Part Two
The explosion reduced the house to kindling and flipped Nathan over before slamming him to the ground. His combat suit protected him from the heat and debris, but the concussive shockwave of compressed air turned his insides to jelly. When he tried to move it felt like he was going to break apart into a million pieces; the only thing preventing him from doing so was the suit, holding him together like a sausage casing.
Burning roof tiles, pulling tails of smoke and embers, sizzled and rained down all around him. It looked like the Pleiades meteor shower. Shards of porcelain scudded past his head. Pretzeled rebar clanged as it hit the ground and went careering off into the surrounding woods. A bed frame landed in the boughs of a white pine, setting the needles on fire.
The rapid change in pressure, from high to low, caused the wind to howl and whip around Nathan as it rushed back in to fill the sudden vacuum.
Administered hormonal agents, otic compound and coagulants, the Director said inside his head. He was speaking at his normal volume, but to Nathan it sounded amplified, booming and echoing through his skull. He winced and — not for the first time — wished for the serenity of a mute button.
SOME PAINKILLERS WOULD BE NICE, he texted back.
Later. There're more Foundation troops en route, both air and ground. Now get up.
Nathan attempted to lever himself onto his knees and elbows. His sight dimmed from the exertion, black particles swimming and expanding across his vision, and he tasted the signature copper notes of blood on his pallet. His strength ebbed and he foundered, sprawled out on his stomach. He may have passed out for a second or two. It was hard to tell.
He tried to pick himself up again, grinding his teeth and choking back a moan that demanded to be released. A vein throbbed in his forehead. Nathan imagined his insides as a frayed sweater, the entire garment unraveling under the governance of a single unspooled thread. He coughed, and the taste of blood grew stronger.
Get up, ordered the Director. You have internal bleeding in your lungs and bowels. One of your lungs has also collapsed. It's been closed off and the other, remaining lung adjusted for compensation. You've got several herniated discs, your right eardrum is ruptured and you have a hairline fracture in your clavicle and another in your ulna. You're dying but the nanodocs have you stabilized. It will take hours for you to expire in your current condition. But if you don't hurry you're going to jump to the head of the line. Now. Get. Up.
Nathan relied on his arm strength, pushing off from the ground and curling his knees into his chest, swinging his feet into position under him. He straightened his legs, and when his sight finally returned he found himself standing, albeit weaving drunkenly.
You should feel the adrenaline and the otic stabilizer kicking in.
Nathan didn't feel shit; or if he did it was too subtle to notice. He had pharmaceutical caches inside his body that could be administered automatically based on vitals or remotely through the phone in his head. The hormonal stimulant should've boosted his energy while the otic compound restored balance, but at that particular moment there was nothing more he'd rather do than lie down and close his eyes, make the world stop spinning and hibernate for the next four months.
The missile had transformed the house into a pocked lunar landscape. In the unsteady light of the burning trees he glimpsed the female agent, supine and half-buried in sheetrock. Her helmet was dented, the bangs pasted to her forehead by a bright red freshet. A curtain rod had skewered her below the left breast, pinning her to the ground like a butterfly specimen pinned to a piece of corkboard.
WHAT'S GOING ON WITH THAT DRONE? he asked, glancing away from the body. Her eyes were open. For some reason that he didn't care to explore that was the worst part of it. The eyes were open. They lent the corpse a vampiric quality and seemed to follow him as he roved the debris field.
It's inspecting a vehicle approaching on George Street. Not one of ours, and obviously not Foundation. Seems to be civilian. Once they figure that out it will return, so we only have a small window of opportunity.
DOES IT HAVE ANYMORE MISSILES?
Yes. I think they're using the AGM-114-V variant of the Hellfire.
WHAT MAKES YOU SAY THAT?
It's what I'd use. If I'm right, then that drone's model can carry a payload of four. So it either has three remaining or some other armament that's the equivalent.
Great, Nathan thought as he stumbled through an asteroid belt of rubble formed by the explosion. A webwork of copper piping was being licked by green flames. The silhouette of a large chifforobe loomed through the smoke — it was missing the wardrobe door, drawers hanging out and clothes strewn across the yard. He stepped over a smoldering pile of tomes and grimoires. A Windsor chair split down its saddle-shaped seat. What looked to be a horned neopagan altar, the unwrought stone covered in a patina of soot and candlewax with runes crudely chiseled into the sides and surface of the Communion table.
He paused, frowning at the spot where he'd last seen the McKeown boy, trying to free his mother from her bindings. It would take a sponge and squeegee to clean them up. They'd been closest to the point of impact, and all that remained now was a bloody skidmark and some viscera that might've belonged to one of them, both or neither. The wet cordage of an intestine stretched like a clothesline between a pile of drywall and a jumble of wooden beams.
