He wanted to pound his friend’s chest. He wanted to rip his own open. He wanted to claw out his heart and pack snow inside. Anything to fill the gaping, burning, crushing void he’d created there.
Deep down, something yelled at him to undo it, to bring his friend back. It wrestled aside the angry beast that had taken him over, giving him instructions on CPR, telling him it wasn’t too late. But before he could think to begin, the door burst open, filling the room with harsh light and forcing him to bring his goggles back down.
Cole turned and saw that his inhuman screams had summoned men dressed up as animals. And something odd seized him. That beast within took over, and Cole fell into a dream-like state untouched by time, a nightmare of slow and fast in which he was but a passenger riding along inside someone else’s skull. He felt a body around him, but it wasn’t his. That body jumped up, taking him along with it, elevating his view. He watched the body’s fists fly at a face.
You aren’t supposed to punch that hard, he felt like telling the body, but the arms kept going straight out, impacting a skull, trying to punch straight through it.
Blood splattered and leaked out from between the strips of fur cover-ing the man’s face; Cole watched the mangled hand hit again, knowing it was broken. Not knowing it was his.
The other man swung his arms as if he held an invisible bat. The person Cole occupied—whose brain he resided in—seemed to jump back reflexively. The torso of the man with the bleeding face flew apart, his insides spilling out like red ropes soaked in oil.
The nightmare slowed down even further as the opened man collap-sed, and Cole’s bodily vehicle slipped in the mess. The man with the invisible bat swung again, his black goggles seeming to pop with rage.
Cole felt himself duck inside the skull, willing the man he was occupy-ing to get low. They crashed down as one, and the invisible blade made a noise above. He watched as two arms—arms he should recognize as his own—scrambled ahead, swimming through the blood and mess on the decking, trying to reach the dangerous man with the invisible blade.
The broken hand reached out and clutched the opened man’s torso, grabbing his lifeless furs and pulling forward. Somehow, Cole could feel the vehicle’s legs pushing and slipping in the blood; they propelled the scene ahead, lurching for the man with the goggles whose brow hinted at wild, unseen eyes.
A hand grabbed the swordsman’s thigh. Cole watched, completely detached, as it yanked the man down, the slick blood assisting as it spread out beneath them. The man’s arms wind-milled, swinging for balance. He landed in a heap, then brought the invisible blade up, preparing to swing. Cole watched other hands—hands he barely recognized as his own—grab the man’s arms and wrestle them down. He admired the way the good hand pinned the man’s wrist while the mangled hand went to work on his face. That hand was no good as anything but a club, anyway. He wondered what it would feel like to own a hand destroyed like that. What the sensation might be like to ball crushed bone into something resembling a fist and throw it, as hard as one could, into a solid thing. Over and over.
He wondered how that would feel, because he couldn’t know. He watched the scene for a little while, the horror slowly speeding up to real-time before he grew bored of it. The striking stopped.
Cole couldn’t even tell what the hand had been hitting. Below him lay a red mess, the orb of one eye dangling from a bundle of nerves. It hung out of something misshapen and leaking. And what had been a crushed hand, now looked like ground-up meat. Splinters of white bone stuck out where knuckles once were, all of it dripping with blood.
The person he was riding inside staggered to its feet, legs wobbly and shaking. It moved toward the light, toward the rectangle of air filled with sparkling flakes that rode on the wind. Unable to do anything but watch, Cole rode along as the person left the small room, taking him out as well, out into a world full of silent fighting.
Men were everywhere, men and aliens, fighting in clusters. It all had the sloppiness of a dream as people split in two and some seemed to disappear altogether. Cole watched the legs beneath him march away from it all, moving toward the edge of the deck where more light and sparks of whiteness—miniature angels—danced and beckoned, offering a calm, seductive reprieve.
When several men came running after him, after the body he was in, Cole hardly noticed the legs beneath him begin to kick. To Run. He jounced around inside the skull—confused trapped and alone—riding along and screaming for everything to stop.
