NOT ENOUGH FUCKED-UP STUFF IN BARRELS
Lowry cut the stupid fucking control words out of his sleeve—no Bible for him. The stupid-fuck sounds Jack-in-the-Box wanted him to say in front of Old Jim for this turd of a mish within a mish, mood sour. If just Winters had headed destroyer-bound, Lowry would’ve been fucking fine, and he and Sky could have fucked off into the next place like first-place champions. If not for whatever brain worm decanted into her skull.
There existed in his head a vision of Winters inhaling wrong on his dinghy-breath and being sucked into the valve, as if boneless, though perhaps that’s not the way pumps worked, either, and filling out the inside like he’d made a new suit for crossing the Border, only it was a dinghy. And then, in his own damn boat of himself, Winters could have sailed for the destroyer like a fool for ballast.
But now, instead, Lowry felt like dealing with Old Jim in the old-fashioned way the man’s name suggested. More satisfying to his fucking point, but also less blowback that way, of taking friendly fire, because he didn’t trust Jack one thousand percent, more like seventy-three, so leery of saying weird shit like no reflection in your coffee or bats be birds, ye olde sailor like thee prophecy.
No, it felt not at all modern, what Lowry wanted to do to Old Jim, even if back at Central, the Warlocks and the Phantoms probably played strip poker based on hunches and faint séance breezes against the drapes of open balcony windows, hoping for a fuck-ugly flying wraith to crash-land like a blue-footed booby right into them.
The point was, Lowry would continue the mission on his own terms.
Yet, there was no purchase, and he kept slipping in his mind, and maybe Sky’s choice felt like a personal curse or that he jumped too much at his own shadow, but none of the places Jack had told him to check panned out.
In false-daughter Cass’s apartment, Lowry found fuck all, not even the goddamn frog terrarium Jack had told him to check. Water damage, some tables and chairs overturned. Some ruin of a moldy fruit in the fridge, now a green fungal geode. Nor Old Jim’s place, except the world’s biggest, ugliest desk full of nothing and papers strewn everywhere—and then at what Lowry dubbed the Institute for Fucking Barrel Researchers he found fucking goddamn shitty naught as well. Except the surprise of jellied dead bodies stuffed in some of the barrels and bad stuff in others and it was like a fucking prize from hell he searched for, in being diligent, in doing the job. Like some large-scale jelly and jam preserves operation had gone all cannibal cult.
“There’s such a bunch of dead guys and poison in here,” he said. “I said, there’s a bunch of really fucking dead people in fucking cannisters in this place.” Shouting now. “Is anyone going to take responsibility? Anyone? Anyone at fucking all?” The reverberation revealing the tinny aftertaste in his own voice.
It made the reality around him more permanent if he talked to himself now, so long as he never fucking replied to himself, fuck, like some fucktoid doubling, some winky-dinky’s voice sneaking up on him, maybe even wearing a shitty polo shirt and cargo shorts.
“Just a bunch of dead guys I do not know.” Nor what they had done to get shoved into barrels.
He could swear as he stood there longer than he should have in front of the Hall of Barrels that a giggling came from all assembled—the barrels in their smug fucking rows, in that space like a swimming pool had been turned into a shit performing arts center for barrels and their culture. Yet he had to check each one for the money that apparently did not goddamn exist.
Nothing nothing nothing. He was nowhere. He was fucking lost. What could he do now? Continue to Dead Town or go back to the extraction point?
He decided on Dead Town, tried to cultivate a good mood by talking to himself. But also talking to his sisters now, which wasn’t a good sign. He finally had a comeback for them, but they were past caring. Mauve and Becka, the giant twins. Who’d never had to deal with their fucking mom. Who always made him do the stupid-ass things. Was it just because he always caved or did she ask him first? He had thought she asked him first, who knew now? As he trudged.
Maybe a shithead followed him from behind, not good at the craft of being quiet and still. Lowry could track the figure over his shoulder all day long. So he knew, he knew, and yet there was some weird comfort in the companionship.
Sometimes, he cried out Landry’s name, hoping for drugs, but really, Lowry wanted to cry out Sky’s name, except she’d made her decision, chosen half a destroyer over him. Chosen a beach of bones over him.
Lowry didn’t know how long it would take to get to Dead Town. A day. A year. If he were a motherfucking compass, he’d never know north again.
Dead Town lived up to its name, and Lowry so sick of scenery he tried to fucking ignore the place until he made his objective: City Hall. Yeah, trees. Lots of fucking trees. A meadow. Marsh. The fucking usual. Move on.
The first floor of City Hall felt stripped and the walls had water damage and the stupid fucking wallpaper they’d used, a blue with shells on it, had curdled to beige and faded as fuck vermillion stippled with black mold, and except for two desks that had been bolted to the floor, nothing else. Someone had cleared it as an infernal fucking dance hall, but anyway some other helpful person had left in black paint arrows leading to the stairs, as if anyone in their right mind couldn’t find the goddamn stairs in that place, there to the left, hugging the wall like even the stairs distrusted that empty massive space, that hole opened up in the air by taking all the chairs and couches away.
So fuck it and la dee dah, up the stairs it was, and he took them two at a time like a one-man storming unit, loping like a fucking wolf, scurrying like whatever scurrying thing pumped out death from a sharklike firearm that wasn’t going to fucking turn into a creature and bury itself in the ground.
Unusual shit didn’t bother Lowry now, if it ever had fucking bothered him. On the second floor of City Hall in Dead Town, he found what had to be Jack’s “secret room”—behind a disemboweled overturned chair, against the far wall of what he guessed must have been the world’s worst fucking tourist center. Area X didn’t want him to tarry here, Lowry felt, yet fucking tarry he would, tarry as proper avenging mish wraith. Damn orange-slice lamps hitting him in the face and he bull-china-shopped the place to get to the crack in the wall. The crack that was a door into the “secret” room. Well, it had become less fucking secret over the years since Jack-in-the-Box intel’d it.
Inside, the junk you found in secret fucking rooms. Stuff scrawled on the walls, a devil’s pentagram of a bunch of diagrams on the floor and burnt-out pieces of gunk in the middle of each circle. Some fire-glazed glass jars cracked and in pieces. He wasn’t about to fucking parse any of that—leave it to the second expedition. There was no off switch in that dreck, which also held signs of recent ransack.
In the far right corner he spied a wide dirty stain like someone had vomited there or the Devil had pissed for an hour and disappeared in a puff of smoke, big fucking surprise, and the far left corner held somebody’s clump of dirty laundry. Well, maybe he’d check out the words on the wall first, then. Held his light up to it, everything fucking stuffy, full of damn pieces of lint almost looking like they were tiny filament worms writhing in his headlamp.
No gold. No papers. So the words on the wall better fucking make up for it. Except, it felt like nonsense, the parts he got, the parts he didn’t. Like, who the hell was Gloria? Who the hell was this James guy? Commander fucking Thistle? Spawn of the devil scrawled into that circle. Some circle jerk of conspiracy? Long-ago primitive bingo?
Not so the fucked-up names on the wall, in three precise columns. Because it was all the fucking names of the expedition, and was that meant to be some kind of joke?
