They had waited for weeks, but today when the mist disappeared into the sunlight of a new morning and there were no new faces, Jacob came to the conclusion that the last of his men were now here. Some were surely spread further about the country, but until a form of communication had been raised, they were on their own. Just like him. Alone.
From the lofty penthouse Jacob was able to watch the rest of the city's survivors return to their everyday lives, or at least try to. He watched them scavenge for food and clothing and check in on the homes of old friends and family. He envied them this simplicity. Jacob though, had never known an everyday life before. Until now each day had always been different than the next. Now, even though each morning he awoke a little less recognizable, a little less himself and a lot more a walking vessel for some unspoken hunger - a static quality had crept into his existence of late. It didn't suit him.
He watched an old woman walk out of her apartment, a large revolver in her hand. She shuffled down the street, hurrying out of sight. In thirty minutes she came waddling back with a shopping bag and a smile. It was only then that Jacob realized how many people had done this exact same thing every day. They headed down the same street, the same way and came back with shopping bags.
Jacob looked over at Arian who struggled with clumsy fingers to hack into the satellite feed. The task had done nothing other than frustrate the man's waking hours without result. Each day as Arian's fingers grew stiffer and more claw-like, code became more difficult to write, and the chances of Jacob getting back into communication with his army grew smaller.
"This was not part of the plan. You just can't plan for the Apocalypse, can you?" Jacob laughed.
Jacob didn't expect an answer, not from Arian or any of his men. Arian had long ago stopped answering the questions that Jacob posed to the sky and the Indians never had. They tolerated Jacob and ignored the truth about him. Jacob didn't ignore it; he looked at the truth dead on. The truth was that in almost every way that Arian or anyone else could think of, Jacob was insane. The only exception was that he was always right and so they ignored his insanity and followed him. They had faith in him, but it was wavering. Each day his soldiers woke up more monstrous, their faith waivered a little more.
Time was running out for Jacob. If Dr. Thomas or Arian didn't find something soon… Jacob would need something else. A miracle.
Jacob looked back down the street and tapped a long claw-like nail against his teeth.
Chapter 34
***
Nestor walked. Street to street. Town to town. He tried to stick to the suburbs, the cities having been the main targets of the missiles and the EMPC's. The innards of parking structures had wiped out city blocks. People seemed to have tried to outdrive the missiles, dying in the inferno of their cars, lining the freeways with a charred memory of the commutes of a destroyed world. Electronic stores had been another tinderbox when the blasts came and the fires they started still blazed unchecked in every town. He avoided the cities because they held nothing but devastation, shallow graves and no survivors he could find.
When he came to the military base he found it mostly deserted. A few charred corpses remained, the unfortunate grunts left on guard duty 'til the end. There had been looting, but a military base wasn't a simple thing to loot if you'd never lived on one. Nestor had spent years in a place just like this. It was here that he replaced his boots and sleeping gear. It was here that he replaced the weapons that he had scavenged and been left with, with two Colt 1911 pistols and a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle. He kept his knife.
Not long after the military base, in some suburb in Maryland, the survivors became more common and visible. It was here that Nestor began to suspect a change in mankind. If he stayed in a place more than a day it got worse. At first he thought it was him, some form of contagious disease he was infecting those around him with, so he stayed distant. In time he came to realize that it wasn't him, it was something else.
Outside of a suburb of some eastern town, Nestor climbed the branches of an oak that was still standing in the memory of a neighborhood park. The underground sprinklers had exploded, making a lake of sorts in the middle of the park. This water led Nestor to believe someone would arrive here eventually to drink. He waited. Soon enough a man appeared on the horizon and headed towards the park.
The man filled two canteens that he pulled from a backpack. The man was jittery and nervous. He washed his face in the water and then suddenly stopped. He jerked his head up and stared around him. Nestor wondered if it was his own gaze that the man was feeling. The man reached in his backpack and pulled out a revolver. Nestor tried to ease deeper into the branch he laid upon. It was then that another man came sprinting over the horizon. The sprinter came on inhumanely fast at the man with the revolver and as he did Nestor saw that the sprinter wasn't quite human. The sprinter's hands seemed to be claws, his mouth filled with fangs. He was disproportionally large and muscular and his eyes and skin reflected the light in a disconcerting way. The revolver cracked, but no shots landed and before Nestor had even registered what was happening, the sprinter lunged forward, knocking the gun from the man's hand and sprawling him on the ground beneath him.
Without hesitation the sprinter began to eat the man.
Nestor took aim through the scope on his rifle. He picked the sprinter's chest, the largest target available, and fired a shot. The sprinter fell back from the impact, but when he sat up there was only a surface wound, a small amount of blood over white, unbroken bone. The sprinter looked up at the tree where Nestor was perched, and though the distance was great, Nestor could tell he had been seen. As the sprinter stood back up, Nestor took aim at his forehead and fired off another shot. Again the impact knocked the sprinter down, but again he got back up and now the sprinter was growling and running at Nestor.
"Shit."
