Underworld Earth Read online

  “Come on!”

  The engine sputters, then dies. I turn the key again, yelling at the dashboard in the middle of the Arizona desert, with only death in the rearview. Struggling through a fifth, sixth and seventh attempt, I stop forcing the key, slumping over the steering wheel.

  Four days ago, everything was fine.

  Vultures circling overhead fill the sweltering landscape with screeching beyond my passenger window. I should have never left Connecticut. Mom would have returned eventually. Maybe. All she will find is Dad’s body and the car missing.

  Rather than entertain the mirage of my panicking mother, searching frantically for my body, eyes roll to the back of my head. The driver door is left open, but what little breeze exists pettily bypasses the car, offering no relief. I don’t know how much time passes before the roar of an engine draws closer on the road from behind the Lexus. Too weak to look, my eyes hurt from the brightness.

  “Well look here!” a man says. turning off a vehicle in the lane next to me. His accent is a subtle Southern, with none of the drawl I’ve heard some Southerners speak. “It’s a fucking Lexus!”

  “No shit,” replies a second voice—younger than the first, but no less excited. “Not like there’s much market for it anymore, though.”

  “Ah. Such pessimism. Like I used to tell your mother, Johnny—there’s always someone who’ll buy what you’re selling!” In a part of the country nobody will ever think to look for me, I attempt to groan to let the man know I’m alive as his voice grows closer. “That’s funny. The door is slightly open—”

  “Think there’s a body there, Pops?” the boy asks.

  The older man pokes his head into the front seat, and I moan louder. This time, he notices, which startles him, sending him scrambling toward the other vehicle.

  “Johnny! We got a live one! Quick! Grab me the water out of the truck! Towels too! He’s probably dehydrated!”

  Boots scrape tarmac before the father returns. Turning my head towards him, he inspects my face, but his own is a blur.

  “Holy shit,” he says, “He’s just a kid!”

  “Pops,” Johnny says, “this is the last of our water.”

  “That don’t matter, son. This boy here’s in trouble. World’s gone to shit. Ain’t an ambulance in a thousand miles that don’t have dead paramedics driving ‘em. If we don’t help, nobody will.

  “Besides,” the older man tells his son while lifting my head to take sips from his flask, “can always find more water. Come on. Let’s get him in the truck. We’ll find him help in JC.”

  The water relieved my immediate thirst, but delirium has overtaken me. I don’t distinguish between two larger men carrying me and being placed in the flatbed of a truck. The world passes overhead in a blanket of endless blue, not a cloud remaining to disrupt it. Next thing I know, Johnny and his father speak to someone in a rash tone. The third voice sounds hurried, and Johnny’s dad gets more intense in his bargaining.

  And finally, when I have tired of drifting between darkness and light, I tumble headlong into the former, remembering nothing after that.

  Samantha

  Survival is a bleak affair.

  Post Falls, Idaho has always been an unfortunate throughway East from Washington. Its bedroom community of churches, golf resorts and posh parks were never my taste. It represents big city living for those who don’t want to move to a big city, positioned perfectly across state lines from Spokane.

  As someone born and raised twenty-eight miles outside that big city, I understand the love-hate relationship.

  The car appropriated from a grotesque pileup just before the border creaks and groans. It was one of the few whose fabric seats were not uniformly covered in shit or bile. The interior smells decent, and despite a sputtering transmission, was solid enough to cover the remaining gap.

  “I don’t know about you,” Mark joked at one point during the drive, “but I’m ready to find a grocery store.”

  My own stomach growled at the mention of food. I looked out the window, trying not to remind him of millions of looters who probably beat us to the punch.

  “What’s after Idaho for you?” I ask, breaking the long silence that followed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well obviously you aren’t going to follow me to Connecticut, are you?”

  Mark shrugs.

  “Would that bother you?”

  “No,” I reply, despite the general weirdness of his response. “Not much left there. Just hoping to get my family and go.”

  “Where would you go?”

