David Nickle - Eutopia

“All right,” she said, and pulled the lantern away.

The whistling started up again as they passed the sawmill. Jason by this time had one hand clutched around the handle of the hatchet, his grip all the tighter for the fact that he knew it would be of scant help, if all those folks turned their attention away from the mill and its maze of lumber. He leaned to Ruth and said that he thought it was time to snuff the light and she agreed.

The crowd around the mill was prodigious; there were easily as many people there as had attended the picnic that afternoon. Their attention on the mill was absolute; they stood facing the walls and between the stacks of lumber, as though waiting for someone to emerge from it.

“Why are they whistling?” whispered Ruth.

“I don’t think they are whistling at all,” said Jason, and then looked to his feet when a woman dressed scandalously in a long nightgown, turned to him and made a shushing noise. Ruth shuddered, and hurried toward the hospital.

It wasn’t far—indeed, they came upon it sooner than they might have thought, because unlike most of the other buildings in Eliada, the hospital was dark. Jason pulled the hatchet from his belt.

Perhaps they both could feel it: the darkness was only an indication of what was truly going on there. They hunkered low as their eyes adjusted to the lower light.

There was movement around the hospital’s perimeter. Maybe more of Sam Green’s men, perhaps guarding Nowak. But they moved different. There was a flutter, like a skirt.

Jason touched Ruth’s shoulder and pointed. She whispered: “ I see .”

Jason leaned to her ear, so near her hair tickled his cheek. In a few short breaths, he relayed a plan that he thought might work. When he was done, she nodded, brushed his jaw with her fingertips, and got to her feet.

Absent sheets and masks, Jason gave up the notion of hiding in plain sight. Better to creep up on the quarantine through the woods surrounding it, emerge from the farthest point from the hospital, and wait until the guards had moved ’round the corner to make the final rush.

Thinking about it made it seem easy. Doing it was something else.

The underbrush was thick with high, curling ferns that came past Ruth’s waist and that combined with the darkness made it difficult to move quickly; nearly impossible to move quietly. So to avoid getting spotted, they decided to go back farther into the woods.

This turned out better or at least easier: under the canopy of the trees, the underbrush thinned, and they were soon walking between pine and fir trees on a floor of needles. Jason’s eyes were well-enough fixed to the dark that he could navigate, stepping around a deadfall here and spotting a little spring-bed there—and still keep an eye on the clearing where the quarantine sat.

Finally, he judged them far enough around to make the plunge back. They stood on a small rise of rock and moss, in a spot near a clear sky that made a lonely patch of ferns behind them.

“All right,” he whispered. “You ready, Ruth?”

There was no answer.

“Ruth?” he said again, and turned.

Ruth stood with her back to him. He thought she was saying something, but it was hard to tell: her head shook and bent side to side, but the words weren’t clear. Jason stepped beside her, and as he did so she bent to her knees, peering down from the rocks. Something was moving down there, in a nest made of crushed ferns. He couldn’t tell what it was. He knelt down too, and put his hand on Ruth’s shoulder. Her back was twitching, like she was sobbing. He looked at her, but she shook her head, and pointed down. Jason looked.

It was a girl. Jason thought she might be a little bit older than he and a bit older than Ruth. She had dark curly hair. Far as he could tell, she was naked. The sweat on her breasts and collarbone caught errant rays of moonlight as her chest worked up and down. Her eyes were only half-opened, looking up at the little space of star canopy, and she had a sleepy smile like she was dreaming up a fine night for herself, there in the ferns.

Except it wasn’t just her in the ferns this night. Looking down her stomach, Jason saw something else curled there. First it reminded him of a raccoon, or some other small animal—but it hunched below her navel, and in between her legs was where it rested—and it seemed to be moving, with the same rhythm that Ruth’s shoulder moved when she sobbed.

Jason let go of her and half-slid down the rock. He raised up his axe.

“I’ve seen this thing before,” he said to Ruth.

Oh yes, Jason had seen it before. Last time, it had been crawling up his own stomach, making a run for his privates. Tonight, it had latched onto this girl’s parts—and it was eating or tearing at them or fooling them.

Whatever it was doing, Jason wasn’t about to let it finish. He made his way up close, reached over and grabbed at the thing’s pulsing back. He grasped smooth flesh that felt like pig, and he tried to yank. But the thing wouldn’t budge—it had itself hitched in there somehow.

Jason had to restrain himself from taking the hatchet to it; he knew if he did he’d hurt this poor girl. No, he had to get hold. He turned back to Ruth, to ask her to give him a hand.

He couldn’t see her.

“Ruth?” he said. He stood up and peered over the rock face. In the distance he could see the squared shapes of the quarantine and the hospital. He thought he might be able to hear the sound of someone scrabbling through underbrush, but it was hard to tell over the whistling.

Jason felt his heart hammering. Ruth had run off. She’d panicked, fled. He looked back down. The girl was writhing, her hands on the rolling back of the thing as it snuffled deeper between her legs. Her back arched and her knees bent.

Jason swore, and turned back to the thing. He buried the hatchet in the ground beside him, got down on his knees, and with both hands grasped the creature. The girl screamed as he pulled, tugging back with all her might, and Jason nearly lost his grip before he reached around and threw his weight backwards.

And all at once, the thing came away. The girl screamed again and scrabbled away—and Jason held the creature to his chest and rolled in the opposite direction. It was like wrestling a hairless raccoon, with claws and teeth tearing at his shirt.

He pushed it away, and found himself face to face with the beast. This time, there was no chance of mistaking the thing for a tiny Ruth Harper. The alternative was nothing short of demonic—the thing’s black eyes glittered in the light and its sharp teeth snapped as he held it back.

It slashed out, running a claw down his cheek—and as he held it, something else pricked at his ribs. He pushed the thing away so hard that he convulsed in so doing, and the creature rolled away. As it rolled, he saw briefly something that looked like a dagger, only knobbed and twisted, point into the air. That, he was sure, was the thing that tried to pierce his belly. It may have been the thing that it had used to hang onto the girl.

He reached behind him, found the handle of the hatchet and pulled it from the ground. As he did this, the thing that had previously seemed the size of a raccoon began to unfold itself. It stood on thin legs, a small hunched body and dangling clawed arms, the height of a child. It seemed to convulse then—like it was coughing. Jason’s eyes stung, and he felt like he wanted to sneeze.

He didn’t. Instead, he swung the axe.

It was a wide swing, and it nearly sent him to the forest floor, but the blade hit the thing where its shoulder might have been. It felt as though Jason had cut into a sapling.

Jason twisted the handle and pulled it free, and for a moment he stood straight, wobbling like a drunk, and the thing stood still too. They stared at each other, as though waiting to see which one would fall first. Jason was sure the creature would go down, but it surprised him. It twitched, and bent, and with impossible speed dove into the shade underneath the ferns.