“Xenofuck, wanna fly?” said Kiss.
Trompi began checking stalls, one by one, while Sax and Kiss moved closer to the guy. He was small and thin, with a nervous manner. His eyes were milky from the using. He tucked the bud into a plastic bag, zipped up, and watched them, offering a wide, toothless smile. They had taken care of his teeth in previous sessions.
“Why do you think the xeno’s smiling?” Sax wondered.
“The fuck’s gotten it so many times he thinks we’re bored already,” said Kiss with a hint of humor uncharacteristic for him.
Sax’s fist wiped the smile from their happy target’s face. The guy fell against the wall like a rag doll. When he raised his bloody face to them, his smile was back. A moment later they heard police sirens.
“That’s why the motherfucker’s happy!” Kiss kicked him and ran up the stairs, followed by the other two.
The police sirens were closer—their cars closing on the park. The three friends ran down the first street they encountered. Sax looked back as two cars stopped in front of Jarvis Street Baptist Church. Cops emerged from the cars and ran after them. He suspected that the other vehicles were moving to cover all intersections around the park in order to cut them off, no matter what direction they chose.
Life had brought the trio together. They weren’t the kind of gang normally pursued by the police. Everything had started when Kiss’s parents, vacationing in France, had postponed their return home after the Glass Plague had attacked Toronto. They’d kept in touch with their only child through phone calls. At the same time, Sax’s mother had fallen gravely ill and his father couldn’t adjust to the idea that her illness was fatal, instead opting for divorce.
Life had also pushed them forward. Who knew when they’d taken their first misstep? Maybe it started when they abandoned their given names and adopted nicknames. James had a Saxon t-shirt. He didn’t really like them, but the t-shirt was cool and it was a present from his parents, before the divorce, the illness, the fights—from the times when everything was good and music was simply energizing. It seemed natural to call himself Sax. And Larry decided, after careful measurements taken during a night of drinking, that his tongue was as long as Gene Simmons’ of Kiss fame, and therefore that he would bear their name. Although antique, he’d reasoned, they’d been a dangerous band, which inspired him to turn against everything strange in his life, especially the alienness the xenos addicts had brought to his city.
Or maybe the misstep had happened even before all these things, when the two of them had inadvertently shared the same girlfriend and then, when they’d discovered her two-timing, they’d decided their relationship was more important, even though they couldn’t stop teasing and insulting each other.
In a few minutes the gang was on Church Street. They wouldn’t stand a chance going south, or west of Yonge Street. The sirens were getting closer. They ran up Church Street, then entered a narrow side street, and continued running toward the Affected Zone—in the direction the police seemed to be driving them, in order to force them to surrender. They cut down Carlton Street just before the police cars appeared, and went on to Wellesley by way of the side streets and the intersecting parking lots and back alleys. Any time they thought to detour, even more cops ran after them.
“It’s obvious, what they want!” panted Sax.
“So what? Force our way back on Church?” Kiss asked.
“No, we hide somewhere,” Trompi calculated, stopping them. He leaned over, bracing his palms against his knees, and looked at them questioningly: where?
“In the Zone,” offered Sax.
“They’re driving us toward the Zone. They think we’ll stop at its border,” said Trompi.
“In the Zone,” Sax insisted, and started running again. Behind them, twenty meters back, the rest of the police cruisers halted and their occupants emerged for the final move.
At the end of the street, the asphalt was cracked and traversed by thick, white veins. The remains of the last barricade around the Affected Zone still stood on Wellesley, abandoned and frozen within a milky white tendril, one of many radiating like the rays of a sun from the core in the Manulife Centre and Yonge and Bloor intersection. They were already a few kilometers long and getting thicker and wider daily.
They entered the Plague area and ran up to the first intersection, then looked back. The cops were still following, but now with caution. They were afraid of the Zone. Lately, the crystal-like walls of the affected buildings had started to bud. Soft, leafy, fist-sized clusters protected cores the size of a nut. Gummy and dirty yellow when they reached maturity, the cores slipped outside the buds and hung suspended by what looked like pinkish umbilical cords.
