American Elsewhere (75 page)

“We have not broken any of Mother’s edicts in bringing Her here, have we? We have kept to Her rules?”

The woman in the panama hat gives him a flat stare. “Are you suggesting,” she asks, “that it is possible to defy Mother?”

He bows his head, and takes the child. “Will I need protection?”

“One of the children will assist you.”

“But it’s daylight.”

She rolls her eyes, exasperated. “And
why
do we need to keep to this town’s rules?”

“You make a fair point.” He and about half of the men and women file out of the room with the screaming child. Mona can still see tiny feet with flexed toes, and struggling arms trying to pull out of his grasp…

“No,” whispers Mona. “No, please…”

One of the men in sweaters—this one a soft brown—turns and looks at her. His gaze is discomfortingly alien. “What do we do with her?” he asks in a quiet monotone.

“Do you know how to use a knife?” asks the woman in the panama hat.

He frowns, nods.

“Do you know how to use one
well
?”

“I understand the concept.”

“Beside the door is a box. Within it are several knives. Cut her here”—she points to a specific point on her throat—“cut her deep, and make sure she dies.”

“She can die like
that
?” asks the man, as if this is a foreign concept.

“Oh, yes. Her kind die quite easily. They all do it, eventually.”

“And that’s all it takes?”

“That’s all.”

He nods again, impressed.

“You, and you.” The woman in the panama hat gestures to the remaining men. “Take
her
”—she points to Mrs. Benjamin—“and come with me. I want to have a discussion with her.”

“Oh, goody,” says Mrs. Benjamin, as the two men grab her by the shoulders. “Am I to get another lecture?”

The woman in the panama hat does not answer as she leads the men dragging Mrs. Benjamin from the room, leaving Mona with the man in the soft brown sweater, who is staring at her with a look of some anticipation, as if about to start a new and exciting experiment.

First he practices the motion: he holds an imaginary knife, and swoops it down in a slash. But he shakes his head, dissatisfied. “Are we too near the wall?” he asks.

Mona is too fatigued by the blood loss to answer, but of course even if she had the strength, she wouldn’t.

“I think we are too near the wall,” says the man thoughtfully, “for the full range of motion.” He pushes her chair over to the center of the room. Mona’s eye registers movement to her right, but it’s only their reflection in the lens. In it, she sees her wrists are bound to the back of the chair by thick ropes. She can also see the doorway out to her left, and beside it there is indeed a small black box. Beside this box, she sees, are her rifle and her Glock.

The man in the soft brown sweater walks to the box, opens it, and says, “Ah.” He scratches his head pensively. Then he takes out three different knives, examines them carefully, and selects the largest one. The other two he places on the ground beside the box.

As he goes through this scrupulous procedure, Mona flexes her fingers. To her surprise, they can move, though she feels very weak. She paws at the seat of the chair, where Mrs. Benjamin wedged the mirrors. She can manage to grasp and retrieve only one, in her right hand; her left remains disturbingly dead, but then it was the one that got tapped.

The man in the soft brown sweater holds up the big knife, and slashes it through the air. “Cut,” he says. “Cut! Or—perhaps like a
surgeon?” He makes a small, dainty slice in the air, and says, with great delicacy: “
Cut.
”

Jesus
, thinks Mona.
He must be one of the really young ones…

But what is she going to do with just one lens? She’s only done this once before, and then she had to have two lenses to get anything to move…

She realizes she’s staring at her reflection in the big lens.

Oh
, she thinks.

“Cut,” says the man in the soft brown sweater. He wheels to look at her. “Cut!” he says, and swipes the blade through the air. “I’ve never killed one of you before. Is it messy?”

Mona ignores him. She tries to concentrate on wriggling her right wrist around to rotate her little lens toward the big one…

“I bet it is,” he says. “You’re all full of… fluid. Matter. Hm.” He looks down at his sweater. He plucks the front and stretches it out. “Hm,” he says again.

Is it pointed in the right direction? She can see part of the face of the hand mirror (or hand lens) in the reflection of the big lens. Two little bubbles of space, floating free and unattached in the air…

She remembers the nursery. The face of the woman who looked so much like her.

