by C. C. York
Arrival
of the
Rifted
◊◊◊
C. C. YORK
©2021 C. C. York
ISBN: 978-0-578-86401-3
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover illustration: Lena Yang
Map designer: Jon Stubbington
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Reed
Alik
Elaine
Reed
Alik
Elaine
Reed
Elaine
Alik
Reed
Elaine
Alik
Elaine
Alik
Reed
Alik
Elaine
Reed
Alik
Elaine
Alik
Reed
Reed
Elaine
Reed
Alik
Elaine
Alik
Reed
Alik
Reed
Alik
Elaine
Monti
Acknowledgements
Want More?
For my parents for teaching me to love to read, and for my brother for showing me what to read.
Reed
Reed Wells shifted his handcuffs so they could dig new indentations into his wrists as he rested his temple against the back of the tattered brown seat in front of him. Anyone else would've seen a young man staring listlessly out the window at the flat landscape surrounding I-350, but he frantically fiddled the rough edge of a bandage that had come loose across bloodied knuckles as his mind wheeled.
The attractive blond was a welcome sight when she'd initially boarded the van. Then she opened her mouth. She sat on the opposite side of Reed, the silver metal door locked tight between them, and chatted animatedly with the armed guards adjacent to her. The word "chat" implies a volley of small talk, but she had barely paused to breathe in between her musings in the last three hours of the ride to Livingston, Texas. Reed knew it was a special sort of hell he'd slipped into when he welcomed the sight of the supermax prison destined to be his final home as it sat squat under a sheet of rain.
At least there it will be quiet at times, he thought.
She glanced sideways at him again, curiosity warring with repulsion, and looked away at his stare. Memories have a way of etching into someone's eyes, and Reed's pale grays were no different. The past leached the life from him, leaving his frame holding a husk of a young man alternating between anger and despondence. And fear. Always fear.
His hollowness spread from him the way joy may radiate from someone else, yet women still found him attractive. Years of working on cars and yards had left his lean shell muscular, and even the scruff of a dark beard worked in his favor more often than not. Most women, though, would not linger on their appreciation while he was dressed head to toe in orange and tied down with chains. The guard filled her in early on the how's and why's he was here, which made Reed wonder again at her role if she willingly rode in a prison transport with a murderer.
Murderer. The same shame stuck inside his gut made his handcuffs heavy, and they clinked together as his hands fell back to his lap. His traitorous mind flit back to a conversation he'd had with Staci not long after they first met.
She chewed her nails to stubs for as long as he could remember. The speckled remains of black polish caught his eye as she brandished her cigarette at him between two fingers. Staci leaned back against the underbelly of their middle school bleachers and looked him over from behind cheap cigarette smoke. "Don't kill me, but where are you from?"
It was the single most terrifying question he'd been asked. One he had prepared for but wasn't ready, nonetheless. He stuttered out the answer he and his mother rehearsed, but Staci waved the smoke between them. "No. Where are you from? Like your grandparents or ancestors or whatever."
He realized that she questioned his light brown skin tone, a watered-down version of his mother's black skin and a hint at what his father likely looked like. Strangers would later ask him or anyone else of mixed race the same bizarre question, but under the bleachers, his thirteen-year-old self debated if he should run or continue the lie they'd fabricated. Staci just laughed and looped an arm around his tense shoulders, claiming him as part of her tribe of two against the world.
They were inseparable for the next twelve years until he killed her.
The braking bus jerked him out of his memories. He stood with the other prisoners and filed out, glancing at the darkening clouds above the chain-linked fence rimmed with barbed wire. Maddie will be frightened of another storm, he thought before he could stop himself. He swallowed at the thick emotions clogging his throat. Despite the pain, he allowed himself to remember the feel of tiny, chubby fingers gripping his thumb. We were happy then. The couple months of holding her were worth all the years of running. He tried to quell the bitterness that laced his mind.
She's better off now. There will be a line of families waiting to adopt her. Normal families. Good families…ones that won't have fathers jumping at shadows, and ones that are not hunted. He squeezed his eyes shut, failing to block out the image of bare feet and the soaked hem of ripped jeans. Ones with living mothers.
Gray clouds swirled above as he shuffled in line behind the other criminals, lost in his thoughts and racing heart. Reed could guess at what years inside prison would be like from TV shows, but as the roof of the supermax edged out the darkening sky, he couldn't help but feel like this was the end. He slowed, wanting to see the purple-tinged sky just a little longer.
"Move it," the guard said at Reed's stall.
Reed nodded, clamping down his rising panic. Before he could delay it any further, the roof eclipsed the roiling sky, and he stood inside the prison.
Checking in proved to be another laborious process of waiting and standing, but the mundane task of waiting his turn helped edge out the unease prickling his skin. Reed shuffled through a series of barred doors while the blonde from the prison transport walked across the room and a world away. She hugged an older correctional officer that glared at Reed when he caught his eyes.
