Maria opened up on the one whose form vaguely suggested a woman. Thick yellow ichor sprayed from several holes blasted into its chest, and it stumbled backwards without a cry or even a grunt. A third shot blew off its jaw and made the head tilt at a sudden angle as the projectile shattered the back of the thing’s neck, destroying what now passed for its upper spinal column. The thing toppled like a statue pushed off its base.
Josh had run at the two hunched over Edward – who had stopped shrieking. He kicked one with all his strength in the face. It straightened up somewhat, turning its visage up to him, grimacing with those yellow teeth. Josh practically pressed his gun’s muzzle to its forehead as he fired. A splash of liquified yellow brains from the back of the thing’s exploded skull. It slumped sideways, and he turned his attention to the one that had jammed its arm into Edward, now almost up to the elbow.
The Blue was so ravenous with expectation that it didn’t even look up at the living man who stood over it. The things prized the entrails of the living, apparently so as to be nourished on the food within, in the process of being digested. The group had sometimes stumbled upon blackened and flyblown bodies in their nomadic wandering, hollowed out, emptied like the shells of oysters.
This Blue had caught hold of its prey’s guts...and with a tug, yanked loops of glistening and dripping intestines out of Edward’s body, which was shivering violently with the last residue of life.
“Die, you fucker!” Josh blurted at the thing, already dead, as he fired again and again at its head, its jaws opened wide to feed, cracked at the edges to accommodate the movement. He took the top of the Blue’s head off. He could see the smooth brain lying exposed in a bowl of its yellow juices. With its mouth still working like that of a fish breathing underwater, the creature thudded to the ground. In so doing, still gripping Edward’s innards, it pulled a few more inches out of him.
Sobbing, Maria came over and unnecessarily fired into the two Blues Josh had killed. Seeing that Edward – though uttering no sounds – still trembled, she pointed her barrel at the back of his head, looked away, and fired a single booming shot.
“God! God! God!” she wailed. “What’s the use, huh? What’s the fucking use?” She bugged her eyes at Josh. “We should all just shoot ourselves now!”
Tanaka, having seen that the Blues had been killed, broke away the rest of the glass in the window frame with her pistol, then boosted Michael through. Josh helped pull her out after him. Maria slung her rifle over her shoulder, grabbed Michael and embraced him tightly, as much to find her own meager solace as to shield his eyes from the carnage – though it wasn’t the first he had seen, nor would it be his last.
In turn, Tanaka took Josh in her arms. She found he was sobbing, quietly, too.
“I used to live in this town,” he blubbered inadequately, nonsensically. It was all he could think to say. “I used to live in this fucking town!”
“All the towns are like this now,” Tanaka said. And it was true. Borders between one town and the next were obliterated, eradicated, buried. Borders between one country and the next. The world had been repainted, sculpted anew. In a way, the world had been destroyed. In another way, it had been unified. Thinking this, Tanaka whispered in his ear, “Every town is our home now.” She kissed his ear, and held him for several minutes more.
“Come on.” Maria let go of Michael, but held onto one of his hands. “Let’s get our stuff, huh? We have to find that fucking town.”
“What town?” Josh sighed, wiping his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“The one where we’re making your fucking farm. Right?”
Lowering his hands, Josh smiled over at her weakly. Then at Tanaka. Then he turned, and cast his eyes across the wide, open land. And the land was the color of sea and sky, the two most vital of life-giving elements.
Blue.
The End
Blue Sphinxes
From the windows in the hospital cafeteria Jill could see one of the Blue Sphinxes, as she had come to call them in her childhood. There were two of them, which she thought of as mates. This one she considered the female, as it had somewhat more feminine – though no less reserved and chilly – features.
The statue loomed above the dark coniferous woods that bordered the town. Eastborough Mental Hospital was hidden here out of sight of the unafflicted in a no-man's-land between that town and those woods, like some idiot child of old locked away in a shed or attic room where he couldn't embarrass, couldn't frighten the allegedly normal.
