Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  The sunken highway called the 10 ran inland from Sugarside, but Casper warned Bottles away, fearing the concentration of refugees trying, too late, to flee Los Angeles. Desperation was dangerous. Instead, they navigated side streets in their course toward St. Philomena’s. Lenin followed obediently at their heels. Casper was aware that with each passing moment more violence was erupting throughout the city. Distant gunfire grew closer. The whistle-crack of artillery passing overhead was unmistakable.

  “That’s them big guns,” said Bottles. “It’s on now. Oh, hell, is it on.”

  Attack aircraft soon followed. Casper did not recognize them, but he knew of their function. Stub-winged carrier jets first, screaming in low and firing missiles and bombs in the area of San Pedro. Attack helicopters and heavy bombers arrived minutes later, carpeting strips of Creeptown as far north as Carson with incendiary bombs. Something was fighting back. Before long helicopters and jets began crashing into the city.

  Bottles pointed skyward as a bomber, big as a jetliner, engines burning and trailing black smoke, came rumbling down for a hopeless emergency landing on the 405, completely packed with refugees. Casper imagined the horror of families trapped in cars and vans as the enormous jet smashed into them. The jet dipped below the line of the surrounding buildings. He felt the impact, and a moment later an immense fireball curled into the sky.

  There was nothing they could do. They continued on through absurdly desolate streets echoing with the dirge of the spore sirens.

  “I don’t like walking out with them sirens going,” said Bottles. He tied a patterned handkerchief over his nose and mouth. “You might have got your shots, but I can still catch it. This do-rag ain’t gonna save me if shit gets bad. Let’s go inside like everybody else and wait for them to shut off.”

  “There’s no time for that,” said Casper. “If we go to ground here, you’re a dead man.”

  Casper’s argument was won as a mass of screeching black bird creatures appeared above their heads like bats issuing from the mouth of a cave. They ducked beneath the eaves of a long-shuttered dentist’s office and waited for the birds to pass by overhead. Gunfire erupted from nearby streets. The sound of breaking glass and screaming accompanied the passing birds.

  When the birds had moved on, Bottles and Casper continued. They soon came upon the body of a jet pilot hanging from a city lamp by his parachute. The birds, or some other animal, had shredded his legs and stomach to strips of cloth and meat with white bones showing through. He still clutched a pistol in his hand. There were shell casings on the street beneath his dripping carcass.

  Bottles realized that Casper was going toward the dead body and objected. “Don’t touch that shit, man. Let’s go.”

  “He has a spore mask,” said Casper. “And a gun.”

  He pried the gun loose from the pilot’s hand. It was a small automatic, but the magazine was empty, and Casper could not find spares in any of the pilot’s remaining pockets. To get to the mask he had to climb the pole and hang on to the pilot’s parachute webbing with one hand. It was a grotesque act that squeezed out blood and produced posthumous sighs from the corpse.

  “Hurry up, man. Somebody is coming. A truck or something.”

  The dog barked in agreement.

  Casper opened the clasps for the mask and shucked the rubberized hood up and over the pilot’s head. The hose was connected to a chemical rebreather strapped around the pilot’s chest. Something rumbled just around the corner.

  Bottles was right; a truck was coming, and it would not be wise to be caught looting a downed pilot if it was the military. He let the mask dangle and fumbled for the strap securing the rebreather around the dead man’s chest.

  “Now or never,” said Bottles, practically dancing with nerves.

  Casper almost had it. He glanced up at the pilot’s face, ghastly pale, lips and nose reddened by fresh blood. Eyes open, glassy, but staring at Casper. The pilot’s lips moved. He blinked. Casper lost his balance and fell, tearing loose the rebreather as he dropped on his back into a pool of the pilot’s blood.

  The trucks, two of them, rounded the corner fast enough that their wheels screeched. The lead vehicle swept its headlights through the smoke haze and over the scene in the street. Bottles and the dog were nowhere to be seen. Casper had no time. He went limp and hoped that amid all the blood he would look like another dead body.

