The Praegressus Project: Part One

by Aaron Hodges

  But now Liz had barely made it a month into winter, and she’d already blown it. Her teeth started to chatter as a cold wind blew down the street, and she cursed herself for forgetting to grab her holey coat as she left the bar. There would be no going back for it now. Scowling, she shoved her hands into the tiny pockets of her jeans and did her best to ignore the cold.

  Liz glanced around again as she passed beneath a flickering streetlight. The urbanites could say whatever they liked about their wealth – she still felt safer wandering the streets of any rural village than she did here. She’d taken to keeping a knife in her boot at all times. She hadn’t been troubled yet, but it paid to be prepared.

  Above, the clouds blocked out the moon and stars, and the next street lamp was a good two hundred yards away. Her heart started to race as the buildings seemed to press in around her. She picked up the pace, even as she berated herself for being paranoid.

  Reaching the next corner, Liz began to relax again as she realised it was her lane. She’d lost track of the turns, but somehow had still ended up in the right place. Pulling her hands from her pockets, she powerwalked towards the turnabout at the end of the lane. The apartment building was dark, and the only illumination was flickering streetlight hovering over the turnabout.

  Halfway down the lane, Liz caught the faint whisper of movement behind her. Goosebumps shot down her neck, but she looked back slowly, expecting to see a stray dog wandering across the road.

  Instead she found the dark shadow of a man towering over her.

  Her instincts kicked in as the man lunged for her and she lurched back. She heard a curse as his fist shot past her head, and then the weight of his body crashed into her. But she was ready, already pivoting on her heel, allowing his bulk to slide past her. As the man staggered, she drove her foot into the small of his back and sent him toppling to the ground.

  Then she was sprinting past him, eyes fixed on the light at the end of the lane, and the iron door to her apartment building. If she could just make it inside…

  Liz barely made it five steps before two men emerged from the shadows ahead of her, cutting off her escape. She staggered to a stop as they started towards her. Neither spoke, but they moved with a deliberate calm, as though they had all the time in the world to catch her.

  Ice spread through Liz’s veins as she turned to flee back down the lane, only to find the first attacker back on his feet and barring her way. For an instant she froze, her insides turning to liquid as panic took hold. It only lasted a second though – there was no time for hesitation out on the streets.

  Dropping to her knees, she inconspicuously slipped the knife from her boot, and then leapt at the first man. A low growl echoed up from her throat as her anger took light. It had already been a bad night – she wasn’t about to let these thugs make it worse.

  The man still hadn’t seen the knife, and was obviously hoping to use his bulk to subdue her. His teeth gleamed as he grinned and opened his arms to catch her. A second later he was staggering backwards, eyes blinking rapidly as he reached for the knife embedded in his chest.

  Sneering at his shock, Liz tried to yank the knife back, but he sagged to the ground before she could dislodge it. She cursed, momentarily considered going after it, and then leapt free, only for his thrashing arms to take her legs out from under her. She crashed down hard on the asphalt, her bones jarring at the impact. Fabric tore around her knees as she scrambled clear and leapt to her feet.

  She tried to run again, only for a hand to catch her by the hair and yank her back. Screaming, she twisted and swung at her assailant. Her fist went wide as the man leaned back, but her second blow caught him square in the throat. He staggered, but his grip on her hair did not loosen, and Liz shrieked as she was dragged down with him.

  Tears sprang to her eyes as she tugged back her head and felt a clump of hair tear free. Something wet and sticky trickled down her skull, but ignoring it she tried to regain her feet – only for the last assailant to tackle her from behind.

  The breath rushed from her chest as his weight drove her face first into the ground. Suddenly she found herself unable to breathe. Thrashing beneath her assailant, she tried to break free, to gulp in a mouthful of air, but his weight pinned her to the asphalt. Stars flashed across her vision as she gasped, and finally managed to suck in a breath.

  “Doctor,” she heard the man’s voice right above her head, followed by the crackle of a radio. “We have her.”

  “On my way, Commander,” a woman’s tinny voice replied from the speakers.

  Liz’s blood chilled at the voice. This was no drunken attack, no crime of opportunity. They had been waiting for her. Sucking in another half breath, she managed to croak out a pathetic cry for help. Iron fingers dug into the base of her neck and ground her face into the asphalt.

  “Quiet,” her captor growled.

  Liz stilled, even as her mind went into overdrive, seeking a way out. Her ears twitched as a distant tap-tapping echoed along the street. It took her a moment to recognise the sound. Her heart soared as she realised they were footsteps. She cried out again, louder now, and received a blow to her head for the effort. Stars swirled again as the strength fled her limbs.

  “Enough of that, Commander,” a woman’s voice came from overhead.

  For a second Liz thought she was being rescued.

  “Yes, doctor,” her captor replied.

  Liz’s hope turned to dust in the wind as she realised the footsteps had been the woman on the radio.

  “You’re sure she’s the one?” the woman asked.

  “Matches the photograph,” came the reply.

  “Excellent.”

