orrin howled and prepared to leap and Harley’s hand flashed. He pointed the blaster between the zombie’s black eyes. From behind him Harley heard a roar and turned to see the bear from the evening before rush in from the tree line. The deputy’s scye had burned a great long strip down the bear’s side and blood was oozing from its mouth, but it charged with all of its fury and Harley opened fire. Two quick pulse blasts to its head and it crashed into the side of the deputy’s truck and lay still. When Harley turned back Orrin the Wrynd King was standing at the top of the slide and even from such a distance Harley could see the murder in his eyes. Before he could fire the zombie slipped over the horizon and disappeared from sight.

Harley went to the truck and leaned against the grill, holstering his blaster and resting the cutlass on the hood. He could feel his heartbeat slowly returning to normal and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He smoked as Quinlan and his children cried over the dead thing that had once been a wife and mother and then he cleaned his cutlass and returned it to its scabbard.

The Wrynd king had escaped, and unless there were a miracle and the Rages hit him before he could rejoin his tribe, there would soon be dozens of zombies coming their way. Harley had seen enough to know there were no miracles. The king would make it to his Wrynd and they would be coming for their vengeance.

Perhaps the only way to avoid being forever hunted by the Wrynd was to make some form of appeasement for the death of their queen. Harley looked at the grieving family and made his decision.

He threw the dead deputy’s pack in the back of the truck and pulled out Quinlan’s. He tossed it inside the dead animal ring beside him and fished his truck’s access tag out of the dead deputy’s pocket. Quinlan looked up from his wife and crying children and saw his backpack and then looked at Harley, questioning.

Harley nodded toward the slide as he tossed his truck’s access tag toward them. It landed beside Raizor and she picked it up in her little hands, her eyes blurred with tears. “My truck's on the left side of the road on the other side of the slide, behind the ruins of an old store. It runs strong. If you go now, you should be able to make it before Orrin can gather up his tribe and head back this way.” Harley kicked at the pulse rifle on the ground. “Best let the boy learn how to shoot. You’re a lost cause.”

Harley stepped over the body of a deer and a Wrynd and picked up the baseball bat Quinlan had used to cave in a zombie’s skull. He hefted it in his hands as he unclasped the scabbard of his cutlass.

“You’re pretty good with the bat. Try this.” He dropped the cutlass on the ground at the young man’s feet and started to back away.

“We’ll die.” Quinlan said.

“Not if you’re willing to live.” 

A hardness came to the young man’s eyes then, a coldness that Harley knew all too well. It was the look of survival.

“You might be thinking I did you wrong killing her like I did. But I didn’t. She was a Wrynd and there’s no coming back from that. You might think it would be good to try and kill me where I stand. But I wouldn’t take kindly to it. Protect your little ones, if you can. They’ll be coming for you. They’ll be coming for me. Perhaps I’ll see you on the trail one day and we can settle whatever needs to be settled. But it won’t be today. Now move.”

Harley turned and climbed into the truck and left the man and his two children sitting in the middle of the road beside their dead wife and mother.

Worlds Apart

The horses galloped across Spanish Fork Wind Farm Memorial Park.  Two sorrels and a bay. Their heads were up; their tails were high. They were the most beautiful sight Harley had seen in ages.

He knelt on one knee on the shoulder of the old highway and imagined that they were running toward him, as if in answer to his call, and a smile of wonder licked his dry lips. But then, perhaps he wasn’t calling them, perhaps they were calling him, coming to take him away from this world where he did not belong to a Wilderness that might embrace him, might make him whole. A mower was meandering across the grass, but Harley didn’t see another living soul. The world was theirs. They were magnificent and for a moment Harley remembered when he rode his first horse, before the Rages. It was an old mare and he had ridden her one afternoon to a bluff that overlooked their town and he remembered feeling her breathing deeply beneath him and he patted her dusty side as he looked down on his home and for a little while he felt at peace. The old horse certainly couldn’t run like those three wild ones racing through the park, but later, when he was older and before everything good had turned so bad, he had been atop a horse as it ran like that. It was like flying. He missed it more than he could ever say.

On the nine great antique wind turbines of the old wind farm, a dozen sentries roosted and as the horses entered the park, their hooves kicking up grass, one of the drones swooped off a wind tower and dropped toward them. Three pulse blasts echoed through the mouth of the canyon and they were cut down, skidding to a stop on the green grass of the park.

Harley frowned and put down his magnifiers. He folded his legs beneath him and sat cross-legged on the gravel shoulder and watched as a collector arrived, hovered over the dead animals and then scooped them up and headed back into the Hub. The mower stopped mowing and scurried over to where the lawn had been damaged by the horses and a number of arms and shovels and rakes unfolded from portals on the mower and began to repair the damage to the grass.

