Monsters of the Apocalypse (25 page)

Nestor
felt at home in the strange bar. The heat was unbearable, like a wet
towel had been laid over the entire city of Mombasa. Nestor tried to stay
focused. He tried to ignore the desire to rush back to the room
where she would be waiting. Waiting for him.

He looked
up as Jacob swaggered through the room and sat down across from him, his white
suit seeming crisp and cool, his face and hair untouched by sweat, despite the
heat.

"I
never understood why you liked this town so much, Nestor."

"It's
hot so people leave you alone. You can disappear here."

"Well,
you don't have to hide anymore," Jacob said as he lit a cigarette.
"It's over."

"I'm
not even sure I know what it was."

"It's
not that confusing, Nestor. October wants to be President. He's
going to run as a hero. We could threaten that by being bigger
heroes. In his defense, it was his father that sent the assassins after
us."

"So
how's it over?" Nestor said nervously swirling the melted ice at the
bottom of his glass.

"October's
father was killed."

Nestor
stared at Jacob's smiling face. He could tell that it had been a painful
death by the gleam in the man's eye.

"No
need to thank me. Now, where are they, Nestor?"

"She's
with me now."

"You're
sure about that?"

"Yes.
Look, nothing happened while you two were together. This started
after."

"I
love her, Nestor."

"I'm
sorry."

"Do
you love her?"

Nestor
tossed the glass back and chewed the last chill of the ice. He used a napkin to
wipe the sweat from his forehead and pushed the hair back from his face.
He scanned the room for any other threat, but there was only Jacob.

"Why
did you come here, Jacob? To ask me if I love her?"

"No."

"To
tell me about October's father?"

"No."

"Then
why?"

Nestor
looked at the knife Jacob placed flat on the table.

"You
know, Jacob, you're really supposed to return those when they discharge
you."

"I
love her, Nestor."

Nestor
stared into Jacob's eyes as the knife cut through the air too fast to be
seen. Neither man blinked.

The wolf sat
there and watched Nestor, licking his face. She looked away when he began
coughing. She looked away for a long time. When she finally turned
back Nestor wasn't moving. She circled him, licked his face, felt the
heat of his breath from his mouth and knew he wasn't dead.

She pricked
her ears. Something was coming. She looked at Caleb, who was
already moving towards the basement door with a pistol in his hand, the sniper
rifle hanging from his shoulder and Nestor's knife in his belt. Caleb
glanced back at her once before he moved upstairs and closed the door behind
him. She sat beside Nestor, breathing softly by his ear.

The screams
from outside brought Nestor out of his stupor. He looked around the dark
room in a panic. The wolf looked at him with a whine and sniffed the
air. Together they listened as more screams came from above.

Not long
after the screaming Caleb came back into the basement and sat down next to the
wolf. He handed her a piece of bloody flesh, which she took into the
corner and devoured quietly. Caleb smiled at Nestor.

"Are we
safe?"

"Stay
down, Nestor. Don't try and sit up."

"Are we
safe?"

"It was
just a roving band of mutants. They just happened to be here. Bad
luck. I buried them. They won't lead anyone here. My concern
is that your fever isn't breaking. I have to go find something for you,
Nestor. I'm gonna have to go. She'll protect you."

"You're
leaving?"

"I'll
be back, Nestor. I promise," Caleb smiled as Nestor closed his eyes.
He lingered a moment to make sure that Nestor hadn't stopped breathing.
He then looked in the wolf's eyes.

"You
stay and you keep him alive. You hear me? Good girl."

She stayed
as Caleb left.

One day they
were just there. Overnight they had come, like a bad dream, but unlike a
bad dream, in the morning they didn't disappear with the rising sun.

Bragg looked
at the Mutant Army, now camped a mile back from the eastern-most entrance to
the tunnels under Los Angeles. The mutants showed no particular signs of
aggression beyond their terrifying appearance and the huge artillery guns they
held like a normal soldier would a rifle. The rumor in the tunnels was
that these big guns were what kept the drones from coming close enough to attack,
but Bragg wondered.

