The Holocaust Engine, page 10
Root fragments?
Blood covered any holes that might be there, but the shape of the right side of her face was wrong now. Her eyes opened, and he startled.
“Alive. Son of a bitch,” Reagan mouthed. “Okay, Mary, we’ve got to get pressure on this. Get in back with her.” He pulled off his shirt and handed it to Mary. “Spade, get ready to drive.”
The back of Spade’s head shook. “I’m sorry,” he stammered, while Reagan helped position Krissy’s head on her mother’s lap. “I thought we was clear. I really did. Then she went back for your garbage bag and I was yelling, but she got back in the water and that’s when it happened. It’s my luck. That’s how it’s always been.”
“Shut up, Spade!” Reagan closed the rear door behind Mary, and climbed into the front seat.
“It’s like I told you that time we was loading them bodies up in the van and all of the sudden it wouldn’t start,” Spade said, tapping at his neck tattoo. “They don’t call me Ace, Reagan.”
“I’ve got you,” Mary whispered, taking her only child in her arms and gently shushing at the girl’s sobs. “It’s going to be all right now.”
“We tried and tried it,” Spade said, “and every time it worked, and I was like, with my luck, the time we go with your family it’s gonna all go to shit. You just watch.”
They started again to the hospital, Spade driving through debris, Reagan ignoring Spade’s confession, all the time looking over his shoulder at what had come of his careful plans.
Mary held Reagan’s shirt against the side of Krissy’s head, stroking her hair and crying with her. When they serpentined through the car shells past Highway 1, Mary finally managed the words. “Where is he?”
Reagan said nothing.
“Reagan, where is he?”
“Mary—”
“You said you would take care of us.”
“Mary—”
“You said everything would be all right.”
“...be all right.”
“He was infected, Mary.”
“You said we would make it.”
“...make it.” Spade nodded his head knowingly, and Reagan glared.
“He was going to snap,” Reagan said, still looking at Spade’s pained smile. “He was hiding it from us, and pretty soon he would have—”
“What happened to my husband, Reagan?” Mary cried softly. There was no venom in her words, only sadness and disappointment.
He turned around slowly. “He drew their attention.” Reagan looked away from the woman, lovely in her sorrow. Into his lap, he said, “He kept them off of us... the best he could.”
Spade stopped the car in front of the coned-off driveway. He turned in his seat and looked from Mary over to Reagan and then back again, nodding as if this were exactly how he had always known it would end.
“We’ve gotta get Krissy inside,” Reagan managed. “I can’t tell how bad it is. She’s conscious so... I don’t know.”
Krissy looked up at Reagan with her one good eye. With only half her face, she still flashed bitter resentment.
“Ah... shit.”
“...shit.”
Goliath
Key West Island, Old Town
When the feeds died, Lacewood was all alone. His father and his father’s current wife, Ashley, had been vacationing somewhere in the Mediterranean (he could not remember where or if his father had even said). He was Facetiming one of his guildmates when it happened. He tried his tablet and PC and out of sheer desperation he even turned on the television. Nothing.
Carter Lacewood was just seventeen years old, but he was smart enough to know that it was only a matter of time before the looters would come so he braced the exterior doors with heavy furniture, took the double barrel, twelve gauge shotgun with the decorative stock down from the mantel and loaded it with the single box of shells he found in the master closet. He ate from the refrigerator and drank from the faucet. He released his pet Quaker Parrot, figuring that it would have a better chance on its own. He slept mostly during the day, particularly during the afternoons which – except for the government aircraft – tended to be quiet.
When the looters did come he fired the shotgun out of open windows, never hitting anyone and never trying. Lacewood was a delicate boy and he feared what they would do to him if he ever hurt someone. He calmed himself with cough syrup and the thought that tomorrow the net would come back, and someone’s voice would tell him that everything was about to return to normal.
But the sounds outside told a different tale. He heard gunshots and glass breaking; he heard crying and crazed laughter. He heard a man die, begging his attackers to stop, on the street only two houses down. Then, several times each day, he heard the PA from one of the helicopters:
“Everyone is to shelter in place. Be aware that help will come as quickly as possible.”
