Resurrection (Eden Book 3)

by Tony Monchinski

  Eden: Resurrection

  Tony Monchinski

  Published by Permuted Press.

  Copyright 2011 Tony Monchinski.

  www.PermutedPress.com

  Cover art by Christian Dovel.

  “...and now my bitter hands/ chafe beneath the clouds/ of what was everything”

  —Pearl Jam, Black

  “I’ve seen the future, brother/ It is murder”

  —Leonard Cohen, The Future

  From Eden

  …Harris’ existence, and everyone else’s, had devolved to nothing more than a matter of survival. Questioning it was a luxury only possible in the relative safety of Eden.

  His wallet was in his back pocket—an old habit. He pulled it out, noting how much thinner it was. He’d never been one to carry cash in his pocket. He’d used a rubber band as a young man, later a money clip. He’d already chucked his credit cards, his library card. Old habits did die hard, though. He’d cut up the credit cards before he tossed them. Still held onto the social security card.

  Harris still had the pictures, but there weren’t many. He looked through them, starting with the last one, working his way to the front of the wallet. A group shot of his parents, his brother, their wives, his brother’s kids. He’d taken the picture, so he wasn’t in it. Tonight he was here, and they were all gone.

  A picture of Daffy girl, sitting in the grass of their backyard on a hot day, tongue lolling out of her mouth.

  His wedding picture. He’d never been a big one on ceremony, and neither had Raquel. They’d done the whole church thing and reception for the sake of their families. That and they didn’t want to grow old one day and regret not having done it.

  A headshot of Raquel—the first picture of her he ever possessed. She’d always been beautiful to him. The black and white photograph lent her an ethereal quality.

  Her face just wouldn’t leave him alone…

  Prologue

  She ran through the trees, her bloodied hands and arms up in front of herself to block the low hanging branches. A terrible pain lanced her side from running, from the wound.

  She stopped and listened. Were they still back there? They had to be. Why couldn’t she hear them?

  A shriek in the near distance.

  There. Dammit.

  She clutched her side and stumbled forward. She’d been running for how long now? How much farther could she go? She had to keep running. It was her only option, and she knew it.

  The ground was dry because there had been no rain for a few weeks, though the clouds on the horizon forecasted some on the way. The mountain laurel on the sides of the trail was impenetrable, prickly. She had cut herself on it several times.

  Her friends were all dead. Those people had killed them.

  She wished they had never found this place, had never come here.

  One of the zombies screamed behind her, its roar sending a fresh chill up her sweat-soaked back.

  They were so goddamned fast. It didn’t help she was wounded. They were tracking her by her blood. Yesterday, when the chase had begun, she had tried to staunch the wound in her side. The little redhead had opened her up. Just like that. Not too deep.

  She hadn’t understood what the girl had done at first or why.

  A wad of blood-stained cloth couldn’t staunch the wound, and she knew the injury wasn’t enough to kill her. The little redhead had known as much also. But it gave away her position every step of the way.

  As she ran headlong through the trees, she racked her brain, trying to remember the lay of the land. She thought there was a river up ahead somewhere. If only she could reach it…the zombies wouldn’t willingly enter the water after her.

  There was another cry from off to the left, and another shiver coursed through her body. She made a racket as she plunged through the trees and scrub, knocking drooping branches and kudzu vines out of her way. They weren’t just behind her now. They were working their way around up ahead, fencing her in.

  Shit.

  She scanned the ground as she raced through a glen, looking for a suitable weapon. Something she could knock the zombies in the head with, a sharpened tree branch, a rock anything. She spied a rock somewhat smaller than her hand, and she forced herself to stop. Panting, she picked it up.

  They were crashing through the underbrush behind now. She could hear them clearly.

  She had stopped running, and she didn’t want to continue. But she forced herself to do so, grasping the rock close to her body, putting one foot in front of the other, plunging headlong into the next copse of trees.

