Editor’s Note:
I’m excited to share this! This is a dark tale that not only entertains but serves as an excellent testament to
’s growing skill as a storyteller. Originally published behind a paywall, I’ve decided to let all of our readers get a chance to enjoy this story.Fresh from the vault, The Remnant.
- Frank Theodat
The thing that shocks you the most about killing a man is the sound. In time, you get used to even that, but at first it is unsettling. I mean killing a real human person, not one of the Plaguers.
In most of the films you’ve seen — before it happened — there was music to go with the forceful induction of death. Some stylization. Some sound effects to adorn and elevate the sickening, unnatural discordance of the deed.
The reality is gurgling and ripping flesh and an agonized screaming against a backdrop of cold silence. I have a memory of the emotions that went with the first few times, the sensations of doing it. It’s all abstract now, but lasting enough to make me think.
Things have been the way they are so long that I’ve grown cold to even the sound, but I still think about it all. The Plague itself. The first time I killed a man. What it means every time I’ve done it since.
She had been out playing in what you could call a yard. A tiny knoll with dead brown grass yearning in vain to turn green in pitiful splotches. Why her parents let her out alone I’ll never know. When I returned her to her family, her tears threatening to soak clear through my dirty blood-stained poplin raincoat as I carried her, I found them as I had found too many others to count. Dead already. Not in body, but in spirit. Waiting, in what seemed like a shaking huddle, to be slaughtered or harvested or whatever the Plaguers would do to them. They had abandoned that girl in a much deeper way than leaving her to play prey in the yard. I wish I could have taken her with me. But I am bound west and there are days where I fear I won't be able to preserve even my own life. I bear the shame of leaving her with those husks that were her family, but I could not bear her, and even less the guilt if I had failed to protect her. Perhaps she still even loved her mother and father and who was I to even contemplate taking her from them? I pray to God she is okay now. But I don’t know. Most do not survive.
She had been playing. Smiling. Lord, the smile. Unquenchable innocence. A beauty I thought was gone forever from the world. One of a handful of memories that sustain my heart's faith in God. My mind cannot cease to believe. But all our hearts have been scarred now.
She had a doll. Sticks, really, that she had fashioned into a grotesque image of a child. But she clearly had love for that ugly collection of sticks masquerading as something sweet and worthy of affection and care. I’m sure it was beautiful to her, for she loved it. And if there is any beauty left to be had in the world it will come from loving things which should be unlovable.
Then, from the treeline. I’d figured the looming, creeping thing for a Plaguer. But it was a man. A man stripped by choice and circumstance of what should make him one, but a human being nonetheless. I can’t think about what he might have done to her. At least the Plaguers seem to only care to feed and for violence, a kind of instinctual lust for bloodsport. The wicked man has far darker designs for the corruption of innocence. Appetites for things other than death and meat.
He ran for her. I ran for him. I caught him with my shoulder in his gut before he could get to her. I mounted him and pulled the machete from my back. He growled like a beast, which he nearly was. A crow cawed. The wind and the growl and the whimpering of the little girl were the only other sounds. I pummeled him with my left hand as I drove the handle of the blade into his throat with my right. He made choking noises. My heart pounded in my ears. I’d killed Plaguers by then, who hadn’t? But never a man. I didn’t even think of him as such until he began to plead. He told me he didn’t want to die. The sadness in his eyes was overwhelming. I am not a monster. But there were no courts any longer. No law. No one to enforce it. The only laws are God’s and the jungle’s. And God’s says that I could not have let the man touch that child. The jungle’s told me how to prevent it.
I pulled away for but a moment and relief flooded into his expression, a tear streamed from his eye, and then I swung the blade into the center of his face.
I remember the sound. I nearly vomited. Like cutting through a steak, when such things existed. The gurgling, fluttering noise as he clawed at his throat after my second strike there. The soft weeping of the girl. The bird.
I believe in the soul. I don’t know if the Plaguers have them anymore. Maybe who they were lives now with the Lord. But the bodies left behind house soulless creatures who love only destruction and pain. This man had a soul, though. I don’t know where I sent it, but I suspect fire, to this day. Where mine is bound, for all I’ve done, I don’t know.
***
I think it’s been a year since I first killed another human being.
