Life After Arrowhead

                We all remember the world that was. Things like Reagan, New Coke, Walkman, the Ayatollah: all legends. The stories are meaningless, but we hang onto them, clutching them in the cold whispering night. I can taste the mist even, through my duct-tape seals: it has a tangy, metallic flavor that’s vaguely artificial. Someday it will fill my lungs completely, and oh, what a relief that’ll be. Because then the fear will be done with.

                I was a little girl, back when it happened. I’ll never forget the blood, the panic: hunched behind glass, we waited. So much screaming. But that’s over, and I have a purpose now. I’m a runner, a courier between the pockets of humanity that huddle in sealed-off factories and rubberized basements, in the tops of skyscrapers where only the flying things can get you.

                My name is Lupita.

                There’s barely any uppers, in the grocery stores and pharmacies. Decades of scavenging have picked those places clean. Spiders with the faces of men live there now; they've webbed up the leftovers. Good luck getting through that silk; your hands will burn off, and then how will you play your vinyls? So I make my first run of the day without the bennies or caffeine or methamphetamine pounding through my skull, hammering at my heart. I run clean, without a buzz. Maybe it’s for the best: there’s less fear, like this. The anxiety comes from real things.

                My Hazmat suit is patched in a dozen places; it’s a kaleidoscope of color, but they don’t see color, so I’m okay. One of these days, the seals are going to break, and I'll be dinner. I often wonder what’ll get me: whom among the scuttlers and flyers and pre-Cambrian rippers of flesh will do the honors. Some of them have acid venom; others just tear you limb from limb. I’d prefer to get stepped on by a Big One, if I’m honest, or  just fall in a sinkhole. Those deaths are quick, simple. Maybe even fun, if you’re zonked out on blues or reds.

                I wake up in the elementary school. Walls etched with chalk, kerosene lamp glowing. It’s a sturdy place, a leftover of brutalism that’s survived into the aughts, although its students haven’t. They’re still there, mummified little bodies webbed up in classrooms or scattered in the halls. I live in the maintenance shed, attached to the main building by one flimsy door. I open this door and pass by the bodies, like I do every day. I’ve never dreamed of cleaned them up. They’re my friends, Gap Tooth and No Face and Stripped Skin. Besides, moving them would risk attracting attention, releasing old scents that make my neighbors anxious. Excited.

                I sprint down the hall, the mist oozing over the visor of my suit. It’s thinner in here—thinny, you might say. I have a machete today, and that’ll do. Ran out of bullets years ago.

                God, I’m hungry.

                It’s like a dream, hammering down these old tiles and into the street, past the yellow buses with their flat decaying tires and rictus skeins of old mucus. The sky is gone, hidden in gray. The fog coats everything, turning objects into specters that hang half-hidden and lurch from the white as I approach.

It’s quiet. Particles of something unpleasant float, bouncing off the thin plastic of my suit’s visor. Spores, maybe, or a new breed of killer unleashed by Arrowhead. Evolution works fast, on the other side: things come through that were bred in weeks, days, to become perfect killers. Heard a guy say once he’d seen the portal, and it’s nothing but darkness over there, deep todash. I wouldn’t mind that.

                At least in the darkness, you can’t see what’s eating you alive.

                A big scuttler goes by, not fifteen feet away. I freeze; the little ones are blind, but the big ones are clever, smarter than the ‘average bear,’ if you kennit. This one's pretty dumb; its feelers play over my suit, and it gives me a nudge with its pincers, just to see if I’ll run. If I’ll turn out to be food.

                I hold perfectly still, as its sucker-mouthed tongue plays over my arm.

                Eventually it gets bored and skitters off. These things have quick metabolisms; it needs to find food quickly, or starve. I wait till it’s a shadow on Green Street, before I start running. My sealed boots go thwap-thwap, thwap-thwap against ancient, cracked concrete.

                My first stop is Wordboy’s house, by the pond. He picked out a nice place, an old mansion type of deal. Lanterns in the drive, lots of windows. He replaced the glass with sheet-metal and the door with a long airlock tunnel, made of duct-taped steel. Must’ve taken him ages to build it, but he’s a smart one. Taught me all my words.

                Wordboy’s in a talking mood. Once he scrubs me off, he invites me inside. I strip off the suit and lie nude on his moth-eaten couch. He doesn’t mind; Wordboy’s gay as lord. No boob has ever turned his gaze. I tell him the bodies are still where they lie, at the school.

                “Good,” he says. “Keep the bastards off your scent. How’s the shed?”

                I tell him it’s fine, though the latrine could use some work. He nods; plumbing is an issue when you can’t churn up earth without attracting hungry mouths. He’s had similar problems, and candles flicker in every corner of his home, masking his scent. One day, I think, this whole place will burn down.

                “Wordboy,” I say, and I ask him—it’s become sort of a joke, you see—I ask him this every time. “Wordboy, when’s it gonna end? When’s the mist going away?”

                He laughs. “When the army comes back, and television comes on, and Project Star Wars is back on the budget.” He’s stooped and his teeth are rotted from eating processed junk to survive, but when he smiles I still see the old professor in him. He waves his empty rifle at the chalkboard in the corner. “Been tracking their migration patterns—south, like always. But slower.”

                I nod. It makes logic. Whatever’s coming through Arrowhead wants to fill the whole world—stuff it to the brim, with teeth and claws and greedy mouths. It hasn’t done that yet, but if the migration’s slow, it must be close. “You think when the mist is everywhere, maybe they’ll move on?”

                He shakes his head. “Never. This ecosystem is too perfect—everything eats everything else on their world, but ours... ours is a free buffet. All you can eat, forever.”

