Fierce Enchantments

by Janine Ashbless

  “Who have you had in here?” he asked, then suddenly roared: “WHO?”

  Zorya fell back, her hands clasped at her throat.

  “Whore!” he bellowed, and turning to the fireplace he picked up an iron poker. Zorya hesitated only a moment: only long enough to see the look in his eyes as he hefted the implement. She turned and ran for the window: she had a foot on the sill before he could reach out to seize her: she was falling before his hand caught vainly in her long hair and snatched a few ash-blonde strands.

  The full moon was reflected in the water below, as it broke through the clouds.

  “Vodyanoi!” she cried as the river rushed up to meet her.

  ♦♦♦

  That was the end of Tzarina Zorya. Her body, when they finally found it, was buried at an unconsecrated crossroads in the forest, and the Gates of Heaven were closed in her face. The Tzar remarried within the month. Let it be a lesson to you: wives must remain faithful, no matter what the temptation.

  Like all girls who drown themselves, Zorya became a Rusalka. She haunts the river bend beneath the Summer Palace still, her pale form dripping with water. On summer nights she can often be seen cavorting in the pools with the Vodyanoi, their two slippery bodies entwined, but it’s bad luck to watch them and the Royal Dacha is inhabited no more; its timbers are already rotting back into the forest from which it was hewn. Still, to this day, their laughter echoes among the trees. Remember her fate and learn from it: denied the sublime joys of Heaven she must spend eternity trapped in the grip of lust and sin, until the woods are hewn down and the rivers run dry and the world is turned to ashes.

  Bolt Hole

  She sees the deer as she comes out from under the supermarket portico. It’s standing motionless between the carcasses of two cars and, as she moves into the open, it lifts its head and starts toward her.

  The deer is surrounded by a cloud of flies, buzzing about the red mask of its skull. It has no eyes left, just empty sockets, but that doesn’t seem to make any difference. They don’t really see anyway—it’s heat they detect, not shape or motion. Heat, and—more dimly—noise, and carbon dioxide. The exhaled breath of terror and exhaustion.

  Looks like it’s been hit by a truck, she thinks. Wonder if anyone around here’s still got fuel?

  She keeps an eye on the deer, but makes sure not to pay it too much attention at the price of the rest of her surroundings. One of its legs is smashed and dragging like a broken toy, and it isn’t so fast that she has to worry. In life, the deer would be the epitome of grace in motion. Now, dead, it stumbles and lurches.

  They aren’t fast, any of them. Just persistent.

  She moves lightly through the scattering of vehicles in the car park, knowing each one offers potential cover to an attacker. Dogs are what really scare her. Far more dangerous than human ACs—faster, and with teeth sharp enough to puncture her leathers. Checking a VW Golf for lurkers first, she hops up onto the hood. She likes to be up high for what’s coming next. The spade she’s got strapped to her back is heavy—that’s the whole point of using it. She snaps the studs of the strapping and hefts it in both hands as the deer staggers up, its neck out-thrust grotesquely and its stained teeth snapping toward her shins.

  Fallow deer, she thinks with the part of her brain that still belongs to the old days. Dama dama. A hind. Then she plunges the full weight of the spade down on the back of the animal’s neck, and the sharpened blade shears through its spinal column. The deer drops like a stone.

  “AC. Ay-Cee. NayCee,” she says. Her voice sounds rusty. It’s been two weeks since she had anyone to talk to but herself. She likes the sound of the words, though, and repeats them to herself, several times, in a singsong manner, before she breaks off in annoyance at herself.

  AC was a grim biologists’ joke, in the beginning. In lieu of other, more obvious nouns, they’d opted for the dry understatement of Ambulatory Cadaver. She can still remember the first time she walked into the abattoir, ready for another day inspecting and certifying the meat, and saw those carcasses squirming and twitching on their hooks. They only stopped when their heads were sawed off.

  She’s been vegetarian since that moment. It’s mostly canned beans she took from the derelict supermarket.