Because it was you
, she thinks.

Stop. Don’t think about that.

She thinks she has the angles right, so she tries to concentrate. But this time it’s not hard at all: she senses immediately that the big lens is a different animal altogether. Using the hand mirrors in Mrs. Benjamin’s house was like using tweezers to pick up pebbles, but this thing is a fucking bulldozer on and rumbling and ready to go, leaping at the slightest touch of the pedal. The challenge won’t be getting it to work, but controlling it.

The man in the brown sweater is now carefully removing his sweater, but he hasn’t thought to put down the knife, which makes it pretty tough on him.

Mona focuses on one of the little knives next to the black box. For a
long time, nothing happens. But then it appears to grow just slightly, slightly transparent…

She opens her left hand wide.
I hope I get the right part in my fucking hand
, she thinks,
otherwise I’m going to cut my palm wide open.

“Ah!” says the man. He’s finally gotten one arm and his head out of his sweater. “There we go!”

Come on, come on.

The knife flickers. Then she feels something hard and cold in her left hand. She begins to close her fingers around it…

… but just as she does, she sees something in the big lens. The lens, she thinks, is a bit like a door, and this one’s been left slightly ajar, opening onto wherever it opened onto last. It’s like looking at something down a long, dark hallway (and Mona isn’t really looking at all, except possibly with the little dark eye inside of her), but she thinks she’s starting to understand.

The lens opened onto a place ghostly and distant, something ephemeral and far away… something that didn’t happen, or at least it didn’t happen
here
.

Was that me I saw? Or another version of me?

She remembers her current situation when she hears a voice say, “Cut.”

She releases the big lens. She’s still sitting in the chair with her wrists bound behind her, the hand lens in her right hand and the knife in her left. She begins sawing at the rope as fast as she can, trying to summon all her remaining strength. Her left hand and arm are so numb that it’s difficult to tell how far she’s getting.

The man, now sweaterless, takes a breath. “All right,” he says softly. “All right.”

He takes a step forward, still staring at her with that detached, blank gaze. Whatever swims in his eyes is wriggling madly.

Mona feels the rope begin to give way. She frees the pinky and ring finger of her right hand and twists the rope, trying to stretch the fibers against the blade.

“Just a cut,” whispers the man.

He takes another step.

The rope frays. Pops.

Mona strains her left shoulder. More pops sound from the rope.

“Hm?” says the man. He leans in, confused.

The rope snaps.

Mona clenches her teeth, and swings her left hand around.

There is a soft thud. It is so soft that it is surprising, really. But then, the knife does bite into a very soft place, just behind the esophagus of the man in the brown sweater, piercing God knows how many tendons and muscles and veins.

Blood sprays from the corners of the knife in tiny, furious geysers, like pinholes in a dike. The man stares at Mona, mouth open. She can already see blood welling up in his mouth. Mona, in disbelief, stares back.

Then rage begins to bubble inside her.
My fucking daughter
, she thinks.

She drops the hand lens, brings her right hand around, grasps the top of the man’s head with it, and rips the knife forward with her left.

She is totally and utterly showered in a hot wave of blood, which shocks her, but she really should have expected that since she’s just partially decapitated this man. As he tumbles to the ground, all she can think is
Man oh man am I happy I kept my mouth closed
.

He twitches for a moment, still just spewing blood (this does not surprise Mona—she’s seen a few murder scenes, which is when you realize the shocking amount of blood in the human body), and then he goes still.

There is the soft sound of thunder from somewhere.

“Shit,” she says. She hopes she didn’t just send this stupid bastard into someone else’s body. But that seems highly plausible right now.

She looks at herself in the lens. She’s bloody from head to toe. But she’s alive. And she’s not quite as weak as she thought. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since she’s just lost a shitload of blood.

But maybe
, she thinks as she stares at herself in the lens,
it’s because you’re not completely human
.

