Dinner that night was plain but filling, because Wells had saved the best for last. The girls loved baked goods, Lucila in her chatterbox-y, singing and dancing way, Kendra in her silent and satisfied way, and Anya in her gleefully malevolent two year old way. There was a time in his life where entire livelihoods were dedicated to baked good, whole television shows. One could order them with a few touches and have them delivered an hour later. It was less a different time and more a different world.

Now there was one baker in town, who had to trade out for her ingredients just like Wells had to trade out for his nearest and dearest treat, real coffee. If you went to the baker in Bushkill Falls, you got baked goods, whatever they had that day. The same way the butcher sold meat and the dairy farmer sold cheese. There were no menus.

Wells had lucked out that day, however. Cydney had baked up trays of an old Pennsylvania treat, sticky buns. Raisins weren’t hard to come by, she told him as he plunked down some trade goods for four buns. He gave her a round of .45 ACP he had lying around and had to wave off her offer of more buns. He was overpaying but they would go bad long before he and his family could eat them. The baker accepted and expounded.

Pecans are a bit more difficult to get, Cydney went on to say. But the most exotic thing here was the cinnamon. And for that I had to forego using brown sugar, but I figured cinnamon was more important to the recipe. They both had enjoyed sticky buns before the war, fresh from the rack at Amish bakeries, and mutually agreed that her decision had been the correct one.

The girls were delighted with this unexpected treat. Each of them ate every last crumb, with Anya making less of a mess than usual almost out of reverence. Kendra licked the wrapper and Wells admonished her gently, because he had news for them.

“We are going to have a house guest here for a few days,” He told them all. “Her name is Miss Lilith Stone. You can ask her what she wants to be called, but until then she’s ‘Miss Stone’ to all of you. She is passing through town. She’s a preacher.”

“A girl preacher?” Lucila was old enough to know how unusual this was. “Our preacher is a man, Mister James.”

“Girls can be preachers.” With daughters had come the disheartening knowledge that life set up women to fail. Wells recalled the children’s picture book he had traded for one day, intending to pass it down from daughter to daughter. It was a Disney book, a long gone cultural bastion. In it, Mickey Mouse and the gang went hang gliding, but only Goofy, Donald, and even rotund, villainous Pete got to strap in and jump off a cliff. Daisy, Minnie and Clarabell all had a picnic lunch and cheered the boys on. Before the war, before fatherhood, Wells had been of the opinion that a woman’s place was in the home. His daughters, especially Lucila, had taught him that a woman’s place was wherever she wanted it.

A children’s book may seem infinitesimal, but before the war that message had been hammered home en masse across the board. Nowadays it was even worse. A man with daughters of three different colors might not be openly remarked upon anymore, but a woman in a position of power like a preacher was going to take some getting used to for the entire town.

**

It was well past everyone’s usual bedtime when the deputy arrived with the preacher. Wells had spent most of the night after the girls had gone to bed with a highball glass of Bushkill Falls’s most valuable commodity, its rye whiskey. The stuff was no nonsense, hard edged and grainy, but it burned neat holes through anatomy as fiery as any HEAP round. Curtis Wells accordingly took it easy, knowing he had a guest coming. In another life, he had fished for pleasure, not the kind of fishing some folks did now just to survive. When things grew quiet in his life he still enjoyed getting out into the wilderness just for the sake of it, and throwing a few lines into the unspoiled waters. That night, while he waited, he practiced some fisher’s knots with a bit of spare line and sipped whiskey, feeling himself relax.

But the evening wore on and even the one drink he had along with the fire he had laid in the hearth began to take its toll. It had been a long day. They always were, on the farm. Wells was dozing in his chair when he heard the whicker of a horse.

He was always quick to wake up, quicker still to make sure his old service carbine was close enough at hand in case it wasn’t a friendly. But he heard a familiar voice hailing him by name from outside and so he got up heavily to bang open the door.

