ISSUE #10 | Full Story, "Thessaly"
AS SEEN IN PLANET SCUMM ISSUE #10
WRITTEN BY LAUREN O’DONOGHUE
Spot Illustrations by Erika Schnatz
Additional title page illustration by Sam Rheaume
Pip goes into labour sometime in the early hours, waking me from a fitful sleep with her hollering. It’s over by the time the morning breaks. We bury the slippery knotted thing in the shadow of the turbine. The placenta goes in the pot with the samphire Meg gathered yesterday. We don’t waste anything now.
It’s Pip’s turn to check the snares but she’s still pale and quiet by noon. I go out instead. I’m on the foraging roster, so it’s no great hassle to go through the copse on the way. Pip can take some of my jobs next week if she feels up to it.
The farm has been ours for close to a year now. A couple of spiker kids were squatting here when we found it, but they cleared out quick once they saw Meg’s Heckler. Lucky they didn’t try and fight us. She’d run out of bullets halfway across Exmoor and only kept it on her for show. The turbines were already out of commission then, but the farm had line-of-sight across the valley and doors that locked. Good enough for us.
It’s half an hour’s walk down to the copse. The clouds are a grey that’s almost blue today, turning a sickly yellow in the place where the sun would be. It’s dark beneath the trees, the earth still damp from last week’s rain. Good for mushrooms. I find a few chanterelles in the shadow of a fallen beech, and—a real coup—a puffball the width of my spread fingers.
All but one of the snares are empty, and the lone rabbit is a skinny, sinewy thing. Never mind. I snap its neck, wrap its warm body in a tea towel and tuck it in my basket with the mushrooms. Protein is protein, and Pip will need the strength today.
I’m picking nettles along the dual carriageway when I hear the sound of engines approaching.
I lay flat on my belly along the embankment as they pass. Once the noise has faded I count to a hundred, and only then do I get up. Meg and Pip ran into a patrol on their supply run to Barnstable nine months ago. We've been more cautious since then.
Another hour’s walk to the coast. Strings of bright gutweed, soft bunches of bladderwrack, dark sprigs of pepper dulse. Into the basket. A moment of hope when I spot a crab in a tide pool, but it’s already dead. The next wave washes the hollow shell back out to sea. Piotr said he found a lobster up here once, but I never saw it. Piotr’s full of shit.
I’ve left my boots on a rock by the entrance to the bay. The wet sand feels good between my toes. I close my eyes as I walk along the shallows, taking great lungfuls of the cold air. Brine, and rotting things. Summer holidays. When the tide is out you can walk up the spit and see the half-sunken carcass of a passenger ferry against the cliffs. We took a dinghy up there once, but it had already been picked clean. Nothing left but the remains of the passenger lounge, patterned sofas dusty with salt.
A good haul this morning, so I head home while the light’s still good. I swap the basket to my left arm as I hop the stile to the airfield, lifting it carefully so nothing spills out. The wicker has left pink grooves in my forearm. I drop to the other side and begin walking towards the farm.
I’m halfway across the airfield when I feel the first tremor. It’s so faint that I think I’ve imagined it. The next one is stronger.
Out in the open. Out in the open. The airfield is a shortcut I shouldn’t take, but it’s been years since I’ve seen one. I’ve gotten lazy. Careless. I think about running for the copse but the tremors are stronger now, and I’d only fall and break something. Still then, very still, close to the ground. Frightened rabbit still. Dead tree still. I look up across my folded arms.
There it is, over in the south. It looks small from this distance. The Shard looked small if you were south of the Thames. It moves so slowly, lifting one leg (is it a leg?) ponderously before letting its foot (is it a foot?) drop to the ground. Another tremor as it steps forward. It’s moving west. Away from the farm. Good. It shines where the diffused sunlight hits it. The word “titanium” floats across my consciousness, a relic from another time.
It’s too far away to see me, so I watch it for a while. I can’t help it. There’s something hypnotic about the way it moves. It would be almost human if it wasn’t so terribly, emphatically not.
The part of my brain that hasn’t seized up with animal fear is surprised to see one here at all. They are city things, sentinels. They patrol for the capital, though I heard talk of them in Manchester and Cardiff before the radio went silent. Perhaps this one belongs to Exeter, the rational part of me thinks. Perhaps they got the walls up after all.
