Feast

by Jeremiah Knight

  Ten steps into his run, he began to second guess his flight.

  I should have taken a second shot, he thought. Should have put it down for good. He’d killed other ExoGenetic monsters before. Why not this one?

  There’s no way to know if more arrows would have done it, he told himself. The first arrow only confused it. How many more would it take to kill it? I’m not even sure where its vital organs are. It could have two hearts, for all I know.

  They were all logical arguments. To a point. But none of them was the truth.

  The truth was that he was afraid. The moment he saw those sinister eyes and the blood-sucking tongue, the mental switch in his psyche that was normally switched to ‘fight’ got flicked over to ‘flight.’ In a world of predators, no matter how well prepared or armed a person was, true humans were still prey, and those instincts couldn’t always be overcome.

  But there was no sense in second guessing his decision to run. He was committed to it. He knew if he reached the road, just a few hundred feet ahead, he would reach the truck. The kids had nicknamed it Beastmaster, on account of its many spikes and metal shields. Peter had argued that Mad Max was a more appropriate nickname for the post-apocalyptic death machine, but Anne’s ceaseless arguing had won the day. Peter tried to explain the Beastmaster movie to them, but they didn’t make it past the thongs before bursting into laughter. It had been a lively debate, and a good day.

  But not all days were good. Most were defined by fear and violence.

  Like today, Peter thought, glancing back, as the Exodactyl let out a shriek.

  The massive creature tilted its body forward, its tail rising up as a counterbalance. Then, with eyes locked on Peter, it lunged forward and ran.

  The dead crow-thing’s jaws, locked in a death grip, still clung to the Exodactyl’s leg. But the larger predator didn’t slow or try to pry itself free. It just charged forward, dragging the corpse along for the ride, leaving a trail of blood in its wake.

  With the chase in progress, there was no reason to be quiet anymore. “How close are you?” he shouted.

  “Nearly there!” Ella replied.

  Peter couldn’t see the others through the maze of trees, both standing and fallen, but he knew they weren’t too far ahead. They’d have just a few seconds before he, and then the hellish Big Bird, entered the clearing ahead.

  He angled his course, aiming for the road behind the armored, black Dodge Ram, and guesstimated his ETA. “Seven seconds! Behind the truck!”

  “I’ll be ready,” Jakob replied. “Don’t stick around.”

  Peter understood the message and poured on the steam. The forest floor began to shake with each of the Exodactyl’s footfalls, but more so when it stepped with its left limb, slamming the still-attached, giant, dead crow into the ground.

  Rounding a tall pine to confuse the predator on his heels, Peter looked back and shouted in surprise, as the massive beak snapped shut just inches from his face. It sounded like two wooden planks clapping together, the noise loud enough to hurt his ears.

  As the Exodactyl rounded the tree behind him, momentum carried the crow out in a wide arc. Its limp body wrapped around the trunk of a sturdy maple, bones cracking. The snagged corpse pulled the larger creature’s limb back, keeping it from lunging one more time and clamping on to Peter’s skull. The frustrated creature shrieked after Peter and then tore its leg from the dead crow-thing’s mouth, leaving deep and bloody slashes in its own flesh. But it was oblivious to the pain, as it flung itself back into the chase.

  Peter threw his forearms up over his face as he crashed through a wall of crisscrossing dead branches that blocked his path. He felt his exposed skin tear, but when his feet hit the pavement beyond, he didn’t slow to inspect his wounds, he just charged right out.

  Moving across the open road, he looked left, seeing Jakob standing in the flatbed, aiming the big M249 light machine gun toward the woods, where Peter had exited. As Peter dove into the woods on the far side of the road, he expected to hear the cacophonous roar of the big weapon, followed by the groaning impact of a slain ExoGen, but neither of those things happened.

  Peter climbed to his feet and stepped back into the road, eyeing the forest, where Jakob kept the weapon trained.

  Where the hell did it go?

  “Where the hell did it go?” Jakob shouted, channeling his father’s thoughts.

