Anthony DeCosmo - Empire

Anita Nehru asked, “Tell me, Captain, what have your men discovered?”

“Not much,” Rhodes admitted. “We found rifles and pistols, most of which looked to have been in storage in this main building. We pulled them from under the ruins so it was probably stuff lying around and not used.”

“Tracks?” Anita asked.

“We found deer and bear tracks, all relatively fresh but that’s about it. Judging by the skeletons in the mess we figure this happened a long time ago, so much so that if they were hit by predators or something on foot then the tracks are long since lost.”

“What about the bodies?” Trevor asked while his eyes scanned the rubble.

“Nothing conclusive yet. Most of our medical evaluation staff is back at Lynchburg helping Dr. Maple’s quarantine team. But it don’t matter much-um, Sir, — because the remains are few and far between. I mean, we’re talking about parts. Scavengers, carrion eaters have picked this place dry.”

Trevor glared. “So you’re telling me you don’t know jack shit about what happened here?”

Rhodes‘ mouth opened but he did not speak. General Prescott stepped in.

“Well, we just spotted this place yesterday and our resources are spread out up and down the range setting up positions. Sorry we don’t have more, but we’re working on it.”

“Show me the rest.”

Dante placed a hand on Trevor’s shoulder. “Are you sure? You might want to chew a few more of them out first.”

Stone swiped away Dante’s hand and followed the others beyond the destroyed estate into the gently rising woods. That is when Trevor noticed the carcasses. Everywhere.

Dogs. Canines. Judging by the bones, they represented a variety of breeds.

Trevor heard a sniffle from his son and saw tears forming in JB’s eyes. He reached down and hoisted Jorgie into his arms.

“All the doggies, father…all the doggies…”

Dante asked Anita, “Can you figure out what did this?”

“I’m not a veterinarian or a coroner. Besides, it doesn’t look like there are enough remains to draw any conclusions.”

Trevor stated surely, “They tore each other apart, in fits of madness.”

The dead dogs littered the forest with as many piles of bones as there were trees. It was hard to make out the parts; spring thaws and winter snows and thaws again conspired to warp and rot the bodies.

They arrived at the small plateau in front of the mountain face where the overturned Hemlock tree guarded a black hole. Soldiers stood there, securing the cave from the outside.

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.