(Scanned from the Sucret Herald)
It was one of those things you typically only see in movies, but luckily, as was often the case, he was present to witness it all, from beginning to end.
He had been behind her, had seen that she was doing nothing in particular, merely strolling along near the drop of the cliff where the two roads converged, and then from nowhere, approaching them both like a banshee, there came a metro car with its sirens blaring up top. It was doing about 60, before braking to a halt behind her, as she was directly in its path. From there it narrowly avoided mowing her down, took the highway on the right, as if apprehending a culprit. A few minutes later, both of them having taken the same route, it re-emerged, then cornered her near a rocky outcropping where she couldn’t easily run off.
She trembled and nearly fell over, her pumps stuck firmly in the wretched mud, as three officers emerged from the interior of the vehicle and began moving towards her. One of them carried a cathode gun in his holster, the rest were armed with electric incapacitators. The one in front, who sported a sharp buzzcut and carried a record pad, drew her to her feet and began reading her her rights under the Provisional Directorate while applying handcuffs.
“Evening, gentlemen,” he rattled, appearing from behind a nearby bush. “Afraid you’ll have to unhand the lady and let her go. She’s done nothing wrong, I was here, I saw it. Leave her.”
“Oh, yeah?” one of the others in back chimed. He had on a cadet’s uniform and shining blue eyes over a well-groomed, thin amber mustache. “Well, unfortunately, you’re wrong. We have her in on impeding an official vehicle, resisting arrest, and creating a public disturbance. As you saw, she wouldn’t let us pass.”
“Well, she could hardly expect you to come out of nowhere like that. The area we’re in is extremely remote.”
“You want to make something out of this?” the officer in front spat. He was the tallest of the three, looked as if he were the best of Academy stock, rugged and lean, muscular in the upper extremities. A real brute of a man, and the stranger had a marked distaste for his kind. His broad fingers left a mark on her forearm as she cowered in shame.
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do,” he volunteered, whipping a pocketknife from his jacket. “As it happens, I have dangerous sociopathic tendencies. I pose an immediate threat to you all. Not only to those of you with the fancy little uniforms, mind you- but to her as well. If I am not apprehended, you will all die. So please- take me in. Take me in with her. We’re equally guilty.” The third officer, who bore a slight resemblance to some Confederate army general with his thick distinguished mustache, raised his incapacitator, but before it could be fired the stranger tossed the pocketknife aside in the dust, rendering it useless. The officer in charge glanced up from her a moment to assess the situation.
“Well, LaForte,” he chortled. “You heard the man. Take him in.”
“Yes. Sarge.” The one with the thick mustache approached, grabbed the stranger by both wrists simultaneously, as he had been taught to do in his courses, felt the stranger’s pockets from top to bottom to be safe and ensure that there were no other weapons present. This accomplished, he promptly drew out some handcuffs and applied them deftly, making sure to tighten them to a less than comfortable level.
Their heads were each lowered in turn as they entered the metro car, and she mouthed a silent gesture of thanks to the stranger, who could if nothing else probably serve as some sort of public advocate at her hearing. At the same time, her expression was wistful and sad, and she wondered why he had willingly endangered himself on her behalf, a gesture which was virtually unheard of anymore. Surely she wasn’t worth it.
The officers with the mustaches got in on either side of them, and the one with the buzzcut began driving, and attempted to make a radio call back to headquarters, but they were so deep into the countryside that the receiver only gave off a potent layer of scratchy electric noise and he decided it would be best to bring them in first and take things from there. He had, after all, recorded everything that happened on his record pad, and sufficiently altered the footage such that he and his colleagues would be presented in a favorable light.
“Two hundred damn miles back to Brixton,” said the blue-eyed cadet. “Coupla hours.”
They tore out, and the evening sun set over the lanky pines, the assorted remnants of what had once been a densely populated city, now growing over again with nature and the distant call of birds. The metro car tore swiftly forward, its droning wheels sliding over the dull featureless pavement like some silent jungle cat in the thick of the hunt.
“So,” the cadet chuckled. “Lot of trouble you went to for your girlfriend here.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” droned the stranger. “I, unlike you, am not attracted to women. No, I’m attracted to metal. Like a magnet. I steal up on metallic things in the night, I lick them and make sweet love to them. You, pig, wouldn’t know the finer things in life, how to discern between fine iron and steel. I must say, I’m delighted to be here among the company of irrational authoritarian filth tonight. I ask you- how many inches do your penises grow every time you make an arrest? Ten, twenty inches? Why, by now, you strapping boys must have genitals ten times the weight of your own bodies.”
“Hey, he’s not making any sense,” remarked the Confederate type, rotating his incapacitator between his thumb and index finger. “You on salts or something?”
