The Best of Subterranean

  I drove home thinking, “What the hell?”

  * * *

  Mark consulted the semi-Q that vibrated in his temple and learned that he had traveled for fifty-two minutes, an unpleasant trek whose destination remained obscure. He had no reason to trust this pirate, but if Solomon intended any harm, it would be a waste of time. Mark knew he was worth very little in terms of information, a link in an encoded chain, and his death, even his dissection, would instruct no one.

  In any event, he didn’t think the pirate was scheming against him. He wasn’t sure what—

  In front of him, Solomon suddenly crouched. Without looking over his shoulder, Solomon patted the ground next to him, and Mark came forward and they both looked down at the valley below.

  The crowd within Mark noisily urged flight, but he quelled their voices with a warning. “I can be rid of you for good,” he thought, and the voices settled into a fluttering of moth wings. He added, “And you’re no help if you hide.”

  Every nest differed, because Lethe’s Children were not inclined to do the same thing twice. They were busy as bees but not as consistent. And not much smarter, according to some of the scientists who studied them. What the LC was was flexible.

  They had swarmed this old NewMeriCo fortress, and they’d left some of the company’s biggest weapons intact because Lethe’s Children just didn’t seem to care about these killing machines. They had no fear. Although they screamed when hurt, they didn’t avoid pain. Good soldiers! Mark thought. Mindless idiots: good soldiers.

  These soldiers looked like children—from a distance. Up close, they looked creepy and terrifying. Unless you were observing a dead one or one strapped on a board—and alone they didn’t last long—you wouldn’t know just exactly what they looked like because they were very, very fast. The way their alien-attributes entered your consciousness was subtle: a moan that rose to a scream. Better to see a monster at once, a full-blown horror, than have it enter your mind as a guest, something familiar, and transform into a goblin.

  War Solutions, Inc., one of the bigger weapons manufactures, created drones that could track them despite their speed. There were a hundred ways to kill the LC. They were, in truth, flimsy creatures. But they existed in vast multitudes and the killing machines grew mired in pale goblin bodies and then the LC decided to shift behavioral gears and bring some new horror forward. And most of the human world, barred from the fortresses, the shielded cities of the elite, crouched in small villages preparing for an attack, practicing with their weapons, while Lethe’s Children were playing elsewhere. Later, on a whim, the LC would come and kill the tiny, irrelevantly brave humans.

  Mark watched Lethe’s Children closely, hardly breathing, looking for some pattern, some weakness, as though they had not already been under the world’s scrutiny for years. Mark had never seen them firsthand; all his memories were hand-me-downs, and, beneath his revulsion and fear, there was still some satisfaction to be had in acquiring a memory born of his own experience. He just needed to live to keep it.

  Lethe’s Children scrambled up and down the altered shell of NewMeriCo. Scientists had discovered that each creature had between three and ten instructions that governed its behavior. As with the social insects, fairly sophisticated swarm behavior could be created with a set of limited protocols. What was unsettling was the constant reprogramming that occurred, apparently somewhere deep in the hive, as though some greater intelligence existed and could make administrative decisions. No such central intelligence existed in an ant colony, and ants were already the most successful insects on the planet. What if the LC were something more?

  They move so fast! Mark thought. They were excavating a hill next to the fortress, running as though some project deadline were rapidly approaching. When they encountered each other they would kiss or slap each other, the slapping behavior being elaborate like a vid his teachers showed him of long-ago humor for long-ago television…slapstick someone said…yes, the stooges, three of them: Curly and Mo and another one.

  A hand clutched Mark’s wrist, and he almost screamed. It was Solomon, and the pirate handed him digi-wraps, which Mark slipped over his eyes to look where the pirate directed.

  There was some beast, a black, bulky thing—a gorilla? No there were no gorillas here, this was a shambling, shabby thing a—yes!—a bear. Not a grizzly, a smaller bear, but bigger than Mark.

