by Brad Munson
“I’ll be goddamned,” she said to herself.
“What?” Fender asked in alarm. “What? Come on, it’s already tingling like a son of a bitch, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Fender. Christ, get hold of yourself.” She wiped the blood away from it. He flinched, but didn’t scream. Then she did it again.
The wound had closed up, though not in the way she’d expected. Not at all. A crust had formed over it, flakes of gray and white, like tiny chips of bone or rock that hadn’t drawn the lips of the wound together but had filled the gash, like plaster troweled into a crack in a wall. It wasn't a scab, it couldn't have formed that quickly, and it wasn't the right color or texture. It was more like...like a patch, something you'd make in a concrete wall.
She took the water-soaked towel and wiped it over the wound again. It left behind a swath of moisture that glistened in the trailer’s dim light…and then the crust along the cheek seemed to swell, to actually grow new chips along its edge as the water soaked in.
No, she decided. It didn’t soak in. It was pulled in, sucked in, like a sponge.
For a brief moment, Lucy thought it was some bizarre infection caused by the needleseed itself. But it couldn’t be infected – not this fast. This didn’t look like the effects of any plant toxin she’d ever seen before, either, and she had seen plenty. There was no leakage, no pus, nothing. Only dry flakes, dry particles. Dry.
How can an infection be dry? she asked herself.
Fender was pulling himself together. His breath was slowing down and his wiry muscles were loosening, if only a little. “Shit,” he said one last time. “Okay. Not so bad now. Whatever you did is helping.”
Lucy hadn’t done a thing. And as she watched, the last of the moisture from her towel, and the last of Fender’s tears, were pulled across his drying skin and drawn swiftly into the wound.
“It’s cool now,” he said now, barely panting. “It’s cool. Whew.” He looked up at her and tried to smile. “Hey, can I have a glass of water?”
She stared at him. “What?”
He passed a hand over his cheek very tenderly. He didn’t seem to notice the wound shifting under his fingertips.
“Water, please,” he said. “Please. A nice, big glass, too.”
Six
She's a moron, Michael Steinberg thought. She's a joke. She doesn't deserve what she got, and when the time comes I'll take it from her. ALL of it.
This time he locked the door to the lab. No one would disturb him again, especially not that fat fuck with the Napoleon complex.
He was through being a target for her and her twisted kind. No more playing the role of the little white cake in the urinal that everybody pissed on. These specimens, this evidence, was going to change the whole fucking world, and put him on top. The very top.
He didn't bother with the latex gloves. He wanted to get the specimens back into their carefully made sponge-rubber pockets so he could work on the documentation a little bit more. Finishing touches. The last polish.
The New Taxonomy, he said to himself. It had a hell of a ring to it.
It didn't matter what she thought. It didn't matter what any of those smelly, squishy pus-pockets thought, if they thought anything at all. His paper was nearly done now, and in a matter of days, months at the outside, he'd be on the cover of everything from Scientific American to USA Today, and she would be begging for scraps.
He was still trembling with anger, still red-faced and muttering to himself about Lucy Armbruster and Jennie Sommerfield and that fucking cop, when he seized the microscope that held the claw-specimen. “Rank bitch, he snarled. “Fire me? Fire ME? What the fu—OUCH!”
The pain was like a spike in his palm. He jerked around, cursing, and his elbow hit the edge of the specimen tray. It skittered across the metal counter and slid into the sink with a splash.
He hadn't been paying attention. When he had tugged the claw-specimen from under the scope's clips, it had snagged on one side and turned in his hand and the wickedly sharp tip had dug deeply into his palm.
Michael hissed in a breath and raised his hand to his eyes, the claw still dangling from his palm. Runnels of blood were flowing through its channels and running down his wrist, turning his ragged shirt cuff a bright, almost theatrical red. The curved point of the specimen had doubled back; it was coming out of his palm a full inch from where it entered. Blood bubbled up from both cuts like water from an Artesian well.
