Terminus: A Novella of the Apocalypse (6 page)

Despite my better resolve, my grin is lopsided and rueful, “You’re telling me you want to get the world working so you can prey on it again?”  For the first time, I see The Girl’s face change.  She is angry.

“Exactly!  Now you get the picture, Scientist!  Somehow, I knew you would understand!  Like I said.  Smart.  Very smart.”

Before I can stop her, The Girl lashes out with the knife.  Though distracted, The Guide is fast, too, in his own way.  Like I said, Terminus had a way of winnowing out the weaklings.  Only the strong survived.

Thus, he manages to retract his left hand before she can chop it off.  Instead, he loses only the tip of his pinky.  Slinging the hand painfully, blood flies.  I intervene, pushing her back, though gingerly to avoid her ire, myself.

Hissing, The Guide fetches a kerchief from the breast pocket of his silk suit to staunch the flow.  It immediate floods crimson.  Digits bleed that way, I learned during Terminus.  Fast and hard but briefly.

The Guide chortles in a self-deprecating manner.  “The Protégé doesn’t approve, I guess.”

Shrugging, I back away from them both, assured he will not retaliate and she will not advance again.  Not any time soon, at least.

The Asian, I warn, “Better skip that part for now.  Get back to the gristle.”

“Ha,” he laughs sickly, “you made a funny.  Is there a poem in that, do you think?  Maybe, but I don’t care to write it.  That hurt, you know!”  Now The Guide turns a reproachful but mild eye on The Girl.  “You didn’t have to do that!”

When she jerks forward again, he flinches and uses both hands to cover his head.  “Okay!  Okay!  Okay!  Sheesh!  I get it!  Never mind with the jokes!” Lowering his hands again, once she fails to follow through on her latest threatened attack, The Guide searches his desk and then the carpeted floor.

Finding his fingertip, cut short just past the last knuckle, he blows off the dust bunnies and then lays it on his blotter, fetching an office-style Scotch tape roller.  As he labors to staunch the blood from his pinky stump and then tape his finger back together, he continues his pitch, though his once cocky, pinched voice wavers a bit.

He banters absently, “Where did you find that one, Scientist?  Holy cow, Batman!  We could have used her back in the day!  No ninja-style assassin was ever so quick!  I think I’m in love!  Imagine.  Me plus her; that equals a whole mess of little gangbangers.  The Yakuza got nothing on that!  Ha ha ha!”  Though she makes no move to assault him, The Guide flinches, sharply turning his head to keep her warily in view, “Oh.  Never mind.  I thought you had jumped off again.  There’s a good girl.  Say, listen.  From now on, just to be safe and make certain nobody else loses a body-part for a misunderstanding, let’s just make friends.  Okay?  From here on out, just assume I got nothing but respect for you.  Mad love and affection and all that.  I learned my lesson.  Take the chick in the room seriously.”

Then he returns to the tape and his pinky finger, grumbling.  “I should have learned that lesson a long time ago.  The only girls who survived were already one foot in.  Know what I mean?  They are vicious!  Like wildcats with cockleburs up their butts!  No offense!

“Say, Scientist,” he glooms, as the tape refuses to stick for all the blood, “what set her off, do you think?  For all that talk, what about… those few words… turned the trick?”

Shrugging and moving across the cargo bay to prop one haunch on the corner of his desk so I can toy with the camera controls, I reply, “Maybe it was that bit about putting the world back together again.  Or maybe it was more about putting it back together exactly the way it was.”  I glance up to see her beautiful green eyes sparkling maliciously, and I know I’m treading thin ice.  “I have to agree with her on those points.  I don’t much care what becomes of this place now, but I do know I don’t want to make it like before.”

“Ah,” enthuses The Guide, his tongue working at one corner of his mouth as he finally manages to get the two ends of his severed finger together again with the nail on top, “hope!  That’s a dirty word, Scientist!  A sucker word!  Got to be real, extra careful with that word these days!  Still, I think I can understand her upset.  Yours, too.  Maybe you’re right.  Of course, it’s all a long, long way off.  If it could ever really happen.”

“Look, mate,” I groan, zooming a body cam from one non-Terminal to another, “I like you and all, the same way I like stinky toe cheese.  So just come to your point before my patience wears through.”

