The girl with the spiral scar pressed the point of a modified steak knife under the chin of a plump teenage boy.
“Say ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ again, you little turd, and I’ll slice your balls off and make them into earrings.”
The boy opened his mouth a quarter inch and whispered, “My dad says—” but shut it when the knife tip drew blood.
“Your dad’s bloated head is stuck up his bloated ass. Tell him that from one of the students he failed in Molecular Biology 303.” She moved the knife and the boy sidled out of reach. “Go try and steal from some idiot in the ’burbs. You’re getting fuck-all from us.”
Fat tears rolled down the boy’s round cheeks. “My dad won’t let me back in without beer and supplies.”
The girl laughed. “You eat all the food on him? Tough luck.”
A whine ratcheted the boy’s voice higher than before. “I have a condition.”
“Yeah, and it’s called stupidity. Get out of here.” She whistled the opening measure of “Deck the Halls” and two men appeared from behind an overflowing dumpster.
The boy took one look at the guns in their hands and rabbited. The slap of his feet in unlaced sneakers echoed down the empty streets.
The tall man with waist-length dreads pulled into a ponytail holstered his gun. “Who’s the asswipe, Holly?”
“Son of my old bio prof. Everything handed to him all his life.”
An older woman with long white braids came into the alley. “He’s the one who should get tripped so the rest of us can escape.”
Holly laughed. “Joan, you’re the best pack mother our band of Merry Men could want.” She wiped the drops of blood from her knife tip on her jeans. “Who else is hungry?”
Whispers of “We are,” and “I am,” came from behind the broken windows.
Holly looked up at the dirty brick walls. “Think of sugarplums and candy canes, you guys. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”
Rory stepped to her side. “You think it’s Christmas?”
Holly shrugged. “Nah. Not cold enough. The idea keeps them distracted.” She sheathed her knife. “I want to see if David’s hidden cellar is still ours for the picking.”
The mismatched pair—she stood nearly six feet tall, his head barely topped her shoulder—stopped at the end of the alley. Each scanned one side of the empty street, searching for any Squatter activity. Holly remembered when the Merry Men’s territory had been known as Georgetown, back when she’d been studying for her Master’s Degree in Biophysics. Back when Rory split his time between street magic and training for the Olympics. Back before some extremist fuckhead heard about NASA’s wormhole experiment and decided it was the perfect vehicle to nuke all the Enemies of His God.
The night the experiment went live the fuckhead drove a Hummer through the gates and blew his nuke. The wormhole connection sucked in the blast exactly like a giant vacuum cleaner. When nothing else happened, not even shockwaves or fallout, everyone said the world dodged a bullet. The Christians blamed the Muslims, the Muslims blamed the Christians, the talking heads on the 24-hour news channels blamed the Chinese and the Russians and the Taliban and everybody else currently on their shit list.
Until one-thirty four that afternoon when NASA exploded. Fifteen seconds later, the first Leechface stepped out of the new, improved wormhole in a confetti shower of human and concrete debris. Holly remembered that bit because TV and radio broadcasts hadn’t shut down yet and people always seemed to record everything on their phones back then.
Rory touched her arm and she shook herself back to the present.
“When I can’t sleep I wonder sometimes how many wormholes the Leechfaces opened,” she said with an apologetic smile.
“In technical terms? Enough to bugger us good,” Rory said. “I used to game—play online video games. Every single one of us had seen a Leechface wormhole in his own country.”
“Fuck me. Sorry about the derail. I’ll get my head back in the game.”
Rory cuffed her lightly on the back of her tangled brown hair. “If anything smelled the spineless asswipe, they appear to have followed him away from our place.”
“So he is good for something. Daddy’ll be so proud.” She turned to the right.
He watched her out of the corner of one eye as they walked the debris-strewn sidewalks, his other eye, and both of hers, constantly searched for Squatter signs. She touched the whorls of the red-brown scar that disfigured her entire right cheek, but her body language remained alert. After two years hunting with her, he knew better than to remind her of that Leechface brand.
Searching for a distraction, Rory touched the hollow gold collar beneath his football jersey. Perfect. “I’ve gotta get a new shirt.”
