But before he got his lips halfway to her face, she sat up gasping. He jerked back just in time to avoid head-butting her.
Her eyes flicked back and forth, up and down. She focused on his face and opened her mouth.
“Don’t scream,” he said. “If you scream, we’re both dead.”
She screamed.
Jack tensed and looked at the door, listening for footsteps, not breathing.
When he turned back at her and held out his empty hands, saying both shh and I’m not going to hurt you with the gesture, she must have seen the terror in his eyes. She closed her mouth, opened it again, and finally closed it and left it closed.
“Something really bad’s happening,” he whispered. He shook his head. “Worse than that. I can’t even…”
She pushed herself into a sitting position. “Where are we?” She also whispered.
“The security office downstairs.”
“Why?” She touched her neck, found the flap he’d cut. When she saw the blood on her fingers, she scooted away from him. “What did you do to me?” Her voice had gotten louder. Her eyes were wide, scared.
“Shh,” he said. “I cut out your chip. It was the only way I could think of to save you.”
She looked at the bloody scissors and touched her neck again. “Save me from what?”
“I…” He let out a short, disbelieving laugh. “War, I guess. Death for sure.”
Her eyes flicked toward the desk and the row of projections. Jack moved in front of her, blocking her view.
“You don’t want to see that,” he said. “Trust me.”
She stood up, pushed past him, and looked anyway. Jack watched her face. Although he didn’t look at the images himself, and although the projections were silent, he knew exactly when the ships revved their engines and destroyed their loads. He saw it in her eyes, in the shocked disbelief on her face and the tears suddenly rolling down her cheeks.
She turned away from the projections and vomited into a trashcan beside the desk.
When she turned back to him, he ripped a strip from his shirt, folded it, and offered it to her. “For your neck.”
She took the cloth and held it to her wound.
“Do you remember anything?” Jack asked.
“I…” She touched her forehead. “No. Last thing I remember, we were in the kitchen drinking coffee.”
“They’re using the chips.”
“Who?”
He shrugged.
“How?”
“I don’t know exactly, but you’re proof positive. As soon as I pulled your chip, you snapped right back to life. Well…pretty much.”
Realization smoothed every wrinkle in her face. “And your chip wasn’t working.”
He was more than just a little embarrassed that she’d figured it out so much quicker than he had.
“Yeah,” he said. “Lucky me.”
“No,” Marian said. The wrinkles returned. She crossed her arms, and Jack could practically see right through her shirt. He looked away. Eventually.
“That’s not luck,” she said. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
She still looked foggy, confused, but Jack saw her calculating, really thinking.
“The hospital,” she said. “They told me you weren’t the first one to have trouble with your chip.”
“I remember.”
“So what if whoever’s controlling the chips disabled some of them first?”
Now Jack crossed his own arms. “Why would they do that? And how?”
“I have no idea, but it seems logical doesn’t it?”
“Not really.”
Jack heard footsteps in the lobby and put his finger to his lips. Marian moved closer to him. They watched the door in silence.
Walk on by, Jack thought. Go hunt down someone else.
The footsteps stopped, continued, stopped again.
Please. Leave us alone.
The doorknob turned. First one way and then the other. Then something thudded against the door and it shook in its frame.
Jack grabbed Marian’s arm. They had to get out of here. But there was no way out. Nowhere to go.
He picked up the scissors.
The door shook again. The frame cracked in one place. And in another.
“Stay behind me,” Jack said. “If you get the chance, run. Cut out some more chips. Get help.”
The door cracked down the middle. The half still attached to the hinges swung in. The other half clattered to the floor.
The soldier on the other side of the doorway looked in at them, raised his weapon, and pointed it over Jack’s shoulder. Right at Marian’s head.
