The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  Seed flak shredded the leaves overhead and ricocheted off the trees. Grunts were caught without their armor and the rain fed their wounds. The darkness was filled with cries and moans. Men were laying fire down into the feet of the trees, and in some small corner of the night a figure burned inside its uniform of leaves. The air smelled of phosphor and blossoms. The grunts called in for arty, for air, but nobody was sure of their coordinates. And then someone yelled for them to back it out of there before the leafheads sewed them in. The Cav was coming. They began to withdraw, leaving their gear behind and hauling only as much ammo as they could strap to their backs. But when they hit the perimeter, they got caught up in their own wire and had to cut their way out with heat knives while the vegheads routed them with seed flak and compost pellets. In the panic, Tibs tripped one of their own mirror mines and what it did to his image in that instant made his face break like glass.

  When the wire finally fell, the grunts broke from the treeline and regrouped, hauling what wounded they could. Stimpfel and Weeps set up a chatter gun on a nearby hilltop and kept the veegs pinned to the horticulture until the Cav came in and laid down dispersion foam. Grunts were stripping down in the rain and frantically running flashlights over their bodies, searching for anything that looked like seed entry. They radioed for medevac and set up triage behind a hill of blistered tin out of which the half-melted corpses of Macks erupted like an expedition of puppets frozen in a glacier.

  Wally was tearing open packets of herbicide with his teeth and handing them to Slice. Cecum had taken two rounds of high-speed seed in his gut before being hit by a nitrogen pellet, and the wound was blooming fast. His right arm burst and the medic lopped it off to stop the spread. But the fertilizer was feeding the seeds now and the bullets wrapped their roots around his bones, burrowing into everything inside Cecum that was soft and vital. They’d kept him standing to cut down on the ground surface, and now his boots had broken open and his feet had taken root.

  ‘That’s cool,’ Slice kept saying, ‘that’s what we want.’

  Air support thundered over their heads and the rain fell and grunts were screaming to be pruned, and in the middle of all the shit coming down on them, somebody was singing. At first Wally thought it was a music gun, but then he recognized Vomer’s voice. He was crooning a weepy ballad about a woman who fashions a tiny man out of chicken to remind her of her lover gone away to war; she lets the little man build a house for himself inside her vagina, and when one day the lover returns she is forced to choose between responsibility and desire.

  Whatever was growing inside Cecum had made him rigid, and he stood there in the downpour with his arms forking out along the horizon as if he’d been crucified to the rain. ‘I’m fucked. Oh man, look at me, I’m fucked,’ he wailed until his screams turned to leaves and his eyes burst into blossoms, and Slice told Wally all they could do now was pack him for flight.

  A lone leafhead was still sniping at them with a compost gun and some grunts had gathered around the chatter rifle and were taking bets on who could pop him.

  ‘Dumb fucker,’ Stevo laughed, his voice edging into hysteria. ‘Who’s he think he’s gonna hit with that fert? Cecum here’s already a fuckin’ forest. And I know I didn’t catch any seed.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Vomer grinned, ‘how d’you know that?’

  ‘I just fuckin’ know, asshole.’

  Dustoff finally showed, dropping down through the rain in a swarm of lights and wind. They clipped Cecum’s roots, sprayed him down with liquid starch and wrapped him in wet burlap like a tree about to be shipped through the mail. Then they strapped him to a chopper and scrambled out from under the blades.

  The Cav dropped in a team of Root Rangers with ugly hardware, and after the greenery had been leveled the grunts went in behind them to mop up. They unzippered the trees and found the roasted corpses of leafheads curled like fetuses inside their wooden wombs.

  The veegs must have had a Mack advisor attached to their unit because the grunts found a Wooden Colonel lying scorched in that burnt wreckage of trees. It sat in the mud with its legs broken beneath it and its wooden head swollen with rain. The mouth tried to speak but all that came out was a clicking sound and the grunts stood around draped in their ponchos like great dark birds, joking nervously while Litz radioed back for orders. The Mack’s chestpan was cracked and someone reached in there with a stick and tickled the pink flaps of flesh dangling through the breach in the steel. The thing coughed feebly and puked up a bit of pulp wrapped in threads of radiator sputum.

