Book Read Free

The Man Without Hands

Page 6

by Eric Malikyte


  “You’ll all see someday,” she had said. “When he rises from beneath the circle of the Earth. You’ll all pay.”

  There had been something about the way her head would jerk from one side to another, as if her blind eyes were searching for something in the infinite darkness. He had found himself standing next to her, his stumps at his sides.

  She had looked directly at him, as though she could actually see him. “And you. You’re the key to all of this. He’s told me as such.”

  “You can see me?”

  “The Spider sees all.”

  “The Spider?”

  “You bear his mark on your soul, and yet you’ve not seen his true form yet?”

  Flashes of a spinning sky with dark clouds and a central pulsing eye fill his mind’s eye. Hands reach out from the center, pleading for his help.

  “No,” he said. “It comes to me in dreams. It tells me what I need to know with images.”

  “Do not fret, stranger,” she said, her dry, crusted lips twisting into a foul grin. “You will have what was taken from you returned. The Spider always honors his contracts.”

  Kurt nodded.

  “The only reason I didn’t burn this place down the moment they brought me here was because I’d had a vision the night before I came here. That I would learn the language of these Masku, and a woman with no eyes would guide me to where I must go next.”

  “The Spider sent you this vision. And how fluent you’ve become in our English in such a short time.”

  “I’m a survivor.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Where must I go now?”

  “Illinois.” Her smile faded. “There is a place where we worship the Spider as a god. A place between Reading and Manville, hidden to the eyes of man, along the river. You will find us there.”

  “And how will I know when I’ve found this place?”

  She stretched out her arm and turned it over to reveal a scarred portion of her flesh, where a large symbol had been burned into it. It had the body of a spider, with sharp edges and a head with many teeth, and six legs that wrapped around its form like a vortex.

  “Look for this symbol.”

  He had started to leave.

  “Wait,” she had said.

  “Is there something else?”

  “Tell me his name.” Her hands had been trembling, eyes wide, mouth drooling. “Please. I know we don’t have much time left. I just want to hear it once.”

  He had smiled, and brought his lips to her ear, whispering. “Oreseth.”

  Her eyes softened, as if the words had shattered a dam within her mind. Her head fell back and a cackle of demented laughter filled the recreation room. The orderlies came and drugged her before he left; her cackling dissipated until it was almost inaudible.

  Was the name of Oreseth so powerful to these weak-minded creatures that they could scarcely handle hearing it?

  That night, a man in the standard uniform worn by the asylum workers had come to Kurt in his cell. He gave him an address and said. “Go here, there will be more answers for you. Your time is done here.”

  Then, Kurt had sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor.

  He remembered smiling, and the flames burning his straightjacket away in mere moments. He had been out of practice for months—having only used his abilities to continuously destroy the facility’s cameras—but it was still easy for him to manipulate his Sulen. He formed a ball of fire so large that he was certain it contained all of his pent-up frustration from the many months since his exile.

  The resulting blast destroyed his room as well as several adjacent ones and caught the rest of the building on fire.

  Sirens had wailed, and he’d leapt through what had previously been a wall, falling several stories to the ground before anyone could see what had happened.

  That very night he’d disguised himself as a stranger on the street and found a phone book. Cory Johnson’s address was in a town called Lincoln. It was clear what he had to do. He’d managed to hitch his way there, disguised as this other man.

  The rest had been easy.

  3

  Kurt found Cory’s wallet on the kitchen counter, along with his cellular phone and the keys to his rusty tan pickup. The drive out to Illinois would be long, and he’d need to tap into Cory’s meager savings to make the trip happen.

  He’d think of some other way to acquire funds later.

  He climbed into the cabin of the pickup, scooting his jeans over a torn cloth seat that creaked when it took his weight. The cabin smelled of oil and deer urine. The truck took a few tries before the engine started.

