Keepers of the Flame Read online

  Milly felt better now that her monthly menstrual friend had departed. Personal matters of every kind were an issue onboard a thirty-two-foot launch packed with five other people and supplies, and only one small bathroom. Factor in sanitary pads made of coconut fiber soaked in coconut oil, the constant roll of the sea, and the relentless sound of the ocean, and it all made her nauseous, homesick, tired, and afraid.

  “You OK?” Peter said. One thousand yards away was the small beach.

  “I miss my family. Curso didn’t want me to come, but Randy didn’t seem to care,” Milly said. “I guess that bothers me most.”

  “That’s not true. Randy loves you.” Peter took her hand, then let it drop and looked around at the rest of the crew who paid them no mind.

  “I ever tell about the first time Hazel came to our place?” Milly said.

  He shook his head no.

  “Randy was more interested in running around with your little girl than anything I was up to. Of all the kids on the island, my boy had to ask your daughter over to play. Granted the odds had been good, with there not being many kids on the island, but it still felt wrong given our family history. I couldn’t take my eyes off the poor kid the entire time she was at our place. Tris dropped her off and seemed stand-offish. That’s what happens when a woman thinks you’re trying to steal her husband.”

  Peter said nothing.

  “And here we are. Will Tris be waiting for you when we get back?”

  Peter said nothing, but turned a light shade of pink.

  He’d come on this trip for her. Given up his family, betrayed his fire guard oath, the only thing that had ever been important to him other than her, and she treated him like her tool. She’d come to understand this as she got older and the guilt ate at her.

  The boat crunched on sand and everyone jerked forward. A spray of birds, their feathers a mix of every color, burst from the trees, tossed about, and disappeared back into the vegetation that encroached right up to the beach. They squawked and yapped, and the party stood frozen. Milly had never seen that many living things together. Except for maybe ants and maggots.

  Tye was the first to jump from the boat into the shallow water, and he tied the launch off on a tree using bark rope. His bolas dangled from his belt, and he held his club. One by one they climbed from the ship that had brought them almost three thousand miles. A painful knot twisted Milly’s stomach as she left the boat. It had been her home. It had protected and cared for her, and now she was leaving the old aluminum launch behind.

  “What are we going to do with the boat? Just leave it here?” Robin said. She looked better already, her color returning to her face.

  “We’ll pull it in as tight as we can, tie it off good, and cover it with branches. That’s all we can do,” Tye said.

  They planned to come back and use the boat to get home. If it wasn’t there, or had been damaged, she didn’t know what they’d do. “How will we mark our location?” said Milly. They hadn’t discussed that.

  “I’ll leave markers along the way until we reach a permanent landmark,” Tye said.

  Vera said, “You want me to mark trees?”

  “Yeah, that’s a goo…”

  Robin screamed with pain as an arrow impaled her leg. The bolts came from everywhere, swooshing through the trees and slicing leaves and breaking branches. An arrow stuck in the ground next to Milly and another hit Robin, this time in her right shoulder. She fell, and her second wail scattered the birds, and it was like a cyclone as hundreds of birds, big and small, fled from the disturbance.

  “Down!” Tye yelled.

  Milly dropped and lay face down on the sand, her nose in the lapping sea water. Robin whimpered beside her, and Tye crawled toward the tree break. She didn’t see Jerome and Vera, and she hoped they were already hidden by the jungle. Peter lay next to her.

  Silence fell for two heartbeats, then “Rabba de vo I.” Jerome and Vera were pushed from the jungle, and all around them their attackers emerged from the trees. “Rabba! Rabba!”

  “That didn’t take long,” Milly said.

  Tye got up, hands above his head. “We don’t understand you. Can…”

  The native closest to him lashed out with a sharp punch that took Tye’s legs out from under him. He fell on his butt and looked up, stunned. Tiny waves lapped on the shore, a frog bleated, and the cacophony of insects and birds made Milly’s head pound in time with her heart.

