Something Wicked Anthology, Vol. One

by M. Scott Carter

  Great. We'd developed the ideal terrorist weapon.

  I still remember losing it the first time I saw what it did to a lab rat. And now...what they were showing on TV was a million times worse.

  Still, there were exceptions to the hideous deaths in India. The wave only traveled across dry surfaces, stopping when it came to a body of water of any size, even something the size of a puddle, dumping its energy into vaporization of the perimeter of the water body. Even saturated dirt would stop it.

  They would discover the discrepancies in India soon enough. Birds in flight would be unaffected, as would airline flights. Standing in a rain puddle would save you, though you'd see the water around the edge flash to steam.

  Stories started coming out of the kill zone. There were bizarre incidences where some people just happened to be jumping when the wave passed under them; thirty percent of a marathon inexplicably watched their running companions shed their skins. A girl jump-roping between two of her friends watched them die while she remained unscathed. There was one report of a woman swimming in a pool when the pulse came through, who got out only when she heard her kids and her dog screaming in agony.

  I wanted to shut off the news-wire after the reports started coming in, but forced myself to listen, perhaps in penance for my imagined crimes against humanity. Deep inside, I knew someone would have discovered and used this device, eventually, but I had discovered it. I kept telling myself this. I had brought the demon into existence. God damn it all.

  It wouldn't take the government guys long to figure things out. I had to disappear. My research had to disappear with me.

  The various governments would be left with few options once they found out about the device and what it did. Try to hush it up. Try to use it preemptively to wipe out those that they thought would use it as a weapon. Or both.

  The possibility that Singh had been unable to destroy his own device after it had sent its deadly pulse out loomed heavily over me. Singh was damned smart, though. If there'd been a way to booby-trap the device against other users, Singh would have incorporated it into his design.

  What could have led Singh to knowingly kill himself and millions of others? Or was it just an experimental screw-up of unimaginable proportions? The only other person in the world who could have done something like this was Bernhard, but he...well...nobody could do something like that just to lay claim to a new idea. Nobody in his right mind. I went back to packing, rerunning old conversations with Bernhard in my head.

  I gathered all the boxes I'd packed and put them on a handcart.The last prototype I grabbed was the size of a deck of cards, which I dropped into my coat pocket. The thought occurred to me that building the device had taken me one month and cost me two hundred dollars in off-the-shelf parts. And in just a few years, most likely, everyone who wanted to build one would find the schematics on the net. If the net still existed.

  I had no idea of the range of the thing, since it had always been tested while mounted on a platform surrounded by a pool of water, but it was refined to a point where I knew it would kill stuff. What if Singh's device hadn't been any bigger? I shuddered at the thought. I could destroy it after I got on the road without leaving any clues for anyone to find. Smashing it here would just leave parts all over, and there were pros in the government that could reverse-engineer a 747 just by looking at the pilot's seat belt fastener.

  I pushed the cart out of the lab area. There was nobody but students and teachers' assistants in the hallway right now, and traffic would be light since classes were in session. No one would give me a glance. Lab guys were always hauling loads in and out, and everyone knew me.

  I got to the door of the building before my heart stopped.

  Approaching the exit door from the outside were two swarthy men in business coats, one in a tie and one in a turtleneck. Neither of them looked friendly.

  I glanced around wildly for escape routes. One of them apparently took this as a silent request for him to hold the door open for me since my hands were on the cart, which he obligingly did. I smiled, nodded, and stepped through, and one of them clapped his hand onto my shoulder. I froze.

  "Excuse me," he said. His accent was light, but definitely not from the States. "Can you direct me to Dr. James Harroway's office?"

  My heart pounded under the lab coat. He had to be able to see my coat flapping against my chest. Pointing down the hallway, I cleared my throat of its nervous phlegm and ineffectively willed myself to not sweat. "Yeah, sure, it's down the hall, turn left at the intersection, and three doors down on the right. You can't miss it, his name's on the door."

  "Thanks."

  I clenched my teeth in what I hoped was interpreted as a friendly smile and watched them walk away. One glanced over his shoulder at me, eyebrow raised. I took that as a cue to turn around and continue my trip to the car, trying very hard to walk casually.

