by Jw Schnarr
Smiling, Paitin looked up. He saw something move in the upstairs window of Sandra’s house.
It wasn’t Sandra.
Fear and disappointment tore through him. He took a few steps backward to get a clearer look. The visage hadn’t gone, only stopped moving. When a distant fuel balloon threw a crimson glare across the darkling horizon, mingled with the fire’s reflection in the window was a leathery face criss-crossed with zippers.
No.
It had been just over an hour since the Invasion had begun.
Of all the places, the man in the zipper mask had to choose this house to have his fun. A minority of Invaders preferred private settings and elaborate rituals. They’d lay claim to a single house or building for days at a time. With so many to choose from, Paitin didn’t think he could count on Zipper to understand his need for this one.
And men like Zipper ceased to be themselves when they entered the past. Their alter egos could be territorial, aggressive. Not all of them remembered where the line was. Paitin certainly did not want to surprise this one, but he couldn’t let him ruin Sandra, not when he’d made up his mind that this Sandra was the Sandra for him, the one he’d stay with. He had the most powerful feeling that he’d never find another. He’d had the feeling before, but it remained as plausible as ever.
Paitin moved to the shadowed side of the stoop and paused with his back to the wall, which still gave off heat. Angry explosions lit the sky to the west. He’d need to move fast. The predator in the mask did not work quickly, according to rumor, but Paitin had no idea when he’d gotten here. He might already have found her. Probably had.
It enflamed some mingled moral and masculine sense in him. Sandra was not a modern woman. She was short, almost pygmy short, and innocent. She wore tidy little clothes she picked from paper catalogues. She was obedient and vulnerable and beautifully bottle shaped from bearing her own child. She was love.
Taking a last deep breath, Paitin swung his leg over the railing and found the door ajar. He pushed it open.
The house seemed to bulge with breathless darkness. Paitin took out his minicorder and turned it on. The camera sensed darkness and a tiny floodlight threw a cone of yellow radiance across a bannister, a closet, a small chandelier. Faint notes of creaking wood floors traveled in the walls.
What, he wondered, would this man do to another Real? What would he do in the anonymous darkness of a meaningless house? Once he’d begun his work, did he still distinguish between Reals and conditional perfects?
“Hello?” Paitin called up the steps. “Can you hear me? I’m a Real. Hello?”
A ball dropped in his stomach as the seconds passed without an answer. He decided to bluff. “Do you need assistance? I’ve got a Rainbow.”
Silence. He took the Snap out of his pocket and slipped it over his finger. It was no Rainbow, but he pointed it ahead of him in tandem with a light beam.
“Hey, come on. We’re all having fun, right?” He tried to control his breathing but it just kept coming deep and fast of its own accord.
A lesser weight suddenly scrabbled across a room upstairs, and the slow, creaking steps subtly changed direction. Paitin put his foot on the first stair, aiming the minicorder’s light above him.
“Look, this is just another house to you, right? It’s not to me. I always come here. Come on, man, talk to me.”
Paitin tried to be stealthy, but the planks of the steps and the landing made it difficult. The place smelled of aging plaster and copper pipes, but was the same clean, active place he’d been dozens of times before with dozens of Sandras.
The slow creaking noises sent tremors through his body. Did he have her? Was he holding her against him, hand clapped across her mouth?
When he couldn’t stand the freighted silence anymore, Paitin called out: “Sandra!”
Following that was a silence somehow deeper than before. At the landing he shone the light down a narrow hall and into the doorway of a bedroom where the light of the streetlamps made a diffuse rectangle on the floor. Paitin swept the mini around, hoping it would be directly in Zipper’s eyes if he decided to rush out of a room. He held his Snap finger at the level of his belly, pointing it everywhere he looked.
The edge of a dark object loomed inside the doorframe of the room at the end of the hall. A man’s shoulder?
Paitin pointed at it, waited a second, and then snapped. The blast of force splinted a bureau or a chest of wood. The bits of wood seemed to take forever to settle. Then he called out, “Sorry. Hey, just playing around.”
