Soma (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  He looked at her balefully. “My uncle was crazy. Not just your garden variety, play-in-your-own-poop crazy. I mean crazy with God. He had this old trailer out in the woods. Tore the walls out of it on the inside. Used to hold these weird church services there on Saturdays, which is actually the Sabbath. Not Sunday, which is the day most churches observe it on.”

  Soma nodded.

  “Mother used to take us there when we were little,” he said. “I hated it. Those services just went on and on and on. Torture for a little kid. We had to sit there for hours while he stomped around the room preaching. It scared me the way he would scream and kick his legs. Sometimes he spoke in tongues. Once, they cast a demon out of a teenage girl. Brenda Jacobs was her name. I doubt she actually had a demon inside of her, but the girl thought she did, and so they did the exorcism. About an hour into the ritual, the girl startled babbling and a man’s voice came out of her, this deep-pitched, just nasty voice. Made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It started talking back to my uncle, mocking him. I couldn’t understand what it was saying, and then someone said she was speaking in Latin. I had gotten the gist of it, though. It was just pure hatred and defiance, directed at my uncle, directed at God. And then my uncle got tired of arguing with the thing and threw holy water on the girl. He held his bible over his head and yelled ‘In the name of Yahweh, demon come out!’ And the girl bent over backwards, screaming her head off. Bent so far back I thought her spine would snap. And then she started gushing blood, you know, from down there. I ran out of there in tears. Refused to go back ever again.”

  He fell silent, brooding, then glanced at Soma and said, “My uncle got arrested when I was thirteen. He was having sex with that girl. She was just sixteen. She was a lesbian, see? And he said he was trying to drive the demon of homosexuality from her body. That’s the reason he was having sex with her. To cure her of her lesbianism. He went to prison for it. The girl… she killed herself later. They found out after she slashed her wrists that he’d been writing to her from prison. She had cut little crosses into her wrists, across and down. He’d poisoned her mind. She was convinced she was possessed by some kind of… gay demon, that she was going to hell when she died. She left a note that explained it all. The way I heard it, her intent wasn’t to commit suicide per se. She was sacrificing her life, martyring herself, to send that demon back to hell. In her mind, it was the only way she could defeat it, to rid herself of the thing.”

  Nose crinkled, Soma shook her head. It was hard for her to understand such twisted reasoning. Her father was a Christian, her mother Muslim, but neither had forced their beliefs on her. She could count the number of times she had gone to church (or mosque) on her fingers.

  “It was all because of my uncle,” Perry explained. “He had egged her into doing it, brainwashed her into his way of thinking. It was the letters he wrote to her while he was in prison, urging her to do it, telling her it was the only way. Bottom line is, he murdered her just as sure as if he’d done it with his own two hands. Faith is a wonderful thing, I think, but religion… religion is a mental disease. A highly contagious one.”

  “And you think we’re in the territory of some crazy religious community?” Soma said.

  He nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  She leaned back thoughtfully, watching the landscape zip past the passenger window. Finally, she spoke.

  “Drive faster,” Soma said.

  30

  About twenty minutes later, as they approached a little town called Penrod, they saw another crucified man.

  Soma spotted him first and pointed at the figure in horror. A chain-link fence stood at the edge of the village on which several signs had been affixed, offering visitors a “downhome welcome” and advertising some of the local churches. The condemned man had been hung from the chain-link panel that supported the signs, bound at the wrists and ankles. “Oh, Perry, another one!” Soma cried, and Perry slowed with a glowering expression. He intended to put the man out of his misery, as he had the others.

  Below the condemned man was a placard that read: THOU SHALT NOT CONSORT WITH THE LIVING. A different transgression, though the punishment was the same.

  The man hung with head down, so Soma could not see if his jaw had been removed like the others. There were no arrows this time, but his clothes were varnished with zombie blood, black and glossy. His persecutors had beaten him before hanging him from the billboard. His flesh was tattered, his limbs unnaturally jointed.

