A chill runs down my spine. I contemplate showing him my name tattoo, but he’s probably noticed at this point — I’m wearing short sleeves — and anyway, it feels like kicking an amnesiac when he’s down. "Okay, so? Third death is when we figure out how to destroy or disassociate these needle cells, right?"
He's shaking his head. "I don't know which death that is — fourth, maybe, or just 'last'. No, third death is a second brain destruction. Even more mental programming is overwritten — memories orphaned, behaviors sloppily restored . . .”
“Taking the second death psychosis to its logical conclusion.”
“After first death, your body is different. After second death, your mind is different. After third death, you . . .” He struggles for words for a moment, then shrugs. “You are different." He makes finger-quotes for emphasis.
My arms prick with freezing goosebumps despite the warm red stone. “So Ron and I have to watch out for second death, but you . . .”
He draws a deep breath, closes his eyes, and lets it out in a sigh. He looks down at his hands. His jaw works like he wants to say something, but he says nothing.
I stare out over the plains. I have decided not to think for a little while, lest Implications start occurring to me.
At last, he removes his little pan from the heat and stands up. “I want to show you something.”
I get to my feet and shoulder my backpack, then notice that Tedrin is watching me with this queer little smile. “What?”
The smile disappears. “Sometimes I catch myself fantasizing that things went differently. That I was able to control myself. That I never hurt you.” He looks away. “I think you and I would have been close friends. Maybe . . . more.”
I can’t decide whether to pity him or vomit. “Look, man,” I tell him as gently as I can, “just because your horrible alien parasite cells are ruining your life and you want to blame all your problems on them doesn’t mean I like you now.” Shut up, Implications, I’m not paying attention to you right now.
He smiles uncomfortably and turns to lead the way back to the stair.
We continue upward, and I lose track of whatever direction I arbitrarily chose to be north. Sometimes we’re forced to follow narrow ledges over thousand-foot drops — without handrails, because this dimension never invented OSHA — before diving deep into the mountain again. At one point we’re on the other side of the mountain — which shouldn’t be physically possible, given the hour or two we’ve been walking — and I can see that the plains stretch into the distance in that direction, too.
I should be fascinated by everything we see, but the tunnels are very bare and there’s no more writing to be found. Whatever artifacts were left by this civilization, they’ve been looted or blown away or crumbled to dust. I peer through doorways and find empty rooms, their red stones still glowing softly. I keep expecting to turn a corner and have my breath stolen by some complex bit of architecture, but whoever built these tunnels was tediously pragmatic.
Tedrin and I talk a little, mostly random chit-chat about the scenery or Ron or the few movies I’ve seen that he can remember, but mostly we walk in silence. Sometimes, when we stop to rest, I catch him staring into the distance with his lips pressed together, as if he’s frustrated with his own deep sadness. There’s something going on in that head of needles, and he doesn’t want to let me in on it yet.
I’ve slid my shotgun back around to rest against my back, but think of it now and then, when he stops unexpectedly or makes eye contact.
We reach a place where the stone staircase has collapsed; he jumps the twelve-foot, pitch-black gap with ease and then turns to wait for me. I take a wobbly running jump and barely make it; he hauls me up onto the step with hands like hot iron. His grip is firm but gentle on my arm. A thrill runs up my throat, followed close by an image of him snatching the shotgun from my back and blowing my skull open. I shudder and head up the stairs without looking at him.
Every once in a while, we pass through a space that floods me with anxiety and nausea, always emanating from a point on the wall. Tedrin doesn’t comment on them, but he unconsciously presses against the far wall every time, as if desperate to keep away from the source.
Just as I’m deciding to ask him about these strange spots, we walk out onto yet another four-foot-wide, unprotected ledge, this one overlooking the valley between the mountain and its range. Tedrin stops to lean back against the cliff face. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a mashed-up pack of menthol cigarettes. Without a word, he lights one, offers the pack to me, and pockets it when I politely refuse. The wind blows his smoke away before I can even smell it.
