by Joseph Fink
Finally, months into his journey, he was drawn by an unrefusable instinct to an air force base in Southern California, and a walled compound within it. A gate opened up in those walls, opened by other creatures like him, and unknown decades after his birth, Hank, who no longer could remember his name enough to try to say it, stumbled cackling into the home that had been waiting for him all along.
51
The Sage Blossom Motel, an hour outside of Dallas. Two people slumped against each other in bed. They hadn’t gotten out of bed in days, except to go to the bathroom, and to accept food from the one place that would deliver, a Tex-Mex and Chinese combination that provided a diverse if lousy menu selection. The Do Not Disturb placard had been left on the door for days, and the sheets had a sour smell.
“Maybe we should . . . ,” said Keisha, swinging a hand toward the sunlight coming in through the corner of the tightly closed curtain.
“Why? To do what?” muttered Alice into her pillow. “We’ve lost.”
Keisha sat up. “But we’re still alive. We have lives now.”
“We do?”
“We do.”
They contemplated lives together lived outside of this war. Could they live, knowing that all the horror was still out there, undefeated, ever spreading?
“We’ll learn to get used to it,” said Alice.
“I guess we will. I guess we’ll have to.”
Keisha let her eyes close as she thought about it. There was a tapping on the window. Keisha’s eyes flew open. The margin around the curtain had gone from the bright sunlight to the white reflection of the parking lot lights. It was night. She had no idea how long she had been asleep. Her head felt full of cotton and glue. She couldn’t get a focus on anything around her.
Tap, tap, tap. Not like a knuckle. A thinner and sharper body part. A fingernail. Or a part of the body with no human counterpart. She shook Alice, and Alice came awake and upright with a gasp. Both of them were groggy. Had something been put in the air in their room? The two of them flopped out of bed and backed up to the wall opposite the window. Tap, tap, tap.
Glass breaking. But the front window was still intact. The sound had come from next to them, in the small bathroom. Keisha nudged the door open with her heel and glanced in. The tiny window above the toilet, at most a foot square, was broken open, and there was a stream of flesh, like an enormous dry slug, oozing in through the opening and tumbling down onto the dirty tile of the floor. The shape resolved itself as it landed, forming back into something like human limbs.
“Hello,” said the Thistle Man that was coming in through the window, but his voice was as warped as his body, stretched out and oozing from his long throat. “Hellllo.” He giggled, and it sounded like a garbage disposal processing gravel. The part of his body that had formed on the ground started lurching toward them even as the broken window vomited the rest of him.
Alice took Keisha’s hand, and they ran for the front door. Likely more monsters waiting there, but better outside than in a small room. Alice flung the door open and they took it at a run. There was no one on the second-floor walkway where they were standing, but every light in the parking lot below clicked off the moment they left the room, and they stared down into the darkness below. There was a chattering from the lot, like a teeming nest of thousands of rats.
“Nowhere to go now,” said the man from behind them.
“Nowhere to go,” joined a chorus of voices from the lot. The chattering got louder. The malfunctioning lights of the lot flickered, and for a moment Alice could see loose faces, and many sadistic, yellow eyes.
Keisha looked at Alice. Maybe it was ok if this was the end. At least they were together. There were many ways their lives could have gone where they wouldn’t have had even that.
“Hey, what are you doing?” said a woman’s voice. The woman, whose name was Theresa, although Keisha would never learn this, stuck her head out of the room next door.
Keisha’s impulse was to warn her back inside, to get her out of harm’s way. This is what she would have done perhaps on any other night but this. But some combination of acceptance of the end and the days of stasis leading up to it had weakened her in some fundamental way and what she said instead was: “Help us.” She didn’t know why she said it. She said it again. “Help us.”
“Back to your room,” gurgled the Thistle Man as he advanced into the walkway. Another Thistle Man leaped up from the parking lot and landed on his belly on the railing, where he began to droop forward face-first. “You don’t have to have seen anything. Go back to your room.”
Theresa’s face registered three shades of green and she moved as though to shut the door. But instead she leaned into the frame and shouted.
