by Doug Goodman
Three giant black bodies loped down the highway and along the far end of the subdivision’s windshield.
“Look how they move,” he said, in amazement.
“Dude, they’re like horses,” Kirk agreed. “Demon fucking horses.”
“And they keep getting faster,” Aidan said. He picked up the FRS and said, “Hurry up.” Then, to the others, “Crap. New problem.”
They all moved to his side of the roof. Down on the streets, other Lakewood foragers, unseen until they began scrambling, were making mad dashes for their homes, having heard the call of the wargs. But one ran towards their end of the street. Aidan aimed the Winchester at the approaching teen and focused the scope on him.
“It’s Aaron,” Kirk grumbled. “I’d hoped he was killed in the first attack.”
“Be nice,” Alyssa said. “We have to let him in.”
“No way. We have more than enough to deal with than to add some asshole to the group.”
“You can’t exclude a person just cause you pushed each other around in the schoolyard a million years ago. He’s a human being, Kirk.”
“If you let him in, he’s just going to fuck things up. Trust me on that. He’s going to get everybody pissed at everybody else, and then the wargs are going to follow our shouting all the way to the front door.”
“You are such an ass.”
A gunshot cracked in the air. Alyssa and Kirk turned to Aidan. The barrel of the Winchester was smoking.
“He had no bleach. He would have led them straight to us, regardless of whether we turned him down or not.”
“Aidan,” Alyssa said, her voice emptying. She couldn’t say anything more.
“What would we have done if we let him in? We’ve got no food. We’re barely surviving the five of us,” Aidan explained.
Alyssa turned away, and a silence fell over the attic. They had done many things in the past three months that they had never thought imaginable, but killing another person was completely new territory. Colt finally ended the silence by saying, “Look. The wargs are coming.”
There were five of them now. Two more had joined the pack, coming up from the western side of the subdivision. Most of the streets were cleared. People were hiding in their attics, hoping they would not be tracked, holding their breath to keep from being heard. The ones who hadn’t been able to get back to their homes were trying to get out of sight and pray they weren’t detected.
A middle-aged man wearing green-and-tan camouflage clothes ducked behind some shrubs just as two wargs entered his street. The giant, stocky beasts – each one as large and thick as an SUV – slowed down to an amble. They sniffed the air. The beasts eyed each other in silent communication, and then separated to different sides of the street. One went up the near side, the other up the far side. They walked with purpose, sometimes leaning down and putting their nose to the ground to scare up a path. Other times, they would shake their noses in disgust at the overwhelming stench of bleach, which was at least a hundred times more powerful for them than it was for humans.
The man lay perfectly still among the shrubs. Over his camo, he wore a makeshift ghillie suit, which had become popular in the past month. Even Jaxon and Peter were working on their own ghillie suits. This guy’s was all leaves, sticks, and grass. Crudely created, but very effective, and it gave him hope. Aidan had almost lost sight of the man in the shrubs.
The warg trotted along the houseline where the man was hiding. In one sudden and fluid moment, the beast jerked its head to the side, lunged into the bushes, and pulled out the guy in the ghillie suit. The man tried to escape, but the warg clasped him tightly in its jaws. It shook him like a rag doll – leaves and grass and sticks flew everywhere – then it spit him out on the ground. He lay there, moaning in pain, blood mixed with the vegetation stitched all over his body. He looked up at the warg. The creature stared at him with malicious intent and opened its jaws so wide the guy could see all three rows of bloody teeth. With despair, he realized that the blood on the warg’s teeth was his.
The beast snarled, then bit him again, but this time, the warg bit down on his leg, and all the way up Vicksburg they could hear the man’s bones crunch. He cried out sharply, and once the warg let go, he tried to pull himself away.