  Perry parked the truck at the foot of the welcome sign. He held out his hand for the pistol. Soma slapped it in his palm and he opened his door.

  As soon as he opened his door, they heard the wasp-like whine of another vehicle.

  They exchanged anxious looks, listening intently.

  “It’s coming closer,” Perry said after a moment. He leaned out the door, shot the condemned man in the head, then plopped back down in the seat. He passed Soma the pistol, but instructed her to keep it handy. “Don’t put it away,” he said as he threw the Ford into gear and took off. “We might need it.”

  It seemed to Soma that they were heading in the direction of the approaching vehicle. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Gonna hide in one of the side streets,” Perry said.

  The town of Penrod was not a large one. Perry wheeled onto the first intersecting street and cut across the parking lot of a gas station. He parked behind a dumpster, killed the engine of the Ford and told Soma to duck.

  “Is it still coming?” Soma asked, crouching as far down in the seat as she could.

  Perry rolled down the window a couple inches. The whine of the approaching vehicle had changed pitch. It was higher now. Closer.

  “Yeah, it’s still coming. Stay down.”

  She realized she was still clutching the pistol. She looked down at it, moved her index finger to the trigger. She wanted to give it to Perry -- she wasn’t sure she could actually use it, not on a human being, not even in self-defense -- but Perry had grabbed his rifle, was holding it in one hand as he peeked over the windowsill.

  A couple of minutes later, a large black truck of indeterminate make roared down the street, speeding in the direction they had just come. Refuse and fallen leaves swept after the truck, borne up in its wake.

  “Dust,” Perry said.

  “What?”

  Soma peeked up and saw a faint trail of dust drifting lazily after the vehicle. The storm they had driven through that morning hadn’t followed them into Indiana. Judging by the patina of dust that coated the windows of the convenience store, it had been weeks since the village of Penrod had hosted any substantial rainfall.

  “They might notice our dust trail and follow it back,” Perry said, sitting up and starting the engine. “We need to move.”

  He backed from behind the dumpster and turned left, heading east. A couple of blocks later, he turned left again and proceeded north. That street was blocked by a fallen tree, a big oak that looked as if it had been struck by lightning a couple years previously. He turned again, and then once more, and they sped through what had once been a low-income residential area -- postwar tract housing and mobile homes, all but engulfed by feverish plant growth.

  He pulled into the driveway of a dilapidated antebellum style home and parked in the midst of a wild hedge of rose-of-Sharon.

  “Will you hand me the atlas?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t want to get turned around. Head the wrong direction,” he said. He rolled his window down, letting in the cloying perfume of the flowering bushes that surrounded them.

  For a few minutes, he just flicked through the pages of the road atlas, consulting his maps, then squinting up at the sky. The world outside was very still. The only sounds were the whirring of cicadas and an occasional twitter of birdsong. After a few bars of nature-music, they heard the droning of the strange vehicle again. It was faint, still distant, but moving in their direction once more. Perry tossed the a
tlas aside and backed from the driveway. He headed down the street at speed, turning corners hard enough to toss Soma around in her seat.

  “Do you see anyone behind us?” he asked at one point, and Soma twisted around to look.

  “No,” she said.

  “Keep your eyes peeled,” he said. “Yell if you see anything.”

  They crossed the highway that bisected the town and Perry grunted in surprise. He had gotten a little lost zigzagging through the backstreets. Head swiveling jerkily on his neck, Perry circled the block and brought them back around to the thoroughfare. He stopped at the four way, cast his gaze up and down the street, then peeled out onto the main road, heading north.

  “Let’s get out of here before we run into anybody else,” he said, pushing the needle of the speedometer to 65.

  Staring fretfully out the rear window, Soma could not agree more.

