Descended from Darkness: Apex Magazine Vol I Page 18

  Over something.

  He hit the floor hard but uninjured. He looked to his left and thought he saw a giant snake, something like a huge red boa constrictor, moving toward his family. His eyes flew wide open and a cold revulsion made him scurry back.

  Dale gained his feet and saw it just as the wrist flexed and the palm spun and opened. The long fingers flapped in anticipation, and Pam's scream turned to a ripping, horrible sound. Her eyes looked about to pop out, and a ragged girl-child rose to replace the woman in her face, sunken-eyed and savage.

  The long arm had come in through the belly door membrane. Dale stomped on it, crushing down with his heel, once, twice, six times. The arm retreated a little but more in surprise than pain, then plunged toward his family again.

  Pam screamed his name, Tommy screamed Daddy, and it was like a nightmare. The complete lonesomeness of his responsibility seemed to press on Dale's head like a vice. For a moment his mind slid into a helpless swirl of stars and screams.

  Then he jumped over the arm and grabbed the cattle prod. The arm leapt when stung, flying into the ceiling and bringing a rain of plaster. He hit it again and had to duck as it swept sideways sending light fixtures and pictures to the floor. Pam scurried beneath the table with Tommy and held a chair in front of her like a hysterical lion tamer.

  The house howled and leaned forward, cracking more plaster, trying to get its arm through the door up to the shoulder. Blood dripped everywhere. Dale shocked it half a dozen times, then stabbed the prod right into the flesh like a spear.

  The arm ripped out of the house like a length of anchor chain.

  * * * *

  "Pam."

  She sat on the edge of Tommy's bed, upstairs, staring straight ahead.

  "Pam."

  He snapped his fingers in front of her face.

  "Please talk to me."

  He looked over his shoulder. Something was moving over the exterior of the house. It whispered along the skin like a vampire bat, then pressed against the house's back like a face in a cake. Knuckles. Pam's face tightened and so did her grip on Tommy, who sucked his thumb on her lap. Mother and son had become one, but not Dale; he seemed to dance all around them.

  "It can't get to us up here. It can't come up the stairs. Not all the way up."

  Pam's ragged new girl-face was ghostly in the dim bedroom. The candles and portable lights had run out weeks before.

  Finally her eyes fixed on his. "They're all dead, Dale. No one's coming."

  He sat and stroked Tommy's forehead with one finger, sensing the furious youthful rationalizing going on in there.

  They lay in darkness on Tommy's bed, listening to the thick sound of worms dropping from the ceiling like ripe fruit, listening to them writhe beneath the acrid mist that clung to the floor, giving a graveyard effect.

  They could make all the worm mush they wanted now but couldn't feed the house: there could be no more going outside with the arm free.

  Dale considered a run in a hub ship, and maybe they could find a friendly rock not too far away. But they'd probably wind up starving just the same, only adrift and in mindless horror.

  * * * *

  Dale gave up on sleep and went to check the barrier blocking the front door. The boards with nails pounded through them hadn't been disturbed. Nevertheless, he looked over his shoulder as he baked pies out of diseased matter and connective tissue, smoking them in battered tins to cover a taste too vile even for real hunger.

  He brought their breakfast upstairs, hoping Pam didn't notice how he had to duck into the room.

  The house was getting smaller.

  He set a big reeking pie on a bed tray where Pam and Tommy sat with their legs under the blanket, and that was when the house blasted through the barrier over the front door, sending boards clattering all over the living room. It howled with rage as the nails bit into its knuckles.

  "No!" Pam snarled.

  The house swayed drunkenly left and forward, plaster dust rained, and there was a sound like a German shepherd rampaging up the stairs.

  In a corner of the doorway, Dale saw the tip of a big red finger. He gaped at it. The house tilted further over, and as the shrunken room canted, most of the hand came into view.

  It wrapped around the doorframe and ripped off a chunk of the wall. The fingers scuttled on the floor.