While he watched, the bleeding just...stopped. Tiny white particles, oversized grains of sand, appeared from nowhere, and were welling up out of the cut or condensing right out of the air. He watched in fascination as they clustered around the base of the claw, building up in a heartbeat, layer on layer, sealing the specimen to the flesh. And as they accreted, the sharp, thin pain of the cut itself simply drained away.
Michael felt a mild tingle, almost a buzz, rising from his hand and filling his head. It was warm and soft-edged and right, like the pulsing in the storm had been right in his head a few hours earlier.
Still, it looked out of place, an alien claw, sharp as a bird's beak, sprouting from his palm? No, he told himself. “I don't want that there,” he said in a dumbfounded voice. “Not there.” Without even thinking about it, he wrapped two fingers around the vicious curvature of the claw and yanked it free, hard as he could. It ripped out of his hand with a thick and meaty squishing sound, but offered almost no resistance, spraying a fan of grayish blood and ash-colored particles as it pulled free. He barely heard the droplets and granules spatter against the window glass above the sink.
The sink. The sink. Oh, god, he thought as he plunged both hands into the water despite his cuts. The specimens! The evidence! Holy Christ, they’ll be ruined by the water!
He hauled the tray out, careful to keep it straight, and peered through the water as it sheeted off, checking for each precious specimen, each carefully measured and photographed and recorded piece.
It was all there. All intact. Everything was fine, fine.
And everything was…
… growing.
“Look at that,” he said, his voice a wondering whisper. “Look at that...”
The specimens were sprouting new limbs, building new layers. Needles were extending, legs were unfolding and struggling to bend. As yet, no eyes, no mouths that he could recognize as such, but...life. A strange, brittle, sharp-edge kind of life, far from human, but still, life in each of the pieces he had found.
In his specimens.
He could still feel tingling in the cuts on his hands. The same particles, the same growth that was changing the specimens was taking hold inside his body as well, he realized, drawing on the water, building with the water. The buzz in his head was still there, too, more than ever like the huge deep pulse he first felt in the rain today. Something that had never quite left him, that kept beating and beating and BEATING.
ACTION, it told him, exactly as before. Take ACTION.
There was a mind even greater than his own at work here. There were thoughts even deeper than his own thoughts. They echoed over him like thunder, surged around him like the roaring wind.
He wanted them inside him. Inside him. He wanted to be part of it completely.
Michael Steinberg looked down at the tray of specimens, wriggling and shuddering in an inch of standing water. As he watched, the water level sank by half as the creatures took it in and changed.
He reached into the tray and picked up one particular specimen, a squashed sphere with a bite taken out of it, no bigger than an apricot. Its surface had originally been covered with small pimples and warts. Now each of those bumps had growing into a short spike, a blunt needle of its own. Soon the specimen would be nothing but needles, nothing but sharp. He could see its final form in his mind's eye already.
He picked up the sphere and looked at it closely. He watched it grow and change as he held it between his fingers.
Then he opened his mouth very wide and laid the wriggling, bumpy sph
ere on his tongue. He could feel one of the needles jump at the sudden moisture in his mouth and grow thicker and sharper to take it all. He could feel an extrusion eagerly pierce his tongue, while another bit into his palate. He felt the curve of the sphere dissolve and flow down his throat like dry sand.
He closed his mouth and bit down. The brittle, papery taste of the thing surged briefly behind his teeth, then mixed with his blood and spittle.
It was the right thing to do. Michael Steinberg stood alone in his lab, staring at nothing, feeling the tingling buzz build and build and build, and he knew it:
It was the right thing to do.
Seven
It looked as if the entire town was melting. The buildings, the trees, even the unnaturally straight lines of curbs and power poles looked soft and pulpy in the dying light. Rose watched it pass, shivering, wet and cold, in the passenger seat of the Range Rover.
Rain isn’t only about getting wet, she told herself. It’s about getting weak. There’s nothing sweet or gentle about it, and there probably never was. We just weren’t paying attention.
