stacked together, some pieces of clothing are visible and 
appear to contain both military garb and every day 
clothing. No facial features are discernible on any of the 
bodies due to the way they are stacked. Atop the bodies 
an infected sits, appearing to have its lower parts fused 
to the pile and with its upper half in a wild state of flailing 
and seizure. Approximately every ten seconds a burst of 
spores flies out the top of this infected which linger in the 
air. Herbie is directed to leave the building. 


After leaving this building Herbie passes by the village 
well, surrounding which are a series of immobile infected 
all facing the well. The arms of each of these infected 
persons are stretched out, one in contact with the next, 
forming a perfect chain, save for one whose arms are 
down at its sides. Herbie passes by this last infected to 
approach what appears to have been a town hall or 
mayor's building when the infected becomes mobile and 
snatches the rover up. 


Video feed from Herbie focuses on the face of the 
infected which is strangely in perfect shape given the 
condition of the rest of its body which is horribly bloated. 
This infected was once a young girl from appearance, 
age estimated ten to twelve. Herbie is rolled side to side 
in its grip as its face stares motionless at the rover. The 
infected's face suddenly balloons in size and explodes 
outward into a series of fleshy flaps that grip Herbie and 
draw it inside. Herbie's video feed terminates here. 


Herbie was considered lost at this point. However, no one at control 
remembered to turn off the video feed, assuming it cut. Five hours 
later Herbie's video feed resumed, stationary and at a raised level 
pointing at the upper rim of the village well. The video feed contains 
some blur due to what appears to be a slimy film which often oozes 
across the lens but when not obscured provides perfect quality 
recording. Herbie does not respond to any remote commands, but 
its video jerks back and forth from target to target, zooming in and 
out of its own accord. Video feed is cut manually and all connections 
to Herbie's unit are ordered erased. 


It never blinked. Ever, that I'm aware of. It just stared, slowly moving 
its gaze from side to side like some strange ritual, never seeming to 
so much look at anything as to scan it. Then, it opened its mouth, 
wide, wider than I've ever seen any animal's mouth open, and sat 
there in silence. After a few moments, a sound came, rising from 
nowhere in particular, a harsh shrieking beep like a microphone 
slowly moving closer to a speaker. Feedback, tinged with silence. 
Then its mouth slid closed again, and it wandered out. Dinner 
resumed. 


No one mentioned the cat that night. 


The next morning, when we had all risen and dressed and fought 
over bathrooms and generally lost ourselves in tumultuous 
preparation for our various drives home, | sat in the kitchen with a 
plate of stolen leftovers and asked my grandmother about the cat. 
She told me that it had just shown up one morning, waking her up 
with its strange harsh feedback not-meow. She'd taken it outside, 
and her husband searched the whole house for holes and cracks 
and gaps it could have come in through, but found nothing. Every 
morning, the same routine. Eventually they'd even resorted to 
replacing the grates on the ventilation shafts in a fruitless attempt to 
keep it out. It always reappeared, stalking into rooms and scanning 
them with its weird red gaze, then beeping like a broken amplifier 
and stalking out to vanish again. 


They never fed it, and as far as | know it never ate. But for those 
times it swished into rooms to look around and split the air with its 
noise, it was nowhere to be found at all. 


My grandmother moved. The entire family was angry about it, and 
still is. She and her husband just packed up and left that house and 
all its memories behind for a small bungalow in a less classy 
neighborhood. They refused to say why. 


This story is too long, and I'm sorry. | know | should cut it short, but 
I've been wanting to write this down for a long time, and | want to be 
sure not to leave anything out. To make a long story short, the cat 
appeared in their new house as well, repeating the same bizarre 
behaviors as it had before, but this time its sound took on a harsher, 
buzzing quality, with the single tone beep slightly fainter among the 


static-like hiss. They put up with it long enough to complete building 
a new house, then they left it behind. So far, it hasn't been back. 


Recently, in a phone call with my girlfriend, | brought up the subject 
of the cat, and how strange it had been, and realized something that 
worries me. She asked me to describe it. 


| can remember the pure white of its... fur?, and the deep angry red 
of its eyes, but beyond that... 


| don't think it had a tail at all. And the strange wide mouth | 
remember was like nothing I've ever seen on a cat before. In my 
mental images, there's no teeth. Just a gaping pink maw. And that 
strange, stalking walk... Cat's knees don't do that. Really, they don't. 


In fact, the only thing remotely cat-like about it is the fact ingrained 
into my consciousness, that every time | or anyone else looked at it 
the hair on the backs of our necks rose and our minds said loudly, 
"CAT". 