This was what the fall of civilization sounded like and for a delicate boy, all by himself, it was terrifying.
And yet, if anything, the silence was even worse. It was not just the anticipation. He had never known silence. Not true silence. Never in his life. Without the sounds of his friends, without even a single text message it was as if the entire civilized world had collapsed in on itself in an instant and left him in a complete vacuum of isolation floating all alone in the reaches of outer space. This was a silence that could be felt. He waded through it while moving from window to window gripping his shotgun. It brushed up against him when he sat down to eat and curled down on the floor to sleep and he hoped with all his might that one of his guildmates – that someone – would come for him.
The void of silence was so complete that Carter Lacewood began to hear, very distinctly, the sounds of his own thoughts. This frightened him almost as much as the looters or the prospect of starvation because it was not a single voice that he heard. Lacewood found that his head was full of voices; a chamber populated by a chorus of sounds that ranged from the familiar to those so outlandish that he wondered if they had not migrated in from someone else’s head. Was this what the electronics had been covering? He sang to himself to try and drown them out, but it was no use.
He thought that it could not be normal. There was a voice for each one of his guild mates and one for his father. A sultry voice spoke of needs. A voice like his father’s second wife, Brenda, scoffed at everything he did. One he named the stranger and another he named the freak. The voices rarely agreed, and he suspected that a few actually hated each other. The one thing they could all seem to agree on was that Carter Lacewood’s future looked very, very bleak.
One night he heard sounds at the back door and when he peered around the living room wall he saw a pair a flashlights trailing back and forth across the kitchen. He startled and fired the shotgun without lifting it, tearing into floor tiles and snapping a leg on the kitchen table. The lights scattered.
He had not wanted to shoot. He had been down to his last two shells. Now he had only one. And the voices knew, that if he were going to kill himself, neat and quick, this would be his last chance. For the rest of the night they chattered endlessly, team hope against team fear, with fear growing ever stronger and more confident.
When morning came, he was sitting on the balcony.
Carter Lacewood’s favorite thing about his father’s two-story Bahama-style house was the view from the balcony. Bracketed on both sides by towering palms, the Lacewood boy could sit out on one of the white rocking chairs, strum his guitar, and look over the railing and the little one-story houses on Angela Street and out into the cemetery. He had always loved the cemetery.
Of the 100,000 or so bodies buried on Key West Island most were buried above ground, some stacked one on top of another. They had to be since you can only dig two feet down into the island soil before hitting solid coral rock. The cemetery is full of lifelike statues and intricate sepulchers. It contains the famous stone-turned-internet-meme of Pearl Roberts, who answered everyone that had called her a hypochondriac by having “I told you I was sick,” engraved on her marker. It has the monument to the USS Maine and the 260 men who died when it went down off the coast of Cuba; a statue of a sailor stands an eternal vigil, scanning the horizon day and night for the sailor’s return.
Lacewood would often play out a tune, imagining that they could hear him. When he was in the mood he would point to the statue of the woman above Carl Von Cosel’s tomb, for some reason naked, her hands tied behind her back and call out, “this one is for you, Sweetie.”
But on this morning his guitar was put up in its case. Instead he had the shotgun, with its last shell, braced against the wooden floor boards, his toe tapping ever so softly against the bottom trigger. He had been seated like that for over an hour, sometimes his toe fully inside of the trigger guard, other times just resting against the stock. It was quiet this morning after last night’s bombing over on Stock. Not even a helicopter in the air. It was only Lacewood, the voices, and his pet Quaker Parrot, now on the railing, who after having been released, had never gone further than the neighbor’s trees.
“You can go now,” Lacewood said bravely. The bird made a noise, ruffled up its green feathers, and shuffled its feet. “What?” At this it flew to one of the Palm trees. From a high branch it turned to the cemetery stones and squawked.
