Something Wicked Anthology, Vol. One

by M. Scott Carter

  My neighbor, Jered McCarthy, had no clue about what I used to do. I didn't talk about it. He and I had gone hunting together, though, since food was pretty scarce for many years, unless you liked fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We got into the habit of foraging for warmer-blooded meals. We worked out a lot of tricks for when we went hunting outside Seattle, just to keep from getting fried by a Flayer. We only had to use those tricks once.

  That day, we took his sailboat around to the south part of Hood Canal and found a tributary, stowing the sails and motoring up. Olympic National Park and most of the surrounding wild areas had only been hit twice in the last twenty years, without very widespread effects. Rivers and rainstorms kept an amazing amount of wildlife there alive.

  We filled our waterbelts in the stream and strapped them on, checking to make sure the quick-release was handy to dump the water at our feet. One didn't need waterbelts while walking around town, since there were jump-pools every fifty feet or so, and little moats around every building.

  We waded upstream, hidden in the shadows of the firs and spruce looming overhead, our movement masked by the burbling of the creek. We went for about a half-mile before seeing any wildlife, spying the sudden motion of a black-tailed buck a few hundred meters inland, grazing in a small meadow. Neither one of us was good enough with a gun to make that shot, so we moved onto land. The soft carpet of pine needles hushed our footsteps as we slowly moved through the forest, closing the gap between ourselves and the black-tail.

  I lifted my gun and aimed carefully. The buck's head jerked up suddenly and my aim faltered. I glanced over at Jered to see if he'd spooked the deer somehow. He stared at the horizon. "Shit," he said. A rumbling, crackling sound finally reached us, a tidal wave of death.

  The deer was running straight toward us as fast as it could. Behind it, we could finally see the cloud of debris and dust rising from the forest as a Flayer pulse decimated the trees, an invisible Godzilla coming for us. The deer flew past us toward the creek. The pulse raged closer.

  Jered tried to scuff out a bare spot on the ground amidst the thick carpet of needles in the few seconds we had to react. We both unleashed our waterbelts as we scuffled and watched the water disappear as the needle-carpet sucked it up. "Oh, man." I glanced around to find a low branch. "There!"

  We both ran and jumped up to grab the branch, knowing we'd never make it to the creek on time. The pulse roared toward us, clouds of needles and bark explosively spraying into the air as the trees screamed in agony, a billion firecrackers tearing at our eardrums as the blinding cloud of dust rushed toward us.

  Despite the intense sensory overload, we both kept our eyes wide open as the pulse closed on us. The pulse traveled up the trees as it peeled and stripped them, moving quickly, but not so quickly that we didn't have a tenth of a second to react. The pulse passed harmlessly below us, and hit the base of the tree. We dropped from the limb. A fraction of a second later, the debris from the destroyed limb rained down on us. Timing is, as they say, everything.

  Coughing in the haze of green steam, dust, falling bark and needles, we ran for the creek. The show wasn't over yet.

  A few short years after India had been decimated, some creative death-merchant figured out that a Flayer could be set to send out repeating pulses. So, even if you had a little pool of water surrounding you, a repeater could eat away at that pool until there was nothing left to protect you. You’d be left standing on your tip-toes in a thimble of water, counting the seconds left in your life. The upside was that the pulses, somehow deriving their power from the thermal gradient of the environment through which they traveled, could only repeat about once every half-minute. Any faster, and they became too weak to kill anything. It was like the environment had to ’recharge’.

  The downside for folks running away was that the second and third and continuing pulses didn't have as much moist environment to destroy. As we ran through the dust cloud, there was no warning explosion from the trees behind us, only a soft hiss as the next wave of energy ate a little deeper into the glistening bare skins of the skeletal trees and shrubs.

  "It's a repeater! And we're not going to make the creek!"

  Jered was thinking more clearly than I was. He had his canteen out and was pouring it onto the ground as we ran. He pointed at another promising branch as we neared it. He dropped the emptied canteen onto the ground and jumped, grabbing the branch with me like a tandem choreographed flying trapeze act. The branch was still startlingly hot from the last pulse. I heard Jered gasp at the sudden pain. One of his hands slipped off and he dangled by the fingertips of his right hand. I winced and clenched harder.

