The solution hit her one morning as she stood in the doorway watching a woman stand unflinching as dozens of Mites skittered over her face and into her open-towering crown. Kate was already positive it would work when Paul showed up later that day, wiping the moisture away from the shotgun he’d discovered in the wormgrasses no more than twenty feet upland from where he’d first found her.
“Paul,” she said, picking a large Mite from his shoulder and crushing it between thumb and forefinger, “I know how we can get out of here. You, me, and your father.” She reached for his face with two outstretched fingers, as though to pluck away another Mite, but instead ran her palm and fingertips playfully across his cheek. She could feel him shudder. He looked down at the ground.
“Dad, too?”
“Yes, Paul. Would you like to hear it?”
He looked up at her. She felt a Mite scurry down the front of her shirt, and saw Paul’s eyes follow it bashfully before looking back into her eyes.
“Okay. What’s the plan?”
“Paul, a Mite just crawled down my shirt. Could you get it for me? Would you kill it for me?”
The boy swallowed hard and looked away, paralyzed. She pulled him close.
“Paul? Please?”
He lay next to her in bed, listening as she filled out the distances beyond the fogbanks with her tales, her description of the world he’d never dreamed of seeing himself.
“When I was a little girl, I remember blue, uncloudy skies ... people. The changes had all begun years before, of course, but they started to come on more powerfully then, like waves of fog just washing over us, killing us and nearly everything else that couldn’t hide or adapt. And in their place ...” She shrugged and didn’t finish, not wanting to scare him too much about the world into which she was about to throw him.
Paul was eager but gentle, awkward but lovingly persistent. As they held each other in the darkness of her bed, she whispered a sanitized scenario of escape to him, and he nodded in agreement with every point. She needn’t have lied to him. She was sure that this boy, her lover, would have agreed to anything she told him.
They trudged through rolling, hissing clouds of milky-white moisture. Kate took the lead, moving quickly while Paul tried to maintain a central position between her and his father, worried that because of Kate’s haste and determination he would lose sight of her. He was frightened by the openness, the emptiness of the sloping ground, and of the fog that sometimes hid Kate completely. He couldn’t afford to lose her for a second, dependent on her not only for leading the way but for her sensitivity and reaction time to all that lurked beyond his own eyes and ears. Still, he could only move so fast. His father was almost too weak for this uphill climb, and far too awkward to keep from falling on his face every few steps.
The beast won’t dare attack us if it’s as afraid of the Mites as you say, she had told him. Your father will be our shield. Him and his cargo. It had all sounded so convincing. I know where the Straggler’s truck is parked. We’ll be able to cover plenty of ground before we have to worry about gasoline. Down there, lying naked against her warm, smooth flesh, there was no way he could not believe her, no way he could refuse.
Since I’ve never seen these Mites anywhere else, maybe there’s something down in the valley they need in order to survive. We can save your father, bring him back. You can grow back your hair. But the world as it had seemed while she’d stroked between his legs and whispered in his ear was far different from the lonely, desolate plain through which they now climbed, so empty but so loud, so vast and yet—with its clinging, milky vapors—so constricting.
The expression on his father’s face was far worse than blank—it was utterly consumed. His head rolled from side to side under the weight of his encrusted crown and wet, gagging songs dripped weakly from his mouth. He has no idea where we’re going. Is there enough left of him to bring back even if the Mites die up here?
Finally Kate ssshhhhed them to a halt at the top of a ridge.
“Is the truck near here?” he whispered. Her response was a sharp grab at his cheeks, her palm pressed firmly over his mouth. He shook her away and lifted his father again.
Kate raised the shotgun and squinted into the fog, trying to catch a sign of movement in those fleeting patches of transparent air. Her head turned in response to noises he couldn’t make out over the din. “It’s nearby. I can hear it. I can ... smell it.”
“What do we do?” he asked, trying to make his voice as soft as hers.
She turned to him coldly. “We put your father out front. I’ll guide him, but he’ll walk ahead of us.”
Paul balked. “You can’t do that. How are you going to keep him on course? Keep him on his feet? How do you know it won’t just attack him anyway?”
She pushed Paul away with the barrel of the shotgun. “Better him than us,” was all she said before grabbing the frail man, pushing him forward and nudging him in the back with the gun every few seconds.
The old man seemed to respond to her treatment, falling down less than he had on the lower, steeper ground, but Paul knew it was no use. He watched the tilts of her head, her prods to his father’s shoulders to change his direction. She wasn’t trying to avoid the beast; she was leading them to it.
He groped for the blade hanging from his belt, measuring how easy it would be to just step forward and stab her in the back. If he killed her, what would he do then? Go on, just the two of them, or take his father back down the hill, back within the sanctuary of the Mites?
But Kate’s instincts were less than sure, and when it finally attacked, it was from behind Paul. He smelled it before he heard it, and didn’t see the beast until it was almost too late to dodge the sideswiping blow of its thick, thorn-fringed arm. He let out a scream as he rolled away and couldn’t look up until he heard the first shots.
