“It means there’s many,” she said. “The man I knew... the man who was my Hound. He wasn’t the first, either. I don’t know how to explain.”
This was too weird. “If we head in and press through, there’ll be an exit to the outside.” I glanced behind as something screamed, high and loud. “I can guess that a DOG is opposite of GOD. What is a Gift Horse?”
Zarya’s lips trembled for a moment, and briefly, her eyes unfocused. When she spoke, it was vague-sounding, growing stronger only as she went along. “The questing beast. The firebird. The daughter of the trees of knowledge. GOD’s radio.”
My breath sped in time with my pulse. “I... understand. Somehow. Come on.”
“Lexi?” Vassily was sagging on his feet, head lolling. His voice was high and delirious. “Left arm.”
“GOD dammit. He’s having a heart attack,” Zarya said.
“Don’t you dare give up now,” I snapped at him, blind with rising panic. It hit a dam of resolve and flowed back from him as I continued to drag Vassily’s dead weight. “We can make it.”
“Vassily, Vassily, please.” The word from Zarya’s lips sounded like an invocation. As she spoke, Vassily drew in a phlegmy breath.
He staggered forward, half his weight on my shoulder, his left arm hanging limp over Zarya’s. “Don’t feel... so good.”
I knew why. “Scopolamine causes cardiac arrest. Breathe, Semych. Deep and steady. Come on.”
The poultry processing plant was cavernous. We ran in near silence past cold processing machines, cutting belts, empty cages, and vats full of water that would be electrified if the equipment was active. Zarya was sobbing and shivering violently. She didn’t touch anything, and when she accidentally bumped into a conveyor belt, she let out a stifled sound of pain. Her skin seared with a welt that looked like the lash of a bullwhip.
“You’re not meant to be here,” I spoke, puffing, as we pressed towards the back of the factory. “Where did you come from?”
“Eden,” she said, “At first, but then I left. I lived... Elsewhere. Another Cell. A world, like this one, but it’s dead. You were there. But the whole Cell is dead. I’m not usually fragile like this—”
A triumphant chorus of howls rang out behind us, followed by the thump and crash of something very heavy hitting the floor. The steel door.
Zarya looked back, her hair swirling around her shoulders. “It’s coming for me. It wants me.”
“It’s not going to get you.” I was grim. “But I’m all out of knives.”
“I’m not as strong as normal. I can’t fight it.” Zarya’s voice was bubbly with mucous. She sounded asthmatic now, her breath wheezing on every intake. “If it gets you, it will eat your body and soul. DOGs are the violet hounds—they are the servants of the NOthing.”
“They drove Jana and Lev mad. I know they don’t like knives. What else?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice high and desperate. In that moment, the newborn Gift Horse sounded terribly young. “I-I can’t remember. I didn’t even really remember it was you, until I saw you. Everything here is different.”
The high-pitched giggling of the DOG began to resound through the factory, building to a manic chorus as it drew nearer. I pulled Zarya and Vassily into another doorway. We emerged into a loading room, filled with stacks of film-wrapped pallets waiting for transport. The smell in the room was alkaline and earthy. I looked around wildly for an exit that led out: the far wall had three truck loading doors.
“Go.” I pushed Zarya towards it, looking over the stacks of crates. “Go, open it. Take Vassily. Save him, if you can.”
“Alexi!”
“GO.” I barely raised my voice, but the word carried emphatically.
She stared at me petulantly for a moment, but she obeyed, scooping Vassily up in her arms and carrying him away. I crossed to one of the stacks. Near one of them, I found a roll of plastic wrapping and a box cutter. A knife. My heart thumped. I took the box cutter and hacked at the plastic over one of the stacks, trying to see what was inside. It parted to reveal eggs, hundreds of them, resting in foam-lined open cartons.
I heard the screech of metal from the direction of the DOG.
I drew a deep breath, exhaled. I could do this. The deflection in Jana’s room had worked. I’d stopped Carmine from blowing my head off. It was possible.
