Post apocalypticon, p.2
Post-Apocalypticon, page 2
part #2 of Apocalypticon Series
“I’ve been stopping the train,” Rogers pointed out.
“Good.”
“Terrible,” Ben corrected him. “This is a terrible idea, and we’re all gonna die.”
“Well, Benny Boy,” Horace said, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, “it’s your job to make sure we don’t.”
“Don’t call me Benny Boy,” Ben grunted. “That is our name.”
Horace frowned and cocked his head, eyeing Ben with a mixture of confusion and pity; he’d taken to talking about himself in third-person plural lately, and that was highly concerning. But it was a concern he’d have to save for later, for a time when he wasn’t being led into a possible trap. He sighed. “Do you think your recruits can handle this or not?”
Ben snorted. “I don’t think my recruits can handle their own hands.” He smirked to himself. That was a good one.
“Well, I don’t want any of the veteran Caps off the train. I need them to protect the cargo car.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ben said dismissively, waving a hand through the air. “I’ll put a couple dummies on it. But if they get knifed in the throat, I’m blaming you.” He turned toward the assistant conductor and gave him his best menacing stare. “And I’m blaming you, Rogers. Because you stopped the stupid train.”
“He told me to!” Rogers said defensively. One hand flew instinctively to his neck. He rubbed it, felt how solidly it connected his shoulders to his head. He liked that feeling.
Ben smirked again. “Doesn’t matter. If my recruits get knifed, heads will roll.” He chuckled softly. “Heh. Get it?”
Rogers blenched.
Ben cleared his throat. “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said, turning and pushing his way out of the engine car. “I have some pool noodles to attend to.”
•
“All right, newbies. Who wants to die?”
The recruits glanced nervously at each other. A couple of them shrugged. But none of them raised their hand.
“You’ll get to use a gun,” Ben said, sweetening the pot. “A real gun, with real bullets.”
Nine hands shot into the air.
“Good,” Ben continued. “You’ll also probably honestly die. There’s a really good chance of it. Probably ninety-four percent.” All nine of the hands went back down. “But you’ll have everlasting glory,” Ben added. Four of the hands went back up, though not nearly as excitedly. “But you’ll be too dead to enjoy it.” Three of the hands went down.
Mark’s hand stayed up. Mark hissed something at his friend, trying to get him to raise his hand too, but Mark’s friend shook his head violently and mouthed, No way.
Hmm. Smarter than they look, thought Ben.
All of them except Mark.
“If you do survive,” Ben went on, pacing across the train car with his most authoritative step, “you will be automatically promoted to the position of Red Cap. You can trade your pool noodle in for a real machete—not you, Ricky,” he added quickly. “You never get to touch another machete as long as you live.” Ricky’s face fell. Tears welled up in his eyes. Ben did not care. “So. Maybe certain death, but you get to use a gun, and if you live, you’re a Red Cap. Who’s in?” Mark’s hand went even higher in the air; he was all in. He elbowed his friend, who sighed with resignation and lifted his hand, too. “All right,” Ben said, clapping once. “Mark and Mark’s friend. You’re up.”
“My name’s Howard,” Mark’s friend volunteered.
“I only remember the names of people I’m going to speak to again,” Ben said. “Survive this mission, and I’ll think about remembering your name.”
Howard grew pale. He wondered if it was too late to un-volunteer.
“The rest of you, head to the armory. Lucas is in there; he’ll give you some knives and clubs and things. Arm up, then spread out. Make sure all the entrances are covered. You two,” he said, pointing at Mark and Howard, “come with me.”
The other recruits chattered nervously. “Ben,” Bob said. “What the heck is going on?”
“We’re about to be sieged,” Ben said. “Because that’s where Horace’s stupid morals have brought us.”
3.
Howard gripped his rifle. “You have any idea how to use one of these?” he asked out of the side of his mouth.
Mark shook his head. “No idea. I’ve only practiced with a tree branch.”