  I smile for what seems to be the first time since leaving home; as if I don't find my family dead at the end of this road, and everything is happily ever after.

  “Canada, maybe?”

  Mark chuckles, glancing in the rearview.

  “Canada’s beautiful this time of year.”

  “That, and go far enough north, right?”

  “Right,” he says, but nothing more as we roll into Post Falls. Parked at the other end of the Spokane Valley—whose rotting contents we mostly, mercifully bypassed—it is as much an extension of Spokane as any part of Idaho.

  “Seems abandoned,” I remark.

  Mark slows along the main road. The small city is largely residential north of the highway. An air of dread is as thick as the orange sun setting over it.

  “Here, and everywhere else in America, Sam.”

  Mark’s growling stomach resonates louder than my own. Wincing from the same pangs I’ve learned to ignore just trying to keep my form over the years, his mouth corners drag lower to suppress abdominal discomfort.

  “You okay?” I ask. “You’re sweating.”

  Mark wipes his drenched forehead with the soaked sleeve of his shirt; it leaves temporary white streaks over flushed wrinkles as he remains fixated on the road, blinking more than needed.

  “Just... a bit out of it, I suppose,” he muses. “That woman. She just... died. Out of nowhere, right? One second she was standing. The next…”

  “She was out there for a while,” I explain, hoping to console him. “All by herself, Mark. The strain on her body must have been enormous. Hunger. Dehydration. Delirium. I’ve seen it before.”

  “You have?”

  I nod.

  “When we were young, and my dad left, Mom went on a real bender. Disappeared for four days. When we found her, she was ragged and dirty, smelled like piss or alcohol. Maybe both. She was gone so long, Aunt Lacy—my deadbeat father’s sister—had to come when the cops called, simply because there was no one else to watch her five children.

  “Soon as paramedics laid her down on a stretcher, Catherine started convulsing. Had to be carted away. Doctors said she was in such bad shape, having wandered Haven end to end God knows how many fucking times, the collapse itself almost killed her.”

  “And you think,” Mark asks, “that’s what happened to this Angela woman?”

  I shrug.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. Her body just gave up. People have died in stranger ways.”

  “Yeah,” Mark repeats, wincing at a new round of uncomfortable gurgling. We drive in silence for a while, scanning the windows of every structure. Neither of us are interested in diverting from the main road, lest there be something unpleasant—like another Frank—waiting for us in the shadows.

  But Post Falls, Idaho, for all its reasons I never wanted to visit, is quiet. At a street lined with family restaurants, supermarkets, car dealers and myriad other businesses—a Walmart down the road is uncharacteristically without patrons, its signage flapping in the breeze—the car rolls to a hesitant stop. As I predicted, every business serving the citizens of Post Falls have their windows smashed out. Storefront after storefront, glass cakes the ground on both sides of their frames. Debris, garbage and merchandise alike are strewn in front of unhinged doors. In an attempt to carry whatever their arms could hold, the looters left a breadcrumb trail of plastic and dirty cardboard to blow over yellow lines of
the parking lot. There are no disorderly-stopped cars as we saw in Haven.

  The world has forgotten this place in the first wave of casualties. No pane is untouched, no pickle jar or juice box on its original shelf.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mark whispers, unwilling to believe things are this desperate. A man’s corpse lies face down in the same lot; his suit identifies him as a grocery manager. The shirt is torn, his face melted into warm pavement, closing the gap to fossilization with each passing afternoon.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find much here,” I remark. Panic in his expression is prompted by extreme hunger, and I have no wish to give him false hope. “We can go in and look if you want but we might leave disappointed.”

  Mark hangs his head in the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah, I might go a bit crazy soon if I don’t get something in me. Anything. What I wouldn’t give for a homemade meal about now.”

  I say nothing as he steps out of the car. His unbrushed cowlick is pushed around by the breeze as he inches to the grocery store opening. Pushing my own door outward, I unbuckle, following him.

