“Wait.” Edgar grabbed my arm and crouched down behind a fallen log, pulling me with him. We both awkwardly tried to keep our rifles pointed away from each other and ourselves. I stared into the trees, looking for whatever he’d seen, but all I saw was the occasional flash of a bird—
Then a figure emerged no more than a dozen yards away, leaning with one hand against a tree, head hung low, as if breathing hard. He—if it was a he—looked to be dressed in rags and leaves, and stood with his back to us. I lifted my gun, shakily, and started to lay the barrel across the log to keep it steady.
“Wait,” Edgar said. “If you shoot him, that saves you, but I’d still get killed.”
I was more eager to fire than I would have expected. “What do you suggest instead?” We had a victim in the hand here, and I didn’t want him to slip away.
“Follow him. Maybe he’s part of a camp of off-the-grid resistance fighters or something, and we can kill a couple of them and save us both.”
Our weird woodsman didn’t look like the social type, and I was about to point that out when the figure moved . . . and I saw his tail, four feet long, wrist-thick at the base and tapering to a point at the end, the color of moss, curling and uncurling as he walked away.
“Is—did you—what the fuck is that?”
“Guy with a tail,” Edgar said thoughtfully. “Wonder if it counts as a person for Hunter purposes?” I noticed the switch from “he” to “it” and approved. It’s a lot easier to kill an “it.”
“The genetically engineered weirdos in that nightclub three years back counted,” I said. “That girl with the eyes on the back of her head, remember?”
Edgar nodded. “Let’s try to follow it.” He pulled off his bright orange vest, and after a moment, I did too. The thing we were following didn’t look like the gun-toting sort—more like pointy stick at best—but it was still hard to give up the protection, though if we were going to have any shot at being stealthy, being a color other than bright orange made sense.
We crept through the woods, and I’m not going to lie: it wasn’t easy to track the thing. Not because it was stealthy—in fact, the only reason we kept up at all was because it didn’t try to be stealthy at all. It took lots of breaks to rest, broke lots of branches, even gabbled to itself in something between human language and the chittering of a squirrel. We tried to trail it from a respectable distance so it wouldn’t notice us, and we did a pretty good job. Every so often, it would stop to pick a mushroom, but otherwise it moved in a pretty straight line.
After an hour or so—our phones had been taken, so we wouldn’t know exactly how long we had until we were going to die, because the oligarchs thought it was funnier that way—the woods changed. There were . . . decorations. If you’ve ever seen a backwoods murder cult horror movie, you know the sort of things I mean: mobiles made from bones dangling from tree branches, animal skulls on sticks, half-rotting taxidermy monstrosities, like squirrels with bird wings sewn on the back. Edgar and I looked at each other, wide-eyed, holding our rifles at the ready, and he was probably wishing we’d had more than half an hour of practice on the gun range that morning, just like I was.
The thing we were following lurched forward more slowly, as if reluctant to reach its destination. I was thinking about shooting it, just to break the tension, when my ankle hit the trip wire.
I didn’t get jerked up in the air by a rope. A big spiked log didn’t fall down on my head. There was no explosion. Instead, I hit the wire, and it pulled loose a big string of bells and tin cans and spoons, making a noise of jangling metal they probably could have heard all the way back in civilization.
A harsh voice shouted, “Intruders! The ritual must continue!” and then the thing we were following whirled around to face us.
We’d never seen it from the front before. Edgar whimpered, and I’m sure I did too.
We’d assumed it was a bioengineered freak, but if so, it was the weirdest one I’d ever seen. Its head was entirely faceless, blank as a gourd, topped by a thatch of filthy hair. Instead, it had a face in its torso—eyes the size of pie plates, black-irised and bloodshot, where the nipples should have been; two ragged holes for a nose below that; and a wide gash full of yellowed triangular teeth all the way across the belly at navel level.