I’m walking now, like I always do these days. Heading west, for California. For whatever remains of it.
I’ve learned to find some melancholy beauty in the dawn since it all happened two years ago, though the sun rises over a wasteland. This is still the day the Lord has made. That much I know. The days on which I can rejoice and be glad in it are few and far between.
There have been moments, weeks even sometimes, where I think it might be okay. But the Plague didn’t just wipe out the bulk of humanity. It transformed us. All of us. Some into monsters, nightmare beings of insatiable hunger and savage, violent craving. Some of us into lawless men and women, those with a forgotten glimmer of human dignity in their eyes but given over to animal lusts. I do not mean these almost-men lost their capacity for reason. They are now the most ruthless of creatures, with the minds and capabilities that allowed man to conquer the world and yet with hearts set only on satisfying the desires of the flesh, no matter how perverse.
Then there are those like me. Those who try with every fiber of our being to remain strongholds of goodness in this hell-world.
But I have killed. I have marred the image of God in my fellow man. Was I justified? Perhaps. I don’t know for certain. I pray for guidance. I pray to be forgiven. I hear nothing in reply.
I carry a cross and a Bible amongst my meager possessions, though in this new world of woe, I am rich. A leather backpack, weathered but sturdy. A canteen, extra boots, a store of rabbit jerky I took from someone who wouldn’t need it anymore. A notebook and some pieces of charcoal. A tattered copy of The Iliad. A few shirts and undergarments. A change of pants.
I have a 9mm pistol with a half-full magazine.
I have hope, but not much of it.
The rubble crunches under my boots. I feel as though rubble is all there is. There is of course the countryside as well. Both are desolation. But the city ruins have a way of threatening to swallow you. The overwhelm is palpable, as if the rocks and scrap metal and charred bits of who-knows-what will become animate and smother me to death. Suffocation. What remains of the cities is suffocation.
I’m somewhere in Texas. I have no map. The city was big. Dallas? I don’t really have a concept of my location anymore and there is no one to ask. Maybe I’ll see some burned bit of signage that will tell me. Perhaps I will wander through a city that will never disclose its name to me.
Namelessness. I barely remember my own. That man was another man. The one who had my name. His name. I, he, sold insurance then. Before it happened. A lot of good such things did anyone when the Plague hit.
At first we thought it was simply a flu-like pandemic. There were so many similarities to that sort of thing, from the past. But then minds began to go. Bodies began to transform. Mutate.
Before they were totally lost, the half-men, half-Plaguers succumbed to insanity. But enough of their faculties remained for a period sufficient to inaugurate the nuclear holocaust. Factions of men driven insane by disease and factions of men driven insane by fear began to war. Destruction and death fell from the skies and fiery judgment blossomed from the ground. Those who remained when the world was finished burning were left with nothing. Beasts made by disease of the body, beasts made by disease of the heart, and a precious few who held on to what made them human. All I can do now is hold on. Keep going.
I don’t know why I am heading for California. No, I know why. But I question my own sanity because of it. I’m westward bound because of a memory. A silly thing. Something that I know cannot possibly be there when I arrive.
I was twelve years old. My parents were divorcing. They sent me to stay with my uncle in Newport. It was summer and it was beautiful. My uncle would take me to the boardwalk. The day was hot and I was sad. I felt that I had been shipped away while my folks fought out their petty squabbles. I felt somehow I had contributed to the dissolution of our family. My uncle told me that was stupid. I wanted to believe him. He hugged me and he held my hand and told me not to worry if the other people would think it was strange. He bought me an ice cream cone from a street vendor. Mint chocolate chip. It was incredible. It tasted like love. My uncle loved me when I felt no one else did or ever would. And so now, when I am truly alone, when it feels that love has left the world, when even God Himself does not speak when I plead before Him, I trek the wastelands, the rotting corpse of a nation, in search of ice cream. It won’t be there when I get there. It hasn’t been there for a long time. But I cannot think of another path.
Burning. Everything smells like burning now. More, really, that everything has already burned. It is the smell of ash that lingers in permanence. I kick a scrap of twisted steel down the road the Plaguers have cleared. I don’t know what the metal was before. I don’t where the road leads but west. I don’t know the road's purpose but to guide the flooding hordes that will come at nightfall.
