The gym and its adjacent locker rooms and such were their primary headquarters, though they told Arden they had stockpiled weapons and food throughout the town in the several months since they'd migrated here. They'd come from nearby, much larger Worcester, where there were too many Shifters to wipe out.
There were others amongst them, and now the entire group congregated here...so that the total came to fourteen, only four being women. While they sat on the bleachers and compared notes and reloaded, Arden strolled about the periphery of the wide wooden floor, which they had cleared of rubble and mopped so that it gleamed honey-colored with the reflected light of their appropriated Shifter lanterns, which never ran out of battery power.
Also on the walls were a few posters of teen pop idol Kristeena Dove, who wasn't as pretty to Arden as people had seemed to think, though her looming bust was so perfect it might have been computer-generated. Those curves must be long rotted now, Arden thought, and remembered that during her fame there had been rumors that she had had breast augmentation.
The kid with bat-like ears, Tim, saw Arden taking her in and swept up beside him. "Those are my posters, Tom. You know what? I saw the Shifters kill Kristeena Dove. No shit. I saw it in Boston, where she was appearing when the Shift happened. She was doing this promotion thing, this concert, for Huh? Jeans."
Arden turned from Kristeena's tanned midriff and winking bellybutton. "Yeah?"
"They crucified her. No shit. It was like a show the Shifters put on for this big group of prisoners they rounded up...human people. They knew she was famous, so they made it a show.
They crucified her on a stage, and gutted her right there while she was still alive."
"It's true," said Bill, joining them. "It happened three years ago. I guess she was able to keep hidden for the first year, till they caught her. The Shifters are strong in Boston...they've pretty much overrun the whole town. Susie over there saw them crucify Kristeena Dove, too."
"Susie was with me," said Tim proudly, grinning, as if he and Susie might be an item, real or imagined. Susie was the woman Arden had admired earlier, and he doubted that any one man was permitted to have her all to himself, with women so outnumbered in their ranks. And he certainly doubted that Tim would be the lucky one.
"Well, I never liked that crap she sang," Arden said, "but that's pretty awful."
Tim narrowed his eyes slightly, and after a few moments asked, "Didn't you ever hear her song Honey I'm Still Lovin' Ya? Can't see how anybody couldn't like that song. It was really slow and pretty."
"Sorry." Arden shrugged and shook his head. "Guess I was too old for that."
Bill cut in, "That's what we're gonna do to our prisoners we caught a couple days ago. Have a big execution for them. Now that we've cleaned up the town, and we don't need 'em for hostages or anything, guess we can go ahead with that any time. Bob will let us know."
"How many prisoners do you have?" Arden asked around a mouthful of a barbecue-flavored dried beef stick. "Where do you keep 'em?"
"We have three. They're in three lockers, chained up like mummies and padlocked in." He chuckled. "Hey, there are air holes, right? Bob says we'll probably crucify them, too. He likes country music, mostly, but he liked Honey I'm Still Lovin' Ya."
"It was my idea to get even for Kristeena," Tim put in.
Arden ignored him, asked Bill, "Has Bob ever tried getting them to talk in English?"
"Yeah. We had five prisoners, originally. That's how we lost two of them...trying to get them to talk English. Didn't work." Bill grinned. "They screamed all right, though. Sounded like a tea kettle when the heat is up high. Matter of fact, the heat was up high!"
Tim broke into loud laughter. It attracted Bob, his arm slung with territorial significance around the shoulders of Susie as he sauntered over. Maybe she was a one-man woman after all.
"You ever seen a Shifter up close, Tom? Alive?"
"Only for a second, before I killed them."
Tim laughed again approvingly.
"Want to see our pets?"
He gave a shrug, chewing. Bob clapped his free arm around his shoulders again, as if eager to show off a new car. "Come on..."
They left the wide gymnasium, entered a narrow cinder block corridor, turned into a boys' locker room. Gloomy, glistening aisles of gray lockers, benches, an open shower area strewn with fallen ceiling tiles. Bill and Tim trailed behind, ever with their weapons at hand. Tim asked
Arden as they walked, "So, you gonna stay with us, Tom? Join us?"
"Can I keep my hair?" he joked.
