Hell's Requiem: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Page 7

  A thought socked his gut. He was homeless.

  This was something he’d never considered before. Surviving this world was difficult enough with a proper shelter. Now he had none.

  Maybe it was his concussion, because he didn’t feel the anguish he should have after losing his home. He almost instantly accepted his fate without a protest or any angst.

  He also felt a strong urge to move, as if he was losing a window of opportunity if he stayed there. This, of course, was silly because he had nowhere else to go now.

  He almost jumped when he noticed the big mass of a person lying beside him. This was the giant who had shot him three times earlier and was about to shoot him again, for a last time. But something, or rather someone, stopped the giant.

  Tom turned back nervously, remembering the shadow of a man he suspected had shot the bullet that killed the giant and then appeared above him like a ghost, telling him not to interfere. And then he was gone, or Tom passed out. The order of events was somewhat of a blur.

  His mind wrestled with the details, now remembering the child talking to him—no, preaching to him—about his own evil intentions. Yeah, they were evil, but someone more evil than him beat him to it. He couldn’t hold back a vague smile when he glanced at the vacant face of the giant man, who was now missing part of his skull.

  Pushing himself to his knees, he examined the area around the man to see if his Sig had dropped when he was shot. Although he suspected the shadow-man had taken this, he looked carefully anyway. Maybe the giant had another weapon. He felt behind the big man, struggling to get his hands under the huge body.

  No weapons, but he felt the top of something in one of the giant’s back pockets. Sliding his thumb and forefinger into the pocket, he teased out some papers. He sat back down, feeling a little winded by this small exercise.

  Unfolding the two pages, he glanced first at both, then decided to examine them more closely. The first page was a map and the second page was a document that gave the holder entry to the community of scientists known as Cicada.

  The last word caught his eye. Cicada was an insect that waited in a larval stage for years to pass before it made its way to trees by the millions and then emerged as noisy insects, like some biblical plague. But this was something different. This Cicada was a sanctuary, a place for scientists, and this page was an invite for a scientist and his family to come inside Cicada and survive whatever was happening outside.

  Tom glanced at the giant, looking for further confirmation: the giant surely wasn’t a scientist. Tom recalled the other two were talking about this map and invitation and that they had taken it from someone called the Teacher. Tom suspected that this Teacher fellow must have taken this from the scientist it was intended for.

  For a moment, Tom considered what it would be like to be part of a community of people whose purpose was to help each other survive and maybe find answers or solutions to the current apocalypse. A part of him longed for this. Reality shook this thought loose.

  He refolded the papers and thrust them into his own back pocket. Again, he felt the need to keep moving, like some unseen clock was winding down.

  He lifted himself all the way up and trudged over to the other end of the pile of materials. Once he had to steady himself on a stack of two-by-sixes. On the way, he looked around for his take-down rifle, hopeful that maybe this wasn’t snatched up too. Of course, it was gone. At least Scarface left him his knife and pack, seeing it was right where he left it against the pile of materials.

  His eyes watered more, but at least the clouds weren’t as thick where he stood by his pack. He tossed a scornful glance toward his missing home, knowing he had to investigate the grounds around it closer. Besides finding out what had happened, he hoped to find anything that was salvageable, besides his bug-out bag.

  He plucked a bandanna from his pack, tied it around his head, and then zippered the pack shut and slung it around his back, through both arms. He made his way toward the house, scanning the grounds. The smoke grew thicker with each step closer to its source, though it parted for him, almost like it was drawing him in.

  Besides his investigation, Tom had a gnawing thought he wanted to confirm. He had planned to use the gas can to create a diversion and draw the intruders out of his house, so he could kill them. When he found the emptied container only a few feet from where his house stood, it confirmed his suspicion.

  The shadow-man they called Scarface was far colder than even he, burning his house down, and Tom’s intruders inside it.

  Tom cast his gaze forward. What he had thought was a hawk screeching again, sounded now more like a hollow groan. And he also knew it wasn’t above him, but near what used to be his front door.

