The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (25 page)

Dale liked the reality of the
closet. It disclosed the grit of the iron spars and utility pipes that
structured the house’s sore flesh into the familiar residential geometries. A
man’s realm.

He stripped off his atmosphere
suit a bit at a time, working his hits in. A sleeve, whack! The other sleeve,
smush! He finally emerged with the top half of the suit hanging from his waist
and his T-shirt all sweated up, having banged away at the house’s balls until
the angry shudders turned to pleading and placating ones.

He found Pam crouching over
little Tommy in his bath. “What,” he asked, “got it worked up?”

“Guess.”

“Tommy, were you sticking pins
in the walls again?”

Tommy grinned and clapped his
hands together in a puff of bath bubbles, and Dale forgot why he’d been upset.

“How are we doing?” Dale asked
Pam that night, as she scanned their accounts. He lay behind her in bed,
stroking her hair; in a moment she’d become annoyed by his absent-minded
fascination with her.

“Okay. But the repair expenses
have been pretty bad, lately. It’s a lot more expensive now that we need a
catheter man instead of a plumber, and a doctor instead of a carpenter.”

“Even though we skipped the
anesthesia?”

“Yes.”

“And did you ask that
antibiotics wholesaler about lobotomy?”

“He doesn’t recommend it. He
says people who lobotomize wind up with random fits and all kinds of
craziness.”

He stopped tracing the curve of
her spine. “It is a willful house,” he said, and his eyes became flat and
shining.

She half turned toward him as
she took out an earring. “Did you hear it trying to sniff around the Ybarri’s
place next door?”

“But the Ybarri’s–”

“What if our house is gay?”

He laughed and pulled her
across him, tickling her so she kicked and wiggled. “A gay house!”

–Four
months later–

“I’m beginning to wonder,” said
Pam through the com in her atmosphere suit, “what we’re going to do.”

They looked out across Divine
Redeemer’s Landing, really just a few rows of houses squatting side by side on
a plain with views of the nebula. It was a yellowish nebula, not one of the
depressing blue ones. They held hands and the bubbles of their helmets touched.

“I know,” Dale said.

“The feed is the worst. It gets
more expensive every week.”

He spread his hands. “It’s a
buyer’s market, right now. Things will bounce back after the war.”

“I hope so. Then maybe we can
get a nice greenhouse, instead. I could get tired of all that meat.”

Dale’s head snapped toward her.
He hated the way she always thought one step beyond what they could possibly
accomplish, but he fought his anger. They couldn’t afford another row, no
matter how nice it was making up. Things felt...thin.

He changed the subject. “How
has it been lately, the house?”

“How do you think? Trying to
walk around, fidgeting all day. The plaster’s cracked in Tommy’s room again. If
it gets an arm or a leg free, we’ll be kicked out of the neighborhood.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“It doesn’t do much good
anymore, Dale. Especially with you wailing away in there any time you get
stressed.”

Her tone was withering. He
watched her, his answer to the cold distances of the galaxy. The spectral light
made her look suddenly chiseled and independent and even hawklike.

Dale suddenly perceived how
little they knew each other, and he glimpsed a stark white fear.

–Six
months of war later–

Pam kept shaking her head
whenever he looked at her. He opened all the kitchen drawers until he found the
filleting knife.

“Don’t do it,” she said. “We’ll
lose twenty percent of the house’s value. What if the war is over tomorrow?”

“What if it isn’t? We have to
see if we can stomach it.”

He took the knife into the hall
closet. The walls shook and shivered as he carved out a good-sized steak, and
he gritted his teeth against the irregular splurts of blood. Finished, he
jabbed a big hypo of clotting factor into the twitching wall and left it hanging
there.

When he came out, Pam and Tommy
were holding onto the arms of their chairs, making him smile.

Dale slabbed the meat onto a
gas-fired grill and rubbed his hands over the little blue flame, feeling a bit
touched in the head. The savor of sizzling meat brought Tommy into the kitchen,
wide-eyed and in his underwear. “Is that part of our house?” he said. There was
a troubled, philosophical bent to the boy’s question.

“Not anymore, buddy.”

They had only candles to light
their table, and above their fickle light Pam’s face looked thin and ashen. A
jagged fault line ran up the plaster wall behind her to the ceiling, where it
continued horizontally to the dead chandelier. Its shadow jumped sides as the
candle flames swayed in a draft. Dale stared out the window as they said grace,
looking toward the Consortium for some sign of life in that seemingly bright
but war-torn cluster.

“What have you heard on the
post?” asked Pam, chewing and slurring her words.

He just shook his head.

Tommy, excited, said, “Are we
going to be the last people left in the whole universe?”

Dale stopped chewing.

The silence was complete except
for the clank of Tommy’s fork. Only the boy remained dignified and confident,
and after a moment Pam began imitating him—literally copying him—in an
exhausted way that Dale found repulsive and threatening.

–Later–

Dale peeled the plaster away
from the skinwalls all over the house and piled the furniture in the middle of
the rooms. “We cut off what we need,” he said, “and hold out as long as we
can.”

Pam held up a large plunger
full of blue fluid. “We only have 1200 cc’s of Worm Begone left.”

“All right. Then we stop the
daily doses and shock the system when things start getting ugly.”

“And there’s no chance,” said
Pam, “the others will find food on—”

“Citris? Oh, they’ve got grain
on Citris. And the first thing those people will do is fire their rockets at
any refugees they see. They’re trying to hold out, same as us.”

Pam sagged. “We can’t reach
Civix or the Inners?”

