In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  There was a frosted window high on the wall. He could get in, if he wanted. She could almost see the knife tick-tick-ticking on the glass.

  No escape. Jessica plowed herself into the narrow gap between the wall and toilet, wedging herself there, fists clutching at her burning chest as she retched bile onto the floor. The light winked and flickered. A scream flushed out of her and she died.

  A fist banged on the door.

  “Jessica, what the hell!” Her boss’s voice.

  A key scraped in the lock. Jessica gripped the toilet and wrenched herself off the floor to face him. His face was flushed with anger and though he was a big guy, he couldn’t scare her now. She felt bigger, taller, stronger, too. And she’d always been smarter than him.

  “Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing, I’m fine.” Better than fine. She was butterfly-light, like if she opened her wings she could fly away.

  “The station’s wide open. Anybody could have waltzed in here and walked off with the till.”

  “Did they?”

  His mouth hung open for a second. “Did they what?”

  “Walk off with the fucking till?”

  “Are you on drugs?”

  She smiled. She didn’t need him. She could do anything.

  “That’s it,” he said. “You’re gone. Don’t come back.”

  A taxi was gassing up at pump number one. She got in the back and waited, watching her boss pace and yell into his phone. The invincible feeling faded before the tank was full. By the time she got home Jessica’s joints had locked stiff and her thoughts had turned fuzzy.

  All the lights were on. Gran was halfway into her second bottle of u-brew red so she was pretty out of it, too. Jessica sat with her at the kitchen table for a few minutes and was just thinking about crawling to bed when the phone rang.

  It was Mom.

  “Did you send someone to pick me up on the highway?” Jessica stole a glance at Gran. She was staring at her reflection in the kitchen window, maybe listening, maybe not.

  “No, why would I do that?”

  “I left you messages. On Saturday.”

  “I’m sorry, baby. This phone is so bad, you know that.”

  “Listen, I need to talk to you.” Jessica kept her voice low.

  “Is it your grandma?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah. It’s bad. She’s not talking.”

  “She does this every time the residential school thing hits the news. Gets super excited, wants to go up north and see if any of her family are still alive. But she gives up after a couple of days. Shuts down. It’s too much for her. She was only six when they took her away, you know.”

  “Yeah. When are you coming home?”

  “I got a line on a great job, cooking for an oil rig crew. One month on, one month off.”

  Jessica didn’t have the strength to argue. All she wanted to do was sleep.

  “Don’t worry about your Gran,” Mom said. “She’ll be okay in a week or two. Listen, I got to go.”

  “I know.”

  “Night night, baby,” Mom said, and hung up.

  September 11, 2001

  Jessica waited alone for the school bus. The street was deserted. When the bus pulled up the driver was chattering before she’d even climbed in.

  “Can you believe it? Isn’t it horrible?” The driver’s eyes were puffy, mascara swiped to a grey stain under her eyes.

  “Yeah,” Jessica agreed automatically.

  “When I saw the news I thought it was so early, nobody would be at work. But it was nine in the morning in New York. Those towers were full of people.” The driver wiped her nose.

  The bus was nearly empty. Two little kids sat behind the driver, hugging their backpacks. The radio blared. Horror in New York. Attack on Washington. Jessica dropped into the shotgun seat and let the noise wash over her for a few minutes as they twisted slowly through the empty streets. Then she moved to the back of the bus.

  When she’d gotten dressed that morning her jeans had nearly slipped off her hips. Something about that was important. She tried to concentrate, but the thoughts flitted from her grasp, darting away before she could pin them down.

  She focused on the sensation within her, the buck and heave under her ribs and in front of her spine.

  “What are you fixing right now?” she asked.

  An ongoing challenge is the sequestration of the fecal and digestive matter that leaked into your abdominal cavity.

  “What about the stuff you mentioned yesterday? The intestine and the . . . whatever it was.”

  Once we have repaired your digestive tract and restored gut motility we will begin reconstructive efforts on your reproductive organs.

