She was dreaming.
He saw Jack sit rigid from the corner of his eye. Oxide stood over the girl and brandished a serrated blade. “Her name is Mary Sue,” he said, barely above the whisper.
Then he cut.
Deftly, with surgical precision and the flourishes of an accomplished master, he filleted several layers of skin from the side of her abdomen. Taking the sheet of flesh in his hands, he peeled it back for Jack to see. The white dermis beneath flushed, turned deep red and began to bleed; he moved quickly to the other side of her taut belly and repeated the stroke.
Her virgin flesh parted with ease. Red droplets welled along every exposed inch, and she began moaning again; still unconscious, held captive by the chemical drip, her mind translated the pain into new sensations, dream sensations, and her breath quickened as her eyes flitted rapidly.
Oxide plucked the scalpel from below her abdomen and made a series of paper-thin cuts to the underside of her breasts. The blood ran like tears down the side of her body. Of course, Oxide didn’t make this association in his mind; he couldn’t contrive such a comparison in his deadened mind, devoid of imagination; he could recall ideas and images from his pre-op life but they were meaningless. Rather than losing himself in the work like a true artist, he simply repeated a well-rehearsed series of cuts; he traced the scalpel around her breasts, bisected her nipples, listened to her gasp and exhale as he laid her nerves bare and prodded them with the very tip of the blade.
Jack was silent. Oxide reached his free hand into his pants and grasped his cock. He watched the girl’s face as he continued to cut. She’s dreaming. What’s she dreaming of? Anything. Anything.
Subtle passes of the blade across her lips, and the redness seeped from them. He nicked her throat, a little deeper than he’d intended. Blood pooled in the hollow of her neck. Get a grip, Oxide told himself, unaware he’d made a joke, and moved to her arms.
He cut in time to a song he’d heard as a child. It had been a piece by a man named Beethoven, comprised of slow, sensual movements followed by sweeping energy. It was perfect for vivisection. Music had once brought him pleasure, he thought as he took hold of the girl’s elbow and wrist and, with his thumbs, spread open the series of incisions he’d made there. Each tiny wound yawned pale and began to fill with crimson. He crossed her other arm over her chest, so that Jack could see it, and took from the tray a length of tubing. This was tied off just below the elbow. Then, he laid the rust-colored teeth of a bone saw against her wrist.
Her head rolled back and forth, soft sounds escaping her lips. Oxide bore down on her arm and sawed rapidly.
She let out a whimper. Her head turned to face him, and her wet lips parted and she said, “Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.”
Oxide felt himself approaching orgasm and paused in his cutting to tug on himself. He leaned towards her, feeling her breath hot on his face as she whispered unintelligibly. The boundary between their worlds was being breached; she was bringing him, he and Jack, into her dream, letting the blades steer her imagination through the recesses of her mind, and she was speaking to Oxide in a tongue he could never understand, in a language stolen from him, and before he knew what was happening he’d plunged his hand into her mouth and dug his fingertips like talons into that squirming strip of meat and he was pulling as her eyes opened and she screamed.
He tore the tongue free and felt cum rush to the head of his cock. Sucking the tongue into his mouth, he groaned as he ejaculated across her stomach. She gurgled, thrashing her head, blood flying everywhere as it poured into her mouth to fill it again and again and again.
Jack rose from the couch. Still cumming, Oxide saw through his haze the bulge in Jack’s pants and urged him to take it out. “Do it! Let go!”
“She’s alive!” Jack yelled. Oxide didn’t hear him. He grabbed one of the girl’s flayed breasts and twisted, listening to her scream as it swelled to a crescendo unrivaled by Beethoven.
Then, a thunderclap. The room shook. Oxide fell back, stunned, and landed on the floor and then he was just a dull-eyed, shiftless zombie with cum cooling in his hands and blood dripping from the operating table onto his bare feet.
Her chest had exploded. The hand that had held her breast was ringing with pain, and Oxide lifted it to see that his index finger was gone, a blackened stump in its place.
