Xenia, After Read online

  Xenia, After

  By Joe Schlegel

  Also check out:

  AN ABRUPT ENDING: THE FIRST TWO

  AND A HALF BOOKS OF THE GODRICK SERIES

  “The Appetite of Floyd”

  “Dare to Defy”

  “Ava”

  HER REVOLUTION ARRIVES: BOOKS

  THREE AND FOUR OF THE GODRICK SERIES

  “Wrath, and Raleigh”

  “A Few Grams of Horror Haze”

  Copyright 2017 Createspace Independent Publishing

  ISBN-10: 1544216459

  ISBN-13: 978-1544216454

  Special THANK YOU to

  Cover photographer Darrian Mullins

  Apocalypse Survivor Ben McQuown

  Apocalypse Survivor Jake Osborne

  “Xenia, After” reviewers

  over the years...

  Kelly Crabtree

  Karen Fontenot

  Sara Fontenot

  Beckie Long

  Sarah Long

  Nicole Mulderink

  Joy Schlegel

  Table of Contents

  The City of Hospitality

  Aaron’s Benediction

  A Holy Crusade

  The Gathering of Survivors

  Ben and Seven

  Maddox

  How Far to Search

  Approaching the Flock

  A Naive Suicide

  Seven and Rhea

  An Unfortunate Gust

  David Serves the Crusade

  The D.O.T. Nightmare

  Surviving the Nightmare

  Ben Arrives

  The Detroit Chase

  Scramble

  The Generators

  The Rescue

  Jake and Ben Go to Church

  Aaron Serves His Crusade

  Full Disclosure

  Norman’s Allegiance

  Containment

  From All Sides

  Containment, Breached

  A Bid for Purgatory

  The Complacent Flock

  An Uncertain Prospect

  X E N I A A F T E R . . . .

  1.

  The City of Hospitality

  The boisterous sounds of civilization simmered down into timid whispers. And mankind, robbed of its digital luxuries, existed within a perfect, inviolable silence.

  Death swept the largest cities first, and it decimated the outer communities next. Rural dwellers fared longer with luck and open land around them.

  But even as the summer months set in, humans failed to rise back to the top of the food chain. No one arrived to help, no one showed up with emergency aid. Only travelers wandered through in long search of loved ones, answers, or home. They gave reports of barrenness and death for dozens of miles.

  Yet Xenia endured.

  Stories told of large communities, some swollen into the thousands – villages of blessed salvation. But unless that village delivered the remaining Xenians to the way things used to be, most recognized no salvation about those far-off communities. It was best to die at home if death thrived everywhere else, too.

  Death ALWAYS wandered nearby.

  And they refused mercy.

  The population continued to dwindle despite their best efforts to salvage it. Either another suicide rocked the community, or another missing person haunted the survivors. They spoke jadedly of mortality. Their words floated upon scarred and traumatized whispers.

  Everyone feared surviving the impending, brutal Ohio winter without the protections of electric heaters and furnaces. The warm, summer weather taunted them with its eventual, subzero drop.

  Xenia scrambled, for they were woefully under-prepared...

  A car driven through the front window of a thrift store sat undisturbed for months. It settled amid its glass and plastic destruction as the weather gradually eroded the paint around the trunk lid and bumper. The dust and dirt that covered the driver’s side door smudged sideways from numerous close brushes against it.

  Foraging among the ransacked clothes racks, Maddox held up an orange polo shirt to inspect in the light. The narrower size lacked the breadth of material to comfortably encompass his round, protruding belly.

  Despite the gut that drooped down overtop his belt loops, his legs developed a toned, muscular fitness to rival a Greek statue. His congenial smile softened his towering frame, and it nearly disguised the menacing appearance of his size and untrimmed mess of sand-colored hair.

  He tossed the orange polo over two aisles and called out cheerfully, “This might fit ya!”

  David lifted his gaze in time to catch it. He examined the bright shirt with passive approval.

  Peeling off his mud and sweat coated linens, he kicked them down the aisle. Several months without the amenities of modern life carved his large frame. His barrel chest stuck out and his arms grew just as massive. Muscular and proud, his shoulders squared powerfully.

  He tugged on the orange polo shirt.

  Maddox retrieved a large ring of keys, kicked his filthy, sullied cargo shirts aside with a mustard yellow tennis shoe, and chose a pair of jean shorts. The bottom hem rose several inches above his knees, and the zipper hardly moved up to the top half of the stressed waistline. His swollen belly pushed through yet another size.

  Choosing a brown belt from a rack, he strapped the shorts tight around his midsection. Then he stepped from the end of an aisle. Arms spread out wide, he beamed a bright smile.

  The too-small jean shorts underscored a black tee with a massive, white-out silhouette of a dachshund perched diagonally and slightly off-center. The stubby pup stretched across his gut.

  “What do you think?”

  David stepped from behind another rack, and he eyed Maddox with a pained grimace.

  He grunted with a sneer, “Please stop doing that to the rest of us.”

  “Stop what?” He craned his head forward and peeked innocently, curiously overtop his protruding belly, unaware of the issue.

