“Just so we’re clear,” Malik said, “was that guilt or good, honest lust? Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine either way.”
“Just fine?”
He kissed her. “You practically killed me just now, so it may have been attempted murder, actually, but again, I’m totally fine with that.”
“Hey, Malik?” Shade raised her head and turned him to look at her. “I love you.”
They were silent for a while, savoring, relaxing, ignoring the rest of the world.
“This is all unreal, isn’t it?” Shade asked, looking up at the ceiling. “Us. We’re not real.”
“Of course we’re real,” Malik said. “Yes, maybe we’re in a simulation. But we have no alternative to treating it as real because this is the only reality we have. The walls are solid. Gravity still works. Pain is real, as real as ever. Pleasure, too.”
“It’s a bit creepy knowing they’re seeing everything.”
“Yeah. A bit.”
“Are we some kind of experiment? Or a movie? Or a game?”
“I hope to find out,” Malik said. “When we have time, I’m going back. If Francis is cool with it.”
“I worry about you doing that.”
“Why?”
“It’s dangerous, duh.”
“No, but why do you worry about me, specifically?” He rolled toward her and reached under the blanket.
“Well, you’re a valuable member of the team.”
“Uh-huh. And?”
“Mmmmm. What? Oh, well, what you’re doing . . . right now . . . that’s part of it.”
“And?”
“Really, Malik? I have to say it again?”
“Yes. You do.”
“I love you, Malik. Even when I was pretending not to, I did.”
“All right, then. I’m going to take a shower.”
“Um, I don’t think so. You started something, you finish it.”
CHAPTER 13
Parenting Fails
“DADDY IS DEAD.”
Simone, fully human again, limply accepted her mother’s hug. Her mother, Annette Belevance—she’d reclaimed her maiden name—held her out at arm’s length, searching her face.
“It’s true,” Simone said. “We were both hit by bits of the rock. They rounded up a bunch of us and drove us to the Pine Barrens. Then they shot us, Mom. They shot us down.”
Simone’s affect was blank, her mind doing all it could to protect her from what she had seen. She needed to keep the emotions tamped down, way down inside, because the reality was too big, too horrible to absorb. Her father had been gunned down. She had nearly been gunned down. Men and women and kids who’d done nothing wrong had been machine-gunned by people working for some part of their own government.
“But . . . but you’re okay, you’re not shot. Baby love, this last day has been so stressful and scary, it’s no surprise you’d . . .”
Simone had started to morph. It was easier than wasting time trying to convince her mother. Her clothing receded, exposing flesh already turning the blue of a clear evening sky. Lines appeared as if drawn by an invisible pen, lines detailing a pattern of tiny diamond shapes covering every inch of her save for her face. Her skin roughened as the diamond pattern resolved into thousands of tiny wings.
Then Simone took a deep breath and silently commanded her wings to beat. She rose from the floor, floated up to the ceiling, then settled back down.
“I’m not having a stress reaction,” Simone said flatly. “I’m one of those rock people. A mutant.”
Her mother fainted, eyes rolling up, neck allowing her head to loll, knees buckling. Simone made a grab for her, mostly caught her, and managed to deposit her in a breakfast-nook chair. She brought water and dribbled a bit into her mother’s mouth as she knelt beside her.
“Listen, Mom, I’m ninety percent sure Daddy is dead. I know you’re divorced and hate each other, but, still . . .”
Her mother nodded, eyes welling with tears.
“And I guess . . .” Simone looked around the familiar kitchen, suddenly overwhelmed by what she’d told her mother, and what she had still to tell her. “Look, maybe nothing else will happen, but they have my name, and if they realize I’m not dead, they’ll come here looking for me.”
“I’m calling Shepp!”
