by Tom Abrahams
He was in the northeasternmost corner of the central two acres. The graves were inside the fenced perimeter, framed by a cluster of mesquite.
“I wish we were together,” he said to the stone. “But I’m not ready to join you and your momma just yet.”
He closed his eyes, trying to remember his son’s face. It was getting harder. The edges of his features were blurring with each passing day, more opaque with each month.
“I may have made a big mistake,” he admitted to Wes. “I let a woman onto the property and I didn’t kill her. She’s the first person inside the house since you and your momma left me.”
Marcus ran his finger along the date chiseled into the stone. The chisel marks were darker than the rest of the stone, dirt, and mildew staining the thin but deep lines defining a life too short.
He traced the letters slowly. “She wants me to leave you. I told her no.” Marcus awaited the imaginary question and answered, “Because, Wes, I built this place for us. If I leave, there is no us anymore. It’s simply an empty house.”
His finger reached the month of his son’s birth and he ran it along the etching, listening to Wes’s voice in his head. “I’m not being stubborn, son. I’m being smart. I’m surviving.” He lifted his hand and balled it into a fist, squeezing the color from his hand.
“Fine. I’ll ask your mother.” Marcus shifted on his heels and turned to face the other stone. “Sylvia, what do you think? Was it a mistake to let this woman into our house?”
The oaks swayed in a slight breeze. Leaves struggled against it, gave up, and floated free of their branches. A couple of them landed on the stone marked for Sylvia Battle: Wife, Mother, and Friend. Marcus wiped the stone clean.
He chuckled. “I know you would have helped her. Maybe that’s why I didn’t shoot her on sight and why I let her in our house.”
Another breeze, stronger than the previous one, whistled around him. He looked up and saw clouds building in the sky above him. “Yeah, it looks like a storm is coming. I’ll be ready. I’m always ready.”
Marcus closed his eyes and imagined his hands on the sides of Sylvia’s face as he pulled her close. He could smell her jasmine perfume. “Her son,” he said. “Her son is missing. That’s why she wants me to leave you. She says she needs my help finding him. I can’t do it, Sylvia. I already told Wes I couldn’t do it. I—”
“Battle?” The voice was soft and feminine. For a moment, Marcus thought he was actually hearing Sylvia’s voice.
“You’re not supposed to be here.” He pushed himself to his feet and stepped away from the stones.
“I’m so sorry,” Lola said. “I didn’t know…”
“Didn’t know what?”
“That they…you…”
“That my family was buried here?”
Lola nodded. She looked at the stones and tears pooled in her eyes. She wiped them away with the back of her hand.
“How much did you hear?”
“Enough,” she said, her eyes darting between the stones and Battle. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I heard you, and I didn’t know who you were talking to. When I realized…”
Battle crossed his arms. “What are you doing out here anyway? You were sleeping.”
“I couldn’t sleep.” She limped a step forward. “I went down to the kitchen and called for you. You didn’t answer. I thought maybe you were in the garden. The back porch door was cracked open. I had no idea—”
“You’re right,” Battle snapped. “You don’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
Battle looked at the stones and then at Lola. He took a step toward her and then marched past her, toward the back porch. “Forget about it. Let’s eat. It’s gonna be a long night.”
Lola wiped her eyes clean of the tears that kept streaming. She gripped the umbrella and followed Battle back to the house. He was at the refrigerator when she slid the back door shut and found a seat at the island.
“We need protein,” he said, bracing himself against the wide-open fridge. “We’ll go very light on the carbs tonight. If we eat heavy food, it’ll make us tired. That’s not good.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got some venison I killed a couple of months back. Thawed it two days ago. It’s not a big portion, since I wasn’t expecting intrud—er, guests.” He turned and looked at Lola as he corrected himself. “You ever eat venison?”
“No.”
