by Zack Parsons
And he heard them when the screaming began.
FLESH soft and weak, lacking chitin or tarsus or limbs enough for the violence of my kind, but, oh, the jaws. They are small and leveraged to rend muscle and sinew, long bone wound with cords, inheritor of power. The liquor of my veins is potent, propelled on shuddering meat, enriched by countless glands, and distilled by reflexive terror. I suck their smell in through my snout, and I know every contour of them, every movement by the vortices in colorless, perfumed smoke.
In the white stone antechamber of the boreal spire of the Sub-Regnant Queen the 702nd, the Cardinal Betrayer, Usurper and Defiler of the ways of true hatching, I faced ninety-nine warriors of her brood. They were strong, honed in the old violence and the old ways, shells scarred from battle, drunk on their queen’s richest honey.
Through beam and chisel and, by second moon’s height, through mandible, I extracted the pulp of each warrior. I cored their husks and burned their nerve cords into jelly. I was VIOLENCE. I was a champion of my kind, like Warren Groves, but of the hard shell and inner flesh.
The soft meat of humans does not stoke fear in my mind. Their way is slow and anchored to the soil. There are no venoms or beams, only crude metal tools. I welcome battle. Praise her name, my Regnant Queen, long gone into water. Praise her and answer this TREASON with VIOLENCE.
I discover great speed in this flesh. I leap and seize with rows of curving fangs. Their throats and groins and bellies are soft. Their limbs snap apart into morsels. I strum their tendons with my jaws.
Stricken faces, pale, wide-eyed, screaming. I KILL WELL. Humans are gurgling, thrashing for the meat I have taken from them. Their fluid is warm on my face and on these quills that do not speak. One human female runs. She sees me for what I am. She is too slow, too soft.
Her death scream inhabits the night. Impossibly loud to my senses. The hot gush of arteries, molten on my snout, on my tongue. Her fluid scent is nuanced, layered as my own would be if this flesh was opened up. DRINK. DEVOUR. It is the will of the flesh, bestial, but I accede, beyond resisting the impulse, filling my belly with a stew of meat and venous brine.
I AM FOREVER AND WILL BE a champion. Victorious once more. Head dampened with the liquid of my enemies. Snout dripping with their gore. I remain restless with lingering urges for violence. Casper Cord lives. The other human, who does not attack, is watching. He has escaped death and yet learns of other things to fear. I clean my mouth with the dexterous muscle of my tongue and stare into his tiny, glistening eyes. The meaning of my flesh to him is transformed by impossible acts. He gazes upon me and trembles.
“This?” Wesley Bishop took the tin box from Patrice. It was heavy. Glass clinked and rasped within. “He gave you this?”
“Gwon get a look inside,” said Patrice. “I check it out. Dass de right one.”
“This is her box.”
Bishop sat down upon the bed and traced his fingers over the faded paint. The pretty portrait had nearly gone, but the word was still legible. Vervains. He could not remember the specific sound of her voice, but he could recall that moment, hands touching across the metal lid, sliding it open to show him how she kept his letters.
“Tings got ya wrong, podnah?” asked Patrice.
“No,” said Bishop. “Go on. Speak with Bethany. I think there remain preparations before our departure.”
“Don’t overimbibe on dem. Ya gotta keep ya head on ya shouldas.”
“Only one,” said Bishop.
Patrice left and knew not to disturb Bishop further unless there was an emergency.
Bishop sat in the quiet darkness. He tried to picture Annie caressed by the sun, tried to conjure her as completely as possible without contaminating her features with the many images of Veronica Lambert that occupied the nearer terrain of his memory. Annie slipped away, and he pictured Violet Vex, waggish, pale, hair black as ink, and Pollen Foster, more like Annie, just as unlucky, but hard at the edges.
His inability to summon Annie caused pain that he wanted numbed with pills or drink. Instead, he opened the lid of the tin box and took out one of the faintly luminous vials of bliss. Each vial held only a few drops, swirling within the glass like a mixture of glowing pigments and oil. The vials smelled sweet and foreign, the delicacies of a faraway land with a trace of the chalky spore odor. He unscrewed a vial and lifted it to his mouth. He took a deep breath, the glass poised against his lower lip, an antique clock softly ticking on a nearby shelf. There was no turning back.
