The Fifth Day

by Gordon Bonnet

  He frowned, but to her surprise, shrugged, his face betraying no emotion. “Okay. Whatever.”

  Whatever you silly women want to do.

  Asshole.

  She tossed her bags of medications into the back seat, then turned toward Olivia. The engine started up behind her.

  “Olivia?” She walked slowly toward her, as one would approach a skittish rabbit. “C’mon, honey. You need to come with us.”

  Olivia moved, a tiny, spasmodic shake of the head. “No. It isn’t safe.”

  “Nowhere’s safe, that’s true. But we’re leaving. You need to be with other people.”

  “We need to go somewhere where we can see. Open space. Somewhere in Nebraska or Oklahoma, where there are no obstructions, where you can see for miles. Where nothing can sneak up on you.”

  “If that’s where you want to go, you can.” Zolzaya kept her voice steady, soothing. “But for now, let’s go back to Furness. Now we’ve got enough people that there can always be someone watching. You can relax.”

  “Relax?” She gave a tight laugh. “Never. You can keep watch all you want. Doesn’t matter. There are corners. Shadows. Edges. Places where things can conceal themselves. Monsters always hide in the spaces between. In the dark spots behind reality.”

  “Everywhere is like that, Olivia.”

  Again, that jerky, frantic shake of the head. “You have to be where space is all filled up, like the world was before everyone disappeared, or else somewhere that there’s nothing but space. Where there’s nowhere to hide.” She shivered, despite the warmth. “California is in the middle. Halfway between open and closed. Halfway between empty and filled. So there’s spaces for the monsters to live.”

  Zolzaya shuddered. She was right. It was horrifying, but she was right. “For now, you need to come with us,” she said, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. “When you want to head east, you can. But you can’t stand out here on the front lawn of the hospital forever.” She put her hand on Olivia’s upper arm, gave a gentle pull toward the waiting car. “Come on, Olivia. We may not be safe, but you’re safer with us than alone.”

  Finally the other woman’s eyes met Zolzaya’s. There was a connection, like some vital link had been established. Olivia gave her a nod, and with effort moved her feet.

  “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”

  “None of us do.”

  “I can’t bear it.”

  “It’s awful, I know.” Zolzaya kept up the pressure, and Olivia kept shuffling toward the car. “No one likes thinking about that.”

  “What did this? All of this?” A shudder rippled through Olivia’s frame. Her voice rose to a scream, but it was still muted in the inhuman silence of the empty world—padded, wrapped in cotton, as if her words couldn’t bite into the air, and were swallowed by the desolation as soon as they were given voice. “It doesn’t make any sense! Things are supposed to make sense!”

  Z gave a brief prayer of hope they had some sedatives in those bags. They were gonna need them.

  2

  WE ARE TRAVELERS from the other side of the forest, one said. We seek a path through.

  So say all who come this way, she said. You are fortunate to make it this far.

  Not all of us did.

  No. I am certain they did not. She turned her sightless eyes toward each in turn. But you have not answered my question. Who are you?

  A man we met counseled us not to tell our names to any.

  Did he? She smiled. It is good counsel. You have learned some of what the forest has to teach. But there are other ways to find what I wish to know.

  —

  JACKSON MOVED INTO the back seat with Olivia on the drive back to Ben’s house. It was what they expected him to do. For now, best to keep the questions to a minimum.

  Zolzaya drove, and spent the half-hour in quiet conversation with Gareth. Jackson listened to them, giving it only as much of his attention as it took to be aware if anything critical came up. So far, it had all been nothing but backstory. As if any of that mattered now.

  What had happened in the hospital foyer had been his second screw-up. First, he’d walked into nearly being killed by Grendel, and then he’d let this pond-thing—whatever it was—throw him across the room.

  Two screw-ups were two too many. They’d all survived so far, but that was luck. A third lapse, and luck would certainly favor their adversaries, who apparently were more numerous and varied than they’d appeared at first.

  But self-recrimination was also a path of weakness. Acknowledge the mistake, rededicate to not making it again, then forget it.

  Time to face forward, and consider what to do next.

  Olivia was silent the whole way. This suited Jackson fine. She was probably still useful, not least because it gave the others the sense that he was in a romantic relationship, or at least a sexual one, and that gave him a veneer of normalcy. If he could be pulled along either by his heart or by his testicles, he was human.

  He was one of them.

  The Voice in the Place Where The Answers Are had warned him about Zolzaya. She would have to be dealt with eventually. So, if she survived, would Lissa. The others?

  He went through them one at a time.

  Olivia might have to be eliminated if she found out too much too soon.

  Gary was a simple guy, most likely could be useful as a rank-and-filer.

  Jeff probably wouldn’t last five minutes anyhow, whatever Jackson did. He’d be too busy thumping his Bible to recognize danger when it came.

  And the kid? The kid was okay.

  Kids were trainable.

  As for the others—the doctor, the crazy Japanese chick, and the woman who was in a coma—well, they’d either make it or not. The Place Where The Answers Are said nothing about them, which must mean that they were insignificant in his plans.

