Tate’s leaving the Food Lion with his load of groceries, cans and more cans, bottled water, toilet paper, Twinkies, and tampons jammed haphazardly together in the cart with the wobbly wheels, when he sees the new storm brewing in the sky above the impact crater off at the west end of town. There’s that now-familiar glitchy static in the air, tinged bright sunrise colors. A mirage-wavering, tornado-like funnel stretches between the depths of the hole and the low cloud of disrupted reality.
“Shit,” Tate breathes. It looks like it’s going to be a bad one. It’s been months, but Tate still can’t predict the storms. He’s tried, keeping logs in old notebooks, looking for patterns. It’s futile. All he knows is that they can come at any time, and they come on fast, and after they pass, the wrack and ruin that was Owl Valley has morphed still further, the rules different, the landscape more dangerous for Tate than before.
Tate hurries, but he does not run. He can see the metal vultures circling in the distance, seemingly excited by the incipient storm; running might attract their attention. Skreek-skreek-skreek go the wheels of the cart on the pitted, cracked pavement. Here and there, a flesh-tree stretches toward the blank gray heavens just beginning to sparkle with storm-glitch. Tate is used to the trees by now, their massed jumble of fused arms and legs and faces and genitals, hair and fur and feathers. Their low, constant hums and moans. He doesn’t stop to look for the features of people he used to know; former friends and co-workers. He only slows down a little when he passes the corner where Alan’s tree looms crooked over the road, anchored to sidewalk and sewer grate by a webwork of bone and vein roots, the blood moving visibly through them. Alan’s fine-featured face is set right in the center of the trunk, towards the street, about six feet above the ground. His eyes are closed, his expression peaceful. When Tate has time, when there isn’t a storm coming on, he’ll stand here and watch Alan for hours. Alan’s eyeballs are constantly moving back and forth beneath their thin lids. His full mouth sometimes twitches into a brief smile. Tate is sure he’s dreaming, that somewhere in the depths of that meaty, sweating tangle, Alan’s mind is still alive and itself. Tate allows himself a brief glance at his former boyfriend’s smooth, placid visage, crowned by a shingle of finger or toenails, cupped by a knot of small birds’ talons, as he walks by.
Tate’s at the intersection of Aster and Schultz, almost home, when the metal vulture dives at him. He doesn’t understand how he didn’t hear it coming. It looks like a janky, bug-eyed marionette made of old car parts, segments of heavy plastic and iron and steel clattering together. As soon as Tate sees it, it does make noise. Deafening machinery jangle and roar. It’s like the vultures don’t remember that, logically, they ought to make noise-- until they’re being observed.
Although, Tate reflects with giddy gallows humor as he ducks and pushes the cart between himself and the vulture’s screeching, rusty beak, logically, the vultures shouldn’t be able to fly. Logically, they shouldn’t even be alive. He hurls the cart at the vulture as it rears backwards with a rattle of wings and an angry hiss. Cans of Campbell’s soup scatter everywhere. A box of tampons bounces out onto the road and explodes like the world’s most embarrassing piñata. The vulture’s goggling chrome eyes roll across the chaos of Tate’s spilled groceries as it flaps itself upwards to avoid the hurtling cart.
Tate runs, sprinting as hard as he can for the entrance to his apartment building. There’s a stitch in his side after thirty seconds, and tears sting at the corners of his eyes, squeezed out by his speed. He just needs the cart to distract the vulture for a minute, that’s all. One more minute, and he’ll be safe from—
Hot, sharp shears of pain scrape across Tate’s back, and he’s screaming before he realizes it, a high-pitched, furious wail of agony. Something is gripping him by his skin and the wool of the sweater he’s wearing. Something has him hooked like a fish on a line, like a dead cow in a slaughterhouse, and oh god, he’s rising, he’s being lifted straight up off the ground. The asphalt falls away beneath his feet. The shape of things changes with the height and angle of his eyes, the door of his building growing smaller, distorted, the top of the frame now level with the dangling bottoms of his muddy sneakers. Tate doesn’t want to look down, but he knows what he’ll see if he looks up, and it’s worse.
Purple and pink light stutters ominously around him. He can hear the noise of metal feathers beating against the air. He squeezes his eyes tightly shut and hopes that whatever happens next will, at least, be quick.
From below, Tate hears a patter, as of rapidly running human feet. He doesn’t open his eyes. He’s the only unchanged human left in Owl Valley; he knows that. He’s scoured the town thrice over for other…what? Survivors? Leftovers? Rejects?
Tap-tap-taptap-tap. A soft grunt. The whistle of a projectile soaring through space. A loud, juddering clang, too close to Tate’s ears. Hideous screeching, rasping. Echoes. Ringing. Tate feels himself tilt downwards, and his stomach drops before the rest of his body follows suit.
