Hellworld

by Tom Leveen

  Charlie stretches out his arm behind Selby and touches my shoulder. I turn the corner out of the neighborhood.

  We decide to take Northshore Road, which runs along the lake. We figure that despite our ease in getting into town, the 15 out through Arizona and up into Utah would probably be either too jammed up, or else too obvious a target. As it happens, we don’t encounter any traffic right away. We really do seem to be the only people left on Earth.

  By the time we make it to the lake, the sun is beginning to rise.

  “That’s really pretty,”I say.

  “It’s because of the smoke,”Selby says. “That’s what gives it all the color. Not to be a downer or anything.”

  “It’s still pretty,”I say. “Smart-ass.”

  Selby looks pleased with herself.

  “So how do you think we can track him down?”I ask Charlie.

  “We’re not the only survivors,”Charlie says. “I think Sells is right about that. We’ll find people and start asking. That’s pretty much it. And if—”

  “Headlights,”Selby says.

  She’s right. We’re on a straightaway, and several miles down the road, two distant white orbs are rolling nearer.

  “Should we stop?”I ask.

  Charlie’s eyebrows are furrowed tight. “I don’t know. If they’re friendly, we can get information. If they’re not . . .”

  No one bothers to finish his statement.

  “Let’s stop and see what they do,”I say, and take my foot off the gas.

  The old Chevy immediately begins to slow. The timing is such that we are only rolling at about twenty miles an hour when the other car slows down. I ease on the brake and finally stop. The other car—it looks like a civilian Hummer—stops about ten yards away, staying in the opposite lane.

  “I only see a driver,”Charlie says. “We sure we want to do this?”

  “Information’s crucial,”I say. “I think we have to.”

  He nods and gets out, holding one of our knives behind his back. He stays behind the open passenger door and raises his left hand.

  The driver of the Hummer hops out. He is not too tall, but is laden with what looks like military gear. But he doesn’t have a military bearing—he strikes me as someone who’s taken on the persona of a soldier, but is not an actual one.

  But his rifle looks real enough.

  I tighten up. The driver, wearing a camouflage cap and black sunglasses, has the weapon strapped around his chest already. He doesn’t raise it, but keeps a hand on the handle and near the trigger. I notice he keeps his shooting finger straight, like I’ve seen on cop shows. So he’s not totally untrained, anyway. He has a thick, full beard and mustache, brown peppered with pure white.

  “Where you headed?”the driver barks. “And show me both your hands.”

  “We’re aiming for Cedar City,”Charlie calls back. “I’ll show you both my hands when you let go of that gun.”

  “Not a chance, motherfucker,”the driver shouts.

  “Okay,”Selby says. “I think we’re done here.”

  “Yeah,”I say. “Charlie?”

  Before Charlie can respond, the driver keeps going. “And what the hell you headed to Cedar for?”

  “Look, I’m just trying to find my dad,”Charlie says, but edges a bit nearer the doorjamb. “We only stopped to ask if you had any information, okay?”

  “Cedar’s fucked,”the driver says. He makes no offensive movement, but doesn’t let go of the gun. “The whole world is. I suggest you find a place to hunker down and die in peace, boy.”

  “Charlie, let’s go!”I shout.

  The driver looks in my direction. Charlie scoots closer to the door.

  Then the driver reaches up and slowly takes off his sunglasses, peering at Charlie. “Oh my God.”

  Charlie’s fingers wrap tight around the knife.

  “Charlie?”

  The three of us freeze as the driver says his name. Suddenly, he lets go of the gun and whips off his cap.

  “Charlie, is that—oh my God, son.”

  “No way,”Selby breathes.

  It’s John Prinn. But it’s no John Prinn I’ve ever met. He is all but unrecognizable. Charlie seems to share my doubt for a moment, but then steps away from the truck, staring at the older man.

  “Dad? Is that really . . .”

  The driver’s entire demeanor changes. He slowly raises his hands and takes a step nearer. “Charlie, it’s me. Son, it’s me, it’s Dad. Look at you.”