“Doesn’t matter, Forte. He’ll have plenty of time to lick metal once he’s behind bars.”
“That I will,” affirmed the stranger. “And while I’m doing that, you’ll be licking up a puddle of shit. It’ll be real tasty. You belong in the sewage, men of your ilk. You belong in the deep dark places where the archaic skeletons go to rot.”
“Don’t talk to them.” She bit her lip, astounded at the brazen attitude he displayed. Wasn’t he aware of the new codes instated by the Directorate? Nobody was supposed to speak to officers in this way unless they wanted swift retribution.
“Show him the picture, Harry.”
“Check this out,” gleamed the cadet, whose name evidently was Harry. He leaned over and shoved his record pad an inch from the stranger’s nose. “This is what we did to our culprit ten bookings ago. Now, if you don’t shut up, I’m afraid we’ll have to- uh- resort to certain means.” On the screen there glowed a monochromatic scanlined image of a man with most of his teeth missing, grimacing in painful fatigue. She averted her eyes, unable to withstand such an image, but the stranger smiled in morbid glee and said merely:
“Do your worst, fascist. All the empires of clowns like you die, all are predetermined to die, it starts before it’s even begun. You think yours is anything new? Keep on running, gerbil.”
Harry’s fist balled up into a compact missile, and without so much as a single measured thought he barreled forward into the stranger’s exposed gut. The stranger, however, tensed his abdomen at the last moment such that the impact was severely reduced. Harry could tell, however, that the stranger did wince in pain slightly, and counted this as a small victory.
“Hey, pipe down back there,” came the muffled voice of their superior from beyond the sheet of specially tempered glass.
“Just entertaining our guests,” LaForte called.
“Your surname is familiar,” the stranger droned.
“Probably,” LaForte responded. “My forefathers were great men. Strong men, unlike you and your modern faggot ilk. Built all up along here, back in the old times. Men of industry, of hard labor who pulled ‘emselves up by their bootstraps. Goddamn self-made men. ‘Course, that all changed when the bombs dropped, we were eaten out somewhat- but that’s why I’m in the spot I am now. To restore something of balance to this country. Something lost.” He began trembling at the thought, held his knees close together, looked out at the passing blur of nature as if he could find whatever it was he were looking for amid the brush.
“Why, honorable suh!” the stranger bellowed, affecting the temperament of an Antebellum dandy. “Ah declare, we have ourselves here one who is not willin’- ah say, not of ample fortitude- to pledge his allegiance to the free states! To rid ourselves of this bastid Yankee tyranny! Shall we call the firing squad down upon him, General Lee?”
“Shut up.” LaForte’s knuckles grew pale.
“Ah say, we rugged men of hard work certainly do employ many fieldhands, many indeed under this- ah do say- peculiah institution, to perform our work on our behalf. Is that not strange, Mistah LaForte? How do you- ah- recommend disciplining yours?”
“Shut UP!” He leered at the stranger. “My Lord, listening to you is miserable! You talk like you know everything! Like you are of some higher station! Men died in that war, man! In the war that altered the course of my life, in the one which shaped the course of my great grandfather, and his- and we have character as a result! Character!”
“It’s not my place to determine how much character you have relative to me,” the stranger continued in that horrible unwavering monotone. “It is for the worms. The worms which will feast upon your carcass soon enough.”
“I’ll hit you again,” Harry offered.
“My pleasure,” the stranger grinned. She ducked slightly, unwilling to cause any rift between them beyond the one which had already been established.
Harry’s fist flew once again, this time toward the stranger’s face. It made a horrible crunching sound as it impacted the stranger’s mouth and lower jaw, and he careened backwards into the cushion. Harry was immensely satisfied with the result at first, but then glowered once he noticed that the stranger remained visibly conscious and looked upwards with a serene kind of all-knowing idiot contemplation, like the portraits Harry had seen of the Buddha in the Hall of Degenerate Faiths- and then, his lips moved as the blood trickled around his tongue, and he gurgled and spat:
“Hit yourself, LaForte. Go on, boy. Pummel yourself into meat.”
She and Harry alike looked on, immensely disturbed, as LaForte raised his own arm beneath the brim of his velvet cap, to which were affixed several shining medals, designating his illustrious performance in the service. They were promptly defaced by the spatter of blood which rose like a frothing tide as he, seemingly without purpose or thought, forcefully impacted his own skull against the car’s window, again and again and again.
Harry rose up from his position on the left to grab LaForte and prevent him from doing any more damage to himself, steady the wrist somehow, but it was too late and LaForte sunk, disfigured, to the floor, doubling over on his knees above the surging rumble of the tires.
