Soma (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  The big man spoke quickly as the half-dozen intruders gathered up Soma and Perry’s belongings and marched them down to the parking lot. After their momentary standoff, he spoke with a little more civility, but he was blunt, and he was in an awful big hurry.

  “Blessed are the Innocent,” the big man said, a hint of wry amusement in his deep-pitched voice, “but they’ll strip the flesh from your bones like a school of hungry piranhas if you run into them, and you two were just about to do that. The herd is just a few hours north of here, and they’re headed this direction.”

  He had a military bearing, erect, commanding. He directed them around the building to the front where they had parked two big trucks, both black. As they started around the building, one of their abductors demanded Perry’s truck keys, and climbed into the Ford to bring it along after Perry, reluctantly, relinquished them.

  “And by Innocent, you mean--?” Soma said.

  “Unawakened zombies,” the big man answered. “The brain-dead.”

  She thought as much, but she had wanted him to clarify. The world had moved on while she was gone, and she was sure there were a lot of new things stalking it now, things she’d never heard of. Maybe things Perry had never heard of.

  “How big is it?” Perry asked, buttoning his shirt. He was still barefoot but had put on his pants -- and his cowboy hat.

  “Massive,” the big man said. “It’s the biggest herd we’ve seen since the Resurrection. After Baphomet foresaw their coming, we sent a scout team to reconnoiter, and they reported thousands of them.”

  “Thousands?” Perry asked.

  The big man nodded. “We think they came from Indianapolis. Those big herds form up in cities, where human populations were the most heavily concentrated during the End Times. They stay there in the cities until they’ve eaten every last rat, cat and living human being, then they break out and head into the country, where there’s still food to be had. We’ve seen it before, these big city herds, but nothing this size. Nothing this dangerous. Most of the really big herds have dispersed already. Abandoned the cities and spread out into the rural areas. They’re not so much of a nuisance after they’ve spread out, but this herd is still clumped together, and they’re hungry. Very, very hungry.”

  Soma raced along with the men, trying desperately to collect her thoughts. Despite their altruistic claims, their abductors hadn’t lowered their weapons or given them an opportunity to reject their assistance. She felt as if she had been swept up by a roaring flood, was being dragged helplessly along by forces that were beyond her control, beyond even her power to resist.

  They passed the swimming pool area, and though she couldn’t see the deadheads inside -- they were hidden from view by the fencing -- their moans and sloshing grew momentarily agitated. The damned things splashed and howled, desperate for sustenance, but the armed men showed neither pity nor curiosity.

  “This Baphomet,” she said, jostled by one of the men jogging beside her, “he told you where to find us?”

  The leader nodded. “The Lord has granted him a vision,” he said. “He saw you two coming. And, of course, you’ve been killing all the criminals we’ve crucified along the way. He isn’t too thrilled about that.”

  “You did that?” Soma asked, her tone sharper than she intended, and Perry shot her a warning glance. Lips pressed together, he shook his head no, just once.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” the big man said. “He doesn’t intend to punish you. You’re not one of us. We don’t expect you to abide by our laws. Those men and women deserved what they got. And who knows? Maybe it was God’s will you came along and put them out of their misery. Whatever the case may be, Baphomet is very interested in you.”

  “In us?” Perry said flatly.

  “Outsiders,” the man said, meeting Perry’s gaze and holding it. “Travelers. He’s curious about the world outside our territory. And he needs people like you to help him spread the Word. To proselytize to the unenlightened.”

  “Like missionaries?” Soma said.

  The leader nodded curtly, his eyes measuring. They were dark, those eyes, and so deeply recessed in his bloodless face that he looked like a talking skull. If not for his prodigious bulk, most of it muscle, and the block of granite that was his chin, he would have looked positively skeletal.

  “The Lord has laid the world to waste, my friends, just like He did in the time of Noah,” he said. “As it was foretold in Revelations, the dead have arisen. The time of Judgment has come to pass. God has laid it on our shoulders to usher in a New Heavens and a New Earth, and He has chosen Baphomet, our prince, to show us the way.”

