Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  “A planet?”

  “That is a reasonable assumption. Trunk theory does not speculate about the destination point at the other end of the peristaltic conduit. It was always possible these pilots might not arrive at all or might arrive and die quickly.”

  “Let’s talk to the dead pilot. Where is he now?”

  “Presumably,” said Milo, “he regenerated upon death from the nearest Pool.”

  Bishop gazed down at the ashen face of the pilot and imagined the man’s air dwindling, his mask filling with aching exhalations. Dying in agony alone in the tiny capsule.

  He actually felt a little sorry for the stupid type twos who volunteered for Operation Westward, traveled through the trunk at impossible odds, saw some incredible planet, and ended up in a loop of asphyxiation deaths. Regular men were considered heroes for dying once for their country; this poor idiot was out there somewhere, still dying.

  “We’ll build him a statue or something. Put it out front of that rocket museum in New Mexico.”

  “Very well,” said Milo. “What do you intend to do in regards to the warning?”

  “I intend to do nothing.” Bishop shoved the pilot’s logbook back into Milo’s hands and started to walk away. Milo fell in behind him. “We do not know who sent the message, we do not know their motive, and we do not know what they’re warning us to do. Unless you know something I don’t.”

  Milo gripped Bishop by the shoulder and turned him around with ease.

  “Do you not feel it?” asked Milo. He cocked his head, a smile slowly splitting his lips. “She is restless now, more than ever before.”

  “Increase the water flow,” said Bishop.

  “The Pool’s turbulence and these warnings are part of a pattern,” said Milo. “Even if you have not read my reports, you know this to be true. They are linked to the increase in anomalous matter emerging from the Pool, the pandemics of hemostaph and PPD, the spores, and the mycoforms. Junk and living things are being pushed out of the Pool like debris thrust through the water by the bow wave of a ship. A very large ship.”

  “We have ships of our own,” said Bishop. “I am very tired of people trying to intimidate me. I won’t be frightened of some specter passing us notes in bottles.”

  “A change is coming.” Milo leaned in, almost eye to eye, demanding Wesley’s full attention. “And I do not believe we can stop it.”

  The PitSec cruiser creaked on its heavy shocks, its interior swimming with the familiar smells of a police vehicle: seat leather, gun oil, the hot plastic of the radio, air freshener canceling the lingering whiff of the last lowlifes to fill the back. Casper’s view of Polly from the backseat was partially obstructed by a mesh divider. The uncanny dog was beside him, still and silent.

  They ascended from the Pit by way of the motor pool’s corkscrew ramp and emerged into daylight in the shadow of one of the familiar cooling towers. Casper blinked away the gray light and took in the immense structure, its paneling outlined by weathering, rust stains where the tips of rebar showed through the eroded concrete. It was ugly but somehow reassuring. Good to be out of the Pit, in the open air, in the shadow of a landmark he at least recognized.

  They weren’t actually in the shadow of the tower at all, he realized, but beneath some much larger building, elevated like the barrel of a cannon firing at short range. Vast, dwarfing the four cooling towers, seemingly constructed from spurs of steel and acres of green glass. The scale of it reminded him of the spires on the other side, the same yawning openings along its flanks, paddle-shaped balconies spilling into the open air. The sun caught in the green glass and dazzled his eyes. He averted his gaze, blinking away the afterimage of the monolith haunting his vision.

  The buildings of the San Pedro Atomic Power Station, much more numerous than he recalled, had taken on a hardened, bunker quality. The facility was surrounded by a fifteen-foot perimeter wall backed by walkways and gun platforms and unwelcoming guard towers. As the cruiser emerged through the main gate, a time-consuming process in itself, a quintet of helicopters whooped overhead, hammering the sky as they disappeared north, heading toward a Los Angeles he doubted he would recognize.

  The arterial road was thronged with men and women, mostly duplicates, on foot and gathering in shacks made from corrugated metal, sections of brick, aluminum siding, and wooden slats. Here and there old signage constituted walls or doorways and reflected the fading remnants of advertisements for products familiar to Casper. Among the many duplicates there was a profusion of facial tattoos, piercings, and ugly surgical modifications. Two women offering their bare breasts up to the passing traffic seemed to have simply cut their faces with knives to leave interesting scars.

