by J. Thorn
***
“Where’s your little monkey?”
Ben felt the rope digging into his wrists. Inside the barn felt like a blast furnace. The three men wore bandanas over their faces and baseball caps backwards on their heads.
“Where is he? We don’t take kindly to his type ’round here.”
“It’s 2026, for Christ’s sake. You telling me you boys are still fighting the Civil War?”
The man on Ben’s right smacked him. The open-handed strike stung his face and brought him fully awake.
“We met on the rails. He left me here.”
“He stole our water and we want it back.”
“Not my problem,” Ben said. His voice cracked and his leg shook despite the strength of his words. “I got nothing to do with it.”
“Seein’ as how you’s all we got, it is your problem.”
The men moved closer. Ben was overpowered by the skunky scent of weed, tobacco and moonshine, until their fists broke his nose in several places and he could no longer smell at all.
***
Ben woke to the sound of crickets and a noisy owl in the loft. He was on his side, bitter copper coating his tongue. He opened his eyes: still dark. Ben’s left eye was swollen shut, but his right opened enough to detect a single moonbeam slicing through the open door.
“Hey,” Ben said through a dusty mouth and broken teeth. “Help.”
He raised a hand to his nose. The slightest touch brought tears to his eyes. Ben was free in more ways than one. His clothes were gone, as were his Doodad and front teeth. He lay on the barn floor, bruised, bloodied and naked.
For the first time since fleeing New Orleans, Ben left the rails. Best guess said Chicago was at least four hundred miles north, and he wouldn’t be able to walk it without food, water or clothes. A fractured face and bruised ribs couldn’t move Ben’s mind from his debilitating hunger.
He shuffled to the barn door and looked out. The maintenance shed, garbage can and surrounding land sat in a dark and desperate silence. The crickets stopped so the only sound was Ben’s own labored breaths.
He walked, ignoring sharp stones as they sliced into the bottoms of his feet. Ben followed a gravel drive to a country road without a paved blacktop or street light. He pushed himself into the night, towards the tree line, where a thickening forest swallowed the world. He walked for an hour and saw nothing, not even a guardrail, until the shape of a chimney claimed its slice of the sky several hundred yards off the road.
Ben thought of the beating, and assumed the men believed he would die. He laughed, picturing himself as the walking dead from zombie fiction’s high-water mark back in the 2010s.
The house was only a house in the word’s loosest definition. It had walls, a roof and a door, but Ben saw no lines or conduit, no optic cable tying most of the residential structures he knew to internet. It was empty, except for the cobwebs and dust covered most of the items scattered about the floor of the one-room structure. Ben found greasy overalls and a baseball cap along with a pair of steel-toed work boots. He put them on and was happy to notice the place had no mirror. He didn’t want to see his own face. The first light bled through the trees and Ben headed back. He still lacked food and water, with four hundred miles of rails spread before him.
He had only a desire to wrap his arms around Emma and make everything right.
***
Ben never found the handcar they shared or saw any sign of Jerome. For a stretch of a couple hundred miles, he was able to ride a rusted handcar he found in the maintenance shed of another stop somewhere in Illinois. But he was forced to abandon it after hitting a run of rail destroyed by a massive explosion. He passed days rubbing his tongue against holes where his teeth used to be. The work boots scraped most of the skin from his toes, but he was able to ignore his sunburn by focusing on the throbbing ache in his feet. Every station and stop on the line to Chicago was either ransacked or burned, but Ben always found enough scraps of food to shield his body from collapse. When fields finally turned to pavement and buildings rose from the ground, he knew Chicago was close.
***
Chicago’s South Side was a war zone during normal times. Ben didn’t want to think about walking it now. In late 2017, the President had been forced to sever the crime-ridden area from the rest of metropolitan Chicago. The Army Core of Engineers built a wall around the neighborhood as the exploding murder rate left them no other choice. Violence spilled into the other suburbs until criminal elements surrounded the Lake Michigan lakefront in a cancer of gangs.
Ben made several stops on his march north. He found better fitting clothing and a bank of vending machines that hadn’t been destroyed. But even as he headed into heavily populated areas, there was no evidence of life. Some buildings burned while others had stacks of corpses piled in front. Ben wanted to explore, to get a closer look, but each step from the rail was one further from Chicago’s Union Station and his reunion with Emma.
He plowed forward, gripping a baseball bat he found lying on the tracks. Guns weren’t the type of things people would leave sitting around, or that looters would ignore, so he considered himself lucky to find a way to protect himself.
He picked through the rail yard leading into Union Station, where several trains sat idle. Other than broken windows and a few burnt cars left to smolder, they appeared ready to deliver passengers south to the Big Easy. Ben dodged debris, hunks of plaster, stacks of wood and mounds of dead flesh. He bypassed the luggage area and ran up the marble steps leading to Jackson Boulevard and Lou Mitchell’s Restaurant. He thought of their world-famous breakfast and covered the sidewalk in vomit. Chicago’s streets were littered. Fires licked the city and made the sky look more like Mars than Illinois. He jogged further west to South Michigan, near the Magnificent Mile, the Midwest’s version of Rodeo Drive. Flames burned over the Hadler Planetarium as a random burst of gunfire erupted from Millennium Park.
