A Perfect Machine

by Brett Savory

  “Marcton, that’s what I’m trying to say: I don’t think ascension is a good thing. If you’d felt what we felt back then… You’ll have to trust me on this. Kyllo needs to be stopped. Hell, the Inferne Cutis as a whole probably needs to be stopped. Palermo could have put this in clearer terms, but I think there’s just something cosmically… wrong with us.”

  Marcton went silent.

  “All that aside, I know where she is,” Kendul continued. “And I think I know how to bring her back. I have no idea how – or even if – we can control her, but it’s our best shot.”

  After a long moment Marcton said, “You said she’s a machine. Like Kyllo.”

  “Pretty close, yeah. By the sounds of your description, she’s a bit smaller than Kyllo, but probably not by a lot… And if we can bring her back, she needs to know that Kyllo killed her father. That could be our ace. Once she knows that, it might be enough for us to control her – to a certain extent, anyway. She can bring down Kyllo, then we put her back in the ground, just like we did the first time. Then we fucking well leave this place. Try to set up again in some other part of the country, far away. Or hell, another country entirely. We’ll do what we’ve always done because what other choice is there?”

  Time ticked by. Bill and Cleve remained silent, thoroughly in the dark about most of what was said, but smart enough not to ask questions right now. Outside the office, every pair of eyes was aimed toward the window. Marcton glanced out at them, felt the weight of his responsibility to them, then looked back at Kendul.

  Finally, Marcton said, “We do this last thing together, then you step down. I think we can agree that your views on our society leave a lot to be desired – especially in a leader. Agreed?”

  Kendul turned his head, spat more blood, turned back, looked down at his boots, said, “Agreed.”

  “OK,” Marcton said. “Show me.”

  E I G H T E E N

  This is the house in which she was born. This is the house in which she died. Well, kind of died, anyway.

  Three years ago, Adelina – the daughter of the Runners’ leader – had been the first to achieve ascendance: full lead content in the body. Almost too perfect to be true. But she had never thought anything was perfect, and she was right about that – especially in this case.

  She’d been in bed when the change came upon her. It had happened differently than it had for Henry Kyllo. For Adelina, it was swift and agonizing, completing in a matter of hours rather than days. She had gone to bed looking as she normally did, but when she woke up the next morning, sixty percent of her body had metallized overnight. She woke up screaming and didn’t stop until her father and Kendul burst into her room. Kendul had been visiting as he occasionally did – secretively – for a shot or two of single malt scotch, maybe a cigar.

  When Palermo saw her, he froze. As he watched, she began thrashing madly, the increased weight of her body causing the cheap wooden bed frame to crumple under her as she chopped at its sides with her metal hands and feet. It thumped to the floor, and that sound was what finally snapped Edward out of his paralysis.

  He turned and ran for the phone, dialed as fast as his shaking hands would allow. Barked at a woman on the other end of the line over the soulcrushing sounds of his only daughter in horrendous pain: “She’s changing!” he yelled. “Get over here and help me. I don’t know what the fuck to do!”

  Before she could answer him, he’d hung up.

  Sandra Beiko, Palermo’s second-in-command at the time, arrived twenty minutes later. Palermo explained what he could as she came inside. By the time they got up the stairs, the first wave of Adelina’s change was complete. She was huddled in a far corner of the room, now roughly seventy-five percent metal and rock, and about twice her original size. Her breathing had regulated, and she appeared to be in – very understandable – shock.

  Over the next ten hours, they watched her grow bigger and bigger. Watched her cycle through incoherent rage, pleading for it to stop, then sleep, then back to rage. Watched her body transform into something beautiful, something horrifying.

  The three of them stood in awe, Beiko murmuring the closest thing she had to religious prayers, while Kendul just watched with rapt attention, perhaps the faintest glimpse of jealousy and envy in his eyes. More than faint, Palermo thought. He wishes he was her. He wants to be her, wants to go through this. That was the first time Palermo thought that maybe this was not a good thing, that maybe this was not something to aspire to. A certain blackness crept into his mind when he looked at Adelina. A bleak otherworldliness. Despair, desperation.

