by Zack Parsons
Polly began to back away, fearful that the hatch might release a torrent of fluid into the chamber. She collided with Rukundo and realized the others were already backing away as well. The two halves of the hatch opened outward on flaking hinges, slowly, heavily and with a resounding wail of fatigued metal. Their inner doors were smooth gold. The inner ring of the hatch was similarly clad in gold. The opening hatch revealed a luminous pearl of white fluid as large as a weather balloon.
“My God!” cried one of the scientists.
The vise of pressure on Polly’s brain suddenly burst within her skull, and Polly experienced ecstasy like nothing before in her life. She dropped to her knees, looking at the face of it, beautiful, bulging slowly out of the lower hatch, extending in a fluid column, its form stretching past the Gardeners and moving toward Milo. Everything it touched—papers, the discarded helmet, the velvet cloth—boiled away like steam.
The scientists, even the Marines, were screaming, scrambling away in a confusion heightened by the disorienting effects of the Mother’s presence.
Milo, his face beginning to blister, barely able to stand, nevertheless reached out a hand as if to touch the approaching mass. The fingers of his suit burst, and the flexible material curled up his dissolving arm. His limb became smoke, and the Mother, pouring into the room, seemed to inhale it. He fell back, leaning heavily against the table. It gathered its mass, squirming out into the room and creating two floes that began to encircle the coffin and Milo.
Some of the Gardeners stepped back to avoid the Mother. Others fell to their knees and allowed her to overtake them or stepped into her milky surface and hissed as their entire bodies dissolved into smoke. Polly, transfixed by the sight, quaking with tremors of pleasure, was dimly aware of arms taking hold of her and pulling her away from the viscous mass still pouring out into the Fane.
The hatch—open doors and the protective ring—boiled away, gold peeling and falling to the floor. Chalky dust steamed from the widening hole. Alarms sounded at the sudden concentrations of spores. The fog became so thick, the Gardeners began to disappear. The grass sprouted over the walls and erupted millions of wriggling tendrils over the heated rock.
The last thing Polly saw as Rukundo dragged her away from the Fane and around the curvature of the tunnel was the encircling Mother collapsing in on Milo and the remains of Holly Webber. A moment later the world began to shake.
They buried Carlos beside the ocean, just out of reach of the waves breaking on the stony shore. The sun was rising behind them, and the sky and ocean were of the same color, divided by a curling meridian of white foam. When it was done, they went to the edge of the water, and, though the stones were sharp and the flooded tide pools unpleasant with life, Bottles took off his shoes and threadbare socks and walked out into the surf. After a time Casper shed his sandals and joined him, the ragged edge of coral against his toes, the jelly of some tidal creature beneath his heel.
Bottles was staring at nothing, at the elapsing night, at the new day unveiled in a gradient, the gentle lifting of the house lights following the performance. Casper’s gaze was drawn to the marina at Sugarside, a quarter mile distant, the many bobbing lights he had believed were the masts of ships by darkness revealed as buoys and mooring posts. Only a few vessels remained, but behind them, beyond the ship canal, almost out to the farthest breakwater, was the shape of a warship.
It was long and low to the water, painted a stark white and liveried with blue. It flew an American flag but no naval standard. Casper studied it for some time. There appeared to be people in blue uniforms moving on the decks, but none of them stayed outside very long.
“The Republic.” Casper read the ship’s name aloud.
“It’s been there for a few days,” said Bottles. “A week maybe.”
“What is it doing?”
Bottles shook his head and began to walk back to shore, stepping gingerly over something that pricked his toe.
“Showed up one morning right as the spores were getting real bad. Sometimes it leaves and patrols around. I used to catch it coming back in toward the marina. They can park it up close at the end of the main pier, but they mostly just sit out there.”
They splashed out of the water. Bottles took a seat on a stump of chipped concrete and began rubbing the grit from his feet before putting his socks back on.
“I got him that medicine.” Bottles stopped trying to fit his second sock over his toes. “I had to sell all my liquor and your card, man, but I got it for him. I knew he was tricking me, getting me out of here so he could die like a fucking dog, man. Die alone.”
