Dead Things (12 page)

The scene is wiped away by the sun again. The effect is like a strobe light, the view outside Peter’s window rapidly alternating between a stark reflection and a panorama of commuters. They seem to move in slow motion as they struggle.

Peter feels G-forces press him against the door. The train starts a gradual dive, a twenty-degree descent that takes it into the subway’s mouth.

They’re trying to get out
, Peter realizes.

He sees their desperation. They can’t escape because they are pressed against the door and the door opens in. Is there a fire? They are either going to die under their own weight or burn to death!

...biting into the face of a middle-aged man. The man flails his arms and screams, his hands striking the window casing. The homeless man pulls him down to the floor.

Peter’s mouth goes agape, his eyes wide. There’s no fire. This is something worse.

He spins, finds his fellow passengers sedate. They don’t know, so he tells them, “There’s a problem in the next car!”

Seated and standing alike, the passengers stare at him with contempt. How dare this lunatic interrupt the isolation of their morning commute?

The intercom breaks in. It is not the pleasant sounding recording. It is the voice of the conductor, full of desperation. “Passengers, there’s trouble in the front car!” He breathes heavily over the intercom as if he’s winded.

Now the passengers in Peter’s car start to look worried, and they all try to look past him trying to determine just what he knows.

A man with dark, slicked-back hair removes an ear bud. “What did he say?”

Peter does not have time to answer. The conductor’s plaintive shriek cracks over the intercom, and the train lurches forward. The passengers yelp as they’re tossed backwards. Peter bounces like popcorn, goes to his hands and knees. He’s lucky. The man with the slick hair catapults deep into the car. He lands somewhere twenty feet or more back, legs kicking in the air. Others are knocked out of their seats or into the laps of fellow passengers. They are a jar of shaken beetles, appendages tangled, wrestling with one another to get free.

The train whirs. It is speeding up, building momentum. As it races forward, it rocks to and fro violently. The lights flash, the train losing and then gaining contact with the electrified third rail.

Train stations fly past. North Avenue. Clark and Division.

We are going to crash
, Peter thinks.

He crawls back toward the front of the car and pulls himself halfway under a seat. He wraps his arm at the elbow around the supports.

Grand Street Station. “This is Grand,” the automated voice coos. Really?

And a moment later, the locomotive does just what Peter predicted. It strikes the caboose of the train just leaving Grand Street Station.

The collision lasts less than a full second. But to those there, it happens in slow motion, edited like an action sequence in a Will Smith movie. The events could be dissected, specifically:

The front of the train implodes, aluminum flowering at the impact site;

In a chain reaction, the second car, Peter’s car, collides with the first, the former popping off the rails to the left and striking a subterranean wall, windows exploding;

The rear of the second car spins to the right, angling upward, the third car slamming it, pushing it over the platform’s edge, throwing sparks, and scattering commuters like dandelion seeds in a strong wind;

The third car burrows beneath the second, driving the latter into the ceiling, mortar and rebar raining down; and

The fourth, fifth, and sixth cars pancake, bending and twisting like molten toothpaste, sealing off the northern portion of the tube.

**

Peter slowly comes to. He sits up against the end of the car, shards of glass rolling down the front of his shirt. His ears ring, just as they had done when he was a teen shooting his twenty-gauge on his grandfather’s farm in Kentucky. He smells the ozone of an electrical fire, and he struggles to see through the midst of smoke that quickly fills the car.

The car sits on a 35-degree angle. No one moves. Despite some distant crying and weak groans for help, no one really makes a sound. A small fire erupts in the rear.

Peter tries to stand, falters, catches himself. He winces and raises a hand to his crown. It feels wet, stings at his touch.
Subdural hematoma
, he thinks.

He reaches forward for a handgrip, white-hot pain shooting up the inside of his left arm. His teeth clench. Muscle tear, he reasons. He squeezes his arm at his elbow, pulling it to his waist.

There’s a fire inside that car, too, yet larger, and growing out of control. Dark shadows bounce in the red and orange light, lurching across a canvas of sprayed blood and fractured glass. Their heads move in violent nodding motions, their hands jerking wildly about their faces.

That’s when one of them hesitates. He diverts his attention to Peter, focusing on him, turning his head slightly like a dog in thought. Then he growls and rushes the emergency exit.

“Fuck!” Peter exclaims, the crazed man banging on the exit.

The man hits the door with force, pressing his face against the window and twisting from side to side for a better view of Peter. The man snarls, blood flowing from his lips, and he charges the glass of the exit with his shoulder.

Spider web cracks appear, expanding as the man hurtles at it again and again. That psycho is going to break his skull wide open!

Peter sets off towards the main exit again and hesitates. There are more of them, more of them feeding on the commuters. If he runs from the car, they’ll be on the platform—and him—in seconds.

So he races the other direction, quickly diving to his left and out a broken window.

Chapter Eleven: A Bottled Message

The page runs up the stairs, tripping over his billowing robe as he goes. He slips down three stairs and bangs his shin. He cringes as the pain shoots up his leg. He crumbles the paper in his hand and finds the strength to lift himself. Then he’s running again. He has news, and his news has too much weight for him to give in to the throbbing.

He knows, too, that this pain is nothing compared to the hurt Statten will inflict if he fails to deliver this message in a timely manner.

