Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “You never did like kids.” Her finger dragged through the slush of mixed blood on the floor. She stuck the tip in her mouth and smiled. Dimples. “How’s Judith?”

  “You won’t find her.”

  “I will.” She sculpted the child’s face into a scowl. “We will.” An adult gesture, that: the slight tilt backward of her head, indicating the Enemy patterns.

  “A simple keystroke. You would never have happened.”

  “Too late. I’m coming. I’m here. We’re here, and we’ll find her.” Maire’s eyes sparked silver.

  Paul’s eyes sparked nothing in the mud of his gaze.

  “This concept of ‘Delta Point’ as you so lovingly call it.. It’s—”

  The space where her hearts had once been erupted with white

  and I saw the Enemy patterns shatter one by one. All was fire and scream and shiver as

  Alina shifted her weapon from where the girl had been and started taking out the Black. The cave crawled. Her troops surged forward, confident with the courage that new-Awake gives them. The Black patterns destabilized, crumbled, sunk into the rock of the ground, but the Judith forces didn’t let them get far; Alina tight-beamed orders up to Samayel, and he doused the hotzone with phased tethers, securing their codes in that When.

  Alina charged through the still-dissembling patterns, throwing a few fuck-you shots into a few black skulls as they melted. She saw the author and his glorified bodyguard West scramble to their feet as they realized what was going on, that they were being rescued.

  Alina’s kids cleaned up the cave in no time.

  Benton wasn’t moving. Next to her, Task lay dying. West tried to hold his blood in.

  “Alina!”

  It was the first time Paul had said her name. She felt something.

  “Judith ME picked up your exit request before the Enemy blocked the signal. They sent us in. Sam’s waiting above to take you back.”

  “Good. We have serious wounded. Task’s critical, Benton—”

  “Paul?”

  He turned to meet West’s gaze.

  “She’s—Hope’s—”

  “No” and he fell to the floor, pulled off the girl’s helmet, placed his hand over her chestplate. He frantically tried to revive her, activating the shield suit’s recharge system, and when that didn’t work, he leaned over her and fisted his weight down into her chest. He stopped to check her breath, her pulse.

  West gently placed his remaining hand on Paul’s shoulder. It fell, rose to the rhythm of the attempt to start her heart.

  “Stop it, Paul.”

  He kept going.

  “Paul—”

  The author threw West back and almost succeeded in tumbling the man over. West reached forward and one-armed Paul off of Benton.

  “She’s dead.”

  These systems of desire and ritual, silver lies and betrayal: what love could breathe in a world of such uncertainty and echo, what morning whisper or crawling dawn could ever replace that scent, that taste, that perfect moment in which we look into eyes not our own and realize that they are?

  Paul again shrugged off West’s hand, walked past Alina and her troops as he studied the ground in front of him. As he passed Alina, he looked up, and in those eyes, she knew the fragments of him.

  Alina thought she felt something in that moment.

  WIND[S]WEPT

  Flatline.

  affliction had been isolated and the source identified, it was far too late for the forward combat crews, who had been exposed to fatal levels of the alien metal as they

  Do you know of blood? Of wind? Of loss, of ruin?

  to the waft of black, bitter coffee and she followed them into the empty streets, finally moon-lit, finally casting aside the day’s embrace of mist and fog, the earlier downpour retreating into the

  sound of their footsteps, his ancient black boots, her new black boots, a drift of laughter and conversation. She had hesitated before the cafe, finally allowing the door to swing shut to the bell’s call. The jingle brought the proprietress’s thin gaze from an emptying pack of Marlboros to the door. The jangle brought her customer’s thin gaze to his wife’s. Eyes locked as the bell settled; they would make love that

  night that Hope was killed, West found Paul sitting alone in the construct. This time it wasn’t decorated with his typical college bar layout. It was gray and empty. Mostly empty. West thought most of the gray came from him. He thought in, saw Paul, and thought out. West knew the author needed time alone.

