Carly was waking, shuddering in his arms as she tried to hold on to sleep.
Jerry ran.
Christy was in front of him. Her footsteps sent back panicky shuddering echoes. The walls were closer now, the ceiling lower. Their concourse was shrinking, the way back closing.
“Sleep,” he whispered, running, trying to move gently, arms tight and straining as he tried not to bounce his daughter. “Sleep and re-dream it.” Change it. Faces of the passengers filled his mind, the people they’d passed on the way in, real as if Carly hadn’t simply peopled them, real as if they somehow ran here, real and not dreamed. “Sleep, baby. Daddy’s here.”
The engine loomed, maze of metal leading back to their home, and the blades were beginning to turn, whir of motion behind him with every turn he made, the jet engine coming back to life. Carly coughed. Her eyelids fluttered.
“Sleep,” again, they were supposed to be investigating self hypnosis, a single word that could lead either of them to the brink of sleep, but they hadn’t started yet, next week he kept saying to the therapist, so much else going on in life. What would Carly’s word be? Pink? Safe? Sleep? “Sleep.”
The basement door loomed. Christy hit it, fumbled at the latch, fell through the opening in front of them. Behind them the jet engine tore into life, churning air, blades spinning. The sound of the plane filled the night, closer than when Jerry had first heard it and everything wrong throbbed in it, the sound of mechanical systems failing. Failed. The plane was screaming towards them. Christy stumbled on the stairs. Jerry caught her, jolted Carly.
“Daddy?”
“It’s all right, sweetheart.”
“I love you. Mom, love you. It’s all right.”
Plane on top of them, sound filling the world, down the carved earth stairs, sub-basement, everything was not all right.
“I’m all right,” Carly said, and Christy stopped running as if she’d hit an invisible wall, jolted back against them. “Carly, no!” But the six-year-old insomniac smiled, older than her years, somehow, loving and sad and said, “It already happened. And it’s all right,” before she looked at each of them one more time and slipped and slid away into the Forever Sleep.
Christy and Jerry stood, arms around each other, around their daughter, and overhead the sound of the engines changed, one last time, mechanical equipment catching, impossible sound of acceleration and lift, engines screaming as the jet climbed, passed, away from the house, away from the city, gravity defied once again and the plane climbed. Inside, the pilots, no doubt sweat soaked and chilled, radioed the tower — we’re all right, we’re coming down normal, keep emergency on hand — inside, no doubt, passengers held their breath, hands clasped together, strangers holding strangers, cabin sharp with the chemical smell of adrenaline and terror.
The plane passed overhead and Jerry held Carly, insomniac no longer, Christy smoothed her daughter’s soft hair and rained kisses and tears on her cheeks as forever Carly slept.
James Sallis is known for a wonderful array of fiction (take a look at his bio). He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Bouchercon in 2007. This story came about after he’d been thinking about all those end-of-the-world stories. Issue #24 is known as the “Baby Issue,” because Orion was born just before it premiered. His uncle Keith Boulger did the cover; it’s scary how much it resembles Orion—particularly since it was painted before Orion was born. An awkward moment at the Canadian border, with no paperwork for Orion, was deflected by showing the officer his photo in the back of the issue.
ROOFS AND FORGIVENESS IN THE EARLY DAWN
JAMES SALLIS
They started early tonight. Susan and I sat listening to their legs dragging across the roof and shutters, the soft snicker of their calls, the occasional brief whirr of wings. At their size, the wings aren’t of much use — best they do is provide a kind of controlled fall.
Susan got up, went to the window to peer out between slats of the shutter, at the roof directly across from ours. Broken bottles baked into tar, part of what appeared to be a toaster with power cord trailing out like a tail behind, a few sacks and plastic bags of trash. One of them was dead over there, on its back. No, not dead, dying. Its legs twitched as I watched. Two others were eating it.
“They’re really rather beautiful, you know. In their way.”
I shrugged. Susan sees things the rest of us don’t, or sees them in ways we can’t. This is what makes her what she is. Against the wall opposite the window is her latest painting. Struck by morning light, half in sun, half in twilight, a sort of hive looking (inasmuch as it resembles anything at all familiar) like the communities of Anasazi cliff dwellers. Above the hive one of them hangs in midair. “They can’t fly like that, of course,” Susan said when I first saw it.
There can’t be much food left for them here, after all these years. While we go on living off the bounty of our ancestors, cans of Spam, peas, Spaghetti-O’s, tomato soup, Pepsi, corned beef hash, asparagus, sardines, potted meat, green beans.
She turned back to me. Must be a full moon out there. Light fell in a soft lash across her breasts. Her soft breasts. But they’re not, really. Small and hard, rather. Dried-up, used-up, like the rest of our world. Always desirable, though. Each night she stands at the window like this for hours before we go to bed. Yet another thing I try not to think about. What it means, how so much is different. How it all has changed.
Soon Susan was asleep. I turned on the radio, spun back and forth across the dial till I found something. You never knew. A few stations were still around and broadcast when they could. Some nights even the static was comforting.