  31

  They saw one more crucified man as they continued north. He was lashed to a utility pole like the first two they had encountered, though this poor soul’s crime was a little more mundane. THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS, the signboard beneath his feet proclaimed. The victim was an older gentleman with fine white hair and a lanky build. Looked like he was in his late fifties, early sixties when the Phage claimed him. Perry eased to a stop and the crucified man’s head rose laboriously. Like his compatriots in misery, his jaw had been removed. Unlike the others, he was still sighted. He had large blue eyes, bloodshot and bulging. Perry stepped from the truck with his pistol. The old man’s eyes moved to the weapon, then to Perry’s face, and he nodded slowly, gratefully.

  They continued in grim silence.

  Later that afternoon, Perry parked the truck behind a barn and they fed on some of the rabbit they had brought along with them. When Soma’s thoughts emerged from the red fog of the feeding frenzy, she found that she had wandered a little distance in her torpid state.

  She was standing over the remains of a dead cow in the center of an animal paddock, hilly farmland receding into the distance all around her. Her presence had disturbed a mob of flies as they deposited their eggs on the animal’s carcass and they hummed around her in an agitated cloud, lighting on her face and hands. Maggots churned in the dead animal’s orifices, under its pelt, in its eyes. Her fingers were moist with the putrid exudations of the decomposing creature, and there was a foul taste in her mouth. She had eaten some of the rotting cow, had torn some flesh from the animal’s cheek, giving it a loony grin.

  Revolted, she tried to spit the rotten flesh from her mouth, but zombies do not have functioning salivary glands and she had to scoop the half-chewed meat from her mouth with her fingers.

  She threw it down with a groan, trembling in disgust.

  “Perry?” she called.

  She turned around and saw Perry swaying near the rear wall of the barn, his back to her. She picked her way through the mounds of dried animal feces that carpeted the ground inside the corral. She called his name again and touched his shoulder, but he did not respond, just stood there with his arms hanging limply at his sides, jaw agape like a mental deficient. Blood glistened on his mouth and chin. He looked like a man who’d been very messily enjoying a rack of barbecue ribs.

  “Perry?”

  He blinked and looked at her, his movements sluggish. She watched, fascinated, as awareness slowly returned to his eyes.

  “Yes?” he said gutturally.

  “Let’s go. I want to go,” she said, and he nodded and followed her to the Ford.

  They made good time for a while after that and then came upon a huge traffic jam. The massive logjam of vehicles had blocked the road from shoulder to shoulder. There was an overturned semi-tractor trailer, multiple collisions, burnt out wrecks, even a few corpses, long since turned to bones and rags.

  “Must have happened during the outbreak,” Perry said. “First, the semi, then smash-boom-bang!”

  They had exited the truck to survey the obstruction, the sun warm and bright on their cheeks, the wind riffling their hair. The clock in the dash of Perry’s truck said it was 2:45 PM. By Perry’s estimate, they had covered about a third of the distance to Brookville Lake. They were in a rural area, the highway hedged by bright green pine forest. Up ahead, beyond the jam, was a faded billboard advertising a campground and RV park two miles further.

  “We’re not going to get through all that,” Soma said, squinting against the slivers of light that shot off the chrome of one of the nearer vehicles, which had once been a very pretty and very expensive red sports car. The nose of the sports car was partially embedded in the back of a white and tan service van with JASPER’S SATELLITE SERVICE emblazoned on the side. A skeleton in khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt was hanging from the back of the service van, legs akimbo. There was just enough jerky-like flesh on the bones to bind them together.

  “We’ll have to take an alternate route,” Perry sighed. “Go around this mess.”

  He turned and shrugged at her apologetically. Soma followed without comment as he walked back to the Ford, boots crunching on the debris the pileup had strewn across the pavement.

  “We need to start looking for someplace to hunker down for the night,” he said from the driver’s side door, squinting up at the sky. “I’m starting to think we won’t make it there before nightfall.”

  “We can’t drive after dark?” Soma asked.

  “It’s dangerous driving after dark,” Perry replied. “Deadheads chase after headlights. They’ll throw themselves right in front of a moving vehicle. We can try it, but we’d have to go really slow. And then we’ll run the risk of getting surrounded by a herd. That’s something I would very much like to avoid.”

