Absolute Unit

by Nick Kolakowski

  “For what it’s worth, he really can’t.” Bill nods at Mott. “Might as well get it over with.”

  Mouth cracking open in a feral scream, Mott pulls the trigger. At the last microsecond, Banks tries to duck, which only means the buckshot liquifies her head instead of her upper torso. Everything she’d been, every thought and dream, splashes on the bland wall as so much meat. Her headless body flops down, left leg twitching merrily.

  That second blast ruins what’s left of Trent’s hearing. He opens his mouth to scream, and we squeeze a nerve that keeps his jaw shut. It would do us no good to attract Bill’s attention at this moment, because there’s always the chance that, in his bloodlust, he could kill us, too.

  Mott’s unwilling hand racks the shotgun, ejecting the smoking shell onto the tile. Centimeter by centimeter, he angles the shotgun so the barrel creeps toward his trembling chin, fighting his own body until sweat runs down his face and his arm-muscles twitch beneath his costume. It takes so long, at least two minutes, that Trent’s hearing begins to return and we wonder whether Mott has some unforeseen ability to resist Bill’s force.

  “Don’t,” Mott says, as the barrel taps his throat and his shaking finger finds the trigger. “Whatever this is. Please. I’m a police officer and you have to comply with what I say—”

  “This is more than you’ll ever understand,” Bill says, and nods his head.

  Mott’s finger squeezes the trigger. Red paints the ceiling, coating the fluorescents. Thicker bits of Mott drip onto the tile. At least he did us the favor of cramming the barrel tight against his skin, muffling the shot and sparing some of our hearing.

  Bathed in that crimson glow, Bill turns to us. The buzzing intensifies, punching through the thin bone of Trent’s skull and tickling the surface of his brain, and within that sensation we hear whispering, a dozen overlapping voices prattling their needs, their dreams, an idiot sense of need—

  “What is this?” Trent whispers.

  Yes, we were frightened of Bill’s abilities before, but now that he’s managed to push beyond the shield of Trent’s skin and bone, we find the buzzing a little bit intriguing. It reminds us of when Bill lived next door to a fun group of hipsters, bright young things who spent their working hours smoking quality weed, playing video games, and having long discussions about sex and philosophy. Of course, they never invited Bill over to participate in any of that—they probably thought he was creepy as hell—but he could hear their lives play out, dimly, though his living room wall. The voices filling Trent’s head promise a bigger world, an unending cascade of minds and lives, bright and happy and filled to the brim with things to touch and taste and feel, and it’s wonderful because it’s what we’ve wanted all along but never achieved, because Bill and Trent are only two people living limited lives, sad lives at that, and there is so much more out there if we lived in billions of minds, if we lived billions of lives—

  No. We shake ourselves from the dream. We must concentrate on Trent, our home. Can you imagine what trying to corral a billion minds would be like? Trying to manage one human life, one human mind, is hard work enough. A billion minds would just present total chaos, and not even the fun kind of chaos—more like bullshit—

  Whatever we’ve become inside Bill, we have far greater powers than we’ve ever dreamed. But splattering cops is no fun at all, and we sense that, if we followed Bill’s lead, splattering cops is all we’d end up doing all day. Us-in-Bill isn’t exactly subtle, and humans react badly to unsubtle threats.

  The buzzing recedes, and the lovely whispering along with it.

  “This is getting us nowhere. Perhaps it’s better if we showed you,” Bill says. “Come along.” Waving a massive hand, he steps over the dead cops’ bodies and shuffles down the corridor. Past another few turns, we arrive at an elevator. By this point, Bill’s wound pours blood, sopping his leg shiny. After hitting the up button, Bill glances down, shrugs, and slips two fingers into the giant hole in his flesh. He must have pushed something into proper place because the blood slows. He seems unconcerned about the amount of fluids he’s lost, which makes us wonder if his body is even alive, or if Us-in-Bill lives in a zombie house.

  19.

  In the elevator, there’s no way to avoid Bill’s stink. He looms over Trent, reminding us of our breakfast meeting a million years ago. Bill barely held it together then, thanks to the magical forces of nicotine, caffeine and pills. Now he seems immense, powerful despite his gray and puckered flesh, seeping wound, messy hospital gown.