  West talked to Jud, and she sent him back to a semblance of home. She’d handle the repairs.

  Abbie was in bed already, the lights out. West had been downstairs reading a parenting magazine half-heartedly between paying bills and watching the game. She’d bought the magazine and many more like it and put them in a stack on the coffee table. West was younger, skinnier, his hands still callused. Before the war. Before she’d…

  So he read the magazines, not that his wife put any faith in them. She knew they’d work it all out eventually. They wouldn’t learn how to love a child by reading articles on the right diapers to buy and proper vaccination schedules.

  West crawled into bed next to her, and her weight shifted as his lowered. A whispered, slept inquisition to which she knew the answer: Adam? She moved into a spoon against him. As he gave her a goodnight kiss on the cheek, he smelled toothpaste and Noxzema and her shampoo, the expensive stuff she felt guilty buying on a farmer’s paycheck, but the stuff that he loved her to have and needed her to have.

  It was a quiet night in Nebraska, away from his missing arm, Hope’s dead body, Paul’s emotionless face in that gray, empty room.

  He didn’t want to go

  back downtown after they’d watched moonrise by the water.

  She was always just behind them, always close enough to taste them, once reaching out for Maggie’s halo of curls, her hand stopping just short of target. Not yet. She didn’t yet trust herself enough to not savage their

  bodies all around her, an imperfect circle on imperfect sand.

  Hunter’s body slumped to the ground, the shattered skull splashing gray and crimson on impact, the shiver gun cratering sand at his side.

  It was in the perfect silence that she screamed, her wail growing younger faster as the silver spread through the sky, the stars, all

  the energy they’d expended on the development of weaponized silver would be for naught if the test failed. Already, there were reports from the many fronts across shattered space that the lumbers were adapting, evolving, fighting back against the harvest fleets.

  Ever cut your grass one day, and the next, you notice a foot-tall dandelion towering above the green, white fluffy seeds spreading in the phantom wind? The lumbers were just as hardy, just as determined to resist harvest.

  You don’t know what freedom is until you’ve seen a system-sized school of trees, branches bare and brittle from the nothing of space, defensive spines bigger than continents firing from ridged, cavernous bark, tearing apart slithers with petrified wood.

  The keening, the screaming: their calls weren’t answered in that void.

  Their song was one of

  morning West left the dream of Abigail’s arms and retreated to the horror that was the final book.

  Paul was already in Jud’s chamber. When West greeted him, his hand waved him to silence as his head cocked toward the obscured cove of Jud’s sleeper. The lights were at work carving her apart, flaying layer after layer down to her silver core where god lived. West never got used to seeing that. Blood, guts, and a pretty little marble. The lights wrapped her in a new Jud body and sealed her up. She stretched, the incision lines still sealing on her face and chest.

  “The answer’s ‘No.’”

  “We need to get back out there.” Paul’s voice wasn’t.

  “You need some time.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You need some time.” She wrapped herself into a robe and reclined. “It’s too soon.�
��

  He spun, mouth curling to a snarl. “There’s no fucking time left. We need to get out there, full-force, and—”

  “Paul.” She held out her hand. “Take this.”

  West knew what it was already: Hope’s marble, now lifeless and useless. Paul snatched it from her grasp and stormed from the room. When the chamber door had cycled shut, Jud patted a place next to her on the dais and motioned for West to join her.

  “He’ll be okay.” West didn’t believe it, but he said it because it was the only thing he could think of.

  “Yeah.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “I liked Hope.”

  “There’s no way…?” He let the question fall.

  “Not this time. Maire fucked the code. She’s lost to us.”

  He didn’t want to think about the implications of to us.

  “Who’ll be our third?”

  “Fourth, with the bear.”

  “I hate that bear. Who’s fourth?”

  “Ever meet Banana Tits?”