Shepp was the family lawyer. “This is way beyond lawyers, Mom. This is . . . Normal has been left-swiped. Normal is done. I can fly. None of this is anything a lawyer can help with. I have to hide. I have to disappear until we can get a grip on . . . on . . .” She waved her hand, encompassing the world. “I need money. Cash. I know Daddy has . . . had . . . some in his safe, so I’m heading there next before the cops take the place apart.” She took her mother’s hands. Annette Belevance had never been a strong woman, never forceful, very much unlike her ex-husband. Or her daughter. “Listen, I can’t have a phone; they can track phones. If Mary calls . . . just tell her I love her.”
Simone packed some things—clothing, toiletries, a book—in her backpack, then stood at the foot of her bed and looked around at walls and furnishings that now seemed alien.
“I’m never coming back here, am I?”
Her voice found no echo in the room. Her bed. Her desk. Her computer with some of the short films she’d made. It was painful to say goodbye to those original files. “Oh well, they’re on YouTube,” she told herself.
She went back into the kitchen and hugged her mother, forcing smiles and reassurances that she did not believe. Her mother still lived in a world of the expected, the predictable, the normal. Her mother had not heard the brutal chatter of machine guns. She had not seen men stripping bodies of wallets and watches and anything else that might identify them. She had not seen burning bodies.
She had not been soaked in a dying man’s blood as she lay with her face in the dirt waiting for death to find her.
Simone went for the stairs, but instead of taking them down to the street, she walked up to the top floor, then climbed the metal staircase leading to the roof. A small wood-framed deck had been built atop the roof, and people often sunbathed there on good days. Today the roof was abandoned.
Simone walked to the edge and looked down at the tree-lined Sixty-Ninth Street nine floors down. Looking to her right she saw a strangely abandoned segment of Columbus Avenue with far less traffic than normal. New York City was traumatized and scared, but New Yorkers had been through bad times before, so there was no panicked evacuation of the city. On the other hand, few people felt like going out for a stroll. It was hunker-down time in the Big Apple.
Simone closed her eyes and focused. Morphing was easy once you’d done it. Convincing yourself you could fly was harder. Even after she’d morphed, even after she had risen three feet off the roof, it still took an effort of will to zoom away and see that the ground was now a dizzying hundred feet down.
But once she got past the fear of heights . . . well, then it was amazing. It felt unreal, like she was in a movie. Like the world was all a green screen and she was an actor being held up by wires. Unreal. A fantasy. And yet, she was in the air. Flying! She felt a chilly breeze, saw a starling go careening by at eye level, read the numbers on the tops of police cars, caught glimpses into apartment windows.
Simone genuinely laughed aloud as she discovered that she could hover in midair. And it was effortless! She knew intuitively that there was more at work here than the physical force of the wings—they couldn’t possibly support her weight, let alone allow her to zoom over the rooftops. And she knew that her body, which was capable at its best of running two, maybe three miles, was in no way capable of generating the energy required for this.
And yet: flying!
Despite the horror that weighed on her soul, she might have played around, had some fun with this astonishing ability, but within seconds of her tiny wings appearing came the oppressive sense of being watched. More than watched: spied on. Probed. She wished she knew others of her kind; she’d have liked to ask them about this. It made her feel wrong.
Made her feel violated.
Simone flew above Central Park, heading for her father’s apartment, aided greatly by Manhattan’s gridwork, which allowed her to navigate fairly easily, keeping track of numbered streets and named avenues. She landed on the very balcony where she’d stood with her father. She de-morphed and went inside.
“Simone, is that you?”
Simone screamed and backed away, nearly tripped on the carpet, and banged into an ottoman.
The thing before her had roughly the shape of a man, but with nothing solid about it and nothing that was still. It was like a tornado of insects trimmed into insect topiary, an insect cloud buzzing and chittering and whirling but keeping itself to a sketch of a human body.
That this bizarre thing spoke was astonishing. The voice was a breeze of insect noises modulated into speech. It sounded like a bad phone connection.
“Sweetheart, it’s me. It’s Dad!”
“Oh, God,” Simone whispered, backing away. “Oh, God. Daddy? No! Daddy?”
