Aberrations (6 page)

Nyck was muttering to himself.  She called out the half-open window.  “Is it serious?”

“I think we’re leaking fluid.  The grill’s pretty messed up, but I don’t see …” his voice was muffled through the rain.  “Wait, a little blood on the fender, some hair … Jesus, it smells bad.  Like rotten meat or something.”

She could smell it now through the open window, a stench like old garbage or a dead animal lying in the sun.  She almost got out of the car, but something held her back.  If she got out, she had the strangest feeling she would never get back in. 

Nyck wrenched open the hood.  She couldn’t see anything now through the windshield except chipped paint, but she could hear him poking around inside the engine.

That smell...

“Wait,” Nyck was saying.  “I heard something.”  He closed the hood and stepped away from the car, and she called out one more time.  He peered in at her through the half-open window.  His jacket hooded his dripping face so she couldn’t make out his expression. 

“What’s the problem?”

Suddenly she didn’t want to admit she was frightened.  Not to him, not to a man who saw only a hysterical woman who couldn’t get along on her own.

“Nothing,” she said.  “I just thought you might be cold.”

He peered at her for another moment, then turned and began to walk purposefully up the road.  She watched until the mist and the darkness swallowed him up.  Then she opened the glove compartment and fumbled around inside. 

She wasn’t sure of the exact day he had bought the gun.  Maybe it had been before they had moved to their house, but she only learned about it months later.  He showed it to her after they had watched a news magazine special about car jackers, and he tried to pass it off as protection for both of them.  But she knew it meant something else. For her, it was a threat.  For him, she thought, it was a talisman against a darkness deeper than he was willing to face.

When she finally found it tucked among the maps and travel pamphlets, she discovered that her hands were shaking too badly to pick it up. She clutched its oily smoothness, its unfamiliar weight, and dropped it on the floor at her feet.

What am I thinking of doing, exactly?

She stared at the spot where Nyck had disappeared.  Tears of frustration welled up and she angrily fisted them away, blinking hard until they stayed down.  She wanted to go home.  But they couldn’t go home and forget all about tonight, could they?  It was far too late for that. 

Something slipped out of the bushes to her right.

One moment there was nothing but mist and rain and then there was something, not a clear recognizable shape but
something
dark and upright, moving with a speed and agility that seemed impossible for its size, loping across the open, lighted space in front of the car. 

One second it was there, the next it was gone.  All she saw were rustling bushes on the opposite side of the road in the dim light, and then even those slowed and became still.

Her throat suddenly dry, she swallowed with an audible click.  What had she seen in that split second as it passed her by?  A
face
, turning to peer in at her through the glass?

Pulse hammering, she scooted over the gearshift and into the driver’s seat, pumping the gas pedal and turning the key.  The engine ground, turning over once, twice, not catching.  Frantically she pumped the pedal again and listened to the engine turn over.  She smelled gas.   

Molly looked out the driver’s side window at the place where the thing had disappeared.  Imagined it peering at her between the leaves.  Rain pounded the pavement and drummed on the roof.

Nyck materialized out of the downpour a moment later, shouting and gesturing at her as he approached down the center of the road.  She scooted back over to her side of the car.  “What the hell were you doing?” he said after he’d gotten back into the car.  He rubbed his dripping face with the soaked tuxedo jacket and then tossed the jacket into the backseat.  His hair was plastered down around his forehead.  “Were you going to leave me here?  Is that it?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Don’t get cute with me, goddamnit.  I know what you’re thinking.  I used to be a big shot, right?  And now I’m kissing up to Kiernan, a fucking sales executive, for Christ’s sake, just to get hired back at my old firm.”

“It’s a job, Nyck.  A junior rep is better than nothing.  You were looking for a long time.”

“I
know
it’s a job.  But I might as well be washing toilets.  And you know it, don’t you?  You fucking know it.”

“Calm down—”

“I bet you did want to fuck him, didn’t you?  Is that what tonight was all about?  Maybe that baby isn’t even mine.  Am I right?  I’d fucking kill you before I let that happen.  You hear me?”

