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He could see no sky and easily imagined treetops that weren’t there; grinning Vietnamese death angels, ready to soundlessly drop; slit him open.

Rain fell harder and thunder shook the ground. He felt his cheek, sensing pain. He touched it and saw it was bleeding, exactly where he’d grazed the Creature. He moaned in horror and stopped, eyes darting. Were those the sounds of villagers? Southeast Asian birds? Bare legs moving through rice paddies, knives held in small hands? He crouched down, swallowing. Afraid. Drenched by rain.

Was he losing his mind? He stood, slowly, head bursting with images he’d written for the show. Faces of slaughtered villagers lunged at his mind. Explosions. Bodies, hanging upside down, skinned like animals. Screaming children, ravaged by napalm, running into his brain, right through his forehead.

He saw the murders, too.

Defenseless victims holding hands up to protect faces as glimmering blades cut them apart. Skin, instantly sunken by bullets that left red-black wells. Stacks of bodies, rising higher, soaring into a bleeding spire of distorted faces, clawing arms, voices crying out in deafening misery.

He clamped hands over ears, and without warning the Creature emerged from mist, face half-melted by fire. It lifted a ghastly smile and elbowed him in the chin. Alan fell to the wet ground, groaning, bleeding from mouth and nose.

The Creature approached, slowly, leaned down, and touched Alan’s bleeding features, then licked the blood off its fingertips, savoring his taste; gory mother’s milk. It wanted more of him, and Alan immediately lunged out and slashed at the Creature’s leg tendons with the knife. The Creature cried out, reaching down to the cut muscles that split to reveal unfinished tissue; no blood.

Alan began to run but felt the sensation in his own leg muscles and screamed in pain. The connection between the two was getting stronger; cross-pollinating with almost no delay.

He knew he couldn’t go back toward his production building; the Creature could be hiding. It could hear him. Get him before he had a chance to kill it. Overpower him.
Cut him open and dump his insides. Alan realized if he felt its pain, and it felt his, it could be thinking what he was. It would know he was heading toward the production office to destroy it. It could anticipate him. Trick him.

Ambush his thoughts.

He would have to hide out and circle back. Struggle to keep his mind a total blank. Give the Creature nothing to work with other than a monochromatic void. Alan knew if he could get to the narrow drainage pipe that traveled beneath the main road and emptied near his building, he could squeeze himself through and sneak into the main vault where he kept the negatives.

He moved ahead, trying to fight the pain in his legs, and found himself at one end of a narrow wooden bridge. He started across.

I
t was the stunt bridge.

Trams would drive across, theatrically stall, and the bridge would collapse, threatening to drop freaked tourists into a death-lake below. Everybody got a hard-on for their photo album.

Alan knew the drainage pipe was across the way and the bridge the fastest route to its ridged mouth. He began to cross, wincing as the wood creaked and fog hedged; silver neon. Crickets and mosquitoes shrieked and the lake bamboo released air bubbles at shore’s edge as water lapped, filing it down.

He moved across the bridge, weak.

Though he feared the Creature was under the damp boards, ready to get him, he was allowed to cross undisturbed. He could hear ducks huddling on the artificial shoreline, rain tapping softly. But the Creature
was nowhere close. Or if it was, it did nothing to stop him.

Alan knew it was as strong as he was weak. As he dissipated and thinned within, robbed by its demands, it became more real. More complete. He tried to guide it to leave him alone, repeating again and again the same thought; a single, insistent mantra.

“Nothing
,” he repeated, saying the word quietly, hoping its sound might make it more real. Hoping the Creature’s instinctive radar couldn’t track him.

He stopped.

Sirens. Kniving sky; rain.

He could wait. They would find him. Protect him. Get him out of this nightmare. But the Creature would find some new, more devastating way to punish him. To pay him back for burning its home. For trying to kill it. Who would it hurt or kill this time? Who mattered to Alan?

He clutched the knife more tightly and stepped slowly, watching his shoes move, looking in all directions for some sign of the Creature. Fog ran its eraser over everything and he could swear a squad of Vietnamese was hiding under the bridge, clinging to the underside, ready to attack. Ready to reach up, drag him into the water, and force his head under the surface.

