by James Davis
As Victor turned to step inside the dead animal ring, Quinlan stood in front of him. “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt her.”
Quinlan shook his head. “That’s not why I’m worried. You can’t beat her. Even with the orangutan arms, even with the nanobot strength. She’ll destroy you. I know. We need to find another way.”
Victor rolled his eyes and brushed past him. The scye hovered above the truck as Victor stepped inside the ring.
Quinlan glanced hopelessly at Harley and shook his head. “He can’t win.” Harley watched as the two of them paced the circle of dead animals and found he was in complete agreement.
“You’re married to her?”
“She’s one of the best fighters I’ve ever seen. We trained together. She can kick my ass without working up a sweat. Against him, it won’t even be a warm-up.”
Harley nodded and stepped closer to the young man as the two in the ring continued to circle. “Have you killed before?”
Quinlan shook his head.
“You’ll have to now.”
Quinlan looked him in the eyes, looked away. “I’ll try.”
“A steer tries son.” Harley’s eyes stormed. “Bull up and get this done. No hesitation. None. Do you understand? You kill, or you and your little ones are killed. There is nothing else. When the time comes you kill everything in your way and maybe we can walk away from this. If we’re lucky.”
The deputy marshal and Quinlan’s wife circled each other a few more times, smiling pleasantly as if they were not seeking out the simplest way to kill the other. Victor suddenly stopped where he stood and Vania did as well, staring across at one another. Vania smiled softly, seductively and attacked in a single, impossible leap 10, 12 feet into the air, her arms and legs extended and a fierce grin on her face. Victor batted her away with his massive right arm. As he did, she seemed to fold onto herself and wrap her body around his arm as she buried her nails into his biceps and let the force of his own thrust rip the flesh of his arm when thrown aside.
Victor howled and swung out with his left arm, but Vania nimbly ducked beneath it and sashayed out of his reach, walking on the balls of her feet like a dancer. Victor rushed at her, both of his long arms extended and reaching to envelop her, but again she ducked beneath them and spun around him, slicing with her own hands and leaving bloody scratches down his back as she tore his shirt away. Every time he attempted to get a hand on her she would deftly slip out of his reach only to leave him bleeding from another part of his body. The Wrynd around the circle cried in delight. The sight of the blood on the big man was working the zombies into a frenzy Harley knew would soon overcome them.
Victor no longer looked so sure of himself and his nervous glances to the outside of the circle and the other Wrynd confirmed the terror that was quickly overtaking him. When Vania ducked beneath yet another blow and scraped her nails down his right side, he howled in frustration and the scye above the truck suddenly dove forward, hurtling toward the zombie woman. Vania did a somersault away from the deputy and as the scye raced at her head, she leapt into the air and came down on Victor’s back, her feet digging into his side as she made two quick chops into his neck with the claws of her left and right hand. Blood poured from the gaping wound and Vania hugged him, buried her face into his neck and tore free a hunk of flesh. The deputy fell to his knees, then to his chest and the scye fell on the ground beside him as the woman rode him to the ground, still ripping with her teeth.
Harley cursed and drew his sidearm and his cutlass and as the other Wrynd pounced he went to work. Vania was oblivious to the battle raging around her as she tore at the dead deputy with teeth and claw.
Harley ducked out of the way of one rushing zombie and took another down with a pulse blast as his cutlass tore through the arm of another. Two more were rushing toward him and as he turned he saw Quinlan strike one across the head with a mighty swing of his baseball bat. Harley blasted the two coming and Quinlan dropped the bloody bat and opened fire with the pulse rifle. Harley dove to the ground as the young man demonstrated perhaps the greatest spectacle of poor marksmanship Harley had ever witnessed. He hit nothing he aimed at, but he did distract the Wrynd enough for Harley to finish the job. When he holstered his sidearm eight of the 10 zombies were dead on the highway.
