The Fall

by E S Richards

  “Get that strung up, Len!” Harrison roared as he fired off two more bullets, both pinging off the side of the delivery truck the two had hidden behind just minutes earlier.

  Len quickly reacted, his body now working off an instinct he didn’t even know he had. Pulling the string of the bow taut against the arrow, Len squinted into the distance, his eyes finding one of the three shaven heads hovering by the side of an old Toyota Dodge. He exhaled slowly, just as Harrison had taught him to do in his back garden and without taking his eyes off his target let go of the string, the arrow flying forward in a graceful arc through the air.

  He missed.

  Len watched as the arrow soared past the man behind the Dodge and lodged itself in the ground several yards away, the wind taking it off the intended course. He cursed himself internally—how could he forget to factor in the wind?

  “Get down!” Harrison yanked Len down to the ground as the sound of two bullets smashed into the wall they were hiding behind. “Stop staring at your lost arrow and string another one up, you fool. Or get the Beretta out and start firing! Do something, dammit!”

  Harrison’s words were harsh, no consideration for their situation present in them at all. As Len let the sounds of gunfire wash over him, he realized he needed that. He couldn’t stand up and look out into a gunfight and expect not to get hit; shaking his head, Len knew he needed to switch on. He could literally die if he made a wrong move and that wasn’t something he planned on doing.

  Positioning himself so he was crouching on one knee, Len copied Harrison’s stance to some extent, making adjustments for holding a bow compared to Harrison’s Glock. With a steady hand Len pulled another arrow from the quiver while Harrison fired off the remaining bullets in his magazine, still hunting down the three surviving shaved heads.

  “Cover me!” Harrison shouted as he ducked below the wall to reload his pistol. Len knew this had to be his moment and fired his second arrow towards the men, this time remembering to adjust his angle based on the wind direction. He missed again, but Len could see he was getting closer and refused to be discouraged.

  Pulling another arrow from the quiver as more bullets slammed into the wall they were crouched behind, Len drew back the bow and took aim like a natural-born shooter. He lined up with his target, adjusted for the wind and then released the string, the arrow flying true through the air and lodging itself in the shoulder of an attacker, who cried out in pain and dropped his rifle to the ground. The mixture of bewilderment and pain on the man’s face more than made up for the awkwardness of bringing a bow to a gunfight, and Len felt emboldened.

  “Good shot!” Harrison’s voice came beside him, his pistol reloaded and already firing back out into the throng. Len ducked down slightly as more bullets pinged around them, his eyes widened at the fact he had actually managed to hit someone with his arrow.

  “Come on, Len,” Harrison spoke again in between the gunshots, “we need to finish them off before their friends wonder what’s going on and join them!”

  With another arrow in his bow, Len popped his head back up from behind the wall, his eyes instantly finding the man he had hit seconds earlier. The man had snapped the shaft of the arrow while it was still in his shoulder, leaving only the pointed tip embedded in his flesh. And he was still fighting.

  Len took aim again and fired another arrow towards the same man, narrowly missing as he ducked behind some cover at the last minute. To his left, Harrison continued to fire bullets with an impressive accuracy, taking out another gang member with the first two bullets from his new magazine. That made it two on two and one of the remaining gang members was already suffering an injury. Knowing they had to finish this quickly, more of the gang probably alerted by the gunfire by now, Len drew back his bow once more and fired another arrow.

  He almost cheered when he saw the metal tip find a home in the man’s abdomen, below the other arrow wound Len had already inflicted. Harrison fired off another bullet beside him, tumbling the final adversary to the ground as a wash of silence overcame the small battleground.

  “We need to move,” Harrison didn’t waste a second, reloading a fresh magazine into his pistol before slipping it back into his holster.

  Len’s eyes were glued to the man he had shot, two arrowheads now sticking out of his body as he knelt on the ground, his hands pressing against the wounds. He wasn’t dead yet, that much Len could see, but he had given up the fight. Some of Len’s confidence started to fade as he stared at the dying man, but Harrison clapped him on the back and drew his attention away.

  “Good shooting, Len,” the older man had a look of pride on his face, clearly unaffected by the three men he had just killed. “Let’s get going; the rest of their group will have definitely heard all of that.”

  Len nodded absentmindedly, fastening the bow back across his shoulder next to the quiver of arrows. He was sort of dazed by what had just happened but knew Harrison was right. More of the group would be coming for them and Len didn’t want to wait around to find out how that interaction would go. Offering Harrison a meek nod, he pushed up from the ground and started jogging forward beside the older man, both of them occasionally glancing back over their shoulders just to make sure they weren’t being followed.

