Distortion Offensive

by James Axler

  “They won’t know,” Richie insisted, anger reddening his face. And without another moment’s hesitation, he leaped forward and drove the blade at the old man’s gut.

  In the ineffectual light of the cell, the blade seemed to disappear into the old man. But when he pulled it back there was no blood. The man was wearing several layers of clothing, Richie realized; the abbreviated blade couldn’t have cut through.

  With a curse, Richie slashed the blade at the man’s smiling face, driving it into his cheek—fit to carve his initials there if he had to—as the old man stood and took it.

  The thing that stuck with Richie and the gang members who witnessed it was the sound that the blade made as it snapped. It rang like the sound of a small bell, tinkling in the silence as the blade broke away from the hilt and clattered to the hard floor.

  Sometimes we don’t really see the things we do in anger and other times we see them all too clearly, the adrenaline giving us the ability to recall an event in far more vivid detail than we normally might. Richie’s anger embedded every nanosecond of that moment on the lobes of his brain.

  The point of the blade hit the old man in the left cheek, in line with where his top gum would be, two back from his upper canine tooth at the second premolar. It was fleshy there, and the blade should have pierced the man’s face with ease. Long gray-white whiskers of the old man’s shaggy beard clawed up to hide that part of his face, and Richie’s blade cut cleanly through two of them as it swished toward the wrinkled skin of his cheek. And then, impossibly, the blade had snapped in two, the point splintering away as a separate part to the main blade, which itself broke from the knife’s little plastic handle.

  Richie’s fist carried on through the arc, still clutching the useless handle of the knife as its shattered blade dropped toward the ground in two twinkling parts, and his fist connected with the old man’s face with a glancing blow.

  The moment passed, and sound and vision resumed normalcy as Richie leaped back, howling in agony as he clutched at his fist. Where he had hit the man’s face it ached with such a raw fury that Richie wanted to hit a wall in some illogical, primordial urge to make it stop.

  Seth saw his brother fall to the floor clutching at his broken hand and weeping, and he turned on the old man. “What the hell did you just do to my brother, you old fuck?” he yelled, bringing his face just inches from the drunk’s.

  The old man didn’t raise his own voice when he responded, nor did he show any outward signs of fear. “All you need do is say the word,” the old man explained.

  On the floor, Richie looked up with pleading eyes at his brother. Seth could see that his knuckles had been skinned, and there was a trickle of blood running between the joints of his small and ring fingers. “It was like hitting stone, Seth,” he muttered. “Like hitting a fucking wall.”

  Seth turned back to the old man where he stood held in place by the other members of the gang.

  “What’s this word you’re babbling about?” Seth demanded, his fists bunched as he wrestled with his urge to try striking the man himself.

  “Ullikummis,” the old man breathed.

  “Bullshit,” Seth spit back.

  A wide smile appeared on the old man’s face then, his yellowing teeth showing amid his shaggy beard. “Your gateway to utopia.”

  From where he crouched on the floor, Richie looked up at his brother, seeing the strange intensity in his older sibling’s eyes. “Utopia?” he snapped. “Look at my hand, man. Look what this old freak did to my hand.”

  With that, Richie held forth his right hand, the one that had held the short knife and had merely tapped against the stranger’s face. A lattice of blood trickled along the grooves of the skin in a thin veinlike pattern. The little finger had bent inward, just slightly, but it was clearly causing Richie pain.

  “What is it, Rich?” Seth asked with a frown marring his dark, handsome features.

  “This freakazoid did something, man,” Richie snarled. “He did something to my hand. It’s impossible.”

  Warily, Seth turned his attention back to the old man, suddenly unsure of what to do. “Is that true?” he asked. “Did you do something to my little brother?”

  The old man smiled, yellow teeth visible through the whiskers of his unkempt beard. “You saw for yourself,” he said, his voice oozing like treacle. “I didn’t lay a finger on him. He struck me—all I did was took it.”

  “Richie,” Seth ordered, “get up here, let me see that hand.”

  Reluctantly, Richie stood up in the ill-lit cell and held his hand out for his brother’s inspection. Like all younger siblings, no matter how old Richie got, he would always feel like a child when ordered to do something by his brother, always feel that he had to justify how he felt. “Feels like he broke something in there, Seth,” he whined.

