The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

SANCTUARY by Jeffrey Osier

The Straggler was suspiciously fat. Moisture clung to him in large, jiggling droplets that collected in sluices within the parallel folds of his flesh. He was already slapping at the Mites that crawled up his legs and shirt when he leaned over, gasping at resistant volumes of humid air, and tried to get the attention of Paul’s father.

“He’s not listening. He doesn’t hear anything.”

The Straggler cast Paul a dismissive glare and continued his pitch to the boy’s father, conjuring vivid images of the goods in his truck: radios, canned goods, guns, books, personal generators… the list went on and on and seemed to grow bigger every time he repeated it. When he gave up it was with a wave of the hand so violent that Paul feared the fat man was actually going to strike his father.

Paul followed the Straggler around the trailer court and tried to see the place through the stranger’s eyes. The Crowned Ones wandered in and out of the fog, some not as badly infested as his father, others far, far worse. The gray-brown hives rose like chimney-clusters from their heads with black gaping holes at the top of the encrusted crowns. The Mites swarmed in and out of those holes, marching along the humans’ faces, through their clothes or across their naked flesh, in and out of the fissures that spread over their bodies.

The Straggler was still wary of the Mites but wasn’t as afraid as he had been at first—and probably not as afraid as he should have been. He would shout at the Crowned Ones as he followed them, hover over them as they sat, asking them what they usually used as trading goods. It always ended with a disgusted wave and a shrug, followed by an increasingly bewildered look at his surroundings. Sometimes the Straggler would step too close to the towerlike mounds that grew along the gravel road, then have to leap away, brushing and slapping at the hordes of Mites that attacked him. He never seemed to notice that some of those mounds were shaped like human beings frozen and thickened into poses of erect, skyward-staring submission.

When the fat man finally approached Paul, the boy was scratching his bald, slashed and scabby head and looking at the dead Mites in his bloody hand.

“You! Boy! What the hell kind of a place is this, anyway? What’s happened down here?”

The Straggler smelled awful, looked awful, and had a hateful sneer on his face. The boy spat into the fog and walked away carelessly, calling over his shoulder, “What’s the matter? You haven’t seen Mites before?”

“Mites? Is that what they are? What are they doing to all these people?” Now the fat man sounded truly frightened. His palms slid over his face and body, searching out the bugs before they began to dig at him.

And so Paul tried to explain the Mites to him, though everything Paul knew was obvious just from looking at his father for a few minutes: the Mites not only built their mounds up from the ground, but were able to dig into the scalps of higher organisms—dig deep—and build their clustered towers out of the tops of their hosts’ heads. Some of these crowns were well over a foot high with bases that swelled in gruesome brick patterns over the hosts’ brow ridges. The Mites were everywhere.

“And that’s why your scalp is so fucked up?”

Paul shrugged.

“Why don’t you leave? I mean, things are bad up there, but you could get away from these things. You’ll starve to death down here. That stream you’re drinking from is so full of toxins that nothing can live in it. Look,” he said, his eyes getting funny and his cheeks started to rumble, “you can leave with me. I got a truck up there.” He pointed to the highlands beyond the trailer court. “You can work for me. You’ll eat well, see lots of things, grow your hair back. What do you say?”

Paul shrugged again and shook his head. No, he wasn’t going anywhere with the Straggler, and he wouldn’t feel safe venturing out of the trailer court with anyone. When he told the Straggler why, the fat man laughed.

“There’s no monsters in those hills, kid. No, you know, real monsters. And if there were, what would keep them from coming down here for you? Who’s gonna protect you here?”

The boy slapped himself in the face and held out his palm so the Straggler could see the Mite squashed across his fingers. “They do. The monsters are afraid of them.”

“Ah, Jesus Christ, you little ass! I’m leaving and if you want to come along, you’d damn well better tell me now!”

He got no answer, and turned with another dismissive wave and walked away. Paul followed, asking him to bring back some canned goods. But the Straggler wasn’t giving away anything and he sure as hell wasn’t going to make the walk down from the road again. Paul followed him to the court’s entrance, then watched him stumble through the grasses along the jagged shards of concrete that had once been the road leading into the trailer court oh-so-many impossible years ago.

Within moments, the fat man was swallowed in the rolling fog. Paul stood there for a few minutes, listening for the sound of a scream, the starting of an engine, but heard nothing. He decided to see if he could find himself and his father something to eat.