  The natives looked orc-like. Milly recalled the description from sacred text The Lord of the Rings. Their faces were covered in lesions and scabs that oozed blood and pus like giant acne, and their blood red eyes were so set in swollen sockets it was hard to see them. Blood vessels pushed against tightened skin, hair as white as dried beach grass stuck from their scalps in patches, and distended ears made the infected appear elvish. Milly expected Legolas to come springing onto the beach firing golden arrows.

  An orc-man kicked Tye, and he fell over. The beast growled and lifted Tye’s head and produced a knife.

  Milly drew the Glock, sighted, and fired. No hesitation. Bad ass and smooth as silk.

  The natives scattered like the birds had, running in every direction as if chased by wolves. Milly waited a few seconds and shot once into the air.

  “Stop wasting ammo,” Tye said.

  “What? We can’t have them coming back soon.” She put the gun in her waistband and knelt beside Robin, who was breathing hard, but awake and aware. The arrow in her leg had gone all the way through and missed the bone. The other hit her shoulder blade and spouted blood. Milly put her hands around the arrow, trying to stop the bleeding.

  “Tye, what the hell were those things?” Peter said.

  “They’re people,” he said. “Or they were.”

  “How could you know that?” Vera said.

  “I’ve seen them before,” he said. “At our conference on the news broadcast. Before the diseased died they had a surge of violent behavior and bloodlust and they looked like that. Black, white, Latino, Indian, oriental, it didn’t seem to matter. The disease turned all people into living husks.”

  Milly rose and went to the dead person she’d shot. It didn’t look human, but she could see how it could have been, or maybe its ancestors. She felt sick. She’d never killed anything bigger than a fish in her life.

  “This thing might be what’s left of the human race,” Tye said.

  Milly remembered the little girl’s silver flecked eyes in her dream. Tye was wrong.

  Hooting and hollering rose above the jungle noise, and it sounded like the natives were communicating. The yells receded, but that brought no comfort. Milly sensed they were being watched, and that the Uruk-hai were calling their friends.

  Tye knelt beside Robin. “Peter, you and Vera keep watch. Robin, I’ve dealt with worse. I need to get the arrows out and stop the bleeding. Try not to pass out. Stay with me.”

  She nodded.

  He turned to Milly. “Go get some rags and the whiskey container.” Milly ran to the boat while he waited. When she returned, he said to Robin, “On the count of three. One…” Tye yanked on the arrow and it came out smoothly. It was nothing more than a thin tree branch stripped of its bark and hadn’t done much damage. He dowsed the wound with berry whiskey and used rags to apply pressure to the wound.

  Robin shrieked. “Shit… you go on two. Everyone knows you go on two,” she said.

  “I know,” Tye said.

  He pulled the other arrow and cleaned Robin’s wounds with the booze, bandaged her up with rags, and stabilized her. Then they all got back on the launch and headed back out to sea, this time keeping as tight to the shoreline as possible.

  “They must’ve been watching us come in for days,” Peter said. “Knew right where we were landing.”

  “You really think those things were people?” Milly said.

  “What do you think?” Tye said.

  “I think if they were people things have changed more than you thought,” Milly said. “We�
�re not sure what the disease did, but now you’re saying you think it didn’t kill everyone?”

  “People like Tye?” Jerome said.

  “No. The disease never found anyone who lives on Respite. She means people who caught the virus but lived,” Vera said.

  “Nothing the virus touched lived that I know of,” Tye said.

  “Yet you call the things that attacked us people. How can that be?” Milly said.

  Tye didn’t answer.

  They hugged the shoreline a few miles up the coast and pulled into another bay. Fate had been their friend. The mountains and forest encroached right up to the water, hanging over it in many places and providing the perfect place to hide the boat. Robin said she could walk, and what choice did they have? Wait until she healed? That would take weeks. She’d have to make it the best she could, and hope the wounds didn’t get infected, because if they did…

  “Let’s get some rest. We head inland at first light,” Tye said.

