by Andrew Post
Still, if such a niche store could keep its doors open, it meant the world had an equilibrium to it. People had the time and money to shop for such things. I was envious of this versh, with their long days and nights, their free time, no one eating expired food from cans.
More stores, so many stores.
Where They Keep the Quiche, a restaurant that served nothing but freaking quiche. Pearl Girls, where you could get your whole body glazed over with a pearlescent finish. Versa-Smith, where you could design and print anything you wanted from what appeared to be hard foam, including a personalized present for a special someone, “regardless of length or girth.”
The Wino Rhino—Fine (Nonalcoholic) Wine and Beers.
Capitán Ragamuffin’s Gourmet Muffins.
Just Socks.
Cassettes Etcetera—Used Music in Any Format. Buy, Sell, and Trade.
Wait a second.
I walked backward, nearly ran into someone coming up behind me, excused myself, stepped over to the curb, and looked up at the sign again. I dropped my gaze to the store and saw through the glass a man with a wild beard sitting on a milk crate, sorting through a box of loose cassette tapes.
I stared for what seemed like only a second, but it must’ve been longer, and he must’ve felt it. He looked up and searched along the windows until he found me.
He smiled, raised a hand to wave. I waved back. He turned the hand around and waved me in, setting aside the tapes he was sorting and standing up. He was young. Only a little older than me. Maybe around Darya’s age. He came to the door and opened it, a belt of jingle bells on the door jangling. The noise made me twitch, worked like a starter pistol for me—I ran.
I came back an hour later, this time sticking to the other side of the street and using a bus stop alcove as cover. He was still in there, going up and down through the painted plywood shelves, carrying a cardboard box under one arm and putting things in their appropriate places. A tape here, a CD there.
He moved like Dad. Had that default expression, the one that if you didn’t know him would make you think he was perpetually grumpy. He wore his Dad clothes, what Mom called his around-the-house uniform: flannel shirt and Levi’s. Part of me wanted to rush in, press my face to his chest, steal a big whiff, and run out—just to see if he smelled the same as Dad.
I could see that this versh twin of the Kenneth Robuck I knew hadn’t fallen into a drastically different path, as Suzanne had. The store was clearly a place for trendoids, which in a way, seemed such an odd thing to continue to be a part of. Clifford had said that the whole trendoid thing was dead and the rehipster thing was back. Now, I suppose, Kenneth Robuck was the proprietor of a store that was attempting to make something thrice-retrocool. No one went in for the entire time I stood there watching, which made me think the attempt wasn’t exactly working out. Still, I was glad he wasn’t living in his mother’s garage. He had a store, even named it the thing that he had tried to tell Mom he would name a store if he opened one.
A woman emerged from the back, slipped off a coat, and dropped a colorful crocheted purse to the floor. She was beautiful, with long dark hair loosely tied back, dressed in a band T-shirt and a pair of black jeans. She came up behind Kenneth and wrapped her arms around his middle, putting her cheek against his shoulder. She was tall like him, not like Mom. I couldn’t see from this distance if they wore wedding rings or not, but they were clearly in love. Made all the more obvious when Kenneth turned around in the hoop of this woman’s arms and kissed her. They talked. I tried reading their lips, but to me it looked like they were just saying cabbage over and over again, which was probably not what they were really saying.
So he’d found a life for himself after all, even if it wasn’t with Suzanne. There had been no Darya, no Cassetera, but there had been a Cassettes Etcetera.
I smiled.
He looked happy. His girlfriend or wife looked happy. As much as I wanted to charge in there, blast his mind with everything I could tell him, I didn’t. Not just because Clifford had said most people didn’t know anything about alternate vershes here, but because it’d be wrong. I mean, what if someone just ran into you one day and told you that you could’ve had this other life? Not better or worse but just really, really different. Even if you brushed them off as nuts, there’d be no way you could help but consider what they’d told you, maybe even do a search or two if they happened to mention somebody by name. I had seen the power of what a song could do, even to someone who hadn’t heard it before, but their versh twin had listened to it a million times. I’m sure a person, a potential catalyst for a different life—with them, for them, because of them, in spite of them—could really be one mean sucker punch.
I moved on, thinking it best not to stir the still waters there. But I did so smiling.
“Watch it there. Do you want to fall in the river?” An old man threw an arm out in front of me. Ahead was just an open pier, beyond it—after somewhat of a fall—a wide brown river.
I’d been walking around daydreaming, too lost in my own head by what I’d seen. I thanked the old man for saving my life, but he grunted and shuffled on. I looked at the river and was stunned to see I had found not just the river—but the Regolatore temple.
It was built as a bridge, straddling the Minnesota River. Apparently the city was too crowded to find room for yet another large building, and they took some creative architectural leaps with it. Daunting is a good word to describe it, with the building itself in the middle of the bridge; on the front and back, a set of roads led up to it. The building itself must’ve been a half mile tall. Gray, shiny, angular, tapering up to a singular spire, like a crystal formation designed by someone who really had a thing for triangles.