He waited
for the call, the call that the attack had begun, but it didn't come. A
trickle of people did instead. A few people came one day, a few more the
next, until they seemed an endless tide that never broke.

They looked
ravaged with sickness and hunger. Their stories were all, more or less,
the same. The Mutant Army had come. It had come upon their
settlement or bunker or city and ate the choice humans and then burned
everything down as they left. The survivors were told that a second wave
of more vicious mutants was coming and if they wished to survive they would
need to follow behind the Mutant Army. So they followed.

The
following human survivors served as a sort of back up food supply for the mutants
when a stretch of barren land appeared, but otherwise they were allowed to
travel in the Mutant Army's wake in peace. When they came upon the Mutant
Army camp at the end of the march they were mostly allowed to pass by the giant
white tent and go to the tunnels, to Bragg, with a message. Always the
same message.

"We're
hungry. We're coming."

Bragg tried
to ignore the message and focus on technical concerns since they were
fixable. Food and beds. Medical care. Keeping peace in the
tunnels. It was more than a full-time job, but Bragg was unflappable,
inexhaustible and his presence threw a calm about him everywhere he
walked. The mere sight of him seemed to bring out the best behavior of
the survivors and this alone kept chaos at bay. He inspected the
survivors who arrived at the gates and took responsibility for each new mouth
that he let in, responsibility for the survival for every soul who passed
through the gates.

At night, in
bed, after his prayers, he stared into the dark and waited for the final attack
to come.

"Nestor
you need to take this, you're burning up," Caleb said as he forced the
pill into Nestor's mouth.

"After
all this… a fever kills me, huh, Caleb?"

"Swallow.
Good. You're going to be okay, Nestor. Don't worry."

"I'm
not worried. I don't fear death. I'm just surprised it's a normal
thing that got me."

Caleb wiped
Nestor's head gently with a wet cloth. Nestor glanced to his side where
he saw the wolf devouring a slab of bloody meet, eyes never leaving the two
men.

"When I
was kid they said global warming would kill us all," Nestor moaned.
"Nuclear war. Terrorism. Earthquakes. STD's. Cell
phone radiation. It didn’t happen. We didn’t die. The world
as we knew it ended and here we are… and I am dying from a fever."

Nestor
nodded his head, his eyes half open as he fell into a feverish
half-dream. Caleb kept the cloth wet and tried to keep Nestor cool.
Nestor's hand shot up blindingly fast and grabbed for Caleb's throat, missing
by inches.

"You
killed her. My little girl! You killed my little girl didn't
you?! I'm going to kill you, October!"

Caleb tried
to hold Nestor down, but found it extremely difficult even with Nestor in a
weakened state.

"I'm
not October, I'm Caleb. I'm your friend. Look at me. I'm
Caleb, I'm your friend."

Nestor
squinted at Caleb's face with distant eyes, but a slight smile appeared on his
face as he relaxed back to the ground.

"Where've
you been?"

"I went
for medicine. I got you medicine."

"What
happened to your face? You have a cut. A big one."

"A pack
of lunatic survivors attacked me. One of them had a damn crossbow.
Shaved my cheek. I was lucky."

"What
happened to them?"

"They
weren't lucky," Caleb said with a wan smile as he re-soaked Nestor's
forehead.

"It's
easy now, isn't it?"

Caleb put a
hand against Nestor's forehead and frowned.

"Sleep,
Nestor. The pills should help, just sleep."

"This is it? This is
the place right?" October sat eagerly forward.

"Yes. Close. It should
happen anytime now."

"I can't stand it. I
really can't. They know to bring back the head right? We can't leave the
head lying around."

"Yes, Mr. President, they
know."

Miho moved over to the window and
looked at the waves crashing on the beach. The lights of the various
buildings burned brightly despite the hour. She knew that in each of
those rooms every eye was fixed upon a screen. October had been insistent
that the Islanders be notified to watch Nestor's feed tonight. Miho had
pointed out that this was a rather suspicious thing to do after outlawing
watching Nestor's feed for the last year. In the end she had agreed to
it, as long as he agreed, that they frame the notification under the guise
that: an ambassador from The Island had been sent to negotiate a protection
deal with Nestor Bravo and should be arriving at Nestor's camp that
night. It was to be a historic moment, the final negotiation of peace
that would bring Nestor to The Island.