There was very little in the way of wind this morning and the blades of the great turbines barely turned. They were just a monument now to a bygone era when the world revolved around the need for energy. Now energy was of no concern to anyone and the world still turned, but Harley wasn’t sure why.

He had parked the truck at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon as the old highway slithered along the hip of the mountain, with Lone Pine Ridge on one side and Spanish Fork Peak on the other. From the mouth of the canyon you could gaze out at what used to be called Utah Valley and was now just a part of the Utah Hub. You could only see a sliver of the massive city and the sprawl of cityscape gleamed in the morning sun. A high-speed passenger train zipped through the valley, clinging to the skeleton of what used to be the southbound lanes of Interstate 15 and riding the northbound were the massive high-speed cargo trains carrying goods to keep a sedentary population happily on the Link. The HSP lines served as the arterial line for hundreds of smaller commuter lines linking the city. You could climb onto an HSP train and with a few simple transfers find yourself anywhere in the country before the setting of the sun. 

Skyscrapers formed metallic mountains throughout the valley, each connected by rail lines and landscaped with trees and flowers and lawn stretching for miles. Utah Lake stretched out along the western border of the valley and the shallow lake looked like it was dirty green in the morning sun. A park encircled the entire length of the lake. Harley knew if he were to take one of the old highways southwest, shadowing the HSP lines that used to be I-15, he would eventually come to a gap in the Hub and enter the farm belt. The Utah farm was small in comparison to the massive farms that stretched across the Midwest and Eastern states. Most of Illinois, Kansas and Kentucky were now just a farm.

Aircraft of every size flashed across the sky and beneath them thousands of storks like an endless swarm of bees danced across the cityscape, responding to the whim of a pacified population. Sentries zoomed around the perimeter of the city scanning for animal life and promptly destroying anything that tried to enter the Hub boundary. Despite the bustle of drones and rail and aircraft, Harley thought the city looked peaceful and perhaps a little sleepy. Hubs were less cities now and more living, breathing creatures all their own and Harley wondered if the teeming masses of humanity who called them home were a part of the organism or a parasite?

It looked like paradise from his vantage point at the mouth of the canyon and in reality it should be paradise. People in the Hub wanted for nothing.

“Except a purpose.” Harley’s voice was a whisper quickly hushed in the canyon. He had not spoken since leaving Quinlan and his children to die at the claw and teeth and fist of the zombies. Perhaps the young man was right. Despite the spectacle humanity had created, it was rotting away.

On the northwest edge of the valley, a skyscraper stood alone, gleaming in the morning sun and Harley knew that was where he needed to go. It was the Justice Tower and held the Hub Marshal’s Service and the Utah Hub Legion. Perhaps there he could find some answers for Wrynd with linktags, lost legionnaires and men with gray eyes and unexplainable powers. But first he wanted to be among humanity for a moment, to get the smell of them, the feel of them, to be part of them, whether they wanted him to be or not.

Before he could do that he had to take care of a few necessities as he came in out of the Wilderness. It was illegal to carry a weapon in the hubs. He slipped his eyeset from his pack, put them on and called up his security box. A stork arrived 10 minutes later and he placed his sidearm and holster inside the box it provided, along with his hunting knife and after a moment of consideration, the baseball bat he had taken from Quinlan. He regretted having given the young man his sword. It had been a rash decision poorly made. He would get another one while at the Hub, unless his plan worked as he hoped, then he didn’t think there would be a need. The stork sealed the box and flew away with his weapons. He would call for them when he returned to the Wilderness.

With his weapons secured he headed toward a rail line. He would need to park the vehicle; it was bigger than needed in the Hub and would be hard to navigate. While the agglomeration was known simply as the Utah Hub, the individual cities still maintained a sense of identity and a localized but limited form of government. As he drove into Spanish Fork City, the old highway stopped at a massive parking garage adjacent to the HSP Line. He adjusted his eyeset and parked in the spot prescribed for him. Because of the size of the truck he had to take two parking spots and his RTI funds were drained accordingly. Those who still bothered driving anywhere, and it was becoming something of a useless luxury, used Pods. Or rather the Pods took them where they wanted to go, since the driving was left to the Pod. They were a fraction of the size of the vehicle the deputy had driven, but considering the dead deputy’s desire to extra size everything in his life; it wasn’t a big surprise he liked to drive something totally inadequate for the world he lived in. Had lived in. Usually those who owned Pods bought a parking spot at a rail garage and would call for it when they needed it. Vehicles that you could actually operate on your own were a special order item.

Harley left his saddlebag in the truck, threw the backpack over his shoulder, slid his hat low over his forehead and went to wait for a commuter, trying not to trip over his own boots as he adjusted to wearing the eyeset continuously. It was no easy task but trying to get around the Hub without wearing an eyeset would prove even more difficult.

