Wade was suddenly aware that he was sitting in the blood-stained seat. All the joy of the ride up the mountain had been sucked out, and in the vacuum left behind he felt nothing. His ears still rang softly, and woven into the sound he thought he made out a keening sob, like the world crying out as it broke open in a jagged, bleeding wound, the skin buckling and tearing, its beauty torn apart. Cara’s voice was a single note of grief in an orchestra of shattered instruments.
“Well,” his father fidgeted, “we should…”
Wade didn’t move. At last his father left his side and walked awkwardly to the house.
He’d never cried when his mother died. Everything had been too big, an enormity of sorrow he couldn’t begin to understand. She left one day, and the earth shook, erasing everything he had known. She had been assimilated into a new, more frightening world, like a character spun off into a different television series. He’d always felt it was something like that: she was part of a new story, the one with the theme music and the solemn radio voices. She was just lost in the blank smoke.
But she wasn’t lost. She was never coming back.
Still, the tears wouldn’t come, until he thought about the men in the house downhill. They might be dead, too. Or lying in the wreckage, in pain and without hope of rescue. He’d killed those men, or left them to die. No one in this new world would help them.
He’d shot them and fled, laughing, as happy as he’d ever felt in his life. What kind of person was he?
Then Wade felt the misery and loneliness flow out of the hidden places inside him. Once the tears started, they felt as if they would never stop. The heat on his cheeks felt strange and alien, like water boiled to wash a wound.
When they ceased, he knew he would have to go back down the mountain.
*
He went inside. Cara was slumped on the floor beside the couch, holding her mother’s hands.
He had no idea what to do or say. He supposed he’d felt that way most of his life. He sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulder.
She was like a statue. He thought about removing his arm. Without knowing why, he remembered the way he’d felt a couple hours ago, when she’d made a joke about his mother. She’d taken a risk doing that. It wasn’t easy to be good to other people. He kept his arm where it was.
“Your dad is digging a hole,” she said at last. “That’s what he said at first—a ‘hole.’ Then he said ‘grave.’”
“Do you want me to go help him?” Wade asked.
“No. It’s his fault. Let him do it.” She unclasped her hands and sat back across from Wade. She regarded him with red and swollen eyes. She reached out to hold his hand. “You’re warm,” she said.
He didn’t answer. He was alive; there was no point in saying so.
“We have to go soon,” Cara said. “Those men were following the road. They’ll get here eventually.”
“They may be dead,” Wade reminded her.
“Maybe. Probably not. Others will follow. They always do.”
“If they’re alive, they probably need help.”
“Yeah,” she said. “So do we. So does everyone.”
“I’m going back down there,” he said.
She regarded him in disbelief. “You can’t.”
“I’m going,” he replied. “I’ll get my pack from downstairs and grab a couple extra things. I need to do it before my dad comes back inside, or he’ll try to stop me.”
“Why would you do that?” Cara asked.
“We left those men,” he said after a pause. “We ran.” He didn’t mention the voices he’d heard, the sound of his name whispered behind the surge of blood in his ears.
“They’ll kill you,” she said. “They won’t even think twice.”
“I can help,” Wade said. “Someone has to try.”
She slumped for a moment, then her back straightened. “I’ll go with you,” she stated.
He shook his head. “You should keep heading inland,” he replied. “You have a car. I think my dad will go with you. He won’t have any reason to stay.”
Cara sighed and squeezed his hand. “This is stupid,” she said. “Just come with me.”
He let go and stood. She was right. He was being stupid. It felt incredible.
It took him only a few minutes to gather up gear from their stash in the basement. He staggered under the surprising weight. Reading about it was decidedly different from shouldering a backpack.
Cara was waiting by the car. “I can drive you someplace,” she said.
He shook his head. “I’m not following the road.”
“You’ll get lost,” she said.
He smiled, although his stomach felt tight. “I’m the last person you need to worry about when it comes to that.”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. Everyone down there is lost. There’s nothing left to navigate by. I know you feel guilty about hurting those guys, but we did what we had to do. Down there, there’s no map that says which way is right and which is wrong. The only way to survive is to do is what everyone else is doing.”
His back hurt from where he’d tightened down the straps. He was already afraid of what he was about to do.
In the gathering silence, he heard a rustle in his ears, the slow knitting-together of the world’s broken bones. Whispers came from the woods, from under his skin, from his fear and the feeling he’d captured briefly when he faced it. He heard his name, and even knowing it to be an illusion, he was happy to follow it.
His father’s voice cracked from the porch like a gunshot. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m leaving,” he said quietly.
“The hell you are. We’re already in enough trouble. I heard shots just before you two got home. We need to bury her mother and figure out what we’re going to do next.”
“You’re going to take Cara and run,” Wade said. “Over the mountains, and find somewhere better than this. Before the scavengers get here.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to go…” he faltered, “do something.”
His father’s features quavered, and Wade saw his anger collapse like a quake-ravaged house, falling in on itself to reveal a desperate sadness and fear.
