Cloud Country (11 page)

There was a laugh, far off, a high-pitch hyena squirt that echoed and trailed off. A shiver ran down Saru’s spine. She rose and did a slow spin, scanning the darkness around her. The circle of light was shrinking. She touched a nearby statue, but it did not glow. The laughter came again, from another direction, longer, a breaking-voice cackle of grinning lunatics and circus clowns, and nails tracing loop-de-loops on a chalkboard. It felt like the laughter was a thing more than a sound, tactile, barbed wire slithering around her neck, a whip across her back, a writhing-guts feel of horror. A new sound now, skittering, clacking, lots and lots of tiny, hard-sole shoes tapping against the stone. The skittering grew closer and closer, and Saru backed away, to the edge of the light, and crouched in readiness. Just as it seemed the skittering was upon her, it stopped. It was quiet except for Saru’s breath—racing despite her efforts—and another’s. A slow, heavy, fat-ass wheeze, air forced through ragged lungs and shredded pipes. And then the voice. It was a voice to match the breath, a pervert’s voice, a rumble with squeaky highs and no midrange: “Welcome.”

Saru let the word hang. She could feel the thing, the person, the creature, hovering just beyond the reach of light across from her.

“Don’t be rude!” A high-pitch scream, jumbling out, loud and fast and mad. Saru clapped her fingers to her ears and stepped backwards, into the shadows. There was a whoosh and skitter, and instinctively Saru jumped forward, into the light. The breathing was now directly behind her, in the spot where she had stepped into the shadows.

“Did you enjoy it?” A whimper, pleading but more, an eagerness, a hard-on begging, sex-pleasure gasping. “Did you enjoy killing me?” A leg crept from the shadows, long and thin, bent, spider-like, covered in down-pointing bristles. The leg made Ping-Pong ball
tocs
as it tapped along the stone, further into the light, until it nudged against the broken Ria statue. “Did it feel good?” A tentacle slithered from the dark, whip-like, and then another, and they caressed the surface of the broken statue. The stone grew wet and raw like mud, and sputtered, screaming, into life. Mouths opened on the tentacles, slurping at the mud of the statue as the melting arms and legs flailed, slurping until it was just a puddle. The laugh came again, in an echoing burst.

“What are you?” Saru said, unable to help herself, words stumbling from her disgust. She hated how small her voice sounded.

“What are you?” Her voice came back from the shadows, mimicked with a note of the unhinged, loud, blasting. “What are you?” Singsong. “What are you?” Questioning. “What. Are. You?” Staccato. “You are what? Are what you? Wou yre aat?” And the laugh.

Saru found she was sweating again, and stepping backwards, unthinking, heel an inch from the shadows. It was forcing her back, forcing her to step into the shadows and…what? What would it do? Kill her? How? This wasn’t real. Couldn’t be real. It was in her head. Her imagination. Her world. She was in control. She steadied her breath and stopped her sweating, and stood straight, willing the light to return. Light, light, c’mon light.

Saru’s voice came from the shadows again, the mocking, cartoon mimicry: “It’s my head. It’s my imagination. It’s my world. I can do whatever I want. WRONG!” The word came like a wall of sound, blasting Saru backwards into the shadows. There was a whoosh and skitter, and tentacles wrapped around her body, ankles, shins, thighs, navel, breasts, arms, neck, wrapping tight, barbs digging into her skin with hornet-sting pain. Saru was lifted off her feet, suspended in the air, tentacles tighter, barbs deeper, gasping, struggling, helpless.

