We cycled through another forty-six, but it seems as though the congressmen and senators’ bloodlusts’ have been satiated. Killing season ends tomorrow. Fifty-four remain. We may have to execute them at cost. I can forget about my bonus.
In the mist I see various Ronald Reagan’s and Sarah Palin’s in the midst of an orgy. Princess Diana cries out, tearing the eyes from Pinkerton’s face, bouncing them across the concrete. The other Di’s pick them up, staring into them.
They drag me along, gravel tearing the flesh from my back, heading to the microwave.
I try to remember what’s happened. Nothing comes to me. I look around for Sammy, hoping for him to save me. How did the gene-whores escape? A small crowd of them walks through the orgy, headed by the remaining GaGa clone. She holds a bloody cleaver in her right hand. In her left she holds a black book. I know that it contains the names, faces and addresses of all of our clients.
She comes no closer as I am dragged to what I am sure will be the microwave. I hear the doors pop open with a ding behind me. She points, and from the orgy of Palin’s and Reagan’s, two Michele Bachmann’s rush toward us.
GaGa turns to face the two of her, lifting her cleaver high. The Levitt and Diana models form a blockade, but the Bachmann on the right reveals a gun - the very one that was used to kill ten Jennifer Aniston models on the first day of killing season.
She blows away Diana, sending her corpse, head exploded, to bloody the wall of the corridor. Levitt begins to run, but she shoots him through the back. He falls to the ground, wheezing as his lung collapses. Two more Levitt’s rush toward the Bachmann’s, but the gun-wielding gene-whore blows them both away in an instant.
She looks at me, and I remember what happened immediately.
The Bachmann’s tried to protect Sammy and I, who turned up later. A few of the Ronald Reagan’s and Sarah Palin’s defected as well, but most stayed with Lady GaGa and the other surviving models, who murdered Pinkerton and cracked me a good one with a crow-bar.
That’s all I can think about before three Howard Stern’s, two Drew Barrymore’s and 4 Ashton Kutchers’ toss me in the microwave and shut the door. Through the glass, I see GaGa behead one of the Bachmann’s. The remaining gene-whores fall upon the other, who goes down shooting, taking out two Howard’s and three Ashton’s.
GaGa is running for her, cleaver dripping flesh blood, when my head explodes.
Bubbles
1. Bubbles
The bubble world popped, and Severn’s ears along with it - his brain dropped out like a loose elevator down a deep, black shaft. For a second he forgot everything, and then he saw the face again; then he knew what had been done to him. He remembered what was lost as easily as he had forgotten it; the world formed around his hatred. As he was born anew into another strange place, the atoms whirled for millimeters surrounding the increasing density of his body, as if propelled by rage. It brought him to life, pulled him from one plane to the next, magnetized by his own will-power. A name stained his mind like a tattoo, the only word he knew of as existence gave birth to him for the umpteenth time.
Victor.
Severn had been following him everywhere, through the bubbles, penetrating the worlds. He saw his traces; marks here, there. Victor didn’t think that he had been watched, but he had; he always jumped down a rabbit hole, and Severn was always right behind him. This bubble was different, though; it didn’t seem like a typical world, and he’d seen plenty of them. Most were the same; some were quite bizarre. This world appeared to be one of the latter. The ground was made of sharp, blackened soil. This in and of itself was not an uncommon characteristic. A pink sky hung overhead - who knew what that meant. The air smelled like gasoline. Severn couldn’t tell where it was coming from - the north, or north-west, but the sun could have been placed differently on this globe. North could have been south. He couldn’t tell anymore. He could breath easily; that meant that Victor could breathe also, which meant that Severn had some searching to do.
He walked for miles. The desolate landscape was largely the same, although a distant forest loomed ever closer to him as the sun arced overhead. The way the star was moving, if it was like most of the globes he’d walked upon, then he was heading east; but he could not take things like that for granted anymore. He’d been so many places, his body - his brain - dropping out of existence so many times… even the nanoseconds that he remained in purgatory had created a horribly degenerative effect upon his memory. He could no longer put things together like he used to; he could barely even remember where he came from.
