by Megan Hart
Life.
The word meant nothing now in this world where the dead came back to rageful animation, infected with whatever it was that had come out of those flowers. Abbie had survived the infection, but that didn’t matter when she’d lost everything else that had ever been dear to her. All she could do now was be the best mother she could be.
All she could do now was find a way to put them both down.
63
Maggie had imagined situations in which her husband and her once-upon-a-time lover would share a dinner table, but it had been a cotton-candy tinged fantasy in which somehow leaving Bill would not have exploded into a volcano of animosity and fuckery, and her new life with Jake had been able to merge with the old. She’d dreamed of strained smiles at graduations and weddings. She’d never thought of the three of them sitting around her kitchen table.
Bill greeted Jake with a handshake and not so much as a wary glance. Her introduction was of Jake as a colleague, someone she’d worked with on some nameless project, years ago. It wasn’t a lie. They had worked together. It had been years ago. A lifetime.
“We had an agreement,” she told her husband. “It was a joke at the time. But he told me if he ever heard about the end of the world before I did, he’d tell me.”
Bill didn’t ask why this other man would’ve promised his wife such a thing, but she thought he probably knew. There were many things she and Bill had never talked about over the years, but that she was certain he’d guessed. The nights she’d stayed up late to cry in the shower, slipping in to bed hoping to find him already asleep and hearing by the sound of his breathing that he’d been waiting for her. The times he’d had to repeat himself when he asked her a question, because she’d allowed herself to fall so deep in reverie there was nothing in front of her but the memories. She’d never left, but she thought her husband knew, just the same, that something had stolen her away.
Jake had finished off another glass of whiskey and taken a refill, but he was only staring at it now. He turned the glass around and around in his hands, leaving a wet ring on the kitchen table. He cleared his throat. “They got word of something heading to Earth just a day or so before it hit the atmosphere. I heard about it only in passing, in the lunchroom. It wasn’t really my area of expertise, you know? And it wasn’t classified information or anything. It wasn’t anything that seemed to be a big deal. Stuff hits the earth all the time.”
“But this was different,” Bill said.
Jake looked at him, then gave a solemn nod. “Yeah. Whatever it was split as it entered, heading off in a whole bunch of different directions. Like it was guided.”
“And nobody noticed this?” It had been years since Maggie had worked with advanced weapons systems, but surely things hadn’t changed that much. “Nobody figured out it wasn’t organic?”
Jake shrugged and sipped from his glass. For the first time since arriving, he shivered at the drink. Coughed a little. He looked at her. “It was organic. That’s the thing. Nothing came up on any systems indicating any sort of guidance or navigation. No source of fuel or power. According to what came through the system just after the pieces hit, whatever it was…it was completely natural. But intelligent.”
“Intelligent?” Bill’s chair scraped against the hardwood floor. “What’s that mean?”
Jake scrubbed at his hair, then rubbed his eyes. “It means that some…thing…of unknown origin and composition entered the earth’s atmosphere in one form, solid, a meteorite of approximately fifteen feet in diameter. It broke into something like fifty pieces or so, all of which hit the earth at trajectories that could not have been possible without some sort of external force or guidance. Or if they were alive.”
Maggie had been toying with a cup of coffee, long gone cold. Now it splashed when her hands jerked. “Alive?”
Bill got up from the table to pace. Without her husband at the table, all there was between Maggie and Jake was a bottle of whiskey and an unbridgeable distance made by time and the memory of the last time they’d seen each other. She wanted to reach for him. The sudden, urgent need to touch his hand skidded her fingers on the table’s sleek surface. But she didn’t touch him.
He looked at her, though, for the first time since knocking on her door. Looked at her and actually saw her. Did she imagine a flash of grief there? Regret? Or was that only wishful thinking, that maybe in all this time, he’d missed her as much as she had yearned for him.
“Are you trying to tell us this was some kind of…I don’t know. Alien invasion?” Bill carefully turned, hands on his hips.
