Broken: A Plague Journal

by Paul Hughes

  His hand went to his throat, found it intact. Confusions blossomed.

  He heard movement from the back room. Something falling, something dragged. A female grunt of a nameless emotion.

  The windows shivered with the sudden onset of rain.

  An overturned cylinder of red plastic stir sticks. An eared copy of Demian, the pages crisp and cracking. A single black leather glove, glittering with something beautiful and heartbreaking.

  Richter walked slowly to the back of the shop, wondered at his boots, the clothing from so far ago. He remembered a desert and the Styx. A spire. New memories dislodge. Timesweep. His jaw worked over new bends in history. He felt his neck again; it was whole. He walked through coffee grounds and crumbled ceramic, the green, furry remnants of pastry. He reached the door to the back room and jumped at a crash of something heavy and fragile.

  The doorknob was cold. Its turn was rusted and audible. Hinges cracked ancient resistance, and the door pushed away from him.

  Benton kneeled on the floor, flopping thick manila file folders from a cardboard box.

  She looked up at his gasp and the quick backward retreat of his boots. “James?” A folder fell from her grasp, spilling an inch of photographs, postcards, love letters to the linoleum.

  “Stay away from me.” His hands shifted to silver.

  She stood. “James? How did you—”

  “Stay back!” His eyes flared white.

  Benton halted her advance.

  “You touch me again, I’ll fucking kill you.” The silver crawled up Richter’s arms, consumed his form, leaving him a shadow, an implication.

  Realizations slammed into place deep in the works of Benton’s mind. “James—It wasn’t me.” She tested a step toward him. “I wouldn’t—”

  He lunged forward and lashed out with both hands, which passed ineffectually through the image of her. She bent toward his shimmer where he touched her, but her projection swam back into a solid, sparkling with her own shift. His fingertips dragged a merge out with that contact. New truths metastasized across lines of resistance.

  “It wasn’t me, baby. Please... Believe me.”

  The wind screamed through the collapsing city.

  Her slurp was a cute annoyance. She was a loud eater. She smacked her lips. He couldn’t remember ever having heard her chew gum, but he could forgive the cracking he suspected she would have allowed herself to ignore. Every brilliant mind controls an eccentric body, a collection of actions that set it apart.

  She wiped aside a windrow of dust and put the teacup down on a laminated menu used as a coaster. “You were right.”

  His eyes asked.

  “The signals were getting through, not bouncing back. Someone was listening, out there. They talked back.”

  He remembered an expensive restaurant lifetimes ago, a conversation broken off because of an unexpected flight to Wyoming.

  “Who?”

  “Maire. The Alpha Centauri system. Just one of infinite possibilities. The first to respond, because of the relative proximity.”

  “I don’t—”

  “We traded signals for thousands of years, neither civilization understanding that someone was listening. Someone was out there. And when the Sol system finally died, when Michael Balfour’s probe finally reached Proxima Centauri, the aliens there—people with two hearts, black blood, but people—they considered it an act of war. Things bend out there in the empty spaces between galaxies. Things splinter into spectrums of possibility. Time thins out and doesn’t mean much.”

  Richter broadcast his lack of understanding with a long draw of coffee.

  “Life isn’t a straight line. This time, Maire was there to catch you. Another time, Michael pulled you out, and you led the resistance against the Enemy. Another, Maire’s forces got to Earth before Michael ever had a chance to build the probe. Sometimes life curves out and back again, intersecting places it’s already been. This place—this ridiculous coffee shop dream—it’s the place where everything collapses. It’s the Delta merge, the place where the two most probable timelines collide. It’s the place where a war between two solar systems begins and ends.”

  “What does that make Maire?” Richter couldn’t look at Benton’s eyes. “Or us?”

  “She’s the eraser at the other end of the pencil. The backspace key. The counterpoint to everything the author’s written into existence. She’s the unraveling. Revenge. And us? We’re a part of her, now. She’s torn us from him, and she’ll use everything we know to win her war against Paul.”

