by James Fahy
*
Sofia drove almost as recklessly as Cloves did, though her car didn’t roar quite as much as we made our way around the city, heading east across the river.
The Tribals’ second in command, Kane-faithful, was maybe my best hope of getting any answers.
“I only answered your call, Doctor, because you promised to find out what happened to my alpha,” she said, her accent making her words growl even more than usual. “You said you would look into it. I told you how much trouble we are having with his daughter, determined to rule, too weak to lead.” She snorted, drumming her fingers impatiently as we waited at a set of traffic lights. The sky had clouded over and a few drops of rain spattered lightly on the windshield. “What is it you want from me?”
“I don’t know where your Kane is,” I replied, figuring honesty was the best policy. “To be frank, as far as I’m concerned, he died in the power station, however-”
“There was no body,” she sneered.
“However,” I repeated with emphasis. “If he is still alive, then there is one man who was the last there on scene to see him. Chase Pargate. He’s the one who made off with the Voynich manuscript. He might know what happened to your alpha. I need you to help me find him. I need your nose.”
Sofia snorted as the lights changed and we set off through the streets again.
“This dead man walking, yes? The one you tell me might be behind this monster stalking the streets. Oh yes, I would very much like to meet him.”
“You would?”
She shrugged at the wheel. “He sounds strong, intelligent, resourceful. If the worst is true… if I cannot find Kane… I could use a mate.” She glanced at me sidelong. “Our ways have structure, Doctor. Kane’s daughter may not be strong, but she does outrank me. I cannot challenge her authority, not officially… not alone. But were I to have a strong mate, the two of us together would carry enough weight within the tribe to push for an official challenge.”
“Then you could take over the Tribals?” I raised an eyebrow,
“To protect them, to protect her,” she clarified. “Until my alpha returns.”
I tried to imagine Chase Pargate with added were-creature powers. I really didn’t like the idea of it. His CV was full enough as it was, thanks. He didn’t need dangerous-shapeshifter adding to his resume.
I had no real idea how Tribal laws and customs worked. Whether this ‘challenge’ would be a voting referendum, a political campaign, or a violent battle to the death in some kind of werewolf arena. I think Sofia was far more Thunderdome than leaflet-campaigning.
“I get first dibs on Chase when we find him,” I said. “Two of my co-workers… two of my friends, are dead. I need to know why.”
The rain had started in earnest now. We were passing into the Slade, and the shop fronts and streets were beginning to look a lot more tired and washed out.
“I am sorry to hear of your losses, Doctor.” Sofia said respectfully. She sniffed, and flicked on the windscreen wipers.
“How do you know where to start looking for this elusive man of yours?” she asked after a moment. “I can track a scent, yes. But I still need a starting point. You have brought us to the ghetto. This is where you think he is hiding?”
“Not in the Slade,” I explained, hoping my hunch was right. “Beyond it.”
It had come to me up on the rooftop, sitting across from Dove, when he had mentioned being in my head. My nagging feeling that Allesandro was in trouble somewhere, the strange waking dreams I’d had where I always felt like he was trying to tell me something I wasn’t understanding. After my run in at the library, when I’d banged my head and had been taken to Blue Lab to recover, I’d seen Dove and Allesandro. At the time, their babbling seeming nonsense to me. But in the light of what had happened since, Allesandro’s words had come back to me.
“So many things in fairy tales point to the forest,” he had said to me “There are all sorts of things in there.” It hadn’t meant anything to me at the time, but now, maybe, it did.
“If you want the truth,” Allesandro had insisted on telling me, “You have to follow the big bad wolf. You have to give chase.”
“Chase in the forest,” I said aloud. Sofia looked over at me with curiosity. I was getting snarky side-eye from my own personal big-bad-wolf.
“You think your quarry is in the forest?” she questioned. I nodded, hoping she didn’t ask me the source of my tip-off. I’m not sure how much faith she would have in me if I told her about vampire dream-speak. ‘The imaginary hottie in my head told me so… not long after a concussion’. It wouldn’t instil confidence.
