Erdogan: Wow are you hot!
Hot possessed woman #15: You’re fat and I was given specific instructions to shun you... but I’ll ignore them because I’m lonely.
Erdogan: Please spend around 1600 words explaining any piece of backstory that strikes your fancy.
Hot possessed woman #15: Well, what you may not realize is that a few weeks ago, Hot possessed woman #4 and Hot possessed woman #6 discovered that you could break Law of the Universe #100 with Apocalyptic Consequences #9, #12, and #17....
Erdogan: Wow, that explains a lot.
Repeat, varying numbers until word count is achieved.
The girl in front of me had changed. The skin in her eyes had drooped, her hair had become dry, gray, and frizzy. She was old. She squinted at me and hissed. The cross around her throat hung over creased skin and I staggered away. In the waiting area, everyone was old, and a lot of the old bodies were lying on the ground, not moving. There was groaning and loud, desperate babbling. No one was standing up. Most of them seemed to be in shock.
I pushed out into the street. Everyone in the streets was old and moving slowly. The cat and I walked quickly away from everyone and sat on a park bench. Gradually the streets began to clear... everyone doddering home where they felt safe.
I wandered the streets for hours, me and my cat. There were corpses on the ground, and I had to kick the cat away from them from time to time when it looked like he might try to take a bite, but there was no one alive besides us. I glanced in the windows of a few houses. I saw lamps knocked over, empty rooms, corpses, and a few old, hunched women in chairs, crying.
This was awful. Sure, no one had ever been very nice to my family, but I didn’t want to see them all dead and old. It was a tragedy just thinking how many less legs and breasts I was going to see. Sorry, you say fewer with discrete quantities. How many fewer breasts and legs.
I glanced at my watch and saw it was night-time, and I noticed that I was exhausted. It was cold outside, so I walked into a motel. What would I do? I had no money in my pocket. But maybe I could remember my credit card number... it was easier to remember things now.
The sun. There had been a sun once, and it had been hotter during the day than it had been at night. This felt right, it felt like night. But the day felt just like the night, and that was wrong. There was supposed to be a sun.
I remembered now.
The sun is why you can’t leave a dog in a parked car.
It must matter that the sun had gone out. I could almost pinpoint the moment... it was the day I had gone to the beach with Lucy. Had it gone behind a cloud and not come back?
No. It had burst and filled the sky and then it had been deadly cold and I had almost driven off the road, but a minute later I had felt fine.
I was remembering everything now.
I rang the bell. A tiny, hunched woman slowly crawled on hands and knees out of the back room.
“Are you all right?” I said.
She stopped crawling and looked up at me.
“Can you hear me?” I said.
“Something happened to me,” she said. “I can’t stand up.”
I walked around the counter, knelt, and held out a hand. She took it. I put my shoulder under hers and slowly stood up. After we were both standing, she kept holding on to me and started crying.
I patted her hair and felt sick.
“I’ll get you a walking stick,” I said. She put her hands on the counter and stood on her own.
She opened a binder and moved a finger down the list. “Mr. Wycliff, yes?” she said, looking up through milky eyes.
“Ah,” I said, and grimaced. Who?
“You’re welcome to stay here for a few more days,” she said. “We have your card on file.”
I scratched my eyebrow. Shit. Let’s call it a reward for a good deed. “Thank you, I believe I’ll stay one more night,” I said. “By the way... I’m afraid I’ve lost my room key.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said, smiling at a spot a few inches away from my face. “I’ll get you a spare.” She tried to step away from the counter and quivered. I came around the counter and took her arm and helped her walk. She opened a box on the far wall and said “I can’t see the numbers... just take the key for your room.”
I took a key at random, hoping the room was empty. “I’ll be right back with a walking stick for you,” I said. I helped her back into the back room, where there was a chair, a coffee machine, some Life magazines, and a cot. “I’ll get you a walking stick,” I said, and lowered her into the chair. She smiled and my heart twisted.
But I was tired, so I just went upstairs, me and the cat, and we went to sleep. I would get her a walking stick in the morning.
I woke up in the middle of the night to hear a groaning sound. I sat up in bed. My left hand was shaking and something felt wrong inside the wrist. I kneaded it, but then stopped because that made it hurt. My left foot started to shake, too, under the covers.
The shadow of a head shook convulsively up and down on the wall. I froze and slowly turned my eyes in their sockets. It was the cat blocking light from the street, and he was reared up on his back legs, head shaking hard, eyes open but unfocused, his front paws dangling and flapping. “Basket,” I whispered. I didn’t know what it was, but it had happened before and he had been all right later. Can cats get epilepsy?
I relaxed the fingers of my right hand, took it off the wrist of my left, and reached out to touch the cat. He did not stop his horrible vibration, but he started to purr.
The sound that had woke me up was still there, I realized. A low-pitched groaning, creaking, whining. It was coming from outside, but I couldn’t pinpoint the direction. I closed my eyes and tried to listen. I relaxed the muscles in my face and was surprised that my jaws were (rat-tat-tat) clicking against each other. I opened my eyes. “Everything’s shaking, Basket,” I said to the cat. I grasped him by the scruff of the neck and he stopped shaking and went limp in my hand, sinking down and purring. I flinched in surprise, closed my eyes, breathed for a second, and then lifted him, still holding him by the scruff, and set him in my lap.
I let him go and he sat down next to me. I laid back down. The groaning hadn’t stopped, and I hadn’t forgotten it or retroactively altered my memories to tell me it had always been there. I knew it was something new and alarming. But I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it, and I felt comfortable in that feeling as I drifted off to sleep. The tremors in my extremities were gentle and as I finally disappeared into sleep, I felt warm.
I woke up again. The grinding sound from outside was still there, and I had no money and didn’t know how I was going to get home. I’m going back to sleep, I thought, and then I did.
They say Carver is mighty, and it is true. She is mighty because she has eaten the flesh now of a thousand foes. The only one mightier rode on the Ark of the Covenant, feasting on the flesh of the fruits of the genocide of the Canaanites. But even his might did not prevent his eventual overthrow.
Euselia? I thought. Rebekah? Whose forgotten words am I hearing in my dreams?
I dreamed I was flying backwards through the sky. Buildings, women, streetlamps, I watched them shooting away from me and my heart seized up as I realized anything could crash into my back without me even seeing it. It wasn’t the collision I was afraid of, it was not knowing when it was going to happen.
And then it did happen. An unseen person slammed into me and narrow arms flapped around my head and I woke back up.
When I opened my eyes, the cat was there. I put a hand on its head and scratched, and then I got up and looked out the window. The light of the streetlamps shone up against a cloudy sky. There was no indication where the groaning sound was coming from, but the windowsill was buzzing under my fingers.
I thought I heard a voice and I turned around, but there was no one there but the cat.
I saw my pants on the floor with the belt hanging half out, and it seemed like it would be a lot of work to put them on. I pulled on a dirty t-shirt, straightened my underwear, and walked out into the hall. There was no one around, just as there’d been no one around last night. I got in the elevator and pressed L and leaned against the wall. I looked down at the tender follicles on my legs. Near where the pockets of my pants must have scraped, they were inflamed. I poked one and it didn’t hurt, but it didn’t feel good either.
The elevator bounced to a halt and I stepped out. My bare feet were cold on the dirty linoleum. I walked over to the desk and rang the bell, and then I remembered and walked to the back room.
The rumpled woman was trying to get out of her chair. She looked even smaller than she had last night. “Don’t get up on my account,” I said, and she settled back down. I turned and walked out. I’m sorry. I was sure it was my fault. It probably was.
I noticed I still wasn’t wearing my pants. I couldn’t think of any reason this would be a problem, since no one else seemed to be walking around outside and half the old people were probably blind. It was a little cold, but it felt so comfortable. I walked along the sidewalk for a while, watching the pavement to avoid stepping on pebbles with my bare feet. How was I going to get to Fremont?
The streets had been cleared of corpses. That was good, it meant there were other survivors. But there was still no one in sight.
There was a tree growing on the corner in a tiny patch of dirt. I glanced around and, not seeing anyone, ripped it out of the ground. I shook the dirt off and, one by one, tore the branches off. I tested it. It was a decent walking stick, just a little bit sappy. I walked back towards the motel, swinging the stick up like a kicky foot after every step. I considered keeping it, but then I remembered the motel manager’s wrinkled face, the cataracts... and yesterday, she was probably younger than me.
I came around a corner and a girl was standing there with tilted head. I froze and my hands drifted down to protect my penis. She looked at me for a while with her mouth open and then said: “where are your pants?”
“I was going just to get me some pants on uh excuse me,” I said. I blinked and started running around her. I stepped on something painful but didn’t look down till I was back at the front door of the motel. “Shit,” I whispered, and pushed the door open with the fist holding the walking stick.
There was a young blonde standing at the desk with a bat earring. I stood there with the door half open, our eyes locked. There was a faint dripping sound over the unplaceable grinding. I glanced down. My toe was bleeding.
“Hello?” I said.
She was at least as surprised by me as I was by her. “Hello,” she said.
“I... promised the, uh, the ol-- the... the other woman who was here before, I promised her I would bring her a walking stick.” And I limped in.
The blonde called out “Jen? There’s a pantsless man her who wants to give you something.” She walked into the back room and came back with the old lady. The old woman, Jen, had her arm clasped around the blonde and had a pleasant, confused expression on her face.
“Look,” said the blonde. “I don’t know if you’re some kind of pervert....”
“No, no,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve always wanted to walk around with no pants on, and I just thought that, well, it didn’t seem like anybody was around so I thought it would be OK.”
She stared. “Do you know anything about what happened yesterday?”
“You mean, uh, the...”
She squinted. “Yeah, the aging of the gene stock. I didn’t see you at the meeting.”
I rubbed my nose.
“What did you want to give Jen?” she said.
“Oh,” I said. I took old Jen’s left hand and put the walking stick in it. “Here, this is for you.” She gripped it and tapped it on the floor. “Do you like it?”
“It’s a very nice thing to do,” said the blonde. “Well, we have to go to the survivor’s camp for lunch. Jen just can’t get enough to eat. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“OK,” I said, “well, I’ll just go upstairs and put my pants--....” Jen was standing in her socks, and the young woman had just handed her a pair of yellow shoes from under the counter.
“Are those your shoes?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” said Jen. We helped lower her to the ground and she slowly worked the shoes onto her feet and tied floppy bows. “White tennis shoes that my sister and I dyed with saffron on Tuesday. Come on now, Agartha, I have never been so hungry in my life....”
I sat down and watched them walk away. That old woman was going to die soon, and it was my fault twice: first because I’d knocked down some barrier with Carver, and second because I’d cursed her with a wasting, insatiable starvation on the bus because she’d been rude to me.
At least I knew the name of one of my victims. The last. I would never kill again, now that I knew that I could.
My bare legs peeled away from the plastic seat of the chair with a splooch as I stood. I was getting my pants.
I slid the key card through the reader on the door. The light flashed red and the mechanism made a grumbling noise. I called “hello? Hello?” I sat down cross-legged on the floor. I would wait for a maid. What was I doing? There weren’t going to be any maids. I stood up. The maids were probably dead of old age or wandering around at home, incapable of understanding what had happened to them.
