Allan
Allan Merwyn absolutely despised the district known as floating
city, that twenty mile strip of wreckage home to every rat and rat bastard in
Jameson. It was constructed ten years ago in the hope it would become a thriving
residential community. Right from the start it was a mess, the lower income
properties were snatched up right away, but the posh and palatial penthouses on
the south side sat unused. The company lost billions on the project and folded,
effectively leaving the floating city in the hands of the Jameson local union,
and that meant the city had been left completely unattended for much of those
subsequent years. Cops only go down into the floating city when they really
need to; if you get in trouble there, you're on your own. The gangs ruled this
part of town, and the central office was content to let it remain that way, so
long as the violence doesn't spill out of that area. And so far, we'd been
lucky. It hadn't.
The meeting with Moyhne had left him all the more puzzled. He
wasn't ready to believe the inspector was his ally, but there was a chance he
could work with him in the future. But he wasn't sure he even wanted to,
Moyhne's words left a sour taste behind that hung around him like a fog. It was
that mixture of superiority and candidness that gave the impression he was
saying "they're all my cases," at least as far as Alan was concerned.
He could stomach the condescension.
As he drove from their meeting, toward the dim lights of floating
city, he began to cheer up. It's not all so bad, he thought, in fact this is a
very big case now, and it could definitely mean a promotion and an office with
a little secretary. He popped a few Apaxafil and smiled: ill see better days
yet, he thought, it can't all be murders and drug deals and child prostitution
circuits. You had to know when to pull your punches, shut your mouth, and let
the big shots talk their big talk. It's all bullshit anyway; you just nod your
head, say "yes sir," and go do it your own way. The brass? They just
want results and clean hands. These were things he had learned during his
service, a little grease here, a little bribe there, a kind smile and a “how do
you do?" It all went along way; people really fell for that shit. They
just wanted to be loved, adored, appreciated, and noticed in any small way. You
give that to them, and they turn to butter in your hands.
The city unfolded below him, like a sprawling metal choking vine,
crawling and creeping and reaching out from its central hub, piles of rubble,
glass and stone and metal and brick and concrete, cut, scarred, jagged,
twisting forever upwards as if to claw and the sun and sky and her very
heavens. This was where the bombs had fallen; hundreds of them. They crushed
the glorious "sky scraping" buildings of his ancestors, brought them
down to lie upon the earth, these massive, phallic towers, the symbols of their
past glory, cast to the dirt and ground, forever to lie as reminders of the
cost of such deviance. The new way, the path, told different. The way to
happiness was through the future not the past, and these golden dreams were
honorable heresy. Such decadence was the folly of men, it was hubris.
The worst of the war was miles and miles away from here, the major
cities like New York and Chicago and London were gone, in the sense that no one
who went in there had much luck getting out. They were overrun with wild men
and women and children, feral and violent, with great red eyes and a penchant
for the eating of live creatures, including their own kind. New York was the
worst, and in fact the name New York was just a distant memory now. They just
called it The Zoo, but the name belied the terrible nature within. The city
itself was now mainly contained on the south west end of Long Island, where it
was said there had formed a sort of tribal government based on sacrifice, as
most of the north end of long island and the surrounding Burroughs were leveled
flat by the bombing. The tribes of the Zoo had put up walls crafted from the
burnt out cars and buses and trucks and scraps of metal, and shone in red the
carcasses of enemies left flayed and dying upon the jagged metal walls. The
heads were removed once the victim had stopped their futile squirming, and then
mounted on pikes or steaks of jagged glass or steel swords hewn from metal
shards. The city was surrounded by this gruesome ring, a warning to outsiders
that to trifle with the tribes of the Zoo is a dance with death. This world was
falling apart.
Even the damn squids couldn't take the Zoo, and honestly, they had
pretty much given up after the last failure of an excursion. Alan's sponsor for
citizenship, a bright red colored (he dyed his skin) squid captain named Philb,
had told him that the people of the Zoo were so far gone that all rehabilitation
attempts had been unsuccessful. Philb liked to speak about humans, he found
them disgusting yet highly amusing and also strangely attractive, and he told
Alan as he hovered in the air above his desk, tentacle to his chin, lost in
thought.
