“I’m…I’m sorry,” he said, holding up his green-smudged palms and backing off slowly. “I’m terribly sorry, miss.” Horrors upon horrors. Never in his career had he inadvertently killed an innocent person, but now he had the intuition that instead of stopping two rapists, he had murdered this being’s two lovers. This race might have three sexes, for all he knew.
His head hot and swimming (was a halo of stars even now orbiting his own befuddled skull?), Ultimatum pushed on into the jungle-like growth that had swallowed up the sad remnants of Megalopolis.
-3-
Each landmark he recognized, like the Megalopolis Public Library or the Gallerium Mall – crumbling and half assimilated by plant life – was a fresh stab to the heart, like seeing a loved one in the hospital, wasted away and at death’s door.
With the vivid green light of the declining sun still casting its long shadows, Ultimatum had worked his way deeper into Megalopolis, which reared from the forest like a titan graveyard to forgotten gods. He had come upon more and more of the simply rendered stick figures, frolicking amongst the trees and shattered shells of ancient structures. His theory about three color-coded sexes (a single gray/blue “female” designation, and two “males” of orange and yellow) was dashed when he encountered purple creatures, orange, emerald green, sapphire blue, jet black, pure white, and even mottled specimens. None of the little entities moved to attack him, nor did they outright flee from him, but they did keep a wary distance. Other than that they didn’t seem to pay him much heed, so absorbed were they in doing nothing. Nothing, that is, except pluck wildflowers and throw handfuls of petals at each other, chase each other about like school children at recess, or engage in incomprehensible orgies of three to six participants. The petal-throwers would leap over these squirming tangles where they lay, and the air was full of those wild monkey-like cries of pleasure Ultimatum had earlier misinterpreted.
His body didn’t require rest, but his mind did, so at last he sat down on the granite front steps of MegaBank Savings and Loan, reminisced about thwarting Yellow Menace’s attempt to rob it – how he, Ultimatum, had appeared on the front page of newspapers across the country after rescuing that villain’s grateful hostages.
The more he observed these primitive beings at play, the less he believed them hostile aliens capable of bringing the Earth to this state. Even considering that they were the more peaceful descendants of such aliens. He supposed they might represent the evolutionary ascendancy of an animal species – such as insects – to a sentient, dominant race in the absence of humans. But his gut told him these were humans – what humans had become in his own absence, either through an evolutionary decline or perhaps, even, an evolutionary perfection to a less complex, less fallible configuration. Might even the green cast of the sun be a natural phenomenon, and might Megalopolis’ condition not signify a devastating war, but simply an abandonment? Could the city have simply become obsolete, as had his own body?
Well, his own pre-superhuman body.
Night fell, and the stick figures all settled down to sleep (or to even larger, more complex orgies as a precursor to sleep), without lighting any fires, and they apparently utilized no technology so there was no artificial light. Ultimatum could see perfectly well, however, by merely the light of unfamiliar constellations. And no stars had ever appeared so bright, so unobstructed above Megalopolis before.
Haunted, perplexed, conflicted, Ultimatum sat on those steps throughout the night, simply watching the dozing creatures. He didn’t budge through the long hours, as if he were a statue erected to his own memory, but his millennia in the Limbo Field had taught him patience no mortal man had ever needed to learn.
At last, though, toward dawn he did doze off for a while, because it was the first time in countless centuries that he had had the luxury of sleeping with his eyes closed.
A commotion awoke him, with the green rays of dawn scattered and splintered by the canopy of leaves overhead. Ultimatum launched to his feet, looking sharply toward the source of the uproar. At last, the sound of discord. It gave him a guilty feeling of satisfaction.