I’m not sure how long I lie there. Too long. Meg will be getting worried. It’s further away now, and the tremors have almost subsided. I get to my feet, rubbing the feeling back into my legs where they’ve cramped up. One more glance at its shrinking silhouette on the horizon. I pick up the basket and head back to the farm.
The turbines are throwing long shadows by the time I get home. Meg is unhappy that I’ve taken so long, but her face softens when she sees the puffball. Pip is still wrapped in her sleeping bag, forehead resting against the wall. There’s a sheen of sweat across her face, and she smells sour when I get close.
If she’s got an infection we’ll be in trouble. We used up the last of the antibiotics last spring. Piotr caught his leg on a barbed wire fence trying to get into an industrial estate outside Taunton. He kept the leg by some miracle, though he walks with a limp now. Fucking idiot. If Pip needs antibiotics he can go to Barnstable and get them himself, limp or not.
Meg fetches some water from the barrel and brews the last of the blackberry leaves into a strong tea. I manage to get Pip to take some, but she leaves the rest to go cold. She stares across the kitchen, eyes fixed on the drooping wallpaper. Piotr comes in around sunset, pulling brown eggs from his pockets before throwing his filthy coat over the back of a chair. Only three. They’ve not been laying as much recently, though none of us have mentioned it.
Now that we’re all here, it seems as good a time as any to tell the others what I saw across the airfield. Piotr sits at the table with me while Meg makes supper on our one-ring stove. Pip stays in her corner.
“You’re sure?” Piotr asks when I’m done with my telling. His thick eyebrows meet in the middle when he frowns.
“‘Course I’m sure.”
“Why here?” he says. “No city here. Nothing to guard.”
“Maybe Exeter,” I say, and realize how stupid it sounds out loud. We met people on the road who’d fled Exeter after the outage. The place was overrun with spikers, picked clean by refugees from the continent. Not enough infrastructure to get walls up, let alone anything else.
Meg looks up from the pot she’s stirring. “Maybe they’re not just guarding any more.”
“Then what are they doing?”
She shrugs. “Scouting. Looking for resources. I don’t know.”
Pip makes a quiet mewling noise. Piotr scrapes his chair back and goes to sit on the floor beside her. She leans against his shoulder, and he says something to her in Polish. Meg and I share a look.
She’s about to say something when there’s a banging on the other side of the house. The four of us freeze. My mind goes to the Heckler, gathering dust in the airing cupboard. It worked on the spiker kids, but a patrol wouldn’t be so easily fooled.
The banging starts again, then a muffled voice calls: “Hello? You lot still here?”
Meg and I frown at one another. The voice is familiar, but I can’t place it.
Piotr gets it first. “Fucking hell,” he groans. “It’s fucking Cooper.”
Of course it is. I’m amazed I didn’t recognize his voice. Cooper was part of our group when we first found the farm. We’d picked him up near Glastonbury, when safety in numbers was a more important credo. None of us had ever really liked him. He talked too much, didn’t pull his weight. Meg caught him spiking in the woodshed one night. We sent him on his way after that, almost a year ago now.
The banging on the door again. “I can see lights on! Let me in, will you?”
“He’s not going to leave until we do,” Meg whispers. “Might as well get it over with.”
Piotr snorts. “Get what over with? He could come here to kill us all you know.”
“He’s not dangerous.”
“He’s a spiker. They’re all dangerous.”
“Here.” I walk over to Meg and pick up the knife she was using to skin the rabbit. “He tries anything, I’ll
kill him. Alright?”
Meg and Piotr look at each other, then nod. They know I mean it.
The kitchen is at the back of the house. The dining room is pitch black, and I feel my way across it with an outstretched hand as I walk towards the hallway. The glass panel in the front door has been boarded up, but I can hear Cooper pacing outside.
“Coop?” I call.
“You are here! Knew it!” Cooper’s voice is muffled by the layers of wood and plasterboard. A nothing Midlands accent, shrill on the vowels.
“What do you want, Coop?”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, just let me in. I’m not here to loot you.”
“Tell me what you want, first.”
There’s a dull thud, as if he’s banged his head against the door. A pause. “Did you see it?”
“See what?”