  When she broke from the trunks and saw the river up ahead, she felt something she hadn’t felt in several days: hope. A fresh surge of adrenaline hit her and she picked up the pace, loping across the open ground towards the nearest bank, ignoring her lungs as they screamed at her from lack of oxygen.

  Knocked off her feet, she didn’t realize she’d been shot at first. She lay panting on the ground, her arm still drawn up to her side, the rock locked in her grip. She’d almost made it to the river.

  The fuckers had shot her.

  She rolled over and pushed herself up and over to a seated position. The bullet had hit her in the lower leg. It had gone in and out through her calf and didn’t hit any bone. It was bleeding heavily and, as she forced herself to stand, a fresh wave of blood spilled down her leg and over her dirty sneaker.

  The shriek made her look.

  The crazed zombie spotted her and loped in her direction. Chain trailed behind it in the scrub, attached to a metal collar at its neck. What was left of its clothes were filthy rags draped on its scarecrow frame.

  She stood as tall as she could and drew back his arm, the rock in her hand. Her whole body shook from exhaustion, and she fought to steady her hand with the stone.

  The beast was nearly upon her—crying out each step of the way—when she spotted a second, and then a third and a fourth, break from the trees and race her way.

  She swung the rock with all she had as the zombie reached her, screaming back at it even as she did so. The rock caught the undead squarely in the side of its head, but the thing didn’t stop running, and its forward momentum carried it into her, knocking both of them to the dirt.

  She scrambled to her hands and knees, retrieving the rock. The zombie was stunned and down, but righting itself when she brought the stone down again on its skull. A crack, as something in its head broke. The monster flopped down and did not move again.

  She turned on her knees in time for the second zombie to reach her to bowl her over. It was all over her before she could get up, and it would have bit if not for the thick leather muzzle solidly affixed to its mouth and strapped firm at the back of its necrotic head.

  Again she found the rock and desperately hammered the dead thing in the head and shoulders. A third and fourth zombie bore down on them, and then another and another. Their weight pinned her to the ground. As they pawed at her body, as they tried to devour her through their muzzles, as their rank smell overpowered her, the fight left her and she succumbed, lying still there under their writhing touch.

  Before they could smother her into unconsciousness, the men with their rifles retrieved the chains and hauled back, drawing the zombies off her.

  “Good, good,” said the oldest one, Thomas. White-haired, he stood surveying the scene with his lever-action rifle, noting how close the woman had come to the river, noting the bludgeoned zombie lying there. “You know…” He squatted down on his haunches a couple of feet from her. “You got farther than anyone else has ever gotten. Didn’t she Tommy?”

  Thomas’ son, standing with his short-barreled shotgun up on one shoulder, nodded. “She sure did, Pop.”

&n
bsp; She heard what the father and son said, but she didn’t know how to respond, so she didn’t try. She drew her legs up to her torso and propped herself up on an elbow, breathing raggedly, trying to regain her breath. Her leg was bleeding all over the place.

  “Water?” The old man held out his canteen, but she looked down. Thomas nodded and drank himself.

  “She looks like she’s in shock,” noted the son. “Don’t she?”

  “Think the kids’ right,” Gammon affirmed. “This one don’t look so good.”

  “Course she don’t look good, Ed.” Thomas said it without looking at the girl. He was squatting there, his rifle under one arm, rolling himself a clove cigarette. “This girl’s been through hell the last few days.”

  “I don’t know,” said MacKenzie, and it was the way he said it that gave Thomas pause. “…she looks pretty damn good to me.”

  “Sure do,” agreed Rodriguez.

  Gammon noticed how his friend Thomas paused ever so slightly as MacKenzie and Rodriguez said what they said.

  Her wounds were bleeding profusely, sending the zombies into a frenzy. They strained against their chains and the men pulling back on them. Two of the more vocal ones carried on screeching and howling.

