by Ryan Schow
And the two creatures doing this to me? They just look at me, each holding a limb, and they wait for me to die. I don’t die.
You pieces of shit, I want to yell about the ceaseless noise, I never die!
My senses, however, are warped, undone; my powers are officially useless. Larger, meatier self-drilling discs are then slapped on the stumps of my arm and leg. An acid-like substance is then poured on my wounds, which catapults me to other dimensions before summersaulting me into some sort of an unconscious state I secretly pray is not me being out cold, but flat f*cking dead.
This memory future me experienced for real, it no longer seems like something I’m witnessing as an observer as much as it feels like something I’m now enduring firsthand. The agony of those days was hers. Now, parts of it are mine as well. The way this memory stamps itself into my mind with such insistence and clarity, like a brand born of intense heat and iron, I wonder how many times my future self has relived it.
Thousands of times, I’m sure.
From inside the metal discs, spinning, drilling, barbed wire snakes violently through my insides ripping and tearing their way to the middle of my body where they entangle themselves in a vicious knot that feels like a razor-sharp fist. Blood and snippets of shorn-off organ meat boil into my future self’s throat. I cough them up from her/my mouth.
Wavering in and out of consciousness, everything weak in me tries to strengthen, to focus enough to stifle this attack. To force those torturous barbs inside of me out, but the uproar of sound blasting directly into my ears from the earbuds keeps me from focusing, from creating the space and silence I need to defend myself.
If I were Superman, those metallic torture devices, those mechanical non-human beasts who have so quickly undone me, they would be my Kryptonite. The way things are unraveling so quickly, how the attack and the shackling of my body is so methodically taking place, while my mind is being ripped and torn apart with brutal expediency, I think I just might understand true madness.
Imagine a thousand fists and feet dipped in resin and broken glass punching and kicking their way around your insides, destroying everything, turning everything into a rich, beaten, non-functioning mush. Now imagine this going on while the heaviest heavy-metal music is cranked full volume in your head. Your body becomes one hundred and ten pounds of squirming, agitated electric eels.
Word of my capture spreads like syphilis, and to everyone’s utter surprise, a resistance forms on my behalf. The normally peaceful people of this century rise up to free me. They amass. They protest. They divide entire segments of the population, and eventually a few select members penetrate the small but heavily guarded holding facility and nearly orchestrate my escape.
Bits and pieces of The Patriarch comes through to me, like a phone line with bad reception, and it says something about me being too dangerous for this time…
….that I must go.
So the holographic metal beings, my jailers, they feed me a marble then override my dashboard and send me back four hundred years in the past where I’m stuffed into a hole, deep in the land that was once known as the Middle East. No worries, though…I am guarded by rapists and well-armed savages. During the transition—and this is maybe only a few seconds—the earbuds fail and I catch a glimpse of my surroundings with my one functioning eye. This is long enough to see my terrain, long enough for me to send a distress signal to Alice.
But only barely.
Alice…
7
With the mightiest and most concentrated of efforts, I plunge back into the mental mire from which the 2015 version of me arrived, pushing out through the wet swill that is my emotional state and future me’s protective moat, then birth myself out of future me’s brain.
Back in Holland’s lab, I’m draped over future me’s body. Wholly spent. Completely done for. And here I thought my life was hard. Ha! I’m back in my body, though. Safe, but queasy. Weakness pervades. My flesh and bone body slips off the gurney holding future me’s unconscious body. How I collapse on the floor and flop over sideways, it’s nothing compared to the rush of bile charging up my throat. In that instant, I feel a bit nostalgic for the pint and a half of puke I chuck on Holland’s floor.
It’s totally gross.
Whatevs.
My body starts to sweat. To shiver. It works to purge itself of the memories I crawled through, but it can’t. Suddenly I’m sobbing, curled on the cold concrete in a fetal position, unable to control the quaking in my body. It’s like the worst fever ever. For a moment, I cannot separate the threads of her from the threads of me, and it’s both claustrophobic and woeful. It’s nausea and dizziness and vertigo all at once. I am her. And it’s like the stain of her life has seeped through to my soul and my existence, and in this moment I cannot make sense of it. I don’t know when I started bawling, but the moment I’d realized what was happening was the same moment I realized I might never stop.
Is this going to be my permanent state? I wonder. Is this an unrecoverable state?
8
Holland rushes into the lab to pick me up; I turn into him, wrap limp arms around this monster and sob into his youthful chest as he carries me upstairs to the couch in the main floor’s lounge.
“What did you see in there that has you so undone?” he asks, concerned. This is not the same man I psychically slapped in the face and sent on his way.
“I…I saw…” I can’t finish. I don’t want to. How do you describe lifetimes of madness? How can you explain hundreds of years of living so violently? So restlessly? How in a sentence or two do you say you lost all your friends, watched yourself become that which you feared and loathed the most, found true love four times and lost all of them before going off the deep end? These are things you feel like an icepick in your chest. These are things you can’t describe. Things you can’t unfeel.
“I saw my entire life,” I manage to say. “I saw you. You condemned me. You condemned us both to an eternity…with this…with your stupid Fountain of Youth serum.”
