by Unknown
I was aware of fighting all around me but I couldn’t take my eyes off the attacker. Once again he threw himself at me and his weight took us both to the ground. We rolled, clawing and scratching like kids in a playground.
Suddenly the weight lifted from me. I looked up just in time to see Prentice snap the man’s neck, as easily as if he’d been tearing a sheet of paper. He left me lying there, mouth agape, and moved along the line. Everywhere he went attackers fell before him. He moved smoothly, fluidly. They shot straight at him but he never slowed. He weaved and bobbed, lighter than any fighter I’ve ever seen, leaving a trail of dead behind.
By this time I had got myself to my feet. I moved to Prentice’s side and put a hand on his shoulder. He stood over the last of the attackers. The man lay broken like a wooden doll smashed to splinters. Prentice looked down at the body that was panting like a hot mutt. At my touch he turned and looked me in the eye. By reflex I went for the rifle — I knew that look all too well.
Once again he smiled at me. “Do you still think you’ll make it without me?”
I already knew the answer to that one.
He didn’t hang around to help us with the bodies, but that was fine by me. Like the bikers before them, we burned them at the back of Mifflin’s store, and I made sure I stayed upwind of the smell.
It was only later that I realized I had missed something important, something I had better write down here before I forget. I counted twenty marauders coming up the road. But we only burned eighteen bodies, and I’m damned sure nobody got away.
While writing this, I hear a scream, high and thin, come down from the Avery House, but I’m not daft enough to go and check it out.
From the journal of John Sharpe — January 12th 2063
I was summoned to the Avery House last night, the first time I’ve been up there since he moved in, but I fear not the last.
Bill Davis came to my door after nine o’clock. It was bitterly cold out, and he was wrapped up so that only his eyes showed.
“He wants us.”
He didn’t have to say anything else. I knew who he meant well enough, and I’d been waiting for this night since the attack on the barricades. A favour was about to be called in, and I knew for certain that I wasn’t going to like it.
I kept Bill waiting for a minute as I fetched a long hunting knife and hid it inside my parka. If he saw me do it, Bill said nothing.
It was a long walk up that hill, made longer by the foreboding that had settled in my spine. Bill didn’t speak, and that was fine by me. I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, trudging through the peculiar grey snow that had been falling for the last week or so. By the time we reached the turnoff to the Avery place, I felt like a Popsicle. Even then, I wanted to turn back to town as soon as I saw what he’d done.
The perimeter of the property, which once had a facade of a pretty white picket fence, was now a wall of thorn bushes, thick, black and strangely alive. Inside that, where there had once been lawn, was now an expanse of concrete, weathered and broken so as to resemble old stone.
The old house had also been transformed, reinforced with more stone and concrete that made turrets and balconies that towered above. I remembered Bill’s words from the summer.
He’s building a fort up there.
This wasn’t a fort. This was a castle.
The main door to the property was a thick piece of oak that looked like it had been there for centuries. There was even a bell chain to pull.
A fucking bell chain!
I felt like screaming as Bill Davis pulled it while we waited freezing on the doorstep in the increasingly heavy snow.
Finally the door swung open and we stepped into a sauna. At least that’s what it felt like at first. I saw the reason soon enough. A huge fire blazed in a solid stone fireplace big enough to walk into. Overhead, three chandeliers hung, each festooned with twenty candles, all burning. At the far end of the room, across a floor constructed of concrete blocks made to look like flagstones, Prentice sat on a large, throne-like chair. He showed no sign of getting down to greet us. Instead we walked forward.
There was no preamble.
“I want a girl,” he said. “A virgin preferably, but I know how hard that can be these days. A young girl will do — no younger than fourteen, no older than twenty. I’ll leave it up to you to choose.”
Bill moved before I could. He too had come prepared. He had a knife out and thrown before I registered it. Prentice scarcely flinched, just plucked the blade from the air like he was catching an apple falling from a tree.