  The trucks slowed as they passed the lamp post, their wheels only inches from Casper’s sprawling arm. The trucks were full of National Guard. They were breaking and fleeing. Deserting. They did not appear to even have fought. Their gas hoods were package fresh, and their equipment was not dirty. They must have heard a nightmare unfolding over the radio and decided to pack it in.

  In his experience, cowards were the most dangerous. They resented being caught.

  One of the soldiers leaned over the railing of the open-topped truck. He passed so close by that Casper could see his eyes through the tinted lenses of the man’s mask. He leaned his rifle over the side of the truck and aimed the barrel at Casper. He fired once. The bullet struck the road and buried itself in the soft asphalt. A shrapnel of pebbles buffeted Casper’s face.

  “What are you doing?” shouted someone in the truck. “Get back in the truck and stop fucking around, Hammond.”

  The vehicles rumbled past, their taillights reflected in the quivering metal back of a stop sign. When he was certain they were gone, Casper sat up. Bottles and Lenin rejoined him in the street.

  “You all right?” asked Bottles.

  “Yeah.” Casper tossed the heavy rebreather to him. “Put that on.”

  Casper wiped away the blood beading on his cheek. When he looked up at the lamp, he found the pilot was dead but still staring right at him.

  By the time they arrived in sight of St. Philomena’s Gothic steeple, the world was enfolded in black smoke. Sheets of flame tore at the southern skies. The aircraft had been destroyed or chased away, and the sounds of front line fighting were drawing ever closer. Artillery continued to shudder overhead, but in sporadic salvos rather than its previous, steady barrage. The sirens continued their dirge for the city of Los Angeles.

  The doors of the church were shut and barred. Only after pounding for more than a minute did a peephole slot open up. Eyes appeared and surveyed Casper, Bottles, and the dog. The peephole slammed shut without comment, but Casper and Bottles beat their hands against the door until it opened.

  They were not greeted by Father Woodhew at all, but rather a mob of angry men and women brandishing household implements as weapons. The dog growled. The crowd surged out of the church’s open doors, ignoring Bottles to lay their hands upon Casper and drag him roughly into the building. Father Woodhew appeared behind the angry mob, begging for them to stop, but it was no use. Their angry cries to “kill the dupe” and “string him up” echoed in the lofty chapel. They beat and kicked Casper until he fell to his knees amid the pews.

  “Stop it!” shouted Bottles. “We came to help you! Stop it! You’re gonna kill him!”

  “That’s the idea. Just be glad you’re not next.” The heavyset man who growled the response swung a rake handle and beat Casper over his back as he tried to stand.

  A noose was slipped around Casper’s neck, and he was dragged to one of the crossbeams. The rope was thrown over the timber, the slack pulled taut so that he was lifted to his feet. He grabbed at the noose, fighting to get his fingers beneath it.

  “I will kill them.” The voice belonged to the dog. “It is not a certain thing. They are many.”

  “No,” said Casper.

  “Yes, you dupe motherfucker!” shouted the man with the rake handle.

  “Then surrender to them your flesh,” said the dog. “It has no more value. It is a passing thing belonging to all intent that shares the water. All that matters is the state of your discrete electricity. It will become fire and fill new flesh. I will show you the ways of the reificant.”

  Casper forced his fingers b
eneath the strangulating noose. He was rewarded with a blow to the stomach with the end of a table leg that nearly made him pass out.

  “Hang him high!” shouted a man.

  “They did this to us!” shouted another.

  “Let God have him!” shouted an old woman.

  “Save them,” Casper gasped. “Got to ... save them.”

  “You’d better pray to your devil god,” said the heavyset man. “Cause you’re the one needs to be saved.”

  Casper’s feet lifted up off the floor. The rope cut into his fingers and neck in equal measure, and he lost his breath. All of it began to darken and grow quiet. Bottles and Father Woodhew were still pleading for the crowd to stop. Men, women, and children were still screaming for his blood. It all receded into quiet shadows.

  “They are doomed.” The voice was still with him. “You cannot save them. This place is lost to the waters. Come with me now, and we will save the next people to walk the next place.”

  “Please.” Casper found his voice no longer hoarse or constricted. “They’re my kind. Don’t you need me to cooperate?”

