Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  A cigarette would taste good about now, so Caleb searched his pockets and got lucky. “If you’re looking for answers from me, I’m the wrong fella.” He popped the roll-your-own in the corner of his mouth, lit it. “But lemme tell you something I heard in a sermon once. It was something like, ‘The only thing you need for bad to win is for good people to do nothing.’ Something like that. I reckon that’s the kind of fix we’re in right now. Most good people that’s left are too scared to do much of anything.”

  “But you weren’t.”

  “Shoot, I just came along at the right time. And you done most of the work anyway.” Caleb grinned toward her, not knowing if she could see him. “Anyway, you want ideas off the top of my head, that’s it. Good people are mostly lying low, and it’s the rotten ones coming out of the woodwork now.”

  “That’s not a very comforting thought to go to sleep by.”

  “Nope.” He pondered this a moment. “But at least it’s realistic.”

  He drew his rifle closer. Fire could only protect you so far.

  * *

  Diane was roughly the same age as Caleb’s and Emily’s daughter would’ve been, had she lived. And survived the plague, as well. Lots of ifs these days.

  Such were the last things on his mind before he fell asleep. Caleb found himself halfway pretending that the woman lying over there, with a matched set of holes in her side, was really his long-lost daughter. He couldn’t recall ever having tended to a woman that much younger than himself, and he rather liked it. It had nothing to do with physical attraction, but even if it did, he wouldn’t be fool enough to believe she could fall for someone like him. Although…once, when she was rearranging her torn clothing, he had caught a glimpse of one pert breast, and it had made him feel quick-hearted for a moment.

  No, the real boost had been in someone’s need for him. It just felt good to be needed again. And to be able to help.

  His dreams that night were the most tranquil he’d had in weeks.

  He stood at a bright seashore, the tide splashing his heavy boots. And although the distance to the other side was vast, unfathomable even, he could still see Emily over there. For the first time, his mind’s eye saw her restored to the neat, matronly woman she’d become in later years. Not the wasted frame lying on her deathbed, and certainly not the muddy relic he’d propped up at the dining table.

  She waved. Her other hand held the hand of a younger woman. She looked a tiny bit like Diane, with the same exquisitely contoured jawline, the small upturned nose. But her long hair was the same raven black shade that Emily’s had been when she’d been that age.

  “Look who was here to meet me,” Emily was saying. She had no need of shouting, despite the distance. “She has something to say to you…”

  And Caleb, who had waded into the surf only to be pushed back onto shore, was all ears.

  “I love you, Daddy,” she said, reaching out and falling so very very short. “And listen to me, because I can only say this once. But look for a silver door, Daddy. Look for a silver door.”

  And then the waves came crashing in, and when the foam and spray cleared, the horizon showed nothing but water meeting sky…

  …and Caleb jerked awake with a smile on his face, tears in his eyes, and the lingering smell of morning glories in the air.

  7

  Jason looked down with something approaching disgust at the squirrel roasting over his fire. In the days when he’d gone hunting with his dad, a squirrel now and then tasted good. And at first, after he’d fled town for parts remote, squirrel had again been a welcome taste summoning memories of better times. Fun to hunt, too. Squirrels were agile little farts, experts at keeping tree trunks between themselves and hunters. Jason took to hanging his brightest shirt on a low branch facing one side of a tree and stationing himself on the opposite side. A gentle tug on a fishing line would set the shirt into motion, confusing even the Einstein of squirrels into spiraling around right into his sights.

  But after nearly a month, the new tends to wear off.

  He drew his hunting knife and sliced away most of one leg, chewed it for a moment, spat it into the weeds beside the squirrel’s fur and innards.

  “Rambo I am not,” he said. He walked over to the edge of the pond, whose glassy surface mirrored the sunset ahead. Behind him, a canopy of trees sheltered him and his nylon tent, a palace of green and brown. “My kingdom for a Pop-Tart!” he shouted over the water.

