by Jae Hill
“To the Reverend?” she asked quietly.
The man nodded.
“What are we going to do with him?” I asked.
She stepped off of his hand, which he withdrew and rubbed vigorously. She casually strolled over to a small boulder, which she hefted up, and walked back to the man.
He started to drag himself along the ground away from her, his legs obviously not working correctly. The strike from the tree had likely broken his back or hips.
“What are you gonna do?” he asked, over and over, as she approached.
Without saying a word or blinking an eye, she raised the rock up over her head and plunged it down on the man’s face as he screamed.
The shrieking abruptly cut off as a small spray of blood squirted out the side of his head, which was now covered by the rock. His body twitched for a moment, before laying still. I was utterly shocked and speechless.
“If I didn’t,” Rebekah said calmly, “he’da told on us. You can’t trust a man who associates himself with the devil.”
I couldn’t argue with her.
“Let’s go,” she said softly, flickering her long chestnut hair over her shoulder and picking up the dusty rifle from the ground.
She led me back across the old highway we’d been following and we soon found a game trail that ran parallel to the road. She assured me we’d be safer here. We hiked on until we started tiring. My hiking watch, synced to my digibook, said we’d made about twenty-five kilometers that day. The sun dropped low over the horizon and we set up our tent in the fading light.
I kept the rainfly off of the tent and placed collected brush around it to camouflage its otherwise bright blue and orange coloring. Turning on the lantern seemed like a bad idea in case there were other trackers out there.
We sat quietly in the dim moonlight, facing each other in the tent, gently washing each other’s face, neck, and arms with a synthetic sponge from my washkit. The dust, blood, mud, and sweat melted away until I smelled human again. Then I noticed how clean and inviting she smelled. Her clothes soon also melted away, her dress dropping off of her shoulders down to her waist. I’d never noticed before that she didn’t wear a bra, but rather just had her breasts held tightly against her chest by a wrap of linen fabric. I washed her shoulders, she closed her eyes and moaned slightly. I traced her collarbone with the sponge. Over the top of her bust. Her legs quivered. I leaned in and ran my lips up the side of her freshly-washed neck. The sponge fell to the ground. She wrapped her arms around me and pulled me deeper into her neck.
The next few moments in our little two-person tent were a blur. Her dress disappeared among the sleeping bags and gear. My shirt went up over my shoulders. Her cold hands ran across my warm chest. She pulled at me. Clawed at me. Bit my lip while kissing me. And before I knew it, I towered above her while her skin was sliding against mine. Her wetness found my strength. We pulled into each other and groaned. She winced. I breathed heavily. We both released within seconds of each other. Both startled by the raw intensity and power of what we’d just felt, we lay there, gently tracing our fingers on each other. Not saying a word.
“I never, uh,” she stammered.
“Me…umm…me either, actually,” I replied, equally as awkward.
“I’m not supposed to before my wedding night,” she said sheepishly.
“I wasn’t supposed to do that ever,” came my quiet response. “And now I know why: it’s incredible.”
I rolled onto my side and looked at her.
“You’re incredible,” I whispered, running my fingers through the wispy tendrils of hair framing her face.
After a few more moments of silence, her hands were the first to move again, grasping me firmly and bringing me back to life. Guiding me to her. Making us into one animal again for another brief moment in time. She collapsed atop me, gasping and quivering.
During the night, we cuddled close for warmth. Without the rainfly on the tent, though, the heat escaped through the mesh roof. Eventually it got too cold and we needed to add layers to stay warm. We awkwardly found our clothes and dressed in the dark, before finally bundling up and falling asleep.
ZOMBIES
The next thing I remember was being dragged from our tent. Rebekah was screaming at the top of her lungs and then went completely silent. There were shadowy figures, three or four each holding her down. I tried to fight against the unseen assailants, but there were so many, and they all kept me held tightly to the ground. They smelled like death: like the guts of the fish I’d thrown overboard or the stink of a dead animal on the side of the road. They snarled and spoke in guttural sounds and grunts that I could hardly understand. I yelled and swung until their blows stifled my resistance.