  But there was something somehow worse than even that in Kendul’s eyes – something bordering on the predatory.

  The only one of them without either of these reactions was Palermo, of course. This was his daughter, and he just felt sick to his stomach. He was the only one to immediately see the fundamental change in her personality. She was losing control of who she was.

  When Adelina was nearly the size of her small bedroom, Palermo took Kendul aside, talked out in the hallway while Beiko stayed inside the bedroom.

  “Kendul, we have to stop this.”

  “Stop it, are you insane? This is what–”

  “I know, and I don’t care. This is my daughter. Something’s… happening to her. She’s changing on the inside, as well. I can feel it. Even when she can’t speak, it’s in her eyes. It’s like there’s someone else inside her now. If we don’t stop it, I think she’s going to disappear. Maybe not physically, but mentally. Emotionally. I can’t…” Tears formed in Palermo’s eyes. He hung his head.

  Kendul put a hand on Palermo’s shoulder. “I feel it, too. Something is… off. Corrupted. But we need to see this through. We need to see what she becomes. This is historic. I know you understand that.”

  That’s when the screaming began. Not from Adelina this time.

  Palermo flung the door to Adelina’s bedroom wide open, looked up to see Beiko flailing around in both of Adelina’s giant hands – his daughter whipping her back and forth like a rag doll.

  Palermo stepped forward, yelled, “Adelina, stop! Stop it!”

  Adelina turned toward the sound of her father’s voice. Like a dog, she tilted her massive head ever so slightly one way, then stopped shaking Beiko.

  Palermo lowered his voice, said, “Now put her down, Adelina. Please, put her down.”

  Adelina removed one hand from around Beiko’s torso, but kept the other one tight. She moved the fist holding Beiko’s limp body against the closest wall, pressed her knuckles flush to it, then slowly, slowly pushed the heel of the palm of her free hand against Beiko’s head.

  Her skull cracked, crumpled in on itself entirely. Adelina smeared the resulting mess of blood and bone along the wall in an arc, like a shooting star.

  Adelina dropped the body and reached out for Kendul, something monstrous burning in her eyes.

  Palermo backed out into the hallway as quickly as his feet would take him. Kendul drew his gun, started firing at her. The bullets ricocheted off her solid steel frame, bounced around the room, thwipping into drywall. One bullet nearly drove into Palermo’s leg, but he moved in time to avoid it. He yelled for Kendul to stop and, after one of the bullets whizzed by Kendul’s ear, he was shocked enough at his brush with death to stop firing.

  Kendul assumed that Palermo had screamed at him to stop firing because this was still, in some way, his daughter, but that was untrue; Palermo knew that his daughter – if she was still in there at all – was not the one who’d killed Sandra, was not the one trying to kill Kendul and himself now. He’d simply told him to cease fire for practical reasons – the bullets were bouncing off. They needed to try something else to stop her.

  “It’s not working, Kendul! You’ll kill us both!” Palermo said. Kendul moved out of the room into the hallway, opened his mouth to speak, since it appeared that Adelina was backing off.

  That’s when she lunged again.

  An enormous metal hand bur
st out of the room, into the hallway where both men stood, cracking through the bedroom doorframe, splinters flying. Adelina roared once, and it was like no sound either man had ever heard in his life. Entirely inhuman.

  With no time to think – and Adelina’s other hand moving to join the first, fingers almost the width of fence posts, her head dropped down to try to see them – both men opened fire. They backed away as far as they could and just emptied their weapons.

  Nearly every shot bounced off, but on two occasions Palermo’s scrambling, terrified mind subconsciously picked up that two or three of their shots seemed to drive home. But where? At what point on her body?

  Then it came to him. As their guns clicked empty, Palermo muttered, “Joints.” He turned his head toward Kendul. “Aim for the joints. They must not be fully formed or something.”

  Kendul nodded. “Ammo?”

  “Downstairs, follow me.”

