Convulsive Box Set

by Marcus Martin

  Lucy’s scowl only fueled Josh’s grin.

  “Anyways,” he continued. “Modern farms are vast because it’s efficient, right? Well, only if the machines are working. And with no power, and no satellites, all the apps, computers, and machines that watered and fertilized those fields, coupled with the increased temperature owing to the lack of air traffic – I’d say this year’s harvest’s gonna get fried and die of drought. We’ve built farms in places that historically never supported serious agriculture, but we got around it by engineering huge irrigation systems. With those systems offline, it makes those farms a write-off.

  “Then there’s the issue of labor. There aren’t enough workers left alive, or coordinated, to collect the crops that do grow. Before machines existed it would have taken half the community working the fields to bring a harvest in, and we’re looking thin on the ground for numbers right now. So the crops are gonna rot in the ground.

  “And thirdly, there’s the new invading species that are taking over. They’re already colonizing our farmlands – you saw that pale-blue crap from the train window, right? It’s spreading, among other things.

  “My happy jobs, then, are to figure out how we achieve an interim harvest, possibly even two, before satellites are restored; figure out a pesticide that will work against D4; and also figure out what crops are gonna survive a five-degree temperature hike.”

  “Sounds like a breeze,” said Lucy, surveying the endless forest and mountain lining the track. The more carefully she looked, the more she started to notice the pale-blue saplings dotted around the forest floor.

  “Yeah, it’ll only take me twenty minutes when I get to DC,” replied Josh. “I’ll probably just take the rest of the week off, maybe go to the movies.”

  Lucy smiled.

  “We might be able to get around the irrigation issue with cloud seeding, at least,” he continued. “Which doesn’t require a satellite – just an airplane and some silver iodine. Or a rocket. Dry ice would work, too.”

  Lucy’s lips formed an inquisitive ‘O’ shape as she waited for him to elaborate.

  “Basically, you dump a load of heavy molecules in the sky – we call them condensation nuclei – and they make it rain. Only downside is it’s kinda hard to predict exactly when the rain will start, and where the wind will have taken all those condensed droplets by then.”

  “But other than that it’s foolproof,” Lucy replied.

  “Right!” chuckled Josh. “Still, we might as well enjoy the fine weather while it lasts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Josh shrugged. “The climate has a habit of counter-swinging when you do something unexpected to it, like suddenly take out all the clouds made by planes. My bet’s that winter’s gonna suck pretty bad this year – especially without electricity. So enjoy the warm fall while it lasts. Bay people aren’t really used to proper winters, huh?”

  Lucy laughed. “We’re totally not! Dan always used to joke that–” Lucy stopped laughing and her smile fell away.

  “Dan was your partner, huh?” asked Josh.

  Lucy nodded, biting her lip and staring straight ahead.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, gently.

  “No, it’s … I’m sure you’ve lost people too,” choked Lucy as the track ahead became blurry.

  Her mind drowned in a sea of guilt. Nausea spread from the pit of her stomach down to her legs, turning her weak and giddy as she tried to balance on the uneven sleepers.

  “My lace has come undone,” she said, stopping abruptly and kneeling to hide her face. “I’ll catch you up.”

  Josh stopped, politely.

  “I said I’ll catch you up, OK?” Lucy reiterated, with an involuntary sniff, while staring down and untying her perfectly tied laces. She clenched her teeth, fighting to hold the tears back.

  “Oh. Of course. I’ll make sure the others don’t rush on,” replied Josh, backing away and continuing down the track.

  Lucy held her breath until he was at least ten paces away before the tears began to fall heavily and uncontrollably. She buried her head in her knee and hugged it with all her might, clinging to it desperately. Tears and mucus ran down her trembling calf muscle. He was gone. Her anchor was gone. Should she have left him back there, unburied? What would Dan have wanted? What would he say or do now?

