Sneak Peek

http://tinyurl.com/jmvzsh4

he Zone (title tenttive) by Russell Ackerman
survival horror, low gore.

rough draft, in progress, partly inspired by "roadside picnic"

updated 12-30-2014

Intro:

On the fourth of july, 2015, a nuclear power plant in Vermont goes critical, then melts down.  The military establishes a 50 mile exclusion zone around it, they evacuate the area and quietly install 300 miles of 12’ electric fencing and razorwire around the perimeter.  For many years no one thinks anything of it.  Eventually strange reports start to trickle out to the media of mutated animals.  One blurry photo emerges of what might have once been a domestic pig, its features distorted and hobbled, a fat, stout creature with legs too long for its round body.  Radiation can cause mutations, that’s to be expected they said, but these had occurred so quickly, in just a few generations instead of over thousands of years.

Pretty soon, rumors are flying on the social media of strange artifacts that can cure a disease as quickly and easily as kill someone, and dangerous anomalies in the zone that can suck you in and turn you to pudding.  The eyes of the world turn to the zone.  The military denies everything, but the fire had caught.  Miscreants, soldiers of fortune, and losers begin to show up at the perimeter, while Megacorps open their labs nearby.  At first the government would let no one in, but then came the contracts, calling us “artifact hunters”, where we lose our rights to whatever we might find.

Yeah, they’ll let you in the zone.  Nine out of ten die on the first day, they don’t care.  In the end, if there is one, it’s when you try to leave the zone with a full contract, with a few shreds of your sanity left over from your trip to hell, where you spent all your time dreaming of a wad of taxpayer cash that isn’t in your pocket, or maybe of godly powers granted by the strange artifacts, or just the taste of plain old freedom.  In the end, you just hope the military lets you back out at all.

Welcome to the zone.

Chapter 1

Standing in the guard tower, I look out over the abandoned fields and farms and adjust myself to the sound of distant gunfire and the shrieks and howls of mutants.  I signed the contract, and I work for the military now.

            “Have you had any military training?” the soldier asks me,

            “Just videogames,”

            “Nice, well..  This ain’t no roadside picnic.  It doesn’t really matter, you’ll die either way.  Let me know when you’re ready,” he says, “You got six hours,”

            “That long?”

            “Yeah, it cuts down on the suicides.  Look at that,” he says, pointing down at the gate.  Someone was being let into the zone, in full military gear.  He takes five steps forward and stops, he turns to look at the gate.  With a splash of blood his throat is ripped out by invisible claws, with the flickering image of a pale, naked man-beast flashing in the afternoon light, it’s bloody, tentacled visage visible for only a second before it seems to turn invisible.  Shots echo from the guard towers but the target is gone.

            “What the fuck was that?  A mutant?”

            “We call em Blooders,”

            “Why?”

            “Watch,” he says.

            I can see the tall grasses parting and then the beast comes into view, tentacles dangling from its mouth.  It stoops over the dead body and starts to suck up the blood.  Its horrid black eyes meet mine and my ears start to ring, my vision becoming fuzzy, my eyes wander away and sensation ceases.  I shake my head and rub at my temples, what a strange feeling.  The soldiers on the wall fire their automatic weapons at the beast and I practically jump out of my shoes.  The creature howls in anger, stands up and throws itself at the electric fence, where it cooks instantly and falls to the ground, emitting a strangely pleasant smell.

            “Hungry?” the soldier says.

            “No…  What hell did that thing crawl out of?”

            “Your worst nightmare,”

            “Seriously though,”

            “They don’t tell us grunts a damn thing.  Could be aliens fucking with this place, or the devil, or Oprah Winfrey, fuck knows,” he says, and I furrow my brow. “That’s a joke,” he says,  shaking his head.

            Everyone who comes here comes here for a reason.

I had lost my rights as a citizen over the years.  It started when I was arrested for driving while intoxicated.  They threw me into the psycheward to cool off, it’s a nice thing that cops do when they really want to screw you.  As they’re drugging me up and trying to strap me down I break the nurse’s hand by accident.  Now I’m a felon, doing jail time.  One of the inmates assaults me with a knife, and I kill him accidentally with a head-butt to the face, his nose goes right up into his brain.  Next thing you know they’ve put me in higher security.  Then they say, you got a choice.   You can spend the next twenty years in jail, or, you can sign up with the military as an artifact hunter.  I didn’t know what I was getting into, I signed the papers, and here I am, a free man.  A free man in hell.

            I had chosen the lesser of two evils, I had come out of the frying pan and straight into the fire.

            “Scared?” the soldier says,

            “Yeah,”

            “Fucking right you are.  You’d have to be shitfucking crazy not to be scared.” He says and spits over the railing, “That’s about as close as I get to the zone right there.  Good luck man, I wouldn’t want to be you.”

            “Gee, thanks,” I say sarcastically.

            They had briefed me along with twenty other prisoners, told us as little as possible, but at least gave us the location of the hunter’s stronghold, a small concrete building where the survivors hole up in between runs.  They said, as soon as I have an artifact, we can talk about my release.  Twenty years of freedom for one artifact?  I just have to survive.  I have to find a way to survive.

            In Zone 101 They gave me a backpack, an automatic weapon and military garb, taught me how to fire it and use a gas mask, gave me a wrist mounted Geiger counter who’s clicks would warn me of irradiated areas.  I sit now in the ready room with the others, staring at this equipment.  I’m not a soldier, I’m a stoner.  The time must have gone by fast, I thought we had another two hours to prepare.   I hear the lock on the door latching it shut.  At the other end of the room, the door to the zone unlocks and opens, afternoon sunlight seeping in.

            While the others file out of the ready room I pull off my boots and try to quickly change into my military garb and I can already hear gunfire and screams from outside.  I’m shaking, shaking so hard and I spill my backpack all over the floor.   The guy across from me wasn’t prepared either, he shoves on his metal army helmet and starts to tie his boot but is interrupted.  Out of nowhere a gust of wind blows through the room, the flashing image of a Blooder, and there’s a splash of red, and he’s dead instantly.

            In terror I fall backwards onto the floor and huddle behind the bench in my orange prison uniform.  I cover my ears with my hands and close my eyes..  I can feel it breathing on me, I feel the heat of its body as it leans over me, it’s tentacles in my hair, I hear its teeth grinding in its mouth.  Several bullets whiz past me and take out the beast, I open my eyes and its pale pink body is lying there, bald and naked, covered with red and blue varicose veins.  It’s too close for comfort, its dead black eyes staring into mine, giving me that sick feeling again.   Its arms are longer than a person’s, the fingers on its hands each ending in five protruding, sharp bones that it used for claws.