That some other expedition survivor had gotten here first and written that shit on the wall? That his name was circled along with Hargraves and other now-dead people? Prankster sick of hiding from all the twinky-dinkys and dunky-wunkys? Smacked of whom, of twhut? He couldn’t tell, dull thud in his brain of the inevitable knowledge: He knew next to nothing about his fellow expedition members. Had no idea of most of their predilections other than whom they were screwing, maybe what they liked to eat, and some scrumptious details from the secret files.
So who would do that? He didn’t know. He didn’t even know who still fucking lived, except that he did. The more he looked at the list, and how it lived there among the mold and the lichen (and didn’t lichen need sunlight to grow?), the less he liked the list. The fucking less he wanted to look at that list, or see his own name there. Like it was not a roster but an accusation. Like someone had been assigned to track down everybody on the goddamn list.
The occult pan-dimensional pentagram bullshit on the floor still didn’t interest him, but for various reasons Lowry turned to the dirty laundry in the left corner. From this middle distance it looked like some kind of slumpity-dumpity body lay within the clothes, all of which kind of fucking resembled a sleeping bag, except it was instead the sleeper.
The uniform bugged him, the remnants of it, covering what he guessed had def been a person wrapped in a blanket, but now all folded over on him or her, or maybe the him-her had gotten folded. Like, somebody shot them in the back and they fell awkward and over time …
Could that be a faded “SR” coagulated on what might have been a sleeve? Fleeting shit-take thought: Had there been an expedition prior to the chicken? But no, it might not even be letters but a kind of stylized snake with a registered-nurse symbol.
Fuck that. He hadn’t come to Area X to solve ancient crimes, had he? Let some godforsaken commission of the future weigh in on cause of death. So he ransacked the strange pile for whatever he might find and that was basically nothing. The corpse hadn’t fallen dead on top of a bunch of money or papers. No, nothing easy on this mish.
But on top of the remains of maybe a jacket, maybe just a fucking bunch of raincoat tatters or who the hell knew, he found a scrap of paper, with words writ fucking large upon it.
DO NOT EAT.
Do. Not. Eat? Who fucking put “do not eat” on whatever the fuck these remains were? Like a fucking enticement. Do not eat? Yeah, eat. Eat everything. Eat every goddamn morsel of everything. Do not eat. What weak tea fucker from the expedition had gotten here first and written that?
He totally could eat it, especially now that he saw it might be more like sloughed-off skin, deep epidermis, not a jacket at all. In the right light, of which there was little in this gloom dungeon, it might even appeal. Peel. Peel the skin, Lowry. Peel it.
“You mean like eat the fucking body? The fucking dead body of a dead fucking person?”
Then he wished he’d not said it aloud. Because now he knew what lay in front of him. That it was more than “skin.” And also it sounded even more batshit than in his head. But also he sounded fucking scared in his voice, but in his mind his voice was powerful and roared out in a non-frightened way, so what was this damn twhut voice that leapt out of him so quick and easy? It was goddamn traitor, this fucking voice. He should reach down into his fucking throat and find this traitor and …
A folded-up dead person that had been here for fucking years. Yeah, who the fuck did that. Eat this guy who’d been lying here like some pensioner waiting for a bus that would never come because there was no fucking bus and because the person was already dead.
DO NOT EAT.
But that must mean … eat?
Jesus fuck—eat a dead person. He recoiled from that, sat against the wall, wondering what he should do. He hadn’t found a shitting thing Jack-in-the-Box had ordered him to bring back. Like he was some fucking barrel boy. And Jack had told him to “do anything—whatever it takes.”
A smell came to him then. Or more that he became aware of a smell that had always been there. It was an amazing smell, like vanilla and lavender but not fru-fucking-fru cloyfucking. No, wait, it was a savory smell, like chicken in a pot of spices, the simmering scent of that, rising from the stove, curling into the living room on a cold fall day. A taste-bud-tingling smell … coming from the dead-skin husk fucking cast-off wax-dribbling figure fucker hidden inside that improbable possible jacket. Secret, self-contained, solitary as an oyster.
Shit. It smelled so good and nary a fucking small woodland creature he’d manage to bag, even since free of the Southern Reach’s fucked-up policy on the matter. A good broth on a winter’s day. The way the broth would bubble with those golden bubbles, each one on the surface breaking open to add to a salivating scent.
If the pile smelled that good … maybe it would taste fucking great, too, and any texture infirmities just the price to be fucking paid for, finally, getting a good meal in this hovel, this shithole, this bed-and-breakfast from hell he would not be fucking recommending to anyone.
His mouth watered and he teared up. Oh, it was such a fucking succulent smell, it would have to be a taste of manna. It would taste like moist chicken breast or slow-marinated pork, where the meat just fell off the bone. It could be the chicken from the first-first expedition, Whitby’s chicken, and he would still eat the fuck out of it. Yes, just think of it as a fowl. A fattened fowl could be a lighthouse and a delicious gorge. Don’t be disgruntled or discouraged by what it looked like—if a thing camouflaged itself, that was nothing to do with him.
He reached his hand out and touched the remembered accordion flubber-sweat of the foot part, the tangled shank-of-leg part … and found that now it had the perfect crispy texture of the skin on a perfectly cooked turkey. That golden glazed magnificence that made it crinkle and crackle, releasing more of that deliciously fucking warm aroma.
It brought back memories from the farmhouse as a kid, the truce and peace, sometimes, of holiday dinner, with a chicken, goose, or, yes, turkey, and his sisters so ravenous they put down the verbal boxing gloves and abandoned his prone insult-punched body out in the field to run back into the house to bask in the steam rising off the sacred bird.
Oh, how could Lowry fucking resist? Slowly, still sitting against the wall, he pulled the husk toward him, foot first, until the delicate wafer-thin heel lay clenched in his hand like a fucking unique communion. The heel smelled like the best spices on the best meat in the world, and he didn’t bother fucking much about what kind of meat.
The texture, though, felt to his touch almost as bad as when in the shower he’d backed into an ex-girlfriend, butt to butt, and he’d recoiled like her butt was an alien or his was and it was just wrong, that was so fucking wrong, that two butts should touch.
So maybe this would be wrong, too.
Yet, it was with only a little hesitation that he tore a piece of foot husk off with his teeth, contemplated a taste that lit up his buds so fucking hard he almost got an erection. How could he taste a whole feast in one bite? One fucking bite and he was raptured and in heaven, for the texture changed in his mouth and under the crispy crumbling of the skin there came a cooked-through sensation as of pork fat nibbled off the bone and under that some sort of thin layer that brought him back to the chicken—a brined and butter-slathered chicken.
But also gathered around like friends at a holy last dinner with no fucking Judas to betray Lowry, all the other dishes as aftertaste, a Christmas miracle: a great joint of meat, suckling pigs, long wreaths of sausages, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, corn bread stuffing, the fucking cranberry sauce, the fucking green bean casserole, the fucking mashed potatoes, the seething bowls of punch, and, after, the pies for dessert and the eggnog.
Despite this vision, he did not feel full despite all of this satisfying heaviness invading his fine, flat belly. With each bite, Lowry felt hungrier still, so that he could not get enough. Bay leaves and wine for a stew with the remains later, if only he could find fucking bay leaves and wine. And was that wrong, the more he tasted, and the meal more like fondue? Dipper or dippie?
