From the Ashes

by Chris Kennedy

  I could take no credit for the nanites, that invention predated me. But what I was able to do with them…some of the best years of my life were spent in Obsidian bunkers, finding new ways for the human body to stretch, grow, develop, and accomplish amazing things. Agents.

  It had been beautiful.

  But it was never enough. Obsidian cannibalized one corporation after another, but when it couldn’t eat Teledyne whole…well, I’d seen enough Geno Freaks gone wrong to ignore how that was going to play out. I hoarded nanites for months, smuggling them out in small doses, faking data to cover how many I’d actually used. And when things became strained, I cleaned out my stashes and ran.

  Not far—they would have expected me to go far. I was fairly certain they didn’t know about the sprawling compound my wife had been working on for her family, so I went to ground under their noses, just off the coast.

  Looking back, I’m sure they would have found me in a couple of months— I was not nearly as good at hiding as I thought—but Obsidian or Teledyne started chucking nukes, and suddenly, everyone had much bigger things on their plates than me. And then, I became fairly sure, everyone who could or would have come for me…was dead.

  So, I used my nanites to keep the people I needed alive, and we set about making Martha’s Vineyard an isolated, purely self-sufficient community.

  It had worked for…almost 20 years. Now?

  Everyone was staring at me, even Geordan, and I realized I’d been lost in my thoughts for a few minutes. Clearing my throat, I rapped my knuckles on the table and leaned forward.

  “Support personnel move around quite a bit, and I noticed a small handful rolled down from Ipswich before detailing back there. I picked up a little chatter, usually while they thought I was lost in thought.” I paused as Kim laughed, acknowledging that was probably something I did all too often. “It was a safehouse for bigwigs, a proper bunker with supplies—weapons, canned food, equipment, and probably king-sized mattresses, knowing some of those guys. Obsidian had them all over the place, so chances are low anyone’s there, and lower that they stayed once the air cleared up a bit.”

  “That’d give us some margin in case things keep tilting down.” Andres shrugged. “And it’s not so far that it would cost us a lot to make the trip if it’s already cleared out.”

  “Some of the med tech would still be good if they stored it properly.” Greed unabashedly coated Kim’s voice and face. “And they might have a stock of nanites.”

  Everyone leaned forward. I didn’t know how likely it was, but if anything kept me safe in this community, it was the nanites and my knowledge of them. I’d taken pains to secretly teach Jimmy and Helen about them in case anything happened to me, but only Helen showed any aptitude.

  Another stash of nanites and I could return to adapting not only our community members, but any promising young people we could find out in the world. There were plenty of parents trading their children to far worse fates…if I had more nanites, I could offer survival and more.

  We quickly decided. It only took a handful of days to stock the Ava and the Telenovela, and to agree on their crews.

  The heads voted to allow Kim and me to go, though we’d sail on separate boats and take different routes to Ipswich. Kim sent a small contingent of her people with me, but refused to entertain the thought of not getting her hands into Obsidian stores if they existed.

  Ten of us would go, with two ships and double tenders for each ship, in the hopes we’d have the luxury of time and enough goods for multiple trips.

  We plotted two different two-day trips, allowing plenty of time to travel the 200 miles—the Telenovela would swing further out to sea, and we’d hug the coast, to see what there was to see and to scare up any prey.

  All went according to plan, until the machine guns.

  * * *

  “Why the ever-living fuck is the goddamn bunker booby-trapped?” Kim demanded, panting behind the remains of the rock wall we’d taken cover behind.

  “Because Obsidian was full of assholes.” My heart was beating too fast for me to steady my aim, and I didn’t know what to shoot at. The machine guns ran on motion-sensors and were quicker than we were. We’d managed to shoot down three, but five new ones had appeared. Eventually they had to run out of ammunition, but Cary and Tim were already dead, and I had a feeling we’d run out before the guns did.

  “Dad!” Helen’s voice was sharp, and I realized she’d been trying to get my attention over the sound of gunfire for some time. She was further down the field, crouched next to Alex, behind a boulder. Something shifted sluggishly in my mind.

