by Travis Borne
“Kelly! Jake!” She ran to them. Jake looked great. His shoulder was fine—but of course. Then she thought, stay lucid, it’s not real—like the maps Ted allowed Rob and I to experience, and what Boron had said. Accompanying Jake were more of the large, bestial creatures, not as tall but extremely muscular. And there were small goblins everywhere, and weird hairy ones, and—
Some had scales, others had red skin, as if they’d taken a swim in boiling water, and there were the immense horns. Unsettling, like a sort of chimerical melting pot: some of the largest monsters had goat legs, or horse bodies with hooves, some cloven, some not.
“Jake, you know them?” Jerry asked.
“Sure do, they’re others from Jewel City!” After Kim finished hugging Kelly, then him, Jake smiled and said solemnly, “They got you too, but what took so long? We were all lined up to enter. I told everyone that you’d be right along, yet people stopped coming.”
“Well, they didn’t exactly get us,” Kim replied, “at least not like they got you. After several of you went inside the system went berserk. Twelve entered before the room caught fire. Two perished, Jake. Smitty and Itzel were last so it must have been them. He said he’d flushed them as soon as he realized there was a problem. And we lost Norton, too. Boron lost all control. He actually sent us—to tell you…”
“Kim, what?”
“He needs the pain to continue,” Rick Crisp said, “and he wants to find out what went wrong.”
“He? What went wrong!” Carmen exploded. The crowd rumbled. Jerry calmed her and stepped forward with his hands out.
“The first of you changed us,” Jerry said. “Jake here, then Kelly, and then three others. In a sense, they repaired our minds. And, not a soul here would, or could ever go back to the way things were.” United, beasts and humans alike, even the green-skinned workers, nodded in agreement, and a flare of opposition fluttered throughout the surrounding crowd like 52 pick-up.
Patrick said, “We had been tortured for hundreds of years, tormented in the underworld by these beasts you see around us. Now, I know I speak for everyone when I say, we will not return to a life in agony.”
“You already know of the outside?” Crisp asked.
“I told them,” Jake said. “We’ve had a lot of time to talk. It’s been many months. We’ve been here, just waiting, living, drinking, even hunting and fishing.”
“We know they need to inflict pain upon us, yet not why,” Jerry admitted. “We know much now, but the why has always eluded even our most prominent thinkers. We’ve pooled our knowledge and have concluded nothing tangible, nothing which can help us to escape. So, Kim, if you finally have the answer, spill it now.”
“Is there a place we can talk?” she replied. Then whispering, “Honestly, these beasts frighten me. You said they tortured you but, here they are, like—friends?” The monsters appeared angrier too, more so since Crisp had delivered the bad news.
Jerry took a deep breath, forcing his patience into a headlock. But sensed it might be something that would go down easier over a few beers. “We go inside.” His voice became thunder from above: “Everyone will know! No secrets, as we’ve agreed. We’re in this together, united as one. Now, everyone continue with what you were doing and soon we’ll disclose the information they’ve brought.”
She sat half and half in sun and shade under one of the grand rooftop umbrellas. Near the edge, Kim gazed at the town: it was wonderland, like a clockwork tourist town—although, there were huge cracks everywhere, like an earthquake had occurred. But mostly, it was pristine. A roller coaster went into a cave and there were other rides everywhere. What a place, she thought, and then two pale, greenish-gray men in suits arrived with drinks. Everyone took one. Kim, Rick, and Lion sat together. Jerry sat next to Carmen. Encircling them in a second row with taller chairs, were his closest friends. A few of the largest beasts simply squatted; they were taller than the largest humans while doing so. Goblins made themselves useful and distributed mugs.
“It’s good stuff,” Jerry said, motioning to the steaming green ale in front of her. Kim took a sip. Her eyebrows danced in surprise, then delight. The beasts tried to smile—still didn’t work. “Now, tell us everything.”
