The Erasable Man: Chronicles of Zachary Artemas

by Christopher Salch

  "Artemas?" said Sheridan, breaking my train of thought.

  "Yes?"

  "Why don't my pants fit?"

  "Your waist might be a size or two smaller after… your ordeal," I said. "Human fat has a significantly lower density than muscle and bone—"

  "Fat?" questioned Sheridan. He'd climbed to a sitting position on the bed and was tightening his belt. A small trickle of blood oozed from one nostril and dripped onto his shirt.

  I handed him a tissue, which he snatched from my hand, grumbling under his breath.

  "Zachary! What does it matter if this bumbling idiot—" started Anne but Sheridan cut her off.

  "I'm a 'bumbling idiot' am I?" he said and froze, staring at his hand. The tissue draped around it like a second skin and started slowly melding into his flesh.

  Anne saw it and backed herself against the room's door.

  "Get Lee!" I snapped at her.

  She nodded once and ran into the hallway.

  Sheridan screamed and tried unsuccessfully to claw the tissue paper away from his hand.

  "Xidorn! Look at me! Look at me!" I yelled. I grabbed his face, physically tearing him away from the Dali-esque nightmare swallowing his hand. Beneath him, the bed started bending, moulding around and merging with his body like soft clay. The fleshless soul… Those words had never had more meaning to me than that very moment, watching Sheridan start to pool at my feet.

  "Stay with me!" I said, feeling his head becoming rubbery in my hands. "I need you to focus! Focus on who you are! On what you are!"

  "What's… happening… to… me?" Sheridan's voice sounded wrong—too deep and wet, as though he were talking with a mouth full of water. The bed was almost completely gone, acting like any other fluid and flowing along a slight incline out into the hall.

  "Your body is forgetting its form. You have to remind it or there won't be anything left when Lee gets here," I said. "Focus! You are Sheridan Xidorn, a police lieutenant! Say it!"

  "I… am… Sheridan Xidorn, a police lieutenant," he choked out the words through a throat that wouldn't hold its shape. Each syllable seeming to drain a little more life out of his liquefying body.

  "Again! Say it again!"

  There were splashes in the hallway—loud enough for three people. Lee burst through the door, pushing a frowning nurse out of his way.

  "Sir! You can't just barge in—" she saw the puddle that had been Sheridan's bed and let out a hoarse gasp.

  Anne, who was following close behind, caught the distraught woman and pulled her back out into the hall.

  "No! No! No!" said Lee, shaking his head back and forth violently. "Not enough left! Not enough! I warned you! Yes, yes! I warned you! This soul is weak, almost gone. Need more material, better quality!" Lee stammered and ran out into the hall—sending glops of silvery liquid splashing all over the place. He came back dragging the nurse—unconscious—his hand already merging with the flesh of her neck.

  "Must strip away… to rebuild… no time …" he mumbled to himself.

  "Lee, let go of her," I said calmly while images of the nurse's drained body flashed through my minds eye. Just thinking about Lee draining away her essence like some macabre spider sent a shiver down my spine. He would sacrifice her to stabilize Sheridan's body—at least for a while. Then there would be the next time, and the next—each episode costing another innocent their flesh.

  Anne stood in the doorway holding her weapon at the ready—its malignant energy sending a chill through the room. Lee ignored us, his arm enveloped the nurse's twitching body as if it were an enormous snake gulping down a small snack. I let go of Sheridan and drew my forty-five.

  I'd seen Lee like this once before, a long time ago, when I was just learning what being a Tekcop meant—before everything changed. A human fist, wielded with the proper force and skill, can make a bloody mess of anything not armor plated and unlucky enough to be in front of it. Sixteen years ago, when Ed arrived in Pocketville, Anne barely escaped. It was sheer luck that Ruth was fast enough to shove Ed sideways before he could land that punch.

  Then the world had exploded and all of Pocketville screamed.

