by Brian Keene
Tony’s smile turned to a frown. “What? Are you calling me a liar?”
I took Charlie by the arm. “Come on. Let it alone.”
“Fuck that! They—”
“I mean it, Charlie.” I squeezed his arm hard, insisting. “Let’s go.”
“But—”
I thanked the group gathered around the fire. “Appreciate your help. We need to get moving.”
They nodded in understanding, but several of them, Tony and the black woman included, glared at Charlie. He let me lead him away. A moment later, Frank followed us.
“Where you guys heading, anyway?” Tony called out.
“Pennsylvania,” I said, without looking back.
“What’s in Pennsylvania?”
“My wife.”
“What else?”
“That’s what we intend to find out.”
Frank, Charlie and I continued on side by side, and when we passed under the body, and heard the rope creaking, none of us glanced upward.
There was no time to hang around, after all.
We didn’t talk for a long time as all of us were out of breath. My thoughts were on Terri. Random images, really. When we met in college. Our first date. First argument. First time we made love. Our wedding day, and when we moved into the house. I missed her.
Frank finally broke the silence. “Anybody know a good joke?”
“How’s this?” Charlie said. “A Jew, a Polack, and a homo are walking down the middle of the interstate at night . . .”
Frank and I both grinned.
“What’s the punch-line?” I asked.
Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know. Guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
Half a mile later, we came across the Soapbox Man, as Charlie called him. Wild-eyed and frothing, his clothes and hair in disarray, he’d climbed atop the hood of an abandoned car and was preaching the Gospel to all who would listen. Surprisingly, he’d attracted a small crowd. They passed a bottle of wine around and listened, staring at him with rapt attention, their eyes shining in the darkness, their mouths glistening wet.
“It’s the end times,” he hissed. “The angel has played the trump and the seven seals will be opened! Blood. Fire. Disease. And another angel will appear, the angel of death, and he shall ride a pale horse.”
5
We crept past, trying to avoid making eye contact with the crazed preacher.
“This is your fault,” the man roared, jabbing a finger at the crowd. “You have brought this upon yourselves, because you had ears but did not hear. You had eyes but did not see. You denied God, and put other gods before Him. Now He has called His faithful home, and has left me behind to warn you of what will come. You removed Him from your schools and courtrooms and allowed sodomites to marry and babies to be killed in their wombs. Now you will pay the price for your sins. This is the start of the long, dark night.”
“Fucking nutcase,” Frank grumbled. “As if things weren’t bad enough.”
After we’d safely made it past the group and were out of earshot, we picked up our pace again.
“Think that’s true?” Charlie asked.
Frank snorted. “What? That God took everybody away because of abortion and gay marriage?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“Fucking bullshit,” Frank said. “I’ve got an easier time believing in little gray men, and I don’t believe that either.”
I grinned. “I take it you’re not religious?”
Frank scowled. “Used to be, until my wife left. Came home from work one day and she’d cleaned the house out. Left me a dinner plate, fork and spoon. And the lawnmower. Come to find out she’d been cheating on me for the last six months. Ended up moving in with the guy, and left me holding the mortgage. We got divorced. I filed for bankruptcy while she got remarried.”
Charlie whistled. “Damn. That sucks, man.”
“Yeah, it does. After that, I just quit believing. Seemed easier that way. I mean, you take a look around and all you see are wars and famine and people dying of cancer and little kids getting snatched by sick fucks like the guy back at the bridge. There’s just too much heartache and pain. Where’s the love? God’s supposed to be love, right? I don’t think He exists. Think we’re all walking around trying to live our lives according to a book that was pieced together when dinosaurs still roamed the earth.”
“So you’re an atheist?” I asked.
“Yep,” Frank said. “And probably going straight to Hell for it. Heh—I don’t believe in God but I still believe in Hell. Ain’t that funny?”
Charlie and I agreed that it was.
“How about you guys?” Frank asked. “You atheists?”
