James Munkers: Freak Out

By Lindsey Little

James Munkers has some explaining to do.

Like why he's wandering the apocalypse-torn world with a psychopath on a string.

Or why the dimensions are falling apart and he's doing nothing to fix them.

And he really should shed some light on who caused the apocalypse in the first place...

But he can't explain any of that, bec

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lindsey Little
• Release date: Nov 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9780648285977

Lindsey Little

Lindsey Little is an Australian author and self-publisher of fantasy adventures for young adults. She splits her time between writing books and running a ballroom dancing studio with her husband. They live in the Huon Valley in Tasmania with two Maine Coon cats with Harry Potter-inspired names.

Book preview

1. Loner

I’m cold.

I’m not saying there aren’t more pressing problems in the world today. The apocalypse, obviously. That would have to rate pretty highly. The gash in the sky has turned more than a few heads. Every physical object threatening to lose its structural integrity at any moment has been something of a to-do. I’m just saying that the chaffed nipples aren’t exactly helping.

I shrug my coat higher up my neck and keep trudging along the road.

I say my coat. Not sure whose it is, actually.

I reach the bridge that leads back into the centre of the city. Not sure which city it is. I’m not even sure what country we’re in anymore. Spain, I reckon, judging by the few signs that are still legible. We don’t tend to stay in one place for very long.

I pause before I cross the bridge, my senses heightened. There doesn’t appear to be anyone around, but I don’t dare use my powers to check. My eyes squint against the drizzle. I hold my breath and listen.

Nothing but the wind and the pattering of rain.

You’d think that’d be comforting.

I take a deep breath and head over the bridge, dodging around the rubble as I go. The wind grows stronger as I crest the bridge, and I pull the coat even tighter around me. The damned thing crosses my scrawny chest twice, and it’s still not enough. I lower my head and hurry down the other side and into the comparative shelter of the town.

There’s more rubble here, so I have to slow my pace. I scramble over collapsed walls and duck through toppled scaffolding, the poles cold and wet under my hands as I pull myself through.

Then, suddenly, something warm closes over my wrist. My heart jumps and my attention slips.

Oh no.

I scramble for purchase on my thoughts as I’m pulled out of the debris and pushed roughly against a stone wall. There’s three of them, about my age or a little older, their faces pinched, their clothes torn.

Are you allowed to be scared of youths when you’re technically a youth yourself?

‘Oh. Hi, guys,’ I mutter.

The one who has me by the collar, a girl, punches me across the jaw. It’s a good punch, connecting well. Must not be the first time she’s done it. The other two, a pair of boys, move forward and plunge their hands into my coat pockets while I recover.

I wonder, if I start up a polite conversation, whether they’ll refrain from stabbing me to death.

‘So, did you tear your jeans during the end of the world, or did you buy them like that?’

The girl hisses at me. The other two pull a can of beans and an old packet of biscuits out of my pocket, and start to move away.

‘Um. Actually, I need those,’ I say, moving towards them.

The girl shoves me back and raises her fist again.

I’m going to have to do something. I can’t risk being knocked unconscious. It could be the end for all of us.

The girl’s fist freezes in mid-air.

She yelps in surprise, looking at it in horror. The two boys are running back, calling out to her. I don’t understand what they’re saying, but they’re clearly urging her to leave me and follow them. She snaps something back, her voice sharp with fear, and tries again to move her arm. Her arm stays put.

She looks at me.

I’m sweating, despite the cold. My hands are clenched into fists, and I’m struggling to focus my eyes on anything. I must look like a deranged maniac, but it’s so important that I concentrate. I don’t want another incident like Berlin.

‘Alright, you can keep the biscuits,’ I murmur, ‘but I really am going to insist that you give the beans back.’

One of the boys leaps forwards. Before he reaches me, he’s pushed back ten yards. The other boy hollers, and lobs a brick at my face. It ricochets off course at the last second, hits the wall further down the road and crumbles into dust. Then the girl suddenly unfreezes, only to hurtle into brick-throwing guy, and they both tumble to the ground.

