The End The Beginning (Humanity's New Dawn Book 1)

by Ryan Horvath

  “I don’t know. It didn’t look good,” Brian said softly.

  Karen shot Amanda a look and Amanda understood. Let’s hope these men don’t blame us for bringing this killer upon them. Karen then looked down at Blaze. He sat, watching, nearly hip to hip with the cat that had attacked the assassin with him, resulting in her release from the madman’s crushing grasp. When she looked back to Amanda, she was struck by a vision. It was horrible. Amanda’s wrists were bound with what looked like a T-shirt. She was naked, struggling, in the woods and not alone. As the vision shifted view, Karen was stunned to see the hateful visage of the man who killed her husband. He was thrusting his manhood into her sister, deep, rough, and vigorous while Amanda cried and labored against him. A victorious look was on his face. And the vision quickly faded. Karen tried not to look panicked. It had to be something latent. The bastard was dead after all. She’d seen Brian put him down with her own two eyes. To corroborate this, she glanced back to where the assassin’s body lay. The body was still where it had fallen after the first bullet struck it in the back. It hadn’t moved. She turned back to the live people and tried to look composed.

  “Can you stand? Walk?” Brian asked.

  “Yeah. I think so. Help me up,” Simon responded.

  Brian and Karen each took one of Simon’s arms and put it over their shoulders. They slowly raised the man to his feet. Brian took care not to aggravate any of the bloody injuries on Simon’s body. When the man was up, they let him go and he swayed for a moment, gaining his balance.

  “Who are you ladies?” Simon queried.

  “That’s Karen and that’s Amanda. But be nice to Amanda. She’s in the topless club like we are,” Brian stated with a jovial smirk.

  Simon laughed and flinched again against his pain. “I shall be a perfect gentleman,” he assured. “I’m Simon. I’d bow but I think I’d fall over.”

  Both Karen and Amanda giggled at this. Amanda shot Karen a look that said I think these guys are okay. Karen returned this with a slight nod to show she agreed.

  Blaze barked, “What about me?” He looked on as proudly as possible while Karen introduced him to Simon.

  Brian looked at the barn and some of the color went out of his skin. “They’re still in there,” he said quietly. “I need to say goodbye to my friend.”

  He started toward the barn and River, Simon, Karen, Amanda, and Blaze followed. None of them said anything.

  When they reached the barn, Brian paused, then stepped into the darkening space. Tears started to fill his eyes. He was sure he’d find Ian dead. His injury was too lethal for him to heal from. He bled too fast.

  When the group found Jack and Ian, Jack was still kneeling over the fallen man. Brian expected to see Jack in tears too and Ian’s eyes closed. Instead he found them talking. Ian was still alive.

  Brian raced over and fell to his knees. “Did you-? Are you-? L-Let me see.” Brian reached for his blood sodden shirt where Jack held it to Ian’s neck. Jack allowed Brian to lift his hand and Brian saw the hole in Ian’s neck was in the process of closing. The others, particularly the women watched in hushed amazement.

  “He’s going to be fine,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, fuck face,” Ian said. “I’ll be teasing you with my morning wood for a while yet.” He smiled pompously.

  Tears streamed down Brian’s face. “You’re an ass,” he said and shoved Ian, who tried to retaliate.

  “Hey, easy now,” Jack started, trying to settle Ian. “Let it finish.”

  While Karen watched this exchange, she knew something wasn’t what she thought. The man she’d been certain was her Jack, well, she wasn’t so certain now. His clothes and hair weren’t right. His accent was clearly Midwestern and not touched with the edge of Appalachia which her husband had picked up where he was raised. Also, since she’d met her husband, he’d always had a dusting of chest hair that led down his lean torso in a neat three inch line where it connected with his more personal body hair below his waist; nothing too dark or thick but it was there and she had, on more than one occasion, run different parts of her body across that strip of hair. But the young man called Jack in this barn sported a smooth chest. She had been wrong about him being her Jack, but the resemblance in height, body type, shade of hair, even the young Jack’s eyes were the exact shade of light brown that her late husband had had. And these young men, with the exception of Simon, had clearly known each other for a while. But she still couldn’t shake the feeling of love and loss when she looked into this Jack’s eyes.

