Clambering to her feet unsteadily, she found her balance on the solid ice and tore off her sodden gloves, immediately drawing her holstered gun and training it on the corpse. On its hind legs, the motionless creature would have been around ten or eleven feet – around twice her height. As she moved closer, leaving the ice and finding frozen grass underfoot, Lucy’s eyes flitted to the knife-length claws at the end of the creature’s limbs. She skirted around the body at a six-yard radius, ready to fire at the slightest movement.
As she neared one hundred and eighty degrees, the beast’s face became visible for the first time. Its grey tongue hung limply from its mouth, the bottom of its jaw offset slightly from the rest of its head where its sunken black eyes stared out lifelessly into the distance, one partially covered by a translucent white eyelid. Either side of the tongue were familiar rows of large teeth, which on closer inspection appeared to be serrated, each curving enamel blade gilded in a dozen smaller blades, honed to inflict maximum damage on its victim. Its facial structure was somewhere between a bear’s and a dog’s. The width of the skull and jaw could have belonged to a grizzly, but its pointed ears were befitting of a jackal.
Lucy’s eyes moved to the beast’s back, and its great protruding spines. They were sharp, ending in the same dark points as the creature’s claws. The glossy white skin, made up of fine scales, was torn between the fifth and sixth vertebral column. Its perforated sheets flapped loosely in the breeze.
At the base of the torso began a tail almost as long as the creature itself, extending far beyond its legs and terminating in a lump. Lucy walked back around to where the tail ended and knelt down for a better view. The tip was obscured by mud.
Hesitantly, she reached out. Taking the tail between thumb and finger, she lifted the tip off the ground, raising it from the frozen mud to face her.
“Fuck!” she cried, as a glossy, beveled black eyeball stared back at her. She dropped the tail and scrabbled backwards in abhorrence.
Grimacing, she reached out a wavering hand and picked the tail back up. The eye was almost entirely black. She reaffirmed her grip on the handgun, terrified the eye might swivel in its socket to focus on her at any moment. Lucy inspected closer. There was a subtle color difference between the black of the pupil and the dark brown iris. A single dark eyelid lay crumpled over the tip, and adjacent to it was a small pink gland.
Dropping the tail, Lucy lifted a boot to the dead beast’s shoulder and shoved in an attempt to roll the thing over onto its back. The body weighed a ton, and it took a few kicking rocks to build up enough momentum to roll the torso over. She gasped; the injuries were not what she was expecting.
The creature had deep cuts across its thighs and chest, revealing a mass of glistening black muscle tissue. The texture reminded Lucy of an orca’s skin. There was no way a human could have inflicted such injuries; this was the work of another beast.
She threw her eyes around the landscape once again, raising her gun out before her as she searched. But of course there were no signs of life; it was daytime.
As she looked down at the corpse once again, a memory from the hike to Fraser came to her. She remembered Josh, the botanist, kneeling down and photographing the butterfly globule on the track, and later photographing the dissolving bodies of the town. His mantra resonated with her now; she had to document everything about this encounter. If she could figure out where this creature might be anatomically weakest, she’d know where to shoot next time one attacked.
Her backpack contained a notepad but not a full autopsy kit; she’d have to fetch cutting equipment from the house, and maybe containers to put body parts in.
She retraced her crawl across the ladder bridge and hurried up the opposite riverbank, only to stop dead in her tracks as she reached the top. Up ahead, approaching her house, was a black SUV.
Humans.
Four men jumped from the back of the open truck, followed by the driver and a passenger from the front. All six of them had weapons – a mixture of assault rifles and handguns.
Lucy dived behind the verge, pressing her body into the cold ground and peering over the parapet, bringing the binoculars to her eyes as the armed men approached the house. Her mind raced. The men looked hostile – they reminded her of the militia that appeared in San Francisco; self-styled, heavily armed. If she did nothing, they might discover her food stores, or her wood fuel. But there was no way she could fend them off alone, with just the handgun and no vantage point. Besides, if they found her …
A shiver crawled up her spine and she pressed herself closer against the ground. With the binoculars glued to her eyes, she prayed for something to distract the men, to draw them away.
