Flare (16 page)

/***/

Heather rose shortly before sundown and woke the rest of them. Heather was fine with Courtney joining them on their journey towards the Salvation. The cards had been thrown up in the air and Courtney had landed with them, and they had no recourse but to go on together.

“We still need to move,” said Heather. “Tonight. Let’s see what we can find in this place and then move on.”

They found a cache of weapons in the warden’s living room, along with a collection of animal trophies that he’d accrued over a lifetime of hunting. The weapons were ungainly, mostly rifles and shotguns, but they loaded them into the RV nonetheless. Courtney gave them all a quick tutorial on weaponry but said she’d prefer not to test the weapons until they were ready to go. She explained that she was paranoid about someone hearing them, even though they were miles from the nearest town. Still, she showed them the basics of guncraft, teaching them how to load the firearms and operate their safeties, and how to clear the weapons to prevent accidental discharge. She also advised them to focus on the front sight of the weapon when aiming.

“Still, on a survival note, don’t force the issue, and don’t point the muzzle at anything unless you’re comfortable with shooting it,” said Courtney. “Don’t bring these out unless it’s absolutely necessary, and even then you don’t have to fire them. You aren’t gun people and neither am I, keep that in mind. But if you do shoot, aim for the center of mass. Try to land a round right in the target’s chest cavity.”

/***/

They took food, flashlights and water from the warden’s compound, but Heather knew the water wasn’t sustainable. The RV’s interior was going be like a sweat lodge every day and no amount of bottled water would last forever. Courtney found a set of fans downstairs, small but battery powered. Ash knew fans could last a while on batteries, but wondered where the circulated air would go. Courtney found three holes in the RV’s floor that they hadn’t noticed before, and Ash felt it was safe to open them up further. Heather inspected the grating on the wall between the front cab and the back and found that there was one section that went under the hand rest in the middle of the car, and it wouldn’t let any light in. If they blew air out of it, the negative pressure would bring air in from the shaded bottom of the RV, and they’d have a breezeway.

Courtney brought out some duct tape from the warden’s basement and fashioned a flap over the holes, and then folded the flap over itself so it fit like a sewer plate. Courtney then took one more strip of duct tape and sealed the holes shut, and she practiced opening and closing the makeshift cover.

“Just in case,” said Courtney.

Ash was glad Courtney was there, and so was Heather. In a short time she had become indispensable, and Ash worried about what they would do if she were ever to disappear.

/***/

They left an hour later, siphoning gas from all the remaining vehicles in the compound and then driving away. Ash felt slightly melancholy about leaving, as if they had been lost at sea and were drifting away from a small but safe island. He mentioned that to Courtney, and she nodded in response.

“It’s tempting to remain in one place,” she said, “but we’ve got to move on. Fortune favors those who can hide
and
move.”

Ash knew she was right, but part of him wanted to stay in the warden’s home forever and give the flare a month or two to burn itself out. And if it didn’t, they’d then go towards the Salvation.
Staying in the warden’s house could be the right move.
The flare might end three days from now, and we might end up burning alive on the road in two.

Ash knew that this thinking was only an excuse to stay where it was safe, and not prudence. His father would have chided him for
not fulfilling his potential
, and the man would have been right.

Ash looked at the ground as he passed it by, lifeless and dry, and realized that any move was nothing more than a guess. They were dealing with variables he’d never seen before, strong variables that were well beyond his understanding. They had no recourse but to keep making decisions, choosing paths and leaving everything else behind. If they survived to the next day, that was the only truth.

Perhaps not the only truth.
If we make the right moves, if we guess the right path, we’re going to end up at the Salvation, and that might be the truth that saves us.

The Salvation, whatever it was, was a mystery that transcended survival. Perhaps it held both protection from the sun and
answers
, answers to what the flare was, why it was here and what they should all do next. Perhaps, at its core, the Salvation held more answers than Ash could ever dream of asking. Perhaps the Salvation would reveal the true purpose of both life and humanity, with or without the flare.

/***/

They hit a roadblock three hours later, easily passable but interesting to behold, so they stopped. It had been a car crash, a real accident with two cars totaled and turned over in the middle of the road, five feet apart, with their smashed parts now in corresponding shapes. Perhaps the accident had been caused by the sun, but whatever the case the cars had run into one another, and the dried-up bodies of their passengers stayed inside at awkward angles.

