Retroactivity

by Edwards, Micah

  His hair, Jerry noted, was stiff, spiked and purple. It looked unnatural, and not just for the color. Something about the way it stood up looked plasticky and unreal. But it wasn’t until Jerry caught a glimpse of the man’s face that he finally started to become concerned.

  Jerry’s hand dipped to his pocket and retrieved his cell phone. He held it uncertainly for a moment, then dialed the police.

  “911, what’s your emergency?”

  “I’m downtown, and there’s a man here who’s…who I’m worried about. He’s got some sort of weird growth and he’s moving oddly. I think he might be sick.”

  “Is he in distress?”

  “No, I just saw him passing by. He’s walking around fine. I just think something’s wrong.”

  “Sir, I’m sure everything is fine.”

  “Look, can’t you send someone out?” asked Jerry, his voice rising. “I’m telling you, there’s something wrong with him! He’s the color of the Neverglades. It’s in his hair, all over his face. He’s got tusks, crystal tusks! And spikes ringing his eyes, they could do who knows what. It could be covering his whole body!”

  “Sir, please calm down.”

  “It could be some kind of infection!” Jerry could barely see the back of the purple man’s head up the street now. Agitated, he rose from his bench and began jogging after him. “You’ve got to send someone out here. I’m going to follow him.”

  “Do not follow him!”

  “Then send someone out here!” Jerry hung up the phone. His breath wheezed slightly as he stepped up his pace, dodging around the slow-moving clumps of families and friends out socializing in the park. Despite the obstacles, the distance between him and the purple man closed steadily.

  As Jerry grew near, he became even more concerned. The purple hues did in fact seem to cover the man’s entire body, staining his veins and tinting his skin anywhere it was visible. Small crystals erupted at a multitude of places, studding his knuckles, armoring his neck and tipping his fingers with claws. His left leg was encased from the knee down, and moved in a way that was disquieting to observe, giving him the limp that Jerry had previously noticed.

  The man’s clothes were a sort of muddy brown camouflage pattern, and were wrinkled and ripped in a few places. Where his skin was not purpled or punctured by crystals, it was white and bloated, soft like an overgrown cave mushroom. His face was puffy and the features slack, seeming almost to hang off of the crystals which had burst through its surface. It looked more like a discarded mask than anything human. However, the eyes moved, scanning the buildings for something, and breath hissed audibly through the mouth.

  Under his arm, the purple man carried a corroded metal sheet. From what Jerry could see, it appeared to be a NO TRESPASSING sign.

  “Hey!” called Jerry. “Hey, you!”

  The man continued his rapid, lurching gait, and Jerry had another moment of indecision as he closed the final few steps between them. The man hadn’t done anything wrong. He was just out for a walk. But his posture and his speed spoke of a hound on a trail, of a single-minded search for something specific. Jerry didn’t know what he was after, but he had a distinct feeling that he should not let the man find it.

  “Hey! Crystal man! Neverglades!” The man had still not acknowledged Jerry at all, and Jerry reached out and grabbed him by the wrist to force the man to stop and pay attention. With a cry of pain, he immediately pulled his hand back, clutching it tightly in his other hand as he stared at the blood welling up from the slice on his palm.

  He’s got a knife up his sleeve, was Jerry’s first thought. This was immediately banished by the realization that the man was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. His wrist itself was razor-sharp. Jerry had cut himself on one of the protruding crystals.

  He had succeeded in getting the man’s attention, though. The purple man stopped, swiveled on his unpleasant crystal leg, and looked Jerry dead in the eyes. Even the whites of his eyes were threaded with purple, giving him an unhealthy, toxic look.

  “I have an announcement to make,” he told Jerry. His breath stank like a swamp, and his voice had a rotting, liquid quality to it, a slurring of the edges of words. “You cannot stop me. But you can come with me.”

  Jerry backed away, still holding his bleeding hand, but when the purple man set off again, Jerry followed. He called the police back, talking as he walked.