  Lethe’s Children were tormenting the bear, prodding it with sticks, throwing stones at it, rushing in to bite a leg, a buttock, genitals. Another LC, smaller than the general lot, jumped on the animal’s shaggy back and bit it on the shoulder. The bear was not defenseless, and with a roar it flung the creature off and swiped at it with a massive paw. Something rolled beyond the frenzied circle, and Mark turned to let the digi-wraps call it into focus. It was a head, still animate, mouth open and making an ululation which rendered the brothers within Mark crazy and incoherent.

  Now the LC were on the bear, and the animal collapsed under their numbers and grunted and coughed and something dark—blood—seeped out beneath the awful writhing of these small, idiot monsters.

  Mark thought he might be sick despite his high marks in self-mastery. A hand fell on his shoulder and he heard the pirate’s voice: “I think they wanted our eyes on the show,” he said. “And it’s too late now.”

  Mark turned, pushing the digi-wraps aside, and beheld the grinning faces, and noted a detail no one residing in his mind seemed to have logged: the creatures had three thin tongues that slipped like a black tide between their blood-red teeth.

  * * *

  Strange times. I’ll cut to the chase here. Yesterday, I came out of my neighborhood grocery store at about one in the morning. I like to do my shopping when most citizens are sleeping. There is a downside to that, but there’s a downside to almost everything. In the case of late-night grocery shopping, the problem is this: now that the crowds have thinned out, the shelf-stocking begins in earnest. There are boxes and giant pallets all over the place. You can’t push a cart down most of the aisles, and you are forced to dart in and out of narrow spaces like some marginal scavenger in the end times. In this predawn state, when few humans are around to enrich the ambience, the lights cast a grey-green pall that wouldn’t be out of place in the world’s worst zombie crack house, and the electricity is more apt to snap at your hands (despite the cart’s rope-like wire that skids along the store’s floor to prevent just this from happening). If you decide to tell your cashier (average age: 14) that you are getting electric shocks, he will look at you with new wariness and say “Whoa,” or something equally unhelpful.

  So I came out of the store and watched a nightjar swoop after bugs drawn by the parking lot’s many lamps. This was not a bat, it was a nightjar. You might think that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but in this instance, I do. Consider that a preemptive strike against your incredulity.

  I unlocked my car with my remote. I was six feet from my car when, out of the shadows, a large shapeless person appeared. His silhouette and lurching gait suggested a man who was sleeping outdoors, and when he came under the street light I recognized him. He was the ancient bearded prophet who I’d seen listening to Vernon on The Drag.

  “Hey,” I said. He had the reek of someone marinated in cheap wine and boiled under a bad year’s vicious sun. He was shabby and sick and wore unsnapped rubber boots that wouldn’t be seeing any rain any time soon. He wore one glove, and that gloved-hand clutched half a scissors, which glittered ominously as though recently sharpened.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  He frowned, possibly interpreting this question as a trick. He said, “Don’t want nothing. Don’t fear nothing. Don’t—”

  He staggered forward and tripped, his clumsiness resulting in a swift lunge that neither of us had been expecting. I dropped the plastic bag—a jar of pickles burst, releasing a sweet and sour smell—and I staggered back, banging against my car. My attacker lay on the ground, muttering. I opened the car doo
r, ducked my head, and turned in the driver’s seat. I slammed the door and drove away.

  When I got back to the Paris Apartments parking lot, I noticed that I still had the half-scissors. My stomach had claimed it, and it was sticking out of my tee-shirt. My heart sped up when I realized the blade was firmly embedded in my stomach. Beyond a certain muted discomfort, I felt okay, but I knew that didn’t signify anything. Maybe I was in shock. I was pretty sure it should hurt a lot. I parked my car, and thought, “I should probably drive to the ER,” but I didn’t. Moving carefully, I slowly marched up the stairs to my apartment. Vernon was not in sight, and since he would engage me in some inane conversation even if I told him I had just been stabbed, I was glad he wasn’t around. He was a night owl, too, and so it was just luck that I dodged him.