  One of the agreements we had before we went hunting is that if one of us didn't make it through a Flayer pulse, the other would have to shoot him. Not a hunting trophy that I wanted to take home.

  The canteen water signaled us when the pulse arrived, blasting into steam as the pulse hit it. We dropped from the already-peeled limb and started running for the creek again.

  We ran by the black-tailed buck; screaming, dying, and flayed. It was shy of the creek by no more than ten feet.

  Getting into the creek, we watched as the pulse slammed angrily against the creekside again and again, just short of its next meal, the edge of the creek throwing off clouds of mist as it protected us. I stared at the dying deer as it squirmed amid hanging tatters of flesh. Jered lifted his rifle and carefully put a bullet in its head. The third pulse just pumped more steam out of the blacktail's carcass.

  Overhead, I heard a new sound. A Rapid Response Unit flew over us, zipping toward the source of the pulse. It was probably carrying one of the sensors I'd designed to detect the pulses. A few seconds later, there was the thump of an explosion, and the pulses stopped. The RRU's carried some nice artillery. Jered and I were bent over, hands on our knees, breathing heavily.

  "All those dumb-ass ideas we talked about worked."

  "One of them, anyway," I said.

  He grinned foolishly at me, the I-just-escaped-death-and-I'm-giddy-as-hell kind of grin. It scared me. "We're alive. Let's dress out what's left of that buck and get the hell out of here."

  We heard the staccato report of machine-gun fire not far away. "What the hell?" Jered said.

  "I guess they found the guy that put it there."

  "Shithead should have used a timer and got the hell out of here."

  I scratched my head. "Maybe he was in a hurry. Why would somebody want to use a Flayer way out here anyway? It's just animals and trees."

  "And us," Jered said. "Somebody hate you a bunch?"

  "I hope not." I stared thoughtfully in the direction of the gunfire, which had stopped as suddenly as it had started.

  We cleaned the buck, wrapped the meat, and went home, both quiet and reserved after escaping death so closely. I kept checking the sky for the Rapid Response guys as the boat puttered along, but didn't catch sight of them again, and wondered if they had been shot down. If they had, whoever had set up the Flayer really had some heavy guns. Not someone we wanted to meet.

  The news was all over when we got back, and we had a lot of heartfelt welcome-backs when our friends saw that we had escaped the pulse with our skins intact. We heard that the RRU had killed someone in the area and brought him back, but they hadn't identified him. I tapped into my headwire to scan the story, and found an aged and bullet-riddled Bernhard staring at me. Crapflakes.

  I packed my bags and left that night. Once they identified Bernhard, it was a few short steps for someone to figure out who I was. I had had the foresight many years before to get a second fake ID from Melanie's brother, and I still kept in touch with him in case something like this happened.

  Bernhard's actions remain a mystery to me. I have no idea why he'd want to track me down and kill me, or how he knew where I'd gone that day. There'd been a lot of boats out on the Sound; there always were, nowadays. Any one of them could have had Bernhard in it, following us. I'm curious, but not curious enough to put my face
on someone's radar screen by researching it. He's dead and I'm...safe, somewhat. Is that all I ever wanted out of life? Or was my research a path to glory and fame?

  I settled in Vancouver and kept my head low, doing electrical work on the side for cash. I kept away from anything to do with Flayers, although I stayed on top of the news about it. I heard that one guy tried to start a bug extermination business using Flayers; you moat the house and toss a Flayer inside. No more bugs. He was murdered before he ever got a chance to try out his idea, and no one has proposed something so stupid since.

  Yet others have tried to come up with a solid that's immune to the Flayer wave. It's the Holy Grail of anti-Flayer technology, the alchemist's dream, the shoe-sole of the future. Nobody's come close to a solution yet.