“I was with him.”
“That almost makes it worse. He didn’t have much use for your kind. Thought you caused all this disease and stuff.”
“He went peacefully,” said Casper.
“Naw, that’s not true. He fought it the whole time. Days would go by with nothing, and then the next day he’d wake up, legs all covered in it, screaming about dreams he was having.” Bottles beat two fingers against his temple. “It got into his head. Like it was growing in there too, giving him fevers so he saw things. Thought I was the devil one time ... and ... ha-ha ...”
Bottles was done talking. He wiped at his eyes, and they finished putting on their shoes in silence. As they were finishing, the rocks around them seemed to dip, like a trampoline depressing beneath their feet and then snapping back up with a release of tension. Rocks clattered down around them; car alarms began honking in the distance. It came again, shaking now, and Casper knew it was an earthquake, not as strong as the initial shock but oscillating rapidly.
Heavy stones rolled down and crashed among the rocks of the artificial headlands. Buoys bobbed violently up and down in the marina. Casper heard glass breaking and the clatter of masonry collapsing, followed by the sharp bang of something falling from a considerable height.
“Goddamn,” said Bottles, steadying himself on a stone post. “I been through harder shakes than this, but the fucking thing just keeps going.”
It felt like a minor earthquake, but it had already gone on for a minute and was still shaking, quivering up into the bones unpleasantly, scattering loose rocks down from the cliffs. The Republic seemed unmoved by the temblor, but many uniformed men were out on the deck, pointing inland.
Casper’s view of whatever it was they were pointing at was obstructed by the ramp leading up to the drainage tunnel and, behind that, the embankment of piled stone too steep to easily climb. He was staring up, straining to see something, when the smoke appeared, moving swiftly on the wind, a shuddering caterpillar of black smoke crawling its shadow across the shore. He inhaled the tang of burning diesel, the smell of foundry and deep earth, hot stone, grit in mouth, and the smell of marrow.
The seared stench of human marrow wafting out to sea.
“Are you aware of the 2004 – 2005 Pandemic Study conducted by the CDC?”
Misha Rosen’s question jarred Bishop out of the gathering stupor. How could she have that study? He had gone to staggering lengths, done very difficult things, to ensure that study disappeared from the face of the earth. Misha continued before he could respond.
“Allow me to quote you something from it. ‘Type-D Pandemic Pneumocystis and Hemorrhagic Staphylococcus follow almost identical outbreak patterns, with first cases reported in the area of San Pedro and South Los Angeles, radiating out geographically, following normal travel patterns.’ It goes on, Mr. Bishop, to state that the only logical conclusion, and I will quote again, ‘is the emergence of immune disease-bearing duplicates from within the Los Angeles Rejuvenation Center.’ ”
“That document is a fake, most likely circulated by groups with a bigoted, anti-duplicate agenda.”
“Experts have authenticated it,” said Misha, but Bishop was bullying ahead and speaking over her.
“For you to parrot the rhetoric of hate-mongers, for you to serve as a propaganda mouthpiece for anti-American bigots like Berezin and the Chinese, against a fellow Ame
rican, well, this is appalling. It’s disgusting.” Bishop reached to tear off the microphone on his lapel, thought better of it, and surged to his feet. “I’m not going to sit here, allow you to come into my place of business, and commit this ... this blood libel against my people. Do you have any idea how much we have done for the United States?”
He shook his finger at Misha, his gaze flicking from her smug face to the glass Cyclops of the camera.
“Harlan Bishop built this country into the world’s only superpower. Look around you. At your camera. At your TV set. Our designs. Our factories. Our jobs we give to you. Our enterprise has transformed an isolationist yokel into the king that straddles the continents. We have fought in wars, fought and died for this country, in great gory heaps, and I will not let you scapegoat my brothers and sisters for every ill in this world.”
“Not every ill, just the diseases and the spores,” said Misha firmly.
