Wanderers of the Silent Season (Heartbeat of the World Book 2) Read online

  “Ah, ginger beer. Exotic choice.” Tyran grinned.

  “The building was whole at first? What happened to it?” Kechua glanced at a chalk board declaring specials lost in the darkness.

  “Completely fine. Didn’t have to climb up the damn rubble at first, but the main stairwell and entrance was in the middle. Even the pipes in the fountain seem to be tapping into something. Here.” He dug out a bunch of bags. “Can’t cook anything. Thank God we didn’t try a fire inside, but that’s another story. You don’t have any matches or whatever on you, do you?” Tyran glanced at Kechua nervously.

  “No. I have a fireplug in my pack, somewhere, and some rope.”

  “Just don’t try to start a fire. It . . . doesn’t work.” Tyran nodded slowly, the memory lifted from his shoulders. “Looks like it’s chips again today. Got maybe one week in us before we’ll need to move out.”

  “What happened?” Kechua pressed, scooping up the bags and heading over to the rallying table.

  Tyran paused, lingering in silence a moment more. “I told you it wasn’t so bad at first, but then the crazy stuff started happening. The fire we made was all smoke and ash, burning hot but not warm somehow. I thought we were just bad at it, but there’s something to it, something that doesn’t sit right. The tiny thing we lit took a day to smolder down. Had to bury it because it never stopped stinking.”

  “The night dogs, they aren’t so bad. You can’t quite see them except the eyes. Sometimes, one or two go into the lower levels, but they don’t climb up or even try the doors. The vine thing doesn’t even go into the lower floor, and you can sort of avoid it as long as you’re careful. Used to work in a group, eyes and ears, and we’d bail into the school the second anyone so much as thought they heard or saw something.”

  He took a deep breath and slumped into a chair. “That was before though. Something else came one night. A whale in an ocean of piranhas.” His voice withered to a slight trembling whisper.

  Kechua sat and opened his drink, letting the biting aroma of the gaseous hiss wash over his nose.

  “It was the first night. Night of big plans; big ones. It was getting too dark in the library, so we were heading into here since it was cooling down. There was this kid, just out of the blue. He showed up here, and we caught him in the hallway.

  “The kid was a huge mess, just a complete babbling idiot. Out of his mind terrified. Couldn’t even tell us what was wrong. We took him in here to get something for him to eat and drink, and he calms down a little with something in his stomach. The thing is, this room, this place you can see all around us.” Tyran shook his head. “First one who saw it was out that way.” The man pointed out into the widest view of the wastes. “Didn’t see the thing, just saw the light; red light looking down on the sands out there, like in a gigantic cone. We thought it was the army or something like that, but the kid’s lost whatever cool he had. Started screaming about a monster.

  “Half of them were holding him down now.” Tyran motioned at a corner of the room that had been disturbed somewhat. “They say whatever it is, it can’t be that bad. But that red light we spotted, it keeps getting bigger and bigger. It’s getting big so fast, coming towards us so fast.

  “We knew it wasn’t the army when the ground started shaking. Slow, long pauses between them, not mechanical, not thunder.” Tyran gave an evil grin. “There was this weird sort of flow too, a kind of grey mat that washed over the place. Completely drowned out the light and the sky above. Left us in blackness.” Tyran’s eyes twinkled with a manic darkness. “What they were, now that’s a punchline, but for now . . . for now . . . the weird mat parts like the red sea, and the light just fills the room here. It was like a spotlight glaring directly down at us and burning hot, like an oven.

  “The kid ran into the hall and the light followed him, the mat closing up behind it. We never did get his name. Shame,” Tyran muttered. “I chased after him; thought I could tackle him and drag him back, and three others had the same idea. I was too slow, though. I’m good at being unstoppable, not so much on the running, and I was too far away, looking at the far wall.” He sighed. “I only saw the walls close in, just like a bite. That big curve is a bite mark that took everything that was there. Took three of my people and the kid.”

