Flex (28 page)

T
he first thing
you must understand is that my parents suffocated me. This is why I killed them.

They did not want a daughter; they wanted something pleasant to show at parties. I did not like crowds. Yet crowds of people were what I was shoved in front of – cotillions, ballrooms, conventions to impress my father’s clients.

They saw my desire to be alone as a sickness. I was sent to ballet classes, to strangers’ birthday parties, to cheerleading clubs, all to train me in the arts of socializing. If I talked to enough people, my parents theorized, I would get good at it.

I didn’t.

They saw me crying, so they got me good drugs. Drugs that turned my head into fog. They told me not to tell anyone how disturbed I was; it might make people unhappy. We were a happy family, rich and good-looking. We held parties.

I wasn’t good-looking.

It wasn’t a big deal, they told me. But they stared at my nose and my lips over and over again, as if my face disappointed them. It wasn’t them, they said; don’t you feel good about yourself? But now, whenever anyone looked, all I could feel was my bony beak of a nose, my thin and shriveled lips.

I begged them to let me cut my nose. To fill my lips with animal fat. They had a plastic surgeon ready for me. They had a dietician to starve me and a personal trainer to yell at me. They were so eager to hire these people that for a while, I felt blessed my parents were willing to fix a wretch like me.

Then they sent me to boarding school.

They hadn’t consulted me. They told me it was about education. But they moved around me as if I wasn’t really there, as if they ached to have me gone already. Even after all the nose-cutting and blisters on my feet from dancing and stiff smiles from parties, they hated my awkwardness. How could such sunny, wealthy people have given birth to this lanky, sullen beast?

So I killed them. A knife to each heart. I looked them in the eyes, and they knew why I did it.

It was the only honest moment we ever shared.

The sick thing was that once I killed them, everyone told me I hadn’t. People like me didn’t kill. So I got a good team of lawyers, and no one wanted to believe a beautiful girl was capable of murder, and my counsel argued until it seemed the cops had done horrible things in attempts to frame me.

So I went free.

Do you understand how insane that is?

As I walked out of the courthouse, I understood what had made me miserable, made my parents miserable, made everyone I knew cradle secret despair:

We weren’t meant to live in such numbers.

We’re still trembling apes, hardwired to live on the savannah, shoved into crude boxes. We’re broken from having to work for money, from being at the mercy of vast economies, from being forced to specialize like insects.

This sickness manifests in obsessions. We gorge ourselves on television, on pills, on sex, on anything that might distract from the truth: we were designed to exist in small tribes.

I have to bring it all down.

I am aware of the irony, yes. Did cavemen have ’mancers? No. How could pyromancers exist in the days of hunting and gathering? No one had time to stare into a fire for hours at a time – who would have subsidized that? No, if you were an able-bodied male, you were raising kids, hunting deer, looking for edible plants. Survival left no time for obsessions.

Some focus in on one relentless thought – usually a consumer need, if you haven’t noticed – so much that we sunder the universe with botched desires.

Isn’t that proof our society is fatally flawed?

SMASH tries to pluck us out. It won’t work. We’ll have more ’mancers, more of this poisonous one-note mania. The Internet magnifies this obsession; corporations profit from our addictions. SMASH think sweeping us into brainwash camps will fix us, but no.

There will be more ’mancers. The culture is creating them. Europe burning from the broach? It’s amazing we’ve gotten sixty years without another continent falling to demons. That was just a preview of how the world will unravel.

The only solution is to cut living tissue until the tumors are gone.

As a ’mancer, I’m cure and disease. I’m the planet’s way of correcting this madness. I’ll kill double every time until nations crumble under the weight of ’mancy, reverting us to a simpler time, one that we can fit into. Billions of unhappy slaves have to die,
must
die, before we can return to a simpler, cleaner, safer world.

I’ve tried to bring the end one victim at a time, loading the most poisoned with ’mancy. That time is over. The rulemancer has figured out how to neutralize my pawns. So I’ll shift from killing thousands to killing millions.

I killed my parents. I told them why I was killing them. That was honest, and true, and good.

Now I am killing you.

