by Jack Lothian
“Mom, I think there are some more cookies here!” Juli whispered. She was excited. She was hungry. And she hadn’t finished her box of squashed cookies.
“Good,” Haley said, not really hearing her. She’d never seen any of the sick ones freeze like this. They always seemed to be moving, groping, shuffling, seeking the life they no longer had, it seemed to Haley. And she was not giving it to them. Or to him, this stinky former bull of a man who was now hunched down, skin hanging off the bones, greasy blond hair hanging down his filthy face, and huge hands flailing around, groping for them, for her and Juli.
Now the filthy face was turned halfway to the counter where the flies buzzed all businesslike, or rather business-as-usual-like. They didn’t care about the sick ones, Haley thought wistfully for a second before focusing again on the weird thing that was happening to the sick one. His arms had seized flailing and had fallen slowly to the sides of his wasted body. His back had straightened. He looked like a man ready to fight. A man who’d sensed danger. Which was impossible, Haley told herself, because they could not sense anything, except for the living humans. They could only waste away. She turned to Juli to tell her there was something wrong with the sick one, when her uterus dumped what felt like a pound of blood and endometrial matter into her panties. With the load came pain, dull but strong, rendering her temporarily incapable of anything more than doubling down and pressing her hand to her belly.
“Mom?” Juli piped, her voice leaving no doubt that Haley looked really bad. And she felt bad, as if all her energy had drained out to pool in the center of the shirt sleeve she was using as a sanitary napkin. It weighed her down. It weighed her down so much Haley felt her knees buckle and sagged down to the floor. Black fog started seeping into her peripheral vision, advancing to the center. Sounds started fading, replaced by a shrill ringing in her ears. Haley gathered the last remnants of energy she had and bit on her tongue, as hard as she could. The fog cleared almost instantly and sounds returned. She heard Juli calling her, pulling on her arm, and then she heard something else. The sick one. The sick one whined like a dog that’d been kicked viciously. Her head snapped up and she saw the man make an about turn and walk out of the store.
“Mom! Mom!”
“I’m fine, Juli,” Haley said. Her voice was steadier than she expected but that was probably the stress—too much of it and you start sounding calm and apathetic.
“What happened?” the girl asked, staring intently into her mother’s eyes, now a very pale blue, disturbingly pale.
“Just a cramp,” Haley said, glancing at the open door of the store. “What happened to him?”
Juli shrugged.
“He stood like a statue for a while and then just left. Lucky us. Can you walk?”
“In a while,” Haley said, closing her eyes for a moment. Her tongue hurt but thankfully she hadn’t bitten into it too hard to worry about an infection. “And we better hurry. Something scared the sick one and I don’t know what it was.”
“Maybe more sick ones are coming and he got scared?”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Haley said. She no longer saw any point in trying to hide her fears and anxieties from Juli. If things got bad, she’d better be prepared than shielded by her mother’s care. That would only make her more vulnerable.
“Okay, let’s go through the shelves quickly and then we’re out,” Juli said.
“You go, hon,” Haley said. “I need to rest a little.”
“All right.” Juli didn’t look like she thought this was the best idea but she didn’t try to argue. She started rummaging through the shelves, trying to find the food in the trash, moving along the aisle away from her mother. Haley closed her eyes again and tried to relax.
A noise made her realize she was about to doze off. A weird rustling sound, followed by a dull thump and then another one. There was another sick one in here with them.
“Juli!” Haley called just when her daughter, who had by now gone around the aisle, started screaming. Haley found energy she didn’t know she had and sprang to her feet. She turned to where the screams were coming from and froze just like the sick one.
Juli was standing a few steps away from the counter, screaming her head off. Behind the counter, a faceless figure caked with blood and stinking of death swayed slightly when it got to its feet and lurched toward Juli. The countertop stopped it.
“Juli!” Haley yelled and got moving. She rushed to her daughter, who was standing there as if she had been planted, screaming and screaming, and screaming. She grabbed the girl’s hand and pulled her to the door, glancing in passing to the dead, faceless girl who had just found where the countertop ended.
Mother and daughter ran out of the store and Haley slammed the door shut, unsure how much good this would do but incapable of coming up with a better idea. The first few steps she had to drag Juli along but now the girl was running on her own. They crossed the road and went around the dilapidated house that marked the beginning of the town. Its backyard was shaded by a huge oak tree. Haley pulled her daughter behind its trunk and sagged down to the ground. She couldn’t run any farther. She couldn’t even walk right now.
“What was that, Mom?” Juli said, her voice quavering, her face as white as the snow that used to cover their own backyard every October. “Was it dead?”
“Yes,” Haley said. There was no way anyone could survive two or more shots to the head.
“Was it a zombie?”
“Zombies are in the movies, Juli,” Haley said. She hated zombie movies. She hated all the supernatural movies, actually, zombies, vampires, the lot. And now one such movie was unfolding right here, in real life.
“So what was it, then?” the girl insisted, a little belligerent, a little agitated, still shaking in her mother’s arms.
“I don’t know,” Haley sighed. She didn’t add that there may be more like it. There were bound to be more like it. But Juli could figure this out for herself.
