She nodded her head. She didn’t like all this whispering. They should be moving in silence, not giving that tentacled thing any chance to find them.
“Did you see the face on the book’s cover?” The boy swallowed, Annika close enough to hear the movement of his throat. “It was a face surrounded by tentacles.”
Annika stiffened. “That thing has something to do with the book?”
“We’ve got to get it back. What if–”
The boy’s face trembled too much to let the words out. He held up his three-fingered claw, with its softly glowing spots. Annika didn’t want him to say what she suddenly knew he was going to say.
“What if we’re turning into it?”
“No!”
But she thought of the strange ugliness of the mushroom men, their ability to absorb and assimilate every species they’d ever confronted. She thought of their misshapen bodies. Weren’t they monsters of a kind?
And yet here she was, in a tunnel with one she’d saved. She had to admit it. The mushroom would be dead if she hadn’t pulled him back. She’d protected the enemy.
In the pink fizzing glow of the flare’s light, she saw something change in the shape of the boy’s eyes. Even with his flat foreign face, she knew he’d made some kind of decision.
He jumped to his feet.
“Kid, no!”
He still had the flare. She bounded after him, but too late, there was already roiling at the end of the hall, dabs and splatters of green paint marking dark flesh. The flare reflected off a huge pair of eyes.
“Kid!”
He skidded, throwing himself under a pair of darting tentacles. He rolled under them, snatching the book from the thing’s grasp. Annika’s mind could barely fathom what he did. She could only stare, stare at the huge eyes, the dozens of wriggling tentacles, the leathery wings stirring clouds of rank air. The stench of rot, of old drains and corpses nearly brought her to her knees.
The mushroom boy jammed the flare into the tender darkness beneath the tentacles.
“Run, lady!”
She stretched her hand to the kid. He was somehow, improbably, ducking beneath the flailing tentacles, on his feet, the green lights around his eyes flashing like stars. He stopped. Jerked. Staggered backward, like a fish hitting the end of a line.
Annika grabbed his hands. Pulled him free with a horrible pop and squish. His hot blood soaked into her jacket as he fell against her.
She squeezed him tight and ran. The creature shrieked and screamed, but it didn’t follow. The kid’s attack with the flare had hurt it, bad.
It was too dark to see now, but Annika kept running. The stink at her back was her guide. The mushroom boy hung limp in her grasp, but she could still feel him breathing. She realized that her lips formed the same words over and over again, a silent plea come on, come on, come on …
And then she hit the door panel, still ajar but opening onto darkness. The wall shuddered and she nearly toppled over. The cat attack still shook the city.
She still had a mission.
One-handed, she found the charges in her pocket and pieced timer to plastique. She flung them behind her, into the tunnel. The thing might not be dead, but she could bury it alive. Her breath sounded in terrified gasps as she crunched through broken glass and the treasures of history.
And then the heavy fire door. The kid felt hot and soggy in her grip.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, throwing open the door and stumbling up the uneven old stairs. “Come on, you can make it. Come on.”
She kicked open the door to the outside world. There was still sunlight, a faded afternoon glow. A sweet breeze cleared the haze of smoke, and Annika could see a clear path to the city gate. The gate stood tall and intact between heaps of smashed rubble. She stared around herself.
The cats had clearly exhausted the stockpile of artillery rounds. Craters pockmarked the cobblestoned streets; the wall of a nearby shopping center lay in broken blocks. This side of the city was nearly flattened.
Annika swung the mushroom boy up over her shoulder and ran for the gate. She didn’t want to get caught in any kind of crossfire as the catman and mushroom soldiers took to the streets. The cats might have crushed the city’s structures, but they still faced the might of the mushroom army as they finished their looting. Once the human weapons had been depleted, the cats’ advantage was over.
She hopped over the remains of the wall. The point of the attack had never been to win. She’d helped plan it herself; she knew. It was all a cover for her mission; the devastation just a beneficial side-effect. A terrorist strike and recon mission, not a pitched battle. She laid her burden down on the trampled grass.