Jack lowered his gun and stood over the dead girl. Brushing a few errant strands of hair from her face, her beautiful face, he sighed. “Mary Sue.” He pointed the gun at Oxide. “That was her name, wasn’t it?”
“What - what did you do!?” Oxide shrieked. “What have you done to me?”
Jack brushed the gun’s smoking mouth over her bloody lips. “You’re under arrest.”
“You’re a police officer?” Oxide’s jaw dropped further. “You just watched me cut her up! You watched! You did nothing! You were complicit in this, do you hear me--”
“You wanna get out of this?” Jack asked. He meant it.
“Y-yes,” Oxide stammered, clutching his wounded hand. “Yes! I have money. I have - you can take anything!”
“All I want...” Jack said, and gestured to Mary Sue.
He left the request unfinished. He let it sink in, let Oxide figure it out for himself. It was painfully obvious after all this, wasn’t it? Jack had seen her dreams come to life, seen the power within her, and now he wanted…
“I’ve heard of you,” Oxide breathed. “I’ve heard of you people. You really think it’ll do anything for you?”
“I know it will.” Jack motioned with the gun for him to get up. “I don’t want to waste any more bullets. Open her up.”
Oxide struggled to hold onto the saw with his bad hand. But he did it, because he had no other choice.
When he was done, Jack strangled him with the rubber tubing.
***
It was hard to believe that Mary Sue had come from Gotham too. When he found her husband, Jack would take special pleasure in running him in.
Under a flickering fluorescent bulb, Jack sat cross-legged on the floor with his prized paints. Most of the tubes he’d never opened, for he possessed neither curiosity nor inspiration. Not until now, he thought, as he raised a gray, pea-sized node to his lips.
He swallowed it and waited a few minutes, waited for that rush, that exultation as the darkened corridors of his imagination were given light. When it hit, tears came to his eyes. He quickly wiped them away and grabbed the tubes, trying not to smile like a kid on Christmas morning. This would last a day at best, perhaps only a few hours, and after that he would return to the emptiness; but eventually he gave into his excitement and his grin spread from ear to ear.
He was going to finger paint.
Interlude
Inside
Nightmare lived in stolen dreams. It took them, pulled them apart and threaded them back together, stitched them all together like a blanket, then wrapped its mind up in them and went to sleep.
It saw the most wonderful nightmares, nightmares inside nightmares and upon nightmares, devouring one another, spitting each other out.
In dreams, it was always the Jabberwock, and it went up to the old gray house and the doorknobs didn’t work. There were keys, but they never quite fit into the lock; sluggishly, it tried one after another, but no luck. Then, the door was gone.
Inside...
A home with an aquarium. The fish are too big; bloated, misshapen, hardly any room for movement. How did they get in there? Their eyes are human and they plead for release. The Jabberwock breaks the glass. A torrent of water erupts from nowhere, fills the room. Drowning now. Darkness.
There’s a door. Swim to it. The door pulsates, undulates. It beats like a heart, rhythmically...lungs and eyes burning, the Jabberwock grabs at the knob. This time it works. Water stays put but Jabberwock is pulled into the next room.
Jabberwock is small, a child. Huge insect-like things made of bright clay rush around the room and scream. Will they see me? Will they see me? YES they see you and you r
un but so slowly, like you’re running against a blizzard, and their screams and scraping limbs are right on your heels.
Outside.
It’s not a house anymore, just a shack, a burnt-out shack, walls crumbling, frame barely holding together. A shack in a field on a bright, warm day. And the stars...it’s daytime but the Jabberwock sees the stars in the sky. The stars are coming down, leaving golden contrails in the air, they’re angels, come to receive...
Over. It’s over and it’s night again. Flying! Flying at full size and full speed around a schoolyard. How to get in? The bells are ringing. All the children are gone. Can’t get in.
Lupine creatures, walking upright, wearing ghastly white robes, walk into the yard. They teem beneath the Jabberwock, waiting for it to fall, snapping their teeth, their jaws making a CLACK CLACK CLACK sound, waiting for its flight to end and for it to fall.
