Soma (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  “Looks like he’s home,” Perry said. He parked beside the other truck and killed the engine. “Let’s go holler at him.”

  Soma opened the door and clambered down. She expected a slew of dogs to come running out to greet them, barking, wagging their tails. Any self-respecting hillbilly would normally have had two or three dogs patrolling their property, but dogs were nearly extinct now, killed off by the Phage. The only sound to announce their arrival was the whisper and creak of the wind in the towering hardwoods.

  Holding his rifle casually in one arm, Perry curled his hand around his lips and yelled, “Yo! Jake!” He paused a beat and then shouted again, even louder: “Hullo, the cabin!”

  The front door swung open and a short, thin young man leaned cautiously out. He was also armed with a rifle. He recognized Perry and lowered the weapon. “Perry!” he cried, raising a hand in greetings. He glanced curiously toward Soma and then returned his attention to Perry. “What brings you out to the Pines today?”

  Walking toward the house, Perry said, “Come to ask a favor.”

  “Well, don’t just stand there in the yard,” Jake said, waving them forward. “Come on in and sit a spell.”

  18

  Perry was not exaggerating when he warned her about his friend’s appearance. Jake Nesbit looked like an old cowpoke who had been dragged behind a horse over a couple hundred miles of sharp rocks and stabby deadwood… not to mention a few bear traps and cactus patches. The flesh on the right side of his face was gnawed down to the bone, exposing his molars in a gruesome Halloween grin. His right eye was all but dangling from its socket, milky and blind. He looked like he had gotten the short end of the stick in a cheese grater fight. He reminded her of someone, she just couldn’t figure out who -- and then it came to her: he looked like that Batman villain, Two-Face! He was missing three fingers from his right hand and some of the flesh and muscle from his right forearm. Aside from all that, he was a handsome young fellow — wavy brown hair, green eyes, boyish features. He was dressed in camo pants and a green thermal undershirt, sleeves skinned back to his elbows.

  “Soma, this is my friend Jake,” Perry introduced them, climbing onto the porch. “Jake, this is Soma. She just woke up.”

  “Just resurrected, huh?” Jake said, looking her up and down. She couldn’t tell if he was actually grinning at her or if it was just his chewed up face. She realized she was staring a little and focused her attention on the intact half of his features.

  “Yes,” she nodded. “About two nights ago. A dog tried to eat me. Perry saved me.”

  Jake laughed, looking from Soma to Perry. “That beast that’s been after your rabbits?”

  Perry nodded.

  “You need to put that bastard down,” Jake said.

  “I guess,” Perry said, following Jake into the cabin. “I hate to do it, though. Live dogs are so rare nowadays. They’re pretty much an endangered species, but he’s not leaving me much choice. He’s just getting bolder and bolder. I’d try to catch him and train him, but I’m afraid I’d wake up one morning and find him chewing on my leg or something.”

  Jake laughed again, nodding in agreement. “You just might at that!” he said. He looked back at Soma. “Just overlook the mess.”

  Soma faltered as she crossed the threshold. She wasn’t so much shocked by the disorder inside the cabin as she was impressed by it. The chaos inside the house was orders of magnitude beyond the modest description “messy”. It was a shrine to pandemonium. Every square inch of the floor was laden with bulging boxes and plastic totes, brown paper sacks and towers of magazines and books and comics. Crudely constructed shelves spanned the walls from floor to ceiling, bent beneath the weight of what must have been thousands upon thousands of figurines and collectibles and precariously stacked periodicals. All of it was brightly colored and shiny, with bold titles and outlandish illustrations, and then her mind made sense of it all and she realized what he was attempting to do.

  “How do you like my collection?” Jake asked, and he gestured to his hoard in its entirety.

  She picked up a plastic mask of the science fiction character Darth Vader. It was an expensive, full-head helmet, very authentic looking and phallic.

  “It’s all comic book stuff,” she said.

  “Well, science fiction and fantasy,” Jake said. “Movies, books, comics, magazines. I’m trying to preserve it.”

