Anarchy

by Peter Meredith

  “Hello?” he called out. “Ma’am? A-Yeoung?” He was going to beg for a lamb chop or the greater part of an entire Chilean sea bass when he smelled pork frying. The aroma weakened him further, but it was a different kind of weakness. His grin was partially submerged when she came in with the largest bowl she could carry.

  A twinge ran up his back as he sat up, but it was already less agonizing than it had been. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! Is this pho?”

  She smacked him on the side of the head. “This no pho. This mine. Eat. No spill.” Although he was not new to chopsticks, she shook her head and clucked as he set about the bowl with them, “Is like child.”

  He might have answered; however, his mouth remained full and working from start to finish, a process that took less than a minute. Before he could thank her, she snatched up the bowl and left, muttering in Korean. Holding his head cocked expectantly, he listened as she refilled the bowl. When she didn’t come back right away, his stomach let out a grumble as if it wasn’t already half-full.

  His stomach kept up its despairing rumbling until she arrived, bowl in hand and a pink measuring tape draped on her neck like a friendly snake. He eyed the measuring tape as he took the bowl, afraid that she was about to start taking a survey of him, while he was naked and covered only by an inch or two of light grey water.

  And this was exactly what she did. In defense of his imagined honor, he plopped the bowl squarely down on his man bits only to discover that it was far hotter than he realized. Clenching made for a great deal more pain, though it lasted for seconds only. A-Yeoung took his measure with a few quick passes of the tape and some Korean muttered under her breath. Then she was gone, leaving him pink as a pig and not just from the heat.

  His embarrassment didn’t affect his hunger in the slightest and within a minute the second bowl was gone and he had topped the bath off with more scalding water. Now he was in even greater danger of drowning, of course it would be the most contented drowning ever. His eyes dipped closed and his steaming hand slid from the tub to touch the tile.

  That hand took the pulse of the building and sent it up into his dreams. He saw A-Yeoung sewing like mad, her tiny, bony frame bent over a foot-powered treadle sewing machine that was exactly two years older than she was. The fabric stretched across its plane was vibrantly blue, but dusty from having sat in the back of her closet for decades, waiting for someone or something special to occur. It appeared to be a robe with wide short sleeves.

  No robe. Is hanbok, she said, without taking her eyes from the whirring machine. He came nearer and watched her boney little fingers come within millimeters of the needle. She was so very intent on her work that she couldn’t feel the fear stealing throughout the building. The people were afraid. Something that knit fear into the marrow of their bones had crept near.

  The Spider Demon was outside the walls, crawling along the brick, sniffing at the windows. Without waking, Bryce slipped deeper into the water until it covered him completely. Still, his hand was out and he felt the panic rising in the people. Even A-Yeoung paused in her work. She hunched over the hanbok and stared over her shoulder, her dark eyes hard on the window as the shadow passed.

  Bryce went so still that even his heart, slow to begin with, seemed to pause in mid-contraction. Seconds ticked by and Bryce could feel the demon’s hesitation. It was no sniffer, and yet it was drawn to power. But Bryce had no power. He was weak and injured. He told himself that he was nothing on the inside, while on the outside he was simply water. Warm bath water.

  Slowly, he drifted out of himself, merging with the water in the strangest sensation.

  The Spider Demon hesitated and Bryce could feel its confusion. He wanted to will it away, but he didn’t dare. He had to remain only warm water. Seconds ticked away to a minute and then two, and still he was nothing, though the urge to breathe grew on him. Perhaps it was this entirely human desire that caused the demon to reach for the window. The candle next to the tub wavered as the demon touched the glass. At the same time, A-Yeoung shuddered and so too did her front door as a fist pounded on it.

  “Miss Yi?” It was Kathy Pierce. Bryce could feel a hyper fear/excitement streaming out from her in gossamer lines. For the first time in her young life, she was taking a leadership role and, shockingly, she was being followed. There were men behind her, taking their cues from her, listening to what she had to say. This small but new sensation of power was a heady brew for one so young.

