by Chad Huskins
Leon stirred. He knew he was missing his left eye (it had leapt out of his face and crawled away), and he knew something had a hold of him. His mind was reeling. Convinced it had all been a dream, he was horrified and stunned to find that something from his dream was in front of him, right before his waking eyes. He was lifted from the floor by cold, wet hands. Hanging from above him, dangling from things forced down her throat, was, unfeasibly, Shannon Dupré.
The other item that made him recoil was that, on his left side, helping him to his feet, was Spencer Pelletier. By reflex, Leon tried to pull away and go for his sidearm, but neither worked very well; the former because he was so weak, the latter because he was no longer armed.
Leon’s memory was sketchy. There had been things chasing him out of the elevator. He remembered Kaley…little Kaley Dupré. Sinking? No, that had to be the dream, too. Or something. Smoke inhalation. Yes…yes, there had been something wrong at CES, and there was a fire or something like that in the library.
His foot touched something, and he slipped. Pelletier caught him, pulled him back up. Leon looked at his feet. He’d slipped on some bit of peeled flesh, and writhing bits of entrails.
“What…wh-what…?”
“Yeah,” said Pelletier. “I know. Fuck ‘to be or not to be.’ What? That’s the fucking question, right?”
Police, fire trucks, and ambulances descended on the scene. Fire was licking out of various windows on the bottom, third, fourth, sixth, and twentieth floors. Part of the wall on the east side had collapsed inward, like the building wanted to implode. There was an explosion at the back, and tremendous flames were pushed out, along with billowing black smoke. One worker in his red blazer came crawling out on his hands. He was missing both his legs. Some teenagers passing by had caught it on their cell phones, and the video was uploaded to the Internet within five minutes, receiving more than one million hits in the first twenty-four hours.
The fire trucks were getting set up, and the on-site commander was just finishing divvying up the duties, when the eighteenth and nineteenth floors both exploded. Shattered glass rained all over the streets as the commander shouted into his radio for all gas lines on the block to be shut off.
The snow came in harder, and a few people even commented on how it seemed that all of the falling flakes were moving sideways. A couple of people commented that the snow was moving towards the Tsarskiy Penthouses building, but the phenomenon would be mostly ignored due to the gripping, fiery scene.
Another late-night worker was blown clear, and the body landed on top of one of the fire trucks, smashing the cab. The body was a tangled mess, missing its eyes, its lower jaw, and the fingers on the left hand. A couple of the onlookers that gathered would later claim that one of the fingers landed near them, and that they saw it scuttling away like a rat, but it would be chalked up to crowd hysteria.
Also from the explosions, strangely, came school lockers and desks, a couple of flaming math books written in English, and a Cartersville Purple Hurricanes T-shirt. A small child would find this on the side of the street a week later, when some of the snow had melted, and would walk away with it. The phenomenon would not be reported.
The firefighters searched for an adequate fire hydrant to tap into, but the water of every single one was frozen. They had some water inside their trucks, but not nearly enough to deal with the kind of inferno the penthouses were set to become. They had little choice but to establish a perimeter, keep everybody safely back, pour what water they could onto it, and watch the building burn.
“Wake up,” said a voice so soft he almost missed it.
For a moment, he didn’t know who he was. As a matter of fact, he didn’t know anything at all. He wasn’t even sure he was a he. Maybe…she was a she?
“Wake up,” said another voice. This voice was a bit more forceful than the last, and a little intimidating.
Was he/she fearful of this new voice? How did he/she feel about the first voice? Was there a correct or incorrect way to feel? Where was he/she?
Hey…that was a good question. Where was this? Was this a where? Was this a this?
Then, an onslaught of voices. Though he/she had no ears to hear them with, he/she no less heard them. It also struck him/her that it was neither English nor Russian, but some other kind of language. Still, no matter the words, it all meant the same.
“Don’t be afraid—”
“You’re among friends now—”
“—have allies—”
“—never doubt that we are here to serve—”
“—you scratch my back, I scratch—”
“Don’t be afraid, Yuri—”
“It’s not as bad as it seems.”
“—no, no, not nearly as bad—”
“—only the beginning of something wonderful—”
“Do you feel alone?”
“Give him some room!”
“Wake up, Yuri!”
“Easy, though. Don’t rush into—”
Those childish fears came back again, though Shcherbakov felt that whatever form he was in now, they could no longer hurt him. He knew that there was no more material world for him. He had died—he also now knew he was a he, or had been a he—and now he wasn’t really anything except a revenant, some thin, pale spark of his former self dissolving into the ether and half remembering what he had been.
“Oh…god…” He could not tremble. He no longer had a body to tremble with. But there was definitely fear. It permeated every corner of what was left of his mind, saturated every node of the Him.
“We were afraid once, too,” another voice assured him. “But we don’t have to be afraid anymore. You have to accept it. Once you do, we can move forward.”
He said, “Move forward with what?” At least, he thought he said that. He certainly meant to say it. This no-place seemed to transcend words, though.
“We’ve found a way out of here.”
