Kevin McLaughlin
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Chapter 21 - Coals and Embers
🕑 Added 2025-07-17 21:03:15 +0000 UTCThe goblins were still building their fort. They spotted us; I felt sure of that. But they didn’t advance toward us, so I let them be, too. There was no sense borrowing trouble. I was confident there were more than enough dangers lurking in the growing shadows without seeking out trouble.
As the sun set, I was seeing more signs of monsters pretty much everywhere I looked. Strange bird-men flew over the river, landing on the top of the Museum of Science. Something that looked like a walking tree wandered along the Esplanade, across the river. And sure enough, I spotted two giant spiders climbing the side of a nearby apartment building. They weren’t as large as the one I’d killed, but it was still enough to make me think seriously about never sleeping again.
I looked around for someplace to bury the dead, but didn’t like the prospects. There was a small green space on the left side of the tracks, just opposite the larger park where the goblins were building their fort. But if I buried them there, the goblins would see what I was doing for sure. Even if they decided not to attack me while I was working, they might come along and exhume the dead later—for food or just cruelty.
That wasn’t going to happen. I wanted Amanda someplace that was at least relatively safe, and I clearly wasn’t going to find that here. Alex and I discussed it briefly in hushed tones, and came up with a workable plan. We’d bring them to the other side of the river and see if we could find somewhere more secure to lay them to rest.
I helped Alex get the bike over the railing so he could ride it on the road while I kept dragging the tarp along the tracks. I kept a lookout for anything weird as we crossed, and…there was plenty to look out for.
These huge white birds were flying overhead and seemed more than a little interested in us. They didn’t attack, but I was worried more than once they could. The things had a wingspan that would make a pteranodon jealous, but otherwise they looked suspiciously like seagulls. If the seagulls were all turning into giant roc-type monsters, that was going to suck.
Mostly they stuck to fishing from the river. They kept diving down and scooping fish out. It was watching that behavior that let me spot one of them get eaten in the process. That was crazy! The bird dove down like it was after a fish and right as it hit the surface of the water with its talons, the water seemed to rise back up and grab it. Took me a couple of seconds to realize what I was seeing was a mouth full of teeth the size of a garbage truck closing around the bird.
Swimming in the Charles River had never been all that smart, but clearly we’d entered a whole new level of ‘nope, nope, absolutely not!’
We reached the southern shore without any trouble, though. Once there, I stood and thought a moment. I wanted to bury our dead someplace relatively safe, and while there were green spaces near the water, with all the monsters rolling around it just didn’t feel like a great plan. We made for MGH, instead.
Tom met us at the doors. He eyed the tarp, then looked back at me. “Castle, you seem to have a death wish. Why are you back out there again? And what are you hauling with you?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” I said. Then I told him about Amanda, how she’d died. “I couldn’t just leave her down there, and I figured while I was there I’d bring the others I found, too. Least we can do is bury our dead. The world’s gone crazy, but we can still do the right thing for each other.”
His face softened as soon as I told the story. “I understand. If it was my wife, I’d want to do the same thing. You hauled four bodies back here by yourself?”
“Strength crystals,” I replied.
He grunted. “Fair enough. I have a couple of those myself, and it would have been hard for me to carry that much weight. We’re still looking for people to help us with security, you know.”
It was a good offer, and one I might just take. For the time being, though, I wanted to get Amanda’s body somewhere safe. I wanted that sense of closure, I guess, more than anything. Although I certainly wouldn’t have said no to a shower, too.
“Tom, you have anywhere we can bury these folks? I don’t want some monster to just dig them right up again,” I asked, changing the subject.
He took the hint. “Can’t bury them. Have to cremate. Turns out some of the dead are coming back as zombies and stuff. We had some of the bodies in the hospital morgue come back right after the Event first hit. We took them out, but we’re just burning bodies now, to be sure it doesn’t happen again.”
I could live with that. I gave him a nod. “Let’s do that, then.”
He picked up the other side of the tarp with a grunt and led Alex and I down a series of passages to a set of doors on the far side of the building. There was a smallish courtyard in the middle, with some lawn and some paved space. It was on the latter area that the folks here had built a set of pyres. They’d obviously done this a few times already; you could tell from all the ashes. A new pyre was waiting with a pair of bodies laid out to be burned.
“Got four more customers for you, Frank,” Tom said as we approached.