The men gave chase, swishing the air with nothingness. Cole could only see them when the head he was huddled inside turned around. Mostly, though, it looked forward, giving him a view of the approaching rail. But he was more concerned about the men, having seen what those blades could do. The body ran—the railing was so near—yet the legs beneath him continued to churn across the frosted deck.
He felt trapped, a little creature in someone’s head. He imagined his tiny arms and legs stretched out, pressing on the walls of the skull, straining to hold himself in place. He wanted to steer away from the rail, away from the edge of the metal deck, but the thing he rode inside sprinted on. He could feel the blades whiz behind him as they threaten to spill him out of the skull and onto the decking.
The body hit the rail at full speed. It bent in half at the waist, tumbling over. The head holding Cole became inverted. He had a brief glimpse of the snowy ground rushing past—far, far below. He grabbed at the controls for the arms, urging them to do his bidding. The nightmare slowed, proceeding at a crawl, each moment drip, drip, dripping.
Then: a hand gripping. Gripping the rail. Both hands now, clutching the metal bar, stopping his plummet. One of them was whole, the other a disgusting mess. Above, several men gathered, their pants and gasps puffing out like smoke. They looked down over the rail, black goggles wrapped with fur. Cole watched from his prison as they scrambled for the arms, trying to pull the body back into the nightmare.
The view turned, forcing Cole to look back down at the ground, at the inhospitable wasteland of snow racing by. When the view returned to the rail, the hands were leaving the arms, one man pushing the others away.
Cole recognized him, recognized the blonde hair and small goggles.
Joshua.
Joshua smiled, almost as if he could see Cole through the goggles, could see inside the body’s skull where he was cowering, confused and afraid.
Joshua held something over the rail: a wooden stick, hanging from another wooden stick.
Cole froze. He leaned closer to the inside of the body’s eyes; he pressed his palms against the pupils and peered out, staring at the familiar device.
Joshua swung the invisible thread right at him—right at the skull he’d receded into. Cole screamed at the hands to let go, at the arms to come up and block the blow.
The good arm still had enough fear in it to obey, but the mangled one did not. One hand let go, coming up in front of the skull to protect him; the ruined hand somehow kept its grip. Cole braced himself as the body he was in rotated on the single grasp of that bloody, pulped hand. He watched as the invisible thread flew past, seeming to miss everything.
But then, he started falling away. He fell into the sinking embrace of open air even though one arm remained fastened to the rail—remained there, frozen in the shape of a claw.
Cole stared at it from within the head, watched it slide away from the body along a neat line of red separation.
My body, Cole thought.
This is me.
That arm, still grasping the railing, he finally understood it to be a part of him. He came to the realization moments after it was no longer true.
His good arm waved in the wisps of snow, but he focused on the other one. He watched the dismembered limb as he fell away from it, watched it remain up high, dripping blood through the whizzing white. The arm became smaller, a tiny piece of meat stuck to the side of the ship, as he fell away, down to the snowy drifts below.
Air roared past his ears. Accelerating. Stomach rising with the speed. He landed with a pained crunch, a thump of lifeless heft. His body smashed through the hard, frozen exterior of the snow and drove down, deep down into the soft wetness.
The cold seeped into his bones immediately. Cole lifted his head. He pushed up with one arm to get his face out of the moisture, away from the tight hole he’d created. He wiggled back and forth, yelling at the pain and horror of it all, the frustration of not being able to move, of being wrapped in the freezing embrace.
His right arm came free. He looked down at it, saw how the limb ended in the middle of his bicep. Blood arced out in spurts, melting red canyons into the wall of white before him.
Cole fought to free his other hand from the clutches of the packed snow. He yelled and yanked it free, grabbed a handful of snow and pushed it against the wound. The raw, exposed nerves burned with pain beyond compare. He could hear himself screaming, could feel the white world around him growing dark. He struggled against the dying sensation, kicked at the brutality of it all, shook with rage at the approaching blackness squeezing in around him . . .
Cole collapsed forward. His eyes rolled up behind his lids, and his face fell into the cold and wet.
