Up, Out of Cities That Blow Hot and Cold

by Charlee Jacob

  Rani had gone out the window, bare feet on the ledge, looking down. Seeing through the storm to crystal faces below chanting the silent jumpjumpjump.

  She called mentally to that blizzard, to please come cool her, to chill the fire which wanted to shriek out of her and turn the fortieth floor into some kind of epicenter, ending the world everywhere.

  “Shut up!” she cried down to those bastards in the street and on the sidewalk. What? Hadn’t anybody called the cops or the fire station?

  She giggled, looking down down, seeing the fire station which had sat across the street from the high-rise and its whorehouse up top ever since she’d been recruited to work there. The firemen had left their dinner and were watching with the rest, arms folded, heads tilted back, ice cube eyes, chanting the insular jumpjumpjump. There was a cop car or two in evidence. But the uniforms weren’t trying to establish crowd control, or to get a bull horn to beg her to save herself for God’s sake and the little baby Jesus’s sake because it was Christmas and surely she’d be breaking some poor old mother’s heart—somewhere. They were standing, arms folded, skulls tilted on bony shoulders, watching with sockets indiscernible from the falling snow.

  She giggled and smoke escaped through her lips. Rani slapped a hand over her mouth and tried to catch herself as she wobbled on the ledge. But that ledge tipped up, taking her back—not yet, baby…

  “Yeah? What will you give me if I do jump?” she called down to them.

  We’ll love you as only the frost can, numbing you to final painlessness, the cancrine glacial—identical icily backward and forward, infinitely cold-blooded inside and out. Love you like air conditioning and ice cream and a full body massage with a rubbing alcohol torpidity. Love you with no demands of the flesh, no lies or promises of affection, no forced swallowing of tinder and searing stew. Only feeling hurts; only love without it heals. Jump.

  Rani felt the warped wall of the building ripple against her back, like a patronizing sexual caress. Something in the window jutted out, jagged, poking her in the crease between her buttocks, sliding down sharp and nasty. It made her sick how it caused her to feel aroused. She glanced back through that glass into the room behind her, door open, torches with breasts in the hall, nameless lover cracker-bonbon on her ruined bed, seeming to sit up with a skyrocket, burnt twig arms gesturing to her to come back, baby…whiz-bang, whiz-bang.

  (Only love without it heals, baby. Jump.)

  She nodded and let herself go, leaning forward off the edge which now seemed willing to accommodate her wishes, leaning down toward that frozen charity. It would feel good to feel nothing, to be packed in white chocolate Häagen-Dazs, refrigerated to sleep with those who hadn’t the fever to demand passion. Here they would be her receptacle.

  And those on the sidewalk lifted their arms up; those in the street pressing in behind them reached up, too. Watching as Rani appeared first to haze over, her outline becoming an indistinct and wavy mirage in the snow, then burst into flame. The building leaned, too, as if following her sizzling descent, and if those down below had been able to think they might have wondered if it was going to fall on them. But it was only breathing in and out through the streetside wall and windows, trying to suck up the smell of her smoke.

  They tried to reach up for her heat, just to be within prickling range of its radius, to be thawed on fingertips and maybe palms. Oh, if only she’d burn all the way down.

  But she didn’t. She incinerated into ash and then even this burned into something less than a gray powder, blowing away in the wind before it could reach the ground.

  Sighing, gasping in susurrating shiver, they turned in various directions and wandered away, unable even to feel regret.

  ««—»»

  Daria was in the park.

  How could that be? It was miles from Bon General. She’d been there before, recently. And on that occasion, she’d also wondered how she’d arrived. Had she been spirited to the place or had she sleepwalked? She was without a coat because the cold was nothing anymore. Soon everyone in the city would go about in it stark naked, inured to suffering, an urban collection of monstrous icebox roses. They would resemble the dead in the Romero movies, zombies. And the only difference in the way that they’d feed off each other would be that now they’d be more open about it.

  It’s not zombies we have to fear. This is something newer. Like a mutation of some disease. Only the virus comes from…comes from…

  She saw a statue of a man on horseback, astonishing detail in white marble. The man wore a police uniform. There were footprints leading up to and away from it. The prints ended with her.

