Bushkill Falls was awash in flames. The bank, the most secure building in town, had been hit the hardest. All of the trade goods and weapons were in its vault, but the folk attempting to hunker down there had been dragged out into the streets and beaten. Once they were too far gone or dead the Bearers had moved on, leaving bodies in their wake.

The familiar form and gray back of the head of Charlie Zeek sat on a milling horse indifferently chewing away at the weeds that shot up through the cracked pavement. Wells called out to him softly, and broke into a slow job.

“Zeek?” He reached up and jostled the man’s arm.

The former model tumbled backwards in the saddle towards him. Half of his face was a scorched ruin of blood and meat, and he had lost his left eye. Wells cursed and eased him down onto the ground.

“Charlie!” He turned away. He had seen more gruesome wounds in his day, but that didn’t lessen the impact of seeing his neighbor with half of his face torn away. His stomach wobbled but he managed to hold it down.

Zeek had a compact Smith and Wesson revolver shoved into his pants. He put Wells’s hand on it.

“Thank you,” He told the other man, slipping the weapon into his own waistband. He also tore off the bottom of Zeek’s shirt, and wrapped it around the older man’s wounded face. “I’m going to help you up and then we’re going to take your horse to my farm, OK? Ready?”

Zeek was making strange sounds, as if he had forgotten how to speak. He pointed his index finger at his temple and bent his thumb repeatedly.

He understood then. Wells shook his head. “Charlie, no. You’ll make it, don’t--”

“Leave me. Like this. Don’t.” The effort seemed to cost the other man quite a bit, and his words were hard to make out with the shattered teeth and twisted, burnt lips like two cut earthworms. “Not going to make it.”

There was the ominous sound of frayed shoes scraping over sidewalk. A sibilant hiss made Wells look up.

A handful of Bearers crept out of the bank’s shattered glass and steel doors, drawn by the noise. One was morbidly obese, another was old, and the third was grievously wounded, crawling on the ground, dragging a pair of shattered legs and a smear of intestines across the ground. Wells’s face hardened.

“I’m sorry,” He told Zeek. He stood, and the Bearers slowly advanced on them both.

Wells thumbed back the hammer of the revolver and turned away as he fired down at the old man’s ruined face. It made the three monsters jump and puzzled them for a moment, but not for long. He turned the big gun on them, bisected the front sight over the largest one’s body and began pulling the double action’s trigger. It was enough to slay one of them and drive the rest away, but the gunfire might attract more. Without a look back he took Zeek’s horse and galloped off, its hooves beating over the asphalt. He only had three shells left.

**

His shed appeared untouched, probably because it was underground. Wells had hacked out a storeroom into the hard, stony soil, covered its hole with a piece of sheet metal, and then piled three feet of dirt on top of it. Not so much that he would have trouble digging for it, but enough to remain hidden. He had always figured he would have a shovel or another tool, but that wasn’t the case now. Wells sank to his knees and clawed at the soil.

Right away, he could tell someone had been there first. The earth was too new, moist and newly churned. The thought of someone else in his bolt hole, pawing his weapons, made Wells feel violated. His digging grew frantic. He tore away the sheet metal, hardly noticing that it sliced into his right palm as he did so.

Whoever it was had been thorough and messy. They had simply dropped a grenade or two into the armory and ran off. At a glance, he knew that all of the firearms he’d squirreled away had been destroyed. His curse was heartfelt and cathartic.

Wells kept his explosives in a location well hidden. Not even Lucila knew where, but she knew what a grenade was and not to touch one. The implication made his stomach turn.

Despite the chaos tearing the town of Bushkill Falls apart his home seemed tranquil, almost inviting. The light on the front porch was glowing warmly, but something was missing. For years now, his old smellhound Dexter, whose once proud and lustrous coat had gone from cinnamon to grayish beige and whose powerful body had wasted away, had lounged during his off time in an alcove by the front door. In his youth Dexter had been pugnacious and athletic, but his indolence had grown as he had gotten old, and his retirement had been a blissfully lazy one. He was as gentle as an old man as he had been hard working as a youth. The girls were devoted to him and the feeling was mutual. Not seeing Dexter’s wizened old form there was not only jarring, but bespoke of his worst fears.

