by Tim Marquitz
“Meat ... places.”
~
Amita Prasad emerged from the dark into the gray. Above and around her were buildings, though she could only see their top edges. The air was so thick she thought she might choke, before she realized she was not breathing, and had not been for a while. The sky above spasmed. Its coiling silver glow was nothing she thought should be called light. Savage roars reached her ears.
A part of her wondered why she was not freaking out, and another part wondered if her parents and other family were caught up in the chaos. Those parts lost out, though, to the part that wondered why the road beneath her felt soft and pliant, why her arms were twice as long as before, and why something like an enormous jellyfish sac now extended from the remains of her left breast.
As Amita considered the sac, it fanned its tendrils. She shuddered, then realized she was the one who moved it. She fanned the tendrils again.
“This is insane,” she said, realizing belatedly that her mouth did not move as she spoke, though she heard her own voice in her head. She tried to move her jaw, and was surprised when her perspective split, shifting to take in the building she was next to while continuing to look into the twisting gray night.
“Get up,” a high-pitched voice told her. “Make the hard places soft.”
The voice was also in her head, but it was not like the one she had heard before. It was a boy’s voice.
“Who are you?” Amita asked.
“We are Ken,” it answered.
Amita considered this.
“Our names and our voices are gone,” Ken continued, “save for those of the boy whose head you ate. Soon, they, too, will be gone. Until they are, we are Ken.”
“You are what spoke to me before.”
“Yes. We needed time inside you to learn.”
Amita decided she’d enough of lying down. Her elongated arms curled back and pushed against the pavement, thrusting her to her feet with surprising strength.
The glass tower building she faced had been the headquarters of a major bank, though it was no longer possible to tell which one. Reflective pieces of glass hung limply from their frames. Inside, something shadowy pulsed.
Amita no longer recognized herself. Her clothing and hair were gone, though its colors streaked her chitinous frame. Parts of her face, neck, and torso still looked human, while much of the rest of her was covered in segmented shells. Her breast-sac’s tendrils seized her chin in alarm, narrowly avoiding covering the large gray eye in her mouth. Her old eyes were similarly large, and she was relieved they had not turned to liquid the way Craig’s had.
“Craig!”
“What is Craig?” asked Ken.
It was a good question, Amita thought. What was Craig Marston now? He had been among the first to change, and she doubted he stopped after she left. Would she even recognize him in this disintegrating city of impossible beasts?
“Craig is ... was ... my partner.”
“Your mate?”
“Partner,” Amita corrected. “We were going to start a business, do some software and app work. Make names for ourselves.”
Her invisible passenger was silent for a moment.
“We ... are Ken,” he finally replied.
“Guess we succeeded.”
Amita walked to the bank building, attention fixed on her reflection. She had never cared much to admire herself in mirrors before, and did not believe what she felt now could be called admiration so much as a repulsed fascination. Tiny tendrils sprouted from her face, neck, and the portions of her not covered by shell. They floated as if in water. She brushed them with her hand and felt a tingle. She gave her palm a second look and saw a hole surrounded by jagged teeth.
“We were of this before you,” Ken told her. “Our memories shape and harden as you spread through the dimensions.”
Her mouth-eye swiveled, as if she could catch sight of him. Instead, she saw a portion of the building not covered by glass. By all rights, there should have been nothing on the other side besides a lobby, but the room-filling mass before her was wet and shuddering.
“We make the hard places soft,” Ken repeated. “We eat ... we change ... we are sustained. It ... is sustained.”
“It?”
“What moves above.”
Amita looked up again. She realized something else was missing.
“Where’s the moon?”
Ken was silent for a few moments. Amita felt a wave of unease, as if something was slithering inside her skull, which, for all she knew, was now possible.
“The moon has no soft places,” Ken answered. “No meat places. It is not ... Goldilocks.”
Amita thought about what that meant. She could feel the rough edges of sense dawning, but was not sure she wanted to know more.
The area of asphalt where she had lain was now a hole, and the partially melted matter of the road poured in. The car that had been to one side of her was also turning soft, its tires and body merging with the road.
“I make the hard places soft,” she said, more to herself than to Ken.
She pushed off with one foot and was not surprised that she slowly and steadily ascended. Gravity, like so many other scientific laws, had gone as soft as the roads and buildings. Moreover, moving her arms and legs, as though she were swimming, she could slow her rise. Something older than her was inside her and knew it to be true; she doubted she wanted to know what it was. She came to a halt ninety feet up and surveyed what remained of the city.
The Ambassador Bridge drooped into a bubbling and choppy Detroit River—just as well, as most of the casinos and hotels on Windsor’s shoreline had slumped against one another. Most buildings in downtown Detroit had lost their angular appearances, though only a few—including, she was sad to see, the terracotta and brick Cadillac Tower—had toppled. Comerica Park overflowed with vile liquid, on which rode innumerable giant, semi-transparent maggots. There was only a hole where Ford Field had been. Amita could just make out a serpentine shape sliding helplessly down.
Monsters were everywhere, and as far as Amita could tell, they were everyone. She could not see which still thought, as she did, and which had succumbed to blind hunger and fury. She did not know how much longer it would matter.
