Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  Lilly finally offered him a smile, thin and guarded, but it reached her eyes. Aged, yes, they were. But not yet hardened.

  How must he look to her, he wondered. How much older, how much more cynical? How bitter? Could she count the people he’d killed by reading it from his face?

  “The British rock star,” Lilly said.

  At last his cheeks flushed with embarrassment at what he now realized was an overreaction, and he lowered the shotgun from her face. He relaxed, leaving the gun dangling from its strap. Still, for another few moments, he could only stare.

  “I always meant to call you,” he then said slowly. “After…you know…that night. But…and then…”

  She knew.

  Another movement caught his eyes, drawing his attention downward. From behind her leg, a tiny hand clutching Lilly’s pants, a little girl crept out to stand beside her. She looked to be…what? Two years old, two-and-a-half? About that. He never had a moment’s doubt that she was Lilly’s child, though. The little girl had her mother’s hair, long and blonde, and the same upturned little nose. But her eyes belonged to someone else. A moment later, in a rush of realization that flooded a long-unfamiliar warmth through him, Jason recognized those eyes.

  He’d spent a lifetime seeing them in the mirror.

  Lilly smiled again. “Her name’s Jennifer. My mom’s name.”

  Effortlessly, lean and taut muscles flexing beneath her shirt, Lilly picked up her daughter, their daughter, and swung her up into her arms. Jason then noticed the large knife and sheath dangling over one hip from Lilly’s belt, and the way Jennifer eyed him with mistrust.

  “It’s okay, punkin,” Lilly whispered into her ear. “He’s safe, he won’t hurt us.” She looked back to Jason with a flicker of unease. “Will you?”

  “No…god no.” He shut his eyes, cleared his tightening throat. “I can look for food someplace else.”

  Lilly shook her head, that long blonde hair giving her the appearance of a young Nordic queen from a millennium ago. “You don’t have to. Looks like there’s enough to share.” She arched her eyebrows, heavier than he remembered them being. No more plucking. “Anymore, you’ve got to take it where you’re lucky enough to find it.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  Jason took a hesitant step forward and Jennifer cringed, turning away and burying her face in her mother’s hair and neck. The sight stopped him cold.

  He felt a sudden overwhelming respect for this woman in front of him. It seemed incomprehensible that she was the same girl he’d picked up in a smoky bar one night—or had it been the other way around?—knowing the only base reason he had for doing so. He tried to imagine everything that had evolved her from spoiled Daddy’s girl into what now stood before him. Losing family and friends—as they all had, but Lilly had seemed particularly ill equipped to deal with that—and then, alone, watching her belly grow. Carrying her daughter through that first terrible winter. Delivering her in the spring, facing up to pain she’d never known before.

  And after that? Jason could only guess.

  Jennifer ventured a peek back at Jason with huge, worried eyes. He smiled at her, and again she burrowed into Lilly’s hair. Lilly flinched and tugged her hair free from the girl’s grasp and gave her a nuzzling kiss on the cheek.

  “She’ll get used to you in a little bit. She’s just shy around strangers. With good reason.” Lilly patted the child’s hand, and with a sick lurch of his stomach he saw that Jennifer was missing a thumb. “But I guess we’ve all got our own little horror stories.”

  “I could tell you a bookful,” Jason said.

  Lilly looked at him, eyes solemn and empathetic, and she nodded. With her free arm she reached into the cabinet to help him finish filling the crate.

  When they were done they left together, shutting the door on that empty house and setting foot outside as a deeper chill gripped the air and the sky darkened with gray autumn clouds.

  And if it was too soon to say for certain, Jason felt as if maybe, only maybe, he was beginning to awaken from a long and troubled sleep. But, then again, sleep brings peace to a troubled soul. And time heals all wounds.

  Sometimes, if you’re lucky, even the fatal ones.

  Afterword

  If You Can’t Go Home Again, Renovate

  Way deep into Dark Advent, hero-verging-on-antihero Jason Hart tells a new friend his own reasons why, as Thomas Wolfe observed, you can’t go home again:

  “It’s never like you imagine it. It’s like you find gaps there…They were always there, only before you leave you don’t notice them much, and after you’re gone you forget about them. Then when you come back, it’s like you discover them all over again. And it’s a letdown.”

