Post apocalypticon, p.16
Post-Apocalypticon, page 16
part #2 of Apocalypticon Series
“Oh, wow,” the female voice said, dripping with sarcasm, “the lord above doth deign to behold us little folks below!”
Ben realized then that he wasn’t lying safely on the only plane of rock stretching out from the wall of the canyon cliff. He stared down at two people, a man and a woman, both standing on a similar but smaller platform, only about twenty feet below him. And beyond them, further north along the wall and maybe another fifteen feet down, was another platform, with another person perched near the edge…and further away, another, and then another, and another, and Ben pushed himself to his knees and drew back with a startled breath as he realized that the entire side of the cliff was pocked with little breaks of stone jutting out over the canyon floor.
Most of them served as platforms for people.
Not all of those people were as vocal as the ones closest to Ben.
“Hey! You see us! You see us! Yeah, you see us!” the man said, jumping around his little plateau and pumping his arms in annoyance. “Get down here and let me punch you in the face!”
“I don’t want to get punched in the face,” Ben said, drawing back a bit from the edge of his cliff.
“Too bad!” the woman shrieked, standing proudly and shaking her fist up toward Ben. “You got yourself up there, and now you have to get punched right in the fucking face!”
“Why do you want to punch me in the face?” Ben cried. “I haven’t done anything to you!”
“You took the best spot!” the woman screamed. She had short, stringy hair, and she bounced like a Gummy Bear. “That rock is ours, and I will absolutely kill you!”
“We will murder you!” the man agreed, his brown hair flopping with each angry bounce. “Do you want to get fucking murdered?”
Ben pulled himself back from the edge. He shook his head incredulously. “This can’t be real,” he mumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Oh, it’s real!” the man hollered. “Oh, yeah! You don’t think I can hear you when you mumble? I can hear you when you mumble! I can hear everything! I have the ears of a fucking badger!”
“He has badger ears!” the woman agreed. “Bring your face over to my fist!”
At that moment—and maybe it was the morning’s dehydration, or the assault in the blacksmith’s shack, or the attack by mutant dusters, or the cramp in his leg from the horseback ride, or the pain in his back from his fall down the mountain—whatever it was, at that moment, Ben had suddenly had enough. He hopped up to his feet, tightened his hands into hard fists, and screamed at the couple below, “What the fuck are you talking about?! Who are you?! Why are you here?! What are you doing here?! Why do you want this fucking rock?! I don’t want this fucking rock—I fell onto this fucking rock...you can goddamn have it, but I’ll tell you this, you string-bean, bounce-around assholes, in the last twenty-four hours, I have been shot at, beaten, roofied, raped, attacked by zombies, and I fell off a cliff—and I have brain cancer. So I will leave you your stupid fucking rock, but I am staying here tonight. I am resting on this rock, I am sleeping on this rock, I am making it my rock, and if I hear one more shriek from either of you about whatever bullshit you’re blabbing on about, I swear to God, I will gladly, glaaaaadly spend two shotgun shells in the name of eight hours of peace and quiet.” He picked up the shotgun, held it above his head, and pumped it for emphasis.
He stared down at the couple, daring them with his eyes.
The man looked at the woman. The woman looked at the man. She grabbed his elbow and led him to the far side of their rock. They huddled and whispered, shooting glances over their shoulders at Ben every few seconds. Ben tapped his foot expectantly, hefting the gun in his hands. Finally, the couple returned.
“We’re sorry,” the woman declared. “We didn’t know about the cancer thing.”
“Or the rape,” the man pointed out.
“Or the rape,” said the woman. “We wouldn’t have been so mean if we’d known about those things. We’re not usually very mean people.”
“We’ve gotten meaner since the apocalypse,” the man added helpfully. “We used to be much nicer.”
“We used to be very nice.”
“I used to be a schoolteacher.”
“It’s hard not to be mean now,” the woman said.
Ben found himself nodding thoughtfully. “It is hard not to be mean now,” he sighed.