“Yes. We’re going for a little walk in the woods,” I said.
Chapter 22
Wytham Woods was an ancient woodland. Parts of it dated back to the last Ice Age, though secondary woodlands were added during the seventeenth century, and further plantations around the nineteen-fifties. To say it had a long history would be quite the understatement. They were ancient.
The woods had come under the ownership of the University of Oxford back in the twentieth century, and they had owned and maintained it right up until the apocalypse when they, like everyone else, suddenly had a lot more urgent things to worry about than botanical conservation. Namely zombie-face-eaters.
Pre-end-of-the-world Oxford has been a lot smaller city than the New Oxford we lived in now. When the wall went up, and what remained of us fenced ourselves in against the horror outside, we dragged in a whole lot of countryside too. Our brave new city would need room to expand, after all.
The Bonewalkers, with their talent for moving things, people, buildings, rearranged a lot of the local rural landscape for us. The woods used to be on the other side of the city, over by Portmeadow, back when that area was mere grassland long ago. When the rich and mighty of our great new order wanted to build their palaces there, the woodlands, all one thousand acres of them, were moved, in the blink of an eye to the other side of the city, beyond the Slade, beyond Headington. I still marvel at the Bonewalkers’ skills, even if the mere sight of one makes all my skin want to crawl off and slink away. Silent things, rearranging the world at a whim, like a child playing with a rubix cube.
Of course, thirty years had passed since New Oxford was established. We have since built on almost every available inch of land we can, making our fortified metropolis. The only real green spaces left now are designated Tribal settlements and the odd, small park. When we ran out of room, we built upwards and burrowed down. But no one ever touched the woods.
“Did you know…” I said to Sofia as we made our way along ever more broken and deserted roads, the car bumping and jolting along through the grim ghetto. There was hardly anyone on the streets here, and it wasn’t just the rain. Windows were barred, shops shuttered and barricaded. There would usually have been a few people milling about in the streets, even if only those with nowhere else to go, but east Headington looked like a ghost town. The monster which had been staking the children of the Slade had clearly quite the reputation here, and people were staying indoors and out of sight.
“Did I know what?” she prompted, making me realise I had lost my train of thought, slightly spooked by the eerily still neighbourhood. It was like driving through an abandoned town.
“Wytham Woods was once designated as a site of special scientific interest,” I muttered.
“Well,” she shrugged disinterested, as the car bounced over potholes in the rain, the windows steaming as graffiti-covered walls slid by. “You are indeed the scientist. And you are interested, so that seems fitting, no?”
“Before the backside fell out of the world, it was one of the most researched pieces of woodland anywhere on the globe,” I said, peering out of the window at the grey day. “Not just in Britannia, in the whole world. It was extremely rich in flora and fauna, something like five hundred species of plants, over eight hundred species of butterflies and moths. I was so glad that we saved it when the wall went up. My father used to tell me
, when I was little, that it was important we saved more than just people.”
“No one goes to the woods, Doctor.” Sofia didn’t seem impressed, but then she wasn’t the kind of person I could picture chasing butterflies through the woods. Bringing down a deer with her bare teeth perhaps. “They say they are haunted by witches and worse.”
I declined to comment on this. The woods did indeed have a dark reputation these days. Something had gone bad in them, like a rot, years ago, spreading out through the trees like a dark stain. People who did go in didn’t come out. Weird noises and lights in the middle of the night, all the usual urban legend bullcrap. The city had built up around the woods, yes, right up to their borders, but most people considered them off limits now. They were tended by no-one and had been left to their own wild devices. A dark wilderness between the slums and the east quadrant of the great wall.