  After Jason had returned from his visit with Larry Cameron and the flood of return messages on Larry’s computer, he’d taken Kelly’s advice about an extended camping trip. He stocked up on what he remembered from past trips with his dad…tent, lantern and fuel, a couple of guns, hatchet, a game knife, a cache of canned and dehydrated food, and the ever-popular toilet paper. He bought what he could, looted the rest from closed-down stores. An uneasy mixture of guilt and thrill overwhelmed him as he broke in and helped himself at a sporting goods store. The noble renegade.

  Once he’d loaded his car, he mentally kicked around his options of where to go. Jason finally settled on the most familiar: the acreage in the country his parents had bought as a building site for some future day that would never come…the land Kelly had helped him sell. The new owners hadn’t built yet either, and until they showed up to run him off, Jason was claiming it as his own, as well as the neighboring tracts. Call it squatter’s rights.

  The woods gave him squirrels and sometimes hares to eat, the pond gave him fish. A few times he ran across mushrooms while hunting or jogging, and he harvested them, hoping his memory of what was safe had held out over the years. So far, so good.

  Jason swam daily, fully naked, and was pleasantly surprised when after two weeks he was feeling better than any other time in recent memory. He could swim end to end, nearly the length of a football field and back, and barely be winded.

  He’d been needing a haircut before he’d bugged out, and now it was longer than at any point in his life. He’d taken to wearing a bandanna much of the time. An even growth of beard had sprouted across his face; itched like hell at the beginning of August, but now it was past that stage. And whenever Jason looked at his distorted reflection in a shiny strip of stainless steel around the lantern, he barely recognized himself.

  A peculiar spell fell over him during his month in the wild. Such a trip was a familiar thing, and life in the woods went on as always, undisturbed. Everything out here was normal, and calm. Routine. Could it follow that things back in town were likewise? That the worst was behind them, and it was time for a new Reconstruction? He hoped. How he hoped.

  The squirrel continued to sizzle and drip into the fire, and the sound conjured an undeniable lust for a hamburger. Surely you could still get a hamburger somewhere.

  “Only fourteen miles back to town,” Jason said. He spoke a lot of his thoughts aloud these days. “Could pack up and be there in an hour, give or take.” Would things be stabilized again? One way to find out.

  He reached over the fire and waved one of the squirrel’s stumpy little forelegs at himself. “Been nice knowing you.” He ate a can of Snack Pack peaches to tide him over, then gathered his gear.

  What awaited him at his apartment? Was it as he’d left it, or had the original tenant survived and returned? If that was the case, he’d been due back two weeks ago. For that matter, Jason should have been back up at college at the same time.

  Forty-five minutes later, he’d stowed everything back in his car and had uncovered it of the tarp and fallen branches he’d used to shield it from sight from the road. By the time he was homeward bound, dusk was surrendering to the dark of night.

  * *

  Traffic was virtually nonexistent as he returned home from the east. Instead of a summer evening, it reminded him of the predawn hour on a winter’s day, when nothing moves unless it absolutely has to. Life may stir behind the scenes, but it hides
itself well.

  The streetlights. After two blocks of passing them, he finally noticed them standing in useless rows. No electricity? No lights burned within houses or businesses. No neon. No hum of hidden conversations from the telephone wires. The town had sunk into a coma, and the only thing that seemed alive were the shadows.

  “Come on, come on out,” he muttered. “Joke’s over.” His voice sounded very loud within the car after nearly a month of having it swallowed up by the forest. And surely that hadn’t been a fearful whine creeping in at the last, had it?

  Come on, snap out of it. No need for worry yet. Power outages weren’t exactly unknown. They wouldn’t just let the system break down, would they? Whoever they were. The collective they. And where were all the survivors? Inside, of course. Waiting for the tube to come back on so they could see the President come on to smile and tell everybody left how great things would be again. Sure, just use your head, use your head.

