Untitled (34 page)

Authors: Unknown Author

BOOK: Untitled

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I was not, however, in the least prepared to see Skeerak standing behind me.

He was back from the dead; and what was worse, he wasn't even mutilated. It was like I'd never even killed him at all, except I was still worn out. He advanced toward me, and I just freaked: next thing I knew, I was winging the table at Rokoko's head and hauling ass.

All the way down the street, with their footsteps close behind me, all I could think about was getting to the Skyrrla. It was the only hope I had, if I had any hope at all. I ran and ran, eyes locked on the door, as if I could will the building closer. When that didn't work, I just ran harder.

A black jellyfsh landed square on my back.

I screamed as the frst slick burning tendrils draped themselves around my neck. The pain was almost electric, as in electric chair. I felt myself starting to fall, and twisted: landing on my back, smashing that fuckwad into jam. I felt my leathers start to fry, and my back came alive with anguish.

But I couldn't stay down, I couldn't stay down, Rokoko and Skeerak were almost upon me; so I rolled to my feet, got back up, kept on running. Almost to the door now. Running up the front stairs.

Then I went through the door, slamming it shut behind me, buying myself a whole second at best as I ran down the hall to the stairs leading up, door exploding behind me, footsteps huge in pursuit. I took the stairs two at a time, the pain mounting as I climbed, unbelievable now. I could feel it eating into my skin, breaking me down like stomach acid. I couldn''t stop to get it off. I couldn't have gotten it off if I tried.

And up I went, past the second foor, the third, the rooftop looming, and all I could think was get to the Skyrrla. Get to the Skyrrla. Even with those monsters on my heels. Even though I was leading them right where they wanted, if in fact they still had any volition of their own.

I had no doubt that they were robots now: self-replicating nightmares, made of nothing but blackness. That blackness was a living thing: subsuming form and hollowing it out. Breaking it down. Destroying it. Killing everything that counted inside.

I had the blackness inside me now, too. It wanted me. It wanted us all. Dead or alive, it didn't matter. It wanted. It wanted. That was all that it knew. That, and the hate that it felt for the life-force: that glorious light, which warms and heals our cells and souls.

I hit the roof, and the Skyrrla called to me. Called out with a surge of brilliance. Begging me to merge with it. Let go. Become One. Become even more than that.

In a fash, I took in the Emerald skyline: saw the jellyfsh swarm through the lightning-wracked sky. I saw Glinda's tower, being hammered by the horrors. I saw winged monkeys fghting them, valiantly dying.

I saw Mikio's face, as he turned toward me. Without blame or hesitation, he assumed the battle stance. His friends, too, were ready, closing ranks, bearing up arms against the monsters on my tail. I fashed them a look as I sped between and past them, tried to single out Mikio for the bulk of my love. But the pain was immense, and my time was almost over. I said goodbye to Mikio with barely a glance.

The Skyrrla was calling. I knelt before it, dropping my axe with a clatter to the foor. The Skyrrla fared. All my hairs stood on end, as did all the nerves within me. The blackness that bore into me was just like ice on a burn now: nothing like pleasure, but suddenly no longer pain.

I remembered what had happened to Mikio's shoe. I wondered where the toe went, when he brought it too close. Wherever it went, I was going there, too.

I put my hands on the Skyrrla. And went into the light.

In less than a second

I
c a m e a p a r t

i n

i n i t e

n f

a n

subatomic

t r

i n g

E
X
P
L
O
S
I
O
N
S

Came a p a r t so completely,

in the
surging emerald fre
,
that every speck
of every speck of me

DIVIDED

without e n d And as
broke

do w

whole universe

I
G
N
I
T
E
D

not
just
merging
with the
green,
but
FUCKING
setting it on
FIRE
.

I had no eyes. I could not see.
But I was not just subsumed.

li
mi

I was an
active
ingredient:

the
my consciousness

nd
neither
lost
nor
sustained
but
ex
pa
nd
e
be
yo
of bone,
meat
and brain.

My body was gone,

e l i u m
H
n
o

g my
self
r
is
i
n

More like a
LASER
.

A
living
LASER
of total
love
.

And
I
do not care
if that sounds corny.

I
can only tell you how it felt.

I
felt myself CHARGED

and AIMED

and

FIRED. Then I felt myself
tear
into the BLACKNESS.

And now

I WAS

the feeding ro

a
one.

and
the

rapp

forced

force
t
ha
t
w

its wa
y
in

took the
weakening
black
weakening
at its source

and
deflowered
devoured

f u n
n e
l e d
d o
w n

at its source by

E
X
P
L
O
S
I
O
N
S
I
f e l t
and embraced it with

LIGHT
fowing

LIGHT

which was

MAKING LIGHT OF THE DARKNESS

ug
h
th
ro
ack

FROM THE FILES OF

GENE SPEILMAN

The blinding, strobing green glow saturated the room now, literally, glomming on to surfaces, absorbing into them. I could see it soaking into the walls, insinuating itself into the cracks in the foor.

My body was still glued to the seat, but the grip Bhjennigh had me in was loosening.

Bhjennigh himself was slumped in front of his shitty computer, facing me, kind of sheepishly grinning at me, like oh well! His face was starting to cave in, like a rotting pumpkin. I don't think he'd noticed yet.

