How to Save the World

by Tam MacNeil

  Art: Where is he now?

  Mad: In the cafe, probably.

  Mad: Why?

  Mad: Why?

  Mad: Why? Something going on?

  Mad: Art?

  Then she hears the rumbling and the sirens and she knows. Shinigami.

  She grabs her bag with the recording equipment, stuffs her feet into her shoes, goes running down the stairs, out of the lobby, stuffing the buds into her ears as she goes. Sean is standing out on the street, the empty street. He’s staring with that glassy look that shinigami victims get. For a moment she wonders what the hell he’s doing, going out into the street while the shinigami sirens are blasting, then she knows, and it’s a nasty sort of sensation.

  She takes the spare buds she carries out of her pocket. They’re not as good as the ones she’s wearing but they’re good enough to block the sound the shinigami make, subsonic, terrible and sweet, and they’ve got comms in them. She puts them into his hand. He looks at them, looks at her, and does nothing.

  Oh for fuck’s sake, she mutters, What am I? Your fucking mother? She reaches up and physically puts them into his ears. Sean straightens up. He stops staring at the skyline, shakes his head slowly side to side as if he’s got water in his ears. She taps the button on the side.

  “You hearing me?”

  He blinks. “Yeah.”

  “Good. The buds will dampen the sounds and there’s comms in the right side.” She grins at him then. “You wanna wait for training or you wanna come now?”

  His mouth twists up in the first smile she’s seen on his face.

  “Good,” she says. “Come on.”

  He follows. He knows that there are monsters coming out of the water, he knows he ought to be running from them. He knows that normal people run from death, normal people run to the shinigami shelters, plug their ears, cower under tables as if monsters are just earthquakes. He has never been close to a shinigami, but even when Alex was with him and things were good, he wanted to know them the way some people want to know the stars. Now… now he is running through the curiously still daytime streets, running with his ears plugged to the hum that the shinigami emit, hearing only the beat of Mad’s running breaths in his ears.

  The grey ribbon of the road rolls down to the glittering water. The white sails of Canada Place gleam in the afternoon sun; the sky is cafe-porcelain blue, and the place where the world is torn and the darkness of the shinigami stains the sky and the water, it’s like a hallucination in the bright sun light. At the waterside, a crowd has gathered, silent, heads turned up to the shinigami and the sky. They move. Move like travellers at the airport. Like getting onto a bus in the morning. Like waiting for the shelter to open its doors. Even the gulls are gone from the waterside. Even the rats went fleeing up the concrete hills. Humans are the only creature stupid enough to sometimes want to die.

  “Sean,” Mad’s panting in his ear. “See that one on the far left?”

  He looks, looks up at the colossal, towering thing.

  “We think they’re always the same,” she says. “That’s the first one is the biggest one. We think it’s the leader.”

  He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with the information.

  “And next to it, that’s the second one that shows up. It’s got a distinct pattern in the darkness there, always glowing on the left side.”

  He can hardly make it out. It stands like a spire, like a building at night, and one side of it glimmers like water.

  “The one close to the shore, the smallest one, we think that’s a young one. It’s the one the mechs tend to kill first, the easiest one.”

  “Mad,” he’s panting. “Wait.” His side is cramped from all the food he ate this morning and it’s hard to run. Plus his leg hurts. He forgot he was injured, went tearing off after Mad all full of adrenaline and rage and dying to kill something. Now he’s got to slow down, the pain is catching up with him. He limps a little to give the muscle a break. Sure, Simone shot something into him and told him it would help the wound heal, but it’s a gunshot, and he’s been stupid. He shouldn’t be running on it. Except that the shinigami were calling him. Calling him, and he wanted to answer. Still wants to answer. All that he had is gone.

  “Come on Sean.”

  “I can’t. Just. What are we doing down here?”

  Mad’s half a block ahead of him, deep in the crowd that’s clamoring to the edge of the water, starting to drop down from the seawall, starting to go into the water like offerings. He realizes she’s been talking but he hasn’t heard anything she’s said.

