He’s gone now. What was his problem? The dirt on my coat and shoes? That I’m with a Kalian woman? Maybe he saw a hardened wariness, a too-easy capacity for violence, unconsciously made manifest in my owns eyes, and was merely alerted by it on an animal level. But I don’t care. It was a poisonous touch and it’s soured me.
In another aisle, I watch Saleet reach for a box of cookies on an upper shelf. She knocks it to the floor with a loud slap. A woman with a carriage behind Saleet stops short and gives an audible sigh of disgust, because Saleet has startled her with this unforgivable act of clumsiness, and most importantly, Saleet has obstructed and delayed the woman’s shopping by as much as three seconds. The woman seems to realize that I’m with Saleet, and glances at me, and I give her a look that says, “I want to slam you with that frozen turkey, too.” She looks away quickly and resumes her intense carriage-pushing.
Saleet has turned and seen my face. “What’s wrong?”
In a bitter whisper, I tell her about the sighing woman and the glowering man. “What am I doing this, for?” I ask her. “Why are you and I risking our lives trying to help these people, to save this whole stinking city?”
Pointing past me, my girlfriend says, “For him.” I follow her gesture and see a Choom infant riding in another shopping cart, his huge smiling mouth as yet devoid of its multiple rows of molars, chin slick with drool.
Grumpily I mutter, “He’ll grow up to be like the rest. I just feel sick at how fouled and diseased everything is...straight to the core.”
“We’re fouled, too, aren’t we? It’s all yin and yang. This city can be as beautiful as it is ugly.”
I give her a raised eyebrow.
She amends, “Well, it can be beautiful sometimes. In places. That little baby is beautiful, and he could grow up to be like us instead of those two dungholes.”
“Beautiful like me? The girlfriend killer?”
Saleet just appraises me silently for a moment, then nods solemnly at our cart. “Let’s cash this out and get home, so you can tell me all about this.”
“So you can interrogate me?” I joke humorlessly.
“So you can confess,” she corrects me.
***
WE LEAVE THE VT on a news station while we have our dinner and talk, the volume set low, though we don’t really expect to hear anything regarding our frantic life and death battle in the bowels of the city today; even if anyone had heard all the gunfire, odds are they wouldn’t have reported it.
On the way here from the supermarket we made a quick stop for some beer, which Saleet paid for like the groceries because I’m on my last munits. Knowing this, earlier tonight Saleet offered, “Let me pull some strings with my father and get you into Alvine Products.”
“Feeding the cows?”
“Hey – I’m serious. They have a customer service department, if that’s what you do.”
“It would be pretty weird going back to a life like that now...”
“What are the alternatives? Full time nemesis of the Outsiders? The pay isn’t great. You have to eat and have a roof over your head, right? And much as I might like to, I can’t support you...”
Embarrassed, I lowered my eyes. “All right,” I conceded. “Do what you can. I’ll make up a new resume to show them.”
But that was earlier; right now, Saleet is digesting not only our pizza, but my confession.
“It was self-defense,” she mumbles, subdued, “like you said...”
“Are you convincing yourself, or do you really believe it?”
Her black eyes leap up to my face, glinting in abrupt anger. “I believe you!”
“You can give me a truth scan, if you ever doubt anything I’m telling you...”
“I didn’t say I doubted you, Chris, did I?” She sips the beer she’s nursing. I’m into my second. After a moment she resumes, calmer: “Gabrielle was self-defense...but Mr. Dove...that was cold-blooded, premeditated murder, Christopher...”
Pacing the room already, beer in hand, I whirl on her and lean toward her face, practically snarling. “What was I supposed to do? Let him go on with being a puppet for these beings? Was I supposed to report him to the forcers? What would you have thought if I came to you with my concerns about him?”
“I’d have thought you were insane,” Saleet admits. “Though, in a way, you are.”
“Be that as it may, I did what I could to stop all this...or at least to hamper it, make it harder for Ugghiutu to enact his will. I’m not some sorcerer, Saleet...but I can pull a trigger.”
“Well you told me you’ve since learned a few things from those two books that you got from Dove. You did those spells at the sites where Jelena’s body parts were found, and you drew protective symbols here in your flat. I suggest we go to the building where Dove Books was and do a spell there, just in case some portal or such is open at that spot. And we should try to get into your old apartment, and do one there.”
“I’m sure it’s rented out already.”
“I’ll go in uniform, with some excuse or other; I’ll get us inside. Then you do your part.”
I nod sullenly; I’m tired and that makes me pessimistic. “Can’t hurt.”
“And we’ll do the bookstore in the morning. Would you need to perform your magic inside, or will outside do?”
“There’s one formula where you can encircle a house or temple or such with a kind of protective moat, supposedly to keep things from getting beyond its parameters.”
“You should have done that to the Church of the Burning Eye.”
“Admittedly. Too intent on guns, still.”
“You realize, Chris, that this is a war we can never win by ourselves. Not that we shouldn’t do all we can...but we’ll only ever be able to do so much. We have to hope others are fighting them. Trying to maintain the cosmic balance.”
