He brought his T-shirt up to his face and followed the staircase, trying to take shallow breaths. The smell was getting worse, and it was darker here too. He turned on the flash and fired off a few more shots. These kind of photographs—basically graphic images of faeces—were obviously not part of his assignment, but if Anthropology Quarterly wasn’t interested in a community of feral animals living in the desert, someone out there would be. It could even be his masterpiece . . .
At the top of the stairs, he stopped.
This floor was not like the others.
Instead of being separated into smaller, more domestic-size spaces, it had been left open, spanning the entire length of the building. It’s domed ceiling and elaborate tiling made the grand entranceway look meek by comparison. The morning light poured into the space like condensed electricity, and at the very far side was the faded and lopsided remains of a throne.
But none of this is what caught Noah’s attention. Noah was looking at the pit.
It formed the centrepiece of the room, and was about half the size of a swimming pool. It was overflowing with the bones of animals, stripped clean of all but the grizzliest flesh and cartilage.
Surrounding it, were the cats.
Hundreds of them.
Most lay together in groups, basking in the sun, their bodies moulding themselves into the shape of the light from the windows. Others walked lazily across the room, stopping only to gnaw on unidentifiable hunks of flesh from the pit.
The aroma was unbearable, and in a few places, he could make out the near-liquid corpses of dead cats as they lay rotting in the heat, the sickly-sweet smell of their decomposition clinging to the inside of his throat like honey, despite the T-shirt.
Next to him, stretching all the way to the far wall, lay what he could only describe as a pile of cats. Fat, hairless babies mewled and sucked at their mother’s teat, their bodies—easily in the hundreds—overlapping until the whole thing looked like one disgusting alien organism, pink and hairy and matted with the offal of birth. The creature pulsated in waves and breathed as one. He suppressed a gag and looked back in the direction of the pit. Behind it, right at the back of the room, on the remnants of the throne, three cats were trying to fornicate with each other at the same time.
Noah stood in the doorway and took it all in. It was creepy. It was bizarre. It was absolutely fucking satanic. He lifted the camera to his face and framed the shot.
This could be the one.
As the shutter fell, the flash from the end of his camera exploded, sending dazzling white light into the far reaches of the room.
Five-hundred pairs of eyes turned to see the intruder. He froze.
What now?
That’s when they began to move.
It was slow at first, their heads and eyes continuing to stare as their bodies rose. It was as if they were synchronised, all the animals moving, no, hunting, as one.
The mass rising was slow enough for a cartoon image to come to his mind; he would back out of the room with his hands up saying nice kitty . . .
They began to move faster, a few chosen leaders seeming to set the pace for the others. Noah could only stare at them, struck by the absurdity of his situation. Was he about to run from a group of cats that were no larger than Larry, who was probably sitting in his apartment right now, happily munching on a dish of cat-food laid out by Mrs. Krasnik from Flat 308?
Quite possibly.
The red mouths within the fleshy pink thing began to wail, as if sensing their broken sanctuary. It was a high-pitched sound, and the volume of their combined mewling was deafening. Noah put his hands against his ears. The movement was sudden, and the other cats took this as their signal, beginning to charge towards him proper, their yellow teeth bared in anger.
Or hunger.
Noah did not stay to find out which it was. He turned and bolted down the stairs.
He was almost halfway around the first spiral when he felt a weight hit the back of his pack. The sudden force made him miss the next few steps, and he tripped, regaining his balance with the help of the balustrade and ignoring the pain in his leg. He was pretty sure it was bleeding again, but was too busy trying to shake off the creature on his pack to care.
Three white hot scalpels pierced the flesh on the back of his neck, gouging at him. He screamed out in pain and threw the bag over his left shoulder, catching it on his right. The animal came with it, but so did a large portion of his neck. He had just enough time to see the red and white chunk, still attached to the animal’s claws, as he swung the pack into the nearest wall. He heard a crunch of bone and was hit with a gust of rotting meat as the breath was expelled from the animal. It dropped from the pack.
He kept moving. Behind him, he could hear them getting closer.
The blood was hot and wet on his back, but he ignored it.
He turned in time to see another cat sail through the air, it’s claws drawn, its whiskers taut, and its eyes alive with hunger. He sidestepped it, and watched as it cleared another ten steps, landing awkwardly on the ledge below him. It was apparently un-phased, and tried to leap again as he passed. This time, he saw it coming, and kicked.
“Fuck you!” he shouted as his foot connected with its head. It soared through the air again, this time its body spinning gracelessly and its legs splayed out limply. At the bottom, he passed it for a second time—its head at an impossible angle halfway up the first step—but hardly looked at it.
As he ran, his head was filled with the images of the decaying animals he had seen upstairs. The pit. The birthing creature. The claw marks on the drapes. What was going on here? A rabies outbreak of some kind, maybe? Cats just didn’t behave like that normally, did they?
It didn’t matter. The only important thing was that they would not follow him out onto the sand; not if last night was anything to go by.
He continued to run, all the way across the hallway and then down the next flight of steps, the camera beating against his chest as it swung from his neck and the pack digging further into his back. His leg felt weak, too, and he began to slow.
