by Andrew Post
They didn’t hesitate to pursue me then. I gave up on trying to assemble the Scary Thing—not even the start of a bone could be made—and dashed away. They peppered the walls of their own sacred place behind me. The interior was similar to the outside, with the disjointed, sharp look to everything. Seeing the material up close, I imagined the Smocks made their temple out of stone culled from deep within the earth. Not their own, of course. Others’.
There were no doors. All hallways gave free passage to all rooms. Everywhere I went, though, there were more Smocks. Each one sprang out of an uncomfortable-looking chair or whirled away from whatever project they were working on: studying holos or communicating in their weird clucks to brethren vershes elsewhere. I kept running, even though I was still partly winded from the Scary Thing hunt not an hour before. Still, I imagined doing this with Thadius, as had been the plan before everything went to shit. He was right; I did need to be able to run.
Not long after I’d arrived and accidentally alerted every Smock in the place by running around aimlessly to find a place to hide, I’d accumulated a pack of chasers. A siren started up, a deafening bleat that rose and fell all over the temple.
I felt the wind of a passing attempt to harvest me. Later, I would see how close it really was. I’d gotten a haircut, a good five inches taken off the right side.
Stairs. I went down them.
Smocks were coming up.
I whipped around and fumbled back down the way I’d come. The Smocks I had surprised on the floor above were now coming down.
I jumped the railing, bypassing the ones coming up, had a nasty fall, tumbled gracelessly on more stairs below, banged my head, but managed to stand up and continue running down. More Smocks desecrated their hallowed place by trying to harvest me, pits appearing in the stairs behind my feet as I raced downstairs, the shots raining down from above.
I ducked a few times, doubled back down some shorter hallways, always avoiding the riotous cloud of footfalls trailing me. I had to take a rest somewhere; my lungs were burning, and each intake of air was a struggle. I found a desolate room in which someone looked to have been the subject of interrogation; the partly harvested corpse was strapped into a chair, which I hid behind. Right then, I couldn’t be repelled by the sight of blood or the idea that they may have done the same thing to Beth in a room all too similar to this one. I crouched, cupped a hand over my mouth to hush my own labored panting, and waited until the noise of the Smocks subsided.
The room was too small to build a Scary Thing. The ceiling would be at midchest. I got up, tried my best not to look at the dead body, and went to the doorway. Taking a quick peek, I saw the hallway was empty both right and left. The ceiling was higher here, the walls much farther apart.
“Let’s try this again,” I whispered to myself.
I put out my hands. Here, have this, I prompted, making as clear a picture of a Scary Thing in my head as I could.
It took more minutes than I felt I could really spare, but I had to get the whole thing out, especially building it back to front the way it’d been harvested. Without a head, a dead Scary Thing in the Smock temple would just be a huge mess to clean up, not the bloodthirsty distraction I needed it to be.
I’d never picked up the channel changer. In all the confusion, I’d left it where it’d fallen out of my hand. I hoped the Smocks had left it here in the main hall of the temple and hadn’t crushed it underfoot or something. I’d have to go back and find it to leave this place.
The Scary Thing started looking wrong. I stopped worrying about my channel changer and focused on building the monster. It corrected.
The last pinch of it left my palms, found its place at the creature’s bifurcated snout, and life shuddered back into it. The Scary Thing shook as if it had gotten a chill. The monster became confused, sniffing around and taking careful steps in this new, cramped environment.
As quickly as possible, I stepped back into the interrogation room, held my breath.
I watched the faint reflection that all the walls of this place carried as the Scary Thing took one step forward, then another. Up the hall, the thunder of many feet ran this way. In a panel of the wall angled to give me a view of what was happening at the other end, through the legs of the Scary Thing, the Smocks came charging into the hallway, saw what was there, and scrambled to turn around.
Too late. The Scary Thing had seen them as well and wasted no time in barreling down to partake of its next, screaming meal.
