"Go home and get yourself some real bullets, son," the tree said. Karl backed away, the rifle still up, but shaking so badly he couldn't hit the sky if he'd needed to.
The other voice came into his ear on breath that smelled like gasoline and sulfur and something ten days dead in a can. It came from behind him. "You're shooting blanks, dumbshit. Say goodnight."
The tree moved then, advancing on Karl so fast he couldn't begin to track it with the useless rifle, reached over his head and grabbed someone behind him, who roared against a muzzling paw. "Go home, boy. When it's time to play, we'll send for you."
Karl ran all the way home down the middle of the road, praying in German and firing his rifle into the air. When he arrived, there were twelve Jägers waiting in front of the gate, the Hauptmann front and center in his longjohns, with a machine pistol in each hand. He pointed them both at Karl and screamed, "Was ist los, Soldat? Bist du getrunken?"
Karl skidded to a stop before the Hauptmann, but his snowshoes got tangled up and he crashed into the icy tarmac head first. It all came back to him then, and he thought,
Someone else will have to tell Grossvater Egil
, and he gratefully fainted.
~5~
The manager of the Vista Del Nada Motor Home Court in Baker, a mildly obese retiree named Del Hotchkiss, looked a lot more forbidding in his portrait in the renter's rulebook than he did in the flesh, probably because he put his teeth in for the picture. By day, he patrolled the court's narrow gravel avenues on an electric golf cart, when most of the inhabitants were either plugging away at jobs in town, or asleep with their air conditioners blasting. By night, Hotchkiss retired to his Barcalounger in the manager's office and turned loose his lieutenants, a pair of attack-trained Dobermans named Mannix and Geronimo, whenever something outside threatened to drown out his TV.
Del had to go out himself to retrieve his dogs twice in the night because they slipped out of their own accord and kept sniffing at Mrs. Gordesky's trailer, #72, at the far corner of the court. The second time, his golf cart had refused to start, the overtaxed batteries still not fully recharged from the day's patrolling, and he'd had to warm up his old Buick and drive over for them in the biting cold. He knocked on the door to apologize to Mrs. Gordesky and maybe check on her, because he hadn't seen her in a few days, and she was more than a few years older than he. He didn't yet fear the worst, but the dogs had an uncanny knack for sniffing stiffs. Usually, it was a dead gopher or a snake they'd run to ground under one of the trailers, but they'd been the first to sniff out poor Mr. Altamorena in #34, and when Del didn't pick up on it quickly enough, they got in the open ceiling vent and had their way with him. It was hell convincing the Sheriff that coyotes did it, but his dogs were more dependable and loyal than most folks he'd met, so there was no question of putting them down. It'd been like he lost a part of his own body back in '81, when they took Columbo away from him and put the old boy to sleep after he bit two fingers off some snot-nosed teenager who had tried to steal his golf cart.
The windows of #72 were fogged up from the heater being on full-blast, and the air smelled of cooking, which took him by surprise, because Mrs. Gordesky didn't do much for herself. She microwaved her meals, and the stuff she ate smelled like burning plastic, and gave her gas like a tire-fire. Her nieces dropped by a few times a year to cook her a proper meal or take her to the Denny's in town, but this wasn't like that. He couldn't categorize the smell or even decide whether it was unpleasant or not, but he didn't blame the dogs for homing in on it.
Just to be sure, Del circled around the trailer and peered in the window on the bedroom end. He didn't want Mrs. Gordesky to mistake him for a prowler, and he sure as hell didn't want her to think he was sweet on her, but he had to make sure, or there'd be more trouble than he could talk his way out of, this time.
He heard the sound of the TV turned up quite loudly, as usual, and saw a blue blob of light from the little TV at the foot of Mrs. Gordesky's bed. He rapped on the window with his flashlight and waited a moment before rapping again and calling out, "Mrs. Gordesky? Del Hotchkiss, ma'am. You all right in there?"
There was no sign of life for a long minute, but then the channel changed, and he heard the big old satellite dish out back turning like a rusty windmill to track another of Mrs. Gordesky's "stories." She liked the soap operas, and it didn't matter if they were in English or Spanish or Swedish or Tagalog, so long as they were rutting and screaming at each other all the livelong day. Something that sounded like a Mexican hair-pulling contest came from inside now, so Del breathed a lot easier as he hauled Mannix and Geronimo back to the car. He breathed a silent prayer that when the Good Lord finally did take Mrs. Gordesky away, He'd let Del find her before the dogs did.
