Lexicon

by Max Barry

  She picked up the pen. She was surprised, because she hadn’t meant to do that. It didn’t make any sense to leave a note now. But she started writing anyway. You are going to perform this test for me, my dear, Yeats had said, and the first letter was K and she suddenly realized what was coming. She tried to pull back her hand but decided no, it was okay, she would just write this instruction first. Yeats wasn’t coming. He was already here, inside her. She began to scrabble and claw for the part of her mind that wasn’t her but her hand wrote KILL EVERYONE anyway. She took the bareword from the satchel. She managed to close her eyes; she could do that. Her left hand found the bulge, the sharp protuberance that had cut her in DC, and her right impaled the paper upon it.

  There was grunting. A slap of skin. “Get him off—” a woman said, and it became a choke. Footsteps. She set the bareword on the counter, the paper dangling from it. She wanted to rip it away, knock it over, obscure it in some way, but her mind said that was a bad idea and she could not convince it otherwise.

  Someone hit her. She fell to the floor. She opened her eyes and saw a bright spot of her own blood. Her mouth was numb. Ahead, an older man with a cane rose from the waiting room seats, his eyes full of concern, but his gaze shifted to the thing above her head and everything about his face changed. He shuffled in a half circle to face the woman beside him, whom Emily knew as Maureen—she came into Tangled Threads sometimes to buy clothes for her niece—and he brought up his cane and swung it at her so hard he overbalanced.

  Emily got to her feet. The receptionist had his hands around the nurse’s neck. Emily took one step toward them and the security boy shot the receptionist and then the nurse, one after the other. Emily skidded and fell. She went on hands and knees for the seats, crawling for her life. Someone shouted, “Help in the ER, code black, code black,” and within about two minutes every red-blooded male in the building would be in this room, Emily knew; that was how it worked here. She wanted to scream at them to get out, let nobody in here, but she had no words.

  Finally she fled. She crawled beneath seats, and that as much as anything felt like murder. By the time she reached the doors, the room was full of howls. Like wolves.

  • • •

  Then the thing. Which at first seemed insignificant compared to what was happening, but she later came to understand was not. As she escaped the emergency room, Harry’s white paramedic van jumped the curb. Harry stared at her through the windshield. Then his eyes shifted to the room behind her. His expression tightened, filling with purpose, and he threw open the van door. She got to her feet and backed away, her hands up, thinking he was coming to kill her, that somehow despite what had happened earlier he had succumbed to the word. But he ran right by her, and she realized the purpose in his eyes was his own. He was going to help.

  She left. She made it two blocks before her gut clenched so badly she had to bend over. She gagged but nothing came out. A police car blew by, lights and sirens, heading for the ER. They would all go there: the cops, anyone trying to help, the injured. It would be endless. She broke into a shuffling run.

  Her eye was burning. It felt like a hard prick of light in there. The thing was, when the van’s door had bounced open, the glass had reflected the ER for a moment. It was only a flash. But she had the terrible feeling she had gotten something in her eye.

  ARROGANCE AND DELUSION

  Discussion Board 14 / Thread 21 / Post #43

  In reply to: Post #39.

  > we learn nothing from God tearing down the Tower of Babel

  God didn’t destroy the Tower of Babel! That’s a common misconception.

  Genesis 11:5-8:

  And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men were building.

  And the Lord said, Behold, the people are one, and have one language; now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.

  Let us go down and confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

  So the Lord scattered them across the face of the earth, and they left off to build the city.

  This is often mistold as Man trying to build a tower to Heaven, which God knocks down as an object lesson in humility. But note:

  (a) no destruction

  (b) God says nothing about the tower at all

  What moves God to action is the common tongue. The story of Babel isn’t about hubris. It’s about language.

  [FOUR]

  The helicopter moved through darkness and Yeats peered through the plexiglass at what lay below. Broken Hill was a small cluster of sulfurous lights, like a ship on an ocean of black glass. Occasionally he caught a tiny spark or glimmer, but those were the only signs that something was happening.

  “Can’t raise any of them,” said a voice in his ear. He was wearing a headset; the voice belonged to Plath, sitting opposite him. “Eliot, the ground team, no one.” She swapped headsets and began to bark into that one and Yeats returned his attention to the landscape. A circular pinprick of lights came into view, surrounding a depthless black hole, which Yeats recognized as the main quarry. He’d never seen it in person before; it was larger than he’d expected. When he’d first taken an interest, some decades before, following hints of something ancient and significant buried there, he could still make out remnants of the hill that had loaned the town its name. Now that was gone—not just erased but inverted, to become this great pit. He found this notable for the demonstration of force it represented. Civilizations rose and fell; what caused them to be remembered was not their contribution to knowledge or culture, not even the size of their empires, but rather how much force they exerted upon the landscape. This was what survived them. A hundred billion lives had passed without leaving a mark since the Egyptians had raised their pyramids, changing the world not figuratively but literally. Yeats admired that. This hole in Broken Hill was nothing, of course, but it would outlast every person on the planet.

  “Okay,” said Plath. “We’ve got buildings on fire now.”

  He looked. There was indeed a flickering.

