by K. B. Draper
I straightened as Norm came running down my internal hallway to pull the fire alarm.
“What?” Ashlyn asked, already spinning to take a quick look around.
“Something bad.”
Ashlyn sighed. “We have got to quit stopping for gas.”
I turned to yell at Ariel and Sammy, but they and Six were already moving in our direction. “Something is coming,” Sammy said.
Michael was coming out the double doors of the gas station with Apoc in his arms and a rather large wet spot on the front of his shirt, I didn’t say potty training was going well. I gave him a “pick it up” motion as my phone rang in my pocket.
I pulled it out, not taking the time to look at the caller ID, figuring it was either Danny or Publishers Clearing House. Hoping for the second, if I was being honest. I hit the speaker button.
“Something big is about to happen,” Danny, not the prize announcer, damn it, “around the town of—”
“Sullivan?” I asked.
“Yeah, how long will it take you to get back there?”
“We are there,” I informed him.
“It’s been four hours; you should be in St. Louis by now.”
“Yeah, well tell that to someone’s magical baby bladder.”
“I … I don’t know what to say to that,” Danny replied.
“You got anything to say about what’s coming at us?” I asked, giving the area another once-over.
“It’s big,” Danny answered.
“Like horseman big?” I asked as I scanned the horizon.
“Like horseman big. I’m getting very similar readings to what we got from the reunion.”
The lights of the gas station and the nearby KFC offered enough illumination for the immediate area. “Not seeing anything.” I rescanned the sky, only finding the soft glow of the sleeping town.
Ashlyn grabbed my elbow, turning me toward the north. There is darkness and then there is really dark darkness. Care to take a stab at which one I was laying my peepers on at the moment? Let’s just say, if Sherwin Williams was naming it, it would be Midnight Sucky Evil. This dark seemed to live and breathe, to consume.
“What’s northeast of us?” I asked.
Mia’s voice broke in, “I’m pulling up live satellite feeds now.”
I started waving for everyone to get in our vehicles.
Sammy and Ariel were already pulling the door handles, Ariel taking the wheel this time. No protests from Sammy. Aw, don’t ya just love equality. Or maybe there wasn’t anything equal about the situation because two seconds later, Ariel had already one-eightied it and she was still accelerating when the parking lot met highway. My ass dropped itself into Woody’s driver’s seat just in time to watch Ariel full on Tokyo drift the SUV’s ass-end onto the blacktop. I might have swooned a little.
They were a half-mile down road before we followed suit, but to be fair, we did have a five-second car seat delay. I handed Ashlyn my phone while I drove. “It’s all black.” Mia’s voice came over the speaker phone.
“Like can’t get a feed black or?” Ashlyn asked.
“No, I have a feed. It, whatever it is, is black. I’m going to zoom out.” We heard a few key taps. “Holy crap.”
“Mia?” I asked, when she didn’t follow up with the dets.
“Sorry. Yeah, it’s about a block wide. It’s moving south toward the town. Hold on. I’m going to go back and see where it originated and try to figure out how fast it’s moving.”
“Can you get Sammy and Ariel on so they can hear this?” I asked.
Ashlyn hit a couple of buttons; then Sammy’s voice came on the line. “Samuel, I’m joining you in on a call with Danny and Mia. They’re tracking this thing,” Ashlyn stated.
“Sounds good.”
“Okay,” Mia started again, “It looks like it came from a large cave just northeast of your location. It’s part of a national forest.”
“Hellmouth,” Michael piped in from the backseat.
“Come again?” Mia asked.
“Hellmouth. A lot of caves double as hellmouths or portals for demons to cross over to this plane,” I explained.
“And now I’m marking off spelunking from my bucket list,” Mia stated.
“It’s traveling slowly. Maybe ten, fifteen miles per hour,” Danny piped in, over more keyboard taps.
“Meaning, we’ve got about fifty minutes until it hits the edge of town,” Mia tagged in.
“It’ll be popping out any second now about fourteen miles northeast onto Highway 185,” Danny added.
