“Sure,” he said.
“You have to promise not to laugh though,” the yellow man said. “The second you laugh, I’m gonna shove this knife into your soft teddy-bear tum-tum and pull out all your stuffing.”
“I’ll do my best,” Filson said calmly.
“It’s my name,” the yellow man said. “My pap knew all about name-magic from papaw. There was this ballad, you see—in the time before the ships came—about a man that had a name that made him invincible. Pap sang it to me once—he had a terrible voice, but he knew his name-magic.
‘A boy named Susan
A boy named Susan
Ain’t never losin’
With a name like Susan!’
“That’s how the song went. I’m not gonna sing the rest to ya’, though, on account of the pack’s hungry and waiting. We didn’t exactly want to burn the building down, hence not soaking you in gasoline or lighting you up with the bottles. Gasoline’d mess with the taste anyway.”
“Wait...what?” Filson said. “Are you saying—”
“That’s right,” the yellow man said. “My name’s Susan.”
He stared into Filson’s eyes as he clenched the knife, hoping for a snicker. He didn’t want this execution to be anticlimactic. It was better with a final provocation.
“Well that’s a lovely name, Susan,” Filson said finally. “I’m going to share a secret with you too.”
“What’s that?” Susan asked.
“The reason alcohol feels so cool on your skin—” Filson said. “It evaporates quickly, and that breeze just carried away most of the vapor.”
Filson pulled the broad trigger on the flamethrower, engaging the pilot light and the valve control in one smooth motion.
Susan’s legs ignited as he jumped back, howling in pain and horror. He flailed, trying to put out the fire with his jaundiced hands even as the air filled with the crackle of fire and the smell of roasting Susan.
Filson opened up on the others as they darted for cover. A cadaverous woman leapt at Filson’s back, and Thursday swung with the Slugger, catching her in the midsection.
A withered youth darted out, table leg held high, and Thursday connected the sweet spot perfectly with his head.
As though in slow motion—for he would remember it that way later—he watched two things happen. The first was that the Slugger smashed the joint at the left temple of the youth’s skull. The side of the kid’s jaw detached at the same time his left orbital socket crushed inward. The kid fell in a heap on the roof, eyes rolling and extremities twitching with shock as dark blood oozed out of his left ear.
The second thing that happened—which Thursday realized even as he swung the bat— was that he couldn’t see the branded Louisville Slugger logo. He’d swung with it facing the youth. At the same time the kid’s skull caved in, the bat shattered at the grip, sending fragments of “Cornelius,” “best best man,” and “Oliver,” flying into the air.
The proof of his connection—gone in an instant.
Filson sprayed flaming napalm at the kids, who’d come out of hiding with more alcohol bombs. The latex exploded in their hands and the kids screamed, falling from the edge of the roof in flaming agony. Thursday didn’t see Molly among them, though, and wondered for a split-second where the crafty waif had disappeared to.
Thursday still held the grip of the shattered bat, which now had a thick, jagged point where it had broken. He shoved this under the sternum of another attacker, and pulled it free as the cadaverous man fell to the rooftop, wheezing from the wide gash in his lung.
“Gahhh!” Filson yelled. Thursday turned, and saw Molly pulling Susan’s knife down the inside of Filson’s thigh from behind. Thursday grabbed her by the neck and the leg, picked her up over his head, and hurled her off the roof to join her friends. Her scream echoed against the walls until Thursday heard a distant but satisfying thud.
“The artery!” Filson said as bright blood sprayed into the air. “She got the femoral—”
He held both hands against his leg, but blood spurted into the air between his fingers, spraying a trail across the roof where it landed.
Thursday tried to hold the blood in too, but it sprayed into his mouth and down his shirt. As he moved his face away, he looked up and saw Filson’s pale, clammy skin. Thursday used Susan’s knife to cut a long strip of cloth from the kid he’d stabbed with the bat grip. He wrapped this around Filson’s upper thigh, and tied it tight.
“It’ll cut off the blood flow,” Thursday said, “It’s called a tourniquet.”
“I know what a—” Filson murmured. His lips kept moving, but no sound came out. His eyelids were drooping.