  “You like big words, don’t you?”

  We assure you the terminology is accurate.

  There it was. That was the thing that had been bothering her, niggling at the back of her mind, trying to break through the fog.

  “How do you know those words? How can you even speak English?”

  We aren’t communicating in language. The meaning is conveyed by socio-linguistic impulses interpreted by the brain’s speech-processing loci. Because of the specifics of our biology, verbal communication is an irrelevant medium.

  “You’re not talking, you’re just making me hallucinate,” Jessica said.

  That is essentially correct.

  How could the terminology be accurate, then? She didn’t know those words—cervix and whatever—so how could she hallucinate them?

  “Were you watching the news when the towers collapsed?” the driver asked as she pulled into the high school parking lot. Jessica ignored her and slowly stepped off the bus.

  The aliens were trying to baffle her with big words and science talk. For three days she’d had them inside her, their voice behind her eyes, their fingers deep in her guts, and she’d trusted them.

  Hadn’t even thought twice. She had no choice.

  If they could make her hallucinate, what else were they doing to her?

  The hallways were quiet, the classrooms deserted except for one room at the end of the hall with 40 kids packed in. The teacher had wheeled in an AV cart. Some of the kids hadn’t even taken off their coats.

  Jessica stood in the doorway. The news flashed clips of smoking towers collapsing into ash clouds. The bottom third of the screen was overlaid with scrolling, flashing text, the sound layered with frantic voiceovers. People were jumping from the towers, hanging in the air like dancers. The clips replayed over and over again. The teacher passed around a box of Kleenex.

  Jessica turned her back on the class and climbed upstairs, joints creaking, jeans threatening to slide off with every step. She hitched them up. The biology lab was empty. She leaned on the cork board and scanned the parasite diagrams. Ringworm. Tapeworm. Liver fluke. Black wasp.

  Some parasites can change their host’s biology, the poster said, or even change their host’s behavior.

  Jessica took a push pin from the board and shoved it into her thumb. It didn’t hurt. When she ripped it out a thin stream of blood trickled from the skin, followed by an ooze of clear amber from deep within the gash.

  What are you doing?

  None of your business, she thought.

  Everything is going to be okay.

  No it won’t, she thought. She squeezed the amber ooze from her thumb, let it drip on the floor. The aliens were wrenching her around like a puppet, but without them she would be dead. Three times dead. Maybe she should feel grateful, but she didn’t.

  “Why didn’t you want me to go to the hospital?” she asked as she slowly hinged down the stairs.

  They couldn’t have helped you, Jessica. You would have died.

  Again, Jessica thought. Died again. And again.

  “You said that if I die, you die too.”

  When your respiration stops, we can only survive for a limited time.

  The mirror in the girls’ bathroom wasn’t real glass, just a sheet of polished aluminum
, its shine pitted and worn. She leaned on the counter, rested her forehead on the cool metal. Her reflection warped and stretched.

  “If I’d gone to the hospital, it would have been bad for you. Wouldn’t it?”

  That is likely.

  “So you kept me from going. You kept me from doing a lot of things.”

  We assure you that is untrue. You may exercise your choices as you see fit. We will not interfere.

  “You haven’t left me any choices.”

  Jessica left the bathroom and walked down the hall. The news blared from the teacher’s lounge. She looked in. At least a dozen teachers crowded in front of an AV cart, backs turned. Jessica slipped behind them and ducked into the teachers’ washroom. She locked the door.

  It was like a real bathroom. Air freshener, moisturizing lotion, floral soap. Real mirror on the wall and a makeup mirror propped on the toilet tank. Jessica put it on the floor.

  “Since when do bacteria have spaceships?” She pulled her sweater over her head and dropped it over the mirror.

  Jessica, you’re not making sense. You’re confused.

  She put her heel on the sweater and stepped down hard. The mirror cracked.

  Go to the hospital now, if you want.

