Steps (12 page)

Chapter 23

The Light   
(Perry)

H
is sister did not scream or cry. His mother stared out the window as if watching a rainfall. His father cranked the steering wheel left and right dodging limbs and mud and rocks in the road. The soldiers in the back of the truck stared up with their rifles laid across their knees. Billings must have sensed Perry watching him, because his eyes peeled away from the sky and locked onto him.

Billings mouthed the word,
Okay,
and Perry nodded.

He wasn’t sure what
Okay
meant. His whole head felt numb. His hands and legs felt like rubber attachments glued on at the wrists and hips. He must have been
Okay,
because they still trusted him with a shotgun.

A steady rumble of thunder filled the air, but it wasn’t thunder, and everywhere dust and smoke rose from the end of a white streak stretching from ground to outer space. Perry wondered how far the meteors had come, and he wondered if they really were brimstone like Shelly Lynn said.

One of them streaked low enough he heard it whistle through the air. The high-pitched whine silenced when it topped the trees. Smoke and dust flew up in a sudden fury. A few seconds later, a low
whump
shook the truck, and the soldiers gripped the truck bed to keep from rolling overboard.

The flag waved up ahead, reaching out from the trees atop a fence post, a dirty white thing hand-painted the way Gentry described,
Like Hell you’ll take it.
It displayed a double-barreled shotgun with both hammers pulled back, drawn so it pointed at those below the flag.

His father wheeled the truck onto the overgrown driveway with ruts on either side and grass growing up the middle. Branches scraped the sides of the truck, grass raked beneath it.

They passed a graying, decaying hay barn consumed with weeds supporting its weight. They passed an Old MacDonald tractor, at least that’s how Perry thought of it, one of those red ones with two little wheels in front and two big ones in back, all rusted and kneeling half-sunk into the ground with some sort of attachment behind it. They passed a boarded-up house where the road forked left and right.

“Go left,” Shelly Lynn said. She raised her voice over the thunderous impacts.

A meteor whistled into the trees behind them. This tiny burning sun exploded, lifted them off the ground, and threw shattered limbs and rock into the side of the truck.

Shelly Lynn’s side window burst and sprayed glass into the backseat. She flicked her head away as the glass blew into her, and she fell across the seat onto Perry’s lap, twisted in the seatbelt, and the truck lurched forward with a surge of speed.

The soldiers piled on top of each other as the ground shook again. The back window burst, and none of it remained but a few thumbnail chunks stuck in the rubber lining. The rest of the glass blew forward into the cab of the truck, into the back of Perry’s ducking head and his mother and father in the front seat.

Perry leaned over his sister and tucked her beneath his body. His mother hunched beneath the dashboard. Now only his father remained exposed, ducked into the steering wheel as he sped ever faster along the dirt road. The truck bounced from the unevenness of the road and lifted sideways as a meteor struck the trees to the left. His father wrenched the wheel against the force of the explosion, angled right to bring the wheels back to Earth, and when the truck leveled off they faced an overgrown shack of a house littered with leaves and limbs and a busted rocking chair on a covered front porch. Doors and windows had been ripped away or shattered. His father yanked the wheel left, managed to avoid clipping the side of the porch, and they lurched off the road into what used to be a back yard. The truck plowed over a fallen tree, a pile of cut wood, a metallic object that appeared to be an ancient tricycle.

Here the yard dropped off suddenly, and even though his father braked and fought their descent, they slid down an embankment nose-first, through briars and underbrush and sapling trees. A sudden stop tossed Moore and Gentry through the back window and into the cab with Perry and his sister. A quick glance showed Billings still in the bed of the truck, but Perry didn’t see Arroyo and Fletcher. The truck came to rest nose-down at a slight angle, upright but with its front dipped downward.

Water and mud caked the front windshield. Beyond that, water inched up over the hood of the truck. His father lay stunned against the steering wheel, and Perry thought he might have busted his jaw like his mother, but he lifted his head, shook Perry’s mom, and then said to Perry, “You all right, son? Shelly Lynn?”

An explosion rocked the hill behind them, and the truck slid farther into the lake. Another explosion shook into the lake and tossed a huge wave over the front of the truck. It was as if a giant hand had reached up from the lake, took hold of the back of the truck, and dragged it off the shoreline.