  As he approached a misshapen form which lay unmoving on the ground, he knew it belonged to the woman who had coaxed him with her sex, drugged him and then set him up to be shot and killed (or so they thought). She now lay before him, ironically discarded like she’d insisted earlier that he be. She wasn’t dead, but appeared to be dying.

  Her face was ashen and matched the gray tint of her smoldering legs and feet. The rest of her appeared no better. She still wore his blue oxford shirt, but it was like the rest of her, a blackened hue. Below the breast-pocket’s fold was the unmistakable hole from Scarface’s gun. A stained cone of brown met the ground where she lay.

  More of the chronology of events clicked into place for him. Scarface set his house ablaze, and the woman must have been on fire when she ran from the front door. The man must have been waiting, shot her once, and then left her to die.

  Tom spun in both directions to see if he could find Shorty, breathing more heavily now through his bandanna.

  Then he exhaled.

  The final home invader must not have made it outside his home before he burned to death or was dispatched by Scarface somewhere else. Either way, Tom felt pretty confident the shadowy figure made sure Shorty got what he feared too. A small part of him almost felt guilty. Almost.

  The woman tried to speak, her words came out in a gurgle. “It’s the boy.”

  Tom thought she might have said, “It’s a toy,” but he wasn’t certain, so he bent over to her, not being able to put aside a feeling of compassion for a woman who spared none for him.

  Her eyes free-floated before finding him, and she attempted a weak smile. “Sorry,” she whispered. “Not your fault...” she said and then closed her eyes.

  A coughing spasm ejected a splatter of blood and saliva like a small spew of lava from a volcano, before it went dormant again. Tom had to move away to avoid being hit.

  Because her face too was covered in black soot, when her eyelids fluttered open and then closed again, they were like flashlights being turned on and off again. Her batteries appeared near gone. They turned on with some intensity once more, blazing at him. So he slipped the bandanna from his mouth and knelt down so that his head was only inches from hers.

  Her lips moved first and then a jumble of words strobed out, “The boy...”—she paused for a long time—“Wanted to hurt the Teacher... Mimi’s there... Cicada’s where they’re...” her words dimmed. Her light flicked off for good.

  Hell’s Requiem Playlist, Track 10

  Song/Artist: Losing My Religion by R.E.M.

  Keywords: me in the corner; me in the spotlight; losing my religion; keep up with you; said too much; haven’t said enough

  14

  Her words rattled in his head endlessly, like rocks in a tumbler.

  In spite of the stinging pain in his eyes from the smoke, and the throbbing in his side and chest, where he was shot because of this woman, he still knelt beside her and gnawed on her seemingly jumbled words. But he kept coming back to the same two.

  Could he have heard her wrong?

  “Mimi’s there.”

  Mimi? His Mimi?

  How could this woman know anything about his wife?

  His knees burned from being pressed into the ground for so long. Still, he remained motion
less, but for his labored breathing. His bandanna hung below his chin, serving no purpose. But he was too in shock to readjust it.

  Time for him stopped as he considered what her words meant to him. The woman’s dying words were lucid enough and felt like a confession. So he had to assume they were correct, whatever they meant. Or was she just hallucinating at the moment before death? He had to know more.

  While remaining beside her, for the second time, he patted her down. This time, he was searching for some clues to help him untangle the mystery of her words.

  This time putting modesty aside, he removed her shirt—it was his shirt after all—to see if she was hiding something.

  The only new revelation was a crude looking “GA” tattoo stenciled onto her right arm, right above her bicep. It appeared more like a brand. Could that have been done by the Teacher’s group? he wondered.

  He found nothing else of value, and then slipped the charred clothes back onto her body, not wanting to leave her half naked.

  Tom sat back, away from her, and drew his bandanna back over his mouth and hmphed out of frustration. He really knew nothing more at this point.

  He pulled out the Cicada map and invite letter once more and took his time reading them.