T
he paintings dumped
Valentine and Paul from the sky. Valentine leapt to her feet, flailing her hands.

“Okay, okay, manifesto, I get it. But how does she do
this
? This cave doesn’t fit under this hill! The paintings suck us in! This whole thing should have reverted by now – I know! I tried to move into Mario’s castle and nearly lost everything!”

Paul knelt by the creek, looking at the mashed and dead Flex fibers Anathema had pounded with a flat stone. The damp husks lay on a woven mat, piled waist-high.

Valentine continued to splutter. “She’s talking as though she expects this site to last – like it’s a shrine people will make a pilgrimage to! The flux load on the dimensions alone should have killed her, and this whole thing should have dissolved back to a crack in a rock. How is she still wandering around, being evil?”

Paul held up an empty water bottle by way of an answer. Anathema had piled a stack of sodden bottles next to the creek.

“…she’s drinking Aquafina?” Valentine asked, puzzled. “That doesn’t seem very cavemancy.”

“She’s changed tactics.” Paul bolted for the exit. “She’s not going to kill a thousand people.”

“Then what’ll she do?” Valentine finally noticed the stacks of plastic soda crates Anathema had buried in the dirt.

“She’s going to dose a thousand people with Flex to kill a million.”

“
G
et SMASH to Sheep Meadow
!” Paul yelled once his cell phone had reception, grateful Aliyah was safe with Kit. “To the film festival. And as many cops as you can. All the cops.”

He ran to Central Park’s south end, confirming his worst suspicions. The sun had set, and the paths were full of jogging stockbrokers; they eyed him with pity, as if Paul was on some crazy exercise program. A few stragglers, toting picnic baskets, were still on their way, making haste, knowing they were too late to get a good seat.

Paul broke over the hill, seeing the reflected flicker of colored lights as the movie started, projected onto a gigantic screen tied to the grass. Thousands of people – families, lovers, film buffs – had settled into the grass, spread out over the hollows of the moist ground, lying on blankets or leaning back on chairs. They all cast long shadows, turned into faceless penumbrae by the glow of the screen.

The crowd was smaller than usual; Anathema kept people home these days. But these brave souls, half the usual ten thousand who made it out to the festival, had shown up.

Valentine puffed behind him, possibly the only person in Central Park in worse shape than Paul.

“Are you
sure
, Paul?” Kit asked. “The mayor’s primed to respond. But if I send SMASH to stop the film festival–”

Paul couldn’t get the words out through the fire in his chest. “You’re worried she’s… going to… strike someplace else?”

“If you’re wrong,” Kit said, “and someone listening to the police broadband hears she’s at the film festival, people will panic. And then we’ll have a riot in one place and Anathema in another.”

Valentine sweated so hard, her mascara had smeared. “Fuck this,” she said, producing an ocarina from her purse. She blew into it, a woodwind triplet melody; one of the police horses bucked off its owner and pranced over to Valentine.

“Fuck running.” She boosted Paul up. His artificial foot caught in the stirrup as Valentine spurred the horse into a gallop. Tourists dove out of the way.

“I can feel it now,” he told Kit. “Send them in.
Keep Aliyah indoors
.”

And he could feel it. There had been the murmur of several thousand people settling down – the clack of folding chairs being settled into place, the fizz of soda bottles being opened. Now it was deathly quiet, as if the attendees had been muffled. The heat and the silence pressed in around Valentine and Paul like a garbage bag pulled tight over the face; each clop of the horse’s hooves felt like a violation of some unspoken pact.

Paul wanted to gag. The stench of Anathema’s ’mancy wafted up from the crowd, roiling in the heat, bad magic oozing out of their sweat.

Valentine galloped down the hill’s gentle slope – then pulled to a sudden stop by one of the soda vendors.

“Christ, I’m thirsty,” she said. “Got any water?”

The vendor slumped forward, as though he was a mannequin with cut strings. Paul thought for a moment the vendor was dead – but no, he was reaching deep into the icebox, leaning far in, up to his shoulders. His face bore no expression as he pushed in deeper, his hands fishing around far beyond where the bottom of the icebox could logically be.

