Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz (6 page)

Up close, their eyes seemed loose and liquid, though
they still moved as if they were in use. Their fingers were
hard-shelled needles, red at the tips. Amita had a second to gasp
before the one to her left—a boy in a blue and silver jersey—stabbed her,
piercing her upper and lower lips and the gums
beneath them.

Pain rippled through her, but it was dull and distant.
Whatever numbness had settled before was still with her. The child’s
anchored needles, spreading like scissor blades, opened her mouth
wide.

The girl leaned close and opened her own mouth.
Something warm filled Amita’s mouth, causing her to gag. The
shirtless boy stumbled back and hissed as she thrashed. The
jersey-wearing boy pulled his needle-fingers out, while the girl
clapped her hand over Amita’s lips.

The meal tasted like rancid meat, though it had the
consistency of a milkshake. Amita shuddered once, took a large gulp
... and was amazed as an ecstatic wave roared through her. She gulped
again without conscious intent and the children were eclipsed by a
pulse of light.

When it faded, Amita was on her feet and the children
were on their backs, as if thrown by Amita’s sudden rise. They
hissed as they rose, but didn’t seem angry. Their razor grins
suggested otherwise.

Amita realized she was on a rooftop, though she had no
idea where. The city was dark, lit only by the churning silver haze
that replaced the night. She could just see the children, the far
edge of the roof ... and something else that froze her where she
stood.

Two feet above the cement, a corpse floated. At least,
she hoped it was a corpse—its left leg was missing, and a
good part of its belly had been ripped away. What had been a suit and
tie were fused with its bloody skin. Most of its face had melted and
run down its front. The girl leapt at it, her legs making popping
sounds as they pushed off. She caught its remaining leg and bit into
its thigh. The meat made no sound as it came off the bone.

Amita turned away, horrified at both the sight and her
reaction. Instead of nausea, she felt a hunger, which stabbed through
her lethargy, and nearly made her double over. She knew what the gray
girl had fed her, and that it had been better than anything she had
ever eaten before.

She ran to the edge of the building and peered into the
dark city. Though there was no light, save the silver her eyes still
adjusted to, she could see buildings, cars, and even people. They
were all varying shades of gray and silver, like the children. Only
their shadows gave them shape.

On her right, in the distance, she could see the
Ambassador Bridge—the steel suspension bridge that spanned
the Detroit River to connect the city to Windsor—filled with
stalled traffic. Several cables dangled free, and the structure
sagged in the middle. To her left, much closer, was the five-tower
rosette of the Renaissance Center, dark and silent for the first time
in her memory. Behind her, close to where she had been before she
passed out, were Comerica Park and Ford Field, homes of two of the
city’s sports franchises—and now, things far more
bizarre.

A massive gray thing slithered over the wall of Comerica
Park. It was not a tentacle, exactly, if only because its end was
rounded and sprouted tentacles of its own. It pushed through the
scoreboard, but where Amita expected the sound of breaking glass and
steel, she heard only a wet tearing sound. Liquid poured down the
back of the board as the grotesque being writhed.

Creatures swarmed the city, tearing into fleeing people
and one another. A segmented tube with six eyes inched its way into
the smaller building across the corner intersection—an art
deco structure she recognized as the Penobscot Building, where she
had once worked. On the street, ten stories below, a naked man with a
ragged beard made thrusting motions with his crotch, shooting thick
explosive projectiles into a glass and granite high-rise. Bloated
cicada-like beasts swarmed the Greektown churches, shops, and the
casino further away.

The monsters were people transformed in ways that defied
logic and science. Those who changed first made meals of those who
were tardy, and those who were strong crushed the weak.

There were exceptions, Amita reminded herself. The three
little monsters around her, for some reason, decided she should be
fed, instead of devoured.

Something struck her back, sending her over the edge.
Arms and legs wrapped around her, and needle fingers pierced her legs
and her belly. She heard the children gurgle with delight as they
tore into her.

So much for benevolent monsters
, she thought. Now
that she was up, she was fair game.

They did not fall. To Amita, it felt like sailing
through liquid, though it still seemed like air to her lungs. The
jersey-wearing boy sank his teeth into her left breast. She screamed,
more from surprise than from any sense of pain.

The back of the boy’s head burst open, as a wave
of burning liquid shot out. She dimly realized her breast was the
source, and wondered when she’d started lactating acid. To
Amita’s revulsion, having the boy’s head blown out did
not stop his chewing. She drove her fingers into his neck, and was
surprised to feel his torso fall away from his head.

The other children pushed away from her, hissing as they
floated off, as if they were the ones betrayed. She ripped the boy’s
still-gnawing head free and held it up. His eyes were gone, but his
mouth was open. His spiked tongue undulated.

Amita bit into his skull, sinking her teeth in where his
right eye had been. What should have been bone was soft and
delicious, and everything went white.

“
We come through the soft places.”

The voice in the dark was back, stronger and clearer.
She knew it was in her head but not much more.

“
We make more soft places,” the voice
continued. “We make them from the hard places. That is why,
Goldilocks.”

“
What does that mean?” Amita asked.

“
Your word for it,” the voice answered.
“Your ... story for it. Goldilocks ... zone. The hard places
must be made soft, but there must be soft places to come through
first.”

“
Soft places?”

Anita wished she had not asked. She feared she knew
the voice’s answer.

“
Meat ... places.”

Amita Prasad emerged from the dark into the gray. Above
and around her were buildings, though she could only see their top
edges. The air was so thick she thought she might choke, before she
realized she was not breathing, and had not been for a while. The sky
above spasmed. Its coiling silver glow was nothing she thought should
be called light. Savage roars reached her ears.

