Prospero's Half-Life (31 page)

His two
escorts brought him to the flipped-over remains of an old 70’s
Buick. Hodges was crouched behind the Buick, relaying orders to a
pair of others in a low voice that did not carry. When he finished
talking and the others left to carry out their instructions, he
rose to his feet and faced Richard with a wide, knowing grin on his
face.

“
So!” he exclaimed. “Our lordly Brother Isaiah has decided to
come to the man’s side of the river, has he? Have you decided that
you are now enough of a man to fight with men? Or have you found
out that your slut-partner is over here? Either way, your mistakes
are catching up with you”.

“
Where is she?” Richard asked flatly. He’d decided on the way
across the bridge that he wasn’t going to play any more games. He
was going to find Carolyn, and they were going to leave. He hoped
that the scared kid across the river would blow the bridge at the
appropriate time, and he hoped that the others would have enough
sense to take the opportunity to seek other corners of the earth to
live in after. He was beyond the point of control over them now,
however. They were under their own auspices. His responsibility had
shrunk down to two people.

“
Oh, she’s around here somewhere,” Hodges said carelessly. “I’m
sure she’s being taken care of. Or maybe she isn’t. I haven’t the
slightest idea. I don’t really care, to be perfectly honest”.
Richard had the inclination to hit him in the same fashion that he
had laid out Dupriss, but he held himself back. With the amount of
black-robes surrounding them, it would be the quickest way to
commit suicide of which he could think. He had found over the last
few months that he actually wanted to live, when it came down to
it.

“
What is it you want, Hodges?” he asked. “Just cut through the
bullshit and tell how you see this going”. Hodges shrugged lazily
and looked around.

“
The enemy will be here soon,” he said slowly. “Our scouts have
already spotted them skulking around the buildings a few blocks up
the street. When they do get here, we’re going to engage them.
We’ll win. Then we’ll go home. Simple and easy”.

Richard wanted
to laugh at the man’s seeming naïvete but only allowed himself to
shake his head.

“
That simple?” he asked, mockingly. Hodges scowled.

“
We have God behind us,” he said stiffly. Richard began
laughing wildly, unable to help himself.

“
You actually
believe
that?” he chortled, and Hodges withdrew a sharp,
wicked-looking knife from within his robes. Even with this new
threat Richard found that he couldn’t stop laughing. On the
periphery of his vision he saw that they were attracting
attention.

“
Stop it,” Hodges demanded. “Stop laughing”. Richard shook his
head. There were tears coming out of his eyes now.

“
You...oh, you really think...you think that God’s highest
purpose, right after killing everyone on Earth, is to cover up
signs and destroy books? You...you think
GOD
is going to protect you from
those bastards that are out there in the darkness?” He got himself
under a rudimentary sort of control and stared Hodges full in the
face. “Listen to me very carefully,” he said in a level, lethal
voice. “Those are people that do not give a fuck. You will stand
here and you’ll think that your God will protect you from them. He
will not. They will roll over you and you will die. Were you
planning on following the plan, still?”

Hodges
brandished the knife and jabbed forward in a feint. “The plan is
for cowards!” he screamed. “We will stand here and fight! If God
wills it, we will cross the bridge and then blow it up, but only if
God wills it!”

Richard shook
his head.

“
How can you even begin to believe anything that comes out of
your mouth?” he asked sadly. He saw a wild twitch in the man’s face
and knew what was coming next. A second later Hodges darted forward
but Richard had already begun to sidestep him. He brought his
closed fist down on Hodges’ outstretched elbow and a startled cry
of pain came out of the fanatics’ mouth. The knife went clattering
to the pavement and a second later the toe of Richard’s boot dug
into the side of Hodges’ ribs. The breath went out of Hodges in a
low
woof
and he
hit the ground painfully.

Richard
prepared himself to be swarmed by the black-robes around them but
in the same instant that Hodges hit the ground the sharp rattle of
gunfire came from the other side of their barricades. Richard hit
the ground with a speed that shocked him and he began scrambling
around, trying to pull his .40 out of the holster and failing. He
cursed and when he was finally able to get the gun out he saw that
Hodges had gotten up and had returned to his original crouching
position.

“
Fuck!” the fanatic screamed. “I don’t have time for this!
Someone grab this bastard and cut his throat! We need to return
fire! Return fire!”

The crack of
rifle fire continued; there was now some being issued from their
side of the fortifications. The battle had begun. Richard hefted
his gun and pointed it at Hodges, who was continuing to shout out
confused orders.

“
Where is she?” he demanded, his voice rising into a shout to
be heard over the steadily increasing volume of gunfire. Hodges
turned his head to regard him and Richard saw that the man’s eyes
were wild.

“
FUCK YOU!” the fanatic screamed, and Richard shook his head
sadly. From ahead there came the
ratatatatatatat
of an assault rifle.
There were screams, both defiant and wounded. The wounded screams
were the worst, and Richard tried to ignore them as best he
could.

From behind
them there came a loud click, followed by the deafening sound of
the bridge collapsing. Richard threw himself into a prone position
and then realized that it was what he had been waiting for all
along. The kid had managed to hit the trigger. The bridge had
collapsed into the Grand River. They were now trapped on the west
side of the water.

“
What the fuck was that?” Hodges screamed. Richard responded by
shooting the man in the face. He flew against the underside of the
Buick and his viscera splattered against the rusted network of auto
engineering. None of the black-robes around them seemed to notice,
or care. They were concentrating fully on the battle that they were
now engaged in; Richard was a minor concern to them, at
best.