He tipped the vial, and the cold liquid spilled across his tongue. There was a sharply bitter taste that lingered only a moment. The fluid was gone. He reclined upon the bed and felt nothing. There was only the sound of his breathing and the tick of the clock. Both sounds became concordant, slowing, gaining in texture and meaning, until he perceived geography derived from the steadily stretching moments, an expanse invisible during the normal passage of time.
When he lifted his head from the pillow, he was not at all surprised to find the walls and furniture replaced with darkness populated by blue traceries, shifting, meaningful, but describing no manmade features. He laughed. Burning, smoking shapes effervesced at his feet. He enjoyed the display, wondering at the ultimate, incandescent form they might take.
The fire shapes burst in a wave of heat and further whooshing smoke and revealed themselves as Harlan Long astride the gray horse Apollyon. Both were alive, though they possessed the sunken features and livid markings upon the flesh of the dead. Their eyes burned with azure light.
“My son.” Apollyon spoke with his father’s voice. “I am come to see you off.”
“No!” Bishop moaned and slid away across the bed.
“This lie you have built is at its end. It is finished.” Apollyon stepped its forelegs onto the bed and stood above him, triumphant, and roared, “Usurper!”
Bishop recoiled. He tried to escape from the horse, for he knew it spoke truth. The drug found time where none existed, expanding the hallucination into the frozen places it eked out between clicks of the antique clock. The effects of the bliss lasted less than an hour. Wesley Bishop perceived months tormented and mocked by his father, fleeing them through phosphorescent streets of blue light, pursued by laughter and the stone horse Apollyon.
Milo Gardener did not kill them on the spot. His men ordered the scientists and Marines to their feet and began marching them down the stairs and to the elevators. Captain Dryson and a few of the other Marines had received minor injuries and were handled with greater care than the scientists. Only Sergeant Funkweed, mouth badly bloodied, nose clearly broken, had sustained any lasting injury.
“I am sorry,” said Rukundo. “I could not stop them.”
A Gardener shoved him past Polly and down the stairs.
“You as well,” said Milo, and a pair of Gardeners with folding machine guns flanked her.
They followed the bedraggled column into the elevator. It was a deep-diving freight elevator, just barely large enough to accommodate them all. Its control panel was equipped with a red box marked with the silver stag’s head symbol of the Gardeners. Milo inserted a key and opened the box.
“Where are you taking us?” asked Dr. Burns.
“Where you wanted to go.” Milo operated the controls inside the box and closed the panel. When he stood to face Polly, he was smiling. “I am taking you to the Fane.”
The elevator shuddered into motion. Some of the UN scientists cried out softly as the car began its long descent into the deepest of the Undercroft.
“Why?” asked Polly.
The elder Gardener signaled to one of his men, who provided him with a small flask. He took a sip from it and wiped the water from his lips. He crossed to where two men held Sergeant Funkweed upright. He was still breathing, but his chin rested against his chest, and blood occasionally dripped from his face. Polly realized he was missing teeth.
“I am afraid you have been doubly misled, Miss Foster. This man is not who he claims to be, nor are his compani
ons. They are a unit of Admiral Haley’s special-operations force. They are Navy commandos, not Marines, and the man who called himself Sergeant Funkweed”—Milo lifted Funkweed’s slack face with two gloved fingers—“works for one of those droll Washington agencies with an invisible budget.”
“He’s lying,” said Dryson.
Milo ignored the comment.
“They communicate using a very pernicious cipher. My men have only cracked a handful of their transmissions. These transmissions are, curiously, always one-sided. They report”—Milo pushed the deployable radio case the Marines had brought with the toe of his boot—“but no one replies. Their goal all along was to get to the Fane. To destroy it, I presume.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Dryson. “We are here to protect these people.
