The Hollow Men (Book 1): Crave (10 page)

Instead of a river, she found herself in a vertical avalanche of hollow bones that rattled against each other, haphazardly tied together in the shredded clothing of adults and children.

The current picked up speed, carrying her away from them. Katie walked to the edge, ready to jump in. “Chase, save her!” Ridley shouted.

Her son pulled his sister back from the bank. Skeletal hands emerged from the river of bones, grasping Katie’s feet—a tug of war until Chase lost his ground.

The river of bones swept Ridley under before she could see if her children were OK. She coughed on the bone dust that poured into her lungs. Her chest grew heavy with it and carried her to the bottom.

• • •

Tom also dreamt of sinking into murky water. He had been treading water for ages. The sky turned soupy green, brewing tornadoes. The water turned choppy. A strong undercurrent sucked him below the swells. With powerful strokes, he surged to the surface only to have the undertow pull him down again.

Each time he dipped below the water, he had flashbacks to horrific firefights; all around him people were torn apart violently, bleeding and trembling as they died. Caught in those vivid memories, he couldn’t tell if he was dreaming or if he was caught in the fight.

He shuddered into a foggy wakefulness. He managed a drink of water though his hands were shaking so badly he could hardly hold the glass. His strength drained away.

White haze.

In Katie’s nightmare, a giant hand herded her into an upper corner of her bedroom ceiling. With each heartbeat, it thrust her further into the diminishing space.
Thump.
Squeezed into the corner.
Thump.
Crushed. She couldn’t breathe.

• • •

Tom saw himself leaning over Katie, the image blurry as if he peered at himself from the other side of a large aquarium. His elbow pressed on her chest, pushing the breath from her lungs. He moved his face close to hers, waiting for her to die. Even in a nightmare, the glimpse of himself hurting his little girl horrified him. He surged past the watery barrier that clouded his vision. When he returned to himself, he was in fact leaning over Katie, but only gently caressing her hair. He dragged his body back to his room. Grey fog.

He stood at Scott’s wooden fence, rattling the gate vigorously. His muscles were twitching involuntarily. His fingers stung, nails ragged and bleeding from clawing at the wooden gate. The need to get into the Hale’s house overpowered him. He was angry. He wanted to rip Scott and his family to pieces. He was ravenous. Tom struggled to extinguish the bloodlust the way he had trained himself to do over years of practice.

Darkness.

In bed with his arm draped over Ridley, Tom’s shirt lifted above his bicep, revealing a red crescent where one of the creatures in the locker room had bitten a strip of flesh away. The edges of the wound had turned a dark grey. Veins of purple and green radiated from the infected bite.

His mind spun in a full panic, recognizing the imminent danger to his family and that he had carried it to their doorstep. They needed to get away. They had to run!

Ugliness washed over him, this time the current so powerful, he couldn’t surface. The thing inside him that was no longer Tom pushed him down, down, down. It needed Tom’s family to be near. It was hungry. It would saw into their flesh with its teeth.

Shivers wracked Tom’s body. He curled up next to his wife and wrapped himself in her warmth.

Black.

CHAPTER 19

T
HE
V
OID
A
ND
F
ORMLESS
I
NFINITE

S
cott woke up at 5:00
A.M.
, his circadian clock so firmly set that he found it impossible to sleep any later. He sat in a chair on the front porch, fighting the urge to go for a run. It seemed irresponsible to leave his house after a night like the one before.

It was the optimal time for Scott’s runs. The early hour coupled with the darkness made the experience surreal. Each morning, he would stagger out of his house, get in good workout, and return to the house to start the day. By the time he hit the shower, the run seemed to him like a hazy memory from the distant past. That amnesia-like effect helped him venture out of the house every morning, even in the most extreme New England temperatures that swung from skin-boiling heat in the summer to bone-splintering cold in winter.

When he first started running, a sense of isolation provided privacy while he labored to get in shape. It embarrassed him that it took several weeks before he could run one continuous mile without needing walking breaks.