He pointed in all directions as he moved down the hallway, one step at a time.
Sandra’s trembling voice quailed: “Help me!”
In one of the rooms down the hall, a tremendous weight shifted. Paitin squinted through the cone of light, trying to decide where the sounds had come from. He wished he really did have a Rainbow. The colorful ribbon could have sought out Zipper around a corner or beneath a door and made coiled shavings of him in a few seconds.
“Help!”
“Sandra! Hold on!”
He heard her crying.
Paitin worked his eyebrows against the sweat stinging his eyes. He swore he heard something scratching behind the wall to his right. He stopped and listened. The miniscule sound came again, the brush of a sparrow’s wing. He pointed his finger at the spot in the wall where the sound seemed to emanate, held it there for a second or two, then snapped.
The wall coughed inwards with a whorl of splinters and dust that filled the minicorder’s light beam. A question-mark-shaped bit of hair hung suspended in front of Paitin’s eyes before an eddy plucked it away and the last of the larger boards clattered to rest beneath a window.
Paitin did not quite put his head into the two-foot hole. He caught his cheek on the ragged edge of a lath when he turned towards the sudden charge of boots behind him.
Zipper exploded out of an open doorway on Paitin’s left. Paitin waved his arm and got a good point at him, steady, almost a full second. He felt the faint vibration of a premature lock-on but before he could snap Zipper’s shoulder slammed against his ribs, pinning his arm and knocking the mini spinning down the hallway. It brought him up crunchingly against the wall and half through the hole. The impact might have broken his ribs except that the ancient wall gave, leaving his crumpled impression on it as he slid down partway to the floor.
Paitin tried to turn and grab hold of his attacker, but Zipper held him by the shirt and put his head through the soft wall, filling his eyes with the sting of sweat and plaster dust. The bigger man pinned his Snap hand flat against the wall and yanked the sleeve effortlessly off his coiled finger. Paitin barked in fear and outrage and began again to slide to the floor, Zipper lifting him up again by the belt and breathing harshly against the inside of the leather mask. Zipper spoke: “You son of a-” He also sounded surprised and outraged, even queerly self-righteous.
Paitin palmed the man’s face with one hand and squeezed where he believed the nose and eyes to be. Zipper knocked his hand away and punched him in the mouth, mostly just a flick of the wrist, but stunning.
Then the zippered mask was rushing at his face like a brown hillside, and he saw no more.
Paitin woke and was unable to feel anything below his neck. His body did not respond to his commands, and he lay with his bloody cheek on the floor in a room of Sandra’s house. He heard a man talking in radio babble: “Two for extraction, two four extract. Suspect in custody.”
As his eyes cleared he saw Zipper standing in a corner of the bedroom, mask off, speaking into his fingernail. Pinned against the wall behind him was Sandra, the strands of a mesh web digging into her tanned skin, the zipper mask and Snap glove hanging off one of the longer strands like bits of laundry.
Must have hit me with a para. Paitin could move his mouth and tongue, could breath, move his eyes, and that was all.
“Confirmed,” said Zipper, then turned. He had sandy blonde hair and a strong nose. He pointed a bright light into
Paitin’s eyes and said, “I’m agent Tarrington, undercover boom, twelve thousandth judiciary. Paitin Derricter, you’re under arrest for the murder of Jerrimore Trentin in conditional perfect past two-one-oh-two point one. You have the right to a culpability scan, should you desire one.” He came closer and lowered his face like a moon. “Myself, I think you did it to save this little tart, here.” His voice dropped. “You killed a Real.” It dropped further. “For this.”
Paitin tried to speak but only managed a convulsive swallow. He alternated seeing double and triple. Sandra tried making aggravated little movements but only chafed her flesh against the cords of the web, which tightened defensively against her.
Tarrington sat on a guest bed that Paitin knew had never been used, propping his elbows on his knees and preparing to wait. “You going to want that scan?” he said.
Paitin turned his eyes away.
Tarrington huffed. “That’s what I thought.” Then he seemed to read Paitin’s mind. He turned and stared at Sandra, then looked back and forth between them.
