A. R. Shaw's Apocalyptic Sampler: Stories of hope when humanity is at its worst

by A. R. Shaw

  Then, when she looked back to Bishop, she found his stare burrowing into her. In a calm but stern voice, he said, “Get your coat on, Maeve.”

  A chill went up her spine. With only those five words he’d said volumes. She didn’t ask what he’d do if she refused. She’d moved to the closet and put on her coat and stepped into her boots when she heard a noise in front of the house.

  Bishop looked out the front and saw headlights down the road the way he’d come earlier, and someone yelled. Then there were shots fired.

  “Move, now!” Bishop bellowed, and Maeve picked up the girl, who was wrapped only in blankets, while Bishop herded them into the garage.

  From there, he didn’t waste time. He pulled his horse out through the side door into the backyard and took the child while Maeve mounted the saddle. He handed the girl to her and swung Ben up behind his mother.

  “Hold on to your mom,” he said to Ben while the sounds of shots and men were gaining on the house.

  He grabbed the horse’s lead in one hand and held his Beretta in the other and ran to the tree line.

  Maeve held on to the pommel while holding the girl, and her son held on for dear life. She hadn’t ridden a horse since childhood but didn’t even think about that as she and these children were being spirited away from killers who were now in her driveway. The last thing she saw before the total dark of the forest took over was headlights in her front driveway, and she heard the sound of her front window shattering in a volley of gunshots.

  14

  Terrified by the loud gunfire, Ben had begun to weep as he clenched his mother’s waist, his head buried in her back.

  “Keep quiet,” Bishop whispered to them as he led Jake through the dark woods. “And keep your heads down.” He pulled them along and continuously surveyed their surroundings. They were nearly a mile northwest through the woods before Bishop broke his breakneck pace, though he still kept his guard up. If I keep this up, I’m going to pass out, and that’s not going to help them. Before long, they made it to a ridge, and what he saw when he looked down angered him even more. “Maeve, look,” he told her and pointed down into the darkness where not only was the original house smoldering, but her own house was up in flames as well as the neighbor’s to the south of hers.

  “Oh my God!” she yelled and tried to dismount the horse.

  “No, stay there. There’s nothing we can do.”

  He pulled them away from the scene and deeper into the forest while trying to ignore the searing pain in his shoulder. She wept quietly from time to time after walking another few hours. By then, Bishop knew Jake needed to rest. The light haze from the sun was beginning to creep over the mountains in the east, though they were within the forest’s cocoon and could only see a dim brightness between the trees. They’d finally made it to their destination when they reached a slight clearing. Had he not known there was a resident here, he would have walked right past; only a trained eye could have seen the few signs of human habitation there.

  “Why are we stopping?” Maeve asked. She was shivering in the cold, and at some point it had started snowing again. The red hair peeking out from underneath her knit hat was no longer auburn but white and crystallized. She’d barely put on her coat and boots before they’d fled the house, and the girl was only wrapped in blankets. He needed to get them into warm shelter quickly.

  “We’re here,” he said, and when he looked up to the sky, so did she, and snowflakes cascaded down upon them.

  “Bishop? That you?” an old voice asked.

  Bishop pulled his rifle from around his back. Maeve’s eyes widened. He put a finger to his mouth. “Yes,” he said, without knowing where the voice was coming from. “I’m injured and so is a child. We need your help, Jax,” he said as his eyes scanned the winter world around him.

  “You know better than to bring strangers here,” Jax bellowed.

  “I had no choice, Jax. We’ll be on our way as soon as you help us.”

  “No,” Jax said. “Take them away!” His loud voice echoed through space as Maeve jumped and trembled in the saddle.

  “We’re staying until you help us, Jax. There’s a little girl here. She’ll die if you don’t. She was in a house fire, Jax.”

  His words were met with silence…at first.

  “They’re all going to die,” the disembodied voice rang out. Bishop shifted his weight and spun to the right, his rifle out in front, ready.