"I...think I may want to..." He had stopped and cast
Alan a glare, "no, nothing, let’s move on."
Philb liked to invite Alan over to his palatial manse overlooking
the Riviera, and they would eat squid dishes and sip on Saltwater extract and
avocado ale as Philb would orate on the values of the Higgson Folwervom Water
Reunification process, or the mountain expeditions made by Cannerous Flavius on
the Red Planet, or the proper way to flat a giant cockroach. Philb would go on
and on with his horrid sciences, and Alan would watch and wonder why he wanted
to become a citizen in the first place. Philb was a messoterrorist and a
brutalist; he found deep pleasure in squishing human children's heads between
his tentacles like soggy bits of rotted fruit. He, like many of the squids,
freely and openly worshipped Ctuhulu and other death gods, meeting in secret,
entombed and wearing black, nodded robes beneath the Bowery where they would
cast incantations and sing their prayers to the squid god and make sacrifice of
the unworthy, humans and squids. They would encircle their victims, chanting
their psalms and curses, in their pointed hoods and flowing capes, the very
essence of death. What followed the ruckus was pure evil, a violent bout of
supreme debauchery, a pool of spent flesh and bare bone and blood and piss and
shit their altar, as they waded, too drunk with delight to use their magic’s
and float above, swimming merrily in the bowels of their own self-made hell.
Accepted humans, even full citizens, were not permitted to view the holy
sacraments, but Philb had gladly described each act of terror and sodomy in
such grave detail, and with considerable vigor, such as Alan felt he had been
watching from the side lines all along.
Philb was, as well as extremely powerful in the local Congress, also
extraordinarily rich, courting a salary of Seventeen Hundred Thousand Pounds a
month from the Official State Science and Weapons Research Department and
another Seven thousand pounds a month from his side job as Television
personality for the News Network. He did a day time (which was like night for
the squids) chat show on Science and Weapons with his good friend and bitter
rival, the unceremonious Captain of Seventh Division, Lesser Lord 1st Class
Kelb, a vicious and insane squid scientist who apparently, and according to
Philb, had lost all those many missing human specimens and assistants by
swallowing them into his gullet. Philb and Kelb hated each other, according to
Philb, but the show was so important to the "furtherment and pronunciation
of our glorious applied and unapplied sciences," that they refused to give
in to one or the other. The more Alan thought about those two, and more
specifically what they talked about on their show, made him feel nauseous.
Alan rolled onto the I-68 and took another big pink pill,
crunching it up in his teeth and swallowing the bitter sugars within. Moyhne
didn't know what he was talking about, but Alan wasn't going to let that stop
him. He looked over the data discs again, each one a photo of the intended
crime scene, each one with this superimposed baseball glove lying somewhere in
the vicinity. They were digital images, like photographs, but made in three
dimensions so the viewer had the feeling of walking around in the photo itself.
He walked to the bench, in some dark alleyway, and picked up the glove to
examine it more thoroughly. The words inside were dark purple, and ran with the
gravity like wet paint toward the edge. "I thought what I'd do
was..." He set the vehicle to auto pilot, and sat back in his chair.
"Next," he said and suddenly he was transported to a
dingy hotel room somewhere in town, with the same mitt, same words, same
feeling. He looked through twenty or thirty, same. Alley ways, motel rooms,
dive bars, each one a nearly perfect replica of the last. Each one a replica.
He furrowed his brow; there was pattern there somewhere though, he thought, or
the inspector general wouldn't have given him the assignment, and Moyhne had
showed such interest in Alan...
"Next," he said, another dingy room in a slum, another
mitt, but this time when he picked it up and looked at the message within,
there was something odd; it was blank. No words at all, just a plain lefty
catcher’s mitt like all the rest. He turned it over, but it was completely
blank and completely mundane.
"Another goddamn mystery," he muttered, making note of
this particular slide, "what does this mean?" He put the glove back
down from where it came and looked around the room. An anomaly? A glitch in the
system, or something much worse. An omen. A back door. A relay.
"Next," he said, and before he got very far in the next
slide, which took place in a liquor depository, he found this nagging tug at
his very being, and he flipped back to the last slide.