He was beyond words, red with confusion and agony and fear, and turned around to the stranger, who merely looked down upon him with the blank expression of the condemned. Harry had witnessed it many times in the Academy, in the slides which were presented of the obviously guilty, how to distinguish them from the innocent, and how to apply force accordingly. The stranger, as he had known since the moment they had apprehended him, was guilty.
“Everything alright back there?” the sergeant muttered from past the murky glass.“Ah, yes, Sarge,” Harry responded, trying his best to mop up LaForte’s blood from the window with his sleeve such that it wouldn’t be visible through the rearview mirror. “Just checking the durability of these doors, how well the locks work. Routine protocol.”
“Alright.”
“You fucker,” he barked, grabbing the stranger’s cheeks with his bloodstained hands and retrieving his incapacitator from his belt. “You know damn well that I’ll get demoted for this. They’ll have my neck for failing to stop what happened.”
“Ah, yes,” the stranger grinned. “The games men play with each other. The fun- the importance, the special titles- how it grows tired.”
“You some kind of- what? Fucking android? Line of those around I didn’t catch onto? Psychopathic fucking prick?”
“Could be, Harry. Or maybe I’m your conscience. Now there’s a thought...”
You listen, you listen good,” Harry barked, jerking the stranger’s neck a full 45 degrees as if to break it. “I don’t know what you are, what the Hell you want or where the Hell you came from- but you’ll learn, one way or another you’ll learn how the world works, fag. It’ll begin dawning on you. Real soon now.”
“That’s a nice sentiment, Harry, but as it happens I’m not gay,” the stranger replied. “As I said, I make love to metal in the deep hours. I desecrate your family’s remains, I piss brazenly on your grave.” And that smile- there was something horrible in that smile, the relaxed posture the stranger adopted, despite the handcuffs which even now held him at bay, prevented him from posing any real threat to Harry’s safety.
He rose to a standing position, or as close as could be approximated in the low cabin, and turned his incapacitator on. It was night now, and it was relatively apparent that they’d make the crest of the range in less than 20 minutes before descending into Brixton, at which point he’d be safe from this madman. The stranger shifted in form beneath the passing lamps, stripes enveloping him in a hypnotic pattern. She tried her best to avoid eye contact, but Harry knew what had to be done to affirm his dominance.
“Fucker. See where your smooth talk gets you.” He descended onto her and she cried out in agony. He began pressing the incapacitator to her neck, teeth bared, eyes glinting in the yellow camphor haze. He was halfway through the procedure of complete incapacitation and it was relatively easy, given her subdued state and her hysteric demeanor, but then the stranger’s voice rang out, crystal clear:
“Let’s talk, Harry.”
It was such a stupid, insipid request, one which Harry couldn’t even believe, and he had been forced to buy a whole lot tonight. So callous, so abhorrent. And yet, somehow, the voice was calming, and without really considering what was happening, his finger released the trigger and the little electric bolts decreased in intensity, and then he felt the soft cushions beneath him, lulling him deeper and deeper into a subdued relaxation. He withdrew the majority of his weight from her. She was silent, half incapacitated, her legs twitching with the shock.
“Good man, Harry. Tell me a little bit about yourself.”
“I was born down there,” Harry sputtered, scrambling to order his thoughts coherently. “Somewhere down there, in the basin. Not sure where, not Brixton, further out. I don’t remember those days much. But it was good- my father had steady employment at one of the nuclear energy laboratories, very good salary, wonderful man. I looked up to him. Loved him, more than most boys do, I imagine. I imagined I’d assume his position one day, do great things for the field. Really make something of myself.”
“This was after the bombs had dropped?”
“Yes- as matter of fact, it was,” he leaned back. “I was born a few years after. Dad was lucky, I guess, so to speak. He could commute, could maintain a semblance of normalcy despite all the resource scarcity, the riots, the ongoing power struggle. Because energy was a stable field, we all needed it and we all depended on it, and so even in those days I was brought up with no real adversity- no obstacles, no challenge. I became a cop because I assumed it’d let me find something of that. Something to fight against. Because I’d never had that.”
“You wanted to become a strong man,” the stranger’s eyes shone. “Tell me, Harry, that motto inscribed onto your armband, there...? What’s it say?”
“This...? Oh, yes,” Harry recited from memory. “The motto of the Council. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. Hard times create strong men. And then it repeats, I suppose.”
“That’s an idiom, Harry,” the stranger stated flatly. “Generalization, oversimplification. I never run my life by idioms. You’re probably wondering how I did that to your friend down there- it was clear to me he operated on proverbs. There’s not a one I trust, Harry. If you think you can’t trust me- if you think I pose any significant danger to you, believe me, I can’t cause a fraction of the damage an idiom can.” Harry nodded slowly in agreement. Below, ten miles or so off, the lights of Brixton glittered. They were coming in on the home stretch now. Harry sighed in relief. He needed out of this box.
