Rune Awakening

by Genevra Black

  As she marveled at him, he flexed his now-free hand. A helix of light shot from it, coiling up his arm then back down to form a long, viciously sharp blade of white-gold light. He sneered as he looked her over one last time before throwing himself after the monsters.

  She couldn’t see him clearly—he and the beasts moved so quickly, tangled together—but she couldn’t help but stare. He had confronted the creatures, who had to be at least seven feet tall, without a moment’s hesitation. And, from what she could make out, he was now climbing them, slashing at their spidery limbs with a chilling efficiency. They moved erratically with their new challenger, but he was fast.

  Edie exhaled sharply. He was going to get himself killed. What they needed to do was run.

  But the man didn’t give her so much as a glance, and before she could cry out again, he and the creatures were engulfed in a blinding aura of light, so bright it left black spots in her vision.

  Her mind whirled as she registered that the light had come from the man.

  Edie flopped over onto her belly and scrambled to get her legs underneath her, struggling with shaking knees until she was able to take off, sprinting in the direction of her yard without looking back. She could hear and see more bursts of light. They were tremendous, and each one stung her back and scorched choppy shadows onto the pavement like strobing stills from a horror movie.

  She found herself fleeing face-first into the brick wall of her apartment building.

  There was no time to regroup. She ignored the throbbing pain in her face—and all over her body—and rebounded off the wall, staggering into the alleyway. With shuddering breath, she felt her way to her apartment door, away from the sounds of battle.

  And then, as soon as she slammed her door closed, the noises stopped.

  She slid down her door and sat, curled against it in stunned silence. Her breath was raspy and labored like a half-drowned woman’s; her hair, jostled from its bun, fell in a black curtain around her face. Her stomach ached, and her back and face burned like she’d just spent a day at the beach without sunscreen. The black spots in her vision lingered as she looked around her apartment.

  Everything was just as it was supposed to be. Everything was normal.

  She wheezed again, coughed, and started to weep fearful tears.

  She was going crazy.

  When she’d finally calmed down enough to check on Hervey, she found him in rough shape.

  For one thing, his tail had fallen off, along with a good portion of his fur. The sores all over his body were an angry red, and the skin surrounding them was tinged with the beginnings of what looked like bruises. Foamy stuff was coming from … somewhere, and he smelled like low tide. It was awful.

  As bad as she felt, though, she couldn’t handle being in the same room as him. The smell was too overpowering. She laid a towel down on the glass coffee table in the living room and set the cage there, kneeling on the carpet beside it to get a better look at her unfortunate little friend.

  Though his balance had been thrown off by the loss of his stubby tail, he trundled around his habitat slowly, completely unbothered but perambulating like a heavy Jim Henson puppet. It would have been funny if the entire situation hadn’t been completely fucked up.

  Scrolling through her phone, she couldn’t find anything online to explain his illness. Her best guess was that he had some kind of skin condition or … ugh, mites. Rabies didn’t seem possible. He was so calm.

  She looked at the time on her phone. It was almost 2 a.m.

  With a heavy sigh, she realized she’d have to take him to the vet clinic in the morning. Screw DYSMANTLE. Mercy would understand. They’d save up more money for the band fund eventually. She couldn’t let Hervey suffer like this, and the vet was her only alternative.

  “You stay out here for now, buddy.” Edie pinched her nose as she shifted and stood. She covered the cage with another towel and shut herself up in her room. He’d have to stay out here for the night. No way she’d get any sleep if he stayed in her room.

  Not that it was likely she’d be getting much sleep anyway, she thought as she locked the bedroom door and shoved a box in front of it.

  She was still trembling from her experience in the park, and even though she had tried to distract herself with Hervey’s frightful condition, it had only escalated her mood. This weird shit wasn’t right, and she was exhausted from working herself too hard, and Mercy would be back tomorrow, and they had a gig that night at some new bar she’d never even heard of, and Edie didn’t particularly feel like going back to work and possibly running into those monsters, or that glowing man, and….

