The detonation is deafening, a chorus of destruction that rises and rises in a roaring crescendo. The cavern’s walls collapse in a shower of alloy and crumbling dirt. I leap over circuits, sprint past power blocks, in a vain effort to escape the blast. Debris falls around me as I weave through dead datastores. A thick chunk of metal topples over and crashes into my side, sending me spinning into a reinforced power station.
Wreckage continues to fall in the background. I can hear thuds, massive collisions that shake what’s left of the cavern. Dust is everywhere, a choking, blinding cloud.
The kill switch is there. I can feel it. Just a thought and this all goes away.
And I am so tired. I shouldn’t be. It’s not like I have muscles that fatigue. But it’s there all the same, riding along the kill switch, tempting me. Maybe it’s the Purge. I don’t know if it got in, if it found a way into my datastore, or if one of my split-streams brought the infection back with it.
I slowly get to my feet. My leg is worse now, the infrastructure damaged by the collision, and it takes me several minutes to make it back to the side chamber. My tac map isn’t cooperating, and I can’t tell what happened after the fusion generator blew. I give up trying.
One side of the chamber caved in, rock crashing through to obliterate one side of the room. The datastore is still here, somehow in one piece.
My finger digs into its outer shell. The scratch mark is added to the others, now fifty-five strong. I lean back and fall against the block of alloy and wait.
I wonder what will happen when I die this time.
* * *
Wilson Geiger
Wilson Geiger has been gripped by fantastical worlds not quite our own ever since stumbling upon his father’s copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. He’s written fantasy and science-fiction ever since, and has several published stories. Wilson resides in Missouri with his wife, two boys, and a possessive cat. You can find out more about Wilson at wilsongeiger.com.
WALKED ABOUT
Jez Patterson
The mist floated about them like cheap detergent that was never going to fully dissolve, and the moors reduced to the patch they were standing on, nothing more.
The stage was set.
“You’ve walked us back to the same sodding place! Jesus, May! Give me the map.”
“There’s no need to snatch. You almost gave me a papercut.” Mayura shot Stephen a look that should have burned. The look he gave back said he didn’t care. Asshole. “You think you can do any better—go ahead.”
Whilst Stephen turned the map round like an unresponsive steering wheel, Mayura shucked off her rucksack and let it thud to the ground. She tried to remember the reasons why she’d ever agreed to this holiday and realised it was like every other decision in their relationship these days: she went along with the flow because resisting the currents was simply too much effort. Ditto finding someone she was more compatible with, more excited by, didn’t think was an irritating, bloated waste of space.
Stephen swore at his lighter, shook it to get some sense out of it, and then sucked on the cigarette like he’d just come up from forty fathoms. Mayura stepped away from him, nearer to the pile of stones they had now come back to three times.
The Yorkshire Moors were supposed to be beautiful, but like most of Mother Nature’s views, She photoed kindly at a distance—especially on those occasions when the sun was playing Photoshop. Real life, and up close, She was not so attractive. Up on the moors, the ground was sodden and the air so heavy it hung and it clung, until Mayura’s hair frizzled and her clothing strangled her.
Mayura squinted, a headache building from the strain of trying to see through the mist.
She was tired, aching, and with every step her new boots rubbed more and her rucksack sprouted an increasingly deformed skeleton whose bony hands sought out her ribs, spine, hips, and then ground its knuckles in.
“I’m having a coffee,” Stephen said, not offering her one as he fished out the thermos and poured a cup. More games. Day Three and Mayura was sick of the moors, sick of youth hostels, sick of dried food, sick—most of all—of Stephen. In fact, all four items in her sick-list matched their innate quality to her and Stephen’s relationship: cold, uncomfortable, tasteless, and loveless, respectively.
Today, all of them were crystallising into a gargantuan monument that read: Stephen and Mayura, In Memoriam.
