A Perfect Machine

by Brett Savory

  To Henry, Milo looked somewhat insubstantial. Not transparent, but more like how someone appears backlit against the sun on the horizon. Definitely there, but with shadows hovering, seeking to obscure.

  Henry took two steps toward Milo, easily closing the distance between them. They stood in front of one another for a moment, then Henry reached forward and down, made to hug Milo – but as gently as he could. He neither knew what Milo was made of, nor had complete control of his new muscles. His arms encircled Milo, and Milo waited with his eyes shut for them to go through him. But they didn’t. They touched him. Held him as softly as metal could hold anything.

  “Where were you?” Henry said, his mouth near Milo’s head.

  “I’ve been with you the whole time, old friend. The whole time.”

  Neither felt the need to say anything else, so they just stood like that, breathing, for a long moment.

  When Henry pulled away and stood back up – as much as he could – he said, “Who else is here? I saw you looking at someone else earlier.”

  Milo glanced at Adelina, who was shimmering and smiling nearby.

  “Adelina,” Milo said. “A new friend.”

  Henry nodded, looked in the same direction as Milo. “I don’t see her, but I believe you. After what’s just happened here – not to mention what’s happening to me right now – I’d believe anything.”

  Adelina said, “He might see me soon, Milo. I hope he does. It would be an honor.”

  Milo frowned at that, but his mind was having enough trouble keeping up with recent developments, so he just made a quick mental note to ask her later what she meant.

  Milo looked at Faye, saw how frail and worn-out she seemed. “Tell her I’m sorry, would you, Henry? This was the only way I knew of reasserting myself in the physical world.”

  “Milo says he’s sorry,” Henry said to Faye. “If he wasn’t dead, he’d offer to buy you new things.”

  Faye didn’t respond. She was in no mood for humor. She was in no mood for anything. Her eyes were glazed, and she appeared to be breathing very shallowly. She sat completely still and just stared ahead into the middle distance. Seeing nothing. Not wanting to see anything.

  Henry turned back to Milo. “She’ll come around.”

  “Tell him what I told you now, Milo,” Adelina said. “It’s very important that he know.”

  “Henry, listen,” Milo said. “Adelina says you can’t leave the apartment. At least not yet. She says they’ll kill you. Apparently, people know about you, that you’ve begun changing.”

  “Palermo has men keeping an eye on this place,” Adelina said, clarifying. “You were careful, but not careful enough. They’ll know if you move, and where you’re moving to. There’s no point in going anywhere right now. We need to figure out our next move, then proceed very carefully.”

  Milo related Adelina’s words to Henry, who stood nodding, then said, “Well, that’s fine. I’m not going to pretend I have any idea what’s happening to me, why Palermo wants to kill me, or what’s going on in a larger sense, but one thing is certain: someone is going to come looking for Steve. His ambulance is parked behind this building. And we need to do something about the body.”

  Everyone looked at Steve’s cooling corpse. Everyone but Faye; she continued to stare at nothing, subconsciously fiddling with a loose thread in her pants.

  “Why did you do that, anyway, Henry?” Milo asked. “I know he was going to take a picture, and that obviously wouldn’t have been good, but this was… unnecessary.”

  “I know,” Henry replied. “I know. I don’t know why I did it. It happened very fast, and I didn’t feel like I was in control of myself when my arm shot forward and just…” He shook his head. “I felt like what was inside me – what makes me who I am, what makes me Henry – was the wrong version of me. Disconnected. Lost. Replaced by something… else.”

  Slowly, like sunlight filtering down through murky water, something Henry said finally penetrated Faye’s exhaustion and confusion. “Wait a minute,” she mumbled, her eyes refocusing. “Palermo?”

  “Edward Palermo,” Henry said, moving toward Faye. He put a hand on her shoulder. Again, gently. Gently. “The head of the Runners. Why?”

  “He visited me outside the hospital not long after I’d helped you home in that cab. Gave me his card, told me to call him if you got in contact with me again.”