“Hey, kid,” she whispered. His face was gray and pale, the luminous green spots invisible in the daylight. “We made it.”
He shook his head. “No.” His teeth were black with his mushroom blood.
“Come on, kid. Hang on!”
He opened his black bead eyes. “It’s Fanjaa, lady. And I’m not a kid.”
Something prickled on her cheeks, and she realized she was crying. She swiped at the drops, angry. “Don’t give up, Fanjaa. It’s just a shoulder wound; I’ve seen plenty worse.”
“I spored it. When I stabbed it. With any luck, it’ll be mycelium by morning.”
She stared at him. The skin on his head looked dark and soft. Rotting away like a mushroom once its spores have flown. “But you’ll die.”
“We don’t really ever die,” he whispered. White tendrils uncurled from the back of his head, sinking into the soil. “Take the book, lady.”
“Annika. My name’s Annika.”
His lips twitched. Then a white film covered his eyes, and he was gone.
She let herself cry then, hunched over his body. She didn’t try to quiet the tiny mewls of pain. He had killed himself to save her, and maybe all of them. Whatever the book had to say, she hoped it was worth it.
Annika backed out of the Chamber of Elders and made her way to her own quarters. Down here in the caves of the people, sweet smells of mint and roasted meat soothed her nose, but she passed by the kitchens, hurrying toward the bathhouse. The stench of the tentacled creature clung to her skin. She itched all over.
No one else waited to use the baths, and she was glad of that. She needed quiet right now. Maybe silence could scrub Fanjaa’s blood from her soul. Lenya the Eldest had praised Annika’s efforts, thrilled to see the book and hear its story. But Annika could not take any pleasure in her work. Perhaps it was time to leave fighting behind. Become a soapmaker or a teacher or a cook.
She sank into the hot spring-warmed water and hissed as the mineral waters hit her cuts and scrapes. She waited for the itching to fade as the water sloughed the dirt and grit of her underground passage. Humming a little, she reached for the soap, but couldn’t find it with her eyes closed.
The song, she realized, was one her mother had sang when she was small. There was so little she remembered about her mother, it startled her to find this tiny fragment of memory, this snippet of song. Something about cake. And horses. Annika had never seen a horse. Their species unraveled long before she was born.
She couldn’t help but think of the doctor who’d held the book. He’d made some kind of medicine, something that would what? Inhibit race? She couldn’t remotely imagine what that might mean. She remembered from her lessons that humans came in different colors and varieties. Had that been his goal, to get rid of human differences?
She shook her head and opened her tired eyes. The mineral water stung their corners. The soap sat on the other side of her, and she stretched out her arm to grab it. In the dim light of the bath house cave, green dots shimmered and glowed along her arm.
Her breath caught in her throat. She scrubbed the dots with her bar of soap. They grew brighter as her fur rubbed off in her hand.
I spored it, she heard again, in Fanjaa’s tired voice. With any luck, it’ll be mycelium by morning.
She’d carried a s
pore-spewing body in her arms, breathing them in, her cut flesh opening her whole interior to colonization. And she’d carried the spores back with her, on her clothes and in her hair. In her rush to give Lenya the book, she’d never thought to clean herself.
She held her hand up and stared at the blinking green lights. This is how it begins, she thought. How one species is absorbed by another. How differences fade.
Annika thought of the creature with the twisting tentacles, ugly and stinking inside the dark cavern. She thought of the book she’d just given her people.
She sank beneath the surface of the water and hoped that Fanjaa had been wrong.
Far below the city, our mycelia strands pulsed as they absorbed new memories. A new strand wriggled up from an area so deeply buried in the cold earth we’d forgotten its existence. We curled around it and digested it, reminding us of our grandfathers’ grandfathers, fruiting and sporing in a place far from this sweet yellow sun.