The homeless had been the first to sample the fruits. Their juice—xenorphine, had quickly become the main merchandise of the drug dealers. Powerful cartels had formed around the Zone and the area had been split into sectors won through grim battles and political pacts. The Native Indians owned the biggest slice, snatched in a bloodbath from the Russians and the Chinese. The police usually avoided interfering with their activity. Only the military moved unhindered through the sectors in their tanks and bulletproof cars, shuttling and protecting the research teams, and sometimes pretending to impose the United Nations’ new regulations concerning the Plague drug. Officially, though, the offer to use the Peace Corps to free the Zone from the cartels had been rejected.
“We go in through the blocks on Isabella,” Sax told them. He’d lived in the area before the Plague. He’d been forced to abandon his apartment along with all the other tenants in the first week of the event, when the white lava started solidifying on the steps of his building. “I know one that has an entrance to the undercity. It’s not exactly the Path, but it’s connected to it. If we hide there, we might lose them.”
“What about the Russians?” Trompi asked.
“It’s in the Native sector. They only prowl at night, and I don’t think they go into the buildings. Yet.”
They passed by one of the Glass Plague’s victims—the old man imprisoned outside of time. He was famous, the way he was immobilized in the glassy substance, like some prehistoric insect in amber, but still alive, still moving his eyes. Videos with him clattered the Internet and were shared on every social media. His eyes followed them. Less than a minute later, his eyes stared at a group of frightened cops. The three boys turned a corner and looked for the entrance.
The door to the underground opened with a sigh. The white stairs seemed coated by limestone deposits. The phosphorescence of the translucent walls diluted the darkness. The three boys looked at each other with clumsy smiles.
“Are they still after us?” asked Trompi.
“What’s the matter?” Kiss demanded. “You wet your pants?” He turned to Sax. “Ever been down there?”
“A few times, before the Plague. There was a power generator, and a gym for kids on the block.”
“What do you say we pay a visit?” Kiss said defiantly, eyeing Trompi. “Who’s got the glassy buds to come with me?”
“That’s not a smart idea,” Sax said, then caught Kiss’s look and shrugged. “Why not?”
“Guys,” said Trompi. “What the fuck is wrong with you? It’s dark—there’s no power. In a few hours the area will be crawling with gangsters–”
“You know, you’re right,” Sax interjected. “Wait here, and if we’re not back in an hour, go to the hospital and tell my sister to stay overnight.”
“James, don’t be stupid!” Trompi caught Sax’s arm. “Your mother needs you. Chris–”
“Don’t pull my mother into this.” Sax pushed him brutally. “And don’t James me!”
Normally, Trompi would have turned on the spot and left the Zone. But Sax knew he didn’t want to do it alone—that made it even more unpleasant. Normally, he and Kiss would have given up and returned to the light too. But not in front of each other.
Trompi was Mister Wise-guy—at least, he sounded more intelligent than his a
ge. He was fascinated by the brute force and animal attraction that Kiss exerted over not only the beautiful sex, but also all the kids who listened with mouths agape to his heroic tales. Kiss was an endless source of urban youth history—the battle on Queen West, the ambush from the beer plant, the guerilla from Queen against the Chinese from Spadina …
Kiss always secretly appreciated Trompi’s opinion, but in their relationship he liked to defy the others and raise the stakes every time. It was the only way he could face the other personalities, by overshadowing them. Sax was the catalyst, the medium through which the two forces—the physical and the psychic—fused. He was the oil that greased the gang’s wheels, the one who suggested, then imposed the action, using Trompi’s brain and Kiss’s lust for adventure.
Sax pushed his earphones into his ears and changed the playlist. He chose Iron Maiden’s 666. The guitar kneaded his nerves as if they were dough. Sax felt the nerves in his legs, arms, and chest itching. He pumped up the volume and turned his back to Trompi.