  “Miss Yi!” A rising anger in her turned the gossamer lines hard, like wires of iron and the men gripped their weapons harder in response, ready to fight. The Spider Demon felt all of this, though it did not fully understand. All it knew was that its quarry had disappeared and that the numbers were against it. In a blink it slipped away, and as it did, A-Yeoung breathed a sigh of relief. Bryce simply breathed, allowing himself to come back into himself.

  The door came open and a tramp of feet sounded in the tiny apartment. “Is he here?” Kathy asked.

  A-Yeoung hid behind her pigeon-English. “What you mean? Is just me.”

  Next to Kathy stood big Mr. Johnson, a bull of a man who had lost all patience with the world. “There’s no one here,” he intoned, his voice a deep baritone.

  Some of the men began to file back into the dark hall when Kathy said, “Hold on.” She went to the counter where Maddy’s ice axe sat looking completely out of place. “He is here.”

  Chapter 32

  Maddy Whitmore stood over her kill, her chest heaving more from the surge of excitement from her victory than from actual exertion. The excitement quickly cooled, however. Behind her, separated by a dozen feet was the little blonde demon…and Victoria Dietch.

  Both were absolutely still. A bad sign.

  Without turning, Maddy glanced over her shoulder to where the demon held Victoria from behind, its clawed fingers gripping the woman’s throat. Strange. It was holding Victoria hostage.

  “This is different,” Maddy remarked as she turned, Bryce’s long pipe in hand. It still wasn’t her weapon of choice, and yet it felt much more natural than it had only minutes before. She could kill with it again; they all knew it. Lifting the pipe and pointing the bloody end at the demon, she said, “You are displaying self-preservation which suggests you can think beyond your appetite. Can you understand me?”

  The blonde had been a pert and pretty little thing a week before; a one-time cheerleader with a winning smile and a bubbly personality. Now it had black eyes and a wet, dank mouth filled with hungry teeth. The being opened its mouth and its jaw moved left and right, up and down as it made strange growling noises.

  It was trying to speak.

  “You want something?” Maddy asked. It nodded, though its head didn’t go exactly up and down; it was more of a circular motion. “You want to leave? If so, let go of her. This is between you and me. She is nothing.” It stared, considering this for a moment before it roared out a screech, its hand tightening on Victoria’s throat. Maddy glared back with just as much anger. She was the injured party in all of this. She was the one who’d been hounded across half a city. She was the one who had lost people she cared about—Bryce seemed to have disappeared entirely and she could no longer catch even an image of him in her mind.

  “One scratch and I will rip your limbs off and mount you on a fucking pole!” she snarled. The two glared at each other and the demon’s hand shook in fury for a second and then relaxed, slightly.

  This was something and Victoria might have wilted in relief if the demon’s other hand didn’t have such a violent grip of her hair. “Tell it we won’t hurt it,” she suggested in the softest, most soothing voice she could manage. “Tell it we’re nice.”

  Nice? Maddy had just threatened to tear off its arms and legs. With a sigh, she said, “We don’t want to hurt you, we just want to…get along.” This sounded ridiculous in her own ears and it seemed to confuse the demon more. It hissed out a string of gibberish and pointed at the door behind Maddy.


  “I’m not going anywhere without her,” Maddy told it. This caused another lunatic’s outburst from the demon. As though she were nothing more than a child, it shoved Victoria to the ground and then waved a hand about furiously, all the while making more of the screeching noises. Finally, Maddy cried, “Enough! I’m not here to talk or bargain, or whatever you’re trying to do. Let her go and face me, man to… or uh, woman to woman.” She was being generous with her descriptions. The demon was no longer a woman and probably couldn’t even be construed as a human in the strictest scientific terms.

  The demon did not let Victoria go. It took her in both hands and lifted her to her feet. Then with a grunt, it pushed Victoria towards the door giving Maddy no choice but to step aside or risk a confrontation in which Victoria would surely be scratched and scratched deeply. She did so warily, ready to crack the creature’s skull wide open. As it passed her, the demon was equally ready to tear out Victoria’s throat.