Holly punched him. “You say that every time we go out for supplies. Squatters don’t know from football. They only see meat on two legs.”
“Call me superstitious.”
“You think a Squatter’s synapses are still firing hard enough to remember back three years when all good residents of DC automatically hated the Cowboys? They can’t ever remember to—”
They flattened themselves against the nearest brownstone. She closed her eyes and he stopped breathing.
Holly pursed her lips like she was about to whistle, but no sound audible to Rory’s ears came out.
A Squatter plodded out of a doorway. It had been a teenage girl. Its short plaid skirt dragged off one hip and its glitter-covered sweater was a mess of holes and blood and filth. It didn’t even look in their direction.
“See? Minimal brain activity.” Holly murmured in Rory’s ear. “Even my mom’s yappy inbred poodle knew enough to search for the human calling it.”
She stepped away from the wall, balancing on the balls of her feet. Rory followed. They hurried in the shambler’s wake until its stench enveloped them. Rory always regretted the need to breathe at this point. With a single movement he pulled the Claddagh collar out of his shirt and opened the hinged crown.
Holly grabbed the Squatter by the throat and stabbed her knife up and in, piercing its brain stem. Its body collapsed against her, eyes wide open for the first time in six or eight months, judging by the Reek Gauge.
Rory put his lips on the Squatter’s lips—rotting teeth stank like shit—and pulled away. A trail of shimmering pink mist followed. He inhaled with all the power of his NCAA-champion swimmer’s lungs until he’d taken in every molecule of the mist. With an exaggerated gesture, he closed the Claddagh’s crown and settled the collar around his neck.
All the visible skin on the Squatter’s body bubbled and sloughed away. Holly set the body on the sidewalk and grabbed Rory before he collapsed.
Rory cursed in three different languages. “They killed her sister first. Then they killed her and put her spirit in her sister’s body.”
Holly cursed too. “You gotta teach me to swear better. Plain old English doesn’t cut it anymore.” She stroked her fingers across Rory’s forehead. “Close your eyes and talk to her, dummy. You know they calm down faster that way.”
“Nag.” Rory smiled as he obeyed.
Holly’s fingers kept their soothing rhythm on his forehead. His face relaxed. She wondered, like she always did, how he talked to the spirits he rescued from the Squatters. He kept the details to himself. The only snippet he’d ever given her involved the collar. He didn’t need it, but tangible act of opening the old Irish symbol for love and loyalty and friendship and then closing it when the spirit was completely inside him made the freaked-out spirits feel safe.
Her spiral scar burned in her memory as she kept her fingers moving. She understood freaking out and the need for a symbol of protection. Hell, if she’d been soul-raped and stuffed inside a dead body to Squat until her energy couldn’t hold the body together anymore, she’d grab at anything that reminded her of the pre-Leechface world. Hanging onto the meaning of an old piece of jewelry? Whatever kept these poor bastards clinging to Rory until he could get them back where they belonged.
At least she’d escaped Bobblehead Leechface before the worst happened.
Rory opened his eyes. She helped him to his feet.
“All set? Is she still herself?”
“Enough to tell me where she thinks her body is.”
“How far?”
“Over on Reservoir Road.”
Holly wanted to run, but Rory couldn’t keep up, not carrying a rescue. Fifteen blocks later she hustled him up cracked cement steps and hacked through the curtain of leafy green kudzu covering the door.
“Cellar,” Rory said.
They navigated gritty stairs, the outside light dimming at each step. Holly shoved the door open far enough to get them both inside. The cool air smelled stuffy. Holly allowed herself to hope.
“She says they left her in their storage unit.”
Holly walked Rory along the row of partitioned spaces filled with broken plates, ripped boxes, and dented appliances until he held up a wide brown hand. “This one.”
As she dragged open its bent door made of chain-link fencing and one-by-twos the hinged piece of wood snapped in half. The fencing slapped against the adjacent door. Holly grabbed the metal after a single clang and stilled it. When no other noises reached them after two minutes, they both exhaled.
