by Alan Ryker
First Edition
DarkFuse
P.O. Box 338
North Webster, IN 46555
www.darkfuse.com
The Hoard © 2012 by Alan Ryker
All Rights Reserved.
Copy Editor: Steve Souza & Robert Mele
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Always to Christina
Acknowledgements
Thanks, of course, to Shane Staley and Greg F. Gifune. Thanks to Imad Rahman, Michael Geither, Michael Dumanis, Christopher Barzak, Eric Wasserman and all the faculty of the Northeast Ohio MFA. Thanks to Theresa Lininger, Rebecca Stigge, Wendy McBride and Kirsten Smith. Thanks to my wife, family and friends. You all know what you did. For good or ill, this book is only possible because of you.
CHAPTER 1
Jed Baker drove his little Bobcat track loader through the landfill over well-travelled paths. His job was moving trash and monitoring temperatures at the county landfill, and while most people weren’t capable of standing such things, he actually loved his job.
The early-summer sun blazed down on the little cab as the Bobcat bounced over garbage, but Jed didn’t bother with the AC. He liked the heat, figured he was built for it. He’d been whip-thin since the day he was born. In fact, his dad still liked to tell the story of looking through the nursery window on the day of Jed’s birth, running his eyes over the rows of fat little babies in their cribs before spotting Jed, long limbs stuck up in the air, looking like some sort of scrawny circus monkey, big ears and all.
Still, even Jed had to admit it seemed like this would be another brutally hot summer, even hotter than the last, which had nearly killed a couple of his co-workers. As a result, the county not only provided them with unlimited Gatorade, but also strict orders to drink it.
Jed monitored heat in the landfill. With all the decaying matter, the landfill was already hotter than anyplace else. But deep down, chemicals could mix and do strange, unexpected things, like combusting without air. Gases could ignite. As dry as it had been the past few years, they’d barely been able to contain the fires that had started. With no rain anywhere on the pale-blue horizon, an unexpected fire would be disastrous.
Jed liked the heat just fine, but the smell took some getting used to. He liked routine too, and drove along the same routes, leaving the tiny cab every so often to shove a sensor into the ground. The day was going smoothly, and everything was looking good.
Until he found one of his regular paths blocked.
A big pile of junk had sprouted up in the middle of it, as if the landfill had awoken with an angry pimple. For some reason Jed couldn’t explain, the pile made him nervous. He sat and stared at it for some few minutes. Then, realizing it wasn’t going anywhere on its own, he grabbed the track loader’s control levers, dropped the bucket, and charged.
But when a big, wild-eyed creature emerged from the heap, Jed stomped the brakes. It took a moment for Jed to realize that the man-sized creature actually was a man, and another to realize that it was Dumb Darren Higgens.
Jed never called him Dumb Darren, at least not to his face. The others acted like because the guy was slow he didn’t have feelings. He lived by himself in a wreck of a single-wide not far from the landfill, and supplemented his government assistance by scrounging up useful junk and selling it. No matter how often they chased him off, he always came back, dragging that big garden wagon behind him. Some of the guys would confiscate his finds, but Jed could never bring himself to take the poor guy’s junk. He knew that he should, that to do otherwise was to encourage Darren to come back and dig through the dangerous landfill time and again, but he couldn’t do it. The poor guy was just trying to get by.
Jed unfolded himself from the cab. “Darren, what the heck are you doing here?”
Darren didn’t reply. He was an odd fellow, but was acting even weirder than usual.
“Did you pile this trash up?”
No reply.
“As nice as I am to you, you go making extra work for me. You need to get out of here.”
But Darren didn’t go. He sat atop the heap and stared at Jed, and the sense that Jed had originally had of not understanding the situation returned. The world seemed strange, and his senses not fit to perceive it.
He got back into the track loader and put it in gear. Enclosed in the familiar cab and performing familiar motions, Jed’s confidence returned. Darren would move.
Jed approached slowly, but Darren just watched. His eyes grew larger, the tension clearly building in him.
“Move,” Jed mouthed slowly and dramatically, scooping air with one hand and waving it off to the side.
Then Darren did move. Or more like, then Darren wasn’t there.
Jed still hadn’t comprehended what he’d seen when the roof of the cab dented down and the thick windshield cracked. Hands reached through the open side, and the next moment, Jed was dangling over the landfill, staring into the angriest, most deranged and horrifying face he’d ever seen. As Darren drew his head back, all Jed could think was that he’d always been so nice to the stupid sonofabitch. Then Darren slammed his lumpy forehead forward, and Jed’s world went dark.
CHAPTER 2
The rat scurried through the dry, tall grass. It had swum across silty creeks and flopped through muddy beds. It had run across black asphalt roads, something normally unthinkable. It needed a new place, and it was desperate.
It had run for three nights straight. During the day it burrowed into the earth, but the shallow, dry holes were nothing like its previous burrow. Moist, over-ripe, squirming with life: just right.
Then the fire came.
Now, it ran through dust at night, watching the sky for owls. It dug into the horrible, cracked earth once the sun rose to avoid the sharp eyes of hawks. It no longer feared them, but it must survive.