  “So he’s known about me that long?” Henry said.

  “You’re a terrible fugitive,” Milo said.

  Henry tried to smirk. Wasn’t sure how it settled on his face, but it felt right. “So if he’s known about me and where I am all this time, why hasn’t he just gotten a pile of guys together to take me in?”

  Adelina said to Milo, “He missed his window to contain Henry right at the beginning and, by the time he knew where he was, he was probably already too much for Palermo to safely handle. Now he knows you’re powerful, but he doesn’t know how powerful. At this point, I suspect he wants to see what you become before he makes a move.”

  Milo relayed her words to Henry.

  Henry frowned. “How does Adelina know so much about all this, anyway, Milo? Who is she? How do you even know you can trust a word she says?”

  “Palermo’s my father,” Adelina said quietly. “Henry’s becoming what I was supposed to be, but never fully became.”

  Milo stared at her. “Palermo’s your father?”

  Henry echoed Milo, astonished: “Palermo’s her father?”

  She nodded. “I was the first to ascend, or whatever you want to call it. No one had ever done it before me, so there’s no proper term for it, but yes, full lead content. I achieved it years ago. My father… hid me away so no one would know.”

  Milo repeated her words to Faye and Henry, then said, “Why would he do that?”

  “Look, we don’t have time for me to explain everything right now. Henry’s right that people will be looking for the ambulance driver. Probably have been for several hours.”

  Milo said to Henry, “OK, she says no time to get in to it, will explain later… So, body disposal. How do we get rid of it? We need to make it disappear, clean up the blood and… other bits, then figure out how to disappear ourselves. With people watching our every move. No sweat.”

  Just then, Henry had a horrible idea. But, like his arm flashing out and pulping Steve’s head, this idea came from that same raw place of instinct. “I have an idea,” he said, tentatively.

  “Spill,” Milo said.

  “I could… pulp the body with my fists. Turn it to mush. Like baby food.” He let that visual hang in the room for a moment, then said, “Or not.”

  Faye had only been privy to certain parts of the conversation as it was and, given her state of mind, a lot of it just went in one ear and out the other, but this last bit stuck. “You’re going to do what to Steve’s body?”

  “Nah, nah, it’s a great idea,” Milo said, his eyes lighting up. “I know it’s disgusting, but it’ll work. And we need something that will work right now.”

  Henry turned to Faye, focused on her, tried to keep her eyes locked to his so that she would understand. “You should leave the room, Faye. This is going to be awful.”

  “You can’t just fucking pulp my friend’s body to baby food!”

  “We have to.”

  She took a deep breath. “That’s insane.”

  “I know, but it’ll remove all identification from his corpse and will make it easy to… further dispose of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’ll be easier to dispose of,” Milo said, “as a liquid than as a solid.”

  Good thing Faye can’t hear him, Henry thought, but said, “We don’t need to go into more detail than that, Faye. You can leave it up to us; we’ll take care of it, OK?”

  “Jesus, can’t we just hide the body, like normal murderers?”

  “Shit idea,” Milo said. “For countless reasons.”

  Henry agreed. “This is the only way t
o be sure the body’s gone, Faye. Just let me do this.” He wanted to reach a hand out to touch her face, but he knew she’d push him away. After what he’d done, after everything she’d been through, he imagined his touch now would just feel cold and monstrous.

  Faye looked down at Steve’s body, back up to Henry. “Where are you gonna go, Henry? How do you think you’re gonna get out of here without being noticed?”

  “No idea. One step a time, though, OK?”

  Faye looked around the room – at her shattered belongings strewn about, the blood-spattered dead body of her friend and colleague splayed out on the floor, the giant metal man towering above her, and the two invisible people apparently standing somewhere nearby – and thought, Fuck it. It’s not like it can get much weirder, or much worse.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “But use the fucking bathtub.”