  “I have to say, I think we’re operating at a high degree of probability that Woolf has deployed the word.” Plath looked at him as if she expected a reaction here: if not an Oh god no then at least an Are you sure; some kind of response to validate her feeling that this was a shocking development, possibly the worst thing she could imagine.

  “Horrible,” he said.

  “I mean, we’re seeing bodies in the streets. Around the hospital, especially.” She gazed out hopefully. “Maybe it’ll burn down.”

  He considered this. It was rather important that the bareword not be lost to fire. That would be a serious inconvenience. But he was also interested in letting this scenario play out to its fullest, in order to gain maximum information from it. “Please don’t let the hospital burn down.”

  “I’ll monitor it. You know, we could send people in now. Stop this before it gets worse.”

  “No.”

  “It’s just . . . there are three thousand people down there.”

  “If Eliot couldn’t stop it, it can’t be stopped.”

  Plath nodded, unconvinced.

  “It is a great tragedy,” he said. He overlooked this sometimes: the need to display empathy.

  They circled the town. He watched toy vehicles run down tiny figures, plow into matchbox buildings. Sometimes there was a lull and the little shapes would head for the hospital, and it would begin again.

  “I think we’ve found Eliot,” Plath said. She muttered into her other headset for a few moments. “On a road a couple miles out of town. He’s not moving. What do you want to do?”

  “Take me there, please,” he said.

  “I can send a team.”

  Plath had been doing this lately: implying that Yeats might not know what he wanted. It concerned him a little, because it meant she didn’t think he was acting rationally, and he needed her to think him rational for at least a while longer. “Thank you,
but no.”

  The chopper tilted. He watched a dozen small tragedies play out below before they were obscured by the towering wall of soil and rock that marked the quarry’s boundary. Dust blew around them. Plath unstrapped and pulled open the door. He hesitated, because he was wearing his Ferragamos, winged patent leather that would never be the same after contact with this land. But he had no other shoes. He stepped out.

  Plath pointed, mouthing words he couldn’t hear over the thundering of the blades, clawing at her hair. He began to walk, placing his feet carefully on the treacherous sandy earth. He was tempted to abandon the whole idea now. He was upset with himself for forgetting about his shoes. But he was committed: He couldn’t change his mind now without risking revealing something about himself.

  Plath caught up with him. She was wearing a perfectly charming pair of Louboutins but clomping along as if they were galoshes. Plath didn’t mind ruining shoes, apparently. He hadn’t known that about her. It changed a great deal.

  They reached the road. The chopper had risen into the air and its spotlight helpfully swung right, so he began to trudge in that direction. Plath fiddled with an earpiece. “Still no sign of Woolf,” she said. “I assume she’s still kill-on-sight?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “And I expect this to be quite a lot easier to accomplish, now she no longer has the word.”

  “If she no longer has it. She could be in the hospital still, for all we know.” Plath bent to one knee. Yeats kept walking. When Plath caught him again, her strappy heels dangled from one hand. “I should not have worn these shoes.”

  “No,” he said.

  “I bet she’s in there,” Plath said. “Compromising people as they come in.”

  “Please don’t assume that,” he said, because that was all he needed, Woolf slipping away while everyone watched the hospital. He was quite certain Emily was nowhere near, because he had instructed her not to be. She had deployed the word and left, so that once this was all over, he could recover it.

  “Is that . . . ?” Plath said, trailing off as the spotlight shifted and made speculation unnecessary. Across the road lay a car; before that was Eliot. Yeats couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead. “Jesus, she’s killed him. Woolf killed Eliot.”

  He approached to within a few feet. Eliot’s coat flapped in the chopper’s downdraft. Yeats studied his face. After a moment, Eliot blinked. “No,” Yeats said. “Compromised, I believe.” He felt his skin crawl. An emotional reaction. Odd. But it was unnerving to behold: Eliot, disabled. Of all the poets, if he were to select the most difficult to compromise in the field, he would choose Eliot. He had chosen Eliot.

  “We need some people down here right away,” Plath told her radio. “Eliot’s catatonic.”

  In the distance, a siren wailed. It felt like a song, like the word calling to him. It was waiting. He need only collect it. He stood very still, studying his own reaction, because there was no mistaking that he wanted it.

  “Yeats?” said Plath.

  His mouth felt dry. A slight tingling in his palms. He had considered many outcomes for this day, but not the possibility that he would be moved.

  “We’re going to want to move. We’ve got emergency services inbound from two directions.”

  “A moment,” he said. He closed his eyes. He could perceive the danger now, the crevice that had swallowed those who came before him. And he could see what needed to be done. He opened his eyes and turned to Plath. To his surprise, she was in the process of snapping a heel from her shoe.

  He wasn’t himself; she saw something on his face. “It broke,” she explained. She tossed the heel into the night. Yeats heard it land. Plath began to wedge her feet back into her butchered Louboutins. “Ridiculous things.”

  When they were away from here, Yeats decided, and safely back at the hotel, he would visit Plath. He would enter her room and wake her gently and make her fuck her shoes. These Louboutins. It would serve a dual purpose, testing his ability to remain unaroused and teaching Plath proper respect for good footwear.

