E Stricker - The Almanac

ILLYA OSLOV FLICKED an ice-coated strand of dark hair out of his eyes and tried to swallow the lump of panic that was rising in his throat.

There was nothing here.

With his heart hammering a frantic drumbeat in his ears, he crouched back to the earth, ignoring the sinking sun and the lengthening shadows. This cattail stand was the last one they had left. The stalks had all been harvested earlier in the year, but there should still be roots left to eat. He refused to believe they could be gone. Illya scraped deeper into the mud. Frigid river water swirled in to fill the hole, soaking his shirt. His nose dripped, and his back ached, but still he dug. Weakness seemed to spread from his shrunken stomach through his whole body, making his vision blur and his muscles tremble. He couldn’t remember when he had last had a real meal.

Darkness began to filter through the sky above him. He felt the shift without looking up. He clenched his teeth together. Soon, the gates in the walls around his village would be closing. Night brought the Terrors. No one stayed out after dark and lived to tell about it. He knew this as well as anything; as well as he knew which plants to eat and which held the malice that could kill; as well as he knew his own ma’s face, but his ma and little sister back in the village were every bit as hungry as he was. He could not go back empty-handed again.

It was near the end of his seventeenth winter, and it was the worst he could remember. The game was gone, the foraging nearly so, and still the snow had not broken. He scraped through another layer of mud, and his nails caught on something. Quickly, he cleared away more, feeling an odd slippery texture through the grit.

Plastic.

His heart began to beat faster. Plastic was rare, left behind by the Olders from the time before the Calamity. It was something he had only seen a handful of times. He could feel regular, straight edges in the mud.

Night advanced, its claws reached over the mountaintop behind him. Not far away, in the darkness that had just covered the foothills, the first yipping of the Terrors began. Illya jerked his head up and stared into the dark with wide eyes. A jolt of fear shot through him and stole his breath. He was out of time.

Still, the box could have anything inside it. Ignoring the mud that caked his palm and stuck under his fingernails, he scraped and pulled with all of his strength until it came loose with a sucking pop. It was smaller than he had expected. The color was strange, and something he didn’t have a name for; between leaves and sky, blue and green at once.

He pushed himself up. He clutched the box to his chest and ran.

The light was gone, and an eerie yip yip yee rang out in the dark. His feet pounded on the frozen earth. His chest heaved like a set of bellows, and he pushed his legs faster and faster.

He could see the safety of the fires of his village ahead. They looked tiny in the distance, seeming to be too small to be the center of all his hopes.

Faster.

The yipping was getting louder, sounding closer. Illya thought he could hear the sound of the Terrors’ gravelly breaths in the air behind him. He strained his eyes forward, willing the ground ahead to be smooth with no tree branches or roots to trip him.

There was a rustling and cracking sound in the brush nearby. He faltered but didn’t turn to see what it was, pressing for new speed as horrible thoughts boiled up in his mind: images of snapping teeth, gleaming eyes, and furious claws.

His neck prickled. He clutched the box closer and tried to focus on counting his steps to drive away the surge of panic. One, two, three— he lost count after ten when he forgot some of the words.

Then he was there. The gates were shut. A palisade of sharply cut pine trunks loomed high above him, cutting him off from sanctuary. He dropped the box and pounded on the gates, yelling with the last of his breath.

There was no answer.

Illya threw himself against the wall, hammering until his fists throbbed. How could this be happening? When he hadn’t come home at evening time, his mother would have worried. She would be looking for him. Surely, she would have thought to check the gates.

But that was the problem. They wouldn’t think to look for him out here because no one but a madman would have imagined staying out this late themselves. His cousin’s hut, the Healer’s, the central fires; there would be many places inside the walls they would look before they checked here.

He wiped his face. His hand was coated in river grit, and it scraped across his cheeks as the mud mingled with a few tears that had escaped from the corners of his eyes.

A growl came from the darkness behind him.

Illya slipped in the snow as he turned to face the sound, barely staying on his feet. Light from the fires on the hill behind the wall glinted off dozens of eyes. The Terrors had surrounded him, and there was no direction left to run.

He glanced around for a branch or rock, anything to use to defend himself. There was nothing he could reach without getting far too close to the gleaming ring of eyes.

He worked his hand into a gap between the stakes behind him, where ropes woven from reed fiber lashed them to cross braces. His fingers, slippery with mud, fumbled on the knot. They were numb and felt disconnected from him, like lumps of clay.

Then, through the gap in the slats, he saw movement. Outlined by the glow of the fires beyond were two figures, walking away from him on the path inside the walls. A bubble of hope swelled in his chest and he yelled, but the sound came out broken and thin. His voice was hoarse from the cold, and he could not push it out more than a few feet.

The figures were getting farther away by the moment.

Illya snatched the plastic box up from the ground and heaved it as hard as he could, high over the fence. Desperation gave him strength, and it flew through the air a long way before falling directly between them. They stopped, looked down at it, and then turned back in the direction it had come from. Illya yelled again with every ounce of breath he had, finally getting more than a croak out of his lungs. The taller figure hesitated, but the other sprinted towards the gate.

More snarls came out of the darkness around him. He could hear the creaking of wood against wood and heavy breathing. Finally, the gates swung open.

As Illya fell through the opening, something brushed against his ankles, and a red line of pain seared across his calf. He scrambled inside and collapsed on the ground, gasping. The gates closed with a groan; the figure of his rescuer leaned against them, struggling with the latch as a chorus of angry howls rose into the night beyond the wall. Illya pulled himself up and stumbled over. Together, they jammed the crossbar into place.

“It’s full dark! Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

It was a girl, slight and red-haired. She turned and glared up at him, chest heaving, shaking with fury.

Sabelle Eder. Of all the people to find him. He gasped, still trying to catch his breath, and found himself staring at the firelight skipping through her tangled waves of hair. His head spun, and prickling heat spread up his neck to his ears.

“Uh…” he managed.

Sabelle was the prettiest girl in the village, and her father was the village Leader. Illya clenched his fists, trying to keep them from shaking. A shiver went through his entire body, reaching his bones. In his flight, he had forgotten the cold, but now he felt it. His damp clothes clung to him.

“What’s this?”

Sabelle’s mother, Impiri, had reached them and was gripping the plastic box with white-knuckled fingers. It was open, and the lid lay on the ground at her feet. Illya’s heart thudded harder. He strained his neck to peer inside.