The Rapture: A Sci-Fi Novel (11 page)

22

Welcome

The car’s tires
spin in the soggy ground; it can go no further, but I’m already where I need to be. I grab a shotgun from the trunk, a little riot gear and head towards the cluster of buildings veiled by the downpour. No tearful goodbyes or sentimental thoughts. Richards and his friends will be here soon, so I have to move. Freeport’s pool is rising. It might be the first time since this place closed that it’s seen this much water.

I drum the shotgun’s barrel against Freddy’s door.

“Hello?” Suspicious.

“Freddy, you beautiful son of a bitch,” I say, shouting to be heard over the storm, “let me in. Could use a favor.”

“What the hell do you need?”

“I need to know what else that switchbox can do.” Long, long pause. I wipe the rain from my face.
Click
; he locks the door. Paranoid guy, this Freddy—must think everyone is after him. With all that horsepower holed up in there, though, someone must be. “Hey, Freddy, it’s frigging wet out here!”

“Go away!”

“Come on man, I got nowhere else to run.”

“Your brother was just here, and they’re gone—”

“Isaac?”

“Yeah, with his girl, cute little thing, and he said he’d kill me if I let you through.”

“Was Kristine with them?”

“Yeah.” He sounds scared. Maybe they’re still in there.

“Now come on Freddy, that’s crazy. I can protect you.” Isaac, that silver-tongued bastard. No answer. “What’d you do, Freddy? Where’d they go?”

“Sent them away, where you can’t follow. And now people are closing in on you, Damien, they’re closing in, and you’d best run, because killing me won’t do you any good.”

I hear a gun being loaded on the other side of the door.

“I can help you if you just let me in,” and he does open the door then, all drug-addled, with some weird sort of rifle I’ve never seen before. He brandishes it towards me, like it’s a saber. “Woah, Freddy, just take a minute here, go back inside. The storm’s about to get real nasty and we can talk in there, where it’s warm, and no one has to die.”

“You’ll keep coming man, I know you won’t let it go, I know you’re just like all of them, I know that,” he says, his voice almost a whisper, “I got to do this, I got no choice at all, unless I don’t want to live…” He’s shaking, and I don’t think it’s from the wind. His eyes are sunken, body gaunt.

“You look like a corpse, man,” I say, and I step towards him, “just tell me where Isaac went.”

He rasps up some blood, and it dribbles from the edges of his cracked lips.

“Stop moving! I swear to God, I’ll do this right now, cook you out here.”

“All right, all right, Freddy, just relax man, you’re right, I’m like them, and I need help. I get it, and it’s just been a long day, you know, and I’m just realizing it all now. So let’s just wait for the cops to show and cuff me up so I can get this help.”

“Get over near the pool.”

“Why?” I don’t move.

“Because the cleanup, it’ll be messy, all those guts outside the front door,” he coughs as he says this, black, viscous liquid splattering down his shirt, “and I don’t want to deal with that, I’d rather just let the rain wash it all away.” He holds both of his hands up to his head and screams, like he’s trying to shake a demon loose from his consciousness.

I bring the shotgun up, pump and fire. He howls and retreats back into the cabin as I let loose another blast, blowing out an already ruined window. Lightning crackles, and I can see blood in the wet sand, but it doesn’t look right at all, more like motor oil than anything human.

“I knew you were going to kill me, I knew it,” I hear Freddy say, more like a whine, and I kick down the door, spraying bullets as I enter. He’s in the corner, hand clutched to his stomach, weapon in his lap. “There are bodies all over the desert, we’re standing on what’s made of bodies, everything and everyone is a body, alive or dead…”

He’s overdosing.

“You damn junkie son of a bitch.”

“Either way, it’s you, Damien, it’s you that got me, I should’ve seen it…you’re just as bad, maybe worse.”

“Getting metaphysical on me now?” Shadows and bright lights dance in the desert through the open door. It won’t be long before the cops find me. “Freddy? I need you to do that thing for me now, tell me what else the switchbox does.”

His eyes are scrunched in slits and scarlet strands hang from his mouth. “That bitch,” he says, and he laughs, coughing, “I’m glad her mom kicked it, the slut. And her brother. I hope the Bull gets hung by his balls. I hope you all do. I know it’s too late for me, but for you, for you, that’s the funny thing about liars, we all get ours in the end. And you’re a dirty scumbag liar, and I should have known it would end like this, in the rain, it never rains here, never once…” He trails off and that’s all he leaves me with. He’s got a little clicker in the hand covering his gut.

I take it and press the button, but nothing happens.

The shack shakes as a flashbang explodes inside. I wheel around, blind, jerk the shotgun and coax bullets out of it fast as I can, hear screams, white heat searing my flesh.

Someone steps out of a car, but all I can see is the hint of someone’s boots, each slow step dragging along mud and grime. I wrap stiff fingers around the cartridges in my pocket, ones that will never make it into the chamber.

