It's Not the End

by Matt Moore

  An explosion spit light and heat, gravel peppering against his helmet. Someone screamed: “My leg! My fucking leg!”

  On their own, hands dug for the bottle, opened it, and popped a pill into his mouth.

  Each concussion lasted longer, deeper. Ancient gods furious he could plumb the depths of their ancient wisdom.

  When the sound of men and machines replaced the explosion of shells, he stood, brushed himself off and wandered out into the base’s grid work of gravel roads. They stretched forever, straight but also curving along ancient, forbidden geometry. He moved quickly, purposefully, like the soldiers and vehicles around him. Shouted orders and reports on damage and causalities echoed down the chasms of his ears. Slow motion fires lit up the compound, sirens sounded, people screamed. He stumbled over a piece of rebar, scorched black, and picked it up.

  Suitably high, either his courage stoked or fear deadened, he made his way out toward her shed, hoping he moved like someone with purpose and not a junkie starting his high.

  Reaching the shed, he slid the rebar into the lock’s clasp, settled one end against the frame, and yanked. The lock popped and he opened the door.

  An ozone smell and something else—fleshy, meaty—made this stomach roll. Running his hands over the wall, his eyes and ears told him something moved just as he flipped the light switch.

  Fleshy things skittered and flopped across the floor. A creature of eight arms, joined at the shoulders, moved like a spider, palms slapping as it scampered toward him. Two legs led up to a metal box, a head emerging from its top, strode back and forth. A torso without a head, but arms emerging from both shoulders and hips, marched in a circle. On tables along the walls, more of these things moved among tools, scraps of machinery, vials and beakers, rolls of that fine silver wire.

  She’d slipped him more powerful pills, Teller told himself. Fucking him over. An intense hallucination, fuelled by what he’d seen on her tablet. If what he’d seen on the tablet had even been real—

  The door clicked shut. A thing of three legs meeting in a swollen torso wobbled at the door, one of its three arms pressing it closed.

  Not realizing he’d wandered into the middle of the room, Teller turned 360 degrees, the tables bowing and sagging. A creature of two hands, attached at the wrists, with a single eyeball perched where the hands met, flitted across it.

  “Who are you?” something asked.

  It was the two legs and head.

  “What the fuck?” spilled out of Teller’s mouth. “No. Nonononono.”

  The two legs and head tottered toward him, the arm-spider following. Something in the legs-head monster whirred. “You should not be here.” It whirred again. “Doctor said so.”

  Teller backed up toward the door, not sure how he’d deal with the tripod that guarded it.

  Whirring. Some kind of fan. That’s how it spoke without lungs. “You shouldn’t be here without Doctor’s permission. Doctor said we must keep her secret. No one can know.”

  The arm-spider rushed him, six arms propelling it, the front two extended.

  How does it see? shot through Teller’s mind, taking a step back before the arm-spider was on him. Front arms wrapped behind Teller’s knees, the rest pushing forward. Teller went down hard, pain shooting up his tailbone, shocking him out of his high. A second set of arms wrapped around his legs. The two-hand thing climbed down the table. Something he didn’t see skittered across the floor. Things of all shades of flesh crawled and slithered.

  His eyes fixed on silver threads joining the arms together. He swung a fist down on where they met and felt hard, sharp edges beneath the skin. Its grip weakened for a moment, but a third pair of arms grabbed him, the front pair shifting to reach around his waist. He swung again, loosening its grip, allowing him to roll over, pinning it squirming beneath him. If he could crawl for the door—

  A blur of motion. Something small sprang at him. The two-hand thing, headed for his throat. Teller managed to catch it. He yanked at the hands—one thick and covered in coarse black hair, the other smooth and delicate. A few silver stitches at the wrists popped, releasing grey-black liquid. The thing’s fingers twitched in Teller’s, the eyeball darting back and forth. He shifted his effort to snap it like a twig. With a wet crunch, the stitches ripped free from the skin, spraying the grey-black liquid, and the hands went limp. Teller tossed them across the room. A two-foot length of stitched-together finger joints snaked around where the hands landed and closed on Teller.

