George J Young

Part 1

Isabel took one last look into the bright street lined with oil lamps and men stoking smoldering fires, before ducking back into the hovel she shared with her husband and children. She brushed the curtains gently into place to block the light seeping in from the greater encampment. The smoke wafted through the hole still, pervading their home with reminders of the world outside. Javier was tucking their daughters, Teresa and Maria, into their cots. The four shared one room, and they felt lucky to have managed to stake out such a space for themselves alone.

“Papa?”

“Yes, Maria?”

“Do we leave tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. We won’t know until we have to.”

Maria’s face turned away and her mother could see that she was troubled. She knelt at the side of the bed and ran her fingers through her daughter’s black hair.

“The world has changed a lot, Maria. There aren’t any safe places. There just isn’t. The senate sends watchers every day to guide our path. We just have to trust them, stay safe, and live the best we can. I know it’s hard. And one day soon we will travel again. Maybe we will find happier homes and friendly people. But for now we just have to wait.”

She kissed Maria’s forehead.

“But God will walk with us. Just trust Him.”

Maria smiled.

“Ok, Mama.”

Isabel saw her eyes drooping already. She leaned in, and kissed her once more, then turned, and did the same for Teresa, who was already asleep. Isabel felt her own eyes growing heavy, and sought the corner Javier and herself shared. The ground was hard, and although they had no source of light in their home, the dancing fires from the window flashed through the shifting border of threadbare fabric and chipped wood. It flickered across their only furniture, the sparse cots her daughters currently slept in and the lone chair, standing near the window. Javier’s face caught the dancing light, and his sunburned features opened her heart. Every day she lay next to this man, this man whom she had known for nearly thirty years, and every day her heart broke for him. Everyone had to work for the good of all. Some tried to shirk their duties and laze about. Her husband was not one of those. Everyday he placed their people upon his shoulders, because he knew the alternative. Not only could they all be found, and killed but, failing that, the senate would prescribe heavy sentences for those they found to be insufficient.

Survival was becoming more and more difficult. The beasts had devoured everything. Food, shelter, natural flora and fauna… There was no longer any recourse but to run. Maybe five years ago, maybe in another world…

But now, all they could do was run. Together. Isabel curled up into the crook of Javier’s chest, his rhythmic breathing rocking her gently to sleep.

The fires burned outside their window until daybreak. Horses rode down the street three times, their riders shouting quick reports to watchmen. Curtains drew open and shut in the windows across the street, and the beating of wings grew imperceptibly through the glossy darkness.

The night fell heavily across the hills and plains running north of Barcelona. Shadows that only an hour ago slipped through the landscape had now faded into an unformed mass of darkness. Clouds rested over moon and stars, rendering the landscape blank to any but those beasts with the most developed night vision.

Slowly, over one hill, more than thirty miles from the city, the ground shifted. Rolling, slowly tumbling, and trailing over and around the summit. Something was traversing the gentle landscape.

The tide increased incrementally, until the roiling trickle running down the mountain became a dark flood. The jostling mass tore through abandoned farmhouses, and overgrown farms. Vineyards that had once been prized for the pungent elixir that flowed from their fruit now lay vacant, alone, until the flow reached their thresholds and they were trampled underfoot. The torrent was monumental in scope. A man standing in the direction of the deluge would have been thrown into the air and crushed by one thousand blows, nothing remaining of his frail body.

It was never ending. The limbs thrashing through short trees and brush. The quiet landscape overtaken by a undercurrent of groaning, snorting, growling; each voice calling forth to the others. There were no longer deer, or mice, or common woodland creatures about. There were no signs of life at all despite the rolling ground now spread from horizon to horizon. Birds of prey and large cats prowled on the outskirts of the horde. But to one overlooking the scene, if they were to stand front and center, neither extreme was visible, from the east to the west, no break, no peace. Such was the scope.

The flood paused in certain areas, now to travel over a large brook or stream at a shallow crossing, now to pass through a ravine, either towered over by hills, or man-made structures. But as if of one mind, the individual components returned to a common goal. Their noses guided them, unconsciously searching for the next target, the next feast. The vineyards were picked clean, grapes, vines, shrubbery. Old trash heaps worn to the soil, structures stripped of wood and drywall. The people of this town had tracked the migration of the monsters. They had seen the devastation, the death and destruction left in their wake. Some municipalities had gambled, trusting their strength to deliver them. But no amount of humans nor advanced weaponry had been able to do more than postpone their inevitable end. The beast bred too fast and were sustained on so little. They devoured both the bodies of their fallen and their enemies alike.

But they harbored no hate. No animosity. Only a primitive instinctual desire to live, reproduce, and eat. Unable to compete with the growing horde, villages condensed into cities where they could better defend themselves and light the dark streets. But no matter their numbers, no matter how bright they lit the night, no matter how far away they fled, mothers and fathers shook as they tucked in their children, and pulled the blinds of the windows in their overcrowded apartments, afraid of the same beast that had driven them from their ancestral homes.

Afraid of the boar.

Part 2