by Mira Grant
That made him think of his mom again, so he buried the memory, how he had for months now, and picked up his pace to a jog. The Parasite throbbed in his stomach and he felt a static charge under his skin, making the hairs stand up from the nape of his neck. That happened more often lately, and always when Bo was angry or frightened or excited. He imagined himself smashing a whirlybird out of the air right as it went to jab his sister with the syringe, and her thanking him, and admitting that if he had his shoes on he was faster than her now. He pictured himself opening the doors and all the other kids streaming out of the warehouse.
A harsh yellow light froze him to the spot. Shielding his watering eyes, Bo looked up and saw the silhouette of a whale-thing descending through the dark sky. He took an experimental step to the left. The beam of light tracked him. The whale-thing was close enough that he could hear its awful chugging sound, half like an engine, half like a dying animal trying to breathe. Bo was never going inside one again.
He ran.
After four months in the warehouse, four months of plodding slowly behind the whirlybird because anything quicker than a walk agitated them, Bo felt slow. His breath hitched early behind his chest and he had an unfamiliar ache in his shoulder. But as the whale-thing dropped lower, its chugging sound loud in his ears, adrenaline plowed through all of that and he found his rhythm, flying across the pavement, pumping hard.
Fastest in his grade, faster than Lia. He said it in his head like a chant. Faster than anybody.
Bo tore down the alley with a wild shout, halfway between a laugh and a scream. His battered Lottos, tread long gone, slapped hard to the ground. He could feel his heart shooting through his throat, and the Parasite was writhing and crackling in his belly. The static again, putting his hair on end. He could feel the huge shape of the whale-thing surging over him. Its acid-yellow light strobed the alley, slapping his shadows on each wall of it, moving their blurry black limbs in sync with his. Bo raced them.
Faster than his own shadow.
He blew out the end of the alley and across the cracked tarmac of a parking lot, seeing the yellow-stenciled lines and trying to take one space with each stride. Impossibly, he could feel the whale-thing falling back, slowing down. Its hot air was no longer pounding on his back. Bo didn’t let himself slow down, because Lia said you were always meant to pick a spot beyond the finish line and make that your finish line.
The fence seemed to erupt from nowhere. Bo’s eyes widened, but it was too late to stop. He hurtled toward it, more certain with each footfall that he wasn’t going to be able to scale it. It wasn’t the chain-link that he used to scramble up and down gecko-quick. It wasn’t metal at all, more like a woven tangle of vines, or maybe veins, every part of it pulsing. A few of the tendrils stretched out toward him, sensing him. Ready to snatch him and hold him and give him back to the warehouse.
He couldn’t stop. The whale-thing was still chugging along behind him, hemming him in. Bo had to get out. Bo had to get out, he had to get help. He had to come back for his sister and for the others, even the ones who cried too much. His throat was clenched around a sob as he hurled himself at the fence, remembering Ferris being dragged away by the whirlybirds. His limbs were shaking; the Parasite was vibrating him, like a battery in his stomach. He squeezed his eyes shut.
There was a shiver, a ripple, a strange pulse that passed through every inch of him, and he didn’t feel the fence’s tentacles wrapping him tight. He didn’t feel anything until he collapsed onto the tarmac on the other side, scraping his left elbow raw. Bo’s eyes flew open. He spun around, still on the ground, and stared at the fence. In the dead center of it was a jagged hole, punched straight through. The fence wriggled around it, fingering the hole like a wound.
Bo clambered to his feet, panting. He wiped the ooze of blood off his elbow, nearly relishing the sting of it—he hadn’t been properly scraped up for months. Then he put his hand on his stomach. The static was gone, like it had never been at all, and the Parasite felt suddenly heavy, no longer twitching or moving. Had he done that? Had he made the hole?
