The Dark and Shadowy Places

by Caitlin McColl

  #

  Jenson scanned the streets as the airship glided silently above the city. Then he saw her familiar turquoise shawl darting across the street and into a pub. “Ground her!” he shouted to the pilot. He was worried she wouldn’t be there by the time he got to the pub, but to his relief, she was. Along with an older man. An Elder, he noticed with surprise. “What is the meaning of this!” he shouted, storming up to them. Allyson smiled, hanging over a folder with his name on it. “We are going to bring back the sun to Lunestra.”

  City of Lost Hope

  There used to be hope. Now there is nothing. Even in the aftermath of the incident, people still managed to hold onto a bit of hope, somehow, I don’t understand it myself. But there is only so long you can hold onto hope it a place like this, and eventually that all disappeared too. Along with everything else. There wasn’t much of anything left, just shells – shells of buildings, of vehicles, of people. A place like this wears you down ‘til there’s nothing left.

  Just last week I lost my best friend. My sidekick. We’d managed to survive all this time – how long it’s been, I don’t remember. Two years? Five? Whatever it’s been, it must be awhile. Before this started, I didn’t have any grey hair. Now I was more grey than not. Time isn’t important anymore. The only thing that matters is that you wake up to see another day. Sometimes I’m not even sure that matters anymore. I peer out between the slats of the boarded up window from our hovel on the 5th floor of one of the only buildings that are still mostly standing. It’s just my hovel now, I guess. It seems like the sun is reluctant even to show itself. I don’t blame it. If you hide in the shadows, you stay safe, stay alive. In the distance I hear the shrill piercing blare of a warning horn over a loud speaker. One of the few that are still functioning. Thankfully. It’s our only remaining warning system.

  I hear a chime and look down at the display on the screen that’s wrapped around my wrist. It’s cracked now, but still works. I look at the words that appear on the screen, and for a moment I think it’s Randy, but then I remember about last week. I shake my head and squeeze my eyes shut to forget. Instead I see the whole scene behind my eyelids, as if I’m seeing it for the first time, on replay in slow motion. Blood splatters across me, across my back, and hits my hair, soaking in. I can feel it seeping into my clothes, but I don’t look back, even though his screams pierce me like a giant hot knife through my heart. Even though I know, if I was a good person, I would turn back and try to save him. But I also know that as soon as they catch you, you’re beyond saving. And they’ll put him out of his misery soon enough. If I’d stayed, tried to help him, it would have just made things worse. My shirt was damp – with sweat or blood, or both I couldn’t tell. I just ran. Ran blindly at first, throwing one or two of the items that I’d scored from that section of the city back behind me, to distract them. If they were people chasing after me, it would be the equivalent to putting large pieces of furniture in their way – it would slow them down slightly. Not much, only once they figured out it wasn’t alive. They weren’t that stupid. That’s why I usually grabbed meat along with other confiscated things. Meat confuses them for a moment, until they realize it doesn’t have a beating heart and pumping blood.

  Tears began to well and force themselves out of the corners of my eyes. I scrub my arm across my face wiping them away, and stare bleary eyed at the screen. The message scrawls across it. Three words in capital letters that chill my blood and for a moment I think my heart has stopped. THEY HAVE ARRIVED. I know who it’s from without waiting for the name at the end – one of the four guard towers, positioned at each corner of our last little bastion of safety – the one corner of the city that had not yet fallen to them.

  But now our little safety zone had been breached. I was alone. Yes, there were a few people hunkered down in the same abandoned building as I was, with the weeds and vines growing up through the concrete, and the broken floorboards, but I was still alone. Alone without Randy, but with the somewhat comforting feeling of my rifle that I’d made a sling for across my back, like some kind of ancient Samurai.

  The siren blare seeped back into my consciousness. It was going on longer than normal. I wondered where the breach was. A beep on my arm answered that question – it would be the same information everyone else with a communicator would be receiving. It was next to the large Supermarket down near Main and 37th Avenue. The supermarket was just outside the perimeter. But it wasn’t really a supermarket anymore. Hadn’t been in a long time.

