“Shit! She’s getting away!” She ran to the window but the girl wriggled out before she could get there. “Kile!”
“On it!”
On the street, the girl, maybe ten, wearing a flower print dress, cornrows weaved into her black hair, blindly ran while still clutching her doll and crashed into the arms of Mr. Kile. The girl screamed and tried to bite. It was all the big man could do not to let go of her. “You’re all right! It’s okay! We’re friends!” She twisted and broke free just as the rest of the squad came running out of the house. The girl screamed again as she was cornered, pee running down her legs.
“Take off your helmets!” yelled KK as she pulled off her own. The girl shook with fright. Kelly made eye contact. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” Upon recognizing a friendly human face, the girl clutched her doll harder and burst into tears. Kelly handed her gun to Kile while motioning for everyone else to point theirs in the air. She slowly approached. “You’re okay. You’re okay. We’re here to help.” The girl stifled her tears and glanced around for escape. When Kelly was three feet away she stopped and said, “My name is Katherine. What’s your doll’s name?”
The girl glanced at her doll and finally said, “Darcy.”
“Darcy is a nice name. She has pretty cocoa skin, just like you. Can I touch her hair?”
The girl looked down at the doll again and then slowly held it out from her body. As KK reached to touch the hair, the girl stepped forward and hugged her, breaking down into sobs of exhaustion.
When they got close to the train, Dean and Eliza met them with their helmets off. The girl walked with her hand held tightly to KK’s, partially hiding her face behind her doll. Dez said, “She hasn’t spoken another word.”
The rest of the mission crew paused from their activities to look at the survivor. “You’re well fed,” said Eliza who kneeled before the girl but kept herself a good ten feet away. She looked into the girl’s big brown eye’s and saw plenty of light in there as the irises focused on her own. “Hello there,” said Eliza. “My name is Eliza and this is Stewart. Are you okay?”
The girl paused as though she was thinking about it. Then nodded yes.
“That’s good. Are there other people here?”
The girl quickly shook her head no.
“Can you tell us where they are?” asked Dean.
The girl hugged her doll closer while nuzzling harder against KK’s side. Eliza looked up at him and said, “Let me talk.” She turned back to the girl. “We know that there were other people here. Can you say where they went?”
The girl looked around as if getting her bearings and then pointed south.
“Are they in another part of town?” asked Dean.
Eliza glared at Dean then turned back to the girl, “Is there somewhere else that they might have gone? Somewhere nearby?”
The girl stared straight ahead and then spotted Hansel and Gretel looking at her from the train. She gasped and immediately dropped to the ground, prostrating herself as if genuflecting. I’m sorry, she let burst from her mind. Please don’t hurt me. My parents made me hide.
The assembly looked back and forth between the girl and the pucks, confusion reigning over all of their faces. Gretel finally spoke to them, saying, “She is communicating with us. She thinks we will hurt her. Her parents hid her.”
“Where are her parents?” asked Dean.
Gretel and Hansel looked at the prostrate girl, her body shivering as Corporal Kelly crouched and gently stroked her back. Finally Hansel said, “Others who are like us took them away last night.”
Gretel continued, “All of the humans here were taken south. It was very sudden.”
Hansel said, “She refers to us as The Chosen.”
Gretel said, “The Chosen took them south. Her parents hid her in a locker or some box and she was left behind.”
Hansel said, “The humans here lived…” He looked at his sister not sure how to describe it. She continued for him, “under Chosen rule.”
“Okay, now that’s some fucked up shit,” said Green.
“Sergeant. Perimeter watch, now,” said Dez.
Everyone was suddenly hyper vigilant again. Hansel said, “They are not here. They have gone.”
Dean said, “We need to move anyway. We’ll sort the rest of this out on the train.” He said to Kelly and Eliza. “Get the girl aboard.”
The girl suddenly stood, desperation crossing her face. “No! I have to wait for my mommy and daddy.”
Gretel said, “They will not be coming back.”
“How do you know?” asked KK.
Hansel pointed at the girl. “She knows. This was a gathering place. That is all. This is where the Chosen gather the humans from the North.”
“What the hell does that mean?” asked Sanders.
“It doesn’t matter right now,” said Dean. “We are getting back on the train. Let’s move!” He looked at Kelly, “Drag her if you have to.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Desert
The Shore train blew through Benson, with the riders taking little notice of the once inhabited surroundings. To Major Thompson, any town meant potential danger and they sped up to pass through quickly. They had stopped outside of Lordsburg to acquire decontaminated water for drinking, but from there, the sole focus was to put an eye on the Northerners and stick with them. It wouldn’t matter that they were seen. They’d lit up the landscape for twenty square miles with the explosions in El Paso.