  “Creeptown”—Polly raised her voice over the din of honking horns and shouting pedestrians—“starts right outside the gates and runs all the way to Carson City. That’s about where the Army cordon is.”

  “For what?”

  “Spores,” she said, and she pointed out a side window at a bullhorn siren attached to a defeated-looking lamppost. “Have the whole city on edge. Deadly stuff for the flakes. You’ll see them in the air if it’s bad enough. Look like particles in pond water. You don’t have to worry about them. They don’t make us sick.”

  A black armored vehicle rumbled past, its slope-nosed chassis creaking on eight fat rubber tires. A man wearing mirrored sunglasses and a uniform similar to Polly’s, with the addition of an armored vest, stood in the top hatch of the vehicle, scanning the crowd from behind a pintle-mounted machine gun.

  “This is bad,” Casper said. The more his face repeated in the crowd on either side of the car, the more isolated he felt. “How the hell did it end up like this?”

  “Simple.” Polly hit the light strip and blasted the horn to clear more of the pedestrians from the road. “We just kept coming, and we didn’t stop.”

  The metal cage enclosing the cruiser’s side windows stippled Casper’s view of the shanties. The slum of Creeptown had devoured every familiar street and landmark Casper recalled, encrusting the city in a visually inscrutable mass of rusty sheds, billowing tarps, cat-whisker antennas, junked cars, garbage, and people. So many goddamn people.

  Polly navigated the cruiser through the crush of the slum toward evenly spaced apartment towers starkly invading the sky. The rust-brown shanties remained, following the roadways and side streets, the grimy foot traffic becoming less respectful of the cruiser. Dense, multitiered aggregations of shanties gathered at the base of each tower the cruiser passed. The color and the profusion of the slum, contrasted with the singular immensity of each tower, reminded Casper of piles of fall leaves spreading beneath trees.

  “I’m supposed to let you out here,” said Polly. “Truthfully, you’ll never make it out alive. You’ve been in the cannery too long.”

  There was a small pond of brown water, foamed and reforming from the passage of a truck, a heap of trash, sifted for anything useful, rotten pieces of food and paper wrappers pressed into the mud, fat bundles of electric cables under tension descending from the tower like guy wires and exploding at ground level into a root system of black veins, caught in a cluster of sloped sheds, roofs of corrugated tin, walls of plywood and translucent plastic sheeting offering a cataract view inside of the shapes of men and women, blinking lights from a television, steam gusting from a cook pot and discoloring the edge of a plastic wall. Nothing marked this little spot as any different from the others.

  Casper realized Polly was watching him. She did not smile, but there was faint bemusement to her expression.

  “I’ll take you somewhere safer,” she said, and she put the car into motion again.

  “What did they do to me?”

  “Read the manual. Shoulda been in the box I gave you. Still have it?”

  Casper checked his pocket and brought out the stapled chapbook. He waved it by the divider so she could see it.

  “Good,” she said. “It’s mostly full of shit, propaganda about the company and America, b
ut it tells you the basics. You used to be a detective, right? Use those skills to figure out what’s a snow job and what’s straight.”

  Casper flipped the booklet open to a random page. It displayed a simplistic black-and-white cartoon of the American flag. A soldier, a boy, and a dog were standing in a row and saluting the flag. Something was off about it. Six rows of stars, nine stars in each row. Ten stars in the sixth row. He closed the book.

  “There’s a soup kitchen, St. Philomena’s, on the other side of the cordon.” Polly turned the cruiser down a side street to maneuver around a stalled truck. “You can get a meal and a bed there. It’s one of the few places that will take in dupes. Just don’t expect the flakes to like having you around as company.”

  “I’ve heard of St. Philomena’s before,” said Casper. He married Lynn there. A flash of happy memories was swallowed by the thought that she was surely dead fifty-five years later.