  * * *

  In the process of dealing with Steve’s body, Milo discovered he could grasp and hold onto things fairly well now – not just sweep them from shelves and destroy them. When they were finished in the living room, they’d been so thorough that it would’ve passed a black-light inspection. They even replaced the smashed china with various knickknacks from other rooms in the apartment so that, if the cops did come looking, they wouldn’t see anything obviously out of the ordinary. The busted hall mirror was just taken entirely off the wall, and a picture from one of Faye’s closets hung in its place.

  Once they were satisfied that the living room would pass a thorough inspection, Milo helped Henry pick up Steve’s body and move it into the bathtub. To an outside observer, it would have seemed like Henry was somehow levitating the body, the head and shoulders supported by his giant metal arms, while the legs and feet were supported by nothing more than thin air.

  The mostly headless body safely in the tub and the drain plugged, Henry – kneeling at the side of the tub – began pulping it. He started at the feet and legs and worked his way up, basically just grasping onto a given body part and crushing it through his enormous steel fingers until it squished out the sides. He repeated this motion until the body part – bone, muscle, flesh – was nothing more than mush. Skin was a little harder to render drain-ready, though, so they used a pair of heavy-duty scissors to cut up whatever might cause problems going down. Milo’s job was to watch closely where any blood-spray went and immediately wipe it down.

  Henry felt the urge to throw up several times before the job was done, but – somewhat disturbingly, Henry thought – Milo suffered no such affliction; he just looked fascinated by it all.

  At one point, his hands, chest, and arms covered in grue, Henry turned to Milo and said, “You know there’s something seriously wrong with you, right? No way you should be enjoying this like you are.”

  “I’m not enjoying it, Henry. I’m just interested in the process. Big difference. Besides, I’m not the one squeezing a body to paste through his fingers like a fucking trash compactor, so you’re not exactly on firm moral ground to be judging anyone, you know?”

  Henry had nothing to say to that, so he just got back to work.

  Once they were satisfied that Steve was as mashed as he possibly could be, they turned on the hot water, opened the drain, and watched it all go down. Milo then tipped in the entire contents of the three bottles of Drāno Faye had found under the kitchen sink.

  “Done,” Milo said, leaning against the edge of the tub.

  “Done,” Henry echoed. “Just have to wash the rest of Steve off my chest, and we’re set.” Then he added, “You know we’re going to Hell, right?”

  “No such place, Henry. No such place.”

  In her bedroom, Faye attempted to make sense of everything that’d happened. She’d put on some heavy music to cover the sounds of crunching coming from the bathroom, but the album she’d chosen, Gojira’s The Way of All Flesh (if she’d been thinking clearly, she wouldn’t have picked such an on-the-nose record), had come to an end. The ensuing silence settled over her, and she felt like she could finally think straight.

  When it had all been happening – when shit had been inexplicably flying all over her apartment, crashing everywhere, Henry talking to invisible people – she’d wanted nothing more than to just run out the door and never come back. But now that it was quiet, her affection (or whatever that simple emotion had now morphed into) for Henry had returned. Stronger than ever, it seemed. She felt vaguely as though her emotions were being if not outright controlled, then somehow manipulated. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she felt incredibly protective of Henry, but was uncertain why she should feel so strongly. Especially in light of everything that’d happened. But it was there, and she could not help how she felt. She’d dated other guys longer than a year – who hadn’t turned into giant metal beasts – whom she would have just run the other way from entirely, if even a small portion of tonight’s events had occurred in her presence.

  Weirdly, an incredible sense of peace washed over her as she thought these things, so when Henry very tentatively knocked on her door, she said “Come in” with more tenderness and genuine caring than she would’ve thought possible.

  Henry opened the door slowly and just stood there for a moment, silent, unsure what to say. Then he spoke, quietly: “It’s done.”

  “OK,” she said.

  “For what it’s worth, it was horrendously awful, and I’d never do it again, no matter the reason.”

  “You did what you had to do, Henry. I understand that.”