  Surrounded by dark shops who once benefitted from proximity to its foot traffic, the supermarket is a testament to abandonment. Weekly promotional posters are torn in half, stepped over and kicked aside in the stampede to empty shelves of whatever goods remained.

  Mark carefully glides between jagged shards poking out of the window panels. I do the same but stop short of following him past the first empty aisle. The corridor between opposing rows of yellowed fixtures is awash in broken and crushed containers, crumpled cardboard flats and disregard. There is no relief for our shrunken stomachs in its anarchy. My companion says little, and his horror speak volumes as he inspects produce stands of rotting fruit and darkened juices dribbled on the floor below. He passes decomposing packaged meat in short-circuited bunkers.

  “Mark,” I tell him, “we should go.”

  The suggestion hangs between the aisles. Light fixtures sway with wind blowing in the broken windows. Turning to face me, color is drained from his cheeks. He says nothing in return over the frame with glass daggers pointing out of it, and I have nothing of a consoling nature to offer him.

  ◆◆◆

  Survival is a bleak affair.

  You never really know if somebody will turn on you. Given everyday stresses of life and family, careers and world-ending plagues; in the midst of self-interest and starvation, it is hard to look ahead, to see the exact moment camaraderie becomes an expendable human trait.

  Twenty miles past Post Falls, the parallel shapes of his brow and mouth signal deeper despair, but Mark hasn’t spoken. An hour ago, we were talking about Canada; now I barely exist in the seat next to him. The car continues down the 90. His driving is more reckless now, foot heavier on the gas pedal. The odd jab of nausea is overruled by my companion’s tension, and the slight concern it inspires.

  Peering over his lap, I watch the red needle climb, numbers on the speedometer passed over in its ascent to top speeds.

  “Do you want me to drive for a bit?” I ask, eyeing the gauge scale the low side of a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Mark swerves around a gentle bend in the highway. The lone vehicle rips down this section of Interstate, brushing the edges of endless fields as we blaze past them.

  “Mark?”

  “Yeah,” he says, wiping his forehead. “I mean, no. Just give me a minute, Sam.”

  But the speedometer climbs higher, the rusty little Honda being pushed to its physical limit.

  Mark has no intention of driving safely. He is hardly the man I met in an airport, but a starving animal, buckling under bodily pressures.

  “Slow down, would you?”

  Concern’s pitch is lost on sonic barriers pulsing around the car’s frame, forcing me to yell across the short distance between us. Visuals beyond the windshield come nauseatingly quick. I would throw up, if my stomach had anything in it.

  “Mark! Please!”

  But my begging means little and grabbing the steering wheel from him becomes a desperate resort. He slaps the first attempt away, telling me to fuck off.

  I’m not dying for him.

  Yanking at it again, Mark backhands me. I launch my fist, connecting with his jaw. Mark’s head slams against his window, hands dragging the steering wheel to the far right—vaulting the car over the shoulder and off the road.

  The moment between the front fender smacking down in a field at maximum speed and its coming to a complete, overturned stop is filled with spinning and violence and terror. There are seconds all I can see is darkness; in the next, light pokes through but offers no safety. It stabs holes in pitch black, only to disappear again. My head is vaulted forward and back; Mark’s status is lost to me, because I am at the mercy of physics until the world ceases to spin. Smoke and haze and creaking machinery leave me only vaguely aware of hanging upside down, hair falling toward the car’s interior ceiling.

  I don’t know how long I was out. Mark’s empty seat leads to his wide-open door, swung ajar toward the field. Unbuckling myself, I tumble from my seat, down to the ceiling’s newfound gravity. Moving carefully on my elbows to avoid glass surrounding the upturned car, every major muscle aches. Flattened grass is straw against my scrapes, the soil beneath it blackening elbows.

  What in the fuck was that?

  I have to find Mark.

  If I don’t get to him first, he might try something else.

  Hightailing it on hands and knees, fast as minor injury allows, panicked breaths accompany every inch forward. Smoke barrels from the Honda’s underbelly into the darkening sky, but there is no sign of my companion in the wreckage.

  “Mark?”

