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“There shall be a fire that knows your name.”
Old Jim also noted a margin scrawl in the Medic’s record books that “all possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.”
By then, the biologists had become embedded in Dead Town, their fate and the fate of Dead Town interwoven, as if they were not an expedition at all, but an outpost, preparing for an assault from some unknown force.
Although, perhaps subconsciously, instinctually, they guessed. That something was off, and would only get worse.
“the null effect—to create a something from the nothing in the darkness, the mind betraying you every time.”
They had heard the words but not in the same context or intonation or the same kind of light or darkness or they could not recall what was different, why it was different and yet the same, no they could not, please stop asking the question. “Please stop asking. Please stop asking.” Please. Stop.
Who could know what on the page had been real and what imagined or outright hallucination.
Take, for example, her assertion that “the rabbits are not rabbits,” which she clinically expanded on to assert that if an organism “acts against its essential nature, it must be a mimic—perhaps to avoid being prey or, as in this case, to disguise that it is a predator.
Central tampering with the selection process, so the biologists had been chosen, in part, for their lack of connections to the world. The lack of parents. The lack of siblings. The lack of strong, close friends. The lack of all the normal things that perhaps were less normal than people who had them thought.
As if Old Jim had spent his time at Central chasing phantoms and dark faery tales. As if none of it had ever happened. (And, perhaps, it hadn’t.) (At least, not in the way Old Jim thought.)
Remembered now why he didn’t want to fight anyone. Because his training might kick in and he’d be helpless next to the compulsion of that, and he didn’t want to kill anyone because he was grief-stricken. Break the pool stick in half, jam it in a biker’s eye, take the other half and smash it across the back of the next attacker. Reach across the bar and pull the bartender toward him into a headbutt, or worse. Now he was back there, now he was overseas again and with a mandate to do whatever, whenever, without asking.
“So young to be so hard.” “So old to be so soft,” she replied.
Overheard in the hallway his last day before traveling to the Forgotten Coast: “I wish you weren’t wonderful in so many ways, because you’re so awful.” A wave of blood, spreading out in all directions.
Could you lose your mind to an unanswerable question, or just your soul?
What was a person, sometimes, but a wandering fire. But put the flames out, and what was left?
Self-proclaimed Gods are the worst of all, but usually they’re easier to kill.
What fucked up lineage meant your half sister joined you, inseparable, in what amounted to a cult?
Henry had a juvenile record, sealed, that, as Cass had indicated, included torturing a hamster and setting fire to the gardener’s shed on his family’s property—when he believed the gardener to be inside. Henry’s father had “sent him abroad” after that, in the grand tradition of rich people across the centuries. Frankly, Old Jim was surprised Central hadn’t tried to recruit him at that point. Disaffected, with a violent streak that could be channeled into a useful aggression.
“We have been looking for signals, sir. And, now, I understand you will be looking for traces?” “Traces?” “Because we want it to come out into the open.” “You mean force it?” Old Jim asked, and wondered what worlds lay between his definition of “it” and the Medic’s definition. “Yes.” “Why?” “So we can control it or destroy it.” “Do you think that’s my mission?” “What other is there, sir?”
“He whispered, ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. It should be different already. But it isn’t, so I’m doing my best.’”
Something terrible is coming. It’s still uncurling from that long-ago moment. I know it, and it’s going to kill us all every one of us. It’ll kill you and me and—”
“What about a postcard? Is that okay?” She was looking at him with an earnestness that made him smile. “When you only care a little bit, yes.” “So he gets a get-well postcard?” No, he gets a fuck-off-and-die postcard.
“Someone has damaged you. Badly and with intent. Over time.”
The voice rough, with a cough behind it like a smoker. “Yeah, like that. God loves you. God sees you. This is his path, his way. Go drown now, happy. All’s well.”
“Who sent you? Who do you work for?” “God sent me.” “No, God didn’t fucking send you, you great fucking asshole.”
“Jack said you might be difficult,” Commander Thistle said. “Now you’ll be difficult for Jack. He’ll put you in a barrel himself.” Jesus Christ. “Stuffing bodies in barrels is God’s work? Is Jack God?”
Debatable, the logic of psychopaths, but Old Jim didn’t want to debate it.
He halted next in front of a sentence that felt like a confession: “I did not mean to do that to them.” No teenager had scrawled that on the wall. He could see where it repeated, faintly, ever lower on the wall, as if written in a frenzy.
Nothing in the end could placate Area X. The land overwhelmed with a spark from the lighthouse, and what came out manifested under the ground and spread and even when it did not seem to spread it was spreading, and though the coast was still and silent, the people who had been there would still exist in some form, in some place. How this would always happen and yet it could happen in ways much worse.
Just do as I do. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Nothing is perfect, ever. Nothing. I forgive you. Can you forgive me?
There shall be a flame that knows your name. But, perhaps, he knew its name, too.
Landry and Lowry, buds, sitting in a tree D-O-I-N-G D-R-U-G-S.
Their suits, as he had always known, would betray them. Their skin might betray them too, but at least it was part of them, more a civil war than a foreign invader.
In the corner, he’d scrawled, “evil advances with good,” but could not fucking remember why.
The answer to some shitty questions was to beg experimental drugs off Landry and not worry about it,
Why did Jack have to be so scheme-y, all foreplay and no fuck? Or did everybody devoured by Central become that way?
Hinojosa had disappeared, presumed missing, presumed dead, presumed more fucked than those who remained behind.
He took a step back. Her combat knife was in her hand. His combat knife was in his hand. How had they gotten there? What the fuck had they been about to do with the fucking knives? He dropped his, but he could pull his sidearm quick if needed. Why did he think he needed to?
“How do you know I’m not already someone else?”
“It’s an illusion. A magician’s been practicing his act on this beach, and I’d give him an F for fuck no.”
Area X would never not happen. There was no off switch, there was no other time in which it faded away or was not activated. But if it colonized the past, then everything would get worse, worse, worse.