  Dale pried Pam's fingers from his shoulders. He went stonily to the corner of the room and picked up the twenty-pound sledgehammer he'd set against the nightstand. He raised it over his shoulder and smashed in the last knuckle of the longest finger.

  He heard Tommy crying, distantly.

  The hand flopped around like a giant bird and then whipped away down the stairs.

  * * * *

  While foraging, he sometimes passed the unmarked closet where the house's blackly gangrenous testicles hung, hearing the faint creak of the metal ring that kept them locked in there, softly pendulating. Soon they would simply lie on the floor, a symbol of his lost control.

  They moved Tommy's bed to the corner of the room to keep the maximum distance from the pattering fingers when they came in the night.

  After keeping a long silence, Tommy said, "Why does the house hate us?"

  "It doesn't hate us, buddy. It's just hungry, like us."

  Tommy's eyes widened in expanding horror as he interpreted this, and Dale cursed himself. He stroked his son's hair until he fell asleep, Pam curled in his other arm and the sledgehammer handle laid across them.

  * * * *

  "What's that sound?" asked Pam in the darkness.

  "What time is it?"

  "What's that? Listen."

  A woody scraping noise like fingernails on a coffin lid.

  Dale was grateful for the darkness as he frowned. "It's nothing," he said.

  "Dale," she said, her voice rising in hysterical crescendo, "The bed is moving across the floor!"

  It was. Just a few millimeters at a time as the house shrank and the walls compacted. The bed was edging toward the doorway.

  But what amazed him was the way Pam had sprung up on all fours, covering not only his son but himself as well.

  * * * *

  Dale's lines of tape retreated in concentric rings, day by day, until they reached the foot of the bed. But he didn't get angry or panicked.

  He'd had a realization.

  It was the house that mattered first and foremost. Its skin was all that held in their precious scrap of atmosphere, and it must be protected like one of them.

  He was impressed by the flat hate he encountered in Pam's eyes as he shared this revelation.

  Alone, he baked more worm pies and tried throwing them out the front door, through the membrane, but they only grew into a pile on the doorstep. Starved though it was, the incensed house preferred to hunt his family.

  It blew great hollow farts all night, and its bloated, gassy belly seemed to be the only thing that kept it from reaching them. The arm that reached inside grew thinner and harder until it was all rage and bone.

  They woke up one morning with the comforter and bedspread gone, along with the footboard. They huddled in the corner, where the ceiling was now too low to sit up straight.

  Dale had a sense of being in a creature's body as he ventured out for food now, could trace the T lines of the torso and the sprocketed shoulders. He could hear a racing heartbeat through the thin walls in the stair. By the bedside, he now kept an electric saw.

  When she did not experience one of her bursts of protectiveness, Pam seemed shell-shocked; the repetitive horror of hungry snatching fingers left her looking like a gawping, saucer-eyed rabbit, scratching against the sheets with rabbit feet as she tried to back away.

  During an afternoon raid, although they had lain in a shivering bunch in the corner, Dale had felt the reaching fingers brush the hairs on his leg.

  * * * *

  That night he woke to Tommy screaming right in his ear.

  The title bout had come.

  Dale flew to a
crouch on the bed and felt a great shifting beside him in the darkness. He grabbed the nearest human limb and out of blind instinct pulled it toward the far corner of the bed, away from the threat.

  To maximize his friction against the bed, Dale lay flat as he pulled. He found the slick-wood-feeling finger of the house that had curled around his son's leg and with both hands began to pry it off.

  He'd forgotten that the footboard was gone and tried to brace his feet against it, and a great wrench from the house brought him and Tommy flopping to the floor, their legs sticking out into the hall.

  The savage girl-Pam, the rabbit-Pam, rushed forward and threw herself across Tommy, bracing her hands on the walls. The fingers grabbed her ankle, and she lunged grunting back toward the bed.

  Dale moved numbly toward the electric saw.

  Pam had grabbed a leg of the bed and was being dragged with it back into the hall.

  Kneeling, Dale brought the electric saw whining to life over his head. The house's arm pulsed against his thighs. His eyes grew and shrank with uncertainty.

