by James Sperl
As expected the New Humans gathered around the covered area, circling it like sharks in search of chum. They remained outside the confines of the shadow and for the moment that was okay.
Everyone except Josh lay on the ground, their chests heaving and expanding in such dramatic swells it seemed as if ribs would break at the exertion required to take in air.
Catherine stared up at the taut canvas, her body recovering with each breath she inhaled. She rolled onto her stomach, her pants kicking up minor dust clouds, and stared at the concrete barricade twenty feet away.
The ends of each wall were joined together by a reinforced steel fence, atop which lay more of that ubiquitous barbed wire. In the center of the fence was what appeared to be a hinged door, sealed and bolted in numerous places—no one was entering unless permitted to do so.
Her mind starting to regain clarity, Catherine regarded the massive security structure as Josh stepped beside her and knelt down.
“So...what do we do now?” he said.
The question was obvious and one for which Catherine had no answer. The New Humans traipsing around them with blank, oxygen depleted stares were the least of their worries. For after all of their travels, after all of the running and lost lives to get to this exact moment, the one thing Catherine had not counted on was exactly the one thing she had been forced to confront.
There was nobody here.
Rising to her feet, Catherine peered forlornly into the secured area and came to grips with the sickening realization that had begun to haunt her subconsciously upon their ascent. Back then it had been irrational fear brought on by a propensity to believe there couldn’t possibly be a positive outcome from all of this. At times, it just seemed too much in her favor. She reminded herself to trust in Warren, but the ticking clock argued against such a probable scenario.
Catherine looked at her watch. It was eleven thirteen. In less than an hour everything would be ash.
“What do we do?” Catherine said finally, turning to Josh. “I have no idea.”
28
Give Me Shelter
Senior Airman Charles Brophy had one hell of a morning. Having retired to the head on more than one occasion to vomit during his shift, he was sure he would be reprimanded and perhaps relieved of duty. Fortunately, his CO had been exceptionally gracious and understanding today, a trait he uncharacteristically and rarely displayed. But today was different from most. They were blowing up the world after all.
He sat back down at his post and peeled a piece of Wrigley’s from its wrapper, popping it into his mouth. The bitter taste diminished with each chomp of the sweet gum and he felt the squeamishness subside.
SrA. Brophy glanced over the array of monitors in front of him with a heavy sigh. Sometimes the sheer monotony of flitting from screen to screen with nothing to view was enough to make him sick, albeit more figuratively than literally. The twenty camera positions he’d been assigned to monitor—split into four quadrants on each of five viewing screens—had had no activity in weeks. It was like watching paint dry. Or grass grow. At times he’d thought of volunteering for latrine duty just to have something to do. But, no, this was his post and despite its predominately stagnant developments was a necessary duty.
Just take last night, for example. Out of the blue and in the dead of night, three people materialized out of the darkness. He’d heard it was a man and two girls. Staff Sergeant Merles on the Southeast Array had first picked them up as they approached and within minutes had a welcome team scrambled.
It was a gratifying break from the doldrums and raised the spirits of most of the other enlisted he’d spoken with that morning. The shelter was shy of capacity by one third so any additions to the preservation of mankind were considered victories. And with last evening’s rescue came the assurance that more survivors were coming and that everyone should remain vigilant in their respective duties. SrA. Brophy had watched his array like a hawk, carefully scrutinizing each watch point for any sign of motion. But the pre-dawn hours had been like all the rest in recent weeks, and the rise of the sun had shed no new light on the alleged arrivals.
Brophy glanced at a digital clock. The red LED read eleven fifteen.
Forty-five minutes.
Perusing the monitors casually, SrA. Brophy suddenly felt the wave of nausea return. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered angrily to himself.
“You all right?” Airman First Class Peattry said from her own wall of monitors.
“Yeah,” Brophy spat. “Just feeling like shit again, that’s all.”
“You need to hit the head? I can cover.”
