Miri opened her eyes again when the earthquake subsided.
Joe stood at the centre of a junk pile. His skin and clothes had returned to regular human qualities, although it took long moments for his skin to lose the grey complexion. The steel in his eyes remained.
The menace pervading the alley was gone.
Miri wiped the last of the blood from her face and stood on shaky legs, still propped against the wall. "What are you?"
A sad smile crossed Joe's face.
"Everything has a spirit, Miriel, remember? That creature you saw was the festering spirit of this place." He gestured at the alley around them. "It was the embodiment of the Exeter Street Strip and the Fringe surrounding it, the corruption that's been breeding here for decades. It was the city's dark heart."
His sad smile died.
"It had been unchecked for too long, and I couldn't allow it to continue. It was insane with lust and murder. By killing the people of the Strip, it was glutting on itself like a cannibal gone mad and would have eventually killed itself."
"But why, Joe? Why not let it kill off this ugly shithole of a place?"
"Because we're all connected—you, me, these alleys. Brick and stone and flesh and bone, as the old saying went, but all that's been long forgotten. This place is part of me, too. My dark side, if you like. Mr X's presence was hurting me and those I care about."
"I don't understand."
The smile crept back onto his face.
"The Strip is only a small part of the city, Miri. Speaking of which ..." He rummaged into a pocket. "Here." He tossed her a key with a piece of paper folded around it.
She caught it and read the note. It was an address.
"Apartment 4. Just been built," he said. "It's a good neighbourhood, out where you used to live. It's yours."
"But why?" Miri blinked the first traces of tears away. "This is too much."
"No, Miri. It's not enough. I'm just taking care of my own. It's something that I lost sight of and should have corrected long before now."
"What about the others, Joe? The other girls."
"I'm working on it." Joe smiled.
#
During the night, something intangible snapped. The fear, the oppressive menace that lingered over the Strip and the Fringe beyond simply vanished.
People went about their business in the Strip but their hearts weren't in it. Deals went unbrokered, money remained unspent, apologies were muttered, and wives and girlfriends were remembered in the pause before the act. It was the slowest night in a very long time.
The next morning, light clouds swirled over the city. The sun cast pleasant shades of gold across the Strip and gained a foothold inside the Fringe.
With the dawn came a convoy of street sweeping trucks. They methodically set about their duty, whirring away through Exeter Street and its labyrinth of alleys, peeling away generations of garbage and filth, cleansing the Strip for the first time in living memory.
* * *
Wrack
I'll never forget the moment: Louise's eyes widened, a look I first took as wounded pride. Her eyes, though, they stayed wide, her irises dilating, her nostrils flaring, her expression crossing the threshold into panic. A whimper caught in her throat. An instant later, her cheeks bulged. She pressed her palm over her lips, acting a fraction of a second too late. A dribble of brown vomit escaped the corner of her mouth and trickled down the side of her chin.
Her face had never looked paler. Pale, like her sister Bella.
That moment, that's when the wrack took hold of our lives.
Louise ran to the bathroom. The sound of her emptying her guts for what seemed hours is another of those things that will linger with me, although she never seemed to stop after that. Once the wrack took hold, she could barely keep her own spit down for long.
At least it had interrupted our argument. It was ironic, really, because we'd been arguing about what to do if the wrack claimed one of us. The warnings had been on the TV for a week. Forget bird flu or SARS, this one was the plague to end them all. No cure. No explanations. No good news.
Louise's bag was half-packed when the wrack overtook her. She wanted to drive out to her Uncle Gary's shack in the bush, hoping to escape the madness—and maybe even me. She was convinced the wrack was God's punishment for the world's wicked ways. She saw no redemption.
Well, life sucker-punched her, and me not long after.
