by Rune Skelley
Initially she had fun randomizing which body parts to pierce and imagining the consternation of her customers when they regained consciousness and discovered a hoop in their nipple or a stud in their dick. But that didn’t last. It took too long to expose the really interesting sites, and when it became clear how many of these damn things there were she opted for simple earlobes and the occasional eyebrow or lip. Also falling victim to the assembly line rush-job mentality was any pretense of sterilization. Rook made sure her gloves were intact, with the left ring finger tucked inside-out to keep it from flopping around, and left it at that.
“I’d say we’re about halfway done,” Kyle said as Rook fastened the gold hoop in place.
Rook groaned. “My hands are cramping.”
“We’ll take a break.” Kyle grinned and said, “Do you have any idea how pornographic you look wearing nothing but lingerie and rubber gloves?”
Rook surprised herself by blushing.
Kyle bobbed his eyebrows at her. “Let’s find a clean pair of gloves and get you in bed.”
*** *** ***
Headlights splashed across the living room wall as a car pulled into the driveway. Brad put his bookmark in place and stood to meet Willow as she came in. She looked distraught, a look she had been wearing for the past week. It hurt to see her so worried.
“No luck?” He pulled her into a hug and kissed the top of her head.
“No luck,” she confirmed. “They’re exhausted. I finally talked them into sleeping.”
Fin and Rook had been banging their brains against their allegedly magic chessboard for three days and Willow was their babysitter, making sure they ate and got a modicum of rest.
“You look exhausted, too, Wil.”
She nodded and went into Zen’s room to say goodnight to the slumbering baby. Brad checked the doors and turned out the lights on his way to their room. As they lay on the bed together Brad began kneading the knots in Willow’s shoulders.
“Tell me,” he said.
She sighed and rolled over to look at him. “They’re so close. Closer than I got.”
“You said you reached in. Or through. Across?” Brad was uncomfortable with this topic but desperate to ease Willow’s burden.
“What I did was a parlor trick compared with what they’re doing. The potential they’re working with is orders of magnitude stronger. It’s like I’ve got a jar with a couple lightning bugs and they’ve got a klieg light. All they have to do is plug it in.”
“Will they be able to?”
“I hope so.” She looked glum. “I feel so helpless, Brad.”
He squeezed her. “Me, too.”
After a minute of uneasy silence Willow whispered, “There is one thing I can do.”
“What’s that?” Brad suspected he wasn’t going to like the answer.
“I can destroy the jewelry before it’s used to hurt anyone else.”
“What if the kids need it?” Brad was proud of his calm tone.
“They don’t. It wouldn’t do them any good. Now that I see the real power they’re tapping into I can tell my method would never work. Maybe I could have done it with Severin’s table…” She blinked tears out of her eyes.
“I think you should do it.” It was contrary to his every protective impulse, but he knew Willow needed to do something, anything, to ease her guilt.
She looked at him, disbelieving.
“I know, I know,” he said. “I will worry while you do it, but I understand that you have to.”
“Thank you.” She kissed him and sat up. “Now I have to figure out how.”
Brad watched in worried silence while she thought. He fought not to make suggestions or ask questions, and at the same time to keep from spinning doomsday scenarios of losing her again.
Finally she said, “I have a plan.”
Brad rolled onto his side and looked at her. Despite his dread over the risks, he was intrigued about this side of Willow. Given her long imprisonment by Severin, his fears were justified. Yet it was a part of her, one he knew of only through hearsay.
“I’ve never actually seen you do... this.”
Willow glanced at him and gave a small smile. Brad fell silent so he wouldn’t cause her to make any mistakes.
She lay still for several minutes wearing a look of intense concentration. Her hands began a series of erratic movements under the blankets. To Brad it looked like a pantomime of sorting laundry.
After a few minutes she blew out an irritated sigh and let her hands drop. She took a few slow, deep breaths and resumed.
This time, Brad could tell she was tracing out shapes with her fingertip, drawing something on the underside of the sheet. Her face looked more composed now. Brad started to feel a prickly excitement on the back of his neck, wondering what might happen when she connected with her power source.
What happened was she flung the blankets off and clutched her face, sobbing. Brad reached toward her, wondering if he should panic.
“I can’t do it!” Willow wailed. “I’m useless!”
Brad rolled halfway onto her, enveloping her in his arms and cradling her head.
“No you’re not,” he said. “Shh, it’s alright.”
“It’s NOT alright,” Willow croaked, her voice thickened. “If I can’t do this, what good am I?”
“You can try again in a little while.”
“That’s just it,” Willow said with a sniffle. “I never have to try. Sometimes I need to explore, search out the right feeling. But it’s always there, just there, and this time it’s not. Why now? Why when it’s actually important?”
“Maybe you’re too keyed up, thinking too much. With most talents, the more you get out of your own way the better it will work.” Brad swallowed. Now that Willow’s distress had diminished, he had mixed feelings over providing such encouragement. “So,” he finished, trying to keep his voice bright, “be confident and it will come.”