  Soma moved through one of the narrow corridors that traversed the lofty heaps. On both sides were boxes and boxes of comic books and paperbacks, collectibles and licensed merchandise. Here was a case of Harry Potter figurines still in their original packaging. There was a leaning tower of Heavy Metal Magazines. The cover of the top issue displayed a muscle bound warrior fighting giant green apes while a buxom blonde clung to one of his bulging thighs. There were framed movie posters, a near life-size statue of the creature from the Alien franchise, a rack of superhero costumes, an R2-D2 trashcan…

  “I started collecting shortly after I woke up,” Jake said. “At first I was just doing it to keep myself occupied. To keep my mind off, you know, everything that had happened. But then it started becoming something more. It started to seem important. This stuff… all of this junk… it represents the hopes and dreams of our generation’s workaday artists. It’s not fancy museum art like Rembrandts and van Goghs -- only it is, in its own way. I figured somebody ought to save it. You know, for future generations. If there are any.”

  Soma nodded. She understood completely. Moreover, she was strangely touched, though she had never really been what anyone might consider a “geek”.

  “It’s wonderful,” Soma said, picking up a plastic model of the USS Enterprise. It was the ship from the Next Generation television series, and wouldn’t it be great to live in that universe, exploring the galaxy alongside Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his resourceful crew… instead of fighting for survival in this fearful dystopia? But that was the power of fantasy, wasn’t it? It transported us out of our worrisome existence, made us forget our trials and tribulations, if only for a little while. That’s why it was so precious, and Jake’s efforts so poignant to her.

  “Don’t let him fool you,” a voice called out from behind the young man. Jake moved out of the way and a woman in a wheelchair peeked through the doorway. “He’s just a nerd with delusions of grandeur.”

  She was a lovely young woman with shoulder length brown hair and pixie features. Remarkably well preserved, the only thing that branded her a Resurrect was her pale flesh and sunken eyes. That and her body was MIA from the knees down. Her thighs, angling out from a pair of white shorts, ended at grisly knobs of bone and tattered flesh.

  Jake laughed. “Well, that, too, maybe…”

  Perry pointed his finger at the woman. “Tracy, right?”

  The girl nodded.

  “We’re shacking up now,” Jake said proudly.

  “Why?” Perry asked her.

  The girl shrugged. “I guess I have a masochistic streak.”

  “That would explain it.”

  “Why don’t you two come in the kitchen?” the girl said, waving her hand. “You can actually sit down in here. I made Jake clear out a spot. You ever try to convince a hoarder to get rid of something? You can’t. All I could do was talk him into piling the bedrooms even higher. I’m afraid one of those heaps is going to collapse on us while we’re sleeping one night.”

  “Ah, you don’t mind,” Jake said.

  “Not really,” the girl admitted as Perry and Soma joined them in the kitchen. “I was never much of a housekeeper. And it is cool stuff. It really is. I just wish we had electricity so we could watch the DVDs we’ve collected. I miss watching movies.”

  “Maybe you can get a generator?” Perry suggested, sitting at the table.

  The two men set off on a spirited discussion of electrical generators then, how they worked and how Jake might wire one into the house grid. “Of course, they’re noisy,” Perry said. “Might attract deadheads. That’s why I
don’t use mine very often. Mostly just in the winter, when the deadheads ain’t too active. Knock the chill out of the house. I hate being cold.”

  “Yeah, I don’t want to attract deadheads…”

  Soma and Tracy listened for a little while before growing impatient. Jake’s gal pal looked at Soma and rolled her eyes. “So where do you find all this stuff?” Soma finally interrupted. She nodded to the miscellanea stacked on the counters.

  “Huh? Oh, from everywhere, really,” Jake said. “You’d be amazed what you can find in people’s houses. I go on an expedition about once a week. Most houses just sit empty now. I let myself in, poke around a little. Check out the attic and basement, bedrooms, closets…”

  “That sounds dangerous,” Soma said.