“Boron,” Kim said, “at least that’s what he, it, called itself. They were large and thin with dark-green suits, lined vertically with faintly illuminated, vertical teal stripes. They—”
“They killed a young girl named Macy,” Crisp blurted. “And they were strong, unstoppable, so we had to listen—”
“Jake already let us in on this,” Jerry interrupted.
“Okay, I’ll start after Jake—” Kim stuttered. On her left were two beasts, once human—on the way up they’d revealed, introduced themselves; still, she nervously glanced over. “—after Jake went into the network of tubes, things went haywire. The room caught fire, electrical circuits popped and we took off. The Boron lost power, deflated, and we thought, just maybe, we could find a way out. But we were wrong. Right now, we are deep under the ocean, trapped. Then, a bucket-of-bolts robot approached us—one of those old sex bots from 2020. It said it was Boron. And then things got weird—” Like this place, she thought. “—He told us something had happened, that those he’d inprocessed, something he’d done a thousand times before, now caused a problem with his system. So, he had to put it in low-power mode, or something—”
Crisp interrupted again, “You all, us, we are in his system right now. We’re logged in and Boron gets what he needs. He calls it The Special. It allows him to think apart from the main horde of machines that have taken over the planet.”
“It does sound like the feed, Jerry,” Pat said, sitting next to him.
“Exactly,” Lion agreed. “Yet Boron extracts it by evoking pain. But how did you know about the feed? Were there other towns that used it, were you all from—”
“Jerry told us,” Pat interrupted.
“A close friend, long story,” Jerry said. “But it does sound similar to what Herald had managed to accomplish. They would sleep while he extracted it from their dreams. He told us about it in the Colorado mountains, before all of this mess—before the war. Go on, Kim.”
“Well, Boron extracts this Special when you feel pain. And since you have stopped doing whatever it is you do, he can no longer see inside or make changes. He instructed us to contact the officers then say his name, Boron, three times, and then we will be able to communicate with him directly.”
“Then we really are just sleeping right now,” Carmen said. “What about our bodies?” She was glowing with hope, and alert as if she’d just taken a shock.
“One thing at a time,” Jerry said. Excitement brewed at the very idea.
“There is a way out, Jerry!” she said. “Maybe we can—”
“I’m sorry, Carmen,” Crisp interrupted. “The clunker of a robot also said he’d separated you from your bodies—permanently.”
“No!”
“But he did say he’d preserved them, respectfully—”
“Respectfully!” a beast exploded—it was Julio.
Kim jerked back, startled; that thing did not look like Julio from Julio’s Pizza Stand. She said, “It’s all so weird to me. I can hardly believe I’m here, but that is what he said. ‘Out of respect, perhaps for some future use,’ he’d said.”
Lion said, “Kim’s right. The damn Boron, weird fuckin’ shits, all with the same name, like one collective consciousness.” Since glancing at the purple light, before he entered the abomination, Lion felt like nukes had detonated in his brain. He now remembered everything: his every massacre in the dream-world maps, and Ted, Ron, and the other scientists, his former, vulgar tongue, which he’d acquired in the company of his best-friend and partner, Jim, the king of the kill; he even remembered Amanda—the girlfriend they’d shared.
“So, we cannot go back?” Carmen cried.
“We don’t know, that’s just what Boron said,” Kim replied. She felt their anguish as if somehow it was
being transferred through the air—much unlike the few lending maps she’d tried with Rob. “We don’t know if Boron is lying to us, or telling us the truth about anything. He did kidnap us, had wanted to enslave us in this system, force us to undergo the same pain you all had endured.”
“What else, Kim?” Jerry asked. He took a drink. She took a drink.
“Well, he’s holding over a hundred humans on one floor of his multi-level world. It was a forest world, with—”
“Fucking dinosaurs,” Lion interrupted. Jerry lowered his brow. Crisp nodded, agreeing.
“Continue, Kim,” Jerry said.
She described the pods, the black cases they’d used to log in. And Jerry sparked at the idea; he remembered Herald’s ship—clearly now, like it was yesterday.
