“You’ll probably have nightmares about it.” Glee drips from Barona’s voice.
Severin’s eyes widen, but he says nothing.
Mayor Ellis looks aghast and doesn’t miss the quizzical stares shot his way at the presence of this hateful woman.
Günn leans over and whispers into Red Feather’s ear, “What the hell is she doing in here anyway?”
Red Feather shrugs and shakes his head. “Do you think Ellis is fucking her?”
“Could be. Although she’s probably fucking him,” Red Feather smiles and Günn snorts. The Countess turns her head—Günn imagines she can hear gears turning—and glares at them. Günn flashes her a broad, cheesy smile and wiggles her fingers in a childish hello. Barona is not amused. Red Feather leans in to Günn, keeping his eyes on the Countess.
“Uh-oh. I think she’s putting a hex on you,” Red Feather chortles.
“Me? She’s looking at you, too!” Günn revels in banter that has nothing to do with the growing impossibility below. Her eye twitch takes a brief respite.
Barona sniffs. “How very unprofessional. Indeed.”
Günn nods with mock seriousness. “It is very unprofessional that a civilian be involved in a police investigation. Indeed.”
The Countess frowns. “I’m a taxpayer, which means I pay your salaries. I have every right to be here.”
“I always wondered whose unintelligible signature that was on my paychecks. Well then. Nice to meet you, Boss,” Günn puts out her hand to shake.
The Countess looks at Mayor Ellis, expecting him to come to her defense. He feigns engrossment in the sheet-covered bodies below. Anger flashes across her face as she silently promises: You’ll pay for this. With a final glare at the detectives, Barona turns her attention back to the operating theater, already contemplating payback.
“Uh-oh. We’ve got a double hex on its way,” Günn crows.
Mayor Ellis turns. “Can it, you two.”
Barona sneers. Too little too late, Blondie.
Water runs down the observation window in rivulets. The pressure in the cabin increases, so much that the room falls silent as people struggle to catch their breath. Günn’s reprieve from the unimaginable over as quick as it started.
After what feels like years, the pressure in his chest increasing, the electricity in the room building, and the video camera whining in protest, Guy Severin stares at the bodies, afraid to blink, knowing that any moment the nightmare that has plagued him will surely come to pass. Severin nudges Captain Anderson.
“Sir, I have an awful foreboding they’re waking up.”
Captain Anderson’s eyes widen. It hasn’t occurred to him that’s even a possibility.
The electricity in the room builds to a crescendo, churning the air around them. The video camera conks out with a zap, startling Tina Vasco and Pete Mazzotti who’ve snuck back in.
Günn doubles over, gasping for breath.
Red Feather feels the urge to hold onto something, like the roof of the building will suddenly hurl into the heavens, taking them all along for the ride. Red Feather closes his eyes and is hit with a quick series of images: high ceiling, ornate carvings, a blue sky so beautiful it must be the doorway to heaven, a circle of beings, holding hands, chanting in a language he cannot comprehend but it feels like love laced with an ethereal power that only the enlightened could understand. Some of the beings look up further into the heavens. Some look down towards the Earth. Their voices rise into a scream that snaps Red Feather’s eyes open. Aho!
In the moment the witnesses feel their hearts will stop beating, the room goes still.
Captain Anderson’s pacemaker is hot in his chest, burning through his shirt. Countess Barona is exhilarated, a cocaine rush. Mayor Ellis’s head thrums.
The electricity in the air makes one last zing and it’s gone. Outside, a funnel cloud—the opposite of the one that sucked up the Crane mansion—makes the building and its environs shake as the air crashes down.
Above, the smog goddess Kaleanathi rages as the dead souls are yanked from her insides. I am become Hell! she screams, as the tributes rip an eye in her maelstrom.
Below, the occupants of the observation deck gasp for breath, hair finally laying flat. Tight chests back to normal. The room turns frigid, early morning in the Arctic.
Severin turns the video camera back on. It works. LAPD and company stare down through the glass at the twelve bodies on morgue gurneys.
Movement. Severin’s heart pounds in anticipation. This is it. It’s really happening!
Another white sheet twitches, then another. Gasps resound.
Tina thinks she’s going to be sick. Barona claps her hands.
Another spasm below strong enough to dislodge the sheet and BAM, the one-eyed girl’s eye is open, panicked, as she thrashes against the restraints, coughing and wheezing.
A moment later the person who started off as just a tail coughs herself awake, the Velcro straps creaking against her strength.
One by one the people who were only pieces of flesh just hours before open their eyes, heaving and quaking, wild with fear and confusion as they fight the restraints.
Dropped jaws catch flies in the observation deck as the thrashing below dislodges covering sheets, they fall to the floor.
“That woman has a tail!”
“I don’t think she’s a woman!”
“A real-life cyclops?”
“Are those nails shooting out of her body?”
“It smells like flowers in here—” The speaker faints.
Below, a smorgasbord of survivors.
The one-eyed girl.
A purple-eyed woman with Tibetan features.
An African-American woman with silver eyes, glinting like mica in the fluorescent light.
