Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham

  Then his circuits started shutting down. Here was the sudden cooling, as if the temperature had dropped by fifteen degrees. Here was the fizzy light-headedness, the sour, spinning intoxication. It seemed to stem not from the entirely false threat of violence but from the absurdity of the threat, the pathos of tricking these sad people (who had, it must be remembered, murderous capabilities). He was all but overcome by the notion that the world was made of tricks and sorrows, of zealots and shoddiness and brutal authorities and old men in costumes.

  He was shutting down. It shouldn’t be happening. He wasn’t harming anyone directly. But here it was.

  Catareen had snatched the keys from the Jesus’ hand. Luke took a step forward, saying, “Please, please, I’ll do anything you want.” Simon was able to move, but with increasing difficulty, as if the air itself were thickening around him.

  He said, “Inside of dresses and ornaments, behold a secret silent loathing and despair.” His voice was heavy and several notes too low.

  Catareen snatched the gun from his hand, leaped forward, and pressed it between Luke’s shoulder blades.

  She said to the old man and the Virgin, “Throw me engager.”

  “Do it,” Luke commanded.

  The old man tossed the engager in Catareen’s direction. It fell on the ground at her feet, and she snatched it up with raptorish speed.

  “Move,” she said to Luke.

  He moved. Simon followed as best he could.

  Catareen got Luke into the cab of the Winnebago. Simon managed to get himself in on the passenger’s side. Catareen put the key into the ignition, started it up. She leaned out the window and shouted at the Virgin and the old man, “If you follow, we kill.”

  Then she accelerated, and they were on their way.

  “Nice work,” Luke said. He smelled slightly of pine air freshener. His fetish necklace clicked softly against his narrow, bathrobed chest.

  Catareen drove. The headlights of the Winnebago lit up the ash-colored road, the tangles of dark grass on either side.

  Simon felt himself returning. Motion seemed to help. He said, “What was that about?”

  He heard his own voice as if from a certain distance. But he was starting up again, no question.

  “That was ‘Sayonara, assholes,’ ” Luke answered.

  “Who were those people?”

  “Blots on the name of the Lord. Fools in fools’ clothing.”

  “Weren’t you one of them?”

  “Posing as.”

  The Winnebago’s headlights continued showing bright, empty road bordered by black fields. Simon saw that it was equipped with a directional. They could find Denver easily, then.

  He said to the boy, “Will they come after us?”

  “Probably. They’ll want the Winnebago back more than they’ll want me.”

  “Should we be worried?”

  “They’re not very smart or well organized. It’ll take Obi-Wan and Kitty an hour to walk to the tabernacle. I’d say go off-road and kill the lights. There’s enough of a moon.”

  “The Winnebago is all-terrain?”

  “Yep. Modified. Engine’s atomic, and the wheelbase has been hydraulicked. It’s modeled on what they used to call tanks.”

  “I know what a tank is,” Simon said.

  “Then you know we can go just about anywhere in this thing.”

  At that, Catareen turned off the road and extinguished the headlights. The Winnebago’s tires held on the uneven ground. Catareen drove into the grass, which was restless and silvered under the moon.

  “So,” Luke said. “Where are you headed?”

  “We’re going to Denver.”

  “Looking for Emory Lowell?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “When somebody says he’s going to Denver, the name Lowell naturally arises. I mean, you wouldn’t be going all that way for the rattlesnake festival.”

  “You’ve heard of Lowell, then.”

  “I’ve met him.”

  “You have?”

  “Sure. I lived in Denver for a few years, when I was younger. My mother and I traveled a lot.”

  “Military?”

  “No. Just poor.”

  They drove across the grassy flats. Every so often the lights of a compound flickered in the distance. Every so often there was a shooting star.

  After they had covered more than a hundred miles, they agreed that they should stop for the rest of the night. Catareen said, “We must to eat.”

  “Love to,” Simon answered. “If you happen to see a café out here—”

  “I find,” she said.