Jake nodded.
Bill began to laugh. At first it was just a small chuckle, but it became a chortle. Then a guffaw. And finally, a full-on, rib-busting chain of snorting, choking and totally unconvinced string of giggles. It embarrassed her, how blatantly her husband was making fun of Jake, but Jake didn’t seem perturbed.
“The meteorites struck over a hundred different locations across the United States. There was another, similarly sized meteor tracked in the UK. One in Russia. They suspected a much larger one over China, but were unable to confirm it.” Jake paused. “All of them split once they hit the atmosphere, and all the pieces broke away from the main one and found paths that could not have happened through a natural trajectory.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then…the storms,” Maggie said.
Maggie and Jake shared a look. Once upon a time they’d been able to say so much without words, with only a blink or a sigh. It was one of the reasons, only one, she’d fallen so hard in love with him. That unspoken communication. The way he understood her so easily and completely, in a way nobody else ever had.
“Yes,” Jake said, ignoring the next round of Bill’s scoffing laughter. “Tornados. Water spouts. All over the place, both in locales where storms like that are common, as well as a spate of them in places it’s unusual. In or close to all the places the meteorites hit, there was unusual storm activity. And after all those storms, something was left behind.”
“Like what?” Bill pulled up a chair and turned it backwards to straddle it.
Maggie hated when he sat that way, but said nothing about it now. “Does this have something to do with that preacher? That one on the TV?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jake said. “I’ve been on the road for a few days, but it’s been hard to get here. It’s a six or eight hour drive, and I was stopped a lot along the way, both because I was trying to get through regions hit hard by the storms and because there are a lot of roadblocks and stuff up. What preacher?”
“Young guy. Wears a white suit. Claims to hear the voice of God.” Bill snorted more laughter, though he sounded slightly more reverent. “Well, I guess they all do, don’t they?”
Maggie got up from the table and, wonder of wonders, found the remote for the small television Bill had installed under the kitchen cabinets, though she hated having it on all the time and he never seemed to want to turn it off. She clicked through a few channels showing static — when was the last time she’d seen static on a TV channel? Until she came to the new station. It had been running nonstop stories on the storms; Maggie knew that much, even though she tried to avoid them. But Bill had been fascinated and he’d been home on extended leave over the past few days due to disruptions in his construction business from to those same storms, so the TV had been on all the time. Over the past day or so, the stories had switched from coverage of the devastation to some more focused on individual stories. One about a passenger craft that had been lost in North Carolina. One about rumors of some cult taking refuge in an underground haven in preparation for the end of the world. Stories like that were usually reported with a tongue-in-cheek sort of tone, but not this time.
“Here,” Maggie said, stopping on the channel. This was the other story that had been running over and over. “This guy.”
It was the same clip. The white-suited preacher, stalking the stage. Gaze intense. They’d mut
ed the volume in order to provide commentary, but Maggie didn’t care what they were saying about it. The young man shivered and yawned, and then his face exploded into a broiling mass of black mist just before the faded.
“He said he came back from the dead,” Maggie said quietly as the three of them stared. “Then he died. Again. What was that stuff that came out of him?”
“It looks like some kind of spores.” Bill came and took the remote from her hand and changed the station to find the same clip, this time apparently filmed from a camera phone and a different angle. They watched the whole thing over again. This time, the clip didn’t fade until several seconds after the preacher hit the stage, twitching and jerking.
“Shit,” Jake said.
It startled her. He’d never been one to curse. She’d been the one with the filthy mouth, using all the words her mother would’ve been ashamed to find out she knew.
“What is it? What’s happening?” Maggie asked.
Jake looked at her. “I have no fucking idea.”