***
There was a time I thought I had found refuge. It must be a year ago. The transformations were complete. The damage done, people become what they are now. If they lived.
I had made it to Georgia. I had no thoughts of California then, only of fleeing. To where, I didn’t know. No traveler I’ve met since the bombs really knows. We are all searching for something that isn’t there anymore.
There were people. Real people. Not monsters. Not lunatics. Or so I thought.
I was weary, as I have been since the day Abigail… Since I…
I was thirsty. And then I saw cabins. Someone had built them recently. There were lights inside. Not electrical, but fires, smoke rising from stone chimneys cobbled together from ugly rubble. I had never seen a more magnificent and lovely sight. Peace at last, if only for a night.
I came to the entrance of the village. They had erected a wooden gate. A useless and wonderful emblem of normalcy in a distorted world. Whoever lived there lived in harmony. They would have tools. Food and drink. They could build. Perhaps one day, long into the future, rebuild.
I knocked at the nearest door. A woman answered. She wore a cloth bonnet and plain dress to match her plain face and I could smell bread baking. She was a radiant vision of beauty. I felt that I had stumbled upon salvation.
She motioned me to come inside. Her children, a boy and a girl, six or seven both of them, were eating soup at a wooden table. Everything was wood and salvaged stone in that place. The whole little town. The land was a frontier now and everyone there looked and acted like pioneers of the past, I gathered and would soon have confirmed. They fed me. No one spoke. Me in my (I hoped) imagined shame for intruding and they in pleasant and warm silence, complete with a smile from each. The husband came in after a time.
“Ah, a traveler,” he said.
I nodded, not knowing what to say.
“Well, I am glad you are fed. I’ll have Marisol make up a bed for you.”
“How?...” was all I could muster.
“Well, friend, in spite of the war and those infernal Plaguers, good people can still band together to create civilization. That’s the way it’s always been done.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard the term “Plaguers”. There was no official name for the people turned by the virus, for there was no one in an office to hand such things down.
“That’s… it’s really something,” I said.
“Isn’t it ever? We’d be happy to host you for as long as you need, good sir. New Macon is a city founded on charity, it is. The Elder says we need as much of that virtue as we can get and I can’t hardly disagree there.”
I learned by those statements about the leader of the city, though I don’t think city was an accurate term, it was a village, certainly, and about where I was geographically. There was some twinge of something anxious in me at the way he pronounced “Elder”. I ignored it, at the time. I’ve since learned to trust my instincts.
The man’s name was Patrick and I was his family’s guest for months. I met the bulk of the townspeople, all as gracious as he and his kin. I thought I might build a life there. They were learning to work the land. I had thought it barren but they were beginning to get a few crops to sprout. Nothing in abundance, but wheat had begun to grow again, and some root vegetables apparently survived the blasts and radiation well. The town hunted, rather well by virtue of their numbers. I figure there were at least a thousand of them. Food was scarce but available. Company was subdued but jovial. I was downcast still but growing in hope. I was starting to feel that life could be normal again.
But I was sorely mistaken.
I took one day many months later to milling wheat with Patrick. He broke from his work and looked at me with an unexpected sadness in his eyes.
“You ever kill a man?” he asked.
I didn't know why he asked me that. Didn’t know why he looked so troubled. But I repaid all his kindness with honesty.
“Once.”
“And… you don’t… are you alright?”
“With having done it?” I said. “I suppose I am, in a manner of speaking. There was no choice.”
“No choice,” he repeated, clearly burdened.
“The man I killed was going to hurt a girl. A child.”
“No choice.”
“Right,” I said.
“Thank you.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
Night was falling and though it afforded little shelter from marauding men and hungry Plaguers (I’d soon learn why I saw so few those many months), the people would take to their homes. I followed Patrick to his, to what I had almost come to think of as mine.
I heard a rustling behind me and turned. A black cloth hood and a hand swinging a large stone were all I saw before the blackness.
I heard the drumming first. Booming and echoing across a vast expanse of emptiness.
Then fire.
