Terminus: A Novella of the Apocalypse (3 page)

According to my venomous thoughts, then, and spurred by an unreasoning loathing festering deep inside my guts, I seek fuel among the debris and abandoned structures crowded along both sides of the dead suburban street that hosts that blighted building.  Through the following hours of night, I pile this fuel high within and without The Priest’s fallacious home until I have gathered sufficient material to thoroughly finish the job.

Then I ignite it all.  Returning across the street, I sit in a comfortable chair I retrieve from a nearby home, and from that vantage I watch the cathedral burn, taking great delight when its roof buckles and caves, hooting with joy when its buttresses groan and then collapse, and chuckling with maddened glee when its walls topple ponderously inward to send a geyser of glowing cinders and sparkling ash billowing high into the pitch night sky!

THE GIRL

Sometime after the conflagration settles into a low simmer but before the sun rises, I fall asleep.  The massive pile of embers keeps me warm despite the drear chill of an autumnal dawn, which rises overcast and gloomy to fit my mood of the previous evening.

Unseen for a thick cloud cover, the sun has climbed high overhead before I stir again.  As ever post-Terminus, I snap abruptly awake, half-formed mumbles fresh on my leather tongue, so I know I have been talking in my sleep.  My bones are stiff from the fight and my flesh aches everywhere.  Sharper pains sing to me of The Priest’s powerful contacts and I know many days will pass before I move with fluid precision again.

When I lean forward to rise, something encumbers my feet.  For a panic-stricken moment, I fear I have been bound by one of the roving Clans of Terminals that still plague the Earth.  Terrified, I kick outward with both feet as I stand to confront the nihilist bastards who have captured me.  Instead, a teenage girl rolls off the sidewalk, down the curb, and into the street.  She squeals painfully, but instantly jumps up with a heavy blade in her left hand and a savage hiss on her lips.

Warily, she squares off against me, crouched low, head held high and eyes forward.  Her powerful, shapely legs work beneath her to maneuver into the best position to fight or run, but I know she will choose the former over the latter, since running only prolongs any new-world conflict.

Seeing her there, my head swivels to search for Terminals.  Finding none, I drag a rough hand across a rubber face, sigh, and return to my easy chair.  I have experienced her kind many times since Terminus.

I groan, “Fetch me something to eat and drink.”

Her eyes press thin to suspicious slats.  She holds her attack pose for several seconds longer, but I can see acceptance rising in her gaze.

I add, “And toilet paper.  Don’t forget toilet paper.  Get the good stuff.  I don’t want any poke-throughs, you know.”  When The Girl continues to linger, I remove my hand from my face, lean forward across my knees and bark, “Go!”

She jumps.  She goes.

I wonder if she will return.  Then I don’t care if she does or not.  Unfortunately, I expect she will.  They always do for a day or two.  Until they learn me.  She will try to wiggle herself into the cracks and crevasses of my psyche and allow me to use her as I please until she figures me completely.  Then she will learn how the absence of my wife and children has filled every gap in my thoughts and every space in my heart.  She will learn how complete my torment has become, such that nothing remains of my former character to show her anything close to kindness or mercy.  She will get the hard, brutal Terminus leftovers and nothing more.  Then she will leave or force me to kill her.  They always do.

Five minutes later, I hear footsteps in the char and cinders of the windswept ruins.  I open my eyes to find her tromping along the street toward me, her arms laden with canned goods and a plastic-wrapped six-pack of TP.

Instead of approaching my chair, however, she stops at a nearby pew from the church, which someone has long ago dragged onto the curb opposite that now defunct structure.  Sitting, she deposits the TP at her feet and then arranges the food beside her.  Methodically, she selects a can of something she likes, uses an opener drawn from a designer purse to cut away its top, and then extracts a spoon from the same voluminous bag to begin eating.

Curiously, I size her.  She is tall.  Well made.  Muscular and fit.  Her sandy blonde hair is long but tied severely into a bun.  She wears expensive athletic attire, which I know will breathe well and keep her warm without encumbering her, should she need to fight or flee.  Indeed, she has pressed her feet into a pair of cross-trainers that look rugged enough to hike the wilderness yet light enough to run a marathon.  The bag is the only anomaly.  It is huge and gaudy.  Before Terminus, it might have been expensive.  She probably pilfered it from a boutique somewhere.  I guess it has everything she needs within it, including multiple weapons.  In fact, I note the knife is nowhere to be seen on her person.