She'd been laid up in bed for days, all pale and tinged with green. The vomit had darkened to burgundy and the pain had long set in. That's why it was called the wrack. The body shook, the nerve ends burned, and every second of life became one painful son-of-a-bitch. I'd heard most people died because their bodies just gave up, the way torture victims died in the pauses between atrocities. With that sort of pain, everybody has a time limit.
I nursed Louise for all those days, despite my own wrack. I'd had the better of the vomiting and the painkillers were still able to soothe me. Louise's screams started on the second day. They trailed off into whimpers by the fourth. Me, I held most of it back behind gritted teeth. When the painkillers stopped working, the cheap tequila and my cache of weed took over.
That day, day four, through my gritted teeth, enduring bleeding gums, the screaming muscles, and acid-fire piss, was when the epiphanies struck, one after the other.
We'd been together for fourteen months now, Louise and I, shared some great times, too, but that was a long time to put up with her turn-the-other-cheek mentality, her passivity that, at times, drove me mad. With her religious leanings and prudishness, she was no Bella. Her sister, my Belladonna, that dirty-sick bitch, my first. When Bella dumped me to screw some gym-junkie, we both knew it had nothing to do with some other guy. It was about control—her control over me. Dating her kid sister Louise had been the closest thing I could call revenge, but Louise's pretty eyes and soft looks, so unlike her sister, had drawn me in. Revenge dating became pleasant, a routine. That Bella refused to attend family gatherings with Louise and I was a sweetener. It meant I was inside both sisters, under their skin, one way or another.
But now, with Louise's pretty eyes sunken in bruised caverns, her skin translucent, vomit and spit crusting the side of her face, I realised my love for her was eclipsed by my desire to survive, to live.
That I still burned for Bella wasn't a surprise, but the realisation that I could abandon Louise for my self-preservation left me retching for half an hour. With my insides scoured and nothing but pain filling my mind, the rest fell into place almost by itself.
At first I didn't know where my course was leading. Pain makes the mind play strange, strange tricks, so when I hauled myself, legs and arms afire, to the linen cupboard, I fumbled with the blanket, befuddled, struggling to comprehend its purpose, when the spare pillow fell free. As my hand clutched the pillow, the clench a fresh knot of pain, that epiphany I'd had earlier raised its ugly head, and slowly, inexorably, guided me to the bed.
Louise watched me every step of the way. Her body had doubled up, pinwheeling in pain beneath a sheet stained with her fluids. Through her little whimpers of pain, hoarse and subtly abrasive like over-rubbed sandpaper, her eyes tracked my progress to her. She stared at me, bruised and dirty-eyed, no longer pretty, barely human at all.
I like to think she welcomed the end of our relationship, especially the way her hand relaxed over mine a minute or two after I clamped the pillow onto her face. She was too wracked to cry out or scream, too weak to resist, too dry and empty to retch any further. My hand shook as I continued press the pillow over her face, every breath a trial of fire and aches. In the haze of my own pain, I had no idea how long I stood rigid-limbed over her. I think I heard a snap but my ears were so dulled by inflammation, for all I knew it could have been a bird striking the balcony window or my own sense of self-worth breaking.
The vitality fled my body when I eventually released my grip on the pillow. With my grip eased, black stars played in my peripheral vision and a high-pitch whined through
my ears. As I slumped to the floor, my vision clouded by the black stars, I distinctly remember hearing an ambulance wailing through the streets. It was the first sound in days I'd heard from the world outside our apartment.
I woke in an awkward huddle, staring up into Louise's dead eyes as she peek-a-booed from beneath the pillow that claimed her life. I jumped at the sight, banging my elbow on the dresser. It was painful, jarring, but not the waves of pain that filled the previous days. I stood and felt strength in my legs that I barely remembered. A few days of the wrack felt like a lifetime. Flexing fingers, rotating my elbows and shoulders, I could scarcely believe the wrack was losing its grip.
Something inside me had changed.
