Burn

by Geoff North

  Hank was forced to move back further as the girls rolled by. “Are they always like this?”

  Trot was picking bits of glass out of his hand. “They don’t like each other.”

  A rifle shot brought the girls back to their feet. They separated and stared at the smoking rifle in Sara’s hand. “Both of you quit this shit, once and for all.” Her other hand was wrapped around the horse’s reins, attempting to calm it down.

  “She said I was ugly.”

  Kay brushed the dirt away from her already dusty clothes. “You got me mad, is all. I found you out in them plains. I saved your life. Most folks would be grateful for that. ”

  “Maybe I didn’t want to be saved. I saw my Ma get ripped to bits. Yer Lawman Pa beat my Pa half to death. I don’t wanna be yer friend, or yer sister, or whatever other gawdamn thing you all expect me to be.”

  Sara had calmed the horse enough to put the rifle away. “You want us to leave you here alone?”

  Angel was struggling to work a clump of moss out from the knots in her hair. Tears were running down her face and leaving streaks of white in the dirt. “I want Cobe to come back.”

  “Then you don’t want to be left alone. That’s settled.” Sara turned on her daughter. “Call her ugly again and I’ll smack out any other bad words waiting in that mouth of yours.”

  Kay looked down at her feet. “Yes, Ma.”

  “Perhaps there’s hope for civilization after all,” Hank muttered.

  One of Trot’s glass-picking picking fingers had worked its way up into his nostril. “Huh?”

  “There is a semblance of order. It’s the fundamental cornerstone of civilization.”

  They walked ahead and stopped in the broken pattern of shadows cast down from the hulking two-hundred foot high frame of steel. Trot reached out and touched it. Rust flaked off under his fingers. “People used to live up in all them orange bars?”

  “It wasn’t just steel back then. There were walls and floors, glass windows and bathrooms, kitchens, and beds.”

  Trot nodded his head enthusiastically. “Like all them rooms and levels we found back in Big Hole. But these rooms reached up into the clouds, not down into the ground. The Lawman told us about them things.”

  There were more steel skeletons for them to see. Some were taller, most were shorter. A few had collapsed on their sides into twisted mazes. Weeds and moss covered their surfaces, vines dragged them further into the ground. Trot rummaged where he could, and found three more bottles over the next few hours. They weren’t as pretty as the first. They weren’t even made of glass.

  The group stopped to rest in a large open area covered in long brown grass where there no signs of ages-old rubble buried beneath them. Hank told them it may have been a park at one time—a patch of nature surrounded but separated from the concrete and steel jungle. That made Trot laugh.

  Angel finally spoke for the first time since losing Spot. “That dumb horse took off ‘cause it got scared of something. It was nothin’ I did.”

  “Scared of what?” Kay asked. Her tone had lost its mean, cutting edge. The girl had taken her mother’s warning to heart.

  Angel was standing while the others sat. She circled around them apprehensively, her arms crossed tightly against her chest. “She started actin’ funny as soon as we got to this place, snorting through that big nose of hers and jerkin’ on the reins… What’s that word the Lawman said? Skitty. She was actin’ skitty.”

  “Skittish,” Sara said.

  Angel stopped behind Hank. “How many people you figure lived here?”

  “Two million, give or take a hundred thousand.”

  “Well it feels to me—and don’t none of you laugh—that with all them people… well maybe some of ‘em never left. Maybe they’re still watchin’ us now from them crooked buildings with no windows and doors. Any of you feel that, too?”

  No one answered, and Angel had her answer.

  “You’re talking about ghosts,” Hank said. “There are no such things. People die, and they stay dead.”

  “You didn’t,” Sara countered.

  “I didn’t die. I voluntarily had myself frozen. All of the people ABZE suspended were alive at the time of freezing. There are no ghosts in this city, or anywhere else.”

  “Quit talking about ghosts,” Trot moaned. He was crinkling one of his bottles in his hands nervously. The thin plastic had begun to crack in a dozen spots. “Angel’s right. This place feels wrong. It makes me want to pee in my pants, and I don’t even have to go.”

