The Indifferent Children of the Earth

by Gregory Ashe

  Chapter 15, Thursday 25 August

  I ran, the gravel grinding together under my feet like half-remembered nightmares. A glance behind me confirmed my suspicion: a sprawl. This one, a grandmother, the remainder of her white hair still drawn back in a bun, a big, flowered hat skewed to one side. It was comical, really. But the way she moved—there was nothing funny about it. Quick, decisive steps after me. The steps of a hunter when the pray is in sight. There was nothing arthritic in her movements to mark her age; nor was there the straggling, shuffling step of the undead that you’ll see in so many zombie movies. Sprawls, like sinks, were creatures stirred awake by leftover magic, and it left them crazed to kill. Not to eat. Just to kill. Guess that’s the dark side of magic, huh?

  So I ran, and the distance grew between us. Even through the thick slaver of fear in my mouth, I felt a burst of hope. Maybe the leftover energy in the sprawl had almost run out; maybe she didn’t have the strength to run, couldn’t catch up. I could make it to the fence, get on my bike, get away from here. I still had a chance.

  The torn shirt saved my life. I darted under a low-hanging limb, hoping the line of trees would slow or confuse the sprawl, and I felt a tug and heat. Another sprawl, hiding just behind the elm. It pulled me toward it, but I had been running, and the momentum kept me moving. With a loud rip, my t-shirt split. I fell forward, landed hard on one shoulder, and kept rolling, sticks and stones scraping my chest and back. Then I was up and running again. The sprawl crouched behind me, my t-shirt still in one hand.

  Hot and humid as the night was, the air felt cool against my bare skin, except for a patch of stinging warmth. I glanced down and saw blood staining my jeans and boxers, but I couldn’t tell how bad the wounds were, not while running, not as I watched my pulse measured out in the blood flowing down my side.

  Ahead of me, the fence came into view. I didn’t know if I was running toward my bike or away from it; I’d gotten turned around when I started running, and when I fell, I had not bothered to stop and get my bearings. But there was the fence, almost invisible against the dark buildings across the street. I ran.

  This time, I saw the sprawl before I fell into its trap; it lurked behind a too-tall tombstone. Only the weak street lights gave the sprawl away where it cast a shadow. I’m not even sure how I noticed, only that suddenly I saw the shadow, and I broke left, parallel to the fence. Three sprawls. Three. Three. The thought pounded in time with my heart. How many more could there be?

  It was like a bad movie; two more sprawls sprinted from a line of cherries directly ahead of me. I skidded to a halt. I could taste my own blood in the air, my sweat, all of it gathered in my nose, on my lips, like a scream. A quick glance told me the other sprawls were closing in around me, cutting me off from the fence, trapping me. No quickening. Hell, I didn’t even have the bat; nothing to fight with, as Chad had shown me just a few days before. I’d be torn apart, mutilated perhaps beyond recognition, unless the police found a tooth or a severed finger. My parents might never know what happened to me. And I was surprised to find I cared about that.

  Then I felt a moment of relief. My bike. I’d left my bike at the gate. They’d be able to figure it out from there. That was some consolation.

  Unlike sinks, the sprawls took their time, pacing toward me, circling me like a pack of wolves, waiting to strike. Sinks would have rushed me. So I turned as well, trying to keep as many as I could in my line of sight. When they rushed me, I would not go down without a fight, however short it might be.

  Something bright and hot wiped the cemetery from my vision; all I could see was purple-white light, and then the red-green afterimage. I could feel the heat of it, though. Energy blazed to life around me, heating my arms, my face, my back, but I couldn’t make out what was happening. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, trying to regain my night vision.

  I looked up just in time to see a sprawl leap toward me, hands outstretched like claws. A rippling wave of light, as wide as my torso, struck the sprawl. The light carried the creature back a dozen yards, until it struck a marker and the light dissipated. With a squishing slide, the sprawl’s torso fell to land next to its legs.

  Still blinking, I turned, examining the cemetery. Long black streaks marked the grass where the crudest forms of quickening had seared the earth. Quickening. That meant that—yes, behind me, less than arm’s length away, his back to me, stood the quickener. Hoodie, even in the heat, and track pants. I couldn’t make out anything about him, besides the fact that he was taller than I, broader in the shoulder.

  “Quit coming here,” the quickener said. He turned to face me, and shadows interposed themselves between us; I couldn’t make out anything but his outline. More quickening, and this was more sophisticated than anything else I’d seen him do. His voice, though—that was what was interesting. It sounded forced, too deep. The voice of someone trying to hide his identity. The voice of someone that knew me and was trying to hide it. “Understand?”

  I studied the cemetery. Aside from the sprawl that I had seen killed with that wave of light, a quickening I wasn’t familiar with, the others had been blasted with the most basic forms of quickening—the type of raw, uncontrolled energy that left long burns along the lawn. The type of quickening that no one used, unless he had no idea what he was doing. Someone with no training, only talent, instinct. The kind of quickener that I was supposed to hunt down and eliminate, according to Grandfather’s training.

  And he had just saved my life. Not to mention the fact that, if I tried anything, I’d most likely get a bolt of lightning. So, in one of my more self-interested moments, I decided I’d let the quickener live.

  “Do you understand?” the quickener asked again. “You will not come here again.”

  “I understand.”

  “You’re hurt.”

  I shrugged, although it just agitated the cuts in my side. I wiped some of the blood away; the slashes weren’t deep, thank goodness, but they’d need a lot of antiseptic; being clawed by a dead person was a good way to get a disease. “I’ll be ok.”

  Without another word, the quickener disappeared in a bolt of light that shot into the sky and scrambled back and forth across the night. It was a bizarre way of quickening, ineffective and counter-intuitive. Like watching someone write every word backward. Or, better said, like watching someone try to walk backward everywhere they went.

  It hurt like hell to get back over the fence, and my boxers were ruined with blood by the time I got home. I threw the jeans in the wash, hoping to save them, and then showered again and cleaned the wound as best I could. I had lots of other, smaller cuts along my chest and back from when I had fallen, but none were serious. Once I had the slashes from the sprawl washed and bandaged, I lay down on my bed.

  There were too many sprawls for it to be holdover magic. There was a grower in this town, and he was doing something that took a lot of power. Enough that it was bleeding through the cemetery and raising half a dozen sprawls. That meant that people were dying, lots of people, to power that much magic. But who? And where? I would have to wait and see if my trick with the herbicide revealed anything.

  And the quickener—well, he was someone I knew. Or someone who was afraid of being recognized. They weren’t quite the same thing, but they gave me something to start by. And, as I had suspected, he was untrained, or close to it. The kind of person I was supposed to hunt down. Grandfather had been very clear about that. Quickeners—trained, responsible quickeners—those we left alone, so long as they didn’t interfere with other people. But people who just used quickening, without any training—they were dangerous to themselves, dangerous to others. And by the time we found them, they’d usually done enough damage raising sinks that we didn’t have any choice.

  My one ally that I might be able to depend on for help against the grower, the only quickener in town, was someone that I had been taught to hunt down and kill. And I don’t imagine that the quickener here would take kindly to that.