  “I cannot force you,” said the dog.

  “Then I will cooperate. I will go with you. If you help me save them.”

  The world was almost dark. The only remaining light was the soft incandescent glow of the dog below his feet.

  “You will travel through the water to the next place?” asked the dog. “You will become reificant, to take on new flesh, even if it cannot be your own?”

  Casper was not sure of the exact meaning of the dog’s words, but he saw no alternative. He would go with it wherever it needed him.

  “I give you my word.”

  Unearthly light unfolded around Casper. He fell from the rope and to his knees upon the floor. Manifesting in the midst of the angry mob, standing above Casper, the dog became the reificant within its flesh, revealing in burning, radiographic detail the widespread wings and upright shape of a twelve-foot-tall insect. Exoskeleton and organs and looping entrails phosphoresced in black and brilliant purple, electric red, and burning gold.

  The hemolymphatic throb of each organ was visible through the others. It was alive in exquisite, overlay detail. It was, at once, beautiful and terrible to look upon. The mob was transfixed by its terrible beauty.

  Father Woodhew fell to his knees and cried, “Praise Almighty God! Behold His messenger!”

  Casper sucked air into his aching lungs and tore the rope from around his neck. He rose from his knees and stood before the burning tracery of the grasshopper. It seemed to envelope him like a cage, and he realized that the dog had moved to stand beside his leg. He scratched its head as one by one the men and women in the mob fell to their knees. Even Bottles prostrated himself.

  “Our salvation is at hand!” cried the fat man who had beat Casper with the rake.

  “I’ll try,” said Casper, his voice hoarse.

  He would lead them to the waters at Sugarside and save as many as he could.

  Wesley Bishop awoke slowly, wondering at first why he was asleep in a junk heap and then recalling his predicament. His upper body and head were pinned inside the wreckage of the crashed helicopter, his suit and shirt bunched up in his armpits, while his bare stomach and his legs and feet extended into the street on which they had crashed. His back was broken, and even the slightest movement was agonizing.

  His right arm was completely trapped beneath the deformed rear of the cabin, but he was able to free his left arm enough to touch his face. His fingers came away coated in blood, but it was not his. The helicopter had rolled onto its side as it came to rest. Misha Rosen, dead and impaled by a piece of the helicopter structure, was now hanging above him. She was cooperating with gravity to empty all of her fluids onto his head and shoulders.

  Bishop cried out for help. He listened for an answer, but there was only the steady whine of the sirens and the confusing din of gunfire and explosions, seemingly all around him. A vehicle drove past. He heard it slow and called out to it for help. His only answer was a long blurt of gunfire very nearby, followed immediately by the squeal of tires.

  Bishop shouted himself hoarse, and no one came to save him. He began visually searching the helicopter’s interior for any means to either free himself or kill himself, though he did not favor the thought of reemerging in the midst of this calamity. There was a flare gun intended to signal the Republic to come to shore. The wrecked helicopter stank of hydraulics and fuel, and he might be able to set it ablaze and kill himself that way. He reached for it, but no matter how he shifted his body, he could not reach it. His gaze fell upon something closer and much more reassuring: Patrice’s snake-leather bag of pharmaceutical goodies.

  He extended his arm all the way out to his fingers across the fuel-dampened wreck of the cabin. The tips of his fingers brushed the snakeskin bag. He stretched, pain exploding in his fractured spine, but only managed to push it a bit farther away. He pushed up on the helicopter’s body, minutely shifting the multi-ton frame and allowing him a scant centimeter to slide his body. He reached again for the bag, but this time, as he extended his arm, Misha Rosen moved above him.

  He cried out in surprise. Her arm was swaying very slightly as it dangled, limp, from her shoulder. No, he told himself, she is dead, and you are imagining things. He looked back at the bag, tantalizingly close, and gave her one last glimpse.

  A pale length of arm darted into the helicopter, clawed fingers reaching above his head and tearing into Misha Rosen’s slack face. The hand withdrew with a quivering hunk of meat. A moment later Bishop caught sight of a naked man, legs all wrong, bounding past the deformed bubble of the helicopter’s cockpit. Another appeared, lingering this time, peering in to reveal a face that was not human at all but a hairless, leporine face with bulbous blue eyes and jaws filled with bared plates of translucent bone.