  “What should I look for? Is there a keypad?”

  “Tim was faster than you, if he couldn’t —”

  “I’m trying, or Cary and Tim are dead for nothing, and we’re not doing that. What should I look for?”

  What had the guard said? He had been a particularly chatty one, trying to impress Susan, who’d only had eyes for ribosomes. It had been over 20 years ago, and he’d been annoyed and barely listening, but something…something had stuck, especially after he’d noted the coordinates…

  “In a tree! They wanted it to be hidden, but it had to be outside the firing line. Something an aide could have reached from a car.” He scanned the area, wincing every time one of the guns fired.

  “Got it!” Helen sprinted away from safety, but out of the area the guns were programmed to care about, so the danger was brief. Still, my limbs went cold and heavy, watching her.

  The guns went ominously silent. If anyone lived nearby, they’d be on the move, either running like hell or coming to see what survived the shootout. I supposed it depended on how important scavenging was to them.

  Helen fidgeted with a few suspicious bulges on a tree near the overgrown road, digging her nails deep into the bark. Finally, something swung open, and we let out a ragged cheer before realizing we had no idea what came next.

  Each Corporate bigwig had a separate code, but the support staff had a dump code, a basic bypass. Chances were low that it was the same for my lab and this bunker, but at this point…Were rockets going to come shooting out if we put in the wrong code?

  On second thought, it was definitely better not to say that out loud.

  “Numbers and letters?”

  “Yeah.” Helen waited, the image of confidence. Her faith in me was, as ever, entirely inspiring and fully terrifying. What if I killed her? Could I shrug that off the way I’d powered through so many other deaths? The way I’d buried the loss of her mother? Of our first son? Of…

  “7-6-A-as-in-alpha-2-2-9B-as-in-bravo.”

  She entered the code and nothing happened. No rockets, and the guns didn’t retract. I was cursing to myself when Alex risked a look around the boulder.

  “There’s a hole.”

  “What?!”

  “A hole. Right in the middle of the guns we shot out. I can’t…” He leaned a little too far, scared himself, froze, then breathed again when nothing shot him. “I can’t tell if it’s stairs or something else, but there’s a hole.”

  “We don’t have time to play. If anyone lives nearby, they might come to check this out, and I’m low on ammo.” Helen took a deep breath, and before any of us could register her actions, exploded forward, racing directly into the line of fire.

  Nothing happened.

  Nothing continued to happen, and eventually, we warily staggered to our feet and out of cover.

  “Next time, throw a damn rock,” Kim suggested, stalking forward.

  Inside the hole was a short set of stairs, which led to a lift, then to a cavern full of goods. Alex and Helen stayed up top to guard, and while there weren’t any nanites, there was everything else we could have asked for.

  “Boots!” Lee’s eyes were shining with joy and tears. “Tim used to complain about how fast the salt eats through them. New boots!”

  “Food and medicines first. We’ll gather clothes on the second trip.” I said it reflexively, as if we didn’t
all know the priorities, but his silent, immediate acceptance shook me out of my self-righteous haze. “Toss a few on the cart. We’ll get more if we can.”

  His grin warmed even me, and I shook my head. This bunker had me off balance, and the sooner we looted it and left, the better I’d feel.

  “These Corporate fancies really were big on themselves. They have a damn tanning bed down here.” Kim rolled her eyes, hiking a huge duffel bag over her shoulder and pulling an overstuffed cart behind her. “I’m expecting to find a bowling alley down one of these halls.”

  Lee glanced at her, confused by some of her terms.

  I knew immediately it wasn’t a tanning bed. I’d already started back the way Kim had come before I caught myself. What the hell did I think I was going to do with an imprinter? For the second time, I hauled my thoughts back to the task at hand, and we’d nearly completed our third trip, when Alex burst out of the lift.

  “Someone’s coming. Helen climbed one of the trees and saw them. We’ve got time but not much.”

  “Oh for fuck’s—move!” Kim had a bellow any staff sergeant would have approved of. “We’ve got incoming.”

