by Alan Ryker
Elizabeth croaked something that could have been a laugh, she wasn’t sure.
The procession of flies emerged first, pouring from the now gray portal. The room filled with the buzzing insects. Then came Death.
Elizabeth thought of Albatross. He would have liked to see this.
Death pointed the sockets of his skull at her. Did he know who she was? He looked to the corpse of her clone. He had been programmed for one purpose, and he would fulfill it. Even with God in the room, Death couldn’t tarry. He stepped away from the portal, toward Beth’s bloody body.
Elizabeth ran forward. One portal passed out of that world. The other granted wishes. For another few moments they’d occupy the exact same space.
I want to switch places with Liza.
PART 13
“For someone named after a bird, he fell like an anchor,” she said as she walked back into the dressing room, glass crunching beneath her feet. “It’s funny how people are all the main characters in their own story. He thought this was about him, when he’s not even one of us.” She shook her head. “Anyway, that was for Pookie. Now…”
Beth wiped her bloody hands on her shirt. Most came off, but it stuck in the creases. She shrugged.
When she looked up, Elizabeth was holding the knife she’d retrieved from the desk. What worried Elizabeth was that Beth smiled and rolled her shoulders in response.
Beth charged, so fast, so absurdly fast. Elizabeth stabbed, aimed for center mass, not having really planned what to do, as she’d never stabbed anyone before. She had thought the threat would be enough. Beth twisted her torso, hugged Elizabeth’s outthrust arm to her chest and hyper-extended her elbow across her ribcage.
Elizabeth dropped the knife, and then was spun with that same rod-stiff arm until she hit the ground. Beth knelt beside her for only a second, then crawled onto her back, wrapping her arms around her neck and head and cinching just hard enough to show Elizabeth that—with her ExerFlexer 5000 hardened muscle—she was strong enough to pop it right off.
“They started a krav maga class at the gym. But you knew that, because you put it there, didn’t you, Eyes?”
Elizabeth didn’t respond, but when Beth flexed her bicep and constricted the blood flow to Elizabeth’s brain, she nodded. She’d installed the Gym Rat expansion pack a month ago, but had never paid much attention to it.
Beth released some tension and Elizabeth drew in a breath, noticing a distinct whistle as she did. The lunatic had her right where she wanted her.
“Why are you doing this?” Elizabeth asked. “We’re sisters.”
“Sisters? Ha! We’re your puppets. But Liza broke through. I don’t know how, but those are her eyes in the sky and on the screens. I’ve never been religious. I always thought family was most important. I thought that Liza and I could be a good combination, run this town, so I reached out to her even though this weird house freaked me out.
“Liza, though, she was religious. Whenever I came over to try to convince her to come to one of my parties I’d find her either staring at you or studying computer programming, which for some reason she called “catechism” though I could see the books were labeled “Computer Programming”. Or I’d find her typing on the computer. She said she was talking to you, to The Eyes, in something she called a ‘forum.’ I started to leave her alone because that all sounded crazy. I was glad she kept her crazy in this tower, because I didn’t need everyone thinking I might be crazy too, with us looking identical. But I guess she was right. You moved us like your little marionettes, but you got tangled in the strings, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know.”
“What do you mean you didn’t know?”
Elizabeth’s vision had gone black when Beth had tightened her grip, but it had mostly come back, and she noticed a pack of gum laying only a few inches from her nose. She let go of Beth’s forearms, showing her open palms, fingers spread wide. She wasn’t fighting her anymore.
Where had the gum come from?
Why was there this huge blood stain?
“I didn’t know that you were real. How could I have? In my world, this world is a computer game. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t know there was anyone to really hurt.” Flattened to her stomach, Beth on her back with her face pressed against her silky hair, her breath coming ragged against her ear, Elizabeth began to reach out. “I see now that this is who I’ve been all the time, though. I used you all casually, not even considering that you might be real. In my world, I did the same thing. People used me, too. I thought that was just how it worked, you know? Everyone using each other.” She stretched farther. “I’m not going to do that anymore, though. It diminishes us all.”
“Your negotiation skill needs some work. You should have been practicing in the mirror when I told you to. Now, how do you get through?”
