Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth (3 page)

It was simple: the Sherry that Evan knew had been replaced by a lookalike, a doppelganger, an automaton. The Exacerbator had wasted no time, as usual. What had he done with the real Sherry last night, though?

Vigilante Man peeled Evan Boanerges off and rolled himself on, snugging the cape on last. It was supposed to be fireproof, even capable of allowing him to glide short distances—say, from building to building—but flame-throwing hoods weren’t quite as common as they were in
Rescue Beaver
—Evan snickered:
comic
books—and the need to move from building top to building top was only felt by the young, like Elastic Man and Kid Bonzai, the new college kid in Collections. And Boy Plunder, probably, depending on how weighed down with loot he was.

Vigilante Man sat on the foot of his bed again and thought about Sherry, the pivotal role she played in his life. How someday he would explain to her that he loved her not out of some misguided sense of protection—though the Exacerbator
did
make it seem that way—but because in the break room she always unscrewed the bottle from the lid instead of the lid from the bottle; because if she could get away with it, she’d wear control top hose under her bikini and then frolic in the surf, the water beading down her nylon legs. Because he needed someone to tell him to be careful and then send him out anyway and turn fast away from the window, already biting her index finger.

He would find her. He would stand at the window all night if he had to, but he would find her.

At three o’clock there was a knock at the door, and Vigilante Man crossed the living room of ace accountant Evan Boanerges, knocked back. The secret knock took a full minute and a half, but in the third series of the left hand diminutions the caller faltered, unsure—
Boy Plunder!
—and Vigilante Man slammed the door back to give chase.

The hall was empty but that meant nothing.

Vigilante Man reeled down the paisley carpet to the closing elevator and dived for it, his gloved hand forcing the twin doors open.

It was just the old woman again, with her dog. She pushed the down button and held it, waiting for him to stand.

Her and the dog both raised their lips at him.

“You shouldn’t be out in your pajamas,” she said around the tenth floor, and Evan closed his eyes and told her to just please shut up please, would she? and when the doors opened Vigilante Man was racing across the lobby, out into the night again, the doorman whispering a slight
go get em, big guy
, which is all any good hero really needs.

HOW BILLY HANSON DESTROYED THE PLANET EARTH, AND EVERYONE ON IT

He wouldn’t say this later, because he’d be dead along with everyone else, blasted into a cloud of comparatively warm ash swirling around in what had been Earth’s orbital plane, but it wasn’t his fault. Really. Or, if there was any fault, it was that he was human in the first place, a species built specifically, it would seem, to push buttons clearly marked D
ON’T
P
USH
, a species that had only evolved in the first place because it kept reaching up to that next level of the beach instead of being satisfied with where it already was.

Given the chance, of course, Billy Hanson might have blamed the political situation of the lab he was with on a three-year grant, a political situation which was purely typical of any money-driven research setting, and beneath mentioning here except to say that there was the usual amount of pressure to collect some data, which could then be cribbed down into a prospectus for an article, dropped into whatever mailbox was marked for the latest pickup.

So, yes, had he had the luxury of time, Billy Hanson might have tried to shift the blame from himself, say it was the lab’s fault, the same way he used to blame his older sister for grape juice he’d just spilled on the beige carpet, but, at the same time, had he
not
destroyed the Earth that fine June evening, then of course all the acclaim would have been his and his alone.

Because, almost on accident, he’d finally done it.

Not scheduled some prime observatory time—that had been scheduled for months, by some process Billy assumed involved darts—but decided, half on a whim, to let the computer cycle the telescope through one of its lighter diagnostic routines, which involved settling its crosshairs on some arbitrarily-chosen but rigorously-mapped set of coordinates, so it could fine tune itself, compensate for continental drift, smog, and all the rest of the usual variables, then hum and mutter to itself in binary for a while, finally give Billy the greenlight to redirect.

Which, to his credit, Billy Hanson almost did, thereby saving the Earth and everyone on it.