With a steady hand, I extended the blade of the cutter and pulled it across the flesh of my forearm. The world turned white, then red, as pain filled my mouth with pressure. I daubed my fingers in the blood that sprang forth and drew the symbol of Mars on the remaining plastic. The blood beaded on contact. The pallets weren’t going to kill it, but they might incapacitate it long enough for me to stab it.
Through the archway slunk the DOG, oozing on each step. Its tendrils reached forward and almost delicately parted the plastic flaps ahead of it as it padded into the room. It was a mockery of living things—huge and hulking, chaotic, and foul.
“Deliciousdelicious smells delicious heeheeehee,” it babbled deliriously with thirty maws, lurching on every step. Pseudopods burst into pincers at the end of each tendril, chomping black needle teeth as they loomed and darted over its back. Its flesh was melting and dripping, running down its bones and crawling back up. Human bones. They had been broken and reset to make a crude skeleton. “Deliciousoh it does... so brave bravebrave heeheehee...”
A sac of fluid erupted from the DOG’s back and burst, and the air of the room seemed to sag around us. Vassily choked wetly, and as he collapsed, Zarya went down with him. I heard the scuffling, the thump, and Zarya’s cry of alarm and terror but couldn’t turn around to look. The DOG filled the room with the smell of rotten flesh, like dead whores preserved in sugar, the needles still in their veins. I licked my bloody arm as Kutkha gathered within and around me in a rising wave of pressure.
“I’ll eat him and fuck the body,” one mouth hissed in a syrupy baritone, lewd and slow. “Hear that? He’s having a heart attack just thinking about it.”
“Eateateateat!” shrilled another.
I could hear: the frothing, the thumping, Vassily’s throat clicking as the foul miasma accelerated his condition and pitched him into cardiac arrest. Zarya was sobbing, but she was rotting away in the presence of the DOG, writhing where she had fallen. I was alone.
“Fuck you.” I lowered my face, nostrils flaring. My voice was thick, the air around me building power and volume. “
The DOG laughed, sounding like Lev, Jana, and Yuri all at once, and as it built to a run and leaped, it converged into spiny, gaping rows of teeth—a huge bone-splintered orifice that came down to swallow me whole.
Chapter 23
I spat blood and roared wordlessly in the DOG’s face. The pressure built to a maelstrom as magic caught and tore through the room, lifting my hair, my clothing. It was anger and grief: anger was the wind that snapped the sails taut, fueled by rage and grief so deep that it ripped something out of me. The pallets I’d marked lifted and flung forward, into the descending DOG. They struck it in the flanks, and it laughed as the pallets simply passed through and its body burst into ropes of tar that splattered across the floor, walls, and me.
The stuff burned through my clothes and gloves to my skin, and deeper. I screamed as pain worse than anything I’d ever known wracked my body, collapsing and convulsing as I futilely clawed at the wormlike stuff burrowing into my flesh. White needles of agony pushed through the roof of my mouth and up behind my eyes as the pallets smashed violently to the floor around me, building on the shrieking, yarping howls of the DOG. I heard the plastic hiss and rip. The eggs exploded, and I was covered in those, too—and then the acidic stuff eating into my arms writhed off to flop and squirm on the ground.
The pieces of the DOG jumped and hopped, baying in a clamor of alien sounds as it frantically contorted and squirmed to evade the wave of sticky albumen and yolk that now covered the floor. It grew legs and tried to skitter, which failed when they broke; then it tr
ied to make wings, contortions of bone and slime that flapped uselessly against the floor. I tried to shake off enough of the pain to move and couldn’t. I flinched when something sailed past my head. An egg. It hit the flapping, congealing form of the DOG and broke across it, pitching it back to the floor with a wail.
I heard Zarya’s ragged, consumptive breathing intensify as she hefted again. Another egg flew by, and it hit. The DOG screeched, scrabbling and falling to the floor. It was a quarter of its previous size now, smoking and bubbling whenever it touched the mess of egg and shell. Whenever it slipped, it lost pieces of itself. NOthing was powerless when it was exposed to something that embodied potential life.
