"You wouldn't understand it if I told you!" I said and took aim with my forty-five. We had about thirty-seconds before it attacked again, and Sheridan's shells were barely slowing it down. I wanted to test the new rounds Anne gave me, but not with one of these beasts breathing down my neck.
"Stay down!" I called to Sheridan and squeezed off a perfect, center-of-mass shot. Knowing "Atomic" Annie's propensity for overkill, it wouldn't matter where the round hit. The effect was much less dramatic than I had expected: the creature's legs collapsed, and it let out one last scream of agony before its new, half-formed heads dropped limply. After a ten count, I walked up to it slowly, bouncing my aim between the closest head and the bulk of its body.
Sheridan popped his head around the wall, shotgun at the ready. "Is it dead?"
"Can't be, it was never alive," I answered by reflex. "'Nothing dies in the Wastes because nothing there lives.'"
"Yeah? That thing looked pretty damn alive to me," said Sheridan.
"Looks can be deceiving," I said. The body was giving off heat. A lot of heat and getting hotter by the second. Black, oily smoke started pouring out of its more distinct mouths, and greenish steam rolled off the body.
"Xidorn," I said, backpedaling without taking my eyes off the creature. Its skin looked wet, almost molten with growing patches of brownish black.
"Yeah?"
"Get down!" A wave of flames blew past the wall's edge just as I dove for cover. Dark spots danced around the edges of my vision from lack of oxygen as deafening gouts of fire surrounded us. The ground shook and something deep inside my mind screamed …
CRACK
I could feel the shackles slicing through paper-thin skin at my ankles and wrists. Hot blood, thick and syrupy, dripped from the wounds, sizzling as it touched the burning stone I was bound to. The air was hot and stale—filled with the dry, dusty scent of an ancient, desiccated corpse. Chains rattled as my flesh writhed. But it wasn't my flesh. It was familiar, but not mine, just as I was known to it, but the flesh did not accept me. It was a beast—mindless, soulless—its only purpose to breathe, to survive, to escape the pain searing every nerve.
"The host is waking again," said Paige. My/its head snapped to face the sound. It knew her voice, recognized it as one of many tormentors. I could feel its animal brain reflexively reaching into my mind, sifting through my memories, trying to pair that sound with meaning. "Someone inside is linked with it."
"Paige?" we said. It needed to be whole, complete. Yet it fought itself attacking my essence with its own tendrils of coarse, feral thought.
"Someone is in the Wastes," commented Janus's voice, tinny and distant as though he were speaking over an intercom. "The crack has grown several millimeters. Paige, get out of there!"
I tried to speak, but the flesh wanted to scream. Rage, deep and visceral, slammed into my mind and …
SNAP
"Artemas?" Sheridan was standing over me looking annoyed.
I coughed, rolled over and dry heaved thin bile onto the ground. My head hurt, my lungs felt scorched, and the back of my neck felt raw. When I had regained some degree of composure, I peeked around the wall. A slight crater and black scorch marks were all that remained of the creature we'd been fighting.
"How long was I out?" I asked.
"Not long, maybe ten minutes," answered Sheridan. "I haven't seen any more of whatever that thing was."
"You very likely won't. They're usually much smaller and attack in packs of ten to twenty."
"Yeah? Well that's just fine," he said. "Now, where are we?"
"This isn't the time or place to have—"
Sheridan shoved the shotgun's barrel into my gut. "Yeah? You saw the kind of mess this made of that things head? Now where the fuck are we?"
"We're in Pocketville—"
"Don't fuck with me—"
"I'm not!" I snapped back and immediately regretted it as a jackhammer went off inside my head. "There used to be houses all along this street. You don't—can't—remember just like everyone else because the City lost too much of itself. It sealed this place off to protect what was left."
Sheridan backed off, staring at me as if I had sprouted a third arm. "You must have hit your head harder than I thought."
"You don't know the half of it, and you—"
"Wouldn't believe you if you told me. Right," grumbled Sheridan. Finally, he lowered the shotgun barrel. "You're spouting bullshit, but I don't know how to get back. This had better be worth my time, Artemas. What do we do now?"
