Wild Horse

by Kyle Richardson

  When he finally closes his eyes, he keeps his hands clenched, his knuckles at the ready.

  ***

  Grady walks down the street with Cassie in his arms. The city has been destroyed. All around them, the metal trees and rusted drills and the walls of glass and stone, they lie crumpled and squashed, shattered like endless cubes. The sky is dark and starless. The moon is ringed with ash. Cassie is limp in his arms, her red cape dangling beneath her, her raspberry-yellow hair matted with dried blood. “You can’t save people,” she says. She keeps her eyes closed while she speaks. “It’s not how it’s s’posed to be.” Grady walks while she talks, his boots crunching over the debris. Cassie seems to weigh more with every step. Her limp body strains against his arms. His bones rattle and blaze. “The more you try to save,” Cassie says, “the more you’re gonna lose.” The warm knot in Grady tumbles free. It knocks against his ribs and spine. It plummets endlessly. “More to lose,” he repeats. “Like how I lost you?” Cassie opens her eyes and looks up at him. Her green irises quiver. Tears sparkle against her lashes. “Now you get it,” she says, her voice tightening. “Now you know how it works.”

  ***

  It’s the gunshot that wakes him—the broad, punching sound. Like a sky full of Balthazars and Great Bobinas crashing to the dirt. Grady bolts up in his cot and eyes the gravelly sky.

  Reslo is perched high on the ledge, his rail-thin body silhouetted against the rock-gray clouds, his smiling face swallowed by a plume of black gun smoke. “Bang!” he yells. “Right to the head!” His voice wafts through the cool night air and clangs against the city. “No coming back for that one!”

  The heat returns to Grady’s joints. Inside him, something smolders. Who has Reslo shot this time? A traveler? A hiker, maybe? A mother scavenging for her kids? Hell, Cassie had it right all along. You can’t save people from themselves. Not even when you see death before it happens. Not even if your blood itself can heal the world. Because things die. People die. They kill themselves and each other. That’s the way it’s always been. The way it’s supposed to be. Grady lifts his arms and eyes his smooth new clothes. He paws his short-chopped hair. He kicks the dirt with the toes of his rubber boots. All this stuff that doesn’t belong. All these things that aren’t him.

  What the hell is he doing here?

  But the guard to his right seems to think otherwise, seems convinced that Grady does belong, seems sure that he isn’t meant to leave. The man is on his feet, the muzzle of his rifle pointed at Grady’s chest. “Something on your mind, freak?”

  Grady narrows his eyes and mutters, “You could say that.” Then he shoves from his cot so fast the starchy fabric snaps.

  Grady hits the man so hard that something solid in the guy’s face goes soft. The man screams out and the rifle pops, loud and white. The bullet hammers Grady in the chest, ricochets back the way it came, and the man gasps, dropping to his knees. He looks down, wide-eyed, and touches the fresh hole in his shirt. His fingertips come away, shining and red.

  Grady runs. Behind him, another man yells. Around him the city twists and grinds. Reslo’s voice rises over the tumult, his words crisp and swift. “The hell?” he yells. “Stop him, damn it! Put him down!” But these people can’t stop Grady. Not now. Not ever. Each dirty hand that grips him, he crunches it clean off. Every face that gets in his way, he smashes it aside. Each body that falls in front of him, he stomps it with his boots. Bullets slap against his skin. Knives snag in his clothes. But Grady is a whirlwind, barreling along. Twice Reslo’s gun fires, but the bullets hit the dirt. Not even all the drills in the world can hold Grady in place.