The Beast crawled from a narrow opening in the earth, away from the shrieks and the wet crowded darkness. He stood in the fog and listened.

Not far away, something big and clumsy trudged across the mud and jagged concrete slopes. It did not sound like one of the sick ones who lived in the valley. He had caught one of those not long ago, when hunger had driven him nearly mad and rendered him groggy and weak. He had torn it apart searching for meat, but found only shriveled organs, swollen joints, and a heavy, rocklike growth atop its head which grew deep into the skull, piercing and embracing the jellylike brain. Mites had exploded out of that head so quickly that he wasn’t sure whether they had also infiltrated the dry, narrow cavities within the body itself. It didn’t matter; there was very little edible meat on the body and the Mites were so voracious that they attacked him immediately, driving him away before he had a chance to take more than a few tentative, dissatisfied bites.

But this one was surrounded by a pungent, alluring odor as it gasped at the thick air and stumbled over the earth. He could feel the vibrations of every step.

Fantasies of ruptured, flowing flesh appeared in the darkness of his mind like quick, blinding flashes of light as he crouched behind a rotted stump, resting his arm along the fallen length of tree that still connected it by thin, tenacious strands. He watched as the figure appeared from out of the fog; a man, not too old, and very fat. The man did not see him through the fog, even as he looked around in a kind of desperate, cautious confusion. He was searching for something, and was too distracted to notice. The man stumbled off in another direction, up and toward the road.

He followed at a safe distance, measuring the strength and edibility of the man, deciding whether it would be better to give chase or spring upon him from a hiding place somewhere farther down the path. But as the human gasped and the smell of his sweat grew stronger, the Beast grew hungrier, more agitated, then found his legs pumping harder as he zeroed in with silent fury, in a race against time and starvation.

The fat man turned and gaped, face frozen in stupid terror as his belly was slit open with a swift downward slash of claw. The scream was transformed into a gurgle almost before it left the Straggler’s mouth.

He slid his hand through the tear and felt his fingers swim through the tangle of intestines, rupturing the stomach and left lung before gently fondling the beating heart as he lowered the fat man’s body into the shivering wormgrasses. He knelt close as the heartbeat quickened and grew erratic under his probing fingers. He looked into bulging brown eyes and let his tongue unroll; the sharp but oil-moistened tip of his tongue ran graceful lines around the eyes, savoring the stupid fear of the dying man, smelling the meat as it marinated in its own panic, before driving his tongue brainward through the eye as his hand crushed the heart within the body cavity.

Wherever Kate traveled, the angelhair followed. It fell through the fog, it fell from the trees in the dead and dying forests, it fell between the hollowed out buildings in the infested city wastelands that sprawled across the landscape like impenetrable but unavoidable barriers. Once she found herself in a clear, blue-skied flatland of rock, sand, and small, whimpering cactus. Even there the angelhair fell from the sky, marking the path she followed, draping across her shoulders and her thick black hair, sometimes setting a path she then felt compelled to follow. If she stood in someone’s doorway begging for a place to hide from the night-cold, there was no way to conceal the thin strands that danced down upon her, and when her host awoke the next morning to find the house smothered in angelhair, Kate was sent on her way. If she slept too long in the open, she would awaken beneath a deep pile of the stuff, hidden from madmen and predators but unable to breathe and barely able to move. She traveled to keep it from accumulating too thickly in one spot, weaving a restless zigzag across the country.

She was moving into lowland country now. There were things that spread like grasses here, but when she sat or tried to catnap, they seemed not to be grasses at all but vast, uniform colonies of gently flagellating worms.

Kate followed the path of a narrow, shallow stream that cut through the shrouded landscape. Within it swam small fish, so weakened that it was easy to scoop them from the water for food. But most of them were bent and crippled by parasites that clung to their sides and slowly sucked their life away. These parasites had thorny carapaces and hooks that dug deep into the flesh. The parasites themselves were inedible and impossible to remove without tearing the fish to pieces. She had run out of food and would have used her gun to hunt if the few animals she saw were large enough to withstand a shotgun blast and still remain relatively intact; instead, she scooped at schools of dying fish and hunted for those few—literally about one out of ten—that had not already become a host.

