by Ryan Schow
Pointing my hand to one of the lab tables, specifically a big glass beaker with some bluish liquid inside of it, I raise my hand and lift it in the air three feet. Orianna and my father, they both gasp. Using my mind, I levitate it toward the five of us, but not closer than ten feet. Using my mind, I make it hover in the air for only a second or two before exploding it.
Glass and liquid bloom everywhere, but I stop it all in the air and it looks like some giant, blue flower. It’s completely suspended and beautiful, at least five feet around now.
Using my mind, I draw all the liquid back into a single hovering ball. They can’t decide whether to be impressed or terrified. After a moment, with my concentration so heavy my own eyes have turned black—like Georgia’s—I gather all the broken glass to the center of the room and form a perfect beaker around the blue liquid until it’s like the thing never exploded in the first place.
My father’s mind errs on the side of terrified; Orianna’s mind is not making sense of this and I run the risk of driving her to madness when she realizes what I’m becoming. And Georgia and Alice? Both are seriously impressed, which doesn’t mean shit to me right now. Maybe if I hadn’t seen what I become I would be excited, too, but my sentiments are on par with my father’s.
I’m fairly well horrified.
Still focused, I send the now whole beaker back to its original spot, set it down, then look at all of them and say, “I have this gift, but I don’t want it.”
Orianna starts to cry again. She’s getting it. Then she gives Christian the merest look that is just a blank stare to him, but worlds of animosity to her. She hates that this is Christian’s fault. I want to tell her she’s not wrong, but I’d be lying. This isn’t all his fault.
I say, “You can’t lay all this on him, mom. Yes, I’m mad at him, too, but it’s not all him. This is where we’re going as a species. Where genetics is eventually shuttling us all. In the future, we will be a heavily modified progeny. In the future, bodies will be interchangeable, disposable.”
“How is that possible?” she says, wiping her eyes.
“All the things you think are not possible now, they are already in the works. And everything impossible in this time will not be impossible a short time from now. You can’t rationalize how this could be, I know, but trust me, it is.”
“You’ve seen this?” my father asks me.
Alice says, “Both of us have.” My parents still don’t seem to get Alice’s role in all this. That she is a traveler seems to be lost on them.
“Eight hundred years in the future,” I say, “you will acquire bodies like you acquire a wardrobe, or furniture, like you buy a house. We are at the start of that, Georgia and I, Alice. All of us here. And this school, it’s preparing us for a future ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of the population can’t possibly imagine, let alone understand.”
“So you know the future?” Orianna asks. She’s looking between me and Alice, and she’s got her head in a twist over what I’m saying. She wants to know about Alice, but she is afraid to ask. Not that I blame her.
“Not all of it. Only the parts I can’t forget. It’s the stuff of nightmares, mom. But don’t worry, you will be dead before the really bad shit happens,” I say, thinking about Christian being killed and my mother killing herself in a head-on collision. Looking at Georgia, my guardian angel, I say, “Even you, Georgia.” She fears she might be immortal, but she isn’t. She’s resilient, but still human. Still capable of insanity. Still killable.
“So you can’t die either?” Orianna asks Alice, her eyes still swimming.
“No.”
“That motherfu—” Christian starts, his head pumped full of virulence for Gerhard.
“Gerhard’s serum saved my life in the first place, dad. I’d be dead without it. I would be dead several times over. So try not to despise him for that.”
In her head, Orianna is unraveling, blaming my father for having done this to me, disparaging herself for not being able to accept me as her daughter—the hideous, fat Savannah version—and she’s not sure how to process this. She craves the relief alcohol can bring her; she aches to drown away her fears, or numb herself with drugs.
But no, she thinks. Not anymore.
If I started to worry about her relapsing before, I don’t worry now. Her willpower, her desire to stay present is more powerful than her addictions, which is the biggest surprise of all considering how fast she will fall into her old ways when my father is murdered.
