“Revenge.... ”
With that, I do collapse, and don’t recover until an hour later, back in the clinic.
* * *
Robert We talk as we walk. With each passing day, Maria sees more of the spirit world, and I explain it to her as we go. She remains essentially skeptical— unfortunately blending together the monotheisms of her culture with misunderstandings of some of my own points—but she has a refreshing openness to evidence. That’s rarer than it might seem, and I make a point of telling her about it.
She shows no affinity at all for any sort of totem. Three evenings in a row we embark on a simple quest for a spirit who might act as her totem, and nothing happens. Well, that’s not entirely true. We don’t find any totem for her. We do find a spirit world in increasing disarray. The fragmentation of things continues, and now I find it offset not so much by any persistence of existing identities as by fusions and hybrids. There are many spirits that resemble the creations of folklore and mythology: forelegs of this, head of that, tail of the other. The unified speech of spirits is fragmenting, too, as new dialects emerge and disappear like lightning flashes in the midst of this cosmic storm, and without that, my rituals for instruction and binding are less than entirely reliable. Maria doesn’t know all that, but she can sense my growing unease, and it’s very much a mutual decision to abandon the idea of a vision quest for her, at least for now.
We also pick up acolytes. That surprises me. I never thought of myself as a particularly good teacher, and I certainly don’t now. But here are these teens and young men and women, up to within a few years of my own age, all of them badly shocked by things they’ve seen while alone. They hear our conversation and come to follow us, not speaking but listening very attentively. Most of them lack identification; based on the few wallets and IDs I do get to examine, about half of those who come are locals, the other half outsiders like myself, and some of them have come cross-country. The Rubbish tries to help me, telling me, “They’re frozen right beneath the skin. They thaw when you say warm things. ”
To be honest, I don’t really want any responsibilities. I want to get my own soul in order and meet my end as gracefully as I can, as late in the life of the universe as I can. If time weren’t ending now, I’d be studying means of reincarnation and soul survival. Without any hope of that working, I do a lot of prayer and meditation, often flashing back to my Bible school childhood lessons as well as my training under Xoca and the others. I resent Maria, and even more resent those hapless silent others. But it’s not my place to shoo them away. Everything that’s happened to me since my higher soul awoke for the first time leads here: I am the healer of their wounds, their protector in the midst of spiritual wilderness, the one who interprets fate and strengthens the soul to respond to it. To forsake my traveling companions would be to forsake myself as well, and this is precisely what I’m trying not to do.
It doesn’t help any that I sense an impending attack. Things stir in many shadows now, as Maria and at least some of the others well know, and mostly we move on by and leave the things to stir right where they are. But there’s something that follows us, slipping along in dark places night by night, watching and studying us. I’d like to tell myself that it’s here for Maria or one of the others, but I don’t have the luxury of self-deception. It’s stalking me, for reasons I can’t yet begin to guess.
My own dreams are unremarkable, which is to say that they’re filled with what are likely small omens, echoes from my past lives, and so on, but no more than has been usual for me. The Rubbish, on the other hand, is dreaming dreams that shake its whole being. As it sleeps, it takes on new forms, sometimes turning into liquids or vapors which pour through chambers made from other parts of its being or from scraps in the immediate vicinity. Upon waking, it doesn’t remember any of this, or at least it can’t describe anything useful to me, so I have to watch and interpret on my own. Maria watches too, but she lacks the experience to evaluate the dreams in any terms other than the canons of psychotherapy, and it simply doesn’t make much sense to treat an animated mound of garbage in the terms of nineteenth-century Europe or twentieth-century America.
As we approach the hospital, I notice more and more intrusions into the physical landscape from the spirit world. In particular, I see signs of the landscape I visited with Xoca when I made my own vision quest for a totem. That concerns me because it was a dangerous place: in an infinite junkyard, refrigerators fell from the sky, and the sun dripped blood as it cycled overhead in days that lasted just a few minutes each. I vividly remember Xoca looking at the landscape after he’d explained how vision questing led to places that revealed important truths about the quester, and saying to me, “You’re real fucked up, aren’t you? ”
I was. In some ways I still am, but much less so. The work of healing my community brought me out of myself and into a healthier relationship with the world beneath community. I don’t want to lose that now, and I really don’t want to endanger the people I’m trying to take care of.