  He runs until he crashes through a rusted gate, his body hard and blazing. He pumps his arms and drives his legs until the shouts sink away, until the city walls disappear behind him, until he’s lost and free in the moonlit outside world. And in that place where the buildings turn to rocks, where the concrete turns to dirt, this is where he finds her: Reslo’s victim. The young woman lies motionless, gaping up at the murky sky. A red hole glints on the right side of her forehead. Blood leaks from her ears. Her cape flutters in the wind. Her raspberry-yellow hair spills around her freckled face. This young woman, her green eyes are dull and glossy, just like a breakfast fish. And the thing that’s tumbling inside Grady, it flares and twists and blooms. It blooms into a pressure, into a weight, into a storm. It blooms until his insides crack, until the crack turns to a hole, until the girl with the wild-horse voice is pulling him clean through. But this isn’t Cassie. This is just another young woman with raspberry-yellow hair. Just another nobody with green eyes and a crimson cape. Somewhere out there his Cassie is still running, her cape whipping around her like a bloodied leaf. Somewhere out there, his Cassie is flicking her food away. Somewhere out there, his Cassie is seeing others die. Others, not herself. Not his Cassie. Not her. His Cassie would never come back for him.

  But pinched in this young woman’s hand, the colors worn and faded, the wrinkles all smoothed flat, is the glossy, tattered picture of a wild horse, running free. And whatever that knot is inside him, it finally sloughs apart, blooming and cracking and spreading beyond even that, shattering into a million jagged pieces, every shard a drill tip, every tip a bullet, until his body is just another courtyard filled with screaming guards, only now there’s no rasberry-haired girl to pull him through it. No Cassie to make it right. Now there’s only an outside world that’s suddenly too dark and grim, too cold and lonely, too wrong in all the right ways. A world that quivers behind his tears, shuddering as if it’s just learned what Cassie knew all along: not a single goddamn piece of it has ever been worth saving.

  No—this is a world that deserves to be torn to the ground.

  ***

  He buries her in an empty field, far from everything. The trees bend and the wind swirls and the birds warble their songs, as if this is just another ordinary day. As if Grady isn’t easing Cassie’s limp body into the earth. As if he isn’t saying goodbye to the one good thing in his life, all over again.

  As if this time, it isn’t permanent.

  And when she’s under all that dirt and his sobs finally die away, and his heart somehow finds the strength to pump his blood again, he takes the wrinkled picture, lays it on the darkened soil, and sets a small rock atop it, pinning it in place. The last wild horse, for the girl who believed that horses were meant to die. And maybe they were. Maybe, about that, she was right all along.

  But she was never meant to die. Not like this. Not hunted like some animal, as if she were just another nobody. As if Reslo or anyone even had the right to do so much as touch her fate, let alone end it.

  No—there has to be a way out of this. A way to break the drill. A way to climb through the crack. A way to leave this horrible prison behind.

  As he trudges away from her grave—his shoulders hunched, his fingers dirt-crusted, her blood-stained cape draped over his arm—her voice echoes in his mind like a siren’s wail, her words all scales and salt: “We’re not the only ones with powers, you know.”

  And something new rises in him: a flicker. A spark. The tiniest hint of a flame.

  ***

  Five seasons pass—each one a familiar, tiring blur—until Grady’s hair is too long and his clothes are too tattered and his scruff smells too much like spit and salt. But on the sixth season, he finds a boy crouched under a concrete bridge, with the body of small rat cradled in his skinny hands.

  Grady’s first urge is to hide—not from fear, but because it’s been so long since he’s seen another soul. So long since he’s felt the need to connect. So long since he’s even tried to speak. But the boy spots him before he can duck away, and soon the air is ringing with the youth’s strong voice, his sharp accent twanging on the wind. “Hey!” the boy calls out. “Hey, ya hungry? Ya sure look it!”

  Grady just stares and grinds his molars together and flexes his grime-covered thumbs. He’s hungry so much these
days that it’s become a normal feeling, like gravity pulling on his legs, or heat pooling in his head. “I—” he croaks, then grimaces at the gravelly sound of his own voice. He takes a deep breath and slowly calls out, “I am.”

  “Well,” the boy shouts, “come on, then! Ya weirdin’ me out, just standin’ there.” The boy lifts the rat’s body for Grady to see, and what Grady sees is just a pitiful lump of coarse brown hair, fractured bones, and . . . really, not much else. But the boy looks proud of his catch, as if he’s holding a fat, wriggling breakfast fish. As if he’s found a meal that even Cassie wouldn’t have dared to flick away. “Wanna eat,” the boy asks, “or not?”