  Once out into the narrow corridor, it dragged Victoria off to the left along the corridor, across a set of tracks and down into another subterranean tunnel. Maddy followed after as they went deeper and deeper beneath the city, where the darkness was like living velvet, and the stench made the sewers smell like roses.

  The foul air grew warm as well, and then hot. Victoria began to pant as sweat ran down the back of her coat. “Where are we going?” she couldn’t help asking. Her answer was a short, vigorous shake that rattled her brains. The demon pushed on until they saw a glow coming from a smaller tunnel that had what looked like grey seaweed dripping from its rounded ceiling.

  There was something down the tunnel, something alive, and again, not quite human. Although there wasn’t a purely evil feeling coming from the tunnel, Maddy expected another demon and proceeded cautiously, ready to fight. The tunnel opened onto a larger room that was partially a water-carved cave and partially an ancient man-made structure constructed of stone and a gritty pre-modern form of cement. In places, trash filled the room from ceiling to floor, and in other places the trash made for a walkway and, to Maddy’s shock, a bed.

  Deep in one corner in an area that looked hollowed out from mounds of mold and rusting tin sheets reclined something so terrible that at first Maddy couldn’t mentally describe it.

  At one time, it had been a man and he still retained man-parts. He had arms, though they were thick, pale tubes five feet in length and ended with tiny finger-like digits. She could only see one of his legs. It was bare and scabby, and although it appeared small and stunted compared to the rest of the filthy, naked monstrosity, it was actually normal-sized. As she stared in advancing horror, the leg kicked against the thing’s immense, flabby side like a dog scratching at fleas.

  His body was a swollen, unmovable mass of greasy flesh larger and longer than a hippo’s. It appeared segmented like an insect’s body; however, these segments were merely great ballooning fatty folds. Atop all of this, his massive head, four or five times larger than that of a normal person’s, seemed to sit directly on his chest and when he looked at Maddy, he did so by torqueing his upper body around.

  “Hmmmmm. You are a Twenty-one?” he asked. She expected him to have a booming voice, one that matched its immensity. Instead, there was a wet, breathy, lisping quality to the words that wafted down and smote her, making her shudder. It wasn’t any power that shook her, it was the hellish stench of rot and corruption that spilled from his enormous pink-lipped mouth. He smelled as though some small creature, a racoon perhaps, had crawled down his throat, got lodged in some fatty crevice, had died and was now decomposing.

  It seemed to Maddy that gagging might appear rude and so she pretended to cough into her arm, saying, “I’m sorry, what?”

  The creature had to take two long, phlegmy breaths before he could spit out, “You are of the Twenty-one series. Magnus’ greatest work.” His eyebrows were black and each roughly the size of a squirrel’s tail. As foreign and alien as they were, they still conveyed a great deal of snideness in his last remark.

  Maddy tapped the pole, irritated, her fear and nausea draining away by degrees. Beyond the stench, there didn’t seem much about the creature that could hurt her. He didn’t radiate a great power like other demons and physically, despite him being something that belonged in a freak show, he was not imposing. Sure, he might be able to undulate, worm-like around his filthy little kingdom, but he lacked the speed to catch her if she decided to run.

  Looking down her nose, she said, “Twenty-one? You know that referring to a person as a number is rude.”

  He grinned, pulling back those disgusting pink sausage lips. “A thousand pardons.” He sucked in a huge breath and added, “It’s been an age since I supped with the queen.”

  It’ll be never with this queen, Maddy thought. There was no way she was going to take the smallest nibble of anything down there. Aloud, she said, “My name is Madison Whitmore.” This sounded oddly pompous, almost as if she were announcing herself. The creature, horrible though it may be, was something far beyond the ordinary, and just then, she felt that naming herself “Maddy” sounded too mundane.

  “Mad Maddy Whitmore,” he said in answer. “Wait, is it Maddy, or are you still going by that tribal name you adopted at Harvard? Mgbaila-something wasn’t it?”