They’d built it close enough to the bridge right next to it that if someone were insane enough, they could climb over the railing of that second bridge and, with a good leap, slam right into the side of the Smock temple. I filed that thought away.
I loitered there a while, standing across the street from the intersection that could take a car either up along the river or onto the bridge pathway up to the temple. I tried to make a map of the place in my head, but the way the fortress was designed, seemingly without windows, it was impossible to guess what was where. I remembered Clifford mentioning the core, which was where their main cistern was housed. That’s all I knew.
A bright orange flash caught my eye.
Looking above the temple, I spotted the smeary residue of a rainbow popper painted in the sky. I scowled at it.
I thought about my versh twin, whatever versh she was from. I had the tablets harvested, with me, by some definition or another, and that felt good. I was doing this for her. So much of her story hadn’t been deciphered, and I guess I was kind of glad about that. I wanted to make my own mistakes now. I wanted to hit the potholes as they came and try to avoid them only when I saw them coming with my own eyes.
“So this is it,” I could hear the other Cassetera say. “What are you going to do now, smarty-pants?” I couldn’t listen to her anymore. She’d been with me since Thadius showed me the e-book. She’d been my speed bump, the one I kept bottoming out on time and time again.
I found a secluded spot on the waterfront, downriver from the Smock bridge fortress, and reconstructed the tablet. Closed my eyes, opened them, and there it was. First page: The Siren House by Cassetera Robuck. I reeled my arm back and sent it over the railing. I heard, but didn’t watch, the splash it made.
As I headed up the sidewalk toward the temple, my heart began racing. It was like it knew what was happening next. I hadn’t read this far, to see if Cassetera had tried something like this. I didn’t care. I was going to try it.
Me.
No guidance required.
Track 34
WALKING ZERO
The second bridge running alongside the Smock temple hovering over the river had a sidewalk protected by a sturdy barricade that looked like it might prevent a car from breaking through. On the othe
r side was a high railing that didn’t look impossible to climb. When I’d walked halfway across the driving bridge, if I looked above the railing, the Smock temple was right there, close enough that I could hit it with a rock. Even up close, with a twenty-foot gap separating the two bridges, I still couldn’t tell what was windows or wall; each side was uniformly a gray crystalline material, perhaps metal or rock. I couldn’t even hazard a guess.
Once sure I was in the dead center of the driving bridge, with the middle of the Smock temple straight ahead of me, I took out Clifford’s homemade versh jumper. I held it low to my side in case there were any windows in the temple, and I just couldn’t tell.
I stared at the seemingly simple device, with only the dial as any means of operation, and guessed just by flipping the channel from the one to the two, I’d jump vershes.
I took the knob in my fingers, gave it a twist.
Pop.
Two popping balloon sounds, a faint taste of raspberries for some inexplicable reason, and when I looked up, the temple wasn’t there.
I turned around and saw the bridge, here, back in my own post-A versh, didn’t have any cars on it. None with people in them, anyway. The few here were all rusted or burned-out shells. The surrounding buildings were all husks as well, their peerless glass pocked with holes, dangling plastic shutters clattering in the wind. It’d been a while since I’d been home, and I’d forgotten what a sorry state it’d been in. Easy to forget after two months in a clean versh, where weeds weren’t growing out in every available crack in the ground and there weren’t mounds of trash and forsaken luggage everywhere.
I turned around to look back at Minneapolis.
Another oddity was that it’d been dusk a second ago, but here it was the middle of the day. Overcast, with a smattering of rain. No, actually, it was snow, I realized after a flake landed on my nose. Thank you, WTF. Suddenly, I was glad I’d bought a new jacket. I hadn’t been sure what the season was going to be when I returned to my own versh, but dressing in layers was never bad practice.
Above was a slight stain to the air on the pregnant clouds of the rainbow popper I’d just made.
Blue. Coming in.
I stood there for a while, waiting for a Smockmobile to come thundering along or for evidence that I’d been spotted jumping vershes in such close proximity to the temple. I didn’t want it, but I half-expected to suddenly find myself surrounded, Smocks chasing me over here. One pat-down and they’d find my hacked TeleHop card and the versh-jumping device and slap the Betrayer label on me.
Thankfully, I hadn’t been followed. I breathed a sigh of relief.
I turned the other way. St. Paul.
There, on the bridge, I could be approached from only two directions. Out there in the wrecked city itself, anything could happen from any direction, even from above.
I was sure the city wasn’t completely deserted. Hundreds of people probably still lived there, dug in deep and using what was left to assemble a new life.
One foot in front of the other, I began heading into the city. I had no means of defending myself other than my sockets, so I was sure to keep my gloves off while I walked, even though my fingers were numb within minutes.
The minute I even so much as spotted a Scary Thing, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let it get a chance to see me: the person trying to sneak up and harvest it.
Yep, that’s right. Payback’s a bitch.