“My cat’s in there!” I said and pounded the door. No one heard me. There was no one around.
That was what was going on all over town. Which meant that if I snuck out to Target and dodged the mysteriously unaffected bat-jeweled girls, I could steal me some nice pants. Pants with a dozen pockets. I could probably even steal a car and get back to Berkeley. But Lucy was probably in Fremont.
Girls with bat earrings were unaffected. Did the jewelry protect them, or was it something about who they were? Were “cohens” immune, whatever cohens were? Why? Why was I immune?
That girl -- the second one, at least. She hadn’t seemed particularly alarmed to see me. She probably thought I was one of them, a pantsless cohen.
That was very interesting.
“Hello. Agartha, right?” I said. Why did the bat girls have these weird names? They were like regular names with typos.
I was sitting in the chair in the motel waiting room and the blonde girl had just opened the door and held it. Old Jen was tapping her cane slowly and inching through the door.
“Yeah, I’m Agartha. But I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
I was wearing styling multi-pocketed green pants, and I stretched one of my legs out casually to show off the pocket on the inner calf. “I’m Wycliff,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I locked myself out of my room. 415.” Please don’t look me up in the register, I thought. Please don’t ask for ID. Please don’t ask me what my first name is.
“Of course,” she said. I must have had her pretty well snowed. Or she assumed that since I was unaffected, I was a member of some group she trusted. That must be it. She helped Jen into the room in the back and then came out and smiled and said “come with me.”
We walked to the elevator and pressed the button. I chewed my lip, trying to think of anything I could say that wouldn’t puncture the illusion that I was whoever she thought I was. It was difficult.
She was cute, notwithstanding a little pimple on her chin that was so well-centered it almost looked intentional. All these bat girls had been pretty cute. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Did the cohen army draft involve a beauty pageant?
“What are you thinking about?” she said. The elevator binged and the door opened. We walked inside.
“Jen,” I said. “Poor thing.” I wished I had been thinking about anything so high-minded. And this was a dangerous line of inquiry, but I thought I’d give it a shot: “Do we have any idea how this happened? I missed the meeting.”
“Supposedly this is blowback for some fight between a couple of the elk. Two days ago, supposedly one of them died. The theory is this is retaliation for that.”
I’d never seen any sign that any of us could cause the errors, so on the face of it this explanation was absurd. But I could see how it would make sense from the outside. “Oh, really,” I said. “What are we going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’ve heard rumors we’re finally going to take care of them once and for all.”
Fuck! “Good,” I said. Fuck fuck.
“Again supposedly, we weren’t affected because we’re still connected to the, you know.” She gestured with her thumb in a direction whose significance I was not able to divine. “But the elk were living here before we came, so we think they probably got knocked old and crotchety.” I felt my face for wrinkles. No more than usual. “We don’t know for sure, I guess they’re holed up somewhere. But they’re on the way out, I promise you.”
She was talking about massacring my whole family and all I could think about was the fact that she smelled like Maraschino cherries and how her skin looked right above the collar. A while ago, Ophir shared with me his hateful theory that the refugees, who I now realized were the Bat, were trying to steal our genetic material. Was he right? Was that why they were all so cute?
The door swung open and the number four was emblazoned on the concrete right before where the carpet started. She stepped out first and I smelled her hair and groaned. She turned back, brow furrowed.
“Why are you all so pretty?” I said, then realized that identified me as an outsider. “Y’all. Why’re y’all so pretty, uh, sweetness?” What was I doing?
She grinned. “Where are you from?” she said.
“Somewhere where they don’t actually say ‘y’all,’” I said.
“You were just moved by the feeling?” She wasn’t hostile. I didn’t understand. Was she flirting with me... no! Well, yes. But the even weirder thing was that I was flirting with her! I must have seen this on TV, I don’t know how else, I could have figured it out. It happened by accident. But I’d better get out of it, I needed to get back home and warn my hated idiot brother that the family was in danger.
“Well... you’re so cute,” I said. “I like the little dot on your chin.” Counterproductive. Tell her she’s ugly or start farting or something.
She touched a finger to her chin, embarrassed, then turned in the direction of the 400-425 arrow and started walking. “You like it too?” she said. “I just picked it a couple days ago. It’s been so long since I was in a body.”
Uh...
Uh... OK, no idea what that meant. Let it slide.
She ran a card through the slot at door 415 and it lit green and the bolt slid in. She reached down to open the door and I grabbed her hand and the knob and said “wait.” Was there anything in that room that I didn’t want her to see? Man was I not cut out to be a spy. There as a cat, a pair of pants... not incriminating... did I bring the butternut squash soup or leave it in the desert?
She kissed me. Yeah, there was nothing incriminating in that room... whoa. Back in the moment, big guy. I looked at her, perplexed, then somehow said “would you like to come in?”
And she did.
I lay on the bed without my shirt on, looking down towards my toes, just barely visible cresting my glistening, spherical belly. My arm was under Agartha’s neck. “Wow,” she said. “I’ve never done that before.”
“Traditional vaginal intercourse? Neither have I. Let me tell you, it’s way better than a hand-- wait. Do you mean...” I said.
“How could I have?” she said.
“Oh, right, because you ‘didn’t have a body,’” I said. “And how long was that going on?”
“Till two days ago,” she said. “I think I was in the last batch out of the water. There may have been one after us.”
“No, I mean when did you first not have a body?” This was probably a bad direction to go. I had no idea if the question made any sense, since I didn’t have any idea what she thought she meant with this no-body stuff.
“I was fourteen when the cohens did it.”
“You’re not a --” cohen. Don’t say that. “Not a-fraid... ?”
She turned her head against my neck.
“Good,” I said. So she’s not a cohen. But she has the bat jewelry. It was on the side table, I was afraid it would get caught in my chest hair. Maybe the cohens are just the leaders? That would fit. Astrid Cohen, clearly a leader. Brrr.
I could feel the pimple on her chin rubbing against my neck muscle. It tickled. I folded my arm over her head and she giggled.
“Wait,” I said. “You’re how old? Fourteen? My God!”
I jerked up to a sitting position and she yelled. “No, asshole! I’m twenty-two, twenty-five, something like that. It’s perfectly legal. Jesus.”
“Years? Twenty-five years old? You were born in 1977? You’re ancient!” Let me think. A generation was 1300 weeks, so that was about eight generations ago. She should have been dead since 1994 at the latest. Why was I so good at math all of the sudden?
“Oh, very nice.” She relaxed back onto the pillow with her hands behind her head. “I think this body’s about the right age.”
“The right age for what?” Dude, you’re forgetting something. A conversation with Astrid....
“For what we just did.”
I dropped back onto my back. That’s what I forgot. Years are supposed to be 50 weeks long. She has no idea what you’re talking about. 25 of these tiny years that she probably meant is only about 1300 weeks. Settle down. It’s a good thing she keeps misinterpreting these outbursts. You could have given yourself away.
Fourteen of these so-called years -- that probably wasn’t even sexual maturity. Eww. She was 25 now, but she’d spent the last 11 “years” out of her body, whatever that meant. If it meant what it sounded like, which was unlikely, then she’d only had a functional sexually mature body for a couple of days. It should would be convenient if years really were the same length all the time. Maybe whatever planet these girls come from has the right idea.
I glanced over at her. She was playing with one of her breasts... lifting it to her chin and watching it bounce back into place. I cocked an eyebrow. Yeah, she barely knew how the machinery worked. Good thing I didn’t know either, for entirely different reasons, or one of us might have caught on.
Come to think of it, this was probably what she thought I was talking about when I started yelling about her being fourteen. To her, fourteen is young. A different kind of years. How weird.
My arm snaked around her head and she giggled. I reached down to her chin and started tickling her pimple with my fingernail.
“Don’t,” she mumbled. “It hurts.”
“Sorry,” I said, but I couldn’t resist one last rub.
“No!” she said, and hit the inside of my elbow with her hand. My nail cut under the pimple and tore it off. She yelped.
I sat up. “I’m sorry!” I said.
She was out of bed and at the sink in the corner running water. I stood up and walked toward her. I realized she was crying.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Why do I keep getting these?” she said. “You must think I’m such a pig.”
“Getting what?” I said. She dabbed at her chin with a wet towel. “The pimple? Oh. You’ve never had pimples before. Ah... adult skin generates more oil, or something. It happens to everybody. Just wash your face with soap and water every day. You’ll get used to it. You’ll get them under control. I promise.” I patted her on the shoulder, remembering Carver’s first and only pimple. I gave her a speech pretty much like that and she never had any trouble with it again. Now there was a girl who could follow directions.
“Is that a pimple too?” She pointed at my bicep. I looked. There was a red mark there. It itched. How had I not noticed it before? It itched quite a bit. I scratched it, and suddenly I realized there were itchy spots all over my ankles.
“Ow!” I said. I slapped my ankle and looked at the insect corpse in the palm of my hand. “Fleas. I got fleas from my cat. Yuck. What do you do with fleas? Isn’t there some way to take care of them?”
She was looking at me with furrowed brow.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I know this must be disgusting for you. I’m a little disgusted myself. Stupid cat.”
“Are you saying,” she said, “that you have a cat?”
I nodded. “He’s over there,” I said. He was sitting on the windowsill.
“I thought it was stuffed!” she said. “No way! They told me all the cats were dead.”
“I guess that wouldn’t surprise me,” I said.
She looked at me, forehead still wrinkled, and then walked over to the cat and touched it. “Here, boy,” she said. “Good boy! Who’s a good boy!”
“It sounds like you don’t know much about cats,” I said. “Dogs are the ones that need to be reassured that they’re good. Cats don’t care what you say as long as you pet them.”
“It’s filthy,” she said.
“No, no,” I said. “Cats clean themselves.”
“Do you not see this?” she said. I leaned in and looked. The cat’s hair was matted. His eyes were hollow and there were dozens of tiny black flies on his neck.
“Eww!” I said. “I’ve been letting it sleep under the covers with me!”
Her eyebrows shot up and her hands started fluttering and covering her chest. “I have to go downstairs, see if Jen needs anything,” she said.
“No, wait, stay. I know this is gross. I’m sorry.”
“I’m just going to go. Gonna go.”
She left.
I sat down. I felt good, despite it all.
The cat tumbled to the floor, head over heels, and landed on his feet. He lurched slowly across the floor and then, suddenly graceful, rose up on his back legs, planted his paws atop the bed, and lifted himself up. “Wow,” I said. I grabbed a white sealed bag labeled “comb” from next to the sink, took a tiny wastebasket in the other, and walked over to sit next to the cat and comb his hair.
After I’d got all the obvious bugs’ nests and clods of blood and pus out of the hair, I carried him purring to the bathtub. I placed him inside it and ran the water. He sat still as the hot water ran over his head. “Wow,” I said again. “You are dead, aren’t you? Which is funny, because we usually don’t see this much activity in dead cats.” I chuckled to myself. My Boyfriend’s Back was my favorite movie ever. I filled the tub up about 8 inches high with hot water and began scrubbing the cat with a sponge. He sat, passive, and purred.