  "Dale!" Pam screamed. Tommy, his thumb in his mouth, walked white-faced toward him like a child zombie.

  He could bring down the saw and end this nightmare, but a new one would begin.

  With no way to stop the blood, the house would almost certainly die.

  Yet if he didn't do it, the probing arm could now reach them everywhere.

  He also couldn't sledge the fingers without shattering Pam's leg. She would probably get an infection in the worm-ridden house and die.

  That left option number three.

  He stole a moment to watch his family, imagined them calm and loving, and stored the picture away.

  Then he knelt beside the entangling fingers like a doctor. He calmly pried off one finger---it took all his strength---and replaced it around his own ankle, where it took hold with insane strength.

  He pried off another, smaller finger and did the same thing.

  After three fingers, he heard Pam grunt and drop to the floor. She'd been racked between the tug of the house and her grip on the bed, wedged in the doorway. "Oh!" she cried, revolted, and sacked Tommy to the floor.

  Dale began sliding across the landing on his bottom. He took hold of the doorframe as he passed it, knowing it would do no good. The fingers of the house seemed to know whom they grasped.

  Pam turned to him with Tommy's face clamped against her breast, and Dale tried to smile. Her eyes went wide.

  He studied her with a stunning clarity of vision as the big hot palm pressed against his back and two fingers clamped over his shoulders like a safety restraint. He watched her expression change from shock to horror to soul-wrenching loss as he floated backwards above the stairs, Tommy dripping into the crook of her arm, her small breasts hanging over him.

  The boy only briefly turned, the stoicism of his ruined childhood and his mother's care already in his face.

  Dale's hands were wrenched from the doorframe with an unstoppable ease. He supposed he screamed, and maybe it was long and loud, as the great arm lifted him through the air, but a sequestered part of his mind watched passively. The stairs and carpet passed beneath his dangling legs.

  Then Pam was chasing him, her eyes so wild they looked slanted and cartoonish in her face. They grew with nearness until the back of his head collided with the transom, leaving him lolling.

  The last thing he saw before the vacuum snuffed out his consciousness entirely was like a single slanted frame out of an ancient movie reel.

  He saw the house's face. The crazed, bloodshot eyes, slanted downward with fury and hunger, the nose still belted down on one side with his ratchet cable, and finally the jaw, hanging and dislocated where the quarter ton spring had slid out of true and shot the joint apart. The swollen gums and missing teeth, the black gullet.

  Dale barely heard the roar, not of hunger, but of outrage and ultimate triumph.

  He had once lain beside Pam on a soft evening before making love. For a moment they had breathed into each other's mouths, quaking little breaths. As he entered the squishing cave of the house's mouth, it was her breath he smelled. Once his flesh mingled with the house's, and Pam put her knife to the walls, it would be her devouring him. He was quite aware of that.

  On the Shadow Side of the Beast

  Ruth Nestvold

  Timo and I live on the shadow side of the Beast. It's a good place to live, because there are many hidden corners where the Hunters won't see you. Besides, the Beast protects us.

  An older girl, Karla, explained to me once that in the times Before, the Beast was a statue of a woman and four horses. They called her Quadriga and she was on top of the Brandenburger Tor---the ruined columns where Timo and I have made our home.

  I asked her what a horse was.

  "It was a big animal people would ride, with hooves and a mane," she said, getting that dreamy look that comes over the faces of the older ones when they think about Before.

  I looked more closely at the Beast, seeing now the bent figure of a woman with wings twisted with the hooves and heads of the creatures called horses.

  "Are there still horses?" I asked.

  Karla shrugged. "There never were many in Berlin. The only time I ever saw them was in a parade."

  "What's a parade?" I asked.

  She shook her head. "You wouldn't understand."

  Perhaps I wouldn't, but I try, and I Remember things. Almost everything since the Destruction. I'm not sure when I started Remembering, or when I realized that not everyone did. I wasn't that old when the world died, but I know more than a lot of the older kids. I don't remember Before much, but when the others tell me things, I remember it all.

