Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  Travis glared wearily at him and for a second Erika saw a pained resignation in his eyes. “Just be there,” he said. He looked like a man who knew he was caught in a dead end and had no idea how to get out of it. If he hadn’t done the things he had, she might have felt a touch of pity for him, but no, he was forever beyond that. She wished him only more misery, until the stain of his existence was washed off the face of the earth.

  As they left, she forced Travis Lane from her mind. Peter Solomon, though, what of him? His touch. His stare. He was utterly dangerous—she had no illusions—and yet, regardless of which side he backed, there was something undeniably intriguing about him. As if he were more than baseline human. Just as she was. The way she’d poured herself into Jason on Christmas Eve…could it be possible that it might be a two-way street with someone? Someone like Solomon?

  Don’t even think about that, she told herself. Just DON’T.

  But some things she wasn’t able to force out. And for the first time since Jason had left more than three months ago, she found her curiosity, however against her will, piqued by someone else.

  * *

  Whether or not to go to the stadium was a subject of great debate over the next twenty-four hours. There were those ready to bow to any demand, those ready to defy Travis and Solomon and the rest on all counts, and those who struck a middle ground, retaining a clear grasp of the situation and weighing principles against reality.

  Ultimately it was decided that they would go, expecting the worst and hoping for the best. All except for Diane and Farrah, who’d had the good fortune to be absent for the invitation.

  As dusk approached that evening, the air was sultry and still, as if the city were holding its breath. They walked the few blocks to the stadium, as silent as strangers to one another. Once there, they found what must surely have been the largest gathering of people since the end of the previous summer, before the plague had tightened its grip. An influx of cars came in from the west, from the south, from the north. Erika gauged the facial expressions of the people those cars brought, everything from pale fright to eager anticipation.

  They followed the ramps inside, taking seats near the field in the stadium’s bowl-shaped interior. Vast expanses of empty red-orange seats stretched toward the upper rim, vivid against the bland gray of concrete. The crowd remained concentrated on the lower terrace, mostly, and Erika and Caleb guessed there might’ve been as many as two or three thousand. Almost inconsequential compared to Busch Stadium’s capacity, but still the largest group they’d seen in close to a year.

  Has it really been that long? she wondered. Have we been living in this shadow for a year?

  A platoon of genial people wandered through the crowd, toting Styrofoam and plastic coolers, and passing out—what’s THIS?—cold beers and sodas. Cold cans that would sweat in the evening heat. Cold! How had they managed such a thing? The sound of conversation swelled louder wherever the concession workers had just left.

  Down below, seasons of neglect had left only the last hint of the white lime lines on the field from the days when the Cardinals played here. Pyramids of scrap wood stood spaced at wide intervals, and as the dusk deepened above and the day’s last light waned beyond the gray lip of the stadium, the bonfires were lit. The pyramids became pillars of flame, and Erika blinked at the momentary smarting in her eyes. She drank deeply of the Sprite in her hand, feeling guilty for enjoying it so. They’re trying to bribe us. And how little it would actually take at this point.

  She watched as Travis and his people took the middle of the field. No Peter Solomon, though. She made a point of searching the entire assembly, all, what, three hundred? Four hundred? More?

  Travis lifted a bullhorn to his mouth, and after a piercing squall of feedback his voice came through as clear and strong as a trumpet. He launched into a monologue that seemed to have grown from the seeds of what he’d had to say at the executions outside Union Station. He told them all so many things, which may have been truth and may have been lies. But down there, on the ragged Astroturf, they believed it, and that’s what counted. Because they were the ones calling the shots.

  They’d all been kept down, Travis told them. Everyone, on the field and in the stands. And a year ago to this day, salvation had come in the form of a sickness, sweeping away the weak and leaving the strong to start afresh. New beginnings were always harsh, he told them, and this one was no exception. But he was the one to lead them all into the new day. Because he was strong. And because he had the mandate of a wise and visionary man who’d come through bearing their salvation in the first place: Peter Solomon.