  Since Adelina was now blocking most of the upstairs landing, both men vaulted over the banister, dropped onto the staircase, ran to the basement.

  “Shotguns will do more damage. Got a few down here,” Palermo said. He moved quickly to the gun cabinet while Kendul kept watch on the stairs – not that Adelina could fit down the staircase, obviously, but she could come tumbling down it, he supposed, and just roll over them like the boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  “Come on, man, come on,” Kendul said.

  Palermo smashed the glass with the butt of his gun, dropped the gun on the floor, reached inside, grabbed two shotguns, scrambled around for ammo, chucked a shotgun and some shells in Kendul’s general direction, then started loading his own weapon.

  There was a deep moan from upstairs, thumping, then an otherworldly scream that filled their ears, drove deep into their brains.

  “Christ!” Palermo said, shaking his head from side to side, as if the noise were a tangible thing and he was trying to dislodge it from his head.

  A loud crash, wood splintering. It sounded like she’d fallen through – or consciously driven herself through – the second-floor ceiling.

  “Load up, man. She’s coming,” Kendul said. “She’s fucking coming.”

  More thumping – metal on wood, metal on tile – as she clomped around the main floor, probably searching room to room, her body busting through the walls, shredding the house, gutting it like a demolition ball.

  She stopped at the top of the stairs, moved her head down to see.

  Palermo’s base instinct was to hide. His primary thought being if she can’t see us, she can’t hurt us. But he knew they needed to try to stop her, couldn’t let her just go rampaging around, destroying the street, the whole fucking city.

  They had to try to be seen.

  Going against every natural instinct in his body – every fiber of his being shouting at him to get the fuck away! – Palermo moved to the bottom of the stairs where he and Adelina locked eyes. Her head was enormous, eyes big metal balls set into a face composed of shards of what looked like jagged rock and steel.

  She snorted once, pulled her head out of sight. Then, a second before her foot came down, Palermo knew what she was going to do, and he leaped backward out of the way.

  Her right leg crashed through the basement ceiling, and she toppled down into the far side of the room, one leg very nearly touching the basement floor, the other caught on the opposite side of a steel support beam. Her bulk tilted to one side and she fell onto her back, cracking the concrete floor, sending up chunks of it to either side of her.

  Palermo and Kendul knew that the moment she got to her feet, they’d be dead – knew that this was their one and only shot. There was nowhere left to go.

  They opened fire.

  At this range, most of the shot found its mark. Palermo concentrated on the right leg joint; Kendul fired on the right arm joint. Adelina wailed in pain. They fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded as fast as their shaking fingers would allow.

  The first limb to come off was the right arm. It dropped to the basement floor with a thud, blood and some other fluid leaking out. Kendul moved on to the left arm.

  The right leg was next to go. Then both men were firing into the joint of her left arm.

  Adelina thrashed around on her back, reaching her remaining hand out, madly waving it back and forth blindly. Kendul was standing too close, and one of her fingers caught his right leg, shattered the bone there. He dropped, kept firing.

  The left arm finally came free, more blood pumping out. Thick and dark.

  With three limbs separated from her body, Adelina went from bellowing to moaning, then whimpering. Then silence.

  Kendul was leaning on his right side on the ground, shaking shells free from another box of ammo, when Palermo put a hand on his shoulder, said, “It’s done, James. No more.”

  Kendul blinked, closed his eyes tight against the pain in his leg. He nodded, rolled onto his back, dropped the shotgun, breathing heavily.

  Palermo stood back up, looked at the remains of what used to be his daughter.

  Arms and legs the width of telephone poles.

  Torso the size of a small car.

  Head the size of a truck engine, tilted to one side, eyes dead.

  Nothing on the body moved.

  * * *

  Later, when they dug out the basement and buried her there, as far as he knew, only Kendul felt the ever so faint thrum of machinery in his bones.

  He didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but the feeling had stayed with him through the years. Subconscious at first, the feeling grew until it become unquestionable knowledge:

  Adelina Palermo was still alive.

