by Scott Hale
“R’lyeh.”
“What?!” she shouted, a knot in her forehead. “Sorry, what?”
“You’re here,” the Skeleton said, “isn’t that enough? That’s better than most, if not all—me withstanding, of course.”
R’lyeh covered her mouth, fought back the urge to wheeze.
“The only past that should concern you is yours. What’s all this—” he held out his skeletal arms, “—going to do for you? Fill the shelves in your head with all this knowledge, and for what?”
“Seriously?” She shook her head. “Isn’t that why we’re here? To use whatever weapons they made in the past to fight?”
The Skeleton stared at her, his crazed eyes glistening in their sockets. “I don’t want to be another Poe.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
The Skeleton sighed. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Then why’d you say it?”
“Can you say no to me?” The Skeleton stepped up to her; his crooked, bare smile sending a chill down her spine. “Can you say no to anyone you trust?”
“Yes, yes, I fucking can,” R’lyeh said. “I’m not a child. I’m a Night Terror. I’m not like you.”
“Without your mask, you are.” The Skeleton touched his chest. “I’m not always me, not with this inside me. Neither are you, what with all you’ve got locked away. I am getting worse. I don’t know you well enough to say if you’re getting better.”
“I’m fine,” R’lyeh said, resolutely. “I’m fine… Atticus.”
The Skeleton grunted. “People used to call me the Gravedigger. Wish I could get back to that. People ever call you something different?”
“No, just R’lyeh.”
“You still R’lyeh? Or do we need something fancier, on account of you being a badass librarian now?”
“R’lyeh works,” she said, trying not to smile. “I guess.”
“Get your Vrana back after this,” the Skeleton said.
R’lyeh pretended not to hear him. She coughed blood up and quickly wiped it off her lips.
The Skeleton pretended not to see her. He touched the heart again and quickly pulled away.
They waited another good twenty minutes in the park before the man, Arbo, and woman, Merna, who had met them outside the City, returned. This time, it was more than the two of them. They were flanked by six suits which were somehow bulkier and cruder than their own. Large, flimsy white tubes twisted out of each of the individual’s backpacks, into their suits and masks. Like Arbo and Merna, it was impossible to see their masks. Unlike Arbo and Merna, these six were armed. With guns.
The Skeleton stepped in front of R’lyeh and said to those approaching, “What’s this all about?”
Rifles? Automatic rifles? R’lyeh hadn’t really learned much about guns in school; most of her knowledge came from the books she devoured. She peeked around the Skeleton. They were definitely rifles. Looking down at her sword, she didn’t feel so immortal anymore. And with the Skeleton having no flesh of his own, he didn’t even make a very good human shield. She coughed again, and bad thoughts starting brewing at the back of her skull.
This is just like Rime, just like Geharra. Bad choices always bring you back to where you belong. Her mom used to say that, but R’lyeh never knew what it meant, and she still didn’t.
“It’s okay,” Merna said, approaching slowly, signaling for the others, including Arbo, to stay behind. “Trust me. We do not want to hurt you.”
A thick, green cloud rolled across the playground, and then took a sharp turn down a street.
“The last time anyone made it this far into the city was decades ago,” Arbo said, going to Merna. “People with animal skulls on their heads. There was a large party of them.”
The Night Terrors were here? R’lyeh wondered.
Arbo went on: “They lasted about an hour. Most of them died before reaching the outskirts. It has been a long, long time of watching, and waiting. This—” he gestured to the six behind him, “—is just necessity. There aren’t a lot of us left.”
Not wanting to look weak, R’lyeh stepped out from behind the Skeleton and stood at his side.
“Not a lot of anything left nowadays,” the Skeleton said. “You said waiting. What’ve you been waiting for?”
Merna spoke up. “A sign, and a chance to leave.”
“Leave the Dead City?” R’lyeh asked, her eyes never lifting from the rifles.
“Walk with us, to where we live. If the Putrid Prince hasn’t rotted you already, then we must assume you are honored guests.”