  It’s nearly sunset now. She cleans off the blade but decides to keep the spade unholstered. The ACs are partially blinded by warm weather but grow active as the day cools. They are worst of all at night when the body-heat of their prey shows up in stark contrast to the ambient temperature. Lighting a fire or running an engine is the equivalent of sounding a dinner gong. She needs to get somewhere secure before the end of the day.

  She’s got a map in her pouch that claims there’s a Safe House two roads over from this supermarket.

  One road over, and she turns a corner and finds herself in trouble. There’s a whole cluster of ACs standing around outside a gutted cafe. A few of them are chewing on each other in a desultory fashion—they seem to dimly realize that they’re not getting what they want—but at the sound of her booted feet on the paving slabs they all swing round toward her.

  Shit, she thinks, nervously, and breaks into a trot to scurry past them. A trot is all it takes to keep ahead—AC muscles aren’t terribly efficient—but it does mean she’s moving too fast to be properly cautious. She rounds another corner into a major road intersection and sees the Safe House. One of the old-fashioned ones. There’s no mistaking it: a shipping container that’s been dumped on the roundabout, with the big white “S” painted on its side and the stenciled logo of the Emergency Administration. It’s been there a long time. Too long, she can tell, because there are ACs scattered all across the open area, standing quietly, waiting.

  It’s not like they learn where to find food … but they don’t always wander away afterwards.

  She sees them turn their blind and unbearable faces, slowly, in her direction. She thinks of ants clinging to the tips of grass-stalks, waiting—with the inexorable patience of their lancet fluke puppetmasters—for the cow that will eat grass and ant and all.

  The steel door of the container is ever-so-slightly ajar. She grimaces. There may be some of them inside. It may be a rat-trap. She has to decide now: head for that dubious shelter or spend the night in the open, on the move. She slows, conscious that the pack is coming up the street behind her. The insides of her gloves are damp. It’s been two years now, and somehow the relentless ebb and flow of danger has dulled but not yet washed away her fear.

  At the corner of her vision something else moves—something too swift to be dead. A human figure, black-clad, emerging from the mouth of a building. Living. There’s a moment of almost comic hesitation as the ACs vacillate between her and the other, and that makes up her mind. She launches herself across the tarmac, heading for the shipping container. She’s nimble enough to dodge around some of the figures in her way. One she fells, using her whole body to swing her spade at its neck like a scythe; the blade is filed sharp on the edges too, and chops through flesh and bone. It jars her arms but she doesn’t let go of the weapon. She doesn’t stop. She keeps moving, barging and hacking, until she reaches the door. An AC pulls at her arm, bending to mumble at her with stinking jaws, but its blunt teeth are no match for her motorcycle leathers and it staggers backward as she wrenches loose and then plants the spade-edge in its face.

  They’re weak. Weaker than her, one-on-one. Slower than her. Stupider than her. But they have the advantage of numbers. She can’t afford to wait around. Vaguely she hears someone shouting, but she doesn’t listen. She heaves the container door open another few inches, enough to allow her to squeeze inside.

  It’s empty.

  Thank fuck.

  Dropping her weapon, she whirls round and grabs at the inner handle. Now she can hear him—a male voice shouting, “Wait! Wait!” She doesn’t. She wrenches on the handle, pulling the door closed, shutting herself inside. There’s a
bolt welded to the metal and a swivel-brace that drops into a bracket. She rams the bolt home.

  Safe.

  Something heavy slams against the metal.

  “Let me in!” he roars. “For fuck’s sake—open up! Open up!”

  She can imagine him brought to bay just outside there. She didn’t see what sort of weaponry he carried, in fact she didn’t get a proper look at him at all. But she can picture the ACs clustering around him, hands reaching, mouths agape. No matter how he fights, there are enough of them to overwhelm him by bodyweight alone. They’ll bring him to the floor and pin him there. They’ll find the gaps in his armor. They’ll chew at any exposed skin, at eyeballs and lips.

  “Come on, you bitch—help me!” The sounds of combat are more muffled than his cries, but they’re there. Thuds and groans. She knows that eventually, inevitably, he’ll start screaming.

  She can’t face listening to that. Not again.

