by Doug Goodman
DOMINION
Doug Goodman
Copyright 2014 by Doug Goodman
For the “Barrio Whisperwood Gang.” You know who you are.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis 1:28
Part One: The Death House
Chapter One – Trustworthy
Opaque clouds hung low in the sky, like a gray, rolling ceiling. The boys did not like being outside on days like this, days that were especially cloudy. You couldn’t see the monsters in the air. The boys knew they should have stayed inside where it was safe. But in the past week, they had run out of supplies, and they had become desperate.
Each day provided a four-hour timespan within which they could move outside the house. If they stayed outside beyond those four hours, they risked being captured, and the pile of severed heads at the subdivision’s entrance reminded them of the consequences for being caught.
Jaxon and Peter played the role of the foragers, though sometimes Kirk joined them. Aidan and Colt never went. After Black Friday, Colt wasn’t allowed outside the house and as for Aidan – somebody had to play the role of Dungeon Master. Alyssa was the Monster Handbook, and she saw nothing except an ugly grackle and an errant squirrel a few houses over.
“Okay,” Jaxon said quietly to Alyssa through the FRS radio. “Just keep your eye on them.”
Today was an important day. Not in a state championship way, or an SAT way or even a Friday quiz way. The day was important for survival. Everybody had to play their position correctly, and they had to trust that the others would do their job well. Failure to comply could be lethal to every one of the family.
Jaxon and Peter’s success depended on their ability to remain undetected. So Jaxon and Peter opened the pouches in their fanny packs, which were full of pine needles. They smothered their hands with the needles. The rubbing left Jaxon’s hands prickly and sore, but at least it kept him hidden. When they finished with their hands, they repeated the ritual with their feet. Both teens wore sandals made of wood and cloth. On one of the first nights, they learned that they could be tracked by the rubber in their shoes, so they had to find a less obvious way to protect their feet. The pine masked their scent.
Peter and Jaxon scanned the streets for any sign of life. Even with Alyssa watching from above, they had learned to double-check the broken-out windows and missing front doors on the houses for signs of activity. Seeing nothing, they opened the fence gate, crept around the house, and squatted behind Peter’s old Chevrolet Cavalier. The Cavalier had taken the family to so many places before – to concerts, school meets, hangouts, movies, and on dates. With the flat tires, it wouldn’t take them anywhere any more. That was how they kept them from mass exodus. They slashed the tires.
Jaxon took the lead, and the pair maneuvered between cars, shrubs, and pine trees. Jaxon felt like a Sioux hunter searching for buffalo. His family’s survival depended on him returning home with a kill. Armed with only a large soft-frame backpack and what skills he learned over the past ninety days, Jaxon’s spine tingled with the thrill of the hunt. While some avoided hunting and others resented it, he reveled in the time spent outside the house. Life was quickly becoming too complicated in the attic, and he loved the impending sense of peril, though he would call it adventure.
From the outside lawn, 1410 Vicksburg appeared empty. The lawn grass had grown as high as Jaxon’s thigh, making recon difficult.
“How are we, Alyssa?” he asked.
“You’re still clear. Don’t forget to look for tampons.”
“You really didn’t have to remind me.”
Peter said, “It’s the end of the world, and that’s still gross.”
The door lay to the side of the foyer, thrown off its hinges. The foul odor of rancid meat permeated the humid air in the house. There was a time when those nauseating odors made Jaxon want to puke, but over the past three months, he had grown accustomed to it. Instead of reaching for a barf bag, he reached for his Camelbak suction tube. Rancid meat would mean…
“Ugh. Maggots.” A stove pot was full of bloated white bodies crowned with wheeling teeth. As Jaxon and Peter grimaced, the maggots moved as one, plopping out of the stove pot like boiling water and wiggling across the stove towards Jaxon and Peter like a slow, vermiculate wave. Jaxon hadn’t seen many maggots, or flies, or any other insects since early September. He, like the others, assumed that all the bugs in the state were migrating to warmer climates.