  Who were these guys, and how did they figure out where I was so quickly? Was I just being paranoid? They had to be tapping into the Wire. Their government had to be monitoring our messages and put two and two together. Or maybe these guys were just students looking for me. Yeah, sure.

  I made it to my Moleman Electric, used my headwire to unlock it as soon as I was in range, opened it up and started cramming the boxes into the little vehicle. I engaged the fuel cells and tickled the front and rear cameras into life, which pivoted to watch the doors to the building, feeding the images to my inner eye. I hopped into the Moleman, just in time to catch the two men on camera coming out of the research building. They scanned the area, then chose to come my direction. Coincidence? I backed up quickly, pulled out of the parking lot and hit the grid.

  Giving the database a mental image of my bank, I sat back and gathered my thoughts, letting the car decide the best route.

  It started to rain. Staring through the windshield of the car at one of the natural defenses against the device, I wondered how many people in India had the great fortune to be nestled away in a monsoon when the device went off. It reminded me of the old joke about the man in a spacesuit, adrift in the vacuum with his air running low, when he sees Earth getting smacked by a giant asteroid. "Boy, am I lucky," he thinks.

  It suddenly occurred to me that if the mystery men knew I worked at the University, then they, whoever they were, would know where I lived. Melanie would be in danger. I called her again. "Hey, Mel, grab whatever you have ready and get out of there. I think some...uh...guys are after me."

  "There are some men out front!" she said. "One of them is going around to the back of the house." I could hear her feet pounding as she ran to the back door to lock it, and the click of the sliding glass door latch as she ran by it.

  "Honey, get one of the guns. Don't let them in. If they try to force their way in..."

  "Jim, the guns, they're..."

  I heard a blast of static, then the wire went dead. I grabbed the steering wheel of the car for manual control and headed for my house. Bastards! If her headwire was down, it meant she was unconscious or an interference wave was being broadcast. Even unconscious she should still be transmitting unless one of us cut the link.

  The car slid on the slick, wet pavement as I came around a corner. The house was still a mile away, and it would do no good if I arrived dead. Taking deep breaths and slowing down, I tried to plan something intelligent prior to my arrival.

  Clearly they expected me to show up. And I had a carload of deadly goodies. I took a deep breath, knuckles crunched white on the steering wheel. Despite the intense urgency to go rescue my wife, I had to get rid of this crap. Hell, what was I thinking? They'd be happy to get a hold of me even without the equipment. Yet here I was ready to deliver myself. I sighed and kept driving. I just had to make sure I didn't screw up.

  I parked the car two blocks from the house. The rain pattered down continuously, shading everything in a shiny gray coat. For winter in San Jose, this wasn't too unusual. From the looks of the clouds, it would keep raining for hours. Getting out
of the car, I walked down the street to the house on the opposite side of the block from my own. Checking to see if anyone was watching me, I hopped over Charlie Hamilton's fence. I stayed low and moved rapidly to my back fence, peeking through the cracks to see my own house.

  The house was not lit. It was now early evening, and I expected to see some lights. It was too quiet. I wished I had a gun, then I remembered her last words to me, "Jim, the guns, they're..." I took a guess: "...they're already packed. They're in the car." Okay. I could see the back of the car. I wired the car and got a response, popping the trunk from where I crouched twenty feet away. No reaction from the house. Good. I could probably start the car remotely, but I couldn’t move it; remote driving had been outlawed sometime around 2020, so I couldn't back it through the fence.

  I positioned myself behind a tall bougainvillea from my own yard and climbed over the fence with barely a creak to betray my presence. The bougie needed trimming, and let me know this with its gentle caress of two-inch thorns, but for now I forgave it as it was providing substantial cover for me. I got on my hands and toes and spider-crawled to the trunk of my car, slowly lifted the trunk lid and stuck my head inside. Sure enough, there were my gun cases. I pulled out my old nine-millimeter Sig-Sauer and located a full magazine nearby, wincing at the sound as it snicked into place. My heart was pounding. I'd never shot at anybody in my life, and had never expected to. Guns were for shooting tin cans, and if you were into graphic violence then you used milk jugs filled with water. It occurred to me that I should have called the police to deal with something like this, but I brushed aside the idea as soon as it presented itself, realizing how much was at stake. But running into a house with unknown enemies and a possibly unconscious wife wasn't an attractive thought either. I sat in the rain behind my wife's car, getting saturated, and thought about it.

