As the monster pulled strings at random, raising wobbly limbs, the Refurbished stretched their mouths even further. Finally, they uttered a piercing shriek that felt like a needle digging into a root canal. Brief clinks of shattering glass popped all around him: watches and eyewear were breaking.
The monster of the arena slowly turned to face the audience, the leer on its face taking on a strange, inquisitive appearance.
Something was happening here, leaving Mark frustrated as to what it was.
The concern on Nathalie’s face matched the general, growing uneasiness that permeated the air. It was as if the entire tent breathed fumes that could blow up with the accidental strike of a nail. People were on the brink of darting out to howl their pent-up terror. They were just waiting for the first person to shout fire.
Mark agonized over a deciphering frenzy. He tried counting the pulls of strings by the monster—a musician directing a symphony playing a silent melody; the shriek of the Refurbished provided a background chant—but no, he couldn’t detect a regular beat, a pattern. He tried extracting a sequence, maybe one that repeated, and searched the underlying algorithm—something like Morse code—but nothing repeated, nothing seemed contrived.
In his peripheral vision, he saw a blurry shape staring at him. It was the elderly lady from the bus. With the knowing eyes and that smirk, it was clear what she was saying: I told you so. As she turned back around, he noticed that locks of hair dislodged from her scalp and stuck to her pullover, leaving cranial spots that glistened pink like burned skin covered with medicated gel.
He reached to his own scalp. His hair was still firmly attached. Suddenly, the Refurbished stopped screaming.
People looked at each other, but no one said anything. It was the silence before the storm. Something was about to happen, and Mark took a firm hold of both Leyna and Nathalie’s hands, ready to bolt.
The Refurbished slowly turned to the audience, and in a guttural voice like a forced whisper, pronounced in unison the first utterance to ever breach their lips.
Hello.
Over the hush, nervous shuffling could be heard clear across the arena.
Everyone waited for what was to follow. Yet nothing came. The puppeteer had stopped pulling strings, the Refurbished had returned to their previous blank stares, and that was that.
“What, that’s it?” Nathalie whispered. Mark winced. He feared her voice might disrupt something. But the monster and its puppets turned and left.
Mark let go of both hands to wipe his own on his jeans and bury his face in them. The chatter volume steadily rose as the spectators slowly disengaged from their trance.
Mark shrugged. “So…they were just saying hello.”
“So…” Nathalie parroted in shock, “that’s what the Refurbished are for? They’re translators?”
Mark suddenly had a vision of the Grinding Machines regurgitating flesh puppets: interpreters programmed to capture and translate the language of the Invaders. It was outrageous, yet there it was—they had just clearly communicated a simple greeting. There was strange hope in that. It wasn’t we will kill you all, or we will enslave you, or you will obey us. It was a simple hello.
“And what if,” he said, “they had much more to say to us? Won’t they need a new batch of humans to process through their Grinding Machine to say it?”
Finally someone screamed, then a child across the stadium followed suit until it infected the audience, reminding him of the nocturnal canine frenzy before the Invasion. Mark rose to his feet in the middle of a cacophony of screams, hands grabbing and pushing, people tripping over seats and themselves. Nathalie’s hand firmly in his, he strained to hear what people were screaming about.
“What happened to him?” Female voice. “He was sitting right here!”
Male voice. “Oh my God! She’s gone!”
Female voice. “I told her not to go anywhere! Please please please please, Mary Ann where are you?”
As the realization of what was happening dawned on him, he spun toward Leyna and found only an empty seat. “LEYNA!”
He searched for her frantically in the aisles, screaming her name, but the panicking audience carried him toward the exit like a tsunami. He pushed his way through the crowd, but lost more ground than he gained, and finally spilled outside.
The emerging crowd eventually thinned. With still no sign of Leyna, he fought his way back inside. He found himself among a couple of dozen people in the arena center, some on their knees, face in hands, some running around to look under seats. But she was nowhere among them. He scanned the tent for the exit taken by the monster, but couldn’t find a single break in the tent material.