He risked a look back, and saw that they were no longer in pursuit. There was not a sign of fur in sight, and the sounds were now distant.
He stopped, resting his hands on his knees and leaning on the wall. Around him, the air once again danced with dust motes, and he watched as each ragged breath sent them scattering.
He considered pulling the water from his pack—god knows he needed it—but decided to push on instead. The sooner he was out of here and on his way to a doctor, the better.
The next three floors passed without incident. He could still hear the cats as they moved, but their wailing and shuffling was still distant. His progress was slow now, and his neck was on fire.
In front of him was a long corridor, the final one before the stairs to the main entrance. He began to walk down it, using the wall to steady himself, again wondering what kinds of diseases lay under the claws of a feral cat.
This wouldn’t have happened if Amy was here, he thought, his foot dragging beside him as he inched down the impossibly long corridor, the same image he had pictured the night before. In a way, it was her fault. If she was here, she would never have let things get this far. He may not have listened to her at first, obviously, but eventually . . .
A noise, closer now.
He took another step and then stopped.
From around the corner came a stampede of slender hairy bodies. They raced towards him, their ranks as wide as the corridor would allow, leaping and clawing and hissing and weaving, clamouring over each other to get to him first. On the ledges around the top of the corridor, the animals charged in single file. He watched with dumb disbelief as one of them fell, disappearing into the undulating sea of matted fur as it coursed towards him.
Ambushed, he thought. What the fuck?
There was no other way down but through them.
Spreading his legs a little, he slid the travel pack off his sho
ulder and held it like a weapon, both straps firmly clasped in the super strength grip of adrenaline.
He began to run towards them, swinging the bag like a golf club.
He hit the first three cats dead on, sending them scattering amongst the others. He continued running, feeling the crunch of a tiny ribcage beneath his feet, lifting the pack high above his head for another swing.
As he did so, an animal with long, dust-coloured hair latched onto his thigh, sinking it’s claws into his flesh. It hung from the perforations in his flesh, and he brought the pack down on it. Just before impact, he saw that the bag had picked up a passenger from the ridge above, and the two cats hit each other back to back, their eyeballs bulging and their bones contorting. They both fell.
He was halfway to the stairs now, and ducked to avoid four sets of barbed paws as one of the animals leapt from the upper ridge. It sailed above his head, but he did not stop to see where it landed.
They were getting more frantic now, becoming aware, maybe, that their dinner was about to escape out of the front door.
He felt an intense and sudden pain in his left ankle, and looked down to see one of the animals with its teeth sunk as far as his bone. He kicked out, but it hung onto him the way he had seen lions hang onto antelope in those nature documentaries. He felt the skin rip and screamed out in agony.
They were all over him now, and he was still trying to kick the one on his ankle off when three more white hot balls of pain erupted across his body. He looked down to see a cat that had its teeth deep into his right forearm. He grabbed at its head and lifted it out of his flesh, blood beginning to flow from the two holes in his skin. He threw it into the wall and kept moving.
Somewhere, deep beneath the pain, panic, and adrenaline, he realised he had made it to the top of the stairs.
He began to descend, and as he did so, they leapt from the higher ground, latching onto his exposed flesh with claw and fang. He screamed out in agony and bent over suddenly, throwing several of the cats from his skin.
He tried to swing the pack again, but it had become too heavy to lift, and he dropped it. He felt a sudden warmth on his neck as one of the cats clawed at the still-fresh wound that lay there.
The cats were all over him again now, and the next thing he saw were three, dirty pearl-coloured claws, lashing out towards his eyes. The paw reached its target, raking across his forehead and right eye, making him feel as if his face was being pressed into a bed of nails.
He lifted his arms involuntarily, but the weight of the cats that hung from them made it too much, too heavy, and all he succeeded in doing was widening the lacerations.
He felt a furry wetness on his face and clamped his teeth down instinctively. His mouth was suddenly filled with hot coppery liquid, and he spat out a chunk of warm wet flesh. Through a blinking, blood-filled left eye, he saw that it was a cat’s snout, the little pink nose still twitching in the sand. The rest of the creature fell from his chest, the gap in the middle of its face filling with thick black liquid.
He was at the bottom of the stairs now, and a shaft of brilliant, golden light filled the entrance, a luminous path to the desert beyond.
He took a step forward and fell, feeling more bones crunch beneath him.
Within seconds, the rest of the brood were on him.
He tried to fight back, but the fight had left.
He fell forwards into a bed of matted fur, feeling the animals underneath him claw and scratch at his chest and groin as they tried to escape from the combined weight above them. His stomach tore and he heard the contents spill into the sand below.
He experienced his final thought in darkness. It was one word, and did nothing to comfort him.
Amy.
Ryan Fitzpatrick lives and writes in the UK. The Sarāya is his second published work.
WAX SOLDIERS
by Kurt Newton
The landscape was a maze of abandoned buildings and cobblestone alleyways. Heaps of rubble forced Simms to navigate through a crumbling tenement in the hope of reaching his checkpoint. He had become separated from his unit, but it wasn't the first time he had found himself in enemy territory outnumbered and outgunned.
