Hidden Realms

by Dean Murray

  She leaned across the counter in front of him, shutting off the tap. “Don’t. They said it was dangerous. Contaminated.”

  Hunter stared down at her, his eyes shining blue in the dim light. “They’re wrong. There’s nothing in the water.”

  Mackenzie only looked at him, the certainty of his voice sending a strange buzz down her spine. She believed him. She wouldn’t drink it and she wasn’t even sure she wanted a shower. But she believed him.

  Despite Hunter’s assurance, there was still the echo of gunfire outside, somewhere far away. With Riley. And there was still the unknown morning would bring.

  “Thanks,” she said, finally easing her grip on the pack. “I’m just going to…” Her voice trailed off, plans to sit down going sour when she noticed the retro-styled stools near the counter. Dark stains lined the vinyl, some could-be-blood color that had been spilled weeks prior, dried to a dull matte finish. It could have been food, juice of some sort; the whole kitchen smelled strange. But Mackenzie’s stomach had already turned.

  “I’m going to chill out in the bedroom,” she said, drawing herself and her pack away from the counter. “Let’s have some bottled water and figure out how far we are from the army command.”

  Hunter agreed, but she wasn’t certain how much that had to do with the stains on the furniture and how much was due to the fact that the bedroom window had access to the fire escape ladder.

  She pulled a padded chair to the nightstand in the bedroom, flattening her map across the table’s surface. The paper was old and worn through in folds, but none of the street names mattered any more. She only needed the city’s layout.

  She ran a finger over the curving blue line of the river. “So, the marker outside says Easton Estates. If I remember correctly, that’s the complex of doctors’ offices and administration buildings for Adamstown Community Hospital…”

  Hunter stood at the window, staring out at a waning sun.

  She tapped the map with a short fingernail.

  “It’s there,” he said, not looking back. “Less than two miles northeast.”

  Mackenzie moved to the window beside him, unable to spot the telltale sign that he evidently had. There was a moment of pleasure at the sight of a purpling sky streaked with orange and blue, and then her eyes caught on an incongruous spike on horizon, graying white and metal and—if it wasn’t on its side—familiarly shaped. She blinked. Pointed. “Is that a plane?”

  Hunter turned from the window, the tinted light blushing his skin. “You don’t have to go, Mackenzie. There will be worse things, so much worse than today.”

  She’d known as much. She’d tried to keep Riley with her, both of them hiding in the basement. It wasn’t safe otherwise. People were scared. The system was breaking down; civilization was going to go primal. And the heavily populated areas would be the worst possible place to try to survive. “Have you been there?” she asked. “Have you seen it?”

  He shook his head. “Not Adamstown.”

  They were standing close, the heat of the sun-streaked window pane at odds with the cool air through the broken glass at its corner, and Mackenzie had the queerest urge to reach out to him. A stranger.

  She shook her head, moving back to the improvised workstation. It was so unlike her. She’d never been boy-crazy, needy. “Blame it on the end of the world,” she muttered.

  Digging in her pack for bottled water, she spotted the green and white papered bandages. “How’s your side?”

  The question seemed to catch him off guard, but he patted his side, moved to her. “Fine.” He glanced at a cockeyed painting on the far wall. “Thank you.”

  Mackenzie popped a stale cracker into her mouth, felt her eyebrow go similarly askew. “What’s with you? I thought you said it was safe here?”

  Hunter sat on the edge of the bed, his long legs mirroring hers in front of the nightstand. “You can go back home.” They sat silent for a moment, his words hurting Mackenzie in a way that she could never explain. There was no more home. Not ever again.

  He might not have grasped the scope of her pain, but Hunter guessed the expression. “Someday, Mackenzie. It won’t be like this forever. Someday you’ll have a place to call home.”

  “No. Not without Riley.” Her fingers slid over the rumpled surface of the map. “This is all I have left, Hunter. I have to finish it.”

  He nodded, letting his weight sink into the mattress, and braced a palm over his knee. “All right, Mackenzie. I’ll help you finish it.”