  “Please!” Maeve screamed and flung her head up, the snow scattering away and revealing her red locks. “She’s not breathing, Bishop. She stopped breathing!”

  Bishop pulled Maeve from the saddle along with the child in her arms. They laid her out on the snow. Her bloodstained blond hair cascaded about her. She lay like a tiny angel. Her lips were blue as Bishop arched her small neck and began to breathe life into her torn lungs. Maeve cried on her knees as Ben sat atop Jake looking on at the futile scene before him.

  After chest compressions and blowing air into the girl, she began to breathe on her own again. Bishop cradled her.

  “Oh, thank God!” Maeve exclaimed.

  Standing with the girl in his left arm, he lifted his rifle with his injured right arm.

  “Jax! Enough, get down—” was all he had uttered before he saw three black lengths of cloth floating to the ground from above.

  “What are those?” Maeve asked.

  Bishop blew out a breath. “Blindfolds.”

  15

  Holding onto her son, Maeve clenched each time she detected someone brushing up against her. The man known as Jax was not friendly in the least.

  “All I ask is that people leave…me…alone!” he hollered, and then there was silence for a time.

  “The child’s dying, Jax. The town has lost control. Looters are taking what they want and killing anyone they run across.”

  “So? That’s not my problem!”

  She had no idea what was going on. Bishop whispered to her that everything would be all right as he tied the blindfold over her eyes. She couldn’t see a thing and neither could the girl if she were conscious or her son who sat next to her. She had no idea where they were. All she knew was one minute Bishop was leading them in the snow by the hand as she held onto Ben outside in the freezing air, and the next minute they walked into a narrow passageway and the further they walked the warmer it became.

  The sound of a fire crackled somewhere nearby. Her son curled into her side, and she guessed he was listening to everything around them as she was. Bishop was the only one without a blindfold, which told her he’d been here before and perhaps the man named Jax trusted him.

  “She might not make it, Bishop. Her lungs, they’re scorched.”

  “Do what you can, Jax.”

  The man brushed past her legs again. He was between her and the fire, and each time he passed she could feel that lack of heat emanating from the fire. There were clanking noises and the sounds of him crushing something, then a pungent smell of wintergreen.

  “You’re all right, Maeve. Don’t worry. Here, drink this,” Bishop said and touched her shoulder as he held something to her lips.

  She swallowed a liquid that tasted like water but was tinged with something she didn’t recognize.

  “Rest while you can,” he said, and Ben laid his head on her lap after Bishop gave him a sip too. She felt a fur blanket being wrapped around them both. “There’s a pillow on your left—you can lie down.” Bishop nudged her in that direction, and she held Ben to her side as he helped her lie down.

  She grabbed his wrist when she felt him nearby. “Are we safe here?” she whispered.

  His breath caressed the side of her cheek when he said, “Yes. I won’t let anything happen to you, Maeve. You’ll have to trust me.”

  I have no choice, she thought as she drifted off to sleep.

  16

  He didn’t want to do it, but when Jax handed him the cup he’d just mixed and nodded to Maeve and her son, he knew it was a condition of their presence ther
e. They would sleep while Jax worked on the girl and his shoulder. They needed the sleep anyway, especially since they were traumatized by the events that had happened earlier.

  Jax was a complicated man. He was brilliant but disturbed and went for long periods without any human contact. He only tolerated a few of them, the ones in the woods, and Bishop was one of them.

  He’d first discovered Jax while fishing early one morning. After fishing in one spot and coming up skunked, he was going to check out another area when he saw a barefoot man dressed in rags on a boulder, but it was what he was doing that caught Bishop’s attention.

  He was practicing what Bishop recognized as taekwondo with a little judo thrown in. His moves were clean and swift for a guy who looked to be in his sixties. The stranger was tall and thin and sported a long gray beard, but what struck Bishop most was the man’s tormented eyes. He’d recognized the pain almost immediately because he knew without looking that he wore those same windows to the soul.