When she first heard the sounds she stopped and tried to form a picture of a creature which would make such sounds. Whatever it was, it was big, and whether it was chewing on the carcass of another animal or just munching away at the wormgrasses, Kate was sure it was dangerous. She moved quietly, her sharp eyes scanning the misty countryside. Kate had seen any number of incredible things during her years of wandering, and the more time went on and the more populations everywhere thinned out, the more extreme and unpredictable the life forms became. She followed the chewing and tearing sounds, slowing with every step as they became louder and more focused and she began to imagine in those sounds and scents the presence of flesh, bone, viscera cooling in the afternoon fog.

She moved cautiously and yet was still caught off guard when she came upon the creature sitting at the lip of a great fissure in the earth, neatly tearing apart the body of a fat human male. It was larger than a man, maybe eight feet tall if it stood erect, with a body thickened by a studded, convoluted armor except for long, thin, and tortuously knotted legs. Its arms were as long and hideously muscled as its legs, but the biceps were lined with thorny growths and the triceps covered by the heavy carapace that extended sharply off its shoulders. But it was the creature’s head that frightened her most, especially in the moment it turned to look at her. Long and sleek along the cheeks but sharply ridged and crowned along the top, it seemed to have no definite eyes or ears or nose—just a mouth like a long, soft-fleshed proboscis. Without knowing where its eyes might be, Kate knew exactly the moment it looked into her eyes while its lips peeled back to show a ring of sharp teeth. She saw those teeth actually bend into hooks, and in the next instant saw a long tongue dance out between them in a hypnotic pattern.

It dropped the body pieces to the ground and roared. The armor on its shoulders rose and fanned outward like the plumage of an iron peacock as it crouched.

Kate raised the shotgun and fired at the beast that stood no more than fifteen feet from her. As she turned to run, she caught sight of the armored wing blades exploding into a hundred black jagged pieces. Then she ran as fast as she could, her feet directing her to lower ground for speed’s sake alone. She could hear and smell the creature closing the distance on her.

She leaped over the trunk of a fallen tree, whirled and fired point blank at the beast just as it leaped. The recoil knocked her backward as the beast clutched its stomach, howling in pain as it dropped to its knees.

Dazed and winded, Kate wobbled to her feet and watched the creature thrash upon the ground. It was not weakening; it was not dying. Its thrashing was growing more violent, more energized, and she realized it was about to rise again. Fearing her dread would paralyze her, she yanked the shotgun away from the grasping wormgrasses and resumed her downhill flight.

It wasn’t long before she once again felt its presence behind her. She could see something down at the bottom of the slope—a roof of some kind—and next to it, a gutted automobile. She tried to spring toward it, her stride so exaggerated and unsteady on the steep incline that she was afraid she was about to run off the edge of a cliff.

Instead, she tripped over a crusty growth and went rolling through the grass. The shotgun bounced on downhill; she glimpsed it disappearing in the fog as she skidded to a stop. Her skin began to itch and burn. Slapping and scratching at her skin, Kate was completely off-guard when the creature slammed into her, wrapping her in its sharp, deadly caress.

Four years earlier, Kate had been stabbed in the arm by a woman who could no longer stand having this angelhair-conjuring witch in her home. Two and a half years earlier, she’d been gang raped by a group of Stragglers, one of whom had held a .38 to her cheek as he giggled his way through the act. She knew more about the threat of close-range death—intimate death—than she could even bear to think about. And yet nothing could compare to being wrapped in the thorned arms of this monster, her face only inches from the prehensile teeth that were hooking toward her.

Her ten-inch blade was in her hand on instinct; she didn’t know if the soft white bulge tucked within the armored folds of that face was an eye or an ear or what, only that it was close and vulnerable. The blade sank into the bulge just as the creature’s tongue-tip sliced open her cheek. It released her and grabbed the ruptured orifice with one hand, thrashing out blindly with the other in a backhanded blow across Kate’s face that threw her down the slope. It seemed to take forever to touch ground, but when she did she tumbled out of control over rocks and brittle mounds rising out of the earth.

Two thoughts screamed for attention as she finally rolled to a stop. One, the fiery pain she felt was not something within her but something swarming upon her. Two, there was someone standing above her, a thin and bloodied male. She blacked out while still trying to figure out whether this strange looking person—now kneeling toward her—was a child or an old man.

Paul could see fleeting glimpses of the monster on the high ground above the court as it took a hesitant step downward, then retreated. He had to strain to make out the black shape against the churning fogbank, afraid he might lose sight of it as it crept down the slope to attack. Finally, he caught a brief, final glimpse of the creature slinking back to the high ground.