Orrin still stood where he had, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he watched Vania feed on the dead deputy. It was becoming a gruesome scene as the woman bathed in his blood. Orrin was obviously pleased but made no move to take part.
Harley stepped into the dead animal ring toward Vania and she stopped feeding and looked his way with wildness in her eyes. She was coiled and ready to strike. He knew that when she leapt toward him she would move fast, perhaps faster than he could manage to counter. He hadn’t seen many faster in his life and again understood why Quinlan had come for her.
Quinlan took a step toward her as well and he dropped the pulse rifle on the ground and knelt in front of her, his eyes brimming with tears.“Vania. It’s me. It’s Quin.”
She glared at him with her black eyes and something like a growl bubbled up from her throat to pass between her bloody lips.
“Mom!” Noah and Raizor were standing outside of the truck, both crying as they looked at their father kneeling beside the thing that used to be their mother.
Vania’s eyes danced their way and when they did something inside the blackness changed for a fraction of a second and beneath the blood and the gore Harley saw the woman she had once been. She was lovely. She looked at Quinlan and her eyes looked lost, confused.
“Quin?” She squeaked, and Harley used that moment to bury his cutlass in her heart. A sigh escaped her lips as the life ran out of her and Quinlan folded her into his arms. He sobbed and tried to wipe the deputy’s blood from her mouth and his children rushed to their father’s side. But there was no wiping away the blood. She had been baptized in it.
Orrin howled and prepared to leap and Harley’s hand flashed. He pointed the blaster between the zombie’s black eyes. From behind him Harley heard a roar and turned to see the bear from the evening before rush in from the tree line. The deputy’s scye had burned a great long strip down the bear’s side and blood was oozing from its mouth, but it charged with all of its fury and Harley opened fire. Two quick pulse blasts to its head and it crashed into the side of the deputy’s truck and lay still. When Harley turned back Orrin the Wrynd King was standing at the top of the slide and even from such a distance Harley could see the murder in his eyes. Before he could fire the zombie slipped over the horizon and disappeared from sight.
Harley went to the truck and leaned against the grill, holstering his blaster and resting the cutlass on the hood. He could feel his heartbeat slowly returning to normal and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He smoked as Quinlan and his children cried over the dead thing that had once been a wife and mother and then he cleaned his cutlass and returned it to its scabbard.
The Wrynd king had escaped, and unless there were a miracle and the Rages hit him before he could rejoin his tribe, there would soon be dozens of zombies coming their way. Harley had seen enough to know there were no miracles. The king would make it to his Wrynd and they would be coming for their vengeance.
Perhaps the only way to avoid being forever hunted by the Wrynd was to make some form of appeasement for the death of their queen. Harley looked at the grieving family and made his decision.
He threw the dead deputy’s pack in the back of the truck and pulled out Quinlan’s. He tossed it inside the dead animal ring beside him and fished his truck’s access tag out of the dead deputy’s pocket. Quinlan looked up from his wife and crying children and saw his backpack and then looked at Harley, questioning.
Harley nodded toward the slide as he tossed his truck’s access tag toward them. It landed beside Raizor and she picked it up in her little hands, her eyes blurred with tears. “My truck's on the left side of the road on the other side of the slide, behind the ruins of an old
store. It runs strong. If you go now, you should be able to make it before Orrin can gather up his tribe and head back this way.” Harley kicked at the pulse rifle on the ground. “Best let the boy learn how to shoot. You’re a lost cause.”
Harley stepped over the body of a deer and a Wrynd and picked up the baseball bat Quinlan had used to cave in a zombie’s skull. He hefted it in his hands as he unclasped the scabbard of his cutlass.
“You’re pretty good with the bat. Try this.” He dropped the cutlass on the ground at the young man’s feet and started to back away.
“We’ll die.” Quinlan said.
“Not if you’re willing to live.”
A hardness came to the young man’s eyes then, a coldness that Harley knew all too well. It was the look of survival.