I really wish I had a knife, Elizabeth thought, holding her extended hand with an open palm turned up. Into it fell a large knife, thankfully handle first. Reaching over her shoulder, she slashed it across Beth’s pretty face. And again. Beth held on, and Elizabeth wondered if she should have wished specifically for a sharp knife, but then she felt hot liquid spilling onto the back of her neck. The knife was apparently so sharp that it took a moment for Beth to realize she’d been cut. Elizabeth stabbed back several times, aiming for her eyes, feeling the point of the blade catch in the bone of her skull.
The shriek hit her ear like a punch. Then she was rolling away as Beth not only let go of her, but shoved her with hands and feet.
Elizabeth tried to get to her knees and fell forward, almost impaling herself on the long butcher knife. She was weak from the choke hold. From where she lay, she watched Beth, who gripped her face in both hands and writhed on the floor, alternating between curling up, bridging and kicking as blood poured from between her fingers.
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said, steadying herself, pushing up to hands and knees, beginning to crawl to her clone. “I can’t stay here. I have to open the portal. I’m sorry, though.”
She stopped talking before she got too close, not wanting to alert her doppelganger about what was about to happen. The woman still thrashed in a terrifying, inhuman manner, and Elizabeth didn’t know if it was from all the ExerFlexer muscle or bad programming. So though she aimed for her heart, when she brought the knife high and then smashed it down it stuck in her shoulder.
Beth shrieked again and twisted, nearly ripping the knife from Elizabeth’s grip, but her flesh gave and Elizabeth kept her hold on the handle. She looked at Beth, and Beth dropped her hands and looked at Elizabeth from the one eye she still had, set in her red wreck of a face.
Elizabeth’s gut lurched, but whatever Beth saw in her god’s face affected her even more strongly. She kicked back across the floor, leaving bloody handprints, watching Elizabeth.
Elizabeth got to wobbly feet.
“You don’t have to… I wouldn’t have… I just wanted…”
“It’s not personal,” Elizabeth said. “I’m sorry. I need you to open the portal.”
“The portal’s right there. It’s open.”
“The other portal.”
Elizabeth’s feet had grown steady even as her stomach churned, and she began walking toward Beth. Beth flipped over to her hands and knees and tried to push to her feet, but she’d lost a lot of blood, and her limbs were starting to do that glitchy stutter. Elizabeth sprang, slamming her knife into her clone’s back. She stopped thinking. She turned her mind off and pistoned her arm. Beth was very strong, but that only made it worse for her.
Elizabeth dragged the corpse to the stain, which was exactly the right number of squares away from the portal, then stood back. It didn’t take long.
A black portal opened perfectly over the gold portal. Elizabeth had noticed long ago that they looked exactly the same except for the palette switch, and figured that the creator of the hack had just repurposed the graphics. But the way they fit exactly over top of each other—even their expandin
g and roiling matching—was more than coincidence.
Flies poured out. Elizabeth started to quake, her knees growing weak, though she told herself he wasn’t coming for her. But he was in a way. A version of her. Maybe the best version. The most driven. The strongest and smartest. Now the deadest. Okay, they didn’t get much more dead than Betty, but second deadest.
Elizabeth croaked something that could have been a laugh, she wasn’t sure.
The procession of flies emerged first, pouring from the now gray portal. The room filled with the buzzing insects. Then came Death.
Elizabeth thought of Albatross. He would have liked to see this.
Death pointed the sockets of his skull at her. Did he know who she was? He looked to the corpse of her clone. He had been programmed for one purpose, and he would fulfill it. Even with God in the room, Death couldn’t tarry. He stepped away from the portal, toward Beth’s bloody body.
Elizabeth ran forward. One portal passed out of that world. The other granted wishes. For another few moments they’d occupy the exact same space.
I want to switch places with Liza.
PART 14
Elizabeth stirred. Groaned. Peeled her face from her computer desk.
She was wearing her pink robe again. How strange. Had it all been a dream? Or had Liza been wearing the robe, and it was part of the switch due to her phrasing of her wish? She hurt, but she would have hurt from sleeping sitting up all night.
She looked at her hands, covered in blood. It hadn’t been a dream. She’d killed to leave that nightmare behind, killed something that had been part sister, part daughter, part herself. She’d fought to leave that world, to live this life. It had been instinct. Now she had to justify that bloody choice. She had to make it worth it.
