by Various
Because I thought of them, I also thought about Tony and the friend he’d been to me. A few years ago, he was simply a kid, working the espresso machine at the local café that my wife and I frequented. The only words we shared then were polite conversations, a few thank-yous, and plenty have-a-good-days. But now? We could have been brothers. He meant that much to me. They all did.
Like a stark revelation, I remembered he was leaving. I might never see him again, at least not alive. I glanced at my watch—it was 11:58—and shuddered with relief that there was still time.
I dashed out of the bedroom.
“Tony? Tony where are you?”
“In the living room. Why, what’s wrong?”
I hurried down the stairs and toward his voice. Tony sat there holding that same book, this time upside down.
“Aren’t you ever going to finish that thing?” I said, motioning to it.
“Oh, this?” he said, letting it dangle. “I already did. Ten times. I only keep because it once belonged to Patrick.”
“Thank God. I was beginning to worry you couldn’t read.”
We chuckled, turning away like the men we were, too nervous to share emotions. But there wasn’t time to be men anymore. There was only time to be family. I crossed the living room in three strides and threw my arms around him. He hugged me back and we stayed that way, until the knock sounded from the front door.
“I’ll answer it,” he said.
“How can you be sure it’s for you?”
“It’s for me. Goodbye Victor. And if you ever see Kathy, say hi for me, will you?”
“Right. And say hi to Patrick for me too. Let him know if he lays one finger or tooth on you, I’ll kill him.”
Tony nodded, grinned a sheepish grin, and headed for the door. Just as he touched the knob, the voice of Patrick said, “Tony? I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
Tony stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind him. I locked it, staring through the peephole as they disappeared into the night.
• • •
Human life had always followed a certain progression, which we came to accept as brute fact. We’re born, we live, we struggle, we die, and afterward our bodies rot. It was such a common experience we never bothered to challenge the truth of it, or think it could ever be another way. But perhaps that wasn’t as necessary as experience had led us to believe. Perhaps it was always meant to change.
Regardless, I wasn’t ready to accept that change just yet. But who knows? It was another day. I was alone now and night was fast approaching. This time the midnight visitor would come for me. If it was Kathy, maybe I’d give in like the rest. Maybe I’d take her hand and we’d step into the cold night, and she’d lead me into some ethereal paradise, where we’d be together with everyone else who had ever died or been taken.
Or maybe the visitors were just zombies all along, and this was some sort of elaborate scheme. If so, maybe I’d just hold out here. See what happened next.
BURNING MEN
by Samuel Marzioli
First published in Penumbra eMag (Jun. 2013), edited by Celina Summers
• • • •
IT’S DAWN by the time we reach our project site, tucked into a field ten miles south of the city limits. As Thomas and I strap on our packs, I look up into the sky. It glows in shades of purple and red, and a hint of yellow nudges through the horizon. And all I can think is God’s up there beyond that beautiful expanse, judging me for my actions. Hating me for the violence I perpetuate.
I tell Thomas about my doubts, even as I check the gauge on my burner and ensure the fuel canisters are locked in tight. In response his eyes roll up. He makes an exasperated sigh and says, “Look, George, it’s one thing to believe that God stuff when you’re a kid, ass parked in a pew on Sunday morning. But another when you’re out on a job.”
“How do you mean?” I say.
“Out here we got no time for lofty ideals. This is Darwin’s world; survival of the fittest. All that matters is we’re strong and they’re weak. We’re lions and they’re sheep.”
“Maybe,” I say, but I find myself pondering his unintentional theological allusions. Because there once was a Lion who was also a Shepherd and never harmed a head of wool. It gets me hoping—just as we sneak into the homeless camp of polyester tents and sleeping bags—that it’s a sign.
“Burn it,” Thomas whispers.
I count eight tents in all: half singles, the other half big enough to fit families. The beggared inhabitants inside are sound asleep, snuggling against the cold and damp of morning. We activate the boosters, take aim, and pull our triggers. A plume of flame erupts.
And then the screaming starts.
• • •
We collect the charcoal corpses and drag them to the shoulder of the street, lay them side by side on the dust and gravel. Their faces are so contorted by pain you can hardly see the humanity left in them. Some fused together from the heat, a collection like some macabre exhibit in a modern house of horrors. Only, they’re real, and it takes all my strength to keep from washing them in vomit.
I head to the car and update Dispatch on the results, mark the project site as clean. The Collectors will come by later in their trucks once their rounds begin at seven. As for Thomas and me, it’s break time.
“Who’s hungry?” he says, tossing me a sly smile, sniffing a finger he broke off a dead woman’s hand. I slap a palm over my mouth and slink to the car.
We head back to the city and end up at the corner booth in my favorite diner. I’ve been coming here for years, only most of that time I was working retail at a small mom and pop electronics store in the White Zone. The waitress, Hilda, was nice then, quick to smile and quicker to laugh. Sometimes she’d bring me a free slice of pie. “On the house,” she’d say with a wink. “Us day-wagers have to stick together.”