  More than anything, Jason longed to slam on the brakes and turn around. So nothing could burst that last little bubble of hope. Instead he gripped the wheel and rolled into a present that had skewed wildly away from the past.

  He weaved around and through multi-car wrecks whose origins would forever remain mysteries. He tried not to notice the people lying on lawns and sidewalks here and there. What a shame, vagrants now sleeping out in public. Somebody should do something for them. Who? They, of course.

  He passed the IGA. There didn’t appear to be any glass left in the front doors. But who needed to break into someplace open twenty-four hours a day? He drove past the high school, and by moonlight tried to count broken windows. He gave up after thirty. Just like the old Alice Cooper song: School’s out for summer, school’s out forever…

  Jason didn’t stop until he’d reached the west side of town. Even Broadway was still. He checked the watch he hadn’t worn for a month, but faithfully wound daily. Nine-thirty. They should be open.

  He hadn’t believed it all until this moment, not really. Not deep inside. But now, the bubble of hope had finally popped. And as he stepped slowly from his car, staring upward at the yellow icon towering overhead, he knew that all the hopes for any semblance of normality had been forever pissed away.

  Jason lowered his gaze and stared across the parking lot into the windows of McDonald’s, silent and empty of life as a tomb. And he sat beneath the golden arches and cried.

  * *

  He had to keep driving. It didn’t matter where, because solace came not from destination, but from being behind the wheel. The car was a friend when friends were hard to come by. And the thought of going back to that empty apartment…well, he’d been alone too long.

  So he drove, and drove, and ended up in a section of town diplomatically described as not the best. Not the place you wanted to have a flat tire. Before, at night, it might’ve been a little dangerous. Now…

  The way Jason remembered it, his front tire didn’t just go flat, it ruptured. He heard the unmistakable whup-whup-whup, felt the sudden grab to the right. He pulled over and stopped, leaving on his fog lights for illumination. Moonlight wasn’t too bad, though. He stepped out into total silence, broken only by the ticking of his engine.

  Houses slouched on the left, shabby and rundown. On the right stood federally subsidized housing, stacks of apartments. Maybe they’d been nice at one time, but if they had, he couldn’t remember. They’d given way to ripped screens, bent storm doors, peeling paint, graffiti-spattered walls. Even in the moonlight it was a depressing sight. And who knew what horrors they’d become inside?

  Jason pulled the jack and spare and tire iron from his trunk. Broke the lugs on the flat. Ran his finger along a jagged hunk of steel protruding from the rubber; it had sliced into his tire like a knife through a cake. Sweating freely now, he jacked up the car and removed the flat. He was rolling the spare closer when the shadows between the apartments came alive.

  There were three of them, their faces unseen, but he knew all he needed from the sound of their voices. They didn’t speak in a tone that he found particularly menacing, just mindless. And this made them the most dangerous of all. Jason stood by his fender.

  “We caught another one.” It came from someone who giggled a lot, as if trapped in an endless puberty.

  Jason’s heart seemed to triple its going rate. He’d always fancied himself more lover than fighter, and probably not much of a lover at that.

  “We been watching,” said the middle one, a black kid, and Jason saw the flash of a grin. “You did most of the hard work. We don’t much mind finishing.”

  “Finders keepers,” said the giggler.

  Jason looked from one to the other to the third one, who hadn’t said a word yet, and it didn’t appear he was going to. He just looked hungry. And not for food.

  Jason found his voice. “In town, anything you need, it’s free. You don’t need my shit.”

  “Fuck no. We just want it.” The black kid advanced another step.

  “More fun this way.” A high burst of giggles.

  Jason could’ve walked away and let them take it all. Maybe they’d have let him turn away unharmed and maybe they wouldn’t have. But it wasn’t this uncertainty that made him decide to stay and fight. It was the memory of his trip to St. Louis for Kelly. The stupid shortcut through the alley, the mugger who had come out of nowhere. And most of all, the sick feeling of violation, without doing anything to stop it. The odds were even worse this time, but damned if he’d go down without swinging.