  “What do you expect to find, exactly?”

  “Animals here, yes?”

  “Some. Maybe. They say some of the hardier specimens are still around. Rats. Squirrels. Raccoons.”

  She said, “I go. I look.”

  “You’re telling me you think you can catch something out there?”

  “I look.”

  “By all means.”

  Catareen slipped out of the truck’s cab and seemed to vanish instantly among the trees. Simon and Luke got out, too. They strolled, stretching their limbs. Overhead, among the branches, stars were manifest.

  Luke said, “She’s probably a good hunter.”

  Simon thought of her talons. He thought of her teeth. “Who knows?”

  “I seem to remember,” Luke said, “when I was little, there was a vid on Nadian customs.”

  “That must have been an old one.”

  “I remember some rodent thing they were fond of.”

  “I have vague recollections. A gray hairless thing about the size of a gopher. Long tail. Very long tail.”

  “Right. They cooked it with some sort of hairy brown vegetable.”

  “Like a pinecone with fur. If you stewed one of those rodents with the hairy vegetable for five or six hours, you could eat it.”

  “It was one of their delicacies.”

  “Right.”

  Luke said, “They do have souls, you know.”

  “I’m not all that big on the whole soul concept, frankly.”

  “Because you’re biomechanical?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Your eyes. It’s subtle, but I can always spot it.”

  “What about my eyes?”

  “Hard to explain. There’s nothing technically wrong with them.”

  “They’re biological,” Simon said.

  “I know that. Like I said, it’s subtle. There’s just a certain sense of two camera apertures expanding and contracting. Something lensish. The eyes of biological humans are sort of juicier. Or more skittish or something. It’s not a question of the visual apparatus, more like what’s behind it. Anyway, I can tell.”

  “You’re a smart kid, huh? How old are you anyway?”

  “I’m around eleven. Maybe twelve. Does it matter? I’ve always had this heightened perception thing.”

  “Through me many long dumb voices,” Simon said.

  “The business with the poetry is interesting.”

  “I hate it.”

  “You dream, right?”

  “In my way.”

  “Do you like being alive?”

  “Let’s say I feel attached to it.”

  “Do you worry about dying?”

  “Programmed to. There’s a survival chip.”

  “Well, we’re all programmed, don’t you think? By our makers?”

  “I’m not feeling all that philosophical at the moment. So, you’re Exedrol?”

  “Yep. When my mother got pregnant with me, she took a few handfuls.”

  “Deliberately?”

  “She thought Exedrol had some kind of program. Monthly reparation checks. I don’t know who told her that.”

  “She intentionally took a drug that would deform her child?”

  “What can I say? She was always looking for a scam. She was that kind of person. I don’t blame her.”

  “Come on.”

 
; “She gave me life. Gratitude is the only appropriate response to everything that happens.”

  “Biologicals are mysterious.”

  “A couple of years ago she and I joined this group that called themselves Holy Fire. Creepy bunch, really. Those were a few of the more intelligent specimens you met back there.”

  “She was a Christian.”

  “She was whatever it took to get set up for a while. The Christians will feed you if you take the vows.”

  “Is your mother still with them?”

  “Naw. She met a guy. A roofer—the tabernacle had leaks. I haven’t heard from her in almost a year.”

  “She left you behind?”

  “Roofer wasn’t interested in fatherhood. She figured the Christians would take better care of me than she could. They’re the ones that named me Luke. Biblical, you know.”

  “Your real name being?”

  “My real name is Luke. My old name was Blitzen. Like one of Santa’s reindeer? Mom was…never mind what Mom was.”

  “And you pretended to believe in their god.”

  “Oh, I do believe in their god. I just don’t like their methods.”

  “Seriously.”

  “I couldn’t be more serious. I’ve had the Holy Spirit in me for almost a year now.”

  “Oh. Well. I guess that’s nice for you.”

  “ ‘Nice’ is probably not the best word for what it is.”

