Multitude

by Swanson, Peter Joseph

  She shrugged. “He was with us for a short while and then he ran off again.”

  “He needs family. I’ll be his dad once this settles down around here, and I can. But I can’t if I don’t know where to ever find him. I was hoping to be his dad at this funeral. A boy needs family and ritual. He almost killed Lady Hatchet in a canoe ride. Or, at least, he almost got her wet. He should be here and see her grief. Isn’t that how we learn to care about each other? We see each other’s grief? He’s just a kid. He might not know anything about that at all.”

  Eleven Jane smiled. “You a dad? Oh that is soooooo sweet.”

  He nodded seriously. “I think that’d be an important part of my being a real person and not just feeling like a dumb clone all the time. He doesn’t need me to feed him and give him shelter, there’s all that here anyway. But he might want a dad to talk to, one that doesn’t hit him. And I look just like his real one. That boy Nuremburg is my flesh and blood. So my heart is pulled to him.”

  “He’ll come back again, I’m sure. He liked our songs and food and made friends easily with the other kids. We all danced together. We were all one. He understood that we were going to tip the place over to wreck it all and he seemed to get excited when we explained how it would smash up the workers’ city and the clone labs. We see eye to eye.”

  “He better be back when the place tips over.”

  She nodded. “I’m sure he will be. We explained it all to him in detail so he knows it’s real, and he understands the importance. He’ll be back by then, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t want to have to go look for him. I’d never find him. Kids know how to keep out of sight when they want to.”

  A car drove up and Lady Hatchet stepped out wearing a wide black brimmed hat, face veil and simple black tube dress.

  Eleven Jane asked her, “Are you ready for us to start now?”

  “You were all waiting for me? Damn.” Lady Hatchet dabbed the corners of her waxy bright red lips. She carefully cleared her throat, but to no avail, her voice choked to a squeak with emotion as she talked. “A while back that knackered old tart called me up, and said, ‘The library read to me that buttons were once used to clasp clothing together to the body.’ I say to her, ‘Well what did you think they were for, you damn dummy?’ I thought she already knew about her damn little button hobby as much as anyone. How much is there to know about stupid buttons? They’re just stupid little buttons! But she says, and so amazed, ‘I was really hoping for something more fantastic, since we are talking about ancient times.’ And I say, ‘Like what?’ And she says, ‘I was hoping for something symbolic maybe, like a talisman or something, something with some meaning that maybe wards off evil or werewolves or some other more primal idea. And I was sure there was something of great meaning to the thread that sews them on. Thread is pretty intense stuff, something one realizes experientially, if you actually bother to take the time to sew a damn button on all by yourself.’ And I realized sewing buttons on with thread and not getting the thread all tangled up, and not dropping that damn little needle, about sums up life. You’re busy with stuff that don’t mean too much and then you die a stupid death. That don’t make any sense, but so what.” Finished, Lady Hatchet stepped back, almost falling.

  Eleven Jane caught her arm and they both let themselves blubber. Wiping her eyes and nose, then impatiently flipping her hair around to get it all behind her, Eleven Jane added, “Venus had the spirit of a hippistick more than I or anybody. She’ll always be so cherished and held up as our ideal.”

  Lady Hatchet turned away from the grave, turning her back on them, to listen to the rest of the funeral while watching the red light shine off the black glistening lake. Ripples started to appear and grow. A few waves lapped up against the shore. Foam surfaced. Lady Hatchet let out a scream. Everyone turned around to see a giant red morass lifting itself out of the lake, straining unsteadily under its own great soggy weight and pushing up towards them.

  “What?” Eleven Jane asked. “Our monkey-mob monster?”

  It pulled itself closer, tiny bits of itself at a time, as it unevenly advanced out of the rising waves.

  “Does it know we’re here?” Malbri Three asked. “Is it coming for us? It’s too slow to tell what it’s doing or what it senses.”

  “Damn!” Lady Hatchet gasped. “If it wants to eat us here then we’ll have to be damn patient.”

