We wake up.
The sun is tired but fresh against the yellowing grass of the checkpoint. We half-lie, propped against something warm and bumpy. We open our eyes, and find that our glasses don’t seem to work right.
Fogged up?
We raise a hand to wipe them, and find that the lenses give under our fingers akin to tensioned fish bladder. We toss them into the dirt, and they begin to slowly melt, frame splitting itself in a rush to join with the earth. We find that, strangely, we do not seem to need a replacement.
Oh, right. They were on when…
We find, in kind, that most articles of our clothing have gotten the same treatment. The fabric of our plain work dress shivers and breathes against our skin. The thick shirt’s texture is closer to that of lichen. The fronts of our boots seem to have gained a focused claw-like quality that is most evident at the sole. None seem fused to our body, which is a bit surprising.
But there is a tightness somewhere in our head, an unfamiliarity. We raise a fan of clawed fingers and find that, fitting as it is, out skull is… Not the same?
As many times as it takes.
How many?
All that perish.
We aren’t ruining their rest, are we?
We close our eyes, and follow the winding thread of events spooling out from the base of the skull we occupy. Its owner surfaces in our mind immediately. Knowing. Willing. Eager.
That’s good.
Something seems to catch on as the thread is pulled back. A wavering, paper-thin intruder. A pair of mirrored eyes peering from between the blades of grass, led to our scent by some semblance of curiosity. The late day seems to wane for a split second. Then, it realizes its mistake, attempting a panicked retreat, but we are faster, and it is pulled inward, thrashing. The edge of our mind is an event horizon, and we spend a few seconds idly pulling its abstracted remains into strands, and the strands settle between our muscles, and within our bulk its rendered thoughts are just another organ cluster.
A rumbling approaches. A diesel engine. Or more than one.
We open our eyes, and stand tall, leaving the demon’s worn copper shell to rest in the outburst of emerald splendor that had stood strong against the fading. It lies near the gates, hollow and placid, blank eyes seeming closed.
We position ourselves on the barrier, half-sitting as we face the road out, and the angry rumbling. Two mannequins watch us from across the river, flowerpots for creeping plants that are preparing for a long sleep.
Our mind wanders towards the base, and we sink a hand into the soil, reaching out through the thousands of tons of thinking matter to check.
Five hearts beat on a branch of a heart of a higher order.
It’s empty. Moon’s blessing, it’s empty. Sharp tracks of armored limbs crisscross the packed dirt of the yard, and the garage door is up. Every door is propped open, power cut, wind sweeps listlessly through the cold halls. The storage room is a mess, the garden on the roof can see that much. They couldn’t get everything out in time, but they got the important things. The dangerous things. The dear things.
“Ma’am, this site is government property, you are trespassing!” - A loudspeaker on the first ugly box screams towards us. It barely finished braking, and yet it screams.
“Which government?” - We stand up, disconnecting from the earth, letting speckles of dirt fall from our skin, and they do so reluctantly.
“The United Fucking Nations,” - it roars. The roof turret tilts to stare us down with its gun that’s too seething and bulbous to be human-made, but our eyes remain firmly locked on the front of the APC, where cameras glisten in their armored nests, - “Or the Human Fucking Union, if you would prefer. We have permission to shoot on sight! Clear the way and open the gate!”
We smile, tilting our gaze towards the base of the old boom barrier.
“The motor’s broken.”
“Clear out. Impeding the armed forces is punishable by summary execution.”
We squint at the crack in the armor that forms the driver’s direct view of the outside world. It can’t be a very wide view.
The soldiers cling to their safety harnesses inside the walls of their shared coffins. We can smell each one distinctly, taste the fear that courses through their veins.
We open our mouth, and half-expect the gun to erupt at this first sign of disobedience. But it does not. Maybe they can smell us, too.
“There is nothing here that will help you. There is no gun and no beast to tame. Please, go home. Spend time with your families, if you can. You will find nothing but your faces painted into the silt. Please.”
There is a pause.
We know they will not listen. Behind their eyes, inside their teeth is the fear of a grandfather clock plummeting off a cliff, thrashing at the fabric of cause for one more hit, one more fracture, one more jolt of torment, anything, everything to delay accepting that it is dead.