He heard the singing when his boot hit the bottom step. The tune carried with it an unearthly beauty, but it also set his teeth on edge. The sound was somehow leaking into his brain, his joints, making him cringe as if he was moving through a fog of molasses. It was coming from the top floor, which was also the location of his main gun safe. No doubt the invader was guarding it. Wells was willing to bet that at least one of his hideyholes had flown under the radar during the past week.

Each step was tough, but he had moved through worst enemy fire and lived. The large wooden American flag carving on the wall looked old, but it swung out silently on oiled hinges. Under it was a wall safe that was just spacious enough to hold a slinged 12 gauge shotgun with a pistol grip, no stock. It was a fearsome, nasty meat shredder from the Vietnam era. Old, but tough enough to survive that war and the big one, just like him. He was almost grateful for the eerie caterwauling coming from upstairs as he fed the requisite number of shells into the underside of the weapon. There was no way anyone could hear him over all of that.

Wells had not been this scared since his first deployment, but each of those and the subsequent tragedies in his life and world wide had steeled him. Even so, it seemed to take years for him to climb the stairs, and make his way over to the bedroom.

Lilith didn’t stop singing as he entered, but she acknowledged his presence with her warm brown eyes. Her chin seemed to hang down to the center of her chest, her head tilted back. Her mouth seemed unnaturally large, as if she had just swallowed a football and hadn’t yet reset her jaw back into place. She had thrown off her traditional clothing, her disguise for coming to stay with them, so her long red hair hung heavy. Her pale body was nude and oddly beautiful. Her fangs chittered as she sang, sliding spasmodically back and forth into their slitted recesses at the roof of her mouth.

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“My song will call them here,” Lilith said in a sibilant hiss. Her natural speech was wet. heavy with phlegm. She could sing and speak simultaneously, somehow making herself be heard at both. “You and your kind will all meet your deaths this night, Curtis Wells.”

The girls were sitting on the floor at her feet. Anya was uncharacteristically silent, wide eyed. Kendra gave him a grim, measured look. Lucila had been crying, hard. Lilith had the shotgun he had lent to her casually in her arms, but the big bore twin barrels were mere inches from the back of his daughter's heads. He didn’t even need to be warned to keep his distance.

“Throw your gun away.”

No wonder her speech had always seemed measured differently, thick as porridge to his ears. Her fangs had to be sucked inside of her head to even sound remotely normal. Wells let his loathing show on his face as he tossed the shotgun.

“Are you girls OK?”

Anya snuggled deeper into Lucila’s arms, who held her close and tightly. Kendra, for once, didn’t lock her eyes onto his at the sound of his voice. The mute girl’s cornflower blue eyes were instead glued on the shotgun in the woman’s arms.

“What are you?” Despite his heart hammering in his chest Wells found that he truly wanted to know. He had pieced it all together in his mind the moment he had seen the first Bearer firing a weapon, and then his weapon cache being destroyed. But the mystery of who had been solved. The mystery of what needed to be investigated.

“I am the first of hopefully many.” Lilith said, tea brown eyes blazing with a twisted pride as she spoke and sang. “The Bearers are no longer twisted exiles. We are evolving. What you witnessed today is just the beginning.”

There were howls outside, gunshots, fires crackling. Grimy hands tore at wooden planks and pounded on stone until the former broke and the latter caused bleeding and broken bones. The Bearers outside didn’t care. They would try to run through a brick wall if they scented prey. Or if they were called.

“They’re homing in your voice.” The question was almost rhetorical. Wells could almost feel their presence lurking.

“Such a clinical, cold word. This process is natural. It’s evolution. Our kind will replace yours like yours replaced Neanderthals.” There was a tone of grim fervor in her strange voice. “We are the next step.”

With each word Anya and Lucila seemed to grow more and more frightened. The howls and angry stomping footsteps were so close now that they could be heard over Lilith’s wretched song. Kendra heard it all, too, and sensing that it was almost too late, made her move.

Wells was shouting at her to stop almost before she began moving. The five year old little girl knew that she couldn’t overpower anybody, and so she only tried to distract and cause pain. But being as small as she was, the child instinctively bit their tormentor, her teeth sinking into the pale flesh of Lilith’s trigger hand, and wrapping all four limbs around the woman’s body, holding tight, mouth already bloody.

His combat reflexes had been developed two decades earlier and the apocalypse as well as the events of this awful day had only sharpened them. Wells dove to the side and rolled, coming up with Zeek’s revolver in his hands.

