Luke’s eyes were glowing. Not the normal silvery glow they gained after the incident, but… radiating light. As though if Cody put his hand in front of Luke’s face, there would be a silvery-blue shimmer on it.
The group all looked both outside and at Luke cautiously, right as Nolan came back down in a new outfit, with Snow walking behind him in a pair of Derrick’s pajama pants that were rolled up at least ten times on her short, little legs.
“W-What’s going on…?” Nolan asked, picking up on the tension in the room.
Nobody said anything at first, and he looked over to Luke, seeing them stare at him.
Luke’s mouth was slightly agape, his eyes blinking slowly and not very consistently. Immediately, Nolan put Snow down and ran over to Luke. He dropped to his knees, sitting face-to-face with his friend.
“Luke? Luke!” Nolan shouted, grabbing him by the face with both hands, trying to direct his attention. “Luke, talk to me man, come on!”
Luke put his hand on Nolan’s shoulder and slightly pushed him out of the way, clearing his view of the window.
“I can… I can see…” he muttered. “I can…can see them.”
“What, the people?” Adam asked, eyeballing every inch of the outside area for any possible threats. “There’s nobody there, man.”
“No, not people… not…” he continued to whisper. “Goliaths.”
The others instantly froze in fear. Snow looked around them all curiously, picking up on the sudden shift in mood.
“What are Goliaths?” she asked, not understanding the horrors that the group did; a luxury they all wished they could share with her.
“They’re h…huge monsters…” Cody explained. “They use smell and sound to track their prey… Hide in big buildings and landmarks.”
“B-But there aren’t any skyscrapers or landmarks around, there shouldn’t be any Goliath’s near here!” Chris said, more to himself than Snow.
“But then… what is Luke seeing?” Jeremy asked, still frightened. Luke took many deep, struggled breaths. He almost seemed in physical pain from whatever was happening.
“It…It can see what I see. It knows w-where I am…” he stuttered, as though he fought just to maintain his composure.
“Well, can you… see where it is?” Nolan asked. Luke paused.
“Niagara Falls…” Luke said. “It’s at Niagara Falls, and… it’s not alone…”
“How many of them are there?” Derrick asked.
Luke shook, and very slowly turned to face Derrick, tears rolling haphazardly down his face; his nostrils flaring, and mouth almost wide open now.
“They’re coming here…” he whispered, the light then completely fading from his eyes. He fell onto the floor, and Nolan instinctively reached to catch him, just barely keeping his head from hitting the ground.
“Luke!? Luke!” he shouted. He got no response. Adam moved over to Luke’s face and put his hand in front of his friend’s mouth, feeling for breath. There was something there, light as it was.
“He’s just passed out,” Adam said after a moment, getting up. “Just lay him on the couch, we don’t know when he’ll recover from whatever the hell that was.”
Nolan, with the help of Jeremy, followed Adam’s orders; they put two pillows underneath his head. Meanwhile, Chris and Cody opened the front door and peeked outside, suddenly very tense about their surroundings. Adam and Derrick just stood in the living room, staring tensley at one another, sharing a very knowing and fearful thought.
“What the hell did that mean?” Chris asked aloud, still peering occasionally out the door.
“We haven’t seen anything in years, and now this? Goliaths? How is that even possible?” Cody said, making his way back inside and running a hand through his long blonde hair.
“I don’t know…” Derrick admitted, shaking his head, grimacing.
“I mean, was this just another ‘moment’ for him? Are we sure this is even something different?” Jeremy asked. “Aer we sure it’s even real?”
“It’s definitely different,” Nolan said. “He was responding to us, talking to us. He doesn’t do that when he’s having his night terrors. And his eyes started glowing. I’ve never seen that before.”
No one knew quite what to say, or to believe for that matter, and so they just sat quietly and confused for a few moments. It felt for whatever godly reason, their lives were being hurled back into some adventure that quite honestly, none of them were prepared for.