“It’s my life, it’s my world, it’s my imaginatiooooooon!” The voice, singing, swaying her back and forth to the rhythm. “My life, my choice, my world—Imagination! LIGHTS!” The word, bellowed, deafening, a force that tore at Saru’s skin like a dust storm. The circle of light widened and swung to center on her like a stage spotlight, and she saw the creature. It was Ria, huge and bloated, with baggy, drooping tits, and an enormous belly, a grotesque, mutated, monstrous version of Ria, reclining on a swarming bed of spider legs that poked from her back. The tentacles were rooted in the belly, surrounding a human mouth with broken teeth that opened sideways neck to groin. The Ria monster’s face was wide and fat, bald except for strings of gray hair, with pudgy eyes, wet and twinkling with delight. The tentacles drew Saru up over the belly mouth, and a flopping tongue licked up to slobber against the soles of her feet. The Ria monster shivered with delight and then giggled.

“Original flavor!” the Ria monster squealed. The tongue lapped hungrily at Saru’s feet, the tentacles pulsed with desire…it’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real…it’s my world…my brain…my island…I’m in control…

“My thoughts, my world, my life, my imagination!” the Ria monster cried, rocking back and forth, and swinging Saru around in time to the song. The tongue slurped back. “EVERYBODY!” the belly mouth screamed. More tentacles burst from the belly, spiraling up into the air, and then plunging down to crack into the stone. Veins spread out from the tentacles in a web, crawling across the stone, wrapping around the statues. The statues grew slick and formed skin around their heads and torsos. They swayed in time to the insane song, singing out in their broken voices if they had mouths, or screaming, or moaning, or smacking their skulls against the stone to add to the cacophony.

The Ria monster rocked and clapped its fat hands together. “My life, my world, it’s my imagination! My life, my world, it’s my imagination!” The statues all screaming and singing and clapping along. Saru swung wildly back and forth, world spinning, dizzy, carried by the tentacles. The tongue spiraled up again, wrapping all the way up to Saru’s neck, and dragging her down to the mouth. Her toes brushed against the slime of the broken teeth, and she kicked away, futilely. The Ria monster laughed and clapped and squealed with joy.

A growl. The Ria monster froze, the statues froze, the singing stopped. The growl continued, a rumble that seemed to shake the very world. Statues cracked and crumbled to dust. The veins around them died, and the tentacles reeled back into the belly. The Ria monster’s eyes rolled and then focused on Saru, a mixture of hate and fear. The tongue slithered back, and the tentacles dropped Saru smack-clatter on the ground. A sly look crossed the Ria monster’s face, and the huge tongue lolled out and wove over to where Saru lay panting. Ria’s face sprouted from the tongue, and giggled.

“See you soon,” the Ria monster whispered, and stuck out her own tongue to lick Saru’s cheek. Saru swatted at the face, and the Ria monster laughed, and the tongue whipped away. With a whoosh and skitter, the Ria monster was gone. Saru lay, propped on an arm, and let a tear slide out, and then another. The cuts along her skin stung; she was striped like a tiger with blood. The blood dribbled and pooled around her, and she let it, too weak and tired to stand. The light shrank and shrank, and was gone. Saru lay in the dark.

9. Phila-fucking-delphia

No light came. No sound. Nothing. Saru waited and then started to walk, not knowing what else to do. Her thoughts were distant and murky, like she was out of her body, staring down at herself, a bug in a puddle going about its day. She could still feel the tongue, slimy stucco wrapped around her skin, still feel the sting of the tentacles, still smell the dead-rat stink of the giant mouth, the breath, hot and wet, staining her with stench. Every few steps, she froze, and held her breath, and listened, straining to hear the skitter, or the laugh, or the moist
shlucking
of the tongue as it slobbered and
tocked
against the teeth. It was too hard to think of what the Ria monster could mean. All that mattered was that it was here, or there, or out there, in this world with rules she didn’t understand.