25
A cylindrical column of blood marched out of Molly’s arm and snaked through the twisted tube attached to the needle. Molly felt faint from watching it leave her body; she could feel her pulse shoving against her temples. She shook her head and pushed at the rag with her tongue, trying to find room to breathe. Beside her, the large man prepared a row of empty bags, hanging them one at a time from the side of her table.
One of the other men in the room told another joke, and everyone laughed. The man over Molly slapped her table with his hand, then wiped his eyes. The sight of his yellowish teeth, his mouth pulled back in a smile, his apron covered in blood—the banality of it all made her realize: the end of her would come right there on that table. No re-morse. No heroics. Nothing special. She just stepped into a dark alley, and was gone. Soon to be a few bags of votes vibrating with punch lines.
She laid her head back and concentrated on her heartbeat, on slowing down the thumps against her temples, if for no other reason than to be resistant. She breathed slowly through her nose and focused on the gradual rise and fall of her chest against the tight restraints—
Another quip from someone and the room rocked with more laughter.
Another bag was hung.
“Aren’t you hurt?” Walter asked Cat as he followed her outside.
“I wish,” she said, speaking over her shoulder as Walter scrambled to catch up. “It’s a cinch to pick a fight in a new town, but then folks catch on. Soon as they reckon you’re looking for it, they ain’t so game. Eventually you gotta start paying ’em, or hanging out with sickos. Before long, you move on. You move on long enough, and you’re going in circles, know what I mean?” She stopped at the alley and peered down it, squinting at the darkness like it had done something wrong.
“This the last place you saw her?”
“At the far end,” Walter said, pointing down the crack between the two buildings. “Sshe ran around the corner like sshe wass chassing you.”
Cat looked down the street at the front of the elections office, then back down the alley. “You don’t reckon she went back to the ship, do you?”
Walter shook his head. “No way. There’ss bad people on the sship and we’ve been trying to find you for agess.” Walter felt for the Wadi, made sure it was still there. “I heard sscreaming when I came around the corner. Thought it came from one of the doorss. I banged on both, and a guy told me to get losst.”
“From that building?” Cat asked.
“No, from the bar. Nobody ansswered from there.” He nodded at the other place.
“Let’s go ask,” Cat said, marching toward the entrance of the place. “I know one of the guys that works here. Throws a helluva right cross.”
“Paulie! Somebody here to see you.”
Molly watched the man leaning over her look up to the far end of the room.
“Tell ’em I’m busy,” the guy said.
“It’s that Callite chick from the bar. She looks pretty rough, man.”
“Aw, hell.” The guy left the second bag to fill and took off his apron; he casually tossed it across Molly’s chest as if she were a part of the fur-niture. “I got no time for her bullshit tonight,” he grumbled.
Molly tried to ignore the commotion and concentrate on her pulse—on the long, steady breaths she pulled in through her nose. She turned her head to the side and relaxed her muscles, no longer fighting against the restraints. The other guy, the one who had held her legs, was filling close to his tenth bag. The person giving the blood had stopped thrashing a while ago, their moans slowly drifting off as if to sleep.
Molly’s procedure was definitely going slower. She tried to make each breath, each slow filling and exhalation as gradual as possible. She pretended the tangy metallic taste in her mouth was her own precious blood reentering her body, filling her back up. The illusion was enough to keep her from gagging, allowing her to slow her metabolism down to a crawl.
She was going to go out on her own terms, she decided. Not thrashing and speeding the inevitable up, but going with a calm and peaceful mind.
It’ll be a bonus if it irks these bastards, she thought to herself.
Walter picked up one of the election brochures and studied it while he and Cat waited. “Wasste of time,” he hissed to himself. He knew Molly better than anyone. Anyone still alive, anyway. Why would she come to a place like this? She hated voting.
The Wadi twisted and struggled inside his flightsuit, which made him suddenly annoyed at Molly for running off and leaving him with the stupid animal. You weren’t supposed to catch the creatures; you were supposed to kill them. Any real Drenard knows that. Besides, the thing had been eating so much food over the past weeks, it was beginning to cut into the money he’d bartered for back in Darrin. Hell, it had already eaten the money he’d made that day—and literally!