A part of her wondered why she was not freaking out, and
another part wondered if her parents and other family were caught up
in the chaos. Those parts lost out, though, to the part that wondered
why the road beneath her felt soft and pliant, why her arms were
twice as long as before, and why something like an enormous jellyfish
sac now extended from the remains of her left breast.

As Amita considered the sac, it fanned its tendrils. She
shuddered, then realized she was the one who moved it. She fanned the
tendrils again.

“
This is insane,”
she said, realizing belatedly that her mouth did not move as she
spoke, though she heard her own voice in her head. She tried to move
her jaw, and was surprised when her perspective split, shifting to
take in the building she was next to while continuing to look into
the twisting gray night.

“
Get up,”
a
high-pitched voice told her. “
Make the
hard places soft.”

The voice was also in her head, but it was not like the
one she had heard before. It was a boy’s voice.

“
Who are you?”
Amita asked.

“
We are Ken,”
it
answered.

Amita considered this.

“
Our names and our voices are gone,”
Ken continued, “
save for those of the
boy whose head you ate. Soon, they, too, will be gone. Until they
are, we are Ken.”

“
You are what spoke to me before.”

“
Yes. We needed time inside you to learn.”

Amita decided she’d enough of lying down. Her
elongated arms curled back and pushed against the pavement, thrusting
her to her feet with surprising strength.

The glass tower building she faced had been the
headquarters of a major bank, though it was no longer possible to
tell which one. Reflective pieces of glass hung limply from their
frames. Inside, something shadowy pulsed.

Amita no longer recognized herself. Her clothing and
hair were gone, though its colors streaked her chitinous frame. Parts
of her face, neck, and torso still looked human, while much of the
rest of her was covered in segmented shells. Her breast-sac’s
tendrils seized her chin in alarm, narrowly avoiding covering the
large gray eye in her mouth. Her
old
eyes were similarly
large, and she was relieved they had not turned to liquid the way
Craig’s had.

“
Craig!”

“
What is Craig?”
asked Ken.

It was a good question
, Amita thought. What was
Craig Marston now? He had been among the first to change, and she
doubted he stopped after she left. Would she even recognize him in
this disintegrating city of impossible beasts?

“
Craig is ... was ... my partner.”

“
Your mate?”

“
Partner,”
Amita
corrected. “
We were going to start a
business, do some software and app work. Make names for ourselves.”

Her invisible passenger was silent for a moment.

“
We ... are Ken,”
he finally replied.

“
Guess we succeeded.”

Amita walked to the bank building, attention fixed on
her reflection. She had never cared much to admire herself in mirrors
before, and did not believe what she felt now could be called
admiration so much as a repulsed fascination. Tiny tendrils sprouted
from her face, neck, and the portions of her not covered by shell.
They floated as if in water. She brushed them with her hand and felt
a tingle. She gave her palm a second look and saw a hole surrounded
by jagged teeth.

“
We were of this before you,”
Ken told her. “
Our memories shape and
harden as you spread through the dimensions.”

Her mouth-eye swiveled, as if she could catch sight of
him. Instead, she saw a portion of the building not covered by glass.
By all rights, there should have been nothing on the other side
besides a lobby, but the room-filling mass before her was wet and
shuddering.

“
We make the hard places soft,”
Ken repeated. “
We eat ... we change ...
we are sustained. It ... is sustained.”

“
It?”

“
What moves above.”

Amita looked up again. She realized something else was
missing.

“
Where’s the moon?”

Ken was silent for a few moments. Amita felt a wave of
unease, as if something was slithering inside her skull, which, for
all she knew, was now possible.

“
The moon has no soft places,”
Ken answered. “
No meat places. It is not
... Goldilocks.”

Amita thought about what that meant. She could feel the
rough edges of sense dawning, but was not sure she wanted to know
more.

The area of asphalt where she had lain was now a hole,
and the partially melted matter of the road poured in. The car that
had been to one side of her was also turning soft, its tires and body
merging with the road.

“
I make the hard places soft,”
she said, more to herself than to Ken.

She pushed off with one foot and was not surprised that
she slowly and steadily ascended. Gravity, like so many other
scientific laws, had gone as soft as the roads and buildings.
Moreover, moving her arms and legs, as though she were swimming, she
could slow her rise. Something older than her was inside her and knew
it to be true; she doubted she wanted to know what it was. She came
to a halt ninety feet up and surveyed what remained of the city.

The Ambassador Bridge drooped into a bubbling and choppy
Detroit River—just as well, as most of the casinos and hotels
on Windsor’s shoreline had slumped against one another. Most
buildings in downtown Detroit had lost their angular appearances,
though only a few—including, she was sad to see, the
terracotta and brick Cadillac Tower—had toppled. Comerica
Park overflowed with vile liquid, on which rode innumerable giant,
semi-transparent maggots. There was only a hole where Ford Field had
been. Amita could just make out a serpentine shape sliding helplessly
down.

Monsters were everywhere, and as far as Amita could
tell, they were everyone. She could not see which still thought, as
she did, and which had succumbed to blind hunger and fury. She did
not know how much longer it would matter.

Above the Detroit Institute for the Arts, an elegant
Italian Renaissance-style building on its way to becoming inelegant
pudding, several large bubbles floated. Amita drifted close and saw
eyes, noses, arms, and other appendages were embedded in the bubble
walls. She ripped a chunk away and consumed it through her palm.

This time, she kept enough control to avoid losing
consciousness. Her left leg quivered, shook, and abruptly lost all
rigidity, though it gained two feet in length and more small, sharp
things than she could count.

“
There wasn’t ... enough mass,”
she mumbled, as she drifted away from the meat bubbles. “
How
...
”

“
Your thinking persists in three dimensions,”
Ken answered, “
though your flesh is in
eleven and knows where to find more. The more you feed, the more you
... unlock.”