Jack lunged. He jabbed the scissors toward the soldier’s chest, but they clanged off some kind of metallic body armor and the soldier grabbed the scissors before Jack could attack again. Although Jack thought he had a pretty good grip on the things, the soldier pulled the scissors out of his hand with what seemed like almost no effort at all. The scissors dropped to the floor, and Jack saw his own wide, frightened eyes reflected in the soldier’s riot mask.
The soldier grabbed the front of Jack’s shirt, jerked him through the doorway, and flung him into the lobby. Jack tripped, fell, and slid across the floor. When he’d skidded to a halt, he flipped over on his back and propped himself up on his elbows.
The soldier pulled Marian through the doorway and to the front desk. He held something to her head.
The gun!
Except it wasn’t the gun. It was some sort of scanner. A beam of light arced out of the device and moved down Marian’s body. She tried to pull away, but the soldier must have had a solid grip on her.
The device warbled.
Without saying a word, the soldier grabbed a handful of her hair, her long blonde hair, and slammed her head into the desk.
Her nose broke. Jack heard it from halfway across the lobby. Blood gushed down her face, and she looked across at him. She started to say something, or maybe to scream, but before she could, the soldier slammed her head into the desk again.
This time, Jack thought the crack was the sound of her neck breaking. She flopped. Lifeless.
Jack tried to get up, despite his suddenly shaking body, but it was too late and he couldn’t make himself move anyway.
The soldier continued smacking Marian’s head into the desk until there wasn’t much left but mush running down his thick glove.
“You bastard!” Jack screamed. Maybe out loud, maybe only in his head.
The soldier wiped his glove on his uniform and walked across the room to where Jack lay.
Jack figured this was it: the end. He had no weapons and obviously wasn’t a match for the guy physically, but if he could get in at least one last blow, maybe he could die with a shred of dignity. He pushed himself up, lurched toward the soldier, and threw a vicious uppercut. His fist hit the guy’s riot mask, and the whole helmet popped into the air.
The soldier stared at him with its single, red, robotic eye. Its face was a smooth, metallic nothing of a face. The light inside the eye blinked, and the soldier punched Jack in the chest.
Jack fell to the floor, gasping, sure his heart had stopped beating. He crawled away form the robot, but only for a few feet. The machine caught up to him, stepped on his leg, and pointed a gun at his head.
No. Not a gun. The scanner again. A beam of light hit Jack in the face, moved around the side of his head. The scanner beeped and flashed a green light.
The robot pulled off its glove. Its fingers weren’t fingers at all but some kind of heavy-gauge needles. It stuck one of these into Jack’s upper arm.
Jack heard a whoosh. And then nothing.
• • •
Jack suspected something might be wrong with his chip, but when he shook his head, his mind cleared and he decided he’d just been imagining things.
The conveyor belt slid ever onward, and the next component stopped in front of him. His fingers went to work, moving delicately, precisely. When he finished, he reache
d up and touched the incision where they’d modified his chip. The area was sore, but by the time the next component slid into place, he’d forgotten all about it.
His mind pulsed, and he gave in to the urge to work, not sure what he was building, not caring.
He thought of a woman he’d once known, a life he’d once lived, and he didn’t miss them at all. They were nothing like the work.
A new component slid into place, and he let his fingers do what they did best.
He accessed a piano concerto he’d learned as a child and played it from the beginning. As he worked, the music pumped continuously through his new mind. He smiled and hummed along.
Chorus
By Robert J. Duperre
The howling began at sundown.
Abigail Browning sat up in bed and drew her legs to her chest. Her entire body ached from the day’s hard labor, muscles and joints groaning each time she moved. She cocked her head and listened as a tingling sensation crept from feet to knees to chest to head. These noises weren’t exactly unexpected – Mort Hollis, the gruff old man who’d sold her the farm earlier that day for thirty gold coins, had warned her about the ramshackle town of Westworth’s savage nightly visitors and told her to make sure her doors were locked tight – but there was no way she could have anticipated the alarming rawness of the sound.
