by Cutter, Leah
It was August in the city, whatever hellish city this place was based on. I’d thought the real jungle was bad. The humidity here was worse, with no rain in sight; just a hot sun baking concrete, putrefying garbage, and raising the stink on everyone who passed through it. Tags marred every surface, a violent conflict of color. The shadows were sharp as knives and offered no relief.
I didn’t understand why people paid money, good money, to come and live here. Or to visit the jungle. Hell, most of the worlds I’d traveled to. Then again, most people’s homes were castles of fake VR comfort. Maybe they thought coming to places like this would make them feel more real, as if they were truly living.
Constance was good, better than most of the workers in dispatch. She set me down at a junction only half a block from the latest anomaly. Of course, the ghost trail led down an alley filled with overflowing garbage bins. It stank of piss and rotten booze. Glass drug vials crunched under my boots as I cautiously walked down the center of it. On one side, a warehouse building stretched up; on the other, a chain-link fence with razor wire topping it, and houses with boarded-up windows just beyond.
Three ghosts clung to the darkness at the very end of the alley. I recognized Kim Fryer, my personal quest. Because he was so well formed, he couldn’t hide as completely as the other two, compress himself into the shadows. The other ghosts I didn’t know and didn’t care about, beyond the extra money they represented.
I couldn’t scan them all huddled together. Being ghosts, their code would be too mingled. “Come on, get out,” I told them. “I’ll let you two go if I can just get Kim,” I lied.
Contractually, I was supposed to scan a ghost before I vaporized it. Freeing up circuits didn’t help the Company unless they knew exactly which ones I’d released. I wouldn’t get paid either. I held my scanner in one hand and my gun in the other. I wasn’t going to take a chance.
“Get the fuck out here,” I growled at them when they hadn’t started moving. “Or I’ll just take my knife to you.”
Slowly, the first ghost unfolded itself, though it didn’t come and stand in the full sunlight. I was impressed: It had emulated real sweat stains on its clothes as well as drops of water rolling down its face, along the curve of its neck. Because it wasn’t in the bright light, I couldn’t see the far wall through it. I still knew it was a ghost.
The second ghost came out, then finally my prize, Kim. I aimed my scanner at him, anticipating that sweet blib of success from the machine.
I hadn’t expected to be body-checked and slammed into one of the garbage bins.
“Run! Run!” screamed my assailant.
I shoved myself off the slimy, hot metal. She fell back easily. The ghosts were nowhere to be seen. I turned my gun on her, but stopped.
She wasn’t a ghost. She stood tall and thin, almost pretty, with an overly long nose, droopy eyes, and a wide mouth.
“Who the fuck are you?” I asked as I holstered my gun and started scanning for ghost trails.
“Who the fuck are you?” she sputtered. “And what the hell were you going to do to those boys? They’re just kids, you know.”
I couldn’t help it. I stared at her. “Do you see this vest?” I fumed, shaking one tail at her. “The orange color? Do you think I’m wearing this to get laid?”
“You’re a collector,” she said. Out of a small pouch attached to her belt she pulled out an identical vest. “Whoop-dee-shit. Those weren’t ghosts.” She put on her own collector vest.
“The fuck they weren’t.” I couldn’t believe her. “What, did you just get out of school or something?”
“I’ve been doing this for longer than you,” she sneered. Then she looked me up and down. “Okay, maybe I haven’t. You’re fucking ancient. What, is your eyesight dimming? You couldn’t see anything through them. Those boys were fucking solid.”
“Bullshit.” I turned and started walking away. I needed to find those ghosts before this alley got too unreal.
“Are you shitting me?”
She followed after me. Great.
“Look, guy—”
“Fisher.”
“Fisher. I’m Dee. Were you even going to scan them?”
I waved my scanner at her. “Didn’t you see this?” I fumed.
“Good to know you’re not the kind of fuck to shoot first and ask questions later.” Then Dee paused. “Let me see that.” She grabbed for my scanner.
“No!” I said, holding it close to my chest.