“See what?” His voice is incredulous. “You know what. You felt the shakes, if you didn’t see it. There’s one here.”
“And?”
“Please, will you just let me in? I need to talk to all of you. It’s important.”
I think for a moment. “I’m going to open the door now,” I say. “I have a knife. You try anything, you’re fucking dead.”
“Fine, fine,” he says. “Whatever. I’m not gonna do anything. Just let me in.”
I unlock the door with my left hand and pull it open. Slowly. It’s hard to make out his features in the dark, but Cooper is much thinner than when I last saw him. Not surprising, if he’s still spiking.
“Well,” I say. “You’d better come in then.”
Half an hour later there are four of us sat around the kitchen table. Pip went to bed after supper. Cooper has a mug of nettle tea in one hand—Meg wouldn’t give him any food—and his other is twitching restlessly on the tabletop. Sallow skin, red-rimmed eyes. Incredible he’s still alive.
He’s also gone completely fucking mad.
“Spike has rotted your brain,” Piotr says, dismissing Cooper with a wave of his hand. “Take your crazy somewhere else. We don’t want it here.”
“I’m not crazy,” Cooper says. “I’ve been planning it out for months. It’ll work.”
“How do you know?” I ask. “Have you tried it?”
“Obviously not. Haven’t had a chance yet. But it makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Meg, Piotr and I answer in chorus: “No.”
Cooper looks at us like we’re the ones who’ve lost it. “They go where the power is.” He speaks slowly, like he’s talking to children. “That’s why they’ve brought them out here. Looking for power sources. I reckon they store it somehow, take it back to the cities. That’s how they’ve stayed active since the outage.”
“How?”
“I dunno,” Cooper says. “I just know what I’ve seen. I was holed up in the Royal Exeter for a while. Me and some others got the generator working. One of them showed up a week later. Crushed the place. Barely got out. I’m telling you, I’m right.”
“Say you are right.” Meg, ever the diplomat. “And you somehow get the turbines working, and one does turn up here. Then what? It crushes the farm too? What’s the point, Coop?”
Cooper’s eyes glitter. His pupils are so dilated, you can barely see the blue for black. “It never gets that far,” he says. “I can rig charges in the airfield. Take the thing down before it gets here.”
“For what?” I ask. My patience is wearing thin. “Why would you want to?”
“Why would you not?” Cooper’s fingers dance along the tabletop. “The scrap alone. You ever think about what’s inside those things? The copper? How much it’d be worth in trade?” He stops for a moment, tilting his head to one side. There’s something oddly feline about the gesture. “It would be enough to buy our way into Arcadia. All of us.”
We fall silent for a moment. What Cooper is suggesting is insane, but the mention of Arcadia is enough to give us all pause. The territory to the south-west would be a thing of myth if we hadn’t seen it for ourselves. We tried to earn passage once, years ago, but didn’t have enough to pay our way in. We’d seen glimpses of it though, beyond the high walls. Green hills and polytunnels, clear plastic biomes, people working in the fields. No patrols, no foraging, no looters. Armed guards and five feet of concrete between us and paradise.
“You really think you could get the turbines working?” Meg asks after a moment.
“I almost did,” Cooper says. He stops short of adding “before you kicked me out.”
I think about this. Cooper had been something in engineering before the outage, and always had a knack for fixing things that seemed beyond repair. That’s why we kept him around in the first place. Even if he was wrong about the rest of it, a working electrical grid would be worth something.
“You wouldn’t even see me,” Cooper says, responding to a question no one asked. “There’s a monitoring station up by the turbines. I’d look after myself. Just let me try. Please.”
Meg, Piotr and I look at one another. Power means light. Heat. Refrigeration. Electric fences. Luxuries we haven’t had in years.
Cooper is cracked, and a spiker, but he’s never tried to hurt us.
Piotr grunts. “I think he can fix the turbines, if he stays away.”
Meg agrees, and after a moment’s hesitation I do too.
“You come close to the farm,” Piotr adds, “I kill you myself. Understand?”
Cooper nods. “I understand.” His eyes are wild. “I understand.”
He heads up to the monitoring station that evening. I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering whether we’ve done the right thing, but one mad spiker is the least of our problems now. Increased patrols on the motorways, the hens not laying, Pip’s sickly pallor. Those are the things we worry about today.
