Tag: forestry

Sequel to The Sea Holds Many Things (Some of Them Are Almost Human), though it can be read independently.

(Fair warning, Here Be Gore)

~

It was always so damn damp here. Early June though it was, the days were chilly and humid, the mountains curtained each morning by pale fog. Dew clung to the trees and undergrowth well into afternoon, dripping onto Sharley’s head like irregular rain. Her hair never properly dried, and her clothes rarely did. The other loggers had assured her this wouldn’t last more than another month, and that soon she’d be wishing the cold would return.

Truth be told, she didn’t mind it. After her last job, working a trawler in the Bering Sea, it could seem downright tropical in the afternoon. And out here she could have much more privacy, wandering the woods while the others were asleep, keeping her distance without the crew finding it suspicious.

The living forest fascinated her. There were plenty of woods where she came from, but they had been more than half-dead since well before she was born, long since parched in a place where rain hadn’t fallen in centuries. The chill of the morning mist was welcome, and on the rare occasions the sun pierced it she felt she could stare for hours at the glitter it cast on the dew. Things lived here, thrived here, and it gave her a sense of wonder time had never diminished.

But she had to be careful. As the only woman on the crew she had her own tent, and she had to make it look as though she slept there. She ate and drank coffee with the rest of them, though she needed neither, listening in silence and smoking her pipe while the others joked and complained in equal measure. Fortunately she wasn’t the only quiet one; the old-timers nursed their coffee with very few words, and seemed to appreciate her company because she didn’t try to make them talk. Sharley liked the mornings best, watching the cheerful, often raucous camaraderie even if she could never truly share it. She hadn’t been here long enough for anyone to wonder why she never joined in.

Most unfortunately, this morning someone decided to address her. Andy, a giant of a man who was a little older than she appeared to be, looked at her curiously over the rim of his battered tin coffee-mug, and when he put it down he said, “Gotta ask — why is your hair blue?”

It wasn’t blue at the moment, not really: it had faded into a peculiar shade of grey, and there was no point in fixing that on this job. Sharley knew it made her stand out, made her memorable in a way she ought to avoid, but she couldn’t bring herself to change it.

“My daughter liked it,” she said, sipping her own coffee. It was almost as thick as tar, solid enough to practically chew. She loved the smell, even if she never properly tasted it.

“I didn’t know you had a kid,” Andy said, surprised.

“I don’t,” she returned quietly, rising and dumping her mug. “Not anymore.”

A highly awkward silence followed, and she strode out into the trees to avoid it, inwardly cursing human inquisitiveness. At least nobody was likely to ask again: a good half of the men had joined the logging crew to escape something unpleasant, to find a place and a job where things were extremely straightforward and simple, if not precisely safe.

“You shouldn’t have said that, Sharley. You oughtta know better.” That was Jimmy, very close behind her right shoulder. Next to Kurt, he was the most obnoxious of her four auditory companions, and he was likely to chew her out about this for half the day.

“Shut up,” she said, and pulled her chainsaw out from under a tarp; checking it over was automatic by now. The voices had followed her as far back as she could remember, and even now she didn’t know what they were or why they were there. All they would volunteer was that they were guardians, though what they guarded, or why, none of them would say. They’d been with her since her Before, since the long-ago childhood she could barely remember. They were the reason she was so habitually silent: between the chattering of the four of them, there was very little she needed to ever say.

To her mild surprise, he did, and the others stayed quiet as she headed off into the trees. The rising sun was trying valiantly to burn through the clouds, casting the forest a strange, pale golden-pink, and it calmed her. The air was completely still, filled with far-off birdsong that would cease once the real work began. Nothing could scare off wildlife like the roar of a chainsaw. The scent of damp earth enveloped her, made stronger by the tread of her heavy boots along the rocky trail, and that too calmed her. Perhaps it was good she’d spoken of Marty: she knew she looked young enough for the others to assume she’d lost her daughter fairly recently, and it might explain some of her oddities to them. They would leave her alone, and that was the way she liked it.

