Broken (26 page)

“Beautifully written,
dark and eerie vision of an apocalyptic future.”
- Margaret Weis, New York Times Bestselling Author

“David H. Burton is a
dark new talent in the genre. This one will make you leave the
lights on for a week!”
- Cathy Clamp, USA Today Bestseller

Prologue

Catherine looked at her watch. The battery had passed on to more
alkaline pastures, so it read the same as it always did —
quarter to eleven. Its delicate, cartoon hands were frozen in a
timeless Charleston pose. It was a reminder of simpler times, of
safer times.

Groaning, she pried her backside from a faded canvas lawnchair
and leaned it against the wall. She fisted her hands on her ample
hips.

“Where is my Ben?”

The question was aimed at no one in particular. It might have
been the cat she spoke to, but the cat was dead — three days
gone.

Sadie. Poor Sadie.

She stared into the distance, beyond the edge of scotch pines
and white cedars. Dark clouds hovered on the horizon.

“He’s not usually gone this long.”

Catherine grunted her displeasure and opened the screen door.
She strode into the kitchen where she grabbed a plastic cup and
dipped it into a cast-iron pot. Her lips quivered over the
piss-warm liquid.

Water.

She hated it. She tired of boiling it every day. What she wanted
was a tall glass of lemonade — pink, with three ice cubes.
Yet Catherine knew there would never be lemonade again.

She forced herself to swallow and took her cup with her to the
orange sofa bed. Her reflection stared back at her from a dust
covered relic on the floor. Its black plastic casing had barely a
scratch.

Catherine missed television, if only for its connection to the
remainder of the world. It stopped working after the Shift, two
years prior.

Two years since the world fell apart.

Two years since everything went to shit.

For months she had wept, longing for everything lost to her; her
parents, her friends, her brother — all gone.

Yet Ben had helped her through it. Ben was her life now. There
was only her Ben.

Her gaze wandered to a tattered blue afghan crumpled in the
corner.

And poor Sadie.

The cat had been snatched up by vile beasts, things she had
never heard of. They crouched low to the ground, yet could stand on
two feet. At first she thought wolf, but they were weightier and
crooked. And they possessed a cunning no animal should. Catherine
had no idea of their origins. She knew only that they were
unnatural — not something of this world.

At least, not the world Catherine knew.

Her Ben assured her they were gone, but Catherine wasn’t
convinced. Even that morning she thought she heard their hideous
cackling in the distance. She pleaded with Ben to avoid hunting in
the forest, yet he refused to listen. They needed more food, he
said; she ate for two now. So, dressed in his khaki pants and green
plaid shirt, her Benjamin Green stepped out the door with makeshift
bow in hand.

Catherine bit her lip and placed her hands over her swollen
belly, a reaction she was prone to of late. He had been gone for
the entire day.

In the distance, the storm churned and a harsh rumbling shook
the walls.

Soon the winds will come.

She wondered how their cottage still stood, battered as it was;
as if their insignificant lives weren’t worthy of the storms that
swept the lands. She looked back to the television, and it sat as a
sedentary reminder of what once was. The man on the newscast said
the Earth had shifted on its axis, aligning itself with the
magnetic poles.

She continued to stare at the lifeless screen, remembering what
it had shown, as if the little black box was a window to the past.
She could still see the darkened skies torched with volcanic fire,
the ground splitting open to swallow cities, and land masses
arising from the depths of the sea. The Shift had released some
kind of darkness upon the land, and brought with it creatures that
had no business walking the Earth. Dead relatives could be seen in
spirit form, shadowy creatures swept past windows in the night, and
spirits rose even in the light of day. Then the newscasts
stopped.

Everything stopped.

For months the storms persisted, the earthquakes continued, and
life in some twisted form endured. The east and west coasts were
lost, a cloud of death drifted through the land, and ordinary
people manifested strange abilities.

Catherine knew all about the latter.

She said nothing to Ben for fear of rejection. It happened to
her, sometime after she got pregnant; she was able to do things she
never could before, like when she called forth a power that scared
off the wolf-like beasts. She had no idea what it was or how to
summon it again, but it terrified her. Her Ben called these things
sorcery, witchcraft, an abomination to God.

She rose from the sofa, passing the antique grandfather clock
with its mechanical sparrow dangling over its perch. Twenty minutes
before nine, it read. It still worked.

A chill sat on the air, or perhaps it was just a cold notion
coursing through her veins. Either way, the result was the same,
and Catherine waddled over to the wood-burning stove. Her toes were
cold.

She ripped pages from an old science textbook, grabbed a small
log, and shoved them in. Ben always tended the fire. Never let it
go out, he said.

The flames ravaged the paper, and the fire flared to life once
more. She remained for a moment, warming her feet and hands, before
shuffling back out the door.

The storm no longer ambled in the distance, but loomed on the
edge of the trees. The wind tousled her scarlet hair, and Catherine
watched as destiny floated towards her with dark clouds clenched in
its fists. At the edge of the woods, the great pines bowed to the
wind’s might.

