The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2014 (Volume 5)

by Kaaron Warren

  Meanwhile the gunship fired another missile, closer this time to inform the creature they meant business. It had the desired effect, forcing the Dark Young to move toward Peel and his group.

  What the gunship didn’t expect was the range of its tentacles, and one whipped out faster than Peel could register. It smashed the Mi-24 with enough force to crumble the cabin.

  The gunship fell like a rock out of the sky. The overhead blades, still spinning, sliced at the offending tentacle, severing it and the monster screamed with many mouths in unison. Peel had never heard a sound so chilling.

  Neither the crew nor the gunship would survive the incineration on impact with the savanna forest. The creature, however, did.

  Peel’s gut went cold; a wall of fire and a monster on one side, a high rise rocky peak on the other. Then the creature trotted toward them. It had nowhere else to go, and the scent of their flesh had caught its attention.

  “Run!” Peel bellowed with all the volume he could muster.

  The group split, scrambled up the rounded granite rocks. The closer they reached the peak, the steeper the track climbed. Peel lost his M4A1 without remembering when, and Ngqobile seemed heavier with each step. He checked his holster, finding the 9mm Glock handgun ready should he need it. He checked for thermite grenades, found three.

  Then Peel had an idea.

  “Run!” he yelled again to the last of the boys he could see, who were ahead of him now. “Get over the rise, head southeast and I’ll come after you.”

  He sat Ngqobile on a rock and caught his breath. His chest hurt with the exhaustion of constant, rapid breathing to oxygenate his complaining muscles, and he wondered again where the hell Ash was right now.

  Peel turned to the small boy. They were alone now. “You should follow your friends.”

  The young boy shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “You’re leg still hurt?”

  He nodded.

  Peel nodded too. “Okay, we’ll go together.”

  The sounds of sizable trees being crushed underfoot grew loud as the monster advanced upon them. It could probably smell them, human flesh. Peel appreciated the fear that grazing antelopes faced upon the African savanna; the horror of knowing that in the end their death would be one of being eaten alive. He didn’t want to go out like that.

  Peel took the three grenades, primed them and threw them one by one in a fan pattern. Each detonation created a wall of flames, deterrent enough—he hoped—to send the creature in a different direction.

  “You ready to go again?”

  Ngqobile nodded. He even managed the slightest of smiles. “Thank you,” he said quietly, “for saving us.”

  Overcome with emotion, Peel didn’t know what to say. So he lifted the boy with both hands now, and strode up the steep path. If they could just get over the hill, he kept telling himself, they would survive this.

  All too soon the flames behind them burned out, and the creature advanced again to hunt them.

  Peel wanted to demand that the boy run, but he couldn’t ask that of him. So he pushed harder, until all the muscles in his legs and back screamed for him to rest, and he ignored them.

  He couldn’t find an easy path that led upward, and soon Peel found he was cornered, in a granite ravine where the walls were too steep and too smooth to climb.

  “Fuck!”

  He was going to die. They were both going to die.

  He put Ngqobile down.

  “Are you okay?” the boy asked.

  “We’ll be fine,” Peel lied. “The monster didn’t see us head this way.”

  Then they saw the tentacles, rising above the forest, no more than fifty meters from them. There was a boulder in its way, several dozen meters wide. The creature rolled it out of the way with a single pseudopod as if it was nothing more than a silk curtain blocking its path.

  Peel’s whole body felt like jelly. Normally he had some kind of plan, even a crazy plan, but right now he had nothing, and only seconds to find one if he were to see this day through to its end.

  He had nothing.

  Ngqobile wrapped himself tight around Peel, gripped for life that wasn’t there. “I don’t want to die like this, taken by the devil.”

  The Dark Young advanced. Its hundred nostrils snorting as it sensed them, moved in slowly for a precision kill. The rest of the creature was stationary while the head of tentacles thrashed with the same madness when it was first released.

  Ngqobile helped Peel take his handgun from the holster, until Peel held the muzzle directly over the young boy’s heart.

  Peel hesitated. He had always promised himself, if he had a choice he would rather take his own life than let an abomination like this one claim him. But never had he expected to have to make this decision for another, and a child at that.

  “DO IT!” the boy screamed, and tore Peel from his melancholy to the horrors about to transpire. The monster was close now, only a dozen meters separated them. Peel felt the creature’s hot breath on him, like the stench of a lion after a feast.

  The boy grabbed Peel’s trigger finger and the weapon went off. Ngqobile fell lifeless at Peel’s feet as a mist of red sprayed him.

  Shocked, the Australian spy turned toward the monster, placed the hot muzzle against his forehead, and willed himself to pull the trigger.

  But he couldn’t do it.

  He closed his eyes and tried again. There had to be a way out, and suicide was a path open to him.

  And he still couldn’t pull the trigger.

  A blast of heat from an explosion shocked Peel. He opened his eyes and saw the Dark Young on fire, burning from its central mass outwards. The tentacles above still thrashed, but with anger and pain now, and a dozen mouths poured out that horrific scream. In that instance, Peel was sure his ear bones shattered.