A Latina, her curly hair a mess and an acrylic-nail tipped hand trying to work her way out of the restraints.
A full-on lizard woman, forked tongue darting in and out of her mouth.
Cyborg woman, her skin a luminous metallic sheen.
A woman with green-tinged skin, translucent, breathing heavily and emitting a scent like oleander baking in the sun.
A South Asian woman with cacao-colored skin and long dark hair.
A freckle-faced redhead with pale Irish skin.
An auburn-haired beauty with a huge rack, her sheet straining against her massive heaving bosom.
A Korean woman who dry heaves, cannot stop.
A Caucasian man, nondescript, short dark hair.
“Dude,” Severin brays. “That’s DJ-fucking-Fetish!”
Red Feather looks at Günn, envelops her hand in his.
“Detectives, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” Captain Anderson breathes.
Red Feather puts his other hand on the captain’s shoulder. “Agreed, sir. Kansas has gone bye-bye.”
They look down at the twelve figures in the operating theater—miracles in physical form—as they scream to be freed from the straps that bind them.
It’s the end of the world as everyone knows it.
And nobody feels fine.
Kaleanathi, The Smog Goddess
Your fury is wide and deep as caverns on Mars. What’s rightfully yours ripped from your belly. Again.
This means war.
At every turn they’ve underestimated you and soon they’ll see how wrong they were. You drink of the pain emanating from the human souls trapped in your toxic womb. They are delicious, but depleting fast. The remaining vital force of the dead is a drug, its effects wearing off quicker than you imagined.
You return to The Source, whence all power in this multiverse emerges. You and Mother, The Ancient One are the only ones now with the power to do this. This makes you her equal. This make
s you co-queen of the everything. All you need now is an army, and The Elementals have always hated The Ethereals. Theirs is a rivalry that goes back to the founding of the universe. It’s time to enlist the other Elementals properly. Nobody can deny you now.
From your perch above Los Angeles, you summon them.
Fiero the murder goddess, who is always ready for a death party.
Aranya, the spider goddess of connections.
Phlage, the goddess of epidemics.
Oceanica, goddess of water, who has the added ability to control humans—their bodies are mostly water after all.
Soleá, the sun goddess, daughter of Ra, bearer of light and fire.
Muuna, goddess of moon and night, at peak power when the moon is full, as it will be tonight.
There are so many more Elementals than Ethereals, and they throng before you, on bended knee, begging to help. They acknowledge your power; they see it radiating from you in waves like it used to off Mother, The Ancient One. You are invincible.
Drunk on power, you no longer have the good sense to honor the trickle of dread that creeps into your belly, telling you Mother is awake, and she’s angrier than anyone has ever been in the history of creation.
Part Two:
The Survival of the Fittest Freaks
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
—Charles Darwin
I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Sunday November 1, 2000
8:00 AM
UCLA Medical Center
Operating Theater
Detective Atticus Red Feather has seen the dead rise before, but only in zombie movies and his dreams. In those his father would manifest as he was after death, marks of torture covering his half-naked frame, solemn eyes pleading for justice. Atticus runs from his father as fast as he can, escaping the shame and the disgust that all these decades later he’s still not fulfilled the promise he made. Every time Red Feather awakens from the dream he’s weeping and so soaked in sweat he’d have to change the sheets. Not that he ever managed to get back into bed afterward. The rest of the wee hours he spends smoking cigarettes and thinking about his dad.
Joseph Red Feather was a good man, a warrior spirit without a battle, who sublimated his fierceness into amateur boxing. He made the rounds in the heavyweight division, a seventy-eight percent win rate. Sometimes up to five thousand dollars a win. He’d come home, face swollen, cauliflower ears bleeding, and with a wad of cash that his wife Melina would take and put with the rest, under the floorboard in their bedroom.
Just as Joseph’s mother taught her, Melina would arrange the herbs and lead a healing ceremony. The children would watch through the cracks in the plywood of their stationary RV. After the ceremony, Joseph would bury his head in Melina’s lap and weep, the only times Atticus Red Feather ever saw his father despair over their station in life.
One uncustomary day Atticus heard his parents fighting. They never fought, loving and gentle was their marriage. Joseph had an offer. An ultimate fighting match: fifty thousand to his family if he loses, a hundred thou if he wins.
“No,” Melina said, “your life is worth too much more.”
Joseph pulled her close. “But I won’t lose,” he promised.
When Father Callahan brought his body, along with the money, it was clear the no-weapons rule had been broken: Joseph Red Feather had knife and mace marks all over his body, his face half gone.
Atticus felt something break inside him as he looked at his father’s shell, the one he had sacrificed so his family could have a better life. He’d given them his share of food if the kids were still hungry. Now, he’d given them the skin off his back.
Melina screamed and fainted at the sight. Atticus’s siblings wailed, thinking their mother had gone the way of their dad, and looked to Atticus for answers he didn’t have. Within a week, Melina bought a new used car, packed up their double-wide, and drove them out to California. They’d only been back to Pine Ridge once, for Grandfather’s funeral.