  The man’s zealotry had a shocking effect on Perry. His eyes widened and his face seemed to lengthen, as if it were melting just a little. His bristly mustache drooped like a fainted lady. It was fear, Soma knew, and her heart answered in kind. It actually seemed to quiver a little in her breast, as if in remembrance of past frights. If Perry – who had seemed imperturbable until now – was scared, they were in very real danger.

  She remembered what Perry had said when they first came across the crucified men: Crazy people are dangerous, and religious nuts are the most dangerous crazy people of all.

  Now they were up to their necks in them!

  They ushered Soma and Perry toward their trucks. Neither of them resisted until they tried to separate the two. “Oh, hell no!” Perry exclaimed, thrusting out his chest. “We ride together or we don’t ride at all!” He had four automatic weapons pointed at him, but he held their leader’s gaze without so much as a blink.

  “We don’t have time to argue,” the big man glowered.

  “Who’s arguing?” Perry challenged him.

  The big man stared him down for a moment, then slouched with a sigh. “Whatever,” he said. “Ride together. Ride on the hood if you want. We just need to get out of here. We’re pushing our luck as it is.”

  They were standing beside one of the black trucks, bathed in the glow of the Ford’s headlights, which was idling nearby. One of the men opened the passenger door for Perry, gestured for him to get in. Perry shouldered the guy out of the way, helped Soma in and quickly climbed in behind her.

  “You okay?” he whispered.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Scared.”

  “Me, too. Just stay cool.”

  The door opened a moment later and the armed man said, “You think you’re going with just a driver? We don’t know you. Scoot over.”

  Perry scooted. The guy got in, sneering at Perry contemptuously. He slammed the door shut. The barrel of his assault rifle wavered around the cab and Perry ducked back, pushing it away from his face.

  “Hey!” the guy shouted. “Don’t touch the gun!”

  “Then point it the other way!”

  The driver’s side door opened and the leader of the group slid in behind the wheel. He jangled his keys in the ignition and started the engine.

  The headlights, when they came on, illuminated the pine forest on the north side of the Red Roof Inn. Stumbling from the misty underbrush, a trio of deadheads craned their heads toward the light. Their lips peeled back in savage snarls and they started toward the trucks at a lope.

  “Outriders of the herd,” the big man said, watching the zombies sprint across the field toward them. He put the truck in drive and drew a circle in the parking lot, headed toward the highway. The zombies turned red in the flare of the brake lights and then the group was on its way, the dark landscape scrolling smoothly past the windows.

  “You called them Innocents in the hotel earlier,” Soma said to the man. “Why do you call them that?”

  The driver looked at her, his expression unreadable in the green glow of the dash readouts. “They are innocents,” he said. “They don’t know good and they don’t know evil, just like Adam and Eve in the Garden. In His mercy, God has returned mankind to the state of grace it fell from so very long ago.”

  “They don’t look too graceful to me,” Perry said from the corner of his m
outh, and to their surprise, the man behind the steering wheel chuckled.

  “No, they don’t,” he said.

  35

  The leader of the company who abducted Perry and Soma from the Red Roof Inn was named Bill Einkorn, but the men all called him “Sarge”, and he invited the two of them to do the same. Before the Phage, he had been a drill sergeant serving at Fort Knox near Louisville, Kentucky. He was six feet four inches tall, broad chested and had a face that looked as if it had been carved from a block of granite with a dull chisel. Soma was not at all surprised that the man had been a member of the United States Army. Military oozed like sweat from his pores. What did surprise her was that he was a great deal more amiable than he originally seemed to be. Now that they were on their way to Siloam, the compound that sheltered the members of their religious order, he was much more sociable. He never apologized for their abduction and that measuring look did not once quit his gaze, but he lowered his voice and wasn’t disinclined to answer some of their questions.