  He’s hot, hot from running, and his leg hurts, and the water will be cool and quenching. It will close over him and soothe him. It will wash the salt from his eyes and the pain from his heart. It will take the weight from him. He can see the shinigami now. God, really see them. They are the night sky. They are the corkscrew of brilliant stars flung against the void. As perfect as a diamonds.

  She’s doubling back now, Mad, her mouth open as she breathes hard, climbing the hill toward him at a run. She must be hot too. She must be desperate to cool off. There will be space at the shore for both of them. She runs to him, catches his arms and she is far too warm, sweating, breathing hard, mouth moving, cursing at him. He tries to take her arms gently, to turn her back around toward the shinigami. She scowls at him. Snatches something hanging from his shoulder and stuffs it into his ear.

  “…tell me you’re not too far gone you stupid fuck-face.”

  Like having a coffee after a nightmare-filled sleep. Like glass breaking. He jerks back from her.

  “You lost your earpiece,” Mad snaps. “Don’t ever lose your earpiece. If you lose your earpiece you’ll die. Got it?”

  He nods.

  “Now come on. There’s work to do.” She turns and starts back down the hill again, he follows.

  “What work?” he asks. He doesn’t like this random action, doesn’t like not knowing his objective. Wants, painfully, for Alex. “What are we doing?”

  “Art needs data,” she says. “We’ve gotta get it before the mechs move in. Sonic signature. We just record the waveforms for Rak to analyze. They're building a sonic gun.”

  "A what?"

  But she doesn't answer. He follows her, follows her through the checkerboard pattern of shadow and light, between cedar trees as broad as houses. Everywhere, people, everywhere, making nooses out of jackets and out of shirts and belts. Everywhere climbing, onto playground equipment and half-rotted stumps, onto parked cars and trucks. Hanging themselves. He runs past a woman lifting up her child, a tiny thing, a year, maybe two perhaps. The little girl’s eyes are sightless, staring, her face utterly blank, just like her mother’s. He stumbles, stops, starts to go back.

  “You want to save one kid or humanity, Sean?” Mad’s voice is cold in his ear. “Come on.”

  He stares. No one seems to see him. No one cares. Everyone climbing up, falling down. Around him bodies hang like party bunting. The air is getting thick with the smell of excrement. The mother has climbed up onto a van that stalled out by the lions that flank the bridge. It overlooks the rocks, the narrows. She’s raising up the little girl. He realizes there’s a tree limb overhead, and she’s going to hang her there. He scrambles up after them.

  “Sean.”

  He grabs the belt, pulls it from the mother’s hands. He expects her to whirl on him, snarling, to fight. She doesn’t. Just lifts the little girl anyway, lifts her high up, and then throws her onto the rocks. The mother throws herself down next. He stands frozen, afraid to look over the edge. Afraid of what he’ll see.

  “We gotta get there before the mechs do.”

  He stares at the space where they were a moment before.

  “O’Connell!”

  “I’m on my way,” he whispers.

  Nine

  Alex doesn’t know how much time passes, but he wakes up and they’re loading him into the cage again. “Simulation?” he asks. The guy nods, but this time he doesn’t believe
it. Tap on the top of the helmet. Like turning on a device.

  The shinigami call out to him now. They know him and he knows them. He never really kills them, but the other pilots never come back. His hands are almost good as new. Once his leg gives out halfway back to the Tank. He has time to wonder how they get the mech back without the pilot before they put him out.

  Again, wakes up. Diesel fumes. The clank of metal and the creak of straps.

  “Simulation?” he asks, but his voice is hoarse and quiet and they cover up his mouth with the comms and nobody hears him anyway.

  They’ve started waiting for him, the shinigami. His head is full of their pleading, their voices. Why do you hurt us? Why do you attack? It’s so hard to fight them when they scream and beg in his head. It makes the comms guy furious. “Fight, pilot, Fight! God fucking dammit, pilot get in there and fight!”

  There are only three shinigami, the same ones over and over again. One begs him for mercy, the other asks him why he is doing this, the third says nothing at all. He kills them, and is so glad the comms only go one way, because he has started to give them names, because he has started to strain to hear their voices in his head. Because screams when he kills them, and cries afterward.

