Glow, p.14
Glow, page 14
And then she was gone, but the fear pinned them both rigid and still.
The car was black, silent and electric, stopping an arm’s length from them. Two men got out, black suits, shiny shoes, black hair, dark glasses, black hats. One stood guard and the other came around the car to face them.
“Get in,” the man said, but his sister didn’t move. Rex felt his knuckles crack under the pressure of her grip.
“I said… get in!” the man yelled again, grabbing her other wrist and hauling her away. Rex went with her, the sounds of his own screams filling his ears. The other man opened the back door and pushed her inside. Still, Rex’s hand gripped hers, but the power, the strength. How could a seven year-old resist an adult?
“No!” Rex cried as their fingers parted, popping free like rubber doll hands. Her face was a mask of terror, but not fear for herself… fear for me?
He stood on the curb as the car squealed away, smelling burning rubber, cologne, and watching her face in the rear window, eyes never leaving his.
“I never saw her again.” The smoke cleared and Mrs O’s gaze remained fixed on him. “I let them take her. I lost her. Mother came back and I tried to tell her what happened, but she mashed my head into the pavement until the police came and took me away. They locked me up in a special school and I never saw Mother again either.”
“You did nothing wrong, Rex,” her whisper curled channels through the smoke, encoding her words in a mystic cipher before dispersing.
“If I’d done nothing wrong, then she’d be here. And we’d all be elsewhere, living different lives.” He stopped talking, tears felt odd on his dusty cheeks.
She eased back in her chair, stubbing out the cigarette and reaching for her glass. “We all have the answers, Rex, hidden inside of us.”
He felt the huge presence stir in his mind.
“I assume the Sisters are teaching you about the Future-Lord?”
He nodded.
“I’m an old woman, Rex. As a sickly child I was never supposed to survive but here I am.” She waved the glass like a conductor’s baton. “Harold and I met in England during the Great War in the middle of the last century.” She let that fact settle into Rex’s mind. He chewed at his lip trying to remember how numbers and dates worked. “We survived so much, only… I lost him to the Nova-Insanity. I vowed I would get him back. I didn’t know how, but I would. And I will.”
“How?” He eased forward, intensely interested.
“I’m still not sure, but I know that I am gifted with the uncanny ability to survive, to ride some invisible wave through time, always on that tumbling edge when the cure for polio or cancer or dementia comes along. My life is a kind of just-in-time experience, and if it carries on like I hope and pray to the Future-Lord that it will, then I will live forever. And I’ll reach Haven at the end of time and be there with my Harold.” She downed the last of her drink and eyed Rex who withered as he always did under another’s stare. “You should commit to joining me, Rex. Live life the way the Sisters say. Believe, live well.
“They will build their Future-Lord, and He will have dominion over all space and time. His resonance reaching back to enable and enhance his own creation and the lives of those who trust and believe.” Her stare grew extra intense. “You do believe, don’t you Rex?”
He swallowed hard. “I think he might be inside my head, watching.”
“Good, Rex, good.” She eased back, her eyes fluttering as if falling into sleep. “He’s inside mine too.”
They sat through a long but comfortable silence as Mrs O just breathed, Rex’s chin nodded onto his chest, and the music machine finished its stack of disks and clacked into silence.
“Confession,” she said, jolting Rex awake. “What you did just now in remembering and telling me about your sister, is a type of confession, a catharsis. If the Future-Lord is to accept you, then He must know the real you and you must know your truth. No hiding behind false memories or fairy tales. Put the truth out there, pay the penance.” Rex nodded, kind of losing the thread of her thoughts. “The Sisters have tremendous resources, Rex. Knowledge. They hoard it. Don’t be afraid to confess and to ask and question. They will put your feet on the right path.”
“I will.” He nodded.
“And get you some music, Rex. Life is not the same without it.”
“Music?”
“Find something you like and enjoy, make your own, positive earworms. They’ll bind you together through hard times and remind you of who and what you are when you have doubts.”