Willow wiped her eyes with her knuckles and gave him a warm, sad smile. “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate the pep talk, Coach, but I think I’m going to call it for tonight. You’re probably right about psyching myself out. It’s so odd, the missing feeling. It’s like being blind, only I hadn’t noticed because I was walking around with my eyes shut. When I opened them everything stayed dark.”
Brad patted her shoulder and gave her a kiss. He had no idea what to say, and didn’t trust himself not to beg her to never talk about this again.
“Maybe it’s your fault,” Willow said sleepily.
Brad tensed, and she gave him a squeeze. “No, I didn’t mean,” she said, groping for words. “All I meant was, I wanted to impress you. Maybe without an audience I wouldn’t have seized up.”
“You know it bothers me,” Brad muttered.
Willow squeezed him tighter. “Even though it scares you, you told me to try.”
Brad kissed her again, because he was unsure what he was supposed to be saying but mainly because she was gorgeous and he was out of his mind in love with her. And she called him brave, even though it was her doing the scary stuff.
Neither of them spoke for the next minute or two, their lips too busy at more primal tasks. Willow said, “I do feel tense. And you feel tense to me. I think we could both use some release.”
Brad signaled his agreement by kissing her some more, on her lips and ears and down the side of her neck. She nipped at his collarbones, and what came perilously close to a tickle-fight turned into something much sweeter.
*** *** ***
“We’re done,” Kyle said. “Everyone’s pierced and ready to go.”
The web chamber is full and we are eager to begin.
Kyle sighed. “We need to sleep. Give us twelve hours.”
Your biological functions will be sufficiently refreshed after eight.
“Give us twelve,” Kyle growled. “Then we’ll unite humanity.” He floated moodily down the corridor and into the chamber he shared with his female.
The spid
ers maintained cursory oversight of the two humans as they copulated then slept. At the same time they recalculated all of the equations pertaining to the physical distribution of the mind control marching band, as Kyle called it. It was unnecessary, of course, because they did not make mathematical mistakes, but this was the closest they had ever come to the goal of regaining the vast assuredness they once knew with the Floating Wisdom. If anything went wrong, Kyle was unlikely to cooperate again.
At the ten-and-a-half-hour mark, Kyle and Rook awoke and began another session of coitus. The spiders took that as the cue to begin deployment.
In groups of varying sizes the tagged humans were transported to carefully targeted locations in the Shaw Ministries compound on Earth, a site Kyle assured them would remain undisturbed for the duration of their operation. To the aliens’ supreme satisfaction the carrier wave functioned perfectly, and each tagged human responded to his or her individual instructions and moved into the required position.
*** *** ***
Brad was in the kitchen making batter, so breakfast was going to be either pancakes or waffles. The sounds of him scurrying and stirring, and the warm, happy baby at her breast, filled Willow with joy.
It made her think of Rook’s anguish. She felt sadness and happiness together, then.
Soon she smelled waffles. She switched Zen to the other side and moved to the kitchen where Brad was setting out their plates.
“You are a god,” Willow said.
Brad hoisted a prodigious forkload of waffle into his mouth and dedicated his attention to chewing for a few moments. He swallowed and said, “I thought I might look in on Fin and Rook. See if they need any errands run, maybe give them some moral support.”
Willow nodded. “I think that’s a great idea.”
They finished eating, and Brad threw on jeans and a t-shirt, looking more like a college student than he ever had in college. He gave Zen a nuzzle, and kissed Willow. She helped Zen wave bye-bye as he went out the door.
Willow played peek-a-boo with her daughter, her thoughts turning to her failure of the night before. She couldn’t sit still, worrying herself with questions about her powers. She paced with Zen, through the kitchen, dining room, and living room, trying to sort her feelings. On one hand she felt a certain level of relief. She knew the kind of trouble such weirdness could get her into. On the other hand, the thought of it being gone made her feel incomplete.
She remembered the exact sensation from last night, what she’d described to Brad as blindness. Now she was afraid to open her eyes again.
Thinking back to the stuck feeling when she created the jewelry in the first place helped her to calm down, because she’d succeeded in that task. She could succeed here too.
Destruction is never as complicated as creation.
She let her memory play back the moment of creation, more a moment of discovery because until she looked down at the paper she’d had no idea what would be there. Perhaps the same process that allowed her to make the stuff would work for the unmaking as well?
With Zen safe in her playpen, Willow tried several things. She doodled without looking at the page, as she had when the original design came into being. Nothing remotely similar to the specifications emerged. She recalled those specs well enough, so she tried a careful recreation which she then ritualistically erased. She went back to unsupervised drawing, devoting her thoughts to the puzzle of what would be the direct opposite of the transceivers, hoping to cancel them out of existence.
Some things don’t have opposites. The opposite of a transmitter is a receiver. A transceiver is both, rendering Willow’s riddle a koan. How zen.
There was no progress to show for her efforts, yet the hopelessness from the night before did not accompany her frustration. This morning she could feel her connection to the weirdness. She could push the buttons and turn the knobs, while last night she couldn’t even reach them.
Willow stretched her neck and shook out her fingers, cramped from all the sketching.
