2.
The first abomination I saw was a thing like a tree stump that walked on four human hands. I was at a dance club—don't ask me why; there was a woman, and things got all Evil Dead, and I don't really want to talk about what happened to her—and the music was loud. We're talking stop-your-heart, void-your-bowels loud.
Which is the only reason I'm still alive.
The Speculum appeared, unfolding in space like the scent of rotting meat. The thing came out, and people died.
It whipped root-like growths around. A head landed on my table, and blinked once. Blood spread in a pool around the stump.
I stood, spilling my rum and coke. The blood and the liquor mingled, as the screams and music turned into a single noise.
Noise. Noun. From the Middle English, from the Old French, noise. From the Latin, Nausea or Noxia. One: various sounds, usually unwanted. Two: Sound or signal produced by random fluctuations. Three: The unwanted part of a signal. Four: The measured level of variation in gene expression among cells, regardless of source, within a supposedly identical population.
The noise saved my soul.
Everything seemed to snap, and my head filled with this ache, this pain that sounded like cold electric blue light.
I reached out, and I touched the noise. I grabbed it, and turned it, made it so that it stopped pulsing, stopped hammering my head. I took the pain and put it in the noise, and I turned the pain.
I turned it partway around, forming a shield—a root struck it, and shredded. Blue-green blood, hot and coppery, splattered across my face.
I turned it again, forming a lance of hate and noise and pain.
It collapsed, and I followed soon afterward. The sound system died, and everything went dark.
Even in my finest moment, I didn't kill the damn thing. And until I face down an abomination in an enclosed space with an industrial sound system, I don't think I'll get the chance to recapture that moment.
They had to put the damned thing down and kept me in isolation for a few days, to see if the blood did anything. Gave me some time to read and do crossword puzzles.
After that, they introduced me to the others: James, Margie, and Ashley. They didn't bother learning my name. As soon as I began to introduce myself, it was:
“Keep quiet, Mate.”
“No names, Dearie.”
“Stuff it, Yank.”
As always, it was Ashley's choice that stuck. Other than the people who processed me and put me in quarantine, no one in the Jacoby Foundation learned my name, though everyone knew me. Just, as “Yank.”
First mission: Acted as anchor. Others complained of pain and double vision, later determined to be weak post-cognition. I don't know what happened, really.
Second mission: sent through, and was nearly useless for Margie and Ashley, and when we got back to the speculum at the end, it was surrounded by Abominations. That's the mission where they decided that Margie would stay behind when we went through.
Third mission: first time with just me an Ashley. Went okay, but an Abomination nearly chewed through my calf muscle before I was able to put the eighth bullet in its head and finally kill it.
Fourth mission: Now.
We lay on our bellies at the top of the hill, and she raised the binoculars she had brought with her, to sweep the horizon for the Gatecrasher.
I checked the safety on my Walther, and examined the dust.
A bit of graffiti on the wall:
THE PASSION OF DESTRUCTION IS A CREATIVE JOY
I considered it for a moment, then belly-crawled over towards it. Pulling off the tight, non-porous glove of my right hand, I exposed myself to the air of the Other Side, the bitter cold and the acid-burn, and touched the graffiti:
Moonlight, mingled with streetlights.
City-sounds, honking cars and the hiss of the spray-paint can and the sound of the spray-paint scribe living and breathing and sloshing and blinking and the noise of those other people who live around him, the night people and city people who laugh and cry and speak and mumble in the dark and are happy with their lot in life and dissatisfied with the paycheck or apartment or lover or lack thereof.
City-smells, filth and sweat and asphalt and curry and rain and heat and animals and the indefinable something at the root of it all that tells you this is a place where people live and work, and at least some of them do it in the sunlight without fear that they won't make it home that evening.
London-long-ago.
Our side.
I slip the glove back on.
“Yank, the hell d'ye think you're doin'?”
I looked back at her, and she saw my sad eyes through the gas mask.