            I totally lose my shit, I stand up and bolt out of there, I run through the old farm fields as fast as I can, past the dead and dying men and mutants, past the survivors carrying their gear, waving their guns, some firing at me, past scattered bones, bleaching in the sun.  I run and run until I can’t run anymore and I collapse in the lee of a boulder, barefooted and alone, wearing only my orange prison garb.

Chapter 2: The Cat’s Meow

            I lay their frozen in fear for some time, my heart beating and beating without slowing down.  I’m alone, it’s getting dark, and I shove myself further under the boulder into a small cavity and hope I will survive the night.

            “Meow,”

            I hear the plaintive call of a domestic cat, and I wonder if it will try to kill me.   A silhouette comes into view, a cat with one shining eye looking out from tattered eyelid, it’s tail spasming left, then right.  It comes closer to my hiding spot, the remains of its ears turns back, and it growls.

            “Nice kitty… Nice kitty, please don’t kill me,”

            “Meow,” it says, and I feel a strange calmness come over me, like I had just smoked a joint.

            “Nice kitty,” I reach out my hand and hold it there in invitation.  There’s a wet sticky sensation as it rubs its face on my fingers, skin and tufts of its fur come off and stick to my hand.  It’s suffering from radiation poisoning.  Maybe once it had been someone’s pet cat, before these farms and homes became the exclusion zone.  It doesn’t seem to be in any pain.

            “Good kitty,” I say, and it lies down in front of me and takes to scanning the horizon.  What’s left of its ears prick forward, it hears something in the night.  I hear it too, moving in the brush, getting close fast.  A huge four legged shape runs past my hiding place, it’s tail flashing in the moonlight, a white tail deer.  There’s other animals chasing it, I hear their panting, their whining, and now the hunt is on and they are barking, some with great big voices, and other’s with just yelps.  Feral dogs.  They pass without incident, and soon the night is quiet again, except for one dog that must have smelled me, because it doesn’t move on with the others.

            It comes out of the grass and I’m face to face with what might have once been a dog, maybe a redbone hound, but it’s legs are all different lengths, and it’s ragged ears hang limp on either side of its peeling face.  under its throat hangs a brass tag with the name Lucky inscribed.  In the dark of the night it doesn’t have eyes – no, it’s that the eyes have been stitched shut.  fuck fuck fuck.

            In the deadly silence the dog’s nose sniffs and flares, it bares it’s teeth, and begins to bark excitedly, an alarm call.  The cat, cornered same as me, spins around and sprays the dog in the face with its urine.  The dog doesn’t seem to notice or care, but it stops barking and slowly moves off into the dark, its twitching nose made ineffective.  Soon things are quiet again except for my beating heart and the sound of distant gunshots and automatic fire that seems to never end.  The cat looks at me one last time and then marks the boulder with her scent before disappearing into the night.

            Holy shit what a day.  I am already missing my cell back at the county jail, the homemade booze, the tv lounge, man, I would love to be on a couch right now, looking forward to a scheduled meal,  but I’m not.  I’m between a rock and a hard place…  Inches from death.   Up shit creek without a joint.

            I don’t have a deathwish.  I want to go home.

Chapter 3

            I don’t sleep that night, and when the sun finally does come up it takes me half an hour to get the nerve to stick my head up above the grasses and take a look around.  When I do I see there’s nothing around except the yellow grasses of what used to be a hayfield waving in the wind, as though all the terror of the zone had left with the night.  I make my way through the countryside without incident,  and eventually come to the hunter’s base, a stout, boarded up concrete building that used to be a train station, nestled into the burnt husk of a quaint new England village, abandoned and vandalized.

            I push through the makeshift steel doors into a dark room.  There’s a tinny radio playing old time music, I hear people talking in low voices, I smell sweat, tobacco, and marijuana.  By the dim light of an oil lamp I can see the walls are covered with graffiti, and everything is trashed, but the hunters are there, maybe ten or so of them, all geared in their makeshift or military armor, some of them pouring over maps, others getting drunk, and some just holding their heads, and one man crying like a baby.

            “You want to end up like that?” a woman’s voice says in the gloom.

            “What happened to him?” I say.

            “A shuffler,” she says

            “A what?”

            “A real nasty mutant, it’ll fry your brain, especially if you’re sober, but they ain’t too quick.   What the fuck are you wearing?  Didn’t they give you some equipment?”

            “I uh.. I panicked and ran, I left it behind.  Mind if I sit?” I say and I take the stool across from her.   She looks like hell, dirty and greasy but totally relaxed, tits hanging,  nursing a beer and dressed in her half removed armor, while her eyes are bright and clear.

            “How long you been in the zone?” she asks me.

            “They put me in here yesterday,”

            “You a rapist or child murderer or anything like that?” she says, noticing my garb.

            “No, I…  I hurt someone by accident, and then got in a fight in jail and the guy died.”

            “Good, you’re not a sick-o, I won’t shoot you right now then.”

            “Gee, thanks.  My name’s Bryan.”

            “You’re a spitfire.   Call me Gale, that’s short for Nightingale.”

            “How long have you been here?”

            “Too long.”

            “So why don’t you leave?”

            “I’m making too much money, that’s why,”

            “Are they paying you to be an artifact hunter?”

            “No, they didn’t let me in, I came in through the fence.  I’m a party crasher.  But yeah, the scientists will pay you for almost anything, you know, artifacts, mutant body parts, pelts.”

            “Who’s got the beer?”

            “Ask Bahamas over there, behind the counter,” she says, nodding at the dark skinned man, who flashes her a perfect white smile.  I get off the stool and walk over to him at what used to be a ticket counter.

            “Out of curiosity, how much for a beer?” I say.

            “A hundred bucks,” he says

            “Fuck!  Is it cold?”

            “two hundred bucks for a cold one.”

            “Are you serious?”

            “You gonna buy a beer, Slim, or just interrogate me?

            “I’ve got nothing.”

            “No shit,” he says.

            Gale walks up behind me and slaps a wad of bills on the counter.

            “That’s ten thousand, islander.  Get this kid a meal, a canteen, a gun and some clothes.”

            “Geez, uh…  I don’t … Gale,” I stammer, “I owe you one,”

            “No, you owe me ten,” she says, setting herself back down in front of her beer, feet on the table.

            Bahamas picks up the wad and flips through it with his thumb, shoving it in his pocket.

            “Aight, I got some gear here.”  From under the counter he pulls out a small black pistol with a silencer sticking off the front and lays it down, along with a box of bullets and a broken wrist-mounted Geiger counter.

            “I got this real special gun cheap, its previous owner didn’t uh, need it anymore.  All the parts are high impact resin, no metal, so it won’t zap you when the atmosphere gets charged up.  I got some clothes back here too, back in a jiffy,”  Please, don’t be camo, I say to myself…  I hate camo.