Except—and this is where the political situation of the lab he was working with comes into play—instead of automatically redirecting, Billy first did a manual check of the computer’s date and time, as that was what was going to get stamped onto each image he was about to record. Last week, either as a joke or to maliciously corrupt everyone else’s data (the latter, surely), some joker who’d pulled an early
AM
shift had set the date back enough years that the days and month-numbers still matched up, meaning nobody caught it for about thirty-six hours.

Luckily, nothing Billy had recorded that night was going into an article.

But that was just luck.

So, to be thorough—in a hostile environment, paranoia was just survival—Billy tabbed down to the clock, and, in doing so, happened to glance at the coordinates the telescope had already focused on.

It wasn’t one of the naked-eye clusters.

Billy thought it was a joke, at first. Another joke.

It had to be.

But his face, it was so hot. And his heart, there in his chest. And he was even crying a little.

He had been right.

To back up a little: eight years ago, Billy Hanson had been halfway through his first post-doc gig, and, following the advice of his dissertation director, was already sketching out a series of questions which he could then narrow down into a legitimate research proposal. The key of it, his director said, was that he had to come up with something revolutionary, or at least revolutionary
sounding
. Because all those boards of directors, they wanted to be discovering the next big thing. Failing that, however, at least give them the promise of a valiant, newsworthy effort, with a data set that could possibly be recycled, even, so long as their foundation’s name was still attached to it.

So Billy gave it to them.

His idea was that, if gravitational lensing was a real thing, allowing starlight to bend around bodies of significant-enough mass—and it was real, thank you—then shouldn’t it also be possible to somehow focus through a ‘web’ or ‘network’ or ‘crystalline arrangement’ of stellar bodies, such that you were looking down the ‘corridor’ of their combined gravity, a sweet spot maybe just a few centimeters wide but infinitely deep, where the combined, equalized ‘pull’ would essentially be opening up a hole in space, maybe even time? What could you see then?

That was how he’d ended his proposal:
What could we see then?

The headlines would be along the lines of “Mankind Looks for God,” and have Billy’s picture under it somewhere, smiling just mischievously enough to usher in another age, where the scientists could again be celebrities.

His project didn’t even make the first cut, though, and no new age dawned, or took him for its darling, its media child. As his director said, Billy’d made the cardinal mistake: proposed a project which required no labwork, allowed no empirical results. Instead, all he needed was a pencil, some paper, and a brain. The
right
brain, granted, but still—the board didn’t think their money would be best spent on a thought-experiment, one that could only ever be proven over the course of a million years, so, the next season, Billy and a colleague had a new, only slightly revolutionary proposal to submit, and he filed his Spatial Tunneling Debacle (as his director called it) into the bottom drawer, waited for the math to come.

Instead of the math, though, what Billy got that balmy night in June was proof, the kind that can be written to a digital image file.

And, because he was still in diagnostic mode, what he was seeing was beyond question, was untampered with, and, even better, whatever magical conduit of stars had lined up around his coordinates, to focus his series of lenses some exponential amount farther away than humans had ever even dreamed, they were each being recorded as well. So this would be a repeatable thing. If not physically, then at least in simulation. Let other people do the math, now; Billy Hanson already had the
pictures
.

It was all so overpowering that he didn’t even bother to wipe the tear from his right cheek. He wasn’t aware of it, really. Like a child, he was just smiling with wonder, leaning in as if to touch the screen.

On some as-yet unnamed planet an untold numbers of light-years away, a form of life wholly alien to him was sitting at what was probably a table, in what might be just another backyard.

As near as Billy could tell, this ‘alien’ was just staring straight ahead. For all Billy knew, though, this—this whatever-it-was, it was telepathically communing with its species, or gestating a litter of young, or turning to stone like it did every third year when the solar flares came, or using some of its complicated neck apparatus to filter the methane from its air, or whatever it breathed, if it even breathed.