“There are treatments, cures,” said Bishop. “PPD and hemostaph are no longer death sentences.”
“These treatments were developed by your company,” said Misha, “with improbable speed.”
“All of our resources were focused on dealing with the crisis.”
“Two years after the PPD outbreak in 2000 and six months after the outbreak in 2003 you went to market with treatments. You released the vaccines as if you were sitting on thousands of gallons of the antibodies.”
“We saved millions of lives.”
“You made hundreds of billions of dollars. Your company profited on diseases you introduced, unintentionally or otherwise, and your fortunes grew amid global pandemic, recession, and chaos. Should we expect Bishop Unlimited to come to market with a cure for the spore sicknesses?”
His fury was spent. He slumped back into his chair.
“Get out. Take your Communist sympathies and your damn cameras, and get out. I won’t hear another word of your racist slander.”
“One more question,” said Misha. “Are you prepared to respond to Admiral Haley’s forty-eight-hour—”
The room began to violently shake, and Misha’s words were forgotten midsentence. The first shockwave was powerful enough to knock artifacts from shelves and stagger some of the TV crew. The cameraman became ensnared in the cable snakes trailing from his equipment and tipped over backward. Light stands fell and dragged down the blackout curtains. Daylight streamed in, stabbing into the stricken faces of the crew.
The mousy sound woman from the World Insight crew yelped and leaped toward the desk, narrowly avoiding being crushed by a falling barrister case weighed down with books. It boomed to the floor, loud as a cannon shot. Patrice hurried into the room and pulled Bishop away from the window.
“It’s all right,” said Bishop, shaking off his bodyguard’s hands. “It’s just a minor tremor. This is California. We’re used to this sort of thing, right? Let’s just all stand clear of furniture or fixtures. It will pass quickly.”
It did not.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Businesses and apartments emptied into the streets, and Casper, Bottles, and the dog walked among the teeming masses. There were injuries, scrapes and bruises mostly, bleary-eyed hordes coated in brick dust and cradling wounded limbs. The earthquake had shaken loose every emotion. Men and women laughed, cried, called out in panic to one another, searching for lost comrades, lost children, among the confusion of bodies. It was bewildering, a scene of too many personal dramas to process.
Car alarms were still honking rhythmically. The sirens of emergency vehicles moved on unseen streets. Bottles peeled away from Casper and found two men he recognized standing together. One was a handsome, light-skinned black man with a neatly-trimmed goatee and dark glasses. The other was a summit of a man as dark as molasses, bald, shirtless, broad-shouldered and rippling with muscles, his expression unchanging, his biceps decorated with the illegible blots of prison tattoos.
“Let him go,” said the dog. Casper could feel it revealing itself again, crawling against his neck, the shifting colors of it playing up and down his arms. He stood still in the middle of the crowded street, the dog at his heels, and its unearthly presence went unnoticed. The frantic conversations surrounding him receded to a murmur.
“What do you want?” asked Casper.
“I know your thoughts. I have steeped in them for longer than you know. You crave violence. This is your nature. Your purpose, like mine. You desire to rend human flesh.”
“Bishop,” said Casper.
“Who is Gideon Long, who has succumbed to the deep waters like so many of your kind. It is too late for this notion of revenge. All that remains is the deep water. It is here now.”
A Warren brushed past, and Casper saw the concern in his eyes, the worry as the man’s gaze flicked to the dog. He clearly sensed more than the others, his gaze lingering on the dog, his mouth working as if he wanted to say something, but he stumbled on past, looking back as he was sucked away into the crowd.
“The white dog.” Casper recalled the dog in the desert of New Mexico, its eyes startlingly blue. “Was that you? Why would you lure us to the Pool?”
“It was not me,” said the dog. “The waters have consumed many kinds from many places. Some are like Gideon Long and take pleasure in the power it gives them. They repay it with their ravenous desire to witness and consume. You have known the ones that wore the flesh of the white dog. You knew them in the fallen shells of the spires of my kind. They pursued you to the shores of the Surata. You know this because I saved you from them.”