  So Grady staggers toward the boy, slowly. Cautiously. And when they’re close enough to touch one another—close enough to fight, to kill—the boy smiles, bunching his dark brown face, and pats the pile of rocks and rusted metal beside him. “Have a seat, guy!” the boy announces. “Ya can thank me after it’s done.”

  And Grady wants to grab the boy by his narrow shoulders and shake that stupid grin off his face, to startle him, to terrify him, until the damn kid understands this world is nothing to smile about and never will be, but before he even has the chance, the boy wraps his fingers around the rat’s corpse and suddenly the air around them is spinning, and the ground beneath them is shuddering, and the space between the boy’s scrawny hands is no longer just a lump of bones and hair. Suddenly the boy is holding a ball of light, like he’s caught a miniature sun, like he’s God Himself ready to lob a brand new star into the nearest galaxy, and Grady can only gape and stare.

  When it’s all over, the world slots back into place—all that wind dying away, all that movement falling still, all that light dwindling into darkness. Then the boy’s smile widens, and he turns toward Grady to hold up his newfound prize: a fat, squirming, screeching rat. A rat that used to be nothing but hair and bone-white sticks.

  Grady’s mind becomes a whirlwind, his thoughts a ravaging storm, his insides a cellblock with every gate swinging open. “Wh—what?” he stammers.

  The boy lets out a triumphant laugh, grabs the creature by its tail, and lifts it high in the air, like he’s about to swing it headfirst into the rocks. Like he’s eager to end the life he just created. But Grady lunges toward him, grabs the boy by the elbow, and pries the rat out of his clenched hand. The kid swears and flails, his tiny body suddenly all movement and fury, but Grady just tosses the rat over his shoulder and they both watch quietly as the creature scurries away.

  “What the hell?” the boy cries out, leaping to his feet. He glares at the shredded cape hanging from Grady’s shoulders and snaps, “Do ya know how hard it is to find dead things these days? Hell. I thought ya were hungry, damn it!”

  But Grady isn’t hungry anymore. Not for rats. Not for fish. Not for berries or muck on trays or even glasses of powdered milk. No, the only thing he hungers for now is lying beneath six feet of packed earth, like a rasberry-haired bird in an egg. Like an egg just waiting to be cracked. “Come on,” he says, jerking his head toward the withered tress. “I’ll help you find all the rat bones you want. Just help me dig up something, first.”

  The boy eyes him suspiciously, like he’s not sure what to make of this haggard man in his battered cape, but Grady’s smile is all teeth, his eyes all light and spark, his mind a hurricane of rasberry-yellow hair. For the first time in a long while, something in him begins to fall.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my perfect wife, Michelle, who wrangles our kids every day just so I can have some writing time. She's also a brilliant first-reader—all the best parts of my writing are because of her ideas. I would truly be lost without her.

  Thanks also to Tricia—the coolest, most encouraging publisher I know. Without her, this story wouldn't have been written. Plus, she's pretty amazing at cover design, too.

  And a final thanks to outer space—for creeping me out whenever I look at it.

  About the Author

  Kyle lives in the suburban wilds of Canada with his adorable wife, their rambunctious son, and their adventurous daughter. He writes about shapeshifters, superheroes, and the occasional clockwork beast, moonlights as an editor at Meerkat Press, and has a terrible habit of saying the wrong thing at the most inopportune moments. His short fiction has appeared in places such as Love Hurts: A Speculative Fiction Anthology and Daily Science Fiction. He can be found at: www.kylerichardson.ca

  Enjoy this sneak peek at Kyle Richardson's enchanting debut, BEAST HEART, a YA steampunk/paranormal romance, coming March 2020. Sign up for our mailing list for news on this and other releases at www.meerkatpress.com.

  Excerpt from

  BEAST HEART

  Kyle Richardson

  THE AIRFIELD IS SMALL AND ANCIENT, its roads sun-bleached and crumbling at the edges. From the looks of it, there used to be white lines painted onto the cement, to give the dirigibles something to aim for when they drifted in to land. But even those have become so worn and faded that they’re practically invisible now. Gabby frowns and leans her chest against the rusted fence, letting her arms dangle over the other side, her jar clinking dully against the chain links. “What’s so perfect about this airfield?” she says to Mom. “It’s all beat-up, and it’s terribly plain.” She points her goggles at Mom’s squinting eyes and says, “It’s a lot like the engineer, actually.”