Scott had been thin into his early thirties, obliviously inhaling double cheeseburgers and jumbo fries with abandon. After reaching his mid-thirties, an extra forty pounds landed on him. His career in sales consisted mostly of meetings, excessive travel and a bottomless expense account, lulling him into gluttony and muscle-killing inactivity. Even walking up a flight of stairs caused his thighs to burn and his lungs to wheeze for a full ten minutes after reaching the top.

It wasn’t just his physical body that suffered. His former profession, while lucrative, strangled his soul. He had no purpose, no mission other than making his sales number every year. One day, he sat across the table from the VP of Sales, a miserable human being, who considered himself someone with the edge needed to get things done where others failed. In fact, he was only a narcissist with a tan and a firm handshake.

That night, Scott consumed a zero-calorie movie, his hand buried in a bag of chips and examined his life. He loved his family but was otherwise unhappy with himself. Scott made the decision to change. He said out loud “I want to do something with my life that has meaning.

The next morning he got up at five and started running. Over eight months and several hard miles, he dropped his weight to a more wiry 170 pounds on his six-foot-two-inch frame. Stairs were nothing. Now he could knock out a few miles at a good pace.

For him, the solitude was meditative. Scott untangled the knotty strings of his life and began to mark a new path for himself.

He quit his job and started his wilderness program. No seminars. He led four trips a year regardless of weather. Stripping away all they had and knew, he helped them forge new lives for themselves by recognizing the power they possessed at their core: the power of decision. He told them frequently:

“
Decide
to have a life that means something.”

It was hard to start up and just as hard to keep going. In spite of it being hard, Scott loved it, sharing what he believed, living what he taught. It inspired him to see the youth become a mighty force for good when previously they were meandering their way to be blights on society.

Scott had more demand than he had capacity. Surprisingly, many of his “graduates” asked to come back and participate in more trips. He put them to work as mentors and doubled the number of programs.

With global malaise caused by environmental changes and ravaging illnesses, there were several no-shows for the last trip. Cancellations put his whole program in jeopardy. He’d meant to spend the weekend figuring out a strategy to save his business and continue to help the legion of people who badly needed it.

He sat on his porch getting more and more restless. His nostrils were filled with earthy fragrances from landscaped yards and garden soil rich with compost. An early morning run was just what he needed to figure things out. He asked himself whether or not he really believed what he’d told Tom a few hours before, that their peaceful community would continue to be so for at least a few days.

Scott pondered Tom’s behavior. There was something beyond the uncharacteristic hostility. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the person standing across from him. It simply wasn’t his friend.

He took in another deep breath of the sultry air. The compulsion to run was too strong. As if entranced, he put on his shoes and hit the street.

Running in the predawn hours on the empty country roads gave Scott the sense of being entirely alone. He loved the rhythmic jarring of his feet. Their quiet scraping blended with the ambient sounds of the sleeping neighborhood around him. His breaths were steady as he took the first of four turns of his usual route that carried him over a five-mile circuitous route back to his house.

He had rationalized that the run was the perfect opportunity to reflect on what to do for his family. But he failed to achieve the state of thoughtful reflection for which he’d hoped.

Last night had been one of the ugliest experiences in his life. He wanted to exterminate Bill and the two men who had intended to assault his wife and daughter. He believed they were just the advance force of the legions of depraved men who would make similar attempts if he stayed near civilization in collapse.

Indistinct forms wavered in and out of his sight. Furtive shadows stalked him, ducking and weaving through the mature trees that clustered between the houses in the neighborhood. The dim shapes never took form, instead dwindling and disappearing as he ran closer to them.

He left the cocoon of residential streets and entered the world of vast farmland carved out of ancient untamed forests. Nature’s perfume from greening fields of cereal rye replaced the scent of lawns, glazed with treated water and chemical fertilizers. Sounds of nocturnal insects grew louder in the final hour of night before the sun rose.