  Grimacing, Soma said, “I’d rather stop somewhere for the night. No sense taking a gamble like that.”

  They clambered into the truck. Perry took the road atlas from the dash and opened it to one of the pages he had dog-eared. He grabbed a pencil and looked at the map thoughtfully. “Morganville was the last town we passed,” he said. “We’re just a couple miles south of Nowlin Lake. We’ll head back towards Morganville and take this route, Rabbit Foot Road. It comes up and around and connects back with 259 on the far side of the lake. Hopefully there’s nothing blocking the road.” As he spoke, he traced their new course with the pencil.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Soma said.

  A deadhead slapped his palms against the window, making her jump. It had snuck up on them while they were studying the atlas. The zombie snarled through the glass at her, eyes like snake eggs, teeth snapping. Soma locked the door and then stuck her tongue out at the deadhead. She glanced at Perry, embarrassed.

  “Sneaky sucker,” Perry grinned.

  “I didn’t even see him coming,” Soma chuckled, clutching her chest.

  Perry leaned forward and waved at the reanimated corpse. “Sorry, no solicitors!” Then he put the Ford in reverse and backed the truck around. The zombie stumbled after them, howling and slashing at the air with curled fingers, but it quickly receded behind them and vanished behind a bend in the road.

  Rabbit Foot Road was a narrow gravel road, overgrown and bumpy. Twice Perry had to stop the truck and drag a fallen branch from their path. If they came upon another, he swore, he would turn around and try a different route. About halfway through the detour, however, the road transitioned to blacktop. It was a lot less bumpy then. They hugged the perimeter of Nowlin Lake the rest of the way, its glimmering surface flashing at them through the trees as a parade of very nice lakeside homes glided past.

  They emerged onto Highway 259 without further incident and headed north toward Hoosier State Park. It was 3:30 PM by then. The plan was to continue north, keeping well away from Louisville and Indianapolis. They drove twenty minutes before they came upon another impassible traffic jam.

  “Aw, hell,” Perry said. “Hand me the atlas again!”

  32

  They lost an hour mapping out another route and backtracking. By the time they were headed in a n
ortherly direction again, it was nearly 4:30 PM, nowhere near dark, not in the summer, but the day’s heat had taken on a logy heaviness, as if the world itself had grown weary from its travels.

  Soma watched the shadow of the truck race alongside them, feeling as heavy and torpid as the day had become. Near exhaustion, neither of them had spoken since the last time they’d had to turn around. Perry spotted a Red Roof Inn about fifteen minutes after switching to Highway 2459. He pulled over without speaking and watched the building for a while, brow furrowed, before finally suggesting they stay the night there. They still had three hours of daylight left, he said, but the hotel was isolated and free of deadheads and they could park in the back, out of sight from the road.

  “I don’t think it’s gonna get any better than this,” Perry said.

  Soma agreed and Perry steered the Ford onto the parking lot. He wheeled around to the far side of the hotel and parked alongside the building. There was a compact car with the windows smashed out a few doors down from them, but no other vehicles in the back parking lot and no signs of activity, living or dead. There was nothing surrounding the hotel but empty fields and pine forest. Like the cheese, the hotel stood alone. Heigh-ho, the derry-o.

  Perry rolled his window down and listened intently. They could hear the wind soughing in the nearby pines, birdsong and the somnolent buzz of cicadas. Nothing else. “I know it’s still early,” he said, “but I’d rather be safe and lose a couple hours driving time than push our luck and get stuck sleeping in the truck or some old barn.”

  “It’s fine,” Soma said, looking out her window. “It’s pretty here, actually. Peaceful.”

  Opening his door, Perry said, “We still need to be careful. There could be deadheads in some of the rooms. They don’t know how to use doorknobs, and if they’re trapped in a room like I was before I woke up, they’re going to be mighty bitey if we let one of them out.”