“It’s very lean,” he said. “Not much fat. I let it age after I killed it. That tenderized it, so it should be okay and not too gamey. I’ll dice it up and sear it in a pan. That’ll be the fastest way to cook it. We don’t have time for stew or a roast. I’ll add some bush beans. It’ll be good.” Battle was trying to generate a conversation that had nothing to do with what had transpired outside. He wanted to move past it. Bury it.
Lola nodded again.
“Usually, I’d cook it with some dried prunes,” he said, pulling the container from the refrigerator. “That’s really good. But not tonight. For obvious reasons.”
“So you hunt?”
“Yes.” Battle slapped the meat onto a wooden cutting board. “It’s the only way to get good, fresh protein.” He flipped on the water in the sink and washed his hands.
“Did you before?”
“Before what?” He yanked open a drawer and pulled out a large serrated knife.
“Did you hunt before the Scourge?”
“A little,” he said, drawing the knife easily through the thinly marbled meat. “Ooh, this is good. Nicely done, Battle!”
Lola chuckled. “You always talk to yourself?” Her face blushed crimson as soon as the words slipped from her mouth.
Battle stopped mid-slice. His expression flatlined and he clenched his jaw. His chest rose with a deep breath and he exhaled slowly. “Not always.” He finished the cut.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I would hunt boar occasionally,” he said, his attention on the venison. “Some people call ’em peccary or javelina. They were overpopulated before the Scourge, and they could do damage too.” He chuckled and crosscut a slice of meat to cube it. “I had no problem killing them with my bow.”
Lola cleared her throat, her color having returned to normal. “Did you eat them?”
“Only in a stew,” he said. “I never much cared for the taste. My wife liked it. She also liked quail.”
“What’s that taste like?”
“You haven’t had quail?” He looked up at Lola, his nose scrunched in disbelief. “How have you survived this long and you haven’t had venison or quail?”
“I told you, we haven’t had good food in a long time.”
Battle washed his hands again and plopped a saucepan onto the gas cooktop. He spun the igniter and threw a chunk of animal fat into the pan. It immediately popped and sizzled as it melted to a liquid. “It’s deer fat. I save it and reuse it. I ran out of good cooking oil a year ago.”
“Oil goes bad?”
“Yes. And you know it when it does. Olive oil is the best. It lasted me nearly three years. Since then, I’ve been draining fat, chilling, and reusing it three or four times before I toss it. Sometimes I’ll use it instead of butter on my beans. It tastes pretty similar, especially when it’s salted.”
“I am sorry,” Lola said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
Battle fought the urge to yell at her or uncomfortably change the subject again. He spooned the grease, tossed in the venison cubes, and covered the pan. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t. But I don’t want to talk about it. We need to focus on eating and preparing for tonight. Got it?”
Lola exhaled. “Got it.”
***
OCTOBER 13, 2037, 6:23 PM
SCOURGE + 5 YEARS
TEXAS HIGHWAY 36
BETWEEN ABILENE AND RISING STAR, TEXAS
The road was easier on horseback. Salomon Pico held the reins tightly as the recon posse clopped away from the setting sun. It was low in the sky, and he felt it on his
neck as they moved in a caravan along the highway. He didn’t have the benefit of a brown hat like the bosses. Up ahead, in the distance, pillows of clouds bloomed downward.
He tried licking his lips. They were dry. He curled them into his mouth and licked them with what little saliva he could muster. He wanted to save his water for the road back.
Rudabaugh slowed his horse and trotted alongside Pico’s. “You better find this place,” he said. He was holding the reins with one hand. The other, he held in a sling against his chest. “If you don’t, I’m gonna put a bullet in both of your hands.”
Pico thought about responding, about telling Rud that he’d had nothing to do with Queho’s violent outburst. But he knew it wouldn’t do him any good. He just nodded. “I’m pretty sure I do.”
“Pretty sure?” Rudabaugh mocked. “Pretty sure? That ain’t gonna cut it, Sillyman.”
Pico gritted his teeth. He hated the nickname some of the bosses gave him. “What I meant to say was that I’m sure. I know where it is. It’s not easy to spot, that’s all.”