The woman nodded too, more vigorously, gaining steam. “Yes, and it’s just that we’ve been waiting so long for that ledge to come open. The real estate market on this cliff is cutthroat as shit.”
“It’s worse than San Francisco,” the man added. “Pre-M-Day San Francisco.”
Ben stopped nodding. He had lost the thread. “Real estate market?” He looked down over the edge of his platform, at the dozens and dozens of survivors camped out on the stone ledges. “You’ve turned a canyon wall into a real estate market?”
“Yep. And this is the toniest cliff in West Desert,” the man said smugly.
“We are not calling it West Desert!” the woman shrieked, slapping him on the shoulder. “We are calling it Sunrise Pointe!”
“We haven’t had the vote yet,” the man explained to Ben. “That happens next week.”
“You listen to me,” the woman said, grabbing the man by the shirt collar and yanking him down to her eye level, “that is a terrible name—it is a stupid name, Carl...West Desert is a stupid name, and if you ever want to be mayor of this town, you will make a case for Sunrise Pointe, do you hear me? Because Sunrise Pointe is beautiful, goddammit!”
“But I’m not even sure I want to be mayor, Linda,” Carl whined.
“Yes, you do! Yes, you do! You have ambition! You have drive! Or was my mother right about you?”
“Don’t you dare bring your mother into this!” he cried.
“Look!” Ben shouted, holding up his hands to quiet them down. “I just need one night’s sleep. Then this…ledge, or plot, or whatever, it’s all yours. Okay?”
“Okay,” the woman agreed, “Okay. We’ve been waiting for that spot for almost four years. See that dumb little ledge down there?” She pointed far to the north, at a tiny ledge that jutted out just about four feet off the floor of the canyon. “That’s where we started. And we’ve been climbing ever since, and that,” she said, jabbing a finger toward Ben’s rock, “that is the best ledge, and we deserve it! That old Mary bastard who had it for the last year just would not die. She had the Green Fever; we thought she’d go quick, but noooo...she was one of the drawn-out ones! She started coughing up green a full eighteen months before she finally threw up her guts once and for all! She was so old, but she wouldn’t die, and we just kept waiting, but she just wouldn’t die, and she coughed up the green, and she swore she saw Jesus four times a day, and her eyes started leaking, but she just wouldn’t die. But then! Then you know what happened? She did die!”
“She splattered herself inside-out, right there on your rock,” Carl pointed out. Ben lifted his feet and shifted his weight. His face soured, and he checked the ledge for green stains. Now that he was looking for them, he did see a few dried puddles.
“She finally died, threw up her own heart right out of her throat, and the birds ate it, and she popped open, and she was dead, and we weren’t glad or anything, we are good people, but she was dead, so we gave her a funeral—”
“We pushed her body over the edge,” Carl clarified.
“That is what a funeral is here!” Linda screamed, hitting Carl across the back.
“I did it with a stick. I didn’t like it,” Carl said sadly.
Linda pressed on: “We are good people, so after the funeral, we decided to leave her ledge untouched for one week, out of respect for the dead, because we are good people, otherwise we’d be up there right now, but we’re not, because we’re good, but that ledge is ours by right; we are next in line, we have earned that ledge, and if you don’t leave tomorrow, then we will punch you in the face.”
“Right in the face,” Carl warned.
“Okay, okay,” Ben said, rolling his eyes, “I get it. One night’s sleep, and I’m gone.”
“Where are you going?” the man asked.
“Carl!” the woman hissed. “Don’t be rude!”
“We’ve been threatening to punch him in the fucking face, Linda!” Carl replied. “I’m just asking a polite question.”
“I’m looking for a place called the Lab,” Ben said.
Linda and Carl both gasped.
“The Lab?” Linda whispered, and she ducked, instinctively, as if she were afraid of being overheard. “You’re looking for the Doctor?”
“You know him?” Ben asked. He scooted quickly back over to the edge of the ledge, squatting down and listening with interest.
