by John Shirley
Tanlee was weeping, shouting something over the shrieking, grinding walls and the flowing moans, the rising chorus of sirens—Colin could only make out, “Some of us knew . . . no one would listen . . . we’re not just fodder, Mrs. Koyne, this isn’t your sheep ranch . . .”
But the rackety high pitched sound from Mrs. Koyne, blurring now, might have been laughter—no, it was some other, inhuman mode of expression compounded of glee, triumph, mocking pity, and giddy relief: the release of unspeakable feelings long suppressed.
Colin took Tanlee by the wrist and pulled her down the rollicking hallway, remembering a State Fair funhouse he’d liked as a boy, where the floor buckled all rubbery underfoot—and the laughing whitefaced, red-lipped vampire face whose mouth had been the entrance of the funhouse.
He paused at the door to the hall—the door which was changing shape from a rectangle to a rhombus—and glanced over his shoulder down the hall to the main room. It was murky in there, except for piercing, lancing forks of light emanating from the wreckage of the computer, from light sockets, wall plugs, all of it angling, bending toward the shattered window facing the bay.
He turned away as the floor gave another convulsive lurch under them, and he pulled Tanlee through the collapsing doorway, down the dust-choked hall to the utility stairs. The bent metal door hung open. Through the widening fissures in the walls they could see the adjacent buildings, swaying.
Then Colin and Tanlee burst from the little outbuilding onto the windy roof.
The roof was sheathed with aluminum and a white insulating gravel, crisscrossed with external ventilator conduits—one of these was buckling now, as if to greet their arrival, snapping up to wave like a ragged blade at the roiling sky. A girder had already broken somewhere below, jammed up through the roof, and as it seemed fairly stable they went to it and clung on, gazing about them, their eyes drawn to the sky where the clouds spun, spiraled inward toward the thing that dominated the city; that owned the horizon:
It was an impossibly big, dull-silver tornado shape, tapering toward the ground, spinning over San Francisco Bay to tower over the Bay Bridge, its top lost in spiraling mists. But as they gazed, they saw that it was not a tornado—it wasn’t a construction of dense air, or even debris whirling in air. It was something solid. Solid, but turning. Screwing. There was a translucent spinning envelope of energy around the grey inner shape that made it seem like a whirlwind—but the solid inner shape wasn’t in fact turning rapidly. Within the envelope of energy it was turning about once every second, or second and a half.
From the windows of crumbling buildings all around them, the seeking feelers of living, flesh-crawling light branched and nosed and oozed toward the great inverted cone driving itself into the bay. Like the clouds, the seawater below, the debris sucked toward it, the branchings of restless light twined and tightened around the turning shape digging into the world—where it made a sucking funnel of the water. With each distinctive turn of the striated cone came another planetary shudder. Colin felt a shadow of comfort in being able to see the source of the quaking.
There was a sputtering thud behind them, penetrating the thick background clamor of the disintegrating city, and they turned to see the roof burst open in a shape like a flower petal opening, neatly folded back petals of metal and substructure and insulation, and from the flower rose a whirling murk of tattering fabric, exposed flesh, hair whipping about blurred grin: Mrs. Koyne. She ascended over the roof and made that gleeful tittering sound of relief, and then—still vertical relative to the rooftops—flew toward the great twisting steely cone digging into the world out in the bay.
Other buildings were rupturing in exactly the same way; flowers of torn metal disgorged whirling figures that zipped giddily through the sky to converge around the inverted cone. Only a few came from each building.
“Her kind,” Tanlee shouted over the din, “they are showing themselves now.”
“Someone sent you to spy on her?” Colin asked.
“Some of us have known . . . I had to play a role, and watch, and try to find some way . . .” She shook her head. “There was no stopping them. We gave them the world in the last century.”
“Who? Who are they? Are they like . . . aliens?”
“They’re from outside. But they’re not from another planet in the way you . . .” The rest of the sentence was swallowed up in a great roar of protest from the infrastructure of the city itself, its streets and foundations and pipes and wires and girders, all twisting out of shape as the screw turning in the bay tightened another thread—and this turn of the thread pulled everything fatally out of alignment, and drew it closer to the screw.
