by Lukens, Mark
News traveled quickly. Other churches in several counties asked about him. He stayed with pastors and their families. He split the tithes with them when he preached at their churches. He was treated like royalty. They treated him with respect. They could see how important he was.
After a year of traveling from church to church, he saved up enough money to buy his own RV so he always had a place to stay. He’d always been good at saving his money, ever since he had shoveled shit for Old Man Chalmers on his farm. He stashed money in various places inside his RV. He bought booze and pot. He picked up women in different towns, miles away from the churches where he preached.
Things went well for almost nine years. He had become a local superstar in the southeast. He traveled all over Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. He’d been on several radio shows and on TV a few times. He’d thought about writing books, maybe doing podcasts, possibly getting his own TV show one day. But not a church of his own, never a church. A church was his father’s dream—a small dream. His dreams dwarfed his father’s dreams.
He was sure the news of his success had traveled to his father, but his old hometown in northern Alabama was one place he would never preach. He still reveled in his father’s jealousy—he could practically taste the bitterness of it even from a hundred miles away. He could see his father’s tormented dreams when he visited them.
One night in a small town in the Florida panhandle, the Dragon was cornered outside a strip club. The four men knew who he was; they’d seen him in the church only two days before. They accused him of ripping off the elderly, convincing them that he could talk to God directly for them if they would only dig a little deeper into their hearts (and a little deeper into their pocketbooks). The Dragon saw into those men’s minds that night, into their hearts. He knew what was coming. He tried to fight back, but there were too many of them.
They put him in the hospital with a cracked skull, broken nose, broken fingers, broken ribs, internal bleeding. He had come close to dying, but he fought to survive.
When he got out of the hospital no one was there to greet him. No one had visited him while he’d been in there. He’d gotten a couple of “Get Well” cards sent to his hospital room, with writing scrawled inside, warnings to leave the county and never come back. His RV had been burned to the ground with everything in it. He had nothing but the clothes on his back. His reputation was ruined. He could never preach again.
He hitched a ride north with a trucker. He called his brother. He found out his dad was dying.
The Dragon went home to see his dad. His father was still vile and mean on his deathbed, still unforgiving, still blaming him for his mother’s death. His father had heard the news about him, about the fraud he was, and he relished it.
The Dragon didn’t wait around for his father to die. He moved on to northern Georgia, then to South Carolina. He was older now, but suddenly back to square one, back to the same spot he’d been when he’d left home at seventeen years old. He started working day labor again, gathering enough money to afford a motel room and some food. He stayed in his motel room at nights, alone. No women, no friends, just some books he had picked up, some paper and a pen for his thoughts. He still had dreams of himself in front of crowds of people, and he wrote those dreams down. He saw himself in those dreams as a savior to humanity, and he still believed . . . no, he knew in his heart that he was meant for something great. These last nine years and his childhood before that had all been tests from God, a hell to walk through that only made him stronger.
A few years later he was drawn to a small town in South Carolina. It had a dark past: slave plantations, the Civil War, segregation, even a serial killer in the early 80s who had murdered eight people in town. This town had seen so much suffering, just like he had. And there was one house in particular, a house on Elm Street where a father had killed his wife and tortured his children for months before finally being caught and sent to prison, then executed. The new owner of the house had turned it into a rental, but no one in town would stay there. Most believed it was haunted.
But the Dragon stayed in that house. He rented a room from the landlady. He felt the dark energy from the house, he fed off it, let it power him. He realized then that there was power in the world, neither all good nor all bad, but able to be harnessed. He fed off that power like a battery drawing electricity from a wall socket, like a predator feeding on meat to make its muscles stronger.
He fed, he grew stronger, and he waited. He worked and came home to his room—the room Jacob slept in now—and then he dreamed. In those dreams he saw the future, a bleak future to most, but in that darkness would come a light. He would be that light. He would lead them out of the dark days.
Then the Collapse came. The weak turned into rippers so quickly, and only the chosen remained.
He remained.
And now it was time to fulfill the destiny that he had waited so long for.
CHAPTER 28
Emma
Night had come and the rippers had finally calmed down a little outside the mechanics’ bay where Emma, Ray, Mike, Josh, and Luke were hiding. The metal door sounded sturdy to her, but the rollup garage doors didn’t sound as sturdy.
But the rippers hadn’t gotten in. And maybe they had grown frustrated and tired, the snowstorm pounding them out there. Maybe they were beginning to freeze as the night came and the temperature dropped even more. Whatever the reason, she was glad they were leaving, if only until morning. She imagined that a lot of them had holed up inside the gas station store, the oil-change business, the office, the hallway with the employee bathroom and locker room. She could see them in her mind, sleeping together in groups like hibernating bears, like a pack of wolves crowding together for body heat, waiting until their prey tried to get out of the mechanics’ bay.
She couldn’t think about that.