Rory leaned against a dusty washing machine while Holly moved boxes. The smell hit them both at the same instant. The light wasn’t strong enough to see the body’s condition, so Holly knelt on the cement and touched its arm. The skin was loose, but not slimy. The phrase ‘dry desquamation’ popped into her head from a forgotten college class.
Holly helped Rory kneel next to the body. “She’s good enough. I didn’t check the eyes or the mouth.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He touched its face until he found the mouth. The lips had pulled away from the teeth and maggots writhed in the tongue. The timbreless voice inside him projected the word “Sorry” into his mind. He pressed his open mouth to the corpse’s, ignored the tickle of a maggot on his lips, and exhaled. The glowing pink mist flowed into the mouth. A maggot wriggled out and fell to the floor, pinkish in the fragile light.
Holly studied Rory’s face, the mist giving his brown skin a much healthier look than anyone had these days. She told herself she did it to watch for signs he was going to pass out. That was the truth, dammit. Using his magic sucked the life out of him.
The dead girl’s body sucked in the last puff of mist on its own. Holly dived to the floor and caught Rory as he fell away from the not-corpse-anymore.
“Wake up.” She slapped his cheeks. “Wake up, wake up. Don’t you die on me too. Wake up.”
“Ow.” His voice was weak, but nothing worse.
Holly kissed him so hard their teeth banged together. The not-corpse coughed maggots all over them. Holly brushed them off. “You gotta teach me more curses.”
Hoarse sounds came from the not-corpse’s throat. Holly covered their faces right before another cough sprayed maggots on them.
“H-hgk you.” It didn’t sound like a teenage girl, but any sound at all from that mouth was a minor miracle. The body reverted to its six months’ dead state as soon as the last syllable came through, and insta-rot took it.
Holly heaved Rory vertical and dragged him into the main cellar before they blew chunks from the stench.
She laughed. “Got no chunks to blow.”
Rory’s head turned to her, but he laughed a second later. “Let’s go cellar diving. I want a can of Spaghetti-Os.”
She dragged him up and out to the front steps and they sat on the kudzu as the weak sunlight peaked to noon.
Rory spat into the ivy. “Maggots are not tasty. Remember Listerine? I could use a whole gallon right now.” He leaned against the door. “I wish we could find them when they’re fresher.”
Holly leaned next to him. What the hell had she been thinking? She’d kept it to herself for two years, for Chrissake. She had five other adults and three kids to feed and protect. All her time was devoted to that. Period.
She pushed a hand through several layers of dead leaves and found a narrow line of real grass growing against the side of the steps.
“Here.” She handed him a fistful. “It’s not as good as parsley, but chewing it will clear some of the taste.” She popped a bunch into her own mouth and bit down.
He imitated her. He could barely remember what parsley tasted like, but this wasn’t it. Not bad in a pinch, though. When she spat out a gob of green cud he cleared his own mouth and tested his breath against his hand. It’d have to do.
“Hey.” He touched her shoulder. When she turned her face to his, a shred of grass clinging to her full bottom lip, he kissed her.
She didn’t pull away. That thought shone through all the sensations crowding into him: Her soft lips moving against his, her breasts meeting his pecs, the feel of her tangled hair when he pushed his fingers into it and pulled her closer. Two years of wanting her and doing nothing about it because protecting the Merry Men came first.
“You taste like grass,” she murmured. “That’s not how I imagined it.”
“Me neither.” He pulled her into his lap.
She nibbled his ear. “Think there’s an unbroken bed in one of the rooms above David’s cellar?”
“If it’s broken, we’ll drag the mattress onto the floor.”
“I’ve wanted you for two years.”
“Same here. We must be the last workaholics in D.C.”
She laughed. He kissed her again, loving her voice, her smile, and how he could make her laugh.
“Come on.” She slid off him and stood. “If that cellar doesn’t have Spaghetti-Os, I’ll scour every house on the block until I find some for you.”
They smelled the cellar from four houses away.
“Damn. It’s stronger.” Holly covered her mouth and nose with one hand.
Rory did the same. “One of the skunks must have died.”
