Troop of Shadows

by Nicki Huntsman Smith

  I will bury Papa in the vacant lot across the street so as not to contaminate the soil of our vegetable garden in the backyard. It may be risky because people are becoming panicked. Like corralled horses catching the scent of wolves on the breeze, they seem to be dancing on a razor’s edge and capable of sudden, explosive violence. Not everyone in the neighborhood, but many. Several of them pounded on our door yesterday while Papa was slipping away. The locks held and the plywood on the windows were secured with molly screws — Papa had been wise about that — and finally they went away.

  I know they are hungry. I am also hungry. I hope I never become like them though. I hope I never get desperate enough to steal food belonging to another person in order to fill my own belly. When we lose honor, we lose everything. In the aftermath of this pandemic, when there are so few humans left in this world, I can’t imagine anything more important than honor. Except love, perhaps. And I think these two things cannot be separated.

  Maybe I’m deluding myself. Maybe I too will get hungry enough to snatch the last crust of bread from the mouth of another man, but I hope not. Oh, I hope not.

  When the disease began taking people a month ago, it was thought to be some kind of influenza. Every evening we would watch the news for the latest information. “Fifteen deaths in the Midwest, twenty-seven in New England, and thirty-eight on the Pacific coast have been reported today. The medical community is recommending that everyone who has not already done so to get a flu shot immediately. Even though the efficacy of the current vaccine is unknown, doctors believe it might at least help with the severity of this new strain, if not prevent it.”

  Mama and Papa would exchange worried glances and say nothing. Our survival in this country had been achieved by staying under the radar, which meant no medical treatments requiring proof of citizenship or documented worker status. And they refused to take charity from the free health clinic, where such paperwork was not required. From the beginning, I knew a flu shot wouldn’t make a difference. I think others suspected as much too, but it didn’t keep the mobs from storming their local Walgreens, the grocery store pharmacies, and the government-run clinics. Soon, the stock of vaccines was exhausted.

  But people kept dying...by the thousands.

  When a young female reporter from NBC announced a week later there had been ten thousand deaths in Seattle, her voice trembled. The news people no longer clung to their façade of composure — their faces reflected the fear everyone felt.

  That’s when the supply chains began to break down. The long-haul truckers stopped making their runs because they were either dying or afraid to leave their families. Union Pacific, BNSF, and other such railway companies that transported food from the Midwest ceased operations because their employees were dying or not showing up for work. The independent farmers and the workers at the agricultural conglomerates which grew and harvested the food, and the tens of thousands of others who supplied the necessary labor in between all these links in the chain, were dying just like everybody else.

  The grocery stores emptied for good.

  I marvel when I think how precariously balanced was the system that put food on the table of most Americans. Such a tiny percentage of our society was self-reliant, which left the remaining vast majority not only utterly dependent on their local Safeway or Trader Joe’s, but also blissfully unaware of how tenuous was their lifestyle. When the store shelves became as vacuous as the minds of the citizenry that embraced television shows such as The Bachelor and Keeping up with the Kardashians, it seemed a reckoning, of sorts...as if people had gotten what they deserved by virtue of their stubborn ignorance. I realize this sounds harsh, but it seems a true statement to me.

  I don’t know why I was spared, but I am happy to be alive and I will make the most of the time I have left in this world.

  So today, while there is still daylight, along the top of our fence I will install the barbed wire Papa and I bought last week. I will bring the chickens inside before dark so they will be safe from those desperate enough to risk injury either from the wire or Bruno, who insists on staying outside to keep watch over what remains of his family. And tonight, I shall bury Papa under both cover of darkness and three feet of American soil, which was always his wish.

  POEM — Blue Marble

  The blue marble spins and twirls

  Never mind my pain, it has orbiting to do

  Another day, another cosmic revolution

  The blue seems glacial now, chill and wintry

  Before, a cerulean embrace

  Now, a hollow place

  Of ice and freezing climes

  Its vocation, not maternal but infernal

  And I, in its frigid gyrating grasp

  A solitary mourner

  The fire had burned down to luminous embers and the waning moon crested the stunted mountain peaks twenty miles to the north of Pablo’s cabin. He sighed and closed the worn, yellow cover of his journal. This had been the first time he’d allowed himself to experience that day again through his own words. He’d never gone back and read anything he’d written, and despite the sadness it stirred in his soul, it also felt cathartic...cleansing. Perhaps he would read more tomorrow night, but for now it was time to sleep.

  “Ready for bed, Bruno?” he said, rubbing the soft head again.

  Instantly, he knew something was wrong. Bruno’s body was tense and rigid — the huge German shepherd ears seemed to hone in on a sound, like a radio dish picking up a weak signal. The low, rumbling growl confirmed it: somebody or something was out there in the desert. Pablo stood, reaching for the ancient shotgun always kept within reach, and racked the slide. Bruno’s growls intensified as Pablo scanned the terrain, a thousand textures of gray in the moonlight.

  Then he heard a scream.