They threw both of us into a cage that sat in the back of an old gas-powered military truck like I’d seen in war movies from the 1900’s. This piece of machinery was ancient. Only the tires looked somewhat new. Rebekah was unconscious and had a bit of blood dripping from above her eye. She was breathing, but badly bruised. Her clothes were ripped and bloody. I wished I could have reached the Mitocaine.
I could see my bag just outside of the cage wall in the tattered flaps of the canvas surrounding the back of the truck. One of the figures sat there picking through my supplies, poking at things, accidentally turning things on and getting startled by their bright lights or sounds. I couldn’t be sure if they were looking for something, or if they were just digging.
The smell in the back of the truck was horrific. These kidnappers reeked as if they’d never bathed, or just simply dwelt in their own sewage. I suppressed vomiting a few times, but finally, I spewed through the cage door onto one of our assailants. The others started licking it off of him.
I finally realized what I was seeing: these were the zombies. The mindless monsters of the Reverend’s army. The creatures Adara had battled. The fairy-tale demons of my youth. The subhumans who had fought with teeth and rocks at Highway Bridge. The scourge of all humanity.
The light of the sun started to peek over the horizon. I could see them now. Naked. Filthy. Covered in boils and pus. Open wounds. Some were missing fingers or eyes. One was even missing his whole nose. Their teeth were yellow and ragged. They were hideous.
We bumped along in the back of the truck for hours, the smell never dissipating or diminishing in any way. Even if I had wanted, I couldn’t have asked them a question: I doubt they understood a word I said.
I surveyed the cage for a way to break out, but it was made of solid iron bars tied with pieces of copper wire. They would have surely noticed me trying to escape. They must have been smart enough to at least follow orders, and their orders must have been to bring me back alive. I don’t know why they needed Rebekah though.
I checked on her again. I ripped off a piece of her shredded dress and applied it to the bloody laceration dripping from her forehead. She awoke at my touch.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Where are we?” she grumbled, not answering me.
“We’re in the back of some truck. I don’t know where we’re going but….” I trailed off, pointing at the zombies.
She started to scream again, which startled the zombies and sent them into a rage. They threw themselves at the cage. I covered her mouth with my hand and could feel her still screaming against it.
The truck ground to a halt. I heard the front door slam and then footsteps as another figure appeared at the back of the truck.
“Ush’yawl, ush’yawl!” it yelled at the creatures, quieting them down.
The zombies in the back seemed frightened of him. He looked different than the others. He wore clothes and his face was intact. He was still filthy and had scars all over, but he had weathered the Plague better than the others.
“Ush’yawl!” he yelled one more time as he slammed the door.
The truck began moving again.
“Are you okay?” I whispered to her.
“Well, no,” she answered back, confused.
/> “I mean, did they, uh,” I pointed toward her tattered dress.
“No,” she said sternly. “They tried. I wasn’t having it.”
In a short period of time, the truck slowed to a stop again, only to lurch forward into water. We were fording a river. The zombies began screaming as the truck moved into the water. Clearly they either hated it or feared it.
“This is Big River,” Rebekah whispered, solemnly.
Through a hole in the side of the truck’s canvas back, I could see an ancient highway bridge in the distance. It was shattered in the middle with rebar exposed, and huge pieces of concrete in the water below. We must have been traveling along the old highway, and that bridge in the distance was where Rebekah’s father and so many others had lost their lives defending the West from the zombies.
I didn’t want to point the bridge out to her. If she hadn’t seen it already, she must have known we were close.
“When I was a baby,” she said. “we crossed Big River all the time. We had family in the Heartland. We farmed in the hills above Deadwood. I remember seeing the Faces. Now you can’t come here. The devil owns these lands.”