A huge, roaring flame, three stories high, many yards wide, in the town center. A wooden dais was next to it. A man stood upon it, shrouded in black. As I regained my senses I saw a sea of hooded figures. I was on my knees, hands bound. I felt hands upon my shoulders, keeping me fixed in the position. The wind was cold on my bare chest. The air smelled of charcoal. Hundreds of others were like me, held and bound between the black-clad men. I recognized a few of them. New to town, like me. It came in a flash that the robed figures were the townspeople themselves. The man on the platform drew back his hood. A weathered face, aged but strong. A man of authority. The one I knew only as “The Elder”.
“Praise the Plague!” he screamed from his stage.
Thousands of voices echoed back.
“Praise the Plague!” he cried again.
The mantra returned to him, repeating rhythmically, growing into a crazed chant.
A bound woman near me sobbed, begged to be released. The Elder went on.
“Brethren, we are gathered for the sacrifice! We live in peace at the mercy of the Overborn! We perform the blood rites with utmost supplication!”
All praised The Plague again in reply.
“Make way! Make Way! Part the sea for the feast!”
Thousands drew back from the fire in unison, leaving the terrified and confused captives to stand. We all looked around us in bewilderment as the circle of black-robed townspeople opened to the east, making a wide path. One prisoner fled as soon as he was allowed to stand, making a panicked rush for the opening. We dared not follow into the unknown of night. Just moments after he was gone from our sight we heard the screaming.
The scream of one became the squeals and cackling laughter of hundreds. Inhuman. They streamed in through the path. Sick mockeries of the human form, lurching and writhing, bounding on all fours, adorned with boils and scars, muttering then screeching hellish lunacies. They were hunger for flesh incarnate. A tidal wave of Plaguers, the objects of the town’s worship, and us, the captives, their sacrificial meal.
I backed slowly into the throng of townspeople, too awestruck to run, as many of the others fled and were tasted first as a result. Crunching of bone. Desperate yelps that became a horrific cacophony of agony. Loud weeping and pleas for mercy.
The crowd was pushing me back toward the fire. Suddenly, I felt the ropes that bound me sever. My hands were free. I turned. Patrick. He held the blade of a machete, handle towards me.
“I’m so sorry,” he said to me.
“Betrayal!” cried the man next to him.
I buried the blade in that man’s skull. A fountain of red burst skyward.
The others around my host took up the chant of betrayal. Patrick had left himself unarmed. I cut my way through two more figures to his right. The splattering blood was hot against my skin. They reached for me. One after another. I relieved them of their reaching hands. One after another. I pushed through the crowd. A few blades to bellies, a few slashes to throats, and I was through. As I ran, I looked back to see Patrick being stripped of his robe, pushed toward the fire, towards the frenzied monsters consuming their prey. He was one of the captives then. And then he was no more.
They did not pursue me further. I made it to the house. I grabbed my pack. I fled into the night.
I think often of that night. Of the killing I did. I had no choice. But Patrick had a choice. And he chose to grant me life. I live in his debt. I live in regret. I couldn’t save him. Just as I couldn’t save Abigail.
But the thing that haunts me most is the question. Could I not save them? Or would I not?
***
The sun tells me it’s noon now. Trudging through the ghost of Texas, I think about that night. About Patrick. About what happened there. I think about it a lot.
I still don’t think the Plaguers can be reasoned with, so it wasn’t that. I thought for a long while that it was some kind of relationship like you’d have with a pet. The monsters knew they’d be fed and the townspeople fed them and otherwise they left each other alone, mostly. Something about that doesn’t track though. Why would they leave them in peace for so long? did they only need to feed a couple times a year? Did they need to feed at all? Did they just enjoy the killing? Nothing about it makes sense.
I finally settled on the robes. That’s about the best I can reckon even now. Something about the ritual garments protected them, since when Patrick was stripped he became prey like the rest of us. I don’t believe in magic. At least, I don’t think I do. I believe in God. I believe in miracles. So maybe the reverse of that has to be true. Maybe it’s some physical property of the cloth. I just don’t know.
All I know is that someone gave their life for me. And all I’ve done is take life.
“Greater love hath no man than this, that he may lay down his life for his friends.”
Patrick knew how to love. I wonder if I ever will.
There’s a clatter to my right. Something falling. Maybe dropped.
I look. Motion. I would swear I saw eyes.
Then nothing, again. Always nothing. Unless there is something. And something is often what you don’t want these days.