  The tank is a shitty place to sleep, but he’s tired enough that he could sleep anywhere. Almost sleeps right through loading, so they give him some adrenaline before he goes out this time. It makes everything so much worse.

  He’s murdering them in the way that he does, in the way that they keep coming back from. The one who asks why, the one he’s started calling the old one, it asks him, Why do you fight for them? and he can do it now, he can answer them the same way they talk to him. They know what’s in his head.

  You’re murdering us. He thinks of his family, he thinks of his sister and his mother and his father lying in face down in English Bay, but all the anger’s gone out of him now, and there’s nothing but tiredness left there.

  We are not murdering you. They are murdering you. He understands the shinigami means the techs and the doctors. They know what’s in his head. They must have seen what happens to him. You are not like the humans.

  I am human. I AM human.

  There is a thing inside of him that is made of rage and it burns in him like the sun. He crushes the shinigami that asks why, the old one, the one that calls him not a human. He breaks its body. He knows there is an eye in that spangled mass, and he goes digging for it, to tear them out, to tear every part of it to pieces while the comms guy screams at him to stop, stop because they’ve lost the comms plate signals and his adrenaline is spiking and he's going to ruin his fucking heart, and he has to return to the tank.

  He ignores the commands because he is big, because he is strong, because he is angry. He ignores them until the shinigami is nothing but a shredded mass, then he shoves the ravaged corpse through the portal.

  He limps back to the tank; he has to rest a few times. His head’s not right, and if it wasn’t for the gyroscopic stabilizers he’d have fallen over. He can feel how things are broken on the mech, and there’s a whole crew waiting for him when he returns. They start pulling apart the computers that run the head’s up display before they even get him out of the cage.

  When the techs pull his helmet off he can smell the stink of hot metal as welders fix the tears in the armor; it’s a smell akin to the taste of blood, and his mouth is full of that. When they pull off the mask he spits the pieces of the shattered comms plate, and when he comes off the ports he realizes there’s something else broken and jagged in his mouth.

  “Shit,” one of the techs says.

  “Yeah,” says the other. “No food till Dr. Sunil’s fixed his jaw.”

  “TPN, man. Eating’s an animal thing. He’s like 60% plastic. We should just be giving him TPN.”

  “You wanna tell them to change the pilot’s diet?”

  “No.” A pause. He hangs there while they talk about him. Hangs there feeling the exhaustion and the pain in his mouth where the impact of his head against the cage broke his teeth and the comms plate, maybe his jaw. “Why’d they make him look him like this? Creeps me out.”

  “Humans versus aliens, man. They gotta look human, the mechs and the pilots. It’s symbolic.” They undo the straps and take him off the ports.

  He tells himself he wouldn’t feel the pain like this if he wasn’t human. He smiles, and one of the techs winces at the sight.

  He lies in bed a week, in and out for about equal stretches. They stop giving him meals on trays, and start giving him TPN.

  Two days after he's started moving easy again, the door to the Tank opens but it’s not the loading crew and it’s not a doctor. It takes him a moment to understand what he’s seeing and when he does his heart leaps in his chest.

  “Cameron,” he says. He sits up. Everything is stiff and sore still, but he can move. Cameron smiles at him and Alex is glad to see him, so glad.

  “Alex,” he says in a fond kind of voice, the kind voice, the voice that means good job. “Look at your face. Why are you such a mess?”

  Alex laughs softly. He hasn’t seen himself in weeks, months maybe. No mirrors in the tank. But he knows that Dr. Sunil’s fixed his shattered mouth, and he can feel the scar along his jaw. And he hasn’t brushed his hair or even showered in ages. He runs a hand through his hair like maybe that’ll help. “I dunno.”

  Cameron isn’t smiling any more. “I heard you’ve been disobeying orders, Alex,” he says. “You were told to bring the mech back and you didn’t. We know the comms were operating and you chose to disobey. Why would you do that?”