  The woman also mentioned Cicada in her final words, saying, “Cicada’s where they’re...” They’re what? What did she want to say before death cut her words short?

  Did she mean that they were going to Cicada? He looked at the map again and considered for a moment what a long journey that might be from Missouri to Colorado. Then he was thunderstruck by a thought.

  He’d assumed when the woman paused after “Mimi’s there” and then “Cicada is where they’re...” that they were two separate thoughts. Maybe she was trying to say that Mimi was there, with the Teacher and his group, and they were all going to Cicada.

  Did he really want to see Mimi again? Before yesterday, he always thought he did, but now he wasn’t certain.

  This separate revelation hit Tom hard, sapping away his remaining energy. He lay back down on the ground to consider what all this might mean for him and to get out of the sting of the smoke. He kept remembering her words about how it was his fault for “murdering” their marriage. But was it? He accepted blame so quickly and easily, because he was the cause of their son’s death. But was he really the sole cause of the death of their marriage? Or had their marriage died long before she brought finality to it?

  Angry memories flooded his mind: the heated words between them, her complete disregard for what he had built for them, her unwillingness to accept what he was telling her... And there was her infidelity.

  He had pushed those thoughts aside all these years, focusing only on his own guilt for their son and her final words. He didn’t want to spoil the good memories, of which there were some, by remembering the bad.

  Then he plucked from his recollections the one about the letter, and what came after.

  He recalled the day, she disappeared again, without telling him. She didn’t have any friends in town and never carried her radio, leaving him with no way to reach her. So he went looking for a note from her to explain where she might have gone. She had done this a couple of other times. When he looked around her desk, just off the kitchen, he found the letter.

  The handwriting on the envelope was foreign and almost unreadable. It simply said, “Mimi.” His heart throbbed wildly as he recalled his feelings when he had first opened the envelope and found the letter inside, scrawled in the same pen. He was thunderstruck.

  The author’s letter spoke of his love for her and desire to do sexual things to her. Finally, it offered a key in it—he could see the imprint on the page as evidence that it once was there—and said she could come over whenever she wanted to do something he couldn’t even read, and was glad he couldn’t.

  He remembered being unable to move for most of the hour he had noticed she was gone.

  Tom didn’t say a word, even when she returned that afternoon with a solemn smile and a slightly better than normal attitude. But the rest of that day, he boiled, thinking of the man who wrote the letter.

  Then he glanced at their wall clock, a wedding present from her mother, and it said it was Friday. He nodded in agreement with his weakly cobbled-together plan and marched out the door, without telling her where he was going.

  At that moment, while lying on the ground, regurgitating his angry memories, a Phil Collins song came to mind.

  15

  Ten Years Ago

  Warsaw, Missouri

  The man in overalls was right where Tom expected to find him: bellied up to the bar and ready for his knuckle sandwich.

  Phil Collins was playing on a distant jukebox, but it was impossible to hear the words to one of Tom’s favorite songs over the numbing banter of Daisy Duke’s inebriated patrons.

  Daisy Duke’s was an infamous hangout that had everything the town’s drunk men could want: cheap booze—featuring swill-like Pabst Blue Ribbon, for God’s sake—loose women, some even for hire; somewhat functional satellite broadcasts of football; and the main attraction, a wait staff of young women wearing cut-offs and unbelievably small denim tops, unbuttoned and tied so as to barely hold in their cleavage. And in case the patrons didn’t notice their ample assets, the waitresses were taught to bend forward when addressing their customers, so as to draw in their blurry eyes. Because God forbid you strain your neck while trying to leer at a waitress who was most likely still in high school.

  Tom loathed this place with every fiber of his body. He didn’t mind the drinking, though he had given it up a while back. He also had nothing against scantily-dressed waitresses. It was the fact that many were barely pubescent, and none were out of their teens. It was disgusting.