Jill sipped her orange juice absentmindedly, her gaze fixed on that towering figure. It was so vast in size that it was misty with distance, like a mountain, almost as if it were a ghost rather than carved of solid stone. Sky-blue stone. Maybe that was why, she thought, no one else but her had ever seen the pair of statues (at least, she had never met anyone who had). Maybe her eyes were more highly evolved, or mutated or defected in some way, permitting her to distinguish the blue of the great sculptures from the blue of the sky itself. Then again, she considered, they remained blue when the sky was gray (as it was now). At night, she couldn't see them either, and that was why she had come to love the night. Those eyes relentlessly gazing were veiled from her own gaze, at least for a while. But she still felt their cold stare, through the dark, just as she felt their gaze through the walls in the hospital where there were no windows. Appraising her. Criticizing her. Loathing her...
They were as beautiful as she was homely, she thought. Abstracted, vaguely oriental features, lips pursed into sensuous but unsmiling lines. No pupils carved in their blank eyes. Her parents had been beautiful too, she remembered, though her father had left them when she was twelve. It was Jill's fault, her mother would tell her. Jill with her homely face and homelier mind. Jill who asked people why they couldn't see the statues like she could (and yet these people were impressed by that puny kitten of a sphinx that presided over the pyramids). Jill had been sixteen when her mother brought her here. Ten years ago, now. And it had been two years since last her still-beautiful mother had come. Though she hadn't seen her father in many more years than that, she imagined he was still handsome, as well.
A light, ghostly snow had begun to fall. Good. It might become a blizzard. Might obscure that carven, spying face. For a while...
An aide leaned over her shoulder, startling her. Asked if she was okay. Jill smiled and said she was fine. The aide, with a knowing look, asked if Jill was staring at her sphinxes. No, Jill lied, just watching the snow. Appearing doubtful, the aide still moved on and Jill turned again to the window.
Tears began to fill her eyes...as they never filled the eyes of the two immense statues.
She wished she herself could be one of those sphinxes. A third, between them.
How she hated those sphinxes. How she loved them.
The End
Harsh Light
His body lay large and glistening wet, still warm, but stiffening, hardening... Donna gasped another sob. She had slid down the bathroom wall and sat on her heels, staring at her husband, dead on the linoleum of a heart attack, lying naked to her eyes for the first time in the light, the first time in their marriage of seventeen years... Bobby was a woman. Donna had never known this, never suspected. Seventeen years. His familiar head seemed grafted onto the alien body of a large-boned woman. He was without the tight binding which she had once glimpsed him in accidentally; he had said it was to support his bad back. Now she saw the breasts. At first she thought he was a hermaphrodite, but there were no signs of male organs. Bobby was a woman whose true name Donna did not even know.
She shut her eyes tightly and shuddered. Her mother had died when Donna was sixteen. She had known Bobby for more years than she'd known her own mother. But now she knew that she hadn't known him.
More than betrayal, more than anger, she felt confusion and hurt. That he...she...had lied, of course. But mostly because Bobby hadn't shared this with her. Had kept this secret, this reality, hidden from her.
They had shared everything else but their bodies. Good times. Bad. Vacations. Holidays. Scrapbooks brimmed with their sharing. They had even shared sex, and again a tremor went through Donna. Bobby told her after they'd dated for several months that he had suffered terrible injuries in a motorcycle accident. Donna had been too much in love with him to break off, though she was tested by the prospect of life without children. They spoke of adoption, but it was too expensive, and difficult, and Bobby was reluctant. Now it was obvious he'd been afraid that a look into his past by adoption agencies might reveal his actual identity.
Bobby had pleased his wife with his mouth, his hands. He never undressed for this. She touched only his head, his face, stroked his neck and kissed his gentle large hands. This was
enough for Donna. Bobby had been her first and only lover. Now she realized that she had never had sex with a man in her life.