                I throw up my hands. “Wordboy, you don’t give me hope, sai.”

                “I know.” He taps the stock of his Remington. “But we’ll rebuild. We’re a stubborn breed. That’s why I have my books, ken? Someday we’ll build a way to stop them.”

                His arrogance is immense. I roll my eyes. “Sure, sure. And someday I won’t shit in a bucket.”

                “I’m telling you. Things will change.” The worst part is, he really means it. Smart types think they have it all figured out; me, I think with my legs. It’s the only thinking worth doing, when a thousand grasping arms are reaching for your meat. “Someday, Lupe, we’ll fix it. Until then…” And he presents me with a miracle. An unwrapped, still-fresh Twinkie, virginal and yellow in its translucent shell. “Here. For the Hodgson books you brought me.”

                I take it. “Is this… real?”

                “As real as anything from the dead past.” He shrugs. “Tastes better than hydroponic carrots, at least. Try.”

                I do. My body is starved for carbs. I want to save the treasure for later, but I can’t help it: my fingers rip open the wrapper. “It’s beautiful.”

                He laughs. “I’m sure the manufacturers would appreciate your review.”

                My first bite is heavenly: stale, yes, stale as dead skin. But so fluffy, and sugary, and light on my mouth! Melting, on my tongue! My eyes roll, and this time it’s from pleasure. Once my Twinkie-gasm is over, and I lick my fingers clean, I stand. “Can’t stay. Lot of runs before dusk.”

                “I can dig it.” He hugs me, and I hug him back. We aren’t family, or even close friends, but we both understand this need, the need for mutual human contact that’s been lost in the face of the forever-darkness. The sunless earth. “I wish you’d come and stay here.”

                I shake my head. In my stomach, the Twinkie churns nauseously, unrecognized by digestive enzymes. “No. I need to be alone. They smell you, if you gather. That’s how they got Brighton.”

                He sighs. “If we don’t gather, we’re just going to go extinct. Matter of time.”

                I don’t care. I don’t like people. They scare me, because at least with Big Ones and the scuttlers, you know what you’re getting. But faces are hard to understand, and caring is harder. Better to be alone, and safe, with my Atari and my corpses. “I know,” I tell him. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

                He nods. “Well. If you change your mind… I’m here.”

                “Yes.”

                I put on my suit, I pass through the airlock with its mist of ethanol-bleach. My boots hit the pavement and I am running, running, past the lumbering legs of something ten times my size that sweeps the ground with a clawed tentacle. I run past a man-faced spider, fighting with its fellows over the last scraps of a dog’s bones. My feet pound the roads, my face stares blank and gauzy from the fogged-up visor.

                Someday, I think, breathing hard. There’s Twinkie on my breath.

                Someday.

"The Uber Out of Time"

You slam the door on your way out.

Stupid, stupid. If you'd just kept your voice down, just tried to work things out, maybe she wouldn't have accused you of all that. Stupid. Doesn't she know what you're going through? You can't be expected to listen to this shit. It's not your fault--you were coerced! You can't be blamed.

You need some air; you need to get away. Soon the ride-share car rolls up the street, speckled by drizzle. It's a Saab, of all things, but well-kept. You haul on the door handle and throw yourself in.

The driver turns around. He's nondescript. The app says his name is Kameel. "How's it going?"

"Hey." You aren't interested in small-talk. Not right now. Rage burns under your skin, and you feel like punching the back of the passenger seat. You don't.

"So, when do you want to go?"

You stare at him. "Now. I thought that was implied."

"No, no..." He holds up his phone. The app there is unfamiliar. You look down and see the app you have open isn't familiar, either. It sure as hell isn't one you downloaded. "I mean, what year? What point in your life?" He checks his phone. "You are Chuck Wentworth, right? You didn't put in a timeline when you requested me."

You stare at him. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm Chuck." You're not.

The app is asking for a year and a date. Outside, the rain is thickening, fat spots of drizzle sliding cold and viscous down the Saab's window. Some corner of you wants to slug the guy, or laugh. But then the other side, the shrewd self that's been hiding lipstick smudges, kicks in. Maybe you'll humor him. See if there's a scrap of truth in his bullshit.

"How far can I go?" Can't believe this crap.

"That's on you, man. Big surcharge on 2020, though. Surge pricing, y'know?" Oh, ha-ha, very funny. You roll your eyes, and the rain stops coming.

It doesn't just pass--it stops falling completely. In midair. Droplets hang suspended; wind-swept showers wait on the cold breeze, captured like a photograph. A photograph you're inside of. Nearby, a sparrow caught in the wetness dangles over a puddle, the spray of its takeoff surrounding it, a halo of dew under the soggy orange streetlight glow.

The driver fidgets. "What's it gonna be? If you wanna cancel, that's fine, but there's a fee..."

"No, I'm fine, How about...." You swallow, the walls of your belief cracking open. "Same timeline. But... six months from now."

An eyebrow is raised. "You sure? Same timeline?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, bro. You asked." He circles the block, gently easing around frozen cars. When he arrives back in the same spot, there's a blinding flash--the corona of two hundred suns flashing across the sky all at once. A wave of heat and cold in alternating stutters washes over you. You find your fingernails longer, your hair shaggy. Your stomach paunchier. Clearly these six months without her have been stressful. Good thing you didn't have to live through them.

"Well, there you go, man. Home sweet home. Thanks for riding."

"Thanks..." You climb out of the car. It's sunny, now, and beautiful. The early, crisp days of March. You check your phone and see that you were charged $10.56 for your ride, courtesy of Yog, a company you've never heard of.

Well, damn.

