Soma (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  Soma nodded as she climbed from the truck. Her joints crackled from sitting so long. “Just have to listen at the door before opening it,” she said. She placed her hands in the small of her back and stretched. More crackling. “They moan constantly, even the really dried up ones. It’s a wonder they can ever sneak up on anyone. First or second floor?” The hotel had two levels, with exterior stairs and walkways.

  “Second floor’s always safer. Got your gun?”

  “Yes.”

  Perry was carrying his rifle with both hands. He had tilted the brim of his cowboy hat low over his eyes so that he looked dangerous, like an Old West gunfighter. In fact, he reminded Soma a little of Chuck Connors from that old TV show her dad used to watch, The Rifleman. Only Perry had a Tom Cruise schnoz and a Sam Elliott mustache. And then it struck her how silly it was to compare him to a bunch of dead movie stars.

  As they circled around the stairs, Soma said, “I wonder if the pool is open.” Perry looked at her with a dubious expression until he realized she was kidding.

  “Maybe we should jump in the Jacuzzi,” he said, playing along.

  “I hope the room service here is good,” Soma mused.

  “I hear it’s to die for,” Perry replied, and Soma laughed.

  They heard a low moan from one of the ground floor rooms then, and Soma covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Sorry!” she hissed.

  Perry shrugged and waved her on.

  They crept up the stairs and started down the second floor landing. At each door, they paused and placed their ears against the paneling. If they heard groans or any hint of movement inside, they passed on. If they didn’t, Perry tried the knob. Most were locked. Halfway down the landing they found a room that was both unoccupied and unlocked. Perry pushed the door open with the barrel of his rifle and peered inside.

  “Anything?” Soma asked.

  “Hang on, let me check the bathroom,” Perry said. He stepped inside, jerked open the bathroom door, then grinned back at her. “All clear!”

  They unloaded the truck, carrying their supplies to the second floor and stacking them in a little pile beside the table. The room was generously apportioned and in surprisingly good repair, considering it had been unlocked for years. The color scheme was Hotel Blah and there were several nondescript landscape paintings hanging on the walls. There were two full size beds, a television, a mini fridge and a table with two chairs.

  Soma was relieved when she saw that the room had two beds, mainly because she wanted very much to share a bed with Perry again, but she feared what dreams might come if they should continue to sleep so intimately. She felt guilty enough about what had happened the previous night, and that had happened by accident. If she didn’t guard her feelings, it was bound to happen again. She wouldn’t be able to blame her moral lapse on ignorance if it happened a second time.

  Until she knew otherwise, she was still a married woman, dead or not.

  Perry put the last of their bags by the table and walked to the window. He opened the curtain, letting in some sunshine. “We’ll have to close the curtains after dark, but for now… let there be light!”

  Soma wandered around the room, inspecting the TV, the dresser drawers. “Smells a little musty in here. Not as bad as me, though.” There was a used condom in one of the drawers. It looked like a little yellow snakeskin. She crinkled her nose and pushed the drawer shut quickly.

  “You want to wash up?” Perry asked.

  “How?”

  “Check the toilet tank for water.”

  She went into the bathroom and lifted the lid of the toilet tank. Surprisingly, there were a few inches of murky water inside.

  “I brought some towels and wash cloths,” Perry said, looking over her shoulder. “I’ll fetch them from the bag.”

  He brought a candle, too, and placed it on the bathroom counter. Lighting the wick with his lighter, he asked her to save a little water for him and withdrew, closing the door behind himself. “I’m stepping out on the landing to have a smoke,” he called.

  “Okay.”

  Zombies do not poop or pee like living human beings do, but they eat, and as the old adage averred: “What goes in must come out.” Soma removed her clothing from the waist down and curled her nose at the ripe stench that wafted up from her nether regions. Perry had very discretely informed her how he kept himself clean -- king size maxi pads stuffed in the seat of his underpants -- and she had taken to doing the same thing. She removed the pad and stuffed it into the trashcan and then moistened a washcloth and cleaned herself thoroughly. She disposed of the washcloth, then put her clothes back on and leaned over the counter. The candle’s golden glow had softened her features, making her look almost alive again. Regular meals had lightened the crenellations of her flesh. She ran her fingers through her hair, adjusted the waistband of her slacks, smiled and thought, Not too hideous.

