by Jay, Jess
With a grunt, she used all her strength to pull her pack free, causing the already broken shelf to fall over and crash to the ground behind her. She didn’t wait to see if it blocked the shrieker’s path or slowed it down, using every bit of energy to rush toward the exit.
Sunlight hit her face, washing her in its warmth. A bony hand grabbed her arm, its grip tight, vines pulsing under its skin. Thea strained and pulled, trying to get away, but only succeeding in drawing the creature further out of the building. She could see its face, recently turned, keeping a small semblance of humanity. Its body was juicy, but its eyes were gone and the dark depths peered into her. She remembered her uncle, remembered the noise he made and fought the scream building inside her. With one last jerk, she wrenched herself free, stumbling backwards, dropping the flashlight, almost dropping her gun.
That’s right, she had a gun. With a shaky hand, she aimed the pistol at the creature, but hesitated before pulling the trigger. It was moving strangely, lethargically. One step, then another, each one more sluggish than the last. Its hand reached out as she backed away, keeping her distance, but there was no passion in either action.
The creature stopped, body frozen in place, it’s face tilting to look up at the sun, vines snaking out from its eyes and mouth, leaves opening to receive the sun’s blessing.
Thea let out her breath all at once, almost falling over as tension left her. Her body shaking, she tried to calm her mind, tried to order her thoughts, but all she could think was how stupid she was. There was no reason to think she could handle things on her own. One encounter with a shrieker and she was a mess, not even able to defend herself.
No, she stopped herself from marshalling that pity parade. She got out of the store. She made it. If she had shot the creature, it would have been too mad to go into a sun trance. Or so she told herself in order to feel better. She did the right thing.
Breaths deep and slow, she got a hold of herself, checking to make sure the shrieker was truly out of commission. It was new, probably not even a week old, dressed in some kind of bright purple jumper. On its shoulder was the name “Louis” embroidered into the fabric, though that didn’t mean it was his name. Her jumper read “Henry”, and her name was definitely not Henry. Still, she decided Louis was as good a name as any and wondered where Louis had come from. Up until a week ago, he had been a person. Did that mean there were others, or was he the last?
It didn’t matter.
No, it mattered, but she didn’t have time to think about it. She had to get to the Library. Part of her wanted to go home, to come back another day. After what she had been through, it would be excusable, but she knew if she waited she might not have the will to do it later. Picking up her flashlight, she walked back toward her bike.
Keep going.
Chapter Five
It was difficult to see the Library through the army of vegetation that surrounded it. The building was large with a wall of broken windows allowing plants of all kinds to reach inside its walls. Trees grew closer and closer to the building, cracking the blacktop as their roots stabbed into the pavement and their branches penetrated the sky. Grass and flowers from what used to be a small garden spread over everything without humans to keep them in place. Left unchecked, nature would eat the Library within the next decade, all the knowledge inside lost.
Thea suppressed a shiver of fear and revulsion as she used the barrel of her gun to push aside the vines dangling over one of the broken windows and stepped inside. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the large interior, she noted how much had changed—and how much hadn’t. Shelves full of books chosen to be preserved lined the walls and filled the rooms, most standing but some fallen over or decayed with time. The tree that made its home in one of the reading sections had disrupted even more of the ceiling, breaking through the roof, pieces of cement and roofing tiles scattered across the floor. Sunlight spilled through every crack the tree made and flowers of various colors grew in the pools of light. The effect would have been beautiful if their invasion of the building hadn’t been so unnerving.
With her flashlight she checked every corner and made her way through the Library, straining her ears for any sound. She had to work to keep her mind clear, to keep her feet and hands steady, the memories of what had just happened threatening to overwhelm her. She forced herself to concentrate on where she was going: the non-fiction section on the other side of the building.
Halfway through the main room she stopped before she could trip the lights. Somehow, the solar panels on the roof in the center section were clean enough to power generators. The moment she moved forward the lights would turn on, but that wouldn’t be the problem—the noise the generators made would.
Not allowing herself to falter, she grabbed a book from one of the shelves. It was a trashy romance novel with a tan man in a business suit holding a scantily clad woman in an intimate embrace. Its pages and cover were glossed with a preservative that kept the book from becoming scrap. Thea wondered how it had been chosen as something worthy of preservation.
As she examined the cover longer than she should have, she was drawn to the man’s handsome face and the way he held the woman. Without dwelling on the meaning of her actions, she placed the book in her belt and grabbed another—one with a man in a skirt and a peasant woman sprawled across the cover—and tossed it a few feet in front of her.
Light flared into existence, but she was ready, squinting her eyes and holding her gun as steady as she could.
A rasping gasp came from about thirty feet in front of her and she froze.
You have got to be kidding me, Thea thought to herself, heart thumping in her chest, body tense. Her eyes strained to see into the darkness past the circle of light and prayed the sound was her imagination. That her last encounter put her on edge, causing her to think something completely normal and natural was something from the deepest depths of hell. She wasn’t going to wait to find out.