  It had been a living patrolman, a living horse. Did she remember going up to them so quietly, slipping an arm about the animal’s neck, placing a hand on the man’s thigh?

  She’d gone up to it, yes. But it was already a statue by then. She’d walked over, looked up, and seen the man’s eyes move a little. Jiggle like an air bubble inside an ice cube. He’d had too much ice in him so that it had to flood out, freezing him and his mount. Would that happen to Daria, too? Or was she somehow immune?

  She’d staggered backward, unable to be startled. She’d heard a few of her brain cells pop as they died in the cold.

  There were bangs, cracks, booms in the distance. Daria studied the surrounding skyline, where clouds perched like misty vultures over where carnage was apparently in full play between violence and silence. She could feel the constant rumbling under her feet from all the automobiles, el trains, subways, rolling mechanical palaces of sex, barges of dead, gunpowder, plastique, softer methods that still delivered the quietus.

  Existence could begin in the strangest places. It was said that the first life may have originated when lightning struck the weird soup of gases and muck which congealed on the earth billions of years ago. Well, one sniff told her the city had a lot of fuel hanging in the air, and there was no denying the city also had a lot of muck.

  Daria had a memory of being in this park. Days ago, when the storm began or just after it, actually. She’d been in the ER, helping with the burned children from that school bus catastrophe. Smells had been reminiscent of scorched milk and blackened Christmas ham mixed with raw gasoline. A boy—whose burns were so severe they had descended through epidermis, dermis, and down to destroy the nerves—was in no pain. But he’d seen the snow falling while he was on the bus, on his way to school. The children had been singing Christmas carols. And he whispered in a hoarse, flame-ravaged voice, “Please tell Santa to forget about the bike I asked for. I want new skin.”

  She’d been about to cry hysterically but switched it off just in time. She’d shut herself down, internal lights going out one by one, then done a double shift, and after that started walking home, little faces trying to emerge in her mind that she mentally put a pillow over each one to blot out. There, there. Nothing. No one.

  In the park, she’d spotted a nativity scene. There was a loudspeaker secreted behind the manger and voices crying, “Herod is coming; Herod is here!”

  The plaster madonna was putting a pillow over the baby’s face.

  Daria did a double take. No, it wasn’t a pillow. It was the cornerstone of the church across the street from the park, the name of its patron saint and the year the church was built engraved in the stone. And looking across the road, through the tops of the trees, Daria could see the church was leaning.

  Something had followed her to the park. She knew it wasn’t a someone. Her eyes shifted, trying not to see, unable to help it. The ungainly, brittle-looking thing scuttling from lavender to indigo shadows, no real blackness with so much snow and so many lights. It might have been a crystal insect amid the reflecting prisms of descending snowflakes. It might have been part glass, part granite, part cardboard. And it had leaped.

  But it was days later and now she didn’t see the nativity at all. She could see carolers strolling about, singing “Oh, Tannenbaum” as they casually set fire to the trees. One of them returned her gaze and D
aria could see the mouth, devoid of teeth and tongue but full of the tops cut from tin and aluminum cans, the arcs of the rims gleaming wickedly. This caroler had a single glove pulled off; the fingernails were pop tops.

  She saw some big-shouldered, homeless man huddled on a bench. The nurse part of her created a need for Daria to see if he was all right, out in the sub-freezing temperatures. She came close enough she could determine that he was breathing okay. His skin color was reasonable. He had enough second-hand sweaters and coats on him to protect him in the North Pole itself. He looked warmer than she did, positively luminous with it as if the star of Bethlehem radiated from a pocket somewhere. This made her feel a fragment of jealousy. She desperately wanted some of that heat he must have, even if she couldn’t feel it with her outstretched hand. She stepped closer and there was still no sense of reasonable body temperature. Was she sure he was alive?

  Somehow, she found herself putting her arms around him, just for a second, for just a whisper of thaw. With no more emotion than one would waste rubbing their hands together. And then the vile little creature inside her seemed to bite down through her arms which encircled him, through her cheek pressed against his chest.

  The man gasped, abruptly awakened, and then he stiffened, his face starting to turn to hers. And then the tan of his skin filmed all chalky white. The opened eyes webbed with tiny crimson lines as if they would shatter right out of the sockets. Her head still near his chest, she thought she could hear his heart as it cracked. Strange how he seemed to be smiling.