“There are four main areas in the woods,” I explained. “Well, habitats I guess. The original, natural woodland, that’s the ancient part. The secondary woodland that was added in ye olden times, more modern planting which went down just a few decades before we lost the world altogether, and the grassland, which is a big limestone area at the top of the hill in the woods.” I drummed my fingers on the dashboard thoughtfully, in time with the drizzle. “There’s also a valley side-mire, and some ponds and pools, but if Chase is anywhere in there, my instinct is telling me he’ll be in the deepest, darkest, oldest part.”
We had left most buildings behind now, following a very disused track up a hill of dead, brown October grass. It was an odd feeling, rising up on a large grassy knoll with space suddenly all around us. We were still inside the city, still within the wall, but it felt like heading into the countryside. Dreary, spooky as hell autumn countryside.
“This is good news,” said Sofia decisively. “With a thousand acres to cover, it will save us time if we know where to start.”
Eventually, on the crest of the hill, we pulled up at the ragged treeline. Sofia killed the engine and we got out, into biting wind and thin but persistent rain. Behind us, slightly downhill, the city rolled away on all sides. But before us, across a swathe of dead and lifeless grass, brittle as straw and whispering and rippling in the wind, the trees were tall, dense and crooked. They towered above us, canopy and branch intertwined so thickly that all beneath them was deep and uninviting shadow.
Great, I thought to myself. First time I ever get a field trip, and it’s to Mirkwood. I swear to god if there are giant spiders in there eating dwarves, I’m done.
“Give me what you have,” Sofia held out her hand. I fumbled in my pocket and brought out the scrap of latex from the rooftop murder scene, which Cloves had been good enough to drop off for me to aid in the search.
Taking it, the Tribal held it to her face in her cupped hand, looking like an addict sniffing glue off an old rag. After a moment, she handed it back to me, the light reflecting in her yellow eyes momentarily, like those of a cat caught in car headlights.
“Let us go and play fetch in the woods,” she nodded, stalking off for the treeline.
I followed her, drawing my Cabal Taser out of my bag as I did so. I’d been attacked so much recently, I wasn’t going anywhere unarmed anymore.
“Did you bring a weapon?” I asked. We passed beneath the darkness of the trees, dry leaves crunching underfoot as we moved into the haunted hush of Wytham Woods. At least we would be dryer in here. The woods were so tangled above us, hardly any real light or rain made its way down to the ground.
Sofia scoffed, glancing back at me with narrowed eyes which glowed softly in the dark. “Please, I am Tribal, Dr Harkness. I am the weapon.”
Chapter 23
I was born into a walled city. My father had left it several times during my lifetime; part of his job role to search by helicopter the wildlands beyond for survivors who were uncontaminated with Pale virus, humans who could be brought home to the city. But like most people my age, I’ve never left the metropolis. I grew up in streets and squares, surrounded by buildings and bricks, roads and cobbles and pavements. I’d never been in a woodland before.
A lot of information from the previous world survived the rising of the Sentinels and their near-extermination of us. Thank the internet for that, that old pre-cursor to the DataStream. It had worked along similar principles, though from what I’d noticed it had contained a lot more material on cats.
So of course I’ve seen woods on screen. I’ve seen many a movie with forests in them. But as we made our way slowly, laboriously deeper and deeper into the trees, pathless, tangled and untamed, and further and further from streetlights, traffic and everything I knew and found familiar, I seemed only to be able to bring to mind those particular movies where people are killed in the woods.
As time passed, and we made our way steadily further from the familiarity of the city, I listened carefully for any Appalachian hillbilly cannibals who may have relocated. I kept an eye out for jersey devils or bigfoot lurking in the shadows, just aching to maim and slaughter, in any found-footage way they could manage.
Sofia could clearly sense my unease, or maybe she could smell it. An outdoorswoman I was not.
“You seem very tense, Doctor.” She sniffed, changing direction slightly for maybe the tenth time in the last hour’s endless walking. I nodded.