Not only could she feel the currents of the weirdness, she could also feel subtle filaments woven through it, connecting her to individual pieces of the jewelry. She started tracing some to see where they led her.
They all led to residents of the Webster area. She followed a couple dozen strands, and developed a rough idea of their total number. Maybe as few as 200. Those were all she could sense.
Where was the other 98% of it?
Willow went to the kitchen and refilled her coffee as she pondered the unmaking of those specimens she located. She absently plucked out a simple tune on an imaginary harp, playing her notes on the jewelry filaments. Certain strands held their vibrations longer, and Willow experimented with the effect. Soon she set aside her mug to use both hands to create the music.
She discovered the voice of each string could be adjusted by pulling it taut or letting it relax. And, each piercing hoop and barbell had a frequency that would overload it and burn it out, a death note. She created an eerie blend of bending harmonies, chamber music for whalesong and theremin. Anyone watching would have thought she was rehearsing to conduct a stormy symphony, not performing the piece.
Three minutes later she picked up her mug and took a well-earned sip. All the jewelry she’d tracked down was now defunct.
Which left her free to concentrate on the mystery of the missing remainder with renewed confidence. It also left her view that much less obstructed.
The missing specimens would all have their own tendrils connecting them back to her in some way. It shouldn’t matter what kind of vault protected them, or how deep underground it was buried. The connections should still be there.
Suddenly a filament lit up, and another a few seconds later. She watched in bewilderment for a full minute as the shining strands accumulated.
Willow wanted to know why this was happening, but it wouldn’t matter once she’d finished her job. She started warming up her new and growing orchestra.
Her previous technique didn’t work.
She could slide the pitch up and down, but their voices were joined by a new overtone that drowned out her adjustments.
Thirty minutes of tugging and plucking at these new strands brought her no closer to finding the death note frequencies, and they kept appearing at a brisk rate. She estimated there were now nearly a thousand, and every one of them traced to the same general area outside of Donner.
Willow abandoned any pretense of musicality. She tried to yank the lines loose, to break them, kink them, tangle them. She exhausted herself trying to tear them out by the roots.
While she rested she studied the phenomenon. The people materialized out of nothingness, and as they did she could feel it.
Willow selected one filament and tried every way she could think of to break it. She twanged from it every tone it could produce, without results. She plucked out ‘initiate self destruct sequence’ in Morse code, followed by a stream of profanity. Meanwhile hundreds more joined the throng.
Whoever was using the devices knew as much about them as she did. Not only their technical specifications, but their supernatural specs as well. Willow reeled at the inescapable truth of it. They’d used this knowledge to engineer a companion wave that interacted with the jewelry’s signal, stabilizing it and strengthening it. The result was something new, something synergistic. Something beyond Willow.
She could not unmake it.
*** *** ***
Fin wearily placed his bishop. “Check.” He and Rook had played this same sequence at least five times already. Rook had the black army this time.
“Have I ever moved my rook at this point?”
Fin tried to remember but Vesuvius answered. “No.”
“Okay. It’s not a good move, but...” Rook slid her namesake tower ahead to foil Fin’s attack and all the squares on the board slid with it, like an Escher-designed tile puzzle. Vesuvius’s descriptions of such things had become routine, but this was the first time Fin saw it for himself.
> “Whoa,” Rook breathed.
“You saw it too?”
She nodded emphatically.
“That was a big one,” Vesuvius confirmed from his perch on the cafe table. “The most movement I’ve seen so far.”
Rook picked up her notes and scribbled down the move. “We must be getting close.”
“What should I move?” Fin asked as he studied the game. He had several options, but none of them looked promising. He wiped his palms on his jeans.
Rook drew her bare feet up and rested her chin on her knees while she studied the board. “You can take my rook with your pawn.”
Hand trembling, Fin did just that. The table seemed to sigh and subside into something less than it had been.
“Shit,” said Fin and Rook at the same time.
“Reset them, quick,” Rook said. “We’ll start over.”
Consulting Rook’s notes, it didn’t take long to reconstruct the game to the fatal point. This time Fin advanced his knight, placing it alongside the rook. The table became a veritable kaleidoscope of twirling patterns.
Wide-eyed, Rook wrote the move down. “I’m still in check,” she said. Fin heard a spark of excitement in her voice that kindled in him something like optimism. They might actually make this work.
He held his breath.
Rook reached for her queen to take his knight, but changed her mind and shifted her king to the right instead.
The board erupted into complicated gyrations, the layout becoming an ever-widening circle of interlocking puzzle pieces. Fin clambered over the back of his chair to avoid the growing chaos and saw Rook scramble off the sofa, too. He ran to her and held her.
Rook squeezed him painfully and stared into the expanding ring. It was full of undulating green fire and overlapping voices.
Terror gripped Fin. Their baby was in there. He looked at Rook and saw determination on her face. With one hand she clutched at her abdomen where Thumper should be.
The chess table kept unfolding, the squares shifting and clattering like an endless Jacob’s ladder. All the game pieces hovered on heat shimmers before tumbling to the floor. Every hair on Fin’s body felt the currents of energy pouring from the Elsewhere.