Reed heard it then.
The faint lullaby that had left him alone since the night he murdered his wife came back like an absent-minded hum.
He twisted each way to see who was singing it this time as chills scratched up his back. The singing shifted to a chant, and he spun again and again to find the source, heart pounding. The guard checking him in stopped typing; the officer to his right muffled something into the radio strapped to his shoulder.
Laughter, deep and inhumane, filtered over the chant marching across Reed's mind. Two guards stepped to him, their hands on the tasers at their waist, as a tang filled his mouth. Even after all this time, he still hoped someone else heard the song. I am not crazy, he thought. He is coming.
The woman from the transport pointed at the darkened windows, and a guard rushed to the alarm system that would signal a tornado. Reed crouched low, hands ahead of him, arms tense, ready. I am not going back.
He eyed the walls, searching for the
same presence that came for him the night he lost everything. Stifling a panicked laugh, he thought life within these walls doesn't seem so bad now, does it?
The lights flickered once, twice, and then hell unleashed itself on this corner of the world. Reed's last view of normal was of white concrete block walls and a perplexed guard standing behind a computer.
The world tipped, and the realization that his worst fear finally materialized hit Reed as he lost his footing and the ceiling above him cracked apart. The building, its foundations, and the ground beneath it upended and tilted on its side before being suctioned out into a void of screaming wind, dark skies, and earth. Reed hurtled through the chaos, a ragdoll tossed in a tornado, when a chair hit his face.
***
He came to gagged. The musty grime from the rope gathered at the roof of his mouth, and the same dirty rope bound his hands and feet. He was pitched on his side, facing away from a crackling fire and towards a dark grassy plain that was definitely not Texas. Jagged mountains too tall to be anywhere in the US silhouetted against clouds of stars, and both a red, crescent moon and a fat, full blue moon shared the sky. Bokki, he thought. The curse coming back to him was as startling as the raspy night bird calls in the distance. He shifted slightly to take stock of any other injuries besides a gash across his forehead and a bloody nose but found none. No time to panic, he thought as he breathed in small puffs of cold air to get control of his mind. Think.
Reed heard them moving around the fire, muttering and clicking, jaws snapping open and shut. He couldn't see the creatures from where he was oriented, but he heard more than one shuffling behind him. He recognized how screwed up his life had become when he preferred the creatures at his back to the one he thought would be waiting.
Fluffy white sock tips shook in the corner of his eye in tune with a man's gagged cries. Reed's stomach dropped. He didn't just take me. How many others have been dragged into this hell just because I was in the building with them? He tried to shift to see who else was tied down, but the movement caused the creatures at his back to still. Reed dared not breathe.
The clicking and snapping resumed, and Reed relaxed a fraction. The other inmates are not your problem. Get out, get a plan, get home. Ropes first.
He worked at his wrists. The creatures let loose an excited shrill noise, and their jaws snapped in a quick tit-tat-tat around slurping. He froze again, but the slurping continued. That's when the smell hit him. The crackling fire and the sizzle of fat hitting the flames were familiar. The scent, fortunately, was something new, but he knew the smell of burnt hair. Whoever they were roasting sent the prisoner nearest him into a hysterical whisper plea to the Virgin Mary. Jesus. Reed moved as fast as he dared, working his wrists while also inching on his side closer to the grass.
The rope at his wrists was tied loose enough that he made good headway with minimal effort. Either they don't know how to tie a rope or had too many of us to tie up properly. Reed dealt with guilt before; leaving prisoners to this painful end would be a drop in the well.
Reed shifted his body further from the fire. Still, he only heard the crackle of roasting flesh and slurping behind him.
Little farther.
He shuffled his ankles to loosen their ties. The heat from the fire no longer licked his back when an alarmed hiss came from behind. Reed got a good look at the milky eyes of a rail-thin monster after its pinched claw gouged his arm to flip him over. A spade-shaped head sat atop an elongated white torso with hinged limbs like that of a massive praying mantis. With an alarmed cry, it raised its other white arm to push its claw deep into Reed's belly.
Reed heaved both of his feet as hard as possible in its chest before it could make its mark. It tumbled back to the fire, losing its footing and tipping onto the roasting spit. Reed didn't let his eyes linger on the man from the bus. The stick impaling the guard's body broke apart into the fire, his skin blackening within the flames.
Ear-piercing screams rang through the night. He shoved the rope from his feet and darted into the field, still gagged. The tall wet grass soaked his thighs immediately, and he shook his hands free from the ties. Reed ran blindly for anywhere but here and felt one of them gaining speed behind him. He spotted woods on one side of the field and tried to force his feet to fly, but a sharp pain shot into his back. He fell face-first into the grass a few feet from a fist-sized jagged rock.