“You might be thinking I did you wrong killing her like I did. But I didn’t. She was a Wrynd and there’s no coming back from that. You might think it would be good to try and kill me where I stand. But I wouldn’t take kindly to it. Protect your little ones, if you can. They’ll be coming for you. They’ll be coming for me. Perhaps I’ll see you on the trail one day and we can settle whatever needs to be settled. But it won’t be today. Now move.”
Harley turned and climbed into the truck and left the man and his two children sitting in the middle of the road beside their dead wife and mother.
Chapter Eight
Worlds Apart
The horses galloped across Spanish Fork Wind Farm Memorial Park. Two sorrels and a bay. Their heads were up; their tails were high. They were the most beautiful sight Harley had seen in ages.
He knelt on one knee on the shoulder of the old highway and imagined that they were running toward him, as if in answer to his call, and a smile of wonder licked his dry lips. But then, perhaps he wasn’t calling them, perhaps they were calling him, coming to take him away from this world where he did not belong to a Wilderness that might embrace him, might make him whole. A mower was meandering across the grass, but Harley didn’t see another living soul. The world was theirs. They were magnificent and for a moment Harley remembered when he rode his first horse, before the Rages. It was an old mare and he had ridden her one afternoon to a bluff that overlooked their town and he remembered feeling her breathing deeply beneath him and he patted her dusty side as he looked down on his home and for a little while he felt at peace. The old horse certainly couldn’t run like those three wild ones racing through the park, but later, when he was older and before everything good had turned so bad, he had been atop a horse as it ran like that. It was like flying. He missed it more than he could ever say.
On the nine great antique wind turbines of the old wind farm, a dozen sentries roosted and as the horses entered the park, their hooves kicking up grass, one of the drones swooped off a wind tower and dropped toward them. Three pulse blasts echoed through the mouth of the canyon and they were cut down, skidding to a stop on the green grass of the park.
Harley frowned and put down his magnifiers. He folded his legs beneath him and sat cross-legged on the gravel shoulder and watched as a collector arrived, hovered over the dead animals and then scooped them up and headed back into the Hub. The mower stopped mowing and scurried over to where the lawn had been damaged by the horses and a number of arms and shovels and rakes unfolded from portals on the mower and began to repair the damage to the grass.
There was very little in the way of wind this morning and the blades of the great turbines barely turned. They were just a monument now to a bygone era when the world revolved around the need for energy. Now energy was of no concern to anyone and the world still turned, but Harley wasn’t sure why.
He had parked the truck at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon as the old highway slithered along the hip of the mountain, with Lone Pine Ridge on one side and Spanish Fork Peak on the other. From the mouth of the canyon you could gaze out at what used to be called Utah Valley and was now just a part of the Utah Hub. You could only see a sliver of the massive city and the sprawl of cityscape gleamed in the morning sun. A high-speed passenger train zipped through the valley, clinging to the skeleton of what used to be the southbound lanes of Interstate 15 and riding the northbound were the massive high-speed cargo trains carrying goods to keep a sedentary population happily on the Link. The HSP lines served as the arterial line for hundreds of smaller commuter lines linking the city. You could climb onto an HSP train and with a few simple transfers find yourself anywhere in the country before the setting of the sun.
Skyscrapers formed metallic mountains throughout the valley, each connected by rail lines and landscaped with trees and flowers and lawn stretching for miles. Utah Lake stretched out along the western border of the valley and the shallow lake looked like it was dirty green in the morning sun. A park encircled the entire length of the lake. Harley knew if he were to take one of the old highways southwest, shadowing the HSP lines that used to be I-15, he would eventually come to a gap in the Hub and enter the farm belt. The Utah farm was small in comparison to the massive farms that stretched across the Midwest and Eastern states. Most of Illinois, Kansas and Kentucky were now just a farm.
