The Hollowed Land

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  THE HOLLOWED LAND

  A Brother's Keeper Novella

  election day: A day set by law for the election of public officials.

  Election Day: The day modern civilization ended after a series of EMP explosions destroyed the planet's electrical infrastructure.

  Chapter 1

  Five years after the Election…

  At daybreak, a thousand-strong swarm of Anaki neared the southern reaches of the crumbling metropolis formerly known as Chicago. Some legends called them the locust people—a ruthless tribe scavenging the leavings of civilization's former glory. While this was true, the description scarcely scratched the surface to their depravations. They opposed the old order, the written word, the contemporaneous recollection of what came before today, the here and now. The only way to truly know the ways of the Anaki was to be of the Anaki, and few people not born into that status had ever crossed the barrier into acceptance.

  The leading edge of the swarm advanced unopposed through vast tracts where smoke-belching factories, empty shipping lots, and decaying slums once sequestered the marginalized from the upper reaches of society. These grassy plains—industrial wastelands even before the time of the Election—had turned to seed, and among the stunted vegetation, mangy packs of goats now roamed, herded by rag-draped children. At the sight of the approaching Anaki, the children scattered, their warning cries startling their bearded charges.

  "They're here! It's the Anaki! Hell's come for us!" a filthy boy said as he took off in a sprint. "Hey-yo!"

  A goat with a gray and brown mottled coat bolted into the boy's path and he tumbled over its back. The goat bleated in confusion and fear and scampered away. A chorus of laughter arose from the road-weary Anaki, Delaney Innsburg included. She hefted her pikestaff and advanced on the fleeing goatherds.

  The boy got to his feet and again started off, this time more carefully. He continued to shout, as did the other children, and their voices merged, becoming a singular cry of warning that reached the tumbledown city in the near distance. Grim faces appeared in the opened windows of the closest buildings. Somewhere close by, someone cranked an ancient fire alarm, one once meant to warn a square mile of city dwellers about a potential danger that had once nearly leveled this city more than a century before the Election. A new trouble now threatened the city, one more volatile than fire itself.

  "Ready?" Kip unsheathed the two short swords at his hips. He favored these weapons over the traditional Anaki pikestaff. Quickness—not brawn—was his strength.

  "Always, love." Delaney lowered her mask, a blackened skull made from lightweight Plymar. Kip smirked and followed suit, covering his own visage with the face of death.

  The people of the city put up little fight in the wake of the Anaki's advance. A disorganized phalanx of a few dozen defenders tried to bar their path at a chokepoint at the first row of buildings bordering the goat pasture.

  Kip broke ahead of the others, whirling his twin swords in front of him in a helical blur. Three men met him: one held a pitchfork, one gripped a baseball bat, and the other brandished a machete. The violent years following Election Day had winnowed the ammunition stores of the nation to scarcity levels. Fighting tactics had regressed, becoming once again primal, intimate exchanges.

  He deflected a blow from the machete, pivoted and slashed open the belly of the baseball bat wielder. The man fell forward, feebly trying to hold the gaping edges of his wound together but with little luck. Intestines snaked between his fingers even as the rest of his body ceased to move. The man with the pitchfork lunged at Kip and let out a cry of rage. Kip caught the tines of the fork with the hilt of one of his swords, slowing the strike before it could gore him. With his free hand he swung his sword above the pitchfork and deftly sliced the man's exposed Adam's apple.

  Amused to this point, Delaney joined the action as the man with the machete closed on Kip's blindside. She swung the heavy pikestaff down across the man's forearms, breaking both limbs in the process. He dropped his weapon and crumpled in agony. When he looked up at her, seeking her mercy, she drove the pointed end of the staff through the soft flesh below his chin. He fell backward with a garbled choke, and she moved with him, continuing to press the point into him until she scrambled his brains. She removed her weapon and immediately took in her surroundings, looking for the next threat. They were alone.

  "Thanks, love," Kip said.