  If I can get the upper hand, I can restrain him. At least until I find him food and water and get him rest. I owe him that much for—

  Adrenaline-fueled rationalization is interrupted by something heavy landing on my lower back, and I cry out in pain. Mark’s injured grunts are desperate as I realize he threw himself over me. He grabs my arm, pulling me onto my back. Hands reach for my neck, thumbs enclosing over my windpipe. Exerting more force into the chokehold until my airway is being crushed inside of it, I gag, fingers clawing at the ground for anything to gain an advantage.

  My fingers enclose on a nearby rock and I hurl it upwards with as much force as my arm can muster. It connects with Mark’s forehead, loosening his grip. I hit him again and he goes flying off. The rock falls from my grip with the second swing, tumbling a few inches to my right, but his lost momentum becomes my gain.

  Gasping for breath, I re-secure the same rock in my shaking hand, allowing less time to recover than Mark gives himself. I crawl to where my assailant lies on his stomach, clutching his bleeding face. Bringing it down on the back of his head, the satisfaction of his cracking skull incites me to hit him again. It connects a second time, and his body goes still in the grass.

  The world is yours now, Samantha.

  The moment should be immediately overcome with guilt, relief or horror—the culmination of insanity that began the day I boarded a plane for my hometown. My exhausted senses come under the same assault of white flashes I experienced in Haven. There are no warning signs; it coincides with the killing blow to Mark’s skull.

  But this time it is brighter, louder, longer lasting. The memories are clear as day, real as anything in my previous recollection of the last decade.

  My mother didn’t want a funeral.

  It is vivid; Stephanie sitting in a red armchair taller than she was, bitterly chewing peppermint gum to mask the alcohol concealing emotional fallout over our mother’s death.

  She told me I would end up on a street corner, peddling heroin or pussy, I said during her eulogy. No joke.

  The clouds darken above; thunder looms in their depths, but only playfully rumbles for now, threatening a taste of its full power.

  You know what amazes me, Derek? That you don’t ask about Nathan because, ‘Hey, I miss my kid’, but because you
don’t want him to think of you as the bad guy. Am I right?

  My husband left me. He abandoned my son and I, running off with some woman from the Caribbean. Then, the hometown I never managed to escape became the home base of a white supremacy movement.

  Every day is a new brand of Hell where I wake up and wonder how Campbell Madison is going to top himself today. It might be a crucifixion, or he might have innocent kids duel. Shoot each other to death. So yeah, I was here when Victor Quinn and Sydney Mayhew turned on each other before—and blew up the courthouse in the process.

  We saved Haven, only for it to fall to even worse examples of human beings. They came with automatic weapons, cajoling its citizens into submission, and held the town hostage from the federal government. They hung women and children, strung people up on crude crosses and occupied Haven for the better part of three years.

  What’s it gonna be, Sam? Have you come to play savior?

  And I murdered all of them.

  I am not some content, middle-class wife from the Connecticut suburbs, but a trained killer who drove a knife through the neck of her lover after he was done teaching me the tricks of his deadly trade. Staring up at a black sky whose clouds have begun to disperse tiny droplets over us, I am left with only one cruel thought, a knife twisting in my gut.

  My son is dead.

  Before I can fully process the emotional depravity of that thought, a voice without footsteps speaks, having crept up on me. It says my name, is female, and almost makes me jump out of my skin.

  “Samantha?”

  Survival is a bleak affair.

  Nathan

  When I open my eyes, my surroundings are immediately foreign. The bed beneath me has no sheets. The room smells of strong disinfectant, like someone spilled an entire bottle of the stuff and only lightly wiped it away.

  I am in a house, but not one I have ever been in before. Pitched ceilings suggest the absence of a second floor above me, likely a bungalow. The walls are adorned in tacky beige paper over a CRT television covered in dust. The living room is heavy with heat; no air conditioning to allay humidity’s smog, my head pounds in the center and throbs on the sides. Muscles revolt as I sit up, swinging my feet over the side of a patterned couch.