Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (36 page)

So talk it out straight, for once, you crooked motherfucker—before your brain turns irretrievably to mush.

Regis Aaron Book: Me. 28 years old. Specialist rank 4, Lang-Intel. Cheat and smart-ass. Traitor.

Coward.

Born in Louisiana, raised in Pittsburgh; deaf grandma, absent Mom—gone so long, all the photos burned, I barely remember if she had a face. But I suspect she was probably pretty; I sure am.

After she ran off, Dad re-enlisted, went to Germany. Got all ripped on LSD one night and drove his tank into the Rhine. The government sent us a letter. I got to it before Nanny Book could see, read it, and flushed it down the toilet.

No great conversationalist, my Nan, and that wasn’t all because of her pronunciation problems. She did teach me ASL before I was five, though.

Ever see the sign for drowning? It’s kind of cute.

I played football in high school, got a university scholarship. Fucked my left foot (deliberately, I must confess)—hairline fracture, long-healed now. Transferred streams. Did languages: French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, five different Slavic variants—the USSR grand tour, they used to call it. Which is how I caught certain people’s eye.

When I went ROTC, I told people it was because the recruiting officers said they’d kick me $40,000 toward the rest of my fees. But that was a lie. I joined the army so I could kill people—after which I joined the CIA, so I could do it for no good reason and be virtually assured of getting away with it.

I’m an American, born and bred. I like money. I like power. I like sex, as long as it doesn’t lead to anything too permanent. I—

 . . . blood in my . . .

—what else? Anything relevant?

(
there
’s a concept)

Oh, fuck: Shut up. Will you just shut the hell
up
, already?

. . . noise. In my . . .

My name is Book, Regis—Regis Book—and yes, I am a coward. And you know why? Because the proper synonym for coward, in this messed-up post-Berlin Wall world of ours, is “smart person.” Cowards always come out on top. We try harder, and when we screw up it hurts worse, so we make damn sure it never happens again. We’re the ones who live to fight another day—or just to live.

 . . . blood.

Stay alive: My sole, my only legitimate consideration. The only one that matters.

Five more minutes, five more hours. Five more days, more years. Fifty. Five hundred—I don’t discriminate. But I
am
selfish: Oh, yes. You damn betcha.

Because I’m not going to die, not here—never here, never like this. Watching image and word meaning shuffle off into disintegration as my mental deck of cards deals me a dead man’s hand, and the air runs out. Watching the Doctor cough his life away. Watching the lights dim, and hearing this thing inside me hold its figurative breath, waiting for me to get so loopy I don’t care whether or not I’m part of it, or it’s part of me. Or if there’s any me still left for it to be a part of.

No. I’m not going to die like this—or any other way, if I can help it. I’m coming out of this sub just the same way I came in, the same way the Doctor and company found me when they opened the Waiting Room’s mag-locked door, after the mandatory five hours had finally elapsed: Alive alive-oh, just like sweet Molly Malone . . .

 . . . before the fever, that is. Before the last verse.

Yeah, well, whatEVER; folk music was never my strong suit.

Alive, spelled ay-ell-ei-vee-ee.

Anything else is gravy.

The Doctor has lapsed into some kind of half-sleep. In the two-way, I catch a glimpse of my fine new self, post-
thing
: My bone-blonde hair, my bleached-out skin. My eyes like bruises, cilia purple with broken blood-vessels. I sniff the air, and decide that my skin has begun to smell like hash packed in sulfur.

And this glow, this glow, around and inside me. This inmost light.

The whispers tell me:
You are a chrysalis
. And I counter by forcing myself to think hard about the shrivelled husks I saw left behind in Nanny Book’s back yard, after the butterflies had gone on their merry way. I imagine my mouth splitting slowly open, ripping. Bending like vinyl under the eruptive strain, as a hitherto-hidden larva sloughs me off like so much deluded dead skin.

I feel the fear rise up in me again like wine, like flame—the salt and spices of it distributing themselves through my body while I struggle in its slow-cooking flame, rendering me ever more tender, more juicy. More appetizing.

