Then I discover a toilet. “I’m using this,” I announce. “I don’t care if it doesn’t work. Don’t follow me in here.”
Apparently I’m not all powerful because they do follow me in and watch me while I’m peeing. It’s totally weird.
Next we check out the Sitting Ducks Pub. With its beer-stained red carpet and sporting trophies all over the walls, I feel like I’ve stepped back in time.
“Wanna hear a joke? A neutron walks into a bar and orders a beer. ‘How much will that be?’ he asks once he’s finished and the barman says ‘for you, no charge’.”
I look around at their faces. “Get it? No? Nothing? Jeez, I give you science humor and bar humor mixed into one and still nothing. Lighten up.”
There are packets of peanuts and crisps and pretzels behind the bar, which I lunge upon greedily. I stuff a whole packet of cheese and onion chips in my face and then force myself to stop and ration the rest. The pack-horses will carry them for me.
The kitchen stinks with rotten food and I decide I don’t want to eat anything that’s been sitting in here for years with this stench. On the floor is a layer of dust, but strangely this time I can see tracks in it. Footsteps, but also evidence of things being dragged. It occurs to me what the tracks must mean: the Furies have already been to this pub, and must have been thrilled to discover a bunch of dead bodies. A shudder moves through me and I wonder again why they haven’t eaten me.
One of the Furies shouts from outside. This is rare enough that it piques my interest. There are only a few of them who ever speak, and when they do it’s either with very brief, simple sentences or with wordless sounds that convey meaning. My bestie is one of them – I think she’s pretty high up in the pack hierarchy, though I can’t work out how it functions. They don’t give each other orders, but there is a definite feeding dynamic. When one of them dies the others basically go feral and start fighting each other for the meat, but when the speakers approach the rest make way for them, unquestioningly. It’s not age, as far as I can tell (although I could be wrong there because it’s damn near impossible to guess how old they are) so it must have something to do with strength. Or it could be the length of time they’ve been with the pack. Maybe those who came first or were turned first are in charge.
In any case, we rush outside and I’m carried along in the sudden urgency to get on the move again. I try to look for what could be causing this panic but I can’t see anything. Pain shoots through my ankle and I swear loudly – there’s potent delight to be taken from loud swearing, trust me. We run a lot faster than we normally do. It feels like we’re being chased and I keep craning my neck to check and consequently stumbling into the backs of the Furies in front of me. Boy, they must find me annoying.
It’s getting colder by the day. Soon I’ll have a greater worry than starving to death, and that will be freezing. I’m still wearing my combat gear – a long-sleeved black skivvy, a black vest and black cargo pants, all filthy and ripped. The outfit is lightweight for maneuverability, and not particularly warm. It’s also getting really difficult to pull my left boot on after rewrapping my ankle.
I spot something again, this time a much larger smudge in the distance ahead. I’m astonished to realize it’s a forest. We’re definitely a long way north then, as there’s nothing but a huge radius of barren plains around the city. Over the next hours we follow the road to the trees. They are unlike anything I’ve seen. Taller and wider than any within the city’s walls, these are magnificent, their bark holding a deep ochre tint. They can only be redwoods – I recognize them from old photography and never in a million years thought I’d witness the real things. They must be ancient, and so much taller than I can see. I read once that the tallest living tree was a redwood called Hyperion, at 379 feet high. I start to imagine him here somewhere, that I might unknowingly brush my hand along his trunk.
My throat is thick as we plunge into their midst. I feel tiny and surrounded by warm, throbbing life. Their immensity touches something inside me and the world feels abruptly more bearable.
It’s dark now, under the shelter of the forest. But I glimpse the sky sometimes, and I can’t help thinking it looks much more gray than it did. Much angrier. The air has a frigid bite to it and I can’t quell the thought that something is coming.
The Furies stop before nightfall for the first time. They make fires, lots more than usual, with all the fallen kindling and debris. I’m grateful to stand near one while they stoke and build them to be as hot as possible. Someone shouts wordlessly and they all hunker down around the fires and against the bases of the trees, huddled together. I am pulled against the woman’s body and the repulsion it causes me is impossible to ignore. I lurch back up and try to get free, escape the touch, but several sets of hands force me back down and refuse to let me move.
Very soon I understand why.
The blizzard hits.
*
September 29th, 2067
Josephine
It’s shockingly cold. And so much louder than I expected. The wind howls ferociously through the trees, sweeping the snow hard against our shivering bodies. It lasts all night and I don’t get a wink of sleep, my teeth chattering so loudly I think they must surely be about to shatter. The pain of the cold is alarming and then it’s numbing.
By morning the blizzard has ended and I can no longer feel my extremities. The world is white and bright and dazzling. It’s actually very beautiful. But I could pretty much see it all swallowed into a massive hole for the agony it put me through last night.