  Lee found what was left of Ruth, badly burned and barely alive, laying across Anne's body in the front yard. He carried the two women inside our house and did what he could to save them both. When there was nothing more he could do, Lee made a choice and sacrificed Ruth just as he was planning to sacrifice the nurse now.

  "Lee, let her go," I warned him one more time.

  "You want this one to be whole? Yes?" he said, gesturing toward Sheridan. "He is more valuable that way, yes? Yes?"

  "Don't make me shoot you," I said.

  Anne's attack caught me completely off guard and sent me sliding through the slippery goo into a wall. My arm was numb from the elbow down, and my pistol landed over by the door—covered in a thin layer of frost and wispy white smoke. Her malicious little tube was pointed directly at me.

  "Do what you can. We'll need him alive and well to help clean up when this mess is over," Anne told Lee. She wrapped a cloth around her hand and pocketed my pistol. "We're leaving."

  I was still too stunned to react when she bodily hoisted me to my feet and marched me out of the building. It was a good ten minutes later before my arm started tingling. By then, we were well on the way to walking back to my office without saying so much as a word.

  "You shot me!" I said, when I felt the business end of Anne's weapon leave my back.

  "You still don't get it. All these years and you still don't understand. Look around you Zachary, take a good look. Do you know what I see? Do you know what I've seen every day for sixteen years?" said Anne, pausing to catch her breath. Her eyes were as wild as I'd ever seen them, staring at me like those of a cornered, desperate animal. "I'll tell you what I see. Ghosts! Empty shells walking through pointless existences, just waiting for their next trip through the darkness to have another part of their identity ripped away—another fucking pound of flesh to feed this place!"

  "Anne—" I said.

  "Don't start! You're just as bad as your father. That bastard wanted his own little menagerie of monsters under lock and key. His personal freaks! He trapped me here just like he trapped Ruth!" she yelled. "Do you know why I'm here? Do you know why that arrogant bastard condemned me to die over and over again in this cursed City? Do you?"

  She looked at me as though she expected me to say something, but there wasn't anything I could say. Nothing I could add to counter her accusations.

  "Anne, please …"

  "Because of you!" she screamed. "Your bastard of a father didn't want his precious son to be alone! That's why I'm here. Why I'll never set foot outside Pocketville! Because that bastard and his bitch of a wife didn't want their child to miss out on life."

  "That's enough! Do you think I had anything to do with that? Can you believe for one second I knew a damn thing about Janus's plans? Why do you think I gave up the name? Don't take my father's sins out on me, damn it!" I said and instantly regretted it.

  "How about your own then? Do you have any idea why I use this thing?" She threw the black tube at me hard enough that I was sure it bruised my sternum. "Aden has it all! All of my power, my energy, my life! All of it! There's barely enough of me left to keep this body in one piece! That's your fault!" Her voice broke and tears were streaming down her face.

  "I'm sorry," I said, knowing it sounded as hollow as it had the first time so many years ago. What could I say to her? It was a mistake that I'd been trying to make right for sixteen years. "I didn't know what was going on. All I saw was a creature sucking the life out of you …"

  "I know …" said Anne quietly. "You couldn't have known what would happen."

  "Aden made the bullets?" I asked.

  "She had to," said Anne and gestured to the black tube. "Adam gave me this. Without it, I'm nothing more than a shell filled with memories. Lee has had to put me back together four times now. Every time a little bit more of me disappears. Aden
is all that I have left, all that's left of me, and now I've lost her."

  Tears were running down her cheeks in earnest now. "Aden is all I have!"

  I picked up Anne's weapon, pocketing it before it could roll away, and wrapped my arms around her. We were halfway back to my office when she finally collapsed. People were staring, but all I could do was pick Anne up and carry her the rest of the way. People—if only Anne could see them as human instead of what this place had made of them—what Pocketville made of everything living that came here. It was a problem that I had wrestled with most of my life. Janus had given me his answer a long time ago when he first told me about the world I lived in.

  "Zachary, you have a gift," he'd said. "Pocketville is open to you as it is open to no one else. Let's explore your gift together."