Everyone knew everyone in Bushkill Falls, of course, but the only thing Wells knew about this particular deputy was that he had once gotten attacked escorting a drunk woman from one house to another. The woman’s slap had been so bad that his lip had never really healed straight after, giving his face a crooked look. The deputy’s name was Al but people always called him “Split Lip.”

“Evening, Al,” Wells called out. His lantern had gone out, but it only took a moment to light it again. He raised it high.

“Sorry we are late, Wells,” The deputies in town had no uniforms to wear, of course. They were known by face and reputation, not even the guns they wore. Al’s was an old war surplus Lee Enfield rebarreled for 7.62 NATO. But most people in town went armed. It would be too easy for the Bearers to attack the berm and destroy them all if most folk weren’t packing.

“She insisted on walking,” The deputy continued. “Said she wanted to get a feel for the place.”

“She can speak for herself.” The preacher, Lilith Stone, was pale skinned, almost unnaturally so, or it could have been the powerful full moon that night. She was wearing a slim black robe that covered her entire body. Her eyes were a deep, warm brown that reflected the firelight from Wells’s lantern.

“Is that chador warm enough for you?” Wells asked her, removing some of the light from her face. “August or not it can get pretty cold here in the mountains at night.”

“You know what this covering is called?” Lilith asked. Despite her pleased and puzzled tone her face had not contorted in the slightest.

“I’ve taken some classes on Islamic culture,” He told her, and it was true. It would have surprised a lot of folk but every Marine who had been deployed to west Asia had taken those same classes to familiarize them with the locals. It was a tool of war, but it did educate everyday Americans who wouldn’t have otherwise bothered to learn. It was all so long ago.

“I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a female Muslim holy woman.” Wells admitted.

“Times change.” Lilith padded to the foot of the porch stairs. “May I come in?”

“I see you two are getting acquainted and already have some lively things to discuss.” The deputy with the split lip said. “I’ll be getting on. See you both around.”

They said goodbye and Wells held open the door for Lilith to enter. “Can I take your bag?”

“I can take it to my room, Mister Wells.” The woman was definitely a foreigner of some sort. Her pronunciation was too tight, too correct. There was too much to her voice for his brain, like it was oddly thick. Everything she said took an extra moment for his brain to translate. “I’m quite tired. Perhaps we could talk tomorrow?”

“Of course. You’ll be taking the spare room, it’s right at the back of the house on this floor.” Wells showed her the way. “I will be right upstairs if you need anything, my girls, too.”

“Thank you for your hospitality, sir.”

“I haven’t been called ‘sir’ in a long time.” He told her with a weary half smile. It had probably been a strange and tiring day for the both of them. “I can’t say it brings up good memories. ‘Curtis’ or ‘Curt’ will do.”

“Well, then, thank you, Curt. I will see you tomorrow.”

“Goodnight.”

**

Wells had never been so proud of his little girls, especially Kendra. Perhaps it was because she was so different that she took to Lilith right away, who also stood out from everyone else in the town. After some initial awkwardness on all of their parts, the preacher woman fit right into life on the farm. Lilith asked to contribute while she rested on her way down south and Wells was glad to have another adult around to do some heavy lifting. The girls attended more school and could be heard doing a bit of whining about it.

Preachers saw to the wounded and the sick, as well as the sick of heart. The fact that Lilith was a Muslim and a woman was much remarked upon, but folk got over it. They were resilient. They had to be, to survive what they had. Lilith, as much as she stood out, was kind, resourceful and smart. The town was lucky to have her.

It was the fourth day of her stay, of seven. She had requested that Wells teach her the fundamentals of riding, and so he had provided her with a suitable steed. Horses could not be raised in town or in the lands surrounding it. Of all the things he owned, the handful of horses were by far the most valuable. Coffee, cinnamon, guns. These things could be procured or grown or made. But horses required a great deal of food and space. Raising a horse wasn’t like raising a crop of turnips. Working the land in its most basic sense could be done by anyone. Somewhere, far to the west, there still existed people and ranches and families who had been raising horses for countless generations. That kind of skill and experience and ingrained horsiness could not be taught easily. It was in the same vein as Wells being able to hit whatever he was aiming at or how good he was with his kids. There was no substitute for an intangible.