True to his word, Cooper keeps to himself. Weeks pass, and at times I forget that he’s even up there, in the plain white building on the hill.
***
We almost lose Pip, one awful night. She grows hotter and hotter, her skin burning to the touch, and the three of us sit vigil around her as she shivers beneath three blankets. Her fever breaks around dawn. By some mercy she survives, though she’s not the same. Meg and I take over her chores, and Piotr begins sleeping on the floor beside her bed.
I go to collect the eggs one morning and find a hen dead in the coop. Before the week’s out the rest of them are gone too. Piotr wants to eat them, but I remember avian flu and burn them in the back field instead. When I pull up the potatoes I planted earlier in the year I find that they’ve turned to black soot in the ground.
I next see Cooper in what might be early September. He intercepts me as I’m coming back across the airfield with my basket, waving me down from across the flat expanse of grass.
“I’ve almost got it,” he says as he reaches me, breathing hard. “It’ll be soon. You’ll have to find another way back up to the farm from now on. I’m laying the charges today.”
While I doubt he’ll be able to get the turbines working, I don’t doubt it enough to risk death by electrocution. I tell him I’ll warn the others to steer clear. He looks pleased, almost manic. Who knows how he’s spiking up here. I don’t ask.
The four of us are eating dinner one night—braised squirrel, a new delicacy—when the lights come on. The fluorescent tubing flickers for a moment, goes out, then suddenly blazes into life. Used to the paraffin lamps as I am, I have to squint against the brightness of it. How many years since I last saw an electric light? I had forgotten the ambient sound of them, the way they buzz softly in the background.
“Fucking Christ,” Piotr says. “Crazy bastard fucking did it.”
Meg and Piotr get up and begin checking every light in the house, switching on the appliances, crying out in delight when the television gives out a burst of static. I stay at the table and look out of the window, towards the white building below the turbines. Its lights are on too, a pinprick star
against the dark hill.
I am woken two nights later by the world splitting in two.
The house shakes so violently that I am almost thrown out of bed, and a thin cry from Pip’s room startles me fully awake. Another tremor, the sound of breaking crockery from the kitchen, then Piotr’s heavy footfalls from the stairs.
I pull on my cardigan and rush to follow him, hitting the light switch in the hall. The bulb flares, flickers, then shatters. I stumble in the darkness, almost falling down the stairs when another tremor hits. I grab a banister in time and hang there, clinging white-knuckled until it passes.
Piotr has managed to light the kitchen’s paraffin lamp, and is pulling on his boots one handed as I come in. Meg and Pip join us soon after, both half-dressed and pale.
“What the hell is going on?” Meg asks, her arm tight around Pip’s shoulders. “What has that mad bastard done now?”
“He’s done exactly what he said he would,” I say. “I think it’s coming.”
The next tremor is so violent that the kitchen dresser topples over, smashing into fragments as it hits the tile floor.
“We need to get out of here,” Meg says. “It’s not safe.”
The four of us scramble for shoes and coats, then run out into the garden. It’s almost morning, and the sliver of brightness cresting the hill gives us enough light to see by.
The turbines, still for so long, are moving now. Their slowly turning shadows stretch across our barren fields, pointing long fingers towards the distant haze of the sea. And between here and there is the dim expanse of the airfield, and what’s moving towards it.
Titanium, aluminium, chrome. Silver.
Its next step is achingly slow and as it lands, the ground convulses beneath my feet. I grab Meg’s shoulder for support to save from falling. She clings to Piotr’s coat with one hand and Pip’s arm with the other. The four of us hold each other upright, an imperfect, fragile structure.
How had I ever thought the turbines so vast? Three of them on top of one another would not be as tall as the thing that approaches. I can hear the movement of its limbs now, a metallic groan that echoes across the valley.
(Additional illustration by Sam Rheaume)
“It’s coming this way.” Pip’s voice is barely there. “It’s coming this way.”
At the side of the airfield closest to the farm I see a figure moving. I know that it’s Cooper. He laid charges, he said. The next time it steps it will be on the airfield. I wonder if the mesh of gleaming copper against the scrubby grass is really there, or if my mind has conjured it from nothing.