Tarrington was taller than Paitin, stronger, and more confident. He seemed huge as he paced the room, his footfalls grinding the grain of the varnished wood floor. “The man you killed,” he said, “was one of my informants.” He seemed to consider what this meant to him. “Not a cop, but a decent man. He trusted me.”
Paitin felt himself smoldering, the words gathered like an army behind the cage of his teeth.
“Had his fun over here, like everyone. But he didn’t bring it home.”
A bubble of saliva passed Paitin’s lips.
Tarrington stabbed a rock-hard finger at him. “You’re going to sing his name, you piece of shit.” He took a long-bladed knife out of a thigh sheath and placed it on the floor beneath Paitin’s smoke-hole eyes. “But before we leave here, you’re going to do the same thing he did. You’re going to barber school.” And he gathered Sandra’s hair gently in his fist.
“And if you don’t, I’m going to do something much worse. And you know I don’t give a shit about it.”
Sandra watched them both. Her coffee eyes grew and shrunk with uncertain revelation. Then she made the mistake of speaking. She whispered, “Who are you people? What do you want?”
Tarrington hadn’t expected her to talk. He stared at her quietly with his head tilted like a dog’s. Then he suddenly licked her face with a fully extended red tongue. When she strained away from the moisture on her cheek, the jealous web contracted with a sliding, snakelike movement.
Neither Tarrington nor anyone else would condescend to speak to a conditional, especially to answer a question, unless it was sport. He glanced at Paitin to make sure he was listening, then said, “The question is, who are you? And who the hell is he?”
Paitin knew the game immediately. Rage spiked in his chest. Tarrington wanted to complete his defeat and humiliation by exposing him. He wanted to torment him.
“I’m—I’m—”
Tarrington cupped her supple shoulder. “Nothing, darling. You’re no one at all. Except to him.”
Paitin struggled to move his fingertips, his toes. Nothing. But feeling had begun to surge in rivulets down his throat. He could feel the vibrations of distant explosions in the floor.
She said, “I’ve never seen him before.”
“Well, he’s seen you, cupcake. A lot of you.” He turned. “How long you been coming to this house, lover boy? Three months? Always to a new…Sandra?” He made like he was going kiss her but ran his nose along her neck and collarbone instead.
Tarrington’s use of her name made Paitin blind with shame and rage. He’d regained some of the sensation in his shoulders and his upper chest but couldn’t move them yet. He dimly wondered how long before the boom arrived.
“We,” Tarrington announced, “are from the future. You believe that? A different future. That way we can do what we want here without going home to a big mess afterwards. Let me demonstrate.”
Tarrington slipped the leather mask off the wire. It looked like a deflated balloon. Paitin was surprised when he pulled it over his head, then daintily undid the zipper over his mouth to reveal his red lips and tongue. He stared through small, piercing silver grommets like hollow dimes. “I’ve killed hundreds of you,” he stated.
Sandra appeared frozen in ice, eyes dead and gleaming.
Tarrington straightened. “You probably think I’m a sicko. But I’m nothing compared to him. He is a pervert.” He indicated the length and shape of Sandra’s body with a wave of his hand. “What else do you call someone who becomes fascinated with an animal?”
She sobbed pitifully, which seemed to enlarge Tarrington to a new height and density.
“You see, this is probably the part he likes the best. Winning you over. Getting you to trust him.” He made little creeping spider gestures with his fingers. “Maybe he pretends to be just like you, running away with you, hiding out with you.” Then he became suddenly morose, and the mask looked comically bereft. “But we all know it ends between the sheets. That’s the only fantasy there is. He gets a last bang out of you, and then you die. Nothing but a snuff.”
Paitin found that he could flex his wrist a bit. He wondered if Tarrington knew he still had a Snap over him. Had he seen him get that good point in before hitting him?
Tarrington stood in front of Sandra, calculating the effect he had, hanging his head as if in sadness. “Because we only come to the same past once, my dear.” He cupped her buttock gently as if he weren’t the least aroused by it. “Because it’s ruined afterward.”
