That was when it struck him. It had begun earlier than he had known. The accidents and crazies he’d seen on the way home; the man killing the woman at the border.
Angus had questions. He was tired, though. They would wait until morning. He turned off the television and lowered the exterior shutters, using the single switch by the front door.
His home was an impenetrable barrier while he slept. The barn was booby-trapped with tripwires and explosives.
Everything would keep through the night.
*****
The morning came earlier than Angus had wanted. His mind rolled over and over the women and the thing that was not quite a woman out in his barn.
At just before 6:00 AM, he got out of bed and threw on a pair of jeans and a shirt. He went to the pantry to get some food.
He looked over at the book of word and shape puzzles on the table; it was how he relaxed. Not so much crosswords, but the maze puzzles. He loved them. He would begin his pencil line and draw, his eyes moving ahead to determine the path that would lead him through.
He had been very young when first introduced to the puzzles. When he was just five years old, one of the men who had come in to fuck his sister had dropped a puzzle book filled with over 500 maze puzzles. He had been pretending to be asleep as the man passed by – something he had done often – and when the book had dropped near his cage, he cracked an eye and saw immediately that nobody had noticed. He reached through the cage bars and snatched it, tucking it beneath his dirty towels.
A pencil had been closed inside the book. Angus had spent many a night on his stomach, drawing lines on the many puzzles within. It had been his escape from the monotonous horror that was his life of captivity and sexual favor.
There would be no puzzles today. He walked to the mirror and looked at himself. His eyes were fine, and he felt okay. No veins traversed his face or arms. He nodded and left the room.
He glanced at the coffee pot, but kept walking toward the front door. He checked the peephole – a habit he had adopted years ago – and saw the yard outside empty. If he were surrounded by cops or worse, he wanted to know about it before stepping into the middle of the shit.
He opened the door and walked to the barn, dialing in the combo on the six-digit padlock with a concealed hasp. No bolt cutters would allow access.
He walked in and hit the lights. The three women in the cages were in their cots topped with thin mattresses, sleeping.
That was fine. He wasn’t interested in them at the moment anyway.
With intentional stealth, he eased past the first cage where the taller, prettier of the pregnant women slept.
The girl who wasn’t pregnant stirred, but as he drew beside the cell containing the other pregnant woman, she said, “Free me.”
Angus jumped a bit, stopping to stare at her. She was sleeping, for he could hear her steady breathing.
As he watched, her mouth moved again and she very clearly said, “Free Mother.”
“Hey,” he said, softly. He waited, but she did not respond. Her slow breathing continued. He looked down toward the end of the building and saw the red-eyed creature standing there, facing the front bars of her cage.
He walked down to where she stood and stayed about four feet back from the cell bars, studying her.
He smiled. “What the hell are you?” he asked. “Red eyes, hair like fine silk. Skin ain’t as bad as some in my tanker had.”
Her head turned to the left, and she appeared to stare toward the woman in the nearest cell. As she did so, the voice came from the distance, “Free Mother.”
“Whoa, fuck!” he said, looking from the sleeping woman back to her. “Are you the fuck doing that?”
Suddenly the creature in the cage slammed her body against the bars, reaching her clawing hand as far through them as she could. While he was not close enough for her to make contact, he jumped backward anyway.
He looked down at her stomach and noticed the bulge there for the first time. “You got a goddamned baby in ya?” he asked. He smiled and looked back up at her. She did not return his smile.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Is that what makes you different than the others that have normal hair and just seem crazy?”
Again, no answer, no smile – not even a hint that he was correct. No matter. He went down to where the other women slept and banged on the front of their cages. “Wake up, ladies!” he shouted. “Time to get the hell up and join the living!”
He looked down the row of cells and added, “Well, pretty much living, anyway.”
He walked to the door and pulled a folding chair from a rack on the wall and carried it to the cell where the tall one now sat up on her bed.
“Tell me what happened to you.”
“I was kidnapped and thrown into the truck outside,” she said. “Now I’m here.”
“No,” said Angus. “Tell me what happened in the truck.”
“It was dark. I have no idea what happened.”
“How far along are you?”
“I’m six months,” she said.
“So three to go,” he said.”
“That is how God arranged things, yes.”
“You look bigger than six months.”
“I look bigger since I went to sleep,” she said, her hands on the bulge in her abdomen.
Angus leaned forward. “I need you to think about this very carefully before answering,” he said. “I need to know if anything happened to you in that tanker. Even if you couldn’t see it. Did you get the sense anything happened to you?”
The woman nodded. “My name is Maria,” she said.
“I don’t give a shit. Half you bitches are Maria,” spat Angus.
“I’m telling you because I want you to know I am a human being with a mother and father and sisters and brothers.”
“And apparently one of them is fucking you. How old are you?”
“I’m seventeen,” said Maria.
“You’re about the age my sister was when I beat her to death with a baseball bat. Answer the fucking question.”