“I’m agnostic, I guess,” Charlie answered. “I believe in something. I just don’t know what. Certainly not the Christian God. His believers say that He hates me. I’ve heard that all my life. Supposedly, He nuked an entire city just because of people like me. So fuck that—I ain’t following. But I do think there’s something out there. Something that maybe we’re not meant to understand. I believe in ghosts and stuff like that, so I guess that’s proof of an afterlife.”
Frank nodded. “But not a Heaven?”
“No,” Charlie said. “At least, not the way you mean. No clouds and people with wings on their backs, flying around and playing the harp. If you want to see that, there’s a gay bar in York I can take you to.”
Frank started laughing and Charlie joined him. They both stopped, clutching their bellies and slapping each other on the shoulder. Despite my eagerness to get home, I was glad for the break, and even happier to see that the tension between the two was easing. When they’d gotten their breath back, we started down the road again.
“How about you, Steve?” Frank asked. “What do you believe?”
“I don’t know. I was born and raised Jewish. My wife and her parents are born-again Christians. I don’t know what that makes me. I guess I don’t really believe in anything, other than that I wish everybody could get along.”
Charlie nodded. “I can’t remember who said it, but there’s a quote that goes, ‘There’s enough religion in the world to make people hate one another, but not enough to make them love one another.’”
“I agree with that,” Frank said.
We walked on in silence. A group of crows were gathered along the side of the road, picking at a corpse. In the darkness, I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, or what had killed it. Stranded motorists ignored the birds. One of the scavengers took flight with something pink hanging from its beak.
A murder, I thought. A group of crows is called a murder.
“But what if they’re right?” Charlie asked again. “The Soapbox Man and his crowd. What if this really was the Rapture or the Second Coming or whatever they call it?”
Frank shrugged. “If that’s true, then God called everybody home and we don’t get to go.”
“Sure we do,” I said. “We’re walking home right now.”
“Yeah,” Frank replied. “But to get to the home they’re talking about, we’d have an awful long way to walk.”
I sighed. “Seems to me like we have a long walk ahead of us either way.”
“Yeah,” Frank agreed. “Wish we’d have brought along some of that whiskey those people back at the fire gave us.”
“I’ve got a new joke,” Charlie said. “A Jew, a Polack, and a homo are walking to Heaven, pissed off that God left them behind . . .”
“What’s the punch line?” Frank asked.
“I don’t know.” Charlie smiled. “Like I said earlier, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Charlie’s words ran through my mind. Home. Heaven. They were pretty much the same thing, as far as I was concerned. Christians said that when they died, they went home to be with the Lord. They called Heaven home. My heaven was home, too—at home with my wife. I’d walk all night to be with her again, if I had to. And if God really had called His children home and took them all to Heaven, then I’d w
alk there to find her, too.
In either case, it was a long way to walk.
6
We reached Exit 24—Butler and Sparks—around 8:40 p.m. The suburbs and industrial parks had given way to woodlands and farms. Lots of cars traveled past us now, both on-road and off. Those with four-wheel drive raced through the fields and pastures, short-cutting around the slow-moving traffic. Some without four-wheel drive tried it too, and wound up stuck in the mud. We had to raise our voices over the spinning tires and blaring horns as they splattered each other’s windshields with mud.
We stuck close to the guardrail as the traffic passed. Frank and Charlie looked as tired as I felt. The cold air raised gooseflesh on my sweaty skin. The muscles in my legs ached and my feet had blisters on them. When I stumbled, Charlie caught me.
“We should rest again,” he suggested.
I shook my head. “Can’t. Need to get home to Terri.”
“You sound like a broken record, dude. You’re not going to do Terri any good if you end up lying alongside the highway, dying from exhaustion.”
“He’s right,” Frank panted. “I ain’t as young as you guys. I need another break.”