The thing ran toward us, arms outstretched, making more of that horrible gabbling noise. One of the hovering camera orbs swooped in to get a better look, and the thing reached out, and—
I don’t know how to explain what its arm did. It reached out, and I want to say it extended, but that’s wrong. It seemed to . . . zigzag, curving in a way that would have been possible if it had possessed a dozen elbows, only parts of the arm seemed to vanish and then reappear. It was like watching the reflection of a reaching arm in the shards of a cracked mirror. (Edgar muttered something about “non-Euclidean motion,” and I don’t remember much of high school geometry, but I think I know what he meant.) The hand snatched the orb from the air, retracted in a fraction of a second, and then the thing shoved the orb into its mouth and swallowed it. (Was the stomach right behind the mouth? Did it even have a biology that makes sense? I have no idea. Maybe its innards were non-Euclidean too.)
Apparently, the orbs enraged it more than we did, because it reached one impossible arm up into a tree and swung through the branches like some kind of nightmare ape, and its other arm and its tail both lashed after the remaining camera orbs, eating one and smashing the other to the ground, where it sparked and sizzled. The cameras should have been crush-proof, melt-proof, altogether indestructible—every other year or so, a Hunter went nuts and tried to wreck them, without success—but the one on the ground looked pretty well destroyed.
The cameras weren’t watching anymore. For a moment, I thought, We can run, but then I remembered the trackers they’d embedded over our hearts. We could try to cut them out with our hunting knives, maybe, but I was squeamish about the idea—what do we know about doing surgery? We don’t even cut meat; we’re vegetarians.
While I was pondering escape and tracking devices—in other words, while I was in denial—Edgar was dealing with the present and the actual. He lifted the rifle, took careful aim, and shot the thing in the head. Or the bulb that would have been a head on a human. The blank knob exploded like a watermelon smashed with a hammer, and the thing fell out of the tree, howling from its vast mouth. By then, I had my gun up, and I shot when it got to its feet, managing to take it right in one immense eye. The thing fell back, all its limbs twitching, but at least in a totally Euclidean way, with no weird disappearing movements.
“So, I guess that’s your kill,” Edgar said.
“I’m not sure that counts as a human. The way it moved . . . unless the Gamekeeper is pumping hallucinogens into the atmosphere . . . there’s no body-mod that lets your arms do that. It’s dead, at least. Should we be worrying about the ones who screamed ‘intruders’?”
“Maybe they’re more like humans.” He nudged the sparking camera orb on the ground. It looked oddly melted on one side, where the thing’s tail had struck it, and I took a step away from the still–mildly twitching body, wondering if its touch did peculiar things to reality. “Assuming we even get credit for kills now that we aren’t being watched.”
“They’ll have us on satellite view or something, won’t they?” I said, then looked up at the heavy tree cover.
“Or they might have surveillance devices implanted on us as well as the tracking devices. I did wake up from the surgery with a wicked headache. Maybe our eyes are cameras now.”
We flipped off each other, simultaneously, and grinned. “Suck it, people watching at home,” I said. “Let’s go see if there’s anyone else we can shoot.”
I wasn’t sure what the point of stealth was and, frankly, was a bit surprised that nobody else had attacked us . . . until we reached the clearing. The people there had plenty on their minds. Siccing that thing on us had probably taken all the attention they could spare.
Five people dressed i
n ragged robes of moss stood equidistant around a hemisphere of some glittering black rock as big as a picnic table. The stone reminded me of volcanic glass, but it had strange blue highlights, which looked almost like fireflies moving under the surface, and I instinctively felt the rock came from elsewhere—that it had fallen from space, or someplace even stranger. The people had their arms raised up, and they were vibrating, as if every one of them had touched a live electrical wire, and there was this weird hum, low and tooth-rattling, coming from the stone or the figures or both. I moved around to get a better view of the stone—something about it drew the eye—and saw a man sitting on top of the rock, cross-legged, totally naked, staring up at the open circle of blue sky above the clearing.
Suddenly, the humming stopped, and the five standing figures lowered their heads, the vibrations done. “The way is opening,” the man on the rock shouted, in the same voice that had called us intruders.
