by Cutter, Leah
The only normal color was the black of the Portal that sprang to life as we passed. I stopped and stared for a moment, willing to see a change. Nothing. The turbulent clouds belched nothingness, while the flames cackled, hungry for my soul.
My Hell remained.
Beppe came back for me. “Don’t look,” he whispered. “It’s not true.”
I took two steps away so Beppe now stood closer to the Portal. The clouds immediately cleared away and an achingly blue summer sky appeared over lush green fields. I could tell the vines were heavy with grapes.
“That is true, you idiot,” I hissed at Beppe. “Look at that.”
“No, no,” Beppe said, stepping away resolutely, looking at the ground. “It can’t be.”
There had always been rumors of ghosts who had changed their fate. I’d never believed it was possible.
Beppe stepped behind me so the glorious was replaced with ignominy. “It will be lonely there,” he told me stubbornly.
“Only if you want it to be.”
“It’s not mature, ripe enough,” Beppe said. He looked at me. The naked want on his face sent a shiver through me. “Soon,” he promised.
As we walked toward the final double-wide, Beppe added, “The Slide. That’s real. That?” He waved behind us. “That fate? A dream. Can turn in a flash.” He sounded so earnest.
I knew he was dead wrong. He had to be.
* * *
“Beppe, let me go first,” I told him as we drew close to the stairs.
“I understand,” he said with a grin. “You’re eager. That’s good.”
Eager wasn’t quite the right term, but I didn’t bother to correct him.
The door to the double-wide stood open. Private Standish wasn’t there, but Hernandez was. He looked just as disheveled as he had the night before, his military jacket open, showing sweat stains around the collar, under the arms. His boots were worn, and he hadn’t shaved. The other men still treated him like the big boss, though.
“Back already?” he asked with a smirk.
“Well, I really, I really only got a taste,” I said, nodding my head, trying to look as nervous as I felt going back into the lion’s den.
The bowl already stood out in the open. I just had to get a little closer.
“So whatcha bring us?” Hernandez asked.
“Bring? I, ah, didn’t bring anything. Standish had said the first one was free!”
“You already had a first one.”
“Not much of one!” I complained, adding a ghostly whine to my voice.
“You are a little bit more here than the others,” Hernandez conceded, rubbing his ear. “Come on. Quick dip then. But next time, a great big fat tip for me, right?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I walked closer and moaned again. Some of the sadness and regret I felt was real. I already craved this stuff more than cigarettes. And I was never going to take another hit of it.
The bowl shimmied at the overtones in my voice.
I moaned again.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
Only soldiers had been trained to advance on a moaning ghost. The civilians left. Quickly.
Pain raced down my left side. Someone had focused a banishment gun on me. Wonderful.
I pressed the tips of my fingers against the lip of the bowl, careful not to touch the liquid, and moaned into it. As the pain from the banishment gun grew, I moaned louder, feeding my anguish into my voice. The pain wrenched my soul, tearing my body away.
All the windows shattered. The men cursed and I sang on. Pain no longer filled my vision, but I didn’t care.
Finally the bowl crumbled, dropping onto the floor as if all of its fragments could no longer stay together.
Surprisingly, the Fixing didn’t immediately fade. I was able to hold onto a piece of the bowl.
“What did you do?” Hernandez asked, advancing.
“Put you out of business,” I told him straight.
“For a while.”
“Only for a while,” I admitted. Before they could hit me with the banishment gun again I streaked away, out the front door.
“Quick!” I shouted to Beppe as I raced by. “I stole some of it for us! And part of the bowl!”
Beppe followed close on my tail. “But we can’t go back!” he whined.
“You won’t have to,” I promised. I flowed to the Portal and threw the sliver of bowl I was holding through it. I expected it to merely land on the other side, like a normal stone or piece of glass.
It didn’t. It slid, somehow, between the realities. I could see it in both places, in my Hell and this Hell on Earth.
Beppe slammed into me, pushing me forward. I was so surprised I stumbled, barely catching myself on the edges of the Portal.
Hellfire burned my face and a tremendous longing to end it all, to quit, to just go away, overcame me. I couldn’t, though. I pushed back and swung Beppe in front of me. “See, not so empty,” I told him. “You can slide right through there.”
Maybe Beppe would have gone on his own once he saw that, indeed, his precious drug lay on the other side. Maybe I could have talked enough sense into him that he’d see the Heaven in front of him.
Or maybe the only way Beppe would go through is how he did, with my boot against his back.
* * *
The Defender’s office was open this time. They seemed very interested in my case. Detective Lewis was as well. I stuck to heavily populated areas, with lots of ghosts, for the extra day I stayed in Yakima. Didn’t want to take a chance that Private Standish might try to find me.
Though if he did, and he used the banishment gun on me, at least it would have saved me the price of the bus ticket back home.
I learned later that the Army, once presented with the evidence, used the men as scapegoats and hung them out to dry. Of course, they disavowed any knowledge of the base components of the drug, claiming that it was all the men’s fault, that they’d invented everything.
Rumors of drugs continued popping up. They were squashed quickly, and another head was cut off the hydra, nothing more.
