by Anna Vera
“They aren’t all dead,” he warns, nodding at a Mute caught halfway under the truck’s tire, twitching. “We need to get out of here before hive mind picks up.”
“Hive mind?” Cyb asks gruffly, wiping blood off a split lip.
“They’re all connected—like bees, kind of. The longer we stay here, the more likely the ones still alive will send information off to the others, alerting them.”
“What about Rion?” Jac asks, nostrils flared. Apollo takes a second too long to provide an answer. “I know you’d just love to leave him behind, you fuc—”
“I’ll carry him,” Apollo snaps, handing Cyb and Merope the majority of the backpacks. Jac insists on bringing one, leaving me with the job of forcing Rion to let Apollo carry him.
A near impossible task.
“Rion, stop being so combative,” I exclaim as he, yet again, finds a way to slip out of my grasp and stagger off. “You’re going to get us all killed if—”
We aren’t even off the road yet. Already there’s noise, startlingly like the Muted, issuing from somewhere beyond the small reach of our truck’s flickering headlights.
“Rion,” Apollo crows. “Let me help.”
“Have you carry me? Hard pass,” Rion says blearily, swaying on his feet as he dips off the highway and into the forest, swallowed by a thick wall of trees.
The second he dips inside, I can’t see him.
It’s too dark.
I throw my hands up. “Whatever, let’s just get going.”
Cyb and Merope follow behind Rion, struggling to get over the guardrail, with Jac and Apollo close behind. It’s so dark under the cover of trees, I wonder how we’ll manage.
“Hold up a second,” I say.
“Wait—where are you going? Don’t leave the group!”
“Apollo, relax.” My legs don’t feel altogether steady under my body as I jog back to the truck bed, where a beam of white light screams through the darkness. The flashlight.
I take it and move to return, but stop. The rest of my group stands behind the guardrail, their faces white—just barely visible in the truck’s dim headlights.
“What’s—” I begin but am stopped by my group, gesturing in unison, fingers to their lips, for me to shut up.
Apollo nods at Jac and whispers, “Reload.”
Jac drops his backpack and slowly tugs the zipper, which is stuck due to the bag being so overpacked. He tugs again. And again and again, but to no avail.
Swearing quietly, he yanks it in full.
The zipper breaks—loudly.
Abandoning their plan, I leap into a run—but it seems I’m a split second too late. Something has clamped a hand over my ankle tightly, tethering me in place like an anchor. I feel the same feeling of energy, the buzz and hum of white noise as it blends in a steady stream from start to finish.
I don’t get to look down and confirm it’s a Mute. My legs are swept out from beneath me in a fast jerk of my ankle, and in the blink of an eye, I’m sprawled on the icy asphalt.
Without a loaded gun.
Without anything but a flashlight.
“RELOAD,” I urge the others as I thrash like a fish out of water, limbs flailing against the Mute. When I get a chance to look up at my friends, I see they’re also being attacked.
And retreating. Without me.
I slam the flashlight viciously into the face of the Mute that has ahold of my ankle—the very Mute that was trapped under the wheel of our truck, yet is somehow still alive.
Its teeth, soft and rotten, shower out of its mouth, falling like stars as I strike and strike again until it’s jaw dislocates and hangs crookedly in a perpetual yawn.
The Mute shrieks, releasing my ankle. A second before it does so, I’m able to identify it as female—a woman who might’ve had pretty hazel eyes before she gouged them out herself.
The others—which I formerly thought dead—writhe at my side on the asphalt. They’re regaining their strength, lured by the scent of lingering prey, prey that should run.
I look up and see Merope pull out of Cyb’s grip and hurdle over the guardrail, coming after me. She’s got a gun. They have managed to reload somehow, but the Muted rise up in a tempest of shrieking and spitting and snarling. I feel their sticky fingers all over my body, my hair, my clothes.
They encircle the others in a swarm so dense I wonder if it’s even possible for them to escape. I see them try, only to be set back by the lunge of a Mute, jaws gaping to generate its signature rip of a shriek.