Holding the cigarette between two fingers, he points down into the valley. “See that blue glow?”
I squint. At the base of the mountain, far below us, is something sky-blue that glints in the late afternoon sunlight.
“Notice the lack of monsters around it,” he mutters, and takes another drag. “This whole mountain is shot through with them. You can feel where they are, buried in the rock. I tried going at one with a pickaxe.” He rolls his eyes. “Not a good idea when you’re made entirely of needles.” He jerks his chin at the stone below. “I can’t even go near that. It’s the only one I’ve seen out in the open.”
I goggle down at the stone. “Holy shit. I came to this world looking for that exact thing, and it’s . . . a rock?”
“Whoever built this place, they weren’t made of needles.” He waggles his free hand. “Or they were, and knew how to protect themselves from the blue light. Either way, they refined stones like that to protect their fortress from the monsters.”
I throw up my hands. “Well, awesome! I won’t question it! What the hell are we doing up here? Let’s go get it!”
“I wanted to give you plenty of time to think on the way back down, because I’m about to ask you a favor.”
Now I’m giving him both eyebrows. “What the hell kind of favor would you ask of me?”
“The only kind you’re remotely likely to agree to.” He takes a long drag of his cigarette and lets the smoke stream out over the valley, whipped away by the wind. “That stone is last death.”
I stare at him, and he stares out over the mountain range. When he exhales smoke, he sounds a little shaky, and I notice his hand shivering as it holds the cigarette.
And then it clicks. “Oh my God, Tedrin,” I whisper.
He looks away. “I couldn’t possibly . . . not on my own. Whatever ability I had to commit suicide, it’s gone now. I wouldn’t be able to . . .” He swallows hard. “I tried once, with a gun, and I lost everything.”
I can’t stop staring at him. “And you want me to . . . help you?”
“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? To kill me?”
Not with you going along so willingly, I want to say. “Not like this,” I manage.
He presses his lips together. “I would rather die than go through what comes next. My body and heart are desperate to live, but my mind knows it’s going to be destroyed soon, and . . .” His voice drops to a whisper, as if admitting some secret weakness. “That’s what scares me the most, even more than losing my memory and everything that makes me the man I am. I might end up unable to think and feel. I might turn into an animal, some mutated, immortal thing. I can’t think of anything more horrifying.” He glances at me and then away. “You’re smart. You probably know what I mean.”
I think back over a few of the hideous mental images that have been haunting me for the past few days. But then I ask myself: If our positions were reversed, would I want him to fulfill my request without any pushback? No, I’d want a modicum of compassion.
So what do you say to a suicidal person? I guess you bring up the people they love. “What about Ron? She wouldn’t want you to die.”
He scoffs bitterly. “Like she cares.”
“Dude, she does care. Hell, I care. You were the first, and I can probably still learn a lot from you. Plus you’re like our psycho mascot. You�
��re part of the team.” The words finally leap to mind: “I don’t think we can do this without you.”
He’s still looking out over the valley, and his dark eyes are sad. “You’ll find a way.”
I stare at him.
“No!” I burst out. “No, and fuck you!”
He frowns at me. “What?”
“Fuck you!” I snap, and make a grand gesture to take in not just this other world, but the entire situation. “You started all of this, and now you want to check out— Excuse me, now you want me to check you out, because you’re,” I make mocking crying motions, “too scawed of woozing your idendidy?” Shut up, Implications, I am not listening to you!
His jaw muscles stand out as he clenches his teeth together, but he says nothing, just stares at me.
“You dragged Ron into this, and you dragged me into this — me, a fairly well-adjusted person who had a long, happy life ahead of her, and in the course of twelve hours you turned me into a grotesque, suicidal freak — and now you think you can just shuffle off the goddamn coil and stick us with the mess? No! No, and fuck you!”
“I never asked for this,” he whispers between his teeth.
