400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  My brothers, yes! Do you hear me now?

  "Hey, man, something's going on here. I don’t like it."

  He cannot count the eyes on him, riveted to his tiny, pink body.

  Yes, see me for what I am: your master! Kneel, I say, for I and my brothers and sisters are your conquerors!

  "But it's only a baby . . . "

  He hears the ticking surge, louder.

  "Oh my God, what's it doing?"

  "Let's get out—"

  It is time!

  The ticking stops, echoing in his ears. Into the vacuum he feels the rush of fire, swelling within him, swelling and growing, blowing and burning and cleansing.

  My supreme moment! My triumph! My—

  Spreading warm wetness.

  His excitement is too great. The instant of victory is shattered as he wets himself . . .

  And only then explodes.

  * * *

  “Rattleground” is copyright 2016 by Marc Laidlaw. It first appeared at marclaidlaw.com.

  THE EIGHTIES: PEAK OMNI

  As a teenager, my favorite magazine was the venerable Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Thinking of it as a slightly more attainable New Yorker, I dreamed of being one of its regular contributors. I did eventually begin to sell my work to F&SF, and it has remained a reliable home for my stories. But I was most fortunate to find my footing as a writer precisely at the time when Omni Magazine was becoming a pop-cultural force, and it was at Omni where I truly cut my teeth.

  In Omni, my stories were guaranteed to reach a large audience, which turned up the pressure I felt to be at my best. It’s also, not coincidentally, where I received the most intensive editorial support from the brilliant Ellen Datlow. I knew that once Ellen finally approved of a story, it was my best work; and lessons learned honing drafts for Omni served me well in other undertakings.

  Of course, only a handful of my stories were suitable for Omni. Night Cry was a welcome co-conspirator when it came to weirder, woollier stuff, while F&SF rewarded my more sober efforts. There were also a number of interesting original anthologies that came along and encouraged work I might not have attempted otherwise, notably George Zebrowski’s sterling Synergy series.

  Early adulthood, marriage, a move from San Francisco to Long Island and back again, I can see all these influences reflected in these stories. Which is simply to say, life was happening. I wrote as much as I could, trying to keep up.

  SNEAKERS

  What are you dreaming, kid?

  Oh, don’t squeeze your eyes, you can’t shut me out. Rolling over won’t help—not that blanket either. It might protect you from monsters but not from me.

  Let me show you something. Got it right here. . . .

  Well look at that. Is it your mom? Can’t you see her plain as day? Yeah, well try moonlight. Cold and white, not like the sun, all washed out; a five-hundred-thousandth of daylight. It can’t protect you.

  She doesn’t look healthy, kid. Her eyes are yellow, soft as cobwebs—touch them and they’ll tear. Her skin is like that too, isn’t it? No, Mom’s not doing so good. Hair all falling out. Her teeth are swollen, black, and charred.

  Yeah, something’s wrong.

  You don’t look so good yourself, kiddo—

  “Mom . . . ?”

  What if she doesn’t answer?

  Louder this time: “Mom!”

  Brent sat up, wide-awake now, sensing the shadows on the walls taking off like owls in flight. And that voice. He could still hear it. Were those rubber footsteps running away down the alley, a nightmare in tennis shoes taking off before it was caught? He could still see his mother’s face, peeling, rotten, dead.

  Why wouldn’t she answer?

  He knew it was only a dream, she just hadn’t heard him calling, tied up in her own dreams. A dream like any other. Like last night, when he had seen his father burning up in an auto wreck, broken bones coming through the ends of his chopped-off arms; and the night before that, an old memory of torturing a puppy, leaving it in the street where it got hit and squashed and spilled. And the night before? Something bad, he knew, though he couldn’t quite capture it.

  Every night he had come awake at the worst moments. Alone, frightened of the dream’s reality, of the hold it had on the dark corners of his waking world. If that voice had whispered when he was awake, he knew the walls might melt and bulge, breathing, as the blankets crawled up his face and snaked down his throat, suffocating him. That voice knew all his secrets, it whispered from a mouth filled with maggots, fanged with steel pins, a slashed and twisting tongue.