“Out of where? There is no here.”
Another voice spoke up. This one was new, and far calmer and more reasonable than the others. It was the kind of voice that wouldn’t shout to have itself heard, but would rather wait for the others to have blown themselves out, and once all had vented, it would then step in with the truth. “I thought that once, too. I’ve since discovered otherwise. We all have. It took some time—as much as time can be said to be in this non-here—but we all came to accept it.”
“Who…who are you? Who are any of you?”
“Names hardly matter here. I was an officer of the law once. A few of us were gangsters, pedophiles, the kind of people I used to go after. But none of us are those things anymore. None of it matters. Neither does gender or race, creed or faith, now or then. You’ve probably noticed that already. All that matters here is motive. Once you’ve stripped all those identifiers away—male and female, here and then—motive is all we have left.”
“I don’t…I don’t think I…”
“We don’t have much time to explain. All I can tell you is that we’ve found a way out. Or rather, we’ve found something that can take us out. Back to the real world, where I know you want to go. We all do. It’s our motive. Well,” the voice added, “it’s one of them.”
Here came another new voice, this one far more malevolent than the others. “I think you know what the other motive is.”
Of course he did. It was pretty much all he knew. Like the other voice said, once you stripped away all physical and temporal identifiers, all one had left was a motive, a desire. Indeed, he felt that all he was anymore was a single, unwavering desire. “When do we kill him?” he asked.
The others seemed pleased with this. He could sense it. “We have to use the Other. We’re his bridge, between this place and ours. But there’s a catch. We have to join with him. He needs that permission. He requires our acceptance. Understand?” Somehow, it was the only thing Shcherbakov did understand.
“Of course,” he said. “How do we start?”
“We already have.
He was just waiting on a few more. Come closer.” Somehow, he came closer to the other voices, the other others, and though he felt no physical connection to any of them, he did feel something that went far and beyond physicality. “A little closer.” He did as he was told. “Just a little closer.” He did so.
In a flash, he suddenly knew who he was, who he had been, and who all these people were. “Zakhar? Yevgeny, it’s you! Mikhail! Olga? Dmitry? Cousins! Zverev! And you…you’re…” The former law enforcement officer was not familiar to him, and yet Shcherbakov knew him. He knew them all so intimately, their greatest insecurities and their most hidden sexual desires, their habits and their prejudices, their idiosyncrasies and their fears.
As suddenly as he knew them, he didn’t know them at all.
Very soon, there was no him. There was only them. A single mind, going nowhere, existing nowhere. It had been there for ten million eons and for only one second. It had never been there, and it had always been there. Something else merged with them. Or, no, swallowed them. Digested them. All personalities fanned out, becoming a single particle each. A solitary mind formed in a great sea of nothing. This new thing formed and yet never formed.
How is it possible for something to come from nothing? It thought. The answer was immediately obviously. I think, therefore I am. The words of some other person, someone who existed back in that other world.
The solitary mind took in the voices of the others, let them fill its lungs, and rose. It used their voices and souls and essences and thoughts and ideas to find familiar paths. It crossed a great gulf over an uneasy swinging bridge, the rope and wooden planks so old it had become precarious. If the solitary mind was careful, it might just make it across.
Millions of years passed, giving it plenty of time to consider. It weighed the opinions of the many voices it had engulfed, consolidated them all and became them all. It had to, if it wanted to find that passage back.
It took eons to feel how the world worked. It found that Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” that provided mass to all matter. Now, it had the atoms, the foundation for its matter. The next acceptable step was to create the three ingredients for life—that is, life as it was understood in this world—those being energy, water, and raw chemical materials. Known forms of life here used two forms of energy: light and chemical. Plants, algae, and some bacteria used photosynthesis, and were fond of light. Animals were chemically-fueled things.
Raw chemical materials were next. Hydrogen? Check. Carbon? Check. Nitrogen? Check. Oxygen? Check.
Now, it needed only complex proteins and amino acids.
From nothing came something. It had risen until it stood amid fire and dying things. It had gained a biomass, something material to work with. Though, the biomass was seriously malformed, and would need constant work. The two stalks it walked on were uniform, but the top handlers, or arms, were not. One handler was a long, slithering thing, and the other was rather mundane. In a moment, it pulled itself together, tensing its thoughts in concentration the way a biomass might tense its muscles. The body became what it once was.
And then it exploded.
The former body of Yuri Shcherbakov went in every direction, as if he had swallowed a grenade. After the explosion, something else stood where the body had been. The cocoon was gone, the incubator of the mortal coil and its material brain had been dispensed, and the Interloper took its first breath in a new home. The fires burned hotter—its presence was like an accelerant, though its body was cold. Always so cold.
The Interloper was uneasy at first. No longer straddling the line between worlds, it had dispatched its many pieces in order to fit each individual piece through a crevice, had absorbed the minds of others that had lived in this reality so that it could understand how they coped with it, how they identified and oriented themselves with things like gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces, and identity. It culled these forces together, and made itself an object. A creature.