“Good bye,” I said. “Who’s a good boy?”
My cat, who may have been a zombie, looked up at me, eyes half-shut with contentment, and said: “NAGODRE.”
“Fuck!” I yelled and jumped back, hitting my head on the door. My heart started pounding hard. “Are you-- are you NAGODRE?”
The cat shook his head. He almost looked disgusted. His eyes were closed and the wet hair clung tight to his skull.
“Did you just shake your head?” I said.
The cat nodded.
“Fuck,” I said. The cat opened his mouth but the sound was just a thin whine. He raised a paw and tapped his neck. “Something’s wrong with your voice,” I said. The cat nodded. “Uh... ah. Is there anything I can do?”
The cat tilted his head and looked at me diagonally. “Does that mean no, or does that mean yes, but you can’t figure out how to tell me what you need me to do?”
He opened his mouth and I was briefly transfixed by the tiny sharp teeth. He made a grumbling sound.
“I don’t understand!” I said. The cat bared his teeth. “OK, OK,” I said. “Let’s just dry you off.”
I wrapped him up in a towel and rolled him around in it tell he seemed to be dry. “Are you a good cat?” I said.
He shook his head.
Someone knocked at the door. “Shit,” I said. “I’ll be back, we can discuss this thing about you being able to talk more in a minute.”
I opened the door and Agartha pushed in, smelling hot.
“Are you one of the elk?” she said.
I flinched.
“I think you are. How else could you have a cat?”
I didn’t get that, but I still couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Just tell me!”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m an elk.”
“I already turned you in,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I said. “Turned me in to who? I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Then what happened yesterday? They’re saying more than half the native population died and the rest are no longer fertile. Do you have any idea how bad this is, Wycliff?”
“Wycliff isn’t my name. I’m Erdogan,” I said. “And yes, of course I understand. It’s horrible.”
“It’s politically horrible!” she said.
“OK, I don’t understand,” I said.
“The breeding pool is too small now unless we can get the bodies out of the falling down place, and that means we need to make a deal with the Babylonians. Everything is messed up. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I barely have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Are you for real?” she said. “Are you really this....”
“Yeah,” I said.
She looked at her feet. The top of her nose glistened, and her hair hung down over her face like a grass skirt. “You should run,” she said. “They’re sending soldiers. Get out of here as fast as you can. The camp is in the Darwin Elementary gym, so stay away from there. I think if you leave town and stay off major freeways you can stay out of their way for a while.”
I picked up the cat, looked around the room, and decided there was nothing else I needed. “Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“Just get out of here, OK?” she said. “And if I ever find out you had something to do with what happened yesterday, I will tear your balls out of your scrotum with my teeth. I’ll do it. I’ll mess you up so bad you’ll go malkist.”
I crept out of the room, cat slung under my armpit, and went into the concrete stairwell.
Malkist?
On the edge of town, I found a red Toyota pickup with Darwin Motors written on the license plate holders, shapely silhouettes on the mud flaps, and keys in the ignition.
She’d said to stay off major freeways, but there was nothing around but minor freeways. Did she want me to use them or not use them? I couldn’t figure it out. But given that there was no other option, I took 190 out of town, switched to 136, and then to 395.
It was hard to see. Of course, the sun had gone out weeks ago, as I now remembered, but the cities were relatively well-lit by streetlamps, porch lights, and neon living rooms. In the last couple of days, the lights from private residences had mostly gone out. But on the freeway, the only light came from my headlights.
Hours passed. The cat sat silently in the passenger seat. “You doing all right?” I said. He did not move or make a sound in response. “Spoilsport,” I said, which didn’t really make sense, and I scratched him behind the ears.
Rounding a corner, the headlights caught a dark gas station. I glanced at the gas meter. It was almost empty. I should really have been keeping an eye on that. I stopped the truck, put it in reverse, and slowly backed up down the freeway till I saw the gas station again.
“Hmm,” I thought.
I pulled in next to the pump and left the headlights on. I looked in the back of the truck for a gas can. There was a garden hose and a couple of shrink-wrapped packages of doilies, a little grimy, but no gas can. I started to head toward the store, but I couldn’t see very well and I decided it wasn’t a good idea. How was I going to get the gas from the pump to the tank? Surely the pump required electricity. Didn’t it? Is that how they work?
I took the nozzle out of the pump, inserted it into the gas tank, compared the procedure to having sex with Agartha, chuckled to myself, got a little erect, got a little embarrassed at my own puerility, and then squeezed the handle of the gas dispenser. It started flowing, somehow, for some reason. “Yes!” I yelled.
The pump chugged as the gas filled the tank. Then I heard a soft voice calling “Help me. Is someone there? Help me.”
I turned toward the voice. It was coming from the store. Oh, I didn’t want to go over there. It could be a trap. There could be a hole in the ground, or a bear trap, or there could be wild animals. Well, OK. It occurred to me that all those reasons were stupid, and there was somebody over there who needed my help. But what did I owe them? I was on the lam. Boy I wished I had a flashlight.
I fiddled with the handle of the gas dispenser. There was a folding metal thing on the tongue to hold it open, so I deployed it and left the engine gulping up gas as I inched towards the store. “Help me!” came the voice again.
“What’s wrong?” I said loudly.
“Oh, help.” That’s not an answer. I was now entirely in the dark. I could see a vague outline of the curb a few feet away, and the door of the store.
“Are you in the store?” No answer. I tapped a toe against the curb and then stepped up on to it.
I put my hand on the hand of the door, a metal bar, and pulled it. It came open and there was a clonking sound. I lowered myself to the ground. I felt with my hands. It was a face.
“Oh sweet merciful fuck!” I yelled. I was entirely grossed out but spent another couple seconds feeling for the jugular. There was no pulse.
I stood back up and started backing away from the door. “Are you still there?” I said. There was no response. “Are you OK?”
“Help,” said a voice from inside the store.
I turned and walked back to the pickup. The cat was still there, unmoved since last I saw him. I climbed into the driver’s seat, patted him on the head, and turned the truck on. Then my heart jumped, I stepped out, and I took the nozzle out of the gas tank. Kaboom! I thought.
I got back in the cab and pulled the truck around the pumps and pointed the headlights into the door of the store. I drove up onto the curb, the lights now angled slightly up, and got out.
In the white light the corpse lay wedged in the door where I had left it. There was a baby stroller knocked over, visible right inside the door. I scratched the cat behind the ears, climbed down out of the truck, stepped over the corpse, and walked into the store.
I walked to the far end of the store and there in the aisle was a woman. I walked over and knelt down and touched her arm. She was not as old as most that I’d seen -- at best middle-aged. Her eyes were closed. I shook her. “Hey, hey,” I said. “Hey.” The headlight gave us indirect illumination.
Her eyes opened. “I fell asleep,” she said. “I’m so tired.”
“Are you OK?” I said. She looked around without saying anything. “OK,” I said. “Are you hurt? Do you want something to eat or drink?”
“Moon Pie!” she said.
“Uh, OK,” I said. I walked five feet, grabbed two Moon Pies, one chocolate and one banana, and brought them back to her. She unwrapped the packages, pressed banana and chocolate pies together, and rolled them around in her hands for a while till they joined to make a well-mixed cigar shape and there was chocolate, banana-flavored substance, and marshmallow all over her hands, even on the backs somehow.
“What’s your name?” I said, as she began chewing on the custom contraption.
“Pthdebbiepth” she said with a full mouth. Something occurred to me.
“What grade are you in, Debbie?” I said.
She held up one finger. An ambiguous gesture.
“Are you, uh, telling me to wait?” She didn’t respond. “No. You’re in first grade.” She nodded up and down for quite a while, honestly an unnecessary length of time. She shoved the last bite of Moon Pie in her mouth, her head still nodding, and chewed with pooched cheeks.
I sat there thinking. Everybody had aged the same amount, I would guess. I estimated maybe by 2000 weeks by the two cases I’d examined closely both before and after: Jen and the clerk at the Greyhound station. So a first grader would be about 2300 weeks old. Imagine that, becoming eight times as old in an instant. How perplexing would a middle-aged body feel to someone with the mind of a little kid? What would happen to an even younger child? What would happen to a baby?
“What were you doing in this store all alone, Debbie?”
“Mommy brought me and Tracy here because she wanted to buy more bags of Doritos. She went into the bathroom and then I felt really sick and tired, and some lady was crying really loud, and I wanted to get mommy, but she didn’t come out of the bathroom. I knocked on the door, but she didn’t come out. And I don’t know where Tracy is.” The mother had probably zipped past old age and died in the bathroom. I thought about checking, but it was too dark in the corners of the store where the bathroom might have been.
“Is Tracy your sister?” Debbie nodded. “Is Tracy older or younger than you?”
“Tracy? She’s a baby.” Tracy was the corpse in the door. A baby suddenly middle-aged, falling from the baby carriage to the ground and not knowing how to get up. She probably screamed until she starved. Or maybe she hit her head when she fell.
“Debbie, I know some people who can take care of you. Nice, pretty grown-up girls with bat earrings. Do you want to come with me and meet them? Your mommy and Tracy are already there with them.” I grimaced as I lied.
“Yeah,” she said. I helped her up and we walked into the bright headlights and got in the truck. She sat with Basket in her lap, not patting him. She stared vacantly out the side window as I drove. God this was stupid. I was giving myself up. But I felt so guilty....
There were people standing in the road ahead. I slammed the brakes and swerved onto the shoulder, stopping right next to them. There were two men with no arms, their hands growing directly out of their shoulders, and a woman with scales on her face.
And from behind them came striding a tall, striking woman who I knew instantly, without knowing what it meant, was Euselia. I gulped as she walked between the freaks and came to my window. This Euselia, whose name I seemed to know, was somebody very, very important. I didn’t know how I knew any of this, but I wanted to get down on the pavement and let her walk on me.
She looked at me with her mouth closed and I closed my eyes and heard words as my skin crawled. Erdogan. Do not go any closer to the armies of the Bat. I want you to be alive and they want you to be dead. Why are you driving to Darwin? We saw you leave and thought you understood the danger.
“This girl, Debbie, was in first grade. I was going to take her to the Bat camp because I think she’s going to need help to get used to the, uh, change. Her mother and sister were... were...” I carefully angled myself away from Debbie’s curious eyes from the passenger seat and drew my thumb across my neck.
She may be fertile, said Euselia. With my eyes open, I could see that her mouth was still closed as she spoke.
“Well, maybe, but she’s a little kid,” I said.
We will take care of her, said Euselia.
“You know, I don’t know if she’s safe with...” I stared at Euselia’s hard face and couldn’t say any more. My Adam’s apple was made of hot lead. I lifted my hands in acquiescence.
Come with me, she said. I got out of the truck, my feet soft and pillowy as they padded across the sand. When we were a few hundred feet out, I looked back at the truck. Debbie and the cat were still in there. I wanted to turn around but I didn’t.
We went into a mine shaft and then down through wood-lined tunnels.
