by Tony LaRocca
They were also green, which was impossible.
But why was it impossible?
Helen was not sure. She was not sure of anything anymore. Maybe… maybe all the filth, pain, emphysema, stains, roaches, obesity, and arms adorned with road maps of needle tracks… maybe that had all just been a bad dream.
“Tish?” she asked. She reached out to her daughter. “Are you okay?”
Tish swallowed as she stared over her mother’s shoulder. She shrunk down into her dress. Her eyes grew even wider, bulging in their sockets.
Helen and Roger turned around.
The man who stood behind them was thin to the point of emaciation. His feet were bare. At first Helen thought he wore a leather coat, one that was filthy and flaking, as if rescued from a dumpster. But it was not a coat. It flowed from the back of his shoulders, a cape made of skin. Pairs of puckered flaps ran down both sides of his neck, like long, chapped lips.
He smiled.
“Oh Jesus,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. She turned away from him, and wrapped her arms around her daughter. “Go away, please. Don’t hurt us.”
“Quiet,” Roger said. He took a step towards the man, his arms outstretched. He stopped, and looked down at his hands. He clenched them over and over, watching the muscles in his forearms dance. He raised his head.
“We’re dead, aren’t we?” he asked.
“Jesus,” Helen whispered again. She dug Tish’s head into her chest with her left hand, and blessed herself with her right. Tish remained silent, her eyes wide.
“I remember…” Roger’s voice trailed off. He shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t matter what I remember, because I don’t really remember it. But I do remember screaming. I remember something bad and dark coming. And I remember my chest feeling like it was a bag full of razors.” He filled his lungs again, and blew the air out. He looked back at his wife and daughter, his eyes scanning them up and down. “This must be Heaven.”
The gaunt man’s grin widened, and Helen realized that he was barely more than a boy, aged twenty at the most. His head bobbed and weaved. He’s a junkie, she thought, just like me.
“Not quite,” he said. “This is not Heaven, nor is it Hell. It will take a little explaining. My name is Asher, Brother Asher. You’re the first. My first.”
“Your first?”
“My first resurrection. I hope you like it. I healed you all as much as I could.”
“Healed us?” spat Helen. “We didn’t ask to be healed.”
“Be quiet,” said Roger, “I sure as hell did.” He looked at the boy from the corner of his eye, and licked his lips. He tapped his forehead with his finger. “She’s right, though. Something’s not quite right, but I can’t put my finger on it. So tell me, did you touch anything up here?”
“No,” Asher said, shaking his head with violent jerks. “Never. We never change the mind or memories, it’s too dangerous. Whatever you can’t remember, it’s all part of the process. Some things are just lost. It will take a while to explain.”
Helen snorted. “I don’t believe you,” she said, “because I don’t feel like shooting up.”
Roger shot her a look. “And you want to feel that way?”
She pulled Tish closer to her, her manicured fingers working into the girl’s soft hair. “Let him explain,” she said. “Let him explain how he didn’t touch our thoughts, if I’m not craving Tangerine.”
“Shut up,” said Roger, but he sounded less certain.
“You always said you’d never, ever let anybody change how you think,” said Helen. “You always said that the government was trying to trick you, the media was trying to trick you, everyone was trying to trick you into thinking what they wanted. Remember?”
“Helen,” said Asher, “your addiction was a chemical imbalance. I cured it, that’s all. I made your brain healthy again. Is that really so bad?”
Roger inhaled, and blew the air out from between his lips. “Listen to him, hon,” he said. He smiled, but the smile was not quite in his voice. Or rather, the smile in his voice was one of warning. It was a smile intended to back her towards the edge of a cliff.
“Not really so bad?” Helen asked. “Look at Tish. Look at her, Roger, really look at her. You can’t tell me —”
Her voice broke off as the girl, who had been standing without expression or comment, broke away from her mother’s embrace. Her jaw fell down. It hung in silence, like a great, open door. Her eyes did not close or blink.