  Travis fell silent, and a brief lull descended over the stadium. In the hesitation, like a breath drawn before a shriek, Erika felt the tension ripple the air.

  Something’s about…to hap—

  It came out of the darkness overhead in one of the upper decks, a single spotlight whose beam speared blinding white through the smoky twilight haze and picked him out on the far side of the field. Peter Solomon, ablaze with electric light, silvery-blond hair like a corona about his head. His eyes, she knew, would be like twin sapphires. The crowd roared in astonishment, and in that instant, every eye was on him, the Bringer of Light.

  Erika shut her eyes. Because he looked absolutely resplendent.

  Solomon was the only god they needed now, Travis told them.

  As Peter Solomon paced forward toward the rest, Travis stated the obvious: Yes, they had reactivated the electricity. On cue, the banks of stadium lights winked on, flooding them all with glare. Men with foam extinguishers snuffed out the bonfires…all but one. Electricity, Travis said. Hadn’t they enjoyed the cold drinks? Didn’t adequate heat sound good for next winter? They could have it all again. The electricity would be routed to a small sector of west end homes.

  Travis then issued a warning against opposing them, because they knew best, and they would see to it that things were better than they’d ever been before. He told them of a handful of others who’d been misled, who’d fought against them and the future in store for all, who’d tried to sabotage the restoration of electrical power…and failed. Travis motioned toward one of the dugouts.

  “Watch close,” Travis shouted through the bullhorn. “And if anyone else has any ideas about treason, let this be a lesson.”

  Five big, black rings were rolled toward the center. Erika squinted to bring them into clearer focus, and for a moment thought they looked like wagon wheels, fat with large spokes. Caleb was the first to recognize them for what they were.

  “Tractor tires,” he said quietly. “Big ones.”

  “What’s that in the middle of them?” she asked.

  He turned toward her, the wrinkled landscape of his face drooping. “People,” he said.

  As they rolled into better view, she could see a struggling person hung spread-eagle on each tire, chained at the forearms and shins to the rubber. When all five were at mid-field, they were laid flat, edges touching, looking like a parody of the Olympic symbol. The black rubber glistened as if wet.

  A dozen torches were plucked from the last remaining bonfire.

  “Rubber burns fierce,” Caleb said through a tightening throat. “Oh sweet Jesus, don’t let them poor folks suffer.”

  To Erika’s left, Colleen grabbed Nicholas and held him tight, pulling his face toward her shoulder, then covering his ears with two cupped hands.

  Torches were dipped down to brush the tires, turning them into five rings of dancing flames. The shadowy figures within each ring strained in a sudden screaming frenzy, and soon, dense smoke began to billow upward.

  Solomon pulled a young woman from the crowd on the field. She went willingly enough, and he began to undress her. Travis, still holding the bullhorn, let everyone know there was still time to join them, and look ahead to a future they would carve out for themselves. Because now, more than ever, if you weren’t with th
em, you were against them.

  At first, nothing. Then one by one, by pairs, by trios…the offer was accepted throughout the stands. Erika bowed her head into her hands, not bothering to look up again until she became aware of a commotion at her right.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Rich was saying.

  “You don’t own us, Rich. We can make up our own mind.”

  Rich was on his feet, squared off against Ted Gilliam, one of their own. Ted’s hand gripped the wrist of a woman named Wendy. The two of them had been paired off since last fall. Wendy averted her eyes when Erika looked their way in disbelief.

  “You’re going? With them?” Rich said, face livid. “They’re against every scrap of decency we still hang on to!”

  “They’re for surviving, aren’t they?” Ted shouted. “And they’re doing a lot better job of it than we are!” His hair fell across his forehead and into his eyes. Angrily he pushed it back, sweat glistening across his brow. Spittle flew from his mouth. “You’re not facing facts, Rich. Against people like that, we are done. Listen, from where I’m sitting right now, Travis Lane doesn’t look so bad after all!”