  Kurt took route 113 and pressed down on the gas with only a hint of trepidation, using Cory’s Global Positioning Satellite device to guide him. More experienced drivers maneuvered around him, honking their horns, tossing obscene gestures and yelling at him. How lucky they were that he was in a good mood.

  The small, desolate town of Lincoln was behind him in what seemed like moments. How could these Masku stand to live in such a place and call it home?

  Soon he was over the water, crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It was a gigantic thing, made from concrete and metal beams that crisscrossed each other across the great expanse. Being over that much water gave him an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, dredging up half-coherent memories of himself drifting across the ocean of his world on a raft of shoddy craftsmanship while the light of Zhelon blazed sores into his back.

  His tension eased when he crossed back onto land. The land transformed from a green forest into a desolate town with white and gray buildings. The GPS device told him to take exit 21 toward Baltimore. He crossed through Frederick and Hagerstown next, noticing signs for a local airport.

  He wondered if it would be smarter to just buy a plane ticket, but then, he barely trusted the technology that he was using. He couldn’t see himself trusting a giant mechanical bird not to fall out of the sky when the vehicle Cory Johnson had trusted to take him from place to place was—as these Masku said—a fucking piece of shit.

  In some ways, the lost technology that his people had once commanded was far superior to the machines these Masku were so proud of.

  He smiled, feeling the wind caressing his skin, and remembered the city of his birth. He remembered the pyramid at its center, whose towering beam of light was a comfort to all Sulekiel residing there through the long nights.

  3

  The signs leading up to Pittsburgh had a strange, smoky tint to them. It wasn’t long before he noticed the smell of something burning and saw the smoke billowing from the pickup truck’s engine. Shortly after that, the engine petered out and he coasted to a stop on the shoulder of the highway.

  Popping the hood and fanning the smoke about did little to inform him as to what the issue was. A small red car pulled off the highway in front of him. A skinny man with a long stringy beard climbed out of the car and approached him with a jolly expression etched into his face.

  “Need some help, man?” The man asked.

  “It would seem so,” Kurt said.

  The skinny man looked at the smoking engine for some time, scratching his beard. “Well, I’m stumped. But, tell you what, I got a triple A card. I’ll give them a call and see what I can do for you.”

  “Right.”

  It wasn’t long before a tow truck arrived. The skinny bearded man claimed that he was going to pay for the tow.

  “Just tell me where you want to be dropped off, and I’ll do my best,” the tow truck driver said. A name tag on the right side of his oil-stained jumpsuit said “Jack.”

  “Take me to Chicago, Jack,” Kurt said.

  “Chicago?” The truck driver shook his head and chuckled. “Hell, that’s too far. I was thinking like a motel or something.”

  Kurt eyed the man a little longer than he intended to. He did not like being told no.

  “Is that not okay?” Jack asked.

  “That will be fine.”

  “Then climb on i
n, sir.” Jack walked back to his tow truck and opened the passenger side, gesturing wide for Kurt to climb in. “Make yourself at home.”

  Kurt climbed into the passenger seat and waited for the truck driver to ratchet Cory’s pickup truck up to the tow. The cabin smelled like motor oil and sediment. He was half tempted to tell the man to just leave the truck there and drop him off in the next town over, but that would probably seem suspicious.

  Jack returned and started the engine, letting it warm up for a few minutes. It was almost strange to Kurt, seeing an engine that didn’t sputter and threaten to die at every possible moment. He noticed little plastic figures with bobbing heads that looked to be fixed to the dashboard somehow, as well as a picture of Jack and what looked like a small family.

  “I’ll drop you off at the Holiday Inn down in the city,” Jack said. “I know the manager, so I might be able to get you a deal.”

  Kurt said nothing and nodded.

  Soon the highway and the greenery transformed into a putrid metropolis, with towers of red and gray that reached for the sky and reflected the brightness of the sun, casting long shadows in their wake. They were not unlike the towers his own people had built across the lands of Gaiulen, before they were driven to the brink of extinction and forced to hide beneath the surface. But these structures had no character. They were square, and rectangular, and each seemed to be made from the same materials. Did these Masku have no originality? No artistry?