Simms climbed through a blast hole in the building's south wall and stepped into another narrow alleyway. The alley brought him to the edge of a courtyard. He stopped to listen for the march of foot soldiers, and was about to break into the open when he heard a tumble of brick from behind. He wheeled, gun raised. It was one of them—tall, thin, dressed in black body armor, black boots, black face shield. The face shield was contoured to mimic human features, yet designed to render them featureless, uniform, indistinguishable from each other.
Simms shot, his reflexes responding to the sudden threat. The soldier landed in a sitting position against the rubble, the bullet piercing the combatant's faceplate. Simms walked over and lifted the mask. The face beneath was just as featureless. As Simms examined the soldier for intel, the head wound began to close. Soon, there would be nothing of the wound but a small circular blemish. Simms didn't wait around. The gunshot had drawn attention.
He scrambled out into the open and ducked behind a debris pile: the remains of what was once a church. A stone cross jutted from the pile like the mast of a sunken ship. Pieces of stained glass littered the ground.
Three soldiers marched into view.
Simms checked his gun clip. Only one round left. It could have been a hundred for all it mattered. He had shot at them before. The bullets tugged at their uniform but they just kept coming.
Simms surveyed his surroundings. There was an abandoned truck ten yards away, its engine compartment destroyed by a grenade, however its gas tank appeared intact. Simms hoped this to be so. It was his last chance. He waited for the soldiers to pass near the truck, took aim and fired.
The truck lifted off the ground, exploding in a fireball. The soldiers lay lifeless beneath a rain of shrapnel. Simms should have run, but instead he approached the burning wreck and the bodies that lay beside it. Each of the soldiers had been burned by the blast—uniform charred and smoldering, face gone, wiped clean by the flames.
Simms worked quickly, collecting weapons and ammo. When the heat became unbearable, he stepped back, but it wasn't soon enough. His hand began to drip, the skin sloughing off. He stepped back further and the dripping slowed, then stopped altogether. Almost immediately, the damaged skin began to regenerate, filling in the portions he had lost.
By now, the enemy soldiers were nearly unrecognizable as men, just clothing resting atop puddles of liquid slag. But Simms knew, once the truck had burned itself out, they too would return to what they were. It was the way of war; it was never-ending.
Simms looked toward the sky to check the position of the sun. He then chose a direction and fled before more soldiers arrived.
Simms reached his checkpoint by sundown rejuvenated, ready for the next battle.
Kurt Newton’s dark fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Weirdbook, Dark Discoveries, and Shroud. He is the author of two novels, The Wishnik and Powerlines. He is a lifelong resident of the Connecticut woods.
BEQUEATH
by G.A. Miller
3:02 AM
Mark Baker gasped loudly, waking from the nightmare. The same nightmare that haunted him since it happened, so long ago.
He was in the shower after gym class, his eyes closed as he washed his hair, trying to prevent the shampoo from getting into his eyes and stinging them.
Suddenly, he was pushed hard from behind, the force causing him to slip and fall on the wet tiles. He rubbed his eyes with his fingers, opening them to see a circle of wet feet surrounding him.
The first stream of hot urine hit his face, causing him to gag and squeeze his eyes closed as the other streams began, all aiming for his head, his face. He opened his mouth to cry for help, and one of them scored a bullseye, right in his mouth. He retched and gagged, vomiting on the floor, as they all laughed while emptying their bladders.
; In his nightmare, those bladders never seemed to empty, their urine hot enough to burn his skin. Then, the cleansing water from the shower heads all turned into forceful yellow jets of boiling hot urine, his skin blistering as he flailed helplessly on the floor before them.
He sat up, tears running down his face, and went into the bathroom, ashamed that he now had to empty his own bladder.
Monday had arrived.
Mark Baker wasn't the sort of man to stand out in a crowd. Slender build, average height and coloring. No distinct features to speak of, he naturally blended into the background of any surrounding.
He lived quietly, renting a small apartment for himself, working as a bookkeeper in a large company, just another faceless occupant in a cubicle. He had no close friends, never really did, having been the preferred target of every bully in every school he'd ever attended.
That harsh childhood taught him to keep quiet, to look down, and try not to be noticed—traits he'd kept as an adult. It also fueled a very deep-seated hatred for the world in general, which he wasn't even consciously aware of, having accepted his fate long ago.
The last time he'd tried to become friendly with one of his co-workers, he later overheard her talking to a friend, describing Mark as "having the personality of an orphaned sock." A bright flare of anger briefly burned inside him, but then he silently sat in his cubicle, blushing furiously, waiting until she'd left the office before gathering his things to go home. He understood he simply didn't know how to socialize, never having had the chance to learn when he was growing up.
But understanding didn't lessen the pain and embarrassment.
He caught the 5:17 bus, as he usually did, and had a window seat. He opened the newspaper in his lap, but gazed out the window instead, watching the world pass by, wondering what it was like to be different, to be confident, like the men standing outside their homes talking and laughing as they collected the mail from the boxes at the curb. There were probably wives inside those houses, maybe children too, waiting for Daddy to walk in, excited and happy to see him arrive.
Hinnom Magazine Issue 001 Page 3