  Now Karla is one of the things I have to remember. I will keep her memories too, for me and for Timo.

  * * * *

  Timo and I have scavenged enough bricks and wood to make ourselves several rooms among the ruins of Quadriga at the end of Unter den Linden. It's cold in the winter; the wind whips through the shelter we've built between the columns, tearing at our clothes and hair. But out here it's not as easy for the Hunters to trap you as in tumbled down halls and rooms.

  We didn't always live here. We used to live not far away in the remaining wing of a big building with Karla and a couple dozen other kids, a building she said was once a university---like a school, but a place for adults to learn. I had never been to school, but Karla had, Before. I asked her everything, and she taught me how to survive. But I have always been better at hiding.

  I wish she had been better at hiding too.

  It was summer, so we had berries and roots and vegetables to eat along with the pigeons and squirrels we caught and cooked. Since we didn't have to scavenge as much, we had more time to play. That day we were playing school in a room where one wall was missing; Andrea with the six fingers, Ingo with the sleeping head on his left shoulder, Fatima with the glowing feet, and maybe half a dozen others besides me and Timo.

  Karla marched in front of us, teaching us a song in words we didn't understand. She said it was a language people all over the world used to speak. "Now you try. If any of you ever leave here, it would be good to know English."

  I didn't see how any of us could ever leave or where to go if we tried since, as far as we knew, the whole world was like Berlin now. But we all liked Karla and we sang along.

  "Three blind mice,

  "Three blind mice

  "See how they run,

  "See how they run!"

  It struck me that she was turning into an adult, and I wondered if we would still be able to trust her then. Some adults are not Hunters, like Frau Decker, the old lady who told me about the war that killed the world. But you never know; it's best to stay away from adults.

  Karla would be one of the different ones, I was sure. I couldn't imagine having to hide from her.

  "They all ran after

  "The farmer's wife

  "She cut off their tails

  "With a carving knifer />
  "Did you ever see

  "Such a sight in your life

  "As three blind mice?"

  We were having too much fun and making too much noise, and we didn't hear anyone coming. Karla was writing the English words we didn't understand on the wall with a charcoaled piece of wood, so none of us was facing in the direction of the missing wall.

  Mistake.

  Karla turned to explain the words she had just written down---and screamed.

  The rest of us turned to find a pack of Hunters, white like Karla and Timo, not brown like me. A wall of mean adults in place of the wall that had once been there. The only escape was through the single door next to where Timo was sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  I grabbed Timo's hand and pulled him up, yanking open the door and running down the hall. The rest of the kids streamed out with us.

  The faster kids were already far down the hall; Timo and I would have to hide. Timo was really big and strong for his age, but he was slow. I hadn't seen any dogs with this group of Hunters, so we just might have a chance. I dashed through an empty doorway and up a flight of stairs, my hand still clamped tightly around his. The stairs came out on emptiness, and we made our way carefully through the rubble to what was left of some walls. Once behind them, we sank down to the floor.

  Below us, I heard screaming.

  Karla.

  Timo clapped his hands over his ears, and tears began to seep out of his eyes. Bad things always hurt him so much more than anyone else. It's one of the reasons I have to protect him.

  I motioned to him to stay put, and he nodded. I crawled over to the edge of the building where there was still a fragment of wall and peered over, trying to see what was going on.

  Six of the Hunters were standing around laughing, four men and two women, but I couldn't see Karla, only hear her, screaming and pleading. The Hunters were all looking at the ground, not up, so I leaned a little farther out.

  Karla was underneath a seventh Hunter, pounding on his shoulders while he pounded her. The high whine she was making hurt my ears.

  And then she saw me, and for a moment it stopped, somewhere between a hiccough and a shriek.

  The Hunter stopped pounding, got up, and a second unzipped his trousers and took his place between Karla's bloody thighs. Karla's eyes were pleading with me, a message I didn't want to understand. When Timo and I did that, what the Hunters were doing with her, it didn't make me cry, it made me happy.