There's a theory that nothing we see is real, and that the entirety of 
our consciousness exists solely as a way of protecting ourselves 
from the realization of what's really there. 

Anyway, | just needed to get that out. 


~yoric 


"It Might Have Been". 


[Trigger warning - non-explicit description of rape.] 


“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might 
have been.” 


~ John Greenleaf Whittier 
It was overcast, that day. 


For many people, the middling grey British sky would be heralding 
something to be wary of — at the least, rain to dampen spirits and 
ruin picnics of those optimistic enough to believe Summer meant 
sun. For others, it would be integrally connected to their mental 
health; a heavy sky pregnant with an equally heavy burden, making 
promises of something awful and unpredictable. 


For Laurel, it was a blessing in disguise. 


She tugged her pajamas off and stood in the dim sunlight that came 
through her bedroom window, arms wrapped around herself in 
protection and in defense against the chill that was definitely not 
born of Summer. Eyes narrowed, she took in the outside world with 
a sense of defiance. 


No shadows. The grey smothered the sun and left people to walk 
alone. Laurel thought of Peter Pan, thought of shadows sewn to 
soles of the feet, wondered where the shadows went when the sun 
hid, or slept. 


As she tugged on a t-shirt that didn't smell so godawful that it should 
have been quarantined, and a pair of jeans that only had suspect 
stains near her ankles, Laurel tried not to second guess her urge to 
go out. Her fingers twitched anxiously and she reached for the 
lighter in her back pocket. Right. Fuck it, she could do this. It, the 


thing, it didn't own her, goddammit! 


She slipped on a pair of trainers, grabbed her keys and a handful of 
suitable money from the change dish near her front door, and left 
the flat. A sign near the letterbox proclaimed in understated, but red, 
text - 


‘Night worker sleeping. Please do not knock! 


Blinking at the slight light the daytime provided, Laurel hesitated in 
the doorway to the outside world. Her mind registered that the 
cloudy day was rather depressing, but it was better than the sun. 


Taking a deep breath, Laurel began her walk to the local off license. 
It would take five minutes, tops. Walk, walk, walk don't look down, 
pause at the road, watch for the cars, walk, walk, walk fuck, is it 
getting sunnier?, pause again, cross again you used to do this every 
day, don't worry, walk, walk, walk, hit the shop like a nosebleed. 


The owner of the shop peered at her licence like he always did and 
she again contemplated getting her date of birth tattooed on her 
arm. This was taking time. Time was something she didn't have. 
Windows were something the shop didn't have. It was all making her 
incredibly anxious, her mouth dry when she finally asked for her 
cigarettes, her hand shaking as she snatched back her ID. 


The transaction felt like it took forever, but she was soon back 
outside and flipping her lighter open. She absently wondered when it 
became automatic to leave her phone at home; when it became 
automatic that she didn't want to check messages and phone calls 
from friends. Her back pocket felt strangely empty without the 
cumbersome object, but she increasingly found that a social life was 
too dangerous, these days. Too troublesome, when... 


She absently shook her head as she also shook her lighter and 
flipped the lid down on it. Fuck it, forget it. She slipped a hand into 
her pocket, her other hand smoking the cigarette with slow purpose. 
She wanted to smoke until her throat was sore, as if curing a 
problem. She bowed her head and absently pulled her hood up over 
her dirty hair, suddenly self-conscious now the desperate drive to 
get fags had left her. 


This self-consciousness is why she was staring at the pavement 
when the sun suddenly decided to reappear. 


It happened instantly. One moment, darkness on the pavement, the 
threat of rain; the next moment, the shadow appeared next to her, 
as it had done half a dozen times in the last few months. Laurel's 
breath caught, but she couldn't bear to lift her head and look away 
from the figure. 


It was simple enough to tell what the shadow was. What it had been. 
What it might have been. A head that came up to Laurel's hip, a 
head with hair in pigtails on each side of the head, and a motion that 
indicated skipping — two skips to Laurel's one step, keeping pace 
with her. Laurel swallowed dryly, shook her head. 


‘It isn't there,'she told herself, firmly. 'You're going mad. You are 
mad. It's the night shifts, it's the isolation, this is nothing, no-one.' As 
she threw affirming, if degrading, thoughts at herself regarding her 
own mental health, a voice from nowhere piped up. A voice she 
didn't know, but it was definitely female and definitely young. And... 
pink? 


‘Was | an accident?’ 