She paused, a strange tremor moving through her body. The relationship between us was changing, somehow. I was no longer quite the outside I had been, having learned something tragic and hidden.
“I know. I know. S'truth. Let's just do the job, y'ken?”
I nod, and follow her.
We're ambushed when we reach the next intersection. The abominations mined it, boring into the asphalt and leaving polypous, hungry things lying in wait for us.
As we approach, they lash out. Things about the size of soccer balls, with three whip-like tendrils coming out at equidistant points around them. The sphincter at the top of them puckers, and emits a whistling shriek.
They aren't quite dangerous, so long as you're paying attention, but they're an inconvenience and they attract bigger, hungrier things.
Ashley pulls off her glove, points her hand at them, and her fingers lance out, growing into long shafts of sharpened white bone, piercing the closest one and causing it to deflate.
I close my eyes, and twist the sound around, creating a feedback loop in one. They sound off when they hear something other than their own shrieks. So, I just changed its shriek into something else. It got louder, and the sound kept getting louder.
Eventually, it couldn't take it, anymore, and just burst. That set off a small chain reaction, destroying three of them, spreading gore and seeds around.
By this time, Ashley had smashed nearly half-a-dozen more, and was wiping their ichor from the long claws she had turned her hand into.
“We're getting closer,” I noted.
She nodded.
“I can tell. I feel it,” she said.
I work for a small newspaper, putting their archives online. I feel like a journalistic undertaker, or possibly the lawyer that handles the will. It only really happens when a paper's going under, they take all their archives, and pay some poor sod to put them on the Internet.
“Journalistic undertaker.” I could put that on a resume. Though, of course, who would hire me? Pretty much all the papers have gone digital, or been replaced by blogs.
I mean, even the mail room would be preferable to going through the stacks and scanning or retyping everything. The paper's been around since the 1870's, and I just hit the first mention of “Adolf Hitler” the week before the incident in the club, and it's been slow going since I started picking up a check from the Foundation, who has made it impossible for the paper to fire me.
For some reason, that just doesn't seem right. I mean, James accidentally killed someone in a soccer game or rugby match, or something, and has a pension, Margie works from home, and Ashley just gets a check from the Foundation.
I'm the only one who has to go into work every day. Does that mean I'm still on trial? I never really thought of that.
Damn.
The gatecrasher is a thing not quite vegetable and not quite animal, but having traits of both. Neither is it quite concrete or abstract.
It stands on four gray trunks, thrice as high at the “shoulder” as I am. Its skin is alternately leathery or chitinous, and its head hangs heavy, the wrinkled skin of its face hanging so that its features cannot be properly defined, unless something walks under its mouth.
When that happens, it opens its jaws, and this pink, worm-like maw descends, snatching it up in squared-off human-like teeth, before pulling it back into the thing's mouth. It closes its lips tightly, and you can hear it chewing.
Its spine is visible through the armored skin of its back, and it has an elephantine tail dangling from its hindquarters. It does not excrete.
On the crown of its head is an orb-like organ, a large, perfectly smooth semi-sphere that always points at the location of the speculum. The sphere glows with its own light, but is the same color as the speculum, flashing the color of a tarnished mirror. If that sphere is broken, the portal begins to close, and the world is safe, for a time.
Around it orbit six geometrically perfect tetrahedrons, seemingly made of black chitin. Their edges cut like razors, Margie says.
As we approach, its maw snakes out, and seizes a man-sized arachnid made out of rotting wood, yellow fluids leak from between the teeth, and we can hear it chewing.
“Yank. Distraction,” Ashley orders.
I nod, and produce the boombox. I crank up the volume, and hit “Play.”
The stomp-clap rhythm of Johnny Cash's rendition of “Run On” began to fill the air. If I was going to be called “Yank,” I'd have American music, at least.
I walked forward, slowly, the boom box raised over my head, and the Abominations in all their various forms turned towards me, looking at me in confusion.
Were they invaders, of some sort? Or did something happen? Were they our creation? Were they always here, and we just never knew?
What was the truth, and how did this become our future?