A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  I realized the Dead World had automatically locked itself into its traditional locus, once again casting its Awful Shadow over Thuria. We’d come full circle.

  “We’ve saved Thuria,” Perry said. “Now let’s save ourselves.”

  Just as the words left his lips, I heard a crack behind us. I turned and saw a spider automaton’s leg pierce the window and wave about in the air.

  Koort limped toward it with his club raised.

  “No, Koort!” I cried. “You’ll—!”

  Too late. He smashed the spider’s leg but in the process punched a large hole in the weakened spot. The gap filled immediately with another spider. Koort clubbed this one as well, sending it tumbling through the inner space, but now more spiders were beginning to break through other weakened points.

  I grabbed Koort’s arm and pulled him away.

  “Too many of them! The balloon! Run!”

  And run we did.

  With the bandage and some time to heal, Koort was able to run on his own. I grabbed Perry’s double-barreled musket and led the way down the hallway. We made the best speed we could, what with spider automatons beginning to break through all along our path. If one was emerging, or about to, I put a lead ball into it. After two shots, the musket was useless, at least as far as shooting was concerned. The double barrel, however, proved handy for ramming emerging spiders off the underside of the windows without enlarging the hole in the process.

  When we reached the chute, I pushed open the flap to let Perry and Koort enter first. What I saw behind them made my heart quail: a hallway filled with charging spider things. I crowded in behind them and wedged the flap shut with the musket.

  “That should hold them!” I said without the slightest reason to sound so sure.

  We clambered up the chute and reached the surface, where vine-choked Thuria spread across the sky.

  “In!” I cried. “The two of you! I’ll release the anchor!”

  For an instant Koort looked as if he was about to protest, but thought better of it and helped Perry into the basket. As soon as Perry was inside, he began uncleating the anchor rope to give me a little slack. But before I could free the anchor’s fluke from the chute lip I heard a clank! from below, followed by the all-too-familiar sound of countless scurrying metal legs.

  “They’re coming!” I leaped for the basket, crying, “Cut the rope! Cut the rope!”

  “Where’s my knife?” Perry said, frantically patting his pockets.

  I looked over the edge just as the spider horde vomited from the chute. For a moment they scurried around in apparent confusion—we must have seemed to have vanished into thin air—then they discovered the rope and began to climb.

  “Where’s a knife?” I cried. “Someone must have a knife!”

  Since no blade was forthcoming, I pulled my pistol and took aim at the rope. Just as I was about to fire, one of the spiders reached the top edge of the basket, so I fired at it instead. The bullet must have penetrated its solvent reservoir, because turquoise fluid squirted over the rope and the edge of the basket. The rope was fashioned from a Pellucidarian variety of hemp, so it began to bubble and fray. In seconds it parted, and Dinosaur III lurched upward. The spiders clinging to the rope fell back to the surface.

  But they weren’t giving up. They began to climb atop each other, forming an aerial chain that reached for us. I began firing my revolver at the topmost, but for every one I damaged, two or three more immediately took its place.

  Their inexorable progress had brought them to within a few feet of us when I turned to Perry.

  “Can’t this thing rise any faster?”

  “Its buoyancy is fixed.”

  “Koort hate spiders!”

  I looked at the caveman and saw that he’d picked up one of the sandbags we kept on board. Of course! But he had no concept of ballast—he saw it as a weapon. He raised it over his head and hurled a bull’s eye at the growing tower of spiders. Not only did it topple their construction, but accelerated our ascent.

  We left them scattered below in confused disarray.

  XIV

  Relieved, I slumped against the side of the basket as we ascended toward the extra balloon we had left in the null-gravity zone.

  “We’ve done it!”

  “Done what?” Perry said. “The Dead World still acts as a beacon and will draw more Fashioners for harvesting.”

  I scowled at him. “You’re just a font of good cheer, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged. “Just being realistic. At least we have a respite.” A mischievous smile twisted his lips. “I just had a thought.”