A hand rested on his shoulder. It was Nathalie. Without enthusiasm, she said, “Let’s look for her outside.”
* * *
For months, he looked for Leyna. He looked for her where the world was slowly unwinding, losing its familiarity, and shrouding her—at least in his mind—like the strange world of Alice in Wonderland. He frequented bars where the last drops of booze were freely distributed, churches, and the dreary, candlelit hallways and classrooms of high schools and universities. There, various groups met regularly to organize plans of action. But his questioning only met the knowing stares of the demoralized. They were veterans; they knew people were never recovered. He looked for her in buses that also ran freely, and for free. He looked in parks where prowlers, shielded by the smog and the conspicuous absence of law, were unstoppable. He looked in alleys where the homeless now cherished the diseases and mental illnesses that rendered them untouchable. Sometimes a Refurbished would crystallize out of the fog with fear on its doughboy face, or maybe an unknowable emotion inherited from the aliens. He would peer at the thing, at the absence of eyes in the malformed crevasses, to wrench some recognizable feature that would tell him that Leyna was in there, somewhere, lost in the cellular soup of a dozen, a hundred—a thousand?
But the only certainty was the faraway sound of the Grinding Machines playing in the background like eternal thunder. And one day, as he fell to his knees in front of one of them, its tall walls without doors rising in the smog, he screamed. Because he knew he would finally search no longer.
One morning, he found Nathalie sitting at the edge of the bed as he woke to her touch. She used a sponge soaked in cold water to cool his face.
“Did you have bad dreams again?” she said. She didn’t use the name Leyna.
But the way he avoided her eyes said it all. She lay down by his side, and he breathed deeply. The weight on his chest was heavier than usual, the fever had come back, and he’d lost more weight. The weakness he had felt when moving about he now felt upon waking, and all he could do was ride the fatigue until he fell into a slumber.
Nathalie curled up to him and rested her head on his chest. He knew what she was doing, but the Illness wouldn’t spread. It would kill him, not her, and she would eventually be alone, waiting for her time at the Grinding Machines, waiting to dilute into the human ocean.
Her instructions once he was gone were simple. There were razors in the cabinet and a bottle of vodka to ingest for a cottony departure. Of course, neither Mark nor Nathalie knew with any certainty whether she would have time to take that route.
Blue and yellow canopies had gone up throughout the city, a clear sign that a new message was to come—the impulse to count them had evaporated with Leyna’s departure. He gathered that the people most likely to venture in the tents would be the curious: the physicists, the psychologists, the mathematicians, and the linguists; people with cameras and equipment; people with a desperation greater than their fear.
In the middle of the night, Mark often woke up in sweat. His worst dream resurfaced again and again—a child without a face crouched by a writhing mass in the grass, holding a kitchen knife over it. The bulk was a cat, skinned and bloody. Every time the child removed some skin, the cat shrieked. Every time the cat shrieked, the boy turned its face to Mark, as if asking for a translation
. Mark screamed, “It’s not talking to you! It’s crying in pain!” The boy stared eyelessly for a moment, then went back to the cat to cut some more.
Whatever the Invaders were trying to say must’ve been of enormous importance, for they were killing life by the masses to do it. Perhaps Leyna, with her inherited love of numbers, might pass on enough enthusiasm about patterns to bring attention to a new means of communication for the aliens.
But for now, with the distraction of numbers out of the way, Nathalie looked splendid and carried a subliminal message of her own that needed no encryption: I will be here with you, no matter what.
In Nathalie’s embrace, Mark daydreamed about what that next message would be. He also wondered if there was anything in that message that would have something recognizable of Leyna in it. And even though the likelihood was slim that a recognizable pattern would emerge, there might still be a coded question in the strange voice of the Refurbished. One that only she and he would know, like a particular pattern from their hand squeezes. He would wait, however long it took.
He would wait for anything.
How many seats in the tent, Daddy?
How old am I now, Daddy?
