The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  By the Internet, Fenton would be remembered as a transsexual Asian with Autism and Gender Dysphoria who displayed sociopathic tendencies due to his high intelligence and ability to read and manipulate social situations. Many would claim that Fenton had originally been the killer due to his inability to cope with whether or not he wanted to undergo sex reassignment surgery, and his reported belief that he was sparing those from a life as troubled as his own. Former classmates would recall how he used to leer and do vaguely scary things when no one was looking. Rumors would spread that he was blackmailing others in return for his services as a snitch as well as a financier. Gulliver Grandin would write a video diary about his interactions with Fenton and how he was forced to share confidential information with him from Bitter Springs’ police department. Because of the allegations that he was a serial killer, as well as his struggles with being transsexual, the Internet would remember him—not for who he was or what he might have done—but because of how the hardcore conservatives would turn him into a scarecrow and hang him in all their fields, as a warning to all those who were not as god intended.

  Lux’s stomach was in knots. It’d been awhile since she’d felt this way. It reminded her of when she had first started blogging. She would pour all her thoughts and efforts into a post and go over it several times, liking it more and more with every pass. Then, in a euphoric cloud of certainty, she’d publish. Doubt would settle in as soon as she saw her creation on display, on the great, distorting window of the world—the Internet. Suddenly, the words she had written would seem so childish or ill-informed. She would begin to see their faults and where they could be exploited by others. In a sea of opinions, the meaning of her words and sentences could be drowned, taken under by the neurotic pull of dissent. Unlike a lot of people, what she wrote was who she was, not who she wanted to be. So it wasn’t until she posted what wasn’t just her thoughts and feelings, but a snapshot of herself, she’d realized that she might be wrong; that not only her beliefs, but herself as a person might be wrong. The two were bound to one another, like the double helixes of DNA strands. To separate one would reduce the other to something indescribable.

  In those earlier days of her career in social justice, she had aborted a lot of posts, because she had wanted others to like her. Over time, her skin had hardened, and she felt as if she had a duty to thrust herself onto others. It wasn’t about being right or wrong; it was about being Lux, and no one had the authority to judge a person’s character as unfit for life. No one, that is, until as of late, when she’d been granted a boon from the Sisters’ apostle in Maidenwood. With their teachings, Lux’s abilities as an augur had been augmented and she had started to see humans as mathematical problems—unsolved equations in a perpetually unbalanced state. To bring harmony, to reach her life’s mission statement, she had to solve these equations, stop them, be it through death or indoctrination, from giving rise to other unbalanced beliefs that were giving rise to discord in the System. The apostle warned that Lux might feel badly about her actions, but in all that time, over all these bodies, she wept nothing but tears of joy; for in the dead, her words would rise above the daily cacophony, and she wouldn’t be judged for what she was, but by what she’d done. And for those out there who had half a brain, it was immediately obvious that what she’d done had not only been right, but necessary.

  However, the euphoric cloud that’d been following her since the death of Salinger Stevens had begun to disperse. Now, as she sat in the party room on the second floor of the Wharf, staring out at what she’d written and wrought, sensing that all of this was about to reach both its beginning and its end, Lux pressed her hands to her stomach and began to doubt. Would they understand? Would they get it? Could they see past what it was to what it actually meant? She knew what she would look like to them, and it was hard to say whether that was a good thing, or a bad thing. They would want to call her a villain, but when everyone came to their senses, they’d immortalize her as an anti-hero, instead. Someone who had done what no one else had the clit to do. Let them hate her. Hate was everything to her.

  Lux was decided, and then, staring at the laptop, watching the ‘yes’ votes come in by the hundreds for Fenton, she was not. Okay, sure, when this had all started, she’d fought for all minorities. Everyone had been accounted for. But over the years, she began to wonder, as the majority had wondered, if everyone was deserving of equal rights, of having a voice. It was something she would never admit, but when Ramona had suggested they use their abilities as impeccable judges of character to better understand how to help their own community, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to discover the true nature of people.

