MoonFall (3 page)

“Sorry buddy.” He patted Bourne. “Guess you’re going hungry tonight.”

“That’s ‘cause you’re in the wrong shop bro.”

Noah spun around at the sound of the voice, Bourne out of his holster and pointed towards the stranger silhouetted in the doorway.

“Whoa, chill!” The guy’s hands flew into the air and he took two careful steps back into the street. Daylight revealed a grin through his ragged blond beard despite having a gun trained on him. “No need for that. There’s a Walmart down the street, got more food than both of us can carry.”

Noah cautiously lowered Bourne. He wasn’t in the mood for more people, and he liked surprises the same way a rodeo bull liked a rider on his back. But if this guy had meant him harm then he’d wasted his best opportunity, which made him friendly or stupid, and either way Noah could handle him.

He slid Bourne back into his holster.

“What’s your name?” Noah asked.

“Paul.” The other guy lowered his hands, held one out in greeting. “Nice to meet you, bro.”

Paul didn’t know the town’s name any more than Noah did, and he laughed heartily at the idea of
Dumpsville
. But then, Paul laughed heartily at most things.

“You should save that one for New York bro.” Paul brushed a dollop of sauce from his faded letterman jacket and leaned back in his plastic chair, reaching to open another can of beans. “Place is a total wreck. There’s, like, old cars jamming up half the streets, skyscrapers with all the windows smashed out, all kinds of crazy shit. Capital of the world, take away the computers and it’s nothing but dead concrete. I mean seriously, it makes total sense man. What can you grow in New York, huh? Am I right?”

His face contorted as he tasted the beans, cast that can aside and reached for another. The can clattered to the curb, spilling its contents across the Walmart parking lot.

“Thought this shit would last forever,” he continued. “Like cockroaches or this rash I caught off some skanky cheerleader in college. I swear to God, you do not want to know what that did to Big Paul. Every minute was like some eternity of torment. I may not believe in Jesus, but I totally believe in penicillin.”

After a pause he spoke again.

“Wonder if they still make penicillin.”

A flash accompanied by a growing roar announced the arrival of a meteorite. Blazing a long, glowing path through the air above Dumpsville, it turned the sky from blue to a burning orange before crashing into a nearby hillside, the explosion echoing through the valley.

“You think that’s it?” Paul asked, looking up to see if any more fragments would follow.

“Reckon so.” Noah watched the woods where the meteorite had hit. If a fire broke out, it could make it risky to keep heading east. But though the crater smoldered, there was no sign of flames.

“What about you man?” Paul asked. “Where you from? Where you going? What’s your place in this crazy, mixed up life on the road?”

Noah hesitated. He’d known Paul for all of an hour, though he’d heard enough of his stories to fill in a lifetime. But then what was there to lose? And how else could you get news of the road ahead, if not by sharing with other wanderers?

Still, his hand drifted a little towards Bourne as he leaned back, a half-empty can of spaghetti resting on his full belly, and considered where to start.

“I grew up in Tennessee,” he said at last. “No place you would’ve heard of. I was barely eighteen when all of this happened.” He waved his hand, taking in the deserted buildings and the dust rising from the fresh crater in the distance. “Been working odd jobs – construction, auto, all kinds of stuff with my hands. I was fixing to settle down and be another small town nobody, huntin’ and fishin’ on the weekends, marrying some girl I’d known since she was wearing her hair in pigtails.

“If it wasn’t for my older brothers I’d likely have died. We stayed in town, but a new mayor took over and that place clean went to Hell. Jeb and Pete, they tried to stand up to him, but he didn’t like that. He...”

The words caught in Noah’s throat, swollen by the horror of memory. Of waking into their shared room one morning to see Jeb’s blood-soaked sheets, rushing over to shake Pete awake but finding him cold and pale as a midwinter snow, his throat sliced open, eyes wide and staring up at Noah, demanding justice.

For an hour he’d just sat there, rocking back and forth on the blood-soaked floor, unable to comprehend what he’d seen, even more bewildered to still be alive. At last he’d pulled himself together enough to pull out Jeb’s stash and roll the fattest, strongest joint he’d ever seen. As the glow crackled up the bloodstained paper and fragrant smoke filled his lungs, Noah had tried to make sense of it all. Why the killing was obvious. Gunderson had had it in for Jeb and Pete for weeks. But why leave Noah? Had the self-proclaimed mayor forgotten about him? Had he or his lackeys not seen him in the darkness? Maybe they just thought he wasn’t a threat, or found it funny to leave him alive and suffering, a reminder that they could bring anybody to their knees.

Nobody brought the Brennan boys to their knees.

That night Noah took Pete’s knife and paid a return visit to the apartment above town hall.

The flash of another meteorite brought Noah back to the present. He lit a cigarette from one of the packs they’d found behind the counter, passed another to Paul.

“Let’s just say it ended badly,” he said as last. “And he won’t be troubling folks no more. But after that, I couldn’t stick around. It wasn’t just that I was afraid of what I might face for my revenge, I s’pose I was more afraid of living in that town and seeing those streets but not my brothers walking them, than I was of dying there.”

“Been on the road ever since – half a lifetime and more, but I’ve never looked back.”

Paul nodded sagely.

“That’s some heavy shit, bro,” he said at last. “Some major heavy shit.”