  “You deliberately pick the most atrocious outfits. And we’re the ones who have to put up with them.”

  Maddox lowered his arms slightly, and his grin somewhat faltered. “It’s self-expression,” he protested.

  David countered, “It’s ridiculous, and this store is rife with less offensive choices. Pick something else.” He retrieved his Ruger 10/22 rifle which leaned against the front window.

  Through the tinted glass of the old thrift store, he studied the parking lot. A few cars with smashed windows and dented panels scattered throughout the area, and one had hosted a raging fire until it eventually burned down to its charred frame. Grass grew wild after four months without care. Weeds towered ever higher, some with wide, sinister, unforgiving stalks and leaves that twisted out overtop the unmanicured foliage.

  The old high school football field across the road lie partially blocked from view by the untamed flora. Above, the sky shone perfectly blue and disarmingly beautiful.’

  Everything in David’s view sat immaculately still, its destruction and abandonment undisturbed.

  He walked close to the car that rested halfway through the thrift store’s front window, and he maneuvered sideways through the hole. His fresh clothes casually brushed and smudged some dirt from the fender.

  Maddox laboriously sucked in his gut and shimmied out after David. He reached in around the window to fetch his Remington 870 shotgun, complete with a custom shoulder strap tac-welded from barrel to stock.

  Out in the covered walkway, they swung their weapons onto their backs and mounted a pair of mountain bicycles.

  They peddled slow and cautious out into the open parking lot.

  Each man surveyed a different direction and scanned the area for any sign of erratic, unnatural movement. A watchful vigilance creased their stern, serious
grimaces.

  David gazed down along the rest of the strip mall’s store fronts. A handful of more cars dotted the asphalt, and one sat abandoned out in the road. The Main Street stop light hung dark in the distance, an inescapable reminder that civilization had only aged a few months since its divorce with electricity.

  Turning toward the space between the old thrift store and the pilfered, defaced grocer, Maddox searched the smaller parking lot tucked beside them. Not even random wildlife stirred amongst the concrete and asphalt, nor along the street past the shallow curb.

  They both pedaled away from the thrift store, away from the football field, away from the old grocery store, and through the smaller parking lot.

  And they maintained close, silent ranks. Seamlessly forming a single file line, the pair rode out into the road beyond the shallow curb. They conformed to the double yellow lines painted in the middle of the road.

  The four, stories-tall Ionic pillars on either side of the cemetery entrance stretched as high as the nearby trees. Erected long before the modernization of Xenia, the men who worked on the edifices passed away long before their beloved town succumbed to the infection.

  Maddox’s gaze drifted between the pillars as he rode past, but his eyes searched no deeper than the entrance—

  One of them spotted the bike-mounted pair. One eyelid sunk uncontrollably down over its eye, partially blinding and stealing its depth perception. Its facial muscles rotted, the flesh draped over its face drooped and wrinkled. The skin and cartilage around its nose blackened and dissolved from infection.

  It charged, sure-footed on two hale legs.

  “They’re here,” he called urgently to David, just ahead of him.

  Both men stood up on their peddles, and they pushed a little harder.

  “How far do you think we’ll have to go?”

  David peered back briefly to gauge the threat, then studied the road ahead of them. “This one looks spry, so we’ll have to make sure it doesn’t veer toward town. We can probably lose it down Orange Street. You up for all that?”

  Glancing back for one last look, Maddox conceited proudly, “None of them have caught me yet!”

  They churned their legs faster, and they leaned as they turned onto the next road on the right. The hill declined sharply, and their momentum rapidly accelerated.

  Behind them, it lost ground with each step. It sprinted wildly around the corner, but its lunch sped out of reach.

  On a sidewalk across from the old middle school, Anika unstrapped a homemade security unit – just smaller than a backpack – from a light pole. Unadorned and utilitarian, the metal face of the device displayed only LED bulbs side by side, a simple button beneath them, and a motion sensor protected within a recessed partition. A battery cradle for C-sized alkalines wired into a small speaker, then fed into an attached flare on the side.

  She steadied the bottom of the unit with her knee as she loosened the top strap.

  Free from the pole, she gripped the sides and gingerly carried it to a child carrier with enlarged, inflated wheels. She rested it on a wadded blanket, then wrapped it protectively with a towel. The tweaked, robust suspension bounced from the weight, yet the over-inflated tires never budged, tethered to her maroon and gold Sunspeed mountain bike.

  The rapid, soft clicking of another bike announced the approach of a fellow survivor, and she peered around the carrier’s nylon top.

  Anika stiffened.

  Apprehension welled up in her gut, and fear trickled along the back of her neck.

  She dropped her head.

  Focusing on her chore, she propped the towel-wrapped security unit against another bundle of blankets already in the carrier.

  Maddox squeezed his hand brakes as he neared her.

  He halted on the other side of her carrier strapped to her twenty-seven speed bike. Remaining straddled on his off-white Huffy, he faced Anika with a gracious smile.

  She unfolded another blanket, and she prepared a cocoon for the next unit along her path.

  And he watched her.

  Still, she refused to acknowledge him.