His eyes flash open at the moment of impact. His breath is knocked from his body, and he skids on his side across the ground, scraping his tender flesh raw. He can feel the blood, from the fall and from the vulture’s claws, gluing his skin to his sweater.
“Fuck,” he sobs aloud. “Fuck, that hurt.”
“Sorry,” says a voice from somewhere above him. “I scared him away, though. Are there other people here?”
Tate rolls over and grits his teeth as he pushes himself into a sitting position. Another boy, or young man, is standing beside him in the charged and glimmering stormglow. He looks about Tate’s age, early twenties. He’s shock-haired like that actor from Eraserhead, large-eyed, probably medium height and build but slouching so aggressively it makes him look short, gives him a gut. He chews nervously on his chapped lower lip. Tate stares and stares.
The boy chews his lip and twitches his fingers, looking at the ground. “Sorry,” he mumbles again.
“What did you throw?” asks Tate. “A rock?” And then: “Where did you come from, anyway? What’s your name?”
He feels dazed. His vision is tunneling. The ground seems to ripple and heave beneath his sore, abraded hands. That could be the storm beginning in earnest, or he could have knocked his head somewhere in the whirl of metal vulture attack and this strange young man’s arrival. There’s no way of knowing.
“I’m Hartley,” says the young man, twisting a lock of hair around a stubby pointer finger. “I walked here from Benthook, you know, about twenty-five miles south? Next town over? Or, well, maybe you don’t know. It’s tiny. Everybody else in Benthook is dead, or they got swallowed up into one of those meat-pillar things after the meteors hit. Or the spaceships. Whatever they were. We had three of them down there. Looks like you only got hit once.”
“Looks like it,” agrees Tate drily. He tries to recall if he’s ever heard of Benthook. Owl Valley was Alan’s hometown; Tate hadn’t even lived here for a year before…well. Shit happened.
“I threw one of your cans,” continues Hartley, rocking back and forth on his heels as he twists his hair. “Chicken noodle. It burst when it hit him. The dragon, I mean.”
“You think of them as dragons?” Tate finds this odd, and a little charming. “I’ve always thought of them as metal vultures.”
Hartley frowns. “Do they really look like birds to you?” He pauses in his fidgeting, his wide eyes going wider as he remembers something. “Oh! I should ask your name! Shit. Sorry, I always forget stuff like that.”
“I’m Tate.” Tate stands up, wincing. There’s no question about it; the ground is definitely moving. It squirms like the skin of a corpse full of insects. Hartley sways and bounces along with it, keeping his balance easily. A veiny tendril, like a bean sprout, erupts from a crack in the pavement and begins to snake towards Tate in time-lapse fast motion. He jumps aside and, without thinking, grabs Hartley by the sleeve of his threadbare jacket.
“Come with me,” he says, already hurrying forward. Hartley trots obediently beside him. “I have an apartment. We should get inside.” Tate has no reason to believe he’s any safer from the reality storms indoors than he is out in the open, but at least walls and a roof will keep the metal vultures at bay. At least he’ll have the illusion of shelter. And a companion, besides the cat.
Tate wonders at the miracle of another walking, talking, ordinary human being, however shabby and socially awkward. For a fleeting instant, approaching the shattered, splintered front doors of the apartment building and its fungus-covered, rubble-strewn foyer, Tate has the urge to turn and embrace the other boy, lift him by the waist and spin him around. Hartley is bigger than Tate, but Tate thinks he could do it. He’s strong, and he’s gotten stronger over the past few months of avoiding metal vultures in the sky, burning sprouts and gnashing tooth-pits in the ground. Breaking into abandoned shops. Scrambling for survival.
The wind rises. The flesh trees moan more loudly, their arm and leg branches straining in silhouette against the psychedelic sky. Their hundreds of mouths and other holes begin to whistle like kettles on the boil. They howl.
Tate pulls Hartley through the crushed doors. Through the foyer, its blackened walls pulsing with dripping, luminescent fungal veins. The floor soggy and littered with plaster confetti. Tate rushes them through the hall and down the stairwell, ignoring the occasional broken or open apartment door through which he might glimpse pale, aborted flesh tree sproutings slumping sadly against mouldering couches and kitchen counters. He ignores the feculent, rotting smell, but he hears Hartley gag several times. Their feet squelch on ruined carpet, and they move lower, beneath ground level.
By the time they reach Tate’s apartment, the smell isn’t quite so bad. The noise of the flesh trees up above is barely audible. Tate unlocks the door with his key— a useless ritual of safety, but old habits die hard— and lets them in. Hartley has pulled his T-shirt over his nose and mouth like a mask.
