The Forsaken - The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two (65 page)

But Dawn wept the most.

93 – Élan

His eyes grated with sand and pain as he
pried them open. Lapping water was the only sound that made it
through the hollow roaring in his ears. His skin was alive with
army ants, tearing, stinging his flesh. The air was hot, scalding.
The assassin’s body was a blister of pain. Upon opening his eyes,
warm fluid spewed from his left—it was dead, blind—the right showed
blurred shapes around a neon green scar. He could just make out the
singed remains of Lucifer’s skull. The black hair was burned away
to the line of Felon’s chest, before cascading into the space
between them. The Fallen’s legs were twisted convulsions of melted
flesh and bone. Quickly, Felon looked away from his own forearms
where they crossed over Lucifer’s breast. The skin was blackened
and burned, yellow fat liquefied, oozed from cracks.

He looked across the gray gap of water.
Boiled bodies floated and bobbed. Steam curled upward, smelling of
pork. The buildings of the Sunken City that had stood as obstacles
had been crushed by the shock waves—little remained. The ocean had
swallowed their memory. The Demon’s yacht had been destroyed. The
assassin was crushed against a three-yard section of scorched deck.
The rest of the boat had disintegrated when the atomic tsunami
rammed it into the collapsing debris of the flooded streets. It
slammed against a gargantuan pile of rubble and was still.

Across from him, Archangel Tower’s upper
stories were gone—the remains of the building, a burning stump,
rained debris into the inferno of the City streets. The Level’s had
collapsed in the nuclear blasts and burned now, white hot in their
deepest reaches. All over the world a similar madness had burned
the human race. He had only seen some few factions at work. There
were others from below, and others from above that had fought out
this final convulsion in the blood of history. He knew that the air
would rain the ashes of bones.

The assassin tried to draw a breath, but drew
in his own body fluids. No more breaths. That was it. His vision
was fading. His heart beat heavy in his ears. The end. Felon tried
to conjure something warm from his life to leave with, but he could
only curse. Pain kept him nailed to the torturous present. He had
pain.

Some would survive, but that was fine.

It was an old world with plenty for all
now.

Roaring, teeming humanity was gone. It was
over. It was the end.

And it was good
.

The fiery Apocalypse had torn a hole in the
overcast above the ruins. Sunrise fell across the cloud in diagonal
orange bands. The assassin welcomed the darkness as his vision
faded.

94 – First-mother

Dawn was having trouble with her sewing. Not
the actual mechanics of it, she’d been sewing for so many years now
she could do it with her eyes closed—once she got going. Once she
could thread the damned needle. A memory of Mr. Jay suddenly warmed
her. He’d grumbled many times about his failing eyesight, spitting
and cursing good-naturedly every time he had to put his glasses on
to read up close. The faces he made!

“Jay!” she scolded, looking over her work,
catching a glimpse of her grandson rolling off the old giant’s
massive ribcage. “You be careful now. Arthur’s not a hill made of
sand and twigs!” She shook her head.

The circus giant winked gleefully at her,
giggled and kicked his legs up as the boy climbed onto him again.
The six-year-old howled like a warrior, brandishing a kill-flower
he had made out of sticks. He charged into Arthur’s arms. Dawn’s
warning would go unheeded again.

“Lord!” she hissed, a smile appearing on her
face as the thread finally slipped through the eye. Under her
breath she said, “Foolish old and young you men.”

A pang settled on her heart a moment but was
soothed by young Jay’s laughter. Her Jeremy had been just such a
fool. Then a blush struck her features. “A romantic fool,” she
chuckled, remembering their early courtship and eventual union.
They’d had five kids together before the radiation sickness killed
him. Arthur and the other workers had warned the people to stay
clear of the lands to the south, and the salvage party had. One
worker, an old fellow named Marcus, said the wind might have been
playing inland that day. Must have carried dust or worse. And there
were places that hadn’t been looked at yet, or mapped, where some
of the foreign bombs might have fallen.