“Answer the girl,” the Skeleton said.
Merna adjusted the voice modulator on her suit and said, “Yes, we want to leave the city. We want to leave this whole planet behind.”
They called themselves Virion, and their home was at the center of the Dead City, where the buildings leaned into one another at impossible angles, creating the image of an enormous triangle looming over the city. With the overwhelming amount of green clouds roiling there, it appeared this was the Green Worm’s epicenter. That was where R’lyeh and the Skeleton were now headed. And if it had been any other Worm, R’lyeh wouldn’t have been able to make the walk. But it was a Worm without form, and apparently, without an effect on her. No, this was easy; what was going to be hard was what the Virions seemed so excited to show them—that large shape, blinking and screaming, they kept getting glimpses of the closer they drew to the pyramid.
“As far as we know, the Green Worm has been awake the longest out of all the other Worms,” Merna said, directing them down the narrow streets. “Humanity did not summon it. God did.”
“The Vermillion God?” R’lyeh whispered.
“Yes. When the Vermillion God brought about the Trauma, It gave Its most loyal followers Its crimson blessing.” Merna stopped and stared at R’lyeh’s right arm. “You do not have the ‘Corruption,’ child.”
R’lyeh kept her mouth shut.
Merna tapped her faceplate, the same way she might’ve her chin in contemplation. “And yet you are still… here.”
Arbo piped up: “Skeleton, were you human?”
“Still am,” the Skeleton said, looking not at him, but the six armed guards surrounding them. “What about it?”
“Those that did not receive the crimson blessing were ostracized, but still they thrived. God did not like this,” Merna said, “nor did It have any interest in this world any longer. As It fell into Its long slumber, It woke the Green Worm and let it loose upon the Earth, to infect and kill anything that did not bear the mark.”
“I should be—” R’lyeh coughed, and then tasted blood, “—dead, then.”
“Dead? No. Changed,” Arbo said, voice wreathed in static through the modulator. “The Green Worm used to kill the unbelievers, but now it changes them. It makes believers out of everyone, eventually.”
“You see a lot of walking, talking skeletons around these parts?” the Skeleton asked. “Don’t see much moved by my being here.”
“We don’t,” Merna said, sounding elated inside her suit. “I see two people unchanged in the presence of the Putrid Prince, who both came here of their own accord. I see hope.”
R’lyeh’s attention bounced back and forth between the Virions and the cityscape that surrounded them. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the sky wasn’t so much a sky, but an infected slab of marbled meat that rendered the sun in a drunken blur. Light should’ve been faint, and yet it wasn’t. R’lyeh hadn’t realized it before, because it wasn’t something she was accustomed to seeing, but yes, holy shit, the Virions were supplying electricity to this stretch of the Dead City.
She started: “You’re just another—”
Street lights flickering; lone bulbs in coffee shops, computer stores; Christmas strings in a tax refund business; an art gallery on full-blast; an adult entertainment store drenched in seedy red.
“You’re just another—”
More coffee shops; a college university smashed between leaning
apartment buildings, light bleeding from its abstract cracks. From a scalped police station, an alarm strobed out a thousand years of late warning.
The Skeleton leaned in, asked her if she was okay.
She nodded and finished: “You’re just another Cult of the Worm. Eldrus, Penance… the Witches—”
The Skeleton cocked his head, started to say something.
“—and here. All worshiping Worms. It’s always the same. Everywhere.” R’lyeh said to the Skeleton, “They’re not going to help us.”
“Witches…” the Skeleton mumbled.
“We do not worship the Green Worm,” Arbo said.
“Not at all,” Merna agreed.
“Besides, for all these Cults you say are out there, there is only one true Worm. The others are merely segments of It. Heralds.”
That’s not what Deimos said, R’lyeh thought, remembering the Bat’s words back at Geharra. “An apocalypse, that’s all they can bring.
“Yes,” Merna said, “an apocalypse. A shattering revelation.”
