Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 92
Nobody likes it when destiny throws gods and monsters into your back yard. You end up spending a lot of time alone.
Sound great?
It’s not.
Imagine plowing your fields with the blood of wandering ogres and spending every Sunday trying to get some wandering sorcerer’s curse off your house because it turned it into a chicken. Who wants that?
Nobody.
So let’s be clear.
You see a sword of destiny?
Don’t pick it up.
Trust me.
Part Two: Broker of Souls
Sasha was good at what she did. She had to figure out what a client wanted by look alone: angry, pensive, scared, aroused, bored, whatever. It was the job.
She was good at it.
This girl, this robot girl, she definitely needed something emotional, cushy, gooey, dangerous.
“Got what you need here, kid,” Sasha said.
“I don’t need anything a broker can offer me,” the robot girl said, moving past Sasha's stall.
But Sasha knew. “I’ve got guts right here,” Sasha said, “teeming with bacteria. Got some crawling with maggots, give you a real authentic experience of being alive.”
“I don’t want the experience,” she said. “I want the real thing.”
“No one can give you that,” Sasha said.
“I disagree,” the robot girl said, and she took Sasha by the wrist and pulled her close and smiled wide with her sharp, shiny teeth. “You know what would make me feel more alive than anything I could buy?”
“Uh, dogs?” Sasha offered. Because she really liked dogs.
“You,” the robot girl said, and ate Sasha’s face.
Part Three: The Star That Would Not Die
She lived the way we hoped she would finally die – a star.
Not the singing and dancing kind of star, but the one you saw every day getting herself into and out of a lot of problems.
Pianos fell on her from great heights. Manhole covers mysteriously went missing on the day she was scheduled to walk down the street. And she'd disappear, only to wake up in her house on our video screens the next day.
She. Would. Not. Die. The day she got hit by a bus and set on fire, ratings were so high we figured that was it, surely, the Star couldn’t go on any longer.
But there was life in her yet. When they asked, after, why she didn’t die, she said, “Because I’m not looking to die.”
“What are you looking for then?” we asked.
“Life,” she said. “Nobody gets enough of it.”
Part Four: Zombie on A Hot Tin Roof
Recipe for Zombie on a Hot Tin Roof:
One zombie.
The top of the zombie is important. Needs to be a little soft and goopy. Kids are good for this. Use kids.
Lure the zombie up to the hot tin roof.
Good to have some fresh blood, not yours. Slather that shit on the roof. All over. Like you’re giving it a massage. Mmmmm massage.
Capture the zombie.
Nets aren’t good. Gotta stake it out on the hot tin roof. I recommend having somebody you don’t like or someone you want to eat next, do the staking. Have had good luck chopping off legs at the knee.
Leave the zombie up there for approximately 24 hours.
(What else do you have to do, right now? Leave it there!)
Test for doneness.
If the zombie bites, it’s not done yet. Also, you know who you’re eating next (whoever it bit. I know, sometimes I have to spell it out).
Prepare the zombie as you would a spatchcocked chicken… and dig in.
If you want to be polite, leave the bones up on the roof for the birds. Zombie birds are a delicacy. You can draw them in with the bones, friend.
Congratulations!
You're now a fucking zombie chef.
First of your line.
Part Five: Bonepicker
I am a woman of bones. Not the bones you read about, the ugly dead ones, but the bones that are here, beneath me. The bones that have made us who we are. That will make us what we're to be.
Bones are the result of junk recycling, did you know that? Calcium is a byproduct of life, and sometime there in the turgid seafoam of our history, the cells that made up our bodies decided to use that waste product for our benefit.
Now I stand on a sea of bones. The calcium deposits, the waste products, of humans past. And I consider what each of them meant to us… what each of them will mean to us.
The calcium taught us that even the most useless bit of waste can be reimagined, and help us build something better. It taught us that the waste is not the past, but the future. The limitations drive us.
And here, beneath me, is not that dead past. But the future we are driving toward.
Not death.
Rebirth.
A reawakening.
Another world.
There, in our bones.
It was there, all the time.
THE LAST
EVERY MORNING, a woman scuttles out from the deep shadows of her apartment and into the shared quad, barefoot, hair wild as a warm winter, her jumpsuit rucked around her ankles, screaming.
"It's awful! It's awful!"
We know it's not really so awful, or perhaps it is. It always is; being alive and breathing has its horrors. We surround her and we comfort her and we hold her close, until her breathing calms and her sobs subside. We pull her jumpsuit back on and we comb her hair. Sometimes, we give her a wash, if it's been awhile.
It has been awful for all of us, at one time or another, living here under the dome, together but alone, this last holdout of humanity for light years and light years in every direction. We could be the last of all humanity, but let's not think about that, not yet, that's too much, that will send you out into the quad, screaming.
I have been that woman, more times than I can count.
Despair is a venomous monster, a sneaky cancer that sits in your belly and uncurls each night as darkness catches up to us; the big primary star eclipsed by passing satellites, then shrouded by our own rotation.