I nod again, in slow motion, and muse aloud, “I think we did some major damage to them today. Not just disrupting that ritual site, which I’m certain was a portal, but more importantly, destroying the brains. I don’t even want to imagine what they’ve been doing, plugged into the city’s veins...but we destroyed them.”
“We can only hope they don’t sacrifice a new victim to reopen that doorway. And hook some new brains up at that site. But chances are good they’ll be afraid to use that place again, now that we know it’s there and that we could always mount another attack. And in fact, we should check it out again in the near future...and this time draw that moat of power around the temple like you say.”
“I wish the priests themselves had been there.”
“Me, too,” Saleet says. She lifts her eyes to me. “I think I’d have killed them like you killed Dove, Chris.”
I smile at her wearily. “That’s my good girl.”
She’s going to pour half of her beer down the drain but I take it to finish off for her (I’m frugal now that I’m poor). Though neither of us have discussed it, I can see she’s going to stay the night. While I shower, she calls her roommate to let her know she won’t be home, and then she showers while I stand watching VT with a towel wrapped around my waist and that half a beer in my hand.
Then on VT I’m seeing various camera shots both long and close of encephalons in rows of brainframes, dreaming in gurgling nutrient solutions of light green or pale violet or rusty orange. I see a news reporter talking to some business executive in an immaculate gray silk suit and I’m suddenly yelling at the VT (set to vocal command) to increase the volume...
Now facing the camera and walking toward it through a long corridor of burbling brainframes, the reporter is saying “...deny that there is any problem or defect with their products, and will not confirm these reports that an incredibly fast-acting and potent virus swept through their facility today, all but destroying their entire stock. Cephalon further denies that this alleged virus has also damaged their encephalons that have been installed in a great many businesses in Paxton. But despite Cephalon Corporation’s denials, tonight a lot of busines
s owners want some answers as to why the products they purchased from Cephalon have suffered severe malfunction and even outright decomposition. This is Martin Brightlingsea, reporting for...”
“VT,” I command, “search all local new stations, key word: Cephalon.”
Attracted by the urgent tone of my voice, Saleet pads barefoot and feline into the room, wrapped in a towel herself, her long black hair in matted wet tangles. “What is it?” she says. I can’t believe I’m not even glancing at the bared gray skin of her upper chest, arms and legs, so intent am I on the huge vidtank.
The VT has diligently switched to another station, in the middle of a similar story about this company I’ve never heard of called the Cephalon Corporation. But I can fill in the blanks myself: Cephalon obviously designs, mass-produces and sells the artificially-generated brain masses that are used in mainframes, servers, sometimes even in individual computers by many large companies such as my own past employers. Again, a reporter (this time apparently in the vast, impressive lobby of the company) relates that Cephalon denies a devastating virus has raged through their stock today, and through a good many encephalons they’ve already sold, as well (which must be linked in one way or another – probably for the ease of maintenance or upgrades – to the company which created them).
“Chris...” Saleet hisses beside me. And I know she’s beginning to think what I’m thinking. I shush her impatiently.
The reporter goes on: “Cephalon dismisses rumors that the virus continues to spread, communicated from the parent company to more and more of those companies in possession of their product. In fact, Cepahalon spokesmen continue to insist that there isn’t even a virus at all...or if there is, that it did not originate with their systems...”
“Chris,” Saleet persists, “is this a coincidence? Or do you think we did this, when we destroyed those computers today?”
“I don’t know...” I breathe.
And then I do know, when the report cuts to an external view of the building which houses the Cephalon Corporation.
It is the pale violet colored building I discovered one day from the window of my office at work. The one that looks like a much larger version of the building that housed Dove Books. It tapers at the top like a ziggurat, culminating in a silvery spike. Its surface looks like a cracked, dried-out mud bed, or the hide of a crocodile, and I remember that other news story I saw recently where they showed how some buildings are formed from an organic material like coral, stimulated to grow along metal understructures by introduction of current.
Our human and humanoid enemies are powerful. Very nearly like gods themselves. They’ve been spreading their corruptions...
...but today, Saleet and I spread some corruption of our own.
“Yeah,” I say, sliding my arm around her shoulders. “We did good today, didn’t we? Better than we could have known...”
***
OVER THE NEXT two weeks, encouraged by our major victory – which had to be a crippling blow to our enemies – Saleet and I inspired each other to a great deal of further activity (the first project being to mount a security system to my door and windows like she has in her own apartment, in case our enemies ever trace our identities to the places where we live, and in the event that my formulae aren’t sufficient to keep out every sort of their many pawns and servitors).
As she had suggested, and in her presence, I walked around the building on Morpha Street B which had housed Dove Books (that shop now vacant and not yet rented to a new tenant), tracing an invisible pattern with a cane she’d bought me for the purpose and simultaneously reading from a print-out of a chant from Skretuu’s The Veins of the Old Ones.