  There’s prescience for you. When I first wrote those lines, I had no clue that I was also describing my reaction to looking at the novel again for the first time in more than twenty years. The pattern: Here and there are bits that make me glad I wrote them, that wouldn’t look or feel out of place in later work, but mostly I just groan a lot and want to bang my head against the desk, unable to believe that this was the published draft. It makes it seem all the greater a miracle that I’ve seen and heard, many times, Dark Advent mentioned in the same favorable breath with Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert R. McCammon’s Swan Song.

  This novel was and is a lot of things to me…including a lesson in the merits of forging ahead with what you truly believe in, of following the path your heart insists on taking and ignoring the arguments against it that your head comes up with.

  In spite of that, and maybe because of it, if you were to have memorized Dark Advent’s first incarnation the way ardent believers sometimes memorize religious texts—a ridiculous notion, but go with it—you would find yourself tripped up on every page while trying to recite along with this incarnation. Word-for-word, the texts don’t much match up anymore.

  I’ve been down this road before, just not as far. Deathgrip and Prototype both got a light dusting and spritz of polish before new editions, along with a jillion shorter pieces. As I write this, I’m going through the same process with Oasis, my first novel; despite its even earlier genesis, it’s told in an easygoing, conversational, first-person narrative, so I’m mostly content to leave well enough alone.

  Dark Advent is different. This is the first (and probably the only) time that the process has been extensive enough that I feel compelled to issue a warning. This time the results could legitimately be called a brand new draft.

  Not to worry—the story is still the same. Nobody behaves any differently. If it were Star Wars, Han would still shoot first. If it were E.T., the feds would still have guns instead of walkie-talkies. A couple things did get expanded and morphed a bit, to shore up spots where, the first time around, either my sense of logic took a holiday or I got lazy. Mostly I think of this epic tweak job as addressing immaturities of presentation in an early, formative work.

  I’m entertaining the suspicion that Dark Advent was probably too ambitious a novel to have written when I did, although to get that through my thick skull at the time you would’ve needed a pneumatic bolt-gun. Oasis was begun a bit over a year after I’d graduated from college. Dark Advent set sail approximately a year after that. The reason the central characters of both are students is because, at the time, a student was still about all I knew how to be.

  But Oasis was a relatively small novel, intimate in scope. As it was getting beaten up on its first naïve, wide-eyed trips to New York, and I was casting about for what to tackle next, it felt as if I had to up the ante or risk dying of stagnation…and what could be greater stakes than ending the world as we know it?

  * *

  I’d been sitting on the idea of mass extinction for years already.

  Dark Advent has its roots in a particularly vivid and unsettling dream I had while a college freshman. In it, I found myself wa
ndering alone in a near-empty St. Louis after some unspecified or unremembered catastrophe had eradicated most of the world’s population. I was taken in by a girl about my age and her father, who had made a new home in the top floor of one of the towers near the Mississippi riverfront, all the better to see for miles around.

  Be careful, they warned me. While there were other survivors, many had banded together to serve some darker spirit of the age. Somehow—dreams are always big on somehow—one night we ended up captives of these people inside Busch Stadium, which sat in crumbly ruins, not unlike the Roman Coliseum. To this day I can still clearly recall the soul-crushing feeling of being unable to save this girl and her father as the others pulled them out of my hands, dragging them off to their fate.

  The dream had an even more enigmatic coda. A few minutes after losing my new people, I was back out on the streets again. Standing outside the stadium, I spotted a guy a few years older than I, probably in his early- to mid-twenties, jogging toward me, all the things he needed to get by in the world stowed in a small backpack.

  “You shouldn’t stay here,” I told him. “It’s not safe here.”

  “Why don’t you run with me, then?”

  Except I couldn’t. For me, there was no leaving. He didn’t ask again, and I could only watch as he kicked up his heels, resumed his pace, and jogged into the distance until he disappeared from sight.

  Damn, boy.

  This wasn’t one of the usual dreams that leave you alone by breakfast time. This one stuck like a thorn. So I wrote it up into a longish story of 30 or so pages, filling in the many gaps that the dream had been inconsiderate enough to leave. Most everyone had died from the one-two punch of a nuclear war and a flu virus that had mutated in the aftermath. The young woman I named Erika, after someone I’d recently met during a spring break trip to New England.

  And that was that. Still, I thought I had something there worth coming back to, once I thought my chops were up to it.

