Tyler and Megan lie still and bleeding, their eyes wide and staring. He feels his chest tighten and his strength drain away. They are gone. His whole family is gone. It happened so fast.
Sudden movement catches his eye as a knot of dark forms converges on him from out of the darkness. Once–men, wild–eyed and feral, their faces the faces of animals. Without thinking, without even knowing how he remembers what to do, he snaps off the safety on the Tyson Flechette, whips up the barrel, and fires into their midst. Dozens of them disappear, blown backward into the night. He swings the barrel to the right and fires again. Dozens more fly apart. He is exhilarated, become as maddened as they are, as consumed by bloodlust. He hates them for what they have done. He wants to destroy them all.
Then he sees another figure, an old man standing off to one side, tall and stooped and ghost–gray in a cloak that hangs almost to the ground. His eyes are fixed on Logan, peering out from beneath a slouch–brimmed hat, and in those eyes is a cold approval that terrifies the boy. He does not understand what it is the old man approves of, but he does understand one thing. Without ever having come face–to–face with one before, he knows instinctively that this is a demon.
The demon smiles at him and nods.
A hand jerks him about sharply and whips the flechette out of his hands.
Eyes as hard and black as obsidian stare out of a face streaked with grease and sweat. "Good enough, boy, but it's time to leave now. Let's live to fight another day!"
He takes Logan's arm and begins to run with him into the darkness. Others with faces painted in the same way join with him, shepherding the strays they have gathered from the ruins of the compound. A rear guard forms up to protect their retreat, weapons firing into the waves of once–men that seek to reach them.
"Run, boy," the man who holds him hisses in his ear.
Fighting down the pain he feels in his gut, struggling to hold back his tears, he does. He does not look back.
THE MIDMORNING SUNLIGHT blinded Logan Tom when he opened his eyes, and he blinked hard to clear away the sleep as he peered out through the windshield of the Lightning S-150 AV. The Indiana countryside, empty of life, spread away to either side of the little copse of elms he had pulled into the night before. The highway he had followed west toward Chicago stretched back the way he had come and ahead the way he must go, cracked and weed–grown and littered with debris.
His gaze shifted. Fields fallow and dried out from weeks without rain formed a broken brown patchwork to the south. North, about half a mile off, a farmhouse and barn sat abandoned and derelict in a small grove of oaks turned wintry and leached of life.
On the four horizons, nothing moved. Not even feeders, and feeders were everywhere there were humans to consume.
He reached over for the staff, gripped it tightly for a moment, then ran his hands slowly along its polished black length, feeling the reassuring presence of the runes carved into its surface. Another day in the world.
He checked the gauges of the AV, a cursory examination of several banks of lights that glimmered a uniform green in the daylight brightness. The red lights were dark, reassuring him that nothing had approached the vehicle during the night. He would not have slept through their audible warnings in any case, but it didn't hurt to make sure. The assault vehicle was his favorite weapon against the things that hunted him, and he relied on her the way you relied on a best friend. Not that he had ever had a best friend. Michael had been his last real friend, but mostly he had been Logan's teacher. It was Michael, a genius with anything mechanical, who had acquired and modified the AV. When he was gone, the
Lightning had become Logan's, a small legacy from a man larger than life.
He thought momentarily of his dream, of that last night with his family, with his childhood. Twenty years ago now, but it seemed an eternity.
Don't dwell on it. Don't give power of any kind to the past. Satisfied that nothing threatened, he glanced at the solar battery readings. Full power.
He was good to go. Solar had its advantages in a world in which the climates had been so drastically altered that the sun shone 350 days a year all the way from the equator to Canada. When you crossed the Mississippi, there was nothing but desert until you reached the mountains, then more of the same after that until you got close to the coast. The ozone layer had mostly burned away, the polar ice caps all but vanished. Temperatures had risen everywhere, and the land that had once been Middle America had turned stunted and dry. Old news; it had happened more than thirty years ago. So lots of sunshine was the forecast for today, tomorrow, and the next few centuries.
Rainfall? Six to eight inches a year in the wet spots.
Logan Tom wondered if anyone would ever again see anything that even resembled the old world. He thought it possible his descendants might, one extrapolated from the raw conditions of the present. But the world his parents and grandparents had known was gone forever, as dead as the moral and social fabric that had failed to hold it together. No one had thought it possible. No one had believed it could happen.
No one except the Knights of the Word, who had dreamed the nightmare and tried unsuccessfully to prevent it. Men and women conscripted to the cause, champions of and believers in the need to keep the magic that bound all things in balance.
For there was magic in the world, born out of the time before humankind, out of the world of Faerie, out of an older civilization. Magic that infused and sustained, that reached beyond what could be seen or even understood to tie together in symbiotic fashion all life.
Magic over which both the Word and the Void sought to exercise control.
It was an old struggle, one that dated all the way back to the birth of humanity. It was a struggle for supremacy between shadings of light and dark, between gradations of good and evil. Logan Tom didn't pretend to understand all the nuances. It was enough that he understood the difference between a desire to preserve and a determination to destroy. The Knights, as servants of the Word, sought to keep the balance of the world's magic in check; the demons, as creatures of the Void, sought to destroy it. It was a simple enough concept to grasp and one easily embraced if you believed in good and evil - and most humans did. They always had. What they didn't want to believe, what they tried repeatedly to dismiss, was that whatever good and evil existed in the world came from within themselves and not from some abstract source. It was easier to attribute both to something larger than what they knew, what they could see.
A refusal to accept that it came from within was what had ultimately undone them.
The Knights and the demons understood this truth and sought, respectively, to reveal or exploit it. Both were born of the human race, evolved into something more by becoming what they were. Until the beginning of the end, humans hadn't even known of their existence. Many still didn't. Knights and demons were the stuff of urban legend and radical religions. No one saw them at work; no one could pick them out from other humans. Not until they had begun to reveal themselves and their cause. Not until the balance was tipped and the steady, purposeful destruction of all humankind a reality.
How hard it was for them to see the truth even then, when it was staring them in the face.
Even after the plagues had killed half a billion people, no one had believed. Even after the air was so polluted and the water was so badly fouled that it was dangerous either to breathe or drink, no one had believed. They had started to believe after the first nuclear weapons were launched and whole cities vanished in the blink of an eye. They had started to believe when the governments of countries collapsed or were overthrown, when chemical warfare attacks and counterattacks decimated entire populations. Enough so that they began turning what remained of their cities into walled compounds. Enough so that they retreated into a siege mentality that hadn't abated as a way of life in thirty years.