  Instead of stopping this time, my heart began to beat fast – faster and harder than if I was sprinting a marathon. The Supermarket – was now the ‘uperma et’ as the front of the store read. The other letters had fallen off, or even used as weapons. I could see as if it was yesterday a small old lady brandishing the giant S and swiping it back and forth in an arc across her, fending off the moving bags of skin and bone. But the S wasn’t enough to protect her in the end.

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit. It was just a few blocks away from me. Meaning they were just a few blocks away from me. I peered down the street, trying to see if I could see anything. Nothing. Yet. I dropped the slat again, closing off my view of the dead city around me. A dead city figuratively and literally. A city of lost hope. I secured my gun in its improvised holster across my back and went to the window across the room, the one with the fire escape.

  I stepped onto the rusted metal platform of the fire escape and placed a booted foot on the first rung. It squeaked noisily, protesting my weight with its age. It shook slightly. Or maybe it was me that was shaking.

  I climbed down the ladder as quickly as I could, and dropped to the ground, hanging onto the last rung for a moment before letting go and falling. I’d done this a million times before. A million times when it didn’t really matter. Trust me to land on my ankle wrong on the one time it really matters. I muffled my scream, and pushed myself up. I heard a noise, a low susurrus like dried leaves blowing across cement. I froze. Even without looking I knew what that noise was. It wasn’t dried leaves – there were no more trees in the city. Or anywhere for thousands of miles. It was shuffling. The slow and steady movement of thousands of bodies. Thousands of bodies with dry, papery skin. Like mummies. I didn’t turn to look.

  I removed my rifle, and stuck the butt of it under my arm, like a crutch, and I began to run in the opposite direction – fully aware I was a lame duck right in front of a pack of wolves. But what else could I do? I had to at least try. Maybe there was some hope left after all. I ran.

  THE COURAGEOUS SHERRIFF

  The bartender slid the drink across the dirty scuffed wood that separated them both. Johnathan looked at it with a mix of confusion and disgust. It was a muddy looking thing that was served in a raggedly cut half of a coconut. He eyed the rainbow striped stick that bobbed languidly on its side in the liquid. He picked it up limply and shook the brown liquid from it. “What’s-” he began.

  “It’s a pixie stick,” the bartender explained with a shrug. “Don’t ask me, I just make these things. You asked me for the special, that’s the special. The Courageous Sherriff.”

  Johnathan looked up sharply and stifled a laugh, and the bartender continued it. “Again, I don’t have anything to do with the name of these things either. Don’t blame me. But trust me,” he said, seeing Johnathan eyeing the drink warily. “It might look odd, but it tastes good.”

  “What is it?” Johnathan dipped a tentative finger in and licked it. It looked like disgusting mud but actually tasted pretty good.

  “One ounce of Chocolate liqueur, one and a half ounce coffee liqueur with a couple dashes of egg nog.”

  Johnathan picked up the coconut, trying unsuccessfully not to slosh any of the drink over the side and took a sip.

  “Don’t forget the pixie stick,” the bartender reminded him, handing Johnathan a pair of tiny scissors to snip the end off the plastic tube holding the rainbow coloured sweet-stuff.

  Johnathan’s eyes went briefly to th
e scissors. Weapon, his mind shouted. A miniscule weapon, but one nonetheless.

  He took the scissors, willing his hand not to shake, and cut the tip off the pixie stick and watching the powder stream into the chocolate coffee liqueur like a rainbow. He realized he was still holding the mini-scissors. Slowly he lowered them to the bar, but kept them on his half of the bar, not pushing them back to the bartender’s side as someone else would do. Someone normal, he thought as he took a large sip of the drink that tasted more like a dessert than alcohol. Not his usual sort of thing, that’s for sure. But it was good.

  “What’s this called again?”

  “The Courageous Sherriff,” the bartender replied, seemingly having forgotten about the small weapon that sat in the shadow of Johnathan’s coconut shell cup.

  “Ah, yes.” How could I forget that, he thought as he choked down a laugh with another swallow of the chocolatey drink. He slid the scissors off the bar and into his pocket. You never knew when something like that would come in handy. It could have come in handy earlier today, he thought bitterly.

  He watched the bartender carefully, but the man had already moved away and was serving the next customer.

