DarkFuse Anthology 1

by Shane Staley

  “Don’t fall off,” Richard warned. “One night, I got out of bed. I was going to go into the living room and sleep there.” He made a sound like a breath and Kevin could feel the cool air on his face. “I never made it to the door.”

  Beyond the blankets, Kevin heard a rustling coming from the direction of his closet. Something was moving between his shirts, occasionally scraping one of the clothes hangers against the metal rod they rested on. There was a sound like something tripping and slamming against a wall.

  Richard’s finger returned to Kevin’s lips as the sounds continued. Neither boy said anything. It sounded as if the thing was trapped in the closet, even though the door to it had been left wide open.

  After a minute of rustling and scraping and bumping into walls, another familiar and horrible sound began. The sound of slippered feet walking down a hallway, accompanied by angry labored breathing.

  Kevin heard the door to his bedroom squeal slightly as it flew open and his mother’s ragged voice saying, “All right. I told you what would happen if you couldn’t keep quiet. Now get out of bed.” He heard the belt in her hands snap once and shook even as Richard took his finger away from his lips for a moment to instead place his cold hand over his mouth entirely.

  “Come on. I know you’re awake.” Kevin heard her take one step towards his bed before stopping. She asked, “What are you doing in there?” The hand against Kevin’s mouth shook.

  His mother screamed only once. There was no sound of a struggle; but he did hear something heavy fall on the floor. After a minute, he heard something being dragged towards the closet. Then there were sounds that he didn’t want to hear.

  Richard’s hand stayed on his mouth the entire time. There were some bumps and more scraping of clothes hangers. There was a tearing sound that went on for a long time. And just once, there was something like a giggle, a high-pitched childish laugh. And Kevin was glad that he couldn’t see what was happening.

  And after a while, those sounds stopped and he was lying with the white-faced boy in silence. They said nothing more to each other, both terrified of whatever was in the closet. And Kevin didn’t want to think about what was in the closet, what was so horrible that even a ghost would be afraid of it. He’d heard the thing and that had been enough.

  A half-hour after Kevin’s mother had screamed, there was more sound from the closet. A shuffling sound that left the closet and moved slowly along the floor towards his bed. Kevin listened carefully. Soon, he realized that it was heading towards his side of the bed. Squinting back tears, he pulled himself away from the edge, closer to Richard, who hadn’t said a word. The thing shuffled closer and Kevin was actually brushed up against the white-faced boy when he felt the thing tugging at the bedspread.

  It was pulling itself up onto the bed. It made no sound, no labored breaths or grunts. The springs creaked as it finally settled on top of the bed. Then it began pulling back at the blankets. Kevin wanted to run from the bed and into the hallway, take his chances on out-running the thing rather than simply waiting for it to slide up next to him. But Richard’s arm was wrapped around him, burning his skin, it was so cold, and held him down. As the blankets rose, he could see that same white expressionless face staring back at him, never staring past to whatever was settling into bed behind him.

  Then the blankets were back down and the three of them were in darkness again. A second arm, cold but not as cold as Richard’s, wrapped around him from the other side. His mother whispered, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you; but now you must be very quiet. It’s sleeping.”

  CARRION FOWL

  William R. Eakin

  1

  They did not know if I was threat or snack. Neither did I any more. From the moment they started to appear, we’d all spent weeks and months shooing then shooting them. They were half lizard, half vulture and early on were found only in Ecuador and then Central America, but they steadily made their way here: my property, my small house with the porch no more than twenty yards from the cliff and a line of now dead oak trees. Our property, I mean.

  No one knew or finally seemed to care where they came from, what gen-lab they’d crawled and then flown from or what subspecies naturally sprouted the evil things. After the diseases started to spread, we cared even less, no longer energetic enough to hire doctors and contagious disease scientists to look into it. Even in the first few weeks there were too many new bacteria, viruses, things we knew not what. We were no longer energetic enough to have a government to fund looking into it, to have a government at all.

