by Andrew Post
The bang was almost swallowed by the cauldron’s noise.
For a nanosecond of absolute terror, the bullet bounced about the metal room, hitting this and that: ting, ping, pew. Squishy and I both covered our heads and ducked. I tried to follow its trajectory, but it was impossible. It seemed as if the noises were just sounding about the room randomly, on their own, the bullet too fast to see.
And I felt it. Like an enormous finger flicking me in the knee. A swat. I felt knocked off balance, and even though I tried throwing my crutches out to keep from falling over, I did anyway, collapsing to the floor.
Squishy abandoned the revolver and ran to me. “Oh, mercy. Oh, good Lord, I’ve shot you.”
There was nothing, at first. Just a warmth, a sort of itchiness. I sat up, ripped off my goggles. Feeling around, I found that the bullet had entered to the right of a kneecap. And even though my legs, as the doctors had determined when I was still a baby, had only one-one-hundredth of normal sensation, I felt the pain arrive after a second. A pain that managed to worm its way past my leg’s insensitivity—as if a greased wooden screw were slowly being guided into my leg, turn by turn.
“Help me upstairs. Come on. Now. I need to get my first aid kit.” Blood soaked through my jeans and began dripping onto the floor. I clamped a hand over it, but the determined stuff squeezed up between my fingers.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am. I’m so sorry.” In a strange fit—something I’d never seen him do in the show—Squishy began striking himself about the head with both three-fingered fists. “I’m horrible. Horrible.”
Throttling my leg to try to stem the flow, my voice reached a pitch I’d never heard it make before: “Just help me up.”
Track 16
TUBTHUMPING
The bullet hit the floor of the bathtub, leaving a dotted line of blood before terminating its roll at the drain stopper with a clink.
I set the tweezers aside and pulled the balled washcloth out of my teeth. I didn’t really need it, but without a whole lot of practicing dentists around anymore, I didn’t want to risk crushing my teeth to powder.
The bathroom door creaked open an inch. “Ma’am, I’m terribly sorry for what I did. It was an accident, I assure you.”
“It’s fine.” I suddenly felt the need to pull a towel off the rack and cover my lower half. I slid off the bathtub rim and scooted backward across the floor until my back collided with the door and shut it.
“Ma’am? I’m sorry.”
I sat there, my hand resting on my bandaged knee, the gauze making my leg nearly twice its thickness. I was worried about infection but hoped the entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide I poured on and into the wound would keep germs at bay.
The gun, I decided, would stay with me from now on. If not on my person, at least far out of Squishy’s reach. I’d make use of the high shelves in the kitchen.
I struggled into my jeans and holding onto both the rim of the sink and the towel rack, hoisted myself to standing. I eased my full weight onto the right knee. Still just that faint tickle, maybe equal to the sensation of a paper cut. Not bad.
After tucking the gun into the back of my pants, I picked up my crutches and left the bathroom, which now smelled coppery and heavy with disinfectants.
Squishy was standing on top of a bookshelf next to the dining room door, looking out the porthole window. Worry marked his face. He didn’t even hear me come in, and I’m anything but stealthy.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
He jumped. “Ma’am! You’re all right. Thank heavens. Please let me just say that I am deeply, deeply sorry for what happened to you. My actions disgust even me. I find firearms abhorrent, and I never meant to hurt you.”
“It’s okay,” I said, waving him off. “I hardly felt a thing.”
His expression—apologetic but tinged with fear—didn’t shift.
“What?” I said.
After two false starts, he said, “I heard some most distressing sounds coming from the other side of the rig, ma’am.” He pointed through the porthole.
I moved closer and, through the frost collected on its opposite side, saw that the lights were on over the helipad garden, each one haloed with mist and falling rain. With my forehead pressed against the glass, I scanned the greenhouses for shadows. Beyond, the various towers of the microrefinery and the drill derrick itself looked still. Streaks of water cascaded in the wind, blurring my view.
No movement on the various ladders and catwalks, as far as I could tell.