It’s afraid of the Mites, just the way Dad used to tell me.

Paul pulled the woman out of the rubble, struggling to heft her over his shoulder. She was just a little shorter than he was and probably a lot lighter, but she was out cold and almost impossible to lift. He finally managed to get her back to the trailer and stretched her out on the concrete at the base of the front steps. His father sat out on the picnic bench, his eyes bulging, empty whites, nodding his head and mumbling replies to the very real voices in his head while Paul examined the woman’s face, her arms, legs, ribs. Nothing seemed to be broken, but she was cut badly on her face and hands.

Worse, though, were the Mites. He could see their glittering shells moving in and out of her long, thick hair, moving along her cuts and dancing within the coagulating blood. He ran into the trailer and came out with scissors and wet rags, hastily cleaning the wounds and wiping away as many of the Mites as he could, then began hacking at her hair. Within minutes he had it chopped down to two or three inches, at which point he rested her head in his lap and began picking at individual Mites, crushing them between thumb and forefinger, slapping at those that escaped onto his pants, moving quickly and with the hopeless determination he’d once used with his father—before the man had succumbed to the sweet, perpetual dreamworld which the Mites offered and began responding to Paul with violent flailings and screams. Then it had no longer been his father talking, but the Mites inside of him.

Paul looked at the woman’s face as he groomed her. He wondered how old she was. Surely not as old as father. Thirty? Twenty-five? There was a delicate beauty about her features that no scar or stress line could hide. He had been a little boy the last time he’d seen a real, uninfested woman—probably no more than twelve years old.

He saw a large Mite disappear down the front of her shirt and ripped away the buttons in a panic, trying to grab it before it escaped. Suddenly she was awake, letting out a scream that escalated into a roar and grabbing his wrists. He tried to stand but her grip was unbreakable and he found himself fighting to free his wrists and retain his balance as she stood and tried to throw him back to the ground. He twisted his body abruptly, managed to free one arm and break her grip on the other with a downward sweep onto her forearm. She howled with pain, then punched him in the face. He landed tailbone first on the concrete and then squinted up at her, trying to make her out through the thousands of flashing lights that danced before his eyes. When he focused on that face again—that pretty, delicate face—it wore a wide-eyed, teeth-clenching grimace of rage. Her hand fumbled at an empty knife sheath.

“I was only trying to get the Mites off you, lady. They’re all over you.” He propped himself up on one elbow and pointed toward the stream. “You better go wash yourself off—”

He didn’t have to finish. Her attention turned abruptly to the hundreds of tiny creatures crawling over her. She let out a resounding “Shit,” then headed off toward the stream. She turned back to him for just a moment as he was standing up. “You lay a hand on me again, mister, and I’ll fucking KILL you!”

He watched her retreat and wiped away the blood that was leaking from his nose and into his mouth.

His father moaned and looked at Paul with eyes that for just a moment seemed just a little bit aware and alive before his weighted head drooped forward and the eyes went dead-white once again. When Paul stepped forward to push his father’s body into a more comfortable position, he noticed several long, white strands of hair lying across his arm and draped over his head. He gathered them together and held them to his face and breathed deep. They smelled sweet and pungent… like the woman bathing in the stream.

They lived in rusted hulls that were scratched and torn from some long-forgotten struggle, staring at the outside world through cracked and cobwebbed glass. Had Kate been of a more philosophical mind, she might have taken issue with the idea that they were still human at all. As it was, she could only look upon them with hopeless, cautionary fear, knowing that the only way to avoid their fate was to climb out of this crumbling, parking-lot wasteland and face the thing that had forced her here in the first place.

Which, of course, was the decision all of these people had once made: either risk agony and death at the hands of that thing up there, or fight the inevitable infestation of Mites and spend the rest of their lives in whatever shadow-world the Mites in their heads would take them to. What purpose did these people serve the industrious insects? What did the humans provide the Mites? They could build a mound four feet tall in a single afternoon, using nothing more than their own secretions. How were the encrusted cylinders blooming from the heads of these people different?

Paul did not, could not, know. But Paul’s father, and all the rest—she counted 24 in all—knew very well. Perhaps that was all they were able to know. It was Kate’s overwhelming priority never to find out for herself. She was starving down here, and the few dried rags of meat or canned green beans Paul gave her were not nearly enough. What did the others eat? Did the Mites feed them, sacrifice their own bodies for the nutritional needs of their hosts?