Peter and Jaxon opened the valves on their Camelbaks and sprayed the maggots. The stench of bleach was almost as overpowering as the smell of offal. The maggots writhed torturously and melted in the chemical burn.
“Let’s kill them all,” Peter said.
“No, we can’t spare the bleach.” Instead, they sprayed a perimeter moat around the maggots, who had sense enough not to crawl over the bleach.
With the maggots at bay, Jaxon and Peter opened the pantry. Except for old mouse droppings and a few opened cans, it was empty.
“Son of a biscuit!” Peter cursed, or at least tried. “Well, that didn’t work out. What do you want to do now?”
Jaxon pointed to a door. “We can at least check the bathrooms. You’ve got to be getting tired of carrying around all that shit.”
“Language!”
The master bathroom was on the second floor. What caught their eye, though, was the extra-large pizza-sized hole in the middle of the master bedroom door. Jaxon pushed the door open, and they walked into the bedroom. The mattress had been pushed up against the windows, which meant these people had lived long enough to see the rocs and were trying to hide from them. There were a few old gnawed bones, but every strip of flesh and meat had been devoured. The shotgun lay next to the bed. They had probably hoped the gun would keep the creatures away, but all that changed on Black Friday like a flip of the switch. Jaxon checked the shotgun’s chamber. It was empty, but there was a box of shells on the dresser. Jaxon grabbed both.
Peter jingled the toilet handle perfunctorily. The toilet did not flush. Water went out after the first month, though nobody knew how the animals did it. More likely, without workers the plant went down. They weren’t sure. Public works wasn’t part of their high school curriculum.
A heaping pile of human feces lay under the toilet lid.
“It will have to do,” Peter said. He opened his backpack, and pulled out the trash bag. They opened the bag and leaned back as the smell of offal permeated the room. Coughing, they dumped the excrement into the toilet.
Eyes burning, Jaxon checked the sinks and medicine cabinet. This place had obviously been hit before, but whoever had been here dropped their shit and ignored the gun. Maybe they didn’t have time, or maybe one of the creatures came after them. Hell if he knew, but if the shotgun was still available, then maybe something else was left. He grabbed a few items, including a bottle of bleach, and shoved them into their backpacks. As they backed out of the restroom, they hosed down their path.
“Aw, man,” Peter said. He reached out to Jaxon. Turned the knob on his radio back on.
“How the hell did that happen? I must have bumped up against something.”
“Jaxon! Peter!” came Alyssa’s sharp voice on the radio. She ordered them, “Be very still. One of them is outside.”
Tree branches shook as the misshapen moved from branch to branch, hidden among the leaves. It crept closer and closer to the house without leaving the tree, and then it stood very still and did nothing. Waited.
“Can you get it, Aidan?”
“No, it’s behind the leaves. I can’t even see it.” He moved
the Winchester around, but he could not get line of sight on the creature.
“Okay. If we wait, maybe it’ll go away.”
“We can’t know for sure,” Aidan said. “It could just be waiting for the others to get back, and then it’ll corner Jaxon and Peter.”
“Well, then what do you think we should do?” Alyssa shot back.
“Pray for a miracle. It’ll be dark soon.”
Jaxon’s voice came on the FRS. “We’re going to go around it.”
“Jaxon, don’t be stupid,” Alyssa said. “It can see you almost the entire block.”
“Not if we are stealthy.”
Alyssa glared at Aidan. Aidan shrugged his shoulders. “If it hears them move, they’re as good as dead.”
She pushed down the button on the radio and said, “Aidan says if you want to die, that’s your prerogative. We can’t force you to not do something stupid.”
“Hey, Mr. Whittenberg’s on his roof,” Colt said to everyone in the attic. Aidan retracted the rifle, and Kirk pulled down the ridge vent so that they would not be seen. Alyssa radioed to Peter and Jaxon that, “The dungeon is closed and the dragons are loose.” Then everyone upstairs watched Mr. Whittenberg, who was standing on his roof. They could only see a partial view, though, since they were watching through the small opening they built using the ridge vent.