The Interloper coalesced into a kind of shape that this universe tried to understand. A few things were lost in translation, but overall, it had earned its uneasy spot in this reality. Its form and face shifted, it was sometimes male and sometimes female, and occasionally both. Taking a few tentative steps, the Interloper figured out balance. Even as Tsarskiy Penthouses burned and crumbled all around it, it tested its environment. It did so patiently, never rushing.
After all, in this world, not only was their time, but there was plenty of it.
That night, all over Chelyabinsk, there was an increase in reports of strange maladies. In years to come, experts in various medical and scientific fields would come to refer to the series of bizarre events on this night as “the Chelyabinsk Event.”
Women would report waking up in the middle of the night with terrible stomach cramps, dozens of them bleeding profusely from their privates. Two women nearly bled to death before reaching the hospital, which was still covered in police officers searching for a foreign fugitive. What made it even more alarming was the fact that, with most of the women, the men and boys they lived with reported violent, painful orgasms that didn’t stop for hours. Blood came out as ejaculate. One late-night walker came waddling into a hospital holding his reddening crotch, and passed out for four days before waking up.
Many people would report an earthquake. Many others reported hearing whispers, but none of those people had ever suffered from schizophrenia. One healthy young tollbooth attendant and an equally healthy waitress at a late-night diner suddenly went blind, and both of them without any previous symptoms or ocular complications. Some of the more mundane symptoms were just incredibly painful morning sicknesses for various pregnant women throughout the city; although, the fact that it happened to so many in one night, with one woman requiring a C-section, caused some alarm. Also, more than 2,000 people would report having brain-splitting migraines that night, most of them with no previous history of migraines.
Was it something to do with the storm? The water? Pollution had been a worry in the city for more than two decades.
Other phenomena had nothing to do with medical science. A twenty-year-old building collapsed in the business district, for instance, a building that had been built with new innovations and designed specifically for hard Russian winds and winters. Snow and winds alone shouldn’t have done it, and there were no explosions or residue left by fire. It would remain completely unexplained.
A 2003 Toyota Highlander was found driven halfway through the second storey of a high-rise. No one knew how it got there. No one had seen it flung by wind or by crane. Indeed, no crane capable of lifting the vehicle was present for dozens of blocks around.
A woman would be found buried halfway in concrete, as if she’d sunk beneath it like quicksand. Only her right arm and half her face were visible; her arm reaching up, as if for help. This particular oddity would actually open a case; the investigators believed it was some sort of vicious killing, perhaps a message sent by the Mafia. The prevailing theory would be that, somehow, the mob had dug that area of concrete up, poured it full of fresh concrete, then put the woman in it and made her stay in it, perhaps at gunpoint, while the freezing weather somehow snap-froze her in place.
Another woman would be found dismembered and half-eaten, with elongated bloody footprints leading away from her corpse and into a nearby park. Trackers would search for three days and find nothing. The investigators would make plaster moldings of the teeth marks left on the woman’s remains—not a single zoologist would be able to identify the animal they belonged to.
Power went out almost everywhere. The grids went into a tizzy, and no one could trace the source of the problems.
The next day, a meteor entered the atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, moving more than 40,000 miles per hour, and exploding with energy thirty times stronger than the atom bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It injured over a thousand people, and collapsed the roofs of a major factory. This event would eclipse all others in Chelyabinsk that nig
ht, drawing attention away from these other phenomena.
However, some would comment on how it appeared that one massive disturbance or curse had been laid on the city of Chelyabinsk. One litigious priest would get into hot water for suggesting it was punishment to the people of Chelyabinsk, God’s retribution for the people and police turning a blind eye to the problems the city suffered. “It’s our penance,” he would say repeatedly on TV for the following months. “Our penance for exploiting our fellow man, and not helping him. Our penance for suffering no empathy.”
Many similar accounts would be reported in Cartersville, Georgia, on the exact same day that the elementary school burned to the ground, killing two teachers and one custodian. Interestingly, not many people would ever connect the two Events, just a handful of dedicated conspiracy theorists. The closest the two Events would ever come to being connected would be in a book written about the Chelyabinsk Event, where the Cartersville phenomenon would be mentioned in a footnote.
Shannon Dupré and Leon Hulsey would find passage back to the U.S. on a boat. They would get their stories straight, for the real story could never be believed. Shannon would say she had been abducted by members of the vory v zakone, and that would afford her and her mother witness protection—while it would be assumed the vory still had young Kaley Dupré, as well, and that would make news: INVASION OF FOREIGN CRIMINAL SYNDICATES. The story would become a flashpoint, one of those watershed moments like 9/11 that put the word “terrorism” on everybody’s lips. Now, the hot words were “organized crime.”
Leon Hulsey, missing an eye and having had too much darkness disclosed to him, especially after listening to Shannon on their boat ride across the Atlantic, felt his grip on reality slip. He would go home, pack his things, and simply disappear for a while. He was headed to Canada months later, thinking about fishing along the Annapolis River, when his cell phone rang, and he had his first introduction with Detective-Inspector Aurélie Rideau.