“Here’s a riddle instead, Harry,” the stranger questioned. “What is a weak man who turns his incapacitator onto the lethal setting and then applies it to himself?”
“Dead,” Harry blurted. “Dead, you couldn’t survive that.”
“Smart kid,” the stranger crooned. “Dead and forgotten. Twenty, thirty years, nobody will sing your praises. It’ll have been for nothing. Go on, now. Get it over with.”
Harry opened his mouth in terror but no scream came out, as his hands raised with unwavering precision against the will of his mind, his muscles adopting a precise and directed sentience unto themselves. The port of the incapacitator glowed a faint blue as his thumb depressed the little white button on top.
Then it was quiet.
She roused from her slumber and felt the seat beneath her, and realized suddenly that they were still in the car and still racing along- but it was later, much later, and they had yet to reach Brixton. It was then she grasped, with some hesitancy, that they were ascending rather than descending- and therefore must have turned around. Next to her, the stranger rode motionless, his face obscured by the shadow of the roof.
“That’s it, Sarge. Couple more miles.”
She looked down at her feet, caught sight of the cadet’s charred corpse, one hand sporting vibrant third-degree burns, the other resting peacefully on LaForte’s chest. She struggled to writhe from the handcuffs, but they were less stifling than the weird air of restraint and decorum which had fallen onto the chamber. Up ahead, the staggered white line in the middle of the road petered into nothing. They were in the country now.
“Stop here and we’ll all get out,” the stranger ordered.
The sergeant did as he was ordered, the engine faltered and then shut off and she saw the silhouette past the sheet of tempered glass rise up from its position and then the stranger, too, still handcuffed, undid his seat belt and the locks chirped open by themselves, and she found herself somehow compelled to exit with the rest of them, in exactly the same fashion.
She was struck immediately by how cool the evening had become as it drew on, as he led both her and the sergeant out into a vast field of beautiful lush grass waving in the breeze. She thought she could detect him smiling, though that may have been only a trick of the light. The moon was almost new, and her eyes weren’t adjusting well.
“Kneel down here,” the stranger said to the sergeant, and the sergeant did as he was told.
“That a cathode gun?” he gestured to the sergeant’s holster, the sergeant drew it out sans resistance. It was a formidable nuclear instrument, the kind used in the war, heavy yet maneuverable, capable of bestowing an extremely painful death far worse than any puny incapacitator could ever hope to yield.
“Lovely thing, isn’t it?” the stranger bent down until they were at eye level. “Gorgeous piece of equipment. You know, little boys like you don’t deserve equipment like this. Never have, never will. You’d be better off, I think, submitting to a higher power. If you don’t mind my saying so. You need some rules.” The sergeant nodded, his thin cheekbones and square jaw kept in ideal synchronous lock with his spinal column.
“Rule number one,” the stranger opined. “Pick that up.” The sergeant did as he was told.
“Rule number two,” the stranger continued. “Aim it into your mouth.”
“Rule number three,” he concluded. “Fire at will.”
The sergeant’s index finger moved slightly and the gun heated in the barrel- and then there was the horrible rending sound of flesh torn from flesh, of eyeballs melting into soup and plasma discharges turning bone into broth, of skin disintegrating beneath incomprehensible Kelvin temperatures comparable to those of the sun’s corona, of all mind ceasing, and where the sergeant had been there was now only a quiet absence, a lingering scent of dust. What remained of his body fell over and met the lush grass.
And then it was only them, staring at each other. There were two white dots where his eyes should have been, reflecting starlight through transposed distant telephone wires- the pupils were vertical, she realized, his tongue longer than any tongue had any right to be.
“You’re sick,” she cried. “What the Hell are you?”
“Pick the gun up and find out,” he hissed. “You think it was coincidence that I just happened to be out here in the middle of nowhere? You think people find themselves in such scenarios out of dumb luck?” He motioned towards the smoldering gun.
She was shaking, she now felt an overwhelming desire to near the weapon, to put it to her head and release the charge it contained. This scenario repeated on a loop in her mind, over and over again, ceaselessly, the ideation strong and very, very real, but then he lowered his hand and she blinked once and realized that the gun remained exactly where it had been, and her nervous system remained for the most part inert. He lowered himself to the ground and skipped through his arms, which had been behind his back the entire time, as if they were a jumprope, rifled through the sergeant’s pockets and discovered a slender key. He tossed it to her.
“This won’t free you,” he said. “But I think you’ll make it out sometime.”
He spun on his heel then, regained his true form as Alcheron, snake thing, master of lies and deceiver of widows, and sunk into the woods.