‘Cause fear is what this thing goes for, see? It loves it. Eats it. Got it in little tiny jolts from Kiley and the boy scouts, one by one by one; suck ’em dry and move along, bub. Skin packets, lit and hollowed from within, irradiated with detritus radiance. One big bruise, left to rot: An empty, man-sized wrapper, stuffed full of crumbly bones.

And why was I the only one, apparently, to ever figure this particular connection out?

Just my luck, I guess.

Dribs and drabs, after the long drought on the sea-bottom—aside from stealing the occasional muffled howl from a passing, boneless thing or two, in between geological epochs. From me, though, a veritable stream of terror, so constant as to skirt actual satiety. Fear-engine Book, running on empty: C’mon in and make yourself at home.

The Doctor turns his head again, heavier. Barely able to open his eyes. And tries to ask:

“What . . . happened . . . to—the—?”

“The shell?” I shrug. “Dust in the wind, Doc.” Adding, as though in explanation: “It was old.”

“Pre- . . . Pleistocene.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”

A wheeze; a cough. “And—what was . . . inside . . . ?”

To which I smile, curling back my bruised lower lip. Showing the tips of all my remaining upper teeth—my ill-set front caps, my jagged, half-missing left incisor. And reply:

“ . . . went—inside
me
.”

And hey, there’s even evidence: The Doctor taped it all, obsessively anal to the last, with a camcorder installed (as per tradition) behind the two-way—images skipping and fading between intermittent washes of static. I wound it back, watched it, in those first dim eons after I knew for sure that no matter what, the sub would just keep right on drifting further down and faster. Talk about post-modern: My cruel apotheosis, shot by shot, in all its real-time glory.

Hour one: Me pounding, pleading. Slumping. Turning.

Hour two: Me and the shell.

Hour three: The glow, beginning. Spreading.

Hour four: My hypnotized attention. Our conversation, me and it—that
thing
; not something which really seems to register, actually, on the purely visual scale.

Cajoling, flattering. Saying:
My love
. Saying:
You know I will honor my promises.

The glow increasing steadily throughout, meanwhile; a slimy glitter. A blazing smokeless cloud, pillar of salt-white fire. A certain sense of boiling. Of moving outward, then—inward. Saying:
Soon
.

Soon, soon.

And in hour five . . .

The Waiting Room door clicks open, admits four—Doctor and goons, the original three-pack, already braced for action. They see me on the floor, face-down; the declining line of my limp back, head clutched in hands, shadow-rapt. No more light, bright or otherwise. No more shell.

 . . . this quintessence of dust . . .

“Bastard ate the fucking thing, fuck your mother,” I hear one blurt. And think:

You could say that
.

The Doctor kneels, waves them closer. One kicks me over. They see my face, hesitate as one—

 . . . this noise . . .

—and I feel my hands knot, my insides furl. I feel them start to reel away from me, then stop dead—sway, dazed. Instantaneously lulled. All of them, Doctor included, plunged into a kind of half-intoxicated trance brought on by my—(its)—proximity. Like standing next to a generator, invisible energy pouring off me in waves. Drowsiness seeping in through the pores.

I feel their fear, like I feel my own. And I feel what was once inside the shell—what’s now inside me—sniffing at it: My mental tastebuds, gearing for the feast. My mouth, watering. The glow rekindling, a slow flame under my skin. This radiance looking out through my eyes, bruising them from the inside with the pressure of its glare.

 . . . in my blood . . .

Disconnected, surfing the current: A battery. A contained conflagration, run on incipient panic. I lever myself up with both hands, mirroring the Doctor. Look around. See them return my look, all of them—helpless
not
to.

“Bet you wish we were back in El Salvador
now
, fellas,” I remark. Conversationally.

And I feel it let go of me, the thing, exploding outward like a concussion bomb-blast: Blow out the bridge, bring the bulkheads down. Crush the goons back against the Waiting Room walls. Crumple the Doctor in on himself. A surge of pent-up energy, driving me upward—haloed, paralyzed, cocooned in power. Catapulted into some pupa stage, lapped in adrenaline and brain-opiates. I feel the shell’s former inhabitant slip away from me, in search of fresher fields, and my terror surges, babbling. I match it, promise for promise—set myself up as its carrier, its willing Judas Goat.