Stella Orozco didn't hear the TV or Del Hotchkiss at the window. She sat on the edge of the massive hospital bed in the old woman's trailer and she looked in the mirror. She sat on the bed whenever she was not eating or sleeping since she found her way here, three days before.
She didn't want to look at herself: she needed to close her eyes and get away from herself while her body healed. She had never been one for fretting over her appearance before, but now…
What she saw made her want to scream and tear herself apart like a mask and maybe she'd be whole and human underneath, or maybe she'd just die, but her hands remained on her lap, roaming only to change the channel every hour or so and retune the antiquated satellite dish, though she never saw or heard the programs. She didn't want to look, but she had to look at a pair of eyes as she tried to get her head around it, and there wasn't another human being in the world she trusted.
I was dying of cancer. Then I found a cure.
Not for the cancer, but for me.
My cancer never wanted to kill me. It wanted to be me.
And now it is.
I'm a ghost that haunts the walking, talking cancer of Stella Orozco.
And God won't stop telling me how lucky I am.
Stella, you have to understand that your life, your body, are still your own. It hasn't been stolen or destroyed. It's been uplifted. You are finally free. Death can't claim you. Old age and illness will never strike you down.
What am I? I'm not even human anymore…
You are more. You are what evolution has been trying to make human beings into for millennia, but we were too weak, too enamored of our machines, and entropy was too strong. In you, the transformation has been guided, and you have been reborn. Species evolve, Stella, never individuals. Until now.
Stella aimed a claw at her reflection. She found she had to fight to lift her own arm, and not just because it had been hanging by gristle a few days before. That was how she knew when God was watching her. She had to push a motion through committee to move where she wanted to, but her body got around just fine without her at the helm. She'd wake up from a sound slumber to find herself sleep-cooking or punishing her joints in sadistic bouts of physical therapy.
"Why me?" she croaked aloud, though the words sounded like gibberish even to her. New teeth were peeking through the black mess of her gums, and new lips were growing over them, a livid, granular pink blooming out of the black ruin of her old flesh, like the first buds of spring breaking through charred soil.
She flexed her healed jaw, savoring the control He let her have, for now. "Why would you want to do this for me?"
Would you rather have died? You were selected because you had the seed in you, and the necessary will to survive. You could still pass away, Stella. Your will is all that keeps you from dying, now. Only you can decide now when life should end.
"You don't sound like God. You're my cancer, not my conscience."
I am only your guide through this phase of transformation. When you have reawakened to your new, true self, you will need no one to guide you.
"I don't need anyone at all, thank you. I've done pretty well on my own, up until now." Get out of my head, she added weakly, but couldn't make her mouth work. Despite everything else that had happened, this was what she feared the most: the violation of her solitude, her self-control. So far, the stranger in her head had kept her alive where she might've died, had driven her past all human effort to escape her grave, but there was always another shoe yet to drop in any favor, and this—this rape—
You cannot do this alone. You are still a long way from recovery. There are others who can shelter you and provide you with the help you need—
"Enough! Shut up!" She stood before the mirror and shucked off the robe she'd worn. She forced herself to look away from her own eyes, and roved over the gruesome shell that she now wore.
Her body looked worse than the desiccated dead thing it'd been a few days ago, because it had begun to heal. The leathery brown musculature was now encased in sheaths of translucent pink protoplasm, bulbous pink-black sacs crowding the places where her bones had been laid bare. The most badly damaged flesh had sloughed off and was growing back before her eyes, amorphous blobs of scrambled cancer weaving itself into skeletal muscle around her right arm socket and her clavicle, and up and down her legs. Patches of new skin, waxy and white like salamanders and brie cheese, spread out from her belly and back. Her ravaged hair had all fallen out, but was now growing back so fast that when she lay very still, she could hear it.
She was a miracle, He told her again and again, but the glory of her resurrection had pushed her to the brink of insanity. A light reached down from heaven and touched her cancer, and the thing that was killing her had saved her life. Small wonder that she was hearing voices, that her cancer had become her therapist. She could berate it for answers, but she couldn't ask it or herself the questions that tortured her.
