Garden State
Taking the old roads now. Sinkholes implode when the water table drops. Trees claw away at the edges. Our pencil mark on the land is swiftly being erased.
– The Wakeful Wanderer’s Guide, Vol. 3, line 421
If they hadn’t stopped in that old parking lot, they would have been fine. Barnabas Yoniver barreled down the crumbling Parkway, bouncing in the driver’s seat. He had left Daschel to oversee the conquest of the xombie town of Reverside while he and three of his men drove back to New Atlantic to check on reports of fires and explosions. Now Ted was gone, along with two more of Brady’s trainees. He was the only one left.
Ted had been the navigator for the invasion of Tarrytown. He told Barnabas to avoid the Garden State Parkway, but Barnabas couldn’t see why. It was easy going down from the Tappan Zee. Overgrowth had time to reclaim the edges, but the middle was still plenty wide enough. If only they hadn’t stopped to discuss the route, he wouldn’t be driving all by himself, Ted would still be alive, and Barnabas could show him how wrong he was.
They had pulled off just outside of Tarrytown. Ted said he needed time to figure out the route back, having torn back across the bridge with news of the fires in New Atlantic. He steered the truck into an empty old parking lot, weeds and trees growing up through the old concrete. A line of low buildings, the remains of shops, lined the far end of the expanse. A fog had moved in. There was evidence of a camp amidst the rubble. A cold pile of ashes, bedrolls, broken bottles, and some packs littered the asphalt. The area was otherwise deserted, however, so they parked and stepped out to investigate.
“I want to avoid that ambush we hit on the way up,” Ted told him. “The xombies have, no doubt, doubled the defenses at that intersection, so it would be better to go around it.”
“The Parkway is faster,” said Barnabas. “We could shoot down it to Perth Amboy, find a crossing, then continue back on smaller roads to town.”
“The Garden State is no longer safe, boss. Believe me. I looked into it. We’re better off on the little roads. I just need time to work it out.”
“Well, make it quick. We don’t know what’s going on at home. I need to get down there like yesterday.”
Ted was standing, holding the old book of maps. The pages were covered with circles, arrows, lines, and notations. The other two men were going through the packs and bedrolls, looking for abandoned supplies.
“You’d better come and see this, boss,” the larger one of them said.
Barnabas walked over to the soldier and the man handed him two spent shell casings. “What am I looking at here, Mr…” he trailed off, not knowing the man’s name.
“Lassus,” the man said. “One of those shells was fired and one was not, but both are empty.”
“That’s strange,” Barnabas replied. “These people were carrying duds in their packs? But some of them worked?”
“Raiders,” Lassus said, kicking the pack to the side. Beneath it was a desiccated leather vest. The words “Enduring Vengeance” in faded paint were still visible on the back. It was the logo of a club employed by the Reynolds family, based somewhere near Pittsburgh. “No way one of them would leave their vest behind. I don’t like it. We should get back in the truck.”
Barnabas bent down to examine the vest. It looked like it had been there for decades. The leather crumbled in his hand when he nudged it. “Whatever happened here, it was a long time ago.”
“The hell is that?” he heard Lassus say, as he passed Barnabas on the left.
Before Barnabas could follow Lassus’ gaze, a pole shot up out of the concrete, missing the side of his head by inches. There was a high light whistling noise, like a powerful wind whipping tree branches. Something hot and wet hit his cheek, and Lassus’ head rolled like a ball against Barnabas’ left ankle. He froze, not sure what he was looking at. Slowly, he looked around the parking lot.
Identical poles stuck out of the old parking lot at regular intervals. The tops of them were spinning, and a light fog of motion extended out from them, at shoulder level. Ahead of him, one of the poles wasn’t spinning. It supported a life-sized doll. What looked like a young girl in a white dress, her mouth open, dangled for a moment, and then disappeared back underground. Barnabas glanced behind him toward the vehicle. The top of Ted’s head was gone, his book of maps covered in blood, lying at arm’s length from the sliced-off section of his skull. Ted had been shorter than the others by half a foot. Barnabas looked to the left and found the other soldier, Dylan, bent over tying his shoe. He was staring at Ted’s body. He leaped up to run.
“Stop!” yelled Barnabas. Too late. A wire or a string, spinning at incredible speed, sliced through Dylan’s face and ears. Barnabas looked away.
In unison, the poles pulled in their whipping tendrils and sank back into the ground. One of them was stuck, the wire embedded in the rear of the truck. It released the wire and retracted into the asphalt.
Breathing heavily, not knowing how long he had, Barnabas ran as low and as fast as he could back to the door of the truck and climbed in behind the steering wheel. It had been left idling. He threw it in gear and stomped on the accelerator. He checked the side mirrors for any motion. The poles stayed down. From the crumbled buildings to the south emerged small machines, heading for the carnage. He turned to face the exit, screaming obscenities, the tires squealing as he made his way back to the road.
The fog grew thicker on the fractured parkway. Barnabas was driving recklessly, barely avoiding riding off the road several times. In spite of the decrepit state of the surface, he pushed himself to go faster to get back to his town.
The danger a few hours behind him, he estimated his position on the old Parkway. The speedometer in the truck was broken, but he had been making good time. He thought he must be near Clifton.
A fire alone was a serious threat to his town. He remembered Bethany saying something about an attack and explosions. That was far, far worse. He needed to get there right away to assess the damage and plan for a counter-attack.