I took my weary soul back to the bus station. This time the driver quickly affixed the artifact behind his own seat. He made a joke about how the cold of the grave would make him drive extra carefully.
I couldn’t have cared. The Slide was leaving my system and I was crashing hard.
When we reached the pass, after Ellensberg, the rain finally came. I wished I could open the window and stick my head out like a dog, letting the rain clean away the last of the orchard dust and slick drugs.
I slept after that, lulled to sleep by the constant spattering water. However, even asleep I knew when we turned that final curve, when the weight of the mountain lifted off my soul, when it was a clear and easy shot back to my bones.
* * *
“I saw him go, Toni,” I assured her. We sat in my office, well after the witching hour. Though I’d explained it all in an e-mail to Antonia, she’d still wanted to hear the story directly from me.
The glare she fixed me with could chill even the dead. “You swear it was Heaven.”
“It looked like Heaven to me. Blue skies, orchards and vineyards full of fruit.” I didn’t mention the Slide. Or that Beppe may not have gone willingly. That I’d touched another ghost had been strange enough. I’d given Toni my theory that Beppe had started fading when the Portal had changed to Heaven.
It could have been true.
“Thank you, paisano,” Toni finally said. “I’m glad someone was there for him.” She stood slowly. “You should get some rest. You look pale.” She gave me a ghost of a smile.
“I will,” I told her, also standing. “I may go home now.” There was no real reason for me to spend more time in the office that night. The Slide was wearing off slowly, colors fading back to a normal gray tinge.
Antonia and I stared at each other.
If I’d been alive, I would have asked her out for a drink, or maybe a late-night dinner.
&
nbsp; As a ghost, I had nothing to offer. Maybe my company, but that didn’t feel like enough.
“Good night,” Toni said, nodding once before she left.
I stood in the center of my office, alone as always.
The habits of the living died hard.
Author’s Note
As soon as I’d finished “Hell By Any Other Name” I knew that there were most stories for Andy. I also had a good idea about the setting of the second one, in Yakima. I didn’t know what was there until a friend who used to live there told me about the drug problem there. I took myself out for an overnight trip, visiting beautiful vineyards off the beaten path, and this story grew to fruition.
Hunting Ghosts In The Machine
The sudden jungle downpour blurred my vision and I cursed loudly. The damned trail between the trees was hard enough to see; now, the rising mud made it slippery and deadly to boot. Rainbow-colored birds shrieked a discordant greeting above me. Fortunately, the rain pounded so hard on the canopy that it blocked most of their warning, so those I hunted didn’t know how closely I followed.
Even in the midst of buckets of water dropping on me, I still could make out the green light filtering through the leaves. Where there’s light, there are shadows, and my prey hid in the darkness of things. I just had to find the right patch.
It didn’t take too long for me to find her, stretched thin as a snake and wrapped around a tree trunk. She gave up as soon as she saw me. Where was the fun in that? I’d just have to get my kicks some other way.
“Please, sir,” she said, her hands rising as she stepped out onto the trail. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yeah, well, you’re fucking wrong,” I told her. “See, if I don’t bring you in, I don’t get paid. If I don’t get paid, I don’t eat. You can see my problem.” I flipped open my scanner to make sure I had the right ghost: Lisa Fryer. Her code popped up on the screen, a match.
I had more than one way to dispatch Lisa. Normally I liked to do it up close and personal: The Company had designed a special bayonet that I could attach to my retrieval gun, but I generally used it in hand-to-hand. For her, though, I brought out the gun. I’d hoped that looking down the barrel of a cold 64T processor would have scared her. Maybe even gotten her to run.
Silly bitch just stood there looking determined. Well, as determined as a ghost could, being as she was just random bits of stolen circuits rather than a real person. She was slightly more defined than most ghosts—an unwavering, brown, translucent form. But she wasn’t real. The rain didn’t roll down her skin; no, it poured through her.
“This won’t hurt a bit,” I lied as I aimed at her, giving her plenty of time to run.
She looked to the left, then back up at me. “Just do it,” she hissed.
Something was wrong. Ghosts never just gave up. They all thought they were alive, that they were human—that they had some kind of right to go on living.
Lisa Fryer just stood there, hands up, rain sluicing through her, almost real defiance in her eyes.
I took my time lining up my shot. She didn’t break until I committed to firing. “I love you,” was all she said before she was vaporized, the random circuits freed to do their intended jobs, no longer hijacked by a ghost.
It was obvious that Lisa hadn’t been declaring her love for me. I pulled up her file again. No mention of a partner. Only a kid.
The bounty had specified one ghost. Not two. I checked the shadows around me carefully. Dispatch didn’t screw up very often.
There, to my right—her left, where she’d looked—lay a faint ghost trail. I followed it all the way back to a junction doorway.
Damn ghost had slipped VR worlds.
I debated not calling it in. Triple bonus for finding a ghost without a chit. But I had no way of knowing which ’verse it had skipped to. Didn’t even know if it was male or female. All I had was a name: Kim Fryer.
