End World : Horizons

by David Peters

  Alex walked around the wheelhouse and looked at the various stations. His hand lightly glided over gauges and darkened controls. Anything that had a light he avoided touching. He finally stood in front of the still ancient looking wooden ship’s wheel and lightly felt the grain.

  “Are we going to leave the ship?”

  “Yes, probably soon.”

  “Why? Is it because a lot of the lights burned out?”

  “No. The lights didn’t burn out. The machinery that used to make them light up broke and it can’t be fixed.”

  “So we have to leave?”

  “Yes, we have to. This old tub has given us all she can. She doesn’t have much left to give. We just can’t ask her for much more than getting us to shore in one piece.”

  “That’s sad about the ship but I’m kind of glad.”

  Charles looked surprised, “Really? I thought you liked it here. You feel safe, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I don’t worry about the monsters. I don’t even remember them but people talk about them every now and then. I know they are bad but they kind of aren’t real to me. You know?”

  “You know they are out there so why would you want to leave?”

  “Neil told me a really cool story about climbing a tree one time. I don’t remember ever seeing one big enough to climb. I got pretty high up on the water tower once, but all I could see was more water. It wasn’t very cool and I couldn’t sit anywhere like Neil could in his story.”

  “It’s been a while since we have been near any land, even longer since we have been near land with big trees.”

  “I also like to dig.”

  “You can’t do that in the fields here?”

  “I can but the dirt smells really bad,” Alex said as he scrunched up his nose.

  Charles laughed, “That is does.”

  “If I dig in it, I smell like rotten stuff for a couple days. Neil gets kind of mad because we only have the one wash day and he says it makes our hut smell like ass.”

  He laughed as the young boy shook his head, “I can imagine. Again, I need to talk to Neil about his choice of words around young children. I’ll tell you what, Alex. It won’t be too much longer before you will see more trees than you can imagine. You will think they are probably the most awesome thing you have ever seen. They stretch as far as the eye can see and grow taller than the bridge deck outside.”

  “Am I allowed to climb one?”

  “All the way to the top.”

  “Promise?”

  Charles turned and knelt down in front of the small boy, “I will make it a priority when we get settled in somewhere. I promise you that, Alex. You and I will climb a tree and look down on nothing but more trees, hills and more dirt than you shake a stick at.”

  “Cool,” he answered with a smile. “Can I dig a hole?”

  “I will help you dig an underground fort. Every kid should build at least one.”

  “Does the dirt stink?”

  “The dirt will have a smell that you will come to love. It smells like, well, it smells like earth.”

  Alex thought for a moment before he found the courage to say something, “You are really nice, I don’t know why everyone is so afraid of you.”

  “I don’t know either,” he lied, “but I will work on it. Tell Neil what I told you and we’ll catch up again soon, okay?”

  “Okay, Mr. Lewis.”

  “Just Charles. I think we are past the formal names.”

  The boy flashed his toothy grin, “Okay, Charles. I’ll see you later.”

  He smiled one more time and turned to leave the room.

  “Hey,” he called out before the door could close.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “No more climbing the water tower, okay? I don’t want to read a report about you breaking an arm or something. Keep it safe. We won’t be here much longer and having to make the trek in a cast would suck.”

  He smiled, “Not a problem, sir. I won’t climb the tower anymore, sir.”

  Charles tilted his head with a raised eyebrow.

  “Sorry. Not a problem, Charles.”

  “That’s better. See you soon, Alex. We have some trees to climb.”

  He waved and pulled the bridge door closed behind himself.

  Charles turned back to the windows and let the tears flow. They weren’t just tears of sadness but tears of relief. His reason for living had been left on a small patch of dirt on a hill overlooking downtown Seattle. Left behind because there was no room, or they weren’t in the right place at the right time and he was too far to help. He was three hundred miles away as he desperately tried to direct anything to help his family. He wasn’t sure what was more painful, knowing he didn’t do enough or not knowing what happened to them.

  His only reason for getting out of bed was to keep this island of steel and those on it alive. That reason was coming to an end and he found the thought of that weight being lifted to be the most comforting feeling he had since kissing his wife goodbye so many years ago. Ever since that last hidden bottle of whiskey had run dry the days had been getting longer. Finally, they were getting shorter again.

  ~2~

  “That’s just how we have planned it out, Jen,” Caperson said, almost pleadingly. “We’ve been over all of this. You were there when we hashed it out and you signed off on it already.”

  “Why can’t we all go together? Wouldn’t that be safer? We could watch out for each other. We could stop far enough away that we wouldn’t get pulled into your attack.”

  “You know as well as I do that we cannot maneuver an entire convoy if we are somehow compromised. It would be a bloodbath. The strike group will go ahead of the rescue convoy and make sure that everything is clear. We clear out patrols and crush that hive before you guys even arrive. You don’t see us on the highway, you leave.”

  “You mean you will go ahead and the women will be in the rear where they are safe.”

