Static Mayhem

by Edward Aubry

  It pointed to another flayed human being.

  "May 18, 1980," It said. "Mount St. Helens eruption. This one generated heat. He could melt steel at distances in excess of two hundred feet."

  Harrison could see where this was going. There were plenty of empty hooks left on the wall.

  "Do you know why I'm telling you this?" It asked him.

  Harrison stared at the tortured humans. Their lives were over. At least two of them were younger than he was, possibly they all were. "To frighten me," he said.

  It nodded. "That's right. You'll be up there soon enough. Are you frightened?"

  He didn't want to give It the satisfaction of an answer. At the same time, he considered that a pathetic denial might give It even more satisfaction. "Yes," he said simply.

  Ru'opihm looked him over. "You don't look afraid."

  Harrison was not sure if he was being baited. He also had no idea what he looked like. Maybe he did not look afraid. He hardly saw what difference how he looked would make. We've lost. Whatever happens now, the bomb's a complete wash. Eventually, this thing, this evil being, would destroy the world and everyone on it, and he had blown the last chance to do anything about it. And all on a foolhardy rescue attempt. The fact of Harrison's inevitable torture and death paled next to his failure to rescue Glimmer. He also regretted dragging Hadley into this and hoped the physicist's death would be quick, at least. He looked at Glimmer. She had wilted.

  "What are you going to do with her?" he heard himself ask. He knew that his devotion to her had destroyed every living creature on Earth. But he had to know what was to become of her.

  Ru'opihm turned to gaze at the pixie. She wouldn't look at It. "She's uncommon," It said. "Quite powerful. I've never seen anything like her. She resembles a pixie, and yet …" It trailed off.

  What? She resembles a pixie because she is a pixie. This banter was pushing at the limits of Harrison's frustration. Still, as he looked at her, defeated, pitiable, he still found himself in awe of her. Despite himself, he agreed with his adversary. "She is singular," he said aloud, then bit his tongue. He would not play into this discussion. Not with what he was sure was coming.

  As Ru'opihm raised one of Scott's eyebrows, Harrison wondered if there was anything of Scott left in the shell. Had he sacrificed his consciousness for the greater evil? Was there some kind of sick symbiosis at work here? "An interesting turn of phrase," It said. "She is many, many remarkable things, but singular she is not."

  More damn riddles. Harrison inwardly growled at the stupidity of the conversation. To what end would this thing pursue that idea? She's the last pixie. I'm sure of that. If Ru'opihm was trying to instill some bizarre hope that there were more of her kind out there, It was wasting Its time.

  "You haven't answered my question," he said. The evil being had no obligation to do so, of course, but Harrison was curious about how it would react.

  "Indeed not," It said. "All right, then. She is to be My avatar. I have never encountered a fey creature capable of sustaining the transformation long enough to suit any long-range purpose. Nor any capable of sustaining My awareness. I believe this one can."

  Harrison felt himself becoming nauseated. She was going to become one of those tiny little perverted spies. Nothing of her would actually survive the process. Nothing except her power, apparently, which he was now hearing for the first time was unusually great. Dizzy with grief, he put one arm on a table for support. As he did, the man in the lab coat, whom Ru'opihm had called Hauptmann, moved closer to Glimmer's cage. Harrison drew Bess and extended the blade. No one would lay a hand on Glimmer while he lived to stop them. Hauptmann stopped moving and looked at Ru'opihm.

  It wore no expression on Scott's face. It seemed completely uninterested in anything that was happening here.

  Harrison experimented. "You're not what I expected," he said.

  "You were expecting a monster, perhaps?" Scott's voice asked. "A giant devil? Horns? Hooves? Something less anthropomorphic? A giant spider, perhaps?" It seemed very mildly amused. Harrison's expectations were clearly not a major concern.

  Harrison shook his head. He swallowed. "I wasn't expecting you to be so petty." It was a twisted gamble. He wondered if he could provoke some kind of carelessness. He knew his situation could not be worse. He hoped randomizing it might accidentally improve it.

  Ru'opihm shrugged. "Pettiness is an evil quality," It said.