Outside of the forest, he saw the first native: a young man on his knees, his face bloody, picking bones out of the black dirt. “You,” Severn said. The boy looked up at the outlandish stranger, dressed in the garb of an imploded universe, and in his eyes held all the reverence of a lobotomy patient. Severn couldn’t tell if he spoke English, as the natives occupying the next universe over in this exact coordinate had; from the look of it, the boy might not have spoken any language at all. The native only stared up at him with blank, hungry eyes. He couldn’t have been older than thirteen, and he looked like he’d been out here for days. The heat was nearly unbearable when the wind blew, as it was starting to now, and the effects it might have upon the biology of a person like the child before him were startlingly clear.
Severn looked up at the horizon, and then pointed at the sun, descending over the skyline of the trees. The boy’s head followed the direction of his hand, stared at it for a moment, his eyes unshielded as they turned to the blazing star, a behavior Severn considered highly dangerous. His eyes locked onto it almost magnetically, and he stared into the hellish orb as though it were a habit, burning out his retinas without the slightest thought. “Hey,” Severn said, softly at first. The boy didn’t look at him, and so he shouted it. “HEY!” This time his head whipped around. “North?” he questioned, trying to sound gruff, hoping that the English had carried over. He noticed cataracts forming over the boy’s irises, and he continued to stare blankly, as if directly through the stranger. Either the child didn’t speak English, or the sun had cooked his brain. Severn walked past him, kicking up sand in the increasing wind. The boy stared off after him, and then finally called out.
“West,” he yelled.
Severn turned around, looking at him, more than angry at his seeming stupidity. “West?” he repeated, pointing at the sun.
The boy continued to stare, this time adding nothing. Perhaps his language skills were limited, Severn thought, or perhaps he had said nothing at all, merely shouted some inanity that happened to sound like a word. He turned, heading back toward the sun – and within the hour he had approached the bizarre forest he had spotted so much earlier. As he started to enter, nearing crooked, maledict trees which stood mutilated by the sadistic gravity of the rock he had found himself upon, he turned back to look toward the boy one last time; he was staring up at the sun again, swallowed up in its flames. As he faced away, he noted the bark of the mutant trees; they were as black as the earth, as dead as the dirt. The shadows hung high below its wood canopies, constructed of branches and large, hideous birds nest. He heard a nasty, insectile chirping from inside of them, but saw see nothing. Good, he thought; Let the forest eat me.
He remembered a phrase from another world, a bubble long-since popped, a line broken. Perhaps it was lost now to oblivion, or replicated in the minds of many throughout the realities - he cared not.
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.”[4]
2. Gasoline
Severn awoke to a horrific stench, a mix of chemicals that his brain could not immediately identify. He could barely breathe, the odor was so obnoxious. White light shrouded his vision; a harbinger of the killer migraine that he knew would be fast approaching. His head throbbed insistently, as if panicked, and he felt the pulsating of the very blood-vessels within his eye. The source of the od
or was not immediately clear, as the darkness of the wood had enveloped him. He could still see vague patches of pink sky above, tearing through the nestled canopy of the freak forest; wildlife, too, watching him, stalking him, perhaps preying on him. Let them try, he thought. He’d been on too many worlds to die without first putting his fingers around Victor’s throat and squeezing the life out of him.
Suddenly, he placed the identity of the odor, at least upon the universe in which he’d begun his existence: gasoline; putrid, ancient gasoline, a stagnant pond of it cooking in the pink heat of this bubble. The world spun around him as he tried to keep constant and steady, but unable to control himself, he stumbled, falling to his knees upon the cold ground of the strange wood. A few feet away, he heard the cracking of a tree branch, and whipped his neck toward it to see - nothing. Nothing was there; at least not anything that he could see. The woods were dark, almost black; blacker than a few moments ago.