  And what, exactly, were his plans? He looked out the open window at the ocean rolling by as the slipstream washed over his arm and face. Once he was done here, and the forces rising up around him had selected the survivors, he’d collect them and strike off northward. Olivia had been right about one thing—California wasn’t where he’d stay. But no way would he go where she was suggesting—the Midwest, with its baking temperatures in summer and blizzards in winter, and the ever-present hazard of tornadoes.

  No, he was looking for a more clement place for him and his people to make a last stand.

  He saw himself making his way along the coast, pulling together as many survivors worthy of saving as he went, and maybe stopping in Portland or Seattle. Somewhere urban, where the supplies couldn’t reasonably be expected to run out for years. Somewhere with adequate natural supplies of fresh water, that wasn’t prone to bitter winters, or earthquakes, or hurricanes.

  Somewhere he could set up shop for a while.

  But something had to happen before that. It was looming on the edge of his sight, like the slate-green clouds on the horizon when a storm is coming. He could see it, just as he’d smelled the oncoming of the disappearance that had ended most of the human race. Once again, he didn’t know when it was going to occur, but he knew it was approaching. The Place Where The Answers Are had assured him on that point.

  Ragnarok. The final battle. A battle he intended to win.

  Jackson had first come across the idea of Ragnarok in a library book he’d checked out when he was ten years old. D’Aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths, it was called. It contained scores of illustrations that had left him breathless—giants and ogres and trolls and monsters, and the gods and goddesses who fought against them. They were the Aesir, beautiful and strong and fearless.

  But at the end, the monsters won.

  He recalled even now how shocked he’d been when Surt the Fire Giant and Midgard’s Serpent and Fenrir the Wolf had destroyed everything, crushed Asgard, killed even the mighty god Thor. He sat in his bedroom, staring at the page illuminated by his bedside lamp, heart pounding, aghast that this could happen.

 
; Didn’t the gods always win? Apparently not. The brave and beautiful god Frey had even offered himself as a sacrifice to Surt, but his death had not stopped the carnage.

  He kept coming back to that story, knowing it was always going to end the same way, but desperate to find a way that it could go otherwise. He checked out D’Aulaire’s over and over. Even the librarian noticed it.

  “Don’t you want to read something else, for a change?” she said, smiling. “There are some wonderful books on Greek myths, if you’re interested.”

  He wasn’t. By that time he could have recited the book from memory, and drawn the illustrations. He had to know why the gods had gone down to defeat. The answer lay there somewhere, even if he hadn’t found it yet.

  It was when he first discovered the Place Where The Answers Are that he realized the whole thing wasn’t a myth, it was a prediction.

  Ragnarok wasn’t a folk tale of something that had supposedly happened in the distant past—it was a metaphor for a battle still to come. It had been one of the first things he’d learned on discovering that deep place where a Voice spoke to him, a Voice that none but him could hear.

  That final battle is yet to be fought, the Voice had told him. If it ends differently from the book you have read, it will be because you yourself made it so. You have a choice—be the right hand of Surt himself, or be the first to be struck down.

  And that’s when he began to prepare himself.

  But then there was Susan.

  That thought came unbidden to his mind, as it always did. Any mention of Susan was from somewhere else, somewhere he couldn’t control. He frowned with the effort of fighting back the memory, but finally let it wash over him, knowing from long experience he would only be able to return his mind to his battle strategies and game plans once the thoughts of Susan had run their course.

  For a time, he’d been able to set aside the awareness of the approaching cataclysm. Susan had done that, and he’d let her. It had even seemed for a while that something inside him was unknotting, that the fear that underlay every experience he had was dissipating. A day with her would pass and he would realize with some astonishment that at the end of it, he hadn’t once thought of staying on guard, of keeping his wary stance with respect to the entire world. Even sex became something that was to be enjoyed, not a distraction to be indulged and released as quickly as possible so the mind could focus on other, more important things.

  His visits to the Place Where The Answers Are became fewer and fewer. The voices there tried to warn him that he was being pulled away, that he would become an ordinary human being and die along with the rest when Ragnarok came, that he was losing his steel and turning to flesh and blood.

  They were right, of course. He learned that later. When he did, the knowledge had felt like a knife in the heart, but a knife that did a necessary surgery, cutting out the part of him that was getting in the way.

  So, in the end, it was all good.

  He came back to the present, closed his eyes, listening to the wind of the car’s motion whistling in his ears. What the others in the car were saying was unimportant. All that mattered was that Gareth was a doctor, and young, and might be useful, and that Jackson would deal with Zolzaya when he found a convenient way.

  He let his mind mull over what he knew, what he had to do. He didn’t sleep. Too many people nearby for that.

  The wind became suddenly less, and Jackson opened his eyes. They were already back in Furness, Zolzaya winding her way around the wrecked and stalled cars. He once again became aware of the conversation in the front seat—it was now quiet enough that he couldn’t ignore it.

  “All this?” Gareth said, his voice aghast.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?”

  “You know, I believed you, but still, seeing it is different.”

  “Part of you doesn’t want to believe. You keep thinking, ‘Oh, come on, it can’t be that bad.’ Then it finally sinks in that yes, it is that bad. Maybe worse.”