Behind Miho, October giggled
incessantly, slapping the tops of his thighs in excitement. Flores leaned
in and whispered in her ear.

"It comes down to this
then."

"It does," she agreed.

"And if they fail?"

"They won't."

"You are so sure? What
if they do?"

"Then you take his
role. You don't think I just keep you around for you looks, do you, Mr.
Flores?"

Flores nodded and turned around
to watch October bounce like a child in excitement. He turned back and
looked at Miho, the woman seemed calm, but Flores noticed that her hand was
fidgeting inside of her sleeve.

Three days out from the basement
and Nestor still didn't trust himself. His instincts and senses were off
just enough that he lacked the confidence to act on them. He crouched at
the edge of the fire's light, stared into the darkness and dug into the dirt at
his feet with his knife.

"Nestor, you're making me
nervous. Sit down by the fire and relax."

Nestor didn't acknowledge the
command. He spat and stayed in his crouch, the wolf sniffing the air
beside him.

"There's something wrong,
Caleb."

"You're paranoid. Ever
since the fever your way of compensating for not being a hundred percent is
being a paranoid asshole. It's really starting to get on my nerves."

Again Nestor spat and kept his
eyes focused on the darkness. Caleb laughed and returned his gaze to the
fire. The wind came across the plain, carrying a haze of dust with
it. The fire bent and cowered with the gust of wind, but returned back to
normal in the following stillness. Caleb had just reached forward to
readjust one of the logs, when the first of the water from the water jug Nestor
was holding began to pour onto the fire.

"What the hell?!" Caleb
shouted falling back from the rising steam.

"Grab what you can and run,
don't look back!"

"What, I'm not…"

Nestor dropped the empty water
jug and jumped through the steam of the extinguished fire and lifted Caleb into
the air, face to face.

"Don't argue, they're here,
it's now. You have to go, Caleb, they won't come after you. Bragg,
will see this and he'll come for you. You hear that, Bragg? When
you see this, you come for Caleb! Now run north!"

Nestor let go of Caleb who stood
still, to shocked to move.

"If something is coming I'm
not leaving you to die, Nestor!"

"I don't need your life on
my head! Go find your little girl! Go now!" The last
shout came as Nestor grabbed his rifle and ran south, into the darkness, wolf
at his heals. Caleb hesitated a moment before he followed after.

Caleb had only cleared the circle
of light thrown by the fire, Nestor's footsteps just faintly audible over his
own breathing, when a sharp pain hit the side of his neck and the darkness of
the night engulfed him.

Nestor had made it a quarter of a
mile. He kept his head down, feet pounding into the uneven ground, until
the wolf fell beside him. Nestor spun on his toe and knelt beside the
wolf. His hand quickly found the dart in the wolf's neck. A
blinding light hit Nestor in the eyes.

"Drop your gun, Nestor,
you're surrounded. You move, we kill you then we kill the wolf and go
back and kill your friend. I'm not playing around."

Nestor without a thought dropped
the rifle and placed his second hand on the side of the white wolf.
Several other lights turned on, the one in his eyes lowered so that Nestor
could see the sergeant's face.

"Nestor Bravo. It is
an honor to meet you. I want you to understand that I recognize that I'm
alive because you chose to protect your friend and the wolf. Had you been
alone, you would have found a way. I know it. That's why soldiers can't
have friends. But, as a soldier, I understand why you'd want them.
I had my men use darts on them, out of that respect. By the way, your
friend Caleb, he followed you. He's a good man. I'll leave him here
so your buddy Bragg can come get him, like you asked. Do you feel that
I've been fair?"

"Yes."

"Any last words?"

Nestor looked up at the
sergeant's face and then moved his eyes back to the wolf. He petted the
white fur and smiled.

"No."

"Good," the sergeant
said as he raised up his gun and smiled. "October Carnegie says
goodbye."

The sergeant pulled the gun's
trigger. Nestor's feed went dark.