by Nick Mamatas
“Ten seconds!” said Alysse from the cab of the RV.
“Anyway, what I’m trying to say, Hamilton, is that I am a bad motor scooter, so don’t try to be a hero. I eat murder and poop ideology. I learned to play the theremin in three days. If you fight, you lose. So just chill. I’ll take off your bra so you can join in the conversation.” Julia undid the gag. Hamilton stretched his jaw twice and licked his lips and said, “You are a crazy woman. You left my wife back there. The police are surely after you. Why not just turn yourself in?”
“Into what?” Julia said, and then she went back to the cab and got behind the wheel.
We restructured our throat a bit and spoke to Hamilton in the squeaky baby voice provided by our chosen anatomy. “Hello. Do not worry. All will be well soon enough.”
Hamilton fainted. The RV revved to life again and in a few minutes we were in Hamilton! Ohio, squeezing down the narrow lanes of High Street.
“I’d ask what the plan is,” Alysse said, “but you’d just change it after telling me, right?”
“Right,” said Julia.
“This is so strange. If Davan—he was my boyfriend, until recently—tried to pull something like that off, I’d be very cross with him.” Alysse turned to Julia. “Do you remember me? I’m the one who told you about Fishman. With Davan.”
“Why do you think I punched you in the mouth?” Julia said. “Where do you park an RV around here?”
“You don’t. Well, not outside of RV parks. I don’t think there are any in the town proper. Maybe over by Miami?”
“This is good. Go fetch Hamilton.”
“Why?”
“We need him to carry the baby.” Julia stopped the vehicle in the middle of High Street. Traffic was light, but built up behind the RV instantly. Only Midwestern manners kept the honking and screaming from starting as Julia and Alysse stepped out of the car, followed by Hamilton, with us in his arms.
“Run!” said Julia, and we all did. There isn’t much to run to in Hamilton! as the residences tend to be squat and surrounded by the sort of cheap chain link that transforms human communities into innumerable fiefdoms of barely coherent nuclear families. There is only a brief main drag of low-rise buildings and the omnipresent chain stores: 7-11, McDonald’s, Starbucks, JiffyLube, et cetera, and the occasional stirring building of stone and failed hopes. Banks, local ones that had seen better days, and old remnants of the economic reach of Chicago, long since withered on the vines of the highway system. Outside of the!, there was hardly any life in Hamilton at all. This is because Hamilton is a node of the Simulacrum.
“Hamilton,” we whispered into the bosom of the man named Hamilton, “turn right immediately!” Hamilton obeyed, his legs twisting before his mind even fully understood that he was being addressed, the psychological phenomenon of latah at work once again. “Another, right! Go!” we squeaked in our infant’s voice. He found himself on a side street. “Up those steps!” Onto a loading dock. “Through the door!” And we were everywhere. A giant web, great balloons of spun silk teeming with life. Hamilton nearly dropped us, but it wouldn’t have mattered. A man of indeterminate ethnicity walked through the curtains of webbing and silk, and held open his hands.
“It’s an odd thing,” we said, “when coincidence works in our favor. Hamilton, thank you.” We took the baby and held it. “Every one of us is precious, especially in these tough times. There are so few of us, we cannot cover the world sufficiently well to help everyone through their hard lives. But there are so many of us it is increasingly difficult to keep our existence secret from you.”
“Well,” said Hamilton, his voice weak and ghostly. “I can keep a secret. I can.” He turned away from our man, but couldn’t help but see us scuttling along strands of webbing, spinning, and knitting, no matter where he turned his gaze. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “I apologize. We meant a collective you. Your species. Don’t worry, we’ll not harm you. Indeed, even now we are working to reunite you with your wife. We’ve also sprung your RV down from the impound lot.” We put the baby down in a hammock lattice of web and those of us animating it crawled out, leaving behind a crumpled husk. Hamilton started backwards, his feet demanding egress, and walked into another wall of webbing. He shrieked, flailed, and then doubled over to vomit.
“Oh my,” we said. “That wasn’t quite right for you either, was it? We don’t normally entertain people. Sorry.”