“About who is fucking me?”
“No, goddamnit! Tell me what happened in that goddamned cage!”
“I do not know!” she said. “I was standing there, and I was very tired. I was beginning to fall asleep on my feet, and I slid toward the next cage over. When I opened my eyes, two red dots were very near me, but then they became very fuzzy, as though clouded by fog.”
“Did you feel anything?” he asked.
“Yes, I did,” she said. “I grew lightheaded and dizzy. My eyes began to sting. I moved away from her and slid down to the floor.”
“Did you feel anything different about your baby?”
“Did I feel differently about it?”
“No, no! Jesus, are you fucking stupid? I asked if you felt something was different about the baby!”
“Leave her alone!” said the other pregnant woman in the next cell. “And my name is not Maria. It is Sofia. And as far as what she is telling you, what happened to her is exactly what happened to me. You had us in such small boxes, of course whatever infected them would infect us! You’ve killed us, turned us into the insane!”
“If you weren’t pregnant too, I’d take you outside to a nice shady spot under my oak tree. You might wanna watch your whore mouth.”
The woman looked down, then back up. “Oh, my God,” she said. Her hands rubbed her swollen belly.
Angus stood and pulled his chair to her cell. “What is it?”
But he did not need to await an answer. Sofia’s stomach appeared three times the size it had been.
“How far along are you?”
“I’m seven months, but I was hardly showing before I was put in there. Everyone told me how it was a shame I did not show my motherhood more.”
“Well, you’re sure showin’ it now. Perfect. We got no damned trustees to take care of the babies.”
“We can take care of our own children,” said Maria.
“Well, from
the looks of it, you’ll be doin’ it sooner than later. I’ll get you some food,” said Angus.
*****
The moment the first child was born, a month later, all the demons of hell came to Rock Springs, Texas.
First off, the baby was deformed. At birth, it had teeth. The moment its eyes opened, it was as if it wore bright red contact lenses. Within another month, the teeth were almost adult sized. Worse, with all that was going on in the world, it would only eat meat.
Angus would have put the first one into a cell all its own, but it had begun crawling early, and would possibly have wormed its way through the bars.
But the freaks who arrived at his gate were the most confounding thing of all.
Dead people. He knew this because most of them wore suits or nicer dresses, all caked with mud, grass and dirt. Some were nearly skinless, but come they did, standing at the gate, pushing against the corrugated crossbeams as though they would never tire.
And they never did.
The second child was born a month later, both of the babies arriving far earlier than the due dates their mothers had expected.
After the second baby was born and the ranch was surrounded by the rotting creatures, Angus had begun to notice things about the first child. It was aware, both of itself and of everything around it.
It was a she. The second child was a girl as well. Both were identical in their abnormalities, but otherwise, seemed like normal babies.
Except for the fact that they did not sleep, nor did they ever cry. They stared at things with their strange, red eyes.
Particularly Angus.
He had a lot of food for babies, being in the business he was in, but he had run completely out of everything but vegetables. He had to figure out how to get the hell out of there and raid a grocery store. Unfortunately, now he was completely surrounded and wasn’t sure what to do. Life as a human trafficker was far easier than this new one.
Of the hundreds of smelly dead people who showed up at his gate and refused to leave, a few scattered here and there were the type with the bright, red eyes and straight, corn silk hair.
If he had the energy, he captured them. Shoot all the freaks around her, open the gate and let her in.
A bullet to one leg disabled it, and from there he would drag it with a chain hooked to the back of his Ford F150. A net over top of them, and he’d use a long pry bar to roll them up onto a large, furniture dolly.
He now had eight of them. He didn’t feed them, and they didn’t complain. They never died, either.
On a Friday afternoon in late September, he loaded up every long gun he had. He walked to the gate and exhausted himself while he placed round after round in the faces and skulls of the gathering creatures. Early on, he’d experimented with rounds to their chests and stomachs, but it had no effect.
They kept coming. He quickly decided not to waste any more ammo. Head shots. He started to collect the ones with straight hair, though. There was something about them. He was going to figure it out.
When no more of them moved, he drove his John Deere skiploader to the open fence and pushed the piles of bodies to the side of the drive. Once clear, he dug two trenches forty feet long by ten feet wide, and shoved the rotting corpses into them, eventually covering them over. The job didn’t have to be perfect; he wouldn’t be staying here long.
He just had to figure things out first. Now it was time to restock on food, fuel and supplies.
*****
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rock Springs, Texas
2020
Angus had raped Maria and Sofia in 2011 just to see what kind of babies would be born to them.
He had captured several men and women from the city with the promise of salvation on his sprawling ranch. By the time he got them back there, they were drugged by his bottled water and easy to get into their holding cells. The men were for nothing but feeding to the females with the red eyes.