Down, down down - water again. Flesh. Sex. She wraps her limbs around the Jabberwock, in the shower, unafraid, lust in her eyes. Then she’s a man. Its brother? It has no brothers. Absurd.
A strangler is outside. A pasty, mute woman in a ratty old sweater. She’ll strangle anyone she can get her hands on. She’ll stop, release you moments from death, and stuff you in her scratchy old sack for another go later.
Oh, we’ll stay safe inside, yes, but for how long? So cold inside.
At the graveyard now, stale and gray, just like the house, and the Jabberwock can’t read the names on the stones but it knows it’s its parents. Parents?
Its teeth begin to fall out. No blood, just an empty, dry hollow left behind as each fang drops to the ground. Aching cavities. Pockets.
Now a running river, and the Jabberwock is helplessly caught in the current, thrashed against rocks. Traffic lights suspended overhead, all red, but there’s no stopping it now. There are lockers out there, on the shore! If it could somehow grab hold of one, it would end, it would stop the raging current. But no, Jabberwock can’t remember the combinations.
Struggling, flailing...stuck! Glued to a carpet, in a room, arms and legs immobile. Something screaming at the Jabberwock’s back. Lights playing over the walls, insanely, colors dancing in its eyes.
Then the colors resolve themselves, and it’s a circus tent, with dancing, rotted clowns, and feces smeared on the canvas walls. The screaming builds to a crescendo--
So real, all of it, so mad and fraught with emotion - terror, rage, paranoia; all of it real. Like a drug to the Other God.
It drank deep of Man’s dreams and napped on a bed of dark matter, caressed by tendrils of light, stars swimming behind its eyelids. And all the while the mad pipers played around Nightmare in their toneless cacophony, played for the writhing God at the center of chaos, played so that He could rest, docile and quiet - the Lord of All Things that was Azathoth.
21.
The Man Who Laughs
“They killed her,” Cutter breathed.
“He wanted that girl dead,” Bruce muttered. “Macendale. I don’t know why. I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand about him anymore,” Cinnamon slurred. Her systems were still recovering, nanobots repairing the damage in the wake of the extracted bullet.
“He wanted her dead?” Cutter asked softly. His head rose from between his knees. His eyes, barely visible to the others, narrowed. He saw nothing but Lucy’s face as the glass-like skewers lifted her to the sky. He felt nothing but rage; more than rage, a panic, a feeling that she could never be avenged, that her wrongful death, her terrible death, would pass without notice.
“You need to get back to the food bank,” he said softly to the others.
“What are you thinking, Cutter?”
“I’m thinking of going out there and dealing with this fucker myself.”
“The Harvesters-”
“I’ll lead them right to us. Me and him. They’ll tear us both apart without a goddamn thought.”
Cutter stood up. Bruce was between him and the door.
“Move.”
“I can’t let you kill yourself.”
“My life isn’t in your hands. You take care of the others. I’m done.”
“Let him go,” Cinnamon said.
Cutter looked down at her, at her broken, twisted countenance. She looked back up, her gaze soft. “I understand, Cutter. And you’re right. It’s your choice.”
“I don’t want you coming after me.”
“I won’t.”
Cinnamon looked to Bruce. “It might work. The Harvesters are otherwise going to ignore Macendale. And then he’ll try to manipulate them against us.”
Bruce held out his hand. Cutter shook it.
“What shall I tell the others?”
“Tell them the truth.”
Cutter looked into Bruce’s eyes. There was a deeper meaning in what he’d said, and they both knew it.
“Tell them the truth.”
“I will. When the time’s right.”
Bruce stood aside from the door. “Lead Macendale and the Harvesters away from this area. We’ll return to the food bank.”
It seemed quiet outside. “They may be at rest,” Bruce said. “You have to attract Macendale’s attention before theirs. Wait here.”
He opened the door and peered through the storefront into the dark street. Not a Harvester in sight. Nor Macendale.