But Courtney noticed the interesting part: that the dried-up bodies were not alone. They were covered with insects, thick beetles with shiny, dark-blue backs, swarming the bodies and slowly feasting on their dried flesh. There were other insects too, but the beetles were the most visible. Their dark-blue shells gleamed like mirrors under the moon, and their bodies seemed as big as Ash’s fist.

“Look,” said Courtney.

One of the blue beetles had crawled through the ventilation hole on the floor of the RV and was sitting silent, threatening to take flight if disturbed.

One more insect came through the flap, a gray locust with a shiny exoskeleton, and it looked to Ash like a grasshopper wearing a suit of armor. Courtney quickly covered the three holes with the duct tape flap and then sealed them shut. Heather made sure the air intake was covered, and they drove up closer to the accident scene to witness the grim spectacle.

The human bodies were still largely intact, as if the insects didn’t quite know what to do with their flesh. Perhaps they were laying eggs under the dead humans’ leathered skin, perhaps they were eating them slowly, or perhaps they were only swarming the dead bodies as a matter of habit.

Or maybe they have no reason to come here,
thought Ash.
Maybe they’re only here to gloat, the new champions of this world, with shiny backs that reflect the sun during the day and hard eyes that still see in the night.

Ash considered that indeed, this world belonged to the bugs now. The insects controlled the day because nothing else could survive the sun, and they ruled the night because no one was left to shoo them away. It was as if these insects had been waiting for millions of years, biding their time underground while cities came and went above them. It was as if they knew the flare was coming, as if they knew they needed only patience to inherit the world.

They simply waited for this day, and then took over the earth without arrogance. They waited for everything to die and crawled out of the dirt humbly, conquering one patch of the world at a time, asserting their rule not by force, but by default.

Courtney held the blue beetle in her hand, and it stayed there comfortably like a pet. If it could fly, it chose not to while in their vehicle.

“There’s always a way to survive,” said Courtney, stroking the insect’s smooth back. “Even in an extinction event, there’s always a way to survive.”

FOSTER

Zeke was reading a passage from Colm’s bible when the old man woke up and caught him in the act. Colm was delighted at seeing this, and read the passage silently along with Zeke, smiling as he did so:

And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore
.

“The book of Isaiah,” said Colm. “It tells us to disable our weapons and turn them into machinery used to grow crops. It’s a little idealistic, of course, perhaps even to the point of being against our very nature. It would be nice if every weapon would be used to till the field, even if only metaphorically. But still, eighteen-year-old males across the world will never be completely enraptured by the prospect of a lifetime of toil in those fields. Some will leave their bales and march to fight in a foreign war,
any
war fought for any reason. It’s in our nature to fight, perhaps for no other reason than it’s exciting and makes a young man feel alive.

“But that passage was written for a reason, Ezekiel,” said Colm. “When that eighteen-year-old comes back to his farm a decade later, with his friends torn in half by stray bullets, a thousand families in tears, women raped and men executed on the orders of his own generals, maybe even one of his own limbs left buried on the battlefield that he had so gleefully run towards …

“Then he’ll realize Isaiah’s truth. This truth came too late for him of course, too late to save him from the horrors that will return every time he closes his eyes. But though these lessons may fail to prevent his nightmares, he’ll recognize that Isaiah’s wisdom is not too late for his own son, and he’ll start to pray. He’ll
pray
that his child doesn’t have the option to run off to a foreign battlefield, let alone the desire. He’ll
wish
to see only plowshares in every direction, so his son will have no recourse but to pick them up and spend his life with limbs intact and eyes clean of blood.”

Colm stood up, his old, round body making a silhouette against the moon.

“We’ll only survive this if we turn our swords into plowshares,” said Colm. “In fact, we’ll only survive if we take it to the next level, which is evidenced later in the chapter. They call it the
Peaceable Kingdom
. Are you familiar with it?”

Zeke nodded that he was. Colm found the verse, and they read silently together:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. 
And the cow and the bear shall feed, their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 
And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the cockatrice’s den. 

This is the place I’ve seen in my dreams,
thought Zeke.
I still can’t quite picture it, but I’ve been there in my dreams.

“Everyone putting down their swords is far-fetched to say the least,” said Colm. “But wolves living with lambs, and children petting snakes? That’s beyond reason, beyond conception!”