Tim narrowed his eyes and didn't joke back.
They came at last to three lockers that had had their combination locks removed, heavy padlocks keeping them secure instead. Bob produced a key ring, and worked at the first. This locker had a bumper sticker for the angry Latino rap group Fight Tha Machine stuck across it.
They had made a lot of money from bumper stickers, t-shirts, and other products of the heinous Machine. Arden idly wondered if they had since been crucified, too -- or if they still lived and
celebrated this return to the primitive purity of hard survival. Or did they lament the actual destruction of the Machine that had afforded them a gilded lifestyle?
He watched as Bob opened the first padlock and then the door, stepping aside with a flourish like a magician's assistant.
And the creature inside did look a bit like Houdini, trussed up as it was in dog chains and more padlocks. It blinked its eyes and scrunched its face at the lantern light they shone in upon it. It was an Aquarius, with the customary pulpy head like a gray lifeless heart into which two black beads had been set for eyes, its tubular mouth and single nostril like severed valves. Arden had found from killing them that they had no skulls.
Bill prodded it in the side with his shotgun's abbreviated barrel. "How's it going, Zodiac killer?"
"Cute, huh?" Bob remarked. "Wonder if it's a girl. Can you imagine screwing that thing if it was?"
"I dunno," Bill joked. "Kinda like that funky mouth..."
"Here," said Bob, slamming that door shut and handing Bill the padlock so he could start on the next. He opened the second locker to reveal an Aries. Where the first captive had seemed to squirm and wince, this one glared back at them with icy, unsettling composure. It seemed to have breasts, but so did all Aries. It had a neck three times as long and thin as a human neck, and a head the size of an infant's, from which hung curtains of glossy black hair. Black eyes glared from nests of black veins in the clown-white face.
Arden didn't like its height, those arctic eyes blazing down at him, and was glad when Bob locked it back in its steel sarcophagus.
He unlocked the third cell, so to speak, and repeated his proud ritual of revelation.
It was a Gemini, like all Geminis -- symbolized in astrology as the Twins. Slender, its body proportioned like a human's, with long, straight hair like the Aries. Tiny childlike nose, a small pouty mouth like that of Arden's Libra twin. Those lips were a bloodless white, however nicely formed. Its obsidian eyes were larger than a human's but had something very much like an Asian human's oriental fold...except that they slanted vertically rather than horizontally. Its face was porcelain white, with a delicate tracery of dark veins, not as distinct as those seen in some other forms of Shifter. In fact, except maybe for the Virgos – with their more human-sized, human-shaped eyes, and who were the only Shifters with eyebrows – Geminis were the most human-like of the enemy.
"Pretty, pretty," Bob said.
The chained being stared at Arden. Directly -- large vertical eyes blinking sideways. It continued to stare at him as Bob began to close the door and say something.
Arden stepped forward and held the locker door open.
"What?" Bob said.
Arden kept his eyes trained on those of the prisoner when he half murmured, "That's my wife."
"What?" said Susie.
"It's Chris. My wife." Arden said it as if talking in a dream. "It's my wife's twin," he amende
d.
"How do you know?" asked Bill. "They all look alike..."
"It's like how we know who our own twins are," Bob spoke up in Arden's defense. "You feel it in your gut. If Tom says it's his wife, then it's his wife."
"Fate, man," Bill said, putting a hand on Arden's shoulder in philosophic solemnity. "It's fate."
"It's a vibration he followed," Susie disagreed. "Subconsciously."
"Anyway," Bob said, and now it was his turn to clap Arden's shoulder. "We'll let you kill her on the execution day, all right? I take it your real wife is dead?"
"Yes," Arden whispered, still staring.
"And did this demon fuck do it?"
"No....it was a Capricorn that killed her."
"Well, anyway, we'll let you put this one down – okay?" And with that, Bob gently moved
Arden aside, and closed and locked the cell once more. Until the door was shut, the Gemini kept its gaze fixed impassively on Arden's.
Four
"Can't sleep?" Bob asked. Even he, the leader, took a watch...and now it was his. He sat on the bleachers under which the others dozed on sleeping bags and wrestling mats, and he was scooping out the last moist crumbs of deviled ham from a little tin, his assault rifle propped beside him and a lone lantern gleaming on the dome he kept as polished as his weapon.
