by R. E. Vance
“The hive mind,” I said. “You needed something that could control your drones. Otherwise the anomalies would just do their own thing. But with Evil-and-Cute and her hive mind, she could control them for you.”
“Indeed, Mr. Matthias. I tried so many other creatures: empaths like myself, humans with an overwhelming desire for control, even the alpha of a pride of wolves. None of them can exert the control that she has. She is … spectacular.”
“She’s a bee,” I said, feeling that in this case pointing out the obvious was a necessity.
“A queen bee that desired to be more,” she said, patting the glass dome. “You humans … so arrogant. You presume that this world was made for you. Like young children who believe everything they see is theirs, your species indulges in the self-delusion that all this world was made just for you. The heroes of your own story. But the gods did not make this world just for humans. They made it for all manner of mortal creatures.”
“Mayyybe,” I said, drawing out the word in a childish tone. “But then we’d have to start sharing. And you know the two-year-old’s mantra: what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine. What would humans be if we out-grew that?”
Colel Cab chuckled at that, three of her hands pointing at me. “Very funny, Mr. Matthias. But your humor is a poor mask for fear … and I can feel your fear.”
“No,” I said. “That is just my aftershave.” I took a moment to check on OtherMe up on the surface. He was being beaten quite badly … and I knew enough about myself to know that something had to happen—and soon, too—otherwise, he was done.
“Ah,” Colel Cab said, seeing my upward glance, “you are connected to your other self. Even though you do not dream? That must be the power of the Houlm. She is truly one of the most wondrous things this Universe has to offer. When I pull her out of your heart, she will be the final piece of the puzzle to create creatures, this time in my own image. My world will be harmonious, beautiful and at peace. That is something the other gods could never have hoped to achieve.”
“OK … But you’ll have to kill me first. And then capture her. And you have to do all that before my army comes down here and kicks your butt.”
Colel Cab clicked several of her pincers together before making the diamond shape with all four sets of her hands. “Yes, they come indeed. Their forces are amassing against me. Just like they have a thousand times before.”
Her voice was distant, like she was thinking out loud, rather than speaking to anyone in the room. Or perhaps she was recalling some ancient memory. Either way, her gaze went distant as well as she stared at the empty space in front of her, her half-dozen eyes glazing over like one day-dreaming or sleep-walking.
“But this time will be different,” she hummed. “This time I will be the one to ascend to the godhead. I have the Crystal.”
She started to grow. No, not grow, because that implied that she was getting bigger. She wasn’t getting bigger … she was becoming more. More tergites appeared, stretching out her midsection to greater heights.
“I have the will.” And as she extended herself, more arms appeared.
“I have the resolve.” She was a centipede that was becoming a millipede. She grew and grew, until she became whatever was greater than a millipede. Decamillipede?
“But most importantly … I have the belief.”
And with those last words, Colel Cab completed her transformation from a simple eight-legged, eight-armed buglike Other to something that had more arms and legs than I could count.
“So …” I said. “You can do that?”
“I can, Human Jean-Luc,” she uttered from a hundred mouths that suddenly sprouted along her body and spoke in chorus. “I can do this and so much more.”
And before I could think of a witty comeback, Colel Cab scampered toward me, her thousand pincer feet clacking against the ground, her thousand hands reaching out to grab me.
↔
Colel Cab slithered across the massive chamber and toward me, using her massive body as a fence to trap me inside. I tried to jump over the decamillipede, but it seemed that the Other not only grew in length, but girth as well. I doubted even Sinbad could clear her without struggle. I thought about hacking through her with my sword, Herculean style, but there was no way I could get through that exoskeleton … and even if I could, she’d just grab me with the rest of her body and rip me from limb to limb.
So I did the only thing you can do when facing a monster of insurmountable strength. I bullshitted.
“Hey, ugly,” I called. “Do you really think you can pull this ‘god’ stuff off? After all … you’re just a bug.”
Colel Cab clacked at me and several of her mouths spoke at once. “But I am a god … and gods create through the manifestation of their belief.” She picked me up. “And my belief is stronger than anything any mere human could hope to conjure.”
“Manifestation of their belief, huh?” I said.
And then the implication of her words hit me … the Crystal allowed beings who had complete, doubt-free belief to create. Creation wasn’t magic—magic was the manifestation of will; Creation was, in Colel Cab’s own words, the manifestation of belief. Colel Cab grew in size and strength because she believed she was already the God. But in order for that to work, she needed to be free of doubt.
There was nothing I could say that would shake her belief, but there was something I could do—or rather, have faith in. I thought of OtherMe, still fighting on against Evil-and-Cute … he was exhausted and outclassed, but still he believed he would win. He was without doubt. I felt him and although I wasn’t him—free of doubt and all I could be—I still understood who he was and what he was about.
I envied OtherMe’s ability to fight without doubt. He believed in himself so completely, and that was something I couldn’t do.
But that was when I understood that belief without doubt was incomplete. It was belief that you held on to despite doubt where true power lay. To believe without doubt was to be delusional.
But belief with doubt … was faith.
And sometimes faith is all you need.
