Matters of Time

By Sara C. Walker, Altaire Gural, Sharon Overend and Lori Rowsell

Mermaids, zombies, dark magic, mad women, youth protected by magic cows and miraculous paintings … these are some of the wild, fantastical tales brought to you by a group of unique writers.

 

Maybe you remember where you were when the clocks stopped and the nightmare began.

 

With stories by:

Altaire Gural

Sharon Overend

Lori Jean Rowsell

Sara C. Walker

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sara C. Walker
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201985813

Book preview

MATTERS OF TIME

MATTERS OF TIME

an Outliers anthology

Altaire Gural Sharon Overend Lori Jean Rowsell Sara C. Walker

Copyright belongs to the authors © 2021

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either product of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

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Cover art and design by Sherwin Tjia

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Time's Up Asshole - originally published in Dream Catcher, issue 42

Tiny Pieces - originally published in Spirit of Northumberland II

both reprinted with permission of author

Contents

Clocks are Meaningless Here

Altaire Gural

The Contract

Altaire Gural

Time's Up, Asshole

Sharon Overend

Tiny Pieces

Sharon Overend

The Devil's in the Detail

Sharon Overend

Bad Luck Leaper

Sharon Overend

The Calm of the Herd

Lori Jean Rowsell

The Guardian

Lori Jean Rowsell

The Final Shift

Lori Jean Rowsell

Adeline de Grimstead

Sara C. Walker

The Bluebird Code

Sara C. Walker

Time to have a chat with Granny

Sara C. Walker

Yellow for the Groom

Sara C. Walker

What Is An Outliers Anthology?

Clocks are Meaningless Here

Altaire Gural

Maybe you remember where you were when the clocks stopped and the nightmare began. Maybe you blocked it out if you were lucky. Though really, it started slow, sneaking up on us so that we didn’t recognize what the hell was going on. The first thing people did notice was the memory loss. More than, like, dementia, or anything along those lines. But we didn’t know exactly how bad it all was till much later. It was just little things that snuck in at first.

Mom, where’d you put the remote?

The what?

The remote?

... what?

 You know, the thing that switches shows?

Blank look.

Stuff like that.  Then it got more serious. Like, mom didn’t know who I was anymore. That was … hard. But not as hard as when she tried to bite my arm. That broke my heart, and my heart’s been in tiny little pieces ever since. 

Don’t put it back together. It’s safer that way.

I’ve been up in this tree for hours, and my fucking back is aching. It’s damp out, and I’m having a freakin’ time stopping my teeth from chattering. I saw a deer go by underneath about an hour ago, and that pissed me off. I need to eat. But I also need to breathe, and staying quiet up in the tree right now is the priority, really.  I’d got caught crossing a stream a half mile south of this spot, and as luck would have it there was a herd behind the tree line. I don’t mean a herd of deer. 

Oh god, I have to pee something awful. At least it’s not that time of the month. That’s stuff we never learned about in any Romero movie.  They can smell us when we’re bleeding. They come from miles around, like sharks. The human race is going to die out because there are so few of us, cause when we bleed every month we’re like a neon sign flashing Chez Panisse or some such shit. We’re dinner. We’re the Catch Of The Day.

There’s actually so many things that you’d never have thought about in this situation. This situation. Jesus. Let’s just call it what it is. It’s The End with a lot of running around before the credits.  No one’s trying to save the human race. No one is stupid enough to try and procreate. Having babies? Babies? They cry. You know what happens when there’s noise? The herd.

Noise is verboten in this new world.

That includes guns. Geniuses thought on their feet when everything went dark. They raided every gear shop and adventure outfitters, every ammo place that’d been boarded up. Guns. They all went after the guns.  Gotta get those guns! But the noise always brings the herd, and you can’t outshoot the herd. I learned quickly that it was things like swords, axes, bows, crossbows, homemade spears, rakes even: things that were quiet. That’s how you survived, and kept surviving. Noise was the fastest population decimator.

And bands of people? No. Freaking. Way. You can’t protect groups, it hasn’t worked yet. Groups are giant targets. No kumbaya. No hunter/gatherer bullshit. No agrarian bullshit.  On your own. Quiet. No light either. That also means no hot food.  Didn’t I say? It’s all just running around before the end credits.  Who wants to propagate in this shit?  The weird thing is, I remember watching zombie movies like crazy before the Turn, and there’s always similar ideas threading through each storyline: survive. Overcome the odds, and start civilization again.  

That’s not happening.

 Except for the very beginning, when everyone kind of did a free-for-all at chucking societal values? People don’t sleep together (we’re all disgusting and we stink), and we are not raising kids.  The kids mostly died early on anyway, they were way too vulnerable. Babies were all gone (like I said, crying). People who menstruated went fast too, until we all figured out what the fuck that was and tried to find ways to hide really well during our cycles.  