The warg let the man drag his body out onto the asphalt. This was the worst part of the wargs. While most animals had developed some version of thicker hides, sharper teeth, and smarter brains, wargs had malicious intent. They had evolved a malevolent playfulness and sense of humor. The monsters didn’t just kill, they seemed to enjoy finding new ways to torture anyone they found before they killed them. Case in point, the man’s shinbone had been snapped in two, so his leg dragged behind him. The warg watched him with its serrated smile.
The other warg, which had stopped and cocked its ear in the direction of the grackle, turned to bark to the first one. It was a series of barks, in different pitches, and much more complex than anything Aidan or the others had ever heard escape the lips of a lupine creature.
The man, who was still trying to escape, cried out for help to anyone who would listen. “Please, somebody! Just shoot the damn thing!” he pleaded between sobs. “It can be killed. My life can’t end this way. It Can’t!”
The warg walked over, put its massive paw on the man’s shoulder, and shoved the man’s torso to the ground.
“No, no, no,” the man insisted. Begged. “I still have things I want to do with my life. I have dreams to fulfill.”
The man gave one last cry as the warg wrapped its maws with all those teeth around his dreams. A quick jerk, and the body crumpled. Bled like an oil leak from a hose, spurting softly. The warg spit out the head and started back up the street.
Jaxon and Peter sprinted across the lawn, and the grackle took to the air, circling over them and shrieking its piercing, noisome call. Then they heard the squirrel.
It hopped, tail twitching, along the fence line like any other squirrel they had ever seen. Then it perched up on its hind legs and opened a cavernous jaw. Two sickle-like teeth flicked outward.
“Fucking squirrels,” Jaxon said. This time, Peter didn’t correct him. He was too concerned with the threat glaring at them with black, pupil-less eyes.
“What do we do?” Peter asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What about the shotgun?”
“They move too fast. I got it. Go for the house. If we can lock it out, we can think of our next move.”
Peter barely heard him over the raucous railing of the grackle.
“Okay. On three. One – two – three!”
However, when they darted for the door, the toothy monster easily dashed between them and their escape. It pounced at Jaxon, who tried to kick it, but as he extended his leg, the squirrel leaped on his leg and jumped at his throat. Two giant teeth were about to rip out half his neck.
Brain and fur blew over Jaxon, slapping him wetly in the face. Blood splashed like a water balloon bursting against his shirt.
“Got him,” Aidan said over the FRS, “But the wargs are following the grackle. Get your asses home, pronto!”
The thought that wargs could be gunning for them made Jaxon and Peter react all that much faster. They hurdled one fence and sprinted another. The grackle followed them, always calling out with that horrible, noisome sound. It hovered over as they moved around the yards, glowering at them with its yellow, dinosaurian glare.
“Fuck this,” Jaxon said. He pulled out the shotgun and aimed it at the grackle. The grackle saw the gun and stopped calling. It tried to fly away, but didn’t make four feet before buckshot blasted it out of existence.
Running is hard when trying to cover tracks with bleach water, but run they did. They hopped the fence to the Christoferson’s house, a burned-up corpse of its former self. It still stunk of burned bodies, though the remains had been devoured long ago. Jaxon suspected the stench was soaked into whatever remaining wood was left of the house.
“Hurry!” Aidan
yelled. “They’ve finished Shiloh and Palmito Ranch Streets and are turning towards us.”
“Almost there,” Jaxon growled, knowing that Aidan couldn’t hear him without the FRS talk button pressed down.
“The dungeon will be closing soon, with or without you,” Aidan warned them.
Three streets down, the largest warg paused in the middle of the street and moved its head from side to side. When that failed, it raised its nose to the air and inhaled deeply. Then it jumped up on the roof of a car, its claws scraping against the metal hood. The alarm went off briefly, then weakened and died. The roof caved under the weight of the animal as it sniffed the air again. It snapped its black fangs in the air, and the other wargs turned, following it towards Vicksburg.
Sweating profusely, Jaxon and Peter ran out into the street, having decided that there was no further reason trying to elude any animals. Between the grackle and the gunshots, every beast in a one-mile radius was converging on Vicksburg. Besides, his arms felt limp and useless from jumping every fence on the block, and his legs were scraped up from catching on cedar wood.
