by Ian Bull
The woman across from me has a shaved head and metal piercings through her eyebrows, lips, and nose. She has an adult head, but her torso is child size and her arms and legs are short and curved. Then I notice the wheelchair behind her, barely visible in the flickering shadows. She has a disability that prevented her legs and arms from fully growing.
“I’m Socha,” she says.
Peter sits down next to Socha, pulls his bandana off, and kisses her on the lips. He turns to face the fire, and I see a jagged, open scar running down the right side of his face, but instead of red inside, metal glints back at me.
“Let me do your saline wash, my love,” Socha says with a British accent. She lays a white towel on her legs and he lays his head in her lap. She squirts liquid from a small bottle onto his scar, then gently dabs it dry, repeating it several times. Peter sits up and winces.
“This is a new procedure I’ve invented,” he says, pointing at his face. “I never perform any procedure on any tribe member unless I perfect it on myself first.”
“It looks amazing. How long will it take to heal?” I ask.
“A long time. That’s why I wear the bandanas when there’s dust. Otherwise, the dry air is good for it. If you like it, maybe that’s the procedure you’ll pick.”
“Pick? What do you mean?” I ask.
“To join us, you must choose your transformation. Subdermal implants, or metal horns, sculpted ears, a split tongue, maybe a branding.”
The idea scares me worse than getting shot again. The faces around the fire smile at me with looks somewhere between humor and pity.
“Choose it carefully,” Bree says. “It should be a gesture of who you are inside.”
“Then you will put your true face upon the world,” Socha says.
“What tribe am I joining?”
“We are FIT—the Fully Illuminated Tribe,” Peter says. “People with desires, morals, and abilities rejected by the world. We fit in nowhere else, but fit together perfectly.”
“How many are you?” I ask.
“Thirty. We are the Leadership Council. You’ll meet the others later tonight,” Michel says. The metal piercings on his face shine in the firelight like a living mask.
“You have fresh scabs and bruises on the left side of your body. Why?” Peter asks.
“The Seattle Police,” I say. “I was breaking into a grocery store. They tried to arrest me. I fought them and ran away. They shot me with rubber bullets.”
“Pain can transform you,” Dreya the cat woman says.
They all nod. Peter narrows his eyes at me. His scar must be hurting right now, just like Socha’s curled legs must hurt her every day of her life.
“You’re angry,” he says. “I can tell, because I have anger as well. It can be a great driving force, if you know how to focus it.”
I say nothing. I just bow my head, accepting their assessment of me.
“Shall we begin?” Blue Bree asks.
“The Council is now in session,” Michel says.
He extends his palms across the fire to Bree, who places her palms against his. They continue around the circle as Peter, Socha, Dreya, and Panther all touch palms. There’s a click as the tips of their middle fingers light up pink.
“You have flashlights in your fingers?” I ask.
“LEDs with small magnets,” Peter says. “When the magnets touch, the circuit is complete, and the LEDs emit light. It’s a simple surgery. Heals in a month.”
“Isn’t it pretty?” Dreya says.
I don’t answer.
Peter stares at me through the flames, the light dancing off his cyborg scar. “You must transform yourself on the inside first,” he says, and uses Socha’s towel to lift the lid off a small pot sitting in the side embers of the fire. There’s a bubbling broth inside, with leaves and twigs floating on top. He dips a metal cup in and passes it to the other council members, who each sip, until it reaches me. It smells like rotting grass. “It’s Ayahuasca. Drink it,” Peter says. “All of it.”
Ayahuasca—Carl and I heard about it when we were deployed in Colombia. It’s a weird South American psychedelic drug, a soup made from leaves, flowers, and bark that packs a bigger punch than LSD. There are resorts in the Peruvian jungle where the wealthy go to drink this pisswater, barf their guts out, and then lay back and lose their minds.
It looks like warm pond scum. I’ve never taken drugs. Never smoked marijuana. I even hate painkillers. Booze and beer, yes, guilty as charged. Getting hammered with my team was a Ranger ritual. We’d even puff on cigars sometimes, but I’ve never inhaled on a cigarette.