As if to punctuate Danny’s statement, Ariel’s brake lights illuminated in the distance. “We’re going to need to come back to you,” Sammy stated. Their reverse lights were next to brighten the quickly darkening backdrop.
“Got ya,” I said, bringing Woody to a skidding halt before slamming us into R, whipping around and heading back toward the town.
We sped back along the two-lane highway, passing a sign for highway PP. In normal circumstances I would’ve snickered ’cause I’m twelve, but there was nothing normal about a tower of big black bad tailgating us and eating the earth out of our back window, not even for my f’ed up world. Trees, grass, powerlines and asphalt one second, a swirling black void the next.
“You know what or who is doing this?” Ashlyn asked, now having to crane her head back to watch the annihilation of Earth.
“Famine,” Michael offered simply. “He’s consuming the Earth and everything in his path. He’ll leave nothing.”
I watched as the town came back into view, particularly the smattering of homes that outlined its border. “He wouldn’t happen to be a vegetarian, would he?” Ashlyn whipped around to the front windshield as Michael leaned forward toward what potential carnage would lie before us if we didn’t stop Famine before he got here.
“No, quite the opposite actually,” Sammy supplied in Michael’s silence.
“Any ideas on how to slow his roll?” I asked no one in particular.
“I only know that Famine feeds off the Earth and its people. He will consume all in his path until there is nothing left,” Sammy offered again.
“Super fun facts,” I said, searching the town’s signs and landscape for ideas. There was a school and a church, both places we shouldn’t have to worry about at this late hour. There was a sign for a diner boasting the “World’s Best Cherry Pie,” not helpful, but I’ll totally be testing that grand claim if we live through this; a distillery, maybe helpful if this all doesn’t go well; and B.I.N.G.O. there we go—another evil, only this one was man-made. Now, I just needed my little band of merry men and women to buy me some time. And probably some life insurance.
Another few cycles of the small dial on Woody’s odometer and I found what I needed. The distraction. Not the life insurance, though Mike Miller’s big smiling billboard face promised he would take care of me and my family. “Sammy?”
“Yeah.”
“There will be a car lot coming up on your right side. There’s an old-school gas tank, you know the drive under kind on the stilts, like the one Frankie had behind his shop.”
“Yeah.”
“I need some time.”
“You got it.”
“Oh, right on! Light things up like ole man Burns’s shed,” Mia cheered, a little too enthusiastically from the other end of the line.
Ashlyn quirked an eyebrow. “Another plausible deniability situation?”
“That was all Mia,” I said.
“Hey, the jerk kept his dog chained to it. Not in it where the poor thing could get out of the rain, but … to it,” Mia said.
Six growled his dissatisfaction with ole man Burns as well. I couldn’t say I disagreed, and maybe I did or didn’t happen to have matches in my pocket that fateful day.
“So you burnt it down?” Ashlyn asked.
“Not technically, but there might have been forty-seven bags of excrement that got lit up in very close proximity,” Mia confessed.
“She als
o may have rerouted all his mail to a small fishing village in Taiwan.”
“And I may or may not continue to do it once or twice every couple of years just for fun.”
“Nice,” I replied, checking my rear view.
“And his dog?” Ariel asked.
“Lives on my aunt’s farm with his best friend Gus, a three-legged pigmy goat. He just turned 17; we had a cake and everything.”
“Nice,” Ariel said.
“Okay, you guys should be coming up on the car lot any second,” I broke in.
“Got it,” Sammy said. “You guys be careful. We’ll catch up to you.” He hung up as Ariel took the corner into the lot on two wheels. Serious swoon.
I pressed forward, hoping they’d be able to slow Famine down long enough for us to alert people. “I’m going to drop you and Michael off. Try to get the people out of their houses and out of the way. I have an idea.” They didn’t even ask. Honestly, it was better that way—again, plausible deniability and all that.
I skidded to a stop at the first row of houses. Ashlyn was out the door before we’d even fully come to a stop. Michael fumbled to unbuckle Apoc only to have Apoc supernaturally rebuckle himself and point at me. “Ajay.”