“The serum is a gift,” he says.
“It’s not,” I say. He brushes my hair back, runs two fingers lovingly across my cheek. Who is this tender man? I wonder. All I can think of is my hostage run into space when I killed the future him and the future me for hundreds of years. “How long was I inside her mind?” I ask.
“Almost three days.”
No wonder I feel so drained. My physical body is depleted. And the strain I feel from being in that prison inside her, the toll it’s taken, it’s immeasurable.
“In the future, I kill you, and me,” I say. “I kill us both. But we don’t die. Ever.”
I close my eyes and see the nightmares. Then I open them. Will I ever sleep again? Not now. Maybe never with these images plowing around inside my head.
“The future is an unwritten book,” he says. He goes to the fridge, pours a glass of water, brings it to me. I don’t trust his smile. Or his generosity. I just look at the glass, unwilling to accept his help.
“It’s not unwritten,” I argue.
“Now that you know what lies ahead,” he says, his tone gentle, congenial, “you can change it. Drink up. You need to hydrate.”
“Can I?” I ask through desperate eyes. “Can I change her past?” He pushes the water my way; again I refuse it.
“If this is how you feel, seeing your future, you must do everything you can to prevent it. Now drink the damn water you stubborn brat.” This is the Holland I know and despise.
I finally accept the water.
“The future world is…criminal…on so many levels,” I say after a long drink. “I thought I could stop it, or change it. I wanted to better it, to make peace, to cement freedom, but I couldn’t. I can’t. It’s too big. The world is too controlled and too destroyed for one person to make a difference.”
“I know,” Holland says. “I was there, remember?” He’s referring to when I entered his mind and took a look around.
“That was so long ago th
at you were there,” I say. I never really knew when he was from, only that he came here in the early nineteen hundreds buck naked in a field where a woman had just killed her eldest child.
“Before I showed up and took Josef Mengele’s DNA, before I was on this time line, I came from another time line. On far into the future, as I’m sure you saw.”
“When?” I ask, giving away the fact that I hadn’t traced him back beyond that day in the field. The truth is, when I was inside his head, I couldn’t bear to trace his history that far back. The feeling of being inside him was a dirtiness so foul it defied description. And even though he’s an open book, his is a book of mayhem, a book of utter insanity. If you could look inside Charles Manson’s head, you would see a righteous, humble man compared to the late, fake Josef Mengele.
“I was born late in the twenty-ninth century,” he finally admits.
For a second, I can’t breathe.
9
My body wants away from him. It cringes and wiggles under the skin. It reels because it holds my future self’s memory of hatred for him. A hatred centuries old. And now that I know him like this, everything bad about him feels so much worse.
Late in the twenty-ninth century?
Serious?
“How many people are here?” I hear myself ask. When I last kicked him out of the lab he said there were thousands of travelers here. I want to know if he was full of crap or being honest. “How many…from the future?”
“Could be ten. Could be ten thousand. I guess it depends on the time from which they came. So to answer your question, I don’t know how many are here. Not for sure.”
“Why did you choose this time? If you’re from the future, then this has to feel like the dark ages to you.”
“I was from California, not the ground version of the state, but the cloud city. Just above what we called Region 1. Where I’m from, there aren’t governments or religion, and there are no police, no military and no world wars. It’s frightfully boring. And for something like me—a sociopath, a sadist, a true and formal repugnance—there is no safe place for me to…be me. No room to stretch my legs, so to speak. So I traveled back in time and stole the genes of a dead boy, applied them to myself and assumed his identity—”
“Mengele,” I say, the feel of being in his memories on that fated day.
“Yes.”
“So you weren’t in Auschwitz?” I ask, interrupting his train of thinking. I already know the answer to this absurd question; some stupid part of me is just hoping maybe he’ll say he’s someone else. As in not him. I’ve seen that part of his life, though. I know who he is, the atrocities he’s committed.
“Oh, I was there alright. And you were correct when you said that Auschwitz was my pièce de résistance. What I had inside me, what I had from my natural birth that grew in me like a psychological tumor—this hunger that spread like a virus to the core of me—was the need to end lives. To maul the innocent. To slice and dissect and understand with my own eyes and instincts what death and mutation and psychological warfare was all about. Forget books and lectures! I dreamt of being in the middle of everything! I still do. Because this is life! Not the future, where our souls rest in air inside a fancy box rather than a body. The body is a privilege! It is a right! And Auschwitz…oh, dear child…Auschwitz was a dream come true. It was my Christmas morning.”
The delight in his voice, that particular shine in his eyes, it makes me so sad to know such a man can exist.
“It was not Christmas for everyone,” I mutter, thinking of the men, women and children he so joyously gassed to death.
“Adolf Hitler gave me a camp. He allowed me my unwilling subjects. Then he looked the other way while I did everything I so mercilessly ached to do. There were no yesses or no’s; there were no oversight committees; and there was no need to obey societal rules or follow any orders but my own.” Animated, lost in the nostalgia of it all, he said, “I was allowed every indulgence! And Hitler…oh, how that man was so brilliant, and so terribly damaged! He wanted this. He wanted me. Do you realize it was because of me that he became obsessed with time travel? Ah, the stories I told him when we were together. They left him feeling enthralled and optimistic, but in the end, they haunted him. All of these things he knew to be possible but couldn’t do himself.”