That’s what it was, Colin realized—Tanlee knew it at the same moment, he could feel that—the thing digging into the world was a screw, a literal, unimaginably gigantic screw, extending up through the troposphere into the tropopause, maybe beyond, a screw digging down through the bay and into the sand, down into the soil, biting the rock, penetrating the crust, the magma, eventually the core of the Earth itself.
Smoke undulated up from the shattered buildings—the billowy motion like Mrs. Koyne’s undulation as she spun—and flame licked and jetted, but it seemed almost muted, secondary, as another change was making the conventional destruction of an earthquake something that didn’t apply: the city’s hard shapes had softened at their edges, as if the fabric of material reality was redefining to accommodate the great screw digging into the world—
The screw digging in, pausing—turning, pausing—turning, pausing—turning—digging deeper—
The city’s metal and glass and concrete became something rubbery, infused with a unifying glue that kept it in one stretching piece, the shore distending out to join with the sea–which seemed to grow glutinous, around the threading column—all of it merging to twine around the great screw, and to draw into its substance . . .
Their building began to move—the building he and Tanlee stood on was like a cobra slithering with its upper length held up over the ground, toward the bay, toward the great screw twisting into the planet. Colin suddenly understood what was happening. “It’s screwing into the world and . . . absorbing it . . . taking all the strength and energy and order from it and sucking it up into itself . . .”
“Yes,” she said, slipping an arm around his waist. “Look! You see how Mrs. Koyne’s people–”
“They’re not people!” he shouted angrily.
“They’re a kind of people! They’re not so different—they’re a parasitic species from some dimension—the fifth dimension, maybe—and they’re not so different from us, which is why they can work with us—you see them up there, floating in the sky, arranged around the screw? They’re feeding through it! But most of what they’re stealing is going back to their world—pure living energy, the life force of Gaia—”
“Those streamers of lights—liquid people, from the computer—” He broke off as the shuddering redoubled, the roof responding by wrinkling up under their feet, its square top becoming a diamond shape pointed at the screw. All the squares of the city becoming diamonds, narrowing diamonds, angling toward the ineffably gigantic screw.
“They’re like phantoms—metaphysical—”
“What? The noise!”
“—metaphysical reverberations from the suffering, the exploitation, the sheer wringing of life from people and the world—and we were part of it, we were part of the corporation, the society that fed on it all, me and you, taking part in gouging the planet, pushing people out of their rightful places, so that they could suck up their strength, their hope, their spiritual force—”
“But that was all money, they were just taking money, it’s just . . . currency!” he shouted. Thinking now he was hearing the real Tanlee, meeting the real Tanlee—when it was too late.
“Oh what does mean—” Another phrase lost. “—say ‘currency’? We were all part of selling our world out to these soulless things—moral choices have metaphysical—” An echoing roar
from the city blotted the rest of her statement. But Colin could feel the rightness of it in his bones.
Colin thought about it, as the city went soft and mutable and coursed in compressed threads up the great screw, the screw crunching deeper with each quaking turn into the shivering world. Not long before he’d heard about lobbyists who’d suppressed every effort at banning goods from countries using child-slaves for labor; he’d heard hundreds of thousands of American tourists overseas paid to have sex with children; he knew that the great forests were being razed, the seas poisoned. And on and on it went.
People knew these things were happening—but someone always prevented anything really significant being done about them. Who? Who let this go grindingly on, like a great screw twisting into the world? Ordinary greedy human beings?
No. Humanity had to have been infiltrated. Seduced, distracted, entranced. Enslaved.
And all of it had led to this moment, this culmination; the patchwork harvesting had ended and now had come the final harvesting of the world.
