by David Bruns
Emily-mother points the boom-maker at him. “Get away.”
“Take me with you!”
BOOM.
The man falls.
My ears hurt, and there’s a high-pitched whine at the edges of my hearing. I bark a lot. Emily screams. I can smell burning chemicals and blood. The man doesn’t move. I want to hurt him too; I yank against my leash, but Emily has tied it up good. I kick and bark, straining against my collar.
“Drive!” Emily-mother shouts. She breaks the boom-maker and two red tubes fall out. She sticks two more tubes in and fixes it again with a click. She does this so fast I can barely see; she’s done before the first set of tubes hits the ground. “Drive, Daniel!”
Emily-father’s strong hands grab my leash and pull, roughly dragging me into the car. I kick and bark the whole way. It hurts. Finally I’m inside.
“Go, go, go!”
The car takes off again, leaving the man and the building behind us.
Silence. Nobody says anything; Emily-mother’s hands are shaking. Emily-father keeps looking at her. She doesn’t look back.
They are talking using the metal in their bodies. I’ve seen them do it before. They don’t want Emily to hear what they’re saying.
Emily, I think, knows that. “Is that man going to be okay?” she asks.
Nobody answers. I lick her face to try and calm her down; she pushes me away.
“Why did you shoot him?” Emily asks.
“I had to,” says Emily-mother. Her voice is so different now. Frightened, but with a hardness to it I don’t understand. “I had to, darling.”
“Are you a murderer?”
Nobody says anything for a bit. The car zooms on.
“Honey,” says Emily-father, “sometimes when people try to hurt you, or try to take what you have, you have to stop them. Sometimes you can’t use words.”
“Like the Reclamation,” says Emily. There’s a big silence. “I know you were in the army, Mum. Did you kill people then?”
“Sometimes you have to,” is all Emily-mother says. She smells strange. A mixture of fear and anger. I haven’t smelled anything like it before.
We go on, and the sun falls further. It is starting to get dark now, and Emily-father is forced to drive slower. This makes me a bit happier. We were driving very fast before.
I start to get hungry and whine. Emily feeds me bits of her snacks; they’re some form of very salty meat. I don’t like it, but I eat it anyway. I’m not very scared now. I think we’re safe. I eat some more.
And then a giant monster appears in the lights in front of our car.
It is big. Some kind of bug as big as a horse, with eyes that reflect red. I have never seen anything like it. Its pincers are up, reaching for the car, and it grows bigger as we quickly get close.
Emily-father yells. The car swerves. We try to miss the bug but hit it.
The car rolls over and over and over.
* * *
I’m very sleepy.
I want to sleep more, but something is shaking me, and my rest isn’t comfortable. I’m lying on something hard. It’s the inside roof of the car.
Now I remember. I kick and stand up. I smell a lot of blood. Emily is dangling down from her seat. Blood runs down her face. I lick the blood, hoping she’s not dead.
Slowly … slowly, she wakes up. Her face is red from being upside down a lot. She’s groggy; she doesn’t say much, just looks at me.
“Demon?”
Then she wakes up. She starts kicking, moving her arms around. The movement scares me. I bark.
Something shakes the car. Something big and heavy. I bark harder.
“No no no,” whispers Emily. She sounds scared too. “Demon, be quiet.”
Then I see what she’s looking at. The giant bug. It’s chewing on the front of the car.
I don’t know why it would do that. It chews into something and steam goes everywhere.
“Mum?” says Emily quietly. “Dad?”
I can smell a lot of blood in the front of the car. Emily-mother and Emily-father hang limp, like Emily did, but they don’t move. Emily-father has a hole in his head. I can smell Emily-mother’s bone marrow.
Emily fiddles with her seat and then falls. She lands with a thump. The bug stops eating the front of the car.
It moves around the car. Around and around. I recognise the behaviour of a predator animal; the bug is hunting. It must sense the heat of the car, smell the blood of Emily-mother and Emily-father, and think the car is bleeding. But I know the truth. We’re inside the car. It’s not the car that’s bleeding.