The three of them lose their nerve, scramble to their feet and take off down the street, leaping over everything in their path. I reach out a hand, and the can of beans elevates itself out of brick boy’s pocket as he jumps over the bonnet of a burned-out car. The can hovers in the air for a moment, then drops onto the car and rolls off onto the ground.

I stay still for a moment, assessing the situation. My mind races through the maze of streets ahead of me, to the top floor of an abandoned building on the other side of the town.

Well, almost abandoned.

My heartbeat starts to slow. We’re good.

For now, at least.

I totter forward. Leaning heavily on the car, I bend down, pick the can out of a muddy puddle and tuck it back into my coat. Then I start to wend my way home.

* * *

It’s a bit of a mess in the flat.

‘Didn’t feel like tidying up the place while I was gone, then?’ I joke. It doesn’t take long to put things to rights – the spare mattress propped back against the shattered window, the sheets of paper gathered up off the floor and placed on the shelf. Not much to be done about the scorch marks up the walls, but nothing is actually on fire, and we can call it interior decorating. The rucksack is untouched, at least.

And the thing in the corner is quiet again.

‘Sorry about before,’ I tell it, leafing through the bits of paper. ‘We had company. They took off with our biscuits, would you believe.’ I find a grubby sheet with a bad picture (mine) of a happy face on it. I walk softly up to the thing and hold the paper up against its cocoon, a midnight blue mass of energy shifting around it, seething like a pit of snakes. Little tendrils of blue sneak out of it and hold the paper in place. ‘I saved the beans, though.’

I scrunch up some old newspaper and place it and some dried twigs in our makeshift fire pit – an old wok held up with stones. We ran out of matches weeks ago, so I carefully channel some energy towards it, making sure I don’t take too much away from the cocoon. The thing doesn’t stir. The tip of the newspaper starts to smoke, and a moment later a tongue of flame flickers into being. Sitting cross-legged in front of it, I let the kindling catch, and then start feeding it some bits of broken chair.

When the heat starts to warm my outstretched hands, I dig into my coat pocket and bring out the tin of beans. ‘It’s one of those self-opening ones,’ I say cheerily, ‘so significantly less chance of me slicing my hand open.’ I empty the contents of the tin into our one precious saucepan, and hold it over the fire, holding it first with one hand, then with the other to stop either one getting burnt.

It doesn’t take long for the beans to bubble and spit. I pour half of them back into the tin, get up and take it over to the thing. I place the tin on the ground, just in front of the cocoon. Then I walk backwards until I’m at the other end of the room.

I bite my bottom lip.

Very gently, I create a hole in the cocoon. Just a small slit between the fizzing strands, like the opening in a letter box.

Nothing happens for a whole minute.

Then a hand appears. It’s thin enough to see the bones all the way through it, and the skin is scorched and cracked. Some nails are so long they’re more like talons. Others have been ripped short, rough and bloody.

The hand lowers to the ground and picks up the tin with the precision of a scientist handling a vial of acid. The hand then retracts back into the swirling mass of its prison, taking the beans with it.

Carefully, I close the hole. Then I let out a long-held breath.

‘You’re welcome,’ I murmur.

I add a few more sticks to the fire. Then I walk over to the one window that hasn’t shattered and settle myself on the ledge.

It’s quite a view. This is one of the tallest buildings in the city that hasn’t collapsed. Most of them are rubble. One looks like it melted, and the water in the river lets off small explosions of steam every now and then. The fires are a ways off, but the smell of smoke lingers in the air and pricks at my eyes.

Everything natural in the world is out of place – the weather, the seasons. Sometimes it gets so dark I wonder if the sun has disappeared or if night has come early. Then night actually comes and I know I was wrong, because it gets darker still. That’s alright, though. I peer up through the grimy glass at the crack in the sky, looming above the chaos. During the day, it looks like an open wound, inflamed and angry.

It’s only when the night comes that you can see it.