I emerged, glanced, and immediately regretted it. They looked like they’d been put through a paper shredder. One, bitten mostly in half but still somehow crawling, his gray mask turned black from soaking up so much red, begged for help, help, help. I turned the other way, charged up that hallway, picking turns simply at random, trying to get away from the screams.
They deserved it, but still I didn’t want to hear.
I ran on.
Part one of my plan had worked, for the most part. I had hoped to jump vershes into a quiet spot, go in stealthily, and perhaps, by fortune, find myself beginning my mission in a bathroom stall or a vent or something. Still, what was done was done and I had to just keep going from here, even if every Smock in the place knew I was there now.
Part two of the plan was to find their cistern. As I understood what Clifford had explained about cisterns, without a place for the Smocks to have their harvestings go to, they could neither take nor make anything. Their sockets would be as useless as having anuses imbedded in their palms. It was just a matter of figuring out how to either deactivate or break the cistern to make this sabotage mission a reality.
Already there were a few times I kicked myself for not asking certain questions when I’d had the chance, but I couldn’t have known they needed asking without having gone on this suicide mission in the first place. That’s why I’m writing this down for you: just in case things go this way. Maybe someday you can thank me. I like chocolate, just so you know.
Unfortunately, giving you turn-by-turn instructions to the cistern core in the Smock temple is going to be impossible. I’d taken so many staircases, so many hallways, and doubled back so many times I had no idea where I was anymore. All I knew was that the Scary Thing was somewhere above me, my proof coming by way of the vibrations of its stomps.
And the screams.
It seemed like the more Smocks got eaten, the more they came running to see what was going on, only to get eaten themselves.
I hit another stairwell, went another floor down. I recalled studying the bridge fortress from the street and seeing that it didn’t appear to be built in such a way that it’d go under the river. So I assume I could go down only so far. Still, the place was enormous and everything looked the same. I may’ve visited the floor I was on a few times already and had no idea. Still, I didn’t want to stand around for too long trying to get my bearings. One hit from the Smocks and there’d go my arm. A leg. My head. I continued my frantic search for the cistern.
The core of the place was found at the bottom of the temple. There was no sign, but when I saw no more stairs to go down and heard a faint humming from the hallway ahead, something in me knew this was the place. I kept low as I moved, hugging the walls like the mice I had practiced jazzing with; the cistern was my slice of bread.
A few more passages led me along as I followed the hum, each step bringing me closer to its source. I came upon a chamber with high ceilings, more semireflective gray stone walls, and the cistern itself. It wasn’t marked or anything, but just the sight of this enormous tank in the middle of the room was verification enough for me.
It seemed entirely out of place here, where everything around it looked so cold and crystalline. The tank itself was like something you’d see on the side of the highway when going through the industrial part of town, like a water tower had been beheaded and its bulbous top dragged in here, set in place with nylon lashings and bolts the size of my fist. Tubes ran out of its side, all going to a separate unit. It was simi
lar to the top of the Siren House in a way, with all of these antennae sticking out of it, odd prongs with black, orb tips. There didn’t appear to be any sort of interface to the thing, either. Like the cistern was brought to the temple, installed—or the temple was built around it—turned on, and left to do its thing. Occasionally, it made a soft ping from deep within, like someone flicking a fingernail against the hood of a car.
I listened to the temple. The Scary Thing was still doing its grisly work, with a skip in its step by the sound of it. I heard some Smocks scream, barking orders to one another in the pandemonium. Echoing down through the empty hallways came the sounds of pieces of wall being harvested as the Smocks apparently tried shooting at the Scary Thing. I realized that after each sound of an attempted harvesting, the cistern made that ping, the fixins appearing inside as dust and settling in with all the other stuff they’d collected.
Off to the side of the chamber, a series of rainbow poppers cracked. Smocks rushed into the room. I found a place to hide in the angular shapes of the wall, a poor hiding place, but it was all I had.