"Now we walk," I said, pointing to the one house still standing in the Wastes. Her house was about a mile away from the wall where we'd entered, a single solitary structure standing on an empty plain, unchanged in appearance from when I last saw it sixteen years ago.
The sky was starting to turn even nastier than when we first arrived—dark, visibly boiling clouds interspersed with wildly branching purple lightning. "We need to get moving. That blast aggravated the Wastes, and we don't want to be out in the open when the rain comes."
"Afraid you're going to melt?" chided Sheridan.
"Around here …" I left it at that and started walking.
Every step dredged up more memories. In my mind, the homes were still there, filled with peacefully sleeping families, well manicured lawns waiting expectantly for the morning dew. Everywhere another house or another face stared back at me from the past. Not one of them had survived.
Her house—the one still-standing structure—was worse than the empty, cement slabs. It hadn't changed at all—the front yard was as neat and green as it had ever been. With the exception of a shallow crater just outside the front door, there wasn't even a smudge on the white trim around the windows. Everything was as I remembered it, right down to the tightly drawn curtains and broken porch light that held a bright yellow bulb. Thirty paces in any direction and coarse glass embedded with blackened slag formed a ring in the sandy soil. I could still see Ed leveling his sawed-off shotgun at Anne as Ruth rushed toward them—still see the tiny spark as Anne …
"Artemas?" called Sheridan.
I had stopped just outside the glass ring, staring at the crater. A quick glance at the sky told me we were out of time, and I rushed to catch up to Sheridan on the porch.
"Sorry, a disadvantage of my memory," I said. "I get lost in there sometimes."
In sixteen years—almost seventeen—I had been home only once before. That once had been enough. I opened the door and was smacked in the face with stale, dusty air—more the scent of a tomb than a house. All of the windows were covered with thick curtains, even the peephole in the front door had a curtain to cover it. The lone floor lamp still worked, and the living room furniture looked no worse after years of neglect—Ruth built and bought for longevity, and the lamp was one of Anne's.
"I don't like this," said Sheridan, eyeing the room and raising the shotgun to his shoulder. "It looks deserted."
There was a hat rack next to the door that I didn't remember and a bone white fedora with matching jacket adorned it. Ruth must have found a new helper.
"Sheridan, put the weapon away. We're safe here," I said.
"Yeah? Well who put you in charge?"
"I did," said a woman's voice.
Sheridan spun around, shotgun leveled and steady.
Ruth stood in a hallway leading deeper into the house, her dark hair hidden by the low light. She was still wearing the same burgundy pant suit she had worn the last time I saw her. "And if you have a problem with that, you will be leaving very shortly."
"Listen lady," he said, lowering the shotgun, "I'm a police lieutenant. See, I even have this shiny badge as proof, and I've had it up to here with people who don't give a damn! So you had better—"
"Lady? Do you see a Lady here?" she interrupted, "My name is Ruth, and you will use it when speaking to me or—"
"Dear, why don't you introduce me to our guests?" said a man's voice. He stepped from behind Ruth, resting a pale hand on her shoulder. One
look, one glimpse of his pristine, white suit and his face was all it took. Time seemed to slow down as I drew my pistol and fired with deadly accuracy.
Except the pistol wasn't pointed at the Man in White anymore, and there was a strange woman next to me. I found myself standing precariously on tip—toes with my body twisted around to face one of the windows. My arm hurt. The woman's hand was clamped around it like a vice—her face blank, without eyes, a small bump where there should have been a nose and a thin line for a mouth. The mouth moved, trying to say something, but my ears were still ringing from the shot. Then I saw the broken glass and the wide open curtain.
"The window!" I yelled, but it was already too late. Where the glass was still whole, I could see the yard and darkening sky filled with wildly branching lightning, but through the broken pane lay a writhing, twisting void. Indistinct, human-like shapes floated there, aimlessly moving through nothingness as they faded in and out of sight. One of them spotted us and rushed for the tiny opening. It pushed its head through a hole scarcely six inches across and kept on coming—forcing more and more of its malleable form into the house. Empty eye sockets and a mouth lined with long, needle-like teeth opened into a boiling well of darkness. It wailed in desperation—sounds filled with longing and pain that wormed their way into my psyche.