Kate wandered the court during the daylight hours, trying to keep the angelhair from accumulating too heavily in one spot. She tried to talk to the crowned, white-eyed, gently mumbling people who staggered about, trying to grasp something useful in their aimless wandering or in the apparently random building and scurrying of a billion tiny insects. She tried to keep those same insects off of her own body as she walked the perimeters of the trailer court and looked for signs of the monster in the fog. As she did, the angelhair fell, snagging atop the trailers and on the old rooftop antennas and in the branches of the dead trees until it seemed as though she was weaving a canopy of silky fibers over the entire court.

How many of those creatures—warm-blooded predators, large enough to require frequent meals—could there be in a world where there was very little on which to feed? Surely there couldn’t be all that many—maybe it was a sport, a one-of-the-kind monstrosity. But as she walked the perimeter, weaving the outer edge of her silver canopy, she looked into the fog-laden roads and slopes and could feel their presence, their attention. During those first few days it had been hard to understand how these people could have allowed themselves to be subjected to the Mite infestations; why Paul, tearing himself apart to hold the infestation off a few more precious weeks or months, didn’t just take his chances and escape this valley. The longer she stayed, the more she understood. It was the fog and the shadows lurking within it. Once you saw the creature, especially at the range from which she’d seen and felt it, it was impossible not to see suggestions of it in every dark or thin patch in the rolling blanket of cloud.

Kate had to get out. She’d wandered too many years to end up trapped here, scratching her flesh away because of a bunch of gruesomely opportunistic insects, afraid to leave because she saw hallucinations in the fog that surrounded her. There had to be a way to get free, and as the days passed she grew convinced that somehow the answer lay with Paul.

After their first ugly encounter, she’d kept away from him for a couple of days, always aware of his presence, his curiosity, his obvious and sadly awkward attraction to her. Once she came to believe the reason he’d given for his groping hand on the first day, she let down her guard and allowed him to approach and talk to her. He led her to the most well furnished of the abandoned trailers, he found her scraps of food, and in his own, clumsy fashion, he tried to provide her with conversation. Were it not for the horrible scabs and scars festering atop his head, he might have been a fairly attractive young man; his eyes were piercing light blue and there was a warmth and determination in his smile that was almost heartbreaking when she considered how bleak his future was in this rusted, bug-saturated hell.

And so, lying in her trailer at night, sleeping in a bed for the first time in months, she would try to walk herself through her escape, try to rationalize her chances now that she’d lost her shotgun and her blade. With each passing night, Paul would figure more and more into these fantasies, and she began to see reasons why his presence might give her the courage to attempt it, how it was the only way Paul could escape the fate of his father, how his presence could help her odds of surviving.

But Paul was even more afraid of the monsters in the fog than she was. As much as he despised the Mites, he spoke as though he were in debt to them for at least providing a refuge from the creatures in the high ground surrounding the trailer court. And—as far gone as his father might have been—Paul was truly devoted to the man. Kate doubted she could convince the boy to leave unless his father was brought along.

The solution hit her one morning as she stood in the doorway watching a woman stand unflinching as dozens of Mites skittered over her face and into her open-towering crown. Kate was already positive it would work when Paul showed up later that day, wiping the moisture away from the shotgun he’d discovered in the wormgrasses no more than twenty feet upland from where he’d first found her.

“Paul,” she said, picking a large Mite from his shoulder and crushing it between thumb and forefinger, “I know how we can get out of here. You, me, and your father.” She reached for his face with two outstretched fingers, as though to pluck away another Mite, but instead ran her palm and fingertips playfully across his cheek. She could feel him shudder. He looked down at the ground.

“Dad, too?”

“Yes, Paul. Would you like to hear it?”

He looked up at her. She felt a Mite scurry down the front of her shirt, and saw Paul’s eyes follow it bashfully before looking back into her eyes.

“Okay. What’s the plan?”

“Paul, a Mite just crawled down my shirt. Could you get it for me? Would you kill it for me?”

The boy swallowed hard and looked away, paralyzed. She pulled him close.

“Paul? Please?”

He lay next to her in bed, listening as she filled out the distances beyond the fogbanks with her tales, her description of the world he’d never dreamed of seeing himself.