  And the same part of him that had insisted Adelina not be stopped moments before she’d killed Sandra Beiko tore into the forefront of his mind, telling him to keep this quiet. Some diseased part of his soul that revered this abomination as a god.

  N I N E T E E N

  Marcton and Kendul stood on rubble in the basement where Adelina was buried. Kendul had brought a large duffle bag along, but hadn’t opened it when they’d arrived, and hadn’t told Marcton what was inside.

  “She’s here?” Marcton said. “Beneath us?”

  Kendul nodded, thought: And there’s that faint thrumming in my bones again, but even stronger than I remember. He still couldn’t understand how Edward hadn’t been able to feel it.

  The house itself was mostly destroyed on the inside, but – quite miraculously – had stayed up the past three years. As amazing as that was, neither Marcton nor Kendul wanted to test their luck, so were fairly edgy, reacting to every creak and groan. From the outside it looked somewhat alright, but one wall had entirely come down, making it clear to any passerby that no one lived there, and likely hadn’t for years.

  “So,” Marcton said. “We just start digging, do we? Then put her back together like fucking Humpty Dumpty?”

  Kendul grimaced. “Something like that, yeah.”

  Kendul turned, picked up one of the shovels they’d brought, stuck it into the earth, started heaving dirt and small chunks of concrete over his shoulder. Marcton followed suit. Before long, they’d uncovered an arm and part of Adelina’s torso.

  “Fuck me running,” Marcton said, stopped digging, leaned on his shovel handle. “She is here.”

  “Why would I lie, Marcton? What point would that have served?”

  “I know, I know, it’s just… Christ. I somehow didn’t expect it to be true.”

  “Let’s get some more hands in to get her out.”

  “Yeah,” Marcton said, still dazed by confirmation of the discovery. “I’ll make the call.”

  * * *

  Three hours later, six sweating men – Kendul, Marcton, Cleve, Bill, and two random Runners – stood in a semi-circle around the two arms, one leg, and one torso-leg combination of what now constituted Adelina Palermo’s body.

  “Jesus,” one of the randoms said.

  “Crazy,” said the other, looked over at Kendul and Marcton. “What
is this again? Some kinda robot?”

  It’s you, Kendul thought. This is you. All of you. What you’d become in your purest state. He shuddered, said, “Yeah. Some kinda robot.”

  On some level, they know. Even if it was never spoken aloud, they know. They have to sense it somehow, don’t they?

  Kendul glanced at the four men they’d called in to help dig Adelina’s body out of the basement. Cleve and Bill were part of Marcton’s team, his inner circle, and they likely knew what they were looking at, but maybe Marcton told them to shut up about it. The other two, though – the looks on their faces indicated to Kendul that they weren’t necessarily firing on all cylinders, so maybe this moment’s profound significance escaped them. Kendul thought that even if they did know – if Marcton and Kendul just came right out and told them – they still wouldn’t really grasp it. They might intellectually know, but anything deeper would be impossible.

  Better safe than sorry.

  “What’re your names?” Kendul asked, flung his shovel into a corner of the basement. Something nearby groaned, shifted, and everyone looked alarmed for a moment till the noise settled, stopped.

  “Harold.”

  “Jeremy.”

  “Well, Harold and Jeremy,” Kendul continued. “What if I told you that this is what you turn into when you achieve ascendance?”

  Harold and Jeremy exchanged disbelieving glances.

  “Geeeeeet fucked!” Harold said, with a giant grin on his big dumb face. “Seriously?”

  Jeremy, possibly the smarter of the two, just shook his head, said, “No way. Nuh-uh.”

  Kendul held their gazes seriously for a moment, then dropped his eyes, laughed once, sharply, said, “Nah, it’s just some kinda robot. You guys’re right.”

  Harold and Jeremy looked satisfied with the answer. Easier to accept. Easier to swallow. Less horrifying than knowing that the thing you’ve been taught to aspire to – to treat as a lifelong ambition – ends with transformation into a giant beast that your own kind felt the need to blast literally limb from limb, and bury in the ground.