  “More doom and gloom?”

  “You decide: Maybe the harvesters aren’t returning for us. Maybe they want the Mahars. Or perhaps”—he gave me a wink and nudged Koort—“they want to collect all the lidi and take them back to their home world.”

  “No!” the Thurian cried. “They cannot! I will kill them all if they try!”

  That’s the spirit, I thought.

  The Fashioners might have created Pellucidar, but it belonged to us now. And we were going to keep it. I would spread the word among the humans and all the species of this world—the Mahars, the Sagoths, the Horibs, even the Gorbuses and Azarians: Keep watching the skies!

  Perhaps this was the threat that would unite us in a common purpose: block the polar entrance and keep Pellucidar safe for all.

  Maybe I’d earn that Emperor title yet.

  THE WIDOW LINDLEY

  The morning Karla Lindley’s daughter disappeared started off pretty much like any other.

  “Look at you,” Karla said as she finished braiding Joanna’s hair.

  Her little girl wore a light blue, long-sleeved cotton dress and pink sneakers. Joanna was a real girly girl who insisted on wearing a dress every day. She hated jeans and shorts. In a way this was good. When she was misbehaving, which wasn’t often, Karla didn’t have to threaten her with physical punishment. The threat of—horror!—having to wear pants was enough to guarantee compliance.

  “Can I go on the swing?” Joanna said in her squeaky voice.

  “It’s awful early, and you just had breakfast.”

  “Please, Mommy, pleeeeease?”

  She never seemed to tire of that swing, though in all fairness it hadn’t been up that long. Barely two months. Jonathan had assembled it just before he—

  Don’t go there.

  “Oh, all right. You put on your vest while I put the kettle on.”

  She hefted the kettle—at least half full and still warm from her first cup. She set the flame to high and took Joanna’s little hand in hers.

  Trees surrounded the backyard on all three sides, oaks and maples up front, all in full fall colors, backed by an impenetrable wall of the town’s ever-present eponymous pines.

  She went to lift Joanna onto the swing seat but the little girl pushed her hands away.

  “I can do it!”

  Karla smiled. “My, my. Such independence.”

  Truth was, Joanna was right. She’d be turning four next month and was quite capable of hauling her skinny little butt onto the seat. More evidence that her baby girl was growing up. Despite the inevitability, Karla hated to admit that her baby wasn’t a baby anymore and would need her less and less as the years went on.

  She also hated to admit that she needed to be needed.

  She’d missed the cut-off date for school this year, but next fall she’d be off to pre-K. That was the rule in Pines: mandatory education from four to fifteen. God, she was going to miss her.

  She watched her little strawberry-blond darling wiggle onto one of the pair of flat board seats—she always chose the one closer to the house—and start leaning backward and forward as she pumped her legs to start moving. Soon she was giggling as she soared back and forth, up and down. Was anything better than the sound of a child having fun?

  Where would I be without you, Joanna?

  Karla had a pretty good idea: a lonely basket case.

&n
bsp; Joanna was all she had. Jonathan had insisted on a house at the edge of town. As a result they had no neighbors and very few friends. No friends, really. Just their family unit of three.

  Now down to two.

  From inside came the high-pitched whistle of the kettle starting to boil on the stove.

  “Be right back,” Karla called.

  “Where you going?”

  “Coffee. Back in a flash.”

  Inside, she turned off the heat. While she waited for the kettle to stop whistling, she spooned coarsely ground coffee into the French press. When the rolling boil had eased, she poured the steaming water over the coffee, stirred the mix, then left it to brew for a couple of minutes.

  In the old days—“old” being five years ago before she’d ended up in Wayward Pines—she’d owned a Keurig machine where all she had to do was pop in a K-Cup of whatever blend she fancied at the moment and have a steaming cup in less than a minute. Then she’d carry it to the computer to check her email.

  She sighed. No Keurig machines or K-Cups in Pines. No Internet either. Not even television. The soaring mountain peaks cut off the signals, they said. But how did they block satellites?