Contrary to the first impression, the steps weren’t slippery. They felt like a split bone, almost adherent to their boot soles. The walls shone with a faint, silvery shimmer. Dark meanderings and sudden convulsions under the translucent skin occasionally startled them.
The floor of the underground passage was also limestone-white. Gray light cascaded from long, latticed windows up near the ceiling, at street level. The whole space under the street was lined with large rooms, pipes snaking along the ceiling.
The walls were different from the ones outside. The translucent crust gave way here and there to matte-white reliefs. Expanses of wall were covered in swellings the size of melons. Most were static, but some throbbed in violent convulsions. Sax felt the hair on his arms rise as if electrified, and a shiver trembled from his chest to his navel. Iron Maiden cried in his left ear about the number of the beast. He moved closer to one of the walls and noticed that on some of the swellings, the matte layer had open pores, like human skin with goose bumps. They resembled breasts. Entire walls of breasts, some hanging inert, others aroused and pulsing nervously.
He drew back and bumped into his two friends. They had stopped in the middle of the room and were staring around. From the ceiling hung hundreds of what appeared to be long, gnarled, dull pink umbilical cords. Some of them coiled along the overhead pipes. What looked like whitish icicles hung from the points of contact.
Trompi jumped violently as one of the cords above them spurted a sticky fluid onto his jean jacket.
“It jerked off on you!” Kiss blurted, and dissolved into laughter.
They helped Trompi out of his jacket and threw it on the floor. The fluid quickly soaked into the material, leaving behind gray foam.
Trompi swore, long and dirty. Sweat shone on his forehead and his hands shook.
“Who’s there?” a shrill voice quavered, startling them. The question came from the second room. They advanced cautiously, keeping quiet.
“I asked, who’s there?” This time the voice sounded a little more authoritative.
They entered the second room. It was illuminated by the same gray light and appeared to have a similar decor draping its walls. Sax recognized where they were; it’d been the generator room. The generator itself now looked like a massive limestone deposit, overflowing with the pale, translucent matter coating everything else. It was perforated in many places, revealing the liquid under the protective layer, bubbling in slow expirations and inhalations. The pipes radiating from the plant were completely covered in a dirty, scabby skin, which pulsed like a muscle in spasm.
Trompi retched.
“Shh!” Kiss interrupted. “Do you see something in that shadow next to the generator? It’s moving fast and it’s dark.”
They all stared in that direction. An indistinct shape withdrew even more into the shadows, then for a few seconds they couldn’t see anything. A hiss near the opposite wall drew their attention. They turned in time to see the shape detach itself from the wall and disappear again, much too fast for them to follow it.
The three boys stood rooted in the middle of the room, not breathing, waiting for the thing to show up again. When nothing moved, Sax and Kiss looked at each other, agreeing with that look on a direction. Kiss grabbed Trompi’s arm and pulled him along.
“I know you!” the thin voice called from nearby.
They all stopped, startled, and turned toward the voice. A naked girl stood a step away from them. Her skin was translucent. Beneath its surface, a dirty white liquid bubbled. Sax glimpsed small shapes winding within it. She had long, dark hair that swayed with her nervous movements. Her eyes looked odd, although Sax couldn’t tell just what made them odd; the details were lost in the dimness. Thin, overlapping layers of whitish deposits, like lace flounces, ran from her temples behind her ears and down her neck. Her feet were buried up to the ankles in the crystalline matter covering the floor and the walls. When she moved, the solidified layer opened in front of her like water, and she advanced without actually moving her feet, as if she were on an escalator; as if the Glass Plague was walking her from one place to another.
“Fuck me …” Kiss murmured and stared, mouth agape.
“I don’t exactly remember, but I saw you before,” she continued, looking at Sax. Her voice sounded familiar.
“I seem to know you too, although you’re …”
“A little changed?” Trompi offered, still looking at her.
She moved into the light. “Probably. Not even my mother would recognize me now.”