  This is where I take them when they’ve died:

  Jacob was wrong. It’s not easier when nowhere feels like home. It’s easier when no one feels like home.

  It was a close cousin to the first book’s Chicago crater, I suppose, a great gouge in the surface of the planet, the cliffs of the edge entirely too sharp on the periphery, the upload generator tilting precariously miles away at the impact’s center. The sky was empty.

  I walked past the older graves, their shadows inking the glassed dust with darkness deeper than that feeble sunlight should have birthed. Simple stones, simple names. Each contained multitudes.

  I buried her marble next to another.

  I wanted to say something when I was done, as if vocalizing the loss would validate her importance to my life, to my sanity. I couldn’t find the right words. The words I did find were inappropriate and filled with a venomous mix of truth and emotion that I could no longer afford.

  I remembered that first night: the beach, the shadows, the voice. Another life. The grating of sand across skin. Too many kisses on the cheek. All of that, all of that, now ruined by the corrupt code of a child, a monster.

  I stood and walked away from my cemetery, certain that I’d visit it again before long.

  There are no mechanics to a shiver gun.

  The basic physics are those of particle acceleration and molecular resonance. The gun itself is nothing more than a shaped form of phase-ready metallish, available in any sculpt one could desire. In the history of her, she’d eventually see shivers like six-shooters, the traditional claw form of the inner worlds, the stylized driftwood grip and sliver barrel of the outer worlds, blocky extended cubes and tubular bells, rifles, billion-barreled shatter arrangements mounted on destroyers.

  No matter the size or shape or taste, the shiver gun she remembered most was the pistol with which she’d been repeatedly raped after her capture and interrogation following the initial invasion of her homeworld. The Inner forces enjoyed such torture. They viewed her lifekind as barbarians; the condition in which they found her blockaded planet certainly helped that assumption. Continental fires, cannibalized cities, necromancy and sacrifice and an innate resistance to the machines.

  She refused to talk. They enjoyed the aftermath.

  A swift and brutal beating to tender her up, to get the juices flowing: blood from her broken nose, her split lip, her torn ears, tears, snot and spittle and vomit. A particularly brutal impact to her chest had split the bottom of her left breast open. They’d stopped the bleedout on that one even as they bit off her right nipple and carved and branded their marks on the soft gooseflesh of her belly, her descent to sex, her thighs. A broken finger, an extracted tooth, a clump of raven hair torn from her scalp and waved as a prize above: she still wouldn’t talk.

  A thumb in her eye: an audible pop, but they kept her alive. She was beautiful.

  The first at her sex was the commanding officer. The only lubrication between her legs was her own blood, the torn labia and excised clitoris providing her a semblance of new virginity, and the splash of seed he left behind, his pathetic penis quickly deflating and retreating below codpiece armor to the congratulations and admiration of his subordinates. The other officers took their turns, filling her, ripping, inverting and bypassing walls of flesh, cervix, uterus, bruising and abrading the softness, the holy tender profaned.

  She screamed until she couldn’t catch her breath, blacked out, woke to new horrors. She’d bit into and through her bottom lip, which hung wordless and kissless in two pieces painting her chin and cheeks.

  Still alive.

  The stood in a circle around her, jerking their members to attention, ready for ensuing rounds, waiting for orders, waiting for questions and answers they knew she’d never give, as if they could fuck the truth from her, bring her to confessional orgasm, ply the coordinates and movements and statistics from her body with their pricks, slick with her truths, blood spattering the floor in revelations.

  Her ears covered with rough hands, armored hands, the fury in his eyes capturing what attention she couldn’t hold dear and safe behind tear-wet eyelids, she couldn’t hear their barks and grunts, couldn’t realize her next coupling until the soldier shot, grinned, crawled out of and off and she saw him then, a former lover, a former underling in her resistance, standing with his hands bound behind him, matching bloods and tears masking his face, sobs because he saw what they’d done to her, what he was about to do to her.