  Edie groaned and lay face-down on her bed, wishing it would swallow her up so she could become one with the mattress instead of dealing with her onslaught of problems, both mundane and not.

  After a moment, she propped herself up and listened closely. The sounds of the fight she’d been running from earlier were gone and the regular sounds of the city had replaced them: nighttime traffic, wind, the monorail that ran past her neighborhood. Maybe she’d misunderstood what she’d seen.

  It was hard to ignore the sting on her face and back, though.

  Every bone in her body ached for sleep, but she was so shaken up she didn’t know if she could. At least, not without a little help.

  She glanced at the bottle of sleeping supplements on her bedside table. The most she’d ever taken at once was two, and that had been more than enough.

  She took three, turned off the light, and buried herself in blankets.

  Chapter Six

  There was nothing. Then, all at once, she became aware of the feeling of something fluttering against her cheek.

  Edie opened her eyes to a world thick with white. Little tufts fell from the sky, so slow and light that she thought they were cotton at first.

  It took a moment for her to adjust and realize she was lying on her stomach in a small clearing. The darkness of the unknown beyond her small patch of moonlight was palpable, even though only a soft gray filtered through the flurries of snow; but the trees closest to her, grotesquely gnarled and struggling to reach toward the sky, were as solid and black as ink in the foreground of her vision.

  She was curled up on the white ground, just as she had been in bed. Under her fingers, she could feel the give of the freshly fallen snow, the way it stuck to the grooves of her palm as it melted. It was cool, but not frozen—not as cold as snow should be.

  Slowly, she sat up. The snowflakes falling on her cheeks and in her hair melted once she moved, like they were living creatures she had scared away. They were cool, too, and the feeling of them sinking into her skin numbed it, but the cold-that-wasn’t-quite was more unnerving than uncomfortable. Instead of leaving behind water, the flakes almost seemed to move through her, like they had bored tiny holes into her skin.

  Where am I?

  Was it real? Visually, everything seemed so detailed, so vivid … even though her other senses were muted. Should she call out? Would anyone hear? The silence here was so pervasive and heavy she wasn’t even sure the sound would reach her own ears.

  Edie stood, wiping her ever-numbing hands down her front. What was she wearing? Some kind of heavy, velvety cloak with slits in front for her arms. She moved to pull the cloak aside, to see what the hell else she could be wearing, when a startling noise cut through the silence: A long, loud howl.

  It shattered the silence, more accurately. As though the wolf’s throaty call had ripped away a layer of haze over her mind, she was suddenly aware of the other sounds of the dark forest: Trees trembling under the weight of new-fallen snow, the weak whisper of a stream nearby, birds in the distance, her own ragged breathing, and the hissing of blood through her ears.

  The clearing suddenly felt too small, like it was the mouth of a huge animal, slowly closing in on her. Edie whipped her head around, trying to find a path out. All the trees seemed to be uniformly packed, thinning nowhere. There was no road to where she stood.

&n
bsp; She’d have to pick a direction and just go.

  She had lived in the city all her life. The only forests she’d ever visited were national parks with carefully marked trails. Even when the trails were tough and the trees were thick, it had never been like this. Edie struggled to weave between the inky growth, which was so black she couldn’t even make out the details of bark. The further she went, the harder it seemed to move at all, as though friction in the air itself was slowing her down.

  She worked her legs, unsure of where she was headed. No noise seemed to come from any specific direction. How was she even supposed to track how far she had traveled?

  She finally called out, voice already raw with panic, desperate to hear something other than the crunching of snow and the vague whisper of water. Was that even a stream she was hearing? Or were people actually speaking? “Hello?”

  Suddenly, she felt a thousand gazes on her, like she’d committed some forest faux pas by yelling and drawing attention to herself. Every knot in every tree was as an eye, watching her progress and judging her; some seemed amused at how lost and confused she was, some irritated that she was there at all, others just emotionless stares.

