From Fraidy Cat Quarterly: Volume 2
“You don’t want to do that.”
Force of habit. Will couldn’t stand to see his little brother walk into danger.
Luke frowned at the board, grunted.
“You’re not meant to help me.” Anger briefly flushed his cheeks, but he withdrew his queen and made a safer move.
Will pushed a pawn up the h file, ignoring the chittering beyond the boarded-up window.
“Roast chicken,” Luke sighed, chin on one hand, the other arm around his ribs. “Stuffing. Spuds with butter and gravy.”
“Don’t.”
“Chocolate ice cream. No – mint choc chip.”
“Snails with garlic. Sea cucumber.”
“Eww.”
“Boiled tripe!”
“You’re gross.”
The strips of daylight were dimming. Will went to the fire, blew on it until he felt lightheaded and added another splintered board from the pile.
“You know, we could make it last another day,” he said, but Luke shook his head.
“We’ll have even less energy tomorrow. It’s got to be tonight.”
Will had done the last three scavenging runs, venturing further each time. Today Luke, who had barely stepped outside in the past month, had demanded a turn. “I’m not a kid any more,” he’d yelled, stamping his foot, then muttered, “I can’t be.” When Will insisted and tried to make a joke about caring for his baby brother, Luke lashed out in frustration. Shoves turned into punches, their first fist fight in months. But the blows lacked sting and they didn’t keep it up for long.
So Will had proposed they play for it.
“Loser does the run?”
“No, Will, winner does the run. Or you’ll lose on purpose. Like Dad.”
Their father had taught them. He would read chess books after dinner and study classic games, and he liked to quote the Soviet grandmaster Mikhail Tal: “You must take your opponent into a deep, dark forest where 2 + 2 = 5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.”
Luke had learned effortlessly, carelessly, as he did most things; Will was the one who’d joined the chess club in primary school and studied the game. Luke had flashes of brilliance and originality but was impatient; Will was better at plotting several moves ahead. He’d been a solid player, but had never won a tournament. To make things worse, Luke was sporty – one of the school’s best at cricket and athletics – and therefore popular, and his friends thought chess was for nerds.
But since the Advent, they had played hundreds of games. Since they had sealed themselves in the house, leaving only to raid abandoned homes and shops, they’d had very little else to do. Since they had been alone – their father and then their mother having failed to return from raiding – nothing else was distracting enough. Reading felt pointless and sad. Chess was pointless, but interactive, and required focus.
According to the tally kept in black pen on the wall, Will had won 221 games to Luke’s 185 – some of which Luke swore Will had lost on purpose -with 42 draws.
The boys exchanged knights.
Will picked up a torch from the floor and flicked it on, off.
“How are we for batteries?”
They had to do the runs after dark, when the Extras slept or at least were less active. Even that wasn’t safe, since they liked roosting on rooftops with a good view of the streets; he had seen three together climbing the walls of a corner shop on many-jointed legs, chittering softly.
“Two little packs of AAs left.”
They would drop suddenly from above to shred and dislocate, to torment with catlike playfulness, before eating the organs and discarding the rest. Will had found one of his teachers like that, and now avoided looking at faces.
The end of their world had happened fast. There had been no diplomacy, no doubt about the invaders’ aims; the path out was only wide enough for one.
Will watched his little brother fidget, eyebrows steepled, eyes darting around the board. Knobs of shoulder poked up through the grubby fabric of his hoodie; his skin was oily and moustache fluff cast a shadow on his upper lip. I’ll have to teach him to shave, Will thought, rubbing his own itchy scraps of beard. He wondered if there were any disposable razors in the bathroom, forgotten at the back of a drawer. Their father had used an electric shaver.
Firelight shone on the little round heads of his g and h pawns, one a rank ahead of the other. Small, overlooked, surviving at the edges, for now. Like them. But for them there was no promotion to look forward to. Just another week’s survival in a weakening body, in the ashes of a society so fragile it had collapsed in a week, its every joy and comfort now extinguished, on a planet whose marvellous array of lifeforms were now one biomass of prey.