The first time they’d passed the cairn, Mayura had done what every walker did and picked up one of the pale, fist-sized rocks lying about the place and tossed it onto the large mound of its compatriots. They’d come across other improvised way-markers like it on the moors, but this one was by far the largest. The cairn stood as high as her chest—although she wasn’t going to be one of those that scrambled up the heap to try and build it higher.
The second time they’d come to it, they realised they’d circled round in the mist and arrived back at the same spot. Stephen threw a mini-tantrum where a healthy couple, Mayura told herself, would have laughed and teased each other about the mistake. She’d put on another rock, as an apology to the pile.
This time, she flicked a smaller rock with her boot—one that might have simply rolled off the existing collection. The stones clinked as they touched, like broken pieces of china.
And here they were.
The mist allowed them no view of the surrounding moorland. They weren’t experienced enough walkers to have brought a compass. The map didn’t show anything useful. There was no trig point about to indicate where they might be. And their phones only managed a single bar that wasn’t enough to get a GPS position.
While Stephen was huffing and puffing himself into a state over it, Mayura felt strangely calm about their predicament. As if the already drab deterioration of their relationship had ordained this latest damp, soulless disappointment.
“You’ve led us into a right fucking mess,” Stephen told her. “Why didn’t you pay attention to where you were going?”
He threw down his cigarette butt, lit another. He was already wheezing when they went up hills. Mayura didn’t bother reminding him the holiday had been his idea. At his friend, Bob’s, suggestion in fact—Stephen’s poked ego inflating to the challenge under the delusion he still possessed the body he’d had when he and Bob had been at law school together. Blind to the fact that his arse and belly now strained the elasticity of his waterproofs and the musk rising off him definitely wasn’t pheromones. His tirade wasn’t over.
“Why don’t you ever pay a damned bit of attention, eh? Why do I have to do everything? The same way I carry this relationship. We’re lost. Totally and utterly lost.”
The last, Mayura agreed, could have been another reference to their relationship. She wasn’t in the mood to mourn, or even get angry. Some time ago, they’d stopped the habit of make-up sex after a row—as even that last hurrah of passion had fizzled out.
She looked at the pile of rocks and kicked her rucksack.
“I’m going for a walk.”
“We’re on a bloody walk!”
“Well, I’m going for a walk by myself.” She strode away as Stephen slapped the map against his forehead, coughing out more dramatic, exasperated noises. “Look, Stephen, I’ll see if I can find a sign. Maybe there’s another path or someone else walking up here.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Keep your phone switched on. I’ll call if I find something.”
“You’ll probably get even more lost in this mist. I’ll need to call out the moor rescue services or something.” He was probably right—but she noticed he didn’t come after her.
Mayura walked ten, fifteen metres, before looking back. The mist had layered itself as thick as milk to make Stephen and the cairn disappear. She took a sharp right and decided the best tactic would be to walk in a circle, fixing where she thought the stones were as its centre, and hope she’d cross over some other path.
She had no idea what you were supposed to do in these situations: whether there was some trick or clue to
look for, or even something specific you were supposed to shout out so that other, more experienced, walkers might hear you and guide you out. At least it was a relief to be without the heavy baggage she’d been dragging around with her the last few days. And the rucksack. Hah!
She shook her head, determined to stop tying every negative remark back to Stephen. Not because he didn’t deserve it, but because it was getting boring and repetitive. Just get off the moors, back to London, and begin the Big Division—where announcements could be followed up with immediate action.
Not that Stephen would make things easy. Came of living with a solicitor. He’d drag it out and then screw her over the sale of the flat and furniture. Mayura knew this because he’d done something similar to her predecessor. She sighed, stamped her feet, walked faster.
The tricky thing with the moors was that between the tufts of heather and the mounds and the holes, it wasn’t always clear whether you were just walking on a clear piece of ground or following an actual path. On occasion, you came across deeper pits—dug and reinforced with wooden slats—for shooters to rest their arses and rifles. This was pheasant country, but a day like today wasn’t going to bring out the hunters. Hardly.