  She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and gripped her ankle firmly. Lucy took a deep breath and exhaled shakily but slowly. She repeated: another deep breath, another exhalation, continuing until the tears subsided and she had control again.

  Dan would rationalize the situation; itemize it, she thought. She hadn’t slept properly, she may still have concussion, two of her ribs were broken and the dull pain was steadily sapping her energy. She hadn’t eaten properly in at least eighteen hours, and they’d just walked half a marathon with backpacks on. OK, she reasoned, channeling Dan’s voice as best she could, problems identified. Solutions? Sleep would have to wait, but the carb deficit could be addressed. She took off her backpack and rifled through the side pocket where the snacks were. Taking several more swigs of water, she stuffed the remaining cereal bars into her pockets, and pulled the ring back on a tin of fruit, first slurping out its juice, then setting off after the others, eating the contents with her hands. Keep moving, she thought. That’s what Dan would do.

  TWO

  The Boy

  ______________________________________

  The light was starting to fade and Helena was cranking up the pace yet again. “Come on!” she shouted, pressing ahead from the others. “We need to make it while there’s still light!”

  Toby was lagging behind at the back of the group, almost at risk of being dropped entirely. Lucy hung back until he drew level with her.

  “Here,” she said, handing him one of her two remaining cereal bars. “You can make it through this, alright?”

  He looked at her, pathetically. She took the bar back off him and ripped it open.

  “Eat,” she ordered, stuffing the snack back into his hands and watching until he pressed the bar to his mouth.

  The sugar quickly stimulated his appetite, and instinct did the rest. Within moments the bar was gone.

  “Thank you,” he said, quietly, as they continued after the others. “When did you first learn to shoot?”

  Lucy looked at him, taken aback.

  “You drew your gun earlier. So I’m guessing you know how to use one, and weren’t just deciding that was the time to vote Republican,” he added.

  She laughed. “My dad taught me when I was growing up. I actually learned on a shotgun first.”

  “For real? That’s unusual.”

  “My dad was unusual,” replied Lucy, with a chuckle. “He’d line up his beer bottles out in the field and say, ‘You get a dollar for every one you hit.’”

  “You must’ve been one rich kid if you were doing it with a shotgun!” noted Toby.

  “Yeah, a rich kid with a broken collarbone,” Lucy snorted. “But now you mention it, I did get good pretty quickly. So my dad stopped giving me money and made me switch to a pistol until I got that too. Then he stopped giving me pocket money altogether and put me to work on the ranch – checking the cattle sites, cutting hay, repairing fences. You name it, I did it.”

  Toby laughed then looked at Lucy’s face. “Oh, you’re serious?”

  “I was fourteen by this point, it wasn’t that bad. And it’s not like I did it all on my own – he would supervise me, or one of the other farm workers would.”

  “Yeah, but still. Fourteen – was that even legal?” fretted Toby.

  Lucy shrugged. “He called it a ‘rounded education’. He was kinda right. I still went to school, obviously,” she added, sensing the look of concern in Toby’s eyes. “This was just on the long summers.”

  “So you can ride a horse, then?” pressed Toby.

  “Haven’t ridden in over a decade, but I’m sure I could pick it up again. It’s the sorta skill that stays with you. Or at
least I hope it is, otherwise I really did waste my youth. How about you?”

  “Me? No way, horses scare me. Big creatures,” said Toby, shaking his head.

  “Horses scare you?” laughed Lucy. “Then those wolf-bison things last night must’ve been …”

  Toby smiled politely but didn’t laugh.

  Lucy immediately regretted her flippancy. “Sorry, that was –”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” he replied, calmly. “Everyone deals with grief differently.”

  Lucy nodded and the two walked in silence for a minute.

  “I had to shoot a coyote once,” said Lucy, restarting the conversation.

  “When?” said Toby, his eyebrows raised.

  “Two days after my sixteenth birthday. That was pretty scary. I had to shoot one of the cows too, it was chewed up pretty badly. Only happened this one time, though. Most of the time it was skunks and the like – you don’t want them getting near your herd. How about you? Ever shot anything?”