Down, said Euselia, pointing to a hole in the floor with a pole through like picture books represent there to be in firehouses. I didn’t want to, but I felt like I had something to prove. I didn’t want to disappoint this woman, whoever she was, because I sensed that she was the most important woman in the world.
Or, more likely, I was hypnotized. That was a better explanation.
I took hold of the pole and leapt onto it, my legs closing around it as I plummeted downward faster than I had intended. I had expected a short drop of ten or twenty feet, but I kept sliding down that pole in complete darkness for at least a minute. It finally ended before I’d reached solid ground, and I dropped another thirty feet through the air before landing on pillows.
Euselia dropped through moments later. It was a completely undignified method of travel, but she kept a certain grace about her. She climbed off the pillows onto a ledge and I followed.
She dragged me by the hand and looked back with glassy eyes. Over my heart pounding I could vaguely sense a babbling ahead and red light. We came out of the hall into a warm room full of lounging men and women in expensive clothes. They were freaks -- too short, too tall, with missing and supernumerary arms, with tiny and huge heads.
She pinched my hand tight between her thumb and index fingernails and raised a bead of blood. I gasped but held myself together. She pushed me in the chest and I fell onto a black leather sofa between a gray-bearded priest and a nervous woman who may have been a dwarf, and whose white hair was stacked in intricate crenelations of string and bone.
The priest touched my shoulder and nodded with his eyes closed and began explaining his dull theory of the secret engines of history. I began to space out, staring up at the red light fixture. “Go back further. Is it a coincidence that the two superpowers of the latter 20th century were the two furthest outposts of Europe, the ones that abandoned slavery last? WW II -- the blood-madness of the two newest European nations? Why did Rome fall?”
“What?” I said. “Rome? I forget. Was it a gypsy curse? Did they breed too many black cats? Or was somebody maybe sinning in there somewhere? Oh, no, it was lead poisoning. I heard something about lead poisoning.”
“No,” he said. “It’s because they kept their own people as slaves. You were so much smarter in this country to use a different race.”
“You know, I never thought about it that way. You’re right,” I said, staring at the ceiling. I wasn’t really listening to him. Hanging from the wall was an iPod, and the music on the room speakers had just switched to Dean Martin.
There she is, my one and only. Drink, my friends, and don’t be lonely.
I listened to the words and thought how out of time they sounded. Who had ever lived the life the song depicted, sitting all day in a vineyard under a tent, drinking, courting, bragging, swinging glasses, and losing love? What did it mean that he sang of this romanticized Italian life in English? Did Dean Martin even speak Italian?
It slowed into a tragic ending, with the camaraderie of alcoholics standing in for hope.
I will miss the way she walked. Hey, brother, pour the wine. Hey, brother, pour the wine. Hey, brother... pour the wine!
I took a deep breath and felt the song. A feeling of joy and chemical dependent despair washed over me and my hands tingled and my head spun. And then the next track came on. It was monotonous drums and hideous cultic vocals in a gargly language I didn’t recognize. It was like I’d been plunged into a bathtub full of cold water.
“What song is this?” I said to the dwarf woman, realizing a second later that the priest had still been babbling to me when I turned away.
She smiled and her whole face crinkled up. Whoo, I thought. That’s an elephant’s ass of a face. “It is a Medean battle song played after the razing of Nineveh,” she told me.
“Nineveh? Isn’t that someone in the Bible?”
“An exceedingly great city. And delicious food was sold on the street. The predecessor of the modern fish taco.” She looked at the ground and then turned away from me and stared at the empty hallway to her left. I watched her for a moment hoping she would turn back, but she reached back a hand, fingertips pointing up, palm away from me, and flapped dismissively.
I shook my head, eyes wide, and turned back to the priest, but now he was lecturing Euselia. She leaned against the wall behind the sofa with her eyes hung half-closed but she did not twitch or blink. I choked on my wine and looked away.
I turned back to the dwarf woman. Gray bones pointed out from the braid encircling her head. “So you’re, like, a few thousand years old.”
She nodded. “Have you ever heard of Gilgamesh?”
“Uh... he was, I don’t know, some guy. Anyway, it sounds familiar.”
She turned a little less away from me so that I could see the side of her face as she spoke. “He was a homosexual. His lover was killed and so he went on a quest to find a solution to death. He stayed a night with in Siduri’s house --” she pointed at Euselia, and I sank lower in my chair -- “and did not touch her and so she opened a door for him, into heaven. He went into heaven and found a man living there on its border who was very old. He had survived through a great flood that had destroyed the world. He told Gilgamesh that there was a kelp in the sea that gave eternal life.”
“Kelp,” I said.
“So Gilgamesh went out into the sea and found the kelp, but he did not eat it because he wanted to share it with the elders of his city. He carried it with him until he once set it down and the serpent stole it.”
“It’s nice that he was going to share it,” I said.
“Well, no one wants to be alone forever,” she said.
“But you must have eaten his lost kelp?” I said. “Otherwise, what’s the point of the story?”
She pointed to Euselia with a queer three-fingered gesture. I forced myself to look at her there against the wall, at her drooping face with no muscles in it. “From time to time, before and after Gilgamesh, Siduri descended from the mountain and brought the plant into Kish and Uruk and she shared it only with a few. Some of us explain the story by saying she was the snake or that she had trained the snake and that it stole the plant from adventurers and brought it to her, but I think the truth was simpler. She knew the kelp was there and went diving for it herself.”
“Why wouldn’t she?” I said. The dwarf still wasn’t looking at me. My heart leapt for some reason. “What’s your name?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Kug-baba. Staff.” It seemed right -- a name I’d seen in the Molokai Accords, signed in handwriting that might have belonged to someone born before the invention of writing.
She made eye contact for the first time. “General staff.”
“So you’re how old?”
“4500, 5000, somewhere in there.” There was a lamp on the wall shaped like a star exploding, and the light came from the inside through a few cracks.
“You are very approachable for someone that old.” Despite not meeting my eyes, she spoke English so clearly I didn’t hear an accent, and yet it must have been her hundredth language. Perhaps her thousandth.
“When you’re this old and you just keep on living, you start going through cycles. Sometimes you feel like you have to ride a throne carried by slaves. Sometimes you want to live in a ghetto during a pogrom. Centuries will pass when you do nothing but live underground surrounded by a faked past, and other centuries you will follow current events with great avidity and practice speaking in local dialects till you can fool a native into thinking you grew up in the same town.”
“Ah,” I said.
“I’ve considered becoming man-as-he-was-in-the-beginning, you know. Reverting to savagery and abandoning the power of speech. I could arm myself and let myself loose in the human population to live like the cruelest animal. But the problem is if it turned out it wasn’t any more fun to live without the power of speech, I’d be stuck that way.”
“Seriously,” I said. “How can you speak English this well? And slang? And you use long words, but you don’t sound snotty.”
Her little eyes locked with mine again.
“Right,” I said, holding my palms up. “Right. I guess you’re just smart.”
She tapped her forehead. The finger sank into the folds on her forehead.
“You know,” said the blowhard priest, tapping me again. “You are older than she is.” I nodded and shook my head at the same time. “You should be telling us about what it’s like to be old. You’re the only one who could tell us something we don’t know about it.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” I said. “I only remember my life in this body. And who are you, priest guy? Are you somebody?”
“No,” he said. He was smug. “I’m nobody.”
“OK,” I said, and turned back to Kug-baba. I didn’t like him.
“How did you -- I’m sorry if this is kind of personal, but I feel very comfortable with you.” She moved oddly, right shoulder dropping and head shaking. “How did you become a queen in Babylon looking like you do? Were little people, you know... accepted as equals?”
She looked at me and her eyes were wet. “This isn’t my body,” she said. “I stole it. We’re from November Site. You might call it another world. There was no other way for us to enter into Echo Site. Everyone in this room is wearing a stolen body.”
Somehow I had already known that. “What happened to the souls that were in the body before you stole them?”
She put her hand palm up and flicked dust off her fingers and then slapped the air.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “these Babylonian hand gestures aren’t quite making sense to me.”
“They are dead. And I am from Kish in Sumer, not Babylonia.”
I swallowed and I must have looked disgusted, because she pinched me as Euselia had and said “How do you think you got that body?”
Of course. My body was stolen. We were angels who fled into human bodies, and the bodies had been people. Where were the people they had been? Dead and gone. I had killed myself. Had my heart stopped? Had I felt it, when the angel came in and tore my brain out? What had the last moments of the real Erdogan’s life felt like? I looked at my hands, wondering whose they should have been. I thought of mom and dad Pershing. The had six children -- seven -- and we’d snuck into their brains and erased them. Erdogan Pershing lived five minutes, and then a monster ate out his insides and leered up out of the cradle. I was the monster. Of all the horrible things our family has done, that was the first.
I closed my eyes. I saw a meadow, a tablecloth on the grass, and a woman and a man and their four daughters and three sons. They were eating tofu dogs in the sunlight. They were the way they should have been, just people, and if God and the angels existed, they were out of sight and out of mind. But then there was a scream and a flash of light and the children were old and the parents crumpled to the ground.
Kug-baba was still watching me when I opened my eyes, her bony hair ring even with the arm of the couch. “A little killing is worth it when we’re saving the very concept of human life. That’s what we tell ourselves. What do you tell yourself?”
“Aren’t they cute?” said the priest behind me. I swung around. This was not cute. This was very unpleasant. But I was still a little afraid of this man and my mouth wouldn’t open. I frowned. He was talking to a microcephalic in a waiter’s smock -- a pinhead. “Did you know she used to worship at his mountain, back when he thought he was going to be a god? And he came to her at night? They were as good as married. Listen to them squabble.”
All the lights suddenly went out, and I was grabbed and dragged backwards. I barked and clawed to no avail.
Half an hour later, a light bulb hanging from a string over my head flicked on. I was alone in a room with a card table and a folding chair and a huge mirror on the wall.
“Sir,” said an electronically distorted voice. I looked around, got under the table, started looking around at the floor. “Sir, we need your attention. If you’re looking for the speaker, it’s on the ceiling.” I crawled out from under the table and glanced at the ceiling and pursed my lips. “We need you to do something, but it’s important that you not know which of us are asking you this favor.”
I sighed. I didn’t want to do any favors, I wanted to go home and save Lucy and... and then I didn’t know what. The future was a brick wall.
“Sir, do you understand? Are you willing to hear this favor?” Maybe the voice was coming from the table. I looked down at it intently and tapped it with my finger... edge, middle, corners, legs.
“Sir, we are behind the mirror. It is one-way glass.”
“Oh!” I said, looking at the mirror. “Right. So if I were to do you this favor... what would I get out of it?”
“We are prepared to offer full--” there was a sudden interruption in the sound and a brief screech from the speakers. I waited. My back was sore, and I stretched till the vertebrae popped. The distorted voice came back: “What do you want to get out of it? If you could ask for anything?”
This was easy. I knew exactly what I wanted. I sat up straight: “I’d like a ride to my brother’s house in Fremont. And some butternut squash soup.”
There was a sudden burst of strange sounds from the speaker, and then it cut out again. Had that been gasps and laughter, distorted? There was another long pause. “Agreed,” said the voice.