“They’re on the roof!” a distant voice yelled.
Thursday heard footsteps from the street—lots of footsteps.
“Just go, Thursday,” Filson whispered. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m too tired to...”
Thursday dragged a body to the door, then another. He jammed one of the long table legs under the knob and against the rooftop, but he knew it wouldn’t hold anyone for long. He dragged another body, and another, but he knew he was only lying to himself. They were on the way up, and the bodies at the door wouldn’t even slow them down.
“Thursday,” Filson whispered. “I love...”
“Filson?” Thursday said. He stopped the charade and went to his brother.
“Love you,” Filson whispered. “So don’t die.”
He shook for a moment, and Thursday heard a deep rattle in his brother’s throat.
Thursday felt for a pulse as the pounding started at the door.
Nothing.
Thursday threw his pack off the roof, then his crossbow. He shoved the bat-shard through his belt, then looked down for anything that might save him—a pool, a sand pit—
A lone spruce tree stood below him, thin and flimsy.
The door burst open behind him, and Thursday leapt into the air. He grabbed near the top of the spruce as it bent—too far over—threatening to snap in half. Thursday tried to slide down into the needles even as they cut into his arms and face, but his momentum carried the trunk over and it cracked halfway, carrying Thursday forward much faster than he wanted to go. He hit the ground hard and rolled, dazed, onto the grass. He remembered the dragon from his dream, and for a moment, the memory of the dreaming world became his reality and Filson’s death a fuzzy memory.
He looked back to see faces appearing over the ledge he’d jumped from.
Fingers pointed in his direction.
Voices yelled to put his head on a spike and roast his flesh.
“You have a concussion,” Thursday whispered to himself. Realizing this made him feel as though he was in control for a moment—that he really understood what was going on.
The dragon became impossibly huge, fanning its great wings around him, inhaling to breathe napalm down on him.
“You have to run,” Thursday whispered. “Run or die.”
His right wrist felt strange, but he wasn’t sure why. He remembered using it to try to break his fall from the tree, just before his head hit the ground.
“Run, Thursday,” he said.
He found his crossbow, and raised it to fire at the first face that came through the door. He missed the face, but sent a bolt through a shoulder. Why wouldn’t his stupid wrist hold the foregrip steady?
The legs were coming at him too fast. He threw down the crossbow and ran, while some distant part of his subconscious thanked God that it was his wrist and not his ankle that had broken.
The dragon faded from his mind as adrenaline flooded back into his bloodstream to try to save him. He became aware of the sweat stinging his eyes and tried to wipe it away with sweatier hands.
He ran, not knowing which direction he was going—toward or away from the Seelbach clan—but as long as it was away from the legs, knives, and teeth behind him, he might live for another minute.
How long would adrenaline carry him? How far would his legs go before all the
glycogen was gone, and the thighs that held it roasted while he screamed for the release of death?
Thursday’s legs pounded, feeling heavier and heavier, but he could still hear them back there, pounding en masse behind him.
The buildings around him changed as he passed north into Old Louisville. The houses grew tall, old, and menacing. Thursday dared to glance back and found that he had a bit more distance on his pursuers than he thought. He darted between two of the Victorian homes, not knowing that Louisville held America’s largest Victorian neighborhood.
If he could just get somewhere safe—but what was safe? He had no weapons, no allies, and no energy. Even if he broke the glass and climbed into one of the 1,400 centuries-old homes, the packs would find him. They wanted blood, and they would have it.
They’d burn the houses down around him just to make sure that he was dead.
Thursday came out on the front side of the houses, and noticed a strange tree—knotted, warped, and grotesque in the most unnatural ways. Gaudy decorations hung from it, and a wooden sign that had survived the invasion dubbed it “The Witches’ Tree.”
Beyond it lay a park—an open space—and one in which he’d be too easily spotted. It had been a park anyway. Now the bones of the dead lay on top of each other, intermingled and locked timelessly in mortal combat. They’d been picked clean by ravens, buzzards, and maggots. A battle had happened here, decades before, in close quarters—after the bullets had all been fired through rifled steel tubes. Wooden clubs and hatchets lay next to femurs and tibias. One ribcage lay pinned to the ground through the tines of a pitchfork.
