by Laird Barron
Whitney climbed over one of them to get to the door. His body squelched and settled under her weight, reminding her of the compost pile.
Outside, the air was cool and clotted with smoke and petroleum fumes. A rutted, muddy alley between ramshackle tenement towers of cinderblock and corrugated tin, purple hills studded with whitewashed shacks like mushrooms feeding on vast, festering corpses.
Catacamas. She was in the city. She felt dazed, unconvinced by the reflexive need to find an American business, a way home. There was no going home, now.
Walking the streets, she burned with hunger. Men whistled at her but backed away from her heat, from the way she looked back at them. Wandering from alley to alley until she found a paved street teeming with pedestrians and choked with idling, honking traffic. She fought the urge to sit down and regress, to take root… If she used her new eyes, all of this would disappear…
But she couldn’t rest. She burned with thirst and a strange, nameless hunger. The corner panaderia was redolent of PCB’s and heavy metals baked into its products, but she craved sugar. She went in and touched the countertop glass. Like frost or Kirlian emanations, delicate arcing fans of fungi spread out on the other side of the glass, mirroring her hand. The room grew hot and damp. The woman behind the counter swore at her. The mounds of parti-colored cakes swelled with fermenting gases, then melted into a soup of black rot.
She ran out of the bakery and into a maze of produce stands. Bananas dominated in their polymorphous perversity, from familiar fat yellow Big Mikes to bunches of purple ladyfingers alongside pineapples and potatoes, mangoes and bins and barrels of exotic fruits she couldn’t identify. Her throat burned. She longed to devour all of it, and when she took a mango from a neat ziggurat of tightly packed fruit, she did.
The fruit shriveled in her hand. The whole pyramid subsided with a horrible sigh of decay that sent droves of customers to their knees in vomiting seizures. The black blight settled on the produce in a visible mist and reduced them to clouds of spores and pools of noxious ooze. Mangos, papayas and breadfruit blackened and burst like grenades as she passed.
Only one stout old farmer could stand up to the wave of sickness. He shoved her out into the street, screaming for the police.
She started to run, but the creeping languor claimed her legs and made her stagger through the crowd and in between taxis, looking for a place to lie down. She had to get to the airport. She could beg a ride from a missionary or some drug smugglers. Or she could get to a computer and have her parents wire her some money to get home—
A car stopped in front of her. Two cops jumped out. The old farmer screamed in Spanish that she had the plague. She turned and ran through the traffic. They shot her in the back once and hit a car and two other pedestrians before they gave up.
She ran across a lot choked with exotic weeds from every corner of the globe and down a steep, unpaved alley, running like the tree was behind her again, until she no longer heard screaming.
She stopped in a courtyard between two cinderblock buildings sagging towards each other like waterlogged stacks of cardboard boxes. The gray mud underfoot was seeded with dead batteries and cigarette butts. Somewhere nearby, she heard the rumble and blare of lumber trucks.
She lay down against an overflowing trash dumpster—just long enough to catch her breath, then she’d get some fresh clothes and some medical attention for the bullet that never found its way out of her chest.
Bright green sap bubbled out of her mouth when she tried to get up. Her feet and legs clung to the mud with millions of microscopic fingers, boring like drills into the polluted soil. If she dug deep enough, she would find what she needed. These bones are seeds—
The rain pelted down and flooded the slums for a solid week. Black water swirled and stagnated over the spot where Whitney lay.
After the floodwaters receded, a gang of hungry children found her, but they didn’t know what she was. She had nothing worth taking, and they argued over whether the strange white things were branches or bones. They dared each other to eat the black-red berries that clustered on the hollow cornucopia under the dumpster, so like a ribcage. When the stupid walleyed boy who took the dare went into a seizure, the rest of them wanted to try it, too.
