"Emergence Services" by Leigh Loveday

The first question everyone asked was why the horses hadn't run. The standing stones held them like a closed fist, like the folding in of a carnivorous flower. It wasn’t just that the stones had toppled; they'd constricted, exerting enough force to embed the luckless animals inches into the earth.

Martin was already on the scene when the other officers arrived. His gaze lingered now on the tapers of bone, impossibly delicate by contrast, curving up from the nearest carcass.

“There’s no blood,” noted Ware beside him, breath coming in clouds.

It was a spring dawn, stingingly cold. Ware shivered. Martin had gotten used to it.

“Better go check up at the Seven Widows, see if there’s anything similar,” he said, and Ware nodded as she broke away from the observers, cinching her jacket tighter with one hand and reaching for her radio with the other.

“I need you to get over there yourself,” he called after her.

#

Martin waited until the birds began to rise, then turned and trudged back alone over the moors. A cloying smell of sodden ash followed. The firefighters had put down the ritual fire left burning into the early hours, charring the clouds the colour of old blood and raising the alarm, but it hardly mattered now.

He made for the village. Above him, tracer lines of crows scattered in all directions. Their unease was deep and rasping.

The first tremors struck before he reached the outlying farms. He knew it’d be quick. Ware had been a good officer.

Starlings lifted from high boughs and wheeled through the sky in ugly overlapping waveforms, mistimed murmurations colliding with force, the fall of broken bodies shocking; at first just a handful but, as Martin made headway, in increasing numbers.

He looked out over surfaces becoming unreliable, fields waylaid by sinkholes like shallow inhalations. Away to his left, strips of dry stone wall began to curl like breakers down the hill, liquid and strange. From a farmyard rose yells and the skirling of dogs, and he suspected old man Cottle had reacted a little too slowly.

Martin entered the village. The leafy lanes gave cover from a gentle spring rain and a sky choked with disarray.

Smoke was billowing across graves and gardens from where the roof of the church had dropped like an inverted bear trap. People in their Sunday best hauled at arms outflung from the rubble. He looked into their eyes, saw them glassy with shock. Distant ambulances burred.

Martin smiled, and didn’t stop.

The day was just beginning.

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Leigh Loveday grew up in south Wales and now lives in the English Midlands, besieged by cats and foxes. He edits videogame blurb by day and writes fiction aggressively slowly by night, with stories last year landing in the likes of Icebreakers Lit, Trash Cat Lit and Möbius Blvd. Find him loitering online at @leighloveday.bsky.social.

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