Is this my body? Am I me? How long before I slip away, before the new, improved me comes along and pushes me out of my own head?
She could remember only jumbled fragments of how she'd come to be in this place. The biting cold seeping into her wounds. The blue-black emptiness of the desert outside the hole she'd climbed out of. The walking, the voice in her head like a sandstorm of commands and exhortations to go on, an un-death march to the trailer park, where she found herself inside and warm and devouring everything in the refrigerator. Was anyone home? She remembered nothing else.
When she'd stuffed her shriveled guts with all the canned and microwavable crap in the fridge and the cupboards, she'd fallen asleep. The pain went away so quickly she thought she was waking from a dream, but it was only the endorphins kicking in as her brain sparked up with the sudden influx of ersatz nutrients. She began to itch all over, almost to burn as her cancer went to work, but she fell off a precipice of exhaustion into a coma-deep sleep broken only when she awakened to eat. The room smelled of overcooked stew, pungent with herbs in a haphazard mixture that made the air almost flammable. Sometime during one of her blackouts, she must have brewed up a soup of all the dried-up old herbs in the pantry and some jars of spaghetti sauce to cover the putrid odor of her rejuvenation. The miasma of rot still lurked beneath the cooking smells, though she'd collected the larger bits in trash bags and emptied a can of Glade on them; but underneath
that
was a fertile aroma like new babies and fresh-baked bread and rain in a deep forest. Gradually, the fragrance of the new Stella Orozco pushed the others into the corners of the trailer, then it began to fade from her notice as the new flesh differentiated into the forms of the old.
Once, she blinked and found her left hand setting the telephone down in its cradle, but she had no recollection of having called anyone. Who could she call? Who would hear her voice? What would she say? Stella Orozco was missing, presumed dead, but any half-sharp investigator who reviewed her medical records and talked to her coworkers would assume she took her own life upon hearing she had cancer. She had no claim on her old life, even if she wanted it.
"What are you doing?" she shouted. Her voice startled her with its strength. Her lungs and vocal cords had repaired themselves, and her voice was deeper, more strident, but still recognizably her own.
There was no answer. Nobody in here but us delusions—
"Sure, why explain yourself? You know I won't tear out my own brain. I can't rip you out of me. You
are
me, now, aren't you?"
Who did I call?
She pressed redial, but got only a taped weather report from the Mojave National Preserve Information Service. Cagey. She saw the number at the bottom of a desk calendar with pictures of the desert on it beside the phone.
She went back to sleep, and dreamed that her face grew back.
When she awoke next, someone was knocking on the door. Pale light trickled in through gaps in the curtains, supercharging streams of dust swirling around the room on the updrafts from the space heater. Dust was over seventy percent discarded human skin cells. Would someone be able to discover she was here from them? She had left no fingerprints, her fingertips were still smooth, pearly pink and tender, but she had shed her skin here. But no, God was everywhere. Perhaps He was in every cell, in every mote of fluttering Stella-dust, giving orders and soothing sweet-talk. They would take care of themselves. She'd still have to take out the trash—
Someone was still knocking at the door.
She rose from the bed and went to the closet. A parade of eye-searing muumuus and housecoats led by a pair of double-knit pantsuits, one navy blue, one fire engine red with candy cane stickpins all down the lapels. Stella slipped into a sweatshirt, then put on the navy blue suit. The coarse polyester fabric scratched her new skin, and she immediately began to sweat. She buttoned up the jacket and safety-pinned the vast waistband of the pants, then looked at herself in the mirror. She looked like a woman who had recently lost over a hundred pounds and been burned over most of her face, or maybe a very effeminate older man, since her hair was less than two inches long. Her skin was a bilious yellow, and had the texture of Saran-Wrap over something unidentifiable from the back of the freezer. Her eyes roved over her face for several minutes, oblivious to the staccato hammering on the aluminum screen door in the next room. She watched the face in the mirror for a good long time. It was hers, but she was waiting for the God of Cancer to twitch her mouth or blink funny or otherwise betray His hand on her strings. Nothing. Her own face looked back at her, blank as if she'd suffered a stroke, until she let it smile.