  Damn, thought Harrison. Imperturbable. He tried again. "What are you making downstairs? You know, the factory with the big disgusting heart thing."

  Ru'opihm did not react, but Hauptmann suddenly tensed and whirled to look at It.

  So. I struck a nerve somewhere, at least.

  Ru'opihm raised Scott's hand. "It's all right," It said to Its subordinate. "It makes no difference what he knows. He can dream of Our weapons while he hangs on his hook." Scott's eyes bored into Harrison's. "Would you like to see one? They're quite snappy."

  Harrison's heart went cold at the mention of weapons. The only reason for him to be shown these at all would be to increase his horror. He didn't feel it needed any further embellishment.

  Ru'opihm walked to a cabinet and pulled the door open. Inside was a small case, about the size of a shopping bag, which he removed and opened. It contained an object similar, but not identical, to the ones he had seen rolling off the production. This one looked a little bigger; Ru'opihm had to use both of Scott's hands to hold it. It was bulky and wide, but as Scott's hands curled around the grips, Harrison recognized it as some sort of gun. He hadn't seen one in well over a year. The old man had been trying to eliminate violence in the world when he set off his ill-conceived static mayhem bomb. One side effect (which he had hoped would be the main effect) was that all conventional guns had disappeared, and it would be impossible to recreate them. Somehow, certain properties of the nonmagical world had changed, ever so slightly. One of these was that gunpowder no longer exploded. Its one useful function had been completely neutralized.

  Apparently Ru'opihm had shown Scott's people a way around that obstacle.

  "This is the prototype," said Scott's voice. "Not as efficient as the ones rolling off the machines downstairs, but you'll get the idea. Let me show you how it works," It said. It pointed the weapon at one of the people on the wall. The first one, Jonestown Massacre. The gun made a series of little whooshing sounds, like an entire classroom full of children, all spitting at once.

  Her left arm exploded. Fragments of muscle and bone showered out in every direction, landing as far away as ten feet. She gasped. Harrison imagined that she had long since lost the capacity to scream.

  Ru'opihm casually lowered the weapon. "I bet that smarts," It said, looking at the woman's ragged stump. The arm was not bleeding. Whatever was keeping her alive had already closed off her blood vessels.

  Ru'opihm strolled to a lab table situated close to her. It was spattered with gore. Scott's hand picked up a chunk about the size of Scott's little finger. There was a sliver of metal lodged in it, and the fingers of Scott's other hand carefully plucked it out. "They sling these," It said, holding the sliver up for Harrison to see. "They're basically razor blades, several hundred rounds per second, at many times the velocity of an ordinary rifle bullet." It put a morsel of flesh into Scott's mouth. As it chewed, it dragged Scott's finger, almost absent-mindedly, through the slick carnage on the table. "Pack quite a wallop, don't they?"

  Harrison was wondering if he was anywhere near being numb to this horror yet.

  "The best part is," Ru'opihm added, taking a second to swallow, "the blades are magically propelled and replenished. The guns never run out of ammo, and they never jam. They don't even get warm." It touched a keypad on the side of the weapon. "It has other settings, too. Watch this." Scott's arm pointed the gun at Harrison.

  He had assumed that Ru'opihm would drag this out longer. Suddenly he wasn't ready to die.

  He heard nothing, not even the whoosh he had heard before, but he felt a sound.
It was a tiny plink. It reminded him of the time he chipped a tooth on a metal fork. The sound and the sensation shivered throughout his body, a grating aggravation. Then the pain caught up with the sound. A white-hot spike of pain in his left shoulder. He gasped, and looked at it. There was a tiny slit in his sleeve, from which blood was oozing slowly. Somewhere in the depths of his brain, he registered that a single one of those blades had been fired through him. At that speed, even one was capable of unspeakable damage. He put his hand on his arm and shrieked. When he turned his head, he could see a larger bloodstain spreading around the back of his shoulder, and his arm and chest were already beginning to swell. He could feel countless bone fragments scraping against each other and poking into tissue inside that corner of his torso. Clavicle. Scapula. Humerus. The words raced back to him from high school biology.

