Threat Quality Press

[Here is another short story that will be offered up in sections. It's a little less polished than some of our pieces in the past. Think of it as a dirty sketch of a thing, a great piece of epic sci-fi that's still nascent and looking for its feet. --ed]

Art by Dave Frankel, PhD.

We Are Shepherds

I

There was no question: I was going to have to kill the horse.

A nasty tangle of red and blue wire had erupted from her stomach, and was now clutching, twisting, heaving in a grotesque parody of her own labored, blood-flecked breathing. She lay on her side, screaming piteously, her eye rolling so I could see the white. She must have picked up a Morgellon’s parasite somewhere; probably before I bought her in that little half-assed shanty town that was now a hundred miles south.

The wires clutched again, and skittering their sharp tips over her skin. She twitched; muscles surged as she kicked her legs wildly, trying to get back on her feet, but the Morgellon’s had gotten into the deep tissue now, and her last show of strength petered out. She screamed again, and fell back to the rusty desert ground.

I shot her in the head with a hollow-point short. She died a half a heartbeat later, and I didn’t regret it. In a few hours, the parasite would have completely replaced her body, transforming it into a hideous, lurching, half-formed biomechanical organism that would have screamed and stumbled around the desert, desperately searching for prey, for something to wrap its greasy, sticky wires around, something it could crush and suffocate. This would have made life a living hell for the horse. It would also have been problematic for me.

“Well?” I asked out loud. You were supposed to subvocalize to the ayeyes, but I usually didn’t bother. I looked around the inside of the ravine. It was relatively cool here, and shaded from the sun, so that the reds, oranges, and yellows of the desert looked like a uniform dark brick.

[You’re not exactly flush for options], Kelly told me, her soft, soothing voice right in my ear.

“Tell me about it.”

[I don’t have records of a town or city within a hundred miles. You’ve got about two days’ worth of food and water. Also: it’s hot.]

“Yeah, it is hot.” I took another look around the ravine. A small stream of mercury trickled along the base, running around the small stones so that they looked like they were set in a piece of jewelry. There’d be no water here—like there was no water anywhere. But it was fairly cool. I could spend the day, at least, try my luck at night.

Something rumbled in the earth. Something big, blocked from view by the jagged cliffs.

“Is that what I think it is?”

[Are you asking me to guess what you think it is? Yes, probably.]

“Fuck.” I started shifting through my saddle packs. The Morgellon’s parasite still twitched, but without a living metabolism to feed it, it did so only feebly.

[You’ll have to leave your armor.]

“I know.” I tried to guess how much I’d be able to carry. I’d trained to walk for days loaded down with gear and rations, but that was in harness. Without the right frame and packs, to distribute weight properly, I’d have to cut my load in half.

[You can carry all the water, but probably only half the rations.]

“Yeah.” No armor, and I was going to miss that. That left me with the smartfibres in my clothes, and the subcutaneous dermal grafts. Better than nothing, anyway. I grabbed the old war-mask, though. For sentimental reasons. Slung the water bags over my shoulders, and grabbed a sack of dense, protein and calorie-rich meal bars.

There was a sound like a thunderclap, and the ground rumbled again, worse this time. It rattled my teeth, and I almost loss my balance.

I snatched up a survival knife, a first aid kit, and a coil of rope. You never knew when you’d need rope. The gun on its magnetic harness never left my side. “Which way?” I asked Kelly.

[I’m not sure. High concentrations of heavy metal in the air are making scans difficult.]

Crap. I set off south through the ravine, resisting the urge to run. It was less likely to spot me if I was moving slowly—and, besides, I had a long, long walk ahead of me. No sense tiring myself out in the first mile.

The ravine grew narrow, and cut deeper; the walls rose up over my head and began to close off the sky until it was a narrow blue crack high above me. The stream of mercury thickened, and I was careful not to get any on my boots. It wouldn’t hurt them, but I had an old paranoia about mercury. I worked my way steadily downwards, as another thunder clap shook the earth. Bits of red and orange dust sifted down from above me; small chips of stone landed in the thick, silver liquid at my feet.

The ravine grew so narrow that I was obliged to try and squeeze through sideways. I had to take the packs from my shoulders, so that they weren’t torn open by the sharp stone jags.