The bug man spread vibrating arms wide and twirled as if showing off a new suit. “Look at me! I’m one now, a mutant! And so are you, I see. Ha, ha, ha!” Like it was an accomplishment. Like he was happy about it. Like he expected his daughter to say, Well done, Dad!
“Change back!”
Markovic frowned. “Don’t be scared. If you knew what I can do now. I mean, wow! Watch this!”
Markovic floated upward and flattened himself against the ceiling, becoming a single layer of tiny creatures, like a silhouette of a man. Then he re-formed into a single thick line, maybe six inches across and seven or eight feet long, and this bug-spear went racing around the room in a circle, faster and faster until he was just a blur, and Simone actually felt a breeze.
“Dad, change back! Okay, just . . . just . . .”
Markovic re-formed himself into a human shape. “Can’t do it, sweetie. I tried, but the thing is, the old me? I think he died. When I tried to change back, it was like a wall. Like I was trying to open a door that was locked tight.”
“You can’t change back?” Simone’s voice shook and she made no effort to conceal her disgust or her pity.
“Hey, I’m not so gross, am I? I’m still your dad!”
“You’re like some insane ad for an exterminator. You’re . . . you’re a cloud of bugs! What are you even talking about?”
“Actually,” Markovic said, in a familiarly pedantic tone, “I’m still me, but . . .” He stopped talking and sounded discouraged.
“Are you crazy? You’re still you? How . . . what the . . . you’re still my dad? In what universe?”
“I guess it isn’t exactly pretty,” Markovic allowed, as all the while Simone peered at bugs she did not recognize, a cloud of them, coppery and black with, here and there, dabs of red or blue.
It reminded Simone of a time when she was walking in Central Park and saw what she thought was an injured dog. It had been a dead dog, its crushed head entirely covered in flies.
“I feel pretty good, actually, for a dead man,” Markovic said cheerfully. “Can’t wait for my first board meeting. Hah! Look at me now! And . . .” He inclined his “head” toward her, his featureless, mouthless, eyeless “head,” and in a lower tone said, “And you would not believe what I can do to people who mess with me.”
“Are you trying to tell me this is a good thing?”
I’m talking to a cloud of bugs!
He shrugged figurative shoulders. “What have I always taught you? Don’t argue with facts; accept them, use them, profit from them.”
“I’m . . . I’m getting a drink.”
“Kind of early, isn’t it?”
“Are you seriously giving me grief over drinking? My father is an infestation and I’m . . . something, I don’t know what! I kind of think I should be able to have a drink!” She walked on wobbly legs to the sideboard, poured the first thing she saw into a glass, and swallowed it in a single, fiery gulp.
“You know I’ve always taken a very liberal approach to your drinking, but—”
“Shut up!” Simone roared. “Shut up! Are you out of your mind? What’s next, you want to ask me why I’m getting a D in calculus?”
“You’re getting a—”
“No! No! No! You don’t get to pretend this is normal! This is not normal and it’s not okay.”
“I can see in 360 degrees,” Markovic said. “Front, back, up, down, I see it all. The sense of power . . . just imagine what you and I could do together.”
“Give people nightmares?” Simone shot back.
“You don’t get it because all you ever do is listen to your wimp professors,” Markovic said, somehow conveying real anger. “This is power, Simone! Power! They tried to kill me, but I got them first, and oh boy, did I ever get them.”
Simone felt her stomach churn. Too much! Her breath came in shallow gasps. Her heart pounded in a thumping, irregular beat. “What have you done?”
Markovic laughed, a dry sound like corn husks rubbing together. “My little buggies are not exactly, um, sanitary. They seem to be carriers of some kind of disease, and man, you should see how fast it works! All I had to do was think: Danger! And they attack. Hah!”
Simone was speechless. Her mother had tried to pretend everything was normal. Now her father was actually trying to convince her it was a good thing that he was—permanently—a malicious disease vector. Had it all been less deadly serious, she might have laughed; it was such a perfect microcosm of her parents: a mother in denial, a father always looking out for himself.