“Toe cheese,” cackles Guide, “ha!  Another funny!  Okay, you’re right.  Daylight’s a’wasting!  So, where was I before Sir-Hacks-a-Lot tied into me with that meat cleaver of hers?  Right!  The date!  You’re late!  You’re late!  For a very important date!  Three hours south down the coast, Scientist, your destiny awaits.”

Frustrated, I kick his chair.  His pinky pops out of the tape and rolls across the blotter.  Undeterred, The Guide fetches it again and continues his work as though uninterrupted, but he gets the point, too.  “It’s one of those fruity little villages that went self-sufficient, Pre-Terminus.  They set themselves up there.  Electricity.  Lights.  Gas stations.  Cars.  Supermarkets.  You name it, they got it.  Like a Little America.  Maybe a hundred people, most of them educated-types.  Teachers.  Doctors.  Engineers.  Heck, they even have an artist or two and, of all things, a lawyer!  Man, I almost kicked that one out of the gene pool, let me tell you!  It was all I could do to keep my garrote in my pocket!”

“What do they want with me?”

The Guide abruptly stops working and turns a dumbfounded eye on me, as though I am an imbecile and he my teacher.  “Isn’t that obvious?  They call you The Scientist, don’t they?”

I exchange glares with the girl.  Flat as ever, her face betrays nothing, but her eyes question.  They are almost… encouraging… hopeful.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Returning to his labor, The Guide adds, “Okay, then try this part of it.  They got a lead on Terminus.  They think they know what caused it, but they need expert assistance working it all out.  They want to be certain, you know.  Guesses just won’t cut it.  They want proof.  Real, scientific-style proof.  You could do that, couldn’t you?”

My pulse races.  I lick my lips.  Was the vile little man sincere?

Again, I kick his chair.  Again, the pinky-tip pops out of its circle of tape.  This time, The Guide groans, afraid time is growing short for knitting his digit back together again.

The Girl steps forward, and the Asian slips sideways against the armrest of his chair, away from her.  Instead of a knife, she has extracted a first-aid kit from that bottomless purse.  She jerks his hand toward her and scoops up the fingertip.

“Hey, uh, Scientist?” he quips nervously.  “Do you think I should trust her?”

“I think you have no choice.  Be glad she didn’t simplify things by taking off your hand.”

With a pre-threaded suture needle, she stitches a handful of knots around the edge of the finger stump, binding it to its lost partner.  Then she glues it all around and tapes it down with proper medical tape.  Adding a metal finger splint, antiseptic, a bandage, and yet more tape, she finishes the job and backs away again.

Amazed at the sight of his mended injury, The Guide sits straighter in his swivel chair and alternates a wondrous gaze back and forth between The Girl and me.  “What made her change her mind about my pinky, do you think-y?”

“Hope,” I grunt.  “Finish your story.”

“Right.  So, that’s it, I guess.  I was going to strangulate them all, immaculate-style, but didn’t.  They told me about their idea and asked if I could help.  I said I knew about a guy called ‘The Scientist’, and they suggested I look you up.  Here we are.  I will now entertain questions from the audience.”

I ask, “Why do I need you?  Why wouldn’t I just go there, myself?  Or not at all.”  With this last suggestion, I ignore the green flash of The Girl’s eyes.

“You don’t know the way.”

I nod.  The girl is back at his throat with the knife.

His face a grimace, The Guide twists his head negatively.  “Nope.  Won’t work.  I don’t care what you do.  I won’t tell.”  He sticks out his tongue.

Contemplating my options, I inform him how I could easily have The Girl take him apart, one joint at a time.  I remind him how gently persuasive pain can be.

“Sure, you could make me talk, if you try real hard,” he grunts through her savage grip, his throat constricted by the presence of her razor-sharp blade, “and sure you could walk the five hundred kilometers between here and there, but wouldn’t it be faster in the truck?  Huh?”

I nod again.  The Girl backs away again.

“You know what the highways and streets are like,” he enthuses, smoothing the ruffle of his blood-speckled suit.  “With me and the Clan, you could get there in style.  We have a sort of understanding, Clan-to-Clan.  Live and let die, you see.  Since we’re all working toward the same goal, we don’t hassle with territorial claims.  It’s all about the nihilism.”

He has a point.  He knows it.  She knows it.  She nods.

Ultimately, I nod.  The Guide retrieves his forgotten cigar, which has charred a hole in his leather blotter, and then he returns to the controls of his murder-system.  Immediately, he finds the pinky splint awkward.  He motions to me.