  Ten-year-old-me thought it sounded cool and exciting—something to break the monotony of growing up in Ruth's lab. Then he introduced me to Adam and we discovered the Founder's Archive together. I spent the week after that dry heaving over a toilet or curled in the fetal position while my head felt like exploding. That's when my "Gift" really came into perspective, and I realized that the whole history of Pocketville was hiding out in the back of my brain. All of it—from the time when the City's foundation soul was stripped from its flesh and its living mind set adrift in a white suit, to the day when Pocketville's first resident was condemned.

  It took months, but I learned to close that door, to segregate my own memories from those in the Archive. Then I discovered that alcohol made the other memories fuzzy, less intrusive on my consciousness. That helped for a while, but I still couldn't forget any of it, not then, not ever.

  "We'll get her back," I reassured Anne once we were back inside my apartment. "But we have to plan our moves. The Man in White is involved."

  Anne stiffened, as I set her down on the couch. "Are you sure?"

  I nodded. "He was at Ruth's when I got there. I almost hit him with one of your—Aden's—bullets."

  "It wouldn't have done any good," she said. "They only work on creatures with flesh and a soul. He has neither."

  "You're wrong about that," I said. "Pocketville was made from his soul. Everything in the City is a part of him that was stripped away and formed into something else. And flesh… I've seen his flesh, seen through its eyes …"

  "Don't," said Anne. "I don't want to know."

  "He wants it all back. He wants to be whole again," I told her. "You know what that means don't you?"

  She shivered again and nodded. "Everyone in Pocketville has to die."

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  T- 17 Years - Matchsticks

  "How ya doin', Anne?" called Alexa.

  "Hi, Alexa! What are you working on this morning?" replied Anne walking over to where Alexa was crouched over her flowers. She appeared to be spreading brownish material that looked very much like dirt around the flowerbeds from a bucket next to her.

  "Fertilizing the flowers. I have a composter out back that I feed with vegetable matter from the Facility kitchens," stated Alexa. "It keeps the plants out here happy."

  "I can see that! You have the prettiest flowers in the whole neighborhood," said Anne. "Well, I need to get down to the lab. Ruth's wanting to take a look at my work today."

  "Better not keep her waiting. She came in early today," Alexa informed her. "Seems Janus sent something feisty through the transfer chamber."

  "Anything to worry about?"

  "I doubt it. That room is built like a vault, and Ruth's added a Junctivator mechanism to it as well."

  "Wow! I'll have to get her to show me how it works. See you later!" called Anne as she headed over to the house's front door. She was still puzzled by Zachary's inability to produce an exploding match. Just the idea that following identical processes could produce such varying results completely blew her mind. His assertion that the difference between the matches had been the person building them and not some subtle difference in technique didn't quite ring true in her mind. There had to be something else going on that she was missing. She just couldn't understand what.

  The Junctivator dropped Anne in her lab with its usual speed, and she quickly started organizing her notes for Ruth. Today would be the day to finally find out just how much punch her twelve special matches actually had. Zachary had mentioned them to Ruth with some degree of trepidation, and Ruth had insisted on testing at least one before Anne added more layers to any of them. Of course, Anne finally had a place where setting off one of those matches might actually be safe.

  Anne checked the glove box hidden away inside the wardrobe and its contents over one more time. Each of the matches was sitting in its individual mount and still had the characteristic shimmering mirage effect that she'd come to expect. It was almost as if there were a tiny lens around each match head.

  Very carefully, she retrieved two of the matches from their mounts and moved them to the glove box's tiny air lock. There was no way to tell how consistent her layering had been so she picked two as a guarantee that at least one of them would detonate in testing. It would also give them a pair of measurements to work from when trying to estimate how the others would work.

  She retrieved the pair and slipped one into a small matchbox waiting on her workbench, the other she took into the blast chamber for mounting. For this test, the manipulator arms would be fully retracted into protective enclosures as a precaution. They weren't designed to survive even half of the energy that Anne estimated her special matches could produce.