She screamed from the back of her throat, a high–pitched, warbling wail. Her entire body shook as she pointed at Asher. She took a deep breath, and screamed again.
The emaciated boy’s grin faltered. “Tish?” he asked.
Roger snapped his head towards the girl. “Honey, you stop it now.”
His daughter gasped for air, and began her cry anew. “Please,” Helen said over the constant, ragged shriek. “Shh. It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.”
The girl continued to yell, stopping only now and then to gulp in air. Her saucer–wide, green eyes never left Asher’s. He took a step forward, his open hands raised. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe I can —”
Roger whirled, and grabbed his daughter by the shoulders. He shook her like a doll. “Shut up,” he said. “Will you shut your mouth? Do you want him to put us back the way we were? Do you? Do you want to be blubbery again, your mother hooked on petals, and me sick and dying, trying to breathe like a fish on the beach?”
“Roger, stop it,” said Helen. She tried to wrench the girl from his hands, but he was too strong. “Stop it, please, you’re hurting her!”
Roger pushed her away with one hard shove, and slapped her with the back of his hand. She spun away, clutching her cheek.
“Oh Jesus,” she whispered. “Jesus, help me.”
Tish continued to scream, her voice raw.
“Or maybe,” shouted Roger, “maybe you’d rather he just fed your soul to the Clown. Is that what you want, for the Clown to suck your soul into Hell?” He shook the girl harder, whipping her head back and forth. “Is it?”
Asher rose up behind Roger’s shoulder. He threw back his leathery flesh–cloak, and Helen saw that his wizened, naked skin clung to his bones like wet clothes. Mouths, like the ones on his neck, lined the sides of his chest. They all opened now, and there was a look on his face, a look of fury mixed with frustration. It mirrored her husband’s. A whining drone, like the buzz of a thousand wasps, filled the room. Then they spilled from his pitiful, naked body to cover her husband’s face, and, like her daughter, she screamed.
Matthew sat at a desk in the precinct’s record office. He lay back in his chair, which, he had to admit, was the most comfortable he had ever encountered. A cold rag lay across his eyes, its water dripping into his ears. The headache that had been building in his sinuses had subsided, but he could feel it skulking within the depths of his mind, rallying for another assault. He fumbled for the keyboard in front of him, found what felt like the spacebar, held his breath, and pressed it. He counted to ten, lifted the corner of the wet cloth, and peeked.
Line after line of digital gibberish flowed across the terminal’s screen. He sighed. At least this time, he had gotten some response.
What he had learned in the days following his resurrection was worrying, if not disheartening. He had upheld his end of the bargain as best he could, showing Asher the flaws beneath his city’s guise of perfection. Glass skyscraper facades that had been “enhanced” by the boy for their beauty but without any knowledge of engineering were already bowing with microscopic cracks. Soft, comfortable streets that would undoubtedly form tire furrows after a year’s worth of traffic. Powerful, efficient transformers that sang, albeit faintly, with the telltale hum of unbalanced AC fields…
At first, the monk had scoffed at his criticisms. After all, he could fix anything instantly with his children. But the number of errors rippling through his infrastructure kept growing. They were tiny now, but they would undoubtedly compoun
d each other over time, and gain momentum towards catastrophe. He had stalked off in a huff, leaving Matthew to fend for himself.
He had begun his search with whatever physical media he could find. Asher had, in fact, resurrected all of the microfilm, blueprints, and maps that the records office had previously housed. But every page and inch of celluloid was blurred and runny, as if someone had poured solvent over their ink, and scrubbed until their renderings were illegible.
Just like the nonsense on the screen.
All of the terminals within the building were connected to one central server. He had not expected there to be any sort of internet that he could access, but he had hoped that the department’s own network would contain some useful information. Instead, digital characters jittered across its screens in a hypnotic dance. The most logical assumption was that Asher had upgraded the computer’s hardware to something that its software could not comprehend.