  They paralleled the muddy brown river for a while. Kurt did not want to know what made the river that color.

  The Holiday Inn was next to a slightly run-down parking lot. The building next to it had a large chalk drawing of two creatures with four legs, long ears and tails. He wondered what significance these creatures had on this world.

  The truck came to a stop in the middle of the parking lot.

  “Here’s the inn,” Jack said. “You want me to take your truck somewhere?”

  Kurt assessed Cory’s finances with his phone and saw that he didn’t have a whole lot left. Not if he needed to stay in the hotel and get repairs on the pickup to make the journey. “How about you buy it off me?”

  The driver chuckled. “That pile of shit? Hell, you’d be lucky to get ten bucks for the fucking thing.”

  “Five hundred.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I want five hundred dollars for it.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not paying five hundred for that thing.”

  “You will if you want to live.”

  “The fuck did you say?”

  It was then that Jack realized that he was not staring at Cory Johnson anymore, but the stern and angry face of a thing which was not quite human.

  “You tell me.” Kurt held up his stumps. “Perhaps I’ll simply blow this whole truck up—” Sparks danced between his stumps. “Or maybe I’ll electrocute you here, take your face, your ID, and this truck, and continue on up to Illinois like I planned.”

  “What—”

  “What am I?”

  The truck driver nodded sheepishly.

  “Doesn’t concern you. What does concern you is your life.” Kurt gestured with his sparking stump to the photograph of the driver and his family. “What would they think if you went missing?”

  “I’ll pay you the damned five hundred, but you’re out of your mind if you think—”

  “Better make it one grand, plus whatever credit cards you have in your wallet.”

  “The police will get you.”

  Kurt chuckled at that. “No. They won’t. Because, unlike you, I can be anywhere, and I can be anyone I want in mere moments. Besides, if I find out you’ve been talking to the police about me, I’ll hunt you down and rip out your heart with my bare hands.”

  “You don’t have—”

  Kurt formed the barriers around his stumps into hands just as Jack was about to finish his sentence. He tapped his glowing fist on the driver’s ribcage, grinning. “Don’t I now?”

  The driver paid him the cash and handed him the credit cards in his wallet.

  Kurt left the truck as Cory Johnson and entered the Holiday Inn.

  The suite cost him one hundred and forty-five dollars for the night. Once he was inside the hotel room, he could see the tenth street view from his window. Within minutes, the tow truck was crossing it with Jack’s new pile-of-shit pickup trailing behind it. Kurt couldn’t help but smile. Masku were so easily manipulated on this world. It made him think of the few Masku whom he’d befriended in the past. They’d had strength of character. They weren’t afraid of a little Sulen.

  He would have to tread carefully, though. One Sulekiel might be a match for hundreds of Masku, but even he could be worn down eventually.

  Never channel more than what your body can handle, and never do so when you are too weak to stand, or you will die.

  It was the first thing a Sulekiel learned. Children were tempted to start experimenting when they were old enough to understand that they had the capacity to bring lighting and fire into existence, but, if left untrained, they could easily kill themselves by trying to wield too much Sulen too quickly. When he was growing up, he’d seen several children kill themselves from over-exhaustion, or by channeling swaths of electricity or fireballs or even simple barriers before they were ready.

  One such child had been a girl who’d fancied herself to be a warrior—before their people allowed women to study anything other than the healing arts, before the war with the Shar had forced them to think only of their own survival. She’d decided to show his teacher that she was worthy of being a Valier by forming a wall of fire around her body, but only managed to cook her own flesh. She’d died writhing in agony on the stone dais.

  Kurt rubbed his temples and decided it was time to eat. Using one of Jack’s credit cards, he ordered room service. He filled himself up with some beer and a thing the Masku called a steak. It was delicious. No wonder Cory Johnson had been so fat.