  Fynn’s voice: “Stop!”

  The snake halted, curling into a coil. The arm-spider, still trapped beneath him, ceased squirming. Teller kicked it off.

  The head-legs whirred and said, “Doctor, we were doing as you—”

  “I meant him!” she screamed. “Tell me what you’re doing here.” The things circled around Fynn as she moved into the room.

  “You’re insane!” Teller shouted, getting to his feet.

  “Answer me! Answer— Oh no!” She sobbed, sinking to her knees and cradling the remains of the two hands Teller had ripped apart. “What did you do?”

  “You’re—” he began, stumbling backward toward the door. Words failed him.

  “You’re high,” she stated, laying the hands down gently. Almost lovingly. “Doesn’t matter what you think you saw.”

  Teller reached the door, the cool night like a loving caress. He headed toward the compound. Reds and golds danced on the shed’s sides from the fires.

  “Who would believe you?” Fynn called after him. “In an hour, Colonel Brice will know you’re addicted to pills and suffering hallucinations.” After a moment, she added: “I’ll protect you.”

  The offer made Teller turn.

  But Fynn was talking to her creations. “I’ll make sure no one finds you,” she said before shutting the door.

  Teller headed for the administrative building at the far end of the compound. She’d tell, he knew. He had to go to Brice first. Tell his side. He jogged a dozen steps, stumbled and vomited into the sand. After the final wretch, he looked back at the shed. Light spilled out around the door’s edges. Shadows of things horrible and inhuman moved across a narrow window high on the wall.

  He stopped between two tents, cloaked in shadow, spitting bile. How much of a fall would he take for the revenge of exposing Fynn? He’d have to admit to being on pills, stealing them, everything. Even implicate Sallen.

  What if Brice didn’t punish her, but rewarded her? Those things were recycled soldiers. Warriors. The pills still working, he imagined a battalion of body parts scrambling across the desert toward the enemy. Hands blown off arms, then hands combining into another creature that kept advancing.

  The adrenaline rush fading, nausea’s warm, damp fingers slid around him. His head went light, cold sweat on his scalp. Fuck it. He had to tell. Come clean. Get free of her.

  Looking up, the administrative building seemed farther away, pulling back down a tunnel. Ears ringing, head light—

  —wiping sand off his face. Dawn touched the eastern horizon pink. Pushing himself to his feet, memories of the previous night flashed across his mind. He was clean, he knew. He felt it and, with sunrise at 0530 hours, it meant he’d been out almost six hours. The drugs would be out of his system.

  Ahead of him, the base moved as it always did. Soldiers walking at a brisk pace, vehicles roaring from one place to another. Overhead, drones circled, waiting for a pad to drop off wounded.

  What had happened last night?

  She must have seen or found out he hadn’t been there for the headcount in the bunker. She’d gone looking for him.

  Everything else had to be the pills. Pills cut with bad shit to really make him freak out.

  Behind him, the shed’s lights were off, its door open and banging against the outer wall in the hot desert wind. He moved back toward it, just needing to check, yet the doorway remained flat and dark, the sunrise at the wrong angle to illuminate the interior. He moved closer, slowly, finding wheel tracks leadin
g away pressed in the sand. Narrow, not too deep. A light duty jeep.

  From the doorway, shapes inside were all blessedly flat and angled. As his eyes adjusted, the shapes resolved into tables and crates, but not the elaborate set up of last night. And without the jumble of materials, there was no place for the things to hide.

  Had any of it happened? Or had she packed up her gear? But where would she take it? He knew one thing for certain—with the shed empty, he had nothing. She’d played him again, still held all the cards.

  Not sure where to go, he moved to the hospital. He had a shift that would have started at 0400 hours. The jones for a pill grated on him. Its promise of sweet oblivion called to him. Needing them to get through another shift. He dug in his pocket, knew the withdrawals he’d faced, and threw the bottle as far as he could.

  The duty sergeant gave him an earful. There was a load to go to the incinerator. Teller grabbed the cart and took the elevator to the lower level, wondering if Fynn would be waiting with another bottle.

