The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (15 page)

The Harvester reached into a
drum and pulled an albino-skinned right arm from the collection of limbs and
flesh. The trunk, brain, and vitals were in the Inductee drums on its back. New
guts for the Brigades Invalid. The Knitter never got those, not that she wanted
them.

“Sometimes it is best to take
them with minor wounds, but she did not have any at all,” the Harvester said.
It gave the limb to Yvette for her inspection. “No matter. She will be of more
use to us.”

With a snap, a finger came off
and Yvette chewed on it thoughtfully.

“Does this arrangement meet
your satisfaction?” the Harvester asked.

She spat the finger bones out,
noting the odd aftertaste that Knitter crafted meat had in contrast to regular
human meat. She had long since gotten over her issues with how the Limb
Knitters fed themselves.

“Yes,” Yvette said, satisfied
that her lonely days were at an end. “I believe it does.”

I KNOW AN OLD LADY

Nathan Rosen

I know an old lady who misused
a teleportation chamber to merge her genetic structure with that of a fly.
Perhaps she thought the compound eyes were desirable. Her true motives can
never be known, as the replacement of her mouth with a proboscis rendered her
completely incapable of speech. The total extent of the damage done is
indeterminable. Her demise may occur soon.

I know an old lady who misused
a teleportation chamber to merge her genetic structure with that of a spider.
She is now capable of casting a fibrous web from her abdomen. She spends most
of her time in a corner by the ceiling, waiting for prey. It is, frankly,
amazing that she still survives, especially considering the previous damage
done by the fly incident. Her demise may occur soon.

I know an old lady who misused
a teleportation chamber to merge her genetic structure with that of a bird. Two
of her limbs have become feathered wings. Despite already being part spider and
part fly, she still survives. Such a thing is unheard of in the history of
teleportation science. Her demise may occur soon.

I know an old lady who misused
a teleportation chamber to merge her genetic structure with that of a cat. She
now possesses fur and retractable claws. Her ears swivel to pick up even the
slightest sound. Nobody can comprehend why she is still alive, yet she survives
as a being in roughly equal proportions: cat, bird, spider, fly and human. Her
demise will surely occur soon.

I know an old lady who misused
a teleportation chamber to merge her genetic structure with that of a dog. Her
sense of smell must be unparalleled. She appears to be happy, if the wagging of
her tail is any indication. Dog, cat, bird, spider and fly. We’re starting to
take bets on how far this can go. Her demise will surely occur soon.

I know an old lady who misused
a teleportation chamber to merge her genetic structure with that of a goat. She
has horns now. This is getting ridiculous. Goat, dog, cat, bird, spider, fly!
Her demise will surely occur soon.

I know an old lady who misused
a teleportation chamber to merge her genetic structure with that of a horse.

She’s dead, of course.

Blakenjel

Lavie Tidhar

1. A Stenchtown Tale

Blakenjel bilong mi
is black like unlit coal. His open wings are like smokers’ lungs. His skin is
taut and fine like expensive vellum that was blackened in flames. There are
many blakenjels, but only one bilong mi. I follow him in the darkness.

“Smell this!”

“Sniff my hair!”

“Taste my breath;
it’s fresh; it’s fresh!”

“Remember ice cream?
Oranges? Soap? Authentically guaranteed, the smell like you remember!”

But there is not
much call for that.

“Sniff my armpits!
Real human sweat!”

“Toes! Toes! Inhale
the smell!”

And further down the
road of Stenchtown, away from the fake smells of oranges and soap, where the
great unwashed line the road and put the merchandise on display. At the far
end, one white boy almost naked but for a thong. Angelic-looking, almost
hairless, fine blond hairs that lie like newborn wheat along the pale contours
of his body.

The sniffer comes
close to the boy. He wears a dark coat, too hot for this city, this place. His
eyes are hooded. The boy smiles. “Smell my crotch?” he offers. The sniffer
looks and doesn’t speak. The boy shifts in place and tries again. “Armpits?
Hair?” the usual routine. The sniffer doesn’t speak, and the boy’s smile
suddenly grows wider. “Sniff my ass?” he whispers, and there is something
unspeakably lewd about the way he stands. “Stick your nose deep inside my
asshole, let the nostrils touch the brown ring?”