            He disappears into the back room and reemerges with some clothes including blue jeans and a brown leather jacket that had both been spray-painted with camouflage pattern.  Off of the shelf he pulls down a similarly painted backpack, boots, canteen and a can of B&M bake beans, also camo patterned.

            “Camoflaged beans?”

            “Here you go, Spitfire, this will help you live for another day,” he says, shoving the gear in my arms and placing the pistol and the box of bullets on top.

            “Don’t die, thank you for shopping, please come again.”

            I step into what was once a utility closet, and cut my bare foot on a piece of broken glass, but it’s not too deep.   I change my clothes and reemerge into the main area, but Gale is gone.  I sit down at the table where she was and eat the cold beans, then fall asleep with my head in my arms.  When I wake, the crew in the common room has been replaced by other hunters, and the crying man is passed out in the corner with a bottle of rum.  My pistol is lying there on the table, and I pick it up and check the magazine and the safety.  I didn’t get robbed, I guess there’s honor in hell after all.

“Hey guys,” I say, “where can I find an artifact?”

Several hunters stand around a table looking at hand drawn maps, one of them turns, night vision gear perched on his head and respirator hanging on his neck.  Taking a break from trying to explain the map, he looks me up and down, then shakes his head.

            “You’re gonna die so quick,” he says.

            “Yeah, I know that,” I say, resigned to my fate.

            “Come with us, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two, or take a bullet for my team.” He says in all seriousness.

            “Great,” I say dryly, “Where are you going?”

            “The kettle anomaly field.”

            “What’s that?”

            “An anomaly.  It’s something invisible that kills you.  The kettle, well, it used to be a hot spring.”

            “And now?”

            “a deathtrap.  But that’s where the artifacts are.”

            “I need one, to trade to the military and get out of here,”

            “One…  You’re funny. I’ve heard that before.  You know how long I’ve been here?  Five years.  I’ve been in the zone longer than anyone.  I’ve seen more artifacts than you can shake a stick at.

            “How come you’re here, and why don’t you go home?

            The hunter looks at me, lights up a cigarette and takes a long puff, his eyes never leaving mine.  “Don’t ask stupid questions,” he says sharply.  He doesn’t want to talk about it, so I change the subject.

            “I’m Bryan,” I say, standing up and extending a hand tentatively.  He grabs it and gives it a hard shake, crushing my hand and looking at me hard with his steel blue eyes.

            “They call me Whistler,”

            “Why’s that?”

            “Because I can carry a goddamn tune, what do you think?  Look, I’ll give you a deal.  If you earn your keep I’ll give you an artifact, except…  Don’t be surprised when the military doesn’t keep their end of the deal.”

            “What?”
            “Look kid – it’s like feeding a bear.  You give it one marshmallow, and it wants another one.  You bring them an artifact, now you’re an asset, now they’re sending you back to the zone for more.  You’re here to stay.”

            “Fuck…  Are you serious?”

            “I shit you not,” he says, “The only way you’re getting out of here is in a wooden box.  You’re home, hunter, welcome home.  Just remember,”

            “What?”

“Don’t die,”

Chapter  4:

I stand a ways off from the anomaly field and cover my ears in between pulling at the neck of my shirt for the heat.  The kettle is a series of toxic, burning pools, along with a bubbling formation in the center that makes a shrill whistling sound at random.  There doesn’t seem to be any mutants around.  Two of the hunters drop their packs under the dead trees and pull out what appear to be a modified hazardous materials suit.  They put on their gear, then enter the anomaly field while I pick Whistler’s brain.

            “Will that protect them from the anomalies?”

            “No, just the heat, the bad air, and the static electricity,”

            “What exactly are these artifacts?” I ask him, and he looks at me as though gauging how much to say.

            “I don’t know.  They might be alien, or maybe supernatural.   Or maybe just god’s idea of fucking with us.”

“What do they look like?”

“There’s twenty seven known different kinds of artifacts.  I found a rat’s tail here, just outside of the toxic pools.  That’s one of the artifacts, that’s just a name we use for it.”

            “Why is it so special, where’s it come from?”

            “I’m going to charge you a consultation fee if you ask me anymore questions,”

            “Fine, I need to know,” I say, and Whistler smirks.

            “It increases muscle and nerve response, makes you faster, hear better, it gets rid of viruses, and it’ll clear up acne and prevent pregnancy.  You could get twenty thousand dollars for one without leaving the zone.  The scientists, Megacorp… They pay good money for that kind of shit.”

            “What does it look like?”

            “A pink spring, four inches or so long,”

            “So, it’s like medicine?  Do you like, break it up and take it orally?”

            “Fuck no, It’s hard to explain.  Look,”

            Whistler checks for danger, then opens his armor and lifts up his shirt.  There’s a bandage wrapped around his middle, and he lifts it up so I can see.  There it is, a rat tail, this little fleshy pulsing spring, and both ends are stuck into the side of his abdomen.  There’s some bruising, and scars on his abdomen where he had attached its sharp tips elsewhere.

            “Does it hurt?”

            “It itches, but, it works.”

            “You’re not pregnant I guess?” but Whistler is far too serious at the moment for a joke.

            “Enough talking, just shutup and keep watch.”

            I kneel and scan the horizon with a pair of borrowed binoculars.  There’s a pack of dogs a half mile off, but things are quiet.

            Suddenly there’s a great boom, a crack of sound and a flash of light.  I turn around to look and see one man out in the anomaly field,  pulling down on the body of the other man that’s suspended in mid-air over his head, waving gently left and right.  The hunter’s feet start to lift off the ground so he lets go, and the other man shoots upward and then explodes, a fine mist of blood spraying everywhere.

            “Fuck!” Whistler yells, “Don’t move!”  he yells to the second hunter, who runs back towards us terrified, towards safety, but something sweeps him off his feet, and then he’s hanging upside down up in the air, and then there’s a small popping sound and another mist of blood, with tatters of material raining down all around along with chunks of his body.

            “Goddamnit!” Whistler says, shielding his face with his arm and trying not to yell.  “I knew those assholes couldn’t read a map!”

            “What the hell was that?  Oh my fucking god!” I say in horror.

“That’s an anomaly.  Look alive, hunter, we’ve attracted some attention.”

            I turn back towards the valley, and using the binoculars I can see the pack of dogs headed this way.  There must have been twenty of them, all different sizes, fur and skin gone, lips missing and teeth exposed.

            Whistler is already climbing up a hemlock tree and it doesn’t take me long to do the same.  Out of reach, we are safe for the moment.  The dogs get close, and they shy away at first, probably sensing the anomaly field, but it doesn’t take long for hunger to have them pushing the boundaries.  Several of them find chunks of meat and wolf them down.  One of them runs off into the anomaly field , takes a wrong step and gets sucked up into the air, split in half and thrown in two different directions.