And so, in Los Angeles, Atticus Red Feather fulfilled his dad’s dream for a better life and became a cop, certain one day he would find his father’s killers. Atticus knows his father continues waiting in the Great Beyond for justice. Hence, the dreams. Those sad eyes, a spirit in limbo waiting for resolution.
Detective Red Feather rubs his face and drags his mind back to the present, where around him witnesses of the Frankenstein hour—body parts from a vaporized site now grown to human size and reanimated through an electric force of nature—run around like headless chickens.
Outside the observation deck LAPD Captain Ward Anderson is on his phone, barking hoarse orders for a temporary media blackout on the events, and then to secure a location for the survivors. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you have to do. You clear a floor and get security detail set up ASAP. The survivors are to be surveilled at all times, you understand me?” A pause while Anderson wipes sweat from his brow, hating the feeling of it trickle down his back and from under his arms. Why didn’t he bring a spare shirt? “We cannot risk even the slightest breach of security here. Move it! You call me when it’s done.” The intermittent sharp pain in his chest becomes a constant. He opens and closes his fist, regulating his breathing, praying.
Inside the operating theatre, Guy Severin cannot steal his gaze away from the group who grew from amputated body parts. The Survivors shiver from the overachieving air conditioning, screaming to be released from the Velcro that hold them to the morgue gurneys.
The Countess Barona salivates, her eyes glued to the young giant with only one eye. I must have her! Which politician will be the most effective in turning over this prize? She has dirt on all of them. But who will get it done? Barona’s body breaks out in gooseflesh as she conceives of a plan. Not just a plan of how to remand the girl into her custody, but what she will do to her afterward. Mayor Ellis catches a glimpse of Barona’s wicked smile and knows he’s in trouble. I can kiss re-election goodbye, deciding he will have nothing to do with whatever the psycho bitch is scheming.
Detective Günn focuses on her breathing, hoping she won’t have a panic attack and embarrass herself in front of her colleagues. Günn excuses herself from their company and heads into the restroom, where she splashes warm water on her face. She fixes the strands of her pixie hairdo, left in disarray by whatever it was that happened in that room. She still feels the electricity coursing around her, making the fillings in her teeth vibrate. This can’t be happening, she thinks, the paper towel coarse against her face as she wipes away water and shock. She looks at herself in the mirror, her cream skin patchy and pale. Her eye has stopped twitching, even it has been shocked into submission. A voice insists: This is happening.
Günn puts her hand over her belly. She imagines the baby stirring inside her—even though it’s no bigger than a chestnut—and it feels like the only normal left in her life. Even though it won’t be around much longer. Her appointment is next week.
8:10 AM The Roswell Institute
Between a fault line and bedrock, in an underground dreidel-shaped compound engineered to withstand seismic forces one mile beneath Los Angeles, Julie Keaton, deputy technician of the Roswell Institute, looks up from Stephen King’s newest when the monitor in front of her lights up like a Christmas tree on crack. Thoughts of being the next King of horror put aside, Keaton runs her hands over the keyboard, isolating the various pingbacks that are sending the radar into a tizzy. Keaton’s screen decrypts an alert: three of The Institute’s missing specimens have turned up in the LAPD database, apparent victims of the Crane Mansion Massacre that’s making headlines all over the United States and the world.
“Fuck me. Ripper’s gonna have a coronary.” Keaton’s hands fly over he
r keyboard as she responds to each alert, dreading having to be the one to report back on The Institute’s three most meddlesome creatures.
Keaton’s workspace is in the basement of an already subterranean facility. She likes it that way. Less contact with the freaks and geeks The Institute houses in its five wings. Aliens, cyborgs, viruses, genetically engineered humans, even gods. A whole lot of mess, in her opinion. And damn shames in lots of cases. Sentient beings don’t belong in cages. Not that she’d ever voice these opinions. Far as she’s concerned, a job’s a job.
Steeling herself, she makes her way out of her office. An industrial metal alloy that’s warm to the touch—synthesized from alien technology—makes The Institute feel like you’re inside a metal jellyfish, tentacles trailing out every which way. Keaton can’t stand the screams so she avoids the cage levels, taking the super-fortified express elevator even though it makes her just as sick as the regular elevator, straight to the commander’s office on Level 1. She inhales and exhales deep before knocking on his door.
“Enter,” the voice booms. Keaton does, steadying herself.
Colonel Randall “Ripper” Ransom, Vietnam special ops vet with the scars to prove it, watches a wall of screens in the room, each trained on cages occupied by a variety of creatures in different stages of behavior modification.
Or torture, as Keaton calls it.
There’s the Harpy who won’t prophesize, her feathers being pulled one by one by a robotic hand larger than Julie herself until she decides to change her mind.
Zuul, who will not divulge the location of Gözer no matter how much electricity her captor inserts into her vagina.
And there’s the unicorn, the last one in Roswell Institute custody, having its horn sawn off for the umpteenth time, howling in an agony that makes Julie Keaton’s heart ache for lost childhoods. The Institute weaponizes the material, something else that makes Keaton’s heart break. Remind me again why I still work here? You make seven figures a year, that’s why.
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