Food. When he scratched at the unhealed wound on his flank, Will’s ribs felt like corrugated iron. They were down to one small meal a day (plain pasta; the last tin was a week ago – thank god for the rainwater tank) and Luke was right, the raid couldn’t be put off. But they and other survivors, scattered and unseen, were living on nourishment provided by the past, and it was running out. Somewhere, perhaps, someone was growing food, insisting on a future. But not them: even if it were safe to be outside, two teenage boys with academic parents, a tiny urban backyard and a lifelong reliance on others to feed them were in no position to start farming. The preppers must be feeling smug, hooting with vindication in their bunkers; but eventually their tins would run out too. The Extras seemed patient. Will wondered if they played anything like chess.
They traded down till there were only kings, a knight, a rook and four pawns left. Will’s pawns and king closed in on Luke’s back rank, trapping his king in the corner.
“Pizza,” Luke said. “With everything. Not anchovies.”
Will indulged the food fantasy for a moment, but even the thought of warm dough and melted cheese couldn’t distract him from the fact that one of them was going out tonight, further than … than last time. He swallowed, sweat prickled under his arms. He had tried to forget, but images, sounds and smells kept intruding on his thoughts uninvited, unannounced, any time he managed to find calm. Gutted buildings, emptied shops, rats and flies gorging on fresh viscera, the reek of older remains, and the sounds of – the sounds.
Then the pursuit. The soft thud and click of joints on the pavement behind him, the near-silent chase in the dark through a suburban obstacle course of bodies and detritus, a full rucksack bouncing on his back, burning lungs, rubbery legs. At the corner of his street it had nearly caught up, swiped a serrated claw at Will’s ribs, breathed hot on his neck. Will grabbed a broken shopping trolley and swung it round, knocking the thing sideways, giving himself just enough time to make it down the street, to Luke ready at the door.
Breathe. Focus. He stared at the board. He’d seen this before in some old game, and in his mind the path to a win slowly revealed itself. Luke’s king was holed up on h8 with knight and f pawn as protection. Will could bring his king to f6 to protect his rook while he took the pawn on g7, Luke would have to move his knight. Will would move his rook out on 7 and next move would be back-rank mate or, if Luke brought his knight back home, mate on h7.
First, get his rook out of danger. He reached towards it and watched as his hand disappeared into the Extra’s mouth, felt the wet heat of it and recoiled with a gasp.
Luke looked up, startled.
Will was hot and sweating now, his heart pounding, turning on his heels, rucksack flying around, only this time he was too slow. Jaws closed around his neck.
Clenching his fists under the table, chewing the insides of his cheeks, he strangled the fictitious memory.
“You OK, Will? You look funny.”
“I’m fine.”
Will swallowed.
A path out for one.
Hand balled to hide the shakes, he moved his g pawn forward in a doomed attack on Luke’s h pawn, pretending to miss the threat.
Luke’s eyes lit up, spying victory.
“Ohh, yeah!” he cried, sweeping up Will’s rook with his knight – then stopped and sagged. “No. Take it back. You gave me one before.”
“No, no …”
“Go on, dickhead.”
“NO!“
Luke stared. Will forced a laugh. “I mean, no, that was just fucken stupid of me – you distracted me with pizza, you little prick. You’ve got me now, easy.”
He tipped his king over.
“Yes!” Luke balled his fist and tugged the air.
He runs faster than me anyway, Will told himself later, hanging the rucksack on his little brother’s shoulders.
©️Penny Durham
Penny Durham is a journalist living in Sydney, Australia, with a tall man and a round cat. She is a writer and editor at doctor magazine The Medical Republic and began writing horror fiction in 2022. Her short stories have appeared in two anthologies, Midnight Echo, Nightmare Fuel, Stygian Lepus and the Tiny Terrors podcast.