Saru wondered and wandered, and wandered and wondered, and it started to feel like in the mirthul the two were interchangeable. Her fear was exhausting—she felt like she had to hold it like an anvil above her head, something she could smash the monster with if it came skittering back. With enough pointless steps, Saru wandered past the point of caring, and found herself sad, and lonely, and thinking of home. She wondered what Eugene was doing right now, if he was missing her, and if he had noticed that she hadn’t stopped by and kicked new holes in his wall. Had he patched all the old ones, buffed out all the scuffs—was she so easily erased? She longed for something crispy and greasy, and something cold and gently poisonous to wash it down, and maybe a little sky to sniff to keep her eyes wide and her fingers twitchy. She missed the dirty, right-angle streets, and the sense they made—horrible sense, but sense nonetheless, something you could wrap your head around. Not like this alien shit.

In the distance, there was light, and Saru followed because, hey, why not? She felt a texture more than smooth stone—grit or dust, dust, yeah, and as she neared the light, she saw the dust fell from the aboveness like snow. She noticed that her cuts had closed, and her breathing had stilled. She was as normal as could be, save for every other thing that was happening at the moment. The dust blew in her eyes, and snuck up her nose with every breath, and made her sneeze. The light grew until she guessed it had gotten as big as it was going to get—the sun, maybe, but she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Dust blew and tickled her skin. It swirled around her feet, and then her shins, and tried to pry its way into her mouth and choke her.

Her toes knocked against something solid, but she couldn’t see what it was, buried in the dust. She strode on, wondering if the monster was out there waiting to take its shot. A smell came, hard to place, smoky, old-tire barbecue. It grew overwhelming, forcing her nose to crinkle, and her eyes to water, and black tears to drip from her eyes as the water mingled with the dust. The light in the distance took on a yellow-orangish tinge.

Her feet knocked against more of the mysteries in the dust, more and more so that she was walking on them, a wobbly, cracking carpet of sticks. It was getting hot, too, the dust blowing harder, warm blasts of air, sweat dripping, mingling black with the dust, the light brighter—ow, what the fuck was she walking on? She bent and sifted through the dust, and came back with a stick, no…a bone. It was black and cracked and thin, but it was a bone for sure, a wrist, maybe. With a sinking feeling, Saru dug further, fingers feathering above more bones, more pokes, more smooth lengths and rough knot ends. She found a thigh, and some ribs, and then a skull that fit in her hand, black and grinning with no teeth. She tossed it away and scrabbled forward, stumbling over the piles of bones, crunchy, knocking, hollow sounds, towards the light, the heat. Now the bones were thicker, mixed with stones and rubble, piling into hills, a dull roar in the background, so low and present it snuck up until it was deafening.

Saru ran, scrabbling up a hill of dust and rock and bones. The dust in the air parted, and she saw in the distance a wall of fire, a nightmarish horizon of dancing black and yellow from ground to sky, the whole world cast in shadow and flame. There were shapes in the flames, easy ones she recognized—the Hathaway Bridge, sagging in snapped-back collapse, the Vericast tower, melted like a candle, City Hall, a molten shit swirl of flames. It was Philadelphia, the whole city on fire.

Saru watched the city burn, feeling the heat crack her skin and the blood and pus dribble from the openings. She took deep breaths, the stench bursting the vessels of her nose to gush blood, the air cutting her throat and jabbing acid holes in her seared lungs, lips burned and curled away, eyelids burned, the eyes steaming and boiling in their sockets. The pain was barely felt at this point, just an input tool for her brain, like fear, or hope, or cumming, or the urge to piss. She drank in the scene and bore witness, feeling her city die, forcing herself to watch, to claw some facts or clues or understanding from the scene, but she could fit it into no semblance of sense. She closed her eyes, intact again, and exhaled slowly, and Philadelphia was gone. Her body was whole. The world was black again. Saru shivered.

“It’s not real,” she whispered to herself. “It’s a vision. It’s not real.” And she yelled at the darkness, “That’s right fucker! I’m in control.”

Saru waited for her mimicked voice to echo back, the Ria monster taunting her, but it never came. Yeah, I thought so. The beating of her heart slowed to a regular pulse.