“We’ll see about that,” Rudabaugh snarled and spurred his horse forward. He joined a couple of men at the front of the caravan.
Pico couldn’t count the number of times he’d been on “hunting trips” in the past four years. Several times a month, the posse bosses rounded up a handful of grunts and mapped out a search area. They’d pack for a few days on the road and leave in search of undiscovered homesteads, farms, ranches, silos, anything they could commandeer and ravage.
He always got a sick feeling in his stomach when a boss would call him in for a hunt. Queho was the most brutal. But Rudabaugh wasn’t much better. When they’d find an untouched but developed piece of land, they were ruthless in their acquisition of it.
Pico lost himself in the long shadow extending ahead of his horse, his mind drifting from one raid to another. He shuddered.
He wasn’t like so many of the men, or women, in the Cartel. It wasn’t as if he was a good man. He wasn’t. His proclivities and strong desire to live left him on the wrong side of history. But he wasn’t morally bankrupt either. He had trouble sleeping. Voices and faces haunted his dreams.
He knew what he was doing and how he lived in the face of an apocalypse was wrong. But unlike most of the bosses, and so many of his fellow grunts, he didn’t relish the opportunity to take a woman without her consent, make her man watch as he lay dying. He didn’t laugh at the squeals of suddenly orphaned children herded into wagons so they could be put to work.
He also knew they’d seemingly combed every square inch of land for fifteen hundred square miles. So the idea that there was someone that close who’d escaped their detection and their wrath was surprising.
Pico thought back to the last hunting trip. He figured it had to have been at least six months ago. It was the worst of them to that point.
He knew, though, that this hunting trip was different. They weren’t only looking to annex Mad Max’s land and weapons. They were exacting revenge. Even if it was just to test defenses, there was the possibility it could end that night. Pico watched Rudabaugh bouncing in his saddle, chatting up the man riding alongside him. He knew Rudabaugh would do what he could to end it, even if that wasn’t the objective. He wanted to prove to Cyrus Skinner he was more valuable than Queho. Pico could smell the jealousy on him. If Rud had his way, he’d ride back to Abilene with the woman on his saddle and Mad Max’s head in a bag.
The fact that the big guy, Skinner, had personally okayed the hunt only amplified its importance. He’d seen the anger dancing in Skinner’s eyes. Even through the thick blanket of smoke that followed the man everywhere, Pico knew this hunt was crucial. He imagined Rudabaugh had seen it too.
It was likely Mad Max was responsible for killing more than the three men Pico had seen him execute. There’d been other small hunting parties that had up and disappeared. Skinner, Queho, Rudabaugh, and the others always assumed missing men had died of natural causes or greed. Some of them, they guessed, had tried to run off and got lost in the vast, dry wilderness.
They’d never considered, until now, a single man had taken care of them. Maybe, then, Mad Max hadn’t gone undetected. They’d found him. He’d just hadn’t let them leave alive.
Pico swallowed hard and pulled his attention from the shadow, which grew longer by the second as the sun dipped closer to the horizon. He uncapped his canteen and took a swallow of warm water.
Within minutes, the sun disappeared and the sky darkened to a deep shade of blue before edging into black. There were clouds ahead of them. Storm clouds, Pico figured. They were still forming in the sky. A familiar nausea slithered from his stomach to his throat. He gulped against it and tasted its acidic burn on the back of his tongue.
Pico looked to the horizon ahead of them, his eyes drifting upward from the caravan to tendrils of lightning that forked through the clouds. Thunder cracked and rolled toward them, rumbling across the open land. It was getting colder. A fresh breeze was building into a wind. All of these were signs, Pico thought. It was nature’s way of telling them to turn around. It was God’s sentinel warning them of their enemy’s strength.
He knew people would die in the coming storm. He wondered to himself if they were the ones who should be afraid.
CHAPTER 12
NOVEMBER 9, 2032, 11:00 PM
SCOURGE +38 DAYS
EAST OF RISING STAR, TEXAS
Marcus sat in the dark of his home office, staring at his computer, his head in his hands. He reread the same page over and again, searching for contradictory news on other websites. He couldn’t find any.
