Reenergized by the hope that her daughter might yet live, Soma rose. Her legs were a bit wobbly, but she got them under her.
“And my daughter?” she tried to say, but the noose was too tight around her neck again and she could only mouth the words. She strained against the lead pole until the cord around her throat loosened enough to speak, then said it again, “And my daughter?”
“Your daughter?” Big Boss scowled, and she could tell by his expression that he knew nothing of her daughter. Whatever had happened here, Aishani had escaped.
Soma feigned confusion, putting her fingers to her forehead. “N-no,” she stammered, “that’s right. Aishani died. She died during the outbreak.”
If Aishani had escaped these ruffians, the girl could be anywhere, and Soma did not want these horrible men looking for her baby. She didn’t want them to even entertain the possibility that her daughter might be out there somewhere, alone maybe, vulnerable, maybe close by. She looked at the man plaintively, hoping to distract him from the subject. “How did they die?” she asked. “My parents. My… my husband?”
Big Boss leaned back in his chair -- in her father’s chair! He eyed her askance for a beat, considering his response, then said simply, “We killed them.” A faint smile quirked his lips as she gaped at him. “It’s a dog eat dog world,” he said. “This is a nice place. We took it from them.”
Soma launched herself at him, fingers hooked into claws. She would have howled had the noose of Jim Bob’s lead pole not cut into her throat again. Instead, she made an urking sound, like someone on the verge of blowing chunks.
Big Boss shoved himself back from the desk, eyes bulging from their sockets. Both hands came up in an instinctive warding off gesture. His look of shock and fear might have satisfied her in some small way if she had been in control of her faculties, but she was beyond reason. For Soma Lashari, reason was about as far away as the Andromeda Galaxy right then.
Despite the fact that Jim Bob Gillette was almost a foot taller and nearly one hundred pounds heavier than Soma, her attack nearly pulled him off his feet. For a second he was too surprised to do anything but hang onto the lead pole, and just barely at that, but then he set his feet and hauled back, face turning red with the effort. He had to put his whole body into it – and his back would be so sore the next morning he would barely be able to get out of bed – but he managed to arrest Soma’s forward momentum so that her sharp, black nails swiped impotently in the air a good two feet from Big Boss’s face.
Soma fell across the desk, clawing at the braided metal noose around her throat, and then lunged forward again. A moment later, something struck her on the back of the head. Felt like a lead pipe or a Billy club. Whatever it was, it hit her with enough force to make stars flash in her vision, and she rolled off the desk and onto her hands and knees. She glimpsed a mud encrusted boot step into her field of view, and then she was struck again. She went down on her belly.
Big Boss was on his feet. “Stop! Stop!” he bellowed. “I need her alive!”
Not alive, Soma thought, lying on her face. She didn’t know if she meant herself, her loved ones or all of the above. She blinked her eyes, trying to shoo all those bright shooting stars out of her vision.
“Put her in the bomb shelter,” Big Boss said. “Cuff her to one of the pipes down there. I’ll question her after she’s had some time to cool off.”
“What if she don’t cooperate?” Jim Bob asked, pinning her down with the lead pole. “She’s pretty strong for a little thing.”
“Then cut off her arms and legs,” Big Boss said. “I don’t care. Just don’t damage her head. We need to know what’s in that cold, dead brain of hers.”
47
They put her in her father’s old bomb shelter. Soma cooperated. She had no doubt they would do exactly what Big Boss suggested -- cut off her arms and legs -- if she gave them the slightest trouble. It was all but inevitable she would die at the hands of these men anyway, and that in short order, probably after a period of excruciating torture and medical experimentation. She knew this as she knew the sun rose in the east and set in the west, and were it not for the fact that Big Boss had made no mention of Aishani, Soma would have welcomed death. Might have contemplated ending it herself, but so long as there was hope that her daughter still lived, she must try to live as well. She knew that that hope was slim, that Aishani could be anywhere or nowhere, alive or dead (or un-dead) but she could not let go of it. She held it close, let it comfort her, as a child held to a favored toy or blanket. So she would cooperate, try to find out what had happened to her only child and try to escape if the opportunity presented itself. If there were even a chance that her daughter still lived, somewhere out there in the world, Soma would do her best to find her, find her and make her safe.
