The loop, p.27
The Loop, page 27
“Lucy?”
“The message has to go through. They have to know what’s coming. I’m going to fight it, like Marisol. I’m going to find a way through.”
Brewer started to stand, detonator in one hand.
“No,” said Lucy. “You have to stay there. Don’t ruin this. We have to force their hand, now, or there’s nothing good, not ever again. I’ll show them the message. I’ll show them you, and the bomb.”
“If you can’t? What if you disappear in there? What if you come after me, or try to trigger the explosion?”
“Then you save us both.” She pointed to his gun.
One bullet left. He’d have to risk capture and infection.
No more good choices.
“Fuck, Lucy.”
“Ada wasn’t only Ada. They’re on their way.”
She pictured the quivering, snarling children of Turner Falls crawling through the caves, their hands slick from handling the eggs of their new god. Even now they’d be climbing up the ladders. She imagined them falling on her and Brewer, blue eyes and blind rage, the cancer in their necks thrumming with expectation.
They’ll break our bones, jam us in by the pipe bomb just to see what happens to the meat when the screws and BBs and shrapnel tear through what’s left of us.
No.
No time left.
Find a way through.
She made her way to Ada’s corpse, rolled her onto her face. The utility knife made short work of the soft, suppurating tissue around the Oracle.
She dug in with her hands and grasped the meat of the creature and pulled, and for one moment she felt how deep the thing—much larger than the ones she’d seen erupt from Marisol—had sunk its arms into Ada’s neck and skull. Then, as if sensing its extraction, or perhaps the warmth of her skin and the still-moving blood beneath, the arms of the creature retracted from Ada with a squelch and rotated back, latching into the thin skin of Lucy’s hand. She saw it then, and realized it was surely a mutant descendant of whatever prototype they’d put in Jason, because the thing in her hand was so repellent even the best marketing team would die trying to sell it. This was no device—the Oracle was a living tumor, a warped nodule of blue-black cell death with eight squirming arms, each of them bearing what appeared to be tiny black bone saws at their tips. An obsidian beak squealed at its center, and circuitry shimmered beneath the viscid mucosal jelly that coated the thing. There were clear, tiny cysts deeper inside, in which something even smaller—Eyes? Eggs? Larvae?—swirled and swam, speeding at Lucy’s touch.
She wanted to throw the Oracle to the ground and smash it under her heel until nothing of it remained, every last cell split and oozing and unrecognizable.
No.
Don’t think about it.
You can’t. Your mind won’t bear it.
Just do what you have to do.
So she did, and it was motion without thought or reason—the Oracle raised to the back of her neck—and she felt her hand freed from its grasp. There was a moment of no sensation at all, and she wondered if the thing was dying from the effects of the gunshot that cratered Ada’s face, or from her rapid extraction technique.
Then she realized that less than a second had passed, and it had been wishful thinking to believe the creature dead, because it was, in fact, very alive, and the lightness she’d felt was the Oracle leaping from her hand to her neck.
It landed and latched.
Sensation returned—her neck on fire. She heard skin tearing, felt a drilling sensation, which she feared would split her head from her body, then something was inside of her, spreading beneath her skin, reaching up along her spine, unfolding over her mind, insisting it had been there all along.
The sky was red for a moment, then black, then back to gray and blue.
Lucy fell to her knees, her head swimming with the smell of burning gasoline, cherry blossoms in bloom, the mold deep inside a pile of decaying fall leaves
And
Dust and vomit and juniper pollen
And
Brewer’s family and dogs, burnt and sickly sweet, and she saw the outline of their violated corpses again, not as a memory but as a layer of her vision, as real as the trees and mountains in the distance.
At the bottom of her sight, a stream of data rolled by, programming language she couldn’t understand. Vestiges of IMTECH’s programming efforts—so clearly subsumed within the Oracle—appeared as a third layer. The remnants of a menu interface, corrupted icons lighting up as her eyesight floated over them. It dizzied her, but she blinked and it disappeared. She blinked again and saw flames climbing white drapery, and she felt as if she were watching a camera pan back, but then she heard laughter and it sounded like Luke Olsen and as he stepped farther and farther backward she realized that she was seeing what he had seen when he burned down someone’s home, and the very worst part of all is that something about his vision made her feel good and excited, and when she looked down her hand was steadied among the flames and she could feel a smile spreading across her face.
“Lucy, did you connect to them? Did it work?”
A voice, distant.
Worried.
Weak.
Another voice, closer, inside her head:
You were always one of us. We understand you. How you feel.
You can feel that way again.
The boy is behind you.
He trusts you. He has something we want. Your knife is sharp.
The absence is coming.
Lucy ignored the voice, its promises and threats and the way her body had begun to tremble again.
You’re not listening. We will show you.
Electricity in her mind, vision a thicker red.
Her parents, burning in front of her. She’d breathed in their smoke, tasted them as they died.
No!
