Shuttered Sky

like bruises. It was naked, and reeked of a fetid, guttery stench, but worst of all was what he saw between its legs. Whatever this creature was, it was neither male, nor female, but both. The pickpocket wailed like a child.

“Give me your clothes,” it hissed.

The creature was by no means strong—in fact it was spent from its ordeal coming through the breach. Still the pickpocket could not resist the force behind its deep-set eyes.

“Give me your clothes,” it repeated, “and I’ll spare your flesh.”

He didn’t pretend to know what the thing was talking about, but that didn’t matter. If he had to give his own clothes to cover this abomination, hiding its groin from his sight, it was a small price to pay. He tore his shirt off, sending buttons flying, and pulled off his pants over his shoes. Leaving him only in his underwear. Quickly the crea­ ture slipped on the clothes, but as the pickpocket tried to scramble away from it, it reached for him again, flipping him around. Grabbing him painfully by his chest hairs, it pulled him face to face with it.

“Please . . .” he begged. “Please just let me go . . .”

“In a moment,” it said, staring at him.

There was something in the creature’s eyes. A spot of light deep within the pitch of its dilated pupils. The spot of light grew, becoming red, and pushing forward from its eyes, like tongues stretching for the pickpocket, probing the pores of his face.

“No . . . please.”

“Be still,” it said.

The tongues of light reached through his flesh—he could feel them like surges of electricity—twangs of pain shooting through his joints and organs. Then deep inside himself, in his gut, in his heart, in his mind, he felt something vital disconnect, as if the marrow were being drained from his bones. But it wasn’t marrow; it was something else. He felt himself tugged loose, his soul discorporating from his body.

And although he could feel his body was still alive, he also knew that he was no longer in it. Instead he was in the grasp of those red tendrils of light that pulled him into the gaping maw of a creature hiding within the flesh of the hermaphrodite: a creature of living light, and living shadow. In a moment he was so far from his own thoughts that he could not recall his own name, he could not think, for his spirit no longer had access to a brain. All he could do now was feel. Feel himself pulled deeper by the tendrils; feel himself sliding down its gullet, and finally feel the lonely agony of his consciousness particulating as his soul slowly digested within the belly of the beast.

* * *

The two officers hurled their bodies against the door until the door frame finally splintered, and the door crashed in. Regaining their bal­ance, they raised their weapons, half expecting to be fired on. They were not prepared for what they saw. It was odd, even by public restroom standards.

The perpetrator was there, in a fetal position on the floor, in his underwear, weeping. Above him stood a woman, half dressed. Or was it a man? Whatever it was, it had an unsettling, undead look about it, like an addict one trip shy of the morgue.

“What the hell is this?” the younger officer asked.

“I don’t want to know,” said his older partner.

The perp looked up at them. “He did something to me,” the perp wailed. “He did something.”

“Whatever it was, you damn well deserved it.”

They pulled him off the ground, and he offered no resistance. The older officer had seen his share of petty criminals, and few gave in with such ease. It was as if he had been sapped of his will to fight—but it was more than that. The older officer caught sight of the perp’s eyes. There was a discomfiting vacancy there; a desolate void, as if this pick­pocket wasn’t a man, but just a shell; a walking, breathing shell of a man, with nothing living inside. Not even hard timers got the death-look that bad.

“What do we do about the other one?” asked the younger cop.

The abject, straggle-haired specimen looked at them like a vulture waiting for roadkill.

“One freak at a time.”

But the younger cop was playing by the book. “You got a name?” he asked.

“Okoya,” it said. “My name is Okoya.”

“We’ll want your statement.”

“Give it a rest,” said the older cop, wanting more than anything to be free of that restroom. “Let’s read this one his rights, and get him out of here.”

The doleful pickpocket was still whimpering, “He robbed me . . . he robbed me.”

But the older officer was wise enough not to consider what might have been stolen, and as they pulled their suspect out of the restroom, he made sure to keep his gaze away from the vacant eyes of the pick­pocket, and the charged eyes of the freak.

* * *

Meanwhile, far away, in the rejuvenated ruins of an old diner, Dillon, dozing with his arm around Maddy, was startled awake by a strange sensation somewhere in his head, like an unexpected popping of his ears. But the sensation quickly passed, so he closed his eyes, and thought no more about it.

15. Gainer

“I’m beyond myself now.”

Dillon gripped the steering wheel with both hands as he spoke to Maddy, worried that some unseen force might jerk the wheel out of his hands. Nothing was to be taken for granted anymore. It was his third day free from the oppression of his cage—but that cage had offered him containment. There was nothing to contain him out here on the back roads of the rural south, and Tessic had been right—his will was not powerful enough to do it. “My body is too small a vessel to hold me,” he said.

“Maybe I should drive,” suggested Maddy.

Dillon turned his attention to the lush oak forest on either side, arcing over the road around them. “You see how the trees move in the wind? I can feel them move. I can feel the currents of breezes in the forest. There must be a lake nearby, because I can feel rippling on its surface.” He tried to shake the feeling away, but it persisted, tugging at his attention. This was the first time he had taken the wheel of yet another stolen car since their escape. He found the simple task of driv­ing kept his focus tethered, but it was still an exhausting battle to keep his concentration narrow in the face of such overstimulation. “I’m beyond myself,” he said again. “I don’t know where I end, and the world begins.”

“Like a newborn,” Maddy offered.

“What?”

“A newborn can’t differentiate itself from the world around it. Maybe you’re a newborn, too. The beginning of something we’ve never seen.”

“There you go again, calling me a ‘thing.’ I’m human, Maddy. I can bleed. I can die.”

Maddy didn’t appear convinced. “Maybe, but Tessic was right about one thing. People like you don’t just get spit out on a regular basis.”

“Tessic.” Dillon gripped the wheel white-knuckle tight. Yes, Tes­sic had believed in Dillon’s ‘purpose,’ but Dillon had no such faith anymore. All he could feel was a blind drive to do something, but with no clear objective. If anything, he could sense futility and failure, and the laughter of the three faceless divers, reveling in his defeat.

“If I need to do something, wouldn’t it help to know what it is?” All he knew for sure was that his own influence was swelling further beyond his control. “And if it was intentional for me to be this pow­erful, wouldn’t I be able to control it? You can’t imagine how far my reach goes now. Fifty miles away, there are grains of sand slowly gath­ering into pebbles, and shattered leaves piecing themselves together again, all because of me. The further away, the slower the process gets—but I can still feel it happening, maybe a hundred miles away.”

They passed a sign announcing their entrance into Alabama. The road lightened, and took on a rougher texture. Maddy gently touched his arm.

“Forget about what you feel a hundred miles away. Feel the wheel. Feel the road. Focus on finding