Standing on the deck of the Harper’s Vengeance, I shivered in the cool of the early morning, and stared at what remained of Collingswood Ohio.
Like a wall of slow-moving chalk dust, gray fog hung thick in the air along the shoreline a few hundred yards off, drifting down to the water in curtains that obscured my sight of the ruins. Deep within the fog, faint calls rumbled like thunder, strange bellows and shrieks that sent shivers down my spine. A cold stillness clung to everything, the sky not yet awake, and it chilled my skin enough to remind me that fall was almost here. The air tasted strange, sour, and reminded me of the factory district along the river in Louisville, with its huge smokestacks and funny-colored dew. Ropes creaked, water lapped at the hull, and few of the crew spoke as they set about lowering the ship’s anchor and furling the broad white sails.
Boots echoed on the wood behind me, and I faced Jamie and Chris. Ever since my conversation with Captain Roberts, they’d been treated much better, with no more beatings, better food and water, and Peter had brought some hammocks down to the brig so we didn’t have to sleep on the floor. Boatswain Emelia hadn’t come near us the entire time, something I counted as a blessing in disguise, but none of that could shake the acidic knots that snaked through my guts like eels.
I tried to put on a brave smile, the Type-9 heavy with fresh cartridges on my shoulder, and glanced at the longboat that waited for me in the waves below, a small red canoe on a towline behind it. “I guess I’ll see you guys tomorrow then?”
Jamie gnawed at her lower lip, a habit she’d been unable to kick so much that it bled, and her eyes scoured the nearby shore for movement. “Stay away from anything that stinks like rot. Dead stuff always draws Speaker Crabs, and those things are scary in numbers. And if you spot any Puppets, don’t fight, just distract them with noise, since there could be dozens that you don’t see nearby. Also, don’t forget to keep mud out of your ammo, you don’t want to get a jam when—”
“Jamie.” Catching her gaze, I gave her a slight shake of my head, wishing I could run to the toilet one more time to throw up from all the anxiety inside my brain. “Don’t worry about me, okay? Just . . . take care of yourself, no matter what happens.”
She sniffled, and before I could say another word, Jamie hugged me as tight as she could with her one good arm. “If you die out there, I’m gonna kick your ass.”
Tears attempted to surmount my eyelids, but I pushed them down, and simply nodded. “Thanks.”
Turning to Chris, I fought a jumble of emotions in my head. What could I say to him? If today was my last, I needed to make this moment count, but I didn’t even know what to do.
His sky-blue eyes pierced mine, and to my surprise, Chris reached for me without a word.
Wow.
Warmth flooded through me, pleasant tingles from head to toe, his broad chest like a solid wall of silky steel. Behind the fabric of his shirt, I could just detect Chris’s heart beating under his skin, a comforting rhythm against my own. Despite the faint aroma of sweat, something about his scent made my brain fuzz over, and heat pooled in my core like molten lava. His arms held me tight, and I shut my eyes to rest my chin on his shoulder, relishing a sense of security I hadn’t felt in days.
“Go north.” His whisper tickled my ear, low enough to keep the nearby guards from overhearing, but enough to snap me from my trance. “Forget the stupid box. Get back to New Wilderness and tell them what happened. Whatever you do . . . don’t come back here.”
Disappointment sliced through me, and I choked back a lump in my throat. Did he not think I would succeed? Did this mean nothing more to him than a convenient ruse to help me escape? Or was he that set on my survival that Chris never even considered if I wanted to survive without Jamie, or him? He’d meant well, but part of me had hoped, even for a brief moment, that perhaps after so many years of being the skinny wallflower I’d at last found someone who wanted more than my camera skills. Sure, Chris was trying to protect me . . . but I’d never felt safer than standing there, wrapped in his embrace.
He moved to pull away, and I tightened my arms around Chris’s shoulder blades to breathe a few stubborn words back to him. “I’m not leaving you.”
