“You read too much science fiction.”
“Shut the hell up, Dave,” Lanyan said.
“We’re intelligent. They would try to—”
“We’re vermin,” Natalie said. “And what I would do, I would engineer some kind of virus and wipe out ninety-nine percent of the vermin. Like fumigating a fucking house.”
“And then?” Lanyan said.
“Then I’d send in the ground troops to mop up.”
Kerans snorted.
“Dave—”
“It’s craziness, that’s all,” he said. He said, “Here, these’ll help you sleep.”
Nothing then. Nothing but wind and snow and the sound of silence in the room.
After a time, they resumed their posts on the floor.
Felicia, weeping, lapsed back into drugged sleep.
“We’re going to have to get to the Yukon,” Natalie said.
“We can’t see a fucking thing out there,” Kerans said.
“At first light. Maybe the snow will stop by then.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Lanyan said.
“We make a run for it.”
“What about Felicia?” Kerans said.
“What about her?”
Kerans looked at his watch. It was almost three o’clock.
He must have dozed, for he came awake abruptly, jarred from sleep by a distant thud. A dream, he thought, his pulse hammering. It must have been a dream—a nightmare inside this nightmare of dark and endless snow, of a plague-ravished world and Felicia dying in agony. But it was no dream. Lanyan and Natalie had heard it, too. They were already up, their weapons raised, and even as he stumbled to his feet, shedding like water the sleeping bag across his shoulders, it came again: a thump against the back of the house, muffled by snow and the intervening rooms.
“What is it?” Felicia said, her voice drowsy with oxycodone.
“Nothing,” he said. “It was nothing. A branch must have fallen.”
“That was no branch,” Natalie said. “Not unless it fell twice.”
And twice more after that, two quick blows, and a third, and then silence, a submarine hush so deep and pervasive that Kerans could hear the boom of his heart.
“Maybe a tree came down.”
“You know better,” Lanyan said.
“Dave, I’m scared,” Felicia whispered.
“We’re all scared,” Natalie said.
Felicia began softly to weep.
“Shut her the fuck up,” Natalie said.
“Natalie—”
“I said shut her up.”
“It hurts,” Felicia said. “I’m afraid.” Kerans knelt by the sectional and kissed her chill lips. Her breath bloomed in the cold air, sweet with the stink of infection, and he didn’t think he’d ever loved her more in his life than he did at that moment. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he whispered, wiping away her tears with the ball of his thumb. “It’s just the wind.” But even she was past believing him, for the wind had died. The snow fell soft and straight through the air. The streetlamp was a blue halo against the infinite blackness of space. Natalie’s game came back to Kerans—what if—and a dark surf broke and receded across the shingles of his heart. Felicia took his hand and squeezed his fingers weakly. “Just don’t leave me here,” she said. “Don’t leave me here to die.”
“Never.”
The glitter of shattering glass splintered the air. Felicia screamed, a short, sharp bark of terror—
“Shut her up,” Natalie snapped.
—and in the silence that followed, in the shifting purple shadow of the great room with its sectional sofa and the gray rectangle of the flatscreen and their sleeping bags like the shucked skins of enormous snakes upon the floor, Kerans heard someone—something—
—let’s play a game the game is called what if—
—test the privacy lock of a back bedroom: a slow turn to either side. Click. Click.
Silence.
Felicia whimpered. Kerans blew a cloud of vapor into the still air. He clutched Felicia’s fingers. He remembered a time when they had made hasty love in the bathroom at a friend’s cocktail party, half-drunk, mad with passion for each other. The memory came to him with pristine clarity. He felt tears upon his cheeks.
And still the silence held.
Lanyan snapped off the safety of the Benelli.
Natalie put her back to the foyer wall, reached out, and flipped the deadbolt of the front door. She pushed it a few inches ajar. Snow dusted the threshold.
“The Yukon locked?” she whispered.
“No.”
Once again, the thing tested the lock.
“Dave, don’t leave me—”
“Natalie—”
She froze him with a glance, and something else she had said came back to Kerans. The rules have changed now. We have to look out for ourselves. God help him, he didn’t want to die. He choked back a sob. They had wanted children. They had tried for them. In vitro, the whole nine yards.
“I won’t leave you,” he whispered.
Then the privacy lock snapped, popping like a firecracker. The door banged back. Something came, hurtling down the hallway: something big, hunched over the floor, and God, God, shedding pieces of itself, one, two, three as it burst into the room. Guns spat bright tongues of fire, a barrage of deafening explosions. The impact flung the thing backward, but the pieces, two- or three-foot lengths of leg-pumping fury, kept coming. Snapping the Benelli from target to target, Lanyan took two of them down. Natalie stopped the third one not three feet from Kerans’s throat. It rolled on the floor, curving needle-teeth snapping, leathery hide gleaming in the snow-blown light, and was still.
Those alien cries echoed in the darkness.
“Time to go,” Natalie said.
Lanyan moved to the door.
Felicia clutched at Kerans’s hand, seizing him with a tensile strength he did not know she still possessed. The cocktail party flashed through his mind. They had wanted children—
“Felicia—” Kerans said. “Help me—”
“No time,” Natalie said.
And Lanyan: “I’m sorry, Dave—”
The moment hung in equipoise. Kerans wrenched his hand away.
“Time to go,” Natalie said again. “We can’t wait. You have to decide.”
And regular as a metronome inside his head: the rules have changed the rules have changed the rules the rules —
Natalie ducked into the night. A moment later, Lanyan followed.
Glass shattered at the back of the house, one window, two windows, three.
“Don’t leave me, Dave,” Felicia sobbed. “Don’t leave me.”
Outside the Yukon roared to life.
The rules have changed. We have to watch out for ourselves now.
“Dave,” Felicia said, “I’m scared.”
God help him, he didn’t want to die—
“Shhh,” he said, brushing closed her eyelids with his fingers. “Never. I’ll never leave you. I love you.”
He bent to press his lips to hers. His fingers fumbled at his belt. They closed around the blade.
A moment later, he was running for the Yukon.
THE AIR IS CHALK
RICHARD KADREY
Richard Kadrey is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen novels, including the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.” Chad Stahelski of John Wick fame is set to direct it as a feature film. Richard has also written comics for Heavy Metal, Lucifer, and Hellblazer. His newest book is Hollywood Dead.
There were three million people in L.A. when the party started. Now there’s a few hundred scattered around in shopping mall emergency shelters, office buildings, and the subway tunnels. It’s okay where I am, but most of the others I talk to by radio are running out of food and water, so they’ll have to go scavenging soon. We’ll be down to less than a hundred people left by the end of the month. If the Rollers don’t get them at night, Floaters and Stingers will get them during the day.