Other Dangers: Slipped Through

by Amanda M. Lyons

  When a few hours had passed like this, she stood and threw water on the fire, walking away. He threw his backpack on and followed; he hadn’t needed to be told what she wanted him to do.

  Soon it began to rain again, humid and soft as last night’s had been cold and sharp. The fog banks returned as they walked. They didn’t rest for several hours, and even then, briefly. They didn’t speak, eating rabbit jerky and dried fruit even though neither of them wanted it, at midday.

  The smell of warm summer rain and fertile soil rose around them, the taste of it in the fog as it baked in the occasional rise of the sun through the clouds. The land spoke of renewal and refreshment, but this reached neither of them. Henry watched the ground before him, and Abby the ground before her, silent.

  Chapter Seven:

  Fire on Babylon

  When they finally set camp it was well into evening; the darkness implied midnight, but he knew that it must be closer to three a.m. The chill hadn’t yet worked its way out of his system and today’s moisture hadn’t helped. He was shirtless and had no way to remedy it, having lost it during the storm. It wasn’t a surprise then, when he felt the cold begin to add itself to the chill in his bones, for his shiver to become something more like a shimmy that jittered him even as he walked. The sun and warmth of the air helped but weren’t enough on their own to make the ache and cold slip away and leave him feeling secure. Of course, not all of it was physical, he supposed. What was it that pushed her? What was it that I did? Was it really me? Was it…?

  The still silence of the day was wearing on him even if he understood why it was there. What could he say after all that had happened that night? What could he even think about it? What was there to explain the feelings involved? He’d been a victim of an attack, that much he got, but it was impossible to pin his…his confusion and everything else on her. At least not all of it. Was that some sort of breakdown? Is she crazy? Am I...Am I safe?

  It’d been more than twenty-four hours since they’d last spoken. If there had been others to speak with he might have let the need to speak, the need to connect go when it came to her, but they were alone, he was tired, and he felt the weight of the day dragging on him.

  “How far is it to the next town?” That was a safe question, right? He didn’t look up as he spoke, keeping his eyes locked on the fire, where they’d been for the last few minutes. His voice was soft and tentative as he poked at the fire with a stick. He didn’t like the quaver, the uncertainty that colored the phrase, but there wasn’t much he could do to change it. He could only wait to see what would happen.

  There was continued silence for a long while, maybe as long as ten minutes, and then she coughed before she opened her mouth to speak.

  “It’s about twenty miles to the next human, and twelve to the next hybrid.” She sounded as listless and shocked as he felt. She’d obviously gone much farther beyond her boundaries than she’d ever intended to go and more than she ever meant to do again. An unbearable tension followed her words, dense and thick like last night’s fog. An uncomfortable guilt rose in him unbidden as he took all this in, the need to connect and soothe as demanding as the ache and confusion over what had happened, what had been done to him. His mouth opened as he struggled to think of what else he could say in this unpleasant space, but nothing came.

  Not daring to do more than dart a quick glance at him, she stood and picked up her shotgun, leaving him to his thoughts as she walked into the surrounding woods to hunt- for meat or for protection? He didn’t know. He listened to the woods around him, the closest thing to calm he’d been since the other night now that she’d left him alone. There was guilt in that too.

  It had been horrible, jagged, and rending as old razors in his mind when he dared to think around the attack, the events that had come before not much better. When he’d come here he’d been an arrogant prick, fat on suburban life, now here he was; hugely humbled, losing weight, and struggling with his emotions.

  Night birds hooted and tittered in the night. Humid and sweet smelling as a greenhouse, the wood was a paradise. This was a wild and uncontrolled place, far beyond the suburban order he’d known all his life. It wasn’t just all the trees or the animals, it was the people too. They wore such masks, lived as jungle wary predators; panther, snake, and bird and tried to live in a world that, in most ways, was beyond their understanding. Here was a humid rainforest in which creatures flourished, natural and unnatural alike, coexisting in some strange new blend of real and unreal, human society and old world survivalism. Gone were the trappings of civilization and excess that he’d known, what remained built upon by the new world which utilized what could be, and then discarded the rest. Clearly time had passed since those things had mattered; dim, rusted, and broken remnants stood here and there in the landscape and that was all, like the road beneath him and the vine-choked road sign ahead. They were the markers, the tombstones of the dead thing human civilization had become and nothing more.

  The few people left clung to each other, seeking protection in numbers rather than the comfort of companionship. They were survivors, a pack in which to dwell, not free from the chance of possible shameful and violent death, but just far enough beyond it to hope for some sort of stability by membership in the tribe. Here childbirth had become a frightening and horrible event, abortion or infanticide an inevitable indignity unless the rare human child was born, still as pained and possibly deadly as the more common pregnancies. Monsters ran screaming from themselves, tearing each other apart as often as they devoured or raped the surviving humans. This was the wildwood and he had landed in its center, lost his wife and had his smugness torn from him as he followed this woman in the hope that he might reach home. To call it surreal and unimaginable somehow managed to understate the effect.

