by Jack Lothian
Charlotte’s knife had a life of its own in her hand, her fingers wrapped around it like a bouquet of flowers. As Kaitlin stopped in front of her, she presented it upward, plunging it deep into the meat of Kaitlin’s chest, her breasts hungrily devouring the blade. Her white cardigan sprung crimson fault lines along the front, feathering the wool with bright blood, almost pleasant in its vivacity. Upon that impact, time hit its brakes and dragged its fingers slowly across the room. Kaitlin’s smile faded, lips falling over her teeth like curtains.
Or shades.
Charlotte watched calmly as Kaitlin’s brown eyes widened, the raft of her pupil floating slowly to the middle of a hazel sea. The shock sent her mind elsewhere.
I can remember boating in Chadron with my dad, the life jacket was too big and the sun was so hot, but we were laughing, paddling around the lake that summer, that trip when we woke up and Mom was gone, Dad was worried but said she’ll come back, and she did an hour later still in her pajamas and no shoes, her feet were bloody, her pajamas torn, she said she was abducted by aliens, that they dropped her off in the woods, and she was laughing and crying then screaming, and I wasn’t laughing anymore, because there is evil here, there are monsters in this world…
Back in the room, she could see the shift of Kaitlin’s arm. Still shaking off her flashback, Charlotte couldn’t move quickly enough. In a sideways motion, Kaitlin tore open Charlotte’s stomach. Charlotte could feel a quick, white heat, the pain melting into a buttery numbness. Her intestines spilled out in wet ribbons, twisting around her thighs like a vine. She could smell bile, rot, and blood, her vision fading under the weight of shock. Involuntarily, she let go of the knife still feeding in Kaitlin's chest, her own hands grabbing for the organs as if to put them back in her belly, slippery in her hands. As she pushed them back into the gash, the pain became violent, wrapping its hands around her and throttling. The world was red.
Suddenly, under Kaitlin’s screams, she could hear something else. The wind blowing through mulberry trees, the sound of the corn stalks brushing against one another like running water. She closed her eyes and could suddenly see the red barn, her father’s yellow truck, the wheel wells lined with rust. The colors were so bright, so alive, breathing against a background of emerald crops. She could see the wild rosebushes, pressing their petals against an opal sky, their pink petals with their delicate scent, calling to her. Home.
The taste of iron seared across her tongue as her lips spread into a dying smile.
She could finally smell the lilacs.
The Monsters of Bear Mountain
S.E. Stone
I didn’t flinch at the sound of Howlers screaming into the blizzard outside the log cabin or at the sound of bombs exploding on the other side of the mountain, but I did at the sound of the door leading to the garage slamming shut.
“Good thing I headed out when I did,” Flynn shouted from the mud room. “The weather’s getting nasty.”
I snatched a rag from where it hung over the faucet and forced myself to clean the kitchen island. I’d already cleaned the granite countertop until I could see the natural wood beams on the ceiling reflected in it. But going through the motions kept ants from racing beneath my skin and standing my hair on end.
Flynn swaggered into the kitchen in stocking feet. He deposited his snow-soaked hat on the kitchen island, freeing his shaggy, black-nearly purple hair to cling to his head. He still wore his winter jacket, and the white, water-proof fabric was covered in a paste of snow, mud, and blood.
“I didn’t know you were hunting,” I said.
“I wasn’t. Just headed into town to fill the gas cans before the storm hit.” He laid a Winchester shotgun on the counter and then scratched the dark stubble along his square jaw. “A couple kids thought they were going to take the last of the gas, but I handled them.”
“How?”
His lips stretched into a full boyish, toothy smile that didn’t come close to reaching his amber-colored eyes.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “What’s for lunch?”
I swallowed and turned my attention to the stove, where crumbled, brown meat sizzled amidst rice and beans. I grabbed the spatula and began stirring the food. In doing so, the smell of cooking meat—a smell halfway between the greasy aroma of beef and the lighter scent of turkey—burst into the air.