The men in the ragged moss robes—one was a woman, and one appeared to have spiraling goat horns, but most were men—turned toward us, and Edgar started shooting them.
I was afraid he was panicking and wouldn’t leave any for me, so I lifted my own rifle and shot the one with antlers and one of the men. The other three, Edgar got. They all fell, dead or dying or groaning . . . except the one with horns, who seemed to dissolve into the ground, horns becoming broken tree branches, flesh becoming mossy slime, robe indistinguishable from the forest floor.
“No!” the man on the rock screamed. “Stop! Heart’s blood must touch the stone or the way will not—”
Edgar shot him in the head, which wasn’t that impressive from such close range, and the naked man fell off the rock.
“I don’t think we get extra credit for killing more than one apiece,” I said.
The gun fell from Edgar’s hands and he sat on the ground, then put his face in his hands. His shoulders shook as he wept.
I didn’t feel like crying. I felt numb. (That lasted for a while. It’s wearing off now.)
I looked at the sky, the one patch of blue over the clearing, only it wasn’t blue anymore: there was a hole in the sky, about the circumference of a full moon, with a burned look around the edges. Beyond the hole was blackness. “Heart’s blood,” I said, and didn’t know why.
* * * *
Edgar found the book. A grimoire bound in human skin with a screaming demon face on the spine would have been more appropriate, but this was a battered three-ring binder full of everything from wide-ruled notebook paper scrawled in blue ink to ancient parchment that might have been written in blood. A lot of it was in languages we didn’t read—Latin, Greek, weirder stuff—but about half of it was the journal of the leader of this group . . . the naked guy, probably.
They weren’t rebels or revolutionaries, at least, not exactly. They were “seers of the unseen,” among other things. The leader described rituals and sacrifices, and talked about peeling off the skin of the world, calling up the ancients, overthrowing the hegemony of man. It would have seemed like nonsense . . . but he talked about summoning the “akephaloi,” which Edgar was pretty sure meant “headless ones,” and about calling forth a “goat of the woods,” and those sure sounded like the other-than-human things we’d encountered. If these people could do that, call up things like those, then who knew where the edge of plausibility was?
“Did the oligarchs send us here on purpose to kill them?” Edgar said. “Like the way they drop Hunters on rebel camps sometimes?”
I shook my head. “I think if the oligarchs knew there were things like this, with power like that, they’d drop rocks on them from orbit. And now that they’ve seen them, from before the cameras were destroyed, or through our eyes now . . . I bet that’s what’s going to happen. Any time now. Fire from heaven.”
“No cash and prizes,” Edgar said dully, flipping a page in the binder.
“No being shunned by our friends because we murdered some people and got PTSD, either,” I said. I was thinking, but the thoughts were far away. My inner landscape had become frozen tundra. “That thing in the sky, Edgar . . . That hole. The naked guy said the way was open. What does that mean?”
“The last pages of the journal talk about a ritual,” he said. “To summon up . . .” He ran his finger along a page and recited. “ ‘Gods of nature beyond our nature, vast in comparison to mankind, who will tread on us as carelessly as we tread on grass, cold but not cruel, as indifferent toward the monuments of man as a tornado is to the farmhouse it destroys, or the running deer to the spiderweb it disturbs.”
“Indifference,” I said. “That doesn’t sound so bad, compared to the oligarchs. To be stepped on by accident is better than to be stepped on because somebody thinks it’s funny.”
Edgar climbed up on the rock, holding his hunting knife. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“I mean . . . yeah.” I didn’t feel much about it one way or another.
“Okay, then. I’m glad I got to be alive with you for a while, Gary.”
I saw what he was going to do, and got to my feet, but I was too slow. He plunged the knife into his chest. His eyes went wide, and he gasped, bubbles of frothy blood spraying from his lips. Edgar wrenched the knife out of his chest, and blood spurted across the black-and-blue stone.