  He watched Emerson Ash stand from the undergrowth. He dropped the shell of a second RPG-7 and lobbed several grenades into the central, burning mass of the creature. He was killing it, slowly, when no one else had been able or willing to do so.

  In a state that felt like slow motion, Peel lifted his Glock 9mm and fired, every last bullet landed into the creature. He didn’t know if he did any good, but he didn’t want any bullets left over. The bullet and the flesh. He still might do it, kill himself, after the atrocities he had caused. With his weapon depleted the choice would not be his to make.

  The creature fell, burning like a pyre and twitched now rather than thrashed. Ash walked up beside Peel and handed him the M4A1 he had dropped earlier. “You’ll need this mate.”

  Peel nodded, went through the motions of checking then loading a round into the chamber. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t respond. He was going into shock, and even though this realization was clear to him, he couldn’t stop himself from embracing that dark place.

  “Major!” Ash exclaimed. The cyber-analyst looked to the dead boy, then back to Peel again. “You did what you had to do Major, now let’s get out of here.”

  Peel couldn’t move. His legs wouldn’t respond.

  And then he was sick, dry retching only because he hadn’t eaten in over twelve hours. Being sick was all he could do to remind himself he was human, so he took his time.

  * * *

  Peel and Ash returned to the trucks and discovered a savanna littered with the fleshy remains of human and animal corpses, Zimbabwe National Army soldiers and zebra being the highest amongst the body count. The Dark Young of Shub-Nigguarath had been thorough, hunting down all that moved on two or four legs. The ZNA soldiers left protecting the two surviving trucks had not stood a chance, and the monster had decimated them quickly and cleanly.

  Peel had never seen so much blood.

  More uncanny, perhaps, were the two trucks themselves. They had not been touched, not even a scratch.

  They advanced with their assault rifles ready, unsure what to expect. Then Ash raised a hand and indicated that Peel should slow. He pointed under the closer of the two trucks, to where a man hid
.

  “Come out or I’ll shoot,” Ash commanded.

  “The m-monster?” the man exclaimed.

  “Gone,” Ash answered sharply. “Now move.”

  When the soldier refused to comply Peel fired a bullet into the chassis of the truck, just above the enemy soldier. The man moved quickly then, clambered to his feet with his hands raised high. He was as scuffed, bruised and bloody as Peel and Ash, and just as terrified.

  Peel noticed the insignia on the man’s shoulders. “Colonel Nambutu?” he asked.

  The despot nodded.

  Peel didn’t hesitate and put three bullets into the man’s chest, dropping Nambutu into a rapidly expanding pool of his own blood.

  Ash faced Peel and raised an eyebrow. “That was unexpected?”

  “Do you have a problem with it?” Peel asked in all seriousness.

  “I promised you could have him,” said Ash.

  Peel stepped forward over the twitching corpse. Just to make sure, he put three bullets into the man’s head and shattered the skull and the brains inside until it became a pulped mess of meat.

  He had hoped to feel better, killing Colonel Nambutu, but he felt nothing. He couldn’t remove the image of Ngqobile’s last pained expression as he pulled Peel’s finger on the trigger. He couldn’t stop analyzing that he was more willing to let one of those monsters take his life than take his own. Killing the Colonel had done nothing to silence the darkness within him. Revenge was a hollow promise.

  “Major, we should check the trucks,” said Ash quietly. “Find out why they were untouched.”

  The former Australian Army officer nodded and the two men peered cautiously into the back of the first, and then second of the trucks. There were six oil drums in each, each coupled with magnetic field generating batteries.

  “We should destroy these,” said Ash.

  Peel nodded through the dark fog that clouded his mind.

  “I guessed that creature sensed more of its own, either afraid to hurt them or wary of more predators taking over its patch.

  Unsure how to respond, Peel searched the trucks’ inventories and the corpses, gathering grenades and explosives, enough to set up a large detonation in each truck. In the vehicle they had toppled earlier, they discovered an additional four barrels. Together he and Ash packed the explosives into three clumps around each truck’s fuel tank.

  Hours passed before they completed their work, and they stood far back, ready to run should they need to. The goal was to destroy, not release the creatures, but they would only know when they executed their plan.

  “Ready?” Ash asked.

  Peel nodded.

  Ash lifted his weapon, stared down the sights and shot the first petrol tank. The explosion was loud, hot and intense, and it sent the second nearby truck into an all-consuming fireball. Ash fired one more shot, incinerating the first truck they had toppled earlier that morning.

  Peel and Ash stared down their scopes, ready for more of the horrors to materialize from the flames, but none did, they had caught them early.

  They marched from the scene of carnage. Their work was done.

  * * *

  After consuming some rations, rehydrating, pulling forgotten thorns from their flesh, and cleaning their wounds, Peel and Ash marched again. They picked up the trail of the former child soldiers, followed them across the granite dome rise, and headed southwest toward Botswana.

  Upon the peak, with the sun setting ahead of them, the two Australian’s stared down at the carnage they had been party too. Peel couldn’t believe they had survived, and wondered if he had deserved too.