Anything at all.
The Exterminators
by Sara Joan Berniker
“Hon, you awake?” Richard shouted up the stairs.
Yawning, Molly struggled to shake off the dream that still ensnared her: Samantha’s dwindling cries; Richard’s shining smile; the silent beach and a sky filled with stars, each worth a wish.
As she dressed, she noticed the bottle of sleeping pills on the windowsill: Richard was having the dream again, too. This was getting weird. They were going to have to have a talk.
“I’ve got to go, Molly! You up?”
“Yeah, Richard.”
“Good, then I’ll let them in.”
“Who?”
Down the hall, Samantha began to cry, obscuring his reply.
So tired she could barely walk, Molly went into the nursery and picked up the wailing baby. Samantha’s forehead felt a little cooler, but that didn’t mean much. She could tell from those snotty, labored gasps that her daughter was still sick.
In the silence that fell when Samantha paused to gulp a breath, Molly heard voices downstairs: more contractors, she guessed. They’d been taking bids for remodeling the kitchen, and lately the house had been crawling with burly men in tool belts.
Molly hurried down the stairs, smiling at the waiting men as she jiggled Samantha to try and ease the cries that came in out-of-breath bursts.
“You and your husband called?” the taller one said. “I’m Grady. This is Stan.”
She blushed under Grady’s unblinking gaze. He wasn’t a bad looking guy, with those muscular arms and straight white teeth. “You’re here to look at the kitchen?”
“No, we’re the exterminators.” He held out a clipboard. “Just need your signature…”
Exterminators? Had she and Richard talked about this? Who could remember? For weeks, Molly had been running on weird dreams and too much caffeine. Richard must have called them because of the ants in the pantry. They’d charge a bundle, these guys, and that meant another raid on the vacation fund. They were never going to get away, never going to get a break.
Molly felt warmth on her neck, and when her fingers came away they were wet with milky spit-up.
“A signature, Mrs. Bindley?”
“Yeah, just give me a sec.” She shifted Samantha to her other arm and dabbed at the mess, the smells of used milk and talcum powder making her dizzy. The dream had been so real this time. Every part of her craved to be back on that sandy beach with Richard at her side, the two of them rapturous under the canvas of glittering stars. If only Samantha would stop crying for two fucking seconds so she could think straight…
“Here, let me,” Grady said, holding out his arms. “Don’t worry. Kids always take to me.”
“You’ll be sorry,” Molly muttered, trading the squalling baby for the clipboard. She stared at the contract, unable to make sense of it; she wasn’t much good before her first cup of coffee, and the writing was so very dense. “Wasn’t my husband supposed to take care of this?”
“Yeah, he did. Put your John Hancock beside his, and we’ll be good to go.”
Molly looked up, startled at the sudden silence: Samantha was smiling. “I guess she likes you.”
“Yeah, I’m good with babies. That’s why they hired me.”
For the life of her, Molly couldn’t grasp how being good with children was linked to being an exterminator, but Grady had the kindest eyes she’d seen in a long while. No sense in looking stupid by asking. She squinted at the contract, a mess of legal jargon gobbledygook, and found her husband’s cramped, hurried signature. Using the pen tied to the clipboard, Molly signed her name.
“There you go,” she said, handing it to the other man. “Let me show you where the ants have set up house. You’ll have to excuse the mess; Richard didn’t tell me he’d called you.”
“You both called us, Mrs. Bindley,” Grady said softly, but Molly didn’t hear him—she was busy wondering if she should offer them coffee and whether they could tell she hadn’t bothered to put panties on under her jeans.
It wasn’t until she reached the kitchen that she realized the men weren’t following her. She turned just in time to see them cross the front lawn toward a white van, Samantha’s little hand waving over Grady’s broad shoulder.
“Wait!” Molly cried, running through the hall and out onto the porch. Stan climbed behind the wheel, while Grady opened the van’s back door and placed Samantha inside.