Mayura shook her limbs until they loosened and then rocked her head to try and encourage her neck to follow suit. Before going back to London, she was going to book herself into a spa. Alone. Make decisions with a clear head and a cold heart about how she could prevent Stephen from running her life and then ruining it.
Long, long overdue.
And…
“Shit.”
She had nearly walked into it. Not because the mist was so thick as to obscure it on this occasion, but because her head had been down as she thought about big things and landmark decisions.
Landmarks, indeed. It was another cairn. Higher even than the one she’d just left.
She saw colour beside it—bright blue with a purple stripe, like her rucksack. Other hikers. Thank God. She walked round the stones.
Like her rucksack? It was her rucksack.
She’d wandered off from her imaginary circle and come back here again. Only, there was her rucksack but Stephen—the bastard—had wandered off. She shouted his name, letting it ring, letting it rasp, but the moors took it, shredded it like wet tissue, and then waited to see what she would do next.
Mayura stamped her foot and caught a shard of stone with her heel. It stung—sudden and hot—and she bit back the frustration that suddenly welled to the surface.
Stephen had the map. He had the food too as she was carrying far too many clothes— according to him—for their week of sweating and discomfort. Finding that anger was preferable to upset, she pulled out her phone and jabbed out his number. Any semblance of calm had sizzled out and she was ready to let the vitriol spit and hiss over the saucepan.
Mayura held her phone away from her ear to listen for his to ring somewhere out in the mist, where he was either hiding or taking a leak or had wandered off to freak her out when she came back.
It didn’t have time to ring before he answered.
“Hello? Have you found a path?”
“What do you mean ‘have I found a path’?” She looked at the ground and saw where he’d smoked a third cigarette before deciding to piss off without her. “I’m back at the fucking cairn. Where the hell are you?”
There was a moment’s silence before he spluttered back through his own rage.
“Are you taking the piss? I’m standing where you left me.”
“Yeah? Then why am I here with my rucksack and your cigarette butts?”
“Are you mad? I’m standing right next to your stuff. Is this some kind of bloody game? Cos if it is, it’s in shitty taste. Getting lost on the moors is no laughing matter, May. We don’t get off here before nightfall and we could be in serious trouble.”
Mayura tuned out his patronising tirade. She’d seen something else, and crouched down to get a better look. Blood. She didn’t bother pretending it was something else because it was the right shade of red, had that fresh, poster-paint quality about it and, anyway, you knew the difference between blood and ketchup when you saw it in real life.
She twisted round towards the stones and saw there was more.
And the reason why the cairn was higher now.
“Stephen?” she said, but not to the voice on the phone. No. This time she said it to the unblinking eye she could see peering at her from inside the stones.
“What is it now?” his voice snapped through the phone and the mist, the exhaustion, the unreality of the situation, made her head swim, made everything skew as Mayura tried to wrestle it into making sense.
There was a dead body inside the cairn. One whose eye she recognised because she’d lived with its owner for the past four years of her life and had just been contemplating the quickest way to extricate herself from the obligation of waking up next to it again.
“Just get back here. Jesus.” Stephen cut the connection and Mayura shook her head in denial at what she was seeing. Blood had crusted thickly along the eyebrow, the body no doubt leaking more inside its coat of rubble. She pictured Stephen’s body in there: broken and bruised, as if from some Biblical punishment.
It wasn’t possible. It was some elaborate joke. But, like seeing blood and knowing what was real, what fake, she knew what she was seeing now. Stephen was dead. Hidden inside the stones.
She whipped around. She’d heard nothing but didn’t trust her senses to keep her safe. After all, it was those same senses that had led her back to this spot four times now. Always back to the cairn.
There was nothing up here with her. Just a faint wind that neither spoke nor pushed nor brought any other aroma than damp cold in its breath.