“Where is my Ben?” she asked.

There was no reply.

She held on to her ragged yellow dress as she peered over the
railing, and pellets of frigid rain pricked her skin. On the
borders of the forest, mounds of creeping phlox littered the ground
with their trails of blue flowers. They spread out endlessly, never
dying off. Winter was no more in this part of the world; a place
where snow once offered a light dusting at Christmas — rare,
but beautiful nonetheless.

Yet never again.

The Shift had seen to that.

The wind sighed through the leaning trees, and her nostrils
caught the scent of musk. Movement skirted the shadows, and hope
surged within her.

“Ben?” she called.

Silence.

Then wicked laughter.

Catherine stared into the woods, and as lightning speared the
sky something caught her attention. She wobbled down the wooden
staircase. Her pale hands gripped the railing. The steps groaned
under her weight.

Lightning pulsed again across the heavens, illuminating the
copse of swaying trees once more.

“No,” she breathed.

Her heart pounded in her chest, and one of her tattered shoes
fell off as she raced to the edge of the woods.

“No,” she muttered, her worst fears being realized,
“no, no, no.”

She stooped to the ground.

Lying among the delicate blue flowers was an arm, severed at the
shoulder. The hand still clutched a makeshift arrow. She might have
fooled herself were it not for the green plaid sleeve.

“My Ben,” she sobbed, caressing the hand.

Twigs snapped and Catherine turned. A wolf-like muzzle inched
toward her face, viscous tongue licking jagged teeth.

The child inside her stirred and thunder pounded in her
chest.

The dripping maw opened.

Catherine clutched Ben’s arm. His blood stained her fingers.

She called upon anything that would help her.

At any cost.

“Please.”

Chapter 1

The masses received the Lord’s blessing and confessed for
transgressions against their fellow man. With strained voices, they
praised the Lord with song, and begged forgiveness for the inborn
sins of their self-righteous souls. And as the church bells pealed,
dismissing the congregation from the stiff wooden pews that reeked
of pine oil, Paine Robertson slipped out the door like the serpent
out of Eden.

He walked across the dirt road, with the late June sun
scorching his tawny locks, to the freshly-swept porch of Fillmore’s
Leathers. He plopped upon the wooden planks and waited for his
parents to finish mingling with the rest of the Lord’s flock. Off
to the side the wind dusted their horse and cart with a light layer
of dry earth. The few provisions they procured, as well as the
goods they failed to sell, sat as a reminder of their misfortune.
It was getting worse every week, fewer and fewer of the townsfolk
willing to barter with them. Paine knew why.

How dare they judge him.

Even his parents’ frustration was surfacing at the rumors,
evident in their recent shortness of temper and talks of parting
ways. A few weeks prior they spoke of Paine and his sister moving
on — of starting their life elsewhere; preferably in another
town. It made him feel like a dirty rag no one wanted to touch
unless there was nothing left to use. He suppressed those feelings,
refusing to even mention it to his sister.

He did that a lot of late, keeping things to himself. It
started when the visions in the mirrors began, two years prior. The
voices taunted him, tempted him with knowledge of things unknown,
and tantalized his innermost wants. He had followed their
instructions, sacrificing small birds and squirrels to the blood
spells they had urged him cast, but their promises were false, and
amounted to nothing. As a result, he scorned them, ignored their
whisperings.

And then one evening he had made the singular mistake of
revealing their presence to his parents. His mother immediately set
about destroying all the mirrors in the house and then turned on
her son and beat the evil out of him.

After that, and threats to send him off as a laborer, Paine
censored what he revealed. He held his tongue and took his beatings
with a quiet resolve because despite their firmness of discipline,
he needed the elderly couple that had raised him.

At least for now.

Things had even been calm for awhile; pleasant, in fact. Yet
over the last few weeks matters worsened. The change in his
mother’s attitude was noticeable. Slow was the indoctrination, but
evident enough. The beatings were becoming more frequent. Something
was changing her, and that something was connected to the arrival
of the Reverend Chapman.

It sat like a bad apple within him.

Paine winced as he leaned against the post; the strap marks
had not yet completely healed.

He watched his parents as they waited, like bleating lambs
lining up in front of the slaughterhouse. Many of the parishioners
waited to speak with the good Reverend, thanking him for his
eloquent sermon about the evils of witchcraft. It was a message
Paine thought typical of the new Church of the Ascension and the
man who came all the way from the Confederation to lead it.
Schooled at Ascension College he was; a son of aristocrats;
learned.

Arrogant was more like it.

The Church was in service four weeks now, replacing the
battered chapel that had been used for centuries. The relic sat
like a forgotten silhouette to the white, stone splendor that rose
above the willows with a single, shining pinnacle. Although he
never enjoyed Sunday sermons, Paine possessed a fondness for the
old chapel, with its ancient smell and creaking floors. Its stone
foundation was from the old world, from the time before the Shift
ripped the Earth apart. That made it over five hundred years
old.