Note: Written for Slodwick's Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook Challenge with this prompt. Title taken from "O Holy Night". Thanks to nymphaea1 and to __fallen for their fantastic betas.
Tromp-tromp. Tromp-tromp.
The sound is loud—surreal and rough, and it doesn’t sound like anything he's ever heard before in real life. It's like a John Wayne movie. A Henry Fonda movie. Allies marching into Germany to save the day. Kelly's Heroes stealing Nazi gold. Bridge Over the River-fucking-Kwai.
Tromp-tromp. Tromp-tromp. Tromp-tromp.
But no, not a movie. Not so much. The columns march through the streets outside, and how many make up a battalion again? Five hundred? Seven-fifty? A brigade tops out at thirty-five hundred, he thinks, if he remembers correctly. Or it used to, back before things changed. Back when hum-vees and armored personnel carriers and plain old everyday cars still worked. Back when turning a key would turn over an engine.
The sound of their boots on the pavement carries. Establishing order. Cowing people into their homes or forcing them at gunpoint into caravans. Real, honest-to-god horse-carts of screaming, bruised human beings shivering in the cold. 'Citizens', they might once have been called, back when the word still meant something. 'Citizens', chosen not at all at random. The edict on the flyers says they're going to 'relocation facilities', but even the soldiers call them work camps.
Tromp-tromp. Tromp-tromp.
It echoes. It echoes through the streets. It's like any of those old movies where the Germans invade, except it isn't the Germans invading.
It isn't anyone invading. We did this to ourselves.
Someone whispers to someone else that they've gotten a few trains running. Someone claims they've pulled some decommissioned steam engines out of a railroad museum. Someone else says they're just old diesels sitting idle in an overgrown rail yard, unaffected by the EMP because they were too old to bother retrofitting with computers. It's possible; they nod to themselves, rubbing their stubbly chins. It's possible.
They ponder back roads and escape routes, they gather information. Along with others, they use their contacts and pull what strings they can. Along with others, nothing happens; the strings fall slack. They take to their feet.
The refugee trains don't sound anything like the other. Refugees march in Nikes and Adidas and Asics and whatever hiking boots they've managed to scrounge. Their feet are blistered, often bleeding. They trudge. Trudge. Handcarts appear. Grocery carts. Flatbed contraptions built from lumber, steel pipes, and motorcycle tires. There are experiments with horses, but almost no one knows how to care for them, what to feed them, how to tend their cracked hooves and bloody-wealed flanks. Almost no one realizes the horses suffer more from radiation sickness than people.
It's cold and they trudge and it hurts. It hurts in their bones and muscles and tendons. It hurts in their chapped lips and chilblained skin. At night they camp on the side of the road. They camp in small circles, a dozen or fewer people huddling together around a small fire. A chain of small fires defining their train. Children wail and fall silent. Women, and men also, wail at intervals, and then fall silent. None are immune.
There's storytelling on the road as they trudge more or less northward, up into the hills, away from the ash-dirty air. Someone recounts something resembling the Adventures of Huck Finn. Someone else tells the story of Hiroshima, per John Hersey. Someone else weaves a version of Casablanca, and that night they all dream of loved ones they left behind.
In the morning, someone starts singing as they break camp. It's low and mournful, but it marks the time. Other songs follow in fits and starts. A bit of Bob Dylan. Some Beatles. Some Porgy and Bess. That night someone sings "O Holy Night" even though it isn't even Halloween yet, and the stars flicker through the atmospheric grit and the moon shines rusty in the sky, and they sing it again just for good measure, just because it sounds right. It sounds as if they're moving. As if the sky itself is moving them.
It grows colder still the further north they move, trudging maybe twenty miles a day, faster downhill, slower up. They're losing people along the way. Some dying, some allowing themselves to fall behind, some tucking into little hamlets along the way, promising to work for bread and a place to rest their legs. They are all so very weary.
When it happened, Johnny nearly blinded himself. It nearly burned away his retinas, but that wasn't as bad as what he saw in his head, what his brain chose to show him. Behind his eyelids, he was in it, and when he came back to himself, he was a mess of piss and vomit, curled up fetal on the ground. Bruce hauled him to his feet and got him walking, trudging along, made him see that the world was still there.
There's frost every night and they huddle together in their tent for warmth, hoarding their meager provisions. They raid a Great Outdoors in rural Pennsylvania; they're not going to freeze to death, at least not before they starve.
Bruce is the only one Johnny lets touch him, and even then, only when he absolutely has to, like at night, when it's that or hypothermia.
Bruce is Zen, most of the time.
Bruce knows to focus on pleasant things when he can, and mostly he can still that voice inside that in everyone else is a screaming cacophony. But he still saw everything Johnny saw and everything Johnny did. And his nightmares are loud.
Johnny has worn his gloves for weeks; he never takes them off now. Bruce watches his back.
Johnny and Bruce are the only ones left by the time they cross out of New Hampshire. Or, there could be others a ways behind them, but there's no time to wait. They have to beat winter. They have to get to their destination while there's still time.
They aren't going to Cleaves Mills. They turn due north, up into the mountains. There's a place there he's been seeing for years. He told Walt years ago. He told Sarah. Last summer, he took J.J. camping there one weekend each month.
It's a long road. He and Bruce sing. Van Morrison. John Lee Hooker. Pet Shop Boys. The Kinks. Bob Marley. Coldplay. Every fucking thing they can remember. They're so cold they can't think. They're so cold they fall down and bruise their knees and their hands and Johnny's hip is fucking killing him, even with the new walking stick he and Bruce carved from a lightning-struck hickory branch, but his legs have never been stronger or leaner in his life.
Dehydration is a problem, but all they can do is find the next stream.
It feels like they've been walking forever.
When they get there, the first thing they see is J.J. wrestling an enormous pile of branches across the clearing toward the side of the house. His blond hair is streaked almost white in the autumn sunlight and he's bundled in blue and black flannel, his parka lying forgotten on the porch steps. Bruce lets out a whoop and J.J.'s head snaps up. Then he's shouting "Dad! Dad!" at the top of his lungs and running for them full-tilt. Walt races around from the back of the house, axe still in hand, but he lets it fall when he sees them.
Johnny registers Sarah stepping out onto the porch before he's got his arms full of not-quite-adolescent boy and legs-gone, he's tumbling to the ground. He's glad they're off the drive; he's glad it isn't rocky. He's being hugged senseless by his son and he's overjoyed, he's speechless, and visions of what J.J.'s been living through are shuddering through him as he holds his boy tighter. And then Walt and Bruce together are yanking them to their feet and Bruce has J.J. and Johnny has Walt and Walt feels like a fucking tank, he's so there, so real, and Johnny lets himself cling fast to Walt's body until he feels Sarah wedge herself between them and reach up to kiss him. He kisses her back and doesn't let go, and doesn't let go of Walt, either.
He loses his feet again as the visions pour in and starts to fall, but Bruce is murmuring behind him, holding him steady, and heaven only knows how Bruce is staying upright, but all the touching—all the touching.
Johnny doesn't know what's a vision and what isn't.
He doesn't know.
So many hands and faces and so much touching. He could kiss them all. He may very well be kissing them all, he can't tell, but that's fine. That's fine.
Greg Stillson's dead. Half the government is gone.
And it's fine.
Everything's fine, because God, at last, he's home.