“We know of him,” Linda said, her voice still low. “People tell stories.”
“Like what?”
Linda looked at Carl. Carl looked at Linda. He shook his head no. Linda hesitated. “Well…” she said.
“Linda!” Carl hissed.
“Well, he should know!” she reasoned.
Carl shook his head sadly, but he didn’t protest.
Linda continued. “People come through all the time with stories of what goes on at the Lab. What the Doctor does there.” She shivered, and she crossed her arms, grabbing her elbows and hugging herself tightly. “Terrible, awful things.”
Ben raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”
“He makes the Dead Things,” Linda said quietly, her eyes wide with fear. “You know? The Dead Things?”
“Those green monsters,” Carl clarified. “The ones that attacked you.”
“Dusters,” Ben replied, and he said it with such authority that both of the people below him nodded their agreement. “He actually makes them?”
“They say he’s building an army,” Carl whispered.
Ben furrowed his brow. “Why would he do that?”
“No one knows,” Linda replied. “The way we hear it, he is absolutely insane.”
“I heard he removes people’s limbs while keeping them alive,” said Carl.
“And that he experiments by injecting babies with dead blood,” added Linda.
“He surrounds the Lab with Dead Things to keep people away.”
“He shoots them up with some secret serum, to make them more powerful.”
“He surgically implants radio receivers in their brains so he can control them through airwaves.”
“He enslaves innocent people and makes them do his bidding, or else he’ll send his Dead Thing army to march on their villages and families.”
“In his old life, he was kicked out of his hospital for performing strange experiments on the patients,” Carl said.
“Like Dr. Moreau, they say, but worse!” Linda said.
“Dr. Moreau, but worse,” Carl reiterated.
“Why would you want to go find someone like that?”
A cold ball formed in the pit of Ben’s stomach. Its icy tendrils spread into his lungs and his chest. “His people took something of mine,” he said. “I need to get it back.”
Linda threw up her hands in a show of mock frustration. “Puh!” she cried. “Kiss whatever it was goodbye! You’ll never get close to getting close to the Lab!”
“You’ll be ripped apart by Dead Things like that!” Carl said. He tried to snap his fingers, but they just sort of fumbled.
“You still can’t snap? Christ, we have worked on this!” Linda shrieked.
“I know!” Carl wailed.
“Anyway,” Linda said, clearly annoyed, “you don’t want to go to the Lab. I mean, you can’t stay here, that is our ledge, and you need to go somewhere in the morning. But look, here’s some hard truth, okay? I don’t mean to be mean, but it’s a hard truth: you’d be better off with the slow, painful death of brain cancer than you would be going after the Doctor at the Lab.”
“Definitely,” Carl agreed, nodding his head. “I’d take brain cancer any day.”
“Thanks for the pep talk,” Ben said miserably. He gave them a little wave and retreated back toward the center of his ledge.
“We’re just trying to help!” Linda hollered up. “Do what you want. But the Doctor is a madman. No one comes out of the Lab alive.”
“No one comes out of the Lab alive,” Carl agreed.
“I just said that, Carl!”
“Thanks,” Ben said again. “I appreciate the help.” He gathered his things together, and he made a small pile of saddlebag and fanny pack. Then he lay back against it, nudging his head into a comfortable spot. He pulled out the map and studied it until he found the canyon, or at least a canyon, and he thought it was probably the one where he was now. He traced his finger up toward the Lab. He actually wasn’t all that far off-base. The Green River was close; he just had to head north from here, and he’d find it, probably within the next day.
He tucked the map beneath the saddlebag, then he settled back onto his makeshift pillow. He stared up at the skies above, at the dark clouds that gathered above the mist, threatening a desert storm, and he sighed. Thoughts of bloodthirsty super-dusters and madmen scientists jostled for purchase in his brain.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said to himself. “One way or the other, I guess it really doesn’t matter.”
He waited for Patrick to agree. But Patrick didn’t say a word.
