"Family Trip" by Kevin Xu

​In the ruins, a little girl was running. At the feet of the skeletons of skyscrapers, under a murky sky where clouds tumbled over each other in their fury, in the cracked streets and mossy alleyways, alongside shattered storefronts and blast-stained walls, she ran on. She was humming a soft tune, some parts borrowed from the songs of her parents, others aimlessly conjured up in her play. Beside her, the wind rasped as it slid past shells of buildings, and far off, nameless animals called to each other.

In the distance, a shadow was watching. It had nested in the rubble underneath a ruined overpass, and from this point, it observed the girl as she skipped around in a circle, rested for a moment, stood up from the rock, and continued running forward. Suddenly, the shadow detached itself from its shade and began crawling after her. It moved deliberately, its paws gingerly sweeping the surface as it went and its heads roving over the landscape. At first, the distance between the two was vast, but the beast kept up a good pace, and soon, it was only a dozen yards away. She was completely unaware.

“Par!” cried out the girl.

Ahead, a figure in a thick, muddy coat stood amidst a cluster of patchy tents with bags sprawled over them and a patch of ash and stones in the center. He strode over to the girl, and her expression faded as she saw his.

“I told you,” Par said, his voice raising as he continued. “Not to go deep into the city. We don’t know what’s in there.”

The girl shrugged and tried to run past him. He clapped his hand over her shoulder and kept her back. 

“One more time, and it’s a switching. And there will be no mobiph for you, not for the rest of the week. None for us.”

Now sullen faced, the girl pushed past him. 

“You’re lucky the dog keeps an eye on you.”
​
And as if on cue, the shadow bounded into their encampment, one head panting with excitement and the other still surveying the surroundings. It tried to kiss Par, who ducked out of its way and went back to arranging things. The dog chased itself in a circle and sprawled at the foot of the girl, who merely looked away and huffed; her sulking could bear no interruption. Above, the sky had faded into a shade of green, and the clouds were congealed into a patchwork of thick masses, shoving each other across the horizon. The little girl squinted her eyes, and for a moment, she thought she could see stars. 

​They had traveled for a year now. Starting in a dusty, overlooked shack on the edge of the great plains, then to a suburban neighborhood that had herds of deer moving through the cul-de-sacs, grazing in lawns and backyards, and after that the endless highway, where weeds and trees sprouted between long-dead cars, and now, here, the city. They were a simple unit: mother, father, daughter, son, and uncle. In the past, Uncle constantly badgered the family with stories, although now, he spoke little and on the rare occasions that he did, he would whisper, and his eyes always looked over one’s shoulder. In evenings, Mar and Par exchanged stories of their past life, a barely remembered, long distant thing, and the girl and the boy would listen with rapt attention.

At every day’s beginning, Par and Mar woke up, taking out the thick, pale rations and cooking them over a fire, then filtering water for the day. Gently, they roused the children, and the day’s work would start. Beds of soil had been cleared out in the old park, amongst scorched hillsides and husks of dead trees. Everyone labored there, with the children dragging along makeshift wooden tools and the adults tilling the fields one by one, ripping the earth up, watching as upturned soil baked raw in the flickering sun. Noontime, the parents cooked more rations, or, if they had managed to hunt down an animal, they cut it up for lunch. Whenever they did so, they left most of the corpse to rot and treated the cut portions with fear. Not that it mattered. Despite what had happened in the past, and perhaps in defiance of it, nature was flourishing. Swarms of birds blanketed the sky, covering up its wounds and sores, and below them, deer marched over abandoned farmland and wolves paced through the streets. Zoo animals, some of them at the very least, had multiplied, and it was not uncommon to see elephants walking over the lands where their ancestors had been hunted down. And there were other creatures.

On the 204th day of their arrival in the city, the family was walking down a highway. Uncle trudged next to the wagon, exhausted from a morning of pulling it, and the girl sat inside, humming another idle tune whilst her parents strode in front, with their boy a few paces ahead. He was sullen faced, still sulking over a punishment that was (unfairly, in his opinion) delivered several days ago. His fury ebbed and surged, and, on a particularly annoyance-infused whim, he broke off from the group and charged forward. As he went farther and farther away, and even as his parents shouted for him to return, he kept sprinting. The little boy approached the edge of the interchange and ran up to the barrier, scanning the landscape below: a vast network of roads winding over and under each other, with gaps and collapsed sections in between, and the wreckage of cars and concrete and bones strewn all over the ground. 

He turned back, saw the outraged expressions on his parents, and turned around again with a smug look. Immediately, it disappeared. For on the freeway underneath, the boy had seen a dark shape, a familiar shape, prowling in the shadows. Instinct told him to scream, sense plugged that notion, and at last he spun around and hurried toward his parents.

The boy stuttered, his words barely sliding out of his mouth in time, but Mar knew what he meant. Her face paled, and she looked at Par with eyes wide and mouth agape. Both of them crammed the little boy and the dog into the wagon, and together with Uncle, gave it an almighty push onto the middle of the highway, and set it rolling downwards. Their wagon, a makeshift thing assembled from carapaces of cars and pieces of shopping carts, rattled loudly as it went down the highway, but the parents didn’t care. They ran.

A hiss, followed by an abrupt wail—that was the first indication of it. Then, the thump-rumble of its speech, a hoarse intake of breath, a steady wheezing that surged upwards, gasping itself out over and over as it ascended into the sky. Other voices soon joined in; there must have been dozens of them. Vast, drifting abominations, looking almost like clouds. Gills ran down their sides, with pus dripping out, scattering with the breeze and with the beat of the creatures’ breath, and eyes, ringed and bulging, spattered at random on their scarred, bloated stomachs. Centered in the middle of each one, a great ragged slit opened and shut repeatedly, rows of teeth curling into view and disappearing, and saliva, or their equivalent of it, flecked out in long strands.