A few pulls of the cord and the chainsaw coughed to life, the harsh-sweet smell of gasoline overlaying the aroma of the mountains. The power of the thing reverberated all through her, up her arms and into her chest, replacing the heartbeat she didn’t have. Felling trees was paradoxically a mindless activity that required intense concentration, and she wished she’d thought to get a logging job long before now: a wandering mind was not Sharley’s friend. Fine sawdust settled on her clothes and hair, powdering her skin — she didn’t need a mask to avoid inhaling it, and only wore one when she was around the others. For her, breathing was a conscious effort, one she only made when she bothered to speak.

She hadn’t always been…whatever she was now. Once she’d been something approximating human, but that almost-human had died when Marty did. She’d been trying to adjust to this not-life ever since, wandering among people whose very species she no longer shared. The last two decades she’d watched the world change, watched others grow old and die, and had yet to acclimate herself to the thought that she would do neither.

The tree creaked, and she heard the telltale crack that told her she needed to get the hell out of the way. Off went the chainsaw, and she darted backward as the tearing groan of splintered wood echoed off the mountain slope. There was a peculiar majesty to the tree’s fall: it almost seemed to hang in the air a moment, trailing a half-tangible ghost behind it before it went crashing to the earth.

Sharley set the chainsaw aside, and started down the length of the tree. She always made sure a tree had stayed in one piece when it fell, and checked to see how many branches she’d have to lop off. It was a time-consuming process with one person, but if she was good at anything, it was patience.

She was halfway down before something gave beneath her feet, a stone shifting just enough to destroy her balance. Before she could blink she’d pitched forward, all four voices swearing at her as she tried to right herself. Even now her reflexes were too human to make that an easy proposition, and she didn’t stop until she’d fetched up against the ragged, pulp-sticky edge of a snapped branch.

No, not against: on. Well, this was nice and undignified; the damn thing had driven itself a few inches into her chest. She was still capable of registering pain, in a sense, but not on a scale this sort of injury ought to produce. Fuck. She had to get out of this before anybody else saw her.

Unfortunately, her peculiar brand of immortality hadn’t imbued her with exceptional strength. Just breaking the branch wasn’t an option — all she could do was dig her heels in and try to throw herself backward, with a spectacular lack of success.

“Nice going, Sharley,” Kurt muttered. He was easily the most aggravating of the quartet. “Grace, thy name is Sharley Corwin.”

“Shut up,” she snapped, scrabbling for purchase on the coarse bark, and with an almost Herculean effort managed to drag herself free. She landed flat on her back, cracking her head, and was too annoyed to swear. Her fingers traced the plane of her sternum; already the wound was gone, leaving only scarred skin chilly as marble. The only evidence was her torn shirt, which she’d have a hell of a time explaining if she ran into any of the others before she could change.

The texture of the scar made her shudder. It, like all the others that littered her body, had been given to her while she was still properly alive — they were remnants of what had killed her, in fact. Slightly ridged, unpleasantly smooth, they looked more like claw-marks than anything.

“Don’t, Sharley,” Layla warned. “Don’t go there. Get up.”

She didn’t. She couldn’t. She knew soldiers could experience flashbacks, and it wasn’t fair that she did, too, always at the worst times. But then, there never was a good time for something so horrible.

                                                                                            

~

 

It had happened in the Other — home, sweet deadly home. Nobody knew just who first called it that, or when, or why, but it was the only name that strange parasite of a world had. A zombie of a world, neither living nor fully dead, a reality separated from Earth by less than half a breath. People disappeared into it with alarming regularity, falling through the cracks that formed between the two, and most didn’t survive. And the few who did, who escaped back to Earth, always ran the risk of being pulled in again. It really was a parasite world, taking what it could get and holding fast to it like glue.

It was a hot, arid place, the sky dull red and without a sun. Once upon a time it had been as alive as ever Earth could be, but Time there had always been a fractured thing, and when war laid waste to it, it had no chance of recovery. That had been long, long before she was born; she’d never known it any other way.

Precious few areas were anything like safe, but you could survive, if you knew how to navigate, and Sharley did. There were places even she feared to tread, though, places nothing sane, mortal or not, would go of their own will. And Old Echo was the worst of them.