“It’s easy,” Ben said, irritated that they obviously hadn’t been paying attention during the lecture. “You put the bullets in here. You pull back on this. You aim the gun, and you pull the trigger. Got it?”
Howard glanced nervously at the firearm in his hands. “I don’t know if I—”
BANG!
Mark screamed as his rifle leapt from his hands and clattered down the steps. It landed muzzle-first in the desert dirt outside the train, which had come to a complete stop just a few minutes earlier. “Holy shit!” he said, feeling both terrified and thrilled. “That was easy!”
Ben stared at him with dumbfounded horror. “Mark. Did you just shoot that fucking gun?”
“I did!” he cried. “I didn’t mean to, but I did!” Mark shook his head in wonder and said, “Huh. I guess I’m really good at firing guns.”
Ben closed his eyes and counted to five. A headache was wedging itself into the deeper folds of his brain. Sending these morons off to their almost-certain doom might end up being the best part of his day. “You are such an idiot,” he murmured. “If I open my eyes and look down and see a whole bunch of red on my shirt because you accidentally fucking shot me in the body, I am literally going to murder you with a pool noodle.” Mark gulped. Ben opened his eyes. He lowered his chin and gave himself a visual inspection. There was no red. He seemed to be whole. “I might murder you anyway,” he decided aloud.
Mark breathed a sigh of relief and wiped his sleeve against his forehead. “I should…probably go get my gun. Right?”
Ben grunted. “You should probably get busy with your mission,” he said, “or I’ll find someone else who really, really wants to be a Red Cap.”
“Speaking of our mission,” Howard piped up, lifting a single finger in the air in a way that he hoped gave his interruption an acceptable sheen of politeness, “what…is our mission?”
Ben snorted. “You guys know that’s the first thing most people would ask, right? Not ‘Which gun is the loudest?’ or ‘Are you sure you have a red hat in my size?’ Most people would ask, ‘Hey, what is this insane mission you just drafted us for?’”
Mark looked at Howard; Howard looked at Mark.
Mark hemmed. Howard hawed.
They both looked down at their feet and mumbled, “What is this insane mission you drafted us for?”
Ben shook his head. “You’re going to be sorry you asked.” He peeked out between the cars and squinted into the dust-colored mountains in the distance. He didn’t see any movement…but he wasn’t sure he would be able to see any from this far off anyway. “Look,” he said, pointing up the tracks. “See that woman?”
Howard leaned back, holding onto the handrails for support. He craned his neck. Then he gasped. “Is she tied to the tracks?” he asked.
“There’s a woman tied to the tracks?” Mark thrust his head out between the cars, too, nearly pushing Howard off the train and into the barren desert. “Holy shit!”
“What did we roll into,” Howard asked, eyeing the woman carefully, “a Charlie Chaplin movie?”
“Cool joke,” Ben said, glaring. “It was hilarious when I said it.” He grabbed both men by their shirts and pulled them back onto the metal platform between cars. “Look,” he said seriously, “your job is to go out there and free that woman. You’ll probably need this.” He handed Howard a knife, an old tool with a rusty blade. Howard took it with what Ben proudly noted was an appropriate amount of wonder. “Cut her loose, and get back. That’s your mission. Understand? Don’t talk to her, don’t lollygag, and for the love of God, don’t bring her back onto the train. Every single fiber of my being tells me this is a trap, and that she’s part of it. But Horace won’t explode her with Patrick’s pushy plow, because he’s weak, probably made weaker by that stupid, heavy mustache he absolutely will not shave for reasons I’ll never know. But we have to get her off our tracks. Understand? You go out there, you cut her loose, you don’t get murdered in some all-too-obvious ambush, and you get back on this train. And you become Red Caps. Got it?” He looked at Howard, then at Mark. They both seemed to be on the verge of tears. “But to be clear: I do not like you. In case that’s a concern.”
Mark nodded stoically. “We’ll get it done,” he promised. “Cut her loose, don’t get killed, get back on the train.”
“Right,” Ben agreed. “And be careful.” He let his gaze wander once more along the mountainous horizon. “Just because I can’t see her people doesn’t mean they’re not out there.”