“If that was your only task, then you have failed,” said Milo. “But I believe you mean what you say. Only your friend, the erstwhile Sergeant Funkweed, knows exactly what was intended, but I think we have him figured out now.”
“You never answered me,” said Polly. “Why take us down to the Fane just to kill us?”
Her question wrenched sobs from the most terrified of the UN contingent. Milo blinked as if surprised that she had not already reached the conclusion he intended.
“I intend to help Sergeant Funkweed accomplish his mission, of course.” Milo clapped a gloved hand onto Funkweed’s shoulder, and the beaten man lifted his head, one eye pasted shut with blood. “I will help him destroy this place.”
“Don’t look at it,” said Casper, helping Bottles to his feet. They pushed through the carnage that filled the alley. They endured the inside-out stench of dead animals, their feet slipping in loops of viscera dragged across the asphalt, splashing in blood pooling in every fissure, gallons upon gallons of it, decorating ten feet up the walls of the church in abstract sprays of crimson.
Casper stooped to pick up the skinhead’s machete from the mess. It fit his hand, the wrapped horn of the handle still warm. He shook meat from the blade.
Bottles was catatonic, a smashed foam tray tilted, forgotten, in one hand, sloshing gravy out its buckled sides as Casper pulled him out of the alley. The gore even sickened Casper, who thought himself inured to extravagant violence by decades of war. No, it wasn’t the violence. The sick tightness in his gut was the fucking dog. Its tail wagging, its blood-soaked mouth hung open wide, tongue flexed and throbbing, panting and looking at Casper expectantly as though the mangled bodies were sticks it had fetched for him.
He was afraid to even acknowledge the dog. As they fled the church and disappeared into the night, down streets scabbed with refuse, human and otherwise, Casper knew it was right behind them. He could hear its nails clicking on the sidewalk.
They hurried aimlessly, past abandoned businesses, through ethnic neighborhoods clinging to life, through sudden campgrounds spilling from parks and ruined buildings. They weaved through crowds, demonstrations, chanting, mob anger, lines of police deflecting stones with metal shields, streets without electricity lit by burning cars.
They climbed a quicksand ramp of trash over a concrete barrier to cross a highway Casper did not remember. The traffic did not stop for them. Cars and trucks roared past, wind sucking at their clothes, horns blasting, men and women screaming insults out the windows. All traveling in one direction: away from the cordon.
Casper was exhausted from dragging Bottles. When they reached the other side of the highway, he collapsed against the stoop of a building missing its second and third floor. A furniture store maybe—there was a weather-beaten couch surrounded by the wooden wall frames hung with scraps. The stoop was substantial and dark and out of the way. It was a chance for Casper to catch his breath.
There were sirens in the distance, police, ambulance, and, farther away, the ominous, droning wail of the alert sirens. What did that mean, he wondered. Garbled warnings, inscrutable and foreign, echoed over the city night. Helicopters tore at the sky, pale blue beams lancing down into the neighborhoods below. One passed nearby, and Casper felt the whoop of the rotor in his chest, a thudding arrhythmia shaking his injured ribs.
“Where are we?” asked Bottles, rubbing his eyes. He squinted up as the helicopter’s searchlight swept over them without lingering.
“I have no idea. Toward the ocean maybe. Are you all right?”
Bottles hesitated, answering the question for himself before replying with a nod. He seemed absurdly normal to Casper, as if his brain had completed its own cordoning procedure of recent memories and effectively shut those areas off.
“Come on, man,” said Bottles. “I know a place. Don’t want to be out after dark in this part of town.”
“Which part of town?”
Bottles studied the neighborhood. There were a few apartments, boarded shops, a Korean restaurant gutted by fire, the nearby buildings smeared with the black grease of its immolation, and a row of cars that looked as though they had been crushed beneath a tank tread. Someone was shooting a gun, rapid fire, not too far away. The helicopter that had passed them over was thudding back in their direction. The bright headlights of Army trucks appeared from an intersection. Harsh light washed over the crushed cars and stretched hard-edged shadows down the street.
“I guess it don’t really matter,” said Bottles.
They continued into the depths of night, the dog at their heels.
