Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5

by Robert Shearman

  A FINAL SYMPTOM

  A child whose skin has remolded itself into a two-inch thick layer of orange rubber can barely be referred to as a parent’s “flesh and blood,” yet this is how, even after the second stage of the ball’s impact, we still thought of our children. The doctors at the secure facility kept them under constant sedation, so it was impossible to know how much the transformation had affected their perception of the world. Did they still think like our children? Would our fumbling hugs still soothe them? Did they still feel the warmth of sunlight and cool breezes the way we did? Was a kitten’s fur softer or harder under the stroke of their new skin? Would they still look at us and call us “father” or “mother” or would they now refer to us by words we couldn’t understand? We didn’t ask, and they couldn’t tell.

  The doctors claimed that the sedation was imperative, not because the rubberized flesh by itself would necessarily cause pain, but because the final stage of the ball’s infection involved a horror for which there was no cognate in the annals of medical literature. Ushered from the treatment rooms due to what the medical staff called “the unpredictability of the final stage,” we watched our children on monitors from areas within the facility labeled only as “safe zones.” Vaguely scented like fresh carpet, these areas resembled bizarrely arranged discount furniture store show rooms, with disparate couches and loveseats and plush recliners and end tables encircling central banks of computer monitors and television sets. The walls of the “safe zones” were also entirely lined in mirrors, which both lent to the commercial effect and led many of us to believe that as we watched our children, so too were we being watched from behind those mirrors.

  Over the course of the three days following our children’s dermal mutation, we sat in these safe zones in relative silence. Occasionally, we would leave and find our way to the hospital’s roof. There, six stories from the ground, we would consider leaping off the edge, into a more certain madness. However, none of us had the energy or the willpower to actually make the jump. Instead, we would simply stand on the rooftop ledge and wonder what revelations the air between the tips of our toes and the tarmac below might hold. Perhaps the wind whipping by our faces in that two or three second plunge might speak to us of death’s mysteries. Perhaps the very ground below might whisper wisdom as it collapsed our forms. We would never know.

  If we did not head to the rooftop, we would leave the safe zones and wander through the dark wards that sprawled under our children. We would pass skeletal figures hooked to spider webs of IV tubes, bodies suspended in vats of brightly hued gels, and other children stuffed inside windowed copper tubes, clearly suffering from a dread malady different from that of our own children. We would continue downward, downward, until we reached the basement of the facility, where we discovered the morgue and its seemingly infinite rows of tabled corpses, some of which were wrapped in thin, clear plastic sheets and others which were encased in silver mylar bags. To this room we would take our husbands, our wives, our boyfriends and girlfriends and secret lovers and there, amongst the plenitude of the dead, we would explode into a molten flow of volcanic sex, entwining with our partners in as many configurations as we could devise, often knocking bodies to the floor with the force of our writhing and tumbling naked after them. We didn’t care that the dead watched us, were part of the act. Indeed, we wanted them to see. We wanted them to know. Why, we couldn’t explain.

  So, mostly, we remained in the safe zones, silent and unmoving, unless, of course, we didn’t. All of which is to say that we knew not what to do with ourselves or how to act as our children, for all intents and purposes, died. While we sat in silence, every one of our children’s bones and internal organs were evaporating. They did not liquefy or explode or turn putrescent and rot; they just evaporated, into air, leaving behind nothing but an expanding bubble of space and increased pressure. Brain and heart, spine and scapula: it all dissolved to nothing. As our children’s brainwaves diminished and their heartbeats flatlined, the space within them grew larger and more rounded. Their tiny bodies expanded and inflated and gained contours no human shape was ever meant to contain. Their shoulders and torsos became one with their heads, with any trace of their necks disappearing; their legs and arms descended into the vastness of their abdomens. With every passing hour, they took on new convexities, new spheroid shapes. They were all Violet Beauregarde, eternally trapped in Wonka’s chocolate factory.

  Over the final symptom’s three day reign, our children continued to expand, to inflate, until, when all was said and done, there were no more bones or organs left to dissolve. What lay in our children’s beds then were no longer our children, but enormous orange rubber balls with the distorted and elongated faces of our individual sons and daughters imprinted upon one of their sides. Somehow, even after this, even after the final symptom had run its course, the worst had not yet arrived, for, when the life-giving machines were shuttled away and times of death were officially stamped on certificates, our children, whatever they now were, began to move once again. They began to bounce. They began to roll from side to side. They began to roll toward us. And we, more fearful than we’d ever been, more uncertain and filled with shame than we thought possible, clawed at our eyes and wished that we had never tried to hide the ball from our children or ourselves in the first place.

  A SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

  Epidemiologists have studied the effects of the orange ball and have determined with certainty that the symptoms it causes cannot be traced to a viral, bacterial, fungal, or parasitic source. Despite extensive tests of our children’s every conceivable tissue and bodily secretion, there is, they say, no detectable pathogen present in their bodies either pre-transformation or post-transformation. This conclusion has led numerous researchers to suggest that the vector for transmission may lie on the molecular or atomic level—a potentially provable proposition, but one that will require many more years of study.