  When the front of it finally reached the shore, a hippistick went and stomped on the edge of it. It splashed out like a puddle but then other parts of it wrapped around his foot. He yelped as he pulled a bright pink foot away with blood spots on it.

  Eleven Jane made fists. “Soooo that’s what ate our Jun Jun Two!”

  “It’s hungry,” Thorn surmised.

  Eleven Jane glanced toward their tent cave. “What if it can make its way to us to eat us all in our sleep?”

  “It looks so liquid,” Malbri Three said. “A low wall should be enough to hold that thing back. Right?”

  Thorn shrugged. “Or hold it in until it dries up.”

  “Dries?” Malbri Three asked. “What are you thinking?”

  Eleven Jane was nodding with him, looking around her surroundings and then smiled wickedly. “A salt corral!”

  “The sacred pillars?” Thorn said. “You can’t desecrate them.”

  She reminded him, “They’ll all knock over in our sabotage, anyway.”

  “Yeah.” Thorn smiled. “If the thing wants to suck us dry, let it try. We can pen it in with the pillars pushed over and shoved end to end. I bet it hasn’t ever encountered salt before. It could be devastating to it.”

  As the blob undulated and sloshed farther out of the lake, it grew thinner and wider, pushed down by gravity. Chugging closer to the cemetery, it slowed but still seemed determined, wiggling up and down rapidly in tiny furious motions.

  Eleven Jane wondered aloud, “Will it even make it all the way up here to us?”

  Thorn shrugged. “It depends on how hungry it is, I guess.”

  “Let’s help it,” Malbri Three said. “Let’s give it the promise of food and water.”

  “How?” Thorn asked, watching it flow around a rock, not wanting to climb over it. He spotted a few stiff hair-thin tendrils poke up here and there out of the liquid, testing the air, and then sliding back in. They reminded him of the jungle vine hairs that pricked him in the zoo lab.

  Eleven Jane said, “We have hoses. Just create a spray on this other side. Just don’t hit any of the salt. We don’t want to scare it back into the lake.”

  A hippistick asked her, “What if salt makes it stronger?”

  “We’ll have to guess it hasn’t seen it before. The lake certainly lacks it. If it lives there it can’t know what salt is.”

  Thorn grinned. “We’ll pickle the damn shit.”

  They sprayed water on the far side of the cemetery. The gray blob put up hundreds of sensors and then accelerated toward it, while trying to wrap itself out like arms to encircle and trap the people.

  “It’s not a very advanced life form.” Eleven Jane crossed her arms. “Doesn’t it know we have legs and can get so bored with all this and just walk away?”

  Malbri Three said, “It may not have any consciousness at all.”

  “It may just be hungry,” Thorn said. “And if it could think, maybe it would think of having legs as we would think of having wings. What good would it do it to think that?”

  When it touched the inside of the pillars at the lakeside, it recoiled from them, sensors snapping back in. A few tiny squirts of black liquid shot out of it. Then it seemed either afraid or tired or dry because it went limp and quickly rolled backwards, immersing its backside in the lake water.

  “It hates salt and it’s escaping!” Eleven Jane shouted. “Thorn, do something! Toss a few of those pillars on top of it. We have to do something. Quickly!”

  He went to a pillar and picked it up over his head then threw it down on the blob, just inside the waterline. M
ore thin streams of black liquid squirted out of it as the creature undulated and broke apart under the pillar. He tossed a few more pillars farther into the lake, and they dissolved, poisoning the lake with the dissolving salt. Soon the creature was broken into small lifeless pieces floating away like gory water lilies. Then thousands of small white fish surfaced and ravenously gobbled up the spots until they poisoned and floated lifelessly on their sides.

  “And we swam in that?” A hippistick pointed, disgusted.

  Lady Hatchet wailed, “I once tossed Venus off the bridge into the horrible water! Damn me to all hell!”

  Thorn stepped through the hole in the zoo wall and reentered the jungle lab. He held his hands cautiously to the sides of his eyes to keep them from getting plucked out. A few small vines the size of spaghetti noodles slapped at his legs and a few hairs growing out of the floor poked up and pricked him.

