by Jack Lothian
It’s been several months since Rip Day. He was lucky when the Rip slits opened. He’d been holed up in his hunting cabin on North Mountain sipping down shine and bagging a few wild turkeys out of season, but he was forced to flee when they came. They were after the wildlife, and it brought them sliding through the cities, the suburbs, and even the remote mountains. They have trouble breathing on our side, so they harvest the lungs of the living to compensate. Some sort of biological symbiosis that allows parts of them to blend with parts of us. They take faces, too, doesn’t matter what kind. Raymond has seen them utilize both the faces of humans and animals alike. They strip the flesh clean, make a mask of it, and then attach the lungs on either side of that dripping mask. The lungs expand, and the tattered mouth of the mask lets them expel a kind of black ichor after the oxygen is spent. They’re fiends for blood, too. They don’t drink it or digest it; they just smear it all over their bodies to keep themselves from drying out in our atmosphere. They like it wet and hot, sauna conditions, and they seem to luxuriate in a thick layer of warming plasma.
Raymond knows they’ve gotten inside. He just woke up from a pitiful slice of broken sleep. He was dreaming of the day that he came home to the doublewide trailer to find his wife’s face peeled clean and all of his children lying on the porch with their chests just open craters, the ribs bent back and snapped with their organs rotting in the sun. All that were taken were the lungs. That’s always the way of it.
He heard the slosh of them somewhere near what used to be a casino bar. It overlooks the entire establishment, a skybox view of all the dust-coated table games. He’s familiar with their watery movements. They sound like a mixture of a dripping faucet and something slithering through a mud hole. He smelled them, too, and the aroma helped to draw him back to the waking world. It’s a stench to make the nostrils twitch. It reminds him of the stink of snot splattering out of the nose of someone fighting through a bout with influenza.
There are only a few entrances to the casino, but he thought for sure he boarded them all up and smeared his special repellent along the thresholds. There’s only that emergency exit with the faulty lock, but he chained that up good, didn’t he?
Raymond hopes so in the deepest part of himself.
They’re so damn fast. That’s the weirdest part. They shouldn’t be fast. You see the physiology of them and you think of the only living organism on earth that they’re comparable to, and you imagine they’d be slow. They’re not. They must have evolved differently in the place they come from. That dark boiling landscape where the rain never stops.
Raymond hasn’t seen or heard another person since Rip Day. For all he knows, he could be the last. Nothing but a bearded old man holed up in cavernous casino and waiting to die. He’s considered going out by his own hand. That’s the merciful way. It’s much better than having them suck off the face and pull out the lungs, but he has a certain amount of pride left in him, and taking his own life is not something he’s willing to do just yet.
He’s been holding to a desperate wish that the world as a whole can still come back from this. Maybe there’s a way to seal up the slits. Perhaps they’ll just close on their own just as naturally as they opened, and the moist hell that waits on the other side will become nothing but a traumatic memory.
He wishes for this, but he also knows in his heart that the horde that came through won’t just vanish into thin air. They’re too numerous, too curious, and too intent on exploring what America has to offer. He thinks maybe they orchestrated The Rip in order to have more space to inhabit. Humans numbered in the billions before all this, but the things that came through seem to exist in the trillions. There are big ones, small ones, and breeders that never leave their chosen hives. Raymond thinks overpopulation drove them to seek out new realms of existence.
If that was their plan, they succeeded. They found a way through. They never tried to communicate with the human race. It seems they speak only the language of subjugation and destruction. Their own biological survival is the imperative, and colonization is the endgame.
Raymond rounds a bend and looks downward, but he sees no sign of their presence. He hears them, though. They’re watching him. Curdled slurping sounds, breathy expulsions of moisture, and that lightning quick noise of multiple bulbous bodies sliding across the floor.
Their defining trails are crisscrossed all around the tiles. Raymond leans down and runs an index finger through the stringy clear ooze with a look of distaste dominating his features. They got in somehow. They see him, they know of him, and the ambush is probably seconds away from happening.
