Variance - Book 1, Issue #5

Potawatomi Woods, Wheeling, IL

Four months after The Rise

     A group of survivors raced across the desolate terrain, not bothering to stop for what seemed like days.  Their legs were tired and their throats dry, but they pressed on.  They had passed through abandoned town after abandoned town, picking up food and clean water whenever they could.  But they afforded themselves very few rests, running on fumes for quite some time.

     Illinois had been just as desolate as Minnesota and Wisconsin, and when they came to a preserve just outside Chicago, things were no different.  It was completely deserted, not even the occasional caw of a crow could be heard amongst the eerie ripples of wind and rattling dead leaves.  They had fled for the city, desperate for hope, for a savior, for anything.  They had fled for safety, but the Variants followed.  And they were not far off.

     “Hey, Lara—check this out!”  Enrique Valenzuala’s words stuttered against his trembling breath.  Enrique was short, stout and Mexican, and ever since he was a little boy, he had been self-conscious of all three.  His mother preached sermon after sermon about being proud of their heritage, but he did everything he could to divorce himself from it.  In one mortifying incident, his mother slapped the Chalupa out of Enrique’s hand after his ultimate defiance: skipping Sunday supper for a quick trip to Taco Bell.  He never forgot the look in her eye, and it was the only clear memory of her his mind could muster.

     “We ain’t got time for this, Enrique.”  Lara stopped next to Enrique, though her voice was calm and maintained.

     Enrique’s stomach grumbled as he bent down to retrieve a Hallmark card fluttering in the wind.  The card was the only definable object that protruded from a mound of wreckage of what used to be a slew of temporary shacks or huts.  Now, however, they were leveled into nothingness.  How the destruction had come about was a mystery to them, but they had seen enough wreckage over the past four months to know not to ask any questions.  On the cover of the card was a cartoon boy with a football-shaped head.  He held a green birthday cake while fireworks exploded behind him.  In the upper right hand corner of the card was a peculiar splotch of brown, something that looked like a grease stain, but was most likely dried blood.

     “What did I just say?” Lara yelled.  “We can’t stop, Enrique!” 

     Lara Holliday was thin and pale, and her blonde hair only accentuated those traits.  Her face was soiled with dirt and her breath smelled of Spam and canned chipotles.  At her sides were dual .357 Magnums fastened securely in their holsters.

     Enrique ignored her (as he usually did) and freed the birthday card from the wreckage.  “Holy fuck!” he cried, stumbling backward and falling onto the pile of tattered shingles and blistered wood.

     “What is it?”

     “A hand!  There’s a goddamn hand under there!”

     “What the hell’s going on?  Why’d you stop?” a gruff voice came from behind them.  “Enrique, quit fuckin’ around.”

     “Captain, get over here!  You gotta see this,” Enrique said to the older gentleman approaching them.

     Captain Richard Blake was old in age, but youthful in personality.  His grey stubble had turned a vibrant shade of white over the last few weeks, and he exhibited a thick head of magnificent silver hair.  If it weren’t for two tours in Vietnam and a brief stint in Desert Storm, Captain Blake would look ageless. 

     “What is it?” Captain Blake asked, the annoyance in his voice transitioning to curiosity.

     All Enrique could do was point.  At the edge of the rubble, protruding from a layer of shingles, was a woman’s hand.  It was limp and motionless, an abandoned relic of what used to be.  The nails were caked with dirt and a thin layer of dust had settled across the skin making the hand look hollow and waxy.

     “Hell!  I reckon that’s the strangest thang I seen all week,” Captain Blake remarked.

     This was true.  True, until the fingers moved, however.

     “Strike the last,” he corrected himself.

     Enrique nearly toppled over.  Lara held back a gasp.  The hand flexed, moving stiffly after waking from a deep sleep.

     “What do we do?” Enrique croaked.

     “What do you reckon we do?  Get her the hell outta there!”

     Enrique began to dig, heaving up splintered wood and crumbled trusses with marked ease. 

     “Where’s the Doc?” Lara asked.  She stepped behind Captain Blake and stared off into the clearing.  It was empty, and painfully quiet, until a deafening scream ripped across the preserve and throttled their eardrums.  It was a blitzing scream layered into a nightmarish harmony. 

     “Is that them?” Enrique asked.  A terrified look flashed in his eyes.  He had momentarily stopped digging, trembling with fear.  “That can’t be them, can it?”

     “Doc!”  Captain Blake shouted toward the clearing.

     Two hundred yards behind them, a man emerged from the tree line.  He was running, a visible sense of urgency in his steps.

     “Martin, what is it?” Lara asked

     “They’re coming,” was all he said.

     Captain Blake stepped forward, the first to voice his pessimism.  “That ain’t possible, Doc, we still got an hour a daylight lef’!”