  “Ed,” Thomas didn’t look up from his cigarette as he spoke to Gammon. “Do me a favor. Why don’t you, Rodriguez and MacKenzie here get these bookers away from her. Way they’re carrying on, I can’t hear myself think.”

  “Sure thing,” Gammon told his old friend, turning to MacKenzie and Rodriguez and the other men gripping the chains. “Let’s go.”

  Rodriguez and MacKenzie looked disappointed. They hauled back on the chains with the others, dragging the zombies forcefully off, away from the girl and Thomas and his son Tommy.

  “Finally, some peace and quiet,” Thomas remarked when the others had disappeared in the trees, the cries of the zombies fading.

  She wasn’t sure who the old man was talking to. Her? His son? She panted, but less so than before. The pain in her leg was very real, though the wound in her side had died down to a dull throb. At least the redhead wasn’t here.

  Thomas held his cigarette up between his thumb and forefinger, appraising it. Satisfied, he thumbed the wheel of his butane lighter and gave it fire. The old man inhaled the clove and held it, tasting it deep in his lungs, and then exhaled.

  “You done good kid,” he said to the girl.

  She looked up at him and he smiled at her, the wrinkles in his face bunching up around his eyes, on his cheeks and around his mouth.

  “I know I told you that already.”

  Tommy stood there with his shotgun up on his shoulder, one leg slightly bent.

  “Cigarette?” Thomas offered.

  She didn’t look up but shook her head and stammered, “W-water.”

  Thomas smiled and extended the canteen to her again. The water tasted pure and cold, and she drank greedily. When she finished drinking, she wiped her dirty hand across her mouth and looked up, seeing how Thomas was looking at her. Not the way the other two men—MacKenzie and Rodriguez—had looked at her, with their dirty thoughts and cruel intentions.

  No, she recognized the look in this old man’s eyes as admiration.

  “A shame we don’t recruit.”

  “Who…who are you people?” She looked at the old man.

  He considered her question. “Who are we, Tommy?”

  “We’re survivors, Pop.”

  “L-look…” She had told herself that no matter what happened—no matter what—she would not beg. But here she was, bleeding in the grass, the old man and his son with their rifle and shotgun, and she knew she had nothing to lose. “Look…it doesn’t have to be like this.”

  “Oh no?” Thomas cocked an eyebrow, encouraging her to continue.

  “You can let—you can let me go…” She stumbled over the words, trying to persuade these two men, when she knew there was no way she could. “I won’t tell anyone about you, or I can stay here. I can stay here and live with you.”

  “Is that so?” Thomas shifted on his haunches. Being an old man, the position was tough for him.

  “I s-swear…”

  “You swear.”

  “Yes.”

  “I actually believe you.” He looked out across the field and the river. “You believe her too, Tommy?”

  “Sounds sincere to me.”

  “But you’re still—you’re still going to k-kill me?”

  The way she said it—Thomas didn’t want to see her cry anymore.

  “Kill you?” He looked at her, something sincere and sweet in those eyes, behind the terror and desperation. He looked away, back over to the land beyond the river. “Yes.”

  She was about to say something when Tommy leveled the short-barreled shotgun and fired a load of buckshot through her head.

  The river was close enough they could hear the water gurgling over stones.

  “That’s always the toughest part, ain’t it?”

  “No two ways about it…” Thomas agreed, exhaling, looking at the cigarette in his hand. “…always is. Red’s gonna be disappointed it wasn’t her got to finish it.”

  “Suppose she will be.”

  Tommy placed the shotgun back on his shoulder and stood there looking down on the woman he had killed.

  “Hey, Pop.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “You see the way Mac and Rodriguez were eyeing her?”

  “That’s why I sent them away. What we do to these people, Tommy, I guess its bad enough. There ain’t no call for that—for what guys like them have in mind.”

  “I don’t get it, Pop.” Tommy was genuinely perplexed. “Mac and Rodriguez, they’re married, they got kids. Why would they want to…with her, you know?”

