She smiles, her teeth porcelain and perfect.
Hours later the bus driver is shaking you awake.
"You can't sleep here," he says, rubbing his hand on the side of your face. You pull back when you see it covered with burns and warts. It's ridged along the knife of his hand, like a crab's claw, bumpy and red. Like something is trying to scrape through his flesh and get out at the world. His more interesting inner self, maybe, the one he never shows anybody. The one he won't show you. His words are deformed because his teeth are crooked and broken. He's a wreck and you wonder why you never noticed it before.
You check your phone and it says the time is 11:43 p.m. It says you have 32 messages that you didn't hear because the ringer was shut off. You didn't feel it because the buzzer doesn't work. The phone is hopelessly outdated and you should have had it replaced years ago.
"Hey," you say to the bus driver. "Where are we?"
He answers with a word you can't quite get your head around, like he said it with marbles in his mouth. You ask him to repeat it and he does, and you can't understand it still. You ask him to repeat it one more time and he points at a small red sign beside his seat that says END OF LINE. He pops the door and waits for you to get your lazy ass off his bus.
It's cold and you see your breath pops off your face in plumes of gray and the air is thick with the smell of sewage from the river and exhaust from the bus. It's dark and you've never seen this street before. You turn and ask the bus driver for directions and he simply points down the road and says, "Start walkin'." Then he slams the door shut. The bus hisses at you and farts propane exhaust as it drives into the night. There are red lights on the back of the bus and green light spilling from within. There's someone sitting at the back and as the bus wanders away the person turns and looks at you and the face is familiar but you can't be sure. Maybe you've seen him before. Maybe you used to work with him or you went to school together. Maybe he's someone your sister brought home once. A moment later he's gone and there you are in the cold and the dark with your phone in your hand and the 32 messages you haven't listened to yet, so you start walking and put the phone to your ear.
"Hey Patrick Terren, it's Angela," she says.
"Hey baby," you say.
"I'm just calling because I wanted to tell you that your genital odour is embarrassing your family."
"I'm sorry," you say.
You listen to her talk and tell you she'll see you soon. The message ends and she tells you about your bad haircut. Then she tells you about how your siblings are worried your hemorrhoids are getting out of hand. She goes through 14 separate things that are wrong about you, things she hates or is embarrassed by or is ashamed of, and then the message changes.
"Patty-cake," she says, her voice breathless. Your heart lurches. "Get off the bus. Now."
You stop walking and look down at your phone. The message is from two hours ago.
*****
Your friend Ajax answers the phone on the third ring. He's holding a towel to his face and there's blood on it. His silver eye is bulging like the orb of a frog; the flesh is waxy and seething heat from infection. He holds the phone carefully with his other hand against the side of his face not crusted and swollen. Your name and face are on the screen, giving him the finger and then breaking into a grin. The scene repeats itself again and again until he answers the phone.
"Hey, buddy!" Ajax says. "What the fuck is up?"
"What?" you say. "No, nothing." The line hisses and pops with static.
"You all right?" he says. "You sound high. And this connection is for shit. Where are you?"
"I ...(STATIC)...hurt my nose," you say.
"You what? Hang on." Ajax says. The static is getting to him, and he swears loudly. He shakes his phone. The video screen you flips him off and laughs again, like you're doing it on purpose.
"...she looks like worms, man. I missed the point..."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Ajax shouts. "I can't hear you!"
"...Not...like...this..."
"Pete!" Ajax yells. "I can't hear you!"
"I'm...(STATIC) ...through a spider's ass," you say, and laugh.
Ajax hears the cogs in some great machine desperately in need of oil, and he hears you panting and laughing in alternating breathes. You're praying gibberish, a language that can only be spoken with broken teeth and blood in your mouth. And then another voice, which turns his blood cold and he throws his phone against the wall when he hears it, cracking the touch screen and causing a rip in your smiling face.
"COME WITH US," the voice said.
*****
You have no idea how long you've been walking, but you do it because the next message you listened to was Angie telling you it wasn't much further. You move from the glare of one sodium arc-light to the next, marvelling at how the rain seems to subtly shift direction with every light you pass under. The effect is disorienting, causing the shadows to warble in your peripheral vision. Sometimes they angle away from you, and other times they almost seem to be reaching for you, grasping for your clothes with tiny broken-twig fingers, and when a shadow actually manages to grab and tear a small hole in your shirt, you scream at it and flail away, slamming your back against a light pole and huffing shallow, panicked breaths.
The pole is a cold wet shock along your spine, with a touch like smooth vinyl where it touches your skin. Something buzzes in your hand and you throw your phone in a panic. It bounces across the pavement and comes to a rest in the dark a few feet away. There's a crack on the screen and chipped plastic on the corner where it hit the ground. The lit screen is flashing red and blue, blue and green, green and red. Your next message, and it's another one from Angie. You can barely hear her through the tinny little speakers .
"It's all right," she's saying. "Don't be afraid of them, Patty-cake. They're harmless. It's all in your mind. It's all in your mind."
And of course it is. This entire thing is in your head. You don't jump at shadows because shadows aren't real. They're dark copies of real things. They have no substance. You're not afraid. Just like you're not afraid that your phone with the broken buzzer suddenly buzzed in your hand to get your attention.