  He didn't need to raise his skull mask for her to hear his sincerity.

  She nodded and then pointed to the alleyway leading into the city, where the other Anaki had already penetrated. The screams of the wounded and dying cascaded before them as they joined their Anaki brethren.

  "Time to do our duty." She took off in a trot and Kip followed close behind.

  Chapter 2

  1.

  Wherever the Anaki tread, a tide of humanity fanned out and away from their touch like ranks of tipped dominoes. The sun had shed the vestiges of gray morning haze, and now a burnt orange disc lingered above the skyline, baking the ruins of Chicago in a heady swelter. An emaciated man ran away from Kip, his lumbering gait foretelling his fate. His left leg lagged behind and was twisted at an odd angle as the foot scraped the crumbling blacktop. Kip followed close behind, his vision dulled by the black mesh of his skull mask. The scent of blood lingered in the enclosed air. It spurred him, kept him focused on the task at hand.

  He didn't have to worry about his blindside; Delaney always covered him, and even now he could hear her following a few cautious steps in his wake. The Anaki had made their way through the neighborhoods skirting the lakefront. Even in the chaos set loose by an Anaki attack, each warrior had their assigned task. Certain warriors focused on infrastructure, shattering windows, piercing walls and roofs—anything to make nature's job of reclamation that much easier. Others opened gas valves, set fires, delighted in destroying the written word.

  The clear-cutters, Kip and Delaney among them, roamed the streets, killing anything that moved. Soon enough, the scavengers would make their appearance; the Anaki children and their mothers stripping away clothing and anything edible from the ruins.

  The emaciated man with the bum leg was starting to anger Kip. The man glanced with haunted eyes over his shoulder, and seeing how close Kip was, he picked up his pace even though it seemed to pain him to do so.

  "You piece of shit," Kip muttered.

  The man stepped free of the skyline, reaching a curving road that hugged the lake shore. Flames guttered from nearby high rise windows. Onetime million dollar apartments were now tinder for the citywide conflagration. A steady ash-laden breeze buffeted Kip's back.

  The wind was familiar, haunting in fact. Kip stopped in his tracks at the edge of the road, checking in both directions as if traffic might be of any concern. Ruined cars stripped of any worth remained where they had died when civilization came to a halt. A mangy brown cat lurked under a gutted panel truck, weary but alert.

  The emaciated man increased his lead, and Kip no longer cared.

  This road…he thought. This very road.

  He walked slowly across the street, hopped over the concrete detaining wall at the center median, stopped in his tracks once again. He saw what had once been a public beach, its conical-shaped parking lot lined with shade trees in serious need of trimming. The parkway had overgrown, had become a wild, untamable snarl, but he could still see evidence of memories. Memories he hadn't thought about in so long.

  The emaciated man, thinking he'd stolen his freedom and his life, let out a raspy chuckle as he continued to widen his lead.

  "Kip, what the he
ll is wrong with you!" Delaney pushed by Kip, knocking her shoulder into his.

  He snapped out of it just in time to see Delaney swipe her pikestaff across the backs of the fleeing man's calves. He fell forward, smashing his face with a dull thud against the pocked blacktop. He let out a sharp cry while trying to drag his useless legs behind him as he watched Delaney close on him. The man never stopped trying to get away, trying to survive for a few more seconds. In a world where so many others had so easily given up long ago, his sniveling almost seemed honorable. Delaney ended it quickly, bringing the heavy blunt end of her pikestaff down against his skull.

  "What the hell was that?" she asked, again bumping her shoulder against his. She made her way back toward the skyline, and Kip followed.

  "Nothing." He glanced back over his shoulder at yet another corpse, and the conical-shaped parking lot that had yet to succumb to nature's advance. When he looked back at her, she appeared worried. "It was nothing."

  "It better be. We have a lot of work to do. The advance team is setting up camp a couple of miles north along the shore. We need to meet up with the others and clear our way to camp before nightfall. Are you with me?"