You swagger up the sidewalk towards your apartment--free, easy, no weight on your shoulders. Barely comprehending. Yet you're loose now: no more responsibility. You cheated, in more ways than one: you've escaped. Now you can live your life without interruption, without nagging. Thank God. You always wanted to be a bachelor, on the inside, but you hated the loneliness, the stigma. Now you can start over.

When you get inside, your girlfriend is on the couch. She looks due in about three months: puffy, tired, and enormous. Her things litter the walls, crowd your tiny living space. She looks miserable.

"Hey," she says, cradling a bowl of ice cream. "Did you get that second job?"

THE GUARDS ARE TALKING BACKWARDS

                Getting up there was easy. The UN had pooled resources to send a mission up to the vessel; we didn’t have a name it then, but a lot of folks in the Army were just calling it the Craft. Capital C—not ‘a’ craft, THE Craft. Real dramatic, those army boys.

                They came with me, Patterson and Trace—we were Contact Team Nine. Eight had gone inside, none had come out. Around this time, the UN -consul general finally admitted it was time to arm their “diplomats.” Took them too long, if you ask me. A twenty-mile-wide, alien craft hovering over New Jersey, and the welcome party didn’t bring any weapons? My brother is a hostage negotiator for the police, and he told me something: if you want something, manners are important, but a gun is easier—long as they don’t see it coming.

                We jumped up into orbit, on these sweet-ass space planes… retrofitted shuttle paneling, horizontal takeoff, the works. They were made for ferrying rich tourists to space. They were a little beat up from the first eight teams, but they were our only ride.

                Inside, time seemed to stretch… It’s still stretching. I’ve been experiencing events backward for some time now. You can’t see it, but that’s what I’m doing. Every moment and event begins with its own results, then folds backward into previous events… and that shape folds into itself, and on and on and on, without ever getting any smaller. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Who told me that?

                They told me.

                Not in so many words, of course. But I want you to understand it’s important for you to know I am experiencing all of this in rewind—did I say this already? My lips are flapping as they sound out a word that makes no logic to me, that my backwards mind cannot accept because every neuron is twisted inside out, retracing its own pathways. No, I wouldn’t call it strange.

                Together, we exited the space plane. It was damn dangerous: even though we were in low orbit next to the Craft, they didn’t give us an airlock to get into the thing. No. We were pushed from the opened hatch of the plane into a smooth, round hole in the rock of its side. We knew it was made of rock: that much was evident from the pits and crags on its surface. But how does a rock hover 20 miles over New Jersey, unmoving, for thirty days? Based on the imaging we’ve obtained from sonar, we knew the thing is hollow. It was understood prior to… prior to… God, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? We are fifty-three days before the day I’m talking about, the day we went in, but in the wrong direction. It’s all folded to me, the memories bunched into a sleeve… gotta work my way through the creases. Fifty-three days ago we made a solemn vow not to hurt anything we found inside. They got me in on this pact, even though I didn’t agree. Even though I thought it was a pussy to do. The last eight teams hadn’t made it out for a reason, and here these goddamn fools were promising to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Well, I wasn’t drinking the Kool-Aid.

                We were heavily armed. We were supposed to defend ourselves, if push came to shove. They’re showing me my childhood, ever since that moment: Autumn leaves crunching dry-crisp beneath our feet. The backyard. The air is chilly and me, my sister and I, are jumping… in…

                The sun hung low-slung and deep-set, those days. In the days of apple cider and cinnamon shaved fresh all over glazed buns. The smell of molasses from the barn. It’s food I remember most, and I guess it makes sense. It’s the only thing I’m allowed to savor, from those days. Everyone is gone.

                The inside was smooth and curved up towards a green light. We approached it… we didn’t know what else to do. We were drawn to it, like deep-sea fish glimpsing an angler for the first time. We each wanted to be the big kahuna, the first one to talk to an alien species…

They aren’t better than us. They make mistakes. We went through, and to each of us the ecosystem inside was something different—superseded over our own perceptions and filters of reality. Our histories, laid out for us, woven from our own minds.

                You’ve been calling them “creatures,” the things that made the Craft. You would be wrong; they aren’t alive, not in the way we know. They are sentient light, beings made of frozen photons running through a certain type of ice, which naturally forms in cubist structures on their planet. Ha! I’m kidding. Just kidding. Sentient ice! Ha, the look on your face, you really believed me! I’m not telling you shit, you government goon. You put us in there. You did this to our minds!

                I’m sorry, have we met before?

                Alive… yes, they are alive. Alive and full of love. And rage. And confusion. They are the essence of thought, distilled and zipping around on air currents. They’re also astronomically large worms, each one as long as a solar system. They are anything that has ever evolved, in this galaxy: they have moved past us on a quantum level, they are entangled with everything. Everything! From the day you were born, they knew your name. “Even before I shaped you in the womb, I knew you.”

Dimensions lie in layers over them, baked into their tissue, their limbs. They are so far from us that we may as well be atoms under their microscopes. And yet, they love us.

                I knew we had to bomb the thing.

My wife? She had divorced me the month before I left the Revivalist movement in New York. The good brothers and sisters thought the Craft was Jesus, was His chariot come to deliver Him. Like a pizza! Ridiculous. We had a “disagreement,” and if I’m being honest, I knew it would come down like that. That damn cult split me from my wife. I needed to prove she was wrong about it… about the Craft being divine. You can’t kill God, right? He’s eternal. I wanted to test that theory. Why do you think I worked so hard—wormed my way into security detail? I killed one man—just one. He knew my secret, and I wasn’t having it.

No, Maria, the dishes are in the sink.

