Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors

by Livia Llewellyn

  “Yes,” Jay says to the floating beast, “I think you were.”

  Red explodes across the glass. Jay leaps back into the hall. Moving in slow strides toward her are figures in white biohazard suits. She backs up into the final office, all the way to its very end, to the prow of the building; she’s trapped. The window is painted shut. Below she sees more men in suits move an undulating hose back and forth. Red bursts forth from it like fire, dancing intricately around the coils, forming the mark they once had five years ago.

  “Stop! I’m still in here!” She pounds on the window, but they can’t hear. Above, the creature pulses, and tiny veins of lightning run down its sides. Something slides around inside the mass, bending the grey flesh without breaking: the tip of the old clock tower. She punches the glass, ignoring the blood and pain.

  “Turn her around!”

  Figures grab her from both sides and pin her arms against the walls, while a third holds up a clipboard. An electric voice pours out of a black faceplate.

  “Is this you?” He thrusts the clipboard into her face. One thick finger points at a word on the page.

  “No.” Her voice is firm over the rising wind, with only a tinge of panic. They will listen to reason, she tells herself—they have to. “That’s not my name, there’s been a mistake. Please get me out of here.”

  “I didn’t ask if this was your name. You don’t have one! This is you, right?”

  “No! That isn’t me. I told you. I have a name!”

  “What are you, then?” The man raises his voice. “Come on! I don’t got all day—tell me what you are! What’s your ‘name’?

  Jay’s face hardens.

  “My name is—my name—”

  I’m writing this down because I’m starting to forget, I may need to remember someday.

  Her name. She cannot remember her name.

  “My name is Jay?” she asks.

  “Hey, wadda ya know? That’s what this says.” Even with the creature growling outside, she hears their laughter float through the room.

  “She’s the last of the trash, boys—let’s do it.”

  Someone steps forward with a small machine and presses it against her right arm. Shafts of metal tear through the bone and flesh, impaling her to the stone wall. Her head snaps back against the glass, and the window finally breaks. Too late.

  Gloved hands rip open her blouse, and another machine appears. Thin lines of light embroider her skin, searing through the flesh. Someone is screaming—is it her?

  “Yeah, she won’t escape this time.” More laughter.

  The entire building shudders. Everyone falls silent and looks up at the ceiling. From above, there is a crackling, then a thunderous roar of ripping stone and metal.

  “It’s started—everyone out!” The figures grab their equipment, jostling with each other to be the first from the room.

  “Why?” Her howl bounces off their backs. “Why are you doing this? What’s happening?”

  From above a second wave of destruction pounds down through the building. The man with the clipboard looks back at her but doesn’t stop moving for the door.

  “Nothing personal, lady. I’m just the garbage man.”

  He turns and runs.

  Vibrations burrow deep in her bones—they travel up from the stone and through the metal pins. Bits of ceiling break away. With a waterfall of sound, everything around her rises. Something smashes against her side, then rips away. Jay no longer feels her right arm. She no longer feels. She stares up into the sky. There is no sky, only the pulsing grey. Membrane and ridges curl back to reveal a mouth as wide and long as her blood-stained eyes can see.

  “This isn’t my name.” She wants to point to the mark but cannot move. “I’m Jay. I’m Jay—” She lets out a small sob, almost a laugh, as the weight of her name drags it downward. It seeps through the skin, nestles into her soul.

  Jay is a letter. It is the mark. It is not her name.

  The grey sky inhales, and she rises.

  Jay is a traveler now, squeezed through tubes and shunted from one contraction to the next. Shapes flood her eyes and graze her skin: bones, granite faces, bits of carved railing and brass fixtures.

  Trash.

  Flashes of light ripple across her vision—the grey membranes holding her become translucent as they rise. Below, she sees another creature move in to finish the job. It spreads great sails of skin and strands of flesh as it rides an unseen current. Jay would sigh at the terrible beauty of it if she were able to breathe.

