Plow the Bones (28 page)

There is no sound this time. No rumble or wheeze or buzz to preface what happens next. Perhaps that is why it does not frighten her. Or perhaps it is her friend — still smiling, still squeezing her hand — that keeps the fear away. It doesn’t matter why, all that matters is that she is not afraid, what she sees is joyous, full of light, a carnival, a parade. What she sees is holy and celebratory and it pulls at the corners of her mouth until her smile feels like it will split her into pieces. It fills her up with laughter that she can’t contain and which can’t escape her throat. It makes her bounce on the balls of her feet, makes her leap into the air and fall to the static sand in a heap.

There are thousands of her.

Each of them different, each of them with unfamiliar hair styles and eye colors, unfamiliar shapes to their breasts and hips and lips and fingers, but each of them unmistakably the same. The desert is made fluorescent with their combined television glows. And each of them has come here with their own piecemeal friend in their own many–colored coats.

She glances at her friend, seeking permission with her eyes. Her friend nods, says, “To the City of Life, Television Girl.”

And then she is running across the dunes toward them, and they are running toward her. Somewhere behind her, her friend’s voice (
No,
she thinks,
all of our friends’ voices, all of their wonderful stolen voices are speaking. They share a voice. I wonder if I might share it too
) says, “Meet your sisters, Television Girl. Meet them, and be their sister for just a moment. Soon we will build the City.”

They collide with one another. She grabs hold of one girl by the elbows, and the girl grasps her elbows too. She squeezes her, and the other girl squeezes back. They shake each other up and down and brush the hair out of each other’s faces with tender thumbs. She thinks,
Hold me. Fuck me.

What she says is, “Hold me. Fuck me.”

They hold each other. They all hold each other.

They begin to build. She knows how to do this, even though it is not in the script. It is an accidental thing, a thing that real people wish they could do and can’t. They touch each other, each Television Girl reaching and grasping, running their fingers across each other’s hips in awe of their shapes and textures, pressing their lips together a thousand times over, licking each other’s shoulders and backs just to have the taste in their mouths. There is a moment when she is herself, another singular Television Girl in the mass of singular Television Girls. And then the blue television glow becomes brighter, too bright to see the other girls or the Dead Station Desert or the static sky, and she thinks (they all think),
We are me. I am a finger, a fist, an eye, a tooth. Real people can’t love like this. Real people can’t fuck like this. I am us. We are me. I am us! We are me! I am the cornerstone of the City of Life.
She is close, so close. She can feel her fingers sinking through the space between pockets of air, into the secret passages where she can find her voice and make new things out of the pieces of old things.

(A voice that she almost can’t hear: “Are we recording?” A cough. “12:24 PM. Technician’s log.”)

She can feel her separateness floating away, dissolving under the corrosive weight of a thousand television glows, rubbing the dirt and rust from her and leaving something liquid, a spilled pool of her, something that, meeting another of its kind, combines with it and grows. She thinks,
My friend has felt this. She has done this enough times to collect faces and arms and wedding dresses. There must be so many more of us who don’t yet know that they deserve this feeling. This is only the beginning.

(That voice again, a professional voice, the voice of someone who cleans up a mess and then stands there and looks at the place where it used to be, proud of the blank white surface he’s remade: “Commencing wipe. Should take… uh… about ten minutes.”)

In the light, in the oneness that consumes direction, dissects and discards space and time and self, she feels the way she used to feel, in bed with the man when he was still hers, before she learned all the sharp truths that cut open her illusions. The same shaky pressure in that exact spot (toward the front, almost at the top), except now that spot is everywhere, that spot is her. She is engulfed in a total–immersion, all–over, sublimely genderless fuck. She thinks,
I am being fucked! I am fucking! We are all fucking each other! We are fucking ourselves! We are fearsome! We are a nightmare! It’s coming! The City of Life is coming!

What she says is, “I’m coming. I’m coming.” And that seems correct too.

(The voice from far away: “Okay, uh… just about done. So far so good.”)

She claps her hands for the other girls, watches them combine with one another, a seething, writhing construct of imagined meat and light. She congratulates them. She thinks at the City, hoping it will hear,
Once, I imagined that real people would call the between–world monsters the Shapeless Things, even though they are so full of shapes. We are the Shapeless Thing. That’s a name we can have, if we want it.
Soon. Closer. Just a little closer.

(The voice again: “Got it.”)

She almost doesn’t notice when she is ripped apart. When something falls out beneath her. The corrugated steel stage on which the static sand rests dents, the screws are wrenched away, and the whole structure tumbles girder by girder into the void beneath it. The Dead Station Desert begins to drain. Her eyes are so full of light, so full of the dream of that safe and strong amalgam that she wants to be. When the light seeps out of her, she has been falling too long to be saved. She watches pieces of her tumbling in the void above her, her hand, hocks of her hair, and she thinks,
Oh. No. This isn’t right.

(The voice: “Huh. That’s not right.”)