“When I was a little girl, I remember blue, uncloudy skies… people. The changes had all begun years before, of course, but they started to come on more powerfully then, like waves of fog just washing over us, killing us and nearly everything else that couldn’t hide or adapt. And in their place…” She shrugged and didn’t finish, not wanting to scare him too much about the world into which she was about to throw him.

Paul was eager but gentle, awkward but lovingly persistent. As they held each other in the darkness of her bed, she whispered a sanitized scenario of escape to him, and he nodded in agreement with every point. She needn’t have lied to him. She was sure that this boy, her lover, would have agreed to anything she told him.

They trudged through rolling, hissing clouds of milky-white moisture. Kate took the lead, moving quickly while Paul tried to maintain a central position between her and his father, worried that because of Kate’s haste and determination he would lose sight of her. He was frightened by the openness, the emptiness of the sloping ground, and of the fog that sometimes hid Kate completely. He couldn’t afford to lose her for a second, dependent on her not only for leading the way but for her sensitivity and reaction time to all that lurked beyond his own eyes and ears. Still, he could only move so fast. His father was almost too weak for this uphill climb, and far too awkward to keep from falling on his face every few steps.

The beast won’t dare attack us if it’s as afraid of the Mites as you say, she had told him. Your father will be our shield. Him and his cargo. It had all sounded so convincing. I know where the Straggler’s truck is parked. We’ll be able to cover plenty of ground before we have to worry about gasoline. Down there, lying naked against her warm, smooth flesh, there was no way he could not believe her, no way he could refuse.

Since I’ve never seen these Mites anywhere else, maybe there’s something down in the valley they need in order to survive. We can save your father, bring him back. You can grow back your hair. But the world as it had seemed while she’d stroked between his legs and whispered in his ear was far different from the lonely, desolate plain through which they now climbed, so empty but so loud, so vast and yet—with its clinging, milky vapors—so constricting.

The expression on his father’s face was far worse than blank—it was utterly consumed. His head rolled from side to side under the weight of his encrusted crown and wet, gagging songs dripped weakly from his mouth. He has no idea where we’re going. Is there enough left of him to bring back even if the Mites die up here?

Finally Kate ssshhhhed them to a halt at the top of a ridge.

“Is the truck near here?” he whispered. Her response was a sharp grab at his cheeks, her palm pressed firmly over his mouth. He shook her away and lifted his father again.

Kate raised the shotgun and squinted into the fog, trying to catch a sign of movement in those fleeting patches of transparent air. Her head turned in response to noises he couldn’t make out over the din. “It’s nearby. I can hear it. I can… smell it.”

“What do we do?” he asked, trying to make his voice as soft as hers.

She turned to him coldly. “We put your father out front. I’ll guide him, but he’ll walk ahead of us.”

Paul balked. “You can’t do that. How are you going to keep him on course? Keep him on his feet? How do you know it won’t just attack him anyway?”

She pushed Paul away with the barrel of the shotgun. “Better him than us,” was all she said before grabbing the frail man, pushing him forward and nudging him in the back with the gun every few seconds.

The old man seemed to respond to her treatment, falling down less than he had on the lower, steeper ground, but Paul knew it was no use. He watched the tilts of her head, her prods to his father’s shoulders to change his direction. She wasn’t trying to avoid the beast; she was leading them to it.

He groped for the blade hanging from his belt, measuring how easy it would be to just step forward and stab her in the back. If he killed her, what would he do then? Go on, just the two of them, or take his father back down the hill, back within the sanctuary of the Mites?

But Kate’s instincts were less than sure, and when it finally attacked, it was from behind Paul. He smelled it before he heard it, and didn’t see the beast until it was almost too late to dodge the sideswiping blow of its thick, thorn-fringed arm. He let out a scream as he rolled away and couldn’t look up until he heard the first shots.

He could barely make out the three weak silhouettes in the fog: the beast—its outline distorted by jagged horns and crests, the woman firing at it and the thin, frail man with the crown of encrusted flesh—on his knees between them, crawling aimlessly, oblivious to it all. The shells seemed to do little more than slow the creature’s advance, though it staggered a little more with each impact. It kicked his father away as though the man were no more than a scrap of garbage, then lunged at Kate as she screamed and jumped away.

Paul ran to his father and pulled the dazed man to his feet. His father’s eyes fluttered as the pupils spun crazily through the red-veined whites. A stream of meaningless sounds escaped his mouth on a malodorous cloud. The man had just enough energy left to shake off his son’s help and fall back into the wormgrass, sitting with his head slumped forward so that Paul could Clearly see the panic of the thousand Mites that scurried about from hole to hole on top of his father’s misshapen head.