Reluctantly, I allowed Charlie to guide me over to the guardrail. We sat down on it. Another vehicle passed by. The woman behind the wheel looked shell-shocked. She stared straight ahead, her eyes not seeing.
A big guy in a mud-splattered, olive-colored trench coat approached us. He didn’t seem wary or afraid. His head was shaved, but long, wispy sideburns framed his leering face. The right lens in his glasses was cracked in a spider-web pattern. He smelled like booze.
“Hi.” He smiled. “My name’s Carlton. What’s yours?”
I returned his smile, still unsure of his motives.
“I’m Steve. This is Charlie and Frank.”
“Nice to meet you.” His voice was softer than I’d expected, given his size.
“I take it you got stranded, too?”
He ignored my question. “The mall is menstruating.”
“What?”
More cars filed past us.
“The mall, down in Hunt Valley? It’s menstruating. A great ocean floods forth.”
“Uh, you mean…bleeding?”
Carlton nodded vigorously. “Really. It is. Just like in the Bible. ‘And behold, the malls shall menstruate.’ The Book of Meat, chapter twelve; verse two.”
Frank groaned under his breath. Carlton didn’t seem to notice.
“There’s cheese in his head,” our new friend continued. “Fishy-fleshed cheese, just like they said there’d be.”
“That’s nice,” I said, giving Frank and Charlie a nervous glance.
First it was the Soapbox Man, shouting and preaching from the hood of his car. Now this. I wondered just how many people had gone insane in the immediate aftermath of the disappearances.
“Are you folks going home?” Carlton asked, smoothing the wrinkles from his trench coat.
Charlie and Frank remained speechless, and I hesitated. Clearly, the guy was drunk or insane—or both. The last thing I wanted was a crazy person following us home. But before I could distract him, Frank spoke up.
“Yeah, we’re just trying to get home. Gotta be moving on now, actually.”
Carlton glanced down the highway, staring into the darkness. Then he looked back at us and smiled. His eyes seemed to twinkle.
“You can’t go home. The others went home. He called them home. But not us. We’ve been left behind.”
I shivered in the darkness. Beside me, I felt Charlie do the same. Could it be a coincidence that we’d just had this conversation, or was something else at work?
Frank cleared his throat. “It was nice talking to you, Carlton.”
Carlton shuffled away from us, then turned around. “This is level six, if you come through the Labyrinth. Level six. Soon, if we stay here, we’ll all have to wear the mark. If we want to buy anything, we’ll have to wear it. The number is six one six. That’s the number of the Beast. We’ll wear it, and then we’ll get really painful sores, and the seas will turn to blood, just like the mall did.”
None of us responded. What do you say to something like that?
“I’m getting out,” Carlton said. “I know a doorway.”
He walked on, and we watched him go. He stopped farther up the road and talked to a group of migrant workers sitting in the back of a stalled pick-up truck. As we listened to their conversation, it became clear to us that none of the men spoke English, but that was okay, because we weren’t sure that Carlton did either.
Another helicopter hovered overhead, low enough to stir up roadside litter and other debris. Hamburger wrappers, cigarette butts, newspapers and plastic cups swirled in a funnel cloud. People on the ground waved their arms and shouted for help, but the chopper flew on. The crowd cursed the pilot.
Charlie took a deep breath and exhaled. “I’ve been thinking.”
“What about?” I turned to him.
“That guy back there at the Thornton Mill Road overpass.”
“Tony? The one at the fire?”
“Yeah, him. I think he was lying about the skinheads. I mean, I’ve got no love for skinheads, don’t get me wrong. But it seems like anytime we need a cultural boogeyman in this country, we lay it on a group like that. Skinheads. Muslim terrorists. Satanic daycare instructors. Republicans.”
“What’s your point?” Frank asked.
“What if it wasn’t skinheads that hanged that guy? What if it was Tony and the other people that were there?”
I rubbed my tired eyes. “Come on, Charlie. You saw them. Most of that group were business people, just like us. Regular people. They’re not going to resort to vigilante justice.”