He’d swung around to face her and raised his fist.  His face was purple and the veins stuck out on his neck.  The words she was going to say, something recycled and familiar, caught in her throat.

“Get out,” she said instead.

She was staring at his hands.  Those black, wiry hairs on them.  He had the same black hairs sprouting across his upper arms.  If she closed her eyes she could see them as he held himself rigid over her in bed, the way he did when he fucked her.  Lately he liked to put it in her ass, and when she said no it seemed to excite him even more.

Violence clung to the air like a scent.  Nyck was still frozen with a fist in the air, a very odd expression on his face.  Almost like shock. 
Why hasn’t he swung at me?
She wondered.
He wants to, I know he does.

His eyes weren’t on her face, but somewhere below.  She was surprised to feel the pebbled grip of the gun in her hand, the oiliness of the trigger under her finger. She couldn’t remember reaching down to pick it up.

She was pointing it right at him.

She could smell the metal and she felt her blood thrum in her veins.

“Molly—”

“Get out,” she said again.  Her hands were steady now.   She cocked the hammer back.

For a moment she thought he would refuse, but then he opened the door and slipped backward out into the mist.

She opened her own door and stood up, feeling the cool air caress her face.  The rain had eased once again and the smell of mud and the leaves of the trees widened her nostrils. 

At the shoulder of the road, behind where Nyck stood staring at her in shock, the bushes rustled.

“I’m going to fucking kill you,” Nyck growled, his confidence trickling back.  He took a half-step toward her.  “How dare you point that thing at me?  Fucking bitch.”

Molly came around the front end of the car.  She braced the butt-end of the gun with her other palm.  She did not look down at her belly, did not take her eyes from Nyck’s face.  But she felt it there, waiting for her to do something.

The creature stepped out of the woods.  It was at least seven feet tall and covered in black, wiry fur.  It stood upright like a man, but had the face of a great ape; the thing’s hands were huge and flat as dinner plates, covered in hair except for the palms, which were deeply creased.  Dirt ringed its fingernails, as if it had been digging in the mud.  Its legs were thickly muscled, toenails curled down and gripping the muddy grass like bear claws.

It bared its inch-long, yellow fangs at her.

She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. 

The gun cracked and bucked in her hands, and she smelled oil and smoke.  When she opened her eyes Nyck had stumbled and she pulled the trigger again and again, the sound of the gun mingling with a low-building howl that came from the thing from the woods as it raised its hairy arms, threw back its head and screamed into the mist.

Finally the hammer fell with a click on an empty chamber.

Molly blinked.  Rain once again shook the hanging branches of the trees.  The mist swirled and eddied and flowed across the open spaces, turning the road into a long, narrow tunnel that led off the face of the earth.

     Nyck lay face down in a pool of blood.  The fingers of his right hand twitched.  He sighed, as if something heavy had been lifted from him, and then the creature had him by the shoulders.  It picked him up as lightly as a pillow and tucked him under one arm, then turned its yellow eyes on her and bared its fangs again.

Blood dripped on the asphalt. 
Drip, drip, drip.

Her hand was numb.  Her face was numb.  The smell of the thing was like a thousand bloody, rancid corpses in a killing field.  She dropped the gun and covered her mouth with her hand, and stepped back as the creature slipped noiselessly through the bushes and disappeared.

Molly waited for another few moments but heard nothing more.  The smell began to fade.  She turned to the car, slipped trembling into the driver’s seat and locked the doors.  Then she dug her phone out of her purse with shaking hands and hit a number on the speed dial.

Joe Kiernan came on the line, sounding groggy.  He barely got out a word before she started talking. 

“I shot him,” she said in a rush. “He knew the baby wasn’t his.  He watched us together all night.  I had to do it or he was going to kill me.”

She listened to Joe’s voice. He spoke for a few minutes and she listened carefully. Joe wanted her to make a note of where it had happened and drive away.  He told her he would send someone to take care of everything.

Then he asked her if she was all right.

She hesitated, glancing back out the rain-streaked window to the edge of the road.  The smell was gone now, and the bushes were still.

