The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

by Brian Evenson

  I was just leaving my final basement when I heard it: a voice, shouting, tinny. I stopped, listened. Then moved toward it.

  “Nameless citizen,” the voice was calling, “we need you!”

  “Nameless citizen,” a second voice called, “please, we beg you!”

  “Nameless citizen,” the first voice called, “we have no desire to hurt you! Please, grant us audience.”

  I squirmed under a collapsed fence and through a ruined backyard, then took a roundabout path back to my house. Eventually, I caught sight of them. There were just two this time. They stood at the edge of the barren ground that marked my yard, on the crumbling remains of the sidewalk, holding rifles in their gloved hands. They wore thick hazard suits.

  “Nameless citizen!” the voice called. “Surely you don’t want our species to die out?”

  But I did. Why ever not? We had destroyed almost everything along with ourselves. It would be better for the little that remained if we did die out.

  Or they, I should say, since even though I was once one of them, I could hardly be said to be so now. The disaster had changed me. I had become a different creature altogether.

  “Nameless citizen!” one of them bellowed through his suit speaker. No doubt he would have continued to bellow had I not tapped his shoulder. He spun around, panicked, trying to get his weapon up, but I already had my hands on the rifle’s stock and barrel, had forced the weapon back flat against his chest. If he squeezed the trigger the shot would travel up through his throat and jaw and remove the front of his face.

  When he cried out, the other one spun and pointed his rifle at me.

  “You called?” I said.

  “Let him go,” said the second one, “or I’ll shoot.”

  “I thought you said you had no desire to hurt me,” I said. “You need something from me. If you shoot, you won’t get it. You called me, I came. Put your weapon down and tell me what you need.”

  They looked at each other, and then the one I was not touching placed his rifle on the ground gingerly. I took the rifle from the first and did the same, then took a step back.

  “Nameless citizen—” that one began.

  “Are you the same drones who came before?” I asked.

  “Before what?” asked the first.

  But the second shook his head. “This is the first time we’ve come. If others came, they are dead.”

  “Nameless citizen—” the first began again.

  “I’m going to stop you right there,” I said. “I might be nameless, but I am not a citizen. Not of your community.”

  I watched him furrow his brow in concentration. And then his brow smoothed. “Nameless person,” he said, “we call on you to help our community and your species! We must have material for the construction of individuals if we are to continue. As you see from our vestments, we are not made to survive in this place, in this air. Even with these suits we cannot be long outside. This visit to you has already shortened our lives.”

  And where I touched you as well, I thought, though I did not say so. My body is as polluted for them as the air outside, and where I had pushed my hand against his chest the skin would soon bruise and slough, even with the suit between.

  “You,” said the other, “have no such constraints. You live outside, not underground. The air cannot hurt you. Truly, you are a wondrous being.”

  “Nameless person,” said the first, “we ask you to help us. Will you travel to where the material is stored and bring it back to us, for the sake of your species?”

  “No,” I said. “I will not.”

  “What can we do to convince you to help us?” asked the other.

  “There was another, a sort of brother of mine,” I said. “He traveled to help you seven years ago, on a similar mission. I saw the cylinder he retrieved. Was he not able to help you?”

  “Horak?” said the second. “That was before our time,” he said.

  “He did help us,” said the first, “but he is not in a position to help us again.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  Neither of them responded to this. Either they did not know or they had been told not to tell me. Considering the shortness of their lives and the pointedness of their purpose, it could be either. Indeed, in all likelihood, these two had been formed hurriedly, primarily for the task of trying to coax me into making the same mistake Horkai had made.

  “Nameless person—” the first began again, “what can we do to—”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I said. “I will not help you under any circumstance.”

  “We have failed in our purpose,” confided the second to the first.

  “Nameless person,” the other began again, “what—”

  But I simply walked past them and into my house.

  For a while they remained where they were, trying, no doubt, to determine if there was some way of salvaging their purpose. Perhaps they were even assessing the odds of taking me unawares and forcing me to come with them. When I judged that they had stayed too long, I parted the shutter and stuck the barrel of my rifle out. At that, they gathered their own guns and left.

  I spent the time until dark setting traps for them around the property. I propped a gun inside both the front and back door, just in case. But, considering what I had done to their comrades last time they had come and tried to take me by force, I didn’t imagine they would return.

  I waited, thinking. Horkai—if Horak and Horkai were the same person—was “not in a position to help us again.” What did that mean, exactly? Dead, maybe? But these ready-made people did not generally speak in euphemism. They didn’t understand it. Should the words be taken literally? If so, what would they mean exactly? I thought about what they had done to Horkai the time before, before I met him, the way they had severed his spinal column as a means to control him, to use him. And him, I thought, despite that, willing to go back.

  Eventually, I slept.

