Fight Like A Girl

by Juliet E. McKenna

  *

  I was ten when it happened, alone in the flat with my father. My mother and brothers never came home. I remember little: chaos screaming in the streets below, the violence that roared from block to block, gunshots and shouting from the Morrison’s at the end of the road. Sirens, but not for long.

  Other memories are jumbled, all mixed up with my father’s severe expression, the determination that sat across his shoulders. The chugging queues of vehicles, later abandoned. The lights going out; the final flicker as the flatscreens all went dead. My father with his old radio, seeking answers, anything – and then, grimly, the day he turned it off.

  We had sandbags that lined the flat’s doors, a water butt, and enough tins to make us sick of beans for good. He reactivated his old Lee Enfield, hand-loaded the rounds for the magazine, dug his survivalist stuff out the back room. And he had a treasured bike with a sidecar that I ride still – now fuelled by wood gas. An old milk can, some steel pipe and a bit of angle iron make a solidly decent genny. But that was later.

  When it first happened, he wouldn’t let me leave the building, even leave the flat. As the eaters shambled and ate and tore outside, and as the war against them raged, we simply closed the curtains. At times, people found us and begged us for help, but we never let them in – even when I was old enough to feel guilty, and I shouted and cried and blocked my ears as I heard them dying outside.

  Once, a group of teens tried to break our door down, but my father shot their leader through the head.

  And I remember the day the silence came, the day the eaters finally stopped – starved or slain. I was older by then, old enough to learn to cock and shoot the rifle myself, old enough to watch the empty streets below, and to report on what I saw.

  “How’d it happen?” I’d asked him once, wondering what the story really was. There was a roadway down there, a vastly complicated system of lines and queuing vehicles, all of them rusted now, their purpose long-lost. The central isle was overgrown, crawling plant-life reclaiming the forgotten world. It had sent out its winding tendrils and now grew up the outsides of all the blocks like ours, its flowers opening to the dead grey sky. There was one just outside the window, its deep red colour brighter than anything I’d seen.

  “Doesn’t matter now,” he’d told me, shrugging. “Tribalism. Greed. Righteousness. Too many flags, and all of them fuelled by hate. When the end came, I think we deserved it. Now, Katie-kat, we survive.”

  *

  The thing in the great hall didn’t care about the end of the world. It wheezed at me through its mineral teeth, their crystal colours gleaming cold. I’d taken others like this with crude flamethrowers or basic explosives, but this one looked about as combustible as the stone around it.

  Shit.

  It was moving faster now, closing on the doorway where the train people were huddled. I snapped a look back at the dark-skinned, grey haired man that led them, “Keep its attention.” When I got a nod in return, I ducked past the beast’s bulging flank, scanning its bulk as I went. Maybe, if I could find a hollow, a weakness . . .

  But it was sharp, had no intention of losing track of me. As I moved, its grin spread and separated, its head split clean down the middle and two new eyes turned to follow where I was going. The face moved within the body, tracking me like a searchlight. A flickering bulge of textures ran after it. I knew more attacks were coming and I tensed, muscles tight and wary, heart pounding, shield raised. This damned monster was going down, one way or another.

  But there was no huge tentacle, no single clacking of claw. This time, the surface of the thing boiled and the fronds that came forth uncurled like the tendrils of the creeper outside, like a myriad spider-legs. They were everywhere, all round me, five and six and seven of them, perhaps more. They were cold, angled, made from rusting steel wire, jointed and creaking, with jagged edges like teeth. And they came at me in a flurry, whipping and spiking at my face and shoulders. Behind them, I saw a darkness – a maw in the thing’s side, another mouth, ready and waiting. From it, came the spitting surge of the monster, need and hunger. Shuddering, I punched the shield edge-on, caught two of them with the screech of metal-on-metal. I pulled it back and struck again with the flat, making more of them recoil; the blade caught another and cut it, sent it twitching, it to the floor. The maw puckered at me, grotesque in its eagerness, and I slammed a boot down on a tentacle that was winding close to my booted ankle, skidding as the metal rasped over the stone. Then there was nothing left between myself and it.

  Right, you rotting beast.

  I could see its flank clearly now; the open maw, the buds of new tentacles. And I could see where it was layering up defences, a thickening of metal and stone to protect itself against me. But the spidery tentacles came again; more of them emerging from the outermost sides of the maw. An eye opened above it, the raw facets of some long-forgotten crystal. And then, I had an idea.

  *

  One day, my father returned with food – with roaches, and with rats the length of his forearm. As both silence and confidence grew, he ranged further, and he took me with him. He told tales of the old world, of the broken glass towers that rose over us, reflecting the clouds in their shattered facets. Tales of the silent streets, and of the tessellated buildings, metal and brick and stone. Tales of the shining-huge curves of the river, and of the myriad bridges that crossed it, all now derelict and swamped in creeper. We went down to the waterside, and found treasures on the stony beach – rusting metal, discarded coins that made him chuckle. He made the genny to the fuel the bike, and we could go anywhere.