Peter popped off the bit from his Camelbak. The bleach water ran down his legs and onto the concrete, hopefully covering their scent, though he had no idea if it would work. At least being on the concrete would help them. Grass collected scent better than concrete, and it was harder to get rid of all the scent in grass. Behind him, Peter left a trail of white water on the dark concrete.
A sideways glance down the street showed no wargs as they reached the house. They jumped a small hedge and ran up the walkway to their front door, which like all the others had been pushed in by the wargs. On the inside, the disheveled house looked like any other ransacked home in the neighborhood: broken furniture; giant water stains; dirt and leaves blown in through the open doors and windows, pictures knocked down, holes in the walls, scraps of trash left by possums, cats, and armadillos, and the acrid smell of animal urine and offal.
The stairwell was covered in discarded aluminum cans. A second look, however, showed a pattern. Each step was halfway lined with cans in an alternating pattern. Peter and Jaxon climbed up on the nickel-plated banister effortlessly and walked up it to the second floor. Though his feet were burning from the bleach water, Peter could not resist a dismount. The second floor, like the first, was a minefield of trash and disarray.
Down the hallway, they walked to the opening beneath the attic. They had to take a long step over a large play set that belonged to an action figure toy line that he outgrew ages ago. Peter looked around at the children’s bedrooms. He had never known the people who lived here, and from time to time, he wondered about them, like why was there a stethoscope mounted to the wall of one of the children’s bedrooms? It made no sense to him. Was the father a doctor? They found no evidence to suggest he was. Maybe the child had an older sibling or a close uncle. Some things just made no sense. Despite that, sometimes the whole gang sat around some days just talking about these phantom people they had never known or seen. It helped to pass time on the long, hot days. Peter would never know who they were or what happened to them after Black Friday.
Under the attic, Jaxon said, “Gunter Glieben Glauten Globen,” and chuckled to himself. It was his idea to make the phrase their shibboleth. Nobody in their right mind would think of it, he had proposed to the group, and he felt pretty certain no animal could pronounce the nonsense words, unless of course they came up with a demonic parrot, but that would be crazy.
The attic stairs lowered, and Jaxon and Peter climbed up into the confines of their home. As soon as they were up, Alyssa and Kirk pulled the attic door shut.
Peter and Jaxon dropped their backpacks and took off their sandals while Alyssa checked over them. “You’re not bleeding – thank God.” She took an old shirt and wiped off the needles and the dirt, and noticed the burn marks on Peter’s ankles.
“I’ll be okay.”
“Not if we don’t get the bleach off you. It’s corrosive.”
She poured fresh water on his ankle. The water’s coolness felt refreshing against his gnawed flesh. Then she took to cleaning Jaxon’s feet. Jaxon jerked his feet away when she touched him with her soft hands.
“What?” she barked.
“My feet are just sore.”
“Keep quiet, y’all,” Aidan said. It was barely more than a breath, but the tone told them more than his words ever could. There were still wargs out there. Aidan had lowered the ridge vents, but left a small line open so that he could watch the beasts moving.
The same black-fanged alpha that had stopped and turned some of the others toward Vicksburg now stalked the street, moving slowly past the houses. The two betas each took a side of the street, which they searched in a grid formation. They were like a platoon marching across a field on the search for enemy scouts.
When the alpha came across Aaron’s freshly killed corpse, Aidan told his heart to stop beating so fast. They thought sometimes that the wargs could hear their beating hearts if they thumped against their chest too hard.
The alpha stooped down and sucked the air out of the gunshot wound and into its nostrils. Aidan imagined the tiny scent particles of gunpowder and metal casing entering the warg’s nostrils. He saw the synapses firing and carrying the information to the warg’s brain, and he wondered if he had doomed them all. That by trying to keep the wargs from detecting them, he had led them straight to their doorstep.