  Sara went to one of the bags secured to their horse. “That sounds good to me. It’s been a long day. We’ll spend the night here, and try to find Spot first thing in the morning.” She spread one of the blankets out over the grass.

  “No,” Trot’s bottom lip was quivering. “I don’t wanna spend the night here. I don’t wanna spend another hour in this place. Can’t we set up camp somewhere else?”

  Angel cut Sara off before she could reply. “My Pa used to tell me stories about dead people coming back to scare the living. How come no one lives in this place now? Probably ‘cause they know better. We ain’t seen nothin’ since we got here. No people, no fuckin’ howlers, not even a bird in the sky. I’m with Trot… I ain’t staying.”

  Sara looked at her daughter. The girl made a sad face that said she would agree to whatever her mother decided. “Fine.” She folded the blanket back up. “We’ll leave.”

  It took them the rest of the afternoon and most of the early evening to travel through the ancient city. Ahead of them, to the west, the sun had set behind a jagged-looking line of purple. Kay pointed it out to the rest. “Looks like we might heading into a storm.”

  “Those aren’t clouds,” Hank corrected her. “They’re mountains.”

  They went a few more miles in what light remained and found Spot. Or what was left of her. The animal’s belly had been emptied, her eyes ripped out. All four legs had been gnawed down to bones. Sara walked about the remains searching for tracks in the gloom. “It’s too dark. I can’t see anything.”

  Kay asked. “You figure a howler done it?”

  “It would’ve taken more than one to do this… A pack maybe.”

  Trot wanted to tell them that howlers couldn’t run anywhere near as fast as a horse, but he was too terrified. He had been stumbling along, walking backwards most of the time, keeping watch over the flattened city. There wasn’t much left to see, only a dark silhouette of bent metal and rock jutting up against the deep indigo of sky behind. Hank had called it a jungle of concrete and steel. It looked more like an endless field of black, broken bones.

  Hank knelt down in front of the dead horse and stuck an arm up into the remaining viscera of its chest. He pulled out its heart. “Still warm. Whatever did this is still close by.” He pictured the naked woman covered in blood rushing at him down in the Lone Tree facility. Howlers, maybe. Humans more likely. He tried to remember the locations of ABZE facilities in the west. Lone Tree and Victory Island were all that came to mind. It was probably information one of his countless aids had stored away a thousand years earlier. Hank had been preparing for other things at the time—destroying the world being one of them.

  “Then we should build big a build fire,” Trot said. “So big it’ll scare anything away.”

  Hank shook his head. He had worked his way up from the Lone Tree facility and crossed three hundred miles of land in the last few days. Thousands had been revived under the ground there with him. The majority had been brainless, hungering cannibals, but they could move quickly. Hundreds could have set out west in his general direction, and followed them to this point. And if the entire sleeping population of a single ABZE installation had been brought out of deep freeze, chances were good they had all been revived. Over a hundred thousand starving maniacs spreading out across the continent in all directions. It was only a matter of time before they ran into some of them, somewhere. Fire wouldn’t scare that kind of people away, it would only draw them
in.

  “We should keep moving… and stay quiet.”

  There was no more discussion. They were exhausted, but kept moving.

  Hank hung back from the others a ways and ate the horse’s heart.

  Chapter 34

  “We’re goin’ to build a big fire,” the Lawman said as he stacked the wood higher. “Were goin’ to build a fire so gawdamn big, all the howlers and rollers fer a thousand miles around will see.”

  Cobe dropped another armload next to him. “We ain’t got that much deadfall around us for a fire that mighty. Figure this will be enough?”

  “Fer an hour or so. I’m sick of sleepin’ with one eye closed, and both hands reaching fer my guns. This fire’s goin’ to burn straight through the night until the sun rises. We all deserve a decent rest.”

