Multitude

by Swanson, Peter Joseph

  Thorn looked around. “A terrible mess.”

  “But to think anybody could make it so that we shake around so that we tip over all the way was giving the hippisticks too much credit. They are naughty but they aren’t magicians.”

  Thorn watched a piece of the ceiling fall, in the distance. “It’ll all stabilize now.”

  They heard a squeaky wheeling sound and a prompt robot nurse turned the corner, cranking towards them. Several large heavy planter buckets slid across the floor and sideswiped the machine, pushing it with them, spinning it, until it crushed against the wall, putting a crack in it from floor to ceiling. One spark blew out of the nurse’s chest and it was dead.

  “What?” Thorn looked around, confused and saw lime green drapery down the opposite wall hanging away from the frame of its bright orange balcony. “We’re tipping again!”

  “And I thought it was just me. Damn this place. Damn my legs, just scoop me up and get me the rust out of here. To the damn train!”

  He picked her up and cradled her over the bike as he tore off again, keeping his eyes out for anymore falling or sliding objects while a row of doors creaked open by themselves. A noticeable wind picked up from ahead and blew in their faces.

  “Does it smell like sulfur?” he asked her. “Are we all breaking up?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good.”

  “But the place is rolling again! How did they do it? Damn them! Turn that way! Turn that way!”

  Ahead of them, Malbri Three appeared out of thin air and pointed the other direction.

  “Don’t listen to him,” she yelled, “It’s just a hologram!”

  Thorn said, “But he’s showing us where to go!” He turned towards Malbri Three.

  He rode down a wide curving flight of stairs that now were steeper. She screamed as she violently bounced in his lap. At the bottom, Malbri Three appeared floating just ahead of them, keeping pace. “Dude! Turn that way,” he pointed. The train is that way, waiting for you.” Thorn nodded that he understood and before Malbri Three had even switched his image off, the gyro bike drove right through him.

  “Guardian angels!” Thorn hollered.

  “Guardian angels, my ass. He’s responsible for all this!”

  “Well now he’s helping us get to safety in time!”

  Lady Hatchet said, “He doesn’t know his way around this city! He hates it!”

  Thorn said, “Maybe he has a map and the train schedule.” The floor had tilted enough so that the tires of the gyro bike started squealing and smoking. “These wheels are supposed to grip down onto anything but I think we’re pushing it! It can’t drive up walls!” Thorn felt the handlebars grow increasingly less steady and he fought with all his strength to stop it from wobbling out of control and bucking off Lady Hatchet, who was screaming and yelling unintelligibly. Ahead, an explosion of paneling and rocks busted out through one wall, sailed by, and ripped out the other. As he swerved, he spotted several of the large spider-like creatures rolling in the avalanche, squirming to ride above it, their insect legs snapping off like plaster.

  “What’s that?” Lady Hatchet screamed.

  “Big bugs!” One scampered past them, seemingly unaware of them.

  She screamed hysterically, “Damn! I smell rotten eggs! The rocks are breaking up!”

  “I know,” he yelled back over the din. “It all just rolled by!”

  “The kids!” she screamed in horror.

  Far ahead, a few lifeless teenagers in long black capes and jackets, trailing long silver mummy wrapping streamers like kite tails, flipped off a low wall as it broke away and tumbled across the floor. The rest of them followed, still kicking and screaming until they all slipped off the edge of the walkway and crashed through an abutting blue glass panel at the edge of a dome roof. “They’re dead.”

  The floor finally tilted too far to grip onto. As the wheels made loud popping sounds, the bike slipped sideways out from underneath them and it spun down an adjacent walkway while they tried their best to grip the floor while pushing furniture and debris out of the way. He grabbed a length of a curtain to try to slow them down. It ripped. “We’re sliding too fast!” Lady Hatchet shrieked.

  “I’ve got us,” he assured her, hoping. “So far.”