  The sun fell in the west, leaving only a bruised sky. Milly imagined she saw Respite on the horizon, and Randy standing on Great Rock waving to her. Her mom whispered in her mind, stroking her confidence and pointing out her insecurities. The night settled in and so did Milly and the rest of the crew.

  Tomorrow was another day.

  She hoped.

  Chapter Eight

  Year 2066, Sierra Madre del Sur, Mexico

  Tye was on point and he led the fellowship through the forest via a thin deer trail. An abundance of wildlife filled the woods: rodents, birds, squirrels, puma, fox, coyote, and a plethora of insects and reptiles occupied every tree, shrub, hole and tuft of grass. Food wasn’t a problem, though it took time to hunt and trap game. There were many freshwater streams flowing from the mountains and refilling the skins proved easy, though fruit and greens were much harder to come by unless you didn’t mind eating boiled devil grass.

  They hadn’t seen or heard any virals since their first encounter, but the company was still being cautious. Milly followed at the rear, Glock drawn. Tye twirled his bolas, the two stones on each end whizzing through the air. Peter scouted ahead, and Vera and Robin shuffled along behind. Every few moments Robin squeaked in pain, but the woman was tougher than she looked. Her wounds were superficial, but painful, yet she kept up without complaining.

  The company’s mood balanced between upbeat and on edge, the memory of escaping disaster at landfall still palpable, even though it had been eight days and the land and its inhabitants appeared oblivious of their presence. So far. Things had gotten real, fast, and Tye and his friends hadn’t been ready so it did the party good to have a few days to adjust while taking in their new surroundings. Wolves attacked twice, but the animals hadn’t encountered normal people before and were easily scared off. There was plenty of food in their habitat, so none of the animals were overly aggressive.

  Mountains rose around them as they walked east; the trees thinning out and spaced further apart, the underbrush of weeds and agave thicker. It was hot and dry, and plumes of dust rose and clogged the air. Tye figured every creature for miles knew of their passage even though they did their best to be stealthy. Thin white clouds fleeted by overhead, but so far there had been no rain. Not even the threat of it. It wasn’t difficult climbing, but it was tedious and tiring. Every step brought them higher into the mountains even though they’d done their best to hit gaps in the range and stay at the lowest elevation possible. They worked around several cliff faces, which appeared out of nowhere in the dense foliage, though most were small and easily traversed. Boulders wreathed in devil grass pocked the mountainside and the farther the fellowship trudged, the sparser the trees became.

  A day moon hung in the midday sky, its white luminescence in blunt contrast to the endless blue. Tye chuckled at his companion’s expressions of constant awe. They’d seen no major signs of the gone world, yet the sheer vastness of their new surroundings had overloaded his friends.

  “That’s something. The moon I mean,” Peter said.

  “Like you’ve never seen the moon on Respite?” Milly said. Tye thought she was being extra bitchy. She’d made it clear more than once that she hadn’t seen any of the fantastical things he’d described, and his explanations of their location and how long it had been since The Day didn’t dissuade her.

  “I saw video and heard audio of a man walking on that Moon. My dad said the entire world stood still, everyone waiting by the nearest television or radio. My mother used to say in that moment the world became one. Perhaps the only time ever,” Tye said.

  “I can think of another time,” Peter said.

  Tye understood why his story was a tough swallow for the younglings. He knew his tales weren’t that far off from many of the sacred texts in their minds. They looked at him with furrowed brows, like he was an old man losing his faculties and slipping into dotage. “Humor your grandfather,” Tye’s mom used to say. Tye had told his stories in the Womb less and less as the years had rushed by.

  “Just up and went to the Moon. Like how people traded internal organs and carried devices that could answer any question,” Jerome said. He wasn’t mocking Tye, more like humoring grandad.

  “Just like that. Fabulous things that weren’t needed to survive, but does that make them any less magical?” Tye said.

  Collective silence. Insects buzzed and two small birds, one chasing the other, darted across their path and disappeared into the evergreen ash trees.

  Peter appeared on the path, coming toward them.

  “Oy,” Tye said. “What is it?”

