It was the voice of a wounded man, a broken echo of what once must have been something fulsome and wondrous. The chair-jumpers embraced one another, sniffling, and the girl with the charcoal eyeliner took a stub of oil pastel from her coat pocket and drew a remarkable V twined in power cords, like the leading letter in an illuminated manuscript, but her grip was crippled, and the pastel crumbled. She bit her lip until it bled.
As Jean Tom sang, the lines around his eyes faded. His grey hair grew darker and richer in luster. The crowd was agitated, ageless faces suffused with a frenzied light. They waited as he moaned and choked through the tune, and when at last, the final note faded, they leapt to their feet and swept him up onto their shoulders. They paraded him around the shadowy, candlelit house in a victory lap, chanting.
Victim of the Digital Age, Welcome to the Empire.
The rain-slicker woman touched Len’s hand. “Welcome.”
Len turned to look at her and wasn’t surprised to see that her skin had become smooth, opalescent as a girl’s. She touched a hand to her hair, which rippled over her shoulders like cream-colored silk. She slipped free of the pink plastic rain slicker and, standing naked, lifted ivory arms to the ceiling. “Behold, Terpsichore.”
Len looked at her, and saw the scream queens of the silver screen, the doe-eyed Erika Blanc, the luscious Cinzia Monreale, the brooding Soleded Miranda. She was all of them, and she was Lizzie too, but also entirely herself. Technicolor crept up the shabby stage curtains behind her, washing the carpets, polishing the brass balcony railings and the leering faces of the cherubs. “Thank you, oh thank you, angels!” She clasped her hands. “And congratulations to Jean Tom.”
The new Jean Tom, no longer turtle-faced, no longer reeking of disappointment and age, danced up the aisle and out the lobby doors. He appeared in the high window of the projector booth, and light washed across the silver screen.
The motley angels settled into their velvet seats, sending an assortment of bottles and crinkling cellophane packages down the rows. Without hesitation, flushed with the magic of it all, Len took a handful of Red Vines and a deep swig of some horrible bathtub gin that set his feet drumming on the theater floor.
Terpsichore, she of the golden hair and the pinup breasts tucked herself under the curve of Len’s arm, and showed him how to bite his red licorice into a straw for a more serious drink of gin. “Stolen by Mr. Sergei, my rascal angel,” she whispered. “Isn’t this wonderful?”
Something fluttered, terribly, in Len’s stomach, and it was clear to him now, what Lizzie had been browsing for, what he had not given her. It was this feeling, a feeling of being embraced and understood. “Oh yes,” he said. “Wonderful.”
They watched the triple feature, Argento’s Suspiria, Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby Kill, Bismee’s Devil’s Nightmare. A flock of angels at play watched demons at work. The gin went to work on Len’s heart, easing his sorrows, obliterating his worry, focusing the totality of his happiness on the sweet progress of the scream queens—their hands over their mouths, eyes shocked, yet subtly complicit. Terpsichore’s hand on his leg was sweetly erotic, but Len found himself sinking into the velvet seat as if drowning, his arms and legs so heavy, so slow. He heard a spate of laughter, felt the sweet camaraderie of horror fans taking in a midnight showing of a cult classic—and as he rested his head against the red velvet chair, he felt the lips of Empire on his forehead, and thought, I belong here. I’m an angel, oh yes.
He understood, finally, what Lizzie had been searching for.
Len woke in a drift of snow outside the Empire Theater. Startled by the rising wail of a passing ambulance, Len fumbled something cold and heavy to his shrunken chest. A slimy residue of gin and Red Vines had glued his lips together. His clothing agleam with frost, he had a movie-marathon headache, a backache, and a profound sense of loss. Loss of warmth, loss of love. As the ambulance screamed by, the EMTs didn’t turn to consider him, although he sat trembling and in serious danger of hypothermia.
Between the end credits of the last film and him awakening in the snowdrift, Len had dreamed of love for a hundred years. In his dream, it wasn’t Terpsichore who sat with her hand on his leg, but his wife—Lizzie, as she had dressed in college, with her earth shoes, and her marijuana cigarettes—back before she had permanently jammed the cell phone into her ear so she could chat with her lover while her hands spidered across a keyboard missing the zero key.