The truck bounced along again until nightfall. I was hungry. I was thirsty. It was getting hotter and hotter the farther east we travelled, as we lost elevation. Rebekah and I were dripping with sweat. I ripped the sleeves off of my shirt and chewed the pants I was wearing into cutoff shorts. Rebekah similarly shortened her dress.
The creatures slept outside, on the ground during the night. The smell somewhat dissipated but the residual stink lingered. Rebekah curled up against me and we slept through the whole night.
I awoke with a headache just before sunrise. I needed water. I started shouting. At this point I felt that there was nothing they could do to me that was worse than dying of dehydration.
The clothed zombie came over and smacked the cage with a stick. I snarled and cursed at him. He looked confused.
“Water!” I yelled. “I want water!”
By now the other zombies had woken, snarling and making a commotion.
The clothed zombie said back to me, “Wa-ter?”
I pointed at my bag, then made a motion of drinking from a water bottle. He understood and dug through the pile of my belongings to get the water bottle. He slid it through the grate of the cage wall and then started yelling unintelligible things to the other zombies.
They quickly piled into the back of the truck, and we started moving again.
It was miserably hot and humid in the back of the truck. The smell was putrid. The eight or so zombies cramped in the back with us slept throughout the day. Rebekah and I found that the quieter we were, the less they bothered us.
We tried not to talk about what was going on, or where they were taking us. Frankly, neither of us knew. Rebekah had last been this far east when she was five, before the incursion of the Reverend and his army started pushing settlers westward. She didn’t recognize the landscape. I secretly hoped that we were going to see these “Faces” she kept talking about, but based on her descriptions of them, we had passed them, or were headed in the wrong direction.
I rationed our sole water bottle, sipping it slowly, just enough to wet our lips. I had a purifier device in my bag that made it so I never had to carry heavy liquids, which was great for hiking but horrible now with a lack of suitable water sources. The zombies didn’t seem bothered.
We carried on, driving through another whole day. We saw only through the holes in the canvas or when the rear flap would get whipped open by the wind. I’d never seen someplace so flat or brown. There was sparse grass and dirt, but nothing else. Occasionally, we’d pass the ruins of some old grain elevator or the crumbled remains of some old town. There were even old highway signs still straddling the road, hundreds of years since they’d last been repaired.
By nightfall, we rolled into the first habitation we’d seen since leaving Magic Valley. I won’t call it a town or a city. Towns and cities have markets, homes, businesses, and public buildings. This was simply a barren place strewn with the ruins of some previous city. There were fires burning. There were thousands of zombies. More than I could have imagined. Some were fighting each other. Some were stoic, hardly moving, staring as the truck rolled through. There was a lot of screaming and shrieking and howling in the distance.
We drove past a pile of corpses and skeletons. The zombies in the truck got excited and started yelling “oh-ma-hah” over and over.
The truck stopped in a large open space in the ruins of a city. We were surrounded by crumbling skyscrapers and windowless buildings. The air was dusty and stank of rotting flesh. The canvas flaps were torn open and we found ourselves surrounded by zombies. Maybe a hundred thousand. They were climbing up the walls of the abandoned buildings and swarming the truck.
A figure walked out on a makeshift balcony over the crowd. He wore a long black robe that trailed in the dirt behind him. The zombies bowed before him and cowered. He was well over two meters tall and incredibly muscular. He bore no scars and no boils. He was dirty just like everyone else, but he carried himself differently. He walked upright, like someone from the Republic, not a slouching zombie.
The zombies hefted our cage out of the truck and carried it up to the balcony. There was snarling and grunting from all the monsters in the crowd. Looking out over the expanse, I could see towering, ten-foot-tall behemoths: those must have been the hulks which Leah had mentioned. They were hideous, covered with the same boils, sores, and scars as the other zombies, but they were also massive with rippling muscles and huge hands and feet.