  Seth reached forward and touched Richie’s crooked little finger with the tip of his own. Richie flinched, spitting out a curse as he drew his hand away.

  “Hey, fuck, Seth,” Richie howled. “What the hell—?”

  “I just touched you,” Seth barked. “Calm down, you fucking girl.”

  Richie glared at his brother but said nothing more, holding his hand still so that Seth could examine it. The way it hung at a strange angle, the little finger looked broken. There was blood, too, but just a little from the graze and it was drying already, turning from red to brown as it lost its vibrancy. And Seth saw something else—dust, a charcoal-gray dust lining a single thin streak along the side of Richie’s hand.

  Seth turned back to the old drunk where he stood held firmly in place by the other members of the gang. The old man looked back at him without betraying any emotion. Taking a pace forward, Seth looked at the man’s left cheek, searching amid the man’s whiskers to see where the charcoal might have rubbed off. He could see nothing.

  “Bring him over to the light,” Seth instructed Hunch and the others. “Let’s get a good look at him.”

  The old man didn’t struggle but simply walked with the gang as they held him in their grip until he was standing directly beneath the single light bulb of the cell. The story was the same—the man’s cheek looked normal, no sign of any discoloration, nothing there that would leave the mysterious dusting on Richie’s hand.

  “What are you looking for, Seth?” Richie asked, baffled. “I hit him, right?”

  Seth shrugged. “Yeah, you hit him, Rich. But what hit you?”

  “Ullikummis,” the old man replied, his eyes intensely fixed on Seth.

  “What is that?” Seth asked. “This some kind of game to you, you drunken bastard?”

  The old man shrugged in seeming imitation of Seth’s own movement just a moment before, and the three members of the gang who held him lurched away, losing their grips as though they had been trying to trap running water in their hands. Two of them stumbled into the wall, so unexpected was the movement.

  “What th—!”

  “Hey!”

  Free, the old man reached forward, the movement as swift as a hummingbird’s beating wing, and his hand slapped against Seth’s forehead with a loud crack that reverberated through the tiny cell.

  Seth toppled backward, his feet kicking out from under him with the impact of the old man’s subtle blow. Immediately, one of the other gang members, a seventeen-year-old called Turtalia, who had an emaciated frame and a chip on his shoulder, leaped at the old man, reaching his hands around the oldster’s shoulders to drag him violently toward him. In a second, Turtalia head butted the old man, a blow almost guaranteed to shatter the man’s nose, only to recoil back with a scream. As he fell away from the old man, Turtalia’s forehead erupted with blood in a circular wound, almost as though he had been shot through the frontal lobe.

  Turtalia crashed to the floor of the cell, blood pouring from his head wound and running into his eyes and down his face. “He ain’t human,” Turtalia shrieked as his colleagues readied their own attacks.

  The old man stood waiting, his clothes
and his breath stinking of the local still. It was clear that the gang had underestimated him now, that somehow this innocuous old drunk possessed a hidden weapon with which he could harm those who came into contact with him. Even so, it took three more attempts to fell him until Seth finally gave the order to quit. Throughout, the old man’s movements seemed effortless, just the slightest of steps to avoid contact, and never once did he actually strike back after that initial blow to Seth’s head. And yet, three fully grown young men, street fighters in the prime of their life, fell before him. And when they were done, the old man turned to Seth, who had finally ordered an end to the combat, and he smiled once more.

  “This is the power he brings,” the outlander hobo stated. “All you need do is accept it.”

  Without thinking, Seth brushed the hair from his eyes and felt at the rough skin there where the old man had slapped him. “What is it?” he asked. “This thing? This Ullikummis?”

  “What you crave is power,” the old man said, his voice lowering to something akin to a whisper. “Power over those around you, power over the situation you find yourselves in. What Ullikummis will give you is strength. And with strength, power must surely follow.”

  As he spoke, the old man waggled the fingers of his hands ever so slightly and, like a prestidigitator revealing a coin that he had palmed earlier in his act, two tiny pebbles appeared in between his fingers, one held in each hand. The pebbles were small, each one little bigger than a person’s thumbnail, but as Seth watched he saw them begin to expand, to move and to grow like living things in the old man’s crooked fingers.

