Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “Guess you saw the boys.”

  Paul scoffed, paced beside the window that looked out upon the birthing fields below. “Lab coats? Yeah, I saw them. Stuck out like an ingrown toenail. Try harder next time.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Fuck you. Bring her back.”

  “You know I—”

  “Bring her back!” Alina and the children flinched at his voice. The bear’s smile faltered. “You expect me to work with these?” He indicated the silent onlookers.

  “Hope’s dead. Her code’s lost.” Jud shrugged. “Sorry.”

  A breath and he was over the god. Lifted. Strangled. She grimaced, her face turning black from her suffocation. Paul walked her to the window, slammed her against the frame. A slizzle and his blades leapt forward, opening her chin to pubis, through flesh and bone.

  He tore the silver ball from her heart and threw the corpse through the window. Glassish shards fell miles below to babies, babies.

  Screams: Alina and the children.

  He squeezed the marble in his right hand. It started to blacken.

  “Find a way to bring her back.”

  He tossed the marble to the chaise and stormed from the room.

  Al did her best to comfort the sobbing girls. Honeybear frowned to himself.

  The thick gurgle and flicker of silver, flesh, blood. The Judith ME sculpted a new body over the marble. Flash, snap to grid: Jud stretched and sat up.

  “He’s broken.”

  that savage transition back to the merge, the tickle and strain, dull beating behind my eyes, the pins and needles stippling up the spine and neck, around my head to settle at my temples, and West was there, all shoves and fists, beating me to the pavement, a knee on my chest: I felt ribs crack.

  “Don’t you ever fucking do that again.” He got off me, extended a hand. I accepted and he pulled me up.

  I wheezed through blood. “But—”

  A swift crack across my face. Index finger extended. “Don’t do that again. I don’t care. I miss her, too. But it’s not Jud’s fault, not Alina’s. Not my daughters’.” He reached and wiped blood into the front of my shirt. “I loved her, too.”

  We stood in a silence. The merge had flattened for the moment: one existence, no fragments or echoes. I knew it had been raining; the sidewalks reflected the emerging moonlight.

  Jingle. Jangle.

  I pulled West into the alley beside Cafe Bellona. I knew the door had opened and was now lazily swinging shut. She laughed, and four feet tapped paths past our hiding spot.

  West’s eyes narrowed. He looked from the couple to me: lock. He’d known them.

  “Welcome to the merge.” I felt my whisper had been too loud, but they didn’t seem to notice us.

  “Simon and Maggie?”

  “Yeah.” I looked out from the alley. They were much too focused on each other to notice me. “Let’s get out—”

  “Quiet.” He pulled me back. “Listen.”

  Another set of footsteps. A different sort of sound.

  I felt it: that lance, that extraction, the energization of the metal now coursing through my blood, the place where my heart had once been, and I knew that Maire was there, somewhere.

  “Close your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Shut ‘em. You’re glowing.”

  I shut my eyes and heard her draw closer to us. The footsteps stopped at the alley entrance, just a pause, but pause enough that I sensed West’s heart beat faster, knew he wanted to inhale, but like me, he’d retreated to silence.

  She started walking again. When she’d passed, I opened my eyes.

  “Let’s go.”

  the theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified, the theory that the self is the only reality: solipsism.

  He was solipsistic. He knew rejection, and that knowledge forced him within. That knowledge forced him apart.

  She knew this because he knew this.

  And children, and werewolves, and piano, and cheese. She’d never heard music. She’d never learn to sing, to dance. She’d never smell lilacs or taste Pabst Blue Ribbon. These things were good.

  She’d managed to distract the girls from Paul’s break with a runtime environment resembling a beauty school dropout’s bedroom. There were giggles. The twins played with rouge. The blush brush tickled Alina’s cheek; she attacked them with bright-red lipstick, drew a smiley face on Phire’s forehead, a moustache above Jade’s mouth.

  Confident that they were engaged enough in the trappings of teenybopperhood to relent the gosling imprinting with which they’d taken to her, she slipped deep into the Judith ME.

