by Various
“It’s a sexy color,” she whispered, her fingers walking up his chest.
“My sentiments exactly,” Jack murmured against her neck.
Aimee’s eyes fluttered closed as his hands moved down to her waist, catching the hem of her sleep shirt between his fingers. The fabric dragged against her skin as he pulled it upward. The room grew hot. The sheets were kicked to the side.
And then there was a scream.
It was amazing how quickly they could go from foreplay to bolting down the hall. The screaming continued as they raced toward the girls’ room, as if desperate to outrun each other.
Jack was the winner. He skidded to a stop in front of the door and stared into the darkness. Aimee wasn’t much farther behind, covering her mouth as soon as she saw it.
Abby was the one screaming. Still in her bed, she sat stick-straight and terrified, surrounded by a veritable lake of vomit. It was everywhere—Abby’s bed, the floor, the desk, dripping off her stack of precious Lisa Frank folders: glossy unicorns and colorful bears swimming in sickness.
Charlie stood in the corner of the room, her chin against her chest, her hands at her sides. Unmoving. Staring through a blank set of eyes at what she’d done.
• • •
In spite of its cheerful wallpaper, the doctor’s office felt nothing but cold. Aimee sat beside Jack in the waiting room, flipping through an old copy of Good Housekeeping, while Charlie sat on the floor, sliding beads up and down brightly colored metal rods. The beads hissed as they slid up and tumbled down with each hill and valley, eventually smacking the wooden baseboard. Jack hadn’t been able to sleep after he and Aimee had cleaned up Charlie’s mess the night before. Every time he closed his eyes he saw her standing in the corner of her room, shaded by the dark; he saw himself approach, ready to pull her from the shadows, only to catch sight of those eyes—soulless. Abysmally empty.
He shuddered.
Aimee raised an eyebrow, flipped a page of the magazine.
“Chill out,” she whispered. “You look more uncomfortable than all of these rug rats combined.”
Across the room, a little boy sat next to his mother, flipping thick cardboard pages of a Thomas the Tank Engine storybook; another kid pushed a bright red Tonka truck across the carpet, repeatedly smacking it into the leg of an old guy’s chair—hopefully a grandfather rather than an unfortunate stranger. A girl on the other side of the waiting room pressed her mouth against the glass of a fish tank, leaving streaks of spit across an ocean scene while the fish cowered behind a plastic deep-sea diver. Her mother hardly noticed, busy conducting business via cell phone.
They all seemed so calm compared to Jack, who was hunched over in his chair, his knees bouncing nervously. He told himself Charlie was just sick, that she had the flu and that was it—but he couldn’t unknow what he knew, and he couldn’t unfeel the certainty that coursed through him like a quick-spreading disease.
Jack’s stomach twisted uncomfortably. His face turned down in a grimace.
Charlie always said she wanted to be just like her dad.
Jack feared that his little girl was getting her wish.
“Charlotte Winter?”
A nurse clutched a clipboard against her chest, her free hand holding ajar the heavy door that led to their assigned examining room. Aimee tossed the magazine onto an empty chair, gathered her purse, and motioned for Charlie to get up.
Charlie strode to her mother, took Aimee’s hand, and looked back to her dad with a blink. Jack hadn’t moved. He hated doctors, hated this whole thing.
“Come on, Daddy,” she said. “You can’t stay here by yourself.”
The nurse smiled as Jack reluctantly pushed himself out of his seat.
“You must be Charlotte,” she said, too friendly to be genuine. “You’re just down the hall.”
Aimee flashed the nurse a terse smile and stepped through the door. Charlie let go of her mother’s hand when Aimee tried to drag her behind, extending her arms out to her dad, waiting to be picked up like the baby she would soon no longer be. Jack didn’t argue. He hefted her up into his arms and stepped past the nurse without a word.
“Room C,” the nurse instructed.
“C for Charlie,” Charlie whispered into Jack’s ear.
C for curse, he thought. C for catastrophe. Calamity. Chaos.
