by Andrew Post
Gone.
Back, no skin. Just musculature and lidless eyes and every tooth showing, slipping around and flailing. “Please,” the lipless mouth hissed. “Stop.”
Gone.
Back, his body twisted into a pretzel—bones poking out at each unnaturally bent-backward joint. “Cass! Help!”
Gone.
Suzanne took a second to get creative. She smirked, put out her hand to rebuild Clifford again. He came back, this time turning inside out over and over like a tesseract screen saver. Unfolding and unfolding and unfolding, his chest birthing his body and his back swallowing it, crunching and snapping with each expulsion and intake . . .
“Stop,” I shouted. “Stop.”
He kept going, his head appearing and then sinking into his chest, limbs flopping out and then getting dragged back in. Over the carnage that could very well go on forever, Suzanne smiled at me.
“Do something about it, then.”
I put out my hand to harvest him. Gimme.
Nothing happened. He continued to furl and unfurl. Still alive, still screaming. The unintelligible pleas for mercy muffled when he was turtled into himself, loud and clear when his head for the brief moments in between when he wasn’t inside of his own body.
I tried again and again. Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme.
Nothing.
“We have his cistern,” Suzanne said, “right in that shit shack you two called a home, as he’d said it would be. We have the e-book, the one he copied from you. We know the whole story. And here we are, right at what chapter thirty-seven probably is. The end . . . for you.”
She harvested him. Behind me, the cistern made a soft thump as his fixin dust was dropped in with all the rest. The room was quiet then. I had nothing but hate for Clifford at that moment, but it was a relief to no longer be able to hear his screams.
“But for her to write that story, she would’ve had to survive,” I said.
“I realized that myself,” Suzanne said. “And that brings me to my next offer. Get Thadius somewhere we can speak with him, and we’ll let you go. Cut off from any cistern, the gift you’ve stolen from me of both taking away and creating will be useless. You’ll be free to write your story; it won’t be of any use. It might actually make the other Cassetera Robucks easier to find. You will survive, though, and be a true unique across all the vershes. All we want is Thadius, the teacher.”
“You already have him,” I said, nodding at the bloody smears all over the floor between us. “That was him.”
Suzanne’s eyes went half-mast. “How stupid do you think I am?”
I sighed. Can’t blame a girl for trying.
Suzanne was about to say something more when she cocked her head. A Smock, his apparel bloodied and torn, charged up to the pack, squeezed through to reach Suzanne, and whispered in her ear. The room was so quiet I probably could’ve heard his thoughts. “They’ve made it to the rectories. We’re going to need assistance up there.”
Suzanne eyed the Smock with disdain. “How’d they get in here?” she asked quietly. The Smock didn’t know, simply said it was two fat men with archaic technology. Scratchers, the Smock called them. Two of them, he emphasized.
Two fat men? Thadius was portly, but when it came to other scratchers, I didn’t even know any others, let alone fat ones. Then it hit me. The guy in the videos I’d watched so many times. He wore an ill-fitting turtleneck and acid-washed jeans, was a little paunchy. I couldn’t help it. I smiled. Mosaic Face. So Thadius had gone east to get him after all.
Suzanne put a hand against the chest of the interrupting Smock and shoved him away. “Well, if there are only two of them, I think you’re all very capable of handling it. I’m busy down here. Go.” She turned all the way around to blast him from the room with her demands, accusing him of being every variant on the word inept. The other Smocks turned around as well to watch their dopey brother stumble toward the doorway. They were all turned away.
This was my chance.
As quietly as someone can scramble over to something, I did my best and went to the cistern’s gelatinous pods. I pushed my hands inside the cold goo, the stuff hugging my hands as I pressed them in. The tentacles recoiled from this sudden invasion, and I willed my sockets open. The tentacles saw the waiting invitation and wasted no time diving in. It hurt, them plunging in like that, snapping new things in place. I’m not sure if it was just creating a connection between me and the cistern or if actual hardware replacement was taking place; either way, it hurt like hell.
