Soma (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  After they had finished loading the truck, Soma hugged Tracy goodbye as Perry gave the young man some last minute instructions. Tracy hugged her firmly around the neck. “Good luck, Soma. Be careful. I’ll be praying for you.”

  “Thanks, hon,” Soma said, hugging her back, and then she walked to the garage, waving to the cheery young Resurrect as she withdrew.

  She did not say good-bye to Jake.

  Perry helped her in and then trotted around to the driver’s side. He slid in behind the wheel and grinned at her. “You ready?” he asked as she buckled her seatbelt. There was excitement on his face.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He started the engine and reversed from the driveway.

  Jake raised a hand from the gate, then turned away.

  Perry steered the truck backwards onto the highway, grill pointed west, then shifted into drive and headed into the Fearlands.

  25

  It continued to spit rain as they drove west toward Stone Ridge. As they crossed the interstate overpass, Perry turned on the wipers. Soma watched the landscape scroll past the passenger window until they came upon the truck stop, then turned toward Perry and said, “Jake doesn’t like me very much, does he?”

  Perry glanced at her and said, “Noticed that did you? I don’t think he actually hates you. He just thinks we’re being foolhardy.”

  “And it’s my fault,” Soma said.

  “I suppose.” He grinned. “Wouldn’t be the first time I did a foolhardy thing.”

  She smiled back. “Nor I.”

  About halfway between the truck stop and Stone Ridge, Perry slowed and flipped on the turn signal. They cut right onto a secondary highway and headed north. “This is Highway 12,” Perry said. “It curves around to the east, take us up and around Harrisburg. Harrisburg’s eat up with deadheads. Best to skirt around it. After that we’ll catch Shawneetown Road and try to cross the Ohio.”

  Soma nodded. She took Perry’s road atlas from the dash and opened it. Illinois was a big state. The atlas had divided the state by regions—the Chicago area, Central Illinois, and Southern Illinois, with separate pages for some of the bigger cities. She found the Southern Illinois page. Perry had traced their route in red ink.

  “And if the Shawneetown Bridge isn’t passable, we take the Scenic Byway north and try to cross at Henderson,” she said.

  “Let’s just hope we can get across at Shawneetown.”

  She flipped idly through the atlas, following Perry’s red scrawl. Home did not seem so far away on paper. She said so aloud and Perry chuckled. He opened his mouth to reply, and then stiffened and stomped on the brakes.

  They had been cruising along at forty miles per hour through a curvy, heavily wooded area called Bent Road Bluff. Up ahead, just around a blind curve, a deadhead was standing in their lane. Soma braced herself against the dash as Perry decelerated rapidly. The zombie looked at them blandly as the truck bore down on it. It was a big man in tattered, colorless clothing, face gray and saggy, jaw hanging agape. The wheels of the F-150 skidded on the wet pavement, but Perry managed to bring the Ford to a halt with several yards to spare.

  “Damn,” Perry muttered. “I should have known better. Especially on this winding-ass road. You okay?”

  “Yes,” Soma nodded. “Just startled me a little.”

  “Me, too.”

  The rain looked like silver needles in the headlights of the truck. As the F-150 sat rumbling in the middle of the highway, curlicues of steam rising from the hood, the zombie lurched forward, wet hair clinging to its scalp like fronds of black seaweed. The deadhead slapped its palms on the hood of the truck, groaning hungrily, and began to climb clumsily onto the vehicle.

  “Aw, shoot,” Perry said. He shifted into reverse and bucked the climber off.

  The deadhead fell onto its belly. It rose and shambled after the reversing truck, howling now, hands outstretched, fingers curled.

  “Persistent sucker,” Perry said. “Must be starved.” He shifted and zoomed around the deadhead, giving the howling creature a wide berth.

  Soma watched the revenant vanish around the bend in the road and then faced forward.

  “I’ll let up on the gas once we outdistance him,” Perry said, eyes flicking from the road to the rear view mirror. “Most deaders congregate in towns, just like living people did before the Phage, but you never know when you’re gonna come up on one out here in the boonies, or a whole herd of them.”