“Yeah, little bit,” I said lightly. I was slightly out of breath from climbing and descending the endless little dips of the forest, and by now had lost track of how many times I’d stumbled and almost fallen over hidden and gnarled tree roots beneath generations worth of mulch and fossilised leaves. “Let’s just say if things start to get Blair Witch in here, I will taze any fucker on a broomstick.” The Taser crackled in my hand for effect. This actually made Sofia smile a little. Her lip curling up in an amused sneer. I didn’t know she had a sense of humour.
“I do not see many hundreds of species of butterfly, Doctor,” she pointed out, needling me. Her hand brushed aside a huge fern which rattled like old paper.
“As long as you also don’t see a burned, smoking, son-of-a-bitch dressed like a dead clown with a stupid grin on his face, that’s all I care about,” I told her.
I was trying not to imagine meeting that thing out here, in this tangled and seemingly endless maze of trees. Just the thought of it lurking somewhere in the shadows between the branches, standing stock still watching us, with its beady, shrivelled little eyes, teeth clacking together softly, was enough to send my pulse up. I’d had more than enough death and demons for one day.
I reassured myself by reasoning that surely if it was out here, Sofia would smell it. It smelled like barbequed dog.
“Wait,” she said, stopping suddenly. We had walked for maybe an hour and a half by this point, and hadn’t seen anything unusual. I had started to zone out. I had thought that roaming freely across the countryside would be liberating and life-affirming but, if these woods were anything to go by, I just found it boring as hell. Ooh look, more trees! I-spy-with-my-little-eye-something-beginning-with-T. I glanced around at our utterly indistinguishable surroundings as she halted us. We had come into a very small clearing at the bottom of a hollow, thick with drifts of leaves. There was even a break in the knotted canopy high above us here, through which for the first time since we had entered this place, I could just glimpse the cloudy afternoon sky, dark and flat as slate. Rain fell down through the latticework of branches in freezing silver shards.
I stood stock still, as still as if we were playing musical statues, and watched as she turned her head this way and that. It was always strange watching Tribals. They looked like humans. It wasn’t until they moved that you would really notice the subtle differences. Sofia’s movements were fluid and strange. The animal in her was just beneath the surface. You could see it reflected in her eyes and in her movements, wanting always to come out. Kane had had the same intensity.
“I have the scent,” she drawled, sounding satisfied with herself. “The dead man, he is her
e.”
“Chase?” I made my way over to her, tramping through the bracken. “Where?”
“Far off still,” she nodded up towards the lip of the hollow, where more trees and darkness awaited, looking thicker and more tangled still. “This way, but…” Her brow furrowed as she sniffed, tasting the air. “He is not alone, Doctor. There are others here… their smell is strange.”
“Others?” I looked around redundantly, as though expecting us to be surrounded by the cast of Lord of the Flies, peeking out between the trees. Nothing moved anywhere, not even a single bird on a branch. We hadn’t seen any natural wildlife since we entered the woods “Are they people?”
Sofia gave me a dark look. “We are all people… Dr Harkness,” she sneered.
I grinned apologetically. Don’t piss off the scary were-lady, Phoebe.
“I mean, are they human?”
“They were…” she said after a moment’s thought, her yellow eyes peering deep into the forest. “Now… I’m not so sure. Perhaps… more.” She suddenly set off up the hill. “Come, we have distance to cover.”
I hurried after her, realising with a kind of grim acceptance that we had turned around so often in here and all the trees looked the same to me. If I became separated from Sofia, I doubted I’d be able to find my way out and back to the city.
It had been a long day already and afternoon was drawing on. Night falls early in October. Faster still in a dark wood. I really didn’t want to be out here alone at night. Dammit, why didn’t I bring breadcrumbs?
*
The light was definitely growing noticeably dimmer between the trees as we fought our way through what was possibly the millionth gorse bush, snagging at my coat, which was no doubt now beyond repair. My Taser was still gripped tightly in my hand, just in case. It felt like a flaming torch and I was a village mob of one, stalking through the forest looking for the monster’s lair in an old black and white movie.