Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

Frantically, Red looked for a weapon. He heard his daughter moan and saw the things bite into her, tearing open her skin, rich red blood pouring from the wounds.

Later, he would wonder why it didn’t occur to him then that she was lost-that she was doomed to the disease in those seconds, infected like the rest of them. But he was frenzied in his purpose, determined to stop them at the cost of anything: his life, the world, the universe, anything at all.

His hand fell on the handle of an axe.

Tom swung the axe up and over his head before he was even fully aware of it. Its weight as familiar as the boots on his feet. Tom had been raised high in the Sierras where it took two cords of firewood just to get through a single winter, and as the only son of a working man he’d split more than his share of good dry mountain pine, the scent of the sap and the seasoned wood coming back to him now in a rush as he brought the axe blade crashing down onto the neck of the Beater who’d shoved him, cleaving his head off and burying the blade into the floor inches from his daughter’s hip.

He took a little more care against the second one, because he was for damn sure not going to hurt so much as a hair of his daughter, and he sank the blade through its shoulders, severing the spine and lodging the axe so that it took some effort to pull it back out.

Only two of the things remained now, and they looked at him curiously. They were covered now with the blood of their companions, Cassie unconscious beneath them. One crawled toward him, right over the body of his daughter, and for that affront earned itself a blow from the side, the axe head hitting with such force that the skull cracked and splintered like an Easter egg.

That left the last one, and it glared at Tom with its mouth wide open, bellowing in rage and excitement. Tom saw with disgust that it had bitten off its own tongue, leaving a ragged lump of meat bobbing in its mouth. It sprang at Red, knocking him down, the axe falling from his hands. The thing was about his size and weight, but as it threw itself on top of him and knocked the breath from his chest, screaming one last time in triumph before lowering its blood-spattered, scabbed and mangled face to feed on him, Tom realized that he was going to die here, in this shed, covered with the blood of the monsters that the earth had spawned, and his daughter would die and would never even know that he died for her.

That realization twisted him savagely, jerking him back. He put everything he had-every synapse, every nerve ending, every muscle and thought-into one last heave and the monster toppled, its face hitting the floor, and even though it recovered immediately and twisted like an eel to grab him again at the ankle, Red had found the handle of the axe and he was just a little bit faster, a little bit wilier and a hell of a fucking lot more determined than some mindless feeder, and it was an awkward blow, that last one, without the benefit of a good windup or gravity on his side, and when the blade crashed down it didn’t finish the thing off entirely.

So when Tom used the last of his strength to pick up his daughter and carry her from that hell place, the inhuman mass watched from the floor, its neck broken and bleeding, its eyes blinking and fluttering, and though its cries weakened and its body twitched, it was still scrabbling with its broken-nailed fingers to reach her.

That night, Tom didn’t get very far. He found shelter in a house a few blocks away. He dragged a dresser in front of the front door and ran the taps dry, collecting the water in every pot in the kitchen as the sun slipped down and the light bled away into night. He bathed his poor daughter, so gently, laying her out on a rug in the bathroom, letting the water run onto the floor, where it pooled in the tiled corners. He gently squeezed the water from what was left of her hair, and more water seeped into the cracks. Who was going to care if it ruined the walls below? Her wounds were horrible, entire strips of her flesh missing, muscle and sinew and even bone exposed, but somehow the bleeding had slowed and he was able to bandage her roughly with sheet strips torn from one of the beds and supplies he found in the linen closet.

If she died that night, it would not be for lack of effort on his part.

When he’d wrapped her as well as he could, finding some soft knit pants, a sweater, socks in a closet, he placed her tenderly on the bed in the master bedroom and arranged the blankets so that they would not weigh on her wounds. Still she remained unconscious, her eyelids twitching and small mumbled syllables escaping her from time to time. He kissed her forehead, her hair, her fingers, and then he gently closed the door to the bedroom and sat down in the hall outside, a knife from the kitchen in his hands and several more on the carpet at his side, and as he waited for the long night to pass he prayed for God to understand that he had done his best and would do his best again and again, as long as He demanded it.

CASS BARELY REMEMBERED to keep breathing while her father told his story. He’d been there. He’d been watching-keeping vigil, really-while she and Ruthie played outside in the sunshine.

How many times had she berated herself for her foolish choice? She knew better than to risk venturing outside the walls of the library. And for such a poor trade: she’d exchanged their safety for dandelions, when surely she could have found Ruthie a dandelion growing in the sheltered courtyard; for the same breeze that blew through the screens in the conference room; for a chance for a few moments of alone time with her baby girl, when she was dooming them both to a solitary death.

Cass had replayed those moments outside a thousand times in her mind. She’d opened the library’s heavy metal door, giving the frowning door guard a sunny grin-no one was forbidden from coming and going, at least not back then-and let Ruthie scoot ahead of her out into the bright sunshine of a spring day. She’d promised Ruthie that she would show her the paving brick that had her name on it, the one bought by her mother and stepfather during the library’s fundraising campaign the prior year, before anyone realized that the world was about to end.

Ruthie had skipped and sung, clapped her hands in delight at the tiny yellow buttons of dandelions growing among the kaysev. She’d picked a handful, marveling at the stems’ bitter milky juice, and Cass had been so busy being grateful for the moment that she never saw the Beaters until it was too late.

But her father had been watching over them. He’d set aside his own safety for them, and the novelty of that knowledge was warm and curious, unfurling slowly inside her mind. He’d cared about her, enough to search for her, enough to fight for her. And as for not being able to gather the courage to come straight to her-well. Cass was certainly not one to judge. Shame had prompted a thousand of her own missteps and mistakes, and if things might have been different if her father had knocked on the door of the library before Cass ventured out that day, well, she had learned that you could never rewrite history, that Fate would always prevail.

She had not winced and she had not looked away when her father described the carnage in the shed: she was trying too hard to remember. But, nothing. She had no memory of the things carrying her to the shed, no memory of their teeth tearing at her flesh, no memory of the axe and the blood and the screaming and her father lifting her, cradling her, rescuing her. The bath…there was something there, a faint shadowy flicker, a notion of floating, of water sluicing away her blood, cool and healing, making her weightless. Maybe it was nothing but a sense memory of unconsciousness, but Cass wanted to believe she could remember something good. She’d seen Red’s gentle way with Ruthie and the other kids; surely he’d been just as gentle with her.