Casper remembered. Scrambling, bleeding, through the echoing boulevard of the dead city. Pursued by a clattering horde of white-skinned creatures with bulbous blue eyes and inverted limbs. Above them, descending from the pyroclastic skies, the cruciform shape of the grasshopper, knocking them away, freeing him to leap into the churning white ocean. The cruciform shape, repeating again and again on the ceiling of the cave, on the ceiling of a white-painted room, the grasshopper idol crumbling in his hands, not clay at all, but the long-ago shell of something that had once lived.
“How do I stop them?” asked Casper.
“Stop who?” Bottles asked, returning to his side,
“Someone I’ve known for way too long,” said Casper.
A black bird streaked above the rooftops, disappeared, flapped back into view, racing parallel to the street and drawing cries of alarm from the crowd below. A second bird joined it, the two animals pirouetting together, seemingly fighting over a morsel.
They weren’t birds at all, Casper realized. Their bodies were black, featherless; their wings were membranes taut over a visible framework of bones. The dark flesh of each wing receded to a line of gray, the trailing edge becoming a waggling comb of luminous blue flesh. Their heads were fused to their bodies, tapered and triangular, powerful, snapping jaws oversized and awkward, like those of deep-sea anglers.
With a last clatter of jaws competing for a ribbon of meat, the pair of flying creatures spiraled out of sight. A fluttering, pink curl of fabric drifted down, and Casper realized it was the torn remains of a coat sized for a child’s body. He gripped the wrapped handle of the machete he had taken from the skinhead. It made him feel more secure to hold it, more secure still to draw it from his waistband as though he might hack a path through the crowd.
Children began to wail, and adults verged on panic. The smoke was again blowing overhead, stiflingly heavy with diesel. Some people were filtering back into buildings despite the fear of another earthquake.
The distant whining of the spore sirens began, rising in volume and intensity to a howl. The oppressive noise spread from one corner to the next, the wail becoming louder and louder with each new siren, until the very nearest siren began to cycle.
As the ugly tone blanketed the street, the men and women crowded there began to cry out in fear, yanking children by their hands, grabbing for belongings and stampeding in a dozen directions at once. It was an aimless, mob convulsion. All around Casper and Bottles peo
ple were trying to escape the warning din. There was no escape; the dirge played from sirens on every corner throughout the city.
“We got to get out of here!” shouted Bottles. He swung his head, eyes wide and white, searching for an escape, shoving and cursing against the tide of bodies. “Come on, man. Come on!”
The dog was unconcerned by the men and women running past on both sides, unworried by the droning sirens and the strange birds. It sat on its haunches, its mouth open in a coincidental smile, pink tongue lolling, watching Casper with the rusty marbles of its eyes. The dog, the grasshopper, wanted him to return to the Pool. Abandon the only man who was anything like a friend to him.
“It is a body without flesh,” the grasshopper had told him of the Pool. “It is mindless and infinite. It cannot be overcome with violence.”
If the world was truly lost to the creatures of the Pool and there was no escape to be found, then it was Casper’s duty to follow the dog’s advice and return to the waters. To leave this place for the next. He’d spent his lifetime walking away from responsibility whenever he couldn’t solve a problem with fists. It’s what the dog wanted him to do now. Abandon his race, his world, and find his way to another to confront the Pool there.
Casper surveyed the panic-stricken crowd. Bottles tugged at his sleeve and urged him to run. The dog waited, seeming to know he would choose to abandon the city and return to the Pool. No. Not again. Not this time.
“Philomena’s,” said Casper, grabbing Bottles by the shredded arm of his coat.
“No, man, that’s too far!” Bottles resisted and tore free of Casper. “Seven, eight blocks. Almost straight toward the cordon. That’s where all this shit is coming from, right?”
“There are families and kids at the church. I have to save everyone I can. We’ll get them down to Sugarside and commandeer a boat.”
“There ain’t no boats left down there except that big one.”
“Then that’s the one we’ll take.”