Splinters

by Matt Carter

  “You’ve done everything you could to make him trust you! To get him alone with you! You made him think you were her!” This was what I screamed at her. It was easier than screaming, You made me trust you! You made me think you were her! With only three lousy months of practice, you made me think you were human! You made me think you were a survivor. You made me think you were someone like me. And then you made me take Ben down here myself, right into your “Warehouse” when all I’ve been trying to do is keep him from ending up in it.

  “You’ve been after him since you got here!” I shouted out loud.

  “This is not about your boyfriend!” Haley shouted back.

  “Ben is not my boyfriend!” I lit the aerosol again and touched the jet to side of her neck. “I killed my boyfriend!” I moved the flame up her face, wanting to see it leave a deeper impression. “Your people made me do it!”

  The fire wasn’t nearly enough to hold in the feeling, so I switched it off and hit her with the can instead, bringing the corner of it down on her skull four, five, six times with my full strength.

  Haley was crying out, raising her hand to try to cushion her face, but when I stopped, she was giggling again before the blood had even receded from around her left eye socket.

  “Really?” she snorted, so amused and interested that I was sure she didn’t know. “Wow, I mean, they told me you had issues, but I thought they just meant your parents and stuff!”

  “I have three more bang sticks!” I informed her, grabbing one of them and holding it over her throat. “And the last time I can take your head off your shoulders, I won’t risk letting it grow back!” I lit the flamethrower in my other hand. “That’s how long you have to start making sense!”

  “Okay, okay!” She raised both hands over her head.

  “Why Ben?” I asked one more time.

  I hadn’t heard Ben’s voice for over a minute, but I was sure I heard it then, responding to his name. He was still incalculably far away, but so far he seemed to be alive.

  “Because he was there!” Haley answered me. The pods began another set of moves beneath us, and I had to adjust my mental gravity to keep my position. Haley didn’t take advantage. She was all back in one piece, but she’d stopped struggling. “I was just supposed to be gone long enough to be a mystery too good to resist solving,” she explained. “But I knew from the way he looked at me at the funeral. I knew by the way you looked at him. Haley Perkins’s brain seems to be very good at noticing things like that.”

  I raised the stick a little. “What way?”

  “You know what way.”

  Arguing that point was going nowhere. “What does that have to do with bringing him here?”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Not him, you.”

  The pods ground to a temporary halt, and I realized zero point two seconds too late why she’d stopped fighting me. She had been waiting for just this arrangement, and as soon as it was perfect, Haley punched me hard in the stomach with a fist newly grown out of hers, knocking me backwards into the next pod. I spread my feet and would have landed on the front of it, perfectly poised to attack, if there had actually been a pod there to land on.

  There was nothing but an empty space.

  Before I could collide with anything and make it a floor, Haley had jumped up and touched the tube above me. Glimmering, translucent petals sprouted down on all sides of me and hardened within seconds into a fresh pod.

  “I did it!” Haley jumped up and down on the pod next to mine like a child who’s just learned to spell her name. “Oh, my God, I did it! I caught Mina Todd!”

  I didn’t ask questions after that. I was too busy kicking every sticky, unyielding wall of my newly grown cage, shoving a bang stick where the seam between its petals should have been, trying not to let the ricocheting shrapnel that lodged itself in my left side and shoulder slow down my subsequent efforts, but Haley kept leaping about and babbling.

  “Ben isn’t the one who exists to destroy us! Ben isn’t the one who sleeps with a taser under his pillow and armed guards waiting at his call to make it impossible to deal with him the normal way! Ben’s just the one I knew would listen to me, and I knew you’d listen to him! I knew it! They thought it was a stupid idea! They thought it would make the Council too mad at me for spending time with him, like I was going to steal his body and run away to San Diego just to get away from their stupid rules! They didn’t think I could do it, but I was right!”

  She was still going on this way when the lining of the pod began creeping up my legs with that horrible, sticky, suffocating texture. I aimed the flamethrower down at it, but it was like trying to boil away a river with a kitchen match.

