“Hey, hold on,” Jackson exclaimed. He turned in his saddle and reached around Cara to pull an old white t-shirt out of his backpack. He held it above his head and waved it for a few moments.
I answered Alejandro’s unasked question with a shrug. “I don’t know what else to do. Do you?”
“No,” he acknowledged. “Okay, how do we know when it’s safe to walk up to the town?”
“Maybe we should dismount and walk the horses in,” I suggested. “That seems like it would be less threatening.”
Everyone agreed and we stepped down from the horses so we could lead them by the reins towards the town. The majority of the carnage seemed to have come from the north. There were several older vehicles that were flipped over and there were these strange claw marks on everything. We quickly discovered the source of the scrapes and what we assumed had caused the damage.
There were four of them. Each had received massive amounts of damage before they were finally killed. The giant scorpions were about the size of a small pick-up truck with tails that stretched for at least fifteen feet. Their hard carapaces were shredded by holes from bullet wounds. Two of the scorpions had human remains protruding from their mouths and it appeared that they died in the middle of their meal. One had a t-shirt stuck on its stinger and all of them had dried blood crusted on their pincers.
“Hey!” someone yelled from the wall. “Chuck, is that you?”
“Yeah,” I responded. “What the hell happened here?”
“We were attacked yesterday! Wait, I’ll let you in.”
We walked up to the gate and it slowly opened to admit us inside. The same boy who’d been on gate duty when we left over a week ago let us in. “Is everyone okay?” I asked.
“Pedro is dead. Plus Calvin, Jimmie, Barbara Simpson and a few others,” he answered as he secured the gate from the inside with several new crossbeams that hadn’t been there before. “We’ve also got a lot of wounded. They just came from out of nowhere and started shootin’ at us, didn’t even say what they wanted.”
“What about those giant scorpions out there?” Alejandro asked.
“They showed up about an hour after all the shootin’ started. Jose Ruiz thinks that the noise attracted them. Hell, we would’ve been goners if those bugs hadn’t come along and killed most of the attackers out there. Damn, if the attackers hadn’t killed the bugs, we would probably be dead too.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. “There were only a few of ‘em left by the time the bugs were done with ‘em and they hauled ass off towards the north. Chris got one with his rifle, but we think two of ‘em got away.”
“Who’s in charge?” I asked.
“Well, now that you’re back, you are,” the boy answered.
“I mean who’s been in charge since the attack?”
“Oh. Rebecca and Sam. They’re the only ones with any experience with this stuff, so they took over after Pedro died.”
Alejandro clapped the boy on the shoulder. “If I know my wife, she probably had every inch of the wall reinforced.”
“Yeah, well, we needed it. We didn’t realize it before, but there were all sorts of places that those people could have snuck in. We’re working on it though.”
“Alright, thank you, Jeff,” I told the guard. “Keep up the good work.”
“Yes, sir!” he said with a salute. I felt a little silly, but I saluted him back.
“Now that they know where you are, it will only get worse,” Cara stated. “That’s what happened in Dell City. Once they realized that we had enough resources to feed ourselves, they began attacking. Over time, we were too weak through attrition to defend the town anymore.”
I nodded my head in agreement. I just wanted peace for my family. “Let’s go to my place first. I’m sure that Sam is probably there with her.”
Alejandro agreed that our wives were inseparable, especially during a crisis, and would more than likely be together. We made the short trip quickly and when I saw my little home I leapt from Rusty’s back and bounded up the steps to the door.
I burst through the entryway and called out for my wife. “Becca! Becca, it’s Chuck. Are you home?”
“Chuck? Oh, thank God!” she cried from the kitchen and rushed towards me.
“Is Alejandro okay?” Sam asked tentatively from the kitchen.
“Yeah, I’m here, baby,” Alejandro answered.
I had barely finished giving Rebecca a kiss when I was again wrapped in a bear hug by Jordyn. She was holding little Jesse and he squirmed for me to take him.
“Oh god, what happened to your nose? Never mind. We were attacked but then these giant scorpions came along,” Rebecca was talking a mile-a-minute, but stopped suddenly when Jackson came in. She rushed over to him and slapped him hard across the chest.
“Oww!” he howled.
“Where the hell did you go? You had us worried sick about you!” she scolded him.
“I left a note,” he replied sheepishly.
“A note? You left me a goddamned note that said you were going after Chuck and not to worry about you. I didn’t know if those scavengers got the three of you or if you were lying dead in a ditch somewhere because your horse threw you. Hell, I thought that those scorpions could have gotten you…” she trailed off when she noticed Cara standing in the doorway.
“Hi,” Cara said with a shy wave. “I’m Cara. Jackson saved my life.” She stepped up and hooked her arm protectively through Jackson’s and pressed her body possessively close to his side.
Rebecca looked back and forth between the two of them and then to me. I held up my hands in surrender. “It’s true,” I said. “She would have been dead if Jackson hadn’t saved her life.”
The stress of the week and the attack at the gate caught up with her and she burst into tears. “I was so worried for you all,” she sobbed. I stepped forward and wrapped her in a hug.