Now the bug is beginning to understand this, too.
Emily puts her hand over her mouth, trying to force her breathing to nothing. I growl at the legs of the bug as it passes; it’s a submissive growl, I’m not challenging its dominance. It can beat a car. I cannot beat a car. The bug is boss.
The bug hisses and digs at the door. Emily shrieks. The car shakes and rocks; the window breaks.
I bite the bug’s claw. It’s hard and slimy, like a wet tennis ball. I bite and I snarl.
The bug is too big. It can’t put its claw through the car window. I keep biting it, going for the weak points in its claws. Emily screams and screams. This urges me on.
I must defend Emily.
I taste bug meat. It bleeds black blood. I have hurt it, but it keeps coming. It doesn’t seem to feel pain. Normal things would retreat when they’re bitten. This bug continues, bending the metal of the car, trying to pry open the door. I latch my jaws onto the claw and shake my head back and forth, tearing at the flesh of its joint. I bite deep.
The limb comes away. The bug flails at the car, bashing with its good claw and its stump. Thump, thump, thump on the roof.
Emily cries and I’m afraid. It’s too big. We have to run. I jump out the other window.
“Demon!”
I leap on top of the car. The bug is there. I look right into its big, weird eyes. Its mouth clacks at me as it bites.
I know how to fight. I twist and jump, biting for its neck. There’s only thick, slimy skin there. My teeth drag across it, trying to find a weak spot. I don’t find one.
The bug’s remaining claw latches onto my rear left leg. It digs in deep. I howl. It hurts!
BOOM.
Emily. She has the boom-maker. The bug falls over the car, chattering and clicking. I smell guts. I smell blood. It’s all over me. All over the car.
My leg hurts. But the bug is dead. I limp over to Emily. She’s shaking so much the boom-maker falls out of her hands.
I lick her all over. She cries a lot. She tries to wake up Emily-mother and Emily-father. But she doesn’t try for long. They’re dead like the bug.
Emily tries to break the boom-maker so she can stick new tubes in. It takes her a little while, but she manages. I lick my wound when she fixes the boom-maker again. It hurts. I can’t walk on that leg, but I have four. I’m okay. I will lick it more later and make it better.
I can smell more bugs. I can smell a lot of things.
“I’ll come back with help,” Emily says to the car. “I’ll come back with an ambulance. Bye, Mum. Bye, Dad. I’ll be back soon. I promise.”
With the boom-maker held in her hands, Emily and I leave the dead car behind.
* * *
“Everything’s going to be okay, Demon,” Emily says as another car drives past. They’re getting more common. Our car was fast. These were slower. “Someone will stop for us. We’ll get help.”
None of the cars stop. Emily and I keep walking by the road. She holds my lead in one hand and the boom-maker in the other. Every time lights come, she tries to get them to stop. Nobody does.
I walk along with Emily. My leg hurts a lot. I know Emily is scared, and I’m scared, too. I smell bugs. They’re getting closer. I don’t think Emily knows. She keeps walking along the road.
This is a mistake. We should get away from the road and hide. I know how predators think.
They
go where the food is.
We keep walking. The cars are now constant. They begin to move slowly; I get scared. They’re moving too slowly. They have light. This will draw the bugs to them for sure. I keep tugging for Emily to leave the road and get out toward the wilderness, where we can be safe.
“No, Demon,” she says, tugging me back. “We have to stay with the people.”
One of the cars stops. The people inside open the door. It’s four humans, probably related. They smell of sweat and fear.
“Hey girl,” the driver says. He’s very fat. They all are. “Get in.”
“There’s no room for Demon,” says Emily. There’s barely room for her.
“Forget the dog,” the man says. “She’ll be okay on her own.”
“Demon’s a boy,” says Emily. “And I can’t go unless he comes with me.”
The man shrugs and drives away. We keep walking.
Finally, the flood of cars slows down. One of the cars far ahead has broken. The road is blocked. Now we’re walking faster than the cars. People look at us. I growl at them. They leave us alone. We pass the fat man and his fat family. I growl at them, too.