  Ru'opihm turned to Hadley, still sitting on the floor. "Would you like one, too?" It asked

  Again, Harrison heard nothing. There wasn't even much to see. One second, Hadley was pressing his hands to his bloody temples. The next, his eyes had gone wide and one hand moved from his head to his neck. Then both hands fell gracelessly to his lap. His eyes stayed open wide. All this took far less time than it took for Harrison to scream. He thought he could see Hadley's throat starting to swell. It occurred to Harrison that dead tissue does not swell. Then he realized that he wasn't seeing Hadley's throat swell, he was feeling his own throat constrict. He had wished Hadley a quick death. He wished now that he had wished for something else.

  Ru'opihm set the weapon back in its case. "Until today," Scott's voice said, "we were planning to use them in a large scale attack on New Chicago. It would have been delightfully entertaining. Your people are so entrenched in the notion that magic and science are incompatible, they never would have seen these coming. That's more or less moot, now, though."

  It stared at Harrison, probably to see if he could guess why. He didn't dare.

  "I received the most thoughtful gift today," It said. "A bomb, of sorts. Someone seems to have put a lot of work into it. It turns out that it's just the thing I need to finish a little project I'm working on. I must say, Harrison, I didn't give you and your group nearly enough credit for resourcefulness. My own people never thought to set off a second bomb to shatter the barrier." It gave Hauptmann an unkind look. "If I'd had My own avatar, I'd have unraveled what you were doing from the start. Ah, well." He looked at Glimmer. "Soon enough. At any rate, first thing tomorrow, I'm putting your beautiful bomb on a boat and taking it to New York City."

  Harrison hit bottom. Not only had he lost, but now no one would ever have a second chance. He had delivered the very means by which to destroy the world forever. Titania had told him that setting off the counterbomb in New York would restore everything back to way it had been before last May. Immediately after that, the stress it would create would rip apart the barrier between his world and hers, destroying both worlds and freeing Ru'opihm. He almost wondered how It would amuse Itself with no one left to torture, but that no longer mattered. Besides, it was a big universe.

  "Still," said Ru'opihm, "a side trip to Chicago would probably be worth taking the extra time. No rush, I would think. I have a few loose ends to tie up before I use My gift, anyway. Probably spend the next few months trying out My other toys first." It tilted Scott's head, studying Harrison through slitted eyes. "You're probably picturing these things," Scott's hand lifted the blade again, "slicing right through your pretty girlfriend."

  He had not been, but when he heard this, he couldn't help it. The left half of his body was throbbing. The image of Apryl suffering a similar wound forced itself to the top of his consciousness.

  "Well, don't bother," It said. "Her place is right up on that wall. I'm going to mount her right between you and that little nigger girl."

  The epithet shocked Harrison out of his stupor. Nigger girl? What kind of sense would bigotry make to a creature of no human race? Harrison had actually been on the very brink of giving up, letting despair pull him under, and then Ru'opihm made that remark and it pulled him back again. It was the same pettiness he had observed earlier, and it still seemed odd to him. There's something else going on here. It's trying to get my goat. But why? Evil had won. The inevitable war was a foregone conclusion. Harrison was beaten on every level he could imagine, and It was still bullying him. Harrison could only think of one reason for that. It was patently insane, but he explored it anyway.

  "Is that why you've been dogging me for a year?" he asked. His tone was as close to snide as he could muster. Trying to sound cocky, he winced through the agony in his shoulder. He hoped it would go numb, or something, soon. "To complete your collection?"

  "Dogging you?" Ru'opihm asked.

  Harrison pressed on. "The spy. The Worm tunnel. All those stupid attempted kidnappings. Is that all this was about?"

  Ru'opihm paused. Scott's face turned away from Harrison.

  His heart was racing now. He was close to something huge.

  "You idiot," It said quietly. "You were never the target."

  That was the exact opposite of what he expected to hear. "Wh-what?"

  "You're nothing," It said. It pointed to Glimmer in the cage. "I wanted her."

  Harrison did not understand how he could possibly have been so stupid. He had spent a year of his life believing that he was the focus of a manhunt, when the only thing remarkable about him was his choice of a traveling companion. No, not even his choice. Hers. He looked at the limp little pixie, languishing in her prison. A complex conflict had been brewing between powers he barely understood. She was central to it. He was a bystander.