“What if I lose my mind?” I ask.
“The Serpent Goddess will guide you,” Socha says.
“What if it kills me?”
“If you don’t drink it, then we will kill you,” Peter says. No one flinches as he says it. This tribe with the pretty pink fingertips has a dark side.
Loneliness and regret sweep over me on a black breeze. This is not my tribe. Julia, Carl, my brother Anthony, Trishelle, Walter—they are the people who should be with me around this campfire right now, not these strangers. Julia is right; since leaving the Army, I’ve had no real place in the world, so I chase this rush and my own sense of justice. Now I’m nearly naked, a stranger among strangers, with no way home. If I make it out of here, I will keep my promise to Julia.
Then I remember—this is how it feels to be captured. This is not a mission, and these people are not enemy combatants, but I am their prisoner and they’re about to drug and interrogate me. My SERE training kicks in—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. I was good at the letter S and the two Es, Survival, Evasion, and Escape. Those words fit my personality. Hiding, watching, photographing, and surviving. But Resistance to interrogation? That scares the shit out of me. If they drug me, hood me, kick me, and stuff me in a box, I may forget that I’m Vic Lowry and reveal everything.
“You’re not John Wayne, so don’t be a hero,” I remember my instructor telling me after I failed resistance training. “If you’re caught, don’t let them know what scares you. Answer the questions with your trained responses, but don’t fight.”
I stare into the cup and see my own reflection in the dark liquid. I hear the metallic slide and click of a semi-automatic handgun being loaded with a cartridge.
“Drink,” Peter says.
“Down the hatch,” I say, and drink it all in one gulp. “And down the rabbit hole.”
It doesn’t take long for the flames to start talking and the world to tilt. Nausea hits me. Blue-skinned Bree helps me to my feet, and I vomit all over the wheels of the Hummer. She helps me back to the fire, where I collapse on my back and stare up at the Milky Way hanging over the steep canyon walls. It undulates and throbs at me, as if the whole galaxy is breathing.
I pinch myself hard on the forearm. As long as I can do that, I can keep a small portion of my brain thinking and aware, like a surfer trying to stay alive on his board while riding an immense wave of chaos threatening to bury him.
Socha crawls next to me. “What do you see? A serpent? A lizard? A bird?
As she asks, the smoke from the rising fire forms into every animal she mentions. A warm snake slithers up my nose and out my mouth. A gust of wind turns the black smoke into a lizard that lands on my face, then a bird that digs its claws into my chest then flies away.
“Who are you?” Peter asks. “What’s your real name?”
“I’m Vic,” I say. “Victor Lowry.”
“You are transforming,” Bree says. “Tell us what you are becoming.”
I create a small walnut inside my brain and imprison myself within in it. From its safety, I watch as the remaining robot that is my body obeys their commands. They take my tunic and underwear and examine me, touching all my scars, old and new. They look under my arms and between my legs. I’m glad I didn’t let Glenn tag me with the GPS button.
“Who are you?” Peter asks.
“Vic,” I whisper.
&n
bsp; They march me to one of the Humvees and toss me in the back, naked, and throw my underwear, running shoes, and tunic on top of me, and we’re on the move. I’m too high to even find the holes in the tunic, and I give up. We zoom down the steep hillside and back onto the desert floor. I’m back in Iraq, racing across the flat desert toward Mosul. Panther pours water on me. Some lands in my mouth. An Arab terrorist wearing red bandanas across his head and face is driving, until he looks back and his piercing blue eyes bring me back. Peter nods at Panther, who grabs my chin.
“Who sent you?” Panther asks.
“No one. I sent myself. I need a job. I need money. No one will hire me.”
His panther face leans close, his yellow eyes glaring. “I can tell if you’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
He leaves me alone. I pinch myself and stare out the open window. The Milky Way still undulates above me. Julia’s suddenly in the next seat, her blonde hair blowing in the wind.
“Are you in danger?” I ask.
“No, but you are,” she answers, and she transforms into Bree, with her blue skin and white hair. “Are you one of us?”