Some of the local spirits remember me and call out their greetings. We talk quietly, and I do what I can to keep them comfortable. They’re more aware of the impending end than material things seem to be, and have fewer options for self-deception and denial. Many of them simply want to tell their stories, seeking a pattern and perhaps even a meaning in the flow of their experiences so far, and wherever I feel I can, I listen. I teach Maria how to listen, and we spend several afternoons sitting at opposite ends of a circle of spirits, each one telling its story in turn and making way for another to come in. My mute followers can’t see most of the spirits directly, and in any event lack the training for helpful interaction, so they take turns pacing the perimeter, maintaining defensive wards. Once something big and ugly, perhaps an early dinosaur’s spirit, races across the spirit world’s ground to blow up against the wards, and once something twisted and charred falls from the sky. It might be a piece of shattered moon bridge or something else; it is in any event not an auspicious sign.
On the night before we reach the mental hospital, a swarm of ghosts surrounds us. I know some of them: they’re my fellow inmates, the ones who died in the hospital over the decades. I introduce Maria to as many of them as I can, and they bask in the intensity of her conflicted emotions. Her zealous curiosity, her battered skepticism, and her growing fear all provide sustenance to the ghosts, who after all depend on the renewal of their own passions to survive here at all. A few of the ghosts undergo a metamorphosis I’ve never seen before, fusing themselves with one or another of the would-be reincarnated avatars. Awakened ghosts? Such a thing doesn’t happen. I would have thought, before the apocalypse began, that it couldn’t happen, and explain why at great length. Apparently, now those rules no longer apply, and so some of the seeking avatars happily leave us alone for their journeys to personal ascension via the roads of the dead. As the Principia Discordia says, "Thus indeed do many things come to pass. ”
* * *
WILLIAM
I really loved spy flicks and action films of all kinds when I was a kid, and I never lost the taste as I grew up. One of the great pleasures for me of working in the Union was that while I couldn’t physically do the weirdest stuff myself, I could get close to the guys and gals who could and work with them in making the sort of world where heroic stunts might be as commonplace as effective antibiotics or nonstick coatings.
So here I am, a paraplegic man in his forties, leaning out of a van speeding along at close to one hundred miles an hour, catching pieces of a disobedient artificial intelligence thrown to me by my cyborg companion. What a life, eh?
Nicolas caught up with the Al-driven jeep after about thirty minutes of chase, and I caught up with them both a few minutes after that. I was worried that the jeep might decide to go cross-country, where I’d have no chance to catch it. But I remembered that once one of these sentry vehicles is committed to relatively high speed, its threat evaluators will favor off-road travel only in response to q
uite extreme road perils. My van and I don’t count.
As long as I chased it as fast as I could and Nicolas did the same, we would be okay.
Once I was in place, he started pulling at the restraining straps and instrumentation. He could have jumped on the jeep and gone right to work, but then the Al could also have electrified the whole frame, and that wouldn’t be a very happy thing for a cyborg. So now, he has to cut off most or all of its ability to sense the outside world before he can do anything else. Hence this high-speed party game. I’m not sure that we’ll need or want any of the pieces later, but why take chances? I make onehanded catches and throw the fruits of our labor into the passenger seat.
While that’s going on, I’m also fiddling with the multi-spectrum tracker I cobbled together on the way here out of several GPS systems and odds and ends. Once I establish the frequencies the jeep’s using, I can go looking for related activity. There turn out to be six fixed and two moving sources of encrypted traffic on the same frequencies, nicely framing downtown Roswell. If anything like what happened out at the research station applies, at least half the town’s remaining people will die. And of course it could always get worse: a black hole, say, drifting from here down into the Earth (or vice versa, really). Not much fun to be had there, so I continue trying to be the best action-movie sidekick I can.