CHAPTER NINE
The Threshold Mass Lab was located more than six thousand feet underground. It was composed of a series of refrigerated chambers, experimental laboratories, pressure locks, and monitoring stations gleaming white with chrome fixtures and the most advanced computer equipment Polly had ever seen. And it was in a shambles.
The Gardeners marched the UN inspectors and the Marines through the corridors. Signs of fighting were everywhere. Walls were splashed with blood, and the acrid smell of gun smoke lingered wherever they turned. This was a coup, she realized. The Gardeners had murdered the scientists and heavy security guarding the Fane. Whatever Milo’s intentions, he was no longer obedient to the corporation and the line of Bishops serving as CEO.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
“Bishop created the Gardeners and bought my loyalty all those years ago with a tangible promise.” He did not stop walking or look at her. “He gave me the body of Holly Webber, blood of mine and Annie Groves, and promised me I could restore her to life. By my own hand I have carved her up and fed her to the Pool. I have seen her return hundreds of times an empty shell. No matter what effort, no matter our devotion to the Mother, she will not come back to me.”
“So this is revenge?”
Bishop stopped and motioned for the other Gardeners.
“Separate the killers,” he said, directing his men to two conference-sized rooms filled with computer equipment. Bullet and blast damage scarred the walls and furniture. Some of the electronic screens were holed and dark. “We will bring them out one at a time to prepare them so they might all bear witness.”
He laid his hand, almost kindly, on Polly’s shoulder.
“You were her friend, Veronica,” he said. “You remember her alive. I envy you that. When I touch her ... each piece of her, each toe and finger, each lock of hair, each pickled morsel fills me with longing darkened with sorrow. You must understand this in some small way. You lost Max and Cecelia.”
It was the burden borne by all of her flesh. She felt the heat of the last memory of her children at her sister’s house, in the yard. They were playing, the sound of their laughter like swings swaying on the power of kicked legs. The fleeting fire of sunset turned them to burnished statues. And then cold, blue waves of time and strange circumstance closed over her recollections.
“I see it,” said Milo. “In your eyes. You are as beautiful as her, Veronica, but you are not her. You can never replace her in my heart.”
Others came and took her gently away from him, leading her into the room filled with the UN scientists. Eac
h of them was dealing with the situation differently. Some cried; some hung their heads in acquiescence or leveled empty stares at screens overflowing with computer information. Konstantin Sokov sat alone, staring at a photograph of his wife. Dr. Cochrane and Dr. Nandy embraced as old friends and spoke in private conversation.
“Miss Polly,” said Rukundo.
She joined him, Dr. Burns, stoic as ever, and Dr. Roux behind a long conference table littered with papers, concrete dust, and shrapnel twists of plastic and metal. The carpet beneath the table was saturated with blood.
Dr. Roux threw her arms around Polly without warning and buried her face in Polly’s bosom. Tears dampened the pretty French doctor’s face. She cried and hugged Polly tightly. Though surprised, Polly returned the gesture as best she knew.
“It will be okay, Dr. Roux,” she said.
Dr. Burns and Rukundo looked away as if the sight of Polly and Dr. Roux embracing made them uncomfortable. Polly soothed Dr. Roux with a hand on the back of her head.
“Mère!” Dr. Roux’s cry was muffled in Polly’s chest. “Mère! Vous me manquez enormement!”
Polly was still cradling Dr. Roux to her chest, trying to calm her, when a pair of Gardeners returned to the room. They singled out Dr. Nandy and Dr. Roux, as well as two other scientists Polly did not know well, and pulled them from the room. Polly objected, but they ignored her. Dr. Roux screamed and reached out for Polly as she was dragged from the room.
When her cries had receded and fallen silent, the scientists looked to Polly expectantly. Some faces were hostile, others supportive. She had no consolation to offer them. The Gardeners returned soon after, and four more, including Rukundo, were marched out of the conference room.
Weary, emotionally drained, Polly sat down beside Dr. Robin Burns and at last noticed that the woman shared her exhaustion. Her skin was pale, her features drawn tight with stress.