But first…
Elizabeth booted up her computer. “Come on, come on, come on…” she muttered, tapping her blood-sticky hands on the desk.
As familiar chimes intoned, Elizabeth imagined Liza in the other world, luring a Ward into her dressing room, placing him over the blood stain, raising a knife, calling up Death’s portal…
The desktop appeared and Elizabeth clicked on the game’s icon. The opening splash screen came up causing Elizabeth to let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Liza had been able to fix the game, because Liza had programmed the patch that had blocked Elizabeth out of it, giving her time to work.
The screen, which always began centered on the last Ward watched, was centered on empty air with a message Elizabeth had never seen before, “Ward not found.” The HUD that showed the character stats said, “Elizabeth,” and had a blank space where her portrait should have been.
And wandering around frantically in the background, screaming out dialogue bubbles filled with unintelligible icons was Liza. And she had a knife.
Elizabeth paused the game. She walled over the door, the windows and the balcony. She hovered the arrow over the bathroom door. One click and it would become solid wall.
But she was a different person now. She even added a microwave and a refrigerator to the room, making it a very comfortable prison.
She almost clicked the pause button, and then remembered one thing. The computer. She removed it, wishing she could erase them from the inventory entirely.
Going to the plug-in dropdown menu, she uninstalled every hack. The portal disappeared.
She had an urge to uninstall the game, but the thought made her hands shake. No, she had to keep an eye on Liza. She’d be living on, somewhere, and Elizabeth needed to be able to monitor her. She needed the game, but only for that reason. Only that.
Finally, she clicked around where Liza stood, frozen in mid-scream, dropping walls around the one square of floor she occupied, then unpausing the game.
Liza abruptly stopped screaming. She stood silent and motionless, and Elizabeth could imagine her realizing what had happened, and not wanting to truly know what had happened. She could imagine Liza’s thoughts as she forced herself to stare straight ahead, only seeing the wall in front of her, then the two walls beside her in her peripheral vision, not daring to look behind her and discover her terrible fate. But eventually she broke and turned.
The screaming began again. She slapped the walls. She spun. Then she stopped and looked straight up into Elizabeth’s eyes. The Eyes. Her god.
With a shaking hand, Elizabeth moved the pointer to that final wall. She even opened the build menu and hovered over “Delete”.
No, she’d let her stew a bit. When Elizabeth did delete that wall, she wanted Liza to feel just how merciful The Eyes was. She wouldn’t kill her. Wouldn’t let her experience endless undeath as she had Betty. But this Ward had received everything she’d ever wanted from the time she’d been born. She’d been created specifically to live in Elizabeth’s ultimate dream house with access to every item in The Wards’ inventory and then some. And it had spoiled her.
Elizabeth had sometimes wondered at that term, because her husband so frequently applied it to her. Now she knew what it meant. That creature was rotten on the inside. She had no concept of value. All she wanted was the one thing she couldn’t have: to not be the video game character she was.
Elizabeth stood. She’d let Liza feel deprivation for awhile. It would be good for her perspective. She needed to go check on David, anyway. They needed to talk. Things were going to change. She wasn’t sure how yet, but they were.
Opening the door to her dressing room and stepping out into the upstairs hallway, a smell hit her. A very bad smell. She continued downstairs, her vision going black around the edges, her heart fluttering so quickly and lightly she didn’t think it could be pumping blood.
By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, bile was crawling up her throat, sour and burning. She walked through the house, following a smell that had built until she could almost see it.
If only Death would open a portal.
She opened the door to David’s study. He sat there in his overstuffed leather armchair, his feet up on his ottoman, the paper spread open in his lap, the handle and maybe an inch of the blade of a butcher knife protruding from the top of his skull.
Elizabeth could imagine so clearly what had happened that it was almost as if she’d lived it. Liza had stood behind David, as he asked when dinner would be done, and with both hands—she must have used both hands and all her weight—had driven that high-quality steel blade into his head. He’d barely even bled.
Elizabeth fell to her knees. She willed Death to come. With his procession of flies, he would clean this world of its inconvenient dead.
Elizabeth had thought that now she’d gained perspective, she was about to begin a new, fruitful life. As the stench finally ripped her guts up her throat, she imagined her new life, sitting in a tiny, walled-in, concrete cube, left only enough room to lay down and die.
She looked at her hands, covered in blood.