Brophy looked over his monitors again when, as if sparked by their appearance, his stomach took a tumble. He hopped to his feet. “Would you mind?”
“No. Go. But hurry, all right?” Peattry said. “We may be blowing the world to hell soon, but Aikers will bust my ass—and yours—if he finds you not at your post.”
“Deal. I really appre—”
SrA. Brophy abandoned the rest of his sentence, sprinting from his console. With a smirk and a headshake, Peattry rolled her chair toward Brophy’s array when her phone rang. She stopped in mid-glide and snatched the receiver from its cradle.
“Peattry,” she said into the phone. “No, sir, I haven’t had a chance to compile—” Airman First Class Peattry winced at the response from the other end. “Yes, sir...Yes sir, I will...No, sir.” She grabbed a pen and scribbled onto a note pad. “Could you please repeat, sir?”
A tinny voice barked out orders and instructions as Peattry wrote, her hand struggling to keep up. Her attention hijacked, Peattry was forced to neglect Brophy’s post, made to forego temporary monitoring duties. And as a result, didn’t see the flurry of activity taking place on Monitor Delta, quadrant three.
Josh bent and scooped up another handful of dirt. Standing, he threw it headlong into the face of a New Human—a trim woman who at one time had probably been pretty—as she kicked and pulled at one of the four poles holding up the tent. The dirt struck her and she reeled backwards, clawing at her eyes.
The tent was under siege. Beset on all sides, Catherine and the others were in a fierce battle defending against the New Humans as they attacked the structure in a frenzied strike. Taking up positions at each corner, they thrashed and railed against the support posts in an attempt to bring them down. They had learned. Had discovered a solution to their weakness and committed to ridding themselves of it.
Catherine, Leanne and Shelby, each guarding a corner, reached in frantic arm swoops at the earth, clutching and pitching rocks and dust into the eyes of their attackers. But as soon as one became incapacitated, another would simply take its place.
“There’re too many!” Leanne cried.
Catherine shoveled a huge pile of dirt into her hand and threw a heaping, pebble-studded fistful into the faces of two New Humans. She searched around wildly looking for any sign of life from the shelter.
But there was no one.
There had to be someone, she thought. There had to be. Maybe they could find some way of letting Warren know they were there, Catherine mulled. A signal they could send. She scrutinized the concrete wall, the fence. Looked over the barbed wire, the bracing poles used to install it. Nothing.
A heavyset man with a beard kicked the pole in front of Catherine. It bent slightly, the canopy rippling under the impact. Catherine pitched some earth into his face, then threw a heavy rock for good measure, it ricocheting off his forehead.
She returned to the gate, searched over its formidable structure. Surely there had to be something. Someone. A guard on duty, perhaps. They knew they were coming, didn’t they? Oliver would have made certain the right people were informed of their arrival. He would have explained what happened and why they got separated and they would be expecting them. Then a counter thought suddenly entered Catherine’s mind: What if the reason no one was here to greet them was because no one knew they were coming? What if Oliver never made it?
The idea ma
de Catherine wince in anguish, not just for her and the others stranded under the canopy, but for the potential fate of her daughters. For if Oliver had not made it...
Catherine’s eyes welled with tears, her mind working overtime to convince her of the worst. She lashed out at a plump woman who latched onto the pole in front of her, throwing a heaping scoop of dirt directly into her eyes. The woman staggered backwards with a yelp then fell. It was the first time Catherine had heard any of the New Humans react in distress. She watched the woman for a brief moment and actually gained some satisfaction from her torment.
The woman climbed to her feet and just stood, arms at her sides as if waiting for the dirt to purge itself from her eyes on its own. Catherine wound up and threw another scoopful into her face as if to emphasize its purpose and her rage.
And that’s when she saw it.
It was over the woman’s shoulder, just before she stooped to attend to her dusty face. Mounted to the top of one of the barbed wire support columns. It was small and camouflaged to blend in to its beige surroundings. Easy to miss. But it was there, God bless it. It was there.