I thought back to all the fights I’d fought, all the times I faced insurmountable odds, all the times I should have died but didn’t. Why? Because I was damn good at what I did. Thing was … I didn’t have faith in a god or gods. I didn’t have faith in a higher power that would come down and save me. But I did have faith in one thing …
I had faith in myself.
I felt OtherMe who fought on without doubt, and realized that I was choosing to fight on because of that faith.
So, seeing the mandibles of Colel Cab closing in on me, I focused on that faith. I held it in my heart, as I struggled to get out of her grip and just as she was about to bear down on me, I felt my strength grow and slowly I was able to peel myself out of her grip.
Colel Cab did not hide her shock as I freed myself. So I dug in a bit more. “Hey, I was thinking about how the gods left and didn’t take you with them. I mean, they did take all the human souls out of all the heavens and hells with them, but … not the god of bugs? Why do you think that is? And then it hit me—to a god, even the god of bugs is still just a bug.”
“Insolent fool!” she said, charging down on me with her decamillipede body.
I lifted my sword and waited for impact. At the last second, I tumbled to one side and thrust my sword into her side. It cut through three of her exoskeleton shields—because I had faith it would. But it was more than that. My sudden rush of strength and my renewed enthusiasm, they rattled Colel Cab. More than rattled her … for the first time this evening she doubted that she would be able to beat me.
So I dug in more. “You know … I defeated the Avatar of Gravity, turned back Tiamat. Did you really think a talking ant could defeat me? Come on!”
Colel Cab swung her tail at me—and I swear to the GoneGods that she shrunk in length and girth as she came at me.
“Children have stories about the things they fear. Wi
tches, wolves, poison … even the Black Plague. Do you know the they say about you? ‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.’
“The gods used warriors and philosophers to do their bidding, but you used children. Why? Because you are weak. If you were a real god, you wouldn’t need to prey upon the helpless amongst us—” Before I could finish, Colel Cab writhed in pain, her body shrinking and folding in on itself at a rapid rate now until it finally returned to near her normal size.
“Stop it, stop it … STOP IT!” she screamed.
I ignored her pleas, jumping over her body and rushing toward the queen bee’s terraquarium.
And without really knowing what it would do, I smashed the glass with the hilt of my bug-gory sword and crushed the queen bee under the heel of my shoe.
↔↑↔
As soon as I swatted the dreaming bee, Evil-and-Cute stopped moving. I know this because OtherMe, exhausted and damn near passing out, took a meager swing at her that surprisingly connected. It wasn’t much of a punch, but it sent Evil-and-Cute back on her evil and cute butt.
She was dazed, and with her dreamer dead, it was only a matter of time before Evil-and-Cute faded away. It might just be a matter of minutes until Evil-and-Cute foamed away into obscurity, or maybe she had spent so much time existing that she was a permanent construct who just needed a bit of time to reorient herself once her RealMe was gone. I was left wondering if someone that, to borrow Sinbad’s phrase, ShouldNotBe exists for long enough, maybe that gave them life.
Either way, my philosophical debate became moot, because with the connection gone, so too was her proximity to the Crystal. With that bridge severed, the DragonFly could no longer exist. The monstrous bug started to falter. Evil-and-Cute, realizing she had lost control over the creature, screamed in abject terror.
Its tail started to turn to foam, and as the rest the DragonFly’s body also turned to foam, it drew its attention to Evil-and-Cute and bit her into two neat pieces, which began to foam themselves—just before its mandibles joined the rest of its body in a puddle of foam. Evil-and-Cute was literally washed away by the tidal wave of her nightmare.
The rush of foamy water didn’t only clear the deck of her … the foam also nearly knocked OtherMe into the sea. But at the last second, Sinbad grabbed him, her other arm still holding on to one of Penemue’s chains.
“I got you, Mr. Matthias,” she said with a wink.
Penemue lowered them onto a dry spot.
“Now what?” Sinbad asked.
Penemue pointed at Shouf and Milton, who were still busy cutting down anomaly after anomaly. “Help them?” he offered.
OtherMe nodded and pointed at an anomaly that looked like the Frankenstein’s monster version of a pudgy doll. “Personally, I kinda wanna slay Otis Lee.”
Sinbad and Penemue gave OtherMe a blank look. “You know … Otis Lee from the Cabbage Patch Kids?” he said pointing at the anomaly. More blank looks. “I guess they’re before your time,” OtherMe sighed.
Penemue readjusted his two meathooks and sneered at the army of ShouldNotBes.
“Nothing is before my time.”
↔↓↔
Colel Cab crawled over the smashed glass and her dead queen. “Oh, my queen,” she said in a mournful voice. “You and I would have brought order to this chaos.” She kissed the dead bee with her mandibles and then did something I did not expect.
She ate her.
And I don’t mean in a cannibalistic way. She ate her because if she could no longer be by her side, then at least she could be a part of her. At least, that’s how it looked to me.
She turned to me, her body smaller, the cut I inflicted on her still oozing goo. “This can’t be,” Colel Cab said. She had shriveled to smaller than her normal size … and I guessed that in trying to implement her plan, she had falsely believed herself to be bigger than she really was. With her self-belief stripped away, she was returning to her normal size—which in Colel Cab’s case was not much bigger than a tomcat. Her voice took on the high, shrill voice appropriate for her new size. “You are ruining everything. Everything!”