With that, I tore myself out of his grasp, and climbed down the rope net flung over the ships rail to the waiting longboat below.
Peter and four others waited in the boat, the pirates manning the oars while I sat in the prow, Peter in the stern. As soon as I was aboard, we cast off from the Harper’s Vengeance, and I watched over my shoulder as the ship, with my two friends at the rail, grew smaller and smaller in the distance.
A single lantern hung from a pole on the front of the boat like a tiny bowsprit, and its yellow flame sputtered the closer we drew to the gray fog.
“Masks on.” Peter barked, and I reached into the small green bag at my belt to pull the gas mask free from its pouch.
The pirates had been given a dozen or so military-grade gas masks by ELSAR during one of their ‘exchanges’, and they’d provided me with one for this mission. It smelled like chlorine on my face, but the rubber sealed to my skin, and once I’d tightened the straps over my head, I could hear the hiss-hiss of my breath being drawn through the mask’s round metal filter.
Surrounded by the gloom, I peered through the plexiglass visor of my mask, and realized there were little wafts of ash falling all around, the water droplets in the air tinged pavement-gray on my palm. Not much else came into view, the fog-ash mixture so dense that at times I could almost cup it with my hand.
“Should be getting close.” Peter leaned over the side to peer at the water, his face imperceptible behind his mask. “The chemical trails are getting stronger. See the color in the water?”
I craned my head to look, and watched tiny ribbons of greasy rainbows reflect in the waves around our boat. “What is it?”
“Some kind of contamination.” Peter reclined back on his seat in the stern. “When the graybacks bombed this place into oblivion, they set off some fertilizer storage tank somewhere, and it’s been burning ever since. That’s where all the fog comes from; fumes and ash driven by countless fires that never went out. The soldiers say it’s burning slow enough that it won’t affect the rest of the county, but it wouldn’t be the first time they lied about such things.”
After another ten minutes of rowing, I could see the vague outlines of squares in the water below of what had once been houses. More shapes rose from the ashy mist, broken sections of taller brick structures, crumpled chimneys, and twisted remnants of old steel girders. As the water grew shallower, more ruins surfaced, rusted hulks of cars, snapped telephone poles, and collapsed piles of rubble where homes used to be. Wavy strips of undulating black rock lay in lieu of the asphalt streets, the tarmac melted in the extreme heat of the bombs, and distant banks of fog glistened with various patches of red flickers. Dark smoke choked the sky overhead, blotting out the sun, and fine slate-colored ash clumped up on my arms, legs, and in my hair. Strange heaps of brownish-white sticks could be seen everywhere, and for a moment, I thought they were old bushes or shrubs.
My eyes adjusted to the gloom, and I spotted the first skeletal hand, outstretched from one of the heaps, frozen forever in death.
Oh man.
The gas mask stopped my hand from covering my mouth in horror, and behind me, Peter grunted, avoiding the sight with both eyes on his shoes. “Imagine, fire so hot it melts the skin right off your bones in an instant. All those people, just gone, and when they died, the mutants took over. Now it’s nothing but a graveyard.”
Glancing down, I fought the urge to shut my eyes, as we glided right over a submerged patch of more rotting corpses. Arms and legs lay entangled in desperate final embrace, ribcages stacked one on top of the other, dozens of skulls gaping up at us though empty sockets, their broken jaws opened wide with agony. They were everywhere, in the cluttered streets, poking out from under the rubble of homes, inside the charred cars and trucks, hundreds and hundreds of people with nothing left to them but their bones. How had it felt that night, when the missiles rained down from the sky? Had they seen it coming? Did they understand what was happening? Did they know who was to blame, or were they too focused on trying to find a way to keep their families alive for just a minute longer?