“Squirrel,” I said. “It’s almost ready.”
“It already smells good.” The sound of clothes sliding off skin and crumpling into a pile on the floor came from behind me. “I’m gonna hop in the shower real quick, then I’ll be back. Do you mind washing my clothes right away? They’re pretty ripe.”
“Leave them on the floor, and I’ll take care of them.”
The putrid smell of body odor reached my nose an instant before his lips pressed against my neck. His ropy, muscular arm wrapped around my midsection and gave it a quick squeeze before he jogged upstairs.
The sound of the bathroom door snapping shut opened the floodgates for the tension to scream out of my body, and I nearly fell forward into the sizzling pan.
“Just get through the day,” I muttered. “Get through the day.”
I stirred the rice and beans and squirrel one more time to prevent it from burning to the metal and then gathered the clothes off the floor. I tried to pick them up by the clean sections, but my fingers quickly started sticking to his clothes.
Off the kitchen sat what had been the laundry room. I used it for the same purpose, though now the washer and dryer both lay in the middle of the front yard. Our supply of gasoline for the generator limited the amount of electronics that we could use, and an electric washer and dryer ranked low on Flynn’s list.
I nudged the washbasin beneath the waterspout with my toe and turned on the water. After adding a scoop of detergent, the water’s gentle ripple was overcome by bubbles. The light hit the bubbles just right to turn the soapy film a translucent purple with hints of green and blue at the edges.
I carefully laid the clothes into the basin one at a time, watching the bubbles pop with each piece of fabric breaking the water’s surface. The wind howling outside turned into white noise, and I found myself drawn to the soothing rhythm of the clothes slipping into the bottom of the tub. I almost didn’t notice the gritty pebbles sticking to my fingers or the small pebbles floating amidst the bubbles.
It took my brain a second or two to recognize what I was seeing. The gritty pebbles on my fingers and floating in the water were flesh. Maybe with chunks of bone mixed-in.
Flynn’s jacket slipped from between my fingers.
My vision blurred at the edges until all I could see was the washbasin. Then I doubled over and emptied my stomach before sinking to the floor. I was barely aware of what I was kneeling in or the smell of charred food coming from the kitchen or the footsteps thudding down the stairs.
“How stupid can you be? Do you have any idea how long it took me to catch and skin that squirrel?”
I didn’t move. I couldn’t move.
Flynn stormed through the doorway, and his stocking foot smashed against my lower back and sent my kidneys banging into my other organs. It knocked the breath from my lungs. I couldn’t get it back before his fingers wrapped around a section of my hair and used it to lift me nearly to my feet. His fist kissed my cheekbone, sending me back to the ground. In the tumble, I smashed into the washbasin and water sloshed over the edge.
I managed to roll over onto my hands and knees and began to crawl. My hands slid in the soapy water, but I redoubled my efforts until I started making forward progress toward the corner where a built-in cabinet stood.
“Get back over here,” Flynn growled.
His hand wrapped around my ankle, and he yanked me backward. I dug my fingernails into the tile floor. The strain as my nails began to separate from the cuticles was the most bearable pain that I would feel for a long time.
* * *
“I’m so sorry, Isabel,” Flynn said for the ninth time in t
he past half-hour. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
I slouched against the dining room table, battling to stay upright even as the room spun around me. Endorphins had taken the edge off the pain inhabiting almost every square inch of my body, but where my forearm had broken still felt like it was on fire. The sensation only worsened as Flynn wrapped it in a makeshift splint.
My blood was splattered across the front and arms of his gray, long-sleeved shirt along with the front of his pants. It would have been turning stiff as the blood across my shirt and jeans was well on its way to hardening into the fabric. He’d yet to wash the blood from his hands.
His fingers gingerly caressed my skin, and he worried his bottom lip between his teeth.
“You know I didn’t mean it, hon,” he said. “Right?”
I channeled my energy into ignoring the spinning room and focused on Flynn.