“Push that thing around to select that control,” he instructs, pointing with his bandage-fat pinky to a computer display, “and that one.  Then that one.  Good.  Okay, here we go.  Hey, esteemed protégé, get the door, would you?  We don’t want anybody falling out or climbing in.  Lock it, too.”

As he speaks into his microphone and listens to his own earbuds, The Clan starts to move.  The truck rumbles to life, backs up, and drives up the street the way it had come hours earlier.  The Terminal cases and their keepers trot alongside until we return to the burned-out cathedral, where a handful of similar trucks await.  These are The Clan’s long range transports for its foot-soldiers.

Thereafter, while our tidy little convoy rolls along, The Girl and I join our host at his dinner table.  The food and drink are excellent, but I am careful to make certain everything opens fresh and new.  As we eat and converse, I find myself bordering on caring, again.  I wonder if I should trust The Guide and instantly know I should not.  Yet, I force myself into it, if only to court the same kind of nihilism that once drove The Clan to do its dirty work… that once drove me to implement my own version of the same labor.

THE VILLAGE

Hours later, just before early fall sunshine declines to darkness, the convoy rolls to a halt.  Through the camera monitors, we see in all directions.  From the trucks before and behind ours, The Clan falls-out to swarm the nearby landscaping, buildings and streets.  Down the road, I can see the guardhouse of a gated community.  Previously well-kept and now overgrown and ramshackle, its most recent inhabitants have nonetheless reinforced it considerably.  Despite the distance, I can see the bristle of firearms amid scrolls of razor wire.

The Guide pans the cameras, chuckling, “The wire is new.  Probably because of me.”

“Will they want you back, again?”

“Would you?” he asks sincerely.  “This still ain’t the old world, Scientist, for all its modern conveniences.  They don’t care much more for life than you or me.  We all did the same things… committed the same crimes… ha ha ha, that’s a big part of my problem, isn’t it?  When everybody is a murderer, nobody is.”  He zooms the main forward-looking camera until we can see a handful of armed people milling around behind the gate, apparently waiting for our approach.  “I bet I could roll in there tonight with my garrotes in hand and get no resistance.  Again, that’s a big part of my problem.  It’s no fun when they want to die!”

“So what’s next?”

“This,” intones the little man, reaching for his keyboard to strike a particular key.  When he next speaks, his voice amplifies through the loudspeaker, emcee bold, “Greetings, hopeful ones!  I have returned, your prodigal son!  I and my amazing Clan of the Immaculate Strangulation have done the impossible!  We have nabbed the brass ring!  Belled the bull!  Bagged the cat!  Buried the-.” Here, his voice cuts short on a knock and a whine, and the microphone thumps about noisily as he adds off-mic, “Hey, cut it out!  This is all part of the show, you know!  What am I supposed to do?  Just drive up and....  Okay!  Okay!  I’ll cut it short, if you promise not to cut another part of me short!”  Now his voice returns to its former gameshow luster, as he prematurely concludes, “You have asked and I have answered!  Behold!  The Scientist-ist-ist-ist.”  Again, distracted, softer now he adds, “Yes, I have to add my own echoes.  Look around this place, man!  There are no high walls to make one naturally!”

For final measure, I clout his ear and back away from the table.  He kills the microphone.

“Let’s go,” I intone, motioning to The Girl.

“Wait a minute, Scientist,” beckons The Guide, spinning in his swivel chair.  “I’m going to sit this one out for now.  Me and the Clan don’t do so well in there, what with all the murderous interactions and what not.  I don’t care, myself, but those civilized types tend to get upset over random strangulations.  They don’t mind if you come to do it on purpose, you understand, but for some reason they don’t like for it be just a pastime sort of happenstance.  Go figure.”

My initial reaction is to beat him to death where he sits.  I can see The Girl mulling the same prospects.  Then we both apparently decide he offers continuing utility, since we might need to use his trucks again.

Still pondering the bizarre turn of events that replaced a public transit service with a band of psychotic stranglers, I push through the truck’s door to lead The Girl toward the community’s front gate.  Halfway there, I suffer another sick realization.  I had assumed they would not shoot me based on the assertions of a lunatic.  Even for Post-Terminus life choices, this is a strange one.  Unfortunately for me, I have come too far to turn back.  While Clan Stranglers scatter from their trucks to mill about doing whatever it is Terminal cases do to fill their time, and then with all those rifles confronting me, I feel caught between the veritable rock and a hard place.  At the least, I believe we are safer with rational recoverees than we are with a mercurial and homicidally inclined Clan.

