Fabrick

by Andrew Post

  He liked it because it mostly dealt with philosophies that if you ever engaged in a fight with an opponent, the Mechanized Goddess would provide you the upper hand in some chance way, like remembering the knife in your boot right before you would have been killed. Things like that. Realistic things. A god worthy of all those clasped-handed mental pleas.

  He’d found the book devoted to her when he was new to the Executioner position. He fell madly in love with it immediately. Rarely did any school of thought thrill him like that, not only permitting his inclinations but encouraging them. Any trace of humanity in him wasn’t just stamped out but redacted from his soul entirely and ecstatically after just reading a few verses. Peace is what he found in the blackness.

  His home had been ransacked in his time away, which didn’t surprise him. He had been a youth once. He knew boredom. Hell, he had even come to this exact street as a youngster with a pail of stones and sharp eyes forever looking for a ripe piece of unbroken windowpane.

  Everything of value had been looted, all his furniture stolen or burned or broken into pieces. That was fine. Those were material things, which the Mechanized Goddess taught weren’t that important anyway. What she bestowed favor upon were machines, weaponry, nuts and bolts. The first lesson in her divine cog-powered teachings was that she created man so that man could make machine and machine could serve the god and therefore create this loop—a spoke or cog—to keep everything greased and moving effectively. Of course, with that was the accompanying rule that machines were cold and unfeeling and that any believer should try to be the same.

  Vidurkis dedicated himself to that. It thrilled him, just the idea of it.

  The floor in the living room was so rotten that his weight sank the boards. He backed away and examined the whole space with his pearlescent eyes. The darker spots were obviously where the wood was the most rotten, but it was hard to determine whether they were just pools of shadow. He took a breath and didn’t put much more thought into it. He simply hopped forward to a lighter spot and waited for the sound of the wood splintering wetly, but it held fast.

  He moved on to another lighter spot, then another, then crossed the living room and entered the kitchen. There, the floors were stone. He’d laid the mortar himself, doubly strong, just for such an occasion—mostly because this floor operated as sort of a second roof over what was beneath. He walked to the icebox, chosen for its weight and theft-proofness, and discovered that the hatch hadn’t been disturbed.

  He thought it ironic, being released from one hole just to climb into another. But at least this one was roomier and chock-full of interesting things.

  The storeroom was just as he’d left it. The ceiling was very low, and when he reached the bottom of the steps, he crouched like a stalking feline. He was used to the dark, so it didn’t take long at all for his eyes to adjust. Out of the gloom before him the familiar shapes began to clarify. His tools, his serviceable objects of deference to the Goddess, all. His guns. He smiled.

  The gadget Gorett had given him rang in his pocket, disrupting the moment he was having looking over all his beloved instruments. He hadn’t even gotten to touch their metal yet or stroke their working parts, the pins and levers and hammers and magnificent firing mechanisms. Vidurkis pulled the communicator from his pocket while taking the first step into the dark hideaway.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you there yet? Have you found her?”

  Vidurkis drew a hunting knife with a ten-inch blade from the collection of others and imagined, with stunning glee, slowly drawing it across Gorett’s throat. “Not yet. I had to get my things first.”

  “What things? The men have plenty of things for you to borrow. They’ve got all the armaments you could possibly need.” He certainly was ballsier over the phone than in person.

  Vidurkis thumbed the knife and felt its kiss. Still sharp.

  “I have no time for plastic guns made in some off-world two-bit sweatshop, Pitka. I want Gleese craftsmanship.” He set the communicator on the corner of a workbench so he could put on a holster belt, then another and another. He filled each available spot with a gun and slipped bullets into each waiting pocket of his bandolier. The weight of the weapons made all the years wasted in the dim recesses under the palace melt from his mind.

  “Fine.” Gorett sighed. “Just get there. They’ve had no power to do anything in a while, but you never know. They might’ve figured something out.”

