Authors: Craig Sargent
But within agonizing seconds the pain was too much for both of their overloaded nervous systems to handle. Like fuses blowing
in the basement, their brains both clicked into darkness. And as the storm continued to howl overhead, sending reservoirs
of radioactive water down over them and the surrounding land, both creatures—human and canine—fell into a merciful sleep.
And as they slept in a total, wet blackness, their skin sent up little puffs of acrid white smoke wherever the rain touched
it.
“U
gh, it’s uglier than you are,” a teenage boy, not older than fifteen, yelled as he ran along waving something burned and hideous
in his hand.
“Is not, is not,” his younger and fatter companion screamed out, running as fast as his thick, stumpy legs could carry him,
trying to get away from the blackened mass of what had once been a deer’s head but now resembled nothing more than something
that might have been found in the aftermath of Hiroshima or Nagasaki—a swollen, misshapen, charred mass of melted teeth, and
eyeballs that had turned to coal, twisting like snails halfway out of their socket homes.
The older teen, dressed in jeans, a tattered shirt, and not a thing on his feet, kept running circles around the fatter, shorter
one, as he was so much faster. He poked the still steaming mess at the boy, waving it into his face.
“Eat it, eat it—Chester eats it. Eats dead slime. Swallows it all the time.”
“Fuck you, fuck yooouuuuu,” the fat one screamed, waving at the air with his pudgy hands like windshield wipers on overdrive.
Totally frustrated at being unable to escape from his older brother and getting a piece of the hot slime right on his nose,
Chester sank to his knees, put his arms over his head, and burst into tears.
Ponzo, his brother, older by three years and taller by six inches, laughed for a few more seconds, wanting to squeeze all
the sadistic glee he could from the situation. Then he threw the oily, burned head away so it landed in some thorn-bushes
and sent out a gush of ooze where the barbs pierced its barbecued flesh.
“All right, all right, you fat sissy—I dumped it, okay?” Ponzo said, standing over Chester and opening his arms wide to show
he had nothing to inflict psychic torture with. Chester sniffled, peeked through his fingers, and seeing that Ponzo had given
up, rose, wiping his reddened now.
“Ahh,” Ponzo screamed, whipping his right hand around fast and squashing it against Chester’s face. The molten eye-ball of
the radioactively poached deer crushed all over the ten-year-old’s cheek and slid down the side in a paste of black and pink.
“You bastard, you. You bastard,” Chester screamed, wiping frantically at the offending substance with the sleeves of his long-sleeve
plaid shirt. He got most of it, but some stuck to him like burned jelly and left a sickening smell like a piece of burger
left out in the summer sun for about a week. He reached for a little piece of it on the ground to throw back at his brother,
but Pomp was already running off, laughing as the fat one followed behind, lumbering along like an out-of-shape cow.
The two boys had been finding all sorts of disgusting objects as they ran through the fields near their home, a sprawling
farm some four miles off. The rains of the night before had decimated about a five-mile-wide swath of land for hundreds of
miles. And in its midst—though the boys had no idea what had caused the devastation—they found smoking heaps of things left
in melted piles everywhere, the leaves and cones burned off trees as if they had been sprayed with a blowtorch.
They didn’t know what had caused it, but they sure as hell could see the results. Their bare feet would have felt the high-rad
moisture that still remained on the ground, in the soil, for it was hot like beach sand, except that the soles of both their
feet were extremely tough, as neither of them had ever worn shoes. So they ran along, poking and prodding the nightmarish
remains of all that they passed—raccoons burned down to smoking dust mops, elk with blackened horns set on burned-out husks
of bodies, like things that had been dissolved by acid. Both boys had already seen some pretty nasty things in their short
lives, but this was by far the worst.
“Hey, look here,” Ponzo suddenly screamed from over a rise as the fat one lumbered up behind him, pressing his hands against
his knees with each grunting step to get him up.
“It’s a man—and a dog,” Chester said breathlessly as he reached Ponzo’s side.
“Of course it’s a man and a dog. What are you, an idiot or something? Jesus, Chester—I don’t know about you.” He poked at
the man whose face and arms appeared to be broken out in boils, the skin itself reddened and blistered in numerous places.