You step into the gloom, praying that whatever grabbed your shirt won't grab you now, and you swoop in and pluck the phone off the ground. And if the shadows seem to take a little longer than normal before they retreat back away from the light, well, that's probably just something you're dreaming up because you're not scared.
The area is growing more decrepit from street to street. When the lights over the sidewalk begin to flicker it makes your throat burn with bile and you taste burnt oil and smoke in the air. Even the graffiti is corrupt. Gone are the delicate, beautiful works enhanced with Light Tape and AniPaint you're used to seeing. These are crude, offensive scrawls scraped out of the sides of the buildings, in languages you don't recognize. On one wall you pass, a massive dead city has been painted, full of corpses and black shadows that seem to be feasting on the meat. VIST R'LYEH, it says. The caption is in Filipino or Latin, maybe, you can't tell. It seems to be gibberish. It looks like ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Maybe it's Arabic.
"It's not Arabic," Angie's message says. There are only three left.
The pavement here is cracked and chipped and there are dark stains that should maybe be best left unexplained. You avoid them as best you can, and wonder how they can remain even though the rain is a steady cold sheet of plastic against your skin. There are fire barrels here and there with dark, brooding shapes huddled around them; you must be somewhere near Forest Lawn but you've never been here before. There are bus routes here, but every small glass shed you pass says the number 1 is out of order, please continue down the line. They blink in digital clarity like an alarm clock, on and off, conserving power by only being active half the time The other half they are somewhere dark, and you shake your head because that's a weird thought to have about a bus stop light screen. At t
he next bus stop it's exactly the same, except your belly sinks when you read it because for just a moment it might have read something different, it might have read something like I want you to eat a live cat.
You stagger and trip in a puddle, going to your knees, the bright lancets of pain shooting up your thighs. You shake the water from your eyes and see that you're standing in front of an old subway entrance. PICKMAN TRAM a cracked sign says, and rust flows like blood in the rain from the letters.
The phone in your hand has one more message. You stagger to your feet, and press your hand against the old steel claptrap door to the subway. It grinds on joints that haven't been opened in years. It opens to a gaping black chasm that welcomes you with a rush of gas air, like the stink of propane additive and sour compost. You can't see more than three or four feet past the doorway, but you sense a huge, cavernous space before you, like the mouth of the world if it were to suddenly open before you and swallow you from the face of existence.
There's a small blue light deep in the throat of the black, some tiny spark bug or firefly. It dances back and forth, swaying in some unfelt breeze before you, and your last sane instinct tells you to run for your life, run like you've never run before, blind and brutal, clawing at your eyes like a lunatic and screaming your lungs bloody. But you don't, because it's all so glorious. It's all bigger than you are. God doesn't hate you. He doesn't know you.
As the firefly comes closer to the door, you see it is no life form at all but the backlit screen of a cell phone, and when it floats up to Angie's face you see her features elongated and canine from the shadows, her eyes large and red. Her blonde hair is matted and tacky from some dark fluid; she smells like motor oil and blood. She smiles at you, and her teeth are porcelain-perfect. Her grin stretches unnaturally large, piercing her cheeks and stretching toward her ears, like her smile is a gash threatening to sever the top of her head completely.
And God, how she looks is beautiful.
"Patty-cake," she says, and her voice has taken on a strange duotone quality, or perhaps it's three voices, you can't be sure. You try to focus on the voice you remember and find you can't. Something tickles your face as she speaks. You feel across your lips with scrabbling, panicked fingers and when you pull your hand away you see your nose has been bleeding. For how low long, you can't say.
She's beckoning you to listen to that last message now. A line of drool runs down her chin, pink and sticky. Her own phone is dancing with colour, flashing images of things you've never seen, never imagined; dead cities; tentacled horrors of eyes and teeth; great, mindless things in the deepest parts of space devouring stars and ripping solar systems apart. Between these photos you see images from her life with you, photos of your face; pictures of the two of you, young and free and happy, cheeks touching, comfortable and familiar. In some of them she's the blond beauty who rescued you. In some she's this fleshy dog-creature with overly large eyes and a smile meant for rending and tearing.
And she's urging you to put the phone to your ear and listen to that last message.
You hit a button and put the phone to your ear.
It's ringing.
"Hey, buddy!" Ajax says. "What the fuck is up?"
"What?" you say. "No, nothing." You're confused. Is this the message you were supposed to hear? The line hisses and pops with static, and Ajax is talking but you can't hear it. "I think Angie hurt my nose," you say.
It's hard to focus when Angie's face is moving like that. Rippling, like her flesh is a sheet covering a pit of fleshy snakes. They rope around each other, and her skin draws back from her stretching teeth.
"...the fuck are you talking about?"
You've made a mistake, you can see that now. You've made a simple, terrible mistake. You weren't looking at the touch screen on your phone when your greasy fingers were looking for Angie's last message, and you hit a speed dial option instead. You're missing the point. There was some vital bit of information on that message and you've lost it. You've lost things before, but not like this.
"Not like this," you say to Ajax and to Angie.