We know they will not listen. But, for a frenzied endless eyeblink, we hope that they will.
The gun erupts.
Seven slugs flash through our chest and stomach, exit in geysers of sticky hot grey and hard splinters of black. We are thrown violently against the gate. Rusted base to our left screams for help.
The coffins start towards us, aiming straight through the gate, through our body. Gravel under their tracks is like a series of geysers. We try to raise a hand in warning, but find it snapped in half, dangling uselessly. Fifty-ton bulk of the personnel carrier crashes through our body and the hollow beam propping it up, reduces both to indeterminate debris.
Four.
We wake up.
“BAD CHOICE,” - we roar from every pliable surface of bark around the disoriented column.
The sun goes dark.
We are weaved together in minutes, the roar of three abominations still poisoning the air. We tear ourself from the soil, take off after them on a set of rock-hard lever-claws. Legs reinforced with hard bark propel us through the hissing underbush with the velocity of a mad hare. The sky is pitch black, but we do not need our eyes to see. The soil tells enough. The seething of roots guides our way. They are heading for the scar of the valley. Through muddled buzz of shadows, we overhear “hunker down” and “retrieve central transformer”.
They will not get there. They will not be allowed.
We make contact again as they roll onto the bridge, a cruel lightshow amidst a determined ocean of dark. They spot our approach before we are out of the treeline, and two turrets swing in our direction. Dead fireflies blaze through the forest, and we swerve left, towards the water. Two rounds manage to tunnel through our shoulder before we dive into the cutting cold. Slugs rupture the boundary, pepper us like large hail, water boiling away at the contact. The skin on our palms rips itself apart to reform into webbing. Hyphae-shoots stitch the shattered bone together.
Our will explodes across the cruel body of sunless life. The wills of all that swims are contorted, bent into purpose, bent into place, twisted through distance to be exactly where they must, and we crash into the bridge’s supports in a terrible tsunami of sleek bodies, head after shattering head after shattering head breaking ourselves against the weary wood, and the stream boils reddish-brown, overflowing with fractured convulsing bodies, and as the last machine reaches the midpoint the weary wood can not handle our wrath any longer, and with a creak like a grove come undone the construct crashes into our maw, where a thousand thousand wills and gills jam themselves tight between tracked steel wheels, below the wildly firing turret, squeeze themselves through the grates of the crew compartment, mulching themselves into paste, where even these disjointed fragments reach and bite and scratch and ram at the panicking, drowning-
The world comes undone, swallowed whole by a hypersonic shock front of indiscriminate, engulfing death, stripping away, boiling away, taking away.
Three.
We wake up.
We are woven together half-sunk into clay-rich soil, gravel grains in our skin tracing counter-laced spirals of subdermal chainmail. The grass is soaked with a warm wet near-featureless mass of what must have been thousands of fish just a minute ago, rendered completely unrecognizeable by the explosion. Vomit-inducing sulfur fragrance is fused into the rising steam.
We can hear them, a kilometer down, past the second bridge. We tear ourselves free, grey, black and brown oozing from our unformed skin. It hurts. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. They will reach it. They will not be allowed. We push ourselves through the dense air, and wind whistles through our wounds, and the shock-absorbing membranes inside our chest cavities thicken even as we run. We know exactly where they are at all times, unconstrained by the notion of road and elevation. Roads hewn in half weave back and forth as we close the distance again.
Before we even reach them, they are interrupted. The turrets scream and scream and scream, but the needle is aimed skyward, where buzzing of rotors is only contested by the flashes of spilling flame. The nearest dish aches from their jammer blasting out at full power, but it is of no use - each is piloted solely by the sliver of Playback’s marrow planted below its mainboard, cradled next to the explosive charge. Most are shot on approach, and the horror and rage of underbush alight in their salvage wracks through our mind almost worse than the blast that had killed us a minute before.