The Skeleton was glaring at R’lyeh as he said, “Don’t know about any revelations. Only thing the Worms seem good for is turning the rest of us into fertilizer.”
“Exactly,” Arbo buzzed. He fiddled with some dials on his suit. “They break humanity down to their rawest forms. And with that naked, desperate fear, the Worms reveal to us the most obvious, odious mystery.”
“That we need God. That without God, we are all nothing but worms ourselves, stuck in the soil of our miseries. The Worms are what they represent, are they not?” Merna stopped. “Violence, hidden knowledge. Religion, disease. Greed, lust. They are what they are, and they come from sacrifices done in the name of what each Worm represents. Worms are just as human as we are, if not more so, because what do humans sacrifice if not themselves?”
“But we don’t worship the Green Worm, nor does it expect us to,” Arbo interjected. “We appreciate what it is has done for us, for all the life it has given us. You’re here to find a way to stop the Vermillion God? Understandable. But you say there are more Worms summoned? Wouldn’t you think our need for God is greater than ever?”
The armed guards raised their rifles and pressed in towards R’lyeh and the Skeleton.
Arbo raised up his large, gloved hand. “We will help you find what you want. You will not succeed, but we will help all the same. The Green Worm is more than disease and sickness; it is a parasite, and we’ve grown used to a parasitic style of living. Hurt us and what we believe in, but that is fine so long as the host is whole.”
The Skeleton spun around and batted away the guns. The armed suits hesitated, but they didn’t open fire.
“I’m not as smart as you city folk seem to be,” he said, his hands clawed, his voice dripping with vitriol, “but if you love your Putrid Prince so much, then why the hell you dressed like that? Why’re you hiding from it?”
Merna’s voice came out garbled from her modulator. Arbo responded in the same unintelligible speech.
She pressed her hands to the sides of her helmet.
Belting out a distorted dialect that sounded like English crossed with a drainpipe, his arm shot out, and he grabbed at her.
“Stop, Arbo,” Merna said.
Click, hiss—she flipped two switches and broke a seal on the left side of her helmet.
“There’s not enough,” Arbo said, his voice nearly normal again.
“They have to know,” she said, her voice sounded scared.
Click, hiss—she flipped two switches and broke a seal on the right side of the helmet. Hesitation; her fingers fiddled with the switches, as if to lock them back into place. Green sludge dripped out from underneath the helmet, where the connectors that lined it had separated from the neck of the suit. As she slowly lifted her helmet off, a gelatinous hunk of mucus fell with a splat onto the toe of her boot.
Liquid syllables, laced with agony—Merna said, “They have to see,” and removed the helmet completely.
After everything she’d been through, R’lyeh wasn’t one to startle easily, and yet the image of Merna sent her reeling. Only a place without humanity could convince someone else that she was human. Merna’s neck and head had the shape and color of entwined kelp; a single appendage that flared outwards in random directions, and moved freely to an invisible current. She had a nose and a mouth, ears and eyes, but they were sunken into the swaying kelp, and held in place by the gaseous swells and seething pustules. Beyond the soft, almost tranquil exterior of Merna’s face were hard, translucent tubes; ribbed, and quivering, they mimicked the tubes that ran out of her backpack; and actually—R’lyeh circled Merna—they were one and the same.
“We do not wear these suits to keep the Green Worm out,” Merna said, each word a struggle without the modulator. She put her helmet back on and locked it into place. “We wear these suits to keep the Green Worm in.”
R’lyeh drifted closer to the Skeleton. When the Green Worm had been threats as empty as the clouds it traveled in, she could deal with it. But now she felt the dark stirrings inside her; the murderous tendons tugging out murderous tendencies. Six guns at her back, and two freaks in front of her. In a city as large as this, it couldn’t have felt any smaller. She knew a corner when she saw one, because everywhere she turned, there seemed to be one.
The Skeleton must’ve smelled the Trauma on her. As she raised the sword to strike, he touched her—
Sprawling fields of flowers, and a cool, babbling spring.
—and stayed her hand.
“You all look like that?” he asked.