“I’ll try.” He stared at the pile of disks. None of the tunes stuck in his mind. Perhaps Mira was right, dog minds weren’t set up to understand music.
As Mrs O sank into a deep slumber, he tried to peek beneath her cardigan, but saw only the bloody edge of her wound. She breathed, snored a little, and appeared strangely unharmed. He eased the empty drinking glass from her hand and placed it on the side table, slunk out the door and secured it behind him.
The city ahead was dark and quiet, like his mind. The Future-Lord was still in his head and apparently inside Mrs O’s as well. He took comfort in that thought, but Haven and the end of all time seemed an impossibly long way away.
He stood for a second, and then put one foot in front of the other. Soon he was walking, and then running, and then it didn’t seem so far after all.
CHAPTER 19
Spare Part Row
Mira stepped out of the Ron King Shelter and Rehabilitation Center in Coriolis’ Cosmos District, aimed her aching body along the busy street, and began walking. A new day, full of new pains. But if Rex can beat Glow, then so can I.
Grit filled her joints, and a deep, fiery anguish burned at the core of every muscle. This morning, she pissed green, shat orange, threw up breakfast, itched, belched and farted uncontrollably. She saw things that weren’t really there; bugs, like tiny humans, crawled over her food and formed columns up the walls. She sneezed and coughed her way through micro-depressions, soaring elations and spasmodic amnesia. Her senses told lies, colors skewed, shapes warped and even when looking straight ahead, she still collided with the walls.
No, I can do this. Rex walked, that must be his secret. Walk it off. She set her chin, steeled her soul and walked as the Glow in her body delivered its relentless message: find more or I will discard you and find someone else.
She’d stumbled upon Ron King’s the previous night. If she’d been there before, she couldn’t remember it. She signed the Ron King pledge, something about her dying on the premises and them owning the reclamation rights to her body. She’d skipped the bit about asking her for favors in return for lodging and food and signed with a thumbprint.
A grizzled man with only one arm led her to a room with a well-stained mattress, unbreakable food bowl and a plastic spoon. “Wear this,” he grunted, handing her a Kingsman protection button with Ron King’s leering grin emblazoned in red. “You get a new one each week when this one dissolves.” He paused one last time in her doorway to deliver his final words of wisdom, words he’d clearly been instructed to deliver and had nearly forgotten. “And don’t eat it.”
She traversed Mausoleum Street like an energized pinball, using people and lampposts as bumpers, scoring imaginary points as life funneled her down the road, before depositing her inside the catacombs beneath Collwell cemetery. There, she elbowed through shops run by lepers and revenants selling skulls, carved bones, potions and trinkets. She paused briefly to examine a bell jar with something gruesome mummified inside.
“Best price,” the assistant hissed through lips that didn’t move.
Makeshift art extended Collwell cemetery out from the square, through neighboring streets. Paintings of headstones, portraits and epitaphs were the only earthly remains of the thousands of lost and reclaimed dead from Coriolis’s endless turf wars.
Her energy faded as she passed beneath a mural depicting the Future-Lord, a robotic humanoid so bright his aura burned the eyes of transfixed worshippers. Stumbling badly, she grabbed at one of the thousands of nameless crosses clumped along the walls. Her eyes found flowers. Her hand reached out to touch, but it was just paint. Fake like the memories of husbands and children and lives she remembered and forgot daily.
She stepped out of the morbid scenery into bright, bustling crowds: Spare Part Row, a turbulent river of humanity surging through a canyon of glass and concrete. The overhead balconies formed eyries where the wealthy gathered to watch and monitor the spectacle.
Mira stopped in her tracks, suddenly self-conscious of all the watching eyes. Just walking. Like Rex. Why have my legs taken me here? She checked her Kingsman badge and lurched into the flow, grabbing at doorways and pillars, trying not to fall and vanish under the trampling feet.
A clan of revenants waved banners with Future-Lord images that looked oddly like they did: gaunt, wizened mummies with bulging eyes. Revenants were always angry, bitter at the fully living and the flesh and blood sensations they missed so much.
