Monday, September 6, 2010

Volume 4: Upon The Pondering of Arms: Nathaniel's Journeys Part 1

Upon The Pondering Of Arms: Nathaniel’s Journeys Part 1
by Scott Thurlow

The first throat that Nathaniel cut did not bleed.  Not that it was really blood anymore, but almost none of the stuff that usually came out, did this time.  The rest of the head came off cleanly after a second slice with his short, serrated hunting knife.  It glinted faintly beneath the moonlit road as he worked quietly.  The dead thing he was kneeling over had lost both its arms and must’ve slowly leaked most of its bile out at some indeterminate prior point; stumbling about whatever its existence had been like before it was ended just now by Nathaniel.  He briefly wondered at the circumstances that had led to its armless condition.  It was helpful that it had been much easier to take down in this case.  Nathaniel also wondered how this one survived for so long without the use of its limbs to prey on the living.  He certainly hadn’t seen anything like it, until now.  He wasn’t particularly surprised by it though.

Nathaniel wiped his knife off habitually and checked his victim’s pockets for anything of value.  Empty.  When he was done he stared down at the severed head.  The eyes returned the look darkly, remaining unblinking and unforgiving detached from the body, as always.  That was fine by him.  He didn’t really forgive them either.  Nathaniel stood and kicked the head away from his path before moving the stumpy corpse to the edge of the woods he had come through and continuing cautiously on the causeway.

Further up, Nathaniel guessed about a mile or two at most, he came across a couple more of the things shuffling on the side of the road and honking in short bursts to each other.  Both had all their limbs intact, which was going to make his task slightly more challenging than the last encounter.  He looked around for anything in the immediate environment that could possibly aid him, or trip him up if he didn’t see it before engaging the fight.

Squatting down to the side of the road behind some thick but sickly-looking scrub growth that appeared to be enjoying a stranglehold on the shallow bank, Nathaniel uncoiled a length of rope from his pack.  He snipped off what he figured would be about the right length and edged closer to the two snuffling monsters.  He didn’t recognize either.  Not that he was expecting to, but sometimes he just never knew.  It did make it that much easier to focus on the next part however.

He crawled as silently as he could towards the nearest one that had its back turned to him.  The other one still honked on, but now it seemed to be hunched over something on the opposite side of the road.  Nathaniel figured this was the best chance he was going to get, and sprang to action.  He lunged forward and wrapped the rope around the first one’s feet, quickly tying it off before yanking on its legs.  It went down with a muffled honk, slamming face first into the ground.  His knife was out as he scrambled to run it cleanly and deeply enough across the back of its neck, which did ooze black filth profusely, though Nathaniel didn’t have time to watch.

The second one was now rounding to see what the commotion was and presumably why its “friend” had stopped communicating.  Nathaniel braced himself for its charge.  As it came at him, he stepped aside and tripped it, sending it sprawling in the ground, with a noise very much like the first had made.  That was the key, he had found.  Get them to the ground, remove their mobility.  He grabbed a decent sized rock he had spotted earlier and moved to methodically bash it against this one’s head before it could get back to its feet.  The geyser of gore that spewed forth mostly made up for the earlier missed sightings, though as always, Nathaniel tried to avoid getting too much on him.

Afterwards, he wiped himself down and glanced around, making sure it was safe to pull out his flashlight and recover his tools from the fight.  Another lesson learned long ago: be thorough.  He gathered the rope back up and set about checking the pockets of these two.  One had a half pack of gum that was as hard as stone.  The other had what appeared to be a faded, losing lottery ticket.  Aside from those, neither had anything useful for Nathaniel.  More junk.  He sighed and set about the second part of his ritual.  Nathaniel figured the ditch was as good a place as any for their true graves, as he dragged both bodies into it.

With the “burial” complete, he moved to the side of the road where he had seen the second thing crouched before the fight.  Examining the patch of earth closely with his flashlight, he could now clearly see the object it had been so intensely craned over earlier.  A mangled and gnawed arm lay there, decorated with some kind of tattoo that Nathaniel was unable to fully make out due to its state of extreme decay.