* * *
Terrifying notion, Scary Things gathering into a pack and charging at even a hint of something in their vicinity that could be eaten. But that was precisely what happened to me. I found them in Rice Park, milling around the trampled trees and the crushed fountain. It looked like they’d turned the St. Paul Public Library into a den of sorts, the front of the building hollowed out to become almost like an enormous doghouse with pillars and overgrown topiaries now spreading themselves across the street and uprooting the sidewalk. From my vantage point behind a rust-stained mail collection box, I didn’t know which was worse: the sight of so many Scary Things congregated in one area, some idly milling about and some having joyless sex, or the smell of the place. Apparently they didn’t take after dogs or cats or whatever the Smocks had used as a molecular jumping-off point in designing them, because they didn’t crap in one particular spot or bury it or anything. They just crapped wherever, rolled around in it, and stepped in it. I even saw one of them drop a pile, and another came snuffling along and ate it.
“Gross.”
Had I said that aloud?
In unison, all of them turned in my general direction. Their stumped heads turned side to side, their tiny eyes scanning, and when the first one let loose this huge roar, I didn’t hesitate in running away.
Running was still relatively new to me. I’d done some with Clifford on the beach at night, or sometimes I’d run up and down the theater stairs just for fun. But running away from something—something that could clear a lot more ground with a single step than I could with several—was different. Sprinting came to me instinctually, leaning forward, pumping my arms hard, bringing my knees up. If I weren’t scared nearly out of my mind, I might’ve been proud of myself.
They were reducing the distance, charging in a solid herd behind me. I could hear them coming up close, the thunderous pounding of their feet quaking the earth so bad I nearly tripped.
After a few turns down alleys they were too big to cross, I had evaded them. They collected at the end, turning to look down at me. They made these small whines, like a dog would if its ball got trapped under the couch or something. I didn’t feel bad for the Scary Things, seeing as how I was the ball here. I let them get the idea I wasn’t coming out anytime soon, and when they began drifting toward the park to continue to hump and poop and all that delightfulness, I took aim at the last one in line, fanning my fingers ahead of me and getting my quarry lined up between my first two fingers like improvised crosshairs.
Gimme.
Big, it’s big, I thought when harvesting it, hoping that’d make the process go faster.
The Scary Thing stopped in its tracks, looked about as if suddenly aware of something stinging its massive butt, and began to break down, frozen in place while the process occurred. It wasn’t like all the times I’d seen Smocks or mice get harvested. It took entire minutes. The skin disappeared, then the patchwork of muscles covering its bones; its guts popped out of existence one at a time, each section of its innards like a map of different shades of pink, vanishing in sequence from front to back. Finally, the bones disappeared all at once.
I waited a few seconds to make sure I wasn’t going to explode or anything. I pressed a hand to my chest, where I now had my own installed version of a TeleHop that’d send back the fixins to Clifford’s cistern, across the barrier of vershes. My heart raced, and my chest felt really warm, like I was on the brink of getting the flu. A pause for disaster.
I wouldn’t be able to get an e-mail from him saying the entire theater blew up because of what I’d just attempted, but the whole thing had been harvested. I hoped there was enough room in his cistern to hold the Scary Thing until I got where I needed to be to reconstruct it.
* * *
One foot up, then the other. I balanced on the railing of the bridge, looking across the water. The Minnesota River looked cold and not just because of the various jagged-edged floes sliding downstream along its surface. The water was dark, rippling in slow motion. Balancing on the railing was no big deal. I was used to if from so many years on crutches. But this was different, with a thirty-foot drop to freezing water.
I didn’t give myself a moment to overcorrect, which would send me spiraling off. With Clifford’s homemade versh-jumper in my palm, I took the knob between thumb and forefinger, ready to crank it to the left. I pressed my arms together, nearly crushing the device in my hands. I wanted to be sure I could turn it effectively while in midair.
“Gazelles have horns,” I echoed Beth’s words, fog trailing from my lips. “Keep ’em sharp
.”
Letting my upper body gather some gravity, I waited until I was a quarter of the way forward before dropping my upper body, collapsing my legs and readying them like springs. Levering forward, essentially sliding off the railing, more and more by the second—I jumped. Shot myself forward as hard and as far as I could. Nothing below me but freezing water, the air rushing past my ears until gravity grabbed me.
When I guessed I’d be through the wall of the Smock temple, I cranked the knob.
Pop.
Track 35
SABOTAGE
Catching myself, I landed flat on my chest on a hard stone floor. Clifford’s device went skittering out ahead of me, spinning as it slid. It continued to slide until it terminated its long, noisy glide—at the feet of a dozen Smocks. They were all in a circle, heads bowed, hands clasped. Their hearing me arrive was unavoidable, since I had rainbow popped inside—flash and bang, the whole bit. They turned their concealed faces toward me.
For a breathless second, no one did anything. I’m sure I was just as surprised as they were.
Glancing behind me as I backed up, I found that I had just barely cleared the wall. A foot short and I would’ve hopped vershes right inside of it. Ow.
The Smocks broke out of their circle to march toward me. That was my cue. I put out my hands, aiming between my fingers again. I heard and felt the sockets in my palms open. The Smocks froze. If they weren’t wearing masks, I’m sure I would’ve seen ten bewildered expressions. Such a shame—that would’ve been a sight.
I said in my mind, Here, have this, and started assembling the monster right there in their temple.