  Then Peter saw it.

  The long beak slid out of the forest, looking almost like just another branch, slowly positioning itself to strike, fifteen feet above Jakob.

  3

  Ella Masse had experienced moments of heightened awareness. When the blood is pumping double-time and oxygen saturates the mind, the world seems to slow down. Things become clearer. Colors appear more vivid. Smells develop more layers. And sounds become more crisp. In her old life, she had experienced this phenomenon on the cusp of discovery. Most people picture science as a dull, laborious job of endless repetition. To a degree, it was true. But after months, or even years, of hard work, that moment of breakthrough, of Earth-changing discovery... There are few other rushes that compare. She’d felt it when she first laid eyes on the initial results for RC-714. The test corn not only grew in the harshest of environments, it had also spread aggressively. They were going to feed the world.

  Instead, they’d made the world hungrier than ever before. They gave humanity an endless food supply that had made everyone, and everything, that ate it, ravenous for flesh. Any flesh. The smallest animals were affected first. Species of rats, squirrels, rabbits and mice had turned on each other in great bloody wars. Then they had attacked other species, including people, and then each other. And it wasn’t long before larger mammals, including people, joined the fray. As the Pandora’s box of ancient genes became available, evolution, spurred by ceaseless hunger, mutated nearly every living thing into something monstrous.

  Only those who managed to not consume the ExoGenetic crops had remained unchanged, and of them, only those prepared for the violence to come, had survived.

  Since leaving the safety of the ExoGen facility in San Francisco, Ella had experienced several more moments of heightened awareness. At first, they had left her feeling shaken and disturbed. Adrenaline did strange things to the body and left most people shaking as its positive, life-saving effects wore off. But she had come to embrace the feeling, knowing it made the difference between life and death, for herself and her family, which now included Peter...and Jakob.

  The boy wasn’t exactly keen on her yet. She understood why. She was his father’s former mistress. Loyalty to his mother made her the antagonist, and she wouldn’t argue against it. Had Peter chosen her over his wife all those years ago, Ella wouldn’t have tried to change his mind. But Jakob’s mother had also tried to eat the boy. Ella, at least, hadn’t done that.

  And now, as the oxygen pumped into her brain by adrenaline-fueled blood sharpened her sense of the world around her, she saw a chance to win the boy over, by saving his life.

  She twisted her shotgun up, aiming into the tree branches above the truck, where a triangular spear was aimed at Jakob’s chest. The Apex bird had given up chasing Peter and was now poised to strike his son.

  Unless she could stop it.

  But she couldn’t.

  With the shotgun still in motion, she shouted, “Jakob!”

  She couldn’t see how the boy responded to her warning, because she didn’t take her eyes off the creature above them. When its head exploded from the trees and stabbed its spear-like beak toward the truck, she had no idea whether the strike found Jakob’s body. She didn’t hear a scream, but then, the strike was so fast and powerful she didn’t think the boy would have time to scream.

  The bird’s head came up for a second strike at the same time Ella’s shotgun finished swiveling upward.

  God, that thing is fast, she thought, and then she pulled the trigger.

  The shotgun roared, firing a storm of 12 gauge pellets into the large target, just ten
feet above her. The blast would have shredded most living things on the planet a few years ago, but now, the pellets simply embedded themselves in the monster’s thick skin.

  Closer, she thought. Point blank will—

  Her thoughts locked up when the bird turned its head and killer beak toward her. Instead of killing the creature, she’d managed to seal her own fate.

  An arrow whistled through the air, striking the beak and deflecting away. The massive, featherless bird paid it no heed.

  Ella heard Peter shout her name, but she didn’t turn. If this was her end, she would face it head on. She pumped the shotgun and saw the bird’s eyes flicker slightly wider. It was going to strike faster than she could pull the trigger.