Suzanne and her Smocks turned back around. She screamed, threw out her hands, but hesitated. I was by the cistern, standing directly in front of it. One missed shot and she’d hit it, start harvesting the place she was dumping her harvests into, and probably end up creating what she’d most recently turned Clifford into: that ceaselessly unfolding heap. Except it would be on a bigger scale. Possibly world ending. At least, that appeared to be what Suzanne was thinking, given the look of terror on her face. She wanted to fire anyway; I could tell.
“Get away from that,” she said.
I pulled my hands from the goo and fanned my arms out, standing before the cistern. The goo slid off my skin, and almost as if defiant of gravity, what globules I’d pulled out with my arms returned home, gliding through the air like the innards of a lava lamp. “Go ahead. What do I care?” I said. “You’re just going to kill me in all the other vershes anyway.”
“I’m offering you true uniqueness,” Suzanne spat. “Isn’t that what all scratchers want: to create something new? Isn’t that what the abominations are all about: breaking the rules? You’ll be breaking the rules just by existing.”
There was a loud crash one floor up.
Suzanne dared a peek, as if at any moment the ceiling would come down on all our heads. “That’s him, isn’t it? Your scratcher instructor. This was part of it, wasn’t it? Your plan to disrupt us.” She shook her head. “This was such a waste of time for you. In all the other vershes, there are countless numbers of each one of us. You can’t kill us all. If you destroy this versh by creating a singularity through harvesting the cistern, this same situation will just happen somewhere else. Whoever makes it out will tell the story, tell the next one of my versh sisters who has yet to reach this point, and we’ll know to avoid this entire thing. In fact . . .” She nodded to one of the other Smocks. Without even touching any device or speaking any command, he disappeared, rainbow-popped out. The air snapped in to take up his absence, a faint orange tinge fading after a second.
“Off he goes,” Suzanne said in singsong. “To do just as you’re attempting to do: spread the word. Except you’re sticking a leg out in the path of the inevitable, trying to keep it from getting where it needs to go. It’ll always get there, and I’m sure eventually you’ll understand that. If not in this versh, as the you standing here now, then in another. Facts are facts, and they’re clean, reliable, and completely unbreakable.”
I had the entirety of the Smocks’ cistern at my disposal. In the background of my mind, the endless catalog of what I could create was there. A list of the most random things: things they’d collected over the last eleven years. People, buildings, household objects, entire towns. There were chunks of cities, entire bodies of water, streams, and ponds. A school. Two churches. A baseball diamond. A picnic table. I recognized these parts as my own town, but there was no time to focus on it. I moved on to see if I could find something big and sharp to hurl at Suzanne.
There was so much.
Riffling through it was like being in a grain silo full of several worlds’ contents, traveling through it without a body. Just so much stuff. No categorization, no order. Shapes and textures, liquids and solids, a riot of overwhelming possibilities. Any of it could be given reality again; all of it seemed to want to be whole again. Not just the people, but the things that had no heart, no flesh. It all screamed out to be remade. If this is what it was like to be a Smock, to know what was at the fingertips of possibility at al
l times, it came as no surprise to me then that they were all a bit insane. It’d take so much control, so much constant care not to birth any of it with the casualness of a sneeze.
“It’s all too much, isn’t it?” Suzanne said.
“Shut up.” I wanted to yell it, but it came out as a mutter. An echo, far away. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. The involuntary search continued, the litany of everything, so much stolen. It was like watching a waterfall, pulling my gaze in. Demanding to be observed but laughing at any attempt to be known.
Clifford, still alive, a possibility of creation. Harvested as that twisting knot of flesh, but I could fix that if I wanted to. If I had the mercy.
Others burbled to the forefront.
Several people from the Siren House the night of the raid.
Ricky. They’d gotten Ricky.