  A year later, exquisite tragedy: As a recent convert to Stephen King, I worked my way up to The Stand, much of it read while hurtling through a spring break trip to Florida. Love the book though I did, the experience was also a little like having a stake driven into my heart, one page at a time. And there were a lot of pages. This, I realized, was the novel I’d wanted to grow from that early seed. This was what I’d aspired to, but could never come close to. This was the gold standard, and—cue music for moping—since I knew I could never better it, I decided why bother even trying.

  * *

  Fast-forward: Further education. Graduation. A job I couldn’t wait to quit. One novel in the can, a handful of short stories that a few editors had thought were worth publishing, and still feeding on the invaluable encouragement of a Harvard professor—my workshop leader at a weeklong writers conference in Boston—who’d assured me I was ready to do this writing thing for real, and had backed up her faith with a list of literary agents to approach.

  I was feeling just cocky enough to go from “why bother” to “why not.”

  The vital thing was to turn the core idea over and look at it in a different light, and commit to making it into a different kind of story than what The Stand was, despite the obvious surface similarities. I believe that King himself has described The Stand as an epic fantasy quest novel told against a modern American backdrop. Tolkien in work boots.

  I, on the other hand, decided after a lot of mud-wrestling with myself to dispense with fantasy and supernatural elements altogether. Yes, there’s Erika and her knack, but that doesn’t count. There really are people like her; for more on that, I refer you to the life and work of psychiatrist Dr. Judith Orloff, whose childhood and teen years could’ve served as a template for Erika’s.

  Instead, along the way I’d gotten interested in the medieval and Viking eras, the latter, at least, obvious from the thousand-year-old bloodfeud at the heart of Oasis. So that’s how I started to look at Dark Advent: as a gritty medieval fable arising out of a fallen modern world and its trappings. And, to kick it all off, what sort of pandemic could be more medieval than the plague? But weaponized, a product of the emerging threat of global terrorism and, at the time, national fears of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. (Ironic, then, that he was finally deposed and killed around the time I started going through the novel again.)

  Jason I began to see as a commoner turned knight errant. It wasn’t by accident that he usually drives cars named for horses. Travis Lane became the brutish warlord who arises in a lawless power vacuum, and Peter Solomon the evil wizard behind him, with his own agenda. To house their growing warband, there could be only one choice: Union Station. If you’ve never seen it—a glorious old train station restored to new life after decades of decrepitude—just Google a picture, then try arguing that it’s not the perfect urban castle.

  At the same time, the novel was also inevitably influenced by several other post-apocalyptic works I’d injected into my gene pool over the years: chiefly, the novels Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Richard Matheson’s classic I Am Legend, as well as the films Mad Max and The Road Warrior, Dawn of the Dead, and Escape From New York. I’ve always loved the tie-in trivia that much of Escape was filmed in blighted areas of St. Louis. The bloodsport scene, in which Snake Plissken is forced into the ring to battle it out with a gigantic gladiator played by wrestler Ox Baker—whose moustache and eyebrows were obviously on steroids—was shot in Union Station itself, pre-renovation.

  With all of this DNA combining and recombining, whether or not my reach exceeded my grasp isn’t really for me to decide or deny.

  What’s unquestionably true, however, is that I was barely past the baby-steps stage of not only learning how to write, but learning in public. I have no trunk novels, that now-anachronistic euphemism for manuscripts condemned to cold storage because there were no takers. I don’t even have that many trunk stories. All together, my unpublished stuff tallies around 37,500 words, easily under the strictest word-count ceiling for a single novella.

  That’s not much of a foundation. Not a lot of margin for what I call the enema phase: getting the crap out of your system, when crap is all you have, so that one day you can start clean.

  Instead, for better or for worse, my post-graduate degree in writing was earned almost entirely before an audience, readers and editors and critics who ended up being teachers as good as, or better than, any that I could’ve encountered in a classroom.

  Which is why I feel I owe you something better with this outing of Dark Advent: the same novel, but with the roughest edges buffed away, without violating the spirit of the original. A remastered recording, hoping that the composition and performance shine through with fewer distractions left by earlier technical limitations.

  If this is your first time reading it, you of course won’t know any different.

  And if you’re coming back to it after years and miles of your own, the finest thing I could hope for is that you never even notice, and think, “Sweet…it’s just like I remembered.”