Angus learned very quickly that if he wanted more trustees, he would have to keep them away from the ones with the red eyes. They would spray them with the strange vapor that pumped from their eyes, and they would fall under their telepathic commands.
It sounded crazy as hell, even to Angus. Soon he had begun experimenting.
After determining that Maria and Sofia were pregnant again, he immediately exposed them to the vapor from one of the females with straight hair. There was no hesitation on their part. When the women were led to their cells, the straight-haired, red-eyed things sprayed them.
Angus wasn’t even sure if it was necessary to expose them to the vapor again after they had been sprayed previously, but it didn’t cost him anything, so he led them there.
It was about midday when he went to the cell containing his girls. These were the first babies born into his new, growing family. The daughters of Maria and Sofia.
He had also impregnated the only normal girl who had come out of the ill-fated trailer load, whose name was Lupe. He had never exposed her to the vapor, and he gave her nearly everything she asked for. Angus needed to learn as much as he could about what made the special children with the red eyes, but he needed help that he could trust.
In Angus’ experience, two things created obedience; fear and kindness. Kindness led to a greed for more; he had seen it in the tricks that had come by on a regular basis to screw his mother and sister. The kinder they treated the men, the more their customers demanded.
He beat Lupe often, but never to the point she would be seriously wounded; he had become an expert at administering pain without permanently maiming. Lupe was his trustee, and she was important to him.
The children, whom he called Alpha and Omega – the first and last – were nine years old, but appeared to be eighteen or nineteen. What was even odder was the fact that the women had their babies in four months rather than nine.
The vapor was amazing, creating accelerated growth and abilities. His problem with the advancing hordes was gone, for his new creations controlled the Mothers and they controlled the Hungerers. His problem controlling the silken-haired creatures was no more.
The girls had done it, almost as though it was second nature.
“Alpha and Omega,” he said, one afternoon. “Come with me.”
He watched as they pulled open the cell door, waved to Lupe, and left, easing it closed behind them.
Maria and Sofia eyed Angus as their daughters fell in behind him without hesitation. He stared back at them refusing to offer even a slight smile of reassurance.
“Yes, Maestro?” they said in unison.
“In the house. We need to talk.”
The girls followed him inside.
“Sit on the couch there,” he said.
They did. “I am hungry,” said Alpha. She looked very much like her mother, Maria. She was on the taller side, and her facial features were long and her jaw femininely rounded.
“I intend to fuck both of you today,” he said. “I have to further my experimentation and you’re both crucial.”
They nodded, clearly unaffected by his announcement. “May we eat?” Their English was perfect.
“Of course,” he said. “Are you keeping them away?”
“As you wish,” they said. “We are not calling them.”
“But you will when I tell you to,” said Angus.
“Yes,” said Omega. “Now please, the food.”
Angus sighed and got up. He had begun making his own beef jerky, because the dried meat kept longer, and the electricity had gone out long ago, making refrigeration possible, but challenging.
He had a diesel generator and mostly diesel vehicles, and he was glad his ranch featured an underground diesel tank for fueling his equipment. While he had kept a huge supply on hand to keep his transport tanker fueled up, he no longer needed the fuel for that, because his runs into Mexico were long over.
He had read in a book that old diesel could be polished – which was essentially running it through a filtering system – and use
d for many years. His pumping system had in-line filters that he changed often. So far, the fuel was still viable.
He returned with two handfuls of beef jerky and two bottles of water from his well. The girls took it and began eating immediately.
“You are loyal to me, right?” he asked.
Alpha looked at him. “You know we are.”
The other words entered his head as Omega stared at him. We love you, Maestro.
“Don’t do that,” he said, staring at her. “Speak aloud if you want to talk to me. You know I don’t like you in my head.”
“I am sorry,” she said. “Do you intend to impregnate us?” she asked.
“How the hell do you even know that word?” he asked.
Both looked down, not meeting his eyes.
“Anyway, yeah. I need more of you, and second generation ought to be better. You two are going to be the start of my army. You’ve got good control over them now, right?”
“The Mothers?” asked Alpha.
“Yeah, the Mothers,” he said. “The pregnant ones with the red eyes.”
“There are thirty six of them now,” said Omega.
“Will you protect me?” he asked.
“With our lives, Maestro,” said both of them together, again, as though one.
“Good,” said Angus. He liked when they used the Spanish word for Master. He was their master; their Maestro.
“Remove your clothes,” he said.
They stood and began to undress; he was not a pedophile, but these girls did not appear to be nine years old; they appeared to be twice that, and they spoke as though they were even older than eighteen.
Their condition was amazing. They were like a shield. They could not only hold off the ones they called the Mothers; they could hold off the regular hordes of walking dead, too, by ordering the Mothers to do so. They were his commanders. He was El General.
Both Alpha and Omega stood before him now, their clothing draped neatly over the back of the couch. He made the girls wear dresses; never pants or jeans. He liked the look of a female body, though he did not respect them.
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