Succor and repair me—love me for real, like you love yourself—and I will bring you prey and praise.

A modern Prometheus for the century’s end: Eat my fear anew each day, that I may live forever. Trying my level best to make it understand, through instinct rather than intelligence, that I’m not just a host—not just some new flesh shell for it to hide and sleep in, hibernating until the next best thing comes along. Wordlessly eloquent, I vow to trade keeping myself in a constant state of fear and pain for a vaccination—however temporary—against the whole concept of death: Death by drowning, by slow suffocation, death here at the bottom of the deep black sea, in the pressure-drunken final fathoms.

Making sure to also point out—with strictest possible attention to detail—that if I lose my personal identity, then I won’t know what I have to be scared of anymore.

And you’ll starve.

I hover, wait for its reply. Until the words come, soft as necrosis. Cells collapsing. A lie for a lie:

Time means nothing . . .

Yeah, yeah: To you.

 . . . to us.

Which brings us, I believe, right back to where we started.

“Book,” the Doctor whispers, now—so soft I can barely hear him, over my own constant internal whisper.

“Doctor,” I reply. The word not meaning quite what it used to: Two empty syllables, ringing hollow in my skull. Language no longer seeming
necessary
, even as a nervous tic.

He clears his throat, or tries to, blood rattling in his lungs. Spits, or tries to. And shapes the words, with a last feeble breath:

“ . . . I’m . . . a—fraid.”

I shift my gaze back to him, slowly. Take a moment to remember his title, his significance. Then nod. And think:

But not as much as me.

Thankfully.

Here on the Subeja Trench’s second shelf, already too far down to hope for rescue—anytime soon, at least—we drift past holes belching black lava, coral mountains crusted five arms deep with vivid, fleshy anemones. Everything watches us go by, large or small. They give us sidelong glances, and bare their teeth. And we keep on slipping down, fathom by fathom, until the foliage thins and the light falls away. Until there’s nothing to note our descent but a congregation of boneless, blazing things which regard us with a total lack of curiosity.

While I note the Doctor’s broken corpse, sprawled and sloughed on the floor beside me. Feeling similarly little.

Wondering:
Did I really strike a bargain, just then? Or do I only THINK I did?

But if I can still think coherently enough to even consider the question, I guess, it probably just doesn’t matter all that much.

The sub buckles, twisting in on itself deck by deck. But I hold fast, footloose and evidence-free, to the improbable notion that I have been promised exemption—that even when the water seeps in under the Waiting Room door, this
thing
’s infernal patronage will render me impermeable, slicked with infection. No swelling, no softening, no gentle nibbles from passing teeth; just a long sleep, a long, long dream. One long nightmare, a phobophobic haze, during which I can jim in my own stew—

(you fucker, you promised)

—stew—
swim
in my own . . . juices. Awhile.

 . . . a while, a minute, a century . . .

And when they (the CIA, the Doctor’s bunch, a salvage crew, whoever) finally find us, and pry open this busted can, how very sweet I’ll be. Well-marinaded, and ready to serve: To be my prehistoric savior’s chosen liaison, its translator. Its face prepared to meet the faces it will eat.

Or maybe we’ll just stay down here, forever, unfound and unmourned, until entropy eats us both.

I raise my hand, look at my fingers. See my vision narrow. My pressure-drunk brain, squeezing itself flat. Glitches, sparking and fading: Images fizzling. Kiley’s shadow-animals. Nanny’s hands.

The two moons of Mars, on that childhood chart. Deimos and—

(Phobo)

—Phobos. Meaning panic—

(phobia)

—and fear.

Fear, my motive, my spur. My dark and guiding star.

All my life, I think, my fear has driven me to take the easiest way. And where does the easiest way lead, usually?

Well, that would probably be—down.

Down here, at the bottom. Where there are a lot of things, and most of them glow . . .

Thinking:
When you get what you ask for, you really have no right to be surprised.