  Did I dream? I would say no—I never dream, at least not dreams I remember. I have not dreamt since the disaster changed me, as if the exchange for surviving the conflagration was to surrender my ability to dream. And yet, despite this, something had rearranged itself in my head as I slept, and I awoke another person. Not changed so as to become the comrade of those two hazard-suited drones, not changed so as to have an interest in saving so-called humankind, but no longer quite so willing to stand aside. And curious enough to know what had happened to my friend that, despite the trail being seven years cold, I went in search of him.

  2.

  I passed down streets thick with dust, cars scoured of paint, the metal beneath hardly rusted in the dry air despite all the decades that had passed. I walked until I realized I had entered a cul-de-sac, and for just a moment old habits asserted themselves, and I almost turned around and went back to a street that ran through. But what did it matter? Nobody had lived in these houses for years, and I could see where the fence had been kicked in at the end of the cul-de-sac, perhaps by the very drones that had come to woo me. I passed through an expanse of dust, then through another backyard and onto a street. The street jogged left, and I slid down a culvert and climbed back up the other side. A few more streets, heading roughly east, passing through the remains of a housing development, then a church that had partly collapsed. The sun was red and sticky, obscured by haze. I kept walking.

  I passed through a river, its water a brownish red, just transparent enough that I could see something floating in it, as if hair was growing from the riverbed. When I started across it, it clung to my boots, making a sucking sound as I pulled myself along. Something alive then, at least in a manner of speaking. Is it edible? I wondered, but I decided it would be a mistake to stick around long enough to find out. Something else, too, that it took me a moment to place: water bugs, skittering across the surface, though closer in appearance to termites than to water striders. At first I wasn’t sure how they kept afloat exactly, then I realized they had extruded blobs of mucus around their feet and
floated on that. I stayed there, calf-deep in the water, watching, surprised how much it moved me to see something alive and new, appropriate to this new world in a way humans were never appropriate to the old. Indeed, I nearly stayed too long—by the time I started walking again, the filaments had tightened enough that it was hard to free my boots.

  I made a wide detour around the capitol building, having nearly lost my life there some years before. And from there worked my way northeast along the ruined boulevard, toward the ruined library where the drones came from.

  I found the drone perhaps a kilometer from the library, collapsed in the middle of the street. He was facedown, and when I turned him over his faceplate was shattered, his skin bruised. Judging from the dust angel inflicted on the ground beside him, the other had stayed with him for some time before continuing on.

  I followed what I assumed were his steps. They wove a little, became shorter. I kept expecting to come across his body as well, but I never did.

  I found the iron door and struck it with a rock repeatedly, the sound ringing out through the empty air. There were bugs here as well—one or two tiny flies that moved in erratic patterns. Things were coming back; another few thousand years and the world might be back to where it was before we appeared. Yet another reason for allowing humans to go extinct.

  Nobody came. I struck the door again and hollered. When it still remained closed, I rooted around in the ruins until I found a place where the ground had collapsed and I could insinuate my way down a level into a half-collapsed lower hallway. I lit a flare and wormed my way forward, wondering whether this was wise. I was, admittedly, very difficult to kill, but being buried under rubble might do it. And if it didn’t, at least not at first, assuming I was buried and couldn’t get out, that might well be worse.

  I snagged my arm on a piece of rebar and tore it deeply. I pulled the arm back, licked the wound clean and pushed the edges together. A few moments later the bleeding had stopped and it held shut, the edges filmed over and milky. A few hours and I would not even be able to see where the cut had been. I worked my way farther in and suddenly was through the rubble and in a solid hall again, ceiling and walls intact.

  At the end of the hall was a seal, a kind of artificial barrier made of vulcanized fabric: one or several hazard suits apparently torn apart and reassembled to form a protective wall. I took out my knife, cut a slit in it, and worked my way through.

  A door was on the other side. I forced it open and found myself in a room thick with dust. Nobody had set foot in it for years. The far wall of the room was entirely covered with sandbags, packed floor to ceiling. Another protective barrier. I began pulling them down and found, in the middle of the wall, a door. I kicked it open and went through.

  It took passing through a few empty rooms before I found the second drone. He was lying naked on a metal table, breathing shallowly, eyes glazed. His body was bruised in places, blackish in others. When I slapped him, he came to himself confusedly.

  “You,” he said when he saw me. “I knew you’d come.”

  “Where’s Horkai?” I asked.

  “Who?” he said, and only then did I realize he was the drone who, of the two, had seemed to know the least.

  “Where is everybody else?” I asked.

  “There is nobody else,” he said. “I’m the last one. You came just in time.”

  “For what?” I couldn’t help but ask, even though I already knew.

  “The monitor will give you a map,” he said weakly. “It will tell you where to go. It will tell you how to assemble the material to form a new generation as well.”

  “I’m not here for that,” I said.

  “No?” he said. And then he closed his eyes and died.

  He had not been lying. When I had been to the ruined library years before, it had been crammed with the living, all of them huddled underground, desperate for a way to stay alive. Now, the whole place was empty. Or not empty exactly. Many of the rooms had corpses in them, desiccated, covered with sheets, with faces and bodies identical to that of the drone I had just seen die.