The dogs smell the meat and start going crazy, running in circles fighting over the dead body, more and more of them getting sucked up into the anomaly field as they circle and quarrel, dogs exploding left and right, bodyparts flying and a haze of blood in the air all around.  One or two surviving dogs, scared and coming to their senses, flee from the area with their tails between their mutant legs, yelping and whimpering.

            “We need to get out of here,” Whistler says, “Before something worse comes around to see what all the commotion is.  We’re exposed, and with only two of us, well..  If we saw a shambler, we wouldn’t have a chance…  If you watch my back I will get us back to base.  Do exactly what I do,”

            We climb down out of the tree and grab our fallen comrade’s backpacks, not willing to let anything go to waste.  We start moving towards the base, through farm fields and green forests, whispering to each other.

            “I guess I get to keep the binoculars,” I say and Whistler gives me this look and I finish, “you’re worried, but, we got here without any trouble.”

            “There were four of us,” he says,

            “Right, we’re more exposed,”

            “We’re at risk of a brain-fry from a shambler.  They’ll screw with your mind, but only one or two people at a time.  If you’ve got friends around they can take care of the mutant while you lie there drooling.  There’s survival in numbers.”

            We trot through the forest, stopping occasionally to listen for mutants, but we are alone.  As we’re walking along, I hear a sound like a blowgun and Whistler swears, then falls to his knees and then sideways onto the ground.  I grab him by the legs and dragg him back several meters, away from the unseen threat.  All is quiet except for the crows in the trees and I collapse with him onto the ground.

            “Whistler,” I say, smacking him in the face a bit.  He’s breathing, his heart’s beating, but he’s paralyzed with a pissed off more than usual look stuck on his face.  There’s six or seven thin, reddish tube-like a needles stuck right through his Kevlar vest, and no matter how I pull on one, it won’t come out.  Eventually the end breaks off in my hand.  That seems to release it and I’m able to work all six out of his chest that way.

            We must only be a few miles off from the hunter’s camp.  I can probably carry him that far.  It might tarnish his dignity a little bit, but it’s better than being left in the bush.  Hopefully the poison would wear off, but god forbid we encounter more mutants.

I stand up and look around.  In the brush not too far ahead is an innocent looking skunk cabbage, a leafy vegetable the size of your head, and as I get closer it seems to lean in my direction.  I pick up a small rock, throw it and hit the cabbage which spasms and it spits out a dozen needles which cut through the air and impale themselves in the bark of a nearby tree.

I take out my silenced handgun and fire a shot into the cabbage.  Gas leaks out of it and it loses pressure, collapsing into itself like a deflated basketball.  It shudders for afew moments, then begins to leak out a gelatinous liquid full of partially digested insects.  The smell is overwhelming, like something dead and rotting for a long time.

I return to Whistler and look around.  The forest looks different, instead of trees, there are threats.  Instead of ferns and rocks, there are threats.  What else could be hiding in the bush, waiting in the bush to kill us?  I fight off a wave of terror that seizes me, focusing on the matter at hand.   I stuff our backpacks into the bushes, then go to throw Whistler over my shoulder but he’s already awakened and gets to his feet like a drunk person.

            “What happened?” he says, putting his hand on a tree.

            “You got attacked by a vegetable,” and I point down the trail at the dilapidated cabbage.  “What do you call that thing?”

            “Cabbage…  Spitting Cabbage,” he says.

            “Can you walk?”

            “I’m fine.  Where are the packs?”

            “In the bushes,”

            We put on our packs and start stumbling through the countryside on a different path.  It doesn’t take long for Whistler to recover, and soon I’m once again trying to keep up with his huge stride.  I can’t help going over and over all the many threats of the Zone in my mind, wondering what could be around each tree, each boulder.  Finally to distract myself I strike up a conversation.

            “You ever killed a shambler?” I ask him.

“Yeah, a few of em,”

            “What was it like?”

            “Like trying to pull the trigger when you’re disintegrating from the inside.”

            “What do they look like?”

            “It looks like elephantitis – it’s a person, but their body is all messed up, growing here and there, protrusions and fleshy nodules.  When they walk, the extra flesh drags along the ground behind them making a distinctive dragging sound.”

            “It’s a person?”

            “Maybe?  I don’t know.  That’s what they say.”

            “But what could have turned a person into a monster like that?”

            “I don’t know, would you shut up?  There’s different kinds of mutants out there, like each of them have a purpose.  The Blooders, they look like a person too, like a mutated person, but radiation doesn’t do that.  There’s something else here, in the zone…  Something very bad, and…  It’s getting worse.  This place is, it’s a living nightmare.  A living breathing, bloodsucking, brain-eating nightmare,  and the artifacts are like candy, just there to tempt us further and further into this hell.”

            “Is there a way out of the zone?”

            “For your body, but not for your mind and soul,” he says and he looks into my eyes like he sees himself there, as if by warning me of invisible danger, maybe I could avoid it.  But the nightmare had already begun, the zone had already worked its way into the cracks and crevices of my psyche, and I feel it, and I understand why someone might stay.

            “I can feel it,” I say

            “You feel it?”

            “Like it’s calling me,”

            “The zone..  It’s calling to all of us,”

            “That’s why you stay,”

            “It’s why I live,”

            The zone is pulling at me, it’s tugging at the edges of my consciousness, urging me on, to uncover its secrets, its hidden terrors, its mysteries.  It’s calling to me, like this sick feeling in my stomach, this flutter in the back of my heart, it doesn’t want me to leave.  It wants me to stay.

            “What is that sensation?”

            “My best advice is to not think too hard on it if you want to keep your sanity.”

            After several hours we finally arrive at the concrete trainstation, tired and our nerves frayed.

            “That was a good run,” Whistler says, sitting down on the train station benches to rest.

            “No it wasn’t, half of us died and we got attacked by an angry vegetable,” I say, too strung out to sit down.

            I open my mouth to speak but a glare from Whistler gives me the idea that we wants to be left alone, so I wander around the train station, try to find a comfortable place to rest, somewhere to wash my face and maybe, get my head together.  I open up my dead comrade’s backpack, to see if there is anything useful.  Among the clothes and survival gear is a small, opaque piece of quartz, a sawn off double barrel shotgun, a wad of cash, a lighter, and a bag of weed.

You’ve got to be kidding me.  I open the Ziploc and take a deep breathe of the heady scent, my nostrils tingling and stinging from the marijuana’s potency.  This could give me some relief from this place, this deathtrap.  Among the refuse in the building I find a bit of copper tube to use as a pipe, I pack it up and take a few hits.  My worries ease, I feel soothed, relief from the harsh environment of the zone, and the strange sensations seem to go away.  I fall asleep on an old dirty ripped up couch, feeling safe and warm, thoughts fading away to dreams.  What the zone had given me, I did not have before.