Matthew sighed in resignation. This was a Sage, and he had used Sages to interface with hyperclocked computers before. The problem was that wherever in the real world his zhivoi–painting resided, its interface with this Sage was haphazard and throttled. He was not sure of its limitations, but he knew that he was nowhere near as strong as he had been back in NorMec. Had he tried at some point to remove his arm, and release the Serpent? The memory danced away from him, like an all but forgotten dream.
He watched the ASCII characters flow across the terminal. Perhaps he did not need to interface with it after all. There might be an underlying pattern, one that he needed to accelerate his mind to perceive. He slipped his right hand underneath the collar of his uniform, and pushed his fingertips into his shoulder.
He felt a euphoric rush of adrenaline and clarity as the digital avalanche slowed. An image had definitely been hidden between its jittery lines. He could just make out a pair of leonine eyes, fangs, and a mane shaped like a heart. Letters, numbers, and symbols continue to rain down faster than he could decipher, but he was sure that a system lay behind the madness. He further separated the divide. The surge of energy he felt as the world around him slowed was delicious.
His eye caught the letter P, followed by a U, and then two Ls. Pull what? He tried to slip his mind into the zone between concentration and observation, but the following words evaded him.
He ground his teeth in frustration. While NorMec faced complete destruction, both from the Burning and the mutants, he was forced to waste his time with this unbalanced teenager’s games. If the general believed there was hope in this Cathedral, then he needed to find it. The mutants would devour everyone and everything he loved, unless he stopped them. They would masticate every last survivor into granulated shit, all because he had to bide his time with this paranoid, self–righteous idiot.
“Pull back…”
Part of him was aware that his mounting rage was a side effect of the separation, but he no longer cared. He would have to slow time further, at the expense of his life. He should just tear the monk’s scabby, bald head apart, and find the Cathedral for himself. He should dig his fingers into the rents of his flesh, and scoop out the wasps from his screaming…
Someone was screaming.
It sounded to his accelerated ears like a moaning wail, stretched and jittery. It carried through the open window, uninhibited by a city’s usual ambient noise. Keeping his fingers within his shoulder, he ran into the streets.
The red–shifted world zipped by with heightened clarity. Every brick, rivet, and blade of grass stood out in sharpened detail. He felt truly alive. He was so accustomed to wearing the shackles of normalcy that he had forgotten they were there.
He turned the corner.
A child that looked around eight or nine ran towards him in slow motion, her slender legs lurching up and snapping down. Ripples shot through her calves every time her feet struck the pavement. She had a face like a doll, unnatural in its symmetrical perfection. Although a block away, she saw Matthew — as what he assumed looked like a shimmering, blue figure rushing towards her — and stumbled to a halt. She fell to her knees, throwing out her arms to protect herself.
They ended in stumps.
Her cries broke off, and a new sound could be heard, the chatter of hundreds, if not thousands of minuscule, chanting voices, underscored by ticking clockwork. In normal time, they had sounded like a buzzing drone. But in his accelerated state, he could make out words.
“Impure.”
“Failure.”
“Worthless.”
“Pull back the —”
Then he saw the swarm.
Not again, he thought. He tore at his shoulder, dilating time to its limit. He raced forward, his breath heavy in his lungs. He halved the distance between them within a second as the cloud grew closer. One second more, and he would be able to save her.
Then she turned her head, and he saw that he was too late. The back half of her skull was already a seething mass of insects. He cried out in rage as they fed upon her cell by cell, defecating grains of crystal onto the pavement. He watched the frozen expression of shock and anguish on her face until he could stand it no more. He pulled his fingers from his shoulder, and time snapped back to normal.
The girl exploded into a shower of sand.
He staggered against the nearest wall, overcome with fatigue. It was all he could do to keep his eyes open. How much had that little stunt cost him? Weeks, or even a month off of his life, and for what? He gasped for breath, forcing his pounding heart to get under control.
“No, no, no, no, no!”
Asher ran around the corner, amidst a stream of denials and sobs. A line of snot streaked from his nose. He fell to his knees in front of the pile, and sifted through it with trembling fingers.