“Well, if this really is real, we know two things for certain,” Adam said, gazing at Luke as he did. “One: the Goliaths are coming, and there’s more than one. And two: they’re coming for Luke.”
After – 2
“Blood & Water”
“Hey,” Cody said, noticing Chris was awake. They had been driving for a long while, having just left Cyrus’s camp for a second time around; this time for good. Cody decided to pick up most of the slack, seeing as he used to drive around all the time back in the day– plus, everyone else was pretty beat.
“Hey,” Chris replied, his voice just loud enough for Cody to hear. He stretched as best he could in his seat. “Where are we now?”
“Pennsylvania, I think; only a few hours left.”
Chris, still half-asleep, simply responded with a grunt. He looked out the window, and Cody glanced over at him. Luke sat next to Chris, and he was asleep, which nowadays meant that things could get ugly very quickly, so Cody hoped it was a smooth ride.
“Codes, do you ever… I mean do you think we made the wrong move?” Chris asked, still gazing out the window. It was raining pretty hard out. Chris hated the rain.
“I don’t know… when exactly do you mean? We’ve arguably made a lot of wrong moves,” Cody joked, though they both knew what he said was in fact true.
So many of the decisions they made led to people getting hurt, or damn-near killed. They were always more lucky than skillful to have made it out of more than half the situations they found themselves in.
“Coming up to the vacation house to begin with,” Chris hesitated to say, though he managed. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we’re alive, but… look at us. It seems like the longer we stay standing, the less of us there is to stand.”
Cody didn’t really know what to say in the moment; in fact there was a good period of silence after that. Not because Cody didn’t want to respond, but more so because he had to consider it. After all, in a way, Chris was right. They felt both physically and emotionally drained more and more, day after day, and as morbid as it may have been to think, if they were dead, at least they’d be with their families. Cody might still be with Bri…
Plus, Derrick had scars along his face, Luke had some kind of Chirper-instilled ailment, and Nolan fought with some kind of PTSD ever since Luke’s incident. He, Jeremy, Adam, and Chris were in an odd sense the luck half, but it was almost just as hard to carry on with the same baggage they packed on, because they always did so together.
“That’s a tough one, C, really,” Cody said. “But… here’s what I think. You remember what really tore our group up? Before the trip?” Chris opened his eyes a little more; he hadn’t thought about that in years.
“Jeremy… Jeremy and Nolan,” Chris said. “Jeremy told me he thought he had feelings for Lily– he wanted to finally be ‘more than super-close friends,’ as he put it. I told him to talk to Nolan about it, and he chose to do that when we were all hanging out, right? Out of nowhere?”
“And pretty intensely too,” Cody continued. “Nolan got pissed, honestly more pissed than almost any other time I can remember. Everyone started arguing, and taking sides: you and Luke took Jeremy’s; Derrick, Adam, and I took Nolan’s.”
“Yeah, and then Nolan got even more pissed because Luke was defending Jeremy instead of him,” Chris remembered. “Everything got so heated; we were all arguing back and forth for like three days, and then everything just split. Everyone was pissed at everyone.”
“Right,”
Cody agreed. “But pretty soon after the firestorm of that argument, I talked to Luke– after all he and I didn’t really have anything to be angry at each other about, and we both knew it– and he told me something. He told me how badly he wanted to fix things, and how much it hurt to see us all torn apart like that. He wanted to take it all back, or at least find something to mend the wounds, but he didn’t know what. I asked if he had at least talked things out with Nolan, and he said he would. I asked him if he really thought it would work– Nolan was kind of, what do you call it… irreparably pissed. Luke just said: ‘Cody, we’re all friends– hell, you guys are my best friends– and friends can fight, sometimes they can even stay angry at each other for a long damn time. But Nolan and I? We’ve fought in our lives more times than I can count, even when we were kids! We may be close, but we don’t agree on everything,’ or something like that. ‘We don’t like all the same things, and we can get pissed off at each other. And you know why?’ And I shook my head, because of course not.”