  “My sister’s not that bright.” Vidurkis tasted the lie. She was sharp—impressively so. Growing up, he had constantly tried to best her. Typically it ended with her crying and Vidurkis doubly mad and making her swear—typically at the end of something sharp—to never breathe a word to their parents of the things he had done. She agreed every time, wordless. Just a nod. That in itself was a display of how smart she was.

  “Either way, get there as soon as you can. She’s not alone. I’m sure they’ll think of some way to get out of the city soon enough.”

  “As you command, my liege,” Vidurkis drawled and cut the communicator off. “Useless shite.”

  He filled each chamber of the revolver with a bullet. As the jacketing grated against the metal of the revolving drum, his heart sang a little. Each shhhk and click as he twisted the drum to the next available slot was a short but beautiful hymn to the Goddess, and he was more than happy to accommodate with a refrain.

  For hours they waited, no rush of power having come. The water continually flowed around their feet, and the four travelers stood at the lift gate, taking turns waiting with a finger—or tail—poised over the call button.

  Flam waited less than five minutes before giving up. Using the panel as a lean-to, he took out his pipe and packed in a black knot of mold. If there was one thing besides garlic that didn’t agree with Mouflons, it was boredom.

  A drop of water landed in the pit of his pipe, hissing as it boiled among the embers of his smoldering spores. Another knocked his horns, which he didn’t feel but heard, then slithered to the curled tip and plummeted into the inner sanctum of his ear. It tickled and made his legs turn to jelly. Working it out with his finger, he looked up the hospital corridor to the elevator that would go up to ground level.

  The water seemed to come from there as well, through the hatch in the elevator car. The steady trickles were now more like the results of a sky whale relieving itself. Umbrella, he reminded himself. Need to pick up an umbrella if I’m ever going to the Lakebed again.

  “No power surge in hours,” he thought aloud. “We got a slow build of current from a burst pipe somewhere in one of the subbasements above us, I reckon.” He pointed at Nevele with his unlit pipe. “But . . .” He removed his finger from his ear and popped it into his mouth. He bent to cup a handful. He sipped it—and promptly spit it out. “Tasting weirder now. Richer. Higher sediment level. You mentioned something about the Blatta doing this, blocking her up?”

  “They need water just like any other living thing,” said Nevele, who was seated on an overturned bucket. The water level had raised to the point that she was nearly floating away with it. “Last I heard, they were trying to reroute the geyser’s flow directly to the hive. They need it to expand the colony and feed their pupae, their babies.”

  “Ugh, babies. Far shot from a little bundle of joy, I’d bet. Anyway, unless they’ve finished rerouting it, where does it go?”

  Clyde stepped off the filing cabinet he’d been roosting atop. Anxiety made his voice shrill as he said, “It’ll get backed up.”

  Rohm continued, “And build pressure until . . .”

  “You see what I’m getting at?” Flam said to Nevele. Not that there was anything wrong with Pasty and the mice, but if there was going to be any real problem, it would be left up to him and Stitches to solve it. “If there’s one thing I understand, it’s plumbing.” He sneered at the beams of water, their white noise not at all comforting.

  “This is a very daft place to be.” Nevele stood. “Electricity or not, we need
to get out of here.”

  Rohm, who seemed to be vibrating in place, stepped away from the control panel. The frisk mice among Rohm’s legs were constantly circulating so that none of them would drown. They began moving quicker, climbing over one another and trading places much more frantically. “We don’t do well with water in great amounts, Ms. Nevele. They used to test us, see how long we could hold our breath. It’s unfortunate; our very small lungs do not match the capacity of our brains.”

  “It’ll be okay,” Nevele said but didn’t seem positive.

  Flam sized up the lift gate. It was reinforced from inside with a crossbar of considerable steel. The cable hanging inside looked sturdy enough. The spool would most likely hold their weight if they went down one at time.

  Somewhere far up the hallway, a pipe shattered, followed by the shush of vastly pressurized water releasing. It made the floor shake and hanging pictures drop. It was as if a giant had stamped its foot on the floor above.