He devoured the first leg then thought better of his gluttony but then fucking hungry again, still with one eye on the cursed watermark, Lowry pulled the other fucking leg to him and that too soon gone until he had no fucking choice but to kneel over the rest of the remains and shove handfuls of collapsed pelvis and torso husk into his mouth—to unpile that fucking delicious feast such that he could eat the goddamn thing down to the last bite, the torso soon just some chest, and with some difficulty Lowry pulled the neck and head out from underneath.
He had known on some level that this fucking moment of truth awaited him. Could he who hated the head of a fucking fish included with his dinner stomach eating … a fucking face.
But Lowry had not expected that he would recognize the fucking face.
Whitby Allen’s face.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
He shoved the head and neck away from him, jammed himself into a sitting position up against the wall again. But as he watched, Whitby’s face ballooned to the top of the neck and torso because Lowry hadn’t fucking put it all back properly. Whitby’s face sat there staring at him, accusing him when he’d done nothing fucking wrong. He hadn’t killed Whitby and eaten him. He’d just come across some human remains and eaten them because they smelled so fucking good, and who could blame a man for that given how much of a remnant the expedition was and oh shit oh shit was he going insane? Was this what it felt like? No, it was entirely rational, his decision.
Oh shit oh shit, it was not. Yes, it was. No, it was not. Yes it was no it was not yes it was no it was not yes it fucking was.
“I’m sorry, Whitby,” Lowry said to the husk. “I’m so fucking sorry, friend.” But was he Lowry’s friend? “I didn’t mean it. I mean, I meant it at the time but I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known it was you. I mean, I probably would have done it if I knew it was you, but maybe not. Hard to tell. But it’s done now. It’s done now, Whitby.”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck?
Whitby Fucking Allen.
Except. Well, except … Whitby Fucking Allen was an also-ran back at the good old SR building, probably having a confab with a bunch of deep-sea fish in jars right about fucking now.
Not out here. Not on the expedition … So reason told Lowry that this couldn’t be Whitby. Which meant it must be some kind of motherfucking illusion cast by some twhut offstage, somebody who deserved a goddamn smack for whatever the point of this was. To test or trick them even after deployment? To trap them into passive fucking cannibalism?
With no punch line other than that he’d already eaten so much of Whitby that what did a fucking face matter? In some cultures Lowry imagined eating a local animal’s face was a fucking delicacy, and once again, anyway, he felt empty, empty, empty, and all that could fill him was not-Whitby’s stupid not-face. All that could satisfy.
It wasn’t Whitby. It couldn’t be Whitby. So it was fucking fine.
“What would Whitby do?” he asked aloud, and hated the echo of “woodity woodity doo doo.”
“Well,” he replied because no one else could, “Whitby would eat Whitby’s face.” Itchby wheat hitchbie ace.
As he said it, he knew it was fucking true. The weird white pretzel would eat his own face. In the name of science. Yes, he would. In memory of the chicken.
“Wouldn’t you, you sick fuck, Whitby.” Not Whitby. Someone else. Something else. And hadn’t he already taken a bite out of a wall?
So Lowry took Whitby’s face with both hands and he crunched down on the fallen-in nose part, which tasted in a satisfying way like marrow and gristle, and he used that inverted promontory to get enough of a grip with his teeth to tear the rest and eat it strip by delicious strip, the neck perhaps the most fucking fragile and delicate, and with its own form of gustatory bliss.
Then, when not a scrap was left, Lowry sighed, burped, and returned, sleepy, to the wall. It had been the best meal he had ever had, even though he didn’t think he “knew” anymore after the devouring than fucking before. If anything, Lowry felt he understood less and less.
But at least he felt full. Finally fucking full.
Up on the messed-up roof, Lowry paused to think about his next move, to digest, to take in the view back toward the sea. Felt like he stood astride an old fort, a fucking alien installation. What was with these fake crenellations and the ghastly fucking barren stucco, the years of seepage and intrusion, how for a very long goddamn time there had been no fucking body to see the view, to know what had happened just below. Not that he’d been expecting an infernal tour guide, because who knew if that was original or double or triple in this stupid place.
Lowry could see far into the estuary, into the golden light and the scattering of palm trees, gnarled swamp oaks, and, beyond, the coast.
Tiny, but the fucking lighthouse still blared out, flared green in waves, and the marshes seemed light-fucked by the green tendril molecules reaching out like the fake fucking animation of a bad fantasy flick. As if Area X tonight chose not to let him believe it was real but only some acetate overlay, about to burn from the heat seek of his regard. Some fucking onion skin, almost not there, and yet so powerfully there he felt some fear for a second.
This was bullshit. He’d never find gold bars or money or whatever the fuck Jack thought Old Jim had been sitting on, incubating, whatever. Nor even find Old Jim. And Area X would do what it wanted to do and it might take a hundred years, Lowry saw now, to learn all its stupid fucking complex behaviors, cultures, its needs and wants, no matter how slowly expressed or fucking perverse.
He had just eaten a fake Whitby Allen’s body molt and was not in the mood for more motherfucking magic tricks.
There were two tired folding chairs drenched in old spattered blood—like, blood that had been poured in unending quantities and spilled all over the floor. Did he even care? No, he fucking did not. Whatever he might’ve cared about had fucked off in a boat.
What he’d thought might just be loose planks had revealed itself as the splatted remains of a piano come apart in a pile on the roof. Next to a corner so perpetually flooded and yet not fallen in (but one glorious damn day) that tiny fish lived there, amid the algae, and spinning insects. That world had a border too and he could stamp through those waters like a fucking demon or god if he wanted to. But he felt merciful because so shaken, and he held the fuck back, did not do the bad thing. Time and gravity would do it for him and the little fish would pour down to the third-story floor and have to fucking hope it also had become a porous reservoir.
Then it was true dusk, sudden, brutal, and the lighthouse burnt unbearably bright, so that the green light bled in wisps of coronary, in fingers beckoning, until he thought it might all be a disinformation of his eyes, like the black spots, and the landscape lay fucking inert and black and barren, but only his eyes blazed, his vision turned inward, his eyeballs just a miniature planetary playground for the fucking animating impulse behind Area X.
Winters had the bad fortune to intervene then, to appear then, like a fucking jack-in-the-box, but not Jack-in-the-Box, out of the stairwell, as if an apparition conjured by a fatal lack of fucking caring. Because Lowry had thought him dinghy-banished, explicitly wished not to fucking see him, he had popped up. A warning to Lowry to take better damn care to banish by fixation on, in this case, Winters from his life.
“I got free of that destroyer stuff,” Winters said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, really. Dead end, just like you said.”
“To you?”
He wanted to say, “And Sky?” But knew that was just a trap, that Area X wanted to punish him for eating the molt, or wanted whatever the molt had been, but how did he know what Area X wanted or didn’t want?
“Yeah, you said that to me, Lowry,” Winters said, even though Lowry knew his “To you?” had been am-fucking-biguous.
“You followed me here?”
Winters smiled long and hard and sharp. “Oh, I’ve been here a long time, I didn’t have to follow you.”
Lowry nodded at the truth of that. Who really had to follow anyone in Area X. You just poked a hole in the map and there you were.
“You’ve got scales turning into eyes all over your body, Lowry.”