The Centers for Disease Control has confirmed the pneumonic plague known as PP1, or the Scourge, is drug resistant. At a news conference this morning, Associate Director for Healthy Water, National Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Infectious Diseases, Mateo Negro, PhD, told reporters the outlook is grim.
“Despite early indications a drug protocol involving tetracycline and other broad-spectrum antibiotics was effective in diminishing the long-term effects of the disease, we now know this is no longer the case,” Dr. Negro said. He is also the director for PP1 Emergency Response. “All indications are that the PP1 bacteria are adapting at a phenomenal rate. They are no longer responsive to any tested combination of existing drugs. This includes streptomycin, gentamicin, and a variety of cocktails involving the aforementioned drugs.”
Dr. Negro, speaking for CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, added that those who contract the latest strain of the Yersinia pestis bacteria are almost certain to die within seventy-two hours.
“Historically,” Dr. Negro said, “fatality rates for septicemic or pneumonic plague was at ninety percent without treatment. We’re finding this latest incarnation of the bacterial disease is one hundred percent. Even with treatment, the rate is nearly ninety-seven percent.”
The World Health Organization reported yesterday it is working on a vaccine cultivated from the blood of the early Syrian survivors of the disease. But development and testing could take months. There are also several American, German, and British pharmaceutical companies working on new, plague-resistant antibiotics. Those, experts caution, could take months to perfect on the fastest of approval timelines.
Both the WHO and the CDC have warned against air travel, attending large gatherings, and have advised those with the disease to isolate themselves for the sake of others.
The most recent census, in 2030, calculated a world population of 8.2 billion people. Three hundred and thirty million live in the United States. To date, the WHO estimates 2.74 billion people have died from the disease, seventy-five million are US residents.
The numbers are increasing exponentially by the day. Dr. Negro sees no end in sight.
“The only people who will survive this,” he said at the conclusion of the news conference, “are those who have a natural immunity. And right now, there’s no way for us to know who those people are. The incubation period is anywhere from a couple
of days to a full month.”
Marcus closed his laptop and sat in the dark. From the kitchen he could hear the hum of the refrigerator. The ice maker clunked. The house was otherwise quiet. And then Wesson coughed.
It was a wet hack that sounded croupy, full of phlegm, and was getting worse. In between coughs, Wes sucked in air as if he’d just surfaced from nearly drowning. Marcus hurried to his son’s side to find Sylvia already there. She was rubbing his back with one hand and holding an empty popcorn bowl in front of him with the other.
“Get it out, Wes,” she said. “Spit it into the bowl if it helps.”
Wes was hacking, shaking his head as he struggled. Marcus flipped on the overhead light and moved to the other side of the bed. He patted his son’s back and looked across to Sylvia. She was on the edge of the bed, wearing a loose tank top and baggy boxer shorts. She hadn’t changed clothes in two days. Her eyes were swollen from lack of sleep and her cheeks drawn from a lack of food.
“Anything we can do to treat the symptoms?” she asked Marcus above the din of Wes’s fit.
Marcus shook his head. The cough syrup, the lozenges, the analgesics, the ice packs—none of them had done anything in the last forty-eight hours to soothe the worsening signs of the plague.
Wes caught his breath and reached for a glass of water at his bedside. He gulped it down like a toddler and wiped his watery eyes. “It’s hard to breathe,” he said. His voice sounded as though his vocal chords were shredded. “If I take a deep breath, I cough.”
“Don’t take a deep breath,” Marcus suggested. He put his hand on the back of his son’s neck and gently squeezed. “Breathe in slowly through your nose.” His son’s skin was hot to the touch. His fever had to be above 102 degrees.
Marcus exchanged glances with his wife. He could tell she was struggling to maintain her composure. Her eyes were as wet as their son’s. The puffiness, he reminded himself, was probably as much from crying as it was from sleeplessness.