  Bishop had begun to back away the way he’d come, but before he knew it, the stranger held a Kimber 1911 handgun on him and carefully scissored a few paces to pick up a Winchester rifle leaning against a tree with his other hand. The man apparently wasn’t messing around.

  “This is my place,” he warned finally after staring at him long enough to study Bishop thoroughly. “Go find yourself another.”

  And he did. He hadn’t seen even a sign of the strange man, and then he came down with a cold so strong he thought it must be pneumonia. Bishop thought himself a dead man and was happy at the prospect, to be honest, but during his delirium, he’d seen the man standing over him inside of his cave, forcing liquids into his mouth, nearly drowning him at times. Bishop never could figure out how the man knew that Bishop was sick or how he’d gained entry to his home.

  Horrible smells of something the stranger was cooking over his stove permeated everything. He was torturing him, Bishop was sure of it. Somewhere in the nightmare, he’d asked him his name, and the stranger had given it to him as a gift. Then, suddenly, he was gone when Bishop’s fever broke. He’d left him with a pungent liquid to drink and didn’t set eyes on him again for another year after he’d recovered.

  Since that time, they occasionally met in the woods, only speaking with few words. Bishop brought him meat from fresh kills but wasn’t sure if that was payment enough for Jax having saved his life. Jax never seemed to appreciate it either way. He mostly wanted to be left alone, and Bishop understood.

  Now, he depended on Jax to save the girl and himself. He was sure an infection would start in his shoulder soon, and he’d be worthless to Maeve and her son then.

  There was much to do, too. None of this would get any better, and hiding in the woods was only a temporary solution. At the moment, they were hiding from the greatest threat—man—but soon the weather would trump man as the greatest danger.

  He couldn’t keep them here for the long term. The ice age would last for years, and the killers needed to be exterminated, or it was likely the whole town of Coeur d’Alene would succumb to the few who’d gained power in the crisis.

  These things were easy to predict for a soldier of war, one who’d watched the worst of atrocities. Man’s true nature, once all the façade of the modern-day world was stripped away, was nothing more than beast. To survive, man would smile at a mother and butcher her child to eat if he were starving—and save her for later. There was nothing man wouldn’t do to ensure his own survival. “We’re fickle like that,” Jax once said to him. “We’ll praise humanity as the height of honor but murder the likes of humans in any shape they come, give all for a meal, an unremitting quench.”

  The girl’s lips were no longer blue. Her thin face was still devoid of color though Jax last said she might have a chance. Her breathing was raspy, and Jax kept a steam going around her that smelled of pine forest. He continually crushed dried berries he had inside of dark hide pouches and mixed them with other equally mystifying herbs into a poultice that he smeared with honey on the girl’s chest. The stench was nearly unbearable. Then Jax made Bishop remove his shirt when the blood began seeping through.

  Again Jax complained and moaned as he attacked several dried items in his mortar and pummeled them into a paste. This time, the stuff he applied looked like tar and smelled more like licorice than mint as he slathered a thick layer over both sides of Bishop’s shoulder wound. Then Jax wrapped a large leaf over both sides before rewrapping his shoulder.

  “It’ll heal on its own. Leave that alone for a week. Drink this too.” He handed him a cup of something foul, and Bishop grimaced before downing the entire thing.

  “You’re such a baby.”

  Bishop didn’t bother with a comeback. “Thank—”

  “Shut up.” Jax cursed him as Bishop found himself falling over and onto the seat where Maeve and her son were sleeping.

  Bastard, Bishop thought before he fell unconscious.

  17

  Shadows passed against a flame. Her eyes mere slits, Maeve couldn’t keep them open but for a brief moment, followed by another struggle to lift her eyelids.

  Again she tried, and finally with all her strength they fluttered open but had all intentions of slamming shut again. Struggling with all her might and finally gaining the strength to keep them open, her eyes searched the room for Ben; a primal need to find him overtook her. She tried to move her arm, and again it was a monumental feat of effort just to raise one finger.