They had slept side by side, Bobby in his pajamas on the hottest of nights. Bobby hiding so much behind so little cloth. As near as a bed mate, as distant as a stranger.
This woman had loved Donna. She had feared rejection, obviously, if she'd been found out.
And Donna had to admit she would have left Bobby if he/she had confessed; what would her family have said, her friends and co-workers? Yet, maybe only in the beginning. But if he had confessed after they had been together for several years, Donna wondered, would she have left?
She wished Bobby had given her the benefit of a doubt; maybe nothing would have changed, ultimately. Maybe she wouldn't have let the prejudices of others affect her decision.
How many nights Donna had longed, in her own pleasure, to please Bobby too. She had thought Bobby derived no pleasure of his own, but in the dark, had one hand sneaked away to stroke his own secret place? Now, to learn that she actually could have pleased Bobby also...
He should have confessed everything, Donna thought, weeping, wagging her head, Bobby's prone body blurry through her tears but stark in the glaring, clinical lights like those of a coroner's table, Bobby's body like a cadaver laid open to spill all it contained, exposed to the core of its flesh, but the mind beyond reach, passed into oblivion, oh Bobby, Donna thought, who were you...
She still loved him, even now. He should have told her while he was alive, before it was too late for them to share it. What a relief it would have been for Bobby to reveal the truth, she thought, and to know her loyalty in the face of it. In protecting himself he had cheated himself.
He had betrayed himself just as much as her with his deception.
Moaning his name, Donna went to him on hands and knees, lifted his large hand – still familiar to her lips and pressed her forehead against it, squeezing her eyes shut. She slowly stretched beside him on the cold floor, as they had lain in bed, her arm slung over him. She kissed his neck as she would do when they parked in his car when they first dated, while he was tenderly molding her breasts in his big hands. She said his name again and kissed his slack mouth, his parted lips. She ran her hand down to the breasts that he had cruelly restrained, like children chained in a cellar, and it was with that strong a pity that Donna reacted to them. Her fingertips just barely stroked them, trembling. He deserved this. He must have always dreamed of this. Could he see her now from some spiritual plane? And derive his long-denied pleasure at last?
Donna cupped one breast now, fondled it as gently as he had done with hers. She kissed the cooling flesh, moved her shivering lips down Bobby's body. Once a victim of its own bondage, a prisoner of fear...now liberated, like a soul that had waited until death to be born. Body and soul had been bound too long. Donna wanted to show him the acceptance he must have craved from
her. She wanted to consummate their marriage...
Slowly, whimpering, she pressed her nose into the soft hair which was now only the most meager mask over Bobby's shameful secret. Yes, he had been ashamed of what he was. Donna
showed him he shouldn't have been. He was as good a husband as she could ever have hoped for, and she only wished she could have shown it to him in this way while he was still alive.
She ground her face against him so as to push her tongue deep inside his poor body, as if to tease out the last vestige of his secret so that no more of it remained.
They were consummated at last, as they should have been all along, and for Donna it was a liberation as well. A tragic one. A liberation that sent deep cracks through her mind. But her shame was lifted. She had been ashamed all these years lest Bobby find out her own guilty secret...bound and restrained in her heart.
She had wanted children, but hadn't really missed a husband's penis. She had loved Bobby as a man with no regrets and no dissatisfaction. But she had never told her family or her friends, and barely admitted to herself that despite her attraction to men Donna had always found herself more attracted to women.