  The source of that plague, that collective of shadow and doubt: she thought through the entry guardians and walked without footsteps into Paul’s refuge. She wasn’t good with maths, but she knew intuitions and rejections. The silver pool chamber was colder than she’d expected; her breath danced, and each painful inhalation, each wheezed exhalation echoed, bounced, and in return to her ears, heightened the loneliness of that place.

  Reaching into, out and through: she knew their senses.

  The silver should have killed her, lapping at the edge of the pool, exposed as she was, but she’d always known from that first breath after virgin birth that she wasn’t like the others. She wasn’t a fragile construct of flesh wrapped around bone; she was, and just was.

  He’d made her to precision specifications, a fine silver blade hidden within a despised and uncertain framework.

  Alina leaned over the pool’s edge, saw her shadowed face in near-perfect reflection, her awkward long neck drawing the eyes down to prominent collarbones and pendulum breasts, nipples erect from the chill and something deeper, darker, pointing parallel to the silver’s surface, and she cupped small hands (long, lithe fingers) and plunged in, retrieving, and she drank deeply of that metal, that mercurial fire, the burning like ice, carving through teeth, tongue and gums, into and down her throat, gasping, coughing, a flare and seizure of cold

  though i know we be but dust

  and she rolled into that mirror, let the metal pour into her, a frigid embrace, an inclusion and wrapping, and in that metal horror, she felt him, knew him, surrendered to that silver and that man, because that’s all he was: silver, and as the surface hardened above her, fine crystalline suffocation, she screamed without sound, her fingers plunged into her, frantic and yearning, her liquid, his liquid, all silver, all silver and

  It wasn’t love, but it was something as painful.

  When she was done, satiated, the surface released with crackle and splintering. She stood from the pool, let the rivulets of silver, of him, of loss and ruin retreat from her entries. She wrung the metal from her hair, for once a semblance of control, spiraled curls then escaping and drying, frizzing, accusing outward.

  “You’d think,” Jud half-whispered from the edge, “he’d have told me about you.”

  Alina jumped at the voice.

  Snap and a towel. Jud flickered, threw the towel to Alina. “Dry off.”

  “How can you—”

  “The real question, I suppose, is how can you? It’s simple for me. Disposable body. ME’s cycling me through about sixty thousand Juds a second. That silver’s a bitch to withstand. But you’re different. You’re built from him.”

  Alina stepped out of the pool and stood on the edge. The towel hung unused at her side. The silver dried by itself.

  “Mr. Hughes is full of surprises.” Jud’s fingertip traced from Alina’s bottom lip down over the outcrop of chin, the valley of throat, between the fraternal twin peaks of her breasts, the gentle swell of her belly, and farther down to settle between and within the vegetative growth on her cleft. Settle and stammer, caress, drape, rupture, rend, rive. Split, cleave. Jud removed her finger, shining with silver and cum, hungrily licked it. “And so, it seems, are you.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Shhh…” Jud put her finger to Alina’s lips, cut off her speech. The mouth opene
d, tasted. “We can use this.” A touch without touch: we can use this.

  They left the silver pool.

  those tenuous lines of commonality, and West wished that he was wrapped in a giant robot, a naval destroyer, one of the deep-black hatchets a different West had once used to carve apart the space between times and stars.

  West thought Paul was having fun with it, but the concept of fun in that moment scared him more than the woman, the woman, the man, the man. He felt like he was intruding at a dance, the kid in the leg cast sitting on the sidelines watching the jocks grope his secret crush, plotting revenge, a bad eighties slasher film.

  A controlled descent into madness: West felt his smile; spiral, spiral, uncontrolled, madness.

  That city. That fucking city. Seattle. Seattle by moonlight. Couldn’t Paul see that it wasn’t real? A Seattle like that had never, could never have existed. His romanticized vision of a city he’d never see, a purposeful avoidance regardless of opportunity or adolescent dreams of visiting Kurt’s bridge, something in the way and that something was her, dead now to everything outside of the Merge, that spectrum of broken tomorrows, and it was like he wanted that pain, wanted to go into that shop and steal just a strand of blonde, a lip print from coffee cup, steal anything as proof that he’d not dreamt that life (he’d neither yet nor ever would live that), but proof? What proof could that place give them?

