Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  The grave he’d dug was four feet deep. He’d not had it in him to go any farther. After resting her within, he stood at its edge to mutter a few words of prayer, wiping away stray tears and streaking dirt across his cheeks. At last he began returning the upturned earth to the hole, and at first he averted his eyes. In no way could he bear the sight of cool, moist soil covering her. Legs, abdomen, arms, face. It was like covering the biggest chunk of himself as well.

  His task was completed when the sun first kissed the western horizon. He fashioned a crude cross to mark the grave, using two short planks of wood lashed together with an ancient strip of leather.

  He bade farewell to Emily, for the time being, and started on the path back to the house. It looked bigger than ever now. Ugly, even, and twice as empty as before. He looked up into the sky, noticing for the first time that the earlier cottony clouds had been chased away by darker cousins. Fat and sullen, they hung low overhead. Indifferent.

  Caleb retreated into the house, toward a couch that beckoned with the promise of rest, and a few minutes later the earth tasted the first drops of rain.

  * *

  The storm gathered force outside the house, wind driving the rain furiously before it. Arcs of lightning sheared down from the sky, and thunder rolled like Armageddon. Shortly after eleven, it was even too much for Caleb, who normally slept as soundly as the proverbial log, and he awakened.

  Flashes of lightning helped him reorient himself. He couldn’t remember coming in earlier, and his head swam with murk.

  Without knowing why, he rose and walked into the kitchen. Its windows looked out over the back yard, all the way to the treeline. Rain pattered away at the panes of glass, pooled on the outer windowsill. Dirty dishes lay piled in the sink beneath him, stinking of decayed food.

  Lightning.

  The split second of near-daylight revealed a shape out back. Something that didn’t belong.

  Darkness.

  He waited, holding his breath, hands clenched on the sink’s rim.

  Lightning.

  Whatever it was, it was moving, swaying. Its progress to the house was slow, inexorable. And he knew exactly what it was.

  Caleb returned to the couch, a bundle of jitters and raw nerves. He switched on a lamp beside the couch, balanced atop an end table with one too-short leg braced by an old issue of TV Guide. Archie Bunker smirked up from its yellowed cover. The lamp’s light seemed yellow as well, impure in the wake of the lightning.

  What’s happening here…to me…?

  Caleb heard the back door burst inward; the rain swelled in volume. Sounds came from the linoleum at the back of the house. A swishing sound. Occasionally a soft plop. A slithering. Just beyond the light’s reach, in the shadows, it moved. He waited.

  Welcome home, Emily. Welcome.

  She stepped forward into the light, her progress slow and plodding. From head to chalky-white foot she was filthy. Much of the mud had washed away in the rain, but not all. It clotted her hair, oozed down her legs, bagged inside her nightgown. She stared ahead at Caleb with none of the warmth that had once been Emily.

  “I’m sorry about Rachel,” she said, voice as hollow and empty as a cave.

  Caleb found himself longing for his rifle. Not for this thing before him, but for his own skull. I’m probably crazy, in fact I hope that’s all this is, but either way, if this is what I’m gonna spend the rest of my days seeing, I don’t want no part of it.

  “I’m sooo sorry about Rachel,” she repeated. “But we can try again.” She reached toward him, moving ever closer. Gobbets of thick mud pattered onto the rug.

  Caleb squeezed his eyes shut, jammed his fists against his head.

  “I’m fertile again.”

  He opened his eyes in time to see her rip open her already tattered nightgown, exposing smeared and muddy flesh that time and nature and gravity had long ago made sag. A slow, rich torrent of watery earth flowed from within her.

  Emily grinned, terrible and cold. “We can try again,” she said, and held up her hand. Clenched there was a long, drooping strand of morning glories. She reached up and clumsily attempted to affix them in the tangles of her mud-caked hair.

  Caleb cried out, finally, ready to scream himself hoarse, and indeed he did when she kept coming, kept coming, and sank down upon him with her empty grin and her cold, slick embrace.

  * *

  By dawn the rain had slacked off. Caleb stirred with the faraway sound of a rooster, discovered he was shivering. His clothes were drenched. Rainwater. What the hell?

  From his vantage point he discovered that he was up to his old tricks again, sleeping where he wasn’t meant to. The first sight to greet him was the dining room ceiling, festooned with cobwebs. Sleeping on the dining room floor? Wouldn’t he ever learn?

  He started to sit up, clothes squishing and clinging like a cold shroud. He remembered vague nightmares, the worst dreams a man could have. In bracing one hand against the floor to push himself up, he discovered something else that didn’t belong here: his shovel. And it had most definitely been used within recent hours.

  When Caleb got all the way up, he saw that he wasn’t alone.

  Emily stared off into space from her usual chair at the dining table, jammed into it in a stiff, awkward pose. As if she’d been molded to fit the chair and the pieces just wouldn’t work anymore. Muddy Emily, unseeing, unspeaking, a rain-beaten strand of flowers threaded into her hair. Her coffee mug, stained from decades of use, sat untouched before her, as if placed there in blind hope.