  “Me?” said Toby, raising his eyebrows. “Oh, goodness no. I’ve never fired one of these outside of a shooting range.”

  “What made you get one?” enquired Lucy.

  “It’s a Republican thing,” replied Toby. “You never know when one’s gonna come at you,” he added, with a chuckle.

  As they wound around another long, tree-lined bend, a small town glimmered into view less than a mile down the tracks. Nestled between the surrounding mountains, the town stretched out across what flat land there was. Candles shone out to them, dotted sporadically across a handful of dwellings; signs of life in the otherwise barren expanse.

  The group’s shadows continued to grow longer, stretching further ahead of them along the tracks. Time was short.

  Welcome to Fraser, Colorado read the train-station sign as they stepped off the tracks and onto the concrete platform.

  “Halle-fucking-lujah,” said Josh, voicing the group’s collective thoughts, as he abandoned the rails.

  As they walked through the deserted ticket hall, Helena grabbed local maps from the tourist-information racks. Meanwhile Toby, to everyone’s surprise, smashed open the defunct vending machine. He didn’t speak as he raided the machine’s contents, but moved away after taking an armful, allowing the rest of the group to do the same.

  “This way,” declared Helena, leading them out of the lobby, map outstretched before her.

  From what Lucy could see it was a small town with maybe enough houses for a couple of thousand people. If as many of them had died here as in San Francisco, then there were probably only a few hundred people left. This correlated with the signs of desertion that met her eyes, save for the sporadic candles flickering in isolated houses.

  Kristen jogged ahead and banged on the door of the first illuminated house they came to, but no one answered. They shouted a few times until a curtain was hastily drawn across the upstairs window and the candle extinguished.

  The last of the daylight disappeared behind the mountains and forest that framed the town. Only the deep purple of twilight remained as the last of the group’s time ran out.

  “Flashlights, quickly!” said Helena authoritatively. Everyone brought out the flashlights they’d either pre-packed or had found among the train wreckage. Lucy had the lieutenant’s.

  The group turned onto the main street, passing first an abandoned diner, then a convenience store, both of which had been smashed in. No one had boarded them up, which didn’t bode well for the fate of the owners, Lucy noted. Next to the store was the community fire station; its single fire truck stood locked away behind the sliding doors.

  A figure sprinted across the street up ahead.

  “Hey!” yelled Helena, her voice swiftly joined by the others’ calls for help as the group tried in vain to get the lone individual’s attention. They broke into a run, but the figure was too far ahead and vanished down a side alley.

  “Come on, not far now,” urged Helena, resuming their course. “The town hall is our best chance of shelter.”

  As they made their way forwards, Lucy found that the group had naturally begun to huddle since the light failed. Their collective flashlights provided snapshots of illumination in a roughly twenty-yard radius.

  The further into town they got, the more pronounced the signs of disaster became. Abandoned cars stood crashed along the side streets, while uncollected trash lay piled up on the roads. Discarded breathing masks lined the sidewalks.

  Lucy’s eyes tracked along the sidewalk further and she began to notice small piles and bundles all around them, some larger than others.

  “Guys,” she said, suddenly realizing what she was looking at.

  She shone her flashlight onto a pile and walked closer. The others followed, training their lights on it too, bringing the heap into sharp focus.

  “Clothes,” said Lucy, shining her flashlight along to another nearby pile.

  Josh took out his phone and began taking photos with one hand, using his other to point his light at the target.

  “We don’t have time for that,” said Helena, casting her eyes around the darkness nervously.

  “We have to document everything,” argued Josh. “It’s the only way we’ll beat them.”

  “Oh Jesus,” came Kristen’s voice from behind.

