Mandible

by Ian Woodhead

  “Is that the Mantil Queen?”

  [Yes. Put me down, Andrew. Allow me to do my part.]

  He gently lowered the staff weapon then laid it on the floor.

  “Very good, Andrew,” said Nelson. “Now, step away and...”

  The creature's words stopped in mid-sentence when Andrew's dream woman emerged from the weapon. She ran over to the Mantil warrior and whispered something into its ear. Almost immediately, the warrior pulled a small control box out of Nelson's hands, dropped it on the floor and stood on it. The energy shield blinked twice then deactivated.

  “What did that achieve?” shouted Nelson. “All you have done is accelerate the invasion.”

  The staff weapon had reverted to its former shape. The warrior threw it over to Andrew. He caught it and aimed the business end at Nelson.

  [Forget about the queen, Andrew, shoot the two figures!]

  “What?” The crowds had gone wild. They swarmed towards him

  [Just do it. They are dead anyway!]

  He took aim and fired. Two green balls of light rose into the air then detonated. Every Mantil in the crowd fell to the floor with the exception of the Mantil warrior.

  “What have I done?” The Mantil Queen no longer resembled Andrew, it no longer resembled much of anything, apart from a lumpy green pool of spreading gunk.

  The woman reappeared. She took Andrew's hand, wrapped her fingers tight around his and pulled him away from the mess. “You took the only option available and halted the genocide of two intelligent species.”

  “How?”

  “When the liquid from the cocoon helped to heal you, for a moment, you were joined physically and mentally with the insect collective. Instead of the spires turning every human into Mantil warriors, it will now turn the humans and the Mantil into one homogeneous species. It really is the dawn of a new age.”

  Andrew wasn't sure how to respond to that. Instead, he turned his attention to the remaining warrior. “I don't understand why you helped.”

  “I was human not that long ago,” it replied. “I made a lot of mistakes during my life and helping you actually felt like the right choice this time.” It paused. “Or it just might be the fact that I find it impossible to say no to such a beautiful woman.”

  THE END

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Meg slowed, braked her bike, and put a foot firmly on the ground. She looked behind her to the south and saw nothing. With one pedal forward and the other back, she put all the weight of her body on her right foot, starting the bike into motion.

  It was the second day, and she’d put almost fifty miles between her and Dallas. The first had been spent getting out of the city.

  She rode a twelve gear bike on a four lane highway. The bike was old, it’s color faded to a deep shade of red. She weaved in and out of two lanes on northbound side of the road, unafraid of traffic. There was no traffic.

  She focused on the small details in the road ahead, the cracks and bumps in the concrete, the obstructions that would trip her up if she didn’t see them in time. She carried little with her. All she had were the things she’d managed to grab from her college dorm room in the last minutes before Dallas was a blur at her back. That included the clothes she wore, the bicycle, and the contents of her backpack. The backpack was stuffed with more clothes, a few packages of food, and a single bottle of water.

  She was somewhere past Denton on the 77 stretch of I-35. It was a bleak road. Four lanes of traffic were closed in on either side by concrete supports, about three feet tall. Immediately past the supports were endless rows of trees, planted right up against the edge of the highway. There wasn’t a soul in sight, despite the fact that she was headed away from one of the biggest cities in the United States. Where one would normally expect to see a heavy flow of interstate traffic there was little more than the leavings of those that’d come before her. The highway was packed with abandoned cars, all pointed in the same direction, the way she was headed; north.

  There were so many things. Things everywhere. Cars, motorcycles, trucks, SUV’s. Articles of clothing half spilled out of suitcases. Overstuffed station wagons abandoned in ditches by the highway, full of forgotten provisions, food, water, camping tents, family photographs, books, Bibles, all the things that either had an obvious use, or a secret one; the things only their gone owners would understand. The highway held the tattered things that human beings needed to survive, when emergencies drove them out of their homes and into the unknowable.

  There were bodies too. On that second day, all bodies were new, though not necessarily fresh. Some held the tell-tale signs of the strange sort of horror Meg had known in Dallas. Where people should have been, there were sometimes only clean, white bones and a few strands of ligaments holding them together. Worse than these were the bodies that hadn’t been fully consumed. Meg saw every one. If they faced her as she passed on the highway, she stared them down eye to eye. If there were no eyes, as it was often the case, she’d stare straight through the sockets of their exposed skulls. She never failed to see them, couldn’t ignore them, and didn’t want to. Her bike didn’t go fast enough to make them a blur, and for that, she was glad. The dead around her kept her going. If she stopped pedaling that bike, it would be her bones gleaming in the sunlight. She knew that…somehow.