Above the Detroit Institute for the Arts, an elegant Italian Renaissance-style building on its way to becoming inelegant pudding, several large bubbles floated. Amita drifted close and saw eyes, noses, arms, and other appendages were embedded in the bubble walls. She ripped a chunk away and consumed it through her palm.
This time, she kept enough control to avoid losing consciousness. Her left leg quivered, shook, and abruptly lost all rigidity, though it gained two feet in length and more small, sharp things than she could count.
“There wasn’t ... enough mass,” she mumbled, as she drifted away from the meat bubbles. “How ... ”
“Your thinking persists in three dimensions,” Ken answered, “though your flesh is in eleven and knows where to find more. The more you feed, the more you ... unlock.”
“I pull the mass from someplace here ... through dimensions I can’t see? Parts of my body transform into parts of ... you?” She shook her head. “I don’t understand how it’s possible.”
“Nor did we. Not until long after.”
She was distracted from her reply by a sound that rolled through the thick air. It came from the Renaissance Center, of which only the cylindrical central hotel tower was still standing. Something massive moved behind it, spreading fine white-hair tentacles all around the tower.
“Ammmmmmiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitaaaaaaaaa!”
“No,” she groaned.
Craig’s new eye was still red, though it had expanded to twelve feet wide. If teeth rimmed its eyelids, she could not tell; he did not blink in any case. His body was something like hers—hard, segmented, and insectile—though the blackened meat billowing through the cracks told her he was on his way to becoming something else. He was nearly a third of the tower’s over seven
hundred foot height, and halfway up it. His arms and legs were smaller than they would have been had he stayed proportional to his old self, and she wondered how much time remained before they would be completely absorbed into his new frame.
“Ammmmiiiiitaaaa!”
The sound came from all of him. The red eye had not swiveled to find her, but she nonetheless felt he knew where she was. She drifted closer.
Faces and bodies swarmed the meat that bubbled through the cracks in his frame. Not merely pieces and appendages, as with the floating bubbles, but torsos and faces. They twisted into and through one another, every visible eye open in agony, every mouth wide in a silent scream. As far as she could tell, Craig had consumed them so quickly they exhausted his new body’s ability to process.
“Typical,” she thought at him. “You never did know how to pace yourself.”
“Aaaaaaaaaammmmiiiiitaaaaa!”
Her name flowed from every visible mouth, a soft wave that cut through her numb acceptance of her new reality. In the depths of what she still considered her human remains, anger welled.
Craig’s red eye found her, at last. In it she saw pain. He could not help what he was or what he was compelled to do. Somewhere far beneath, she was sure a piece of the old Craig watched in horror.
If what happened to Detroit and Windsor was happening everywhere, the world was over. Everything would turn to ooze. A little suffering should make no difference in the end.
But somehow ... it did.
Amita dove toward his eye, moving far faster than the push she received from her swimming motions should have allowed. It was as though she was even larger than the parts of herself she could see, and could push herself to lethal speeds just by flexing in those invisible dimensions.
Craig focused on her as she shot toward him, but she did not slow down. Tentacles broke free from the building’s slimy surface and lashed at her. Her former left leg whipped up and sliced, severing the glistening two-foot-thick strands. One strand got through and ripped away her left-breast-turned-jellyfish-sac. Black and red ooze sprayed over her torso and burned where it landed.
She pierced his iris, not losing any speed on impact. Craig roared with inchoate rage as she pushed deeper into his eye’s hot toxic sludge. She spread her arms, opened her mouths, and drank.
In the moment before ecstasy overwhelmed her, she crashed through something hard, and the roar abruptly stopped.
~
A time later, Amita Prasad woke. She tried to open her eyes only to discover she didn’t have any. She had a body, as she could feel its pieces move, but what it was moving in was no longer anything she could say. It was warm, wet, thick and turbulent.
“I’m trapped,” she thought,“aren’t I, Ken?”
The voice inside her did not answer.
“Ken?”
“We ... we are ... Craig.”
Amita was silent. Craig seemed content to wait.
“What happened to Ken?” she finally asked.
“We are ... Ken.”
This clarified nothing. Amita turned her consideration to the viscous material she was floating in. She had never tried floating in a sensory deprivation tank, though Craig had once tried to get her to do so. The sensation was remarkably like what he claimed she would feel—suspended, surrounded, and unmoored from her body’s senses.
“I’m in your corpse, aren’t I?” she asked. “I pierced your skull and just kept going ...”
“That body is gone,” Craig answered. “As has Ken. As has Detroit, and Earth. All this around us is your world. It has been made soft by what moves above.”
“What is What Moves Above?”
Amita didn’t think that should be a difficult question, but Craig had no reply.
That everything she had ever known was gone should have crushed her, she knew, but she could not work up the least emotion. She tried to think of her friends and her parents, but nothing came. She could no longer picture the niece whose children’s book had supplied Craig’s first attempt at communication. She had transformed inside, as well as out.