Nestor thought back to the crazy man that he'd killed in the suburbs. He took aim on the eye of the sprinter. At the speed the sprinter was running his eye was a hard target, but Nestor didn't miss and the sprinter fell to the ground. This time he didn't move.
Nestor jumped out of the tree and walked over to the corpse of the sprinter and looked it over. He pulled out his knife and bent over when he became aware of the screaming. He walked over to the man by the lake who laid, half-eaten, bleeding into the water. Nestor reached down and put a hand on the man's shoulder, which seemed to calm him down.
"Where is it?"
"Dead," Nestor replied.
"I shot it but… the bullets did nothing."
"I know. It doesn't seem possible."
"What are they?" the man moaned.
"I don't know."
"They eat people. Cannibals. Mutant cannibals. How could this have… how could this have happened?"
The man died before Nestor could reply, though he had no answer to offer. He closed the man's eyes and then walked back to the other corpse and pulled out his knife. He decided to put a bullet in the mutant's other eye out of caution before he started dissecting him.
Chapter 35
***
"I think if you saw what I'd done you'd be really impressed, Nicolette! I found this code right…"
"Look, I'm sorry, Caleb," Nicolette interrupted, her voice quavering, a tear in her eye, "but this was a mistake."
"You're kidding."
"You don't understand, Caleb, I like you, but, we just met at a really hard time for me. I just got out of a serious relationship. I'm a mess and I sort of need to sort that out before I can really be with anyone. It's not fair to either of us."
Caleb stared at Nicolette in silence, disbelief on his face.
"Nicolette… The world was blown up. It's a hard time for everyone. No one is in a good place right now, they're in bunkers."
"But for me, it's even worse," she said with a loud sigh, hands on her hips. "You see one of the reasons I became a musician is because I have these thoughts that I need to express, but I always date men who don't listen. I've
been trying to find myself through music because I've been trapped in my relationships."
She nodded her head as if she'd made a solid point, one easily understood. Caleb's eyes just got wider.
"You're kidding me, right? I mean, you couldn't possibly be this self-involved."
"Oh I'm sorry, Caleb, because I won't sleep with you I'm self-involved?!"
"You did sleep with me! It was good… I thought. Did you really forget or are you just being mean?"
"That's not the point, Caleb! Why did you call me self-involved?!"
"No, you're self-involved because humankind is hardly cold and you're dealing with stupid relationship issues from the past. And projecting them. In a bunker. Under a nuclear wasteland! Who said anything about a long-term relationship here? We'll probably be dead really soon!"
"So what, I should stay with you? We should just settle?!"
"No. I'm not saying that. I'm not settling, Nicolette. I saw you long ago, across a room, and I've loved you since. I want to be with you," Caleb moved towards her with his crooked smile. He put a gentle hand on her shoulder and she smiled at him. "I don't think it needs to be this complicated."
She tossed his hand off her arm and stormed to the door and then turned back.
"I'm complicated, Caleb. My mother bought me therapy she was so concerned about me. I'm so just… tortured, my life has been so hard… and this whole Armageddon thing just came at a bad time and I think I'm getting my period."
"This isn't happening. How can this be happening?" Caleb laughed.
"It's not funny, Caleb. This is serious!"
"No. It's not. None of this is. How did you not gain perspective when the world as we know it ended?"
She laughed and opened the door.
"It's like you said, Caleb, my world didn't end. My world is still here. I'm still growing, and I just don't think there's a place for you in my world right now. But maybe… look… I just needed someone to keep me warm when the world ended. Now the world's still turning and I need something more but, you're still just someone. I need more than just someone."
Caleb watched her walk out the door for the last time and was almost too confused to be hurt. Almost.
Chapter 36
***
October sat in his office and looked out over The Island. There were barracks on each side of The Island. Simple, but efficient in design. One for young potent women, one for soldiers. In between were fancier, more elaborately designed homes for the Founders and their associates. October turned his back, sat down and finished his plate of pasta. As he chewed he stared at the black screen. Nestor would be up soon October knew. Nestor hardly ever slept and when he did it was brief, so October watched the feed even while Nestor slept. He secretly wondered if at some point he would be able to see the man's dreams.
And if he did, he wondered if he'd be dying painfully in them.
October had known Nestor to some degree for just over twenty years. During that time he'd seen the man silently and passively kill more people than most diseases. There had never though, in that time, been a moment where October had seen Nestor mad. The man killed of necessity and duty, never anger, but October was sensing that Nestor was angry about the whole Apocalypse thing, and he seemed to be walking west.
"I wish I hadn't tried to take off his pants."
"Sir?" Miho was now sitting bolt upright and staring at October who had forgotten that she was even in the room.
"Nothing, Miho. Just thinking."
"About what? Who's pants did you try and take off?"
"I said forget about it, Miho. Forget about it."
Miho shrugged and returned to her tablet while October wiped his plate clean with a piece of bread.
"Oh my God!" Miho shouted at the tablet.
"What?" October spun to Miho. "What is it?"
"Mr. President, I think the satellite feed has just been hacked."
"How do you know?"