               

These things… see, they aren’t eternal. They aren’t immortal. They are the past, the instant flash-bang of a species’ final steps away from the one from before it, and before it, and before it. They are less than an instant of life. Their life-span ticks off in attoseconds.

                They showed me the technology that made them like this: they showed how to see inside a star, how to watch the sub-atomic dance unfold. They taught me that every single second happens at the same time, every moment of every world. They showed me things my mind could not have grasped if given a lifetime to contemplate the reaches of my irrelevance.

                Sir, I don’t reckon good human beings need to see things like that.

                Our power is in our brevity. Our short lives, our limited hands and limbs and eyes are what define us—what make us the clever, original, cunning and dangerous apes that we are. If we were handed this gift, this Pandora’s box, we would have lost ourselves. Any hope of identity would have disappeared—one human mind, one human spirit. One human moment spread across countless millennia, with no frame of reference for what is heroic, or evil, or the meaning of kindness. Kindness requires a physical shape.

                Kindness requires a soul.

                So yes, I killed it. A week inside the Craft, and then I blew it to pulp. You can blame me, call me a lunatic. You can say I sabotaged our only attempt at contact with another species.

                But I stand by what I did. Those idiots on my team stood around slack-jawed in the billowing infinity, consumed in the light of orgasmic comprehension. Transported by it. No different than the religious sheep my wife is following: the light made them blind. Stupid. We can’t worship these things; we simply can’t afford to. We didn’t evolve to interact with them: the human mind can’t survive it.

                I see. You want to know why they came? Why they taunt us with their presence, if we can’t talk to them in ways that don’t turn our minds to soup?

                I think it’s because one of us… one of our future versions… the Earth that could be, that Earth is ready for them, because it is so much like them, a brilliant mesh of infinite possibilities not held back by doubt or fear… And they are forever seeking Earths like this, and destroying the rest by contact with them. No, I can’t prove this. You can’t prove a feeling.

                You think you can contain the fragments… But they are loose now, no longer bound into one concept, one idea. And the human mind loves ideas: ideas are like candy, rotting your head to a husk if you have enough of them.

We are so lucky. Where am I? They will change us all for the better—no, be quiet, shut up!! They will change us all, each diaper-shitting child and crumbling adult, each schizophrenic and depressive and obsessive, they will mold us into the infinite forms beyond this single, dry, turd-reality. We are the chosen ones. We are nothing, we are everyone.

               

I stand by what’s done. Maybe, if I’d left them in the Craft… if I hadn’t scattered their ur-flesh all over the landscape. But I stand by what’s done. It’s all you can do, right? You have to stick to your guns, in time of crisis. God help us.

My mother says it’s time to get up. I never kissed that girl behind the quad—no, no way. Not her, Dad. It’s my fault, I burned the bread. Where’s my scar? I used to have a scar… The guards are talking backwards. You might want to hear what the guards have to say. The guards are talking backwards.

               

I bet you’ll find them quite illuminated.

The Bonus Episode

An excerpt from "Obligatory Road Trip Book," something I've been working on for a friend.


                Almost a year after the trip, I had a dream.

                We were going through the deserts of New Mexico again, this time in daylight. It’s odd my mind chose to fixate here, because we barely spent any time at all in that state—after passing the crux of weirdness that was Roswell, we passed out of the state pretty quick. But something about the dream—you know, that implicit and wordless transfer of information, the mental “elevator pitch” if you will—told me it was New Mexico. Scrubs, desert, a little badlands and some mountains in the distance. I could feel the heat and light of the place.

                In the dream we weren’t in our trusty Passat, but instead in some kind of red-leather-upholstery, Oldsmobile type of deal. Again, I don’t know why it’s just these details that were swapped out. Was it a kind of mimicry, with small screw-ups from my subconscious, or do the changes mean something? Who the fuck knows, man. I don’t take stock in dreams; as far as I’m concerned, they’re the unconscious equivalent of a fart. The only useful function they serve is creating pictures, concepts and scenarios your feeble waking imagination can’t attain. Stretches of the brain, scenes and worlds you would never have conceived of before, because you’re limited to the reaches of your perception. Dreams, luckily, are not very concerned with reality.

                Enter Mitch.

                I’m calling him Mitch because the dream wouldn’t give me a name for him, a real name—the dream only told me that his name was generic enough not to cause concern. Again, specificity was not the strong point here. We were getting into the car after making a pit stop at a tiny, sun-beaten restroom somewhere in the New Mexico flatness, and there was Mitch, sitting and grinning

                Supposedly, dreams can’t show you the face of anyone you haven’t seen somewhere in life. This makes sense—no matter the power of the human mind, it’s just not clever enough to conjure up a whole new person, right down to the follicles and pores. But I think this guy was the real deal. One hundred percent computer-generated, if you will, a flawless CGI insertion into our story. He sat in a mysterious middle seat that had somehow appeared in the front of the old car, along with himself. And he was grinning, as if he’d been waiting for us to come back.

                You can probably see where this was going.

                Mitch was Bad News. He was that creeper who shows up at the beginning of a horror movie, uninvited, to foreshadow the shitshow that’s about to start. He’s the shapeshifter whose head pops open at some point in the story. And he knew it: he was acting the buddy, the pal, sitting between Sergei and the Nymph and cracking jokes. None of us laughed. With that sort of instant narrative telepathy of dreams, we all knew something was up.

                We drove in silence for a very long time.

                Eventually Mitch asked us to pull over beside a seedy, abandoned motel. We did. He took Sergei aside and they had a brief conversation, Sergei smoking like a chimney and Mitch just smiling, and smiling. Finally Sergei comes over to us and says he’s going around the back with Mitch for a while. He doesn’t seem worried, or angry, just calm and lighting up another butt. Even in dreams, presented with a horror movie cliché in the flesh, Sergei was suicidally determined to be unruffled.