  They slammed up against a railing where the train was waiting for them on the other side at the platform, with Eleven Jane standing at the door. She was almost sideways, tilted with the city, not compensating her image for how up and down really felt anymore. “I’m so glad you made it.” She smiled at them as he carried Lady Hatchet to the doors with one hand, the other hand grappling with the railing to slow their descent. When the railing stopped, he fell on his back, her in his lap, and they slid inside. Eleven Jane walked in after them, still tilted, and then switched off. As the doors closed and the train slid out of the station, a sudden surge of broken wall, windows, furniture, appliances, plumbing, cabinets and plants slammed down onto it. Thorn gave up holding onto the seats and stepped down onto the wall of windows. “You say this is made for this?” he asked Lady Hatchet, cringing at the sight and sound of the loud pounding the train was getting. A spider creature plopped onto their upper windows, its shell shattering. Gray body slime poured out of the beast.

  Lady Hatchet screamed again. “I’ve never seen those before! Damn what are they?” A car crashed heavily onto their train window, putting a small dent in the glass before it bounced away into oblivion. Then a pillar rolled toward them, but it was all veneer stucco and had unpeeled to harmless splinters and wire before it hit them, smashing into dusty pieces then continuing away. Lady Hatchet whimpered, “In the tunnel we’ll be safe. Safer.”

  The train’s movement was interrupted as it abruptly lurched. Thorn saw a massive wall of dirty foaming water colliding with its front. It threw them both forward and he rolled across the wall with Lady Hatchet still in his arms, both of them screaming. A window ripped out with a deafening pop and water poured in, slamming them against the back wall. In an instant the car was full to the ceiling and they were caught in an underwater maelstrom. He put his hand snugly over her mouth and nose in case she was tempted to give in and think she could breathe, as he fought the current. Facing the rear of the car, he saw Eleven Jane and Malbri Three there, underwater but not wet and swimming, standing sideways at the door. They calmly pointed to the door. He nodded and kicked to it, and pushed the button. Thorn washed through with the explosion of water, to the car behind. Lady Hatchet was still in his grip, at his chest. As soon as they poured through the door and were clear of it, it closed. With what water was in the car, they rode it to the back wall, Thorn keeping Lady Hatchet’s coughing head up the entire way.

  They rebounded and started to wash toward the front of the upside-down train. Then it was hit from behind by another wave and violently lurched again, pounding both of them back and forth against all the walls. Something hit the car that was behind them. It was large enough to completely rip it away, causing the rear wheels of their own car to momentarily buck up off the tracks. It snapped back into place. Thorn had Lady Hatchet’s mouth and nose clamped over, again, to keep her from breathing in the wildly sloshing water. It loudly hailed large rocks that were bouncing at them from all directions. It dented the car, and then the train finally entered the shelter of the tunnel. When the thick gates closed behind them, it was pitch black and the noise turned into a bizarre muffle. What was left of the train screeched to a stop, brightening the tunnel as sparks shot up from the wheels and sparkled outside their cracked up windows. Then all went black again.

  “Are you still alive?” Lady Hatchet gasped.

  “I’m holding you.”

  “I know that! But I wanted to know if you were holding me while you were still alive.”

  “I guess we made it, huh?”

  “Who knows?” Lady Hatchet moaned.

  “We made it!”

  “Damn.”

  chapter 9: the end of that world

  Malbr
i Three and Eleven Jane returned, their images the only lights in the dark, illuminating the seats that were now up on the ceiling, still slowly turning and falling back around as the world was finishing its spin to full circle. Then, slowly, all gravity went away.

  “I’m floating,” Lady Hatchet gasped. “I’m flying. I’m free! Damn. Am I dead?”

  “No,” Thorn said. “Just watch that you don’t crack your head. Is it going to stop?” he asked the hippistick images. They nodded but didn’t at all look sure.

  “I’m floating! I’m free!” Lady Hatchet swam amongst floating wobbling globules of water. She batted them away from her face so she wouldn’t breathe any in.

  “Yes,” Eleven Jane said. “Soon. Hang on.” Without even realizing it, they settled onto the wall as the spinning resumed.

  “We made it?” He smiled, as big heavy drops of water fell on him.

  “You made it,” Lady Hatchet wept, lying on her side. “I’m a mess! I’m all wet! Damn this water!”