The creature pinned him immobile to the ground out of arm's reach of the stone. Reed reached his hand out, thinking thoughts he hadn't dared in over a decade, but the rock lay useless on the ground. The rail-thin creature with bone white arms reared back to claw his head, and in doing so, put it off-kilter enough for Reed to buck it off. He grabbed the stone and rolled, heaving it at the creature. Reed managed to knock it back and heard another fight going on near the fire. He tackled the beast ahead of him, pinning it down in the tall grass.
Blood ran down Reed's face as he rammed the stone into the creature's head.
Over and over and over again.
He saw Staci's profile near the tub and heard her laughing. He hit harder and harder until the face underneath him was a puddle of white flesh and black gore. Staci's singsong voice rang through him, "They're coming."
Another white claw yanked Reed up, feet dangling, just as a big stick hit the creature across the back of its angular head. The beast slumped down to the grass next to its comrade and struggled to get back up. A prisoner Reed hadn't seen before pushed at him to run. He didn't wait to see if Reed would join him as he made a beeline for the woods, stick still clutched in his right hand and his orange jumpsuit covered in black blood.
Reed caught up to him and yanked the gag from his mouth. "Go right, towards that light! Stay out of the woods!"
Rustling from behind. The creature was on its feet and gaining speed. It released a high-pitched scream, a hawk sighting its prey, and Reed moved zigzag in time to miss its outreached claw. He scanned the ground for anything to use as a weapon as he ran when a shot echoed out in the valley.
The sound bounced off the mountains and reverberated the air surrounding them like a sonic boom. Reed knew in his bones that this world had never heard that sound. It did not belong here. The crack was as foreign and unfamiliar here as that creature would have been in a Kroger back home. The steady hum of background noise Reed didn't register until it was gone, stopped. The birds and critters and creatures of this hell paused. And as one giant, beating chest, they breathed deep once more before erupting into a chaotic cry. The sharp chirping of insects and bestial wails grew into a tidal wave of noise that washed over Reed and the valley, and the woods behind him shook as creatures too big to be birds took to the sky.
They know we're here, Reed thought.
Blonde hair whipped past Reed, "Run, you idiot!"
The woman from the prison transport dashed ahead of him, holding a pistol in her right hand and pumping her arms. Two ragged men from the prison ran after her, carrying the older man she'd hugged before their world ended. Reed froze as horses gaining speed appeared behind them.
At least the incoming cavalry rode creatures like horses, but the similarity ended there. Men barreled down the valley atop Clydesdale-sized beasts with rhinoceros-like skin and short jagged horns at the edge of their nose. Swords glinted in the twin moonlight above the valley, and the men cried out while slashing the handful of tall white bone creatures now fleeing to the woods. Reed ran to the scattered people of his world just as two riders broke off, riding hard for him.
Reed pumped his legs, bypassing the others. The older man cried out for his people to leave him, and the blonde pleaded with the old man to push when the first rider broke through. The rider's tunic stretched under the curved sword strapped to his back as he snatched an inmate by the neck, yanking him onto his beast. Several more riders followed behind, grabbing the older man and his escorts. The woman stood still, frantic eyes and mouth agape. Reed made the split-second decision to tackle her just as a beast t
hundered to them. Its rider reached for her as well, missing by a handspan. The rider shouted a command to the beast, pulling to a stop to circle back around.
Reed hauled her up with him and ran for the woods the lizard part of his brain warned him adamantly against. Laughter rang out in his mind once more, but he pushed it out as he ducked behind a large, gnarled tree at the farthest edge of the dark woods topped with flaming orange leaves. He pushed his back against its pulsing bark and held the shaking woman tight to him with his hand over her mouth. The laughter in his mind morphed into a deep baritone.
The valley echoed orders shouted from the men, but after what felt like years, retreating hooves finally faded away. Reed's heart pounded as the fear he'd known as a boy threatened to drown him again. One step at a time. Get out, get a plan, get home.
He watched the woods, his hand still clamped over her mouth, and ignored her warm tears spilling over his fingers. Reed whispered in her ear as quiet as his aching throat allowed, "Do not make a sound until we are out."
He felt eyes on him. Underbrush shuffled. He did not turn to watch what could have followed as he dragged the woman through the tall wet grass, back into the valley under two moons.
Alik
Alik Iktidar folded the list of missing Efendian girls into a thick square that barely fit in a pocket now. The square felt heavier than it did the day before, and sharp edges from the additional pages cut into her fingers to remind her that she was useless. She focused on the dark mountain range outside her palace window to blot out the dread of receiving more names today.
Her skin crawled from the inky presence still lurking in her mind from the nightmare. Last night's dream was the same as the others; she chased a child through the Silos, but just as she could reach the girl, someone snatched Alik from behind. The click of her bedroom door pulled her back from rehashing all that she didn't know about her missing citizens.