“So I do, Winters. So I fucking do. Thanks for pointing that out, even though I don’t think you were supposed to tell me that. Very kind of you.”
Maybe that’s why he felt heavy yet light, like he was both opening up and closing down. Yet it seemed unimportant, impotent, fucking stupid, as if the king below and his alligator had no import and their inane convo had some kind of weight it should never have fucking had. Did not have. Because he was seeing Whitby astride a giant greenish-white alligator down below, just walking by as casually as a fucking tourist procession, and he knew that wasn’t fucking true. That was not fucking true.
“Did you see what’s down below?” Lowry asked, pointing over the edge through a gap in the faux fortifications.
“What is it?” Winters asked, looking down and having located something weird, or pretended to, Lowry guessed.
Lowry shoved him over the edge—feather weight, anvil fall—and he landed with all too much fucking sound. Be fucking still. Be fucking still. Be silent. Rest.
Winters had not been real. Any more than Whitby. Than Lowry felt.
Funny, how Winters looked more like Formsby, or was it Fussell, lying there all broken. But even that—how he’d broken so easily and lay there not moving—felt like provocation. Felt like if he hadn’t been Winters, then he hadn’t been Formsby or Fussell, either. That Lowry had been right to push him, and maybe the mercy that he hadn’t winky-dinkyed him instead. Rest in pieces. Return unto Area X from whence you fucking came. Yeah, that was it. RIP. Rip rip rip.
His hands shook as he watched the fucking pyrotechnics out in the marsh for a while, which might just be in his eyes. The stars came into focus, went out of focus. They oppressed Lowry, dug into his head; he was watching them too hard or they were communicating too much, seeking something. He felt something rising up he could not identify or control, but that clutched at the heart of him. A sadness or an underlying terror that could only be satiated by additional excess, until even that thrill faded and something more extreme beckoned.
Maybe he would still do as Jack had asked. Maybe he should fuck off to the Village Bar now. Maybe this was where all this had been heading.
Man, did he miss Landry. There had been a pen pal for life. A conversation partner. A good fix. A bad fix.
It was all the same.
It fucking was and fucking wasn’t Whitby who now like a horse’s tongue slapped atop a butcher’s block—a meaty, fleshy tongue, was slapping atop his head, carcass caress descending into that place now porous between gray matter and skull, as if a rough and continual licking had occurred like when he woke after a night of debauchery on someone’s lawn with a cat licking his face, but one lick only, and the weight of it just fucking lay there, made him stumble, catch himself, adjust. Slopped and stopped, then disintegrated into his brain like the surface of his brain was full of holes and the thing that was Whitby yet not turned from fat tongue to thin soup stock, had drained right into his mind. Colander, liquid, and maybe it would pass through and he would be undamaged.
Except, it changed again so it was a hundred fingers in a bowling ball that had a hundred holes and he was with his giant sisters in the local alley with a skating rink and the smell of loaner bowling shoes and rancid figure skates and the one telling him to hurry up and the other just shrugging with her huge soft drink and making sounds with the straw, the ice, the dregs as he tried to line up the pins, except he’d never line them up. Gutter balls for a solid century.
A tongue like a pile of meat, like a carcass, a flesh carcass tossed atop a butcher’s block and the weight made him repetitious, a weight his mind could not shake off, dislodge, that began, slowly, to dissolve into his brain, so he began to understand what he felt as a tongue was another brain lying atop his own as if both had been decanted from their skulls and tossed on a pile, and still able to feel the odd sensation of that, numb, but not the pain. Not the glistening blood agony of that, the snail track of red pleading out.
Imperfect, the meal to the appetite, or why would he feel anything at all? Why wouldn’t it be seamless? Though where this thought came from he did not know. As if he were the meal now and someone gorging on him. As if Whitby’s face had disagreed with him, and as he breathed now, a sparkle of golden dust pressed out of him and forayed out from the pores, so that he was expressing the molt, releasing it as it released him, so that he became a kind of vessel, but also a candle and a flame.
While the idea of mind dissipated until there was only the lagoon of clear blue water that was his mind, haloed with reeds, and Whitby’s presence a school of golden fish at the core that multiplied and spread out in ever vaster circles, to every corner of him and each particle, each fish, strove to join itself by filament to every other fish floating inside the vessel that was Lowry, and within each new connection he could see the world more like Whitby, or this hybrid thing that had taken on the appearance of Whitby, that had been Whitby for a time, but also had a reptilian eye, a carious eye staring at him from the bottom of the lagoon, through the golden fish and fuck and fuck but resisting meant not seeing it not feeling it for what it really was but his mind pulling up these constructs so he wouldn’t go mad. He’d come this fucking far and had far still to fucking go, but he wanted to make it out in a raw, animalistic way, no matter what had overtaken him and was still overtaking him.
The way it had patience. The way it had depth, and how it hid when it had to, came out when it must, the measure of what it had to do, the way it had to do it, and the future it came from. How it came from so far away in time and suddenly Lowry was
there
air
was air
was water.
For water lived there and everything was water and nothing was water. How as it weighed upon Lowry, a presence had weighed upon it, gauged it, and thus it must be disguised, must be water, must be death, be dead, inert. He’d come chasing down something, had gone wrong but right and now existed out there again, waiting for a time to wake, was asleep except now forever in a corner of Lowry’s mind.
Across that haunted landscape Lowry strode and he did fucking appreciate how it changed and kept changing, but not how the fucking rabbits kept appearing and winking out, so he knew they were just in his brain, but he could not stop them from being like malfunctioning toasters or strings of Christmas lights, except they were nothing like that at all, but lunging and snapping at him, only to fade the fuck away into golden dust.
While he grasped at the dust as it left him, as if he were a fucking stuffed teddy bear and the dust his stuffing and when the fucking stuffing left him, he was done. That was it, Lowry was over as a reality and a fucking concept.
Whitby Not, the Changeling, this rogue becoming restless within him and wanting out. Wanting to leave Lowry, although Lowry wasn’t ready for that somehow, to be without the Changeling, despite the terror, despite the way he sweat dust as he sweat sweat, so he was disgustingly wet and dry at the same fucking time, and the dust spiraled out of him like he was a human fucking crop duster, earthbound scarecrow, still walking out among the fields to contaminate them.
The fucking enormity, the puzzle of it, as if a Changeling molt told him things sideways, even as the dust still left him and the ghost rabbits bit and clawed and fell away, and fucking all of his remaining eye senses and sound senses keeping to the fucking trail through reeds and through limestone terrain, keeping his compass only by the radiating blade of the lighthouse beam, so ever and always the only destination he could have was the lighthouse or he’d never make it. No instinct within him that could compensate for all his senses overlaid and overloaded this way.
How Whitby came from the future but inhabited the past, and the one he’d met at the Southern Reach innocent of either, still peering out at him from the catheteria corner talking to him of blatherTOT and chickenauts, but the molt-owner lay out in the swamps, the marshes, whatever the fuck you called that blue lagoon and he’d stay that way for centuries. That was the thing that almost broke Lowry’s brain in the overlay—that this Whitby Not was going to resurrect himself into a future that did not include him, fully repaired from some catastrophic systems failure, and hoped the future he came back into was the one he’d saved … from the rabbits? Lowry couldn’t grok it to save his life, the way the Changeling’s brain and his brain meshed like two different kinds of nets cast out on water that interfered with each other.