It started as a rumbling, drawn-out mewl that drifted through the cabin like the hum of a distant motor. Soon other, higher-pitched screeches joined in, echoing in the audible space above and below the originator. The sound wavered in tone, scaling up and down, creating an abstract, primal melody. The window shutters rattled with each variation in timbre. It almost seemed as if they were shaking in fear. Abigail felt the same.
She glanced to the door, expecting it to swing open any second and a frightened toddler to sprint into the room. He would dive under her covers and wrap his quivering arms around her, while she in turn wrapped her arms around him, the way she did any time the coyotes back east began their nightly song. She would then whisper into his ear that all would be fine, nothing could hurt him, she would always be there to protect him.
But that wasn’t going to happen. Nathan was gone. The Incident saw to that. Tears streamed down Abigail’s cheek as she saw his once-beautiful face swollen and bruised. She remembered touching his forehead and felt the coldness of his flesh once more. She hadn’t cried as she held him then, covered in blood, cradling him in her arms and singing his favorite lullaby, pretending nothing had happened. She more than made up for that now. Her body quaked with guilt from the memory, from the guilt of not having been there to protect him from the bastard until it was too late, and she choked on her sobs. It felt like her sorrow would never end.
And still the howling continued. Even as she wiped down her cheeks with the dirty towel from her nightstand it persisted, filling the air, becoming thicker, more resilient. Abigail swallowed the last of her sorrow and swung her feet off the bed. The slatted wood floor was cold, the air even colder, and she wrapped her arms around herself as she stood up and wandered to the window.
Pulling back the shutters, Abigail gazed through the open portal, across the expanse of dust and dirt. She saw her cattle out there under the fading red sky, still as death, as if they too were captivated by the alien sound. Behind them was her fence, a crumbling barrier built from the rotting trunks of the last trees that grew in this barren part of the new world. And out there, beyond the cows and dirt and fence, rose the red clay cliffs, their rocky surfaces glimmering like blood in the day’s final light. She saw nothing odd, no monster, human or otherwise, that could make the sound she heard. There was nothing but an endless expanse of sand stone.
She thought she saw a shadow bolt across her periphery. Abigail slammed the shutters, locked them, tiptoed across the room, checked the safety bar across the front door of her shack, and then leapt back into bed. She rolled into a ball, sticking her head beneath the covers and breathing deep, trying to instill the warmth of her breath into the atmosphere inside her cocoon. It was cold at night, made even colder by the memory of her son and the strange, shrieking beasts outside.
It was hours before it all ceased and she was able to fall into a restless sleep.
* * *
The midday sun blazed as Abigail walked along the boundary of her land, examining the livestock. Its glare turned her shadow into an image of Medusa, her kinky-curly hair transforming into a wig of snakes. Shaking off a shudder, she went back about her business.
The twenty heads of cattle wandering about had come with the farm, and though Mr. Hollis had promised they were of good stock, all she saw were sickly, mutated beasts. Some had missing or extra legs, some had too many or too few eyes, and all were slender to the point of starvation. Not exactly the perfect specimens, but she shrugged, assuming it would be hard to find better out here in the wastelands, especially considering there were still invisible pollutants lingering in the air that made plants wither and animals spit out teeth, bleed from their gums, and perish in the night.
She’d traveled out here in hopes of building a better life, a quiet existence far away from the crowds of frightened people back home; or at least that’s what she told herself. In reality she was on the run from her pain and her guilt, from the knowledge that the one thing that defined her – motherhood – had been ripped away, leaving her empty inside. Over the last few months she’d pushed her body to the breaking point, traveling when she should’ve rested her tired bones, withholding nourishment when she should’ve eaten, staying out in the day when she should’ve sought shelter from the sun. She lifted her arm and gazed at the hands that emerged from her long, tattered shirt. Her skin had been dark to begin with, but now it was reaching the point of blackness. There were blisters on her feet and fingers, and she had frequent, massive headaches. Sometimes she wondered why she pushed herself so hard, but that questioning was nothing but a cover for the truth.