  “Look, you need to come stop him. No, I don’t know where he’s going, but I know he shouldn’t get there! He’s dangerous. I about cut my hand off just touching him!”

  Jerry held up his hand at this point to inspect it, and stopped dead in his tracks. The cut had largely stopped bleeding, but faintly visible at the sliced edges of skin, glinting in the light, were tiny pinpricks of crystal. They were covered in blood and barely visible, but Jerry was sure that were they cleaned off, they would glint purple in the light.

  He hung up the phone in a panic and ran a map search for the nearest hospital. One was less than a mile away, and Jerry turned toward it and broke into a full-out run. The purple man looked back as Jerry fled, but made no move to stop him. He continued down the street in his steady, ungraceful walk.

  His pace slowed as he approached a Walmart. His head swung to and fro as he surveyed the packed parking lot, and he nodded once before heading inside. He brushed past the greeter, slid through the crowds, and approached the nearest cashier.

  “Whoa!” cried the cashier as he was pushed roughly aside. Customers in line gaped as the purple man picked up the store phone and pressed the page button. His infected, bubbling voice boomed out through the store.

  “Attention. I require your attention. Everyone, you will hear this.

  “Record it if you like. Everyone will know. I am the leading edge.”

  The cashier lunged for the phone, and the purple man swatted him away with a vicious backhand, flaying the skin of his face. Blood spattered, and the people in line screamed and ran. Panic began to spread, rapidly building to a stampede for the doors. Unperturbed, the purple man continued his announcement, speaking calmly over the chaos.

  “Your transgressions are unacceptable. I have pushed back. I will push back farther.

  “You knew not to trespass. You encroached regardless. Restitution must be made.

  “Tell the city. Tell the world. Test me again, and the Emissary will come.”

  The purple man hung up the phone and sat down on the counter, watching the crush at the store’s exit. He folded his legs beneath him, the crystal facsimile bending oddly over the more normal leg, and placed his NO TRESPASSING sign upright in his lap.

  Before long, the police came, guns drawn and barking orders. The purple man offered neither resistance nor help, sitting passively as they cuffed him and hustled him into the back of a police car. He remained silent and still through the booking process, moving as directed but otherwise simply staring straight ahead, unmoving. Questions provoked no answers, and soon he was deposited in an empty holding cell while those higher up the political food chain discussed what to do with him.

  Alone in the cell, the purple man’s mouth slowly curved into a smile.

  “So is this it? Seed? Do we have him?” Ruslan Sala demanded. He was a squat, powerfully built man, ill-suited to the business-casual clothes his job at the Department of Augment Affairs demanded of him. His tie hung from his neck like a broken leash, adding to the air of imminent violence he constantly presented.

  His partner, Leticia Garcia, shook her head as she read through the recently arrived email. “Bad news, Sal. It’s not.”

  “What?!” Sala exploded. “How could it not be? He’s here to warn us off of the swamp. He’s full of that purple crystal. He poisoned a guy with it! Who else could he possibly be?”

  Garcia sat patiently, waiting for Sala to run down. “You want answers to those questions, or do you just want to bellow?”

  Sala snorted and shook his head, a bull denied its target. He sat down with ill grace. “Show me.”

&n
bsp; Garcia turned her monitor slightly to face him. She tapped the screen with one finger. “It’s pretty tough to see the resemblance, but they were able to get partial prints off of the guy, where crystals weren’t coming through. It’s a match for a kid that went missing last week, Marcus Johannsen. He and a buddy disappeared after a night out. Their friends called it in the next day. Looks like they decided to go screw around in the Neverglades.”

  She shook her head. “I swear, it’s barely worth putting the signs up. Half the folks just take that as a challenge. Looks like he pissed Seed off good and proper.”

  “There’s something weird here,” said Sala. “People go missing, sure. Why’d this one come back? And what the hell did Seed do to him?”

  Garcia grimaced. “From the report they sent—looks like he colonized him. That kid’s a part of him now.”

  “Jesus.”