  Casper stuffed the booklet back into his pocket. He looked over at the dog. It was staring right at him. It reached a paw out and placed it on his leg just above the knee. Something about the way it blinked and lifted the paw and set it down again was deeply unsettling.

  “What do I do?” he said, not wanting to stare at the dog anymore.

  “That’s up to you, Ninety.” Polly was watching in the rearview. “Like I told you before, if it were me, I would get as far away from LA as fast as possible. You’re gonna learn that the flakes don’t like you, especially outside the cities, so stick to the main highways and head east. Maybe head for Las Vegas or Dallas—lots of dupes there—or somewhere in the Midwest maybe. Chicago got it real bad with a strain of hemostaph last summer. Housing is probably dirt cheap if you can find work.”

  “Do you have a ... is there a number where I could call you? I haven’t seen too many friendly faces, and—”

  “No,” she said, pronouncing the finality. “I’m not an emergence counselor. I’m not your parole officer. If things play out the way I intend, I’m not even gonna be in this job in a couple of days. From the moment you leave this car, you make your own way in the world.”

  North of the towers and the shacks, tent shelters and improvised hovels continued for several miles before gradually diminishing, first into empty lots and abandoned properties waiting to be overtaken, and then disappearing entirely into a bulldozed strip of jumbled concrete, masonry, and metal.

  Military trucks formed the outer perimeter of the cordon, blocking all lanes of traffic, parked across the road to force those approaching the checkpoint barricade to weave slowly back and forth around the trucks. The barricade was constructed from infill barriers heaped with broken concrete. A heavy-gauge gate on rolling wheels spanned one lane of traffic. There was a rectangular guardhouse building, prefabricated, larger than seemed necessary, set flush against the barriers, its plastic siding partly hidden behind a warning sign displaying checkpoint rules and a map of the cordon. A long antenna emerged from the guardhouse, curved by the limp weight of a Confederate battle flag.

  The cruiser’s arrival interrupted conversations among the soldiers manning the checkpoint. All of the men wore gas masks, but tension visibly poured into their posture, and they set rifles against the barricades. Casper reckoned facing a squad or more of riflemen behind cover was never a pleasant experience. As if to add to that thought, one soldier swiveled the long barrel of a machine gun toward the PitSec car, his upper body protected by the folded shovel of the gun’s shield.

  “Park the car in the red zone, and turn off the ignition.” The message was boosted almost to feedback by the low fidelity of the loudspeaker, but Polly understood. She slowed the cruiser, easing into the rectangle painted on the roadway in front of the gate. She shut off the engine.

  “Remain in your vehicle, and do not make any sudden movements.”

  Casper studied the cordon sign. You may be required to provide a blood sample was printed alongside a simple picture of a syringe and a red drop of blood. In bold lettering was the warning: OFFICIAL TRAVEL ONLY.

  Beneath these warnings was a map of the military cordon zone. From this checkpoint, marked with a red star, the line ran west to the Pacific and east, inland to Long Beach, south from there to the ocean again, neatly isolating the San Pedro Atomic Power Station, the housing towers, and the rusty accretions of Creeptown. A far-reaching curfew sealed the cordon completely during overnight hours.

  A soldier emerged from the guardhouse, and the gate was opened enough for him to pass through. His appearance did little to ease the tension.

  He wore desert camouflage trousers bloused into boots, his forest-pattern BDU jacket completely unbuttoned and inside out. The jacket was open; his dog tags hung against a white undershirt. He was not wearing the gas hood like the other soldiers, which caused the straps of his gas mask to bunch up his hair and force down the top of his left ear. His combat webbing was unbuckled and sagging under the weight of spare rifle magazines, a compact radio, the case for his gas equipment, and a pistol in a shoulder holster.

  The soldier lifted a palm-sized device hanging from his belt, and a light on it flashed green-yellow. He let it drop on its lanyard and crossed the last few feet to the driver-side door of the cruiser.

  “These guys are 114th Infantry, upstate, National Guard,” Polly whispered urgently. “They aren’t regular Army. Keep your mouth shut.”