Howard wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead. “Okay,” he said, nudging Mark. “Let’s just…let’s just do this, okay?” Mark nodded.
“All right,” Ben said. He clapped a hand on each man’s shoulder. “Good luck. Don’t die.”
“We won’t,” they said in unison.
None of the three men really believed it might be true.
4.
Howard couldn’t shake the feeling that he was doing something really, really stupid.
“Do you think we’re doing something really, really stupid?” he whispered as he and Mark crouch-stepped across the desert, guns above their heads, sidling toward the tied-up woman.
Mark’s eyes were wide with fear, darting across the horizon, desperate to find some sign of murderous cutthroats preparing to storm the train. “Of course I think we’re doing something stupid!” he hissed.
Assistant Conductor Rogers had stopped the train about fifty feet from the woman, and the two Red Caps covered the gap easily. No one shot at them while they ran toward her, and no hordes of murderers had appeared on the hillsides and stormed down toward the train, and they took all of this as a really good sign. They skidded to their respective stops on either side of the woman. Howard waved away a particularly dark green cloud of Monkey dust, and they saw the woman clearly for the first time. She was both bound and gagged, which definitely ratcheted up the Charlie Chaplin-ness of the whole situation by a good ten or twenty percent. She was a fierce, bony woman, with dirty blonde hair, vicious green eyes, knobby joints, and a face that was caked in dust. She strained against her bonds as the two men approached, bucking her back and pulling at the ropes, grunting and groaning into the filthy handkerchief that had been stuffed into her mouth. Her hands were tied together at the wrist and cinched to her belly with the help of a thick but badly-frayed rope. That same rope wound down and around her body, crisscrossing a series of Xs down her legs and up her chest, binding her to the metal tracks.
“Jesus,” Howard murmured, “how are you even able to feed rope under train tracks?” He dropped to his hands and knees, setting the gun down on the sandy gravel embankment and inspecting the rope. “It’s like they had to actually dig under the tracks to make room.”
“Who cares?” Mark whispered nervously. He held his rifle to his shoulder and slowly swept the horizon. The mist made it impossible to see too far in any direction, but he thought he saw shadows moving across the ridge in the distance. Sweat trickled along the back of his neck and dripped down the inside of his shirt. He hated that. “Just untie her, and let’s go.”
“Right, right,” Howard nodded. He pulled the knife from his belt. “Don’t worry,” he said to the woman. “I’m not going to cut you.” But as badly as his hand was shaking, it was a pretty unlikely promise.
“Hurry up,” Mark whispered. “It’s too quiet out here. It’s giving me the heebies.”
Howard stopped and thought for a second. He looked up at Mark, his face twisted with confusion. “Isn’t it the heebie-jeebies?”
“What? No,” Mark said with no small amount of disgust. “It’s the heebies. The jeebies are something totally different.” He returned his gaze to the distance. “Idiot,” he muttered under his breath.
Howard shrugged. Then he went back to work. He lowered the blade to the rope, but he couldn’t quite decide where to start cutting. First, he went for her waist, but her hands made that sort of difficult. Then he moved up her torso, but the closer he got to her chest, the more he blushed, until he could practically see the red coming off his own cheeks. So that wouldn’t work, either. Then he moved the knife down below her waist, and that made him uncomfortable, too...because if he was being honest, he was still a virgin, and the mystery of the female reproductive system proved far too distracting. He moved his hand down even further and started cutting at the rope around her legs, but the way her thighs strained against her faded jeans aroused certain feelings in him that made him just want to cry.
“Will you hurry up?!” Mark said.
“Sorry, I don’t...” Howard began. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and shook out his hands. “There’s nowhere to—how do I—where do I do it?”
Mark turned and blinked at his friend. “You are such a wang.”
“Shut up!” Howard grumbled. He hopped onto the tracks and began sawing through the ropes at the woman’s ankles, deciding that it was a strategically chaste place to work. “I am not a wang.”