“What are we going to do now?”
“We’re going to stay put,” her mother said. She wasn’t afraid anymore. She was too exhausted to be afraid. “We can spend the night here. Then we’ll figure it out tomorrow.”
“You think it’s safe?” Juli asked, incredulous.
“No, Juli,” she said. “Nowhere is safe, but it’s a bit better here than trying the house. We can run if something—that thing—comes this way. I can’t fight right now and I need some rest before we move on.”
“I know,” the girl said softly. “I’m sorry.”
Haley thought she actually heard her heart snap. She had a pretty good idea what she would do, right after Juli went to sleep. Walking corpses were just too much. She wasn’t going to live in a horror movie and she wasn’t going to let her daughter live in one, either. Haley had a knife that Juli didn’t know about, a pocket one, and she was going to put it to good use later this night.
“It’s okay, honey,” she said, pulling her daughter into her lap. “It’s okay.”
Men of Tomorrow
Jack Lothian
After all the death and destruction, all the blood and horror, it comes down to this: five men with kitbags and weapons, shivering in the cold, making their way up a snowy trail, through the dark winter woods, on their way to face a god. It’s a futile gesture in the face of humanity’s last gleaming. We’re going to die and it’s probably going to be very painful.
He knows we’re coming, of course. It would be naive to think otherwise. He can hear every step, every frosted breath. Sergeant O'Reilly claims to have seen a dark shape hovering over us as we passed Mount Healy, but we’re tired and hungry and have suffered so many losses that it’s hard to trust our senses anymore. We’re like a boxer staggering off the ropes, raising our gloves for a final desperate assault, even though the canvas is lurching toward us with every weary step.
Then we all stop walking, one by one, staring off through the branches and leaves. We can see it in the distance now, glowing in the night. A
giant structure of ice, towering up into the sky, nestled between valleys. His home. It’s beautiful and it’s terrifying. We’re so small, so helpless. For a moment I feel myself drowning, overwhelmed by the task ahead, but then Captain Mason taps my arm softly, reminding me that this is my cue, that I have the first line.
“There it is. That’s his fortress.” It’s clunky set-up dialogue but I do my best with it. I haven’t spoken since yesterday and my voice feels strange and distant.
O’Reilly is up next. “Keep low. Eyes front. Stay frosty.” He grimaces at the lines but at least he delivers them like he means it. Before all this he was with British Special Forces—leading coalition teams on night raids in Afghanistan, taking down strongholds of Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab in Kenya and Nigeria. He says he’s surprised by his nostalgia for those days. The world was simpler then, even if we didn’t know that at the time.
There’s a pause during which Mason shoots Sergeant Hernandez a sharp look. Hernandez is still staring toward the crystal tower and it takes him a moment to remember his line.
“I wonder if he knows we’re here.”
The snow covered trees look on in envy at his wooden performance and I feel a twinge of anxiety. Can the target sense insincerity? Is he monitoring us, shaking his head at the stumpy cadence of Hernandez’s recital? He could crush us in a heartbeat. He would barely have to move. I can’t really blame Hernandez, though; he’s a career soldier who never imagined he’d end up in a situation like this. None of us did.
“If he knew we were here, we’d already be dead.” Mason sells his line perfectly, making up for Hernandez’s lackluster performance. For a moment I forget myself and even believe we’re having a real conversation.
“How so, Captain?” That’s the final member of our team. Lance Corporal Eriksson—twenty-eight years old, a solid slab of muscle and patriotism, topped off with a severe crewcut. Eriksson told me he’d joined the Marines to test himself, but when he says “test himself” you really hear “hurt other people. ” He’s a man who has never been troubled by the moral complexities of pulling a trigger. The other night I held him as he broke down and wept, his great big shoulders rising and falling as he muttered in horror of how there was no bird-song in the woods anymore.
“Because he’s a coward,” replies Mason. “Look at India. Europe. At what happened to the Chinese. It’s always from a distance. A real man would look his opponent in the eye. A coward hides.”
There’d been some debate over the phrase “a real man.” Mason delivers the whole thing as a challenge, though, a gauntlet thrown down. We’ve been reciting these exchanges for the past few days, always variations on the same theme. He’s big and powerful, we’re nothing, so he needs to come out and face us. It’s crude and basic psychological warfare, meant to allow us to get closer to him, because this plan, this suicide mission, it only works if we’re in the same room.
We’re working from a script that Diane wrote up for us, back at the Anchorage base. There were disputes and hushed arguments over how we should approach this, but in the end high command deferred to her—after all, she’d known him better than anyone. She was his wife. They were the perfect couple. Before everything changed.
There’s a crater in a field in Iowa that the government declared a national monument. Shards of the meteorite that carried him on display in the Smithsonian. Even though he was from some distant dying planet, he was one of our own. He saved folks from burning buildings and falling airplanes, he made rain fall on the arid settlements of Ethiopia and Sudan, every natural disaster would see him hurtle into danger, to do what he could, like he had no choice. He was the best of all of us.
I keep wondering if there were warning signs we missed.