  Cobe couldn’t recall a time when the Lawman had seemed so upbeat. He wouldn’t go so far as to say he was in high spirits, or that he was happy—Willem couldn’t even imagine a happy Lawson—but he could guess what the Lawman felt inside was a sense of relief. They all felt it. Burn and Rudd were already hundreds of miles behind them to the east, and they would never return to either dismal place again. Lothair Eichberg was probably dead, or close enough to it that they didn’t consider him much of a threat. The four were headed back west, and they would soon catch up to the others. They would travel the last part of their journey, all of them together once again, to Victory Island, and put the horrors of the last few weeks to rest.

  Willem was striking a piece of flint against one of the rifle barrels as Lawson had showed him. The sparks settled into a little puff of dry weeds and started to smoke. The boy carried the smoldering ball gingerly in his hand and placed it into the branches. He stepped back as the Lawman bent down and started blowing on it. Willem poked him in the side with his boot. “Howlers don’t got eyes to see fire with. And weren’t you the one what told us they have to steal fire from people?”

  “I told you that,” Cobe said.

  Flames began to dance. Lawson stuck his face in closer and blew a little harder. When the fire was burning hard enough to sustain itself—and more so because he was thoroughly winded—the Lawman settled back and lit a pre-rolled cigarette. “Then let ‘em come and try and steal it. We’ll be ready, and we’ll stick together.” He glared straight at Willem. “No more wanderin’ away fer shits.”

  Dust made a contented snort and moved in from the shadows to gather some of their heat. Cobe could see Jenny, lying on her side and turned away from them. She, too, seemed less morose, and more relaxed. Perhaps knowing the final fate of her mother, and how the woman had played a role in saving their lives had settled something inside of her. All of her ties to an ancient life were gone. She could begin a new life with them.

  Lawson saw him looking at her. “She’s been sleeping a lot the last few days.”

  “Cryers don’t need sleep,” Cobe reminded him. “She’s just resting.”

  “Or maybe she’s goin’ back into them dreams of hers.” He leaned closer to Cobe and whispered. “Searchin’ fer the dead.”

  “What she sees or where she goes when her eyes close is her business. It ain’t like she’s keeping any secrets from us.”

  The Lawman nodded his head thoughtfully. “Speakin’ of secrets… You got anything you want to share with us, Willem? Maybe there’s a little something you’d like to return to me?”

  Willem didn’t try to deny it. He reached into his back pocket and handed Lawson his book. A few more outer pages had broken away. Rain had seeped into the remaining pages and dried again, bloating the book out and rippling the old paper. “Sorry the way it looks. I was gonna put it right back where I found it, but Eichberg got to me first.”

  He handled it as if was something alive and dying. “Can’t blame Lothair fer all our troubles. You took it without asking.”

  Cobe defended his brother. “Ain’t no trees around to hang him from. All that’s left of them are burning in your fire.”

  “Maybe I should shoot him. Learn him a lesson.”

  Willem knew he was kidding. Or at least hoped he was. “Can’t learn nothin’ if I’m dead.”

  Lawson reached back for his ammunition bag and placed the book inside. “How long have you been able to read?”

  Cobe shook his head. “He can’t read. I was the only one Ma taught.”

  Willem read the last paragraph of the book from memory, word for word. “None of the Lassiter clan ended up going to trial and hanging for their crimes. They lay in the dusty streets where Hannon had brought them down with a sure-eyed aim and steady trigger finger. Seven bodies. Cattle rustlers, bank robbers, and cold-blooded murderers all. It didn’t much matter to the townsfolk how it had been done. Dead Creek was safe again, thanks to the lawman. Justice had been served, hard and without mercy.”

  “Sombitch,” Cobe whispered. “All them nights when we thought you were sleeping.”

  Willem grinned. “Not sleeping. Listening and learning right along with you.”

  Lawson flicked his cigarette butt at him. It sparked against his shoulder and Willem batted it away. “Sneakin’ and lying is more like it. And now it’s progressed to theivin’. Still… you did learn to read, and that’s all I ever really wanted fer you boys. It’s where I’d hoped the whole town of Burn would someday get to. Smart and educated, less stupid and fearful.”