The road got better. The Parkway changed from the narrow, cracked strip to a dark, wide, smooth expanse. A half-hour later, to his left, he saw the outskirts of Newark. Newark was a xombie town and had been for decades, but Barnabas planned to blow by it before they could stop him. He reached to his side where he kept his handgun. It belonged to his grandfather, a SIG Sauer 9 millimeter SP2022 with a custom leather grip. He drove with one hand on the wheel and held the gun in his lap. “Just try it,” he said to himself.
He rounded a bend, and saw a crowd of people and some small houses right in the middle of the road. It looked like an open-air market. The people were bicycling and walking around a few dozen shops and stalls. They saw his truck, still speeding along. Barnabas expected them to run, but they just stood there watching him approach. Barnabas switched the gun to his left hand and fired at them through the open driver’s side window, one, two, three. He was too far away to hit anything yet. “Save your ammo,” he thought to himself. The structures looked flimsy. He decided to plow through the middle. He heard a pop. The truck broke hard, and the road rose up to meet the windshield.
• • •
Barnabas is playing on the floor with a toy truck. His mother and father are in the kitchen. His mother is yelling at his father. She does that often.
Bethany is there. She grabs his hand and leads him out of the sliding glass doors to the deck. In the backyard is a swing set. Bethany pushes him on the swing. Barnabas’ legs reach for the tops of the trees, the sun, the sky.
Bethany goes back into the house and returns carrying their baby brother. She puts Daschel on the grass, wrapped in a blanket, and Daschel watches Barnabas go high again as Bethany pushes.
Barnabas is learning how to pump his legs. Soon he will be able to swing himself. Bethany pushes him some more and then sits on the swing next to him and shows him how to do his legs properly. He tries to extend and pull back his legs to get the swing moving. He thinks it might be working, but soon, he loses too much height. Now he is just pumping his legs back and forth almost at a stop. Bethany gets off her swing to push him again.
• • •
He opened his eyes and turned his head. He was lying on his back in a fourth or fifth story room with floor to ceiling windows overlooking a cluster of other buildings. The room was huge and empty except for the bed in which he lay and a small table to his left. He tried to get up and almost blacked out from the pain. His chest hurt, his head hurt, his left leg was in agony. His right hand was covered in a translucent pink ball of goo that pushed back when he touched it. The same stuff was on his leg, and around his ribs and forehead. Otherwise, he was naked.
Panicking, he tried rolling onto his side. The pain got much worse, and he couldn’t hold the position with his leg bound up. He rolled back.
“Hey!” he called. “Hello!” No answer. The sound of his voice reverberated off the windows, the walls, and the floors. “This could be Princeton. I could be in a family-controlled building,” he spoke to the ceiling, gripping a thread of desperate hope.
He reached out with his good hand and took the cup of water from the table. He tried to smash it against the bed frame, rising up behind his head. Maybe he could use it to cut this stuff off of him. Either the frame was too soft, or the cup was unbreakable. All he accomplished was spilling water over his head and pillow. He licked the water from the sides of his mouth and sank back down in the bed. He waited.
Barnabas was unaccustomed to boredom. It infuriated him. He called out for someone until his voice was hoarse. He thrashed about as best as he could on the bed, causing new waves of pain. Hours passed. The sun was setting. Then, abruptly, he began to feel really, really calm. He smiled and chuckled a little. The room became friendly. He glanced at the pink ball on his hand and chuckled some more. Then he sunk into a sweet, dreamless sleep.
The light behind his eyelids and the pain woke him. There was a tube in his mouth. He was swallowing something cool and syrupy. He tried to pull the tube out and found he couldn’t move his hands. He opened his eyes.
“You’ve been in an accident,” the man said. He was forty-ish with a black beard and straight black hair. He wore khaki shorts and a long-sleeve button-down gray flannel shirt. Behind him was a woman in a bright green jumpsuit. She was the same age or older, with graying straight hair. Her hands were in the pockets of her jumpsuit. She seemed distracted.
“Muh hahns,” Barnabas said, trying to form the words around the tube. “I can’p moob muh hahns.”
“That’s right, Mr. Yoniver. You can’t move your hands or anything else right now, but you’re alive.” The man said this in a way that suggested he might prefer the alternative.
“Are you a doctor? Where am I?” Barnabas was finding it hard to speak.
The man smiled slightly. “My name is Genghis. This is Mathilda. You are in our care. As it happens, I am not a doctor. Neither is she. You have already been looked at by people who could ascertain your condition. You are in no immediate danger. You just need time to heal. In the meantime, we have some questions for you to answer about the incident. Do you feel up to that?”
“What inthident?” Barnabas remembered the truck skidding on the road near Newark. It felt like it hit something in the road. “Did you crass my thruck?”
The woman looked at him for the first time. Her gaze was unnaturally steady. “Tire grips,” she said. “To stop you.”
“That’s not the incident we want to discuss,” the man said. “Tell us, if you will, about a boy named DASL6.”
“Who or what,” Barnabas gurgled, “the fuck is a DSL thix?” Barnabas was certain he had been captured by xombies. He pushed back a wall of panic and steadied himself.
“The boy you tortured to death with your sister in that basement near your hometown of New Atlantic.” The man in the gray flannel shirt betrayed no hint of rage as he spoke these words. His face was a mask. “Surely you remember that, unless you and Bethany made a habit of taking children apart?”
“You… and everyone like you… can fuck a rat,” he said around the tube. It sounded more like “whuck a hat,” but they got the gist.
Without another word, they turned and left. The metal door closed with a solemn click.