“Look,” he said, scooping up a handful of grains. He held them up to Matthew, unfazed by his sudden appearance.
Matthew examined them. “They’re a tiny bit pink,” he said. “Why are you so upset?”
“They’re poisoned,” said Asher, tears streaming down his face. “Don’t you understand? Her Sands are poisoned.” He patted them with his fingertips. “I can make it better, it’s just a little bit. I can always make it better.”
A shiver ran up Matthew’s spine. “You tried to improve her?”
“She was fat,” said Asher, “like, seriously chubby. The kids called her Piggy, and Lard Mountain, and she hated every second of her life. Her parents, they —” his voice broke off. “No little kid should ever have to be so full of disgust and self–loathing.”
Matthew thought of the glass skyscrapers beginning to bow, of the transformers that would inevitably overload. “What happened to her hands?” he asked.
Asher’s face turned the color of paper. His mouth opened and closed. “She…” he began, and swallowed. “I will do better. I swear to the Ophanim, I will do better.”
Matthew rubbed his eyes. Remember that he’s unbalanced, he thought. He’s an exhausted, unbalanced man–boy, way in over his head. And that head holds the fates of millions, both here and back home.
He felt a pang of guilt for what he was about to do, but he squashed it. He had a mission to complete.
All that mattered was the Cathedral.
“Listen,” he said, “it’s not your fault. They wanted this to happen.”
Asher’s head jerked up, the corners of his cracked lips twitching. “The Church?”
“Yes.” Matthew crouched, ignoring his aching muscles. He stared into Asher’s eyes. “I’ve been studying the city. The poison is a fail–safe, to make sure that you don’t make improvements. They’re afraid of men like you, men who have the power to make things better.”
The emaciated monk blinked. “Afraid,” he repeated.
“Yes, afraid. That’s why you have to rebuild San Domenico exactly as it was. The root of the poison lies there. Once we can see the city as a whole, we can figure out how to remove it.”
“And then, we can fix the people.”
“Exactly.” Matthew
gave him a conspiratorial smile. “But the first step is to get the entire city out of your head exactly as the scrolls intended. Then you can fix it.” He drew back. “If you can do that, of course. It might be too much.”
Asher snorted. “Oh, I can do it, you don’t think…” His voice trailed off, his eyes widening as he focused on something above Matthew’s head. “No,” he said.
“What?” asked Matthew as he turned around. Then he saw it.
The wall behind him had been laminated with stucco. Its pattern of rough sand and gravel was mostly random. However, if he unfocused his eyes, he could just make out a blurred image within its texture.
It was a lion within a heart.
Asher pushed himself to his feet, and sang. His children swarmed around the bottom of an iron fire escape fifteen feet above them. At first it seemed that they would devour it, but instead, they shaved it away at an angle, creating a fine, glistening blade.
“Stand back,” he said.
Matthew complied as the insects chewed away the platform’s side and supports. It clanged to the pavement a second later, and bounced to the side.
Something tiny had fallen with it. Matthew presumed that it had been attached to the wall, and that the descending blade had cut it off. Asher pointed at it.
“Don’t touch it,” he said. “You see? Do you see?”
A tiny camera rested on the pavement, but it was unlike any Matthew had ever seen. The wires that trailed from it were spindly and brown. Its spherical lens resembled a flower.
“It’s just a security camera,” he said. “Their use was common. I’m guessing that you enhanced its technology, along with the rest of the building.” He gave it a closer look. He had to admit that it did seem strangely organic.
“No,” said Asher, jerking his head from side to side, “I made sure to get rid of all the cameras. This isn’t the Church, this is her. She’s watching me.” He raised his hands. “Whatever you do, stay back.”
He sang again. His swarm devoured the front of the building brick by brick, until a long, rough wire was uncovered. Tiny, forked hairs extended from it, like tendrils from a root. The wasps continued their delicate excavation, all the way to the building’s foundation. They swirled as they dug deeper into the ground, until Matthew could no longer see or hear them.