  She shrugged. No matter. She liked her coffee paint-stripping strong, and a French press brewed far more potent joe than any K-Cup could manage. And they all were probably better off without TV and the Internet anyway.

  All . . . that used to mean three, but now it meant two.

  She shook it off. She wasn’t going to think about Jonathan now. Not just yet.

  She looked at the cut-out paper snowflakes festooning the kitchen. Joanna’s work. One a day, every day, since last winter.

  Karla placed the screened plunger atop the carafe and pushed it down, pressing the grounds against the bottom, squeezing the last bit of caffeiney goodness out of them. This was why she used a coarse grind—too fine and the grounds seeped through the mesh. She poured the supernate into her cup, added a teaspoon of honey, a dollop of light cream fresh from the town dairy, and she was ready.

  She returned to the backyard where two empty swing seats swayed in the breeze.

  “Jo? Joanna?”

  No answer.

  “Jo? Where are you? Are you hiding?”

  Hiding wasn’t Joanna’s thing—or at least it hadn’t been. Maybe this was a new game.

  “Okaaay. I’m gonna fiiiind you.” She took a deep gulp of her coffee before setting it on the back steps. “Ready or not, here I come.”

  Trying to put herself in the mind of a four-year-old, Karla looked around and asked, Where would I hide?

  The thick trunks of the trees rimming the property looked good. Karla began walking the perimeter.

  “Am I cold? Am I getting warmer? Am I—?”

  Her throat locked when she saw the broken branches. She froze and stared.

  “J-Joanna?”

  Karla tried to tell herself that Joanna had done this, that she’d pushed her way into the underbrush to hide, but it was too thick for a four-year-old to penetrate on the simple whim of hiding from her mother.

  “Joanna!” A scream now.

  Frantic, she pushed her way into the break and came upon a small area of flattened brush. Flies buzzed around a pile of fresh stool.

  Had something hidden here? Watching? Waiting for its chance?

  She saw paw prints in the moist soil—oblong, each crowned with a line of punctures. Claws?

  “Jesus God!”

  A wolf? A bear? She knew nothing of animal tracks, but what else could make those punctures but claws, talons.

  “Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God-oh-God!”

  Frantic graduated to terrified as she pushed past the flattened brush and deeper into the woods. The undergrowth thinned and disappeared as the trees, mostly pines now, thickened. The forest floor became a cushiony bed of browned needles that stretched away in every direction. They didn’t appear disturbed. The only good thing—if anything could be good about this—was that she hadn’t seen a drop of blood anywhere.

  Karla skidded to a halt, screaming her daughter’s name. And then she stopped and listened—for anything.

  Please make a sound, Joanna. Please!

  Nothing. Nothing moving and no sound but the breeze rustling through the branches above.

  Why wasn’t Joanna calling, crying, screaming? Why hadn’t she made a sound in the backyard? Karla would have heard her—even the slightest squeak of alarm would have returned her to the backyard at lightning speed.

  All her instincts pushed her to run now, run blindly in search of her daughter, but another voice told her she couldn’t do this alone. She was going to need help.

  Reluctantly accepting the hard reality of that fact, she forced herself to turn and race back to the house. She burst into the kitchen, grabbed the phone, and hit 9-1-1. No special emergency services in Wayward Pines, just—

  “Sheriff’s office, Belinda speaking.”

  “This is Karla Lindley!” she said, breathless from panic rather than exertion. “It’s taken my little girl!”

  The voice jumped an octave. “Who? What?”

  “I don’t know! Some animal! A bear or a wolf—I don’t know! It’s taken my baby into the woods behind my house! Tell the sheriff to get up a search party! I’m going after it!”

  “Wait! You shouldn’t—”

  Karla slammed the receiver down and ran back toward the door.

  Wait. She couldn’t go after whatever it was with her bare hands. She needed a weapon. And she knew just where to find one.