  Oddly enough, a variation on the Flayer has been independently developed into a device to effectively find underground water sources, without my involvement at all. Someone in Australia figured out a way to make a friendly version that projected a vertical, ground-penetrating wave, the very thing our own team was pursuing. It'd still blow the skin off a man, but only if he happened to be underground. Not too healthy for the gophers, though. Supposedly, it's helped out a couple of countries during drought and actually saved some lives here and there. I'm humbled and pleased, but I still have nightmares every night.

  Can the small good that’s come out of it even begin to balance the terrors that I unleashed? Can I ever really forgive myself?

  For mankind, there’s still hope. But for me? Perhaps, perhaps not. Time doesn’t really heal all wounds.

  SIX FEET ABOVE

  by Cate Gardner

  “The Devil pulled the string on his attic door and all the people tumbled down,” Pastor Baest said, recounting recent history. “Soil shot up in an almighty plume, affixing its weight to the sky and colouring the world sepia. Amen.”

  “Amen,” the children repeated.

  Allyson mouthed the word, looking at the sky through the torn church roof. The inconstant sun pressed against the dust haze. Pastor made the fall sound easy, with no calculation of personal loss. She pressed her hand to her stomach. It grumbled, echoing the ground’s rumblings. The earth no longer shifted as often as it had done in the beginning, when the world had first collapsed, although she doubted it would ever still again.

  Using a bone shard as a pencil, Allyson scratched a line on the pew in front - a calendar of sorts. According to her calculations this was the eleventh Sunday since the fall. She’d lost count of the months or perhaps years. Not that time rolled in the old-fashioned way anymore. Whatever the measurement, it felt like an age since she’d last seen Darren.

  The church bell tolled end of service and the end of their Sunday. Above, dust clouds shivered their load across the sky to block out the sun. Allyson shivered too. Cold air pressed through the holes in her moth-eaten cardigan and wind whistled through the hole in her cheek.

  Darren’s sister, Yellow-Anne, collected the hymn sheets from the children. Blood-streaks had replaced Anne’s once golden highlights and her hair hung limp over her sunken cheekbones. The children clutched her torn lace skirt and gathered about her unformed hips. They waited for Pastor Baest to lead them from church. Yellow-Anne walked with a limp. She’d shuffled along even before the fall.

  Allyson wondered why they bothered to leave at all. It wasn’t as if there was anywhere in particular to go. Their decimated town comprised the church, a broken gravestone, a quartet of trees and a crypt, a section of road, and the post office front - places she’d skipped and strolled with Darren before her cheekbones had collapsed and worms had nested in her belly. Their town ended behind the church.

  Pastor stepped from his pulpit.

  His cassock moth-bitten into a cape and his words stolen from a cult-leader’s manifesto, Pastor Baest had fashioned his exposed bones and brain into a superhero’s guise, but his rotting guts spoke otherwise. All the same, Yellow-Anne followed him, and the children and the bell ringer, Bill, followed her. Allyson was last to leave. By the time Allyson had entered the remains of the graveyard, Pastor Baest had locked himself in the crypt.

  Time no longer measured in seconds, minutes or hours, its calculations were now wrought from the gaps between earth shudders. Allyson waited four earth shudders before approaching the crypt. She pressed her eye to the keyhole, then, unable to see anything, pressed her ear to the thick wood. The wind whistled. Beneath her, the ground rocked, urging her away from its edges. Allyson rejoined the children, who sat on the grass outside the church. This decimated world broke her heart. She hoped it broke the children’s hearts too, but feared it didn’t.

  Yellow-Anne clutched her ragdoll body and pressed her bony back to the church wall. She rubbed her lame leg, a sneer twisting her thin lips. The girl no longer looked like her brother Darren--another death of sorts. At Yellow-Anne’s disfigured feet, a girl poked and pulled at a boy’s intestines, as if hoping to unravel them to use as skipping rope. Otherwise, there wasn’t much else for them to play with. The edges of the hopscotch squares, which they’d chalked several shudders ago, had crumbled into the abyss. Allyson looked at the trail of intestines. The remains of her stomach churned, disturbing the children with its rumble.