  Whatever Bishop had given her to drink, the concoction had knocked her out, and now she was struggling to stay awake. The warmth from the fire was almost too much as she lay under a fur blanket, and the person next to her smelled awful. His skin sweated onto her shirt. She stirred and found that the hand she was trying to move was draped over his bare arm. The arm belonged to Bishop, and she recoiled away from him, realizing she was cuddled against his side in a way too intimate for a stranger.

  Maeve pulled herself into a sitting position and out from the stifling heat of the blankets, finding Ben asleep on her other side.

  She pushed on his shoulder. “Ben. Wake up.” His small body jerked with her efforts. It didn’t matter how much she jostled him, though; he didn’t move on his own. His little chest rose with each breath, and she was consoled by the fact that he was merely sleeping. Then it dawned on her. Where are the blindfolds? she wondered and then looked around the room she found herself in. This isn’t the same place we were in before. The room they were in before took stairs to climb. This place had a solid floor of stone and felt like a cellar or cave of some kind. In front of her, there was a fire pit made of stone. The flames blazed away at the logs inside, and beyond that, there was a locked wooden door with a cast-iron handle. They were lying on a pallet on top of a cold stone floor. “Where are we?”

  Bishop’s arm was wrapped in the half T-shirt with some horrible-smelling medicine underneath. Beyond him lay the girl next to his side.

  “Louna,” she called out and scrambled out from between the blankets. Maeve’s shoes were off, and her socks caught on the rough stone floor. When she rounded the other side of the girl, she found her asleep but breathing well next to Bishop.

  “Bishop must have moved us here,” she reasoned, staring beyond the girl at the man sleeping. “How, I don’t know.”

  She looked around the enclosed room and found the rest of their shoes and Bishop’s firearms piled nearby. Closer to the door there was a bucket full of what she hoped was water. She took a metal mug from nearby and dipped the cup in the water and smelled it first before she dared take a sip. The water was crisp and cold and tasted pure. She quickly brought the mug to her son and lifted his head with her arm while holding the cup to his lips. “Ben, can you hear me? Take a sip.”

  He did and then no more. She laid him back down and checked him over. Satisfied that he was all right, she brought the cup to Louna, and though the girl did not respond she was able to get some of the liquid past her lips. Next, she went to Bishop and tried th
e same technique. “Bishop, wake up.”

  His eyes bolted open, and his response scared her so much she spilled the water down his chest. “I’m sorry,” she said, and he looked at them in alarm.

  “Where’s Jax?”

  “I…I don’t know. I just woke up.”

  “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you brought us here.”

  He shook his head. “No, I didn’t.” He looked at the sleeping girl at his side and checked her pulse. And then he looked to Ben.

  “He’s fine. He’s still asleep.”

  “Where’s Jake?” he said after he had realized both children slept on either side of him.

  “Who’s Jake?”

  He looked at her with frustration. “The horse!”

  “I don’t know,” she said, still holding the empty mug.

  This was like some kind of bizarre dream that she was still trying to figure out.

  When Bishop stood, he swayed a little and caught himself on the stone wall.

  “Where are we?” she asked him.

  “I…I think we’re in one of Jax’s hideouts. He must have brought us here.”

  “How did he do that? I thought you brought us here.”

  “He really doesn’t like to be around people.”

  “Well, it’s not OK for him to put us all to sleep and move us around like that,” she yelled.

  “Yeah, but we’re alive, and the girl sounds good, too.”

  He pushed a few fingers to his wound. “I wonder how long we’ve been here,” he said as he walked toward the wooden door.

  “I have no idea,” she said and realized she was still holding on to the metal mug. She set it down.

  “Had to only be a day. He must keep coming to reload the fire pit.”

  Bishop slipped his feet into his boots and picked up his Beretta and pulled the iron lever on the door. Cold air and flurries blew inside. The fire protested and roared while Maeve pulled the fur blanket up over the children to shield them from the sudden cold.