Good morning, all you. Dark here, don’t we know — but always morning somewhere. You’re listening to The Voice of the People, Free Radio 102 point 4. What you’ve just heard was Shen O-Wah reading from her new book, Slide It In.
My God, I thought, someone is still publishing books. Susan drifted towards the surface in her sleep. She turned and moved closer to me, said (roughly) Mmgh. I was on my right side. Her arm came across my chest, hand hanging into space. I took it in my own and drew it to me. We were one.
Reports are just in from our watchers. Heaviest activity tonight is in the southwest part of the city,
Our part.
from riverside up to the old Beltway. That’s the current hot zone. Stay tuned for updates. We’ll be with you all night here. Who can sleep, after all?
Susan could, for one. There was some kind of switch in her head. She threw it and the cogs disengaged, she slowed and stopped. By contrast I felt I never slept at all and spent the night with my mind whirring about snatches of songs and thought, never quite getting purchase. I did sleep, though, I must have, because from time to time I’d rouse with tatters of dreams drifting up, there for a second or two, almost graspable, before they trailed off and were gone.
Lot of us around the station have been listening to Ornette Coleman these past weeks. Here’s one of the tunes where Coleman and his crew broke through for the first time. To us, this sounds like the world we live in.
He was right, it did. So would Ravel’s La Valse. The difference was that in La Valse we started out on solid ground, witnessed the unwinding, the unraveling into chaos. With Coleman, chaos was already there, waiting like slippers and robe, a comfortable pair of jeans.
I heard the whirr of wings, moments later the thump of one of them hitting the shutters outside. The six-inch spurs of its legs ground against wood, a sound like a wire brush, as it groped for footholds.
Susan, I realized, was awake.
“You remember when we thought they might just go away? We’d get up one day and they’d be gone, gone as suddenly as they appeared.”
I did. We’re a hopeful species. And things went well for us for a long time. Longer than we had any right to expect.
Sorry to break in. Ornette does grab on and hold, doesn’t he? But new information’s just come in. Our watchers tell us that activity seems to be shifting heavily towards the n
ortheast. We don’t know why. But we never do, do we?
Susan got up, went to the window. She put her hand on the glass, opposite one of its feet. At length then, she turned back to me. Light fell in a slant across her thighs.
“Do you remember birds, Jean-Luc?”
I nodded.
“I can — just barely.” And such sadness in her eyes. “It’s their world now.”
What could I say? What could Ornette say, other than to honk away on his plastic horn? Then a scrambling rasp as our latest visitor dropped off the window, trusting itself to the grace of those lamentable wings.
“It’s their world and they know it,” Susan said.
It was highly unlikely, of course, that they knew anything at all, but I didn’t point this out. With them all was hunger and instinct. We humans have always valued our precious intelligence far more than it deserves. My brother told me that, just before he went home to dive off his fourteenth-floor balcony, almost ten years ago now. Two or three years after they began showing up.
Outside, the sky had begun to lighten. Those who hadn’t already moved on across the city would be heading back now to wherever it is they go.
I looked at Susan and had a vision of her throwing back the shutters, leaning into the window. I saw her legs slide across the sill, heard the soft snicker of its call, the whirr of wings, as she fell into the arms of the future. I took her, before that happened, into my own.
I remember vividly Eric Del Carlo’s stories in Figment, stories that blurred the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. Blurred the brain too. “Nothing But Fear,” from issue #8, came during a time in Eric’s life when he suffered from anxiety attacks. Paul Swenson did the interior illustration for it, and when I first told my brother I was considering a Best of Talebones anthology, this was the story Paul mentioned as one of his favorites. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve never met Eric or his wife Samala Ray, but I know from first hand experience that they are among the most generous, giving people out there. Thanks, you guys.
NOTHING BUT FEAR
ERIC DEL CARLO
In my restraints, REMing in one of the small hours, a nauseous wavelet of dream sliding over the sand in my eyes at two AMish, I reenact the pulling of my wisdom teeth. Age 17, two top and the lower left — they came out at once, a clinic on Sugar Street, hard ribs of the rack-like dental chair, adjustable pans of fluorescent light, IV in my inner forearm, queasy anesthesia, the staff standing about waiting for me to go under. Clinking instrument trays. Smells of industrial disinfectants. Masked faces. My teeth throbbed with the rooted pain that had brought me here.
I was terrified.
Now I dream it, more than two decades older; and it’s just a smear of dreamtime phantasmagoria, bent and surrealed images of novocaine needles and bloodied shark-sized teeth held in blacksmith tongs. And I mewl in my sleep and twist a few inches in the restraints and sleep onward toward morning.
And wake to the doctors in my room.
They pull a long dripping string of boiled meat between them, over my bed, two on one side, three on the other, tug-o’-warring unevenly. They sing a hymn in a high insect whine, behind their pleated blue masks, something we sang at Christmastime in my childhood church; but the words — those I can make out — are filthy, lewd, obscene: “pussy” and “shit” and “nailed up the ass by Christ.” I cry, like I always do.
The drippings from the meat are sizzling and scald my stomach and groin through my pajamas. The string of meat looks vaguely fetal.