Arden scuffed out of the shadows, hands in his pockets. "Guess not," he murmured. He took a step closer to the cinder block wall to squint at another of Tim's many posters, this one only the size of a sheet of typing paper. The light didn't fall directly on it, but it seemed to show a large woman squatting down and vomiting.
Bob gestured at it with his spoon. "Tim printed that off the internet. Before the Shift, of course. It's a fat woman smeared with shit, making herself puke."
"Why?" Arden said, turning to him.
"Why is she making herself puke? Or why is she covered in shit? Or why did Tim hang it up?"
Arden didn't need to ask, really. On the internet, he had seen deformed stillborn babies and naked murdered women with humorous captions like, "Children are better seen than heard" and, "Sexy Dead Bitch" (but he could find nothing on the web about his father's ship, which had been present at the D-Day Invasion). All that virtual blood and rot was lost now, diffused in the ether.
The real thing, less glamorous, was all that remained.
"Why did Tim save it?" Arden asked, finally.
"He just thought it was funny, I guess." Bob shrugged, gave a little chuckle. "He thought it was freaky. And Tim's got this weird artistic streak, y'know? He hangs up posters and other things he got off the internet, wherever we go. In a bathroom in a supermarket in Worcester he hung up a picture of a cute naked girl with no arms or legs. He just thinks it'd be funny if someone went in there someday, a human or a Shifter, and saw it there unexpectedly. He told me he went to Maine, right after the Shift, in a car he found...he was looking for his parents, but he never found them. Anyway, in a toll booth along the highway he left a picture of Kristeena Dove sucking on a horse -- except it wasn't really her, of course...somebody just put her head on somebody else's body. Tim just thinks it'd be freaky if somebody chanced to see it, either a year from now or ten years from now. Like I say, it's a kind of artistic thing he does." Bob nodded profoundly. "I think it's his way of saying ‘I was here.’ You gotta hang on to a sense of humor.
Remind other people or just remind yourself of everything we lost in the Shift, and everything we still have."
Arden nodded slowly, as if with understanding. He glanced at the vomiting woman again, then moved closer to Bob. "Bob...about the prisoners...I've been thinking..."
"Yeah?"
Arden played with a lapel of his shirt, kept his gaze averted. "The one that's my wife...I don't
want to see that one killed..."
"What? Come on, man...you know as well as I do that thing isn't really your wife. That thing's a mockery of your wife. That monster's kind murdered your wife."
"In a way, though..."
Bob cut him off, but kept his tone wise and fatherly, as if unseling a confused teenager. "If
that thing could have killed your wife itself, you know it would have done it in a heartbeat. You want to kill your own twin more than anything, don't you? And he isn't really you, is he? It's not like you'd be committing suicide if you shot your twin, right? Look...I'm one of the lucky ones. I found and killed my own twin, and let me tell you I now have this great inner peace, all the time. I think if you kill this Gemini fucker, you'll feel something like that. It will help you come to grips with the death of your real wife."
Arden was silent a few moments as if absorbing this, but when he looked up into Bob's face he said, "No...I don't want to kill her. I'd really appreciate it if you just let her go, Bob."
Now it was Bob's turn to be silent for several moments, but when he spoke his tone was still even and calm, perhaps with that inner peace he had alluded to. "Sorry, Tom, but I just can't do that. I can't let any Shifter live when I have it in my sights. With all respect to you. I just think you're confused."
"Bob...I'm just asking you, as one human to another..."
"I'm sorry, Tom. Look...I don't want to hurt another human where there's so few of us left, and I know you feel the same way, so let's not let this come between us, okay? If it was your prisoner, maybe I'd turn the other way...but this is my prisoner, Tom. And I just can't do that, buddy." When Arden didn't respond, he added for good measure, "Face it – if your real wife wasalive, you wouldn't think twice about wasting this animal."
"It's just one Shifter, Bob."
"One Shifter that would kill every last one of my group if it had half the chance. Yourself included. Tom we aren't going to fight over this, are we?" A beat. "You wouldn't kill a human
to save the life of a Shifter, would you?"