  Amanda had brought up the rear when they all had entered the barn. She had spied an old shirt hanging from a nail near the barn door and was grateful to finally be able to fully clothe herself again after so long.

  About ten minutes later, Ian had recovered fully and was scar free. He was on his feet and back to his jubilant manner. He quickly introduced himself to Amanda and she seemed to be genuinely interested in him. They walked out of the barn into the evening again. The sky was beginning to resemble the way it had during the eclipse earlier in the day.

  Brian and Simon left the barn together as did River and Blaze.

  When Karen turned to leave, Jack said, “Wait.”

  She stopped, keeping her back to him.

  Jack stared at Karen’s back. He guessed she was his own mother’s age or thereabouts.

  “You knew my name. How?” he questioned.

  Karen didn’t say anything or move. She wasn’t sure what to say.

  “I don’t know your name,” Jack said.

  “It’s Karen,” she answered after a moment. Tears stung her eyes. She had desperately wanted this man to be her husband, reincarnated in his youth but she knew he wasn’t. Her husband was dead. He’s to be buried tomorrow for God’s sake! “I just thought… well, I just thought…” But she couldn’t finish. The stress of the day ultimately took its toll and she was overcome by heavy sobs that hitched in her sore throat.

  Jack didn’t know what else to do, so he walked over to her and held her close while she cried. He had no idea why but it felt right to him to do that for her.

  Even though her sobs clogged up her sinuses, she noticed there was something to the way this man who held on to her smelled. He smelled almost exactly like her husband, even when the perspiration was factored in. The familiarity made her tremble.

  A short time later, after Karen had mostly regained her composure, she and Jack left the barn and joined the others in the twilight. The four humans and two animals who were already outside stood in a semicircle around the man who had arrived, attacked, and died after the eclipse and before the evening.

  Jack and Karen joined this group.

  To the east, they heard a large explosion. Something big had just been destroyed.

  They stared at the corpse on the ground.

  Ian finally spoke. “What do we do with this asshole?”

  “Let’s put the son of a bitch in the ground,” Amanda said after some time passed.

  The men returned to the barn and got shovels, with the exception of Ian. He went in the house and brought out food and water. He cooked pork and beans in the yard and everyone ate heartily, especially Karen and even more especially, Amanda. River and Blaze shared a can of chicken.

  After they ate, they took turns digging a grave next to the corpse of the man Brian had killed to save them all. When they felt they had gone deep enough, around two feet, Ian and Amanda rolled the body into the ground where it landed with a thump. The limbs of the assassin were splayed around him at awkward angles and his empty dead eyes stared up at nothing. None of the living thought to strip or check the corpse. Had they done so, someone may have noticed that some of the wounds River had first delivered on the assassin looked slightly… recovered.

  Everyone participated in covering the body with soil. Even Blaze and River pawed soil into the hole and before long, the assassin was sleeping with the worms. Additional explosions in the distance sounded periodically and pops of gunfire were heard
occasionally from afar as well. They all silently prayed the gunshots were far away but hearing them told them that they were close enough.

  When the burial was complete, everyone but Jack, Brian, and River went inside the house. The two men dragged the shovels back to the barn while the cat walked between them. They were still shirtless but now large patches of dirt and sweat were mixed with Ian’s blood on their bodies.

  “I hope the shower’s good,” Brian said.

  “Me too,” Jack said. Suddenly the events of the day swept over him. He grabbed Brian and held him in a fierce hug. The smell of comingled perspiration, blood, and earth coming from Brian invaded Jack’s nose but he didn’t care.

  “I love you, Bri,” Jack said.