Raymond knows he’s dead already. He sighs, resigning himself to slaughter as many of them as possible before he goes down. He checks the shotgun, and he finds that he has quite a few shells left. All the lead has been dumped out, and that’s par for the course. Lead smashes through them, but it does no lasting damage.
Only the rock salt seems to put them down. He’s seen it happen a few times when he was racing through the streets to get here. A few courageous souls saw what the things resembled, and they fought with nothing but cans of sodium and fists full of white particles. It’s nasty business. They writhe, twist, and contort inward when the salt hits them just right. It’s acid for things like them. It corrodes and eats them up, and Raymond isn’t opposed to offering up a little misery to the bastards that razed the only world he’s ever known.
They’re coming now. They make no attempt to hide because they know he’s cornered and there’s no place left to run. They slide with incredible agility across the floor, these great gastropods, blazers of slime trails and masters of the mucus that coats them. Their man-masks hang from featureless faces, just droopy and decaying visages with stalk eyes protruding up past the ragged crater holes of their masks. Sensory tentacles curve outward in anticipation, and the human lungs that they’ve bound to themselves expand faster and faster as they converge on the lone survivor.
The shotgun fires again and again. Rock salt splatters the horde, and many of them fall, seizing and tormented, to the floor. The salt dissolves them, their mucus membranes bursting with agonizing blisters, but still they come, sliding and slithering over their dead with single-minded purpose.
Multiple soft and sticky bodies smash into Raymond at the same time from all angles, and he loses his grip on the shotgun. Probing sensory tentacles manipulate his flesh, and he finds his chest caving inward as they strike for the lungs, the most pivotal part of a man. It’s what they need. It is the singular resource to allow this colonization to be a complete success.
Raymond’s last thought is a fragmented memory from his boyhood. He recalls a vision of himself giggling in the dirt and tipping a canister of Morton salt on a few slugs that were out and about in his mother’s garden.
They boiled and they writhed, and their suffering brought him a form of tingling pleasure. He didn’t think of it as anything more than a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon.
They’re slurping out his eyes now. They’re drowning him in a cocoon of mucus. Their sharp stalks find him, and they stab and they stab, ragged punctures taking shape all over his torso. His anguish seems to last forever.
Deep in the abyss of what remains of his mind, he thinks that this must be how it feels when a slug is salted. Desolate pain. Endless excruciation. Hurt, helpless, and at the mercy of the merciless…
His lungs explode outward in a spray of viscera.
No more breath. No more life. No more humans.
He regrets what he did to those slugs.
A Year Later
Irina Slav
The straps of the backpack had rubbed Haley’s flesh raw and were now gnawing at it, biting ever deeper, to the bone. The backpack weighed a ton, or maybe it was just a couple of pounds but she’d been carrying it for what felt like months. Or was it months? Right now, Haley couldn’t care less which it was. She tried to adjust the right strap a bit, wincing with pain and then relief washed over her, for about a second,
until the strap slipped back into its old place, gnawing at her flesh with every step she took.
“Look, smoke!” Juli yelled and Haley almost jumped out of her skin. She swayed but kept her balance. Her daughter grabbed her hand and pointed forward. “Look!”
“Juli…” She didn’t have the energy to tell the girl it’s not a good idea to yell. She didn’t have the energy to tell her to be quiet, as she had done so many times in the early days after the world got what it deserved in her decidedly non-humble opinion. She only had enough energy to look up from the road, where she had been gazing for the last few hours, or days, or months. There was a town about half a mile from them, the town they had set out to reach, and there was indeed a plume of smoke rising from the chimney of a house at the near end of the place.
“Come on, Mom!” The girl pulled on her hand and Haley lurched forward, almost falling over again. Her hair, wispy brown streaked with white now that she couldn’t maintain the lovely auburn shade that came in bottles, fell into her eyes. She tossed it back.