“Yes,” she said.  “I’m…just a little rattled, that’s all.”

After they hung up Molly got out of the car.  She kicked the gun into the grass, out of sight.  Then she walked over and knelt, reached down and caressed the huge, misshapen footprint she found there, pictured those claws in her mind as the cold mud squelched between her fingers.  She remembered the screams and the blood.

Then she locked it all up and put it away for good.

Molly turned her back on the woods and returned to the car. A quick twist of the key and the engine roared to life.  She gave it a little gas, eased out the clutch and pulled into the road, driving slowly, carefully, back the way she had come.

She was a long way from home.

Survivors

by Joe McKinney

The ramp dropped open and Canavan’s squad un-assed from the LAAV fighting vehicle to take up their positions amid the rubble.  They’d been fighting for weeks, street by street, building by building, trying to retake San Antonio from the zombie hordes that had overrun it, and now the city lay in smoking ruin all around them.  Everywhere he looked Canavan saw dead bodies, and most of them were still moving.

They were facing south down Broadway, right into the heart of downtown.  Echo Sector.  Their mission was simple.  The lieutenant had located some survivors but now he was surrounded and taking shelter in a fire station off Bonham Street.  Canavan and his squad were to extract the lieutenant and the survivors, and fall back.

Quick and easy.

A pair of helicopters sprinted overhead, flying so low Canavan could feel the thropping of their blades echoing inside his helmet.

One of the pilots spoke to him over his headset.  “Squad Two, you got incoming ahead and to your left.  Clear behind and to the east.”

“Roger that,” Canavan answered.

He turned and motioned to PFC Bill Travis to position his M249 machine gun forward.  Noise from the fighting was bringing more and more zombies into the area, which is what they wanted.  It would ease up some of the pressure on the lieutenant and at the same time put the infected into the meat grinder they’d set up with the LAAVs.

Clouds of smoke and powdered concrete floated across the street ahead of them, blanketing everything in a depthless, churning gray fog.  In the haze, Canavan saw zombies staggering toward them.  He scanned the rest of his squad.  Their eyes were bloodshot and hollow, exhausted, but they knew their jobs.  They’d been through this plenty of times before.  They were steady, and Canavan was proud of them.

Above them, one of the helicopters banked hard and came in low, the downwash from its props momentarily pushing the screen of dust from the street.

It was enough for Canavan to see how deep the shit really was.

Thousands of zombies choked the street.  They poured through the gaps made by the abandoned cars and crumbling buildings, and their moaning was audible even over the rumble of the LAAVs and the ear-splitting shriek of rockets overhead.

The gunners in the LAAVs opened up and Canavan gave Travis the signal to do the same.  Before the fighting had really gotten bad, back when clearing the infected from the overrun cities was still a matter of bullpen strategy, some of the pundits on TV had said it wouldn’t work to unleash bombs and machine guns against the zombies—that only carefully directed sniper fire would work.  That was the only effective way to ensure the headshots that would stop the zombies, they had said.

Well, whoever said that had clearly never fought on the ground with a seasoned urban combat group, Canavan thought.

White lines appeared in the creases at the corners of his mouth as he smiled.

They were kicking ass.

For nearly two minutes the LAAVs churned up the advancing hordes with a steady stream of fire.  The roar of gunfire echoed off the sides of the buildings.  The sky was laced with the smoky trails of rockets.  Canavan took it all in, his eyes moving from side to side as he scanned for gaps in the fire pattern.

But there were no gaps.  They were thinning them out in huge swaths.  The operation was going smoothly, and he was already planning their route through the rubble when the LAAV to their left went silent.

Canavan turned back, but all he could see of the LAAV in the dense screen of dust was a dim, dark outline.

A moment later, the LAAV one block east of them fell silent too.

Above them, the helicopters banked again and sprinted over the rooftops to the east.  Canavan waited, maintaining radio discipline.

Then one of the pilots came on.  “Squad Two, you got a whole bunch of bogies to the east.  Ya’ll need to hump it out there.  Head for Delta Sector.”