  “If I take you to the hospital, what will you do? Infect other people? How many?”

  Jessica, please. Haven’t we helped you?

  “You’ve helped yourself.”

  The room pitched and flipped. Jessica fell to her knees. She reached for the broken mirror but it swam out of reach. Her vision telescoped and she batted at the glass with clumsy hands. A scream built behind her teeth, swelled and choked her. She swallowed it whole, gulped it, forced it down her throat like she was starving.

  You don’t have to do this. We aren’t a threat.

  She caught a mirror shard in one fist and swam along the floor as the room tilted and whirled. With one hand she pinned it to the yawning floor like a spike, windmilled her free arm and slammed her wrist down. The walls folded in, collapsing on her like the whole weight of the world, crushing in.

  She felt another scream building. She forced her tongue between clenched teeth and bit down. Amber fluid oozed down her chin and pooled on the floor.

  Please. We only want to help.

  “Night night, baby,” she said, and raked the mirror up her arm.

  The fluorescent light flashed overhead. The room plunged into darkness as a world of pain dove into her for one hanging moment. Then it lifted. Jessica convulsed on the floor, watching the bars of light overhead stutter and compress to two tiny glimmers of light inside the thin parched shell of her skull. And she died, finally, at last.

  Tim Marquitz is the novelist behind the Demon Squad series and the Blood War Trilogy. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies including At Hell’s Gates, Demonic Dolls, and Neverland’s Library. He is also the editor-in-chief of Ragnarok Publications.

  “Retribution” had to be included in this anthology because of how nakedly raw it is. This revenge fantasy can’t be ignored. There is often a tendency to tiptoe around the anger and even hatred that the attacks of 9/11 engendered, and to self-censor in the name of a genteel liberalism. Tim Marquitz is having none of that.

  RETRIBUTION

  Tim Marquitz

  September 11, 2001, 8:46 a.m. That’s when it all went to hell.

  The date and time are seared into my mind with a heat I can only pray my wife never felt. Candace had found her dream job. Just the week before, she’d started at Channel 5, WNYW. Their offices were on the 110th floor of the North Tower, and she’d worked overnight, preparing for her first time on camera. She was just a fill-in, but she wanted to be perfect. Candace always did.

  She was scheduled off at 9:00.

  She was also six months pregnant with our son: Joshua Michael Drake.

  We’d only settled on his name a few days earlier. I never got to meet him. They never came home. Just fourteen minutes before Candace would have been in the elevator and down past the impact point, I lost them both.

  I lost everything.

  No, that’s not entirely true. I didn’t lose everything. After watching all I loved disappear in a roiling cloud of gray smoke as the building went down, there was still one thing left in my life. Once all the tears had dried and the empty words of comfort had soured on sorry tongues, there was still my fury.

  I’d been a good husband until that moment, 8:46; the moment they took them away. I’d been a good man.

  That man died with his family.

  September 11, 2006, 8:40 a.m. Revenge was but six minutes away.

  While the world had watched my wife and child disintegrate live on television, and had seen the eagle roused in righteous anger, our soldiers sacrificed in foreign lands, it would never know the truth of what had been set in motion that day. The jihadists had brought the struggle to our shores, but five years after our nation had been dealt a grievous blow, the war had yet to truly begin. In five minutes, it would start in earnest; with me.

  My job was to repay our enemies in kind.

  It was my pleasure.

  The road from then to now had been difficult, in far more ways than I could ever have imagined when I signed up to fight. I wanted nothing more than to kill the bastards who’d stolen my family from me. All I asked of my country was a gun and a one-way ticket to the desert. It gave me so much more.

  The morning sun of northern Waziristan beat down upon my head, the heat already sweltering as I made my way along the dusty streets of Mir Ali, heading toward an open market. My skin darkened by chemical staining and my beard grown out thick, itching at my chin and dyed black like my hair, I looked as though I belonged.