  Finish it. That was what she was planning to do. Nineteen-year-old Mackenzie Scott was going to singlehandedly save the world.

  Brilliant.

  But what else could she do?

  The two of them sat alone in the empty apartment as the sky’s blush faded away. The artificial heat died, but Mackenzie didn’t want to block the cracked window, because it was the only thing keeping out the scent of stale apartment and hallway trash. When the chill became too much, she kicked off her boots and climbed onto the bed beside Hunter, leaning back against a leather padded headboard.

  It wasn’t weird until the lights went off.

  Their disappearance was only preceded by a strange buzz and the brief pop of static from a digital clock atop the dresser, but was followed quickly by Mackenzie’s nervous attempt to fill the void with chatter—a personality trait she’d never known she had until that moment.

  It isn’t weird, she thought. This was the guy who had saved her life. He was more than just a way out, the key to help her get the authorities to listen. He’d been near death himself, and he’d somehow managed to get to that bridge and drag her up to safety. She could still see his skin, cold and clammy, pale as a ghost. Looking at him now, she understood just how bad a shape he’d been in, how close he’d come.

  Either of them could have died that day. Yesterday? No. Two days…

  Mackenzie realized Hunter was looking at her. Hunter might have been a stranger, but she was grateful for him. She was lonely, and part of her wouldn’t stop thinking, What’s your problem? It’s the end of the world, go ahead. Kiss him. He did have a great mouth. But it was obvious he was not at all thinking along the same lines.

  “What?” she whispered, praying it was not some horrible thing he wanted to say. Not that he’d lost his young wife or all of his family or that he planned on leaving because this was all too much and he couldn’t risk heading to the riots and fighting downtown just so she could see if there was any chance to be of help.

  When he finally spoke, there was a question in his words. “You have disowned your father’s name.” An implied reminder of Riley, that Hunter knew her family was important to her.

  It wasn’t what she’d been planning to talk about. In fact, Mackenzie had never told anyone the story. Never. Not the doctors, not the school counselors, not the assigned therapists.

  It had been a moment that had broken her; it had changed everything that ever was, everything that ever would be.

  But she wasn’t a child anymore. She wasn’t nine and in pigtails and Riley wasn’t relying on her to be strong for both of them. Riley was gone. Their world was ending. None of her reasons could possibly matter now.

  She shrugged. “It was a car accident.” Her palms didn’t sweat. No bile rose to her throat. They were just words. “We were in the backseat, fighting.” She stared at the bedspread beneath her feet. She’d not expected the ease in which the story came free, the honesty that seemed to spill out of its own accord. “I was picking on Riley, calling him a dorkfish and making pucker faces—just stupid kid stuff—when Dad turned around to tell us to stop. He wasn’t even yelling at us, not really. Just why couldn’t we stop? Why couldn’t we sit still for one blessed second and just behave? That’s when he slammed into the other car. He crossed the center line and crashed, head-on, into a sedan filled with women.

  “They were just three friends, heading to the city for a church social, and they died. All of them. Three innocent women… and my mom.” Mackenzi
e’s chest squeezed, but not with the pain that had always been there. This was different. This was letting go. “After my mom was gone, he couldn’t even look at us. For a long time, I thought it was me, that he blamed us. I can see now that wasn’t it at all. It was his own guilt, eating at him. But it doesn’t change things.”

  Mackenzie’s eyes met Hunter’s squarely. “He left us, Hunter. He abandoned his children at the hardest moment of their lives. I might have moved on. But I won’t forgive him.”

  That man wasn’t her father, not anymore. Eleven-year-old Mackenzie might have used her mother’s maiden name for spite, but now it was plain old principle. As far as she was concerned, she was Mackenzie Scott. She was not her father’s daughter. She hadn’t even seen him in years.

  Hunter stared at her. But Mackenzie could see that he understood. It made her wonder what had happened between Hunter and his own father.