Merope grabs my wrist. “We’ve got to spilt up!”
The others don’t get the opportunity to reply—a flooding surge of the Muted exudes from the forest on the other side of the highway, washing toward them in an angry, violent wave.
I grab Merope’s elbow and pilot her away, in the opposite direction of our group. “If they are drawn to groups,” I breathe as we sprint together, “shouldn’t we all split up—individually?”
Merope ducks behind the cover of a broad tree, pale chest heaving and sweaty. The shrieks in the distance—heading away from us—suggest the Muted aren’t following.
They’re after the bigger group.
“You really want to face this alone?” Merope asks, her lips as white as chalk. “I don’t think—”
Our breath catches in unison as, out of the darkest part of the woods, the largest Mute I’ve ever seen emerges. It is big and deformed and ugly, with bulbous growths bubbling up over its semi-glowing flesh.
Glowing flesh?
It turns, blindly facing us, displaying a bloody maw crowded and overflowing with bristle-thin teeth. Its eyes are veiled by a flap of skin, lumpy with tumors.
Merope raises her gun, shooting the Haunt in the chest.
The bullet does absolutely nothing except infuriate the beast beyond all reason. It lifts a deformed, clawed hand, facing us.
No, not us. Me.
I don’t dodge fast enough. I feel an invisible hook cling to a place just behind my navel and drag me forward, a force that is downright impossible to resist.
Merope screams, grabbing for me, but I get dragged on.
I kick and flail and cling to the trees and uproot the yellow hibernating shrubs, but nothing—nothing—will stop it, not even the full magazine of rounds Merope sends thudding into its chest and eyes and skull.
“What do I do, what do I do!?” Merope cries openly, now, as she watches me be pulled into the arms of the Haunt. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I’ll do anything!”
Merope drops to her knees, sobbing hysterically, as I feel my feet leave the ground and I’m strung up midair. The Haunt lifts a clawed hand to my body, groping until it finds my throat, and in the second it touches my flesh, I know something’s happening.
Something very bad.
I choke back a gag. “Run—you’ve got to run!”
The Haunt’s contact with my skin causes everything around me to fall behind the veil, a smear of screaming voices—human voices—bleating between the hemispheres of my brain. And I see a series of faces, and know them—their families, their friends, their lives prior to getting attacked and killed . . .
I know them so well, it’s as though they were my own friends, my own family . . . I know everything about them, and their lives before getting attacked.
Their final moments alive are revealed to me like a scroll unrolled before my eyes, and I can feel the searing rip of death as it spreads through their bodies like a black stain—and, strangely, inexplicably, I sense they haven’t ever fully left. Like somehow, they are trapped inside the body of this Haunt.
Merope screams somewhere far away.
Bullets explode, boring holes in the Haunt’s chest. I hear it roar somewhere in the distance. I feel its claws retract from its grip around my throat, and its bloody, dripping maw slink away from my
lips. But this time, I don’t let go.
I hold on tighter. I channel every ounce of my remaining strength into digging deeper, ransacking its ugly, perturbed mind, looking, looking, looking . . .
Looking to find those lost souls.
Looking to free them.
And suddenly the Haunt’s energy shifts. It no longer feels like a smear of white noise; it feels vibrant and alive, a beat loud and wild, thudding through its flesh, singing a muddled song.
The edges of my vision sharpen. My group is here, together yet again, eyes wide. They have stopped shooting.
The Haunt’s skin glows like a harvest moon, a liquid gold which floods out of its body, siphoned into my own. My grip on the Haunt is a conduit through which the gold is running out of it and into me.
“They suck the souls right out of the living . . .
“I’ve seen it myself . . . they reap a life and get stronger from it.”
I fall.
i wake up to a world gravely still.
“What happened?” I sit up quickly—feeling so good, I must have slept for three straight days.