A vein throbbed in his face, he felt it push against the flesh of his temple, and he listened to a fly buzz a few paces away as though it were buzzing within his very brain. His vision grew blurrier, and he could think of only thing.
Gasoline.
It was all that he could smell, taste, or breathe. He fell to his knees and vomited profusely, the world lost in the haze of ejection. He forgot about the bubbles, he forgot even about Victor. Only sickness was within him. It took a moment, but he started to regain some sense of composure. He realized that he was wrong about the air; it was not safe to breathe for long periods of time. But Victor was still there… Severn’s quarks were practically singing the monster’s name.
He moved forward, still not ready to ride the wormhole to the next plane. He and Victor were tied together inextricably, entangled on a quantum level quite literally now that he had been gliding after his atoms through the endless bubbles. Victor may not have understood that. Severn suspected that he may not even known that a pursuer existed at all. Severn intended to keep it that way.
He gathered himself and walked on, puked once more without falling over, and slowed the pace of his breathing dramatically. The stench was not as over-powering as originally thought, although he felt something in his brain twisting, a vapor in his eyes. He could feel them reddening. He heard the branches overhead rustling, caressing, locking skeletal fingers, and stopped and looked up at them, noticing their complete lack of leaves. A cool breeze flowed through the forest, chilling the air, strange amidst the regular heat. It rode ahead of a thunderous exhale, an echoing sigh which sent the earth vibrating and the trees quavering.
Severn headed away from it, in the opposite direction of his entrance, hoping to escape the strange wooded dreamscape. Through the cracks in the high roof he could see the pink sky was fading to a deep purple. The woods were almost black and there was no end in sight. He’d be lost here, in purgatory, and with who knew what. In order to survive the black night, he’d have to move to another universe ahead of Victor, risking complete disentanglement, and the loss of his ability to ever kill the son of a bitch. His DNA sang out that Victor had not yet left this universe. The odds against their paths ever crossing again were next to nothing. He couldn’t risk that. He had to stay and risk his life; it was less valuable to him than the possibility to end Victor’s own.
He walked on. Fifteen minutes passed, then thirty. Pure blackness had overtaken the forest. His only sensations were the darkness and the smell of gasoline, which seemed more overpowering now that the rest of him no longer seemed to exist. He felt his sinuses, raw and irritated, could taste the metallic tang of blood as he breathed and it washed down into him from the stress exerted by inhaling this world’s toxic air. Severn thought of it as nothing more than a grease bubble, ready to pop at any moment. Breaking this place might grant it a mercy.
He sat down, wishing that he had some way to create fire, though he was half afraid that any spark might ignite the entire atmosphere. He couldn’t say how long it was before the fungi started to glow. Pale pinks and greens alit throughout the dark forest, so faintly at first that he believed himself to be hallucinating. It was a full hour or so before he realized that he was witnessing a natural phenomenon. About thirty minutes after that he stood up, feeling the glow of the mushrooms had achieved a luminescence great enough to allow him procedure through the wood. He tried to remember the direction that he was walking in, but could not. Victor could have been in any of them, although he was almost assured that the man had not yet departed this universe. If he had, Severn would have felt it immediately and quickly followed suit, leaving this place to disappear. Their atoms writhed in bondage.
He picked a direction and walked in it, allowing spontaneity and chance to guide him. The fungi grew brighter through the night, and after many hours the black brightened to a deep purple, and then just before sunrise, a strange, neon pink before fading to a more bearable hue. During this neon phase, the fungi of the forest still glowed brightly, and the strange lights of the forest made it look like a kind of electric nature. Enormous, impossible-to-view birds soared above the camouflaging forest canopy, temporarily blocking out the neon cracks in its ceiling of branches, strobing brilliance into the remarkable wilderness.