We turned our attention to our soil, so recently clawed by the catmen. It would not take long to heal. And from the chemical messages borne on the breeze, we no longer had anything to fear from our furred children any longer. The first mycelia were sending us messages.
There are no differences.
We are all one.
We.
Wendy N. Wagner grew up across the street from a cemetery, which may have colored her interests in life. Her short fiction has appeared in Innsmouth Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the anthologies Armored and Rigor Amortis. Her first novel, Dark Depths, is due out this summer from Dagan Books. To keep up with her preparations for coming apocalypses and future fictional creations, visit her website.
Story illustration by Nick Gucker.
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Drive, She Said
by Tracie McBride
Tony hasn’t been a taxi driver for going on 14 years without developing a sixth sense about his fares. This one, he decides, is trouble with a capital T. Without a word, she slides into the front passenger seat bum first and swings two stiletto-clad feet inside after her. Her glossy leather skirt rucks up her thighs as it squeaks across the cheap vinyl upholstery. Her blouse is perilously low-cut. Between her breasts nestles a silver scimitar-shaped pendant. A tiny black tattoo adorns one slender ankle.
“No smoking in the cab,” he says sharply, then blinks, confused. He could have sworn… but there is no cigarette, neither between her lips nor in her gloved hands. He shakes his head. I’m getting too fucking long in the tooth to be working the graveyard shift.
“Too many foreigners driving cabs in this city,” she says. “Don’t you think?” Her face is shrouded in shadow.
So she’s going to be one of those passengers… Tony presses his lips together in a thin line.
“I got no problem with them,” he says.
“What about you…” – she leans forward to examine his ID card – “…Tony. Where are you from?”
“Born and bred here,” he says, pointing at the ground. “Never been outside the city.” It’s a perverse point of pride for him. He senses the woman smile in the dark.
“Good, good,” she says. “I need someone who took his first steps on this soil to give me safe conduct.”
He’s used to hearing all kinds of racist comments in his line of work, but this is the most oddly phrased. Fruit loop, he thinks.
“Tell me, Tony,” she continues, “have you been a taxi driver for long?”
“All my adult life,” he says.
“And your father—what was his profession?”
He wants to say, none of your fucking business, but instead he finds himself answering her.
“My father? He was a cab driver too. A good man, my father was. Good provider.”
“And his father before him?”
“What? Why…look, if you must know, he was the skipper of a passenger ferry.”
The woman claps her hands delightedly. “Oh, the stars are in alignment tonight! I have found myself a true ferryman.”
No, just the grandson of a ferryman, you mad bitch, Tony thinks. Annoyed now, he turns on the interior light and gets a good look at her face for the first time. She’s hot, beautiful even, with full lips and sculptured nose and high cut cheekbones, her features reminiscent
(heatshimmersand)
of some unidentifiable distant shore. Not that that’ll cut any ice with him. He gets propositioned at least twice a week, “a ride for a ride” they laughingly call it at the depot, but he’s a good family man, got a wife and two kids at home, and besides, he’s not that stupid.
He taps the sign on the dashboard.
“Fare has to be paid in advance, love,” he says. “New rules and all that.” He steels himself for dissent—she doesn’t carry a handbag, nor can he see any pockets from which she can produce cash—but her hands flick through the air like a conjuror’s, and two notes flutter into his lap. He picks them up and examines them.
Two hundred dollars.
“How far you wanting to go?” he asks. “’Cos I haven’t got much change…”
“Just drive,” she says. Her voice is low, silky, devoid of accent. She waves in the general direction of the meter. “Drive until the money runs out.”
He hesitates, and she pouts mockingly at him.
“Come now, you are a true ferryman, are you not? A true ferryman would not turn away a passenger who bears the right coin.” She winds down the window and sniffs the air like a
(cat)
dog. He opens his mouth to tell her not to, it’s freezing outside, then she turns and looks at him
(eyes, black, so black)
and his protest dies unspoken.