Now, after Hilda takes our order, she gives us plenty of space. There’s nothing like happiness in her expression, only a hint of scorn behind the blankness of her features. The steady line of her lips sometimes catches in a tremble whenever she’s forced to speak to us.
“You’re working yourself up, George,” Thomas says, after gulping down his eggs. “There’s no God up there looking down. No Devil below looking up. Just those of us who do what our government demands, those who break the law and the day-wagers in between.”
He’s still wearing his black kevmex Burner suit, his mask pulled up around his forehead. Hilda’s not the only one affected by our presence. I see the same expression of false calm on every face around us, barely hiding terror. That’s why I took my suit off the moment we went on break. But Thomas? He’d wear it on a trip to the grocery store if management allowed it.
“I know, it’s just—”
“Just what, hom?” he says. Hom is short for hominid. It’s one of his ways of reminding me that, beyond our clothes and culture, we’re all just animals at heart.
“I had a dream. The people I killed collected around my bed and they told me of the fire that waits for me when I die. Fire that burns but never consumes, leaving a man to taste his own misery for an eternity.”
“Ah, that’s all hocus witchus bullshit,” he says, and gets to work downing his bacon and sausages. “Besides, what we do is for the greater good. That’s got to count for something.”
Maybe he’s right. Every day they show us vids down at Burner Central of the good we accomplish every day. Crimes down. The economy is soaring. The unemployment rate is virtually zero.
Nevertheless, I can still hear the cries of men woken by heat, of women smothering their babies to give them a kinder death, or children screaming the names of their dead parents at the passive flames. So maybe Thomas is right; maybe they all are. But I can’t help thinking I’m doing wrong.
• • •
After breakfast, we head out on patrol. There’s no job in our queue from Dispatch, so we cruise the city streets, keep our eyes open to the clues of poverty around us. People t
urn aside at our passing. Curtains shut, doors close. Some hide in the shadows until we’re out of sight.
Around Tenth and Market, we come across an elderly woman hobbling on a walker. She’s dressed in old, moth eaten clothes, and looks a little too haggard for any proper citizen. Probable cause to stop her for questioning.
The moment she sees us step out of our vehicle, her mouth gapes and she wets herself. Thomas laughs and points at her indignity, but I don’t give it a second glance. Once her papers check out, we send her off with a polite, “Have a good day, ma’am,” and it’s back to patrolling.
For the next few minutes I think about the look in her eyes and it reminds me of when I was a day-wager too. Seeing the Burners pass, I often wondered if they would come for me next, despite my gainful employment. And when Mr. and Mrs. Fowler closed their shop two months ago, and laid me off, that fear only escalated. I never left my apartment, searched the internet for jobs from morning until night. Barely slept.
My “salvation” came through Thomas. We had been friends since high school, and he stuck his neck out by recommending me for a job to his supervisor. Without him, I might have been roadside charcoal by now. Despite it all, I can’t forget that. Or the relief—a feeling like gravity had lost its pull, and all the weeks of despair were gone for good. A new beginning.
I try to hold those feelings close when Thomas spots another suspect under a bridge in the Red Zone. This time it’s a man in his forties. A beard like a wad of moss, and his crime as plain as the ragged clothes upon his unwashed body. When he sees our patrol car, he makes a run for it. Thomas jumps out the passenger side and gives chase. They race a hundred yards before Thomas tackles the man, pinning him to the ground with a forearm and a knee.
“Come on, hom. It’s grill time,” he says when I catch up at last.
I aim, then pause and lower my burner to the ground. “Are you sure this is right?”
“Again with the moralizing? There is no judgment, no damnation fire. Just death followed by an everlasting nothing. The moment you realize that the easier this all gets. It worked for me.”
“I just don’t know.”
“Look, if God’s real I’ll take the blame.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like this.”
He jerks the homeless man to his knees, slaps the man’s chin up until they’re both staring into the sky. He points his burner toward the sun and lets off a stream of fire.
“Hey up there, it’s me, Thomas! If you’re real, turn this fire into snow. Do it and I’ll let this guy live. Otherwise, I kill him.” The fire persists, falling like raindrops, sizzling when it strikes the wet pavement. “See?”
“Yeah,” I lie, but really my attention is drawn to the man. For a moment, I thought I saw the fear on his face gilded by hope, as if he expected the miracle to happen. Honestly, I did too. We’re both disappointed by the result, but I’ll give him the edge on that.
“Let’s get this done,” Thomas says, taking a few steps back.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the man.
• • •
We get a call from dispatch. They send us over to the Green Zone for a project by the name of Mackie. He was a rental service manager. For ten years he did good business, until the Green Zone market for apartments went south and suddenly he was nothing. Living on welfare with his sons for seven months—one month too long, according to the powers that be.
We kick down his door, drag the family out of their rooms and throw them to the sidewalk in front of their house.
“Ready?” says Thomas.
For a moment I look at Mackie and his sons, the panic in their eyes red, wet and bestial. I wonder again if I’m doing right and I stare up at the clouds, pleading for an answer. Something to resolve the conflict boiling inside me. But the sun shines bright as any other day. The wind’s a downy breeze, and the silence from above lingers on and on and on.