“Oh. Ohhhhh.” I stand back and cover my mouth with my hands. “Oh. He didn’t ask for this. Wow. That changes everything.”
“You don’t have to be such a bitch.”
“And you didn’t have to put this curse on Ron, even if she was dying. You didn’t have to break my goddamn neck and put it on me, too. You didn’t have to keep this whole monster thing quiet until it turned into a goddamn invasion, but I don’t see you running to the National Guard.”
“They wouldn’t have believed—”
“I don’t want to hear your fucking excuses!” I shout in his face. I point back in the general direction of the portals. “We’re going back to Earth and stopping this invasion, and then after that, believe me, I’ll be next in line behind you for a goddamn mercy kill! When, and only when, no one else has to suffer for your fuck-ups!”
That’s enough. I move a few steps away and try to wiggle my rage out through my fingertips. I’m shaking all over.
“I’ll only make it worse,” he grits. “I’ll hurt people. All I do is hurt people.”
Ain’t that the truth. It reminds me of all the ways I’d like to hurt him. I think back over my whiteboard of experiment ideas, horrible things I’d inflict on mice.
How much more precise could I be with a human test subject?
I blink. “I’m a genius!”
“Hn?”
I slowly turn back and find him glaring at me but listening. “There’s a lot of experiments I’d like to perform,” I explain carefully. “There’s a lot we still don’t understand about these needles.”
“And?”
“And a vivisection or two could help.”
He stares calmly at me. Something behind his eyes has performed an illegal operation.
I pinch his arm. “If you’re so desperate to atone . . . It’d hurt like hell, but afterward, no one would be able to accuse you of flinching. Not me, not Ron, not anyone.”
His shoulders slowly relax, and he stares at me with a wondering look. “You make torture sound so attractive.”
I shrug uncomfortably. “Somebody’s got to do it.”
He looks out over the valley and smokes his cigarette and thinks. At last, “What else did you have in mind? Besides cutting me open without anesthesia. I assume I’d be strapped down in some kind of lair—”
“Besides vivisection?” No use beating around the bush. “I think I’d start by severing a complex structure, like a hand. Once it grows back, I’d sever it again. Repeat until something interesting happens — mutation, failure to regrow, et cetera.” I start counting on my fingers. “There’s also immolation, various forms of body modification, oxygen deprivation, starvation, dehydration—”
“This is me flinching.” He looks slightly ill.
“You don’t have to agree to it right away. I’m just saying, we still have uses for you.”
“And I’ll be in here the whole time,” he whispers, pointing at his head. “Losing even more of myself.”
I shift uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I’m especially interested in seeing what coping mechanisms you’ll adopt.”
He flicks his cigarette butt out over the expanse and we watch it fall away into the distance. “Alright,” he whispers. “I’ll do it.”
I look up at him. “Really?”
He grins lopsidedly. “‘Later, as I looked back, I would point to this as the moment I really screwed up’.” Then he clears his throat. “We’ll write up a list of experiments you’d like to try, and I reserve the right to veto any I don’t think I could endure.”
I adjust my backpack straps uncomfortably. “Well, before anything else, can we go down there and get that tide-of-the-war-changing stone?”
He doesn’t move, just stares out over empty space. His expression has gone blank, his face slack. He slowly turns his face away from me.
“Tedrin?” I wave a hand in his peripheral vision. “Earth to— Weird alien dimension to Tedrin.”
“I just,” he whispers. “This person inside me. I don’t want him to endure that.”
I stare at the back of his head.
“This body needs to atone for what it has done. But that mind can be set free. It lingers. It is ever in pain.” He looks at me, and his eyes are pinpricks. Tedrin is deep inside his own head, looking out at me through little holes, trying to communicate using the weird framework the needles have given him.
Goosebumps prickle all the way up my arms. “Look, forget I brought it up, man. It was a stupid idea.”
He takes a step closer, and I’m keenly aware of the stomach-punching drop behind me. “This mind has endured enough,” he mumbles, lips numb. “Better to obliterate it.”
