Authors: Andersen Prunty
“Well... yeah.”
The Processor took a step toward Alvin. Her gnarled hand hung down to her knees. He imagined the rotting meat caught under the nails. He wondered if she ripped people like Lars apart with her hand. People like Lars? Hell,
he
was people like Lars. He guessed he would find out how she did it soon enough.
“Just tell me why,” he asked Ben, trying to ignore the Processor.
“Money. Isn’t that why anyone does anything?”
“But you killed all the officers.”
“Did I? I don’t think anyone will believe that. I think, maybe,
you
killed the officers.”
Alvin scanned the brightly lighted room around him. It looked a lot like Archer’s Shucking Room. Only this one was used to shuck humans, not rades.
Alvin took a deep breath. It felt like breathing in all that sterile fluorescent light. It entered his lungs and crackled along his bones. He didn’t feel so tired anymore. He felt like something wanted him to move. He shook a little more violently and imagined wires hanging from the ceiling, maybe hanging from the sky, into him, into his muscles. They could yank him whatever way they wanted him to go.
“You’re crazier than Archer,” Alvin said.
Ben threw back his head and laughed.
The strings tried to jerk him up but he wanted to lie on the floor and figure out how he was going to get to the Point. How he was going to get out of here.
The Processor had a murderous hand that Alvin thought he could outrun. Ben had an assault rifle in each hand that he was pretty sure he could not outrun.
He couldn’t think anymore. His arm jerked up and he aimed his gun at Ben and fired as many times as he could. Ben shot back but he was probably already dead and the shots went all over the place. Thankfully, none of them went into Alvin.
He charged for the door, slammed into it and frantically tried the knob.
The Processor’s hand slashed at his back, parting flesh.
Alvin screamed with pain and yanked the door back into the room. He turned and fired about where he thought the Processor should be, darted through the door, and let it bang back into the frame. He ran up the dark stairs and into the office of the station, nearly slipping in all the blood. He dropped his gun, wished he knew where they kept the assault rifles, and settled for another pistol in a dead cop’s belt.
Casting quick glances behind himself, Alvin continued outside. He expected it to be alive with rades but the only things out there were human—officers’ concubines and many more women and girls.
A trashy-looking girl with bleached blond hair, too much make-up, wearing skin tight pants and something that looked more like a bra than a shirt said, “Why’d you have to kill all our fucks. Now how we gonna get pregnant?”
“Don’t matter anyway,” another girl said, approaching from across the street. “Dr. Lucky shut down. Said he needs to rest.”
“He ain’t never done that before.”
“I always thought there was two of ‘em.”
“What do we do now?”
“I don’t know. Things are really weird.”
Alvin was aware that he was the only male within eyeshot and he wondered how many of them were eager to conceive.
“The station is filled with booze and drugs,” he said and took off running for his car, jerked by those puppet strings, moving without feeling anything.
Where were all the rades? He expected to see them swarming his car, at least.
He unlocked the door and slid behind the wheel.
A Hospital at Night
Part Eleven
Detective Fouquette, Wilson, raked a big, bony hand across his face. He looked tired. April glanced toward him and then at the figure in the bed. Everything now seemed so clean and exposed. This was an examination, she was sure. The part where everything would be thrown open and laid bare.
“First of all, let me say this isn’t a formal questioning,” Wilson said. “I’m here on my own, not as part of the investigation. That might come later.”
“Might?”
“Probably depending on whether or not Mr. Blue lives. If he dies, I’m sure there will be some questions, but if he happens to live, it’ll be drawn out indefinitely, I’m sure.”
April nodded.
“Because you were harmed and Doctor Morning is now dead, I feel somewhat apologetic. I know you’re aware of how Mr. Blue ended up in his current condition and how Dr. Morning died. I felt as though I should fill you in on the events leading up to that. I’m still a little lost, trying to piece it all together, and that’s where I was hoping you could help me.”
“I’ll tell you what I can.”
“Very well.” Wilson sat up straight in the chair and produced a notebook from the inside of his black blazer. He began reading in a staccato fashion.
Eleven
To get to the Point, Alvin had to drive through downtown. He turned the radio to his favorite station but the only thing it picked up was static. He wasn’t surprised.
The car had a quarter tank of gas. He didn’t know what it was he expected to see. What he saw was more of the same. Darkened buildings, some of them demolished. Darkened streets. A few scattered people wandering aimlessly. A lot more women than men.
He wondered how long it would take for people to realize what had happened at the police station. He wondered if it would be difficult to get into the Point. He wondered if he would be able to fill out the necessary paperwork to stop the detonation of his house. He wondered if he needed to think about anything since what his body did now seemed completely out of control.
A light in front of him turned red. He planned on blowing right through it. If there were still any cruisers on the road, he knew they were probably headed back to the station. But he depressed the brake anyway, and the car rolled to a stop. He felt like he could struggle to press the accelerator but knew he would only be opposing some other force. The thought of it made him exhausted.
The passenger door opened and someone flung himself into the seat.
Alvin panicked and yelped.
The first thing he thought about was jumping back out of the car and running. The next thing he thought about was the gun, but his unwelcome visitor now sat upon the gun. Then he thought about who his unwelcome visitor was.
Alvin stared at him, unbelieving.
The burns were a pretty good indicator.