Our claws crack and snap as we double our pace, and we rocket up the slope to the stretch of serpentine last violated by dead men’s wheels. A deeper, bone-twisting hum descends from the heavens. Tracers converge on the delivery drone, and though it is swiftly disabled, its sheer mass carries it against the depleted uranium hail, and it blooms blinding white at the side of the first coffin. The column screeches to a stop, and rear doors of the disabled carrier blast open, humans spilling out into the dirt in a disoriented clump of simmering skin and mismatched insignia on patchwork uniforms, and with a scream like a trillion eyes snapped off their branches we crash into the middle of that distracted mass, rend it twixt, emerge on the other side having doubled our effective mass with recognizeable fragments of human alone, and lead flowers snap and lodge themselves in the armor of our back, and from the clot of hair splattered against our chest our hide catches fire, and we slam into the face of a rock, and dozens and dozens and dozens more rounds pierce the layer of sharp rock inside our skin, and we lose control of our body, spine snapped, neck bent back from the impact, and the survivors sprint to the remaining machine, and our eyes lock with one, just one, and we watch them freeze solid, left behind as the tracks spew soil once more. Their shivering fingers slowly rise along with a barrel, and in the thousand orange tongues embracing us we aren’t sure whether they shoot us before shooting themselves.
Two.
We wake up.
We are woven back together amidst a pile of smoldering soft things, twisted metal and burning paint, covered in a thin layer of wet, cold dirt. The skin on our mighty, rocksheet-armored limbs has gained a dull, dry quality, and the noxious hot grime covering every surface of the scene slides off, repelled. We are a great lumbering form, and the ground shakes as we rise to our feet, and it is not enough.
We will the dead asunder. The soil bulges out, rises like a forest of offering hands, and warring provinces of their bodies are carried to our form, united under a new vertical.
One.
Bones are welded onto rock.
Zero.
Skin is rolled into cables.
The branch snaps.
Alien memories assault us, latching on like lampreys. The new dead still shiver as they are grafted on. We pull, and pull, and pull, and in the lampreys’ jaws parts of us are pulled away too. We walk towards the central scar, where the ship of green steel makes landfall and the pear trees scream for help, and bleed thicker than ichor with every step quaking the earth. Trunks snap at the push of our shoulders.
We tower far above the plaques of dead spruce-flesh, above the bushes, above the pillars of cast rock. We can see the roof of the dwelling, framed by a starting fire. We can see figures clambering up to the radar dome, hastily peeling away off-white protective panels. We can feel the chained thing inside making its pained routine loops, yet oblivious to the new abuse about to befall it. Its sorrow sweeps across the landscape, and a few of the silhouettes are pulled into the fault line, stretched impossibly thin, and new ones replace them. Dead fireflies bounce off our hide.
“STOP! YOU WILL KILL IT! YOU WILL KILL IT! STOP! YOU WILL KILL THE RADAR!” - our scream bellows through the landscape, louder than gunfire, but they do not listen, again they do not listen, they choose to not listen, and though we speed across the bridge we are not fast enough. A figure ducks inside the dome, towards the ancient seal controls. We trample screaming plants and crush the well-loved implements of life, ignoring that we are on fire again, ignoring the bullets, reaching for the roof, and still we are not fast enough. A flower of scalding white erupts to our side, throwing us into the soil, stripping layers of cross-woven flesh.
Struggling back up again, we are blinded, but even without eyes we see the chains of dream lift off the radar’s tortured mind.