“That’s a K220, isn’t it?” Dee asked. “The scanner that has the most false positives? Why the hell do you still have that model? I thought they’d all been recalled.”
“Mine’s refurbished,” I lied. “Specially made.” I didn’t need it to tell me if the thing in front of me was a ghost or not. That’s where dispatch came in. They put me in the right place and all I had to do was go hunting.
“Huh. Like that knife?” Dee said, glancing at my belt.
“Yeah. Works like a recalling gun,” I told her with a grin.
“You’re a sick fuck,” she said, finally taking two steps back away from me. “I know, I know, brothers in arms and all that shit, but really, you need help.”
“Are we done?” I asked in my most bored tones. “Cause I still have a job to do here and not a lot of time.”
Dee bit her lip. “Yeah, we’re done. You won’t find ’em anywhere. See? No ghost trail.” She waved up and down the alley.
“That’s because you distracted me.”
“No, dickhead, it’s because they weren’t ghosts.”
I shrugged. She was wrong, of course. Constance wouldn’t have sent me out on a wild-goose chase. Before I could reply, the graffiti on the can just beyond Dee jumped, sliding up, then off.
Fuck. The world was coming apart. “Just stay away from me,” I warned Dee as I headed back to the junction. There must have been something wrong with this world; it couldn’t have been even fifteen minutes. But it was already dissolving.
“Yeah, like that’s going to happen,” Dee told me.
I stepped into the junction and stared at her. I’d met so few collectors. We tended to be solitary—another collector in a world meant less money. It meant my own real world was pretty lonely, only me and dispatch ever talked on a regular basis. I’d thought more than once that it might be nice to meet up with some other collectors in the real world sometime.
But I’d be happy never to meet Dee again.
* * *
I hadn’t expected the obituary for Lisa Fryer to be so long, or for it to have so many links to articles about her. She’d been a whistle blower at the Company. When she’d died—under mysterious circumstances, of course—some of her circuits had jumped ship, reformed, tried to be her. I knew all about how ghosts came to be. Warnings for ghosts, particularly well-known or popular people, were ubiquitous. It was far too easy for a person, once they died, to be spoofed.
The dates on the ghost warning had to be wrong, though. They were all after I’d met her in the jungle.
Her son, though, was still alive. Ghosts could be formed from living people, but it was a much more rare occurrence. Luckily, thousands of people died every day, or I’d be out of a job.
That didn’t mean that fucking Dee had been right. It just meant I had to be more careful.
* * *
“There you are,” Dee said from where she leaned against a fence.
“What the fuck.” A cornfield, with dried stalks growing far above my head, spread out before me. Behind me was a horse-training ring, brown and dusty, marked off by a white fence. The junction lay in the open gate. At least it was fall here, the air cool and crisp. I groaned at the sign that proclaimed in scrawled black letters, “Corn Maze.” A crooked arrow pointed off to the right. Not many ghosts came out to the country: too easy to be spotted and not enough people around to blend in.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I growled. I thought I caught the edge of a ghost trail at the start of the field.
“I won’t. Now why don’t you go back to your cradle and let the adults work?”
“Not gonna happen.”
Fuck. I didn’t need a babysitter. Those kids had been ghosts.
“I won’t claim any of the bounty.”
“Sure.” I didn’t believe her. I would have said the same thing in her shoes.
“See?” Dee held up her hands and turned slowly. “Unarmed.”
She was. She couldn’t claim a kill without a scanner. And she didn’t have a gun attached to her waist. Or a knife.
Seemed like I had my own shadow. “Fine.” I strode beyond the first rows of stalks, and then stopped. I’d been raised a city kid. I knew fuck-all about corn and mazes. What I was learning was why they put mazes in cornfields. You couldn’t see anything and the rustling of the corn would drive anyone crazy. It was claustrophobic and irritating and I knew I was already crawling with bugs from this place; corn mites or whatever the hell grew here.