I dragged my eyes away from the grotesque sight and scanned the fog around me for a distraction. A foolish part of me wanted to believe that I would spot the box lying on the bank somewhere, tucked between some blades of grass like a lost apple, but I knew the pirates wouldn’t have risked losing our ransom if the mysterious box was easy to find. No, from where I sat in the longboat, all I could see was the forest of ruined structures around me, endless banks of gray fog, and that man with the yellow chemical suit in the window—
What?
My head snapped back around, and I stared at the ruined corner of a house, barely standing, with what remained of a window on the halfway-submerged ground floor. Nothing occupied the dark window save for a fluttering scrap of dirty yellow cloth, likely dropped there by a crow or some other curious winged creature.
Thump.
The long boat lurched, and I nearly fell over, looking around to see a muddy patch of long grass in front of the little wooden prow. Land. From here on, I would go alone.
My legs and arms felt numb and heavy as I stepped out onto the grass, the pirates untying the red fiberglass canoe and pushing it to me with a long pinewood paddle tucked inside it. None of them looked me in the eye, save for Peter, who handed me a folded bundle of paper inside a plastic Ziploc bag.
“The map won’t help much, but it has all the streets and old landmarks of the town before it went to hell.” He pointed over my shoulder deeper into the whirling clouds of smokey mist. “I’d start near the square; apparently the soldiers had an evacuation site there before the massacre. Be careful where you go, alright? We can’t breathe this crap, but the mutants can, and there’s hundreds of them in there. And above all else, if you see something . . . abnormal for this place, especially toward the center of town, stay away from it.”
Taking the bag, I tucked the map into the pocket of Chris’s flannel shirt, and lashed the tow rope of my canoe to a nearby log so it wouldn’t float away. “Okay. So, when I’m done . . ?”
“We’ll be waiting further down the coast.” Peter hopped back into the longboat, and the pirates rowed off into the fog as he stood in the prow to call out to me. “We can’t stay here with the air as bad as it is. If you find the box, paddle north along the shoreline. You’ll see a coal barge, big as a house, you can’t miss it.”
The mist swallowed them up, and for the first time in a long time, I was all alone.
Okay Hannah, stay calm. Just do what Jamie would do. Keep your eyes open.
I drew a breath through the gas mask filter, pulled the submachine gun from my shoulder, and started up the debris-filled street.
With the pall of vapor that filled the air, there wasn’t much in the way of sunlight, the entire town clouded in what amounted to a very overcast day. A light breeze kept the falling ash moving, but I still had to shake the tiny flakes from my clothes every so often. Thanks to my gas mask, I couldn’t smell anything, but I wondered how foul the air must be if I had yet to see so much as an insect anywhere in my walk. My footsteps crunched on bits of stone, asphalt, and even glass at times, loud as cannon fire in the deserted streets. Every nerve ending in my body fired on edge, and I focused my mind on the image of the black box, repeating the numbers in my head over and over like a mantra.
LDB01106. LDB01106. LDB01—
Something blurred in the extreme right of my field of vision, and I spun to raise my weapon, palms clammy against the cold steel.
Nothing, save for rubble, and a fire burning a few blocks away.
I quickened my pace and climbed over a stack of charred wood and shattered bricks, my boots dislodging crumples of ash from the pile with every step. A little voice in the back of my head screamed at me to turn around and check behind myself, but no matter how often I did, I never caught sight of anything substantial. Shapes moved in the distance, sometimes highlighted by more fires that lit up the fog banks with flashes of orange flame, tall angular shadows that moved with jerky lunges. More than once, I could have sworn I caught eyes leering back at me from holes in the rubble, but every time I turned my head to look again, there was nothing there. Bare feet slapped at warped pavement when my back was turned, low gurgles chittered from the ruins, and metallic screech-thumps rattled closer in the mist.
A loose stone clattered somewhere nearby, and my heart skipped a beat.
Okay, I definitely heard that.
Scanning my surroundings, I spotted a halfway-intact ruin, and strode for it with steady, unpanicked steps. If something was following me, I couldn’t reveal that I knew, or it might pounce. No, I had to do like Chris said in the farmhouse; I had to outsmart whatever was back there.