"Look…" she pointed at the wall. He turned and looked across the room at the screen that had only moments ago been the pink hued blackness of Nestor's eyelids. Now, imposed on top of it was the image of a hand, middle finger raised.
It dissolved away as Nestor opened his eyes.
Chapter 37
***
There was a knock at the door. The man didn't move.
“Hello? Are you home?”
Again the man held perfectly still. The door slammed open and in the doorway stood a mutant. The mutant wore a beautiful suit, a little too small. His hair was perfect.
"What are you doing in here?! What do you want?!" The man screamed while brandishing a baseball bat in his sweatsuit. The mutant seemed to have caught him midway through a meal of cold canned chili.
"There's a little spot across the way that everyone seems to be going," the mutant said moving further into the room. "They walk down this street, and they get to this spot and they turn right, where a bunch of men with guns let them into a building. I went ahead and turned left. You see, I could smell you, which is a new ability I seem to have, and I thought, maybe this guy could tell me what goes on over there, in that building with the men, with the guns."
“You... you are a mutant!”
“You can call me Jacob though. You know, if you just burned some wood, you wouldn't have to eat that cold.”
“Please don’t eat me!”
Jacob smiled and stared at the little man.
“Huh. That's it! I didn't know exactly why I came over here, but now I do. You're right. I do want to eat you. Interesting. How do you think I should…”
"Please… please…"
"Hey, don't make me the bad guy, you suggested it. In the next life when a monster knocks on the door, don't bring up eating you. It gives them ideas."
Jacob advanced on the man who swung his bat lamely. Jacob caught it thoughtlessly and tossed it aside.
"I hope one day the man you go to eat is Nestor Bravo you mutant scum!"
Jacob stopped in his tracks.
"What did you say?"
"You'll burn in hell you mutant!"
"Oh. Okay."
Jacob looked around the apartment and sat down.
"Why did you say that thing about Nestor Bravo?"
"What?"
"You were going to die, in your last breath you didn't curse me with God's wrath, or call for Jesus, you used Nestor Bravo's name instead. Why did you do that?"
"I don't know really. I guess I just finished reading about him and he was on my mind."
Jacob no longer felt that he knew his own face, there had been such odd changes, but he suspected that he was unsuccessful in hiding his confusion as he continued on.
"May I see where you read about him?"
The man got up and returned with a pamphlet, a rudely drafted little book. On the cover it said, "The Walk of Nestor Bravo." Jacob opened it with some degree of difficulty and read this:
"Nestor was always tired, never hungry. He traveled constantly. He slept outdoors. Too many things inside those walls that he didn't want to see. He'd found children burned in their beds. Their toys perfect and intact. Little black skeletons holding fluffy white stuffed animals.
This was the neutron bomb. Islanders, killing the people, but keeping the things so they'd have something to play with when they returned.
The closest he came to helping anyone was when he killed suffering people. The first man was still the only one who'd tried to attack him. But, since then, he'd begun wearing a handkerchief over his nose and mouth, not only to breathe, but also to hide his face. A self-made turban to hide his head from the radiation glow.
Most were so sick, so disoriented they didn't even notice him as he passed in the street. He kept his head down and walked. He kept a bullet in the chamber and the safety off.
He slept for an hour and in his dreams he walked and ached just the same. He couldn't keep food down. He only had water for days. Time blurred. In the dark of night Nestor cast no shadow and made no sound. But he did no
t sleep and he moved on. The night had no stars or moon. His eyes saw little, and for that he was glad. He could smell the death all the same. He could always smell it.
He didn't flinch at trees that looked like men or buildings that held eyes that looked into the night for food. He moved through the night and found comfort in the blackness of it all, peace in the silence.
His path was lined with bodies, though in truth, it had been before any of this. Nestor Bravo had wanted to kill a man once upon a time. Before he was a man, he'd wanted to kill one. His fingers had calluses that were formed with last breaths. His scars nothing but choices made.
Nestor knew he was walking. Nestor knew that he was walking because he felt the ground under his feet when he stepped and felt it fall away when he lifted his foot again. Nestor knew it was night because it was dark. Nestor knew he was alive because his body was racked with pain and suffering. Nestor knew he was Nestor Bravo because that day he'd watched someone die because of it."
Jacob set the book down and tapped his knee, staring into the man's terrified face.
"I don't suppose you smoke?"
"No."
"Shame. Where'd you get this?"
"The Syndicate. I traded for it. Honest."
"The Syndicate? Who are they?"
"They're the ones in the building across the street. They run the city."
Jacob smiled at the man and growled, "Who are they?"
"I don't know who they were before, but now they're the guys with anything you need. Drugs, food, weapons…"
"And books about Nestor Bravo?"
"They have a connection to Nevers."
"Nevers?"
"The hacker who hacked the satellite feed. The story goes that, like, a day after the missiles dropped, maybe a week, this guy had hacked it. Or woman. No one really knows. No one knows why they call themselves Nevers. But, there's someone who hacked Nestor's feed, that's for sure."
Monsters of the Apocalypse Page 9
