Sunday Spotlight + Giveaway: Frail by Joan Frances Turner

Being human is a disadvantage in post-apocalyptic America…

Now that the Feeding Plague has swept through human and zombie societies, it seems like everyone is an “ex” these days. Ex-human. Ex- zombie. Except for Amy, that is. She’s the only human survivor from her town-a frail. And if the feral dogs, the flesh-eating exes, and the elements don’t get her, she just may discover how this all began. Because in this America, life is what you make it…

Excerpt: 

CHAPTER ONE

     When I was fourteen there was a security breach near the intersection of Seventy-Third and Klein and my mother killed her first intruder, and her last.  She was on the six-to-three shift and I had guitar lessons a four-toll drive away in Leyton and she was supposed to pick me up straight from school, so we could hit U.S. 30 before the evening checkpoints started.  But she didn’t show, wasn’t answering her cell, so I just sat there in the cafeteria, waiting, inhaling traces of stale crinkle-fry grease and watching the sky fade from drab blue to deep gray. I was reaching for my phone again when the warning siren kicked to life.

The intercom snapped on.  “Code Orange alert,” said a woman’s voice, prerecorded, urgent but serene.  “Code Orange, located at–Klein–and–Seventy–Third–”

“Please lock all doors and windows and seek basement shelter until the all-clear sounds.  If you are outside please seek the nearest safehouse or other accessible building.  It is a federal crime to deny shelter to any person seeking refuge from an environmental disturbance.  Code Orange.  Code Orange…”

“Just what I need.  Haul it, Amy.”  Ms. Acosta swept my backpack off the table, grabbed it like it’d burden me too much to run from the crippled hordes.

“They’re halfway across town,” I said, and folded my arms.  No wonder I couldn’t reach my mom, there hadn’t been a Code Orange in years and never with her on shift.  If I could somehow get over there I could watch her toast their asses, maybe flick one with my own lighter if it tried to run away–

I got up.  Shoved my hands in my pockets, feeling with fingertips for my school ID, town ID, curfew card, access gate e-pass.  Followed her a few steps, sizing up her scuffed beige pumps with the one loose wobbly heel, my black flats.  Then I ran, sailing over the damp linoleum, Ms. Acosta stumbling and screaming “Amy, goddammit!” but I was already down the hall, out the steel double doors, the approaching sunset tinting Sycamore Street in a lurid orange wash and the sirens making the air tremble and throb.

My chest was a hot hollow husk but I was laughing as I ran, nobody can catch me, everyone else was basement-bound but I was going to see an honest-to-God living dead body get exactly what it deserved.  I’d never seen one in the flesh, not even by the roadside, and even on the news all you ever saw was “dramatic recreations” and shitty movie CGI–I was gunning for the real thing and to see my mother do the deed.  She’d get a raise, a promotion, if she faced it down.  She could do it without puking or fainting, not like so many of the men.  All their big talk.  I was proud of her, still one of the only women on the security squads, and this wasn’t just to gawk and rubberneck.  It wasn’t just for me.  After everything that happened you have to understand, I’m not lying, this wasn’t all just all about–

I’m getting ahead of myself.  Sorry.  You start to ramble, blither, when there’s nothing left to talk to but the air.  Ms. Acosta, she’d tell you all about that, if she were still alive.

I picked through backyards and easements looking for the best vantage point and completely by accident I saw her, framed perfectly by the gnarled, curving tree branches around me:  my mother, an ambulatory burnt marshmallow in thick padded charcoal-gray fatigues, coppery hair twisted up at the back of her head, waddling down Seventy-Third calm as you please as she fitted another cartridge to her flamethrower.

There it was.   All alone, standing there in front of the torn shrubbery and rusted, broken fencepoint it’d ripped down, arms dangling and limp, perfectly quiet but with its long pearl-gray teeth bared and grimacing.  A bloated, brackish, muddy mess, a first-grader’s art project shaped with careless palm-slaps into a too-angular skull, a smeared nubbin of a nose and horribly thin fingers; something about those fingers, the way each one was a perfect sticky twig of tacky clay not yet softened to full rot, made a horrible shiver rush up my back, my chest going hot and tight in disgust.

The police and firemen heaved and retched but not my mother, she didn’t even flinch, just pulled on her breath-mask and stood her ground

It made a sound, looking at my mother, and the noise it made sent a strange, prickly disquiet through me because it wasn’t like in the movies, it wasn’t the right sound.  It was a low, full moan that bore an edge of surprise, a living human’s dismay and uncertainty turned to stretched-out toffee in that undead mouth.  It kept staring at my mother, wide gaping eyes from the collapsed ruin of a face and make it stop, Mom, tell it to knock that off; it’s not hungry, I can tell it’s not.  It’s like it thinks it knows you, somehow, from somewhere.

The stench was so awful my throat closed up; I was making little huhh, huhhh heaving sounds I couldn’t stifle, warm acidy puddles pooling in my mouth.  Kill it, Mom.  Make it stop.

“You’re trespassing on human territory!” she shouted, a strange, strident agitation buoying her voice up over the squadron vans, into the trees, as she rattled off the black-book gobbledygook it couldn’t possibly understand.  “As a civic security official I am authorized to use all necessary levels of force to address Class A environmental disturbances by Indiana Code Section 17, paragraph 8(d)–”
It made another sound.  Airy, hollow whistling, trying to make sounds a rotten tongue, lips, palate wouldn’t allow anymore.  Ooooosssssss.  And it took a step forward.

My mother didn’t move.  The squadron snapped to attention; you could see it on their faces, fear, and some smirking, because they thought she’d frozen up.  It wasn’t that, I knew it wasn’t, but something was very wrong and even over the horrible stink of living death you could smell, feel, hear the wrongness all concentrated in her voice as she raised the flamethrower and screamed, “Get out!  Get out!”

It opened its mouth again, making softer, cow-lowing cries like it wanted to wheedle her into something.  Coax her.  It stumbled forward, slow as they all do, holding out its arms…

Frail by Joan Frances Turner
October 4th 2011 by Ace
Urban Fantasy
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