She looks at the vat of blood before the lens. She almost wishes to touch it. She cannot conceive that a child was just there, and that that child might have been her daughter…

Mona decides she doesn’t understand a goddamn bit of this. But she knows someone who does.

She takes off her shoes before venturing out into the hall, and she moves silently and swiftly over the cracked concrete floor. She has her Glock, but she doesn’t want to use it (because fuck knows what that bitch in the blue suit would do if she heard her coming), so she’s got two of the knives stuffed into the belt loops of her shorts as backup.

It isn’t very long until she hears voices echoing down the hall.

“—if She’ll be happy to see us,” says a man’s voice.

“Of course She’ll be happy to see us,” says another’s. “We’re Her children.”

“But She’s been gone so long. Will She remember us?”

Silence for a moment. “I had not thought about that. I had not thought that She could forget.”

Mona creeps toward the voices. She comes to a hallway entrance on her left, and listens.

“Do you forget Her?” asks the first voice. “I do, sometimes… it seems awfully hard to remember Her. I remember being happy. I think I remember being happy. But it seems very long ago.”

“We were meant to be happy here. That was what we decided.”

“I know.”

“But I… I will admit that I found it… hard. It was not as easy as I had expected. Maybe Weringer was wrong.”

There is a long pause. “I don’t know. Maybe we were all wrong. Maybe She will know.”

Mona uses one of the hand lenses to look around the corner. She sees two men before one of the lab doors, sitting on the concrete floor cross-legged like children. She wonders what to do before remembering the extreme incompetence of her last captor. The bitch in the blue suit, she decides, must have really scraped the bottom of the barrel for help, but that makes sense—the older and smarter ones would have been too dangerous to approach.

She feels her pockets, and finds a spent round casing from the fight
in the canyon the night before. She weighs it carefully, then throws it across the hallway entrance where it tinkles loudly as it rolls away.

“What was that?” asks one man.

Mona shrinks up against the wall. She hears footsteps growing louder. The two men emerge from the hallway entrance, and sure enough they turn immediately in the direction of the sound: they don’t even
think
to check the other end of the hallway.

So the one on the left is incredibly surprised when Mona stabs him in the back of the leg, just behind his knee, and the other is too stunned to even look at her before she brings the butt of the Glock down, cracking him on the side of his head.

Both of them collapse. “My leg,” says the stabbed one, with an air of wonderment. “What’s happened to my leg?”

There were people in those bodies, once
, thinks Mona.
I wonder where they went…

Still, she can’t risk these two causing any more trouble, and she doesn’t want either of them hopping into another poor soul’s body. So she stoops down and stabs them in the knees, just next to the kneecaps, severing the iliotibial band.

“My other leg!” cries the stabbed one. “Oh, my other leg!”

“Shut up,” says Mona softly. “There are worse ways to incapacitate you. You want me to try one?”

He doesn’t answer. Mona wonders if he even knows what the word
incapacitate
means.

Forget it. She leaves them both behind and heads for the door they were guarding.

Mona eases the door open just slightly. The room is the typical Coburn lab (excepting the lens chamber, of course): bare, concrete, wreathed in stains and shadows from equipment long gone. Mrs. Benjamin sits in a heap in the corner, and in the center stands the woman in the blue suit. The two seem to be in the middle of a discussion.

The woman in the panama hat is saying, “—d you know I’ve been farther than you, big sister?”

“Oh?” says Mrs. Benjamin. She looks quite weak, and not very interested.

“You were trapped here in Wink like all the others. But I went to its very limits. When I died, I turned to lightning, and rode the curves of the skies above us… and I’ve been to the fringes. I went there all the time. Maybe past them, just a bit. You can’t claim the same, can you?”

Mrs. Benjamin does not answer.

“No. I even went to that Roadhouse of theirs. That’s where I met them. The
natives
who helped me. Everyone here thought it was outside the limits. And no one ever tried, because you were lazy, and afraid. But I did. I went there. Imagine how silly it is: a bunch of men, drunk and drugged and stupid, bringing down our five eldest family members. Do you want to find out how?” She reaches down again, and lifts up something: a small, lacquered box.