Pools of perfect blackness stretched between the distantly spaced farmhouses set a hundred yards or more from the road. From lampposts, soft lights bored through the soupy humidity. Running on the forlorn country highway was like traveling in an infinite universe, sparsely peppered with dimly twinkling stars.

A moving form quivered at the edge of his vision, startling him. The indistinct shape materialized too slowly. As it got closer, Scott shouted “Hello!”

Nothing came in response. No reaction of any kind.

He heard grunts, gasping breath, feet slapping the pavement. Uneasiness began to eat into his gut. He remembered the lurkers that had spurred him to quit his confrontation with Bill.

Blond hair and bright pink running shoes splashed into his vision as a lone runner glided near. Loud, tinny, musical sounds emanated from her ear buds. Her music must have been at a brain-scrambling volume. It explained why she hadn’t answered him. She gave a slight jump when she caught sight of Scott. She smiled and shook her head at herself as she disappeared. “Yeah, me too”, he thought. At least he wasn’t the only person so addicted to exercise that it overwhelmed common sense, leaving the house despite the calamities in the world.

Mystery solved, Scott steadied his pace, rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck from side to side to help clear the tension of his paranoia. He took a deep, cleansing breath and let it out in short bursts. His attempt at relaxation didn’t banish the nervousness in his stomach.

The new firehouse that sat on the corner of the old country road and the main street that led to Smithfield. The red-brick building was surrounded by a parking lot with plenty of room to maneuver the three fire engines it housed. From the bright light inside the building, Scott could see the gleaming yellow trucks through the large windows that made up a significant part of the bay doors. He thought of the sleeping firefighters trained to jump into action in an emergency, with glaring lights and blaring sirens that could shatter the stillness of the silent morning. The firehouse stood dark and silent.

He was grateful for that. It meant the riots playing out in cities all over the world had yet to touch his small town.

A strong smell emanated from two ethereal shapes ahead of him. He had come to know the “regulars” who shared the road with him in the pre-dawn hours. The spicy fragrance was a familiar signal that he would soon see the two elderly ladies who hosed themselves in heavy perfume before their early morning walks.

Scott usually picked them up from a distance. They sounded like an aviary of squawking birds as they chattered loudly while trekking the rural roads. From overhearing their energetic trading of news about families, friends, TV shows, and health problems, Scott knew pretty much everything about them, except their names. In his mind, they were “Betty and Wilma”. Betty was the doppelganger of Betty White. Seeing her for the first time, he’d done a double-take. Her walking companion was taller and thinner, and she wore a red wig that she always styled in one sweeping curl across the top of her crown. She could pass for a grandma version of Wilma Flintstone.

When he saw the pair, it didn’t feel right. Part of it was the unsettling silence. Betty and Wilma were mute. No chatter. Not even an audible breath from either of them. They were only a couple of yards from him in the darkness. He made out their forms crawling from a shallow ditch that ran parallel to the road.

Scott wondered what they were doing in the muddy canal. Maybe they had fallen. Maybe they were hurt. He approached them to offer a helping hand.

As the ladies lurched onto the street, they seemed bewitched. Close enough to make out their features, there were no smiles. Their faces jerked bizarrely from blank expressions to their normally sweet smiles then sagged to blank again. They shifted their unblinking eyes in his direction.

Scott’s body clenched in fear and his mouth went dry. He stopped abruptly.
They’re just old ladies
, he thought, confused by the irrational dread that washed over him.

Betty’s expression continued to morph. She raised her arm, her hand outstretched, her eyes imploring.

“Are you OK?” Scott asked her.

No sound came from her. Wilma took two stuttering yet determined steps closer to him. Her face ceased its strange spasms. Her expression was fixed and menacing. Ravenous.

His voice cracked past his dry throat and tongue. “What’s wrong?” He posed the question to himself as much as her. She didn’t answer. A primordial instinct shouted from deep within Scott’s bowels, rapidly gathering volume and urgency.
Run, run, RUN!