After a while, the Rover’s headlights revealed the hunched shoulders of the hacienda on the crest of the West Ridge at the end of the long dirt drive that led to it, really nothing more than a wide, lazy circle of decomposed granite on a base of pounded earth. The driveway sidled along the entire length of the two-story adobe, past an endless display of deeply set, small-paned windows. Lights burned in some of the rooms – fire-yellow, ember red, electric silver-blue. As they trundled by, Rose caught glimpses of an exercise room, an old-fashioned study, a parlor of some kind and a kitchen. Empty, she knew. All empty.
The turnabout made a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circuit around a huge flat-topped boulder as big as a guest cottage, more than ten feet high and thirty feet across. It seemed to surge out of the ground like the base of a ruined tower. The detached garage was beyond it, and when they passed the rock, water hissing and glittering down its rough, piebald surface, the garage door in front of her eased upwards. Water sheeted off its sides in sprays so wide and thick it looked like a mouth opening under a dirty brown mustache.
The interior of the garage was immaculate and antiseptically illuminated by a bank of ceiling-mounted lights. Ken killed the engine and Rose climbed out of the Rover, very watchful and quiet as Ken opened the door to the covered walkway that connected the garage to the house.
The storm blew across their path in a tumble of mist and wind. “Everything’s set everything up for you already,” he called over the gale as they crossed the ten feet of covered walkway. Beyond him, Rose saw the lights in the kitchen pop on, and the outer door click open all by itself.
Rose stopped moving while Ken kept going.
“I have no idea what you like,” Ken said, “so I got a little of everything. If there’s some…”
He was halfway across the kitchen before he realized he was talking to himself. He stopped and turned to see Rose still standing in the doorway, wide-eyed and hesitant.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“You ever watch The Prisoner?”
He blinked at the non-sequitur. “What, the old TV show?” he said. “Gad, Rose, that was way before you were born.”
“They show it on BBC America all the time,” she said, still not moving.
He frowned more deeply. “Okay…”
She looked at him like he was a complete idiot. “The lights,” she said. “The door.”
He blinked again. “What about them?”
She sighed bitterly. “Never mind.” She ducked her head down, gripped the sides of the door and pulled herself into the house, only to stand inside the doorway, frozen in place, as if waiting for lightning to strike.
Nothing happened.
“Are you finished?” Ken asked her, truly annoyed now.
She scowled and walked carefully into the kitchen.
It was a great room. Expensive china and glassware gleamed on open shelves along two walls. There was plenty of counter space and wonderfully deep cabinets. Even the stove looked important, a brushed-steel professional-grade monstrosity with six burners and an oven large enough to cook two turkeys side-by-side. And everything was clean. Superbly, impeccably, deep-down-scrubbed-to-see-your-reflection clean.
“Damn,” she said, impressed in spite of herself. “This is bigger than our whole apartment back home.”
Ken gave her a strange, quick smile. “I’d like to see your place sometime,” he said, almost asking permission.
She chose to ignore him. Ken shrugged and led her into the dining room, with a table large enough to accommodate twenty, and then through a high arch into the front entrance’s anteroom and a huge, high-ceilinged living room. The entire house was decorated in Desert Modern, from the nubby off-white area rugs on burnished hardwood to the chocolate-brown exposed beams. The far wall was dominated by a wide, low-stepped staircase that swept up to the second floor, looking as if it had been sculpted right out of the wall.
“Your room is upstairs,” he said, “with all the other bedrooms, including mine. Third door on the left for you, last door on the right for me. Down this hall there’s—”
“Is that where you keep it?” Rose demanded, sounding angry.
“Keep it?”
Rose looked disgusted. “Oh, for …” she said under her breath. She looked around wildly and swept open the door to the hall closet. There was nothing inside but an old windbreaker, a mop, and box of replacement light bulbs. “Not in here, anyway,” she said and slammed it shut, then turned and stalked down the hall as if she knew exactly where she was going. Ken followed three paces behind. She found his study with no trouble.
