Empire

20 Wheeler

"J.J.!!" Wheeler shouted from the mens' room. He pulled a screwdriver from his coat and worked furiously at the hinges of the stall door. The other man ran in to see the boards dropping from the window. The rotters would be able to get through this one.

"What do I do?" J.J. cried. Screws clattered at Wheeler's feet. "Just keep 'em away til I get this fuckin' door off!"

J.J. edged toward the window. A dead man thrust his hands through. J.J. staggered back into the doorway.

"C'MON!!" Wheeler bellowed. He dropped to his knees to take off the last hinge. J.J. slammed both fists down on the sink faucet, knocking the rusted length of pipe loose. "Okay!" Taking the pipe up in his hands, he turned to face the window.

Another rotter had taken the first's place. He pointed a rifle at J.J.

The stall door slammed against the rifle just as it discharged, and huge chunks of plaster exploded from the tall, spitting dust and debris into the air. J.J. felt tiny, hot daggers lashing his cheek and fell to the floor.

Wheeler pushed the rifle outside and held the metal door against the window. "Get up, J!"

The door rattled in Wheeler's grip. He put all his weight against it, but then there was a gunshot and the door rocketed into his face.

J.J. watched Wheeler drop. Getting to his feet, he caught the warped, smoking door and thrust it upward again. A dead hand snaked around it and grabbed him by the hair. "Aaaah!" J.J. let go of the door and grabbed the rotter's wrist, snapping it. As the door fell aside, J.J. saw something pushing past the other rotters, some kind of skull-thing dressed like a doctor, holding an axe.

It was planted between J.J.'s eyes with a solid thud. His body was pulled outside.

Wheeler feebly pulled himself from the room, and before he kicked the door shut he saw their faces, crowding the window; a cry escaped him.

The young cop hauled him to his feet. "Are they in?" The cop shouted. "ARE THEY IN?!"

Wheeler nodded. "Addison. They're the Addison children, I know them. He sent them."

"What? Who?"

"Addison," Wheeler answered, then passed out.

Several years prior to taking up permanent residence at the shelter, Wheeler had moved from building to building, squatting a few days, stealing what he could. Sometimes it was an abandoned construction site or an alley where he spent the night, and without fail on those nights it rained. It had been raining when he'd entered the cemetery, and though he first huddled beneath a stone angel in his stinking wet rags, Wheeler was forced to give in and enter one of the burial vaults.

It would be safer in the vault, he told himself. All he carried for protection were a switchblade and a bat. The vault with its shadows and its coffins at least offered a place to hide. Maybe he'd spare himself pneumonia. Settling on the floor, Wheeler gripped the bat tightly and fought sleep until there was no fighting it.

A scraping sound awoke him. He sat perfectly still, eyes wide open in pitch blackness.

"Mrm," came the voice from overhead. The coffin that Wheeler was crouched behind trembled, then the lid fell on his head. He didn't move. Jesus, the body in the coffin wasn't ALIVE, was it? It didn't work like that!

"You'll do." Said the voice. Wheeler shut his eyes and waited for death.

"Who are you?" The voice snapped. He opened his eyes to see Dr. Addison standing there. He'd seen Addison a few times before, back when he'd earned a few meals working as security

(decoy)

at one of the west end's wealthy estates. Addison was the one that adopted all the kids, claiming he could cure the plague. And here he was, pulling a papery brown corpse from its coffin and piling it into a garbage bag. The doctor shot another look at Wheeler. "Do you live here?"

Wheeler shook his head. "Just getting out of the rain."

"You could probably use a shower and a shave."

Wheeler couldn't give a fuck about the shave, but a hot shower sounded like Heaven. He nodded.

"Help me here, then."

So Addison and Wheeler loaded a second corpse into a second bag, then carried both out to a pickup with some landscaper's faded logo on the side. "This yours?" Wheeler asked. He knew the rich guys still had cars but he thought they'd be a little nicer. "Don't ask questions." Was all Addison said in reply.

They drove across town — it took a couple of hours, Addison silently cursing at the manual transmission — and to the edge of the swamp where Addison's house lay. Addison turned on a powerful electric lantern, they got the bags out of the back, then they set off into the swamp.

"Does anything strike you as unusual about this place?" The doctor asked. He was short of breath, as was Wheeler; the soft earth was threatening to swallow the damn bags. Wheeler shrugged. "It's creepy. People don't come out here much."

"Why is it 'creepy'? What's so unsettling about it?" Addison pressed. Wheeler looked at the gnarled trees, their clusters of branches covered in moss, with great leaves dragging them toward the boggy ground. The night sky was completely obscured. He opened his mouth to speak but Addison spoke first.

"You don't see plant life like this anywhere else, do you? So green, so full, devouring everything around it — it won't stop growing. We have to cut it back every day to keep it from overtaking the manor. What's your name?"

"Wheeler."

"Mister Wheeler, this swamp is a sort of Source — a wellspring, if you will, of some energy. It feeds the swamp, engorges the swamp, infuses every cell of this place. Hold tight to that bag! This place…well, rather than try to explain it I'll just show you."

Stopping, Addison opened his garbage bag and let a pair of bony arms fall out. Barren of life, wrapped in shriveled skin and tissue, the arms lay like little fallen branches among the trees.

Then they moved.

The skin tore, and stringy tendons produced only subtle, jerky movements, but Jesus Lord they were moving. That's when Wheeler felt a shuffling about inside his own bag and dropped it with a cry.

"It brings the dead to life." Addison said, his smile horrifying in the lantern light. "This is the Source of the plague. Here it isn't contagious, caught up in the simple trappings of a virus — I suspect we're responsible for that particular development — but it still infuses dead tissue." Addison watched the two corpses shaking themselves free of the bags, teeth in hollow skulls click-clacking and the bodies themselves crumbling under the strain of new life.

"How does something like this exist? Why? Did God put it here?"

Wheeler realized that what Addison was talking about had nothing to do with science or medicine. The doctor knelt and rapped his knuckles on the forehead of his corpse. "This isn't of God. He and the life He's slapped together are impermanent. Look at our bodies. He did make us in His image, after all, didn't He? Do you know why, Wheeler? We're just a shallow attempt by God to leave His mark after He's long gone.

"This energy came before God."

Wheeler was backing off, in the direction from which they'd come, but he wasn't sure he'd be able to find his way out of the swamp before — before-

"We can rise above the flaws of our 'Father' and His finite purpose. We need only appeal to the Old Ones that have given us this gift." Addison saw Wheeler backpedaling through the mud and laughed. "Run if you want. Where are you running to? Man has already set the wheels in motion, whether or not he knows it! God is dead, Wheeler, and He's not coming back!!"

So Wheeler ran. He ran and ran and ran until his legs burned and his lungs screamed. He fell into a ditch and covered himself with dirt and prayed that he'd never wake up.

Now, in the shelter, he did wake up.

To the realization that Addison had been right.