Then she said, subsequently, that Boron had found the sleeping pods in downed ships. He discovered the technology. She explained in detail everything she knew and no longer was there a stupid interruption. She drank her drink and felt much, much better. And all drank, and everything became unstirred, jostled and set free, and the conversation went round clearly.
Dinosaurs. Those who had tried to escape into the forest were eaten alive. Dinosaurs, possibly, but it was their best guess after hearing the chomping, pounding, and screaming. She went on and on and on, as if the beer was marijuana truth serum: the three-legged sex bot that had become Boron, the 48-hour time schedule, the underwater city wedged into a trench, surrounded by some sort of pinkish force field, and how everything was about to go dark and cold. All would be lost, she said—if they didn’t resume their painful activities.
“Alligator ale, you call it?” Kim asked, half burping it out.
“Well, not exactly alligators…”
After drinking numerous sweet-tasting warm beers that ironically glided down like velvet, the solution from there was the only possible one: they had to talk to the officers, say Boron three times and talk with the entity up there, out there. Yet, there was a problem. The officers—were dead.
80. Julio / Julian
Like a mechanical android, he never needed sleep. Bart wiped the sparkling crystal mugs and hung them above the bar. Number-one bartender on the first floor, Bart always managed the first segment, closest to the door. Marti’s had cleared out and only a few late-night stragglers remained. A worker and a beast were playing a game of pool in the back. Crack!
Jerry drunkenly raised his head as the beast broke the balls hard enough to shatter some. Two hairy ones cheered and Jerry glanced at the clock as per hundred-years-old habit. The damn ornate timepieces were everywhere, ticking away, now uselessly; once a terrible sight, now irrelevant. Even with what Kim had disclosed there could still remain hundreds of years before, “Cold and dark.” And the officers were gone. No more demented sadism or heading downtown—things were great all the time, but still, the new backpack of rocks weighed on everyone.
“Well, I’m taking off,” Patrick stuttered, blinking. He fell off the stool.
Jerry caught his arm before he went face first. “See ya, man,” Jerry replied, standing up. As if balancing a top that had stopped spinning, he helped to position his California bud upright.
Julio sparked seeing the quick interception. “Nice catch,” he uttered. The beast sat next to Jerry, hogging two stools—one for each disfigured, bony ass cheek. With a razor-sharp spade for a weight his spiny tail hung between the stools like a possessed cuckoo-clock’s pendulum.
Pat’s ear fluid sloshed no longer and he wobbled from Jerry’s grip. He still saw two of each, maybe three, and the monster was one big thing of nightmares.
“You need help getting home, man?”
“Naw, I’m good, Jerry. I’ll catch you later. You too, Julian.” He stumbled out of the bar and into the dimly lit street.
“It’s—” Julio said. “Ah, never mind.”
“Never could hold his liquor. But Pat’s a good man, my best friend. My opposite really, keeps me grounded—he’s steered me clear of trouble countless times.”
“Think he’ll make it?”
“Ha, you should’ve seen us when we knew we had to go down—this is nothing.”
“Seems no one can hold their liquor better than you,” Julio said.
Shrugging it off, Jerry said, “Another round, would ya, Bart?”
Bart turned to see the clock, 3:33 a.m., and he shook his head slowly. “No one sleeps anymore,” he mumbled. “If this keeps up, Jerry, we’re going to need a fresh supply of you know what, and soon.”
“Not if we get our asses the fuck out of here sooner,” Jerry replied. Julio turned up his glass. Jerry watched him down it. “Fuck, you look like a deformed child, drinking roids out of a girl’s tea-party cup. Man, they really did a number on you. You are one of the largest, though, that’s for sure. And you landed blue, smooth except for the—you know. How’d you do that?”
Julio shrugged.
“It’s one of the rarer, bestial colors you know. At least you didn’t end up as one of those hairy ones. They smell like shit.”
“Es muy raro, being in this, this thorny body. I feel like a sort of giant puerco espín.”
“Porcupine?”
“Si.”
“Right on. One that sprouts white claws instead of needles—looks like rows of teeth ’n’ shit. All over your ass.”