     Doctor Martin Knight was dressed handsomely in black slacks and a white button down.  Both articles of clothing were a bit dingy and dust-stained, but, otherwise, in perfect condition.  When he finally reached them his breaths were heavy and plodding, and his shirt was rich with perspiration.  He stepped to Enrique who was still knee deep rubble.  “What the hell are you doing?”

     “Check this out, Doc!  There’s a god damn woman under here!”

     Another scream split across the preserve, this one more intense than the last. 

     “They’re gettin’ closer, Doc,” Captain Blake said, the southern twang in his voice suddenly more pronounced.

     “Pull her up!” Martin said.  He crouched down, helping Enrique sift through the debris.

     “Are you crazy?  They’re almost on us!”  Lara’s protest was warranted, yet ignored.

     Enrique lifted the last fragment of wood and cast it aside.  He and Martin peered into the crater and saw the face of middle-aged woman within the hollow.  Apart from a minor scratch on her cheek and a small bruise on her forehead, she appeared to be in reasonably good condition.

     Enrique reached into the crater and the woman’s eyes suddenly opened.  He jumped back, a small scream escaping from his lips.  “Holy fuck shit!” 

     The woman opened her mouth as if to speak, but no words came out.

     Another scream in the distance.  A rumbling.  They were very near…

     Martin and Enrique reached under the woman’s arms and pulled her up.  Her hair was littered with soot and grime, and her fingernails were cracked and brittle.  Her eyes darted back and forth between the four, unsure of what to do or say.  Understandably so.

     “Are you all right?” Martin asked hastily.

     The woman could only blink at them. 

     “What’s your name?”

     Another scream tore across the preserve.

     “Can you understand me?”

     The woman blinked again, but, this time, she seemed to grasp some semblance of comprehension.

     “What’s your name?” Martin repeated.

     “Annie,” the woman’s voice croaked.  “Annie Walker.”

     Martin took her by the shoulders and looked deeply into her eyes.  “Mrs. Walker, I’m afraid I don’t have time to explain what’s about to happen.  All I can tell you is that we’re going to have to run; run as fast as we can.  I don’t want you to look back and I don’t want you to ask any questions.  All I want you to do is run.  Do you understand me?”

     There was a blatant look of pandemonium in her eyes.  She didn’t answer.  She gaped in awe at the shotguns in Captain Blake and Enrique’s hands, the Magnums stuck against Lara’s thighs, and the rifle strapped across Martin’s back.

     “Mrs. Walker!” Martin snapped.  “Do you understand?”

     “Yes…” she mumbled.  “Yes, I understand.”  Though, truthfully, she didn’t.

     A final piercing scream and they all turned to face the tree line.  In the distance, a hundred bodies emerged from the wood, their features indistinguishable from the survivors’ distance.  The figures were lined up in a meticulous row, like an army in attack position.

     “What is that?” Annie asked.

     “The Variants,” Captain Blake said cocking his shotgun in an absurd moment of surrealism.

     “The what?” Annie asked. 

     “Jesus, honey, what’d Martin just say?” Lara barked.  “No fucking questions!”

     Martin interlocked his fingers with Annie’s and the five were off and running.  “Get to that cluster of trees!” Martin shouted, pointing to a broad acreage of firry pines.  Their trunks were as thick as Cadillacs and their branches were low and dense.  

     Their feet pounded on the dry grass, but the sound was drowned out by the pursuing Variants.

     The survivors reached the tree line and traversed their way through the crowded wood.  Annie glanced up at the tall pines as Martin pulled her along, his pace quickening.

     “There!  Up ahead!”  The four followed as Lara made a slight left on a faux trail and emerged into another clearing, this one twice the size of the last.  It was open, exposed.

     They were sitting ducks.

     On the far end of the clearing stood a small cottage, recently built considering the glimmering shingles and unfinished wood.  Its unnatural location looked like a bizarre construct haphazardly placed inside an Edward Hopper painting.

     “Get to the cottage!” Martin shouted, now leading the way.  Annie was close behind him, her hand still firmly clasped in his.

     They hustled up the porch steps and tried the front door.

     Locked.  Quack, quack, went the sitting ducks.

     “Enrique!”  Martin called him to the door.

     Enrique knelt down and removed a lock-pick set from his back pocket.  Within seconds the pick took and the latch lifted.  He pushed the door open and a shotgun blast landed next to his head, the sound piercing his ears.  Wood exploded off the frame, unhinging the door.  Splinters skipped into Enrique’s cheek, but he avoided the shell’s BBs.  He toppled backward, gun in hand, and instinctively fired a shot into the house.  A soft groan was audible from just inside the doorway."  Shit!  Oh shit!”  Enrique was on his feet and the first one inside.

     “Get inside!” Captain Blake ordered,

     Lara and Martin looked back at the pines wavering in the breeze.  At the edge of the clearing, four-dozen bodies emerged from the wooded darkness.

     “Come on!”  Martin grabbed Lara by her tank top and yanked her inside. 