  The Splinter substance worked its way up to my waist, attached itself to my elbows, and sucked me backward into the inner wall. Haley’s squeals of celebration were the last thing I heard before the lining grew over my ears.

  There was an instant of blinding pain when the sharp points emerged from the sticky mass around me, razor-tipped threads of Splinter, finer than a blood vessel, burrowing under my skin, under my muscles, wrapping around my heart, my lungs, tunneling under my glasses, in through my tear ducts and the soft spot at the nape of my neck.

  The process took just long enough for me to think one thought with the entire cavern of my mind, every remote corner of it focused to a single point. I will not be one of you. I refuse. You cannot make me.

  And then I was somewhere else. Someone else. Myself, but reset to the very beginning with everything I had ever been wiped utterly blank.

  For a moment, there was nothing at all. Then things started to come back in a stream of chaotic, disjointed images that were barely familiar, as if someone else were watching a highlights reel of the life I could no longer remember through my eyes.

  The real me would have understood that I was being read.

  But for the moment, I was two years old, hitting the back of a rocking chair against the wall of my parents’ sitting room.

  I was five and playing chess with Mom, making her laugh when I accidently moved my rook diagonally.

  I was seven and sitting on my dad’s lap in his workshop, my real dad’s lap, sobbing into his jacket while we waited for the glue to dry on my favorite porcelain doll’s face.

  And then I was nine, and I kept being nine, and I couldn’t stop being nine when I heard the crash of breaking wood in the middle of the night and knew that something terrible was about to happen.

  I was nine and in my big sleep t-shirt and bare feet, tiptoeing across the dark living room where the sound had come from, surprised to see all the wooden furniture still intact, closing in on my first glimpse of the monster.

  It had my father’s face, but everything else about it was wrong. The limbs were too long with far too many joints. Other stumps with sharp, bony points sprouted asymmetrically from its torso.

  Its right arm lifted and bent, almost where the elbow should have been but backward, and came swinging down like a morning star flail, knocking something, someone, hard against the floor.

  I recognized my uncle’s voice when it cried out in response. It had read me too many stories to mistake.

  I felt the gasp slip through my lips. The monster froze to the spot to listen.

  Without turning, without moving at all except to shed a patch of hair that was in the way, the back of its head blinked open a pair of freshly grown eyes, exactly the shade of my father’s, and looked back at me.

  “Mina.”

  The only word I could find was the one I didn’t believe anymore.

  “Dad?”

  And then I was suddenly ten, hunting Creature Splinters in the forest with a borrowed rifle that was much too big for me.

  I was eleven, stretched out on the floor of my room with a nine-year-old Aldo, my overly complicated early list system spread out around us, trying to explain my latest deductions to him and marveling at how easily he understood.

  I was twelve, hanging from the Prospero Middle School
bleachers by a fast-fraying sweater, one of my more vile nicknames scrawled across my face in itchy permanent ink, while Patrick Keamy and his assorted goons practiced chucking dirt clods at me, and Haley Perkins, the real Haley Perkins, stood in front of them, intercepting the lazier throws with a ruler and yelling at them to get a life.

  And then I was fourteen, the flood of images slowing back to a clear, ambling stream again, and I was crying for the last time in the presence of another being, human or otherwise.

  His name was Shaun Brundle, and I was happy to see him, happy after the replacement of five classmates in a single week to curl up for a moment in his arms, to let him watch over me and kiss away my exhausted tears and examine for me the surveillance footage I had already poured over for so many hours that I could no longer see it.

  I thought he’d spotted a clue I’d somehow missed when he directed my attention to the monitor, until I caught his reflection in its glass surface, raising the keyboard over my head and bringing it crashing down.

  To my small credit, I didn’t stop to mourn, not then. I just grabbed my paring knife off the desk, stabbed, and twisted.