“Take me somewhere dangerous,” she says, and before he even realises, he’s put the car in gear and is pulling away from the kerb.
Despite the icy air blasting through the open window, he is perspiring, feverish, and he dashes the sweat out of his eyes with the back of one hand. He wants to ask what do you mean, somewhere dangerous? But he knows, or at least his gut does, and he steers the cab toward the part of town where cops and taxis fear to tread.
This chick gives him the creeps, although he would be hard-pressed to say exactly why. He desperately wants her out of his cab, but with her two hundred dollars
(slave, in chains, with whip-striped back)
she has bought him, at least for the next couple of hours. Unless she does something illegal or destructive, he’s stuck with her.
He drums his fingertips on the steering wheel.
“So… you just got off work, have ya?”
As soon as the words have left his mouth, he regrets them. At 3 a.m. and dressed like that, there’s only one line of work she could be in. Whether she’s a prostitute or not, she will resent the assumption. Normally he doesn’t give a shit if he offends his customers with his ‘banter’, but this one… no, he really does not want to piss her off.
Mercifully, the implication goes over her head. That, or she doesn’t care what he thinks of her.
“No,” she says absently, “I’m… looking for something.”
Aren’t we all, love, aren’t we all.
They travel in silence for several kilometres. The streets gradually become more dimly lit, more strewn with debris, and the buildings degenerate as they pass until it seems like the graffiti is the only thing holding them up.
“Down there,” she commands, arm outstretched through the open window. “Slowly. Very slowly.”
It goes against every instinct to kerb crawl in this part of town, but she is right; it would take more than a rough neighbourhood to make him turn down two hundred bucks. He glances anxiously about him. Over half the street lights are broken. The denizens of the night, the drugged, deranged and down-on-their-luck, find shelter in doorways and side alleys. The street opens up abruptly into a plaza, its paving cracked and filthy, probably built as part of some urban beautification project that has spectacularly failed. It reminds Tony incongruously of
a fairy circle in the woods, with bird shit-splattered concrete seats and sagging, half melted rubbish bins forming the outer ring.
“Stop,” she says, holding up a palm. “Wait.”
Stop? Here? Are you fucking nuts?
The sensible, if self-serving, thing to do would be to take off the instant she gets out of the cab. But he’d never abandon a fare, especially not a lone woman. He puts the car into neutral and hauls on the hand brake, but keeps the engine running. Anxiously, he caresses the baseball bat mounted on the inside of the driver’s door.
The woman peels off her gloves and places them on the dashboard, then opens the door and steps out. The rhythmic click of her heels on the paving draws out half a dozen deadbeats. Tony holds his breath.
Like prisoners emerging from a dungeon into daylight they come, cowering and blinking, hesitant hands reaching out to her. She passes her own hands palm downward over their heads as if in benediction. One barefoot man weeps. She whispers into one supplicant’s ear, then another. They pass the message amongst themselves and disperse much more quickly than they came. The woman stands alone in the glow of a single functioning street light and waits.
A few minutes later, the roller door on a nearby derelict workshop rattles open, making Tony jump and curse. A man emerges and approaches the woman. He is not like the others, not a patient failed by the mental health system, not an addict, or if he is, his addiction is not physical. He is
(magnificent)
straight-backed, clean, proud. Beneath a black leather vest he is shirtless, leanly muscled and seemingly impervious to the cold. His skin gleams as if oiled.
He and the woman could be brother and sister.
The man stops a few paces from the woman and opens his arms wide in a gesture that is part welcome, part challenge.
“You did not have to send them to fetch me,” he says. At this distance, Tony should not be able to hear him clearly, yet his voice is as distinct as if he sat in the passenger seat. The man says the woman’s name, or at least, that’s what Tony assumes he says, because in that instant the acoustics of the place go screwy, and it’s like he is listening to a not-quite-correctly-tuned radio station broadcasting in a foreign language.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 Page 29