We tell each other we are lucky, to be the last. We have food. Water. Shelter. Radiation is minimal. The gravity here is kind. We are so lucky, to be the last.
But we are the last.
It is that creeping certainty, that lack of future, that leads to the screaming.
And it takes all of us, all of our strength, the strength of our friends, and of those who are left, to soothe us, to carry us back inside, to carry on, even if we are the last.
MOONTIDE
ACHIYA WAS A PRECIPITOUS PORT CITY nestled several kilometers inland within the spokes of a jagged natural rock formation, out of reach of the tremendous tides that washed the shore clean twice a day when the moons were in progression. Most people in Achiya made their living scouring the beaches after the tides receded. What they pulled out of the sea was often monstrous, and rarely palatable. But there were real treasures sometimes, too – bits of semi-organic heat shielding from some derelict, or the tuberous helmets that survived the long plunge taken by some spacefarer shot out of the sky.
But Zoe’s mother turned her back on the life of a scavenger, and instead took to the sea itself. When she announced to Zoe’s grandmother that she would fish the sea, the story went, her grandmother had told her she was an arrogant ghost, and God would punish her for her arrogance and turn the whole village to salt.
Zoe’s mother had fished that sea for forty years before it finally consumed her. Six days after she disappeared, the tide had surged further inland than its usual kilometer, and set the colorful debris of her mother’s boat to rest just a few thousand paces from their stoop. Zoe remembered climbing down from the loft high up in the branches of the living abordna tree that supported their home, and finding her aunt wailing over the wreckage.
Weeks later, a salty group of her mother’s peers hauled a vicious monster from the sea – ten meters long, four meters wide, covered in massive stinging tentacles that dangled with a thousand glittering optic nerves. It did not have a proper mouth or jaw, but a sucking maw that made up the core of its underside. They slit the thing open and found Zoe’s mother’s corpse there, perfectly preserved in one of the eight interior sacs the beast used to store its captured prey for later digestion.
Zoe remembered standing on the rocky beach. Thousands of tiny beetles migrated across the pebbles between the tides. When the moons were in recession, they hibernated. Her people were like those beetles, their livelihoods dependent on the long, 10-year cycle of the moons.
She became a data harvester, steeling in and out of great monsters like the one that had taken her mother, ransacking their guts for bits of flotsam they had ingested. A beetle casing here. An old semi-organic brain mesh there. Zoe did her best work during moontide, that long spill of dark when the nearest moon pulled hardest at the planet, peeling the ocean back like a flayed blanket of skin.
The goods she pulled out all went up into the city proper, for sale; she hiked through the winding streets, kept the sun off by moving from one tattered awning to another, offering salvage for a fraction of the cost of new, exchanging what the monsters ate for a bag of rice, a keg of beer, and once, a long length of muslin that put her in mind of her mother's shroud.
She lived with her aunt up in the old abordna tree, until her aunt's vision went, and then her knees, and finally her heart, and Zoe sent her, too, back to the sea. For years, after, she expected that every behemoth she dug up would contain some scrap of her aunt; a toe, a bit of torso. But as Zoe, too, scuttled about on the beach like those beetles, year after year, 10-year moontide after moontide, she found no sign of her aunt while digging and skinning and squeezing.
As she, too, began to fall more often while descending to the beach, she considered the comfort that such an existence had offered her, and her people, the beetles on the beach, each of them making up a small piece of something far greater, cyclical as the seasons. Death and rebirth; the sea at once a murky incubator of life, and a seething dumping ground of death and waste. This was life; its most potent metaphor. Birth and shit.
Moontide.
The moons so close she felt she could reach up on touch them. Her vision, not so great as the day they pulled her mother from the sea. Her balance, ever worsening. Her mind, wandering. Her body, tired.
Achiya rose up behind her, a tremulous beacon lit by swarms of fireflies. The city neither grew nor contracted, it hummed along, like the sea, like her own heart.
Stretched across the sand before her, here at moontide, a great bloody gob of slime-crusted organic matter lay inert, waiting. Zoe put her hands on it. Marveled at the ache in her fingers as she took up her knife and slit it open, filled with the same anticipation as the day they revealed her mother's body. She hoped for a treasure, something from the sky.
Inside, she found a boat, a proper craft. Sturdy and gleaming, like a new tooth. Zoe drug it away from the creature and pulled it down to the water, compelled there though she could not say way. The craft took the water as if born there, and perhaps it was. Zoe climbed inside, her hands still sticky with blood and viscera. She lay on the bottom of the craft, and gazed at the moons. Is this how her mother felt, at sea?
She lay in the belly of the sea, the belly of the planet; she was the guts of the universe. Like her mother. Her aunt. All of Achiya, like the beetles and the tides and the moons. A great gory living thing. She was a bit of sinew, a length of bone, a knobby knee.
The craft began to drift. Zoe drifted with it.
They shared the same heartbeat. She felt it under her hands. The same rhythm as the lapping water. The same pulse as the stars.
She closed her eyes, and hoped to be swallowed whole.
SKY BOYS
DEAD BOYS kept falling from the sky.
