Erik was barely listening now. He rolled down his window and stuck his head outside. The wind made his eyes water, but he could see the sky was all wrong.
“Other times the signs are more subtle,” Vaughn said as he slowed down and coasted onto the berm. “Car brands you’ve never heard of. Maps with the wrong number of states. Or something as simple as a new app on your phone. One you don’t even remember downloading.”
The car rolled to a stop. Vaughn killed the engine. “And the people?” He took off his sunglasses. “Well, you don’t want to make eye contact; let’s leave it at that.”
Erik’s stomach dropped. He threw open the door and stumbled out of the car, landing on his backside. Gravel and grit ground into his palms as he skittered away from the car. His head tilted back, and he froze. Millions of multicolored stars shimmered overhead, a sea of sinister jewels: endless, brilliant, dizzying in number. But they weren’t his stars, the ones he’d learned as a child. Erik felt a presence then, something ancient stirring far beyond the stars. It was looking for him. A dark stain spread down the front of his pants.
Vaughn smiled, then reached across the seat and shut the passenger door. The dome light turned off. In the darkness, Vaughn’s pupils glowed a sickly orange. He started the car and turned up the radio. Erik heard his own voice breaking through the static, warning himself not to use the app.
As Vaughn drove off, the ground began to shake.
Larry Hinkle
By day, Larry Hinkle is an advertising copywriter living with his wife and two dogs in Rockville, Maryland. When he's not writing stories that scare people into peeing their pants, he writes ads that scare people into buying adult diapers so they’re not caught peeing their pants.
His work has appeared in a number of publications, including The Horror Zine, Sanitarium Magazine, and the inaugural issue of Red Room Magazine from Comet Press, as well as such anthologies as Alternate Hilarities 5: One-Star Reviews of the Afterlife, The Arcanist, and Another Dimension, among others.
Website: larryhinkle.com
Facebook: willwriteforbeer
Twitter: @WrittenByLarry
Emaiclass="underline" willwriteforbeer@gmail.com
MAMA CASCADE
by Samantha Mills
7,800 Words
“I WANT TO hunt,” Shanto said, and Arwa’s world began to crack.
They sat hip to hip on the thickest branch of a plauplau tree, swinging their feet above the surface of the river Bombio and waiting for a fish to catch. Shanto was taller, nimbler at climbing, adept with hook or spearhead. Arwa was smaller, wilier, a better swimmer, and yet everyone in their village said that the girls were indistinguishable. Arwa-Shanto. Shanto-Arwa.
They were birthmates, born to different mothers in the same season, and they were inseparable. At least, they had been.
Cautiously, as though it wasn’t her entire future in her throat, Arwa said, “I thought you wanted to fish.”
Shanto sighed, tugged at her fish-rope, and sighed again. The branch creaked with her nervous shifting, now leaning against Arwa’s side, now leaning away. “I don’t have to decide today,” she said. “But . . . we each have our skills . . .”
It was clumsy. Shanto wasn’t usually so clumsy. She knew Arwa had never considered any other path but fisher. They were supposed to move up together. Share a canoe. Spend every day sitting knee to back and back to knee, spearing what they couldn’t hook, washing together, cooking together, talking till the stars came out together, and they couldn’t do any of that if Shanto went hunting.
Arwa was saved from blurting anything she’d regret when the river surged upward, violent and frothing and absolutely unnatural for this season. It slapped over their feet and clawed its way up the shoreline foliage that had grown complacent in its absence, and half a dozen Timbo warriors swept around the bend on a raft of driftwood and bone.
They had no time to move. The raft was piled high with baskets, poles, urns—all of it lashed into unsteady pillars, the weight distribution all wrong, the height ludicrous—and it hit their branch in an explosion of fruit and wicker. A warrior cried out, caught in the face. Half of their towering goods crashed to the water.
And Shanto was torn from the branch. She spun, tumbled, hit the churn of broken baskets, and vanished from sight.
Arwa leaped after her, barely drawing a full breath before she was submerged. The Bombio swept her along, swift and unrelenting. For a harrowing moment she was directionless, tumbling, battered by debris, and slapped by fishes caught in the flood.
But the river had always been kind to her. The silt cleared, the sun glittered through, and she spotted Shanto’s foot kicking against the current.
Arwa caught her around the waist and tried to pull her toward the opposing bank, but they were surrounded by tangled reeds and shattered clay. The world darkened—a shadow, the jagged bottom of another war raft—and Arwa fought to swim lower, ignoring the pain in her chest, only praying that Shanto had air remaining.
A fist gripped her hair. Another grasped her arm. She and Shanto were hauled from the river like fish, flailing and coughing and fearing the mercy blow that would take their heads.
One of the Timbo crouched over Arwa, babbling in his village tongue. She had only ever spoken Bitumb, but there were enough similarities for her to catch his general meaning, and what his words lacked, his tone made clear. They weren’t trying to kill her.
They were asking for help.
He spoke through an interpreter, one of their oldest grandmothers, who still remembered most of the birth language she’d left behind when she was matched into their village. She sat on a reed mat with her eyes shut tight, and after every word he spoke, her brow furrowed in something close to bliss.
“There are creatures coming,” she said slowly. “Creatures that walk like people, and cover their bodies, and make tools, and speak.”
The Timbo warrior paced as he explained, illustrating with his hands and the angry curve of his back. The rest of his war party remained under guard at the riverbank. Here, in the hollow beneath two interwoven beknal trees, there were only the speaker and the interpreter and the ring of worried faces surrounding them.
“They come from beyond the grassland,” he said. “First, they traveled through our territory, and we let them live because they left us gifts. But our leniency was a mistake. They developed a taste for the sap of the hupa vine. Now they come in greater and greater numbers, cutting their way to the vine, burning what they cannot cut.”
He spoke of creatures gone mad with sap lust. He spoke of a village destroyed, children stolen, an entire territory turned to ash and muck. He was a warrior laid low, begging for help, for shelter, for vengeance.
Arwa clutched Shanto tight throughout this furious appeal, afraid of the future and desperate to ensure they had one. Her mind was awhirl with logistics: flatland and jungle and water, always water. A conviction had stolen over her, hooking as deep as a bone lure and potentially just as fataclass="underline" she could do this. She could fight back, save her people, clear the land of this invasion before it pushed any deeper.