As these thoughts swirled in his mind, so the sea, the city, the land, the great Bay Bridge itself, twisted like debris sucking in a drain around the great, the ineffably gigantic screw that was biting, digging deeper and deeper into the world, with a grinding noise that grew so loud no further talk could pass between him and Tanlee, and there was only their embrace. There was only time for the intimacy of shared despair. For there was no hope of escape—when even the mountains and the core of the Earth were being drawn into the great spinning shaft . . . and what remained of Colin and Tanlee’s roof, too, rushed toward the towering screw.
Now their part of the crushed city, the compressing rooftops, went spinning around the steely shaft, just as tiny strips of wood are pulled around a drill digging into a plank, and Colin, staring up at the stupendous screw, could see there were distinct sharp screwthreads in the side, just exactly like a woodscrew but each thread wider than an eight-lane freeway. And looking past the screw as they were pulled around and around its shaft—too amazedly caught up in the majestic dismantling of the world, too overwhelmed to be frightened—they saw the crumbling, melting skylines of other cities from far away: Hong Kong and London and New York and Denver and Peking and Moscow and Cairo and others they didn’t recognize, pulled into the screw.
All the cities of the world were being drawn through some transdimensional shortcut to converge on the screw, the one great screw that in a thousand separate places was digging into the world, creak-creak-squeak, screeeee, screwing right through its heart. The planet twisting around the screw, sucking into it as if collapsing into a black hole. Screaming, billions of people deliquesced into concrete, asphalt, melting steel and gushing magma, sizzling seawater—
Near the end, just before they were sucked into the merging of roof and metal and sea and flesh and stone and lava, Colin and Tanlee looked up along the turning, sharp-threaded shaft of the screw. They saw clearly that it was a thing of energy, and a thing of metal at once; that it was an expression of the city, of the world, and that it was also otherworldly; they saw that it was death for some, life for others.
And then the screw turned one thread more.
ORIGINAL PUBLICATION DATA
Animus Rights (Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2009)
Call Girl, Echoed (Originally published as part of “TechnoTriptych,” Dark Wisdom #8, Winter, 2006)
Cram (Wetbones, Fall 1997)
Cul-de-Sac (Flurb, Issue #2, Winter 2006-2007)
Faces in Walls (Black Static # 17, June 2010 [UK])
Gotterdammergun (Horror Garage # 6, 2002)
“I Want to Get Married,” Says the World’s Smallest Man (Midnight Graffiti, ed. Jessica Horsting & James Van Hise, Warner 1992 )
Just a Suggestion (The Bleeding Edge, ed. William F. Nolan & Jason V. Brock, Cycatrix Press/Dark Discoveries, 2009)
Just Like Suzie (Cemetery Dance #9, Summer 1991)
Learn at Home! Your Career in Evil! (Embraces, ed. Paula Guran, Venus or Vixen Press, 2000)
Paper Angels On Fire (Sick Things, ed. Cheryl Mullenax, Comet Press, 2010)
Raise Your Hand if You’re (Dead Dark Discoveries #17, Spring 2010)
Screw (Interzone #189, May/June 2003 [UK])
Skeeter Junkie (New Noir, Fiction Collective Two, 1993)
Smartbomber (Originally published as part of “TechnoTriptych,” Dark Wisdom #8, Winter, 2006)
Ten Things To Be Grateful For (Gothic.Net, November 1998)
The Exquisitely Bleeding Heads of Doktur Palmer Vreedeez (Black Butterflies, Mark V. Ziesing, 1998)
The Gun As An Aid To Poetry (Original to this volume. Copyright © 2011 John Shirley)
Tighter (Darkness Divided, Stealth Press, 2001)
You Blundering Idiot, You Fucking Failed To Kill Me Again! (Swill # 4, 2009)
You Hear What Buddy and Ray Did? (Forbidden Acts, ed. Nancy A. Collins, Edward E. Kramer & Martin H. Greenberg, Avon 1995)
IN EXTREMIS:
THE MOST EXTREME SHORT STORIES OF JOHN
SHIRLEY
© 2011 John Shirley. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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In Extremis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Underland Press
www.underlandpress.com
Portland, Oregon
eISBN : 978-0-982-66395-0
First Underland Press Edition: August 2011