He heard a scream and two more shots.

Paul ran in the direction of the sounds, stopping short when he saw the creature, its back thorns fanning wildly like the wings of a trapped bird, staggering about and finally collapsing on hands and knees as it gave a howl that seemed to fill the countryside.

Paul stepped around the creature carefully, never taking his eyes from it as he approached a winded, wildeyed Kate. She pointed the gun at him to hold him off.

“Kate, you’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

“I can’t kill it! I’ve got to go before it builds up enough strength to stand and come after me—”

“Does that mean I can’t come with you?”

“I can’t lug around some bald, scabby-headed kid and his bug-farmed zombie of a father, Paul!”

Paul gazed into the fog; he could no longer hear or even see his father. I’m not going to leave him here like this. He pushed the barrel of the gun aside. “Wait for me a second, will you? Don’t leave, okay?”

She nodded reluctantly and he ran back to his father, who raised his head and smiled at Paul, then tipped it backward to expose his throat as he collapsed into the wormgrass.

There was blood, but less than Paul would have expected.

They found the Straggler’s truck near sunset, but it was useless. The ground around it was dug up in a series of narrow, criss-crossing paths, as though an army of small but vicious animals had passed through, destroying everything in their wake, including the truck’s front end. The metal had been torn and chewed, and everything under the hood twisted and broken and thrown out into the grass. When Kate realized that the truck was beyond hope, she threw her shotgun on the ground and began screaming, her fury building until her knuckles left red smears on the scratched white of the truck.

Paul walked around to where the army had torn through the truck’s rear doors. Now there was only wreckage, scattered into piles of nearly indistinguishable rubble. There were edible strands and clumps and puddles in there somewhere; the smell of it made his mouth water.

But as he crawled into the back of the truck, the failing light revealed something else. Hanging above him were bleached human bones and sheets of dried skin stretched tight over skulls that stared with sunken sockets and generous smiles.

As his fingers poked at the papery strands within one of those eyesockets, he thought of the obese Straggler, his hungry eyes and his desperate offer.

Paul jumped from the truck and dipped his fingers into the jagged tear at the top of a crushed can of nectarine wedges. They tasted of metal and mold, but he had no idea what a nectarine was supposed to taste like and had a lifetime’s experience with the tastes of mold and metal.

He found Kate, looking dumbfounded into her upturned palm and then staring at the sky.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“It stopped. The angelhair. It’s gone.”

“Maybe it… I don’t know.” He tried to make eye-contact with her, show her his attempt at a hopeful smile. “Maybe that’s a good sign.”

She looked at him, perplexed and unsteady, as though she wasn’t quite sure whether or not to be frightened. “I won’t know where I’m going. Or where I’m coming from. It always… covered my paths at both ends… following me, leading me—”

Paul looked at his own palm. Hadn’t there been a smear of his father’s blood there just a short time ago? There was no trace of it now, lost amid the rust and bitter nectarine syrup. He thought of the brittle flesh on the hanging skull he’d touched in the back of the truck. It had been no colder or drier than his own father’s cheeks the moment he’d slit the man’s throat.

He held out a gray wedge of nectarine and Kate leaned forward and sucked it from between his fingers. She made a sour face as she chewed it and looked at him suspiciously. His own face was calm and cold and unperturbed. There was anger in there somewhere… at her, at his father, at the world; there was fear, too, but it was buried too deep to be much of a problem. For now.

They cleaned out the back of the truck and managed to salvage some of the edibles for the next day’s trip. He wouldn’t let her take down the Straggler’s hanging trophies. That night they made love beneath the gently swaying bones and teeth.

The next morning was hot, wet, and milky white.

It had begun as an insignificant pain, an abscess that nagged when he chewed and when he tried exposing or retracting his eyes too quickly; still, nothing that wouldn’t go away eventually. It had been the stab wound by the female human that had ruptured the abscess and driven the pain deep into his head and down into his gut, where it remained, throbbing and spreading through him. How long had the pain blinded him? How many days and nights had he wandered uselessly, his sense of smell so weakened that he couldn’t even sniff his way home?

He’d finally resorted to lying in the wormgrasses, no longer caring if he was so far down into the valley that the Mites attacked and colonized him. He thought back to the times he’d followed a scent to find it belonged to an animal, alone and apparently uninjured—just lying in the grass, waiting patiently for death.

