by Mike Kraus
Rachel continued to push the handcar, nearing the hopeful side rail, when she heard a great noise from behind her. The train’s engines both roared, gearing up to pull the train cars up to full speed. Rachel kept her eyes forward, not daring to look back. Up ahead, not even half of a football field away, was the grove of trees with the train cars behind them. As Rachel drew closer, she saw a small post standing near the outside of the grove. A railroad switch! I knew it! The switch on the post confirmed for Rachel that there was, indeed, a side track. If she was able to get the switch moved, she could push the handcar onto the side track, switch it back and let the train pass safely by on the main track. Easier said than done, she thought.
Rachel pushed the handcar up to the split in the track, letting it coast to a stop. She ran around to the back of the handcar and grabbed hold of the switch, pulling it hard towards her. With a loud groan the switch’s rust gave way and the set of switch rails slid over, opening the path to the side passage. Rachel headed back around to the front of the handcar to push it onto the side rail, nearly stopping as she saw the train rolling towards her, gaining speed with each revolution of its thundering wheels. I’ve never seen a train pick up speed that fast, especially not one that loaded with cars and cargo. The swarms must have modified it somehow. The train hadn’t slowed down during Rachel’s pause and she hurried to push the handcar out of the way, doing her best to beat the train.
Tired and in pain as she was, Rachel managed to get the handcar off onto the side rail without issue. She half ran back to the switch and began to pull it in the opposite direction as the train bore down on her, scarcely a hundred feet away now. While the switch had moved into place quickly enough before, it was less smooth this time, squeaking and nudging as she threw her body weight against it, but still not moving enough to shift the tracks. Panic built in Rachel’s mind and body and she thrashed the switch, trying to get it to move into position.
Finally, in a desperate attempt, borne of frustration and anger, she stepped back from the switch and gave it a mighty kick. She went toppling over backwards into the grass from the force of the kick. Time slowed as Rachel fell back, and she watched in slow motion as the switch slowly, incredibly, shifted. The last bit of rust and age gave way under the force of her foot and the rail clicked into place. Seconds later the train rolled past the switch, still gaining speed, its wheels clicking against the fork in the tracks.
Stunned, Rachel laid still in the grass, watching the train pass by, rolling towards the south to a destination unknown. Faint shimmers of silver smoke flowed around the train and its cars as it went along, ignoring both her and Sam. Long after the train and its cars had passed by, Rachel still sat in the grass, her breathing slow and labored as she watched off into the distance where the last train car had vanished into the night. Wherever the train was heading, if their purpose was for anything like Rachel suspected, she feared that even if she could reach Washington and her lab, it would be too little and too late to do anything about it.
For the moment, though, Rachel allowed the thoughts of the swarms and Washington and Richmond to all fade away. She put her head back and pulled Sam in close. Rachel stared into the heavens, watching as the clouds and smoke drifted high in the sky, looking for any glimpse of a star beyond the filth that clouded the once clear air as she slowly drifted off to sleep.
Final Dawn: Episode 4
Undisclosed Location
March 17, 2038
In a long hallway lined with thick glass windows, two men in suits walk side by side, speaking in hushed tones. The sounds of compressed air and commercial machinery echo in the background, emanating from the rooms on each side of the hallway. Stopping in front of a window, the men pause to watch the work unfolding in front of them. The taller man speaks first.
“When will they be ready?”
“R&D says two weeks for final hardware fab, software another week after that.”
“Field testing?”
“As soon as everything’s uploaded, we’ll start the trials.”
“Contingencies?”
“Unknown. We’ve never done a test this big before. It could go perfectly or it could all go to hell. Bertha’s primed and ready, though. Anything goes wrong, she’ll take care of it, guaranteed.”
“What about the… incident, from last week?”
“Nothing to worry about, sir. We’ve taken care of it.”
The taller man turns to stare at the other, his steel eyes cold and emotionless. “We can’t afford to throw that resource away, no matter how much noise it makes.”
“Oh, absolutely. Once the testing is complete, she’ll be back.”
The taller man turns back to face the window. Both are silent for a moment, staring at the workers going on about their tasks. Men and women dressed in lab coats, wearing face masks and hair nets are rushing back and forth. They argue over figures, check numbers and verify sample batches, all in an elegant ballet of ordered chaos.
The men in suits continue down the hall, moving on to view the other rooms.
“Hard to believe it’s really happening, isn’t it, sir?” The shorter man speaks this time.
The taller man doesn’t respond, and the other doesn’t continue. The towering man speaks again a few minutes later, after they make several more brief stops in silence.
“Did the programmers fix the issue?”
An audible gulp precedes the response. “They’re… still working on it, I’m afraid. They think they found the source, but I’m not sure it will be ready by the time we go to testing. Still, we can always—”
“They will find it, fix it, integrate it and have it online before testing begins.”