  "Yeah… yeah, let's do this," he said, trying to sound more enthused than he felt.

  Before they put the beach behind them for good, he glanced once more over his shoulder. The flood of memories were gone and forgotten, if they were ever there in the first place.

  2.

  After the distraction of the emaciated man, Kip and Delaney found themselves working alone just west of the lake. It wasn't unusual to get temporarily separated from the others, but this situation was fraught with peril. The city loomed all around them, and the steel and concrete bulwarks housed hundreds if not thousands of survivors. Large-scale communities never lasted long in this new world. There was too much distrust, too much risk of infectious disease. Factions tended to form in any group over a couple hundred or so individuals. But to call the ruins of Chicago vast was an understatement. Any number of isolated small groups could be within shouting distance, and yet, it was unsettling how quiet the neighborhood had become.

  Kip and Delaney stood in the middle of an intersection. It was so quiet they seemed to be the only living things left in the city.

  "This one." Delaney pointed to a three story brick building at the nearest block corner. The windows were boarded up, but the brickwork appeared solid. The metal fire escape had either pulled free from the building or had been torn down, and now sat in a rusting pile of debris on the sidewalk.

  "We should track down the others. Rigs, Porter, Lannahan, they're probably already at camp."

  "One more building."

  "We're not really supposed to go inside, remember?" he said and lifted his mask. The air was cool against his face. Despite the odor of acrid smoke from a nearby chemical fire, he took in a deep breath. "Besides, why here? Why now?"

  "Look at that." Delaney pointed to an odd zigzagging metal gutter system angling down from the building's roof. It disappeared through a gap in one of the boarded windows.

  "They have a water catchment system. So?"

  "Well, it looks maintained. And we're thirsty." Delaney touched her belly and shook her empty canteen hanging near her hip. She gave him a wicked smile and headed toward the building.

  That smile always does me in, he thought in defeat.

  It could have once been an old mom and pop store, perhaps a family pharmacy or corner grocery. Kip could picture a family living in the rooms above the ground floor business. Perhaps the business had been passed down for generations from father to son. He laughed at the idea. While it was quaint to imagine a business being passed down in such a manner, he had also been born into a certain business—the Anaki. He checked the windows and doorways of the surrounding buildings, but he still saw no sign that anyone still lived in this part of town. He trotted to catch up to Delaney, squeezing the hilts of his swords.

  Delaney pressed the blade edge of her pikestaff into the door seam near the knob. She carefully pried at it until part of the doorframe splintered and the door eased open. "See, no problem."

  "Hold on. Let me."

  Delaney stepped aside and Kip raised his swords as he entered the building.

  It was a cluttered mess, but a lived-in cluttered mess. The place was currently unoccupied, for all he could tell. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he realized he'd been wrong; the final incarnation for this storefront appeared to have been a jewelry store. Glass cases formed a horseshoe around the outside of the floor space. He saw evidence of someone trying to convert the cases into greenhouses. Trays of growing cells filled the displays, and soil filled the cells. He didn't see how this system would work. There wasn't enough sunlight for seeds to germinate. Fluorescent lights would do the job, but electrical power almost seemed like a forgotten form of magic these days.

  It didn't matter how these people lived. He wasn't here to make friends.

  Two army surplus cots formed an L in the room's center. There were piled blankets, spare clothes. The cot looked solid yet functional, and would most certainly feel like a pillow-top mattress after years of sleeping rough for going on five years.

  "See, look at this system!" Delaney said in an excited whisper. She stood nearest the wall on the employee side of the jewelry case. The gutter system she had spotted outside funneled into a blue fifty-five gallon drum that was open on top.

  "That looks like a good place to catch cholera. I know you're thirsty, but we can find water someplace else."

  Kip stepped closer as Delaney dipped her hand into the water. Her eyes widened. "Fucking brilliant!" She reached into the water to almost her armpit, before removing it. Her arm dripped water to the floor, and something grimy and dark slimed her fingers.