  Oh Lord above, I didn’t, he thought. Tell me I didn’t go out there last night and DIG HER BACK UP.

  But the mud on his hands, on his clothes, on the shovel, was all he had for evidence. And dead women certainly tell no tales.

  Crazy from grief? Or from guilt? Didn’t much matter one way or another. But he knew as sure as day was dawning that he couldn’t stay here any longer. Best just to pack a few belongings in his battered old suitcase and seek the open road.

  And then where? Good question. But no doubt his rendezvous with a payback to the earth lay out there somewhere. He could go east, or north, or south…but he was a man of the land, and the most land of all lay to the west.

  Maybe there was work to be done somewhere. Of what manner, he hadn’t the vaguest of notions. And then again, maybe there wasn’t. But as Grandpap Elmer had once said, you go questioning too much and you can lose something in the knowing.

  SECOND EPOCH

  THE FINAL CURTAIN

  August 1987

  1

  He walked the streets of Potosi, alone, and for the time being, wanting it that way. They felt hollow, ringing with the fading echoes of a town that had been stricken, had whimpered mightily, and had finally died. A familiar scenario currently playing out in thousands of other places great and small.

  Nearly two millennia before, the apostle Paul wrote that it wasn’t a building that made up a church, but its people. If that was true, and Peter Solomon believed that it was, then consequently Potosi had ceased to be a town. Most of its residents had died, and of those who hadn’t, or hadn’t yet, most had fled, sneaking around the uniformed men enforcing the quarantine before it had been deemed hopeless, or heading out in plain view after there weren’t enough left to stand guard. The people made the town. All else—houses, stores, offices, schools, and yes, even their churches—were props. Like a movie set on a Hollywood back lot.

  “And as Potosi goes,” Peter Solomon said to himself with a self-satisfied nod, “so goes the world.”

  A sociologist’s dream, a little microcosmic model of society as a whole.

  There were stragglers, of course, just as he’d been betting and hoping there would be. A risky gamble, given the nature of the disease that Shaffer had cooked up, but Solomon was a betting man willing to take a chance or two. He didn’t often
play poker, but when he did, the stakes were high, and what he enjoyed even more than winning was making the other players sweat.

  And so, yes, stragglers. From time to time he would see them furtively ducking between houses, could hear the desultory drones of nearby cars. He could sometimes see and watch them through their windows at home, when the electricity decided to cooperate.

  It was browning out at times, seemingly with greater frequency as the days passed. High-tech systems, they were built for reliability. And complex? Oh hell yes, tremendously so. Efficiency always breeds complexity. Missouri belonged to a region where better than eighty percent of its electrical energy needs were met by coal, and the coal gasification process was broken down into eleven steps before the power hit the outlets. But without the good people to feed that fuel and drive those turbines and generators and combustors and operate those transmission and distribution centers, well, those 600,000 or so miles of overhead lines across the country were just so much ugly tinsel.

  He knew what the stragglers were thinking, could see it written across their faces. He could tell the pure cowards from those radiant with blind hope for miracles that wouldn’t come. He could tell these from those who’d been culture-shocked into permanent disbelief. Easiest of all to spot were the worthy ones, those reaching deeply into their souls to dig out enough strength and courage to face tomorrow.

  What a feat, what an accomplishment, to have been the catalyst to force these misguided folks into a new direction, far far better than the path they’d thought was progress.

  Peter Solomon walked on into the night, taking in its sounds, its sights. He smiled, let loose a high-pitched laugh of ecstatic glee, then breathed deeply of the night.

  It was even smelling better.

  * *

  Nights later, he was still wandering the streets of Potosi, no apparent destination in mind. These walks had become the equivalent of a stroll through the Concord woods for Thoreau, ripe with the constant discovery of an excitingly new and better world.

  So what next? he wondered. What do I do with my world?

  He gave it some thought, but before long fell prey to distraction. He saw a woman, maybe fifty yards ahead. He couldn’t make out much, given the darkness. But she was walking toward him, pushing…a shopping cart?

  He held his course. For all she knew, why, he was just another man, same as the rest. And when they drew up to one another, Solomon could see her. Appraise her. The short hair, the wary eyes, the fists tightly clenched on the pushbar of the shopping cart. It was filled with canned food, boxes, more.

  “You’re smart,” he said. “Stocking up, I mean.”

  Her hand dropped to the revolver resting in the cart’s childseat, lingered there. “That’s right.”

  “No more Kroger’s trucks for a while, I think.” And he smiled, first at her, then down at the gun beneath her hand. Would she actually try to use it on him? He didn’t think so. And he was a betting man.

  “You best not try anything, bud,” she said. “My daddy was a state trooper, and he taught me how to use this thing.”

  Solomon laughed, loud and hearty. He smiled at her, this time more gently. This girl was definitely okay. Tough as shoe leather on the outside, probably marshmallow filling on the inside.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s food enough around, for a while. And I have no desire to hurt you. Not you.”

  Her hand had been tightening on the gun, and she even went so far as to lift it an inch or two from the cart’s seat. But she stopped. And Solomon continued to smile at her, staring. He knew that she wanted to tear her gaze away, pull back from those blue, blue eyes, eyes of polar ice and low-grade flame. And that she just couldn’t. Or didn’t want to as badly as she’d first thought.