  And she did. She and Ramona, and eventually the others, honed the art of being an augur. But Lux? Lux learned the skills of a social surgeon. Being an augur was easy. Society had embraced being an augur. In a world where memories were recorded with cell phones rather than brain cells, it was inevitable that people like Ramona would change the conversation from the masses to the minutiae. It was all adjectives and nouns, and cheap threats that made people move for the sake of money. But being a surgeon? A social surgeon? It required a steady hand and a keen eye, and the willingness to make cuts, to excise. People wouldn’t need to move. All you’d have to do was step over the bodies that’d fallen to her scalpel.

  These days, Lux had settled on supporting women. Men were fine, all things considered, but that’s not what the people who supported her wanted to hear. They wanted easy answers, boogeymen. What was the patriarchy but some amorphous threats to which there was no method of attack? What were women’s rights when some women had some of them, and others did not? There were sluts, and then there was female empowerment. There were heteronormative gender roles, and then there were just some women who genuinely liked cooking. Everyone had an idea of how things were supposed to be, but no one knew how things were supposed to be.

  Lux did. She knew. She knew it, because she’d seen it. She’d dissected the soul and seen the things lurking within. She was how things were supposed to be. How could she not be? You need only look upon her works to see the support of her patrons. Salinger Stevens, Ansel Adams, Zoe/Zeke Crampton, Paul Zdanowicz, Asher Jones, Fenton Miike—they had all been impostors, and through Lux’s operations, she’d revealed them for what they truly were. But that’s all they were. Lies lying on the slab. It was the Internet, the People, who had decided they needed to die. And die they did, in spectacularly surreal ways. Death sentences from the other side. Scissors snipping stalks in the under-Garden. No one else was capable of this. No one else besides her. If she wasn’t meant to do this, then why could she? And why couldn’t anyone else?

  The knots in Lux’s stomach started to unravel. She pressed her fingers to the laptop’s sticky keyboard and pulled up a picture of Ramona. She hesitated. For as long as they’d gone back, she could only remember yesterday. And yesterday, Ramona had an opportunity to call her out, to stop her. She hadn’t. It wasn’t like Lux had wanted her to, and it wasn’t like it would’ve made a difference, but still… if she had… With Echo echoing everything she said and did, it might’ve been nice to hear something else for once.

  Lux loaded up Ramona’s picture with the poll into her blog, but didn’t post it. Someone knocked on the door that led into the party room, and smiling, Lux said, “Come on in.”

  As someone started shouting about blood downstairs, Ramona stepped into the party room and closed the door behind her. It smelled badly in here, like a locker room and a meat shop. It was almost pitch-black, too. The only light was the light coming off the laptop, which shone on Lux’s face, who was seated behind it. She was smiling. Her hands were wet.

  “Hey, Ramona.”

  Ramona’s eyes struggled to adjust to the dark. It was like it was a new kind of darkness, an alien blackness that moved like fog might move. There were things in the dark, though, that much she could tell. How many had Jessie and Cole and Fenton called up here? Fifteen? Sixteen? She strained her
ears for breathing, for shuffling feet and cracking knuckles; muffled laughter, slow sips. There were things in the dark, but what?

  Ramona took a few steps forward and then stopped. “Lux?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s… going on?”

  Lux put her hands behind her head and leaned back in her chair. “Celebrating.”

  Ramona took a few more steps. The toes of her shoe nudged something lying across the floorboards.

  “Do you want the light?”

  “Uh.” Ramona wrinkled her nose. It smelled as if someone had shit themselves. “I… don’t know.”

  “What are you doing up here, then?”

  “Can we talk?”

  A white sliver crept across the floorboards. As Ramona realized the door was opening behind her, the lights were suddenly switched on. Ramona recoiled.

  The room was drenched in blood, the floor covered in hunks of flesh and chunks of gore. Bodies were scattered about Lux’s desk, each one a link in a chain that ran unbroken and endlessly around her. Sixteen in all, they had been stripped naked and completely ravaged. Their backs were cavernous; their faces stew. Where their spinal columns should’ve been were empty holes where gallons of blood stagnated, and a single cell phone, one in each corpse, floated. Ramona didn’t read much, and she didn’t know why she thought it now, but the phones reminded her how people used to place coins on the eyes of the dead to pay the Ferry Man.