“Oh God, oh God, I need to wake up. I’m still in the trailer, still tied up. That crazy woman with the little boobs and her maniac friend. That’s so much better than this.” He turned to us. “Listen, you can trust me. It’s not like anyone would believe me, even if I told them what was going on here. Even if I led them to this very spot. Uh, not that I know where I even am. Not that I would bring people here, or come back myself with a can of gasoline and a torch.” He sank to his knees, resting on the vomit. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
“Oh no,” we said, very concerned. We moved the face of our man to make us look concerned as well. We were concerned. “We don’t want you to get the wrong idea. We are quite peaceful. We do not kill other intelligent beings.” He stared at us, eyes wide and skin nearly as pale as those eyes. “We are sure you qualify,” we said, as jokes lighten mood. He did chuckle a bit. “We would like to arrange your life so that this no longer upsets you, yes?”
“Yes,” he said, though if he had said “No” we would have simply assumed that he was negating the idea of his life continuing to be upset by us. And we introduced him, and his wife who was in a nearby hospital waiting in the ER for treatment for our bite, into the Simulacrum. It took the form of his RV, filled with high-octane fuel and prepared with new car smell, and a slightly less interesting itinerary for the remainder of his trip.
We’ve said before that coincidence tends to work against us, and indeed it did. Julia knew, or guessed at least, that Hamilton! was an element of the Simulacrum. Her random paths around the Midwest were designed to keep her within a day’s drive of the city, to let her watch our comings and goings, our reactions to her sorties and sallies, just as we have watched hers. While the U.S. is a phenotypically diverse area, it is true enough that in much of the great stretch of flat and farm, and in the shivering cities that depended historically on river rather than ocean traffic, men of indeterminate ethnicity tend to stand out. Simply put, she had lured us out into the open.
“And Hamilton!” she said, turning that last word into a shout though she was out of breath from running, “c’mon. The exclamation point gives it away. Geographers rejected it, the bang doesn’t appear on the maps, but it still stands out in the town itself.”
“Why would the spiders need to signal to themselves?” Alysse asked. They were both catching their breath between two Dumpsters that reeked of chicken fat and cut grass behind a KFC, where a few of us were sitting in the sun, waiting for flies.
Julia shook her head. “It’s not a signal, it’s a tell. They cannot help themselves. They’re not quite human. Nobody on Earth thinks having an exclamation point at the end of a town, especially a Podunk little burg like this one, is a good idea. That’s why there aren’t any others, right?” Julia threw up her hand, and ran her finger through the thick, knotted dreadlocks of her hair. “It’s like this,” she said. “Can you understand your cats and what they want, all the time? You had them since they were kittens, right?”
“How did you know I have cats?”
“I can tell from your haircut and tone of voice. It’s a demographic inevitability.”
“Uh … okay,” Alysse said. “And yeah, I found one as a rescue and she was already pregnant. Then she had kittens. And then over the years they got old and died and whatnot, and I only had Stymie left.”
“And did you?”
“Know what Stymie wanted all the time? No, of course not.”
“Same with them and us. They’re not bad. They’re would-be jailers, but like overprotective mothers. And they’re terrified. They whipped up
a fake little life for me, and fake little lives for—God, who knows?—millions of people. They just can’t tell what we want. They spend their time thinking, ‘Hmm, maybe people want to be happy. Maybe we should play with them, or give them Royal Crown Cola or uncomplicated orgasms, or just leave them alone or pay them close attention.’ There just isn’t a lot of communication between the two species,” Julia says. “Unlike cats, though, they’re frightened of us, not imperious towards us.”
“Frightened of what?”
“The Orkin man, I presume. It’s not like we haven’t wiped out species before. We do it every day, by accident. And one that might be a threat, that is older than us and maybe smarter than us?”
“Yeah. I’m feeling a little genocidal myself.” Alysse leaned heavily against the Dumpster and wiped her forehead with the thick flannel of her shirt. “It’s so strange, even thinking of there being someone else out there, with us.