23.
Ben could see for almost a mile in every direction from the crow’s nest in Fort Doom. Mobile lay stretched out to the northwest, or what was left of Mobile did. A string of controlled fires burned in the streets, and lanterns dotted a few of the windows in the taller buildings, but all was quiet. The town sprawled and trailed off to the east, where the mid-rise buildings stepped down to low huts and ruined houses, into the darkness of the outskirts, where the coyotes and the wild boars kept mostly to themselves. The bay stretched out behind the fort to the south, opening up into the great Gulf of Mexico, and sometimes the tides brought in boats and makeshift sea craft, but there had been no manned vessels for weeks, and when there were, they didn’t come at night. There were no lighthouses, and the bluffs were treacherous.
It was a quiet night outside the walls of Fort Doom. And that had made it even easier to fall asleep.
He didn’t know how long he was out. Too long, there was no doubt about that; the moon had climbed high above the dogwoods and was now hovering near its zenith. How long had he slept? An hour. Maybe two.
It was a sharp crack that woke him. The sound of a gunshot, or maybe wood breaking. The sound broke through into his dream, snapping him out of his sleep. He opened his eyes. Had there actually been a gunshot? Had he dreamed it? He thought he heard the reverberation against the walls of the fort, but maybe that was just dream residue.
He climbed to his feet and lifted the rifle to his shoulder. James had fitted a scope to the barrel of the firearm, but it was something he’d scavenged, and there was a thick crack down the center of the lens. The break made it impossible to accurately sight a target, but it was still sort of useful as a magnifier. Ben angled the rifle around to the east of the wall, where he thought the sound had come from. If it had come from anywhere at all.
Through the broken scope, he saw silhouettes of burned-out cars and abandoned houses outlined against the darkness by the moonlight, and the swaying shadows of the wild grass and weeds that had reclaimed the suburban sprawl. He scanned the horizon to the southeast, to the far edge of the bay, and then back up toward downtown Mobile, tilting the rifle upward, then downward, searching for movement.
“Nothing,” he said out loud, trying to convince himself. “There’s nothing there.” But when he lowered the rifle, something did move, out beyond the wall. A dark shape flashed in the edge of his vision, over near the bay cliff. He threw the rifle back to his shoulder and searched through the scope. The shape was gone, swallowed up by the darkness…but the grass along the bay wall dropped and sprang back up, disturbed by whatever had muscled its way through.
Something was out there.
Or someone.
He grabbed the strap of the rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He climbed out onto the ladder and stepped down carefully. For a split second, he wondered if he should wake James, or maybe Annie. But that was stupid. “Let them sleep,” he thought aloud. “It’s just an animal.”
Animals don’t have guns, his brain pointed out.
“I don’t know that it was a gunshot,” he countered. “I don’t know that I actually heard anything at all.”
But he was pretty sure he had.
He climbed down the ladder, hand over hand. He jumped the last three rungs and plunged down into the ocean beneath the watch tower, sinking, drowning, breathing the cold water into his lungs...
•
“Hey! Wake up!”
Ben awoke with a gasp. He rolled over onto his side and coughed the water out of his lungs. Torrential rain pounded the ledge. Disoriented, panicked, he grabbed his fanny pack and held it over his head for protection. Drops of water trickled through the mesh belt and pattered against the top of his head. He shook the water from his eyes and gazed around, his vision slow with sleep. It must have been raining already for some time; not only were his clothes completely soaked through, but in the canyon down below, a thin stream of runoff had formed. It was raining so hard through the canyon that the rivulet seemed to grow wider as he watched. Lightning cracked in the distance, splitting off into an electric snake tongue in the sky, and thunder cracked almost immediately behind it.
He mopped his face with one hand and leaned over the edge of the platform. Carl and Linda were huddled together under a tarp that was doing little to keep them dry. Water pooled in the natural divots in the stone beneath them. It was soaking their clothes from the bottom up.