So he had to just grit it out, thought fuck of the drug experiences, of Landry, and of what, fuck, Landry’s advice would be, and that would be: Riiiiiide it out. Landry would also probably tell him to just lie down for a while, but Lowry felt a powerful fucking urge to put Dead Town behind him and so he kept stumble-walking through the visions in his brain.
A halo of gold surrounding the clearest blue. Out there in what could be a thousand places and not wake for centuries. No winky-dinky could compete with that. An astronaut who had never left Earth, fighting an enemy toward entropy. The glimpses of an army and a cleft between two mountains under what had been the ocean, the way all of the earth and the sky and the water had become a refuge for those who were left. How they had, willingly, willing to change, slopped their way into a different way of being, like seagulls yolking into the waves.
And it became fucking clear to Lowry, or maybe not clear but distinct, like some goal on the horizon that he might or might not be able to describe to Sky if he ever saw her again, like a goal in physical form, an objective, a fucking freak objective, that what they called Area X wanted the past, too, and that was what freaked Lowry out so much he almost pissed himself: The casual way the Changeling’s molt told him that the world was gone already. That it might last a few more decades, but it was fucking toast, or most of it. That the fucking thing they fought in here, the way it had no central nervous system, no fucking sorcerer who came out from behind the curtain so Lowry could shoot him in the fucking eyeball … that this … thing wanted the past, too, in an automatic, thoughtless way. So that there could be no future but its future, no ability to adapt.
He could see even as it faded out of him with the dust, like he was a broken hourglass, so no point in turning him over, how Central had meddled in the business of the Forgotten Coast and how Area X had homed in on that first occurrence, that first appearance of its enemy, and attempted a beachhead there by redirecting what the Southern Reach itself sent through the Border at some point in the nearish future that Lowry had not yet experienced, but maybe he could stop it, except that the Changeling wasn’t trying to stop Area X but to just make sure everything happened as it had already happened.
That the Area X Lowry had fucking experienced was the best possible outcome. That 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.
With the rabbits now came glimpses of the earth the Changeling came from, the colossus of ghosts of the alien that manifested, in time, after Area X had expanded. The relics of civilizations from wherever Area X had come from, manifesting, glimmering like a mirage, like poems never completed, but it wasn’t fucking real. It couldn’t be real. This future overlaid upon the marshes.
Neither circular nor square, but in some pattern or geometry that hurt his brain or made his gaze fucking slide away—he could not look at them directly, like he was a wood plank going through a buzz saw when he tried, and through an open door as the saw split him in half came the unbearable light of the sun and as he tried to see past the sun he was being torn apart even if there was no pain but just the crackle and wince of the bleeding light.
These fantastical visions he could not quite credit, that he distrusted, as if they were the residue of drugs he had taken, was still taking, how there came across the face of the Earth such change, such decay and stillness and absorption that how could the violence of that, well beyond Lowry’s own fucking capacity for violence, the sheer negation of human life, not be understood as an extinction event. No matter who lived now in the water, no matter how Whitby Not had risen from that time and come back into Area X, that all might remain the same … so that Area X might be as it was now, that he might be as he was now … how that felt like the most cracked, fucked-up thing. That if granted the wish of any other fucking reality … it would be worse … than there.
There would be no space for any human soul as the world spun farther off its rotation in the sense of the seasons, the terrain changing as Area X transformed it, and there was so much more spinning out of him with the golden dust and dissipating into the night that made him sad. How the details could not live with him long enough, that he could not see his place in this, that in a way he’d never felt from the real Whitby, some ghost of an influence in his head, some wraith of a cosmonaut stared out hostile at him and did not wish him to survive this, to know these things, and perhaps he would know none of them again when all the dust was gone, but also now he panicked that he would never be the same and began to run toward the lighthouse as if the lighthouse could save him, but really what he hoped is that he would find Sky there, and, yes, even Winters, and that he could explain this all to them before it left him. Because it was leaving him at an ever more fucking rapid rate.
Then, maybe, he would be a real hero. Maybe then he would be a fucking god.
Lowry became himself again in front of the lighthouse in darkness lit by the sliver of a moon that should not shine so bright, the destroyer still there on the horizon, but no tinkling, pleasant sound of waves over bones.
Above, the stars no longer shone but scattered across the sky—like creatures scuttling along the convex surface of a massive planetarium. He’d run out of drugs. He’d run out of molt. He’d run out of f f f f again. The golden dust had left him entirely and he felt flat, unapproachable. The things that energized him disgusted him. Whitby had done that to him, or Whitby’s clone, and it was beyond his understanding. He kept close vague memories, said nothing he’d learned aloud, for fear it would escape like the dust into the air and be lost to him.
The lighthouse lay dull and dark, like the night after a rave. No green light—just the lighthouse from mission briefings, but with fortifications now, facing the sea. He did not know how much time had passed. He never knew, now, how much time had passed. The idea of time seemed too ponderous an idea, that it should exist at all, or he had become a ghost and existed on the other side of some invisible barrier.
Spilling out from the mouth of the lighthouse, he could see bodies, the lighthouse clogged with them. Hundreds of bodies, an ever-flowing river of bodies, and as he drew near he could see that they were, every last one of them, the reoccurring body of Henry from the S&SB, dressed in black, that oval, pale face unmistakable, even in a final sleep.
Such a torrent of dead Henrys that they led out to the beach and somehow he knew that if he waited until morning, these bodies would once more turn into a beach of bones and there would not be a trace of them on the lighthouse steps.
But Lowry was headed elsewhere, would not pine for Sky on that beach, give neither lighthouse nor destroyer the satisfaction.
His fucks would return, his self would return, he knew, if he just kept going, to the end.
The Village was a dump. Pure fucking dump, and Lowry had come down from both the spirit-world highlights of eating Whitby creature’s molt and the dregs of Landry’s drugs. So, low on fucks but also drained like the golden dust had also been, in part, his blood. Pure and utter dump. Not a vacay or top-ops spot. The wind-wracked landscape shoved low to the ground in places between the relics of huts and stone, the sun a howling red halo pierced by the spikes of reeds—and, best of all, redeeming, even, no sign of the freaky-deakys, the permeable people, the winky-dinkys.
And everywhere, on every wall, as if to test Lowry’s patience in another way, the graffiti tag of TOT. Here, there, any goddamn where. TOT. Everywhere a TOT TOT TOT TOT TOT TOT Tot tot tot? TOT fucking TOT and Whitby, the real Whitby, back at Central, had warned him about TOT, but what in the flying fuck did TOT mean? TOT TOT TOT fucking TOT. It was going to drive him fucking nuts fucking TOT. Fuckling TOT, and the only satisfaction was that his pilot light had come back and the molting, the urge to eat the molt, the utter ravenous desire to shove all of it into his mouth, had become an ancient-mariner memory from fucking centuries back.