                The Nymph and I are scared shitless at this point, so we both agree to wait by the car. Sergei goes around back with the smiling guy, who by this time had teeth so big you couldn't stop looking at 'em even if you wanted to. This is all typical spooky story stuff, right? You’d expect Sergei to end up dead and the chase to begin: me and the Nymph on the run in the dying New Mexico light with a monster in tow.

                Nope. Nothing of the sort. We waited for hours, till the sun was getting low, nervous but afraid to leave. There were no sounds—maybe the dream’s audio department lost an MP3 or two. But eventually Sergei comes around the front, wiping his hands on his pants, and says “let’s go.” And we go.

                I don’t present this thinking it’s a super fascinating delve into my head. Woop de doo, you had a dream, good job buddy, do you want a Snickers? But I do present it thinking, despite how afraid we both are of Sergei sometimes, this is the kind of thing even your unconscious expects from him. It just fits. He defies expectations, whether he’s supposed to or not, in reality and in fantasy. And whether we like it or not, he’s miles tougher and more strange than the other two of us combined. Crude, he might be, but he damn sure is effective.

                And so we drove on, and the dream segued into someplace and sometime different, the cast shifting and changing with the random and unfathomable needs of the night’s visions. On to a remake of “John Dies at the End” with puppet animation, and something about my dead uncle Ward. All these things revolve, and all these things come back, playing over the mind’s eye. Things that might seem irrelevant or stupid rise again, from the muck of our brains.

                And some experiences never go away.

Shooting Sweeps

You never knew what Mr. Tracey was going to do next. Prajeet was his driver, and had been for four years, ever since Tracey struck it big with that movie of his, and had his name plastered in lights all over Los Angeles. He didn’t seem to like LA much; like many of his predecessors, he was eccentric to the brink of insanity, and the noise and glamor of the city undermined his sense of self-importance. He moved to a sprawling estate in Montana, and Prajeet followed him. Well, technically he’d been following the money, but unfortunately, the money was attached to Mr. Tracey and there was no way to separate the two. If there was, he thought often, he would have done so.

On the day he fired a grenade launcher for the first time, Prajeet was hung over. He was not a drinking man, but he had found out the day before that his girlfriend was not coming to the States. She had found someone else, and the unspoken truth was that this man was wealthier than Prajeet, was better than he was. A driver for one of the richest filmmakers in America, and he’d been upstaged by a tech company manager! An assistant manager, at that! The betrayal had cut him deeply. He’d spent the previous night in the bar, muttering darkly about dowries to his friend Nathan. Half-cooked schemes buzzed in his head: he would show up at her door, with a fistful of American dollars. He would throw the bundles of cash at her feet, and he would ask, is this enough? Is this what you wanted from me?

That morning, when he arrived bleary-eyed and aching, Mr. Tracey had a gun.

A big one, very modern. He was cleaning it on the back deck when Prajeet arrived, the deck overlooking the infinity pool he’d had installed “because my guests miss their Western excesses.” The gun was long, black and looked like something out of a movie. It had a long barrel, folding legs that tucked underneath like the limbs of some deadly wasp. A prop, perhaps, straight off the set of American Sniper--at least, he hoped it was a prop.

Prajeet approached, with a pretty valid case of the jitters. “Sir? Your car is outside.”

“Yes, yes.” Mr. Tracey placed the gun in a case almost as tall as he was, and snapped it shut. “Very good.”

“I’ve been calling you…”

“Let’s not start, Praj. Punctuality is for people who’ve never won a Golden Globe. Come now, we’ve got work to do.” He hauled the case down the hall, resisting offers by Prajeet to help him. Very self-sufficient, was Mr. Tracey, even at sixty-two and with a mane of gray hair he combed back into a helmet-like shell. Prajeet thought he looked like Stan Lee, from the Marvel movies, but had never said so.

Into the limo they went. Its sleek black hulk looked so out of place in the shadow of Montana’s red-brown hills that Prajeet often felt they were out of their depth here. In winter, the limo needed snow chains to even get down the driveway, yet Mr. Tracey refused to buy an SUV with his piles of money. Americans, thought Prajeet, and hit the ignition button.

Mr. Tracey sat in the back, holding the gun case over his lap. “I’ve had all the arrangements made. Today’s going to be a good day, Praj, an excellent day.”

“Yes, sir?” Most of Prajeet’s responses to his employer consisted of various “yes sirs” arranged in different tones and inflections. If you offered any more, the gregarious old coot would suck you into a long conversation, and he was not in the mood for this today. Especially when his employer was carrying a gun with a magazine the size of a phonebook.

“Good day. Excellent day. Today,” and those silver brows arched, “I get my revenge.”

“Yes… sir?” Now Prajeet was starting to panic. It was one thing to be an accomplice in the man’s peculiar hobbies; it was quite another to assist in murder. He wondered if the man who’d shot John F. Kennedy had taken a cab that day, and how the driver might have felt once he’d learned of the shooting. A lot like this, he thought, the poor guy had probably felt a lot like this.

“Quite so.” Mr. Tracey’s phone rang, and the director fumbled it out of his back pocket, his fingers shaking strongly enough for Prajeet to see it in the rear-view mirror. “Yes! You’ve had it delivered? Yes?” He nodded. “Yes. Fantastic. Many people are called the man, but you are actually the man. Know what I mean?” Another nod. “Beautiful. I’ll have my people wire you the money. And the city didn’t make a fuss? Good.” He hung up. “Gorgeous fucking day, isn’t it?”