A trio of men took her to her father’s bomb shelter: Jim Bob, Ray and an unnamed fellow with bushy red hair and a beard. The underground bunker had been her father’s most extravagant eccentricity: a self-contained, fully stocked nuclear fallout shelter, with food and water enough for four. It was a trailer-sized chamber, eight feet wide by fourteen feet long, with three feet thick concrete walls, an air filtration system, a fully functioning kitchen and bathroom and four fold up bunks.
Shortly after the outbreak, when the bombs started falling on the East Coast, all five of them had fled there to escape the fallout they were certain was headed their way. They had spent most of the month underground, peeking out like groundhogs several times a day to see if any radioactive ash had begun to fall from the sky. There was never any fallout. The nuclear strikes had been limited, and the winds had carried the debris out over the Atlantic. They’d finally abandoned the shelter and returned to the business of living in a post-apocalyptic world, not quite trusting their good fortune but determined to persevere.
The entrance to the bomb shelter was a brick shed in the side lawn, about fifty yards from the house. The door of the shed opened onto a set of concrete steps that descended to the shelter. Ray got the door, which had swollen over the years and opened only grudgingly and with a squawk of complaint, and now she was being marched down the concrete steps, the redhead lighting their way with a flashlight.
As they descended, Jim Bob snarled terrible threats at her, most of them sexual in nature, but it was not hard to ignore him. She could smell the fear in him, his fear of her, and it made the hunger inside her snarl back. She could kill him just as happily as he’d (no doubt) kill her – for what he’d done to Perry, for her parents, for Nandi. It would be easy. She’d just have to surrender to the red fog that hovered so near now to her thoughts.
They stopped at the foot of the stairs and Soma waited as Ray sidled carefully around her and pushed open the door. The shelter was a dark maw, the air that came rushing out of it hot and stale, like an animal’s breath.
“Get inside,” Jim Bob said, pressing her forward with the pole, and she stumbled into the dark chamber without protest.
The interior of the shelter had not changed much since last she’d seen it. The rations had been plundered, of course, but everything else was neat and in good repair. The beam of the flashlight flicked back and forth when they entered, as if the redheaded man were afraid something wicked was crouched in one of the corners, ready to pounce. In this day and age, such paranoia wasn’t without justification, but there were no bogeymen hiding behind the shelves – just shadows and cobwebs, and memories of the month her family had hunkered down here in the dark.
She was the only bogeyman in residence.
Their retreat into the bomb shelter had been the longest four weeks of her life. They had left the shelter more to get away from one another than out of the belief that the danger of fallout had passed. After four weeks in a hot concrete box, living cheek by jowl, it was radiation sickness or murder, and they had wisely chosen the radiation.
“Over there. By the pipe,” Jim Bob said.
The flashlight swung helpfully toward the pipe that Jim Bob had spoken of.
The metal conduit, about two inches in diameter, rose out of the floor near the entrance and zigzagged across the cinderblock walls to the kitchen area. Jim Bob motioned toward the bunks and Soma marched over to them. She held out her left arm when instructed and watched passively as Ray stepped in and nervously bound her to the pipe with handcuffs. He made sure the bracelet was cinched tightly around her wrist, jiggled the other end attached to the pipe, then stepped quickly away.
“She good?” Jim Bob asked.
“She’s good.”
Jim Bob flipped the lever that controlled the leash of the lead pole and lifted the noose up and over her head. All three men backed away, eyeing her warily.
Soma waited as they withdrew to the door, then lowered the bunk that was folded against the wall and sat.
“There’ll be an armed guard posted up top twenty-four-seven,” Jim Bob said, “so don’t even think about trying to escape. And who knows? If you behave yourself the boss might let you go. He’s not a bad guy.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Soma asked. Her voice was even more hoarse than normal, a horror movie rasp. Her neck stung where the leash had dug into the flesh.