Perry felt someone in the bed of the truck tug at his shoulders. Billings reached around Perry, unsnapped his sister from her seatbelt, and slid her through the back window. Grasping Perry by the shoulders, Billings dragged him up behind his sister and said, “Get her over there, stay low.”

Billings pointed to the shoreline, a few hop-skips away through a wretched black mud sucking at Perry’s feet and calves. Perry did not question the order, and his sister did not fight him as he carried her over his shoulder through the mud and into the briars lining the shore.

The briars snagged his clothes and scratched his skin, but he pressed through them until he reached the section laid flat by the truck’s downward plunge. Behind him he heard movement. Billings pushed his mother and father forward, with Gentry and Moore in tow.

An explosion announced another meteor, this one in the lake, and a second wave crested the truck and doused them as they crouched on the shoreline. Billings motioned for them to fall against the shore, and he and Perry flanked Shelly Lynn, while Gentry and his father lay on top of Moore and his mother.

Perry thought of Jack at the top of his beanstalk listening to the giant’s footsteps as he hollered his
fee-foes.
No voices hollered for Perry, but huge booming footsteps pounded the ridge and threw mud and broken trees down on them. Footsteps slammed into the lake and tossed waves ashore that washed them off the bank and sent them all scrambling back to the shoreline through the mud, screaming, all of them calling for Shelly Lynn and finding her tucked beneath Billings’ arm.

The footsteps boomed up the mountainside as the sky grew ever darker. They boomed in the faraway hills and the valleys to the other side of the mountains. They boomed farther away across the lake and into the hills until they stomped softer and less frequently, and they tiptoed, and they were nothing at all.

Perry’s ears rang, all of him drenched and muddy, and he lay still until Billings tapped his shoulder and said, “I think we can get up. Seems to be over.”

When he raised his head, Perry saw the truck nosed into the lake, buried to the bed beneath mud and water. His parents seemed to be all right, as did Gentry and Moore and Shelly Lynn, clutching to Billings’ chest. Only Billings seemed eager to test his legs, or his one good leg.

His father finally rose and made his way over to him in the mud, leaving his mother unable to move in the muck, and he said nothing to him and Shelly Lynn other than, “Okay. Okay.” He seemed about to say something else, but he put his arms around Shelly Lynn, plucked her away from Billings, and carried her to her mother.

Gentry, Moore, and Billings screamed up the hilltop. “Arroyo! Fletcher!”

Perry heard no answer, and neither did they. Gentry began up the bank and made it halfway before the slope angled steeper, and he could find no hold for his hands and feet. He shook his head and said, “No good. We’ll have to find a way up farther along the shoreline.”

“I can do it,” Perry said. His legs were still rubberized, but he forced them along with his rubber arms and rubber fingers to claw at the dirt until he climbed up to Gentry.

From here it appeared a lot steeper than from the lakeside, straight up, and he understood why Gentry gave up.

“We’ll go around,” Gentry said. “It’s too steep.”

“No, no, no. No. No it isn’t.” The words stuck in his mouth, and he stumbled over them as if something had become disconnected between his head and tongue. An electric tremor pulsed through him, the same feeling as when he jabbed his funny-bone, but up his spine and into the base of his skull. He closed his eyes and let it settle, and then dug around until he found a root and pulled himself up a few feet. He lodged a foot into the bank and shoved himself higher, switched hands and found a new finger-hold and slid a few feet higher. With the next hand-over-hand he managed to grasp a sapling tree still rooted in the mud, and he pulled himself up the bank about two lengths of his body. Here the vegetation began to thicken, and he found another rooted weed and pulled himself higher, took hold of a briar bush, ignored the prickling in his palms as he tugged himself to within a few feet of the lip of the ledge.

When he topped the ridge, he stood and regarded those below. They stared up at him. He expected one of them to wave or say something, but they only watched in silence, unmoving, until Billings cupped his hands to his mouth and said, “Stay within shouting distance, Maggot! You copy!”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“See if you can find Fletch and Arroyo. They got tossed out by that house. Did you see the house?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“You find them, you start yelling and we’ll find you. We’re right behind you. Move out, Maggot!”

Perry’s legs shook, and his mouth tasted of dried cotton. The back of his throat itched, but he doubted he had enough phlegm to warrant a cough. The words
One more mile
haunted his mind. He aimed toward the house and forced himself into a jogging run along the path the truck had taken. The ruts cut deep enough to sink his calves, and they formed a winding trail that looked like something Shelly Lynn might have drawn.