            I’m young again.  I take another sip off of my coconut crush and flip myself over in the sun to get an even tan.  This isn’t so bad.  But I feel it, deep inside, a great dissatisfaction.  And a sound like the great beat of a drum, the cool, sanded grip of a pistol in my hand, and the echoes of mutants and gunfire in the distance, and I’m in this place, this dangerous place, but I’m so alive, more alive than ever.  And I want to get there, I have to find it, the center of the zone, the center of my life, my soul.

--Chapter 6

            “Wake up,” Whistler says to me in the darkness.

            “What?” I say, waking out of a deep sleep.

            “Get up, let’s go,”

            “It’s the middle of the night,”

            “Goodmorning from the zone, shithead!” he says and slaps me in the face.

            “Ow!” I say, rolling off the couch onto the floor with a thud, “What the fuck?”

            “Class is in session,” he says, “if you want to learn something, follow me,” and I know better than to argue.  I pull out my gun and start to check the magazine but he tells me, “You won’t need that.  Come on.”

I blink the sleep from my eyes as we creep up to the second floor of the trainstation in the dark and into the remains of an office.  Chairs and desks are tipped over and broken everywhere.  Whistler’s face glows red as he takes a puff off a joint and hands it to me.

“Take a hit,”

“Sweet,” I say and he presses the joint into my fingers.  I take a puff and hand it back to him.

            “Stay low,” he says, and we make our way quietly to the window where Whistler carefully pulls down one of the boards.

            “Look.”

            “What’s out there?”

            “Look out across the road about two hundred feet off, towards the butcher shop,”

            I put my face to the gap and I glimpse something there in the moonlight, a slow moving mass, like a person dragging a heavy sack, and then it turns towards me and it’s… Not a person, and I see the whites of its eyes, and it’s looking at me.  There’s pain in my head, and I’m getting sucked into the darkness, into the swirling black pits of its pupils, and my ears are filled with the shrieking screams of a thousand children burning alive.

*~*

“Wake up,” Whistler’s voice breaks into my empty mind and I open my eyes.

            “What the hell was that?” I say as I lay there on the floor under the window, my senses hitting me like so much sobriety after a night of drinking.  Whistler is there in the shadows, leaning against the wall, looking down at me with that piercing look that doesn’t waver.

            “Is it still there?” I say, putting two and two together, “That was a sham… Sham,”

            “A shambler.”

            “What… What happened?”  I try to move but I feel like I got hit by a freight train.  I sit up, then lean over and start to dry-heave.

            “You got attacked,” he says as he waits patiently, his eagle eyes never leaving me.  When I stop wretching, he hands me the lit joint.  The pain in my head eases as I take a hit, and I feel a little less nauseous.

            “You give this special treatment to all the newcomers?” I say, propping myself against the wall and wiping cold sweat from my brow.

            “Just the ones I don’t feel like seeing dead,” he says, “and usually I couldn’t give a flying fuck, but you remind me of, ah, nevermind.  Just shut up about it.  You’re fine.”

            I know enough now about Whistler not to pry and just be thankful.  I’d never met a more confident person, but being around him is like being caught in a strange tide, pushing and pulling at the same time.

            “Thanks,” I say in between shallow breaths.

            “You’re welcome, Spaz.  Pay it forward."

            “That’s charitable of you,” I say, but the sarcasm is lost on Whistler, his mind already elsewhere as he disappears into the train station, leaving me in the dark, lying on the beaten wood floor with the burning joint and the fading memory of a nightmare.

--Chapter 7

            I open my eyes to the afternoon light streaming through the boarded up window.  I must have fallen asleep while lying there with the joint.  I pick myself up and glance outside, half expecting a shambler, but the parking lot is empty.

            I head downstairs to the bar and Whistler is nowhere to be seen.  Most of the hunters have gone out on their rounds, and the place is dark and empty except for Gale who is perched in the corner at her favorite table.

            “Mornin’, spitfire,” She says, lit by the lamplight as she lounges in the corner of the room, nursing a morning beer.

            “Hey...  Hi, uh…”

            “He’s gone,”

            “Whistler?”

            “He’s out on a manhunt,”

            Like so many others had before me, I take a seat at one of the round wooden tables and put my head in my hands, rubbing at my temples as if I can rub sense back into myself, as if I can rub away the terror of the zone.  I wish I could click my heels and be at home in bed with polar bear patterned sheets and a porno mag, but I’m not in Kansas anymore…  Here in the zone, Toto’s got no eyes and a bad attitude, and Dorothy…   She’s a mutant hunter with a bar tab.

            “Who’s the target?”

            “Well, this guy we call Spic-n-Span, Spiccy was supposed to be watching Halfbad’s back in the field, only instead he shot him and took his shit.  Bahamas wasn’t too happy about it, said he’d pay to see Spic’s scalp.”

            “What’s with the nickname?”

            “Spic-n-Span, well..   He’s a vain jew asshole, - not that there’s anything wrong with that - so naturally the affectionate nickname.  I think it started when he started calling Chainsaw by the name of Nosejob,”

            “Cause he’s ugly?”

            “No, because I’ve got a serious desire to rearrange that guys face,” a voice like a chainsaw says, a deep rumble with a grinding sound from a throat that’s had one too many cigarettes.  I turn to see a big guy lean down and come through the metal doors with a sour look on his face, and a shotgun.

            “You Spaz?” he says, pulling off his helmet.

            “No, I..  Have you been talking to Whistler?”

            “That’s the Spaz,” Gale chimes in from her perch in the corner, pointing at me with a lazy finger, her crossed legs resting on the table.

            “Bahamas, give me a couple cold ones,” he says and the dark skinned man hands him two beers from the cooler, “call me Chainsaw,”

            “What’s uh… What did they call you, before the zone?” I say as the big man sits down at my table

            “Fuck off,” he says nonchalantly.

            “That’s a nice name,”

            “Yeah?”

            And behind him I see Gale elevate her beer to get my attention and shake her head at me furiously, so I change the subject.

            “Right..  Nice to meet you.. You’re a friend of Whistlers?” I say as he downs his beer.

            “No, I’m his goddamn fairy god mother.  Yeah I’m his friend.  I watch his back, kill things…  Beat the crap out of him when he loses his shit, sit on him when he’s drunk…  We get along good.”

            “Maybe next time I’m piss drunk, you can set me straight.”

            “It’s a deal,” he says, and slides the second cold beer across the table to me.  Trying to look tough, I pick it up and empty it down my throat while inhaling at just the wrong time.  I cough, sputter, and spit on the floor, hacking and gacking until I’m shaking with sweat, eventually catching my breath and sitting heavily back in my chair.

            “Good constitution, this one,” Chainsaw says over his shoulder to Gale, who shakes her head and conceals a frown behind her second beer.

            “He’ll probably live through the day,” she says flatly.

            “Well, at least he’s not boring,” the big guy drones.