There was still a lot of road and night to go, and although it seemed to be fairly smooth sailing for now, Nathaniel was acutely aware that he could never know exactly when a storm might rise up out of the sea and swallow him up.  He didn’t like the looks of that arm, the sight of it lying there, discarded like a used baby’s bottle, which it might as well have been.  It made him uneasy, unlike anything else he had done and seen so far this night.  Gazing at it was making him think back on another arm he once knew.  Anna’s.

It happened roughly a week after television stopped making sense, and the day after Anna had taken a turn for the worse over the previous night.  By then there were hardly any more rumors and garbled government warnings and instructions coming out.  Most of the people left in their town had boarded up their homes into miniature, picketed fenced fortresses, lined like sentinels up and down the street.  Nathaniel and Anna had been no exception.  Before that, they had heatedly talked about whether or not they should leave, evacuate, like it was at first being advised to do, or stay and hold out against whatever might be coming their way.  Nathaniel and Anna were as uncertain as everyone else in town on the issue.

“But where to?”  Nathaniel had said, over their seemingly endless debates before the day.

“I know we’ve heard they’re quarantining, or trying to I guess, somewhere, but we haven’t heard much of anything else.  The closest one is supposedly a hundred miles away, and there’s no telling what they’re really going to do to us.  Or be like.  And besides…” On and on.  While Anna would constantly respond that, “surely someone was doing something about ‘all this’.”  They went back and forth like this each day before going to bed, restless but thankful for each other.

It was about nine-thirty in the morning that day, when they suddenly heard a crashing of garbage cans and muffled voices outside their lovely light lavender home.  Nathaniel looked over, not expecting to see Anna out of bed yet.  The night before she was tossing and turning for hours before finally settling down.  She didn’t look too well still, but he thought that her being on her feet was perhaps an encouraging sign.

“Sounds like something’s… going on…down the street,” she slurred.  “Maybe help…or some news about …anything…finally…”  She stumbled over to the door as Nathaniel nervously followed and embraced her in the doorway, halting her.

“Hey.  Wait.  Just be careful.  Take it easy, Ann.  Maybe you should have some water or something first.  You don’t look so well.  We don’t know even what’s going on, we probably should wait…”  She shrugged limply out of his arms without a word and opened the door to step out, heading towards the sounds of the commotion.  Nathaniel followed suit behind as Anna led him partly into the street in the direction of the disturbance.  No amount of news coverage description or any other kind of second-hand account or wild imaginings could have prepared him for what he was about to witness.

The first group of people he recognized were their neighbors, the Hardy family, from two houses down.  They were a slightly older married couple named John and Amy, joined by their older son, Charlie.  All three chased the younger Hardy boy, Jason, across their yard and into the street in something akin to a ludicrously aggressive, reverse game of tag.  Upon catching Jason, John, Amy and Charlie Hardy began to greedily consume him.  Nathaniel yelled unintelligibly, and very loudly, a reflex, just then at the horribly surreal scene that was now playing out before them.  Which was to be the beginning of the end.

As soon as they finished chewing on poor Jason, they rose up and began advancing on Nathaniel and Anna, who herself was now faltering and stumbling quite a bit with every step.  The three Hardys however, happily united as a family in their gruesome game, were eager for another round.  Nathaniel was yet composed enough to grab Anna’s hand and start pulling her as rapidly as he could back across the street towards their driveway, supporting what now felt like her full weight.  The Hardys hurriedly followed in their footsteps.

He made it back just to the edge of their driveway before the herd of hunting Hardys caught up and pounced on Anna, ripping her from Nathaniel’s grip as she shrieked.  They dragged her down by the back of her pretty flower-patterned green dress and throttled her gurgled scream as they tore her into her like dogs would a raw bloody steak.  Disturbingly, it resembled almost exactly the manner that had befallen Jason.  Horrifyingly hypnotizing; morbidly mesmerizing in its brutal efficiency.  Charlie seemed to be especially enjoying the feast, munching gluttonously on Anna’s left arm.  Munch.  Munch.  Munching.  Crunching and chomping away at it like it was his favorite, most delicious snack in the whole world.  That was the thing that paralyzed Nathaniel with absolute unspeakable dread, utterly freezing him and rendering him unable to move or think as he saw it happening.  Incapable of deciding in favor of either fight or flight, he could only simply watch in numbing fright.  Then in a flash, that part inside him realized that he had only those two choices: start moving again or succumb to the same fate in seconds.  He chose.