I pull myself forward, towards the door, and I’m about in the middle of the room when a figure cuts in the frame, silhouetted by the moon.

Eyes shut, I hear Richards say, “Let’s finish this and leave his body to rot.” He cocks the hammer on his gun.

There’s no shot. Just the lonesome lilt of the rain fading into nothing, like an old picture that’s been around too many years to hang on any more.

Do good things
change us as much as bad? You take them for granted, part of the daily routine, while the bad, a man might never get acclimated. They tear at his heart, shatter his mind, crush him down into less than he was before.

Whoever named Riverton must’ve got a storm or two like this and thought it was the Promised Land. Believed they had found an oasis in the midst of the nothingness.

But everything turns to shit, because the good can only go down and most things are wrong to start. Or maybe I’m talking in old clichés because they’re easy as cheap whores. Men take these generalities as truth to be a little less alone, pretend like their experience is shared by everyone else.

Desert rain is pretty, like most things you don’t see too often. A coyote cries, a brother-in-arms, both of us in solitary battle with this unfamiliar element.

Desert chill is strange as anything; it seems wrong that one moment the sun could burn you off the earth’s surface, the next the ground’s harder than tundra.

Snow isn’t sprinkling from above, but it feels like it could be, even must be. The only reality is what you think, not what’s actually there. Because nothing is. I strain to push myself from the ground, but my shoulder buckles. A hole straight through it, still bleeding.

That makes two in less than three days. This one’s worse.

It takes a try or two, but I rise up. Freddy’s body is in the corner. I look out at the pool; it’s clean, well-kept even. The shack is a nice building, architecture unlike anything I’ve seen—a strange mash-up of modern steel and some sort of polished stone. Everyone else has disappeared.

Freeport Recreation, the sign out front reads, followed by symbols I can’t read.

No cruiser treads in the dirt, no sign of Richards or anyone else. I sleep in the shack while I wait out the storm. I don’t dream, my sleep blank and empty. An alarm wakes me at midnight, but I’m not hurtled back to the start. I go back to sleep, wake in the morning, pristine sky above. I touch my shoulder and it burns, oozes red and white.

A new world. One of reality or insanity, I know not which.

I exit the shack and start to walk, the sun not yet out all the way, the rain not burned all away and the earth still cool beneath my bare feet. Open road stretches on away from Riverton, until its swallowed whole by the horizon. I follow it, don’t look back—can’t look back.

A floating car zooms by and does a quick turn, coming up alongside me.

“You look like you could use a ride, there,” a man says. And I get in, say sure, why not, and he says, “damn, son, that’s a nasty sort that worked over your shoulder,” and I nod, ask him what year it is, to which he gives me a quizzical look, followed by “2049,” right before we move off to meet whatever the distance holds.

I’m in a
hospital. I move my shoulder and, to my surprise, it doesn’t hurt at all. A nurse comes in, and I can’t see her behind the curtain, but she talks to me in sweet tones. “The machine sure had a whale of a time with you. A record around these parts. The system isn’t programmed for wounds like that.”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“Haven’t seen weapons like that in a twenty years. You must’ve been fighting ghosts.”

“I don’t even feel it.”

“If it’s going to take that long, I sure should hope that it doesn’t sting even a little bit. That’s fair, right?”

“How long have I been here? It’s got to be a couple weeks.”

She laughs, good and long at this, like it’s the best joke in the world. “My, my, they must have you on something I can only imagine. Honey, you’ve been here about fifteen minutes and you’ll be discharged in another five.” She sweeps aside the curtain and then jabs a long metal tube into my arm.

“Jesus Christ,” I say, startled by the pain. She takes the syringe out and gives me a look over.

“Well I sure hope you’re not one of those Rapture sorts. You look like such a nice boy. Some of those nameless folks are, and I wish they’d keep that nonsense to themselves.”

“What?” But she’s already gone. I get up, feel better than I ever have. The hospital is a single, sprawling floor, all made out of gleaming black stone and steel. I touch the wall; it’s soft. I jump back and do it again. Like a blanket. When I get to the desk, the receptionist smiles and asks for my scan card.

I reach into my pants, empty, and tell her I don’t have anything.

She says all right, but she’ll need to do a bio scan. I nod, but a room across the hall draws my attention away, and her explanation of how she’ll have to call someone fades behind me. I hear strains of a familiar voice, low, measured, just holding on, tears about to break through the stoicism.

“Come on,” a woman says, “just hang on for a little bit longer. It’ll be all right, they’re getting a shipment from New Chicago later today.” But the man, the one in the bed, just gives her a weak smile, speaks so soft that I can’t hear. I bang against a table and the girl’s gaze turns towards me.

Those eyes, they’re always the same. But the voice, it’s kinder. Less world-weary. Only a hint of vengeance.

“Hello, Damien,” she says, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

So have I, Kristine. For too long.

THE END

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