My hand is already reaching for my shotgun. “Calm down,” I order sternly. “Let’s talk about this.” The prey animal part of my brain is shrieking in terror; my hands are bringing the gun around to my front.
He takes another step, and then shudders all over for a moment, eyes becoming heavy-lidded, full of despair. His hands rise to press against the sides of his head, and he squeezes his eyes shut.
My shotgun is in my hands. I click the safety off and point it at his head. “Don’t move—”
He darts toward me, hands outstretched with fingers like claws, but his eyes are so frightened, but he’s going to send us both over the edg—
BLAM
Tedrin’s head explodes in a cloud of gore.
As I stare at the red needles flying in all directions, at the little branches already growing from his neck stump, his momentum carries his body forward despite the blast taking off his head. His body lands with its hips on the edge, and then the top half flops down and carries his weight over.
Meanwhile, my balance has been thrown hard to the right by the shotgun’s kickback, and my boot slips in the dust. The gun tumbles from my hands as I scrabble uselessly for purchase on the edge of the cliff but too late—
My hands slam against the cliff face rushing by, as if there’s any possib—
I stupidly look down and see Tedrin’s headless body tumbling into the distance—
mouth is screaming—
My left hand reaches for the cliff face and digs into the rock. Flesh and then bone tear away as I plunge through stripes of warm and cold air, shrieking breathlessly from terror and pain—
Something in my hand catches in the rock, and my descent slows dramatically. I’m still very high up; the forest is a dark blur far below.
I look up at my left hand and find that the needles made an emergency adjustment. Where there were four fingers and a thumb, there is now a white garden claw, its five wicked points raking grooves in the stone. Best I can tell as I hang from it, the claw is a natural extension of my forearm bones.
With my still-human right hand, I grab a handhold and bring myself to a stop. My left shoulder bu
zzes and stings, half-wrenched out of its socket. Shuddering, I cling to the cliff face. I can’t possibly climb up, but if I continue down, I might be able to find a ledge or balcony.
I’ve lost my gun. I’ve killed Tedrin. I’m alone again in this alien world, and I’ve murdered the one other human—
I squeeze my eyes shut and force away all thoughts but one:
Climb.
Slowly, painstakingly, I move from rock to rock, ramming my left-hand claw into cracks when I need a handhold. It’s strange, not being able to feel my hand, having such an indestructible tool attached to the end of my arm.
Down, down, each yard of progress taking back-breaking minutes. If I fall, the cliff might be out of arm’s reach, and then nothing would stop me until I reach the ground. My head would split open and my brains would be dashed in all directions. Second death.
My stomach turns and my head spins; for several minutes I can only hang there, one foot hooked into a crack in the rock. I want to vomit. I want my mind to be still. I want to be in the deer stand again.
Remember the deer stand, I tell myself. If you can remember it and all it represents, you are still ‘you’.
I continue climbing.
At last, just as it’s getting dark, I reach a balcony. The moment my feet rest on smooth stone, my legs fold underneath me, and for several minutes I lie under an alien sunset and shudder.
I raise my head and look around, but neither my gun nor Tedrin’s body landed here. There are tears running down my cheeks.
My flashlight is still in my pocket, thank God. I make my way into the tunnels and find an empty room with a warming stone. I heat some canned ravioli — working a can-opener with one hand is a bitch — and eat in the cavernous silence left by some other planet’s apocalypse.
It’s hard to breathe between the sobs. I constantly find myself gasping for air. For the first time since this entire adventure started, I’m terrified to be so alone. Now that I’ve temporarily destroyed the only other human in the vicinity, I am officially the most isolated person in the history of my species.
He needed me.
There’s nothing I can do in the dark except get lost in the tunnels, so I opt to curl up next to the glowing red stone. It should take at least a few hours for Tedrin to resurrect, and even if he has a mind to, he won’t be able to find me in these tunnels unless he searches for days.
Eden Green Page 15