“Okay…” Saru said to herself, a stave against the quiet. “So far we have a bunch of statues of Ria turning into monsters, and one giant fucking Ria monster. Then we have Philadelphia on fire, the whole thing burned to the ground. And that means…what, exactly?”

Saru started walking forward, no longer wandering. She focused on accepting the idea of these visions, like accepting the idea that you were tripping and you just needed to ride it out. The motion of her legs was another mental prop, a way to bring her from one vision to the next. And to her amazement, it worked. The light came with only a few steps, and she was back on the streets of Philadelphia.

These were the streets Saru remembered—God they felt real. She had clothes too, an outfit she remembered, jeans and a
Slut Choir
tee, the gun belt and her trusty cattle prod. She laughed, held her head back and laughed, and then laughed more as people crossed the street to avoid the crazy, high bitch in their way. Home! This was home! Phila-fucking-delphia. Everything was right! The air smelled of gasoline, with a bouquet of urine and rot. There were all the happy city sounds—the squealing of sirens, the honking chaos of traffic, shouts, advertisements booming out, sappy actress voices astonished at low, low prices!

A fat man in a budget caji suit bumped into her and bounced off her chest. His eyes were glazed with the feeds.

“Watch where you’re going, you stupid bitch,” he snarled.

Saru laughed and kissed him on his fat lips. He pushed her away and ran, spitting. Aha, ahah! People! There were people—dirty, and ugly, and rich and poor, and all in a hurry, and all so beautiful she wanted to kiss them all!

The smog darkened overhead, covering the skyscrapers so their lights winked through like Discount Day—she never noticed how beautiful, how magical the city was with all the lights in rows up to the sky, like a fairy kingdom. It started to rain, and the people sped up, or dashed to cabs, or popped their umbrellas. Saru held her hands wide and welcomed the wet and the cool, thrilling as the rain soaked her shirt and ran down the channel of her spine. She skipped through the streets and splashed in a puddle, and then kick-rolled an elzi into the middle of the sidewalk like a barricade, causing the pedestrian sea to part and stare at her in horror. The elzi lay there, snoozing, swatting at invisible flies, sucking his thumb.

Saru ran to the corner store and stole a forty-ouncer, and chugged the whole damn thing, letting out a tremendous, award-winning burp—and it worked! The faintest buzz rose timid against the tyranny of her rock-God liver. She had never been so happy. The laughter poured out, coming like vomit, uncontrollable, and then, before she knew it, the laughs were tears, and she was crying. Saru fell down on the sidewalk, and leaned against the elzi, and cried, broken with a snort-laugh when someone threw change into her lap.

The rain picked up, and she pressed against the elzi, feeling an odd comfort in his warmth. The last of her tears fell out, squeezed, empty. She wondered what was going on in his mind, if this virtual world she was in had simulated a virtual world for him as well, and if there were layers and layers of the virtual, and one woman’s reality was just another’s simulation. Was she a string of numbers in a computer somewhere, all her acts, her thoughts, her hates and lust just ones and zeroes? Could you change information, snip some code here or there and make her nicer or prettier or smarter or dumber, or make her forget or remember things that had never happened?

Saru smashed the forty bottle. She took a jag of glass and held it to the elzi’s throat. If she opened him up and bled him out, would he die? Was she killing, was she destroying life? Or was it just a jumble of data she was rearranging? She saw the people hurrying by, like ants avoiding a predator, crossing the street or weaving through the parked cars to avoid the homeless bitch and the elzi. If she killed one of them, was it murder? Would she go to jail here? If she went on a killing spree, fucking up the data left and right with her gun and prod, would the cops come and shoot her dead? She held the glass to her own throat. And if she killed herself, what then? Would that end her life? Or end this vision? Would she wake up on the island again? Or back in the real world, in the torture cell? Could she die in the mirthul? Why had she never thought to ask John?

