Blizzard of Souls Read online

  War raised his right fist, sharp spikes standing from his knuckles, and all movement as far as he could see ceased abruptly. The hissing dwindled to silence. Surveying the throng of his minions, all eyes focused upon him, he finally lowered his arm and gave a single nod. His gaze turned to the enormous smelting pots suspended over the massive bonfires encircling the fortress. Deep black smoke gushed from the burbling fluid like volcanic lava, firing spatters of molten metal above the rim.

  The crowd came to life around him, scrabbling up the fallen telephone poles and girders and plunging into the fiery metal. Hissing escalated to a deafening reptilian scream as bodies floundered in the scalding magma, rolling nearly unconsciously over the lip and falling twenty feet to the ground. Barely alive, they crawled away from the fire before another could fall down atop them, the metal taking on the appearance of liquid silver on their sleek scales. The coating hardened as it cooled, forming a thin armor that cracked away from the joints when they moved. The screaming reached a crescendo of pain, growing louder still until it found Death’s ears in his chamber at the top of the skyscraper. He allowed his vision to drift back up from the metallic bodies littering the street until he again saw through his own eyes. Their preparations would soon be complete and they would begin their march to the west where they would wipe out the survivors he could feel gathering on the western bank of the Great Salt Lake.

  III

  Mormon Tears

  ADAM SCRAPED THE LAST BITE OF THE BROWN SUGAR-SWEETENED BEANS from his paper plate, licking off the remaining sauce, and cast it into the bonfire. The warmth of the food in his belly made him feel a million times better. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten something that had actually been cooked. It had been before the refugee camp had been obliterated by the tank. Before wading through the endless sulfur waters in the Ali Sadr caves and the trans-Atlantic flight. Before crossing nearly the entire United States in a helicopter and on the back of a winged stallion. So much had transpired since the last time he had actually sat down with a real meal. He chuckled at the thought of what he might have said had someone told him during his last dinner that the next time he would sit before a warm plate of food would be in a smoke-riddled cave at the edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah after the world had ended. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember what his last dinner had been.

  He rose and stretched, his back cracking as he reached toward the roof only a couple feet over his head. The movement drew the attention of everyone else sitting in there, finishing their beans with their backs to the stone walls, but they quickly averted their eyes. Despair was a palpable aura between them, the fear and the unknown leading most everyone to turn inward, becoming silent observers in their own flesh as they waited… But for what? For someone to assume command and lead them?

  Adam looked to Peckham, the ranking officer between the three of them who had been soldiers overseas before the war had escalated beyond the point of no return, but Peck just sat there with half a plate of beans cooling in his lap, staring vacuously into space. Norman’s empty plate had fallen from his lap when he tipped to the side against the rocks, overcome by exhaustion. Adam knew that he should join the medic in rest, for Lord only knew when the last time he had allowed his body to recuperate, but he felt that there was something he needed to do first. It was an irrepressible need, a tingling sensation in his gut, but he hadn’t the slightest clue what he needed to do any more than he knew where to begin.

  There were about ten of them sitting in the smooth mouth of the cave now. None had ventured away from the fire and deeper into the earthen orifice leading off into the darkness, but judging by the sounds of dripping in the distance, it led at least a hundred feet back into the stone mountain. After his experience in Iran, the last thing he wanted was to be below ground for any length of time. Eventually he suspected he would have to, but he wanted to postpone that decision as long as possible.

  He was just about to sit back down to tuck his chin to his chest and close his eyes when Phoenix materialized through the smoke from the fire against the gray world without.

  Someone coughed in the corner, a dry barking sound that almost sounded like croup. Until that moment Adam hadn’t even considered the daunting prospect of potentially having to treat all of these people medically. They had no supplies and the nearest antibiotics were surely locked in the back of a pharmacy fifty miles away in town on the other side of the lake. It was as though overnight they’d been hurled a hundred years back through time.

  “You should see it out there, Adam,” Phoenix said. “The lake. The beach. Everything. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Adam smiled at the boy’s unbridled wonder. Phoenix had said that he was eighteen years old, but he still had the wide-eyed awe of a child.

  “You up for taking a walk with me?” Adam asked.

  Phoenix turned and looked at Missy.

  “I’ll bring a plate out to you,” she said, stifling a giggle.

  “Okay then,” he said, walking back out through the smoke.

  Adam caught up with him on the soft sand, throwing his arm around Phoenix’s shoulder to guide him to the north and away from the others so they could have a measure of privacy.

  “I believe I owe you my thanks, Phoenix.”

  “For what?” Phoenix watched the sand sluice between his toes. They were as red as lobsters from the cold, but he wouldn’t have traded the sensation for anything in the world. Just feeling anything at all was a special experience.

  “For saving us.”

  “You saved me, remember?”

  “We helped get you out of a house. You brought us a thousand miles to safety.”

  “I guess we’re even then,” Phoenix said with a shrug.