  I wired my next-door neighbor, Cob Murcheson. "Yeah?" he answered. Brusque and rude, like always. I needed that right now. Plus, I needed a distraction.

  "Hi, Cob. This is Jim. Look, I was talking to my wife a while ago and she just stopped talking, but the wire was still live. She's not responding. I'm worried something might have happened to her. I'm still at the University, could you pop over there and check up on her?"

  "Man, have you seen the news?"

  "Yeah, Cob. Look, I'm really worried about Mel, could you check on her now?"

  He grumbled a bit. I could hear the news about India blaring in the background. "Yeah, okay, just a minute."

  I waited. He was probably programming a redirect to his own headwire so he could monitor the news while he came over. I heard his front door slam, then peered around the corner of the car, watching him pass by the driveway at the front of the house, splashing through puddles as he went across. Waiting until he knocked on the front door, I sprinted for the back door, key in one hand, gun in the other.

  Unlocking the door, I opened it up a crack to peek inside. Cob was banging on the front door again. "Melanie?" he shouted. "You okay?" The men inside, if indeed they were still there, would have to answer the front door or expect Cob to try to come inside. It would be clear that Cob knew something was wrong. The front door opened and I heard voices, my cue to slip inside. I entered and froze; Mel was lying on the kitchen floor just inside the back door. I stuck the gun in my belt and picked her up by the shoulders, dragging her out the back door into the rain. There was no quiet way to do this. As I got her out the door, another man, his shape nearly indistinguishable in the unlit house, appeared at the door. "Doctor Harroway?" he asked. I grabbed my gun from my belt as he pointed something at me. A jolt of high voltage electricity jerked my body spasmodically and I dropped Mel in the water. So that's what had fried her headwire. I fell heavily, the gun flying wide from my hand, but found that the pain was bearable and I could still move. Of course. I still had my lab coat on. Besides being covered with rainwater, it was also made out of a high-strength conductive anti-acid polymer fabric that the University had bitched about buying until it had saved a student's life. And now mine. Lucky me.

  Something skidded out of my pocket as I fell, and I instinctively grabbed at it, finding my hand wrapped around the killing machine, the flayer, the dealer of uncountable deaths, no bigger than a deck of cards. Now I'd put it within easy reach of these strangers. With my wife unconscious on the ground beside me, millions dead in India, and the grinning man in front of me holding the Taser in his hand, the decision to use the device only took a second’s consideration. Water flowed steadily around me as it poured off the eaves and saturated the ground. Standing pools and rivulets isolated sections of my yard into islands of grass and dirt. My neighbor Cob would be wet, standing in a pool of rainwater on my porch, but they would send him away with an excuse and never let him set foot in the house. I hoped. Let it be, let it be.

  A set of buttons on the device armed or disarmed it, codes I could enter without looking at the device, a sequence complicated enough that it would take weeks for a novice to crack. To actually activate it would take an encrypted code from my headwire. I tapped the buttons on the case to arm it, watching the momentary look of astonishment on my attacker as I stood up and approached him, unscathed from his attack. He stared at me and squeezed the trigger on the Taser again and again, pointed it at me as though a death ray should come out of the end of it anytime. My labcoat sizzled and sparked, and I shuddered and clenched my teeth as each pulse leaked through my defense. "What..." he said, just as I straight-armed him back into the kitchen, where he landed heavily on his back, dropping his Taser. His raincoat separated as he fell, exposing a holstered gun. He reached for it.