Don’t Make Me Assume My Ultimate Form
Laird Barron
Polychromatic Mercy
Before you become Dee Dee Gamma, before the Black Kaleidoscope takes over your existence, you are Delia Dolores Andersen and you specialize in knocking over jewelry stores. Today will be your last day on the job. Your head swivels and that serves nothing, spares you nothing as your partner, a brute, points her gun at the jeweler and squeezes the trigger. A bullet punches into the jeweler’s forehead. The pistol vibrates. The frame drags, almost disintegrates into cigarette burns, and then steadies. Words and sound synchronize
What you’re thinking at this moment is primitive and inchoate as the explosion of chemicals and electrified neurons through your system. The thought is as elastic as all of time and space, and like the contrail of the reflexive act, it hangs in your mind in the gulf between, Don’t touch that alarm, you stupid sonofabitch, and, Sweet Jesus, oh, fuck. Willa killed him. That’s right, you forgot for a moment, your partner’s name is Willa. An Iowa girl, a Star Wars action figure collector, overweight and undereducated, childlike in her emotional incapability. She appears baffled at the report and the jeweler sprawled on the floor.
Now you’ve got the case with the diamonds and you’re cat-footing through the ghost-lighted lobby for the doors. You stepped in blood to collect the prize and you leave a trail.
The driver rolls up to the curb in a Maserati. She pegs it zero to sixty before you get buckled. The vista of glass shop fronts, sidewalk cafes, alleyways, and cross streets blurs, reverses into sequoias, swamps, the mists of prehistory and bubbling lava. Keep rewinding. An old star burst into a fountain of gamma rays about a hundred million years ago. That cosmic lance has crossed an infinity of cold and darkness to pierce the sunroof, the dome of your skull, and your brain. Cells roil and transform in squamous panic. Decades of your allotted mortal span are reduced to a handful of years. Every tick of the second-hand is emphasis.
Your consciousness untethers from its flesh and rises above the car for a fraction of a millisecond that lasts closer to an eon. The universe fractures into a blizzard of eternally replicating slivers of ice. Images are imprinted within the slivers. You see men with automatic weapons. A wound drips in a magenta sky. You behold with the searing clarity of an X-ray the new ravenous companion that has taken root in your gray matter.
You will never be alone again. That realization is terrifying. You feel nothing, however. You remain numb, even when it all begins to come true.
Mrs. Shrike
Seven months into a twenty-year stretch in a Spanish prison, a chick from way back in high school visits your cell. She apparates between skull-shattering migraines.
Norse: “Hi, I’m Indra Norse. Mrs. Shrike thought a friendly face might cheer your gloomy ass up.” Afro, shooting glasses, gold jumpsuit, utility belt with a black sunburst buckle, and combat boots. She looks different than the demure schoolgirl you knew in Alaska. Faster.
You remember her instantly because she’d been the smartest girl in the room. Her names fascinated you. Indra is a male god and Norse seems an odd surname for an African American family. You also recall that speculating on the subject is a sure-fire way to get punched in the mouth.
Norse: “Two options, Dee Dee. Run away with me to the circus or rot here. Option one, I return in twenty-four hours with all the papers to make you a free woman. Only catch, you gotta repay the debt. We’ll talk about that later. Option two, I hope you are happy with the roaches.”
You don’t require twenty-four hours to weigh the merits. She gives them to you anyway. She asks how the migraines are as she watches you dress in clean traveling clothes. No fancy jumpsuit for you. Later, perhaps. Your own questions are deflected—who, what, w
hy?
Norse: “The spirits aren’t cooperating? Ask the magic eight ball again later. Eat these. Take the edge off those headaches.”
Clean clothes, clean record, passport, and tickets home. Norse’s reference to your heightened powers of perception, which is a secret you’ve not bothered to share with anyone. The FBI is running a game, has to be. Somebody is running a game. Life is rigged.
It’s true—pain pills are addicting when you gulp them in bunches. An inoperable brain tumor grows fat and you’ve resigned yourself to the worst. The pills fog your mind too often. Although once matters begin to reveal themselves, you’re actually grateful for the respite from reality. What passes for reality, at any rate.
You: “Where are we going?”
Norse: “The Nest.”