One of the cars is different from the other cars, a metal-box. There are people riding in it; I can see their faces through tiny windows.
Emily runs up to the door and pounds on it. The window rolls down.
“This is an ambulance, right?” she says, her eyes very big.
“Sorry, kid,” the driver says. He’s wearing strange, bulky clothes and a helmet. “Military use only.”
“No, no,” says Emily. “You gotta go help my Mum. She was in the army! She fought in the Reclamation; she’s back there, and she’s hurt bad.”
“Sorry,” the driver says again. “We can’t go back.”
“You have to!” Emily is shouting. “She’s in the army like you!”
“We’ll radio another unit to pick them up,” says the driver. “They’ll be fine.”
“You promise?” Emily doesn’t look happy. That makes me unhappy.
“Yeah. Sure, kid.” The driver looks down at her. “Are you hurt?”
I growl at him.
“No, Demon,” says Emily to me, quietly. I growl anyway.
“I’m fine,” says Emily. “Demon is hurt.”
“So your mother’s back there,” says the man. “Where’s your father?”
Emily points back the way we came. “That way, too. They crashed. I still think we need to go back for them.”
The man shrugs helplessly. “We couldn’t even if we wanted to,” he said. “The road that way is bumper to bumper. What a beating.”
Emily cries a bit. “My parents need help. They were bleeding. The car rolled. We hit a bug.”
“What?” The man looks concerned. He opens the door and leaves the metal-box. He slides a small box into his boom-maker. It makes a clicking noise. “What kind of bug? How big?”
“Big,” says Emily. She’s shaking a bit as she talks. I bump up against her leg to reassure her. “Like, really big. It attacked our car. Demon and I killed it.” She holds out the boom-maker. “With this.”
That seems to surprise him a lot. His voice is quiet. “You killed one?”
“Yeah.” Emily gives the boom-maker a shake. “Like I said.”
The man squints at her and pulls out a light. “The Prophets Wept,” he says, looking over Emily and me. “Black blood. Like they have.”
“I told you,” she said. “Demon bit it, and while it was distracted, I shot it.”
I did bite it. I’m a good boy.
Nobody says anything for a bit. Then he touches his helmet. “LT, I got a little girl out here. She’s separated from her parents.” He pauses. “I know, but she’s got a shotgun and a pretty mean-looking dog. She says she killed one of them.”
Another big pause. Then the man jerks his thumb toward the metal-box. “Anyone who can kill one of those has gotta be tough. Go around the back and jump in.”
Emily hesitates. “What about Demon?”
“And your dog, too. We’re getting past this shit-show. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you safe till we reach the evacuation point.”
“Evacuation?” Emily looks confused. “What?”
The man suddenly smells funny. “Just get aboard,” he says. “Let the corpsmen in the back take a look at you, and then I’ll call the rear elements and make sure they pick up your folks.”
Emily seems happy. That makes me happy. She goes around to the back of the metal-box. It slides open, extending a ramp. The inside seems cramped and smelly. It’s full of people. Emily walks up the ramp and cautiously sits on the floor. I sit beside her. The door closes, then the metal-box begins to drive; it swerves to one side, and through the tiny windows, I see it passing the line of stopped cars.
We’re driving off the road. Metal-boxes don’t seem to be worried by that.
Everyone is looking at me. They’re male humans and female humans. One of the males pulls out a bag full of weird-smelling chemicals. The metal-box shakes a lot but nobody seems bothered by it.
“Hey there,” he says. “My name is Specialist Roderic. I’m a medic.”
“Hello, sir,” Emily says. “I’m Emily Rowlandson.”
He nods understandingly. He looks at the boom-maker. “I don’t think you’ll need that anymore.”
Emily clutches it close. “It’s my Mum’s. I’m keeping it.”
“Okay,” he says. “Just keep your finger off the trigger when we’re moving. If that thing goes off in here, that’s a recipe for unpleasantness.”
Emily lays the boom-maker down beside her.