Nor did he feel sediment or sentiment passing by the messages for loved ones on the wall outside the Village Bar. This community bulletin board for all who had disappeared, including those who had left the messages. It had no import, no power, felt obscene—obscenity—so late now, so fucking behind where the times had left them. So he tore them down before he went inside. This sentimentality. This misunderstanding of the truth of their situation. It enraged him or felt like an affront—but to whom? So he tore them all off the wall, he lit into those messages like they were the enemy, and down they came until the path leading to the Village Bar was strewn with the trash of that, and the balled-up negation of that, and he might be weeping but fuck those tears. It wasn’t what his brain was receiving but what his body had endured to that point. “Lost son, Burke, call if seen.” “Saul, if you see this, I’m in Bleakersville. I’m safe.” “Taking in who I can down the street at 620.” No no no.
Then Lowry had crept inside, shut the door behind him as if it were the door to an airlock and outside lay the unforgiving vacuum of space, as he breathed heavy and deep of the safe air inside. Even if the roof hung low across the far right corner, over a shitty little stage, and the counter itself had been ripped and defiled, flanked by fallen-over stools and on the wall behind the bar the off-kilter dozens of frames of mostly motley fucked-up-looking men, like a tribute to drowned sailors who had been bad at their jobs.
And what was he looking for, in this place where the fatal fucking fool known as Old Jim had lived part of his life, explained his face to strangers, been acting a role? And now here was Lowry, just trying to get by plundering his files, his stolen gold that appeared to live nowhere in the whole fucking universe that was Area X. There, lost in the middle of an alien catastrophe, and yet still Lowry cared, still Lowry hoped to return to the normal, ordinary world, a rich man. That, he had decided.
No dead here, just overturned tables and chairs, a half-crushed piano in the middle left corner, facing the door, and no one on the bench. It was a place to start, a place to look, Old Jim’s piano, and something spilling out of the crushed and broken left side, in envelopes. So that he crept through the debris to that breach, to fucking investigate, hopeful he might find what he needed, what Jack wanted.
He knelt in front of the vast flow of letters, more than he could have guessed from the door, and they did not have the look of wealth, the look of money. He opened first one and then another, noting the music sheets from Winter Journey on the stand and the blood on the keys.
But they were all letters to Cass, and which “Cass” was that, but from the dates Lowry knew it must be the fucking prehistoric one—before Old Jim had come to the Forgotten Coast for his brief sojourn, and no help to Lowry, though he opened more and more, in hopes that this had been the way Old Jim hid Jack’s money, amid the terrible fucking pathetic wreckage of his nonlife, his pathetic antilife, this spook of a spy who had caused so much trouble in the end for Jack that here he was, mighty fucking Lowry, on his hands and knees, tearing through pages that pleaded, that raged, that seemed to contain every emotion and every variation of syntax and speech from formal and fluid to informal and rigid, and yet all of it no more intelligible to Lowry than TOT TOT TOT TOT TOT. Taught. Taut.
Fuck it. He tossed letters away from himself, chucked them away from himself, threw them across the room, still felt awash in them, drowning in them, and what the fuck did he care what happened to them now.
Except, unexpectedly, Karen Hargraves stood there, in the doorway, staring at him, and his startlement gave way to relief gave way to something like wariness and even a little spike of fear.
“Hargraves,” he called out, too loud, like she stood on the other side of a canyon. “You’re alive.”
She moved not at all, but stood rigid, alert, watching him, while he suppressed the instinct to step closer. Something told him not to.
But, finally, she gave him a smile, if grim, and she came a few steps farther into the bar, closing the door behind her. Lowry missed the light that disappeared, that she seemed to eclipse.
“So you made it, Lowry,” she said, but something in her tone did not reassure, and he kept one hand on his rifle. In case she winky-dinkyed or walkie-talkied, or slick-tongued over his brain.
“The others make it?” Lowry meant the side expedition that Sky had sent to the Village.
“No, Lowry. They did not.” Said like she was closing another door.
“That’s a shame,” he said. “That’s a damn shame.” Although, did he care? At all? He couldn’t be sure.
“How’d you survive?” she asked, although Lowry frowned, thinking he should be asking her that fucking question. Like, she was doubting that he had survived, though he stood in front of her.
“The usual way,” Lowry said. Unusual ways.
“I survived because it turns out I don’t work out there. I’m part tragedy out there. But this place, here I do well…”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Lowry said, diplomatically. “You like this place?” He had a genuine fucking curiosity, which surprised him.
“I do.”
“You’d rather be here and dead than out there and alive?”
Lowry didn’t know if he meant her or, in that moment, himself, but Hargraves said, “I don’t think that’s the choice. Not anymore.”
“It’s been hard for you,” Lowry said, trying to sound sympathetic.
Hargraves laughed. “Hard. Well, yeah, no one knew it would be like this, did they? Walk in the park, you said. Although you also said ‘titty’ and ‘glory hole’ a lot, Lowry, so maybe we shouldn’t have listened to you so much. What do you think?”
Lowry thought he didn’t like that, the memory on that, the memory it took to fixate on such trivia, but she was already busy wrong-footing him again.
“Going through Jim’s letters to his daughter, I see,” Hargraves said. “Rooting through them. Like a rat.”
He ignored the insult. “Did he really have a daughter?” he asked, only because he didn’t know what the fuck else to say.
Hargraves ignored him. “There’s nothing in the letters that will help you. No ‘off switch,’ no intel, so you might decide to put them down and leave them be. You might even decide to clean up your mess and put them all back in the piano.”
Lowry realized that his hand that did not hold the rifle still held letters, and he didn’t know how long Hargraves had stood there, watching him ball them up and rip them up and otherwise try to destroy them. He dropped the ones he held as quickly as if they’d burst into flames.
“So, you know about Old Jim,” Lowry said. “Do you happen to know where he is now?”
He noticed that Hargraves had a wicked-looking handgun in addition to a first-rate sniper’s rifle, and that the handgun had appeared in her right hand at some point while they talked, and she’d somehow affixed a silencer to it, very fast. And that this fact confused him in a fundamental way.
“I do happen to know where he is now,” Hargraves said, but did not elaborate.
“Well, where is he?” Lowry asked.
“I’ve been here long enough to figure out Jim, Lowry. To figure out lots of things.” And there was a flame burning in her eyes now that he also didn’t understand.
“So brief me,” Lowry said, trying to sound casual and yet they both stood there rigid at twenty feet, like they were about to draw down on each other, whether Old West or old-fashioned duel he had no fucking idea, except it seemed like a sad waste in either direction, should it come down to it. He didn’t want to kill her, but he’d proven recently he could.
“Pretty clear what happened,” Hargraves said. “He was sitting at the piano and Area X was changing him and at some point I think he went outside to that little bridge—you know it? Of course you don’t, but I do—and he was in agony by that point, Lowry. He was injured and his nerves were shot and he was probably hallucinating because the Border was about to come down, and he was afraid. He was so afraid and so alone and I wasn’t there for him and neither were you, you stupid fuck.”
“Hey, Hargraves, maybe you could—”
He’d wanted her to turn down the aggro, but she was already barreling through him, interrupting.
“He’d lost a hand, and, from the evidence, the other was eating him, slowly. And he sat down on the bridge, waiting for the dawn. And then he died. He died alone on the bridge, waiting for help. And, eventually, I came along and I found him—or, I found the husk that Area X had left of him.”
“Is that right, Hargraves,” he said, wondering if he could reach for his gun before she got a shot off. Wondering how the fuck she was scaring the shit out of him.