“Juli, give me a second and stop pulling,” she finally managed to say. She swallowed spit—spit that had suddenly filled her mouth at the sight of the smoke rising from that chimney of the nice-looking house half a mile away. Smoke meant people, sane people, and people meant food. But not necessarily, Haley thought. Not always. Her daughter let go of her hand and looked away, biting her lower lip.
“I’m sorry, hon, you know it may not be good,” Haley said. “It’s July, you know. People don’t light fires in July.”
She was barely keeping her eyes open. She was barely standing on her feet. If she were on her own, she would have put an end to it a long time ago. She had a knife. But she wasn’t alone. She had a 12-year-old to take care of and she had promised Jim.
“Can you give me just a minute?” she asked and without waiting for an answer, she slipped the straps of the backpack off her shoulders and sagged to the ground.
“Sure,” Juli said quietly. “I’m sorry.” She sat down next to her mother, crossing her legs. “Are you in pain?”
Haley shook her head and tried to smile. She almost did and saw Juli’s face mirroring her expression. The deep brown eyes, the raven black hair—Jim’s eyes and hair—sent a bolt of pain through her chest but she swallowed it and tried to smile.
“I’ll be fine, just need a bit of a rest before we reach that house.”
“Sure,” Juli said, frowning. “We can wait 'til tomorrow, if you want.”
“No, we can’t,” Haley said, looking around and then meeting her daughter’s eyes. She saw the disgust that suddenly claimed the girl’s face. “It’s okay. I forget about them too sometimes.”
They were surrounded by corpses. The road leading to the village was lined with piles of still decomposing bodies, bony fingers sticking out from rotting sleeves, eyeless skulls with pieces of skin still stubbornly hanging onto them staring at the woman and the girl, the bodies at the bottom crushed by so many other bodies on top, human parts scattered around the piles.
“It must have been bad,” Haley said, gazing at the stinking piles.
At the beginning, she used to throw up from the smell whenever the Barnes family encountered a single corpse, of which there were many. Then the killings began on a mass scale. Now, a year later, Haley didn’t notice the smell most of the time. Neither did Juli. The girl looked embarrassed by it now. Haley got hold of her hand and squeezed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah, I know,” Juli said, squeezing her mother’s hand back. She cleared her throat and tore her eyes from the piles of former humans. “I just forgot and that’s kind of scary.”
“I know, honey,” Haley said. “I forget about it, too. It’s normal.”
“But it stinks so badly!” Juli said. “It’s… It’s disgusting!”
“I know. I know.” A shot of pain made her wince again and double over.
“Mom?” Panic rang out loud from that single word.
“I’ll be all right,” Haley said. “I will, I promise. Just a cramp.”
She’d been pregnant when Jim died. She was no longer pregnant, exhaustion and malnourishment had taken quick care of that last mistake she and her husband had made, but she was still bleeding. Haley hoped she hadn’t developed an infection, she really hoped. Doctors and medicines were hard to come by these days, as was food.
“Are you sure?” Juli asked, her eyes wide with fear. Haley thought, not for the first time, what she would do to make this fear go away. Anything, that’s what she would do. Or maybe not, she thought hazily. Sometimes there was a worse look in her girl’s eyes—an absent, indifferent look. Haley was seeing it more and more often.
“I am,” she said, hoping she’d managed the reassuring expression she tried for.
“Okay,” the girl said and looked away, to the house with the smoke coming from the chimney. Haley sighed.
They sat like this for another minute or so. Haley offered Juli water from the half-empty and much used plastic bottle she carried in the backpack. Juli refused. Haley took a very small sip and put the bottle back. They had to find water soon. This was their last bottle and the sun was scorching. Haley stood up, slowly and carefully.
“Come on, Juli, let’s go,” she said, picking up the backpack and putting it on. “Got your knife?”