  And with that, Charlie beelines for him.

  Just as I scream at him, “No, wait!”

  Charlie skids on the blacktop, maybe three yards away, and hurriedly backs up. John Prinn stops. He’s bigger now than what I remember of him. There’s no trace of the scholarly bookworm he used to be. Now he looks like someone on one of those “prepper”shows, like he builds fallout shelters for fun.

  Maybe he does. And maybe that’s good; maybe that’s exactly what we need.

  Charlie takes a half step back, angling his body toward Prinn. Like a boxer preparing to strike. “Dad . . . you mind if I check your pulse?”

  “You think I’m possessed?”

  The question makes Charlie flinch.

  “One of the pains?”Prinn goes on. “Or ghosts or whatever they are, those goddamn clouds of evil? I’m not. But sure, go ahead. Take my pulse. Then, if you all don’t mind, I’d like to take yours. You know they can only inhabit inanimate material, I take it.”

  Yeah, we figured that out, I want to say. Prinn drops his arms and raises his chin. Charlie slides closer, cautious, and puts his fingers against his dad’s throat. A moment later, he nods. Then he offers his own neck to Prinn.

  For one second, I’m sure it’s the last thing he’ll do, that Prinn is a ghost or a “pain,”whatever he called the animators. But instead, Prinn takes Charlie’s pulse too, and gives him a nod.

  “Okay. So we’re all who we say we are. That’s a damn good start. For God’s sake, can I hug you now?”

  He and Charlie embrace, and hold it for a long time. Prinn’s eyes squeeze shut. I notice Selby brushing quickly at her eyelashes.

  Quietly, I say to her, “Are you sure you don’t want to look for your—”

  “No. No.”

  “Okay. Sit tight.”

  I climb out of the truck and walk over to the two men. Charlie reintroduces me and waves an introduction at Selby in the cab. Then he faces his dad again.

  “Dad, how did you know we were coming this way?”

  “I didn’t! I was on my way to find you and Stephen in LA. I knew he had that camping spot he liked. I was headed there first.”

  “So you know what’s happened.”

  “Of course I do. The goddamn ark opened. Right?”

  “Yeah. That’s the short version.”

  “How’d you first find out about it?”

  Charlie and I look at each other.

  “Go ahead,”I tell him.

  So Charlie, as quickly as he can, tells his father the entire story. To my shock, Prinn doesn’t seem all that put off that we’ve opened some kind of gate to Hell.

  “And then we found you,”Charlie says. “So, now, what do you—”

  “Well, let’s go close it,”Prinn says.

  “What?” The word comes out of me like a bark. “Just like that? We shut the gates of Hell, la-dee-da?”

  “You think those things were . . . you think that’s Hell? Sweetheart, those are the pawns.”

  “Dad . . . ,”Charlie begins.

  “Listen,”Prinn says. “They want their world back. They were here first, and they want the good old days. Their world didn’t have skyscrapers and Ford F-150s and 747s. They’ll tear down every brick and bit of steel we’ve put up and make it a Garden of Eden. No humans allowed. Anything you’ve seen so far? Those goddamn monsters? Those are the first act. These are just the landscapers, getting ready for the permanent residents. Something else will be coming out of that cave, out of that endless pit, wh
en the time is right. And all this . . . all this will be gone.”

  “Dad, wait. Please. What happened? Can we start there?”

  Prinn looks up and down the highway, impatient.

  “Yeah, what happened in the cave five years ago?”I say. “What happened to my mom?”

  Prinn holds up his hands. “Clock’s ticking, so here’s the short version. We go into the cave, planning on getting some good footage. Interview our guest, all the usual stuff. We stop to take a break, I go up the tunnel to take a piss. That’s when the screams started. Like nothing I’ve ever heard. I run back, and they’re all . . . they’re just dead.”

  If Prinn’s lying, he’s a master. His face has blanched pale.

  “I have no idea what happened. So I start to scoot back out the way we came, except then—then I heard them. They were getting up. Do you hear me? They were dead, and they got back up.”

  I catch myself nodding. We know how it works.