Bill leapt forward, fists flying.
Prentice stopped him with a single backhand blow that sent Davis sprawling and sliding across the floor. I was still struggling to get my knife out from the folds of my jacket as Prentice came down off the throne and bent over Bill’s prone body.
For the first time he let me see his fangs.
“Is this what you want?” he said, looking straight at me. “I can take the whole town tonight … if that is what you want?”
He smiled. He knew he had me.
He moved away from Davis and sat back in the chair.
“This is how it will be,” he said, in a voice that would brook no argument. “I will protect you and feed you. The town will survive.”
“And in return?”
He smiled again. “In return, I will ask you for a favour now and again, a token of your goodwill. And you will send any travellers that come this way to see me first. As I have said already, the old ways are sometimes the best.”
Bill and I took the message back to the town and called for a meeting. And once again, it didn’t take long.
We gave him Becky McKenzie.
It’s better than dying.
But not much.
* * * * *
William Meikle is a Scottish writer with ten novels published in the genre press and over 200 short story credits in thirteen countries. He is the author of the Watchers series among others, and his work appears in a number of professional anthologies. His ebook The Invasion has been as high as #2 in the Kindle SF charts. He lives in a remote corner of Newfoundland with icebergs, whales and bald eagles for company. In the winters he gets warm vicariously through the lives of others in cyberspace.
Chelsea Mourning
By David Tocher
Stooping low in the darkness, Chelsea Mills clutched her bleeding palm and peered at the Montreal ruins through the grimy window of an abandoned pub.
Thick dust clouds and debris smudged the sky, and Chelsea thought it’d probably been months since any living thing had seen sunlight. Montreal had become a disemboweled corpse, stone and steel guts scattered amongst the bones of its streets and avenues. Skyscrapers and cathedrals no longer blocking the view, the landscape offered her a panorama of the distant St. Lawrence River, a rippling expanse of black, swirling with cross currents.
Chelsea listened to the wind, high and keening, as it rushed through the crumbled framework of buildings, spinning eddies of ash and debris into the air. She also heard the voices of the others. Fleeting words. Sentence fragments. A mostly incoherent drone.
Since childhood, she’d called them think-voices. Hearing them now, Chelsea knew she wasn’t the only person above ground; there were others nearby. Those disembodied whispers kept her pinned inside the dark building, unwilling to show herself. Of this earth, but not human — that was how the think-voices felt against her mind.
As the pain in her palm dulled from searing to a bitter throb, she considered the think-voices — how they seemed like one thing, but were really another. That reminded her of something from childhood: She’d dug a hole in her backyard with her plastic shovel. When she thought she’d uncovered a rock, she pried it out from the soil. But, unlike a rock, the object had some give. Movement. When she realized she’d unearthed a large beetle and saw its legs scrabbling at the air, she had screamed in horror.
Chelsea noticed three shadowy figures emerge fro
m the remains of a nearby building.
She sucked her breath in and held it, afraid to make a sound. Don’t be silly, she thought. The think-voices, of course they’re human. What else could they be?
But she didn’t convince herself. With good reason, too. After the world went to hell, she had seen things she could never un-see. Mummified corpses scattered in the streets. Bodies motionless, decayed clothing fluttering with the wind. Each time she pointed her flashlight at one of their faces — leathery skin stretched taut on skull, eyeless sockets, yellow-toothed mouth howling soundlessly — she saw a deathmask swimming in a sea of darkness.
What frightened her even more were the fresh bodies. The people who’d come above ground before her. She’d counted ten pale, lifeless forms, all with large puncture wounds in their throats, legs and stomachs. If those are teeth marks, Chelsea had thought, then they’re not human teeth. Animal? She doubted it.
It was as if someone had driven railroad spikes through the skin. Smeared dried blood formed straggly patterns, like brushstrokes of abstract art, the canvas their rotting flesh. It was their faces, though, that horrified her most — frozen contortions of pain that screamed a warning: Run! Get away from here! Now!
