Trevor and the others stopped. JB slid from his father’s grasp and stood.
The hole in the earth beckoned Trevor as if it were a voice from some forgotten past begging to be heard again. Pleading to tell a tale.
Stone stepped forward. His son grabbed his hand and took a step, too.
Trevor hesitated. How could he possibly justify taking his three year old son in there, especially before he had seen it himself? Then he remembered the drawing and the shadowy figure his son saw in nightmares.
Against his better judgment, he allowed Jorgie to accompany him inside while the others waited behind. The two pushed through the deformed roots of the Hemlock and into a hole of black.
Trevor stopped a pace inside the entrance. He saw nothing, as if he had closed his eyes.
The air felt surprisingly dry and his nose detected-or perhaps felt-an almost chalky taste in the air, masking an underlying, distant odor of decay.
His eyes slowly adjusted, noticing a flickering red light coming from somewhere at the back of the dome- shaped cavern. That flicker splashed enough illumination to allow his eyes to understand his surroundings.
He saw bones. Human bones everywhere, the remains of skeletons broken and decaying. Many wore the torn and faded remains of jeans, dresses, fatigues, and police uniforms. The red light danced over them like a ghost of spilt blood.
Trevor cupped his palm over JB’s blue eyes.
“You shouldn’t see this.”
Next, he saw a pile of debris stacked against a wall of dirt, rock, and roots. The light came from-no, that was not a pile of debris, it was a mound of remains. Skeletal bodies stacked one on top of the other creating a…
“A wall,” he thought aloud.
“What’s that, father?” JB’s eyes still hid behind Trevor’s hand.
“I said, someone piled…piled junk in one corner to hide the entrance to another room.”
Trevor hoisted his boy and carried him toward that next chamber, toward the red glimmer. With his father’s shielding hand gone, JB covered his eyes himself while slung against his dad’s hip.
Trevor felt his son shake. Or maybe it was Trevor’s own tremble.
Brittle human bones crunched under his feet as he approached the barrier. Something had breached that wall, pushing out from inside. A red light flickered from behind the pile.
Trevor stopped. A chilled air escaped from the smaller chamber and carried with it a harsh smell that nearly overwhelmed his senses. He could not quite place the smell, perhaps one part rot and another part stink; something akin to the stench of a sewer.
As bad the odor, he hesitated for a different reason.
Like the smell, he could not quite place that reason but it caused an eerie tingle along his spine, much like the first day of the invasion when he went home and found the front door smashed open. Despite everything he had seen that day-monsters in the streets, people dying-it was that moment when he crossed the threshold of his house that his world truly changed; when he found his dead parents and the horrific creature that had mutilated them. At that moment, he had confronted the truth of a new reality.
This felt similar. The tiny chamber in the cave hidden behind a mound of bodies held something more than just another creature or alien invader. Something waited for him. For Richard Trevor Stone.
“Father?”
“Yes, yes, we’re going in. Hold on, I have to stoop, the ceiling is low.”
The flickering red light came from two flares placed there by Rhodes‘ men. The red glow danced across the rocky dirt floor, around the rough walls, and against the low-hanging roof where roots reached down like warped fingers.
In contrast to the larger chamber, the smaller one held no bones. Instead, remains of a different kind: empty bags of freeze-dried food, old soup cans, wrappers, and plastic water bottles pushed into a corner like a miniature garbage dump.
“A survivor’s sanctuary,” Trevor, again, thought aloud.
“It smells in here, father. It smells bad.”
“Jorgie, it’s okay, you can get down and open your eyes.”
JB squirmed and dropped to the floor where he stood next to his dad. At first, he shielded his eyes from the sparkle of the flares but his pupils soon adjusted.
“Someone hid in here,” Trevor explained. “Look at all the wrappers and cans. Someone survived in here for a long while.”
“Is that smell from the old food?”
Trevor thought for a moment and then answered, “Some of it, yes. But if someone was hiding back here for a long time-”
“Yuck,” Jorgie offered his thought on the matter.
“Yes, yuck,” Trevor agreed.
“Father, look, someone was coloring, like I do.”
He followed his son’s attention to the walls.
The survivor had left behind a story told in drawings.
No, not drawings. Paintings.
Colorful and finely detailed paintings by an artist’s hand. Borderline beautiful despite being colored on the canvass of rough stone along the rear wall. Trevor could not discern how they had been made. Perhaps real paint, perhaps colored chalk, maybe some manner of dye.
The first depicted a city skyline erupting in flames. The silhouette of a tall lanky creature-probably a Shadow-wreaked havoc. What resembled Jaw-Wolves chased groups of people while primitive men, almost certainly Red Hands, fired arrows and gored humans.
A painting of Armageddon; a gruesome recollection of the day when the hellish gates opened on the Earth. The day when humanity went into hiding.
The second painting was so well done that the emotion of its vision poured from the colors. This one showed a mass of downtrodden people surging forward with their hands outstretched toward the point of view of the artist. Despair, yes, but also hope in the eyes of the people, an expression Trevor saw often during those first months when he found survivors. Survivors like Sheila Evans, the first person he actually rescued.
In that painting were a hundred Sheila Evans’ rushing to whoever promised them salvation. They huddled together like refugees while in the background flames of destruction licked the sky.
A third depicted yet another group called forth. Trevor recognized this group, too: a thick line of canines of many breeds marching in strict obedience to a master.
However, as the line of dogs stretched from left to right across the picture, the animals changed. In the lead, rows of sturdy, proud K9s but as the march progressed the dogs warped becoming first shaggy, then weak, then diseased, and then pitiful creatures snarling, collapsing, and turning to bones
“The doggies, father,” JB stood on his tippy-toes and touched the image. “They’re in pain.”
He gave Jorgie a comforting hug even though he had little comfort to give, particularly when he saw the fourth painting. By the time he understood the image it was too late to warn his son away.
Again, perfectly crafted in vivid colors, mainly red.
People torn asunder, impaled on edged weapons and eviscerated by monstrous talons, grabbed by the extending maw of a Jaw-Wolf, decapitated by the claws of a Devilbat.
The carnage played out in front of a collection of buildings-most small but one a mansion-burning and collapsing.
Trevor recognized the scene. He saw it many times in his worst nightmares, an image of his greatest fear: an image of failure.
“Father…”
“Look away, JB.”
But Trevor realized JB had moved on to the fifth, final painting.
“I’m afraid, father.”
In the background, a large homestead of obscure but essentially Victorian style with a second floor balcony overlooking a lake. In the foreground, two people: one older, one much, much younger.