Bushkill Falls had to drive back the Bearers a few times a year. It was so commonplace that they didn’t need to drill anyone. Lucila knew to find her sisters, especially Kendra, and get them both to safety. Every man or woman who could fight was to report to their section of the town’s walls or a designated spot on one of its gates. Everyone who was too old or sick or young to fight but could still carry a weapon protected those that couldn’t even do that.

Luckily, when the bells began to peel, they were all together. Lucila even had her .22 Crickett rifle with her. She exchanged a significant look with her father, for an instant appearing like a scared eight year old girl, and then she was all business. She asked Kendra to pick up Anya. When all three were ready they walked speedily, not running, to the house and its secured basement. Wells noted with pride that the muzzle of Sila’s weapon was solidly pointed at the dirt as they made a controlled beeline to safety. Nerves of steel, that girl, he thought.

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“I’d offer to help, Curtis, but I am afraid I don’t know how to use one of these quite so well as you.” Lilith’s words were punctuated by the clang clang clang of the bells. She held up the twelve gauge double barrelled shotgun he had given her.

“I was about to ask you to watch over my family. We’ll get through this, it’s just another handful of Bearers throwing themselves against the walls.” He told her, eyes on the horizon. Wells needed to be away. “Please head to the house and stay with the girls. You got two shots with that thing, but you won’t have to use ‘em. I’ll see you soon.”

He needed a horse to get to the defensive perimeter. Wells slung his carbine from over his shoulder and double timed it to the stable. He had his leg over Cadillac, a bay so dark that he appeared almost black, and was soon barreling off of his property, into the midmorning sun.

**

Bearers came both at day and at night. They were people, after all, or at least appeared to have been people. The only differences were their behavior and the fangs. They didn’t talk, or settle down into villages or towns. It was that and the fangs most of all. All Bearers were cursed with them. And all people were cursed with Bearers and their infernal attacks.

Heavy caliber gunshots were already ringing out when Wells dismounted and handed Cadillac’s reins off to a boy tasked with reloading magazines and handing them out. The grim faced young teenager had a pistol at his hip and looked all business.

Dalton and Cargill waved him up onto the berm’s parapet. Bushkill Falls’s walls were made from wrecked automobiles, hard packed dirt, aluminum siding sheet metal, sand, rubble, whatever the town’s earliest inhabitants could scrape together to form a twelve foot tall barrier against them and the cold unknown.

Harry Yim, who had been a gunner’s mate, was touching off a few rounds from the .50 machine gun, an old but lovingly maintained Browning. The town had had a National Guard Armory in it before the war, and not many troops had been stationed there outside of drill weekends. The hardware they had inherited from it wasn’t top of the line, but it didn’t need to be against Bearers.

There were a few trying to sneak around the trees off in the distance, and it was them that Yim was firing at. The big .50 bullets chewed at the bark and fired up immense clods of dirt, but no kills had been scored yet. It was just a message, a kiss on the cheek to let the monsters know they were in the town’s gunsights.

It was also to drive them out of cover. Dalton was one of the other vets in town, an Army sharpshooter. He and Wells had even been in Iraq at the same time, but they hadn’t ever met until later in their lives. Dalton was good, quick to the kill. He showed it in the smooth and practiced way he found his target with his scoped M14 and fired only once.

Almost 600 yards away a Bearer whirled around as if she’d been slapped in the mouth hard enough to send her bottom mandible spinning off into the woods in a whirlwind of blood and bone. It was the first enemy killed of the day. The defenders on the walls let out a brief cheer.

“Shot the fangs right off of her,” Wells commented. With his carbine he was reduced to picking and choosing his shots at a much closer range. His turn would come.

“That was the idea. Give the kids at home a thrill.”

More and more were coming out of the woods. Yim’s machine gun chattered away, spitting hot death. Dalton sent three more Bearers to their graves. The more powerful rifles, the sheriff’s and the deputies' bolt actions, took up the call.