Some of the Furies are up, moving through the snow to stoke the fires. The heat they managed to create before the snow fell was enough to keep the deepest coals hot and if I weren’t so frozen I might marvel at this. As it is, my heart rate has dropped very low and my breathing has slowed. I recognize the signs of slipping into hypothermia and know I must get up, must move, but I can’t seem to make my muscles obey me.
That’s when the men from my guard lift me to my feet and force me to follow them, force me to start running, slow and ungainly at first and then faster as my temperature rises. The relief is so much that I nearly burst into tears, but since my initial blubbering mess I have refused to cry again. Instead I laugh. I laugh as my muscles remember how to move and burn in doing so. The sound of my voice trickles through the still, snow-covered forest and up into the ancient branches. My feet sink in the deep white but the more effort it takes to move, the warmer I get.
Back at the camp one of them passes me a packet of chips, which I scoff with shivering fingers. This Fury watches me eat and doesn’t try to take any for himself. I suppose barbecue chips don’t seem so appealing when you’ve developed a taste for chowing down on human flesh. It’s weird, though, the way he watches me. I catch them all doing it. Perhaps weirder still is that I never see any malice in their eyes, no anger or hunger or savagery. Only curiosity. The more time passes, the clearer it becomes that they don’t consider me a source of food. What they do think of me is still a whopping mystery.
I study the one watching me now. I don’t normally do this – it’s easier to hate them when they’re all the same, all ugly and torn and hungry. But now I look at this particular Fury. I can’t really guess his age because his skin is papery and the bruising around his features makes him look older than he is, but maybe between 20 and 40. He has blond hair, he’s very tall – even taller than Luke, which is unusual – and he’d be taller if he didn’t stand so hunched over. He has a rough beard – most of the men do, which tells me they’re still growing and living like humans do. His irises, within the ghoulish sea of red, are a pale blue. This disturbs me, for some reason. Thinking of their eyes as red is easier than seeing the real colors within the burst blood vessels. His clothing was once a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that says something. I have to peer hard to make it out: Schrodinger’s cat walks into a bar … and doesn’t.
A breath leaves me, almost like a laugh. It’s a shocked breath. A breath of I-can’t-
believe-I-just-told-a-science/bar-joke-of-my-own-and-he-has-one-on-his-shirt. And let’s face it, it’s a much better one. It abruptly, undeniably humanizes him. I try not to imagine who he was before this but I can’t help it. Suddenly I can’t stop imagining.
And just like that, my stories change.
Instead of telling stories about Luke, or making up stories about alternate mes and Lukes, I start telling the stories of the Furies around me. I make up adventures for them to have lived, I invent the lives and loves that made them exceptional before they were ruined.
This man, this science nerd man, I call Astro Boy. I decide that he’s not a psychologist, but a paleontologist, and wearing this particular shirt is like a treacherous act to his profession, one that his colleagues give him shit for. I imagine he has seven older sisters, all of whom are in equal adoration and exasperation with him. They ask him why he hasn’t met anyone yet, over and over, like it’s his decision, like he has any choice in the matter. One of them tells him he’ll be alone forever at this rate but he just can’t work out what she wants him to do differently. He doesn’t mind, anyway. He’s more interested in bones and fossils. He has a trilobite collection larger than any of his college friends. He wanted to be the first to find a new species in fifty-three years. And actually he quite likes psychology experiments, the ones from the twentieth century that pushed the boundaries of professional conduct. He thinks privately that he might just as easily have gone into this field, but would never admit it.
I start giving them all stories. And with these silly made-up lives now existing in the spaces between us it is much, much more difficult to hate them. I don’t actually know why I’ve just done this to myself.
*
Today we don’t go anywhere. We stoke the fires and rest. Some of the Furies disappear, presumably to hunt for food. I take the opportunity to keep my swollen ankle elevated, and to watch the monsters.
They’re capable of every physical task, have perfect balance and movement, which means their cerebellum is intact. Their logic centers are too, their ability to reason and infer, they have incredible threat instincts and more energy than a normal person, presumably from the adrenalin coursing through them. Their language capabilities are low. Some of them may have lost those capabilities altogether, or may simply see no further need for them. Their social behavior has deteriorated, but not to anywhere near the degree I thought. They only grow savage and aggressive when it comes to food. In normal circumstances they’re very calm with each other, very unthreatening.
For the first time in a while I think about Doctor Meredith Shaw, and of course my very own doctor Ben Collingsworth. They’d know the answer to this – it was they who were responsible for these transformations in the first place. Trying desperately to cure anger, they instead created human after human who suffered terrible, murderous side effects. The two of them alone would know exactly which parts of the brain are functioning in the Furies and which have been disconnected. I’d give anything to understand – my curiosity comes alive with the thought.
Night is falling when I see the thing that changes it.
One of the men from my guard – not Astro Boy, but Washington, named thus because of his gray beard and hair shaped like a top hat – sinks to the ground in what I can only deduce is severe hunger. He’s grossly emaciated and on his last legs. The other Furies in my group look at him but don’t move to help. How can they?