  Eleven Jane floated up and looked down at her. “My reading here only shows that you have bruised knees and a few nominal bumps on your elbows and head.”

  “Oh does it? You know more than I?” Lady Hatchet splashed water at her. It went right through her. Then Lady Hatchet’s face contorted in alarm. “The children!” she gasped. “All your children at the camp!”

  “Don’t worry about them,” Eleven Jane said. “We put them all away. I’m not going to have some rash kid run off in harms way at the height of my vandalism, creating annoying last minute melodrama and rescue.”

  “Damn, I was so worried for a second.”

  Thorn sadly reported, “Some of your older children who lived in the city, the ones in black capes, weren’t as lucky. We saw them sail by us, fall a block or so across the city and then crash through a skylight in a dome.”

  “I know.” Eleven Jane looked away from them all to hide her expression.

  Malbri Three said, “We tried to guide them to our hippistick shelter, but those dudes ran from us!”

  “They rejected us,” Eleven Jane said, softly.

  Thorn asked, “So Nuremburg is alright?”

  Eleven Jane shook her head. “We have no record of his whereabouts at this time, good or bad.”

  Thorn asked, “He wasn’t with you?”

  “No.”

  “Damn you both! How’s Christopher Goi?” Thorn asked. “Do you know?”

  “He’s just freeing himself, now,” Malbri Three informed Thorn.

  “What happened to him?”

  “His legs got caught in the ceiling panels of the tower room. He was there trying to undo what we just did. But we made it far too complicated for that.”

  Thorn asked, “Is he hurt?”

  Malbri Three said, “He’s fine now, just swearing. He doesn’t like swinging upside-down, I can presume.”

  Eleven Jane said, “I just assured him that we’re still alive. He has sprained ankles.”

  “What’s the rest of the damage out there?” Thorn stepped off the crumpled wall as the train turned upright again. He held Lady Hatchet into a seat that was still tilting back upright.

  “Unbelievable!” Eleven Jane looked proud.

  “We accomplished everything,” Malbri Three said. “The evil city is destroyed. Well, it’s punched full of holes. Good enough. It now has a history. We messed up its straight lines. The grad schoolers’ and any robber scientists’ work left in the villas is surely just as destroyed. The fishtanks are all smashed to bits.”

  At that news, Eleven Jane smiled again. “Yes. We did do that well. The evil is gone. We did sooooo well!”

  Lady Hatchet yelled at her, “Did what well? Look at us! Phhh!”

  Malbri Three said to Lady Hatchet, “Sorry, really I am. I’m sorry to you, I’m sorry you got wet.”

  Thorn said to her. “I kept you from drowning.”

  She made a sour face. “I would not have drowned. I grew up in a swamp.”

  “Then why do you hate getting wet?”

  “Because I grew up in a swamp!”

  Malbri Three added, “But I’m not sorry. The evil in the city and labs has been destroyed! We destroyed it to save it!”

  Eleven Jane said,” It was harder than you realize. It wasn’t enough to merely re-spin the asteroid. That would still feel like bottom-down gravity no matter what direction you go in. The rockets had to throw the asteroid out and back into a full and complete lurching circle in space.”

  Lady Hatchet gasped. “Damn! You could have smashed into other things out there, doing that! There are other asteroids all around out there, nearby. Are the solar panels still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is our orbit the same? Are we going to smash into something out there tomorrow?”

  “No,” Malbri Three said.

  “Are you sure? Are you sure!”

  “Yes!” He assured her. “This place needed transformed, not thoroughly destroyed.”

  Lady Hatchet asked, “How much energy did that burn?”

  “Immense quantities,” Malbri Three smiled naughtily. “Yes, the solar panels are fine but all battery storage is now completely drained and it’ll take weeks to build back full power. Burning off all the power was part of the plan.”

  Eleven Jane added, “It was a phenomenal accomplishment.”

  “Phhh! I’ll say!”

  “The greatest act of vandalism ever in the history of history. The hippisticks will leave for Earth, now. We need to live a photon life under the sun as we were intended to, to be wholesome. I wanted to leave no temptation to stay and be corrupted by the comfort of this artificial world.”