  She retrieves her spade. Her hand moves to the bolt and it rasps in its sleeve. She’s already damning herself for her weakness as the crack of daylight breaks open and dark bodies occlude it. She can hear the bubbling moan of the ACs, and knows there must be dozens out there now, scores maybe.

  He bundles in through the gap, whirls and hauls at the door. He’s big, and heavy. A reaching AC arm gets caught in the gap but the metal edges crush the wrist flat as cardboard and the fingers are left spasming.

  “Aaah!” he gasps, sliding the bolt home, setting the horizontal beam into place. “That was fucking close!”

  She lets the spade-edge drop to rest on the back of his neck. “Just hold on,” she says. “Kneel down.”

  He goes still. He can feel the metal, hard and heavy, pressing at the base of his skull. “Okay,” he growls. “Whatever you say.” The ACs are banging on the door now, but that’s suddenly just background noise. The danger is in here. He goes to one knee, then both.

  That’s better. The spade is too heavy for her to hold up for long.

  “Get rid of that weapon,” she orders.

  He lets it fall onto the metal floor of the container—it’s a home-made pike of some sort, maybe more properly a naginata: four foot of shaft topped by a two-foot blade. The clang is horrible. Then he shoves it away, out of immediate reach. She wishes she could kick it right to the back of the chamber but she daren’t ease the blade from his neck. She’s looking at his crouched, black-clad form. His backpack makes him look hunched and inhuman.

  “Right.” Her voice is croaky. She rarely dares talk, even to herself. “Take your hood off.”

  Like her, he’s wearing a tight leather balaclava that covers most of his head, with a zip behind the ear. Two years ago it would have been a pervy gimp-mask. These days, when even a small scalp wound can be a death-sentence, it’s just armor. But he doesn’t protest as he unzips and pulls the mask off. Underneath, his head is shaved down to all but bald, with just a stubbly ghost of his hairline. There’s little light in their prison—two rows of airholes drilled around the top of the walls, that’s all—but she can see his skin is shiny with sweat. She suddenly aware of how hot and itchy her own head is, and how much she wants to take her own hood off.

  “Okay?” he asks. The metal walls rumble to the fumbling of dozens of hands on the outside.

  “And the rest,” she tells him. “Show me your skin’s not broken.”

  “On a first date, darling?”

  “Shut up and do it.”

  “Dominant type, huh? I like that.” Carefully, he pulls off his gloves, shucks the backpack and unzips his padded motorbike jacket. Just like with her own clothes, there’s a shiny silver lining on the inside of his leathers that keeps body-heat trapped, making him more difficult for the ACs to spot. The once-white shirt beneath follows the jacket to the floor. She sees the broad reach of his shoulders, and the hard, ridged muscle, and the scars. But they’re old scars. If they’ve had time to go white then he wasn’t infected. She gives him an inch of grace with the spade blade, because she hasn’t cleaned it yet and neither of them wants that congealed blood on his skin, but she keeps it leveled at the back of his neck.

  “Now turn.”

  He rotates, still crouched, and looks up at her. In her red-and-black one-piece, she must be nothing to him but a shape in the gloom, but she’s got the spade braced, one elbow bent and the other hand stretched out on the shaft. One thrust and she’ll have him. From that filthy blade, even a scratch would be enough.

  His eyes, locked on hers, are deep-set in dark hollows, and his skin rough and grimy. He looks dangerous and desperate—but then, everyone left alive nowadays looks like that. His bare chest is bruised under a plastering of hair, but she can’t see any blood.

  “Interesting choice of weapon,” he observes.

  She doesn’t answer. Sometime, long ago, she’d read that a sharpened spade was a favorite in the street-to-street battle for Stalingrad: silent and fool-proof. That was what had first prompted her to pick one from the trashed debris of a hardware shop.

  “Want me to keep going?” he asks, popping the studs of his trousers with the exaggerated motions of a stripper. She’s shocked to realize he’s being sardonic. He mustn’t see her as that much of a threat. She’s suddenly aware of two things, above and beyond the bumps and bangs and groans of the besieging mob outside, and the creep of sweat down her scalp. She’s aware that she’s just locked herself in a metal box for the night with a strange man and no way out. And she can feel her arms starting to tremble from the strain.