  He went to the back room and found that the door to the stairwell was now locked shut. He went to the elevator and pressed the button. Nothing happened. He manually pushed the doors open. He pulled himself up to the roof of the elevator box and looked up the shaft. “Nuremburg! Nuremburg!” He noticed that the shaft stopped where a pink mass of shimmering wet living bubbles slowly worked its way down towards him. Where the red blob at the lake seemed mostly water this blob seemed mostly air. He couldn’t smell but could sense that this odd formless creature was consuming the shaft’s oxygen. So, as he studied it, he decided it was probably more animal than plant. He finally noticed a shadow above the foam and then made out the form of a man. The man finally dropped down through the bubbles and although still far away he saw it was a clone of himself. The clone was completely shaved like his old way and wearing black tights.

  “Who are you?” Thorn called out, his heart jolting. “Are you Nuremburg’s dad?”

  There was no answer. The powerful clone slipped further down the shaft until he effortlessly stopped his fall by reaching out and grasping a cable with one hand. “So that’s what I look like with hair,” the clone said. “I always wondered. “Is it under your arms, too? Everywhere? How disgusting a woolly copy of me you are. A wild animal.”

  “Who are you? I mean I know who you are… but who are you and why are you here?”

  “Don’t worry,” the man said. “The bubble monster won’t hurt dirty cops. It doesn’t even know we’re here.”

  “Who cares about experimental life forms?” Thorn felt anger. “Did you kill Venus? Did another clone of you and me do it? How many clones of us are there around here? Is there robber scientists up there in the villas?”

  He frowned. “Us, you say? There’s only me, and then the rest of you all inferior retarded models.”

  “What name do you go by? I’m Thorn.”

  “No, I’m the real alpha Thorn… and you’re dead meat.” The other clone let himself slide further down the cable. “I’ve always wanted to kill myself. All of me… them. And you’re the only one of me left. You’ve been the least interesting of all my clones, a dim whining escort for stupid old women. A bonehead. So to be the cruelest to all of us that I could be, I’ve let you live the longest. I’ve killed the most interesting of my clones, first. You should have met them. They would have put you in your place. They lived great lives that would have made great tales. They were smart, witty, and genuinely accomplished.”

  “W-what? Are you the real alpha or just a mass murderer?”

  “Haven’t you always wanted to play with yourself? I have. I suppose you’ll be a boring homicide compared to all the others but by now I’m so addicted to us any fix will do.”

  Thorn shook his head. “Fix? What?”

  The man smiled. “Have you ever wondered if you were insane?”

  “There is only one of me that is me,” Thorn insisted. “I haven’t even wanted to see a clone of myself. I wanted to be the center of the universe.”

  “You wanted to be special? I know every inch of you and so do hundreds of other men who once had your same body down to the microscopic nonsense and chaos that makes up every dot before I ripped them to hell. So shut up. You’re a dirty rapist and murderer and I’m going to kill you because so am I.”

  “No. That first one is dead. We’re new souls.”

  The other clone laughed heartily. “Have you been looking up hippistick skirts again? Soul? Human meat has never had a soul. Human meat just had an insanely ballooned ego and a maniacal gift for its own speed. Human meat wasn’t happy living forever in the form of new offspring, as nature intended. Nope. Nature is never good enough. You and I are just very unspecial men that the stars blindly gobble away by their shear numbers.”

  “Now who’s talking the religion? You speak of all the stars?”

  “We have the same brain. You know how I speak. You know my nose hairs that couldn’t be shaved and how that drove you nuts.” He dropped lower on the cables and smiled waggishly.

  Thorn shuddered at the sight of his own teeth. “You don’t know me. Not this one.”

  “I know your penchant for compulsiveness. I know.”

  Thorn asked, “Are you really going to kill me?”

  “Yeah. And will it really be murder? I know I won’t feel bad. You shouldn’t have existed.”

  “Neither should you.”

  “But here I am!” The clone yelled, wildly yanking at the cables as if he wanted to tear them down.