  The elevator doors opened and he wheeled the cart forward. In the shadows, he fought to ignore motion in his peripheral vision. His junkie heart, trying to scare him, make him want that fix. The scampering sounds were rats, the dull thumping just the machinery of the place.

  Rounding the corner, the door to the incinerator room hung open. Slowly, he wheeled the gurney forward. Two sets of legs lay on the ground, partially obscured by another gurney. One in scrubs, the other an MP’s black fatigues. Black medical bags covered the gurney. Most empty, but a few remained zipped shut, their contents twisting and squirming against the black plastic.

  Bile rose in Teller’s mouth. He backed out into the hall.

  She was going to destroy her children. In case Teller told. Then find another junkie. Start someplace else.

  But they’d rebelled. She made them to be warriors.

  He turned. Shadows moved and slithered. Impossible shapes, like a spider made of eight human arms, hovered in the shadows. Behind him, zippers slid open, flesh slid against plastic.

  Teller bolted for the staircase. The flat slapping of eight palms pursued him.

  In the Shadow of Scythe

  Archie placed the butt of the rifle against his shoulder and pulled the trigger. He was rewarded with the click of a finely tuned weapon.

  Across the cramped apartment’s small kitchen table, the younger man with a weightlifter’s body he knew as Timothy looked up, a 9mm bullet in his latex-gloved hand. Sweat shone in the stubble on his shaved head. “It’s good?”

  “Yeah,” Archie replied, his guts twisting. He told himself he’d just pointed an unloaded sniper rifle at a spot on the wall, but that didn’t hold back three-year old memories of lining up dying, desperate people in a rifle sight as they stormed the perimeter.

  Timothy took a swig from his water bottle and resumed snapping rounds into ammunition clips.

  Between the two men lay the suitcase, custom-made to carry the rifle, two Heckler & Koch MP5s that Archie had already checked, a dozen clips for the submachine guns, and boxes of 9mm shells.

  Using the bottom edge of his already soaked T-shirt, Archie wiped sweat from his face. He blamed the cramp in his belly on the heat and tang of gun oil hanging in the air. But opening a window meant trading hot, close air for the warm, humid air of evening. Besides, they’d been warned that even twelve floors above the city’s streets Daniel Deanne heard things.

  Archie didn’t doubt it. But at least this job was done. In another hour, the guns Archie had arranged for Timothy to buy would be out of Archie’s hands. As he began to break down the rifle, cleaning each component before fitting it into its slot in the suitcase, the weight of the moment settled on him: this weapon might kill Daniel Deanne.

  And we used to be friends, Archie thought.

  Timothy looked up. “Say what?”

  He’d spoken aloud. The pressure to tell what he’d done—to finally come clean—built. The haunted look in Timothy’s eyes told Archie the younger man had his own demons. Maybe he’d understand. “Me and Daniel. Eight years ago—”

  Timothy’s cellphone chimed. He pulled the device from his jeans. “Got the address for the transfer,” he said, looking at the screen. His brow creased. “Meeting someone new.”

  Suspicion, borne from both experience and animal fear, made the hair on Archie’s neck stand straight. “Why?” Archie asked.

  Timothy shoved the phone back in his pocket. “Doesn’t say. We should motor.” He loaded the guns, clips, and remaining ammunition into an oversized gym bag.

  Archie finished breaking down the rifle and closed the case. From its battered leather exterior, no one would know what it held. He and Timothy tossed empty ammo boxes, rags used to clean the weapons and their latex gloves into a garbage bag.

  Timothy put the water bottle to his lips and, for a moment, his hard features were replaced by the gaunt, lined face of the old man in the Venezuelan countryside. The pungent smell of blood stung Archie’s nose. He blinked and Timothy’s face returned.

  Timothy picked up the gym bag. “Ready?”

  “Yeah.” After one last check that they’d left no sign of what they’d done, Archie grabbed the trash bag and the rifle’s case.