Colm took a moment to contemplate his own words.

“Our forefathers never quite chose to embrace Isaiah’s truth,” continued Colm, “but our forefathers are also now gone. The world is currently a harsh place, but it has been born anew, and perhaps
now
is the time to bring these inconceivable, impractical truths into being. They say we can only bury our swords forever if everyone else does it too, but look around! There are only a few people left, so it’s quite possible that
every single person
could do away with their weaponry and make war a thing of the past!”

“And though even I can’t quite grasp the entire truth of Isaiah’s Peaceable Kingdom, perhaps that’s precisely what we need to do! Perhaps the only way for us to survive is if we take this truth to its fullest extent, and have the wolf live with the lamb!”

Brother Colm took a glass of water, sterilized by the sun, and sipped it.

“I speak in metaphors that I don’t fully understand, and I know that I sound naïve,” he said. “But maybe the time for naïve metaphors is now. Those in the past that turned their swords into plowshares may have been run over, but perhaps there is no
rest of the world
left to run us over anymore. Maybe it’s our time to become innocent again, to do the impossible and make the Garden of Eden anew.”

Colm took another drink of water and looked down at Zeke, his calm, clear eyes just barely visible in the silhouette of the moon.

“The path of the meek might not just be the righteous road, but the
right road,
the one that keeps us alive. Ninety-nine percent of this earth is now gone, and the only path left is to be mild, to hide in hovels and quiver against the power that surrounds us. The strong and the fierce are no longer rewarded, at least not in the long term, because we’re all now weak in comparison to the sun.”

Zeke thought about what Colm said and nodded.

“But that’s just a theory, and I won’t rest too heavily upon it, for if we’re not careful the sun will turn both meek and fierce alike to dust,” said Colm. “We have no destiny to rely upon, no cosmic forces that will keep us safe if something rips a hole in our tent. We must press on, and still be wary, because our goal is in our hands and no one else’s.”

Zeke nodded in understanding. Colm had the wind of a preacher and could talk for days, but he wasn’t crazy.
He might be dead wrong about the Peaceable Kingdom, he might somehow be right, but he’s not crazy.

/***/

They walked through the night slowly over the endless plains, each hour looking the same as the last, the landscape never changing, and the faintly visible stars the only thing to guide them. They had picked up another traveler, a young, unsmiling man with a goatee and a fierce, aquiline nose who said he was en route to
the dockyards
. His name was Foster, and he never quite walked with them, instead traveling off to the side until he became invisible. He always seemed to find his way back though, and this time he returned after being gone twenty minutes, somehow backtracking towards them from ahead, even though he had left them from the side.

“You guys gotta see this,” said Foster. “But I gotta warn you, it’s not pretty.”

/***/

They found a pair of legs sticking out of a heavy bag in the middle of a field, and though the legs were burnt by the sun, they were quivering, and a faint whispered moan came from underneath the thick cloth. Colm made the sign of the cross, and Foster’s eyes turned soft with helpless sympathy. They listened to the bag and heard the soft sounds of a man still alive and pleading for mercy.

Colm nodded at Foster, and he knelt down on top of the bag and started to open it. The quivering man underneath shuddered against Foster’s movement, and Foster pulled back. He tried to open the bag twice more, but it was too painful for the man inside. Each time Foster jostled the bag, the man screamed as if they were trying to wedge a needle into his gums. Foster got up and looked down in frustration. He didn’t want to do this. Zeke took the cue and knelt down in his stead, gently feeling the bag around the man, which was thick and wrapped tightly from his head to his waist. Zeke felt around for an opening, and finding none, took out a knife from his belt and cut a hole in the material. The outer cloth was thick, like that of a black duffel bag, and inside was more cloth, wrapped around the man’s body with duct tape. Zeke ended up cutting through six layers in all, one of which was made of tin foil. He cut gently so as not to lacerate the man’s flesh, and eventually reached the bottom layer to reveal a squinting man in a straitjacket. He had neck tattoos that were crusted over with dried blood, and he was fading in and out of consciousness. He snapped into lucidity when Zeke started to cut the straitjacket off, and howled at Zeke to stop.

“Just take it off slowly,” said the man. “They … cut me,
g
ü
ey
.”