  He gasped and shuddered, eyes wide and hurt and confused, ordinary-looking blood gushing out over my hand, and for a moment I dared to hope it would be just that simple.

  Then, in one quick wave of a chain reaction, the blood hardened to the consistency of stale gummy worms.

  I pulled back instinctively, and the blood gave a squelching, sucking sound against my skin. I could feel fresh, liquid blood joining it when I twisted the blade, and Shaun winced with its movements but didn’t loosen his hold. The thickened blood crept along my arm, almost dripping upward, in sticky, rubbery tendrils, pulling me in further until my fist, with the knife still clutched in it, was pressed against his imitation of a spine.

  The bones of my arm snapped somewhere inside of him, Splintery sharp edges cutting gashes into the flesh that even my body’s excellent self-healing capacity would never erase. Then he was around me, all around me like inch-thick shrink wrap, carrying me out the window, I didn’t know where.

  I was fourteen and seven more minutes, cutting my way free just before the tree line, pouring lighter fluid over the Splinter even while it twisted itself back into Shaun’s shape and told me with his stolen voice, “If you kill me, you kill us both.”

  To make his point, he put a hand on the bare skin of my ankle and forced in his threat, the cold, hard, crystal clear image of my Shaun, locked away in the greenish dark somewhere, pale and slouched limply to one side with half-open dead eyes.

  I knew that “both” meant the real Shaun, not me.

  And I knew he was telling the truth.

  It was not ignorance that made me touch the flame to his dripping skin.

  I did it because of that hot, thick-blooded killing feeling that couldn’t let him get away with what he had done to my Shaun and to me, that couldn’t let him win.

  I was fourteen and ten minutes more, lying on the grass where Kevin found me, broken and bleeding and reeling with imposed thoughts that weren’t my own, explaining to him why the fast disintegrating, charred mess on the ground had both inhuman parts and remnants of his brother’s clothes. Still fourteen and telling him every bit of what I knew, more to stave off shock than for any sensible reason. Fourteen and teaching him how to make me a secure tourniquet, holding him in my one good arm while we waited for the ambulance I knew I had to risk, as if it were for him instead of me, soothing him as best I could while he sobbed and gibbered but never once called me crazy.

  And then I was fourteen and two more months, standing with Kevin in front of the headshot that took the place of Shaun’s missing body at his funeral, where he told me he was finished. No revenge, no answers required, just moving on, hoping I would join him, knowing that I wouldn’t.

  And finally I was sixteen, spotting Ben for the first time in person, across another colorless funeral crowd, at the same time hearing faint, frantic words in his newly recognizable voice.

  “Mina! Mina, can you hear me?”

  Words that he wasn’t speaking yet.

  I was sixteen, sixteen and myself just minutes ago, beating the aerosol can against Haley’s skull and being flung backward into the open pod space.

  Then there was nothing again, nothing at all but a faceless shape forming itself with tremendous effort out of a sticky, clinging ocean, all the way across the immeasurable room from me but at the same time so close that it might as well have been inside me, sucking everything else in me away.

  Except for one thought, one thought hanging there after all the images had finished washing over it.

  I refuse.

  I grabbed that thought and held it. I clutched it with all of me and felt a shudder, a shockwave, run through my pod and out through the ones surrounding it.

  I used that thought to wrench my eyes open and stood there in the Splinter sludge with its hooks still lodged deep in each of my organs, fully conscious and gladder than I had ever been in my life to possess my fractured and possibly not-quite-sound mind.

  I could see the inside of my pod and the distorted image of the Warehouse outside, but that wasn’t all. I could feel the inside of every pod, hundreds of thousands of bodies with Splinter pressed against the skin, hundreds of thousands of sleeping minds.

  Most of them were empty, silent, vacant, nothing but a blurred impression of one of the distant scenes playing on the pods’ surfaces, but others were sharper, more human, more alive. And in that ungainly cavern of my head, I had room for them all.