  The door slammed behind Ramona. She jumped and spun around.

  Asher stood behind her, his chewed-up face peering out from the hood of a rain coat. Ramona started to run to him, and then stopped, noticing his hands. They looked gloved, but they weren’t. They were white, and fleshy. And then he spoke.

  “They didn’t notice,” Echo said.

  Ramona screamed. She stumbled backwards, her ankles going sideways as she nearly slipped on a tongue.

  Echo unbuttoned the rain coat and dropped it on the ground. Underneath, she was naked, except it wasn’t her body, her skin. It was… It was… Ramona’s eyes traveled from the bloody color of the body suit to its crotch, where both a small penis and a vagina were present. The face was Asher’s but… the skin… the skin was Fenton’s.

  “What the fuck did you do?” Ramona belted.

  Echo ignored her, addressed Lux. “Didn’t even notice.”

  “Of course not,” Lux said. “Like that, you’re one of them. All those liars down below.”

  The room began to spin. Ramona’s throat constricted, and then a gout of vomit exploded out of it. She gasped, tasting the rot in the air, and vomited again. Crying, whining, she moved back and forth with short strides, not trying to escape. Not trying to go anywhere at all, really.

  Echo took off Asher’s face, and shook of Fenton’s skin. The costumes crumpled around her ankles, and she stepped out of them, in her own, albeit blood-soaked, clothes.

  “Didn’t notice?” Ramona drew her fist back. “Didn’t notice?! You were…” She looked at the pile of flesh that had once been her friends. “You… were in a fucking coat. You fucking freak. You fucking fuck!”

  Echo rolled her eyes and leaned back into the door, her hand on the knob.

  “Ramona,” Lux called.

  Ramona ignored her. She was burning up on the inside. A hazy darkness was closing around her vision. Crying so hard she was smiling, she crouched down and screamed, “Help! Help me!” Globs of spit fell out of her mouth. It tasted of sea salt and of sulfur.

  “Ramona,” Lux said.

  Finally, she turned to face Lux.

  “They won’t hear you over the music.”

  “Why?” She drove the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Why?”

  “They were liars. They were part of the problem you and I promised to fix all those years ago.”

  “No! No! I have nothing to do with this!”

  “Sure,” Echo said.

  “It doesn’t matter. You can’t… you can’t just…”

  Lux held up her hand. “That’s the thing. That’s the thing, Ramona, I can. I shouldn’t be able to do this. No one should be able to do this. But I can. That means something.”

  “That means something,” Echo parroted.

  Ramona heaved. Making growling sounds to clear her throat, she bent over and hacked up phlegm.

  “So many in this world are on life support, needlessly sucking up resources they’ll never really deserve.” Lux stood up. “Even our own. That’s the thing. We gave the gays and the lesbians and the intersexed and the mentally ill and the minorities a pass, and all they’ve done for us is give us a bad name.”

  “Are you fucking… kidding me?” Ramona shook with rage. “They’re human-fucking-beings!”

  “That didn’t stop you from judging them.”

  “I didn’t kill them!”

  “We did, in our own ways,” Lux said. “Condemning people based upon a few traits and observations. Making it public for everyone to see. It wasn’t wrong, but it was rudimentary. There are better ways.”

  Echo said, “We have to be strong together. If there is any weakness, they’ll use it against us. Asher and Fenton weren’t strong. They had turned against us. They made us look bad.”

  “Made us look bad?” Ramona gestured to the gory remains. “Made us look bad?”

  “I know what’s best,” Lux said. “Echo does, too.”

  “Because she just does what you fucking tell her to!”

  Echo snorted.

  “I think you are wonderful. You’ve been a great friend to me. But if it’s meant to be…” She spun the laptop around, so that the screen was facing Ramona. “…then it’s meant to be.”

  On the screen was Ramona’s picture, and beneath it, a poll that read yes or no.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “That’s you.” Lux’s finger hovered over the Enter key. “And if that’s really you, then you have nothing to worry about.”