When the commuter arrived, Harley stepped inside and sat down and the chair formed around him comfortably. He linked and requested the seat to be a little cooler and asked for a massage and settled in with a satisfied sigh. When the train politely linked to ask his destination, he told it the nearest Hilton. 

There was only one other passenger on the commuter, a little old man with a balding head who was also wearing an eyeset. When the old man saw Harley looking at him, he removed his eyeset and smiled. Harley nodded.

“Mornin’.”

“Good morning,” the old man beamed. His voice was rough and he cleared his throat and said it again. “Do you know you’re the first person I’ve spoken to in two weeks?”

“That so?”

The old man stood up and came to sit in the seat across from Harley. “Oh, I’ve talked to lots of people on this,” he waved the eyeset absently. “But you’re the first in the real world.”

“Real world?  Thought it wasn’t polite to say the ‘real world?’”

“Oh, I know. It’s completely improper to differentiate between digital or physical world. Universe and digiverse are the same, they say, but they’re not. Any fool knows that who has a mind to think.”

“Suppose so.”

The old man looked at Harley’s dirty and dusty clothes and boots. “You come in from the Wilderness?”

Harley nodded.

“What’s it like out there?”

“Different than here.”

“Did you see any animals out there?  Cows and such?”

“And such.”

“Was it bad?”

“Wasn’t good.”

The old man looked out the window. “I used to be a veterinarian. It used to be my job to take care of animals, but I gave it up when the Rages hit. I know I could still be a vet, still take care of animals when they get injured in the Wilderness. But I used to love the interaction with them, the love they showed and the love I gave. Now if they’re wounded you have to sedate them, heal them and get them away from you before they come out of anesthesia or they’ll just attack. I just don’t have the heart for it.”

“What about dogs? There’s still dogs.”

“Yes.” The old man agreed. “But it’s just too sad. I had to give it up. Even the dogs don’t seem the same,” the old man paused for a time and his dull eyes were far away, to different times and places. Harley let him wander. He looked up after several minutes and smiled. “I know a lot of people who have dogs but they don’t seem like the dogs I remember. They know they’re hunted, just like us, maybe even worse than us. They have been denied by the rest of the animal kingdom and they know it. They’ve lost something because of it.”

“Price you pay for being man’s best friend.”

“I suppose.” The old man extended his hand. “My name is Jose Guillermo.”

Harley looked at his outstretched hand but did not take it. “Harley.”

“Do you live on one of the reservations? I understand there are still quite a few Native Americans living on the reservations.”

Harley stared blankly. “No.”

The commuter flew down the rail and the two travelers were quiet for a time. Harley looked toward the lake at an expansive building that stretched for more than a mile and was perhaps 20 stories tall. There were a number of people coming and going. Pods were zipping in and out of the parking area, dropping some people off, picking others up. Jose saw where Harley was looking.

“The Provo/Orem Medprint.  Just opened a few weeks ago.”

“Lots of people there.”

“Well, the Medprint is about the only thing you can’t get delivered nowadays. But I’m sure the day will come when you order whatever parts you need and a medrone arrives at your apartment, performs your surgery on your kitchen table and lets itself out.”

“You think?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Is that where you’re headed? The Medprint?”

“Never been.”

“Never?”  Jose looked at him as if he was some oddity that needed closer examination. “You mean you’re all original?”

Harley shrugged. 

“That’s something. I didn’t think anyone over the age of 25 still had all their original parts.”

“You?”  Harley eyed the old man. He looked original and about worn out.

“New heart, eyes and lungs.

“How old are you?”

“I’ll be 137 next month. I was alive before they cured cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes. Dodged more bullets in my life than most. Nowadays I go for my monthly checkup and quarterly fat removal. Of course, that’s just good body maintenance.”

“So’s watching what you eat.”

The commuter silently came to a stop and told Harley he had arrived. He stood up and left the commuter without saying goodbye to Jose Guillermo.

Outside he paused to take off his eyeset and smoke a cigarette. He could see the Hilton Hotel a half a block down. There were maybe a dozen people in the thoroughfare. A dozen people in sight in an agglomeration of more than 23 million. He tossed his cigarette on the ground and walked toward the hotel. A groundskeeper scurried past him and scooped up the butt before it had stopped smoldering.

There was no sign of life in the lobby of the hotel and Harley cursed and slipped on his eyeset. He had forgotten. Through his eyeset an attractive young woman with lime green hair was smiling at him seductively and he nodded at her as he approached the lobby desk and requested a room on the top floor.

He saw nothing living as he climbed on the elevator and ascended to his room. There were a number of fillers roaming the halls and he couldn’t decide what was sadder, to be the equivalent of human wallpaper walking the halls in a digital representation of the Hilton Hotel in Provo, Utah, or to be the only physical person walking the halls of the Hilton Hotel in Provo, Utah.