He loaded a flare round into the Gyro. A bright red contrail issued forth from the gun, streaking out the front window and across the street.
“He! He! He!” Macendale’s voice.
Cutter pushed past Bruce and ran out of the store.
The bot stood in the middle of the road, a rifle in each hand, grinning maniacally. “Ready to play?”
Before Cutter could even approach him, Harvesters leapt from the surrounding rooftops.
Macendale raised both rifles and blasted the creatures’ heads to gory bits in mid-air, sending their corpses down with a series of flat, wet thuds.
More were coming. Macendale walked towards Cutter, picking them off. “No!” Cutter roared, and tried to knock the rifles from the bot’s hands. Macendale slapped him down with the butt of one, knocking him out cold.
“He’s MINE!” Macendale snarled at the Harvesters. One after another they charged and were brought down. Their reinforcements slowed their pursuit, circling Macendale warily.
He slung Cutter over his shoulder. “MINE,” He repeated.
It didn’t seem to be worth the casualties for one human. The Harvesters began to back off, wary of this strange other-kind before them.
“That’s right, get along now! Go on!” Macendale hooted and fired into the air. The Harvesters retreated; he fled in the opposite direction.
***
Cutter awoke under the sweltering light of a lantern dangling over his head.
He was bound and gagged in a chair. Sitting in an aisle in some other store, in an aisle with prop weapons from the Dark Ages. There were other items among the weapons, gargoyle statuettes and parchments...some sort of curiosity shop?
The shelves had been moved back to give him some breathing room; at least that’s what he hoped.
But he knew he was wrong.
“I’ve got an itch that needs scratching,” Macendale’s voice said from the shadows at the end of the aisle. “A bit of the old ultraviolence.”
The bot stepped into view, snapping replacement teeth in his mouth. “I don’t have many more of these,” he said, talking through his fingers, “hope you know that.”
“Fuck you. Fuck you, you killed her.”
“Well, I helped, I guess.” Macendale was massaging parts of his head, fitting plates back into place. He stared up at the ceiling. “I think that last spat with the fam may have opened some new pathways for me, pathways of perception. You know, the more ‘broken’ I get the more I see things as they are. I wonder if the same could be true of humans. Some of your ancestors thought so. They liked to play with all sorts of mind-altering drugs - opium, salvia, LSD f
or starters. They played with the body and the mind, yes, but I don’t think they really broke it enough.
“Hence, what we’re going to do today.”
He grinned. Cutter moaned through his gag.
“This shop houses some rather morbid reproductions of torture tools from the Inquisition. Ah, Man’s imagination! Can you see this?”
Macendale held up a pear-shaped object made of marble and metal, a large screw at its tapered end. As Macendale turned the screw, the object flowered out in four leaves of equal size, spreading wide...click click click click.
The bot reversed the screw and closed the device. “It seems only fitting that, since you ruined nearly every tooth in my lovely smile, we start with the oral pear.”
Oral...?
“Open up.”
Macendale seized Cutter’s hair and yanked his head back. Cutter screamed through clenched teeth.
Macendale smashed the pear right through them.
And began to turn the screw.
“Open wiiiiiiiiiiiiide.”
Cutter felt blood filling his mouth, his throat. He felt his jaw strain, his cheeks stretch. He felt blinding pain course through his skull.
Then:
CRACK.
***
In the basement of the food bank, all was quiet. Knowing that the Harvesters were roaming the streets up above, the survivors were forced to bear their grief in silence.
“We should have been watching her,” Amanda whispered through tears.
“Cutter was,” West said. “Cutter was watching her, and he’s dead.”
“Macendale took him,” Bruce said. “The Harvesters were in a frenzy...Macendale was armed to the teeth...”
“You’re saying you couldn’t have done anything?” West snapped bitterly. Amanda placed her hand on his. “Whisper!”
Hitch sat under a torch at the opposite end of the basement. He stared blankly into a can of greasy wheat product, one of the few foodstuffs left in the bank. He felt like coughing it up and letting it warm on his belly.
The Harvest Cycle Page 14