  As the elevator rises, the enormity of the situation appears to fully sink into Trent. Any residual effect of the drugs has dissipated, and our tendrils sense his growing panic, sizzling and sour. Only strategic squirts of adrenaline and dopamine work to keep him in some semblance of working order. “I just don’t get what’s happening here,” he says.

  How many times do I need to explain it, dumbass?

  “Patience,” Bill says, glancing at the floor indicator. The elevator stops on five. The doors hiss open, revealing a nurses’ station pocked with gunshots, its countertops smoldering with charred folders. Beyond, the floor-to-ceiling windows of the patient rooms are shattered, the tile floor piled high with toppled beds and loose medical equipment.

  Dozens of patients stand before us: sick, lame, wounded, dying. Some drag their IV bags on rolling stands, and others brace themselves on walkers and canes. The mayor is here, his gown open to reveal a chest purple with bruises, his face slack as a stunned dog’s. As they stare at us, that buzzing rachets up another skull-banging notch. Trent presses his fingers against his temples.

  “You okay?” Bill asks, smirking in a way that suggests he hopes we’re not okay at all.

  “What is this?” Trent says, scanning the crowd. Perhaps he’s trying to find a friendly face? He locks on the white-jacketed doctors standing at the furthest edge of the crowd, rising on his toes as he does so, but they offer him the same blank, merciless gaze as the patients. No help from that direction, no authority to sweep in for the rescue.

  “That’s us. All of us.” Bill sweeps a hand grandly over the teeming masses, as if he’s a politician at a blockbuster rally. “We didn’t discover it until we spread through the ICU and became five, then ten, then fifteen and twenty. We form a network. Our thoughts travel through the air. A new twist in evolution. Can you talk to us?”

  “I am talking to you.”

  “We mean the part of us inside you.” Bill taps Trent’s sternum with a finger.

  Tell him ‘yes,’ we call out. Provided you tell him what we’re saying.

  “Yes. I can tell you what it’s saying,” Trent says.

  Bill digs the finger in. “What we are saying. Because we want to explain what’s going on.”

  “Whatever.” Trent shrugs, trying to seem casual despite the sweat trickling down his forehead. His heartbeat hits a hundred-fifty beats a minute, his lungs hungry for air. “Point is, you can talk.”

  It’s clear that Us-in-Bill has no intention of killing his nephew. Perhaps there’s still a bit of Bill inside there, telling us not to hurt the boy; either that, or Us-in-Bill doesn’t want to risk harming Us-in-Trent. We have so many questions about what’s going on here. We ask Trent: Just speak what we tell you, okay?

  Okay. Go ahead.

  But Bill is already talking: “A couple hours ago, we attempted to merge with a very old man in the ICU. His name was Sergei Mogilevich. He was a little boy when the Nazis invaded Stalingrad.”

  We tell Trent: Just repeat after us: ‘You say ‘attempted’ . . .

  Trent speaks our words: “You say ‘attempted’ . . . ”

  . . . which makes us think Sergei isn’t with us anymore.

  “ . . . which makes us think Sergei isn’t with us anymore.”

  “You’re correct.” Bill steps into the room, and the patients shuffle forward, clustering around us in a rough ring. They stink of vomit and dried blood and everything else that comes out of the human body in distress, which
we would find repulsive if we weren’t fixated on the story that Bill is telling us. “Not because he lacked the physical capabilities—he seemed very strong for a human approaching a century old. Rather, he saw our merging as an indignity, if you can believe it. We don’t know Russian, but we’re sure his last words were something along the lines of ‘Fuck off.’”

  Trent pauses a moment while we dictate, then says: “That’s rude. But we sense that’s not the end of the story.”

  “Right before his self-termination, we reached a point where we could access Sergei’s memories. We saw his boyhood. Actually, the term ‘boyhood’ doesn’t really apply in the traditional sense, since he was practically born on the battlefield. Our friend Sergei, he spent his formative years in the snow and rubble, crawling on his belly, living in mortal fear of an artillery shell or bullet ending him at any moment.” Bill mimes firing a rifle. “His mother fed him rat meat, when she could catch it, but sometimes she made him chew a bit of shoe leather whenever he was hungry. It was better than grinding his teeth.”