“Why not? Things have gotten real weird real quick. The mob rules, man. People have vanished, authorities aren’t around, the survivors are scared, and nobody knows what’s going on. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.”
A black Labrador scampered by, its nose to the ground. When Charlie called out to it, the dog ran away, tail tucked between its legs. It must have belonged to somebody because it had a bright red collar around its neck, complete with dog tags. Whimpering, it disappeared.
“I’m starting to think it’s true.” Frank scratched the back of his neck.
“What?” Charlie asked. “That regular, everyday people hung that guy?”
“No. That aliens abducted everybody. It sounds silly, but could that actually happen?”
“There’s no such things as aliens,” I said. “It’s just another bullshit rumor. They don’t exist.”
Frank gazed up at the stars. “Just like God…”
“So what’s your theory, Steve?” Charlie asked. “We’ve seen a lot more since it first happened. Where do you think Craig and all these other people went?”
We watched as a Lexus, its speakers rattling with a thudding bass line, swerved to avoid a pedestrian. The driver blew his horn. The man in the road shook his fist and shouted curses.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, after the car had passed. “But it’s not fucking aliens and it’s not the Rapture. There has to be a reasonable explanation for what’s happened.”
“Maybe the scientists did something,” Frank said.
“Which scientists?” Charlie asked.
Frank shrugged. “I don’t know. Any of them. Maybe there was some kind of accident.”
I considered the possibility—a malfunction while experimenting with stealth technology or particle acceleration or teleportation. There was supposed to be a government laboratory somewhere in Hellertown, Pennsylvania that fooled with stuff like that, but those options didn’t seem any more plausible than an invisible alien fleet abducting everybody. Not to me, at least.
We shielded our eyes against another pair of approaching headlights—the car was hugging the shoulder, rather than creeping along with the rest of the traffic. The car’s horn blared, loud and insistent. All three of us jumped up from our seat, and I
almost fell over the guardrail and down the embankment. The horn grew deafening.
“Look out!” Frank shouted.
A black Volvo bore down on us, tires crunching in the gravel along the side of the road. It swerved away at the last second, weaving back into traffic.
Charlie gasped. “That motherfucker . . .”
Our friend, the yuppie from earlier in the day, rolled down his passenger-side window and flipped us his middle finger as he rolled past.
“Hey,” he laughed. “Your friend’s still back there in Timonium with a pipe through his head!”
“It’s him,” Charlie shouted, pointing. “The guy from the crash. The one that wanted to sue us!”
“You guys need a ride?”
The Volvo inched forward, moving farther away from us.
I swallowed. “Are you serious?”
“No.” The yuppie laughed. “Fuck you.”
Then he swerved back onto the shoulder and raced up the highway, scattering other pedestrians out of his way. People hollered at him, but he kept going.
“He needs his ass kicked,” Frank sputtered. “Son of a bitch, driving up on us like that. He could have killed somebody.”
Both Frank and Charlie shook their middle fingers at the receding taillights. Then the Volvo vanished into the darkness.
“Nothing we can do about it now.” I started walking again. “Let’s move on.”
Groaning with exaggerated effort, Charlie trailed along after me. Frank stood still, staring back the way we’d come. I followed his gaze. The horizon was on fire. The city of Baltimore’s after-dark neon shimmer had been replaced with a hazy, red glow. Smoke curled into the night sky, blacker than the darkness around it.
“My God,” I whispered. “What is it?”
“The city’s on fire,” Frank said. “The whole thing.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
Charlie cleared his throat. “I guess that answers our questions about how busy the authorities are.”
We stared in disbelief, watching the glow expand. Baltimore was burning, the entire city engulfed in flames. I wondered if the astronauts on the space station could see it, and if so, what else they were witnessing down here on Earth. The ones who were still onboard the space station, that was. I thought of the news report we’d heard earlier. NASA had claimed that one of them had vanished.