Juli rolled her eyes and that made Haley finally smile. The kid was still okay. As okay as a kid of 12 could be a year after a breakout that had wiped out 80 percent of the population. At least, that’s how it looked to Haley. Their whole neighborhood was gone, dead or sick, very sick. And infectious. So infectious that you couldn’t touch them unless you wanted to become like them—completely retarded, incapable of doing anything more than shuffle aimlessly, mouth hanging open, and moan. Zombies, only not those from the movies, thankfully. The sick ones didn’t chase people and they didn’t try to eat them, but they could still be dangerous because sometimes they lurked in their houses and could grab the unwary by an arm or a leg, which was a death sentence. They died of starvation and dehydration. Or they got shot and thrown by the road. Nobody could be bothered with graves, not any more.
The disease was terminal, whether you died quickly, from complications, or wilted away slowly like these new helpless monsters whose touch was death. Everyone died, some by their own hand right after they were infected or even without being infected. They just couldn’t take it, and Haley could completely relate. She couldn’t take it either but she was taking it. Just like most of the people still left out there, she guessed.
“All right now,” Haley said as they started walking again. “What’s the drill?”
The first time she’d referred to it as a drill, Juli had laughed, a little hysterically but still amused. This was exactly why Haley had used the word. Yet funny or not, they both knew they had to be prepared for their encounters with strangers. So far they’d been lucky. Kind of.
“We move slowly, we look around, and we listen,” Juli recited.
“And?”
“And we’re ready to run if we hear a moan,” her daughter said.
They didn’t carry knives. It was a joke that Jim had come up with a few months ago, after they’d waited out the exodus and the quick deaths, and they were forced to move on because they’d eaten all the food. The shops were looted, the streets were clogged by empty cars, so walking was their only option. Jim had taken a knife, the biggest knife from the kitchen. But they all knew, even Juli, that a knife would be useless if one of the sick ones touched them. The knife was for the healthy ones. They all knew that, too.
The piles of human bodies thinned as they approached the town. By the time the two got to the sign that said “Biderford,” all traces of corpses had disappeared. The stench remained, though. It was everywhere. Juli turned around and looked at the road they’d just come from.
“Do you think they killed them all?”
“Yes,” Haley said curtly. Even though they’d spent a year surviving, running, and hiding, she
still had that instinct to protect her daughter from life’s cruelties, which had significantly multiplied over the past twelve months. Yet now she saw no point in trying to make the truth look prettier. Not that it was possible, really, not after they’d both seen the piles of decomposing flesh and cloth.
“Makes sense,” Juli murmured. They’d stopped to look around. There weren’t any obvious signs of life in the town, or at least this part of it—only an empty road lined by seemingly empty houses. There were no cars, which probably meant there were enough survivors in Biderford to have cleared them from the streets. Why anyone would bother doing that was beyond Haley but if the townspeople had really driven the sick ones out and massacred them, then they were probably capable of caring about the state of their streets and clearing them from abandoned cars. Or they just all left in those cars if we’re being realistic, Haley told herself.
The house with the smoke coming out from its chimney was two houses down on the right. An unassuming two-storey affair in faded white. That’s how it looked from a distance, anyway. The smoke continued to trickle up into the still July air, dissipating into the intense blue of the sky. For a second everything looked so peaceful that Haley dared imagine that this whole last year was a nightmare, an extremely vivid one but still just a nightmare. And then the stench returned, filling her nostrils, bringing her back to reality.
“Come on,” she told Juli, who was looking around, daring a few steps forward. Haley detached herself from the pole of the town sign and took a step forward. The backpack, containing two sweaters, a half-empty 50-pair box of surgical gloves, three cans of baked beans and the half-empty bottle of water along with what remained from a shirt that had belonged to Jim, which she’d used for the bleeding, weighed her down again. Juli had carried it for a while in the morning but Haley had insisted they switch after a couple of hours. For some reason she felt safer with the backpack on, despite the pain. If anything happened that needed them to run, Juli would be quicker without a backpack.