It had been a thriving town once, very long ago, and outwardly the war hadn’t touched it much. Ancient though it was in the Other, it looked like it had been something out of quaint, small-town Americana, a postcard of a place Norman Rockwell would have drooled over. It made its current desolation that much worse, this dead little burgh filled only with dust and silence.

She and little Marty had stumbled through a crack that led straight there, in autumn of 1970, and they weren’t alone. If only Earth knew where so many of its missing children went: for some reason, kids passed between the cracks far more easily than adults, and at the edge of Old Echo Sharley found eleven of them. Scared, dirty, borderline starving, huddled together on the heaved, buckled remains of what had at one point been a sidewalk.

They were so young, too; the oldest couldn’t have been more than twelve, all sunburn and freckles and tangled curly hair, his eyes blue wells of terror.  Sharley sighed.

“You sent someone in there, didn’t you?” she asked, taking Marty’s hand.

The boy nodded. His eyes were swollen, his cheeks red and puffy, and when he spoke, his voice had the hoarse quality that came from having cried until you had nothing left. “My sister,” he said. “She said she was gonna go see what was in there, and she didn’t want the rest of us to, because….”

He trailed off, hiccupping, but Sharley understood the ‘because’. Old Echo looked like no more than a ghost town, but there was a sense of malevolence here unlike anything she’d found anywhere else in either world, a malice imprinted so deeply on the walls and streets that it radiated outward like heat. The problem with this town was not that it was dead — the problem was that it wasn’t. It was a twisted kind of genius loci, a place with its own awareness. All the Other had a kind of sentience, but in Old Echo it was much more pronounced, and evil in a way that could be all too personal for those who ventured in.

But the only way to get somewhere safe was to pass through it. Her foster-aunt lived in the Swamp, some ten miles beyond the town, and the only danger one would face there was stepping off the path and drowning in a bog. It was one of the Other’s precious few havens, but if she could get those kids there, she might be able to figure out what to do with them.

And she had to go herself, anyway. There was no way back the way she’d come: the cracks didn’t go both ways. Her foster-mother could help her find a way back to Earth, but the only way forward lay through this town of invisible, unrelenting horror.

Sharley picked up Marty, trying not to hold her too tightly. Little Marty, with her father’s blonde hair and her mother’s mismatched eyes — Marty had never been here, though Sharley had told her a few stories from what she recalled of her own childhood. The girl probably wasn’t much safer in her mother’s arms, but not for anything would Sharley put her down.

“Follow me,” she said quietly, trying to keep her own instinctive fear from her voice. The sweat that dampened her T-shirt had little to do with the heat. “There’s rules in here, and if you follow them you might get through.”

It was almost disturbing, how willing the children were to listen to her. She was an adult, and most of them were so young that that made her, in their eyes, infallible. It wasn’t a thing she liked, because she wasn’t sure their trust was warranted. They stood, huddling around her like chicks around a mother hen. No, she couldn’t let on how terrified she was herself.

“There’s gonna be some things in there,” she went on, somehow keeping her voice steady. “They’ll look like people, but they’re not. Don’t look at them, don’t talk to them, and don’t follow them. And whatever you do, don’t run.”

“What things?” the boy asked, and Sharley shut her eyes, trying to slow the jack hammering of her heart. She wasn’t about to explain the particulars. Not now.

“Just…things,” she said. “Follow me.”

She led them slowly, letting them press as close to her as they could. Dust that had lain undisturbed for decades swirled up as they walked, hazing the empty, silent buildings. The nearest shop still had one intact window, a big plate-glass thing gone milky with a cataract of grime. A wooden sign, the letters long since faded, hung drunkenly from one hook above it, strips of green paint still clinging to it here and there. Sharley didn’t know just what had happened to Old Echo during the war, what could have wiped it out and left so few marks. Even the descendants of those who had survived it didn’t know — or didn’t want to.

Marty twined her arms around Sharley’s neck, burying her face in the soft, worn fabric of her T-shirt. The little girl was shivering, but unlike some of the others, she wasn’t making a sound. And that was good — quiet was good. Quiet might be the only way to escape the notice of the creatures that had taken residence here, trapped within the limits of this nightmare town. Only the scuffle of the little group’s feet and the faint whimpers of the youngest gave any indication they were here at all.