It was just as he had left it, including the open drapes that looked out onto the small backyard and his dying garden. Probably washed away now, he thought as he crossed the threshold. Lightning cracked open the clouds above the ridge, and for an instant they could both see the rounded, hard-edged silhouettes of cloud banks behind the slashes of rain, sharp white against the carbon sky.
“Do you keep it in here?” she asked impatiently, and swept open the double-doors to the media center. There was nothing inside but a huge wall-mounted flat screen and a complicated remote with lots of fashionably unreadable black buttons and sliders.
She hopped to a dark wood filing cabinet Ken had put against the far wall. “What about in here?” She rolled open a drawer and peered comically inside.
“Rose–”
“Oh, don’t tell me it shows up as a cartoon-face on your computer screen,” she said. “How eighties.” She started to punch keys at random on his onyx keyboard. “Hello, Siri. Greetings, Max Headroom. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Come out, come out, wherever you–”
“Hey!” Ken snapped. “Stop it!”
She snatched her hands away from the keyboard and stood there, faced away from him, for a long moment. Ken saw that she was staring at the photograph of the three of them, but he couldn't see the expression on her face well enough to guess at what she was thinking.
After a long moment she turned to him, looking guilty and sullen at the same time.
He tried to pick his words carefully. “We thought it was probably a good idea if Maggie didn’t, um, join in at–”
“We thought?” she echoed. “She? What, you sat around and discussed this like, like buddies?”
“Rosie, that’s the whole point to Maggie. She’s supposed to be an assistant, a colleague, a trusted friend.”
“God! Dad! Listen to yourself! Didn’t you see Her?”
“See what?”
“It’s a fucking computer, it’s not your friend.”
“She’s designed to be both,” he said very calmly. He looked nowhere in particular as he said, “Maggie, talk to her.”
Silence.
Ken scowled. “Maggie, show her what I mean. Come on.”
Silence. Only the rumble and spatter of the rain.
Rose cleared her throat. “Um…Daddy?”
“What? You think I made this whole thing up? Do you think I’m totally insane?”
Rose put up her hands and answered too quickly. “No no no, of course not. Maybe there’s something wrong with the, the program.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the program,” Maggie said.
Rose squeaked and jumped two feet into the air.
“I like to mess with him sometimes.” As always, the AI sounded like a beautifully modulated adult female who seemed to be standing right beside you.
Rose clutched her chest like a heart attack victim. “Jesus,” she said. “That scared the shit out of me.”
“Boy,” Maggie said, “one little disembodied voice in a strange house in the middle of an enormous rainstorm, and she gets all jumpy. What a wuss.”
“A what?”
“Take it easy, Rose,” Ken said, trying to sound soothing. “She’s trying to put you at ease. Make you comfortable.”
“She? Make me…? I’m gonna be sick.”
“Come on, give her a–”
“No. Really. Seriously. I am going to be sick.” She looked around for an exit.
“There’s a half-bath through the door to your right,” Maggie said, still sounding amused. “No tub, but a nice place to pu—”
“SHUT UP!” Rose shouted, and ran out of the room. Ken could hear the slap of her shoes on the hallway tiles, then on the stairs, then a distant slam echoing down from the second floor.
“Well, at least she found her room,” Maggie said in a low voice.
Ken didn’t move for a long time, just stared blankly at the empty doorway. Finally he said, “Well,” and rubbed his eyes. “That didn’t go well at all, did it?”
“Let her be for a while. Besides, you have a couple of other things to worry about.”
“I do? Like what?”
“For one, the storm has caused some damage to the house. Nothing serious – yet – and I’ve taken care of most of the repairs already, but you should know about them.”
He sighed deeply. “Okay,” he said.
“And Marty Fein has called back four times since you left. I out-referenced that original cell phone call for voice stress analysis, and Ken, he’s not kidding. If you don’t show up with a really good presentation tomorrow, they really will cancel your contract and come rip the equipment, and the programming, right out of your system.”