Troubled by merely stiff muscles, I crouched by Louise and removed the pillow from her face. Death had given her serenity but the wrack had taken an ugly toll—the bruises, the pinpricks on her cheeks and neck where blood vessels had burst, red fading to black, and those once-pretty but now sunken eyes. Her lips were blue and her skin was finally as pale as Bella's. Matted hair obscured part of her face, which I brushed free. I felt a tear rise but rubbed it away, kissed my tear-stained finger and then applied it to those blue lips of hers. It was a small gesture, a meek gesture, but enough. It was all I would spare for her. I kept any remaining tears to myself.
I left her there, choosing to remember our time together and not the ending of it, choosing instead to discover how the rest of the world was coping.
Information was in short supply. As I stuffed my backpack with food, I flicked on the TV and found only one station still on the air. A newsreader wearing a face mask mumbled progress reports from around the globe, all of it inconclusive, but the look on his face told me all I needed to know. The fear there, the uncertainty, told me a cure was yet to be found. The way things were going, there soon wouldn't be enough people left with the know-how to cook up a cure.
With my newfound strength, I hefted my pack and pocketed the keys to Louise's car.
I was never religious and glad of it, but looking in on Louise one last time, at her tiny, ravaged frame, and that Bible she always kept on the dresser on her side of the bed, it left me wondering.
They say at the end times, the faithful will be tested and the meek will inherit the earth.
As I headed downstairs to an empty street, listening to screams and agonies that tormented the neighbours, and distant gunshots, clear as church bells, I came to believe that the faithful were being tested. The clarity of thought at that moment was like a burden lifted, like awakening from a dream.
Bella's apartment was across town. I started the car, leaving my girlfriend dead and cold in our bed, believing Bella, my Bella, would welcome me back. The price of her cure wouldn't bother her, I was sure. I couldn't even remember his name.
Redemption was only ever for the worthy. For those willing to make sacrifices. Louise never understood but Bella would, my nasty-beautiful Bella. I would show her how to find redemption, how to pass the testing of the faithful and overcome the wrack.
No, the meek would not inherit the earth.
* * *
About the author:
Shane Jiraiya Cummings lives in Perth, Western Australia. He has been acknowledged as "one of Australia's leading voices in dark fantasy", had more than sixty short stories published in Australia, USA, and Europe, and his work has been translated in Spanish, French, and Polish. Shane has won two Ditmar Awards, and he has been nominated for more than twenty other major awards including Spain's Premios Ignotus.
Shane is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association and former Vice President of the Australian Horror Writers Association. When he is not writing, Shane is an editor and journalist by day and sword fighting instructor by night.
In his youth, Shane was trained in the deadly arts of the ninja, and the name Jiraiya (lit. "Young Thunder", after the legendary ninja Jiraiya) was bestowed upon him by his sensei.
More information on Shane (including his free fiction) can be found online at http://www.jiraiya.com.au.
Interact with Shane on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Shane-Jiraiya-Cummings/401910315831) or rate and review his books on Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com/jiraiyac).
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You can find Shane's other e-books at all good online retailers:
Novellas:
Phoenix and the Darkness of Wolves (Damnation Books). ISBN: 9781615720552
Requiem for the Burning God. ISBN: 9780987076809
The Smoke Dragon. ISBN: 9780987076823
Collections:
Apocrypha Sequence: Deviance. ISBN: 9780987076830
Apocrypha Sequence: Divinity. ISBN: 9780987076847
Apocrypha Sequence: Inferno. ISBN: 9780987076854
Apocrypha Sequence: Insanity. ISBN: 9780987076861
Shards. ISBN: 9780987076816
Print version, illustrated by Andrew J. McKiernan (Brimstone Press). ISBN: 9780980567724
Available from Brimstone Press: http://www.brimstonepress.com.au
Chapbooks:
Shards: Damned and Burning, illustrated by Andrew J. McKiernan (Brimstone Press). Free download from Brimstone Press: http://www.brimstonepress.com.au
Apocrypha Sequence: Deviance Page 6