The thought horrified him, with a horror that sank into all the moments that followed as he called 911, woke Marcia from her stupor-like sleep, followed the ambulance to Carrolton General, filled out the papers for psychiatric observation. But Marcia hadn't meant it. She'd lived, as she'd lived every other time, and so this suicide attempt joined the others as fresh testament to her unhappiness. To Ian's inadequacy as a husband. To the fragility that tied him to her with bonds of pity and guilt and the baseness of his own fervent desire to leave this woman who gave him nothing but who needed him so much that she attempted suicide every time he brought up divorce.
In the elevator, 911 was still busy.
Bascomb suddenly flailed at the air, screamed, "No no no!" and woke up himself and everybody else except Jessica.
He glared at them all, as if they and not he were the source of his nightmare. Cindy Smoker flipped him the finger. Ancient Cindy, eyes still closed, said, "Let her go."
Ian's throat tightened. He grabbed for Jessica's wrist and felt for a pulse. Her eyes flew open and she glared at him. She was alive. Gladness flooded him, even as he wondered why. He was never going to see any of these people again once he got off this elevator.
Ancient Cindy said, "You made it this far, sister! No fire, no smoke." Then, after a pause, "Time to die. Have mercy on our souls."
No one answered her.
The elevator rumbled and started to move.
"Fuck!" Cindy Smoker cried, in delight and fear. Ian had been asleep, dreaming in confused images about which he was sure only that they'd been bad. He got to his feet. The car had stopped between the third and fourth floors—if the thing just plunged straight down the shaft, was that survivable?
The elevator didn't plunge. It moved slowly down, everyone staring at the number display, until it reached "1." Ancient Cindy said clearly, in a voice stronger and much younger than before, "Let her go." She was staring directly at Ian.
The elevator door opened.
Only when fresh air from the lobby wafted in did Ian realize how foul the elevator had become, reeking of piss and smoke and sweat and old flesh. Carl helped Jessica to her feet. The girl seemed stronger; she said, wonderingly, "I'm hungry." Cindy Smoker still held the unlighted Parliament between two fingers. Ian saw her drop it on the elevator floor and grind it underneath her shoe.
It was early morning. People in the lobby turned in amazement as the seven captives staggered out of the car. Ian didn't wait to find out what had happened, why no one had rescued them, how a non-working elevator could have been not noticed for ten hours. He wanted to go home. He wanted to go home now, and he wanted it with the unreasoning passion of a six-year-old who has run too much, too long, too hard.
When he woke in his own bed, it was two in the afternoon. Ian showered and dressed, his mind clearer than it had been in days. Weeks. Years.
He turned on the local news station. The elevator break-down wasn't there. A solemn anchorwoman with perfect hair intoned, "—found just over an hour ago. Cause of death was allegedly a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Bascomb, under indictment for his allegedly leading role in the burgeoning financial scandal, faced almost certain imprisonment for—"
Ian stood very still.
"—chief witness Daniel Davis, at present recovering from a heart attack sustained while on vacation in Pennsylvania—"
"He knows everything."
The rest of the news, whatever it was, washed over Ian unheard.
"Let her go," the old woman said, but she hadn't meant Jessica. Jessica had looked stronger after her long, restorative sleep; she'd said she was hungry. Cindy had crushed her cigarette and maybe—maybe—hadn't lit another: "You made it this far, sister. No smoke means no fire." And to Carl, his anguish over his son masked by all that forced heartiness: "Right as rain. . .they all come again another fine day. . .cops can't stop the rain."
But to Bascomb: "Best to die."
Ian walked to his garage. At the hospital, which he had no recollection of driving to, he took the stairs to the fourth floor and stopped a nurse. "Which room is Peter Townes's?"
"Four sixty-two, first corridor on your left." She pointed.
No police guard stood in front of 462. Ian went in and said, "Peter Townes?"
"Yeah, who wants to know?" A surly teenager with Carl's round face and chunky body.
"I'm a legal advocate with—"
"The charges got dropped. I don't need any more legal shit."
"Glad to hear it." The words came out thick, uncertain.