But Jeremy and the rest of the salvage party
had got the radiation poison bad, and they died none too
gently—some of them with their skin peeling off like a leper’s.

Dawn’s heart sank momentarily before being
cheered out of the darkness by the boy and the giant. They were
singing now, where they lay in the grass with the sun beaming
down.

Still, life at the new start was hard, and
radiation wasn’t the only thing ready to make an early death of
you. There were sicknesses aplenty, and infections. Not to mention
the rigors of childbirth.

She was no stranger to it. Indeed, Dawn had
turned out to be the First-mother. When life started again and the
forever kids got growing, it was just a matter of time before the
babies started, and it took a lot of time. Dawn even beat the older
girls, but once the first one came, it was a downpour for all.
Sadly, she counted many of her friends lost or badly injured in
that unwelcome process. And there was only so much the workers
could teach, and only so much that they knew. There weren’t enough
to go around and serve and warn and protect all the people.

Dawn herself was forty-five years in the new
counting. That was, the counting when she started growing up again,
like all the other kids did. And she was doing what she could to
pass on the knowledge she’d got from all the others. That’s what
old Arthur had told them, and the other workers too.

They weren’t going to be around forever, so
the young ones would have to take their places and teach the next
generations and beyond. It was clear to all the people that the
workers were worried about “backsliding” as Arthur called it.

“Can’t have you survive and then lose
everything,” he’d told her one evening over a cup of mint tea. “Of
course, that’s not so bad in some cases. There’s things I’m sure we
could leave behind.” Then he’d gotten solemn, “Not to suggest I’m
in agreement with old Solomon.”

Solomon was a worker who wasn’t happy with
the old ways and disagreed with the other workers teaching the
people how to live and to remember the days of old. Solomon thought
the world was given a new start, now that the old gods were dead,
and the best thing the people could do was to forget what was past.
He was so worked up about it that he convinced other workers and
caused quite a rift at Nurserywood. Finally, he led a good third of
the people away—those that agreed, and he said they were going to
go to the north and west and build lives based on the world not on
the mind.

Since then, little word came of Solomon or
those who followed him. Salvage groups and hunters said they saw
people on the path ahead from time to time but there was no one
there when they arrived.

Arthur thought the whole thing was stupid.
“Going back to nature just leaves you standing there with your ass
hanging out,” he’d said with humor. “And I’m an Indian, I should
know. The way of people is progress. If you ain’t there. God help
you when those who are come.” He’d always end his tirade with the
same thing: “It’s a free country!” He’d shrug. “I just wish they
hadn’t stole my native history books.”

Of course, he was none too happy about some
of the other teaching either. One of the workers started using a
book of Bible stories to teach the people how to read. That was
innocent enough, but some among them were religious or had become
so during their years of hiding, and they got great comfort out of
reading the books and talking about the stories. It wasn’t long
before some of the people were meeting to read the books and to
talk about their meaning.

“We don’t need any missionaries either,”
Arthur had puffed on more than one occasion. “And I’m an Indian, I
should know. Religion’s the last thing you people need—goes over
you like a freight train.”

Dawn was never entirely sure of all of
Arthur’s references, and she’d been so busy learning about the ways
of going forward, that there was little time to focus on anybody
else’s past.

Thinking about Arthur’s talk usually got her
thinking about Mr. Jay. A strange feeling went through her then, or
it was a friendly warmth heated up with loss. A heaviness clutched
her features momentarily, but passed into a smile. No one ever saw
Mr. Jay again. The last glimpse Dawn ever got was of him riding
across the burning plains caught in desperate conflict with the
pale rider.

And never after their travel north to
Nurserywood, or in the first years as the aging started.

They’d never seen him again.

She and Old Arthur talked about Mr. Jay a lot
and wondered what had become of him. The giant had always liked
him. He said he’d first met the magician at Nurserywood not long
after he’d arrived with the treasure. “He was circus folk if I ever
met one,” Arthur had laughed. “Through and through a
performer.”