Jim Bob shrugged with a grin. “What’s it matter? You’re dead already.” His companions guffawed.
Ray and the redheaded man exited to the stairwell. The wan light retreated across the walls in strange trapezoidal shapes as the men passed through the doorway. For a moment, Jim Bob stood in silhouette, his face occulted by shadow, but she could tell by his posture that he was still leering at her. His scent betrayed the sordid thoughts he was entertaining, and it sickened her.
“Be a good girl,” he trilled, and then he pulled the door shut, closing her in the dark.
Soma sat, feeling the silence and the darkness wind ever more closely around her, like a shroud. After a while, she maneuvered around so that she could lie flat on the bunk, one arm dangling uncomfortably from the cuffs. She thought perhaps she might sleep, but Perry’s absence was like a stone beneath her back – it held sleep at bay until she thought she would go mad.
Oh, Perry! she thought. Her body shuddered a little in mourning, but tears did not come. Her eyes burned, blind in the dark, but they remained dry.
Was he still hanging out there in the woods? Had they left him to be worried by the animals, bird-pecked and gnawed until he came apart? Oh, she couldn’t bear to think of it! Stop it! she screamed inside her head.
She sat up. She lay back down. She sat up again and tried to wriggle her hand from the cuffs.
The cuffs were cinched tight. She wouldn’t be able to wiggle out of them.
But she could free herself easily enough if she wanted to, couldn’t she? All she need do was chew through her own wrist and snap the hand off. It would hurt, but she wouldn’t bleed out. Zombies didn’t bleed. Not like living human beings bled. And she wouldn’t die because she was already dead.
Yet she hesitated – not because she was afraid of the pain, or reluctant to lose her hand. She hesitated because she wanted to know what had happened to her family. She wanted to know how they had died, and the only way she was going to learn that was to get it out of one of the invaders. And it wasn’t just morbid curiosity that drove her. In that knowledge might be some clue of Aishani’s whereabouts.
Perhaps Big Boss would tell her when he came down to the shelter to question her. Perhaps they could trade questions and answers Clarice Starling style, quid pro quo, like in the movie The Silence of the Lambs. She was not tough like fictional Agent Starling, but she thought she might be able to pull it off.
After that, well… she would do what she had to do.
Soma lay back down and stared up into the darkness. Now that she had been in the shelter a while, she noticed the silence was not as total as it had originally seemed. She could hear the wind mumbling in the pipes that vented the bomb shelter to the surface. It sounded like someone chuckling softly in the darkness overhead. It was creepy, but it was also comforting. Without that little snuffling sound, her internment would have been like lying in a sensory deprivation tank – sure to drive her mad.
To keep her brain occupied, she roved through her memories, replaying the especially pleasant ones, anything to keep her spirits up. Time, she quickly found, had little meaning in absolute darkness. She didn’t even have a heartbeat to help her measure its passage. The only thing she had was the hunger, which was growing more and more insistent as the night wore on… and her memories.
Teaching Aishani to ride a bike… Her first word: “Papa!”… Her parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary, when everything had gone so wrong… Her marriage to Nandi, and how nervous he had been during the ceremony! They had had a Christian wedding, and when the pastor told him to hold out his right hand, he had momentarily forgotten his left from his right and pantomimed writing in the air to recall which side was which… The evening Nandi proposed to her… The first time they made love… And Perry… Oh, Perry! Perry’s slow laugh and the way his moustache quirked up when he was amused… Loving Perry, if only in their dreams.
She had loved them both, Nandi and Perry. Now they were gone. Taken from her by the men who had imprisoned her in this dungeon.
For the first time in her life, she was completely and utterly alone.
48
At some point, she slept, but the dreams that came were not the lifelike waking dreams she had shared with Perry. The dreams she had that night were splintered and hallucinatory, as if a membrane of translucent tissue had been stretched across the waking world on which abstract images were being projected, waxing and waning as they flowed through her semi-conscious awareness: a moonlit road, rotting leaves, forest, field, bloody flesh. Eventually she realized she was picking up the brain waves of other nearby zombies, the unawakened dead – or Innocents, as the denizens of Siloam had dubbed them.