She tried to remember why, at the end, she had dove on Craig. All she could recall was the three gray children who had fed her. It had been a strange and arbitrary kind of mercy, but one she knew she had to give Craig, despite what he had done that night and before. Even monsters sometimes helped one another.
“All our worlds were in what you call the Goldilocks Zone,” said Craig. “The ideal distance from a sun for a planet to sustain life. All the forms you saw, which you called monsters, were pieces of us ... memories of ourselves from long ago, jumbled, merged, and distorted. All of us had experiences, such as yours, when we were taken by What Moves Above.”
Amita noticed Craig’s voice had become softer as he spoke, and somehow more familiar.
“Craig?”
“We are ... Amita.”
The wall between her and them was thin. Her identity would blend with Craig’s, and Ken’s, and the countless others before her. Once, she would have been filled with sadness and anger from such a loss, as she had been earlier in the face of Craig’s betrayal. Now, if she felt anything, it was relief.
There was a thousand trillion tons of liquefied earth around her. She wondered if this, ultimately, was why no signal from an alien world had ever been found ... because What Moves Above regarded Goldilocks Zone planets the same way the Three Bears regarded Goldilocks in the early versions of her tale—warm, wet, defenseless, and tasty.
No wonder monsters understood mercy, she thought. When they realized the implacable end had come, rendering their appetites and rages meaningless, turning their loves and lives to pain, mercy was all that was left to show before the long night began.
Amita opened her mouths and drank in the Earth. The others drank in her. Everything, for a time, became light.
They Wait Below
Tom Olbert
***begin recording***
If you think me insane, then you are as naïve as I was … as most people in these end times are; blissfully ignorant of what lies below.
Most of us labor on in smug complacency, secure in the belief we are the uncontested masters of the earth and all that lives on its surface or below. But, there are things … horrible things … beyond our knowledge. Beyond even our imagination.
They hide in the dark places … waiting.
~
I woke to the sound of a muffled scream in the dead of night. I gasped in the pitch black of my cabin, struggling to find my clothes. I had little sense of time. It felt as though I’d only just gotten to sleep after tossing and turning, on my miserably uncomfortable bunk, for what had seemed like hours. I looked at my digital watch, realizing it was barely 2:00 a.m. After hastily dressing myself, I opened the hatch, letting in the cold, damp night air. The sickly, rotted smell of the sea assailed my nostrils as mist slid into my small cabin, illuminated by the meager, veiled electric lights of the oil platform.
There before me, on the platform deck, I saw two of the oil rig technicians supporting a third between them. They held him by the arms as they half-dragged, half-carried him across the deck, towards the elevator. The man was babbling incoherently, his head bobbing up and down. My first thought was that an accident had occurred. Perhaps the man had fallen while working on one of the pumps. Then I thought, perhaps, he’d too much to drink. Against regulations, of course, but it did happen. That’s, of course, one reason the Energy Commission sends inspectors like myself to oversee these deep sea rigs. You can’t always trust the oil companies to police themselves.
But there was something about it that just didn’t feel right. I’m a safety inspector not a security man; I’ve no experience dealing with violence, but this one sent a chill through my stomach. A voice in the back of my mind screamed that if that man was taken down in that elevator it would be the last anyone ever saw of him. I knew how insane the thought was even as it formed, but the voice grew louder with each step they took. Something rose up in me, spurrin
g me to action. Heavy iron chains of fear pulled at me, but I couldn’t keep still.
“Hold on there!” I yelled, my heart pounding hard enough to break my chest even as I ran after them. “What’s going on? Does that man need medical attention?”
“We’re handling it, Mister Corby,” one of the techs, Johansen said, his voice dry and hollow. “Please go back to your cabin, sir. This is a security area.”
“Now, look here … ” My breath was white steam on the air as I ran up to them. “My job is to inspect this rig. If there’s a safety issue—”
I started as the half-conscious man tore free and lunged at me, grabbing me by the neck. I gasped, my eyes growing wide and my stomach nearly turning as I saw his face. It was torn open, half covered in blood. His eyes were wild in mortal terror. The blood half covered the front of his work coverall, but I could just make out his nametag: Hastings.
“Help me,” he croaked out of a strangled throat, his eyes wide as saucers. The lights on the elevator shaft behind him flickered wildly. I felt someone or something grab me from behind. A shock blasted through me, like a bolt of electricity.
I started as I awoke, finding myself on the bunk in my cabin. My mind raced as I looked about in the pale gray light of morning. I could hear the techs working on the platform outside my door. Did I dare open it? I looked down, seeing I was undressed, my clothes slumped on the floor where I’d left them the night before. My muscles felt sore and stiff, and my head throbbed. Had I dreamed it?
I must have, I reasoned as I dressed. Still, I felt an instinctive hesitancy, like a chill prickling its way up my spine as I opened the hatch. The damp, chill morning air hit my face. I bundled my jacket about myself as I made my way across the grubby deck. The wind was clammy and raw, the sky its usual overcast, gray pall. We lived in a dying world, the climatologists told us, even as layers of pollution shrouded the sky. I think I was nineteen the last time I actually saw the sun. In the naiveté of youth, I told myself becoming an environmental impact inspector would make a difference. The young are such arrogant fools.