Aircraft of every size flashed across the sky and beneath them thousands of storks like an endless swarm of bees danced across the cityscape, responding to the whim of a pacified population. Sentries zoomed around the perimeter of the city scanning for animal life and promptly destroying anything that tried to enter the Hub boundary. Despite the bustle of drones and rail and aircraft, Harley thought the city looked peaceful and perhaps a little sleepy. Hubs were less cities now and more living, breathing creatures all their own and Harley wondered if the teeming masses of humanity who called them home were a part of the organism or a parasite?
It looked like paradise from his vantage point at the mouth of the canyon and in reality it should be paradise. People in the Hub wanted for nothing.
“Except a purpose.” Harley’s voice was a whisper quickly hushed in the canyon. He had not spoken since leaving Quinlan and his children to die at the claw and teeth and fist of the zombies. Perhaps the young man was right. Despite the spectacle humanity had created, it was rotting away.
On the northwest edge of the valley, a skyscraper stood alone, gleaming in the morning sun and Harley knew that was where he needed to go. It was the Justice Tower and held the Hub Marshal’s Service and the Utah Hub Legion. Perhaps there he could find some answers for Wrynd with linktags, lost legionnaires and men with gray eyes and unexplainable powers. But first he wanted to be among humanity for a moment, to get the smell of them, the feel of them, to be part of them, whether they wanted him to be or not.
Before he could do that he had to take care of a few necessities as he came in out of the Wilderness. It was illegal to carry a weapon in the hubs. He slipped his eyeset from his pack, put them on and called up his security box. A stork arrived 10 minutes later and he placed his sidearm and holster inside the box it provided, along with his hunting knife and after a moment of consideration, the baseball bat he had taken from Quinlan. He regretted having given the young man his sword. It had been a rash decision poorly made. He would get another one while at the Hub, unless his plan worked as he hoped, then he didn’t think there would be a need. The stork sealed the box and flew away with his weapons. He would call for them when he returned to the Wilderness.
With his weapons secured he headed toward a rail line. He would need to park the vehicle; it was bigger than needed in the Hub and would be hard to navigate. While the agglomeration was known simply as the Utah Hub, the individual cities still maintained a sense of identity and a localized but limited form of government. As he drove into Spanish Fork City, the old highway stopped at a massive parking garage adjacent to the HSP Line. He adjusted his eyeset and parked in the spot prescribed for him. Because of the size of the truck he had to take two parking spots and his RTI funds were drained accordingly. Those who still bothered driving anywhere, and it was becoming something of a useless luxury, used Pods. Or rather the Pods to
ok them where they wanted to go, since the driving was left to the Pod. They were a fraction of the size of the vehicle the deputy had driven, but considering the dead deputy’s desire to extra size everything in his life; it wasn’t a big surprise he liked to drive something totally inadequate for the world he lived in. Had lived in. Usually those who owned Pods bought a parking spot at a rail garage and would call for it when they needed it. Vehicles that you could actually operate on your own were a special order item.
Harley left his saddlebag in the truck, threw the backpack over his shoulder, slid his hat low over his forehead and went to wait for a commuter, trying not to trip over his own boots as he adjusted to wearing the eyeset continuously. It was no easy task but trying to get around the Hub without wearing an eyeset would prove even more difficult.
When the commuter arrived, Harley stepped inside and sat down and the chair formed around him comfortably. He linked and requested the seat to be a little cooler and asked for a massage and settled in with a satisfied sigh. When the train politely linked to ask his destination, he told it the nearest Hilton.
There was only one other passenger on the commuter, a little old man with a balding head who was also wearing an eyeset. When the old man saw Harley looking at him, he removed his eyeset and smiled. Harley nodded.
“Mornin’.”
“Good morning,” the old man beamed. His voice was rough and he cleared his throat and said it again. “Do you know you’re the first person I’ve spoken to in two weeks?”
“That so?”
The old man stood up and came to sit in the seat across from Harley. “Oh, I’ve talked to lots of people on this,” he waved the eyeset absently. “But you’re the first in the real world.”