“Awful lot of them,” Cargill mentioned. His submachine gun was at the ready, scanning the dozens of people emerging from the trees.

“Reload,” Yim yelled.

The teenager came over with a square ammo box of .50 rounds, looking unsure. Yim, Cargill, Dalton and Wells formed the core of veterans who lead the defense to repel every attack. He couldn’t recall the last time, if there had been one, where they had needed to reload the fifty cal. Patiently, Yim walked the boy through the reload process.

By then there was no need to seek out targets, just to choose them. Bearers moved fast when the situation called for it, and when they did so they howled, bared their fangs. The fact that they looked and acted so human only made the sounds more unnerving. Wells fired his carbine mechanically, sending a shrieking body to the dirt with most every shot he took.

All around the walls more and more shots were ringing out. They had never had to expend so much ammunition before. Dalton’s rifle snicked over from semi to full auto, another first. The former soldier sprayed a handful of rounds at a Bearer no less than 100 yards away. He missed and cursed.

Cargill was the first to spot the Bearer who was climbing the three. None of them knew what to make of it, but at least it made for a good target. Cargill was raising his submachine gun to draw a bead on the climber when half of his face exploded.

It stunned all of them, even the war hardened vets. The gunfire quieted. Wells’s first thought was an ND, a negligent discharge, but then another shot went screeching into the wall to his left. It was a shotgun round and it only could have come from one place.

There was only one thing to do. Wells and the others ducked behind cover. The boy fetching the ammo was crying so loud that he checked on him to make sure he wasn’t also hit. The Bearer who had climbed the tree also had a weapon and fired off a handful of slow, widely spaced shots. From the big booms it sounded like a large caliber revolver, but he couldn’t be sure.

There was one other thing to do, and that was fire back. The woman with the shotgun was the first to die. Both Dalton and Wells had sighted her, dispassionately getting their revenge for their fallen comrade. The Bearer female took the rounds in her stomach and chest. Wells cursed himself for shooting at her to kill. She deserved a slow death. He heard an awful gurgling sound from her even from so far away. Cool it down, remain calm, he thought. His anger wouldn’t help him now.

The Bearer in the tree wasn’t hit, but splinters of bark made him lose his balance and fall to the ground, right on his neck. He flopped and twitched there, making a panicked shrieking noise. Dalton and Wells both silently agreed to leave him to it. It might distract the others.

Wave after wave of raggedly dressed people were emerging from the woods now. They howled. They were encrusted with filth. Yim cursed.

“We only brought out one box of fifty cal,” He said hoarsely to the others.

“Boy! More ammo, run to the armory, now!” Dalton yelled at the teenager, who gladly fleed.

Wells jabbed the fallen Cargill’s submachine gun at Yim, and from then on the slow chugging sound of an old World War II weapon replaced the big fifty caliber machine gun. It wasn’t nearly as reassuring.

They had never had to coordinate to this degree before. The three vets provided overlapping fields of fire as best they could. But that only proved a brief respite. There were far too many of the enemy, no matter how many they chopped down. They had gotten complacent over the years, too overconfident. The knowledge of that frightened him almost as much as the sound of the enemy shrieking for blood.

The Bearers were moving low and slow, but when they got a sense of their own numbers compared to the amount of guns firing on them they stood and charged as one. All of those disparate howls became one awful chorus. Wells had never seen or heard anything like it, even with all his years in the service. His carbine clicked empty.

“Fall back,” He heard himself yelling. Wells performed a lightning fast combat reload, something he hadn’t had to do under duress in years. Like riding a bike, he thought.

Hands were slapping against the walls. All around the perimeter of town the other defenders were leaping to the earth from the parapet to flee. The Bearers made noises like nothing human, especially when the first heads began peeking over. A headshot is showy stuff, not practical, and riflemen were rarely trained to take one. When Wells saw one of them throwing a leg over the wall he tapped out a neat pair of rounds into center mass. The Bearer was sent tumbling over the side, but there were plenty more where that came from.