Sandra was so frightened that for a moment she did look like an animal. A rabbit, maybe. So soft and in need of protection.
“There’s despair. Starvation.” Tarrington caressed her cheek with his index finger. “The survivors start killing each other within a couple of weeks. They turn cannibal.”
Sandra made a mournful sound. To Paitin it was terrible, withering, but Tarrington seemed enchanted by it. He suddenly became very focused on her. He angled his body to block Paitin’s view of their exchange and pressed his groin fully against her. He spoke in a new kind of gravelly voice, low, intimate, for her alone. Paitin could barely hear him. “We’ll do this a thousand times. We’ll kill you over and over again. Your world will end, and you’ll forget there was ever anything but brutality. And we’ll do it in a single weekend, so drunk we can hardly see straight. And then we’ll forget you.”
He broke from her suddenly and came to stand above Paitin.
“Except for lover boy, here. He had to nail you so bad he killed one of his own for giving you a little haircut.” Tarrington kicked him and Paitin’s fingers coiled like a spider.
Paitin tried to snap and nothing happened. In another minute, one minute, he might be able to do it.
Tarrington pulled off the mask. His face was the very image of contempt. “The rest of them, out there? Just kids having fun.”
Then Paitin spoke. He sounded like a walrus barking. “Sandra.”
She froze at his call. Tarrington’s head snapped in his direction and spotted the waggling fingers of his right hand against the floor, and a terrible revelation blossomed in his face. Paitin, still unable to speak above a groan, said, “Sandra. Snap.”
Paitin saw the gummy bottom of Tarrington’s bootheel rise over his head and then smash down with crunching force on his hand. He barely felt it and went on trying to snap his mashed fingers, the bootheel coming down and down and down, slowing and finally killing the spider.
“Snap your fingers. I’ll protect you. Swear to God.”
She looked about to do it but was distracted by sudden cackling laughter in the streets.
Tarrington had a thumb needle out of his belt and charged across the room to stick it in her neck.
Paitin managed a shout. “Snap! Snap your fingers NOW!”
Paitin didn’t hear her do it. A small explosion formed itself out of the air in front of Tarrington’s chest and hit him like a speeding car. Paitin saw his feet
fly out in front of him before he was blown, doubled, through the window.
The curtains fluttered. The familiar ozone smell filled the room, and the broken window let in the wail of a hundred mournful sirens sounding the end of a civilization and the smoke of a thousand fires.
Eventually Paitin got up. He lurched to Sandra and released her from the web snare. She fell to the floor and scuttled away from him like a crab.
Paitin had to waste precious minutes speaking soothingly to her through a locked closet door. His love for her made him patient despite his desperation, and she eventually agreed to open the door wide enough to receive the objects he handed through: the minicorder, a pair of seashells, and a sealed envelope. The silence that followed seemed to stretch to eternity and back. Paitin’s heart became hollow and ready to collapse from the combination of her nearness and her distrust. He heard rumpling paper in the closet.
He’d shone a naked-ray through the envelope after she’d given it to him a month ago at his suggestion. It contained a piece of her very own stationary paper and a message penned by her own perfect little hand. It said:
Dear Sandra,
You are going to be frightened and confused when you read this, but listen to one piece of advice from your closest friend: Trust Him.
Sandra
Of course she couldn’t trust him completely. Not right away. But she would. Over the last three months, she had come to love him at least half of the time.
When she opened the closet door it was like a birth. Sandra emerged on wobbly legs with her damp hair matted to her forehead. He delivered her, holding her beneath the armpits so she wouldn’t fall, then let her collapse against him. Her body was stiff and unyielding, but that would change.
Paitin watched her. Tarrington had called her an animal, but that was ignorant. Modern civics taught that conditionals were inconsequential, but also that they gave their consent to the Invasion with their treatment of each other. They would have believed in the Invasion. Sandra’s misty civilization had already rejected liberalism. The upshot: Paitin’s lover was a human being capable of understanding him.
