Children Of Fiends (4 page)

“I expect we will find something in Tucson. Almost there.”

As they approached Tucson, they passed through a small settlement called Old Vail Village and noted that every structure was burned to the ground. As they passed ever denser construction, every building was gutted to its foundation. Not even a storage shed stood above the heaps of ash. At the city center, the vast rail yard told the same tale: every railcar, boxcar, tanker, all of it, burned to the axles. Nothing that could be considered a shelter stood. Thompson finally said, “This was systematic. This isn’t bombing. It’s only structures. Trees that are far enough away from any house are still living. This was salting a city back to the earth. Who would do this?”

Plimpton almost shrugged. “The demon children have fire. We know this. Who else?”

“But why?” asked Gallagher.

Collins said, “To make it uninhabitable.”
 

Thompson said, “Not long ago. The ash is too fresh. Wind and weather would have tamped it down or blown it away.”

The vicar stepped into the doorway, his bulk making the space entirely too crowded. “We have entered the Devil’s playground. Speed this thing up. We will find nothing but horror in this land.”

Gallagher didn’t need to be told twice. The rails before them remained freshly polished. The Northerners hadn’t stopped. Why would they? He pushed forward on the accelerator handle and the engine offered a throaty hum as it picked up speed.

“So much for finding additional accommodations,” said Plimpton. “Vicar, why don’t you stay and get warm? I’m going to step outside and see if I can lie down without falling off.” He awkwardly stepped around the reverend and closed the door. The destruction went on for miles, reaching far outside the city. For every suburb and farm it was the same. At Picacho, the rails split, with one route going north toward Phoenix and the other continuing west toward California. The Shoremen wasted a good hour heading north, following the silvered rails until they suddenly became solidly coated in rust again.
“The sons-o-bitches,” swore Thompson. “Doubled back they did.” He ordered the train reversed and they wasted more precious time rolling back to the split.
 

For at least a hundred yards along the rails that headed west, dirt had been thrown on the rails, obscuring the fresh polish. The switch mechanism had been covered with tumbleweed. When they tossed aside the brush they found the mechanism sabotaged: a broken length of chain telling the tale. As they all dismounted to study the problem, Timbs said, “Looks like they hooked up their train to the switch and yanked it all to hell.”
 

Beckman and Timbs huffed it west to the small burned down town of Eloy where in the wreckage of a hardware store, they were able to salvage a couple of large pry bars and steel mallets. With considerable effort, and by taking turns, the Shoremen were able to tear out the sections of track that had been destroyed, pry up some fresh track behind them and lay it in as a bypass around the damaged junction. The effort took the better part of a day and Thompson chose to lay up for the night in the offices of a salvage yard that had somehow avoided the continuous burning of nearly every standing building. The men ate their meager rations and sent the Sentinel to the roof on auto-watch. Not that they could do squat if a band of those devil children came wandering through. At least they would know to hide. Plimpton had never felt so vulnerable in his life. He was a man used to the world working for him. Even in the dark days of Omega, organization and a team of confident talented men and women surrounding him had meant steady hands attached to his gifted mind. Now he found himself fighting depression as his place on the planet had been reduced to survival in an unknown and extremely unsafe world. With profound frustration that their quarry might be getting away, the band of ten men spent their evening in silence, each commiserating with his maker or, in Plimpton’s case, himself.

The tiny desert town of Niland, California stood just inland from the Salton Sea along highway 111. As Wen Blakely gazed out at the landscape, God Is Love could be clearly made out written on the hill in the distance. Salvation Mountain, a curious monument created by an even more curious eccentric named Leonard Knight, stood tall, painted with flowers, trees and waterfalls, and covered with scripture. A little further on was Slab City: an abandoned WWII Marine base, converted to a Mecca for recreational campers. Thousands upon thousands of RVs stood in a jumble together. He could only assume that at the end, a mass of doomsday preppers seeking escape from Cain’s had gathered here with the confidence that they had gotten out, only to die as a culture together. And there was the Salton Sea itself. He had been there as both a Marshall chasing drug dealers and as a young man traveling to learn about his State. The sea, a vast area covering more than five hundred square miles, was gone. Gone as though the frigid desert had swallowed it up. A gently sloping pit fifteen miles wide and twice as long was all that was left. He noted that the train ride was distinctly rougher, with random jerks right and left, so he told Sergeant Green, who was up on the roof, to keep a sharp eye on the tracks ahead. He suspected that the San Andreas had woken from its long slumber. The Salton Sea ran right over it. It must have been thirsty.