  The fellow bookending them was named Tyler Johnson. Before the Phage took his life, he was a thirty-three year fast food cook from Carbondale, Illinois. He was short, slim and fidgety, with curly blond hair and weasel-like features -- the type of guy who got confrontational in the presence of bigger men. The little guy had a chip on his shoulder. Napoleon Syndrome, her father had always called it. He was also a little chewed up -- his face, his neck -- giving him a ghoulish mien. He seemed to take an instant dislike to Perry, but the feeling was apparently mutual, as Perry cursed the man profusely when he continued to wave his rifle around. When Tyler allowed the barrel of his rifle to swing toward Perry for the third time that night, Perry shoved it hard into the man’s narrow face and exclaimed, “Damn it, kid! You do that one more time, I’m gonna shove that popgun up your ass and pull the trigger!”

  They got into a brief pushing match in the crowded confines of the cab, jostling Soma into Sarge and making the man swerve across the road. “DE-SIST!” the drill sergeant roared, the muscles in his neck and temples standing out. The two men froze guiltily like a couple of scolded kids on a family outing.

  “I cannot believe you two actually did that,” Sarge said, eyes bulging. “Ty, quit antagonizing our guest. You…”

  “Perry,” Perry supplied.

  “Perry. Have a little more regard for your lady friend’s wellbeing,” Sarge said. “We’re trying to save your lives, after all.”

  “Sorry,” Perry said immediately, ducking his head contritely. Soma patted him on the knee.

  “Yeah, sorry,” the cook muttered. He picked at the wounds on his face, eyes twitching in their sockets.

  Hoping to dispel some of the tension in the vehicle, Soma addressed the driver. “So this place, where you’re taking us, you call it Siloam?”

  “It’s named after the Pool of Siloam in the Bible, where Jesus restored the vision of a blind man,” Sarge said. “You know the story. How Jesus came upon a blind beggar, and his disciples asked him who had sinned to cause the man to be born blind, him or his parents. ‘No one’s sin caused this man to be born blind,’ Jesus told them. He said the man was born blind so that the works of God could be illustrated in him. Then Jesus spit upon the ground, smeared it around to make some mud, rubbed the mud on the blind man’s eyes and told him to go wash the mud away in the Pool of Siloam. After the man did that, he found that he’d been healed.”

  “I guess God ain’t averse to blinding a few babies to make a point,” Perry said.

  “So it’s a military compound?” Soma asked, ignoring her companion.

  “Oh, no,” the man chuckled. “It’s a church. A very big church. What they used to call a mega church. They used to film religious programing for a Christian cable network there. One of the shows was called The Water of Life. Another was Hour of Power. That was where Baphomet was reborn, where God struck the scales from his eyes. He’s a Resurrect, like us. Maybe the first. A sinner in life and an Innocent in death, but God restored his mind there, at the altar of New Life Church. It’s where God revealed the Path to him, His new covenant with man.”

  “So how many people you got?” Perry asked.

  Sarge glanced at him but didn’t answer.

  “We’re not spies,” Perry laughed. “You came looking for us, not the other way around. We’re just trying to find her family.”

  “They were still alive when I died,” Soma said. “My husband, my daughter, my mother and father. We went to my father’s farm in Brookville Lake during the outbreak. I got bit and died. Nandi -- that’s my husband -- Nandi was always a bit softhearted. I guess he couldn’t bear to… you know, make sure I didn’t come back. I woke up in Illinois. Perry took me in, offered to help me find them.”

  Sarge looked at her. There was pity in his eyes.

  “You know you can’t stay with them, don’t you?” he said. “Even if they’re still alive. We can resist the hunger. We can resist it for a while so long as we’re well fed, but it always wins out in the end. Eventually you’ll slip. You’ll slip and you’ll hurt one of them. Kill one of them, most likely. I don’t know if you’ve realized it yet, but we’re a lot stronger than living people now, especially when we’re in the grip of the hunger. One of them will cut a finger, or your little girl will fall down and skin her knee. You’ll smell that blood, and that’ll be it. For you or for them.”

  “I know,” Soma admitted reluctantly. “I know you’re right. I just… I need to know what happened to them. I need to know if they’re still alive.”