We’re actually passing the Roswell town limits when Nicolas gets the Al fully unsecured. He looks at me and mimes pushing. Yeah, I see the problem. I wave him back and prepare for the necessary maneuver.
How does it come to this, anyway? I’m not what you’d call a good person. I have what I think is a noble vision for humanity as a whole, but at the same time I have nothing but the deepest contempt for almost every individual person in that whole. I think little of abusing others’ trust and I pay out respect slowly when I do it at all. I don’t owe the bastards in town a thing... except that, well, I do. I can’t explain it. Is my long-dormant, long-suppressed empathy at work again? It will suck mightily if I find out I’m just doing all of this as a matter of neurolinguistic shell shock, so to speak, the result of too much telepathy without proper controls. But the feeling is still there, and still demands that I act on it.
I swerve and steer directly into the jeep.
The shock of impact is terrible. The jeep takes it worse, and rolls side over side off the road down into a narrow rocky ravine that presumably holds rainy-season overflow. It explodes when it hits bottom—that’s probably a result of the batteries and stuff associated with the AI rather than the jeep itself, since it’s usually much harder to make a car explode than you’d guess from TV. I just barely have time to see the signals passing along between units in Roswell flicker out and know that the town's been saved before I plunge down into the ravine myself.
Black smoke rises from the wreckage: a solid black mass, completely unreflective and shaped roughly like a human being. The van tumbles through it like so much darkness, and slams into the ground near the jeep with a terrible shudder, shattering glass, and a full bounce, but no explosion. There’s something lodged in my useless leg and it hurts to breathe. I have several broken teeth, too.
The humanoid darkness comes flowing in through the air vents and congeals into a human form on my twisted passenger seat, without so much as asking. “Get out! ” I shout at it, ignoring the jabbing pain from what must be a broken rib.
It makes a peculiar coughing sound. “I come for you, Ming Xian. ”
“Oh, fuck off! ” I shout. “I’m not her! She’s just some damn hallucination I had on Mars! You’re the biggest disgrace to cosmic horror I’ve ever encountered! ”
“You have the soul of her, ” that strange voice says. “You have the soul of her and therefore you are her. ”
“I’m not her jack or shit! I’m me, there are no souls, and you’re some freak of nature that’s taking up space I could be using to come in! So get the fuck out. ”
“This is the day of your doom, Ming Xian. You will not endure to see the end of all things, and you have no place in ascension. ”
I spot a camera thrown forward from the debris in the back of the van and grab it. I fire off a dozen strobe flashes in quick succession, really hoping the light will do more than just make it flinch and scream. Unfortunately, that’s all I get, and who really needs to hear shadows screaming more than once? But it hangs in there, despite its outer layer boiling off. Finally it grows a new voice again. "That hurts. You must not do that again. ”
“I’ll do whatever I damn well please. Now get out. Go haunt Mars and look for the Tomb of the Unknown Conspiracy-Monger, for all I care. This is my van. I’m not your target, and you aren’t paying for gas, so shove off. ” I can hear Nicolas calling my name from up above, but he’s obviously decided to get much better intel before trying to help. Can’t blame him there, since I would too. Did I mention that I’m not really a nice person?
The shadow thing twists around for a while, and then it does take off. That part is good. The bad part is that every single piece of shadow in the van goes with it, including shadows lying on solid objects. The van and I are both ripped apart in a stupidly arcane version of that explosion I thought I’d avoided. By some fluke, my head is pointed nearly straight up as it sails free. I can see Polaris shining away. And getting redder. And spreading. The last thing I see is the Red Star taking over the pole star to gaze at me one last time. Damn every last subatomic particle and Planck cell in this lousy shithole of a universe. I hate dying while looking at some stupid metaphor given melodramatic existence.
Figures, really.