He leapt from the steps of the bank, raced toward the mad cacophony, and found a sizable crowd of the many-colored beings gathered around the trunk of a particularly large tree, into the bark of which strange symbols had been etched a long time ago. An immature stick figure, slighter than the skeleton of a spider monkey, clung to a high branch, while an adult creature of a devil red hue stood on a lower bough, brandishing a stick at the child. A parent attempting to discipline an errant son or daughter or what have you? It looked to Ultimatum more threatening than that, and why then the agitated crowd? Without wasting any further time on speculation, lest the adult reach the child or the child lose its footing, Ultimatum surged forward into action. A few bounding steps, and he was airborne – flying toward the tree with his metallic silver cape snapping in the air behind him.
Recalling the fragility of the two beings he had accidentally killed, Ultimatum decided at this point simply to rescue the child from its precarious perch, and then to gauge the reaction of his pursuer. If the stick-wielder backed off, he wouldn’t need to use potentially lethal violence. But if the thing was foolish enough to press him, well then he’d have no choice.
And so Ultimatum alighted on a sturdier branch below the child, just long enough to reach up and delicately close his hands around the creature’s middle. Perhaps not trusting this huge but lighter-than-air alien, the child clung to some twigs and resisted at first, but pulled away handfuls of leaves as Ultimatum gently persisted. Gracefully, he floated to the ground with the bug-like child in his hands, and set it down safely on the grass.
The crowd gathered around the base of the inscribed tree had turned to him, and in unison started up a hissing sound, maybe issuing from the orifice on the flipside of their flat lollipop heads. Many of them began shaking one twig-thin arm above their heads. Still up in the tree, the red-hued creature shook its stick above its own head and joined in the chorus of hissing.
As before, Ultimatum backed off and lifted his empty palms in a passive gesture. “What now?” he asked them. “I didn’t hurt him, did I?”
The red-colored being scrambled down the tree, and the crowd parted to let it pass through, none of them attempting to seize or berate the creature. Now the child turned and ran through the gap in the crowd, hooked its barbed appendages in the carven trunk and commenced climbing back up into the tree. The red entity chased after the child, shaking its stick again as it climbed. The group closed around the tree once more, many of the beings casting looks over their shoulders at Ultimatum. Despite their lack of features, he distinctly felt their scathing disapproval.
He sighed, retreated to a moss-covered fallen tree trunk and sat there to study them. He deduced, ultimately, that this was some religious or coming-of-age ritual. Driven on – apparently only symbolically – by the red being, the child continued higher until it broke off a thin branch of its own close to the tree’s summit. Then, both the red-colored entity and the child descended. The child stripped the leaves from its branch, then it and the red being shook their branches above their heads while from the crowd around them arose a more approving chorus of buzzing monkey shrieks.
For the next few days, Ultimatum followed this or that group of the stick beings, watching for conditions of peril that never came. Once, a large animal resembling a praying mantis with the skull of a triceratops came crashing out of the foliage, charging a group of children. They scattered from the beast, and Ultimatum leapt up from the block of concrete he’d been sitting on and dashed after the nightmarish animal. Once he’d tackled it and smartly twisted its huge head off its bony frame, the children all turned and made a shrill whistling noise. When the adults gathered and began comforting their offspring, Ultimatum realized he’d just killed the tribe’s pet or mascot. The parents looked up at him with those impenetrable black Cyclops eyes, and he wanted to hide the big dinosaur skull behind his back. Instead, he
set it down gently in the grass, raised his empty hands and backed off. “Sorry about that, kids,” he sighed.
-4-
Another night was falling, a last smudge of green on the horizon – where buildings and trees blended into a serrated edge of silhouettes. Ultimatum crouched on a projecting piece of ledge, several stories above ground level. Perched there like a gargoyle, an ugly and incomprehensible monster to the little stick people below him as they settled in for another round of orgies before sleep came.
Maybe the whole world wasn’t like this, he considered. He could take to the air, fly anywhere and explore – perhaps find others like him who had cheated time, or races of humans who had not evolved so radically. But he knew he was deluding himself. Anyway…he was Ultimatum. Everyone knew – or, everyone had once known – that Megalopolis was his home.