What about Herbert McKeown? said the Director.
Nathan, assuming he meant the old man, picked his way through the wreckage. The old man had been partially shielded from the blast by the box truck and one of the SUVs, but still looked to be in poor shape. As Nathan recalled, even prior to the missile strike he hadn't exactly been a shining beacon of health.
Nathan jabbed his hand under the outcrop of chin, rooting for a pulse. It was there, fluttering and off-tempo. Nathan wasn't sure if he was breathing or not.
Rivulets of blood leaked from the old man's nose and ears. His skin was jaundiced, beard the indistinct gray of cobwebs, speckled with putrescent food and squirming with fleas and lice. The fingers were chapped and stained from nicotine and resin. He was naked except for threadbare cargo shorts, starched with dirt and dotted with cigarette burns. Up close the yellowed flesh was oddly translucent. Not only could Nathan see the vascular system, but also the faint outlines of the skeleton — the attenuated and pronounced rib-cage, the almost bird-like fragility of the arm and leg bones and the spur of his hip…
Unless it was all some kind of elaborate subdermal tattoo. There were designs, a mandala and what appeared to be Buer or Baphomet —
The drone has completed its scan of the car and is headed back your way.
Nathan removed the catchpole noose from the old man's neck, pulled out the gag, and then picked him up, draping him over his shoulders in a fireman's carry. He was greasy but remarkably light, and the new burden seemed to make little difference to Nathan, except for an acute itch that flared in his collarbone.
Maybe those hormones were finally kicking in after all.
Even through the air filters of the suit he was assaulted by the stink of the old man. It socked him like sulfuric fumes, causing his eyes to water and the little hairs in his nose to curl. It reminded Nathan of a long night he'd once spent out in the Florida everglades, surrounded by an inhuman miasma of jungle rot and scales and steaming mud.
He opened the driver's side door of the closest SUV, a Ford Explorer, and after verifying the keys were in the ignition he tossed the old man over the center console and into the passenger seat. The rear left tire was on its rim after catching a stray bullet, but he chose it because the other SUV had taken the brunt of the explosion and was worse for wear. He threw the transmission into reverse, looping backwards to align the front end so that it pointed down the driveway.
Wait. Take her with you.
WHAT? WHO?
Don't be obtuse. The female Foundation agent. I want her. Bring her along.
WHY? SHE'S DEAD.
She's not dead, and stop arguing. We don't have time for this. I want her.
Nathan put the Explorer into park and darted out. He didn't understand or agree with the request, it seemed to jeopardize their objective with additional — and unnecessary, if you asked him — risk, but the Director was right on one account: there was no time for arguing. He wrenched the curtain rod from the woman's abdomen. The yawning wound fountained blood like a geyser.
He texted, as if the Director didn't already know: FOUNDATION AGENTS ALL HAVE TRACKING IMPLANTS.
I've arranged an ambulance retrofitted for surgery to rendezvous with you in Ware. It's equipped with stealth technology, signal dampeners and multi-spectral camouflage. That should buy us enough time to extract the devices.
AND WHAT ABOUT ME AND THE OLD MAN? WE DON'T WARRANT AN AMBULANCE? I DON'T THINK HE'S GOING TO LIVE MUCH LONGER WITHOUT IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION. He hauled the woman up onto his shoulders, repeating the process of the fireman's carry. Her removal left an impression of her profile in the powdered sheetrock like a snow angel. She was much heavier than the old man, and the itch in Nathan's collarbone graduated into a molten burn.
The separation of you from the agent is tantamount to your safety. The sooner the better. After you drop her off a private maglev train will be waiting for you and Mr. McKeown up in Fallon. It has a fully-staffed medical bay to see to both of your injuries, and is about twenty miles north of Ware. The distance is… regrettable. But it's the closest point in the railway line to your location. There isn't a station; the train will be making an unscheduled, unreported stop on the westbound line, which is where you'll board. Your vehicle will then be dumped into the nearby Pike's Pond. It's small but deep. Used to be a quarry. The Toyota will never be found.
Nathan pawed open the rear door of the SUV and deposited the Foundation agent into the back. After a moment's hesitation he decided to remove one of the zip ties from her belt, rolled her prostrate, and cinched her wrists behind her back. He didn't think she posed any threat, not really. If she was alive she must've been knocking on the pearly gates, had an appointment with Saint Peter. But she'd already proven to be a dangerous adversary, and he didn't relish the thought of her waking up and finding herself strategically positioned behind him.
