Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature

by Jacob Weisman

  “In the Bushes” is a story of the demise of the automobile. It was commissioned for 2033: The Future of Misbehavior, an anthology of stories assembled by the editors of Nerve.com.

  We met in the bushes. That’s where everyone goes nowadays to get their fun on around here, ever since we had to give up the cars. We did it without a fight, because there wasn’t much oil left to put in them. The president decided to start a bunch of wars (Q: How many wars can you start at once? A: Four.), and he asked us to donate our cars so we could build weapons, and we all said, “Sure, wasn’t like we were using them anyway.” And just like that, it became illegal to have a car. They throw people in jails now just for possession of a hunk of metal. So now we walk everywhere, or ride our bikes (the bikes weren’t worth their time), and when we want to make out in the backseats of cars, we just use the bushes instead.

  I wasn’t making out that night. My girl had left me to get married to a soldier who was going off to war. (The one in India, I think.) “No offense,” she said. “Benefits.” She had met him at one of the barn social nights held just for those purposes—for young women to meet soldiers. I did not know she had been attending them. But marrying a soldier was your best bet for a good life. I could not hold it against her. We had just graduated from high school. I had nothing to give her but a ride on the back of my bicycle.

  Although it is a smooth ride.

  I was taking the dog for a walk instead, but we were lured by the bushes, the sounds and the smells, the kisses and the moans. Everyone was so happy and free. The air smelled so fresh and green and sexy.

  This is what they do now. They start at one end of town at sunset, and, one by one, the kids show up and make the march to the park. By night, the streets are full of kids walking and talking, sharing whatever news they heard their parents whispering about that day. A good piece of dirt can get you laid before dusk breaks. (Not that they’re in any hurry: Curfews disappeared with the cars. How far could anyone get? What kind of trouble could they find on their feet?) And then there they are, at last, at the park, in the dark. Kids fall in love in the bushes, babies are made, mosquitoes bite.

  Sometimes I miss oil.

  They gather near a patch of American elms—that’s where it shifts. Maybe they’re thinking about how they’re doing their part for our country, our great nation. They swig booze from paper bags, shift from foot to foot. And then they pair off, eventually, wander away from the elms, closer to the bushes, pointing at a constellation, or lying down and hoping for shooting stars. A shooting star guarantees that first kiss. After the first kiss, it’s just a short walk to the bushes that spiral up every year higher to the sky.

  They’ve been calling it the Rustle lately.

  Not everyone hangs out in the bushes. Some kids like to pair up on a Friday and pick the dirt weed on the back roads. (That stuff was never strong enough to smoke until a few years ago—there was a shift in the air after the explosion in Council Bluffs, and now what looks harmless can send you flying for two days straight.) On Saturdays, the town council hosts a bonfire at the church (mostly old auto magazines); there’s romance in roasting marshmallows while erasing the past. And of course there’s the equestrians—they’re all over the roads. Those girls sure do love their horses; they never seem to want to get off them.

  And then there’s me. I just like to walk, and watch everyone. When I met her, we were just tracing a little path, me and the dog. I had a stick I was dragging along, and he would stop me every few yards and dig into the ground. She was coming up toward us, a huddle, in the darkness, of sweaters and a sturdy coat and a gigantic backpack. We stopped as we approached and stood in front of each other, and just then a girl let out a loud and very final-sounding moan from the bushes, and the leaves rustled.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m lost.” She didn’t look scared at all, though maybe she should have been, wandering around in the middle of nowhere near all those squirming bodies in the bushes.

  “Where are you trying to go?” I said, though I had a pretty good idea.

  “I heard there was a place for people like me around here,” she said. She shifted her backpack up on her back, and she lifted her head up and the moon and the stars hit her face, and I could see that her skin was clear and her eyes were dark and focused and determined, and then she smiled—not warily, but aware nonetheless. There was a sliver of space between her two front teeth. I wanted to insert my tongue between the space and let it lie there for a while and see what it felt like. The dog liked her, too. He sniffed at her feet and then rested at them.

  She was making her way to Los Angeles, she told me. We’d seen a few of her kind passing through before. Los Angeles had seceded from the Union a while back, when the first rumblings of the car reclamation had started. They had fought the hardest out of anywhere. They loved their cars the most. And we had all heard stories of a city trapped in gridlock, but people were still migrating there from all over the country. To a place that still moved.

  It was a real shame about Detroit, what happened there.

  “You’re a ways away from the shelter,” I told her, but I said I’d walk her in the right direction. It was a nice night. From the bushes we heard two voices jumble together in laughter, and then a guy said, “I love you.” I offered to carry her bag for her, and she judged it, judged me, and then handed it over.

  As we walked she told me about life back East. Her husky voice perfectly matched the sound of the crunch of gravel under our feet. She had taken hold of my walking stick and dragged it behind her. She was from Philadelphia, and, like every other city out there, there weren’t too many trees left, let alone bushes. There were lines every night at the few public parks that remained, and the government charged admission. A fee to flirt. If you couldn’t afford that, it was all alleyways for you.

  She said she got sick of the feel of cold cement against her ass.