Then he popped up back up, a water bottle in each hand. Valentine lunged for it… and didn’t Paul need one, too? It was so hot, the air like a dog breathing in his face, his tongue dry as cardboard, his sweaty shirt sticking to his chest like flypaper. Paul
needed
a drink, his body crying out for it – something moist to splash upon the sponge of his throat…

Valentine moved to guzzle her Aquafina. Amber motes of magic drifted through the water like jellyfish.

She stopped and tilted the bottle.

“I’ve done
way
too much peyote to see this as normal.” She blinked and looked out over the field. Hundreds of bottles glowed firefly green, tucked into drink cozies, tossed by the side of lawn chairs, heaped in the garbage. Paul wasn’t sure the glow was only visible to ’mancers, or if Anathema’s Flex was activated by moonlight. Regardless, he felt the sick sweep of Anathema’s ’mancy, gaining strength as the moon rose.

The first notes of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” echoed across the field.

On the onyx-black screen, a crescent green slice of earth crept through space. It was shadowed by the moon, the blazing sun rising over it – the classic opening to
2001: A Space Odyssey
.

Paul knew how crowds worked: this is where he’d expect to hear good-natured hoots and hollers hailing the movie’s start. Instead, there was burbling confusion as people noticed what their neighbors were doing. Paul heard incoming helicopters, low and too distant.

“What do we do, Paul?” Valentine asked. In the darkness, they saw people staggering to their feet with high, ragged screams – one person at first, then five, then twenty, then hundreds clawing their backs in agony, tearing their clothes as their bodies swelled. Men and women scrambled backwards, knocking over glowing drinks, only to bump into another monstrosity exploding from what had been a fellow filmgoer.

The screen switched away from space to mirror the action below. Cavemen shuffled about on-screen, banging their knuckles against the dry clay floor.

Standing in their center was Anathema, clothed in a dead deer’s hide, wielding her deadly spear like a scepter. The camera zoomed in on her as she bared those sharklike teeth at the crowd below.

“
Scatter
,” she hissed. “
Kill
.”

The screams coalesced, turning from anguished bellows into a defiant cry of bloodlust. The rest of the crowd began to comprehend what had happened to the people around them; they stampeded in every direction as the newborn cavemen grabbed chairs, wastebaskets, umbrellas, whatever was within grasp, and beat their way through the audience, smashing skulls, stopping occasionally to snap a neck.

Thousands of freshly born savages flooding the streets of New York.

“What do we do, Paul?” Valentine repeated, hauling Paul away from the impending riot. “What do we
do
?”

“Hang on,” Paul muttered, clutching his chin in concentration. There was some way to untangle these innocents from Anathema’s ’mancy, he was certain–

–the tide of brutes smashed into them.

P
aul believed
, deep down, that humanity wanted to be rational. Yes, there were killers in our cities, always had been… but deep down, men understood that communal activity was what separated us from the animals. That men and women sought their safety with rational methods. That people inevitably struggled – inefficiently at times, but consistently – toward the light.

Being engulfed in fleeing refugees grabbed that idea by the lapels and shook it until it wept.

A shrieking mother banged headfirst into Paul, bowling him over, not caring where she went as long as it was away from the beasts. The crowd bore him up, pushed him away from Valentine. A black kid in a basketball jersey leapt on top of him in an attempt to climb a lightpost, sending Paul tumbling to the ground. Four college boys trampled him, too terrified to hear Paul yell for help, stepping on his face with gum-sticky sneakers.

I’m being stomped to death
, Paul thought as a woman in broken high heels snapped the fingers on his left hand. The crowd fled in any direction, reduced to rabbits in a hunt.

A fat man with a triple bypass scar tripped and fell on him, then grabbed Paul to beg for help. “You need to get off.” Someone banged his head with a briefcase. “I can’t help until you get off!”

The fat man continued to blubber, unhearing; words were dead weight here. Paul boxed his ears to get his attention. “
Get up!
”

The guy staggered to his feet through the crowd’s jostling, stumbling back towards the streets, clutching his chest.

“
Wait!
” Paul said. Someone smashed him in the forehead. A hairy hand yanked him backward.