Chris chuckled, as did Cody, and he cleared his throat, taking a breath.
“‘Because,’ he said, ‘Because friends might get angry at each other, but brothers always fight, and one way or another, they always get through it. They always get through the good times, and the bad,’” Cody finished. He paused, and Chris looked at Cody in awe.
“I never knew he said that to you,” Chris admitted. “That’s… way to belittle his friendship with all of us.” He chuckled again, and Cody laughed along with him.
“Yeah, but see man, that’s what I’m trying to say, here. You’ll never hear the others say it, but back then we were friends, and they were brothers. Now? We’re all brothers. We’re family. What we have, we wouldn’t even be close to it if we didn’t take a shot in the dark based on the memories of the past and go up to Maine with Luke. And despite all the shit we keep having to trudge through, we do trudge though it, and we haven’t lost each other; not yet. So… no Chris, I don’t think we made the wrong move.”
Chris looked over at his sleeping companions, and smiled softly as he did. Cody just focused back on the road, and relished in the memories of the past for a little while longer.
“Yeah, maybe not,” Chris whispered.
Both of them knew– or at least they believed– now just a bit more than before, that so long as they still had each other, they had to be doing something right.
Day 2003
“Jonah”
The guys woke up the next morning with mixed feelings toward the future. On the one hand, they now had to worry about both a group of Goliaths and a large and very possibly dangerous group of humans all converging on their current location.
On the other hand, Luke did have some kind of ability– or a curse, no one was totally sure yet– and could… see from far distances? See through the monster’s heads?
Well, nobody was really a hundred percent on what it was exactly, but still they all had to admit that it was pretty cool, even if it was leading an almost exact personification of death to their doorstep.
“Snow? Snow. Snow!” Chris repeated, trying to get the girl’s attention. She ate the ripoff bran-flakes Derrick made for food with nothing but her bare hands. She stopped for a moment, catching her breath as she did, and Chris simply held up a spoon in front of her. “Silverware. We have it, you use it. No more eating like an animal, okay? It’s disgusting.”
She took the spoon, and after eyeing it carefully, hesitantly ate with it. Soon enough though, she used it at the same pace and ferocity as she did with her hands just moments before. Chris just looked to the others for some kind of counsel over the situation, and they all just shook their heads.
“Easy kiddo, you don’t want to get a stomach ache from eating too fast,” Luke said. Pretty nonchalantly too, which somewhat surprised Nolan.
Not that it was super unlike him, trying to keep cool under a stressful situation, but this was kind of different; a whole other level of stressful. He literally passed out because of it, and yet now he was giving advice on how to eat “cereal” to an eight-year-old. It just seemed… odd. Something was up with him, Nolan just didn’t know what yet.
“Mm nah guh-na…!” Snow said through even more spoonfuls of breakfast, hardly even coherent to the group. Chris cringed at her messy eating habits, but Nolan just smirked.
“So guys,” Adam careened the conversation. “We need to talk about what we’re gonna do here. The longer we wait, the worse this is going to play out for us on either side.”
“Adam’s right, we need to talk shop,” Derrick agreed, standing straight, no longer leaning on the kitchen counter. “I think we should have someone on watch-duty; go up to the watchtower with a rifle and keep a lookout for this other group. We can’t let them get the drop on us.”
“Hey,” Snow asked, swallowing a big gulp of cereal down. Everyone turned to her. “Why’s he got those scratches on his face?”
“Take it easy, kid,” Jeremy said. “Don’t be an asshole, rule number one.”
“I got attacked by a Pack member,” Derrick said. Snow nodded, fascinated, and then went in for another spoonful of food.
“Yeah… well I can start,” Chris volunteered. “I’m probably the best shot with a rifle.”
“Alright, well I wouldn’t go that far,” Cody said. “I seem to recall that I was the one to kill at least two members of a Pack just a couple years ago.”