  “Not even close,” Adam said, clapping him on the shoulder. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his weathered fatigues and looked at Phoenix. The boy’s skin was pasty white, his long hair such a light shade of blond it was almost ivory. With the pink highlights in his irises, he looked like an albino, but there was something else in those wide eyes. A light. Not just a twinkle, but a resonant glow that drew Adam magnetically to him. He had scarcely known this gawky boy for more than a day, but already he knew that he would lay down his life without a second thought.

  The thought absolutely terrified him.

  “How did you know to bring us here?” Adam asked, chasing the last irrational thought from his mind.

  “Because this is Mormon Tears,” Phoenix said, giving Adam a strange look as though it was the most obvious question he had ever heard.

  Adam laughed. “I suppose it is. I guess what I was fishing for was how did you know it was here? How were you able to find it?”

  “Oh,” Phoenix said, blushing. “I saw it in my dreams. Well, I guess I didn’t actually see it, but I knew it was here. It was more like a feeling, like how you know someone’s there in the dark with you even if you can’t see them. I guess once we were flying, I just kind of let the horses lead the way. I figured we’d arrive here eventually.”

  “So what now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where do we go from here?”

  “Nowhere. This is our home now.”

  Adam stopped and stared at him. Phoenix took another couple of steps before he realized the older man wasn’t beside him and turned around.

  “We can’t stay here,” Adam said. “I bought into the mysticism, the whole idea of meeting everyone here in the middle of nowhere because, truthfully, I didn’t have any better ideas, but staying here is a fool’s proposition. We aren’t equipped to survive the winter outdoors.”

  “There will still be others arriving—”

  “And we can leave them a map, but think about this logically. We should find a town and move inside. Houses. Apartments. Anything. Get out of the elements. We need to take advantage of the power while it lasts, and even without electricity we would have a much easier time heating smaller enclosures versu
s the great outdoors. Then we could figure out how to run the generators. Heck, for all we know there could be entire small communities out there in the desert powered by the wind or the sun—”

  “If we leave here we will die.”

  Adam opened his mouth to argue, but held his tongue.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” he finally asked.

  Phoenix looked away.

  “They will be coming,” he whispered.

  “Who?”

  “The Swarm. God’s army.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Can’t you feel it?” Phoenix snapped, whirling to face him. “Can’t you feel their power growing? It won’t be long until they’re strong enough to move against us.”

  “The creatures from your house?”

  “Thousands of them,” he whispered. A haze clouded over his eyes like milky cataracts.

  Adam staggered backwards, unable to so much as blink.

  “Listen carefully, Adam, chosen son of man. You must lead them. Their lives are in your hands. I have given you one last chance for redemption. You must ready yourselves for the storm, and you are already running out of time. Death’s armada will descend beneath the Blizzard of Souls, and either you will triumph or all is lost.”

  “Phoenix?” Adam whispered. He walked up to the boy, whose entire body was stiff, as though conducting a current, the tendons in his neck standing out like cords. Adam tilted up Phoenix’s chin with trembling hands, his heart pounding so hard he could barely breathe.

  The swirling mist disappeared in Phoenix’s eyes, leaving only that uncomfortable red stare.

  “All right!” Phoenix said, brushing Adam aside. “Baked beans!”

  “Phoenix!” Adam called after him, but the boy was already running down the beach to where Missy was walking toward them with a steaming plate in her hands.

  “What the hell was that?” Adam said aloud, his eyes falling to the ground. The sand where Phoenix had been standing was now fused to glass.

  IV

  The Gateway

  RICHARD ROBINSON WALKED AT THE FRONT OF THE PACK, HIS TIE AROUND his head to keep the sweat and the remainder of the hair gel from running into his eyes. Fists in his armpits, he crossed his arms over his chest to contain as much of his body heat as he could. The lapels of his suit jacket were turned up to shield his neck from the rising wind that raced across the deserted highway, tearing his pluming breath sideways. The scruff on his cheeks was beginning to gray to either side of his chin in contrast to the otherwise rich black of the hair he normally kept slicked back. Lightning bolt vessels struck through the whites toward his startlingly blue eyes, the trademark that had launched his career in politics. His Italian loafers were scuffed to hell and there was precious little left of the soles, but if the sign in front of him was right, there wasn’t too much farther to go.

  “Mormon Tears,” he said, reading the words spray-painted onto the twin rock formations that faced each other like praying children on their knees. The gravel shoulder was marred by the tire tracks turning from the road and passing through the stone arch. Twin lines stretched off across the white desert to the horizon.