  A loud boom hiccupped a shout from her mouth, but her fright was as short-lived as the bird’s predatory confidence. A small implosion punched a red hole into the creature’s chest. It was quickly followed by a much larger explosion from the bird’s back. She heard the burst flesh slap against the trees and leaves behind the creature, and then a series of booming reports erased all other sounds. A line of bullet holes stitched its way up the creature’s writhing body. The final round punching into one eye and out the other, came from a different direction. The bird fell in a heap, crumpling in a bloody mass of chewed-up avian meat.

  Ella turned right, from where the final shot had come, and found Anne clutching a handgun in her small hands, the barrel smoking.

  The girl looked Ella up and down, her forehead twisted in worry.

  “I’m okay,” Ella told her daughter, and she knew who she had to thank for that. Jakob stood in the back of the armored pick-up truck, still holding the M249 machine gun mounted in the bed. Blood trickled down his right arm, revealing just how close he had come to being impaled...before saving her life.

  So much for scoring brownie points, she thought.

  She was about to thank him when he beat her to it. “Thanks, Ella. If you hadn’t shouted...”

  She smiled and replied with a genuine, “Thank you.”

  “Everyone okay?” Peter charged around the back of the truck, nocked arrow aimed at the very dead ExoGen. Upon seeing the creature, he slowly removed tension from the bow string and removed the arrow. He scanned the group, eyes lingering on Jakob’s arm for a moment before moving on. “Where’s Alia?”

  Fear flickered into Jakob’s eyes for a moment, but then Alia slid out from beneath the truck, a pistol gripped in her hands. Despite being four years older than Anne, Alia lacked the younger girl’s experience and defiant bravery. They had been training Alia while on the move, but she was a slow study. Jakob had struggled at first, too, but a few weeks in the wild had done a lot to boost his confidence and quell his fears. Ella saw more and more of Peter in the boy with every passing day. But Alia...she was still a liability. So when things got crazy, her job was to get out of the way, and this time she’d chosen to hide under the truck.

  “FYI,” Alia said, a quiver in her voice, “under the truck isn’t the best place to hide.”

  Jakob glanced down at the truck bed, his eyes widening. “Holy shit.”

  A six-inch wide hole had been punched in the floor—one of the few outer surfaces that didn’t have extra layers of armor plating welded to it. Luckily, the strike that had sliced Jakob’s arm and hammered through the floor had missed anything important, above and below the truck bed’s surface. The look in Alia’s eyes as she squirmed out from beneath the truck, said it had been a close call though.

  “Everyone in,” Peter said, climbing into the driver’s seat.

  No one complained or argued. This wasn’t a family vacation. All of the sound would have attracted the attention of any Apex ExoGens within earshot, and once they were close enough to smell the massive amount of blood from the two dead birds, they’d be whipped into a frenzy. Ella had little doubt that the scene would be littered with more dead bodies before the sun set.

  The faster they left the area, the better. There was still a chance they would run into an ExoGen while fleeing the scene, but better to deal with problems head on than linger around and face three hundred and sixty degrees of trouble.

  As the kids slipped into the back seat, Ella climbed into the front, feeding a fresh shell into the shotgun. They had found and raided a National Guard Depot, pilfering guns and ammo, just a week ago. Ella had claimed an M4 assault rifle, which she used most often, but in the close confines of a thick forest or a building, she preferred the shotgun. They’d also managed to find a good amount of 5.56×45 mm NATO rounds for the machine gun. If they hadn’t, she would have become an ExoGen shish kabob.

  Peter pointed at the first aid kit beneath Ella’s legs and snapped his fingers twice. The first aid kit had been heavily customized over the past few weeks, containing supplies that made it closer to a mobile surgical suite than something you could pick up at a grocery store. She handed the box to him and he held it back over the seat.

  “Anne, patch him up.”

  “Seriously?” Jakob said. “She can’t sew a straight line.”

  “You’d rather Little Miss Barf’s-A-Lot puke in the wound before stitching it?” Anne asked, taking the kit and popping it open.

  Alia raised her hands. “I’m not touching it.”