He could barely make out the three weak silhouettes in the fog: the beast—its outline distorted by jagged horns and crests, the woman firing at it and the thin, frail man with the crown of encrusted flesh—on his knees between them, crawling aimlessly, oblivious to it all. The shells seemed to do little more than slow the creature’s advance, though it staggered a little more with each impact. It kicked his father away as though the man were no more than a scrap of garbage, then lunged at Kate as she screamed and jumped away.
Paul ran to his father and pulled the dazed man to his feet. His father’s eyes fluttered as the pupils spun crazily through the red-veined whites. A stream of meaningless sounds escaped his mouth on a malodorous cloud. The man had just enough energy left to shake off his son’s help and fall back into the wormgrass, sitting with his head slumped forward so that Paul could Clearly see the panic of the thousand Mites that scurried about from hole to hole on top of his father’s misshapen head.
He heard a scream and two more shots.
Paul ran in the direction of the sounds, stopping short when he saw the creature, its back thorns fanning wildly like the wings of a trapped bird, staggering about and finally collapsing on hands and knees as it gave a howl that seemed to fill the countryside.
Paul stepped around the creature carefully, never taking his eyes from it as he approached a winded, wildeyed Kate. She pointed the gun at him to hold him off.
“Kate, you’re not going to shoot me, are you?”
“I can’t kill it! I’ve got to go before it builds up enough strength to stand and come after me—”
“Does that mean I can’t come with you?”
“I can’t lug around some bald, scabby-headed kid and his bug-farmed zombie of a father, Paul!”
Paul gazed into the fog; he could no longer hear or even see his father. I’m not going to leave him here like this. He pushed the barrel of the gun aside. “Wait for me a second, will you? Don’t leave, okay?”
She nodded reluctantly and he ran back to his father, who raised his head and smiled at Paul, then tipped it backward to expose his throat as he collapsed into the wormgrass.
There w
as blood, but less than Paul would have expected.
They found the Straggler’s truck near sunset, but it was useless. The ground around it was dug up in a series of narrow, criss-crossing paths, as though an army of small but vicious animals had passed through, destroying everything in their wake, including the truck’s front end. The metal had been torn and chewed, and everything under the hood twisted and broken and thrown out into the grass. When Kate realized that the truck was beyond hope, she threw her shotgun on the ground and began screaming, her fury building until her knuckles left red smears on the scratched white of the truck.
Paul walked around to where the army had torn through the truck’s rear doors. Now there was only wreckage, scattered into piles of nearly indistinguishable rubble. There were edible strands and clumps and puddles in there somewhere; the smell of it made his mouth water.
But as he crawled into the back of the truck, the failing light revealed something else. Hanging above him were bleached human bones and sheets of dried skin stretched tight over skulls that stared with sunken sockets and generous smiles.
As his fingers poked at the papery strands within one of those eyesockets, he thought of the obese Straggler, his hungry eyes and his desperate offer.
Paul jumped from the truck and dipped his fingers into the jagged tear at the top of a crushed can of nectarine wedges. They tasted of metal and mold, but he had no idea what a nectarine was supposed to taste like and had a lifetime’s experience with the tastes of mold and metal.
He found Kate, looking dumbfounded into her upturned palm and then staring at the sky.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“It stopped. The angelhair. It’s gone.”
“Maybe it ... I don’t know.” He tried to make eye-contact with her, show her his attempt at a hopeful smile. “Maybe that’s a good sign.”
She looked at him, perplexed and unsteady, as though she wasn’t quite sure whether or not to be frightened. “I won’t know where I’m going. Or where I’m coming from. It always ... covered my paths at both ends ... following me, leading me—”
Paul looked at his own palm. Hadn’t there been a smear of his father’s blood there just a short time ago? There was no trace of it now, lost amid the rust and bitter nectarine syrup. He thought of the brittle flesh on the hanging skull he’d touched in the back of the truck. It had been no colder or drier than his own father’s cheeks the moment he’d slit the man’s throat.
He held out a gray wedge of nectarine and Kate leaned forward and sucked it from between his fingers. She made a sour face as she chewed it and looked at him suspiciously. His own face was calm and cold and unperturbed. There was anger in there somewhere ... at her, at his father, at the world; there was fear, too, but it was buried too deep to be much of a problem. For now.
They cleaned out the back of the truck and managed to salvage some of the edibles for the next day’s trip. He wouldn’t let her take down the Straggler’s hanging trophies. That night they made love beneath the gently swaying bones and teeth.
The next morning was hot, wet, and milky white.
It had begun as an insignificant pain, an abscess that nagged when he chewed and when he tried exposing or retracting his eyes too quickly; still, nothing that wouldn’t go away eventually. It had been the stab wound by the female human that had ruptured the abscess and driven the pain deep into his head and down into his gut, where it remained, throbbing and spreading through him. How long had the pain blinded him? How many days and nights had he wandered uselessly, his sense of smell so weakened that he couldn’t even sniff his way home?