“Jesús! Get out here!” A man came stumbling out behind Theresa. She had already turned back, was already running forward, putting her hands on the shoulders of the creature crawling over the railing and flipping him back over. The Thistle Man yelped in surprise and there was a sound like wet dough hitting a kitchen floor. Meanwhile Jesús, bleary eyed with sleep but getting the gist of the situation, swung at the Thistle Man and connected. The monster grunted and fell forward into the wall, denting his forehead.
Another room opened, and a woman in business clothes came out.
“What’s all the noise?” she said, ready to let them have it.
“Help us!” said Keisha and Theresa. There was no hesitation. The businesswoman, whose name was Angela, although Keisha would never learn this, grabbed the Thistle Man from the back while Theresa, Jesús, and Keisha took turns kicking him. The Thistle Man groaned and shook them off, then leaped forward off the second-floor walkway into the black empty below. There was no sound of him landing. A second later, all the lights in the lot popped on. The lot was empty.
“Thank you,” managed Keisha.
“Yeah, sure,” said Angela, already heading back inside. “We have to help each other, you know?”
Jesús also went back to his room with a nod, because the game was coming back from halftime. But Theresa stayed for a moment. “If they come back hassling you, you let us know, ok?”
“We will,” said Alice. “Thank you so much. I don’t . . .”
Theresa hugged her. “Sometimes it’s us who wins,” she said, and then she followed her husband into the room.
Keisha and Alice hid in the truck while the police ostensibly investigated the disturbance reported by the motel clerk, but of course instead making sure the truth could never be determined. But neither of the women had any desire to return to that room, which had become a spiral they hadn’t been able to find a way out of. Both of them had the same thought now, one they could discuss later but were content that evening just to sit with, feeling something other than despair for the first time in two weeks. Because Theresa was right. Sometimes it’s us who wins.
52
October. Two months since the motel.
Organizing a country of people into an army capable of fighting the monsters hidden among them seemed an impossible task. But like all impossible tasks, it was made of a lot of small, doable actions. First Alice and Keisha simply held a meeting. They put out word through the people they had met and trusted on their journeys, since public notice would attract the attention of Bay and Creek. A month’s lead time, to give people time to travel if they needed to, and a spot at a quiet park in Upstate New York that was uncrowded enough to talk in peace but frequented enough that a small gathering would be unsuspicious.
At twenty miles per hour on the narrow road into the park, Keisha was speeding by ten.
“If it’s no one, that’s ok,” Alice said. “We’ll try again. We’ll try as many times as we need to.”
“Of course. But there will be people there,” said Keisha. “You’ll see. Maybe even a lot of people.”
When they pulled up to the covered picnic tables, there was no one, and Alice nodded, confirming what she had forced herself to suspect so as to avoid disappointment. But Keisha kept a ca
reful watch on the road in and within an hour other cars arrived. A pair of seventeen-year-olds from Texas who had known Sylvia before she had fallen off the map. A quiet woman in her sixties with a knee brace who said hello and not much more. A man in his forties who responded to Alice’s friendly hello but couldn’t quite make eye contact with Keisha, which she was somewhat offended by until she realized that she recognized him. He had been behind the counter of a convenience store in Swansea, South Carolina, and it was possible that she had spoken fairly forcefully to him. “Dan,” he said, introducing himself with a bop of his head and then standing on the other end of the crowd from the two of them. Keisha had the sense that these people had seen things they could not understand and were hoping that coming here might allow them to finally make sense of what they now knew the world to be.
A short man in a baseball hat stepped out of a twenty-year-old Volkswagen.
“Hey, we’ve never met in person,” he said. “I’m Tanya. You once called me looking for Sylvia. I wasn’t sure I could trust you then.” He looked around at the few others that had come. “Still not sure.”
“I welcome healthy suspicion,” said Keisha.
“Never anything healthy about suspicion,” said Tanya. “But it sometimes will keep you alive.”