  He fell under the rifle stock. Unable to stop his collapse, his hands bound, he slammed onto her front, their collision producing a unison exclamation of pain. Soldiers adjusted his position, tore his pants down and from his legs. His tears dropped to her face, cleansing unremarkable tracks across tacking blood.

  I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

  The soldiers laughed at him: flaccid penis and tears and the mutual sobbing he shared with her. She looked up to see the commander drinking from a flask, his foreign orders sending a scurry of soldiers to her lover’s sides and rear, a flurry of hands coaxing and encouraging, violating him as they’d violated her, forcing him to a half-erection with their manipulation of his shaft, his testicles, his prostate. His was a different form of resistance.

  All through the rape of him, he remained still above her, his two eyes locked on her one, their inhalations and exhalations matched, the paths between their gazes and breaths a hesitant solace. He grimaced through the pain and when they judged him hard enough, one enterprising soldier guided him into her.

  Through blood and the seed of a dozen others, she’d produced enough of her own wetness for him. Only for him.

  The position wasn’t impossible, but difficult because of the bindings holding his hands at his back. They were chest-to-chest, and he whispered to her, knowing he was crushing her, knowing his weight took her breath, which he tried to replace with hitching whispers: i love you, i love you, please forgive me, i love you and she ground beneath him, pain spiking from the groove where her clit had been, where her vagina had been grated and gouged, where the blistering brands split across her navel and inner thighs.

  He hated himself for building to orgasm. Her eye comforted, knew.

  When he shuddered and released, she barely felt his cum splash within her. A last look and she definitely felt his weight release; they pulled him up by his hair and shot him in the back of the head with a shiver gun, the resonated needle of metallish emerging just below his left eye, covering her with chunks of his brain and skull and the cartilage of his nose, a rain of blackened blood.

  His dead weight slammed back against her, and in his death his body opened, his penis shrinking with awful speed even as it pumped urine and remnants of his semen into her gaped hole, mixing with her blood and slick, his shit and sweat running against her thighs and buttocks, puddling in that puddle that surrounded her broken body.

  The soldiers laughed and cheered as they dragged his corpse from her and began their rage again, being sure to
keep her alive, just keep her alive.

  Maire screamed out to no god in particular.

  Some months, some times.

  Jud tapped her fingers on the table.

  “He’s the only god here, you know.”

  “Well, fuck me in the ass, Frenchie.”

  Jean Reynald shrugged his shoulders. “It’s true. You’re a name. A placeholder. You’re the focus of his divinity. Without him—”

  “Without him, none of you’d be here today.”

  West grumbled. “Stop this shit.”

  Sapphire and Jade Jennings West sat on either side of their “father.” Like almost all of the others, they’d been retrieved from the enemy line just before the hells Paul had written. They both made to speak at once, both looked at West, both let mouths close and fingers interlace.

  West, the twins. Jud and Reynald. Honeybear and Banana Tits. Arik Mandela, a circle of a dozen others, each noting the echo of staccato fingertaps across the chamber as Jud thought.

  “He’s falling apart.”

  “He knows we’re here right now.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that. He never saw the Delta crossover coming. It was—”

  “If he’d looked hard enough, he’d have seen it.”

  “Stop.” West rose, paced. A thought and the A/O line appeared at the center of the table. “Only thing that matters is that it happened, we’re trying to fix it, and the focal point of our existences is losing his fucking mind. We can’t get a solid lock on Delta within fifteen points. We can’t—”

  “You sure that’s not just the loss of your maths girl?” Reynald considered, turned to Alina. “No offense intended, dear.”

  “None taken. I suck at ‘maths.’”

  “How many times do we have to do this? Without even knowing how or why? He hasn’t told us nearly enough for us to succeed once he—”

  “Once he loses it completely,” Jud sunk farther into her seat, “We’re dead. You know that. Simple as that. Once he forgets us, we’re gone.”