Inspector Abijah Olivia picked her way through the detritus of the latest crash. Chunk of torso here. A webbed swatch of heat shielding there. She kept her hands stuffed in her pockets as she toed at the wreckage, idly guessing which bits of flesh had come from which part of which boy’s body. G-forces tended to obliterate bodies. Turned them back into meat. It made incidents like this difficult to process, even when they were local.
"Not you again," said Garda Katya Sobrija. Up on the hill behind her, the yellow lights of a single garda ambulatory unit blinked lazily in the morning haze. This far south, they only had three or four hours of daylight this time of year, and the garda would want to make the most of it. Even lazy ones like Katya. It wasn’t often they beat Abijah to a scene that interested her. Three other gardai moved methodically through the wreckage in the field, jabbing at the remains with long canes; to what end, Abijah had no idea. Morbid curiosity, maybe. She saw no medical or forensic crash specialists on site.
"Got sent to do a retrieval," Abijah said. "Boy on this barge had a package for a client."
"Wasted day for you, then," Katya said. "There’s at least a dozen dead boys here, all horked up into hunks of meat. Good luck sorting through this shit."
"Maybe so. He has some identifiers." Abijah flicked her wrist, offering up the relevant paperwork, which bloomed from the interface written into her skin.
Katya grimaced, but accepted the link between their interfaces and downloaded the information packet. "You fucking cunt."
Abijah shrugged and let Katya digest the official order releasing the boy’s remains and personal articles, if any, into Abijah’s care.
"Off-world cases are garda cases,” Katya said. “Can’t believe somebody is fucking with this one, again.”
“Again?”
“Yeah, this is the third transport that didn’t make it planetside in as many months.”
Abijah had heard reports of it, but hadn't kept up on the final count. “Somebody
shooting them down? Malfunctions?”
“The investigation is ongoing.”
“I see. So, you have no idea."
“Fuck you.”
"I never fuck," Abijah said, halting a few steps from a charred bit of flesh still clinging to a jagged yellowish bone. A wrist? Elbow? Who could say? “Not without permission.” She crouched in the churned mud, peering at the flesh. She took a stylus from her coat pocket and poked at the flesh, turning it over to see if there was any marked skin on the other side.
"Another order from a rich dip,” Katya said, eyelids flickering as she reviewed the data cloud privately, streamed onto her retinas. She snorted, blinked away the data. “Why is it you’re always doing business with fallen capitalists?”
“They’re the only ones willing to pay my fee,” Abijah said. No telltale marking on the flesh. She straightened, and frowned at the mess of churned mud, flesh and scrap metals littering the crushed turf of the field. The air smelled of burnt meat and seared grass.
“I have money on a dumb kid doing it,” Katya said. “There’s some kind of civil war up there, the boys say. Maybe this was pay back from one side to another.”
“I don’t like them bringing their conflicts down here,” Abijah said.
“Nobody does. But here we are. You done? I have a team coming to catalog these pieces.”
“Bill the medical examiner to my account. Save the public a few notes.”
Katya snorted and trudged back through the mud to the ambulatory unit.
Abijah brought up her wrist; an overlay of the entire crash site unfolded above her arm, in miniature. She activated the GPS identifier her client had given her to track the case the boy was carrying. In the absence of any official recording devices or beacons on these rusty old hulks ferrying cheap labor down from the skies, private clients getting goods smuggled in from off-world used their own private trackers. A blinking green light on the projection led her to the edge of the smoldering field.
The ground beneath her feet surged upward, like a wave. A hunk of siding from the craft towered above her, dripping mucus, like the gooey ribs of some great leviathan. She removed her stylus and poked into the ground until she felt resistance. Dug up the relic beneath.
A smooth case, about as wide as a hatbox, deep as a can of rum. The case was linked to a length of chain, which she pulled. The ground vomited up the other end: it was attached to a metal cuff, which still bore the meaty, semi-recognizably wrist and most of the hand of the boy who had been ferrying the case. Also attached to the wrist was a communications fob, a piece of alien tech the sky boys often used to talk to each other.
Abijah pocketed the fob and yanked up the case – only to have it fall open in her hands, the locking mechanism broken or busted open. Inside, the case was empty.
“Fuck,” Abijah muttered. Her client wasn’t going to be pleased. Better to be the bearer of bad news now than later.
She used her interface to call up Zoya vo Neberissy, waiting until Zoya’s plump, seemingly poreless face dominated her vision, then she blinked the image back to her left eye only, and set her right eye to record the scene in front of her.
“Good and bad news, ambassador,” Abijah said, holding up the empty case.
Zoya gasped; a hand fluttered to her prim mouth. Zoya, like most of Abijah’s private clients, was loosely related to the founding families, and had gotten herself a cozy job as island ambassador to one of the many murky and varied counties on the continent. While the founders had most of their wealth repatriated centuries before, they had found ways to continue sucking wealth from the public via government stipends and allowances to maintain their properties as “historical points of common interest.” Aside from factories, the little fiefdoms run by founding family members used most of the cheap labor from the sky boys. Fewer taxes. Less paperwork.