  Caperson shook his head, “Don’t even try and play that card, Jen. You know me better than that. I’m doing it this way because we are the crew that has the most experience. We have already done this once, and that was a hell of a lot more risky than what we are doing now. And there aren’t just women in the convoy so don’t even go there. There is no division of danger in this community. We have as many women guards as we do men, even the patrols are pretty close to even.”

  Jen pursed her lips and closed her eyes as she bit back several comments. She finally spoke, “You’re right. I’m sorry, that was wrong of me to ever accuse you of that. It was a cheap shot.”

  “It’s understandable and not a big deal,” he smiled as he pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head. “We’re all under a lot of stress. If given a choice, I would rather be sitting on a bench next to you as we rode out of here.”

  She paused for a moment, “I just hate this. You know? I hate not knowing how you are, where you are.”

  “It will be a cake walk. This hive is smaller than Sumter!”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “We have enough evidence suggesting it. We don’t have a lot of intel but not one thing we have learned leans toward anything but a Sumter sized hive.”

  She didn’t let up, “You know nothing ever goes the way it’s planned with the Corrupted. The second you think you know what they are going to do, they do something different.”

  “Things not going as planned is what I spent my entire career dealing with. No plan is worth its salt ten minutes into a battle and that’s how I have always done business. I’ve been fighting in one country or another for more than two decades. Why are you being this way?”

  “You will be a full day out from us. If you guys manage to get bit, how are you going to administer the Dust?” she asked with true concern.

  “It won’t happen, we won’t let it.”

  “Chris, I’ve known you a long time. I’ve fought at your side from the first days of this damn thing. You know as well as I do that you can’t c
ontrol everything the Corrupted will do. You aren’t some super hero that can call on the power of the gods when things don’t go your way.”

  “You’ve fought next to me, have you ever seen me unable to adapt to a changing battle? It’s what I’ve spent my whole life doing and I’ve gotten pretty damn good at it. I have three of the best damned Corrupted fighters with me. We have probably singlehandedly killed more Corrupted than anyone still alive and we did that by adapting to the battle. It’s what I do. Improvise, adapt and overcome. It was a marine motto but it was a damn good one when it came to combat.”

  Jen nodded then hugged him, “I’m just worried. I’m your wife, if you won’t worry about yourself then I have to, it’s what I do and I’ve gotten good at it.”

  “Then worry away. When you see me standing on the highway, you’ll know that I was right.”

  “And if I don’t see you on the highway?”

  He thought about it for a moment, “Then I probably stepped off the road to take a leak. I’ll be there.”

  “You just aren’t going to let me do this, are you?”

  “Nope. I deal with a hell of a lot of ‘what-ifs’ and the day I start working out what happens when I can’t adapt to a battle is the day I don’t come back.”

  “So you will adapt to anything that happens out there?”

  “I always have in the past so I plan on doing it in the future.”

  “Adapt away.”

  Chapter 4

  A knock on the door pulled Charles back from the edge of darkness, the pit of his nightmares where he spent most of his sleeping hours. This time he was having the dream where he was on a high cliff watching his family on the beach below. Corrupted were moving toward his screaming family and all he could do was yell a warning. He had no weapons, he could only watch in helpless horror as the monsters moved toward his family.

  As he opened his eyes to the darkened room, he mumbled under his breath, “Thank god that’s over. I hate the nightmares where I live the most.”

  He cleared his throat then spoke louder, “Come in, the door is open.”

  “Sorry to wake you again, sir. I have a report from Weather Ops.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We did a quick sweep with the radar at the top of the hour as you had requested and that second front looks like it has turned back in our direction. It’s already increased its speed five knots and it is packing on more every hour.”

  Charles rubbed the sleep from his eyes, “How far out?”

  “About forty-six miles but the winds are pushing close to fifty knots and they are fairly erratic. This could be a rough one, sir. I don’t think the deck is going to take a fifty knot ripper.”

  “Any chance it will swing back the other way and miss us?”

  The head in the doorway shook slowly, “Mitchel thinks there is a possibility but he is the only one. Everyone else in ops thinks we are going to get flattened. The track we have developed for it has us in the crosshairs.”

  Guess we can kiss what’s left of the crops goodbye,” he said as he pulled a worn-out t-shirt over his head. “What is the best estimate on when it hits us?”

  “We should begin to feel the front within the hour but the big winds are several hours behind that. Best guess based on how quick it is building is sometime around eleven-hundred hours.”

  “Thanks, Ben. I’ll be up shortly. Tell them the standing order on the rudder is still in effect. Let’s do whatever we can to keep the bow into the wind and keep the rolling to a minimum. Get the salvage crews on the deck and get what we can before it is gone. Even if it isn’t ripe we can still use it, stalks and all.”

  ~1~

  Dylan looked down at the two lumps of black flesh as they passed. Their bodies continued to bubble and boil as the blue dust ate away at them like an acid bath. The wind and rain whipped the cloud of dust away in a flash but the wet skin of the Hunters allowed the dust to stick like paste and eat away at their already dead bodies.