Other events had been unfolding out in the streets and yards of their (no longer) quiet town during this short time.  More people, neighbors, workers from local stores, school teachers, were coming out of their houses.  They were being followed or led by one another in what would have been a comically fast paced chase of circles, were it not for the excessive violence involved when one caught up to another and put a grisly end to it.

Tears were streaming uncontrollably down Nathaniel’s face as he dashed the final feet to the car as fast as he could.  He could hear the Hardys getting up again to start their abhorrent chase, with him now their target, and let out another animal yelp.  As if in gross response, they too all started to make noise.  He wasn’t sure if it was at him, or each other, or both, and he did not want to know.  But the noise went on, got louder, as they all joined in and got closer.  It was the most horrible sound Nathaniel had ever heard in his entire life.

He fumbled with the keys but managed to get them out and slam the door behind him as he fell into the relative safety of the driver’s seat.  He found himself besieged then by the various people he knew throughout his life, singly focused on the idea of devouring him and probably everyone else left alive in the neighborhood for breakfast.  Foremost amongst them were the recently revenant Hardys (from two houses down) and Anna.  Sweet, adorable Anna.  His Anna.  Their grating voices croaking outside the car window jolted Nathaniel to action as he thrust the keys in and started up the engine.  He backed recklessly out of the driveway, hitting one of them on the way, Amy it looked like, which made him start crying even harder.

Before Nathaniel had a chance to pull away down the street, he looked out to the last vision he would ever have of his town, and of Anna.  The front of her dress was stained darkly from the bites at her neck while her mauled arm appeared as if it had been dipped in tar or grease.  She was at the head of the small crowd that was converging on his car, joining those who had suffered the fate of the Hardys, and billions of others now throughout the world.

 She looked out at him distantly with cold, cold, eyes, which were also still so very, very, blue, and now hopelessly gone.  They would never again be the shining stars Nathaniel had always told Anna they were to him.  He forced himself to turn away and jammed on the gas pedal while frantically wiping the tears from his own (very much alive) eyes.  Then, with no room for other thoughts, he sped off and kept driving far, far away, for a long, long time, finally stopping to bawl some more before collapsing into a fretful sleep.  He had locked himself in his car on the side of what he fearfully hoped was a safe enough section of whichever road he was on.  He could not think of or bring himself to do anything else at the time.

After that Nathaniel drove in a daze for miles and days on end.  Stopping surreptitiously to check stores and gas stations, any place nearby on the road that seemed like it might offer shelter or supplies.   He also found a few nightmarish surprises.  He would sleep always locked away, silent and hidden, under the layers of blankets in the back seat of his car.  Then it was back to driving.  Nathaniel decided to only drive in one direction, east, away, ever away.  Away from his former life in his former small town and former neighbors, the Hardys, and former girlfriend, Anna (thinking about her was like running a razor across his brain, so he tried not to do it often. Though it was difficult at times.)  All of whom had eaten and made a wreck of everything he knew.  He cried profusely along the way, alternating it with bouts of furious, blinding rage (spent punching the seats until his fists hurt too much or he got too tired to continue) that he had previously not thought himself capable of.

A multitude of other events had transpired during and since that time of endless driving, but they were far too many for Nathaniel to think about or remember as clearly as the one that had just come to him in that moment, staring down at the arm in the dead of night.  He decided he was no longer going to look at it or dwell on it, or any other arms, and what they did or did not mean, or might or might not have meant.  Instead, he walked away and despite the night’s activities was slightly less wearied.  It wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, all in all.

Sometime recently the city he heard about was where he decided he’d head next, and though Nathaniel knew it was still a ways to go, at the present moment it was as if he were being carried to it on the invisible tide. Nathaniel found himself sensing that, just as it was impossible to tell when the gale storms would begin to batter, likewise sometimes a perfect calm will arise out of nowhere and settle.  He sailed serenely onwards, always watchful.  He kept a pace that allowed the rest of this night’s journey to seem to at once take forever, and no time at all.

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