As Emma had figured, Ray took an inventory of what they had been able to salvage from the Jeep and the van. They’d been able to take a few of the duffel bags and packs, but not everything. At least they had some food and medical supplies. Luke had the metal box with the ammo for the machine gun he’d gotten off the Dark Angels back at Doug’s cabin. The rippers were surely going to get to the rest of whatever they had in the two vehicles—probably already had. They would bust out the windows, eventually open the doors. The snow would drift inside the two trucks. Ray spelled out the likely scenario to all of them in his deadpan voice, like a reporter on the scene of a disaster.
Josh suggested that they eat.
Ray suggested that they conserve their food.
Josh suggested that if they didn’t eat they would be too weak to run or fight back and therefore conserve their food.
They met somewhere in the middle.
Ray was frustrated and taking it out on Josh a little. She wished he wouldn’t do that, but he did. Maybe he had warmed up to Josh a little in the last few days, but not all the way. Maybe he never would.
Ray mourned the loss of their bags in the van and the Jeep, but more than that he mourned the loss of Doug’s cabin and the supplies that were there. “Every time we build up a supply of food,” he’d said, “every time we find somewhere safe to stay, we lose it all.”
“At least we’re safe now,” Josh had said, looking on the bright side.
And Luke reminded them that at least they had most of their weapons with them.
After they ate, they felt a little better, and after the rippers finally quit banging on the rollup doors and the metal door that led to the hall, they felt even better. They relaxed, all of them still trying to stay quiet.
Ray made plans with Luke about getting back to the two vehicles in the morning, about picking off the rippers that were still around. He also prepared them, saying they might have to stay here for a few days until enough of the rippers eventually left. Hence his reason for conserving food, he’d told Josh.
Luke helped Ray make some vague plans.
> Ray told everyone that the snowstorm had been what he’d feared, the reason he’d wanted to stay somewhere for the winter.
Yes, Ray was right. She wanted to tell him that. But what good would it do? They couldn’t change things now. The feared storm had happened, and they had survived it. They were all still here, and for the moment they were okay.
“We’ll get out of here,” Emma said to everyone, but mostly to Ray.
Silence. She could tell they were all listening to her.
“We’ll get out of here, and we’ll keep heading south. We’ll find Avalon. I know we will.”
Ray didn’t say anything.
“She’s right,” Josh said.
She felt Josh’s hand on her knee.
A little while later, Luke and Josh looked for anything they could find in the mechanics’ bay that could be useful. But they didn’t find much. Ray went over by the doors. Emma sat on the floor, her back resting against one of the metal cabinets. She heard Mike sitting down next to her.
“You okay?” he asked her in a low voice.
“Yeah,” she told him.
“You think we’ll dream again tonight?”
“I don’t know,” she lied. “Right now I think I’m too tired to even dream.” She smiled at him.
“Do you think I’ll have those dreams again?” Mike asked her in a low voice. She could tell he was keeping an eye out for his father.
Mike had discussed his dreams with her before. In his dreams he saw himself ten or fifteen years in the future, a strong man, alone in a desolate world that had never recovered from the Ripper Plague. What seemed to scare Mike the most was that he was alone in every one of the dreams; his father wasn’t there, she wasn’t there, no one he knew was there.
“What do you think the dreams mean?” he’d asked her back at Doug’s cabin when he had talked to her about them. “You think those are dreams of my future?”
She didn’t know for sure, and she’d told him that.
He’d asked if it meant that he was the only one who was going to survive out of them, that his father and everyone else he had left in the world were going to die.
She’d told him that he might not be seeing the future, but only a possible future, one of many possibilities. She told him that maybe he was scared of that possibility and that was his mind’s way of dealing with that fear.
Her explanation seemed to have consoled him at the time, but obviously he was still worried about it.
“Are you tired?” she whispered to Mike.
“Yeah, but I don’t want to dream.”
“I know,” she said.
She listened as he lay down. A few minutes later he was breathing heavily.
The rippers seemed to have been gone for a while now, but they still had to keep as quiet as they could in case the rippers were still out there, in case they were hiding right behind the metal door to the hallway.
Josh came back and laid down right next to her, snuggling up to her. “Got to survive on body heat,” he said in a low voice and kissed her neck.
She couldn’t help smiling.
“Get a room,” Luke whispered.
Josh snorted out a laugh with his lips still against her neck, blowing her hair a little, tickling her skin.
Ray had decided to take the first watch. He stood somewhere else in the mechanics’ bay, sitting alone somewhere in the dark, away from their little sleeping area near the wall. He’d probably heard Josh joking around, and she was sure he wasn’t amused.
It didn’t take long for Josh and Luke to fall asleep, their breaths deep and heavy, like Mike’s. Josh was close to snoring, and if he started snoring too loud she was going to have to wake him up. The exhaustion was catching up to all of them. And even though it was freezing inside the building, at least their bellies were full and they were safe from the rippers for the moment.