  Tyran leaned back, taking a trembling breath. “Then that grey mat comes rushing in. I made it in here and barricaded the doors, but the bugs got in. Roaches and beetles, all covered in ash or something, filthy and grey. They flowed in like water. Doors didn’t stop the rats.

  “We all ran when that came in; ran upstairs. Stairs didn’t stop ‘em, quick and easy as you please. The rats had some trouble with the climbing, but they made it, oh did they ever. Just before they made it halfway to where we were standing up there though, they started filtering back, like a wave going back out to sea. They peel back on the inside and outside, and we can see the thing walking away.

  “We couldn’t even really see it, you know. The moon’s kind of useless now, but I don’t think I would’ve been able to describe it even in daylight. It wasn’t going anywhere specific, and it turned around; changed directions a few times. It was huge, taller than any skyscraper I’ve seen, and I’m a city boy. When it turned, you could see the circle, a big red thing glowing in its chest, casting light into the desert. Little dots swarm around it, not just rats and bugs, but things circle it and fall off of it. At least that’s what it looked like. Thing had a hunched back too. Kind of took turns between walking like a gorilla and sort of shuffling like a penguin. It didn’t even look back, but it shook people pretty bad.”

  Kechua finished the last sip of the biting drink.

  “Thing is that wasn’t the worst of it. I still had doers even after all that. People wanted to check what we had. Someone thought to plant the potatoes and onions, and start digging a well.”

  Something slithered up Kechua’s neck, painting his next words slow with caution. “You said the first night. How many days ago was that all?”

  Tyran paused, shaking whatever slow thought had entered his brain away. “Three nights before you came was the giant.” He added with a droll accusation, “What, you slept through them?”

  “I must have,” Kechua muttered, rubbing his neck.

  “Well, lucky you then.” He rose, leaving his empty bottle at the table. “Time to get this to the others. The lot of them have been holed up in there since the night before last,” he mumbled with a resonant frustration. “Someone’s gotta keep them alive.”

  “With any luck, some will have calmed down a bit, but I don’t know.” He sighed, irritated.

  “What happened then, after the second day, to make them stay in the room?” Kechua asked, only then noticing the song above the repetitious din.

  “Quick, quick,” Tyran muttered, biting on the words as they rushed past the door. “Faster!” he grunted as the pace became a mad sprint past the lower arch of the absent hallway. Tyran leapt up the path with a practiced athletic effort, only stopping a moment on the third floor, leaving Kechua behind. Kechua’s pace slowed when he noticed the absence of Wolf’s still form.

  “Come out little ones, come out.” The ethereal chorus rose, reverberating in the earth beneath them, the stones trembling with the shrill tune.

  “We started getting a peek at that on day two.” Tyran winced, stealing a look over the ruined cliff, surveying the stilled earth beyond. “Just stay quiet for now.”

  Kechua watched the still sands from his lower perch, unable to find the burrower’s form with the white noise beneath. “Come fetch the water, come watch your feet as they sink in the soft, soft soil,” it sang with a shrill joy.

  Kechua climbed the final floor, the man taking his cargo before helping him rise.

  “Shh, just quiet for now,” Tyran silenced, boding him into the darkness.

  The library doors stood as a dim pair of halos, glowing blue where the cafeteria had burned bright orange. He knocked quietly at first, but after allowing a few minutes
to pass, he rapped against it and pounded with his closed fist.

  “I thought we were being quiet?” Kechua muttered, fully expecting a curious tendril to come bursting from the light and trap them in the dead end.

  “Let me in, you ingrates!” Tyran bellowed, his neck throbbing from the strain. He grimaced and hung his head, repeating the pounding, slower but with enough force to make the hinges of the doors rattle.

  Shifting sounds came from beyond the door; the muted squeak and rumbling of rubber-edged tables being dragged away, and then a final set of scrapes against the door itself. The door cracked open, light shining against a single pinprick eye covered by a glass lens. It shivered with movement, not blinking, or even daring to squint.

  A waft of foul air, somehow a witch’s brew of sweat and old paper mixed in an outhouse cauldron, slapped Kechua in the face and struck Tyran unprepared. The man staggered back as the door yawned open enough for three grasping hands to burst out below the crazed eye.