  Brian smiled and kissed Jack. All the sudden, he remembered something. He turned to River. “That woman, Karen, she said you said they were the ones we were waiting for. I thought I felt something when they were first running across that field. Are they… River? They are the last pieces of our puzzle, aren’t they? Tell Jack.”

  She meowed, but with Jack being there again, Brian heard her say, “Yes. They are indeed.”

  63

  CONNECTIONS

  The group of six humans, one heterochromatic dog, and one tortoiseshell cat spent Friday night on a rotation. With the exception of the animals, everyone showered. Jack looked at Simon’s injuries and allowed him to wash as much of the debris from his skin before he started to sterilize the wounds and bandage them. Simon had never once asked to be taken to a hospital. With the explosions they had heard throughout the night and the things they had seen on the news, he’d never even thought of asking. When Jack had finished extracting as much of the earthen shrapnel as he could from Simon’s flesh without cutting into the man’s skin he apologized and told Simon he’d probably spook children for years to come. Simon took this well and opted to not look at his face before Jack bandaged it and Jack assured Simon that the injuries on his face were not as abundant as his arm and abdomen.

  Simon, along with Karen and Amanda, showed no signs of rapid healing. Jack silently observed this and knew not everyone was like Ian. He wondered how many of the others came to that realization.

  Those not currently in the shower or on medical duty alternated standing watch between one of the front windows and one of the back. They had pulled all the curtains to keep the little light they had on in the house as invisible as possible from the outside. While Karen watched, she looked at the stars and thought of her husband. Was he up there? Was he watching? While Amanda watched, she stared mostly in the direction of the only other place she had been in on her first trip to the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes; the cold, dank, moldy, dismalness; the invasive weight of the spider as it sat on her nipple; the kidnapper’s colossal erection thrusting from between his legs as he brandished it at her and trailed his DNA on her flesh. When Ian watched he alternated his gazes from the night time horizon outside to Amanda. Sometimes he saw her from the front; sometimes he saw just her profile; sometimes he saw only the back of her. Each time he saw her, his heart raced in his chest. After a few instances of this, even Jack took notice from where he tended to Simon and gave Ian a curious look. When Brian watched, his gaze fell on the place where they had buried the man he had killed. Trepidation slithered up his spine. When he walked to the back window the feeling dissipated but when he went back to the front, he was again drawn to the grave site and felt butterflies flutter in his stomach.

  And those who weren’t standing watch, showering, or tending wounds took up various spots in the living room and had watched the television. Throughout the night, channels had one by one fallen off the air but they had witnessed as the Presidents of both the United States and Russia were assassinated. They heard stories that the Australian continent had been devastated by nuclear attack and that South Africa was uninhabitable as well. They observed as cities burned around the world. They cried as they saw terrified police gun down rioting people from Tokyo to Berlin to Santiago and then stared in stunned silence as the rioting masses got the upper hand and butchered police men and woman brutally. They heard news reports of governments around the world losing control of their nation’s people. China and India, with their massive populations, were reported to be in utter chaos. Virtually all air traffic, commercial and military, around the globe was reported to have ceased.

  No one in the house in Orono retired to any of the home’s bedrooms as Friday night moved into Saturday morning. Blaze and River sat curled up side by side, sometimes dozing, sometimes heads up and looking, for most of the night. The humans in the house took catnaps where they sat on the sofas or chairs. None of them knew the staggering number of people that had died in the panic by the first minutes of Saturday. They watched plenty of people die. It seemed that the FCC was no longer regulating what the media was broadcasting.

  Around 8:00 Saturday morning, there was only one channel left broadcasting and it showed a grainy picture. In the previous day, the city of Portland, Oregon had burned to the ground. With it, Miami, Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco were well on their ways to joining Portland in ashes.

  Around 9:00 AM, the power went out. Everyone was awake and moving around and Ian had just finished brewing a large pot of coffee.