Let’s just say there are a lot less of us now. And we’re not winning this war.  I used to think that I’d shoot myself if an apocalypse happened.  I mean, who wouldn’t in a motherfreaking dystopia? But the thing is, when it comes down to it, we just kind of … keep going.  Very few people actually off themselves, which is weird. You can always tell, by the way the bodies are splayed, if they did it to themselves. I’ve seen maybe five or six suicides. The rest were food till they weren’t.

I had that dream again last night. It was like I was indoors, maybe in a giant stadium or something. Mostly it was all dark, but I was curled up in a ball, right there in the middle.  There was the sound of bombs, or thunder? I don’t know, but it was loud. It was cracking, and reverberating, and lightning was flashing all over with weird colours, like purples and blues and greens, merging with the dark.

Even in the dream, everything felt wrong. It felt bad.

And I was scared.

Something was trying to talk to me. Or … this might be a better explanation … it was talking at me. Like, the message was for me, but it was also for everybody. There was a giant face in the flashing lightning. Huge. Grotesque. I was so scared I shut my eyes and curled tighter into myself.  I couldn’t look, and I sure as hell didn’t want to hear whatever this thing was saying. I mean, I don’t remember, but I know it wasn’t anything I wanted to hear.

And I could smell it, all around. The air smelled like garbage.

The smashing thunder got louder and louder 

And then I woke up.

It was only a dream, and I was still in my bed, safe. Safe at the end of the world. Go me.

When the Turn happened, the FULL Turn, and for several weeks after all the crazy, I witnessed what people could do to each other when they were genuinely scared, and a lot of it was ugly. I decided I needed a base camp that was far from everyone else.  I didn’t want to team up with anyone, even though bands were forming for safety.  I didn’t want to owe anyone anything. People can be creepy too.

So I went travelling, mostly at dusk as I could still see (ambushes suck, from breathers and Them) , but I could also blend into the shadows when I needed to. I’d followed the river west, miles outside of town. I walked along the bank for hours, thinking that at least I’d have the water to jump into in case one of Them came at me from the shore.  This was when I discovered They don’t care about water. It’s no kind of barrier at all. They could walk in and keep going and going cause they don’t need to breathe.

So that plan sucked.

I learned to really watch the tree lines with new eyes, but it slowed my progress by a lot. I was twenty times more cautious, and believe me, I’d already been cautious. Eventually I came to these giant warehouses, the kind where all the windows are up high, lining the tops of walls under the roof supports.  The buildings were massive, and so were their bay doors. The bay doors were also impenetrable if you locked them down from the inside, which I did.  It was like a huge concrete fortress. It had been empty (I guess it was off hours when the big Turn happened), so it was now mine. I could even have a small fire in the middle of the warehouse, and the smoke would disperse before it got anywhere to cause me trouble, but I learned never to cook unless it was daytime (the windows didn’t hide the glow of the fire, so night time fires were dumb.) Being able to have hot water felt like I’d re-invented the internet. It was a game changer in every way. I think I cried the first time I made myself instant coffee. Best of all, I found an interior office in my building which I was able to deadbolt. Now I was doubly protected, and I finally slept like a baby. 

Except … sometimes you can hear one of Them howl (oh yes, they do that.) It sounds like a wild animal, and I’m pretty sure they’re calling to each other, or something. Makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.  

You know what else makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up? They have reflective eyes. It’s the freakiest thing you’ve ever seen, especially at night. More mirror than milky. Stops your blood cold when you see it. They also occasionally twitch, like they have epilepsy, or tourettes. They’ll be walking along, and then just have these … spasms, is the best way I can describe it. 

I’m also starting to think they have something like intuition. I’ve been noticing them noticing things.

Wanna try something?  Stand behind a curtain, or something like a wooden fence with a tiny hole in it, somewhere you can watch them pass by.  Don’t move, don’t breathe, just watch. I swear to you, they’ll be going along and then one of them will just … slowly turn and stare in your direction for a while before they shuffle on. Sure, at first I thought it was just smell tipping them off, but I’ve tried several different experiments (bathing being the least extreme). It’s not smell. It’s intuition. I’m telling you. Creepy as hell.

I didn’t sleep a rat’s freaking wink.

The rolling dark storm clouds in my dreams were back, and the giant face was there, angry and malevolent. It looked like Them, but It was also something far more terrifying. From  thundering clouds it looked down on all of us, everyone that was left, every breathing thing, and glared with eyes so black you could almost see stars beyond them. 

And then it opened its mouth. Its giant gaping mouth, threatening to devour the whole world, the entire planet. All of us. Wider and wider it stretched its jaws, and I could see its rotting black tongue as it roared something into my consciousness. A word that I’d never heard before, but that shook me with its staggering power.

Ma’as

Wtf is Ma’as?

After a while, and don’t ask me how long because I gave up keeping track, the fear from the new scenario subsided. Or I just adapted. At first I felt lonely, but I was too scared to do anything about it. Then I just got bored. Eventually, the boredom makes you brave. At least it did for me. I started heading back into town once in a blue moon to go get things that would keep me occupied. Books and puzzles and paints n’shit. Not like I was ever a painter. But now I had no one to judge my crap, so I