  Tyran shifted forward again, banishing each of the hands with a bag in turn. Plastic rustled, and to Kechua’s surprise, the sound didn’t become more hurried and desperate into some battle in the dark. Muffled voices intermingled in turn, bottles shifting and clinking.

  “Who are you?” a woman’s voice exclaimed, the frantic eye panning over to Kechua.

  “A traveler. Whole and well. He’s walked through the sand and come out alive.” Tyran spoke to the woman but cast his voice specifically into the darkness.

  “Have you . . . have you been far?” The woman’s red eye loosened a little and looked at Kechua, a trembling hand slipping out the door a little. She tested Kechua’s reality with a poke, and with the simple clarification, the crack widened to show both her shining eyes. She was younger than Mana and probably older than his parents, but she gripped Kechua’s arm like some desperate anchor with a strength reminding him of the elder.

  “About a day’s walk.” Kechua reeled back a little as another face presented itself above the woman’s head, the features obscured in the shadow.

  “You’re still alive.” The man glanced over Tyran.

  “Still alive.” Tyran gave an annoyed half shake of his head. “Hasn’t got any worse.”

  To Kechua’s further surprise, the crack yawned open and the two figures slipped out of the crevice, both gripping their chips and water. The woman stared into Kechua with a frantic and blank expression. Long brown hair clung to her face, tangling into her glasses and in a growing chaos. Olive eyes fought to show themselves through so much red that Kechua’s eyes ached in empathy. She was dressed fairly casually, with one of the cuffs of her shirt torn, one of the middle buttons on the blouse missing, and the thing half tucked into her pants.

  The man had thick black hair curling in upon itself. He wore a grey dress shirt, heavily stained under the arms. He had an oily musk about him, which penetrated even the lingering befouled air of the library, and he quickly grew into a beard.

  Both of their rhythms felt exhausted, pulsing hard and slow, barely remaining wound. Even a few days after this event, their old rhythms were submerged and stifled.

  The door slammed without ceremony behind the two of them, and the chorus of rubber scraping signaled the sealing of the fortress once more.

  “Hey, you forgot two of—” Tyran bellowed, reeling back to strike the door again, fully winding up as if to smash right through it like paper.

  “It’s alright.” She sighed, gently stopping his hand before it could fire. “I don’t really want to be in there anyways. We all just got caught up in the moment.” She smiled gently at Kechua. “I want to hear about what you’ve seen!” Her drum trembled a little, a flickering spark bordering on hope running up her spiral.

  The man stayed silent, taking a swig of the bottle he held, his attention on Kechua as well.

  “I think I’ve seen less than you have, from the stories. Sorry.” He apologized, the smell of the oil and salt from the snacks reminding his stomach of his own pack waiting in the darkened room nearby. “I’m from a reservation. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

  “At least three days travel by foot then,” the man grumbled accusingly. “Do you have a car, or horse, or something?”

  “Just a . . . dog with me, but I didn’t ride him here. There’s nothing left of where I came from; no people, no houses.” Kechua glanced backwards to the light. “I did see a few spots, some traces of other people, but it’s all like this out there. You’re the first people I’ve actually seen in flesh.”

  The man shook his head, uninterested in the digression from his topic. “You must’ve rode that dog. You aren’t making it here from reservation country in three days in this sand.”

  Tyran and the woman shared a silent look of either bewilderment or annoyance at the man, who noticed and quickly concluded, “Doesn’t matter. Does the dirt get any firmer anywhere? Any different terrain?”

  “It’s mostly the same sand that you see. There’s a river coming up from a spring, actually heading sort of in this direction. There’s some rock, some trees, but their leaves are all gone. A few houses and a shop.” Kechua’s feet guided him from the lingering stink near the doorway.

  “Mmm, it’s nice to have the light on my face again.” The woman sighed, pressing her bottle against her neck and stretching. “Air in there’s awful. I’m sure you noticed.” She shot a smile at Kechua, but he didn’t respond, his gaze surveying the ruins below for the raggedy grey fur.

