Monster of the Apocalypse (3 page)

An early start and a full stomach gave them an energetic beginning to the day. Rather than a slow exploratory hike through the old residential section of town, they decided to move north quickly.

They missed seeing the old Governor’s Mansion. It was one street up from their chosen path and, though they might have seen it from the lower intersection that they passed through, they happened to be watching some deer in the opposite direction as they hiked past. The mansion was the last residence of a governor to be security fenced in the entire country. After the bomb had been found on the front step at Halloween, the novelty of not being fenced wore off immediately, and the priority changed.

Toward midafternoon they made their way to the north end of town. The road they were on ended abruptly and before them stretched bare ground for several hundred yards. The bare ground surrounded a building, a hospital by the sign still gracing the front entrance.

It didn’t look like a hospital with the surrounding wall of heavy construction equipment and the two mounds of dirt behind the wall, topped by two camouflaged military tanks.

Lecti dug the camcorder headset out of her fanny pack.

T
wo dogs lay tethered in front. One dozed fitfully, a male, loosely Rottweiler-like and scarred badly about the right side of his head and neck. Angry red expanses of scar tissue with occasional tufts of black hair and a drooping, bloodshot eye gave him a demeanor of cruel fierceness and unpredictability even as he chased rabbits in his dreams. The other dog looked almost purebred Doberman pinscher. She was a beautifully alert, obviously intelligent, absolutely regal female in her youthful prime.

Both dogs silently alerted before the three strangers broke cover among the high weeds surrounding the expanse of open killing field. Bregor, the male, lay down on his side and promptly went to sleep, saving his energy for when there was an imminent threat. Lilly positioned herself where she could look under a road-grader in order to watch. She was obviously interested, but her real intent was only evidenced by the saliva that pooled below her tongue.

The dogs tugging on their chains had switched a light on, just as it had been lit earlier in the day. Hal couldn’t believe it. There was only one other time that people had shown up in such numbers. A family of five wanderers, over a year ago. Now he had three travelers inside the hospital already, and it looked like three more were at the edge of his clearing.

“Wow,” he thought, “how unusual is this?”

Hal didn’t do much deep thinking lately. Although he was marginally bright, he was not very well educated. After being left solo, or as good as solo, in Carson, he became industrious for several years. Left with no one to talk to except a toddler who was not much of a conversationalist, he buckled down to building a fortress to keep himself safe, out of boredom and nervous energy. It was funny to Hal, naming the toddler, “Hey You.”

Locking the little one, Hey You, in a childcare room with a low drinking fountain, a box of cereal and a video system filled with thousands of recordings set on random, he would disappear, sometimes for days to scavenge anything of value that he could find in Carson. As the hospital rooms filled with everything from canned goods to trinkets, he was also building elaborate fortifications intended to give visitors the impression that he was one of many, and more dangerous than he really was. It never occurred to Hal that he could not possibly man all the gun emplacements or even flip all the switches to activate the various sensing devices and cameras and automatic alarms that he had installed over the years. Eventually he forgot what most of them were for.

What Hal didn’t forget or grow tired of was his lust. Oddly enough he didn’t see Hey You, somewhere around twenty-two years old by now, as an object of satisfaction. He liked young girls, and boys, but liked them closer to ten or so. Just prepubescent. As children got older he lost his interest in boys, though he still found young women interesting. Hey You didn’t interest Hal because he never taught her any personal hygiene, and by the time he would have thought of her as prey, she smelled really bad and looked worse. It never occurred to him that it was intentional.

Hal began to lay traps as his paranoid phase wound down. After several travelers came and went, he decided that maybe it would be nice to have the option of keeping some of them. When the family of five showed up he was already well practiced in the art of capture.

Bregor had never shown an interest in man flesh. He was too sweet and forgiving, and Hal felt guilty about the hot oil he had employed in order to try to train Bregor to hate, or at least distrust, humans. Lovely Lilly, on the other hand, was another story. She exuded beauty and charm right up until she started to toy with you. Hal narrowly missed a serious mistake with her more times than even he knew. It was all about timing with her. She had played with the patriarch of the group of five for almost half an hour while Hal watched. He already knew she was more than deadly, but he gained a new respect and fear for her after that performance.

