Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods (19 page)

“Why?”

The smile disappeared from Piece’s face. “The Masters want you back of course. Good subjects are hard to come by.”

The masters of Templedog, of course, those eldritch horrors that kept humans like sea monkeys, breeding and working and farming…

Archer scowled and, despite the gun, took a challenging step forward.

“Your creators set this up, didn’t they? Pre-empting us all along, hoping we’d settle down here.”

Piece nodded. “It beats vivisection, which I would’ve recommended.”

A sound of squelching, heavy footsteps issued behind her. Archer glanced back to see the fake cow, the monster, flanking her rear.

“Come back to us, Archer,” Piece said. “These people need a leader. They can awake back home with you to guide them.”

“And the alternative?” Archer asked, knowing the answer already.

“Death,” Piece said, and as if to emphasize his words, a tentacle brushed Archer’s legs.

Archer sighed. Her arms dropping loosely, her whole body sagged in resignation.

“Let me carry Rhian back to the house,” she said.

“We’ll help you,” Piece replied.

by Jeff C. Carter

The spider wriggled in my hand as I cooed to it.

“You’ll thank me for this.”

I plucked out one of its legs. It had scurried across the floor of my hospital room on seven legs. I don’t know how it lost number eight, but it had to be fixed. I flicked the twitching, odd numbered leg away and admired the spider. An even number of legs and an even number of eyes. Perfect.

I let the poor creature flee.

You broke it. You stupid bitch, you broke it. It’s your fault. You broke it. You stupid bitch, you broke it.

That runaway train has been circling inside my skull for three years.

I picked up my sticky, bloody tooth. I thought teeth were nice white squares, but they have ugly, twisted roots that snake deep into the bone. I ignored the pair of aching holes in my gums. The stupid dentist pulled the first one after it cracked.
I explained how I needed to touch my tongue to each tooth before I went to sleep. There is a system.

He didn’t understand or didn’t care. He left me with a mouth full of odd numbers. I begged and pleaded with him to take out another. The odd number burned in my head like a hot coal, worse than the cracked tooth, worse than what I did next.

An orderly discovered me drooling blood in the janitor’s closet. I had gouged out the odd tooth with a claw hammer. That’s when they locked me in my room.

Screams ripped through the halls. There were always screams in the Arizona State Mental Hospital, but the last few days had been different. The routine clop-clop of orderlies and squeak-squeak of cart wheels were gone. The power had gone out and the trays of food had stopped arriving. The violent outbursts I heard on the other side of the door were no longer met with the bustle of guards. Now there were only the screams.

I didn’t know what was going on, but I was sure I caused it.

You broke it.

I traced the thick purple scar that spiraled around my right arm, the self-inflicted injury that got me committed. It was beautiful, my eye in the storm of uneven, disordered chaos. A perfect spiral is built from right angles. It is called the Divine Proportion. That is what my father and the doctors and the dentists don’t understand. When you get everything positioned at the proper angles, you fit into the perfect order of things.

A key scratched at the lock. My door swung open for the first time in days.

It was Tariq, one of the other patients. He was the only true sociopath at the hospital. His olive skin had fresh bloody scratches from the corner of one beady eye down to his jaw line. I pictured the finger nails of a petite woman, like me. The tracks were not quite parallel.

He grabbed me with one thick arm and hauled me out of bed.

The hallways were black except for the scattered green blurs of the fading battery-powered exit lights on the linoleum floor. The sharp sting of Clorox had been replaced with the cloying stench of rotting meat. Dead doctors and orderlies lined the corridor. I counted fourteen, including the dentist. I shut my eyes and tapped my tongue against my teeth.

A group of patients stood in the cafeteria, looking wet and haggard. Lizzy bit her lip and squirmed with manic energy. The blonde hair on the unshaven half of her head hung wet and limp across one bare shoulder. She stood next to a large steel tub.

Dan chewed a filthy fingernail and slouched with his eyes fixed on the floor. His clothes were stained with feces but his face and scraggly beard were clean for once. Maybe they were bathing in the tub?