  “I told him most of the stories,” Tyran said, joining the two in the light. The man lingered in the shadow of the fragmented roof.

  “Just panic for me.” The woman sat, munching on her chips and swinging her dangling legs over the broken edge. “It’s not so bad in the day anyways.” She glanced to the right. “Ooh, I can see the way you came.” She strained, adjusting her glasses. “It’s funny, the dogs and the vines never leave lasting prints, but you did.”

  “Gregoris, Susan, Kechua.” Tyran finished the introductions for all of them, though Gregoris offered no hand in greeting. Susan seemed more interested in surveying the land below her kicking legs, more jagged and nervous.

  “If you look over there, you can see our try at a well.” Tyran pointed over a spot towards the low wall. “Thing took us hours to dig on the second day. Can’t boil it, of course, but it may end up being all we have. Water came in much sooner than we expected, too.”

  “Why bother hiding in the library?” Kechua muttered.

  “Safest place from the earthy thing. No easy path for the dogs if they get bold.” Susan gave a half glance backward.

  “He said you had a system, eyes and ears.”

  “System failed,” Susan replied, and her nervous twitching slowed. “At first, it was just huge flowers popping out of the soil, tall as full-grown sunflowers, with big and strange red blooms on them. They stood still at first, and someone was bold enough to touch one. He said it felt oddly cold and wet, sort of prickly, like a baby cactus. The quills stayed in his hand for most of the day and nobody touched them after that, not on purpose.”

  Susan wiped her nervous hand on a pant leg. “I guess those are its eyes, maybe? They started turning to face people after that, and people gave them an even bigger berth. Then they started going into the soil and popping back up to ambush people; to slap you with those awful prickles, only to slip back into the ground before you could see it. There was always this sound too, mostly just a buzz that was almost a note, but too far off to really grasp?” She turned her head in thought. “Now it’s sneakier, like it got smarter. Even the song got more varied; tone changes, volume changes, and it even waits silently under the soil now. It never so much as leaves lasting cuts in the earth when it pops up. Can’t afford to guess,” she muttered, glancing at the puddle.

  “It never shut up at first,” Gregoris began as Susan’s voice trailed off. “We heard it all through the first night and had no idea what to think of it, other than to stay the hell away from the windows. Didn’t hav
e an issue in the day when we struck water. The sound rose and disappeared with the blooms for a chunk in the morning. We thought it was an alarm, but it came from outside the college,” Gregoris rambled with a grumble. “We noticed at some point in the afternoon that we were missing someone, a man who had decided to get the potatoes into the ground.”

  “He wasn’t far from the well, but I saw nothing; heard nothing.” He shook his head. “All we found in the end was his tracks, and then a crater in the ground, decorated with swirling red like blood going down a drain. The bundle of potatoes was cast all around, like they’d exploded out.”

  “Then it happened again,” Tyran continued. “One more person just . . . gone. She’d gone for water while the rest of us were arguing about what to do; which way to go, and she just never came back. We searched, followed her prints, and realized they just stopped; one more red coiled crater in the sand.”

  “We’d all seen the flowers ‘lick’ someone, I think. That girl, Megan, she was the first who actually saw it happen,” Susan began again, her voice and coiling drum trembling. “She was screaming about vines, or tentacles—something like that—and was calling out to . . . I don’t even remember who he was.” She choked.

  “I don’t think he ever really spoke to anyone.” Tyran sighed.

  “It was so fast . . . ” Susan stopped, lost in the memory. “It was a tangle of vines, or tentacles, or something, just climbing up his leg. The moment I looked, they just shot up the rest of the way, right to his shoulders, and the soil just slurped him up before he could even scream.” She shivered. “An eye flower thing had been staring at him the whole time, and it went under when the vines got him.”

  “We watched for it then, and it got bolder. It seemed to understand we knew what it was now, and it started singing to us; to taunt us,” Tyran grumbled. The tinny voice of the burrower sang in an imperceptible chorus somewhere far away. “Haven’t lost any more since then, and I don’t intend to. It’s just not worth leaving the building with it out there.”