The whale-thing was stopped on the other side of it, and it didn’t have a face but he got the sense it was as surprised as he was. Bo gave an instinctive glance around for grown-ups, even though he knew he wouldn’t see any, then flipped it the bird. The whale-thing didn’t respond, still hovering in place. Then a strange moaning noise came from inside of it. Bo watched as the whale-thing’s underbelly peeled open. Something slimy and dark started unfolding itself, then dropped to the paving with a thick wet slap. It was human-shaped.
Bo felt a tiny trickle of piss finally squeeze out down his leg. The human shape moaned again, and that was enough to give Bo his second wind. He turned and ran again, the cut on his elbow singing in the cold night air, the Parasite sitting like lead in his gut. But he was out of the warehouse, and he wasn’t going to let them take him again, not ever. When he came back, it would be to get Lia, and the others, and to smash every last whirlybird in the place.
It was the only way to be sure he got the one that had pinned him down that first day and injected the Parasite right through his belly button.
Bo made it his new pact as he jogged, deeper and deeper, into the dark and ruined city.
Violet was heading to Safeway to pick up some groceries, walking down a silent street under a cloudy gray sky. Gray as the day the ship came down, scorching the city with the electric blue pulses Wyatt said were exhaust from its engines. There’d been no sun since. Just gray, a hazy emulsion that looked close to rain but never gave it up. Violet didn’t mind the new weather. Sun burned her and rain made everything too wet.
She walked down the middle of the street instead of the sidewalk, weaving through the stalled-out cars. Some had wasters sitting inside, imagining themselves driving off to work, but most of the cars didn’t work anyway. Their chips were fried. The ones that did work were useless, what with the roads so clogged and nobody really knowing how to drive besides.
The intersection ahead was stoppered up with the splintered geometry of a crash, a three-car pile-up that had happened during the big panic when the ship came down. Violet didn’t want to walk around it, so she clambered up onto the accordion-scrunched hood of an SUV. The soles of her Skechers popped little dents in the aluminum. She tried to ignore the dead-thing smell that wafted from the backseat.
On the other side of the wreck, she faced a corner liquor store, half of it black and crumbled from an electrical fire, and then beyond it her destination: the Safeway where she’d shopped with her mom four months and a lifetime ago. The parking lot was strewn with garbage, picked at by a flock of dirty gulls, and wasters shuffled slowly around it with grocery bags that Violet knew were sometimes full, sometimes empty. Some of them were pushing squeaky shopping carts across the ruptured tarmac.
But one of the carts wasn’t being pushed by a waster. Violet narrowed her eyes. It was a boy, maybe ten or eleven, skinny frame swallowed in an oversize hoodie. She watched him roll his sleeves up to his elbows, one of which was swatched with Technicolor Band-Aids, and start wrestling with the cart again. He’d picked one with sticky wheels, but it had alright stuff in it: a sleeping bag, a trussed-up Styrofoam mattress, canned food, and bottled water. Usually kids fresh out of the warehouse were too dopey to do much more than wander around all shell-shocked.
Violet swapped the duffel to her other shoulder and cut across the culvert of yellowed grass to the parking lot pavement. By the time she was close to him, the boy had snatched an empty cart from one of the wasters and was dumping everything from his own into the replacement.
“Hey,” Violet said. “Those Winnie the Pooh Band-Aids?”
The boy looked up, startled. The hood fell back off his head and Violet could see his face still had a bit of chub to it, the kiddie kind, but his eyes were sharp. A little bloodshot from crying, but focused. His black hair reminded her of a ball of steel wool, and she could see a comb mostly buried in the tangle. He yanked his sl
eeve down over the yellow patchwork on his elbow and stared back at her for a moment, mouth working for words.
“You’re not a zombie,” he finally said, in a voice that was a little closer to cracking than she’d expected from someone his size. It made her extra conscious of her own.
“Nobody’s a zombie,” Violet said, as the waster he’d swapped carts with stumbled past. “They don’t eat brains or anything. Just wander around being useless. We call them wasters.”
“Where’d you come from?” the boy asked.
Violet peeled the stretchy fabric of her shirt up off her stomach, showing him the rust-red Parasite under her pale skin. The boy immediately stuck his hand to his own belly. His face twitched.