It was. The still blue skies of morning hung over a dry and scrabbly landscape spotted with pines, sagebrush and huge chunks of rock which looked to have been forgotten on the day of their creation. Prajeet felt his fear soothed by the sight; strange as this country was, much of it was very beautiful. “Yes, sir.”

They drove in silence for quite some time. Prajeet was afraid to ask what the gun was for, and his boss did not offer an explanation. He had finally worked up the courage to ask, but by then they’d arrived.

Mr. Tracey’s phone had spoken to the car, and sent it a set of GPS coordinates nowhere near Missoula, the filmmaker’s favorite destination for antagonizing everyone with ostentatious displays of wealth. He had guided them out into the badlands, an area that was half-Idaho in the composition of its heavy soil and all-Idaho in the bleakness of its hills and crags. Someone had set up a large table in the dirt nearby, and on the table were more guns. Lots more.

Prajeet kept close to the car as Mr. Tracey got out, lugging his case, and leaned it against the cornucopia of murderous tools. A swathe of hunting rifles, oversized pistols, stubby Russian machine guns, and even what looked like a grenade launcher sat patiently, each one awaiting a turn to do mischief. If Prajeet had been jumpy before, now he’d crossed the border into pure terror. He wondered how far he could run before he was out of range of those things. Pretty far, from the look of it.

“I’ll just, er, find a shady place to put the car,” he said. It was heating up, the height of June in a climate with few trees… and fewer places to hide if, say, one’s eccentric employer decided to go postal.

“Nonsense! Come along. Have you ever fired a gun before?” Mr. Tracey’s jovial attitude did not allay his driver’s fears, but against all his common sense, Prajeet walked over to the table with his boss. They surveyed the armory before them: it was, Prajeet had to admit, fascinating to see such an array of deadly force all in one place. “It’s quite thrilling. And today, we have the perfect target…”

“Me?” Prajeet blurted. He hadn’t meant to, but he was sweating into his white collar under his black suit-jacket, and sweating always made him nervous, made him blurt out things like “I love you” to a girl on the other side of the world. Both blurts were equally embarrassing.

Tracey looked at him for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. “God, no! What do you think I am, some kind of sociopath?”

“Well,” said Prajeet, not sure how to answer that.

Tracey shook his head. “This isn’t a Leslie Banks movie, Praj. No, my revenge will be much more than personal. Today we strike a blow against an institution.”

He pointed. On a hill nearby, so small as to almost be mistaken for a distant boulder, there was a vehicle. Clunky and tall, it had a glass cockpit and enormous twin brooms on the underside. Prajeet squinted at it. “Is that a…”

“A street sweeper! Yes, of course.” Tracey rubbed his hands together, not unlike a praying mantis, and reached for a pair of noise-cancelling headphones at the end of the table. “Here, I saved one of these for you. I want a witness to my vengeance, now that it’s finally at hand.”

Prajeet, utterly perplexed but morbidly curious, put on a pair. The world faded into a muffled mime-show, a silent film. If Mr. Tracey was going to shoot him, he thought, he was certainly taking his time. He flinched as his boss plucked a Desert Eagle from the table, a gun so oblong and ridiculous as to almost resemble a marital aid, and emptied a full clip at the street-sweeper.

The noise was deafening, even through a shell of rubber and foam, Prajeet’s fight-or-flight instinct made him leap back. Shell casings flew and the Eagle spit fire; there was an echoing crack with every shot as the slide jumped and the force travelled up Mr. Tracey’s burly spray-tanned arms into the thickness of his neck. His eyes were dead-set, purposeful.

His aim had appeared steady, but no sounds of impact bounced back at them. He might be rich, thought Prajeet, but he was a pretty shitty marksman. “Hm,” Tracey said, grabbing a pair of miniature binoculars from his pocket. “Unharmed! Fate continues to mock me, after all these years. Prajeet, have you ever entertained thoughts of revenge?”

The driver’s mind immediately went to his girlfriend, who he had been excited to think of as his future wife. He’d built his life around the idea, and now it was all crumbling down. “Ah. Well.” He had to shout, to be heard through the earmuffs. “Sometimes, yes. I mean… doesn’t everybody?”

“Exactly! Spot on, my Indian friend. And when I was young…”

“Bangladeshi,” said Prajeet.

“What?”

“Never mind.” He’d said it many times, but some people you couldn’t educate. Especially rich ones.

Tracey leapt back into his story without skipping a beat. Thunder crashing between his words as he reloaded the gun, emptying another clip to no avail. “Right. When I was young, I lived in a city on the east coast. No need to name names, it’s all in the past. I don’t hold grudges.” But his thin mustache quivered, and as the sweat began to roll down their necks from the sun, he grabbed a revolver that would not have been out of place in a sixties western. The earsplitting pop of the shots going off was accompanied by sulphurous whiffs of gun-smoke. “I didn’t have much money, back then. I might seem richer than God now, and sometimes I think I am. And when that sequel’s finished, I’ll walk away even richer. But at one point I had nothing, a bank account full of mothballs and some petty cash. And a certain group of human beings took it upon themselves to persecute me.”

“Street sweepers?” guessed Prajeet.

The revolver was emptied in flashing spurts of force, but a glimpse through the binoculars showed no results this time, either. “Yes! Well, no, not the drivers. Those shiftless monkeys had no charge over the real scam. You see, Prajeet, I used to drive myself everywhere. Shocking, right? I had but one asset in the world: a Ford station wagon, old as the hills, and it was my only friend as I was writing scripts and struggling to feed myself. And these stupid weasels… These damned, filthy, spiteful animals… They towed my car every day.”

“I… see," said Prajeet, wondering if he was supposed to care.