  Dylan shouted above the rising storm, “This wind is not working in our favor! The Dust barely has any time to spread before it’s completely dissipated.”

  Caperson called back from the wagon, “No doubt. Another squall like that last one and we may drown out in the open. Been a long time since I have seen a rain that heavy. It’s like South-East Asia.”

  “Hope those new holding ponds are keeping the town square above water,” Travis added. “If my cellar floods, I’m going to have to find another compressor for Doc.”

  “We over-engineered them. We kind of expected downpours like this in the future,” Dylan said over the sound of the rain. “Bet the lower falls are crazy right now.”

  Caperson pulled his poncho tighter around himself, “Bet they have hot tea going.”

  Dylan smiled as he coaxed Buck forward into his point position. He was about one-hundred yards in front of the wagon and two full days in front of the main caravan. The rain had been pelting them for the last twenty-four hours without a break and just after sun-up was joined by an even more forceful wind. He would rather ride further ahead but one-hundred yards was about as far as they could reliably see in the weather.

  With the growing wind, he finally gave up and flipped the heavy plastic hood from his poncho down, or more accurately, wasn’t able to keep it on his head. Having the hood up kept his upper body dry but it drastically reduced the view of the landscape to his left and right.

  He cinched his western hat down tighter as another gust threatened to tear it off his head. Three dead patrols lay still and bubbling behind them and an hour ago they passed his furthest point of the previous trip. He expected the hive to come into view around every corner but as yet, they had seen nothing but the long winding trail the patrols used and the empty forest and fields surrounding the highway. The battle was still ahead of them.

  ~2~

  An off-ramp ahead angled off to the right then took a steep hill down to a small round-about. At the far side of the circle he could see a park with a small amphitheater spread out over the center. A stack towered over the park, the humming just barely audible above the sound of the growing wind and rain. The brown, cardboard-like material flowed down and around the park like mud that had flowed and hardened.

  It was small. Smaller than the hive in Sumter. It meant the Corrupted were still building, still spreading throughout the area.

  Dylan stopped at the top of the long hill and waved a signal to the battle wagon coming up behind. As Caperson and Travis stepped down from the wagon to join him on foot, he turned back to the looming battle arena in front of him.

  The low valley below them gave them an unobstructed view of the small town below them. Many of the houses on the outskirts were burned to the foundations. The concrete structures in the center of the small downtown area also showed signs of fighting and fire. In some cases, entire brick buildings had been blown apart and scattered over the street.

  He climbed down from Buck and leaned against the wagon, “I didn’t think about that. We didn’t make any plans for something like that.”

  Travis swore out loud while Jokester just shook his head in disbelief.

  Travis nearly yelled, “Freakin’ stairs? They have damn stairs leading to their entrance? I thought I had this one, I really did! Damn it!”

  Nearly ten yards of granite stairs led up a slight incline to the large concrete stage. In the center of the stage a large hole had been dug into the wood and pavement. The hive had literally grown out of the ground.

  “What the hell do we do now?” Dylan asked openly.

  “Can we drag the cans up the stairs?” Caperson asked.

  Dylan shook his head, “Even if we did, that’s going to eat into our time. Seems to me that will end up being a suicide run. That’s assuming that we can unbolt them from the bottom of the wagon and still spin them up. Every minute we sit here is another minute they have to put out the alarm. Travis, can we do it that way?”

  “Can’t unbolt them. They are geared f
rom the bottom now, not the top. It left more air space without the counterweight sitting in the middle. I didn’t think this one through. I think I may have...” his voice trailed off into silence.

  Travis continued to slowly look back and forth across the park below as the other three waited for him to finish his sentence.

  Dylan nervously tapped his finger on his rifle receiver, “Travis? You still with us?”

  “I’m thinking, boss-type-dudes,” Travis said as he continued to look around. “It’s jellin’, give me a second.”

  He walked several feet to the edge of the road and continued to nod as he looked around the landscape. His eyes wandered down the pathway leading into the park. His gaze continued to follow the path until it hit the wide flight of stairs and nodded. He jogged back to the wagon and looked at the underside then at the back of the gear used to connect the two horses to the heavy cart.

  “Cap-Cap, can I use your binoc’s for a minute?”

  Caperson shrugged and handed them over, “If it will move this cavalcade forward, by all means.”

  Travis continued to nod and smile, “Perfect.” He scanned the park and nodded again, “Oh, yeah. That will do it right there.”

  He handed them back without a word and began rummaging through a storage bin on the back of the wagon. He set a large spool of braided-steel cable on the bench and returned to the small, red tool chest in the corner of the wagon. He pulled out several tools and set them next to the cable. He leaned over and looked at the underside of the wagon one more time before pulling out a final tool.

  “This should work just groovy, bossmen. Cap-Cap, you think that hill right there is a good over watch for one of the Dustguns?”

  Caperson looked across the field with the binoculars, “That is acceptable. Angle is good for covering the door.” He looked around the small valley one more time, “Yeah, that will work fine.”