We rode for an hour before the cart’s small engine puttered into silence, leaving us in the rain like waterlogged orphans. The gas tank was the size of a car’s washer fluid reservoir and I felt lucky that we made it as far as we did. The cart didn’t stop our feet from hurting but it did stop the pain from worsening. Walking long distances was excruciating and dangerous and I didn’t understand how people did it without their feet becoming nothing more than dead weight to lug around. I knew I was out of shape but the kind of traveling required from us took something more than mere training…such as endurance that comes from a strong constitution, built after the success and failure of many trials over years of attempts.
The rain reduced itself to random splatters while the sun set behind gray clouds, drying us out with a breeze but leaving us cold. We sat on the dead cart, stiff like mannequins.
“Are we going to just sit here?” asked Tarah. “I don’t want to offend anyone’s need to process what just happened but it’s getting dark and there’s a creepy fucking forest ahead.” She pointed to a menacing tree line jutting from the growing fog, with a dirt road that sliced through like a rusty blade. The trees thickened up in a hurry and cast everything inside into shadows. And the coming darkness just made it worse.
Sue Spirit shook her head. “I am not walking through that forest. I’m feeling bad vibes just looking in that direction.”
“We’ll be OK,” said Sam. “At least the dark isn’t trying to kill us.” And then, like an apocalyptic tour guide, he warned: “Just remember, folks: keep noise to a minimum.” He looked at me. “That means picking up your feet when you walk like a person trying to be quiet. Our enemy is attracted to noise and repelled by sunlight. Since the sun is leaving us, we have to rely on keeping quiet because they are relying on us to fuck up. Now, are we ready? Let’s go.”
The darkness crept in along with the fog, leaving a scene suggestive of a cemetery on Halloween, or a backdrop on a horror movie from Atomic Age Hollywood. Even the birds and bugs were silent as we entered the forest, fully expecting to get swallowed up as though entering the belly of a whale. I kept beside Tarah while Sam scouted ahead with Sue Spirit. After a while, it became too dark to see so I focused on Sam’s pink unicorn shirt to keep my path straight, the one he’d “traded” his shotgun for back at the junkyard. He didn’t seem to mind that it caused him to stick out from the crowd, for a couple of reasons.
Suddenly, there was a violent rustle ahead, short enough to be a branch falling harmlessly into the bush, but my imagination ran wild with scores of revs pouring from every patch of grass after my precious bodily fluids. We stopped and listened, hearing nothing until the nearby brush erupted again, with a fat raccoon lumbering from the high grass on the side of the road, pausing when it spotted us but then dashing to the high grass on the opposite side. A dog quickly scrambled in pursuit, stopping at the road’s edge, also wary of us. Tame and surprised, it sniffed the air a couple of times until it picked up the scent and then again bounded after its prey, though I was fairly certain the dog had more intention to play with the raccoon than hunt it down for food. Unfortunately, there were plenty of food sources lying around that were much easier to get to.
“Why are we being so quiet when animals are thrashing through here?” asked Tarah. “We’re in the sticks…we have to be the only people around.”
“Go ahead and make all the noise you want,” Sam responded. “Just walk a ways ahead so you’re the target.”
Despite Tarah’s idea, we continued in silence, listening to the faded rustling of the raccoon and dog chase through the brush. I hoped for some break in the forested gloom that never came, maybe a clearing where we could camp for the night and pretend to sleep, but the road continued to stretch in the darkness before us forever, as though we were on a dirty treadmill. Time and space turned to luxuries as we traveled down what felt like a tunnel between dimensions. But we stumbled on, focused on an eventual end to this dark march. As the saying went, if you find yourself going through hell, keep going.
***
The clouds above the tree line lightened up, reflecting a dull light from somewhere down the road. As we kept walking, an old-fashioned mercury light affixed to a far-off post shined through the trees and wisps of fog. Outdoor lighting meant people could be near…and along with people, their various pets and pursuers. And as if to confirm that belief, our focus on the light didn’t last long before the sounds of a massacre pierced through the dense brush like a siren. Gunshots rose to the level of a pitched battle, screaming and growling piercing the gloom like verbal red flags. We soon learned that the road was leading us right past the battlefield.
“Keep your heads down,” Sam whispered. “For real, this time.”
I heard a noise to my immediate left and we drew weapons just as a person came out of the brush gasping a prayer. Only when he looked up and spotted our weapons did he stop, though only long enough to interpret what he saw before him.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” he said, throwing his arms in the air, a pistol in his grip. He continued to move cautiously around us, sidestepping his way down the road the way we’d come from, clearly not wanting to stay for a chat. He wasn’t so much as looking at us than past us, towards the battle.
“What’s going on?” asked Sam, lowering his pistol. “Hey, where are you going?”
“I’m getting the fuck out of here, brother, and I suggest you do the same.”
“What is this place?”
“Our family farm. We were overrun. We had secured the main house but the infection started from inside…one of the farmhands got sick and rose up like a vampire. Then more came out of the woods and there was no place to go. There’s way too many. A lot of ‘em are dressed in medieval costumes…coming from the fair down the road.” He sized us up. “There’s more over there than you folks can handle. Dozens. You should turn around.”
“You’d leave the family farm without a fight with nothing but the clothes on your back?” Tarah asked.