The tug-o’-war isn’t as lopsided as I thought. The anchor man for the two-doctor team on my left has six arms, gnarled bulging biceps of glistening green beef. One of those on the right has the hindquarters of a goat. None of the faces behind those masks are remotely human.
I squirm uselessly in my restraints.
Where is my Angel?
The doctors finally snap the meat in two, then voraciously devour the fetal matter through their masks, bloody, ripping, fierce jaws and inconceivable fangs. Then they turn on me.
Instrument trays on fragile stands wheel up to my bed. They fight over garage grease- and blood-caked rusted implements. They want my teeth. I chew ferociously into the fitted rubber bit that keeps me from biting off my tongue. Seventy fingers (remember the six-armed doctor) reach for my lips, fingertips alternately scorching and freezing, peeling and pushing a grotesque smile back from my clamped teeth. The five doctors labor to tear the rubber bit from between my aching jaws. An anesthetic needle punctures my pinned arm, then my hand, then one in each leg; and swampwater poison fills me. A needle dives from the ceiling and pierces my left eye, and I shriek against the bit, bowels giving way, nose pouring mucous; and they get the fitted rubber saliva-strung piece out of my mouth and brace open my jaws with a cold steel spring.
My teeth . . .
Trumpets sound at the height of my dental torture, as the doctors are hammering spiked coals of blue fire into the gum-holes of my long-absent wisdom teeth. Glorious, cacophonous divine trills of holy music ringing across immense plains of pure celestial wheat and poppies. The doctors look up, troubled, from their operating.
My Angel has arrived.
Off go my restraints, pajamas gently peeled by warm ivory hands. The doctors have retreated out of the bedroom, upsetting the instrument trays that melt away into the grey carpet. My Angel disposes of the soiled linens and tenderly wipes me. My nose is cleaned, my eyes dabbed of tears. I hold my scalded midsection until my Angel lovingly lifts my head so I can look down and see my exposed belly and groin unscathed, unburned.
“My, Mr. Cada, how did you manage to get that mouthpiece out? We’ll have to get you a new one. That must be an agile tongue you’ve got.”
I tell my Angel I fought the doctors, but they tore it out from between my teeth.
My Angel feeds me breakfast, pours coffee into me, guides my dressing. It’s time to go to work. I drive a truck.
*
We leave the apartment bloc, and the streets are filled with the tortured.
A woman with silvered hair in a blue bodystocking writhes on her back on a street corner, withered hands stretched up to grasp a lamppost, breath coming “uh . . . ah . . . uh . . . uh.” Where is her Angel? My Angel won’t let us stop; and of course I don’t ask that we do. My Angel is for me alone, and among the tortured, we do not assist one another . . . because mere mortal human assurances and comforts and solaces are useless. “It’s all right.” “Don’t be afraid.” Gauche words — unwanted and impertinent. I don’t speak.
Others are led about by their Angels, just like me. Some tremble and curl themselves into the divine arms, sobbing. I feel relatively stable for the moment.
We must take the subway.
I’m fine through the turnstiles, down the dirty concrete steps and waiting on the platform. Then, aboard the train that arrives late and settled into a seat and pulled along down into the tunnel, it comes on.
Twenty-pound rats — bloated, black, nap-furred — scrabble across the outer glass of the train windows, fat pink feet adhering fly-like. They scamper and scuttle in conflicting rodent waves, running riot on the exterior of the bulleting car. Fleeting-past maintenance lights whip across the horde, and their faces are seen to be childlike and retarded.
Other people aboard the train have begun to cry or whimper — one man is screaming — but they are seeing different horrors.
My rats find ways in. They spill out of empty light fixtures, squeeze through gaps in the floor plates; then they come for me.
I buck and kick in my seat as my feet are flayed by ravenous rat mouths. They climb my legs. Their claws disembowel me.
My Angel spreads over me, a cloaking holy body. A warm ivory hand pats my head, soothingly, and by the time we reach my stop, the rats have retreated.
I drive sewage. I know I’m among the luckier of the tortured — not that this employment is so grand; merely the fact that I’m able to work, to function, to still hold a place in society. So many ar
e locked away, gibbering, drooling, minds and souls destroyed by the Fear. Whole cities have been given over to the institutionalizing of the disabled. Blocks and blocks of office buildings, warehouses, schools converted to padded hospitals, rank after rank of the Fear-maddened contorting in restraints, worthless as human beings. Chicago is a madhouse. Tallahassee is an asylum. Vancouver is a loony bin.
I can perform, I can contribute to the basic necessities of living (which is all the world can manage under the attack of the Fear), with my Angel to protect me. So I haul sewage.
The light’s green, Mr. Cada.”
I stir from the nebulous nausea that might mean another attack coming and grumble my big truck out into the semi-deserted intersection. My Angel is in the cab with me. I wouldn’t dare drive alone.
We pass a pile-up — a car overturned in the middle of the three-lane roadway, another car having rear-ended it, a third broadsiding. All three are burning. No life visible among the flames. We swerve around and take my sewage load onward.
The Best of Talebones Page 34