It was the last thing that I wanted to do. I wanted to lay my head on the cool wood of the table and let it soothe the throbbing beneath my cheekbone. I wanted to close my eyes until sleep or unconsciousness let me escape from the pain for a little while.
The lie that’d danced across my tongue and slipped from my lips a thousand times balked at being said.
This was not the life that I expected when Flynn discovered me huddled inside a jackknifed tractor trailer on I-495 outside of Boston. I’d survived for more than a year on whatever expired canned food that I scavenged from empty buildings and had avoided being mauled by Howlers. It was a life lived day-to-day with no guarantee of seeing what passed for sunrise.
Flynn promised an end to that. Surviving alongside another person meant sleeping an hour without bolting awake at the creaks or hard gusts of wind; it meant cooperating to accumulate more resources than I’d gather on my own; and it meant human contact. That was what convinced me to crack open the back of the trailer that day nearly ten months ago: leaning into another living person.
Solitude cannot be a way of life for anyone intending to remain human; it wears too much on the soul. It wore on mine.
Flynn was on his way north to Bear Mountain in New Hampshire and to the over-stocked, seasonal cabins buried deep in ski country. He had an SUV and a Browning rifle, and he was a handsome man. So I said yes and climbed into the passenger seat the next morning.
“Isabel?”
I wrapped my fingers around his muscular hand and squeezed.
“I know you didn’t mean it,” I said. “I know.”
He held my hand gingerly in his own before bringing it to his lips.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
Flynn brushed at his eyes with his sleeve, sniffling as he did so. Then he pushed his chair away from the table, eased my chair backward until there was enough room for him to pick me up, and then carried me upstairs to the master bedroom. After helping me undress as carefully as he could, Flynn laid me beneath the covers and kissed my forehead.
“I’ll bring up some ibuprofen,” he said.
I didn’t hear him walk across the wooden floor or come back inside the room to pour water and pain killers down my throat. When I opened my eyes, he was gone. There was a glass of water on the nightstand, and the door was closed. The grayed, hazy light that normally seeped through the lone window behind the headboard was gone, leaving the room dark.
I eased myself onto my elbows and waited for the bed to stop rolling like it was on a ship at sea rather than on the second floor of a mountain cottage. The motion eventually turned into a quiet rocking, and I was reasonably sure that I could be upright without tipping over. I slowly sat up until I leaned back against the headboard.
The broken bone of my forearm suddenly felt like it caught fire. Despite the tight splint, the bone had moved. Maybe a fraction of a centimeter. Or a millimeter. But it had shifted, and the pain dug its claws into me, resisting the numbing of endorphins and the painkillers still in my bloodstream. I clutched the splint to my chest and breathed through clenched teeth.
Slowly, the pain receded ever so slightly the longer that I remained still. It was too dug-in to go away completely.
I embraced it. It was the only thing keeping me from tumbling back to sleep, and I wanted to stay awake. There were too many nightmares licking at the edge of my dreams.
So I sat still, listening to bombs being dropped on Howlers on the other side of Bear Mountain.
* * *
A foot and a half of snow had fallen by the time I’d recovered enough to emerge from bed. I clung to the walls and the counters and the chairs whenever the blood rushed from my head. And while the pain of a broken arm had mostly faded to static, I still kept it protectively against my chest when I walked.
“Let me help you with that.”
Flynn eased the plate from my grip and took the other one off the counter. He laid them on the kitchen island before guiding me to the barstool with a hand on my lower back.
“Are you sure that you don’t want to eat at the table?” he asked, eyeing the barstool.
“I’m sure,” I said. “I haven’t felt dizzy all afternoon.”
He helped me onto the seat and watched me from the corner of his eye as I blew steam from the rice.
Then a bomb exploded.
The cabin shuddered, and I toppled from the barstool and only managed not to slam into the ground because Flynn caught me by the upper arm. He hauled me to my feet, keeping me upright against the counter even though his attention had travelled outside.