 . . . including me.

The Machine is Perfect, The Engineer is Nobody
Brett Alexander Savory

When she touches him, he flinches awake. Lying on a filthy mattress, he stares up at the low rock ceiling, listening to the sounds of machinery. Her breathing close to his ear blends with the mechanical sounds, nearly indistinguishable from one another.

“What do you think they’re doing out there?” she asks.

He sighs. “We’ve been over this a thousand times. I don’t know what—”

“Yes, yes, but what do you
think
they’re doing?”

He turns on his side, away from her.

Outside their little cave, gears grind, engines roar deep and throaty. The stench of oil exhaust permeates everything.

A few moments later, she touches him again. He does not flinch this time, does not respond at all. In all the time they’ve been here, she has not asked this question, has not had the courage to do so, but now she does, now she feels she needs to: “Are we going to die in here?”

He turns back to her, cups her cheek with one hand, and kisses her gently. It is the first time they’ve kissed.

They fall asleep, their backs touching.

Four months ago, when they first arrived, they’d thought to escape through the small vent in the ceiling, but when they’d finally gotten the vent cover off and shined a lamp inside, they saw that the shaft went straight up as far as they could see. It probably only went up a dozen metres or so, but they had no way of getting a grip to climb up its metal sides, and it was small enough that either of them could’ve easily gotten stuck.

Piled in one corner of the cave was a supply of lamps and kerosene; in another corner, they’d found canned food and bottles of water, stacked nearly to the ceiling. A toilet-size hole was dug into the floor, in a tiny cul-de-sac, as far away from the bed as possible. As with the vent, they couldn’t see how far it extended. Within the first week, they’d run their hands over every part of the walls, ceiling, and floor and could not discover how they’d gotten in. When they’d asked each other what they remembered about getting to this cave, neither could recall. One of them felt that the other was lying.

Several hours after kissing her, he gets up from the mattress, lights a kerosene lamp. Yellow-orange light dances on the walls until the flame settles. The vent in the ceiling flaps with the strength of the wind outside.

He looks into the corners of the room, these corners that used to be completely stuffed with food, water, and kerosene. Now only four bottles of water and six cans of food sit in one corner; two containers of kerosene are left. He goes back and sits on the edge of the mattress with a can of food and a bottle of water. He pulls his utility knife from his belt, cracks the can open, pulls up the edge of the lid, and scoops out the beans with his fingers, shovels them into his mouth. He hopes she doesn’t wake up to see him eating a whole can to himself in one sitting.

When he finishes the beans, he neatly and quietly stacks the empty can in another corner of the cave. He sits back on the mattress, facing her, and sips his water. She stirs when he sits, knuckles her eyes, turns and grins sleepily at him.

“What’s for breakfast?” she asks.

He smiles briefly, but it quickly slips. “There’re only five cans left.”

She yawns, sits up, says, “I know. You don’t have to tell me. I know.”

They are both so thin that their cheeks are sunken and their vertebrae poke through their thin black shirts.

“Do you want to talk about the kiss?” he asks. Despite their situation, he still, absurdly, blushes.

“What is there to talk about?” she says. “It was nice. Isn’t that enough?”

His eyes fall to the floor. “Well, what I mean is—”

She suddenly brushes past him, picks up a can of beans, holds it at arm’s length in his direction. “Can you please open this?”

He has had control of the utility knife the entire time they’ve been here. Now he pulls it from his belt, extends his arm toward her, palm open, upturned. She looks at him strangely for a moment, then gently takes the knife from his hand.

Later, they are lying on the mattress, trying to sleep, but both wide awake. The machines pound and they pound and they pound. Sometimes small bits of rock fall from the ceiling, sprinkling them, their mattress, the floor. It is one of the only things that makes this experience seem real to her. She says, “If that vent just goes straight up and out, why can’t we ever see daylight when we look up it? It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t understand.”

He waits a moment before he responds, fiddles with his watch—the watch that tells the time and date. The number “22” sits in the little window, on its way to “23.” Glancing at the remaining supplies, he knows they probably won’t live to see much of next month.