  Chapter 5

  Amy squeezed her son’s hand as they walked, keeping him close beside her as the two of them slowly moved away from the town of South Haven. They hadn’t lived there long, but Amy already counted the lakeside town as her home. She used to visit it a lot when she was younger with her family and now that she’d taken up permanent residence there she felt like it was where she belonged.

  It therefore deeply saddened her to be leaving it all behind. Amy highly doubted she would ever feel comfortable in her two-bedroom home, not after what had just happened there. She still couldn’t believe it. A break-in, a betrayal by someone she thought was a friend, and a murder. Thankfully she had not been the one to wield the knife herself but Amy could still see the man dropping to the floor and the life leaving his body—all she had to do was close her eyes and she was back there again.

  For the sake of her son though, for James’ sake, Amy had to remain strong. They hadn’t been walking for very long at all but Amy could already tell the destruction of South Haven was worse than she’d imagined. She could taste ash and smoke on her tongue as she breathed, the clouds above her gray and dusty from the countless fires that raged throughout the small town.

  She wondered how other places had been affected. Whether it was possible she’d walk up the coast and things would gradually start to return to normal. Whether it had just been a freak disaster and the television reports a gross overreaction.

  That was wishful thinking and Amy knew it. She hated that she had been so late to discover the news; when she was younger she used to pride herself on being prepared for almost anything. Though at that point in her life “almost anything” had been a surprise quiz in college or a flat tire on a road trip. Being prepared for something of this scale was well beyond her comfort zone.

  The tell-tale signs of a disaster surprised Amy with every turn she took. Shop windows were broken; cars were wrapped around lampposts or burning through the last of their fuel, the smell of gasoline thick in the air.

  Amy and James gave each burning car they came across a wide berth, both of them all too aware of what could happen. The memory of those few seconds where Amy had lost James amongst the mass of exploding cars was even worse for her than what had happened in her house. At least James hadn’t had to experience that death, whereas on the streets he had witnessed hundreds.

  On countless occasions Amy thought about asking James if he was okay, if he had anything to say about what had happened, what he had seen. Every time though, Amy stopped herself. It was too soon for even her to try and process it, let alone a boy of James’s age. Amy knew she just had to be there for him and protect him with all her strength.

  “Wow Mom, look at that!”

  James let go
of Amy’s hand for a second, pointing to a giant plume of black smoke rising in the distance ahead of them. Amy was shocked she hadn’t noticed it, her mind wrapped up in the memories of what had already happened.

  “Maybe we should find another way around,” Amy suggested, as the two of them grew closer to the cloud of smoke. Her eyes began to sting as the air became laced with ash and dust, distorting her view of whatever was burning.

  Getting a general sense of her surroundings Amy realized they were just outside of a giant RV park, a popular spot with vacationers who came to the area during the summer. Sure enough as a gust of wind blew some of the smoke back, Amy managed to make out a couple of RVs crackling under the heat of the fire, their once comfortable living environments consumed by fire.

  Amy and James stared at the flames for a second; both in awe of the giant yet somehow contained fire. It didn’t seem to be trying to spread any further, satisfied by the countless vehicles, engines of fuel and rubber tires within the park.

  Amy wondered how it had started, whether the engines had overheated like the hundreds of cars on 2nd street she’d run from yesterday or if there had been another cause. She also wondered whether anyone had been trapped inside the vehicles, doomed to be burned alive as their makeshift home was turned to dust around them.

  “Come on James,” she murmured after far too long, “we can’t stand and watch this forever.”

  James took his mother’s hand again as they continued walking, making their way closer toward the shore of Lake Michigan in the hope that the fires wouldn’t spread that close to the water. They walked half in sand and half on sidewalk, changing their path on more than one occasion at the sight of rogue fires or overturned vehicles in the distance.

  As they climbed over a small hill, Amy immediately clasped her hands over James’s eyes, trying to shield him from the horror that was laid out on the sand in front of them. It was a hideous sight and yet Amy couldn’t tear her eyes away, her mind frantically speculating over what could have caused the gruesome scene. Roughly fifty bodies were strewn across the beach and floating in the water, not a single one of them moving.

  “Mom?”

  James whimpered in front of her, Amy’s hands still covering his eyes to protect her son from the image in front of them. She knew he had seen countless people dying the day before, but that had been in the moment, surrounded by madness without a spare second to think. This was different. Flames blocked their other path so this was the only route Amy and James had left to take; they needed to walk through the beachside graveyard, nothing but silence and space between them and the bodies.

  “James,” Amy spoke to her son while she was still covering his eyes. She didn’t know what to say to him. There was no way of preparing someone of his age for what he was about to see. “Try not to look, darling.”

  As Amy removed her hands from her son’s eyes, she carefully watched his face. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, clearing the dust from his vision. As the young boy focused on the massacre on the beach in front of him, Amy saw his eyes widen and his mouth drop open slightly. Even for someone of his age, he still understood what death was. Perhaps he didn’t understand the details of how these people had died, but he knew they were dead nonetheless.

