by Hodge, Brian
She kicked, catching him in the jaw with her knee, and he felt her slipping out of his grasp. But he was not going to fail. He pushed as he let her go, and she stumbled backwards even as he collapsed on to the floor, landed on his back, limbs a flurry of motion moving so quickly his bones felt like jelly.
Oria screamed. The antenna, raised in a curving arc as it pulled itself through the shutters, protruded through her chest. The point dripped with blood. Her gaze fixed on him as her eyes opened wide, as if letting in the true monster she had, at last, discovered.
She wasn’t Naja, nor one of his girls. She was a dream he couldn’t have. A thing who’d tried to turn him into what had killed his family. A monster.
The antenna pulled itself free from her as it escaped through the window. She slumped to the floor. Stopped breathing. Her eyes remained opened, her lips parted with one last word trapped between them.
Slowly, the seizure subsided. He stopped laughing. The tiny candle flame had caught on to a sheet, and smoke was filling the bedroom. Marican reclaimed his body, and his first act was to toss Oria’s corpse out the window. He almost followed her down. Instead, he dragged the sheet and threw it out, as well. It flew down in a fiery arc, blazing wings spreading.
He’d made it to the foot of the bed when two knocks on the door made him stop. He took a deep breath, shouted, “I’m here. I’m fine. Thanks.”
The knocks came again. He lurched to the door, braced himself against it.
Another pair of knocks answered the noise he’d made.
“She’s gone,” he said. “She won’t be coming back.”
Knock.
“Ticks on the dog,” he whispered.
Knock.
“It’s all gone.”
Marican didn’t bother answering the third single knock that followed. He went back to bed and surrendered to his drained body.
He woke up in the morning to a dream slipping from his awareness. The picture on the dresser distracted him, and the dream escaped. A breeze blew through the open window. The talking drums spoke about the sky opening, again.
He bowed to a moment of dislocation. The window, he usually closed it. The names to the faces in the picture eluded him, like the night’s dreams. He clutched at the mattress, still damp from night fits. An odd smell permeated the room, for an instant overwhelming even the stench of khli.
Naja.
He snatched the name from out of the buzzing in his head and held on to it.
Camille and Cara. How could he forget?
He sat on the edge of the bed for a while, collecting his thoughts. He’d been on assignment. A missing man. There’d been an orphan girl involved. Mothers and sons, perhaps. Not the usual case.
He shook his head. He must have caught something, straying into new territories in pursuit of the truth. He’d been out from work for days. A quick survey of his body revealed no lesions or other signs of disease. The big mirror was gone. That was odd. But a careful fingertip tracing of his face confirmed his skin was intact, unblemished. Whatever he’d caught had passed through him. He’d still need to clear the Bureau of Clinical Services.
He washed. Discovered some of his clothes were missing, as well as a small portion of his savings. But here was enough fresh laundry at the door to get him to work. He’d have to go to the Market.
He went to the Ministry thinking of the case report he’d have to write. An orphan gang appeared among the ruins at the edge of the plaza as he walked by the central fountain. The other workers ignored them. The guards at the door pointed and laughed.
He entered the Ministry, cold and empty.
He’d warmed up a bowl of khli drawn from the old container and prepared his tea before sitting at his desk. Counting the pellets left in the bowl, he discovered he’d been paid for all the days he hadn’t come in.
He’d only swallowed a spoonful of breakfast before noticing the fresh papers topping his work pile.
A memo of thanks from Bureau of Boundaries Chief, which did not mention the reason for his gratitude.
A notice of his promotion to Chief for the Bureau of Investigations.
An approved requisition for staff assignments from Security to his Bureau.
Cari and Camille, two lost innocents. Naja, the woman of his dreams. There was no announcement concerning their status, no folders detailing the reasons why they were not in this world, with him.
Still, he had his monsters. And the missing. What would he do without them, what would he do if they vanished, and all the missing returned?
Give up fear, or find something else to be afraid of.
Everyone dealt with fear in their own way.
He’d never voted for change, always for security. He always would.
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Afterword:
The Fear Puppet
The character came first in this one. A man, a survivor, captured in a reporter’s post-conquest Baghdad coverage about the consequences of war. It seems the guy would giggle and laugh uncontrollably every time he heard a loud noise, an echo of bombs going off around him as the city was being attacked. Of course, his friends found his trauma-induced reaction highly amusing and they laughed right along with him. The image of man’s helpless reaction, in the ruins surrounded by friends, wouldn’t let go for many years. He needed a story.
Apocalypse seemed like a natural foundation for his story. Of course, it couldn’t be anything natural, or even made-made. It had to be bigger than bombs. Strange, and alien. Beyond understanding, like so much of what humanity does to itself. For that, I went to Lovecraft, who occupies, for better or for worse, essential real estate in field of writing about darkness. It’s difficult to write about the dark without eventually touching on our place in the universe and experiencing the emotion of dread in the face of insignificance, irrelevance, meaninglessness. The violence I imagined the victim had faced felt vast and impersonal, alien in its source. But I didn’t need the mythos, just the shadows and the odd motion of clouds, all that was left after the apocalypse of some kind of terrible, universal transgression.
The landscape that came to mind belonged to post-war Europe, to the Third Man and Harry Lime’s Vienna, Berlin Express and Jacques Tourneur’s Frankfurt and Berlin, and the suspect clown scrambling through their ruins. A crumbling landscape where social structures have collapsed, the economy is personal and primal, and what survives has been corrupted and is dying or, worse, transforming into something else.
Finally, I wanted to show a culture struggling to survive, a reflection of the character, a fading society hanging on to the old world, enforcing irrelevant rules and structures as reality slowly shifts, slips and slides all around it. Kafka meets Lovecraft. Welcome to the after party for the Apocalypse.
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About the Authors
BRIAN HODGE is one of those people who always has to be making something. So far, he’s made 10 novels, and is working on three more, as well as 120 shorter works and 5 full-length collections. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was ranked by critic Stanley Wiater among the 113 best books of modern horror.
He lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are useless against the squirrels.
Connect through his web site: www.brianhodge.net
Facebook: www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter
Gerard Houarner works by day as what could be described in layman’s terms as Arkham’s Recreation and Recovery Director. He’s had over 280 horror, fantasy, and science fiction stories published in the last 40 years, with some assembled in 6 collections, and 67 receiving Honorable Mentions in various St. Martin’s Press/Night Shade Year’s Best anthologies. He’s also had 5 novels published by both the small and commercial press. He has served as Fiction Editor for Space and Time magazine since 1998. At night, he continues to write, mostly about the dark.
Con
nect through his web site: www.cith.org/gerard
Facebook: www.facebook.com/gerard.houarner