Aidan raised his hand, the signal to be ready to run. Jaxon pulled his sandals back on. Peter’s feet hurt too much, though, to put his sandals back on. And he was afraid the wargs might hear his feet moving across the floorboards. In the weeks immediately after Black Friday, Peter had tried to hold his breath as long as possible, but that only made him breathe hard when he couldn’t hold his breath any longer, so he learned to just breathe slow and steady. Colt, being the youngest, scooted next to him.
The wargs are coming for us, Aidan feared. The alpha air-scented and turned to the house. For a second, it seemed like the large beast looked him in the eye. Aidan wanted to pretend he was staring the beast down, giving it the stink eye. In reality he just prayed he didn’t blink so that the warg saw him.
Quietly, all three wargs made for the house. Aidan got ready to drop his hand, which meant it was time to run like hell. They had gone over this many times. It was a well-coordinated yet very simple contingency plan that involved burning the house and escaping to the nearest car with gas, then tearing out of Dodge like they lived in NASCAR City. Hustle like you got a bustle, his father would say, though Aidan had no idea why wearing a bustle would make you run fast.
The wargs approached the curb and sniffed around it, no doubt picking up on the bleach. When the boys had first started using the bleach, they feared it might lead the wargs straight to them. But throwing bleach on a trail was like asking a person to find a fluorescent-painted path at night, then shining a bright light in their eyes. Sure the bleach helped break down some of the smell, but mainly it just painfully overpowered their senses so they could not track.
The wargs’ heads weaved back and forth. Tried to see beyond the bleach smell. With each step, they inched closer to their home.
Everybody in the attic watched Aidan’s fist. And as he was about to lower his clenched fingers – his mind made up that it was time to make a run for the border – at that moment the cacophonous undulation that sounded like a hundred thousand elephants dying blared across the subdivision. The wargs responded, turning away, but not before the alpha took one last look to the attic, then raised his hind leg and urinated on the curb.
Once the alert was over, the teens in the attic breathed a sigh of relief. Shoulders relaxed. Lungs exhaled. Then Jaxon pulled out his backpack. Peter brought his out, too. They opened them to share their spoils.
First, they tossed their shit-sacks to the side. The sacks were always re-used. At first, they went through sacks about twice a week, but ever since the food began dwindling a month ago, so did their use of t
he shit-sacks. Now they used up maybe a sack a week.
Jaxon pulled out a bucket of bleach, floss, razorblades, cotton swabs, toilet paper, and moisturizer and set them aside. “And for the little lady,” he said as he handed Alyssa a box of maxi pads and a Reader’s Digest.
Alyssa’s face lit up with that half-smile that had caught so many boys’ attention back when there was a thing called high school. “Ooh, I haven’t read this one.”
“Well, it was Reader’s Digest or Home and Garden.”
“Thank you.”
Aidan pointed to Peter. “What about you? Did you find anything?”
Peter unzipped his backpack and added to the pile several empty liquor bottles, string, a hammer, carpet cleaner, and fungicide. Lastly, he pulled out a notebook and a pen and handed them to Aidan.
“For you, bro.” He slid it across the rainbow-colored gym mat floor.
Aidan picked it up and nodded. Alyssa poked him with her elbow until he said, “Thanks.”
The rest of the evening, everybody did chores. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded because nobody had to do anything like clear the table or vacuum the floor – chores that just kept up appearances in their old homes and lives. In the new world, chores were needed for survival. Bullets had to be inventoried, the attic had to be de-scented, and the power line to the solar panels had to be checked.
Everyone had their own duty, though none of them was assigned. People took care of what needed to be done until the sun began to set. With the first red and gold rays of the evening breaking through the gray lid of sky, Aidan and Kirk retracted the ridge vent while Jaxon filled several balloons with moisturizer and fungicide. Jaxon held up the open bottle of moisturizer to Kirk, who wrinkled his nose at the smell.
“Ugh, that’s awful. What is it?”
