“Indeed, lass? And what’s more important than the end of the world? Answer me that. Or don’t. I’ve little left to teach you, but there’s this: don’t go another step.”
“Christ, next you’re going to tell me your God doesn’t want me up there.”
The woman shook her head. “Teuagh is no god. He is my father. He is the father of us all. When I was alive a child did what his father told him. I used to think I was like a father to you.”
“Really? Because I thought we had more of a Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepard thing going on. Wow, now that I think about it that’s kind of creepy. Well, listen, you can’t stop me. If I want to go up there I will.”
“You don’t ken it yet, Nilla. I’m not trying to stop you because I’m afraid of what you’ll do. I’m simply afraid you’re going to hurt yourself. There’s so few of us now. You, some fellow in New York who figured it out on his own. A lad in Russia who doesn’t even know where he is. I’m just trying to protect a very scarce resource, that’s all.”
Nilla opened her mouth to rebuke him but then she saw charred corpses in the broken field ahead of her. She took a step closer and felt the warmth of the Source grow hot. Another step and it was painful. “Oh,” she said. The same energy that fed her could burn her to a crisp if she got too close. Yet moving forward meant getting closer.
But then she just had it, as if her body knew what to do even if her mind was oblivious. She banked her energy—subtracted her darkness—made herself invisible. The one thing she could do that nobody else could manage. The one thing that set her apart. Instantly the warmth was gone. She stepped forward, and again, until she was even with the burnt and disfigured bodies sprawled across the rocks.
Nothing happened.
Singletary had been right. She was the only one who could go to the Source. She started to climb.
It was a far easier ascent than what had come before, though every step knocked loose showers of pebbles and dirt, eroded bits of hillside that went skittering down, pattering, pittering away from her. The handholds were stable, if the footing wasn’t. In a few minutes she had reached the top of a ridge. A green-painted stegosaurus stood watch there, sculpted out of concrete. Just as Singletary had shown her.
Dinosaurs. Statues of dinosaurs. A tyrranosaur loomed over the site, while human-sized velociraptors leered out from around corners. In the middle of it all stood a dilapidated building with a sign posted next to its door.
DINOSAUR EXPERIENCE
-HALL OF FOSSILS-
PROPRIETOR DR. E. VRONSKI
OPENING SUMMER 2006
The door opened and a man stepped out. A living man. He was mostly bald, with tiny blue eyes, intensely blue eyes. Nilla walked over to him and took the hand he extended. He had no trouble seeing her, even though she was invisible. She must be invisible—if she let her energy show, even for a moment, she would have been incinerated.
“I always imagined one of you would come. Please. We should go inside.” He lead her into a dark building full of glass display cases. Some of them were empty and collecting dust. Others held dark fossils half-buried in matrices of brown or red stone. Educational plaques hung on the walls.
“Are you Dr. Vronski?” Nilla asked.
“I was,” he told her. “I mean… I was a paleontologist, before all this, well, you know, started. I’m the one, by the way. I’m the moron who killed off the human race.”
Nilla didn’t know how to reply to that. Then she thought of something. "How can you see me? I'm invisible."
He burbled pleasantly, as if something had tickled him. “After a while I learned how to see it. The singularity. It's like living next to an invisible star for months and months, eventually you start wondering where all the light is coming from. You’re like a shadow against that light. You know, like on a dark night, you can see a tree because its silhouette blots out the stars behind it. Come on, please, this way. You’re going to kill me, right? Kill me and eat me? It’s far less than what I deserve. Here.” He lead her to the top of a stairwell. “Maybe you’d like to see it first, though. The singularity. Or maybe… something to eat.”
Nilla looked down the stairs. There was someone else down there—or maybe two people, standing very close together. They moved into the light and her mouth fell open in true horror.
“This is my wife, Charlotte.” He looked at her eyes and whispered, “please don’t say anything about her appearance. She’s very sensitive.”
Chapter Fifteen
Unexpected side effects, all over the news I… I did this? I can’t believe it spread so far… I did this? I did it for her, only for her… forgive me… [Lab Notes, 4/2/05]
“I’m sorry that it’s dead. I know you would prefer it alive.”
Vronski put down a plate in front of Nilla. A dead rat lay on its side there, one glazed eye pointed in her direction. She ate it without thinking too much about it. She was too busy trying not to look at Charlotte.
The paleontologist had prepared a Lean Cuisine for himself. Apparently Charlotte didn’t eat any more, so instead he had placed a vase full of cut flowers where her plate should go. As Nilla tried not to watch Charlotte slowly and methodically tore the petals off the flowers and crumpled them between her fingers.
Charlotte was still alive. Vronski had assured Nilla of that fact at least three times. It was hard to believe him. Boils and eruptions covered the skin of her one remaining arm, which emerged from under a pendulous roll of ill-defined flesh. When she moved Nilla could almost make out the shape of a human being in the mass.
The paleontologist’s wife had been a lawyer, once, he had told her. Now she was an abomination. Pancreatic cancer had blossomed inside of her, spreading to every part of her body. It should have killed her. Vronski had kept her alive at the cost of apocalypse, but in the process he had kept the cancer alive as well. Apparently there had been no choice.