  Lady Hatchet shook her finger at her, “You tried to kill us!”

  Malbri Three said, “And we came and saved you from being crushed. We’re sorry. We didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “We love you,” Eleven Jane said. “Really. We never intended for you to be collateral damage.”

  “Phhh! Just damaged.”

  Malbri Three said, “But we had to take our only chance to purge the great evil.”

  As the asteroid finally came back to what was intended to be upright, Thorn let go of Lady Hatchet and she leaned back wearily into her wet seat. Then he went to the train door. “It won’t open.”

  “We know,” Malbri Three admitted. “It’s crushed. But we already dialed for help. Just sit tight until something real shows up. But first you have to wait a while for the waters outside to subside. It’s really raining up an apocalypse.”

  Lady Hatchet asked, “Is there anything out there left?”

  Eleven Jane stated, “Only enough for Thorn, Nuremburg, and Christopher Goi who can’t return to Earth, being lab clones or their tainted offspring.”

  “Then why destroy my inheritance?” Thorn asked. “You’re cruel!”

  “No. I saved you from sin.”

  Lady Hatchet replied, forcefully, “Phhh! Damn you!”

  Eleven Jane said, “I saved you from the evil city. You won’t know to thank me because you won’t ever know how you’ve been corrupted into mental sloppiness and laziness, shopping and corporate hypnosis.”

  “I’m not thanking you,” Thorn grumbled.

  Eleven Jane said, “Of course not. We aren’t so vulgar. Flattery is for insecure simpletons.”

  Thorn said, “So you decided our path for us? That’s arrogant and bossy!”

  Eleven Jane explained, “Every civilization has had its hand of God, its prophets, floods and purging rain of fire. You’ll just have to live with it… and so I don’t require a thanks.”

  Malbri Three smiled in forced chagrin. “I suppose not now at least, not waiting around in a train wreck like this.”

  Lady Hatchet frowned. “And in the meantime we have to put up with you! And I can’t even throw damn things at you that’ll hurt!” The two holograms vanished. The train car got dark. “Where did you go?”

  Malbri Three asked, “Can you still hear us?”

  “Yes,”
Lady Hatchet answered.

  Malbri Three said, “The hologram projectors out there just got smashed up, I guess. You’ll just have to listen to us, then.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be seeing you in person for a while,” Eleven Jane said to them both.

  “Where are you now, the real you?” Thorn asked.

  “Sealed up in coffins in our locker under the cave.”

  “Coffins!” Lady Hatchet gasped. “That’s gruesome. Why not just broach yourselves down in the locker without all the high fashion and drama?”

  “In case something unforeseen happens and we die,” Malbri Three explained. “Then we aren’t just floating around like the furniture or sucked into space. We’re already properly buried ahead of time.”

  Thorn said, “That’s not very confident.”

  “We’re not afraid,” Malbri Three said. “We don’t mind waiting in our coffins to see if we’ll die.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of death?” Lady Hatchet asked, irritated. “What’s wrong with you? You’re all not normal!”

  Malbri Three explained, “One is only unduly afraid of death if their mind is stuck in the physical. The city we just smashed up was that, just a physical thing, and to an extreme. It was living in such a city of labor and shopping that makes you afraid of death.”

  “We all live in the physical!” Thorn said. “That’s extremist nonsense coming out of your mouth, to suggest one can avoid that.”

  Malbri Three argued, “We’re challenging materialist extremism.”

  Eleven Jane added, “The devil is the world become material.”

  Lady Hatchet said, “No. The devil is riled-up people tipping over the world I live in! Damn you!”

  “The world is physical,” Malbri Three said. “When it became physical, it became evil.”

  “Where did you get that damn idea?”

  “Our library,” Eleven Jane explained to her. “We read that Christianity was about that. Physical evil. Yoshua the Anointed One told his friend Kefa, ‘Get behind me Satan, on you I will build my church.’ And from then on the church of Yoshua became physical and satanic, one and the same, and the world suffered for it for centuries. That’s one interpretation of it, anyway.”