  Then he decided it was time to get some rest. He had a long journey ahead of him tomorrow.

  That night, he had a terrible nightmare.

  The ground shakes beneath his feet. He looks up to see the great monotonous towers of Pittsburgh crumbling around him. The brown river shakes and splashes, overflowing from a powerful downpour of rain, and from its depths shine millions of lights reflecting beneath the surface.

  Crimson clouds gather above, eating the sun alive, and the shaking ceases. The crumbling stops.

  Their bodies are made from hardened light, with a core of metallic silver and crystal. They hover above him and pledge themselves to follow his command.

  Then he sees it. Crawling out from the depths of the river, clawing through rock and an otherworldly gate that sparks and rumbles with a terrible scratching noise that poisons the air. It has six legs, with great glowing golden spheres for joints near its body. Its body is not unlike a larva or a spider that’s grown too large, with snapping teeth and a single, crimson eye fixed atop what he thinks is its head. When it moves, it seems almost like it’s spread between every dimension at once.

  A black, inky substance oozes and bubbles from the crevices in its body, and tiny hands reach out from its belly and the pits of its legs—like the remnants of devoured souls reaching out in vain for some hope of salvation that will never come.

  It towers over the city and looks down on him. He feels small in its presence.

  He bows to it.

  He woke screaming.

  His skin felt flushed. The room lit blue as he formed hands on his stumps and went to the liqueur cabinet. He poured himself a glass of whiskey and drank it in one gulp, then poured himself another.

  Sitting nude in a chair next to the liquor cabinet, he watched the lights flicker on the Pittsburgh skyline. It was a strange comfort, knowing that it wasn’t all coming crashing down.

  He knew that this was only a fleeting comfort.

  His head fell into his glowing hands.

  What was he thinking? Was this t
ruly the one he’d struck the bargain with, the being known as Oreseth? He had imagined something far less grotesque.

  His doubts and his fear eroded.

  It doesn’t matter, he thought. It’s all for her.

  4

  The next morning, he checked out, paid for the bottle of whiskey that he’d drunk and left in search of the nearest train station.

  He was happy to leave Pittsburgh behind. The bland towers that comprised the city sank into the distance as the land once again took on a more vegetative look. It was like this for a while; small towns with small buildings of varying designs crept at a snail’s pace before his eyes between long stretches of forests and the occasional view of what he thought was the ocean until some generous passenger pointed them out as The Great Lakes. Somewhere along the way he nodded off. When he woke, he started to see more and more hints of civilization.

  They were approaching Chicago.

  Then, the city sprang into full life from the view of his train car window. Buildings of all shapes and sizes, with metallic cylinders fixed atop their rooftops—these were called water towers, he knew from his time in the Masku asylum—and one building with a constant burning flame which stabbed up into the night sky. The buildings looked to be mostly interconnected from where he sat.

  Soon the train came to a stop at Union Station. He departed and found himself wandering aimlessly through the labyrinth-like train station, trying to find his way out. Rushing crowds of people formed around him, impeding his way. It was all too tempting to blast his way out, but he knew that would call attention to himself too early in the game.

  After almost an hour of searching, he found the exit. According to his GPS, the address he’d taken from the orderly was an hour-long walk from where he was. He had all the time in the world, so he walked.

  His disguise did the trick for the most part. No one paid him much attention as he walked to the address displayed in white letters on his GPS.

  The closer he got to his destination, the more he saw strange scribbles—or crude drawings—displayed on the walls of certain buildings. The night grew colder, and this only invigorated him.

  Finally, the digital voice inside his phone told him his destination was on the right. He peered up at another one of those conjoined houses. The one he wanted was in bad shape, even an outsider like him could tell. The paint was worn, the bricks cracked, and the windows dim and dirty. Yet, somehow this felt right.

 

‹ Prev