“I am.”
“Then what are you?” she asks.
“I don’t know yet,” I say. I can’t evade her forever, and must eventually answer her.
A ribbon shines in the distance. We must be coming around the mountain and seeing the lights of Phoenix. A huge metal dinosaur appears in front of us, and Peter swerves to avoid it. Then another looms toward us, and we pass right under its belly. He stops the Humvee and Panther pulls me out, naked. My feet touch asphalt, not dirt. The other two Humvees pull up and their headlights reveal that the metal dinosaurs are the ruins of old jets and prop airplanes, stretching into the darkness, some without heads, some without wings, some without tails, all with their wires and guts hanging out and cannibalized parts strewn around. It’s an old airfield.
“Get dressed,” Panther says.
I pull on my underwear and running shoes and the rough tunic they gave me. The drug adds color tracers to any light I see, like ribbons of fireworks. Loud screams pierce my ears as a crowd of zombies swarms the convoy. I put out my arms to protect myself.
The zombies swirl around me, with a rainbow of tattoos and plastic implants and metal piercings on their arms, chests, noses, eyebrows, lips, and hands. They surround Bree and Michel and Dreya and Panther, and everyone touches palms, greeting each other as the magnets light up pink. Peter stands to the side, carrying tiny Socha as if he were a circus sideshow giant holding the Midget Girl, both smiling over their kingdom.
“The novitiate must be tested!” Peter yells, and the zombie crowd picks me up off the ground and drags me into a ruined building filled with weak green light from flickering fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling. What must have once been the airport office is now a maze of broken chairs and desks, with broken glass crunching underfoot. I’m glad I have my shoes on again. They drag me into a circle of bright light and prop me up in front of a table covered with a white tablecloth. On top are lines of TV equipment: three GoPro cameras, still in their boxes, three CCTV security cameras, two small handheld monitors, a laptop computer, and a toolbox filled with cables and tools. Zombies move on the edge of the darkness, like black moths. Peter sweeps his hand across the table, igniting a streak of red in my retinas. Smoke seems to rise from the table, which morphs into the altar at St. Cecilia’s, back home in San Francisco. I am an altar server again, helping prepare the censer for Mass, but the priest is dressed in black and has a metal scar like a cyborg.
Peter snaps his finger under my nose. “Rig four cameras. Send two signals via Wi-Fi to the laptop, and then hardwire two others to the one monitor with a quad split.”
The walnut grows inside my skull and my thinking brain returns. I have a task, which gives me focus. My photographic memory kicks open my mental filing cabinets, and I’m back in the Le Clerq’s Cadillac, screaming across the American Southwest, speedreading camera manuals, online forums on Wi-Fi broadcast and transmissions. If there really is a Serpent Goddess, she’s pulling out the exact pages I need. In five minutes, I have four cameras working, sending signals to the computer’s hotspot MiFi plug-in, which I output to the monitors.
“Rig the last two cameras, punch in twenty-five percent with no image loss, and hardwire them to the other monitor with a dual split,” Peter whispers.
My ever-expanding walnut brain watches my hands work. The Serpent Goddess stands in the back of my brain, a pencil over her ear and glasses on the bridge of her nose, yanking out technical instructions from my mental filing cabinets, holding them up for me to remember. She’s got the body of a snake, with the torso and arms of a woman, and colored feathers for hair. She is a soft, quiet, and helpful reference librarian in my throbbing skull. Thank you, Goddess. I assemble the cameras and make the dual split work.
“You pass, now pick,” Peter says. “Are you an animal? A robot? A tree? A flower?”
“I’m Vic Lowry.”
He snaps his fingers and the zombies rush forward and grab me again, and I’m crowd-surfing atop a moving punk army that carries me outside and tosses me in the passenger seat of an old Volvo. They strap me in. Bree leans in the open passenger window and Michel is in the driver’s seat. They touch palms in front of me, and their fingers light up pink.
“Pick your totem animal,” Bree says.