A man in a grey uniform stood from where he’d been watching the pyre and came toward us. “Good. I was getting tired of standing guard anyway.”
“Standing guard?” Alex asked. “You worried someone’s going to steal dead bodies?”
“We’re more worried about them waking back up,” Frank replied with a leering grin. “Already happened downstairs. Don’t want them wandering off to take a bite out of people up here, eh?”
“Guess not,” Alex replied.
With Frank’s help we got the four bodies laid out on the pyre with the other two, then stepped back as Frank poured some gasoline from a tank all over the pyre, then set it alight. It caught, but there was no ‘whoosh’ of flames shooting out like I’d been expecting.
I glanced toward Tom. “No explosions at all, huh?”
He nodded. “Some of the docs have been running tests all afternoon, trying to find out what works and what doesn’t. Guns don’t fire. The powder still burns, but it burns slowly, without enough intensity to generate thrust and fire the bullet. It’s like it fizzles instead of burning in a burst.”
“Sort of like the gasoline on the fire,” I replied.
“Exactly like. It’s the gasoline vapors that usually make the big flash of flames when they go up,” Tom said. “Now, they just burn slowly, same as the fluid. That’s why car engines won’t work anymore. There’s no bang to move the pistons in the engine.”
“What about the electronics, then? Why aren’t they working?” Alex asked.
Tom shook his head. “The why is something nobody seems to have a clue about. The bigwigs working on the problem seem to know what is working and what isn’t, but not why. Electricity in any form seems to just be gone. Batteries don’t have a measurable charge anymore. They even tried making new ones with lemons or potatoes, but they weren’t able to generate any power at all.”
That didn’t make any sense. I wasn’t a doctor, but I knew we couldn’t survive without electricity. “What about the electricity that keeps our hearts beating on time? Or the electric signals that run our brains?”
Tom shrugged. “Don’t know what to tell you. Without an MRI, we can’t see if our brains are still passing electrical signals or not.”
“Well, something has to be keeping our hearts beating and brains working,” Alex said.
I thought about it a moment, then looked at him. “We’re fighting monsters that we’re pretty sure transformed from normal animals. They drop magic stones that give us special powers. Guns don’t work. Cars don’t work. Electricity doesn’t work. I have this sneaking suspicion that the reason our hearts can still beat is ‘magic.’ Same as the rest of this mess.”
Like saying the M word out loud was a signal, the bodies atop the pyre caught. I turned immediately back toward Amanda to watch as she was burned away, and the others kept a respectful silence while we all stood vigil.
That was my whole past burning away there.
I’d met Amanda most of a decade ago, when we were both freshmen in college. We’d been at Harvard together; then in grad school, she stayed on at Harvard while I shifted to MIT, but we still stayed together. After school we’d moved in together. We’d been planning a life together, sharing dreams together…
I thought about that ring I’d been planning to buy for her, the wedding we would have had, the decades we should have been able to spend as a team. There was no one else I’d rather have had by my side if the world went crazy, and now she was gone and there was nothing I could do but watch her burn.
Tears poured down my cheeks as the flames rose higher. I let them. If the whole world saw my grief, I couldn’t care a bit. Amanda was my everything, and she was gone.
What was I supposed to do now?
Who was I supposed to be? What was I going to do, without her? I didn’t have answers, just questions, and pain, and loss, and sorrow.
But just for a moment, I thought I felt her there with me. It was my imagination, I’m sure, but…it was like she reached out from behind me and wrapped her arms around me, then whispered in my ear. All at once, I knew what I had to do, the only thing I could do. The only thing worthy of her memory.
The world had gone to shit in ways that I had never even dreamed about. Everyone was in trouble. The threats we all faced were very real. I suddenly felt with absolute certainty that this Event, whatever the cause of it, had hit the entire world. Everyone, everywhere, was a victim of the same Event. Everyone was losing people they loved, or fighting to cling to whatever they had left.
And they needed someone to help them.
So that’s what I would do. That’s who I would become. I’d be the person Amanda would want me to be. I’d go out and help. Try to make a difference. Try to save whoever I could. I’d make my life a memorial to her by taking on the things she’d want me to tackle if she was still here.
The sense of her presence faded, but my resolve didn’t. Even as the flames died down to coals and embers, the fire I’d started burning inside my heart kept raging on.
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Kevin McLaughlin
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MARK FRINK
entered a while new level should be: entered a whole new level