He takes the stairs two at a time.

When he gets to the top of the flight, he’s nearly out of breath. He knocks on the large oak doors, holds his knees, and waits for an invitation.

“Come in,” an annoyed voice moans.

The door creaks as the page enters, echoing Statten’s groan. The page breathes hard. He can’t yet bring himself to speak.

Statten doesn’t look up. He is signing documents, passing them left to right. He adjusts his glasses as he reads another parchment. He blows, annoyed. “What? Out with it already.”

“We’ve lost a plane,” the page says. “Flight 183 to Padre Island.”

Statten holds his petite hand out. “Let me see the manifest,” he snaps. “Now!”

The page watches Statten read the creased sheet. Statten glowers as he draws a finger down the registry. Mostly nobodies. Except there, Richard King. Richard King will be missed. He was good at providing information about the comings and goings of the flock.

And there, Doctor Heston. His mouth twists. The people, more than Statten, will miss Heston. There was just something about him, though, that Statten didn’t trust. Perhaps too much free will.

He continues through the manifest until…his finger stops on a name.

Statten’s eyes thin, then widen, a glow rising in them slowly like a newly lit candle. His cheeks plump as the edges of his mouth turn up, revealing a ravenous-looking set of teeth.

The page thinks Statten looks like some villain from an old black and white film. All Statten needs to do is twist an imaginary mustache or ring his hands maniacally to complete the picture.

But this film isn’t so silent. Statten laughs. No, he actually cackles as he jabs the sheet with a single gaunt finger. His finger punches one name again and again and again.

Van Gerome. Van Gerome. Van Gerome.

“Should we contact his father?” the page asks.

Statten looks up, startled. He realizes with horror he’s been saying Van’s name aloud. Over and over and over. All he can muster is a stunned, “What?”

“Should I contact the bishop in Cincinnati? Should we send a team out to locate Roger Gerome?”

“No, no, no, no, no…” Statten tut-tuts. The bishop is too busy blessing the new recruits. He’s likely on the front. And there’s definitely no reason to bother Roger Gerome. He’s in the field doing God’s work. What could be more important? Nothing.

Not even Roger Gerome’s son. Especially not his son.

**

Roger Gerome’s team moves north quietly. They do not drive tanks, or troop carriers or humvees. They use none of the heavy equipment from Fort Knox. Those machines are best suited to the front.

Instead, they bike.

Bicycles give Gerome the element of surprise. They cover miles in near silence. Plus, there are no guarantees of fuel, let alone tools and parts, should a truck break down on the road. Vehicles would require drivers and mechanics, and Gerome wants to drag as few personnel as possible into the wilderness.

The same rules don’t apply once they’ve completed their mission and are ready to return home. Then, fully loaded with their booty, they hotwire an old UPS or Fed Ex truck, hightailing it back.

They spend nine months of the year on the move like this. The other three months they spend training. It is arduous work. It is unrewarding work. But it is work beyond the prying eyes of the church. That’s good enough for Gerome.

Gerome has learned to stay out of the cities. From there it is straight east toward the setting sun, towards Champaign-Urbana, the home of the University of Illinois and what was once the Fighting Illini.

One day, Gerome thinks, he will head further still, to the real West. He wants to see the Pacific again before he dies. Maybe in just a few years, once Van has served and is able to accompany him. He dreams of camping on the Utah plains, in Yellowstone National Park, and on the beaches of California.

He fantasizes about a father and son finally sharing quality time together.

This is Gerome’s first time venturing north beyond Evansville, Indiana, in all the years he’s been leading excursions, twelve in all.

Twelve years? Has it been that long? He’s almost forgotten who he is, and how it all began…

Medieval.

That’s the only way to explain conditions in the first years of the New Order. Gerome and his family lived in a hamlet southwest of Louisville, a farm on the banks of the Ohio River.

With the collapse of, basically, everything, people drew together by the need to share resources. Settlements arose near mills, mines, and farms.

Farming. It’s a far cry from what Gerome does now. It’s a far cry from what he used to do twenty years ago: information technology at Humana, specifically WAN and LAN support.

The transition from geek to farmhand was difficult. He wasn’t used to physical labor. He was soft in the middle…too many Krispy Kremes. “Cuddle pudge,” his wife, Bethany (nee Allen), used to say on those nights before the plague as they snuggled before a Star Trek movie on the flat screen, their son Van fast asleep in his crib.

Thank God for Bethany and her family. Without the Allens and their farm, he and Van would have been lost at the beginning.

Conditions for farming were less than opportune. Where they could, the Allens and others relied on existing infrastructure. But the worsening winters—a legacy of global warming (and the politicians called it a myth)—took their toll, hastening the disintegration of roads and bridges. The expansion and contraction of water turning to and from ice excavated giant potholes, some large enough to swallow a compact, and splintered wooden planks.

Summers were no better. The intense heat and droughts withered crops and left the fields barren. The survivors borrowed a page from the Aztecs, building vast systems of canals linked to the river. For two years Gerome wielded a shovel instead of a laptop.

Little by little the canals brought water to the fields. Little by little the crops recovered as the river’s fingers stroked areas where rain would not. Little by little Gerome’s body became lean, shedding flab as his nearly atrophied muscles flexed.