  “Well, every now and then I come across a deadhead that’s been stuck in his house for a while, like our boy Perry was. That can be dangerous. Usually they’re too stiff to be much of a problem. When our kind go without eating long enough, the Phage sort of… sucks the juice out of us. Like a spider eating a fly. All that’s left is a dry shell. They can be revived if you feed them, but most of the deadheads I find in the houses are just husks. They can barely move, much less run you down and eat you.”

  “What do you do?” Soma asked.

  “Let ‘em out,” Jake shrugged. “If they’re not too rowdy. I’ve had to kill a couple of them, but it was strictly self-defense. I try not to hurt them. Most of the time I can trick them into following me outside.” He chuckled. “I lead them outside, run around the yard in a big circle and then go back in the house and lock them out. They’re not too bright.”

  He wanted to know about Soma then, and how she had come to be with his friend. Soma told him her story -- her awakening, her run-in with the survivalists, the dog. Jake was very sympathetic toward her until Perry told him why they had come and what they planned to do. His whole demeanor changed then, and he glared at Soma as if she was some siren who had tempted his friend onto rocky shoals.

  “Are you crazy?” Jake railed, looking back and forth between them. “You know how dangerous that is! What are you going to do if the headhunters catch you?”

  “Headhunters?” Soma exclaimed.

  “Yes, headhunters! Didn’t he tell you?” Jake demanded.

  Perry blew through his lips derisively. “There’s no such thing as headhunters! That’s just tall tales and you know it!”

  “What does he mean headhunters?” Soma asked.

  “They say there’s a tribe of Resurrects east of here who hunt and eat other Resurrects,” Perry said. “Nobody’s ever seen ‘em, though.”

  “Seen them and lived to tell about it,” Jake interjected.

  Tracy gaped at the two men, then looked at Soma, clearly anxious.

  “It’s just folklore, like bigfoot,” Perry said to Soma, trying to soothe her. “The kid believes in bigfoot, too.”

  “Hey, bigfoot is real!” Jake exclaimed.

  “What about the Chupacabra?”

  “Well, I don’t know… I’ve never seen one.”

  “So you’re saying you’ve seen a Bigfoot?”

  “You know I have!”

  Soma relaxed as their bickering grew more and more farfetched. She looked at Tracy. Tracy rolled her eyes again. Still, she couldn’t help worrying. Most urban legends contained at least a grain of truth (negligible though it might be) within the pearl-like accretions of exaggeration laid down with each successive retelling. There might not be a tribe of headhunters lying in wait for them somewhere to the east, but there might very well be a tribe of unfriendly Resurrects.

  That was what she worried about the remainder of their visit. They talked about local events and the survivors that had recently passed through the area -- it had caused quite a stir among the Resurrects in town -- but she couldn’t stop worrying about Jake’s supposed headhunters. She couldn’t bear to think she might be endangering Perry.

  Finally, as they were driving back to his house, she decided she would rather abandon her quest than put her new friend in danger.

  “Maybe we should call the whole thing off,” she said.

  “What?” Perry exclaimed, head jerking between her and the road.

  “I could never forgive myself if anything happened to you.”

  “Is this about what Jake said?” Perry asked. “Listen, hon, that kid is smart as a tack, but he’s also crazy. He thinks he saw a Bigfoot once!”

  “I just… I’d rather stay here, with you, than do something that might bring you to harm.”

  “You just put Jake’s crazy talk out of your head,” Perry said. “If you knew half the things that kid has said to me in the past year, you wouldn’t give it a second thought. Kid thinks he can read minds. You heard him say it.”

  Yes, she had. Jake had claimed, at one point that afternoon, that he and Tracy could merge their thoughts while they were dreaming. He had called it dream sharing. Claimed it was some aspect of Jung’s collective unconscious. “It’s why we traveled in herds when we were brain-dead,” he explained. “We’re all linked together on a subconscious level, like telepathy. All living things on this planet are. With our higher brain functions blocked by the Phage, the collective unconscious took over. How else do you explain the herding behavior we exhibited while we were zombies? You should try it tonight, after you guys go to bed. It’s pretty amazing.”