And Dawn remembered him and missed him every
day of her life. Lots when she first got back to Nurserywood, and
even more when she realized she was starting to grow up. More and
more she missed him when she grew in size and then lots again when
her body changed into a woman’s. And when she hooked up with
Jeremy, and she’d missed Mr. Jay so much when she’d had her first
baby, a boy she named “Jay.” And she’d missed him, really missed
him like hope and dreams and life when the little fellow died of a
lung infection his first winter. And she missed her old friend like
warmth and fire as she knelt in the snow, or on the earth, staring
sadly at her little baby’s grave.

But something in his memory kept her going,
and kept her trying. He had a way of turning things upward, of
calling attention to brighter days ahead. And so she missed him
when her kids Eliza, Boone, Thorn and Jeannie were born. And missed
him some every day as they grew and enjoyed success and weathered
storms, and started having kids of their own. And now Dawn only
missed Mr. Jay a little bit every day, but she missed him.

And she hoped that he was safe. Or that if
something took him that it had happened quick and with little pain.
And if that was the case, she hoped he was getting lots of rest in
the world beyond. Because she hoped that’s what waited there for
her.

But most of all, when she was up to watch the
sunrise, or getting kids settled in as it set, she hoped he’d come
back some day.

****

The story continues in

The Fifth Horseman

The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Three

by G. Wells Taylor

***

COMING 2010

The Cabin

The green lizards watched the approaching
rider from a hole in the ancient sandstone foundation of what used
to be a settler’s cabin. They had just scampered in ahead of the
sun’s first rays. With luck the cool dry shade would keep them
alive for another day. A long night of hunting had scared up little
for the hungry pair—a white-ringed moth, a mouthful of fly larvae.
Moments before, they had quarreled over and devoured a shiny brown
scorpion. The desert kept them close to starvation and they were
always on the watch for food, so their quick yellow eyes were
instantly drawn to the distant motion. The thin black line leapt
out at them, a twitchy needle of shadow against the shimmering
orange dawn. One of the lizards chirruped, raised its tail. The
other chased an ant.

A man rode up the rocky shelf that sloped
toward the cabin. The coating of dust and fine patina of salt from
endless days in the arid Savagelands obscured the true color of
both horse and rider. Reigning in his mount, the man paused a
moment bent forward in his saddle to study the ground. He raised
his hat brim quizzically with a thumb then jerked back into motion,
angling his horse toward a crumbled stone wall that circled an old
well. Dust rose from each weary hoof.

With a snap of the reins the rider halted.
Something—a sound: a sudden burst of air had traveled through the
cabin’s pine door. A cough perhaps, severe—exploding from lungs
painful and tubercular. He dismounted slowly, drawing one of his
guns and sliding the hammer back. His spurs clinked as he walked
toward the structure. The rider set a gloved hand against the pine
planking, and pushed the door aside. Sheltering his heart with the
doorjamb he peered into the darkness.

The cabin’s poor construction allowed many
thin lines of light to burn through cracks in its walls. The effect
dazzled his vision and obscured the room within. A dangerous
millisecond passed as his eyes adjusted. The rider stepped in, gun
level.

A man was propped in the far corner. The
silhouette pushed itself upright, wheezing.

“Are you the man?” The voice was husky and
dry. An oily crackle in the lungs foretold his death.

“Some say,” the rider rasped, features
clouded. His eyes squinted against the glare, flared in
recognition. “I know you…”

“Horseman…” Another voice as brittle and dead
as bleached bone rattled behind the door.

The first gunshot drove the green lizards
from the relative coolness beneath the cabin. Reckless with terror,
one was snatched up in the talons of a starving hawk. The other got
away.

****

Titles by G. Wells Taylor

The Apocalypse Trilogy

WHEN GRAVEYARDS YAWN – A Wildclown Novel

THE FORSAKEN

THE FIFTH HORSEMAN

Wildclown Mysteries

WHEN GRAVEYARDS YAWN

WILDCLOWN HARD-BOILED

WILDCLOWN HIJACKED

MENAGERIE