  Now they skim in silence over the top of the massive wall. The rest of the city appears, healthy and alive. Jay’s severed right arm lies slightly below her—spires of steel sift between the fingers. She sees the city, a slow-moving river of rooftop gardens and secret alcoves, silver windows and neon smears, resting like the body of a lover, safe in sleep. For now. One calm moment of beauty, worth the price of Jay’s pain.

  The creature tilts. Trash rumbles about her as Jay is thrust forward through hooked membranes. Mucus uncoils from her throat. Everything shifts. Jay plummets into darkness like a blood-tipped comet, the remnants of the building her silky-stoned tail.

  Nothing is left behind.

  My name—

  “What are you looking for?”

  Jay looks up at the sound of the boy’s voice. She is unaccustomed to being spoken to, unaccustomed to anything other than the sound of her hand sifting, sorting, pushing aside, and breaking. She pulls a cardboard box to her side, and opens her mouth. But the words fail her, as always. If she could just find the fragment, she might remember what to say….

  The boy steps back and watches as Jay shoves her hair back from her face and stares into the valley. Jumbles of skyscrapers fill deep pockets in the land, separated only by occasional trickles of rivers and accidental bridges. Up where they are, blind horses canter down cracked streets with deformed dogs nipping at their sides. Here, potter’s fields and wooden shanties cling despondently to each other, and the people do the same. Perhaps they are afraid if they let go, they will drift away. From where she stands, she sees no difference between the brown of earth or sky. There is no up or down in the universe’s midden.

  Jay and the boy both crouch as a wind rises. Heaps of trash stir and hitch around them, great stinking piles of garbage—old toys and dishes, broken lamps, bits of magazines, clothes. It is their history. It is everything they ever jettisoned in life, before life jettisoned them. Her box is full of paper. She reaches inside with long, dirty fingers. They curl around like dark worms. Papers crumble. If she could only find a fragment, a piece, a certain word…. She doesn’t remember. She only remembers the wind and the search, and that sometimes the sky will open up and vomit more broken memories across the land.

  “What’s your name?”

  My name—

  The boy is speaking again. She tries, tries to mold the feelings up out of that festering sore in her chest, to trick it from the darkness in her mind. Her fingers creep, searching for inky triggers. But they find nothing, and the only word that comes out is the only word she knows. It cracks open her mouth and hovers before them, then floats away in the filthy wind, nothing more than what it is—which is everything around it, everything she has ever been.

  “Jetsam.”

  The Four Hundred Thousand

  I stand on the balcony outside my parent’s cinder-block apartment, watching contrails drift apart in slate skies. My left hand grips a just-delivered letter, crushes it. I can’t help it, the tracking device that the officer has shot into my hand makes it impossible to uncurl my fingers just yet. It burns.

  By direction of the President…the following personnel are ordered to active duty…on that date, the named will proceed to ______ __ Military Facilities for the retrieval of said personnel out of Jet Oberaan(yr-15)/ovaries-2:

  In the living room, a printout of number and letter combinations sits on the couch: four hundred thousand, one name for each egg follicle inside me, one name for each poten
tial soldier. I’d stopped reading after the fourth page—there are one hundred and nine pages more. By my calculations, and the doctors’ latest report, I’m twenty-six healthy divisions full of death to our enemy. No surprise I’ve been called. I always sort of knew. I just thought I had more time. I have five days.

  Inside, Mom still shouts with joy. She’s been waiting for this moment since the day I started my period, when she dragged me to the registration office. She’d said if I got picked, we’d all get rich. A credit for every vat-grown baby forced into adult soldierhood within a year of conception, a credit for every soldier shipped into space, with a bonus if they were modified. Then I’d have a room of my own instead of sleeping on the couch, and Mom could buy us real food. Dad could get a new heart, which they couldn’t afford because all the money from Mom’s factory salary was going to me—for pills to jump-start all the plumbing and for doctor’s fingers poking inside me every six months, from the time I turned five. It was my fault he didn’t have the right pills or the right heart. That’s what Mom said. Of course I signed, the day my period started. I didn’t know any better. I was nine.