The passenger from the front appeared to be the leader. He wore a brown cowboy hat, a dark green hunting jacket, black cargo trousers, and tan boots. He signaled the other four men to head to the rear of the house, while he and the skin-headed driver approached the main entrance.
As his men skirted the building, the man in the cowboy hat tore open the white insect door with force and proceeded onto the wooden porch. He banged his rifle against Lucy’s blue door three times.
Heart racing, keeping her body pressed to the ground, Lucy panned between the front and back of the house, struggling to keep track of both groups. Of the four men around the back, three disappeared into the kitchen. The fourth man kept watch from outside, keeping both the kitchen and the car in his sight. His arrogant body language oozed boredom. His gun swung idly by his camouflage trousers as he kicked stones around, pulling his grey hoodie over his head and fixing a hand in one pocket, his arm pressed tightly against his body.
At the front of the house, meanwhile, the cowboy leader had taken a seat on the porch bench and lit a cigarette.
At the rear, something made the idle guard re-approach the kitchen door – presumably shouts from inside. Lucy strained her ears but couldn’t make out his replies as he relayed the message to the leader around the front of the house. The leader jogged around the side of the house towards the kitchen, followed by the skin-headed driver. Lucy could see the guard’s lips moving as he said something inaudible to the pair. Neither acknowledged him; instead they jogged past and into the kitchen. The sultry guard pulled hard on the strings of his hood so that it shrank around his head, then kicked the gravel around again.
More muffled conversation turned the guard’s head back towards the kitchen. The rest of the gang were now re-emerging laughing and joking, each with an armful of looted possessions. One of them chucked a bra at the hooded guard while returning to the SUV, causing great hilarity for his comrades. The guard derisively shook it off his foot, visibly cursing them.
The leader and driver also re-emerged from the kitchen, but headed away from the others – instead walking purposefully into the barn while the others continued towards the vehicle.
Lucy tracked her binoculars back to the looters busily loading up the SUV. She quivered with rage as she watched all her hard-earned firewood disappear into the back of the truck, along with piles of towels, coats, and other precious burnable items.
A shot rang out from the barn, startling Lucy as she cowered on the cold soil. She watched as the tall, cowboy-hat-wearing gang leader emerged from the metal doorway – alone – casually replacing his handgun in the back of his jeans.
Back at the truck, the gang had finished loading. They slouched, idly, against the black SUV as their leader swanned back into their midst and said something Lucy couldn’t hear. It made the others laugh, including the hooded guard this time. All returned to their seats, apart from a short Latino man with aviator-shaped sunglasses and an earring. He now took up the driver’s position.
The new driver revved the engine unnecessarily, propelling the car backwards as he threw it into a flashy handbrake turn on the gravel drive. The vehicle sped away down the long drive, eventually reaching the road and disappearing from sight and sound within less than a minute.
Lucy stayed hidden for a good while
longer, counting the minutes as best she could to steady her nerves and make sure her emergence into the open wasn’t premature.
“Fuck it,” she said, steeling herself midway through the ninth minute of counting. “Fuck it, and fuck them,” she repeated, forcing herself forwards, over the lip and into the field, where she approached the house at a run, not slowing until she reached the gravel drive.
The white kitchen door was open as the men had left it. Lucy stood on the gravel, torn between confronting what she knew awaited her in the barn, and learning what the bastards had done to her home and possessions.
She stepped into the kitchen, where the floor bore the muddy footprints of each visitor. The cupboards and drawers all hung open. The fuckers had taken her matches! With growing trepidation, she approached the living room.
The perma-crackle of the fire that she had grown accustomed to was no more. In its place was a watery paste of charred wood and ash, which spewed unconcernedly over the chimney’s bottom bricks and onto the carpet below.
“Bastards. You vindictive bastards!” she bellowed, kicking a cabinet in frustration and fracturing the paneling.