“Mind if I take a look at that wound?” the man asks.
Emily shows him her head. He seems pleased as he looks it over.
“She’s not hurt bad,” says one of the females. She has a long tube that smells of sulphur. But there’s a sound in her voice that raises the fur on my back.
The man glares at the woman. “What’s your problem, Corporal?”
“The LT didn’t authorise us to pick up a fucking dog. I hate dogs.”
I growl a bit at her. Emily rubs my back. That usually means the human is okay. I stop growling.
“I know,” says the man. “But it’s here now, so stop complaining.”
We ride in silence. The metal-box rocks from side to side; Emily and I slide across the floor. Driving away from the road is difficult. The man holds Emily with his legs. I whine and start to get dizzy. I throw up.
“Fuck!” The woman has my vomit on her boots. “Are you shitting me?”
“It’s not Demon’s fault!” says Emily. She’s crying again.
The woman kicks me. I feel sick from the rocking and my leg hurts. I whine and put my tail between my legs. I don’t want to fight the woman.
“Knock it off,” says the medic-man. “Don’t be a bitch.”
“I fucking hate dogs,” the woman says.
We keep going.
“What’s this about an evacuation?” says Emily.
Nobody answers.
“You’re getting everyone out, right?” she asks. “All those people?”
“Yeah,” says the medic-man.
“And other army people are going to pick up my parents?”
“Yeah,” says the medic-man. He smells funny as he talks. “We’re driving to meet a ship. It’s going to land in the woods and pick us up.”
“What kind of ship?” asks Emily. “A heavy lifter? There’s a lot of people.”
The humans all look at each other.
“I don’t have an aural implant,” says Emily. “Just say it out loud.”
“You don’t?” The medic-man looks surprised. “Most people have them by your age.”
“I know,” says Emily, sounding angry. “My Mum got sick in the Reclamation. The pension isn’t much. Implants are expensive. I only have the basics.”
For some reason, this seems to make most of the people … strange. They all look a bit sad, a bit angry.
&n
bsp; “Yeah,” says the medic. “Military pensions aren’t exactly great.”
“That’s what we have to look forward to,” says the woman.
“You vote, don’t you?” says the man. “If you don’t like the system, change it.”
They bicker for a bit. Talking about something they call politics. I throw up again.
“You said it, buddy,” says the medic-man, patting me on the ears. I’m too sick to growl at him.
The metal-box jerks, rocks, and then mercifully stops. Everyone instantly becomes tense, listening to a sound only they can hear. More metal-talking, I guess.
“We’re bogged,” says the medic-man to Emily. “Wait here.”
Emily nods, holding my collar tight.
The back of the box opens. The smell of bugs washes in. I can see tree trunks. We are still away from the road. The people run out of the metal-box; they move fast and surround the metal-box.
We wait. I definitely smell bugs. I tug at my lead and Emily, too surprised to do anything, can’t hold on to me. I run out and down the ramp.
The bugs are coming from behind the metal-box. I bark and I bark.
I hear the medic-man. “The dog’s freaking out.”
“Fuck the dog,” says the woman. “Ready. On three…”
The bugs are very close. I bark as loud as I can. Emily comes out and tries to drag me back into the metal-box, but I resist. The humans don’t know the bugs are there.
I know how predators think. The humans are prey.
The medic-man walks out from beside the metal-box. “Hey, buddy,” he says. “What’s wrong?”
I sniff, and I know where they are now. I look up and bark.
The man follows my eyes, up to the trees.
“Contact!” he shouts out. “Climbers in the trees!”
Dozens of bugs with wings fly down from the trees. They snatch up one of the humans and tear him in half. The medic-man fires his boom-maker: crack-crack-crack! Emily and I run back into the metal-box and hide far away from the noise. The door closes.
The sounds of fighting thump all around the metal-box. It shakes suddenly as something hits it.
Through the window I can see a big bug, its claws holding onto the sides of the metal-box. It has lots of arms; it slams a claw against the side, denting the metal. Emily screams. Thump. Thump. The metal cracks.