  He was invincible, unstoppable, ever-confident. And when he died, it wasn’t by eater or madman – we’d seen no life other than our own in years – he was killed by a rat-bite that poisoned his blood, an infection that ate him from the inside out. He had strength enough to get home, and there, he made me promise that I would find others, and not remain alone.

  And I cried. And then, I made my shield. And out I went, bike and rifle with me, into the rotting and empty city.

  *

  I knew it from experience: these beasts had a critical mass. Enough damage, enough bulk lost, and their conscience dissipated. They fell back to a pile of debris. The theory was sound. This one – rotting hell – this one was just that much bigger than the rest. I had to try something else. From somewhere, the train people were shouting. I could hear their leader, telling them to be ready, be ready – and I guessed that the thing was attacking them too. So much the better.

  Gods and Rot, this might even work.

  I shouted at them, “Attack it, throw things at it, everything you have!”

  And, as their noise increased, I went in against its flank, kicking, shield-bashing, hacking at the flailing tentacles – they were clumsier when I was close. And slowly, slowly, it massed up a wall of heavy defence against the continuing assault.

  *

  The city, my father had told me, was over two thousand years old. It sprawled to one and half thousand square klicks – though once, you could have walked across its centre in less than an hour. Its outermost limit was demarcated by a massive and looping roadway, now a crumbling graveyard of rusting vehicles. And it had once been home to more than eight million people – eight million. The number was beyond me. I’d seen no face, other than my father’s, for nearly fifteen years . . . eight million. What had happened to them all? Had they all become eaters? Or eaten?

  The flat was safe enough, in a tower at the Elephant, and I knew my way north to the river, to the broken bridges reflected in its surface. From there, I began my exploration, the sound of the bike raw and shocking in the silence. Its invasion made the swarming creeper shiver. But nothing around me cared. Only the rodents and roaches, only the shadows scudding as the clouds crossed the dead-grey sky. As time passed, I found myself talking to the rats, with their glittering piss-yellow eyes, or crying at the nothing when another hope turned out to be ashes, drifting cold on the empty wind.

&
nbsp; On the river, I found a great ship, a huge metal monster listing in the water – but the eaters had long since gutted it, and the creaking of its shell scared me. The Tower, too, the ravens long dead, their bony corpses tiny in the surrounding swathe of green. And I found tunnels, endless winding mazes of tunnels, some of them flooded, some of them laden with swag for the taking, some of them still with their metal rails and trains. But there was no-one down there, only the layered ghosts of the millions that had died. It was dark, and it was far, far too easy to get lost. And it was there that I found the first of the monsters.

  *

  Behind me, I heard them attack. I heard them rage defiance. I heard the scrabble of feet, the clatter of their simple weapons – barbed and rusted treasures from the tunnels at South Ken. I heard them give everything they had and I hoped that the same effect was massing for them too – a bulking up of the thing’s heavyweight materials . . .

  But they had neither the strength, nor the experience.

  As the open maw and crystal eye were obscured by a thickness of pale stone, as my shoulders hurt from the effort and my throat grew raw from the shouting, the hope rose in me that this would be enough . . .

  I heard their defiance rise into fear, and their fear into death. And I wondered what I had done.

  *

  I heard it moving – too big to be a rat. And even as my heart pounded with hope and fear, even as I struck and threw the flare, I knew there was something wrong – that this wasn’t human, some lonely figure left behind by the end of the world. In the sudden hiss of light, it was human-sized, but its skin was brick and rust and splinter, its colours garish in the brilliance. Its shadow flickered over me, huge in the curve of the wall. I unslung the rifle, but hesitated. Maybe, maybe – please the Rotting Gods! – maybe this thing could be a friend, an ally against the empty and overgrown nothing.

  But no, the sense of wrong was overwhelming – the tunnel was empty of rats. They’d not attacked me, or fled, squeaking, from the light . . .

  It took me a moment to realise that the tunnel was also empty of everything else.

  Reacting to the glare, the thing came forwards. Its shadow swelled as it moved. Skin crawling, I backed away, waited. I felt almost sick. I cocked the rifle but still watched it, some hope still lit like the flare, but dying, even now, with the fading of its light. It was only when it came closer that I understood completely . . .

  It was an amalgam, made of old brickwork, pieces of benches, and signs. It had edges of bright plastics, colours from posters and graffiti. It was somehow made of the debris that the world had left down here.

  The flare was dying. In a moment, the tunnel would be pitch-dark.

  Still, I didn’t fire.

  It came closer still. Its shadow swelled and juddered. It looked at me – looked back at me. There was a bright thread of awareness to it, a gleam of something sentient. And it had flesh in there, and bone, and skull, and socket. It was not just the forgotten pieces of a lost culture; it was the people who had hidden down here, the rats I could not find. I swallowed bile. Blinked water. I shot it, point-blank, half in defiance and half in sheer terror. When it recoiled, shrieking like tortured metal, bits of it flying loose, I re-cocked my weapon and shot it again, and again. I emptied the magazine into the thing, five rounds that boomed down the tunnel, that shattered it into flying pieces and left me shaking, panicked and sweating.

  The flare guttered, almost dead now.