I saw more bodies in a pile, not quite diagonal to the kitchen door. Tariq let me go and I ran to fix the bodies. How could they rest if they were not part of the perfect order?

I smoothed the cold wet hair and uniform of the cafeteria lady that had always been nice to me. She even used to count out my peas. Her face was blue and she smelled like the ocean.

Did I chew an odd number of times in my sleep? Had I tapped my thumb against my fingertips in the wrong order?

It’s your fault. You broke it. You stupid bitch, you broke it.

I looked up to see a man in a gray robe. I knew everyone at the hospital and this person was a stranger. His robe wasn’t a hospital gown; it was made of thick wool. His bald head was anchored by a steely beard in tight curls like a Greek statue. His skin was inscribed with thirty four scars. Each scar was a symbol, and they all looked self-inflicted.

His shale gray eyes searched my face and I knew he was like me. He understood the perfect order.

He spoke in a hoarse voice.

“Are you worthy of the great god Nodens, our once and future savior?”

I flicked my tongue against the small pits of my missing teeth and asked him in a small voice. “Who are you? What do you want?”

He peered at me from the crevices of his wizened, rune-scarred face.

“My name is Leith. I want you to help me save the world.”

He nodded to Tariq.

Tariq rammed my face into the steel tub so hard my head bounced off the bottom. Salt water flooded my mouth, stinging the open gaps in my gums. I tried to buck him off but he was too strong.

I opened my eyes. Shimmering bubbles oozed out of my nose and tickled my cheek. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

The water grew darker. Was that my blood? The bubbles came slower. Twenty two. Twenty three. The salty water coursed into my lungs. I squeezed out one last breath for an even number. Twenty four.

My limp body hit the floor. My lungs kicked and a geyser of salty water jumped from my throat. I turned my head and wretched until my chest was clear.

Leith ran his hand through my dripping hair.

“Merciful Nodens has found you worthy. Welcome to the Brotherhood.”

Tariq slapped me on the back.

“No hard feelings?”

His face split into a toothy grin. His jaw never stopped moving, even when he smiled. It clenched and chewed like a burrowing insect. Veins throbbed at the corners of his jet black hair and his empty eyes drilled into mine.

I nodded and returned a weak smile. Whatever had knocked out the power must have given Tariq and the other criminally insane inmates their chance to take over the hospital. Dan and Lizzy and I would have to play along until we got a chance to escape.

Sickly pale light crept over the room. Outside the windows, a smudge of sunrise dissolved in green air. The husks of ruined buildings wavered in the distance. Black tumors of fungus clung to sign posts and sprouted from cars. A tangled carpet of rotting corpses clogged the streets.

An avalanche of guilt smashed over me. I let this happen. I didn’t gouge out the odd tooth fast enough.

It’s your fault. You broke it. You stupid bitch, you broke it. It’s your fault.

Leith placed a hand upon my trembling shoulder.

“You have forgotten Nodens, but he remembers you. The Greeks called him Poseidon. The Romans knew him as Neptune. He is our father, and he has chosen you to serve him.”

I knelt down and clutched his legs.

“Please…just tell me what to do.”

“The natural order has fallen. Our world has been invaded by outside forces. We must enact the proper rituals so that Nodens and the old gods can drive them out.”

Dan stammered without looking up.

“How can we be worthy? We were locked up and left to rot. Because we’re garbage.”

Leith shook his head.

“I recruited others, hiding in the rubble. Their untested minds shattered as soon as they set foot into the unmade world. You are visionaries and holy fools, touched by the gods. The outside forces shall not so easily unmake you. Come and see.”

He led us through the blood-streaked hallways to the front door. I had not been outside the hospital since I was committed eight hundred and seventy six days ago. 

Downtown Phoenix was smothered in a clammy fog that circled the buildings and congealed in the streets. The blazing sun I had grown up with was barely a lunar eclipse.

You broke it. You stupid bitch, you broke it.

Leith pointed to the spires of an old stone church that jutted through the fog.

“That church is where the degenerates betrayed mankind and opened the gateway to the invaders.”

Lizzy perked up.

“And we’re going to close it!”