Minutes and perhaps a hundred meters later, we stand before the lighted gatehouse.  A mobile barricade wrapped with razor wire blocks the double two-lane entrance to the community.  Pre-Terminus, this was one of those wealthy enclaves with its own private police force, governance committees, and golf course.  Now the same walls that kept out old-world riffraff serve to keep out the new-world Clans, but they won’t do much of a job of it.  Those murderous crows can be surprisingly canny and capable when they want to be, as The Guide’s previous breach of the perimeter has already established.

“Hold there,” commands a gruff voice, also broadcast through a loudspeaker.  “Carefully, slowly, do as I say when I say to do it.  We’ll shoot on the slightest deviation.  Nod if you understand.  Good.  First, we need the girl to remove the strap of the purse from around her neck, drop it to her feet, and kick it away.  Then the knife.”  When The Girl hesitates, the voice shouts, “Do it!”

Pursing my lips, I hiss for her to comply.  I hope I haven’t made a mistake keeping her around, as I expected her to be smarter than this.

Reluctantly, she complies.  She seems naked without that huge knife and gaudy bag.  Smaller, somehow, and less fierce.

The voice continues, “Both of you, using both hands, lift your shirts.  Still holding the shirt above your waistbands, slowly turn around.  Good.  Now, drop the hem of your shirts, lean forward, and lift your pants legs.  The girl can simply stand for now.” She is wearing skin-tight exercise pants, but I’m wearing denim.  “Good.  Remove your boots and kick off your shoes.  One by one, turn them upside down and shake them.  Fine.”  Without the bullhorn or whatever, we hear the voice tell someone else, “They’re clear.  Send the kid out to fetch the bag and their footwear.”

Without opening the gate, a young man of approximately twenty-five scrambles through the tumble of wire and obstructions.  In the half-light of evening and the glare of electrics, we see he is horribly disfigured by excessive scar tissue, which contorts his face and scrawls his neck to his shoulders and beyond.  Fire, I think, or acid.

Silently, he collects The Girl’s bag and both pair of shoes.  He retreats behind the barricade again.

For several long minutes, we stand there uncomfortably with our hands raised, flatfooted and expectant.  Behind us, we hear the Clan stirring restlessly, which forces us both to keep our heads on swivels, wary of what The Guide called “pastime happenstance”.

When the process takes too long, I demand, “Hey, just give us back the shoes and the bag and we’ll leave.  Okay?  Anybody in there?  Yo!”

They continue to ignore me until a female voice calls gently without the bullhorn, “Are you the one they call ‘The Scientist’?”

I shrug.  “I suppose I am, though I never picked the name.”

“Are you scientifically educated?”

Another shrug, “I was.  Then the world fell apart and I murdered my wife and three children in their sleep.   Now, I just am.  That’s all.”

“What discipline?”

“Biology.  Chemistry.  Computer science.  A bit of mathematics.”  Without lowering my hands, since I can still look directly into the black holes of half a dozen rifle bores, I snap my fingers and add, “Oh, and I have an MBA, too.  Does that do anything for you?”

“Do you have a terminal degree?”

I know what she means, but I find this question humorous.  Nobody has asked me about my doctorate for five years or so, and I have not previously juxtaposed that sense of the word ‘terminal’ with its newer connotation.  “Give me a break, huh, lady?  It’s getting cold out here, we need a touch-up, and The Girl keeps her makeup in that piece of luggage she calls a purse.”

She exchanges a sharp glance with me.  Again, I shrug.

Abruptly, the mobile barricade rolls open.  Those rifle barrels retract into the darkness on the far side of the gate.

Glancing backward at the brilliantly painted convoy of circus trucks and the small army of crows meandering through the landscaping abutting the road, I am grateful to get inside the camp, whatever it might contain.  Nothing these days is more uncertain than the fickle will of a hundred lunatics and their psychologically damaged keepers.

Standing in front of the gatehouse situated between the twinned set of double lanes as the gate closes behind us, I spy a well-made middle aged woman, her hair gone prematurely gray, her mocha eyes deeply troubled, her face careworn, and the corners of her lips laced by fine lines of sorrow, as though she has spent the last five years continuously frowning.  Haven’t we all?

She stares us up and down as we approach.  Once the barricade rolls shut again, she asks, “Who’s the girl?”

“Just that.  The Girl.”

“Is she useful?”