  “I can’t understand what motivated Woolf to do all this,” Plath said. Men in black jogged out of the darkness and began to heft Eliot.

  “We may never know,” Yeats said.

  • • •

  Harry ran down the main street, leaving the hospital, the emergency room, and many, many people who needed medical attention. He had tried to help. He had stayed long enough to bandage the jugular of Maude Clovis, who tried to scratch his eyes out as he worked. He had seen Ian Chu from Surgery cut three more jugulars with a scalpel, moving methodically from one person to the next, his eyes carefully judging each attack. He had seen Jim Fowles, a twenty-year cop, bring in a kid with a bleeding head and draw his revolver and execute that kid right there on the floor.

  That was when Harry decided to leave. What he was doing, stabilizing these people, that wasn’t helping them. That was only delaying. He stood and Fowles turned to him. The only reason Harry had not died then, under Fowles’s calm, unsmiling eyes, was that Chu chose that moment to step behind the cop and delicately draw the scalpel from left to right. Fowles gurgled and Chu plucked the revolver from him with his long surgeon’s fingers and turned it over, testing its weight.

  Then he had left. He ran, because all he could think was Emily. There was chaos outside but he ran through it. He found her vomiting over the rail of a traffic bridge. He caught her by the arm and hauled her around. Her face was ashen, her pupils dilated, like a junkie’s; for a moment, he barely recognized her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I did it. I did it.” She wrapped her arms around her head and moaned.

  “We have to get out of here.” He was trying to think of vehicles. Something off-road. If he could get back to the house, they could take the bikes. “People are going crazy.”

  “It’s the word!” she screamed. She got to her feet and took two steps back toward the hospital, then veered around, clutching her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Em,” he said. But he knew what she was talking about. That ridiculous piece of wood, with the black symbol, that she’d waved at him back at the house like it was a magical talisman. Like it could command him to obey her. He’d seen it in the ER with a piece of paper tacked to it that said KILL EVERYONE. At the time, it had not been the strangest thing in the room. “Your word? It works?”

  “I can’t stop it,” she said. “He won’t let me.”

  He left her and ran back toward the hospital. He was still a hundred yards away when he saw the two police cruisers parked outside. People clawed and reached, spilling over the cars, filling the air with cries. Harry had intended to go in there and get that piece of wood, hack it into a million pieces, but that was clearly going to be very dangerous. He hesitated at the intersection. A car purred behind him and his brain finally registered this as a danger and he threw himself out of its way. It blew by close enough to tug at his clothes and hit one person, then another, and crashed into one of the police cruisers. Its engine revved. Harry could see the driver tugging at the shifter, trying to get the car into gear. A cop came out of the ER and jogged up to the driver and shot him through the window.

  He noticed a figure approaching from the side of the hospital, carrying a cleaver. Harry recognized the someone as an orderly. And the cleaver was not actually a cleaver; it just looked like it. It was a bone saw. “Jack?” Harry said, wondering how, exactly, he was supposed to tell the difference between a person carrying a bone saw for self-defense and one who wanted to saw him open with it, and the orderly broke into a run at him, which answered the question. Harry contemplated running but instead opted for waiting for the orderly to get close enough to punch in the face and disarm. This was an option because the orderly was a thin teenager who played a lot of video games, while Harry was not. He looked at the bone saw. But he couldn’t fathom a use for it, and the orderly started to get up, so Harry punched him in the jaw hard enough to keep him down. Then he did run, because more people were emerging from
the hospital’s rear, nurses with whom Harry had frequently shared coffee, and, in one case, a bed, and he did not want to face them.

  When he returned to the traffic bridge, Emily had vanished. He turned in a circle, cursing. He didn’t know what to do. Ahead, the street looked clear. To the left, a small group wandered in his direction, one limping. To the right, not far, a woman lay motionless in the gutter. In the streetlights, her hair looked yellow. She was the only thing in this landscape he could understand, so he went to her. He knelt and checked her vitals. Beth McCartney, the town librarian. Her hair was sticky with dark fluid. His fingers found a depression in her skull about the size of a tennis ball. He sat back on his haunches and exhaled.

  The group approached him. He recognized the local math teacher, his two daughters, and a woman who ran a little grocery store. Two teenage boys supported the limper, who was a broad-shouldered guy Harry knew as Derek Knochhouse. Harry had pumped Derek’s stomach twice in the past six months. Both times, he had looked better than this. He could tell without touching him that Derek had a shattered pelvis.

  “Thank Christ,” said the schoolteacher. “Harry, you have to help us.”

  “What’s happening?” said the grocery store owner. She was clutching her necklace, a crucifix. “Oh God, is that Beth?”

  “We have to get Derek to the hospital.”

  “Car came out of fucking nowhere,” said one of the teenage males. “Fucking took aim. Then it reversed over him.”

  “Hnk,” said Derek.

  “We’ve gotta get him to the hospital, Harry.”

  “You can’t take him to the hospital,” he said. “It’s not safe.”

  “Then where? What should we do?” One of the schoolteacher’s daughters tried to push Derek’s hair out of his eyes. Derek coughed and spat meatily.