Not long after this the hunting party returns with five dead bodies. They have been gruesomely killed – who the hell are these dead people? Furies who died while on the hunt? A different gang? Surely not humans – there aren’t any alive except in the city. The corpses are dragged into the center for the leaders – two males and a female (my female). The three of them go to it and remarkably the rest wait.
The female, who I’ve decided to call Medusa, turns away first. She has hardly eaten anything, but tears away an entire leg and carries it to us.
I am mortified but some scientific part of me must be fascinated because I keep watching, curious about what’s going on.
Medusa carries the severed leg (delish!) and drops it on the ground before Washington’s prone form. One of the others goes for it but she snarls at him and he backs off. Washington attacks the leg and manages to eat the whole thing on his own – remarkable given the amount of Furies those bodies have to feed. We watch as he demolishes his meal and as he does so I realize something.
He was dying. She could have let him die. I would have assumed they’d be happy when bodies dropped, as it meant sustenance for the rest. But she literally took the food from her own mouth to keep him alive.
And I don’t know what that means, but something about it scares me more than anything else about the monsters. Something about it makes them seem very, very human.
Chapter 16
January 5th, 2068
Luke
The paddocks have been set up. The coops are built. We take the pigs first. The exchange for them is less traumatic. A group of us herds them slowly and gently not toward the slaughter room but out the other way, through the warehouse and into their very own five acres of grass. They don’t want to go at first, snorting and squealing and terrified of any human interaction, but once they explode outside into the comparatively enormous space they acclimatize beautifully. A great cheer goes up from our crew, a distant one since those in the pens don’t want to frighten the pigs. But almost all of us have come above to the farm and now wait at the fence in the distance to cheer on the liberation. I join the pigs in their pen and show them the food and water troughs. Then I sit with them, in the corner where I won’t get in the way, and watch their saddlebacks wiggling. There’s so much more intelligence in their dark eyes than I expected.
The chickens are a more difficult task.
We’ve built them nests and roosts so they won’t be overwhelmed by the space, but they have clear access to the outside paddocks for when they’re ready and capable of venturing out. Some of them will never be able to walk, most will never fly.
We carry them now, one by one, into the outdoor coop. The McDonaugh’s vet is on hand, helping to treat any wounds on their feet or wings, gently rubbing soothing balm into their raw skin.
We are halfway through moving the birds when I pass by Josi for the first time in a while. We both have a chicken cradled in our arms. Mine is a golden beauty with missing feathers on her head and rump. She’s smaller than most and I feel fiercely protective of her; she is fragile in my arms.
Josi’s bird is black and red and unruly. She wants free. I walk along the grate in time to see Josi pulling her out of her tiny cage. The chicken squawks and flaps its mangled wings and Josi struggles to hold her.
“You okay?” I ask, moving closer. My goldie is quiet and perfectly behaved and for a second I love her.
Josi doesn’t respond, too focused on her chicken. She gathers the broken creature into a firm embrace, keeping its wings in tight, and she leans down and soothes it with gentle murmurs. It’s almost like a song, and for the first time her singing voice isn’t so bad. Like this – soft and cooing – it is suddenly sweeter than anything I’ve heard.
I stop and stare – I can’t help it. My heart thumps against Goldie’s chest and the moment is profound.
Josi’s chicken gentles in her arms. “Lovely girl,” I hear her murmuring.
And it’s so obvious: the love she feels and is capable of. Whatever she may think, whatever damage she’s undergone, she hasn’t lost the ability, as she told me she had. Perhaps she no longer loves me, but in this moment the potent tenderness in her hands and voice tells me everything I could ever have wished for: she isn’t gone. Not by a long shot.
I make a decision. I won’t look for the answer anymore. I won’t ask her or anyone else what happened. I’ll let it go, I’ll let her go, let her have or be whatever she needs. I only want for her what she wants for herself, even if it doesn’t include me.
I walk past her and smile a real
smile, the first in months.
“What are you so happy about?” she asks.
I shrug and laugh. “The chickens have changed everything.”
*
January 10th, 2068
Dave
I can no longer handle Mom and Dad’s pleading stares so I’ve started helping out at the farm more than anyone else. I spend time with the animals when the others have left – all except Josi, of course. She has almost become one of them, sleeping in the pens with them at night.
This evening she brushes herself off earlier than usual, heading for the paddock gate.
“Where are you going?” I call. Luke’s favorite chicken, Goldie, is in my arms, quiet as always. I gently deliver her to the nest and shut the coop latch.
“I gotta teach a history class,” she tells me. I must express surprise, because her eyes roll and she says, “I know, I know. I’m terrible at it, but I’m trying to make an effort.”
“Can I come?”
She shrugs and nods for me to follow.
We make our way over the grassy hills and along the creek. We don’t talk – Josi rarely talks unless she’s asked a direct question – but I find myself, oddly, wanting to. Not with anyone else, but with her, at least. The overtness of their feelings make me retreat, but Josephine is almost as detached as I sometimes feel. I guess that makes her safer.