“Best to face this sober,” I tell my mother, echoing her thoughts.
“It doesn’t feel like it,” she says, wiping her eyes.
“This body is not an addict, mom, but your mind carries over the shadows of it, and a little of the hunger. You won’t feed it. I know this, and this is why I want you in my life.”
She looks over at the hacked-apart body in the tank and says, “So you know the future…because of her? That’s really you?”
“Yes.”
“Can you, I mean, if that’s you,” Georgia finally says, “can you, I don’t know, can you somehow influence the future? Maybe not be her?”
“I’ve been inside my head, her head, and she only wants one thing. She wants me to kill her. To kill me.”
Toilet Bound, Stepped-on Cockroach
1
Netty was walking down the street with groceries when she was approached by a curious looking boy with shadowy silver eyes and a thick, northbound twist of hair. He crossed the street, stopped right in front of her. Strange, she thought. This is the city, though. In San Francisco, wierdos multiply like a pack of sex-starved rabbits. They’re like a freaking infestation.
“Hi,” he said, his expression surprisingly disarming.
She stopped, so mesmerized by how normal sounding and forward he was. “Hello, I guess,” she said.
“You have an interesting look.”
He was smiling that disarming smile. Maybe he was going to try to sell her drugs, or give her a flier to an Indy concert. On closer inspection, she saw his eyes and gasped.
“Are your eyes really silver?” she asked, hypnotized by them. She was studying them the way you study rare coins, or gaze at the many ways light reflects off a diamond.
“It’s a genetic anomaly,” he replied. “My father learned of some of my irregularities prior to birth, yet he decided not to terminate me early.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” she said, thinking of ten ways to escape this clumsy conversation. She was but a block from her house and already she was looking around to make sure people saw her in his company, in case she needed to make a run for it. In case she needed witnesses.
His expression changed. How odd, she thought. For a second, he looked…inhuman.
“The expectant parent is an interesting thing, no?” he said.
She didn’t say anything because the shock of that one sentence left her throat feeling stuffed full of cotton. Her stomach wasn’t sticking out, so she couldn’t help wondering, does he know? Is this why he’s talking to me? Then she thought: get a hold of yourself, Netty, he doesn’t know. That’s just crazy thinking he would!
“I need to go,” she said, trying to leave. Her throat felt so dry.
He blocked her path.
“One minute you have life inside you,” he said, “and then the next minute you don’t.”
“What?” she said. “Get out of my way.”
“Tell me where she is,” he said, insistent, “and I’ll happily move.”
“Who are you referring to?”
He tilted his head down, made his eyes into slits. He didn’t take them off her for a good ten seconds. And then he grinned, like Netty should know exactly what he was talking about.
“Raven.”
“I don’t know a Raven,” she lied, her mind now spinning, wondering what he wanted with Raven.
“Black hair, solid build for a skinny girl, amethyst eyes and…exceptional in her abilities.”
“I wish
I could help you,” she said, dispassionately, “but I can’t.”
“You have life inside you. Is it as wondrous as death inside you?”
It’s like time just stopped. He knew. How did he know?! She barely had time to consider the possibilities when she was rocked by an horrific pain low in her stomach.
“How does life feel now that’s it’s death, Anetka?”
The cramps hammered her immediately. Then she felt things shifting down through her. It was like something was trying to claw its way out of her. Blood drained into her underwear, and her knees all but buckled.
It’s the boy, she thought. This goddamn freak. He was bent over, face aimed at her crotch. He was bent over and sniffing the slightly tinged, coppery scent in the air while saying words like amazing and titillating.
The groceries fell from her hands, spilling their contents on the San Francisco sidewalk. Netty dropped to her knees, shoved him away when he got too close, and that’s when he said, “You need to tell me where your friend Raven is. Right now.” There wasn’t an ounce of kindness or humor in his voice. His tone drove an icy chill down the center of her spine.
“She’s not my friend,” Netty managed to say. “I just know her from karate.”