  3.

  There was only one computer I could find that seemed to be operational, and I assumed this was what the drone had called the monitor. I fingered it on. On the screen appeared an old man, his beard gray, his hair mostly gone. He moved slowly and tentatively, as if he had forgotten how to use his legs and was only just becoming accustomed to them again. He wore on his feet a pair of dirty slippers that swished as he moved, and he had a tattered bathrobe over his bright jumpsuit. Why he had opted for such a self-representation I found impossible to understand.

  “Ah,” he said, his voice hoarse and wavery. “You’re here.”

  “I am,” I agreed.

  “Yes,” he said. “Who woke you?” He turned back to me. “Well?” he said.

  “I …,” I started and then stopped, realizing he had mistaken me for Horkai. Or Horak. Very carefully, I said, “I wasn’t aware I had been asleep.”

  He watched me, his eyes suddenly attentive, shining. “You don’t remember who I am, do you?” he said.

  “You’re a construct preserved electronically,” I said. “You’re part of the monitor.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But who was I in life?” And when I didn’t answer, he said, “Rasmus. Does that ring a bell?”

  I knew the name of course. Horkai had spoken of him, and perhaps I had met him many years before, the first time I had come to the ruined library. I knew he was not to be trusted. But, then again, is any human meant to be trusted?

  “Where’s Horkai?” I asked.

  “Ah,” he said. “So you’re not him. I’m afraid you all look alike to me, all of you who have left the race. You must be Rykte.”

  “That’s not my name,” I said.

  He waved his hand feebly. “It will do in place of a name,” he said. “I was told you weren’t coming. And yet here you are. Had a change of heart?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “As you can see, I’m the only one left. It’s too late.”

  “But you’re not really left,” I said. “You’re just a construct, an impression within a computer’s memory.”

  This irritated him. “That may be,” he said. “But even as a construct, I’m the most human of the two of us.”

  I laughed. “I would hope so,” I said.

  “And it really doesn’t matter to you?” he said sometime later. “We could die out and you wouldn’t care?”

  I shook my head. “It should have happened long ago,” I said. “Where’s Horkai?” I asked again.

  He waved the question away. “How about we trade?” he said.

  “What sort of trade?” I asked.

  “You get the cylinders of material we need, bring them back here. I’ll show you how to form new mules, and then I’ll teach them. And then I’ll show you your friend.”

  “Why does it matter? A series of artificial persons will never bring real people back.”

  “Won’t it?” he said. “If that’s the case, then what can it possibly hurt to indulge an old man’s whim?”

  I thought it over. Did I want to see Horkai badly enough?

  “No,” I said.

  “No?” He regarded me a long moment and then sighed. “So be it,” he said.

  …

  I turned to leave. “One more thing,” he said from behind me.

  I turned back.

  “Will you please power the machine down? I might as well go extinct along with everybody else.”

  I reached out to do this, but then began to think. About what Rasmus had done to Horkai, about his unwillingness to reveal where Horkai was now, about the drones or mules or whatever the fuck he called what he was creating out of pilfered genetic scraps. “No,” I said.

  “No?” he said.

  “You wanted so badly not to go extinct, let’s see what living alone until the machine dies does to you.”

  And then I left. The construc
t called after me, but I ignored it. I looked for my friend in the other rooms of the complex but did not find him. I looked above ground as well, in the open air. I moved in a widening circle, exploring those buildings that were still standing nearby. Though I found a preservation chamber that had been recently used, he was not in it. And I found little else.

  4.

  But that preservation chamber in the end may prove useful. Not knowing what else to do, what other course to take, not caring to go back to the life I was living before, I have decided to take the step of having myself preserved. I do this despite the strong likelihood of there being no one left to awaken me. Eventually, I know, the preservation chamber will break down and I will probably die while being improperly thawed. But perhaps, with a little luck, someone will find me first, bring me back to life, and allow me to see how the world has changed.

  Who? a voice inside me wants to know.

  The rest of me has no answer for that. Maybe someone will come, from somewhere. Maybe I have missed someone. Or maybe Horkai will someday return.

  Besides, I am curious. I don’t want to live out my last years scrabbling away at my mushroom farms. I want to see what will come next, what will replace us.

  And so I shall preserve myself, throw the dice, trust to fate. I leave this record also as a way to tempt fate, to make whoever finds it curious enough about me that they will attempt to rescue me.

  But chances are that it will not be found. Or if not that, that what eventually finds me and unthaws me, decades or centuries from now, cannot, properly, be described as human.

  But then, for that matter, neither can I.

  The Coldness of His Eye

  1.

  There they were, Jens and his father, again together, after so many years. The same as it had always been, only so much had changed. Jens was far older, as old as his father had been when they had last been together, hair white and wispy and fugitive, complexion sallow, hands thin enough to display the articulation of his bones.