Beth, along with her wheelchair. I was about to rebuild her, just to get her out of there, even spoke my internal command to do so, but it wouldn’t come. In the catalog, she was labeled inert properties, cannot be reconstructed. I tried again and again before I understood. She’d be killed. I could rebuild her, but she’d be . . . dead. I put a hand over my mouth. She’d died. For me.
It took effort, but I pushed it all aside. The catalog vanished. It cleared, the churning stewpot overflowing with possibilities pulling away to the periphery so I saw Suzanne and the Smocks ahead of me again, still with their sockets ready to take me the second I moved and gave them a clear shot.
I looked her in the eye. She smiled. She thought she had me. That I couldn’t take it. I wouldn’t have to give any of it form, though. I could jazz, just free-flow it. Just make what I wanted to as it came to me, let rip without sense or logic. This one was for Beth, for my parents, for everyone.
“Here, have this,” I said. And uncuffed my muse.
Track 37
LIGHTNING CRASHES
From my hands came a rush of things barreling into the cistern room in unintelligible noises, colors, weights, and shapes. A column of stuff, overturning and pounding out as fast as a bullet train. It overtook Suzanne and the Smocks immediately, and they were lost in the rush. All I had to do was think about it, speak my magic words when rebuilding something, and it came.
Cartruckriverbasketballdumpstersteeldrum.
The car flipped through the air, landed on one of the Smocks, and crushed him under its overturned roof.
The truck, a flatbed eighteen-wheeler, did a half-flip and landed on its wheels, missing everyone.
Suzanne gaped, doused in the river of water I’d summoned, and ducked as the Dumpster flew overhead and collided with the wall.
The steel drum smacked one of the Smocks in the face and peeled part of his skull away.
The basketball, after all had quieted, scooted harmlessly across the surface of the ankle-deep water now in the room. When it collided with Suzanne’s shin, she kicked it away, throwing a spray of water on herself.
We all looked at one another for a moment, waiting for someone else to make a move. It took a lot to rebuild that much that fast, and my heart was chugging along like I’d just clack-thumped up six sets of stairs. I held my ground, spread my feet, and tried to calm my nerves in preparation for a second salvo. I let my imagination run wild with what I could make, and the cistern’s catalog was more than happy to accommodate. Lists were prepared. I would rebuild no people to use as weapons; I’d use only the junk—the heavier the better—of what the Smocks had stolen.
While recuperating, I made sure to keep standing in front of the cistern. None of them could do anything; none of them would risk the shot.
Or so I thought.
One of them, apparently friends with the Smock I crushed with the cobalt-blue coupe, attempted to harvest me. I produced a fully decorated Christmas tree to put before me—hey, I didn’t really have time to be picky—and he harvested that instead. An ornament smashed to the floor.
Suzanne wheeled and glared at him. He apologized, but she still harvested his head from his shoulders. His body crumpled on the floor.
Justice dispensed, she faced me. It was just she and I now. “Stop this,” she said.
“You stop it.” Not the cleverest of comebacks, I know, but summoning all that a sec ago was exhausting, both mentally and physically. I got a breath and added, “I don’t know what it’s going to take to realize you’ve lost, but I can do this all day. I have one hell of an imagination.”
To show her I meant business, I rebuilt a dancing robotic dog on the floor between us. It yapped a couple of times and did a backflip and splashed down onto all fours, raised a leg and made to pee on Suzanne’s leg.
She stomped it to pieces. “This means nothing,” she bellowed. “You kill all of us, we’ll just be rebuilt and come right back. We’re already out there, seeking every other time you and Thadius arise in all the other known vershes.”
“Then tell me where that happens—where all of you actually come from and get rebuilt—and I’ll take the fight there. You must not be that important; otherwise, they wouldn’t have put you in charge here.”
“You’re in no position to make demands. And I’m the high priestess of this quarantine, and I—”
I pointed one open palm at the cistern. “No position to make demands, you say?”