Abigail Browning was torturing herself.
She approached one of her disfigured cattle, a female with an extra, gangly, withered leg protruding from its hindquarters. It stood apart from the others, facing away from her and releasing a strange, rumbling groan. The beast let out a snort as her fingers traced its bony spine. Its head shot to the rear suddenly and it kicked out with its rear legs. The superfluous leg flopped about and Abigail jumped back, barely avoiding a hoof in the face. She slung her rifle from behind her and shouldered it, just in case the frightened animal decided to charge her. It didn’t. Instead, it trotted toward the others, who were gathered around the feed bins, feasting on the meager supply of grains.
Abigail stepped to the side as the cow left the scene and spotted the reason the creature had been acting so strangely. There was a calf there, lying on its side on the parched earth. It shivered as if cold, and a puddle of red expanded around it. Abigail moved closer, trying to see over its side, and froze. The poor creature wasn’t moving on its own accord. There was another animal there, a tiny thing with gray, peeling skin, squatting in front of the calf with its head buried in its stomach. Its neck twitched back and forth, causing entrails to flow from the gaping wound in the calf’s underbelly. Abigail slid back the bolt of her rifle, chambering a round.
“Hey!” she shouted.
The monstrosity pulled out of the calf, revealing a bulbous skull and a blood-soaked face that might have once been human. A pair of milky white eyes with tiny black dots for pupils stared at her. The creature had not a hair on its head and its grayish flesh was stretched and peeling. There was a hollow gap where the nose should’ve been. Its cheekbones were too wide, the jaw too narrow, and blood dripped from its frayed chin. It hunkered down, thin ropes of muscle tense, and then leaned forward and hissed. Abigail backed up a step.
The creature swayed from side to side before rising on its skinny legs. In a moment of panic, Abigail almost squeezed the trigger, but she paused. There was something about the thing’s posture that hypnotized her. It was no bigger than Natha
n had been when he died, and the way it scrunched up its empty nose cavity, exposing its sharp yet gapped teeth, reminded her of the expression that came over her son’s face whenever he tasted something that didn’t agree with him. Her breath hitched and she dropped the rifle. The creature’s shoulders sagged as it stared at her. The way its head tilted, with one nub of an ear almost touching its bony shoulder, while its virtually nonexistent lips puffed out, made it appear strangely innocent.
Abigail slung the rifle back over her shoulder and stepped forward, wondering why Mort Hollis had never mentioned the presence of these odd beasts. Her old leather moccasins sunk into the blood-drenched dirt. When the liquid swished beneath her feet, the tiny monster bared its jagged, dagger-like teeth and crouched into a defensive position.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to be afraid.”
She leaned over the calf and reached her hand toward the thing, waggling her fingers to let it know all was okay. She didn’t know why she did this. The creature had just mutilated one of her cattle. It was a monstrosity. And yet her heart pattered while she stared at it, and somewhere deep down she knew the tiny thing wouldn’t hurt her.
“Take my hand.”
The creature hissed one final time, spun around, and took off. It was fast – faster than a horse, from her perspective – and it cleared the fence in one leap. In a matter of moments it was but a speck on the horizon, rushing up and over the red clay cliffs until it disappeared from sight.
Abigail frowned, staring at the landscape. She wondered how the strange little being survived being out there, all alone in the desert. Strange as it sounded in her own head, she wished it well.
With a sigh she shrugged the rifle off her shoulder, placed it on the ground, and knelt before the dead calf to inspect the damage. She ran her hand over its weathered hide, feeling the bumps beneath the flesh, tumors that would’ve one day sprouted extra hooves or tails or whatnot had the poor beast lived. She purposefully kept her eyes away from its gashed stomach. It’s not that she was weak in the presence of blood; she just didn’t want to think of that strange little beast as anything vile.
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