  Ramona’s body stopped shaking. She stopped breathing. Everything inside her sank. The sweat on her skin retreated. She looked at the bodies on the floor, their backs broken open, their innards drained—the cell phones circulating the bloody lakes of the hateful—and saw herself amongst them.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t worry.” Lux hit the Enter key, and the post was uploaded. “I know you better than anyone else. I wouldn’t worry.”

  Ramona said nothing, did nothing. Paralyzed, her eyes were fixated on the poll counter.

  Echo opened the door, poked her head out, and said, “Police are here.”

  Ramona snapped out of it. The poll was still sitting at zero. She still had time. She turned around, threw herself at Echo.

  “It… won’t matter!” Echo caught her.

  Ramona slammed into Echo. She kneed Echo, took her by the face and bashed her head against the door.

  “Ramona… Ramona,” Lux said.

  Echo swung at Ramona, smashing her fist into Ramona’s cheek. It didn’t matter. Nothing hurt as much as how she hurt right now. Ramona elbowed Echo’s throat. Echo wheezed, dropped to her knees. Ramona ripped the door open. It smacked into Echo, sending her sprawling, mouth-first, into a pool of entrails.

  “Ramona,” Lux said, sweetly.

  Ramona didn’t know why she turned around, but she did. Maybe she was expecting something else. A monster, or an answer. Or the seams to what should’ve so obviously been a horrible dream. But it was just Lux and her laptop.

  “You’re at zero,” Lux said, relieved. “You’re real.”

  Ramona’s jaw dropped.

  “Oh.” Lux pressed the Enter button. “Sorry. I forgot to refresh the page.”

  Backing out of the room, Ramona’s eyes fell to the updated numbers.

  “It’s strange how something can be both true and not true at the same time,” Lux said. She sounded as if she were going to cry. “Do you think it would’ve mattered if I hadn’t pressed this button?”

  By family and friends, Ramona would be
remembered as having died a cruel and unnecessary death at a young age. For the weeks and months and years to come, they would recall Ramona’s tomboyish behavior, her wicked sense of humor, and her deep dedication to the LGBTQIA community. Her mother would visit her grave every week, and there she would have a private conversation with her daughter, telling her how beautiful she was, how proud of her she had always been—things she wished she’d said and never did. Her father would immerse himself into the LGBTQIA community of Bitter Springs in an attempt to pick up where Ramona had left off; he would be welcomed with open arms, but his efforts would never amount to much, because he would seldom be able to keep it together long enough to see a project through. Those who would reject Lux’s ideology would paint a mural to Ramona on the walls of the safe space at Bitter Springs Junior High, though it would later be removed to make room for a mural of the football mascot. Ramona would have become a local politician in her later years, and much to her own surprise, she would have written a book on her experiences as a gender fluid lesbian. It would be a national bestseller. Many would have been inspired by it. She would have lived until she was one-hundred-and-one. Grandchildren would come to know her as the foul-mouthed grandmother who always gave the best gifts at Christmas. She would’ve made a lot of mistakes until her eventual death during the Trauma, but that’s how these things go.

  By the Internet, Ramona would be remembered as a gender fluid, Caucasian lesbian with ADHD, Depression, and Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Due to her heavy involvement with the augurs and the statements by Lux and Echo upon the police arriving at the crime scene in the Wharf’s party room, the general consensus amongst the general public would be that Ramona played a part in the murders, and may have even taken part in the killing of the sixteen men and women found in that room. Diligent self-taught detectives would track down where Ramona worked and lived, and they would harass both her employer and her parents, for no reason other than they were undoubtedly responsible for what Ramona had become. Former male classmates would call Ramona a tease, while others would claim that she slept with anyone that looked at her. Former female classmates would say Ramona had done everything she did because she had been overweight most of her life, while others would simply refuse to comment. Men on the Internet would dig up pictures of Ramona when she had weighed three-hundred-pounds and digitally alter them, making garish nudes. Whether or not the Internet would remember Ramona simply depended upon how many women were in the headlines that week. Two was one too many.