  “I don’t know what motivates some people, son…” His father stood slowly. He stretched his legs, fighting off cramps. “And I don’t think they do either.”

  Tommy was quiet.

  “We do a lot of things.” The old man tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette. “We are a lot of things. One thing we ain’t though. We ain’t rapists.”

  Tommy nodded, thinking of Rodriguez and Mac.

  “Well,” said the son, considering the last few days, “that was fun.”

  “Wasn’t it, though?”

  Strangers in a Strange Land

  The radio in their kitchen was on.

  “…and if you’re just getting up out of bed, well then good morning, New Harmony. Peace and love, peace and love, and all that jazz, am I right? Hey, here’s…”

  Riley looked up from the table at her brother, Anthony, on the other side of the nook. His view of her was blocked, so he didn’t see her hand on her stomach.

  “You want juice, sis?”

  Dawn filtered in around the window blinds.

  “Already had, little brother.”

  Anthony was Riley’s younger brother, but he was not little. He was one hundred and seventy eight centimeters tall, as was she. They were both adopted, taken in by their father and raised as brother and sister. They bore no blood relation to their dad or to one another. Riley had been nearly four when Dad brought Anthony home, and she’d watched him grow from a gangly, elfin-faced little boy into a tall, handsome young man.

  Calling him little brother was a nod to their childhoods and a term of endearment.

  “I hate that hat,” Riley told him and meant it.

  Lately, Billy had taken to wearing his dark beanie with the ear flaps over the curly hair he wore to his shoulders. He sported the hat inside and outside. Riley suspected he slept in the thing. She didn’t get it. Her brother was almost twenty-one years old and was attached to that hat like a toddler to his infant blanket.

  “I know.”

  Anthony sniffled and blew his nose in a tissue from a box on the counter.

  “Shouldn’t sleep with that window open,” Riley said.

  “I sleep better that way.”

  It was shortly after six in the morning. Thei
r dad wouldn’t stir from bed for a few more hours. He wouldn’t be up until noon if he’d been out with their uncle the night before, tying one on.

  Riley rubbed at her flat belly under the table where Anthony wouldn’t notice. She’d known she was pregnant but hadn’t said anything. Not a word to Alex, even though it would have been his. Nothing to Anthony or her best friend, Troi. And definitely not a word to their dad. Riley had known—when she’d woken up last week and her legs were wet and the sheets were red—she’d known the baby was gone before it had really even had a chance to begin.

  She’d known that she would never get to know him-her-it? Riley knew because this was the second time that her body had rejected the life inside of her.

  “You’re going to catch pneumonia, Ant.”

  “Cold weather doesn’t cause a cold.” Anthony sipped his juice. “Anyway, I can’t get sick. We’ve got plans, sis.”

  The brother and sister had made arrangements to travel farther south in New Harmony. Their society stretched for several hundred miles along the interior of what had been the Carolina coastal plains region of the United States on the North American continent. There was no North or South Carolina any longer, and no United States of America to speak of. There were autonomous societies like New Harmony, dotting the landscape here and there, outside the radiated hot zones.

  Anthony and Riley had grown up near the northwestern border of New Harmony, close to the Outlands with their thousands of miles of inhospitable, poisoned terrain. Radiation from nuclear weapons was responsible for everything from the huge spike in cancers, to the diminished life expectancy, to the precipitous rise in infant mortality. The nukes were detonated twenty-five years earlier. And then the nuclear power plants had melted down when there were no humans left that knew how to tend to them.

  Riley knew this. Anthony knew this. Everybody in New Harmony knew this. But only Riley had known she’d been pregnant this second time. There was no use in dwelling on it, she thought. A majority of pregnancies ended in miscarriages, and many of the babies born were sickly and died shortly after, or were malformed. Her best friend, Troi, was a nurse in the hospital and had all sorts of stories. It was sad.