A savage grinned down at him, the shreds of the tweed jacket he’d worn hanging off his shoulders. His ivory cane was coated with the brains of his friends. His teeth were filed to points, like Anathema.

“
The slow get eaten
,” the savage purred. Paul looked behind him to see the trails of dead bodies – movie-lovers who’d come to the park only to get trampled, beaten bloody, or devoured.

“This isn’t how it
works
!” Paul cried, trying to summon up ’mancy, any ’mancy. The savage hauled him up with two clublike hands to bite his throat.

“
Scatter
!” Anathema roared, standing atop the screen, gesticulating wildly with her spear. “Cluster here, and their armies will box you in! Flee down boulevards! Duck into alleys! Break into buildings! Scatter, and feast on those who rely on
others
for protection!”

The savage flinched, hunching from Anathema’s terrible power.

“Fight it,” Paul whispered. “You’re a good man at heart. You don’t want to do this…”

The savage peered down at Paul with black eyes, looking through cracked glass-lens.

“
Your words are
nothing.” As Paul struggled in his grasp, he laughed and put Paul’s neck into his mouth, laughing at Paul’s helplessness…

A gunshot.

A spray of warm blood.

Paul tumbled to the ground. Strong arms bore him up.

“…Valentine?” Paul asked, dazed.

It wasn’t Valentine. It was a familiar face, the last person he wanted to owe a favor to, a cocky sneer he hadn’t seen since he’d been barfing his guts out when SMASH had caught him in Valentine’s lab.

“Sweetie, I saved you,” Lenny Pirrazzini said, cocky as ever in his NYPD blues. “But that doesn’t make me your valentine.”

“A girl. Called Valentine. Have you seen her?”

“That’s
two
you owe me.” Lenny’s voice shook with terror. “I saved you from the Refactor, and now I’m saving you from Anathema. For New York’s supposed finest ’mancer-hunter, you need a
lot
of help.”

Paul would have been irritated by Lenny’s scorekeeping, except Paul knew he didn’t mean it. Lenny was in shell shock from the tide of savages around him. The cops pushed in over the bodies, firing everywhere, trying to save whoever they could. The savages ignored them, rushing past, disappearing into the alleyways. The cavemen were flooding the streets, vanishing into apartment buildings where they’d murder everyone they could get their hands on…

“You gotta kill that bitch for me, Paul.” Lenny held his gun so tight, it quivered. “You knew it. Now New York knows exactly how bad every ’mancer needs a cap in his ass…”

Paul doubted Lenny had ever killed a man in the line of duty, let alone seen a ’mancy-fueled outbreak. He should have been offended by Lenny’s remarks, but Lenny was talking trash so he wouldn’t crack.

“…Paul?”

Valentine stumbled from the crowd, one of her pigtails torn off. Paul rushed to embrace her.

“At least we saved you and your girlfriend,” Lenny said.

“She is not my girlfriend,” Paul snapped, just as Valentine yelled, “I am
not
his girlfriend!”

Lenny nodded, too agreeable. “Two saved in a sea of… Christ…” He looked out over the bodies. Cops fired riot gas in vain attempts to disable the Neanderthals. Handfuls of the savages ignored Anathema’s commands to go after the remaining cops, cheerfully tearing policemen’s limbs off.

It was all so huge, bigger than any one man could solve. Paul could see the thought on Lenny’s face:
what can
I
do?

“Listen, Lenny. I’ve got a plan to fix this.”

“Paul,” Valentine interrupted.

“In a second, Valentine. Lenny, I can undo this. But–”

“
Paul!
”

“Valentine, I have to fix the city. Lenny, you have to help me get to–”

“
Is that the rulemancer, too
?” Anathema’s voice echoed across the green as the trio of savages chasing Valentine caught up with her. “
Oh, the rulemancer
and
the illusionmancer in the same place?! Beautiful
!”

Lenny looked at Paul in betrayal. “Who – is she talking about
you
?”

“
I’ve always wanted to say this
.” Anathema spoke slowly, relishing the words. “
Minions? Kill
.”

Every savage in Central Park ran toward them.