Orgonomicon (17 page)

In the end, he told her he was deeply
involved with another woman and had a child with her, and really
shouldn't be meeting with her in such circumstances. He hadn't
expected the scene she would make, with the hitting and the
table-flipping and throwing of glasses. He fled the place in as
much of a hurry as he'd arrived, with his ears deeper in his
shoulders and a brain doing its best to shake off the bad crazies.
Was literally nowhere safe?

Was
he
himself unsafe?

Whatever it was that he was supposed to have
done in the park, he'd done it.

William turned to leave the other children
and thought of his dad. He remembered his smiling face, being
picked up and swung around, reading him his favorite bedtime story,
a string of moments when love flowed freely between them, and felt
a warmth in his chest that spread outwards and then left his body.
William had touched the universe and, through it, his father. He
was ready to go home now. The people at his school would be mad at
him, his mom would probably ground him, but he knew his dad would
understand why he had to do it. He didn't know
how
he'd
known to do it, or what it was exactly he'd done, but he'd known
that it was absolutely necessary. His dad would know why.

The long walk home was longer and lazier
today, knowing that there would probably be a lecture at the end of
it.

"William, where the hell have you been? I've
been looking everywhere for you! Your school called me—what have
you been doing? What the hell's gotten into you?"

"Mom, I had to go out to collect the
light."

"Don't sass your mother, boy. You tell her
what she wants to know."

Karen shot his father a dark look, and then
went back to work on the boy. "Don't lie to me. What was so
important you had to leave school for it?"

"Dad, dad tell her, dad!" This wasn't how it
was supposed to go.

"Don't lie to your mother. Go to your
room."

"I'll tell him when it's time to go to his
room. You go to your room, young man, until you can decide to start
being truthful with me. Now!"

William felt betrayed, abandoned in a world
of misunderstanding, alone. He went to his room. The shadows grew
around him.

"I need him."

The voice whispered itself into Ella's
auditory nerves, microwave bursts at inaudible frequencies that
manifested as subconsciously-received inner dialogue. It sounded
like her talking to herself. She believed it. It was easy to.

"I can't let him go."

If she thought about it, she could come up
with a number of reasons why this would be true, and it was the
logical way her brain worked, making connections between what was
known. The programs wrote themselves. She knew that he'd gotten his
life back together, that he'd gotten off the drugs, that he was
safe… She wanted that kind of safety in her life. She
needed
it.

"I have to get back to him."

The urgings wouldn't leave her alone with
their constant goading, and neither would the itch on her ankle. It
had gotten to other places, too, her armpits and the folds of her
thighs—though it was the ankle that had it worst. It had turned
into a long scab, oozy and dank, that didn't want to set right.

Worse, she was starting to notice an
unexplainable foul taste, constant, in the back of her mouth. It
tasted like pennies and mushrooms.

She was coming apart, and needed a
saviour.

Scott lay on the ground, shaking, the
memories of what he'd done giving way to the memories of what had
been done to him. There had been so many doctors, so many
tests…

The machines messed with his head, taking
away his memories…but scraps still remained to him. There were
pills, and acid baths that had washed his body away for the
scientists to study the crust remaining; there were injections and
electrodes and chambers that hummed and left him sunburnt. There
are was always a ringing in his ears.

And then there was the itch. A rash of hives
had erupted on his chest and spread outwards over his entire body,
tiny red welts with black centers that stank and itched like crazy.
Scratching only spread them, and then they'd ooze out long black
tendrils under his skin, his roadmap to hell.

Scott didn't know where he was, or how he'd
gotten there. But he'd met the monster. And he was seeing the dead,
his victims, everywhere.

He opened his eyes to a concrete landscape
tilted sideways; the world collapsed around him and he reoriented,
lifting himself up off the ground, and stumbled out of the
alleyway. He needed to get home, to force his way through the fog
and the dragging rays from above and move, move, move! Back home to
his bed so he could sleep it off, keep himself together, try to get
back to normal.

He reached up to scratch his scalp and his
fingernails peeled off in his hair. He chewed at the raw ends of
his fingers, stalking the street as a mindless revenant horror. He
was covered in blood, most of it not his own, and guided by an
inner sense of knowing delivered by microwave.

He'd lost the will to resist. It made the
hallucinations stop, to go along with the voices, and it was so
much easier to go along now that he'd seen what he was becoming. He
was becoming something more than human, a symbiote piloted by an
electro-responsive hybrid mycoplasm. It wasn't his fault.

"Do you love her?"

The voices penetrated even the fog of agony
that attended his transformation. "Do you love her?"

"Yes! No! What do you want me to say?" He
screamed the words and, miraculously, the pain stopped.

"Do you love her?"

"Yes, I love her! Arrrgh!" It came first as a
headache behind his eyes, shot to his gut with an acidic roil, and
then quickly spread through the rest of his body.

"No! No, all right, I hate her!" The pain got
somehow worse. "I give up!" He curled up into a ball lying on his
side, whimpering. "I give up, okay? I don't know anymore. I'll say
whatever you want me to say."

The pain left him again, and Scott wept, not
with relief.

"Mission success. My phase of it,
anyway."

BUZ4937 was gloating; SEL6210 couldn't allow
himself to hate the man for it. His triumph was short-lived,
though, for no sooner had the rad-station beeped to notify him of
his success, yet his chip beeped to tell him that HQ had noted his
work and was sending him a message.

They were to be reassigned to different
cases. Equipment and ordnance was to be decommissioned at the
nearest field-office and no more radionic work was authorized.