  He opened one of the folders on the table. There was a photograph of the author in London. A postcard shaped like a sea monster. A tiny slip of paper on which a left hand had written a three-word note.

  “There’s boxes of this stuff stored here. Maire’s built quite a collection. She’s pulling things from him, storing them away in this construct, using each innocent little memory to destroy him. The whole back room, shelves and stacks. She’s breaking him down.”

  “And you’re going through it all, trying to find something to help him?”

  “Trying. Not much luck. It’s a mess.”

  “Why help him?”

  She frowned at the question.

  Richter shook his head. “If he’s written these horrible futures into existence, if he’s the cause of these wars, why help him fight Maire?”

  Her fingertips traced over fading photographs, crumbling paper. She pulled a line of poetry from a notebook page, drew a memory of a skin’s texture and taste from a passport photo. “He made this. All of this. Even Maire. Us. Without him, we never would have existed. Maybe I feel an obligation to help the person who gave me life.”

  “You really want to help him?”

  Hope nodded her resolve.

  Richter reached into his pocket and placed something on the tabletop. She saw small paper edges through the cage of his fingers.

  “If this is the place where it all comes together, if the coffee shop is the place Maire hides the pieces of him,” Richter lifted his hand, revealing a colorful book of matches, “then maybe it’s time we end this.”

  She took the matches, popped the cover open. There was a number, a cartoon face. Pigtails. She wondered where James had gotten the matches, but it didn’t matter. The Cafe Bellona was a focal point. Nothing had a satisfactory explanation. Nothing needed one. Sometimes life collapses into distinct moments of chance. Sometimes life, or the digital approximation thereof, is a spectrum of gray.

  She picked up a photograph, let her thumb trace the eroding surface. He looked happy. Whole. A depiction of a time and place he’d never live now.

  She took Richter’s hand. Her face bent into a quiet attempt at a smile, but it only squeezed wetness across the colorless hemispheres of her eyes.

  She’d been trapped so long here, searching for an answer to the calculus, the silver concretion savaging the author. She’d tried to prevent Maire from using her against Paul, but exiled to the construct, she’d been powerless, deconstructed. A silver marble held in a child’s hand.

  Hope tore a match from the book. Her third strike resulted in flame. She slowly, gently singed the edge of the manila folder on the table. Outside, the wind grew louder. A building collapsed. The sky tasted like ash.

  She fed a postcard into the fire. The ground shook below them.

  Richter pushed a note into the curls of flame. One of the front windows splintered.

  “The whole back room?”

  “And the basement. Stacks of boxes.” She held the burning edge of a photograph. The author’s face blistered and fell away.

  Richter counted twenty-seven matches.

  “Are you okay?” Alina’s voice echoed out into the command chamber. She adjusted the drape of the interface web, reached out to see for herself how he was doing, but felt nothing. There was none of the consciousness lockstep that interfacing with Sam had provided. Paul was wrapped in layers of silver.

  The vessel shifted, walls realigning, nac
elles stretching out, clawing. They fell.

  Concern itched to life behind her eyes. “Paul? Talk to me.”

  Somewhere below them, rapidly approaching, was a small blue planet and the exile city and Maire.

  i’m

  “Paul?”

  so many

  She could feel him trying to contain the silver, the trillions of souls inserted not gently into his core.

  too many

  “Hold on, Paul Hughes. Almost

  there it is.” Reynald fingered sweat from his forehead. The targeting laser arced over the author’s skull. Reynald hesitated, looked up at Hank.

  “Go for it.”

  He triggered. A stark lance of white light

  rocked the superstructure as a shard of silver tore from his caudal fin. Alina swung in the interface web, burying panic, unable to keep her hearts from racing. “Hold on, baby. Just

  come and get me.” Maire grinned, leapt into the air as the city shattered beneath her, the planet imploding, great plates of continent glowing with ancient silver light. She could feel him, the line collapsing above her, countless futures dying in his wake. Every particle of her glinted with the shift, with the ocean of machines that defined her.