Trembling with rage, she surveyed the room. The stench of urine hit her nostrils as she approached the bed and discovered the sodden sheets and duvet.
“You fucking animals!” she screamed.
The fire was out, the wood was gone, the food was gone, her bed was ruined, the whole room was ruined, and the upstairs had been trashed too. Every semblance of stability she had fought to build from her own sweat and tears had been taken from her in the blink of an eye. All done by the first humans she’d encountered in four months.
Knowing the house held nothing for her anymore, she confronted the barn. The dead driver lay face down on the concrete floor, stray pieces of straw sticking out at odd angles beneath him. A bullet had exploded through the back of the driver’s head, revealing pulverized, pinkish-grey brain matter.
A pool of blood seeped out onto the floor, and the body of the white beast suddenly returned to the fore of Lucy’s mind – the beast that had been killed by other beasts. She had to erase every trace of the blood by nightfall.
***
With great effort, Lucy loaded ten hay bales onto a wheelbarrow and ferried them one by one from the barn to the yard. There she arranged them in a long rectangular shape, onto which she dragged her piss-soaked mattress and bedding, finally hauling the dead driver’s body on top of that. She topped it all with the blood-soaked rags she’d used to clean and bleach the barn floor, and the sheets she’d dragged the man’s body on. The sun was well into the last quarter of its arc by the time she had finished building the pyre.
She hadn’t had to make a fire for months, having kept one going almost constantly throughout the winter out of necessity. But she no longer had the help of matches. Growling, she struck two pieces of flint together, over and over again, above the pyre. A spark finally hit the hay and began to take. Lucy breathed life into it, fanning the flames, and then set fire to a rag wrapped around a stick, which she used to light the other bales in turn.
Lucy stood back and watched as the flames spread through the dry tinder. They lapped at the mattress and body from all sides until the whole lot was ablaze.
“Eugh,” she choked, covering her mouth with her shirt as the putrid smell of burning flesh reached her nostrils.
As night fell Lucy retreated indoors to the frigid house, where she continued to watch the flames feed on the fruits of her misery. The pyre slowly crumpled in on itself, stooping to the ground as the structural hay disintegrated.
Lucy breathed softly onto her freezing fingertips in a bid to warm them. Using the flickering light of the fire outside, she wrote in her diary.
8th February (est.) – Those fuckers broke into my house. Thank god I was down by the river. There were six of them. They pissed on my clothes and bed, and in the water. They found my primary stashes of oats, potatoes, and carrots in the barn and took them. They shot one of their guys dead in there, too. His body’s burning in the yard as I write. I had to clear up all of his blood; there are beasts in the area – I found the body of one by the river. It’s white, and much bigger than the black ones from the train. Don’t know how long it’s been dead for, I was about to do an autopsy when the gang arrived.
I was planning on doing the creature’s autopsy tomorrow, but I have to get fresh water. And chop more firewood – they took that too. I also need to revise my ration count – I still have some oats and veg left in the better-hidden reserve stores, but I reckon it’s only enough to last a few weeks. There’s no way I’ll be harvesting anything from here for at least two months – it’s still way too cold. In other words, those bed-pissing animals have given me a death sentence.
***
When the next morning broke Lucy was shivering with cold. With no fireplace in the upstairs master bedroom, and only layers of clothes and a blanket to keep her warm, she might as well have slept outdoors.
She sniffed away some runny mucus from her freezing nose. Standing in the kitchen, boots on, but with the blanket still draped around her quivering shoulders, she surveyed the charred remnants of her bonfire.
“Argh!” she cried, grabbing a mug from the counter and hurling it to the ground.
It shattered loudly, blending with her cacophony of follow-up expletives.
She confronted the view outside once more. You could still discern the outline of the mattress: a pile of ash mingled with bones in the middle. It would take a second bonfire to reduce it any further, and that would require wood – the hay had burned too quickly.
She shuffled into the living room and confronted the work to be done. The smell of piss had faded now that the mattress was gone, but the wet ash was still seeping into the carpet, spewing out of the fireplace from where the gang had needlessly extinguished her fire.