The examination room felt even colder than the waiting area. Aimee took a seat while Jack plopped Charlie on a padded examination table, her attention immediately drawn to the counter space next to a small steel sink.
“Can I have one of those?” she asked, pointing to a jar full of tongue depressors.
“No, you can’t,” Aimee said, but Jack was already making a move for them.
“Jack.” Aimee gave him a stern look.
“You think they’ll be mad?” he asked, fishing a depressor out of the jar. “You think that maybe they can’t afford to buy any more of these after they send us our bill?”
“That isn’t the point,” she muttered. But she averted her eyes nonetheless, checking her nails.
Jack handed Charlie the depressor, which she immediately stuck into her mouth.
He took a seat next to Aimee while Charlie traced the shape of a smiling bear against the wallpaper, ignoring her parents as she sucked on the wooden stick in her mouth. Eventually, a soft knock sounded at the door.
Charlie’s doctor looked quite professional with his white coat and horn-rimmed glasses.
“Hi, folks. I’m Dr. Hogan.” He extended a hand to both Jack and Aimee before turning his attention to the little girl sitting on his table. “Hi, Charlotte,” he said.
“Charlie, please,” Charlie requested, her words jumbled around the tongue depressor.
“Charlie, then. How are we feeling, kiddo?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I told that to my mom but she’s still mad.”
Aimee shifted uncomfortably, clearing her throat.
“Mad about what?” Dr. Hogan asked.
“She was very sick last night,” Aimee cut in, but it didn’t stop Charlie from telling her version of the story.
“I puked all over the floor. And then Nubs got in the room and started eating it…”
“Charlie,” Aimee warned, her voice edged.
“… so that was gross.”
Jack held back a laugh.
“Nubs?” the doctor asked.
“Our dog,” Aimee clarified.
“Sometimes he eats his own poop,” Charlie explained.
“Charlie!” The name cracked like a whip. Aimee had the uncanny ability to shut anyone up by hissing their name.
Dr. Hogan cleared his throat, attempting to regain his professional composure before turning to Aimee and Jack, but there was still a hint of amusement dancing in the corners of his mouth.
“So,” he said. “Let’s see what we can do.”
• • •
“Completely ridiculous,” Aimee snorted, stomping across the parking lot. She reached the passenger door and crossed her arms over her chest, fuming. “Nothing wrong with her,” she sneered. “Where did that man get his medical license anyway? Off the Internet?”
Jack put Charlie down next to the car and fished the car keys out of his pocket.
“You don’t just vomit buckets the night before to be fine the next day, Jack. That doesn’t happen.”
He held his tongue, unlocked the doors, and helped Charlie into her car seat—it was the only thing they had salvaged from the wreck. When he finally slid behind the wheel, he sat quietly for a moment, transfixed by the Georgia plates on the back of a rusty red pickup. It was like déjà vu, except this time he was the father and Charlie was the kid.
“Isn’t it better that she isn’t sick?” he finally asked, trying to calm Aimee down despite the slow roll of nausea within his gut.
“She is sick,” Aimee snapped. “She’s been sick for the last few days. She had a fever of one hundred and three. Or do you not remember her clawing at your arm when you
put her in the tub?”
Jack remembered it.
“It was cold!” Charlie yelled from the back.
“It was probably just a bug,” he denied, not sure who he was trying to convince. “She caught something at school. It was a two-day thing and everything is fine.”
Aimee shook her head and stared out the window, refusing to look at him. Unable to reassure Aimee or himself, he exhaled a shaky breath and started the car, slowly rolling it out of the parking lot and onto the street.
A few minutes later, while idling at a red light, Aimee spoke up again, her voice low.
“There’s something wrong with her, Jack. I can feel it.”
And at that very moment, Aimee’s voice wasn’t hers. It was his mother’s.
Alisa Alering became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Everything You Have Seen” in Writers of the Future, Vol. XXIX (2013), edited by Dave Wolverton.
Visit her website at alering.com.