  How did it know him?

  Brent lay back and watched the dark ceiling until it began to spin, and he felt himself drifting back to sleep. Everything would be safe now, the voice had run away, he would have okay dreams. At least until tomorrow night.

  * * *

  It was not fear, the next night, that kept him from sleeping. Curiosity. He stuffed pillows beneath his covers to create an elongated shape, then he sat on the floor inside his closet with a flashlight. He had drunk a cup of instant coffee after dinner, to help him stay awake.

  He heard the clock downstairs chiming eleven; sometime later the television went off and the shower splashed briefly in his parents' bathroom. Midnight passed. A car went through the alley, though its headlights could not reach him in the closet.

  At one o’clock, a cat’s meow.

  The sneakers came at two. Footsteps in the alley.

  Brent nudged the door ajar and looked out at the pane of his window. He could see windows in the opposite house, a drooping net of telephone wires, the eye of a distant streetlight.

  Footsteps coming closer. It could be anyone. He thought he heard the squeak of rubber; it was such a real sound. This couldn’t be the whisperer.

  Then they stopped outside, just below his window. Not a sound did they make, for five minutes, ten, until he knew that he had fallen asleep and dreamed their approach, was dreaming even now, listening to his heart beating and a dog barking far away, and then the voice said, You’re awake.

  Brent pressed back into the closet, holding his flashlight as if it were a crucifix or a stake in a vampire movie. He didn’t have a hammer, though.

  Why don’t you come out of there?

  He shook his head, wishing that he were sound asleep now, where these whispers could only touch his dreams, could only make him see things. Not awake, like this, where if he took that talk too seriously, he knew the walls could melt.

  I’m still here, kiddo. What did you wait up for?

  Holding his flashlight clenched.

  A walk, maybe?

  He opened the closet door and crept out, first toward the bed, then toward the door of his room. Into the hall.

  That’s right.

  Was he really doing this? No. It was a dream after all, because the hall was different, it wasn’t the hall in his house: the paintings were of places that didn’t exist, changing color, blobs of grey and blue shifting as if worms had been mashed on the canvases, were still alive. That wasn’t his parents’ door swinging wide, with something coming to look out. He mustn’t look. There was a cage across the door so he was safe, but he mustn’t look.

  Downstairs, though, it was his living room. Dreams were like that. Completely real one minute, nonsense the next.

  Like Alice in Wonderland. Like the Brothers Grimm or Time Bandits.

  Who’s real, kid? Not me. Not you. I promise.

  Don’t wake the Red King.

  Don’t pinch yourself unless you want to know who’s dreaming.

  Don't open the back door and look into the alley, because here I am.

  He turned on his flashlight.

  Right behind you.

  The black bag—if it was a bag—came down fast over Brent’s eyes and whipped shut around his neck, smothering. He got lifted up and thrown across a bony shoulder. The sneakers started squeaking as he heard the alley gravel scatter.

  Say bye-bye to Mommy and Daddy.


  He was dreaming, this wasn’t real.

  There, that's what I meant, whispered the voice.

  * * *

  “Sneakers” copyright 1983 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Shadows #6 (1983), edited by Charles L. Grant.

  400 BOYS

  We sit and feel Fun City die. Two stories above our basement, at street level, something big is stomping apartment pyramids flat. We can feel the lives blinking out like smashed bulbs; you don’t need second sight to see through other eyes at a time like this. I get flashes of fear and sudden pain, but none last long. The paperback drops from my hands, and I blow my candle out.

  We are the Brothers, a team of twelve. There were twenty-two yesterday, but not everyone made it to the basement in time. Our slicker, Slash, is on a crate loading and reloading his gun with its one and only silver bullet. Crybaby Jaguar is kneeling in the corner on his old blanket, sobbing like a maniac; for once he has a good reason. My best Brother, Jade, keeps spinning the cylinders of the holotube in search of stations, but all he gets is static that sounds like screaming turned inside out. It’s a lot like the screaming in our minds, which won’t fade except as it gets squelched voice by voice.