He walked up a flight of steps. But on the landing, hand on the heavy fire door that led to Marcia's floor, Ian stopped. His eyes closed.
All the rest of his life. Tension and arguing and coldness and these suicide attempts. Unless maybe, finally, years from now, one of the attempts succeeded, long after Ian was as completely destroyed as Marcia already was. Two people going down instead of one.
"You need to die," Cindy said. But not to him.
Carefully, as if his bones were spun glass, he walked down to the first floor. Gabriella walked by, carrying a stack of blankets. She wore fresh pink scrubs.
"Nurse! Nurse!"
She turned toward him, smiling serenely. "Yes?"
"That old woman—Cindy—what is she?"
Her smile didn't waver. "I don't know what you mean."
"Don't know? I mean last night—the elevator—your patient—"
"I work in Pediatrics. And I wasn't on duty last night."
He gaped at her. She turned to leave.
"Wait, wait! You can't just—I need—"
Something moved behind her eyes, some kindness mingled with amusement. She said in the same soft voice as last night, "You people have it wrong, you know. Mercy is strained, difficult, hard. Always. Or it's not really mercy."
"But—"
"I'm sorry, I'm late. Please excuse me."
"But Cindy—"
She turned and walked away.
"Let her go." Said to him, to Ian, and not about Jessica Said by a babbling half-mad crone, by an alien or an angel of mercy or a whatever-the-hell-she-was. Said to him.
In the lobby, a volunteer at the Information Desk loaned him a phone book. He found the listings for ATTORNEYS—DIVORCE, even as he wondered if he had the strength, after all, for mercy. For himself, and maybe even for Marcia as well.
He chose a number and keyed it in. His cell phone worked perfectly.
THE ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY OF LORD GRIMM
Daryl Gregory
The 22nd Invasion of Trovenia began with a streak of scarlet against a gray sky fast as the flick of a paintbrush. The red blur zipped across the length of the island, moving west to east, and shot out to sea. The sonic boom a moment later scattered the birds that wheeled above the fish processing plant and sent them squealing and plummeting.
Elena said, "Was that—it was, wasn't it?"
"You've never seen a U-Man, Elena?" Jürgo said.
"Not in person." At nineteen, Elena Pendareva was the youngest of the crew by at least two decades, and the only female. She and the other five members of the heavy plate welding unit were perched 110 meters in the air, taking their lunch upon the great steel shoulder of the Slaybot Prime. The giant robot, latest in a long series of ultimate weapons, was unfinished, its unpainted skin speckled with bird shit, its chest turrets empty, the open dome of its head covered only by a tarp.
It had been Jürgo's idea to ride up the gantry for lunch. They had plenty of time: for the fifth day in a row, steel plate for the Slaybot's skin had failed to arrive from the foundry, and the welding crew had nothing to do but clean their equipment and play cards until the guards let them go home.
It was a good day for a picnic. An unseasonably warm spring wind blew in from the docks, carrying the smell of the sea only slightly tainted by odors of diesel fuel and fish guts. From the giant's shoulder the crew looked down on the entire capital, from the port and industrial sector below them, to the old city in
the west and the rows of gray apartment buildings rising up beyond. The only structures higher than their perch were Castle Grimm's black spires, carved out of the sides of Mount Kriegstahl, and the peak of the mountain itself.
"You know what you must do, Elena," Verner said with mock sincerity. He was the oldest in the group, a veteran mechaneer whose body was more metal than flesh. "Your first übermensch, you must make a wish."
Elena said, "Is 'Oh shit,' a wish?"
Verner pivoted on his rubber-tipped stump to follow her gaze. The figure in red had turned about over the eastern sea, and was streaking back toward the island. Sunlight glinted on something long and metallic in its hands.
The UM dove straight toward them.
There was nowhere to hide. The crew sat on a naked shelf of metal between the gantry and the sheer profile of the robot's head. Elena threw herself flat and spread her arms on the metal surface, willing herself to stick.
Nobody else moved. Maybe because they were old men, or maybe because they were all veterans, former zoomandos and mechaneers and castle guards. They'd seen dozens of U-Men, fought them even. Elena didn't know if they were unafraid or simply too old to care much for their skin.