“I can’t let you do that,” his dad said, his voice breaking.
“I know,” Wade said. He reached into the broken passenger window of the car, and came out with the gun. He didn’t point it, just held it in one hand. His father’s eyes widened. “I’m going to leave this at the end of the driveway. Once I’m gone, you can go get it.”
He waited to see if Cara would divulge the truth—that he’d fired all the bullets as they escaped from the men. But she remained silent.
“Are you crazy?” his father asked.
“No more than everyone,” Wade said.
He turned, and behind him heard shouting, and terrifying sobs, and Cara’s voice, and the gravel beneath his feet, and above it all the thrumming call, the lure of the chaos below, between the fuming remains of what might have been and the tender scars forming in the world’s skin.
He went down into the smoke.
* * *
Adam R. Shannon
Adam R. Shannon is a career firefighter/paramedic, as well as a fiction writer, hiker, and cook. He and his wife care for a German Shepherd, an array of foster dogs, a free-range toad, and a colony of snails who live in an old apothecary jar.
THE BILINGUAL
Andrew Leon Hudson
As the sun descended, Hiui’Lleyen abandoned the welcome shelter of the forest, not knowing if he would ever return to the domains of the People.
His torso had become no larger than that of a songbird, though he could pass for such only from a distance. His downy pelt had retreated into bristling points but his “wings” were naked, their batlike span a translucent membrane, forked on stretched, spindled fingers. His head was all but gone, compressed into a bony arc with a feral parody of his face upon it.
His legs, barely stumps.
He allowed the breeze, forever drawn like a great breath towards the long cliff’s edge, to sweep him across the wide belt of open grassland that framed the enemy’s capital. He passed far above the city’s defensive wall, looking down on the knotted streets and alleys. They could almost have been a nest of coiling snakes—but he felt no love for them even so.
Finally he banked and circled, the currents of the air buffeting his flimsy span as he challenged their desire to plunge to the farmlands thousands of feet below and race to the distant sea.
He dipped, drifted, studying the city as daylight fled and it drank in the shadows. At length he located the building that was his target: a palace, but no longer home to the king of the Others—he resided in a newer, larger, grander structure at the sliced heart of this cliff-top city. This had been given over to his military leaders, and from it issued the incomprehensible messages that had come to threaten the safety of Nature’s People.
A threat Hiui meant to end.
The Others were strange troglodytes, the least living of living things. Even with their backs long turned on the caves and burrows of their infancy, they feared the sky and were compelled to shelter from it. So they smashed stone from the earth and assembled new caves above ground.
He eyed the grey outer shell of the palace, tried to envision how it must be within and shuddered, guttering in the wind, spiralling—but as the palace rotated in his sight he felt a brightening in memory and pictured Dyffar’s map playing upon the structure below, turning with it, the two synchronised.
He took strength and began to descend, scanning the city for danger. Even this far from any battlefield, guards might be charged specifically to watch for such as he, and a lone mote approaching a place of importance might catch the eye even if they were not. He could have used birds in flight as a camouflage, but the city's flocks were no longer at wing.
He saw the seams where the great pieces of rock that formed the walls had been stacked, no rounded edges except where trunk-like columns rose beside them. Periodic clusters of translucent sheets—windows—allowed hazy views of the cavities within. They rose in layers and he circled the fifth from the ground, seeking ingress. They were as smooth and fine to the touch as crystalline stones washed leaf-thin after millennia in a stream bed, but none allowed him passage, and in his dwindled state he doubted he could force entry.
Reluctantly he descended, circling the fourth level as night fell around him, then the third—and found his chance. A flicker of swift shadow passing from one darkness to another, gone in a moment were anyone watching, he slipped through a window left ajar, shrinking from its metal frame.
He was in.
He clung to the inside wall, waiting for signs of alarm. There were none. At last he withdrew from inner space, dropping to the ground—no, here the word was floor—while his size and mass increased. In moments he was returned to his natural state: bipedal, slender, coated in fine, sheen fur that seemed dull brown in the shadowy interior. Only his hands, feet, and the hourglass of his face showed bare skin, the last framing large, reflective eyes, the long, low ridge of his nose and a wide, flexible mouth.
He luxuriated in the familiar stretching as his body decompressed, but was troubled again by the new sensation that followed: an echo of his time with Dyffar, the lure of another inner space beyond that which, to some degree, had enveloped him all his life. He wasn’t a child, he had seen one hundred and forty-eight new suns, but Dyffar would pet him like a woodland kitten if he said as much aloud. He scowled. Females were impossible, best left to their own thundering business.
He focused on his surroundings, and shivered. How wrong his assumptions had been. This space seemed comparable in size to a clearing, but was not at all like one. Wood was all around, yet none of it living: the inert flesh of dead trees split into angular, intersecting planes and arranged on all sides like the scales of a lizard. Instead of a whispering, shifting canopy, solidity hung crushingly overhead.
It was discomforting to know it was night, yet look up and see no stars—and maddening to know there were many more spaces like this one still between him and the glistening sky! It was all so alien.