I looked over my shoulder at the dining room, paying close attention to the lights. Whenever the cauldron was going, the bulbs in the entire rig would dim or, sometimes, go out completely. Now they were all burning at their full brightness. The cauldron had either stuttered and crapped out—which happened sometimes for no apparent reason—or it was finished scratching what I’d asked it to scratch. Shit. I never turned the thing off.
“Did you see anything?”
“No, ma’am. I just noticed that the lights outside had come on. Are they on some sort of timer or . . . ?”
“Motion detectors.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Stay here.”
“Do be careful, ma’am.”
I clack-thumped onto the catwalk, rain cold on my neck and bare arms. “I will,” I said, holding the door behind me, “just as long as you stop calling me ma’am.” I closed the door on him.
I remained just outside the barracks for a while, watching and listening. I knew every square inch of this place, knew which stairs creaked, which ladders rattled when someone climbed up them, all of the hiding places. The rig, before things went bad, had been a wonderland for hide-and-seek. I guess it still was, but I didn’t really like the idea of playing it with ninja Smocks.
The Smocks’ harvester guns came to mind: how they didn’t shoot with a big enough area to take someone all at once. The holes they made in the walls, which they’d wanted to put in Thadius, were the size of basketballs. They didn’t want to take all of you. They wanted to take a piece here and a piece there, let you feel yourself chipped down to nothing.
And they could fire without a sound, from anywhere.
On my crutches, I took one swing forward after another, keeping as quiet as I could, until I was standing between the two long troughs of the raised vegetable gardens. I hugged one crutch under my armpit, canted my weight to one side, and freed the revolver. I snapped it open, saw the one spent brass inside, turned the column until the next fresh bullet would be squared up with the hammer and barrel, and snapped it back in place with a flick of my wrist.
I drew a deep breath and shouted into the cold mist, “There’s no way off this thing. You guys might as well come out now.”
No reply but the hiss of the sprinkles landing, the swish and splash of Lake Superior all around the rig. Somewhere way out there on shore, a foghorn blew a stretching, melancholy blat.
I reset the safety on the revolver and held its grip with two fingers so I could manage the crutch handle with the others, and ambled forward. The catwalk connecting the two halves of the rig was like a blue tunnel, hugged by plastic sheeting to keep people from being propelled off during high winds. I stood at one end and used the tunneled catwalk like an amplifier, calling out again, this time directly toward the labyrinth of pipes and hoses of the microrefinery on the far end. “Seriously, there’s no way off. No lifeboats on this thing, no life preservers. You try to swim to shore, you’ll drown.”
There was a flash, which I took for lightning—until I saw the part of the railing next to me was now gone.
I ducked, fumbled with my crutches, and threw myself onto the floor. I glanced up and saw the hole that had appeared in the plastic surrounding the catwalk. Size of a baseball. Smaller. More painful. Couldn’t help it—I imagined bites that size being instantaneously nabbed from my abdomen, my chest, my neck. I thought about my heart being molecularly snatched from my body.
I expected some words to follow that warnin
g shot, and I remained lying still to listen. Nothing. Silence.
Straight ahead, to where the metal bridge terminated at the walkway along the microrefinery’s front doors, I saw a shape skitter by. I remained prone and aimed my gun ahead. Hopefully lying down would make me a smaller target and not just an easy one.
When the wind changed, I could hear something. Heavy breathing. Injured. Sick, perhaps. I pulled myself forward with my elbows along the catwalk, abandoning my crutches for the time being. I didn’t need to be standing to shoot. I continued, realizing that moving forward brought me closer to the sounds of the heavy, panicked breathing.
Near the end of the catwalk, floodlights drowned out my view of the other paths and platforms. Another shape snapped past. This time I got a better look. It was without clothes, running hobbled over, hugging itself. The breathing continued but in a different location.
Another hole appeared in the plastic, sounding like a cracking belt, roughly where my head would’ve been if I’d been standing. Rain spit in through the hole, and I continued my army crawl. I wasn’t a great shot; I’d have to get close.