  ‘Hey, don’t fuck with that thing, man.’

  Litz crouched in the mud, his ears plugged into the ether. ‘They want us to break him down,’ he said.

  ‘Shit.’ Vomer spat into the rain. ‘Fuckin’ spooks.’

  The Mack wasn’t dead yet, so they stapled it to the dirt, and as they worked it watched them through lenses clouded with lymph. They ran a wire into him and when they opened his seams with a heat knife and a portable saw they found a live pigeon in there, its body woven through with wires. Vomer clipped the fibers, then held the bird by its wings and beat it against a tree until it looked like a feathered mojo bag leaking gruel. The apertures of the Mack’s eyes clicked closed. ‘You’re set,’ someone said. Reno hit it twice with an air chisel and its head broke open. Vomer checked it out for triggers and when nothing showed they fished out the map cylinder with a wire, cataloged it and sent it back to Intel in a sealed pouch. Then they cut the lenses out, crouched in the smoldering mud and drew cards for them.

  Fuck protocol. They’d lost seven men.

  That autumn, Mack shelled the city and fire roosted above the buildings like some new form of weather. Toward the end of October a team of wooden guerrillas with wires and rubber fingers commandeered one of the radio stations and Emma saw an old woman and her chauffeur killed in their car by a boobytrapped song. Their heads seemed to swell with music and then burst against the glass, and when the cops finally cut through the hood, clipped the battery cables and opened the car the interior looked like one of those canvasses she’d seen before the war in uptown galleries specializing in Impact Painting. At night, despite repeated protests from the Vegan ambassador, defol trucks rumbled down the avenues, watering the asphalt with herbicide. Come morning the air had a thin bitter smell and the trees sewn to their cubes of dirt stood dark and crooked against the dawn. The panic was on. Everyone was holding their money or shifting it out of the city in preparation for flight, and of necessity the skin industry seemed to pass overnight into a division of the War Department. The premier flesh houses were occupied by noncom officers and spooks from Intel, while the rest of the waterfront was overrun with grunts on three-day passes. Of the civilian clientele, only a few hardcore fatalists still haunted The Hairy Clam, Merkle’s Rubber Womb or the black and blue bar of The Iron Tongue, where the whores had to unzipper their faces to suck you.

  Emma’s girls were skittish. The blare of a car horn sent them bolting from their beds, and every Friday at noon, when the carting company came through, the crash of the dumpster out back brought them up out of their sleep still dripping dreams and togaed in sheets damp with business and fear. They would pull on their pollen masks and clot the hallways like trapped crickets, chittering, goggle-eyed and anonymous, and no amount of Darvon could coax them back to sleep.

  She had the house on Albacore Street by then. Her maids swept throat clamps and bits of metal out of the beds in the morning. At night, tracers stitched the northern sky with messages too brief to read, as if the war were some subliminal advertisement for a product no one could name. When the peace talks collapsed in early November, Emma shifted her money into an offshore account, had her windows painted with anti-flak lacquer and installed an escape ladder in her third-floor bedroom. At Hippolyta’s urging she increased the brothel’s security budget and rented a goon from one of the waterfront temp agencies in order to beef up the door during business hours. They kept a riot gun, a pair of pruning shears, a spray
rifle full of Blue Elixir and two canisters of silence foam behind the bar. But the threats were myriad; there were only so many precautions Emma could take and inevitably the changes brought by the war left her confused and depressed. All these attempts to reduce risk, to make the city safe, to quantify it, were like trying to capture fire inside a paper box. The war could not be reduced to something logical. Her clientele had changed drastically, their desires mystified her, and for the first time since she had opened her own house Emma was scared. On her afternoon rounds of the rooms she came across ominous objects deposited in ashtrays and toilets. Three teeth wrapped in leaves. Dried vegetable ligaments. A pair of paper ears. A knackle of wet seeds webbed in pulp and hair. And once, in one of the third-floor bathrooms, something small and dark unfurling in the water at the bottom of the bowl, bleeding color.