“Wait, wait, wait!” She apparently heard herself begging and didn’t like it. Her posture tightened, and her face lost any humanity it’d had a moment ago. Her lips tightened. She snapped the hem of her waterlogged robe down and ran a hand over her fiery red hair to smooth it back. “Fine, then; go ahead. I’m ready.” She put her arms down at her sides, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. “Harvest the cistern, kill us all, and cause this versh to collapse. It’ll be a loss, but there are plenty of others where my brothers and sisters are already waiting.”
“You don’t believe it, either—do you?”
Her eyes were still closed in preparation for death. She opened them. “What?”
“That you aren’t unique.”
“The Regolatore don’t believe in uniqueness; we’ve seen how each one of us occurs time and time again in all vershes and that—”
“Not that.” For a second, with her so pale and cold doused in river water, she looked a lot like Mom when she was at her sickest. “I mean, you are you, here, and—you don’t really believe that just because there’ll be other yous out there to take over where you left off means that you will be replaced, the you standing right here.”
“I feel as if I’m good at what I do, yes, and that without me, the Regolatore will be missing a dependable member. There’s others, my versh sisters, but they’re . . . not quite at the same point I am yet. I’m the reigning versh sister, with the most tasks complete.”
“You can leave,” I said. “Just like you sent off that peon of yours. You don’t have to stay here and watch me do this.”
“This as well as that dump you call a versh are my pair to manage. I will not abandon my post. I do not belong in any other set; those are for my versh sisters to manage and achieve their own greatness in.”
“Ever meet your versh sister, from my versh?”
Suzanne blinked. “I knew of her, yes. She was a housewife. But hers was a versh that was to be policed, and losing her would be a sacrifice that had to be made. It wasn’t her fault that the scratchers decided to do what they did. Nor was it my fault that my versh was advanced and . . . it doesn’t matter. There’s a reason the Regolatore has rules against wondering about your versh siblings that haven’t donned the gray yet. It’s pointless to even think about it. If control and order are to be maintained, nothing can be allowed—not even a single What if? Otherwise, no one would stand by the edict. Just end it; collapse the versh and be done. It’s cruel, dragging it out like this.”
“Your versh sister wasn’t just a housewife. She was a mom, a loving and caring woman. A dedicated wife, a great woman who had a huge heart, lots of smarts, and knew exactly how to keep it all together. She had t
he good life. And when you guys came here, you wrecked that. I can’t blame you entirely for her death, but a big part of it was because of you guys. I blame myself a little, I blame my dad a little, but it was an accident in the end that killed her.”
Her face fell. “No.”
I nodded. “You should’ve met a man named Kenneth Robuck. You should’ve had two daughters, one named Cassetera and another named Darya. You and Kenneth should’ve met when he was selling some of his old stuff online. You’d go to his place, go into the garage, and start looking through tapes. You’d go after one in particular, and there was a song on it you’d really like. You two would talk about how the band’s name was pronounced and when you and Kenneth would get married, you’d play it at your wedding despite your mom’s protests that it should’ve been something by Elvis.
“You would’ve died as you should’ve—of old age with dad’s arms wrapped around you. The room would’ve been warm and quiet and full of love. You would’ve leaned over and played this song one last time when you knew the moment was coming.
“But because of you—you—she never got to have that. She died of tetanus, a horror I wish you could know even a fraction of.”
Suzanne’s face was serene. “What was the name of the song?”
“Well, I—” I stopped myself and let the catalog gush back into my mind.
Lo and behold, in the bottomless stores of the cistern, there were dozens of boom boxes and a few cassettes of Throwing Copper. I built one of each, opened the case, and snapped the tape in. There was nowhere to plug the boom box in, so I built two C batteries and popped them in.
All the while, I kept an eye on Suzanne. It didn’t seem like I needed to, though. I’d dug up something she’d long since buried.
It took a bit to find the right song, some fast-forwarding and stopping, hitting play for a second to see if it was the right one, then fast-forwarding again. And then some rewinding. Wrong side. I flipped the tape. Finally, I found it. I hit play. I held the boom box at chest height, aiming the speakers her way.