“Unless you want me to make you shit out the rest of your insides along with that bastard child of yours, specifics would be wonderful.”
Netty looked up at him, her face stricken with terror. She was swept into the gravity of his silver gaze. Her willpower waning, she wanted only to melt into the atmosphere of him, as if she couldn’t run far enough from him. Then his eyes swiveled unnaturally, ever so slightly in his sockets, and her insides swayed with revulsion. Whatever he was, he was making it hard to think. To not submit.
“What…are you?”
“I’m God,” he said, drawing the word God out.
“If you were God, you wouldn’t need me. You’d already know where she is.”
2
The demented boy’s silver eyes started to tremble and that’s when a nice older man with a plastic crap-collecting bag and a white curly-haired mutt tried to drag the boy with the preposterous hair away from her.
“Step back, son, can’t you see she’s hurt?” he said. His face was a thousand wrinkles. It was white stubble and wet eyes. It was dentures and a hearing aid and teeth that could use a cleaning and two rounds of bleach.
The youngish boy spun his head around the same way that a creepy clown twists his head around with a wicked grin before killing you. The old man looked at the boy with the flame-twist of hair on his head, then it was like a fist-sized hole in the fabric of time opened up and started to suck at him with an unrelenting force. Netty didn’t understand what she was seeing. She blinked a lot. Fought not to throw up from the cramps, from the poisonous feeling in her belly, from the irrationality of this situation.
The old man’s body shook and shivered; his eyes shot wide and his jaw went slack, then the pain set in and it was like in the sci-fi spaceship movies, where a small hole in the spaceship grabs and starts to eat at your giant body—pulling it violently and mercilessly through a hole the size of a baseball. The Good-Samaritan’s face was screaming and thrashing, it was a bone crushing, folding, crumpling of the skull; yet not a single sound erupted from the man’s shot-open mouth.
The sounds Netty did hear, however, were awful: sucked skin, snapped-in-half bones, collapsed ribs, the squishing, grating sounds of organs being pulped and deflated, ripped open, twisted and grinded into a stringy mush-like substance that leaked mid-air like a wrung towel directly onto the sidewalk.
The dog was hunkered down, barking in fits, but even his voice was silence. He was a TV dog with the sound turned all the way off. When the last of the elderly man was chewed up and swallowed into…wherever the hole in the universe led to, the dog tried to attack the boy’s leg.
Instead of sending the mutt into the impossible hole in the world, the boy lifted his leg high into the air and stomped it down so hard on the dog, its back broke in two and the thing just sort of gave up, blood dribbling from its white, mewling mouth.
Netty looked down in horror, blood now spreading like a rose through the fabric of her light blue jeans.
Behind the boy was a young woman in workout clothes and running shoes who literally stopped in her tracks. The boy’s face was still smiling, like he had gone off the rails. He was a soulless creeper. Totally inhuman. He spun, lifted his hand toward the girl, and her eyeballs literally rotted in seconds.
She couldn’t breathe—the girl—as her knees knocked and buckled; her hands didn’t know what to do with her blackening, crispifying eyes. When she drew in a breath and screamed, it seemed louder than ever, impossible. She just stood there, hands before her face, shrieking.
The boy turned back to Netty, and at the same time the athletic woman went to pieces. At his feet, the dog lie broken, sitting next to an ever-expanding pool of bloody, wrung out Good-Samaritan meat-sauce no wider than a beach ball. The blood and gristle was soaking into the pits and cracks of the San Francisco sidewalk. Another strange piece of Bay Area history being made.
“What did you do?” Netty asked, mortified, barely able to catch her breath.
“I do whatever it is I want to do,” he answered. “Where is she?—Raven? Tell me now.”
“I…I don’t know. Please—” she said, holding her stomach because the pain of miscarrying was excruciating. She was afraid the smell of the dead dog and the disemboweled juices of the disappeared man would make her puke. Realization hit her. The boy knew she had a baby and he was taking it from her. “You’re doing this, to my belly, to my baby, aren’t you?”