  The group spun around and followed the direction of her flashlight, which pointed to two abandoned police patrol cars. The more distant vehicle had been abandoned mid-lane, both of its passenger doors open. The nearer car had partially mounted the sidewalk at an angle. Leading away from the open driver’s door was a crumpled heap: an officer’s uniform.

  Cautiously, the group edged forwards, their beams illuminating more of the car as they approached. The clothes glistened in the flashlights.

  “They’re still wet,” said Josh, reaching for his phone again.

  “The passenger seat’s wet too, and there’s another uniform in there,” said Kristen.

  Lucy’s eyes clocked several bullet casings on the ground, surrounded by beads of water.

  A long howl pierced the darkness, reverberating through the street.

  “We need to find shelter, right now!” cried Helena.

  The howl repeated, this time joined by more howls coming from a different direction.

  “The church!” cried Toby, pointing up ahead, his flashlight stretching just far enough to reveal the outline of a white wooden church a few hundred yards away with open doors.

  As they ran towards the church, their flashlights sent streaks of light across the road and the buildings. Lucy’s arms pumped, driving her legs forwards, desperately combating the weight of her backpack.

  A car screeched around the corner out of nowhere, and in that moment Lucy saw death itself. There they were, in all their supernatural splendor, hunting down the fleeing car. These were the vast, abominable beasts that had obliterated the evacuation train. They’d outpaced centuries of human engineering, and overpowered heavily armed human soldiers. They were here, and they were real.

  Their black fur glistened in the flashlight. Deep, guttural snarls mixed with the car’s straining engine. The panicked driver had a wispy moustache and rounded glasses. The terrified middle-aged woman next to him, presumably his wife, braced herself against the door as they turned.

  As the car skidded out in front of the church, it turned side-on to the creatures. The foremost animal leapt with a roar, landing upon the roof of the vehicle, punching an impression of its body into the crumpling metalwork.

  The driver slammed on the brakes, throwing the beast onto the ground.

  The creature rolled onto all fours and turned, snarling. The headlights vividly illuminated its features for the first time as it bared its razor-like teeth to the car. Ivory tips protruded from each shoulder blade, mirroring the claws on the ends of its long, muscular limbs.

  The driver slammed the accelerator and rammed the beast before it could pounce. But the creature’s body immediately wedged under the bumper, stalling the ca
r in its tracks.

  As the driver frantically tried to reverse, his door window shattered inwards, showering the occupants with glass. A second beast was now leading the attack. Two powerful black forearms thrust through the broken window frame and clamped onto the man’s skull. The beast planted its legs vertically against the car like a climber and wrenched the screaming man from his seat. Both beast and man disappeared from view as they rolled to the ground, falling away from the car’s main beams. Through the darkness, the man’s screams painted his fate.

  The female passenger burst out of the opposite side of the car but was felled instantly by a third beast. Its vast jaws sank deep into her collarbone, crushing it, spilling all the life from her shuddering body. She lay dying in plain view of the headlights, obstructed only by the predator ravaging her.

  The horrified bystanders reeled as a fourth beast arrived at the scene. The creature pounced onto the crumpled roof of the car and surveyed the scenes below, quickly turning its eyes on Lucy and the other four humans who stood just a few hundred yards away.

  “Run!” yelled Josh, the first to awaken from their collective stupor.

  The group turned on its heels and began to flee. Before they knew what was happening, they’d split in three directions. Lucy and Josh fled down a side street on the left. Toby was nowhere to be seen. Lucy snatched a glimpse of Kristen and Helena disappearing the opposite way to the right as one of the beasts bounded after them with a roar.

  Lucy and Josh kept running, adrenaline surging through their bodies.

  “Here!” yelled Lucy, peeling off down the first street on the left.

  It was a wide suburban road lined with houses and parked cars. Josh spun on his feet and doubled back after her, following Lucy onto the lawn of a detached house and immediately down the steps to the basement.

  From the small secluded porch in front of the basement door they peered out above the grass line, trying to control the volume of their sharp, heavy breathing.