  “So I hid. What the Christ was I supposed to do? I hid, and they shuffled off down the cave. That was it. I stayed put for hours before finally getting up and running like hell for the entrance.”

  “Did you tell the police?”Charlie demands.

  “You two know better,”Prinn says. “You’ve seen these things. What was I supposed to tell them? Plus, don’t you get it? It’s magic. The real thing. Something that’s not supposed to exist, and I saw it. I don’t know how it works. What if it’s following me? What if I’m next? I couldn’t go home to you two boys and risk infecting you somehow. So I ran. I ran, and I hid, and I studied, and I waited. Then I got ready. And while I did that, I had to wonder about every murder out there. Was that one of them? Some thirsty pain on his way to find me?”

  “Pain—those are the clouds? The black-and-green things?”Charlie says.

  “We call them animators,”I say.

  “That’s them. The good news is, evil isn’t omniscient. It can’t just know where you are or what you’re up to. Those creatures are mortal in some fashion. Those, uh—animators, you called them? The Wintu Indians, among others, called them pains. But evil still needs senses. If they have a weakness, it’s that. The pains can’t hurt you by themselves. They’re just bugs. Sensate, cognizant bugs, but still bugs. The rexes, those rhinoceros creatures, they take direction and make big holes, but they can be killed. They’re mortal. Those giant flame-throwing bug things, I have no idea what those are. They appear to have corporeal bodies, maybe they can be gunned down. I don’t know. But whatever’s coming next . . . I don’t think we can plan on taking them out by any conventional means.”

  “So all this magic stuff, this proves God exists?”I say.

  “Oh, one thing at a time, all right? Magic exists. Or something so far advanced from us we can only call it ‘magic.’ There’s a place where physics as we know it no longer applies, and that place is in the cave. Now can we please get back on the road and fix this thing? Let’s go, hop in.”

  He moves toward his Hummer.

  “Hey, I’m not giving up the truck,”I say.

  “We’re packed pretty well in there,”Charlie explains.

  Prinn frowns and swings himself into the car. “Fine. Follow me, then.”

  “Wait, just so we’re clear,”I say. “You’re saying we’re going back to the cave?”

  “That’s right.”

  “All of us? Selby got stabbed—didn’t you hear that part?”With some detachment, it occurs to me that three days ago, I never would have spoken to an adult this way. Now? Fuck it.

  “Fine,”Prinn says. “You girls skedaddle wherever you need. Go back to your house. Charlie and I will handle this.”

  Charlie looks about as surprised as I feel at that suggestion. I can feel him being torn between going with his dad and sticking with us. We have been through a lot, after all. Frankly, I hope he won’t break up the team.

  “Charlie?”

  “I’ll just ride with him,”he says after a moment. Prinn roars the Hummer’s engine to life. “If you need to stop, just flash your lights. Okay?”

  I move closer. “I don’t like it.”

  “I know, it’s okay. We’ll be fine. All of us.”

  He reaches out and hugs me close. It’s not until the hug goes on a bit longer than friendly that I feel Selby’s eyes on us, burning hard.

  I step back. “Don’t let him lose us.”

  “I won’t. Promise.”

  He goes over to the passenger side of the Hummer and climbs in. I get into the truck, start the engine, and take a wide looping turn to get behind the Hummer as Prinn guns it down the highway.

  “You two are awfully chummy,”Selby says with acid on her tongue.

  For a need for something to say, I go, “It won’t happen again.”

  Selby snorts. “Sure it will. Just drive, okay?”

  She reaches out gingerly to try the radio. A good idea, but there’s nothing but static. I scrounge in Mrs. Brower’s console and come up with a CD, which I quickly jam into the player.

  Johnny Cash. The Man in Black. It beats silence, at least right up until Johnny sings, “God’s gonna cut you down. . . .”We go back to silence after that.