“We don’t ever see daylight when we look up the shaft because the daylight is gone,” he says. “It’s gone.”

They sleep again, but this time their backs do not touch.

A couple of days later, eating and drinking, trying to ration what little they have left. They sit on the bed, cross-legged, facing each other. The man thinks of it as their attempt at creating a civilized dinner-table situation. The woman simply thinks of it as heartbreaking and squalid.

“What did you mean when you said the daylight is gone?” the woman asks, licking beans from her fingertips.

“I mean that the daylight is gone; it no longer exists,” the man answers. He does not look at her when he speaks.

“So what happened? Does it have something to do with the machines outside? Or maybe something to do with what they’re digging for?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.” He wipes bean sauce off the inside of the can with his index finger, angling it so he doesn’t cut himself on the sharp edges.

“Sometimes I feel like you’re not telling me something.”

The man finally looks up from his can. “Like what?”

“I don’t know.” She reaches a hand out, touches his knee lightly. “You wouldn’t hide anything from me, would you? We’re in this together, aren’t we? I want to think that I can trust you.”

The man grins a little, touches the woman’s hand with his own. He plays with her fingers like they’ve known each other for years, gently stroking the tops, curling down to slide under her palm. His familiarity simultaneously excites and disturbs the woman.

“Yes. Yes, we’re in this together. I’m glad you think so. I really am. I know I haven’t said it before, but I’m very happy you’re here with me.”

Something about the phrasing of this statement makes the woman pull her hand away from the man.
Happy you’re here with me
, she thinks.
What does that mean?

Something like suspicion crawls across her scalp, settles deep at the base of her skull.

When they fall asleep that night, one of her hands is curled into a tight fist, nestled next to her heart; the other hand wraps around the fist, pulsating in time with the grind of the machines.

He is awakened by more pounding, but this time it’s much closer and not nearly as deep. Not the bone-rattling pounding of the machines outside, but a machine inside—or at least very nearly inside.

He springs from the bed—a movement he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of anymore—and reaches down to his belt for his utility knife.
Fuck
, he thinks.
I knew I shouldn’t have—

“Here,” she says. “Calm down, it’s right here.” Awake now, too, she hands him the knife. He snatches it from her hand, flicks open the longest blade with his thumbnail.

The noise comes from beneath them. A drill. Louder with every passing moment. The floor shakes. He is very aware of the knife in his hand, his thumping heart, blood pounding through his system. She yells something at him from where she sits on the bed.

“What?” he bellows back, the floor now buckling. The faint outline of a manhole-size circle forms.

She takes a deep breath and shouts, “I said, why do you want to kill this person? Maybe he’s here to rescue us. What’s wrong with you? What’s
wrong
with you?”

The tip of the enormous drill finally breaks through, scattering pieces of rock across the floor of the cave. The drill then recedes. Muttering voices as it’s passed from the driller down to someone below him. The driller tentatively pops his head into the cave. He eyes the man and the woman in the room. He raises himself up a little more, bringing a gun into view.

For nearly a full half-minute, no one says anything. Just heavy breathing, wild-eyed stares, and the sounds of the machinery growling outside the cave walls.

Then: “Nearly out of water, I see,” the driller says. He’s wearing a heavily scuffed hardhat and dark goggles. “Food, too.”

The man with the knife just stares, still in defensive posture.

The woman speaks: “Are you here to rescue us? We’ve been here for so long.”

The driller does not look at her.

“Sir,” he says. “We have to get you out of here. They’re getting closer, they’ve nearly drilled down to where they think it is. But they’re getting bizarre readings, indications of something no one expected to find this deep and—”

“I’m not leaving,” the man with the knife says.

The woman’s brow furrows. “What are you
talking
about? And what is
he
talking about?” She moves her head in the direction of the driller. “What is this ‘sir’ shit? What’s going on here? What—”

“Doctor Farrid, listen,” the driller says, cutting the woman off. He steps up out of the hole in the floor, kicks aside chunks of rock to get a firm foothold. “We don’t have time for this. We need to leave
now.
They’re getting close, and I know you wanted to see it, but—”

Farrid steps forward quickly, pushes the knife out in front of him, hisses through clenched teeth, “I’m not.
Fucking
. Leaving. I need to see this. I need to know what it is. And
do not
say my name again, understood?”