  My neighbors across the way are staring at me. Faces peer out from a grimy square of glass, barely large enough to see out of. They’re surprised I’m out here—there’s not much of anything to see. Their balconies are the same as ours, the same grey concrete and steel. If I stood on the railing and jumped, I could almost reach them. To my right and left, hundred-story high apartment buildings sit in rows, bits of laundry fluttering from tiny open windows. Eighty stories below, a neon-lined strip of street glows in shadow. I’ve walked for miles and never seen the end of our street, never seen the end of this metal canyon, the beginning of somewhere else. Somewhere up above me, a war is being fought, has been fought for as long as anyone remembers. My made-to-military-specification sons and daughters will cram themselves into ships, soar past the curve of the planet. Will they crowd the windows, stare at the dwindling city before space and time swallow them whole? Will they see the end of my street before I do? Probably.

  It’s so quiet out. I pull the oxiclamp from my nose and sniff the air. Metal and fuel.

  Building by building, row by row, lights flicker and wink out. Airbase sirens sound through the chilly air. The city sobs. The latest corps are about to launch—little more than one hundred thousand in all. Rumor has it, something terrible happened with the deep space travel modifications to the last draft. They had to destroy half the crop. And the last two female draftees disappeared—ran away, or killed themselves. That’s why they needed me so soon, I bet. I stare at my hand. Under the brown skin, a dot of garnet winks at me as it burrows deeper. No one’s taking chances this time.

  “Jet, get inside.” Mom reaches out from the doorway, plucking at my sleeve. I go in and lock the door behind me, sealing it airtight. Mom bangs the thick steel shutter over the window. Everything has to be protected. The burn-off of battle cruisers floats through the air for days, bright cinders of liquid fire, beautiful and deadly. Sometimes it burns right through the walls. I grab my pack off the couch, fastening it to thick rubber straps at my side. Everything I need to survive is in it: food and ammunition, credits and bullets, tampons and hemlock. For barter, or for use.

  “What about the list? Jet, take the list!” Mom struggles with her own pack, trembling hands snapping the locks into place. It’s hard to see anything in the garnet glow of the single emergency light over the door.

  “It’s too big, I only need the letter.”

  “Put that away, and get the list! It’s military property, we need to bring it with us when you go to the hospital.”

  “No, we don’t!” Mom never listens to me. She rips her pack off and opens it, trying to cram all the paper inside. The hall alarms kick in, and we wince. My earplugs are somewhere in my pockets. We have two minutes to get to the inner stairwells.

  “Mada, we don’t need the list,” Dad shouts from the bedroom doorway. His pack is crammed with plastic bottles: heart pills, all my vitamins and supplements. I see how his hand presses against his body. I recognize the stance. He’s holding a knife.

  “Dad, I won’t need those anymore.” I hold out my hands to take the pills. “Not after next week.”

  Dad stares at me, open-mouthed. He hasn’t thought about it. None of us really have, until this moment. We’re so used to doing the same things, over and over again. Now it’s all changed. He shakes his head, no. He stares at my winking wrist. I say nothing.

  The building trembles.

  “She’s right, Essam.” Mom looks up from her pack, pulls loose strands of her hair away from her shiny face. The air is getting hotter. Or maybe she’s been crying. I realize I don’t know how old she is. Mom could be close to fifty, or no more than thirty. She stands up, the pack slipping to the floor. Behind us, the safety override on the front door clicks on. We’re in here for good now, for at least a day. One less day of freedom left for me.

  I press my hands against my body. Everything depends on two small, soft sacs of flesh and all that they hold inside. The vibrations of the battle cruisers crawl up my legs as their engines reach full power. I wonder if the egg follicles feel it, wonder if my children will crowd the curved walls of the ships a year from now, remembering that they first felt that thunderous power from within their mother’s flesh.

  “If I went through all this for nothing,” I scream over the noise, “I swear I’ll—”

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Mom’s face crumples as she speaks, and I feel my heart stopping. “I didn’t mean to— I wasn’t thinking. I’m so tired. I’m just so tired of this, this life. I only wanted us to be happy. That’s why I did it.” She stretches out her arms, so thin in the black fabric of her unisuit, and I reach out mine. But she walks into Dad’s embrace. She wasn’t talking to me.