  She could see him, the terrifying shiver of his form, as it tore through the fabric of that time and plummeted into the merge. Her claws cut into her fists in anticipation, spilling torrents of black blood and mercury into the sky. She could feel the god buried somewhere in

  Alina saw through his blurred, dying eyes, the nightmare below them, the monster that was Maire, looking up and through, a smile on her face, her Enemy army surging below, an armada of them careening around the planet toward Paul. He shook, and she didn’t know how to stop him. Didn’t know the plan. He was silent. Alina sobbed, helpless.

  Richter lit every match in the book, let the flame grow. Hope wrapped her arms around him. He kissed her forehead, finally home.

  Was that an orgasm? I’ll be the old man with cats. With loves.

  This is where the fish lives. We did the 69. How do you catch a unique rabbit?

  Kentucky City. Cover my feet. Horses don’t get flu shots.

  Paul Hughes, come here?

  He dropped the fire into the tinder and

  “Paul!” Alina surged in the silver umbilicals. “Tell me what to do!” She struggled in the unresponsive interface gauntlets.

  The planetship that he was fell, uncontrolled, into the atmosphere. Maire’s army rose to meet the threat, to cut into that silver flesh, to extract the guts of it, the pattern cache of the remnants of a species.

  alina? His voice was forever away.

  Head shaking, hearts breaking, two tiny hands pulling against silent systems, the witch below. “What?”

  i love you.

  And his presence cut a deeper distance as the umbilicals withdrew, the uplink severed, and he jettisoned his lifeboat into the sky, Alina and the pattern cache at its center, thrown savagely away from him. Where the hidden ship had rested, broken silver fingers snapped and fell away. He fell without control or direction into Maire and her horde.

  Alina screamed as she felt him fall away.

  I’m losing

  her, he thought as he put the truck into reverse, her image burned into his arc of vision as he checked his mirrors and pulled out onto the street. He smiled and waved, his right hand hesitating in that wave a little too long before retreating to the shift forward.

  Are you leaving?

  He felt his smile breaking as he pulled away, blinked through something overwhelming as he looked into his rearview. She was wearing his shirt and his pajama pants. She was wearing a smile all her own, and as he accelerated into the curves and down the hills, he catalogued the memory of her, everything, holding tightly to everything, because somewhere he knew that he’d never get that shirt back. She’d had the pants since that first night, making them more hers now than his. So ridiculously big on her, lost in fabric, accelerating into her curves and he remembered the landscape of her, the scent of her hair, that morning frizz and the sleep in her upturned eyes. He let the radio sleep. Drove past the field of tiny horses. Horses don’t get flu shots. All the stupid fights they’d fought over nothing, all the disagreements over things that didn’t matter; these are the edges that define loss. These are the frantic thoughts before the fall: please stay, please forgive me, please let me hold on to you, because you’ve become integral.

  Left hollow and without purpose, these are the edges that define broken tomorrows, all the futures we’ll never live, all the mornings we’ll wake alone, hoping the pillow isn’t a pillow, that the weight of her will be the incentive for waking, the dim angles of sunshine through a rusted ghetto window, the sound of the morning world outside, chill air stippling gooseflesh across arms and chest, we will remember those senses only so long, we will replace and forget, and each loss will take a little more of us with it.

  He was leaving, and she slept on his shoulder. Speeding across the nighttime country on the wrong side of the road, running through concourses weighed down by a lifetime’s collection of things; I need this to remember, I need evidence that I was ever here at all. She shifted against his arm, dug deeper into the overhang of his chin, spiraled hairs popping up to tickle his nose, and he inhaled, because this is life, such contact, and without it, he is lost. A coffee break in a Starbucks; he’s never been in a Starbucks except for with her. The coffee burned his tongue, but not badly enough so he can’t remember her taste hours later on the plane over plains of snow, a nearly empty plane, enough leg room in his own aisle to take off his cowboy boots, to pull out his wallet, the photograph from it, and the inscription that breaks his heart, he is so happy.