My little family was complete, but we wouldn’t be safe until we went far away from the highway. We needed to get away from the inevitable land-grab that the people of New El Paso would eventually make and away from their crazy slavery system. Further away from Jillian and her Villains up north who were slowly carving a bloody path across the entire country. We needed to go beyond the mountains of southern Texas and into the wilds of northern Mexico where there wasn’t anyone else.
“We need to call a town meeting,” I declared. “There’s something that we need to discuss.”
TWELVE
The debate raged back and forth for two full days in the city park about what our course of action should be. Alejandro and I wanted to travel south to Mexico, and beyond if needed, but most of the town’s older population wanted to stay in their homes. I understood where they were coming from. Besides our little group, none of the town’s population had ventured beyond the state park a couple of miles away since before the bombs fell. They were scared of the outside world and the attack by scavengers and ensuing attack by the giant scorpions cemented the belief in their minds that they were going to stay put.
I felt guilty about the attacks. Even though I knew on an intellectual level that they would have happened eventually, I was the one who insisted on talking to the merchants at the lake. I was confident that one of Jason’s men had told someone that the town wasn’t abandoned and that we had food that would be easy pickings for a group of scavengers. After our encounter with the Changed up in New El Paso, I knew how powerful the desire for food was out here in the wasteland.
I argued that since one group of scavengers had found us, more would follow—especially since some of them escaped. The question that I couldn’t answer was about the giant scorpions. Sergeant Murphy had told us about them and about other creatures that had grown to freakish proportions due to the radiation, but we had no idea how many of them there were or where they lived. The only two things that we knew about them was that they were attracted to noise, or more likely, to the vibrations from loud noises and that it took a lot of firep
ower to kill the damn things.
In the end, the unknown was too much for the majority of the town’s population. The threat that another group of scavengers might come after them wasn’t enough to convince them to leave the safety of the town that most of them had known for their entire life. Of the two hundred and seventy-nine residents who were still alive in Balmorhea after the battle, fifty-four decided to leave with us.
We declared that we would leave in three days’ time and Alejandro immediately set out to design and build wagons that we could pack supplies onto and the pregnant women could ride in. His engineering skills shone once again and we had three fully-functional wagons by the end of the first day. He’d taken the beds off of three small pick-up trucks and added a second axle to each so the wagons had four wheels, which would make distributing the weight easier and all them could be pulled by two horses each. He admitted to me privately that he could have been done in half the time if he hadn’t wasted time trying to figure out how to add shocks to the new front axle, but he’d ultimately abandoned that plan due to time constraints.
Our group was comprised mostly of the town’s younger, more adventurous residents, so we loaded up everything that we could carry onto the three wagons and everything else went into our backpacks. Alejandro took two complete plows and the parts to convert one of the wagons into a plow once we reached our destination. We also gathered a healthy dose of the seeds since my group was the one who’d brought them to Balmorhea in the first place. Added to the list were weapons and ammunition. We were ready to go by the evening of the third day.
Alejandro and I planned our route with two others and purposely kept the information hidden from the residents who stayed behind because we didn’t want one of them telling the next group of merchants to come through where we’d gone. We planned to go out near the US border and into the Chisos Mountains near the old Big Bend National Park. The mountains had water and some open areas that we could use for farming. Alejandro had been hiking there before and his description of the absolute isolation of the region was enough to sell me on the validity of the location.
The map indicated that the distance was about 170 miles and we decided to stick to the back roads as much as possible. We’d be heading south down old Highway 17 to the town of Marfa, which was famous before the apocalypse for the strange lights that danced in the night skies and sometimes raced teenagers driving in the desert. From there we’d work our way east and then south into the mountains.
It was a solid plan, but I didn’t like leaving behind everything that we’d worked so hard for during the past two years. We were leaving behind our homes, our prepared fields and the safety of the town’s walls at night in exchange for the unknown. My sense of adventure had dulled after the trip to New El Paso, but I knew that this group looked to me for leadership and guidance. Only my family, Alejandro and Sam had any idea what to expect beyond those walls.
As the gates of Balmorhea slammed shut behind us, we set out on the first leg of our journey. This was our next great adventure. Out there in the mountains lay either our salvation or our death. I’d come to terms with the fact that we would never be totally safe and that our lives would always be difficult, but we would endure the Armageddon and I’d make every moment count for something. We owed that much to each other. I owed it to my new family.
About the Author
A veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan war, Brian Parker was born and raised as an Army brat. He moved all over the country as a child before his father retired from the service and they settled in a small Missouri town where the family purchased a farm. It was on the farm that he learned the rewards of a hard day's work and enjoyed the escapism that books could provide.
He’s currently an Active Duty Army soldier who enjoys spending time with his family in Texas, hiking, obstacle course racing, writing and Texas Longhorns football. His wife is also an Active Duty soldier and the pairing brings its own unique set of circumstances that keep both of them on their toes. He's an unashamed Star Wars fan, but prefers to disregard the entire Episode I and II debacle.
Brian self-published four books before signing a 4-book contract with Permuted Press. His novels GNASH and Enduring Armageddon were previously self-published and will be re-released by Permuted along with two previously unpublished works, REND and SEVER.
Besides the extensive collection of horror works, he is also the author of several non-horror works, including the children’s picture book Zombie in the Basement which is written to help children overcome the perceived stigma of being different than others.
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