The UM shot past with a whoosh, making the steel shiver beneath her. She looked up in time to take in a flash of metal, a crimson cape, black boots—and then the figure crashed through the wall of Castle Grimm. Masonry and dust exploded into the air.
"Lunch break," Jürgo said in his Estonian accent, "is over."
Toolboxes slammed, paper sacks took to the wind. Elena got to her feet. Jürgo picked up his lunch pail with one clawed foot, spread his patchy, soot-stained wings, and leaned over the side, considering. His arms and neck were skinny as always, but in the past few years he'd grown a beer gut.
Elena said, "Jürgo, can you still fly?"
"Of course," he said. He hooked his pail to his belt and backed away from the edge. "However, I don't believe I'm authorized for this air space."
The rest of the crew had already crowded into the gantry elevator. Elena and Jürgo pressed inside and the cage began to slowly descend, rattling and shrieking.
"What's it about this time, you think?" Verner said, clockwork lungs wheezing. "Old Rivet Head kidnap one of their women?" Only the oldest veterans could get away with insulting Lord Grimm in mixed company. Verner had survived at least four invasions that she knew of. His loyalty to Trovenia was assumed to go beyond patriotism into something like ownership.
Guntis, a gray, pebble-skinned amphibian of Latvian descent, said, "I fought this girlie with a sword once, Energy Lady—"
"Power Woman," Elena said in English. She'd read the Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm to her little brother dozens of times before he learned to read it himself. The Lord's most significant adversaries were all listed in the appendix, in multiple languages.
"That's the one, Par-wer Woh-man," Guntis said, imitating her. "She had enormous—"
"Abilities," Jürgo said pointedly. Jürgo had been a friend of Elena's father, and often played the protective uncle.
"I think he meant to say 'tits,'" Elena said. Several of the men laughed.
"No! Jürgo is right," Guntis said. "They were more than breasts. They had abilities. I think one of them spoke to me."
The elevator clanged down on the concrete pad and the crew followed Jürgo into the long shed of the 3000 line. The factory floor was emptying. Workers pulled on coats, joking and laughing as if it were a holiday.
Jürgo pulled aside a man and asked him what was going on. "The guards have run away!" the man said happily. "Off to fight the übermensch!"
"So what's it going to be, boss?" Guntis said. "Stay or go?"
Jürgo scratched at the cement floor, thinking. Half-assembled Slaybot 3000s, five-meter-tall cousins to the colossal Prime, dangled from hooks all along the assembly line, wires spilling from their chests, legs missing. The factory was well behind its quota for the month. As well as for the quarter, year, and five-year mark. Circuit boards and batteries were in particularly short supply, but tools and equipment vanished daily. Especially scarce were acetylene tanks, a home-heating accessory for the very cold, the very stupid, or both.
Jürgo finally shook his feathered head and said, "Nothing we can do here. Let's go home and hide under our beds."
"And in our bottles," Verner said.
Elena waved good-bye and walked toward the women's changing rooms to empty her locker.
A block from her apartment she heard Mr. Bojars singing out, "Guh-RATE day for sausa-JEZ! Izza GREAT day for SAW-sages!" The mechaneer veteran was parked at his permanent spot at the corner of Glorious Victory Street and Infinite Progress Avenue, in the shadow of the statue of Grimm Triumphant. He saw her crossing the intersection and shouted, "My beautiful Elena! A fat bratwurst to go with that bread, maybe. Perfect for a celebration!"
"No thank you, Mr. Bojars." She hoisted the bag of groceries onto her hip and shuffled the welder's helmet to her other arm. "You know we've been invaded, don't you?"
The man laughed heartily. "The trap is sprung! The crab is in the basket!" He wore the same clothes he wore every day, a black nylon ski hat and a green, grease-stained parka decorated at the breast with three medals from his years in the motorized cavalry. The coat hung down to cover where his flesh ended and his motorcycle body began.