  He turned back to the others, the worst of the stragglers more than a half mile back down the road. She did nothing but whine about her sore feet anyway. If she didn’t want to walk, there were always other options. Back in his great grandfather’s day, if a cow couldn’t keep up with the herd on a cattle drive, they didn’t slow their pace to wait for it. They put it down, plain and simple. That was the way of the world. Lead, keep up, or be left behind. What had they become as a people if they were willing to compromise the advancement of the group to coddle the weakest link? It was the welfare debates all over again…

  “Hurry up!” Richard called back. There were seven of them in total, and so far as he knew the only ones to survive the massacre at the airport in Las Vegas. His plane had been en route to LAX when the first major wave of turbulent air hammered them from the nuclear detonation in the Middle East, forcing them to descend through an ungodly cloud of locusts to land at McCarran International Airport. When news of the first atomic cataclysm had reached Washington D.C., every legislator had already been booked on a flight back home. There was no way that any of them were going to wait around to see if the terrorists were going to strike the Capitol. Granted, the senators and cabinet members somehow ended up with chartered flights or air removal by chopper, but there was no such special treatment for congressmen. No, they had to take the first available commercial jet. It was just another unpleasant reminder of how many more rungs of the ladder he had yet to climb. Come November two years from now he would have been a senator. From there it would have only been a matter of biding his time until he could make the transition into the White House, but now…

  He couldn’t occupy his mind with what might have been. Those thoughts only opened the doors to the memories of the airport. He’d been furious when the captain announced that they were going to have to prepare for an emergency landing in Nevada. Didn’t they know he was going to Los Angeles? He was an elected official for God’s sake! And that condescending flight attendant… She didn’t care who or what he was, he just needed to buckle his seatbelt with the rest of the cattle and land hundreds of miles from home. The sight of that black reptilian thing squeezing through the shattered window to rip out her throat was one of the few positives from the entire experience. After that, everything became a blur. Shooting down the inflatable slide onto a tarmac littered with bloated black corpses, amidst the clutter of clothes blowing from overturned piles of baggage. Cutting loose the luggage carts from the train led by a small white vehicle. Clinging to the back of it while one of the other passengers drove, trying to outrun the mob of creatures, listening to the screams of the slaughtered fading behind them. Driving down the long series of runways toward the desert while the first of the flames that would consume the airport rose behind them.

  They’d come across the whiny woman first, sitting in the middle of the desert a half mile past the gate in the barbed wire-capped chain link fence surrounding the runways, screaming and sobbing as she pried cactus needles from her bloody feet. Apparently she’d shed her sandals on an incoming flight from Cancun and run as far and as fast as she could until she was overcome by the pain, trying not to think about her traveling companions who’d been butchered before her very eyes. Outside of Garrett, the personal trainer with whom he’d escaped Flight 721 from Dulles, she was the first living soul Richard had encountered in hours, otherwise they probably would have just continued driving. But she was young and blond with freshly tanned legs. A shivering damsel in distress, dressed for summer in the winter. And if they eventually needed to repopulate the world, she at least looked like she might be able to provide a little fun in the process.

  Garrett was stocky and heavily muscled, reminding Richard more of an elementary school physical education teacher than any pretty-boy personal trainer he’d ever seen. He’d been the starting left tackle for some small college or other. Richard imagined he hadn’t paid that much attention to the events that transpired between Saturdays, especially the classes, but in any sort of physical confrontation, Richard knew better than to underestimate the man’s worth.

  They had eventually come across an old van at a gas station with the keys still hanging from the ignition, the owner’s swollen body face down on the concrete beside the open driver’s side door. Fortunately, the corpse had just finished filling the tank, and so long as they stayed away from The Strip, there was space to maneuver through the stalled traffic. Once outside of town and into the desert, they’d been able to move much faster and had eventually encountered more survivors. To Richard, the others were nameless, faceless hitchhikers, whose presence was simply to be tolerated. There was the young mother, somewhere in her mid-twenties, but as plain and nondescript as wheat toast. At least that shaggy-haired little boy of hers didn’t cry nearly as much as that wench with her bloody feet who even now was slowing th
em all down. The child was somewhere between six and ten years old, Richard surmised, but the last time he had spent any significant time with kids, he had been one himself. There was another man in a leather jacket that looked pretty warm and comfortable, and the woman with whom he’d been traveling, but they had only run into them a couple hundred miles ago. They’d run the tank dry in the van, allowing it to coast to a halt in the middle of the desert highway. They had sat there for several hours, not daring to open the doors until the sun rose over the desert. Even though the heat during the day was nearly unbearable, the chill that descended upon them during the night threatened their very survival. Leather jacket and the dark-haired woman had passed on their motorcycle sometime just before dawn. Garrett had been able to flag them down and Richard had convinced them to siphon the remainder of the gas in the bike into the van for the greater good in hopes that they would all be able to make it to the next gas station. Obviously, they hadn’t, but they’d only been on foot for a couple of hours now. Two long, excruciating hours of listening to that woman shrieking about her damned feet…

  “This the place?” Garrett asked, sidling up to Richard. With the faded olive jacket and days’ worth of stubble, he looked like the stereotypical panhandler Richard was accustomed to seeing through the windows of his limousine at stoplights.

  “Looks like it,” Richard said, gesturing to the enormous letters painted on the rocks without even attempting to mask his sarcasm.

  “Are you guys sure this is where we’re supposed to go?” Leather Jacket asked.