“Hell, another assisted suicide,” Aidan said.
Mr. Whittenberg stood on the arch of the roof on his two-story property. His clothes were soaked with blood and he wore only one shoe, and when he spoke, he sounded loopy, like he hadn’t slept in a thousand years. He could barely stand.
They had seen others like this, especially after the first week. That’s when the assisted suicides became heavy rotation so that even Colt got bored with them. Mr. Whittenberg was the first one they had seen in almost two weeks.
Colt said, “He helped fix my bike chain that time it got bent in the gears. Dad was at a conference. Remember?”
“Yeah,” Kirk said, having never met the man. He had seen the man once when he was visiting the Fannins, but never spoke to him. “Didn’t he have a couple of kids?”
“Toddlers,” Aidan said. “A pair of twins and a newborn, I think.”
Mr. Whittenberg was a young father, pudgy, barely in his thirties. He had been in the subdivision less than a year before the change.
“I’m ready to die!” Mr. Whittenberg yelled at the air.
“So jump off the roof,” Aidan said to everyone in the room.
“Callate,” Alyssa chastised him through her half-mouth, but everybody knew she didn’t mean it. Not completely.
“I can’t do this any longer,” Mr. Whittenberg said. “I’ve lost my wife and my children, and I’ve run out of allopurinol. My foot feels like it’s been shot a thousand times,” he cried. “I can’t do it. Do you hear me? I’m ready. Come and end me! End me!” The man screeched the last words, arms raised out, head up to the dark, dense clouds. Just as he hit his highest note, another screech emitted from the heavens. It came up behind him, shot down out of those low-hanging clouds and hit him like a train wreck. Shoved him to the arch, and then adroitly flipped him on his backside. The grisly talons squashed him like a mouse. Arms and legs flailing, the man screamed and cried like a child. The giant beak poked his gut sack, and then pulled out his insides, which it tossed in the air. The man continued to scream, though with considerably less energy. The creature repositioned itself on him and popped his head off.
Alyssa turned into Aidan’s shoulder. She never got used to that part.
The head bounced like a deflated basketball down the chimney rock roofing and came to a stop in the overgrown crabgrass in front of the Whittenberg’s home. The weeds at the far end of the front lawn rustled back and forth. A small creature ran through the grass to the disembodied head. Alyssa was sure it was the squirrel she had seen earlier. It came from the same general direction. The creature grabbed Mr. Whittenberg’s head by the hair and ran back across the lawns, dragging it to the front of the cul-de-sac. The squirrel rolled Mr. Whittenberg’s head on top of the pile of skulls and partially devoured heads, then ran up the side of a pine and dashed across a fence and vanished. When they looked up, the Roc was gone, too, leaving only the discarded remains of Mr. Whittenberg draping from the eaves.
“Okay,” Jaxon heard Alyssa say over the FRS, “the dungeon is open for player characters again.”
“Who was it?” Jaxon asked.
“Mr. Whittenberg.”
Jaxon thought of the pile of heads at the front of the subdivision and shuddered. He tried not to think about the pile. It was hard, though. His mother and father’s heads lay there.
“Ask her where the squirrel is,” Peter said.
“Where’s the squirrel?”
“Don’t know,” Alyssa replied over the FRS. “It disappeared into somebody’s backyard, so be careful.”
“Got that,” Jaxon said.
While waiting on the roc to finish its grisly business, Jaxon and Peter had planned their escape route. Since they lived on a cul-de-sac, they had decided to jump fences from house to house until they circumnavigated their way back home. By never being in the front, the grackle would not see them. That left the squirrel to deal with, but at least they didn’t have the grackle.
Having grown up in this subdivision, the boys knew every inch backwards and forwards, and in ways their parents could never understand, like how certain sidewalks were easier to bike on because the cement wasn’t cracked, or where to find all the good hiding spaces. It was a knowledge gained from years of hide and seek, cops and robbers, and pedaling to convenience stores. So Peter and Jaxon knew the Sanderson house would give them the most trouble because it had no coverage.