  Johnathan waited, holding his breath as he listened to what the man with the young woman beside him ordered and was relieved when they both just ordered a beer, and not the special that required the small scissors to cut open the pixie stick.

  He gulped down the remainder of his drink, slapped some bills on the bar top and made his exit. He didn’t think the bar man would remember the small scissors until later. Or maybe not even at all tonight.

  He hoped that the drink would give him what the name implied – courage. Especially when he saw his face appear on the TV above the bar. He saw his name flashing underneath the picture of his mugshot. Johnathan Chase.

  Thankfully the sound was turned down, so most people didn’t look up at the screen but Johnathan knew what the Newscaster would be saying anyway. Underneath his name were two words that said it all – more than the newscaster would be if the volume was up, attracting eyes around the room. Escaped Convict, it said in bright red, stamped underneath his name and washed out worn police station photo. He was thankful it wasn’t any more specific than that. That it didn’t say Escaped From High Security Prison. That was his cue to leave.

  He shouldered his way out of the pub and into a fine drizzle that had a reddish glow from the neon lights of the bar’s name that flickered lazily and realized he was still holding his half coconut. He was about to toss it when he stopped his hand cocked behind his head and lowered his arm, and decided to hold onto it. He had the small scissors and now he had some coconut to nibble on in a pinch if it came to it. He took a bite of the meat that tasted a little bit of the liqueur. Almost $8 for barely anything, he grumbled.

  It was dark. Johnathan didn’t know what time it was except it was night, and cold and rainy. The coconut seemed oddly out of place here, in winter in the Pacific Northwest. He shivered in the thin grey shirt he wore. He had taken it from the locker in the Sherriff’s office. From the night shift guard. He’d torn off the name patch that was sewn onto the breast. He wore it loose over the non-descript pants of his prisoner’s uniform.

  He took a deep breath of the cool air. It had been a long, long time since he had been outside. Actually outside, and not just stuck in a small fenced in patch of outdoors. Everything looked like he remembered it. Except…he blinked. Did he just see what he thought he had?

  Sure, he’d been locked away, kept separate from the rest of the living, breathing world for longer than anyone really should…but… He shook his head, and then shook it again, and looked into the empty half of the coconut he still held, wondering what else was in there besides pixie dust and liqueur. He looked across the parking lot into the darkness and then turned around and pushed the door he had just walked through back open again and stormed up to the man behind the bar, annoyed that the bar separated them. He shook the coconut fiercely. “What did you put in this?” he shouted, aware of eyes all around the bar turning in his direction. The bartender took a step back, bumping into the shelf that held various bottles of whiskey, vodka and gin.

  “What?” the man said, his voice shaking slightly. “Nothing. I mean, just what I said. Nothing strange.” The bar man brought out a bowl of pixie sticks from underneath the bar, and a bottle of egg nog from the mini fridge behind him, and gestured to the two bottles of liqueur that sat side by side on the surface he was pressed up against. “That’s all. That’s it. We serve it all the time.”

  Johnathan lowered his voice, and tried to control his face. He knew he must look crazed. He felt crazed. Anyone would, he thought, after what he’d just seen. But it couldn’t have been The Courageous Sherriff. It was barely a couple mouthfuls. He’d drank a lot more in the past, before his immediate past, that is, and he’d never seen anything like what was outside, at the other side of the parking lot, the dim reddish light of the pub’s sign reaching just to the other side of the parking lot and no more. A street light along the road just met the edge of the reddish light of the sign and it was in the middle of these two puddles of light he had seen the thing. At first he thought it was a deer. That would make sense, he thought. That would be rational. There was a lot of forest around here. Lots of trees, lots of trails and wildlife that bled right up to the edges of all cities, large and small, in this part of the world.

  Johnathan glared at the man behind the counter who still held himself as far away from him as he could, despite the wooden expanse between them and turned back around and out the door. He closed his eyes as he took the first few steps onto the pavement of the parking lot. He hoped that when he opened them, the thing would be gone. That it was just something he imagined in his fevered panic to leave the bar, his distracted mind at being spooked seeing himself on the news, and the risk of being recognized by one of the patrons.