The sniffer twitches
in place, and the boy smiles like a predator. “I just had a shit half-an-hour
ago,” he confides. “Not wiped, either. Soon as I saw you I could tell you were
a connoisseur.”

The sniffer comes
closer. His voice is like rusted blades being scraped. “How much?” he says.

“Thirty.”

“Ten...”

“Twenty-five and you
can stick your tongue in there, too.”

“Fifteen—” The
sniffer doesn’t quite finish the sentiment. His body twitches and his face,
which was sheathed in the darkness of the street, becomes visible. The boy
steps back, but there is only the wall behind him. He says, softly, “Shit,” and
for once it isn’t sales-talk.

It’s fear.

The sniffer smiles.
His face is a horrid, writhing mass of unquiet flesh. His eyes are large and
round and inhuman, clear and strangely innocent in that ravaged face. He has no
nose, but two slits for nostrils gape out of the moving, worm-like scars.
“Smell...good...” the sniffer says. His mouth is a jagged line filled with
small sharp teeth like a predator-fish.

“I...I don’t do
f...fear,” the boy says. “Go somewhere else!” But of course he knows it is too
late, that he made a bad mistake, and you are not allowed mistakes in this
place, this time. The boy whispers, “Open Sore.”

The sniffer raises
his arm. His hand extends and grabs the boy’s throat with ease. His nails are
claws, long and black and foul. The boy chokes. The smell of shit fills the
air, free, and the sniffer’s mouth opens in what may be a smile. A red
worm-like tongue protrudes and searches the air.

“P...please,” the
boy says, but quietly. “Don’t.”

The other hand
reaches for the boy’s crotch. Pulls aside the narrow thong. The boy quivers but
remains silent. Perhaps he thinks that this is how it ends—with fear alone, and
not with death. But of course that is only delusion. The swamp-thing will kill
him when it is done. And so the boy does the only thing he can think of, and in
his fear he prays, and so he says, almost inaudibly:

“Blakenjel.
Blakenjel bilong mi.”

In the darkness
something moves and halts. Fine leathery wings beat once and are still. The
blakenjel listens. It is hard to tell what he does next. I cannot see in the
darkness, only guess. There are no distances in the darkness.

The sniffer’s face
comes close to the boy’s. The naked nostrils open and close like air-vents. The
red-worm tongue quests along the boy’s skin. The sniffer shudders. So— although
for a very different reason—does the boy.

Suddenly the
sniffer’s head is jerked back. His eyes stare at the boy, a few inches away,
eyes clear and blue, the way the sky once was. Slowly, there is a strange,
soft,
sucking
sound.

The sniffer’s left
eye disappears inside its socket. There is a wet-red tunnel through his skull.
The eye is like a false opening at its end. The eye moves away like a
locomotive through his brain. The sniffer tries to scream, perhaps, but the
only sound coming from his mouth is the sound of loose nails falling. His hand
lets go of the boy’s crotch. The boy feels wetness running down his legs. The
sniffer’s other eye disappears with a quiet
plop
. An eyeless thing
stares at the boy, no longer seeing. Then the sniffer falls to his knees.

Behind him there is
only darkness. The boy shakes but manages to bow his head. There is a price to
pay, there always is, but every time it’s different.

In the darkness I
can suddenly
smell
him, my blakenjel. He has acquired smell. His smell
is not pleasant, although it can be intoxicating. It is the smell of fear. My
blakenjel flies through the darkness, and I follow his scent.

2. The Grisly Growths of
Gristown

There
is a scentless boy whose name is Dak who, having lost his path like all the
other scentless boys and girls, now works in a Gristown ho
tel.