Through the pounding wind and the plastic sheeting snapping and curling around me, I heard a voice shout, “Where am I?” Female. Terrified, pained.
I didn’t know how to answer. Give her my location, risk her getting away and telling the Smocks about this place?
“Why are you doing it?” I shouted back, for lack of anything better. If she really was in as much pain as it seemed, she might answer. No harm in trying.
She coughed, sputtering, “Please—there’s something wrong with us.”
Us? They? I’d made a recipe with Thadius’s cauldron for one Smock. Had the thing made more? There were six Smocks in the fixins canister, after all. Had my cauldron just decided to do them all? Shit biscuits.
“How many of you are there?” I asked.
“Uh. Oh . . . f-fuh . . . uggh.”
I scooted forward another few feet on my elbows. She was somewhere to the right, somewhere beyond the catwalk’s tunnel of plastic. I pulled myself up onto the railing and peeked through the hole she’d made. She was out on the microrefinery’s catwalk to the burn-off tower. Wet and stringy hair hung in her face. Her bare skin was pale enough I could see the blue of her veins; her eyes were rimmed in red. I saw a long red streak running from her chest to her stomach and down her legs. She was hugging an injured arm to herself while using the other to keep the pressure on.
“What’s wrong?” I shouted through the hole.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” she said, stopping herself to cough. A red mist hit the air and was snatched away in a damp gust. She backed up from the railing and stepped into the opening at the end of the catwalk, trying to find shelter from the rain, even if it meant being under it with me, her enemy.
I loped along, using the railing to keep myself up.
The woman came in, sat down heavily, immediately pulled her knees to her chest.
I got within a few paces, shifted my weight to lean on the railing with my side, and used both hands to train the gun on her. “Tell me how to stop you—all of you.”
She looked up at me as casually as if I’d merely inquired about the time. Now, closer, and with her head raised, I could see the twisted mess that was her left arm. It looked flayed, the fingers all fanned out in unnatural angles, some bent backward, others corkscrews. “You don’t know what you’re doing with that thing,” she hissed at me, showing me the ruined arm. When she seemed satisfied I’d seen enough, she brought it back to her chest and cradled it like a dead thing. “I’m lucky I came out as well as I did.”
“You weren’t the only . . .”
She nodded without looking up. “No. I wasn’t.”
From inside the microrefinery, down its many, many stairs and halls, deep within its metal bowels, I heard a disjointed chorus of cries. They seemed to be in competition: one rose, the others followed. Then, together, they fell into silence for a beat. A moment later, as if a new round of torment had begun, they rose and fell once more.
“I tore myself free,” she said.
“They came out . . .”
“As one. Yes. I told you, you don’t know what you’re doing.” She looked toward the open door. “You should really just put them out of their misery. If you’re using us for materials, get down there and use your harvester. It’s cruel to leave them alive like that—if you call that alive.”
Bile burned the back of my throat. The gun rattled in my hands. I let one hand free of it to catch myself. “I can’t.” I could barely hear my own voice, let alone expect her to. I forced the words out: “I don’t have a harvester—just the one on the machine. Could I put you back in and—?”
“No. We’ll just keep coming out the same, now. There’s no undoing this—with what you have.”
“Tell me what to do.”
Her reply was issued dry, her eyes hovering on the gun in my hands for a flicker. “Kill us.”
“I . . . I can’t do that.” My bladder felt full all of a sudden, my stomach burbling. This was bad enough, the woman with the ruined arm—seeing it, knowing it was my fault. But killing her? Shooting her? Going downstairs and shooting all the others—three or four screaming voices plus others, I imagined, who didn’t make it out with usable throats? “I can’t do that.”
