S Morden - One Way

There was a shiver, a ripple, a strange pulse that passed through every inch of him, and he didn’t feel the fence’s tentacles wrapping him tight. He didn’t feel anything until he collapsed onto the tarmac on the other side, scraping his left elbow raw. Bo’s eyes flew open. He spun around, still on the ground, and stared at the fence. In the dead center of it was a jagged hole, punched straight through. The fence wriggled around it, fingering the hole like a wound.

Bo clambered to his feet, panting. He wiped the ooze of blood off his elbow, nearly relishing the sting of it—he hadn’t been properly scraped up for months. Then he put his hand on his stomach. The static was gone, like it had never been at all, and the Parasite felt suddenly heavy, no longer twitching or moving. Had he done that? Had he made the hole?

The whale-thing was stopped on the other side of it, and it didn’t have a face but he got the sense it was as surprised as he was. Bo gave an instinctive glance around for grown-ups, even though he knew he wouldn’t see any, then flipped it the bird. The whale-thing didn’t respond, still hovering in place. Then a strange moaning noise came from inside of it. Bo watched as the whale-thing’s underbelly peeled open. Something slimey and dark started unfolding itself, then dropped to the paving with a thick wet slap. It was human-shaped.

Bo felt a tiny trickle of piss finally squeeze out down his leg. The human shape moaned again, and that was enough to give Bo his second wind. He turned and ran again, the cut on his elbow singing in the cold night air, the Parasite sitting like lead in his gut. But he was out of the warehouse, and he wasn’t going to let them take him again, not ever. When he came back, it would be to get Lia, and the others, and to smash every last whirlybird in the place.

It was the only way to be sure he got the one that had pinned him down that first day and injected the Parasite right through his belly button.

Bo made it his new pact as he jogged, deeper and deeper, into the dark and ruined city.

Violet was heading to Safeway to pick up some groceries, walking down a silent street under a cloudy gray sky. Gray as the day the ship came down, scorching the city with the electric blue pulses Wyatt said were exhaust from its engines. There’d been no sun since. Just gray, a hazy emulsion that looked close to rain but never gave it up. Violet didn’t mind the new weather. Sun burned her and rain made everything too wet.

She walked down the middle of the street instead of the sidewalk, weaving through the stalled-out cars. Some had wasters sitting inside, imagining themselves driving off to work, but most of the cars didn’t work anyway. Their chips were fried. The ones that did work were useless, what with the roads so clogged and nobody really knowing how to drive besides.

The intersection ahead was stoppered up with the splintered geometry of a crash, a three-car pile-up that had happened during the big panic when the ship came down. Violet didn’t want to walk around it, so she clambered up onto the accordion-scrunched hood of an SUV. The soles of her Skechers popped little dents in the aluminum. She tried to ignore the dead-thing smell that wafted from the backseat.

On the other side of the wreck, she faced a corner liquor store, half of it black and crumbled from an electrical fire, and then beyond it her destination: the Safeway where she’d shopped with her mom four months and a lifetime ago. The parking lot was strewn with garbage, picked at by a flock of dirty gulls, and wasters shuffled slowly around it with grocery bags that Violet knew were sometimes full, sometimes empty. Some of them were pushing squeaky shopping carts across the ruptured tarmac.

But one of the carts wasn’t being pushed by a waster. Violet narrowed her eyes. It was a boy, maybe ten or eleven, skinny frame swallowed in an oversize hoodie. She watched him roll his sleeves up to his elbows, one of which was swatched with Technicolor Band-Aids, and start wrestling with the cart again. He’d picked one with sticky wheels, but it had alright stuff in it: a sleeping bag, a trussed-up Styrofoam mattress, canned food, and bottled water. Usually kids fresh out of the warehouse were too dopey to do much more than wander around all shell-shocked.

Violet swapped the duffel to her other shoulder and cut across the culvert of yellowed grass to the parking lot pavement. By the time she was close to him, the boy had snatched an empty cart from one of the wasters and was dumping everything from his own into the replacement.

“Hey,” Violet said. “Those Winnie the Pooh Band-Aids?”

The boy looked up, startled. The hood fell back off his head and Violet could see his face still had a bit of chub to it, the kid-die kind, but his eyes were sharp. A little bloodshot from crying, but focused. His black hair reminded her of a ball of steel wool, and she could see a comb mostly buried in the tangle. He yanked his sleeve down over the yellow patchwork on his elbow and stared back at her for a moment, mouth working for words.

“You’re not a zombie,” he finally said, in a voice that was a little closer to cracking than she’d expected from someone his size. It made her extra conscious of her own.

“Nobody’s a zombie,” Violet said, as the waster he’d swapped carts with stumbled past. “They don’t eat brains or anything. Just wander around being useless. We call them wasters.”

“Where’d you come from?” the boy asked.

Violet peeled the stretchy fabric of her shirt up off her stomach, showing him the rust-red Parasite under her pale skin. The boy immediately stuck his hand to his own belly. His face twitched.

“Same as you, Pooh Bear,” Violet said, tugging her shirt back down. “You thought you were the only one who got out?”

The boy frowned. “Is everyone else… Is all the grown-ups…”

He tapped the back of his head, where the clamps went in.

“Everyone over sixteen,” Violet said. “Or around there.” She reached over and yanked the sleeping bag and a single bottle of water out from the cart. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Bo,” the boy said. “Bo Rabiu.” “Violet.” She stuffed the sleeping bag into his arms and tossed the bottle on top with a slosh. Getting groceries could wait. “Alright, Bo, time to get out of the streets,” she said. “The othermothers are going to start coming through soon.”

“What?” “The o-ther mo-thers,” Violet enunciated. “You’ll see one soon enough. For now, we’re going to a safe spot, alright? A hideout. So you can meet Wyatt.”

Bo tucked the sleeping bag under his arm and tossed the water bottle up and down with his other hand. “Who’s he?” he asked suspiciously.

“He’s a jerk,” Violet said. “Let’s go.”

She set off back out of the parking lot, mapping the way back to the theater in her mind’s eye. She didn’t bother to check if Bo was following. They always did.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2018 by S. J. Morden

Excerpt from Annex copyright © 2018 by Rich Larson