There was always this aura of blandness about him. He was charming, handsome, almost too perfect I guess. The fact that he dressed up in tights and wore a cape does, in retrospect, seem like a huge red flag, but like many of us, he’d grown up on a midwestern diet of comic books and cartoons—his costume was a tribute to the very culture and people he had sworn to protect.
He wore that same costume the night those confused news reports first started rolling in. Natural disaster. Terrorist attack. There was panic and chaos and then that infamous footage of him floating above the Eiffel Tower, the city on fire beneath him, that smile on his face.
I’d met him twice before.
Once was at the base in Cornado, just across the bay from San Diego. I was out the back of the barracks, having a quiet smoke, when I felt a sudden shift in the wind. There was a strange charge of electricity in the air and there he was, standing in front of me.
I’d seen photos and videos of him, of course, but in the flesh he was even more impressive, the colors seemed brighter and sharper, exactly how a legend should be. Larger than life. I had an odd feeling, like déjà vu and vertigo at the same time. I think I actually steadied myself against the wall. He nodded a greeting at me, asked me my name. It took me a moment to compose myself and reply.
“Tom. Tom Hooper.”
He leant forward and took the cigarette from my hand, studying it. “How long have you been a smoker, Tom?”
“Uh…a few years now.”
“There’s a shadow.” He snuffed out the cigarette with his fingers and then took his hand away. The crushed cigarette remained floating in the air. “On your left lung. It’s very faint but it’s there.”
He waved his hand over the cigarette and it separated into fragments, a constellation of burnt and broken tobacco. His gaze fixed upon the pieces and they started glowing, burning up, disintegrating. The small galaxy on fire. Then he fixed those blues eyes upon me.
“This will only hurt for a moment,” he said. He pulled me in close and slammed the palm of his hand against the center of my chest. The air went out of me. I felt a rush of fire rolling through my lungs, with a sharp arctic wind chasing behind it and then he removed his hand and smiled, releasing me.
“Stay off the cigarettes, Tom. Life is for living.” And with that he was gone, a shimmering blur disappearing off into the cloudless sky, leaving behind a Private First Class who returned to his bunk with shaking hands and a broad smile as he tossed his cigarettes into the trash.
That was the kind of man he was. He saw little difference between extinguishing a forest fire or returning an errant balloon to a crying toddler. He was here to help. To make the world a better place.
Then you think of what happened later. Bodies twisted and mangled. Cities scorched and burned. Continents shaken and torn apart. I was in the ops room when we got news that Europe was gone. My brother was over there, serving on the battleship Anna Maria. I remember my CO staring at the comms officer, saying over and over again, “What do you mean gone?” his voice rising to a panic.
In Rio de Janeiro they dropped a B83 nuclear bomb on him. 1.2 megatons—seventy-five times stronger than the Little Boy that was dropped on Hiroshima all those years ago. He walked out of the mushroom cloud like it was just smoke on the breeze.
I can’t view that day at the barracks in isolation anymore. Some nights I’ve lain there, placed my hand over my chest, just like he did, as if by copying his movements I could find some insight into why he changed. But no insights ever come. All I know is that there was a shadow on my left lung, and then there wasn’t, and that was his choice, his will.
The second time I met him was two years later, in Syria, the aftermath of the Mhardeh refugee camp massacre. The killings were some sort of insurgent statement; this is what would happen to those who accepted aid from the West. Families. Women. Children. Two hundred fifty people were slaughtered that day. I thought I’d never see anything that bad again. It only took a few hours for me to be proved hopelessly wrong.
Our squad was first on the ground. We had forced them back to their strongholds on the edge of town, blocking off the roads to Hamas, settling in for a lengthy war of attrition—or a shorter one if the requests for air support went through. Then the order came over th
e comms of support of a different nature—he’d joined the fight. The CO told us to drop back and secure the perimeter. To this day I’m not sure what made me disobey that order. Maybe I just wanted to see what retribution looked like. Maybe I was hoping for some myself. I walked through that camp. I’d seen what those insurgent forces had done.
It was an old paint factory, three stories tall. Broken windows like jagged tombstones. The metal doors of the main entrance had been blown in, a dark, gaping mouth. I later discovered that my helmet cam started malfunctioning at that point, some kind of static interference. Maybe that was his doing. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to see what he’d done.
It was near pitch black inside the factory. I clicked on my flashlight to see where I was going. It swept over the husks of rusting machinery, and then onto shapes that I couldn’t understand at first, in the center of the room. It was like some giant sculpture, except it was still alive, mostly alive, impossibly so.
There were bodies but they weren’t bodies anymore. It’s like he had rearranged their atoms, blended and melted them together. It was around seven or eight feet tall. Flesh, melted and fused, arms and legs and screaming mouths and wide open eyes, all as one. Skin stretched and distorted, veins and intestines interwoven across the surface like twine over a ball. It was the enemy. It was a horror of meat and tissue.
And then one of the eyes blinked and all I remember was rushing for the exit, falling to my knees outside, retching into the dirt, gasping for air.
“They were bad people, Tom.”
He was standing there, looking off, and even though his body language suggested a level of agitation, his hair was perfect and his eyes were dolphin blue, and for the first time I wondered if it was all some mask, and if so, what the true face below looked like.