  I should kill him now. If it comes to a fight, that’s my only chance of winning.

  “I don’t mind,” he adds, with a lopsided grin, easing the waistband of his trousers. “It’s like a fucking oven in here.”

  He’s not wrong. The sun has been on the metal all day, and there’s hardly any ventilation. The damn place must glow like a beacon to AC senses, but that’s not’s what bothering her. She’s run and she’s fought, wearing a suit designed to stop heat escaping. It’s roasting hot, and the insides of her gloves and mask are sodden, and she can feel the sweat running between her breasts and crawling down the small of her back. She feels like she can hardly breathe. Suddenly, it’s unbearable—the heat, the strain, the fear. The weight of his life in her hands. All of it. She wants to scream.

  She’s had enough fighting. Him … them … the world.

  Without a word, she backs off, seven paces taking her to the far end of the container, where she puts her shoulders to the wall. The metal booms faintly. She rests the spade, upright, in front of her, glad to spare her tired arms. Her eyes must have grown more used to the gloom now, because she can still see his expression, and she watches the grin drop off his face to leave it horribly grim. Then he reaches into his discarded jacket and pulls something out.

  The snickering levity was a front, she realizes dimly. A mask, like his leather hood. He’s come within a hairsbreadth of death and he’s as freaked out as her. And he’s got something metallic in his hands.

  Shit, she says to herself.

  Silently, he lifts the object to his face and tilts it. It’s a canteen.

  “Water?” he asks, smacking his lips, then holds the bottle out toward her.

  She would do anything for water—not to drink, but to pour over herself. Clean, cool, running water. She’s cooking inside her insulated armor, like one of those old fish-in-a-bag dinners. But she doesn’t answer him. Words seem too heavy to raise to her lips.

  After a moment, he stoppers his bottle and scoots it right down the length of the chamber, almost to her toes. “What’s your name?”

  Still she doesn’t answer. Maybe she should be trying to establish some sort of connection with this man, if only to mollify him, but the threat he poses is nothing compared to the discomfort she’s already in. Panic is rising in her breast, like steam, as she tries to breathe deeper but finds she can only pant. There d
oesn’t seem to be any oxygen in the metallic air. The room in front of her swells and billows and shrinks again. She catches her glove in her teeth and rips it off, then fumbles at the zip of her headgear. I’m going to faint, she thinks. If I don’t get this off I’ll suffocate.

  The mask comes off with a foul wet dragging. She shaved her own head, weeks ago, but the hair has grown back somewhat. She can feel the air licking at that wet fur—an overwhelming relief. But still not enough. She tugs the zip that bares her throat then, bending, she snatches up the canteen from the floor. That motion almost undoes her. She can feel the blood running the wrong way in her veins, and she almost loses her balance. It’s only her desire for the water that keeps her from pitching forward dizzily.

  Yanking the stopper out with her teeth, she tips the liquid over her forehead and catches it with open lips as it sluices over her face. It’s tepid and metallic and it feels wonderful. Running down her chin and throat, some finds its way under her clothes into the secret valley between her breasts. Blinking stinging, sweat-tainted drops from her eyes, she glares at the man, daring him to have moved while she wasn’t looking.

  Maybe he has, just a little. She sucks defiantly from the neck of the bottle.

  “What’re you doing out here on your own?” he asks.

  “I wasn’t alone,” she rasps.

  “Huh.” He grimaces. “Nor was I.”

  The water down her cleavage just feels like more sweat now. She can’t bear it. She’s got to lean back against the metal just to stay upright. Discarding the spade against the wall beside her, she wrenches off her other glove, then pulls down the zipper of her suit from collar to navel. The vest-top beneath is absolutely sodden with sweat, and plastered to her torso. She sees the pale flash of the man’s widening eyes, and she knows her chest is heaving as she pants for breath, but it doesn’t seem important. All she wants is to get out of these leathers.