A camera.
Catherine spun toward Josh, a last sparkle of hope in her eye. “Josh, up there! On the fence! There’s a camera. You see it?”
Josh kicked at the hands of a New Human as it grabbed for the pole in front of him then threw two quick blasts of earth at another as it lunged for the metal support. Turning, he crouched to get a look from under the canopy. His eyes widened and his brow furrowed.
“Yeah, I see it!” he said excitedly. “But why the hell don’t they see us?”
“I don’t know. But we’ve got to find a way to get their attention.” Catherine snatched up some more dirt. “Think you can hit it with a rock?”
Josh looked at his mother. “Hit it? What the hell is that gonna do?”
“Maybe you could shatter the protective glass over the lens,” Catherine said, throwing handfuls of dirt at a fit looking man. “Or hit it hard enough to change its angle. Or, hell, break it for that matter. I don’t know. Just anything that will attract attention to it.”
Josh suddenly ran over to where Shelby stood and kicked at a man in an Oxford button-down and khakis as he wrapped his hands around the pole and shook it violently. Josh’s foot caught the man square on the knuckles causing him to release his grip. Emboldened, Josh pushed his luck and kicked the man again, this time in the stomach, his foot extending beyond the safety zone of the canopy shadow.
“Keep it up,” he said to Shelby sincerely. “We’ll get out of this.” Shelby offered an unconvincing smile, throwing gravel at an approaching woman dressed in jeans and a blouse.
Josh ran back to his corner and kicked at a portly teenage looking boy who reached for the post then recoiled at the sight of Josh’s foot.
Josh glanced quickly at his mother. “If I break it, how will anyone see us?”
“I don’t know, Josh! Okay?” Catherine yelled. “I don’t know. If you have a better idea I’d love to hear it because I’m rapidly approaching the point of being fresh out.”
Catherine swiped away a single tear, frustration overtaking her remaining hopes. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was submit to the full-scale meltdown that desperately wanted to ignite. But that would do her and the others no good. So, for now, she would bury it and hope the few shreds of hope that remained inside her were enough to extinguish it.
The New Humans’ attacks on the canopy were ceasing, their dirt-crusted eyes signifying the ineffective means by which they attempted to demolish the tent. They stood back from the cast shadow made by the canvas and stared, seeming to analyze the structure. Formulate a new plan of attack.
“Try now, Josh,” Catherine said anxiously, turning. “Hurry, before they start—”
A blast of earth hit Catherine square in the eyes. She screamed, dropping to her knees and rubbed at her face frantically with the palms of her hands.
Josh whirled with the frenzy of a tornado, his head twisting in all directions, searching for the source of the attack.
“Did you see it?” he shouted to Leanne and Shelby, panic-stricken. “You see where it came from?”
“No. I didn’t,” Leanne said, her eyes darting from her corner, where four New Humans gathered, to Josh and back. She backed away from the pole.
Josh looked over the deadened faces of the nearest New Humans as he knelt beside his mother. He turned quickly to Shelby. “Watch them carefully. And keep back.” He placed his gloved hands around Catherine consolingly. “Are you okay? Can you see?”
Catherine moved her hands away from her face and blinked profusely, Josh scrutinizing her eyes. Dirty tears stained her face and muddy residue rimmed her lids.
“Keep blinking,” Josh said, glancing around the canopy at the New Humans who, for the moment, only stood. “Don’t wipe. You’ll make it worse.” Catherine’s hands instinctively went to her eyes. Josh grabbed them. “Don’t wipe, mom. Try and keep your eyes open. It’ll force them to tear and flush out the dirt—”
“How does it feel?” said a man, clean cut from lawyer’s cloth as he stepped front and center. His navy blue jacket, coated with a layer of desert, perfectly matched his equally discolored pants. A red and blue striped tie dangled loosely from his neck in front of an off-white Oxford, stained with filth and sweat. His thick, disheveled hair suggested that at one time he probably used product to contain its unruliness. But not today.