“You get used to the stink, don’t worry.” Tate tries to smile. “Couple hours, you won’t even notice.”
Hartley nods, his eyes watering.
“Make yourself comfortable,” says Tate, lighting the candles he’s been using since the electricity stopped working. “I gotta feed Jaws.”
* * *
Alan named the ginger tabby kitten long before he grew several extra mouths, layered with multiple rows of tiny needle-fangs. Maybe he had an unknowing precognitive moment, Tate thinks as he opens a can of wet cat food from the cupboard. Jaws and his many mouths are rooted in a corner of the room, in a thin shaft of light that trickles down through a small hole in the apartment’s ceiling. It’s not sunlight; Tate’s pretty sure it comes from the fungus up on the first floor. But it, and the cat food, seem to be enough to sustain Jaws.
The cat meows in harmony with himself and strains his one remaining paw bonelessly towards Tate as Tate brings him the Friskies Tuna Shreds. Hartley kneels on the floor beside the cat and watches him with wide eyes.
Hartley jumps when Tate sets the can down. He springs backwards when Jaws digs in, messy and voracious, his mouths snapping at each other as they fight to be first at the meal.
“He’s harmless, don’t worry. I mean, he’s never been the friendliest cat, but he’s not gonna hurt you,” says Tate.
“I…” says Hartley. “Is, is he why you’ve stayed here? To keep him alive?”
“Well,” says Tate, thinking of Alan’s face asleep in the middle of the tree, “sort of. He belonged to someone I used to know.”
They’re both silent for a moment. Then Tate continues: “Besides, why would I leave town? I’m doing okay. I know where things are. I figure the world’s about the same everywhere else now, anyway. The same or worse.”
“You can’t know that for sure if you haven’t seen it,” says Hartley, frowning. “The world is enormous.”
“I have common sense,” says Tate. “And I know good odds from bad ones.”
“Uh-huh,” says Hartley. “Whatever.” Then, changing the subject: “Hey Tate? Can I ask you maybe kind of an awkward question?”
Tate sits down beside him on the floor. Candle flame casts strange shadows and streaks across their faces, and across Jaws’s elongated, sprawling, toothy form.
“Sure,” says Tate. “Shoot.”
“Are you boy-Tate or girl-Tate? Or neither, I guess? ‘Cause, obviously, it’s a gender-neutral name, and you look like… but, well, and I’m not sure—”
Tate sighs and tries not to be annoyed. This is something he hasn’t missed about interacting with other human beings, although at least Hartley isn’t just assuming he’s a woman. Most people do that. Most people did that.
“I’m a guy,” Tate says. “A he.”
“Oh! Oh, I thought so!” Hartley brightens, his large eyes widening still further, a crooked smile snaking across his face. “Me, too!”
“Yeah,” says Tate. “What, you want me to congratulate you?”
“No, I mean…” Hartley flushes. “I mean, I’m also transgender. I’ve been on T for two years. Or I had been, before…” he trails off.
Tate looks more closely at the boy sitting beside him. He notices the way Hartley’s jacket and shirt drape over his chest, and realizes why Hartley slouches so much. He hears the crackle in Hartley’s voice with new ears. Hartley has a scraggly, adolescent sort of mustache and a patchy crop of hair on his small, sharp chin.
“That’s cool, I guess,” says Tate. “I…haven’t met a whole lot of other trans guys, except online. I mean, to be honest, I’m bad at meeting people in general.” He had been happy enough with just Alan to love him, Alan to come home to at night.
“You’ve met me!” says Hartley. Jaws, finished with his food, meows loudly and extends a bewhiskered pseudopod to rub against Hartley’s leg. Hartley flinches at first, then tentatively bends over to scratch the appendage. A loud, deep purring emanates from the cat-tree; its whole surface wobbles like happy Jell-O. “Oh, wow,” says Hartley. “Jesus. That’s fucked up.”
“Jaws must like you. Weird.”
The ceiling starts to shake, as though a train is passing overhead. Some more plaster falls from the hole in the corner; more weak fungal light filters into the room. Everything goes photo-negative for a second, glitched out. When it passes, Tate’s mouth is filled with the sickly-sweet taste and texture of phantom cotton candy. A few of the candles gutter; two are extinguished in thin gasps of smoke. Hartley coughs and gags.
Tate watches him, human and unlovely, alive and awake. Alan’s tree must be bending with the storm now, Alan’s dreams flickering behind his closed eyes as the next wave of change sweeps over and through his new conglomerate body, meeting no resistance at all.