  “I know I shouldn’t complain,” she said. “I know how lucky I am, how lucky we all are. We live in the safest place in the world.”

  She talked about how much she still loved her hometown, the kind of fun she had there. Young people had taken over downtown Philly with graffiti. When the trees went away, the kids began to paint new ones. People now met and fell in love over a can of paint; five-story marriage proposals covered abandoned buildings. They were calling it a cultural renaissance.

  “But I just wanted to see what it was like,” she said. She threw her arms up toward the sky and all around. “Out there.” She stopped and touched me, turned me toward her. “Not that I care about the 152 cars so much. Although I guess I do care. What they mean, what they meant. But I just wanted to be somewhere new.”

  And then, because I wanted to impress her because she had impressed me with her ache and desire and energy, even though I didn’t know her at all, even though she could have been lying about who she was and why she was there, even though I might never see her again, even though she was tired and dirty and she smelled of the earth (or maybe because of it), even though I could have been trading in my freedom, I said to her, “Do you want to see something really cool?”

  We shifted direction toward my home. She dug the trail behind us with the stick, like we were Hansel and Gretel. We made it home quickly; we were both excited. I dropped her bag on the front porch, took the dog off the leash, and let him run around in circles in the backyard. We walked toward the small island of trees and bushes behind my house. The dog barked, nervous, but I ignored him. I held her hand and cleared us a path through the bushes until we came upon it.

  A 2017 Chevy. The roof was missing, and the leather had been beat down by the rain and snow. Everything else was rusted. But still we slid in the backseat immediately.

  She started to cry, but I think maybe she was laughing, too.

  “It’s just a useless piece of junk,” I said. “It’s not that special.”

  “No, it’s really nice,” she said.

  I put my arm around her, and we slouched down in
the seats and looked up at the sky. “There should be a radio playing,” she said. “Classic rock.” So I sang, my voice echoing in the trees. I sang her every song I remembered, and then, when I was done with those, I made up a few new ones just for her.

  BRIAN EVENSON

  Fugue State

  Brian Evenson’s work, including Immobility, Last Days, The Open Curtain, Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue, skirts the boundary between horror and literature. His more popularly intended fiction appears under the byline of B. K. Evenson. Evenson has received the O. Henry Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association’s RUSA Award for Best Horror Novel. He has also been nominated for the Edgar Award and four times for the Shirley Jackson Award. In addition, he has translated several books by French writers into English. Evenson lives in Valencia, California, where he teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts.

  “Fugue State” was originally published as the title story of Evenson’s eponymous World Fantasy Award–nominated collection. This tale may be about a plague, zombies, or the ephemeral quality of our everyday lives.

  I.

  I had, Bentham claimed, fallen into a sort of fugue state in which the world moved past me more and more rapidly, a kind of blur englobing me at every instant. And yet he had never, so he confided to Arnaud, felt either disoriented or confused. Yes, admittedly, during this period he had no clear idea of his own name, yet despite this he felt he understood things clearly for the first time. He perceived the world in a different way, at a speed which allowed him to ignore the non-essential—such as names, or, rather, such as his own name—and perceive things he could never before even have imagined.

  Arnaud listened carefully. Fugue state, he recorded, then removed his eyeglasses and placed them on the desk in front of him. He looked up, squinting.

  “And do you remember your name now?” he asked.

  At first, Bentham did not answer. Arnaud remained patient. He watched a blurred Bentham glance about himself, searching for some clue.

  “Yes,” said Bentham finally. “Of course I do.”

  “Will you please tell it to me?” asked Arnaud.

  “Why do you need to know?”

  Arnaud rubbed his eyes. Subject does not know own name, he recorded.

  “Will you please describe the room you’re in?” he asked. Bentham instead tried to sit up, was prevented by the straps. Subject unaware of surroundings, Arnaud noted. “Will you describe your room, please?” asked Arnaud again.

  “I don’t see the point,” said Bentham, his voice rising. “You’re here. You’re in it. You can see it just as well as I can.”

  Arnaud leaned forward until his lips were nearly touching the microphone. “But that’s just it, Bentham,” he said softly. “I’m not in the room with you at all.”

  It was shortly after this that Bentham began to bleed from the eyes. This was not a response Arnaud had been trained to expect. Indeed, at first, his glasses still on the desk before him, Arnaud was convinced it was a trick of the light, an oddly cast shadow. He polished his glasses against his shirtfront and hooked them back over his ears, and only then was he certain that each of Bentham’s sockets was pooling with blood. Startled, he must have exclaimed aloud, for Bentham turned his head slightly in the direction of the intercom speaker. The blood in one eye slopped against the bridge of his nose. The blood in the other spilled down his cheek, gathering in the whorl of his ear.

  6:13, Arnaud wrote, Subject has begun to bleed from eyes.

  “Bentham,” Arnaud asked, “how do you feel?”

  “Fine,” said Bentham. “I feel fine. Why?”

  6:14, Arnaud recorded. Subject feels fine. Then added, Is bleeding from eyes.

  Picking up the telephone, he depressed the call button.

  “I need an outside line,” said Arnaud when the operator picked up.

  “You know the rules,” said the operator. “No outside lines during session with subject.”