Then a woman whom Keisha recognized, arriving from what was likely not far at all. It was the woman at the front desk of the Dutchess County Sheriff’s Office in Poughkeepsie, the one who had once given them the video of the murder of Sylvia’s mother. As she approached, she bundled her jacket up around her face, as though to hide herself from onlookers, or watchers in the nearby woods.
“Like I said,” she murmured, “not all of us are on their side.” She wouldn’t say any more.
Alice moved through the crowd, greeting people one-on-one, setting them at ease with her easy way. There was no combination of gestures or words Keisha could ever learn to match the instinct of Alice’s way with people.
They waited another few minutes to give stragglers some time to show themselves, and then Keisha stood.
“Ok, I guess I’ll start by thanking y’all for coming.”
“Hold up.” A voice shouted from the parking lot. A woman was hurrying toward them. Keisha felt a wave of panic. Alice stepped in front of her, hand in her bag. The teenagers looked ready to bolt. But the woman approaching had both her hands up and seemed to be in a hurry rather than attacking.
“Sorry, sorry,” the woman said, and Keisha knew who it was. Lynh, dispatcher with Bay and Creek Shipping who had once given her access to the routing software. “I heard someone was looking into my bosses and I wanted to know exactly what those sneaky fucks have been up to. Lay it on me.”
And so they did. The first meeting was a telling of stories. Alice and Keisha told theirs. One by one, each of the attendees, rather than responding directly or indicating any degree of belief or disbelief, recited their own stories back. Things seen, run away from, hidden from, attacked by, encountered. There were things worse than men on these roads, and the people in this park had met them.
That night Keisha and Alice slept, for the first time, in the same cot, pressed close together. The back of Alice’s neck was the part that smelled most strongly of her, and Keisha put her nose there. She hadn’t forgiven her, but they were doing good now. And doing good together felt a little like forgiveness.
April.
This time Sharon from Poughkeepsie showed up first, even though she had the farthest to come. They were meeting in a suburb of Minneapolis, in the parking lot of a mall. The lot was mostly empty as was, for the last couple years, the mall. A monumental structure hollowed out by internet shopping, and so affording them a good amount of privacy as they slowly rolled in. Lynh soon after Sharon, and Tanya, in sweaty athletic clothes.
“My baseball league,” he explained. “Couldn’t miss it. Never have. So I had to jump in my car right after and drive eight straight hours here.”
“Glad you could make it,” said Keisha.
The quiet seventeen-year-olds, two days of driving from Denton. One introduced himself as Jeff. The other one didn’t talk, just smoked and watched everyone else talk. Jeff said that he and his friend had been hanging out by the fairgrounds when they had been approached by a person in a hoodie who had told them things that no one else knew, saying that they were needed to help make the world a better place.
“It sounds corny,” he said defensively. “But when she said it, I believed her. Or him, I guess. I never saw her face.”
“I saw him too,” said Sharon from Poughkeepsie. “Only he was standing in the Hudson River. Up to his knees. Except when he lifted out his feet to walk, they were dry as bone. Like he wasn’t part of this world.”
“What did she say?” said Jeff. Sharon only shook her head.
“I know what they said to me,” said Lynh. “They told me that there were monstrous things in this world. And that I could help fix them. And I think I can.”
“Amen,” said Tanya, wiping his forehead, even though in the cool evening air he was no longer sweating.
Dan from Swansea didn’t say anything, just nodded along, following the conversation with nervous flicks of his eyes.
Alice and Keisha ate dinner from take-out boxes, knees pressed together in the seats of the cab. They didn’t talk as they ate, but the silence felt light. The heaviness of the months together was temporarily lifted as they ate their turkey sandwiches and Alice looked up and caught Keisha’s eyes and they both started giggling and, once they had started, they couldn’t stop.
August.
A storefront church in Tallahassee. It was a Monday, and the church wasn’t using it, and so was willing to rent it out to what Keisha had described to the owner as a support group. Not quite a lie. The carpet was kept meticulously clean but was threadbare and flat-out missing in a few places. The pulpit was wood laid over milk crates. There was a scattering of foldout chairs in a variety of conditions.