“Family farm? Hell, when it really comes down to it, I’m just a distant cousin,” he replied, his voice fading as he retreated down the road and out of sight, towards where we had just traveled. “Good luck.”
“Hey, it’s not safe that way!” Sue Spirit shouted.
There was no response from the darkness and we let him disappear in the night. He may have survived the attack at the farm, but his fear would get the best of him eventually somewhere else, driving him into another jam down the road, maybe with the revs we’d gotten away from.
“This explains why there weren’t many revs back at the fair,” I said. “They ended up here.”
Getting closer to the battle, I felt a tug on my sleeve as Tarah pulled me to the far side of the road to crouch and maximize our cover. The forest ahead had been cleared as residents carved out their property, allowing the fog to roll across a large farm plot littered with bodies, both human and animal. An abandoned tractor sat in the middle of the field, one of its cab doors flipped open. Beyond the field, at the top of a hill, a large barn with a high sloping roof stood next to another outbuilding and a smaller house. The entire area was illuminated with floodlights to the extent everything in the open could be seen as though in daylight…and what I saw was brutality beyond comprehension, as humans fought revenants swarming across the property like angry bees. Individual humans were battling groups of revs in pockets across the property and it wasn’t looking good for the humans, who could only pull the trigger of a shotgun or swing an axe so many times before meeting overwhelming resistance and soon forced to switch teams.
Sam crept closer to the property line and crouched, the rest of us following. He stared ahead, looking worried.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Why are we stopping?” Tarah asked. “We need to take advantage of this distraction and keep going.”
Sam brought a pair of binoculars to his eyes. “I just want to take a look.”
“All it takes is one of them to notice us.” She paused. “Wait a minute…we’re not going over there.”
He lowered the glasses and looked at Tarah. “I know that.”
The front door of the farmhouse flew open and a woman wearing combat gear barreled across the porch with a revenant, its legs missing, clinging onto the woman’s back like a barnacle. She twisted side-to-side, trying to shake it off, while also trying to keep the rev’s gnashing jaws away from her neck. She solved the second problem first by ramming the wooden table leg she’d been carrying into its mouth. Slamming herself into walls back-first was only bringing them closer together…and not in a good way. Panic setting in, the woman began running randomly across the grass, more concerned with getting a good grip on the monster than watching where she was running.
Tarah readied her rifle as though an orchestral musician preparing for their upcoming part, wrapping the strap around her arm. “I can’t sit here and watch this shit without doing anything. It ain’t right. I can pick that thing off from here.” She raised her rifle to aim but Sam grabbed the top of the barrel and pulled it toward the ground.
“Stop, it’s too risky,” he said. “You don’t have a good shot. You could just as easily hit them both…or miss and reveal our position to Half-pint over there and a dozen of his buddies.”
“I wouldn’t have half of my kills if I listened to you, lightweight.” She then raised the gun again and took aim. Realizing that he wasn’t going to talk her out of making a move, he found some cover behind a tree and held his mace high in case a rev came within bashing distance.
The woman in battle fatigues spun around and brought the rev to the front of her body. With her back to us, she dropped to her knees and held her attacker up almost like a cartoon lion, miraculously lining up its head with Tarah’s aim, and her shot tore right through its skull, light pouring through the bloody hole. The shocked woman, now holding a limp body, dropped the corpse and turned to locate the source of the divine bullet, peering in our direction in the darkness, but we kept our heads so low, we’d almost dropped to a crawl.
“Don’t move,” whispered Sam. “We shouldn’t get any more involved than we already are. We’re risking our asses here.”
With all of the chaos swirling around her, the woman didn’t concern herself with the mystery bullet for too long. She returned to her feet and pulled the stray table leg out of the rev’s mouth before heading back into the farmhouse to continue the fight.
“Let’s go,” said Sam. “Best thing we can do now is wish ‘em luck.”
No matter how skilled any of us were under fire, none of us were heroes and we knew it. Everyone has their own skills and talents and some were more useful than others. And most modern skills weren’t useful in our current situation. Under normal circumstances, my compulsion to flee kicked in as soon as my heart rate rose ten points, but not even rough-and-tumble guys like Sam could make perfect work of violence and there was no question he was still able to do many things the rest of us couldn’t manage. Tarah could shoot well from a distance but as a stick in cowboy boots, she could find trouble for herself in close quarters with a rev or two. My skills were to find easy escapes like a Magellan exploring the closest exit, relying on people like Sam and Tarah to do my fighting for me. And so far, the best skill Sue had other than her intuition was staying out of the way. Maybe she sensed that was the best place for her.
The onslaught on the farm spread beyond the far side of the property and deep into the dark woods, keeping us on constant alert as the battle rose and fell around us. Wherever the noise was became the beacon for every rev within earshot to join the fray, and we tried like hell to maneuver in the opposite direction of any sound that would draw their attention, while trying not to add to the sounds ourselves.
The fighting wound down around the dawn and our bodies eventually made it out of those woods, but a big part of who we were when we entered them was left behind at that farm that night. It was worse than the end of innocence, the sting that comes when reality taunts the child into adulthood…it was the loss of whatever glue kept our humanity intact. How much savagery could we see going on around us without resorting to it ourselves?
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