Sax turned off the Deep-V and the silence of the place thrilled him. Without music he was vulnerable.
“My name is Julie. I lived in the building above before the–”
“Yeah. Now I remember you. Julie. You were friends with a guy, Gabe, a few years older than you.”
“Yes,” she admitted and looked down. “Gabriel died at impact. We couldn’t save him.” She looked up. “And you are?”
“Jam—uh, Sax. You can call me Sax. They’re Kiss and Trompi.” He jerked a thumb at his friends.
Julie didn’t laugh. She watched them seriously and acknowledged their names. There was an awkward moment of silence, and then she resumed. “You’re the first to come this far. I wonder, what made you try it?”
“Yeah, that’s a good one,” said Trompi. “I asked them the same question before we entered.”
“Is it widespread now?” she asked.
“The Plague?” asked Kiss.
“Plague? Who called it that?”
“You mean you didn’t know?”
“I’ve been here since the beginning. It would’ve been my first time with Gabriel. We came here in the evening, we had dinner, drinks, music.” She paused and stared into space. Eventually, she continued. “I don’t know how it felt outside, but here, it was like an earthquake. Afterward I didn’t dare go out. You can see how I look. And He told me that the world isn’t ready for me yet.”
“Gabe told you?” Sax asked.
“No, the angel.”
“So, Gabe died and turned into–”
“No, Sax, Gabe died and he’s dead. The angel is real. He fell here by accident.”
“Oh, the Fallen Angel,” Trompi supplied, his tone ironic.
“He says he’s not that angel.”
“So, where is he now?” asked Kiss, and looked around.
“He’s under Manulife. There he can stay in contact with his kind. He opened all the ways from this basement up to the Path under Manulife and Yonge and Bloor.”
“We can get you to a medical campus,” Kiss offered, extending a hand toward her, but her violent reaction stopped him. She withdrew several meters at lightning speed and watched them, looking scared.
She breathed deeply, then answered in a calm voice, “My skin is kind of special right now; it’s more sensitive than it was. Any touch gives me … sensations, mostly painful ones. A strong draft makes me tremble with pleasure, but a real wind makes me scream in pain. He is the o
nly one who knows how to protect me and how to touch me.”
“You mean to say that any touch is sexual?” asked Sax, bewildered.
“No, not any touch. Only He knows how to touch me that way.”
Sax frowned, troubled. “That’s nuts! Do you think we could see the angel?”
“Fuck, no!” Trompi groaned. The other three ignored him.
“I’d like to talk to him first. But you could come and visit again. We’ll leave the door open for you. Anytime.”
The three boys turned to leave. They heard Julie’s voice behind them, hesitantly, “I wanted to ask you if you by any chance have a book, a magazine, a newspaper—anything of the sort.”
Sax turned back toward her. “No, we don’t, but we’ll bring some next time.”
“Well, it is something, but I don’t know if it suits your taste,” Kiss announced, stopping them all. He grinned and pulled out of his jacket’s inner pocket a sex magazine—Canadiana.
Julie burst into laughter. “Does it have articles, or only pictures?”
“Take it and see for yourself. I didn’t look for articles.”
The girl took the magazine and vanished into the darkness. They moved back into the first room. An odd writhing on their left caught their attention. They approached it cautiously.
“Good God!” Trompi withdrew a few steps.
The jacket he abandoned during their arrival was splitting, unwinding into little snakes with denim skin that slithered toward the dark corners of the room. The Plague was reproducing. It made an inanimate object multiply. The explanation sounded absurd and yet, at that moment, Sax couldn’t think of anything else.
In the sudden silence, he heard drips from the ceiling splashing on the glassy floor and being absorbed with quiet slurps. He shook with disgust. It was difficult to imagine what would happen to a living being impregnated by the Plague. Carefully eyeing the umbilical cords hanging from the ceiling, pink and elongated and swollen, ready to ejaculate, he made his way back to the exit.
Dark Horizons Page 12