I sit and watch, and as the daylight fades away tiny strands of gold appear, dim at first but growing in strength. They stretch over the crack in the sky, pulling the torn edges closer together. I cast my eye over the destroyed city beneath me and see them there too, holding up a wall or weaving between the paving on the street. It’s everywhere, all around me. I reach out and stroke a vein of gold running up the cracked window frame in front of me.

‘Hey,’ I whisper.

Then I shake my head. It’s not Win’s turn tonight, or Snug’s. I lose track a lot, but I reckon it’s Claire again.

I turn my back on the scene of desolation out the window and sit on the floor, my back propped up against the wall.

Right. Claire.

I imagine Claire as some kind of apocalyptic bad-ass. Not quite Milla Jovovich, because I reckon it’d be weird to fantasise about your sister being Milla Jovovich, but definitely suited up and sharpening both her wits and her throwing knives. She would have acquired more martial arts and weapons training from Will by this time, specialising in the crossbow, perhaps. She’d know how to sew up a wound, and how to make a packet of lentils last a week. And she wouldn’t let anyone else slack off or become despondent. If she were here right now, she’d tell me to do fifty push-ups, then race around the district, gathering all the survivors into one place so together we could fend off the zombies.

Well, she would if there were zombies.

And if she were here.

And that’s presuming that she’s made it this far.

The feeling is on me before I can fight it off. It does that, sometimes, creeps up and attacks. It goes beyond longing. It’s more like a punch in the guts, a physical pain, a rage that I’m stuck with this monster that I’ve created. I want to run away. I want to go home. I don’t care what she does to the world, the world is screwed as it is, I just want to see Claire again, and hug my Mum, and have a cuppa with Pete. I want Will to tell me I’m an idiot, and I want Pippa to tell me I’m an idiot only in a nice way, and I desperately, desperately want someone to tell me what to do.

Because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m alone, and I’m making things up as I go, and I’m scared.

And I know I’m a teenager and prone to panicky melodrama, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think this is the end of the world, and it’s all my fault.

I don’t cry – my eyes are too dry and dusty for tears – but I fall onto my side and a strange howling escapes from my mouth. It goes on and on, fed from some hidden part of my stomach.

When it finally stops, I notice that the cocoon is twitching angrily.

‘Sorry,’ I mutter. ‘I’ll try to keep the existential dread down.’

I wake up to a sterile howling. I poke my head out of the covers and see a figure standing near the window, moonlight haloing around her head.

‘They’re coming?’

‘Yes.’

I shrug a blanket over my shoulders and go stand next to her. I can’t see much. It’s too dark. The wail of the siren continues.

‘What if they get us?’ I ask. ‘What if we’ve chosen the wrong place?’

‘Then that’s the end, I suppose.’

‘Of us?’

The rat-tat-tat of primitive machine gun fire reaches us, and little sparks appear in the sky.

‘Of everything,’ she says.

2. A Crack In The World

Something shudders through me, and I wake with a start.

I experience a sort of double whiplash when I realise that waking up means I fell asleep. My hands fly to my chest, and I half expect to feel the hilt of a dagger sticking out of my sternum. There’s nothing there and, apart from my panicked breathing, there doesn’t seem to be anything the matter with me.

I raise my head and look over to the cocoon. It’s still there, although the weave looks a bit looser than before. I can see her red eyes staring out at me.

‘I think it’s nice that we’re sharing look-out duties,’ I say.

Her eyes narrow before they disappear under a web of thicker energy.

My prisoner contained, I stand up and look around. Nothing seems out of place, so what woke me up? Was it just the sudden consciousness that I shouldn’t have been asleep at all?

No. There it is again – a shuddering, this time coming up through the soles of my shoes. And again. Either there’s a giant monster climbing the stairs of this building, or something much more dangerous is going on.

I pull the spare mattress away from the window and peer out through the shards of broken glass. It’s very early in the morning, still dark, but the street below me and the buildings opposite flicker in and out of visibility as if someone’s put a strobe light on the scene.

I look up. I take a deep breath.

The sky is at it again.

I turn to the cocoon. ‘We have to go,’ I say.