* * *
Short Story: “The Wanderer King” ••••
THE WANDERER KING
by Alisa Alering
First published in Clockwork Phoenix 4 (2013), edited by Mike Allen
• • • •
IT IS DAY 90 and most all are dead. Wanderers are dead, Fixers are dead, but me and Pansy are alive today, and we both want to be alive tomorrow. We want to find a way out of this deep dark bottom hole the world has fallen into.
We are in the potato man’s house. He is dead on the floor and we look for something to eat. The potato bins stack top and top along the cold stone wall. It smells cool in my nose like dirt and mud, starch and flour. The potato man is not long dead, and smells sour coppery wet.
“Gone,” Pansy says, her arm in the bins up to the elbow, fingers crawling on the bare boards.
“All?” I ask. There is one window, small. But we are in the forever days, and the light from outside shows the dark space of the potato man’s life. The hard chair with the folded blanket. Pegs on the wall hang mattock, fork. I take down the mattock, swing and heft. Old dirt cracks off the head and crumbles on the floor.
Pansy gets down on her knees and leans under the bed. She drags out the trunk, goes through the clothes and blankets. “We’re not first,” she says, finding nothing worth having.
I tuck up my skirt and go up the ladder to the cramped loft under the musty eaves, where I find a dead bird, its feet in the air, its beak so still I can see the holes of its nostrils. “Nothing here,” I say, backing down.
As we leave Pansy spots the crown, hanging from a nail above the door. It looks to me like a pair of antlers, stuck on some skin, tied with string.
“The King,” Pansy says. She comes from Wanderers, so she knows things differently. She says the King can lead us back to the top world, where things are right side up. She says we have to try it on, in case one of us is secretly the King.
I think we would already know, but she says you can’t tell until the crown is on your head.
“You go first, Chool,” she says. She rubs her palms across her eyes in that way that I have got used to.
“You,” I say, because she wants me to say it. We have been together now since Day 45 when we hid from the Fixer men in the same storage shed among the grease drums and the fertilizer. I know how her wheels wind. I lean the mattock against the stone wall and take the crown. The antlers are sturdy, short stubby prongs the color of a polished walnut, stitched with oiled thread onto a dark leather cap. Braided cord trails down over the earpieces, with a catch to fasten under the chin.
Pansy is taller than me. I reach up high to hold the antlered cap over her head. She stands so still that I know she is listening all hairs on end. She is waiting for whatever form the magic takes. She is waiting to be King.
I push the cap down over her springy hair, holding out the earpieces. I balance the weight of the antlers between my open palms, then let go. I see the exact moment when she realizes nothing is going to happen. And maybe I see her think about pretending. But Pansy is honest. She puts her hands up beside her ears and pulls off the crown.
“Your turn,” she says.
I know that I’m not the King, because I know what I have done. But that’s not something I’m going to tell. So I stand still. I feel her breath on my neck, and then the lopsided weight of the crown, settling along my head, the cap bending down my ear on one side. I give it a few beats, so she thinks I take it serious. I lift my shoulders, let them back down. “Now what?”
I give the crown back to Pansy. “What would a real King’s crown be doing here?” I am looking at the rope bed and the tin teapot and the stack of turf beside the cold stove. Kings don’t live like this.
“This King’s not like that,” she says. “Besides, maybe he—” meaning the dead potato man “—is come from the Kings’ family line, maybe he’s been keeping it. Maybe the King put it here for us to find.” She holds the crown close to her face, letting the horns touch her cheek. Wanderers trundle the woods sniffing after invisible things. They know about finding. She looks into far distance, then back at me. “We have to try him,” she says.
“But he’s dead.”
“Everyone’s dead, Chool. We have to find the King.” She takes the crown from me and goes over to the dead man. His wool vest is buttoned up straight to the chin. The slice starts there, halfway round his ear and into his hair. He looks up at the mud roof with his one eye left. Pansy picks his head up off the floor, and rests it on her lap. She sets the cap on his head and holds it there, watching his ruined face.