  Slash goes, “Jade, turn that thing off or I’ll short-cirk it.”

  He is our leader, our slicker. His lips are gray, his mouth too wide where a Soooooot scalpel opened his cheeks. He has a lisp.

  Jade shrugs and shuts down the tube, but the sounds we hear instead are no better. Faraway pounding footsteps, shouts from the sky, even monster laughter. It seems to be passing away from us, deeper into Fun City.

  “They’ll be gone in no time,” Jade goes.

  “You think you know everything,” goes Vave O’Claw, dissecting an alarm clock with one chrome finger the way some kids pick their noses. “You don’t even know what they are—”

  “I saw ‘em,” goes Jade. “Croak and I. Right, Croak?”

  I nod without a sound. There’s no tongue in my mouth. I only croaked after my free fix-up, which I got for mouthing badsense to a Controller cognibot when I was twelve.

  Jade and I went out last night and climbed an empty pyramid to see what we could see. Past River-run Boulevard the world was burning bright, and I had to look away. Jade kept staring and said he saw wild giants running with the glow. Then I heard a thousand guitar strings snapping, and Jade said the giants had ripped up Big Bridge by the roots and thrown it at the moon. I looked up and saw a black arch spinning end over end, cables twanging as it flipped up and up through shredded smoke and never fell back —or not while we waited, which was not long.

  “Whatever it is could be here for good,” goes Slash, twisting his mouth in the middle as he grins. “Might never leave.”

  Crybaby stops snorting long enough to say, “Nuh-never?”

  “Why should they? Looks like they came a long way to get to Fun City, doesn’t it? Maybe we have a whole new team on our hands, Brothers.”

  “Just what we need,” goes Jade. “Don’t ask me to smash with ‘em, though. My blade’s not big enough. If the Controllers couldn’t keep ‘em from crashing through, what could we do?”

  Slash cocks his head. “Jade, dear Brother, listen close. If I ask you to smash, you smash. If I ask you to jump from a hive, you jump. Or find another team. You know I only ask these things to keep your life interesting.”

  “Interesting enough,” my best Brother grumbles.

  “Hey!” goes Crybaby. He’s bigger and older than any of us but doesn’t have the brains of a ten-year-old. “Listen!”

  We listen.

  “Don’t hear nothin’,” goes Skag.

  “Yeah! Nuh-nuthin’. They made away.”

  He spoke too soon. Next thing we know there is thunder in the wall, the concrete crawls underfoot, and the ceiling rains. I dive under a table with Jade.

  The thunder fades to a whisper. Afterward there is real silence.

  “You okay, Croak?” Jade goes. I nod and look into the basement for the other Brothers. I can tell by the team spirit in the room that no one is hurt.

  In the next instant we let out a twelve-part gasp.

  There’s natural light in the basement. Where from?

  Looking out from under the table, I catch a parting shot of the moon two stories and more above us. The last shock had split the old tenement hive open to the sky. Floors and ceilings layer the sides of a fissure; water pipes cross in the air like metal webs; the floppy head of a mattress spills foam on us.

  The moon vanishes into boiling black smoke. It is the same smoke we saw washing over the city yesterday, when the stars were sputtering like flares around a traffic wreck. Lady Death’s perfume comes creeping down with it.

  Slash straddles the crack that runs through the center of the room.

  He tucks his gun into his pocket. The silver of its only bullet was mixed with some of Slash’s blood. He saves it for the Sooooot who gave him his grin, a certain slicker named HiLo.

  “Okay, team,” he goes. “Let’s get out of here pronto.”

  Vave and Jade rip away the boards from the door. The basement was rigged for security, to keep us safe when things got bad in Fun City. Vave shielded the walls with baffles so when Controller cognibots came scanning for hideaways, they picked up plumbing and an empty room. Never a scoop of us.

  Beyond the door the stairs tilt up at a crazy slant; it’s nothing we cannot manage. I look back at the basement as we head up, because I had been getting to think of it as home.

  We were there when the Controllers came looking for war recruits. They thought we were just the right age.