  Timothy killed the lights, locked the door behind them, and they moved down the dingy hall. At the elevators, a full-colour glossy poster had been taped above the buttons. It showed a working-class woman leaving her apartment. Visible through the doorway, the light over the stove had been left on. Behind the woman, Daniel—curly, unkempt steel-grey hair, a smirk framed by a goatee, green cotton shirt tucked into blue jeans—leaned against the wall. The caption asked: “Is everything off? Daniel knows. Do it for Daniel.” The symbol for Daniel’s One Faith, One World campaign—a green circle circumscribing a “1”—made it clear who’d produced the glossy.

  Archie squeezed the handle of the suitcase, thinking of its contents. He’d seen that smirk before, face-to-face.

  On the ground floor, they went out the back to the alley where Archie tossed the garbage bag into an overflowing dumpster. Reaching the street, they talked about the play-offs, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes to maintain surveillance of their surroundings.

  They turned a corner to find four young men wearing green Daniel’s Disciples vests giving a cabbie a hard time. One of them slammed both fists onto the car’s trunk in time to a chant of “No-idl-ing! No-idl-ing!” while the three others took turns shoving the heavyset man around. Glare from streetlights glinted off the One Faith bracelets on their right wrists.

  Archie heart hammered, but he didn’t break stride.

  The cabbie shoved back, knocking the closest Disciple on his rear. Within seconds, the other three were on the cabbie.

  In his peripheral vision, Archie saw Timothy’s head turn. Archie asked, “You going to do something about this?”

  Around them, others watched. Some cheered the Disciples on, taking up the “No-idl-ing!” chant.

  “Would you help if I did?” Timothy replied.

  “Help!” The cabbie begged, hands outstretched as Archie and Timothy passed. “Please—” A punch to his guts silenced him. He dropped to his knees.

  Archie kept his eyes straight ahead. “Not part of the plan.” Behind him, fists and boots thudded against flesh. Then the crunch of metal panelling, the tinkle of breaking glass.

  “You’ve heard the saying about what happens when good men don’t do nothing?”

  “I’m doing something.” They reached Archie’s car—an old, gas-guzzling Japanese hatchback—and loaded the gym bag and suitcase into the trunk.

  “Yeah, and in an hour you can say you’ve done something.” Timothy got in the car, slamming the door.

  Archie said nothing as he got in the driver’s seat, started the car and headed for the drop-off.

  After a few blocks, Timothy asked: “What’d you mean before, man? You and Deanne were friends?”

  Archie scanned the road ahead. He’d been stupid to
consider telling Timothy anything. If the younger man were caught, what he knew would make it back to Daniel and Archie was as good as dead. Still, Timothy had earned a small truth. “We worked together.” But the confession brought no relief. Archie was talking to a man ready to forfeit his life.

  “Thought you didn’t want us to know nothing about you.”

  “Nothing that could identify me. I’m sure Daniel has plenty of former friends.”

  “Ain’t many who’re still alive.”

  Archie remained silent, conceding the point. He kept his eyes on the road and mirrors, looking for a tail.

  They parked next to the blue PureRun sedan at the far end of the abandoned mall’s empty parking lot and exited the car. A middle-aged woman got out of the PureRun, wearing one of those “Salvation” T-shirts with a stylized version of Daniel’s face rendered in green, beige, and blue. She stood with her hands on her hips, a posture that allowed easy access to a pistol no doubt tucked into the small of her back.

  Timothy approached the woman while Archie put his foot on the bumper and retied his shoelace, keeping watch. They were alone and unobserved except for a passing cyclist riding a pedal-converted Harley. He gave Archie and his car a dirty look.

  “You the guys to see about lightbulbs?” the woman asked, scratching her left temple.

  Timothy smiled and tilted his head to the right. “Only if they’re Daniel Deanne approved.”

  The woman held up both hands, palm up, and shrugged. “They aren’t.” She opened the trunk.

  Archie gave Timothy a look to see if he’d caught it.

  Timothy lowered his head slightly—he’d noticed. The final countersign was to hold your hands up and say, “They ain’t.”

  Archie raised his eyebrows—this was Timothy’s contact, his call.

  “Fellas?” the woman asked, hands back on her hips.