“Yes, that’s right, Lowry.” And now he could tell she was mocking him and the moment felt even more wrong.
“Maybe he’s still kind of alive, then, if he left a husk,” Lowry said. “Maybe you could just show me the—”
“Shut up.”
When he’d imagined a reunion with another exped member, other than a false one thrown off the roof for good reason, it hadn’t felt like this, hadn’t been like this. He’d instead confided all he’d learned—all the wisdom, all the knowledge he’d retained from Whitby Not’s molt, and what it meant, and, yes, the urgency of that warned him off speaking somehow, because he felt he’d stepped into some other scenario, one he had less control of, and so he blurted out an instinctual question he’d hoarded since he couldn’t access her files back at the Southern Reach.
“Who the fuck are you, Hargraves? Who are you, really?”
Was she Jack’s third? And, if so, what was her mission and did it affect Lowry, and he thought it did, it must, the stance she took, the way she regarded him.
The way she took her time replying, like she was lining up a target.
“Who am I, Lowry? Great question. I’m Old Jim’s daughter. Not his real daughter, although his real daughter was nothing to write home about. He was better off with me.”
The False Daughter Project. She must be lying. He didn’t know how to take it, like she’d introduced some element far more alien than anything he had experienced in Area X, so she must be lying.
“Look,” Lowry said, hoping to take back some kind of control, “why don’t you come to the extraction point with me. And we can sort this all out back at the Southern Reach.”
She laughed at that, a disrespectful sound. “Extraction point? You mean crawl back through the tunnel? Even though there’s no expedition anymore? And no suits?”
“It’s time to go home,” Lowry said, thinking he sounded ultra-fucking-reasonable. Though he didn’t really think it was time to go home, just wanted Hargraves’s hand a little farther away from her gun.
“In time, maybe I will come home, except not through the front door,” she said. “But you’ll never know when or how. Maybe I’ll disappear, poof, like Jim’s real daughter for a while. He might appreciate the poetry of that, you know. He might. From wherever or whenever he’s watching now.” And he could hear the weight of that—the tremor of emotion in her voice, like she’d just come from a wake, and he guessed she had. She actually had.
“Come on,” Lowry said, and taking a chance, “I’m Jack’s fail-safe. I’m the one embedded with the expedition to take over if anything went wrong. And I say we head for the extraction point.”
She hesitated, but Lowry understood somehow that he couldn’t know what the fuck she was hesitating about—that it might have nothing to do with his question.
“I knew Jim well. I know Jack,” she said, finally, there, as they stood in the wreckage of the Village Bar, and a new anger burgeoned in her that alarmed him. “You’re not the fail-safe. You’re the jackass who takes the attention off the fail-safe. Threes, Lowry. Jack always works in threes. But I’m done being that. I never really was that, because some of us at Central actually believe in the future. And you know what I’m going to do if I make it back? I’m going to wipe the whole slate clean, one way or the other. I’m going to be the one who cleans house. I’ll be the one, starting with you.”
Maybe the way she said things mesmerized him or he was tired or got careless or just still underestimated her, but Hargraves had her gun trained on him, shot to the chest, and no way could he now raise his rifle in time.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said, like he was in a movie of his life, not his actual fucking life. “Put the gun down. I have so much to tell you. I have seen so much.”
“No, I don’t think so. Because you know what I found in Jim’s pockets, along with a few diagrams of an alligator in a secret room? The impossible thing?”
“Fuck, I don’t know, Hargraves. Put the gun down.”
“A piece of paper.”
“A piece of paper?”
“And do you know what he had written on it?”
“Drink more milk? Eat more fucking vegetables?”
“Kill Lowry. It read ‘Kill Lowry.’ And I’ve been asking myself how he could even have known your name. What happened after I left that he could have known your name. Who gave it to him, why it was important. But, on some level, I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. I don’t think it matters why. What do you think, Lowry?”
“I think you should take a breath, Hargraves. Cass. I think you should give this a lot of thought. What it means to—”
“Kill Lowry, it says,” Hargraves said, distant, “and you know what? I think I will.”
And then she shot him.
TWO MEN IN A FUCKING BOAT THING
Nothing was better than getting shot. Nothing. To be shot and still be walking around. He couldn’t feel his right arm, or part of his face, but who the fuck needed part of his face. He could still see, and there was warmth on his left side. And he could move his left arm and he could sling his knapsack across his back and still hold his machete. Still had that. Wasn’t sure where the gun had gone. Was it still shoved into his pants? Who had done that? Hargraves? No, Hargraves had shot him. He must’ve done it. But she’d been quick on the draw. Too quick. Just muscle memory that got him out the doorway. And she didn’t follow? Was he too far dead for it to matter? The lighthouse was shining in his face, on the back of his neck, from all positions, no matter how he moved, and only with difficulty and time did the marshes become clear to him, or even the path he shuffled forward on, back to the extraction point. What if there was no suit? Would he attempt the corridor without one? He’d have to.
And then there on the horizon, parallel to his horizon, on another raised berm trail far out, there was a figure gamboling about, swinging its arms and shouting or was it screaming? Was it him? His own true doppelgänger? This was his first thought.
With difficulty he put binoculars up to the side of his face that wasn’t numb. Landry. Landry coked up. Landry on meth. Landry clearly on whatever he had left and Lowry crowed in triumph. Landry had made it. At least, made it for now. A salute and a shout out to him, going out with a bang not a whimper, but the shout came out as a croak and Landry couldn’t hear him and suddenly Lowry felt nauseous and like a hammer had come down on top of his head, and he staggered and his binoculars swung back against his chest like someone was giving him CPR and he concentrated, one blade of grass at a time, on the trail in front of him, with the lighthouse still stabbing into him from every direction and Landry would just have to fend for himself and come down from the drugs on his own and holy fuck that would be the greatest withdrawal of all time. In the most inhospitable place.
But a short time later, he came across Landry again, this time next to that damned green boat that undulated and ebbed and flowed in its boatness in a disturbing fucking way. A way he didn’t care for, that made him think Landry had gone space-age in the excess of his personal drug use, and even Lowry felt fucking unsettled by it—the gleam in Landry’s eyes, the way that Landry seemed to have transcended speech but for odd burblings and burstings forth of phrase that said Get in the boat so convincingly that Lowry got in the boat, because he was tired and fading and it was better being in the boat with this Landry than being not in the boat and not with Landry.
And Landry had the bag of drugs with him, though Lowry felt fucking good for now. Maybe just because he had someone to talk to who was not the murderer Karen Hargraves, the anti-Sky and not a Winters who had fallen from a great height and lied about the boat before.
Even the lighthouse in the distance, reimagined, felt—or maybe Lowry just fucking hoped—like a newborn thing, a creature that did not yet know the full desire or strength of its own engines. Did it intuit its damn purpose? Flow to flow, the Geiger clicking somewhere. That they at times seemed to be motoring toward rather than away as they hugged the coast with no hint of an engine to propel them but not using the oars either, well, as he said to Landry, that was the fucking shitting pissing yourself bastard part of special ops, of expeditions, of the things you just had to do.
Landry smiled so very, very wide, he was clearly high, and said, “That’s rad, man. That’s profound,” but the words felt fuzzy meeting Lowry’s eyeballs, to his mouth-ear hearing them.
