Then it belched out one of those black clouds, and slammed itself back into a sea of debris that used to be a sparkling dream of a city. This cloud wasn’t like the others. There were things inside it…flying things…maybe they were miniature versions of the Vegas-eater. We thought our vehicles could outrun the cloud, so we headed back west, until the Flyers came down on us.
I was riding in a jeep driven by Adam Ortega, a man I’d known since Iraq. We were two lone wolves who had gone through a lot of shit together and somehow came out alive. One of those Flyers swooped out of the dark and landed on his face. It smelled like fish guts. He screamed, and the beast pointed its orchid-face at me. A cluster of pinkish tongues quivered between the rows of fangs, and I raised my shotgun just in time to blow that thing to Hell. My shot also took Ortega’s head off. God knows I didn’t mean to do that. I was scared.
The jeep veered off the road, hit an embankment, and sent me flying. I blacked out, and when I woke up the entire convoy was in flames, every man lost beneath a mess of black-winged monsters. But they had forgotten me, at least for a few minutes.
They were good men, all of them, but there was no helping them now. Some had brought families with them. I heard women screaming. And children. Me, I’d always been alone, ever since my divorce. Farm life was lonely life, but it was good. My daddy passed away three years previous. Now that I think about it, I’m glad he went before all this happened. And that I never had kids of my own to see all this evil shit coming down. But some of my friends had loved ones they weren’t about to leave behind, so there they were…deep in the middle of the shitstorm with the rest of us. I hid in a ditch and watched a few stragglers try to escape, but the Flyers tore away from carcasses like flocks of ravens and flapped after them.
I still had my.45 Desert Eagle and knew I was probably dead anyway. I could run, maybe live awhile longer. But one of the women trying to outrun those things was pregnant. So I started picking off the Flyers chasing her, one by one. A man ran behind her, and the things took him down. He screamed her name and I knew who she was.
“Evelyn!”
That was Johnny Colton and his wife. They hadn’t been married more than a year.
Johnny’s blood spouted as the damned things tore his heart out, then set to work on his face.
I ran toward Evelyn, shooting two more Flyers out of the air. I’m a pretty good shot. Got a lot of practice in the Mideast. Kept up my skills at the shooting range over the years.
One of them landed on her back and she fell, not twenty feet from me. I was afraid of shooting her, so I came at it with the hunting knife from my boot. Sliced it clean in half, but its blood was some kind of acid, splashed across my left cheek…burned like the Devil’s piss. Still have one helluva scar from that.
I helped Evelyn to her feet, and we ran together. She cried out for Johnny, but I wouldn’t let her look back. The black cloud was bearing down on us, blotting out the stars and moon. I smelled the stink of the ocean rolling over the desert…the smell of dead and rotted marine life.
I grabbed a satchel of gear from the overturned jeep, and we took off into the desert. The Flyers must have forgot us after awhile. They had a big enough feast back on the highway.
As the sun came up, red and bloated in the purple sky…it had never looked right since the Big Waves…we came into Pahrump. The tiny town was deserted, and corpses littered the streets. We saw they had been gnawed up pretty good, probably by the Flyers…or something just as bad. There wasn’t a single living soul there. But we did find a good supply of canned food, bottled water, a gun shop full of ammo and a few rifles, and some other odds-and-ends.
It was Evelyn who told me about the old silver mine on the edge of town. She was a Nevada girl before she married Johnny.
“Maybe we can hide there…in the mine tunnels,” she said. “Maybe they won’t go underground. Those mines are pretty deep. We’ll be safe down there, Joe.”
I didn’t believe we would, but I looked into her big, blue eyes, crystalline with tears shed for her dead husband, for her dead relatives in San Joaquin… for the whole damn world gone to Hell.
“Yeah.” I lied to her. “We’ll be safe down there. Good idea.”
We loaded wheelbarrows with provisions, water, guns, blankets, and I picked up an old ham radio from the gun store. I didn’t expect it to work, but it was something. Something to pin our hopes on. When the world is ending, you’ll take anything you can get.
Evelyn was five months along when we moved into the mine. We weren’t exactly comfortable down there in the belly of the cool earth, but it was as close as we were going to get. Even a blanket laid over hard stones feels good when you’re half dead from exhaustion and worry. She tended the wound on my face, and I told her hopeful lies to settle her nerves. I said this would all blow over and things would be back to normal in a few months. I didn’t believe a word of it. Maybe she did, or at least she wanted to.
I started playing with the radio, hooking it up to a portable battery and listening to the static. I scanned every frequency, every day for weeks, but there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. I imagined all those ham radio geeks lying dead in their basements, or their bones in the bellies of nameless beasts, their radios crushed to splinters or lying in forgotten barns covered with dust.
Slowly, the months crept by. It turned out Evelyn was right. We were safe underground. Her belly grew bigger, and she stopped moving around so much. I started mentally preparing myself to deliver the baby, something I had never done before. But I’d seen so much blood and suffering, first in the war, now at the end of the world, that I knew it wouldn’t matter. How hard could it be to pull this little bugger out of his momma’s belly? She would do most of the work.
“I’m gonna name him Johnny,” she said. “Like his father.”
I smiled as if it mattered. The kid had no future in a world like this. I cleaned my.45 and contemplated putting us both out of our misery. Why go on living? What was the point? We’d both be better off dead. I loaded a clip into the chamber and tucked the gun behind my belt buckle. I went over to sit by her on the makeshift bed we’d been sharing. I had never touched her sexually, but we’d hold hands in the dead of night. It brought some measure of comfort…more for her than for me, I told myself.
The baby was kicking today, and she was excited. I lowered the flame in our lantern and told her to get some sleep. I might sneak out later and hunt a hare for dinner, I told her. I always said that, but I’d never found any living game outside in the three months we’d been there. Still, sometimes I’d sneak out between the rolling black clouds and scavenge, or look for signs of life. I knew I was kidding myself, and I was tired of it.
She would nod off soon and I would end her life painlessly, one clean shot through her skull and another to finish off the unborn child.
Then one last round through the roof of my mouth and right into my brain pan.
All this suffering would be over for us. The baby would never know a world of crawling Biters and hungry Flyers. It was the right thing to do, I told myself, my mind made up.
But Evelyn…she stopped me without ever knowing my plan.
She looked up at me with those big, blue eyes, her dark lids heavy, and she raised her head a bit.
She kissed me, damn her.
She kissed me like she loved me, and I took her into my arms. We lay there for awhile, then fell to sleep. After that I knew I could never kill her. Not even to spare her the pain of living in this dying world.