  But it wasn’t over. Replacing the magazine with a full one, I crept forwards, slowly, keeping the scattered debris covered. Part of me felt slightly stupid – surely I was just going mad with the loneliness – but I closed without lowering my guard. And then I kicked at the bits, kicked and kicked and kicked at them. I slung the rifle, found my father’s old magnesium-flare lighter, and I set the wooden bits aflame. They gave me enough light to leave the tunnel, backwards, watching them all the way.

  But the thing didn’t move again.

  *

  Over me, now raging with its victory, it towered up towards the shattered remnant of the roof. I could see its eyes, high in the grey light, its teeth made of thousand crystal colours. I saw its bulk bulge and rise, saw it grin as it looked down at me and I realised that I’d made a mistake.

  It fell forwards. I had time for a scrabble of panic, to reach for the rifle – almost out of reflex – and then everything went dark.

  *

  That small beast was the first one, perhaps its own equivalent of a child, I had no way of knowing. After it, there came others – creatures of urban sentience, distilled from the death about them. They seemed to live where people had been – as I ranged wider, and I found more of them, and larger. And inevitably, one day, they led me to the city’s other survivors, to those tiny huddles of humanity, as battered and dirty as I was, and every bit as able to survive. And, at last, they led me to the station at South Ken, and to the great halls that still stood there, history and future both now lost to the monster that dwelt within.

  *

  The darkness receded.

  When I opened my eyes, the hall’s broken roof arced silent over me, and the sky skulked a dark grey with the swelling evening. I felt strange, my head swimming. Instinctively, I groped for blade and rifle, but the floor was empty. The beast had gone.

  The huge space was quiet, the overgrowth still. Debris from the creature had scattered, dispersed as the driving sentience had left it. I had won.

  Had I?

  With a peculiar, detached unease, I wondered where it had gone. Without looking, I knew that there was no-one in the doorway. If there were survivors, they had left – returned to their line of rusted carriages, perhaps, to the living they’d scraped from the homes and tunnels around them. But something was very wrong, something . . .

  As I went to stand up, my vision blurred, and I stumbled back to my knees, hurting. My skin was prickling and I held out a hand, struggling to focus on my callused fingers, my scarred and wind-worn skin. It all looked wrong, hazy, and I couldn’t understand why. I found myself shivering, my stomach turning over with a tension I couldn’t name.

  A voice said, “Stay where you are.”

  In the doorway, the leader of the train people stood alone. His dark, lined face was severe and he was pointing my Lee Enfield at me, cocked and ready. He was sharp, grey-haired and wily. His grip was shaky – but Gods and Rot, he couldn’t miss from that distance. I tried to speak – what, why? – but even my voice was wrong. It came out like a rasp, a wordless noise that scraped the ruined walls. I tried to cough, failed, lurched to my feet and took a step, holding my hand out – plea or request, I didn’t know. I wanted my rifle back. “It’s my life’, I wanted to tell him. “My security’.

  “I said, “Stay where you are’.”

  The roiling in my belly grew worse. I took another step and I thought that my hands were moving, that there were things under my skin, like parasites. Something I had caught from the monster, maybe, some infestation . . .

  It was only as my forearm split open that I understood. Only as the splinters of the debris I had lain upon came roiling out of my skin, only as the dizziness in my head was obscured by a sudden sharp awareness not my own, only as I tried to laugh with a sound like the walls coming down . . .

  The grey-haired old man raised my own Lee Enfield and applied pressure to the trigger.

  And I understood the one thing I’d never known – where the sentience of the monsters had come from, why they’d always dwelt so close to the city’s last pockets of humanity.

  I felt myself expand, felt the debris ripple under my skin. I felt the walls of the old hall, the blank white stare of the statue, the crumbling of the roof and the life of the red-flowered creeper. I felt the ruination that was still scattered, still there to be consumed. I felt the life of the human as he shot at me, and missed. His life was mine: more feast, more fuel.

  And that last pocket of humanity, cowering there at South Ken – it was just en
ough to make me live again.

  Vocho’s Night Out

  Julia Knight

  Vocho surveyed the carnage before him, and put up his sword without ever having laid a stroke. “Do you have to do that, every time? Couldn’t you leave one for me?”

  His sister, Kacha, looked up from where she was wiping her hands on a random tunic. “I can’t wait for you, or I’d be here until next year. Maybe,” and here she speared him with a look he knew well, “maybe you should pay attention. We’re supposed to be protecting this shipment, after all. Not poncing about in front of a mirror pretending to perfect our technique.”

  Vocho looked at the incredibly boring boxes that they had been paid, through the duelling guild, a small fortune to protect. The prospect of a rumoured heist by the newly notorious thief, Slippery Simno, weighed heavily on their employer’s mind. Then he looked at the surfeit of unconscious, and occasionally bloody, bodies now surrounding said boxes, none of which he could lay claim to. This wasn’t going to do much for his reputation.

  “That seems a lot of thieves for what is supposed to be herbs,” he said. “I mean I know there’s herbs and there’s herbs, but even so.”

  “Not exactly well prepared either, were they? Slippery Simno they are not.”