  Chapter 6

  Colleyville, Texas

  Dani was still smiling when she arrived home. The dentally-challenged, would-be thief had been typical of the type of people she encountered after Chicxulub, with a few exceptions, of course...Sam being one of them. She shook her head, mystified by the capricious nature of fate and the irony that a person such as herself would be cast adrift in a sea of morons.

  Well, at least they were fun to play with.

  She flicked her Zippo and lit several candles in the kitchen of her parents’ home. She’d nailed plywood to the windows months ago — it wouldn’t do to allow candlelight to announce her presence to roving marauders. The kitchen door was her only means of ingress and egress at the sprawling, two-story suburban house, and it boasted three sets of Schlage deadbolts, which she locked behind her. She’d converted the place into Fort Knox — a long and arduous process but worth the effort. When she was at home, with the boarded up doors and windows, the bolts and the booby traps, she felt safe. It was the only time she let her guard down; she knew her continued mental health depended on regular reprieves from the ‘high alert’ mode in which she spent most of her time.

  She shrugged out of the backpack and set it on the dining table. When she turned around, a muscular man of medium height stood three feet away between her and the door. His lips curled back in a grin of anticipation. Without hesitation, she shifted her stance into something one might see in a boxing ring — arms bent at the elbows, chin down, shoulders forward. With her left arm, she threw a perfect cross body punch. It caught the man on the jaw and wiped the smile off his face.

  “That hurt, Dani!”

  “I thought this was another one of your sneak attack lessons, Sam. I’m sorry. How bad is it?” She reached for his face, turning it roughly toward the candle.

  “Well, it doesn’t feel like a walk in the tulips, I can tell you that.”

  Dani laughed. Sam’s mixed metaphors always cracked her up. She had never been able to determine if the scrambled clichés were intentional or not. Finally she decided she didn’t care — it was best not to look a gift laugh in the mouth.

  “Oh, suck it up, sissy boy. You’ve given me much worse.” She smiled
at her friend. “What’s for dinner?”

  Sam rubbed his cheek, gazing at her with the joy of a golden retriever welcoming his master home after the work day.

  “I was thinking tomato soup and grilled cheese with some of the peasant bread I made last week. We still have plenty of propane for the Coleman. My mom used to make us tomato soup and grilled cheese every Friday night.” The family memory evoked a beautiful smile.

  “We’ve talked about this,” Dani said, her voice gentle. “We have to be careful about using up too many of our resources before winter. I know it doesn’t get that cold here, but it gets cold enough. Don’t you think we should save as much of the propane as we can? It’s only October, and it’s seventy-five degrees out. What about regular cheese sandwiches for tonight? We’ll open that last bottle of cabernet...how does that sound?”

  “It’s just that the dehydrated cheese doesn’t taste too good unless it’s warm and melty. But I understand. I get two glasses of wine though. It’s only fair.”

  Dani nodded with a smile. She had no idea what Sam meant by ‘fair’ in this context, but she’d realized a long time ago that his thought process was fundamentally different from hers. Sometimes she wondered if he’d been in remedial classes growing up, and then out of the blue, he’d spout off with some complex philosophical statement. He was a mystery, for sure. She respected him and his opinions, especially when it came to self-defense. The man was a genius at martial arts. He wasn’t too hard on the eyes either, but she didn’t return Sam’s feelings, which she suspected went well beyond friendship. She couldn’t explain it. She liked boys, and the pickings were mighty slim now, but despite his many fine qualities — a big heart being one of them — she didn’t feel anything of a romantic nature for him.

  Like her father would say, it is what it is.

  As they puttered about the kitchen preparing their meal, she relayed the events of her evening.

  “That could have been bad,” he said, his brow creased with worry. “What if you hadn’t been able to take those guys? You should’ve let me come with you.”

  “We’ve been over this. I have to learn how to protect myself. If I needed you to take care of me every minute, how would I fare in this world if something happened to you? You know it’s important for me to be self-sufficient.”

  His nod was slow and noncommittal.

  Dani punched him in the arm and said, “Hey, let’s go sit outside to eat. It’s a gorgeous night.”

  “You sure? You think it’s safe enough?”

  “Yeah, for a little while.”

  They carried their dinner and wine back through the kitchen door and into the backyard, which at just shy of an acre, was large even by the standards of the upscale neighborhood. Murky water filled only the bottom half of the swimming pool. It had been used to flush toilets and wash clothes for months now. Her parents only lived eight years in their dream house before the plague took them, along with almost everyone else.

  As they ate their dinner, she indulged in a rare moment of nostalgia, remembering the people who adopted her as a three-week old infant, and never, not for one second, treated her as anything other than their own offspring. Dani missed them so much sometimes it felt like burning icicles had formed in her chest — enormous pain that only now with the grace of time had diminished to a level which felt survivable. Living through their deaths and acquiring the critical knowledge she knew would be necessary to survive in this new world had been a trial of monstrous proportions...but she’d done it.

  She just wasn’t sure why she’d done it.