Sprinting, breathing raggedly, Mar chanced a look back and swore. But it wasn’t all that bad. The beasts were drifting aimlessly, as if uneasy and feeling out the skies. She looked over at Par, at the kids. Up ahead, the skyscrapers had come into view, and rooftops of houses covered both sides. They were making good speed.

Uncle burst out and sprinted towards the other end of the highway. He screamed.

In a rush, Par leaped into the wagon, cursing at the top of his lungs, for it didn’t matter now if he did, and he rummaged around in a frenzy, Mar at his side, both of them scrabbling amidst the supplies. Shrieks rose up in the distance. Finally, Par located it, a slender set of bags, and without regard to anything, he tore them off their contents, and withdrew a couple of spears, some of them falling onto the ground in his haste, but Par managed to grab one of them, and he ran out into the open, praying under his breath. The cacophony became louder. Uncle kept sprinting.

It was all too much for the little girl, so she poked her head from the crumpled bags and looked upon the scene. Uncle in the center, Par close behind him, with a slender, bound spear in his hand. And in the sky, a great, roiling mass, whirling around itself, spitting out droplets and pale, long feelers. One of them hurtled down and wrapped around Uncle, who relaxed at its touch. A spear went through the tentacle, and Uncle tumbled out, and just as rapidly, he was snatched again. The spear cut through it. The tentacle flopped down in a shower of gray spittle. Back and forth, Par cut at the feelers, batting them away or stabbing them to pieces, but they rained down repeatedly. His shoulders grew weary, his heartbeat became raspy, and then one of them batted him away towards the median, and another one stuck onto Uncle’s face, and more kept coming, more kept swarming, and the little girl kept screaming, screaming in vain.

Then a blur at the corner of her vision, and purple light shot out. Mar was standing on top of the wagon, guns in each hand; at last, they were charged. The creatures faced her. On instinct, she cringed and faltered for a moment. Screams encircled her, and the tentacles reached down, grasping over Uncle, crawling tentatively to Par’s unconscious body, chopping each other away in their frenzy. Mar exhaled and pressed both triggers.

Violet flame belched out and clawed up the air, roasting the creatures, driving them backwards. For a moment, they bobbed together in the sky, watching as their brethren were blasted apart and reduced to falling cinders, and suddenly, in one, massive, contiguous howl, they sped away and burst themselves over the horizon, gliding downwards like shadows running against the sunset. The creatures were gone.

Evening now. Their fire had died down to wisps of smoke and dirtied rocks. The children were asleep under fur blankets, and the tents quivered in the presence of a light breeze. Uncle was standing away, looking up at a gap in the roof, small shafts of light upon his face. Crackling and shifting from behind. Par was at his side. He opened his mouth, but Uncle spoke first.

“I’m tired of this all.”

Par stayed quiet.

“I’m sorry. I can’t say anything about it.”

The same nothing.

“I wish…I wish I could believe there was more to life than walking here and back and there. Than working day after day in the dirt. I wish everything was back. I can’t deal with this all, I want the past but I’m—”

Par left his side and limped back to the camp. He ducked into one of the tents and looked at his wife. She spoke first.

“The guns are running low.”

“Mm.”

“They’re at three charges each. Five, max.”

“We’ll head to the East Quarter then. Tomorrow morning.”

Pause. She stared at him, shadows masking her face.

“I want to leave him behind.”

“We can’t do that,” said Par immediately.

“It’s the best thing to do—it’s the right thing to do. Look at yourself. If it weren’t for him, it wouldn’t—”

“Where would we go?” hissed Par.

“Back to the Missigone. Our old home. There’s still plenty of good soil over there.”

“I’m not leaving him.”

Mar sighed deeply and turned around under the covers.

“We can’t give up! We’ve been here for at least a year or something. We’ll find them—”

“We’ll find nothing.”

“You’re homesick! That’s it! I understand. It’s all fine. We can take him if we go back. We can go back to our old home.”

“Don’t be stupid. I don’t care about that house. You know what I mean.”

Par shook his head disconsolately.

“We’ve seen it before. He’s lost it. And he’s lost hope. So if we keep him around, and he keeps on doing things like this—”

“He won’t!” exclaimed Par.

“And he keeps putting our children in danger—have you thought of that? If we hadn’t gotten lucky, if they had seen the wagon—”

“That wouldn’t have happened! And we weren’t lucky. It was under control.”

Mar’s voice was rising now.

“Under control? With you barely conscious in the grass?”

“Be quiet. You’ll wake the kids up!”

She laughed, disbelievingly. Now, Par began the offensive.

“I can’t let you leave him behind, like the same thing that we did to your dad. This is my brother, I can’t—”

A sharp intake of breath.

“Don’t mention that.”

Mar’s voice was completely calm now.

“What?”

“Don’t bring him up.”

Par tried to speak, but she turned away and ignored him the rest of the night. Which may have been for the better. The medicine made him feel strange, and as the trees swayed gently and the animals cried out, he drifted between consciousness and sleep, trapped in the delirium of his own thoughts. Visions of eyes and bleeding purple, of his brother and his parents and other people long gone, drifting before him and fading out.

Eventually, the sun rose; Par got up groggily and made breakfast, thinking all the while.

And in the morning, they left.

​Kevin Xu is a graduate of Westlake High School in Ohio and is currently studying computer engineering at Case Western Reserve University; he has published two short stories before in his high school journal. Besides writing, he enjoys reading books and playing the saxophone.