  Hidden behind him, his right hand groped, found the top of the jack column. Worked down a few inches. Closed on the tire iron.

  And it felt good, felt right.

  He made no move to surrender. Would give no quarter.

  The hungry one moved first, and now he had a knife.

  Jason yanked the tire iron free of the jack’s lever with a grunt, swinging its angled end into the guy’s head. He flopped to the street like a rag doll, knife clattering into deeper shadows.

  The other two were on Jason in a second, fast and lithe, their muscles like corded leather. They pulled the tire iron from his fist, and as he curled up in defense of whatever hell was to come, he took the first blow across the back. With the second they aimed for his face, but his forearms got in the way. The third felt like it caved in his entire left side of ribs. There came more, and he lost count, and then they started jabbing at him with the beveled end. Jason tasted blood and tears. If only he could get to the guns inside the car, or the game knife. They looked a marathon’s distance away.

  He tried to stand, and made it. As a runner, he’d always had limber legs, strong legs. He high-kicked into the giggler’s face, aiming mostly on instinct, and connected. The force sent the kid down to the pavement. Jason, unbalanced, went down beside him. They both lay sprawled beside the car, the giggler closer than he.

  And he saw what might work to turn things around.

  Jason dodged a downward swipe of the tire iron, and jabbed his elbow into the giggler’s groin. The kid cried out and rolled away from him, closer to the car…and under its edge.

  Things are gonna get ugly, Jay, Kelly had said. Real ugly. And if you gotta get ugly to hang in there, you go on ahead and do that.

  Jason hesitated one last second. Could he really do this?

  Damn right I can.

  He rolled toward the front of the car, grabbed the bottom of the jack with both hands. He gave a heave and tugged it free of the bumper. As the baseplate went clanging across the pavement, his car dropped like an anvil. Jason heard the giggler’s ribcage splinter under the wheel, like he’d just stepped on the biggest roach in the world. The kid’s legs spasmed for one frenzied moment, then fell splayed and still.

  The sight left the black kid, the largest of the three, speechless and paralyzed. Only for a moment, but it was all the time in the world to Jason. The raise/lower contr
aption had locked at the end of the jack, turning it into something that was half-club and half-ax. Jason rose upward and bellowed and pushed himself toward the last one. He swung the jack at his head with all the strength he could summon. In the second before the single devastating impact, the black kid looked as though he couldn’t wait to get away.

  Jason stood, unsteady, and the sudden silence was deafening. His hair had fallen past his eyes, and strands trailed into his mouth. Other strands lay plastered against his skin by blood. He never knew he could hurt so much, in so many places at once. Using the jack like a cane, he started to hobble away.

  And then the hungry one groaned, sat up in the road. Rubbing his head, he grimaced and looked up at Jason as if to ask, What the hell am I doing down here?

  This time Jason felt no hesitation. Teeth flew from the kid’s head like dice.

  This time the swing took Jason back to the pavement. He couldn’t get back up. He lay there for a moment, then pushed himself up to retch into the street. He gritted his teeth and crawled toward the far side of his car, leaving wet smears behind to glisten in the moonlight. He pulled himself off into a shallow ditch, rolling onto his back. The moist smell of sour earth and decay surrounded him, and he gazed upward at the blurry twin moon high above.

  All he wanted for the moment was to sleep. Because sleep brings peace to a troubled soul. And time heals all wounds.

  THIRD EPOCH

  KEYS TO THE KINGDOM

  October 1987 – January 1988

  1

  If a few months ago someone had told Erika that she’d be living in a department store by autumn, she would have thought them out of their mind. The place still didn’t feel like a home yet, but at least she felt she was making a little progress.

  After the evening she’d watched Chad Wilder die, she’d turned her back on Spanish Lake. In no way could she stay where so many she’d known and loved had died. Anywhere but there.