  Henry just looked at the ground. “I’m not sure that’s true, but I did what I did, and it’s done, so the only thing left to do was deal with it. And I did. Now I just want to get out of here. Figure out what’s going on, why Palermo wants to kill me. And get you someplace safe. You didn’t ask for any of this.”

  “But I did, Henry, I did.” Faye got off the bed, walked toward him. “I helped you get to where you are now, so we’re in this together, OK? As awful and confusing as it all is, it’s you and me.” She reached up and touched his face.

  “And Milo.”

  “Yes,” Faye said, smiled. “And Milo.”

  “And Adelina,” Henry added after a moment. “And maybe more people we can’t see, who the fuck knows?”

  They both laughed a little. Henry moved forward to hug Faye. She let him. He embraced her as softly as he could, then stepped back again.

  When they returned to the living room, Milo said, “Alright, I figure we have till tomorrow morning before we’ll need to leave here. The hospital will be wondering where in fuck Steve went, but they – and subsequently the cops – will have no reason to start looking here, so that’ll give us a bit of breathing room. That said, no reason to hang around till they start piecing it together. We should vamoose ASAP.”

  “That’s great, Milo,” Henry said, “but where are we supposed to go? And how do we get anywhere without being noticed? Adelina said we’re being watched by Palermo’s men, right? And even if we weren’t, I’m kind of gaining on eight feet tall and made nearly entirely of metal. Bit of a point of interest there, you know?”

  “Let’s just get a couple of hours sleep, then decide, OK?” Faye said. “I’m running on empty, and we should be thinking as clearly as possible when we decide our next step.”

  Milo and Henry exchanged glances. Until Faye said it, neither of them had really thought about how tired they were. Henry was physically beat, and Milo was emotionally tired, since physical concerns were no longer at the top of his list – though maybe they would start to be again, since he was feeling somewhat fleshy now.

  Faye took Henry’s silence as agreement. “Alright, so corporeal people get the bedroom; incorporeal people have to sort themselves out. The living room is fine, if such things matter to ghosts.”

  “I’m not a–”

  “I know, Milo,” Henry said. “We just don’t know what else to call you, OK?”

  Milo frowned. “Maybe one day I’ll be a real boy.”

  Henry laughed.

 
“No way I’m fitting on a bed anymore, even if you’d allow me in,” Henry said, “so I’m good on the bedroom floor… Actually, I don’t even need to take up your space, if you’re not comfortable with it, Faye. I’m fine to go out on the living room floor.”

  “No,” she said, quicker on the heels of his words than she wanted. “No, I mean – I want you to stay in here. With me. OK?”

  Henry nodded. “We’ll set the alarm for three hours from now.”

  “And I’ll call in sick to the hospital when we’re up again.”

  “See you guys in a few hours, then,” Milo said, and hovered out the door.

  When he got out to the living room, Adelina was gone.

  “Really? Again?” he said to the empty room.

  T H I R T E E N

  All around Adelina, energy swirled. She was aware of no sensation other than a strange kind of sight, but even that gave her no clue as to her whereabouts.

  Although she had no way of knowing it, in those instances when she disappeared from the world she knew, Adelina reappeared here, in this near-colorless space. She floated here, in this place where time did not seem to exist. Occasionally, she would see what looked like a flash of lightning, but not much else. It seemed to her that her surroundings were constantly in flux. And though she did not feel it as a sensation, per se, she felt somewhere deep inside that she was more alone than she could ever have thought possible. Wherever she was, she was the only person who had ever been there, the only person that would ever be there. Her loneliness carved a channel through her psyche that got deeper every time she returned.

  Warring with these emotions, however, was the supreme sense of calm she sometimes felt. When she’d first come here, immediately following her ascension, she’d felt this same overwhelming calm. She did not know how long she floated here back then, but when she returned to her world it was with a purpose. She had appeared to Milo, tried to impart to him information received in this strange place. Information she had no recollection of receiving in any traditional way her mind could interpret, but there nonetheless.