Thompson had made room for Plimpton to stand with him in the cab while Gallagher and Collins drove, and he glanced at the councilman, not for the first time, wondering at the nature of the slightly built fellow’s power. After all, Thompson himself was a man of power, a man with leadership built into his DNA. Yet Plimpton, despite being a somewhat frail… No, frail wasn’t right… A man of smallish build and the air of what Thompson considered a dandy. Yet, despite this, the councilman had supreme confidence. Thompson had seen it falter when they were under attack, but Thompson himself had felt his loins lock as he had contemplated jumping out into air filled with hydrogen cyanide, roaring flames and marauding telepathic demons. When it came to Plimpton, no one questioned the man. He had that rare gift of having an aura that demanded respect. Despite everything that he knew about the councilman (and his utter distaste for working with him) Thompson hadn’t even considered making room for say, the vicar inside the cab. Plimpton allowed his head to nod down to his chest to rest, and it occurred to Thompson that his grudging respect for the fellow pissed him off. The guy was after all a – As though he had been cued by Thompson’s inner thoughts, Plimpton suddenly looked up and turned to the major. He offered a brief friendly smile and said, “Lovely it would be to have a place to lay one’s head. Shame we haven’t spotted an abandoned passenger car yet.”
“I expect we will find something in Tucson. Almost there.”
As they approached Tucson, they passed through a small settlement called Old Vail Village and noted that every structure was burned to the ground. As they passed ever denser construction, every building was gutted to its foundation. Not even a storage shed stood above the heaps of ash. At the city center, the vast rail yard told the same tale: every railcar, boxcar, tanker, all of it, burned to the axles. Nothing that could be considered a shelter stood. Thompson finally said, “This was systematic. This isn’t bombing. It’s only structures. Trees that are far enough away from any house are still living. This was salting a city back to the earth. Who would do this?”
Plimpton almost shrugged. “The demon children have fire. We know this. Who else?”
“But why?” asked Gallagher.
Collins said, “To make it uninhabitable.”
Thompson said, “Not long ago. The ash is too fresh. Wind and weather would have tamped it down or blown it away.”
The vicar stepped into the doorway, his bulk making the space entirely too crowded. “We have entered the Devil’s playground. Spee
d this thing up. We will find nothing but horror in this land.”
Gallagher didn’t need to be told twice. The rails before them remained freshly polished. The Northerners hadn’t stopped. Why would they? He pushed forward on the accelerator handle and the engine offered a throaty hum as it picked up speed.
“So much for finding additional accommodations,” said Plimpton. “Vicar, why don’t you stay and get warm? I’m going to step outside and see if I can lie down without falling off.” He awkwardly stepped around the reverend and closed the door. The destruction went on for miles, reaching far outside the city. For every suburb and farm it was the same. At Picacho, the rails split, with one route going north toward Phoenix and the other continuing west toward California. The Shoremen wasted a good hour heading north, following the silvered rails until they suddenly became solidly coated in rust again. “The sons-o-bitches,” swore Thompson. “Doubled back they did.” He ordered the train reversed and they wasted more precious time rolling back to the split.
For at least a hundred yards along the rails that headed west, dirt had been thrown on the rails, obscuring the fresh polish. The switch mechanism had been covered with tumbleweed. When they tossed aside the brush they found the mechanism sabotaged: a broken length of chain telling the tale. As they all dismounted to study the problem, Timbs said, “Looks like they hooked up their train to the switch and yanked it all to hell.”
Beckman and Timbs huffed it west to the small burned down town of Eloy where in the wreckage of a hardware store, they were able to salvage a couple of large pry bars and steel mallets. With considerable effort, and by taking turns, the Shoremen were able to tear out the sections of track that had been destroyed, pry up some fresh track behind them and lay it in as a bypass around the damaged junction. The effort took the better part of a day and Thompson chose to lay up for the night in the offices of a salvage yard that had somehow avoided the continuous burning of nearly every standing building. The men ate their meager rations and sent the Sentinel to the roof on auto-watch. Not that they could do squat if a band of those devil children came wandering through. At least they would know to hide. Plimpton had never felt so vulnerable in his life. He was a man used to the world working for him. Even in the dark days of Omega, organization and a team of confident talented men and women surrounding him had meant steady hands attached to his gifted mind. Now he found himself fighting depression as his place on the planet had been reduced to survival in an unknown and extremely unsafe world. With profound frustration that their quarry might be getting away, the band of ten men spent their evening in silence, each commiserating with his maker or, in Plimpton’s case, himself.
The tiny desert town of Niland, California stood just inland from the Salton Sea along highway 111. As Wen Blakely gazed out at the landscape, God Is Love could be clearly made out written on the hill in the distance. Salvation Mountain, a curious monument created by an even more curious eccentric named Leonard Knight, stood tall, painted with flowers, trees and waterfalls, and covered with scripture. A little further on was Slab City: an abandoned WWII Marine base, converted to a Mecca for recreational campers. Thousands upon thousands of RVs stood in a jumble together. He could only assume that at the end, a mass of doomsday preppers seeking escape from Cain’s had gathered here with the confidence that they had gotten out, only to die as a culture together. And there was the Salton Sea itself. He had been there as both a Marshall chasing drug dealers and as a young man traveling to learn about his State. The sea, a vast area covering more than five hundred square miles, was gone. Gone as though the frigid desert had swallowed it up. A gently sloping pit fifteen miles wide and twice as long was all that was left. He noted that the train ride was distinctly rougher, with random jerks right and left, so he told Sergeant Green, who was up on the roof, to keep a sharp eye on the tracks ahead. He suspected that the San Andreas had woken from its long slumber. The Salton Sea ran right over it. It must have been thirsty.