  She would have dismissed it out of hand, but Tracy had verified it.

  “It’s like lucid dreaming,” she had said breathlessly, “only you control the dream world together.”

  Either Jake was telling the truth, or Tracy was as kooky as her boyfriend.

  Soma leaned toward “kooky”, despite her own strangely vivid dreams.

  “I know he’s kind of eccentric,” Soma said, “but his headhunters may have some basis in reality, no matter how small, and I’m afraid it’s just not worth the risk. Like you said, my family’s probably not even there now. They may have run Home, or they might even… they might even be dead.”

  It took a lot out of her to say it aloud. She felt defeated.

  “No,” Perry said resolutely. “No way. We’re going. You’ll never have a moment’s peace unless you know. You’ll always wonder what became of them. You’ll always blame yourself for not trying.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Besides, I’ve been sitting around doing nothing for too long. I’m restless. I want to have one big adventure before I die again. Don’t take that away from me now.”

  “All right,” Soma sighed, hopeful and frightened and grateful all at the same time.

  “It’s going to be fine,” Perry assured her. “Trust me.”

  She did. She trusted him completely.

  But he was also very, very wrong.

  19

  They drove into town the next morning.

  Perry had loaded a cooler with the rabbits he’d slaughtered the previous evening, after returning from Jake’s house. He put the cooler in the back of the F-150, helped Soma into the passenger seat and then climbed in behind the steering wheel. He propped his rifle against the seat. “You ready?” he asked, and Soma nodded.

  “Ready,” she said.

  They backed out to the highway and headed west.

  It was the direction she had come from after her awakening. They drove up the big hill to the interstate exchange, passing the Chevy she had sheltered in overnight and the truck stop where she had run into the survivors. There were buzzards circling the parking lot where her herd had been gunned down. It felt wrong that they should just lay there in the parking lot, unburied, their passing unmourned, but what else could she do? She watched the black kites spiraling slowly in the air as they drove past, her brow furrowed. Perry didn’t stop, although he asked if she was all right.

  Soma nodded. “I’m fine.”

  But she wasn’t. She was thinking about the boy who had awakened after being shot in the head. Had she done the right thing when she put him out of his mis
ery? He was crippled and in pain, didn’t understand where he was or what was happening to him. She had only wanted to end his suffering. Now she was second-guessing that decision.

  No, she thought. Put it out of your mind. You’ll go crazy if you start doing that. What’s done is done. He’s at peace now.

  It was the living that suffered. Or perhaps it was more apt to say “the living and the undead”. Death was no escape from suffering now, not unless it was the final death.

  A few miles past the truck stop, they passed a sign that said, Welcome to Stone Ridge, Illinois and below that, in more fanciful script: Say Hello To God’s Country! The sign was sponsored by the First Baptist Church of Stone Ridge, with a picture of a little country church below the byline. Population 1,740. The sign stood in hip-high prairie grass. A burned out wreck canted in the ditch a few yards away.

  “How many people -- I mean, how many Resurrects -- live in Stone Ridge?” Soma asked.

  “A couple hundred,” Perry answered with a shrug. “People wander in. People wander out. I doubt anyone’s thought of taking a census. Our kind is pretty apathetic.”

  She wasn’t certain she understood what he meant, but his words came all too clear when they rolled into town. She expected to find a small but thriving community. She expected to see the men and women who had escaped death’s tenebrous embrace working together with vigor and resolve to rebuild their lives and restore their community. What she found instead was worse than the most hopeless and squalid inner city ghetto.

  The streets were littered with abandoned cars. There was garbage heaped in the gutters, and grass growing up through the cracks in the pavement. The houses were slumped and discolored, windows like the vacant eyes of the mentally deficient. Only a few of the lawns were mown. Only a small percentage of the homes seemed to be occupied, and the people who were out and about this sunny summer morning shuffled dispiritedly along the sidewalks, bodies bowed by their misfortune. They moved with purpose but no particular drive, like mourners leaving a funeral. If not for their clothing, it would have been quite easy to mistake them for the unawakened dead.