The UAV is locking on to you.
The drone couldn't actually see Nathan, but it sure as hell could see the Ford Explorer and his two passengers. He jumped into the driver's seat and floored the accelerator. The vehicle lurched forward with a jolt that pushed him back into the seat. They caught air cresting the top of the driveway, and he bit his tongue when the SUV's tires touched down. Sparks spat out from the rim. The old man jounced and slewed sideways, leaning against Nathan's shoulder. His slack mouth — the few remaining teeth rotten kernels of corn — was only inches away, and Nathan could feel his rank cesspool breath on his neck.
At least he's breathing, he thought and shoved him off. The old man flopped and sank to the floor, wedged between the glove box and the bucket seat.
He turned right at the bottom of the driveway, the rear of the vehicle fishtailing as he swung onto Hammond Hill. For one brief moment Nathan was sure that he was going to flip the damn thing before the Explorer responded and straightened out of the slide.
There were headlights about a quarter mile up the road, three pairs, maybe more, approaching fast and occupying both lanes of traffic, blocking his escape. More headlights appeared in the rearview mirror. Too many to be a coincidence on this rural backstreet and at this hour of night, and they lacked the flashing red and blue lights of emergency response vehicles.
HEY, I'VE GOT A PROBLEM HERE.
He considered turning his own headlights off and vetoed the idea. A lot of good it would do him. He was dragging a rooster tail of sparks behind him like the fourth of July.
I told you that Foundation troops were en route by both land and air.
They were already between Nathan and the fire road where his Toyota Camry — and his weaponry stashed in the trunk — was parked. He checked the ammunition on his gun. The feed counter next to the slide read seven. He had a spare magazine containing another twenty flechettes. He was also wearing the explosive bandolier with an assortment of grenades — frags and incendiaries and flashbangs. And he had his knife.
The shoulder of grass on either side of the road was only two feet wide. Too narrow for him to squeeze on and sneak past. Nathan, his foot a lead weight on the gas pedal, red-lined the tachometer, the RPM needle dancing as the Explorer roared forward. He couldn't sneak past them, but maybe he could barrel through if he gathered enough speed and momentum. Probably not; probably the collision would kill both the old man and the agent, and then the Foundation could finish Nathan off leisurely in a hail of gunfire.
What I wouldn't give for a plough or cowcatcher right now, he said to himself as the speedometer crept to forty miles per hour. At this speed the SUV continuously wanted to pull to the left, cantering on that rim. Nathan fought the wheel for every inch he gained.
He buckled his seatbelt. How did that old joke go?
Question: Do you know what the letters in Ford stand for?
Answer: Found on road dead.
The headlights had grown much larger and brighter. Lensflares kaleidoscoped across the windshield. There was the squawk of a voice projected over a loudspeaker or megaphone. Nathan couldn't parse the words but knew the gist. Pull the vehicle over and exit with your hands up. Stop or we will shoot.
Walls of fire sprung up in front of and behind him, transforming the night into a holocaust. His hypersensitive eyes were blinded by the sudden blaze, and he threw his arm up to shield them in the crook of his elbow, until the lenses of the cowl dimmed and polarized. The flames erupted thirty feet into the air; they spanned the entire width of the road and scored the trees that fenced the street, cutting a swath through their ranks.
Nathan had to fight the reflexive impulse to slam on the brakes. Instead, he applied even more pressure to the gas. A large sycamore had been guillotined and the cloven trunk was toppling into the street. If he didn't beat it he'd get trapped behind it.
Or crushed beneath it.
I hacked the drone, the Director informed him, and deployed the remaining Hellfires. Direct strike on the Foundation vehicles. They've already regained control of the drone, but not before I set it into a nosedive.
The fire was fading as quickly as it had bloomed. Nathan drove into the newly-formed crater. Waves of heat prickled his flesh and sweat issued from every pore, engaging the suit's climate control. The Explorer shook and rattled across the scorched bowl as if skiing over moguls. He could feel the rubber of the tires melt and try to adhere to the chunks of baking macadam. Of the Foundation vehicles only one remained — they'd all been blasted into scrap except for a sedan that had been lagging behind the formation. It was now nothing more than a charred husk. Tines of fire lapped the interior, and flames poured from the driver's mouth and eye sockets. The corpse was still strapped in with its hands fused to the steering wheel.
The descending sycamore's branches raked the roof of the Explorer, gouging the paint in a high-pitched squeal, like nails on a chalkboard. It was going to be close. A window coughed inward, showering the unconscious Foundation agent with glass as a limb of the tree speared through the back seat. The hatchback door was ripped from its hinges and disappeared in a spray of foliage. The sycamore's bole grazed the rear bumper, briefly lifting the SUV off the front axle until the bumper tore off and the Explorer squirted out from under the immense weight of the tree. Nathan clipped the burnt sedan's fender in his haste and sent it spinning off the road.