“Leviathans,” Rebekah whispered. “Hulks.”
They placed our cage on the ground a few meters away from the robed man.
“Welcome to the land of Misery…do you know who I am?” he asked with an accent reminiscent of a southern drawl.
“Are you the Reverend?” I asked.
“I am, indeed,” he said.
After a pause, I asked testily, “Aren’t you going to ask who I am?”
“I don’t care who you are. I care what you are: a child of the Republic, with the tools and knowledge I need to reconquer this world in the name of the Lord.”
“Which ‘lord’ do you serve?” Rebekah hissed at him.
“The only one,” he smiled at her, and then smugly stated to me, “I see you’ve brought me some motivation.”
I didn’t like his tone or his implication that he might hurt her. I wanted to rip his head off. Rage swelled inside me. He took a deep breath next to me as if consuming my hatred. I spat at him, and he ignored it.
A small zombie-woman crept along behind him. It was the only female zombie I’d seen so far. Her eyes were sunken and hollow. She was covered by a few scraps of clothing and had fewer scars and lesions than the other zombies I’d seen. I was starting to see that there was some kind of a caste system among them based on how well they had borne the effects of the Plague.
“Translate,” he ordered her, and then began speaking to the crowd.
“Ush’yawl! Ush’yawl!” the Reverend’s voice boomed as the crowd quieted down.
“Silence, silence,” the zombie-woman said quietly to us.
“Akh alastra ben phooding ahst ab’gavalt!” he continued to the crowd.
“I know you’ve been waiting for a sign,” she whispered.
“Bift melek akh rushmah felg ab’gavant,” he shouted.
“But here I present to you a revelation,” she repeated.
“Taft donz akh heb prehbash delim elg arr flim grond, en veech heb binj tok, veech incahz iz berift macheens dem vestenfold!”
I only paid attention to her words now, ignoring the gibberish language of the zombies. “That though I have promised to deliver you to all the lands of the Earth, and we have taken many, our cause is still defeated by the machines of the west lands. But now, we hold in our hands one of their tools to use against them. The Lord gave me a vision of this day, which I have given to you before. You see our vict
ory here in my hands!”
He held aloft my digibook, the screen glowing. The crowd roared, and he continued.
“We have their device and we have a child to use it. A child who feels pain and will bend before the will of the Lord. They released this Plague upon us. It was they who created the mosquitoes to spread it. It was they who sought to end all things. But we shall overcome their demonic ways and seek to restore the Lord to this place. We shall taste the blood of their children and destroy all that they have built. By my command and the glory of God, we will reclaim the Earth in His name.”
There was a deafening roar as he again held the digibook into the air. I still couldn’t imagine what he wanted with it or how it could defeat the Republic. He turned to face me.
“I want you to make this device search for a phrase,” he ordered.
“What phrase?” I asked, as he handed me the device.
“B61 gravity device,” was his simple reply.
I was perplexed, but did as I was told. I accessed the Central Library in the capital and searched for the phrase. I was utterly shocked by the results and felt a pit in my stomach as I read the first screen.
B61 Thermonuclear Delivery System: a gravity bomb dropped by aircraft. Variable yield, up to 340 kilotons….
The search results continued on and on. Schematics. Articles detailing which former military installations had stored the bombs. There was so much information I couldn’t take it all in. And then I saw the arming procedures. Such information was considered unclassified by our government because all of the devices were either recovered, destroyed, or presumed to be unusable by centuries of misplacement. Also, I imagine, the government had no idea the zombies were smart enough to use them.
The Reverend snatched the digibook from me and then turned to face a large cart being towed by several Hulks. The cart had a stack of grey, oblong, metal objects on it. They matched the bombs in the pictures on the digibook. I felt pure dread.
“What’s going on?” Rebekah whispered.
“Those are bombs,” I whispered back. “They’ll cause explosions big enough to destroy entire cities at once. He wants to destroy the Republic with them.”