I shake my head. Michel leans close, and I see that the rows of tiny metal bars pierce his face like gold chainmail. He grins, and his upper lip curls to touch the bone in his nose. He revs the engine. We’re aimed at the cement wall of the airplane hangar.
“No crash, please,” I whimper.
Michel puts on a fake announcer voice. “Volvo! Boxy, but safe!” he yells and hits the gas. We’re up to fifty miles an hour, passing screaming zombies. We smash into the cinderblock, and my face smashes into the soft white marshmallow exploding in front of me. I black out.
I wake up and I’m fourteen again. I’m with my family, camping on a beach in Baja, and my brother Anthony and I are bodysurfing in the green waves as the sun sets into the ocean. As the low sun shines through the water, we see the shadows of a dozen sea turtles, some four feet long, swimming an arm’s length away. Their heads pop up and they spy on us with cool black eyes, their nostrils exhaling tiny jets of air through their beaked noses. Anthony shakes my arm, and his grinning face transforms into Bree.
“I’m a sea turtle,” I moan.
“He’s a sea turtle!” she screams to the tribe. The swarm of howling zombies yank me out, and I’m crowd-surfing on their outstretched hands as they haul me back into the dimly lit ruins of the airport office. A doorway of open light appears, and I’m in a clean white room.
Peter’s voice cuts through their howls. “Take off his tunic and strap him down.”
They yank off my rough wool cloak, toss me into a dentist’s chair, and buckle me down with hand and ankle straps. Running shoes and underwear is all I’m wearing, and the cold leather makes me shiver. The scent of rubbing alcohol, medical soap, and latex hits my nostrils.
I am alone with Peter and Socha. Peter puts on an operating gown, mask, paper cap, and latex gloves on his hands, while Socha sits on a table looking at sea turtles on a computer screen.
“This one looks good,” Socha says, and points at an underwater turtle on the screen, with a face that’s a jigsaw pattern of intersecting green, white, and black scales and ridges.
Peter nods and holds up square pieces of flexible plastic and lays it against my forehead. “This will work nicely. I have some carving to do to make them join up like facial scales.”
“You’re going to make me look like a turtle?” I ask, my voice breaking.
“Yes,” Peter answers. He places the square piece of plastic into a stainless-steel tray and cuts with a scalpel. “We’ll give you a line of subdermal implants across the forehead, then tattoo them. Maybe add a ridge. Also, add pieces under the skin on either sid
e of the nose, to create the beak shape. Maybe give you black contacts.”
My heart races as I fight the straps. Peter pushes my head down with a firm hand, then touches the raised scabs and bruises on my left side. My skin recoils an inch, but there is no escape. “We’ll also transform this into a line of scales running up the side of your body.”
The circular medical light suspended over my chair emits pulses of purple laser beams that turn into snakes floating up to the ceiling and slithering in circles, devouring their own tails. The Ayahuasca trip is getting stronger. My mind climbs back inside my walnut to hide. I close my eyes and feel coolness on my forehead and skull, and then gentle, sweeping touches. I open my eyes. Socha smiles at me, and I see she has a razor covered with shaving cream in her hand.
“I’ve been shaving your head. You look good without hair,” she says.
Peter cleans my face with alcohol swabs and then rubs a cooling cream into my forehead. “This is a topical anesthetic. You’ll still feel me cutting your skin, though. Any questions?”
“I’ll give you back the money. I’ll work for free,” I say.
“That’s not the deal we made,” Peter says as he leans over me. “I don’t know who you are, Vic Lowry, covered with your scabs and scars from so many bullets. You could be a cop. I don’t care. But you’re a survivor, like us. And I need an expert to help me do this job, and the Serpent Goddess sent you to me. But you must blend in. The overlords for whom we whore ourselves must see you as one of us. Understand?”
The Steven Quintana deep inside understands. Because of Peter, I’ll soon be seeing the people who tried to kill me. They know my face, so transforming me into a turtle may be my safest choice.
Peter lifts Socha off the table and places her in my lap. Her pierced, lily-white skin is beautiful under the light. She smiles as she strokes my face. “When the modern world ends, our tribe will disappear into the desert and survive. And you can hide with us.”