  When Chicxulub raged through the global population like a biological wildfire, a survival instinct surfaced that she never knew she possessed. She’d been watching the latest death tolls on the news one evening with her parents, when something shifted inside her; a tiny but insistent seedling which grew overnight as she lay in bed devising a strategy. By morning, the seedling had burgeoned to an intense desire to live, even when others were dying en masse. She created a methodology for living under the adverse conditions she knew were imminent for anyone who survived.

  And some did survive, like her. But most of them now subsisted on whatever scraps they could scavenge from the looted stores or the homes of dead neighbors. Dani did more than scrape by...she thrived. Before the end, she’d used her father’s credit card to order as much shelf-stable food from companies like Mountain Home and Lindon Farms as they would ship at that time; she wasn’t the only person who’d had the same thought, and inventories depleted rapidly. She made trips to Costco for bottled water, over the counter medicines, batteries, camp gear, and a lengthy list of other items.

  She’d met Sam on one of those shopping forays while standing in the vitamin aisle at a Wal-Mart. She soon discovered the hunky Krav Maga instructor had much to teach her; lessons even more important than the information she’d garnered from all the books she’d collected. In the following months, he’d taught her the art of self-defense. That training had saved her life tonight, and not for the first time.

  She studied Sam’s profile in the starlight. His sculpted jaw was covered in reddish gold stubble, and his straight-edged nose and full mouth would be at home on a Greek statue, perfect in their symmetry. A guy like him wouldn’t have looked twice at a chubby nerd like her under normal circumstances.

  But he had. Thank god.

  She was still a nerd months later, but the chubby girl was long gone, and happily so. Sometimes she felt guilty that in between the moments of grief — the loss of her parents, the loss of humanity — she was kind of digging this Brave New World thing. If that was immoral or evil, she didn’t care, and she couldn’t deny her feelings.

  After all, it is what it is.

  She still asked herself ten times a day: why her? Why Sam? Why the skinny dude with the bad teeth? Why had they survived and not the seven billion or so others?

  Sam startled her out of her reverie with a sudden, firm grip on her knee and a finger held to his lips.

  Someone is out there. He mouthed the words and pointed to the darkened area beyond the pool.

  Five figures detached themselves from the shadows with inky fluidity and walked toward them with measured, confident movements.

  “We are so fucked,” Dani breathed.

  ###

  Stanford University in California

  “One more time. I have to do it one more time,” Julia mumbled.

  She had done the test twice now with the exact same results — results that were so incredible, she struggled to believe them herself. Yet the evidence was there. The tests had been flawlessly executed, and her findings would be validated after the third run. The most colossal breakthrough in genetics and nobody was here to share it with her...except for the stupid cat.

  Well, he was better than nothing.

  “I know this sounds unbelievable and yeah, yeah, I know looking for specific personality and talent dimensions in genetic polymorphisms is a bit farfetched, but there was a compelling twin study done with mind-blowing results before mine, so shut your trap, Brains.”

  The cat, whose name had recently been shortened from Shit-For-Brains, merely gazed at Julia with an inscrutable expression from the comfort of a blanket-lined cardboard lid. She’d always thought cats were creepy, but the little dipshit was a warm body, at least. Despite their brief time together, she realized she’d grown attached to him. And when she talked to him rather than just out loud to herself, she felt less crazy.

  Somewhat.

  “Yes, I know they weren’t able to replicate their results, but I did. And I’m about to do it for a third time, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

  The feline began to clean his orange fur with gusto, giving no indication a pipe quest was imminent.

  “There’s still so much to do, but the dopamine D4 receptor in almost all my viable samples indicate marked intelligence. That’s freaking huge, Brains. Do you know what that means?”

  He stopped grooming and studied her with mi
ld interest, as if anticipating the weather forecast.

  “The samples — the ones where the Lixi molecule in the DNA never flipped on, meaning the human donors would have survived — the weird thing is, in about half of those which presented with this trait, the serotonin transporters also indicated an increased spike in anxiety levels, neuroticism, and psychosis.”

  Brains went back to his toilette, underwhelmed by the news.

  “Stupid cat. You don’t get it do you? This could mean Chicxulub targeted certain types of people; or more accurately, skipped over a tiny percentage of humans who contained these genetic markers. And what that indicates is a distinct and sudden macroevolution.

  “What it means,” Julia continued, her voice filled with awe, “is that most people were meant to die out quite suddenly, and the few who didn’t are special. Very special indeed.”

  Chapter 7

  Liberty, Kansas

  Steven and Jeffrey watched the tiny security camera monitor inside the bunker. If Steven’s trap had worked, only one of the two intruders would reappear. The minutes ticked by at what felt like half speed. What the hell were those guys doing out there?

  Finally, one of the men emerged on the left side of the screen. The clarity of the high resolution Sony captured fresh stains on the man’s clothes, but his movements were fluid, confident. It must be his companion’s blood.

  This wasn’t a worst-case scenario. If he and his son only had to deal with one assailant instead of two, their odds of success were vastly increased. Steven could see in Jeff’s eyes that he’d reached the same conclusion. He nodded at his father with a somber, adult expression.

  They both knew what they would have to do next. Then something neither of them anticipated appeared on the monitor.