“Get upstairs,” he said.
I watched him collect his respirator and a Browning rifle from the hall tree before bolting through the front door. The door swung back into a closed position, but the latch didn’t quite click into place.
I wobbled when I stepped away from the counter, grabbing hold of the nearest barstool to keep my balance. It was slow work moving from the kitchen to the laundry room. The dizziness slowed my pace for sure, but so did the explosions that rippled through the floor.
Flynn kept his guns on display. A Browning semi-automatic rifle and a Winchester rifle leaned against the hall tree while a matching set of Ruger semi-automatic pistols rested on stands atop the fireplace mantle. He even had a sawed-off Winchester shotgun that lived on his nightstand. There wasn’t an open corner of this cabin that a piece of heavy artillery didn’t call home.
But they were big guns with a recoil that nearly knocked me over whenever Flynn coaxed me onto his makeshift firing range in the woods. I couldn’t hope to fire one of them one-handed since using both hands was out of the question. So I had to get ahold of my gun.
My Glock G22 semi-auto pistol belonged to a Suffolk County Sheriff before I pried it from her corpse. It served me well enough: accuracy at a distance and plenty of power to stop a running Howler or human.
I gripped the doorframe until the aftershocks of the explosion stopped vibrating through the floor and then went directly for the cabinet in the far corner. There was a false shelf on the bottom of the left-hand side which hid a sixteen-inch by sixteen-inch cubby that I’d discovered a day after Flynn and I moved into the cabin. He didn’t know about it, and he didn’t know about my Glock, the holster, or the ammunition that I’d found when he still allowed me on supply runs.
I checked the chamber for a bullet before sliding a new magazine inside. When I started back for the doorway, the front door banged open. The bang was quickly drowned out by shrieks. Each hit an octave that threatened to burst my eardrums, the sound travelling through my skin and leaving bits of shrapnel behind until it lodged firmly in my chest. It was pain embodied, and it was nothing like the pain humming below the surface in my arm. This pain was one of living flesh being devoured one molecule at a time.
Howlers stampeded through the living room, and their footsteps branched off in different directions. Some faded while others stomped toward the doorway of the laundry room.
The front of the cabinet pressed against my shoulder blades until I realized that I’d backed myself into the corner. I trained the Glock on th
e open doorway and rested my finger on the trigger guard. A drop of sweat trickled down from behind the hair at my temple. The rest of my body was still, and even my heartrate had slowed to a crawl.
I breathed in. I breathed out.
The Howler stumbled into the doorway.
Howlers used to be human and were still considered human by Howlers-Rights groups before the second asteroid hit Greenland. The scientists that survived the first strike in Australia theorized that a microscopic organism carried by the asteroid caused excruciating pain when introduced to the human body. It did other things, too: multiplying and devouring every healthy cell it could find; causing the skin and underlying fat and muscle tissue to seemingly melt off the body; and instilling an insatiable, cannibalistic hunger.
I knew more about the Howler in the doorway than any of the scientists before or after the second asteroid. Mostly because there wasn’t enough time between the two strikes for anything but panic to spread, and because those still alive after the second were more concerned with survival than pursuit of scientific inquiry.
The Howler in front of me curled back what remained of its lips in a snarl, displaying its worn, graying teeth. Its sunken eyes peered out from a face that seemed ready to sluff off at the slightest breeze. There was no skin left and only a few muscles curling over the white of its skull.
The Howler let out an ear-piercing shriek, and then it charged.
I deliberately moved my index finger from the trigger guard to the trigger, sighted-in on the barreling figure’s forehead, and delicately squeezed the trigger. The bang that followed made my ears ring even more so than the shriek.
The Howler slammed to a stop like it had run head-first into a glass wall before crumpling to the floor. I felt rather than heard the pounding feet of the other Howlers racing toward the gunshot. The narrow doorway forced them into a nearly single-file line, and those behind bunched up in the hallway, creating a logjam.