  Mom takes a deep breath and lets it out quietly. The wind whips her yellow bangs against her forehead and she brings a hand to her face, shielding her eyes from the sun. “He’s not going to fix your hand, Gabs,” she says. She stares intently at a small white airship that’s sitting lopsided on the grass, just beside the pavement. “He’s going to make it usable, though. You’ll be able to function just like everyone else.”

  Gabby narrows her eyes behind her lenses. Function? What kind of word is that? It makes it sound like she’s part machine—like a human appliance. “I don’t want to function,” she says, leaning harder against the fence. She slaps the jar against the metal, making the glass clang. “I want to be normal, like everyone else.”

  This actually makes Mom laugh. “Oh, honey,” she says, brushing a stray lock of hair behind her ear, “normal is so overrated.” She looks down at Gabby’s spectacles. It’s bright out today, the sky a sharp, piercing blue, so Mom probably can’t see Gabby’s eyes through the glass. But their gazes lock anyway, and Mom smiles warmly. “One day,” she says softly, “you’ll understand how special it is to be . . . well, special.”

  Gabby’s mouth goes dry, and she tries to force some spit over her tongue, just so she can swallow comfortably. Part of her wants to argue, to point out that Mom couldn’t possibly know what it’s like to be her; to have such huge, clunky goggles and a hand that looks like warm breath on a cold day; to have jet-black hair and blurry green eyes and stupid freckles all over her nose and cheeks; and most of all, Mom wouldn’t know how it feels to be skinny and straight in all the places where so many other girls already have curves, to be all but invisible to anyone her own age. But she doesn’t say anything at all. She just stays there, slumped over the top of the metal fence, while a pair of rickety, lime-green airships wobble across the sky above them, practicing their take-offs and landings.

  The hour passes quickly, and before long, the engineer’s voice catches in the wind, his gravelly accent flattening his words into a steady, unchanging tone. “I’ve finished the glove. Bring the girl to try it on.”

  Mom looks down at Gabby and offers an encouraging smile. “Well, then. Let’s see how it turned out.”

  But Gabby is suddenly too numb to respond, her mind teetering off-balance. The engineer hasn’t done anything to fix her hand—he simply built her a stinking glove to cover it up.

  Mom wraps her slender fingers around Gabby’s bad wrist, gripping the dark gray tape that holds the jar around her hand, and they take their time trudging down the dry hillside. Mom seems eager—hopeful, even—but
Gabby’s insides are all warbling heat and chalky cinder. It doesn’t matter what color the glove will be, or how it’ll feel, or what the stupid thing will look like. No, she’s already decided: she’s going to hate everything about it.

  And not even Mom will change her mind.

  ***

  It takes days for the sting of Abner’s belt to finally stop wrenching tears from Kemple’s eyes. He spends the time lying facedown on his scratchy cot in nothing but a pair of tattered shorts, his arms dangling over the edges, his fingertips grazing the floorboards.

  Abner, at least, leaves him a box of saltine crackers and a jug of dirty water—just enough to keep him from starving to death.

  Right before it happened, Kemple was actually foolish enough to think he’d done a good thing—helping Josephyn escape her first ever lashing. But since then, the girl has been like a ghost. He hasn’t seen her or heard from her in days. It’s like she somehow up and left, leaving him to suffer from his injuries alone. And now that he’s had a few days to think it over, well . . . if he had the power to go back in time, he’d tell Abner the truth, right then and there. He’d let the girl feel what he’s feeling now. Let her know what it’s like to lie here, slumped over hour after hour, with these scorching hot bruises stinging her back, like so many merciless licks from a dragon’s tongue.

  Let Josephyn know what it’s like to cry alone for so long. To have nobody to tell her that it’ll all be okay in the end. Let her—