Ponzo poked the tip of a branch in the thing’s stomach, then in its face. He was sure it was dead until the tip suddenly entered
the prone figure’s now for a second. There was an explosive roar as the man sneezed violently, his head jerking up out of
the mud for an instant and then slamming down again.
As surely as if a corpse had risen from the grave—or a ghost had walked through a tree—the two youths ran screaming in terror
from the event, sure that the thing was some sort of ghoul coming to get them. But after racing nearly a quarter of a mile
and discovering that nothing was in fact pursuing them, Ponzo, his curiosity getting the better of him, turned and started
back. Chester followed reluctantly, being more afraid of being trapped alone out in these woods with their dog packs—and other
things—than having to return to the sneezing corpse.
But if the puffed-up man lying in the dirt had any intentions of going after the two boys, he hadn’t tried too hard. In fact,
he hadn’t moved an inch, Ponzo saw as he came back. The man and dog might be alive—but not for long. Ponzo bent down and examined
the dog. Even though there were little burned holes right in its fur, oozing craters here and there where the high-rad rain
had penetrated into the pelt, even though it was horribly messed up, he could see that the animal was, or at least had been,
beautiful. He stroked the dog softly under the neck, and it opened one eye slightly, barely We to move even the eyelid. The
disarmingly intelligent eyes of the pitbull caught the youth full in the face, and in a flash he felt the power of the animal
and knew he couldn’t let these two die. People he could do without—but dogs he had always loved. There were four back at the
farm, big strapping things that could make mincemeat out of this one. On the spot he decided to try to help them.
“Let’s strip him,” the fat boy said, rubbing his hands together and getting down on one knee as he reached into the man’s
jacket, searching for booty.
“Get your damn hand outs there before I as it off,” the older boy said, slapping hard at the offending appendage with a small
branch, like a schoolmarm slapping an errant student with a ruler. “You really are a pig, aren’t you? Jesus, Chester,” his
brother said, shaking his head.
“Well, why not—we found ’em. It’s the scavenger’s law, you know—what you find you keep. It’s the law of the land, Ponzo.”
“You know what Dad, what Undertaker said,” Ponzo replied with disgust, herding the fat boy away from the body by whipping
him quickly but not very hard on the shoulder like a cowboy heading a steer back into line.“You can strip the dead—but not
the living. You go to hell for doing that Chester. Hell.”
“Well, how the hell
we
going to help them?” the fat boy asked, suddenly having a horrified image in his head of having to somehow carry the man
on his back, which he knew would kill him long before they had gone the three or four miles back to the farmhouse.
“We’ll—we’ll—” Ponzo said, looking around. “There—the motorcycle—we’ll put them on that.”
“But you don’t know how to drive,” Chester said, taunting the boy, as it was a sore point with their father, who hadn’t permitted
Ponzo to drive the family tractor yet, saying he was too irresponsible.
“So we’ll roll the stupid thing, you idiot,” Ponzo said, leaning over and slapping the boy on the back of the head to make
him stop his whining.
Ten minutes later they had somehow righted the big Harley and lifted the two weak, groaning bodies onto the seat, draping
them over the top like animal carcasses brought back from the hunt. Both boys were quite strong—even Chester, with his layers
of fat from eating too much fresh farm cooking. But they had spent their lives working their asses off in the many chores
of farm life and had muscles that ran deep. Walking along one on each side, holding tight onto the handlebars of the Harley,
they wheeled the vehicle forward.
It was tough going at first, as Chester kept somehow losing the grip on his bar and the whole thing would shift to the right,
threatening to topple over. But they went slowly and after several minutes got the hang of it. They didn’t exactly hit cruising
speed, but the two were able to get up to a respectable five miles per hour or so as they headed up and down the fields of
wildflowers, purple and red and white and blue in their resplendent brilliance. Going downhill was the easy part—uphill the
had. Chester was particularly worried about the final rise just before the farm. And he was right to be, for they had hardly
reached the top when he slipped in some hogshit along the side of a path and went down hard. The whole be tilted over, and
the unconscious occupants were thrown to the ground where they rolled around a little and came to a stop.
