by James Davis
Through his scye, he found them again creeping back toward the Walmart and he shook his head in amazement. After they left, the zombies who had survived the attack turned and pursued Harley and had now pulled away from the old store completely. He watched through his scye as Quinlan and his children climbed out of the car and hugged the old man and woman before climbing into the pickup. The children were even smiling. He zoomed in on the old couple and grunted. He had never paid them any mind because they seemed so harmless. He would certainly pay attention to them now.
Staring at them from above through the digital sensors of the scye, something in the way the old man winked at him across the chaos of the Wrynd brought a memory flooding back. The years peeled away and he remembered why he had chosen to set up a homestead in Orangeville in the first place. Suddenly everything he had always thought was chance seemed anything but.
The first time he visited Orangeville he had only been a boy. It was before fusion and the Energy Wars, so he had to be no more than five, maybe six. He lived with Mom and Dad in Arizona on what he didn’t know was the Navajo Nation but was. Dad worked out of town, and it wasn't a good time there when Dad went away. One day, while he was out playing in the dirt (because really, what else was there to do), his Mom received a phone call. She had an old-fashioned phone she kept in her pocket and used for emergencies and to talk to Dad. It was an antique and the only reason it worked at all was because somebody had seen the potential in preying on the neand-minded (they weren’t called that yet, neands), who were afraid of the Link. They created an application that allowed the old phone technology to interface with the new Link. Mom hated technology, but she kept the phone for emergencies. He remembered even after the phone stopped working she would still carry it with her and when she finally gave it up she sat it on the bookshelf in the front room next to a little ceramic elephant standing on a ball. Harley had dropped the elephant and broken its trunk and Mom had beaten him and repaired it as best she could. She kept the phone by the elephant with the broken trunk and she would look at it almost every day, especially after Dad left and never came back.
But on this day, when the phone still worked, she had received a call from her sister who lived on a ranch overlooking Orangeville. She was dying from cancer, even though Marlboro had cured cancer; she couldn’t afford the cure and it was long before there was anything like free medical or income. Mom packed a suitcase with two fresh changes of clothes for each of them and his Spiderman toothbrush. They climbed into their old NG van and drove north and then west for a little bit and then cut through the desert and crossed over an old bridge that spanned a river that wasn’t much more than a trickle and through canyons that were so deep that it seemed like they would swallow the sky. Mom had stopped and showed him silly pictures painted on the side of a cliff and told him the ancestors of all their people had painted those pictures, but he didn’t really know what that meant. The pictures hadn’t really been all that great. He was pretty sure he could do better if she would stop long enough and let him try. But they hadn’t stopped all that long. It wasn’t too much longer until he reached the home of his Aunt Edna who was dying of cancer.
The house was a little two-bedroom home that sat on a hill and looked down on the valley of trees and homes that bumped against the tall and dusty mountains. The porch faced west and from it he could watch the sun set each day and he would wave at it as it dipped below the flat-topped mountains. His Aunt Edna had a lot of animals on her ranch. There were chickens and goats and horses and cows and cats, loads of cats. Even then Harley didn’t care much for cats. They scratched and hissed at him and he hissed back and threw rocks at them.
His Mom left him alone most of the time, except when it came time for lunch or dinner and then she would call him and give him a sandwich, usually peanut butter and honey, even though he didn’t really care for peanut butter and honey, and send him out to play. She was worried; he could tell because her brow had furrows on it and her eyes leaked, but he didn’t think she was crying because he didn’t think Mom knew how to cry.
Aunt Edna had a man, but Harley didn’t think he was her husband because he really wasn’t a very nice man. One afternoon, while Harley was waving goodbye to the sun, the man came out on the porch. He sat on the rocking chair Harley’s Mom liked to sit on, which wasn’t very often because she was usually with Aunt Edna in the bedroom, where Aunt Edna coughed and puked an awful lot. The man saw where Harley was looking and he nodded.