  All the joy and hope bleeds out of him. “I only did it once,” he whispers.

  “And now the mech is damaged. So that’s one too many times.”

  He nods.

  “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

  Cameron smiles again. “No, you won’t, will you?” He nods, and that seems like it's the end of that. “That’s not why I came. I came because I bet you’ve been wondering about Sean.”

  Alex nods again, a little more hesitant this time. He has been, even though he knows he shouldn’t be. In the quiet times, the times between loading and having his head full of the mech or the shinigami, he thinks about Sean because those times were good and the memories nourish him. He’s kind of eating them to stay alive. Cameron’s hands go to his belt, he undoes it and then unzips his fly and comes over to Alex. "Why don't you get on your knees," he says.

  Alex does. It’s not easy, because the bed is right there and Cameron is already standing close. Cameron catches his chin and tips his head up. He frowns faintly and Alex’s chest tightens up a bit. He’s unhappy with how Alex has been piloting, and he’s unhappy what he sees. Alex doesn’t want him to be unhappy.

  “I should have them fix that,” he says and rubs his thumb over the place where they stitched his skin when they put his jaw back together. He pulls his erect penis out of his underwear and puts it into Alex’s mouth. Alex wants to know about Sean, and why Cameron is here. He works at Cameron, knows the faster he can bring him off the faster he’s going to hear about Sean, and maybe he’ll be allowed to leave the tank, and maybe they can work like they used to again.

  Cameron puts his hands on either side of Alex’s head. “Good boy,” he says, groaning a little. “You’re my favourite. Always will be.” It takes some of the fear away. “I wanted to tell you about Sean.”

  He works. Makes Cameron happy. He slides his hands over Cameron’s thighs, he knows he likes that. Get him off. Get out of here.

  “I found him, you know.”

  It’s bad right now but it's all going to be ok. They’re going to be the Fifty again. Like it used to be.

  “I found him Alex, and I took him out on the Fraser.” Cameron’s hands go up into his hair. Alex has got stitches in his scalp, tries not to cringe and wonder if they're going to have to be fixed. “Know what I did when I found him? I took him out on the river, and I took a baseball bat to him. I bet the
shit out of him, Alex. You should have seen it.”

  Alex stops. Stops because it’s not right it’s not right, it’s not possible. Sean’s half of the Fifty, he's valuable. Cameron pulls Alex's hair so that he’s looking up, so Alex can see past the fur on his belly and the dress shirt and up to his slightly smiling mouth. Cameron looks almost lovingly at him, and in another time Alex could buy it but not now, not after so many years of this. “Nobody told you to stop."

  But Alex doesn’t want this. Not for nothing. He’d do anything to get out of here, do anything for Sean, but not for nothing.

  Cameron moves forward, filling up his mouth and choking him. “I beat the shit out of him, Alex. I beat the shit out of him. I broke his arms and his legs. Legs take a long time to break, Alex. A long. Fucking. Time.”

  He's choking. Closes his eyes. Just get it done.

  “I threw him into the water,” he says, pulling Alex and pushing. “He swam a little bit.” Alex can hear his own ragged breathing over Cameron’s voice. “He tried to swim. He was strong, wasn’t he?” Cameron’s hands on the back of his head, gripping his hair like a vice. “He liked you, didn’t he? And you liked him.”

  Of all the horrible things that Cameron has done to him, this, he knows as it is happening to him, this is worst of them. When it's done he steps back and leaves Alex kneeling there in the Tank with his heart broken in his chest and knowing that there’s no hope any more and this is all there will ever be. All that’s left, the only kindness in the world, are the voices of the shinigami.

  Cameron’s hands slide out of his hair and to his jaw. He thumbs at the scars on one side of Alex’s face. “Now you do what Marshall tells you, all right, Alex? Just like you do for me.”

  He nods.

  Cameron tucks himself away and does up his pants. He goes and taps on the tank door and it slides open. “Fix his goddamned face, Marshall,” he shouts as he steps up and out of the tank. “Unless you want me to start calling you Dr. Frankenstein from here on.” The door closes with a booming sound.