  She dashed upstairs to the master bedroom—the one she used to share with Jonathan—and went straight to his closet. She had to rise on tiptoe to reach the metal lockbox. She dragged it down and—of course—it was locked, and—also of course—she didn’t know where he’d kept the key.

  She ran back downstairs to the rear closet. Jonathan’s toolbox sat on the floor, tucked in a rear corner. With shaking hands she pulled out a screwdriver and a hammer. She placed the flat head against the lock. A couple of sharp blows drove it back into the box and the lid popped open, revealing Jonathan’s silvery gun.

  Tiny scintillating lights lit the rim of her vision as she stared at it. She’d known he had it, but she had never seen it before. He’d take it into the woods to practice but always kept it out of sight in his backpack, even in the house. The words .357 MAG – 8 TIMES ran along the barrel, engraved in the steel. She grabbed the wooden handle and felt a strange tingle run through her. Jonathan had never shown her how to shoot, but how difficult could it be? Point and pull the trigger. But first she needed to find something that deserved shooting.

  A sob burst free. She prayed Joanna was still alive.

  She leaped to her feet and then stopped. The gun—was it loaded? She turned it around and looked at the front of the wheelie thing that held the bullets and saw metallic domes in the exposed slots. She would assume that meant the answer was yes.

  She ran for the back door.

  Joanna couldn’t fight the monster anymore. She’d kicked and punched and screamed into the dirty stinky hand clamped over her mouth. Sometimes it slipped over her nose and she couldn’t breathe at all. She felt weak and sick, and kicking, slapping, and scratching didn’t help anyway. She was so scared she’d wet herself. She hoped Mommy wouldn’t be mad.

  She’d been swinging on her swing, waiting for Mommy to come back, when all of a sudden the stinky hand went over her mouth and she was pulled into the air. She’d screamed but she could barely hear herself, so Mommy probably hadn’t heard a thing. Next thing she knew she was pressed against dirty stinky skin as the monster carried her away from her home, straight through the bushes and into the woods.

  Even though she hadn’t got a look at it, she knew this was a monster. Not like the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are. Mommy and Daddy had read it to her many times, though Mommy hadn’t read it since Daddy went away. Those monsters were ugly but they were clean and furry and soft looking. This monster was hard and smooth, and wh
at she could see of its skin through the caked dirt looked like smudgy glass. And so stinky she almost threw up her breakfast.

  The monster wasn’t running but still it moved so fast with its feet barely touching the ground, or at least that’s the way it seemed.

  Where was it taking her? Somehow she didn’t think it was going to crown her king of the Wild Things.

  “Where’s the search party?” Karla said as she reached Sheriff Burke.

  She’d been leaning against a tree trunk, sobbing with fear and frustration when she’d spotted his black Stetson cowboy hat a hundred yards downhill. He wore brown pants and a darker brown jacket with a Wayward Pines Sheriff patch on the sleeve. A brass star was pinned to his red and blue flannel shirt. She’d run to meet him.

  He’d been on the job only a week or so by now. No one knew what had happened to his predecessor, Sheriff Pope. He’d gone off somewhere and not come back. Burke didn’t radiate aggressive authority like Pope. More like cool competence.

  He shrugged the shotgun off his shoulder and pointed it at the ground as she stopped before him.

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “Wh-what?” She couldn’t believe it. “But we need to canvas the whole area!”

  “Probably not the best way. More people mean more noise, and more noise means the more warning it gets.”

  She felt her throat start to close but forced the words through. “Do . . . do you think there’s a chance?”

  “Have you seen any blood?”

  Now her throat was completely locked. She could only shake her head.

  “Okay. At least we’ve got that.” He was staring at the gun in her hand. “Where’d you get the revolver?”

  She managed a breath. “Jonathan.”

  “And he is . . .?”

  Of course. He hadn’t been here long enough to know.

  “My husband.”

  “Okay. How’d he get it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know how to use it?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know the first thing about guns.”

  He sighed. “Look, Mrs. Lindley—”