Issue 1 Preview: A Distant Sound of Hammers

Our previews of Spectra Magazine Issue 1 continues with the intense, cannibalistic horror A Distant Sound of Hammers by S. Boyd Taylor. You can find out more about the author on his personal website, and you’re cordially invited to discuss this – and our other stories – on the Spectra forums.

“In a world of the dead, religion is the only thing keeping people from devouring each other. Until a human-meat butcher rediscovers his long lost family…”

A Distant Sound of Hammers

by S. Boyd Taylor

I see her at work the next day. She looks like my mother. Except she is too old — fifty at least — and too fat. She sees me staring at her as I bring the slop bucket to her cage. A fire lights in her eyes. “Jody?”

I tilt the bucket to dump the slop through the bars but she reaches out, touches my hand. Stops me.

“Jody, is that you? God, it’s been decades and you look just the same,” she says.

My stomach knots. Is she just reading my name tag or does she really know me? Hunger rises like it did last night, only stronger. I knock her hand away.

“Jody, it’s Mandy. Your sister. You’ve got to remember me.”

“I never had a sister.” I didn’t, did I? Everything before the change is so vague. Just bits and pieces.

“Jody, you have to help me. Get me out of here.”

I’m starving and she looks so tasty. I could steal her. I remember the taste of human flesh and my jaw unhinges instantly. The savage hunger rises hot in my soul. I tremble. “Stop talking to me. You’re just cattle.”

“I’m not cattle. I’m a person. Like you. Hell, I’m your sister.”

“I don’t have a sister!”

“Jody, look. Look at my hand where you bit me. Remember that?” She holds out her arm and her hand is purple and scarred all over with teeth marks. “You have to remember.”

Something flutters in the back of my mind. A vague hint of memory. My fever cools. My jaw slips back in hinge. “You’re lying. You’d be a Z if I bit you.”

“You mean — you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“There’s a cure. For the disease you have. It’s been around for years.”

“It’s not a disease. It’s the next stage of evolution.”

“Really? Is that what the Church tells you? Do you like it? The rotting? The desperate, fevered hunger? The way you can’t trust anyone. Life’s not like that. The disease makes you this way.”

“It’s not a disease!”

“Yes, it is.” She reaches out. Closes her scarred hand around mine.

“Shut up. Just shut up. Don’t you ever talk to me again or I’ll put you next on hammer line.” I shake her hand away. My whole body crawls all over like maggots are eating me instead of just my arm. I feel something I cannot remember feeling ever before. Fear. No, Terror. Absolute freezing cold terror.

“Jody, no. You have to believe me.”

I do believe her, that’s the problem. “I told you to shut up.”

“Come back. I can cure you. We could run away to the Resistance.”

My legs want to fly, to run me away from the heresy I’m hearing. But I want to hear it. “You can’t cure the dead.”

“You’re not dead. None of you are. Not entirely.”

I run.

#

I am in my apartment again, sitting in front of the nightly Church of Z broadcast. I can’t raise my eyes to it, though. For the first time since my Awakening, I feel out of touch with Our Lord Zacchary

I am unclean. A heretic. A traitor. Stained inside by the words the human woman spoke as if by oil. What if she’s right? What if I really am alive? What if we all are? What if there are millions of other people — walking, talking people just like me — penned up in corrals, bred, and fattened for food.

But, Z, they taste so good.

Another hymn begins on the TV and I stand and turn away and look at my apartment. The greasy carpet. The rusted pre-Awakening refrigerator, mostly empty. I go to my closet, stare in at the clothes. All the same. Every pair of jeans spattered with gore from the slaughterhouse and stained where I licked them clean. Every shirt the same shade of Cragmer’s Slaughter House red to help hide the stains. How many have I killed so far? Raise the sledgehammer, aim for the back of the skull, swing. Raise, aim, swing. Raise, swing. Swing. Swing.

I could be in that cage tomorrow. Like that gray-haired old woman. What did she say her name was? Z, I don’t even remember. She could be my sister and I might crack her skull wide with a sledge in the morning and I don’t know her name.