She swallowed, her throat unbelievably dry, eyes darting into every shadow. Old Echo was only six blocks long, and once they were past it, the only dangers would be the garden-variety sort you found everywhere in the Other. The evil in this place was chained to it, hemmed in because it could not be destroyed, not even by those who called themselves gods.

“They’re here. Jesus fucking Christ, Sharley, they’re coming.” Kurt was so close he was practically hiding in her ear, and hearing him so afraid was just wrong. Kurt was the asshole, the one who feared next to nothing, but even he knew what they were about to face. “Don’t run.”

“She’s not gonna run,” Layla whispered, from somewhere right behind her head. “She’s not stupid.”

Knowing Kurt, he was already preparing some nasty retort, but it died when something shifted in the shadow up ahead.

It was subtle, so much so that she might have missed it. They always were, though, giving no indication of their existence until they were practically right next to you.

“Remember what I said, guys,” she murmured. “Don’t look, don’t talk, don’t follow.”

And no sooner had she spoken than they came. They poured through the darkened, yawning doorways of stores, of houses, streaming out in utter silence.

They really did look like people. Men, women, children of all ages, the color of their clothing a startling contrast to the washed-out sepia of their surroundings. Their faces, though, gave them away: inhumanly blank, with no more animation than a mannequin. Only their eyes were alive, in a sense, flat and glassy but with a terrible inhuman intelligence lurking just beneath the surface — a malicious awareness so strong it was palpable. In their silence they were suffocating, the combined malevolence of what she knew to be a hive-mind so oppressive she could hardly breathe. Her legs went weak at the feel of them, but she forced herself onward, knowing that if she caved now none of them were getting out alive. She’d made it through here once, years ago; she could do it again, goddammit.

“Mama, what are they?” Marty whispered.

“Memories,” Sharley said, as steadily as she could. “They can’t get us if we don’t run.” That wasn’t strictly true: the Memories could attack any time they chose, but for reasons of their own they seemed to prefer fleeing prey.

There were more of them now, lining either side of the street like spectators at a parade, and now their silence made her want to scream. The children were all too afraid to even speak, but it was all Sharley could do to keep her mouth shut, and to keep an eye on all those kids who could be such easy prey for the damn things.

“Two blocks,” Layla muttered. “Two blocks, two blocks.” She said it like a chant, singsong, and Sharley wished she’d shut the fuck up, because if anything would be able to hear the voices, it would be the Memories. She didn’t know how they perceived the world around them, how they saw or heard or thought, but she didn’t want to tempt it.

One small boy finally broke and tried to make a run for it, unable to handle the tension any longer, and she reached out like a striking snake, grabbing the collar of his shirt and yanking him back to her. “Don’t. Run,” she hissed, and he burst into tears.

The effect on the Memories was galvanic. As one they stepped forward, the whole crowd moving with a synchronization that was beyond eerie. Though they stretched out seeking hands, they didn’t actually approach the little group, and Sharley thought she knew why. They were letting the living stew in their own terror, letting it grow and build with every step, and it pissed her off. Anger was good, though: it kept a little of her own fear at bay, enough that she could keep moving.

“Two blocks, two blocks,” Layla chanted, and Sharley ground her teeth, gripping Marty even tighter. Layla was right: just two more blocks and they were free. Two blocks, she thought. Two blocks and we’re out.

And then the Memories moved.

They closed in across the far end of the road, first two, then four, then more than twenty, and Sharley froze, dragging the children to a stop.

“What the fuck?” Kurt croaked. “They can’t—”

“They can,” Sharley murmured, “they just don’t.” She wasn’t the only one who had been through Old Echo and lived to tell about it, and all the other stories bore out her original experience: Memories didn’t hinder you. They waited until you went mad with your own fear and took off. What they did to those they caught, nobody knew, but so far as anybody had been able to discover, they never left corpses.

For what seemed an eternity, all was still. She stared at them, and they stared at her — only at her. Oh, fuck, what was this?

She didn’t have time to wonder. The eldest boy screamed, an earsplitting shriek that echoed off the empty buildings and hammered straight into her brain. It was a sound of horror, but also of intense grief, and he raced forward before she could stop him.

“Andrea!” He was pelting toward a teenage girl, a tall girl with curly hair who looked so like him she had to be his missing sister.

“Dammit kid, don’t —” She reached for him, but he was too fast, careening into his sister and trying to pull her into a desperate hug.

It happened before Sharley could react. The girl cocked her head to one side, then yanked her brother’s head back and tore his throat out.

He screamed, or tried to: all he managed to do was choke on his own blood as it sprayed a fine mist over the Memories nearest him. The other children more than made up for it, shrieking and clinging to Sharley as though she could do anything to protect them. Nauseatingly bright red wicked down the boy’s cotton shirt, and when his sister lifted him by his ruined throat his feet did a twitching Saint Vitus dance in the air.

The others fell on him, clawing, tearing, giving Sharley the tiniest of opportunities. Fuck not running — she shoved the rest of the children in front of her, and they took off through the thin gap in the murderous crowd. She was operating on pure instinct now, all rational thought shut down as a positively inhuman survivalist woke within her brain. Shit, shit, that was not what she needed right now, not when she wasn’t alone, and she fought it with what little energy she had to spare.

“Go!” she screamed, clutching Marty even closer, and they did, tearing off in a race that proved fatal for two more, snatched by the Memories in less than a blink.

“Don’t you dare stop for them, Sharley,” Kurt snarled, but she didn’t need the order. Once the Memories got someone, there was nothing to be done for them: you couldn’t fight the Memories, couldn’t hurt them or even slow them down. Those they caught were lost, period.

Her lungs were burning as she ran, choked by the miasma unique to Old Echo, and her vision was going grey. What little cogent thought she had left was vanishing fast — until searing pain snapped her horribly back to reality. One of them had caught her, slashing down her back with nails like claws, and she was dimly aware of the wet soaking her tattered shirt. Now the copper-hot stench of her own blood joined that of the dead and dying, and she gagged, fighting the bile that rose and burned in her throat.

Someone was screaming, and it wasn’t her. It was Marty, crying as she hadn’t done since she was a colicky baby, and oh Christ, her hair was wet, red spreading through the blond strands like dye —

It was there that her consciousness snapped, everything that made her Sharley subsumed by the other half, the Stranger — the leviathan that normally lurked in uneasy sleep at the back of her mind. It was the thing that fought to ensure her survival in time of need, but it didn’t care what happened to anything around her. Sharley was not a killer: it was, and then some.

How long it had control of her, she never knew. When awareness returned, she found herself just beyond the edge of the hellhole of Old Echo, surrounded by the few surviving children. Acrid dust had invaded her sinuses, stinging wherever it made contact with dozens of wounds she didn’t remember receiving. The bittersweet salt of blood burned at the back of her throat, and when she tried to cough it out she wound up on her knees, dry-heaving onto the ruined asphalt.

All around her the children were crying, but her brain only dimly registered it. Something else was wrong, some subtle thing her beleaguered mind tried to beat her into registering as she gripped Marty in an embrace almost crushing.

Marty. Marty wasn’t crying.

Ice flooded Sharley’s veins, a horrible counterpoint to the Other’s dry heat. One hand reached up to stroke her daughter’s hair and came away red and sticky, and she felt a scream rising with the blood in her throat. When she dared look down, she found Marty’s face death-pallid and streaked with gore: her eyes, mismatched like her mother’s, stared sightless through the tangled curtain of her bangs. And her throat —

Sharley did scream then, a cry of rage and unimaginable grief. No, no, no, no, they’d got out, dammit, even if she didn’t remember…wait.

Wait.

“You,” she hissed, forcing herself to her feet. Sheer blood loss had rendered her balance a tenuous thing, but the strength of her fury kept her upright. She cradled her dead daughter, whose body was already cooling. “You let her die. You let her die so you could get me out.”

The Stranger didn’t answer; unlike the voices, it never did. It wasn’t dormant, though — she could feel it stirring, still restless, but for now the magnitude of her wrath kept it caged.