They stopped in Indio, before the tracks turned parallel to Interstate 10 and then westward toward Los Angeles. Unlike the border towns to the south, Indio remained mostly intact - at least as far as fire was concerned. It was just as abandoned, lonely, neglected and weather-worn as everywhere else where man had finished mucking about, but a significant earthquake had randomly damaged and demolished hundreds of buildings. A hunting party was assembled and the still intact Coachella Valley Rescue Mission proved to be a boon.
 

Dean went on the search, if only to get his head clear. As the team walked back to the train, their packs heavily weighted with essentials, he was stunned by how distracted he was. He wasn’t hungry. Food was hard to even keep down and he was worried that he was getting sick until he remembered feeling like this before, falling for, or lusting anyway, for Amy Wells, back in high school. He was like some lovesick, wet-behind-the-ears schoolboy. It wasn’t rational. How in the hell was he feeling like this while leading people through hostile territory? It was utterly unnerving and completely unprofessional. Intellectually, he knew that the chemicals spinning around in his head were just that, chemicals… He hadn’t gotten laid in well, a really fucking long time. But so what? He’d been on years-long missions without getting laid. Not in a good way anyway. This was different. Eliza was different. He could end it. He should end it. Just tell her... He found himself remembering his fingers brushing across the soft but firm skin of her stomach, the muscles tensing and relaxing, the soft down of peach fuzz… He cleared his throat and shook his head. Like a new heroin addict, having had a mental taste, he was ready to mainline. Maybe once they’d gotten the sex thing out of the way, he could focus better. Had to focus better. He told himself tonight, then stumbled on some fallen debris and chuckled in a way that had the others looking at him askance.

The ride became really rough as they crossed the Inland Empire, the abandoned western suburbs of Los Angeles. Evidence of the earthquake, or quakes, compounded as the landscape filled with densely packed housing and industrial zones. The destruction was evident everywhere, yet random in its placement. Depending on the arbitrary nature of affected faults, whole neighborhoods had either been destroyed or remained solid as the day they were abandoned. They had to stop several times to clear debris and more than once they held their collective breath as they crossed barely standing bridges. That ended in Pico Rivera along the Rio Hondo (a concrete tributary of the L.A. River). The bridge was not only gone, but washed away by what had to have been a tremendous flood. That left them roughly twenty miles north of San Pedro and the Los Angeles Harbor. Dean decided that they would spend the night in the relative safety of the train and finish the trek by foot at first light.

They dined in relative silence, each in his or her way taking in the surreal landscape around them. The cluster of skyscrapers that made up downtown L.A. remained erect. More than any other buildings, the monsters of glass, steel and concrete appeared, at least from a distance, to have been untouched.
 

The twins sensed nothing that could be considered dangerous but the ruined place was so filled with ghosts that no one felt at ease. Millions had lived and perished here. Millions had been infected; their human side destroyed, rendering them instead into devils. Every one of the crew experienced memories of the television reporting from L.A.. The South had been rapidly falling apart. The West seemed untouched, a haven. To the dismay of the world, the pattern remained the same: A place that seemed safe was within days a riot of chaos. Wen recalled a TV reporter standing on one of the bridges that crossed over the 110 Freeway into downtown. It was a live report. The freeway, rather than being free, was full of stopped vehicles with tens of thousands of people running north for their lives. Almost indistinguishably blended amongst them were the Fiends, rabidly pulling down the healthy and ripping and hacking them apart. The TV reporter was pointing down on the insanity and screaming over and over, “This is happening! This is happening!” He was tackled out of camera frame and before the feed was cut, the camera itself was upended, falling into the melee below. Wenfrin Blakely for one, cried silently at this apparition of what was once his hometown. It dawned on him that he hadn’t really mourned what was before. Seeing the place where he had grown up and worked was like looking into an open casket. The body was recognizable, but the life was long gone. Maggie Tender put a comforting hand on her adopted boss’s shoulder. He accepted the gesture with gratitude and held her hand in response.

When Stewart crawled into bed with Eliza, the chemicals that had turned their brains into love-lusting mush had shut down. Blakely’s tears had spared no one from feeling blue. Until this point, they had been passing through each tragedy with the stiff spine of a well focused team. There hadn’t been time to reflect, to remember. With the train stopped from further progress, the engine that had been through the hellish landscape was quiet. Eliza and Dean held each other in a gentle way, hoping for sleep that wouldn’t come easily.