“Not directly.” He leaned close
to her and whispered, “The war’s spread. We’re safe here—” he led her by the
arm to a membranous window. “—but you see that?”

“The Folk Rocks?” Pinpoints of
yellow and pink light ringed by invisibly small, arable planets.

His nostrils flared. “Now? It’s
a tomb.”

She nodded in defeat. When he
kissed the side of her nose, it was cold.

Tommy clambered over the pile
of furniture at the center of the room, looking the miniature philosopher,
never smiling.

Dale couldn’t stop his nostrils
flaring. He slapped the angry red endothelium of the house’s bare interior.
“Now, who’s hungry?”

“Dale?”

“Yes?”

“What do we feed the house?”

They fed the house bushels of
the thumblike white worms that hung wriggling out of the infected walls like
earthworms in a fresh grave. Pam added chaff and vitamin B to make them taste
more like grain, but Dale still had to clamp the house’s nose shut with a
ratchet cable to make it swallow. They waited a month, then shot it full of
Worm Begone, and the worms went away for a while.

“They’re gone,” Pam marveled.

He was still as she hugged him.
During the last month they’d worked elbow to elbow together as they’d never
done before, remaking their life into something that could survive the war. The
previous night Dale had sat across from his wife at their empty table and told
her that he’d never loved her this way before, not even when they were first
married. They’d slept packed together limb in limb like blind baby mice,
sheltered and guarded in each other.

He told her the truth: “No.
They’ll be back, and it will be worse than before.”

When she sat down and began to
cry just as suddenly as she’d been overjoyed, he sat at her feet in a pool of
the limpid pus that slicked the floor.

He’d have to mop again soon; if
he let it dry, it’d crust over like egg yoke.

The house grew thinner.

On a short, hot night in the
asteroidal summer, Pam whispered, “What was that?”

For a long time, he’d sensed
her lying awake, but finally they both must have slipped off. He flicked a
thumb-sized worm off the edge of the bed. “What was what?”

“That.”

“What?”

A rustling sound as the house
slithered.

“That!”

He sat up, listening, and the
house canted and nearly tipped him over. Tommy screamed, and Dale brought him
into their room to sleep between them with the worms and ooze. He found it
terrible listening to Tommy’s moans, to watch his sleeping, emotionless face
while the slitherings and the leanings carried on throughout the night.

At some point Pam said, “What
is it?” but fell into exhausted sleep before Dale could tell her he didn’t
know.

Tommy actually pitched a fit
the next morning. “Daddy don’t go outside Daddy don’t go!” He seemed to gargle
his tears, and Dale didn’t like the broken way his face looked. The Spacewalk
classes had helped before the war, but now he’d begun regressing and closing
off.

“I’ll be back, buddy, I just
need to see what’s making that noise.” He put on his helmet and slipped through
the passive membrane, outside.

He gaped.

Next door on the Ybarri’s side
was nothing but a giant set of footprints that walked off into the silty
asteroidal distance, taking the baby steps that the housemasters’ special
shackles permitted. On the other side was a collapsed wreck, giant bones
showing through the papery skin like the masts of a stove-in sailing ship.

Dale bounced around to the
back, looking up and down the bruised and lacerated hulk of his wretched,
willful house. He hated it, hated its giant, stupid butt crack and scabby
elbows, the tufted hair that grew along its spine.

Then he saw it. The right wrist,
folded down against the forearm,
glistened
with red and black blood. The bone showed against the gou
ging wire. The
arm twitched back and forth as he watched, sawing itself
with the wire. The house had become so thin that
the arm nearly fitted through, and soon it might get free like a double-jointed
person slipping out of a straight jacket. Dale could sense the pain and the
ambition
.

He’d bought the mouth brace
with the quarter-ton spring for this very reason when he’d thought of the
house’s teeth.

He didn’t tell Pam about the
arm. Instead, Dale shut himself in the closet and unleashed a storm of
violence. He leaned against the sweating, swaying testicles digging his fingers
into them when his strength ran out.

Dale used the exposed bones
like railings to avoid slipping in the slick rivers of pus. He placed the
filleting knife against a raw red strip of meat, expecting the house to twist
dryly away from him again, but it didn’t move.

Was it asleep?

Too weak?

It never occurred to him that
the house might simply be distracted.

Then it tipped to the left
rather ponderously, deep and slow.

Dale froze.

In the kitchen, Pam started
screaming.

Dale threw down the knife and
bolted down the stairs. He saw Pam with her rump backed against the edge of the
dining room table, cradling Tommy in her arms and screaming, seemingly at him.
He tried to run to her and tripped.

Over something.

He hit the floor hard but
uninjured. He looked to his left and thought he saw a giant snake, something
like a huge red boa constrictor, moving toward his family. His eyes flew wide
open and a cold revulsion made him scurry back.

Dale gained his feet and saw it
just as the wrist flexed and the palm spun and opened. The long fingers flapped
in anticipation, and Pam’s scream turned to a ripping, horrible sound. Her eyes
looked about to pop out, and a ragged girl-child rose to replace the woman in
her face, sunken-eyed and savage.

The long arm had come in
through the belly door membrane. Dale stomped on it, crushing down with his
heel, once, twice, six times. The arm retreated a little but more in surprise
than pain, then plunged toward his family again.

Pam screamed his name, Tommy
screamed Daddy, and it was like a nightmare. The complete lonesomeness of his
responsibility seemed to press on Dale’s head like a vice. For a moment his
mind slid into a helpless swirl of stars and screams.