“My grandmother would call that a mixed blessing. At least it’ll keep everything living, dead, or Squatting away from our stash.”
The skunk odor hit them worse than insta-rot when they opened the back door. Coughing and eyes watering, Rory set one foot on the stairs to the second floor and the wood shattered beneath his boot. He grabbed the banister and that shattered too.
“Termites,” Holly said through a cough.
“Cock-blocking insect bastards,” Rory took her arm. “Let’s just get supplies this time and get back to the Men.”
She kept hold of his left arm as he stepped on the first wooden cellar tread. It creaked but held. He gave her a thumbs-up and stepped down. She followed. The next-to last stair snapped in half when they both set their feet on it together, but they jumped onto the packed-dirt floor with ease.
“My lungs are threatening to pack up and leave,” Holly said, already at one of the two remaining full shelves.
“Should’ve been a swimmer like me. Ninety seconds of breath holding in three… two… one.” Rory handed her a plastic bag and they loaded themselves with canned peaches, applesauce, potato salad, and three kinds of beans. Rory knelt on the dirt to look through the bottom shelves and Holly stood on tiptoe to scan the top ones.
“Yes!” Rory stood with two cans in each hand, a spoon piled with circles of macaroni still discernible on their faded red labels.
They didn’t stop running until they were half a mile away. Panting, they cleared their noses and lungs with the usual city smells of dust and out-of control vegetation. This time of year they got dead leaves and—
“I smell apples,” Holly walked around a detached house and kicked in the door of a privacy fence. “Holy shit, we’ve hit the mother lode.”
A dwarf apple tree rose above a tangle of grass and blueberry bushes gone wild. The berries were withered but the apple tree’s branches bent under the weight of the fruit.
Holly stomped the bushes flat and reached for the nearest apple. Rory dragged her back.
“Wasps.” He pointed to an apple several inches to the right of his foot. As they watched, three wasps staggered from a hole in its side. One tried to fly in a jerky, confused pattern, and fell back to the grass. “They look drunk.”
“They are. My aunt had apple trees in her backyard. One really warm fall the fruit got too ripe. Wasps used at least a quarter of the apples as their personal liquor cabinet.” She stripped off her shirt and stepped around the fallen apples scattered in the grass. “Just don’t piss ’em off.”
They gathered as many as they could reach and loaded them into the improvised shirt sack. Her undershirt covered her chest so she didn’t tease poor Rory.
That didn’t stop Rory from staring at her. “Let’s go. The Merry Men Apartments must have a private room with a mattress.”
They shared an apple as they walked. Holly thought it might be a Macintosh, but three years without pruning or fertilizing had sent the tree back toward its wild days. The aroma and tart juiciness filled her nose and mouth with decadent pleasure.
They dropped the bags of food when they reached their alley. Even then it took several long seconds for the smells of warm blood and offal to cut through the appleness.
One of the kids hung halfway out of the dumpster. Sasha. Holly recognized her from the Hello Kitty shirt because Sasha didn’t have a face any more. Robbie, the adult who scavenged train sets for the kids to play with, lay naked in the right-hand doorway, spiral burns decorating one side of his body, stars still oozing blood carved into the other side.
She walked deeper into the alley. Her boots squelched but she didn’t look down. She needed Joan. Their den mother would have protected as many as she could. Holly almost pitied the Leechface who took on Joan.
Rory ran past her and tried to open the door, but it was jammed. Holly stepped on the closed half of the dumpster and hooked her fingers onto the window ledge. Rory gave her a boost and she climbed through the glassless window frame into the twins’ room. Blood everywhere. Down the stairs through more blood with small drenched shapes in it. Scattered teeth. An ear. A finger.
Joan Squatted against the door. Holly heard little whimpering sounds. No living human sat in that specific posture, but Squatters didn’t make noise. Then who… Holly pushed her hand over her own mouth and the noises stopped.
She tiptoed up behind Joan and gave her a small nudge in the back. Joan stood up, more or less, and shuffled in the direction of the nudge. Holly opened the door.
Rory stopped himself from gagging at the blood-saturated air when he saw the tears streaking Holly’s face. He followed her gaze and saw the Squatter. Joan.