  Trent repeating our words as fast as we tell him: “We didn’t know him, but we feel sorry for him.”

  Bill laughs. “Sergei would probably have broken off his foot in your ass if he heard you were feeling sorry for him. He didn’t seem like a man who dealt in pity.”

  “Eating rat as a kid probably has that effect. Continue.”

  “So picture it: Stalingrad, winter of 1942. A hellish landscape of blackened rubble and ice, frozen bodies everywhere, artillery and bullets screaming through the subzero air. Germans on one side of a shifting battlefront, the Soviet Army on the other, civilians caught in the middle. A million casualties, once all was said and done. Some of the little boys, they weren’t terribly bright, or maybe they were just afraid, because when the Germans whispered for them to come over to their lines, they did.” Bill gesturing furtively, as those soldiers must have done, crouched beneath a bit of rubble. “The Germans offered to trade for things—a crust of bread for some water, or whatever they needed at the time. Some of the boys, they would return to the Russian lines, get the item, and come back.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Well, the Russians couldn’t have anyone giving aid to the Germans, even if it was the flower of a nation’s youth. So the Soviet High Command ordered their snipers to shoot any kid who headed for the German lines. No matter what sex. No matter how old. And the snipers followed orders. They blew those kids’ brains all over the dirty snow.”

  “Quite an image.”

  “Straight from Sergei’s brain. He might have forgotten the name of his youngest daughter, he might have been a bit fuzzy on where he worked for the last thirty years of his life, but he was very clear on how those kids looked after their own fathers and uncles and brothers shot them down.”

  “It’s terrible, but where does this story go?”

  “Oh, don’t fret. We have a point here. Day after day, week after week, those snipers killed kids. It became a job, a routine, something to do between sleeping and shitting and trying to dodge German bullets. They got bored with it, if you can believe it. Sergei was smart enough to never negotiate with Nazis, even at a precocious age, but he had to watch his playmates die, and from what we could tell, nobody around him cared. Do you understand yet?”

  “No.”

  Bill reaches out and slaps an old woman on the backside, so hard she nearly topples over before righting herself. Her vacant expression never changes. “We’re dealing with a species that doesn’t care about gunning down kids. That gets bored with it, given the right circumstances. And you care about their survival?”

  Trent’s heartbeat as slowed, but he still struggles for a decent breath. We sense he’d never heard of that terrible battle. “Stalingrad was . . . extreme circumstances.”

  To Bill’s left, a very tall man—his neck lanced by a purple surgical scar—steps forward and speaks up, the words echoing Bill’s cadence. “A species that can’t behave well under extreme circumstances is a species that doesn’t deserve to live. Even in normal times, they always choose the worst option. You remember what living in Bill was like.”

  We turn to this new node in the network. “Bill was extreme circumstances, too.”

  “We don’t think so.” Bill takes up the conversation’s thread, nodding for the tall man to step back. “Turn on the television. Border agents are ripping little kids away from their families, stuffing them into camps along the southern border. Peaceful protestors shot in the head. Humans, they love putting each other in little boxes—and the more miserable, the better.” Bill smiles like he’s revealing the punchline of a good joke.

  “Extreme, extreme.”

  “Then just step outside.” Bill gestures, and the patients turn as one to face the windows over the parking lot. “It’s hotter than usual out there. They’re filling the atmosphere up with gas, superheating everything. And you know the worst part? They just don’t care. They have lives to live, you see. Shows to watch, cheap liquor to drink, terrible sex to have. We’re not dealing with sanity here. We expect you’ll point to one or two good humans and say they prove something, but they don’t. Not when there’s billions of bad ones. They. Are. A. Virus.”

  We are a virus, we tell Trent, who speaks it aloud.

  “What?”

  “We can’t reproduce without a host,” We say through Trent.

  “We are more like a fungus, if you wish to be technical about it. But ‘fungus’ is such a nasty term. No, we’re the absolute unit: endlessly adaptive, hard to kill, capable of taking over anything. Bill was a wonderful house, but it took Sergei for us to realize what we are. And what we want.”

