The Saviours - By Phillip Carter
An excerpt of story 4 of 5 in Macabre Multiverse
I know Phillip quite well. When Stephanie isn’t taking over as the voice in my head, I can sometimes hear myself calling out with new ideas for stories.
“What if mushrooms could get drunk on human blood?”
“What if time was a three-dimensional crystal?”
“What if a crab started a new religion about simulation theory.”
I’ve written all these stories before, and I am continuing to add to their ever-expanding lore with this story.
Because it’s not just a standalone developed specifically for the MM anthology, it is a story which slots neatly into an expanded multiverse of possibilities. The aliens here - Saviours, might show up again.
The Saviours
Phillip Carter
Susie played out in the water, watching another family in the distance. Andy stacked a second sandcastle atop the first, patting down the edges where he got the alignment wrong. He poked some windows into the thing, then turned his attention to gathering more wet sand. Mum and Dad took turns with their children, following Susie and supervising Andy. Susie almost waded too far out, and Dad brought her back, explained how big the waves could get. Someone else’s dog zoomed between the family, running in a loop back to its owner. Andy struggled to place the third castle perfectly on the tower, and Mum helped him keep it straight. Still, it fell down.
“The more complicated you make it, the more things can go wrong,” Mum said.
Andy didn’t understand, not yet, but he nodded anyway. Mum was always right. He resolved to find a compromise between two castles and three, found Susie’s seashell-shaped sand mould and filled that instead. It was not much bigger than his hand, and its weight didn’t put too much pressure on the existing structure. The rest of the tower was patched up by real seashells, which Andy showed to Dad and Susie, who had triumphantly returned to land. A flag was improvised from a drink straw, and the children worked together on the final touches of the sandcastle. Mum and Dad were distracted for a moment, both pointing to dark shapes in the sky.
By the time the family had reconvened at their towels and bags a few steps away, the clouds had developed a sickening physicality, had become like tendrils of iron in the sky.
“What’s that?” Mum asked.
“A storm.”
“Looks like a tornado.”
“Can’t be, not here. Waterspout?”
“Those are just wet tornadoes, honey.”
“Yeah but, Wales of all places?”
“We’ve had bad storms before. It’ll be all right.”
Ahead and above, the sky grew rageful and twisted. Tendrils of dark iron lumbered ghostlike on some invisible frame, fraying into multiple faint streams that streaked like veins under the skin of the sky. The clouds writhed and churned, spinning and collapsing, a thousand storms at once erupting on the horizon. Now, one by one, the dark things clawed at the ocean.
“It’s tornadoes, isn’t it? Tornadoes? Here?”
Further along the beach, another family had noticed that the low tide had lasted longer than usual, and the clouds on the horizon had crushed together into something unsettlingly solid.
“It’s like an island… in the sky,” one holidaymaker said.
“That ship, look!” a tall woman cried, pointing at a cruise ship that was struggling against a sudden swell of water.
“It’s a tsunami!” someone else yelled.
The holidaymakers turned and ran from the beach, but some stayed, hypnotised by the churning ocean. The water swell was not coming closer to land, but rising in an egg shape towards the sky, taking the cruise ship with it. A dark and smoky tendril had congealed in the sky and had plucked the cruise ship from the ocean. Above the sky, a strange shape lingered, a writhing thing made vague by distance and atmosphere, but made visible in the increasing lightning strikes that preceded its arrival. It was a mess of craters, mouths, dishes, and ports, a gargantuan rocky thing pockmarked with countless destructive tools, each as large as a city. It had congealed between the Earth and the Moon, drifting in on cosmic winds, and it was here to eat.
End (of excerpt)
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