  All the precautions Ruth had insisted on seemed like overkill. There was enough energy bound up in one of those matches to be scary, sure, but Anne couldn't believe that her toys were really that dangerous. Then again, Anne had no idea just how big a blast they would produce.

  The Junctivator chimed in the work room just as Anne finished mounting the match. Ruth stepped out, followed by Zachary close behind. He looked more than a little annoyed, but didn't seem inclined to say anything.

  "You should really think about what you're going to do, Zachary. You come from the Tekcop line, no matter what you think of your father, and that means you have the world at your fingertips," said Ruth in her lecturing tone. "And I mean that literally!"

  "Which world, Mother?" said Zachary. "I can't leave Pocketville anymore than you can."

  "That's a very pessimistic way to look at—"

  Zachary shushed her with a scowl and gestured toward Anne who had just sealed the blast chamber's door and was waiting for the pair to acknowledge her. "Can we talk about this later?"

  "Oh!" exclaimed Ruth covering her mouth. "Am I embarrassing you?" she continued in a whisper.

  "Yes," answered Zachary out of the corner of his mouth. Ruth winced apologetically.

  "Alright!" she said, turning to Anne. "I believe you have something to show me?"

  "Yes, ma'am. This," said Anne picking up the little matchbox and pulling out the spare match.

  "May I hold it?" asked Ruth.

  "Just don't drop it," said Anne, handing her the match.

  Ruth turned the tiny wooden object over in her hand, getting a feel for its weight and shape. Physically, it wasn't far off from any of a thousand other wooden matches—maybe a touch heavier at the head and slightly off color, but otherwise identical. A quick sniff showed that it even had the same sulfur-like scent as a normal match.

  "This looks like a match," observed Ruth. "A very ordinary one at that."

  "Look closer," said Zachary.

  Ruth held the match up to her eye, looking over its surface. Zachary flipped the light switch leaving the match's faint glow as the only illumination in the room.

  Ruth gasped. "It radiates that much background energy?"

  "Background energy? What are you talking about?" asked Anne. "You mean Cherenkov Radiation?"

  "Sorry! I haven't had a chance to explain that to you yet," Ruth apologized. "When you add a layer to one of your matches, you're binding energy into matter. The glow is a little of that ener
gy radiating away in the form of light. Not nearly as simplistic as what our Russian friend dreamed of."

  "It really is amazing work," said Zachary, adding his own analysis to the conversation. "The amount of energy that bleeds off is vanishingly small in comparison to what is actually stored in the match."

  "How small?" asked Ruth.

  "I'd say about twenty-eight to thirty orders of magnitude," answered Zachary.

  Ruth's eyes widened ever so slightly, and she looked askance at the match in her hand.

  "Hey! Who's demonstrating here?" cut in Anne. "I built these things after all."

  "You are absolutely right, dear!" said Ruth, gingerly handing the match back to Anne.

  "You've seen the match. It's one of twelve that I've been working on," said Anne. "One of these bad boys is mounted in the blast chamber ready to go whenever you're ready. The others are in that wardrobe."

  "How stable are they?" asked Ruth, glancing in the wardrobe's direction. "And why a wardrobe?"

  "As to stability, I haven't had a single accidental detonation from any of my matches. Of course, I keep these locked up to avoid any problems," said Anne. "The wardrobe just happened to be the only thing I could store the glove box in. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to match scientific equipment to furniture and living space."

  "Tell me about it!" agreed Ruth. "Remind me to give you a hand adding some shielding to that wardrobe. I'm sure we could—"

  "Ladies, we have a bomb in the other room. Now is not the time to be discussing lab decor," commented Zachary.

  The two women looked at each other and then back at Zachary.

  "Where's the fun in that?" asked Ruth.

  Zachary frowned, but didn't add anything more.

  "Okay, okay! Let's get on with it then," said Ruth. "Boys and explosions! Hmph! Anne would you do the honors?"

  Anne stepped over to the Waldo controls and flipped the red cover off the striker control. Ruth and Zachary were standing on the opposite side of the blast chamber door looking out to where the match sat.