“I’m charred. You can stop staring.”
But Alvin couldn’t stop staring. He didn’t know how this person was alive. The left half of his head was blackened tissue and raw red pulp over charred skull and teeth. The hair on his right side was fried, sticking out wildly toward the window. His clothes were melted to his body. He was missing a foot, white bone sticking out of the blackened meat. His bombs were strapped across his body, criss-crossing his chest like bandoleers.
“We need to get moving.”
“How are you still alive?”
“How are you still an asshole? Come on. Chop chop.” Archer tapped the dashboard.
“To the Point?”
“Where else?”
“Are you going to blow it up?”
“Hell yeah I’m going to blow it up.”
“I need to fill out some papers first.”
“It won’t do you any good.”
Alvin’s foot lifted from the brake and pressed the accelerator. Archer had found the gun and now held it pointed on Alvin. Alvin hoped his body did what it was supposed to do. Maybe if Archer blew up the Point, then the demolition crew would have to stop. If the very orders that told them to do what they were doing no longer existed, then why follow through with it? Archer only had one good leg and most of his body was burned. Alvin thought he could probably beat him into the Point, with his only restraint being the wires that guided him. He guessed, in the end, he would do what his body wanted him to do.
A Hospital at Night
Part Twelve
At 9:04, her estranged husband, Alvin Blue was arrested and held in a cell.
The last time he appeared on the surveillance film was at 10:16.
After that, it appeared the cell was empty yet Alvin was never released.
At 12:36 PM, two heavily armed assailants opened fire on the police station, killing everyone in uniform.
“The underlying motive seemed to be drugs. It is believed the station was either holding a potential informant, gang rival, or it’s even possible that the assailants, out of their heads, were raiding the station’s evidence room for narcotics.
“Surveillance footage shows one man leaving the station. It is believed that man is your estranged husband, Alvin Blue. Preliminary examination of the crime scene has not found the remains of the remaining suspect. The suspect is thought to be a man named Brian Tippin.”
Twelve
Leaving downtown behind, they drove through a dilapidated suburb that seemed to exist to feed the Point. The houses were shrunken and drained of color. Archer filled the car with a powerful reek. The strength of it reminded Alvin of Ben but this stink was different, even closer to death. He wanted to roll down the window but he couldn’t move his arm. They crested a hill and the Point lay towering above them on the next hill, huge and black against the night sky, like something more science fiction than reality, giant smoke stacks billowing steam and fire. Here, even over Archer’s stench, he could smell the gaseous reek of the Point.
They made their way up the hill. The gate in front of them was closed but it was only a tall chain link fence and the car drove through it. Archer nodded greedily in the passenger seat, as though this were exactly what he wanted Alvin to do.
Could Archer be the one pulling his marionette strings? Could he now be completely under Archer’s power? Did Archer have that kind of power?
Once they were in the parking lot, Alvin’s foot jammed on the brakes and the car screeched to a halt.
“No,” Archer said. “You’re supposed to drive into it. Right into the administration building.”
Alvin threw open the door and jerked his way out of the car. He took off running toward the Point. He heard Archer’s gun crack behind him but if any of the bullets hit him, he didn’t feel a thing. Archer screamed something behind him but Alvin didn’t care what it was.
He continued to charge toward the Point, those sky wires jerking him along so he felt like he was barely even touching the ground. To his right, at one of the loading docks, he saw a cargo truck with “Dr. Lucky’s” stenciled across the side. Under the words was a baby’s head. The baby had dollar signs for eyes.
Alvin reached the threshold of the Point and it felt like something cut the wires propelling him forward. His knees buckled and he tumbled to the ground.
He had come in one of the large bay doors of the foundry. They usually kept these open so the heat didn’t build up. Alvin stood up and surveyed this section of the Point.
It wasn’t the Point he remembered.
A lot of the equipment was still here but it was all covered in rust. Everything was covered in rust. It dropped in flakes from the ceiling, several stories above him. It coated the ground and crunched under his feet. There wasn’t anyone working. Off to his right, where Dr. Lucky’s truck was parked for unloading, he saw fetuses piled twenty feet into the air. Some of them looked red and some of them looked purple and some of them were flesh colored. Umbilical cords trailed from some of them while others didn’t resemble much of anything at all.
Some of them were moving.
Alvin dropped to his knees and vomited. He thought it would be more dry heaves. Rust flowed from his mouth.
No, Alvin thought. He hadn’t been asleep. He couldn’t be rusting.
He vomited more rust. He could feel it on his tongue, running down his throat. He could feel it sitting in his stomach. Rust. Rotten metal.
There wasn’t any paperwork to fill out here. He knew he could search the entire Point—even the administration building—and he wouldn’t find anything but rust and more rust.
He walked toward the pile of fetuses, moving closer and closer. He could hear some of them crying. He felt like an old woman staring at a pile of fruit. Or a vulture. He picked one of the moving ones up. It had its eyes closed. It was a boy. Alvin had to reach down and pry its eyes open to make sure it wasn’t filled with rust. He pulled it close to his chest and bolted out of the Point.
Outside, Archer nearly plowed into him with the car. Alvin turned to watch him pass. He could hear Archer laughing from inside the car. Alvin began running toward town, toward home. He heard a giant explosion behind him and felt the heat on his back.