Within two hours of sunrise, Severn was at the exit of the forest. He had gotten used to the stench of gasoline and could almost completely phase it out now and the raw walls of his lungs and sinuses had already grown numb to the assault of the toxic air. He walked another two hours. The sun blazed high in the sky, whiter than nothing; he could see sun-bursts popping from its sides like grease-fire. The heat grew almost unbearable; he half expected the vaporous atmosphere to ignite, ravaging everything on the landscape. And then he saw Victor.
Asleep.
A burnt-out campfire smoldered a few feet from his sleeping bag, inside of which he was curled up, right out in the open plain. He probably thought it was safer than the forest; a tragic final mistake. Severn walked to him cautiously, keeping himself as quiet as possible. He could hardly believe he still slept when he stood over him, when his hands reached down and wrapped around his throat, when his grey eyes open and he realized that he couldn’t breathe.
“Victor,” Severn said, increasing his grip. “I found you. I’m so happy.”
He struggled, but Severn only looked at his face, his eyes, waiting for him to die, when Victor grabbed from his side the very device he had been using to drag himself behind, a gadget stolen from the scene of Victor’s crime in his reality, which had caused this chase in the first place - and suddenly the world broke apart.
A neutron yanked Severn from Victor, and like a bubble caught in the air he was lost in a wave of time-space.
3. Green
“Tell me about where you come from,” asked the little green Victor. Severn knew that he was not the same, not the Victor he had been following; he was close, though…
The room was black and emerald, no other hue escaped the effulgence generated by the deep-dyed light-bulbs. Shadows and evergreen painted the objects of the small prison in which he was being interrogated. Victor looked like a soap carving, wearing a rubbery white suit, sunglasses with white-lenses, and a strange skin-tight white plastic cap over the top of his head, extending down the back of his neck into his white jacket, all painted green by the illumination of the facility.
Severn was tied to pipes along the wall, he could feel their heat coursing up his back, burning him and threatening to do worse. He was sweating. He knew that if he was tied to them for too long, he’d start to cook; so did the alter-Victor.
“I don’t remember,” he told the alter.
Alter-Victor’s frown extended in further submission to gravity, transforming the crescent into a magnet. “You’re the third who’s come through it,” he said. “Neither of the other two spoke any recognizable language. They were eventually used for research purposes. But you speak the Queen’s English. So you had better be of more use to us than they were.”
“What do you want from me?” Severn q
ueried, trying to hide the true extent of his frustrations.
“You come from another world,” he said, a hint of awe in his voice. “I want to go there, or anywhere else. Tell me how you’ve done it. So far we’ve only brought things over by way of the particle collider… I can’t imagine how to actually send things through it. But clearly you’ve figured it out. You didn’t even use the machine to come over; you dropped into a damned field. How?”
Severn ignored his questions. He didn’t know what the alter talking about, what a particle collider was, or why he was calling English “the Queen’s English.” The best thing to do would be to take control of the conversation, and the only way to do that was to surprise his interrogator, and captivate him.
“I’ve met you before,” Severn said. “I’ve been following you.”
Victor only stared at him through his white glasses. Severn couldn’t make out any emotion on his face, and he couldn’t read his eyes because he couldn’t see them through the goggles. But the silence told him that the alter was pondering what he had just been told.
“The odds against that are astronomically impossible,” he finally stated, although Severn could tell that Victor was begging him to go on because he wanted to believe it. He wanted Severn to explain to him why he was wrong; he wanted a demonstration of the type of value that he was looking for.
“And yet here we are,” Severn said, probably disappointing him. Victor’s face registered nothing, however.
“Why should I believe you?” the alter replied. “Can’t you explain to me why you would be brought to here, to me?”
“I was following you - or the other Victor. Our quarks were entangled. That’s how I followed him to the same bubbles. But then he sent me on without him… now I’m here. Probably won’t see him again. I suspect the fact that you two have similar genetic make-up might have magnetized me to your general vicinity… somehow I always found Victor, or at least came close to finding him before he jumped over.”
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