            “How come you didn’t go with Whistler to get this guy Spic?”

            “Whistler wants to bring him back alive, and I  uh..  Well.. Suffice to say I’ve got an itchy trigger finger.”

            “You can’t go death sentencing everybody I guess,” I say.

            “Wow Gale, we got a real badass here,” Chainsaw remarks.

            “I mean…  Not every asshole deserves to die,” I say.

            “He’s a philosopher too,” Gale adds.

            “Spic deserves to die,” Chainsaw says.

            “He’s that bad?” I say.

            “We’re pretty sure he put a bullet in Halfbad’s back, after they’d discovered an artifact,” Gale explains, “ Halfbad was a good hunter, a good man.  He had family outside the zone.  If someone doesn’t deal with Spic it’ll be you or me next.”

            “Why all the nicknames?”

            “What’s your name again, boy?” Gale says, shaking her head.

            “It’s…  It’s uhh.  I know my name, it’s…  They’ve got my papers back at the military base.  Fuck, what’s happening to me?”

            “The zone’s taken it from you.  What’s your social security number?” Gale says, and I shake my head.

            “Birthday?” she says, and I keep shaking my head,

            “Did the shambler do this to me?” I ask her.

            “Yup,” Chain says, cleaning his gun’s barrels, “Face it kid, you’re Spaz now.”

            “It ain’t the shamblers, it’s the dark man down in the lab,” one of the hunters says in the gloom.

            “No,” Gale says, “No it ain’t ‘cause of those.  It’s the little girl.”

            “Everything in this place is made to kill you,” Chain says, “That demon imitates a child, and you should stay the fuck away from it.”

            “Chain, go bite a tree.” Gale says irritably, and I get the feeling they’ve had this conversation before.  Chain goes back to cleaning his weapon in the gloomy lamplight, and I move over to Gale’s table.

            “What lab did you mean?”

            “Sunrise lab…   It’s a long story,”

            “I got time,” I say,

            “Meh,” she says,

            “I’ll buy you a beer,”

            “If you insist,” she says, so I hand over two hundred bucks to Bahamas and give the red stripe to Gale.

            “Aren’t you charming?” she says,

            “So what’s this lab?”

            “For about thirty years it was a hospital, then when they got closed down, it reopened two years later as a cosmetics laboratory.  DuPont sold it to the government, and they, well..  There’s rumors about what went on there.”

            She stops and takes a sip of her beer, as if collecting distant thoughts and memories.

            “The lab, it’s on the other side of the zone.  Okay, so, little known fact.  The fence around the zone went up without any kind of evacuation.  A few people escaped, but most of them got taken down into the lab, they filed people through saying it was to check for radiation.  And they did that, and on the way out, they’d grab em and throw em in the pit.

            “See, they didn’t want to experiment on people that were healthy, happy.  They wanted scared folks, miserable folks, folks turned into animals.  So they’d throw ‘em in the pit for a couple weeks, these old corn silos.  When half of them had died, they’d take the other half down to the labs.”

            “What were they researching?

“There’s really only rumors…  Animal experiments…  Some people say, a vaccine to bring back the dead.  Other people say, they’re Nazis making a mutant army, and that’s where the mutants come from.  Or maybe they tried to open a portal to hell.  Wanna know my favorite theory?”

“Yeah?”

“They were harvesting souls for Oprah Winfrey.

“Oprah Winfrey?”

“That’s Lucifer... Bit of local slang.”

  The place is dangerous, if you can keep your sanity over there at all.  There are anomalies everywhere, and things happen that shouldn’t be able to happen.  Last I was there I saw a hunter get ripped apart by a grinder anomaly, but his separate body parts just wouldn’t die, flopping around…   Staring eyes, and gaping mouth.”

 “And what’s this about a little girl?”

“Katie Monroe.  She uh, shows up during the blooms.

 “How do you know all this?” I say,

“Whistler told me, but I seen Katie with my own eyes,” she says. 

A couple dozen hunters arrive at the station seemingly out of nowhere, and Whistler comes in, without Spic’s scalp.  He takes care of his business with Bahamas, puts a heavy hand on Chainsaw’s soldier and looks at me,

“Still alive today, how’d you manage that?” he says to me.

“I stayed inside all day -“ I say, cut off by the sound of a tornado siren, slowly rising and falling like a bad omen.

“Is there going to be a storm?” I ask.

“We don’t have storms, here in the Zone,” Whistler half-smiles, the first time I’ve seen him do it, and I’m eerily disconcerted.  “We call it the bloom.”

Bahamas locks up his shop.  Everyone picks up their equipment and takes the stairs in the corner down to the basement, so I follow.

“Why the basement?”

“It cuts down on some of the ah…  Symptoms.  Would you just shut up with the questions?  It’s the bloom, it’s bad news, don’t get caught outdoors.  It’s an electromagnetic storm, no good for your nervous system.”

I hear a great deep groaning sound echoing through the night, indistinguishable from a great moaning that seems to vibrate the building, as if there is a train going by, or some great mutant in pain.  Colored lights start to appear in the room, floating in the dark, like a trick of your mind except there they are, flashing lights of different colors like blooming flowers, and great waves of multicolor light piercing the gloom among the stationary hunters.

Everyones eyes except Whistler’s are closed.

“Close ‘em,” he says to me.

“You’re not,” I tell him back,

“You better close em,”

“If you can handle it, I can,”

“Okay asshole, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he says and hands me his cigarette, “that will help a little.”

The roaring sound is getting louder, the building feels like it’s going to up and fly away.  There’s a flash of light and everything freezes still.

Everything fades into mist except for a shadow that lingers in my vision, creeping in the corners of my mind, becoming the shade of a little girl.  She wanders amongst the hunters, then runs up the stairs and out of sight.  I follow her up the stairs, out the door and into the violence of the storm where she turns to me, her transparent hair whipping in the wind while bright flashes of lightning and colored light sail through the sky.

“The dark-time man knows you’re here.  He wants to be your friend.  Will you play with us?” she says.  I look up at the sky and my ears ring, my head like hurts like it’s about to explode.  It all fades to black, and I’m falling upwards.

“Goddamnit, Spaz, wake the fuck up,” Whistler says, slapping me repeatedly.  I wearily wave my hands in front of my face to get him to stop, then crack open my eyes to a cloudy, angry sky.

“Fucking A man, you tore right out of there.  I found you out here after the storm.  You ok?  What’s my name?”

“Whistler,”

“How many fingers am I holding up,”

“None?”

“What’s the capital of Antarctica.”

“C’mon man, who the fuck knows that offhand?”

“You seem fine.  Next time I tell you to close your eyes, just fucking do it for god’s sake.  I don’t know how you survived out here in the open without your brain being fried, maybe because you were knocked out somehow before it really started to pick up.