  Maddy’s mouth fell open. This was almost exactly what Bryce had first said to her days before when he had climbed into Magnus’ helicopter. How did it know what had been said? He couldn’t have read her mind since she had not thought about that moment at all since it happened. Maybe he can pick through memories or maybe he can see into my past. This reminded her of how Griff had been able to look into her mind, and just like then, embarrassing memories bloomed into her consciousness. These showed on her face, and made the creature laugh.

  The unsettling sound was a wet, gasping “Hurrah, hurrah,” that turned into a wet, gasping cough, which brought up something grey and chunky, similar in size and consistency to a three-egg omelet. When he began to chew on the gunk, Maddy went pale and Victoria turned away, retching. The poor woman couldn’t turn too far as the blonde held her in a tight grip.

  “Ah, little miss pris doesn’t like seeing what’s on the other side of the tracks,” the creature said to Victoria, speaking around the grey matter. With a hideous grin, he added, “Hmmmm, I don’t think she wants to see any kind of tracks after what happened last time she tried to cross them.”

  Victoria went from pale to red like a shade being drawn. “Fuck you, you piece of shit.” This came blurting out and seemed both to shock and invigorate her, and she added, “That’s what you look like. Like a whale shit you out.”

  Although the creature only continued to grin, the blonde demon, squeezed Victoria’s arm with such crushing force that her knees buckled and she dropped, letting out a sharp cry.

  “Stop!” Maddy ordered. Although she did not have the same vocal power as Bryce, she had enough to cause the demon to flinch slightly away and relax her grip.

  “Hmmmm,” the enormous creature murmured. “You are awakening, still.” He drew out his words, especially the last in the sentence so that “still” came out as stillll-la.

  Maddy had a dozen questions based on this alone, but she was still somewhat hung up on manners. It seemed particularly, as well as oddly, important. “I’ve told you my name. Who are you and…” She glanced over at the blonde demon, not sure if it needed to be included in the introductions. It was mute, for one, and thoroughly evil, while the great slug hadn’t completely gone over.

  He sneered at the demon. “Her name had been Jen Breen and what a fine young thing she had been, too. Now it is nameless like all the others. But maybe you can tell if that will remain the case.”

  “You want me to look into its future? It won’t take power to see that. It’s going to die very quickly unless it lets her go.”

  The slug-thing glanced over at the demon, paused a moment, then shrugged. “Let’s not worry about her just now.” He squirmed, heaving himself up so th
at he towered high over Maddy, swaying back and forth. He cleared his throat, a sound like a toilet being snaked and stated, “I am Number Five Zero One! I was the first volunteer.”

  His eyes, almost lost in fatty folds to begin with, disappeared altogether as he beamed with pride over his accomplishment. Maddy could not understand the look at all. “You wanted to be like this?”

  “I volunteered!” he said again. “I took the first step. I paved the way while you kicked and screamed and whined! Oh, the whining was never ending. You remember how it was, Victoria. It made you want to tear your hair out.” Victoria was in a terrible situation and nodded vigorously, eager to please. “Yes, you kept thinking that the ‘fat cow’ would never make it. But she did, and do you want to know why? Because I took the first step down the path that led her to what she is now. I should be given a medal!” His slurry voice boomed and once more Victoria nodded furiously.

  “So, you didn’t get a medal?” Maddy asked.

  “Hmmm.” The rumble went on and on as his eyes disappeared, purposely this time. He was looking back into the only past that he could not pierce—his own. He had once been Mark McFadden, a thirty-year-old computer hacker who had the world at his fingertips despite rarely leaving his couch. Magnus had used his hacker skills off and on for years, only slowly revealing his true purpose during that time. Then came the first trials. His perception of the months after he had volunteered to bring mankind out of its dark age and into a new light, was a hazy jumble of pain and, he would never admit it, terror at what he was becoming.

  He shrugged again. “Maybe I did. If not, what does it matter? You stand before me, Madison Whitmore, a vindication that my sacrifice was worth it. You may not be everything you think you are, with your superior attitude, but you are vastly greater than you were, and maybe you are the missing link, Magnus searches for. We’ll never know, I suppose.”