His super-sensitive ears picked up a tiny, stealthy crunching sound somewhere behind him. He guessed, on the shattered stairs he had used to mount this ruin. He turned casually, staring into this level’s shadowed interior. He smiled to himself thinly when he detected two creeping stick figures; he could see them even through several intervening walls. They couldn’t see him yet, but they knew he was here.
So…at last, even as infuriatingly peaceful as they were, they had had enough. He didn’t blame them for it. The fact that he found their blissful, innocent existence infuriating told him well enough that they did not need this hero.
A primal survival instinct urged him to fire heat rays from his eyes. Even through those intervening walls, he could turn the two flimsy gray/blue critters – and the machine they carried between them – to ash. But he stilled such thoughts. Turned forward again and closed his eyes.
He did not want to see them come, lest the heat rays beam from his eyes on an unconscious impulse before he could contain them.
But more importantly, this time when the Limbo Field enveloped him, he wanted his eyes to be shut. This time, he wanted to be able to truly find sleep.
PORTENTS OF PAST FUTURES
The vacant lot was positioned at a street corner, so it was open to the sidewalk along two sides. Its left-hand border was demarcated by a chain link fence, while the rear of the lot was shadowed by a high concrete wall covered in artwork. Dill didn’t know whether to classify this art as a mural, despite its consisting of a row of unrelated images, or graffiti. Since the painting was composed of images rather than gang-style tagging, he was leaning toward mural. The images included: a fish bowl occupied by a goldfish skeleton, which regardless of being picked clean sported big blue eyes with curly lashes and puckered crimson lips...a dark-skinned old woman in an armchair with a TV for her head, its screen shattered...a sandwich lying on the ground being dismantled by cranes and steam shovels, the ant construction workers wearing yellow hardhats...and a little red devil in diapers pointing his pitchfork and announcing in a word balloon: “Art is dead!”
Perusing the wall with hands on hips and wagging his head in disgust, Dill’s partner Sloane remarked, “I wish.”
“Different,” was all Dill opined.
“Doesn’t look like gang art. Must be druggies.” Sloane shambled his bulk around in a little circle, scowling at the buildings that flanked this convergence of sun-blanched streets, as if he might catch glimpse of the artists peeking down at them around the edges of window curtains.
“There’s a high school just a block over,” Dill said in his laconic tone, pointing with his chin. “Maybe students did that. Art students.”
“Druggie art students.”
Dill gestured at the body splayed in an X at their feet, as if they had been putting off this part. “What about her?”
The uniformed cops who had been the first to respond now deferred to the two plainclothes detectives, having withdrawn from the crime scene to regroup in front of their cars, which lined the curb as if to block the scene from the public. Neighborhood people had been drawn to the scene nevertheless, but hung back in little knots and clusters behind the yellow tape that had been strung like party bunting. The locals seemed to know the drill, as if they had been through this as many times as the police officers. They were all assuming their roles, right down to the forensic team as they unpacked equipment from their own vehicle. Even the spread-eagled victim played her part, the focal point, X marks the spot.
The hair of the young Jane Doe was long, black, and soaked wet – plastered to her pallid face like streamers of seaweed. Her lips were parted slightly, and bluish. The lid of her right eye was at half-mast, open just enough for Dill to see that the iris of her glazed eye was a pretty blue. Her left eye was swollen nearly shut, however, obviously from a blow.
The body lay immodestly with all four limbs flung wide, completely unclothed, the woman’s grayish nipples looking hard as if she were cold despite the sun’s hard glare. Dill’s gaze tracked the progress of two ants as they scampered along the woman’s paper-white thigh, making a run for cover in her sodden mass of pubic hair.
When he lost sight of the insects in the glistening underbrush, he lifted his eyes to the mural on the wall at the back of the lot. The ants wearing hardhats, demolishing a gigantic sandwich, carting tasty morsels toward the opening of their underground lair.
“It sure as hell hasn’t rained lately,” Sloane stated. “Killer must have given her a bath to wash away evidence. Or blood.”