  They appeared in great number, crawling all at once into the helicopter’s wreckage. They insinuated themselves through narrow openings, reaching out and tearing hunks from the dead reporter and the mangled corpses in the front of the cockpit. One came very near to Bishop. It sniffed at him, flaring nostrils slits and touching his face with its cold hand, but it withdrew, seemingly uninterested in him. They snapped at one another over choice bits and began tearing out Misha Rosen’s entrails in a frenzy. The helicopter filled with the bestial sounds of gorging and the carcass smell of organs.

  Bishop wished they would kill him. Wished they would sink their strange teeth into his throat and tear it out. He was not afraid of pain or death and did not want to watch such savagery any longer. At the limit of his sanity, a gunshot mercifully rang out and struck one of the creatures. He became aware that rumbling vehicles were nearby, and the helicopter was suddenly shaking with the impact of dozens of bullets. The creatures screamed and began to flee. Some died in the process of escaping and lay thrashing beside the helicopter.

  The shooting stopped, but the vehicles did not immediately move on. Boots crunched through debris. Men were talking, voices muffled by respirator masks.

  “This is one of Bishop’s private helicopters,” said a woman, her voice clear.

  “Yes,” cried Bishop. “Yes! I am here!”

  A head covered in a spore hood leaned in above him, near Misha Rosen’s mutilated carcass. It ducked back out, and after a few moments they had cleared the crumpled door above him. He was still trapped, but they at least had a view into the helicopter. A familiar woman’s face appeared in the door. She was wearing a Rapid Response uniform, and her face was serious and marked with abrasions.

  “Thank Christ,” Bishop sighed. “Please, get me out of here. I have a ship waiting in Sugarside. It will take us to safety.”

  The woman smiled. She did not move to free him.

  “What a lucky find,” said the woman. “I’m Pollen Foster. You sentenced me and about thirty innocent people to death.”

  Foster? Yes, he remembered her. The woman from Bad Tower. Milo’s loose end.

 
; “No,” said Bishop. He panicked and stammered for a response. “No, I was against that. I told Milo that it was a foolish idea. That you would, ah, that they would just send more UN inspectors. That it would be messy. It would be too messy to kill your team in Bad Tower too. I tried to veto him, but he is a monster. He is—”

  She aimed a machine pistol in at his face.

  “There’s more of them coming,” said one of the men wearing spore masks.

  Her smile darkened, and she withdrew the gun. Her face disappeared.

  “Wait,” he said. “Don’t leave me here with those things.”

  She was walking away with the men.

  “Please!” he screamed. “Please! I’ll tell you how to signal my ship!”

  She reappeared in the door. “Speak quickly.”

  “There’s a flare pistol, just there.” He gestured weakly with his free hand. “Fire it twice. Two green flares, and they will come to the docks. Free me, and I’ll—”

  “We’d have to cut you out of this. We don’t have time.”

  Bishop licked his dry lips. She pushed away from the door frame, intent on leaving.

  “Please, have mercy,” He gestured to the snakeskin bag. “Just leave me that. It has my medicine.”

  “You don’t deserve it,” she said. She nevertheless reached into the helicopter and handed him the bag. He clutched it to his chest with one hand and thanked her again and again. He continued to thank her even after he heard the doors slamming on the vehicles and the engines revving and rumbling away.

  The pale creatures crept back to the helicopter. They crowded around it in even greater numbers than before. Jaws snapping and hissing, they leaped atop the wreck and pried open the metal. The helicopter shifted painfully against his chest. Alien faces appeared at every possible entry point. Hands reached in and tore wet strips from Misha Rosen. Bishop fumbled the bag open. He stared at the watery blue eyes swept by nictitating membranes.

  Something about these creatures was familiar. Like wolves. Like that fucking dog that started all this. He could see it in their watery fish eyes. That same thinking. Watching from the rippled spine of a gypsum dune. Watching him fall and suffer.