  “I was just going to say the same thing, we’re from the same cheap mold so I should know! But then that’s not very original is it… like you’re not.” Thorn took a deep breath and felt the air thin dangerously as the bubble thing came closer. He noticed how the clone’s head was just below the bubble creature but he didn’t seem bothered. “Don’t you need air?”

  “I’m made of plant matter and it smells good in here.”

  “You lie. That’s impossible. If you were plant matter you’d have no human strength.”

  “Your science is stuck in kindergarten.”

  “Were you made by the grad schoolers?” Thorn asked.

  “It isn’t Elysium Grounds. However, I call them my God. My Maker.”

  Thorn didn’t think the clone looked different so he decided the man couldn’t be made of plant matter. His skin had a hue that said blood of the furnace of human plasma and metabolism. If he was a plant, the science was staggering. Thorn decided the clone was a rotten liar. “So what makes you a clone any different than me?”

  “I got to live in the villas of the scientists,” he said. “I never lived in your trash world of pig gorilla gerbils wandering in circles as if that’s all there was to do. I never breathed your air or ate your dirty little cannibal food. I’m directly from an alpha before I killed him. So now I’m the alpha. I served the greatest scientists the human race has ever known, firsthand, until I became them. You are dubbed down garbage. I’ve killed everyone who just had me thinking I was a part of a multitude. I insist on being the only one!”

  “Well, blah blah blaaaah. You look like the same old junk to me.”

  “But I’m not. I serve the elitist group of scientists directly and they sent me to you because you’ve gone wild, so I must rip you limp to limp.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  He grinned. “Prove it.”

  “I can’t prove anything.” Thorn said. “If you rip me limp to limb that sounds like a lot of blood.”

  The clone laughed. “Lots.” He lunged at Thorn. Thorn kicked his leg up to keep his distance. The clone grabbed Thorn’s foot and gave it a quick twist, snapping it clean off. “Got you!”

  Thorn fell back and played weak. “Oh damn. You ripped off my damn foot.”

  “Limb to limb a tiny bit at a time! I will pick you to pieces…”

  “Damn you.” Thorn’s new weapon had been unsheathed. As the other clone still held his foot and looked at it in amusement, Thorn lunged forward and stabbed his broken off ankle stub deep into the clone’s gut, neatly parting the muscle and intestine, stopping at the inside of the backbone.<
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  With one wound far more potentially fatal than the other, it was the attacking clone who cried out. “What?”

  “Nope, got you!” Thorn said.

  The other clone quickly pushed away and climbed a few levels up the cable, his blood streamed out in rubbery strings, already clotting. He looked up at the crawling foam creature bubbling steadily down, and he scoffed, “I’ll be back,” but then he jumped onto Thorn’s shoulders, knocking him down. “But I’m not done tearing off body parts! I have time for a few more!”

  “I’ve just killed you,” Thorn laughed, bouncing him away against the wall.

  The clone stood up, holding his guts in with his hand. “What do you mean? Here I am and I heal quickly.”

  “So what?” Thorn said. “Too late.”

  “For what? I feel like I’m healing already. Damn my gut itches!”

  “You may be the psycho but my blood is full of all kinds of experimental pathogenic organisms and micro robots.” Thorn laughed. “And I’ve just injected you with a great volume of them all, you stupid clone.”

  He glanced down at the brown coagulated mass on his stomach and his eyes widened with a flash of real terror. “Poison? Why doesn’t it kill you?”

  “It’s always been in me. Not you, though. You’ve been kept clean and away, serving the masters who’re so sterile and rarified in their precious quarantine. You stupid clone, welcome to the real world where blood is a busy world unto itself...and you don’t have the antibodies.”

  “You lie. How do you know this? How can you?”

  “When you hang around a labor union you learn all kinds of dirt about the business one isn’t supposed to otherwise hear about out in polite society. I’m afraid it’s true and I’ve just contaminated you with the same shit all the lab clones have. Welcome to the family of Thorn. Welcome to the experiment.”

  “I’ll get all the antibodies! The scientists have to have them, that’s what they do. They make germ warfare antibodies to sell to Earth after they’ve already sold them the war germs. That’s why they used you as their little toilet.”