It wasn’t quite bipedal either, Billy didn’t think, but did seem to be bilateral. From where Billy was looking, anyway.

Which is the exact point, not counting that first fish flopping up into the dirty sunlight, when humanity started to wink out of existence.

Billy Hanson’s fingers fell to the keyboard as they had a hundred other nights, to adjust the second lens, which needed regrinding, really, not just another gear pulling on it, and his gravity peephole focused down across the universe, tight enough that, for an instant, the skin or covering of his subject’s forelimb blurred, then snapped back in fine detail.

Billy nodded, backed off a hair—
had anybody ever done this, even? was he, in addition to testing the limits of physics, pioneering exobiology as well?
—and when the image finally settled again he nodded to himself, content, and only stopped when the alien cocked its head over the slightest bit, in a way that made Billy feel suddenly hollow inside.

This was the way the deer on the golf course he’d grown up by would stop, when they became aware of him and his sister, trying to sneak up.

“No,” he mouthed, as if even voicing the word would give his position away, but it was too late.

The alien was tilting his head around now, then focusing up, back along the gravity tunnel, using some sixth or forty-first sense that Billy Hanson couldn’t even conceive . . . had it felt the pressure of his stare? was this a species so hunted across both time and galaxies that it had developed a sensitivity to observation acute enough that it even kicked in across light years? Or—or could it even be knowledge-based, part of some maniacally epistemic religion, where knowing something about a fellow creature was tantamount to rape, or murder? It could even be that, sitting there, this alien was involved in the most dire offense known to its kind, so all its senses were already turned up, listening, feeling.

It didn’t matter.

What did was that it had turned its head up to Billy Hanson in direct response to Billy leaning closer to his monitor. Nevermind that Billy was holding his breath now, shaking his head no, insisting that this wasn’t in his research, that this shouldn’t even be possible, according to the laws of physics as he understood them.

But neither should looking across the universe.

“No,” he said again, instead of all the famous and enduring things he could have said. By then the alien was standing, looking back down the tunnel of stars, into Billy Hanson’s heart, and it was only when the alien smiled that Billy realized what he was thinking: that this
was
a bilateral species, yes.

The only reason he noticed this was that the smile spreading across the alien’s main face, it was lopsided, not really meant to indicate pleasure. The kind of smile Billy Hanson associated with an older cousin standing perfectly still in an empty hall during a game of hide and seek. Standing perfectly still and listening to the linen closet.

In that closet, Billy closed his eyes, tried to pretend he wasn’t really there, and so never saw the backlash of power boring now through the fabric of space for Earth, to implode it with such suddenness that the brief vacuum left by it would, for a few breaths, pull all the surface flame from the sun, allowing what had been his solar system a moment of darkness, followed by a cold millennium marked by a shroud of dust, that, because the implosion had been so thorough, no longer contained even the building blocks of life, much less any memory of man.

That was all still seconds away, though.

A lifetime, an eternity.

In it, Billy Hanson opened his eyes, smiled the way you smile when you’re caught, and, in the last and perhaps purest gesture humankind would be afforded, pulled the phone up to his ear and dialed the first six digits not of his girlfriend’s number—he had no girlfriend—but of a girl from his department who always touched her right eyebrow when she laughed, as if there were a button there to make her stop embarrassing herself.

What Billy was going to tell her, maybe, was not to worry about it, you’re beautiful and perfect and everything good, and I love you I love you I love you, please.

What he did instead was wait to call her for what turned out to be too long, and then, along with everybody else, wink out of existence with the phone to his ear, as if that mattered, what he meant to do.