So Other.
The floor was dominated by a thing that had once been the heart of some mighty growth, its long surface stained dark and raised almost waist-high, surrounded by the delicate constructions which the Others stiffly reclined upon. Many different trees had fallen—or had been deliberately felled—and their flesh combined to make all these things.
Disgusting.
He forced his mind to his task. Since he was below the level of the structure he had sought, his instinctive orientation to the poles was now a limited guide. Until he explored directly, only the outline of the building could be assumed… but his perception of it was radically altered. The palace had seemed large from a distance, a mountain made by Other hands. Now he was inside and had resumed his full size, it felt oppressively constricting.
He straightened, flexing his arms and legs, pelt prickling on end before laying flat again, and crept silently to an opening in one wall, its cover partially open. Beyond was a longer, narrower space. He felt as though at the edge of the densest forest imaginable, the trees crushed and tangled together into solid masses, with only narrow partings between them connecting one clearing to the next.
Except the words here were different, their concepts not his. Table and Chair. Window and Door. Wall, Floor and Ceiling.
Room. Corridor.
How easy to become lost in such a place—and no freedom to soar upward and escape. He shuddered again, and cast his mind back to Dyffar’s map for any detail that would help him.
He wished he had it still.
*
After leaving the clearing of the Messireen, Hiui had travelled from the heart of the continent, riding tailwinds when he had them, gliding, darting, dipping and soaring when he did not. In time he passed over into what might be called the Others’ territory, keeping to those regions where the old growths persisted against encroachment, until the walled clifftop city was finally in sight. It lay beyond an artificial plain, the treeline pushed far back from the high precipice it once commanded.
He landed in the comforting shade of an ancient tree at the forest’s fringe, drawing forth from inner space to step lightly onto a mat of fallen leaves. He withdrew the map as well—it appeared to grow out of nothing in the centre of his palm—and he spread it upon the earth.
The strokes of Dyffar’s painting were barely visible against the blue-stained parchment, a fine thread amongst the sharp white strokes of the original lines. They represented the interior of an Other-built structure, but for all the inherently bizarre qualities of “buildings” they at least had dimension. The image sought to directly represent physicality without itself having any. He struggled with the contradiction, yet the Other who had created the image seemingly embraced it with ease. He wondered what the palace would really look like, when he found it.
Afternoon faded into evening while he studied the patterns, committing them to memory. He would not be able to consult it while in flight, after all, it would be larger than he. He was still debating strategy with himself when a sensation of approach made itself felt—he had become so preoccupied with his plans that the presence was almost upon him as he raised his eyes.
For a moment he saw a flittering shape, both dark and pale, slowing to hover at a less than respectful distance. Two flat and feral faces stared down at him, their simple expressions hostile as they began to expand. What had been wings became more hand-like, each brittle, spiderish span plumping and shortening as limbs and torso extruded from a compact point the way a fresh green shoot curls and grows from an opening seed.
The body distended like a ripening fruit, but then bulged wrongly as if corrupted by some invading parasite. It bifurcated into two figures, the faces peeled apart from one another and taking on distinctive traits as they grew—then the bodies parted and the large
r dropped free, bursting forth into strength and weight and power.
Dyffar’Kaoi struck the ground with a force that shook fresh leaves from the tree. Where Hiui was slight and delicate, she was dense and potent, limbs twice his in girth and many times greater in strength. Even her pelt was thick and coarse, each hair uniform in shade and combining to present a warrior’s dappled patterning.
She straightened before him, looming, her visage full and lovely, but the vibration of her anger filling the air.
Behind her, Dyffar’s carrier landed with a more delicate touch. Waeo’Jannin was a century her junior but more than twice Hiui’s age. Like all those males who served as spies or carriers for a warrior, he was by necessity a proficient combatant in his own right, though physically both Waeo and Hiui were dwarfed by Waeo’s superior.
The unfriendliness which Hiui had sensed upon Waeo’s face before was undisguised now he had resumed his full size. His grey pelt rippled, the bands of rich colour that lay along the line of each hair revealed in flicks of antagonism. But there was something else too, less easy to identify, mixed in his emotions. Whatever it was, Waeo radiated a fierce animosity.
Hiui fought for calm, picked up the map and bowed.
“Not just a spy,” Dyffar said, disappointment in the anger, “but a thief.”
“I apologise, Dyffar’Kaoi,” Hiui said formally, refolding and holding out the map. “Forgive me.”
Dyffar took the offering with a look of hurt. Dangerous hurt: she stood more than a head taller than either of the males, her strength and density intimidating, as well as precipitously attractive. “I trusted you,” she said.
“It was not my intention to disappoint,” he replied. Waeo snorted in contempt and Hiui ignored him. “Quite the opposite.”
“You sought to encourage, then? By stealing the only means I have to prove my assertion to the Messireen?”
“No.”
Her face twisted. “Not that any evidence would be welcome, if I had it to give. I have been censured,” she said, “for obscenity.”
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