  “Didn’t what they just did to those people down there faze you?” Rich was close to angry tears. “Didn’t that sink into your thick head?”

  “When it comes to being strapped to a burning tire or holding the torch…? I’ll pick the torch every time.”

  “We just want to survive!” Wendy shouted. “We just want to live.”

  That’s the same thing Jason said, Erika thought, recalling the morose night he’d come back from their arena. The exact same thing.

  Rich collapsed into his seat, shaking, and they watched Ted and Wendy clamber over the wall to drop onto the field. After another minute they were swallowed up among the rest, two among hundreds. Soon, maybe, two among thousands.

  Erika sought out Solomon once again, finding him just as he mounted the woman he’d chosen from behind. She swore that he was grinning straight up at her the whole time.

  4

  Some people pictured eternity as a place of pearly gates and streets of gold. Jason was beginning to think of it as gray, with a white line down the center. The road…it was going to outlast him, he was certain of it. Outlast him and every fading memory of him.

  He was rolling west on I-40 down the center of Oklahoma. The Mustang was caked with a thick coating of road dust absent only in the tracks worn by the wipers. With the sun blazing high in the western sky above, Jason laughed at the shape of the cleared portion of windshield. It abruptly looked to him as if someone’s enormous ass had plunked down on the glass and wriggled. He laughed until he cried.

  “Oh shit,” he moaned to himself, wiping away tears from his sunburned cheeks. “You’re losing it, Jay. You’re losing your fucking mind.”

  Jason twisted the rearview mirror so he could look at himself. No, no…he didn’t look crazy. A little road-weary, yes. Expect that. But otherwise okay. A mentally regular sort of fellow. Both eyes in their respective sockets. Bearded and long-haired again, a minor messiah complex or two taking root, but otherwise fine…and…fucking…dandy…

  “I’m not even looking for a home anymore!” he shrieked to the four winds, all of which seemed to be buffeting the inside of the car. The air conditioner had died two weeks ago. Had anybody checked the Freon before he’d left St. Louis? Probably not. And it was hard to get a good mechanic these days.

  He hadn’t slept the night before. Instead, buzzed on instant coffee, he’d driven through the night into the dawn through the morning into the afternoon. The months of fruitless searching had begun to weigh on him, like boulders piled atop the chest of a medieval wretch condemned to execution. Why map out a course anymore, huh? It was all luck anyway. Destiny. If they were out there—whoever they were, just the faceless they he was supposed to find—why, no doubt they’d just reach out and snare him when he passed by.

  He punched the eject button on the tape player. Four hours of the same Aerosmith tunes were quite enough. He popped in Van Halen and let fly.

  Jason pulled his eyes from the never-ending gray river before him and looked at the grubby notebook in the other seat. The letters to Erika. He hadn’t written in…how long? Two weeks? Yes. He remembered telling her about the air conditioner going out. One of the few things that made sense when he read it later. Lots of rambling in the last letters, as if it were somebody else’s voice coming through instead of his own.

  He could remember the last line he’d written: I feel like a guitar string tuned five octaves higher than normal. And how about now? Six octaves? Seven? Can I get an eight, ladies and gentlemen?

  He was finding it tough to remember just what Erika looked like, what she felt like. He remembered that there was an Erika, that he had loved her and she had loved him. That she’d been important in his life. But surface details were the best he could do. He could remember facts, but the underlying emotions had submerged beneath a topsoil of speed and motion and asphalt.

  A truck stop materialized at the right of the highway like an oasis in a desert, a heat-shimmering lot instead of water, light poles and towering signs instead of palm trees. No mirage, not this one. No mirage would advertise itself as the “Roadrunner Trucker Plaza” and the “Home of the Runnerburger.”

  “Mmm boy, sounds appetizing,” Jason said. “Shovel me up three to go.” Then, in his best pirate’s voice, “And pray thee it dasn’t give me the runs, arrr.”