I’m still wearing my coat and shoes, so it’s just the packing that needs to be done. The papers and maps get placed in the backpack, then the spare T-shirt, the torch, the pocket knife and the rest of the food, such as it is. The saucepan gets strapped to the side. It doesn’t take long, but even in that short time, the shuddering gets worse. Dust falls from the ceiling.

I swing the backpack over my shoulders. ‘Come on,’ I say, and elevate the cocoon off the ground and float it out the door.

The stairwell is narrow and doesn’t feel any too sturdy with this earthquake going on. I walk down it sideways, my back to the wall, one eye on the next step and one on the cocoon as I guide it down behind me.

The building evidently gets tired of my slow progress and hurries me along by tipping suddenly to the side.

I lose my footing on the next step and tumble down the flight. By the time I hit the wall at the end, the wall is the floor. I grunt as the air is knocked out of my lungs and stars flash in front of my eyes. The cocoon floats above me, uncaring, as I get my breath back.

The walls creak and groan, and dust sifts down on top of me. I stay very still, my power held at the ready. If this whole place collapses, I’m going to have to blast our way out.

And then she’ll blast her way out.

Nothing happens, though. The structure is holding. Why isn’t it coming down on top of us?

I’d better get us out of here before it changes its mind.

I get shakily to my feet. Okay. So, if the wall is now the floor, that means the building has fallen sideways and I’m at the bottom of it. That means, to get out, I either have to work my way up or sideways.

Sideways sounds easier, and faster.

I scramble up the sideways flight of stairs, floating the cocoon in my wake, until I find a door. I have to push it up to open it, like a garage door. There’s broken furniture and fittings in the room beyond it, and it looks like part of the wall collapsed when the contents of the room suddenly fell on it, but I can see light ahead. Gingerly, I make my way through the splintered wood and plaster dust to the edge of the toppled building. There’s a bit of a jump from the shattered window to the ground outside, but a smidge of power sees me safely to solid earth. The egg thing floats down next to me.

I jog us across the street and turn to survey the building we just climbed out of.

Oh.

Oh.

The whole thing is covered in gleaming golden threads, like a giant magical spider web. It’s been holding the building together while we escape. As I watch, the golden lights flicker and die, and the rooms cave in on themselves, windows shatter, and a giant cloud of dust billows up into the air.

I sigh. Another home destroyed. At least it wasn’t her this time.

At least it was deserted.

The sky starts spitting fire. I shrug the hood of my coat over my head to prevent my hair from catching fire, pull a glowing blue tendril of the cocoon towards me with my mind, and start walking down the street, the cocoon dragging along in my wake.

‘What do you reckon?’ I say. ‘Something with a sea view next?’

I can’t imagine there are too many people about but, if there are any and they see me, I must look like a right lunatic, taking a massive glowing egg for a walk in the fiery rain. I giggle as I imagine myself leading it to the park and encouraging it to do number twos.

There’s a clanging sound behind me, and I realise I’ve walked the cocoon into a massive skip bin on its side.

‘Sorry, sorry.’ I steer it around the bin. ‘I am paying attention.’

I turn to face forward again, and immediately fall into a hole.

‘Ughuh!’ The lead I’ve been pulling the cocoon around with snaps tight, and I’m left hanging suspended by my arm in the giant hole. I look up. The cocoon is snagged at the top, caught in some broken pipes. The tendril I’m holding is wound painfully around my hand, and starts to crackle with my own nervous energy.

I look up at the cocoon. ‘Don’t you dare laugh,’ I tell it.

Okay. Okay. Well, I haven’t fallen to my death, so that’s a plus. I also have magical powers, diverted though they may be. I glance back up at the cocoon. Better not risk it. Let’s try the physical realm first.

I attempt climbing up the tendril, but living rough in an apocalypse has failed to turn me into a muscle-bound action hero, and I seriously lack the upper body strength to do that. I reckon I might be able to do it if I get my feet braced against the side of the hole. I stretch a foot towards the nearest bit of rock, but I can’t reach. Maybe if I swing a little