Even maniacs and dictators, hunter-gatherers, millionaires, child molesters. We all have something in common. We’re human, you know. We shit, we fuck or want to fuck, we smell things. It feels like we’re all in this together, somehow. Maybe we should tell the world.”
“They are the world, or at least a big hunk of it,” Julia said. “We should keep moving. Police station. Nobody pays attention to white women in police stations.”
“Sweet. I know where one is,” said Alysse. “I got drunk here once with my college boyfriend and keyed some SUVs. They kept us for seven hours and tried to make us eat bologna sandwiches, even though we told them four times that we were vegetarian.”
“Fight the power.”
We followed them for the several blocks to the police station and indeed, Julia had become an insightful observer of the human condition. The officer at the front desk did not look up at the pair of women, despite Julia’s ragged appearance and the splotch of blood on one knee. Alysse’s fat lip didn’t get much attention either. Traffic came and went. There were sandwiches delivered and dissected—“Fucking pickles,” the desk officer declared, followed by “Fucking coffee”—and phone calls handled. The scanner was on, and calls crackled across the vestibule. Alysse closely examined the Most Wanted lists hanging on the wall. Julia had her ear on the scanner, tensing when the RV was mentioned and declared impounded. She didn’t jump right up and rush out the door though, as that would have been information that even a semi-somnambulant desk officer would have recalled at a later date. Instead she counted to herself, subvocalizing, lips shifting subtly, to nine hundred. Then she waved Alysse outside.
“Got a cell?” she asked Julia on the steps.
“Sure.”
“Good. I was worried you’d have a paper cup and a single string as part of a movement to raise awareness about alternative forms of communication. Call information to find out where the impound lot is.”
Alysse did, and the address was on the far side of town. “How about a cab?” Julia said. “Do you have cash?”
“Well, I promised myself not to take a car, but I guess I blew that already with the ride this morning. I mean, Julia …” Alysse ran ahead three steps and then turned to face Julia. “I think, I have to tell you, this is just great. It’s amazing. The changes we’ve made. We shut down the Internet! I realized what a jerk Davan was. People are doing things all over the world, and it’s all thanks to you. It’s an honor to be here with you. I feel like Samwise to your Frodo. This is a real adventure.”
“Samwise?” asked Julia.
“He was the heavyset hobbit. Played by Sean Astin? Hello?”
“Let’s keep moving. I’ll pretend by heavyset guy from a movie you mean Don Corleone. That way we’ll both be happy.” Alysse dialed information again and got a taxi dispatched to the corner on which they were standing.
The drive to the impound lot was silent, though the cabbie kept glancing at the pair of banged-up women, nearly ready to say something.
“How much cash do you have?” Julia asked Alysse, sotto voce.
“A couple hundred in each shoe.”
“Good,” she said. Then to the cabbie, Julia said. “Listen, we’re waiting for an RV to come rolling out. We’ll give you a hundred bucks to follow it to wherever it’s going. It won’t go out of town, at least I don’t think so.”
The cabbie leaned over the seat, his elbow resting on it. “And why should I do that? There’s only one reason why anyone ever wants a taxi driver to tail another car?”
“Really? What’s the reason?”
“They want to follow the driver to the home of his mistress, or to the local bordello.” He shrugged. “Two locations, but it’s the same reason, you know?”
“Well, do you think it’s okay to have affairs?” asked Alysse.
“I think it’s good business not to get involved in domestic disputes.”
“Two hundred,” said Julia.
“Done,” said the cabbie.
Alysse turned to Julia, her mouth open. Julia reached up and closed it. The cabbie subvocalized the word “dykes.”
Hamilton, accompanied by a few men of indeterminate ethnicity, arrived at the impound lot, and claimed the RV. We allowed Julia to follow us back to the large warehouse on Millville Avenue, on which our local headquarters hummed and spun with life, and from which we engineered the Simulacrum town.
24
ALYSSE had her cell phone out. “Should I text people?” she asked.
“To what end?”
“I dunno. What’s the plan? Maybe we need people to help us brainstorm?” Alysse said. “A critical mass.”