He crawled
through the mass of men, going from barricade to barricade with
agonizing slowness. He was unable to rise completely to his feet
for fear of catching an errant round in the head. Everyone around
him looked exactly the same, a vague shape of black robes against
the slightly darker shadows of the night. He stared up at the sky
and tried feverishly to gauge how long it would be before the moon
rose. If it rose at all – he had no idea what phase of the moon the
sky would be showing. If it was a new moon, he was completely out
of luck.

“
Carolyn!” he screamed, trying dumb luck in the extremity of
his concern. “Carolyn! Are you around here?” There was no response
to his cries, only the rush of men and the rattle of
gunfire.

“
The bridge is gone!” he heard someone shout, and it set off a
panicked wave of similar shouts.

“
We’re trapped!” someone screamed, and then that same voice
issued a high-pitched scream as though they had been shot. Richard
grimaced, trying madly to block those dying screams out of his
consciousness. He crawled his way onward, dodging around groups of
milling black-robes, and making his way around the fallen bodies of
the dead.

He stopped to
catch his breath on the safe side of an overturned pickup truck. He
was weary to the bone and his breathing was coming painfully. He
rested his gun on his left thigh and stared into the milling,
chaotic mass of black-robes dispassionately. Overhead, the moon
emerged from behind a bank of clouds, and Richard managed a short
laugh at this. Apparently it had been up for a while, but in
hiding. It was waxing, and its light illuminated the scene of death
and horror that was resulting around him.

There were
several dead bodies nearby, thrown into their final reposes by the
force of gunfire. The air stank with copper and shit. Richard was
forcibly reminded of that day in that long-ago city where he had
first seen the mass of plague victims; he remembered the nausea,
and the vomiting, and the sheer disgust at the final indignities of
the human form. He shook his head and then rested it against the
underside of the truck. He was unsure as to whether he would ever
move it again.

From nearby
there came the sound of a struggle. He looked over, his neck
muscles complaining at their usage, and saw that two black robes
were wrestling. At second glance he realized that ‘wrestling’ was a
misnomer; one of the black-robes was straddling another and had
what looked like a sharpened kitchen knife in his hand. The man
balled his empty hand into a fist and brought it down into the
others face with vicious force.

“
Fucking whore!” the man screamed. “Should I rape you now or
should I cut your throat and rape you while you bleed to death?
Huh? Whore?”

Richard shook
his head sadly and then froze. The black-robes were, to the last,
an organization comprised only of men. He brought the gun up with a
speed that his muscles would not have dreamt of only moments
before. He aimed with shocking clarity and squeezed off the shot.
The man pitched off of the pinned form of the other, his head
cracking open on the pavement like a rotted melon. Richard was up
and over to the other before he even knew what he was doing.

“
Carolyn?” he asked, his voice going loud. It
was
her. She was badly
bruised on one eye and her lips were split and bleeding. Still, he
thought, she had never seemed more beautiful than she did at that
moment.

“
Richard?” she asked, confused. “Richard, they
know”.

“
I know,” he replied. “We have to get out of here.
NOW!”

“
They knew all along,” she said hazily, and Richard began to
worry that she might have a concussion on top of everything else.
“They took me over here as bait for you, and you took it. Now
they’ll kill us all and we’ll never escape”.

Richard
laughed shortly. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he said. “If
anyone on the other side of the river has any brains at all,
they’re already well on their way to escape. I had them blow the
bridge after I crossed it, once the fighting started”.

Carolyn sat up
slowly, blinking. “You had them blow it anyway?” Richard nodded.
“But you’re trapped here on this side”.

Richard
shrugged. “We’ll find a way out,” he said, trying to keep his own
disbelief from infecting this sentiment. “It gave them the chance
they needed, though”.

Carolyn
reached out tentatively and caressed his face. “I love you,” she
said, and Richard encircled her hand with his own.

“
I love you too,” he said, letting all of his worry and relief
flow into that one sentence. “We have to get out of here, though”.
Carolyn nodded and followed after Richard as he began to crawl away
into the newly moonlit darkness.

The Richard that watched that city burn from the top floor of
the tower would never have believed this Richard
he thought, with something approaching
wonder.

It took them an hour to crawl out of the battle zone; by the
time they were away from it, it had become clear that the
black-robes were not going to win the battle. Most of the
barricades had been overrun, and the screams of the dying filled
the night air like a symphony of hell. Richard and Carolyn crawled
away towards the river; once they found the bank, they made their
way carefully down to the edge of the river and began to walk along
it quickly. There was a thick mass of weeds lining the edge of the
river and they used it as rudimentary cover, trying to keep
themselves hidden from prying eyes. A half-mile down the river they
began to hear a low, coughing thump, followed by the fat sound of
explosions. Several of the cars that formed the black-robes
fortifications flared into hideous, flaming life. They looked back
and saw that there were several small figures covered in flames
running towards the rivers like torches in dire need of quenching.
Richard bit back a spurt of vomit and forced himself to turn his
eyes away from the scene.
I tried to warn
them
he thought, but he knew deep down that
it wouldn’t have mattered. Regardless of whether or not the cult
had put up a fight, this would have happened.

“
That’s terrible,” Carolyn said, her voice crawling with
revulsion. Richard simply nodded, not trusting himself to
speak.

They made
their way along the river in silence, keeping the noise of their
passing to a minimum. The bank of the river passed into a small
forest and Richard began to relax. Every once in a while he would
look through the trees to see if he could observe anything on the
other side. The moon reflected off of the water like a shimmering
silver ribbon, but the far bank of the river was shrouded in dark
mystery. Richard found himself wondering if the majority of those
grey-robes had managed to get away, and what direction they had
gone in if they indeed had gotten away. For all he knew they were
fleeing in opposite directions.

“
There’s no help for it,” Carolyn sighed after he voiced these
concerns. Richard nodded gloomily but had to admit that she was
correct.