“Hartley,” Tate asks, when the shaking and gagging have both subsided a bit, when his mouth tastes like a mouth again, “do you ever wonder why you were left…untouched? Out of everyone and everything, why you? Why us?”
“Just luck, I suppose. Or maybe some rare natural immunity. I’m glad I met you, though; I knew I couldn’t be the only one.”
“You knew, huh?” Tate chuckles without humor. “I was sure I was alone. I thought maybe I was cursed. The opposite of lucky. This huge, incredible thing comes and remakes the world, brings everyone else into itself, and I’m left standing here like a dope, still stuck in a body that feels like a stranger’s house, twice as lonely and a hundred times as scared as I was before. Maybe I just wasn’t up to snuff, right? Something wrong in my heart or my DNA. Maybe even the aliens or whoever didn’t want to bother with me.”
“That’s stupid,” declares Hartley, moving closer to Jaws to pet him between his four and a half ears. “You’re telling me you’d prefer to be like this guy?” He uses his other hand to gesture at the cat-tree.
“None of them seem to mind the way they are now,” says Tate. “That’s more than I can say about myself. I think all the humans are dreaming in there, in the trees. I can see their eyes moving. Sometimes they almost smile.”
“Sometimes babies look like they’re smiling when they just have gas.” Hartley shrugs. “Sometimes people in comas smile, but it’s only a reflex; they’re in too deep for dreaming.”
“This isn’t that,” Tate says, too defensively. He shakes his head. “I can tell.”
“Anyway,” says Hartley. “You’re here, and I’m here, and we’re awake, and we can go places.”
“Not right now we can’t,” says Tate. As if on cue, a loud crackling sound fills the apartment, and a viscous, dirty substance begins to drip through the hole in the ceiling: thick, greasy strands of almost-liquid. Whatever it is, it isn’t water. It shimmers inside with tiny rainbows. “This storm might not let up for a while.”
“We’re not really safer from it in here, are we?”
“No,” admits Tate. “But I don’t want to leave.”
“We could at least try going back up for your groceries? Be a shame if the dragons got all that, or if they fell through some new hole in the ground.”
Tate closes his eyes. “I won’t stop you, if that’s what you wanna do. I’m staying right here until the storm’s passed.”
Jaws purrs. Hartley takes a deep breath.
“Tate, you’re the first other person I’ve met since the Event.” Tate can hear him pronounce the capital E, and he supposes that’s as good a name as any for whatever happened to the world. “Maybe there aren’t many of us at all. But I bet there are more. If you come with me— if you come with me after the storm is over— we’ll find them together. You don’t have to live alone in a basement. The world is new, and we can make something new, too. Those of us who are left. We can make anything we want in the ruins. We can be anything we want. Things were always dangerous; it’s just that the dangers are different now. If we travel together, we’ll be safer from dragons.”
Tate opens his eyes. Hartley is flickering in candle flame, his eyes huge and black and shining. Earnest. Pink and yellow shapes wobble across his features, leaving warm patches of darkness in their wake.
“Hartley. That’s a lot to ask. I just met you.”
“But who else is there?” Jaws yawns with his dozens upon dozens of tongues and teeth. “Um. Your cat will be fine, I’m sure. Or we’ll find a way to take him with us! Put him in a pot like a Venus flytrap and carry him along.”
Who else is there? Alan, of course. Alan crowned by thick, rippling keratin shingle. Alan with the gorgeous tracery of blue veins across his eyelids, his cheeks blooming with blood and life, like he could wake at any moment and see Tate, call out to Tate, thank him for waiting. Step out of the tree’s flesh cocoon or beckon Tate inside it with a long, muscled branch.
Tate stares at Hartley. He feels one answer tremble at the edge of his lips, and then a different one. Hartley leans in towards him, eager. Tate can feel and smell the other boy’s stale breath. He leans away.
“I don’t know,” says Tate, finally. The hole in the ceiling is still oozing, weeping like a sore. “I’ll think about it. Stay with me for now. Stay until the storm is gone, and we’ll see what things look like.”
“Okay,” says Hartley, light and simple. He nods once, a rosy halo of candleglow making him briefly beatific before he moves to sit beside Tate, instead of across from him. Something makes tearing, crunching sounds on the first floor of the building. Who knows what it is, or if it’ll venture down to the basement to find them. It’s all down to luck. When Hartley reaches over to take Tate’s hand and squeeze it in his own, Tate lets him.
BRIAR RIPLEY PAGE (they/them) writes horror & fantasy fiction in Central Pennsylvania, where they live with their cat, Torgo. Find them online at briarripleypage.xyz. They are working on a novel about telepathic mutants and organ harvesters.