  “I’ll help you keep an eye out for them,” Soma said.

  “Won’t be so bad once we’re out of these hills,” Perry said. “The land flattens out on the other side of the ridge. We’ll have a better view of the road ahead then.”

  “I thought all of Illinois was flat,” Soma said, eyeing the woods to either side of the road. It was thick, dark pine forest, the land rocky and steep. The landscape rose into stony cliffs on the left side of the road and fell away in a deep valley on the right.

  “It is up north,” Perry said. “Down here in Southern Illinois it’s more rugged. This is where the glaciers stopped during the last ice age. They pushed the land up in front of them as they came down the continent. Crumpled it up like a rug. It’s flatter near the river, down on the flood plains. Fertile soil there. Good for farming. Or it used to be. Not many folk farming anymore.”

  The road continued to slope upwards, winding back and forth until they reached a plateau. For a mile or two, the trees thinned out and the travelers had a panoramic view of the distant lowlands, a gently rolling prairie, hazy with precipitation. Once it had been a patchwork quilt of woodland and fields, divided by country roads and zigzagging creeks, but nature had quickly reclaimed the land, blending the forests and farmland into a uniform green. A smattering of homes and a few faint highways were the only remaining signs of man’s former stewardship of the Earth, and those too, she knew, would fade away soon, erased by the relentless march of time.

  “Jake was right,” she said mournfully. “Man’s day has passed. In just a few more years, you won’t even know we were ever here.”

  “All things pass,” Perry said. “Even us.”

  “It’s so senseless and tragic,” Soma said. “We could have reached up and grabbed the heavens. Instead, we wasted our time here fighting over dirt, dividing ourselves by the color of our skin or what gods we believe in, and coming up with new and better ways to kill each other.”

  Perry nodded sagely.

  “We deserve this,” Soma said.

  Another solitary zombie was standing beside the road ahead. It was a woman, naked, her flesh as pale as a fish’s belly. She was standing in the ditch, head tilted back so that the rain fell onto her cheeks.

  Perry slowed and steered to the other side of the road, but the woman took no notice of their passing.

  26

  Perry brought the truck to a halt. They had crossed the summit of the rugged hill and were descending along the winding highway when they came upon their first real obstacle. A large pine tree had fallen into the road. It lay amid a scattering of sandstone rocks, which had tumbled down from the cliffs on the left. Its needles had already turned orange and were falling off the branches. Perry shifted into park and climbed out of the truck, telling Soma to wait for him.

  Soma watched anxiously as Perry walked out in front of the truck and inspected the fallen tree. The Ford’s engine rumbled and the wipers swiped left and right as her companion kicked at the trunk of the tree with one booted foot. Perry grabbed a couple branches and tried to drag to tree out of their path. He heaved twice, then let them go and returned to the truck.

  “Too big,” he said through the open driver’s side door. He was already soaked. Rain drizzled from the brim of his cowboy hat.

  “What do we do?” Soma asked.

  “Can’t go around it,” he said, glancing back at the tree. “Don’t want to drive over it either. Might puncture a tire. We’ll have to use the chainsaw.”

  Soma scowled. That wasn’t good. Deadheads w
ere attracted to loud noises, especially artificial sounds like engines and gunfire. If there were any zombies within earshot when Perry cranked the chainsaw, they would come running. Singly or in small numbers, they wouldn’t be much of a problem, but if a herd was nearby...

  “Grab the nine millimeter out of the glove box and cover my back,” Perry said.

  “You want me to get out of the truck?” Soma asked as she moved to obey him. She checked the safety and clip.

  “Nah, just keep your eyes peeled,” he said. “Don’t shoot any deaders unless they look aggressive.” He started to move away, then turned back. “If you see anything, honk.”

  “Okay.”

  Soma used the mirrors to watch the front and back at the same time as Perry trotted around to the bed of the truck. He lowered the tailgate with a bang and dragged his chainsaw onto it. He fiddled with it for a moment as the rain continued to slash down, then hefted it with both hands and jogged back to the fallen tree.