The Ford, limping along on its last leg, managed to make it the rest of the way to the old fire road. Nathan stepped out and doubled-over, bracing his arms against his knees while he tried to catch his breath. It felt like a python was squeezing his lungs. His eyes scanned the road, up and down. It was unbelievably deserted in comparison to mere seconds ago. Through the burning trees he saw a light on at the nearby ranch, and heard a one-sided conversation as a neighbor, out on the wrap-around porch, screamed on the phone at a 911 dispatcher.
A buzz with a Doppler shift drew his attention. What now? Nathan groaned inwardly. The noise seemed to be plummeting out of the sky, right above his head. It quickly terminated as another explosion burgeoned just twenty yards away. It was smaller than the Hellfires and lacked the forceful punch of the missiles.
"The fuck was that?" he said, reverting back to verbal communications. "They're shelling artillery now?"
The Foundation stalled the drone trying to pull it out of the dive.
Nathan chewed his lip. It was the first piece of good news he'd heard all night, and it momentarily caught him off guard. He stifled a laugh. "Are there any agents left in the area?"
A pair of military helicopters have been deployed out of Worcester. ETA seven minutes. Local law enforcement is much closer, they're only ninety seconds out, but they're approaching from the southeast and will be blocked by the felled tree if you follow my directions.
He jogged down the fire road and hopped into the Camry, backing it out onto Hammond Hill. "Some painkillers right about now would really hit the spot."
I administered them at the same time as the hormones and otic compound.
"You did? Why didn't you tell me?"
Because I wanted you focused on the task at hand and not thinking about it.
Could Nathan feel the opioids coursing through his bloodstream, releasing pain-blocking neurons in his brain? Certainly he could feel the hormonal stimulant by now, his mind honed to the sharpened point of a single atom, body thrumming like a finely-tuned instrument. Likewise the otic compound seemed to be working since his balance no longer troubled him. But he still ached all over. A heavy weight had settled over his chest due to the collapsed lung. And even more worrisome were the injuries he couldn't feel — the internal bleeding in his lungs and bowels. He could wind up drowning in his own blood or bleeding to death through his ass.
"Did you ever stop and wonder if by withholding that information you were having the opposite effect than intended?"
Yes.
He pulled the Toyota alongside the SUV, swapping the prisoners from one vehicle to the other. He placed the woman in the passenger seat, right beside him where he could keep a close eye on her. From his travel kit he ripped open a packet of powdered antibiotics coupled with a cauterizing agent. He dumped the entire package down the ugly hole in her tactical vest to try and staunch the bleeding and keep her alive, at least until he got her to the ambulance and she became someone else's problem.
When Nathan laid the old man in the backseat he spasmed, shackled arms and legs outstretched as the atrophied muscles seized and contracted. His gnarled hands beat a drum solo against the upholstery, and a dry keening ejaculated from the back of his throat like a Passing Bell.
"I think we might be losing the old man," Nathan remarked.
Is there anything you can do?
"I don't think so. Are you hearing this shit? It looks like he's having a convulsion or something."
You must have some medication that will help.
"I wouldn't even know what to give him."
Let me see him.
Nathan took a hard, steady look at the old man, letting the Director soak it all in. His spine arched as he writhed and spittle ran through his beard.
That's not good.
"Thank you, doctor."
His condition could be caused by a multitude of different injuries. It could even be neurological or biological.
"Yeah, definitely biological. Has nothing to do with the missile that landed on his head."
Do you have chlorpromazine?
"I'm not sure what that is. Maybe."
It's Thorazine.
"Yeah, I think I've got it somewhere." He fished through the travel kit and found the small glass vial and a single-use syringe.
Administer ten CCs intravenously.
Nathan bit the cap off the syringe and spat it out onto the ground. He stabbed the needle through the vial's rubber stopper and retracted the plunger until the barrel was filled with ten cubic centimeters of the clear fluid.
"You think this will be enough?" The dose looked paltry and insubstantial.
I think it might be too much for a man in his state and estimated weight, but I have no clue. Give him the shot.
"Isn't this stuff for psychotics?"
It covers a wide range of receptors, which is why we supply it to our field agents and why we're going to give him some without knowing exactly what's wrong with him. I can guess that his injuries are probably similar to your own, but you don't happen to have any extra nanodocs or clotting factors in that bag, do you?
"Sorry, fresh out."