  The reek of pickles entered my apartment with me, and I realized that the cuff of my right pants’ leg was soaked in pickle juice. I sat on my sofa and studied the scissors. Should I call an ambulance? Probably I should, but—I gripped the scissors’ handle and slowly pulled the blade out. It came out as clean as it had gone in. No blood? I was expecting a great dark patch to bloom on my shirt, a malignant Rorschach test whose interpretation was easy. But nothing happened, and when I lifted my shirt up, my stomach, though larger than I would have wished it to be, was unsullied by any wound.

  I don’t know how someone else would have dealt with this anomaly, but I was exhausted. I lay down on the sofa and immediately fell asleep.

  * * *

  All my life, I’ve felt that some reckoning awaits me. For the longest time, I assumed that everyone felt that way, but they don’t. Say the phrase “existential dread” to most folks and they’ll draw a blank. Some folks will say, “I studied that in college. Camus, Sartre, those guys, right?”

  I was always a morbid kid, I guess, although I only know that in retrospect. I can remember when I was maybe seven or eight, me and Artie and Susan Randall and her kid brother Pie and a gawky kid named Hoot who lived in a haunted house, we found a dead cat by the side of the road. I told everyone that we could all be like that in less time than it took to spit, just as dead, because we were made of the same stuff! I told them I’d seen a television show about the human body, and it wasn’t good news, we were built out of jelly-stuff and baloney-like valves that opened and closed but couldn’t do that forever and a heart that beat like a moth against a screen door and germs that swam in all the juices inside us and a brain that looked like a lot of grubs stuck together or maybe one of those popcorn balls people make at Christmas and everything depended on everything else, which was supposed to be wonderful according to the television scientist but wasn’t when you thought of all the things that could go wrong, and if you took your eyeball out and put it on the curb in the sun, it would dry up right away like a grape on a hot skillet because: we were just like that dead cat.

  Susan Randall hit me with her lunch pail, and I still have a tiny pale scar on my chin. I went to her funeral in high school; she’d jumped off the Skyway Bridge that stretches across Tampa Bay. She was on vacation with her folks, and they found a note. Her boyfriend had dumped her for a girl named Lily Fields who was cute in a way that I knew was going to go bad and it did. I saw Lily at a ten-year high school reunion and she was already looking puffy and clownish against her will. Her boyfriend wasn’t there, but they had both shown up for Susan’s funeral, clutching each other in an erotic fit of bereavement.

  In college, I was friends with Leslie Heckenberg—and we were just friends, no sexual entanglement. She was pretty, but I wasn’t attracted to her for whatever reason (pheromone mismatch maybe). She was the funniest, smartest person I knew.

  She could talk for hours about life’s various hideous aspects. She had some hilarious rants. There were other days, however, when irony deserted her and in a harrowing monotone she would talk about the utter failure of her existence. She began going into hospitals for depression. She got some electro-shock treatments and cheered up for a while but then plummeted into some dark hallucinatory hell and took a lot of pills and left a message on her landlady’s answering machine—it was a Friday and the landlady wouldn’t be back until Monday—saying: “By the time you get this I will be dead.” And she was.

  A friend of mine said, “Well, she’s been talking about killing herself for years, so maybe congratulations are in order. She followed through. You’ve got to admire that.” And he added: “I’m sure you helped her along; you’ve always been sort of…I don’t know…pro-death?”

  * * *

  Of course I thought about killing myself. To some extent, it was peer pressure—one time I made a list of friends and acquaintances who had offed themselves, and it came to fourteen names—but I also fancied myself an intellectual, so I had to reflect on Camus’s famous utterance: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

  My father and older brother were hunters, and on my sixteenth birthday I was given a shotgun. I had decided, years earlier, that I was never going to shoot at anything that couldn’t shoot back, so my father and brother continued to hunt without me, but I did, on occasion, go off into the wilderness with my weapon and contemplate blowing my brains out. However, I had never liked Hamlet’s overwrought vacillating, and when I saw the same behavior in myself, I stopped entertaining thoughts of self-destruction. I figured I’d know if I were ready to end it all. Hamlet never figured it out. He was killed when Laertes stabbed him with a poisoned sword, and consequently never had to answer Camus’s ultimate question: why proceed?