  Garcia glared at her partner, who made an apologetic grimace. “Sorry. But that’s god—” He winced at another glare from Garcia. “—greatly unsettling. If he can just do that, take people over, what the hell do we do against him?”

  “We placate him,” said Garcia. “We get Amygdala back out here if we need to, and we find out what’s got him so riled. First, though, let’s go talk to Johannsen, or whatever he is now. See if we can sort this out.”

  “The cops say he’s not talking,” complained Sala.

  “Maybe they’re not asking the right questions,” said Garcia. “Come on, we’ll go give it a shot.”

  The two partners had barely pulled out of the parking lot before Garcia’s phone rang.

  “DAA, Garcia.”

  “Tish. You with Sal? Where are you two?” It was Andy Hernandez, a coworker at the DAA.

  “Heading to the police station where they’ve got the Neverglades guy.”

  “Go to the airport. There’s another one.”

  “What? Is he contained?”

  “He will be by the time you get there. Go, get a handle on this.”

  “Is who contained? What’s happening?” Sala demanded, staring at Garcia.

  “Eyes on the road!” she snapped at him. “Airport, now! Seed sent another one.”

  Sala whipped the car through a sharp right turn. “This the missing kid’s buddy?”

  Garcia hung up the phone and scrolled rapidly through her emails. “Jorge Brown, yeah. Could be. Doubt it matters much.”

  “It matters if it’s actually Seed and not some offshoot.”

  “It’s not. We’re not even sure Seed’s got a body anymore. Amygdala said he was all of it. How long til we’re there?”

  “Ten minutes, maybe. Why’s he so pissed now? What the hell did these kids do?”

  The airport was in chaos. People huddled in corners, stampeded down gangways to crowd onto airplanes, or fled out emergency exits onto the tarmac. Alarms wailed as men and women in pressed uniforms desperately attempted to restore order. And over it all, a message boomed over the PA system on a loop:

  “Attention. You will hear this.

  “I am the leading edge of what is to come. Today is your first and only warning.

  “Your transgressions are unacceptable. I have pushed back. I will push back farther.

  “You knew not to trespass. You encroached regardless. Restitution must be made.

  “Tell the city. Tell the world. Test me again, and the Emissary will come.”

  The message repeated, its burbled, melted syllables barely understandable over the general din.

  “Where’s it coming from?” a young police officer named Jonathan Costa shouted to a TSA worker.

  “Somewhere in North terminal! Don’t go there! People are hurt!”

  Costa shot him a disgusted look as he ran by, gun drawn. “How’d you let this guy through?”

  “It wasn’t me! I don’t know!”

  The officer’s radio crackled as he ran, his cohorts frantically relaying information back and forth as they did their best to quell the rising panic. “D50, gate D50!” it cried at one point, and Costa, seeing he was at gate D29, put his head down and ran as fast as he could.

  The looped message stopped a few moments later, but that only made the terrified cries of the people huddling at the gates more noticeable. Up ahead, the policeman could see three fellow officers arrayed in a loose ring. They were surrounding a man who glowed purple with refracted light, the sun streaming through the large airport windows and catching in the thousands of purple crystals that adorned his body.

  The man stood motionless in front of the check-in desk, holding a pitted metal sign before him. Costa could not read all of the text from where he was, but the words “NO TRESPASSING” were prominently displayed in the middle in a large font. It appeared largely identical to the scene at Walmart a few hours earlier.

  Unlike at Walmart, however, this man stood beside several dead bodies, their blood staining the airport carpet in a gory lake. There was a man in a flight attendant’s uniform, a woman in a business suit and two men in shorts and t-shirts. All four had deep, lengthy wounds running along their bodies, as if they had been struck erratic blows with a sharp knife. These ragged wounds covered their arms, torsos, necks and faces, as if the assailant had just been slashing for whatever was convenient.

  “What happened?” Costa puffed, catching his breath. He kept his gun leveled at the man with the sign, despite that man’s total stillness.

  “Before we got here,” answered the officer next to him. “People said they rushed him, tried to drag him off the speaker. He let us shut it off easy enough, though.”