A frantic fumbling of a phone, a short text message and a hushed call follows.
“All right, yes sir, it’ll be taken care of as you’ve said. There are just a few small techni—”
“Not my problem. Fix it, integrate it and have it online before testing happens.” The temperature in the hallways drops by several degrees with the response. “Don’t make me repeat myself again.”
The shorter man nods violently, stumbling over his words. “Of course, sir. If-if you don’t mind, I’ll g-go and personally oversee the, uh, the—”
The taller man dismisses the shorter one with a wave of his hand, sending him walking, then jogging, then running at full tilt down the hall.
Left alone, the taller man watches through the window, following the equipment around the room. Large vats are transported to conveyer belts with robotic arms, workers push and stir and mix ingredients, small lights and sensors blink on and off in a rainbow of colors. A smile creeps across the face of the man, so faint as to appear barely perceptible as he watches the final pieces being laid into place.
Marcus Warden
3:48 PM, April 3, 2038
Marcus walked along the shoulder of the interstate, a dozen miles from the first exits into Richmond. Though it had been a full day since he lost the bicycle, he still cursed with every step, berating himself for not paying closer attention when he was riding through a section of crashed vehicles.
I could have gotten myself killed. I’m lucky it was just the bike. It’s not like that makes any difference, though. The bike’s still gone and here I am, stuck walking again, with six of those things somewhere behind me. I could have at least pushed the stupid thing and maybe found a bike chain somewhere up ahead, but oh no, I couldn’t bother to do that, could I?
After riding for a long time, Marcus had stopped for a few hours to rest, only to get up and continue again early the next morning. In his haste to put as much distance between himself and the creatures as possible, he took the bike through a large pile of wrecked cars a bit too fast. The tires had slipped on some broken safety glass, and though they didn’t pop, the bike slid out from underneath Marcus, breaking the chain and sending him tumbling headfirst into the ground. While the back of his head had been skinned up pretty badly, his physical injuries weren’t serious—though his
pride did take quite a hit.
The more pressing problem had been the loss of the bike, rendered useless by the broken chain. Marcus had tried everything to jury rig it, including using one of his shoelaces to tie the ends of the chain together. After snapping off a piece of the shoelace after only a few feet, Marcus angrily tossed the bike aside and continued on foot. By the time he got far enough along to regret abandoning the bike, it was too late to turn around. He didn’t want to risk trekking back that far in the direction of the creatures.
Without a fast mode of transport, Marcus became more paranoid, jumping at every little noise and rustle of the trees behind him. Every few minutes a branch would snap, the wind would whistle or the bushes would shake and he would whirl around, ready to face one of the creatures. Without fail, the noises were always natural in origin, but Marcus continued to walk along at an anxious pace, jogging when able, trying to get as far down the road as possible.
It was late in the evening when Marcus finally reached the first exit to Richmond. It only led to some of the smaller communities surrounding the city, though, and Marcus needed to get into the city proper to find his parents’ house. He still had a long way to travel before reaching the exits to the main part of the city.
As he was walking by the dark green exit sign, a low vibration passed through the night air. Marcus didn’t notice it at first, but when the dull noise finally reached his ears, he flinched and instinctively leapt for cover, diving into the median and rolling into the underbrush. His first assumption was that the noise was the sound of the creatures or one of the silver swarms approaching. The noise rapidly became clearer as Marcus held his breath, and then he recognized it for what it was.
Is that… that’s an engine!
The vibrating sound coming towards him was most definitely an engine, and a loud one at that. Though Marcus was apprehensive about coming out of cover, he tried justifying it to himself. It’s not like any of those creatures have been driving around, so it’s got to be a person. The prospect of merely having another living person to speak to filled Marcus with hope, and he climbed out of the median and stood on the shoulder of the road. Marcus shielded his eyes from the bright glare of the evening sun as he strained to see the vehicle that was approaching.
Leonard McComb
1:45 PM, April 3, 2038
Leonard’s Jeep sputtered and coughed as he pulled into an apartment block somewhere inside the city of Richmond. “C’mon, girl, just a few more feet.” Leonard coaxed the Jeep along, willing it to keep going. The fuel gauge’s needle had been stuck on empty for the last hour, and Leonard was desperate to find a source of gasoline before he drained the last vapors in the tank.
Since his close encounter at the hotel, Leonard had spent the next several hours weaving his way through the side streets, highways and alleyways of Richmond, trying to make his way through the city while at the same time shake his pursuers off of his tail. At some point early in the morning, he looked behind him and – finally – saw no sign of the creatures. This did not in any way mean that they weren’t still after him, though, so he continued to drive, straight through dawn, late morning and into the early afternoon. Only when he looked down at the fuel gauge and saw that it was dangerously empty did he begin to search for another vehicle from which to transfer gas to the Jeep.