“It was only two, and there were still four that we all had to unload everything on because you kept missing their damn nostrils,” Adam countered. “Chris, you go up first, Cody take over after three hours; we’ll all sub in from there.”
“Good, wouldn’t want the hypochondriac to get a cold being out there so long,” Cody teased. Everyone else just nodded and made sounds of agreement, while Cody and Chris snuck each other competitive glances.
“I feel like we still need to get an idea of where they are,” Nolan said. Snow glanced at him nervously, though she didn’t fully tear herself away from her food. “We need to scout around, see what we can see.”
“Well I mean, we kinda have,” Jeremy pointed out. “The last like, I don’t know, almost half a decade ring any bells? We’ve scoured the surrounding area and towns.”
“The closer ones, yeah, but remember what Jack said all those years ago?” Nolan asked. Nobody knew. Nobody was surprised. “He said they were it from there to North Waterford to mid-New Hampshire.”
“That was years ago,” Luke replied, “things could be much different now.”
“Or he could’ve could be wrong,” Jeremy said. “Or lying. The guy wasn’t exactly a symbol of truth and justice.”
“Snow said she was raised by these people, so wherever they are they’ve been there at least four some-odd years,” Nolan continued, getting up from the kitchen table and moving over to a cabinet.
He searched through it quickly, and pulled out a map of the state of Maine. He put it down on the table in front of Snow and stood in front of her, staring down.
“Snow, do any of these places look familiar to you? Any of the names?” he asked, pointing out towns and cities in a surrounding radius he made with his finger.
Snow looked at all the names on the map Nolan pointed out, but said nothing for what seemed like a long time. The others grew rather impatient.
“S’this like… a field?” Snow asked, clearly confused. Which, of course, only threw off everyone in the room, causing a devastating slew of confusion.
“Is she for real right now?” Derrick asked, looking around at everyone.
“Snow, that’s Maine, the state we’re in right now. It’s one of fifty in the U.S,” Cody explained. She looked at him like he was speaking a different language. “Okay…”
“Great,” Jeremy muttered. “Look it doesn’t really matter anymore, anyway. Snow, these were the names of towns and cities in Maine, see?” He pointed at where they were. “This place was called Lovell.”
“Is called Lovell,” Derrick said.<
br />
“By who?” Adam asked.
“By us!” Derrick insisted.
“Whatever,” Jeremy said. “That’s the name of the place we live– where we are right now, and a good few miles out.”
“Oh, okay…” she said, still a little shaky on the newly incoming information.
“So… can you not read?” Adam asked from across the room, but certainly loud enough for everyone– including the little girl– to hear.
“Um… no,” Snow answered, after giving a solid second of thought. Derrick just sighed, and Chris facepalmed.
“Okay, that’s okay,” Cody said, moving over to the map and pointing at places again. “Well then have you ever heard of Hunts Corner?”
“Uh… no.”
“What about Hastings?”
“No.”
“Bethel?”
“Nuh-Uh.”
“Gilead?”
Snow looked up at Cody, and suddenly she grew much more tense again. She didn’t say anything in response. The others all took notice, and moved closer to both her and the map. Nolan put his hands comfortingly on her small and hunched shoulders
“So, that’s our place then?” Adam clarified. Snow looked at him and nodded. Jeremy just wrote furiously in his notebook, likely putting down all the information on the new settlement, and what they already knew of them.
“That’s something like 25 miles out from here,” Derrick commented. “That’s like, Christ, an eight to nine hour walk?”
“Snow, did you really run that whole way? Even with some of the other kids?” Luke asked.
“Y-Yeah…” she said, her tone cold, as though the memory haunted her worse than camp itself.
“And they followed you, right? You said they got the other kids while you were running?” Chris asked. She nodded her head. “Well where? Do you remember where? How long were you running for? How many of the others did they get? Did they still follow you? Were they–”
“Chris!” Nolan shouted, silencing his friend. He motioned to Snow and gave him a very shut the hell up glance.
The Way Back (Book 2): The Way Back, Part II Page 6