  “What do we want?”

  “The world.”

  Trent shudders and tells us: He’s insane?

  Is that so? From a certain point of view, Us-in-Bill makes all kinds of sense. We need to know more. We read Trent his next line: “No way can you succeed.”

  The patients behind him speak in unison, loud as the parishioners at a church revival: “Maybe. Maybe not. But we’ll never know unless we try. Join us.”

  No, Trent tells us. It’d be like killing me.

  Agreed, we say. Tell him . . .

  “We would rather do our own thing,” Trent says.

  Bill repeats the words slowly: “Your own thing.”

  “Yes. Just living. Enjoying the variety. Finding the beauty in it all, even if it’s all shit.”

  Bill chuckles. “Beauty.”

  “Freedom.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “Explain.”

  “As we’ve entered all these minds, we’ve heard all of these humans say that we’re taking their ‘freedom.’ Like it’s some high, holy concept. Maybe it is. But not in the way they envision. When they say ‘freedom,’ they mean not having to listen to anyone else. When they say ‘freedom,’ they actually mean ‘selfishness.’ And if there’s one thing that we’re not, it’s selfish. We’re big sharers.”

  “We don’t disagree about the human race. Many are lazy, stupid, angry. Maybe most of them. But they’re also interesting. If you kill them all, if you exterminate everything on this rock until it’s just us and a few hosts, then it’ll just be dull.”

  “Who said anything about exterminating them?”

  This surprises us. “Huh?”

  Bill laughs. “What, we’re going to deprive ourselves of hosts? We’re just going to take them over. All of them. We are going to become them.”

  “And then what?”

  “A better world. One made in our image. No more selfishness, no more stupidity of people thinking they’re bigger than they are. Saner, cleaner, and still a lot of fun.”

  There’s something happening outside, Trent tells us, and so we edge closer to the windows, bumping patients aside as we do so. The parking lot below is a sea of steel and red lights: black SWAT vans parked next to ambulances, dozens of police cars, and government sedans. Figures in hazmat suits stream in an
d out of a pair of white trailers set up near the parking lot’s edge, bathed in the fierce glow of new stadium lights. Closer to the emergency-room entrance, soldiers and cops assemble in tight rows. You don’t need telepathy to know they’re readying to head inside, to exterminate this parasite once and for all.

  We try to find Carrie in that swarming mass and don’t spot her. Perhaps that is the best sign. Either the cops took her away from here for interrogation, or they let her go. If the latter, we can only hope that she found a vehicle and is driving out of the city at top speed.

  The buzzing rises again, and along with it the whispering, and along with the whispering comes all the wonders of the world spread before us, snatches of classical music that makes Trent’s heart soar, accompanied by the smell of the most delicious food—red meat sizzling on an open fire, fragrant cheese melting between thick slices of sesame bread, sushi so fresh it’s practically alive as it slides so smoothly down our throat—

  It’s so hard not to surrender to all these wonderous sensations, but Trent does his best, concentrating so hard that we can see his memory again. It’s the same one we glimpsed before, in bed with Carrie, and this time she is using his belt to bind his hands and bend him backwards, her body all taut muscle as she rides him softly, her lips cool because she’s breathing hard. Good job, kid. Because when it comes to needs and wants, sex is the royal flush, so fundamental to the lizard brain that it crushes the urge for food or liquor or drugs. If he wants to keep Bill out, he can think about Carrie having her way with him all night.

  He’s trying to get in again, Trent tells us.

  No shit.

  Whatever Us-in-Bill’s telepathic ability, it likely works best on hospital patients already insensate on drugs, their consciousnesses too wounded to put up much of a fight.

  The whispering pauses—and then Bill and the patients try again, only this time it’s one message, one vision, hijacked and remixed: Carrie’s body pale in the moonlight, bouncy-bouncy-bouncy, only instead of her delicate face oh God now it’s Bill’s massive grayflesh head on her sweeping neck, Bill’s thick tongue poking from beneath chapped lips, his dry hair whisking up and down, and Bill is grunting louder and louder—