WRITER OF FANTASY,
SCI-FI AND HORROR

The man folded in the bathtub is still alive when I discover him. He’s a lucky find; we have eaten through most of the living. Some of the ones we don’t finish turn to increase our numbers, and some of them are simply too torn-up to revive. This man breathes in shallow little bursts. I must eat, but when I lean towards him his hands shoot up and grip my shoulder. The suddenness of it knocks me off balance; this man has more strength than he should have. As he grapples with me, half climbing out of the tub, I try to push him back down, try to pin him. A couple of my fingers snap. I feel nothing, nothing but terror as I watch my chance at memories struggle out of my grasp.

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"Sum, do you know where we are?" Cailan knelt and checked his brother's temperature. Rising again; he settled a soggy ice-pack against Sum's cheek. "You tracked us in your book, right?" Sum cherished his star compendium Uncle Alun gave him on his eighth birthday. Every trip he mapped their progress, able to reel off not only the passing stars and minor planets, but also most of the decommissioned warships and abandoned stations.

"Kethell 73, I think. No human life." Sum withdrew his arm and winced. Cailan only had two days' worth of painkillers left; they couldn't stick around any longer than that. "What are we going to do, Cai?"

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The garden bloated with something like life, though it wasn’t the life she remembered Simon cultivating. Fly orchids spiralled up in strange helixes, different from the photos Simon had shown her the day they originally planted them. The delicate dancing girls she had planted with their soft petal arms were pushed down, pinned under the violent arch of sharp red leaves. The parasitic underground hydnora africana gave off a familiar, sickly-sweet and cloying scent, its red flowers worming up through the soil with their hungry mouths gaping open. Fat, moist-looking vines netted the ground, spewing out hundreds of those little yellow buds that seemed to scuttle like insects. Colours oozed together into uncanny spectrums that Gabrielle couldn’t quite wrap her head around.