  Bear saw the nurse, detecting the thing within her as the cold struck and overwhelmed him. He didn’t fight as he was being taken down into that place where he could sleep forever. He’d finally found the animal bigger than he was, and he was going to spend eternity resting between its paws. He might have been the only person in town at the moment who wasn’t afraid.

  Daria slowly stood, trying to recognize some kernel of horror in herself, wishing she could be dismayed at finding none. She ought to be experiencing some burning at the base of her brain, a flush of shame, an elevation in blood pressure with increased respiration and heartbeat. Heat, damn it.

  But she stared down at him as if she were as dead as he was. Or nearly so.

  Please, shed just one tear, a single diamond of release.

  Nothing. Yet the cold beast which had taken part of her over was as wild as its ghastly, bitter stupor would permit. It smiled a thin nihilistic smile, a tracery of the pattern found in the gradually crumbling mortar of inner city structures. (Except the crashing rumbles from every block in evidence belied that these structures were crumbling slowly anymore.) Its inhuman limbs clacked chitinously within her own until Daria began to shiver with its tremors.

  She was immune but apparently, she could pass it on. Had she done this to any others? That last time in the park? Some other homeless person?

  When she noticed the second man watching, she felt absolutely catatonic, unable to run should he have actually witnessed her killing the homeless one. Yes, she was shaking, vaguely aware of the motion as uncomfortable, and that murder had been done through her. But she honestly couldn’t muster up enough reaction to give a rat’s ass if this fellow saw or not.

  And then she noticed that where he stood, the ice melted around his feet so that he stood in puddles. The snow turned to water as it landed on his coat, in his hair. Light shimmered off him like waves of heat-born hallucination.

  The entity inside Mike hissed at the creature inside Daria.

  The one within Daria howled like unsparing wind.

  Around the park in every direction—the city visible in total perimeter—fires were burning. They flared in trash heaps, cindered even in the freezing wind to ignite the roofs of rowed houses, puffed out the tops of high-rises like volcanos. The blizzard picked up speed at the same time, snowing its white-gray until—with the red flames—the night turned a lurid, venal pink. The temperature oscillated in wavelengths of blistering heat and scathing cold. Gas lines caught and detonated, whooshing thunderously. One tall pale building began a long, surreal slide down through midtown, like a disintegrating iceberg. Another went up like a 4th of July rocket, steel girders jangling out from its gouged base. Then another shot up, fast enough to collide with the first. Autos from inside parking, furniture, cinder blocks and people rained out like from shaken piñatas. Had much of the population turned terrorist? The answer came as, everywhere, far windows blinked, suddenly sentient, malevolent.

  Mike saw the woman’s frosted hands and—without understanding how he knew—recognized that she was his angel of mercy. He took two steps toward her. He murmured from Eliot a last time,

  “The intolerable shirt of flame

  Which human power cannot remove.

  We only live, only suspire

  Consumed by either fire or fire.”

  Daria observed the man’s singed eyebrows, the melted buttons on his coat, and equally recognized him as her crucible of relief. She took three steps toward him.

  It wasn’t going to make a bit of difference to the demons of excess and deficit if two people came together. It would neither save the city nor do much to further its destruction.

  All he wanted was a cool touch to lessen his fever, and she but a bit of simple human warmth. It could be matter meeting anti-matter. It could be a burst mighty enough to lift the whole park up.

  But the city wouldn’t notice one more explosion.

  — | — | —

  About the Author

  Charlee Jacob (born 1952) is an American author specializing in horror fiction, dark fantasy, and poetry. Her writing career began in 1981 with the publication of several poems under the name Charlee Carter Broach. She began writing as Charlee Jacob in 1986.

  This native Texan is best known for her graphic explorations of the themes of human degradation, sexual extremism, and supernatural evil. Her first novel This Symbiotic Fascination (Necro Publications, 1997) was nominated for the International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Award. Her novel Dread in the Beast tied David Morrell’s Creepers for first place for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel of 2005, and her poetry collection Sineater won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Poetry Collection in 2005 as well.