“Same as you, Pooh Bear,” Violet said, tugging her shirt back down. “You thought you were the only one who got out?”
The boy frowned. “Is everyone else … Is all the grown-ups …” He tapped the back of his head, where the clamps went in.
“Everyone over sixteen,” Violet said. “Or around there.” She reached over and yanked the sleeping bag and a single bottle of water out from the cart. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Bo,” the boy said. “Bo Rabiu.”
“Violet.” She stuffed the sleeping bag into his arms and tossed the bottle on top with a slosh. Getting groceries could wait. “Alright, Bo, time to get out of the streets,” she said. “The othermothers are going to start coming through soon.”
“What?”
“The o-ther mo-thers,” Violet enunciated. “You’ll see one soon enough. For now, we’re going to a safe spot, alright? A hideout. So you can meet Wyatt.”
Bo tucked the sleeping bag under his arm and tossed the water bottle up and down with his other hand. “Who’s he?” he asked suspiciously.
“He’s a jerk,” Violet said. “Let’s go.”
She set off back out of the parking lot, mapping the way back to the theater in her mind’s eye. She didn’t bother to check if Bo was following. They always did.
By Mira Grant
PARASITOLOGY
Parasite
Symbiont
Chimera
NEWSFLESH
Feed
Deadline
Blackout
Feedback
Rise: A Newsflesh Collection
Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box (ebook novella)
Into the Drowning Deep
WRITING AS SEANAN MCGUIRE
Rosemary and Rue
A Local Habitation
An Artificial Night
Late Eclipses
One Salt Sea
Ashes of Honor
Chimes at Midnight
The Winter Long
Once Broken Faith
The Brightest Fell
Discount Armageddon
Midnight Blue-Light Special
Half-Off Ragnarok
Pocket Apocalypse
Chaos Choreography
Magic for Nothing
Sparrow Hill Road
Every Heart a Doorway
Down Among the Sticks and Bones
Praise for MIRA GRANT
INTO THE DROWNING DEEP
“Grant’s heady brew of visceral horror, fascinating science, and, of course, the hubris of mankind in the face of the awesome unknown is irresistible. A claustrophobic, deep-sea terror tale that will leave readers glad to be safely on dry land.”
—Kirkus
“Grant’s skillfully crafted story combines science, horror, and mystery into a gripping novel of terror on the sea.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Will unnerve and enthrall even seasoned horror fans.… Mira Grant masterfully ratchets the tension up and down, holding readers firmly in her grip.”
—BookPage
“Entertained and enraptured from the first page to the last.”
—Bookriot
“Engrossing and adrenaline-fueled.”
—Shelf Awareness
FEEDBACK
“A U.S. presidential campaign set in a zombie-infested future bears an eerie resemblance to the way we live now. Simply jump in and enjoy.… A whip-smart thriller overflowing with sharp ideas and social commentary.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
DEADLINE
“Intelligent and exciting … raises the bar for the genre.”
—Telegraph
“OK, all of you readers who want something weighty and yet light, campy and yet smart, horror with heart, a summer beach read that will stay in your head and whisper to you, ‘what if,’ Deadline is just what you are looking for.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Deft cultural touches, intriguing science, and amped-up action will delight Grant’s numerous fans.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
FEED
“Intelligent and intense, a thinking person’s post-apocalyptic zombie thriller set in a fully realized future that is both fascinating and horrifying to behold.”
—John Joseph Adams
“I can’t wait for the next book.”
—N. K. Jemisin
“It’s a novel with as much brains as heart, and both are filling and delicious.”
—The A.V. Club
“The story starts with a bang as corruption, mystery, danger, and excitement abound.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Gripping, thrilling, and brutal … Shunning misogynistic horror tropes in favor of genuine drama and pure creepiness, McGuire has crafted a masterpiece of suspense with engaging, appealing characters who conduct a soul-shredding examination of what’s true and what’s reported.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)