  Worse, beyond all these things there were secrets, monstrous and barbaric; they told the tale of how this world had changed, gone mad and accepted its own hideous fate. Henry craved them, wanted to find truths simply for the sake of understanding, though he would never truly know it as they did. The call to gain access to the backpack still remained, was almost an anchor keeping him here with more weight than even the knowledge that he had no hope of surviving to reach the place where Abby meant to take him for the journey home without her knowledge and skill to get him there.

  Abby was gone, off hunting or scouting, but he didn’t think to go after the bag, knowing that such a thing would probably be unwise. She had shown him her ability for hiding, the silent steps she could take, and he knew she might use them to prevent his search and discovery just as easily. He didn’t want to be trapped as he was before, attacked and threatened by this woman he had come to depend on for his very life. So he listened to the wood; the night birds sighed, the insects made their myriad sounds, and the other forest inhabitants roared, distantly bedding down in the cooler hours before dawn. A subtle breeze eased over the trees and plants, touching on his growing beard.

  It was calm in this place, disquietingly so, and he waited in that silence uncertain about everything.

  Chapter Eight:

  I’ll Remember

  When Abby returned, he opened his eyes. He had allowed his mind to drift into sound and he knew when she started back in this direction, though he sensed her rather than hearing her. He supposed it was a sort of meditation and therefore a bit risky, but his awareness had remained and so he let any anxiety over the risk go. He said nothing to her and looked away from Abby almost as soon as he saw her. The memory of the attack was in this motion, her shudder, which Henry caught from the corner of his eye, was as well.

  The sound of movement followed. She was getting her catch from the woods, another rabbit, and securing it to cook over the fire. He wasn’t sure what to do now, restless and insecure in her presence. Dimly he wondered if she saw the redness that crept over her cheeks, thought that this was likely and that she felt it was pointless to try to hide it. Needing to find something to look at, he got his pack and drew out one of
the books Benjamin had given him. It was a book of poultices and infusions, a first aid book from more archaic times in his own world. He stared at the words and through them, not taking any of it in but the pictures.

  Abby stirred the fire with a stick, attempting the same restless disinterest he was, just as uncomfortable and confused. She cleared her throat as if to speak and the silence edged in, pregnant with its emptiness until he was sure he’d scream if she didn’t talk.

  “I-I God-I-I didn’t mean it! It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me that night and I wanted it to stop!” She looked at him then, her face curled in regret, uncharacteristic tears in her eyes and running down her cheeks. “But I couldn’t! There’s something in me! Something I’ve never understood, that drives me to…I never wanted any of this. All I wanted was to get you and your wife home. Before this place changed you, before…before I could change you…”

  “Too late.” The words came out before he’d even thought about them, the cynicism in them born of the terrible events these last few days, but most certainly spoken by the suburban tyrant he’d thought he’d left behind. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her, if there were so many other monsters, why not another within? It was resentment that spoke, and exhaustion both physical and emotional.

  “Yes, I know,” she said quietly. Regret made her silent, the few tears left wiped away with a swift brush of her hand.

  “What happened to you? To Pereneaux? To everyone here?” He sensed that she wouldn’t answer, felt it in his bones, but he did it anyway. He wanted to shock her, make her hurt a little for what she’d done, with or without the aid of another.

  An edge of anger and suspicion crept into her remorse. “No. No, I won’t tell you that! I can’t. I won’t.” For a moment she became the animal again, dangerous and beautiful at once, then it was gone. “I don’t want to change you. What will you do when you go back? How can you face your daughter when you don’t feel as she does in your home? What will you say when you can’t settle there anymore? This place grows on you. In you.”

  Henry looked up from his book and closed it. What was the point in pretending to read it now? “How do you know all of that hasn’t happened already? Maybe I can’t go back now.”

  She shook her head, her ponytail wagging as she moved in denial. “No, you’ve changed, but not so much that you can’t feel the person you were, or the place that is your home. You want to go back; I can see it in your eyes. The hollow fear that haunts them even after all you’ve already seen.”

  A distant sound caught her attention and made her head jerk in that direction, a thud and a crash that carried through the woods and chased away all concern with the conversation. Drawing her gun, she leapt to her feet, scanning the woods on either side. Henry felt it too, had felt it when Abby had gone. Whatever it was, it was still waiting, and maybe it meant to attack. The air was heavy with the sudden edge of silence, deadly and deep, the small animals sensed the danger and sought invisibility in stillness. Fear floated on the air, a tang of choking electricity on the wind. With their guns drawn, Abby and Henry waited, sure of a danger too close to be illusory.

  Like daggers, the edges of tension and fear ran along Henry’s spine. Suddenly sharp cold ran into his bones, nearly twice as penetrating as that of this morning, and soon, far worse. With a certain knowledge he felt it had been there that night, that it had taken their strange encounter in and waited until now to make its presence more clear. It had watched as Abby tore at him, mad and attacking him in the boggy and senselessly strange night, watching it all and smiling.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, confusion crumpling her features. The lie was clear in her words, but it was a lie that she meant for her own ears as much as his. She didn’t want to believe what she thought.

  The silence grew harsh and drilling in the misty humidity of the night. A time like hours passed, though Henry never knew how long it really was. And then, out of nowhere it was gone, not for good, but for now. As surreal as anything else in this place.