  And tomorrow…

  By this time tomorrow, she could very possibly be reunited with her family.

  The very idea made her ache with longing and she said a quick prayer that her loved ones were safe. She didn’t care to contemplate just how high the odds were stacked against that, or how they might receive her if, by some phenomenal stroke of luck they were still alive and well, or what she was going to do about Perry if they wanted her to stay. She was honest enough to admit that she had fallen just a little bit in love with her new companion, but Nandi, Aishani, her mother and father, they were her family. If she had to choose between Perry and her family, she would choose her family.

  Feeling somewhat guilty, she walked out onto the landing.

  Perry was standing by a post, staring out across the field with a placid expression. He had burnt his cigarette to a stub.

  “Bathroom’s all yours,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  She stood beside him, enjoying the smell of his cigarette. Back before the Phage, smoking had become a real social evil, but she had always liked the smell of cigarette smoke. It reminded her of her father, who wasn’t averse to firing up a Camel every now and then.

  She followed Perry’s gaze with her own, smiling into the breeze as it ran soft, invisible fingers through her hair. “The world seems so much bigger now,” she said. “Big and empty and just… quiet.”

  “It is,” Perry said. “It always was. We were the ones making all the noise.”

  She leaned her head against his shoulder, thanking him once more for taking her to her family. It seemed a small betrayal, her familiarly with him, but it was also right. She could love him as a friend, even if she couldn’t love him as a man.

  Perry tossed his stub down to the parking lot, then said, “You really ought to stay out of the pool.”

  “What?” Soma blinked, and he pointed to the swimming area, which sat almost directly below them.

  A tall white privacy fence encircled the hotel’s pool. There was very little water left in it. What remained was a sludge of decomposed leaf litter and coffee-colored algae. Stumbling around the bottom of the pool were three deadheads and the skeletal remains of at least half a dozen more. The three still moving were stick-thin and sun-broiled, their skin glossy brown. They marched along the walls at equal distances, their movements labored and mechanical. The gate on the far side of the fence stood open.

  Soma’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, my goodness!”

  “I guess they’ve just been kind of wandering around in circles in there,” Perry said. “Fresh one falls in, eats the older ones, then circles the pool until another, stronger zombie falls in.”

  “That’s so horrible!”

  “I’d put ‘em out of their misery, but we really need to conserve our ammunition,” Perry said.

  There was a ladder in the pool, and a set of narrow steps, but deadheads understood the workings of ladders and stairs about as well as they understand doorknobs. They slogged through the fetid water with robotic jerkiness, groaning intermittently. They would wander the perimeter of the pool
, going around and around and around, until starvation reduced them to a state of agonized rigidity.

  “Is there any way to get them out of there?” Soma asked.

  “Safely? I doubt it. They look pretty hungry.”

  “Maybe, when we leave tomorrow?” she said. “We could lasso them, pull them out with the truck.”

  “All three at once?”

  “Or one at a time…?”

  “We’d have to contend with the first one while we try to rescue the second and then repeat that with two of ‘em running loose when we go back for the third. They don’t look too durable, either. Might snap ‘em in two trying to drag ‘em out of there.”

  Soma sighed. “They’re just stuck in there, aren’t they? Forever and ever.”

  Perry nodded.

  Soma could stand to look at them no longer. They were too pitiful.

  “I’m going back inside,” she said.

  Perry nodded. “I’ll join you in a minute,” he said. “Gonna have one more cigarette.”