  “Well, that’s that,” Ian said. “So much for civilization.” He was quiet for a few seconds and then whispered, “Fuck.”

  “This place still has a propane powered generator somewhere,” Jack reminded. “But I don’t think we should turn it on ‘til we have to.”

  “I agree,” Simon said. “No need to draw any attention to ourselves. Maybe we can get something on the radio.”

  No one said anything right away.

  Finally, in a voice still laced with rasp from the throttling she’d received, Karen said, “Leave it off. I think we’ve seen and heard enough.”

  Jack looked at Karen. He decided he wanted some answers. He moved the kitchen chair he’d been sitting in and set it down across from Karen, where she was sitting on the end of the sofa, sipping a cup of coffee.

  “All right,” Jack said, sounding almost irritated and plopping himself in the chair. “Let’s talk then. River says you all are friends. So tell us you’re story.”

  Amanda moved and sat at her sister’s side. Last night, she had found a long sleeve T-shirt printed with an image of what looked like Jimmy Hendrix in a forest and a pair of blue jeans in the bureau of what appeared to be the master bedroom. They exchanged a look and Amanda nodded. After a moment’s hesitation, Karen began. She started with her making brunch Sunday morning (Has it been a year ago now? she thought) that never got eaten and told of her cross country trip in search of her sister before ultimately finding herself here. If Karen didn’t or couldn’t provide a detail, Amanda did, if she was able. They held almost nothing back. They were supposed to be here. The cat had said it and Blaze had confirmed it.

  While Karen talked, she was relieved to find the four men totally open to what she was saying. They didn’t laugh or scoff when she told them she had started talking to a dog and that the dog was talking back. They didn’t flinch or ridicule her when she told them of her visions leading up to the eclipse. Karen had held back the vision of the assassin raping her sister that she’d had yesterday. The vision was ludicrous after all. The sick fuck had been dead and buried for well over twelve hours. But she couldn’t see a connection between the two groups.

  Jack listened. He alternated gazes between the sisters and the blue and green eyed Dalmatian. He marveled at the dog’s ability to track. The astonishing animal had followed a man halfway across the country. He remembered thinking his own sense of smell was probably better than a dog’s. He wondered if he could track like that. Maybe Blaze could teach him. But while he felt comfortable with Blaze, Amanda, and Karen, he could still not understand why they were here.

  Brian listened. The tale the two women told was amazing, an adventure almost. He had always been adverse to adventure and preferred to keep
things routine and orderly but recent events had thrust him just down the path he’d tried to avoid. He’d loved watching end-of-the-world-flesh-eating-zombie-killer-virus-deadly-meteor movies and TV shows. Sure there weren’t zombies out there but there was still evil out there. He listened to the women talk and even though their story still provided no connections to him and his friends, a validating beep was going off in his head, assuring him there was. It was just like the sensation he’d had when Simon nearly stepped out of their lives and his presence here was also as yet, unclear. He wondered if he could use his connection with Jack to make him hear the beep.

  Ian listened. He heard Amanda’s courage in the presence of the madman who had shot him. He felt hatred for the man for the way he had treated the remarkable woman seated before him. And he was grateful Brian had killed the man who had threatened Amanda with the foulest degradation and violation. He noticed the bruises on Amanda’s face looked a little better today and he wished he could use his own ability to recover from injury on her and make her unblemished again. Ian didn’t know how or why the women and the dog were here but he also did not care. They were here and that was all that mattered to him.

  Simon listened. However, unlike the other three men in the room, Simon heard things from the women differently than the other three men. He heard words like the woman’s last name, congressman, assassination. As the women talked, all the connections fell into place. All except one, that was. Simon couldn’t figure out how the cat fit into their puzzle. Did it matter with the animals? The dog had a connection with Ms. Thomas but they hadn’t been close before and that scene she described at the animal rescue sounded like more than a slight connection. Maybe the cat’s attachment to Jack was just that: an attachment. If that was the case, they all fit together perfectly.