  I want you to see: how beautiful the view is from the cliff? Even though the carpet of trees below is death gray, it is still beautiful, as it was in our first days here together. The sky is blue. The two birds above me still think I might be a threat. Behind me the house windows are dark; in one, an upper floor window, you sit, Marsha, just watching. Marsha? Just sitting. What else is there? I know: the worst of the germs, the brain distorting ones, the brain-eating ones, didn’t start until they—the Carrion Fowl—began to hunt and feed in the night, not just in the day. The Carrion Fowl, it turned out, never needed sleep—or rather grew into things that didn’t need it, as if you could be walking along a country road looking at stars and never make it home. I know, Marsha, how creepy and finally terrifying it was at first. And I’d thought it was just the fear of the night time feedings and the fear of going from car to house after every trip to the grocery store, what was left of the dwindling world, or what it was like for you out on the nighttime porch checking on the cat, that that was what had driven you mad. Then the cat was finally gone. And one after another of our friends down in the village were terrified into catatonia, too. Is it madness to sit, catatonic, gray and staring and nothing but that when the world is like this and you yourself change? Madness from fear I could understand: I miss you, Marsha, I don’t know where you are! There in the window, staring at the blue sky we once shared, are you anywhere there at all? Beneath those distorting, elongating eyes, gray and strangely shiny?

  Threat or snack—you will be neither. You and I will someday celebrate our love, our world, our unity, our fall. I scratch at my arm: the skin now is like yours, Marsha, it flakes away. I remember the first time I saw it on your arm, the stretch of lizard skin and small feathers. I locked you away, Marsha, because—because I know the remainder of us who are healthy, not mad, not driven mad—we are threats. You see? How could I not protect you from me?

  The birds above me shift weight and then bound off from a trembling, dead limb. Their movement up and out from the cliff is a great whoosh; they are huge birds, human-sized, their movement through crackling air is like thunder, with little lizard twists. Thunderous, even when they are silently flapping off into the blue.

  And I know now. I scratch at my arm. It is something detestable, you would want to cut it off, cut it out, rip it out from the diseased and pulsating and fluid tissues that run in great systems through the whole of the body, your body, my body; you would have to kill it, I suppose, if it were me in the mad room. But I refuse to do it to you or to become this: to be your snack!

  What remains of us if we are no longer either threat or snack?

  Looking at the patch of non-skin on my arm, I realize it fully. Now things change: I go to see you.

  When I come up into the dark house to the dark room to the gray of you, you hardly move, but I know you sense me there. I have so missed contact with you! But now we are together in this, Marsha, you see? Really together, both of us gray in the light shielded at the window. At night, the great Carrion Fowl feed and reproduce, like insatiable gods, devouring, seeding, transforming. Do you see what we must do, what I must lead you to?

  What madness now?

  I reach for your arm, what is left of it, the original flesh seeming to be just dust, the new muscle moving like the muscle of strangely-textured snakes. And then for the first time in how long, Marsha? Your eyes turn to me: elongated, shining, powerful. Then there it is, Marsha, my love,
there it is: contact between the two of us. Only not like before.

  I know what is left of you also sees what we must do.

  I motion and am thankful, exhilarated that you willingly stand up for this, and, at least without struggle, follow me through the door, down the stairs, out into the daylight. We’d always joked of this, lovers leaping from the cliff. Down in the village they’d taken to sky-burials as the Tibetan lamas once had, leaving the suicides in the open for the swarms of the lizard-vulture-carrion-beasts.

  I look at you and motion to the cliff. And you do not again acknowledge my presence. How could you, with your tattered brain matter? I scratch away a shred of skin from my own arm, the second one, and nod. We are neither threat nor snack. And how is it possible to hurt so in every fiber, to feel such loss, such horrible indignity and the mad loss of self, and yet—and yet feel so lifted?

  It doesn’t hurt, does it? It changes the neural patterns. It doesn’t hurt physically; it just leaves—loss.

