Chapter Four: The Fall of Fort Brigham
It was nearly dark when he had first seen them. At the time, he’d thought it was just the desert heat addling his brain, just a collection of the long shadows cast by the setting sun, but every time he looked, they had seemed more unnatural and out of place than before. Staring long and hard, eyes watering, he knew that they were wrong in some way not imaginable. Following was not an option, but a requisite. He was a scout, a runner, and he’d given weekly reports of nothing for almost a year and a half.
Raids had been more or less regular his entire life. Nothing would happen for months at a time and then they would come. Less than a hundred, usually, but sometimes more like two. Also, they moved slow, shambling forward to a dirge only they could hear, trudging along to some unknown destination. Later, during the ensuing battles, they had moved faster, but before that, they moved slowly, conserving energy until they could feed.
The destrachan that moved in his memories had come at night, always at night. The dread hour when all the dark things came out to play, haunt, and feed. Some said they were zombies, the dead come back to life, and still more said they were vampires, preying on men for sustenance. If they were the dead, why didn’t those who fell to their attacks not return as part of it?
If Gabriel had pondered more on the subject, he would have said they didn’t seem like the dead at all. More often than not, their corpses were warm after death, making them more of an evolutionary fluke than anything else. Truly, the sickness of shades was a baffling disease.
Yet he didn’t consider much about the destrachan, nor did he care to. The important things were what really mattered. Where would his next meal come from? Was there any water nearby? And the most important of all . . . How in the nine levels of hell would he survive his next encounter with them? He hadn’t failed to survive thus far, and it wasn’t for the lack of battles. He didn’t waste his energy thinking about things which couldn’t affect him in the present. Much more pressing were his battle plans, his strategies, his tactics. Those things not in the hands of fate.
Ka.
Not this massive thing spreading quickly across the salt flats, who could do anything to stop that? Not a one man army, and that’s what he was. In the days of old, perhaps, he could have radioed for help without being close at all to Hill, and help would have come. The cavalry, the trucks. But radios had become extinct in the present; lack of upkeep and lack of batteries, mostly, but some had failed just from age. Thus come the runners. How else to get a message across hostile territory, get vital information from one place to the next? All forms of communication technology had already failed, and most petrol-powered cars, trucks and transports had rusted through or run out of the fluid that so powered them.
A part of him wanted to forget that he’d seen them, abandon his post and flee south to New Zion, but that didn’t seem possible. Gabriel was a runner, and a quick-fighter; that sort of thing was not in his nature. Long ago, he’d shed his fear of death as he’d dealt it mercifully to the destrachan. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Forget your woes and sorrows and raise the sword in service to your fellow man. For now, he’d follow. The time to fight a never-ending battle had not yet come, but he hoped to be there.
Though the destrachan might not be dead, they no longer seemed human at all, anything that had, had been replaced with animal instincts. Yet there were similarities to those creatures of folklore. For one, they never rested, moving tirelessly from one battle to the next and laying waste to all humanity within reach. Yes, these were moving faster than all he’d seen before, but any implications this knowledge might hold was lost on him. It was pointless to ponder for any length of time on any detail save one. They were a threat, and he would follow, maybe take some of the bastards out as well. The destrachan had the advantage, they would get there long before he’d have any chance of warning anyone.
So he followed. Yet even at his fastest speed, faster than a jog, just a little under a sprint, they gained distance between them. The trail they left was a swath cut through the jungle, leaving enough evidence to track with ease. The sand was packed along it, bits of flesh that had fallen by the wayside crawling with new life. The direction too, now, was unmistakable–an entire host of shades was headed straight to the settlement furthest north–‘the Brig.’
Thick concrete walls surrounding its interior buildings, post-apocalypse designers had created a defensive fort, a haven from the evils terrorizing the land. It was nestled against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, near the open roads and had clear visibility of the desert stretching westward to the Sierra Nevadas. The walls were set around a group of timeworn schools once used to house the natives of the land. Most of those left standing had been built to withstand nuclear blasts, having a solid foundation of bunkers and fallout shelters.