#

After I bribe the guard, I come into the warehouse. He’s used to taking bribes, he says. Everyone sneaks out a piece of meat now and again.

I throw the light switch, but nothing happens. The generators are still lazy from their hours of rest and they aren’t used to waking at midnight. Several moments I stand in a stinking, humid void. But then comes the buzz of electricity overhead. One bank of lights blasts on above me, then another, then another. The blinding cascade rolls away into the vast and filthy pens like some unholy storm where the lightning never fades.

I peer through the tangle of chain link and rusted poles. Countless chests heaving with breath. Glimpses of shoulders skulking between shadows. Heads turned at all different angles staring numbly up at the blazing metal sky. Lord, how many in this warehouse alone? And we’re just a discount dead-meat shipper for the cattle too old or too rotten to sell elsewhere. A small operation compared to most.

I feel their eyes on me. Thousands, maybe millions of eyes. Watching. Weighing. Wondering why I’m here in the middle of the night. Knowing that business doesn’t start for another five hours.

In the presence of so much sweating, blood-pumping life, the hunger rains down on me. It floods like lava into my belly. Fills my lungs, my throat, pushes my jaw wide until it unhinges. I could eat them. Every one.

What am I here for? Am I savior or destroyer? Even I don’t know.

I walk between the first row of cages. At first all is silence and sweat and stink. Dozens of faces stare back at me. Wild-eyed. Afraid. Angry.

But soon the whispers start: He’s alone. There’s only one of them. Why’s he here? I don’t care, there’s only one of them, maybe we can kill him. Maybe we can get out. Get to the Resistance.

I feel the edge of their hate sharpening. Heating up. Cages shake in uncountable hands. Catches and latches rattle.

But when I grab up a sledgehammer as I pass the killing station, there is only silence again.

“What are you here for?” comes a voice. It’s an old man — older than any I’ve seen. Grade D for sure.

“I’m here for my sister.”

Whispers like the waves of an ocean. A boy runs to the old man’s ear and mutters something to him. He thinks for several moments, then nods. “She is here.”

“I will take her, then.” I near the man. He is small, withered, stooped with a white beard as long as he is tall. But there is something powerful about his eyes. Instinct makes me grip the hammer tighter.

“And where will you take her?”

“Outside. To the mountains. To the Resistance.”

“Where do you think WE came from?”

I blink, stunned.

“There is no more Resistance.”

“There has to be.”

“We were all that was left.”

“You’re wrong. I heard a story last week–”

“There’s no Resistance to run to. There’s nothing for you out there but Inquisitors, the fear of annihilation, eventual death. You’re not the only sympathizer we’ve ever had. That’s why the Church is there, you know. That’s part of why Inquisitors exist. To eliminate Z’s just like you.”

“But she asked me to rescue her.”

“Just turn around. Leave.”

I look at the naked, sweating bodies crowded all around. The diseased eyes. The bruised legs. The swollen and pus-filled cuts of life. I remember the way these people tore the bodies of their own dead to pieces just two days back. They are nothing but desperate and miserable sacks of organs, grown and fed to fill supermarket shelves. There’s no resistance left in them.

“I’m taking her right now. I have the hammer.”

“There are always hammers, all of them about to fall. No matter where you stand, there is a hammer.”

“Then you keep your hammers, and I’ll keep mine.”

Then my sister is there, her flesh pressed into the wire at the filter cages. “I want to go with him.”

“Are you sure?”

“She said she wants to come with me.”

Silence.

My sister, hesitant: “I am sure.”

I don’t wait for the old man to say anything. I pull the lever on the first filter cage and she crams herself in while the others claw at her back.

# # #

Continue reading A Distant Sound of Hammers in issue 1 of Spectra Magazine. And you can also check out previews of our other Issue 1 stories below:

Wolf-Being, by Kim Falconer

When The Arizona Moon Meets The Arizona Sun, by Brian Dolton

Songbirds, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch