He might have said something else, but Vida turned to look at the television. Smoothly turned her smooth, luminous face toward the great blue light, as if swiveling her head on an axis.
~
Vida did not want Tom to go to Kursattar. They weren’t dating by then, so she had very little say over his decisions, but when he told her over a weekend coffee, she was still unafraid to show her displeasure. “Why would you go there?” she asked, “What are you looking for?”
But those were the very questions he was going there to answer. He did not know why the coordinates he saw when he closed his eyes were Kursattar’s, why he felt compelled to see if the rumors on the dark web were true and SOLAT lay defused on a beachside military base. His mother thought it was perverse, an attempt to confront—or maybe thank—the thing that broke his father. But he didn’t think there was that sort of emotion attached to it. Nothing so personal. It was just so fucking unbelievable, the way he imagined people must have felt when they first discovered dinosaurs to be real. That the immense horror of this thing had broken his father’s brain only made it that much more compelling.
“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he told Vida, who sighed and sipped. She was working at the World Bank now, calculating the aid that should be allotted to countries like Kursattar. The sort of thing that Gordon Chalmers would have said was just another arm of empire, had he come back from the Caucuses alive. Now that everyone was dead, the world was an untapped oil field. Full of potential, yet barren. Tom left for Kursattar the week after.
He arrived with his passport and his credit cards and a few changes of clothes into a roiling pit of humidity and humanity. His passport earned him no sour looks, no visa trouble—maybe not in and of itself surprising, since the United States was busy jawing about the respect it was due, trying to goad its rivals into a missile shoot-out—but he almost wished it had registered more of a reaction. He wished he saw more fight from a vanquished people. More resentment. It was the same gnaw he’d felt since he put on pounds the summer before junior high, came looking for Noah Quint, and discovered that the jackass had moved away.
Instead, he saw something else. Indifference. Disregard. The small immediacy of life.
The country was struggling without SOLAT. Without the monster’s protection, there was nothing it could do to make assailants stand down, to extract better terms from the IMF, to kick out predatory corporations, to kill any foreigners who brought any drugs within its zero-tolerance borders, free of all but the softest of pressures. Now Kursattar fluttered in the breeze, frayed and faded. The over-inflated currency—tens of thousands for a taxi—still boasted of their long-gone days as a force of global rebellion—the proletariat pride, the forward motion—but that was the stuff of fantasy now. The old factories that had welded together the parts that would make SOLAT had been shuttered and condemned, if not torn down for mall space.
Roadside vendors with missing limbs did still sell vintage posters issued by the defunct propaganda office, and Tom bought several to unroll in the privacy of his hotel room, but the SOLAT that towered in the corner of those posters was so unlike the old satellite images. That SOLAT was mechanical, an armored soldier blown up to a thousand times the size of the fleshy, disposable kind—faceless, skinless, inorganic. The SOLAT in those posters was just a very large kindly guardian, one who might scoop up a drowning child on the beach. It certainly had a face.
Kursattar’s national history museum claimed that SOLAT’s menace had been greatly exaggerated by a hysterical Western media. One plaque even said SOLAT had been the size of a clocktower, not a skyscraper. Was it even real, Tom wondered, or had his father lost his mind over a walking clocktower? Maybe his poor old man had always been feeble-minded; he was too young to remember otherwise. Or maybe the only “monster” his father had seen in Kursattar was the one in the mirror. He’d never know what his father had done after his boat made landfall.
While Tom was sitting near Ode to Freedom—the last remaining tribute to SOLAT—eating shaved ice and feeling sorry for himself, he was approached by a local middle-aged man who asked him if he had come to Kursattar to see SOLAT.
“Yeah, I saw your statue,” Tom said, glancing over at Ode to Freedom.
“Not the statue. The real thing. It isn’t junked, you know.”
A beat of hope thumped in his heart, but he quickly tried to collect himself. “I know it isn’t,” said Tom. “It’s deactivated, it isn’t junked.” Did this man think he knew so little about that legendary Kursattar pride, whatever magic they’d cultivated that gave them the nerve to build a steel giant to ward off the American empire? Oppressive dictatorship or not, even an American had to admire that sort of daring. “They would never have just junked it.”
“That’s right, we wouldn’t have.” The man tilted his head thoughtfully, as if to look at Tom in a marginally different half-light. “Would you like to join a pilgrimage to see it?”
By then, his father was dead; General Quint was as well. Only one of those men got a motorcade through downtown, but he tried not to let this bother him. What mattered was that all the barriers of that old reality were lifting. It was nice to think that he might yet have the chance to live in a world that was still in the making instead of a page in a textbook, a world that breathed and moved as it willed. A world that warred. Was that why he loved SOLAT so much? Because its war gave him meaning? Because he still needed Earth’s Defender to be good?
Time to start the world over. He stood up, crumpled up the cup of melted shaved ice in his hand, and said, “Yeah.”
~
SOLAT was as horrible as it had been in his dreams. Not the thoughtful daydreams of his post-doc days—not that one dream he used to have about going home to visit his father and seeing a small fallen robot lying in his bed, like a silver mannequin—but the visceral nightmares of his childhood. The face rising from the water. The sound of the splitting earth.
The pilgrimage had only taken a day, but it had felt like a week. On the bus there were grandparents with grandchildren, couples holding hands, solo travelers who spoke to no one and stared out the window with tears in their eyes. Tom plugged in his earbuds and listened to the new president promise a new world on Voice of America. He hadn’t voted for this platform, so he didn’t know what this meant—it seemed to include a lot of deployed warships—but the hint that the world was about to come alive, even in a terrible fashion, still gave him a blood-rush. Though he’d originally intended to catch up on sleep, he felt every minute that passed.
In the evening, they reached a western beach, and there they walked through fields of weeds toward a military base that lay dark and quiet by the surf, a long bullet-shaped tomb. A guard was at the gate to greet them and take their payments—hundreds of thousands this time—and absently jerked his gun at Tom. “What are you doing here, American?”
Why don’t you want to see it, he always asked Vida. With her back to him, her voice always answered: Why do I want to see a thing that will guarantee a war if it ever wakes up?
Why do you want to see it?
The guard took them into the base. Around him the other pilgrims were starting to weep, to sing, to take out little white sticks that he quickly realized were chalk. More than a few times Tom felt himself tripping over his own feet, only to be buoyed forward by the push of the murmuring crowd. He knew in his gut that to see where this crowd was taking him was to see the thing that he had come across the world to find, so he tried to answer Vida’s question with what little time he had left before everything changed. But his mind was completely blank, save for a deep demand from every blood cell of his body for everything to change.
He didn’t know what he expected to see behind the last door that the guard unlocked. Maybe a vaguely humanoid submarine submerged at the bottom of an Olympic swimming pool. Or a kingly statue that didn’t look like it could ever have moved at all, carved in the like
ness of a paladin and lying in state. Possibly nothing. But he did not expect to see a giant steel man kneeling as in prayer. With knees to floor and head to knees, SOLAT was perfectly folded up in what Tom recognized from Vida’s yoga classes to be “child’s pose.” The world’s largest and oldest child, now rendered at rest. Passive. Sleeping. A dead battery. But that was the difference between man and machine, wasn’t it: A battery could be recharged. Dead to the world and yet …
Humming. An unmistakable steady hum of a machine that was not actually off.
Tom looked at the guard. The guard looked back at him, across the same stretchy bridge of indifference that he had never managed to cross with Vida. There was so much he wanted to ask, but he knew those eyes. He knew now that they’d never open for him.
The other pilgrims were using their chalk to write on SOLAT’s legs, the only part of his enormous body that they could reach. Tom had brought no chalk and was in too much shock to ask for one, but one small child saw him standing, looking lost, and gave him a stick of chalk as her grandparents carried her away. It was with this tiny blessing that he walked up to SOLAT, Earth’s Defender, and reached out to touch it. He tried to make out some of the other messages etched, weakly, into the giant’s skin, but he could only make out stray words in the steel. “Health” and “job” and “love.” The small immediacy of life, on so large a being.
Part of him wanted to scrawl a screeching obscenity. Maybe “USA,” just to get a reaction. He had a fantasy of waking it to life with his rage, watching it lumber to its feet, looking for enemies to crush. Swimming to New Birmingham, leveling the whole town flat. Maybe he’d run out to meet it before it disappeared into the water, wave his hands, yell, take me.
Kill me.
But he decided he didn’t want to die. So, instead, he searched for the great, charred wound where Corporal Amy Dee had crashed her plane, and wrote his father’s name upon SOLAT’s ankle. Then he leaned his head against SOLAT’s skin, and listened for the sound of his heart.
One Day of Inside/Out
Linda D. Addison
Most believed it was a special effects hack,
videos of people shrieking in pain while
skin flash-burned to muscle and bone, within
seconds healed to grey, leathery epidermis,
leaving horrible, naked creatures in human shape.
Behind locked doors, others’ skin instantly flayed
then closed in thick ropey scars, resulting
in living things with useless hands and feet,
writhing on tiled, carpeted, wood floors,
mouths twisted open, incapable of denying their past.
Cameras dropped, onlookers froze as leaders, court
rooms, events witnessed eruptions of flesh,
splitting with mottled purple infections, leaving
limbless nightmares behind, out-of-control egos,
now resembling squirming, hideous movie creations.
No one knows what caused the Day of Reckoning,
permitting remorseless ugly insides to erupt out,
carving deep in dermal stratum repercussions of
previous actions. No science could fix the living
malformations that remained—proof of free will misused.
One Last Transformation
Josh Malerman
Full moon means you gotta decide.
Always been that way; that’s how it is. Of course you know it’s coming and you got time to make up your mind, but, just like the coat you think you’re gonna wear to the party isn’t the coat you wear to the party, you don’t really know what you’re gonna do ’til the night of.
I’ve transformed into a wolf six hundred and thirty-four times. From about age nineteen into the sixty-one years since, I’ve decided yes much more often than I haven’t. Still, there’s close to a hundred moons I’ve said no to, a thing I take great pride in. Am I slowing down? Do I say no more often than I used to? Damn right I’m slowing down. So are you. Don’t matter how old you are, you’re not as quick as you were last year. And changing ain’t as easy as jogging a lap around a track. It’s something more like exerting yourself to the brink of insanity, pushed as far as you can think, ’til you worry your bones might break, your brain might pop, you might actually lose something in your head. But once you decide to do it, you’re a different person than you were when you hadn’t yet made up your mind. Something like the alcoholic who says you know what, one more, and, for a while at least, believes he’s made the right decision. That’s how it is, how it’s always been. I’ve never known a wolfman to chain himself up or lock himself into a room, even if I’ve only known a dozen or so other wolves in my eighty years of living. If you decide to do it, you’re doing it. And you’re temporarily insane by that choice. You feel thirty, fifty years younger. Your hair feels fuller, your body feels tighter. You actually crack a smile. Cause you know what’s coming, for better or for worse.
It’s like falling in love. Falling in love with the moon.
Every time.
We’re not pack animals for this very reason. Who seeks love in a pack? And just because the inner half of us travels that way doesn’t mean the outer, the man, feels any loyalty to that instinct. We’re about as loner as it gets, I’d say, and the locales in which I’ve crossed paths with others were as remote as any you’re liable to find on the planet. Saw one across a tundra once, he on all fours, me on the same, two silhouettes feasting on villagers, and all we did then was nod. Not a word. Not a growl. Not a howl. I didn’t look for him in town the next day and I’m sure he didn’t look for me either. Same with the one I ran into—physically ran into—in the northern forests of Canada, way up, chasing a young man who’d decided to write about roughin’ it. I know what the man was up to because I took the time to read what he’d written after I swallowed the fingers he’d done the writing with. But before catching him, I chased him. And as I chased, I took turns in the woods, quiet as I could bring myself to be, too quiet perhaps because the other didn’t hear me and he must’ve been thinking the same way cause I didn’t hear him any either. We rammed heads out there. The clunk alone shoulda sent the writer into hiding. But I suppose he took the sound for a natural wonder. The other and I exchanged a look. I didn’t piss any territorial stamp and neither did he. I believe his head got the worst of it and, without any exchange of words, certainly no how-do-you-do, he went his way and I continued on mine. Did I wonder what food he found that night, under that northern moon? Only insomuch as one fisherman contemplates whether or not the dots in the distant boat got anything of their own. No more.
We don’t travel in packs.
And I’ve no idea how many of us are out there.
I can guess, maybe. Based on news reports and stories and just how afraid people actually are of the werewolf. This changes through the years, different when I was twenty. People are piqued again nowadays, after a long period of not worrying so much at all. I don’t know enough about the real world to tell you why. Maybe it has something to do with feeling like you know all there is to know or feeling like there are still the unknown, elusive truths to be had.
But people are scared of us again. Just enough so anyway. You can see it in their eyes, in the way they look over their shoulder a minute or so after laughing about the idea of a werewolf. I bring it up all the time. Usually in hotel lobby bars. I’ll make a joke of it to the man or woman sitting next to me, say something like, Not unless a werewolf transformed in here and ate us all. Without fail, people laugh. But some, more recently now, they’ll look at you for a second, silently asking, What did you go and say something like that for?
I like scaring people. It’s something of a snack, you could say, compared to the feast I have to decide on every month of my life. Scaring people is fun. And any werewolf who tells you he or she isn’t in the scaring business, that it doesn’t feel good to see true horror
in the eyes of the to-be-feasted-upon is lying. How many have I killed? Every moon I’ve changed but one. One unfathomably hungry night in which my stomach became something with teeth, it seemed, like it had begun eating the rest of me from inside. But that one horror-show night aside, I’ve killed under every moon. That means I’ve seen the eyes of every one of them, as they realized my kind are real, as they realized, too, they themselves had reached the end of things. Most look to your claws first, perhaps determining the odds. In my case, they almost all look to my chest, to the name there, my name, tattooed fifty-three years ago in Finland, a drunk thing I did to remind myself I’m more human that wolf. Way I saw it, on the nights I had to decide, I’d go check myself in the mirror. Read my own name on my chest. Johnny. Remind myself to consider the moon, not to rush. But I know now that doesn’t work. And the only thing that tattoo added was people knowing the name, the human name, of the creature that killed them.
I don’t feel like a Johnny anymore. Don’t feel like a Jonathan either. Feel more like a J. That’s right, J Dennis Allan. Old enough to go by initials if only because my life, and the guilt inherent, has chipped away at the very letters that must look so powerful and gigantic on my wolf’s chest as I rise to full height before the people I kill.
So it’s up to you, see? Up to me, anyway. My kind. And ain’t that the kicker? Ain’t it cruel? Not only is that monthly carrot wagged in front of you, not only does it feel good to change, to do it, to kill, but then you don’t even get the consolation of saying you had no choice. You can’t shrug your shoulders and carry on, believing you’re a good man who happens to be more than a man. Nope. I’m responsible for every one of those deaths. For having acquiesced. For having said yes to over six hundred moons.
I met a man once, long time ago, much older man, who told me he’d figured out how to say no every time. This man I met on the tracks, train-hopping from Detroit, Michigan to Seattle, Washington. That’s where he had his mind set to go. Told me he’d heard of others like him out there. Men and women who had figured it all out. He told me it didn’t get any easier month to month, as it should have (his words, and I agree), he said a day didn’t go by when he didn’t thirst a little for the blood in the bodies he passed. But he cited “moments of clarity,” see, brief bursts throughout those same days in which he understood, wholly, that he was good. I asked him if it was worth it, briefly believing himself to be good versus satisfying that everlasting love for the moon? He didn’t answer. Said he didn’t know. But he told me I ought to go with him to Seattle. And I thought about it. All the way into the Dakotas I thought about going the distance with this man, meeting the others he said he heard of. I thought about learning from him, learning more, getting myself together like he had. But day before the moon of that month, I snuck off the boxcar in the early, dark hours. He noticed me at the car’s ledge and called to me from the recessed shadows. He said,
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