“Come on,” I muttered, though I’d been the one to stop. I paced forward, carefully studying the ground, seeking that elusive ghost trail through the raised mounds between the corn stalks. The trail grew clearer, a dark snaky line that cut across the rows. Damn leaves cut my face and arms as I pushed through them, my shadow close behind.
The ghosts waited next to a mechanical witch that would pop out when the unsuspecting drew closer. They huddled together, hiding behind her black skirt. They seemed to be shivering or something. They wore shorts and T-shirts. But ghosts couldn’t feel temperature. They weren’t complete enough. It had to be something else.
I scanned them quickly. The two ghosts came up clearly, Samuel and John Harrison. Kim Fryer, well, I already knew he was a ghost. I aimed my gun as they trembled.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Dee screamed at me.
“They’re ghosts!”
The boys melted into the stalks. “Goddamn it!” I strode off toward them, but Dee grabbed my arm and stopped me. “Let go of me,” I warned her. She didn’t.
“No. Not until you see my scanner.” She held it up. Where the hell had she hidden it? The brothers registered as ghosts, but the scale was wrong. They seemed closer to human than usual ghosts.
Whereas Kim didn’t register as a ghost as all.
“I don’t fucking care what your scanner says. Dispatch sent me after him. I know he ain’t real.”
“Dispatch?” Dee asked, unbelieving.
“Yes. Constance at dispatch.”
“There’s no Constance in dispatch.”
I sneered at her. “How the fuck would you know?”
“Because I worked there before I started collecting on my own.”
“Bullshit.”
Dee shrugged and let go of my arm, finally. “There’s no Constance at dispatch and that boy’s real.”
“You believe what you want. I know what’s real,” I told her, taking off after the ghosts. Given my luck, of course they’d split up. I was only going to be able to track one at a time. Hopefully they’d stay there instead of switching back to another world.
I crashed through row after row of corn, Dee following right behind me, swearing like I was. The damn ghost was moving fast. No way to corner it in a field. And I was completely lost, just rows of corn on all sides, a bit of blue sky above. Nothing to guide me. I pushed on, following that snake trail.
I nearly ran by the gulch. The ghost trail was a little stronger. But something made me look over. There, curled up in the dried sticks and mud, lay little Kim Fryer. “Got you now, boy,” I said, pulling out my gun and advancing on him.
“Don’t you dare,” Dee told me.
Kim just lay there, eyes big as saucers.
“He’s mine,” I hissed at her.
“He’s not a ghost. He has a soul.”
I looked over at the boy. He looked as scared as any human kid. Then I looked through him, to the grass he’d bent over with the weight of his body. On the one hand, as a ghost, he shouldn’t have been so heavy. On the other hand, he still wasn’t solid. “Don’t care,” I told Dee. I carefully aimed my gun. He shut his eyes.
Then my arm was pointing straight up and Dee was screaming, “Run! Run!”
I’d like to say it was an instant reaction. But it wasn’t. I stared at Dee, gape mouthed and shocked. I didn’t shake her off; I didn’t pull down my arm and push her away. My muscles grew thick and slow, like taffy.
I don’t know when I grabbed my knife. I must have been reaching for it at the same time my arm floated down slowly. But there it was, solid against my palm.
Then there it was, buried deeply in Dee’s chest.
It was her turn to gape, wide-mouthed, pale.
I turned the knob on the handle. Automatic reflex. All her circuits were suddenly freed. Her body at the other end of the knife stiffened, pushing up into my hands, as if offering herself, then it slumped.
I’d killed her. Another collector. Like a ghost.
Her body didn’t bleed. Humans bled. At least, I did, when I hurt myself.
Ghosts didn’t.
Then her body just vanished.
Dee had been a fucking ghost. She’d looked and acted human. But she’d been a ghost. Just out to save her buddies. I wondered if she’d been the collector who’d been killed in the concrete jungle, and knew just enough about how to come back and seem real.
I thought about going back to the junction. But I couldn’t. I had a job to do. I tracked the brothers, though the rows of corn started segmenting. I knew they were ghosts. They had to be. I could see through them. They registered as ghosts, or at least close enough for me. I needed to get paid.