There wasn’t time to reason, and by reason I totally mean bribe the kid so, “I’ve got him. I won’t be long. Throw me the straitjacket.” Michael hesitated. Not because he feared leaving his son in my care. As you know I’d packed my soul up and gone to Hell to rescue Apoc, which pretty much validated my babysitter cred, but it took him a tick to remember what in the truckload of kid stuff I’d nicknamed “the straitjacket.”
“Carrier,” he muttered, pulling it from the opposite floorboard and handing it to Apoc to hold. “Yell if you need me.” And he was gone, running to the first house across from the one Ashlyn was currently banging on.
I slowed Woody as we came up to the gate arm that was blocking the entrance to the chemical plant, which I’d seen advertised under the disguise of an Adopt-A-Highway sign. I have opinions about a toxic chemical plant touting their good deeds of keeping litter from the highway, but we’ll leave that for another time and another soapbox. It’s like Ho Hos sponsoring a Jenny Craig meeting. Sorry, just had to get it out there. I’m done now.
There was a guard shack, but the lights were off, so I assumed that meant there was no need to stop and introduce myself. I pondered busting through the gate like an action movie and jacking up Woody’s grille, but that was a big no thank you. Maybe another day, another vehicle. Instead, I jumped out, took hold of the end, and began walking backward. It began cracking at three feet, then snapped off entirely at five. I tossed it aside and was back in Woody and moving. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for or what I would find, but I was hoping for something super bad. I did a half loop around to the back of the building and over to the loading docks.
Five bays made up the building’s back wall. Three stalls were empty. Two had semis backed up in them. What were the chances there would be a preload of bad already neatly packed up and ready to go? Zero to none, I guessed. I put Woody in the nearest slot to the back door. I jumped out, running around to let out Six and then Apoc, where I jacked with the straitjacket for a full twenty minutes. Fine, it was more like twenty seconds. I get dramatic when I’m rushy. I looked at Apoc. “I don’t suppose you could self-install?”
I had to take a quick step back to balance against the sudden weight attached to my back. “Thank you,” I said, actively ignoring the fact that baby backpacks were part of my life now.
Norm had been hardcore vibing my insides since the gas station, so I didn’t hesitate to put a boot to the back door.
The warehouse space before us was … well, pretty warehousey, and honestly rather depressing with its rows and rows of crates with hazardous waste symbols stamped all over them. I tried to hush my environment-loving heart, but the sight of so much bad-for-us things stacked in ready to deploy and destroy mode had me second-guessing my quickly forming plan. The questioning of my plan of attack was short-lived because if Lucifer had his way, there wouldn’t be a world left for all of us to destroy ourselves.
I hit the big green up button for one of the dock doors that had a semi parked in front of it, waiting patiently for an extra foot of gap for kid clearance before I slid under it. The back of the truck’s trailer had double-swinging doors. Before my next stop, I thought it best to unbuckle Apoc and leave him on the dock. “Stay,” I ordered, then pointed at Six, “You got him.” Six barked once, moving to Apoc’s side, and placing a paw on one of the straitjacket’s straps, holding Apoc’s already wiggling ass in place.
I leapt the short two-foot gap to the back of the truck and pried open the trailer doors. As I’d suspected, it was as empty as the fried shrimp tray at Shoney’s buffet.
“Let’s get it loaded up,” I said, already running toward the nearby forklift and dropping into its seat. Keys, check. Bucket list item, check. Hey, you can go climb Mount Fuji. I’ve always wanted to drive a forklift. You do you. I’ll do me.
It took a second to get the loosey-goosey feel of the steering wheel, but sometime between the water fountain incident and the near miss of the hazmat safety station, I got a feel for it, at least that was all the way up until I didn’t. I was flipping levers, pushing buttons, and twisting knobs because, um, that’s what one does when presented with a plethora of levers, buttons, and knobs. I blame kid stimulation toys. Anywho, one of said buttons or it could have been a lever, or a knob, shot the forks up to the top of their track, where they snagged the corner of a storage rack. That wasn’t a horrible thing since I was stopped at the time. It did become a slight horrible-ish thing when I hit the wrong knob, pulled the wrong lever, and might have accidentally pushed the gas pedal and started going forward. We, and by we I mean the forklift and I because we were in this together at this point, went from ass to back in a blink. Followed relatively quickly by a rather large crash.