The Nest
The Nest is located in western Washington. Mrs. Shrike’s Home for Wayward Girls is how it hits you after you mingle with Norse and the others at Liz Lochinvar’s Bellingham residence. Set among old-growth fir trees and straight out of the 1960s with lots of glass and lots of shag. Jacuzzi, steam room, a wet bar, etcetera, etcetera. Lochinvar, another of your long-lost high school comrades, inherited it from some rich relative and this is where Mrs. Shrike keeps you sharp and ready as a box of knives. You have access to food, weapons, and discretionary funds. Everything except capes and domino masks.
Several women form the heart of the sorority itself. Introductions occur around a coffee table while a grand Pacific Northwest thunderstorm rumbles overhead.
Norse: “Naval Intelligence. Profiler. Authority doesn’t give a damn about ridding the world of evil. I want to burn things down.”
Lochinvar: “Ex-Army. Olympic Judo champeen. Too many rules. Wasn’t suited for it. Not at all.” She smiles at the knife in her callused fist.
Sloan: “Ex-housewife. Alcoholic. Addict. Antisocial. Shrike taught me how to manage my assets. By the way, fuck Judo. Krav Maga all day and all night.” She smiles at Lochinvar. A couple of sweet-faced calendar girls who can tear phonebooks apart with their bare hands.
Mace: “Professional final girl.” Her voice is rough, her neck is scarred. She smokes the living shit out of cigarettes. She wears a bunch of fighting rings. A tattoo of binary code runs along her left forearm. The Zeroes and Ones spell REX. He’s dead.
You: “I’m a career criminal. I’m dying.”
Norse: “Dying? Dying? Bitch, we’re survivors.”
Sloan: “Survivors—for now.”
Lochinvar: “It doesn’t matter a rat’s ass what we were. Now we’re the point of the spear. Now we are the first cohort. What scales you ain’t shed from your old life, will fall real soon.”
Sloan: “The legionary first cohort of ex-girlfriends.” She whacks her bottle of Rolling Rock against Norse’s.
You: “Groovy digs, to be sure, and the company is pleasant—”
Mace: “She wants to know why we’ve been gathered here today…” She’s half in the bag, which proves to be a routine condition.
You: “Point of the spear? That’s not phallic or anything.”
Sloan: “We’re down with phallic metaphors, and phalluses.”
Norse: “Some of us are down.”
Lochinvar: “We are a privately funded clandestine civilian agency. Certain elements within local and federal law enforcement and military organizations are aware of our existence. Some of these tolerate us, assist us on occasion. Mostly we’re on our own.”
Norse: “We fight evil.”
You: “Specifically?”
Norse: “We rescue kittens from trees.”
Sloan: “We help old ladies cross the street.”
Norse: “No job is too large, no need too small.”
Lochinvar: “The other day I personally annihilated a cult that wanted to revive mass sacrifice to open a wormhole to deep space in somebody’s basement. Next week it could be some asshole has figured a way to construct a pocket-sized death-ray.”
Mace: “Or the kitten will be up another tree.”
Sloan: “We ennoble the downtrodden and defame the wicked. We set fires, we bat our eyes, and we get the last word. Whatever it takes.”
Norse: “You just never know what will happen when you jump out a bed in the morning. Shrikes have all kinds of fun.”
You nurse your near-beer and search their faces for the joke or the con. None of them give a damn about your skepticism. The easy camaraderie and devilish smiles aren’t the kind a woman can fake. Their gallows humor and haunted glances are sharp enough to cut right through your cynicism. These are condemned souls hatching doomed escape plans while the firing squad assembles. If your foot wasn’t already in the grave you might worry more. You wonder about frying pans and fires.
Norse squeezes your hand and your apprehensions are overcome.
X
The stories are similar for the others who inhabit the Nest, the girls who come and go on mysterious errands and sometimes disappear without a forwarding address. Each of you has a purpose, a function within a great complicated pattern. Nine is the current magic number of the roster of your all-girls club. There were eleven as recently as last week; circumstances are such that membership fluctuates. Although the core of the team hails from Alaska, none of you calls it home for one reason or another. The last frontier is a magnet that draws against the metal in your blood and you’ll head back soon enough, ready or not.