  “Hello?!”

  Another howl, this one deeper. And closer.

  You should find it. Edie wasn’t sure where the idea came from. The only wolf she’d ever seen had been behind Plexiglass at some nature reserve when she was, like, eight. But the answer seemed so simple now that it had presented itself. Find it.

  Her body moved without consulting her mind: She took a deep breath and tipped her head back, then loosed a howl of her own.

  The foreign sound coming from her own chest frightened her even more than the wolf had, made her heart beat faster. Where the fuck did that come from?

  Complete silence answered her. No snow fell from boughs, no branches creaked under the weight, no birds called, no whispers reached her ears. The gazes she had felt looked beyond her, now … as if they, too, waited for a response.

  She was about to give up and start walking again when she noticed two points of light in the brush.

  Fires?

  They flickered and slowly came closer, but the perspective was all wrong. They couldn’t be torches, could they?

  They changed rapidly, ducking, and she realized they were nested in the skull of something stalking her.

  The white wolf bared its teeth.

  Edie awoke in a cold sweat, looking around her dark room. Groggily, she pressed the home button on her phone, which was nestled in the covers near her side, and checked the time. It was around five in the morning, but it was still dark out.

  She groaned as she turned over in bed. Her throat ached, her mouth suddenly unbearably dry and thirsty. Great. She knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep with her throat feeling like sandpaper.

  She lay in bed and glared at the ceiling for a while, trying to conjure up the will—and the courage, considering she ought to lock herself in her room and never come out—to get out of bed.

  Ugh. And she’d have to get up in a few hours to take Hervey to the vet. Just the thought of it made her head ache.

  But the sooner she got up and went pee and got something to drink, the sooner she could get back to sleep. She forced herself to sit up and swing her legs over the edge of the bed.

  The moment her feet touched the floor, she knew something was wrong.

  A strange power thrummed through the floor, a vibration traveling into her body and through her nervous system. It was something she’d never felt before. It stung a bit, but was oddly familiar at the same time. It was almost the same feeling she’d had when she’d touched Hervey ... when she’d passed out.

  She sat for a moment, eyes wide, letting the hum acclimate to her body and eventually fade into the background like a heartbeat. No matter how long she sat there, it didn’t go. Something was very wrong.

  There was something in the apartment.

  How she knew that was anyone’s guess—but she knew. Slowly, trying not to make any noise, she rose and crossed to the locked door. She could feel strange vibrations from the other side, getting stronger the closer she came. Listening at the door, she could hear shuffling ... the sound of Hervey moving around in his cage, faintly ... and....

  Someone coughed. It was a hacking cough, distinctly male.

  Edie covered her mouth, feeling herself go numb and cold in an instant. Her stomach dropped, every muscle in her body winding up tight. Was it the glowing man? One of the monsters?

  She’d locked the apartment door. She’d locked the freaking door. Someone had forced their way in to get to her. Someone was in her home.

  At least on the playground she’d had somewhere to run. Her room only had one door, and one window above her bed that was way too small for her to fit through.

  She had to find a weapon.

  She dropped silently to a crouch, trying not to trip on her sweatpants as she crawled across her bedroom floor, looking for something—anything—she could use to defend herself.

  Looking around the room, she could only see a few things she was sure could at least keep her attacker at arm’s length: her bass guitar, a plastic axe that had been sitting in the corner of her room since last Halloween, and ... a bottle of nail polish remover.

  That wasn’t bad, actually. If she could splash it in this guy’s eyes, she could run into Mercy’s room and grab her machete, or just straight up run out of the apartment.

  She grabbed the nail polish, turned it over, and tested the weight anxiously before carefully twisting the cap off.

  Creeping to the door, she toed the box in front of it out of the way. She reached out with one hand and slowly, slowly lifted the hook-and-eye lock, holding her breath as the metal scraped against the wood.

