300 Miles to Galveston (9 page)

They enjoyed their evening together, and in the morning, found they had been given fresh water and biscuits for the road.

“I feel like we’re being winnowed out, and the good ones are few. I hope we meet again,” said Tom. He held out his hands, and they gathered into a small circle, where Tom prayed for their safe journey, and sealed it with an Amen.

They didn’t speak again until they saw Welcome to Corsicana, a placard held on a free standing limestone brick wall with an image of railroad tracks crossing in front of a sailboat with a rising or setting sun. The rain fell lightly, and the clouds had a smoky glow. 

Chapter 9: 100 Chinese with a Sword

“Are we really going to visit Aunt Tali?”

Kurt finished his drink of water. “I don’t know. Would you like to?”

“Sure, I guess. I mean... I don’t really remember her.”

“Your mom and I divorced when you were 4 or 5, and I don’t think you’ve seen her since then. It’s up to you.”

Kurt tapped his bike computer. The plastic screen was wet but undamaged. Thankfully, the GPS satellites were still broadcasting. He could see regularly updated information on distance, average speed, and estimated time of arrival with their target:
Pelican Island, Galveston Bay
.

“I remember where her house is. We can head that way, or not. She’s a nice person, but our supplies are good, so I don’t have a practical reason. Plus, she might not even be there.”

Sophie considered it. “I don’t like lying to Mom. It’d be less of a lie if we actually dropped by.”

“Good enough for me.”

They took the Chatfield Road exit and headed towards town, then made a left on Bunert Street. On the left was Woodland Cemetery, a beautiful cemetery as old as the town itself, shaded by century-old live oaks and cedar elms, and colorful Texas madrone, with their small red fruits.

There, at the fence, Kurt saw Tali pressed against the wrought iron fence, her tall, lanky form holding her face in the square made by the repeating vertical rails and the two horizontal rails, just beneath the bullet finials that topped the fence like blunted fangs.

Kurt turned his bike towards her and stopped. Sophie and Bane followed.

“That’s her,” said Kurt.

Across the lawn they saw other Angels. Like Tali, they wore white ponchos, but here they all had small gold crosses with WOODLAND CEMETARY beneath them. Tali’s dripped from the recent rain.

“It’ll be OK,” said Kurt, taking Sophie’s hand as they got off their bikes. “We’ll just say hi, and be on our way.”

When they were about ten feet from the fence, the mud burst in front of them, and then they realized they were looking at a long arrow stuck in the mud, pointing to the right.

“I told you if you came back I’d kill you!” yelled a voice from somewhere to the south.
That tree? That barn?

“Time to die!”

Bane trundled off his recumbent bike and crawled to the ditch that flanked the road on the cemetery’s side, pulling a canvas bag. Kurt and Sophie ran for the same spot, but Bane waved them off. “Spread out!” he hissed. Kurt ducked and ran 50 feet north, dropping Sophie in the ditch first, then crawled half the distance back towards Bane.

“We can’t stay here forever,” whispered Bane. “He’ll just walk up and shoot us.” He unzipped the bag and pulled out his pistol crossbow.

“He might not be a great shot,” whispered Kurt. “Or, he was being nice and giving us a warning.”

“I don’t think ‘time to die’ is a warning,” whispered Bane. He lifted his head and saw a large shrub waddling towards them. “Oh crap. This guy’s in a ghillie suit.”

Kurt mouthed the words and looked perplexed. Great. Some survivalist nut is protecting a cemetery.

“We were just visiting my daughter’s Aunt Tali,” yelled Kurt. “We don’t want anything. Let us go, and you’ll never see us again.”

“Kurt?” the voice yelled back. “That you?”

* * *

They biked slowly as Sophie’s Uncle Phil and Kurt talked.

“Some local boys – I don’t know who they are – are abusing Angels,” said Phil. “I came to visit Talia yesterday, and I saw some of them on the inside of the fence. One of them had thrown a mover’s blanket over the top. They had surrounded a young Angel, I don’t know who, a little Mexican gal who must have been around 18, and they were touching her. I yelled at them and they took off, but I could tell they’d be back. One of them flipped me off before joining the others, and they were laughing. Sick freaks.”

“It’s just as bad up in Dallas,” said Kurt, looking towards Sophie.

“Oh, man, I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s OK. She’s quite the fighter. I know two boys who won’t be bothering girls again.”
Or anyone else, ever,
he thought.