But the discomfort of his wriggling bed eventually began to overshadow the now diminishing pain. He tossed and turned and finally sat up. He was weak with hunger, and gripped by fear and guilt about the family he’d left behind. He could smell those aching distances and the impenetrable gray in his head cleared into the richly textured daylight fog. He sat for quite some time, admiring the dense hieroglyphic texture of his armored flesh. Then he smelled her.

He stayed close to the trio, eyes focused on the shotgun at her side, the rest of him focused on the smell of her meat and how far that meal might be spread among his cubs. He had withstood the explosions from the shotgun, as painful as they might have been, and he could withstand them again. He would dispatch her quickly this time, cut her and her companions down and not bother to let them marinate in pain and fear before he squeezed their hearts away. He was old, his armor frayed and brittle, and the abscesses were only going to spread and become more obvious with the passage of time. Nothing would ever get close enough to rupture him again.

But this time the shells did hurt and she did not stop firing until he was down and could not stand again. There was a male with her, a young one with even fresher meat on its bones, but he would have neither of them now. They had left one behind, however, a rickety old man who barely gave off a scent at all. When he finally stood and approached the man, he realized why. He was dead and infested with Mites. He was inedible… probably.

He knelt at the man’s side and clawed a neat slit from breastbone to crotch, reaching inside to palm the last glowing moments of warmth from the cooling heart. But the heart was already cold and dry and it seemed as though it had stopped living a long time ago. He held the heart tightly in his hand for awhile longer, then ran caressing fingers down the rest of the dried, useless organs, pulling apart the foreign, gelatinous infrastructure that had succeeded them all.

He looked into the dead man’s eyes. They were open and staring intently at him. Something inside—the Mites—pulled the cheekflesh away from the mouth, revealing a part of the skullsmile beneath. The head rolled for a moment, then collapsed back into the wormgrass.

When he pulled his hand from the man’s chest, it was covered in transparent jelly and a thousand scurrying Mites. He howled as he shook them away and wiped his hand across the ground, crushing and smearing the wormgrasses with every swipe.

He was still scratching at the memory of them as he followed the scents home. He had no food and was no longer even sure how long he’d been gone—how long had the cubs gone without food? Had his mate needed to hunt in his absence? But there was a familiar trace floating on the air, and it took him only a moment to remember what it was. The fat man—he’d killed a fat human and prepared it exquisitely. He had been at the entrance to the burrow when the female human had found him the first time. So he’d brought back food after all. The traces were minute—the meat had all been eaten days ago.

But other scents began to intrude on him now. As his eyes examined the violently torn paths through the grasses—as though an army of small, voracious carnivores had passed over this terrain—panic swelled within him, washing away all the hunger and traces of the poison that had flooded his system.

They were the wrong scents. He broke into a run when he caught sight of the black slit in the earth—the entrance to their burrow—but he stopped cold when he saw the tiny spine, curled like a tail and resting half-obscured beneath its thick, soft armor shell. There was no meat between the spine and the shell, no blood—just fog and ciliating grasses.

Farther on, another, this one with a few chewed bones attached, its inedible shell shredded and strung out like a tangled web of wire. He felt something crumble beneath his foot: a tiny skull. And there, at the lip of the burrow, a larger skull, broken into half a dozen pieces, its thin, thorned armor spread around it. There were meager strands of meat snaked through the grass. He fell to his knees and pulled the tiny skull toward him, his mournful howl piercing the fog.

He heard a response in the distance. An almost perfect impersonation of his cry. He rose and followed the scentless sound through the fog.

The dead man, dried viscera flopping about the lip of the vertical incision, stumbled toward him, the Mites within working their wonders. The high ground was not killing the Mites at all; it was making them stronger.

The look on the dead man’s face was purposeful, threatening when it stepped up to him. It made one last mocking cry. With a swipe of rage, he separated the man’s head from his body. The body continued to stagger about, not much less agile than it had been with a head attached.

He went back to the burrow, collected the remains of his family, and placed them in a half-circle around him as he curled into the darkness to sleep, hoping that the diminishing traces of their scents might soften the bleak edges of his dreams.

But he could not sleep right away, only ponder the shape and disposition of this new army of predators sweeping across his terrain and telling himself over and over again…

I am not the last. I cannot be the last.