Mayura swallowed awkwardly and a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold caused her body to ripple: starting in her shoulders, running electrically out to her fingers. She closed them into fists, hugged herself and rocked back and forth on her haunches.
“I want to go home,” she said, and found it entirely natural to address this to the cairn. “I want to be free. Let me go.”
No reply, no movement, but she realised the answer was already carefully arranged before her. The pile demanded more offerings than simple rocks, or things would be just as Stephen had predicted: they would be stuck up here, in the mist, forever. Not because they were lost—but because something was waiting for the price of freedom to be paid.
“Oh. I see.” The stones were waiting.
No one would ever find her and Stephen, even if they came looking. That wasn’t how it worked up here. There was only one way out. Memories of all the bad times, all the fights, the insults, and how bad it would be if they had made it back down together, flooded her mind, washing through her with the same cold, certain draught of the moor winds.
Mayura nodded at the pile and staggered away, back into the mist, onto paths that couldn’t be read or even seen but which were laid out to lead those that came up here on misty days to one spot in particular.
After another fifteen minutes, Mayura saw a figure ahead, caught the glow of a cigarette and the sharp tang of smoke. He had his back to her, but the hunch of his shoulders showed Stephen was fit to rage again. Her feet faltered and she crouched down and picked up a rock. One already conveniently honed to a jagged, sharpened point.
She saw Stephen held a rock of his own. He was knocking it against his thigh impatiently. The cairn had shown him the way out too.
Gripping her rock more tightly, Mayura crept softly towards him.
* * *
Jez Patterson
Jez Patterson is a British teacher and writer, currently based in the UK and Spain. Links to other things with his name at the end can be found at jezpatterson.wordpress.com.
MAPPING OUT THE FUTURE
Kate Coe
Things That I Have Learned Today, Number Twelve: Teenage squeaks of pain are high-pitched, and come through plasterboard walls easily.
I’m in a
high street tattooist’s shop, and it doesn’t look like the most well-built of places. I don’t like modern buildings anyway because the walls don’t talk to me and there aren’t any ghosts. Call me picky, but I like my locations to have a degree of age; it makes them more lived-in. This place looks about five years old. It’s a baby, in building terms.
While we’re on the subject, ‘Things I Have Learned Today, Number Eleven’ was “It takes a lot to phase a tattoo artist.” Particularly one as good as Taylor.
She’s very well-known in a very select circle. And it’s because she’s well-known—and extremely good at her job—that I’m lying naked on the table. I’ve been here for four hours, and I’m seriously hoping that we’re near the end of the whole damn process. I was hoping for a nap, but the pain’s just agonising enough to keep me awake. Full body tattoos aren’t quick or painless, even when you’re magical enough to get your skin to heal almost as soon as the ink’s put in. And this tattoo is composed of a line along every limb from fingertip to forehead, nose to toe, all drawing in across my stomach and back to my heart.
But Taylor really is good. She hasn’t even asked what the payment is for this, bar a few quick words to the person who escorted me here. She already knows what it’s meant to do, and what I asked for.
Which is why I’m lying on Taylor’s table, butt-naked and wondering when the pain’s going to stop. I feel like every inch of my body is aflame.
“Is there anywhere that doesn’t hurt?” Taylor is asking from somewhere far away.
Doesn’t hurt? I have to think about that. “My hair.”
“That’s fine. Anywhere else?”
“Left foot.”
I feel a brief pressure on my left toe. “Hmm. All right.”
Silence for a bit. The pain’s still there, but I’m starting to get used to it.
And then my left foot starts to hurt too.
Seriously?
*
This entire episode really started when I got a note from a certain Molly Parsons. I knew her by reputation—could be a model for the M&S catalogue as long as their criteria is “owns most of their clothing already”, do-good charity supporter, definitely-not-wicked sorceress, and soccer mom who drives a minivan and supports her kids with all the ferocity of a maternal dragon who’s just had her clutch threatened. That sort of reputation.
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