“Good,” said Phil. “Well, I’ve got some lemonade and cookies at the house. Time to carb up.”

“Really?” said Sophie. “Awesome. If I eat another protein bar, I’m going to crap playdough.”

Kurt glanced at her, but given his own freedom of the tongue, couldn’t chastise.

The house was at least 100 years old, and functioned quite well without electricity. Phil had a water pump twenty feet from his back porch, and showed them how he’d learned to make candles from beeswax. He had a dozen white hive bodies resting atop old construction sawhorses with orange and white stripes, which seemed to set the appropriately cautious tone. He still grew wheat and corn, and raised chickens, and had plenty to trade with neighbors for whatever he needed.

“It was cancer,” said Phil at dinner. “There was a lump in one breast, then both, then along her armpits. She was in so much pain, it was a relief when she died. Now she has no tumors, but doesn’t speak, doesn’t know who I am. She eats Cheerios out of a dispenser and water from a fountain with a motion detector. Still works since it’s solar, but still… I wish I could leave, but where would I go? I’d feel disloyal to Tali, but is she really there? Then those disgusting kids started messing around, and I just snapped. Sorry if I scared y’all.”

“It’s OK,” said Bane. “It’s hard to know what’s what anymore.”

“Where are y’all headed? You didn’t come all this way to see Tali, did you?”

“No,” said Kurt. “We’re on our way to Houston.”

“What’s down there?

Kurt paused. “The ocean. We’re going to continue to the coast, look for a boat.”
That’s close enough to the truth
, thought Kurt.

“Sounds cool. You know how to sail?”

Kurt and Bane looked at each other. “Nope.”

“That’s OK,” said Phil. “I didn’t know how to farm. Now I’ve got six goats, a hundred chickens, and a million bees.”

“We learn by doing,” said Sophie. It was something Kurt had said to her many times over the years, but it was the first time he’d heard it from her mouth.

* * *

That evening Bane helped Phil solve an interesting problem – which is to say, a problem Bane found interesting. Working alone on the farm, Phil was nervous to lift heavy things, in case he got hurt. Bane noticed in the junk in the barn was a wheel barrel-sized bucket, which would fit on the front of Phil’s garden tractor. Though the tractor wouldn’t run because it was out of LNG, it was light enough to push once the motor was removed.

Bane salvaged an actuator from another piece of machinery, and with a little cleaning, it worked well. With a six inch stroke and 600 pound lift, and leads suited to the tractor’s 12 volt electric system, it could use the recharge from a solar cell and get several lifts done before it lost power. Phil was so delighted that when they headed out in the in the morning, he’d given them three jars of honey, some fried chicken, three dozen saucer-sized sugar cookies, and a mason jar of corn whiskey.

“This may be the only 300 mile bike ride in human history where people gained weight,” Bane said as he chewed a large sugar cookie, the 20 mile per hour crosswinds blowing crumbs everywhere as they rolled down I-45 South.

Kurt tapped his bike computer. “We’ve got to maintain a better pace than this. Can you do 13 miles per hour?”

“I guess,” said Bane. He freed his hand from the hand crank and flipped the electric-assist switch, then brushed his beard free of crumbs. “What are we doing now?”

“We’re averaging 10.”

Kurt accelerated to 13, and Bane dialed up the assist until it found a steady 13 MPH rhythm.

“Yeah, I can do this, but I’ll need a break every hour.” Kurt figured that’d make their 11 hour ride into about a 13 hour ride, but that was OK. After resting at Uncle Phil’s, Sophie and Kurt felt great. Bane, however, was haggard.

At their first break, Sophie tuned the radio.

“This is the USS
Fort Worth
at Coast Guard Station Galveston. We have room for 22 survivors. We will update the count as we accept new passengers. Message repeats.”

“Twenty-two?” Kurt cursed.

“How far are we, Dad?”

“Two hundred and forty miles. We can do this in two days, if we press.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Bane. His throat pulsed as he rested his eyes from the sun. “Next stop, Huntsville.”

* * *

Going to Huntsville was synonymous with going to Hell. The Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville contained the state’s two execution chambers: Polunksy for the men, and Mountain View for the women. Yes, there was a state university, Wal-Mart, and a Dairy Queen, but the signs along I-45 warned not to pick up hitchhikers, and the rifle towers told you why.