  He hunted her.

  From the cafe down dark streets, grunge lilting from afterhours bars; the streets were too dead, a perfect moment for her, but too dead: unnatural, as if the buildings lining each avenue barely contained a dream of life, as if the avenues themselves drew them into the center of the maze, and West knew Paul felt it, that merging, that convergence around Delta, around the witch Maire, her shadow form dancing between streetlights and footsteps: they followed the two (three).

  Hesse and Deus. They were a cute couple, those ghosts. Maggie Flynn and Simon Hayes traced the edge of the city’s knife; by moonlight: a fog lifts as the desire and thirst of a madwoman descends.

  Mr. Hayes, I—

  Call me Simon.

  That would have been her ultimate victory, to take them from the Enemy line. Paul had been proud of those characters, fucking around with their names until he got them just right in the tenth or so version of the book, that first book, nothing so presumptuous or gaudy as “Hunter” or the troublesome “Lilith.” Read into that what you will, but Paul liked them, liked their names. Simple names.

  Maire made her mistake.

  As the young couple walked innocently down East Roy, 714 (he knew the subtraction of four, the exact and precise number, but because of concern, lost love or stalking, but because he was thorough, solipsistic, self-involved and self-aware to a fatal flaw, and if we’re taking the story there, take it there, a reminder of loves wasted and loss, a ruin of a building now, if a building could signify a loss, [he never knew: bricks of what color, consistency, texture? some research is beyond safety and the ability of reuptake inhibitors to allay that desire]), Maire struck out, or tried, but his hand met her fist, and she spun to him.

  It should have killed him, that touch; it didn’t.

  And the city wiped away, a smooth transition to the non-space he projected. West was there; the couple wasn’t. Paul had saved them from Maire and brought West along for the ride. Maybe he needed a witness.

  The horror of him, the astounding horror of him: becoming silver. West had first seen it on the ice, then in the pool, now in a muted substrata of the dead city. He could taste it, smell it, hear its screams; Paul stood before her, her small fist grasped easily in his hand. His face was empty. Eyes gray, then silver, then

  And he’d mastered the laws of metaphysics and quantum maths, bent sciences and witching sight; he’d become more of her now than she could ever be. It was everything, everywhere: the crush of his mind as he grasped all probability, sent time and space down channels of non-exist that only he could envision. He’d trapped her, that sometimes child, that now-woman with the raven swathes. She snarled and hissed as she tried to tear her hand from his grip.

  Simon and Maggie were safe. Gone. Maybe he’d erased them.

  “You,” he whispered, and it was like tears, “never were.”

  there’s a place in france where the naked ladies dance

  it was a beautiful hand

  the dust was thick…nothing had been touched since she left.

  rupture

  rend, rive, split.” Kisses grew frantic. “Cleave.” She pushed Alina down to her chaise.

  Below, she was born again, a million new Judiths, a million short-term possibilities.

  “Is this…”

  “Shhh…” Lips drag. “It’s perfect.”

  so textural, so sensual. inviting, but distant, the strong contrast of the white of the panties, human-made, human-patterned, to the natural bristly texture and dun color of the flowers, implied scent: the queen anne’s lace to the cotton to the gentle musk of skin

  A tickle of something; she ignored it in favor of the tingle of fingers around and into and within.

  Trapped for so long: god. Not that she minded the ancient housed inside of her, now one with every fiber, now one with every bioelectrical impulse, every desire; hers was a life shared with forevers. She remembered her first meetings with god fondly; she’d been chosen as a Medium at a young age, raised among her flux siblings in generation chambers beneath One’s surface, miles beneath, those first meetings with gentler deities: angels and saints forced into the slumbers in the time between machine wars, and that last time, the time she became one, only one with god through that tainted host body, the instant of realization, the burning of merging, merging: omniscience. Omnipotence. Enveloping, encasement, purge. The dark night of silvered space until rescue: Hannon.