Holly took out her knife. He pulled out the Claddagh collar and opened the crown. Holly clapped her left hand over the Squatter’s mouth, jammed her knife into its brain stem, and pulled its limp body down on top of her own. Rory clutched its head in his hands and covered its mouth with his.
Joan’s spirit sparkled pale green like sun glinting on new leaves. It lit the tears on Rory’s face—at least Holly thought it did, because her own tears blurred her vision into uselessness.
Rory clicked the collar shut. He cleared his throat. “She says—” He swallowed and cleared his throat again. “She says the twins are—”
He stopped because Holly made a gagging sort of scream and her blurry shape disappeared. He clawed the tears out of his eyes. A Leechface held Holly by her hair a foot off the ground and was licking its barbed tongue around the whorls of the scar on her face.
Joan’s wail inside Rory mingled with his incoherent roar as he slammed into the Leechface’s scaled legs. It made that brittle nails-on-chalkboard sound that passed for a laugh. Holly kicked and clawed until it unfurled its five suckers and wrapped two around her. Rory dug his fingers into the lower sucker arm and used his elbows for leverage to pry it off. A second later the other three suckers pinned him to the floor.
Three years into their invasion, Leechfaces still hadn’t bothered to learn the language. This one projected images into Holly’s mind: Of her terrified face twenty-three months ago, the first time it captured her. Of her agony as it branded her with its litter’s symbol. Of its relish at its drawn-out ways of killing one of her species in the proper way for the body to host a Squatter. Of the bets they placed on whose Squatter would last the longest. Last, of the revenge it had been planning ever since she escaped.
“Eat shit and die, you fucker! Why don’t you fight me if you want revenge so bad?” Holly forced herself not to puke from terror. “What kind of conquering Leechface doesn’t like a fair fight?”
“Holly, don’t provoke it.” Rory’s deep voice came out thinner than it ought to, what with a sucker squeezing his chest and Joan’s spirit crowding his own.
“I’m going to piss it off so it lets you go to wrap all these sucker arms around me and you’re going to get the hell out of here.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
The Leechface projected humor into her head: Its opinion of “love.” Its tongue rolled over her face as it’s mind planted images of pleasure at her fear-sweat. Its tongue cut diagonally across her lips. She opened them and bit two barbs off at the roots.
It made a worse noise, like microphone feedback mixed with a dentist’s drill. Its tongue dripped gray-green fluid where the barbs used to be. Its hate and revenge exploded into her head as it slammed its two-foot long tongue halfway down her esophagus.
Holly gagged and choked and tried to scream as the tongue withdrew with shreds of her larynx impaled on it. Burning agony ripped through her. Over it she thought she heard Rory’s voice. The Leechface clamped a sucker on her head and bent her neck down so she could see Rory. Her blood splattered his handsome face.
Then the Leechface planted suckers on Rory and ripped. Holly screamed his name with her voiceless mouth. The suckers came away stuffed with flesh and blood and nails and eyes.
And dragging two glimmering streams of color: Joan’s new-leaf green and the red-orange of the heart of a bonfire. The Leechface flung Joan’s spirit to the floor where it frayed and vanished. It yanked Holly’s head back and its puckered-tentacle rimmed mouth smiled. It raised the dripping sucker and shoved Rory’s spirit through her face and into her own. Her mouth stayed open but her useless throat couldn’t release their mangled howl.
The Leechface dropped her onto the curling linoleum. Her broken, shredded body Squatted where it fell. The Leechface settled on the floor in front of her, opened its mouth, and began to eat.
END.
by Kate Morgan
Bio: Baker of brownies and tormenter of characters, Kate Morgan grew up watching Hammer horror films and Scooby-Doo mysteries, which explains a whole lot. When she’s not inspiring nightmares in short and long fiction, her alter-ego Alice Loweecey is creating trouble for her sleuth Giulia Driscoll. If she’s not exploring the darkest parts of the human soul, she can be found growing her own vegetables (in summer) and cooking with them (the rest of the year).
Twitter: @KateMorganBooks
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