Other Dangers: Slipped Through

by Amanda M. Lyons

  Henry clenched his teeth, holding his head in his hands, attempting to let the creature see none of his weakness. There was no doubt in his mind that the woman endured much more than this and it astounded him that she could bare it. He was unable to move and unable to speak, stopped in a hell of glaring pain.

  But he could still hear.

  From behind him rose the sound of swinging iron, and a rush of wind moved across the skin of his face. A clacking of two pieces of metal grinding on each other came, and soon after the pain was abruptly gone.

  He knew even before he opened his eyes and looked at what had happened, all of the sounds and sensations of that moment of pain had told him. The zombie mother had struck the Zombie Lord with her chain, distracting him, if only for a moment. Henry took the few moments he had and rushed toward the woman, picked her up and ran out toward the door and beyond. The zombie-mother ran behind them, carrying the woman’s clothes, weapons, and on her back the backpack that had come to be so much more important in the face of Henry’s wife’s death. Knowing that the zombie lord’s rage would come soon after, he threw all of his energy into running. Henry sensed the presence of the other prisoners behind him, and he made a silent prayer they would all escape alive.

  A roar of clacking bones and bitter voices rose behind them. Breathless already, Henry attempted to speed up. As he moved, the woman’s body stirred against his chest, her eyes opening a crack as she pulled deep breaths into her lungs.

  “Alex! We have to get Alex! He’s-”

  “I’m already here, Abby!” A strained voice called out from the group behind them. “I’m as close to fine as I’m going to get!”

  Hearing the words, she began to relax, the tension going out of her and leaving her nearly as limp as if she were dead, weak as she was in her unconscious state. They rushed as a group toward the side of the encampment where Henry and the woman had entered a day or so before. There were eight of them in all, the escapees in the back of their line fending off the monsters that had come to kill or imprison them.

  “I will have her!” The Zombie Lord raged. “I will have her in the end!”

  Not if I can help it, Henry thought, and not if these people love her as much as they seem to. It was a strange thing to understand that he meant those words; that the woman in his arms had come to mean something to him somehow in the time he’d been here. He didn’t connect to other people the same way others did, this was new.

  “I have your wife, Otherworlder! I have her! She is mine now!” The Zombie Lord raved. “I will give her body to them! I will let them rape her until she cannot bear them anymore. I will make her their whore!”

  With a certain sense of self-disgust, Henry realized that he didn’t care anymore. His wife, the woman he had raised Karen with, and in his own way loved, was dead, and there was no getting her back. Maybe no going back home either. I may be trapped here forever.

  A swell of light made him look back at the village and he wondered if the fire would take all of them with it, hoping against hope that Rachel might be purged of the terrible thing that had taken her body. The zombie-mother threw another torch into a building and laughed as the zombies ran to put it out, their target forgotten in their haste to save their young and their wounded.

  His mind was a hazy blur as he turned back to the road, her weight in his arms.

  Abby, he thought dimly, her name is Abby.

  Chapter Three:

  Silent Running

  They fought with the zombies that followed, for hours, each foot of space gained lost within moments of getting it. Henry had never gone to war and so knew so very little about how it played out in real life. Watching each of the former prisoners, and Alex, work to defend and repel the onslaught was a startling experience to say the least.

  The zombie mother was adept at wielding branches and torches against the zombies, her fervor fueled by clear insanity and centered grief. Here, there was no sign of her anguish over the child she had destroyed, but clearly it was a part of her anger and desire to destroy their enemy, the monsters falling into pieces, one by one, as she relentlessly thrashed out at them, stabbed into their soft places and kicked them away. The other women seemed to have some of the same zeal for battle as the zombie mother, those of them who were able to fight in any case. Daggers and other blades were wielded shortly after they’d been stolen from the zombie’s encampment, so clearly none of them had wasted time in gathering what they could in the event of this battle. Not all of them were as finely tuned to the conflict as the zombie mother, and they suffered for the detriment to their focus, but overall they held their own far better than anyone might expect them to, certainly after being prisoners for who knew how long.

  Alex, the only man other than Henry, was also a strong leader regardless of his damaged sight, using his staff to strike heavy blows to the heads of the zombies and bringing them down in small batches as quickly as he could. Henry was grateful for the protection the man offered him as they crept slowly away from the village, but he suspected it had more to do with the woman he held in his arms than any real investment in his personal survival. In fact, it didn’t take him long to realize that the group had made special pains to surround him as they fled the village, guarding him from all attacks.

  That being said, entrenched as they were in the midst of thirty or forty of the monsters, he didn’t think there was much chance of their winning. He’d been wrong. Inch by inch they began to gain ground as the number of zombies began to fall away, literal pieces scattered in their wake, and soon there were only stragglers left to dispatch. Bloodied and sore, all of the warrior women, the zombie mother, and their leader, Alex, gathered together in a protective marching group and prepared to make all the distance they could. They were mercifully free of any further attacks after this last attempt.