“Not very pleasant, is it?” the Lawyer said.
Josh stood at his approach. “Neither is exploding out from the inside. But maybe you already forgot about that day at the beach.”
Catherine reached for Josh and climbed to her feet. She wiped at her blinking eyes. “Don’t talk to it, Josh. It just wants to get inside your head.”
“Yes…Josh,” the Lawyer said coldly, eliciting a look from Josh at the mention of his name. “Don’t talk to us. For what could we possibly have to share? What bits of knowledge could we impart to you?” A smirk that bordered on sarcasm grew on the man’s lips. “You’re on the verge of extinction and yet you still cling to the possibility of a different outcome that, I’m afraid, is just not going to happen. This thing that’s occurred to us, it’s an improvement that you can’t possibly comprehend unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. If you—if all of you—would only submit to the process, you would see. It’s something to behold.”
Josh snorted. “See what? All I see are a bunch of half dead zombies that run for cover like cockroaches when the sun goes down.” He took a step forward. Catherine reached for him, but was too slow. “You spend half your day hiding from the dark. Your mental capacity is like a child and you attack like packs of wild dogs. If there’s an improvement somewhere in there I’m afraid I just don’t fucking see it.”
“You won’t,” the man said. “You can’t. Not yet. It’s indescribable. Whatever this is, it connects us. It connects us in ways that transcend race and ethnicity.” The man looked to the ground then moved closer. “But you are right. The process is far from perfect. The evolution is slow and the birth is understandably fearsome. But compare it to what you think you know. Look at a human birth. Isn’t it filled with fear and pain and, in some instances, even death? And while your reference to us as ‘zombies’ may seem accurate, I ask you to consider the functionality of a newborn. What are they capable of? What abilities does a three-month old child possess? I have only been converted for the better part of two months and yet I have already matured to my former self. My previous memories, knowledge, aptitude—all of it still intact. But there is so much more that I’ve gained.”
The Lawyer walked along the precipice of the shadow. He eyed Shelby and Leanne, saw the fear in their eyes. “It’s understandable that you feel afraid. But I assure you, these people that surround you do not want to hurt you.”
“You could’ve fooled me,” Shelby said timidly.
“You’re not people,” Josh spat.
“You say
you don’t want to hurt us,” Catherine said, her eyesight back. “Then how do you explain last night in that wall of cars you things built? I would say the sole intention of your actions, from the crashing of the trucks to the pounding of the excavator, was to hurt us. And then you chase us unceasingly through mountainous terrain? How are we to see it any other way?”
The Lawyer stopped near Leanne and looked over at Catherine. “That’s a valid question. The best answer I can give you is exuberance.”
“Exuberance?” Catherine chortled.
“And I didn’t think you things had a sense of humor,” Josh quipped.
“Exuberance. Overzealousness,” the Lawyer continued. “Eagerness. Anxiousness. They all apply. You must understand that you are not dealing with fullly functioning rational minds just yet.”
“Really?” Josh said sarcastically.
The Lawyer began walking again, motioning to a cluster of New Humans standing near Leanne. “These ‘things’ as you keep referring to them, are in various stages of development. Many are in the early phases of recollecting their previous lives and, as a result, behave like tempestuous children acting out in sudden and deliberate ways. They don’t mean to. They just don’t know any better. All they know is that they want to share the gift they’ve been given. They may not even know why or how to articulate it. But they know it’s something special, even if they are a bit aggressive in their delivery.”
Catherine had to admit she was relatively impressed with the thing talking to her. Save her neighbor who had done nothing more than unsettle her with eerie talk and mannerisms, Catherine had actually heard very little conversation from a New Human. But this one certainly possessed a strong vocabulary and a convincing way. She wished now more than ever that Janet were around to help keep a clear head.
“So you can talk,” Catherine said, her eyes following the Lawyer as he continued his stroll around the tent.