Arbo said, “Yes, and there are not many of us left.”
“Why’s that?”
“The Putrid Prince did kill,” Merna said. “God wanted the bloodlines that swore allegiance to It to prosper, while It wanted those bloodlines that rejected God to die. But disease and sickness cannot survive with hosts—”
“Sacrifices,” R’lyeh spat.
“The Vermillion God and Its pieces are bound by rigid rules. Our Prince knew it would be needed again, so rather than fall into slumber after wiping out most of the unbelievers, it stayed awake, here, in the Dead City, and sustained itself on those that were able to resist its power.”
“First came the change,” Arbo said, flexing his gloved hands, “and then the realization the Putrid Prince’s presence had left its hosts infertile. All of us carry the Green Worm with us. We need it as much as it needs us. But the Vermillion God is coming, and soon the world will be Its. Eventually, It will grow tired of this world and seek out others. We want to be on each of them when this happens, to see our Prince restored to its former glory.”
Merna added, “We believe in the Vermillion God, but we owe our lives to the Prince. It has been good to us. We were once heretics, but now we are more.”
“We’re here to kill God,” R’lyeh said.
“You’re here to try,” Merna corrected. “We are all Worms in our own ways. You are the Red,” she said to R’lyeh. “You are the Black,” she said to the Skeleton.
He cocked his skull, looked at his arms, and laughed. “Is it still so obvious?”
“And we are the Green,” Merna said. “Through and through, forever, until we are never again.”
Shaking her head, R’lyeh said, “They want something.”
“We do,” Merna said, “but before we ask, here is what we offer.”
R’lyeh scanned the street, searching for weapons, bombs—any kind of anything that might deliver a good dose of deicide. In her searching, she noticed things she hadn’t before: massive tubes, running in and out of the buildings, down the street towards the leaning buildings—tubes not unlike those in the Virions’ suits and bodies. They reminded her of the Crossbreed’s roots, the way they had overtaken Geharra, went where they willed. Great appendages of a greater being, searching for fuel amongst the dead.
“I don’t see anything…” R’lyeh furrowed her brow. “Bag of Bones, I don’t think this is a good—”
“The Dead City,” the Skeleton said. “That’s your offer?”
“Yes,” Arbo said, modulator on the fritz. “Once we leave, the Green Worm will be gone from it. You will have all the destruction you could ever want at your fingertips. You could even bring your followers here. You have followers, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” the Skeleton said, reluctantly.
“If you don’t take this place, others will,” Merna said. “If you do not succeed, the Vermillion God will wake again, and It will claim this city.”
“And It’ll get rid of you,” R’lyeh said. “It’ll seal the Green Worm away. You’ll die.”
“Replication is the key to a pathogen’s survival,” Arbo said. “We cannot replicate, so we must be selfish, instead.”
“Assuming you got what I want…” the Skeleton chewed on his words, “… what do you want?”
Merna and Arbor told them to follow, and so with six guns at their backs, R’lyeh and the Skeleton followed.
The Dead City became less of a city and more of a machine the deeper they plunged into its narrowing streets. The tubes R’lyeh had spotted were everywhere, connected to everything. Like umbilical cords, they had been attached, or had attached themselves to everything capable of giving them electrifying life. The buildings, which were leaning so badly against one another R’lyeh was now certain they would topple, stopped being buildings and transitioned into moldy obelisks decorated with dials and jittery screens, and rows of lights, large and small, behind and between the miles of wiring that webbed the buildings. R’lyeh had seen a computer once, inside and out, and it didn’t look much different to the Dead City; the only difference was the scale… and the intent.
When they reached the center point, where the leaning skyscrapers formed that menacing pyramid in the sky, they were greeted by more Virions. More cumbersome suits with impenetrable visors, all in various shades of white, as if those that wore the dirtier suits had been around longer than the rest. Some were armed with rifles, others had handguns; but mostly, they held their arms outwards, to welcome R’lyeh and the Skeleton into their own makeshift Inner Sanctum.