Up came an AK of some kind—Prajeet recognized it from movies, but couldn’t place the name of it. A bayonet gleamed at its tips. A thunderous cacophony, and brass shells scattered as Mr. Tracy fired it from the shoulder. This time there was the tinkle of glass, and the clatter of metal being riddled with lead. “Ha! That’s more like it! Did you hear that? Did you hear that whoreson take a hit?”

“Yes,” said Prajeet, his teeth gritted at the echo. The noise was not doing wonders for his hangover.

“It’s wounded, I think… Yes, there’s motor oil trickling out.” The ritual of the binoculars was observed. “I know it seems silly, Prajeet. Even deluded. But every week, those bottom-feeding, purposeless vermin would go out, and they would steal my only earthly treasure. Didn’t matter the time, didn’t matter whether the street was actually being cleaned—they were very efficient, you see. Towing was big business, they all made a profit. And everyone got a slice! They called the police, the police called the towing rats, and off went my Bessie. It pulled them a hundred thousand in ticket money and impound costs every day. They were blue-collar scam artists, Prajeet, confidence men of the highest quality. Satan himself could not have pulled a better grift.”

“Ah.”

“It does things to a man, to have his happiness taken.” Mr. Tracey looked over his collection of destructive devices; his pompous boom had faded to a whisper, and he looked to be gradually deflating in the Montana sun. “Oh, how I burned to go out there and bludgeon one of them to death. Just show them how it was done: how easily a person could be pushed into homicide. But I held my tongue. I could have taken any one of those scum-suckers—maybe several. I could have mailed letter-bombs to their fat, crooked cop friends in the precinct. But I held back. I believe in civilization, Prajeet, even when it screws you. Even when you have nothing, and then that nothing is taken away.”

Prajeet said nothing. He was thinking of his woman. Not his, anymore—no, not at all. The bitterness in Tracey’s soul warmed something in his own, and he longed to gather around that fire of hate and frustration. But he didn’t want to overstep himself. Losing this job would be a final blow: best to let his mad employer do as he would, then go home. Sleep it off. Do nothing irrational.

The old man shrugged, to no one. He opened the big case, the latch-clicks coming from far away, as if they were underwater. “Well, no need to waste every bullet, eh? They’re just pea-shooters, after all.” That boisterous clangor was back in his voice, and Prajeet was almost glad to hear it. There was something too familiar in Tracey’s growling hints of murder; something he remembered from the pub last night. Words spoken in earnest, ugly things promised. Could you take a promise back, once you were sober? How much weight did your vows hold, when uttered in drunken fury?

“Feast your eyes,” his boss said. “I’ve loaded this beastie with depleted-uranium rounds strong enough to blow through concrete!” He bounced his silver-caterpillar eyebrows at the driver, gesturing at the gun, Vanna-White-style. “What do you say, Praj? Care to work out a little aggression? I promise you, it’s more rewarding than jail. Why, if I’d killed the entire precinct back then, I never would’ve made my money!” And he laughed like a child.

Prajeet looked at the gun, thought of his girl. That twenty-two-year-old waitress with dusky eyes from a Maharashta hillside, whom he hadn’t really known at all, in spite of late-night Skype sessions and whispers of a future together, of real, actual, lasting love. He thought of the things he’d like to do to the man who’d stolen her: public humiliations, vandalism, maybe the trick some local kids to throw a flaming bag of cow shit through his open window. This rabbit-hole of frustration went deeper, so much deeper than he’d expected, and suddenly he was very frightened.

These things—he was actually planning to do them. He’d already calculated the costs of the plane tickets, the odds of arrest. Suddenly he longed for an escape from his own evils, for a compulsive explosion focused through a tiny, reinforced metal tube and exerted on an enemy that wasn’t real, who couldn’t feel pain or the terror of revenge. After four years, he finally began to understand Mr. Tracey; behind madness and a vast, inflated ego, he saw a frustrated little boy trying his best to play safely with God-like financial powers. To exert his human furies, and harm no one—there was a certain nobility in that, a certain safety in tilting at windmills. He felt his eyes come to rest on the grenade launcher.

“She’s a beaut, that one. Got her from war surplus,” said Tracey, his eyes glinting with taboo delight. “Want to give ‘er a spin?”

“Yes, actually,” said Prajeet, smiling as he sized up his target. “I would love to.”

The Traitor

An excerpt from one of the books I'm working on, called "Plague of Steel."

            My name is Jamie Dhukkan, and I am about to become a terrorist.

            When the first refugees arrived, my husband and I campaigned to deport them. It was ironic: we were both second-gen immigrants, his parents from Kolkata and mine from Sri Lanka, and here we were petitioning to try and reject frightened, scared people from our shores. America is beautiful, yes… but as they say, you must pay the toll to get in, and the toll was far too high for these people, escapees of the first infestations in Ukriaine, in Sierra Leone, in Indonesia. My husband overheard the military discussing the plague; they thought might have been “delivered” to developing nations on purpose. “Developing”… Well, they developed under Silver’s influence. Very quickly. They developed into angry hives of furious, faceless half-machine monsters, their last sliver of humanity allowing them to understand the pain and betrayal of border closures, UN firing squads, the last resorts of a terrified Europe. Can anyone be blamed for trying to run from these things?

            If we had permitted a few more to make landfall, if we’d seen the face of the disease instead of sharpening bayonets and building higher fences, we might’ve managed a cure. We might have had enough time, enough human specimens to work on. Applied EMP bursts worked temporarily for pushing back the infected, but it was like using a sledgehammer against a swarm of gnats—by the time the FDA had approved the manufacture of EMP belts and necklaces, Florida was already neck-deep in nanites, and the first cases had surfaced in New York. We waited too long; we saw only in the short term, planning for today instead of thinking of tomorrow. Now we’ll pay for it.