In the apartment block where Leonard stopped, he twisted his head, looking around at the tall buildings, searching for any dangers lurking nearby. While the apartment buildings were still standing, this did not make Leonard any less nervous. Dozens of windows, doorways and shadows all tugged at his sight, tempting his imagination and causing him to wonder if he saw movement out of every corner of his vision.
Three cars were parked on the street outside one of the buildings, all of them intact. Leonard hurried with the siphoning process, nervously glancing back and forth, half-expecting one of the creatures to jump out of the back of the Jeep. In the dead silence of the city, strange sensations took hold. The sound of traffic, people and animals normally filled the air, but such sounds were nonexistent now. Flowing into every crack and crevice, the silence was palpable, and Leonard cringed with every small noise that he made filling up the gas tank. Being in the Jeep for so long, he had forgotten how quiet the world was in its present state.
Panicked and fearful for his life, Leonard had thought of nothing but the creatures and escaping from them since he had left the hotel. As the gas slowly flowed, his mind wandered a bit, finally starting to process the events of the previous night. From his glimpses of the creatures – both up close and far away – it was obvious that they were once human. That much was confirmed by the sight of the person who was – changed? Transformed? What the hell was that, anyway?
None of what Leonard had observed of the creatures – either in Washington or in Richmond – made sense. The only fact he knew for certain was that the creatures were extremely hostile and wanted him dead. He looked down at his shirt as the gas finished draining into the Jeep’s tank, eyeing the small tears in the fabric from the creature’s hand that nearly pulled him out of the car. His chest was bruised underneath the shirt and tender to the touch, reminding him of the raw force and power that he had felt from that hand.
A howl of the wind whipping through the apartment block sent shivers down Leonard’s spine, breaking through the silence and awakening him from his thoughts. He quickly removed the hose between the two vehicles and climbed back into the Jeep. The vehicle started with a brief cough, then roared back to its usual self, the fuel lines filled with life-giving liquid. Leonard spread his map over the steering wheel, then looked up at a street sign that was dangling precariously from its post. ‘98th Ave South.’ Where the hell is that?
The mazelike city had become even more so in the aftermath of the bombs. Entire blocks had been eradicated, streets had become one with the surrounding rubble and the pattern of destruction was so bizarre that, at times, Leonard didn’t know where he was. Traveling a tenth of a mile in any direction showed severe changes in the level of destruction in the area. It was to the point where you could go from a relatively normal looking section of the city to one that had been utterly erased in the space of a block, as if you were passing through an invisible wall that separated two worlds from each other. These sections of destruction and normalcy made navigation more difficult, since you couldn’t fully rely on street signs for directions, nor could you count on seeing far enough in the distance to find where you were by line of sight.
Making his best guess, Leonard pulled out of the apartment block and turned to the east. The road ahead appeared unscathed, at least for the next block or two. This must be Lindhurst Street… I think. Leonard held the map in the passenger seat with one hand while steering with the other, driving slowly along as he tried to verify where he was. He continued to cast nervous glances in the mirror, keeping an eye out for the beasts. Their absence, which should have been comforting, only served to increase his anxiety.
Nancy Sims
6:07 PM, April 3, 2038
Nancy’s mind and body were numb as she tore down the interstate in the truck. The last two days had been an emotional roller coaster, starting with elation and relief from her and James’s escape to despair and grief at the loss of the only kind soul she had found in this new world. After leaving James in the field, Nancy had expected to continue sobbing for hours afterwards. Instead, she found herself feeling detached from the situation. Back behind the wheel of a vehicle, once again driving on an abandoned road, she could almost forget that the entire series of events had ever happened.
As one day turned into another, Nancy had grown weary, but refused to stop except to refill the gas tank. The number of full cans was dwindling fast, and Nancy wasn’t sure how much longer the truck would keep going before she would have to find an alternate source of fuel. When she got onto the interstate, her mood brightened at the sight of signs proclaiming that her destination was a mere eighty miles away. Nancy hadn’t planned on tra
veling to Richmond on her own, but the conviction that James had spoken with had convinced her that it was the only course of action left to take.
As the sun began to sink toward the horizon and glare brightly in her rearview mirror, Nancy came upon the outer edges of the city. Then, in a startling moment, she saw a flash of movement off in the distance to either side of the road. It was quick, barely there for more than a second, then it was gone again. If not for the silver color of the movement, Nancy would have chalked it up to the wind shaking the trees. The peculiar color, though, instantly made her nervous, thinking back to the silver mass at the farm and then to James’s brutal description of what had happened to his friend.
As quickly as she saw the movement it was gone and didn’t return again. Nancy kept a wary eye on the mirrors, but there was nothing to see behind her but the orange sky. She once again focused on the road in front. Several minutes later, she spotted something else that was new, but also familiar.