  The carts were hell to move through the field, but the canal wasn’t far, and Helen had sent two men ahead to inflate a zodiac. Between the four tenders and the zodiac, we were able to load everything, and we were underway before we heard our pursuers.

  Unfortunately, reentering the dump code hadn’t closed the bunker or reset the guns, so we wouldn’t be coming back for anything we’d missed. Nor, sadly, did we have automatic weapons to cover our retreat. I hoped the open pit would attract the survivors’ attention, distracting them from their pursuit.

  But some people couldn’t do what was easy.

  The current was with us, and we pulled ahead without laying eyes on anyone, but they must have had some resources and someone smart. While we were still tying the tenders to the sailboats, they caught up to us.

  That wouldn’t have been much of a problem if one of the motherfuckers hadn’t had a rocket launcher.

  * * *

  I remember salt burning my nose and water heaving out of me, and being unable to tell if I was wet, bleeding, or dying.

  The answer was all three.

  Helen held my head still, her eyes boring into me as Kim cursed like the sailor she’d become.

  “Dumped half your blood into the ocean like you don’t have any goddam sense. You’re fucking lucky there wasn’t a shark smorgasbord. Alex almost died pulling in Lee and his damn boots. But fuck if we don’t still have two tenders, the zodiac, and your dumb, old ass. Fucking Obsidian bunker. Wish your motherfuckin’ nanites would kick in and knit up any damn one of these mother —”

  I’d never been so happy to lose consciousness.

  * * *

  I woke up at home. Jimmy was slumped in a chair across the room.

  I had to clear my throat three times to wake him, but he leapt admirably into action once I did.

  “We brought enough supplies back to make the trip worth it, but we had to sink the Ava.” He ran through a list of updates, while I sipped water and tried to find my voice.

  Damn. I’d have to talk to Andres about getting the Connor repaired.

  “We lost a chunk of the stuff we collected and four of the 10 men we took in. And…” Jimmy halted, fists bunching on his lap. The scars on his neck bulged, as though the gills wanted to open.

  “Either some of them followed us, or the Nantucketers are better prepared than we thought.”

  “What?” I croaked, but he understood. Still, the moments stretched before he sat up and met my eyes.

  “We’ve lost twenty sheep and a handful of goats. Zee took the Squid out for a day-trip, two days ago, and hasn’t come back. Burner says two of his shellfish harvesters vanished.”

  I wanted to go back to sleep and try again, but the nanites had done their job, and there was no escape for me.

  “What’re we…?” The roughness in my voice was definitely related to my long stretch of unconsciousness, not this horror he was sharing.

  “Helen’s on the hunt with some of the night boys. Everyone’s taking patrol shifts. You might want to see if you can whip up some new aids in the lab to help us get a jump on them.”

  We both knew that was a stretch, but I certainly couldn’t stay in bed.

  * * *

  Unsurprisingly, I had not had a new stroke of brilliance in the lab. Two more days, four more killings. Whoever was hunting us seemed to know exactly where we weren’t looking and was able to strike and vanish before anyone could turn their head.

  The gravel path between the shed that covered my lab and my house was lined with oyster shells and sea-turned rocks. I’d long ago learned to walk it quietly, and I listened to the general night sounds with the overconfidence of knowing my surroundings. None of the killings had happened in the middle of town, and I was sure I’d hear anyone on my path.

  I didn’t consider that someone might already be there, waiting, in the stretch of darkness between the shed and home.

  The shape shambled forward, stretching to its full height. The top resolved into an oversized head a moment before the entirety of its face split open. Shadows couldn’t hide the utter wrongness—teeth crowding in sharp rows, and the gaping wound of bone and gums and jagged edges. A hint of rotten fish and congealed blood stained the air between us, and its mouth opened further.

  “I ate your wife.” The voice was somehow worse than the growing stench, guttural and forced out of a shape that had no business using words.