Stumbling down the stairs, she saw that the van’s interior was crowded with racks of big guns and cruel-looking spiked mallets.
“Stop! Stop!”
Grady stared at her. There was nothing threatening in his gaze, only mild confusion. “Ma’am?”
Molly sprinted across the lawn, her breath coming in harsh bursts. “Give her back!”
“Shit, not again,” Stan said. “We don’t got time for explanations. That last one put us forty minutes off schedule.”
“There’s no need to be upset, ma’am,” Grady said. “Everything’s in order. She’ll be fine.”
“Sure she will,” Stan said, winking. “Tell the nice lady what she wants to hear.”
“We’ll bill you in two to four weeks, Mrs. Bindley,” Grady said, ignoring his partner.
“What? No, the ants! That’s why you’re here!”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Give me my daughter back!” Molly reached for the van’s rear door, meaning to wrench it open and rescue Samantha, but Grady held her back, smiling patiently as if she were an ill-tempered child.
“You signed, ma’am,” he said. “You and your husband both. Have a nice day.”
Pushing hard, he sent Molly sprawling to the ground, then climbed into the van. In the moment before the engine growled to life, Molly heard her daughter laugh and wondered when she’d last heard Samantha sound so happy.
The van roared away from the curb.
A Chainsaw Execution
by Stephen R. George
A chainsaw execution is an ugly, messy thing. That’s the point. At least, that’s what my brother Grayeyes says.
To deliver a death so horrendous that it can never be forgotten. Its aftermath to linger in the minds and affect the actions of those who witness it; but even more so, to affect those who only hear of it. In their minds to take on a significance far beyond its admittedly ugly reality. The details, blown up to nightmare proportions, become the thing itself. Those details are what really matter, says Grayeyes. Putting a chainsaw to somebody who deserves it, if anybody can ever be said to deserve such a death, is one thing, but putting the saw to somebody who does not, that is pure genius, that is the poetry of kings. Those are Grayeyes’s words. That is the kind of death that resonates forever. It makes the condemned a figure of nearly unbearable pity—it makes the executi
oner a figure of terrifying legend.
The man tied to the chair in the garage of the derelict North End house was named Lisandros. He was the leader of a Chicago gang called Tráiganos. Lisandros was Hispanic, maybe Mexican or Puerto Rican. I couldn’t tell. They all look the same to me. His skin color was nearly the same as ours. We could have been brothers. Maybe we all looked the same to them. All us redskins.
His eyes were impossibly black. In one a tiny flaw glowed like a nugget of gold, and beneath that eye a deep scar on his cheek curved like a crescent moon. If not for the scar, he would have been a handsome man. Tráiganos had expanded north of the border a month ago, cutting first into our cocaine, and then into our prostitution. My brother had called for a meeting. Lisandros had been foolish enough to accept. Now he sat bound in a chair at the back of a derelict garage, in a country not his own, looking from Grayeyes to me to his own four men who were standing at the back of the garage with shotguns pointed at their heads.
Lisandros, like my brother, was a small man, wiry, muscular. His power came from his eyes, burning, focused. Those eyes moved slowly from my face to Grayeyes’s face. If he knew what was about to happen, he gave no indication. There was a tattoo on his neck, just visible above his collar: a black skull with its tongue reaching out of its mouth and slithering into one of its eye sockets. They said Tráiganos means “Bring us.” Bring us where? Bring us what? I don’t know. We all had something like that. On my right forearm, as on my brother Grayeyes’s forearm, as on all our men, was a dreamcatcher. A dreamcatcher is supposed to catch the bad dreams, to let the good ones through. When I was a child on the reserve, I had one hanging above my bed. I remember staring at it as I listened to my mother cry for hours in the dark. I have never known one to work.
The atmosphere in the garage was thick and sour, as if the air had become heavy like stale cigarette smoke. It was as if a bad spirit had come in there with us, was hovering at the edges of things, waiting. Our voices seemed to echo, sounding not quite like us, as if the walls were made of tin.
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