Fuck.

The Creature was doing it. Filling his mind with images. He was convinced it was learning to think; to imagine. As he lost parts of his own mind, it moved in; took over.
It was doing this to him!
Suggesting ideas; torturing his mind.

Or was it …?

It couldn’t think. It was a killing animal. That’s all
he’d ever written it to be. That was its whole complaint. It wanted to be more than just a flesh machine with mere survival in its primitive program. Alan knew that its current only ran in one direction; he’d seen to it. He’d even made it have elements of compassion in the one script he’d written that the network hated. It had added a small measure of humanity but that wasn’t the same as being able to think.

All it knew how to do was survive; it was its disadvantage and its advantage. It lacked so much; things Alan had never given it. Ultimately, it was only brute force; dominating impulse. Though it could physically overwhelm him, he could outthink it. Everything it knew, he’d thought of. Everything it wanted, he’d told it to want.

It would only kill him if he let it.

He stopped, halfway across, hearing a noise.

Something was under the bridge.

He stood there, eyes moving frantically and screamed as a blade was shoved from underneath, between boards, and went all the way through his right foot. He stared down at the gleaming metal rising out of his shoe, trying to lift his foot off the blade. He reached down to grab his leg, to help pull.

He turned, strickenly, hearing the Creature coming toward him, from the other side of the bridge. Saw it grinning. As it stepped closer, Alan lifted harder, straining to free his foot from the blade. It was excruciating and the foot slid up, slowly, releasing blood.

Alan began to limp away and turned to see the Creature hobbling on its own right leg, coming after him. Fog masked the distance between them and he could see the
pipe ahead, its rusted lips forming a narrow, three-foot opening. He picked up rocks, tossed them in another direction, heard the Creature momentarily follow their sound.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing …”

He fell to his knees and climbed in, shimmying through the wet metal that ran uphill toward his office. It was narrow and smelled bad and he pulled his body with skinny, unmuscled arms, digging the toes of his shoes into the pipe’s ripples, using them like rungs.

Rain and mud thrashed through the pipe and Alan turned his head to avoid the filthy current, fast-moving rocks cutting his hands. He kept climbing, moving up through the roaring throat. His hands slipped on the mossy walls, bloody; raw.

He couldn’t remember exactly how long the pipe was and there was no end in sight. His foot was still aching and bloody from the knife wound and the muddy water made it worse. He heard something up ahead. Something shrieking; struggling. Scratching at the cold metal. As he tried to see, a cat twisted closer, trapped in the current. It was half-drowned, fur slick, and clawed at him in terror.

He tried to pull it off and it went insane, baring teeth, struggling for life. It tore up his face with sharp claws and Alan finally shoved it away. He heard it disappear, crying out like a frightened kitten, washed away.

As he kept moving, he heard another sound. Sirens pulling into the studio; red banshees. They would go to the soundstage and spray water on the glowing death. They wouldn’t understand what it meant. Insurance companies would settle and the studio would rebuild the sets.
They would be ready to commence shooting within days. But Alan knew the show was dead. He was going to kill it.

If it didn’t work, he began to think of another plan: he could trap the Creature. Pen it up somewhere, where no one would ever come. Let it starve to death while he stood outside the bars and watched with his good qualities; watching the bad ones wither, beg for life.

He suddenly screamed, dragged backwards.

Something was grabbing his ankles and he looked back to see the Creature, pulling harder, dragging Alan backwards; downhill. Alan’s chin was gouged open by the rough, galvanized metal and he struggled to hold on.

He tried to inch himself away, breathing hard, unable to get enough air in this metal vein. But the Creature was too strong. He tried to make it stop, tried to think thoughts that would make it let go.

“Nothing!”
he screamed, kicking madly, voice hoarse.

But he knew it was too late. The Creature was too far along; too developed. He could no longer control anything about it. He was trapped. It would pull him out and murder him. A new executive producer would be put on the series and it would continue its cancerous popularity. The Creature would get stronger and stronger. Kill. Rape. It would become more and more monstrous as it became more real.