Then the closet at the orphanage. She never knew when the light would return. She was shrinking away. A mildewed mop in the corner. Girls laughing on the other side of the door. She had to pee and couldn’t help it anymore, and when they set her free they saw what she’d done and they rubbed her face in it and called her “perro” and then she was deeper in memory, smaller, and so alone, and when you were all alone you weren’t safe and you had to run from a certain kind of man and woman, you could see it in their eyes, something dead but hungry at the same time, and you tried to tell your parents but they heard nothing that wasn’t the voice in them calling for the next bottle and then you were in the closet again, and then you were trying to wake the Hendersons but they were ghosts too, bleeding and lying and retreating from you and this will only feel worse every second you don’t listen…
“Lucy! What’s happening?”
That voice again.
It brought her back to her body, but that was a curse. She felt crushed, her neck in agony, strained and cracking, her skin loose, like it was slipping away, rotting away, but at least it was a sensation because the Oracle was coming into her mind again and draining her ability to be anything and she was so afraid of what waited in that blackness beyond herself because she could feel that it only held worse for her…
But that’s not true. You can feel good again. We learned from the first of you, how to escape the absence. Jason showed us how to feed it, how to keep it at bay.
Lucy saw Jason’s “wisdom,” layers of it all at once: neighborhood dogs split, organs catalogued; girls in tears, bleeding; his younger brother screaming, hand forced to the stovetop; a man sleeping under a tarp by the railroad tracks, kicked in the head until he stopped moving…
She tried to blink it away, to focus on the natural light coming in from the desert sky, but the visions would not leave her, and she wanted them to sicken her, but whatever it was in the Oracle that Jason had taught how to feel was rewriting her code, teaching her this was good, that this was how to escape the loop, how to stay on, how to make herself feel anything at all, and the absence is returning you don’t have to feel low the boy is there he’s calling for you he’s nothing we don’t need him he’s only good for how he can make us feel…
How he made us feel, Lucy thought, and she saw his arms wrapped around her as they sat on the desert floor and then she was shaking worse and she felt something stir, low in her body, and wondered if the salvage sequence had been initiated. Maybe the Oracle had no use for her anymore and the others had risen from the caves and they would soon be discovered and killed and something would grow from her womb and emerge from her and stand swaying in the desert, her body nourishment for the strange new plant.
Or is it feeding me that vision, because it doesn’t want to think about Brewer? Because this thought is mine?
You weren’t loved. Not once. Not now.
She tried to focus, to turn toward Brewer and her thoughts of him, and the clarity they seemed to bring.
Pain roiled in her guts. Her neck throbbed. Her sight filled again, and she could see herself, splattered with blood, her face hideous, angry beyond her own awareness, her arm swinging down, wrench in hand, striking one of the seer’s eyes blind. The sight line shifted toward Brewer on the stairs, shocked.
He’s terrified, watching you, this is what he thinks of you he doesn’t love you he fears you he hates you he doesn’t know what you are what you can be you have always been part of us we have always been inside of you.
No, she thought, that was never you. It was because of you. Never for you.
Another wave of pain wracked her body. Lucy wondered at how long Marisol had managed to go without killing Steve. The pressure was relentless, and she wanted so badly to feel good again, to have an end to the nothingness and destruction and the creeping voice inside her skull.
She shook terribly. One of her legs faltered beneath her, leaving her sitting on the desert floor.
A voice outside of her head. Hands on the front of her shoulders, setting loose spasms through her body. “It’s not working, Lu. I can’t watch it do this to you.”
He had come to her, abandoned their plan.
She met his eyes.
“Oh, fuck. That blue. It got into you bad.”
He was terrified, but for her.
He’s already dead, like the rest. Only a matter of time. But you can feel good right now. You can get back on.
“Stay in front of me. Keep me in this place,” she said. “Don’t let them back in, not all the way.”
Let us in.
Flames again. Luke Olsen’s memory, stealing her sight, striking Brewer from her perception. She could smell the fire this time. Familiarity in the scent, beneath the smoke. It reminded her of Carol’s favorite perfume. Luke took another step back, and she knew why the Oracle was showing her the blaze.
My house, she thought. The Hendersons.
“He’s already dead, like the rest.”
It was that knowing, the final erasure of hope that the Hendersons might have survived, that she felt in her chest. But the ache of losing them was real and present, and even as she watched the house burn she felt it moor her within herself, in the body she knew.
They wanted her broken and controlled by the rules of their world. But something was changing inside of her.
Lucy tucked her legs beneath her with trembling hands and reached out to Brewer.
“I’m here, but it keeps coming back. Forcing me to see. Help me stay. Sit here. Hold my hands.”
He could have run, guessed it a trap, pictured himself being pulled down to her, her teeth on his neck, tearing away.
He could have pulled the trigger then, figured Lucy for mad or lost or both, and sent their last bullet through her brain, setting her free.
Instead she felt his hands on hers.