The Smocks ran toward a section of the cistern and put their hands toward it. They weren’t after me, didn’t know I was here. Tentacles sprang out of the cistern, found each of their palms. Each hand received a snapping click, the Smock shuddered, and the tentacle retracted. They spoke to each other in Smock talk.
“She’s released an abomination in here,” one said.
Another replied that there was a second break-in, in the spire.
A third wondered aloud why they were being pulled from their work in versh 27519-K to bother with this problem.
The others were swift to correct him as they waited for the cistern to finish its work doing whatever it was doing to his sockets, that any problem that concerned one part of the Regolatore concerned all members of the Regolatore.
Together, the troop of Smocks charged off to tend to the Scary Thing.
I didn’t have time to wonder why I could partly understand them or to ponder any of my other questions. Still, the questions flooded in. Did they need to reconfigure which cistern their harvesters fed to—and got their fixins supplied from—each time? And who else had broken in?
Alone in the chamber again, I moved toward the panel they had all gotten their sockets probed by. The section of the cistern was a wad of semitransparent muck that wobbled like gelatin with each pounding step of the Scary Thing two floors above. I could see the tentacles inside wriggling about: ribbed bodies with pointed, curved tips that reminded me of thorns on a rose stem. It seemed to sense my presence, and the tentacles remained inside their goo but curled and tangled around themselves in serpentine anticipation.
If I connected to their cistern, I’d have their entire supply of fixins at my disposal. But at the same time, if I disconnected from Clifford’s cistern, there was a chance I wouldn’t be able to reconnect with it. The Smocks could cut me off, and I’d be without a cistern at all, and then my sockets would be completely useless.
As much as I wanted to just blast holes in the tank, I couldn’t help but stand in awe of it. It was enormous. A Scary Thing, as big as it was, could be broken down into dust that a regular person could hold in a measuring spoon. The actual, specific math of it escaped me, but I guessed the cistern could hold entire planets. To just crack the thing open once and start rebuilding with it, there was no telling what could be constructed. My heart raced at the prospect.
It doesn’t matter, I told myself. You have to stop them. Screw their fancy toys.
But it was impossible to entirely fight off the possibilities of what I could create, given access to such a wealth of raw materials. The Smocks harvested anything that could potentially be of use to them, squirreling it away here for later use. I imagined a library of weapons I could summon from the dust. Hell, if I wanted to, I could build my own planet, sail off into the cosmos, and leave all of this bullshit behind forever. The escape boat meteor would be a complete original to this versh, too; none like it. There’d be no way they could catch me. I could finally be free of them entirely.
Planet Cassetera. Hmm. Had a good ring to it.
Beth’s snaggletooth smile sprang up in my mind.
If the Smocks didn’t burn someone, what did they do with them? The body in the interrogation room had wounds too clean, the edges too neat. They hadn’t been cut off; they’d been harvested off. What if, when they were through with Beth, they had harvested her corpse? Maybe they’d harvested her alive, like they did with new recruits, to use them as replacement fixins for the more important Smocks—maybe she was in the tank right in front of me, waiting as dust, her life paused. Impossible to tell. To break the cistern open and let all that dump out—there was a chance Beth could’ve been saved.
I growled at my inability to make a decision. I’d been holding my hands out for so long now that my arms were starting to hurt.
Just as I was beginning to make a decision, hoping Beth would understand, and think the word Gimme, behind me, a scrape of a foot across the smooth floor.
“Stop.”
Track 36
BREAK STUFF
A ragged bloody mess landed on the floor, the Scary Thing’s skull with flesh still clinging to it, the forked, barbed tongue spilling to one side. A crowd of Smocks stood before me, all of their hands out, sockets ready. Clifford was brought forward by two Smocks and shoved down beside the Scary Thing’s head.
His glasses were gone, and his clothes were ripped, half his face streaked with blood. He cradled his arm, moaning and squirming while lying on the floor.
I rushed forward, dropped to my knees. “Cliff.”
“Cass . . . I’m sorry.”
“Are you okay? Oh God, look at you.”