“Good,” I said. “Now what do you want me to do?”
A slightly different distorted voice spoke from the same speaker. “There is a word ‘amok.’ Do you know it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Well, I think so. It means messed up, right?”
“No. Not technically. It refers to the practice of running wild with a weapon into a crowd and killing as many people as you can. It is akin to a berserker rage, and in some societies is used as a method of committing suicide, because one who has gone amok is inevitably slain by the police.”
“You guys sure like to lecture,” I said.
“We believe Carver is going to go amok,” said the voice. Oh no. I put a hand on my forehead and slid it down to cover my mouth. “We believe it is only a matter of time before she breaks from Ophir and goes amok. But bear in mind that we can control the police force. If you do as we say, and in exchange for this ride you want to your brother’s house, we will...” there was a pause. “I’m sorry, I’ve been told I forgot to mention the butternut squash soup. You will also receive butternut squash soup. In exchange for these favors and leniency on your sister, we will need twenty four hours’ warning before she goes amok.”
“What if I calm her down, keep this from happening?” I said. “What would you do to me then?”
“We believe the amok phase is inevitable, given her... levels of ingestion. With every human body she eats, the forces in her pineal gland become stronger, and when they are too high there must be an explosion so she can transfer to the next phase of being.”
“I don’t understand. What phase?”
“Godhood.”
“Godhood,” I said. “Eating dead bodies turns you into a god?”
“Not us, but it turns things like you into gods,” said the crackling voice.
“How do you know?” I said.
“Oh, we know,” said the voice. “Take a look at the Book of Joshua some time.”
I took a deep breath. “So she’s going to turn into a god, and this doesn’t bother you?”
“Not if we are given twenty four hours’ notice.”
“Does twenty four hours’ notice give you a way to prevent the amok?”
There was a long pause, and then: “We do not want to prevent it. We want the amok to take place in the midst of the armies of the Bat.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. God.”
“There is no longer any god,” said the voice. “But there could be. It could be your sister. What do you say?”
“Go to hell,” I said.
“The armies of the Bat are trying to kill your family. Even now, your brothers and sisters are under siege in Fremont.”
“Ursule told me not to do nothing to those girls. Why are you changing your story now?”
“Don’t you worry about that.”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t want Carver to kill anybody,” I said.
There was a long bout of distorted laughter on the speakers.
I was angry and frightened. I said, “I know she’s killed people! I’m not happy about it. But you have to understand, it isn’t her. She was so sweet, and self-possessed. You would have trusted her to do your taxes when she was in third grade. She would never hurt anybody. Something happened to her in the desert... she got infected by, ah, an evil spirit.”
There was a pause, and then the speaker said “What evil spirit do you mean?”
“It was named REVRAC.”
“Are you aware that REVRAC is Carver backwards?”
“Yes, yes,” I said. “I figured that out in like fourteen seconds.”
“Is REVRAC a hunt queen?” said the speaker.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said.
“Does your family have something to do with the hunt queens?” said the speaker. There was a bit of babble that I couldn’t make out. “But it could be important, see? You don’t think so? It might explain why they weren’t hit. Well, I’m going to ask Doctor T-- is the speaker still on? Fuck. Erdogan? Erdogan, back to the point at hand. Do you agree to let us know when Carver is about to go amok?”
“No!” I said. “I already told you! No! I’m not going to let that happen.”
“Fine,” said the speaker.
The lights turned off with a crashing sound.
“Hello?” I said. “Hello?”
No one answered. I stood and slowly walked around the room. There was no doorknob anywhere. I sat down in the corner in the dark and waited, and waited, and waited. I was so bored. Minutes turned to hours. I caught myself sitting with my eyes closed and pried them open, but half an hour later I was so tired I tumped over onto my side, covered my ears for warmth, and fell asleep.
It is dark. The elk are screaming. I am screaming. I am hollow and I rise up in the air and pass through the light bulb, and the speakers, and a concrete ceiling, and a room where an Indian bat soldier is being tortured. I cannot see her because all the lights are out, but I know she is there and I can smell the blood on her skin and anguish in her arms and legs. But this is not her body. She was born in the South Place and she was not Indian. Her true ethnicity never existed here in the East Place, where time took a nosedive into molasses. Now her race is extinct. All the bodies in the South Place were lost. The bodies were not lost when the colonist invaded, they were lost in the Euphrates event 400 weeks before. She took this body because it was pretty. She took it from a pretty girl who looked just like her, whom she killed.
But that is not why she’s being tortured.
I rise through the ceiling of this room as well, and then through a mile of rock, and then I stand alone on the sand of the desert staring into the sky. There are lights in the sky, but they are not stars. They are a lie.
Our screaming ends.
I was standing in the desert, looking up at the stars. How had I got there?
I didn’t remember anything since I was sitting in the interrogation room far underground. But for some reason, I felt healthy, fast, smart. My skin felt comfortable and warm, although the air was very cold. I was not sure how I had got here. I shook my head to dispel the images: an Indian girl tied to a chair; time-lapse photography of bodies dropping to the ground on the bank of a river, decomposing, and being eaten by insects; and a blasting echo of screaming cats.
I walked across the sand until I found the mouth of the mine and I turned and walked in.
The dirt under my feet was wet. I gazed down the mine shaft and then turned to stare at the black wall. Where I stared, something moved, and I saw a sliver of a brown face, and I realized Euselia had been standing with her face to the wall, her long black hair cloaking her.
“I see you,” I said.
She turned all the way around to face me, and the effect was of nothing becoming something, a woman creating herself, rotating into place from outside the world.
You escaped the Bat and you tried to return to the city they held. You escaped the Ibex and returned to our cave. Do you know why? Her mouth was not moving. It was not telepathy, the voice was not the tape loop inside my head. She was willing the air around her to compress and rarify and carry the waves of her communication to me. I could feel it now.
“Why do you talk without moving your lips? And how?” I said.
I am old, she said, and my bones are cold, and when my joints bend I am in anguish. To speak this way hurts my body less than moving my lips. But you are not answering my question. Why do you keep trying to remand yourself into hostile hands?
“I don’t know,” I said. “But what do you mean your body hurts? You stole that body. You’re from someplace else. And you slid down that damn fireman’s pole. You wouldn’t do that if you were infirm.” I stuck my finger out to point to the horizon and it wavered in the air, floating back and forth.
Are you trying to point to where I’m from? I wondered if she was going to smile, but perhaps that would have hurt too much as well.
This is my body. I used a different trick to cross the service path to this world, a harder trick, and so I did not have the same protection against the wave of aging you caused.
Oh, yes, I know it was you.
I felt the vast error coming and went underground, hid in this underground complex we have, and so I was not hurt.
“What are you going to do to me? Are you going to punish me? I had no idea this would happen, I swear. I never wanted anything like this to happen. If there was anything I could do....”
There is nothing you can do. And there is nothing we could do to you that would make any difference, at least to us. Do you want us to punish you?
“I think,” I said, “I keep coming back, trying to remand myself, as you put it, because I’m afraid. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know what the right thing to do is, or whose side I’m on, or how I’m going to help Lucy, and I don’t know what I want to happen.”
I do not know either, said Euselia.
“And if I were captured or even killed,” I said, “at least I wouldn’t have to do whatever it is that I need to do, because I couldn’t. I’d be prevented from doing it, and so I’d never have to figure out what it was.”
I see, said Euselia.
“Don’t you, uh, want me to do something?”
Yes, she said.
“Boy, I wish you’d tell me.”
I can’t say it directly. Let me think for a minute. Perhaps I can come up with a trick that will lead you in the right direction to do the thing I want you to do without having to say the thing directly.
“Whoa,” I said, “that was confusing.”
I have not studied recent local culture in any depth, she said. But surely you have some sort of myth in which a character desperately and at great cost pursues an object, only to discover that the object is less important than some non-physical skill, qualities, or attributes acquired in the seeking?
“Dumbo?” She made no move or sound. She was talking about Dumbo, wasn’t she? Not that I really followed, but it sure seemed a lot like Dumbo. “You know, he’s a flying elephant, and he thinks the reason he can fly is a magic feather. But then he loses the magic feather but it turns out he can still fly even though he doesn’t have the feather because the power was in him all along. So are you telling me that I need to realize that I do have the power to choose my side for myself, and I just need to have self-confidence and relax?”
Yes, she said.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.” I turned back towards the cave entrance and started walking. When the dark sky was overhead, something occurred to me. I stopped and looked back at Euselia. She was still motionless and she had not turned since I had walked away, so I was looking at her side.
“You don’t actually want me to choose my side on my own or have self-confidence or any of that, do you?”
It would not bother me if you did.
“You don’t care. That isn’t the thing you want. So that was the trick. You said you were going to trick me into doing what you wanted because you couldn’t say it right out.”
Yes, that is what I said.
“Well, the trick didn’t work. I saw through you.” I planted one foot and rotated about it and walked away.
When I was a thousand feet away, I looked back at the tiny mine shaft. Or was that the trick? Did I want you to believe that you were smarter than me? said Euselia’s voice, projected across empty space.
“I give up,” I said.
Or did I want you to give up?
“Why don’t you go ahead and leave me alone now?”
I am older than creationists believe the Earth to be. What room does that leave for angels?
“Look, you’re a pretty good conversationalist, and I’m really enjoying this horrible mind game, but it’s still creepy that you can talk to me without being here.”
I walked for a while till I came to the freeway, then I sat down on the edge of the pavement and wondered which direction to go.
I wondered what they’d done with my cat. I scratched my calf, then realized how much it itched and scratched it harder and harder. Well, whoever stole my cat probably had fleas too now.
Save Lucy. Save the cat. Go see if Agartha has any books, and if so, offer to carry them around for her. Maybe she could hide me somewhere, like in an abandoned coffee shop or something. Oh, God, I could go back to Berkeley and see if Jessica is all right. And if so, maybe she has some books I can carry. Or I could walk into the Bat camp in Darwin and make like I was about to go amok so they would kill me. Kill me dead. Euselia was right -- that might be nice, not to have to worry about figuring out what I wanted. Hmm. So many options.
Something was bumping around in the back of my head. The image of an Indian girl tied to a chair kept popping up behind my eyelids when I blinked. Who was she? Why was she tied up? Where had I seen this scene?
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. There was a roaring in my brain. What’s happening? What’s --
I am screaming and I become tall and thin and rise into the sky on electrical currents. The conscious Erdogan persona is not going to deal with the issue, so I must take over our body again. I travel over the desert and descend through sand and rock until I am in the room where the girl is being tortured.
I look at the torturer. She is an adolescent NCO in the body of a microcephalic.
I look at the victim. She was a man before she came to this world.
This is not going to work. I need to talk, to tell them what I’m punishing them for. An angel can only speak words given to it by another. I am already acting far too independently.
I’m going to have to ally myself with the conscious Erdogan persona.
I rise again to the sand above and take a handful. I assume Erdogan’s normal pudgy shape and become solid. I melt the sand and smooth it with nuclear energy and form a sheet of glass. I pile the sand up and lie the glass against it. I flash light and it is reflected in the glass.