  The soldier’s feet scraped grit on the pavement as he drew up beside the cruiser’s window.

  “Turn back your vehicle, ma’am,” he said, his voice muffled and shaped by the cup of the gas mask. “Official business only. You know the evac rules.”

  Polly held up a badge or card of some sort. She pressed it to the glass.

  “I can’t see that through this basket.” The soldier rapped his knuckles on the bottle-break cage. “Step out of the vehicle. Just you. Leave any weapons inside the vehicle.”

  He took a step away from the car door. Casper could not see his face from the backseat, just his torso. The soldiers behind the barricade were not moving their heads or talking. It seemed unusual discipline for something as routine as a vehicle arriving at the gate. A radio crackled inside the guard post; it went unanswered, maybe just crosstalk on the channel.

  The dog growled softly.

  “Keep it quiet,” said Polly, laying her pistol and baton on the front seat. “Just stay calm. Nothing is going to happen.”

  She clambered out of the cruiser. She was talking to the soldier, but Casper could not hear what was being said. She passed the ID card to the soldier. He looked at it, flipped it over, handed it back. They continued talking. Casper leaned forward, straining to hear what they were saying. There was a sudden flurry of movement. Polly was wheeled around and slammed facedown on the hood of the car. Casper tried to open the door, but it was locked.

  The soldier was right behind her, pressing in, kicking apart her feet. Casper couldn’t see her upper body behind the protection plate over the windshield, but now he could hear what she was saying when he leaned forward up against the partition.

  “You do not want to do this,” she said, her anger contained.

  “Shut up, bitch,” the soldier said. “Piece of type three meat dangling in our faces, huh? I fucked one of you in South Texas, you know that? Did you feel it? She called herself Persimmon, and she was a cheating whore. You know her?”

  “No,” said Polly.

  “She wasn’t any good.” The soldier ran a hand down over Polly’s backside. “We’ll let you through, sure. Sure. Once we’re done with you.”

  She grunted as if she’d been hit. The dog whined on the seat beside Casper.

  “Carefully consider the actions you are about to take.” Polly spoke with police authority, loud and crisp. “I am with PitSec. Whatever you have planned, it’s not too late to stop it.”

  “You think anybody is gonna miss a couple dupes?”

  “It doesn’t—”

  He slammed his fist against the hood with a loud bang. She replied with
hostile precision.

  “This is Post number fifty-six. It is printed on the sign. You are a lieutenant with the one-hundred-and-fourteenth California Army National Guard, Eightieth Infantry Brigade Combat Team, First Battalion of the One-hundred-eightieth Infantry Regiment. You operate out of Fort Orland. How many nights have you spent in those gray longhouse barracks with the shingled walls? Do they still have that shitty shopping mall in Orland?”

  “Shut up,” he said, and he drove a knee into the back of her thigh.

  “This will not go well for you. I want to be very clear on that. If you kill us, we will be back. I will remember every detail, every scrap, the temperature, the exact time, the Brown Barrel on your breath, the gold wedding band on your finger. I will come for you, Lieutenant, along with all my buddies in Rapid Response. It won’t be hard to find you. We will come driving up here, or to Orland, in the dead of night. The door will explode without warning. Your kids will be screaming, your wife will be facedown on your kitchen floor, and we will drag you out into the night, and that will be the last they see of you, but it will not end there. You will wish it did, but it will not. We will drag you and your little posse down into the Pit. I know you have heard the stories about what happens there.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” The soldier hit her again. “You fucking freaks. Shut up.”

  “It’s worse than that.” Casper could hear the pain in her voice, contained by her willpower but unavoidable. “Worse than ... anything you can imagine. I am a killer, Lieutenant, and I won’t give up on you if you go through with this.”

  “This is our side now, bitch. You don’t go through anymore. You don’t ... we will fuck you up. You don’t go through to our side. We’re taking it back, and you don’t go through.”

  “Can and I will,” she said. “Draw the blood, do the test like you’re supposed to, and we’ll forget this ever happened. We’ll be on our way. Chain of command doesn’t have to know. Your wife doesn’t have to see—”