Authors: Brian Evenson
Immobility (25 page)
“Again,” he heard Rasmus say, and felt his neck and jaw tense and roll, saw the flailing of his arm though he couldn’t feel it. He tried to keep his mind focused, tried not to forget what had happened to him, what had brought him there, but he felt his thoughts rapidly receding, being replaced by a wincing, screaming pain.
And when it was finished, there was Rasmus, standing over him, paddles in hand, smiling.
“Again,” he chanted. “Again. Again. Again.”
* * *
UNTIL FINALLY HE FOUND HIMSELF
being loaded into a tank, being prepared for storage, for perhaps ten years, for perhaps thirty, for perhaps more. As they prepared him, he was trying to remember everything that had happened, trying not to lose track of what were more and more disconnected images, slowly escaping him, fleeing him. He tried to remember, tried to keep track of where he’d gone wrong so that next time they woke him, it’d be different, and was surprised to find that he still had large parts of it in his head.
Maybe next time,
he told himself,
it actually will be different.
They closed the lid.
Stay focused,
he told himself.
Remember. Remember.
And then suddenly the lid was open again, revealing Rasmus’s swollen face.
“Almost forgot,” he said, and injected something into his neck. “One more thing to help you forget,” he said.
He felt quickly dizzy, then nauseated, then vaguely confused. “I’ll kill you,” said Horkai, his voice already sluggish from whatever the drug was.
Rasmus smiled. “Doesn’t matter what you say,” he said. “You won’t kill me, time will. By the time we wake you up again, I’ll be an old man or dead.”
Then he straightened up. “Now listen very carefully,” he said. “Your name is Josef Horkai. You are a member of my community. You love your community dearly and would do anything to serve it and to serve me. My name is Rasmus. I am your leader and your friend.”
And then the lid closed.
Fuck him,
thought Horkai. And then thought,
Who?
* * *
WHERE WAS HE?
Why did he feel so drowsy? Last thing he remembered was … Something terrible happening, what was it again? Fire and ash and houses, corpses everywhere, the screams of the dead. Yes, he remembered that, more or less, but was that really the last thing? Wasn’t there something else?
What’s wrong with me?
* * *
HE LOOKED UP,
saw a blurred shape that, by squinting, he was able to make into a lid or cover. He looked down, saw before his chest a convex surface.
Tank,
he thought. Then came the hissing of an air pump.
Ah,
he thought, just before the sudden inrush of extreme cold.
I’ve been in storage. They must just be waking me up.
TOR BOOKS BY BRIAN EVENSON
Dead Space: Martyr
Immobility
About the Author
B
RIAN
E
VENSON
has written several works of fiction, including
The Wavering Knife,
for which he was awarded the IHG Award for Best Story Collection, and
The Open Curtain
. His most recent novel,
Last Days,
won the ALA Award for Best Horror Novel of 2009 and was on
Time Out New York
’s list of top books of 2009. Evenson is the director of Brown University’s Literary Arts Program and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize and an NEA fellowship. He’s also written Dead Space novels under the name B. K. Evenson.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
IMMOBILITY
Copyright © 2012 by Brian Evenson
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
e-ISBN 9781429992886
First Edition: April 2012