It may have been the tenth or so time she had seen this shadow, but 
Laurel had never had the figure talk to her — if, indeed, that was 
what was happening. She didn't feel confident she wasn't only 
providing her own narrative. Her chest hurt, and she looked around 
to ensure she was alone, so it didn't feel so weird when she said out 
loud - 


"No. You were very much wanted. | just... lost you." 


‘Well, I'm not lost right now!’ The voice was quick to reply, cheerful, 
definitely pink. "You found me!' 


Laurel felt like her own grey-speckled thoughts were disturbed, 
thrown about, struggling to find a foothold in her own brain, 
struggling to make sense of what was going on. It was this unnerved 
disruption that allowed her to speak freely. 


"...L. guess | did." 


It hurt her chest more to try and ignore the shadow than to actually 
give it attention. She couldn't pinpoint why, and she could hear her 
own breathing, heavy, as she tried to stumble for some moment of 
reality. She tapped the ash off her cigarette — it had consumed so 
much of itself that over half of it blossomed and blew away in the 
wind. Shit. 


She kept trying to ignore the shadow. The doorway wasn't that far 
away. 


‘Who was my daddy?’ 


The voice was sweet. Almost lyrical, humming to a tune forgotten in 
childhood, going up and down in all innocence. The simpleness of 
the question was another heart-stopping moment. 


"Your daddy...uh, his name was David. He was a lawyer." 


The child shadow nodded, still skipping, keeping up with Laurel, on 
an even plane. 


"It was probably him. But it may have been a man...whose name | 
didn't know." 


Dark shadows - why always shadows, a cold punishment - an alley 
by aclub. Drinking, after the end of a relationship. Drinking way too 
much, get pushed out of the bar for being an obvious drunk. "No 
more for you." Some guy comes up. Handsome enough, looked 
sober, tall and muscular — an overwhelming strength she was 
oblivious to, at the start. He offers to help. Blinded by drink and 
tripping over her feet, she takes it. Next thing she knows, her back is 
scraping brick under her shirt and he is inside her, and she tries to 
scream but can only whimper. She hates her body in the darkness, 
she hates it in the shower later, and she hates it when she pees on 
a stick and it tells her she's pregnant. But she never hated the... 
thing, growing within her. 


"Who your daddy was...or wasn't, doesn't matter. | wanted you." 


The reply was instant, and cheerful as ever, waking Laurel from the 


dark memory of that night where everything changed. 
‘|want you too, mummy. Always.’ 


The shadow, which until now, had been like any other shadow, 
produced a hand that twisted awkwardly but stayed flat as it was 
lifted from the ground. It shakily turned the palm towards Laurel's 
empty hand, the hand without the cigarette. 


Laurel paused, then took the hand. It felt like holding nothing, but 
when the shadow squeezed her hand, she could feel it, and her 
fingers tingled. It was like when her insides had tingled before the 
blood started trickling between her legs, before she lost the baby 
from the cozy nest it had made itself in her womb. She never even 
got to hold her, but now... 


"This is as close to you as I've ever been." Laurel muttered, mainly 
talking to herself. She could see her front door now. The sky above 
was changing its mind on this moment of freedom for the shadow- 
child, and the sun was threatening to go in once more. Laurel 
swallowed anxiously, squeezed the alien hand that somehow 
gripped back, despite its consistency and the impossible nature of 
the situation. All that didn't matter right now. Only one thing 
mattered. 


"You know you'll...go away, once | get inside." 


She waited with bated breath. She wasn't sure what for. A denial? A 
tantrum? A sudden revelation that the shadow could do more than 
hold hands, that it could come to life and be the child lost so many 
years ago? 


All she got was childish innocence in response. 


‘| know.’ The child answered. 'But | won't be lost, and you'll find me 
again. 


Find her again. That meant going outside in the sun. That meant 
confronting this. That meant being seen as potentially insane as she 
spoke to shadows she was pretty sure no-one else could see. But... 
she had lost her child, once. Did she really want to lose her again? 


Hand in hand, both continued walking towards the building. With a 
heavy heart, Laurel knew that her child would disappear the second 
they reached the threshold. The child kept skipping, seemed happy, 
held her hand, and continued towards their destiny, for now, 
motivating Laurel to keep moving too. She suddenly felt all too 
aware of where shadows go when the sun goes in, and she 
suddenly felt all too aware of the people she met in her life who 
hated going out in the sun, and she suddenly thought that maybe 
she wasn't so alone after all. 


Linked hand in hand, mother and child both knew as soon as they 
hit the threshold, Katie would disappear. She would be gone until 

Laurel could face seeing her unborn child once more, on a sunny 

day, filled with a desperate need. 


Leviathan