In the 19th century, when Huntsville opened, the prison was whites only. Blacks were not imprisoned. They were whipped, or killed.

Until the mid-20th century, prisoners were killed by electrocution by Old Sparky, a high-backed wooden chair built and maintained by the prisoners themselves, with leather straps at the ankles, wrists, waist, chest, and a piece of leather headgear that looked like a 1920s football helmet, hanging like a saggy crown as it waited for the next skull to bake.

In the late 20th century, Huntsville unit became the first place in the world to execute a man by lethal injection, his arms held out like Jesus, torso raised so he could apologize or rant, before being laid back down and silenced.

No matter how the Chamber of Commerce tried, no one wanted to go to Huntsville.

Kurt, Sophie, and Bane felt no differently now that there was no power grid, and Huntsville was home to over 5,000 of the worst Devils to rise up from their deaths in Texas, mad with unknown terrors, clawing off their own skin, only to have it regrow, ripping out their own tongues, only to have them reform with a new scar.

After the grid had collapsed, and news only came by travelers, there were only rumors as to what was left of Huntsville. Money meant nothing. Kurt couldn’t imagine anyone was left maintaining the prison, even out of a sense of civic duty.

Could we behead 5,000 Devils? Burn them? Would that even work? Kurt thought.

Even if we could kill them all, would we be the same when it was over?

He thought back to a book he’d read about the Nanjing Massacre. A century ago, two Japanese officers had a contest in occupied Manchuria to see who would be first kill 100 Chinese with a sword. It was popularized in the Tokyo and Osaka newspapers, where stories of fearless hand-to-hand combat by these modern samurai fed the blood lust of the people, and the PR needs of the imperial Japanese war machine. In truth, the two second lieutenants had simply beheaded dozens of Chinese prisoners.

What does it take to act like that? Did such people still exist? Were they still people afterward?

Bane had fallen behind. Kurt and Sophie circled back the half-mile to where he stood, leaning on his cane and pouring water over his head.

“Sorry. I tried to get y’all’s attention, but I just had to take a break.”

“No worries. I was daydreaming. Let’s have some dinner.”

The trees were now East Texas pines, tall, straight and fragrant. The land had gotten hilly. If it weren’t for the nearby prison of the damned, it’d be a beautiful place.

“You tried any of that moonshine yet?” said Kurt.

“Not yet,” said Bane.

“Wanna try it?”

“How’s our pace?”

“We’re ahead of schedule, actually. We can stop here for the night if you like.”

“How far to Huntsville?”

“About 10 miles. We can blow through there in the morning. I really don’t want to wander through there tired if I can help it.”

“Yeah. I... that makes sense.” Bane was deeply tired.

“That chicken will probably be OK if we cook the bacteria out of it. It’ll be a little burnt when we’re done. Cool?”

Sophie and Bane agreed.

As the chicken smoldered in the pan in its own fat, sending whiffs of black smoke off the pan and spits of flame back into the campfire, Bane unscrewed the lid and sniffed.

“Doesn’t have much of a smell.”

He sipped the clear liquid, and coughed. “Oh. My. God. I think a tooth just fell out. No?” He rubbed his tongue across all 32. “Guess not. Man, that burns.”

He handed the jar to Kurt. “Man. The fumes of my own breath are making my eyes water. Nice finish, though.”

Sophie looked at him.

“OK.” He passed her the jar.

She took a sip, made a face, and handed it back to Bane. “OK, that makes no sense to me. Why would anyone drink or make that on purpose?”

“Ah, there it is,” said Kurt. The warm feeling spread, and Bane nodded.

They snored. The chicken was gone, as was half the Mason jar of corn whiskey, and the fire was dying. Sophie was wide awake. She took the flashlight with her to gather more wood.

When she got back the fire was dead, and the snoring had subsided into a low, dueling grumble. She tossed a few dry twigs and pine needles onto the fire, and blew. The embers ignited the needles, which made too much smoke. She brushed them aside and pitched in dry leaves and pieces of bark.

A small flame grew in the center of the fire, and in its light, she could see the creatures standing where her father and Bane had been, breaths rattling, mouths open, eyes wet and black.

Chapter 10: The Polunsky Devils

There were too many and it was too dark to fight, though that didn’t stop her from kicking one Devil deep in the crotch. She felt the sting of a fist on her upper lip, and went groggy.