  I step forward, my hand on what remains of your arm. And then all that falls away. And we lean forward and are raised up with a great whoosh of something like thunder.

  2

  I open an eye to a blur, and feathers, a lizard-strange head. I want to say to you: “Do you remember what it was like when we first moved to the cliff; we planted flowers. And then the children, and walking in the garden in the cool of the day?” And what my beak says—only not a beak, more like curved joined teeth, more like something new—what my beak says is a trumpet blast of annoyed unintelligence, a huge squawk that reverberates through the tree and the lizard-feathers of the others and the cracking blue sky. And you respond then with the same, like anger in the animal food chain, like anger and cranky absurdities from the tree and the other dead trees and the whole valley of dead trees.

  The membrane that had opened so slowly on memory with the unblurring of my own glassy eyes, my vulture eyes, snaps shut. The memory world, the fantasy unreal world of green and children, is almost gone.

  When had I last seen the last one, April, the six-year-old girl, our daughter? The Carrion Fowl had just gone sleepless when she went out to play as she always had, they’d just gone more than nocturnal; it meant they were awake even at playtime before supper. And we did not yet know this. I remember: ripped leaves in what were once rose and chrysanthemum and woods and thickets edged with sweet-smelling honeysuckle. The membrane snaps shut again, tighter.

  “Wrockk!” you call out one more time and I know somehow what your squawk means, though it has no meaning, not in the way human words once had meaning—the neural nets are so different, still evolving; “Wrockk!” We all look, all of us in all the trees along the county road. Jed’s car, an old pastel blue VW bug, is bouncing its way down the road. “Wrockk!” I respond; as do all the others; the multitude of us in the dead trees of the valley responds.

  It isn’t a membrane that blurs away the past now; it is long, thin flags of it crossing the present; it is long, thin tendrils and feathers of blurred memory, dribbling across and disappearing and leaving just the present: Jed, driving on the road that runs across the valley and up the cliff to where we once walked together, all three, he your oldest and first. A drizzle of memory: he and then April and then you and me. He: when he was just trying his legs, holding our hands, walking along the cliff top among the flowers, little sweet boy. You loved him. You kissed his forehead. You and I together encouraged him to walk. And then that, too, dribbles away

  “Wrockk wrocck,” our fellow Carrion Fowl all cry; “Wrockk!” we all shriek. Only I stay perched watching from above: you and maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand—there can no longer be such a thing as counting—a hundred thousand swarm down into the road before him. The “wrockk-wrockk-wrockk” and all of you standing waiting for him in the road do not keep him from driving on. He comes on deliberately, slowly but determined, undaunted. There is an eruption of angry, evil squawks as one of you goes down under the tires. We are not bird or lizard, we have human legs, and human hands though clawed, and the shreds of something like what human faces had been. We are not just bird or lizard. The human face of the one who went down below the tire twists with the slow agony of it and he lies still. There is another eruption, loud trumpets, angers, fears, desires coming out as explosive cries: Jed does not slow down or speed up but goes straight into the whole crowd of you, his jaw and eyes set, straight on through you all, and over some of the others with his tires—but, then, he abruptly stops.

  “Wrockk wrockk.” He opens the door and stands in the road, surrounded, but looking at only one, the one who should be now under the fender, at you. Your face, Marsha—only not below the tires; just in front of them—your face is melted formless flesh around a curved-tooth beak, but he sees and recognizes it. “Mama!”

  “No, Jeb!” I try to call, but it comes out: “Wrockk!” and that incenses them and you, Marsha, all of you! Mar—! There is another “Wrockk!” and then silently, with a determination not unlike what he has shown, the circle tightens and you, Marsha, step forward, leading them; you are taller than he is for the first time since—since he had that growth spurt in junior high, you remember? Taller and the shreds of your human face— just warped shreds hanging around the beak-teeth growth—bigger, fouler, and your great vulture eyes reflect him, and the little boy he’d once been, and all we’d been together walking through the chrysanthemums, and the grace of young skin when he looked up at you fresh and new and not yet having the smells or the scars or the fears of anything in the world. You make a motion, your beak-teeth yawning wide above him and without pause or memory or worry, they clamp to his head. They press together. They cut into scalp and face and skin, and then his whole head, his whole existence, Marsha, explodes with the pressure, like a melon, like flesh everywhere.