  “What are those?” Seth gasped, unable to take his eyes from the living stones.

  “Your future,” the old man replied, and he tossed first one stone and then the other at Seth and Richie as they waited before him, expressions agog.

  Like scurrying animals, the twin stones embedded in the flesh of the two brothers and began to burrow beneath, hiding themselves below each brother’s skin. And then the tiny cell began to echo as Seth and Richie screamed in absolute terror.

  Utopia was upon them.

  Chapter 9

  Reluctantly, Clem Bryant had agreed to cook four of the six mollusks, warming them briefly in a hot oven, the way one might warm pastries for breakfast, in much the same manner that the Hope teenagers had cooked them in the fire before eating.

  “I’m just warming them through,” Clem explained. “All this will do is take the edge off, possibly making them taste less salty but otherwise changing nothing fundamental of their natural constitution.”

  “That is what we expect,” Lakesh agreed as he stood beside Clem in the staff-only area of the cafeteria along with Brigid, Kane and physician Reba DeFore.

  “Can I just confirm, for the record, that I am thoroughly against this line of inquiry?” Clem stated.

  “But you agree that it is a valid line of inquiry,” Lakesh said with a knowing smile.

  Clem looked at him, seeing that roguish twinkle in the older man’s eye. “I didn’t say it was valid, Lakesh.”

  “We learn through experience, Mr. Bryant,” Lakesh reminded him. “No amount of reading can replace actually experiencing a thing.”

  “And we’re about to experience something very few people on Earth have ever experienced before,” Brigid added. “We’re going to eat some knowledge.”

  “Like the golden apple of Eris,” Clem said. Then he opened the oven door and, using a cloth to protect his hands, pulled the heated tray from the oven. Atop the black metal tray, four glistening mollusk shells waited, white smoke pouring from their innards through a split in the shells, the fizzy sounds of bubbling coming loudly from inside. As Clem turned them with a fork, one of the mollusks spit, a dollop of fatty liquid sizzling on the tray. Carefully, Clem began spooning them onto twin plates that rested on the countertop beside the oven.

  Brigid, Lakesh, Kane and Reba looked at Clem blankly, and Brigid asked him to explain himself.

  “In Greek myth, Eris brought the Apple of Discord to Mount Olympus and sparked the Trojan War,” Clem explained as he took the plates to a quiet corner of the large kitchen area. “It’s seen as a metaphor for cognitive dissonance, that feeling one gets of holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. The world is round, and yet the ground we walk on is flat,” he elaborated after a moment.

  “That sounds surprisingly accurate,” Kane said uncomfortably. “Those kids were seeing more than we were. They babbled, but it wasn’t a directionless kind of rambling. They made sense. Kind of.”

  As Kane spoke, Brigid and Lakesh took their places at the table. The bubbling sea creatures waited on the plate before them, and Clem had already placed glasses of iced water and paper napkins at each seat. It seemed almost comical in its way, the genteel manner in which they were about to imbibe a potential hallucinogen that may contain all the secrets of the universe.

  “On three?” Brigid asked, picking up one of the oil-patterned shells with the napkin. Even through the medium of the napkin, it was still hot to her touch, a sliver of steam trailing from its seam.

  Lakesh picked up his own mollusk and brought it close to his mouth. “On three,” he agreed.

  A moment later, the two of them had the steaming shell openings to their mouths, and they sucked at the innards, pulling the tiny, jellylike creatures out of the cavity and taking them between their teeth. They tasted salty, the taste of the ocean. Brigid closed her eyes, swishing the bitter taste around her mouth, chewing on the pulpy flesh until she felt she could swallow it. Opposite her, Lakesh did the same. Between chews, Lakesh explained that it tasted a little like oysters or caviar, delicately holding his napkin before his mouth as he spoke.

  Standing sentinel over the table, Kane watched as his two friends ate the weird shellfish and prepared for whatever would happen next. Beside him, Reba DeFore checked her wrist chron and unconsciously patted at the medical supplies that she wore in a purselike bag over her shoulder.