  “I wonder how long I’d have stayed up there on the fourth floor if you all hadn’t shown up.”

  “You’d have had to chance it eventually. Food and water, you know? You probably weren’t that far from running out. Snack machines only last so long.”

  Gareth nodded. “And you have no idea what that thing was?”

  “No. Not any more than we have ideas about the other things we’ve seen. None of it makes any sense.”

  “I never believed in monsters, you know?” Gareth gave a nervous laugh. “Even as a kid. My parents are both the rationalist types. My mom is a General Practitioner up in Eureka, my dad’s a radiologist in Sacramento. We read those kinds of stories when I was little—myths about giants and monsters and all—but my folks were always, like, ‘You do know these things aren’t real, right?’ I always was kind of surprised they asked. I was like, ‘How dumb do you think I am, Mom? Things that people made up can’t come to life.’”

  Jackson’s eyes narrowed as Gareth mentioned myths about giants and monsters, but he kept his mouth shut.

  Zolzaya laughed. “You need to talk to Lissa. She’s our resident skeptic. You’ll get along great.” Her smile vanished. “But right before I left, Lissa said that even she had to revise her ideas, because the thing that attacked her was exactly that. A monster from a myth. Grendel.”

  “You mean from Beowulf?”

  Zolzaya nodded.

  “I dunno. I’d have to see that to believe it.”

  “Be careful what you wish for. You’re the one who just got rescued from a monster that turned out to be a pile of pond weeds.”

  “True.” He looked over at her. “You’re accepting this all pretty easily.”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. “You’re wrong. I don’t understand any of it. Ever since this started, pretty much from the moment I went outside and saw my neighbor’s bathrobe and nightdress in a pile in her doorway, all I’ve done is react. What else can I do? If I stopped, really stopped, and thought about what was going on here, I’d collapse into a heap and never get up. So I’m working off the plan of sticking together with the people we’ve found, helping them as much as I can, staying alive, and trying to meet whatever gets thrown at me as squarely as I can. I know that’s not much of a strategy.”

  Gareth said, “I don’t know what else we can do either, honestly.”

  Jackson, still sitting silent in the back seat, watched as Zolzaya turned the car into Ben’s driveway. No, the naïve young doctor probably didn’t have any idea what he could do, but Jackson, himself, did, because he knew what was coming, and none of the others did.

  Olivia was still silent and grim as they got out of the car. Zolzaya, in earnest conversation with Gareth, didn’t look back as she climbed the stairs to the front door. But when she opened it, she stopped suddenly, her voice cut off mid-sentence. Jackson stepped forward, and looked at her, his mouth turning downward in a scowl. She was wearing an almost comical expression of astonishment—mouth hanging open, eyebrows raised in perfect arches.

  He stepped around her, looked into the living room, and then he, too, stopped and stared.

  Margo Nishikawa was sitting in the recliner, eating a sandwich. She gave a wiggle of her fingers, and smiled.

  “Hi, everyone,” she said.

  Ben bounded up from the sofa, and said, “Z! Wait till you hear. I figured out why we’re all seeing monsters.”

  3

  AND THE BLIND woman reached with her right hand, and grasped her left wrist; and to their horror, she gave it a twist, and the left hand split from its arm with a crack, although there was no blood and her face gave not a hint of pain. The left hand writhed, its fingers flexing, and she tossed it toward them. It scuttled toward the nearest, walking on its fingertips as a spider walks. He was frozen to the spot with terror as it crawled up his leg and under his shirt. He gave whimpering cries of fear, and reached with his own hands to try to catch it. The others, horrorstruck, could see it moving under his sh
irt, but they were paralyzed by their fear. If the hand had fastened on his neck, torn his throat out, his friends would have done nothing but stare.

  —

  LISSA CHUCKLED, DESPITE the pain. Ben was a true scientist—no preconceived notions, no assumption. He simply following the evidence wherever it led, putting together a theory that made sense of all of the available information. In that way, he was a far better scientist than she was. Because the theory he was proposing was one that, a week ago, she’d have laughed into oblivion.

  “It’s all here.” Ben slapped The Encyclopedia of World Mythology and Folklore with the flat of his palm. He stood right in front of Zolzaya, so excited to tell them what he’d found that he wasn’t even letting them come into the house first. “I started thinking about Grendel, you know, the thing that hurt Lissa? So, I looked him up, and he was in there. Then I thought, maybe if Grendel was in there, some of the other things we’ve seen would be, too. I started looking around in the book, and I found this thing called the feu follet. It’s a light thing that attacks you and sends you to sleep. The book said that if you take someone who’s been bewitched by the feu follet and hold a needle up in front of them, the light thing will be sucked into the eye of the needle and will turn into fireflies. That’s what I did, and it worked. Margo woke up.”

  “Fireflies?” Zolzaya asked.

  Ben nodded.

  Lissa smiled again. The boy’s eyes were shining. That’s what discovery did to a person—the feeling of joy at finally understanding. “I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it myself.”

  The three people standing in the doorway each had a different expression. Zolzaya looked astonished, her mouth hanging open slightly. Olivia looked terrified, as if this explanation was worse than not knowing.