For as many destrachan as there were, little noise carried in the night air, wind blowing steadily south and away from the settlement. There would be blood spilled, of that there was no doubt in Gabriel’s mind. His pace slowed as exhaustion crept into his muscles, lactic acid building steadily in his tired calves and quads. He stopped, opening his canteen for a slight refreshment for his thirst before replacing it at his hip. Then he was off again.
He ran. Not because he wanted to be a hero, not because he thought he could save any person at all in the Brig, but because he could. Running was release, as his veins pumped burning blood through his legs, his very breath catching in his throat. Freedom. A timeless pull towards the unknown, and he sprinted towards the doomed town. Everything ran downhill, and he was running downhill with it. Not across the flattened desert after a legion of destrachan, but hurtling himself towards his fate. An endless downward spiral toward everything and nothing at the same time.
It was a sense of purpose, cleansing doubt and resigning himself to whichever way the wheel of his destiny rolled. He ran, not stopping as the moon’s slivered form began to rise, body aching and heart beating out of his chest. His breath was short, dizziness creeping over his mind like flood waters reaching ever higher. And still he continued his rush into the darkness, and when the moon began to sink low, stars swimming in his vision, he stopped. His breathing was heavy; he hadn’t run like that in a long time.
Bright torches flared away, staving off the darkness in patches, and failing. Unaware of any danger to themselves, militia men slowly dozed at their watch, waking every so often to a startling noise either imagined or nonthreatening and then dozing off again.
His heartbeat slowed, night vision returned. Low white light gleamed from the stars and moon in the heavens; the torches shone garish and yellow against the sand and concrete. The army of destrachan lay only a few hundred yards from the main battlements, just out of sight. They weren’t making camp; destrachan didn’t camp, or make fires, or ready themselves for anything, not even a siege.
They were waiting.
Even as they waited, their glimmer rose steadily, humming and singing ever so softly to the wills of all who could hear it. Give in. Let it go. Peace be upon you as we go to our victory and your defeat. Give in. Waiting, and watching. A deep rumble sounded from the south, a growl, the heartbeat of some strange beast, almost indistinguishable from his in the darkness, growing steadily in volume. From the south? Along the old highways. Although the asphalt was cracked and holed along its entire length, it was better than moving along the sand. It must be a vehicle, of that, at least, he was certain, sounding too much like the transport trucks that had once run at Hill before the last of the petrol had run out. But how? And why? The idea that destrachan could make use of such a thing was preposterous, wasn’t it? If then, it wasn’t destrachan, surely no one would aid such creatures as they were.
He decided finally that whatever was happening was part of a much larger and darker path, an encircling pattern that might lead to humanities ultimate demise: extinction. It smacked, no, reeked of anger and deceit, of lies and corruption, of all the worst things that were part of human existence, and it would kill far too many people, guilty and innocent alike. Two things that this might mean bothered him to no end. Firstly, even if no man drove the thing, how would destrachan of all things gotten the petrol necessary to fuel it? And second, if it was a human, why would he aid the very beings who sought only man-blood and flesh?
Questions that could lead anywhere. What really frightened him, however, was the idea that he might find exactly what the answers to those queries were.
The lights on the truck–and it was a truck, he could see its black shape bobbing crazily on the road as it curved slightly towards the Brig–were off, presumably burnt out. It moved directly towards the most concentrated force of guards, strange foreknowledge indeed for shades to possess, let alone use. The gate. By this time, each militia man had heard the impending sound, standing nervously at their posts. Most were armed with a variety of melee weapons, an assortment of makeshift swords, spears, axes, and pole-arms, and each held a small quiver of javelins at his side. They milled about confused and excited, at the rumble and at the shedding of blood. Adrenaline pumped like water, blood rife with it and pounding in the ears. Men always delighted in the shedding of blood, be it his own or his enemies, the greatest weakness in his primal need for it.