  City Hall ferried grunts in from the zone on fuck junkets for R&R. They arrived at the bordello’s check-in desk like travelers disembarking from a dream. Eyes baked into a glaze. Skin ravaged by de-fol. Divots of hair scooped from their scalps by parasites, fear and fert burns. They wore necklaces of detonator cable strung with wooden tongues, lung sprockets and scrimshawed stalks of bone. They kept love letters, dried Yap paws, and puppets of cloth and bundled leaves tucked inside their helmet liners to shelter their heads from stray pieces of sky. Some had their nostrils pierced with firing pins; others wore keechee pouches stapled to their tongues and stuffed with curative seeds, twigs and Vegan prayers tattooed on scraps of rind. One grunt had a trained clock spider that lived inside his nose and roamed his face on a thin leash that was anchored to his ear; in a fit of nostalgia he’d removed the spider’s trigger and now it was just a gimmick ticking in his head. Others converted to Carnism, swore off flesh and wore the anal effigies that the monks shipped to the front by the crateful…and still, come R&R, they shuffled into the madam’s kitchen in embarrassment, asking for jars of vinegar in which to soak their effigies while they fucked her girls.

  One night an Aluminum Terrorist slipped through a checkpoint on the northern border with forged documents and a paper face. He took a table at The Golden Triangle, then went into the bathroom, where he opened his own seams with a heat knife and assembled a music gun from the pieces he’d concealed inside his body. He came out firing staccatos and fugues. The diners were caught with their food in the air. The music funneled into their ears and traveled down their bones, tearing holes in their bodies as it sought some point of exit. In some cases, it erupted from the victims’ mouths in a bloody song, bursting their tongues and blowing out their teeth, sparing the vital organs. As they lay bleeding, music pouring out of them, the wounded tried to plug their ears with napkins or bits of food. A desperate few pierced their eardrums with toothpicks and chopsticks then cowered beneath their tables as the mechanical assassin moved through the nightclub, until finally one of Ho’s sumos, his ears sealed with wonton skins, managed to draw his pocket cannon and blow a hole in the Mack’s chestpan. Mucus and motor lymph spurted from the wound and the killer’s paper clothes began to dissolve as the fluids saturated them. By the time the cops, the AT boys and the spooks from Intel arrived, the sumos had stomped him flat as a cookie sheet. A pair of trigger specialists had to lift him with a spatula and tongs, while the AT crew sprayed everything down with silence foam. They brought in bunting and sound tarpaulins to muffle the lingering music, and they wrapped the wounded in soundproof blankets to keep them from contaminating the medical crews.

  The following evening G.A.S.M. convened an emergency meeting. By the time Emma arrived everyone was talking about the latest attack. Earlier that day, a typewriter bomb had exploded at a blackmarket skin house over on Eel Street, sending words raining through the cardboard walls of the boudoirs and tattooing copies of the Machinist’s ‘Twelve Terms’ on the bodies of whores and patrons alike. Forty pieces of merch ruined. Their bodies had been obliterated by language, all traces of their sexuality buried beneath a storm of words. There was something horrific about the sight of those who had survived a typewriter attack. Their faces scarred with text, as if they had become hostages to some awful advertisement. A few of the victims took to working the streets around the library where bibliophiles sometimes paid them to satisfy their fantasies amid the desolate hush of the reading rooms and the deserted stacks where the only witnesses to this erotic pantomime of the blank body and its printed partner were other words.

  Everyone was wearing muscle. Ho arrived dressed in a live suit of sumos, a fat jigsaw of killers tailored into a sort of double-breasted kung-fu affair replete with epaulets of braided hair and a shirt that seemed to have been woven out of eyes. Rumors were rampant. The enemy, someone said, had launched a major offensive to coincide with the spring thaw. The situation was so dire that Morrison Carney himself was expected to attend that evening’s meeting. Everyone was a wreck. Galena had doubled up on her vitamin enemas and confessed to Emma that she was undergoing sneeze therapy to deal with her anxiety. And even Merkle seemed to have developed a nervous leak. His cheeks were slack and stitched with fine wrinkles. His clothes hung on him, and the inflation specialist he traveled with was checking his air pressure every ten minutes.