“Whistler, what did you see, with your eyes open?”  He looks at me like he sees through me, towards something more important.

“I saw a little girl in the basement,”

“Did she say anything to you?”

“No, her mouth and eyes were…” He grits his teeth, extends his arm and puts his closed fist on the table, closes his eyes and presses it onto the table hard, as if grounding a hot wire, and he finishes with noticable apprehension.  ”Sown shut.  Did she say anything to you by any chance?”

“Nothing that made any sense,” I say.

I peel myself off the ground and Whistler opens the door for me.  All the hunters, dirty and armored, are staring at me like they’ve never seen me before.  I take a seat against the wall near Gale in the corner, while Whistler starts a heated discussion with someone at the other end of the room.

“Gale, what was that?”

“Just a passing nightmare.”

“Have you ever kept your eyes open?”

“Yeah,”

“What do you see?”

“Tall shadows, and darkness, and the little girl who always says the same thing...” she trails off.  Whistler sits down with us and starts to lecture me.

“Incidentally, you’re lucky not to be dead, you stupid fool!  Just a general rule of thumb in the zone, don’t go chasing your hallucinations around.  Last guy I saw run out the door during a bloom I never saw again.  So when I tell you to keep your goddamn eyes closed, in fact if I ever tell you to do anything, just do it without talking back and without asking a goddamn question, even though I know those are your two favorite things,”

I open my mouth to ask a question but decide better of it.  Who or what is the dark-time man?  None of it makes any sense, now that it’s over, it seems like it really was just a dream.  I can’t resist myself.

“Gale, you heard of the dark-time man?” and the train station becomes unusually silent.
            “He’s just an old wives tail we tell around the firepit sometimes,” she says,

“What’s the story?”

“He’s the devil,” one man says from somewhere in the gloomy room,

“He’s the Tall man,” someone else says, “come to the zone to steal children and got stuck here,”

“No he ain’t,” says another, “The dark man ain’t none o those things.  I seen ‘em.  He’s an alien, twelve feet tall and black as oil,”

“He’s your worst nightmare,” one voice booms, above the rest, and the man who spoke gets out of his chair and steps up to Bahamas at the ticket window, who hands him a cold beer.  He clears his throat, and there’s dead silence.

“The dark man is your worst nightmare, worse’n the Devil, worse’n a alien, he’s pure evil.  He’s the darkness come out o’ the places that see no light, he’s come to the zone to feed on the souls of the dead and damned, he’s a dark god summoned up from the abyss by the evil done here.  He stalks the stalkers, hunts the hunters, kills the killers and eats the meats of the unlucky.  Maybe once, maybe maybe once he was a man, if he was, they called him Prodigy.”

“When Prodigy came to the zone, no mutant would touch him, not a dog, or a Blooder, not a Shambler or a Bloat.  He wore no armor, and he carried no gun, just a whittled spear, for puttin the mutants out of their misery, he’d say.    Indeed he walked among ‘em, smiten’ em, ‘till he found the black orb and disappeared, I kid you not.  The zone don’t like to be mastered, he took advantage for too long, and the zone cut him down.  All that’s left of him is his shadow, maybe, and his jealous ghost, trying to drag us down with him, jealous cause his precious zone lets us stay, but turned him into a monster.”

“That’s not it,” someone says,

“Not it at all,” another says

            “Tell the rest,” someone else says.

“Of course not, of course not, that’s not right,” the storyteller continues, “His name was Skinner, he was a bright, bright scientist, head of lab SR188, where they experimented on folks like you, turnin’ em into demons.  There was one girl they couldn’t break, so he comes down to the lab and locks eyes with the she demon and she murders him with her mind, sends him to hell, but hell ain’t black enough, and it spits ‘em right back out.  Meanwhile the zone goes all to hell, the anomalies appear.  He’s stuck there at the lab, and they eat each other until he’s the last one, and the she demon, well, she’s locked up, good meat, so he goes to eat her and the dark man comes and stops him, maybe the devil come to protect his investment. Skinner, he’s still down there in the lab somewhere, mind wiped, bumpin’ against the wall, ‘cause the dark man won’t let him die.”

I notice a woman in the corner hugging herself, shaking, her fingers on her scalp, pulling at her hair.  I don’t blame her, this place has an intimidating learning curve.

            “Whistler, there’s a rookie over there, looks like it’s her first day in the zone.  Maybe you should go slap some sense into her and introduce yourself,” I say and Whistler’s lips go thin,

“I don’t hit women,” he says,

            “I do,” Gale says, looking over at her, and she throws her legs off the table and walks over to the rookie, taking a seat across from her.

            “I hate it…   I hate how many people die here,” Whistler says, closing his eyes hard, fighting back remorse.  I can’t imagine it – what five years in the zone must do to a person, or how many friends he must have lost.

            “You should go home, get out of the zone,” I say.

            “I’m not going anywhere…  Long story,”

“I got time,” and he looks at me, as if gauging whether I mattered enough to bother with the telling.  Finally he nods to himself and says,

“Well, I used to live here…  Before it was the zone, I had ten acres of land.  When the power plant melted down they came door to door, loading people up in buses.  My wife and daughter were evacuated, When I got home from poaching they were gone, and I waited there hoping they’ll come back and then…  A week later, during a bad storm, my first bloom, she came to me, my little girl.  She’s always says the same thing, ‘Help me, Daddy’”

 “The little girl during the storm?”

            “Don’t you tell anyone, hear me?”

            “Do you think she’s alive somewhere?”

            “I don’t know.  It’s probably just some kind of electromagnetic pattern that’s embedded in the zone, the bloom…  It’s just perpetuating this pattern that got stuck in it years ago.  I’m not sure why it seems to be my daughter.”

“The zone absorbed her,” I say.

            “I guess…  Maybe she’s a part of the zone now,”  and he looks at me, clenching his fist on the table.  “The fact of it is, I’m not leaving this hell until I find my wife’s bones, and my daughter’s bones, and they’ve each got a proper grave.  And if I die here, at least I can join them,”

            “That’s morbid,” I say, “We should go to the lab, check it out, if you think they were there at some point,” I say,

            “I’ve never been able to get closer than a half mile, there’s too many mutants, especially, Bloats and Shamblers, and the Not-Dogs, that some people call Mouthers on account of the feeding hole.  And between mutants you’ve got anomalies, and between anomalies you’ve got the Rips, these chasms where the psychic fields will fry your nervous system.  If you wanted to knock on the front door, you’d have to have a small army and top-notch equipment.”

            “Sounds like a frontal assault would be suicidal,” I remark.

            “There’s got to be another way in,” Gale says.

            “There isn’t,” Whistler says.

            “We can’t get a helicopter or an armored car or something?” I say.