As soon as I rounded the corner of the building, I searched the crumpled wall with my eyes, and sure enough, there was hole roughly the size of a couch ripped through the fire-blackened wall of the old home. Enshrined with weeds and dripping with enough mold to give a health inspector a coronary, it didn’t scream ‘safe’ by any means, but it was the closest thing to a complete building within a three-block radius.
Click.
I pushed the button on a small flashlight that I’d taped to the heat shield on my Type-9, and squeezed into the hole, doing my best not to crush most of the weeds, or leave any muddy footprints on the water-stained floor just beyond the gap. Granted, if anything was on my trail, it could probably track me via scent, but in the case it wasn’t that smart, or simply had a bad nose, I needed to give myself as much of a chance as possible.
Inside, I paused, and swept the room with my weapon light.
Much of the interior had been burnt from the fire, only a few places on the walls and floor recognizable with smudges of blue paint, and a section of scratched linoleum. Everything else lay charred to black cinders, the floor curled and puddled where the heat had melted it, beams in the wall exposed from the collapse of drywall turning to dust. All the windows were without glass, and rainwater had left ring-shaped stains on whatever hadn’t been burned to a crisp. If I could have smelled anything, I figured it would have stank like wood rot and charcoal, but there was a hallway to my immediate front, and two walls on either side, enough to give me cover for now.
Staying as far back from the window as I could to avoid revealing my light to the outside, I edged down the hallway, pulse roaring in my ears. A door leaned inside its framework at the end, both hinges snapped, but I could glimpse a set of steps through the gap.
If I can get higher, maybe I can see further into town.
I slung the submachine gun onto one shoulder and gripped the crumbly black door planks with tentative fingers.
Crunch.
A chunk broke off in my hands, and I winced at the noise. How close were the mystery things behind me? I couldn’t hear as well from inside the house and had no way of knowing if they were right outside or not. Perhaps coming in here had been a bad idea, but it was too late now. If I wanted to live, I had to get through this door.
I put my shoulder to the door and shoved as hard as I could.
The entire thing cracked under my weight, and the planks fell to the floor with a loud latter.
Each step groaned under my boots, but I climbed to the top, and had to crouch under a snapped roof beam to wriggle into the room beyond.
It had been a bathroom at one time, with white tile on the walls and floor, an old-fashioned standalone bathtub in one corner. The mirror had been shattered over the sink, whose cupboard was rotting underneath it, and there were scorch marks on the tilework across from the nearby open window. Bits of half-melted glass decorated the floor, but aside from the rubble that filled up half the room, it could almost have been intact. There was even a discarded yellow rubber duck on the floor under the bathtub, and I nearly smiled at seeing it.
I would have . . . if I hadn’t looked out the window first.
They crept from the street I’d wandered through, six gray figures scuttling around on all fours, with seven more creeping out an alleyway further to my right, while five clambered over a collapsed house a half-block to the left. Dressed in rags, their milk-white eyes peered into the fog with hungry persistence, and some of them would stop to sit back on their feet like an ape, tilting their head to listen, mouths slightly agape with that eerie Cheshire smile.
Puppets.
My throat threatened to close up in fear, but I forced myself to keep calm, and switched my weapon light off. With all the ash and dust, I guessed the sun to be obscured enough for these things to roam at all times of day, meaning there would be no safe time for me to travel. They hadn’t seen me yet, but if they knew I was watching, they’d surely charge in their typical suicide-wave fashion. For now, they weren’t shrieking like they did when the chase was on, instead being quiet, stealthy, moving like wraiths in an attempt to track me down.
But this time I’d spotted them first.
I glanced down at my gun and shook my head at myself. There were already too many for me to fight alone, and if Jamie was right, there could be another pack not a block away doing the same thing.
“Come on, think.” Whispering under my breath, I rifled through the room, tugged open the decayed cupboard beneath the sink in desperation.