  “Come out, come out, wherever in free!” they yelled. When they came hunting, we did our trick and disappeared.

  That was in the last of the calendar days, when everyone was yelling:

  “Hey! This is it! World War Last!”

  What they told us about the war could be squeezed into Vave’s pinky tip, which he had hollowed out for explosive darts. They still wanted us to fight in it. The deal was, we would get a free trip to the moon for training at Base English, then we would zip back to Earth charged up and ready to go-go-go. The SinoSovs were hatching wars like eggs, one after another, down south. The place got so hot that we could see the skies that way glowing white some nights, then yellow in the day.

  Federal Control had sealed our continental city tight in a see-through blister: Nothing but air and light got in or out without a password. Vave was sure when he saw the yellow glow that the SinoSovs had launched something fierce against the invisible curtain, something that was strong enough to get through.

  Quiet as queegs we creep to the Strip. Our bloc covers Fifty-sixth to Eighty-eighth between Westland and Chico. The streetlights are busted like every window in all the buildings and the crashed cars. Garbage and bodies are spilled all over.

  “Aw, skud,” goes Vave.

  Crybaby starts bawling.

  “Keep looking, Croak,” goes Slash to me. “Get it all.”

  I want to look away, but I have to store this for later. I almost cry because my ma and my real brother are dead. I put that away and get it all down. Slash lets me keep track of the Brothers.

  At the Federal Pylon, where they control the programmable parts and people of Fun City, Mister Fixer snipped my tongue and started on the other end.

  He did not live to finish the job. A team brigade of Quazis and Moofs, led by my Brothers, sprang me free.

  That takes teamwork. I know the Controllers said otherwise, said that we were smash-crazy subverts like the Anarcanes, with no pledge to Fun City. But if you ever listened to them, salt your ears. Teams never smashed unless they had to. When life pinched in Fun City, there was nowhere to jump but sideways into the next bloc. Enter with no invitation and . . . things worked out.

  I catch a shine of silver down the Strip. A cognibot is stalled with scanners down, no use to the shave-heads who sit in the Pylon and watch the streets.

  I point it out, thinking there can’t be many shave-heads l
eft.

  “No more law,” goes Jade.

  “Nothing in our way,” goes Slash.

  We start down the Strip. On our way past the cog, Vave stops to unbolt the laser nipples on its turret. Hooked to battery packs, they will make slick snappers.

  We grab flashlights from busted monster marts. For a while we look into the ruins, but that gets nasty fast. We stick to finding our way through the fallen mountains that used to be pyramids and block-long hives. It takes a long time.

  There is fresh paint on the walls that still stand, dripping red-black like it might never dry. The stench of fresh death blows at us from center city.

  Another alley cat pissed our bloc.

  I wonder about survivors. When we send our minds out into the ruins, we don’t feel a thing. There were never many people here when times were good. Most of the hives emptied out in the fever years, when the oldies died and the kiddy kids, untouched by disease, got closer together and learned to share their power.

  It keeps getting darker, hotter; the smell gets worse. Bodies staring from windows make me glad I never looked for Ma or my brother. We gather canned food, keeping ultraquiet. The Strip has never seen such a dead night. Teams were always roving, smashing, throwing clean-fun free-for-alls. Now there’s only us.

  We cross through bloc after bloc: Bennies, Silks, Quazis, Mannies, and Angels. No one. If any teams are alive they are in hideaways unknown; if they hid out overground they are as dead as the rest.

  We wait for the telltale psychic tug—like a whisper in the pit of your belly—that another team gives. There is nothing but death in the night.

  “Rest tight, teams,” Jade goes.

  “Wait,” goes Slash.

  We stop at two hundred sixty-fifth in the Snubnose bloc. Looking down the Strip, I see someone sitting high on a heap of ruined cement. He shakes his head and puts up his hands.

  “Well, well,” goes Slash.

  The doob starts down the heap. He is so weak he tumbles and avalanches the rest of the way to the street. We surround him, and he looks up into the black zero of Slash’s gun.