When I crawled out from the destruction, Apoc was laughing and clapping. “Again. Again.” To add to the funzies, my dog, and I’m seriously considering changing our status on Facebook, was rolling on his back, legs wildly running in the air, and doing a bark chuffing thing, which I didn’t find all that flattering.
“I’d like to see one of you do any better,” I huffed, already spinning around the room in search of an alternative means of loading the truck that didn’t include the time it would take for me to heft the containers in one by one as my internal doomsday clock was already hitting the warning bells. Famine would be knocking at the edge of town any—The building shook with a distant sound and a glow of light flashed in the dock door. Guess that answered that. Famine was at the car lot. My phone buzzed in my pocket and I pulled it out.
“Slowed, but still here,” read the text from Sammy.
“Ideas. Ideas.” Ordering my brain to speed up its processors. All I could come up with was to get the forklift back on its wheels and try again. “Wakey, wakey, Norm. I’m going to need some assistance,” I said as I fumbled to get a solid grip on the cage.
Six barked once. Then twice. I was midlift so it was a no-go on checking on him at the moment. Plus, it wasn’t his “shit is about to get real” bark so I kept lifting. I got the cab mid-thigh when Six barked again. “Not helping,” I grunted, before taking a breath to try to lift again. Boob high this time, I paused, taking a moment to draw from my reserves. I adjusted my grip. “Okay, on three. One.” I adjusted my footing. “Two.” Six barked again. A short double tap this time. “Not now, Six. Three.”
I stood back, admiring my upright awesomeness for a second. Then spun to look at my adoring fans. “I’m pretty much a bad—”
The man standing in the doorway was sixty-five give or take five in either direction. Cholesterol rating I guessed was north of 180. His black cap said SECURITY, and his gray hair shot out in every direction as if it had been at an underage kegger and someone yelled “Cops.” His too-big black windbreaker had SECURITY across the righ
t breast, a stencil image of a badge on his left. I was starting to sense a theme. His belt was doing a half-ass, literally, job of holding his pants at the proper height, and his front zipper gave up halfway through its journey.
“Hey, boo,” I said with a finger wave.
His mouth didn’t technically move, but his denture plate did so he adjusted it with a thumb. “You ain’t supposed to be here,” he finally said.
“Are any of us really? I mean spiritually maybe, but …?”
He coughed. “So you’re one of those city hippity-dippity freaks that wanna save the Earth, are ya?”
“You have no idea, Barney.”
“How’d you lift that machine?”
“Vegan. Plant-based diet,” I said, just to see if his head would explode. It didn’t, but it was an inconclusive experiment as it was questionable whether he even heard me.
“You got your man in here helping you?” He asked as he pulled at the set of handcuffs looped through his belt. Or at least he tried. I waited. Until I didn’t.
I left the security dude handcuffed on the top shelf of the now empty rack. I could have left him on the first shelf or second, third or fourth, but I didn’t. I blame it on the “you got your man helping you” comment.
“And I’ll have you know, a woman and her ovaries can wreck a forklift and trash a biohazard facility all by herself these days.” I tweaked his nose before leaping down.
Oh, and if you think the shelves were empty because of my little incident, they weren’t. I mean those ones over there were, sure, but these particular ones were clear because Apoc had taken it upon himself to poof all the crates of chemicals into the trailer. I looked at the full truck and then at Six. “We’re going to have to work on our communications.”
I turned to Apoc. “I don’t suppose you know how to drive this thing too?” I got a spit bubble in response. “Right. I’m going to make sure this thing has keys.” Probably should’ve started with that, but it was a quickly evolving plan. “Stay put.”
It did have keys. It also had an instrument panel that would rival a 747. And it was a stick shift. “Super.” I jammed the clutch in, jockeyed with the shifter, found neutral after the eighth try, and brought the rig to life. It rumbled and bucked, then smoothed out. “Okay, I totally got this. I just don’t have Six—”