  Rage boiled through me, almost enough to block the death smell, and I froze in place. Ava had disappeared at the water’s edge, and a picture of how it happened crystalized. She’d been out walking, studying the colors of the sunrise, finding some measure of beauty in this Fallen World. The water had risen. A bullet head, impossible, flat dead eyes, and teeth, all of those teeth, opening out of the water and grabbing her by the leg, ripping an arm—

  No! Rejection fought against the rage, the illogic of it slamming home. If this creature had found me all those years ago, it would have hunted me then, not now. The missing lambs, the cracked ships…they would have happened all along.

  There had been no blood anywhere in the harbor, nor screams. Staring into that huge blue-gray mouth, studded with red infections, and the endless rows of claw-sharp teeth, I knew this one wasn’t made for clean kills. Ava was gone, but this Geno Freak hadn’t been there for it.

  Nevertheless, I wanted to split him down the middle and see what made him work. How had he survived, continued to change and grow, when all those eager young things had died before the world fell?

  Part of me wondered how often I or one of my peers had used Greenland sharks, if their longevity had been passed on in the same way the fleetingness of a feline had. Would parrot plumage have led, in some cases, to a century of life, if the shock of the body’s changes hadn’t killed them in a handful of years?

  I remained wary, ignoring my scientist’s voice, and focusing on the survival instincts that had brought me this far. I had no weapon, while the Geno Freak kept his in his face. My lab offered plenty of options, but he’d waited here, on the path between the shed and my house, where there were plenty of rocks and little else.

  Even in my prime, I had never been much of a fighter, and though the nanites kept me hale longer than I deserved, they couldn’t suddenly make me strong enough to survive combat with a seven-foot-tall, walking shark-man.

  “You ate my wife and waited 15 years to come for me? Have you been waiting for seasoning?” I hadn’t mastered my rage, and the words came out sarcastic and provoking. I was smarter than that. For some reason he didn’t attack; he made an awful, choking sound that I belatedly realized was a laugh.

  “Now, I know who you are. Before I was just passing through, and she was convenient. I followed you. I learned. I hunted.” He laughed again—the sound of a goat strangled by a python. “I’m glad she was your wife. Next you. T
hen your daughter. Then your son. No one is looking at the ocean. Everyone will think it’s someone else. They don’t know what you did. They won’t look for me.”

  The joy convinced me. The grating, grinding, rotting voice made the muscles of my neck clench, but underneath the horror was unmistakeable happiness. He was so pleased with himself, with this looming death of mine, I knew it was true.

  He’d taken Ava.

  He’d hunted and stalked the island for the last several weeks, but he’d been here before. Maybe he’d caught my trail from the bunker, but I knew it didn’t matter. The failing ocean had always sent him back to a place he’d once found easy food. It was only a matter of time until he found me.

  I tensed to jump sideways. I would grab the largest rock I could find and bash him until I bled out. But the sound of his laughter stopped suddenly. I froze like the prey I was, waiting for his attack.

  He stood there, unmoving, a thick shadow crawling over the top of his bulbous head. I have no idea how many seconds it took me to realize there really was no shadow.

  A hatchet had split him from the middle of his pointed head to damn near his eyes. I couldn’t make sense of it until a taloned hand appeared from behind him, raking across his eye down toward his open maw.

  He staggered, and still I could only stare.

  The fight was bloody and fast, and I stood uselessly by as my daughter silently took the monster apart as he thrashed around to face her. He bit her left shoulder, but before he could tear and rip, she dug her hands between them, plunging the reinforced bone and claw into his throat and pulling it free in a spray of blood.

  They fell to the ground, his teeth still locked onto her. Finally, I found my feet and remembered how to move. As I leapt forward, eyes shone in the dark to my right, and a single howl echoed through the night air.

  Who? Which of them had seen, had heard?

  It didn’t matter. Not yet. I don’t remember closing the distance, just the feel of clammy skin, neither shark nor human, and the sight of Helen’s wide, bright eyes losing focus as they stared up at me. The creature’s dying effort had been to dig his countless rows of teeth as deeply into her as he could. Given the width of that impossible mouth, I couldn’t know what he’d punctured, nor could I pull him off her to let her bleed freely in the path she’d run as a girl.