Smiling ruefully, lowering my arms at last, I reply, “Lady, you have no idea.”

Pointing to a pair of benches positioned along the broad sidewalk that surrounds the guardhouse, where we find our shoes and her purse waiting, the woman instructs, “Get dressed.  We searched the bag.”  Upon seeing The Girl’s body stiffen anxiously, our host assures her, “Don’t worry, child.  We left the machete, or whatever that huge thing is.  And everything else.  The only contraband that concerns us are machine guns and explosives.”

Sitting to pull up my boots, I grunt, “I suppose garrotes cause you no concern.”

“Perhaps you think I should apologize for sending a Clan to fetch you,” returns the older woman, “but I won’t.  He offered.  We accepted.  As you can probably guess, nobody much cares how things turn out, anymore.  Nevertheless, we thought you might help.  Can you?”

Standing again, I retort, “That depends.  What sort of help do you need?”

Extending her hand, she announces, “Darling.”  Like so many hands, it writhes with scar tissue and it twists from broken bones.  I shake it.  The Girl refuses.  “Follow me,” she offers with a toss of her arms, leading us across the street to a holding lane where pizza delivery drivers once waited for permission to enter into that hallowed village.  Now, a large electric cart waits for us there.  “I don’t know what that one told you about this place,” she says, indicating for us to climb inside the car, which she immediately jolts away from the curb and up the winding lane, through an overhanging arch of tree boughs that must have been beautiful back when beauty was a thing, “but this might be the only functional community on the entire coast.  Of course, functional is a relative term.  Though we have a fraction of The Village’s old-world population, our suicide rate is probably many times higher.  Is this so surprising?”

It’s a rhetorical question.  I abstain from answering.

Instead, I admire the massive houses, ivy grown walls, weed infested tennis courts, algae filled swimming pools, and sprawling lawns gone to seed.  It must have been some place back in the day.

Darling continues, “We have most amenities now.  A bit of wind- and solar-powered electricity.  Hot water.  Refrigeration.  Television, if you don’t mind recorded reruns.  Fresh meat.  Fresh fruits and vegetables.”  Driving along at a surprising pace for such a small vehicle, our host runs over a fat squirrel, which expires beneath the cart’s little rubber tires with a shocked squeak.  The woman never flinches or swerves.  “If you decide to stay, you can have your pick of locations.  Most of the houses are available.  Or you can live in one of the communal facilities.  Some prefer it.  They have nightly orgies there.  Nobody cares much about diseases anymore, so all the fun is bareback.  Both genders.  All ages.”

I grin.  “You sound as though you’re experienced.”

It’s her turn to shrug.  “It’s something to do.  It fills the holes.”

Exchanging another sardonic gaze with The Girl, who occupies the rear bench seat and is busy rearranging the disturbed contents of her bottomless purse, I wonder if Darling has made a pun.  The older woman seems not to have noticed, though.  She refuses to belabor the point.

“We have a community government, of sorts.  I’m president or whatever, but only because nobody else wants the job.  I don’t do much, really.”  Now the lane opens up as we turn right onto what must be a major thoroughfare within the enclave.  “This is the main street of The Village.  It’s circular.  Think of the place as three concentric rings.  The outer ring, we just left.  It’s mostly expensive single-dwelling homes.  They’re nice enough, I guess, but you have to remove the bodies, yourself, and then clean up the blood and guts.  That’s not much fun.  The middle ring is stores, churches, and the communal properties.  Townhomes and a few apartment complexes.  I guess this is where the help lived.  A golf course occupies the center, but nobody plays golf now, although a few old farts have taken to bow hunting the squirrels there.  It’s become a kind of unofficial sport, I guess.  They call it ‘Critter Darts’.  Do you play?”

Now I’m beginning to wonder if Darling is all here.  Rather than antagonize her with the obvious questions, I tip my head and reply, “Not today.”

She shrugs again.  “Maybe tomorrow.  By now, they’ve staked a couple of hundred of the little bastards down all over the course.  They’re really thick right now, what with the seasonal fall of acorns, walnuts and chestnuts.  Yard rats.  Tasty, though.  So, anyway, like I said, we have a village government, kind of but not really.  Sometimes we meet.  Sometimes we don’t.  Sometimes we talk about meeting and never do.  Sometimes we meet without talking about it.  Did I tell you I’m president or mayor or some shit?  Yeah, I did.  Mostly, nothing gets done.”