  He shook his head at the thought, hating it. He couldn’t let negative chatter get the better of him, because that was the path of madness. But he needed an action to undertake to appease his soul because revenge was not the answer. Otherwise he wasn’t certain he would survive this day with any mental fortitude left in him.

  “Africa’s beautiful.” Ash stated it as if it were a matter of official record. “If you don’t count those corpses over there, and those flames, and that blast site . . . oh and the corpse of creature . . . and . . . ”

  Peel could see Ash tried hard not to laugh, and the man was right, because all they could see before them was the carnage and aftermath of battle. Nothing majestic about it at all.

  “Mate, shut the fuck up,” Peel quipped.

  “Is that an order, sir?” Ash almost chuckled.

  Peel sensed the man was relieved Peel was finally talking again.

  Peel wanted to laugh too. He really did. He wanted the world to go back to the way it was before today, when he didn’t have the blood of children on his hands.

  “Damn straight it’s an order.”

  He felt a sharp object rub against his leg, and he remembered the diamond he’d recovered earlier. He’d forgotten that he had a hundred thousand dollars in his pocket.

  “Sergeant?”

  “Yes Major?”

  “You think we can catch those boys before the border?”

  Ash grinned. “Sure.”

  Peel smiled, an action he thought he’d never be capable of again, but he was wrong. Redemption came not from spilled blood, but offering possibility to deserving others.

  “Let’s go then. I have something very important I need to give those boys, to help them on their way.”

  Necromancy

  Kyla Lee Ward

  Did you think to escape me by this ploy?

  To escape me? Did you think you could hide

  so I would not in season find you out?

  And dig yourself so deep into this grave

  that I could not exhume you, should I choose?

  I must call this a poor and common plot

  for such as you, and an unworthy death.

  I see it now, and scarce can bear the thought!

  To break yourself upon the mundane wheel,

  to suffocate so slowly, day by day

  beneath the weight of earth, who gleamed so bright,

  who saw so clear and far! And did you think

  that as all darkened, so you would forget?

  By subtle transfer, I too would forget?

  A common grave, and yet it has some charm;

  An avenue of solemn, shading trees,

  now lit by lamps as darkness claims the sky.

  Such quiet neighbours, such a spread of grass.

  White roses at your head, brick at your feet.

  But false the name engraved upon the post;

  I know the truth, and now I see that here

  you swelled, engendered small and squirming things;

  To share your bed with such profligacy!

  But yes, I understand your real intent,

  to gain annihilation through decay.

  But we were strong, my friend, who taught me love.

  The magic that we wrought was stronger yet.

  Those sigils in your skin protect you still:

  your form is whole, your eyes, they are aware.

  You knew full well that I would not forget.

  Not in a thousand years; such is the price

  of this my Art, the sweet, forbidden Art

  that once we shared. I bring dreams into light,

  distil desire. On summoned wings, I fly —

  oh, how we flew! How sang, how wonderful

  were you and I! And even in your sleep

  that memory struck, and so your rising gas

  became blue flame. And so it was that on

  this late Midsummer’s Eve, I found you out.

  You stirred to feel my tread upon the grass.

  Then heard my voice command your corpse to rise,

  by your true name. Remembered then, too late,

  the dead no longer have recourse to flight.

  But now, my slave, you must recall my touch.

  The coldness of your skin gives me no pause.

  As my hands play your nerves awake, my breath

  shall resurrect your lungs, my
kiss your heart.

  Of greater value than black pearls in wine,

  this kiss, and of more potency. And now,

  as muscles twitch and tongue begins to stir,

  I conjure you to speak, and not to lie.

  This sovereign Art interrogates the dead

  and such you are: your choice was made long since.

  You abdicated wand and word, and fled,

  left me upon the crossroads, crimson-stained.

  Did you think that would weaken me? Destroy

  the tang of my sharp will? Not for one day.

  Else you would not have taken such long steps.

  I cherished deep those stains upon my hands,

  inscribing sign and sigil in that ink.

  So vast our sanctum seemed, but I kept faith.

  Through cobwebbed noon and midnight’s blackened vault,

  the lonely hours saw me attend the flame.

  I starved and stole; performed such sacrifice

  as made the one you saw seem but a game.

  And now you claim that was the way you died!

  That mine own blade had entered in your heart.

  Whatever you believe, the fear was all:

  your fear of what I dared. Had I not laughed —

  but how may I say now that you were wrong?

  How may I swear that you alone were safe?

  How may I even wish that you had stayed?

  And there it is. The knowledge that I craved,

  Not from your tongue at all, but from my own.

  Left in the shell of our vast sanctum, there

  I tended well the flame, annealed my will,

  so grew in solitude, in power and time

  to fill it. Now my name elicits awe.

  My slightest work commands a fitting price.

  I have attained all once we dreamed, and more;

  such wisdom as could only come with time.

  The truth that at the crossroads was unguessed.

  And not one part of this may I regret.

  Perhaps, if you had stayed, we would have done

  the like, but not the same in part or whole.