  “See?” Anne said, removing a hooked needle from its sterile packaging and handling it with her grimy fingers.

  “Anne,” Peter said. “Your dirty fingers are nearly as bad as Alia’s fictional puke. Keep it clean. Do it right.”

  Anne frowned and sighed, but her attitude quickly shifted to something resembling professional discipline. She had come to respect Peter over the past few weeks. When he spoke in that deep, serious tone, she listened. And learned. She had become quite deadly during her time in the wild, with just Ella. But they had survived mostly through an almost cruel cunning. Now she was disciplined. Learning to keep her cool and react with her brain as much as with her instincts.

  Jakob calmed when he saw the shift in Anne’s attitude. He lifted his short sleeve up over his shoulder and stayed quiet as Anne began to clean the arm with alcohol.

  With everyone settled, Peter started the truck. The engine roared to life, making Ella flinch. The truck always felt too loud, but once it was moving, the sound was minimal. Anything able to hear them, would likely see them anyway. They had talked about ditching the truck, but it got them where they needed to go faster, could outrun some enemies and provided hard-hitting protection in the form of armor and a light machine gun. Their route east had become circuitous thanks to broken bridges, blocked roads and dangerous territories, but they were still making better time than they would have on foot.

  Instead of heading directly northeast for Boston, as intended, they had been forced southeast, all the way down through Charlotte, North Carolina, and into South Carolina. The plan was to hit I-95 and follow it north, all the way to Boston. If the road was clear, they would make the trip in a day. If it wasn’t, and they were forced to follow more winding back roads, they might have a few more weeks on the road. But before that happened, they had one last stop to make—at Little Hellhole Bay. It didn’t sound like a nice place to visit, before or after the Change, but it was one of many locations Ella had helped build a biodome farmstead. She felt the occupants might be able to help her work at George’s Island...if they were still alive, and if she could convince them to leave.

  As dangerous as life in a biodome could be, it was still a lot safer than trekking through the wilderness in a truck.

  Jakob hissed as Anne slipped the needle into his skin and pulled the two-inch-long slice together. The wound would heal and Jakob would live, but Ella was under no illusions. They were hunted by nearly everything left alive in the world, including her former employers, who wanted them for far worse reasons than satiating their primal, unceasing hunger.

  4

  “What do we think?” Peter asked, looking out the windshield at what looked like a busy supermarket.

  There were cars still in the lo
t. The day was clear and warm. The corn growing on the large flat roof looked like a neat haircut, but there was so much growth covering absolutely everything that Alia Rossi filtered it out. If not for the stench of their odor-masked bodies, she might have been able to convince herself that the nightmare had come to an end…that the Change had never occurred…that her father had never gone mad and her mother was still alive.

  But she couldn’t even pretend, because if she felt just a hint of her previous life, she would cling to it like an addict.

  Except that it’s gone, she told herself. This is the world now.

  She tried to be strong for Jakob. Modeled herself after Ella, and Anne, and Peter. But she was no good at it, really. And when push came to shove, and then teeth and claws and twisted freaks of nature, she cracked. Hiding became her specialty. No one judged her for it, or complained. Better that she was out of the way, rather than in it. But that didn’t stop her from feeling useless.

  So when Peter posed the simple question about what looked like an untouched oasis from the past, she thought, I can check expiration dates on food, and said, “Let’s do it.”

  “Well, if Princess Pouty-Pants is in, I’m in.” Anne smiled at Alia.

  Alia couldn’t tell if the younger girl was really mocking her or engaging in some kind of playful banter. Anne was a mystery to her. Funny, but jaded. Young, but somehow older than her and Jakob. Their relationship was rocky at best. Anne took every sarcastic potshot that presented itself. Alia came to the conclusion that the girl was trying to thicken her emotional skin. Maybe because she cared about Alia. Maybe because she cared about Jakob and didn’t want to see him hurt. He was doubly at risk because of Alia. He took risks protecting her, and if he ever failed to protect her, the fallout might be enough to break him, too.