64
Kelsey had been the one to figure out that attaching a baby cart to the back of each bike would be the easiest way for them to transport whatever they’d managed to find along the way. There’d been a lot to scavenge, but they’d decided to stay away from the big warehouse clubs like the one where’d they met. Without a truck it made no sense, and they’d decided against a truck, too. Once it ran out of gas — and it would, probably before they were ready to stop permanently, all they’d have is a truck full of stuff they’d have to fight to keep. The world, it seemed, had gone to shit pretty fast, and in Dennis’ experience, even in times when it made more sense to band together, people would always stand apart if they felt like they were going to lose what was theirs. His mother had raised him that way, and she’d been right about a lot of things.
“I used to hate riding my bike.” Kelsey called this over her shoulder from a few feet ahead of him.
For being this close to a major city, they were still in a pretty rural area. Twisty, curving two-lane road, surrounded by trees so thick on either side they’d made a canopy. Without a formal discussion, they’d both been riding in the center of the road to keep themselves away from the possibility of anything coming at them from the undergrowth. It was a natural survivalist technique, one he hadn’t said anything about to Kelsey. She’d just understood.
“Why?”
“I hated the exercise bike. Pedaling and pedaling and never getting anywhere.” She shot him another glance, this time with a broad grin. “And biking on the road, super cute bike shorts aside that totally showed off that I had and will always have, too much ass…I don’t know. A nice, leisurely meander from a beach house to the beach, that I could get into. But miles long rides always felt so brutal, and guys that liked that sort of thing were mostly into athletic girls. Which I am not.”
“I don’t know about that. You seem pretty fit to me.” It might never cease to amaze him that the beautiful woman ahead of him bothered to give him so much as a wink, much less anything else.
Kelsey slowed, putting a foot to the asphalt to keep herself steady while he pulled up along side her. “Sure, if you don’t pay attention to the huffing and puffing. Oh, and the sweat. Never was a big fan of the sweating, either.”
“I like the way you look when you sweat.”
“You are just the sweetest. You know that?” Kelsey laughed and shook her head, then gave him a sideways, tilting glance from beneath the fall of her hair. It wasn’t so blonde any more, but he liked her natural color. Chestnut. That’s what it was called. “Dennis. I am so very, very glad I met you. You know that, right?”
It seemed like a good time to kiss her, then. The bikes made it awkward. He managed, anyway.
“Very nice,” she said against his mouth and pulled away far enough to look into his eyes. “Maybe instead of fifty miles we can stop today at five. Make camp early.”
She waggled her eyebrows, and it sent a shiver of delight straight below his belt. “I guess it’s not like we have a deadline about when we need to get…”
“Anywhere,” she said.
They both laughed. He kissed her again, lingering a little this time. When she cupped the back of his neck, holding him to her, it didn’t even matter that the bike pedals dug into his calf or the seat nudged him too hard in a sensitive place.
“Let’s go, I’ll race you!”
Before he could reply, Kelsey had pushed off and was a few feet ahead of him, standing on the pedals to get herself going faster. Dennis scrambled to get on his bike and get started, but she had the advantage, for sure. She’d started sooner and he was pulling more weight.
“Cheater,” he called after her. Not angry. Laughing.
She was laughing too, looking over her shoulder at him. When her bike hit the buckled bit of pavement, she bounced, hard. She’d have been fine if the bike cart attached to her bicycle hadn’t also hit the same patch of broken road, though in a slightly different place. It caught the wheels and tipped the car up onto one tire. The weight of it made the bike wobble.
With a shout, Kelsey struggled to keep herself upright, but in the next minute she’d tipped over the handlebars. She hit the pavement in a tangle of arms and legs. The bike hit next. The contents of the cart spilled out, only a little, but Dennis didn’t care about that at all. He dumped his own bike, leaping off to get to her.
“You okay? God, Kels, are you —”
One minute, he was cradling her while she stared at him, dazed. The next, a roaring, growling…thing…burst out of the undergrowth. It was on him in seconds, tearing at his clothes. Punching, kicking, clawing. A fist caught Dennis under the chin, knocking him back. His head hit the road hard enough to send stars spiraling through his vision.