I realized that it was a she, or had been in some past life. Now she was little more than a translucent shadow—a shade, indistinct and wispy. I knew her kind well from the Archive, there would be nothing left of her mind but ragged wounds and a memory of what she had lost. Her kind yearned to be whole again; simply touching anything of flesh would feed their hunger but never satiate it.
Sheridan was staring at the creature, slack-jawed and unmoving, his shotgun forgotten. Lee's words came back to me. "I was touched by the fleshless soul. It changed me. Yes, it changed me." I didn't want to think of what would happen if that thing touched him.
The faceless woman's unyielding grip was the only thing keeping me from falling over. Even if I were standing on my own, I couldn't move fast enough to get Sheridan out of harm's way.
"Get back!" I screamed, just as deaf from the creature's voice as my pistol shot. Its arms were flailing randomly, trying to grab hold of anything that it could use for leverage.
"Xidorn! Get away from it!" I yelled one last time as the faceless woman let go, and I lost my balance.
The faceless woman was fast. At least as fast as Paige, maybe even as fast as Ruth, back when she could have boasted about such things. Sheridan was across the room, back against the wall, and disarmed before I hit the floor. Our uninvited shade swung its arm impotently through the space Sheridan's body had just occupied and wailed in frustration. I cursed myself for being stupid enough to take a wild shot, even at the Man in White. Firearms were worse than useless in this situation—another bullet would only open the hole wider.
A second form started trying to force its way through the broken window, pinching the first intruder's waist into one corner of the tiny pane. In seconds, more arms and hands were wedging their way into the mass of translucent limbs. They kept coming, piling up outside the hole-like panicked herd animals against a fence—pushing and reaching frantically but never quite making it through. Wails of longing and hunger became screams filled with pain and fear as the female shade was crowded out. Her kind were too insubstantial—even in numbers of thousands—to widen the gap on their own, but not malleable enough to fit into an ever shrinking wedge of the broken glass. One final scream and the top half of her body solidified, dropping away from the window. She hit the floor with a wet thud—thick, ropey cords of intestine pouring out of her severed abdominal cavity. Greenish fluid splattered onto the wall after each ragged breath as her body spasmed in pain. The shade held up a hand—her strength all but gone—reaching out for someone, anyone to help her, even just to touch her.
"Stay back!" I yelled one more time, slowly climbing back to my feet. "One touch and you've had it!"
"It's alright. This child won't be any more, trouble and the rest of them won't stop fighting each other long enough to get inside," said Ruth, shaking her head. "Candice, please draw the curtains and see to our uninvited guest? That should keep out anymore unwanted arrivals until the glass reforms. You two, sit your asses down before I have Candice here administer a lesson in humility. Really Zachary, you should know better than to pull a weapon in this house."
"Candice?" Sheridan asked. "Does she have a last name?"
I looked at him sharply for a moment, but said nothing.
"No more than any creature in this place," answered Ruth. "She was pulled from the Void only a short while ago. Do you think you knew her?"
Candice closed the heavy curtains over the reaching arms of the shades, carefully avoiding coming into contact with them while we spoke. With their view into the house closed off, their wails disappeared almost as quickly as a they had started.
"Maybe," answered Sheridan. "I knew a Candice Aberdeen." He watched the creature for any signs she recognized the name and shrugged at her lack of response.
"It wouldn't matter," continued Ruth. "A trip through the Void leaches away the mind and memories too fast for much of her personality to be left."
"The Void? What are you—" he started to say.
"The Void is death here. At least for your kind," said Ruth, cutting him off. "Now quiet!"