Another groan as it lifts its leg (is it a leg?). I imagine looking up at the sole of its foot (is it a foot?) from beneath. A spacecraft, a football field, an eclipse.
It leans forward as its weight shifts to the right. I see it make contact with the airfield but I do not see what happens next because I am thrown to the ground by the tremor, deafened by a bellowing and shrieking of metal that is louder than bombs, louder than death, louder than Pip’s screams when I pulled the dead thing from between her legs.
Then, like a seizure passing, the world falls suddenly quiet.
I push myself up onto my now-bloody knees. My whole body feels battered and wretched. The others look as dazed as I do, but they’re not hurt. With effort, I stand and turn.
I can’t help it. I bark out a laugh, more from shock than mirth. It lays smoking in the airfield, one leg (is it—)
blackened and burned up to the joint. A plane crash, a train collision, a motorway pile-up. A speck—Cooper—races towards the wreckage.
It takes us the best part of an hour to get to the airfield. Meg has the foresight to send us to the barn for oil cans and rubber tubing and whatever else we might need to siphon fuel from the thing’s remains. There won’t be a soul on this stretch of coast who didn’t hear the crash. Sooner or later others will arrive, and they will not hesitate to kill us if they have the same idea. We need to be halfway to Arcadia by the time that happens.
It looks larger fallen than standing, somehow. I have to crane my neck to see the top of its head (is it—) as I approach. Cooper is already upon it, a red toolbox open on the ground beside him. He is working a crowbar into what might be a joint, though I can see no plates or rivets. Perhaps they’re too small to be seen from a distance.
“Fucking hell,” Piotr says. He has been muttering this under his breath ever since we left the farm. “Fucking hell.”
Pip shivers. “He killed it.”
When Cooper sees us he drops the crowbar and dashes over. His eyes are wild, his teeth stained almost black. Spiked, spiked to high heaven. Madman. Genius.
“Did you see it?” he laughs. “Did you fucking see it?”
“We saw it, Coop,” Meg says. “Now how do we get it open? The looters’ll be here within hours.”
He laughs again. It is not a good laugh. “I can’t,” he says. “Can’t do it. I can’t… it’s not….”
Cooper bends over double, clutching his stomach.
“Got it the wrong way round, didn’t we? The wrong way fucking round….”
Cooper’s babbling fades as I walk away from him, towards the wreckage. The early morning fields are cloaked in a thin mist, which is gathering in beads of moisture upon the metal. Warm, I think. There is a humming coming from somewhere. The same ambient buzz as the fluorescent lights in the kitchen, except I feel this one in my bones.
I pick my way across the grass, careful not to step on the wires that criss-cross the ground. Their faces (is it—) always seemed featureless from a distance. Just two bright lights where the eyes would be. The eye (is it—) that I can see is closed now. I’m close enough to touch it, so I do. It is warm. Warm, and soft.
A deep hum, a whirring, a cat asleep in my lap, a jet engine taking off. By degrees, an eye the size of a house (it is) begins to open. Its face (it is) creases—I don’t know how I ever could have thought it featureless—and suddenly I realise the mistake I’ve made. The mistake we’ve all made.
They first appeared around the time the fighting broke out. We thought they were weapons, guardians, brought in to quell the conflict. They were a source of terror but somehow still on our side, like armed police at an airport. It never occured to any of us that they were something other. That their arrival was unplanned, the root of all that came after.
Chicken, egg, chicken, egg. I want to laugh, but my body has forgotten how to move.
Slow as a glacier, it pushes itself up onto its knees (it is it is) and turns to face me. In its eyes (it is it is it is) I see myself reflected, and in that reflection I see the truth of the thing. Aphids, beetles, blackfly. I am nothing. We are nothing. How arrogant to think that we were not.
It gets to its feet (it is it is it is).
Somewhere, in another world, Pip is screaming.
I no longer have to imagine. I close my eyes, and think of Arcadia.
LAUREN O'DONOGHUE is a writer and community organiser based in South Yorkshire, UK. She graduated from Sheffield Hallam University with a first class honours degree in Creative Writing, and has most recently featured in the Cranked Anvil Short Story Anthology.
When she's not writing she enjoys watching folk horror movies, drinking malbec, and rabble rousing.