The sun had nearly set, and the sky was darkening. Thursday prayed for the shroud of darkness to cover him quickly so that he could escape.
He heard shouts from the alley behind him.
“I see him,” one yelled. “Go around! Catch that gangly runt before the Wendygo monster comes out.”
Thursday also did not know that Old Louisville had always possessed a reputation for hauntings and demonic activity.
He did know that getting surrounded in the open terrain of the park would mean certain death, so he darted across the street past a low brick wall.
Another pack whooped as they caught a glimpse of him, and he found his path cut off again.
Certain death soon was better than certain death now, Thursday reasoned, so he turned to the field of bones and ran as fast as he could.
“She’s near!” a voice yelled behind him. “Eyes peeled—this is where the others met it!”
“She don’t show till the thunder,” another yelled. “Stay on him. She prolly sleeps till midnight, and we got bellies to fill.”
Cornelius hadn’t told him about any monsters, but this part of the city did seem strangely well-preserved and oddly designed. He remembered the Witches Tree he’d just passed, and noted the monumental body count as he ran through the park, kicking jaws and metatarsals even as he tried to jump over the tangled skeletons.
Thursday ran toward the largest house—immense, gray, and menacing—like a castle built for a mad scientist in the middle of a city. A lone window on the third floor was propped open, and Thursday thought he saw a shape moving inside.
Thunder clapped, echoing through the homes, ringing against the upturned chunks of ruined pavement.
Behind him, one of the feral packers screamed in pain. Thursday didn’t dare to look back—he kept running, knowing he was on the verge of total collapse, feeling his mind go numb with exhaustion even as he hoped, dimly, that some thunderous monster would at least avenge him before eating him too.
Thunder clapped again, and another packer screamed.
Again.
Echoes. Screams.
Thunder—but not a cloud in the twilit sky.
The pile of bones grew higher as Thursday neared the castle. He tried to jump over them, but he found that for the first time in his life, his body wouldn’t do what it was supposed to. His left leg cramped as he tried to push off against the ground, and he tumbled into the bones. A skull met his skull, metacarpals met his hands, and he flopped onto the grass with pelvises and phalanges flowing down onto his back.
He squirmed through the bones, only now realizing how sticky with blood and sweat his clothes had become. His elbows cramped, and he found his body trying to force itself into a comfortable fetal position.
Just let me die here, his flesh whispered to his brain. The glycogen had run out. His fear had left him for a calm acceptance of the slow roast that would make his body into a feast. Even the adrenaline meant to save him from himself had run out.
Love you, Filson whispered, so don’t die.
Thursday pushed with his right hand at the end of a broken wrist, and tried to lift himself from the bones. Some of them tumbled under his face, and he found his eyes looking up into—fur?
He rolled, and under the darkening sky, he saw the monster—claws of blackened steel hung from bloodstained brown paws. Cold, lifeless eyes stared at something beyond the pile of bones.
Thursday turned more, sat up slowly, and found the pack with their knives and clubs fanned out in an arc around the monster.
It made no sound now. The thunder was gone. It only stared at them, daring them to approach and join the bone pile.
Yet they didn’t retreat.
The thing stared, then shot both its clawed paws into the air, reaching heavenward for vengeance and despair.
The ground opened up beneath the packers closest to Thursday, and they fell with the bones into an abyss. They screamed, and Thursday heard wet noises as spikes ran through their withered bodies. Echoed cries came from the abyss as they died, slowly, unable to pull themselves from the spikes that impaled them.
The others—the less brave ones who’d stood at the back when they’d seen the Wendygo appear—listened to the screams, and ran.
Thursday watched them for a moment before collapsing again into the bones that had slid under him.
He looked up at the monster’s head. The brown, furry snout turned down toward him, and the lifeless black eyes met his.
Please let this just be over.
The thing cocked its head, and Thursday heard the last thing he’d expected to hear: laughter.