  33

  Night fell and they prepared for bed. Perry asked, in a very roundabout way, if she wanted to bunk with him for the night. His prevarications were charming -- almost amusing enough to tempt her into his bed -- but she gently declined. “I’d like to,” she said haltingly, “but I’m afraid we might, you know, have a repeat of last night. We don’t really know how the dreamsharing works, if physical contact strengthens the link, and besides, I still don’t know what’s happened to my family. If they’re alive or...”

  There was so much more to say, but she didn’t know how to articulate it, or even if she should.

  “Oh, sure, sure, yeah, I understand,” Perry said quickly, and she had a strong suspicion that if zombies could blush, his face would have been as red as a tomato right then.

  She was sitting cross-legged, a pillow in her lap. Perry had lit a single candle and placed it on the nightstand that separated their beds, a glimmering chaperone. The tremulous light made their shadows caper eerily upon the walls, but he was afraid to light any more candles, he said. It was dangerous to have lights on at night. Deadheads were like moths. Light drew them. Even candlelight. But she knew that. Soma was staring at the moon when she awakened, entranced by its gibbous glow. She had been staring at it for hours while the herd fed on some unlucky deer or cow or whatever it was they had killed earlier that night.

  Human beings have always been fascinated by light, she thought, and the dead were no exception.

  “I mean, we should be there tomorrow,” she went on. “At Brookville Lake. I could be reunited with them tomorrow and I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around that. I’ve been dead for years, but for me it’s like I just saw them last week. What are they going to think about this? How is Nandi going to feel about me? Aishani is going to be all grown up. Nandi might even have a new girlfriend. He might even have another child. Or kids! Plural! Oh, lord, Perry! I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight!”

  Perry chuckled as he sat down across from her. “There’s no telling what we’ll find tomorrow,” he said. “You’re just going to have to roll with the punches.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “They could be dead or gone or alive and still there. They could be deadheads or Resurrects like us. They could be anything. We might not even make it there. Something might happen to us along the way.”

  “Exactly,” Perry said.

  “So what do I do?” she pleaded, her voice climbing an octave or two in frustration. She felt like there was a storm bottled inside her skull, and her thoughts were leaves caught up in its winds.

  He leaned forward and took her wildly gesticulating hands in his own. “Let go of it,” he said. “You’re trying to predict the future, trying to control it, but you can’t. No one can. Pray tonight, if you think that’ll help. If it makes you feel better. And then let go of it. You’ll go crazy if you don’t.”

  She sighed, nodded her head.

  “It’s hard,” she said.

  “I know.”

  He held her hands in his for a moment, looking down at their clasped fingers. His bangs hung over his eyes like two silver bird’s wings. He had a strange expression on his face, a mournful look, almost morose, as if he were giving her up and it was breaking his heart.

  “Thank you,” she said, extricating her hands from his.

  He blinked up at her and then smiled. “Oh, yeah, sure. Sure.”

  “I… think I can sleep now.”

  “Good. Good. Glad I could help.”

  Soma tried to still her thoughts, seek that inner peace Perry had talked about, but her thoughts continued to swirl long after Perry blew out the candle and they bedded down, each to their aloneness. She lay in her big, empty bed, staring at the ceiling in the dark, and listened to the zombies circling the pool down below. She could hear them in the stillness, their feet sloshing through that sludgy water, their low, plaintive moans. It just went on and on and on until she wanted to clap her hands over her ears and scream, but she knew it wasn’t those poor trapped zombies driving her crazy, it was her fear -- fear for her loved ones, fear of the unknown, fear of her own desires.

  She turned her attention to Perry, looking for distraction, but he was silent, covers pulled up to his chest, eyes closed, head tilted slightly to the left.

  Finally, at her wit’s end, she bent her thoughts inward, diving resignedly into that lucid dream-state that passed for sleep for the undead. She was afraid to let go, afraid of what might happen should she and Perry dream share again. Her mind adrift, her inhibitions forsaken, she might cheat on Nandi again -- in fantasy if not in flesh. But she did not dream of Perry, or even the loved ones she’d come so far to find. She dreamed she was in a big, abandoned house, the epitome of the Haunted House, with deep dusty rooms and labyrinthine corridors, its menace as tangible as the cobwebs that festooned the ghostly draped furniture. In the dream, she was running from someone, trying to find some place to hide from him, but there were eyes in the wallpaper, large stylized eyes, and they turned to follow her as she fled through the creaking manse.