It wanted to be a complete man. Part of the human community. That’s why it wanted more detail. But he knew it would continue to ravage and destroy; it would never be in balance, once Alan was dead. He was the only thing that could provide emotional texture; conscience. Without him, it was doomed to be nothing more than a monster.

But it didn’t know that. He’d never created it to know anything, except violence and an obsessive need to win. Just like in the pilot when he’d had Barek kill the guy in the bar in Saigon who was hassling him.

The one who broke Barek’s jaw
, thought Alan. A jaw that remained permanently vulnerable; fragile. It had all been rooted incontrovertibly in the pilot.

Alan instantly kicked backwards, hard as he could, forcing the Creature to stop his foot. He kicked again with the other foot, managing to kick the Creature’s forehead. Then, again and again, until he’d finally connected with the mouth and jaw and the Creature screamed, filling the drainage pipe with echoing pain. Alan kicked again and the jaw was damaged worse, dislocating, causing the Creature to let go, clutching the lower part of its face.

Alan shimmied upwards through the pipe, ignoring the extreme pain in his foot and palms, torn by the pipe’s surface. Rainwater plunged faster, as he neared the pipe’s source, and his gasping mouth opened wide for air. The grainy water raced to the curve of his throat and slithered in, filling his stomach with thick, cold mud. He choked and threw it up, looked back to see if the Creature was following. He was alone and could hear a mix of sirens and the Creature crying out, halfway down the dark pipe.

Alan was to the pipe’s opening and climbed out. He managed to stand on shaking legs and looked at his foot. It had soaked his cut shoe with blood, though the water had rinsed most out. He limped toward his production building and heard the fire company rumbling up to the soundstage. Heard faraway voices. Axes crashing. Pressurized water slaughtering flame.

His imagination being extinguished.

He moved to his building, entered the security code. The door unlocked and he limped through the lobby, past the reception desk with his steel logo behind it, on the wall. He fell as he moved past the desk, got back up, and staggered weakly down the long hall to his office.

In his office, he went to the fireplace, turned the gas key, pressed the auto-start button. He squinted at the blinding ignition and moved to the wall vault, trembling; and working the combination. The metal door opened soundlessly.

The master negatives were stacked neatly, twenty-two cans in all; the first season. He gathered an armful and walked to the fireplace, leaving a bloody path on the white Berber. He stood at the mantel, opened the cans, began to toss them into the blaze.

The Creature stood in the doorway, looking at him.

“… please … don’t …” Its jaw was wrong, distorting its features.

Alan threw two episodes in and the Creature howled, grabbing at its body as flames hissed and film smoked. It dove at Alan and fell to the carpet, looking up at him with pleading eyes. Its hands were starting to fade, fingers nearly gone. As Alan threw more film into the fire, the Creature’s limbs began to shudder, its mouth working helplessly.

It tried to speak but couldn’t and Alan scrabbled back to the vault, grabbing more cans. He opened them with shaking fingers and threw them into the flames.

The Creature was making inhuman sounds, its solid mass now opaque as Alan threw in more film and fire
destroyed polished surface. The Creature yelled, in agony, as its flesh broke down, its unevolved innards going amorphous.

It was being destroyed, one piece at a time; an assassination of detail. Alan turned the fire up higher, relishing the liquidation of each bit and piece. He sat cross-legged, after tossing in the final episode and watched the Creature as it shook and cried, unable to fight the horrible ruination; the foreclosure of self.

It extended a hand to Alan.

“… please …” Its voice was unprotected; frightened.

Alan looked into its eyes. In its vanishing features, he saw a fear he could remember. The way he felt on playgrounds when bigger kids would walk up with tough expressions and humiliate him.

The way he felt all through his life, when he couldn’t please his father. The fear he felt when he stood by his mother’s dead body and watched her bloodless face, that he loved with all his heart, as she went away forever, abandoning him.

“… please …”

Be careful what you wish for.

Alan kept running the phrase through his head as he watched the Creature losing life; diluting into nothing. The only meager thread it clung to was Alan and it stared at him, terrified.