  I dreamed that Vernon was in my apartment last night. I woke to the sound of a match being struck. I was instantly alert and upright, peering into the dark to where a cigarette’s red ember hovered.

  “Who’s there?” I said.

  “Oh, good, you’re up.” a voice said, someone sitting in the big, multi-colored armchair I’d gotten for free when a couple I knew grew rich and needed more sedate decor. The lamp on the end table clicked on, and I saw Vernon. He was wearing a suit, which may have been his usual visiting attire for all I knew. He held a small black derby, balanced on his knee, while he held his cigarette with his other hand.

  “No smoking in here,” I said, the sort of thing anyone might say in a dream when more pressing issues are at hand.

  “Nothing to worry about. I have disabled the smoke alarm.” He gestured toward the ceiling, and, sure enough, the smoke alarm was dangling there, clearly deprived of its 9-volt battery.

  Vernon leaned forward and said, “I want to apologize for Truthman’s behavior.”

  “Who?”

  “Truthman.” Vernon chuckled. “He says an angel on fire gave him that name, and it burned away his memories of his parents and whatever name they might have pinned on him.”

  “Well he stabbed me with a scissors,” I said.

  “I did not encourage that at all.”

  I remembered. “I saw you talking to him. You put him up to that, didn’t you?”

  “I did not. I was just discussing the nature of free will with Truthman and some of his cohorts. He is not a sophisticated man, and he came to the conclusion that he should kill you.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “To prevent your doing more harm in the world.”

  I was starting to get angry.

  “Who are you? This isn’t the Vernon I know. That Vernon is…well…a boring idiot…a monologist…a nuisance…but I can’t imagine him breaking into my apartment in the middle of the night.”

  Vernon nodded. “Yes. That Vernon utters ‘polite, meaningless words’ as the poet Yeats would say. I have been in a disguise, and you have told me much about yourself.”

  I knew I had told him nothing.

  He read my expression and answered it. “But you have. It is what Yeats said, again, ‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.’ ”

  “What sacrif
ice are you referring to?”

  Vernon sighed, put his cigarette out by scrubbing it against the bottom of his shiny black shoe, and stood up. “Your compassion. We’ve had this conversation many times before, but you don’t remember. You were hell bent on not listening. You used to be what we call a karmic facilitator, for want of a better name in this sad fleeting world, but you are retired now. I should have retired years ago, myself.

  “We are night people, you and I. We are more comfortable in the dark, and the dark has entered our blood. The indelible dark. Ring a bell? It should, you’re the one who coined the phrase. Well, you are my last case, and I can’t say a lot, so you’ll have to listen as hard as you can. You are not responsible for the people you killed, but you killed them all the same.”

  “How come I don’t remember this entire secret karma-agent thing?” I asked.

  Vernon shrugged. “When you retire, you get a choice. You can remember, or not.”

  “And I, of course, chose to forget.”

  “Well, most people do. It’s what I’m choosing. And, anyway, on some level, you didn’t forget, did you?” Vernon looked around the room as though he might be forgetting something.

  He said, “You might decide that you need to leave this world, that your staying in it endangers others. There is a young woman you spoke to several months ago at her father’s funeral. Earlier tonight she was lying in her bathtub. The water was warm, and she held a razor in her right hand and she knew that the surest cut was lengthwise and she had been drinking, wine, quite a lot, and she was confident she could do this thing that would separate her from her pain, but, reaching out for the wine glass, she knocked it to the floor, and it shattered, and she got out of the tub and cleaned the mess up—fastidious woman—and the water went tepid and the impulse toward oblivion was lost. She went to bed, wrapping herself in blankets, crying until the alcohol pulled her into sleep. Tomorrow is another day, and she can kill herself then.”

  Vernon paused, but it was clear he had more to say. How could this be the same man who had never, as far as I knew, uttered a single word worth marking? I was breathless now, waiting for him to speak.