“Sir,” the driller says, clearly intimidated, even though he holds the gun. “No disrespect intended, but these are orders from higher up—higher than both of us. We need to get you to a safe place, somewhere through the service tunnels, maybe to the first check post, where we can—”

Farrid steps forward quickly, slashes the knife across the driller’s throat as hard and as fast as he can, then steps back. Blood bubbles out of the driller’s throat, his eyes wide, throat gurgling. He drops his gun, slumps forward onto the floor. Twitches once and is silent.

Farrid pockets the knife, picks up the driller’s gun, points it at the woman’s face. “Not one sound, do you hear me? Not one sound.”

But the woman isn’t thinking about speaking, screaming, or any other sounds. Only one thought runs through her mind:
He kidnapped me. He kidnapped me. He kidnapped me.

Someone calls up from below: “Derek? Everything all right, brother? What’s going on up there?”

Another few moments of silence as the man below waits for an answer that will never come. Then booted feet clanging on metal ladder steps, coming up. Farrid points the gun at the hole, but keeps his eyes trained on the woman.

The man, far from expecting to see his colleague’s dead body, comes up fairly quickly through the hole, glances at the woman and Farrid before casting his eyes down to see his fallen partner. Shocked, his mouth just flaps a couple of times, then his hand instinctively reaches for the gun on his belt.

“Don’t,” is all Farrid says, shakes his head once.

The woman, finally finding her voice, says, “Why did you do this to me? We don’t know each other. I don’t understand.” Her hands flutter like curious butterflies at her sides. “Why did you do it? What sort of sense does it make to—”

Farrid motions with his gun at the woman, speaks to the man: “Take her. Go.”

There is fury in the man’s eyes, a tightness around his lips. He wants to go for his gun. Farrid sees that he desperately wants to try. Farrid shakes his head again. “I will shoot you both before you even get your revolver halfway out of its holster, son. Just take the girl and leave me. I’m sorry about your friend. Really, I am. I did not mean for things to turn out like this.”

Farrid sees wetness on the man’s eyelids. The face hardens further. Farrid squeezes the trigger a little, sensing movement of the man’s hand toward his holster. Then the man’s eyes drop to his friend again; they remain there for a few moments before he lifts them to the woman. Frightened, confused. Her breath comes in hitches. The man holds his hand out to her. The butterflies at the ends of her arms settle a little. One of the woman’s hands comes up slowly, then before her and the man’s fingers touch, she says quietly, “Are you here to rescue me? You’re here to save me, aren’t you?”

The man does not react, only keeps his hand out for her to take.

The woman takes the man’s hand, steps over the blood-soaked body of the driller, focuses her attention on Farrid once more. “Liar. Murderer,” she says.

Farrid nods.

The woman’s lip trembles, but she does not cry.

Outside, the machines seem closer, the earth shaking more than any other time since he’s been here. Concerned voices drift down the airshaft. Farrid cannot make out the words, only the tone. Curiosity. Fear.

The man steps out of the hole, moves aside, helps the woman find the top rung of the ladder several feet down. Once she’s safely on her way, the man lowers himself to the top rung, locks eyes with Farrid, says, “I’m taking the body.”

Farrid nods again.

The man pulls his friend’s legs toward him, maneuvers them so they’re aligned with his back, rests the torso on his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He descends slowly with the body, making sure not to bump the head on anything.

Farrid lowers the gun, stares at the red streak of blood leading to the hole, the congealing pool a few feet away, the flecks spattered across the jumbled rocks.

Liar. Murderer
, he thinks, and knows the truth of it, but is unable to dig out of himself anything resembling remorse.

Farrid picks his way through the rocks to the stained mattress, sits down softly. For a brief moment, he imagines the gun in his mouth, the knife sliding along his wrists. He feels this is what he should be thinking about, but he is not. He is thinking only of what the machines have found. What he has waited his whole life to see.