Her hair hung over her eyes. “Then what’s that thing for? Showing off?” She dropped her head. The puddle beneath her was growing, now more red than translucent. “You scratchers accuse us of being barbaric animals, but look at what you use for tools. Things that can’t do anything but kill. At least we can create, heal if need be. But those crude things?” Despite her injuries, she scoffed. “Gunpowder was the worst of all human inventions. But, still, here I am. Asking you, a Neanderthal with an obnoxious, loud killing device, to use it on me. Go ahead. End it. You made this mistake; it’s yours to fix.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should’ve thought of that.”
“Is there some other way?”
She grunted, pulling her flayed arm to her chest. “Like I said. Animals. Always willing to rip things apart, but when it comes to actually fixing the things you’ve done, you’d rather just . . .” She was either too weak or too disgusted to finish the statement.
I got her point. I had to do something. This was my fault. I held out the gun, pointed it at the woman’s head. “Tell me how to stop you, or I’ll just let you bleed to death.” Whoa, bad Cass, my conscience gasped. I told it to shut up.
She found her words. “You get your hands around something you have no idea about, and you think it’s your right to mess with it, thinking just because it can be done, it’s yours to do. You don’t want to take the time to start small. You want to go right for the big idea—progress.” Her bright blue eyes studied mine. “And now we have to come here, try to fix your mistake, and save you from yourselves.”
“How do we stop you?” Then I shouted, “Tell me!”
“Find the Betrayer. They apparently like your versh, and if they’re honest with you, maybe they’ll tell you what’s really going on. The Betrayer sympathizes with you idiots here. I won’t sully myself in speaking to you any longer. Animal.”
“The Betrayer? Who’s—?”
“Your guess is as good as ours. But I saw you that day, at the fat man’s theater. I was there. I felt you. Thought maybe you were the Betrayer.” Her good hand pressed to her forehead, she peeked at me sidelong between thumb and finger. She sputtered a wet laugh. “Shame, too. The one who finds the Betrayer is granted ascension. I would’ve much preferred that end to this one . . . but maybe in another versh.”
“Don’t. Don’t kill yourself.”
Eyes clenched shut, she gently shook her head. “As a member of the Regolatore, I have to clean up after your people, even if it means dealing with the mess you made of me. I refuse to let this blight follow me into the next life.”
A flash flared out from under her hand.
A wet crunch.
Her head snapped back.
When her hand fell away, her eyes rolled back, showing only the whites. Her entire body lurched violently. The hole she’d just harvested from her own skull, clean through from front to back, bled freely.
Immediately the skin on the inside of her arm began to turn black, like frostbite in fast-forward. It trailed up, following a specific line up her arm, to her chest, and to her heart. Within her, I could hear a snap, a muffled thump. A dark coloring bloomed, spreading across her chest like an asterisk. A wisp of smoke snaked from her slackened lips.
I was going to throw up. I whipped away, trying not to add insult to injury by empting my stomach onto her. I got most of it over the railing.
Puke on my chin, I fell to the catwalk hard and scrambled backward.
A warm hand on my arm made me jump. I screamed. Squishy. I hugged him to me and, for a moment, forgot my disability and tried to make my legs piston me away from this horrible scene. For a moment there, I kind of lost it. Matter of fact, no kind of about it. “Maybe she’s all right now. Maybe she harvested herself and now she’ll be back where she came from and she’s okay and—maybe they can make her a new body or something.”
Squishy held me. “Thadius said they can’t harvest themselves. I think when she did that, she overloaded her body’s harvester. I think she did it on purpose.”
“We need to go get Thadius. We have to get off this thing.” With shaking hands, I pulled on the railing to get to my feet. My crutches were still at the far end of the catwalk. I couldn’t stomach turning around, looking at that woman’s body again. The last person I saw dead was Mom, and it wasn’t like that. No blood. Just a silent slipping of the soul, ending with a long sigh, as if she was glad to be done with the chore of suffering. Not like this, the Smock woman voluntarily plucking a cylinder of meat and bone from her own head.
I pointed at my crutches and begged Squishy, “Please get my crutches. I can’t . . . I can’t . . . I don’t want to be here right now.”