  His face gradually tilted into a shadowy deviousness.

  He swung a fit leg over the bike frame, as high as his protruding belly allowed. Maneuvering the kickstand with his mustard yellow tennis shoe, he rested the Huffy on its perch.

  She rose from her carrier, suspicious.

  Maddox’s veneer of contempt hardly wavered despite her full attention sussing out his intentions. “Looks like they got you working awfully hard! And all by your lonesome?”

  His gaze drag-netted across Shawnee Park, which expanded out beyond the sidewalk.

  Anika peered over her shoulder and overtop the overgrown common, but a small hill blocked the view to the large, sterling white gazebo and the pond beside it – and witnesses. She snapped her attention back to her unwanted visitor.

  “So,” he snided and craned his head sideways to check inside the carrier, “do these contraptions of yours actually do anything? It looks like a bunch of goddamn nonsense, if you ask me.”

  Alone, she refused to rise to his bait.

  She eyed the rifle which leaned up against her side of the carrier.

  He taunted again, “Did ya’ll even do your homework? I mean, that looks awfully complicated for some C-average students to rig up, right?”

  Maddox examined the custom suspension of the child carrier, built atop the enlarged, over-inflated wheels to soften the clatter felt by the blanket-coddled devices.

  He sneered at her maroon, Central State tee, faded from multiple hand washings.

  “It’d be embarrassing of something ignorant were to botch everything up.”

  Anika heard the snapping bite in his voice, and she felt the simmering revulsion thinly-veiled by his tone. She tensed. A desperate isolation shivered from head to foot, trapped by a taller, wider brute.

  Maddox advanced a few more steps, “Do you need any help there—”

  “No,” she stated firmly.

  He froze only a yard away, and he waved a hand dismissively. “Nah, it’s fine; we’re a tight-knit community, remember—”

  “Do not touch this equipment!”

  To emphasize her resolve, she placed a hand on the rifle and glared fiercely into the fat man’s face.

  He flashed an unapologetically bemused smirk, entertained rather than intimidated by the sharp bark in her voice.

  “Why won’t you let me help?”

  “I don’t know why you’re here, but I’m sure it’s not to help.”

  He checked around them again, and then pivoted to search the old middle school directly behind him. Insuring their solitude, the shadows across his plump visage darkened ever so slightly, and his bemused smirk remained playfully smeared across his lips.

  “Of course it’s to help,” he proclaimed and reeled back to her. “These idiots around here are trusting a couple coon children to our safety. I want to make sure ya’ll don’t fuck it up and kill us all.”

  Anika gripped her rifle solidly, “Leave.”

  He sneered again at the Central State design on her shirt. Then he taunted, “There used to be a few more of you around, right?”

  She propped herself up confidently, and she projected her courage despite that she stood several inches shorter and thinner.

  The corner of his mouth tugged outward with disgust, and the amusement dissolved from his posture. “You could have left with the rest of your kind back to Detroit or Chicago or where ever else you immigrated from—”

  Anika rolled her eyes.

  “—but instead a whole herd of you squatted here in our hometown.”

  “There’s nothing out there for me,” she conceded. The sober admission only somewhat softened her voice, “This community needs to remain as strong as possible if we’re going to make it to Spring—”

  “You’re dying off,” Maddox seethed. “All of your kind, you’re dying off faster than the rest of us. How long do you think you’ll re
ally survive out here?”

  He leaned in, “Go home.”

  Anika lifted the rifle into her hands. “Leave. Now.”

  But she gulped ever so slightly.

  The involuntary response betrayed her steel resolve.

  Maddox noticed.

  His smirk widened up to his eyes, darkly, knowingly. Then he shuffled back to his Huffy.

  With her rifle still clutched in her hands, Anika watched him mount and pedal to the middle of the street.

  2.

  Aaron’s Benediction

  Nothing looked like it had changed, yet everything looked different. The new stillness unsettled the familiarity felt by even lifelong Xenians. Few people transitioned well into the new way of life.

  For many weeks after the infection devoured society, suicides plagued the survivors. Strings of sudden disappearances mystified everyone. But nothing frightened them all quite like ...them.

  Some clung to faith to quell their fears, to keep evil at bay.

  But their nightmares never ceased.

  On the slope of a tree-packed hill, two semi-circles of stacked stones with a flat, concrete topper rose up one behind the other. They faced an enormous, matching dais. Trees and evergreens of every shade of green thoroughly blocked any view of Xenia which spread out beneath the old orphanage’s grounds.

  A pair of trees behind the audience stood nearly bare, robbed of most of their stocky branches after many decades of wind storms. Very few leaves grew on their remaining limbs, and it offered a nearly flawless peek at the sprawling land left after the orphanage closed.

  Nearly a dozen lawn chairs spread out on the semi-circles, each filled with a member of the devout. Their uniforms complemented one another – solid color polo shirts, khaki shorts, and complacent, peaceful expressions – their faces remained unadorned by make-up or jewelry, just as plain and muted as their clothes.

  They sat motionless, rapt with attention and adoration to the top of the enormous, concrete dais.