“Only mighty Nodens has that power. Our task is to find the cult and stop them from strengthening their masters with sacrifice.”

He led us to a station wagon with four flat tires crashed on the hospital steps. He pulled out a duffle bag bulging with weapons. Tariq shoved us aside and rummaged until he found a tree pruning saw with a long, curved blade. Lizzy dove for a chunky shotgun. Dan hung a pair of binoculars around his neck.

I stared at the clots of old books that spilled from the station wagon. Bibles, scrolls, and stacks of crumpled religious tracts littered the ground. Leith grabbed a handful for each of us.

“These are your sacred traditions. Remember what we are fighting for when you encounter the blasphemies of the new order.”

My book was written in tightly packed Chinese symbols. The precise columns of evenly spaced characters soothed my jangled nerves.

We stayed low and hurried through the gloom towards the church. I had to step over charred bodies filled with yellow, corroded bones. I counted thirty eight of them. Seven sky scrapers had been split open to reveal steel bones draped in curtains of glowing moss.

A tremulous whistle rang through the iron gray sky. We crouched under a school bus and waited for a bomb to drop on our heads. Something that was not a plane shrieked through the clouds on its way over the city. Dan raised his binoculars to follow it. Leith covered the lenses with his hands and made us hurry on our way.

We stopped outside the church parking lot. The jagged shadow of the church roof loomed over a row of dead brown hedges and a long ornate railing. We saw no movement inside.

We moved towards an alcove with our weapons out. I scanned the sidewalk for cracks and counted cars. The shadows were all wrong. They didn’t fit the contours of the church. They were superimposed over the world, like mine shafts snaking in impossible directions.

I froze in place and dug my tongue into the holes in my gums. Everything was wrong.

It’s your fault. You broke it.

I spread out my arms to stop the group. Dan shuffled around me and yelped. He lurched and fell, but not forward on his face. He flailed and spun sideways down the mine shaft. No one could believe their eyes, but we all heard his high pitched scream reverberate and fade as he dwindled into the unknown void.

Tariq flinched away from the shadow and bolted to the church door. Lizzy followed with her shotgun swinging in her small hands.

Leith took me by the arm.

“You saw it before we did.”

I whimpered and hid behind him. As I moved my head the mine shaft folded into itself and vanished. I dragged my fingers across the spiral scar on my right arm until the world stopped spinning.

“You perceive the perfect order of things. You understand that only ritual can restore it. Come.”

He drew a long dagger from his robe and handed it to me. It was straight, with a small perpendicular bar between the blade and handle. There were eighteen lines circling the grip.

We entered to the roar of Tariq’s laughter. People were screaming. A shotgun barked twice. Leith ushered me towards a flight of curving stairs and then shouted, “Stop the sacrifice at all costs!”

The dagger quivered in my hands as I counted steps. They spun at well placed angles around a central pillar. I froze on the second to last step, number fifty six. I couldn’t skip the last step and I couldn’t end on an odd number. The orderlies used to drag me screaming up stairs like this. Now I was free. I could escape the church and go anywhere I wanted.

I tip toed back down. Tariq was holding a shredded green robe drenched with blood and arguing with Leith.

“You wanted the robes, didn’t you?”

I snuck outside. The shadow with the broken angles was waiting. I searched for another route, but it was the same everywhere. Wrong angles simmered everywhere beneath the oily fog. The horizon skewed and shattered like a compound fracture and the vertex of certain angles opened like hungry mouths. Like the one that ate Dan.

Shame churned through my guts.

You broke it. You stupid bitch, you broke it. It’s your fault. You broke it.

I had to set things right. I went back and climbed the stairs. I rubbed the spiral scar until it was red. I dug my nails into my palms, squeezed my eyes shut and dragged my feet across number fifty seven.

The light that seeped through the old wooden shutters struggled against the tar black air of the steeple. Eddies of dust swirled in chaotic patterns, as if stirred by the beating of invisible wings.

A tarnished metal box squatted on a table in the center of the room. The box sent chills through my clammy hands and I nearly dropped it. I wiped my hands ten times and then opened the lid.