I hop half a crumbled concrete wall in the direction of the noise. Weeds are growing up through what used to be the floor. The earth, charred and scarred as it is, reclaiming what we stole in our building.
A can. Pinto beans, half eaten and spilling liquid onto the ground. There was someone here! Friend or foe, I don’t know yet. The gamble is on the latter but along with a pang of anxiousness I feel some kind of yearning. Whoever it was did not attack. They were watching. Perhaps the purpose was sinister. But I feel something. Something good. I think the Spirit is telling me something. Is this an answer to my prayers?
If it is, do I deserve it? I know I don’t deserve anything, but isn’t that the point? The Lord makes it rain on the good and the evil. He gives grace to the sinner.
Rabbit jerky. What does it profit a man to gain his food if he loses his soul?
***
I had been trekking for another month. A month after the bonfire. After my friend laid down his life for me.
I came upon another fire. Small, for one man. He pricked up at my approach, reached for a gun. I held up my hands, told him I meant only peace. Perhaps there was something in my eyes that he believed me. He stowed the pistol. There is a gift some have for knowing when to trust and this man had it. In that moment he was right. Later, in a moment of one of my most profound weaknesses, he could not have been more wrong.
“Sit and eat,” he said.
“Thank you.”
It was roast meat. It smelled like heaven. I dared not inquire from what animal it came. It was a revelation.
“I’m Daniel.”
“Well met.”
I didn’t give him my own name but only my hand. I think, on reflection, what I would do was already festering in my heart and I feared to tell him my name. I can’t say I was already planning my transgression but I think the devil already had his hooks in me when I saw the abundance this man had laid up for himself.
We spoke for hours. He was a kindly soul. A good man in a land of darkness. I, a dark man in the presence of a deep and improbable goodness.
We talked of hunting. Of rabbits and meat preservation. We talked of things before, of things present, of what would be. He told me that even this mess would be healed through love. I wanted to believe. I still do. But I know what I did. What I was planning to do even as he spoke to me out of the charity in his heart. I would steal from him. And that I did. And more.
He drifted into a quiet slumber after a time. I waited. When it seemed he would not wake, I crept to his pack. The jerky was there. Pounds of it. It was not mine. And yet I so wanted to live. To be secure. Sick rationalizations for a wicked deed.
I transferred the meat to my own bag as quickly as I could do while staying silent. He slept. As I pulled out the last cloth wrapped portion of the rabbit, he stirred. Suddenly his eyes were open and upon me, piercing me to the root of my being. I had been seen. Shame washed over me.
“What are you doing?”
I could not answer.
“Stop. You don’t have to do this,” he said.
Maybe I didn’t. I thought I did. I gave a weak answer, expressed my crippled spirit.
“I am hungry.”
“It doesn’t belong to you.”
“I’m sorry.”
He rose. Stepped toward me.
I tackled him. He groaned as he hit the dirt and I was upon him.
“Let me go!”
“I can’t. I’m sorry… I can’t.”
He fought to get out from under me but I was stronger.
I had killed before. What did it matter anymore? The law of the jungle overtook me. I tossed aside the law of God.
I put my hands to his throat. He grasped at them frantically. His eyes began to bulge.
“Staaahhh…” he choked out, breathless.
He could not finish the word. He kicked and struggled beneath me. The sound. Horrible. You remember the sounds. Tears fell on his face. Mine.
His look was all pleading.
I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop.
His breathing did.
The writhing mass under me went limp. A body now, a thing and not a man.
I grabbed my pack and I took his gun and I ran.
I am running still.
***
I’m turning the can over in my hand. I haven’t seen canned goods in over a year. Someone found a store. Or kept one somehow through all the destruction and the raids that followed. It’s hard to believe that one person on their own could have held onto a storehouse. There must be people here. A group.
A flash of movement. I know I saw it. Northwest.
I follow.
I’m jogging now, towards what I don’t know. I hear panting. It’s me. Of course it is. I’m alone. But no, I don’t think I am.
Then I see him. A little boy in ratty clothes. He can’t be but ten. Dark-skinned. African, I think.
He has backed himself into the corner of some ruins to my right and he’s shaking.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I call.
He moves his head back and forth, his whole body silently screaming, “no”.