Her face is pleasant.  Placid.  Her eyes are green.  Brilliant.  Disinterested.  She is beautiful in a plain yet perfect way, save for a savage scar etched across her cheek from her left ear to the left corner of her mouth.

“Well?” I demand harshly, my voice strange in my ears.  “Bring me breakfast.”

She continues eating.  She does not ignore me, exactly, since her flat gaze remains fixed on me, but neither is she compliant.  She simply eats and stares.

Exasperated, the grumble of my stomach drives me up and out of my easy chair.  Moving stiffly for the abuse of my former endeavors, I hobble along the sidewalk to the bench.  As I near, she drops her spoon into the can of soup and then gingerly places the can onto the seat beside her.  Reaching into her massive, brilliant bag, she extracts the knife.  This, she lays across her left thigh.  Then she once more fetches the can to continue eating.

I get the message.  This can be a pleasant morning repast, or it can be a fight to the death.

“Relax,” I growl.  “I’m hungry.  Nothing more.”

Approaching the bench, I loom over her.  She remains nonplussed and unconcerned.  She eats.  The knife balances on her thigh.  She stares up at me without fear, anger, concern or interest.  I shift my gaze from her pleasant yet abused face to the toilet paper.  It’s the brand I prefer, ‘Extra-Strength’.

“The good stuff,” I remark, “just what I need.”

I take it and turn to depart.  Behind me, she knocks something against the top of the bench, and I turn to see her holding a box of pre-moistened towelettes.  Her intentions are obvious.  Taking the cue, I retrieve the box and disappear for a time into the house behind the bench.  When I return, I am refreshed in more than one way.   Facing her once more, I wait for permission to join her, because this is the last thing we take for granted Post-Terminus, and then I ease onto the opposite side of the bench, which she has left clear for me

Pointedly, I move my eyes to the canned goods she has selected.  Tepidly, she nods.  She continues eating, the spoon working methodically from the opened can to her mouth and back again.  Strangely, it makes no noise inside the can, and I admire the precision of her movements.  Cautiously, I tear my eyes away from her vaguely pretty face to read the labels on the cans.  I select a soup.  Curiously, I note it is the same flavor she is eating.

Holding the can in my lap, I watch her eat.  She watches me not eating.

Then she once more returns her spoon to the can, the can to the bench, and she reaches inside her king-sized kit to retrieve an opener and a spoon.  These she offers to me with a ginger stretch of her left arm.

I accept them, use the opener and return it, and then begin eating with her.  Because she seems ill inclined to speak, we pass the meal in silence, her eyeing me and me examining the ruins of the little cathedral.

With improving light of the morning, I see how the fire has burned through the church and into the neighborhood surrounding it.  Several empty homes have gone up, too.  Nobody needs them.  Nobody will miss them.  Nobody cares.  I glance left and right along the debris-strewn avenue, but find no emergency vehicles come to the rescue.  No fire trucks.  No police cars.  No ambulances.  I shrug.

From the side of my mouth, I say, “You must have been, what?  Fourteen?  Thirteen?”  I shake my head.  “I can’t imagine how you survived it.  Not many so young did.  I’m impressed.”

When I turn to face her, I expect her to take some pleasure from the compliment.  Instead, having finished her meal, she simply sits at her end of the bench, watching me.  The knife remains balanced on her thigh.

I open my mouth to ask if she had help, but stop myself.  No, I guess.  She had no help.  None of us did.  Nobody helped to save us.  Nobody helped us murder.  Everything we did… everything done to us… was truly a one-on-one proposition.  For some strange reason, Terminus was an individual endeavor.  No families.  No clans.  No gangs.  No armies.  Just me.  And her.  And them.

Because I have had no one to listen for some time, and because I know she will not last, since none do, I decide to practice the forgotten art of speech before her.  I hope doing so will clear my mind, perhaps order my thoughts.  For a few moments, at least, the act might dispel incessant visions of dangling ropes, ready handguns, bottles of pills, and jars of poison.