If there was a creature, it didn’t know where she was. It knew where the book she threw was, and if she stayed quiet she could escape without any issues. She could get back to the windows, back to her bike and get away. Since the Library was practically in the middle of its own forest, it would be harder to reach sunlight, but if she could, then…
What if the other shrieker freezing was a fluke? What if only new shriekers chose the sun over meat and the one in front of her was old like the witch on the road?
Then she’d get on her damn bike and pedal for her life. That was the plan before. It was still a good one. No matter how fast one of them could be, Thea was fueled by the desire to not die. She had this. She could do this. She survived before and she could do it again.
As she turned to move toward the windows, she heard another sound—a word, a whisper: “Wait.”
Thea swallowed and tightened her grip on her gun. It couldn’t be a word. It just couldn’t.
She turned to where the sound came from and tried to see into the shadows beyond the patch of artificial light. Her flashlight beam fell on the source of the noise: it was a person, though it wouldn’t be for much longer, sitting in the darkness across from her. Vines pulsed beneath its skin, eating away at what was left of who it had been. On its lap was a face mask with a large crack down the front. Its hand clutched what looked like a thick and glossy piece of paper. As Thea got closer, she could see little tendrils of green breaking through its skin.
Bile rose in her throat and she turned away, covering her mouth with her hand. She felt the steel of the flashlight on her cheek as she gagged, forcing the thoughts of Uncle Jeremy out of her head. She should go. It wouldn’t be long before the person was dead. She didn’t want to run from another shrieker if she didn’t have to.
“Wait,” the word came again, more forceful, more real. Thea looked back at the person huddled against a door, its head back and eyes unseeing. Another word tried to work its way out of its mouth as it struggled to lift what it had in its hand. “Please.”
Thea knew she should go back toward the windows, should get on her bike and pedal away, but she didn’t. She walked through the patch of light toward the door of what looked like a meeting room and toward the soon-to-be monster sitting in front of it. Its emaciated face turned to her as she approached, trying to make more words but having trouble with saying anything intelligible. There was the sound of a “b” and a “k,” but Thea assumed it meant to make different sounds. It was unlikely that it was referring to a book, though they were in a library.
As she got closer, Thea determined the person had been a woman. Its hair was long, though most had fallen out, and in its ears and around its neck were simple pieces of jewelry. It wore a bright purple jumpsuit with the name Annabelle embroidered across the shoulder, similar to Louis’s. They must have been traveling together and gotten separated.
She wondered where they came from, what they were doing, and how they got infected. She wondered how Louis turned so much faster than Annabelle. So many questions—too many questions—but she knew she wouldn’t get any answers, so she didn’t ask any of them. They lodged in her throat and she cleared it, not needing any more frustration.
Annabelle heard the sound and lunged forward, her skeletal hand grabbing Thea’s leg tight, the broken face mask falling to the floor. Thea felt the green beneath the woman’s skin slithering even through her pant leg and yanked her leg back, causing the woman to topple forward, bent in half and unable to straighten up again. Something that sounded like a sob or a gasp escaped from the woman’s lungs and once again she tried to raise her hand with the paper in it. She wanted Thea to take it.
It took a moment for Thea to get her body to follow her mental commands, but eventually she was able to lift the item from the woman’s hand. It was a picture of a little girl with her parents. The girl was small, perhaps three or four, with long blonde hair like her mother and blue eyes like her father. She was chubby and well cared for and her parents looked happy. Pristine foliage filled the background, obviously from a time where agriculture was viewed as decoration and not the enemy.
Was the woman in front of her the child? She couldn’t have been the mother. Then Thea saw what the family was wearing. Bright purple jumpsuits with names embroidered on the shoulders.
Louis and Annabelle.
Annabelle’s body convulsed, drawing Thea out of her revelation. The woman was entering the final stages of the change. In seconds she would stop being able to control herself and would be controlled instead. Thea needed to go, but her feet were stuck to the ground. She wanted to know what the woman was trying to tell her, what she was supposed to do with the picture. She wanted to know where the woman had come from and how that place still existed. If it still existed.
Thea knelt in front of the convulsing woman and reached out to steady her. Annabelle gripped her hand, fixing her hollow eye sockets on Thea’s face. Thea felt tendrils of green breaking through the woman’s skin, reaching for her own flesh, and tried to get away, but the woman was using the last of her strength to make sure Thea didn’t leave.
“Take her,” Annabelle said, clearer than ever. Thea stared into the darkness where the woman’s eyes had once been, the light from the ceiling behind her revealing something twisting and convulsing deep within them. The woman shook her head in frustration, forcing out one final word: “Pasture.” Her body then jerked back, her limbs moving as if she was a complicated marionette with an unskilled puppeteer.
Thea acted on instinct, raising her gun and shooting the woman between her eye sockets, dropping her to the floor as if someone had cut her strings. The shot wouldn’t kill her, but the jolt to her system would give Thea enough time to get to her bike.
A faint noise came from the room beyond the shrieker. A whimper.
Annabelle had said to “take her.”