Kendra had the look of a child who knew she was in big trouble. Her blonde tresses flew in all directions as she ran. She only made it a dozen feet before the Bearers began to tumble over one another in their headlong rush to get up the stairs. The filthy and gore streaked people’s angry glares and growls froze the little girl where she stood.

Lilith drew an inexpert bead on the child and fired, her weapon roaring, sending her tiny body hurtling towards the hardwood floor. Kendra made no sound.

An instant later the pale red haired woman’s body was hit with three tightly placed gunshots. Wells, from his kneeled shooting stance, didn’t dwell on the kill. He found his discarded shotgun and mechanically began firing slam shots at the crowd of monsters. He only had to keep his finger depressed on the trigger and rack the slide to send the remaining shells at the Bearers, the buckshot tearing into them, chopping their bodies up into meat and bone in a bloody instant. The weapon was finally empty, the house devoid of enemies.

Kendra had not moved, but Wells couldn’t check on her, not yet. Lucila and Anya were weeping hysterically, yelling in anguish at the noise and the sights around them. Wells hadn’t saved any ammo for her, but once glance down told him that Lilith was done for.

She had taken all three .38 wadcutters high up in her torso. The trifecta of wounds had all started to bleed separately but they soon merged, coating her breasts and flat stomach with red. The woman, if she still was one, was still alive. But her deserved painful fate was sealed, and Wells had no desire to subject his daughters to anymore trauma by beating the remaining life out of her with an empty scattergun. He knelt by Kendra, turned her little body over.

The rock salt had taken her right in the back, cutting it up into a gruesome tableau of red cloth and flesh. The pain had made her pass out, but she was still breathing. Wells clutched her to him, for once in his life not fighting the tears that spilled freely down onto his cheeks.

**

Lilith Stone’s death had robbed the Bearers of their newfound intelligence and coordination. The moment the woman’s song had ended and the life had been punched out of her the threat had ended. The sheriff and the remaining core of veterans had mopped up stragglers around town and from then on the strange, twisted people from the woods only rarely bothered Bushkill Falls, and never with the same deadly aplomb they had that terrible day. For now, the new danger seemed to be over.

Kendra took a long time to heal. But once she did she had a set of scars on her back to match her father’s. After a while the mute terror that had been wholly contained within her cornflower blue eyes was replaced by her usual stoicism, only more marked than ever. If it wasn’t for her youthful body Wells would have believed she was a woman well into middle age. She acted like it. The mute girl did every task that was asked of her, but whereas before she had taken a measure of delight in learning them nowadays she did it dutifully. The fires of her quiet personality had dimmed, as if she had matured into the person she was supposed to be from the start.

Lucilla threw her leg over Hawthorne on her ninth birthday. One day, a pair of visiting horse traders saw her riding him. They told Wells that in the former Montana there was a town that raised the best horses in the world, and that the tribe of natives who did the raising were always on the lookout for the finest riders to be in their employ. After that, Sila’s desire to ride horses could not be quenched. Improving her seat became her life’s ambition, to the point of her neglecting her studies. Wells didn’t care for that or the thought of his oldest daughter, the person he knew best and longest in this strange and dangerous world, leaving him to work on a Montana horse ranch. But if that was her goal he would support her. Any prospect of that was far in the future, anyway.

Anya alone seemed unaffected by the incident with the Bearers and what the townies were now calling their queen, Lilith. She was too young to have remembered. Gradually her face and body changed into that of a young person in miniature, no longer a squalling ball of snot and baby fat. Besides talking and learning faster than any child had a right to, she was still the same bright eyed little girl he had fallen in love with. Mischief was never far from Anya, and in a few years she might prove to be a handful, but for now Wells was in turns amused and awed by his youngest, her precociousness, her intellect and her sense of comedic timing. Given that she was his child of the wastelands, to him Anya was a microcosm of the former world that had died, innocent, silly and boundlessly energetic. He loved that about her.

And how had he changed? The newfound evolution of humanity’s enemy had left an indelible mark on him, as it undoubtedly had the entire town of Bushkill Falls. Besides newcomers having their teeth and mouths checked, a sense of normalcy returned. For Wells, who some whispered was next in line to be mayor, it was the simple, invigorating work on the farm, the occasional battles with the Bearers, trading, fishing. It all grew mundane again, except for one unspoken fear that was shared among them all.

The Bearers were still out there. And perhaps so was a new queen or king, maybe walking among them at this very moment.

**