  She pressed her finger to her lips. “Shush,” she said.

  Moving to the edge of their world, Allyson lay on her belly and looked down at what they called Hell. The long-dead swarmed. Ripped from their graves with the first shudder, their embalmed bodies didn’t rot like hers. Allyson parted her hair and pressed her fingers to the hole in her skull. Below her, other ants swarmed. The fresh dead, the broken and perhaps the living (someone had to have survived), were busy constructing barricades to keep the true zombies out. The ones who had died and been buried before the fall. Allyson thanked the Pastor’s god. Up here, the remains of their world may be small, but at least their infection did not give way to apocalyptic madness. She looked towards the silent crypt. Except for the Pastor, and he was an all-too-human sort of monster. The quake had not fashioned him.

  Allyson sat and dangled her legs over the edge. The drop was forty foot and pitted with handholds. If the long-dead chose to climb, Allyson and the children would make a paltry meal. In the distance, what remained of the city poked defiantly above the caverns, pressed against the horizon, metal on smoke. Skyscrapers listed at unnatural angles. Allyson suspected the city wouldn’t stand much longer. When the skyscrapers fell, the old world would be truly gone.

  “Come away from the edge,” Bill, the bell ringer, shouted. The man never ventured further than the church door, clinging to its wood as if he believed God still lived within. “You're scaring the children.”

  A girl with hollow eye sockets looked up at Bill. “I'm not scared, sir.”

  “None of us are,” Yellow-Anne said, spitting out the words. “You're the one squealing, Bill.”

  Darren would have admonished his sister.

  Allyson stood, brushing dust off her hands. “How about we hijack the church organ and have us some hymnal karaoke.”

  “You’ll bring the house down,” Bill said.

  “Perhaps that’s my intent,” Allyson said, ushering the children inside the church.

  Despite the attempt at life inside and the continued shudders, the church didn’t crumble. Pastor Baest stood in the church doorway, a ghost of his former self, his cassock flapping from his bony shoulders. She’d lost count of the shudders since he’d locked himself in the crypt and they’d danced into church. There’d been no Sundays in between and looking at the weight of the dust-filled sky, Allyson feared they’d seen the last of them. A sigh rushed through the cracks in her jawbone. Sometimes she wanted the world done.

  “Allyson, come with me,” Pastor said.

  The blind child clutched Allyson’s skirt. “It will be okay, pet,” Allyson said, uncurling the girl’s fingers from her thigh and trying to ignore the snap of their bones. She’d have kissed the girl’s fingers if she’d had lips.

 
; Allyson and Pastor Baest formed a solemn procession as they walked the short distance between church and crypt. Across the road, the post office had fallen from the edge and in the distance, a lone skyscraper poked towards an empty sky. When had the others fallen? At times, it seemed what remained was all there ever was.

  Taking the key from his belt, Pastor Baest unlocked the crypt door. She wondered why he’d bothered to lock it. It wasn’t as if the dead could crawl out. Or so she believed. The door creaked open to reveal an almost empty space. Most of the crypt had tumbled into the abyss, opening their town to Hell and its inhabitants. Only the stone steps remained and they formed a jagged pathway between worlds.

  “Sometimes we have to face our temptations,” Pastor Baest said. “Overcoming them makes us stronger.”

  She had no temptations left to battle. She’d left want behind in the old world.

  The steps ended at an iron gate that had buckled with the shifting earth - a barrier between here and there. On the other side, a dead girl moaned. The girl’s milky eyes turned to them, her head perched on fractured shoulders. Loose black thread dangled in place of eyelashes. Allyson had never known the dead to wander so close. Usually they foraged far from where Allyson’s town rested. The girl stood, leaving an arm behind on the rock where she’d sat, and held out a spool of cotton and a needle, as if she expected them to sew her together. Pastor Baest grabbed her thin wrist and stole the needle and thread. The girl scratched his forearm, causing him to drop her things. Allyson picked them up. The Pastor turned and hurried Allyson up the steps.