            “That’s a nice idea… But nobody flies in the zone, it’s too dangerous.  And an armored car?  Every mutant for miles would be piling on top of the damn thing.  Anyway, the last time someone tried that, it got flipped over by an anomaly.”

            “Prodigy could have gotten through.  He’d just mosey on through there,” I say.

            “Right, naked with a sharp stick,” Chainsaw says with a loud belch.

            “Maybe we could get a posse going.  How many hunters do you think there are in the zone?” I say, looking around the room and counting.

            “Too many,” Whistler says,

            “Where’s the money in it, really?” Gale says, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke up at the ceiling.  “I can make ten thousand in a day selling mutant bodyparts.  Count me out.”

            “That place is a death trap,” Chainsaw says.

            Whistler is lost in thought, his eyes staring upwards into the gloom, a look on his face like surprise and disbelief and we all stop talking and look at him.  He comes out of his trance and spreads his hands out on the table, as if counting his fingers to make sure they are all there.

            “We could easily get past the mutants and anomalies, if we went during a bloom,” Whistler says.

            “How’s that?”

            “During a bloom, the anomalies aren’t localized.  You could run up and down through the kettle anomaly field, there’d be nothing to stop you.  And the mutants – they can’t screw with your mind during the bloom, because of all the interference.”

            “But how would you keep your brain from getting cooked?” Gale says.

            “Well, if you were really high and drunk, or under the effect of a strong sedative, that would theoretically prevent the psychic waves, the electromagnetic waves of the bloom from propagating in your nervous system and damaging it,” Whistler says,

            “There’s Valerian,” Gale says, “It’s an herb, a sedative, grows everywhere…  It’s harmless but potent, and it’s free.  You mix that with a little marijuana and you’ll get stuffing knocked right out of you, but it won’t make you stupid like alcohol does.”

            We all look at each other in silence for a moment, the facts of the zone taking their heavy tolls on our thoughts, and one by one we each turn away from the pipe dream to more mundane needs.

            “It’s getting late,” Gale says.

            “Can I ask a question?”

            “You just did,” Chainsaw says.

            “What’s the black orb?” I say, and the table is quiet as the three hunters look at each other.

            “Who wants to take this one?”  Gale says.

            “I will,” says Chainsaw, “It’s a nasty artifact.  It draws you in, makes you want to hold it, and when you touch it you die.  And it grants wishes,”

“Halfbad said he’d seen Prodigy holding a fist sized black orb and then he disappeared right into thin air, and that’s the last anyone ever heard of him,” Whistler says,

Gale says, “And the night before, everyone says they saw Prodigy come into the station holding a dead rat, and you know..  I guess Steve swears it was a black orb,”

“Wait- Steve?  How come he doesn’t get some stupid nickname?”

“He doesn’t need one.  He knows his name.”

“What’s different about him from anyone else?”

“Alzheimers, for a start.. But he ain’t stupid,” Chainsaw remarks.

“Most of the time he’s up on the roof of the trainstation, he’s too scared to set foot into the zone.  But he makes a living, and he stays alive, that’s more than most can say,” Whistler says.

“He’s saved a dozen hunters from mutants over the years, sitting up there with his sniper rifle… And the guy’s been hit by shamblers so many times that he can look ‘em in the eye without flinching.  When there’s a bloom, he just stays up there,” Whistler says.

“He’s an older man.  If you try to talk to him, you’ll find out his brain is a bit scrambled, But…  He can tell a mutant from a hunter and he can aim and pull the trigger, so we take care of him,” Gale adds.

“He’s up there now?” I ask.

            “More ‘n likely,” Chainsaw says.

            “Excuse me,” I say, standing up and pushing my chair under the table.

            “Here, bring him this,” Bahamas says as he gestures me over and gives me a plastic bag with some foodstuffs and a plastic bottle of water.

            In the dark of night the gloom of the train station is blacker than ever, but indoors I’m safe and I know my way around so I take the stairwell up above the third floor.  It’s natural to fear of the dark, but its just a tickle compared to being out in the zone.

            I push on the heavy metal door at the top of the stairwell and emerge onto the concrete rooftop where the familiar sounds of distant gunfire and howling mutants greet me.

            “Hello?” I whisper, looking around in the twilight.

            “Who’s that?” someone says, an older man.

            “It’s uh.. It’s Spaz, and, I got some food for you.”

            “I’m over here,” he says, and I crouch down and follow the sound to find him lying there on a foam pad on the concrete, aiming into the distance with his rifle.  There’s some tarps strung up, and camouflage webbing, it looks like he lives up here.

“Is that you, Prodigy?” he says to me.

I start to say no, but I stop myself.

“Yeah, it’s me, Prodigy,” I say.

“Brought me some ammo?”

“No, just the food.  Know anything about a black orb?”d

“Do you still have that damn orb?” he says to me, “You know the devil is going to come for what’s his, I don’t care how much power a man can get.  Best put that orb back into the nightmare where you found it.”  Found it in a nightmare – a bad place?  Maybe he means lab SR188.

“What do you do during the bloom?  I didn’t see you in the basement,” I say, sitting down next to him behind the short concrete wall at the edge of the roof.

“The bloom don’t bother me none,” he says, “It’s just another cold, moaning wind.”

“I thought that it was deadly,” I say.

“It is, but I got this,” and he opens a small white foam cooler beside him and gestures for me to look.

Inside is a brown teddy bear missing one arm, with a single button eye hanging.  Just looking at it makes me feel sleepy.  I reach towards it but he grabs my arm.

“Don’t touch her.” He says, “Trust me, you don’t want to,” and closes the cover and gives it a pat.

“That thing protects you from the bloom?”

“Mostly.  She’s an artifact.”

“But it’s just a stuffed animal,”

“Not anymore.  Maybe it was once, maybe just some stupid toy stuffed with foam.  But the zone’s taken her and changed her, given her a purpose,”

“Where did you get it… Her?”

“In the corn silo at the Elm Street School anomaly, among the bodies, before…  Before I stopped hunting.”

Shivers run down my spine and I put both hands flat on the cold, gritty concrete.  Could he be talking about the infamous pit, where so many had died? 

“What did you say?” I ask him.

“I don’t know,” he says, “I don’t know.  What’s your name?”

“Spaz,”

“I’m Steve.  Want to hear a joke?” he says.

            “Sure,”

 “How many shamblers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” he says, the hint of a smile on his thin lips.

“Seven?”

“Two, but they would have to be tiny little shamblers to have sex inside of such a small space,” Steve says and can’t seem to stop chuckling to himself.

“That’s a pleasant thought.  How many years it take you to come up with that one?”

“One what?” he says, back to scoping out the countryside with binoculars.

“Nevermind…  Hey, nice to meet you,”

“I got your back,” he says, and lays himself back down in front of the rifle.  He can’t think real straight, but somehow, I feel just a little safer knowing he’s up there with his gun.