  “Whatever we’re going to do,” Flam said, “we need to make it snappy.”

  “I’m thinking!” Nevele dropped her hood and rolled up her sleeves. She thrust her arms toward the elevator gate, and from her fingertips plunged arcs of thread. At once the flesh of her face sagged, the interconnected swatches no longer bound by anything. She sent the tendrils toward the four corners of the elevator gate, and they wrapped themselves around the crossbar and wove into the chain-links. She snapped her wrists, and all the twining locked into the gate went cello-string taut.

  She leaped backward, snarling, pulling with all her might.

  The gate clanged in its frame but didn’t budge any farther.

  She drooped her shoulders, her cords going slack. “It’s tough,” she slurred, since the left half of her lip was now where her chin was supposed to be. She seemed to notice the others staring and released one hand long enough to adjust her cowl to conceal her face.

  “Can I?” Flam asked, reaching before her dangling threads.

  Face partly obscured, she hesitantly nodded.

  He took a double handful of her threads and pulled.

  “The bottom—it’s coming loose!” Clyde wedged the end of his wooden club into the gap and worked it forward and back. A few of the bolts snapped from their holes, their heads popped clean off.

  Flam took the opposite corner and did the same with his broken blunderbuss.

  Rohm kept watch on the hallway behind them, the individual mice dancing in a frenzy of fear. “Hurry! It’s getting worse!”

  The gate came free, and Nevele, Flam, and Clyde fell backwards into the water.

  Clyde sprang to his feet, shoved the gate aside, and peered down. He went breathless.

  Flam splashed next to him and looked.

  The elevator car was halfway down to the forest floor below. Miles of open air.

  The sudden drop, with no gate between, made Clyde’s head whirl. He took a step back and looked to the others. “What now?” he shouted over the rushing noise.

  Nevele’s focus darted all around. She gripped the wrist-thick elevator cable and leaned over the edge. She hesitated there, as if taking a second to say a quick prayer, and then let her feet fall from the ledge. She hugged the cable with all four limbs and suspended.

  “Does it feel secure?” Flam asked.

  “Strong enough to hold me, but I’m not sure about you.”

  Individual tiles on the ceiling popped out of sockets and joined the flow, washing over the edge past Nevele and thousands of feet to the world far below.

  “Meech! We need to do something.”

  Clyde watched a tile drop, spinning end over end, almost graceful in its two-mile descent. If he were to fall, he knew it wouldn’t be so pretty and quiet—falling, thinking about it all, trying to suddenly develop the ability to fly. Vertigo made him take a step back.

  Flam felt possessed. This was it, the end. He needed to get everything bad he’d ever done off his chest at once. He looked to Clyde next to him and began rattling off the lengthy list. “When I was a teenager, I cheated on my first girlfriend. Her name was Coot, and she was as ugly as my furry arse . . . When I got my first automobile license, I used to go to the beach when I told Mum I was going to see Grandma . . . Once, when I was sick, I threw up out the window of my bedroom because I was too lazy to go to the bathroom. That rose garden never grew back the same, and Mum never could figure out why.”

  Clyde looked into Flam’s rambling face, eyes wide. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “What in the hell are you doing?” Nevele screamed. “You know how it works with him.”

  “I don’t know,” Flam cried. “I . . . I can’t die with all this on my chest. I just can’t . . . And another time, last week actually, when I went into the Mole Hole general store, I thought about screaming, ‘Fire!’ and just grabbing up everything I could and—”

  “Shut up,” Nevele shouted. “And you”—she looked at Clyde—“plug your ears or something.”

  It was too late.

  There was a reverberating thud, and a gale pushed Flam and Clyde from behind. Air from inside the hospital was shoved toward them by something big. Like a whole lot of water, for instance.

  The Mouflon closed his eyes, unable to bear the end. He felt something hitting him—soft, warm things pelting his whole body. He looked down. Head to toe, he was covered by leaping frisk mice. They screamed in a mismatched cacophony, too scared to think as one at the moment.

