The Pure: Book Three of the Oz Chronicles (4 page)

FOUR

“A low rumbling growl greeted us when we
emerged from the woods and found ourselves on a deserted two-lane highway. The
black in the sky had completely gobbled up the purple. The dimmest light broke
through little vents in the thick darkness that hovered over our heads.

“The source of the growl emerged from
the woods. Lumbering before us with a tremendously scarred body and face, was
an enormous gorilla. It opened its mouth and flashed brilliant white canines.
It rose up and pounded its chest with cupped hands, pock-pock-pock. It was a
scene that would have been unheard of a few short years ago, especially on a
back road in South Carolina.

“Tank, exhausted from carrying Bobby,
stepped back into a pothole. The two of them went tumbling to the pavement. I
raised the broken tree limb I had chosen as a weapon. It was a useless gesture
with a totally useless weapon. April simply dropped to her knees and began to
weep.

“Lou stepped forward and gave the beast
a series of hand signals. The gorilla signaled back. A German shepherd raced
out of the blackness. It was panting heavily, but didn’t show any
aggressiveness. In fact, it approached April and licked her tearstained face.

“The gorilla sat on its haunches and
huffed. It bobbed its enormous head up and down. Lou walked over to it and put
her arm around the animal’s shoulder.

“‘These your friends?’ I asked.

“She flashed a relaxed smile that said
everything. These weren’t just friends. They were her home.

“The gorilla signaled to her.

“The smile disappeared. ‘It was a dead
end.’

“A sour grimace absorbed the gorilla’s
face.

“Lou stroked his back. ‘We’ll find him.’

“‘What’s this?’ a voice boomed. A fat
man with a bushy beard stepped onto the highway. He wore a tattered gray shirt
with a name patch above the breast pocket,
Wes
.

“Lou smiled at him. ‘Good to see you,
too.’

“‘What in tarnation do you think you’re
doing, Lou?’ he asked, ignoring her sarcasm. ‘You was supposed to follow up on
Canter’s lead , and find...’ He shook his head. ‘Instead you come back with
four more...’

“‘What was I supposed to do?’ she asked.
‘You should have seen them. I don’t know how they’re not already dead. No
offense,’ she said motioning to me.

“‘None taken,’ I said. ‘We’re not
exactly sure ourselves.’ “Tank stood, leaving Bobby writhing in pain on the
road.

‘Look here, I know a thing or two about
taking care of myself, if you know what I mean.’

“‘Please,’ I said, ‘We found you crying
in a fetal position in a Wal-Mart bathroom in Athens.’

“‘That’s not true,’ he barked. He
hesitated, mulling over some fanciful lie, I’m sure, but instead cleared his
throat and said, ‘It was a Sam’s Club.’

“‘Fine! Great!’ Wes threw up his arms in
disgust. ‘This is just great!’

“A young girl of about ten stepped out
of the darkness followed by a boy of the same age. They smiled the first
friendly smiles I had seen in a long, long time. They approached Bobby and
knelt down beside him.

“‘Skinner dead got a hold of this one,’
the boy said pointing to Bobby’s mangled shoulder.

“Wes stepped in their direction and
quickly assessed Bobby’s condition. ‘Is that true?’ he asked Lou.

“She nodded.

“‘And you brought him here?’

“‘I didn’t,’ she said. “The big one
carried him.’

“‘Huh?’ Tank said. ‘You told me to.’

“‘Is he going to become a zombie?’ April
asked.

“‘Zombie?’ Wes shook his head. ‘Lord,
this ain’t Dawn of the Dead.’

“‘Ha,’ Tank screamed. ‘Told you.’

“Wes shot Tank a puzzled, irritated
look. ‘He ain’t going to turn into a zombie, but he’s got a smell on him now
that will attract every skinner dead within a twenty-mile radius.’ He stomped
the cracked highway pavement. ‘Lou, you know better.’

“She shrugged her shoulders.

“‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ I asked.

“‘You would have left him,’ she said.

“I would have offered an argument, but
she was right. We would have left him behind or worse to save our own hides.

“‘Roses,’ the little girl said.