Keep moving. Mira merged with tourists. Cameras clicking, they skirted a huge bipedal cyborg with cannonball shoulders and spindly mechanical legs. Groups jostled and combined like merging storms, twisting fleeting paths through the crowd before breaking apart and depositing Mira into the relative stillness of a shop doorway.
A butcher’s shop? Hunks of meat and bones hung in icy rows, eyeballs leered cold and dead from jars and display cabinets, and strings of ears and noses looped across the ceiling like decorative chains.
“Welcome!” A hopeful-faced man with a white, tufted head like an onion, greeted her. His deep bow sent forehead to knees, spine flexing like a snake’s. “Welcome to Flesher and Sinod’s, the leading cross-species surgical practitioners in Coriolis.”
Mira tumbled backward out the door.
“Spare a few pennies for the baby, Dearie.” The gravelly voice came from a leper with a second head growing sideways out of her neck.
“I don’t have anything,” Mira stuttered, trying to push ahead of the freakish little woman. But the wall of people circled, crunching inward and forcing Mira and the leper together.
“I’ll keep hurting him until you give me something,” the leper yelled, jabbing fingers into the spare head’s dull eyeballs, causing it to emit a mewling sound from its tiny mouth.
“Leave me alone!”
Mira yelled, switching directions, swimming cross-stream until she fell out of the skirmish and onto a raised garden where people sat eating and examining their purchases. A wide man with a topknot stood up from a concrete bench and left. Mira lunged at the opportunity and crashed down. Her cry of relief scared away the other tourists, leaving her alone on the bench.
Free from exertion, the pain staged a new attack. Her eyes rolled up and she floated in somanetic hell. Walk it off. Walk it – How? How did you do this, Rex?
The bench creaked as someone sat next to her. “Everyone wants to go to Haven, Mira, but nobody wants to die.” The serpentine voice caused Mira to leap to her feet, but a metal hand gripped her shoulder and pushed her back down.
“Yellow?” she gasped. “You can’t touch me here, there’s laws and people and…” She looked around frantically, but no one took notice, no militia came running to her aid.
Yellow was a leprous cyborg, an ochre ball of cancerous growths with huge, watery eyes and fingerling stumps for ears. Instead of arms and legs he wore a metal frame supporting cyber-appendages of pistons and cables that hummed and hissed as he moved. A cunning deception, Mira knew. Concealed under the crude mechanics were sleek, modern cybernetics that could move him with the speed and stealth of a cat.
“Mira, you malign me. I would never hurt you. You, who just happen to be wandering through my turf at the exact time I’m always here.”
He released her arm, but numbness was already spreading down her spine to her legs. “Bastard. You drugged me.”
“A mild sedative, Mira. Can’t have you making a fuss. Bad for business.”
“What do you want?” Mira’s eyes searched the crowd for liches.
“I was just passing by and saw a familiar face. Once a pretty face, but now…” He looked her up and down, neck servo whining under the weight of his oversized head. “You look like you need someone to put a little Glow back in your life.” He blinked, and a sapphire tear leaked from his eye and ran down his cheek.
“You sent a fucking lich after me. I told you I would pay.”
Yellow looked hurt, a pincer hand clutching at his chest. “A lich? I hardly know any liches.”
Yellow leaned back, his machinery hissed and powered down, arms folding into a relaxed pose. “Tell me more about this lich.”
“We ran away. He followed. We ran faster.”
“We?” Yellow’s gaze probed for clues but Mira sat in pained silence. “Have you left me for someone else?”
She forced the words out, as if hearing them would make them true. “I – I’m not doing Glow anymore, Yell. I’m going clean.”
She heard the cackling noise she hated so much, the sound of Yellow laughing. “I’m not a charity, Mira. I have wives and husbands to feed and you just vanish from my life without paying. Stealing the very bread from their mouths.”