  His foot hit one of the concrete parking spot dividers and he opened his eyes. And met the dark ones of the creature who still stood in the patches of light. The thing was a man, Johnathan was sure. He was tall, and muscular, and would be nothing out of the ordinary, except for the fact that it only wore trousers. It was topless, exposing a well muscled stomach, chest and arms. That would be slightly odd, considering it was the middle of the night, and hovering around freezing. But Johnathan had seen plenty of strange things in his life. It was the antlers on top of its head that bothered Johnathan. At first he thought the …monster was wearing some sort of hat, and the antlers were fake. But in the light, it was clear that they grew directly out of its head, through shaggy brownish hair, that curled, almost shoulder length, under its ears.

  Johnathan stared at it, his Courageous Sherriff coconut hanging limply, forgotten, in his hand. The creature stared back at him, its eyes dark and glowing, reflecting the light back as the eyes of animals do. Johnathan didn’t know what to do. And then the solution presented itself. The creature took a strange, loping step forward, towards him, and another, almost gliding across the smooth concrete. Johnathan heard a strange hollow sound as the thing moved and he looked down and saw not shoed feet but hooves just like the deer he originally mistook the thing for. The deer-man stopped and raised his hand, hitching a single finger in a way that signalled he wanted Johnathan to come to him.

  He stood, frozen, and shivered, though not from the cold wind that blew through his thin stolen shirt. The creature beckoned him again, and took another two strangely long strides towards him. Now it stood wholly in the red glow of the neon sign, just a hundred yards or so away. Johnathan saw its face – entirely human, except for the two antlers that jutted out of the top of its head, ending in three prongs on one, and four on the other.

  The man-thing smiled, revealing strange teeth that looked…not right in a human face, and pointed a finger this time at the coconut that Johnathan still held.

  Johnathan followed the finger, and realized he was gripping the coconut tightly, his nails digging in to i
ts white flesh.

  “The Courageous Sherriff, I see,” it said, in halting words.

  “Uh, yes?” Johnathan didn’t know what else to say.

  The man met his eyes again and Johnathan was shocked at how human they were. They were blue, and didn’t look any different from his. Except that they glowed in the dark.

  “Then you need help.”

  “I, uh…,” Johnathan broke the man’s gaze and found himself staring at the creature’s lower body. It wore pants that looked like they were made by hand, soft leather stitched together and skin tight, showing off its powerful hooved legs. “I just ordered the special,” he explained.

  The thing laughed, a strange, strangled sound that caused Johnathan to look up again, trying to avoid the antlers. “That is what people order when they are lost, when they don’t know what they want. It is people like that, like you, who we are here to help.”

  The deer man turned and headed for the trees on the outskirts of the parking lot. It bent a finger. “Come.”

  What other option did he have?

  Johnathan shrugged and followed it into the darkness.

  The Griefstruck Earth

  Usually you don’t remember specific days. At least I don’t. But I’ll remember last Saturday for the rest of my life. It started out like any other Saturday. I was walking down the sidewalk toward the bus stop, minding my own business and avoiding looking at anyone too closely, when two…people, I couldn’t tell if they were men or women, they were wearing all black with their faces and hair hidden by balaclavas, grabbed me by the arms and dragged me into a large glass building that I’d walked past a million times before and never really given a second glance.

  I hadn’t even had time to scream. I heard the sound of the doors sealing hermetically behind me as I went through the first set of doors, cutting off the outside, before stepping through the second layer of doors into pristine controlled air and before I knew it, I was being marched briskly down sterile narrow white hallways. I was about to open my mouth, to question my abductors when they shoved me into a dimly lit room and my courage that had started to come up was squashed back down again. My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the sudden change in light. I vaguely made out a large circular table, a dark hole in the middle of the room. Around the table sat people I could barely make out in the darkness. They wore all black, like my captors, but I could see their eyes, glinting dully in the small amount of light that shone in through a narrow window in the far corner of the room. I pressed a button on the side of my goggles and the room brightened.

  One of the figures around the table, opposite me, stood up. "Welcome to GES," he said, in a soft voice that was somehow commanding at the same time smiling widely, his teeth brilliant white in contrast to his dark skin.

  I opened my mouth and then closed it again. I didn't know who he was or why I was here. I removed my respirator that I hadn’t even had a chance to remove once I’d been taken inside. "What?" I said lamely.