  The flayer tumbled forward from my hand toward the kitchen floor, a green LED flickering into life as the enabling code was sent. I stepped back into the gloom of the protecting rain as he grabbed his gun, slid it from its holster, and pointed it at me. The flayer touched the ground. The pulse vaporized my wet footprints in the kitchen into puffs of steam with a staccato firecracker noise, then hit the stranger. I was vaguely aware that the water at the doorsill crackled and rose in a small cloud before me, inches from my toes. The stranger screamed and his gun went off, missing me by a whisper. His whole body made a sound like crackling bubble wrap as steam blasted out from every pore. He was suddenly engulfed in a fine, reddish-gray mist, but his scream didn't stop. He stood and fell forward out of the mist, his eyes hollow, dripping portals, strips of hair and boiled skin slipping off of him like red snakes, leaving the exposed raw mass of oozing muscles, twisted in agony. His clothes somehow remained intact, bulging in odd ways as they collected the slippery skin in folds at the bottom of sleeves and cuffs.

  I looked for my gun in the wet grass and picked it up, pointing it at the screaming man, unable for a moment to pull the trigger. I had to tell myself that this was mercy, this was a kindness, and the bastard deserved it anyway for zapping my wife. I took a deep breath and shot him in the head. I wanted to stop and breath, just stop everything and let the rain wash my life away, wash the guilt away, but there was more screaming at the front of the house where another man...men?...writhed and choked. I picked up the spent flayer from the kitchen floor and pocketed it once more and went to the front room of the house. Cob was still at the door, staring at the writhing, fleshless man. I never thought I would be so happy to see him standing at my front door.

  "Go home, Cob."

  He looked at me as though I were a ghost, then threw up, adding to the horror that the living room carpet had become. He turned and ran.

  I did what needed to be done, again, then loaded Melanie into the car, and left San Jose forever.

  It'd been twenty years, and I hadn't heard from Bernhard or Singh. I assumed Singh was dead. I hadn't dared call Bernhard or anyone else I used to know for fear that I would be traced through the wire. And I was no longer sure that I trusted Bernhard. Once I’d decided that Singh would never have done the deed, it left me wondering who else had the motive and means to do it. I had to wonder if I was next o
n his - or someone's - agenda.

  Four billion people had been killed since the invention of the Flayer, fewer than I had feared would be taken by it. Thousands of plant and animal species had gone the way of the dinosaurs. Much of China had become a wasteland, and parts of the Middle East had been attacked eight or nine times, survivors clinging to their holy land despite the danger and attrition. Dry areas were the worst hit, so most people avoided those parched kill-zones. Washington DC got nailed twice, but by then moats had become enormously popular, even around whole city blocks, and the Southern Coalition states were left with most of their government intact.

  Melanie and I stopped running when we reached Seattle. She left me shortly after she found out about my involvement with the Flayer, and I came to terms with the idea that I'd be in hiding for the rest of my life, sporting a false identity that her survivalist brother had set up for me. I no longer think of him as a nutcase.

  Seattle had become crowded, as most wet areas had. It rained a lot there, which made people feel safe. The island communities in the Sound were enormously popular. In Florida, I heard that they'd dredged and 'dozed the state into thousands of canal-separated islands. Much of the Coalition's government is located there now, and they meet by wire to keep from congregating in one vulnerable place. The population there has gone up ten-fold. Boat businesses are booming.

  New York City has had a similar rework. It now looks much like Venice but with much taller buildings.

  Once the various governments figured out that the Flayer could be used to tactically deny an area of dry-farmed food, wet-farmed rice and fish became foods of necessity.

  I kept my own Flayer so I could keep experimenting with preventive measures, though my neighbors and friends would kill me if they knew I had it, or knew any of my hidden past. Over the years I'd built up a business making early-warning devices that sent out radio signals when a Flayer wave was detected, something that very few people actually knew how to detect. Communities posted them miles from town, and when the detector transmitted, a number of safety devices kicked in. Water tanks dumped into channels, moats flooded, personal alarms went off, headwires signaled you, all sorts of things. The Flayer pulse moved at less than a third the speed of sound, so a decent warning system gave a person quite a few seconds of response time. A few seconds, to someone prepared, is all you need.