Candice turned to the injured female shade on the ground and sighed. Candice's face could hold no expression—it didn't have the needed physical features—and yet there was no doubt in my mind she had pity for the creature at her feet. She took the shade's outstretched hand and shuddered as their flesh melded into a thick, boneless cord. The shade's eyes went wide as the cord bulged—flesh flowing from her broken body into Candice's as though they were attached by a cartoon straw. The shade tried to pull away, fighting with what little strength was left in her body, but it was already too late. Her free hand grabbed a leg of the coffee table mere moments before it receded into her wrist and then into the stump of an arm. Every part of the shade's body collapsed in on itself until all that remained was her face and a quickly shrinking neck at the end of Candice's arm. The shade's eyes were wider than possible with a purely physical body, and her mouth open in a silent scream as the last of her flesh disappeared into Candice's palm.
The creature Ruth had named Candice touched its own face, feeling the subtle changes that went along with absorbing the shade's essence. Its thin line of a mouth had been replaced by a pair of human—decidedly female—lips. She now had a nose—a little reminiscent of the shade's—where only a small bump had been moments before. Even the shade's bone structure had blended into the Candice-thing's smooth skull.
"How do you feel?" asked Ruth, watching the Candice-thing carefully. There was always the question of who had eaten whom when one of these creatures finished a meal.
"I am… We are fine, Mrs. Tekcop," it said, struggling to find an appropriate pronoun.
One body and the tortured remains of two shattered minds—only a few such combinations could survive without one of the minds forcing the other into submission. I'd seen it done before, and the results were never pretty—usually the more distorted and disturbed the mind, the more likely it was to come out on top.
"You see? I told you it wouldn't be that bad," said Ruth, frowning. "Now, what is your name, dear?"
It tried to speak, but its mouth contorted around the sounds as if it were stuffed full of bouncing balls. "Can… Beth… "
"Your name is Candice," Ruth said, over enunciating the word. "I think everything is under control here." She flashed me a stern look—her eyes obsidian spheres. "You've joined with your first shade, Candice. It will take time to come to terms with your combined identity. Why don't you go upstairs and meditate for a while. It will help you focus."
The Candice-thing nodded, glanced one last time at the window, and disappeared down the hallway. I looked hard at my pistol, considering what to do next, then holste
red it. It wasn't the time or the place to settle old scores—even if I had the right tools, which my pistol obviously wasn't. Sheridan was rubbing the back of his head and examining his shotgun—the Candice-thing had left it intact with the exception of a small scuff on the stock.
"What the hell is he doing here?" I demanded, nodding at the Man in White.
"He's my guest," answered Ruth. "And you have no right to question who your mother lets visit."
"Wait a minute," interrupted Sheridan. "She's your mother?"
"You don't know the half of it," I said. "Ruth, do you know what Dad would do if he saw that man here? He'd tear you apart!"
"You know as well as I do that he wouldn't," laughed Ruth. She walked through the couch and sat down, floating just above the cushions. "The only thing he could do is break 'our' anchor, and you're too valuable for Janus to even think about putting you in jeopardy. He'd sacrifice me this instant, if there was a chance of saving you, but Janus would never sacrifice you."
I dropped into a recliner—the same one that I remember Janus using when he visited more frequently, back before the Wastes. I knew there was a tiny ball of cells deep inside a statue somewhere that bound Ruth and I together, and destroying one of us meant destroying the other. I started to say something, to tell Ruth she was wrong, that he loved her very much—anything to contradict what she'd just suggested—but I couldn't find the words. Maybe it was true—maybe Janus would sacrifice her to save me. Not that it mattered in the end, she was already little more than a ghost anyhow—deceased for all intents and purposes. Even when she was still flesh and blood, if Ruth had tried to leave Pocketville it would have been the end of me. If I found a way out now, her wraith-like existence would come to an end as well. Janus was a bastard, but I couldn't believe he was that much of a monster.
"Artemas, Artemas, Artemas… You really have no idea what's going on do you?" stated the Man in White, taking his fedora and jacket from the coat rack. "I'm glad we could finally meet face-to-face."
"If we were anywhere else, you'd be a dead man," I said, my right hand just itching to throttle him.
The Erasable Man: Chronicles of Zachary Artemas Page 13