  Another faction of scientists—mostly biophysicists—have conjectured that what occurs to the infected children has little basis in any macrocosmic discipline. These experts have advanced a hypothesis that the wholesale restructuring of an organism can only find its catalyst in the quantum realm, amidst probabilities so infinitesimally small and possibilities so strange they might be thought impossible. Therefore, in their view, it is far better to approach the issue as a problem of fundamental forces and abstract equations than cellular division and genetic re-encoding. Intriguing though the concept may be, it is untestable with current medical technology.

  Still another segment of the scientific community washes their hands of the entire matter, choosing to believe that the orange ball and its accompanying syndrome must be either grossly misreported or an outright hoax. To the myriad MDs and PhDs in this camp—none of whom have seen a ball-child in person—the situation is undeserving of serious attention and, in their assessment, a blemish upon those scientists willing to examine the phenomenon.

  Needless to say, the underlying reason for the changes to our children remains unknown and we are forced to wonder not just “Why?” but also “How?”

  A TREATMENT

  The symptoms having finished their grotesque parade, we were left with their result—a roomful of huge rubber balls bouncing and rolling about the hospital ward under what appeared to be their own volition. We watched, fascinated and horrified, as the faces of our children, forever frozen in a dilated sleep, spun about the balls’ surfaces. The doctors assured us that the balls were not our children, could not be our children, as our children had surely died when the dual hemispheres of their brains evaporated. Time and again they explained that, clinically, our children were gone. And yet, for all the explanation and entirely rational assurances, the movement of the balls—nonstop and just a degree under total chaos—reminded us of our daughters and our sons and their feverish orbits of play. When we gazed through the windows of the secure ward, we saw both our children cavorting in a schoolyard and utterly alien beings performing a
dance we could not understand, and, in truth, we could not distinguish between the two despite our best efforts. We watched the balls for many weeks this way, our terror becoming familiar, our sense of certainty in the world further eroding.

  Thus it was that by the time the doctors at the facility presented us with two options for the balls’ futures—to leave them in the facility for continued study or to take them home with us—we chose to take them home. The doctors, the facility’s administrators, and a panel of high-level bureaucrats from various government agencies all attempted to convince us that turning over guardianship of the balls to the facility would be in everyone’s best interest. These things, they said, should not exist—by all rights, cannot exist—yet they do. These things, they reiterated, were not our children. These things, they warned, would be well beyond our control and may even pose a danger to others. Of course, we knew the doctors were right. We knew that we would never be able to touch our children again without shivering, that we would never be able to look at those child-sized orange balls without worrying that unknown intelligences might be looking back. We knew that we could never talk to them again without nervously contemplating all the unfathomable thoughts and incomprehensible plots that might be incubating beneath their surfaces. We understood that the balls were not our children anymore. Yet, by the same token, we could not shake the impression that the balls were not not our children, either. Somewhere within them still floated fragments of our DNA and, therefore, we believed that somewhere within them surely floated remnants of our children. However fleeting or memorial those remnants might be, we could not leave them to the emptiness of the facility and its doctors clinical probing. So, instead, we took them home with us. In this decision we were sorely unprepared.

  Once in our houses, the balls went wild. Brimming with an unnatural energy, they slammed against our walls and bounced from our floors to our ceilings in rapid, machine gun succession, perhaps testing the boundaries of our homes. They cracked our windows and shattered our lighting fixtures, knocked over our tables and splintered our chairs. They rolled throughout our houses every minute of every day, always in motion, always progressing toward a destination we could seemingly not provide. Sometimes they even bounced against us—often with enough force to make us stumble or send us sprawling to the ground—and we, unsure of what else to do, fled from their advances, scraped and bruised as we were. Whether the bouncings were attacks or gestures of play or symbolic movements beyond our guessing, their violence caused us to worry for our lives, especially after several of us suffered concussions and broken bones. Therefore, in order to protect ourselves, we did what any reasonable community would do—we instituted a treatment plan for our ball-children’s unchecked mania.

  Our options to this end were admittedly limited. We owned no golden egg with which to bankroll a major project and we received no meaningful guidance in our planning. At secret meetings held in neutral locations, we brainstormed and we deliberated and, ultimately, we embarked upon a plan that we thought most effective under the circumstances. Laughable though it may seem, we bought high-end treadmills and, between their arms, rigged leather harnesses that would support the weight and girth of our transmuted children. Into these harnesses we wrestled the frenetic balls, locking them in place with a variety of straps and buckles while making sure that they could still spin freely within their binds. We provided a modicum of leeway in the harnesses’ lengths so that the rubbery dynamos could also bounce a few inches into the air, off the treadmill track, if they needed to bounce at all.

  Once we were certain that the ball-children had been firmly restrained and fully introduced to their new living arrangements, we turned on the treadmills and set them rolling at a sprinter’s pace. There, in those harnesses, we’d planned that they would spend every moment of the rest of their strange existences, safe and secure, locked in place yet spinning ever forward, on a path we’d made for them, a path that could cause no damage or destruction. We would never unfasten their buckles or loosen their straps; we would never lift them out of their bindings or wash the residue of the treadmills’ rubber belts from their orange sides. We would not even pause the treadmills’ circulation unless their motors burned out. We were too frightened to do anything other than maintain the ball-children as surreal conversation pieces and monuments to our parental failure. We were not offering a cure to our children, but a palliative to ourselves. And, in this, we were relatively satisfied, at least for a time.

