Soul's Road: A Fiction Collection (21 page)

I usually piss off the edge of the tower, anyway.

Watching the Freaks run through the city is a bit of sport in itself; trying to pick out the right holes in the right buildings to see them through, trying to angle oneself without toppling from the roof; it’s good to have space to walk over, when getting a good vantage point.

The Spike Cannibal crosses a street and they’re all heading for the intersection. Once, two years ago, a bunch of freaks – all of whom are dead now, thanks to the Mopman – dragged all the traffic lights they could find into a large pile in the center of it. I, in a fit of pique, glued a hula-doll to the top of it, just to see what they’d do.

Wouldn’t you know it they started worshipping the thing. You never could tell with the Sunnies.

That intersection, thanks to some demolished buildings and clever pre-Crash architectural flare, is the place I’ve got the widest view, so I practice my profession for when the Spike Cannibal gets into view.

Bang-bang, thrump-thrump; I’m actually a little excited.

***

“We should stop by with the freaks first, I bet they have something we could use.”

She wants to know, like what, and they are going back towards the intersection, because he knows the way to where the Box People bed down, and says that the man with the mops will be gone by now.

“Like food, or maybe a gun. I’ve asked them to look for one; so far they’ve only found bullets. They like to give me things, I think ever since I gave them the generator, we’ve been friends or something like.”

She says that she thought they were leaving the boxes for her, she’s been following some of them north for months; and he says “Well, they probably were; it’s not like there are a lot of lucids around here anyway, and I think it’s fine if you call dibs.”

She says ok, and he says ok, and then they see the intersection and freaks pour out of a building, dressed in browns and blacks, and they are yelling of the Great Terrible Thing; and one says to get away, Prayer-Bringer, get away, Man of Virtue; he comes with his Spike for all of us; and one falls while the other Box People flee past them, through side-streets and open buildings, and they keep running, and the girl watches them for only a moment and then she sees the fallen freak; her age only scant years younger, and she limps over and tries to help him up, but in his panic they stumble backwards and down, now both hurt, and in the building before them a door topples into a bang as the Mopman slams into it, rusty hinges broken by his weight.

The girl and the boy are transfixed, until the Box Person’s whine inspires the girl to put him behind her.

“Great,” the boy says, and he snaps his knife open.

“A tooth?” The Mopman says, his voice booming around them.

“Sure,” the boy says, and then he calls something to the girl which she cannot hear over the adrenaline; it is really a very big spike.

“Very well fool, use a tooth.” The Mopman whirls the spike over his head and brings it down, and the boy throws himself right and towards the freak and the knife cuts leg, blood oozing out slow then quick. The boy runs, a tight circle, as the Mopman turns to catch him, shouting unintelligently, and then the knife sticks wetly in his shoulder.

The Mopman slams the boy with his body. They push, the Mopman’s foot sending the boy backwards. He swings the spike horizontally, two-handed, into the boy’s stomach, which of course causes him to curse then bleed and the girl to blanche.

***

I watch a boy with a beard fall into the intersection, right on his back, and he’s bleeding pretty bad, stomach all torn up; but the Mopman lumbers out after him bleeding just as fierce and I think, well how about that.

***

“Who are you? Just a Man,” the freak shouts, standing up, rearing up, taller always than he let on.

The boy screams back, “And you’re just a man with mops,” and from the ground he kicks at the gash in the Mopman’s leg and blood makes his boots slick.

The Mopman winces and pulls back, hefting the pipe overhead as the boy climbs to his feet. “I will unmake you,” he roars.

The boy slams into the man so the girl jolts ridgid. The pipe falls backwards behind the freak and the boy grabs the knife, dragging it down and out.

They fall away from each other hungry, and pace in a circle once before everything is interrupted by two quick sounds, thrump-thrump, and a bullet goes arcing through the staggering Mopman, another through the boy’s shoulder; clean.

***

She drags him back out of the intersection and rolls him over and he is whimpering, and then he is saying things and she is trying to talk over him and let him know it will be ok, she has gauze and painkillers goddamnit, and they are sitting underneath an awning, then, and she leans him back and there is quite a great deal of blood, and she sees, then, that there is not much left of his shoulder, and the second to last thing he says is ow; and the last thing he says, when she looks him in the eyes, hands cradling him at the chin, is: oh.

***

“Oh happiest of catechisms, that which belongs to the dreams of the dying, that which will never bask in the light of day; sacred writ dreamed by the mind feverish from slick virus or man-made belief; oh most joyous of passages, those things which are born into truth and become secrets never again known in the space of a man’s last two breathes.”

The girl sees this, written in thick block lettering with rust-colored paint over the tower’s door, and she wonders if it’s the kind of thing used to mark a temple or a grave.

The tower does have a lock, a padlock notoriously big, like something out of bizarre legend; but it’s ok.

She has picks now.

1-0-1

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I was agoraphobic on the freaking internet; I’d sign on to IRCs and mail clients as “invisible” so people wouldn’t be able to see me.

Part of the appeal of I-T: no one had to know who you really were, and I had maybe thirteen different accounts; when I was at my worst, before I said “well, addiction” and got over it right quick.

It was because I was afraid of people. Of all of them, at once, talking to me, spitting their words out over the screen in horrifying black hieroglyphs which would enrapture me, render me unable to process the world. Or play my game.

I was agoraphobic.

One thousand four hundred fifty one feet and a sniper rifle do wonders for agoraphobia, is what irony is.

***

The Box People burn the Man of Virtue and leave his ashes in a box, as is their way; and they will wait with the box until the Prayer-Bringer comes back with her bandoleer of hallowed songs, because they know she’ll want to say goodbye to the Man even if she doesn’t know it herself, just yet.

***

As she climbs: Calculation Theme, by Metric. On repeat. Because she feels like she has to. She sings the lyrics, now and then.