  The eyes… they were just patterns on the peeling wallpaper, but they moved like the pictures in those Harry Potter movies that were so popular right before the outbreak. Stylized, like Egyptian hieroglyphics, the eyes rolled to follow her, blinking, glaring.

  “Who are you?” she cried out in the dream. “What do you want?”

  (Light.)

  Light played across the ceiling and walls, slipping in through the seam where the curtains hung together.

  She had been staring blankly at the ceiling while her mind drifted, while she raced through that terrible dream-house, but the light drew her back to the waking world. She sat up in alarm.

  “Perry!” she hissed.

  She watched the light shift around the edges of the curtain, a timorous halo, as Perry snorted and rolled over.

  “Perry!”

  “What?”

  “There’s someone out there!”

  He saw the light and scurried out of bed with a curse, stumbling after his rifle. Even as he fumbled for his weapon, disoriented and clumsy, voices rang out on the landing. “No, this one!” someone shouted. Another voice ordered, “Kick the door in!” Shadows flitted across the curtain, distorted into monstrous shapes by the undulations of the fabric. An instant later, a heavy blow shuddered the door.

  “Perry!” Soma wailed, swimming across the bed toward him.

  Another heavy blow landed on the door and it crashed open. Stark white light flooded the hotel room, dazzling Soma’s eyes, even as chips of wood from the doorframe peppered her cheeks and bare arms.

  Zombie pupils are slow to adjust to changes in the intensity of light. Blinded, Soma threw her arms up in front of her face, crying out in fear and surprise. She saw at least two figures on the landing before she shielded her eyes from the glare, their forms indistinct.

  Survivors, she thought, and she was suddenly quite certain they were about to be gunned down, j
ust like her herd had been gunned down in the parking lot of the truck stop. Her quest to find her family would end in a hail of bullets, and she would never know what had happened to her loved ones. Not unless there really were an afterlife.

  “Get out of the way!” Perry shouted, and he let go of his rifle with one hand to shove her out of the line of fire.

  “Lower your weapon!” one of the intruders barked. “We’ve got you outnumbered ten to one!”

  She could tell by the raspy quality of the man’s voice that he was a Resurrect, not a living human being. For a moment, her brain could not reconcile the two realities: the universe she had imagined versus the universe her senses were reporting. Not survivors -- Resurrects! But what did that mean? Who were these men? And what did they want?

  There was a moment of tense silence, then Perry capitulated.

  “All right! Don’t shoot!” Perry said behind her.

  “Put it down! On the ground!”

  Her eyes were finally adjusting to the glare. Soma blinked back at Perry, saw him lower the rifle to the floor and rise back up, his hands in the air. She put her hands up, too.

  Several men spilled into the room. They were armed with big flashlights and even bigger automatic weapons. Their lights careened around the room as they advanced on Soma and Perry. The swooping beams made her feel dizzy, or maybe it was the terror. She retreated toward Perry, and he put an arm around her protectively.

  “Who are you?” Perry demanded. “What do you want?”

  “We’re here to save you,” one of the intruders answered. He was a big man with heavy, angular features and deep-set eyes. “Your lives and your immortal souls.”

  34

  They were, they said, disciples of a man called Baphomet. Baphomet was a prophet of God, like Jesus of Nazareth, or Moses before Him. Baphomet had seen the two of them in a vision and had dispatched his followers to rescue them. When Perry demanded to know just what exactly they were being rescued from, the big man surprised them both by answering immediately and without equivocation. “There’s a huge herd of Innocent headed this way,” the big man said as the intruders hustled them from the hotel. He seemed to be their leader and took care of the lion’s share of the exposition as the two groups fled from the Red Roof Inn.