“Horn Mountain.”
Harley had looked at him, puzzled. “Horn Mountain?”
The man nodded and scratched his boobs. Even though he was a man he had boobs and Harley tried not to look at them, but he didn’t wear a shirt and it was hard not to. “That there is Horn Mountain.” He pointed at the peak the sun dipped behind. “Have a beer.” The man handed Harley a bottle and Harley took it and drank the beer. He sure liked that beer. It made him feel silly and a little sleepy.
Before Aunt Edna died, they had all gone into town and Harley had liked Orangeville. They stopped at Food Ranch and bought bread and water and beer (for the man with the boobs) and then they went down Main Street. There was a park and at the park there was a swing set and slide and there were other kids there and Aunt Edna had told Mom that they should stop for a little while and let Harley play. Mom hadn’t wanted to but Edna insisted. He ran to swing on the swings, because he sure enjoyed swinging on the swings. It was the closest thing he had ever felt to flying and he thought that someday he would surely like to fly.
Looking through his scye, years and years in the future Harley remembered that it was there, at the Orangeville City Park that he had first seen the old man and his wife.
They were selling apples from the back of their truck. Big red apples in old apple crates and there was a small crowd of people gathered all around them buying up those apples. Harley swung in the swing and remembered looking at the old man and his wife and thinking that those apples sure looked good, better than the peanut butter and honey sandwich he knew would be waiting for supper. And as he sat in the swing the old woman looked his way and she smiled, the same kind of smile she had smiled at him from across the killing field of the Wrynd and he had smiled back. She walked over to him and in her hand she held one of those big delicious apples and she held it out to him and said something, but he couldn’t exactly remember what it was that she had said.
But he did remember that he had stopped swinging and reached for the apple and the old man had suddenly been there and he had pulled the old woman’s hand away. When she looked back at him, the old man had looked at Harley and winked, just like he had from across the road.
“Not for him.” He had said.
And it had been a peanut butter and honey sandwich for supper that night.
His aunt died a few days later and after she was in the ground, they had gone home. When Harley was on his own and after he had crisscrossed the country a couple of times and had a mind that he might want to find a place that he could call his own he thought of his Aunt Edna’s little house and he went to Orangeville. The man who had lived with her was still there, but he left when Harley arrived. He seemed to be in a hurry to leave and that was fine.
The Rages had started then and the animals were all gone, but Harley still enjoyed sitting on the porch and saying goodbye to the sun as it dipped below Horn Mountain. Sitting on his porch all that time he had never given the old man and his wife a moment’s thought, or the apple that had been within his reach and snatched away.
Until today. Today it suddenly came flooding back.
Two days earlier he had stumbled across a legionnaire who apparently had her linktag removed by the Gray Walker and then dropped into the middle of a dead city. If you had asked him if the Gray Walker existed a week before he would have smiled and said “not likely.” He was a legend, a new age boogeyman. A man of the shadows in a world where there were no shadows. He was a mystery in a universe quickly running out of mysteries. If every
thing man had learned was accessible with a thought, what was left? The boogeyman. The Gray Walker. But now Harley not only believed in him, he believed there was a whole lot more out there than the Gray Walker.
A little old couple who tended an apple orchard had controlled the elements to fight off zombies. He had seen it with his own eyes. The same little old couple who had offered apples to everyone but him. For most of his life, he had gone where the wind willed him and he had watched the world spin on by, never really being a part of it, just an observer, just another wanderer on the path. But he had watched enough and learned enough to know that nothing was ever exactly as it seemed and considering the things he had seen in the past three days he knew that there were things stirring in the background, powerful things. Things he hoped might not break loose until he could move on. Because when they did break loose the world would rumble and the mighty Realms of Man would come crumbling down. If there was a place to hide from things like that, Harley counted on finding it before it was too late.
“Intrestin world.”