  I was dressed in the traditional shalwar kameez, colored in a simple brown and carrying nothing. The other people on the narrow lane paid me little attention. I affected a shallow limp to feign a sense of weakness, and greeted those I passed with quiet courtesy, my teeth clenched to still my tongue. After five years of learning the language, I was proficient, but it always paid to be cautious. It wouldn’t do for someone to note a flaw in my inflection, the anger in my voice. Not when I was so close.

  In another three minutes, it wouldn’t matter.

  Central Intelligence reports had placed a number of ranking al-Qaeda fighters in the area, the people of Mir Ali complicit to their presence, or at the very least, complacent. No real difference between the two in my eyes. You harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist.

  Inside the market, I moved amidst the jumbled stalls and carts, my eyes drifting as I weaved my way toward the thickest concentration of shoppers. I was disappointed there were so few women around, the local culture hiding them away from the eyes of men not their husbands. My dissatisfaction was tempered somewhat by the number of children that ran laughing through the crowded aisles. They were mostly boys, but there were a few girls as well, all too young to be coveted yet, even in their society. I counted nearly thirty who scampered about; twenty-seven young boys who would one day take up arms and fight against my nation, and three girls who would breed more. The numbers were hardly equal, but it would be a good start.

  Two minutes.

  I sidled up close to the busiest of the stalls, patrons haggling in quick tongues over the price of chapatis, the long loaves of bread stacked a dozen high. Flies swarmed about, their humming buzz adding to the morning’s furor. It was hardly the last meal I would have chosen, but then again, none of them knew just how close to death they were.

  I ignored the old man barking at me to move away if I wasn’t buying, and let my heart settle. He’d be quiet soon enough.

  My thoughts reached down and I felt the first stirrings of heat in my veins, my blood warming in response to the pressure of my will. The man went on, threatening violence if I didn’t step aside, only affirming my cause.

  I raised my finger and smiled at him, mouthing, “One minute,” in his own tongue. That only set him to frothing, his tantrum drawing an audience of o
nlookers to the stall. I should have thanked him, but I needed to concentrate.

  Blocking the ranting shopkeeper out, I closed my eyes and sent the spark of my fury to light the fuse inside. My stomach roiled with stinging acid and I could feel the sweat pushing its way from my pores, coating me instantly in a wet sheen. The man went silent as though he could hear the boiling rush that was building, the napalm sear that rippled beneath my flesh.

  I opened my eyes to see him staring at me. His face was twisted in an almost comical confusion, and I wondered what he thought, not that it really mattered. The people who had gathered to watch the shopkeeper’s tirade had drawn back a few steps, their voices muted by the uncertainty of what was happening. They sensed something they couldn’t understand, but still they gathered thick, sheep too dim to see the culling ahead. It was too late to run.

  I turned to face the crowd, my smile breaking through the blackness of my beard. “You have taken my family from me,” I told them, in English. Though most of them probably didn’t understand a word I’d said, there was no doubt they understood my intent. Their eyes went wide at the recognition of an enemy among them, one of the great Satan, but that thought would be their last. “Now I take you from yours.”

  8:46.

  With one more push, my blood boiled over. A flash of white stole my vision as the gift my government had given me took hold. Pain lanced through my body, growing sharper with every instant. The agony multiplied like shattered glass, each shard breaking into a million more and yet again, and again, and again. All but the simplest thoughts left my head, my essence too scattered for true coherence. Split into a billion pieces, my consciousness was a tiny blip in each, my body broken down into its basest molecules. Every atom imbued with the fury to match Oppenheimer’s greatest achievement, I felt myself explode.

  A blur of motion filled my remaining senses and I was overwhelmed by the feeling of being hurled in every direction at once, vertigo at its most exhilarating. Though it seemed, even to me, to be impossible, I noted each and every impact as my fiery essence tore through the assembled crowd, shattered the stalls, and decimated the wares, millions of me peppering the ground where I had just stood. Dust whipped about in my wake.