He thought of Emma and pushed on. He ran up North Lasalle towards the Merchandise Mart and past 1871, the office building that had housed the new tech elite of 2009’s startup movement. He turned on to North State and, for the first time in days, saw the entrance to his red stone duplex nestled under the Union Square Lofts unruly shadow. He knocked the door aside. It fell at an angle still attached by one hinge. A blast near the knob had blown a basketball sized hole from the wood. He gripped his bat and stepped inside, a burgeoning headache turning him dizzy.
“Emma!” He shouted as he ran up the stairs towards the second floor. He could smell smoke, but saw no flames. He thought of the Great Fire of 1871 and hoped Chicago could recover from whatever this was.
“Emma!”
He rounded the landing and saw “2C” dangling from a brass screw on the door’s face. It was closed, and the hallway was empty, just like the rest of the city. Ben looked at the biopad security panel the building manager installed the week before and remembered the emergency bypass codes were sitting on his kitchen table. He had no codes, no Doodad and no way to get in. Ben looked to the right and saw the fire escape outside the window. The old paint held the sash tightly closed, so he used the bat to break the window then climbed outside and around the fire escape, until he could make his way through the kitchen window. His feet landed on broken glass in what was once his condo. It looked more like an abandoned factory than a loft apartment.
“Emma, are you here?”
He dashed from room to room, wincing. He looked at the floor and hoped not to see blood. Clothes lay scattered throughout the rooms and water dripped from the tub in long, loping drops. Broken glass was scattered beneath two windows and his books fluttered on the carpet like dying birds. The climate control system must have been out for days. The smell of burning rubber filled the apartment.
Ben returned to the kitchen with a pounding heart and dry mouth. He looked at the refrigerator, one of the few appliances not lying on its side or in pieces.
A paper fluttered under a magnet frame holding a picture of h
im with Emma in Cancun, Mexico. He immediately recognized her handwriting on the note, although it looked odd seeing it on real paper. He grabbed the sheet and tried to steady his hand, reading the note out loud to his empty apartment.
“Ben-
Your Doodad was dark, so I searched you in Cleveland, but no hotel has your coordinates. The National Guard is forcing us out. The attack killed our internets. Radiation has been detected at West Loop Gate, and we need to evacuate before it reaches River North, too. Chicago police handed out protective suits, but soldiers said that 2,200 millis can kill you in an hour. Sorry I lied and told you I was staying home, but I wanted to surprise you in Cleveland. I hope you’re not reading this, because that means you’re already dead. I wish you were here. I love you, Ben.
Emma.”
###
The Hunt
Second Edition
Copyright © 2009 by J. Thorn
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, places, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Edited by Talia Leduc
For more information:
http://www.jthorn.net
[email protected]
Take a bite. For the Boutique du Vampyre in NOLA.
I stumbled upon the Boutique du Vampyre in the French Quarter on a trip to New Orleans, falling in love with it long before Twilight ruined vampires for all Bram Stoker fans. The city and the shop inspired this particular tale that won first place in the Lullabies Short Story Contest for 2009. With a few more revisions and a new title, please join me on "The Hunt".
* * *
The Hunt
Maidens like moths, are ever caught by glare, and Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair.
--Lord Byron, Childe Harold, 1812
Time fixed the stars upon the black canvas, pushing them through the endless universe. The celestial show no longer excited Tilla. She ignored the mechanical satellite that plunged from the heavens like a burning metal corpse, cutting a line across the sky. The relics that succumbed to planetary gravity after the Fall would do so without an audience.
Tilla moved through the forgotten wreckage, knowing the animals could be hiding within. She moved swiftly past plates of rusted iron, the paint worn away ages ago. As the urban decay bled towards the trees, her senses sharpened. The animals loved the primitive habitat even though it was as lifeless as the concrete world they had destroyed so carelessly. Tilla paused at the edge of the silent forest and glared down into the valley.
She reached for the knife strapped to her hip. Tilla’s black leather pants had worn thin, and she could feel her knees pushing against the hide. Her lustrous hair spilled like ink in the night, framing an alabaster, oval face. Tilla’s bony fingers left the knife and moved to the edge of her full, red lips. She tasted wild sage on the gust through the trees.
The new moon hid behind the clouds while the fire cast a low light upon the forgotten landscape. Tilla caught movement in the valley and recognized the leader instantly, even though she could barely hear his guttural shouts.
Cut off the head to kill the beast, she thought.
Tilla could see four figures clothed in shadows, the leader’s harem of personal guards. She approached her target with caution—scorned women could be as deadly as armed men. She crawled down the barren hillside, hiding behind a twisted tree as she reached over her shoulder and grabbed an arrow by its shaft. She twirled it into the bow in one motion, pointing the arrowhead at the leader of the pack as he gnawed chunks of flesh from a bone.
She paused and drew a deep breath.
If they ever organize themselves, I’m finished.