Dean woke to the almost total darkness that was the train compartment at night. He was on his back and he could feel his shoulder touching Eliza’s. He shifted his hand and felt her knuckles. The pattern of her breathing shifted and she laced her fingers with his. They lay like that for several minutes, the silence only broken by the breath passing through their noses. The mere act of holding this woman’s hand had him imagining pulling off her clothes – so much for not feeling up for it. Then she was drawing his hand across her thigh and letting it rest between her legs. With both her hands she pressed his fingers down and let out a soft sigh. She whispered, “That would also be known as a, yes please.”

With stifled snickers and a bit of comic fumbling they fought off their clothes while trying to remain silent. In another moment he was on top of her, the two of them taking in the sublime sensation of skin on skin. No more than twenty minutes passed from when they finally climaxed to when she rolled on top of him again. This time they took their time, reveling in the sensation of being physically connected. They quietly laughed and played and snuggled and whispered their shared relief at having finally done it. When they finally slept, they threw caution to the wind and remained naked.

In the next room the twins found it very hard not to invade the lover’s thoughts.

That. Was. Disgusting.

They seemed happy.

Gross. Disgusting.

The feelings were happy. I liked that.

Just made me hungry.

Yes, hungry.

There are small animals outside. I can hear them, feel them searching about for food.

Let’s go eat some.

They quietly rose from their sleeping mats and stepped to the platform, their huge eyes letting in plenty of light to see. Knowing that they would be spotted by the night watch, they didn’t leave the edge of the train. Instead, they crouched to the ground and called out with their minds to the small rodents that hunted in the night.
 

Along with the taste of the blood and the meat and the gristle, they shared the sensations that the dying animals felt and they giggled with the pleasure of it. Then they noticed the girl or rather, felt her thoughts coming from above them. They both looked up and offered gory tooth-filled smiles. The girl stood leaning her head out an open window. Gretel said aloud, “Hello… Brandy. Your name is Brandy. Are you hungry?”

The girl drew back her head slightly and suddenly spit down on them while quickly withdrawing back into the train.

Gretel wiped the spittle off her face and rubbed it on her pants. Hansel wiped his own cheek and tasted the spit instead. Gretel said, “Now that, is disgusting.”

“Perhaps, but I can say that eating her tongue would be a delicacy.”

At dawn, after everyone ate their fill, the group assembled on the tracks with what they could carry. Twenty people, in a wasteland that once held millions, began to march south along the river’s edge. Dean found himself walking tall as he enjoyed playing back the night with Eliza. They couldn’t make eye contact with their helmets on but she let him know she was thinking about him by letting her hand occasionally brush against his. Sanders caught the motion and smiled to himself. The couple wasn’t fooling anybody. You didn’t need to be a clairvoyant telepath to pick up the vibe. It was good to see his boss happy. Sanders reminded himself to keep the captain sharp.

The march was straightforward. Perpetual winter had kept plant growth at bay and the concrete design of the river system made for easy walking, all of it slightly downhill. Just north of the junction of the 105 and 710 freeways, the tributary fed into the main river. From there it was a straight shot to the Port of Long Beach. They stopped to eat and rest near an area called the Dominguez Gap Wetlands and marveled that there were birds there. For two of the birds, the encounter went poorly as Hansel and Gretel made their lunch of them. To a man and woman, the rest of the team remained astonished, watching as the pucks simply called out with their minds while the birds flew to their doom. After two more hours of walking they crossed over the Anaheim Street Bridge and continued south until they arrived at the mouth of the river and the rail tracks and roads that led away from the port. They had become inured to the random heaps of chaos that was left of the L.A. sprawl, but they nevertheless were stunned by what lay before them. The satellite photos that they had to work from told the tale from the sky, but to see it in person… The ports of L.A. and Long Beach shared the same stretch of waterfront and together made up what was formerly the Long Beach Naval Complex. Before Omega it was the busiest port system in the Western U.S. In the panic that ensued as the Cain’s virus hit, thousands upon thousands of people thought to flee by anything that might float, but were stymied by a national and international quarantine that kept that in check. The harbors were overflowing with ships that had not been allowed to leave. A U.S. Destroyer squadron whose modern history was primarily made up of humanitarian actions in Southeast Asia and Oceania were called upon to blockade the ports and sink anything headed for open ocean.