The Badlands Trilogy (Novella): Redemption In the Badlands

  Redemption In the Badlands

  a novella

  Brian J. Jarrett

  Copyright © 2017 Brian J. Jarrett

  Elegy Publishing, LLC

  St. Louis, MO

  All rights reserved by the author. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted by any means without the written consent of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any names, people, locales, or events are purely a product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to any person (either living or dead), to any event, or to any locale is coincidental or used fictitiously.

  2017.RITB.1.0

  For Jim Carcia. Thanks for the inspiration.

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  Chapter One

  Dan Owens cruised the ruined streets of his town, searching for victims of the plague, infected or not. He didn’t need many supplies these days; the old public school building he’d adopted as his home had been well-stocked by others before him. He sometimes wondered who they were and what might have befallen them. Why they’d abandoned their home, leaving behind their weapons and supplies, he supposed he’d never know. He had a hunch, however, that whatever happened to them wasn’t good.

  Sometimes it was hard to remember that there was still good in the world.

  But he had found the place, and it could only be a gift from God. Dan Owens, “Pastor Dan” as he called himself these days, maintained an unconventional relationship with his God. In the days before the virus, no mainstream church would have ever formally ordained him. But now with most of the world’s population dead—killed either by the virus or the zombie-like monsters the contagion created—it didn’t matter what the establishment said.

  There was no establishment anymore.

  It had been a couple of months since he’d last seen anybody outside of the infected. They had a lot of names; deadwalkers, carriers, deadheads. Dan mostly just referred to them as carriers. Poor unfortunate souls who had no natural resistance to the mysterious virus that had swept the world several years back, decimating humanity.

  The pair he’d met had been a young man, probably in his twenties, traveling with an older man in his forties, around the same age as Dan. The older man, Ed, had been separated from his family and the younger man, Jasper, was helping to reunite them. They were good guys, and after a pleasant evening of conversation over a bottle of Jack, Dan sent them on their way with some supplies and well-wishes.

  He wondered whether or not Ed ever found his family.

  Dan had saved the two men from a mob of hungry carriers. When he brought them back to his place, Ed and Jasper had been surprised by what they’d seen. It was odd, even by Dan’s standards, but callings from God didn’t always make sense. They didn’t have to. Sometimes the reasons were simply beyond human comprehension. Dan’s particular calling happened to be rounding up the infected and quarantining them inside the old football arena built on the school grounds of his current home. There he kept them behind a sturdy fence while the steep walls surrounding the arena’s playing field proved too difficult for the carriers to scale.

  Over the last year, he’d collected an impressive number of infected souls. A frightening number. Ed and Jasper had been surprised that he simply didn’t put them down, but it wasn’t Dan’s role to play executioner. That was up to God to decide when their time had come. So he penned them up in the arena, keeping the streets a little safer for what few survivors remained. He tossed the carriers venison whenever he could, along with any squirrels or rats he happened to catch. The rat population shrunk along with the human population, but more deer were running around now than he had bullets for.

  He’d watched the infected, noting their behavior patterns. Sometimes he thought he watched them a little too much. Over time, it became apparent that they were changing. Not all of them, but a fraction of the carriers seemed to be getting smarter while their counterparts slowly withered away. The more intelligent of the group began working together in packs, searching for a way out of Dan’s prison and eating the weak to stay alive. He had to admit that it worried him a little, but he always checked the perimeter and the gate, ensuring that his keep remained secure in their permanent quarantine.

  But then, a week ago, he noticed something strange.

  At first, he didn’t know what he was seeing. He thought that maybe one of the poor bastards had expired and was quietly rotting away in a corner. God knew it wouldn’t help the stench. But after a few more days, Dan noticed a couple more of the odd-looking sacks lying around. His interest piqued, Dan got in his reinforced truck, strapped a deer carcass to the back and drove inside the mass of the walking dead.

  In other words, a regular feeding run.

  As he carved out his path through the infected, he pulled up beside the gray sacks he’d seen from afar.

  This time he got a better look.

  But he left with more questions than answers.

  That night, as he blew out the last candle before bed, a frightening thought occurred to him.

  The carriers were indeed changing. Transforming the same way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The mass of spongy tissue he’d seen was a cocoon. Dan couldn’t be sure of it, but his gut told him he was right.

  His gut also told him that whatever emerged from that cocoon wouldn’t be anything like a butterfly.

  Chapter Two

  Two days after seeing the cocoons in the carrier pit, Dan found the woman inside of a rundown Safeway. She was lying amidst the leaves and other debris blown in through broken windows, clinging to life. At first, he thought she was dead. He was sure she was dead. Her pale skin shined like alabaster against the dirty backdrop of the floor as she lay beside an aisle that had once shelved ketchup, mustard, and other condiments (all of which had been looted ages ago). The woman’s shallow breath created only the slightest rising and falling of her chest. It took a few moments of watching her for Dan to notice it.