“It’s perfect,” she had said to the owner, and he had beamed.
“It is, isn’t it?” he had said with pride.
The location fit their purpose even better than before. The meetings had quickly taken on a religious aspect. Every soul who gathered had experienced encounters with the oracles, who were, if not messengers from a god, at the very least otherworldly messengers of something. Once Lynh had shown up, thirty minutes late, they gathered in a circle, hands clasped.
“Let’s start this the way we always do,” said Alice. “Let’s thank the oracles for their work.”
When this ritual had been introduced, by Dan of all people, one of the first contributions he had made to the discussion, Alice had found the whole business a bit silly, but Keisha had convinced her that it would be useful. It would keep people focused, and believing, and grateful, all states of being that could prove to help protect them in the difficult struggle ahead. Now Alice embraced the ritual completely, taking ownership of its administration, because while she struggled to believe in the concept of faith, she believed completely in anything with a practical utility.
This day there was a muttered babble of thanks from the group, nothing that could be individually picked out but the general tenor was clear. “Now,” continued Alice, “has anyone had any experiences with the oracles since we last spoke?”
“Right here,” said Tanya. He was looking energized and snapping gum between his teeth. “My backyard has this low wall, and then behind that wall is a field that I think technically belongs to the city but nothing has been done with it in years. I keep showing up at town meetings and I swear that Councilman Gold had headphones on last time I was speaking my bit. Sorry, not directly relevant. The field’s home now to a few thousand rabbits and everything that likes to eat rabbits, and so I sometimes sit on the wall and watch the field in the evenings. Nature blood in tooth and cottontail and all that. Well, once a week, every Thursday, at 5:15 p.m. on the dot, one of those figures in a hoodie walks across the field. I’ve called out
to them, but they never answer.”
“Thank you for your story, Brother Tanya,” the group whispered.
“Yeah, sure thing,” he boomed back.
The testimonials continued. Jeff and his friend had spoken to their oracle at the same spot they had seen them before. The oracle had told them that they would be there at the end of this but wouldn’t elaborate on whether that was good or bad.
“I hope good,” said Keisha.
“Don’t we all,” Tanya said, laughing.
After, they went over what they knew of Bay and Creek and of Thistle again and discussed strategies for tackling the problem step by step. They hadn’t gotten far, but ten months into this process both Keisha and Alice had settled into the long timeline of it. Even if this was the rest of their lives, at least they were living it together.
April again.
The first part of the plan was for each person who came to the meeting to start a group of their own, back where they lived. And to varying degrees of success, related to their ability to motivate both themselves and other people, that’s what they did. Tanya, of course, had a group lined up in no time. Jeff and his friend also did quite well, despite their shyness. They knew a lot of other quiet kids, and quiet kids are good at listening. Lynh had the most trouble, since she spent her days at Bay and Creek, which left her with no one she knew who could be trusted.
But gradually the groups spread, among others who had encountered the oracles, and others still who just felt that it was all wrong and wanted to be part of the healing of all that. Soon members of those meetings were given the same assignment, and even more of the groups started. None of them communicated with any of the others except through the occasional encounters with the oracles, who would whisper encouragement or information. All the people drawn to these groups had seen terrible and strange wonders, and they sat in circles and described the shape of the monster that was devouring them. Not for comfort, but for information. They meant to fight that monster and they meant to win. The oracles were treated by the movement as something close to deities, and the further the group was removed from the original circle, the more that the meetings took on the religious aspect, praying to the oracles and asking for their guidance. Almost as revered, though, were the Derelict Bombers, the two prophets who had first borne the message. Among the membership that had never met them, they were considered almost as divine as the oracles themselves, taken as role models in the struggle for a better world. “Thank you to the oracles,” they would mutter. “And thank you to Keisha and Alice, who led us to today.” All over the country, mouths young and old, of all races and gender identities, speaking the names of two women they believed could offer salvation. The groups called themselves and what they were doing “Praxis.” No one could say where that name had come from, or who had decided on it, but there was no question.