***

One Hundred and Ten stories with a sprained ankle and a monstrously bloody spike as a walking stick is why she has painkillers, she tells herself, and herself doesn’t argue back.

***

I watched someone, a freak maybe, drag the thief’s body into an alley. That doesn’t matter so much. Watching the Mopman lying there, dead beyond dead, that’s what mattered, yeah. That’s what I wanted to see. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad that I keep trying to appreciate the people I shoot at a distance. To try and imagine who they were before the Crash, what they were like before I decided, because I got to decide, me, on my own: time to be dead.

***

On the fiftieth story she finds plants, all kinds; a garden, twenty stories of gardens and even some people taking care of them They do not talk and when she waves to them they ask her “Are you one of the chosen?” and she gets it; someone is incorporating freaks into his world, rather than the other way around.

***

On the eighty-fifth story she is tired out totally and the ankle burns, so she finds a room which is not occupied; the papers in it old and covered in dust, the chair and the cabinets and the computer; all untouched for years. She lays herself on the floor and looks at the ceiling.

She would like to have given him the cough syrup, if only because she had no wine.

After a moment she thinks it’s not enough, and so she gets up and breaks all the windows, and she lays back down and wraps tight and shivers, and she is going to go back to her music but she hears the streets, then, dogs or coyotes wandering and howling, yipping, ownerless; and she listens instead to them.

***

She wakes up early and she holds herself at the knees, just to feel them, and the ankle is better, moderately; she packs quickly and begins to climb.

At the top the door is locked, but she picks it quicker than the last one, and she thinks she’s getting good at this. She opens the door and is looking at a rather well-kept man, bitter, with a pistol.

***

I ask her how long it took her to get inside, and she tells me she fiddled with the outside lock for some hours, she wasn’t counting how many.

Well, that’s perseverance right there, I tell her, and she nods and says it sure is. She says I should probably switch them, freaks don’t really pick locks and it’s easier to get in here than it is to get into the tower.

I lower the pistol finally and say yeah, yeah you’ve got a point.

Did you take anything from the garden I ask and she says she didn’t and I say well, it’s about time for an early lunch, if you’re hungry. She thinks for a good solid moment, the kind of moment you can really feel, and then she leans against that great awful spike and says sure, food would be good.

Seeing it up close, it’s just as monstrous as I thought, just as grisly, a mutant flower irregular but it kind of suits her, the way she leans, and I say I’ll get right on that.

***

So what’s your deal?

She says that she just wants to know what I’m doing up here, and while I pile clothes out of the main room and try to straighten the empty cans and opened computers I tell her I’m surviving, however I can, and that it’s a damn shame I need to say either of those things. We’re sitting at the island and the spike gets its own seat, next to my rifle, and I tell her I used to be a programmer, back before we lost the world. She asks what I programmed.

I tell her I worked on the games, because most people did. When she asks me which ones I just tell her it was most of them, whatever people hired me for; that I was interested in a lot.

She asks what I did during the Grand Crash, and I tell her well I tell her, I was up here counting down with a pair of binoculars, and then it wasn’t quite very much what I expected. It wasn’t very much worth it, watching the whole thing.

I ask about the handy little impaler and she tells me it’s from the Mopman, and I say that I know and I’m going to ask about it anyway but she says, too quick, I’m lucid, and I say yeah, me too, crying shame.

She says it’s not, it’s the best thing ever; and she wants to know if there’s anywhere she can charge her e-readers and music players. Two sandwiches; fried ham, smoked fish, some mayo and some pepper, and I snicker much impressed by her bracelet.

We eat first, because it’s always best when things come in twos, yes-no, on-off, one-zero, and I think maybe it’d be kind of a shame once she leaves.

So about that power, she says, and I point her towards the generator. She thanks me. Standing by it she asks me if it’s the only one I have and I go a little weak-kneed, the way her eyes are big. I say I had a backup. It was stolen.

You don’t use back-ups until you need them, and I say no not really, but it was still mine.

She asks me if I’d be happy if other people used it, to make their lives better, and I ask if she needs a place to stay but no, she says, she’d best get going on after she’s got juice.

***

Stay for dinner, I say, watching the bars on her players fill.

Well I don’t know, and I tell her there are caioats out there, and she asks me why I pronounce it like that, and I say I don’t know. I guess I always figured if the world was going to be mad I may as well have a style. A man needs a style.

She asks me about what’s written on the side of the tower, and I say I put it there when I put the place together.

To scare away freaks? She asks.

To scare away lucids, I say. Right now, talking to you, it doesn’t make much sense, does it?

No, she says.

Stay for dinner? It’s fish over greens.

What if I don’t like fish? she says, and I say then it’s anything else over greens.

You’re lonely, she says, and I say aren’t you?

Not really, anymore. She tells me she listens to the caioats at night.

***

I hand her a gun while she’s sitting on the balcony, watching the horizon. Dinner was fine; she was truly interested in the way things were up here, and how it all ran, and how programming used to work and what it means to “hack” and to “infect.” I let her try out the goggles. She reels, and giggles, then stops herself. I offer to give her the Encyclopedia Britannica on file and she tells me just N and beyond would be great.

So I upload it while she’s sitting on the balcony and I hand her a gun, watching the sunset. She wants to know how often I watch the city, and I tell her pretty often.

She wants to know why I shot the man earlier today, and I tell her that hey, he was a freak, wasn’t he? I thought that was you, down there, I was just worried it was going to get rough. You know, get rough-and-tumble, like maybe those two were going to hurt you. You seemed pretty normal, really. No ornaments, just the bandoleer. I’d love something, like that.

She asks me why I shot both, and I just repeat my answer, and she says that she gets it she thinks and then asks me what the gun is for.