As the two vehicles left the parking lot and headed toward the business loop, Harley brought the scye back and pulled out of the garage, wishing he could control the scye and drive at the same time. Marshal Tempest had been right; to truly master the scye would take a lot of work. He hoped to live long enough to put forth the effort.
He let the truck coast back onto Main Street and shadowed the magic that wore the skin of two little old apple peddlers.
Chapter Fourteen
To the Great Orchard
Raizor couldn’t see out the windshield and kept trying to get on her knees. Quinlan forced her to sit back down. There was nothing out there she needed to see.
There were bodies on the business loop. He wove around them, trying to follow closely behind the old man and he tried not to look at the bodies as he did. Apparently, the Wrynd didn’t intend to turn everyone in the city.
The sun was dipping lower in the sky and Quinlan squinted into it as he drove. Two miles down the business loop there was an exit and Edward turned on his right blinker, making Quinlan laugh in spite of himself. There were zombies on the prowl and dead bodies in the middle of the road and the old man had used his blinkers.
Something flashed in front of him and Quinlan slammed on his brakes as a wave of Wrynd raced onto the highway and slammed into the side of the old man’s car. The car teetered back and forth for a moment and then another wave hit and the car tumbled on its side and then rolled off the road and down the sloping shoulder to the bottom, coming to rest upside down.
Quinlan cursed and stomped on the accelerator. The truck leaped down the highway and hit a half dozen Wrynd, scattering them before him as he went down the on ramp and skidded to a stop. He ordered Noah and Raizor onto the floor and climbed out, bringing the pulse rifle to bear and opening fire blindly. He hit trees, rocks and the exit sign and finally a pulse took out the kneecap of a Wrynd clambering toward Edward’s car.
“Yes!” He wasn’t hitting much in the way of targets, but the pulse blast was drawing the zombies toward him and giving the old couple a chance to escape, if they had survived the tumble off the road. He kept firing.
Edward Toll moaned and wiped blood from his brow. Sara cried out in pain and he quickly unbuckled his seatbelt and flipped over to face her. Her wrist was twisted at a bad angle, but her eyes were alert and scared and he nodded at her and unbuckled her own belt.
“Let’s go.” They climbed out the driver’s side window and he had a moment to look around him. Quinlan was drawing the zombies away with random and mostly useless blasts from the pulse rifle, but there were more racing down the shoulder of the highway toward them.
A truck screeched to a halt on the road above and Harley Nearwater climbed out. He looked down at the old man and the zombies racing toward them and he aimed his blaster at Edward’s car. He was aiming at the natural gas tank and Edward grabbed his wounded wife by the elbow and tried to move faster, looking back as he ran.
Harley Nearwater winked and pulled the trigger.
The explosion pushed Edward and Sara in the back, lifting them off the ground and tossing them toward Quinlan. They landed hard 30 feet from the young man and Edward cried out in pain and rolled over and onto his knees. The blast had thrown the zombies around his car back up the hill and several of them were burning and screaming as the fire spread.
Sara lay on her back and Edward knelt over her. Her eyes were wide and frightened and very far away and the old man took his wife by her right arm and tried to lift her but found that he could not. She groaned once and the breath escaped her in a gasp. Edward eased her on her side and a jagged piece of metal, hard and sharp and deadly, pierced her back. The weed-choked ground around her was pooling with her blood. Edward rolled her to her back and her eyes stared at him softly with the same love and humor and mischief that had made him fall in love with her so many years before. Then the light within them began to fade away and Edward Toll found himself alone for the first time in such a very long time.
He sat there, oblivious to the zombies around him or the dozen more that rushed across the road and down the shoulder of the highway. His hands were covered in blood, in his wife’s blood and he could not get over that. He heard someone shouting his name and he didn’t care because it didn’t really matter that someone was shouting his name because Sara was gone. How was it possible that she was gone?
“Ed! Ed!” The voice sounded like Sara but when he turned his head it was the young man named Quinlan and he was surrounded by Wrynd and firing madly. There were so many of them now that he was actually hitting some.