Perry smelled smoke, the odor of burning wood, campfires or chimneys or the hearth back at the cabin. He stopped and searched for the source, but could not see it. He called out, “Fletch! Arroyo!” Nobody answered, and he ran on.

He ran past a rusted propane tank, one of those huge ones shaped like a submarine. The truck tracks barely missed it. He reached the house and screamed, “Fletch! Arroyo!” He stopped and held his breath against the will of his lungs and listened for an answer. He heard only the cracking of trees.

As he ran on, the smell of burning wood intensified. Smoke crept through the trees about chest-high, rising through the treetops and merging with a growing darkness in the sky.

He stopped next to the house and hollered the names again, held his breath, and heard nothing. The house itself seemed to answer with the slapping of wood, as if someone threw a plank flat on the ground, and Perry’s head snapped left in time to see a man standing at the window of the house. Black covered the figure’s eyes and face. Its mouth drew open in a silent scream, and it disappeared, Perry heard more slapping of wood as the man ran through the house.

He ran back the way he had come, and the man from the window stumbled behind him, joined by a woman in a tattered, calf-length dress. The woman screamed something that sounded like the screech of a hawk. Her head cocked back on her spine, and her arms and legs went rigid, and she fell forward and writhed on the ground as the man pressed on.

Perry followed the ruts sucking at his feet, crawl-running as much as the man behind him. He made it past the propane tank to where the ruts dropped off the edge of the ridge. The woman shot up, but she trailed well behind them both, and when Perry reached the lip of the ridge, he stopped and faced the man rushing toward him.

He planted his feet and waited, and when the man neared enough, Perry ducked, stepped aside, and threw his arms against the man’s chest. A hand raked Perry’s face and left the burning evidence of its passing along his neck and cheek, and then the man tumbled down the slope. Moore remained down there along with Perry’s father and mother and Shelly Lynn. He did not see Gentry and Billings, but his father scrambled toward the man rolling down the embankment.

Perry swiveled in time to see the woman racing toward him. The remains of her dress fluttered behind her like a broken cape, and rather than charge at him, the woman slowed, stopped, and put her hand to her chest. She appeared about his mother’s age.

Her head tilted sideways and her eyelids fluttered across blood-filled eyes. She wrinkled her nose and breathed heavily through her mouth. Perry saw the black pupil in the middle of a deep-purple iris, surrounded by the fresh-meat red where white should be. She stepped left and jabbed him with a finger, withdrew it as if the touching had burned her. Then her mouth widened and she let forth with another of her hawk-like screeches.

Behind him he heard rushing feet, and when Perry spared a glance, he saw Gentry and Billings running through the woods toward him. Gentry led, well ahead of Billings and the kick-run-kick stride of his titanium leg. Gentry bent as he ran and scooped up a stick about the width and length of his arm, and when he reached Perry, he laid the stick against the woman’s head.

The woman stumbled from the impact but did not fall. Gentry raised the stick and slammed it into the side of her head repeatedly, and it clunked like he was banging the trunk of a tree. With each strike, her head clocked sideways and righted itself, but her eyes never left Perry. Her hands never came up, and her feet seemed to work of their own accord to keep her standing.

The stick shattered, and Billings appeared beside Gentry. He slipped behind the woman and snaked his arm around her neck. She stood shorter than Billings, and he lifted her off the ground, swung her to the dirt, and fell on top of her. Billings grunted and wrenched his arms to apply more pressure to the back of the woman’s neck. He kicked, twisted, said, “Go, bitch!” and with another grunt there was the audible crack of bone.

The woman’s head snapped left at a sharp angle. Her legs stiffened and her arms reached out with splayed fingers, alive with the electric shock of nerves firing one last time. Her eyes rolled in her head, searching until they locked on Perry. Her mouth opened but no air moved through her throat.

Billings tightened his grip as she writhed, but Perry could see there was no connection between her body and mind. On her face appeared a stark calmness in contrast to the violent twitching of her body, and as the body quieted, her blood-filled eyes remained fixed on Perry. Her eyes never left him, and when her body stopped moving, Billings rolled off and left her on the ground.

Billings stood, and they all studied the woman. Billings rubbed the inside of his forearms and said, “Boys, if we weren’t infected before, we sure as hell are now.
FIDO
, right, Genny?”

“Yeah,” Gentry answered. He said to Perry, “Fuck It, Drive On.”