  It was a good lie. It almost worked.

  Harrison looked back at the wall. Those people aren't nothing. They're not random victims. They're trophies. Something about them had driven this thing to defeat them, break them, obsessively torture them. That same something was in Harrison. He counted seven pairs of empty hooks. One was for him. Four more were for his friends, both those on the Ptolemy and those back in New Chicago. He forced himself to set aside the image of pregnant Sarah hanging on the wall. That left two hooks. He was sure they would be filled in a matter of time.

  He tried to conceive of how he could be worth the effort that had been invested in capturing him. More effort was now being put into the task of destroying his spirit. What was it about what he could do that could possibly pose any real threat? When Scott had first taken him prisoner, he didn't even know about Harrison's ability. He had put Harrison in a cell with an ordinary lock and left him unguarded. He had essentially had the run of the castle and they hadn't even known it until it was too late.

  They hadn't even known it.

  It was a genuine struggle not to cry out. Ru'opihm, the very embodiment of evil, with the power to resculpt the world in the space of hours, had not figured out that Harrison could open a simple lock just by touching it. Harrison was not "nothing." He was an absolute, severe threat. He was the unknown. The unknowable. Somehow, for reasons Harrison could only guess at, he was Ru'opihm's blind spot. Even with all Its power, It could not perceive this one simple variation. He wondered what it would feel like to look at a world and see eight hundred thousand victims topped off with twelve complete mysteries. He, and Apryl, and Claudia, even Sarah and Dallas, were the random element that threw off Its entire master plan.

  Ru'opihm feared them.

  He had given It too much credit. It was horrible, beyond human comprehension, but It was not yet strong. Whatever fragment of It inhabited Scott was just that. A fragment, a tiny piece. It was not free, It could not do whatever It wanted to do yet.

  Harrison seized on that fact, on the courage it gave him.

  He wondered what the torture victims hanging on the wall had been put through to determine the nature of their abilities. He also wondered how his own ability had finally been identified. Based on their escape from Texas, he supposed it was simple deduction. Both Harrison and Claudia had used their powers then. Someone
, some flawed human or creature, must have seen or recorded what had happened. And explained it to Ru'opihm. As far as he knew, there was still no evidence that It knew what Sarah or Dallas could do. Or Apryl.

  Which meant It had no idea what Harrison could do now.

  Harrison assumed a resigned expression. His left arm was a dangling, useless piece of meat now, his hand still on the table. He held Bess up with his right arm, looking like he would fend off the mad scientist who was about to kill his pixie, but he tried to make it appear half-hearted. While he did this, he focused on his left hand. He was concentrating on the weapon as a component of the larger structure around him. It was a piece of the machinery, and he pictured drawing energy from it. Then he pictured injecting energy into it, flooding it, but giving it a controlled flood with a specific destination.

  Ru'opihm started toward him, looking concerned.

  Harrison realized he had probably been too quiet for too long. He gave a little extra push. The building shook. Scott's eyes suddenly widened. Harrison saw it. He had surprised Ru'opihm.

  "Gotcha," he whispered.

  The sound of a huge but distant explosion filled the room, and the building shook again, throwing Harrison to the floor. His shoulder got jostled, and he screamed. He heard the sound of Bess clattering against the stone.

  "What have you done?" Scott's voice shouted.

  Harrison scrabbled for the sword, trying to overcome the pain, but Ru'opihm was on him too quickly. It picked Harrison up and threw him on the table. He felt shoulder bone fragments tearing holes inside him, in quantity. Scott's hand was on his throat. Anytime It wanted to, Ru'opihm could snap his neck. Harrison didn't believe It would.

  "I overloaded your weapon factory," he gasped. "Dumped as much power as I could into the machines and that unholy power source attached to them. With any luck, they're all broken by now."

  "How?" It was genuinely surprised. "How could you do that? You don't have that kind of power!" It sounded panicky, like Scott taking over just in time to cry. Harrison basked in the sound, even knowing it might be the last thing he ever heard. "How?" It shouted.