They stopped in Indio, before the tracks turned parallel to Interstate 10 and then westward toward Los Angeles. Unlike the border towns to the south, Indio remained mostly intact - at least as far as fire was concerned. It was just as abandoned, lonely, neglected and weather-worn as everywhere else where man had finished mucking about, but a significant earthquake had randomly damaged and demolished hundreds of buildings. A hunting party was assembled and the still intact Coachella Valley Rescue Mission proved to be a boon.
Dean went on the search, if only to get his head clear. As the team walked back to the train, their packs heavily weighted with essentials, he was stunned by how distracted he was. He wasn’t hungry. Food was hard to even keep down and he was worried that he was getting sick until he remembered feeling like this before, falling for, or lusting anyway, for Amy Wells, back in high school. He was like some lovesick, wet-behind-the-ears schoolboy. It wasn’t rational. How in the hell was he feeling like this while leading people through hostile territory? It was utterly unnerving and completely unprofessional. Intellectually, he knew that the chemicals spinning around in his head were just that, chemicals… He hadn’t gotten laid in well, a really fucking long time. But so what? He’d been on years-long missions without getting laid. Not in a good way anyway. This was different. Eliza was different. He could end it. He should end it. Just tell her... He found himself remembering his fingers brushing across the soft but firm skin of her stomach, the muscles tensing and relaxing, the soft down of peach fuzz… He cleared his throat and shook his head. Like a new heroin addict, having had a mental taste, he was ready to mainline. Maybe once they’d gotten the sex thing out of the way, he could focus better. Had to focus better. He told himself tonight, then stumbled on some fallen debris and chuckled in a way that had the others looking at him askance.
The ride became really rough as they crossed the Inland Empire, the abandoned western suburbs of Los Angeles. Evidence of the earthquake, or quakes, compounded as the landscape filled with densely packed housing and industrial zones. The destruction was evident everywhere, yet random in its placement. Depending on the arbitrary nature of affected faults, whole neighborhoods had either been destroyed or remained solid as the day they were abandoned. They had to stop several times to clear debris and more than once they held their collective breath as they crossed barely standing bridges. That ended in Pico Rivera along the Rio Hondo (a concrete tributary of the L.A. River). The bridge was not only gone, but washed away by what had to have been a tremendous flood. That left them roughly twenty miles north of San Pedro and the Los Angeles Harbor. Dean decided that they would spend the night in the relative safety of the train and finish the trek by foot at first light.
They dined in relative silence, each in his or her way taking in the surreal landscape around them. The cluster of skyscrapers that made up downtown L.A. remained erect. More than any other buildings, the monsters of glass, steel and concrete appeared, at least from a distance, to have been untouched.
The twins sensed nothing that could be considered dangerous but the ruined place was so filled with ghosts that no one felt at ease. Millions had lived and perished here. Millions had been infected; their human side destroyed, rendering them instead into devils. Every one of the crew experienced memories of the television reporting from L.A.. The South had been rapidly falling apart. The West seemed untouched, a haven. To the dismay of the world, the pattern remained the same: A place that seemed safe was within days a riot of chaos. Wen recalled a TV reporter standing on one of the bridges that crossed over the 110 Freeway into downtown. It was a live report. The freeway, rather than being free, was full of stopped vehicles with tens of thousands of people running north for their lives. Almost indistinguishably blended amongst them were the Fiends, rabidly pulling down the healthy and ripping and hacking them apart. The TV reporter was pointing down on the insanity and screaming over and over, “This is happening! This is happening!” He was tackled out of camera frame and before the feed was cut, the camera itself was upended, fa
lling into the melee below. Wenfrin Blakely for one, cried silently at this apparition of what was once his hometown. It dawned on him that he hadn’t really mourned what was before. Seeing the place where he had grown up and worked was like looking into an open casket. The body was recognizable, but the life was long gone. Maggie Tender put a comforting hand on her adopted boss’s shoulder. He accepted the gesture with gratitude and held her hand in response.
When Stewart crawled into bed with Eliza, the chemicals that had turned their brains into love-lusting mush had shut down. Blakely’s tears had spared no one from feeling blue. Until this point, they had been passing through each tragedy with the stiff spine of a well focused team. There hadn’t been time to reflect, to remember. With the train stopped from further progress, the engine that had been through the hellish landscape was quiet. Eliza and Dean held each other in a gentle way, hoping for sleep that wouldn’t come easily.
Dean woke to the almost total darkness that was the train compartment at night. He was on his back and he could feel his shoulder touching Eliza’s. He shifted his hand and felt her knuckles. The pattern of her breathing shifted and she laced her fingers with his. They lay like that for several minutes, the silence only broken by the breath passing through their noses. The mere act of holding this woman’s hand had him imagining pulling off her clothes – so much for not feeling up for it. Then she was drawing his hand across her thigh and letting it rest between her legs. With both her hands she pressed his fingers down and let out a soft sigh. She whispered, “That would also be known as a, yes please.”
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