I declare, “It wasn’t natural, you know.”  I lift a spoonful of cold soup to my lips and eat it without really chewing.  “It happened too fast.  It was too precise.  Too exact.  Since it was obviously some kind of artificially-induced madness, it must have worked in the brain, but what was it?”  I shake my head, taking another mouthful of my meal.  “Disease?  If so, bacterial or viral?  Chemical?  If so, gas or liquid?  To have affected everyone all at once the way it did, it could only be in the water or the air… maybe in the food.”

Having scraped the last spoonful from the can, I glance down at it sickly and my hunger fades instantly.  Rather than eat it, I sling the spoon clean, wipe it with thumb and forefinger, and then offer to return it to The Girl.  After she accepts it to finish cleaning it with one of the pre-dampened tissues drawn from her kit, I toss the empty can into the bushes behind the bench.

“No,” I continue, unscrewing a plastic container of sports drink, “It wasn’t the food.  It wasn’t the water.  Too many people drink… drank… exclusively from packages like this one.”  I raise the bottle as though making a toast, and then finish half of it in a single throat-bobbing guzzle.  “Since Terminus hit everybody at the same time in the same way, it had to be present everywhere and available all at once.  That leaves only the air.  Therefore, an organism?  Or a gas?  If it were the former, then I would expect more variation in the effect.  If the latter, overdose due to uneven dispersal.”

As ever when I engage this debate, I shake my head, because these suppositions always end the same way.  Ambiguously.

I turn to The Girl, who is still simply watching me, silent and flat.  I ask, “What do you think?”

She shrugs.  She refuses to care.

Instead, she reaches into her bag again to extract the pre-dampened tissues and a first-aid kit.  Pushing the remaining canned food aside, she slides along the bench seat to approach me, and then she labors to clear the dried blood from the cuts on my brows and cheeks and lips.  She pries into my unkempt clothing to clean the matched horizontal traces of fingernails, where The Priest has raked my skin to scabs.

Because her touch is pleasant and comforting, I lay back and let her work.  During the course of an hour, she cleans me from head to toe until I recline against the bench, naked.  Then she resorts to more pleasant ministrations yet.  When I next open my eyes, I find her working me with her head.  I can scarcely contain myself.  My eyes press tightly shut again.

When this sensation stops and my wits return, I glance up to see her naked.  Lithe and athletic, her body traces the same abuse with the same scars as does mine.  From head to toe, literally, the only difference between her flesh and mine is fifteen years of age and the individual patterns Terminus has wrought upon each of us.

She straddles me, her face flat as always, her green eyes sparkling but not with pleasure or malice, rather with life.  Simple life.  Because we are alive, we can.  We do.

Beneath her, I buck and groan.  I rise and fall.  Both hands slide along the curves of her body, from the gentle swell of her breasts, over the course of her delicate ribs, to the indentations of her waist, around the bulge of her hips, along the swell of her buttocks, to finally encompass her thighs and hasten her work with gentle urges that alternately push and pull.  Despite my sensuous prodding, she refuses to hurry.  The motion of her hips and legs is certain and timely.  She will build it properly and end it perfectly.  I cannot refuse.  I am not in control.

Afterward, she leans backward away from me, her liquid eyes searching mine.  Not for meaning.  Not with meaning.  She wants to be certain I understand what she has done, but she is unconcerned for my grasp of reason.  She doesn’t care if I know why she has done it.

Then she lifts her left knee and slides sideways off of me with a hot, liquid gush.  Before I open my eyes again, she has clothed herself and returned to her side of the bench.  Her silent observation of me resumes.

Naked save for the bandages and tape she has pressed to my flesh, I remain as I am for a time.  Burning and hot, I revel in the chill autumn air.

Then I feel an insistent nudge from her quarter.  When I open my eyes yet again, she offers my boots and my clothing.  She tips her head to indicate my attention.  When I groggily turn my own gaze to follow hers, my eyes struggle to focus on what I am seeing.

The Clan

There, moving slowly along the street toward us, yet unaware of our presence for the distance, I identify the unmistakable presence of a Terminal Clan, which consists of several colorfully painted trucks and perhaps a hundred black-robed and hooded ghouls.  Instantly, my heart skips a beat and my breathing hastens.  I curse them for breaking the spell she has woven around me, but I do not resist the urge that rises within me as a result of discovering their presence.  The urge is to run.