     “I’m sorry man, I’m so sorry.”  Enrique was sobbing over the body of an older gentleman.  By the look of his wrinkled skin and fragile bones he couldn’t have been younger than seventy-five.  A single gunshot wound stood out on his tattered white t-shirt.  His chest was expanding and contracting with such difficulty Martin was sure the BBs had lodged in his lungs.  Enrique had the old man’s head propped up on his thigh and was applying pressure to the wound as best he could.

     “Lara, secure the door!”  Martin knelt down next to the old man.

     Lara grabbed hold of a stained, blue couch, spun it around, and wedged it against the unhinged door.  She toppled a nearby dresser onto the sofa, the drawers regurgitating out as she did.  Inside the drawers were articles of clothing, both male and female, both young and old.

     Martin lifted Enrique’s hand from the wound and saw a deep hole three inches above his floating rib.  The blood was fantastically dark and seemed unusually thick for an unclotted wound.   “How you holding up?” he asked the old man.

     “He shot me,” the old man coughed.  His teeth were stained with blood.  “The son of a bitch shot me.”

     “I didn’t mean to, man, I’m sorry.”  Enrique wiped the tears from his eyes.

     “Enrique, go help Lara.” 

     He left reluctantly, his sobs continuing to fill the small cottage.

     “They’re coming, aren’t they?  The Variants?” the old man asked.  He mustered a defeated laugh, then coughed again.  Blood ran out the side of his mouth and collected on the unfinished wood floor.  “Those goddamn Variants.  I thought I’d be able to stay here forever.  Goddamned fool, that’s what I was.”  His breaths were becoming shorter and more constricted.  

     Outside the sunlight was diminishing and the remaining rays projected the Variants’ shadows against the cottage walls.  They were long and daunting and stretched like something out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

     Lara peered through the cottage’s lone window.  “Jesus, they’re everywhere.”

     “Listen…”  The old man’s voice was now barely a whisper.  “Under the rug…there’s a door…you can hide down there…until…”  His words trailed away and his eyes fluttered.

     “Lara, check under the rug.”

     Lara snatched up a Moroccan rug exposing a small door cut in the floorboards.  She pulled it open and the fantastic stench of death wafted up at her.  Lara recoiled, dropping the door with a thud.

     “Shhh!” Captain Blake hissed.

     “It smells down there!”

     “Just go,” Martin told them.

     Enrique and Lara were already in the cellar by the time Captain Blake had led Annie down.  Martin put his hands under the old man’s armpits and dragged him toward the door in the floor.

     “Let go a me,” said the old man

     The front door shook suddenly.  The couch blocking the door slid forward.  The Variants would be inside soon.

     “We have to get downstairs,” Martin pleaded.

     “Let ‘em come!  I ain’t scared!”  The madness in the old man’s eyes was dreadful.

     Martin tried again to slide him to the cellar door, but the old man continued to struggle.

     The dresser on the worn blue couch rattled.  Hands were reaching inside.  It wouldn’t hold much longer.

     The old man reached for his shotgun.  Martin tried to intervene but the old man knocked him away.  Martin fell back, tumbling through the cellar opening before landing six feet below the cottage floor.  The air rushed from Martin’s lungs and he gasped for a breath.

     Upstairs they heard the couch slide another foot, its legs skidding across the brittle wood.  

Captain Blake jumped up, grabbed hold of the door in the floor, and slammed it shut, enveloping them in darkness.

     Martin heaved in his first true breath and the rich smell of decomposition ran up his nostrils.  It was a familiar scent, something he had grown accustomed to during his semester of Gross Anatomy.  Only this smell was of rotting corpses.  No special care was taken, no embalming fluid had been used, no preservation of any kind.  There had  only been the summer’s heat to keep death’s company.

     The front door exploded open sending the dresser clattering to the floor.  Martin pictured the poor old man above him, staring in awe as the Variants hogged his doorway, paralyzed by fear and pain.  “You filthy Variants!” he heard the old man yell.  “Get outta my house!”  

     There was the unmistakable crack of a shotgun blast exploding out of the barrel followed by the futile attempt of the old man trying to reload.  Footsteps thundered into the house.  Tearing flesh and crunching bone was all they could hear from the cellar before the old man gurgled a final breath and was no more.

     Martin’s eyes adjusted to the cellar’s darkness and he glanced over to see Captain Blake covering Annie’s mouth with his hand.  Tears were streaking down her face and settling on his wedding band, but Captain Blake seemed not to notice.

     Lara hung from the cellar door, using every ounce of her thin frame to hold it shut.  

     The Variants lumbered around upstairs, pacing and breathing with ghostly depth.  Then the footsteps turned and made their way out of the house.

     They waited several minutes before anyone spoke.  When Lara did, she said, “At least it wasn’t as bad as last time.”

     Annie broke down in an uncontrollable wave of sobs.  It was the only sound any of them made until the rain mercifully came and drowned everything out.