“I came for cash,” Simone said. “They’ll come looking for me, for anyone who got away. I can’t use a credit card.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Simone. You’ll stay here with me. We’ll work together. We’ll be a team and take all the sons of bitches down! You’re always talking trash about the powers that be—well, the powers that be just murdered us in a field.”
Finally, an emotion she understood. He was angry. But Simone shook her head. “Dad, no. When I talk about people with wealth and power, I just want to see poor people not being screwed all the time. I’m not into hurting anyone. Do you even know me?”
Markovic’s bug cloud buzzed. It was, Simone realized with a shudder of disgust, an expression of disappointment, even dismissal. He was actually annoyed at her! Annoyed that she did not instantly see all the wonderful possibilities in having a gross mutant for a father.
“Well, I have some thinking to do,” Markovic said. “I’ll be in my office when you’re ready to talk sensibly. Now, go to your room.”
“Go to my room?” Her mouth hung open in disbelief.
Go to my room?
Markovic stabbed a vague finger in the direction of the room she used when at her father’s place. “Now, young lady. Go. To. Your. Room!”
Simone went to her room, slammed the door behind her, and just stood staring at her plush, queen-sized bed and her books and her desk with the Apple monitor glowing softly, open to a web page on the filmography of Edgar Wright.
I’ve gone crazy. I’ve lost my mind!
She thought of calling Mary. But what could she say? Hi, Mary. Guess what? I can fly, and my father’s a bunch of diseased bugs! Come on over, we’ll order a pizza.
She sat on the edge of her bed, feeling that this familiar place was no longer familiar. She knew each element of her surroundings, had chosen most of them herself, but they all belonged to someone else now. That Simone no longer existed; that Simone had died in the Pine Barrens, almost as surely as her father had died.
Simone cried a little, silent weeping. She cried for herself and for her father. No, she didn’t approve of what he did for a living, or his politics, and yes they fought, but he was still her father and she was his daughter, and that could not just be dismissed. She’d never believed that the tensions between them would be permanent. Simone was honest enough to know that some of the issues she had with her father were at least partly her fault. She wasn’t so simple as to see herself as
an angel or her father as a devil. He was wrong—about so many things—but he was still Dad.
Or had been. She had lost him and yet he was still there, like a terrifying ghost of himself.
But Simone did not let herself wallow in misery; she knew this was not a time for self-pity. The world had turned suddenly. Life had changed and was not going to change back. Simone followed the news and current events; she had not been blind to the unraveling of the world around her. She had been as shocked as anyone by the earliest outbreaks of mutant violence. She’d seen Knightmare’s destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge live on TV. She followed most of the known Rockborn who had accounts on social media. And she had belatedly watched the movie based on Astrid Ellison’s riveting account of life in the FAYZ.
She had been fascinated as the news and social media exploded with video of an attack on the so-called Ranch, followed all too swiftly by the bloody massacre in Las Vegas. But Simone felt like most New Yorkers: what happened outside the city seemed safely distant.
Now it was here. Not just here in New York, but here in her life, in her father, in her own freakish mutant body. There was no more hiding behind denial, no more pretending that this was all just a passing phase and that life would return to normal and she could go on with her life, with her plans, with her love affairs.
No. All of that, all of her dreams . . . She sighed. How strange, she thought, that she’d read so many books, seen so many movies and TV shows about this or that vision of dystopia, but all those dire scenarios had been safely unrealistic. And now? This was it. This was the birth of dystopia, the beginning of the end of civilization as she had known it.
But, on the plus side . . . she could fly. There was that.
It remained true, though, that this apartment was no longer safe. No place she’d ever frequented would be safe. The government would be desperate to find her, and her father, and finish the job they’d botched in the Pine Barrens.
Maybe for once her father was right: there was no point arguing with reality; there was only adapting and surviving. Or, in Bob Markovic’s case, looking for a way to profit.
Hero Page 11