SEL6210 couldn't believe his good luck. He'd
been too long running radionics against targets that refused a
lock, while this man micromanaged and bullied with the calling of
rank. He was starting to hate the work, and that wasn't right. If
the world couldn't rely upon him to do the hard job of saving it
from itself, upon whom could it rely? And now he was being ordered
to call in his losses and give up. Still, he'd be getting away from
his coworker.

"I'll sure be glad not to have to look at
your assface anymore, either."

SEL6210 was shocked the man had picked up on
his thoughts so quickly, then returned, "Just how did you join the
Agency, again?"

"I was a prison recruit. One of the
headshrinkers there recognized my psi-talent and I earned myself an
instant pardon from the government. Call it work-release. Only
served two-and-a-half out of my forty. And fuck you for asking. I
got a better return rate outta here than you did, chum. What you
got to say for yourself? Get that shit off your head and packed and
let's get the fuck outta here. I'm done with this."

SEL6210 was not. "I'm almost there. Let me
just… There. Done."

"With what? We've been reassigned. Get over
it already."

"I'm over it." He'd sent one last set of
orders out into the causal matrix, the last item on a docket he was
supposed to have turned over to the next agent, a chaotic tolling
of the deathknell in the form of a school shooting requisitioned
from local resources. It was a strategic loss-quotient of some
importance, and the thought of letting it go galled him.

He wouldn't let it pass without the last
word. "And why were you in prison?" He wanted to see the other man
sweat.

"Hedge funds. Predatory lending practices. I
killed a lot of people. With my business practices—I specialized in
hospices. Foreclosures. Loan fraud. Why the hell do you need to
know?"

"No need, just asking. I'm done."

That'd schooled
him
.

He'd listen to the news channels in the
morning and look for any sign he'd accomplished the DOR-event; he
could still recover something of his reputation. The vortex of
failure wasn't something he wanted to get used to; he
had
to
have a success somewhere.

And
then
he'd leave it alone. At least
one.

Emmanuel congratulated himself on a job well
done—he'd gotten back to the house before Karen and the kid.

He'd ejected that crazy woman from his life,
again. She'd scratched his face, though—he didn't know how he was
going to explain that.

Think. Think, think, think.

He swabbed the scratch with alcohol and
smeared ointment over it, covered it with a band-aid. He'd go
banging up a shelf in the closet real quick, and say he'd hit
himself with the hammer. Yeah, that would work.

It would sure suck to get hit with a hammer
in the face.

The metal impacts the skin; the layers of
tissue rend; the bone shivers and crunches.

He could feel what it would be like, to break
in such a way, to come apart at the touch of something hard. It was
his brain, sending him messages from his DNA in the form of
pictures; he'd been infected.

Karen knew that Manny was lying to her about
something, she just didn't know what. He was acting weird.

"So, what did you do today while I was out
dealing with
our
child? You know he skipped school today."
Too late, she hadn't meant it to come out that way. Or maybe she
did. He could stand to help out a bit more.

He's a useless bum. He doesn't deserve to
live.

Yeah, he
was
a real asshole, she
thought, the conversation inside her head taking place on a
subsonic level. The back-and-forth coming from her throat impacted
Emmanuel on subaudible frequencies, stunning him. At least he shut
up.

As she thought the individual words in her
internal monologue, she contracted her vocal chords as though she
were actually speaking, but without the bellows-action of her lungs
that would have vibrated them audibly. He heard the words on a
subliminal level, and was immediately overtaken with shame. She
could smell it on him.

"I'm sorry, I got called away today by a
friend who needed help."

She didn't have to think about it, she could
easily read the thoughts on his mind. He was thinking: Dammit, he
hadn't wanted to give that away! He'd thought it would make him
look good, doing a friend a favor—what the hell was he doing? He
was throwing himself directly into the lion's mouth! He was
transparent.

"Friend? What friend? Who's this friend?
What's her name? And what'd you do to your face?"

"Her name is Ella. She's just someone I know
from long ago. She's nobody."

"If she's nobody then why is she more
important than your kid? Tell me that."

"I didn't know he'd been skipping class,
nobody tells me these things!"

"I'm telling you now! And don't raise your
voice in front of the child! What's wrong with you?!" She
straightened herself out while Emmanuel cowered. "Who is she? Were
you using again? 'Cause if you're using again, I don't want you in
my house or anywhere near my kid."

"I'm not using!
Your
kid? What the
hell, he's
our
kid, Karen! You said so yourself!"

I hate you
.

Uggh, he was hard to deal with. She came at
him from so many angles, and he still kept it up. He was good, she
had to give him that.

"And what did you do to your face? I asked
you a question—you never answered me!"

"I hit myself with the freakin' hammer while
I was putting up a shelf! What do you care?" He was really starting
to squirm now.

Manny wouldn't be able to keep his secret for
long, whatever it was, she knew it. Whatever it was. She
knew
he was just a parasite, how could she have let him
trick her like this, again? She felt trapped.

William watched his parents fight, listened
to everything they said to one another, his mother tightly gripping
his wrist. He felt afraid, lost in a world out of control; and then
his eyes softly unfocused, and he saw the black rays and clouds
emanating from them, long piercing feelers of antipathy that dashed
against each other, the two people he loved most in the world
engaged in deadly phantom combat.

He'd seen it so many times before, not only
between his parents but almost everyone he'd ever met. Sooner or
later,
everybody
showed their true colors, and they were
dark.

But they didn't have to stay that way;
everything changed.

William didn't want his parents to fight.

There was a place in his chest, a massive
glowing sun in the cave of his heart, where he kept his secret
pictures of times when they didn't fight and instead got along, and
he let the love he knew for his parents shine brightly there; and
he directed his thoughts of his parents to them and sent the
feeling along that corridor, and relaxed as their tones toward each
other mellowed and became conciliatory, and the words they
exchanged rang of empathy, and William was no longer scared.