He snapped his fingers in her face, loudly, purposefully. Then: “I already said I was.”
“Why?”
“Kids are an unnecessary burden,” he seethed.
“I want this one,” she cried.
“Too late,” he said hunkering over her with a hard, ice cold gaze. “It’s dead. Squashed the same as a cockroach gets squashed underfoot.”
“My baby is not an unnecessary burden, and it’s not a cockroach!” she said in a strangled, hostile tone that held every single ounce of her pain.
“Yet it’s dead. And its untimely passing is a burden that brings you pain. When you shit it out of your vagina, though, just know it will look almost the same in the toilet as a cockroach you scraped off your shoe directly into the bowl.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I merely want what I want, and if you give it to me, I won’t kill you. I will however, make your passing more difficult than you can imagine should you fail to tell me where she is.”
If it was anything like what she saw the old man go through, she wanted no part of it. “I last saw her at my dojo.” She gave him the dojo’s address, hoping to God her sensei had the skill set to resist this maniacal boy where she could not.
Bent over her, sneering, he said, “If you’re lying, I’ll be back to break you the same as I broke this furry nuisance.” And with that, he picked up the dog, hurled it sideways at the house beside them, but the dog never hit anything; its corpse just went into…nowhere.
Out of sight, mid-air.
She turned back to the boy. He too, was gone. Walking across the street, ignoring everyone’s accusatory stares. The people who saw what she had seen, they weren’t enraged. They were terrified. Mistrusting of the things their eyes showed them, not wanting any part of this awful scene. She lifted herself up, walked home on wobbly knees, miscarried things into the toilet and tried not to think of the now dead baby that was hers and Brayden’s as a stepped-on cockroach.
A Sprinkling of the Truth
1
That night, around eleven, Brayden got the text from Constance, who asked for his dorm room number. Honestly, the way his life was going (and her being so damn hot), he didn’t expect her to text him. His heart kicked a little harder in his chest at the thought of her. While he was marveling at his good luck, another
text hopped on top of the last one.
It read: U CAN STILL DO ME, BUT I NEED A RIDE BACK HOME. STILL WANT TO DO U.
The way he was feeling, it could only be described as sick with lust. With trembling fingers, he text her directions to his dorm, along with his floor and room number. She sent another text telling him she was on her way, and then another still.
It read: JULIE KICKED US OUT. EMERY WANTS TO GO HOME. HE’S PISSED. THEY GOT INTO THE WORST FIGHT EVER. LOL. GOTTA LUV FAMILY.
He tried calling Raven again, but she wasn’t picking up. Or she wasn’t using the phone number she gave him. He was so happy when he learned she was alive, that she wasn’t the other Abby. But she had changed. Changed in ways he didn’t like. She made him nervous now. Uncomfortable. Like she had become this hostile creature who managed to lose her connection with humanity. She felt detached in so many ways. Sadly, he felt detached, too.
He finally gave up trying to reach Raven about the time a little fist started rapping on his door. Constance. Even before he opened the door, he knew he wouldn’t have sex with her. What was he thinking talking to her the way he did that afternoon? What was he thinking kissing her? And those lips. God they were impossibly soft! This wasn’t Vegas, though. He liked Julie, didn’t he? He did. For some inane reason, he was feeling like he really liked her and this gave him pause.
He opened the door and there she was, looking every bit as sexy as when he first saw her. She breezed right in and he smelled the scent of her hair, and the light dusting of her perfume. It took him back to her kiss. Back to the way she grabbed him and said she wanted to—
“Are you going to offer me anything to drink?” she said, looking the place over. “God, this is a carbon copy of her place. This whole campus, it’s a cookie-cutter high rise, isn’t it?”
“This is the kind of housing a six-figure semester will buy you,” he replied. “What can I get you to drink?”