The slivered moon’s gray and silver light reflected off the truck's metallic body, which appeared to be mostly rust, and as it approached, its rumble became a roar of contempt and despair, joining with the glimmer and weakened the knees. Its frightening pitch denoted its poor health, and the engine was almost assuredly making its last run. He was almost in its path, lying there in the dirt and grit, and he rolled back from its death-track. A logo, too, now glittered visibly from the front grill, imprinted in the rusted metal and worn from time and rain. MACK. To say the dumping truck had seen better days was an understatement; it had seen better centuries. Its bucket had rusted through in chunks three feet wide in some places, and its walls swayed and groaned as the truck rumbled along its path. The axles had warped in the heat, every few feet the truck tottered kitty-corner from the rear driver’s side tire to the front passenger side one. Through the rusted gaps in the bucket, he could see stacks and stacks of small green and grey cans wobbling back and forth off beat with the truck.
A sinking feeling came to him abruptly with a premonition, an intuitive glance that told all, and held his suspicions in a harsh light. A breach of the protective wall surrounding the Brig would leave all its inhabitants vulnerable to the attack, and would without a doubt mean the end of its people. The truck was less than a quarter-mile from its destination when the helplessness he couldn’t help but feel reached its valley. He counted slowly the seconds until its impact.
Ten. The guards on the wall scurried across it hurriedly, racking brains to figure what exactly to do. The glimmer reached out across the deserted expanse of brush and dimmed the torchlight, darkening everything with its sick aura of doom.
Nine. The shades en mass began the chant, a maddening chant that started slow but gained volume and speed as they went, time slowing as the truck neared its target. The word repeated, over and over, drawing itself across the glimmer as it stretched to every mind in the vicinity. Esseshoos.
Eight. A stream of heavy, blackened smoke shot from the engine cavity as the hood was tossed into the air, quickly falling behind the truck. The engine was aflame.
Seven. Gabriel drew his nine millimeter pistol from its holster at the small of his back, pushing the safety knob to the ready.
Six. The wild and nearly nonsensical chanting continued. Esseshoos. A figure from the vehicle’s cab leaped outwards, rolling in the dust to slow itself safely, and began to run southwest, away from the carnage that would ensue.
Five. Tumbling about dangerously in the heavens, thick clouds broiled and struck, lightning flashing and crackling between clouds and several times struck the ground near the truck.
Four. Gabriel pushed himself to his feet, not a hundred feet from the nearest shade, striding across the sand in great sweeps of distance, moving to the southwest. The figure who had been driving the death of Fort Brigham was a traitor to his race, and had to be destroyed, if not for the survival of the race then for simple vengeance.
Three. Esseshoos. As if they were one, all destrachan rose from their strange kneeling position, sprinting forward as if tugged along a string as the truck’s flames leaped out towards them.
Two. Static. White noise. Bright, flaring and blinding in a fiery bolt of both wisdom and insight, the lightning struck three times, all in an instant at the city gate. A single guard standing directly about the metal bars channeled one of the strikes directly and fell to the ground, eyes bulging and dry, flesh bubbling and cracked and charred, completely unrecognizable from his previous form.
One. The gate buckled under the heat and strain and instantly whipped, twisting free of the stone and breaking massive chunks of the wall away. A mad rush of people inside the city backwards, towards the furthest wall. Massive mob of shades rushing the gate, following the truck, a single man running from the battle after the conspirator responsible. No one was prepared for the chaos that lay just a split second away. Children and mothers, screaming both, holding tight to each other.
Esseshoos. That mad chant of apparent worship. The glimmer was all-encompassing, ripping the heart, the courage, the will from every man woman and child.
The wind blew softly, and the grass rustled until the wind abruptly stopped, a microsecond of calm before the storm. Static. White noise. The air was dry, dust falling from all around and even the guttural chants of Esseshoos fell silent. The stillness was suffocating for that entire cosmic instant. It seemed as if the universe itself was holding its breath, ceasing planetary rotations and revolutions, galaxies frozen in their nearly endless spiral of perfect proportions. It seemed as if everything reflecting inward upon the past, remembering the simpler times of the ‘good ol’ days’, boding ill or well, deciding whether or not to collapse in on itself, crushing the totality of existence.
Esseshoos. The word hung in Gabriel’s mind as he ran, face watching in horror but unable to look away as his feet moved ever away from it, echoing a darker possibility of what it could mean. A foreshadowing of a malicious nature behind the relatively humane essence of life in all its many variations. A vision kept hidden at a cellular level, laid bare now before his eyes. A shadow beneath and from around the edges of the bright light.