She wanted to spit in his face and run, but Yellow’s contact-drug had shut that option down. “I will pay. You know I’m good, man. I always find a way.”
“Did this lich have a chameleon suit?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Sounds a lot like our old friend, Auld.”
“Yeah, that’s the name I heard. So, you do know him.”
“I confess I do. Auld was our main lich, our top farmer until he went rogue and ran off with our best reclamation suit. Shame you couldn’t bring him in. Thorne would pay your habit for a year if you bought us his body. He’s drained a lot of our best clients. Most inconvenient.” Yellow pushed his face close to hers and whispered. “You’ll have our new lich, Niros, to contend with soon. He’s not as nice as Auld, bit of an itchy ball sack really.”
“I’ll pay. But… I just need to get clean, fix this pain, clear out all these –” she managed to lift an arm but couldn’t wave like she wanted, “– these fake memories and things that never happened to me.”
The laugh came again, louder and longer. Mira felt tears run down her face. “Mira, Mira, so full of fire-ah. I think you are at what I call the resistance stage. It’s where you think you can still win, that you can fight this, that there really is some small part of the real you left inside somewhere.
“But, Mira-Fire-ah, you need to move on to the acceptance stage, where you just live for the moment. You get out there and work the streets, you rob, you beg, you prostitute yourself, you sell off body parts if you have to.” He waved a hand at the shops of Spare Part Row. “You do whatever it takes to pay me back, and then, if you still have money left over, you get to buy more Glow.” His voice dropped. “Remember how good it feels when you get a real fix. How strong you become? That energy, virility, the elastic wonder of a body, young and in its prime? Everyone wants that, Mira. Even me. But alas, I am a simple cripple, eking out a living the only way that I can.”
Yellow’s machinery jumped out of its standby mode and he rose smoothly from the bench. The bulging vein that ran around the side of his head pulsed as he spoke. “You know where to find me, Mira. Or maybe you just want to give yourself to me as payment. I’ll feed you all the Glow you need. Think. All this can be yours.” His metal fingers clattered over his obscene body as he grinned and lurched away, puffing like a steam train.
“I’d rather die,” she slurred, but for an insane moment it felt like a plausible option: a life chained in Yellow’s basement. It wasn’t so different from being a leper or revenant.
“And you will die, Mira. Soon. But pay me back first.” Yellow hobbled into the crowd that parted and closed behind him.
She felt better. Pain eased, and her boiling blood cooled. For a second she thought she had the answer, that somehow constrained rage overcame Glow. But the illusion crashed as she saw the tiny, square patch on her knee. A maintenance patch. A taste of Glow to lure the addict back online. She tried to snatch it away, but her fingers refused to pinch.
A horrific revenant lurched in front of her, blank, dead eyes right in her face. She barely saw it, but didn’t care. It seemed to be looking for someone, maybe it spoke. Eventually it went away.
She felt the world turning, flinging her away as gravity dragged her back to the ground. A balance. A line. An infinitesimally thin region where she existed between fictional Haven and a very factual Hell.
CHAPTER 20
Towers of Knowledge
Sleep teased Rex like a dog’s tail: the harder he chased, the harder it fled.
It finally came as he stretched out on the floor under his wash basin, down with the spiders, pipes and plumbing, and the comforting presence of bed legs. The floor was cold and solid, nowhere else to fall from here.
He rolled and whimpered as his dreamscape shifted from dogs and walks to Mrs O. He could see the bricks in the wall behind, through the hole in her chest. “Good boy,” she said, her smile spreading far too wide, cutting her whole head clean in two. “Good boy, Rex. Up… up here–”
And he was on the operating table again, but the surgeons were liches, their eyes dead and rotten over their surgical masks. They shaved his fur, hacked off his legs and grafted on new limbs, human limbs. One took off her mask. “Mother?” he screamed as she grabbed his hair and punched his face down into the cement, again and again. She crafted his skull with each blow, flattening his snout, blunting his ears, grinding away fur so only raw, pink, human flesh remained.