“That’s spider talk,” Julia said. Then she smiled. “Text who you like. I’m going in. I have no idea what will happen, or what I’ll see. Maybe I just miss the lover they assigned me.”
“A lover?”
“One of them,” Julia said, pointing with her chin toward the warehouse. “Well, dozens of them probably, like that baby. They changed me, you know. They didn’t change be back to the way I was either. I was a stung by a wasp that had altered my personality. The spiders are just parasites of a different sort, and more awful for it because they think they know what we want, while the usual run of parasites just use their hosts as channels for nutrients and whatnot.”
Alysse texted a number she hadn’t tried in weeks: Davan’s. HEY, she typed, M WELL U? “Is that why you don’t have a plan? The changes?”
“Who can say?” Julia said.
Alysse put a hand on Julia’s shoulder. “Well, we can! Let’s figure it out.”
“How do you propose we do that?”
“We can figure out what parts of you are essential,”—she glanced up at Julia’s hair—“like not the dreads, and which are contrived. It’s like psychotherapy, except we have to figure out a way to do it right now.” She pursed her lips.
“Hmm.” Then, “Okay, free association. Um, should we do this right here?”
Julia shrugged. “Good a place as any, eh? If I’m right and this town is just a reality-prison, it hardly matters where in the cell we stand.”
“Fish,” Alysse said.
“Man,” said Julia.
“See, most people would say water,” Alysse said. “Oh, I shouldn’t kibitz.”
“No, you shouldn’t. Give me more.”
“Dread.”
“Lock.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t look at you when I do this,” Alysse said, turning her head.
“Wear.”
“House?” said Julia. “Or did you mean wear like in wearing clothes?”
“You’re not supposed to kibitz either!” She hmphed. “Love.”
“Hate,” said Julia.
“Spiders.”
“Squish.”
“Wasp.”
“Sting.”
“Point,” said Alysse.
“Bang,” said Julia.
“Peace.”
“Shattered, or did you mean piece as in pieces?”
Alysse turned back to Julia. “Would your answer have changed?”
“Not waste, Julia, spend. This is us spending time.” Then she pointed to a VW microvan that had just turned the corner and was cruising down the street. “I got us a ride. Let’s just get out of here. There’s nothing in that warehouse for you but another rewriting of your personality. Let’s go fuck some more shit up.”
Julia grabbed Alysse’s wrist and started dragging her to the gate of the warehouse, which we had left closed but unlocked. Alysse pulled back and kicked at Julia, but the older woman was stronger, sinewy, and determined. Drew Schnell emerged from the van and rushed to Alysse, grabbing her around the waist and pulling her back. Alysse grabbed a thick sausage of Julia’s hair, but Julia twisted her neck and shrieked. She then quickly turned and slammed into Alysse and Drew both—her push met their pull and the trio fell to the floor. Julia scrambled to her feet and Alysse followed, but Drew simply untied his Doc Martens boot while still sitting on the ground, slipped it off his right foot, swung it around his head by the laces and hurled it at Julia. It bounced off her back and knocked her off-balance.
“Jesus!” she said. “What the fuck was that?” She glared at Drew, bent over nearly double, her left hand reaching for her lower back.
“I got another one,” Drew said as he dove for his other boot. Julia snatched up the boot that had just hit her and lobbed it, underhand, at Drew’s face. Alysse rushed at Julia again, but was swept to the floor and had her arm twisted behind her back for the trouble. Drew’s other boot sailed over Julia’s head and through a window into our warehouse.
“Uch,” said Alysse through gritted teeth. “Now you’ve fucking done it. Let me go, God!”
“Nice throw, asshole!” Julia shouted at Drew, who was finally picking himself up. She twisted Alysse’s arm even further, into a full hammerlock. “Any closer, and I’ll break her arm.”
Drew walked calmly toward Julia. “Go ahead. It’ll heal.” Alysse squirmed, but Julia grabbed a fistful of her hair as well and said to Drew, “Will her fucking face heal too if I smash it against the concrete?”