  Simon and Luke had returned to the Winnebago and were sitting with their backs propped against its right rear tire when Catareen returned. She was surprisingly quiet. There had been no footfall, no snap of twig. She was suddenly there. She held something behind her back.

  She said, “I find.”

  “You mean you really did catch something?” Simon said.

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?” Luke asked.

  Catareen hesitated. Her eyes glowed in the darkness. She said, “I fix on other side.”

  “You don’t want to show us?” Simon asked.

  “I fix on other side,” she said. She took whatever it was she held and went to the far side of the vehicle.

  “What’s the matter with her?” Luke asked Simon.

  “She’s embarrassed,” he answered.

  “Why would she be embarrassed? If she really went out there and caught something we can eat, she’s a hero.”

  “She doesn’t want to look like an animal to us.”

  “She’s not an animal.”

  “No. She’s not. But she’s not human, either. It’s strange for her, living here.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I can imagine. That’s all.”

  Soon Catareen returned. She held the neatly skinned and filleted carcasses of two squirrels. She had removed their heads, feet, and tails. Her eyes dimmed and lidded, she offered them to Simon and the boy. Her cape was flecked with blood that shone darkly against the pale cloth. Simon hoped she didn’t see him notice it.

  He said, “Thank you.”

  “We’ll be eating them raw, then,” Luke said.

  “I have an idea,” Simon said.

  He raised the hood of the Winnebago and lifted the housing of the minireactor that had been nested into the place where a battery once resided. It put out a pale green glow. The squirrel carcasses would be mildly contaminated but not enough to cause serious harm.

  He took them from Catareen. They were warm and slick. They were clearly things that had been alive. He experienced briefly something like what Catareen must have experienced, catching and killing the squirrels. There was an inner click. He could put no other word to it. There was hunger and a click, a small, electrical trill inside his chest. He looked at her.

  He said again, “Thank you.”

  She nodded. She did not speak.

  He laid the squirrel carcasses on the exposed reactor. He did it gently, as if they could feel pain. They made a soft sizzling sound on contact. They would not be cooked in the technical sense, but they would not be raw, either.

  He stood over the carcasses as they slowly darkened. They put out a smell that was wild and sharp. Luke stood close by, watching. Catareen stood farther off. Simon had seen a vid once, ancient footage of a family engaged like this. The father was cooking meat on a fire as his wife and child waited for it to be done.

  They ate the squirrels, which were stringy and bitter, with a strong chemical undertaste. Still, it was food. After they’d eaten, they slept in the back of the Winnebago. Catareen and the boy fit nicely on the two orange-cushioned benches bracketing the woodlike table-shelf. Simon, being larger, slept on the bedshelf that protruded over the Winnebago’s cab.

  He dreamed about flying women wearing dresses of light.

  They drove again at dawn. The land rolled on, high grasses and immensities of sky. The Winnebago cut a swath through the grass, which closed up immediately after. They left no trace behind. White fists of cloud roiled overhead, massing and dissolving.

  “It all looks pretty normal,” Luke said.

  “Hard to know, isn’t it?” Simon gazed out the windshield. “I mean, did clouds look like this before? Was the sky this shade of blue?”

  “I’ve heard that the meltdown was in North Dakota. There was a secret underground facility there.”

  “I’ve heard Nebraska. Near Omaha.”

  “A guy I knew told me it was the coup de grâce of the Children’s Crusade. Crazy kids with a really big bomb.”

  “No, that was over by then. It was separatists from California.”

  “That’s not what I heard. The California separatists turned out to be, like, seven or eight people in Berkeley, with no funds or anything. I have that on good authority.”

  “They were bigger than that. They definitely did the thing with the drinking water in Texas.”

  “Whatever. You know, some people think the evacuations weren’t necessary. Other people think it’s still not safe.”

  “There’s no denying that the birds are gone.”

  “Yeah, but I heard they’re reintroducing them on a trial basis. The tougher ones. Pigeons, sparrows, gulls.”

  “Maybe they should think a little harder about reintroducing some of the people first.”