The cancer outweighed what was left of Charlotte, probably by a factor of three to one. Its abstract tissue draped over her back and down her sides. It dragged on the floor behind her. It obscured her breasts and hips and it completely hid her face. It mostly looked like fat tissue covered in thin, translucent skin, but in places it had tried to form itself into pieces of a human being. A row of perfectly-formed teeth emerged from the smooth expanse where Charlotte’s shoulder must be. Patches of hair had broken out here and there on her back and there were fingernails growing in places that weren’t fingers. A single closed eyelid could be seen on her stomach.
A thick bundle of black cables drooped from under the roll of flesh and snaked its way out of the room. It connected Charlotte’s nervous system directly to the Source. Without those cables, Vronski explained, she would die instantly. The human parts of her were incapable of supporting the cancerous parts without direct stimulation.
“I kept her alive,” he said, over and over. The culmination of his life’s work.
He had tried his best to give her back a face. To this end he had bought a porcelain domino mask—the kind found in little girl’s bedrooms around the country—and tied it around where her head should be with a length of pink ribbon. From time to time it would begin to slip down and Vronski would patiently get up and readjust it.
He had not bothered to put any clothes on her, though Nilla imagined it would take a tent’s worth of cloth to cover her swollen bulk.
“Is she… is she even aware of us?” Nilla asked, dragging her gaze away from Charlotte to look at the thing’s husband. “Can she smell us or something?”
“Please don’t,” he hissed.
After dinner he agreed to take Nilla down to look at the Source. On the way she passed quite close by Charlotte. She noticed the mask had been broken at some point and very carefully glued back together.
"There have been some psychological adjustments we had to make," he whispered, but said no more.
Vronski lead her down two flights of stairs into a room at the very bottom of the museum. It had been used once as a
workshop and laboratory and it was still full of crates full of carefully-packed fossils. Vronski offered to show her his best specimens—he claimed to have a nearly intact archaeopteryx—but Nilla was far more interested in the room’s other contents. Namely, the Source.
Various items surrounded it—what looked like tikis carved out of wood and shrunken heads mounted on sticks, while elaborate patterns of colored powder lined the floor, but the room was also stuffed full of scientific apparatus. A complicated looking device collected the energy of the Source and sent it through the black cables to where Charlotte waited upstairs. Vronski tried to describe how that worked but Nilla didn’t care at all. The Source demanded all of her attention.
It was difficult to say how large it might be—it radiated life energy so strongly that when Nilla closed her eyes it looked like a blazing star. She could feel its power, quite literally—it pushed at her. It blew her hair back. It was beautiful, far more beautiful than a dead thing like herself deserved. Probably it was more beautiful than anything on Earth deserved. It was constantly in motion, its shifting, shimmering rays twisting through the air as if they were threads of gossamer billowing in a pleasant breeze.
It was the beginning, the start of all things. You could feel as much, if you reached out a hand toward it. It made you. It shaped you. From a center that was also an edge it reached out to every cell, to every twisted coil of protein. It spoke the language of chemicals binding together and combining, recombining, a language as softly spoken as pine needles falling on snow. It knew your thoughts. It gave you your thoughts and your feelings.
“I’m sorry,” Vronski said.
She looked up at him. “For what?” she asked.
“It’s just—you’ve been standing there for fifteen minutes now and I’d kind of like to get on with things. If you don’t mind. You can go back to looking at it after you’ve killed me.”
Fifteen minutes? She had barely started gazing on the Source.
“I’m still considering what I should do,” Nilla said, collecting herself. And she was. She had choices, or at least a choice, for the first time since… well, the first time she could remember. She could kill the man who had started the Epidemic. In the process she would insure that nobody else could ever take the Source away from her—that her unlife would go on forever. Mael would like that. Alternatively, she could do what Captain Clark had wanted. She could shut this thing down. End her own existence, yes. End all the death and pain and horror too.
She thought of the creature upstairs that Vronski called his wife. Vronski had started the Epidemic in order to maintain her life, long past the point where anyone would think she would want to keep it. Nilla’s choice was sort of the same. Prolong her own, largely miserable, existence, or choose death. Actual death.
She stalled. “What is this?” She asked. “How did you make it?”
“It’s a field, a kind of biological field. It’s similar to the Earth’s magnetic field. Life couldn’t exist without it. I didn’t make it. It was always there, I just… well. I’m sure you don’t want all the details. Imagine a balloon full of air. I stuck a needle in the balloon and now air is rushing out. Except this balloon won’t ever deflate—it’s constantly being filled back up with new air. This is a singularity, you see, a biological singularity. It’s pumping out the raw energy of life itself. Ordinarily that power is used by the cells of living things, both as an energy source and a repository of patterns, a complete set of blueprints for every biological process. The cells control it and manipulate it via a feedback loop we don’t really understand. I’ve liberated some of the energy from that system, to keep Charlotte’s body from failing. Unfortunately I had no control over how much I liberated. It grows, it wants to grow. It keeps growing, spreading from one biological cell to the next. You, and the others like you, are the result.”
“I can’t believe this. You fucked with the life force? Talk about playing God. What are you, some kind of mad scientist?”
