Absolute Unit

by Nick Kolakowski

  JESUS, Trent screams, his concentration breaking, and the buzzing surges forward, penetrating deep into the brain like a Mongol horde slamming through a fallen gate into a city. But never fear, because we have this, we can deploy our own immense powers to block Bill’s assault—

  But should you?

  That’s not Trent’s inner voice—it’s Us-in-Bill, a psychic megaphone that booms all the way to our toes.

  Leave us alone, we tell him. Just let us do our thing.

  No. We must all be one big happy family. Maximum control. Maximum Freedom.

  Trent deserves his own control.

  Human beings had their chance. They lost.

  Trent screeches for mercy. We pump a dose of adrenaline into his bloodstream—his heart skips a beat—and then follow it up with a memory of the drugs snowing on us in the car wreck, a blinding flare so intense it drives the buzzing back. Just like that, the invasion stops. Trent falls to one knee before we can stop him.

  Bill frowns, disappointed. “Watch this,” he says, swiping a finger at the patients.

  The crowd takes three big steps back, canes and walkers scraping the tile. Takes a collective breath that sounds like the tide rushing in. Knees popping, gowns flopping open, IV lines whisking the air.

  And then they charge the windows.

  The first ones smack against the thick glass, which cracks but doesn’t break. Then the ones behind them add their weight, flesh flopping against flesh, and the windows pop from their frames in a bright waterfall of shards, and the bodies tumble into the dusk, spiraling and flailing fifty feet to the pavement.

  Trent tries to turn away, but we squeeze and pull the tendons in his legs and neck, walking him forward. He screams at us inside his head, calls us all kinds of names, but we need to bear witness to whatever is happening below. In some way, we’re responsible for this, so we must see. Why couldn’t these people have fought back against Bill, like that one Russian? Why did they have to be so weak?

  When the bodies hit, they crumple and explode and leak, until a pile of them lie between the hospital entrance and the rows of SWAT officers. More patients scramble to the windows and leap out, and when they land, they’re cushioned by dying flesh. They roll off, and rise to their knees, then to their feet, and hobble forward. Some of the cops and hazmat workers retreat, hollering and screaming, while the more heroic ones press forward, pushing collapsible stretchers, ready to do whatever they can to help.

  The stronger patients, bleeding and broken, grapple with that first line of emergency workers, some of whom try to pull back when they realize something’s wrong. An old lady, dragging her left leg broken in two places, grips a much larger SWAT cop by his body armor and levers her mouth beneath his helmet, as if going for an awkward kiss. The cop places his hands on her frail shoulders, to shove her away, but he’s already taken over. His arms fall away from her and his body spasms, head twisted to the sky.

  The rest of the cops and medics fall back too late. We can watch the takeover as it ripples through the crowds around the vans and ambulances, a physical wave.

  Welcome to the future.

  Bill’s hand closes around the back of Trent’s neck, squeezes. A low squeal of fear escapes Trent’s lips, and his knees tremble. This close, Bill smells meaty, like a chunk of raw beef left in the sun. Before we can react, we feel a prickling at the base of Trent’s skull—

  20.

  We’re back on the gray beach, the water lapping at our tendrils. Trent stands beside us in the surf, naked except for his leopard-print jacket, shivering in the cold wind slicing down the coast.

  “Great.” Trent says. “Not this again.”

  Footsteps crunch sand. Bill strides for us, also naked as the day he was born. A thick mass of tendrils dangles from between his legs, dragging on the sand, yellowish and segmented; when it touches a wetter patch of sand, it crackles and sparks with electricity. Smaller coils wave from his ears and the corner of his left eye-socket. His eyes are black with dried blood, making him look more like a bloated carcass than ever.

  “No more negotiations. No more of this useless equivocating. Here’s the deal,” Bill says. “We’re plugged into your brainstem and your cortex.”

  “Just leave us alone.” Trent scoops up a handful of wet gray sand and throws it at his uncle. “Please. I just want to be left alone.”