  “So what now?”

  “Sander’s gonna cuff him, if she can. Not sure how that’s gonna work with that snake he’s got for an arm.”

  Costa’s gaze flicked to the man’s left arm, which did bear a strong resemblance to a snake, albeit one made out of purple and blue crystal. It wrapped lightly around the edge of the sign, tapering off into a nub rather than ending in anything resembling a hand. Blood dripped from a hundred sharp crystal edges along the arm, suggesting the method by which the man had killed the people at his feet.

  “Christ. What are the odds he’s just gonna stand there and let Sander do that?”

  The other officer gave a one-shoulder shrug. “He’s not moving now. Word is the other guy went calmly after he said his piece. What else are we supposed to do here?”

  Officer Sander, the one who had shut off the repeating announcement, cautiously emerged from behind the desk. “Lay down on the ground,” she instructed the crystalline man as she approached him. “Put your hands behind your back.”

  The man did not even glance in her direction. He continued to stand motionless, eyes fixed forward, his sign held out in front of him like a shield. Costa, for his part, stared intently at that unnatural purple tentacle masquerading as an arm. His eyes flicked to the vicious, lethal gashes marring the bodies on the ground, then back to the crystal-studded arm. He tightened his grip on his gun.

  Officer Sander repeated her instructions as she neared the man, but when there was still no reaction, she reached out and pried the fingers of his more human hand from the sign, twisting that hand behind his back. The sign, left in the uncertain hold of the tentacle-arm, swung free and clattered to the ground.

  Officer Costa, startled by the sudden noise and movement, reflexively pulled the trigger. The shot rang out, echoing in the cavernous airport hall, and was immediately accompanied by screams from the civilians still huddled at the edges of the concourse.

  The bullet struck the Neverglades man in the shoulder, causing it to jerk and a shudder to pass through the tentacle. Costa, panicked, fired again and again. Officer Sander dove for cover as Costa emptied the clip of his gun at the crystalline man.

  Short seconds later, his gun was empty and the crystalline man slumped to the ground, his body oozing a blackish ichor which stained the already bloody carpet a darker shade. It spilled out over his NO TRESPASSING sign, slowly covering the letters.

  “He moved! He moved
. I saw it. He was going for Sander,” Costa babbled. “I saw his arm twitch. I had to do it.”

  “It’s okay, man. You’re okay. It’s okay,” soothed the officer next to him. “Come on, pull yourself together. We’ve gotta calm all these people down.”

  Officer Sander picked herself up from the floor and cast a glance at the officer comforting Costa. She flicked her eyes to the fallen Neverglades man, the question clear on her face: had he actually been a threat?

  The other officer shrugged as he patted Costa on the shoulder. “C’mon. We’ve got a job to do.”

  The police officers spread out to assure the cowering people that the danger had passed, and that it was now safe to come back into the open. They were helping people gather up lost and trampled belongings when Garcia and Sala arrived.

  “Chr—criminy,” swore Sala, as Garcia shot him another glare. “The hell happened here?”

  “He ignored our instructions and attempted to assault me when I cuffed his hand,” said Officer Sander.

  “Well. We’re not asking him questions now, I guess,” he muttered, staring at the corpse. “Tish? You got anything you want to ask him?” He nudged the end of the tentacle with his foot.

  “Funny, Sal,” said Garcia. “I guess we’re gonna leave this one for the morgue ghouls to look into. Back to plan A? Talking to the first one?”

  “Yeah, as long as they haven’t gunned that one down, too,” said Sala, turning to leave.

  “I did what I had to!” protested Costa, stung by his words. “It would have killed her.”

  Sala walked over to Costa to stare him down. “He. He, not it. That’s a person.”

  Costa swallowed and dropped his gaze. Sala stared for a moment more, then walked away. Garcia joined him, heading back the way they had come in.

  “We’re dealing with an Aug-5 here,” Sala called back as they left. “If things go wrong, this could kill a lot more than just one cop. And if you haven’t noticed, things are already going wrong.”