I heaved, choking back bile, and forced myself up to one knee. The wounds the DOG had left were burning cold, itching and running freely with watery blood. I touched the edge of one and gasped: the pain made my vision blur. The DOG had nearly taken my arms, chest, and shoulder down to the bone. I felt around until I found an unbroken egg and threw it at the parts of the struggling, snarling demon closest to me. It collapsed and then fell apart to fleshy gobbets that thrashed under their coating of egg, falling still as they shrank, then disappeared. Nothing was left, not even the bones of the fallen men it had consumed. Even the stench of it was clearing, while around me, the remaining albumen boiled and dried.
“Wh– wh–” I tried to speak, failed, and licked my chapped lips to moisten them before giving up on the attempt. I turned to find Zarya sprawling on the floor next to Vassily, who was gaping soundlessly. Agonal gasps.
The bottom fell out of me as I crawled across to them and tried to turn him on his side, pawing at his neck to turn his head and clear his airway. I tried to do chest compressions, but my arms buckled. I fell over his chest, struggled up, and knew that this was the end.
“No! NO!” I gathered him in my arms. Nothing. Fluid drained from his mouth, but he hung limp, convulsing in fits and starts. I've seen a lot of men die. I knew the signs: the fluttering eyes, the false breaths that never reached the lungs. Sure enough, his head lolled and he choked out foam and spittle onto the floor, but there was no response. His heart had already stopped. “You can’t, Vassily, you can’t...”
Zarya rasped beside me, her lungs full of phlegm. Bent over Vassily’s body and heaving with dry, wracking sobs, I hardly heard her. No, dammit, no. I clutched him close and rocked. Back and forth, back and forth. No. Everything. Everyone. I’d lost everything.
“Ah–ah–lexi,” Zarya whispered. “P-please...”
I couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t speak. I moaned, breathing in Vassily’s smell through his shirt, and then screamed, a harsh sound of pure agony and rage.
“Ah–lexi. Take... the knife,” she gasped, louder. Her lips were flecked with bright silver. “Kill me. Try… feed him... heart’s blood.”
Her last words broke through my fugue. I hunched in a ball around Vassily’s body, tear-streaked and shaking, unable to form any reply.
“Yes.” She breathed the word as a fluted sigh. “Ah–lexi. Kill me. You must... fulfill the Pact. You must.”
“I...” In all the times I'd killed, I'd never done that. I'd never eaten them or fed them to anyone else. “I don’t—”
“Fruit.” She looked up at me, shuddering with the effort. Her veins were visible, shot through with ugly violet streaks, which were spreading like poison as I watched. Her flesh was depressed and soft-looking, bruising under her own weight. Just like a rotting peach, she dimpled when pressed. “I’m... fruit. Made for it. Please.”
I swallowed and lowered Vassily to the ground, touching his face, his unseeing eyes, his mouth. I turned to the Gift Horse, this strange familiar woman, and thumbed the box cutter blade to its full length. Her eyes were flickering, and as I watched, she heaved and brought up a gout of clotted silver streaked with black. The air was full of sweet perfume, but Zarya gagged, a horrible sound that wracked the air of the room. It was beginning to smell like Nacari on the docks... and I realized what the rotten sugar smell really was.
“Feed... him.” She reached up, clawing weakly at my thigh. “My... heart’s... blood. And eat. We will... see you again.”
Beside her, I fell to my knees. “Zarya-”
“Trust... me.” She smiled, and it was ghastly: her teeth were covered in tarnished chrome. "I'm... here, now. On this Cell. Trust... me."
I brought the knife up like a sacrificial priest. Zarya relaxed and fell back, lifting her chest up towards the blade, as if she'd done this a hundred million times. I brought it down without hesitation. Her flesh was so soft that I punched it through her ribcage without resistance, deep into her heart.
Zarya’s eyes flew open, and she choked, staring up at my face with an expression of blissful relief. Unable to look away, I felt my Neshamah take my hand and draw the blade through her ribs and then pulled it free. She cried out, and her pupils expanded completely until they filled her irises. They unfolded into a spiral that led my gaze down, down... drawing me into a vortex of energy that took my breath away.
“The Hunt will go on,” her voice ruffled through my mind. “Until we meet again.”