  I expected my own pod to keep fighting me the way it had at the start, but one more thought, I refuse, made the gelatinous goo around my right leg shudder and melt away. This time when I kicked the wall that had withstood a shotgun blast, it gave way like cheap window glass.

  Ben had caught up to the sound of the struggle, and I caught a momentary glimpse of him standing on the pod opposite me with Haley in a headlock, the motionless blade of the chainsaw pressed to her throat, before they both saw my pod shatter.

  Haley’s look of unconcern dissolved into terror.

  “Mina!”

  Ben let her go and leapt across to me, still calling my name. He tried to grab my hand, but I waved him back and looked over his shoulder at Haley’s face, trying to absorb her every detail of imitation until I could feel without a doubt which sleeping consciousness was a perfect match.

  “The real Haley is fifty-six pods to your right, fifteen forward from there, and forty-two straight down. You can catch her if you freefall. Cut her out at the connection and she’ll live. I’ll be right here.”

  Ben hesitated, letting the next shuffle draw that much closer.

  “Go!” I shouted, and even in the muffling, shimmering, echoless air, he listened and fell sideways out of sight.

  Haley looked back and forth for a moment in abject panic between me, prone and defenseless in front of her in the broken pod, and Ben, plummeting toward her lifeline to sever it. Then she sprang after him, leaving a time-

  displaced streak of blonde behind her.

  24.

  Two Damsels, The Reaper,

  and a Guy with a Flamethrower Walk Into a Warehouse . . .

  Ben

  I tried to remember everything Mina had said, everything she had showed me, about how gravity worked down there. I tried to let that comfort me as I plummeted through the shifting, shuddering structure of the Warehouse, bouncing the light blobs off of me and hoping they, and not some other moving piece of stone, were the only things I would hit before I landed.

  It didn’t help much.

  I focused. I focused as hard as I could on a safe landing on the platform beneath me. I pushed out all thoughts of splattering on the ground like some old cartoon and imagined a soft landing that I would barely feel.

  I closed my eyes.

  Soft landing.

  Soft landing.

  Soft landing.

  I don’t think I could have been more surp
rised when I actually did land softly on the platform below, light as a feather. If I hadn’t been busy laughing like a loon out of pure relief, I’m sure I would’ve tried to come up with some witty, action movie-esque thing to say.

  The platform I landed on was narrow, maybe ten feet wide and about fifty feet long with three pods on either side of it. The pod on the far left side was Haley’s. I had no idea how I was going to get her out. The chainsaw might do it, but I might cut into her just as easily. The flamethrower was worth considering, maybe melting her out, but that was just as risky. The tools in my belt all seemed so pitiful compared to the hard shell of the pod.

  And to make matters worse, I also had to contend with the padded footfalls of the Haley-Splinter landing be-

  hind me.

  “Son of a . . .” I muttered.

  I dropped the chainsaw, whirling to face her with the flamethrower.

  She was faster, more used to moving down here. I didn’t stand a chance. She ripped off one of her own hands and threw it at my left foot. Its freshly grown claws lashed out and dug into the ground, bolting my foot in place. Her other hand soon followed, locking my other foot to the floor. Tendrils of bone and tendon stretched from their severed stumps, wrapping around me, binding my legs, chest, and arms. I tried to flex my wrist, to aim the flamethrower at her.

  The Haley-Splinter shook her head, smiling an all-too-Haley smile. “Let’s aim that somewhere . . . a little less dangerous.”

  Impossibly strong and sharp tendrils wrapped around my wrist, aiming the flamethrower at my legs. This would be a problem.

  She looked at me curiously, a childlike smile on her face as she walked towards me slowly. The snapping, popping sound of her further transforming made looking at her like staring at a pond in a rainstorm. When the sound waves had subsided, parts of the creature that stood before me more or less looked like the Haley I knew. Her sundress was in shreds around her ankles, and long, floor-length tentacles mixed with her shimmering blonde hair, spilling around her shoulders and wrapping around her nude frame like a madman’s vision of the Birth of Venus.