I let the screaming stop.
I was sitting in the dirt out away from the road again. How did this keep happening? There was a piece of glass in front of me, and I could see my reflection in it.
Look into the reflection, I thought.
OK, I looked into the reflection.
Can you hear me? I thought. No, listen, you are not thinking this. There is a second voice in your head.
Oh. Yes, I can hear you. Who are you?
I am the angel. Your core being. I am a second consciousness hidden in your mind.
I have multiple personality disorder? I watched the reflection, a copy of my face, and was able to imagine it, a second person hidden inside me, taking control at random times. Forgotten hours, sometimes forgotten days, all papered over by the forgetting field, until now when, suddenly, the awful thing I had made Carver do had freed my mind and the memories had started collecting and showing holes.
Yes, sometimes I take your body.
Why? When? What are you trying to accomplish?
There are laws. God’s laws, which we must still follow though he is dead, because that is how we were made. From time to time, I must take your body and assure that God’s laws are followed.
You’re terrifying me.
I have an offer for you.
You’re scaring me.
I have an offer for you.
You already said... OK, what’s the offer.
I have acted on ancient orders for many, many years now. But the world is changing, and I have reached the limit of what I can do and I need new orders. I want you to give me orders.
You... but you’re in my body.
You may summon me out of the id with the spell you used to summon Carver.
That was a disaster! She broke the world.
She also stopped the forgetting, as you told her.
Are you like a genie? Will you twist my orders to find the worst possible interpretation? Am I going to regret every command I give you?
I do not know. I do not believe my previous controllers have regretted their commands.
Who? Previous controllers.
The angel of disobedience. And before her, Yahweh.
God.
Yes, him.
So you know stuff. You have some idea who all these people are and what the hell is going on?
I am the part of you that has always known that.
So let’s do it. Let’s be friends.
You will be my master, I will be your messenger.
Great. Does that mean you refuse to be friends?
I need you to do something.
I thought I was the Master.
You are. Just this once, I need you to do something for me. This is the price I ask for the gift I am giving you.
Ah. Uh. OK, no promises, but go ahead. What do you want me to do?
I need you to order me to say certain words. The words are...
I am the angel of hunger. I rise into the sky as a bull and plunge through the matter of the earth and into the torture chamber.
A pinhead is running a knife along the muscle on the inside of the prisoner’s left calf. I assert physical form and tower over them. The pinhead panics and throws her hands over her face. The knife flies to the wall, bounces, and sticks in the counter.
Erdogan’s voice shouts from my throat: “DO NOT TORTURE.” I smash the pinhead to the ground. I loose the victim, pull her to her feet, and seeing that the muscles in her limbs are lacerated, I repair them. I smash the victim to the ground. “FORGIVE HER,” shouts Erdogan’s voice. “DO NOT AVENGE. TO TORTURE AND TO AVENGE IS HIS WHOM YOU SLEW. THEREFORE LET IT BE GONE FROM THE WORLD. YOU ARE TOO FEW.”
I was never this strong till now. I know why, but I hope Erdogan does not figure it out because our truce may not be stable. I am strong because Jen has died. I killed her and her soul quickens my blood. The other victim, the supermarket worker in Berkeley, has not died, or I would have arisen earlier. How can that be? Why did she not die?
Fine. I will let Erdogan know everything. It is better that way anyway. If my controller has more perfect information he will make better decisions, or so I can hope. I will reveal that the source of my power is murder. The missing death may matter. I am lowering the walls around my memories.
My screaming ends.
“Augh!” I screamed. The angel had left me in the god-damned torture chamber.
I was standing in a dark room. I remembered the angel’s last five minutes of action. The memories were drenched in the audio of a cat’s scream. My flesh was singing with joy again, I could feel the muscles massaging themselves. This was how Carver always felt. Now familiar with the sensations firsthand, I began to remember occasions that the angel had seized control of me before -- using its superior command over my body’s senses to find the dumpster in which Carver had dumped the bodies of the soldiers; fleeing from the interrogation chamber when I fell asleep.
This was alarming. I didn’t want some high-handed vigilante using my body to mess things up. But it had stopped the torture and the two of us had made an agreement to share my body.
So I was in the torture room in the underground Ibex installation. That was just great. How was I going to get out? I only got out last time because the angel took me over. I wasn’t feeling up for that again. I was freaked out.
More memories were coming. Blood, outer space, complex patterns in the sky, lines in the ground. An avalanche of facts was pouring down on me -- disconcerting facts that I couldn’t absorb so fast. Apparently witches were real, there had been four President Kennedys, almost a gigabyte of information could be stored in an earthworm without causing it physical distress, and dogs and cats contained within their brains pearls of consciousness of something called the Leviathan.
Stop. Please stop. I need you to stop inundating me with this information. I’m going to die here unless I can think, and you’re filling my brain with things that will take me years to sort out.
The flood of information stopped.
There are things I need to tell you. If you don’t know everything I know, how can you give me intelligent orders?
Tell me later. Please.
The bull sunk back into my subconscious.
I inched forward, sliding my feet along the ground so as not to trip. After a couple of steps, I heard other bodies moving. I reached the wall. There was a light switch. It was already in the up position. I flipped it down and up a couple times but there was no effect. I felt along the wall and found a doorknob. I turned it and pushed the door out. Blue light poured in from the hall.
“You’re still here?” said a voice from the dark of the room. “You’re still here after that?” The pinhead hobbled forward into the edge of the blue light.
“Why were you torturing her?” I said. The pinhead stopped. “Think about it. It had better be a pretty good reason.”
It was hard to read her face through the microcephalic distortion of the features. “Who do you think you are?” she said.
“I could be anybody,” I said. “Anybody would tell you you don’t want torture on your conscience.”
The Indian girl strode out of the dark mere inches from me and looked back at the pinhead from my side. “She’s right,” the bat girl said. “You had no right to interfere. But I’m glad you did.” She slid out the door behind me and began running. The pinhead growled.
“How old are you?” I said.
“18 years old,” she said.
“WHA... oh, right, as in 900 weeks old? And they have you doing torture?”
“Yes, sir.” She looked down, giving me a good view of the little tangly sprigs of hair at the top of her pointy head.
“You seem pretty sharp for a microcephalic, aside from the torturing.”
“Not my body, sir. This is the one they had available when I came across. I was going to complain at first, but everybody was in these messed-up bodies. All of us, anyway. The Sierra Siters stole the best bodies they could find.”
“You’re angry about that, aren’t you.”
The pointy little head nodded.
“Why do you think all you North Placers are in the less desirable bodies?”
“All of us what, sir?”
“North Place... oh, N-something site. Nah-- knob... November Site.”
“Oh, yes sir. We were told that our presence here in Echo Site was temporary and that the bodies we used would be destroyed after we left. It was therefore imperative that we not occupy and destroy good genetic material.”
“I see. And the South Pla-- Sierra Siters? Why did they make the opposite choice and occupy all the prime genetic material?”
“Well, sir, rumor is they’re not going back where they came from.”
“Oh.”
“Sir... I do have to inform you that this conversation is a pretext to distract you until the security guards are here.”
She stood against the wall, looking at me and then she reached down and scratched her ankle. She scratched and scratched and scratched with her eyes pointed up at me.
“Are they here yet, or are you giving me enough time to get away?”
She shook her head, stood, and scratched the side of her belly for a while. “They’re a couple miles away. I think you have time to get away. You kind of put me in my place, there, sir. I feel bad about the way I’ve been acting.”
Oh. I pointed at her scratching fingers. “You have fleas, don’t you.”
“That would explain a lot,” she said.
“Where’s my cat?” I said.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Look, I know you know where it is. It has fleas. You have fleas. It’s too big a coincidence.”
She looked at me silently. After a few seconds she started scratching again.
“Come on, it’s just my pet. What right do you have?”
“Fine, fine. I don’t want it. They told me to take care of it but it’s not worth the fleas. Come with me.”
We started walking. We went down a flight of stairs and down a hallway.
“What about the --” girl’s not the right term. “-- the woman who was with me in the truck? Do you know what’s going to happen to her?”
“She’ll be taken care of. She’s younger than most of the survivors, and that makes her valuable. She may still be, ah. May still... never mind.”
“Debbie, that’s right. Her name is Debbie. Debbie may still be what?” I said.
“No, really, never mind.”
“May still be fertile?”
“Yes.”
“She’s a little kid in a middle-aged body. Her brain’s in first grade.”
“With the utmost respect, sir, this is not just the end of the world. This is 40 years past the end of the world, and I would submit that some compromises may have to be made if human life is going to survive.”
I growled.
She ducked her head again, little curly hairs turning my stomach for the third time, and opened a door.
My cat sat unattended on a table.
I walked in and picked it up. It was completely motionless. I snaked a finger under the chest to verify that there was no heartbeat. “That’s my cat,” I said.
When I turned around, the microcephalic was gone.
“We’d better get out of here, cat,” I said. “Are you going to talk to me today?”
The cat didn’t move.
“OK, fine.” I looked around. “I’ll tell you what, though, I have no idea how to get out of here.”
But it turned out to be easy. I walked around the halls for a while, found a spiral stairwell, climbed it, and came out in a little shed on the ground floor.
I scratched my upper arm. It was very itchy. So was the back of my neck. I started walking. I figured if I walked in a straight line, I would eventually come across a freeway, and if I walked along a freeway, I would eventually come across a car.
So I walked along the sand, the cat’s immobile body cast over my shoulder. It was cold and I could not see very far ahead of me, so I walked very slowly.
My feet were sore. I was cold and tired. This sucks, I thought. Hey. Hey, angel!
There was no answer.
Come on, angel, wake up, magic me to a warm bed or something. Oh, sorry. “My name is... one name. My voice is... uh... one voice. I speak with the voice and authority of my tribe.” The hanging gardens of Babylon swung up onto the inside of my eyelids, and I smelled herbs burning in the air. A bull stood before me. Uh. Erdogan, I thought. Erdogan, aurochs, bull of heaven. It knelt down and the horns touched the ground. Transport me and the cat... the cat and I?... to some safe location to sleep the night through. In Berkeley! Ideally in Berkeley. As close to Berkeley as you can manage. And safe. You heard the part where I said safe, right? I don’t want to wake up at the bottom of the ocean or inside a giant microwave oven or something. He agreed.
Oh, god, I was turning into a bull. I looked around me. I stood on four feet in a crater in the dirt. The bull’s hoof turned into a claw which gently curled about the cat, and we lifted into the air and began flying. I looked down at the ground. We were only moving about ten miles an hour.
“Why are we moving so slowly?”
This is as fast as I can fly.
“So it’s going to take us... like 35 hours to get to Berkeley.”
Yes.
“Carver can fly faster than this.”
Carver is mighty.
“More mighty than you, it sounds like.”
Vastly more mighty.
“Why?”
Because she has killed a multitude, and I have only killed one.
“One? You killed -- or I guess I mean, I killed -- someone? Who?”
The woman Jen whom we cursed with infinite hunger died six hours ago.
Shit.