  Another voice piped up. I didn’t see who said it, but it was female. “The Griefstruck Earth Society.”

  I didn’t want to sound dumb, but I couldn’t help it. “Um, what?” I repeated.

  The man who had stood up replied, echoing the woman. “This is the Griefstruck Earth Society.” I could see his arm gesturing to the people sitting around the table.

  “Okay,” I said, drawing out the word. “I don’t know what that is, or why I’m here.”

  “We heard you know about Earth.”

  I laughed. I didn’t know about Earth any more than anyone did. Not really. Just what you could glean from books. They had transferred all the books in history into digital code, just before the end, thankfully. But I knew you couldn’t really know something just from reading about it.

  Sure, I taught the local high school kids about it, what it used to be like, when we used to live on it. It was hard to get past the glazed-eye looks my students gave me in class. They didn’t want to learn about some place none of them had been to, or could ever get to. It was little more than a chunk of rock now, with its atmosphere stripped away to nothing. So why were we still teaching about it? It was ancient history. It had been at least two centuries since people had been on earth, since the evacuation in the mid-21st Century. Even though the cities that we lived in mirrored those on Earth, it still wasn’t the same. I knew that. I knew it every time I looked up at the watery sulphur yellow of our sky, through my protective goggles. I knew it from the thick coated glass of our buildings, to help reflect some of the light, and protect from the harsher pollutants in our atmosphere.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” I admitted. “I’m just a teacher.”

  “But you specialised in the 21st century, did you not?” said a man next to the leader.

  “Yes, but-”

  “We have a plan. You know Islands? We’re trying to terraform one so it’ll be an Earth-Twin.”

  The islands. Large masses of so-called land made of what my mother used to call ‘moon rock’ when I was a little girl. Even though our world didn’t have any satellites like Earth’s moon. It was light, airy, volcanic stone and in our atmosphere the large slabs of rock floated miles above the planet’s surface.

  One of the larger ones was where the World Government was. The World Government was its own small city. There were no individual rulers, no separate countries, nothing as interesting as it was on Earth.

  “We need to convince the World Government that we can build another Earth.”

  I stared wide-eyed and open mouthed at the collection around the table. My hand rose to my mouth in shock. “Why in the world would you want to do that?”

  “Because-” the woman who spoke before began. I saw her now, a slim blond woman. Her respirator, like the others, hung loosely around her neck. Her goggles were darkened so I couldn’t see her eyes.

  “It’s a fool’s errand,” I spat. “Why would you want to replicate Earth? You obviously know absolutely nothing about it. If you did, you wouldn’t want to rebuild it. We’ve moved on from it. We’ve moved past the atrocities that we humans caused back then. Before we were forced to leave. We left because we messed up, and we couldn’t undo it. Why would you want to put people through that again?” I was dumbfounded. It was ridiculous. “You shouldn’t even have this society,” I said plainly. “We shouldn’t grieve for Earth, we should grieve for us, if anything.”

  I turned to leave and went to put my respirator back on in preparation. The two who had grabbed me off the street blocked my way.

  “It’s too late,” The dark skinned man with the commanding voice said. “We’ve already started. And we’ve hired you as our Chief Advisor.”

  I turned slowly. “We?”

  “We are the Governor’s main advisory committee,” someone in the room explained.

  “But why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” The blond woman said, her eyes unreadable behind her dark visor.

  I shook my head.

  “We’ve already failed here. We tried to make this Earth version 2, but it’s already dying. We need to start again. We need to get it right, this time.”

  My shoulders drooped and I smiled sadly. “You don’t understand,” I said quietly. “I don’t think we’re capable of ever getting it right.” I shoved myself between the two black clothed members and walked purposefully down the white hallway, adjusting my face mask before opening the doors to the outside world. What was left of it.

  Long Way from Nowhere

  Being trapped in the empty cafeteria of an abandoned army outpost in the middle of the Nevada desert with a hysterical wannabe celebrity, mascara dripping down her face making her look like something from a circus show on drugs, and a ghost named George was the last thing that Annie Headley would have thought she would be doing on a lazy summer Sunday afternoon.