  ***

  By the time they’d gotten back onto the road and well away from the zombies, it was night. Abby remained unconscious in Henry’s arms, a strange weight. The people around him refused to stop, and remembering what she had told him that first night, he didn’t argue with them. Again, the night air was filled with groans and howls, haunting things that seemed more at home in medieval nightmares. Henry moved along with the others, not thinking about the eyeless man that had taken up a place at the very front of their procession; it was obvious he shared a place in their hearts very near to Abby’s. When he found Pereneaux walking next to him he turned, a bit dazed from his travels, and waited to see what would happen.

  “Otherworlder,” Alex began. The man reminded Henry of a mystic, or lawgiver in some ancient village. He had shaggy shoulder-length hair and wore blue robes made grey by time; the ragged pieces of fabric did not hide the boney structure that existed beneath them. He appeared to be in his mid-forties, and even with the strained gait he’d taken, Henry knew that he was a strong man. “We will need to rest soon. I- ah, trust that A-she told you a little about me.”

  “She said that you had helped people to get through these times. I’m sorry for what happened to your- ah, your daughter back there.” Pereneaux flinched at this. “I hope she’ll be okay; I have a daughter of my own about that age. I can’t imagine…well, I’m sorry. There really isn’t any need to avoid saying her name now.” He nodded toward Abby. “I already know it’s Abby. You said it as we escaped.”

  “As far as my daughter, and indeed, all of the women here, I’m afraid that they will most likely bear the weight of hybrid children in a few weeks. You see, it takes only four months for a hybrid child to gestate. They grow at twice the rate of human children. The women will likely be forced to abort them from their wombs or kill them when they are born.” Henry flinched at this thought, remembering the Zombie Mother’s own such act.

  “It hardly matters if you know her name. Abby is the one that holds these secrets, these truths about how this place came to be as it is now, and about who we are. I can understand why she holds our past from you, but her name?” He shook his head. “I won
der about that.”

  “Do you see the hill about half a mile down this road? That’s where we’ll camp.” Pereneaux gestured ahead of them as Henry looked in the distance, and back to the man beside him with amazement. A beaming smile stretched his lips wide. “I see your puzzled expression as well, Otherworlder. I’m a sorcerer of sorts. Look into the dark hollows that once held my eyes and you will see two blue lights, these are my soul eyes.”

  As Henry peered into the man’s face, he saw exactly what Pereneaux had told him he would see. He could hardly suppress his apprehension; a certain sense of awe and fear mingled in his belly as he looked into the twin azure lights. He didn’t know how he could have been blind to their light, how the crevice had not echoed there out into the void that held two inches of space before them.

  “The dark man thought he could take my vision from me, but I’m no stranger to magic, not anymore. Just as Benjamin is now no stranger to the healing arts. He’s the one we will take her to now. I’m sure she meant to take your wife to him before she would have sent you home. If only things had not gone as they have. Too often that is the way of this place; even after all of the things that have come and gone, I am so saddened to see them come to pass.”

  “Is he some sort of witchdoctor or-?”

  Pereneaux laughed, the lightness of it touching amid all of this strangeness. “No, Benjamin is no primitive. He earned his skills, as did all of the protectors, before this time. When there were televisions and police, harmless entertainment and some sense of order. Once our world was like your own, you see. He had problems then, as we all did, but they have faded since the conflict and we can protect him from these actions now. He’s become a healer of the mind and body, moved beyond the obsession that once swallowed him up. We’ve all come to have our own beliefs in the face of all of this. Whatever they may be, they are certainly not those that we were raised to believe. In a place like this the vision of our past seems as close to heaven as we might ever reach.”

  Problems? Obsession? He couldn’t help but be thrown by such words, certainly in relation to a man that was respected and revered in this place. Henry waited, and when Pereneaux didn’t say anything else, didn’t offer any clarifications to the things he’d said, he faced forward and waited for his feet to take him to the rise ahead. He supposed that answers would come soon enough, or at least be indicated by what he experienced when he got to the village. He’d certainly learned enough at the other encampment.

  When they left the camp the next morning Henry continued to carry Abby as the others followed. All the while he thought about all that had passed as he walked and the hardly settled curiosity about the contents of her backpack rose again, pushing aside his exhaustion and the ache losing his wife had begun.

  ***

  After setting up a fire the night before, Pereneaux had led two of the women into the woods to hunt for their dinner. They returned within a few minutes, bearing four of the strange rabbits Abby shared with him a few nights ago. It was a surreal thing to be where he was; the thought of that night felt strange, his emotions then hollow and insincere compared to the ones he felt now. The quiet susurration of breath that had replaced her voice, and the torpor that blotted out the swift arch of her movements unnerved him; it already seemed like ages since that night. It didn’t help that he was also so utterly displaced and removed from the things which happened around him, carried along through a flurry of events that inspired actions in him that were more instinctual and reactive than anything he had experienced in his own world. She was his link to this place, the one thing that he had come to understand. The impermeable rendered weak. Without her he was at a loss and his fate inexplicably tied to her wellbeing.