I almost felt sorry for her. She really believed she was going to save us all … but then again, so did Pan, and so did the Avatar of Gravity. The problem with saviors is they don’t tend to care who they step on to get what they believe we all want. Not that I said anything. Colel Cab was in pain, and even though she did horrific things, a part of me felt for her. A very small, ant-size part of me … but a part of me, nonetheless.
“This can’t be. It can’t be. I am Colel Cab. A god. More than a god. I am She-Who-Came-After and She-Who-Will-Bring-Order-to-the-Chaos.” She tried to bolster herself up, puff out her chest in pride, but she just couldn’t muster it … her doubt was too great. She could never become the god she once believed she was destined to be. Her exoskeletal face wore her defeat. She knew she was done.
“Now what?” I said to the creature, more a rhetorical question than anything else. “Now you tell the world what you tried to do. You free all of those under your spell and we go about putting things in order. You go to jail. Hell, there’s one right above us—”
“No,” she said, her voice sullen and distant. “I will not do any of those things. I may have failed to save the world, but I will not fail at condemning you. This attack, the Others kidnapping the children … all of it will make the world fall to its knees. Pain is coming. Suffering is near. And you are the cause of it, Human Jean-Luc. Your hands have blood on them and by the time this ends, your hands will be so stained that not even death will offer you relief,” she spat. Then, looking down at herself, she said, “If I am not everything, then I am nothing.” With one last effort of will, the once-decamillipede, once-millipede, once-centipede did something that showed a resolve I knew very few creatures had: she twisted around and, grabbing her own tail, took a large bite.
Then another. And a third.
“What the—?” I started in her direction, seeking to stop her, but it was too late. Those three bites were the equivalent of me biting off my own foot. And with her hard exoskeleton there was no way to stop the bleeding, no tourniquet I could put around her lower half. She would bleed to death. If, that was, she didn’t eat herself first.
Colel Cab continued to consume her lower half, preforming a harikari of the insect world. As she took one last bite out of her body, I watched the light go out of her eyes and she faded into oblivion.
↔ A BRIEF INTERLUDE ↔
Sarah hears unusual noises from above. Not that unusual noises are actually unusual anymore. Since she came to this place she has heard monsters howl, cry, screech and clamor. She has comforted little boys and girls who wailed and whined. This place … this prison has creaked and groaned, straining under its own weight.
But these noises, the ones happening right now, coming from above, are different. There is shouting that includes actual words. The monsters never speak in actual words.
And there is banging and clanging. She is pretty sure that people are fighting outside, and she knows deep down in her heart that Sinbad has come to save her. What’s more … she believes Sinbad is here.
She gathers the children in her cell and tells them that they are going home today. But she knows that it won’t be so easy. They will need to run. Maybe even hide. So she checks each child’s shoelaces and makes sure they are tied tight. She tucks in any straps, threads, strings or ponytails that the monsters could grab, and she ties Elliot’s doll tight to his body. She doesn’t want him dropping it and then stopping to pick it up. That’s when the monsters get you. She’s seen the movies. She knows the dangers.
Once the children are prepared, she has them wait near the door, ready to run at a moment’s notice.
There is a POP!—it sounds like that noise her dad’s beer makes when she shakes it too hard and he opens it.
POP! POP! POP!
Then the world goes quiet.
“How long?” asks Elliot. He squeezes her hand tight.<
br />
“Not long now,” little Sarah reassures him. “Sinbad is here. I know it. I can feel it.”
And POP! breaks the silence.
She knew Sinbad would come. She never doubted it for a minute … and now Sinbad is here.
Sinbad, her hero. Sinbad, her savior.
She is here. She is here.
She is here.
↔
But when the door to Sarah’s cell opens, it is not Sinbad who comes in to save them. It is a man in a police uniform. “Come on, kids,” he says. “You’re safe now.”
He smiles and his blue eyes scan each and every child, surveying if any of them needs to be carried. The children are scared but otherwise unharmed. Trauma is their true injury. And trauma cannot be seen. But they will all recover, that much is certain.
The children smile. A couple of them even cheer. They are all happy that they are going home. They are all happy to be saved.
They are all happy to see their savior: a handsome policeman with striking eyes and a warm smile.
They are all happy except little Sarah. She would have preferred to spend a thousand years in this cell than to be rescued by someone other than Sinbad.
“Let’s go, kids,” the policeman says. “Let’s get you home.”
One by one they shuffle out of the cell, until only little Sarah remains.
“Come on, little girl. We’ve got to get out of here.” He stretches out his hand.
Sarah takes it and, with tears in her eyes, whimpers, “She didn’t come. Sinbad didn’t come.” And perhaps the biggest wound suffered that day was the one a little girl felt when she no longer believed in her hero.
↔
Sinbad and Penemue fight side by side. Their motions are seamless. It is as if they were born to fight together. Near them is Judith who does her disappear–reappear trick and uses her poltergeist rage to blow dozens of monsters away like foamy leaves in the wind.