Stenchtown lies in a
row of crumbling brick houses on top of the hill. Down from it is the sea,
black and toxic, where the fishermer hunt by the light of poisoned algae. Away
from it, the great mountains rise where, so it is said, the blakenjels go to
lay their great obsidian eggs, as hard as diamonds. Between town and hill lies
the vast corrupt forest. Things live there: they call them Open Sores. To the
west are the swamps where the Open Sores collect like poisoned water dripping
down a drain: do not go there. To the east lie other towns, other lost suburbs,
the squalid dwelling places of the human-born: Gaslight and Tooth-bridge,
Cancer Ward and Golgotha, Smokers Hill—and then there is Gristown.

The boy, Dak, having
lost his trade, took gainful employment in Gristown.

Gristown! The things
that live in Gristown, it is said, were human once. Dak does not believe it. A
race of alien deep-sea life-forms, others say. Who rose from the depths and
took to the land when the great darkness came. Dak does not believe that
either. They are slumbering gods, others say, but quietly. It is humanity’s
duty to ensure they do not awake. And some say they are mutated nano-goo, which
is the same as saying gobbledygook.

Those who smell
human dare not go to Gristown. The Grisly Growths are always hungry. The scent
of meat drives them mad with lust. To feed them, the fishermer provide a steady
stream of ocean-spawn, and the scentless boys and girls feed them to the pits, and
the 0wnerz grow rich while the cycle of economics is maintained. For the
Growths can pay.

Dak works in
Pit-Stop Namba Six. He has no name in Gristown. Here he is nambafaef. The
others, all more senior, are nambafo, nambatri, nambatu and nambawan. They speak
the pidgin of this place, this time. Nambawan is shift-boss. She is a girl,
with light-black skin, and deep blue eyes, and gold ear-rings. Outside her name
is Naet.

Dak follows Naet on
the perimeter of the pit. The Growths pulse below, great masses of organic
grief, hungry cancers, shapeless. Dak is tugging a cart. On it are heaped the
dead corpses of sea-creatures, poison and evil-smelling, things with fins and
things with tentacles and things with eyes like bunches of grapes hanging
upside down.

“Sakem,” Naet says,
and nambafaef obediently chucks the chunks of rotting meat into the pit. As he
comes too close to the edge he totters and almost falls.

“Lukaot,” nambawan
says. “Ples is gris.”

Then she sniggers.
Dak smiles. It’s an old Gristown joke and has never been particularly funny.
“You ever lose anyone down here?” he asks.

“About once a
month.”

He stares down at
the pulsing mass beneath. Pseudopodia rise from the shifting masses and stare
up mournfully. The meat Dak threw ebbs on top of the green-brown mass. Then the
feeding begins.

The Growths
absorb
their food. Dak watches as the slimy masses begin to glow and the rotten
poisoned meat is sucked inside them, losing colour, losing
definition
as
it disintegrates into the blobs. Today is a good day. Feeding from above. But
on bad days, Dak and the rest are sent down,
into
the pits, and they
have to clean the blobs, massage them, soothe them. They should be in no
danger, they are told. Scentless, they are of no interest to the Growths. So
they say, but Dak doesn’t believe it, and neither do the others. There have
been...accidents. Too many of the workers in the pits are missing fingers,
hands, patches of skin. Some have lost eyebrows, teeth. They say you don’t quit
working the pits: you merely lose your definition slowly, ebb away, until one
day you are simply not there any more.

“What are you doing
tonight?” Dak asks, and Naet grins and says, “Why, what do you have in mind,
nambafaef?”

Dak blushes. Naet
has that effect on him. He says, “Would you like to—” and Naet says, “Sure, why
not.”

“Oraet,” Dak says.
“Oraet.” For a moment they grin at each other. The Growths pulse below.

I follow the
blakenjel through the darkness as I always do. He has long lost his human
scent. While he still had it, I had the sense, in the middle of the dark, that
he had met another. Perhaps the human smell attracted him. I got the sense of
leathery bodies meeting, of wings rubbing against wings. But perhaps I merely
imagined it. I cannot see in the dark. When it was over I could no longer smell
my blakenjel, but I could still follow him. There is no Darktown. The darkness
is not a city; it is a living thing.