  A woman’s humming, low and sweet, came from the floor below them. The tone was sad, so incongruous with its melody—a happy birthday tune of all things—and Mackenzie had the image of a mother holding her small, sick child, the one who had coughed perhaps. Mackenzie had the flicker of memory, of her own mother’s habit of running a hand over her cheek, how she would murmur a sweet, “Kenzie. You’re so pretty.” But the truth of that story below might have been anything.

  She cleared her throat, sitting up. “So, what time do we leave?”

  Chapter Ten

  Mackenzie had known what human blood looked like. In the accident, red had engulfed everything. It hadn’t all been her mother’s. The bitter metallic taste in her memories would have been Mackenzie’s own blood. There had been numerous stitches. She still had the scar.

  That was how she knew it was a dream. The scar was gone. Every bit of her was covered in blood, strange dark burgundy that flowed too slowly over her skin. And her scars were gone.

  All she’d felt was blissful as she leaned against the handsome stranger with unsettling blue eyes. She’d pressed into him, stretching upward for a kiss, and he’d stopped her. And his eyes had changed. They were suddenly lit with gold, his brow widening into a thick, low ridge as his lashes darkened to black, pupils going into cat-like slits.

  He was the monster. He was the monster and he was holding her, his claws ripping into her flesh, tearing bits of her free as she screamed, warm, wet blood seeping over them both, coating her fingers so she could not get a grip to push him away. He was huge, his bare chest and wide shoulders blocking everything else out of the scene. There was only him—this monster, his claws—and blood.

  She woke slapping at Hunter, his hand covering her mouth to muffle her sobs, his urgent hushing and her hoarse throat indication of exactly how loud and how long she’d screamed.

  “I’m sorry,” she rasped, trembling. “I’m sorry.”

  He’d drawn his hand away as soon as he’d seen she’d woken, but smoothed it over her arm, brushing at the sleeve of her shirt. The gesture was sweet, but awkward in the way a dog person might pet a cat. She hiccupped a laugh. He mustn’t have spent much time around kids with nightmares.

  Mackenzie drew in a full, deep breath, pressing her forehead into Hunter’s ribs, and let his arms relax around her.

  It was morning. Sunrise.

  Time to face the city.

  They left the car hidden in the apartment’s parking garage, Hunter assuring her that it would do them no good the closer they got to the city.

  “It would only draw attention.” He pulled aside a section of chain-link fence for her to crawl through. “People think having a vehicle will get them to safety.”

  Hunter’s words were a bit ironic after he’d suggested returning her home the night before, but Mackenzie restrained herself from pointing that out. They walked through abandoned garages, empty alleys, and broken buildings. Population was picking up, but “things” were becoming more and more scarce. They ambled through a closed-down grocery store, its shelves disassembled, looters taking pallet racks and shelving and the little plastic shopping carts she and Riley had played in as kids. It wasn’t just empty. It couldn’t even be called a store.

  Every step closer the change became more noticeable. The crowds were louder, the buildings barer. The streets were full of people, walking and yelling and demanding help. Fights broke out at random, no one there to prevent the young and strong taking what they wanted, no one to protect or punish or provide.

  They made their way to the downtown business complex, and Hunter boosted Mackenzie up an ornamental brick wall, its crown a flat white stone nearly a foot wide. She crouched there, waiting, until Hunter joined her and it felt safe enough to stand.

  From their new vantage point, Mackenzie could see the boundaries of the military camp. Soldiers lined the interior of a razor-wired fence, surrounded by two cages of chain link bordering the camp’s periphery. Guards were posted at intervals on each concentric ring, armed and ready. She recognized the khaki of the local guard, the dark green and gray of armed forces, but there didn’t seem to be a pattern to their arrangement. She squinted, working to make out what sort of weapons the lookouts carried, and was baffled by their full body armor.

  Gas masks, she thought. Why are they wearing gas masks?

  She dredged up a memory of the news reports, warnings of contamination and magic, the alienness of the official response. It was like they didn’t understand these creatures at all.

  Mackenzie glanced skyward, searching for shapes—monsters—in the tendrils of cloud. “The ones we saw at the park, is that all there is? The only kind?”