  “Do you think there’s been an election?” Luke said.

  “I’ve been wondering. Yeah, I think so. The laws seem to have changed.”

  “I heard one of the presidents has been put in jail.”

  “I heard the other president converted.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  They drove on, into the day, across the vast platter of the earth. They were able to go west in a straight line, relatively speaking. The directional kept them informed about what was ahead. They skirted the towns and settlements. They had to curve around the occasional stand of trees, but for mile upon mile there was nothing but fields that had once been grazing land or cropland and were now gone to grass. They saw deer. They saw coyotes. Always at a distance, tawny spots in the green immensity, watching them from afar. The larger animals were coming back, then.

  They stopped periodically so that Catareen could hunt. She was usually successful. She would vanish for half an hour or longer and return with a rabbit or a squirrel. In her work of food procurement, Catareen was always the same. She slipped silently away, returned just as silently, and skinned and gutted her catch on the far side of the Winnebago, where Simon and the boy couldn’t see her. She presented the gleaming carcasses wordlessly. They never spoke, any of them, about what they ate. They simply ate, and Catareen buried the heads, bones, and whatever else was left. She always buried the remains. It was apparently necessary for her to do that. After the bits of the dead animals had been interred, they drove on.

  On the second night, they stopped the Winnebago atop a modest rise overlooking a pond that was as bright as a circle of mirror in the fading light. It gave back the brilliant lavender of the evening sky, a rippled and deepened version, as if the water wore a skin of pale purple light.

&n
bsp; Simon said, “I could use a bath.”

  “We all could,” said Luke.

  They went to the edge of the pond. Gnats and flies hovered over the water’s surface. It had a smell—iron and something else, an odor Simon could identify only as wetness. He said, “Hard to say whether it’s toxic or not.”

  By way of an answer, Catareen slipped off her cape, strode into the water, and dove, with the same alarming quickness that enabled her to stalk and kill small animals. She simply stood at one moment on the bank and at the next was only a discarded cape stained by animal blood. The black dot of her head surfaced twenty yards out.

  “She’s not worried,” Simon said.

  “Me, neither,” Luke said, though there was no conviction in his tone.

  Simon and Luke got out of their clothes. Luke lifted the fetish necklace over his head, shrugged off the bathrobe. He paused naked at the water’s edge. Simon noticed Luke’s pink smallness, the twists and concavities of his body. Unclothed, he resembled the skinned carcasses of the animals Catareen hunted.

  He said to Simon, “I guess it’s clean enough.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure it is.”

  Luke seemed to take comfort in Simon’s assurance, though of course they both knew Simon had no way of knowing anything at all about the pond’s level of contamination. Still, Luke seemed to derive a sense of permission. He went with a whoop into the water, throwing up droplets of spray.

  Simon stood ankle-deep in the bright water. He thought for a moment that his circuits were seizing up again—he felt the first intimations of chill and languor. But this, it seemed, was something else. This was a new sensation. It seemed to arise from the pure strangeness of finding himself at the edge of a circle of water (quite possibly polluted) with a lizard woman and a deformed boy. It was something that moved through his circuits, like shutdown but not quite; a floatier sensation, vaguely ticklish; an inner unmooring, like what preceded sleep.

  “Come on,” Luke called.

  Simon dove in. The water was warm on its surface, cold below. He swam out to Catareen and Luke.

  Luke said, “This feels so good. I don’t care if it’s toxic.”

  Catareen floated on her back, so effortlessly that it seemed she did not swim at all but was simply held by the water, propelled by it, as an otter or muskrat would be. They were swimmers, then, the Nadians. In the water she looked wilder than she ordinarily did. She looked wilder and more true. She had a creaturely inevitability. Simon understood; he thought he understood. She would be feeling the layer of warm water floating on the cold, the sensation of skimming across a shallow bowl of purple light surrounded by a darkening world as the first of the stars came out. She would be disappearing into this just as she disappeared into her dream states, her lizard song.