  She wasn’t afraid of dead people anymore. Once in her life skeletons and corpses had creeped her out to no end. Now she knew better. There were worse things.

  ***

  The road stretched onward as the sun rose into midday. Meg kept pedaling, unaware of herself, or the details in the passing and changing world, only the road. The road didn’t change, and for that, she was also thankful. Small details might need to be dealt with, a highway exit overstuffed with cars blocking her lane, or a spill on the road of some sort, but unless there was anything in particular to pay attention to, anything that would require her to be fully there, she wasn’t. She gave herself as much as she needed to pedal the bike and weave through lanes in the road. Everything else went and hid.

  Memories of the city would come occasionally, and she’d hold them back as long as she could, as if her mind was a retaining wall on the edge of a shoreline, and with the rising of the tides her memories would flood over into a sensitive area that she wanted to protect. Every time this happened, she’d bite her lip hard and pedal furiously, forcing her brain to focus on something not tied to memory. Then the tide would recede. Whilst she was still this close, still a day away from Dallas, it was best for Meg to ignore everything that didn’t directly deal with moving that bicycle north.

  She weaved her way through car pileups and wrecked heaps in the road. She was the only thing that moved. Everything else was frozen in place. A huge semi-truck was overturned on one section of the highway. Its cargo container badly smashed through the interstate’s center divide, spilling the truck’s contents into every lane, both north and south. The truck had been full of furniture. Parts of tables and ornate cabinets were reduced to splinters on the asphalt. An overturned armchair had caved in the windshield of a nearby station wagon. The area wasn’t safe for her bicycle, because there were far too many splinters for its soft tires to safely move through. Meg picked up her bike and carried it around the semi-truck. As she passed by the front door, she saw the driver, his body halfway out of the windshield. He was still in one piece, but the journey through the glass had dissected him down the middle. His head was resting face down on the hood of the truck, in a stream of blood that dripped all the way down to the road in small droplets from his shredded neck. There weren’t any flies near his body to lay eggs in his exposed insides, as might be expected. Not yet, Meg reminded herself. They’ll come.

  The body reassured her in a sickening way. So far, on her trek north, all the bodies had been picked over, down to the bone. This one wasn’t. She hoped it meant that she’d gone beyond the danger zone, that she’d outrun it.

  As she got back
on her bike, skidding the pedals backward so she could get a leaning start, Meg remembered why she was on I-35 in the first place, and why she was heading north. There had been a number of different options available to her once she’d managed to escape the city. Go west or east on twenty. Loop around and head south, aim for San Antonio, why not? Maybe the military was set up down there, near the base. It was as good of a plan as any. Why north?

  North was home.

  North was her mom and dad. Her brother. Her house, with its two stories of yellow painted homeness. North was Wellington, Kansas, the town with the post office on one corner of Main Street and grocery on the other. Stuck somewhere between was Meg’s entire life, the life she’d left behind a year and a half ago to move to Texas for college.

  She’d had this thought, this intuition, that’d rooted itself in her mind since the moment she woken up the day after Dallas. She’d known something that she had no basis of knowing, but knew anyway, not as belief nor faith, but as a natural conclusion reached from a part of her mind Meg hadn’t been aware of. The fact that she knew it made no sense to her. It scared her, like a mirror reflection she didn’t recognize.

  My brother’s still alive, she knew. Kurt. My parents are dead, but my brother’s back home in Wellington and he’s alive. A million miles from here, but I’ll reach it, because my brother’s alive, right now, and I’m alive, right now. I don’t know how I know this, but it’s true. My brother’s alive, holed up somewhere in my hometown, and I-

  There was something else in there as well, but Meg pushed it back into the receding tide.

  ***

  Noon came and passed. The sun stopped rising and started to set.

  As she rode she noticed two things. The first was that she wasn’t getting tired. She’d never been a very athletic person, never on any track or soccer teams, and she was sweating out all the water her body could spare, the single water bottle already half empty in her pack. Yet she didn’t feel tired, not even slightly tired. It wasn’t from any sort of adrenal rush either. Whatever adrenaline she’d ever had was all gone back in Dallas.

  It was the lack of options that made ‘tired’ disappear. Her body knew that the bike was all she had. It was either the bike or death, so her body left tired behind, just another piece of refuse on the road. No room for it in her overstuffed pack, or on her shoulders, behind her eyes. Tired was dead.

  The other thing she noticed was her front tire was going flat.

  It’d started around two. The bike simply wasn’t taking her weight anymore. When she tried to continue forward, it would sink and rise, wobbling under the deflated inner-tube underneath the front tire. Once, when she maneuvered sharply around a briefcase lying in the road, she almost skidded right off the bike. It’d taken a frantic moment of counterbalancing to keep from falling facedown onto the asphalt. You can’t steer a bike on a flat, she thought. Go figure.