The kudzu that had been attacking my feet was wilting, shriveling slowly.

The fortress rumbled suddenly, and I heard the now-familiar loud booming, and I knew the last satellite dish was history. But this time the rumbling continued, and a rolling motion started, resonating, until the foor and walls rocked terrifyingly back and forth around us.

The fimsy corrugated wall separating us from the containment tank buckled and collapsed, and I could see the tank itself. Now most of the vines had fallen away, and it was seeping something dark, as if it were rusting away. I heard the hissing sound again. But it was louder now, and in it was a high keening squeal, a cry, as of something in great pain.

"Don't pay any attention to that," Bhjennigh demanded, his voice still holding on to that supernatural thunder behind the parched rasp. "Don't pay any attention to that."

"Why?" I asked him, "What's in there? And what happened to your 'friend' all of the sudden?"

"I'm here," the Hollow Man said, in a voice about three octaves

lower, and three miles away, "I'm everywhere..."

Parts of his skin were glitching, like a faulty videotape, fashing static. He looked like he was getting skinnier, turning anorexic before my eyes, time-lapse starvation. I could see past his ribcage in places, see darkness where muscles and organs should be.

"He don't look so good," another raspy voice shouted from the direction of the tank. I looked down on the foor in there. Guttierrez' head was awake, and had shaken itself out of the leather vest. It was staring up at Bhjennigh in disgust.

I could move again, and it didn't look like Bhjennigh (or what was left of him) was going to stop me. I got up unsteadily, fghting against the shaking and rolling of the building. Pieces of the ceiling were raining down on top of the trailer, and a few had punctured it.

I'd been in a few big quakes, and they were nothing compared to what the fortress was doing. I didn't have much time. I staggered over the corrugated wall to where the head was. I had to grab it and get the hell out of there, even if it meant crawling out throught one of the holes where the vines came in.

The head didn't argue with me this time when I crouched down and stuffed it back into the vest. As I got up, I could see that the containment tank was completely porous now, like a coarse wire mesh, or a thick spider web, barely holding what was inside, and that what was leaking out looked alot like blood. The keening scream was louder now, and when I took a step closer, I could see what exactly it was coming from.

There was a person inside—the insides of a person, anyway, without the skin and bones. It was all layed out like a Visible Man model kit, all anatomically correctly placed: organs, brains, eyeballs, veins, arteries and nerves. Here were all the parts that the Hollow Man was missing. And they were screaming.

I almost bashed straight into Nick as I was coming out the front door of the trailer. It's a miracle that he didn't slice me in half with his ax. He was covered with gore. He glanced over dissappointedly at the bag of rotting skin piled in the chair where Bhjennigh used to be, and into the next room at the organs and viscera that had fnally plopped free and were oozing out over the foor, and were still screaming. "COME ON!" I shouted at him, and as I pulled him out the front

door, the ceiling collapsed over our heads.

This is it, I thought, as the boulders fell around us, and I waite
d for one to hit me on the skull and get it over with. But that never happened.

I was covered in green, swimming in green, fying in it. The same stuff that had poured out of the computer screen had taken the walls apart, and now that same stuff was raising us up out of Bhjennigh's basement.

I could see into this plasma, this ethereal substance.

And inside was another world.

Directly in front of me foated a ball of energy, a brighter vibration of the surrounding stuff. It sported a gigantic happy face, and when it saw me, it grinned even wider than it already had been. I got the feeling I knew this big fella. All around it, suspended between the falling rubble, were other creatures of light, but these were different. Majestic. Ancient. They moved from side to side, and as they moved produced a singing vibration in the green.

Off to the side, I could see Nick Chopper foating, staring in wonder at the apparitions. A little further on was my ogre vest, and a little beyond that, Guttierez's head, smiling, tumbling in freefall. And beyond that, Ledelei, still twitching and vibrating a little bit.

I fgured I must be dead. This was too much.

But we foated away from the debris as it crumbled down into the ground, robbed of whatever black vitality had been invested in its substance, and we came to rest on a hill not far from where Ledelei and I had frst entered the fortress. The green faded down slowly, and I could see what was left of the black cloud following the fortress down into the hole in the ground, like a movie of a smoke bomb in reverse, crumbling up the ground beneath it as it dissipated, folding itself into the giant pucker in the earth. Green lightning fashed around it, shepherding the blackness to its doom. Soon nothing was left but the hole.

The green faded, but the other world that had been inside it did not: from horizon to horizon, light creatures foated above Oz, outshining the disc of the sun, which had returned to the afternoon sky.

Three light creatures approached us from the south, rose up over the hillside and foated down to rest in front of us. One was the fa miliar ball of light with the happy face that had greeted me, the other two were changing as I watched, the light component muting out, the vaguely humanoid shapes coalescing into something more familiar.

One of them was Aurora.

She ran over and threw her arms around me, Nick, and even Ledelei in quick succession, hugging and kissing us.

Then the happy light blob approached me, and extended two pseudopods. When they touched me, I was suffused with a euphoria I had only experienced a few times in my life. I don't mean to sound sappy, but it was a feeling of deep love, a feeling that no matter what petty concerns turned me into a supreme sourpuss, they were fyspecks in the wake of eternity, and that I belonged, and I was infnitely important, and infnitely insignifcant, a neuron fring in the depths of God's mind.

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