  The sound of shoes scuffling against concrete followed. Cracking open her eyes Liz saw a sleek black pair of high-heeled shoes beside her face. They presumably belonged to the doctor, but all Liz could see of her were the shoes.

  “Please,” Liz managed to croak, “you’ve got to help me. You’ve got the wrong girl.”

  Neither of her captives spoke a word. And in her heart, Liz knew it was a lie, that her past had finally caught up with her. She’d thought she’d covered her tracks so well, moving around, shifting from town to town, using a fake name, keeping off the records. On her brightest days, she’d thought they might have finally stopped looking, that they’d given up.

  How wrong she’d been.

  She flinched as something cold and metal pressed against her neck. Gas hissed and she felt a sharp pinch, then the pressure was gone again. But now a strange warmth was spreading slowly down her spine, numbing as it went, and she realised they’d injected her with something.

  Liz knew it was hopeless, that it was already too late and the drug would soon render her helpless, but she thrashed all the same. The man holding her swore and his grip on her neck tightened, hurting her. She cursed him, calling them every filthy word she could remember, but it was useless. In close quarters, pinned on her stomach, there was nothing she could do to free herself.

  Then suddenly the iron fingers were gone, the weight on her back vanished. Hope swelled in Liz’s chest, and she struggled to sit up, to scramble to her feet and race down the lane – back to the bar, to the cold, to the countryside, anywhere but these men and the doctor.

  Instead, she found her limbs twitching uselessly, her body unresponsive, her mind falling away into a swirling darkness.

  Too late, she opened her mouth to scream.

  CHAPTER 1

  Chris let out a long sigh as he settled into the worn-out sofa and then cursed as a broken spring stabbed at his backside. Wriggling sideways to avoid it, he leaned back and reached for the remote, only to realise it had been left beside the television. Muttering under his breath, he climbed back to his feet, retrieved the remote and flicked on the television, then collapsed back into the chair. This time he was careful to avoid the broken springs.

  He closed his eyes as the blue glow of the television lit the room. The shriek of the adverts quickly followed, but he
barely had the energy to be annoyed. He was still studying full-time, but now his afternoons were taken up by long hours at the construction site. Even then, they were struggling. His only hope was winning a place at the California State University. Otherwise, he would have little choice but to accept the apprenticeship his supervisor was offering.

  “Another attack was reported today from the rural town of Julian,” a reporter’s voice broke through the stream of adverts, announcing the start of the six o’clock news.

  Chris’s ears perked up and he opened his eyes to look at the television. Images flashed across the screen of an old mining town, its dusty dirt roads and rundown buildings looking like they had not been touched since the 1900s. A row of horse-drawn carriages lined the street, their owners standing beside them.

  The sight was a common one in the rural counties of the Western Allied States. In the thirty years since the states of California, Oregon and Washington had declared their independence, the divide between urban and rural communities had grown exponentially. Today there were few citizens in the countryside who could afford luxuries such as cars and televisions.

  “We’re just receiving word the police have arrived on the scene,” the reporter continued.

  On the television, a black van with the letters SWAT painted on the side had just pulled up. The rear doors swung open, and a squad of black-garbed riot-police leapt out. They gathered around the van and then moved on past the carriages. Dust swirled around them, but they moved without hesitation, the camera following them at a distance.

  The image changed as the police moved around a corner into an empty street. The new camera angle looked down at the police from the rooftop of a nearby building. It followed the SWAT unit as they split into two groups and spread out along the street, moving quickly, their rifles at the ready.

  Then the camera panned down the street and refocused on the broken window of a grocery store. The image grew as the camera zoomed, revealing the nightmare inside the store.

  Chris swallowed as images straight from a horror movie flashed across the screen. The remnants of the store lay scattered across the linoleum floor, the contents of broken cans and bottles staining the ground red. Amongst the wreckage, a dozen people lay motionless, face down in the dark red liquid.

  The camera tilted and zoomed again, bringing the figures into sharper focus. Chris’s stomach twisted and he forced himself to look away. But even the brief glimpse had been enough to see the people in the store were dead. Their pale faces stared blankly into space, the blood drained away, their skin marked by jagged streaks of red and patches of purple. Few, if any of the victims were whole. Pieces of humanity lay scattered across the floor, the broken limbs still dripping blood.

  Finally turning back to the television, Chris swallowed as the camera panned in on the sole survivor of the carnage. The man stood amidst the wreckage of the store, blood streaking his face and arms, stained his shirt red. His head was bowed, and the only sign of life was the rhythmic rise and fall of his shoulders. As the camera zoomed on his face, his cold grey eyes were revealed. They stared at the ground, blank and lifeless.

  Standing, Chris looked away, struggling to contain the meagre contents of his stomach.

  “The Chead is thought to have awakened around sixteen hundred hours,” the reporter started to speak again, drawing Chris back to the screen. “Special forces have cleared the immediate area and are now preparing to engage with the creature.”

  “Two hours.” Chris jumped as a woman’s voice came from behind him.