The others approach, operating prudently. I hear something at my side and realize it’s the Haunt dying slowly, the bulk of its body deflating around a skeleton disproportionately built and terrifyingly inhuman, the loss of the souls living inside its thick hide rendering it a husk of what it once was.
I feel myself coming to, reality sharpening before my eyes.
All around us, the Muted lie dead.
I shoot up to my feet. Everybody freezes, regarding me with a strange hybrid of curiosity and fear. Merope, Cyb, and Jac look like they can’t tell if they’ve witnessed a miracle or a disaster.
Apollo and Rion, though—they smile.
“What?” I snap.
“You killed every Mute for miles, I believe,” Apollo relays in quiet circumspect. He nods at the Muted, all dead, and I realize they all have something in common.
Snapped necks.
“I—no, I didn’t do that,” I breathe, but my palms burn like a spate of blisters, and my core feels eerily empty. And in a place even deeper and darker, I feel . . .
Hungry.
Unsatisfied.
“Well, I believe the jig is up.” Apollo eyes Rion, whose stiff posture and clenched jaw says, It was up a long time ago, you just didn’t know it, Apollo.
Cyb drops the supply bags, nostrils flared. “Does anybody care to explain what’s going on?” Her eyes glide to me, cold as a block of ice. “Explain how Eos did what she just did?”
But before Apollo can reply, I hear the loud zipper of a bag being opened and the clinking of glass jugs.
Jac holds up vodka. “You’re going to want this,” he suggests, tossing the fifth to Cyb. “It’s a long story and I don’t think you’ll like it too much.” Jac snorts a laugh. “None of your kind do.”
Rion tries leaving the tree he’s been using for support only to stagger and nearly fall over, caught by Merope, who dips into the crook of his arm, supporting him.
“Let’s just . . .” Merope surveys the landscape. “I guess let’s make camp right where we are?”
“Well, why not?” Apollo says casually, unpacking the bags of supplies and distributing goods. “Dare I say we may even be able to sleep peacefully tonight?”
Jac grabs a rag out of the supplies and presses it up against his bleeding shoulder. “Not all of us.”
“Why not?” Merope asks, lowering Rion to a place where he sits with his head between his knees.
“Rion’s got a concussion. Can’t let him sleep.” Jac gets help from Cyb, who sips from the vodka—only to douse his wound in it all of a sudden, without any warning.
Jac yells, going red in the face.
“Stop being a child,” Cyb scoffs, wrapping the bandage over his shoulder now that it’s disinfected, securing it so it pinches off the blood flow.
“I’ll stay up with Rion,” I offer, to no protest.
Cyb cinches the wrap tighter around Jac’s shoulder, ignoring how he winces, and goes straight for the vodka. After putting it to her lips again, pulling deep, she glares at Jac.
“Happy?” she asks curtly, tossing the jug to Merope who’s at her side, assembling a fire. “Now do you feel like telling us what the hell just happened?”
Rion’s head is still between his knees. “Tell them, Apollo.”
“Ap—Apollo?” Merope echoes, alarmed by the usage of our real names. She, too, sips deeply from the fifth of vodka, cringing at the spitting flavor of it.
Apollo brushes himself off, sweating slightly as he drags the corpse of a Mute away from camp.
“Where to begin?” he says, issuing a laugh void of mirth and entirely clipped, eyes looking elsewhere.
Cyb snorts. “Might I suggest the beginning?”
Merope blows a fire to life. Jac takes the lighter when she’s finished with it, igniting the tip of a fresh cigarette, which he’d previously had the forethought to tuck safely in his pocket.
I glance sidelong, catching Rion’s eye. He looks away.
Apollo stops piling the corpses together, swiping at his hair, sticky with sweat. “A while ago, when Rion told Jac to take me to the barn—that was code for letting me speak with Mabel.”
My jaw actually drops. “What?”