  There had to be something larger, surely. There had to be some other threat that explained what the military had planned for.

  Hunter peered into the crowd below. “They’re no different than your people, a variety of the same species. Some just appear more beastly, I suppose.”

  Mackenzie pursed her lips. “So, where are the bears, then?”

  He almost laughed. “The worst, you’ve already seen.” She thought he said something that sounded like, “here, anyway,” but he turned away, jumping free of the wall with an ease that made her feel ungainly and scared. It was a long way down.

  Hunter’s arms moved up to her, but she still must have been a good five feet from his hands. And it was only the first step in a long path on their way to Riley. She took it with a cautious leap.

  Hunter led the way, Mackenzie close behind him, and the loiterers and protests got thicker and thicker, eventually driving them toward the main group, a ring of figures surrounding the fence for as far as the eye could see. She’d known it wouldn’t be easy, once she’d spotted the layout from atop the wall, but down there, on ground level, she could barely see past the men in front of her.

  “Okay,” Hunter said over his shoulder, “stay close.” He wedged his way between them, steering Mackenzie to the lead, and the tightness in her stomach returned. They pressed through the throng, a protesting mass of bodies, their progress slow and indirect. It was too hot, too close.

  Mackenzie edged sideways past a man in a dirty rag of a shirt—fist pumping skyward as he yelled his dissent—and was shoved into him by the crowd. He grabbed her by the shoulder of her jacket, yanking her closer to examine her face. His unshaven cheeks were dark with stubble, his right eye bruised and puffy. A crusted patch of blood below the man’s ear flaked onto his partially covered arm. Arms thick with muscle flexed as he dragged Mackenzie nearly off the ground.

  Her toes slipped across the asphalt and she raised a boot to kick the flat of his shin, but Hunter was faster, knocking the man in the back of the knee and grasping the nape of his neck to pull him down to chest level.

  The man stared up at Hunter, bowed backward but obviously preparing to fight. Hunter jerked, twisting the man’s neck to pin him in a fixed position, and Mackenzie got her footing, wrenching the stranger’s grip from her sleeve. Hunter leaned forward, whispering something toward the man’s wounded ear before shoving him to the ground.

  He glan
ced up, gesturing toward the gate. “Get inside. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Mackenzie hesitated, mouth opening and closing in nothing but an empty gulp of air before another stranger shoved her. She pressed back against the crowd and was rewarded with a hard elbow to the ribs and a close shave between a shovel handle and the side of her head.

  “Go,” Hunter demanded.

  She ran, struggling against faceless bodies and makeshift weapons.

  It seemed a million miles farther than it had from their spot on the wall.

  Nothing about this was the way she’d expected. The only soldiers she saw were outside, guarding gates and fences. Where would she find the troops, the volunteers?

  How would she get to Riley?

  She stood before the gates, hopeless, helpless, and Hunter’s hand pressed against her back, his voice in her ear. “You start here. I will circle around to the right and check with the other gates. Either of us gets in, we come back for the other afterward.”

  She nodded, forcing her way toward a uniformed man built as if he were in his twenties posted behind a mesh fence. A helmet sat low on his shaved head, gas mask and collared jacket covering all but a strip of pale, sweat-speckled skin.

  “I have information,” Mackenzie yelled over the noise of the crowd. She wished she could see his face, gauge his reaction. She’d never seen a machine gun up close. “I need to get inside.”

  “Me too!” a tall woman yelled from her side. Her face was thin and exotic, smooth, dark skin beneath a layer of filth. Mackenzie thought she might have been a supermodel in a previous life. Or two weeks ago.

  The crowd surged and knocked the woman forward to land hard on the edge of concrete footers with bare knees. Mackenzie was jostled too, kicking an elbow out to defend her space, and reaching to help the woman to her feet. A second woman tripped over them, pulling Mackenzie’s sleeve and yanking at her hair in an attempt to get to the guard station. Two men pushed past them, shoving Mackenzie forward again, into the chain link fence.