It took the boys another ten minutes to get the whole damn thing straightened out and their wards all loaded up again. This
time they got the be to the top of the hill first. But from then on it was all downhill and easy sailing across the half mile
to the main house. There were neighings and barks, slurpings and caws of countless domesticated animals. There were pens of
pigs and chickens, and many dogs were running around the place. As the two teens got closer, they saw that there was a lot
of activity in the main open yard in between two red silo-topped barns. At twenty people—from young children not older than
four to old, wrinkled women in their eighties—all were sawing, sanding, pounding, and nailing pieces of wood together, making
coffins.
“What the hell you got them?” a young face screamed out, looking up from the nail he was pounding into some jaggedly sawed
pine planking. A dozen other faces also swung up and around, and for a few moments there was a sudden, complete cessation
of sound as the entire crew stared at what the cats had dragged home. There was a certain similarity to many of the faces—a
similar slant of brow, placing of eyes, shape of nose. Which was hardly surprising, as the gathering was basically one huge
extended family—the Hanson family, run by the patriarch, grandfather, and sire of half those present—Bradley “Undertaker”
Hanson, who stood over the coffin watching it Al with a stem eye.
“Found this bunch out by the gorge,” Ponzo yelled back, beaming with pride at his find, as was his brother, Chester, who knew
that something like this would be worth a minimum of a few extra desserts—and the maximum of a knife or some object of value.
Undertaker liked to run things like a general, rewarding those who were “clever” and punishing those who were “stupid.”
“Back to work, Al of you,” he shouted to the box makers. “Keep your eyes on the damn nails—there’s money to be made tonight.
Five were killed this afternoon in town. Five…” His eyes lit up with a certain glee at the presence of the Grim Reaper. For
it meant two dollars a box. Two times five equals ten. Ten bucks—that was two more horses for his stable. He patted himself
on the back for the thousandth time for starting up the undertaking business as his second vocation—after he had seen many
years before that farming alone wouldn’t support him. Not with
his
appetites,
his
virility,
his
progeny. With the additional good luck to live just a few miles from one of the bloodiest towns around—Cotopaxi—where they
brought the bodies out of the bars and the whorehouses by the wheelbarrow full—he had it made.
In fact, “Others’ tragedies—our blessing,” was just one of the Undertaker’s many expressions, which he quoted sternly to the
rest of them.
“They dead?” Undertaker asked, starting forward, his large girth rolling around him as he moved. The man was only about 5′8″
tail but must have weighed perhaps 400 pounds. The good life had been good to him, that was for damn sure. Where others had
starved, he had prospered. His completely bald head and red-cheeked face, sitting atop the ovular body below, created nothing
so much as the impression of two eggs atop one another—one immense, the other the size of a bowling ball, both of them sort
of rotating around each other like two planets in orbit as he walked along.
“Hmm,” Undertaker said with interest as he saw the value of the motorcycle. He had an old one in the shed, but it was rusted,
barely functional. This one, on the other hand, was in perfect order and had the added feature of weapons. He leaned down
as his two sons—both like all the male children, bald as M&M’s—held the heavy be a little unsteadily. Chester, in particular,
was exhausted from the afternoon’s exertions. Undertaker got down on one knee with a
whoomph
of expelled air and looked into Stone’s face, which was hanging down over one side of the leather seat. He couldn’t see any
noticeable sign of breathing but could see the horrendous red boils and bumps all over the man’s face and neck. Undertaker
knew what it was instantly. His years of undertaking work, and the reading of a number of medical journals, had actually made
him quite a competent doctor capable of treating his own family—more than one member of which he had saved by his diagnoses.
Radiation poisoning! The man had been exposed to some powerful radioactive source—perhaps the rains that had just missed the
farm the night before. The patriarch reached out, grabbed hold of Stone’s now, and tweaked it hard. The figure let out a little
sharp sound, and the head tried to stir, the eyes opening for a split second and then closing again as the fever-racked body
let its head fall back to the metal side of the motorcycle.