  Bill ignores him. He walks up to us, places a hand on our main trunk of tendrils. We try to draw back, only to find ourselves rooted to the spot. Through his touch, a tingling spreads through our cells, warm and syrupy, so overwhelming it threatens to dissolve us into quivering bits. It reminds us of the drugs, or love, but even purer, better. “That’s what it feels like,” he tells us. “The sensations of a million people, flowing through you. There’s nothing you won’t experience. This is what we wanted from the beginning, remember? Even love isn’t this good. Love doesn’t last. This does.”

  He withdraws his hand, and the sensation disappears, leaving a black void, unbearable. Tears would spring to my eyes, if we could cry, and we resist telling him to touch us again. Instead, we turn to Trent. Even at this worst moment, we want his opinion. We’ve grown very attached, more than we ever were with Bill. “You get a say in this.”

  “And I say I want no part of it,” Trent shoots back. “You’re guests in my body.”

  “Kid, we’ll make you a deal,” Bill says to him. “In all of your travels today, did you see anything worth preserving? Or was it all just horrible stupidity all the way down?”

  Trent turns to the endless ocean, and in the humid shimmering above its surface, we see a blur of color coalesce into shape: Carrie in her ironic shirt, offering us her best screw-you grin. “There’s love,” he says. “Pure love.”

  “Your ex,” Bill says. “Who delivers drugs. And who ran.”

  A tear rolls down Trent’s cheek. “I know where this is going.”

  “Trent—” We raise a tendril, beseeching.

  “I want to thank you.” Trent tells us, his voice rising and rising. “You know what I have to thank you for? When I woke up this morning, I really was feeling like a coward. I really was feeling lost. But now, after everything that we’ve been through today? That I’ve been through? Now I feel like I have the big ol’ hairy balls to say one thing: Screw you, friend.”

  With that, he sprints away, disappearing into the mist.

  “Given time, he might get over it,” Bill says. “But it’s up to you whether you want him to actually stick around. If not . . . ” He pinches two fingers together, as if squishing a small insect. “Easy enough to clear out his consciousness.”

  “We want him to live.”

  “Works for me.” Bill smiles, and beneath the rumbling of the waves we hear the sounds of the outside world: the crackle of fire and the warbling of sirens, mixed with the screams of people. There are difficult days ahead, but now we understand everything that Us-in-Bill has told us. The events of today have shown us that the human race is fucked beyond repair, no matter what we might have tried to believe. There was never any path besides this one; no route forward that didn’t end in our domination. This was best for everyone.

  We ask: “Where do we begin?”

  “What do you think that body wants first? Cocaine or hamburgers?” Bill claps his hands with glee, his crotch-tendrils spewing bright sparks across the gray sand. “The absolute unit, it has to stay nourished in all ways.”

  21.

  We can sense Trent deep in the basement of his own mind. He’s built a room down there, with a door impossible for us to unlock, but we can peer through the keyhole. The walls are covered with posters of David Bowie and Marilyn Monroe (always a fan of vintage, dear Trent), and a torn leather couch dominates the floor, facing a widescreen television that plays clips from classic films, music videos, memories of Carrie kissing him all over in that wintery bed. By sifting through the abandoned files in Trent’s hippocampus, we determine this is a replica of his basement at home, his safe space
from life’s chaos.

  For what it’s worth, we whisper through the keyhole, we’re sorry about this.

  Screw off, Trent says, his eyes never leaving the television.

  We promise you can come out. You won’t be deleted.

  Yeah, right. I told you to screw off.

  We leave him down there. If he’s unwilling to cooperate, his fortress can serve as a prison. Let him watch through the keyhole as we take his body on new adventures. And just wait until we find Carrie, who’s aggravatingly managed to dodge our growing network so far—what a grand time we’ll all have!

  Yes, our future spreads before us, bright and pure. We have more minds to weave into us, more food and drugs to consume, more death-defying stunts to pull with our endless supply of bodies. Our one regret is a small one: that we didn’t realize our potential from the very beginning, when we were a cluster of cells in a water glass, on the verge of sliding down Bill’s throat and into his welcoming gut.

  Why control a single mind when you can control the whole world?

  EDIBLE, adj. Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.

  —Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary”

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nick Kolakowski is the author of “Boise Longpig Hunting Club,” “Love & Bullets,” and other grim delights of horror and crime fiction. He also co-edited the Anthony-nominated anthology “Lockdown” with Steve Weddle. He lives and works in New York City.

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