  No reaction from the other side of the door. She could still hear whoever it was moving around out there, clearing his throat. He hadn’t noticed that she was awake.

  With her free hand, she gripped the doorknob, trying not to let it slip from her sweaty palm.

  You’ve got this, she told herself. But she had to get going. It was only a matter of time before whoever was out there decided he was tired of waiting and tried to come into her room.

  Okay. One—

  Two—

  She turned the knob, and it practically vibrated in her palm.

  Three.

  Edie flung the door open.

  Almost immediately, any plan she’d had for attacking the trespasser fell to the floor along with her bottle of nail polish remover.

  She had never seen a dead human body before, but there was no mistaking what she was looking at. Sitting on her couch, fully animated and glowering at the hamster cage adjacent to it, was a corpse.

  Chapter Seven

  The corpse leaned forward, resting its elbows on its knees, and continued to glower at Hervey.

  It was male, and looked like something that had stepped right out of The Walking Dead season five: Sallow, stretched skin was pulled tight and peeling over the valleys of its face, and she could see the leathery red muscles of its substantial biceps; the larynx was visible, and there was nothing but wisps of dark hair on a head with the worst case of dandruff Edie had ever seen. Its torn, chapped lips were twisted in a sneer, and the angry crease between its brow wrinkled the bridge of a nose that had long ago rotted away, leaving a torn and gaping hole.

  After a second, the corpse stood, and she was able to get a better look at its body. It was over six feet tall and built like a Marine. Its clothes weren’t tattered like it had just risen out of a grave or something, though. It wore a tight white T-shirt with a pair of army-green cargo pants, and worn Carolinas with the thickest rubber sole she’d ever seen.

  “The fuck’d you do to this hamster?” it asked, looking at her sharply and gesturing in the direction of Hervey’s cage.

  It asked. Okay, that was the first problem in a string of at least fifty.

  Its voice could have put Tom Waits to shame, sounded
like someone who smoked twenty packs of cigarettes a day, ate nail sandwiches, and chased them down with cement-gravel cocktails.

  Edie drew into herself, pressed up against her bedroom door. Her voice came out smaller than she anticipated, considering she felt like shrieking at the top of her lungs. “He’s ... he’s sick.”

  The zombie—what else could she call it?—looked at her like she had just said the stupidest thing it had ever heard. It rolled its milky eyes and grimaced. “Well, ain’t you just the slickest little shit? When’d he die?”

  “He ... didn’t. He’s ... I don’t know, he has some kind of”—she winced, trying to keep her voice from rising in pitch—“skin condition.” Am I really getting chastised by a Fallout Ghoul right now? “What— Who are you? What are you doing here, what do you want?”

  As she asked, she was reminded of what she’d witnessed on the playground just a few hours ago. This had to be related. So many weird things couldn’t just happen to one person for no reason. And here she was with a Romero reject in her living room, criticizing her ailing hamster.

  Maybe this was a nightmare, too. She’d prefer the wolf, if she was honest.

  The zombie looked at her for a moment before sitting back down, taking out a pack of Newports, and lighting one up. Judging by the look on what was left of its face, this was going to be a long night.

  She dared to raise her voice. “This is a no-smoking apartment.” The least of her worries, but it was the only sentence she could form coherently.

  The zombie turned up its palms and raised its voice along with her: “Do you ever do anything besides bitch?”

  Whatever this thing was doing in her living room, it was on the fast track to getting a kick in the ass.

  After ashing its cigarette directly on the glass coffee table (she noticed a few used butts there, too; how long had it been sitting there, waiting?) it looked up at her, and their eyes met squarely for the first time. The zombie was slightly wall-eyed, but then again, it was probably an achievement for it to have eyes left in its head at all. They were also the bluest eyes she had ever seen, even as cloudy as they were—and there was something in the pits of them, like a little glowing light in the back of the skull.