Then there was the dull, wet sound of a rock falling into a swimming pool, and Mark fell over into the sand, a harsh stream of blood pulsing out from the gunshot wound in his throat.
“Jesus fuck, they shot Mark in the neck!” Howard screamed, even though the only person who could really hear him was the woman on the tracks, and she already knew, because she had seen it for herself. “They shot him in the neck!” he screamed again. He dropped the knife and scrambled backward off the tracks, down the slight embankment, tumbling over his own heels and landing hard on his back. The wind exploded from his lungs, and he struggled onto his belly, gasping hard for air, and clawed his way back toward the train. He shrugged off the cumbersome rifle that was slung across his back and flung it away so he could give himself a better hold on the dusty desert earth, and he squirmed through the sand like a broken snake, writhing closer and closer to the engine.
He was about fifteen feet from the train when a bullet exploded through his spine. The hot lead shattered his vertebrae, snapping his nerve roots and liquefying the marrow. His legs went numb, and he felt the bullet lodge against the inside of a rib, cracking it in half so a ragged edge poked roughly through his skin. Two hot streams of blood spilled from his body, one from his abdomen, the other from his back. And as he lay there dying in the sand, he thought, Well this wasn’t worth it at all.
5.
“Goddammit, Horace, I told you it was a trap!”
Ben willed his legs to move, to run like hell out of the engine car and back to the armory, with the rest of his body in tow, but they refused to listen. Legs, Ben found, were often the most useless when you really, really needed them. Or maybe it was his eyes’ fault...they couldn’t stop staring out the window at the two bodies of his recruits, Mark and Mark’s friend Howard, still and bleeding and lifeless and dead and already being covered with sand and swallowed by the mist.
“Of course it was a trap!” Horace cried, throwing his hands up in frustration. “And it was a really good trap! That’s why it worked!” He shouldered past Ben, stomping out of the engine and passing angrily into the next car.
Ben’s legs finally started to get the message, and he turned to follow the conductor, but Rogers grabbed Ben’s arm. “Wait.”
“What?”
Rogers didn’t reply. He just nodded out the window, the color draining quickly from his face.
Ben followed the man’s pale gaze and peered out through the swirling mists surrounding the train. Dark shapes moved beyond the fog. An entire legion of deep green shadows scrambled down the mountainside and ran for the train. Ben did a quick assessment of the number of approaching figures in his head. He lost count after forty.
There were only twenty-four Red Caps, even counting the new recruits.
Twenty-two, Ben reminded himself. Goddammit.
“Maybe they’re dusters?” Rogers asked hopefully. It was a hope that Ben would have found funny if he’d had a second to process it. It was just three years ago when he and Patrick encountered their first batch of dusters in the woods somewhere between Memphis and Mobile; he never would’ve thought he’d one day hope to see those drooling, drug-addicted cannibals swarming down toward him on their stupid, stumbling, stiff and broken legs. But Patrick’s hydraulic train plow was more than a match for the calcification of duster bones. One thrust from the metal wedge at full power, and they literally liquefied on contact, exploding in a red and yellow mist of blood and Monkey goo. With the train in their arsenal, dusters were barely a blip on the radar of their concern.
It was other survivors who were the real monsters now.
Compared to the other humans, zombies were a piece of cake.
“No such luck...their movements are too smooth,” Ben murmured, watching the legion of mysterious strangers scrabbling toward the train. “This is bad.”
He ran out of the engine car and barreled his way back through the armory, plucking a machete and a baseball bat from the shelves as he passed into the cargo room. Horace was standing in the center of the train car, barking orders to the Red Caps standing nervously in the aisle, between the rows of shelves, swinging their weapons awkwardly and hoping they wouldn’t have to use them. “All right, listen up!” Horace hollered. “They don’t take the engine, they don’t take the armory, and they sure as hell don’t take this cargo hold!”
A few of the Red Caps cheered bravely, thrusting their weapons into the air and accidentally striking them against the train car’s ceiling. A chorus of “Whoops” filled the air.