Arden looked away. He heard someone snoring. He heard his throat click as he swallowed.
"No," he answered, his voice distant to his own ears. "I wouldn't."
"I didn't think you would. You're not psycho. You're just confused, like I say. You don't have to kill the thing if you don't want to. Look...I won't even have a big execution for it, okay?
I'll kill it myself, nice and quick. You won't even have to see it happen. All right? If that helps..."
"Thanks," Arden mumbled softly, and he drifted back into the shadows. He felt ashamed of his weakness. Ashamed of his request, which even he couldn't understand well enough to properly defend. Bob was right about one thing. He was confused.
Five
In his dream, it was Chris beneath Arden's slowing churning body. She spread her arms out away from her naked torso, pulling her breasts taut, and he braced himself above her with his
arms so he could look down at where they joined. He saw her tanned midriff, her belly button which seemed to be winking at him, but when his eyes moved back up her body again, he saw that her breasts had become larger, as if augmented, and that she had become the teen pop star Kristeena Dove, with her dyed blond hair and her vapid face made all the more vapid by the fact that she was dead, her arms spread out in crucifixion...
An explosion jarred him from his sleep.
He fumbled for the Scorpion beside him, even as tiles from the ceiling rained down and shattered across the bleachers above his head. He saw the shadowed forms of the others around him scrambling up from their mats and clawing for weapons as well.
"The door!" screamed Bill, who was on watch, and he opened fire with his shotgun as fast as he could pump it.
Arden didn't hear the clink and clatter of the second grenade that was tossed into the gymnasium from the doorway, but he heard the detonation in every cell of his body. It jolted him, but others got it worse. He heard a body thud on the bleachers nearly above his head with such force that the metal benches rang afterwards. The rumble off the enclosed walls was deafening. So was the fusillade of gunfire directed at the doorway in the wake of the explosion, but Arden suspected the terrorist hadn't stuck ar
ound to encounter it.
He got out from under the bleachers and saw several badly mauled bodies in the center of the room, where the honey-colored floorboards had been torn up and blackened. A glance behind him showed that the corpse hurled onto the bleachers was Bill, the first of the gang to approach him. His knees ended in red streamers of flesh and his face was a gouged-out crater.
"Team One out the front!" Bob bellowed. "Team Two out the back! Meet up at Camp Five!
Move, move, move!"
"How did they find us?" Susie shouted furiously.
Arden thought he knew. The prisoners. Giving out some telepathic whistle, or maybe even a literal one beyond the range of human hearing. Or maybe they could track their own kind via
vibration, as they could track their twins...
The prisoners...
Arden headed for the smoky door with its bullet-chewed threshold, where the terrorist had appeared.
"Tom!" Bob called after him. "Hey, you're with Team Two! Don't panic, man!"
"I'll get him!" he heard bat-eared Tim yell helpfully, racing after him.
Arden picked up his pace and scooped up a lantern by the door bolting in the direction of the showers.
Even as he reached the lockers he heard Tim catching up with him.
"Yeah, that's right," the bald-headed young man panted, "we have to take care of these bitches." He nudged past Arden, leveled a shotgun, and fired through the metal of the first locker. Big jagged holes punched by buckshot; Arden thought he heard a keening scream inside.
Arden turned to Tim, lifted his Scorpion, and fired it into his badly-shaped skull from two inches away. It blew the side of his head out, and the young man crumpled with a slack-jawed look on his face that wasn't much different from his living expressions.
After darting a look over his shoulder, Arden focused his attention on the padlock to the third of the three narrow cells. Bob had the keys. He decided to try the concentrated force of Tim's shotgun on the lock instead of the Scorpion, and retrieved it from the floor. Pointed it at the padlock, and turned his face aside as if that would save him if a pellet ricocheted and struck his head.
The thunderous report bucked both his arms, rippling his flesh and nerves. Metal clanged behind him from a few ricochets that had thankfully missed him. He looked again to the padlock and saw it was twisted but not broken. So much for the movies. He had no choice but to pump the slide with aching arms and try it again. Meanwhile, he heard more gunfire from somewhere close at hand and from the gym, a third explosion. The enemy had not fled...were still encircling them...
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