  He arrowed the car to the right, cutting from the highway onto the off-ramp, then to a frontage road that doubled back to the Roadrunner’s lot. Three semis and a handful of cars were scattered about like discarded toys, each one slowly sinking beneath a heavy coat of dust. He coasted up next to the building and shut off the engine, killed the music. Silence and stillness assaulted every sense, and his body thrummed with imagined vibrations. Walking across the lot was like trying to regain land legs after a month at sea, and his entire body felt as hot and grainy as his eyes.

  He found a welcome mat of shattered glass at the front doors. So he wasn’t the first wayfarer to drop by.

  “Dear Erika,” he addressed the building. “Friday, July fifteenth. Discovered a wonderful out-of-the-way dining experience. No tipping required.”

  The inside was a hotbox of dry smells: yellowed paper, cracked vinyl upholstery, and food long since gone to stone. Sunlight angled in through Venetian blinds and lay across the interior in long bright slats. He paused for a moment at the counter, resting his shortened shotgun against one of the round fat-cushioned stools. He stared at the monstrosities inside the pie case. Eight wedges of a fuzzy, powdery blue-green stared back at him.

  Edible food finally surfaced in the kitchen. The place had been pretty well cleaned out, but whoever had preceded him had missed a stainless steel cabinet in the farthest reaches of the kitchen. On the lower shelf he found a number of single serving cans: chili, beef stew, chicken and dumplings, beans and wieners, fruit salad. He dumped a bunch of cleaners from a box and scooped the cans off the shelf.

  Jason sat out at one of the booths, and as he popped the lids from some stew and fruit salad he looked over the final hit parade of country-and-western on the table’s miniature juke. A time-honored classic: “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” Right. That was the legacy to leave some future archaeologist.

  He heard a low sound, like the drone of a squadron of airplanes. Soon he felt steady vibrations across the floor, the stiff seat. With a mouthful of sickly-sweet diced fruit, he peered out the window.

  Trucks. Better than a half-dozen. Several semi-cabs with no trailers behind any of them, a couple-three pickups. The caravan nosed into the parking lot and spread out like a herd of migrating buffalo. Exhaust snorted and belched and farted into the still Oklahoma sky. And then, one by one, the engines died, leaving Jason to listen to faint voices and closing doors
and scuffling footsteps. Beyond the blinds, they approached, throwing a swarm of shadows across the floor. And then they were inside.

  At least a dozen, Jason noted from his booth, but he didn’t bother counting. Whenever there’s only one of you and you can’t count the others at a glance, there’s really no point in counting at all. Mostly men, but a few women as well.

  “You the maître d’?” asked the man in front, his voice an easy drawl. He was tall and rangy in jeans and a tight T-shirt. Beneath a mesh cap and mirrored shades, his face looked lean and leathery.

  “Still waiting for my last paycheck,” Jason said.

  The leader chuckled, as did a couple others. He scuffed at the gritty floor with a boot. “You know, son, I think I know how we can make things easy on all of us. How’s about you just stepping along and letting us have a bite to eat. Looks like you’ve had your fill.”

  Oh yeah, I’m about to pop. “Not a lot left,” Jason said. He leaned over and grabbed one end of the box, tilting it to show them the cans rolling around inside. “Hardly worth your effort.”

  “You take it where you can find it.” He peered closer, and behind the shades gave the impression of squinting. “Is that some chili in there?” He looked like a kid discovering an unexpected treat in his Easter basket.

  “Uh-huh,” Jason said, his hand sliding into the seat beside him and closing over the pistol grip of his shotgun. “It comes with this.” He yanked the shotgun out and over the table and leveled it one-handed at the leader, holding it as steady as he could. Let it waver, they know you’re scared.

  Jason surged with one electric jolt of giddy triumph, but in the next instant found himself staring into the barrels of seven or eight of their guns. They came whispering out of waistbands and shoulder harnesses, arising out of the shadows of the people in the back: pistols, shotguns, the odd assault rifle or two.

  “I do believe we got the drop on you,” the leader said with a grin, reciting the line as if he’d seen every Western ever made. Twice.