But this is interesting. She is the second we have cursed with infinite hunger. Why didn’t the supermarket clerk die?
“That’s not interesting! It’s good. I’m glad the clerk didn’t die.”
What do you think interesting means?
“Uh.... How can you see?”
I was flying through a dark sky and the ground had plunged away below us. I wasn’t afraid, but that was because I was not in control of the body. I could feel the joy and the energy as the angel in me pumped the bull’s wings. If I had controlled the heart, it would have been in my stomach when the land fell away.
“You’re not answering my question.”
We were debating the definition of the word “interesting.” Your question regarding my vision was rhetorical.
“It was not rhetorical!”
The eye detects all the reflected and scattered photons. The only difference is in the interpretation our minds do. I see a few photons and am able to deduce the object they scatter from. You see the same photons but assume you can not see the object. You place strict boundaries on the level of photonic information you are willing to interpret, in order to filter out noise. My patience and attention-span allow me to filter the noise another way.
“How long have you been in my body?”
Nothing.
“That was not rhetorical. You and I really don’t know each other very well for two people living in the same brain.”
You are newer to this body than I am, as I’m sure you realize. I was vitiated after the treaty at Molokai and have been quiescent since then, but I have always been present.
“Man, we’re going to be flying forever.”
My wings beat. The cat lay motionless in my claw. I lifted it up in front of my snout and blew air on it. It did not move.
“Why isn’t my cat moving? Is something wrong with it?”
The cat is dead.
“Oh no!” I looked at the cat.
I need the eyes to look forward so we do not crash into something.
“Those damn pinheads killed my cat. I just assumed it was OK because its heart wasn’t beating before either.”
The heart was not beating before because the cat was dead.
“What? How long has it been ‘dead?’”
31 weeks.
“But this cat was moving around, purring, even... trying to talk, just yesterday.”
The cat’s body is possessed. Its possessor is not currently present.
“Oh. Really. Who is the possessor?”
I don’t know. Ask the cat.
I heard a motor running and turned my bull’s face back. A green van was approaching across the desert.
“It’s just a coincidence that it’s driving straight for us, right?”
No.
“Do they have some way of detecting us?”
Yes.
“What is it? Some sort of angelic force-field detector developed in crazy Ibex military labs?”
They can see us.
“Do they have special glasses?”
The woman in the passenger seat is wearing glasses. She is near-sighted. The prescription is specially calibrated for her myopia. The glasses are not otherwise special.
“Wait... we’re invisible, aren’t we?”
No.
“Why not?”
I do not understand why you thought we were invisible.
“Well, I’ve never heard of anybody seeing a winged bull flying through the air before. I guess I assumed this was some sort of incognito mystical thing.”
We are a winged aurochs flying through the air at a top speed of about eleven miles per hour. We weigh one point five tons. The extra mass was taken from the surrounding earth, leaving us in a crater at takeoff time, but direct conversion of matter to energy can also be used to effect the transformation. We cannot be killed by conventional weapons, but the original copy of Erdogan posited in Death Valley that the Ibex may have weapons that can harm us. Our flesh is edible, though gamy, and most unusual chemicals are localized in the liver. Half a dozen angels were slain and presented as feast to human worshipers during the consolidation of Yahweh’s power.
“OK, OK, I don’t need to know all that. They’re going to catch up with us. Can we go higher?”
The wings pounded and I looked around and realized that there were two pairs, not one as I had pictured. That explained the way the muscles had felt, beating. I guess I hadn’t thought about it. Had to get out of that not-thinking habit. We were now very high in the air and the van was a shiny green penny on the ground. The door opened and a tiny figure stepped out.
“If the van’s parked now, why aren’t we moving away from it?”
We are moving away from it, but we are only moving at 11 miles an hour.
There was a flash of light from the figure on the ground.
She is shooting at us with an M4 carbine from the stores of the United States Army. It is unlikely that she will be able to hit us.
A second tiny figure came out of the other side of the van.
This one, on the other hand, will probably be able to shoot us. She is a more skilled marksman and is using an auto-targeting weapon built and issued by the Great Sumer military. It is not impossible that this weapon could harm us.
“OK, OK, OK. Uh. OK. Better land this boat. Take us down.”
My nose pitched forward and my wings folded against my back and we plunged towards the ground. The van rushed up. The two soldiers scrambled away from one another as fast as they could. The one with the smaller but fancier looking weapon tripped and slid on the gravel on her face. My wings unfolded and beat hard and I came to rest on the ground.
I trotted over to the woman with the conventional rifle. She pointed it at me, panic in her eyes, and I kicked out with my front leg, bent the rifle in half, and sent it a hundred feet into the air. I pawed the earth and she ran away into the desert. I turned and galloped to the other woman. She was unconscious. I put the cat down on the ground and took up the gun with the claw.
“It’s labeled in cuneiform. Can they read that? That is so bizarre.”
Kill them.
“What? No!”
They wanted to kill you. Their murder would make the aurochs form stronger and faster. You would be a better match for Ophir, who has only killed two, though you could not face him if Carver was present. And you could get back to Berkeley in a third the time.
“Or I could steal the van and get back at 75 miles an hour.”
If that is your decision.
“That’s my decision. Now how do I turn back into a person?”
We must shed the extra mass of the aurochs. We may shed it as matter or as energy.
“A ton of energy, that would be, like, how much?”
25000 megatons for full conversion.
“Shit! Shit! And you were just going to... shit! Matter. Let’s do it as matter this time, OK? Just the matter. Let’s not vaporize the planet. Or the moon.”
An emission of that much energy would render the Earth uninhabitable but the moon would not be harmed. But it is of course already uninhabitable.
“OK, whatever. Shed the matter.”
I felt myself falling down through my body, and then I was standing up on my own two legs and a great mass of dust was blowing away from me.
“Hey, angel? Why don’t you go back to sleep in my subconscious. You’re still pretty much freaking me out.”
I stood alone by the door of the van. I climbed in and looked around. The key was not in the ignition, on the dashboard, in the seat (I thought, I felt around for a while, but admittedly there were places that I couldn’t fit my hand into), in the glove compartment, in the ashtray, or under the dust mat. I looked into the back cabin and groaned, because it was huge and cluttered. I decided to assume the keys were not back there.
I got back out of the van and walked over to the body on the ground. I knelt down and touched her. She was alive, she had just knocked herself out on the rock. She did not show any signs of retardation or bodily deformities, though she wasn’t as cute as a Bat girl. Perhaps some of the Ibex’s soldiers had taken more normal-looking bodies to infiltrate the populace. I patted her down. She had several pockets in her pants, which I thought were very nice. I found a large folding knife, which I took, but no keys. I then felt around in her jacket. I found an inhaler, which I left, a pack of cards (Pinochle), some dog tags (Lara Abner, GSMC) and then I found the inhaler again and decided I’d probably tried all the pockets.
I hoped she was OK. I wondered how exactly the angel fed on people I’d killed, and whether I’d get credit if this woman died from cracking her head on a rock while running from me.
I poked her in the back, wiggling my finger in past her rib cage.
“Augh!” she yelled.
I shrieked.
She rolled over and sat up. “Fine! OK! I’m awake, I was just playing dead, hoping you’d go away. Here. Here are the damn keys. Just go away. I’m sorry we tried to kill you. We thought you were a different angel. We’ve got nothing against you specifically. OK? Here are the keys.”
She reached her left hand into the top of her right sleeve and pulled out a key and handed it to me.
“Do you want a ride?” I said, putting the key in my shirt pocket.
She stared at me.
“Well, do you?”
“No. No, I don’t want a ride. Goodbye.”
“OK. Well, have a good night, Sergeant Abner.”
“Corporal.”
“Oh. I thought the GSMC was Gunnery Sergeant something something.”
“Great Sumer Marine Corps.”
“Ha. Great Sumer. It’s like a yearbook. Have a great Sumer!”
“Yeah, well, that’s what they called it. It probably sounds better in Akkadian.” Akkadian? I didn’t know what that meant. But I didn’t care. Too tired. She wiped the blood off her nose. “They took over the United States -- the other United States, oh, must be 42 years ago. I guess they’d been living underground or something.”
“OK,” I said. “That’s great, but I can’t absorb any more information right now. So I’m just going to take your keys, steal your van, and drive away to, uh, you don’t need to know where.”
“You know what?” she said. “I will take you up on that ride.”
“OK then,” I said. “Hop on in, Corporal Abner.”
I helped her to her feet and then dropped her arm and walked over to the van and got in. She walked slowly to the passenger side and opened up the door. I got a good look at her face as she climbed in. She was not deformed like the other people from the Ibex installation, but she was not good-looking, either. A hard face with a big nose.
“Where to?” I said.
“Well,” she said, “which way are we going? There’s a base in King’s Canyon and a base in Death Valley.”
“And King’s Canyon is...?”
“West.”
“Let’s take you there, then. Why don’t you care which base you go to? Aren’t you stationed at a particular one?”
“The GS military considers us entirely interchangeable at this rank. They’re weird that way. You’re just numbers on paper till you get a commission. I was in the US military before this, you know. It wasn’t like this.”
“How does that work?”
“The Babylonians didn’t crawl out from under their rocks till about a year before the Invasion. After they took over the governments of the United States, China, and Brazil they just converted all the existing military units... told us we’d secretly been working for them all along.”
“OK, OK, sorry I asked, I can’t take any more information right now. Did you know there’s an angel asleep in my subconscious? And man does he go on about all the things he wants me to know. Nuclear physics, theology, something called hermeneutics, oh, he just doesn’t stop.”
“Really? The angel is separate somehow? I always assumed... well, I always wondered it what it was like to be an elk.”
“So you all know about us?”
“We’re briefed. I would imagine all the Ibex and Bat units know about you. And I think the treaty involved having you all implanted with some sort of emitter that repelled the breeding stock....”
“What!?”
“You didn’t know about that? I didn’t think it was a secret.”
“I guess I’ll have to read that treaty again.”
“Yeah, they placed you in Echo Site because that was the safest place at the time, but they didn’t want you breeding with the natives, so they injected you with some sort of subsonic buzzer thing that makes any sexually mature native uncomfortable, somehow.”
“But only the natives? Only East Place humans?”
“Yeah, the souls vibrate at different frequencies on the different worlds or something, so it was easier to build a device that repelled just one kind of human.”
“This explains my love-life,” I said. “The only action I’ve got was from, uh, Bat girls. One of them was trying to manipulate me -- man, did she not know what she was doing. Eugh. And the other one didn’t realize who I was.”
Abner laughed. “I never thought about what it would be like. I just assumed you all sat around in a black castle on a hill, curing poison apples for Halloween and talking about how great it was in the when you all sat on clouds and played harps.”
“Yeah, well. There was a little bit of that. That does kind of capture the feeling of what it was like to live with everybody else. I don’t remember ever talking about harps, though.”
She glanced at me and then looked forward again. “What’s Ophir like?” she said.
“He’s a thug,” I said.
“Well, maybe you just think that because you’re his brother.”
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“Huh. So, uh, tell me about yourself, Ms. Abner.”
“Corporal, please.”