I remember the Nazi regime constructing something called The Bell. From watching the show, Ancient Aliens, I know Hitler became obsessed with time travel in his later years.
“Did he…escape?” I ask. “This time, I mean?”
A crooked, creepy smile crosses Holland’s face; there’s something vile in his eyes, something that repulses me. “Yes, of course he did.”
“Where is he?”
“Wherever Adolf Hitler is, that’s where he is.”
I sit up on the couch, look him in his eyes. “So you really don’t know where he’s at?”
“After he faked his death and escaped to Argentina, people lost sight of him. Last we spoke, he met a scientist like me, a man on the cutting edge of biology, a doctor who could…do what I do. Who Hitler is now, he could be anyone! He could be you, and only you would know it.”
“Do you even hear yourself?” I ask. “How excited you are about a genocidal maniac?”
He flaps his hand, waving off the subject, then says, “Anyway, after the fall of Germany, after having the taste of that which I swore to preserve—my unwilling subjects—I refused to ever return to my time. The cloud city was so serene, so peaceful, so…just. This world is not. Here, I am in a body, yet unrestrained and unshaken. Here, in this time, in this glorious body, I can create mutations like you and Georgia. I can make all of you just the way I want. For me, genetics is how I’m able to make man in the image of my choosing.”
“Like God?” I ask.
“Exactly,” he says, breathing out the word with a wild, exalted gaze.
Staring at him as he confesses his life’s truths to me, the world tints itself gray beneath my own malevolent stare. My temper shifts, like black roses blooming. My hands become claws as I dream up ways to torture and end him. “You’re one sick, demented fuck,” I all but hiss.
With the sweetest, most appreciative grin, he tilts his head and says, “Controlled insanity is but one of my finer qualities. So thank you for such a gracious complement.”
Bald Headed and Scarred
1
Cameron sloughed off the blankets and crawled out of bed. She stumbled to the bathroom, plopped her bare ass on the toilet seat and peed. Usually her long hair hung down in her face and she had to drape it back to see. Now there was no hair to move, and this made her cry.
Again.
It had been a couple of days since the attack. She stayed in her room sick and was called by an administrator this morning and told to go to the infirmary. Yeah, right, she thought. No way. How the hell would she describe what happened to her without being shipped off to the crazy house? All she wanted was the emptiness of sleep. And to maybe swallow a bottle of pills so that sleep could stretch out forever.
After the attack, for the first few hours of sleep, she fought to wake herself from the nightmare, but it was no nightmare. She was bald headed and scarred, and Raven was some sort of an anti-Christ superhero. The new, very real villain in her mightily shrunken world. She wiped her crotch, pulled up her panties and flushed, then stood before the bathroom mirror feeling every bit the victim she was. She refused to look at her plucked, scabbed head. She couldn’t even meet her own eyes. Instead, she lifted her t-shirt and stared at the scabbed X’s crossing over her pink, once immensely cute nipples. Her heart broke at the sight of her ravaged breasts.
She dropped her shirt, then her head. She fell so hard into a fit of tears, her sobbing became a snot dribbling, wet-faced mess of an affair. She didn’t even want to pull down her panties to see what that bitch did to her abdomen. Cameron was a bully, sure, but to now have to look at that word forever carved into her skin?
Oh, God.
Her tears came harder, as did her desire to take her own life, but suicide was such a chicken-shit way out, and so cliché these days. But what choice did she have? Really? Her bald head was one thing; she could grow hair again, maybe even invent some story in the process about surviving cancer, but her crossed-out nipples? And the word BULLY etched into her? What would she do about that? Never have sex in the light again, that’s what! Never wear a bikini or fall in love. She crawled back in bed, rounded herself into a ball under the covers and blanched at the prospect of having been desecrated so badly.
When she couldn’t feel sorry for herself a minute more, her attention turned to the girls she had teased to death. Patricia Hardy and Kristen Whales. She thought of Kristen’s piano playing, and how Patricia’s father went from raping her to raping other young girls, and then she thought of Kristen and Patricia taking their lives, what they must have felt to do it when all she could do was dream of it. She was a coward. The two girls she drove to suicide, they weren’t cowards as much as they were pushed too far. By her.
I’m wrecked, she thought. And weak. And not nearly as strong as either of them.
How pathetic.
And now she was stuck in her bed until her hair grew out enough to hide the scabs and patches of what she feared would become scar tissue. But could she face Raven? Her stomach plunged. Her body trembling ever so lightly against a hard chill, she thought she would rather meet Satan himself. If she saw the girl again, she just knew she’d shit herself. It was the only natural reaction she could imagine! That’s when a knock at her door startled her. It was almost noon.
Almost lunch time.
Who could be at the door? She waited for them to leave. The knock-knock-knock came again. More insistent. Cameron pulled her head under the covers and decided she would have to move back home. She couldn’t be here anymore. Not at this place. Not with that psycho, Raven, still out there.
Just when she thought the person knocking was gone, the lock on the door unlatched itself and started to open.