Vronski shrugged uncomfortably. “I kept her alive. She’s still alive.” He raised his hands and lowered them again. “I would have killed myself a while back. I know what I did, and how wrong I was. But then who would look after Charlotte? She’s always bumping into things, and cutting herself by accident and she needs someone to tend to her little boo-boos. I love her, you see. I love her so very, very much.”
He looked less human in that moment than his wife. He looked like a part of a person, an idea that never got thought over. A fragment of intention with nothing to back it up. He was a mad scientist alright, but not in the traditional sense. He was a scientist, and he was mentally ill. That was all.
“Okay.” Nilla had made her decision. “Well, that’s over with now. You and I are going to shut this thing down. I don’t care how difficult that is or what it will do to her, just show me how.”
He looked up with a strange expression on his face. Incomprehension, from a man used to understanding things intuitively. “Shut it down?”
“Yeah. We end this, I fall down dead, the world goes back to normal. How do I begin, do I do this?” she asked. She knocked over one of the tiki statues. Picked it up and threw it against a wall until it broke. “How about this?” She grabbed an oscilloscope off a wheeled cart and dropped it to crash in pieces on the floor. “Stop me when I’m getting warm.” She found a hatchet on one of the lab tables and started breaking equipment.
“I don’t think you understand,” he told her. “This is a breach made in one of the most basic elements of nature. This is a self-reinforcing singularity. It provides its own power, it, it increases in size without any kind of input!”
“So?” Nilla shouted. “So what?”
“So… you can’t shut it down. That isn’t physically possible. You can’t stop this now. You can’t stuff the air back into the balloon.”
Nilla let her arm drop. She stared at him. Into him. He was telling the truth. He wanted someone to stop the Source. He needed it, though it meant losing his wife. But it couldn't be done.
He turned away from her and picked up a fossil from a lab bench. A trilobite—something extinct and yet still beautiful. “I imagine you’re going to kill me now, which frankly, I’m fine with. I mean I deserve it. I deserve worse.”
“Yeah.” Nilla thought of all the people who had died to get her this close. Shar and Charles. Mellowman, Morphine Mike. The Termite. Captain Clark and all of his soldiers. The man in the truck who bit her on the neck. Every single person she’d met since her reawakening was dead along with others, so many others, so many millions of others. What this man had done was beyond evil. “Yeah. You do deserve worse.”
She picked up the bundle of black cables that ran across the floor. With the hatchet she cut through them all in one stroke.
They heard a tiny shout from upstairs, a sudden yelp of pain, but nothing like speech. Then something large and heavy collided with the floor.
Vronski’s blue eyes quivered in their sockets and sweat broke out on his forehead.
Nilla dropped the hatchet and walked away, away from the scientist, away from the museum, away from the mountains. Somewhere in Kansas she stopped in the middle of a highway because Mael was trying to talk to her. She turned around to see him standing naked behind her, looking apologetic.
“Your name was Julie,” he told her, and then he vanished in thin air.
END OF MONSTER NATION
Epilogue
The big fan chopped up what little light made it into Dekalb’s spider hole. It pushed freezing air down on him, across him, dusty cold air that skittered across his swollen skin. The remaining fluids in his body had pooled in his back, in the back of his thighs, in the back of his head. The mummies lifted him up with metal hooks beneath his armpits, they hoisted him off the floor to try to get the liquids moving again.
The rattling of the chains, the droning of the fan irritated Dekalb. He wanted to brush the sounds away like buzzing flies. He didn’t have the strength to lift his hands. “D
id you hear something before?” Dekalb demanded. The mummies swiveled him around until he was looking at Gary. “Or maybe it was a smell, something foul in the air.”
The skull on the floor didn’t move its lower jaw but it spoke all the same.
She picked up the thick bunch of cables in one hand and cut it with her hatchet. That killed the cancer woman, of course, her system couldn’t function without the constant input of energy from the Source…
“Shut up for a second,” Dekalb hissed. His own voice was less than a whisper. It was the movement of a gnat’s wings, with no strength behind it. “There’s something different. Something… bad.” His eyes went to Gary’s skull again. The lower jaw… something was wrong with it.
So what Clark wanted, which was just vengeance, revenge for humanity, was achieved and she left, which makes you kind of wonder. Was she good or evil? Or maybe she just wanted to make up her own mind about things…
That jaw—it hadn’t been there before. When Dekalb had still been alive, when he had taken Gary’s head away from the fortress in Central Park, he had left the jawbone behind.
Gary had grown back an entire body part while he told his story.
Dekalb’s eyes were clouded with decay, his vision poor at best. He looked closer. Had the skin on Gary’s head smoothed out, erasing the old burn scars? Were those—had he seen movement in the empty eyesockets?
So she found Mael again and he told her, her name was Julie. He could be pretty generous when you did what he wanted. Maybe I was too hasty in eating him. He could have taught me so much more…
A rumbling vibration shook the room. A vast emergent noise—a whale turning over in the darkness below the ocean. A mountain falling down in another country. Except it wasn’t a sound at all, was it? Dekalb felt it on the back of his neck.
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