Edward stood on shaking knees and looked at the carnage around him and the lifeless form of his wife at his feet and the shiftless man on the roadway who had destroyed his car and killed his wife and something in his face began to change. The lines became sharper, harder and the green in his eyes became darker and the storm he had spoken of to Quinlan started there in the old man’s eyes and something like lightning flashed within them.
Edward extended his right arm and a wind devil swirled around him. His fingertips seemed to disappear into nothingness for a moment, then his hand and then his arm up to the elbow. He gritted his teeth and drew his arm back and when it came back from wherever it had been he was holding a stick, long and gnarled and thick and black with age. A walking stick, or staff, or shepherd’s crook you might think and in that you might be partially right, but you would mostly be wrong. For Edward Toll, it wasn’t any of those things; it was a talisman to draw his focus so he could return what was given.
The first of the Wrynd dared to approach him, snarling and reaching out with sharpened claws and gnashing teeth. Edward swung the staff and hit the hateful Wrynd and the staff or stick or crook or talisman ripped away flesh and bone and the zombie died where he stood. The old man raised his arms above his head, holding the staff in both hands and lightning flashed in the blue sky and erupted from the ground and enveloped the Wrynd and they fell dead, smoldering.
He had been given death and he returned death.
On the hill above him, Harley Nearwater aimed his blaster at the head of the old man. Edward looked his way and pointed the staff toward him and they stood that way for a moment, accusations in their eyes and Edward wanted very badly to kill Harley and Harley wanted very badly to kill Edward, but in the end they nodded at each other and Harley rushed to his truck and sped away.
Edward turned toward Quinlan and his hand flashed and the stick or staff or shepherd’s crook or talisman disappeared.
Quinlan, Noah and Raizor came to him then and they all stood and looked down at Sara. Even though they had only known her for a moment, they felt like they had lost someone very dear whom they would miss for the rest of their lives. In that, they were right.
Edward gripped Quinlan by the arm and the younger man helped him as he lowered himself to his knees before his wife. He kissed her lips and muttered soft words Quinlan and the children cou
ld not hear and then he placed his palm on her forehead and said goodbye. As he knelt there with his hand on his wife’s brow, her body seemed to shimmer in the afternoon sun as if she had been only a mirage after all. The ground seemed to reach up for her then, embrace her and when the old man lifted his hand, his wife was gone.
“Where did she go?” Raizor asked, and great fat tears streamed down her chubby cheeks.
Edward looked at the little girl and smiled a difficult smile. “She went to the great orchard.”
“Will you see her again?” Noah asked, wiping tears from his own eyes.
“I’ll find her there some day. She’ll wait for me.” He struggled to his feet and surveyed the carnage around him. “You need to be on your way. More will be here soon.”
“We’ll take you home.” Quinlan offered and took the old man by the arm. He seemed so frail now, so beaten.
“No. I’ll walk.” Edward pulled away, but not unkindly.
“You said it was more than 30 miles. You can’t walk that far.”
“I can. It will keep them occupied while you make your way home, having me between you and them. Go south until you hit Huntington, it will be the first town along the highway. Once in town there is a road that points toward the mountain. Take it, and it will take you home.”
The four of them walked back to the truck and Quinlan helped his children inside and buckled them up. “I have water.”
Edward shook his head. “I’ll find what I need along the way.” He noticed the concern in the young man’s face and shook his head softly. “I am not without friends out there.” After what he had seen Quinlan could not argue and could think of nothing to say.
The old man peered in at the children still crying in the front seat of the pickup, and he pinched their cheeks and kissed their foreheads. “I would like to have gotten to know you better I think. Maybe later? Remember what my Sara told you. Bottle this up for now, this pain and these tears until you have time to deal with them. And when you have the time and the strength take a sip now and again to remember what you have been through and grow strong from it. Drink up the pain and the suffering and piss it away and hold onto the memories. They will be your armor.”