  She reluctantly got off the bike, knowing that if she continued to ride on it, she’d damage either the tires or herself. She didn’t want to leave it behind, however, so she walked it along, her arms rested on the handlebars. Her pace slowed to a dead crawl.

  It was something else to walk rather than to ride. On a bike she was as weightless as air. The world gave way and it made her forget where she was going, or coming from. On her feet, Meg couldn’t help but take frequent looks back behind her, one quick glance followed by an obsessive double take every few minutes. She knew that it was a ridiculous thing to do, and that she’d hear the danger coming from a mile off. No sound in the world was bigger, more obvious, but that knowledge didn’t keep her from continuing to look back.

  The world was clear and slow and dull. Grey brush and grass gave way to short, bright-green grass, the farther from the city she went. The number of cars receded, as did the number of bodies. Instead of loose trash and possessions littering the road, things looked thoroughly picked over, as if drivers, upon running out of gas, stalling from mechanical issues, or stopping for various other reasons, had taken everything they could with them, having time to spare. But to where? Meg wondered. Do they know something that I don’t? Why would you leave your car and the highway? Where would you go? Into small towns? The back country? There were probably plenty of drivers, the majority of drivers, that’d run into no trouble at all and were a thousand miles away by now, going west to California, north all the way to Canada, or east to DC, to knock on the doors of the White House and tell the President of the United States that there was a mess to clean up in Texas, and he needed to get his ass in gear and order some low flying AC-130s into downtown Dallas.

  Thinking of the city made the tide rise over the dam in her mind. She started to put together all the pieces of the questions she’d wanted to ask in the city, but hadn’t had the time. What the fuck’s happening? Had been numero-uno on her list, followed shortly by how? And Why? The last two were apt to drive her crazy, the first would give her nightmares for the rest of her life. The real question, the one she could’ve used an answer to, was what am I really gonna do, and how am I supposed to do it?

  Then she saw the people, ahead on the road.

  Four of them, all standing behind a low barricade of smashed cars directly under a double-headed streetlight at the center divide of the highway, two of them held weapons in their hands. One was man holding a shotgun by a front grip, another a woman with a baseball bat. There were two others behind them, young teenage boys by the look, unarmed. The boys, both of whom looked no older than fifteen, were focused primarily on the dark sweat under her neck that made her shirt cling to her midriff.

  The wielder of the gun was a middle aged guy, grey hair went straight down to his shoulders from a widow’s peak. A fresh, shallow scar ran across one cheek. He put up his right hand, the left kept the gun balanced on the hood of a car. Meg stopped.

  “You’re from the city,” the man said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yea,” Meg said back, her throat ached as she made the words. “Going north.”

  The man nodded. “You know,” he said. “Others have come from the west and east, and there was one dumbass I met going south, but you…You’re the first we’ve seen from the city, coming from the highway at least.”

  “Really?” He nodded unsmiling. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “There’s nothing I wanna hear. Keep your stories to yourself. What’s your name, Miss?”

  She shrugged uncomfortably, “Megan. I-uh, my bike’s got a flat. You know where I could fix it? Anyone in town that would help me?” She knew of the town off the interstate, Gainesville was its name, and could also guess the reason these people were out on the highway. They were locals, keeping refugees out of their pocket of highway land, away from the provisions of grocery stores and twenty-four-hour gas stations.

  “You know why I’m out here, don’t you?” the man with the shotgun said, reading her mind. “Some came yesterday, after it started. They said bad things. Things we didn’t want to hear. We told them to leave and they did. Are you gonna say bad things?”

  “No.” She promised. “I’m not gonna say anything if I’m not asked. If I am asked and I know it’s…bad I’ll say I don’t know. I’ll be a good guest. And I don’t want to stay. As soon as I can, I’m gone.”

  “Good.” He seemed convinced. “Head to the mechanic’s shop. Guy by the name of Jim runs it, young kid but good mannered, he’ll help you out. Tell him Manny sent you. It’s a home shop. Take the exit down Weaver till you hit California street, head right, and after you go over the railroad, take a left on Denison. He’s the lime-green house right past the scrapyard. He’ll fix you up, just don’t go wandering.”

  “Thanks.” She memorized the directions.

  Meg turned to the right to pass them and start down the exit. The woman with the baseball bat nudged Manny on the shoulder and gave him a look. He rolled his eyes, then spoke to Meg once more. “One more thing. You don’t gotta answer if you don’t want to.”

  “What?”


  “How do you know that your brother is still alive?”

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