  Another book: another line.

  To be resurrected: the boy author, in his subconscious collision of realities, his unknowing manipulation of probable realities, brought her from the deep of non: JudithGod, even before Benton and West were sent in to retrieve him. What pathways of thought, dream, and fear constructed this? What innate and incomprehensible combat of the soul had taken place to allow the forging of broken tomorrows from the space and times between bound paper?

  Surprises, more and more: his immunity, his immaculate conception of the silver-proof Alina. Banana Tits could be her vehicle.

  Judith’s was the Mind-Essence; she forced universes of analysis into motion. Galactic networks of circuits, planet-sized nano-pathways of bent energetics: a whim, a thought, and it was done, bursts of zeros and ones carved from continental shelves, zero, one, and the spectrum of realities contained between: her mind was forever, and the answer, not a city, a scent, a hair pulled from teeth, was silver, silver, and had always been silver, that ocean of machines, that alien viral agent, that scourge: an answer.

  Alina had been born without the sin of risk.

  It was extortion, excision, removal, usage. Sticky, honey-sweet, like blades, that union, her host, her hostess, as she’d been for too long, as take it from me, from me she’d been forevers. Jud seized at those cycling selves, new bodies and souls (or the precipitous lack thereof) flickering through the spacetime she grasped. That quickening, that shuddering as their bodies entwined; she felt it: silver, reaching, tearing from flesh to flesh. Alina above her, spread, outstretched, tissues stretched, her face: those arched eyebrows could have signaled pain, ecstasy, and they did, her mouth chewing on nothing but air, heated from their exchange. Her breath smelled of Judith.

  Bleeding, gushing, neither red nor clear nor viscous: silver, coaxed and urged from her, across the bridge between skins, from every pore, every entry; it crawled into and through Judith, and it was fire, ice, a swift smack on the ass, a kick to the throat, a feather across nipple, and it was silver, tomorrow, everything, agony.

  They became one.

  Maire laughed.

  “Never was?” She slapped her free hand down upon Paul’s, cru
shed. “Never was?” Her face morphed between grin and grimace. A hiss escaped between clenched teeth as her grip forced the author to his knees. They could have been the same age. Weren’t. West heard the crackle and splinter of metacarpal, phalanx. “I’ve always been.”

  A flash and he’d swept her legs from beneath her, his hand still locked in an improbable vice. Maire was on the ground; he straddled her from above, his free hand flickering: silver: his eyes now burned. Hers matched his: free hand and eyes.

  Strength he’d never suspected: she threw him off, over. He rolled, snapped up to a crouch. She matched his ready stance.

  So it would be combat between them.

  And it bent, everything, and it was beautiful for a moment, that bend. It wasn’t Seattle, had never been Seattle; the sky was gauze, and above it, something swam, that something black and writhing.

  She’d summoned the Enemy.

  entry: transgression function: noun definition: violation synonyms: breach, contravention, crime, defiance, disobedience, encroachment, erring, error, fault, infraction, infringement, iniquity, lapse, misbehavior, misdeed, misdemeanor, offense, overstepping, sin, slip, trespass, vice, wrong, wrongdoing concept: error

  Buffer Overrun:

  An attack in which a malicious user exploits an unchecked buffer in a program and overwrites the program code with their own data. If the program code is overwritten with new executable code, the effect is to change the program’s operation as dictated by the attacker. If overwritten with other data, the likely effect is to cause the program to

  crash cart in here!”

  “Hold on. Just fucking hold on!”

  He heard, tasted the panic, felt the array of warming steel probes, that copper aftertaste, the scent of smoke displaced somewhere in front of his eyes, the sensation of warm water, warm red water. His fingertips sparked, he thought. He thought, but metal intrusions forced new pathways, new avenues of

  and there was the hitching of chest, bubbling of what he assumed was blood from beneath a facemask: citrus, giggle, two or four tears escaped. Fists slammed; ribs broke, and he was