  Chapter Nine:

  Careless Whisper

  When dawn came they broke camp and started out. They were as silent as they’d been on their previous walk. Though the tension wasn’t gone, it had been diminished by the certainty of the other somewhere beyond their vision. The other who might have been the source of it all now left them more united by its presence.

  What did she think it was and why did it seem impossible for her assumptions to be right? I know she doesn’t want me to know so much of what goes on here but this feels like it’s something I have to know for my own survival, to keep her stable too. Damn it, I need to get a hold of that thing and figure this out. As seemed to be a constant now, Henry’s thoughts were drawn back to the backpack and its contents. What if all of her secrecy got them killed? What if she had another attack of whatever it was that happened the other night and it was worse? How could he prepare for it if he didn’t know why it happened, or the signs it would? He had to gain access to that information, to protect himself if nothing else, but how? He knew that it would be a long time before he could have another shot at it and so he debated how to go about it when he had the chance, but the need to have answers to questions like these made the pull that much stronger. It was only a matter of time before he sorted out how to get his hands on it, he just had to figure out how to make it happen.

  The day was much clearer and sunnier than it had been the last few days, but the humidity and temperature were higher as well, nearly suffocating in their intensity. Even so, by the time noon had come, they’d traveled an uneasy fifteen miles through the hybrid territory and just barely out of it. The lack of encounters in that time was a great relief after all that had happened with that first one, and now the attack and last night’s frightening presence. In some ways Henry wondered if it were the influence of that other which protected them today, some control it held over the other monsters that declared them off limits. Of course, it also helped that they were being very careful as well. Abby hadn’t even needed to ask him to be quiet, he was too busy with his own thoughts to be asking her things as they moved, and reticent to prod the tangle of discomfort and horror the attack had caused. The reality was that the silence was beginning to seem normal now, safer. This didn’t mean he wasn’t alert and conscious of the potential threat however. Though they were out of zombie territory, Henry clung to every sound he heard, picking it over for signs of something other than the normal sounds he’d adapted to over time. He remembered his imprisonment and the attack that had come before it quite clearly and the weight of that other seemed to promise there could be more in store in time.

  Time passed in a haze, the weight of it too far distant to tell just how much was spent as they moved. It made it all too easy to get buried in thought while he waited for some sign they would come to stop and rest. Henry certainly had enough to consider. What would he do when they asked about Rachel? What would he say when the authorities asked where they’d gone and why? When it came time to answer for the absence of his wife’s body, was there anything he could say? Certainly, he would be the first person to be considered a suspect in her death and disappearance. He’d have to answer for it all somehow and what could he answer with when he did? How would he relay all of this to his daughter? Would she be able to see him and not a monster, a liar who took her mother from her? Could he be a better father when he felt that being such a person had been a lifetime ago? Would he survive to get that far? Was this woman sane? Was he? Over and over, these things ran through his mind, the possibilities droning in and out with all sorts of variables for each of them filling his thoughts.

  The only way he knew the day was passing was by the slow progression of heat over his flesh and then the temperature falling away by degrees. Thankfully, by the time they reached the village it was nearing nightfall, and cooler, if only a little less unbearable. The deadly noises of the woods were sharper and more irritable tonight, the monsters in the depths a
s restless as any human gagging in the oily, desolate air.

  The world was a choking blur in Henry’s vision, hazy with the mire of a hellish day’s sweat and the moisture of an unbearable humidity. Rivulets of sweat poured over him, making his clothes cling like a second skin and weighing him down as he walked.

  The village, when he saw it, seemed like a beacon in the dense mist that permeated its tents and huts as deeply as the wood. Torches stood on all sides, making it something of a target for the creatures, and that gave him pause. Considering his own discomfort, he had to wonder if they were likely to attack on a night like this, out of irritation if for no other reason.

  Abby stepped ahead of him and into the village, and as he watched, her form became nothing more than a shadow once they had a few feet between them.

  “Who’s out there?” A voice yelled from the lights, and Henry jerked at the sound of it, so strangely loud after so long without words. The command of it could only add to the effect, an edge of warning making it clear that they were likely to be addressed as enemies if they didn’t make themselves clear soon enough. Henry couldn’t say he blamed them in this place; it was not only wise but necessary to wield such caution. Before he could do more than draw a breath to respond, Abby spoke for them.

  “It’s Abigail, and I have a guest along. If you see anything else then it’s not mine.” Henry listened closely to the world around him. His eyes told him there was nothing where the light didn’t penetrate the fog and allow some of the shapes to come through, but her words and the lack of visual certainty had him on edge, his nerves giving a shiver as he strained to hear.

  “Come closer to the light. I have to be certain.” There was a brief silence from the guard and then a figure moved silently toward him. At first he stiffened, his hand on his weapon but not quite grabbing it for fear of being fired on himself if it was one of the guards. In a moment, light from one of the torches slipped across their features and he saw that it was Abby. His anxiety didn’t resolve itself completely as shadows of the attack slithered through his mind, but he softened his stance as she drew near.