Dispatch thanked me for my diligence, even authorized a ten-percent bonus for bagging Lisa. ’Course, most of that would be eaten by taxes, but still, it was nice to have confirmation, once again, that the Company took care of its own.
I waited next to the junction while dispatch spun its wheels, searching for a new anomaly. Buckets of water stopped pouring down and the green sun shone brighter. The birds doubled their noisemaking, and now the insects came out to play. Clouds of gnats dive-bombed my head and mosquitoes as long as my finger tried puncturing my clothes.
They weren’t as bad as my other problem. The trees had started pixilating.
Most people can’t distinguish between virtual reality and the real world. When I’d been a kid, I could tell right away. I couldn’t tell them how I knew, whether it was the monkey shit that smelled wrong at the zoo, or that an ocean wind didn’t mess up my hair the right way, or something else. Once my brain realized there was a difference, the code would unravel.
It was why I could see ghosts as well. Often ghosts amassed enough circuits that they could pass as human to everyone but people like me.
VR had improved until it could fool me now for twenty, maybe thirty minutes at best. Then it all started to unravel and look like something from “The Matrix,” only not as pretty.
“Dispatch,” I called as the muddy trail turned into a brown river of dirty code. “I gotta get out of here.”
“Programming now. Step through.”
With relief, I stepped into the cool doorway strung between the two trees. I took a deep breath and settled back, happy to be leaving the unreal for the real.
Just as the world started to go black, a small brown creature darted across the path.
Kim Fryer had the audacity to grin and wave at me before taking off under the canopy.
My voice was already gone. I was halfway transitioned. I shuddered to think about the state I’d be in if I didn’t continue—half here, half there, all messed up and no longer able to function. A fucking ghost of myself.
Still, now I knew that Kim Fryer was a boy. Young, big smile against dark brown skin, even more formed than his mother.
I’d make it my personal mission to kill him.
* * *
Sammy woke me up that morning, crooning about how something’s gotta give. I’d assigned that song to Constance at dispatch. She was my inside gal, and it meant she’d found something for me, personally.
I waved open the comm link but ignored the video feed. Though Constance didn’t care that my unit was no VR palace, I still didn’t feel I had anything to flaunt: real books stacked floor to ceiling covered every wall, with just a small niche carved out for my bed. I could only take three steps between my bunk, the console, and the far wall. At least it was only me in there. I’d seen places smaller, for those who lived their lives in VR worlds.
My console was seriously old school. Instead of an immersion suite, it was a quartet of monitors. I even had a keyboard. While I could gesture like everyone else, I saw through the walls too often. It was faster for everyone if I just typed in what I wanted.
“Fisher, what the hell is that goddamned racket?”
“Classics,” I informed her. I did pinch down the volume a smidge. Didn’t want to get on her bad side so early in the day.
“Classics, my ass. Sounds like someone dying,” she grumbled. “I found your ghost,” she added. “Kim Fryer.”
“You’re shitting me,” I said, reaching for my headset. “Where?”
“Urban jungle this time.”
I dropped the headset and wiped open the video hookup. “Let me guess. Same place as the last attack, right?” Where a gang of ghosts had tried to take out a lone collector.
“You got it.” Constance looked same as she always did, an older, overweight woman with the worries of the world pressing down on her shoulders and darkening the bags under her eyes. She was calling from her cubicle at dispatch. Just beyond her were beige walls covered in pinned-up notes and a calendar from a local bank. How much of that was real, I had no idea. I wouldn’t know unless I went
there. She wore bright floral blouses with matching pink lipstick.
“Goddamn it.” A ghost on its own couldn’t do much harm. A pack of them, though, could do some serious damage to a collector. It wasn’t because your soul or some shit went through the computer and into the virtual world, or whatever crackpot theory was popular that week. It was because your brain was fooled. If things felt real enough, your body reacted. Like fake sugar could cause insulin spikes, fake injuries could cause real bruising or worse. Collectors were more gullible until overload started. Scientists speculated that was why we couldn’t stay fooled: We sank too deeply and then bobbed to the surface, while most people floated in some middle ground.
“That’s why I’m calling,” Constance said. “To give you the heads up. They want collectors to partner in that area.”
“And split the fees,” I grumbled.
“Not if you get in and out first.”
“That’s my girl,” I told Constance, reaching for my headset again.
“Not your fucking girl,” Constance told me sharply.
“I’ll make it up to you,” I promised. I always did. “Next woods visit. Pine cone.” The rest of humanity, because they believed the fake open spaces, settled for them. The government no longer had to spend money on parks and open greenways. For those of us that couldn’t live that way, we got regular visits to the few nature preserves that the acid rain, pollution, and overcrowding hadn’t destroyed.
“You just see that you come back in one piece,” Constance said as her hands danced in front of her screens, sending me everything I needed. “Safe travels,” she added.
As if I were going anywhere. Still, it was custom.
I closed my eyes as I put on my headset, then felt my way into my gloves. The field sprang up as soon as all ten fingers were filled. Bad old days, people had to wear suits. Now, the headset and the gloves created enough stimulation between them so you felt as though you were walking, even though you were still slumped in your chair, drooling.