  The drive goes fast and it goes slow. We stop once to use the bathroom—or, rather, the bushes. With each roll of the tires, we are getting closer to the place that unleashed this hell on Earth. I wait for some malevolent creature to attack us, to put a stop to whatever plan John Prinn has, but the attack doesn’t come. Even if he’s right and the pains or animators can’t be everywhere at once, aren’t they smart enough to post a guard or something? Unless, of course, they don’t know there’s a way to stop them.

  The sun, hard as it is to believe, keeps going through the sky. It will be night by the time we get to the cave.

  Only a few times do we pass cars, and none of them give any indication of stopping. At first this seems odd and perhaps even intentional, like someone or something is allowing us to go where we are headed. But then I consider just how much time between the initial outburst from the pit to when the electricity went off: not much. And how far does the outage reach? If it’s nationwide—or worse, which I can’t imagine, but who knows—then people haven’t had much time to get good information, or bad information. There hasn’t been as much time for rumors to begin and to fester, driving people to go places that aren’t actually any safer than their own homes. So by now, most people who have a place to go have probably gone there. Everyone else has boarded up their windows and is awaiting the cavalry.

  That’s what I tell myself, anyway. The alternative is pretty damn upsetting: that this is all on purpose somehow, and the pains and rexes and dragonfly creatures will all be there waiting for us.

  But they’re not.

  We make it to the cave without a single encounter. Thanks to John Prinn’s preparations, we don’t have to worry about gas, even: he’d come prepared with plenty of extra. He also said there were ways to get gas out of gas stations without electricity, but wouldn’t elaborate.

  We park the vehicles by the remnants of the cave entrance. It takes me a minute to talk myself into getting out of the truck. It doesn’t seem, for what it’s worth, that anything has been here recently. Our surroundings look like they did when we left.

  I can’t believe we’ve come back.

  38

  Then

  * * *

  In a sudden rush of sound, the petrified planks burst apart at the center, sending shards of rock raining down on us. I didn’t even scream. I just hunched down into as small a ball of human as I could and covered my head. My flashlight bounced on the rock, stayed on, and pointed toward the center of that floor, where the explosion had happened.

  I saw what caused it a moment later: a giant horn, like that of a rhinoceros, but bigger than an elephant’s tusk.

  The horn, black and sharp and curved, smashed again through the floor from below. More chunks of petrified wood burst into the air and crashed back down.

  From the hole left
behind, clouds of black and green appeared. They took on slender forms, vaguely humanoid, rising en masse from the hole and shining with their own inner, unearthly light, like Halloween glow sticks. First, just one came up from the hole and floated. Then another, and a third. By the time those three began floating casually but purposefully toward us, another ten, and what looked to be another hundred behind them, rose from the ark.

  Without warning, they collectively issued a horrific shriek. The sound punctured my entire body, a million pinpricks of terror nicking my skin.

  They came at us.

  Continuing their wicked howls, the clouds flew toward us and up the incline, spectral and translucent. One of them seemed to target me, and sailed right for my face.

  The cloud reached me . . . and went through me. I felt it go through, a samurai blade slicing through fruit. Ghostly teeth cut cleanly through me like glass.

  It didn’t leave a mark—I could feel that even in my horror. It didn’t break the skin. It simply passed straight through my bone and brain matter.

  That’s not to say it didn’t hurt. It did. Like distinct blades slicing through me, sharp as scalpels.

  My breath froze in my lungs and mouth as a lightning spike of ice shot down my spine. Cold. So very, very cold. I dropped to the ground, unable to move, barely able to breathe, still processing the agony in my face and skull where the cloudy spectre had swiped through me. Like my sinus cavities had filled with volcanic ash.

  Paralysis set in. Freezing paralysis, like being in a full-body ice cube. I could blink, and I could force air in and out of my mouth, but nothing more. Powerlessness overwhelmed me, making the pain in my head a distant second. I could not move, at the mercy of the undead thing that had struck me.

  The spectres continued to race overhead, up the incline, and out into the cave.

  That’s the last thing I saw before mercy came to me and I saw nothing more.

  39

  Now

  * * *

  Charlie, Dr. Prinn, and I meet at the front end of the Hummer as Selby slowly picks her way out of the truck. She stays close to the door.