* * *
Robert The first refrigerator falls from the sky now as we enter the mental hospital’s grounds. I suppose I’m not terribly surprised. Whatever it is that’s been following us in the shadows is getting bolder, and part of that is the weakening distinction between spirit and flesh that we must deal with. The swarms of body-seeking avatars aren’t visible to my mute charges, but I can tell all these pseudo-acolytes know something’s haunting them. They shoot worried glances side to side. Too many of them take to drink and drugs taken from abandoned convenience stories along our way, and honestly, I can’t blame them too much. It must be maddening to feel that something wants to replace your very soul with itself. Even the staunchest materialist who never thought of his thoughts as anything but chemistry can recognize such an intruder when it comes. All of this adds up to serious unrest, and my own unease acts as a beacon of its own. So now, crashing into the material world, comes a bundle of poorly resolved spirit that chooses to be a refrigerator. It lands on the roof of the hospital’s garage, teeters, and falls down to the driveway. I can’t see what food spills out of it, but there’s something there. I assume it’ll reek when we get closer to it.
"Maria, ” I say quietly, "I don’t think I have much time left. This is stuff being drawn to me. It looks to me like there’s still some underlying order, and I have some hope that if I die it’ll clear up. But then you’ll have to take charge. ”
“Falling refrigerators have something to do with you? ” She laughs. “That may be the most egotistical thing you’ve said so... ” She realizes I’m not joking. “Okay. Are you expecting to get crushed! ” “I don’t think so, ” I say while pointing at the bushes where I last noticed the shadow stalker. “Eaten, more likely. If anything does come for me, step back a little ways so that it doesn’t decide you’re too closely linked to me, okay? ”
She nods. “This sucks, though. ”
“It really does, ” I agree. “This isn’t the life I’d have chosen for you, or for any of the others. I hope that you can get them talking—I think it would do them some good to share their experiences. But you’ll all need a lot of courage and grace, and I wish there were something I could do to make it easier for you. ” I hear a rustling, and motion her back. “Too soon. Sorry. ”
Out of the bushes charges a thing of pure, amazing darkness. I’ve seen the night without stars. I’ve been blindfolded in a cave.
This is darker than any of that, a curse from which light flees. Its outlines are vaguely human-like, with massive limbs sprouting appendages I get no clear sense of. Its silhouette is confusing, in flux, and judging its speed and size is a mug’s game. It’ll be here when it’s here.
It speaks with a voice formed out of channeled winds, deep and somewhat hoarse. "I have come for you, Ming Xian. ”
What the hell! It takes me a moment to remember that Ming was the Chinese woman I met at Doissetep, the oldest member of our little combo. I haven’t thought a whole lot about her lately, despite being aware that our bond continued to exist in quiescent form and could become active again. I honestly didn’t expect it to matter quite this way, though. As soon as the thought occurs to me, I can peer at the very faint silver traces of astral tie and see that the shadow stalker isn’t following that. This is not a thing emerging from our connection, and for that, at least, I’m grateful. I’d like to know what the hell it is, of course.
The other day, I explained to Maria that the language of prevailing religious and cultural assumptions could often serve the shaman’s more esoteric purposes. Now I get to give her a lesson in that principle in practice. “Begone! You transgress against the order of the world, and in this time of impending judgment, you must give heed to your sins! ” I learned this sort of faux-Catholic exorcism years ago, and it continues to work. It must be a combination of tone and echoes of actual binding rituals. The thing teeters back. -.
And then there is the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. Nothing even begins to compare to it. Think of every wall you’ve ever seen falling over at once. It’s like that, only more so. There’s no physical damage. What fell is the wall between the material world and all the spiritual realms. The first thing through from the other side is the Rubbish. It piles into the back of the cringing shadow thing and then ignites in a pure golden flame. The shadow thing dissolves into a dry dust in seconds—precious little can resist a magical force that resembles napalm or a fuel-air explosion, and the Rubbish shaped all its most useful parts very carefully.
World of Darkness - [Time of Judgment 03] - Judgment Day Page 24