My eyes landed on a strip of canary yellow, and a light bulb went off in my head as I snatched it.
It was a rubber exercise band, about six feet long and four inches wide, the kind used by older people to keep themselves limber when they had grown too unsteady to run or walk. Thanks to the cupboard and the wall behind it shielding the band from the heat of the flames, it hadn’t melted, and was still stretchy as the day it had come out of the box.
Moving to the window, I picked at the broken wall to tear away chunks of tile and burned wood until two mostly intact two-by-four wall studs were exposed on either side of the window frame. I wove each end of the exercise band into the space and pulled it taught, tying them off with fingers that trembled in adrenalized excitement. Outside, the Puppets drew nearer, so close I didn’t dare to poke my head above the windowsill.
I sat on the floor facing the window, the band pulled back to my chest, and fished around for a chunk of broken ceramic tile.
Here goes nothing.
With the shard cradled in the section of band between my fingers, I aimed at the cloudy gray sky above, and let fly.
Snap.
The band jerked back into place, and the tile piece hurtled into the air in a long, high arc. I could see it tumble back down toward the empty streets, and outside, one of the Puppets let out an inquisitive chirp.
Clink.
Splintering into a hundred tiny fragments, the tile shattered around sixty yards down the street from where I sat, and at the noise, dozens of alarmed shrieks echoed in the roadway outside my hiding place.
Another scrap of ceramic found its way into my hand, and I aimed a little higher this time.
Crash.
Somehow, I got lucky, and from the sounds of the impact, my second shot hit glass somewhere, loud enough to draw in the rest of the pack. Grimy feet and hands scrambled over the pavement, and the Puppets ran to the source of the sound with glee, completely unaware that their prey sat not twenty feet above them.
It felt good to smile, even with the restrictive grip of the gas mask over my face, and I untied the band as fast as I could, ready to dart for the next block of ruins now that my pursuers were confused. My idea had worked, and if it could deflect threats here, why not every time I got into a bind? Maybe I wouldn’t have to fight after all. I could be like those super-spies from the movies, the ones who cracked the code, stole the secret documents, and got out without anyone the wiser. I’d be a hero, the pirates would let Jamie and Chris go, and maybe Chris would be so impressed that—
A flash of color caught my eye through the open window, and I froze.
He stood around a hundred yards or more away, casually watching me from atop one the of rubble piles that had been a house, arms at his sides. I guessed it to be a man, though I couldn’t really tell with how far away he was, as his protective mask and yellow chemical suit obscured most of his facial features anyway. He didn’t have any kind of weapon that I could see, but it didn’t matter. With that fancy suit, the fact that he’d spotted me, and the uncanny way he watched without caution from the open, he could only be from one place.
ELSAR.
My pulse jumped, and I slowly pulled the submachine gun from my shoulder, glancing down to thumb the safety off.
Raising it, I squinted down the sights . . . and saw nothing but the swirling contaminated fog.
Ice crept through my veins, and I swallowed, tasting sour fear on the back of my tongue. No way he could move that fast, the streets were too open, and with that suit, he would have been slow, clumsy, visible. Surely the Puppets would have seen him standing there at some point in their run past the rubble. But now he was gone, within seconds of me breaking eye contact, almost as if . . .
“No.” I shook my head to clear the thought away, switched the safety on my Type-9, and headed for the cramped opening beneath the rubble to the stairs. “It’s just my imagination. There’s nothing there.”
But the entire journey back down the steps, my hands trembled, and I jogged down the lonely side-streets and fire-blasted alleyways with a new sense of urgency. Every curl of fog now looked like a man in a chemical suit, every shadow a soldier, every breath of wind a potential enemy footfall. I had escaped the mutants for now, but a part of my brain hissed the nagging question I didn’t want to think about over and over in my head.
If I was truly alone out here, then who . . . or what . . . was watching me?