Jaxon led, duck walking across the lawn and climbing up an old live oak. Its giant arms reached over the fence and into the next backyard. Jaxon and Peter hopped from oak to shed to ground. This property had a thick bush line, which hid them as they crossed to the next fence. For the next few houses, they had to jump the fence, which they did as effortlessly as expected of two state finalists – Peter in gymnastics and Jaxon in Taekwondo.
At the base of the cul-de-sac, where the houses all circled in on each other, Peter and Jaxon were tempted to hop onto the subdivision’s brick-and-mortar windshield. Then they could cross three houses in a fraction of the time it had taken them to get to this end of the street. However, the grackle might see them, or worse things that lurked outside the subdivision. Finally, they reached the Sanderson’s home.
They entered the Sanderson’s yard through a small hole in the fence. The yard was a long plateau of tall grass with purple stalks. No trees, no sheds or clubhouses, not even a damn patio overhang. Just open grass. They could be seen years away and not know it.
“You ready?” Jaxon asked Peter.
Peter looked around. There had to be at least five or six thousand cubic feet of backyard. He nodded.
They got down on all fours and crawled through the grass like snakes on their bellies. Hand over hand, Jaxon pushed through the lawn. They did not drop any bleach behind them as they had done all afternoon because they were touching too much grass. No matter how much bleach they poured, their scent would still be somewhere.
Low to the ground, the grass grew thicker around the bases, which slowed their progress. Jaxon wished he had a machete. Or a weed eater. Or an air conditioner for that matter. And a Gatling gun. He shook his head and reminded himself to stay focused. Stop fantasizing.
Grass seeds clung like spider webs to his arms and face. The wind blew over them. The purple stalks swayed in the breeze. They stopped and waited for the wind to pass over. Peter prayed the wind did not carry their scent.
Suddenly, Jaxon’s palm landed on something that was not grass. He jerked his hand back and pushed up. His head emerged slow and easy from the grass line. When he decided that nothing was waiting to rip him apart, he moved into a stooped position and slowly stood up.
&n
bsp; “What is it?” Peter asked, but Jaxon shushed him. “I don’t know,” Jaxon said. “I’m going to check it out.”
The corpses lay sunken in the grass. The wind had carried the stench of death away from Jaxon and Peter. Decomposing bodies had a sweet smell, almost like cotton candy. It was weird, and not what any of them had expected, but what had they expected? Everything was different now.
Despite being headless, Jaxon recognized the bodies of the two sisters. He used to have a thing for the older sister, who was going to JuCo. The younger one was in junior high. She was on the swim team, he thought, but wasn’t sure.
“What is it?” Peter asked from below.
“Remember Jennifer and Jessica?”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“So they’re?”
“Yeah.”
Peter rose up in the grass behind Jaxon. “Not much left of them.”
“Nope.”
“They lived across the street. Why do you think they were out here?”
Jaxon checked what was left of the girls’ hands. Pulled out some stems. “There must have been a garden out here somewhere. They were hungry.” Jaxon pointed to the bloody paw prints on the door. “Wargs got ‘em.”
“I’m ready to get back.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
But as they lowered into the grass, two things happened almost simultaneously. As Aidan came over the radio, warning them that the grackle had taken flight, it flew over the house and into the backyard. The black beast swooped around, landed on a fence, and started calling out madly, its eyes wide and yellow, and its feathers on end.
“Can you get it?” Jaxon asked into the FRS. A quick negative response came back.
“There are some trees in the way,” Aidan explained.
Alyssa jumped in, “Run, boys! Run!”
Just then, an enormous sound, chthonic and booming, resonated through the subdivision like an earthquake. Trumpets of hell, Aidan had dubbed them. More than hearing the sound, they felt it. It was as if the air was sucked out of the world. Though they had heard the sound many times over the summer, they did not know what made it, whether creature or machine, but it always heralded the coming of the wargs.