Gun and flashlight ready, Thea nudged the twitching husk of the woman aside. As she opened the door, senses alert, she was greeted with a room, empty aside from the pile of blankets in the corner and a flurry of processed food wrappers. Processed food was the first resource to go when other types of food started eating the people who ate them. It was rare to find any, yet there were at least ten wrappers spread across the floor.
“Hello?” Thea cleared her throat and tried to sound more confident. “Anyone there?”
Silence, then the pile of blankets moved and whimpered. There was someone there—an actual complete person. A very small, complete person.
“I won’t hurt you,” she reassured the pile of blankets, telling herself she wasn’t lying but having her gun ready all the same. She realized she was telling the truth when a little girl of about six or seven peeked out from under the tattered cloth, tears in her large blue eyes.
It was the girl from the photograph. The photograph had been taken recently, within the last few years, but that wasn’t possible—that place couldn’t exist. Not now. Not after everything that happened. Not after thirty years of chaos and destruction.
Thea didn’t know what to believe.
The girl couldn’t be from the Pasture. Her family wouldn’t have left if that was the case, especially not with a child. The Pasture was an ideal, a utopia, a dream… But if Annabelle and her family came from a place that shouldn’t exist, that might mean the Pasture could exist.
Thea felt a lightness in her chest and stared at the girl who sniffled and stared back. The child looked like hope, and that hope cast shadows over everything that had been Thea’s life. True, she had done her best to keep a positive attitude, to get through each day, but hope was something different, something infinitely more powerful. It scared her.
Annabelle’s body thumped against the wall with a violent jerk.
Thea didn’t have time to process her entire world changing. They had to go. It would be more difficult with the child considering they’d have to walk, but the girl was another person—the first fully real person she had met in three years. She wasn’t going to leave that behind, even if they ran out of daylight.
You help people. It’s what you do.
Thea put the gun back in her belt and the picture in her pocket before reaching her hand out to the child. The girl stared at it for a moment, then shrank back, almost retreating under the pile of blankets again, her eyes wide and afraid. Thea wondered if she looked scary and tried to soften her features, making her smile as gentle as she could.
“You have to come with me now.” She resisted the urge to wince as the words left her mouth. She sounded more like a kidnapper than someone trying to save the girl’s life. The girl seemed to agree, shaking her head and clutching the blankets.
The sounds of the thrashing body became more deliberate as the creature gained control of itself. Even if Thea failed at talking, the girl should have wanted to get away from the monster outside, should have some kind of self-preservation wired into her, but then that monster was her mother. The girl didn’t want to leave her mother.
Thea closed her eyes in realization. She wasn’t equipped for this. She didn’t even know how to deal with her own trauma, preferring to banish it to the farthest recesses of her mind. How could she deal with someone else’s?
You help people.
“Your mom told me to take you with me,” Thea said, opening her eyes again. The girl perked up at the mention of her mother. “She told me to take care of you, but if we don’t go soon, bad things are going to happen.”
The girl looked past Thea, through the door and into the darkness, but didn’t shrink back again. Thea wondered if she registered the monster as her mother and hoped she didn’t. She didn’t want the girl’s last memories of Annabelle to be a writhing mass of hunger and rage.
The girl looked at Thea again and decided. She stood, blankets falling to the floor, and wobbled to the older girl, grabbing her hand. Thea picked her up and rushed out of the room, past the shrieker as it yelled in frustration and tried to grab at them. The child’s arms tightened around Thea as she saw the remnants of her mother, but she didn
’t look away.
Thea ran faster than she thought possible, her feet thumping on the ground, her heart thumping in her chest. She reached the windows then her bike, kicking up the kickstand and half dragging it behind her as she rushed through the trees and out into the daylight.
She didn’t stop to see if the sunlight took it, she just kept running until she couldn’t run anymore.
Chapter Six
The girl’s blond hair fell halfway down her back in two long braids. Her jumpsuit was pink, but dirty, and she was wearing a little pack with a stuffed dog peeking out the top. Her sneakers lit up as she walked and she held Thea’s hand tight, as if afraid the older girl would leave. Or perhaps she was afraid the shrieker would catch up to them. Thea told herself over and over that wouldn’t happen. The sun claimed it during their escape and as long as it was light out, the shrieker wouldn’t move. She tried not to remember that the sun was going to set before they got home, or about the witch-like shrieker standing in the middle of the Highway waiting for them.
As they walked, Thea tried to converse with the girl to ease both their nerves, but the child wouldn’t answer even the simplest questions, like what her name was or where she came from. She understood what Thea was saying but refused to speak. Thea couldn’t blame her after what she had been through. She had just lost her parents. Thea knew what that was like. Still, that left the girl a mystery, and the long walk gave Thea time to wonder.
Louis and Annabelle had left where they lived with their child, despite how dangerous the world was. That meant wherever they came from was more dangerous. Thea remembered her uncle and wondered if someone where the girl came from had been as careless as him. If the green infiltrated an area, it was nearly impossible to remove, tainting everything it touched. It was the only reason she could think of dangerous enough to force a family out into the unknown. She knew there were other possibilities, but her limited experience limited her imagination.