He was on his hands and knees as fast as he could get there, grabbing at the woman who’d come out of the trees. She was naked, her flesh torn and mottled, giving him nothing to hold onto but the length of her tangled, filthy hair. He sunk both hands in and yanked, pulling her backwards off Kelsey, who was also rolling and scrambling upright.
The bike wheels were still spinning when Dennis and Kelsey both got to their feet, the thing that had once been a woman between them. Her bare, broken feet slapped on the pavement. She clenched her fists and tipped her head to the sky, screaming so loud her voice cracked and cut off as though she’d split her vocal cords. She swung her head toward Kelsey, and in the glimpse of her face as she turned, Dennis saw she had no eyes. Only empty sockets frothing with what looked like black maggots. There were more in her gaping mouth. Something had split it at the corners, letting it open wider and wider like a snake’s jaw, ready to swallow something whole.
Kelsey didn’t scream. Blood trickled from a cut at her temple, painting her cheek in a feathery spray. Her chin bore the kiss of the asphalt, scraped and raw. So did her hands, which she made into fists as he watched. She swung at the other woman, connecting with her cheek and knocking her back. She fell like a stone and didn’t get up again.
“Shit,” Dennis said, breathing hard. He tasted blood and spit to the side. “Are you okay?”
“I’m banged up a little, but…nothing that I can’t handle.” Kelsey worked her hands, looking at the palms. “I need to get cleaned up.”
She burst into tears.
Dennis was at her side in a moment, holding her. She curled against him, shuddering. He stroked her hair carefully. She was fine in a minute, swiping at her face with angry hands. He held onto her a little longer, more for his sake than hers.
“I’m okay,” she said. “Just surprised. And my head hurts.”
They both looked at the woman on the ground. She’d busted her face pretty spectacularly. It was hard to tell if she were still breathing. Dennis considered making sure she wasn’t with a boot to the skull, but didn’t. It was hard to kill someone who wasn’t coming after you, even if you knew that it better to be safe.
They gathered all the stuff that had fallen out of the bike
carts and set them upright. He hefted a can of ravioli. At his feet, the woman shuddered and yanked at his ankle. Without hesitating, he swung the can of ravioli downward and crushed in the rest of her face.
“…I was going to suggest we stop for lunch,” Kelsey said after a few seconds of silence. “But now I think maybe I’d rather just find a place to get clean.”
“Whatever you need.” He’d have hugged her again, but now he had blood on his hands. Not his own. Dennis tossed the can into the bushes and scrubbed his fingers with an old towel he then also tossed aside. “Can you ride?”
They both could, though slower than before. Around the curve in the road, they came to a gas station and convenience store. It didn’t look like it had any gas left, not by the way all the pumps had been wrecked and the metal plate covering the tanks had been tossed to the side. Broken glass scattered the pavement in front of the store, but lights flickered on and off inside.
“The power’s still on.” Kelsey pointed.
It had been on in lots of places they’d passed. Off in many others. Dennis studied the store from a distance before turning to Kelsey.
“There will probably be running water.”
“Oh, thank God.” She was moving before he could stop her.
“Wait!”
She looked over her shoulder at him, then bent to pick up a crooked piece of pipe from the sidewalk. She hefted it. “Anyone or anything that gets in the way of me washing up is going to get a face full of this.”
He believed her.
Inside, there wasn’t much left to scrounge. A few packages of beef jerky, some bottles of power drink. He followed her into the bathroom to make sure nothing was in there, waiting, then headed back out to the rest of the store to see what he could find. In the store room, boxes of oil were too big and basically useless. The bags of bread and rolls had gone mushy from condensation on the inside of the plastic, but disturbingly had grown almost no mold. They weren’t hungry enough to eat that. Not yet. In a few months, in the cold of winter, maybe then. But for now Dennis left them and returned to the main part of the store.