But what about the morning? Would they be able to get back to their vehicles? Would the rippers be sleeping inside the gas station store, waiting for them?
Emma listened to the gusts of wind outside, the snow pelting the metal rollup doors; it sounded like sand hitting the metal. The wind howled in the eaves. Occasionally she heard the cries and screeches of the rippers, but they sounded so much farther away now.
Maybe they had moved on.
But probably not all of them.
Soon she was sleeping, lost in the dark halls of her own dreams, the gray mists where she only saw shadows. But she heard things in that darkness, she smelled things, and she felt things.
“I’ll find you,” a deep voice with a slight southern accent whispered from the darkness. “I’ll find all of you very soon.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER 29
Ray
Ray woke up with a start. No one had touched him or woken him.
The dream woke him up.
His sluggish mind tried to catch up, his body aching from the cold, his sore ankle really throbbing now.
The others were awake, sitting grouped together on the floor thirty feet away, whispering to each other conspiratorially.
It was light inside the mechanics’ bay, not bright light, but some of the gray daylight seeped in around the edges of the garage doors. It was brighter than it had been yesterday, so maybe it wasn’t snowing anymore and the sun was shining.
Had he slept straight through the night? He remembered being on watch for a while, and then Luke had taken over at the end of the watch. He’d gone over to lie down near Mike, who hadn’t moved a muscle in his sleep. And then Ray had fallen asleep.
He’d had dreams. He could remember flashes of Avalon, inside the chain-link fence, the small building inside that fence that led to the elevators, the path down to Avalon. A mist clung to everything, a mist similar to the blizzard that had just raged outside on their way here to this gas station. And like the blizzard, rippers had materialized out of the mist in his dream, so many of them outside the chain-link fence, grabbing onto it, pushing against it, some of them kicking at it. The rippers were everywhere outside the fence.
The fence was going to collapse at any moment and the army of rippers was going to get inside.
But Ray wasn’t alone inside the fenced-in area. Kim and Vanessa were there with him. He tried to get them to go into the building with him. He tried to explain that they needed to get away from the rippers, get down underground where it was safe. But his wife and daughter weren’t coming with him. Ray knew somewhere in his mind that his wife was already dead and that Vanessa had turned into one of those monsters outside the fence, but at the same time in the dream he believed they were still the same as they used to be, still his wife and daughter. He needed to get them inside that small white building because the fencing wasn’t going to hold much longer.
But the fencing was much stronger than it looked; it bent a little, bowed in, but it wouldn’t break. More rippers came from the fog, pushing against those pushing against the fence, adding more weight to their masses, crushing those at the fence, pushing their bodies through the holes in the chain-link, their bodies liquefying, pouring in through the holes like hamburger through a meat grinder, multicolored liquid flesh and blood, spilling down to the ground as the rippers kept pushing, wave after wave of them. The screams of pain and terror didn’t stop them—they just kept on coming, they just kept on pushing.
The rippers.
Ray listened for the rippers outside. They had run from the rippers yesterday in the blizzard and had gotten here into this mechanics’ bay. The metal door that led to the hall and the four garage doors had held. After a few hours, as night came and the snowstorm still raged, the rippers had gone away.
No rippers now, at least none that he could hear. No rippers banging on the doors, none screeching in the hall or anywhere outside. Everything was silent.
Ray got to his feet slowly, his body felt like a rusted machine that had run out of oil to lubricate the moving parts. He tested his weight on his ankle. A burst of pain shot up his leg, but
he pressed his weight all the way down, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists.
The others were watching him, saying nothing, still trying to be quiet.
Ray hobbled at first, but all the eyes on him gave him strength. It was like at a football game when he was younger, when he’d gotten hurt on a tackle. He’d be down for a moment, unsure of how badly he was injured until the coaches, trainers, and medical staff ran onto the field, crouching down around him, moving his leg or foot, asking questions. It was the fear at first that he had really hurt himself, the fear of a season-ending injury, or worse, a career-ending injury. But as soon as the trainers said it wasn’t that bad, the pain seemed to melt away. He’d hop back onto his feet, the crowd cheering, giving him even more strength as he jogged off the field.
And today Mike, Josh, Emma, and Luke gave him that strength. But there were no cheers today. The pain was still there with each step, but with each step it became more tolerable.
Ray figured they had moved farther away from him so they wouldn’t wake him up. Luke drank a bottle of water. Mike had eaten a small can of fruit, the empty can beside him on the floor.
“How long have you guys been up?” Ray asked in a low voice.
“Maybe an hour,” Josh answered.
“You want something to eat?” Emma asked. “Something to drink?”
“Not hungry,” Ray said, but he felt the first pangs of hunger in his stomach. His mouth was dry.