He blinked at his wrinkled, liver-spotted hands, then up at the marquee. DATE WITH AN ANGEL! ANGEL SANCTUARY! RUN, ANGEL, RUN! With a cry, Len hurled himself against the doors, pounding with palsied, ancient fists. How had he become so old so fast? “Terpsichore!”
He expected no answer, and he got none. Across the street, a small crowd was gathering at the post office. Keith, glued to his palm device, stood just inside the glass doors, ignoring an old woman’s plea to get in. She waved a newspaper, shouted, and pounded on the glass.
Watching her from deep in the snow drift in the lee of the Empire, Len wondered if Jean Tom, and Mr. Sergei, and Lizzie had sat there in this same drift of snow, watching the morning post office drama unfold, wondering how to re-enter the Empire.
Had they, too, waited in the cold on Washington Street, like angels yearning for Heaven?
Starter House
Jason Palmer
Dale looked up through the ribbed Lucite dome of Asteroid Cintas II, his eyes lit from within by thoughts of a bright future. “I never imagined,” he said, “I’d own a purebred house.”
Pam locked her eyes on his. “I knew you would. I knew we would. This makes it all worth it.”
They kissed.
A forklift driver smiled at them as he passed, trundling a giant spool of wire through corridors of stacked feedbags. He disappeared into the high dark bay of the feedlot.
Dale and Pam shivered with excitement when a giant discomfited humph came from the bay. They smiled into each other’s eyes. “Do you think they’re working on ours?” she said.
Dale waited a loaded moment to answer, slowly, “I think so. I think so.”
Someone said, “Y’all got that male?”
A salesman.
“Yes,” said Dale, cradling Pam’s waist. “We want a little independence.”
The salesman came around a stack of grain bags. “Can’t say I blame you. People buy females, they know the payoff for breeding is good, but some don’t realize it’s a long road. These ain’t chickens.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Stu Armstrong.”
They shook. Armstrong tipped his hat at Pam, and then another massive humph beyond the lighted part of the warehouse made him look up. “Uh-oh,” he said, grinning, “I think they’ve started on your boy.”
They all looked at each other in suspense.
Armstrong said, “What say we go and watch them wire him up?”
Pam clapped her hands in excitement, and they crossed the warehouse to stand in the entrance to the vast dim bay. Beyond the boundary of the bonecrete floor and overhead lights, the soaring dome gave perspective to the universe.
There was a vast hiss from pressurization and a thickening of the hair smell of B vitamins.
Dale and Pam held hands while a gantry with bubble tires entered from the vacuum plains outside. Upon it stood something pink, bipedal, and male, forty feet tall. A humanoid, mongoloid mountain that looked one quarter armadillo.
Armstrong waved to some of the workmen, signaling Customer here! and a few waved back.
The giant standing on the gantry didn’t move except to chew, rolling cud lazily in its mouth. It had a hayseed sort of look except for the bulging forehead. The workmen used long gaff hooks to bring it baying down into a painful crouch, then held the hooks firmly until it adjusted. It began chewing again, although its big human eyes looked wild.
Dale and Pam watched in fascination. Armstrong observed them. “Yep,” he said, “purebred, perfect health, and one hundred percent aye-daptated. One big atmosphere suit for the family.”
&n
bsp; The slow workmen barked at one another, throwing loops of wire over the creature and catching them on the other side. A steel cable went over the back of the neck, keeping it bowed down. Tight loops bound the ankles to the thighs and the arms to the wrists like chicken wings, and it made Dale vaguely hungry. He glanced at Pam wondering if she shared the thought, but her face was that of a little girl filled with wonder and happiness.
The creature’s stomach was brought between its knees, the chin to rest on the stomach. A faux Georgian porch was hung on a steel band over the eyes and secured with a giant padlock at the back of the head.
“Is it all done?” asked Pam.