  Blood too, Arnaud noticed, had started to drip from Bentham’s nose. Perhaps it was coming from his ears as well. Though with Bentham’s visible ear already puddled with the blood from his eye, it was difficult to be certain.

  “The subject appears to be dying,” said Arnaud.

  “Dying?” said the operator. “Of what?”

  “Of bleeding,” said Arnaud.

  “I see,” said the operator. “Please hold the line.”

  The operator exchanged himself with a low and staticky muzak. Arnaud, holding the receiver against his ear, watched Bentham. It was a song he felt he should recognize but he could not quite grasp what it was. Bentham tried to sit up again, straining against the straps as if unaware of them, without any hint of panic. In general he seemed unaware of what was happening to him. A bloody flux was spilling out of his mouth now as well, Arnaud noticed. He groped for a pen to record this, but could not find one.

  Bentham shook his head quickly as if to clear it, spattering blood on the glass between them. Then he bared his teeth. This was, Arnaud felt, a terrible thing to watch.

  The muzak clicked off.

  “Accounting,” said a flat, implacable voice.

  “Excuse me?” said Arnaud.

  “Accounting division.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Arnaud. “The subject assigned to me is dying.”

  The man on the other end did not respond. Bentham, Arnaud saw through the glass, had stopped moving.

  “I think he may have just died,” said Arnaud.

  “Not my jurisdiction, sir,” said the voice, still flat, and the line went dead.

  It was hard for him to be certain that Bentham was no longer alive. Several times, as Arnaud prepared to record a time of death, Bentham offered a weak movement that dissuaded him, the curling or uncurling of a finger, the parting of his lips. He was not certain if these were actual movements or simply the corpse ridding itself of its remaining vitality. For accuracy’s sake, he felt, he should unlock the adjoining door between the two rooms and go through, manually checking Bentham’s pulse with his fingers. Or, rather, making certain there was no pulse to check. But the strangeness of Bentham’s condition made him feel it might be better to leave the adjoining door closed.

  As to leaving his own room, he had no choice but to wait until the session had officially expired and a guard came to unlock the door. He waited, watching Bentham dead or dying. He watched the blood dry between them, on the window. When his ear began to ache, he realized he was still pushing the dead receiver against his face, and hung it up.

  He stood and looked under his desk until he found his pen, then wrote in his notebook, 6:26, Patient dead?

  The remainder of the session he spent, pen poised over the notebook, watching Bentham for any signs of life. He watched the skin on Bentham’s face change character, losing its elasticity, seeming to settle more tightly around the bone. The nose became more and more accentuated, the cheeks growing hollow. The frightful perfection of the skull, the tongs of the jawbones, glowed dully through the skin. Even when the guard opened the door behind him, it was very hard for Arnaud to look away.

  “Ready?” the guard asked. “Session’s over.”

  “I think he’s dead,” said Arnaud.

  “How’s that?” said the guard. “Come again?”

  The guard came and stood next to Arnaud, stared into Bentham’s room. Arnaud looked too.

  When he looked back up he saw that the guard was looking at him with frightened eyes.

  “What is it?” Arnaud asked.

  But at first the guard did not answer, just kept looking at Arnaud. Why? Arnaud wondered, and waited.

  “What,” the guard finally asked, “exactly did you do to him?”

  It was not until that moment that Arnaud realized how wrong things could go for him.

  II.

  The guard became businesslike and efficient, hustling him out of the observation room and down the hall.

  “Where are we going?�
�� Arnaud asked.

  “Just down here,” said the guard, keeping a firm grip on Arnaud’s arm, propelling him forward.

  They passed down one flight of stairs, and through another hall. They went down a short flight, Arnaud nearly tripping, and then immediately up three brief steps and through a door that read conference rooms. The door opened onto a short hallway with three doors on either side and one at the end.

  The guard walked him down to the final door, coaxed him inside. “Wait here,” the guard said.

  “For what?” Arnaud asked.

  But the guard, already gone, did not answer.

  Arnaud tried the door he had come through; it was locked. He tried the door at the far end of the room; this was locked as well.

  He sat down at the table and stared at the wall.

  After a while, he began to read from his notebook. Fugue state, he read. Had he done anything wrong? he wondered. Was he to blame? Was anything in fact his fault? 6:13, he read, subject has begun to bleed from eyes. Even if it were not his fault, would he somehow be held responsible? Subject feels fine, he read. Is bleeding from eyes.

  Oh no, he thought.

  He got up and tried both doors again.

  He sat down again, but found it difficult to sit still. Perhaps he was in very serious trouble, he thought. He was not to blame for whatever had happened to Bentham. But someone had to be blamed, didn’t they? And thus he was to blame.

  Or was he? Perhaps he was becoming hysterical.

  He opened the notebook again and began to read from it. The words were the same as they had been before. To him, now, they seemed all right, mostly. Perhaps the guard was simply following routine procedure in the case of an unusual death.

  No, he began to worry a few moments later, something was wrong. Subjects did not habitually bleed from the eyes, for a start. He closed the notebook, leaving it face down on the table.

  On the far side of the room, affixed to the wall, he noticed a telephone. He stood and went to it.