  "What is it?"

  "It has a sand and charcoal filter. A spigot is at the bottom. This is as good as nature."

  Delaney bent down at the knees, uncapped her canteen, and filled it at the spigot.

  Kip chuckled at her delighted smile and handed his canteen over for her to fill.

  "Told you so."

  "Let's just hurry up."

  Kip took in the rest of the room. Along the front window, where natural light filtered through seams in the boarded windows, stringers of fish hung to dry. He saw piles of rope netting, fishing tackle and poles.

  "Terry? You had me worried, babe. You have a lot of explaining to do," a voice called out from a backroom. "Want me to fix some supper?"

  Kip turned to Delaney with wide eyes. He held his left sword at forty-five degrees, and the other parallel to the ground and above his head, the point aimed at the direction of the voice.

  A short, very pregnant woman entered the room. She wore a tent-like woolen cape over a faded purple Northwestern University hoodie and a do-rag on her head. Wisps of red hair clung to her broad forehead. She saw Kip and stopped in her tracks.

  "I'm…" she said and paused when she saw the danger Kip and his swords represented. The three of them stood motionless, frozen.

  Kip glanced over to Delaney, and when he did, the woman lunged behind a high counter where a cash register most likely once stood.

  When she stood erect, she held a crossbow in her trembling hands. She was working on nocking an arrow, but couldn't get her hands to settle.

  Delaney took advantage of the woman's nerves to advance on her. She raised her pikestaff, ready to strike.

  "Wait!" Kip said, rushing over to step between them.

  "You better move, Kip." She held the staff in both hands, waist-high, the pointed end cutting the air in front of her.

  "Just hold on a second. We don't need to do this!"

  "Yes…" She paused long enough to slap the flat side of the staff against his thigh.

  The blow stung.

  "We don't need to be here. We can just leave. No harm, no foul."

  "Have you lost your damned fool head?"

  "Delaney, look at her."

  "So? What about it?
She's knocked up."

  "Right… and don't you think anything should change… now that you are…"

  Delaney grunted. "Out of my way!"

  She tried forcing her way past Kip, but he wouldn't let her through.

  "Please, my Terry, he went out to bring in the fishing nets this morning… he… he never returned."

  "See, Kip. We'd be doing her a service. Putting her out of her misery."

  "Del, please." He held up his hands in a placating gesture that was still menacing with the swords held in his tight grip. "Let's just think a minute—"

  The woman in the Northwestern hoodie couldn't get the crossbow armed properly. As Kip tried in vain to calm Delaney, the woman stabbed an arrow into his back near his spine. He felt the attack as a dull thump. His armor protected his shoulders and back as low as his shoulder blades. Another couple of inches lower and she would've severed his spine.

  He didn't think. It was so easy to slip back into this mode. The thoughtless killing machine. He turned on the woman in an instant, and before she could ready for another stab with the arrow, he'd slashed her across the abdomen.

  The woman's eyes widened impossibly as she clamped her hands over her belly, then fell backward against the wall, out of sight.

  "Kip, listen, you had to—"

  "No, I didn't!" He stepped closer to the girl, thinking he might be able to help her. Even if it wasn't too late to save her, he only knew how to take people apart, not put them back together. Her do-rag had slipped away from her scalp. Her red hair contrasted with her ashen skin. She was trying to say something, but no words came out.

  He took a step closer, but Delaney tugged on his arm hard enough that he had to look away from the woman. "It's over!" Delaney yelled.

  "But…" he said, not knowing what he should say next. He could never give a close estimate to the number of people he'd killed in his life. He'd killed plenty of women. Children, too. Innumerable faceless bodies littered his path… yet something had changed when he learned that he would soon be a father. Chicago was their first battle since her coy announcement a week ago. A week… and his brain had ceased to function as it had been programmed to do. A week and his years of training and hardship had gone out the window.