I performed the same ritual around the much wider base of the Cephalon Corporation. While in the process, a security officer in a gray uniform and holstered gun emerged from the front doors to approach me, but Saleet came forward in her own more impressive uniform to intercept him, telling him that everything was under control and that he should return inside. Later she informed me that the security man had glanced at her badge as if to take her number, but so far nothing has come of it: no calls from her superiors, and of more concern, no visits from vindictive Cephalon agents.
As promised, she got me inside my old apartment when the landlord wasn’t around to recognize me; she told the current tenants, a young Choom couple, that there had been complaints of loud music and fighting. While they protested in one room, I was doing my formulas in another, and when they switched rooms, I did the same. I felt a deep stab of sadness which actually caused my throat to tighten when I stood in the bedroom where Gabrielle and I had made love. And where she had burned eight candles in the corners...eight corners where I now hastily traced a design with my trusty lip balm.
During this time Saleet also spoke to her father, an executive at Alvine Products in Industrial Square, about getting a job for a friend of hers. I imagine she downplayed our “friendship” so as not to alert him, just yet, to anything romantic in nature. Her father assured her he’d put in a good word with the customer service department, and over my computer I was invited personally by the department head to submit my resume. I did so, again over my computer. I have an interview with them tomorrow, in fact.
I feel a little better about going back to work now. Cephalon can no longer deny the disastrous extent of the damage Saleet and I inflicted...every one of their encephalons, both in their home building and in every company that has purchased one, have now blackened and decayed. Even Cephalon Corp. encephalons as far away as on Earth have rotted to black slime. Word is that the company can not support these catastrophic losses and will declare bankruptcy. So I have a sense of climax, of fulfillment. Of revenge...for Gabrielle, for Jelena, for God knows who else have lost their lives to the Outsiders and their heterogeneous flock. I feel like I can now return to a more conventional lifestyle without guilt, that obsessive sense of personal responsibility.
Later on we still plan on revisiting the Church of the Burning Eye, to perform another of my rituals, but right now we both feel like we’ve done a lot. All we really can, realistically. Yes...we could hunt down and kill every executive who works for Cephalon. How widespread is the poison within its walls? Does it extend even to that guard who began to accost me? We’ve taken note of the names of the top Cephalon people, but we’re not eager to become outright assassins unless desperate situations should arise. We will remain alert, watchful, we are sentinels and guardians. But we are only the two of us, two tiny hermit crabs facing a vast rolling ocean, and it’s remarkable that we’ve done as much good as we have.
We’ve been sure to make time, despite all our activity, to further our love life, and I’m happy to report that Saleet is more comfortable with her passion now. Every third night or so, she sleeps over my place (though I never sleep over hers).
We have woken from the nightmare, and the cold sweat dissipates from our skin, to be replaced by a hot sweat which I find much more to my liking.
She’s coming over to stay again tonight, though she won’t be driving me to Alvine Products tomorrow afternoon; I imagine she doesn’t want to risk having her father see me in her vehicle. I’ll be taking the subway to Industrial Square. Yeah, I’m nervous...but I feel like I’m beginning a new life.
Well, this is pretty much it now, isn’t it? Better get myself ready for my woman.
***
I WAKE UP in a world of screams.
I’m lying on my side, my cheek painfully pressed to a floor littered with crushed glass and pebbles of decimated ceiling tile. Convulsively, at the shock of awakening, I gasp in a chest full of dust, and begin to hack violently, which sets off a chain reaction of aches and pains throughout my body...but in my skull it detonates a nova burst of molten agony. Any wound above the neck bleeds like a bastard and my face is caked and crusted in blood; I feel for its origins timidly and wince when I connect with a gummy and gritty laceration at my hairline. I’m afraid to sit up, lest I set off another nuclear blast in my
head, so I lie here and listen to the shrieks and wails of the damned.
I don’t know why I’m lying on the floor, or even where I am, or what caused this demolition. But I think I can guess, as terrified as I am to do so...
The stars have cranked slowly, like the clockwork gears of a cosmic time piece, into position at last, and the gong of doom has rung. The Old Ones, the Outsiders, have been summoned back from the dead, their suspended animation, through the necromancy of their cults and cronies. And they have reasserted their domination of our galaxy, perhaps of the entire universe and all time and dimension. Out of wrath or out of pure mindless force, they have leveled Punktown as a man might trample an ant mound. What I’m hearing are the other survivors like myself, wounded and mad, the half-crushed ants that will be lucky to scavenge an existence in the terrible New World, forever scurrying and lurking and hiding from the vast eclipsing shadows of Ugghiutu and his brethren. Punktown, which once embodied that slumbering god-like entity, is now no more than the cicada husk he has sloughed off, the remnants of his cocoon.
A shattered coffee mug close to my face puts reality into perspective for me; its exploded chunks help fit back the shards of my fragmented memory. The mug belongs to me. Saleet bought it for me as a good luck present the first day I began work at Alvine Products. Now I recall where I am.
The Old Ones have not returned. As far as I know. But I do know there has been an earthquake.
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