  GRANT REMAINED WITH BALAM in the basement interview room, gazing with disinterest at its bland walls and empty notice board. Donald Bry was assisting Balam with his notations on the sprawling map of the Pacific, providing a selection of pens that their visitor might mark the place up clearly in different colors.

  Dressed in her blue robe, Little Quav appeared to be getting anxious, and Grant took a step over toward her, towering over the little girl as she looked up at him.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” Grant asked.

  The girl looked wary of Grant, and he realized that his domineering frame had to seem like a giant to her, used as she was to Balam’s much shorter figure. The ex-Mag leaned down, gently offering the hybrid human girl his hand.

  “I know it’s all a little bit boring,” Grant said quietly, “and maybe a bit scary, too, but you’ll be out of here soon enough. Uncle Balam will take you home, okay?”

  The girl reached forward, coiling the tiny fingers of her hand around just two of Grant’s own, smiling tentatively at him. “Quav,” she said.

  “Grant,” Grant replied. “I was there when you were born, right here, just upstairs. I saw you enter the world.”

  The girl didn’t really understand his words, Grant knew, but she liked to hear his deep, rumbling voice. She had been starved of human contact for three years, hidden away from her own people, or the closest thing that existed to them on this planet now.

  “Come on, Quav,” Grant said, standing up and letting her hold on to his fingers still. “Let’s go see if Uncle Balam has nearly finished.”

  The pale girl walked across the room, hanging on to Grant’s hand. The ex-Mag shortened his strides, walking slowly to accommodate her pace. When the Cerberus team had agreed to let Balam take care of the girl they had never considered the fact she would not be interacting with her own kind. In keeping her from the Annunaki they had hidden her from humans, too, the very people her disappearance was intended to protect. If she should turn, if she should grow and embrace her destiny as Ninlil
, the Annunaki queen, then Cerberus had no excuse—they had brought it upon themselves if the girl grew up loathing and fearing humankind.

  At the desk, Balam peeked up from his work at the map with those dark, sorrowful eyes. “It’s done,” he said, placing a red pen on the table beside the others, extricating his eerily long fingers from its grip.

  Grant nodded as he and the little hybrid human girl joined the alien at the table.

  “You do realize,” Balam said, “that I could have planted the information in your mind using telepathic suggestion alone, of course.”

  “I think we’d all sooner avoid any telepathic trickery,” Grant replied. “It makes everyone uncomfortable.”

  Balam nodded in acknowledgment. “I respect that,” he said.

  IT TOOK TWENTY MINUTES for the effects to become manifest. It was strange, a little like slipping into a dream when you were categorically certain that you are still awake. The world, the kitchen around them, seemed normal. People continued to bustle about, pans burbled and bubbled and their lids rocked as steam struggled to escape. Something behind Brigid dinged, a timer assuring the mess cooks that their dishes there was done. Kane stood over the table still, staunchly watching as nothing seemed to change. And yet, as Brigid looked at him, his sleek, muscular, wolfish form standing guard above her like some faithful hound, she saw colors emanating from the exposed skin of his arms and face, like the rays of the sun peeking over a towering mountain.

  Brigid had never seen Kane look so beautiful; he was like something from one of the pre-Raphaelite paintings she had seen in her archivist days. The way the light rippled upon him, the way it played across his dark hair and in the grooves of his taut muscles was like some wondrous dance conjured from the very fabric of the universe itself. Strange as it seemed to think it, the light seemed to enjoy running across Kane’s skin, and in its joy it shone brighter.

  To Lakesh, an eminent scientist and man of logic, the whole experience was a little like trying to look at one’s finger while holding it up close to one’s nose. He could see things, and yet the world behind them had somehow doubled, taken on two contrary aspects while remaining fundamentally whole. The table before him was solid enough. It looked as it always had, a flat surface made of lightly colored beech wood, the varnish marred in a few places where things had been scraped against it over the years. And yet somehow it seemed liquid, like something he could see through, see past. Somehow, in some indefinable manner, the grooves, the mars, the little indentations all seemed to be more solid than the tabletop itself, more real somehow. These were ruined things that could no longer change their properties for his eyes, could no longer be more than they really were.