“Oh, no ma’am,” said Armstrong. “We still have to gouge and cauter and clean. I just thought you might like to see this part. I imagine, if it was my first house, I’d want to see everything having to do with it, top to bottom, except the gouging. All the moaning and baying and the mess, kind of turns people off. That’s why we’re full service. ‘We Do The Dirty Work’, that’s our motto.”
“We’ll remember you, Mr. Armstrong,” said Pam, her hand over Dale’s heart, “the man who sold us our first house.”
–Two Months Later–
Dale left work and piloted his cruiser across the Valley of the Shadow with two fingers on the stick. His breath turned to ferns of ice on the front glass, and he listened to the treads popping icy pebbles along the floor of the impact crater. The coolers burped to life, as the temperature topped 220 Fahrenheit in the sun that peeked into the valley.
Then he was home.
Home puffed and sweated in the heat.
Dale bounced across a short patch of asteroidal plane and then stepped through the wet membrane of the belly door. Setting down his helmet, he stood a moment in the entryway. The white and red Christmas tree lights in the living room soothed him.
Pam called from another room, “Honey?”
He sighed. “Yes?”
“The house was very shifty. Just a minute ago. Will you do something?”
Relieved. “Oh, okay.” This he could handle. He set the helmet on a peg near the door and shuffled down the hall to an unadorned closet. Opening the door, he turned on a naked fluorescent light by pulling a chain, and picked up his worn cricket bat.
He crunched his fingers against the electrical tape on the handle.
Dale closed the door and rolled his shoulders, then took a first cursory whack at the loose, hanging scrotum that took up most of the closet. The yielding bulk was flaccid, and the exertion felt good. He hit it again, much harder, and an angry rumble ran through the walls.
Dale liked the reality of the closet. It disclosed the grit of the iron spars and utility pipes that structured the house’s sore flesh into the familiar residential geometries. A man’s realm.
He stripped off his atmosphere suit a bit at a time, working his hits in. A sleeve, whack! The other sleeve, smush! He finally emerged with the top half of the suit hanging from his waist and his T-shirt all sweated up, having banged away at the house’s balls until the angry shudders turned to pleading and placating ones.
He found Pam crouching over little Tommy in his bath. “What,” he asked, “got it worked up?”
“Guess.”
“Tommy, were you sticking pins in the walls again?”
Tommy grinned and clapped his hands together in a puff of bath bubbles, and Dale forgot why he’d been upset.
“How are we doing?” Dale asked Pam that night, as she scanned their accounts. He lay behind her in bed, stroking her hair; in a moment she’d become annoyed by his absent-minded fascination with her.
“Okay. But the repair expenses have been pretty bad, lately. It’s a lot more expensive now that we need a catheter man instead of a plumber, and a doctor instead of a carpenter.”
“Even though we skipped the anesthesia?”
“Yes.”
“And did you ask that antibiotics wholesaler about lobotomy?”
“He doesn’t recommend it. He says people who lobotomize wind up with random fits and all kinds of craziness.”
He stopped tracing the curve of her spine. “It is a willful house,” he said, and his eyes became flat and shining.
She half turned toward him as she took out an earring. “Did you hear it trying to sniff around the Ybarri’s place next door?”
“But the Ybarri’s–”
“What if our house is gay?”
He laughed and pulled her across him, tickling her so she kicked and wiggled. “A gay house!”
–Four months later–
“I’m beginning to wonder,” said Pam through the com in her atmosphere suit, “what we’re going to do.”
They looked out across Divine Redeemer’s Landing, really just a few rows of houses squatting side by side on a plain with views of the nebula. It was a yellowish nebula, not one of the depressing blue ones. They held hands and the bubbles of their helmets touched.
“I know,” Dale said.
“The feed is the worst. It gets more expensive every week.”
He spread his hands. “It’s a buyer’s market, right now. Things will bounce back after the war.”
“I hope so. Then maybe we can get a nice greenhouse, instead. I could get tired of all that meat.”