Now three men sat in the lobby of what was once a thriving healthcare facility. They had arrived on solar-charged battery bikes from Reno. The rumor of high radiation in Reno was wrong. That applied to a city further east. As they came down the hill from Washoe Valley, the once pretty but since industrialized route from the larger city, they noticed the cleared vegetation around a building and knew there were inhabitants. The tanks gave them pause, but they were used to fortifications and a spray painted welcome sign on a bus by the highway gave the oldest of the trio reason enough to investigate.

He met Hal just outside the barricade of heavy equipment. Hal introduced himself, but the newcomer avoided giving a name. Since Hal appeared to carry no weapons, and seeing no obvious threat, the stranger waved the other two in.

Cotton, the blonde, was jovial and outgoing. He laughed easily and liked crude jokes. His easy-going manner hid a deep cruelty and sudden temper. About six two and one eighty, he was slender and very lightly bearded, looking like he usually kept himself shaved irregularly. Dressed like a figure from the old west, with a vest and cowboy boots, he wore a revolver slung low on his left thigh.

The dark brooding one, Zip, was better looking. Beautiful to the point of being pretty, his sinister attitude made it plain that he was volatile. He was just under six feet and weighed as much as Cotton. He sported a braided tail in back of his longish black hair, a trimmed moustache with a braided soul patch, and muscular shoulders and arms beneath a shirt with the arms cut off. The only obvious weapon showing was a Bowie knife on his back with the handle over his left shoulder. A bomber jacket hung heavily from his frame.

Hal steered them away from the dogs. Cotton, seeing Lilly, rushed over to her. Cooing and looking directly in her eyes, he started rubbing her ears and scratching her back. Lilly enjoyed the moment and looked forward to enjoying whatever the future held.

Standing in the front entrance, the three travelers hesitated. The atrium of the hospital was roughly oval, a large room with a curved back wall and a huge, curved expanse of two-story glass in front. A broad staircase looped around the back wall, rising from right to left over the main hall into the facility, just beyond the wide reception desk that Hal used as a bar. The two younger men walked in, backlit by the glass. The older man moved to the right where the shadows were, making it difficult to see him in dusty, dark leathers.

He noticed movement on the partially shadowed second floor balcony as he entered behind the other two. There was no special reason to think that there would be a problem. It was just good to be cautious.

Relieved to get the three inside without incident, Hal offered them what he felt they would want. They looked rough, and though he was fearful, he always had a plan. Still, he would be cautious and had already decided he was not interested in containing them. Unless, of course, they started to threaten him or he found out they had something he wanted.

After the younger two were shown to the center of the room where five tables with chairs sat, and they received amber colored whiskey, the older traveler in dark leathers still hesitated. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the balcony, he saw bright eyes in a dark face, and a form covered in what appeared to be a bundle of rags. When he made eye contact the person slipped into a doorway, and just discernible, he heard the slap of bare feet on a corridor floor, running away. He asked for a soda and sat down, away from the others, close to the shadows.

Hal wanted to talk the ears off his visitors. He missed conversations, especially since Hey You was very quiet and unpleasant to be around. He dearly wanted to ask his new guests so many things, but he would start slow. There was too much tension in the room.

Approaching the loner first, he was rebuffed by the obvious reluctance of the older man to communicate. The all-seeing eyes and frown were clues Hal ignored in his urgency to talk. When he asked the stranger if he’d like something to mix in his drink and got a growled, quiet, and terse, “No,” he realized he might have better luck with the others.

Sitting and speaking quietly, laughing at private jokes while leaning their heads close to each other, the younger two were making rapid progress on their fifth of good whiskey. They still appeared completely sober, just seeming a bit more dangerous than before. One in particular, the dark haired one with the hard eyes, seemed to be in a volatile mood.