Down in the cemetery smoke, swirling and eddying around the tombs, seemed to form shapes and silhouettes so very close to human. For a brief moment he thought he saw a whole crowd of the dead, looking up at him with anticipation.
“Would they be less lonely if we were with them?” His own voice sounded, aloud, drowning out the other voices inside his head. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Bird?” He turned to the bound woman, “this one is for you, Sweetie,” he said and twisted the pad of his big toe until it was flush with the trigger.
That was when he noticed that the bound woman seemed as if she had moved. When he blinked away his tears and looked closely it seemed to him that she had somehow turned her head. In fact, her whole body looked as though it had shifted. It was hard to tell with the smoke, but to Lacewood it appeared she was looking at someone, someone walking through the cemetery grounds, the same direction that his bird was facing. Lacewood knew his mind had to have been playing tricks on him, nevertheless he shaded his eyes and peered out at the far edge of the cemetery.
And that was when he saw Hunter Grant.
Hunter Grant was not in Lacewood’s guild. Short and powerful, with Roman hair and eyes that always fixed forward as if staring with total resolve at some terrible future only he could see, he was striding between the above-ground vaults, straight towards the Lacewood house. Then he looked up and saw Lacewood; he did not smile or even acknowledge, as though that were exactly what he had expected. No more. No less.
Carter Lacewood took his toe out of the trigger guard and stood to meet his classmate. He wondered if the other boy might have news. But when he went downstairs, moved the chair and opened the door and Hunter Grant said simply, “you got food?” and he answered, “yeah, I still got some,” it seemed strange that Hunter Grant had simply said, “good”, and walked past him, dropping his backpack in the entryway.
But that was not the strangest thing.
The strangest thing about Hunter Grant showing up at Carter Lacewood’s door was not that he only had in his possession a backpack of clothes, a toothbrush, and an aluminum baseball bat. It was not that he said, very matter-of-factly, “I’ll take the sofa”, when the house – at the time – still had three perfectly good and empty bedrooms. It was not that Hunter Grant seemed to have somehow known that Lacewood was still on the Island, in the house, by himself. And it was not that Lacewood barely knew Hunter Grant (although that did give him a reason to pause). But then Hunter Grant probably needed a roof over his head after the Monroe County Detention Center suddenly threw all of its inmates out into the chaos and besides, the whole reason Hunter Grant had been kicked out of school and Lacewood supposed at least part of the reason he had been locked up (he did not have the courage to actually ask), was that he had come to Lacewood’s defense against Ben Trahan and Joey Shipp when they had decided to kick his ass in the Key West High parking lot. The strangest thing was not even that once he established his residency in the Lacewood home Hunter Grant had immediately taken on the role of a kind of surly older brother that Lacewood could never seem to please.
No, upon reflection Lacewood had to admit that the strangest aspect of the entire episode was that once the others in his guild who were still on the island found out that Hunter Grant was living there, the Lacewood home not only did not repel them, it actually became a kind of magnet, pulling all of them inside its walls until it eventually housed ten instead of two.
After Hunter Grant took Lacewood out to find the others, Face had come first, staying the night, when Old Town had power and New Town did not. The next morning, they paused their PVE game of Elder Scrolls so that Hunter Grant could help him “get a few things”. They came back with a pair of suitcases. The twins were next. Not really twins, not even related, Shawn Robb and Billy Blankenship answered the door of Billy’s mother’s trailer and within five minutes had collected everything they owned of value (which mostly consisted of posters and old heavy metal cd’s that the four of them could easily carry) and took the upstairs bedroom opposite Lacewood’s.
Vera Krasinski did not move in at first since the elderly great-grandparents she lived with were still on the island. But after her grandpa ran out of oxygen for his breathing machine Hunter Grant, Face, and Lacewood, rolled him down the wheelchair path on Rest Beach for one last sunrise. The two smaller boys sat with him at the water’s edge while he died, and Hunter Grant stood over them all like a protective silverback gorilla carrying a black aluminum baseball bat with the word ‘Defiance’ emblazoned across it in red.