  “I know how you feel,” Sarge said. “I had a wife. No kids -- she couldn’t have any -- but I had her, my Rachel. I was killed during the outbreak. My unit was deployed to Louisville to help with the quarantine there. We were overrun. I got bit four or five times. I managed to break free somehow, escaped into a construction site and hid inside a drainage pipe. I changed there that night, listening as the city died, as it devoured itself, like Oroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. I woke up here in Indiana. Baphomet had found me, called me back from the darkness. God needed me, he said, to help usher in the New Age. Well, I’ve always been a God fearing man, maybe not the best Christian in the world – we all have our failings -- but before I could answer that call, I had to find out what happened to my Rachel. I went back to Fort Knox, tried to find my wife. Baphomet let me go, even though he knew I wouldn’t find her. He told me so. Tried to warn me. And he was right. She was gone. Our house was just like I left it that day, not a thing out of place, but there was no sign of my Rachel. She was gone, like she had vanished in a puff of smoke.”

  Soma put her hand on his bicep and said, “I’m sorry.”

  He looked at her hand, her face, then returned his eyes quickly to the road. He cleared his throat.

  “She just needs closure,” Perry said gently. “She knows all that.”

  “And what do you need?” Tyler asked with a sneer. “Why are you sticking your neck out for her? What’s in it for you?”

  “Nothing,” Perry said with a shrug. “Soma’s my friend. I wanted to help her. Not everyone’s motivated by self-interest.”

  Tyler rolled his eyes.

  “So tell us about this prophet, this Baphomet,” Perry said, ignoring his nemesis.

  “What can I tell you about him?” Sarge said thoughtfully. “He’s kind of hard to describe. He’s a little… scary looking. Outré, I suppose you could say. You’ll see what I mean when you meet him. But there’s something about him. An inner light. A radiance. He has a way of getting inside your head, like he can read your thoughts. The world just sort of melts away, and you see…” His voice drifted off as he tried to find the words.

  “See what?” Perry prompted him.

  “The Truth,” Sarge said. “The way the world really is, and what we need to do to save it. To save ourselves.”

  “He’s got powers,” Tyler interjected, speaking in a stage whisper.

  “Powers?” Soma asked.

  “He sees visions,” Tyler
said. “Of the future. He knows things he ought not to know. And he can control the deaders -- the Innocent, I mean. They’re like puppies when they’re around him. They do what he tells them to do. And he can bring people back from the dead. Not, you know, literally from the dead. I mean, like, he can wake them up. He takes their faces in his hands and calls them back. Makes them smart again, like they used to be. Like us.”

  “Some more than others,” Perry remarked, but the insult sailed over Tyler’s head.

  “So why’d he send you after us?” Soma asked. “If he can call people back from the dead, what’s he need us for? He can resurrect all the missionaries he needs.”

  Sarge shrugged. “I don’t know. He just said to bring you back. That you were special.”

  “And told you where we were staying,” Perry frowned.

  “He knows things,” Tyler said, tapping his head and grinning.

  Soma recalled the nightmare she had had right before the men burst in their room. The big, creepy house. The eyes in the walls, following her as she fled through its corridors. Perhaps, in that strange hypnotic state that passed for sleep for the dead, she had sensed his questing gaze. Sensed it, and fled from it. Then she thought of those poor people crucified on the utility poles, their bodies mangled, the inhumanity of their punishment. How long had they suffered before she and Perry came along and put them out of their misery? Months? Years?

  Despite the awe in which her abductors held the man, she was not too eager to meet this Baphomet.

  His religion was just a little too Old Testament for her taste.

  36

  It was still night when they arrived at the campus of New Life Church, though the sky had begun to lighten in the east. The drive from the hotel to their abductor’s headquarters took less than an hour to complete. About halfway through the journey, a crazed deadhead threw itself in front of the truck, enticed by the vehicle’s headlights, and Sarge had to swerve the avoid it. The truck following nearly skidded into their rear-end, brakes squealing, but they managed to avoid a collision, and the rest of the trip proceeded without incident.