  The owner—a prick of a man, of the highest order—wanted to bring his version of Hooters to their little town. Being a Dukes of Hazzard fan, he made his waitresses dress up like Daisy Duke. And although the idea wasn’t horrendous, it was the fact that he only hired the youngest of girls to tempt their middle-aged male patrons out of their coin which got to him.

  Tom had reported the place a few times to the local sheriff, but he suspected the sheriff was one of Daisy Duke’s patrons and perhaps got a little something under the table to keep quiet. So having young girls, too young to drink, and therefore illegally serving alcohol, became an accepted practice.

  Then Tom found another reason to hate the place.

  Griff Tanner was his EMT neighbor and the town’s infamous bully. Griff owned his own ambulance, so that he could steer patients to the doctors and clinics who paid him the most. He also made extra money handing out business cards for accident attorneys, who’d pay him to send business their way. Griff apparently was also a patron of Daisy Duke’s, since opening day. And today Tom had learned that Griff was sleeping with his wife.

  When Tom found out about Mimi’s infidelity, he had a simple solution to make the whole problem go away: threaten Griff with death if he even looked at his wife again. It wasn’t a great plan, but it made Tom feel good.

  Yet as he crunched his way through the slog of peanut shells and other debris carpeting the floor, toward Griff’s back, he’d forgotten one crucial problem with his plan which made him hesitate. Griff was a hulk of a man who stood six-foot five. Approaching the guy, Tom’s mind flashed the possibility that he’d end up being the one getting killed, and the bully getting his wife afterward. His hesitation was just momentary.

  Griff was ogling one of the youngest waitresses Tom had ever seen. Her freckled face was that of a pretty child no older than sixteen, but her bar uniform, at least two sizes too small, showed off way too much of her God-given endowments. When Griff grabbed her backside, the young girl shrank away, eliciting guffaws from Griff and his buddies. Tom saw nothing but red. Griff was old enough to be this girl’s father—older!

  Tom quickly stomped over, grabbing an empty beer glass—one of the heavy ones—from a nearby table. At the bar, Tom cranked the bas
e of the substantial tumbler down hard on a set of Griff’s beefy fingers, curled over the bar-rail.

  “Can I get another—Oh, I am so sorry,” Tom said as he also drove the heel of one of his shit-kickers into the man’s ankle with the force of a pile-driver.

  Before Griff could cry out his pain, in a flash—so that it wouldn’t be seen by anyone—Tom chopped with the heel of his hand to Griff’s larynx.

  Griff’s quarter-ton weight collapsed hard. But before he tumbled, Tom had wrapped his arm around the man’s trunk and tugged his beer-laden belly up to the bar’s edge, letting it take most of the flagging man’s weight.

  “Oh, looks like our man has had a little too much to drink.” Tom said, his voice overly satirical.

  Griff’s friends, still awash in their alcohol-soaked laughter, continued to hee-haw, but now at their friend. Griff’s eyes were wide and flailing around in their watery pools, his lashes beating frantically. Tom leaned in so that only Griff could hear him. “I heard you and your pedophile friends hung out here, manhandling teenage girls. And I see my information was correct.”

  Griff attempted to offer something in a mild protest, but all that came out of his foul breath was “I...” before he succumbed to a coughing fit.

  “Don’t worry you disgusting pervert; I’m not here because of that, although that’s reason enough to take you out back and put a bullet in your fat gut. I’m pretty sure no one would miss a degenerate like you.”

  Tom stopped before telling Griff the real reason for his visit, when he sensed someone was behind him. He turned and there was the buxom teenager who had escaped Griff’s clutches just moments ago. She smiled sheepishly, holding her head down either to hide the embarrassment of her costume or the small blemish forming on her cheek. Tom couldn’t be sure.

  “Thanks mister,” she said with a high-pitched Southern drawl—they all had to speak this way. “This one’s on the house.” She carefully deposited a pitcher of piss-colored beer in front of him. She hesitated, and then said in a softer voice, “But Griff was just playing. Best not to push it too far.” She attempted to shrink away again.