A vision struck her eyes, trying to erase any knowledge of what was happening. She saw two fires then: the people who made her and the people who loved her, all consumed, and she felt the familiar bright white tremors of her rage filling her up, threatening to negate her, to pull her toward the empty malice of the Oracle’s hunger.
But she also felt immense sadness for what had been lost, and what may be lost still, and she allowed it because it was real and hers and even though it hurt it wasn’t an absence.
She felt all of this at the same time, and she realized the Oracle’s invasion had altered her mind, fracturing the layers of her perception far beyond what her own trauma and time as a child ghost had done, and as she had in the past she allowed her anger to ascend, pictured it as a beam running to the sky, and this time something new happened.
She closed her eyes, and her body remained on the desert floor, Brewer before her, but her mind, at long last, cleaved
right
in
two.
And then there were three of her.
The Lucy from her old life, terrified and abandoned and mocked, crushed by fear and grief.
Confused, opening her eyes to flickering light and finding herself in another room she’d built in her mind, blank screens on the wall, its earthen floor lush with dark green ferns.
Bucket was still there, smiling.
“I thought you’d never come back.”
And the other Lucy, a series of animal instincts, a creature born of this new world, seeking continuation at any cost.
Finding the pleasure in seeing any living thing that wasn’t her fall bleeding to the ground.
And she found herself deep in the caves, dozens of eyes looking to the surface of the stone dome, where something grew and waited and demanded to be fed.
And a body, not entirely hers,
trembling,
stolen,
steadied by the hands of a young man who held her and waited for her to return.
“It’s coming, Lucy. It wants in.”
A huge thud against the door to Bucket’s room.
“You have to do something.”
“It wants the stimulus. That’s all that really matters to it.”
The weight fell on her, pressure in the darkness, and she was all of them,
and none of them were themselves anymore, all drones in service of whatever the Oracle had become, reduced to sensory organs feeding constant need.
They shivered and shook and watched layer upon layer of murders on loop and fell upon one another when their urges demanded it,
And some of them had softened, their skin splitting,
something slick emerging from their bloated limbs,
allowing them to climb the walls of the ancient cave and bring the queens’ harvest to the floor,
where it would be set free,
carried to the world on rushing waters.
“I don’t want to feed it. It’s already so strong.”
Another thunderous crash against the door.
“You have to, Lucy. You have to give it what it wants. You have to match its signal, or overwhelm it, so it can’t broadcast in here anymore.”
“But I can’t be that Lucy, anymore. I never wanted to be her. They made me.”
“I’m sorry, Lu.”
Bucket stepped closer to her, the smell of his cheap cologne sweet as spring to her senses. He put his arms around her and whispered in her ear.
“You have to end this.”
She fed the hive, let them feel what she felt.
The sick pleasure in the violence,
in crushing and not being crushed.
She filled their eyes with what she’d done.
Ben’s skin peeling away, folds of his face bunching under her nails, fresh red rivers running down.
Ashley’s nose and teeth crunching under stone, the feeling of her body shaking under Lucy’s.
Bradley’s face crumbling with each swing of her wrench, the thrill of blinding an animal that saw you as prey.
Toni’s head opened and emptied and smoking next to the barrel of Lucy’s gun.
Ben again, resurrected by the Oracle only to have one eye staked and the other gouged, his head and throat pulped flat under the hammer in her hands.
And Lucy did not ignore the feeling that coursed through her and them, the body rewarded with the thrill of not dying, the flesh never so alive as when it asserted its need to continue atop a pile of dead predators.
She could feel the hum of their pleasure as she fed them her fresh sense memories, and she dove into the feeling and gave them more, the warmth of Ashley’s blood on her skin, the momentum of her body weight swinging through a boy’s head, his one remaining eye gone wide knowing death was coming, the path of the bullet destroying the symmetry of a once-perfect face, the seep of Ben’s optic fluid around a splinter of charred wood,
And they loved all of it, and the creatures in the cave were swaying and moaning and always,
always,
always
wanting more.
The sound at the door subsided; something sated had turned its vision toward Lucy’s
Symphony of death, loops of suffering harmonized
and speeding their pace.
Her anger the engine, untethered and rising and feeding the masses
everything they needed to feel good again.
And she let them have it all, opened her mind and showed them
Marisol, writhing on the floor, the hectocotylus cracking her skull and coiling in her head, gray matter liquefying and running from her nose.
“It’s working, Lucy. Look.”
The screens in Bucket’s room grew brighter, the IMTECH logo glowing from their centers.
Then text:
COM SYS RECOVERY, PLEASE WAIT.
She said, “I’m sorry, Bucket, but
I’m giving them everything,
And she showed them Bucket colliding with the windshield,
And the bodies falling from trucks, necks snapped, skin flayed, spines twisted.
Faces peppered with glass.
She even gave them Bucket’s face.
Swollen.
Split.
Flesh falling away.
His last breath.
“It’s okay. There’s no choice.”
The screens in Bucket’s room went blank for a moment, leaving him and Lucy in blackness,
