Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead by Nancy Kilpatrick

Author:Nancy Kilpatrick
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing
Published: 2013-11-29T23:00:00+00:00

Chelsea Mourning

By David Tocher

Stooping low in the darkness, Chelsea Mills clutched her bleeding palm and peered at the Montreal ruins through the grimy window of an abandoned pub.

Thick dust clouds and debris smudged the sky, and Chelsea thought it’d probably been months since any living thing had seen sunlight. Montreal had become a disemboweled corpse, stone and steel guts scattered amongst the bones of its streets and avenues. Skyscrapers and cathedrals no longer blocking the view, the landscape offered her a panorama of the distant St. Lawrence River, a rippling expanse of black, swirling with cross currents.

Chelsea listened to the wind, high and keening, as it rushed through the crumbled framework of buildings, spinning eddies of ash and debris into the air. She also heard the voices of the others. Fleeting words. Sentence fragments. A mostly incoherent drone.

Since childhood, she’d called them think-voices. Hearing them now, Chelsea knew she wasn’t the only person above ground; there were others nearby. Those disembodied whispers kept her pinned inside the dark building, unwilling to show herself. Of this earth, but not human — that was how the think-voices felt against her mind.

As the pain in her palm dulled from searing to a bitter throb, she considered the think-voices — how they seemed like one thing, but were really another. That reminded her of something from childhood: She’d dug a hole in her backyard with her plastic shovel. When she thought she’d uncovered a rock, she pried it out from the soil. But, unlike a rock, the object had some give. Movement. When she realized she’d unearthed a large beetle and saw its legs scrabbling at the air, she had screamed in horror.

Chelsea noticed three shadowy figures emerge from the remains of a nearby building.

She sucked her breath in and held it, afraid to make a sound. Don’t be silly, she thought. The think-voices, of course they’re human. What else could they be?

But she didn’t convince herself. With good reason, too. After the world went to hell, she had seen things she could never un-see. Mummified corpses scattered in the streets. Bodies motionless, decayed clothing fluttering with the wind. Each time she pointed her flashlight at one of their faces — leathery skin stretched taut on skull, eyeless sockets, yellow-toothed mouth howling soundlessly — she saw a deathmask swimming in a sea of darkness.

What frightened her even more were the fresh bodies. The people who’d come above ground before her. She’d counted ten pale, lifeless forms, all with large puncture wounds in their throats, legs and stomachs. If those are teeth marks, Chelsea had thought, then they’re not human teeth. Animal? She doubted it.

It was as if someone had driven railroad spikes through the skin. Smeared dried blood formed straggly patterns, like brushstrokes of abstract art, the canvas their rotting flesh. It was their faces, though, that horrified her most — frozen contortions of pain that screamed a warning: Run! Get away from here! Now!

That dreadful someone’s-behind-you feeling struck like a fist. The city’s ruins came to life, taunting her.

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