Thunderstruck again and the light above me vanished, just as I managed to squeeze through the last few feet of rocky channel. Just ahead was a green tower, fifty feet around and a hundred feet high. I froze. Instinctively, I followed the line of the tower up, up…

…up the gigantic leg, to the body of the heavy. It hovered up there, massive, a floating mountain of a thing, the swarm of tentacles like barbed dicks that writhed in its mouth was just barely visible high above and in the dark. I couldn’t see its four other legs.

Heavies sometimes leaned down and snatched up people with those phallic tentacles. If you were moving fast, or if you looked tasty, or if you met whatever unfathomable criteria the heavies judged you by. Heavies sometimes ignored you, and went on about their incomprehensible business.

I let my hand rest on the grip of my weapon. I had absolutely no chance of hurting this thing—even with my gun—but it made me feel better. I pondered options, there with my heart in my throat. I couldn’t even subvocalize to Kelly, for fear the heavy would hear us.

Could they hear radio signals? No one knew. They didn’t seem to have eyes or ears, though nobody had made an extensive study of the things. If you stayed nearby for too long, you were likely to get snatched. No one was sure where they came from, though it was generally thought that they weren’t around before the End of the World.

The heavy made a noise, a groaning sound like a mountain breaking in half, and I could see pink tentacles, tips engorged with blood, black barbs wicked with toxins…Grenades, at the feet? Maybe I can slow it down. Maybe I can cut some of the tentacles, make a run for it…

Another groan, a long creaking sound, and the vast black body began shifting away from me. The massive tower of a leg lifted up, higher than seemed possible, and crashed to the ground with the sound of thunder, somewhere beyond my view. I waited until the shadow passed, and the hot sun glared down at me again before I let out my breath.

[Lucky] Kelly told me, and I didn’t argue. Just set my eyes to the west, and started walking. I wasn’t going to stay in the ravine with the heavy around, and there wasn’t any shelter I could see.

So. Walking. There’s not a lot left in the world, since it Ended. A hundred, two hundred years ago, no one’s sure when, or what happened. Whether it was war, or robots, or aliens, or demons, or who-the-fuck knows what. We know there’s a lot of desert, and we know enough to know that we’ve lost something.

When you walk through the desert, where there’s nothing to see but flat stretches of heavy-metal sand and grit, everything becomes significant. You feel like you’ve got a relationship with the weird, hammer-shaped stone that you see ahead of you on the horizon, or the ten-story tall spar of bone that once was something’s rib. Your eyes fix on it, it comes slowly, steadily, incrementally closer, and by the time you reach it you’ve spent a half a day staring at the thing. Its familiar to you now, close enough that you miss it when you pass on by, and find something else in the distance to stare at.

Static kept crossing my left eye, every time the wind kicked up.

[You’ve got grit in the servos] said Kelly, her voice still soft, but prim. She didn’t have to worry about grit; she was Old Science. The new shit that had built my eye was well behind the old stuff; it was like a rifle built by a caveman. I had no time to clean out my eye, nowhere clean to do it.

I kept walking. Day and night, because I had to get as far as I could. I didn’t know how far the next little island of civilization was. I didn’t know anything, except that I had to keep going.

I could feel the heat draining the life out of me, sucking the breath from my lungs. I drank regularly from my waterskins, tore at the protein bars, lived the mindless-mind of long treks, where idle thoughts would drive you mad. No thinking, no worrying, don’t see the weird rainbow of colors in the desert. Don’t see the red sands. Don’t see. Just left foot. Right foot. Keep moving. Left foot. Right foot. No one is going to find you if you die here. No one is going to rescue you. Left foot. Right foot. If you stop you’ll never make it. Left. Keep moving. Right. If you stop, you won’t stand up again. Left. Keep moving. Right. The sun hung fat and low, orange on the horizon, drawing me towards it, drawing the life out of me.

Left. Keep moving.

Right. Keep breathing.

Left.

Right.

There was a black spot on the fat orange globe, and it grew larger. Faster, too fast, it was moving towards me. I clutched at the gun, pulled it from its magnetic holster, tried to lift it but lassitude weighed down my arm. I realized I was on my knees. My lips were cracked and bleeding with the heat.

[Someone’s coming.]

I hoped I wasn’t going to have to shoot them. I couldn’t lift my arm.

[On to Part 2]