That terrible, infinite instant shattered everything he’d ever understood, leaving him to free fall through his mind, slipping from the very concept of sanity like a small coin dropped from the full height of the ruined Empire State Building. It was at this moment, this vulnerable junction of time and space that the rusted, rundown dumping truck–filled to the brim with green and grey cans–rusted and rotting, bouncing hilariously from the front passenger side to the read driver’s side, struck, the consequences of which were both far-reaching and predicted by whomever had set the atrocity on its wheels.
Flames burst from all around the cab as the rich diesel pumped into the already burning rubber and plastic hoses and various intake, cooling, and sensor parts. The truck itself fell into well over a thousand visible pieces, and rust flakes and random bolts flew into the air. As it collapsed against the incredible stopping force of the wall, the entire payload of small green and grey cans shifted forward into the back of the cab, now being doused in high grade diesel. The many stacks of cans lit up like marshmallows held too close to a campfire, paint bubbling and ancient DOT stickers peeled back, revealing the remains of whatever adhesives had once held them in place.
It started as a single sharp concussion, and continued, each blast louder and more powerful than the last. Beat after beat, a crescendo before eventually letting debris settle in its place. And then the big chunks landed. Human-flavored gibs mixed with chunks of concrete ranging in size from a Volkswagen Beetle to that of a basketball. As the last boom cleared, the thousand-shade army reached the new hole in the wall. The only men left were wounded or unarmed, several had been nearly buried in rubble. Those who had died in the explosion were the lucky ones, any left standing were beaten to the ground, and those on the ground became food for the army, a cannibalistic feast amid devastation.
Gabriel would have been dazed by the blast had he not expected it so depressingly, not as it had happened, God no, it had been nothing like he had expected! He wasn’t entirely sure what he had expected to happen, but perhaps it was close to what had happened in actuality. Close, that is, if getting trampled in a stampede of cattle was close to getting chased by a single cow with a lame leg. Or close if seeing a picture of a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino with original maroon paint was close to driving a 1911 Ford Model T.
He gained on the figure, could feel the distance between them slipping as his feet flew across the sand, and he knew that this was his chance for pure and righteous retribution, if only this one stone to be weighed against the hundreds of thousands the destrachan themselves had put on the scale. Justice would be served. He snatched a piece of the cloak of the figure he chased, dragging it to the ground, and threw himself upon it, gun pointed at the figure’s face. Dim light bent around his form, the hood of the cloak falling away, revealing the traitor's identity. Preparation for this event was shattered as he stared at the man who wore his own face. Grappler and grappled alike were taken aback by this strange turn of events, yet Gabriel could sense the sameness between them, knowing that while his motives for continuing onward were the same, an undying loyalty to someone other than themselves, and though that loyalty might not be shared, if the circumstances had been different . . . no, the situation was much more complex. This stranger with his face was him, not merely a copy under a different set of loyalties, but under a different number of years. His gun shook in his hand as he struggled against the trigger, but the pistol would not fire for him, something larger than himself was pushing him back, not allowing this terrible deed to move forward.
The stranger below him shoved up and out against his chest, and Gabriel felt himself fly backwards through the air in the direction of the broken Fort Brigham, and watched helplessly as the man who wore his face fled deeper into the desert, towards his own home, towards Hill. He could still feel the inconstancy of that moment where he had seen the barrel of his own gun being pointed at his nose, feel the youthful eyes of himself staring back into his time-worn and travel-wearied eyes, colors so different in the moonlight, one set brown and the other a rich violet. There was no hypocrisy in admitting his shame, for although he would never be able to deny that he had seen the traitor, he would never deny that he couldn't kill him, not even for the good of his species, and that was the greatest hypocrisy of all: that he had been helpless against that foe, unable to finish what he had sworn to do, and that was a paradox that would scar him the rest of his days, however long they might be.
The slivered moon glittered in the sky, black shadows grew and fell at the strange glimmer. Children screamed and women cried into the darkness as the wind blew softly, grass rustling in repose. The night was still, save for the low hum of the glimmer, and the lulling thrum in the distance.
Copyright 2006