That dreadful someone’s-behind-you feeling struck like a fist. The city’s ruins came to life, taunting her. Wind-tossed newspapers scraping pavement became dragging feet; the clatter of distant rubble, a shout. She spun in circles, gasping, looking everywhere, her flashlight drawing zigzag patterns in the dark.
She couldn’t think straight. She had to find someplace to hide until her courage returned. She’d run down an alley, crawled through the transom above the pub’s backdoor, slicing her palm on a shard of glass jutting from the frame.
Now, as whispers clamored in her skull, Chelsea watched the three shadowy figures outside. She squinted, struggling to see details from the darkness. Suddenly, what she saw made her skin crawl. Not one particular thing, but a bunch of slight irregularities that, when added together, made each of their three forms seem … offish.
The backs of their skulls were bulbous, slightly larger than normal. One turned in Chelsea’s direction. She made out the eyes, bulging from their sockets. Another was female by the flare of the hips, tapered legs, rounded chest, long hair — the jaw opened wider than normal when she spoke.
But when one of them raised his hand and pointed at another, Chelsea’s crawly feeling was replaced with fascinated horror. The thumb extended past the fingers and curled into a talon. She examined the hands of all three and saw that they were the same.
Their think-voices were a cacophony of words and phrases she couldn’t string together. But after watching how they interacted, it became clear that the female was the leader.
Chelsea fine-tuned her mind to the woman’s think-voice. The others faded to faint whispers, but the woman’s echoed even louder.
Stop bleeding humans! It’s been two days since we’ve found any. We’re taking the next one we find back to the colony. Maybe they’ll know where we can find more.
One of the men barged towards her, raising his taloned fist in protest. Instantly, the woman’s arms shot out and seized his throat. She heaved him off the ground. He kicked and twisted. Chelsea wished she could hear more than one thought-voice at a time.
I’m the leader of our colony, so I’ll be giving the orders. If we don’t find more, we won’t have enough blood to feed our weaker ones.
From where Chelsea squatted in the darkness, she sensed waves of power emanating off the woman. A feeling of excitement flared inside her chest — I want that power! If I’d had that kind of power … nobody would’ve ever been able to hurt me. Or Brian.
At his name, her throat constricted. She touched the friendship bracelet on her wrist, the only thing she had to remember him by. He’d been the only man who’d ever—
Footsteps behind her. Hands seized her by the shoulders and flipped her around. She struggled in his steely grip until she saw his face. Bulging eyes. Bulbous head. Trembling, she looked at the large, taloned thumbs clutching her upper arms.
“You shouldn’t have cut yourself, girly. I could smell your blood on the wind,” he said. “If it weren’t for my orders, you’d already be dead.”
He raised one hand above his head. It swept down and struck Chelsea’s face.
Everything went black.
When Chelsea came to, she was lying on the floor of a wide cement room, torches fitted into the walls. The air, thick and clotted with burning oil, made her stomach clench. She fought back the urge to gag.
Dark shadows flickered in the orange glow. People surrounded her in a loose circle, their features offish.
The room also had a coppery smell. It vaguely reminded her of pennies, or rain, or blood. Blood! Her mind screamed the word, conjuring up the memory of a night, five years ago, when her father raped her.
On the night it had happened, she was fifteen. Chelsea, lying on her back, awoke in the darkness to her father’s hand over her mouth. Booze on his breath. His other hand roamed places on her body where no father’s hand should ever roam. His fingers probed a place no father’s fingers should ever probe.
She thrashed and kicked him where she knew it would hurt. He snatched a handful of hair and smashed her head into the wall, knocking her out.
She awoke to the smell of copper. Pain throbbed in her skull. Her father looked down at her. She heard a whisper in her mind, her father’s voice. Except his whisper said different things than what came out of his mouth.
What now? How will I tell her I’m sorry? How will I make her trust me again? Brenda can never know.