The humming came back, louder than before, like trillions of flies descending on a world-sized corpse. I looked up, where the circle of darkness burned and spread and burned and widened. I started to feel something then, like an ice floe breaking up in my chest.
I pulled Gary’s body off the rock, and sat down beside him, and started writing this in the journal with the dead man’s pen. Maybe someone will be left, to wonder why the world changed. I don’t know why, but this is how.
The whole sky is black now, full of blue sparks, and there are structures growing in the darkness.
I’m going to close the journal now and wait for the next thing to happen.
WHOSE DROWNED FACE SLEEPS
AN OWOMOYELA AND RACHEL SWIRSKY
When she comes into the loft, she glares at me with the bright-eyed, serpentine resentment of the dead. In the dry attic, water drips from her hair and pools at her feet. Her lips pull back. I’d forgotten that I used to grimace like that—teeth bared like an animal’s.
I’m not her and she isn’t me. When I say “I,” I might mean either one of us, but that’s not precise. I have no past, so I took her memories. I have no name, so I took her name. I had no body, but I have hers now, and she’s the one languishing in a puddle, snarling, hungry, and hating.
She went by R. I go by R. R names us both.
I’m still sorting things out.
* * * *
This is a murder story. It’s the story of how I killed myself.
* * * *
A memory, before I made these memories mine:
I walked into a life-drawing class and there she was, Selene—more comfortable in her naked skin than I was in my jeans and bomber jacket. She sat on a table in the center of the room. Her legs were held tensely together, but her shoulders were relaxed. She sat with her head thrown back so that I could see the foreshortened lines of her face: the way the point of her chin angled up to her cheekbones, the flash and flutter of reddish lashes over hazel eyes.
After class ended, she shrugged into a robe and walked a circuit of the easels as the students packed their things. I tried not to watch as she made her way past one sketch and then another, but even with my focus firmly on my charcoal pencils, I knew the instant she neared. I held my breath until she approached me. Or possibly it happened in reverse; she began to approach and nervousness stole my breath.
My lines were clumsy and architectural, slicing Selene’s figure into angular planes. I’d used a gray stripe to replicate the slant of illumination that the skylight cast across her. I wanted to capture something of the building we were in, its mood if not its essence: the old walls, the clouded glass windows, the crown molding that belonged in a more prestigious u
niversity.
None of my angles were as sharp as Selene’s. Standing there, she looked like a brass detail. Hard-edged and honed.
Without speaking, she put out her thumb and smeared the charcoal under the triangle I’d drawn for her left breast. She worked the smudge down the line of her stomach and hip, blending my lines into effortless chiaroscuro.
One gesture and the meaning of the work changed. Object became artist. “There,” she said with a nod.
She gave me a stare edged with challenge. She was prodding me, I thought, seeing if I would just let her get away with the casual violation of my page. Part of me wanted to meet her gaze with equal strength, to assert that even though she was the one who’d initiated contact, I was still equally in control. The bulk of me, however—the part that was nineteen and unsure—barely managed to meet her gaze at all.
“You’ve caught something real, I think,” she said. “I’m Selene.”
“R,” I said automatically. “I go by R.”
“For . . . Rebecca? Roseanne? Radioactive?”
R for “Are you going to stop asking me that?” I would have said to someone else. “Just R.” As an afterthought, I stuck out my hand.
She glanced at it; shook her head. “Left-handed.”
I switched immediately. She took my left hand and held it hard, leaving a smear of charcoal over my wrist.
Someone told me once that wedding rings go on the left hand because it’s the most direct arterial path to the heart. I’ve read that slitting the wrists kills you because the hands are hungry for blood: all that fine motor control, fed by little capillaries, drinks a mortal quantity. I used to rest my fingers on my pulse point as a child, to experience the thrill of my own fragility. I’d scare myself with the thought that I’d crush my arteries if I pressed too hard.
That childhood obsession left me with a few odd tics. I always needed to be able to see my wrists, to know my blood was safe. I couldn’t stick my hands into dark places or opaque containers. I needed clarity.
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