Colm took over for Zeke and cut off the straitjacket with absolute precision, listening to the man’s groans and slowing down if the man yelled. The straitjacket was bright orange and not white, and Zeke looked to the ground and saw that the bottom was also soaked with dried blood. Colm eventually took off the jacket, and found that the man had been wrapped in razor wire, with most of the barbs long buried in his naked skin.

Foster walked away in disgust and then knelt on the ground with his head in his hands. Colm made the sign of the cross again and then looked sadly at Zeke, as if looking for an answer.

Wherever the Peaceable Kingdom may be,
thought Zeke,
it’s far, far away from this place.

/***/

They didn’t want to take the razor wire off, for fear that the man might bleed to death. But he was lucid, so Colm searched in his bag and found some pills that might help ease the man’s suffering. Colm crushed the pills and mixed them in water, and then had the man keep the liquid on his tongue for as long as he could, so the pills would be absorbed faster. They eventually eased his pain, but not by much. Still, the man kept his lucidity and was able to tell his tale.

His real name was Ignacio, but he went by
Archangel
, and he was a prisoner at the penitentiary a mile away. He was disoriented and didn’t know where it was, but Zeke eventually found it on the horizon, flat, dark and ominous, a block of concrete against the night sky. The building was quite large and dared them to come near and find shelter, as if it wanted to swallow them whole.

Archangel told them tales of
Black Vice Kings
,
Cholos Norte, Southern Lowriders
and
Aryan Block Lords
, and he spoke with so much slang that Zeke couldn’t understand it. Brother Colm nodded as the man spoke, and even spoke back using the same slang, and some Spanish too. After five minutes of talk, Brother Colm nodded at Zeke and Foster to walk with him where Archangel couldn’t hear them.

“I did quite a bit of volunteer work in these prisons, so I understand what happened,” said Colm. “But be warned, it’s a harsh tale.”

Colm told them the tale about how the African American gang was in the yard when the flare hit, and they had all been killed. There were three gangs left, two of them Latin and bitter rivals, and the third was the white Aryan gang. The Aryans had been in the lunch hall when the flare hit, which knocked out all the power. They turned the tables on the guards, killing most of them and keeping the rest hostage until they figured out what was going on. The Aryans were allied with the Northern Latin gang and had freed them from their cells, leaving Archangel and his group of Southern Lowriders locked up in the dark, completely helpless. The Northern Latin gang used the guards’ guns to shoot a few of Archangel’s comrades in the legs before chaining them up on the surface and waiting for the sunrise, just to test the flare.

One of the Cholos Norte had a particularly bad feud with Archangel, so they got one of their sickest members to devise something particularly cruel for him, and here Archangel lay with his lower limbs withered and useless, and his upper body protected from the sun but wrapped in razor wire so that he still felt pain with every movement. The barbed wire looked dirty, and Zeke wondered if it had been purposefully covered with dirt, or perhaps even human waste.

“What are we gonna do?” asked Foster.

“I’m afraid there’s not much we can do,” said Colm. “If we move him, he’ll bleed to death.”

“Maybe that’s the right thing to do,” said Foster.

“No man deserves to bleed to death,” said Colm. “Even if it is the right thing to do.”

They heard a grunt, and it was Archangel in the middle of a small seizure. They ran over to the man, and he was thrashing about, cutting his flesh further with every spasm. Archangel couldn’t quite yell because of his spasm, but he was in agony and tears were rolling out of his eyes. Zeke sprang into action and fell onto the ground and grabbed hold of the man’s wired body, absorbing the razored barbs with his thick coat. He knew it was wrong to hold a man in the midst of a seizure, but this was different, and he couldn’t let Archangel be cut in half by his own shackles. Whatever the case, it was wrong to let that happen.

The man seized and shook, and then calmed. Zeke got up to see Foster and Colm both shocked. Colm brushed Zeke off and looked him in the eye with admiration.

“I’ve seen compassion, son,” said Colm. “But I’ve not seen a man willingly jump into the thorns like that before.”

Zeke nodded and Colm looked over at Foster, who was still speechless. Colm breathed in for a moment and then looked at Archangel, who was alive but in worse shape than before. Miraculous as Zeke’s tussle in the thorns was, Archangel was still in tremendous pain, and he was still destined to die slowly.

“What do you think, Foster?” asked Colm.

“I don’t think he can be helped,” said Foster. “But yeah, we can’t just leave him here.”