The phone is hissing at you. The blood on your hands makes it feel soft and spongy, like you've been holding a spider to the side of your head and trying to talk through its ass.
Angie takes you by the hand. In a moment of total clarity you see the fields again, with those strange plant-like torsos, those flesh anemones spurting their lung-wads into the air and sucking them back in like red flags. You can almost feel the bones in your limbs cracking and the sockets popping as they reform into large bruised tentacles. You can feel your gorge rise and the heat in your midsection, burning ache for your Angel, your loins swelling with blood and tissue and bulging against the seams of your jeans. You feel beautiful. You feel powerful.
"Come with us," she whispers, her teeth clattering as she speaks. It sounds like she's smashing coffee mugs together. She draws you into the dark, her large red eyes never leaving your face.
You shuffle after her, your half formed-feet and arms making you clumsy and unbalanced. You stumble, and she picks you up. She's as beautiful as ever, a true angel. You look up into her dog face and smile. She would never hurt you, and you trust her completely. Everything is forgiven and forgotten, but you're not sure if it's because of love or because the cracking and popping in your skull and your head reshapes itself is wiping out delicate memory networks. You flip a coin and decide on love.
Later, when the screaming begins, you try to hold on to that thought.
*****
There's a phone ringing, and for a long time Ajax doesn't know where it is so it rings and rings. Finally he digs it up from under a couch cushion and sees your cracked, smiling face giving him the finger. His thumb hovers over the answer button. He feels he should answer but he doesn't. There's a small beep and the call goes through to voicemail.
A lone, bloody tear tickles his cheek as he thumbs through to his voicemail options. The phone tells him he has one message from Patty-cake. It asks him if he would like to listen to the message.
He wipes the tear with his hand, and then fingers the eye patch where his silver eye used to be.
The phone asks again if he would like to listen to the message from Patty-cake.
After a long time, Ajax pushes a button.
WHAT WAITS OUT THERE
Jamie Lackey
I'm a little jealous of Jamie. We met in the same writing group I met Kathryn Board in and she's a force to be reckoned with, both in concept and execution. Hell, I'm jealous of her for her sheer speed of production; to date, she's published 18 stories in a little over two years, appearing in places like The Living Dead 2 and Daily Science Fiction, while also working the slush over at Clarksworld. I think I'm allowed to hate her a little. You can keep track of her at www.jamielackey.com.
Buzzing alarms greeted 238-R when she jolted out of cold sleep. The world around her was fuzzy, and her fingers felt stiff and strange. She pulled herself out of her pod and stabilized herself against zero G drift with her tail.
The lights pulsed, and the alarm buzzed. It was just like the drills she'd done over and over again before she left. She propelled herself over to the control panels.
Everything checked out. Engines, life support, fuel--she glanced out the tiny viewport, and froze. The distant, scattered stars weren't moving.
They should have been. She'd broken the light barrier before she entered cold sleep.
She floated forward and looked out the port there.
There were no stars in front of her. Had she crashed into something? How was that possible?
There was no sign of impact, and she was in deep space, light years from anything that could be an obstacle.
She fired the starboard thrusters, then the port. The rear of the ship swung back and forth, but the front stayed anchored. She tried full reverse. Nothing happened.
She ran through all of the drills she'd practiced--she'd trained for a thousand situations.
This wasn't o
ne of them.
She wished that her mission had been a duo instead of a solo. She'd already wished that a thousand times. She imagined she heard someone else breathing, felt a hand squeeze hers. She shuddered and pushed the feeling away. She couldn't afford to let her imagination run away with her.
She sent a report back to Earth, but it would take over a month to get to them, and another month for her to receive a response.
She stared out at the vacant darkness.
The darkness stared back.
*****
Two years earlier, 238-R floated next to her berth and stared at her orders on her infopad. She blinked, and they didn't change. She felt numb.
238-S burst into their room, waving her own infopad like a flag, her identical face twisted with rage. The engineers who'd designed the 238 class had given them long, narrow faces, prehensile feet on stunted legs, and smooth, hairless, brown skin.
"I can't believe it!" S shouted.
"Believe what?" R asked.
S wrapped her tail around a hook in the wall and shoved her orders into R's face. "After all that talk about how they didn't look down on clones having relationships they still assigned us to different ships! Look! You're not on my crew roster! I'm going to fly straight down to the main office--"
R pulled the infopad out of S's hand and replaced it with her own. "They didn't separate us as a punishment."
S looked down at R's orders. "Oh." Her eyes widened. "You got the deep space solo!" She pulled R close and kissed her. "Of course you did! Who else could they pick? I'm so proud of you! You're going to explore the galaxy!" S kissed her again, then pulled away. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes and floated away. "But that means that I'm never going to see you again." Her tears caught the fluorescent light and shone like stars.
*****
R pulled on her pressure suit. Maybe if she could see the problem from another angle, a solution might present itself.
She wasn't ready to waste any of her probes yet, and couldn't think of anything else to do. The enforced idleness was driving her crazy. She saw movement out of the corners of her eyes, heard faint whispers beneath the thrum of the engines.
Torn Realities Page 3