  “We need to go over the beach,” Amy whispered as she reached down for James’s hand, pulling him behind her as she began to walk towards the bodies.

  Most of them were floating in the shallow water of the lake, just offshore and therefore out of reach. However there were still several bodies adorning the sand, each one of them frozen in appearance. The first body Amy found knocked the breath from her lungs, the sight of it putting only one cause of death in her mind. Electrocution. The woman’s veins were mapped out in deep, purple scars all across her body, evidence of an electric current running through her and frying her organs from the inside. Her eyes were open and staring upwards, boring into Amy’s own as she looked down at the woman.

  Amy looked around her, searching for what could have caused so many people to die that way. A few splintered pieces of wood and metal floated beside the bodies in the shallow water, perhaps evidence of some sort of boat explosion. Grimacing Amy turned her head away and tried to push the thought from her mind. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since the first death she witnessed in South Haven and yet in that short space of time she must have seen over a hundred.

  Moving along the beach as quickly as she could, Amy dragged her son along with her, trying her best to shield him from the bodies. It was no use though; she knew that he was looking just as much as she was, both of them unable to avoid the basic human pull of curiosity. The worst part of the whole ordeal was seeing so many young children, children who had obviously been playing in the water after their day at school.

  Amy was chilled to the bone by this thought, knowing that if it had been any other day James would have probably been in the water. If she’d gotten to his school the day before and nothing had happened, they would have probably returned home for him to paddle with his surfboard in the lake, Amy watching with a good book from their patio.

  It was all too real and too possible, the feeling making Amy sick as she looked upon the faces of so many dead children.

  “Up here,” Amy panted as she spotted a small path up to the road she and James could climb. “Come on James, let’s get off this beach.”

  They pushed forward eagerly, both Amy and James wanting to get off the beach and away from the display of bodies. Both had seen death before, but just walking along what used to be a beautiful, relaxing beach and having nowhere to look apart from into the face of dead holidaymakers was enough to make anyone’s stomach turn.

  “What’s up here, Mom?” James asked as they climbed up onto the road, seeing the path fork left and continue upwards slightly.

  Amy read the sign, pausing for a moment to decide what to do. “It’s a country club,” she told James. “Come on, let’s go check it out.”

  The pair of them had only been walking for a few hours, but already they had put fairly decent ground between them and their home. The sun was high in the sky and despite the clouds of smoke and dust drifting around, it was still beating down with an unforgiving heat. Amy knew the country club would be a good place to rest for a while to replenish their energy and perhaps see if there was anyone left in there who could help them.

  She found it strange they hadn’t bumped into anyone on their walk yet, all the windows pulled closed and the streets eerily quiet. The country club would have had many people in it yesterday morning—back when everything was normal and no one suspected the world was about to erupt into chaos—by that logic Amy expected there had to be at least someone left there.

  Edging closer to the large building, the first thing Amy noticed was that it wasn’t on fire. This came as a relief to her, giving her hope of finding help within the building. Still she approached cautiously, walking around the large water fountain that adorned the entrance and stepping quietly into the lobby.

  “Hello?” She called out, her voice laced with apprehension as she peered around the empty room. It didn’t look like there’d been a disaster here, though several things did appear a little out of place.

  Amy called out again, her voice a little louder as she moved James further into the club. Leading him down a hallway, they passed by an open door, the words Staff Lounge scrawled across it in gold lettering. Amy could see a drinks fridge inside it and she let go of James’s hand for a second to walk inside, picking up two cans of Coke and passing one to her son.

  As they continued walking, now quietly sipping from their cans, Amy started to hear the familiar echo of voices ahead of her. She paused for a moment, straining her ears in order to listen and deduce what kind of people lay ahead of her. Normally Amy was a trusting person, but after what had happened in her home she was wary of trusting anyone ever again. Still she knew she had to keep putting one foot in front of the other, especially as she still didn’t have
a true destination in mind for where she was taking James. So with a deep breath Amy led her son forward, slowly pushing open the door at the end of the hallway to reveal the source of the voices within.

  Chapter 6

  Relief instantly washed over Amy as she saw who was waiting inside, the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding slowly leaving her lungs. For want of a better phrase, it was just a group of completely normal people: unsuspecting Americans keeping themselves to themselves while they waited for things to return to normal.

  “Hi,” Amy said as she entered the room, a sort of lake view terrace with large bay windows that opened up onto a balcony overlooking Lake Michigan. No one in the room was facing the windows though; even the young woman smoking beside one was angled away from it. Amy didn’t blame her—she was all too aware of what they would be looking at. “Everyone all right in here?”