            My husband has been gone for three weeks.

He was working on Project Kessen—a “breakthrough” he claimed would turn the tide of the plague. Two days ago the Army came and confiscated all his work, right down to the last sample. I was furious; I demanded they tell me where he was, what had happened. They served me a death certificate on the spot, like stone-faced magicians producing a rabbit. Reach into the black top hat and poof, Annie, your husband is gone. So sorry. An accident at the lab, casualty of the war, these things happen.

They stripped the lab and left me standing in the kitchen, hyperventilating like an idiot. I sucked life from my inhaler, struggled for air as they piled into an armored truck and pulled away. I wish I’d fought them on it, asked more questions, forced my hand… but would it have helped? We all know what happens when you ask too many questions about the nanites. About where they came from. The president has stopped issuing denials—Silver is a federal experiment gone wrong, and everyone knows it. My Farook wouldn’t say so—but I saw the guilt in him. The shame. The terrible knowledge that his adopted country had unleashed something on the world, something that was eating men and women and children alive. Changing them. That kind of guilt can’t be shaken off—you live with it all your life.

I should know; I’m a cellular biologist, like my mother before me. When I was five, she was working on malaria for the Sri Lankan government, trying to neuter infected mosquitoes. Somehow a single insect escaped from the lab—my mother would never say how, but she suspected that someone simply left a door open. One fault in a specimen cage, one door left ajar, and hundreds of people died from a completely preventable disease. The elderly, the weak, and the poor died in droves. Such are the wages of knowledge.

Sorry, I’m rambling. I’m getting bitter in my old age. Just forty, and I’ve lost my husband, my career, my government grants. No golden years for us, no peaceful retirement—it’s not like there’s a Florida or an Arizona for us to retire to, anyway. But I refuse to believe I lost him in some idiotic accident. Farook wasn’t like the other Army hire-outs, the ones who sucked the CDC’s teats and outsourced their work to agencies that didn’t even wash their petri dishes. Farook was smart. He could sense a change in the wind before anyone else—it’s how he survived the budget cuts, the havoc at DARPA when funding for his cellular automata disappeared. He never quit, naturally: he was patient, he was precise, and above all he was committed. He loved the whole concept of nanobots, I took to making fun of him for it. “Don’t make anything that can think,” I would warn him, and pinch his ear. Oh, how he hated that.

Guess the joke’s on me. Because if he didn’t have a hand in making Silver, who did? Some backwoods Iranian engineer? Those madmen in Pyongyang? I don’t think so. These machines are not logical; they do things to human cells that shouldn’t be possible, that defy the laws of physics. They move so quickly and evolve so fast it borders on—I hate to say it—magic. If human hands were behind this thing, I’ll eat my doctorate.

The Army is running out of doctors. Silver cases among the enlisted are through the roof, and of course the nanites can chew through a clean-suit now. They’ll do anything to get at a vulnerable human host. Which makes no sense; the wet, hot environment of human organs should be anathema to machines. We should be inhospitable to them. But the ‘why’ of the disease is no longer important. The plague’s hunger is my ticket into Farook’s Army base.

It’s been a long time since I left med school for epidemiology. I didn’t have the heart for being a medical doctor… Watching people sicken, watching them die. I wasn’t strong enough to watch for that, because I knew for every man or woman I saved, there would always be two more who died of leukemia, or bone marrow cancer. No, that life was not for me. Until now.

               

I found a man who will forge me credentials. He smells strange, like curry gone rotten, and doesn’t speak much. But he’s ex special-forces and he knows what they look for—the personality quirks they check you for. He thinks he can get me into the base, to “treat” their sick. As if anything can stop the machines, once they take root.

                There’s an on-site lab, very secure, hidden below fifty feet of bomb-proof elevator shaft. I have Farook’s codes. I took them, before the army came. I thought he might want them, if… if he ever came back.

                I’m packing now. I’m leaving this tape recorder because, well, once I get in there I can’t guarantee what will happen. If they disappear me, if they wipe me from the records and ship me to Guantanamo or some other blacksite, Chicago maybe, at least someone might find this. At least someone will know why I did what I did, why I turned traitor. It wasn’t for a big agenda, not for fundamentalism or money. It’s just love. I loved that ridiculous, eccentric, occasionally stupid husband of mine, and I am going to get him back or find his body. One way or the other.

                Project Kessel… They think they’re so clever. They think just because I’m a biologist by training, there’s no chance I could have understood his notes. They didn’t even take me in for questioning. But I know what they’re up to.

                They’re trying to tame it. Turn it to their side, or a piece of it, or a colony. And then… what? Weaponize it? This thing has already threatened us as a species. How many more will die when they try to turn it loose, a dog on a very brittle chain? Right now, the machines convert people at random. It’s all arbitrary. Some hosts merely get sick; others warp into monsters with gears for teeth and titanium fingernails. But if we make it angry, threaten it… It’s not stupid. It can respond to stimuli, evolve. If we declare war on this thing, turn nanite on nanite, how long can our species survive?

                I’m going. I don’t know what I’m going to find, but I know this will be the last time I see the house. The photographs in the hall; the shrine near the coat-rack. All of it, I must hold in my memory. When they catch me, and waterboard me, and put battery clamps on my loins, it will be this house I think of. Our peace that we built, here, in spite of the plague. In spite of a lack of children. We made this house our child, and it breathes in and out with the essence of us. The essence of what we were.

                I’m coming, Farook. Wherever you are, please don’t give up.

                It’ll take more than a little plague, to stop me loving you.