  A DIVIDE

  Other towns deal with the orange ball and their own infected offspring in other ways.

  In Mercury, Ohio, the citizens have built a windowless, private gymnasium the size of an entire office complex for their ball-children. Within this gym the ball-children permanently reside, never allowed to exit the building’s triple-locked steel doors, even with supervision. The people of Mercury reason that their ball-children should never want to leave the gym, given that it’s equipped with a dizzying array of tubes and chutes and mazes and wheels in myriad sizes and shapes. It is, after all, designed to be a ball’s veritable paradise. And yet, when questioned about the usual movements of the ball-children within their unique enclave, Mercury residents recite an odd fact: no matter how often the ball-children run their mazes or blast through their chutes, no matter how much exuberance they seem to emit as they slide and bounce and roll, they always end their day by congregating around the doors, rebounding against them lightly.

  Elsewhere, in Sutter’s Glen, Tennessee, every family of a ball-child owns an oversized, triple-reinforced bouncy castle which their individual ball-child inhabits. These bouncy castles are a significant source of revenue for the people of Sutter’s Glen, as they allow the families of ball-children to offer wealthy curiosity-seekers the opportunity to purchase exclusive admissions to view their ball-children. It’s rumored that, for the right price, the people of Sutter’s Glen will even allow patrons to enter the bouncy castles and play with their ball-children. Through this trade, the community has grown quite wealthy—so much so that Jaguars and Porsches and Ferraris are now common sights on the streets of Sutter’s Glen. It should be little surprise then, that, privately, many of the town’s citizens whisper a desire for the orange ball to return, to transform the rest of their children, to help them erect more bouncy castles in their backyards.

  In yet another locale—Kylersburg, Wyoming—the ball-children are herded onto a ranch with absurdly high, electrified fences. There, after they have been stamped with a unique number and fitted with a tiny tracking device, they are given free reign of the open fields and sky. On the ranch, they are treated much as any other herd of livestock; they are frequently rounded up and counted, often driven from one area of the ranch to another so as to evenly wear on the land, and occasionally used in special rodeos during which ranch hands attempt to rope and tie them or ride them like angry steer. The people of Kylersburg contend that, as a whole, their treatment method is by far the most natural and humane of all known treatment methods. Perhaps surprisingly, few outsiders argue with the assertion.

  Finally, in Vernonville, Texas, in the town that ignited our initial fears, the people have no ongoing treatment plan, as the treatment they eventually instituted was of a singular and final variety. “Shots from heaven,” some of the citizens of Vernonville call their particular treatment. Others refer to it more modestly as “A mercy.” No matter what moniker they choose, the people of Vernonville claim they feel no remorse or guilt over their actions. They say they simply copied the treatment from their traditional methods for handling lame horses and terminally ill pets. They say that the greatest kindness they could show to their children was to let the dead lie down. Whether or not this statement rings true, one thing is certain: the people of Vernonville no longer need to worry about their ball-children, because there are no longer any ball-children in Vernonville to worry about. Considering this outcome, some might argue that their treatment has been the most successful of all.

  A REVE
LATION

  After our treatment plan went into effect, we returned to lives of relative normalcy. We went to work and complained about paperwork and bosses rather than silently hunching at our desks, worrying over what the balls might be doing to our possessions and our loved ones while we were away. We attended movies and ate at fine dining establishments. We went out for drinks with our friends and argued politics and sports with our families. We walked about our homes with confidence, with surety, with the peace of mind that no weighty orange ball might be tracking us from behind, waiting to pounce upon us and send us careening down a flight of stairs or through a window to our certain dooms. Gradually, we returned to our blissful old routines and, in a sense, the sharp edges of our lives once again began to wear smooth.

  Meanwhile, however, the treadmills kept running in the background.

  The ambient thrum and whir of treads cycling around and around became as ubiquitous to us as the soft whistle of breath from our own nostrils. We avoided the rooms in which we’d placed the ball-children—often keeping the doors to those rooms closed, if not altogether locked—but no matter which room or closet or hidden alcove of our homes we might try to hide away inside, we could hear the treadmills spinning. Music, sound machines, televisions blared at painful volumes: nothing entirely muted the noise. It became clear that if we were in our homes, we could not escape the treadmills’ flat song, and because we could not escape we were perpetually on the verge of remembering why they ran nonstop. Even when we were not at home, many of us heard the treadmills’ rhythmic drone, as though it had somehow recorded a loop of itself upon the very drums in our ears. Animated luncheons with friends, meetings with important business clients, birthday parties for significant others: all of it played out with the soundtrack of the treadmills whispering in the background. Our lives may have been returning to a state of normalcy, but it was certainly not the normalcy we’d known before the ball.