After that they all moved Vera’s great-grandmother, who had no idea that anything had changed on the island, at a slow, tense pace, through the back alleys until they reached the Lacewood house and set her up in the downstairs master. Vera slept in the room, sometimes on the bed and sometimes on the floor and her friend Lindsey MC, who had known Hunter Grant since childhood, and had visited twice before moving in to room with Vera and Granny.
The last to move in, after Face’s big brother Carl – who also was not a gamer and made sure everyone knew how little he thought of Hunter Grant – was Chris Meyers. Chris ‘Thyroid’ Meyers, was never quite a member of their guild before Key West became the Kill Zone. They had hung out plenty, and Thyroid gamed with them whenever they let him, but he was always on the outskirts. They made him take point when they played Call of Duty and they laughed when he died. Thyroid Jenkins! But all the same he needed a place. Like Lacewood he was an only child and after Hunter Grant and Face’s big brother Carl went over and moved his mother and stepfather’s bodies out of his house he had come to stay. The others didn’t go so hard on him for the first few days. None of them had lost family except for Vera.
But, like Carter Lacewood, they had all been left. Some like both of the twins’ moms, who worked at the Seaside in Marathon, and were both on the other side when they closed Highway 1. Some like Face’s dad who left on a friend’s boat the day they blew the bridge and could not be bothered to make arrangements for his two sons. Lindsey MC’s mother had been abandoned by husband number five but had already found a replacement while going door to door begging for food and Lindsey had said goodbye to the woman with little more than a shrug. None of them knew who left Hunter Grant while he was locked up, but they could all tell that he was like them. Someone had left. This was nothing new for them. They were all used to being afterthoughts.
Maybe that was why Hunter Grant called the shots. He looked them all straight in the eye. Never smiling – none of them had ever, ever seen him smile – but always fixing them right in the eyes. There was no escaping those eyes. Those eyes were on a mission. They had a plan for each of them. He was turning them, the nine of them, into a group. A gang.
The Lacewood house was base. All of them knew the drill if the place got hit: throw the buckets of molded metal ‘caltrops’ in front of the door. Grab the weapons. Ambush when they enter. Fall back through the cemetery to the now empty Krasinski place if they were overrun.
Lacewood’s dad owned a precision cutting business and had always been proud of his million- dollar home. Lacewood figured the man would bust a vein if he ever got back and saw what they had done to it. The bedrooms were bad enough; the twins had covered a print of Pissarro’s Sunset at Eragny with a Nine Inch Nails poster, thrown their clothes over everything, and littered the shag carpet with candy wrappers. Even with Granny Krasinski on the bed, Lindsey MC had still decorated the dresser tops next to Vera’s hamster cages with jar lids of ashes from the last of her personal stash. The downstairs television room looked like it had been ransacked, and every morning, just before noon, Face’s big brother Carl would emerge from it and tell them all what immature little shits they were. All except for Hunter Grant (Carl knew what Hunter Grant had done to Ben Trahan and Joey Shipp, and had heard the rumor that he had beaten up someone else inside of the jail). The kitchen and living rooms were overrun with boxes and jars of all the food they had scavenged. Both of the bathrooms needed the maid service and a good bucket of bleach. Lacewood did not care. And if the old man ever did come back he would tell him so.
For the first time in his life, Carter Lacewood was happy. Not just distracted and entertained. He was actually happy. It did not make sense on the surface, that was sure; they were all trapped inside a government kill zone (that was what Hunter Grant called it) with boats in the water that shot at you if you passed one of the blinking buoys they were setting up all around, and helicopters and drones that flew over non-stop looking for anyone trying to escape (That was what Face’s big brother Carl said they were doing). On an island with a bunch of people infected with a disease that turned you into a psychotic murder machine (they all had this on good authority even though none of them had seen one, the news was even starting to call them zombies before the feeds went dead, so that was that), and a bunch more people who were using it as an excuse to do all the crazy, mean, evil, things they had always wanted to do. But he was happy nonetheless. They all were. Except maybe Hunter Grant. It was hard to tell with him.