The thing chuckled with all-too-human mirth before speaking, and when it spoke, its jaws didn’t move.
“Hello Rabbit,” it said. “Welcome to Conrad’s Folly.”
~~~
“So it’s just you, your mom, and your grandmother living in this house?” Thursday asked. “Where are all the men?”
“You can read,” Wendy said. “Have you ever read about Praying Mantises?”
A day and a night had passed. Thursday had awakened to find himself stripped and bathed under linen sheets, with a splint on his right wrist.
“I know they eat other bugs,” he said, not sure what she was getting at.
“After they mate,” Wendy said, “the female often eats the male. It makes the best use of him, really.”
“Are you saying—”
“Gran traded with the Seelbach King to get a mate for Mum. The poor boy probably thought he’d made a good deal, moving into our little farm with all we’ve made of it. Gran made sure Mum was actually pregnant with me before getting the second use out of his body, of course. Gran says men ain’t good for much else.”
“What if you’d been a boy?” Thursday asked. “Would they have—”
“Oh no,” Wendy said. “We’d give a boy back. That’s part of the deal too. The Seelbach King doesn’t educate his clan. He keeps them benighted and makes sure little schools don’t sprout up from nowhere. In the off-chance—God forbid—one of us did make a boy, Seelbach’d get an educated asset, without the risk of wide-spread literacy.”
Now that she’d removed the headpiece of her disguise, Thursday saw that she couldn’t be much older than fourteen or fifteen.
“People are made out of people stuff, after all,” Wendy said. “Best way to make sure a baby’s healthy is to fee
d her people material, right?”
The thought of these three women eating any men they mated with made him shift nervously on the bed, but Wendy expressed it as the most logical extension of humanity.
“Why do you wear that suit?” Thursday asked. “What even is it?”
“The Skubadu suit?” Wendy asked, a wild light dancing in her eyes. She held her paws up and flicked the steel claws against each other. “Gran made this. She said they had bears at the zoo before the invasion. Bears are omnivores, after all, and resourceful—probably killed off the rest of the zoo animals before heading this way. She said she found one sniffing around the door just after she’d come here from the bunker. She said she couldn’t have a bear waiting to eat her with all the packers about too, so she made a Skubadu suit out of him to help scare the packers.”
“A Skubadu suit?”
Wendy smiled.
“Skubadu was a great detective before the ships came,” she said. “He solved problems and fought supernatural monsters—but every monster he fought just turned out to be a person in a mask. Gran figured the packers were uneducated and superstitious, so she’d give them something to be superstitious about.”
“But why do—”
Wendy put a paw to his forehead and stroked his hair. Thursday forgot what he was going to say for a moment. He felt a single steel claw trace a line from his temple around the top of his head, and it made the back of his neck tingle with a strange delight.
“Mum said I’m not to let you over-exert yourself, and you’re getting excited,” she said. “One more question, and then I have to go help carve and salt the packers you brought.”
One more question, when a thousand could be asked.
“Your name is Wendy,” Thursday said. “Why did the packers call you Wendygo?”
Wendy smiled again, and Thursday found it odd that she didn’t sweat in the early autumn heat.
“When Mum told me I was old enough for the suit, and Gran was getting too old to shoot the Remington, a bunch of packers came sniffing around Central Park. Mum told me dinner was waiting, so I went to pull the ropes on the punji pits under the bone pile. Gran put the bones from her swarm-massacre there to hide the pits. We never seem to run out of bones even when some fall in, since packers keep showing up. Anyway, I went out to pull the ropes after Mum had shot a few of them with the ‘700, and I couldn’t help myself. Gran read me a story about a Wendigo monster once—a monster that ate people—and so I screamed it when I pulled the ropes up with my paws and the supports dropped out. ‘Wendygo!’ I screamed, with my fabulous murder-paws in the air—and the packers fell in. The rest of them ran of course, but Mum said I couldn’t ever use my voice around them again, or they’d start figuring out that the Skubadu suit was just a little girl in bear fur. She said I needed to ‘temper my ecstasy’ or some such thing.”
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist's Guide to Louisville: a novella Page 4