“‘What are you carrying on about?’ Wes
asked.

“‘If we pack the wound with roses, the
dead won’t come. They can’t stand the smell of roses.’

“I was about to ask her how she knew
this, but I realized it wasn’t important. How does anyone know anything in this
world? You learn by trial and error. And you don’t want to hear the trials and
errors in this place.

“‘Roses?’ April said. ‘Where do we get
roses?’

“‘We passed a landscaping sign a couple
miles back,’ the little girl said. ‘Said something about a greenhouse and
orchard. We might find some there.’

“Wes breathed deeply. “‘You happy?’ he
asked Lou. ‘Now we got to backtrack cause you decided to pick up company.’

“‘They’re called survivors, Wes,’ Lou
said walking past him. ‘Just like you and me.’

“He scanned our group. ‘Darling, they
ain’t nothing like you and me.’”

***

“The greenhouse did have roses. The
little girl, Valerie, trimmed the bloom off a couple of red roses and tore the
petals off. She packed Bobby’s wound and wrapped it with a sheet that the boy,
Tyrone, had cut into bandage-sized strips. They worked together as well as any
medical team I had ever seen on TV. It was obvious they had dressed wounds
before. My guess was they had seen and done a lot of things kids their age
should have never had to see or do. I wondered how many people they had seen
die. Worse, how many had they seen killed... or killed themselves?

“We sat inside the greenhouse. It was
amazing to see that the cycle of life had continued in this artificial
environment without the benefit of a caretaker. Somehow the plants grew and
thrived on their own. With no background in horticulture, I had no idea if that
sort of thing was unusual or not. I imagined it wasn’t. After all, plants grew
just fine without human interference for billions of years.

“The gorilla awkwardly knuckle-walked
over to our group with one arm tucked up to its chest and dumped three bottles
of water at my feet. It tilted its powerful head, gave a garbled hoot-grunt and
slowly sauntered away. I had no idea if gorillas could get depressed, but that
ape looked about as depressed as I had ever seen.

“I handed the waters to April and Tank.
They were fixated on the new group of survivors, too. I sensed they were just
as fascinated and frightened by them as I was. There was something different
about this crew. They were more than just survivors. I could tell by their
attitude, the way they communicated that they’d been through battles together.
I mean battles you willingly participate in. Not like my group. We had been in
battles, but only because we ran out of places to run. This new group, they
looked for fights.

“I admired them, but I didn’t want to
have anything to do with them. They were going to die in a grand show of
bravery and pride. That wasn’t the way I wanted to go. In fact, I didn’t want
to go at all.

“As if she were reading my mind, April
said, ‘We aren’t staying with them, are we?’

“I sipped my water and shook my head.

“‘Good,’ she said. ‘They scare me.’

“The old man of the group, Wes, walked
in from outside. He maintained an impossible paunch given the shortage of food
in this world. A few dozen Twinkies wrappers on the floor of the green and
yellow VW bus we traveled in to get here hinted as to his main source of food,
but still, a man would have to eat an awful lot of the fat-filled treats to
maintain the girth he sported.

“He approached us. ‘You folks settling
in all right?’

“‘Fine,’ I said. ‘We’ll be out of your
hair soon.’

“He spotted a five-gallon tub of weed
killer and sat his rather sizeable rear end on it. ‘I want you all to know most
of my goings on back there was just cause I wasn’t expectin’ Lou to come back with
guests. It’s nothing against you personally. Understand?’

“I nodded my head. ‘Sure.’

“‘What’s your story, anyhow?’

“‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

“‘I mean where do you come from?’

“‘Come from?’ I said. ‘Well, last place
before this was Athens...’

“‘No, no,’ he interrupted. ‘I mean where
you from? You know, your people, your kin. Me, I from a little town off I-24 in
Tennessee called Manchester.’

“‘Bonaroo!’ April said with a shout.

“Wes smiled. ‘That’s right. They had
that Bonaroo music festival there every year. You been?’ he asked April.

“‘Once,’ she said nervously. ‘I’ve never
seen so many people.’