Steady, aim, breathe, squeeze. He had been performing these actions with part of his brain and analyzing with another. The Bearers were growing more daring as they realized how few they were facing. The fifty cal had been abandoned. Against a tsunami of nuclear twisted humanity the town only had assorted small arms.

Yim was feeding another magazine into his grease gun when the Bearer swiped at his face. Its scratched bloody raw fingers and cracked nails carved out red furrows. For its trouble the monster got butt stroked right on its temple, hard enough to drop it. Yim cursed the thing and resumed backpedaling.

“I’m out,” Dalton barked and slung his rifle around his back. He yanked the pistol out of Wells’s holster and continued to blast away.

There were townsfolk who hadn’t ever fought anything worse than a mere handful of Bearers, who hadn’t been law enforcement or fire fighters or soldiers before the war. They could shoot well enough and the horrors of the apocalypse had hardened them, but they had never faced anything of this magnitude before. The Bearers were not only attacking en masse, but they were demonstrating intelligence, coordination, even a proficiency with firearms. Against such unknown chilling fear there was no mental defense, not even for the veterans among them.

The boy directed to the run to the armory had not returned, and others of his ilk soon followed suit. Their screams swelled in volume and they tried to run. Wells saw a woman get tackled around her knees and topple on her side, twisting the joints and making her shriek. Had she survived she would have needed months of recovery to take her first step, but that didn’t matter. Homing in like a school of piranha, the shrieking monsters piled onto the downed woman, tearing, pounding, biting. The blubbering feminine cry from the epicenter of the pile up was the worst thing he had ever heard in his life.

Fires had broken out in town as the panic spread. The air was full of clouds of wafting cordite and screams. Yim was going for a running horse’s reins when he was shoved from behind, right into the churning hooves. He didn’t even have time to struggle to his feet before the howling tide swept over him.

By then the fight was upon him, close enough for him to lose sense of the grand scheme of the attack. What had once been a tall, thin old man was now an emaciated, fanged monster. Bearers always had twisted expressions and they could shred their own vocal cords with their shrieking. Wells noted all the details of that face in a moment of preternatural clarity. The old man had an inflamed eye, dead teeth, and many half healed wounds from a life spent out in the terrible wilderness. If he had ever known how to fight the knowledge had been replaced by an animalistic desire to slay and feed and mate. His attack was like a shambling whirlwind of limbs and teeth and ragged dirty fingernails.

Wells thought he might be out of ammo, but either way the Bearer was too close to swing his carbine, so he let it fall. All of his own skills deserted him, replaced only with one fervent prayer: don’t get knocked down. His overriding instinct was to kick the son of a bitch right in the balls, a dirty move, but that might throw him off balance. Instead, he punched the old Bearer in the throat, dropping him to his knees. He scooped up his carbine and, hedging his bets, aimed at the thing’s head and fired.

Someone else was jostling his arm, so even at point blank range Wells missed. It was another Bearer, a big, strong woman, who had clumps of dirt and grass shoved up into her mouth, packing around the fangs, the way some deer get debris in their antlers and hooves. The Bearers were nothing but vicious, murderous animals. Wells shouted in loathing and anger as the woman tore his weapon from his arms.

There was a thunderclap of his own pistol firing, close enough to send his hearing exploding in a kaleidoscope of tinnitus. Dalton.

The former Army Ranger’s face was hard and without expression as he stepped up and put another, final round into the wailing Bearer, putting her out of her shrill misery. He offered the gun to Wells.

“Keep it, I’ve got more at my place.” Blood was weeping freely down his arm where one of them had caught him with a nasty bite or had gouged out his flesh with their hands, but the wound was largely cosmetic. Wells scooped up his own empty carbine from the fallen woman.

“Get home to your family!” Dalton exclaimed. “We can try to regroup, but we need to save our own for right now, do some recon.”

Wells couldn’t have agreed more. He squeezed the other man’s shoulder and they both went off without a word, into all the smoke and horrible screams.