Readjusting her beanie hat so that it covered her earlobes, Lucy returned to the master bedroom upstairs where she dispensed with the blanket and adopted several more layers of clothes.
“What is the point?” she moaned as her head pounded with cold and hunger. “Get a grip. Get a grip, get a grip, get a grip!” She slapped her cheeks until they burned. “OK, day one hundred and twenty-nine, you are going to be better than day one twenty-eight, because I can’t handle two days like that in a row. Deal? Great, yeah, seems only fair, doesn’t it,” she rambled, pulling the third pair of thick socks right up until they covered half of each shin.
She caught her reflection in the dresser mirror. “Oh boy. Work to be done there,” she scowled, distrusting the pallid, gaunt stranger staring back at her. Her cheeks were sunken, and dark black rings clung to the bags under each eye. “You may not look like this year’s prom queen,” she said, reaching for the bottle of sickly sweet, grandma-scented perfume on the bedside table, “but you smell fantastic.”
“Food. Water. Fire,” she repeated, padding back down the stairs. Taking her emergency water bottle, she poured half the bottle’s remnants into a bowl of oats. She then placed the bowl among the warm ashes of the bonfire outside while she went to fetch fresh water.
The empty buckets were still there, where she’d abandoned them by the river, as was the body of the white beast. Lucy quickly filled both buckets with meltwater then staggered back to the house, the pair weighing heavily on her emaciated frame.
By the early afternoon, she’d managed to clean out the sodden brick fireplace in the living room and install several fresh pieces of firewood, which she immediately set about lighting to get the carpet drying.
By nightfall, her hands were blistered from wielding the axe. She fell onto the fresh mattress with immense appreciation; it had been worth the struggle to drag it down the staircase and into the room, and the warmth of the fire provided immediate reward. With a groan, she lifted herself into a sitting position and prodded a boiling potato. It was about done, so she tipped the chopped carrot in with it.
Lifting a warm mug to her lips,
she took a sip, letting the warmth of the hot water spread through her hollow insides. Lucy opened her diary and randomly flicked through the hundreds of pages she’d filled. She often did this – adding extra details in the margins here and there as they occurred to her.
Nov 19th – Found some horse antibiotics in the house. Hoping they’ll get rid of this goddamned rash.
Nov 25th – Rash is gone. So is about half of my body mass through shitting and puking. Thanks a million, whoever created this drug, real nice job. On behalf of horses everywhere, you’re an asshole.
Dec 4th – I want some goddamned meat. I miss burgers. And fries. And BBQ sauce. I could probably try and snare something at the edge of the forest, but if I brought the blood onto the farm, that could be game over. So I guess it’s just gonna be more oats, potatoes, and carrots. That’s my life in three words.
Dec 5th – Thought of three more: lonely, cold, abandoned.
Dec 6th – If anyone ever finds this diary, know that I hated every minute. I’ll probably burn it before that, though. Might burn it tonight. Who knows? Who cares – I guess that’s more to the point. Don’t actually know why I’m bothering. Maybe I’m just too scared to let myself die. That’s probably the most pitiful thing of it all. If I was braver, I’d be with Dan by now. I dreamt about him again. I dream about him almost every night.
Oct 3rd – Got a fire going in the fireplace. Only took all day. I can at least read in the evenings now. They’ve got a pretty big bookcase here, it’s just a shame all the books are terrible. I found a map and some mail, though, so have figured out where I am. Looks like I’m someplace near Preston, Missouri. It’s around two hundred miles to St. Louis. If I can figure out a way to get the car working, I could make that in a few hours. From there it’s about eight hundred miles to DC, which I reckon I could do in two days, if I break the journey in Columbus. Interstate 70 should do it. Just need a working vehicle. When I get to DC, I will find Dan’s father. He needs to know what happened to his son. To my Dan. To his boy. It’s all I can think about doing.
Convulsive Box Set Page 25