Kim I took out at the junction. His scream was louder than most, and his body, more messy. But he died just the same as they all did, and the Company showed their appreciation as well.
I noticed, afterwards, that the ghosts Constance sent me after, personally, were all better formed than a normal ghost.
It kept me up maybe for a night before I decided it didn’t matter.
I was a fisher of men, be they ghost or human. They all could fall under my blade.
Author’s Note
I actually wrote about 500 words or so on this story a long, long time ago. I always liked the idea, but it wasn’t really a story, no real plot. I decided to revive it for this challenge. I threw away everything but the main character and the world, and came up with something new in terms of plot and story.
Were-Teen
Patrice sat huddled on her couch, arms wrapped firmly around her bent knees. God, how could she be so stupid? Mortification poured down on her head, drowning her. She had vague memories of self-confidence, once upon a time. Now, only hopeless awkwardness and a bitter, lonely life stretched before her.
What had she been thinking, calling her ex-boyfriend? It had kind of started as a joke, like drunk-dialing. Only she wasn’t drunk. Just young.
She’d also been so bored.
Nothing on TV. Nothing on YouTube that she hadn’t already seen. Nothing to do but wait and wait and wait until midnight and she just couldn’t take it any more.
Patrice pressed her forehead against her knees, not caring how much it hurt because of the horrible acne raging across her face. She kept hearing Tom’s words, over and over again. She’d only wanted to talk about school or something. It wasn’t until they’d started talking that she’d remembered—duh—that he didn’t go to her school. He hadn’t even recognized her voice at first, either.
Patrice knew Tom wouldn’t take her back—who wanted a loser like her?
A voice at the back of her head spoke nonsense about how she’d actually broken up with him. But Patrice couldn’t hear that now. All she listened to was Tom’s voice, hearing again how stupid she sounded, particularly since she had to form words carefully because of her awful braces.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
That was her in just three wo
rds. She hated this waiting, hated her life, and if she could just get over all this…
The clock ticked on, gaining momentum, and finally striking midnight.
Patrice untangled herself and rose from the couch, then kept rising, growing an additional four inches, her body rushing back from where it had been hiding. Curves returned, and her short hair. So did the ache in her shoulder from last weekend’s raking, all the calluses on her heels from cute but bad shoes, as well as the weight of her years.
With the transformation from her teenaged self to her forty-two-year-old self completed, Patrice stretched her arms above her head, flexing her back, then bending forward to touch the ground in front of her toes. Since she knew exactly how flexible she’d been as a teen, as an adult she worked hard to maintain that level.
The memory of the phone call to her ex came back. Only now, Patrice smiled, vindicated. Tom had looked great on paper—smart, snarky, and cute. He’d certainly said all the right things. Maybe he even believed them. He’d been very slow to show his true colors. Turned out he was also a bigot and didn’t actually respect women. Patrice knew she’d been lucky to have gotten out early, before she’d committed too much of her heart.
Slowly, Patrice rolled up, then wrapped her arms over her chest, hugging herself tightly. She wished for the ten-thousandth time that she could hug her teenaged self, that somehow she could communicate during her curse with her younger self in a meaningful way, to let herself know that it got better, that she got better. Maybe Patrice hadn’t found true love, but she had great friends, an amazing house, and a career she loved and excelled at. But notes didn’t work: either her younger self never saw them, or didn’t believe them.
Every time the curse lifted, Patrice remembered just how lucky she was, how good she had it now.
Life would be perfect, if only she wasn’t cursed.
Patrice made her way out to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea to take with her to bed. The number of dirty dishes always staggered her. The curse lasted about twenty-four hours, midnight to midnight, on the first night of the full moon. She swore her teenaged self liked messing up the kitchen. She’d been such a slob as a kid. More than once she’d apologized to her mom for it. She started rinsing dishes and putting them into the dishwasher. It was such a soothing task. If only she could convince her inner teenager of that.