  Placing the chainsaw on the ground, he began to yank the start cord. Blue smoke farted from the tool as he tried to start it. After half a dozen yanks, the saw came to life with a snarl. He waded into the branches and began to cut.

  Body tense, Soma shifted her gaze from window to mirror to window to mirror. The pistol felt cold and oily in her palm. Anxiety sat in her gut like a heavy stone.

  Perry cleared an opening to the trunk of the pine and then began to saw through the central bole. Sawdust dropped in moist clumps at his feet. The tree shifted and pinched the saw’s blade as he finished the first cut, forcing him to stop and wriggle the blade free. He was soaked through by then, clothes clinging like a wetsuit. He wrenched the chainsaw free and cut again. All told, he made about a dozen cuts, then set the chainsaw aside and began to toss three-foot sections of wood out of their path. He only cleared enough space for them to pass.

  Soma spotted movement in the side mirror and turned in her seat. About fifty yards behind them, a deadhead came stumbling from the underbrush on the side of the road. It was male, tall but slim, dressed in some sort of uniform -- she could not tell what sort of uniform, exactly. Law enforcement, maybe. Or a postal worker. The uniform was too ragged to tell for certain.

  The male fell onto its hand and knees as it clambered from the ditch, then rose and began to shamble toward the Ford.

  Soma leaned to the left and tooted the horn.

  Perry glanced back. She gestured behind the truck and he leaned out to look. He kicked some chunks of rock out of the way, then jogged back to the Ford. He threw the saw in the bed, slammed the tailgate shut and hopped in behind the steering wheel before the deadhead could close the gap between them.

  “Good thing they’re slow,” he panted. “Generally speaking, that is.” He looked out the back window, then wiped the rainwater from his face

  “You’re soaking wet,” Soma said.

  “Yeah,” he said, flicking his hands. He winked at her. “Think I’ll catch my death?”

  The deadhead popped into his window like a horrid jack-in-the-box then, snarling and gnawing at the glass. Perry didn’t jump but Soma did, and she almost pulled the trigger of the Smith & Wesson. She gingerly set the safety and put the handgun away.

  “Whew! He looks mad,” Perry said, locking the door.

  The zombie thumped at the window with his palms, growling in at them. Up close, Soma could see that he was indeed a postal worker. There was a patch for the US Postal Service on the breast of his uniform blouse. His face was pale and bloated, the skin pudding soft, as if he had spent an appreciable amount of time floating in a body of water. He gnashed his broken green teeth, trying to bite Perry through the glass.

  “Sorry, buddy,” Perry said to the zombie through the window. “We’d love to stay and chat but we got places to go and people to see!” There was a joke somewhere in this concerning postmen and inclement weather, but she couldn’t get it together in her head before Perry took off. “You ready?” he asked, as the postman made out with the window behind him.

  “Yep,” Soma said.

  Perry shifted the truck into gear and stepped on the gas.

  27

  The first twenty miles of their journey took nearly two hours to complete. By the time they had traversed Bent Road Bluff, the rain had begun to slacken and patches of blue sky were peeking between the roiling clouds. In the distance, brilliant shafts of sunlight slanted to the rolling prairie. Patterns of light and shadow shifted across the low, hilly landscape with a sort of idle grandeur. It looked to Soma like the backdrop of a religious painting, one of the pictures in her dad’s big family bible, perhaps. Still soaked, Perry said they would be passing the town of Harrisburg in about ten more minutes.

  Soma was afraid they would run into some other obstacle -- another fallen tree or a pileup of cars -- but the remainder of Highway 12 was clear. Though the road had begun to fracture from neglect, and there was grass and even a few saplings sprouting up through the cracks in the pavement, there was little to really hinder their progress. Nothing they couldn’t drive over or go around.

  “You want to try the radio?” Perry asked suddenly, as if the thought had just occurred to him. “Sometimes, when it’s cloudy like this, we can pick up the station from Home.”