  I fit my earplugs in, adjust the clamp at my nose, making sure the oxygen still flows. Lift-off: the engine scream hits us, and we drop in the hot air. They built the airbase a few years ago, less than half a mile away. No one bothered to relocate us. There isn’t anywhere else to send an entire ghetto to.

  Dad lifts me up, carries me to the bedroom. As he lowers me to the bed, his fingers press against my flesh, trapping the tracking device before it sinks any further inside. The blade lowers, presses against the veins.

  You can’t. I see his lips form the words in the red-tinged darkness. There is no war. You’ll be murdering your children. I’ve heard his lies before, but still I freeze. He waits for me to nod my head, yes or no. Mom’s hands reach out, grabbing him, grabbing me. We lie in a huddle on the thin mattress, our hands clasped in a circle, waiting for my answer. Engine after engine roars into the air. It’s raining black and red now, pocking the metal balcony doors with burn marks. The walls hiss. Despite the noise, I hear Dad’s heart, or think I can—the soft fluttering of something that’s been dying for years. We’re all dying, I realize. It will always be this way, for us. But it doesn’t have to be this way for my children. And despite the noise, I know they both hear me when I scream over and over until I almost pass out from the roar and heat of my own anger, yes I’ll do it yes I’ll go yes I’ll give them up yes I’ll save us all—

  Only then does Dad let go of the knife, and my wrist. The garnet dot disappears. He never wanted this for me. He’d say anything, any lie, to stop me. He just wants us all to let go, to stop making soldiers and guns, to lay down and let them come, let them bring death, or bring peace. Anything other than this life. But it’s too late. It was too late the day I turned nine, the day I signed. Mom falls back on the bed and smiles. I close my eyes and hold him. He cries.

  Outside, battleships rise and burning fuel falls.

  Mom sits at the kitchen table, under the dim light of the bulb, carefully turning the pages of a pamphlet. The pages are glossy and stiff, crowded with fancy writing and bright photos of apartment buildings covered in sheets of light blue glass. I bet the people who live in those places have never seen their st
airwells.

  Dad sleeps in the bedroom. It’s been a few hours since lockdown ended, and after thirty-six hours in the stifling apartment, burning debris pounding against the outside walls, you’d think we’d want to be anywhere except here. But there’s nowhere else to go.

  “We’re out of food.” I stare into the metal cupboard. All I see is half a tin of crackers, and two cans of soup. Dad may get hungry later on, so I shouldn’t eat them. For once, I can go without.

  “Then go downstairs. Take Essam’s prescription with you.”

  “Do you want anything?” I stand in front of the table. Mom doesn’t look at me. She pushes her hair behind her ears as she turns another page. I sigh. She looks up, annoyed.

  “What do you want, Jet? Do you want me to tell you to be careful? It won’t matter what I say. You never listen to me.”

  She stares down at the pamphlet again, then picks up a pencil and draws a circle around an apartment floor plan.

  “I’ve never understood why you hate me so much.” My tongue feels dry and swollen in my mouth, and the words are hard to pronounce.

  Mom doesn’t look up. “I don’t hate you. I’m tired of you.”

  At the end of the hall, half a block down from our door, I push the swinging door into the eightieth floor communal bath.

  The air smells of mold and disinfectant, sloughed-off skin.

  Steam rises in thin wisps from a single nozzle—Thabit stands under a stream of light brown water. I slip off my unisuit and pad across cracked tiles to the next nozzle.

  “You look lovely,” says Thabit as he points to my red nose and bloodshot eyes. “Heard you spent lockdown in your apartment. You missed Solomon bugging out in the stairwell. Took four shots to take him down.”

  “The stairwell’s for pussies,” I say, pushing at a small soap dispenser on the wall, then activating the shower head with the circuits in my wrist—wiring given to each occupant of our building. The water is hot, but there won’t be much. The timer is ticking, I have three minutes to find some semblance of clean. Thabit’s shower shuts off, and he shakes the water off his long pale hair onto my face.