  He approached her slowly, pistol in hand. A few steps in and he thought better of it.

  He searched the remaining aisles for anyone else hiding in the store without the best intentions. Dan Owens was a trusting soul, but he wasn’t a fool. The woman could easily be the bait in a trap that would not end well for him.

  But when the store turned up empty, and the woman remained lying where he’d found her, Dan figured she needed some help. He approached her again, the .38 clutched in his hand, nudging her with his foot.

  She didn’t respond.

  He nudged her again.

  Still no response.

  He knelt beside the woman, placing a hand on her forehead. She was burning up. Probably an infection. If the infection was of the bacterial variety, then he might be able to help. Amongst the food and weaponry his previous tenants had left behind, they also had collected a small pharmacy. Dan didn’t know what half of the pills did, but he knew there were some antibiotics mingled in there somewhere.

  He gently shook the woman. Her head lolled to one side like a corpse, but her breathing remained steady. Shallow, but steady.

  “Hello?” Dan said. His voice seemed to boom in the deathly quiet store. Awkward as his phrasing was, he realized these were the first words he’d spoken to another human being in months. Talking to the carriers didn’t count. “You okay?”

  No response.

  Dan pried open an eyelid. Her pupils were small, her stare fixed. It occurred to him that she might be beyond help.

  Never hurts to try, he thought.
r />   Dan slid the .38 into his back pocket, gave the store another scan, and then hefted the sick woman upon his shoulder. She was frighteningly light, the weight of a middle school child. He wondered when was the last time she’d eaten or even had a drink of water.

  Stepping carefully around the debris lining the supermarket’s dirty floor, Dan exited the building. Getting her in the truck proved no easy feat, but after some struggle he had her propped up inside, her head resting on the side glass. Not necessarily comfortable, but in her state, he doubted she would mind.

  He slid into the driver’s seat and closed his eyes, saying the little prayer he always repeated before turning the key. The engine sprang to life on the first try, like it always did. Grinning, he cast a quick glance to the Big Guy in the Sky before placing the transmission into drive.

  He eased out of the Safeway’s parking lot, headed back to his home.

  He would have cleaned the place up a little if he’d known he would be having company over.

  Chapter Three

  The woman slept most of the first day.

  Dan found the antibiotics within the collection he’d inherited from his unknown predecessors. He was able to wake the woman long enough for her to swallow two of the pills along with some much-needed water. He could tell she was dehydrated from the way her skin lacked the ability to snap back after a light pinch between his fingers. After getting her meds, she went back to sleep again.

  For a good portion of the day, Dan read, catching up on some new books he’d collected from various houses during one of his runs. It was dangerous going into empty houses; sometimes the carriers took refuge inside the abandoned structures. Sometimes people did, and those people didn’t always have the best intentions. But after reading at least a hundred books (probably two hundred if he was keeping count), he found himself desperate for something new (or new to him, at least). It wasn’t like he could pop into the nearest bookstore and pick up Stephen King’s latest release.

  So he entered the disintegrating homes, looking for new books and sometimes magazines. Not the gossip rags of yesteryear, but the informational kind. Science journals, astronomy mags, National Geographic, stuff like that. Sometimes, he’d find the occasional Playboy magazine tucked away inside a moldering closet. It made him feel like a kid again; finding something forbidden by his overbearing, but well-meaning preacher-dad.

  Dan Owens might be a man of God, but he wasn’t a prude.

  Truth was, he didn’t spend much time thinking about women. Not anymore, at least. They were far and few between; hard to come by after the Captain Trips pandemic wiped most of them out. In the short period after the outbreak—and before the television stations went off the air—some of the talking heads had taken to naming the virus after King’s imaginary superbug that killed 99.4% of the human population in his novel The Stand. He couldn’t know for sure, but Dan suspected that King himself was long since dead; ironically killed by a virus much like his creation. Life imitating art. Dan felt it an homage to refer to the virus by the moniker King had cooked up. It had a nice ring to it, after all.

  Women might have slipped off his radar after the virus, but now one had entered into range, and he was tracking her very carefully. So he read, looking up from the book every half hour or so to find the woman still sleeping. Her sleep, however, was anything but peaceful. She tossed and turned, sometimes spouting gibberish. English nonsense, at least. If she ever woke up again, at least Dan would be able to talk to her.

  Sweat beaded on her forehead, forming droplets that sometimes ran down her brow and into her closed eyes before streaking down the side of her face and onto the pillow beneath. Dan mopped her up from time to time, lifting her head and dumping more water down her when she’d take it. Once, she opened her eyes and looked at him, her eyes meeting his with a sudden clarity that disappeared as quickly as it came. Then it was back to the land of dreams again.

  As the day gave way to evening and the darkness began to gobble up the light, Dan looked up from his book and studied the woman. She had soft features that had been turned hard by a difficult life. He could tell things like this about people just by looking at them. He had a knack for it. His mother had called it a talent and his father, the steadfast preacher-type that he was, had called it a gift from God. Dan supposed they were both right. This gift (or talent) had served him well since the end of humanity, helping him weed out the good from the bad. His last two visitors, Ed and Jasper, had had kind faces.