In times like these, it’s hard not to suspect that Thomas’s right, and the only God is nature. And yet I think about the brutality of the natural world, as cruel as anything we’ve done the past five days. A lioness doesn’t cry when she brings down a baby gazelle. A crocodile doesn’t weep when he snaps up a mother zebra. So then, why do I feel the knife-sharp edge of guilt for every life I take?
“Burn them,” says Thomas.
God—if there is a God—help us.
We pull our triggers.
• • •
After work, we had back to Burner Central and get dressed in our civvies in the basement locker room. Around us, thirty other men and women do the same, and another fifty suit up for their coming tour. I hear authentic laughter in the back. A man a few rows over talks about the barbecue his family is throwing this weekend, asking his partner if he’s coming. I shake my head at their apathy, even as I swallow my conscience further down, to a place I can barely hear it.
“That’s your first week George, how do you feel?” says Thomas.
“Like shit.”
He hesitates. “Can I be real with you?”
“Yeah.”
“When I first started, I went through the same kind of thing you’re going through now. That’s what makes us a special breed, you know? We fling shit just like any other monkey, only we feel bad about it afterward. But you get used to it, you have to. If you’re not a burner you’re a day-wager, and if you’re a day-wager you’re as good as roasted meat.”
“Survival of the fittest?” I say.
“That’s the world we live in, hom. It is what it is.”
I nod. It makes sense. Maybe one day it’ll be the only sense I got left. But for now, I still don’t know if I’m doing right.
Michael Matheson became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Per Una Selva Oscura” in One Buck Horror, Vol. 6 (Mar. 2013), edited by Christopher Hawkins and Kris Hawkins.
Visit his website at michaelmatheson.wordpress.com.
* * *
Short Story: “The Many Lives of the Xun Long” ••••
Short Story: “Weary, Bone Deep” ••••
Short Story: “The Last Summer” ••••
THE MANY LIVES OF THE XUN LONG
by Michael Matheson
First published in Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories (2013), edited by Claude Lalumière and Camille Alexa
• • • •
WEI JIA watched his granddaughter’s granddaughter, Xinhua, from a second-storey window of their row house home overlooking Kensington Avenue; watched the young woman make her way through crowds browsing the street market; watched Xinhua thread through them like the waters of a swiftly flowing river. Like her mother, and all the daughters of his line, she had taken quickly to his training.
Xinhua’s mother, Lin, coughed at Jia from the adjacent room. “The neighbours,” she said.
He sighed and moved away from the window, slipping around the doorjamb and drifting down the stairs, the fog of his feet trailing slowly after his translucent form. He was at the front door when Xinhua unlocked it from the other side. He could hear her talking to someone. Laughing. She said her farewells as she opened the door, her friend’s footsteps fading.
“Welcome home,” Jia said in Mandarin, smiling at his great-great-granddaughter as she slipped inside and closed the door quickly behind her.
“Xianxian Jia,” she reproached, slipping into English in the space of a single breath: “What are you doing?”
“Must we, in English?” Jia asked, working the memory of his lips around words still uncomfortable nearly a century after he had learned them. Death did not make them easier to say.
“Yes, in this house we must,” Lin said from the top of the stairs, her hands on her hips as Jia whirled slowly in midair like a leaf caught on the wind. Wisps of his form trailed after him in a lazy circle. “What are you doing near the front door? What if someone had seen?”
“Someone nearly did,” Xinhua whispered, frowning at
Jia.
“Can I not even greet my line-daughter in my own home?”
“We’ve discussed this, Xianxian Jia.” Lin descended the stairs in quick two-steps. At the bottom, she looked into Jia’s eyes and, as though talking to a recalcitrant child, said, “You must not be seen by others.”
Jia harrumphed and stood straighter, putting his hands on his hips, his self-image still lithe and muscular—the image of a man in his prime: the image of his body at the time of his death. “And who was it who taught you both of stealth?” he began.
Both women groaned and turned toward the kitchen, Jia drifting after. “Did you remember the milk?” Lin asked Xinhua.
Xinhua nodded. “And the bak choi, and the duck,” Xinhua rattled off, tapping her full backpack for emphasis.
“—Who was it,” continued Jia, slipping into Mandarin, “who first fought for our people in this strange land?”
“How was the interview?” Lin asked her daughter as they moved into the kitchen.
“I think it went well,” Xinhua said, pursing her lips and slipping her backpack off. “I’m not sure I’m what they’re looking for though.”
“—Who first woke Tianlong to our plight, and begged him whisper of it to the Celestial Bureaucracy, that it might make its way to the Jade Emperor?”
“Do they know what they want?” Lin asked, leaning on the wooden table in the centre of the kitchen.
“Probably not,” laughed Xinhua, unpacking her backpack and handing the items one by one to her mother.
“—Who was it who was granted the blessing of the Jade Emperor himself and was made the first Xun Long, defender of our people against the violence of the Canadian gweilo?”
“I will not have you using that word in my house,” Lin said, finally acknowledging Jia’s presence in the kitchen, “divinely appointed Swift Dragon, or no.”