“They’ve known about us—all along, they were waiting for our league to deploy. They have profiles of every specimen that has ever landed in this zone, and that’s how they knew that I’ve been working with Mabel Faye for a long time. When they took me to speak with her over a walkie-talkie, she confirmed that.”
Cyb stands. “What in the hell?”
Apollo raises a hand, begging for calm. “They are here to help us—all of us—and I only ask that you bear that in mind as they tell you what you’re about to hear.”
Then, with an abrupt nod before going back to piling up the corpses of the Muted around us, he says, “Do the honors, Jac?”
By now the fire is blazing. Merope takes a blanket out and drapes it over her legs, her face still insipid and moist. The forest is quiet and vacant of the Muted.
“I—well, I’ve never done this before,” Jac confesses, exhaling a stream of smoke. “Usually Mabel does this part.”
“Stop stalling and tell us,” Cyb barks, getting more hostile with every additional sip of vodka she takes. “Spare us nothing.”
“All right, then.” Jac clears his throat and takes a final drag of his cigarette before fixing his eyes sincerely on us. “Just over thirty years ago, on the first of September, two things happened to the world. First, it discovered a UFO by the moon, harboring verified, intelligent extraterrestrial life.”
Cyb’s nose crinkles. “Aliens?”
“An advanced civilization from Coronae Borealis—a place over seventy-five million light years away.” Jac’s expression steels in a way it never has. “This race made contact with the world at large and announced it was here and didn’t intend to leave.
“Three days after the sighting, the plague claimed its first victims by way of infection. A week after that, they flipped into the world’s first Mutes.”
Jac takes a twig and sticks it in the flames, watching it light up and burn. “The outbreak started in Snowflake, Arizona and was classified as a worldwide pandemic a month later—but the plague wasn’t the world’s biggest threat.”
“The Muted were,” Rion slurs, eyes bleary. “They had killed over half of the world’s population by the time scientists even decided on a name for the plague: A-42.”
“Why A-42?” Merope inquires just as Apollo finishes with the corpse-clearing and reluctantly joins us by the fire. “What do they know about the plague, if anything?”
“The ‘A’ represents ‘alien’ and ‘42’ is the hourly average of time before somebody infected flips into a Mute.�
�� Jac turns his gaze to Apollo, suddenly. “And we don’t know anything about the plague—only that it isn’t a virus. Hell, we can’t even be sure that it’s contagious.”
I think back on the Skims, how they employed the usage of gas masks and goggles almost religiously. Clearly there are people who do believe it’s contagious.
That’s what we’ve always been taught, that specimens have a genetic resilience to the plague. But then again, Onyx has never mentioned a UFO sighting, let alone a correlation between it and the plague at large.
Cyb hiccoughs, shoving the vodka bottle in the ground at her feet where it stays perched in snow. “Are you suggesting an alien influence on the A-42?”
“Not suggesting—confirming,” Jac says stoically.
“Ridiculous,” she scoffs. “What these people saw wasn’t a damned UFO. It was our spaceship, a top-secret governmental endeavor, and they thought it was a UFO.”
“Wrong,” Jac says simply.
“And how is that?”
“The United Nations made a public announcement just days after the UFO’s sighting to refute all accusations affiliating it with the spotted alien spaceship—”
“It doesn’t matter what they claimed!” she hisses. “This is a multi-billion dollar project, and they aren’t going to reveal it to the public so easily!”
Jac chucks the twig he’s been burning in the fire and fixes her with a steeled gaze. “You’re telling me the spaceship was built and piloted and launched days before the A-42 existed?”
At this, Cyb falters.
Jac grins in a sympathetic way. “The ship existed prior to the A-42 by three days. The intelligent life it harbored made no effort to hide, in fact contacting government officials—”
“Stop.” My throat is so tight, the word’s a croak.
“What’s the matter?” Jac asks.
“I just—we weren’t ever—” I pause, glancing back and forth between Cyb and Merope, and eventually Apollo, who stands in the shadows rigidly. Nostrils flared, I add, “What the hell are you trying to say, Jac?”