  And sitting by the water in another’s territory, the attacks of the morning forgotten or at least unspoken, cutting cheese with a key, he’d seen her upset and needing to run, and he’d driven her to the land’s edge, because they both needed it, the sun burning their skins. He’d rolled up his sleeves, and the slough of that exposure had outlasted them. Looking out across the water, he wondered which of his lives was the dream. The wind brought her scent to him, the sand between his toes and the square cleave of the rocks grounding him to that place. Spider webs between the rocks, Zinger wrappers he collected and took home. Maybe the sandwiches got too warm.

  And walking down the streets of her, that tiny hand lost in his. The streets that defined her, the cobbles of places far from him, the avenues she’d walked a lifetime and he’d followed a year. Sitting on a rock, hiding a cigarette from spying armies, he hated the way she grabbed his ass and loved it. Public. Displays. Her hand held him to that place and time, and he remembered her whispers. Wondered if it was real. Hoped he’d finally paid off the wages of a lifetime, and that finally he’d found her. He’d seen her eyes a thousand times before, felt her heartbeat in other cities and beneath other cages of bone, slowly edged toward that soul we search for all our lives, the one that so reflects us that we can’t help but die a little each day after it leaves. Something fuses. Something breaks. We’re left with pieces missing.

  And the lifetimes we assemble into madness, the fragments of the departed we write into the days. He thought of Alina and knew that wasn’t her name at all, that the scrawl of their love couldn’t begin to emulate reality, that not even the Jud god inside of her or the Maire witch outside could approximate the feeling generated by staring across an antiques store in Lewes, making sure she’s not watching, stealthily jogging to the cashier to purchase a teacup with feet, wrapped into the football pages, secreted away in a drab green ruck, returning to the rows before she noticed, hands tracing over the dust of centuries, settling on misshapen birds that have vented the steam from a thousand meat pies, over photographs of people dead now, crumbling, the photographs and the people, from times before we were born. That we run to train stations and weave through the schoolchildren, our hands held, collapsing finally into seats jangling with our change and the day’s treasure, tiny old wom
en sitting opposite, their accents thick and their skin thin like paper, speaking to each other but watching the two American kids pull out a bottle of water, a Yorkie bar, splitting it to share before dinner, curling together on the plastic bench, a head of curly hair, glasses, smiling eyes closed coming gently to rest under a stubbled chin, which lowers to rest, a tickled nose, a heart beating fast, knowing that this is heaven; this is all he needs.

  Are you leaving?

  Alina wretched as she felt herself break apart, the tangle of interface web sparking. Her vision doubled, trebled as she fell to the floor of the chamber, her form cleaving, new limbs flailing from the split of her form. Static and agony. Jud crackled to solidity and slumped from Alina, a glistening mess of wet silver and dried blood, chest grating over bitter air, hair dripping with something black and ancient.

  “Get up,” she growled over loose vocal cords, her tongues reaching for better words. She rocked with the exhaustion of being whole again.

  Alina’s hands splayed over a shattered cardiac shield. There were lifetimes of her missing. Two lines of tear fought through the slick of nervous sweat to bead out onto the floor.

  “Get up.” Judith grasped her hands and seesawed her to standing. The severed souls supported each other’s stance. “Where’s the cache?”

  Alina was looking past Jud, who turned to meet the direction of her desperate gaze. The glass, cracked and fading, showed

  Maire’s army a whirlwind around her, the nightmare cacophony of the damned, the merged silver purpose. Paul could hear them, the collection of an eternity of broken tomorrows, the aggregate fury of the lost.

  Maire paused in her flight, her claws a brilliant silver, garish strands of the machine ocean pouring from her eyes in a disconcerting ruin of a mask. Paul could hear her war cry spilling from between those horrible shimmering fangs. She was older than he’d ever written her, thick strands of white contrasting the black, dancing in the winds.