The Park and the Beast

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***** * *****

Sam, Ella, and the goons found the highway 65 overpass just after dusk settled into night.

“If we go a little farther west,” Sam said, “There’s a nice local park where we should be able to gather plenty of wood for our fire and find a place to camp by the creek that runs through here. Then we can regroup in the morning and start heading down 65.”

Ella nodded. They’d been in the city for a while. Her backpack felt heavier for the long day’s walk.

The goons were still faithfully following as she supposed they would. Seven of them in all. If she were a better student of anatomy, she might be able to tell if they had been male or female in life, but then again, what did it matter now?

All the sexual processes were tied up in the meat and muscle, and that sort of identity more a product of the nervous system than whatever soul inhabited these forsaken creatures. Their brains oozed out of the skull long ago. They were just the goons now, and the only way she could identify them was by their T-shirts.

Every shirt was black but one.

The single blue shirt had a white horseshoe on it. The local football team, she recalled, so she called that one Colt. It seemed to understand, answer for, and coordinate the others.

When they got to the park, she and Sam found a clearing amidst a circle of trees. They set up their pup tents, and she went to gather wood, as always, to spare Sam any more painful shambling for the day; but Colt held up a hand, and the EYEGOONS flared to life from her front pocket, filling the air around them with a song anyone in these parts would have immediately recognized before the Turning.

It was the Beatles’ With a Little Help from My Friends, but the Joe Cocker version.

There was not enough flesh on Colt’s face to see if it was smiling, nor any vocal cords to execute a laugh, but Ella had the distinct feeling that the latter would have followed the former if such were the case. “Thanks, Colt,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. Colt turned and pointed to three goons who followed while the other three stayed and dug a small pit.

When Ella came back to Sam, he was quietly crying. “Sam, you okay?”

He wiped away his tears. “Yeah. It’s that song. It used to be the theme for a popular TV show when my girls were kids. We watched it all the time. Made me think of ‘em, and Debra. She loved that show. It made her think of our childhoods, back in the 1960s. My Debra was literally the girl next door. I was so lucky to have married someone I fell in love with so young.”

Ella was only 21, but she thought she knew the show he was talking about. She’d heard him talk about Jane and Cassidy, his daughters, and how much she reminded him of them, but he hadn’t opened up much about Debra.

“She passed before the shit hit the fan, as we used to say, and I’m glad.” Sam said. “I never thought I’d be thankful to cancer, especially after watching her die like that, but if she’d turned like the girls did…” He trailed off, and Ella didn’t press.

They’d talked briefly about the Turning, but they both agreed it was better left undiscussed. Her memories of her parents and her brother during the end times were not good ones, and she preferred not to remember them that way.

The four goons returned with wood and fallen leaves, neatly stacking them in the pit.

Ella pulled matches out of her pack and lit one, applying it to the leaves. The kindling caught and the fire came to life. They settled in for the night. After a brief meal and some chit-chat, the goons stood guard while Ella and Sam slept.

***** * *****

There was a rustle out in the woods. Heavy footfalls and breaking branches. A low growl. Ella stood at the edge of the trees, gun drawn, pointed at the dark, which was impenetrable under a clouded sky that blocked the light of a full moon. She hoped the threat would pass, but the sounds got closer, and she’d have to shoot soon, and hope that whatever was coming wasn’t quick or strong enough to tear her apart before she could put it down.

In the clearing the air was still but so humid that she wasn’t sure what was sweat and what was the ham-fisted grip of the sweltering heat. Her eyes were stinging, but she just blinked the sweat away, not daring to spare a hand from her firing stance lest the beast burst free from the woods at the most inopportune moment.

Then she heard the low growl, but it was at her back.

Two words were whispered in her ear on currents of breath as rancid as a newly abandoned slaughterhouse. Before she could turn—

Ella sat up with a gasp, greeted by a cool fall morning with the first rays of sunlight peeking through the trees. Sam was sitting across from her on the other side of the firepit, which was now just ashes and a few burning coals.

“You been dreaming again, kiddo. And it didn’t look good. Wanna talk about it?” Sam was concerned. Whatever was haunting her, he didn’t know if he wanted to know, but he figured he needed to know.

“No,” Ella replied. The Beast visited her everywhere they slept, attacking her in her dreams in a shadowy mirror of whatever setting she inhabited in the waking world.

The first time, she thought it merely a dream. By the fourth time she knew something was trying to get to her, and she resolved not to tell Sam, for reasons that didn’t seem so absurd now that there were seven skeletons following them on some random hero journey.

She was sure if she told him that the Beast would enter his dreams as well, and though he still seemed to have a strong heart, and one of the keenest minds she’d ever encountered, she would never risk him. The Beast was her trial, not his, and she would take care of it when the opportunity arose.

“Okay, kid. I respect ya, but you know—”

“I know, Sam. Don’t worry. Just a dream. What’s for breakfast?”

This was a joke, of course. Squirrel jerky was for breakfast. It wasn’t all they had, but it was close, and they agreed to ration until they found more stock.

Sam laughed and handed some over. They ate in silence as the sun rose fully into the sky.

As they were packing up their gear and shouldering their packs, Sam said, “I know you don’t want to talk about it, Ella, but I gotta ask one more time if everything’s okay. Don’t want you losing sleep on our perilous journey if it could be resolved with a chat.”

Ella reflexively evaded a question with a question. “You think it’s gonna be perilous?”

Sam laughed again, recognizing what she’d done. “Well, we do have a skeletal bodyguard. I’m glad they got a sense of humor, but I can’t imagine they’re just here to fetch wood.”

Ella sighed. “Yeah, I figure the same; but this whole stupid mess reeks of destiny, and after all that’s happened to us, why should we worry about it? Why not just go? But we worry anyway, and I appreciate your concern for me, Sam, I really do.”

Sam just nodded.

As if reading each other’s thoughts, the nine companions moved on without another word.

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