On his right side, several of his teeth were knocked out, the eye so swollen and bloodshot it bulged from the socket.
“The Betrayer came forward, after three years of hiding,” a voice said.
Her.
Cradling Clifford’s head against my legs, I looked up.
The one Smock among them who didn’t have her hands out balled a fist on top of her head to gather the mask and peel it off her face with one clean yank.
Suzanne.
I expected as much, but I thought when showing me her face she’d be wearing a look of bitter hatred, of absolute frustration, of hard-won victory. No. Instead, she looked confused. Staring at me was probably like looking in a distorted mirror. The glimmer came, and I could feel the tickle of her—and all the other Smocks—scanning every inch of me, paying special attention to what must’ve been familiar to her, the parts of her that we’d stolen.
“Not a scratcher.” She squinted hard. “You’re something else. What are you?” She broke eye contact with me to glare at Clifford on the floor. “Is this your work, Betrayer? Create some kind of mockery of me, a living parody? And you expect to have your blessing reinstated after letting this thing run around killing your brothers and sisters?” She gestured for one of her Smocks to give Clifford some motivation to answer.
He kicked him in the side.
Something cracked inside his abdomen, and Clifford screamed. He gave up on cradling his broken arm, instead put his hands to the new hurt, rolling over and balling up tightly, openly crying.
“Answer me,” Suzanne roared, her demand echoing.
“No . . . no, she’s . . . she’s the author.” Clifford spat a red glob onto the floor.
Suzanne’s green eyes searched my face. I felt the glimmer of her scanning me again—rougher this time, almost hurting my brain. I let her. Not that I had the choice. Suzanne’s left eye flickered as if a malfunctioning Xerox machine were deep inside her head, spying down the tunnel of her pupil, flashing whitewhitewhite.
“We’ve had a confrontation before,” she said and pursed her lips. “I checked the cistern when I was reborn, saw the various chunks of steel. I knew I’d been onto something, saw it’d been somewhere near a body of water; I just didn’t know which.” A deeper g
limmer now, harder, stinging as she searched my mind. “Lake Superior. The oil rig.” She nodded. “The Betrayer’s story wasn’t a lie. It is true.” Again, deeper and deeper. I started to develop a headache. “You two spent some time together. He told you a lot about us, how to stop us. You even made love.” Her lip curled. “Disgusting.” She looked at Clifford, eyes like burning coals. “You had sex with your own mockery of me. Kill this filth.”
Clifford scrambled to try to sit up. “No, please, wait—”
One of the Smocks fired, and a hole appeared in Clifford’s forehead, the force knocking him off my knees. His body skidded a foot, and when his head dropped to the side, one pumping gush of red after another sloshed out. His eyes were dull then, and his face rapidly grayed. I could hardly believe it’d happened—so fast, so sudden.
I couldn’t breathe. I stared at his inert body. A cold metal spike in my heart.
“And again, before he dies,” Suzanne said.
The same Smock quickly harvested the rest of Clifford, leaving only a puddle of blood on the floor, and brought him back. He reassembled in a flash, whole, and hit the floor free of his injuries, gasping and fighting to stand. I pulled him down to me, wrapped my arms around him, and blocked as much of his body from the Smocks as I could.
“You’re going to protect him?” Suzanne said with repulsion twisting her tone. “Even after he told us everything?”
I pulled myself back from shielding Clifford. His face said it all. I asked him why.
“It’s like you said . . . I’d just be hiding the rest of my life. Nothing would be different from Thadius’s life. I’d just be fighting and fighting forever. I wanted something different. I wanted to live my own story. I belong with them, regardless of what they choose to do with me—”
Clifford was harvested, this time by Suzanne. He reappeared half a breath later, this time with no arms. He slapped to the floor, hitting face-first with no hands to put out to slow the fall. Blood pumped from the stumped limbs. His screams echoed for a second after he disappeared, harvested again. He reappeared, his lower jaw missing. He tried to scream. It came out as a long hiss, red misting the air with each attempted shriek.