The blood that ran down her torso was mercurial, a thick spill of silver. I could see my reflection in it as it spilled over her chest and pooled on the floor, evaporating upwards in thin runnels that disappeared as they decayed. My face loomed larger and larger as I bent down over Zarya’s body. She was gasping in agony now, chest rising towards me as I bowed towards her and, with a trembling tongue, lapped at the shivering pool that welled up from her heart.
Time slowed… and then wound in to a single point in space.
I was gathered up in a rush of wings that carried me down a long tunnel, and they broke me into pieces, into dust that was carried, rushing, down a river of light; a water chute flung me out into a sea of endless GREEN.
A throbbing, booming sound rolled through my being, through every bone, every muscle, every cell as the scope of the ocean expanded exponentially. There was the seething Green cauldron, burning like the heart of an enormous star, and there were its innumerable, uncountable filaments—branches of GREEN bigger than my entire universe. At first, I thought they were veins, until I registered the minute twinkling flashes along their lengths and realized they were ropes of neural tissue. Each nerve strand was roped with pearls, and I knew without knowing that they were universes, entire universes, and there were BILLIONS of them. Billions and billions of flashing specks, in all directions, as far as my eyes could see. They expanded through a rippling aqueous structure that went from white to green to yellow to orange then red—but it was the core of this enormous thing which drew me to face it as the pounding, the booming, began to resolve into a chorus of genderless voice.
loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou
It was looking back at me. The voice intensified and deepened. I was not even one cell within its mass. I was perforated, penetrated, a membrane full of holes that writhed and sobbed and screamed as my head was filled, full of it.
loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou
Images flashed in a whirlpool of sensation. I saw myself split and brachiated along many of its nerves, living many lives on many worlds. I was a blond youth, laying my head down on a hexagonal stone in the seconds before a sacrificial hammer fell. I was on horseback, straight-backed and proud... I was riding in a car, I was sitting on a bench in the drop bay of a spacecraft. I saw Zarya and others like her. I saw Crina: female, male, arching back against a sofa, a stripper pole, braced with a gun in the door of a helicopter. And I saw Vassily, shadowed by the streetlights beyond a window as he came to me in bed…
loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou
I woke over Zarya’s body, sobbing. Seconds had passed, but I was no longer in pain. I scrambled upright, remembering her last words. Feed him. Give him my heart’s blood.
The Gift Horse’s flesh was turning translucent, trembling as it began to fade and pee
l away into the air. I cracked her chest and pulled her heart free. It was an enormous organ, half again as large as a human heart and with arteries like the spokes of a wagon wheel, blue and sweet smelling. Shaking, I shuffled on my knees to Vassily’s cooling corpse and wrung it over his face and into his mouth. It felt stupid, and once more, the dry retching of grief began as I looked down into my sworn brother’s wide black eyes and saw nothing there.
The silver fluid soaked into his skin, ran into his mouth, over his cheeks, disappearing into his pores as I watched with wide, frightened eyes, and set the organ down on the middle of his chest. The structure of it clarified, turning as clear as glass, and then dissolved into his body.
I saw and felt some kind of energy ripple outwards from him, and his darkened eyes turned numinous, an incredible, fathomless blue shot through with stars. For a moment, I thought I saw him in there… but then the color left, and so did Vassily. Whatever I had seen in that moment – his Neshamah, my own desperation – left as quickly as it had come. I was too late.
He was gone.
Epilogue
Sunrise dawned hot over St. Vladimir’s, raising fog from the hard pavement outside. The church was holding funerals early to avoid the worst of the heat because – even with the air conditioners on – the mortuary wax used to restore Mariya’s body wouldn’t hold its shape right come midday.
Ukrainian funerals were not private affairs. St. Vladimir’s was packed with mourners for both brother and sister: Mariya’s customers and friends, her tear-streaked ex-husband, his family, his friends, Vassily’s friends, his released prison buddies, nearly every member of the Organizatsiya who cared to attend, and curious members of the local public streamed from the doors and down the aisle. The Orthodox church was not made for so many people, and they mingled and bickered and chattered out the door and onto the street, where Vanya’s hand-picked bouncers patrolled and guarded the gates.
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