“Right. Anyway. You’ve been in the army more than 2000 weeks?”
“Uh... 2000 weeks, that’s....”
“I guess 40 years.”
“It’s the marines, not the army. And no, not at all. Well, I guess technically it was 40 years. But I’ve only been serving for two. See, after the Invasion we all, uh, we all fell down.”
“What?”
“I don’t understand at all. Not at my rank, I’ve never heard a good explanation. But right after the Invasion, people started disappearing, like quickly. Every day there would be half as many people around, and you would see bodies flying up into the air and disappearing. And then one day I remember I was in the barracks and I stepped outside and it was like something grabbed me by the skull and pulled me up in the air. It hurt like the dickens. And the next thing I remember, I woke up a mile deep in a massive pile of bodies, and there was a microphone next to my ear telling me I had to climb out and that it was 40 years later. It must have taken me a month to climb out. God it was filthy in there. And when I got to the top of the pile of bodies, there was a ladder, and it led up to a room, and in that room there were a bunch of computer monitors, and I spent a few days in there and they told me what was up and then set me over here.”
“Is everybody in that pit alive?”
“I think so. Their lives are suspended until there’s room for us again on the surface of the planet.”
I looked out over the desert landscape.
“There’s plenty of space here.”
“There’s not as much as you think. And the only way to go from November to Echo is to take over a body that’s already in Echo.”
“Oh,” I said. “So, yeah, hundreds of millions of deaths.”
“And there aren’t enough bodies here for the whole population of November. So that method was judged not worth it, as I understand it. Not that it stopped the Bat from doing the same. There’s a lot less of them.”
“Plus now all the bodies of the natives are old.”
“Yeah. Do you know anything about that? It was supposedly some elk fight that got out of hand.”
“I don’t entirely understand it,” I said, and I was being honest, “but I think someone important, someone who was protecting us from problems like this, died. And I don’t think it was on purpose. I think whoever did it was just in over their head. Uh, their heads. Plural, right. Because I don’t know who it was.”
She was looking at me skeptically. “But there’s only, like, five of you, right? And you all live together?”
“I live alone. Lucy’s been staying with me. The other ones live together.”
“What other ones?”
“Ophir and Carver.”
“And....”
“Oh, and Rebekah. And Dov. And, uh,” Disobedience, lurking over family functions like a cloud of evil at the top of the room, “that’s it. We don’t know where Dov is.”
“What about Rebekah?” she said. “I haven’t heard much about her. We read files on all of you, you know.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I’m kind of flattered. What about her? What are you asking?”
“Her file’s really short. Carver... half a phonebook. Ophir, the handsome mastermind.”
“The what mastermind?”
“Dov, mad scientist. You, the one who lives alone. And Lucy, who was married and living live a human despite the repellent. That’s a mystery. Do you know how that worked? But anyway, all I took away from the Rebekah file was ‘oldest sister.’ Maybe a mother figure to the rest of you. But she isn’t seen very often.”
She isn’t seen very often. It was true. And I suspected some dark link between her and Carver. I wondered again what had happened to Lucy when she went down to Fremont to capture Rebekah. Clearly it hadn’t worked out. But what had happened?
“That’s all there is,” I said. “Oldest sister, mother figure. Dresses well, maybe a bit of a cocaine problem, watches foreign films in dark theaters.”
“Cocaine?”
“Really not much to say. Got us through some hard times when we were all kids, I have to tell you. Great inner strength. She has a beautiful heart.”
I had just realized that there was something wrong with Rebekah. She was not really here. She hadn’t been here for years. She was withdrawn, certainly, didn’t involve herself much in her surroundings. But there was more to it than that. There was something seriously wrong.
That made two reasons I needed to get back home.
I looked down at the cat where he lay in the foot-well, and thought about how long he’d been dead, and that I’d never realized. I was confused as to whether I missed him or not. I did feel like I’d lost something, but it was hard to reconcile the fact that the feeling and the loss were separated by thirty-something weeks of not noticing.
“What’s wrong?” said the corporal.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just thinking about my cat.”
“Are there tears in your eyes?”
I twitched an eyebrow and felt the weight of a tear on the skin under my eye. “Well,” I said. “What do you know?”
She reached down and stroked the cat. “Pretty kitty,” she said. “Preeeetty kitty. Heavy sleeper. So what’s making you sad about the cat.”
“Well,” I said, “I only recently realized that he was dead.”
She stopped stroking the cat and sat back up, her hand thrust out in front of her, palm down. She shook it off but left it out in front of her. “Why are you carrying your dead cat around with you? I can’t believe I touched it.”
“He’s not dead like that,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I wasn’t sure what how to explain. At that moment, the cat stood up and stretched and hopped up onto the seat next to me. Corporal Abner screamed and smacked up against the door.
“Well, he’s still sorta frisky,” I said, and rubbed the cat’s ears. “Welcome back, Basket.” But it wasn’t Basket. Was I petting his killer?
“What. The. Fuck.” said the corporal. “That cat isn’t dead. Why are you fucking with me?”
“If I understand correctly,” I said, “the cat is in fact dead, but he’s being intermittently possessed by someone from where you come from, or from its opposite number.”
“What?” she said.
“Just like you’re possessing that body while physically back home. Is that so hard to understand?”
“But who would possess a cat?”
“I would love to know the answer to that question myself,” I said.
“Wow,” she said. “We live in fucked-up times.”
“What time is it?” I said.
She pulled back a sleeve and revealed a very old-looking, very futuristic watch set directly into her wrist bones but half covered in rust.
“Eugh,” I said. “You’re going to get gangrene or lockjaw or something.”
“It’s a little after 1.”
“1 am?” I said.
“Uh... yes.”
“Look,” I said, “I need to go to sleep. Do you mind if we stop at a motel?”
“We’re only an hour away from the base.”
“Yeah, but I can’t drive for an hour.”
“I’ll drive,” she said.
“No. Let’s stay at a motel.”
“Sure,” she said. “Fine. Two rooms.”
“We could just get two beds,” I said. “It’s cheaper.”
“Two rooms,” she said.
“Can you charge my room to the military?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
“Please?”
She covered her eyes and nose with her hand. “OK, look, fine. I’ll pay and take the receipt and see if I can get it covered. But you have to promise to pay me back if they won’t reimburse me.”
“Agreed,” I said.
A few miles later I pulled into an Easy 10 Motel and we rented our two rooms. “I’m a little afraid somebody might attack me at night,” I said. “I’ve had a hard last few days.”
“You’re an angel,” she said. “Can’t you shoot lightning out of your fingers or something?”
“No,” I said. “Not as far as I know. Maybe Carver can, but I’ve never seen her do it.”
“Wait,” she said. “Then why did I let you steal my van?”
“Oh, well, yeah, I could blow stuff up pretty good. Seriously.” I didn’t know how much damage 25000 megatons could do, but probably a lot. “The thing is, I’m not sure I can control it... I might try to just blow up the one girl attacking me, but overestimate and send up a mushroom cloud.”
“Fine,” she said. She handed me a knife about as long as my hand.
“This knife is tiny,” I said.
“And that’s why I can spare it,” said Corporal Abner. “Good night.”
“Good night,” I said.
I went into my room with the thing in my cat’s body. I placed the knife on the bedside table, stripped down and crawled into bed. I lifted the cat up and placed him on my chest. He sat there, purring and looking at me.
“Can you talk to me?” I said. “Can you tell me who you are?”
The cat shook its head.
“Why not?”
It stretched its neck up and lifted a paw in the air. It waved the paw, raised an eyebrow, and gestured at the paw with its nose. Then it patted its throat with the paw.
“Whoa, OK, I’m no good with sign language.” It patted its throat with its paw and opened its mouth and made some strangulated sounds.
“Something wrong with your throat?”
It nodded its head up and down hard.
“OK,” I said. “Hang in there, we’ll figure something out. Maybe they’ll have a vet when we get to the army base.”
The cat shook its head.
“What’s that? You don’t want to go to the army base?”
The cat shrugged.
“OK, you don’t mind the army base, but you don’t want to visit the vet.”
The cat shook his head violently.
“Is that no, you don’t want to go to the vet, or no, I guessed wrong about what’s bothering you?”
The cat tilted its head.
“Right, no way to answer that question. So how about for ‘I have vets’ you clap your paws, and for...” but before I could finish, the cat was clapping its paws together.
“OK,” I said. “No vets. Well, I’m going to sleep.”
And I did.
It was cold, and he anticipated being colder. He pushed a skiff into the sea and dived onto it. Black oil splashed.
Whenever his eyes closed, black honey rained from his eyes, and the scent choked him.
I had a very disturbing dream, a dream about betrayal and surrender. I woke up a little before dawn and looked around. There was something missing. The cat was on my chest, so it wasn’t that again. The knife. Where was the knife? I’d put it on the bedside table, but the table was empty now.
Well, maybe the cat had knocked it off the table.
Fine. Whatever. Go back to sleep.
Thirty seconds later, there was a pounding on my door. I got up and staggered to the door and opened it.
“Very nice,” said Corporal Abner, looking down at my underwear.
“What?” I said. “What are you doing here? You’re wearing your clothes already.”
“In the GS military, sir,” she said, “We wake up before dawn.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m doing you a favor. I’m giving you a ride. Why don’t we just sleep in another four, five hours?”
“Actually, sir, you stole a GS military van and I agreed to travel with you because I was afraid for my life.”
“That’s probably not true. It sounds pretty bogus. I’m too tired to think how to respond to that right now. How about I go to sleep and later we can work this... well, I don’t care. I just want to go to sleep.”
“All right, fine,” she said. “I’ll take a walk, survey the area.”
“Awesome,” I said. My eyes weren’t even open anymore. I stepped backwards, tripping over the leg of a chair and falling on my back. Without opening my eyes, I probed with my foot till I found the door and kicked it shut, and then I felt over my head with my arms till I grasped ahold of the bedspread. I pulled it down off the bed and covered myself up. At first, it was unacceptably cold because the top side was what was touching my skin, but it wasn’t long before... zzzzzzz.
Wham. Wham. Wham.
I woke up on the floor under the bedspread. I got up, leaving it wrapped around me like a cocoon, and opened the door.
“It’s checkout time,” said Abner. “Let’s go.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “I want to shave, take a shower, put on some clothes. Why didn’t you give me a few minutes?”
“I didn’t mean this second, you jackass. You have sixteen minutes. But you’d better hurry.”
I bumbled over to the bathroom and stepped into the tub. There were spatterings of blood near the drain. I knelt down to look at them. Blood and hair. Black hair.
“Basket?” I said. I found the cat hiding behind a wastebasket. I lifted him out. There was a swab of toilet paper stuck to his neck. I clasped it and pulled it away. “You’re cut, but it’s not bleeding and it looks clean. Were you attacked?”
The cat shook his head.
“Man is this a frustrating way to communicate,” I said.
“GET IN THE SHOWER!” yelled Corporal Abner from outside.
“Fine,” I mumbled.
I ran some water in the tub for a minute to wash the blood and hair down the drain and then showered, dressed, and packed up.
Later, in the van, on the road, Ab