“‘Me, neither,’ Wes laughed. ‘Lord help
us, but you folks used to drive us locals crazy. You damn near doubled the
population of the entire county every festival, and we didn’t know what to do
with you all.’

“‘God, I had so much fun,’ she said, and
we all fell silent. Never before had something so frivolous and relatively
recent seemed so meaningful and so far away.

“‘I’m from Kansas City,’ Tank said
breaking the awkward silence. ‘Lived there my whole life.’

“‘The Chiefs,’ Wes responded.

“Tank smiled. ‘Don’t get me started.’

“‘Please, you’re talking to a Titans
fan. We were a foot away from winning the Super Bowl.’

“I looked around, and they all had
smiles. I didn’t know why, but it made me angry. How could they smile and
reminisce in the face of where we were and what we had been through?

“‘You?’ Wes asked. ‘What about you?’

“‘What about me?’

“‘Who was your team?’

“‘My team?’ I said.

“‘Yeah, who did you pull for?’ 

“I looked him in the eyes and said, ‘I
can’t see how that could possibly matter.’ There was an audible gasp from
April, and Tank looked at me slack jawed.

“Wes squinted his left eye and thought
of a thousand different ways he could rearrange the nose on my face, but he
didn’t act on his anger. Instead, he breathed deeply and stood up. ‘You folks
are welcome to tag along as long as you want.’ He gave me an accommodating nod
and walked back outside.

“April and Tank didn’t speak.

“‘Ignorant red neck,’ I said.

“‘I don’t know,’ April said. ‘Seemed
nice enough.’

“‘Ahhh,’ I said waving her off. I stood
and exited the greenhouse. I was beginning to feel trapped by the small space
and the conversation was irritating the hell out of me.

“I couldn’t believe the fat-ass had
asked me what my story was. My story was my family was gone. Why the hell would
I want to chitchat about something like that? I was married. So what? Got
married right out of high school. Had a kid, a boy. So what? It didn’t matter
anymore. They were gone. Lost them to this punk-crap world, if you must know.

“I quickly walked away from the others.
I knew what was coming. I got like this every once in awhile. When I would
remember. Think about them. I would cry like a baby. The others didn’t need to
see how much I missed them. They didn’t need to know that it felt like my heart
was being pricked with pins whenever I faced the fact that they were gone.
Dead, at least I hoped they were. I wished them dead. I didn’t want them to be
one of those purple jerks, or the skinner dead, or any of the other
monster-freaks that had taken over the world. I didn’t want that for them.

“That was the hell of it. I was a
husband and a father whose only real hope was that his wife and kid were dead.
That’s the kind of world I was left with.

“I found a stump on the edge of the
orchard and sat down. A legion of withered trees stretched out before me. It
was acres of evidence of the fragile and feeble nature of our old world.
Skeletons of trees that once bore blossoms and fruit and fluttering leaves were
now dry, hulking, twisted pieces of wood that were just waiting to fall. I
realized sitting there that I was one of them. I was waiting to fall, too.

“I rubbed my hands together and fought
not to cry. I tried to tell myself that it served no purpose. I wouldn’t feel
better afterward. I wouldn’t get a great sense of relief out of it. My family
would still be gone, but my throat would hurt and my eyes would burn. But I
couldn’t talk myself out of it. The tears came. The snot dripped. And the hurt
engulfed me. I sniffed and snorted. I asked the alien sky why, but got no
answer. My story. This was my story. Is this what Wes wanted to know, that I
was a coward for letting my family die?

“I stopped mid-sob when I heard a
rustling in the trees to my right. A shadow of a figure approached. An animal.
A gorilla. It plodded towards me. Its sad eyes fixated on me from under its
scarred brow. It stopped at my feet and sat down. It sighed deeply and turned
and looked out to the orchard. It had lost something, too. It had come here for
the same reason I had. It dropped its powerful head and picked at the infertile
ground in front of it. I reached out slowly and patted its shoulder. I chuckled
at the absurdity of it, me crying at the edge of a dead orchard patting the
shoulder of the saddest gorilla on the planet. This was the world I lived in, the
world without my wife and son.”