Chelsea wondered how she was able to hear his think-voice. She touched her sore head. She felt the bandage. Understanding descended.
“I can hear your think-voice, Daddy,” she said, and then, in a forceful whisper, she mimicked the tone of his thoughts: “What now? How will I tell her I’m sorry? How will I make her trust me again?”
She caught an image inside herself. A mere husk of a girl, alone, buffeted by winds of rage and hatred swirling in the emptiness.
She stared at her father and hated him.
She had wanted to drag him into the black, swirling chaos and let the rage and hatred tear him to pieces.
In the coppery, torch-lit room, Chelsea felt panic well in her chest. She was surrounded by hideous offish-people, staring down at her with bulging eyes.
She closed her eyes and remembered what Brian had taught her, months ago, when they’d taken shelter beneath the city, on that day the earth was scorched.
When you’re afraid, when you’re in danger, you have to go somewhere in your mind. The Place of No-Hurt. It could be a memory, a fantasy. Whatever makes you feel safe and strong.
Chelsea, trembling, turned within her mind.
She went to the closest thing she’d ever had to a Place of No-Hurt — a revenge fantasy. She imagined herself swinging a baseball bat, smashing her father’s face to a pulp. His screams and the sound of his splattering blood were music to her ears, a soothing ointment to her hurt and fear.
The whirlpool of reality drew Chelsea from the placid waters of her mind and back into the swirling madness of the waking world.
When she came to again in the torch-lit room, the think-voices were faint and jumbled. Her mind was weak, unable to decipher their whispers.
Her eyes opened as narrow slits and her head tilted sideways. She saw that her arm had been raised. Her eyes followed her arm to the wrist where one of the Offish-people had his mouth clamped. Blood ran down her forearm. It looked black in the firelight. The friendship bracelet, woven with green and red chevron patterns, was still on, stained. Relief washed through her. If she was going to die, she’d prefer to go out with the only object she cared about, one that helped her remember Brian.
After the night she had been raped, her father never touched her again. His glances, though, remained eager. Furtive. Sometimes her mother noticed. Why didn’t she do anything? Six month
s later, Chelsea ran away from home and hitchhiked from Ottawa to Montreal. She met Brian at a homeless shelter.
Frightened and alone, in a city where people spoke a language she didn’t understand, she was standing in line at a soup kitchen, her hands red and shivery from the nighttime cold.
“Hey, you look like you could use these,” a voice said.
She turned her head; he held a pair of gloves out towards her. Short and stocky, with a shaved head, he looked about seventeen. He wore green cargo pants and a black hoodie.
“What do you want me to do with those?” she asked, refusing to make eye contact.
“Take ‘em. If you want.”
Chelsea listened to his thoughts: Looks like a nice person. Afraid, though. Hope she lets me help her out. These streets aren’t the place for this one.
Unlike most men she’d met, his first thought had been directed at her personality, not her body. She knew his concern was sincere. But no matter how much Chelsea wanted to accept the gloves, she couldn’t.
Even her father had been capable of showing love. That hadn’t stopped him from hurting her. What would stop this stranger?
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Did I ask for your help? Now please, fuck off.”
His mouth dropped open.
As she watched him walk away, anger and sadness twisted her up inside. If only she could dare to accept someone’s kindness, let someone come close to her. At that moment, Chelsea became painfully aware that the walls she’d put up to protect herself had become a prison.
Chelsea rushed out of the line-up and sprinted towards him. “Hey. Wait! I’m sorry.”
He smiled.
She had taken the gloves. “Thanks. My name’s Chelsea. Wanna wait in line with me?”
The memory made Chelsea ache inside. Brian had taken care of her, had shown her how to survive on the streets. He was the only man she’d shared her body with that she’d trusted. And now he was gone, shot in the head because he’d caught a fever.
“We can’t let him make the rest of us sick,” they’d said. That happened after The Scorching, while people struggled to survive below the city streets, in the metro stations and tunnels.