“Do you know how you’re sounding to others, my glorious Landry. You hurt your own drugs now, not the other way around, you’re so fucking high. Enumerate. Reconstitute. Something something I forgot.”
There was the wind, yes, and the crashing birds that seemed to have forgotten how to fly sometimes and dashed themselves like glass against rock on the surface of the ocean, and the ones who seemed to have learned to fly too well and were so far-distant and high up that he wondered if they might fly away to the moon. He tried not to notice the loops of sea creatures in the water, and the feeling that the shore wanted to eat them like a mouth. Had the drugs made the fucking birds high? Sprinkling them over the goddamn water.
“We could just fly out to the sea and never come back,” Landry said. “Just keeping flying around. Just do that. Do that thing. What did I say?”
“Sail. Motor. Not fly.”
“There’s sauce out there and I want all of it. I want to walk into the sauce and eat it all.”
“Not walking swimming. Not sauce. Water.”
“Glide like kings and get the sauce, just for us.”
“Fucking swim, motherfucker. Sail, asshole. I mean, Landry, what the fuck are you on because I’m taking the same stuff.”
“You tell me, Lowry! Tell me!”
The flushed, peaked look to Landry’s face. The carnivorous shadows around his face. Surely cavernous, but, no, carnivorous fit the moment. The tremor to his hands, which seemed to be growing mangroves out of them like a boss.
“Do you like boats, Landry?” Just to change the subject. Just to look away from ol’ mangrove hands.
“No not boats. Not boats at all. Yes. But we are not in a boat.”
And Landry was right, it wasn’t really a boat, was it, he’d just wanted to think it was a boat, to escape Hargraves. It was some creature, low and long against the water, and they motored in the shallows within the shadow of its mouth and the safety railing he thought was the edge of the boat was actually a row of teeth oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit.
“Landry, this isn’t fucking right. This is all wrong.”
“This is all wrong, Lowry.”
“What the fuck even.”
“What the fuck even.”
“Shut up.”
“Shut up.”
“Holy fuck.”
“Holy fuck.”
“Stop it you fuck.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Blort.” Or something like “blort,” as if to blurt was to lunge.
Because that was when Landry lunged at him and Lowry had to shoot him in the face and then plunge over the side as the mouth tried to close over them both.
Then it was a hard long slog from the shore to the Border extraction point, more and more of him paralyzed, that damn half-face Landry shadowing him from afar and saying shit that was pointless now, like they were not going to have a productive conversation after what had gone down, but as long as Landry obeyed the restraining order in Lowry’s head and stayed more than five hundred feet away from the kick-to-curb of Lowry’s boots, it was still cool. Or cool enough.
Lord, he was feeling weak and perturbed and hot and the wheel and wreck of the heavens was full of knives that gleamed and kept together like flocks of glittery sharp clouds or flocks of birds and he just wanted to make it to the Border was all. That was all he wanted.
Even with fake Landry out there, holding up the bag of drugs like he was a candy master on some dark ritualistic night, wrangling that candy for the kids. Wrangling that candy while Rome burnt like a candle, like a flame, in the vessel of his brain.
For a time, then, Lowry felt like he was unconscious but walking still, and for a time, too, as if he had fallen in, footstep for footstep, with the marching soldiers of scientists and psychics approaching the distant green light of the future, as if he were in their ranks, but when he came to, instead, the hole in the ground, the corridor entrance lay in front of him even though he had a nagging thought in the back of his head that he was not himself and even more of his body had gone numb, and was it the bullet or was it something else? The second skin that had always made him queasy. Had made him shocked and shockened and fuck that wasn’t a word but it was in his head.
The suit right there and all he had to do is put it on. But it was illuminated somehow by the lighthouse rays and he could see refracted back how the suit was moving. Every inch of the suit moved in a subtle way, as if it were less a second skin than millions of tiny organisms trying to provide the illusion of being a suit. But what if that was just his wound talking? What if he was so fucked up that the suit was normal and his fucking paranoia had commandeered his senses and his common sense. Because he had to put on the suit. Because he had to make it down the corridor if he wanted to live. If he wanted to bring back the critical, the vital info he only half recalled.
He believed he could feel the bullet inside him, like a cold, dead weight, like something you’d put on a tiny scale before you paid out for nuggets of gold found by some dumb-fuck miner up in the mountains of a state you never visited but kept telling friends you would go camping in. Ah but the numbness hurt. It hurt so much, and he wished maybe he could go back to being scales that became eyes from which issued the golden dust.
There was the suit. There was the corridor. He could make it out. He had to make it out. He’d be a hero. He’d be able to set his own terms. He might even run the joint one day. If he could only make it out, he might be the one to defeat Area X. He might be the one. If only. If only. If only he were himself. And of that he could not be sure.
Slowly, with great difficulty, he dropped his knapsack. He dropped his binoculars. He undressed and, naked, stood before his suit and his suit spoke to him and said, “Are you ready?”
And he said, “Fuck, yeah, I’m ready.”
But he stood like that, half toppled, for a long time. For a very long time, wondering what to do next. Because he was, as far as anyone knew, the last survivor of the first expedition. Because something felt important about that he could not put a finger on because he could not feel his fingers.
If he could just get into the suit. If he could just get into the suit.
And the suit said, “Don’t worry, Lowry. I’ll help you get into the suit.” And he said, “I’m scared,” because he was scared and couldn’t stop crying. And the suit said, jauntily, “Don’t be scared. Just get into me. Just let me cover you up. Let me just cover this all up.” But still he was afraid.
“You see that Hargraves, suit?” He’d been wandering aimless a bit, lost sight of the horizon, even, or the point.
“She passed through here a while back.”
“Ah, ah good.” And yeah, he was happy for her. Just like he was happy for Sky if she had managed to make it to that destroyer and maybe it had even turned into a spaceship and lifted her into the sky and into a better life than this shit. For this truly had turned to shit, hadn’t it, and he wasn’t going to be a hero, was he?
But maybe, just maybe, Hargraves was another Landry, splintered into a thousand parts, and no fucking shard of diamond left in the middle to put into a ring and offer in a room full of dead things in jars. Maybe she was the dream and he would still make it back and she wouldn’t, never couldn’t, never ever would. Just him.
“Maybe I am the last and I’m going home.”
“If you’re talking to me,” the suit said, “you’re long gone, my friend.”
“Landry?”
“No, Landry’s been dead for a while.”
Lowry was in a bad way it seemed, given how ripped up the suit was, or how it was ripping itself in new ways to bind him into it more securely.
“Anyone else pass through?”
“I told you—Hargraves. She made it through.”
“Got any of the good drugs left?”
“Yeah, in my suit.”
“But you’re all suit.”
“Ain’t that right.”
If he craned his neck, Lowry could see a version of himself that was better than this, somewhere on the horizon but not here. Not here. And maybe he didn’t need to be. Maybe he didn’t need to be. Maybe for now this was what he needed to be.
“I just need to sit for a bit, suit,” Lowry said, “and then we’ll cross over.” There was comfort in the thought, how if only he could make it across, nothing would change.
And the suit nodded at him, and they watched the sun set over that beautiful fucking place together, propped up against a log, and it was all right and fucking good, even.
For a time.