Its first reaction is shock, an interruption of its self-guided sweeping, which the intruders mistake for compliance. Irregular triangles of the dome liquify on contact with its unbridled awareness, and space bubbles and gives as the humans turn the confused wound of the world on its platform, aiming it towards us. It hyperventilates, a horrible thrum of a simple sack lung trying to provide oxygen for a world-sized brain. We manage to get up, but a second detonation throws us back into the mess of our burning home, and, helpless, missing half of our body, we watch it watch us, and it knows what it does to us with the exactness of an ingrown claw circling in on itself, and the edges of us are stripped in a wave more violent than any pyrotechnic and we scream scream scream scream scream with it in a duet of loopback infinitely reinforcing guilt that rises from the seen is to be oblivion is to not be seen without turn swerve scream scream scream disinfect disembowel object of to be seen of uncontrol understand predicament spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral erase spiral spiral spiral erase the edges of ourselves in a wave more violent than any pyrotechnic and we flail flail flail flail as a parody of our mind is forcefully stitched together in the ruins of our burning home and the reinforced concrete walls are stretched into impossibly delicate strips letting human steam into the earth and though our chest cavity is wide open we can still see how wrong it is on the other side of the boundary where the radar now thrashes with us, shock worn off, moving at three million revolutions per minute, melting the treeline, melting the flame, melting the clouds, melting the mountaintops, melting the people, melting our home, and then it can not handle its own pain any longer, and it is ripped apart by its own thrashing, and the wrong is all and all is wrong and we are taken nowhere and brought back and we lie atop corrupted soil among humans ripped apart same as us, stripped of words, stripped of skin, stripped of of of of of of of of of of of of of of of of of sewn together amidst the cooling chaos but there is some things left to do but we walk all wrong, what is it, what is we, we try to get up but the up is what, there is no up, where is up, and slowly things are back but the place is gone, the place is gone, the place is gone, reinforced concrete walls form perfect L-system flowerbuds sizzling in the night air, and the sky is dark no longer, our confiscated thirst for perfect black slipping away into oblivion, and we finally manage to stand, and directions make sense now, and we see the last group of self-proclaimed conquerors of the unknown limp away into the damaged forest on their pathetic steel raft, and we want to scream, why, oh, why, why have you done this, why could you not heed, why must you be the same, but only a throat-tearing groan escapes us, and their tongue is as foreign to us as that of the now-dead radar, and we wish we could scold them, we wish we could ask why, we wish we could talk, and their tongue is as foreign to us as the gurgling of other kevlar beasts, as the machinations of dead meat under crosses, as the anxieties of a priest we didn’t get to eat, and the rage of the woods is nowhere near extinguished, and the tadpoles and the roots seethe at us to follow, and we can do nothing but follow, lumber ahead on broken limbs and finish the job, will our body back into something yet different, catch the intruders, smear them against wet earth, scatter their ash, take their madness into ourselves and break it down until their trace is less than nothing, become grasses clambering over the corpse of an abyss plucked off the stem unjustly, cover everything in boiling brown and green, so we do, so we do, so we do, so we do, so we do just that, and through the night the hunt continues, and we forget where it started, and inside our permeated mind is nothing but lampreys, seven quintillion lampreys and exhaustion of inevitability repeated thrice.
We wake up startled, sensing something approach, crushing a delicate spire of altered matter under our weight, prepared for another rain of metal, another flower of fire, but none follow, and our eyes wander down, and before us stand two creatures. One appears similar to intruders, and for a split second we are driven to lunge at it, to hurt it before it hurts us, but a blurry recognition holds us back. The other is a beautiful forest of living metal, and looking into its delicate tangle fills us with a longing we cannot place. Though its form and matter is impossibly distant, semblance to the poor prisoner of elsewhen is unmistakable in its features.
Staring them down fills us with a pain, though of a different kind to what we had been feeling. Like a scab coming off, and we realize we shake, and as we shake the layers of charred meat and grafted parts and rock armor and metal come off like scabs, flop to the ground, shivering, and our body reduces itself, again and again, until it is nothing but itself.
And we stumble, confused on unfamiliar thin limbs, out of our corpse, towards the creatures, and at the base of our fragile feathered head there is a tightness, a familiarity. We raise a fan of clawed dark fingers, and find that the skull feels right, for once. Not taken from a long-dead stargazer, not confiscated from a blackguard, but ours.
The creatures make calls and whistles at this distance, and we raise our eyes at them, confused. We try to make a call, but find that we can only cry, and when we begin to cry we can not stop. We stutter and fall to the dust, between trunks and furniture turned to slush.
Something must be wrong with us. The creatures’ calls repeat in patterns, and we only recognize some of them. There are strings of sounds that appeal to what seems like only parts of us, and we try to focus on these sounds, but they slip away.
We curl up, lacking the strength to continue thinking, and, hazily aware, we feel them settle to our side. Some limb brushes across the rough grey plumage of our chest, and another touches our wrist, and after the first second of panic we find their presence immensely comforting. We cry until the sun comes up to glance above the scarred peaks, and then we lie quiet in the carnage, eyes closed and without a goal. And when we manage to get up, to remember how to balance between our bony tail and the chipped claws of our six thin limbs, they lead us out of the obliterated dwelling, across a windswept ridge and a metal ear left forever idle without guidance, past the futile dig site, towards a cavern in a dry creek where it is dark and safe for us to fade into a dream again.