  Three other women and a young boy he hadn’t seen before they’d escaped the camp carried out the process of skinning and gutting the animals. Efficient, fast fingers slipped away flesh and organs, then placed them on a high spit made from sharpened branches, and then carried on, washing their hands with water from their skins. Henry, who had yet to put Abby down, had taken all of this in with the dull and hazy mind of exhaustion and despair, watched with a helplessly distant fascination. His eyes drifted from one person to another as camp was made, and took in the activity in a listless and disconnected way that was nevertheless tied into retaining some sense of control and attachment to the world around him. A sudden tap at his shoulder startled him, and when he turned, it was to face Pereneaux once again.

  “Give her to these women.” Pereneaux gestured to two girls, who kneeled, soothing Pereneaux’s recently violated daughter. ‘They’ll do what they can.” Henry followed his instructions and knelt to lay Abby next to the women. Having done the task, he started to get to his feet, but then when an immense exhaustion struck and threw off his balance, he let himself fall to his knees once more. Wavering a little, exhausted and weak, his lips touched Abby’s forehead as he gave the flesh there a reverent kiss. He didn’t know why he’d done it, but took little time to challenge the action in his thoughts. It hardly mattered anyway.

  Struck with a certain sense of inner calm, he walked back to where Pereneaux stood and waited for him to speak, the burden of his unspoken words weighing the air around them. “Come with me,” he said to Henry. “I want to speak to you.” He walked a few feet from the fire and sat on the ground there. Henry sat as he did, folding his legs Indian fashion before he settled to listen.

  “There was a time, many years ago, when I knew a world like your own. I was an actor, if you can believe that, arrogant and so certain of my own power that I didn’t think that what would come might be more than I could handle. I had a brother, an American who owned a failing farm in Nebraska. I came to help him and his family but in the end I saw them…I saw them lose…themselves. I don’t dare to say more than that about them.” The shiver that passed over Pereneaux’s body and made lines in his face were enough to cause Henry not to ask probing questions.

  “I nearly lost my mind then, and gained an enemy who traveled on the very breath of darkness. He is now only one of the many demons who walk here, and she,” he gestured toward Abby. “Abigail saved us from all that had been intended for us, or certainly a great deal of what might have been had she chosen to walk away. She didn’t go it alone, mind you. I was but one of many others that fought in that battle, but she is the one that brought us together in the first place. She’s the one that knew we had to stop what sh-what was created. I’ll not tell you more than that. I imagine that she’d murder me for sharing that shred of it.

  “I’ll offer you a solid warning about all of this. Don’t tell her about our talk, and stop your curiosity about all of this before it comes to something worse. You should consider your future instead, getting out of here and back to your daughter before this place takes hold of you.”

  “The woman you have so unwittingly become attached to -yes, you have that to think of as well-is out of your reach.” Henry didn’t respond despite the flinch that had moved his features for a moment and the inner denial that played across his thoughts. Instead, he let Pereneaux go on. “Your wife is lost to you, the pain of her loss hasn’t reached you, not truly, but I promise you it will. Take this loss and your concern for your own daughter back to your world. Leave the concern for Abigail to the other protectors and me. I warn you, there is much to lose in knowing that woman, much less coming to love her.” He spoke with the voice of experience, and that stirred Henry’s curiosity, but he took what he’d said as close to heart as he could and attempted to push his need to understand this place aside.

  His efforts didn’t give him much peace, however, the thoughts stayed away through their dinner and just after the others slept, no longer.

  Lying on his back near the fire, he looked at the stars, thinking over what Pereneaux had told him. I saw them…I saw them…lose themselves. The man’s voice echoed in his thoughts. Abigail saved us from all that had been intended for us…she is the one that brought us together…The words passed through his mind
again and again as he tried to put it together, to imagine the battle this world had seen and how it had all come to this. After a time, he drifted into sleep; having worn himself thin in the week he’d spent in this place, it happened quickly.

  ***

  He didn’t awaken until late into the following afternoon. Pereneaux urged the group to travel on despite this delay, and Henry was glad that he hadn’t cost them the whole day’s travel. Abby was in need of help and he didn’t intend to be the cause of her death. Pereneaux remained silent through the remainder of that day’s travel, apparently meditating. Over Henry’s curiosity or Abigail’s injury? Or was it something else? Henry didn’t know and didn’t interrupt long enough to ask.

  Looking at the women in his party, he was ill at ease. The tired and abused expressions hadn’t left their faces. They, in fact, seemed to have grown more hopeless. Watching them, he realized why. Abby was a savior to their people, she meant more than anything to them, a physical representation of their strength. Seeing her in this weakened state left them all weakened. Their future became less certain, and the harsh realities of this place became stark in that light, most terribly so for the women who had been reduced by that enemy. He was surprised to find that he shared their anger and helplessness; perhaps she had come to mean something to him as well. Pereneaux certainly seemed to think so.

  She’d kept them safe, his wife and he, for a long time, through all that had happened, and none of it had gained her anything. She’d endured his arrogance as well, he owed her something more than a simple thanks and moving on to his own world. He knew much of what he felt had come from that feeling, that need to repay his debt, but there were other reasons lurking under that gratitude.