Gregory Norris - Down with the Fallen - A Post-Apocalyptic Horror Anthology

“You’re weak,” her grandfather used to say when showing off his war trinkets. “When I was your age, I’d seen things that would’ve made your eyes bleed right out of your head. You don’t even have the courage required to make friends.”

“ Well, screw you,” she wishes she could say. “ I survived when no one else could.”

Whether that’s due to skill or pure chance, it’s hard to say, but the circumstances don’t matter. What matters is she’s still alive.

Her cottage emerges from the Dust, whitewashed exterior long ago stained grey. In a previous life, it had been a hunter’s lodge, a retreat for townspeople searching for temporary solitude. The nearest house is over five miles away, and aside from a megalithic boulder on a nearby hill, it’s the only structure over a foot high in the area. For Jack, who never felt comfortable around others—a damnable trait for a twenty-something—it had, quite simply, been an escape.

Inside, the cottage doesn’t contain the expected kitchen and bedroom. Sure, a futon claims some space in a corner, and a camping stove sits discarded in another, but most of the single room is claimed by less conventional items. A corkboard of pinned butterflies, moths, and dragonflies hangs like a tapestry on one wall, and entire tanks of pond specimens and notebooks eat up almost half the cottage’s floor. Every now and then, a wing twitches, or an antenna waves. An assortment of radios and walkie-talkies cover anywhere left over.

Jack removes her gasmask and shakes her hair free of its scarf, cringing at the acidic scent still lingering in the curls. Not dropping the repulsed expression, she reaches for the nearest personal radio set and turns its dial.

“Hello? Can anyone hear me?” she asks in the robotic tone of someone expecting no answer. “This is Jack Sinclair, Hunter’s Cottage, Dartmoor National Park. Is anyone out there?”

Static.

“Please. It’s getting kinda lonely.”

Nothing. Only an empty crackle and the scratching sound of something—a bird, maybe?—crawling across the roof.

Trees are scarce on the moors, so Jack burns thorny brambles as firewood instead. The Dust makes the flames burn a darker, almost bloody red. The thorns cause weird shadows like reaching hands to twist over the cottage.

Jack lies on her back, staring up at the moonless sky stretching above. She’s more than accustomed to emptiness, but there’s something about the density of the darkness beyond the fire’s red glow that unnerves her—she prefers looking upward. Occasionally, she’ll see the smoky trail of a commercial starship heading into the oblivion.

“Stay!” she wants to scream. “Don’t leave me here!”

Not because she necessarily wants company. But the idea of being the last one left behind fills her with a paralyzing dread.

That’s the problem with people, though; they lack resolve. After all, it hadn’t been the plague that ended the world. It had been the aftermath. The panic. The wars. Maybe, if they’d pulled together and kept a cool head, Jack would still be getting her weekly eggs, milk, and newspaper. Instead, they’d run headfirst into self-destruct mode.

And Jack is marooned with nothing but her brain and a Springfield rifle for help.

Her eyes slip closed.

Moments later, something screams. Not a human scream. The scream a deer might make when shot, or that of a devil haunting crossroads. High, guttural, and unnatural.

Jack stumbles to her feet, grasping wildly for her rifle.

A shape darts into the darkness on two legs.

She stares after it, heart pounding. Perhaps she’s imagining things.

Lowering the rifle, she realizes her arms are covered in goose bumps. Shouldn’t the fire be warmer? Shouldn’t the glow reach further?

All of a sudden, the flickering red flames make her feel sick. She tosses a bucket of dirty water onto the thorns, covering her nose with her scarf as smoke billows across the heath, and runs as fast as she can toward the cottage.

“Can anyone hear me?” she says into the radio. To her dismay, she realizes she’s crying.

As if in answer, something shrieks again. It sounds far too close, like whatever it is is standing right outside her window.

“Is anyone…?” she begins, but trails off. She’s not sure she wants to know the answer anymore.

The outside world never quite managed to touch the people of the moors. Long after such things were frowned upon, locals celebrated their holidays with bonfires and dancing instead of gift exchanges and solemnity. They left salt on windowsills, carried bunches of dried lavender, and turned their clothes inside-out before walking alone.

Even as a child, Jack never believed such nonsense. She knew good sense kept accidents away, not silver bells. Tylenol cured headaches, not herb poultices. She remembered sleeping over at her best friend Lydia’s house in total silence—her family never spoke from sundown to sunrise to avoid accidental cursings—thinking she’d prefer living anywhere else but the moor.

Of course, even she couldn’t escape its strangeness entirely.

When she was four, a baby bird fell from a tree and broke its neck. Jack carried it inside to show her grandfather. No sooner had she crossed the threshold, the bird beat its wings again and wriggled from her hands.

When she was nine, she stepped on a snail, and after a few minutes, watched it continue moving as though its shell wasn’t shattered.

When she was thirteen, she ignored her grandfather’s warning and attempted to visit her parents’ graves in the village cemetery. He caught her before she could find them and dragged her home by the ear. He seemed more upset than angry.

“Don’t you understand?” he kept repeating. “Don’t you understand?”

That evening, when she was supposed to be asleep, she’d crept downstairs and watched her grandfather skin a hare. Without even stripping meat from bone, he’d taken the carcass outside and laid it at the edge of their property. Then he’d locked all the doors and turned out all the lights.

The next morning, the hare was gone.

When Jack graduated, she left Dartmoor to study biology at King’s College in London, and returned with her head full of science rather than superstition. She hadn’t planned on returning at all, but after four years of city living, coming back to the empty heath felt more like a necessity than a choice.

Within six months of moving into Hunter’s Cottage, the plague hit. Jack shut herself away, something she’d perfected, and let radios be her only human interaction. She listened to accounts of virally transmitted sicknesses that destroyed organs in a matter of days. She listened to accounts of riots and opportunistic terrorists, of order crumbling and anarchy in the streets. She listened as martial law was imposed, as stories of the wealthy abandoning Earth altogether for extra-terrestrial colonies surfaced. Of something labelled ‘Dust’, a by-product of the wars and chemical attacks, swallowing entire countries. Then, gradually, the radios fell quiet.

And Jack knew she was alone.

The morning after the bonfire, Jack finds a dead field mouse on her doorstep. Given the circumstances, there shouldn’t be anything odd about this—except, like the pony, the mouse is missing most of its throat.

Which means something must have dragged it to her doorstep. A cat, maybe? Surely, there are still cats left?

Without the strange colors and sounds of night time, Jack’s apprehension has evaporated. She nudges the mouse into the grass with her toe, pulls the straps tighter on her gas mask, and sets out to find food. There’s a town with a Co-Op Foods roughly an hour’s walk away, but she’s hesitant about re-entering civilization. She’s not strayed outside a two-mile radius of the cottage since the outbreak, and she’s terrified of what she’ll find. Besides, Jack Sinclair has never needed modern conveniences to survive.