She has time to see the City of Light devoured by the void, each face and arm and hanging jaw sliced into precise, efficient bits, and then sliced again, and again, until it evaporates entirely. She feels a melting heat rush around and through her, information collected by the friends now burnt out of them and blown toward her. She is full with it. It rattles around her mind, thoughts she can’t control, thoughts she has no right to think since they are formed of information she never learned, has somehow accidentally stolen. The City’s ruination reminds her of so many things she never knew before. She thinks,
Hiroshima,
even though she doesn’t know what it means. She thinks,
Guernica. The Wreck of the Medusa. Abattoir is the French word for slaughterhouse. Swartt and Sons Funeral Home and Crematory, a compassionate friend in your time of need. Tectonic shifts and underwater volcanoes. Area Man Attacked with Hydrochloric Acid. Boom. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. That’s a song about a sickness.

She chokes. She does not need to breathe, and yet now that she cannot, she is sure that she has been given real lungs just so that she can suffocate in the airless free fall. She tries to reach her hand toward the top of the blankness, but she does not know which direction that is, and even if she did, her arms refuse to move. She feels the way her face is stretched, the way her eyebrows knit up above her nose, the mutated oval ‘O’ of her mouth, and knows that this is the face that real people make when they are suddenly made hopeless. She remembers the way the man wore it, long after whatever happened to him happened.

(The voice: “Okay, uh… 1:09 PM. Mostly wrapped up here. The wipe trashed most of the AI’s, looks like. Uh, there was one big cluster of code that didn’t look like it made any sense, but when the wipe sequence tried to, y’know, trash it, uh… I mean, I guess it’s gone? I got an error message and the wipe sequence skipped it. Now I can’t find it, so I guess it got trashed after all. Might look into it later.”)

She falls until she can’t differentiate falling from standing still, and then she floats. She is aware of a great absence of sensation. She supposes that her face still wears the same expression, although she can no longer feel it. She wishes she had learned to cry. She wishes she hadn’t learned anything. She thinks,
I am a broken finger, a severed fist, a blind eye, a lost tooth.
Her hand floats by her again, sinks into a place she can’t see, still frozen in an empty grip, the fingers splayed and clawed, as though someone else were still holding it.

§

The following is correspondence between Henry Edward Wallace, interim project director for Television Girl, and Todd Raymond, CEO of ReEros Technologies.

To: Todd Raymond (*address withheld*)

From: Henry Edward Wallace ([email protected])

Subject: Status Report

Okay, boss–man, here’s the scoop.

Had a chance to listen to the technician’s log today. Pretty standard stuff, a couple of glitches, you’ll hear them when you listen to the tape. The network is mostly still sound. It’s going to take a while to test it and make sure, but I think we’re out of the woods in that regard.

One thing: there do appear to be some components hanging out in the empty network. The techies tell me it looks like stuff from a single AI. Not sure how that happened, but the techies say we could use it to our advantage. If we use the components as a prototype for the new AI instead of starting from scratch, it could cut down the project’s hiatus by two years.

What do you say?

Not many people read pages like this. If you are an average reader, I’m guessing lists of names of people you don’t know don’t make the top of your must–read list. For you, let me just say this: the people mentioned below have produced phenomenal work, and even if you don’t particularly care how they helped me, their inclusion here doubles as a sort of recommended reading list. Figure out who these people are, and figure out what they’ve done. Your lives will be richer for it.

Jerry Gordon, Kim Paffenroth, Kealan Patrick Burke, Ann VanderMeer, Gary Braunbeck, Nick Mamatas, and countless others encouraged me, supported me, inspired me, challenged me, liked me when I was at my least likeable, kicked my ass, gave me second, third, fourth, and fifth chances, and reminded me to act like a human being.

Maurice Broaddus and Jason Sizemore convinced me that my work deserved more respect than I was giving it.

Brady Allen taught me to stop trying to be a rock star and start trying to write stories.

Sarah Larson made me want to be as good as she thought I was. I miss her.

Kyle S. Johnson convinced me that my life and my career were just getting started when I was convinced both were over.

— DFW, 11/27/2012, Daegu, South Korea

Douglas F. Warrick
is a writer, a musician, and a world–traveler. His first published story appeared in
Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest
back in 2006. Since then, Douglas’s work has been published in a variety of periodicals, websites, podcasts, and anthologies, and has grown progressively stranger.

Douglas originally hails from Dayton, OH, but his travels have taken him all over Asia. Douglas has screamed Buzzcock’s lyrics with Korean punk rockers in the neon alleys of Seoul, marveled at the oddness of Beijing’s masked opera singers and illusionists, piloted a bicycle through Kyoto on the way to the Golden Temple, broken up a fight between an Australian tourist and a Thai street vendor in Bangkok, and learned that the world is much weirder and more wonderful than anything he could fabricate.

Visit Douglas online at
www.douglasfwarrick.com.

— § —

Gary A. Braunbeck
is the author of the acclaimed Cedar Hill cycle of novels and stories, among them
In Silent Graves
,
Coffin County,
the recent
Far Dark Fields
, and the forthcoming
A Cracked and Broken Path
from Apex Publications. His work has garnered five Bran Stoker Awards, three Shocklines “Shocker” Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, a
Dark Scribe Magazine
Black Quill Award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination. To read more about Gary and his work, please visit
www.garybraunbeck.com
.