The earth sucked the moisture straight from the rat’s flesh. The horrible, dry heat of the sun penetrated its temporary burrows, but not its dreams. It dreamed of a moist, fetid womb to finally curl up in.
Then it awoke, and it ran, until it smelled something.
It smelled a den. It smelled the mold and fungus and rot that the electric shocks in its brain demanded of it. They spurred the rat on. Inside its veins, they squirmed. It felt their pleasure as its own.
The rat crawled beneath the den. It wasn’t underground, but it smelled like its old, perfect burrow. It also smelled like cats. Lots of cats.
A tiny part of its brain knew fear, but the strangeness in its veins welcomed the natural enemy. The rat wouldn’t need to hunt far.
It crawled up into a wall, then chewed through the weak drywall. In less than a minute it had squirmed through the hole and into glorious filth.
The sour juice of rotten food soaked its coat, and it immediately felt the dryness subsiding. Its trip had ended.
The squirming in its veins intensified. Pressure built behind its right eye until it finally ruptured.
Something crawled out of the socket, unfurling.
Grabbing it in its front paws, the rat pulled, but then stopped as shocks pulsed through its brain. Once the long creature had crawled out of the rat’s skull and into the garbage, the rat continued on. Its veins still throbbed, because though its trip was over, its work was not.
Tunneling through the garbage, the rat emerged into open air.
A thin cat crouched low on its front legs, poised for ambush, its tail stirring the air and its hind end twitching back and forth as it shifted its weight from paw to paw.
It sprang.
The rat did not retreat. It sprang as well, b
iting the cat on the nose and gripping its wide head with its front paws. It flipped around, aided by the cat’s jerking of its head, and landed on the cat’s back with its long incisors still buried in the short snout.
This was no junkyard monster, born in gasoline and rusted nails and accustomed to fighting rodents its own size. The rat could kill this soft little domesticated cat. It could eat it. But again shocks pulsed through its brain, commanding that it release the cat. So it did.
The yowling feline retreated a few feet. Other cats approached. Circled. When the rat didn’t move, they pounced.
The rat remained motionless as the cats ripped it open, only flopping back and forth as one cat tore at its body, and then another. Along with blood, slender creatures spilled from its veins, their long legs unfurling. Some escaped into the trash heap. Others began immediately laying eggs in the moist filth. The perfect filth, the rat thought.
But when the final parasite had escaped its veins, and when the shocks in its brain subsided, for just the moment of life it had left, the small part of it that had shrieked in pain and primal terror grew very large.
CHAPTER 3
A cat twined its way between Anna Grish’s ankles. Its whiskers tickled the outside of one calf; the tip of its tail the other. She looked down over her crocheting at the tiger-striped feline. Most of her cats didn’t have names, but this was a particular favorite: Little Lady. Many of her cats hid from her, only coming out to eat after she’d left the kitchen. This silent little mother cat stared up at her through gummy, red-rimmed eyes.
Anna reached down and scratched her pretty little head.
“Out of food already, eh?” she said, but she didn’t precisely remember when she’d fed them last. “Okay, let’s get you something to eat.”
She pressed herself carefully out of her armchair. Her seventy-three-year-old knees ached. Bone ground on bone as she stood. Her quack of a doctor wanted to put metal and plastic in there, but they always wanted to do a lot of crazy things. She hadn’t been back.
Anna took a moment to steady herself. After sitting for so long, her lower back grated and clenched in protest, forcing her to mince all the way around, set her yarn and hook down, then carefully turn back without disturbing the waist-high stacks of knitting, crocheting, homekeeping and country-interest magazines that surrounded her chair.
Just as she took her first step towards the kitchen, the little gray cat bolted ahead of her, slipping between her legs and almost tripping her.
“Darn it…” Anna barely managed to catch herself on a wobbly popcorn tin stacked atop some quilts on an ottoman. “Little Lady, I can’t feed you if you kill me first.”
Shuffling towards the kitchen, she noticed a more recent pain. Her feet hurt. All her life, she’d gone barefoot in the house to spare the carpeting. Her feet were swollen such that her toes barely touched the ground and her ankles didn’t bend. They looked particularly bad contrasted against her bony legs. Almost like cartoon feet.
Getting old was a terrible thing.
“Don’t get old, kitty,” she said.
The cat turned its head to gaze over its slinky body at her, blinked its gummy eyes, then turned back and pranced ahead.
Anna held her arms out and caromed from one stack of possessions to the next. Over time, she’d determined which items were most stable, and which she enjoyed touching the most. A little old television stacked on some books atop an end table provided a solid handhold. She enjoyed cupping the silky head of a large antique doll seated atop a pile of mail on a television dinner tray, so that while it did little for her balance, it became one of her constant handholds. A locked wooden box of her children’s baby teeth attracted her arthritic hand for both reasons.
In the kitchen, she scooted along her narrow path. Though the items here were softer, they were piled more solidly, had the counter tops as a firm foundation, and offered good support if needed.