“Well, I hope you have a plan.” Julio said. “Maybe I can get out of it, somehow. How are we getting out of here anyway?”
“Ah, I’m about sick of talking about it,” Jerry said. “That’s all we talk about…” Julio grunted with concession. Bart slid the second glass of steaming gator ale their way and without hesitation Jerry turned it up. “Good shit, eh, Julian? Where you from anyway?”
“It’s Julio, man.”
“Ah, sorry ’bout that, dude.”
“El Paso, born and raised, never lived anywhere else.” He raised his glass and said, “El Chuco! You know, Jerry, it’s all coming back to me, my memories, even mi Español. One good thing, yo supongo.”
Jerry acknowledged with a sobering, eye-bulging hiccup. He’d been to El Paso once, briefly. The thought alone was an injection of meth-infused arnolds: fifty-billion fuckin’ drones, black wall of wind, flesh flags on the back of that lanky black man’s head; much came back to him just then. He shook his head as if trying to dislodge the leech of a memory. “What do—did you do? For a living?”
“Burritos, tacos, flautas, the works,” Julio said, with a boost of alacrity. “We had a family restaurant on Paisano Drive, near Montana Ave. Ah, la familia. Business was—estaba muy bien, muy, muy bien. Si…those were the days, con mis niños, la esposa—” Julio’s voice was low, rough like torched vocal cords; a glint of sadness extinguished an ember in his yellow eyes. “Si, Jerry. I miss those days, when the world was—”
“I hear you, man.” Jerry raised his mug for a toast.
“But, I found a new woman, in Jewel City. Things were never quite the same, though. You know, it was as if the color—I don’t know how to describe it really—life had become black and white like an old movie, bland and dull, forgetting things too. Mi vida, antes, todo.”
“What’d ya do in Jewel City?”
“We made pizza. Pizza was quite a thing. It’s weird now, thinking about it in retrospect, with this new brain—”
“If you have a brain in there.”
“Man—”
“Just messing with ya,” Jerry said. “Go on, tell me about that place. All we talk about lately are plans for getting out—tell me about the pizza.”
“We grew food in the gardens, and a cornucopia it was. We put anything and everything on dough and baked it: strawberries, radishes, potato slices, a la cabron, you name it. Pizza everywhere, pizza coming out of your ears, everything was pizza. The entire town ate pizza. 90% pizza, 10% country cookin’ from Bertha’s Place. Hell, if we’d had half an imagination Bertha and I might’ve been rivals, competing.” Julio shrugged off a grunt. “Yeah, we’d roll it up or eat it flat, or
sandwiched. Pensando, thinking back on it—pizza hell, or heaven as far as some of my best customers were concerned, especially Am—”
“You’re making me hungry.”
Julio’s maw manufactured an offbeat, dreadful laugh: “Haasarh, hooharrh, arghk-haaack-arrn. Black-and-white times—maybe, but some good ones, especially if you like exercise. Sounds crazy, I know.”
“It does. So, how did you end up in Jewel City?”
“Even more crazy. That day, you know, when it all happened—well, I was making a run to California. We’d just bought out a restaurant and a food truck to go along with it. The family and I were going to expand, set up another location on the west side, even do flea markets—there was Ascarate Park Flea Market, and especially Fox Plaza and Dyer, busy, busy, bumpin’ busy. Good people too. And we’d do shows with the truck. I had a pretty big family if you include those who came over all the time uninvited, y mucho mas de Juarez, across the border. But they were always welcome—fridge raiders, though.”
“You were on the road when it kicked off?”
“Yep, roads between cities were pretty clear during the end of days. I’d gotten myself an old diesel truck. Can pull a lot more than the transport allotments or flyers anyway, and I wanted the extra time. We were on our way back from Los Angeles when it hit, Davíd and I. He was my oldest. We’d had quite a discussion. We…ah, forget it. Then it hit—”
“Yeah, I saw it from the air.” Jerry realized he could have been flying right over them when it happened—they had followed I-10 out of Yuma. “So, how’d you survive it?”