I step lightly forward.
“It’s okay.”
He points at me.
Then I hear the screeching. The hyena-cackle. The hungry growls. He’s not pointing at me. Behind.
One of the Plaguers is bounding ahead of the pack. There have to be a dozen of them.
I whip around and draw my gun and squeeze a round into the head of the first one. It goes down with an animal yelp and splash of blackened blood.
The boy is crying now.
I don’t have enough bullets.
I fire again. Again. Again. Two down. The rest will overtake us.
I know it’s nonsense but I can’t bear to use the rest of the ammunition. If we survive somehow, I might need it. If I die, maybe the boy’s people can use it. A paltry inheritance to leave, but it’s all I can think of.
I run the twenty-some paces to the boy and drape myself over him. He’s cradled in my arms, his tears wetting my shirt, shivering.
I am shaking too.
Claws tear at my back, my ears are filled with chilling screams of madness. My own or the beasts, I don’t know.
I feel the blood flowing. The pain is excruciating.
An ear-splitting crack. Then another. And another. Ten, fifteen more.
Cries of agony. Not my own.
The clawing ceases.
I succumb to the blackness, knowing I did all I could to save him. Is it enough to atone?
***
Fire. Always, there is fire when something is about to change.
I try to rise. I can’t. Pain explodes across my back.
“Stay, stay. You are gravely wounded.”
My vision flickers, then is with me again.
An old man is sitting next to me. Dark like the boy.
“Where am I?” I say.
“We are the Remnant.”
I try to ask what it means. My voice fails me.
“You are sick with fever. Rest. We mean you no harm. You have my gratitude.”
My questions swim in my head as I lose consciousness again.
***
When I come to, I am in a cabin room. The old man is here.
“Where…”
“You are safe,” he says.
“How long have I—”
“Four days. The doctor says you will recover.”
“Thank you.”
“It is I who should thank you, sir. You saved my nephew from the creatures.”
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You could have run. You risked your life to protect him.”
“I have run before.”
“You carry the Good Book with you. Do you believe?”
“Yes. But I have done so much… I am not a righteous man.”
“None is righteous but one. This you should know if you have read.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Venant.”
“What is this place?”
“This is the house of the living God, my friend.”
“A church?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a preacher?”
“If you please.”
He places an aged hand on my arm. He looks into my eyes and speaks.
“You are welcome here.”
My eyes sting.
“You don’t want me here.”
“I do.”
“You don’t know what I have done. I don’t belong here.”
“Tell me.”
“I have killed.”
“It is a season for killing.”
“An innocent man.”
“And do you repent of this?”
“I tried… to atone. With the boy.”
“Only one atones.”
“My wife, Abigail. I didn’t save her. They came and they took her life and I didn’t stop them.”
“Could you have?”
“I don’t know.”
“And do you repent of this also?”
“I've killed more men. Left a friend to die to save my own life.”
“And the apostle denied our Lord. Is there no sin which is not covered?”
“I couldn’t let anything happen to that boy, your nephew.”
“You have turned from your old ways.”
“The guilt. Oh, God…”
I am shaking now. Weeping.
“There is provision for it,” he says.
“What do I do?”
“Rest, for now.”
“And then?”
“And then you walk in newness of life.”
“It is only darkness.”
“And it has not overcome the light. I come from a country called Burundi. You know of it? We have known war and suffering before this. The man who is of Christ knows how to be a refugee. And now we are all refugees upon this earth.”
“Where is God?”
“Here, with us.”
“Will He not help?”
“The world has always been enemy territory. And yet the Lord has dominion over it all.”
“What good does it do us?”
“I am afraid that I cannot answer.”
“And you still believe?”
“Do you not?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
“What is it you are seeking?”
“California.”
“Why?”
“A memory.”
“A memory of what?”
“Of love.”
“There is love here, now. You must stay.”
“I have to get there, west.”
“You are running, child.”
The tears come again.
“Where can I go?”
“Here. You are home now. This is a place where love lives. A love you demonstrated when you saved my boy. A love like God’s own. Rest. Accept His peace.”
I sit. He embraces me. He leaves.
I lie down.
As I drift into sleep I think of God’s love. Of ice cream. Of home.
I’m home.
Is gud.