One of the children tugged on the tattered end of her shirt, and she shifted mental gears without realizing she did so.

“You’ve gotta go, Sharley,” Layla said quietly. “They’re still alive. You’re still alive.”

Not for long, she thought, as she staggered forward. She might be tough as old shoe-leather, but she could feel the life draining out of her with so much blood, and she didn’t care. Without Marty, nothing mattered. She’d get these kids to the safety of the Swamp, but it would be no haven for her.

It wasn’t the Stranger that dulled her thoughts this time: pure exhaustion overtook her, leaving her only dimly aware of the heat and blood and dust. Her unsteady feet made her weave like a drunk, and she fell more than once.

Her last, lethal collapse happened at the very edge of the Swamp, and she didn’t bother trying to get up again. The others would be safe here, if they followed the blue lanterns that marked the path. They glowed like stars in her darkening vision: the last thing her human eyes ever saw.

She’d been dead. She knew that, though she could remember nothing about it. Death hadn’t wanted her, though — not all of her. Her mortality, all the beautiful frailties that made a human a human — that he took, because he had no choice, but she hadn’t been fully human to begin with. And Death grabbed hold of the piece that wasn’t, the fragment of soul that had always been alien to the rest of her, and used it as an anchor she couldn’t fight.

And Sharley knew it. As soon as she regained consciousness she knew what he’d done, because everything felt so very wrong. She had no heartbeat, no need to breathe: no life coursed through her veins. The wounds that killed her were now nothing more than scars, flat and faint to the touch, but she was sure she’d bear them for the rest of eternity.

And she’d have eternity. That knowledge was instinctive, for even without opening her eyes who had brought her back, and why, and how. And she thought she would never forgive him for it.

Her eyes opened, and she waited for her swimming vision to focus. When it did, she found she saw everything with unnatural clarity, and it made her dizzy. With great difficulty she turned her head, and there he was: Azarael, the Other’s god of Death. She’d rarely seen him, and she’d never seen his current expression.

She opened her mouth and coughed, trying to force her new vocal cords into cooperation. It took a minute, but when she spoke, at least her voice had not changed. “I hate you,” she croaked.

It was a long moment before he responded. “I know, Sharley,” he said. “But you are my only daughter. You knew when your time came, I would not let you go.”

Shaking her head, she staggered to her feet. Even moving was different now, strange and unnatural — whatever passed for muscles in this new existence was unlike anything human. “Where’s Marty?” she asked.

Again he was quiet, and dread filled the heart she no longer needed. “I could do nothing for her,” he said, so quietly mortal ears wouldn’t have heard him. “She was too human, Sharley. What little you inherited from me did not pass to her.”

Sharley staggered again, numbness warring with rage. “You trapped me like this,” she snarled, “you stuck me with immorality without my daughter? You son of a bitch, you made me lose what you couldn’t bear to?”

She hit him, hard, and her fist registered no real pain. He only watched her, impassive, even when she struck him again.

“Fuck you,” she hissed. “Fuck you. You lose, asshole — I’m out. And I’m never coming back.”

 

~

 

She’d been true to her word, too. She’d gone back to Earth, and on Earth she had stayed, wandering from place to place and job to job, trying to re-learn all she’d lost. It was something she knew she’d never truly accomplish, but after all, she had eternity to try. Her immortality meant she would always have to wander, but the Earth was a very big place. She moved, she learned, and she lived as best she was able.

“Sharley. Sharley.” Layla was circling around her head, anxious and aggravated, and Sharley sat up and put her head in her hands.

“What?” she demanded.

“Get up. Somebody’s coming, and they can’t find you like this.”

She sighed, and climbed to her feet, buttoning her coat over her torn shirt. Sure enough, Andy was on his way down the slope, trying not to dislodge anything else. His expression was more contrite than Sharley would have thought possible.

“I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing the back of his head. “I didn’t mean to —”

“I know,” she said, cutting him off. “It’s okay. You couldn’t have known. Let’s just get back to work.”

He nodded, obviously relieved, and she turned away, heading downward once more. She still had a tree to inspect.

~

This story is followed by Sleepless.