Deciding that another bottle might help him ingratiate himself into their circle, Hal reached for another fifth of whiskey. Just as he did, a light above the doors flashed on.

Sitting in her room, Hey You followed the unfolding developments. The security station overlooked the atrium lobby through a large, one-way window, as well as the outside approach across the cleared area through an exterior window to the south. With a door to the balcony, it also had another entrance, which she quietly used after making enough noise running down the corridor to leave a false trail for the watchful man that knew how to use the shadows. She had cleared out all of the office furniture and made the room hers, changing the locks and always bolting the doors to keep Hal out. So far she was successful. The long coat of smelly rags hung just outside in another locked room, so that she would not pollute the air in her space. It had taken her a while to figure out a hidden way to install an alarm light in her room without Hal being aware, but she managed. That was why, from the second floor window, she saw the newcomers before Hal.

When the three visitors in the atrium saw the light, and Hal rushed to the side of the windows to pull a ladder from behind the two-story curtains, they all reacted. The older man faded into the darker shadows. The light haired Cotton hurried to the window, standing beside the ladder and looking out as Hal scrambled up to look over the outside wall of machinery. Zip sat calmly, finger slowly tracing the rim of his glass, his mind mulling over the activity and waiting to see the advantage that he knew would come to him.

By approaching from a side street, Lecti, Deo, and Toshi missed the spray painted bus on the freeway coming into Carson. Now they were confronted by an imposing dilemma. Was this the store that the faded spray paint advertised when they came into town? It certainly didn’t look much like a store. The building looked big enough to house a small army and appeared to be fortified to be defended by one.

Adjusting the camcorder on her head, Lecti leaned in close to Deo, “Well, this looks like it
could be something to avoid. What do you think?”

Deo looked carefully at the open space, the wall of heavy vehicles, the tanks, and the sandbagged gun emplacements. He noticed the tanks had an accumulation of wind-blown dirt in their visible crevices, the weathered sandbags were starting to leak, and there was a lack of use in the undisturbed open area, but he also noticed some signs of recent activity.

“It looks like there’s someone home,” replied Deo. “Those tracks in the drifted sand by the curb are recent. And I can see the tops of plants up there.” He pointed at the roof, “I think it’s a garden.”

“Deo, you could walk out and see if anyone comes out.” Toshi desperately wanted this building to house a community. Even though its aspect intimidated her, she realized that if there were as many people in the building as it looked like there might be, she could finally have a chance to dump the kid that fawned at her feet and his sister that was always trying to be in charge. “Go on out there, and let’s see what happens.”

Deo moved and Lecti grabbed his arm. She gave Toshi a look.

“Wait a minute, that’s dangerous, and you know it, Toshi. Why don’t you risk your own skin if you think it’s so safe?”

“It’s okay Si---.”

Lecti whirled on him and cut him off.

“No! It’s not okay. You getting shot is not okay. You getting killed is not okay. She’s just protecting her own ass by putting yours on the line. It’s not okay.”

Toshi was insulted, even though it was true.

“Somebody’s got to do it. Deo’s the man here, unless you’ve been hiding a pair of balls that I haven’t noticed. It’s about time you let him be a man.”

Lecti turned back and glared at Toshi.

“It’s got nothing to do with being a man or who’s got balls. It’s about putting all of us in danger. Let’s just sit here for a while and think about it. Look, Toshi, I know you’re anxious to get in there, but coming up with a plan or just waiting to see if something happens might keep us all safe.”

It was difficult to keep from saying what she really felt. Lecti could hardly contain herself. God, she just wanted to be rid of Toshi. Already Lecti thought this could be the place that Toshi might leave them, but she didn’t want to jump on that bandwagon if it meant jeopardizing them all.

“You’re just so fucking smart,” Toshi said, matching Lecti’s glare. “I can’t wait to be rid of you.”

Deo was taken aback.

“Whoa, hold on, you don’t mean….”

Two men stepped from behind a road grader on the other side of the dirt field, and Deo lost his train of thought.