  “There’s a good view from the ledge ahead, and the land changes dramatically. Everything is brown except a few trees on the valley floor. You sure we’re not by Los Angeles? Sure looks like a bomb detonated down there.”

  “I’m sure.” Tye needed every ounce of his self-control to keep from going off on Peter. “LA is… was on the coast.”

  “Anything else?” Milly asked.

  “I need the binoculars, but there are a few strange things we can investigate,” Peter said.

  “Dipshit,” Tye said.

  Peter turned and looked at him, but whatever he saw in Tye’s face made him look away.

  They walked for another hour before they came to an outcrop that looked over a brown valley. In the distance, tan mountains rose to an azure sky, and everything looked dead or dying. To the right of the ledge a smooth, flat, wide tract of dried turf and weeds stretched in a winding path to the valley floor.

  Tye went to the trail, knelt, and dug his fingers into the ground. “This was a road,” he said.

  “Where?” Milly said. She knelt beside him. “All I see is some crumbled packed rocks.”

  “Give me the binoculars,” Tye said, and Milly complied.

  A town, deteriorated and overgrown with wilting weeds and kudzu vines sat at the confluence of two thin rivers on the valley floor. Light sparkled off metal, and most of the structures were nothing but rubble, but a few still stood. There were no signs of people anywhere.

  “Is it Mexico City?” Robin said.

  “No. Mexico City is much bigger and at least three hundred miles from the coast. We’ve got a long way to go,” Tye said. “We’ve only come about seventy miles.”

  “What’s to the left of the tall tower?” Milly said.

  Tye shifted his gaze and jumped back. “A snake hole.” Uruks stood guard beside a large tunnel entrance. “We should go around.”

  “Around? Skip our first signs of the gone world?” Milly said.

  “I’m guessing those things have tunnels throughout the town. We go down there and we’re done,” Tye said.

  “I disagree. We can’t run at the first sign of a threat, we’ll never get anywhere,” Milly said.

  In a rare departure from his usual unwavering support, Peter said, “Tye might be right.”

  Milly huffed and stormed off.

  “Don’t go far. They might be up here in the hills,” Peter said. She ignored him and continued on
into the trees.

  She’d only been gone a few minutes when she called back to them. “Come see this.”

  Tye led the fellowship back into the trees and they found Milly standing by a pile of bones. Kudzu and weeds covered the skeletons, intertwining through the eye sockets of skulls and twisting through ribcages.

  “Are they human?” Jerome asked.

  “Sure are. Those skulls and femurs are unmistakable,” Tye said.

  “They look like they’ve been here for a long time,” Vera said.

  Behind the pile and slightly raised was the remnants of a stone house covered in dead vegetation. The roof had caved in, three of the four walls had tumbled to the ground, and the fourth was half gone and only still standing because of the brick fireplace on that side.

  Robin whimpered. Tye saw she couldn’t go any further. Blood leaked through her makeshift bandages and beads of sweat ran down her forehead. She looked pale, her eye sockets black and red.

  “Let’s make camp here for the night. Peter, search the area while Vera and Robin unpack and get settled. No fire tonight,” Tye said. Sighs and grunts. “Get used to it.”

  Everyone went about their business except Milly, who’d been given no orders. “Take a walk with me,” Tye said.

  They headed back the way they had come and Tye continued his examination of the valley. The sun fell behind them and it was difficult to see what was happening on the valley floor.

  “We need to post a watch,” Tye said.

  She nodded.

  Tye was surprised at her patience. He knew what she wanted to do, but she wanted him to suggest it. “See that in the center of town? Don’t know how I missed it before.” He handed her the binoculars. “What do you make of that?”

  A church, clean, white, and untouched by time stood in the center of town. Atop its steeple a broken cross formed a T. It cast a long shadow as the sun fell. Milly handed the binoculars back to Tye, and he examined the town again. No weeds peeked through the church’s steps, no paint peeled from its clapboard walls. Two dark wooden doors stood open, but there were no people.