  “Wroccckkk!” Neither victorious nor envious, just the mother eating the child. The mother and the whole tribe.

  Suddenly his blood and flesh is on every beak but mine. “Jeb!” I cry with still possibly, partially human lips, but from the curved bone it cannot come out that way at all. It does not. “Wrockk!”

  And there is the sound and fresh smell of bones crunching and cartilage and bone marrow, sounds that are like horribly wet meat. And they eat, you all eat, you all take in the particles of what he has been, Carrion Fowl. Carrion foul. We are what we eat.

  Another memory—a shred of it wavering across the flurry of feathers and flesh and blood. No, not a memory, something instinctual, something else that wipes away the foggy membranes that obscure the present and the old world, and then the murky blurry membranes that obscure things lower than that, obscure a desire, the Basic. The God-like. It runs god-like through us all. This is what the neural nets are doing now: I feel it as desire; I become it as desire: hunger incarnate.

  I open my beak and squawk in response to the feeling, to the new being. I squawk it loudly, without and not needing intelligence. Not that we don’t have it—but we are beyond that, too, intelligence or order. With the squawk loud and loose, I look up away from the VW and the messy flurry of lizard-human-feathers, the fury in the road before the bloodied tires. I look away from the road and the cliff and the dead trees and back over my arched shoulder toward the east. The city. The city! And all the Carrion Fowl turn, too. Looking up with blood on their unnatural beak-curved teeth, looking up, with the cry of the god-desire like a mist of blood echoing across the valley.

  3

  We fly, you, I, the countless. Below our outstretched wings a solitary man runs in a battered street, a woman huddles with a baby in a doorway, a child stumbles. The geometry of the buildings is already tattered, edge-crumbled, windows shattered. We land in a great circle on the highest rectangular precipice, the topmost floor of what humans once called a high-rise, the one we’d taken to and occupied and from which we’d spent our dawns and moonrises and sunsets looking across the abandoned skeletal land of concrete, looking always for food—or more, really, looking always for new substance.<
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  You and I and our circle land. Several bow to us as we fold wings and walk forward. I grasp one, a young one, his head; I twist it; broken, it falls bloody on the concrete. Do they not at least sense the old ways are dead—no power, no government, no hierarchy! I must show power to show them their own. I twist and pull and leave his body quivering, twitching, stopping. He’s been more reticently human—we are all different, all patches of things grown differently, as if each is his own different species, as if some virus has grown different symptoms for each host. Great birds, but much more than that: patches of all we’ve eaten, all our sustenance patch-worked into us, into our genes, into our very souls. Except we have no such things, we are growing past that, too: soul. We are great bloody powerful gods unto ourselves: Will incarnate. No need for hierarchy or thought.

  You and I go to our roost with no sound but the “Wrockk!” of movement through the crowds. A young Carrion Fowl gnaws a child beside us. You rip the remnants of the thing away from him and devour it, gulp it down entirely with a single motion, because you, too, show our power; with a single motion, the thing you eat becomes you. Beyond good and evil. And then that young male convulses, too, with a desire. He sits back and is obvious with intent; violently you take him, grasp him, with your still hand-like claws you pull his sex into the open, which is all he wanted, his body still also human-like, and you sit across him. You are far bigger than he could be, you cover him with twitching wings, and twitching body, and twitching flesh. Dripping saliva and anger and blood from mouth and eyes, dripping devouring lizard juices, your great god-mouthed face opens and then snaps shut, your teeth and great bird jaws and skull and head and body encircle him, all of him. In a bite, two, three, he becomes you, too. You are One.