The thoughts of these creatures faded in and out like weak radio signals as they passed in the night, just images mostly, sensory information, with no sense of identity or cognizant direction. The images were so faint she doubted she would have noticed them were she not being held captive in what was basically a large sensory deprivation tank.
She tried to reach out to those other minds, curious to see if she could strengthen the contact by a conscious act of will, but the images raced away from her like timorous dryads, growing increasingly weak and fragmented until she lost the threads completely. It was like trying to snatch minnows from a pool of water by hand.
At last, frustrated, she gave up the pursuit, and she let the images drift through her awareness as they would.
Curiously, the strongest of the images, the one that reoccurred most often in her mind, was a vision of rotting leaves and damp, dark earth. There were small white mushrooms growing in the fertile loam. A plump beetle trundled between the waxy stems, its carapace an iridescent blue-black. It stopped, drummed its tiny limbs over a bit of fuzzy mold, then continued on its way. Aside from the activity of the beetle, the image did not move or change in any discernible way, though it was accompanied by a dim sense of pain. And hunger. Terrible, gnawing hunger.
An injured zombie, she thought; crippled, unable to feed itself, but still animated, still alive, and suffering terribly.
Soma pushed it from her mind. It was too awful.
She smelled flesh. Raw bloody flesh.
She opened her eyes and immediately squeezed them shut again. The door of the shelter stood open and indirect light, brilliant to her dark-adjusted eyes, slanted down from above. It was day again. Big Boss had finally come.
He stood near the door, dressed in blue jeans and a white and gray plaid shirt. His shadow stretched the length of the bomb shelter, grotesquely elongated. He was holding a plate in his hands on which a small, skinned animal lay weeping blood. A pair of rectangular glasses – old man glasses, she had always called them – were perched on the bulb of his nose. One of the earpieces was taped with black electrical tape. He looked like someone’s slightly eccentric, s
lightly pervy uncle. Jim Bob had accompanied him, waited in the stairwell with a rifle in his hands.
“You sleep?” Big Boss asked. He did not mean, “Did you sleep well?” but “Does your kind sleep?”
Blinking at him painfully, Soma said, “After a manner.” She sat up. Her eyes had still not adjusted to the light, and the smell of the raw flesh made her stomach contort in agony. She needed to feed. Every cell of her body cried out for sustenance. She stole another peek at Big Boss as her pupils slowly contracted. He was staring at her with clinical curiosity.
“After a manner?” he said, prompting her to clarify.
“We don’t sleep like living people do,” Soma explained. “It’s more like a trance, or a lucid dream. And we can sense the thoughts of other Resurrects when we sleep. Sometimes we share the same dreams.”
“Telepathy?” Big Boss asked. He sounded skeptical but intrigued.
“Not exactly,” Soma said. “It’s mostly just images, sensations. We can’t communicate with it. And we can’t control it. At least I can’t. I met one zombie who could.”
“Your friend who died in the woods?”
“No.”
He waited for her to continue, but she held her tongue. Finally, he said, “Who?”
“I’ll answer your questions,” Soma said, “but I have questions I’d like you to answer for me.” She looked up at the man, locked eyes with him. “Quid pro quo.”
Big Boss laughed. He had a big, barking laugh. It filled the small room. “You’re not in a position to demand anything!” he said when the laughter had dried up.
“But I am,” Soma insisted. “I have knowledge you want. No, I have knowledge you need. The worst thing you can threaten me with is death and I’ve already died once. Dying doesn’t scare me. Neither does pain. This… this thing that I am… it hurts. It hurts all the time. The hunger is a constant, maddening pain. It would be a relief to die. So, no, there’s nothing you can threaten me with that can make me talk if I don’t want to. I’m calling your bluff right now.”
Soma (The Fearlanders) Page 29