Tilla pushed the thought from her mind in an attempt to refocus on the target. Her arrow whistled through the air with deadly accuracy. The beast rocked backwards, arms outstretched in a pose of crucifixion as he stepped to the right of the fire and crashed into the spit, throwing smoke and burning ash out into the camp. The man screamed while his flesh sizzled on the pulsing embers, filling the camp with the stench of burning hair.
Tilla exhaled and watched the clan flee from their skewered chieftain. Shrieks echoed through the barren slopes, rising from the valley floor to her position. Two figures embraced in panic while others hid where they could.
Loose scree preceded Tilla down the hill. She darted from tree to tree, the black leathers concealing her from the chaos below. Another arrow split the night before piercing a skull of ragged hair. Tilla lunged from behind a boulder and landed at the foot of the dying creature, plunging a knife deep into his chest. Thick, dark blood covered his tattered t-shirt.
Tilla spun and struck another with the heel of her boot, striking him between the eyes. Before the body hit the ground, she had lodged a dagger in his throat.
The remaining members of the clan took flight into the gaping maw of the primeval forest, and Tilla sighed and sat on the trunk of a fallen tree. The roasting flesh of the leader wafted from the fire and drew a bead of saliva from the corner of her mouth.
Now is not the time to feed.
Polaris blinked from the zenith of the infinite sky, and Tilla glanced at the gray band of stars, the smear that civilization had called the Milky Way. She estimated three hours until the sun rose on the empty world.
“Mah. Mah. Mah.”
Tilla’s hair sliced through the mist as she spun to face the phantom sounds. She nocked an arrow on the bow to greet the young girl emerging from a hole in the ground. Dirty blonde hair hung from her scalp to her shoulders like serpents tethered at the tail. White eyes shone through a dirt-encrusted face. The remains of blue denim unraveled at her knees, revealing bruised and bloodied shins, and cotton strips clung to her torso with the help of cloying sweat.
“What is your name?” Tilla asked, not expecting an answer.
The girl shivered, mumbled again, and sat on the ground. Her chest hitched, and her mouth opened in a silent scream. Her gaze crawled across the leg of the man protruding from the wrecked fire.
“He was your father?”
Hands with torn fingernails caressed the chieftain’s blackened heel.
“I guess so,” Tilla said. She dropped the bow to an angle, keeping the arrow drawn.
“Pa,” the girl mumbled, her tears tracing white streaks on a brown face.
It’s cute now, but what happens when it grows up?
The girl cowered, silent sobs shaking her fragile frame. Tilla slung her bow over her shoulder and set her hands on her hips. She scanned the area for others and determined that they had fled deep into the forest, living to die another day.
Hunger pangs tugged at Tilla’s core, pushing her towards the broken girl at the foot of the human roast. Tilla squatted low as her black leathers creaked in protest. With one hand on her knife, she placed the other on the girl’s shoulder.
Tilla jumped and held her breath as the girl crawled into her lap, nestled her head into the crook of Tilla’s arm, and pulled both knees up into a fetal position.
She pushed the girl’s hair to the side, revealing a bright, white neck. Eyes wide, Tilla gripped the child’s shoulders, and her incisors burst through the gum line, spilling the coppery taste of blood into her mouth. She leaned over the whimpering savage and licked a bead of sweat from the girl’s ear. Her mass of black hair enveloped the child’s head.
Tilla shoved her away. “Go. Get out of here.”
The child dashed from Tilla’s lap on all fours. She hissed and sprinted deep into the darkened forest.
When the child left, and when Tilla was no longer able to smell her, she sat down in the bloodstained dirt. She stood and vaulted after the child, ran a few
paces, and then returned to the fire. Tilla kicked the dead man’s leg. The remains of the camp were scattered around her, and she hefted a nearby fuel drum high into the air with an ungodly scream, spilling the contents across the ground in a trail of flame. She gathered her weapons, pulled her arrows from the slain, and climbed to her stronghold on the east side of the valley, cursing the encroaching dawn.
***
Tilla woke and left the cave in time to see bands of orange, red, and yellow wash across the western sky. The salty taste of the child’s sweat still resonated on her tongue. Venus climbed the horizon, and two hawks circled high above, scouting for their next victim.
She gazed into the valley, where the fires of the previous night had left piles of smoldering charcoal.
They buried their dead. When did that start again?
Tilla’s tongue felt like a wad of dry cotton. Her vision wavered as if she were standing in the middle of a desert. The belt on her leather pants sagged lower, and she yanked the buckle hard to her left, sinking the pin through the last hole. Tilla ignored the numbness in her legs as the mountain’s slope helped her descend into the valley.
Movement caught her eye, a metallic surface reflecting the rays of the setting sun.
You just made a costly mistake, she thought.
Tilla walked down the steep incline, her ears tuned to the noises of the wilderness, concentrating on the reflection. She detected voices, paused at the site of the previous night’s battle, and dropped to her knees. With an index finger, Tilla scooped the reddened, moist soil and licked the blood from her fingers. The voices burst into her head like a strong radio station brought to point on the dial. To her left, she felt movement. From behind a gnarled oak stepped the girl Tilla had released the night before. The child smiled at her and skipped into the woods with a carefree giggle.