  “Really?” Soma replied, intrigued. She had gone so long without listening to music she hadn’t thought of turning on the truck’s stereo. And there were CDs in the glove compartment if they couldn’t pick up the radio station. She thought some traveling music would be nice. Very nice indeed.

  Perry twisted the knob of the stereo and low static issued from the truck’s speakers. “I keep it tuned to Home’s radio station. It’s the only one on the air now,” he said. They crested a low hill and a woman’s voice crested amid the hissing white noise. She said:

  “… Ronni and Rick Parker, the Last Living Deejays. We are broadcasting from Peoria, Illinois, a city we now call Home. There are thirty thousand living men and women here, and there are children, and there are dogs. You can have a real life again. You can be safe. If you hear this radio broadcast, run Home. Run as fast as you can.”

  The deejay had a purring, throaty voice, the voice of a Hollywood sex kitten, an angel with dirty knees. Soma stared at the stereo’s LED display in amazement. Perry glanced over, saw her expression and laughed.

  “It’s like picking up a radio signal for another planet, ain’t it?” Perry asked. “Their voices sound so different than ours.”

  They descended into a small vale and the voice subsided into frenzied static.

  “Her voice was so soft, so pretty,” Soma said. “Compared to her, we sound like crows speaking German.”

  “Like dogs growling over bones,” Perry agreed.

  She also noted, to her dismay, that the living woman’s voice had aroused her hunger. They had eaten a big breakfast before leaving -- finishing off Jake’s venison -- but her stomach clenched painfully at the sound of the woman’s voice. Her guts burned with need, as if someone had opened a little door in her belly and shoveled hot coals inside of her. It was just a distorted reproduction of a living woman’s voice. Ronni Parker, the owner of that voice and one of the world’s last living DJs, was hundreds of miles away, but the hunger leapt rancorously inside her, leaving her feeling twitchy and anxious.

  She glanced down and saw that her fingers were curled into claws. She forced them to relax. It was disturbing, but she reminded herself that she had resisted the instinct to attack when she crossed paths with the survivors at the truck stop, and she would not harm her loved ones if and when she found them.

  “How far away is Peoria?” she asked. Trying to distract herself.

  “I’m not sure,” Perry said. “It’s about a six hour drive from here, I think.”

  “How can we pick up the signal so far away?” she asked. “I remember reading somewhere that FM signals only travel a hundred miles or so.”

  “Repeaters,” Perry answered. “Home has treaties with several Resurrect communities. T
hey maintain repeater towers for the radio station.”

  “Why would our kind help them?” Soma asked. “We don’t even keep up the roads.”

  Perry shrugged. “For the meat. Survivors hear the radio station, then try to run Home. Most tribes patrol their territory pretty relentlessly. They catch and eat the runners as they try sneak through.”

  “So it’s a honey trap,” Soma said.

  “It is,” Perry nodded grimly. “A lot of survivors make it through, though. They haven’t lived this long by being stupid.”

  “No,” Soma said. “I suppose not.”

  She wondered if her loved ones had answered the siren call of the city -- and if they had survived the gauntlet of snares and undead hunters standing between them and Home. It would be tempting: the promise of security, a chance to live among your own kind once more. Especially for Nandi. He was a gregarious man.

  “There’s no use wondering,” Perry said, almost as if he had read her mind. “We’ll know one way or another soon enough.”

  They crested another hill and the radio station came back to life. It was the Carpenters singing “Top of the World”. That seemed wildly satirical to her for some reason and Soma burst out laughing, covering her mouth with both hands. Hysteria tinkled along the edges of her laughter – just a tinge -- and Perry looked at her anxiously.

  “I’m okay,” she gasped. “It’s just… I almost wished I had stayed brain-dead. The world has gone crazy.”

  He nodded, returning his attention to the road.

  “It was easier being like that,” she said when the laughter had subsided. Her face had gone grim. “Not thinking about the future or the past. Not worrying about anyone or anything. Just… following the herd.”

  “It’s always been easier to do that,” Perry said. “Most people lived that way even before the Phage. Keep your eyes on your feet. Never look at the road ahead, or the people marching beside you.”