  Between the sweating and the lack of a bath, the woman had begun to smell a little. But who didn’t stink up a room these days? Hygiene fell pretty low on the list of priorities, listed right beneath avoiding becoming a carrier’s lunch and trying not to starve to death. Once she woke up (if she woke up), she could then take that bath. Dan’s previous tenants (thank God for them) had hauled a bathtub into the place at some point. It took a while, but he could heat up buckets of water and draw a bath when necessity called. These days, Dan mostly just washed down once a week with cold water and a bar of soap. It shocked the system, but it was much easier that way.

  Dan estimated the woman to be in her mid-thirties. Slight crow’s feet formed around her closed eyes and a few age spots dappled the backs of her hands. She was too thin (who wasn’t these days?) but with a little bit of Dan’s canned food supply in her belly, she’d fatten up enough to shed the emaciated look. It’d be a while before she could keep anything down, though. Starvation ironically did that to a person’s appetite. Eat too much, and up it comes. She was keeping the water down and, more importantly, the medicine.

  So maybe, God willing, she had a chance after all.

  Chapter Four

  “Where am I?”

  Dan opened his eyes, pulled from a dream that involved himself, and a banana split the size of a loaf of bread. He’d just sunk his spoon into the first mound of ice cream (chocolate, always chocolate) when the woman’s voice awakened him.

  “Where am I?” she repeated.

  Dan blinked hard and shook his head, clearing away the cobwebs. She was talking at least. Hopefully a good sign. “Don’t worry; you’re safe.”

  “Who are you?” the woman asked.

  “I’m Dan. Pastor Dan Owens.”

  “What am I doing here?”

  “You’re sick. I found you and brought you here to my place.”

  The woman paused, the wheels turning in her head as she struggled to comprehend what was going on. “I have to pee.”

  Dan closed his book and placed it on the table nearby. He stood and reached out a hand.

  The woman pulled away.

  “Just helping you to your feet,” Dan said. “I won’t go in with you.”

  The woman paused, still hesitant.

  “It’s really just a chamber pot, but the toilets in this place don’t work so well.” He smiled. “I hear it’s the same all over the world.”

  The woman paused, considering. “I can do it myself,” she finally said.

  Dan nodded and took a seat. He pointed. “Out this door and hook a right. You’ll go down a long hallway and then you’ll run into the restrooms. There’s a big sign. You can’t miss it.”

  The woman nodded. She pulled the blanket off of herself and got to her feet. She swayed precariously, catching herself on the armrest of the couch on which she slept.

  Dan sat on the edge of his seat, poised to catch her if she fell. She’d ring her bell but good if she crashed down to the unforgiving government tile beneath their feet. “Can you walk?”

  The woman nodded. After her balance had returned, she left the room and headed down the hallway.

  For a fleeting moment, Dan wondered if she’d come back. And for a split second there, he was worried she wouldn’t.

  Minutes passed, and the woman returned. She looked at him with that soft face and hard stare, the dichotomy between the two visible, before heading back to the couch again.

  “What’s your name?” Dan asked.

  The woman closed
her eyes. “Lilly.”

  “I’m Dan.” He paused, wondering what to say next. Casual conversation, a thing that he’d taken for granted and sometimes even disliked in the old days, was damn hard to come by. He craved it now. “Where are you from, Lilly?” he finally asked, feeling the absurdity of the question like a physically uncomfortable thing on his lips.

  But the woman didn’t answer.

  She was already fast asleep.

  Chapter Five

  In the dream, Pastor Dan Owens isn’t a pastor. He’s just Dan, the son of a preacher loved by the community he serves.

  But Dan is also the grandson of a son of a bitch; an abusive alcoholic with a criminal record and a mean streak the size of Texas.

  Dan’s father, the Reverend Harold Owens, and his wife, the ever-faithful Peggy Owens are sitting on the couch when Dan arrives home from school.

  ‘We need to talk,’ his mother says. Her face is solemn. ‘It’s about your grandfather.’

  Dan tosses his backpack on the floor and takes a seat across from his parents. Dan is seventeen; zit-faced and hormone-crazed and blissfully unaware of the tragedy that will befall the world.

  ‘He fell down the steps and broke his neck,’ his father tells him. “Drunk again, it would appear.”

  Dan’s mother places her hand on his father’s shoulder. He gives her a weak smile.

  But even at the tender age of seventeen, Dan can see that there is little compassion in his father’s usually kind eyes. Even a diehard Jesus groupie like the Reverend Harold Owens knows that some people are simply beyond saving, including his own father.

  Dan studies his father’s eyes, but the sadness that one might expect in the eyes of a person who’s father had recently crossed over into the Great Beyond just isn’t there.