  “Eichberg made me read the whole thing to him. When I was done, he made me read even more.”

  “I didn’t have any more books,” Lawson said. “What did he make you read?”

  Willem stood and reached down the front of his pants. He pulled the shiny black tablet out. “He made this thing light up and then he talked to it.” The boy handed it to the Lawman. “There’s like a million books inside. Maybe all the books that ever was.”

  Lawson turned it over in his hands. “This ain’t no book. It’s one of them things those people put their ideas into.” He passed it to Cobe.

  He could see the reflection of his face in the device from the light of the fire. “How did you end up with it?”

  “Eichberg was smart, but he wasn’t expectin’ a one-armed kid might pick it out of his pocket with his back turned.”

  Lawson grunted. “More thievin’.”

  Willem shrugged. “I got the thing from him, didn’t I?”

  “Fer all the good it did. Unless you know how to make it work, it ain’t got no value to the likes of us.”

  The brothers continued passing the device back and forth, trying to make it light up. They shook it, rubbed it, tapped all four corners against the ground, and held it closer to the fire. Jenny remained oblivious to their efforts, curled up on the ground a few feet away. She was in the dream world, and she was happy.

  Her mother was with her, human and whole, and joy-filled. Her father was with them, wearing blue jeans and a tee-shirt instead of army fatigues. He had flip-flops on his feet instead boots. His skin was no longer a patchwork of grey scars, and his eyes weren’t orange. They were sitting at a picnic table together sipping the coldest, tallest glasses of iced tea Jenny had ever seen. Children were running by, laughing and hollering at one another, playing without a care in the world throughout the playground Jenny’s mother had brought her to in rural Minnesota a thousand years ago.

  Jenny reached across the table and touched the backs of their hands. “You don’t know how good it is to see you both here… together again, in love.”

  Michael kissed the side of his wife’s face. “We were never truly together in life. My duties as a soldier kept us separated in distance. Her responsibilities to the company drove us even further apart. We could never be who we wanted to be.”

  A light breeze placed a lock of black hair into his eyes. Edna pushed it back and kissed the tip of his nose. “And we could never be the parents you deserved. But that’s all different now.”

  A child yelled out and Michael plucked a yellow ball from the air before it could crash into their drinks. He tossed it back, and
the little boy ran back to his friends. Jenny squeezed their hands. “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here with both of you forever.”

  “There’s only one way that’s going to happen,” her father said.

  Edna leaned into the table. “Are you prepared to take your own life?”

  Jenny pulled back slightly. “I… I want to be with you. I’m not really living out there.”

  “But you’re not quite ready to make that big step. It’s alright, we understand.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “There’s nothing to fear here,” her father offered. “There are no monsters. Only people.”

  “Is Lothair here?” Her parents said nothing. “Then he’s still alive. He’ll be coming after the Lawman again. He’ll kill Cobe and all the others.”

  “You’re not responsible for them. They’re not your family,” Michael said. “We are.”

  Jenny pulled back a little further. “I can’t abandon them like that… I can’t just leave them.”

  Edna was suddenly in front of her, the table was gone. She hugged her daughter and whispered in her ear. “Then go back to them. Go back and finish what you must do. But be careful when you come back here. Not everything in the dream world is as it appears.”

  “Everything’s exactly the way I always wanted it. Me, you and Dad… I don’t understand.”

  Her father was next to her. He placed a warm hand on her shoulder. “Eichberg is a liar. Be on guard. The next time you come back… Make it your last time crossing over. Stay with us.” There was a flash of orange in his eyes as he stepped back. A final warning.

  Edna kissed Jenny’s forehead, and forced herself back as well. “Until then.”

  Her parents became blurs in front of her. The children’s laughter started to fade away. She could hear something crackling. She could smell smoke.

  Jenny turned onto her other side and saw Lawson, Cobe, and Willem sitting at a big fire. The brothers were arguing about something, poking at a small black device, and fighting for its possession. Jenny sat up and recognized what it was after a few moments. “Where did you find that?”