"Back," he said. There it was, it was plain as day now.
As he stood in the front hallway of the tiny apartment, he could see from the
out the windows the glorious land scape of the city, the real city, his city,
except it wasn't his city, or rather, his city wasn't that anymore. Out the
window he could see the Wilkes Building, proud and tall, all gleaming metal
beauty, silhouetted against the southern sky. And behind it, the Bullinore
Building, and Clarendon Industrial Tower, and the Torches of Albion wall, and
the sepuchuler of Cain. These buildings, however beautiful and however proud,
were no longer standing in his time; bombarded and destroyed during the last
war. Or the one before it. This place wasn't a memory, it was a dream. It was
an imposter, a fake. He looked back at the glove. It was a lefty catcher’s
mitt. And so was this memory. It was a set up. He had to get out of there; he
had to get out of that room.
"Abort," he said, but instead of the sensation of
disconnection along with its pleasant "whooshing" noise, nothing
happened. The room was still there. He was still in the room. His thoughts grew
short as panic began to set in, and he rushed around the room in a fever,
clawing at the walls for his escape.
"What the hell is this? Abort!" he turned and caught a
shadow moving across the wall. There was another presence there; he could feel
it, eyes watching him, burning into his head. He was not alone here.
"Can you hear me, Elena?" He almost never invoked the
"name" of his computerized cybernetic assistant system; it felt like
giving humanity to something in humane. "Abort! Exit!" There was no
response. He spun around, pulling his firearm, which was there, but he knew
wasn't real, and fired. Nothing happened. He looked at his hands and they were
empty. He had felt something, right behind him, close enough to feel its
breath, but when he turned again, he was still alone.
"What the fuck am I going to do?"
Then he saw him; it. A shadow, deep and black and empty, standing
far off in the corner of Allan's mind. The presence, hounding him, hunting him,
watching from the spiraling darkness, waiting to strike. Allan felt his brain
split, a headache with the full explosive power of a throttling engine, and he
yelped in pain, and fell with a thud to his knees, his hands grasping the sides
of his head as if to keep it from breaking in two.
"Abort!" He hollered, but there was no answer, no
action. He was trapped like a rat inside a fragment of memory as his real body,
not to mention his vehicle raced toward what could best be described as the
rough part of town, and the last thing that was welcome there was a cop. He was
a sitting duck, and the gathered vultures would not balk at opportunity. He
would be dead before his ass could hit the ground.
"Fuck," he stumbled through the pixelated frame of an
end table, "abort!"
The vomit filled his mouth, mixed with blood. If it truly wasn't
real, then it was a perfect fake, because it felt more real to him than
anything he had ever experienced. He moved with the speed of a lummox to the
window and tried to cast it open, but it was fused shut. He smashed his hands
against the glass, as his head spun and swam, but it would not give. The vomit
then exited his mouth, and it was cold and sour, his eyes filling with tears,
the absolute searing pain raped his senses a dulled his mind. He fell down to
his knees and let it come, spilling out of him like some cooked molasses, thick
with spit and mucus. He reached out, felt his hands searching the end table
next to him through the misty veil of tears. Then he grasped at it, pushing
himself up to his feet with a vigor he had not long felt. I'm not ready to give
in, he thought; you'll have to do way better than that. He raised the table up
over his head, and with a thunderous crash, lofted it through the window. What
followed was without explanation, at least, without logical explanation.
There was a mighty gust of wind, not unlike a hurricane, that
sucked from the room all but its color. Allan felt the sensation of floating,
lifting from the earth, or perhaps the floor below him was falling. No, it
wasn't the floor, it wasn't the building, and it was reality. Everything was
falling, fading to pure white, leaving him suspended in the nothingness, a rag
doll left to the will of the dream. Or the dreamer. Outside the window, as the
world fell away, Allan could feel the dark presence, leering from his secret
perch.
"Come get me," he said, "I am waiting for
you," he closed his eyes, "show yourself to me, I am ready to
see," he was drifting, his body a weightless vessel aloft a silent sea of
forged memories. Then the world fell, he was falling now too, collapsing into
itself, as he transcended into another dream.