Nothing happens, and Pansy closes her eyes. I hear the breath go out her nose. She eases the man’s head down to the floor, where it rests with a little thunk. She stands and wipes her hands on the back of her skirt. Careful, she carries the crown.
We go out to look for the King.
• • •
We steer clear of the mines—that’s Fixer territory. The Wanderers are dangerous, too, ever since they came fighting back around Day 30. But there’s always been less of them—less in all, and less because they scatter through the woods on their business instead of fixing to the towns and mines.
We step along to the city, fitting the crown on all we come across. We sleep in the darkest part of the day when the sky dips to dark blue. At first, in the country, there aren’t many heads to try. But we come up on the city, and we slow. We even try it on Fixers because Pansy says the King is the King and it doesn’t matter whose body he’s in. “The King is for all,” Pansy says. “Anyone can carry the King.”
We start down a back street at the edge of town, all trampled gardens and the backs of shops, bordered on the other side by the crumbled rocks of the old Wanderer’s wall, tumbled down and the gaps slap-patched with crankling sheets of corrugated tin.
In the first ten days, the Fixers rounded up the Wanderers as they came into the bureaus with their gleanings to sell, and killed them all at once. These bodies are blown up big like water bags, gurgling and gassing and covered in flies and we pass them by. We can’t stand to get close enough to test them.
Up ahead, behind a garage, three women lie together in the road. Scarves flutter loose around their heads as if they had tried to hide their faces when they left home. Fixers or Wanderers or some other, I don’t know. Two are huddled together, dying with their arms wrapped around as the knives bit into their backs. Glass glitters at the base of the wall, a broken bottle of soured milk. The third is farther away, stretched out flat. Slashes are on her legs and chest, and the flesh of her cheek split wide. A black-spotted pig has squeezed through a gap in the wall, and forages at her side, snuffling and grunting.
“Get away,” Pansy shouts. She runs at the pig, waving her free hand.
The pig turns and charges her. Pansy leaps back. The crown tumbles out of her arms as she scrambles up the stone wall out of the reach of the pig.
I pick up the crown by the antlers, ready to leap up the wall next to Pansy. W
e can run down the length and find other bodies to test.
“No,” Pansy says. “Try them first.”
Keeping my eye on the pig, which has settled down to slurp clots of milk from the broken jar, I try the crown on the two women lying together. When I get to the separate one, I see where the pig has chewed two fingers from her hand. I crouch down beside her and pull back her scarf, peeling it loose from her scalp. Her hair is razored close to the skull, a soft fuzz. She has sharp black brows that wing together above her puffed eyes in a way that accuses.
I rock back on my heels. “This is stupid,” I say. “No one’s going to save us.”
“Just do it,” she says. She wipes her hand across her eyes, digging at the invisible blood.
“There is no King,” I say, mostly to myself. But I lower the antlers onto the woman’s head, and as it skims her brow some force reaches out for the cap, sucking it down, gripping it against her skull. I try to snatch it back but it sticks fast. I drop the antlers like they’re on fire and jump to my feet.
Red blood pumps out of the woman’s pig-eaten fingers. The woman’s eyes blink open, dark gold like the polished antlers on the crown.
• • •
A hot wind blasts us in the face, carrying voices. Men talking and shouting on the other side of the garage.
Pansy stares at the dead woman wearing the crown of antlers and bleeding from the stumps of her fingers.
“We have to get gone from here,” I say.
The woman sits up, gets to her feet. The antlers reach above her head, poking the sky. The cords dangle unfastened along her jaw. She wears a man’s jacket, the rolled-up sleeves sliding down her scabbed arms. I can’t tell if she sees us or not.
The men’s voices come closer. They are in the street on the other side of the shops. The air carries the smell of their sweat and the dust they stir up from the road. I hear the stamp of their feet and the zsh-zsh swing of their knives. I look down the alley, then back at the woman. I am sure she was dead. Not just slightly dead, but very dead.
“Pansy,” I say, “What is she doing standing?”