  Spinning on his heel, he let out a long breath as his mother walked in from the kitchen. “I thought you had a night class!” he gasped, his heart racing.

  His mother shook her head, a slight smile touching her face. “We finished early.” She shrugged, then waved at the television. “They’ve been standing around for two hours. Watching that thing. Some of those people were still alive when it all started. They could have been saved. Would have, if they’d been somebody important.”

  Chris pulled himself off the couch and moved across to embrace his mother. Wrapping his arms around her, he kissed her cheek. She returned the gesture, and then they both turned to watch the SWAT team approach the grocery store. The men in black moved with military precision, jogging down the dirt road, sticking close to the buildings. If the Chead came out of its trance, no one wanted to be caught in the open. While the creatures looked human, they possessed a terrifying speed, and had the strength to tear full-grown men limb from limb.

  As the scene inside the grocery store demonstrated.

  Absently, Chris clutched his mother’s arm tighter. The Chead were almost legend throughout the Western Allied States, a dark shadow left over from the days of the American War. The first whispers of the creatures were believed to have started in 2030, not long after the United States had fallen.

  At first they had been dismissed as rumour by a country eager to move on from the decade-long conflict of the American War. The attacks had been blamed on resistance fighters in rural communities, who had never fully supported their severance from the United States. So the government had imposed curfews over rural communities and sent in the military to quell the problem.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the young nation had moved forward, and prospered. The pacific coast had boomed as migrants arrived from the allied nations of Mexico and Canada, replacing the thousands of lives lost in the American War.

  But through the years, reports of attacks continued, and accounts by survivors eventually filtered through to the media. Each claimed the slaughter had been carried out by one or two individuals – often someone well known in the community. One day, they would be an ordinary neighbour, mother, father, child. The next, they would become the monster now standing in the grocery store.

  It was not until one of the creatures was captured, that the government had admitted its mistake. By then, rural communities had suffered almost a decade of terror at the hands of the monstrosities. Newsrooms and government agencies had been beside themselves with the discovery, with blame pointed in every direction from poor rural police-reporting, to secret operations by the Texans to destabilise the Western Allied States.

  The government had extended curfews across the entire country and increased military patrols, but the measures had done little to slow the spread of attacks. Last year, in 2050, the first Chead sighting had been reported in Los Angeles, and was quickly followed by attacks in Portland and Seattle. Fortunately, they had yet to reach the streets of San Francisco. Even so, a perpetual State of Emergency had been put into effect.

  On the television, the SWAT team had reached the grocery store and were now gathering outside, their rifles trained on the entrance. One lowered his rifle and stepped towards it, the others covering him from behind. Reaching the door, he stretched out an arm and began to pull it open.

  The Chead did not make a sound as it tore through fthe store windows and barrelled into the man. A screech came through the old television speakers as the men scattered before the Chead’s ferocity. With one hand, it grabbed its victim by the throat and hurled him across the street. The thud as he struck the ground was audible over the reporter’s microphone.

  The crunch of their companion’s untimely demise seemed to snap the other members of the squadron into action. The first bangs of gunfire echoed over the television speakers, but the Chead was already moving. It tore across the dirt road as bullets raised dust-clouds around it, and smashed into another squad member. A scream echoed up from the street as man and Chead went down, disappearing into a cloud of dust.

  Despite the risk of hitting their comrade, the rest of the SWAT team did not stop firing. The chance of survival once a Chead had its hands on you was zero to none, and no one wanted to take the chance it might escape.

  With a roar, the Chead reared up from the dust, then spun as a bullet struck it in the shoulder. Blood blossomed from the wound as it staggered backwards, its grey eyes wide, flickering with surprise. It re
ached up and touched a finger to the hole left by the bullet, its brow creasing with confusion.

  Then the rest of the men opened fire, and the battle was over.

  CHAPTER 2

  Angela Fallow squinted through the rain-streaked windshield, struggling to make out details in the lengthening gloom. A few minutes ago the streetlights had flickered into life, but despite their yellowed light, shadows still hung around the house across the street. Tall hedges marked the boundary with the neighbouring properties, while a white picket fence stood between her car and the old cottage.

  Leaning closer to the window, Angela held her breath to keep the glass from fogging, and willed her eyes to pierce the twilight. But beyond the brightly-lit sidewalk, there was no sign of movement. Letting out a long sigh, she sat back in her seat and smiled with quiet satisfaction. There was no sign of anyone outside the house, no silent shadows slipping closer to the warm light streaming from the windows.

  At least, none that could be seen.

  Berating herself for her nerves, Angela turned her attention to the touchscreen on her dashboard. Its soft glow brightened as she tapped its screen, making her glad for the tinted windows. No one in the house would be able to see the car was occupied.

  Angela pursed her lips, studying the charts on the screen one last time. It displayed the driver’s license of a young woman in her early forties. Auburn hair hung around her shoulders and she wore the faintest hint of a smile on her red lips. The smile spread to her cheeks, crinkling the skin around her olive-green eyes.