He’d finally resorted to lying in the wormgrasses, no longer caring if he was so far down into the valley that the Mites attacked and colonized him. He thought back to the times he’d followed a scent to find it belonged to an animal, alone and apparently uninjured—just lying in the grass, waiting patiently for death.
But the discomfort of his wriggling bed eventually began to overshadow the now diminishing pain. He tossed and turned and finally sat up. He was weak with hunger, and gripped by fear and guilt about the family he’d left behind. He could smell those aching distances and the impenetrable gray in his head cleared into the richly textured daylight fog. He sat for quite some time, admiring the dense hieroglyphic texture of his armored flesh. Then he smelled her.
He stayed close to the trio, eyes focused on the shotgun at her side, the rest of him focused on the smell of her meat and how far that meal might be spread among his cubs. He had withstood the explosions from the shotgun, as painful as they might have been, and he could withstand them again. He would dispatch her quickly this time, cut her and her companions down and not bother to let them marinate in pain and fear before he squeezed their hearts away. He was old, his armor frayed and brittle, and the abscesses were only going to spread and become more obvious with the passage of time. Nothing would ever get close enough to rupture him again.
But this time the shells did hurt and she did not stop firing until he was down and could not stand again. There was a male with her, a young one with even fresher meat on its bones, but he would have neither of them now. They had left one behind, however, a rickety old man who barely gave off a scent at all. When he finally stood and approached the man, he realized why. He was dead and infested with Mites. He was inedible ... probably.
He knelt at the man’s side and clawed a neat slit from breastbone to crotch, reaching inside to palm the last glowing moments of warmth from the cooling heart. But the heart was already cold and dry and it seemed as though it had stopped living a long time ago. He held the heart tightly in his hand for awhile longer, then ran caressing fingers down the rest of the dried, useless organs, pulling apart the foreign, gelatinous infrastructure that had succeeded them all.
He looked into the dead man’s eyes. They were open and staring intently at him. Something inside—the Mites—pulled the cheekflesh away from the mouth, revealing a part of the skullsmile beneath. The head rolled for a moment, then collapsed back into the wormgrass.
When he pulled his hand from the man’s chest, it was covered in transparent jelly and a thousand scurrying Mites. He howled as he shook them away and wiped his hand across the ground, crushing and smearing the wormgrasses with every swipe.
He was still scratching at the memory of them as he followed the scents home. He had no food and was no longer even sure how long he’d been gone—how long had the cubs gone without food? Had his mate needed to hunt in his absence? But there was a familiar trace floating on the air, and it took him only a moment to remember what it was. The fat man—he’d killed a fat human and prepared it exquisitely. He had been at the entrance to the burrow when the female human had found him the first time. So he’d brought back food after all. The traces were minute—the meat had all been eaten days ago.
But other scents began to intrude on him now. As his eyes examined the violently torn paths through the grasses—as though an army of small, voracious carnivores had passed over this terrain—panic swelled within him, washing away all the hunger and traces of the poison that had flooded his system.
They were the wrong scents. He broke into a run when he caught sight of the black slit in the earth—the entrance to their burrow—but he stopped cold when he saw the tiny spine, curled like a tail and resting half-obscured beneath its thick, soft armor shell. There was no meat between the spine and the shell, no blood—just fog and ciliating grasses.
Farther on, another, this one with a few chewed bones attached, its inedible shell shredded and strung out like a tangled web of wire. He felt something crumble beneath his foot: a tiny skull. And there, at the lip of the burrow, a larger skull, broken into half a dozen pieces, its thin, thorned armor spread around it. There were meager strands of meat snaked through the grass. He fell to his knees and pulled the tiny skull toward him, his mournful howl piercing the fog.
He heard a response in the distance. An almost perfect impersonation of his cry. He rose and followed th
e scentless sound through the fog.
The dead man, dried viscera flopping about the lip of the vertical incision, stumbled toward him, the Mites within working their wonders. The high ground was not killing the Mites at all; it was making them stronger.
The look on the dead man’s face was purposeful, threatening when it stepped up to him. It made one last mocking cry. With a swipe of rage, he separated the man’s head from his body. The body continued to stagger about, not much less agile than it had been with a head attached.
He went back to the burrow, collected the remains of his family, and placed them in a half-circle around him as he curled into the darkness to sleep, hoping that the diminishing traces of their scents might soften the bleak edges of his dreams.
But he could not sleep right away, only ponder the shape and disposition of this new army of predators sweeping across his terrain and telling himself over and over again ...
I am not the last. I cannot be the last.
THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE by Andrew C. Ferguson
There is a particular atmosphere about the Jekyll & Hyde early on a Friday evening: the first few drinkers through the double doors order up quietly and talk in a murmur, as if waiting for something to happen.
To a certain extent this is something the place shares with almost every other pub in Scotland, and for that matter perhaps in England and further abroad; for despite changes in working hours in certain occupations, early Friday evening still signals the start of the weekend for the vast majority of us, and this is reflected in the feeling of quiet anticipation in a newly opened pub at this time.
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