"Don't you worry about Lord Grimm," he said. "He can handle any American muscle-head stupid enough to enter his lair. Especially the Red Meteor."
"It was Most Excellent Man," Elena said, using the Trovenian translation of his name. "I saw the Staff of Mightiness in his hand, or whatever he calls it."
"Even better! The man's an idiot. A U-Moron."
"He's defeated Lord Grimm several times," Elena said. "So I hear."
"And Lord Grimm has been declared dead a dozen times! You can't believe the underground newspapers, Elena. You're not reading that trash are you?"
"You know I'm not political, Mr. Bojars."
"Good for you. This Excellent Man, let me tell you something about—yes sir? Great day for a sausage." He turned his attention to the customer and Elena quickly wished him luck and slipped away before he could begin another story.
The small lobby of her apartment building smelled like burnt plastic and cooking grease. She climbed the cement stairs to the third floor. As usual the door to her apartment was wide open, as was the door to Mr. Fishman's apartment across the hall. Staticky television laughter and applause carried down the hallway: It sounded like Mr. Sascha's Celebrity Polka Fun-Time. Not even an invasion could pre-empt Mr. Sascha.
She knocked on the frame of his door. "Mr. Fishman," she called loudly. He'd never revealed his real name. "Mr. Fishman, would you like to come to dinner tonight?"
There was no answer except for the blast of the television. She walked into the dim hallway and leaned around the corner. The living room was dark except for the glow of the TV. The little set was propped up on a wooden chair at the edge of a large cast iron bathtub, the light from its screen reflecting off the smooth surface of the water. "Mr. Fishman? Did you hear me?" She walked across the room, shoes crinkling on the plastic tarp that covered the floor, and switched off the TV.
The surface of the water shimmied. A lumpy head rose up out of the water, followed by a pair of dark eyes, a flap of nose, and a wide carp mouth.
"I was watching that," the zooman said.
"Someday you're going to pull that thing into the tub and electrocute yourself," Elena said.
He exhaled, making a rude noise through rubbery lips.
"We're having dinner," Elena said. She turned on a lamp. Long ago Mr. Fishman had pushed all the furniture to the edge of the room to make room for his easels. She didn't see any new canvasses upon them, but there was an empty liquor bottle on the floor next to the tub. "Would you like to join us?"
He eyed the bag in her arms. "That wouldn't be, umm, fresh catch?"
"It is, as a matter of fact."
"I
suppose I could stop by." His head sank below the surface.
In Elena's own apartment, Grandmother Zita smoked and rocked in front of the window, while Mattias, nine years old, sat at the table with his shoe box of colored pencils and several gray pages crammed with drawings. "Elena, did you hear?" Matti asked. "A U-Man flew over the island! They canceled school!"
"It's nothing to be happy about," Elena said. She rubbed the top of her brother's head. The page showed a robot of Matti's own design marching toward a hyper-muscled man in a red cape. In the background was a huge, lumpy monster with triangle eyes—an escaped MoG, she supposed.
"The last time the U-men came," Grandmother Zita said, "more than robots lost their heads. This family knows that better than most. When your mother—"
"Let's not talk politics, Grandmother." She kissed the old woman on the cheek, then reached past her to crank open the window—she'd told the woman to let in some air when she smoked in front of Matti, to no avail. Outside, sirens wailed.
Elena had been only eleven years old during the last invasion. She'd slept through most of it, and when she woke to sirens that morning the apartment was cold and the lights didn't work. Her parents were government geneticists—there was no other kind—and often were called away at odd hours. Her mother had left her a note asking her to feed Baby Matti and please stay indoors. Elena made oatmeal, the first of many breakfasts she would make for her little brother. Only after her parents failed to come home did she realize that the note was a kind of battlefield promotion to adulthood: impossible to refuse because there was no one left to accept her refusal.
Mr. Fishman, in his blue bathrobe and striped pajama pants, arrived a half hour later, his great webbed feet slapping the floor. He sat at the table and argued with Grandmother Zita about which of the twenty-one previous invasions was most violent. There was a time in the 1960s and seventies when their little country seemed to be under attack every other month. Matti listened raptly.
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