Saru pushed herself up, and for no reason kicked the elzi, hard, in the face. Her boot went deeper than she expected, boot tip going easy through the cheek like the face was made of lard, rotted, empty. She
shlucked
the boot out and walked away. The elzi lay, whimpering in whatever world he lived in, oblivious to the hole in his face. Maybe a rat would crawl inside and make a nest there.

Saru wandered up Broad Street until she found a bar, about fifty feet, and one she recognized. It was called Craig’s or Sam’s or Chuck’s, always closed and resurrected with a new owner, new design, same sad customers. She ordered some shots and found there was money in her wallet, and gave it all to the bar bitch, a saggy, pack-a-day woman. The dumb bitch wouldn’t take the money.

“Get outta here, you scammy cunt,” the bar bitch yelled through her two remaining teeth, and Saru did, grabbing a bottle and running, because who the hell cared anymore? The buildings started to blur, the lights of cars and windows drifting down, and around, spinning as she chugged cheap vodka, and stumbled down Broad Street, and swore at the people walking by. She wondered if Eugene was in this vision, and if she should try and track him down and have her way with him. It seemed weirdly uninteresting, and not even as exciting as porn—too fake and too real, not enough left to the imagination.

The air turned ozony. It was vibrating, causing her brain to rattle, tickling the hairs across her body and making her feel all icky and tingly. Other people were noticing it too, stopping and looking around like the morons people were—run, idiots, for all the good it will do you. Saru willed herself sober and it worked, the chemistry of her body just a few switches and pumps her mind could flick with ease. A circle of light appeared amidst the clouds, causing them to go gray. The light circle grew larger, like the sun coming down for a visit. The rain stopped, and the vibration intensified, her teeth vibrating, eyeballs jiggling in their sockets, spine rattling like the prongs of a rake. The light grew brighter and brighter, and the clouds grayer and grayer, until they thinned and burned away, and the sky was an ominous blue.

A ball of fierce white light hung above City Hall. It wasn’t the sun and it wasn’t exactly blinding. The light was contained, as though it were solid, the border between it and the air precise. Saru recognized it as one of the orbs Ria had used to destroy the Uau monsters in the holodomor, except this orb was the size of a blimp. It hung for a second, vibrating the air, vibrating so hard there was no sound, just the vibration. A few people were running, mouths open in screams she couldn’t hear, but most were stopped, staring at the ball, expecting. They probably thought it was a promotion, a Hathaway stunt, a giant piñata that would rain down oil-change coupons and candy. Well, go get it.

A beam of light shot from the orb, so bright it left squiggling black and green when Saru’s eyelids snapped shut. She opened her eyes and saw the UniBank building had been carved in half, and the top half had tumbled into City Hall, causing tidal waves of wreckage to spill through the streets. People ran now, boy did they run, or crawled when they were hit with rocks, or exploded in sprays of blood when hit with especially large rocks. Saru willed her eyes to adjust and found that her vision obeyed, that the beam was no longer bright, and she could stare at it directly, watch it carve the city into neat graves without more than the usual blinks. The destruction too she willed to ignore her, and so, as the buildings fell and the people vaporized in sweeps of light, she was always missed, sometimes by a hair, but never touched, walking freely through the carnage.

It was peaceful without sound, just the gut-rumbling, bowel-lubricating vibration as she moseyed through the ruined streets, and flames, and corpses smeared like globs of paint throughout the rubble. She climbed a mountain of rubble, up girders twisted like paperclips, and toppled pillars, dodging cracks and pitfalls until she stood three or four stories high to overlook the destruction. The hip warrens—the mazes of abandoned factories and slum houses—had been spared, untouched by the carving sphere. Veins of silver and green wound through the warrens. It was a forest, untouched by the Blue God, surreal within the destruction of the city. The sight of the forest nagged at Saru’s memory. She had seen it once before, when she had floated above the city with Ria in the beam of the scintillant. The forest had something to do with the Slow God. The Slow God was claiming that scrap of Earth, protecting it.