Dale’s head snapped toward her. He hated the way she always thought one step beyond what they could possibly accomplish, but he fought his anger. They couldn’t afford another row, no matter how nice it was making up. Things felt...thin.
He changed the subject. “How has it been lately, the house?”
“How do you think? Trying to walk around, fidgeting all day. The plaster’s cracked in Tommy’s room again. If it gets an arm or a leg free, we’ll be kicked out of the neighborhood.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“It doesn’t do much good anymore, Dale. Especially with you wailing away in there any time you get stressed.”
Her tone was withering. He watched her, his answer to the cold distances of the galaxy. The spectral light made her look suddenly chiseled and independent and even hawklike.
Dale suddenly perceived how little they knew each other, and he glimpsed a stark white fear.
–Six months of war later–
Pam kept shaking her head whenever he looked at her. He opened all the kitchen drawers until he found the filleting knife.
“Don’t do it,” she said. “We’ll lose twenty percent of the house’s value. What if the war is over tomorrow?”
“What if it isn’t? We have to see if we can stomach it.”
He took the knife into the hall closet. The walls shook and shivered as he carved out a good-sized steak, and he gritted his teeth against the irregular splurts of blood. Finished, he jabbed a big hypo of clotting factor into the twitching wall and left it hanging there.
When he came out, Pam and Tommy were holding onto the arms of their chairs, making him smile.
Dale slabbed the meat onto a gas-fired grill and rubbed his hands over the little blue flame, feeling a bit touched in the head. The savor of sizzling meat brought Tommy into the kitchen, wide-eyed and in his underwear. “Is that part of our house?” he said. There was a troubled, philosophical bent to the boy’s question.
“Not anymore, buddy.”
They had only candles to light their table, and above their fickle light Pam’s face looked thin and ashen. A jagged fault line ran up the plaster wall behind her to the ceiling, where it continued horizontally to the dead chandelier. Its shadow jumped sides as the candle flames swayed in a draft. Dale stared out the window as they said grace, looking toward the Consortium for some sign of life in that seemingly bright but war-torn cluster.
“What have you heard on the post?” asked Pam, chewing and slurring her words.
He just shook his head.
Tommy, excited, said, “Are we going to be the last people left in the whole universe?”
Dale stopped chewing.
The silence was complete except for the clank of Tommy�
��s fork. Only the boy remained dignified and confident, and after a moment Pam began imitating him—literally copying him—in an exhausted way that Dale found repulsive and threatening.
–Later–
Dale peeled the plaster away from the skinwalls all over the house and piled the furniture in the middle of the rooms. “We cut off what we need,” he said, “and hold out as long as we can.”
Pam held up a large plunger full of blue fluid. “We only have 1200 cc’s of Worm Begone left.”
“All right. Then we stop the daily doses and shock the system when things start getting ugly.”
“And there’s no chance,” said Pam, “the others will find food on—”
“Citris? Oh, they’ve got grain on Citris. And the first thing those people will do is fire their rockets at any refugees they see. They’re trying to hold out, same as us.”
Pam sagged. “We can’t reach Civix or the Inners?”
“Not directly.” He leaned close to her and whispered, “The war’s spread. We’re safe here—” he led her by the arm to a membranous window. “—but you see that?”
“The Folk Rocks?” Pinpoints of yellow and pink light ringed by invisibly small, arable planets.
His nostrils flared. “Now? It’s a tomb.”
She nodded in defeat. When he kissed the side of her nose, it was cold.
Tommy clambered over the pile of furniture at the center of the room, looking the miniature philosopher, never smiling.
Dale couldn’t stop his nostrils flaring. He slapped the angry red endothelium of the house’s bare interior. “Now, who’s hungry?”
“Dale?”
“Yes?”
“What do we feed the house?”
They fed the house bushels of the thumblike white worms that hung wriggling out of the infected walls like earthworms in a fresh grave. Pam added chaff and vitamin B to make them taste more like grain, but Dale still had to clamp the house’s nose shut with a ratchet cable to make it swallow. They waited a month, then shot it full of Worm Begone, and the worms went away for a while.
The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Page 17