“No worse than most folks by now, I expect.” Noah took a long drag on his cigarette, fought down the sorrow that rose within him, threatening to steal away his energy, his will to go on. He flicked the butt away, lit another, looked for a distraction. “What’s next for you?”

“Heading south, catch me some sunshine,” Paul said. “Winter was hella cold upstate this year. I want to get somewhere hot before I lose any more of these bad boys.” He pulled off one of his boots, revealing the blackened stumps of two toes eaten away by frostbite.

“Hate to tell you this,” Noah said, “but it ain’t gonna be much better down south. Weather’s a mess wherever you go. Even the Bayou gets frozen some winters now. And before that, you’ll have to bake through the summer – from here on out it gets hotter every day.”

“Thanks for the warning bro.” Paul pulled his sock and shoe back on, started tying the twine that had replaced the laces. “But what I saw this winter, storms burying whole houses in snow, fucking polar bears roaming the streets, whatever’s down south it can’t be any worse. What about you? Where next for Tennessee’s own Lone Ranger?”

“Keep heading east. See what I can find.”

Paul gave his thoughtful nod of the head. He had a way of gazing off into the distance that made him look wise until you heard him speak. It was only then that the distance and the pauses were revealed as vacancy, not thoughtfulness. There was far worse company to be had, but he wasn’t exactly filling Noah with a desire for civilization.

“Maybe two hours of daylight left,” Paul said. “Trade before we part?”

Noah nodded. It was the common parting point for folks on the road, getting the chance to switch supplies before going their separate ways, not giving the other guy time to plan a scam or rob you of the wealth you’d shown them.

“You got any bullets?” Noah asked.

“Sorry bro.” Paul shook his head. “No-one left that shit lying around. Got this though.”

He pulled a bottle of brown liquid out of his pack, the remnants of a whiskey label still visible across the middle. Noah grinned, then sagged as he realized how little he had to trade.

“Nothing I’d love more,” he said, and he could hear the longing in his own voice. “But all I’ve got are these.”

He undid a tow sack hanging off of his backpack, opened it up to reveal the rabbit skins inside.

Paul grinned.

“Shit man, that is badass,” he said, gazing into the bag. “I saw some needle and thread back in the store. Can make me a proper fur coat, like some crazy wild man out of history. I’m gonna be mother-fucking Captain Caveman.”

Noah blinked in confusion. Was this guy for real? How had he lasted this long if he couldn’t even trap and skin his own food?

But then he remembered the baboon. The world was a crazy place, best not to question the good bits of that craziness.

“You’re a good dude, Noah,” Paul said, handing over the bottle. “You travel safe, you hear?”

Noah couldn’t remember the last time he’d had the chance to get properly, wretchedly drunk. That night he managed, screaming at the crazy world long into the night, passing out at last in a patch of tall grass. He woke the next morning wrapped around his precious, empty whiskey bottle, his thoughts wrapped around a kernel of fierce pain.

He got up, tried to brush the dew from his clothes, and walked on alone.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

W
HAT
P
ASSES
F
OR
C
IVILIZATION

W
HEN
SPRING
-
LIKE
weather rolled through, it was a good time to be heading to higher ground. As the snow and storms eased off, the prospect of ascending into the Appalachians became more practical, with less threat of snow or violent storms to rip Noah off a hillside and leave him lying like a broken doll in the valley below.

There were times he cursed his own overactive imagination. This was one of those times.

The advantage of heading up the mountain was the pickings to be had now that the weather was changing. As animals emerged from hibernation and dormant plants started to appear, suddenly a wealth of eating could be found, as great a bounty as he’d see before the fall came. And as Dumpsville had reminded him, up here there were plenty of places that had been abandoned early on that other drifters might not have completely emptied out. One more reason to get up the mountain quickly, before anybody else did.

The next place he found had once been like Dumpsville, but time, humanity and the ravages of a devastating climate had entirely transformed it. The houses were ruins at best, burned out shells at worst. Tree roots and meteorite falls had turned the roads into little more than broken clumps of asphalt between raised ridges of dirt. There were plenty of stores, but those that still stood had been thoroughly looted, windows smashed in, shelves not just emptied but torn down and scattered across the grimy floors.

‘So this is what passes for civilization around here,’ he muttered to Bourne as he walked past the rusted remains of a children’s playground and on towards what appeared to be a high school.

The stores might be empty, but there were always opportunities for a wanderer who knew where to look. Community centers, if they could be found, sometimes had a stockpile of emergency blankets and old dried food for the homeless. If you could break through the reinforced doors then town hall emergency shelters sometimes held secret stashes, as rare and as precious as toilet paper in an abandoned outhouse. They almost made Noah wish he’d spent his youth hanging out with the kids who liked breaking into cars, not the ones who enjoyed repairing them – those criminal skills would have been mighty handy now.

But schools, schools were best of all. Most folks underestimated schools. They’d only ever seen them as places for learning, but a homeschooled kid like Noah didn’t have that disadvantage. He didn’t see a lunchroom as a place for gossip and the dreary routine of half-warmed burgers, he saw it as a place where people worked to prepare food, vast amounts of food, much of it preserved for storage on an efficiently industrial scale. Then there were lockers. People abandoned all sorts of things in lockers. An old lighter might not amount to much, but go through a few hundred of those teenage hiding holes and you could end up with a heap of lost treats, from the odd bag of weed to a well oiled flick-knife. Staff rooms had coats and coffee, janitor’s closets had tools, even corridors had vending machines.