Cryptic histories and gallows humor to the contrary, not all of you are damned. Far less melodramatic. However, you are and that’s why everybody smiles like you’re a puppy with cancer, except you’re a thirty-something ex-con with cancer. You’re happy to have a job. Each of you has one individual to thank for this newfound lease on life.
You refer to your benefactor as The Old Woman in the Mountain. The connotations are evident upon consideration of your group’s favorite problem-solving methods. You also refer to her as Mrs. Shrike because that’s the long-defunct company name graven into the serial plate on the underside of the midnight-blue phone. Shrikes are beautiful and cruel. The universe, blind, insensate, and implacable, understands perfectly.
The Old Woman represents an enigma. The fact you can’t turn the Black Kaleidoscope her direction is troubling. Who is she? A do-gooder tycoon? The mouthpiece of a multinational corporation? A government shill pulling strings for murky objectives? Lochinvar and Mace allegedly have the most insight. Too bad they aren’t talking. The name of the game is trust, although blind faith seems more apt. Bottom line, you placed your bet. Let it ride.
You and Norse aren’t present when Lochinvar unlocks the sacred gun safe (a rusty and verdigris-stained Diebold hulk with skulls and crossbones painted on the side) and makes the ritual call on the midnight-blue rotary. You get an earful soon after. Lochinvar convenes an emergency session to discuss the options. She drops the blinds and puts on the lamp with the crimson shade; transforms the furnished basement into a bunker where generals have gathered to decide between DEFCON 2 or DEFCON1.
Word is, X must be retrieved or else. Or else could indicate the assassination of a world leader, the end of an era, or the fiery demolition of planet Earth. Or else covers a spectrum of unpleasant possibilities.
Once X is secured, further instructions will follow. The main problem confronting the group is that none of you know what X represents. The basic idea seems to be this person or item currently resides in a ghost town in Alaska and that you’ll recognize X when you see it. Are missions always this ambiguous? That would explain why Lochinvar brought you into the fold despite your violent misdeeds and how much fixing it took to cover your tracks.
The other girls want to draw lots, throw dice, or knives, go two out of three falls. This case is special. You are uniquely suited for the business at hand—the mind control lessons are paying off. Most importantly, the Old Woman in the Mountain informs Lochinvar and Sloan that it must be you, no substitutions. This is your trial by fire, Gamma. The first mission is a blooding and it is traditionally done solo
. Mace and Lochinvar explain that they’ll run interference and direct the opposition’s attention elsewhere and give you the best chance possible. However, this first go-around, you’re on your own with everything to prove.
To be accepted by the team, to become part of something larger than yourself… You need it to fill your hollow core. Time surely isn’t on your side. In the face of imminent extinction, no risk is too great for a shot at redemption. Whatever threat lurks in the great white north can’t be worse than the miserable existence you’ve put in the rearview nor the malignancy of your traitor cells. The others laugh at this naÏveté. Mace and Lochinvar, despite their scars and their notoriety, laugh the loudest. Their bitterness raises the hair on your neck. In that moment your friends aren’t soft or warm or jocular. No longer are they sarcastic ex-college girls gone a little wrong, lounging in bathing suits, indolent from wine. They are druidesses, naked but for antlers and red ochre, obsidian daggers raised high against the black supermoon, as they loom over the sacrificial slab and you squirming there.
You smile as the fantasy bursts. A weak smile because you’re never sure anymore. Could be in another reality, a previous incarnation, wherein Mrs. Shrike’s crew ate human hearts and trilled Aztec death whistles.
Sloan believes the effort is fruitless and that it will end in all your deaths. She’s a gleeful pessimist. Mace says it doesn’t much matter, win or lose. She’s even more of a pessimist. Neither of them are talking about your impending trip into the north, they’re referring to the big picture.
Norse: “May as well be me. Spare new girl the pain.”
Sloan: “Nuh-uh.” She flexes her biceps. “It should be me and thee. Could be an occasion for violence. Home girl’s soft. We’re the violent ones.”