Another friendly cat joined Little Lady and began to yowl as Anna took the bag of food from the cupboard. It once held dishes, but it was now the only place to keep the food where the cats couldn’t get to it. They certainly tried, though. She’d become used to the noise of wood lightly slapping wood as a cat sitting on the counter top pried the door open a bit with its claws, then lost hold and let it bang shut. At one time she would have smacked a cat’s behind for getting on the counter. Anymore, she’d given up. They moved too fast for her. Even if she weren’t coming to swat them, most didn’t let her touch them.
A stab of pain jolted through her lower back as she bent to pour the dry food onto the floor. She held the position, afraid to move in either direction, and breathed sharply through her clenched jaw.
The cats began to eat immediately, weathering the shower of kibble on their heads.
For just a moment, a strange thought entered Anna’s head. She saw the filth around her. She saw the old food plastered to the ground, too moldy even for the mostly-feral cats to eat. She saw the dusty cat feces piled higher than her ankles in places. She saw the bugs. Usually, she didn’t let herself see these things. She saw the maggots, the grubs. Most white, but some a strange shade of reddish purple. She imagined grabbing Little Lady and hurting her. Not killing her, but biting little holes in her side, then pressing her down into the filth, into the bugs.
It was another sharp stab of pain in her back that awakened her to the fact that she wasn’t only imagining, but was actually reaching down for the oblivious cat.
She shook her head, and the filth disappeared. Then she unbent at the waist very slowly, until the pain in her spine was only a dull throb.
Anna returned the bag of cat food to the cupboard and mixed up a pink glass of Crystal Light before turning to shuffle back to her crocheting.
Behind her, cats hissed and growled.
With only one free hand now, she touched her treasures as she passed.
As she placed her palm on the silky head of her favorite old doll, a cat bolted out from a hidey-hole burrowed through a stack, hissing as it went by. Anna jumped. The doll tipped and toppled with her.
She held up the glass so that it wouldn’t spill. It did anyway, when she collided with first one stack, then bounced into another, and finally hit the ground. The narrow passageway collapsed in. Magazines and mail. Storage bins. The old television. The wooden box.
The world went dark. Above her, items shifted as they settled. She knew she should be in pain, but she wasn’t. She felt a small twinge of panic, but then a small hand took hers. Her son Victor lay beside her. Then the darkness got darker.
CHAPTER 4
The brutal Kansas sun beat down on the tractor so that—even with the doors off the cabin—Peter Grish felt he was cooking. Heat emanated down from the steel cabin roof. Light blazed in through the windshield as he plowed west into the sun. The air was thick and sticky, and sweat soaked his shirt, soaked his ball cap, and soaked his jeans and his seat.
The tractor had AC, but it had fritzed out and Pete didn’t have the money to fix it. And since he was in the process of plowing under his wheat crop, it didn’t look like he’d have the money anytime soon.
Because—despite the typical, insane Kansas humidity—there had been no rain in a solid month, and there had been little before that.
Sweat pooled in the goggles on Pete’s face then dripped through the ventilation slots onto the facemask over his nose and mouth. The mask trapped his own hot breath and he felt almost as if he were suffocating. But the dust the disc plow kicked up as it cut his stunted, yellow wheat down into the powdery earth would certainly suffocate and blind him.
Pete didn’t mind hard work. He’d worked hard his entire life. He’d grown up farming the same land he was still farming. Pete didn’t know anything but hard work.
But working hard to plow under a crop he’d worked hard to plant less than two months earlier, that didn’t seem right. Still the sun burned his face and soaked him in sweat. Though he’d never vocalized it, or formed it into a coherent thought,
for Pete, the sun had always stood for the callous nature of the universe. Sometimes it helped you. Sometimes it hurt you. But it always shone the same, without a care for which it did.
* * *
Pete stood at the back door to his house. It was a neat one-story he and his dad had built together once Pete had decided to start a family of his own. Letting Pete continue to farm the land had been practical. Though the old man would never admit it, he knew that he couldn’t farm that much land on his own, the way he had once. And Pete knew that the old softy had loved having his son there with him, and wanted to see him do well. And that mattered a lot to Pete.
So they built a one-story with a peaked roof, painted it white and put a nice porch on it. It was a comfy little home, though Katherine, Pete’s wife, had begun to complain that it was getting too small as Teddy got bigger and crazier. The kid was nuts.
Pete’s walkie-talkie beeped. Years after mobile phones became popular in the cities, but years before coverage stretched far enough out into the country to reach Pete’s farm, he and Kathy had gotten a couple of compact walkie-talkies to keep in touch while he was working.
“You about done out there?” she asked.
“I’m at the back door.”
Pete stopped attempting to pat the dust off himself, dust that just turned to mud as he pressed it into his sweaty clothes, and stepped into the utility room.
He removed his boots, then his shirt and jeans. Besides being the entry closest to the tractor shed, this is why Pete came in the back door. Katherine would have a conniption fit if he stepped into her clean house covered in the filth of the field. He tossed the dirty clothes into his own separate hamper and entered the kitchen dressed in his sweat pants and white undershirt.