The End
Insides Out
Ending sadly, story told often, fate unhappy always follows it -- you hear wailing whales, you see nearing angels, tattered and torn fins like wings, mists spouted become dispersing halos, flesh that covers treasured chest, blubber is this for this you eat, blood is this for this you drink, "I am cursed but cured," you say, "this to witness am I", watching haunted and hollowed mothers of ghosts, skulls as echoing and depthless as sea, "harpoons plunge deep too," you cry, brine of tears are cried, great but tragic beasts striking upon sharp rocks, water like tossing flesh, blood in dyed waves, hammer pounding uselessly a heart, vast and stranded whales like fetuses die, flayed insides out insides flayed, die fetuses like whales stranded and vast, heart a uselessly pounding hammer, waves dyed in blood, flesh tossing like water, rocks sharp upon striking beasts tragic but great, cried are tears of brine, cry you, "too deep plunge harpoons", sea as depthless and echoing as skulls, ghosts of mothers hollowed and haunted watching, "I am witness to this," say you, "cured but cursed am I", drink you this for this is blood, eat you this for this is blubber, chest treasured covers that flesh, halos dispersing become spouted mists, wings like fins torn and tattered, angels nearing see you, whales wailing hear you -- it follows always unhappy fate, often told story, sadly ending.
The End
Ouroborus
The roots of great trees had burrowed through the ceiling over many years, growing ever downward and piercing into the floor as well. Into the walls, too...squeezing between mortared stones, the larger roots even nudging blocks out of their sockets so that they had fallen to the endless Tunnel’s floor here and there. Some of these roots were as big around as trees themselves. Noon marveled, because he estimated this stretch of the Tunnel was hundreds of feet below the surface. Not only that, but by his estimation the surface in this region was now a blasted desert devoid of any life. The forest that had once covered this area should be decades extinct. Maybe the trees were indeed gone, but their roots continued to dig blindly deeper and deeper, as if to one day sip the very magma from the planet’s core. These roots still alive like nerves after a tooth is extracted. Refusing to die, determined to survive at any cost, but without quite realizing why they should do so. Just like Noon.
This spider-webbed lattice, this living weave, became so tight in spots that Noon could barely squeeze himself through it. He didn’t want to draw his machete and hack at the roots, because he didn’t want to leave a trail the Foeti could easily follow. Yet who was he deceiving, in that concern, but himself? Though the floor of the Tunnel here was of uneven flagstones, not dirt as it had been some miles back, he knew he was leaving plenty of signs of his passage for the Foeti and other denizens of the Tunnel to follow. The Foeti might not possess the sense of smell, but it/they could see clearly enough – just as other entities might not have the sense of sight, but could sniff the blood in his veins from a mile away.
It was difficult to tell how far behind him the Foeti was/were. The Tunnel made its/their cries echoy, distorted. It/they might be lost way back in the steam as black as squid’s ink which he had groped his way through an hour ago, or as close as
the beginning of the root forest. Its/their wails sounded like a nursery of newborn infants drowning at the bottom of the sea.
Though the wails sounded like multiple creatures to him now – and on a few occasions he had injured the/a Foeti so badly that he was sure it would die of its wounds – he was not certain if there were many of them, or only a single individual. His opinion on the subject changed from day to day, from hour to hour.
In any case – and fortunately for him – even if the Foeti was/were fairly near, the tangled roots were too dense to see through very deeply...and though there were bare light bulbs hanging from the low ceiling, they were spaced far apart so that the gaps between their pools of light offered brief shelters of darkness. He only hoped that nothing hostile was lying in wait for him in one of these intervals of darkness. The bulbs rested against the roots here and there, and their heat had scorched them black in spots though they hadn’t caught fire. Fire was perhaps Noon’s worst fear. If he ever came to a place in the Tunnel that was filled with flame, he would have to wait for the fire to die down before he could proceed. In that time, the Foeti might catch up to him. And if the fire was of a kind that would never die away, then he would have to turn back. That was simply impossible to contemplate. In all this time of running through the Tunnel, he had not once turned back.
He estimated that he had been running for a year, at least...ever since he had fallen through the hole in the rotted floor of his moldering house in the old, old city – waking from unconsciousness to find himself in the Tunnel. The ceiling far above him, with just a dim bluish light showing him the hole his weight had broken open, so high out of reach. Luckily, the floor of the Tunnel had been of a thick black soil in that section (churned up by a seething population of night crawlers), and it had broken his fall.
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