  “There’s something…” she said, faltering, because her heart wasn’t in it anymore, “…wrong about you.”

  He smiled wider still and began to let some of his edges slip, those threads of control that kept her from seeing what he was truly made of, the stuff of deity. He gave her a glimpse inside.

  The gun came up.

  And his hand was there to pluck it free and send it spinning, spinning into the shadows of night, to clatter on a sidewalk or bounce off a tree or thump into a lawn, he didn’t care which, just as long as it was no longer a barrier between them, a shield to prevent her from experiencing the greatest moment of her life.

  Marshmallow filling indeed.

  She went down on her knees, both of them still in the middle of the deserted street, modest houses around them as black as tombs on the inside. Trees whispered softly from all sides, and moonlight cast a soft, silvery luster on them both. She was no longer looking at him, not directly. Her gaze fell somewhere off to one side. He noticed that she was shaking, her body rigid, her shoulders quivering.

  Peter Solomon, Giver of Life and Comfort, reached down and lightly brushed his hand across the top of her head. A moment later she tilted her head up, caressed his hand.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t…”

  He nodded. There was nothing at all erotic in her touch—he knew the difference. But the simplicity of it, the sudden unexpectedness of it, the sheer beauty of that clasping hand surprised him to no end. Surely it was homage. And worship?

  Absolutely.

  He was quite sure that arousing him was the farthest thing from her mind. But in taking one look at her—her upturned face, her parted lips, her quickening breath—Solomon knew it was the nearest thing to his.

  “Lucky girl,” he whispered, thrusting a finger between those parted, trembling lips. “Lucky, lucky girl.”

  And so he moved quickly then, stripping her of her clothes, for she didn’t need them anymore, not in his presence, and he then hit a new peak in the evolution that these past weeks had brought him, and he became that God of Pain and God of Rapture that he knew was hiding inside his skin all along, and he took her there in the street on a bed of asphalt, in one long wail of agony and ecstasy.

  Perhaps there were others like her here in Potosi, those who hungered for what he offered, but there would be a lot more to the northeast. And the needs of the many had to be ranked ahead of the needs of these few. The time had come to seek them out. He fleetingly wondered who needed whom more.

  Solomon rose, arranged his own clothing once more, and left her cuddled beside her cart, curled onto her side…

  His newfound daughter, the first of many.

  2

  It had taken a while, but finally Jason conceded that Kelly, on his deathbed, had been right. He’d known exactly what he was talking about.

  John Kelly, his last bastion of security, had been dead just over three weeks. Since then, Jason had opened his eyes to what was going on. Tried to make himself see as Kelly had always been able to.

  He rose early in the mornings and, while he no longer worried about going to work himself, cruised along in his car to monitor those who still did. He drove between seven forty-five and nine. Mt. Vernon was a small town just like ten thousand others, easy to maneuver around in if you knew the ins and outs, but that’s not to say it was free from traffic congestion in the mornings and evenings. Even so, over the past three weeks he was finding it easier and easier to zip around unhindered.

  Jason walked up and down the mall, walked the streets around the town square, peering into storefronts as if they were museum exhibits. One by one they were closing up. Signs on the doors that had read open the day before now read closed. And didn’t change.

  He haunted the aisles of the grocery stores, aware of the gradual depletion of cans and boxes. Restocking of the shelves seemed sporadic at best, as if shipping schedules had been thrown out of whack. And in one store, he overheard a manager complaining over the phone that revenue was down forty-four percent and still dropping.

  Jason watched every televised network news broadcast tha
t he could. Something seemed odd from the outset, though it took him nearly a week to peg it: they weren’t doing many remote broadcasts. No man-on-the-street shots. Almost as if, by avoiding it, they kept you from seeing something that was there. Or wasn’t there.

  People are sick, people are dying, he told himself. Those are givens. But how widespread is this?

  The news wasn’t much help. He listened and watched, and perused the weeklies, and finally they did break down and acknowledge the existence of a disease some medical jokester had termed “the bionic plague.” Isolated outbreaks, they said. Not to worry, they said. An experimental vaccine was being perfected and widespread distribution was imminent, they said.

  “Right,” Jason told the anchor team one evening. “Now where’s that bridge you want me to buy?”

  And then there were the trucks. Army trucks. Huge and green, with double sets of wheels in the backs, their cargo areas covered with heavy canvas tarps that looked as big as circus tents. They roared through town every day, it seemed, although he never saw them stopping, never saw troops emerge from the rear. Maybe they were just waiting for something. And then?

  Martial law seemed about right.

  * *

  He felt it before he actually heard it, a deep rumbling from outside. He awoke with the sheets twisted about him, and in a mental haze thought it was awfully dark out for the garbage men to be making their rounds.

  The slam of the building’s door woke him fully. He lay stock-still in the darkness as his heart thundered into double time; felt its reluctance to ease back to normal. Just the building door, he told himself, nothing to get worked up over. People could come and go at all hours.