  Just as Vito Vesuvius gaveled the meeting to order, there was a commotion out in the lobby. The doors of the assembly spilled open and Morrison Carney rode down the velvet aisle of the chamber trailing his mute entourage of accountants, Carnite monks and tailored killers, and driving before him the ancient doorkeeper like some gaudy defector from an army of circus monkeys in his blood-colored uniform with its ridiculous panoply of sashes and honorary medals from apocryphal orders and secret societies for the preservation of pleasure: golden penises, ribbons, lace garters, and tiny velvet vaginas embroidered with jewels. Carney’s mechanical chair came to rest at the foot of the speaker’s podium.

  The tycoon was accompanied by a pair of Mouths, one of whom served as his interpreter. The first Mouth carried a pair of ivory chopsticks in his pocket – talking sticks, which he used specifically for the purpose of communicating with the Carnites.

  Carney nodded, cheeks puckered as he gummed the stone fetish in his mouth. A couple of Emma’s clients were Carnite buffs, and she’d heard it said that the mannequin in his mouth had no face. That the old man’s own effigy was the Thirteenth Aspect, CARNEY ABSENT, and that each of his effigies was carved by a blind monk and delivered to the tycoon’s mansion in an opaque hingeless box of hardened water so that no one but Carney would ever set eyes on it.

  The two monks walked up and down the aisles with carved lumen trays tweezered between their Edgar sticks. Piled upon the trays were tiny stone effigies of Morrison Carney affixed with rubber gaskets. ‘Mr. Carney must ask you to please seal your ears,’ said the first Mouth. He was wearing razor-tipped Teflon espadrilles and a tie made of water. As one of the trays passed before him he chose two stones and gently screwed them into his ears. When he lifted his arms, Emma could see the dark lump of the holster fastened to his upper torso like a nylon leech.

  The second Mouth was blind and his ears had been sewn shut. Someone had sawn off his fingers and his hands looked like two canoe paddles. Sockets sealed with scars.

  When everyone’s ears were safely sealed, the monks unmuzzled the blind one’s mouth and Emma saw his lips move. Across the room, the prisoner suddenly stiffened in its skin of burlap and blue plastic, and then something inside it softened, some secret wire went slack, and the Mack collapsed in a heap on the floor of the assembly.

  For a moment nobody moved. Then Carney nodded hungrily. The monks placed the harness back on the blind Mouth’s head and tightened the jaw screws. The one in the Teflon espadrilles removed the effigies from his ears and gestured for the pimps to do the same. The lumen platters were passed around and for a moment the only noise in the hall was the sound of the small stones clattering against the trays of hardened light. Emma watched as Carney’s monks approached the fallen figure and rolled it over on its back. One began cutting into its ches
t with a water knife, while the other inserted his sticks into the wound, pried back the edges and removed a dark object: a hardened bird. Emma heard Merkle gasp beside her and for a moment she thought one of the ear effigies had pierced his latex and he’d sprung a leak. But then she heard his sibilant lisp – he seemed to be speaking from somewhere inside her hair, murmuring his astonishment.

  The extracted bird looked like a statue carved out of bread and the monk waved it in the air as if it were a trophy.

  Vito climbed down from his chair and pushed his way through the wall of owners to where the Mouth stood beside Carney and the leashed leathermouth. The Mouth cocked his head toward the monks and gestured with one of his talking sticks.

  ‘Go touch it,’ he told Vito. ‘Don’t be afraid. Yes, yes,’ he nodded, ‘it’s all right, touch it! You’ll find it’s quite dead.’

  Vito snatched the ivory stick out of the Mouth’s hand and cautiously approached the monks. One of them lifted the hardened bird in his Edgar sticks and Vesuvius stopped in his tracks.

  ‘A little moral support would be nice,’ he hissed over his shoulder.

  There was a mechanical chorus of clicks as muscle and management alike, reaching into their suits and purses, hitching up their skirts to get at thigh holsters, produced a small arsenal of weapons and cocked them at the object tweezered in the monk’s sticks.

  Vito poked at the bird with the talking stick. Tapped on it. Then, satisfied, tossed the stick aside and took the bird from the monk. He hefted it in his hands, lifted it over his head and hurled it at the floor, where it shattered into clumps and fine brown powder. He crouched. ‘Fuckin’ clay.’