“I don’t see any wounds,” Dill said. “Aside from the contused eye.”
“Maybe on her back. We’ll see when Ken flips her over.” As he said this Sloane nodded in greeting to Asamatsu, the lead forensic identification specialist, as he approached them carrying his field gear.
Dill conjured a mental image of a man with an indistinct face washing Jane Doe’s slack, dead body in a bathtub. It wasn’t his method, though, to limit his thinking to the obvious. What alternative causes might there be for the woman’s drenched state? He began turning slowly in a circle, as his older partner had done, but not so much looking at the drab buildings as through and beyond them. The Pacific Ocean was close, but not that close, and would a blighted neighborhood like this feature any community swimming pools? And if it did, how easily could a body be brought here from there, even under cover of darkness – let alone the killer having access to that pool off-hours?
Dissatisfied, he returned to Sloane’s suggestion of a bathtub. But this time he pictured that faceless figure holding the young woman’s thrashing, living body under the water.
He didn’t have to voice his opinion on the manner of Jane Doe’s death, however, because the moment Asamatsu stood over the naked corpse he remarked, “This woman was drowned.”
“Well, ain’t you young and good-looking for a policeman,” the elderly black woman noted after opening her door.
“Thanks,” said Sloane, squeezing into the apartment ahead of Dill.
“Wasn’t talking to you,” the woman muttered.
“I know that,” Sloane said.
She motioned for them to enter her dark, cluttered parlor. Atop tables and bureaus, potted plants abounded. Half of these were brittle and brown, long-dead, though she seemed not to have noticed. Her TV was on, playing a soap opera. The reception was terrible. Dill figured she didn’t even have cable.
After introducing himself and his partner, Dill said, “Mrs. Otis, you called our office and said you had something to tell us about the girl they found in the lot across the street?”
“Yes sir I do,” the old woman said. “Can I get you boys some coffee? You policeman sure do like your coffee, don’t you?”
“We’re all set with the coffee,” Sloane said, glancing around dubiously at the apartment’s dusty, grimy state. The chairs had thick layers of newspapers spread across their seat cushions as if to absorb stains. Sloane opted to remain standing.
“Please sit down, Mrs. Otis,” Dill prompted, “and tell us what you know about that girl.”
Mrs. Otis lowered herself onto one of the yellowed mats of newspaper, her arms shaking as she g
ripped the chair’s armrests. “Don’t know nothing about the girl,” she told them. “I never seen her before.” She looked up at one man, then the other. “Do you know the poor girl’s name yet?”
“No ma’am,” Sloane replied, “we don’t. She’s still unidentified.”
Dill stepped nearer to a window with dingy lace curtains, and brushed one aside with the back of his hand, gazing down into the street. On the corner: the vacant lot, strewn with the flotsam and jetsam he and Sloane had poked through extensively yesterday. Used condoms like shed snake skins, cigarette cartons, candy wrappers, iridescent shards of CDs. Like an archaeological dig, and these the items that had been unearthed, to represent some extinct and poorly-understood culture.
“Did you see the men from here, Mrs. Otis?”
“Men?” she said.
“They told us you said you saw men...leaving the girl’s body in the lot.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Sloane told her. “Remember?”
She glared at Sloane. “I remember why you’re here, detective. But I didn’t see those...people from my window. I saw them there.”
The investigators both followed the woman’s pointing finger. She was indicating her outdated television set.
“Come again?” Sloane said.
“I can only get a few channels, and they don’t come in so good,” she explained. “Some nights I’m seeing two shows at once...one on top of the other. But last night I lost my show entirely, right in the middle...got more and more snow ‘til I couldn’t see or hear nothing. But then I started to see people moving around behind the snow.”
“Snow...on the screen.”
“Yes, on the screen! You think I mean snow for real in L.A.? You think I got Oldtimer’s Disease or something?”
“No, ma’am,” Sloane sighed patiently. “Please go on.”
The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Page 15