  Even Clyde let out a scream.

  Nevele was saucer eyed. “Now you’ve done it.”

  Flam turned back and saw an enormous white fist of water thundering up the hall toward them.

  Chapter 19

  The Gush and Fall

  Clyde took Flam’s hand and jumped, pulling the mouse-carpeted brute with him. Nevele saw them coming and glided down the line to make room. Once all were on, they slid down, the grease on the cable making their speed involuntary. They skidded a few yards, came to a near stop when their hands painfully hit a dry patch, and then skidded some more.

  Nevele pressed her boot heels together to work as a brake and glanced up to make sure she wouldn’t get run off the cable.

  Countless gallons of sediment water came pouring down after them. They skidded down and down and down. They were far enough that there was no fear of the water knocking them off the cable.

  The wind was strong on the underside of Geyser, and a majority of the flow was carried away as a brown mist. They were all soaked head to toe, which made keeping a grip on the cable difficult.

  “We’ll keep going down,” Nevele shouted up to them. “When we reach the car, maybe we can make it swing over to the stem and we’ll climb down that way.”

  Clyde saw the column that supported the platter of Geyser. The rock was made of the same sediment water, just like what was still dribbling on them. It made formations, like stalagmites, smooth and flashing with the occasional sparkle set within the stone. Nearly halfway to the elevator car below, he considered the prospect of trying to climb down such a slick surface, especially with wet footwear. It wouldn’t go well. Trying to get the elevator car to swing that way to make the jump would be suicidal. He opted to keep that thought to himself. Now wasn’t the time to start crossing things off the list of possibilities.

  He couldn’t help but notice all the frisk mice nestled within Flam’s fur were in some kind of a power surge of their own. They were all looking up, the downy undersides of their little jaws showing. Some pointed, some gasped, and some even swore. None of it could be clearly made out, especially when one of them stepped on Flam’s left eye and he began cursing.

  With trepidation, Clyde looked. Within the housing of the elevator gears, far up, the cable was splintering. Unraveling, just as Nevele’s tentacle of stitches had, the loose end trailing. A small but terrifying jerk in the cable.

  “Feel that, Pasty?” Flam murmured.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Move it, Zippergirl! This thing’s co
ming down!”

  “What?” Nevele shrieked.

  “The cable—it’s breaking! Get a move on! To the car, the car!”

  “What good is that going to do us? Get inside and hope for the best? We’ll still be a mile off the ground, you fuzzy dolt!”

  Having to force himself to look, Clyde saw the cable coming apart in more than one place.

  They all felt a shudder in the line just as they reached the car, still a dizzying distance from the island’s green floor. They all stood on the top of the elevator around the cable, holding on as if they were passengers on an autobus sharing a pole. They met one another’s gaze as if wordlessly exploring possibilities.

  “I hope you can make a parachute jump out your rear, because this thing won’t hold much longer,” Flam said. He pinched his eyes closed. Without opening them, he addressed Clyde. “This is happening because I told you all that up there, isn’t it?”

  Clyde frowned, nodded.

  “Meech help us.”

  A loud snap sounded, fierce as a gunshot, and the elevator dropped a foot. A melancholy droning issued out of the cable, the rusted metal’s swansong.

  Clyde could hear swishing sounds, like Master Tabernathy’s testing of the lash before he took it to Clyde’s back. He wondered if this was what he had once read about, seeing his life flash before his eyes. If so, he wished whoever was in charge of that replay would fast-forward over the bad parts and play just the happy ones. Then he noticed it. The sound was Nevele coming completely undone.

  Every inch of her threads was spiraling out of her fingertips, and she was sending them snaking down around the elevator car, encasing the entire thing as if in a net. When she had it firmly held, she cast her gaze up. Using what remained of the cords within her skin, she began spraying them up against the cable. The others watched as the stitches inched their way up the cable fastidiously, pausing to loop a few times around where the cable was tattered or weakened from rust.