LITTLE MONSTERS

We built the monster from leftover pieces of other monsters. A beak here, a tentacle there, claws all over. Gina kept pushing for bilateral symmetry, and I held my tongue for as long as I could—this wasn’t her idea, after all—but finally had to say it over ordered-in boxes of noodles: that this is a nightmare creature we’re foisting on the world, right? It’s not
supposed
to conform to biology as we know it. That’s specifically what’s terrifying. Gina chopsticked another mouthful in, showing off that she could—of the two of us, I’m the barbarian—then shrugged and explained that bilateralism is particular to two things (chew, chew): whether or not the monster walks upright, might need to
balance
in some ‘crazy, unmagical’ way, and what gravity field it developed in. And of course it had to walk upright. Chase scenes are completely unexciting when the creature’s just clumping and oozing and looming behind. Sometimes I hate her. But I wouldn’t be doing this with anybody else, either. So, again, I told her sure, sure, this monster was going to be terrestrial, definitely, homegrown, and it was also going to get around without leaving a slime trail. And then I forked another bite in, let it swell until I had to close my eyes to swallow. The creature I’d been dreaming of for so long now, I told myself, maybe I’d been hiding it half in the shadows of my mind on purpose, so I didn’t have to get into stupid details like gravity. I guess what I wanted was the effect—people in the streets falling to their knees, screaming, the whole city stopping what it’s doing, looking around to this new thing in its midst. Except, then, two days later, Gina stepped back, kind of rubbed her lips with the side of her hand, and said something was wrong. “What?” I asked, squinting in dread. “Peter,” she said, cranking the garage door up to let us breathe, “so it, you know, it eats random citizens, pets, the occasional shrub or mailbox.” I nodded. Hated it when she called me by my full name. It never tokened well for what was coming. This time was no exception: our monster needed some means of elimination. If not, then it would bulge, teeter, finally explode. And, if it was going to have that kind of apparatus, then we might as well assign it a sex, right? Unless of course we wanted to pioneer a third, fourth, or fifth gender—but we were already pushing it with the tentacles, wouldn’t I say? I closed my eyes, could feel things collapsing inside me. We had to go to the kitchen to hash this out, and it took days, sketch after sketch. Not just the bathroom habits of monsters, but the mating practices. The dimorphism between the sexes—we were unimaginative, finally stuck with just the two we knew—and which sex was likely to be the most fierce, the most terrifying. The most successful. So the beaks had to go, turned out to just be vestigial, movie-inspired ornamentation. Driving to get more noodles that night, I hammered the steering wheel with the heel of my hand and cried, called myself
Peter
over and over. The next morning, then—I’d like to say after a night of furious lovemaking, but, well: more like acrimonious sitcom watching—we walked into the garage, found we’d forgot to disconnect the fibers from the switchboard. We salvaged what we could, our hands working in a unison we thought gone forever, but still, at the end of that terrible day, our monster was maybe a sixteenth of its former mass. The tentacles were still disconcerting, sure, but the claws were outsized now, had to go. “I’m sorry,” Gina said into my chest, “it was me, it was me,” but it had been both of us. I’m adult enough to know that, at least. So we did what we could with what we had. Again. Gina pulled back-to-back eighteen hours days just getting the eyes right—if it wasn’t going to be fast, it at least needed to be able to spot its prey from a distance, have that kind of advantage—and I decided to save the tentacles (our last complete set) for next time around, and promised myself to harbor zero malice toward this monster, for not having been worthy of them. And then, finally, all of summer behind us now, it was done. Sure, we could tinker here, adjust that, shade this over a scratch, but the good artist knows when to put the brush down. And we could pretend to be good artists, anyway. “Well?” Gina said, her arm around my side, my arm draped down across her far shoulder—you love whoever you climb the mountain with, right?—and I nodded, hit the button in my hand, and the garage door creaked up behind us, bathing the slick cement floor in early morning sunlight, and, just like the two times before, our little monster hitched its backpack into the right place and we unleashed it on the world, out into the river of children leading to the playground, to kindergarten, each of them perfectly designed to wreak its own particular brand of havoc on the world, to never ever
ever
stop until the helicopters made it. And, if the city’s breath caught in its throat a bit when our garage door came up, if it looked our way for maybe a moment longer than usual, then we never knew it. We were too busy watching her walk away ourselves.