So give him the Thorazine. It's not going to treat his injuries, but it might ease his symptoms and prevent him from hurting himself.
It was easy finding a vein, since they were all highlighted in ink. He chose one on the calf, waiting for the small muscle to unclench, and then thumbed the plunger of the syringe.
"Okay, done. Anything else?"
No. The police are arriving. Just get to Ware.
The Camry, as a Director-issued vehicle, came with an electronic countermeasure pod installed in its undercarriage, coupled with stealth advances to deceive an array of detection systems. It was a Toyota in appearances only. By putting the two prisoners in it Nathan made them vanish from any aerial surveillance that might be spying. The ECM applied various passive and active techniques to manipulate surveillance intelligence and sensing behavior. It could engage in soft-kill measures such as electronic warfare to jam communications, mask acoustics or confuse missile guidances with directional IRCM, and even substitute image-feeds with false pictures, erasing the car from visual recordings.
I'm going to have Levine drive.
"Go for it," Nathan replied. It was one less thing to have to worry about. "Tell him to be gentle. Precious cargo."
The Camry was then remotely controlled by Levine, a professional driver on the Director's payroll. He'd driven for Nathan on several prior occasions, during a car chase on the Los Angeles freeway and an extraction in Mumbai.
Of course, none of the stealth advances in the world did any good if you had a police cruiser riding on your tail or a helicopter pinning you in its spotlight. That's where the performance upgrades came in.
The car's engine was an after-market V16, essentially two V8 engine blocks linked to one crankshaft. The immense size and weight necessitated a custom chassis and hood to accommodate the mount and an enlarged heat sink to hide its thermal output. The car purred as it chewed up the road. They broke sixty miles per hour in under two seconds. But as a back road in New England it wasn't exactly like racing on a salt flat; the street consisted more of hills and potholes than actual pavement, and their speed was constantly hindered.
Nathan let his eyes drift shut. "You know, I've been thinking… "
Don't. Stick to things you're good at.
"Funny. You should heed your own advice and leave the humor to the professionals. But seriously, how come I'm getting the feeling the old man isn't a priority anymore?" He glanced in the backseat. The tremors — or whatever the hell they were — were still present, but had subsided in their intensity. "Why did I pull this guy out? I mean… why don't we stick him in the ambulance and I take Little Miss Foundation over here — " he hooked his thumb at the agent " —to the train instead."
I don't pay you to question motives, especially mine. That being said, it seems I've learned an important lesson which you, unfortunately, have not.
"Oh, yeah? And what's that?"
What's done is done. As unpropitious as Herbert McKeown's death may be, there's no point in getting upset over something that can't be changed. It's counterproductive. Do I wish it had gone differently? More smoothly? Of course. But I've adjusted my plans accordingly and we will continue to forge ahead with the resources that are available to us — not lament over what could have been. And that means getting the agent into surgery as soon as possible to remove the implanted Foundation trackers.
"Is he even the right guy?" Although Herbert was the eldest of the McKeown clan, that didn't automatically make him their target. It could just as easily have been that the Sothian talent in the family skipped a generation, and his daughter was the sorceress, or that the grandson showed an aberrant proclivity for the cult's particular brand of black miracles, one the rest of the family didn't share.
I have no idea. It might turn out he doesn't know anything and his death won't be a loss to us. Certainly the capture of all three members would've been preferable to just one that might die anyway. Even their bodies could've aided us in our research.
"Yeah, I'm not going back to the house to pick them up. You'd need a fucking wet vac for that job."
And I'm not asking you to.
"I know. That's not what I meant, though. You're getting me sidetracked. I want to know why you suddenly became interested in the girl." He allowed his sight to linger on her. "What's so special about her?"
There's nothing inherently special about her; not that I'm aware of. It was simple opportunistic predation. The drone was investigating the car, it was going to take me at least another thirty seconds to hack into it, and so I had you retrieve her. Can you not see the benefit in capturing a Foundation agent alive despite the risk?
He still couldn't believe she was alive. They'd been standing right next to each other when the Hellfire hit, and she'd been impaled like a goddamned kebab.
"Are you sure she's even alive? She looks dead. I might just be carrying a Foundation tracker inside a hundred pounds of rotting meat." Her head rested against the window, and he noted there was no condensation formed on the glass around her lips or nose.
She's alive, the Director said. And I intend to find out the explanation for that as well.
Nathan shook his head but remained quiet. It wasn't like a movie where the action star bodysurfs the shockwave of an explosion. If something had the power to toss you through the air for thirty feet, could bend metal and shatter glass, then you weren't somehow getting back up unscathed and without a single hair out of place.
The car slowed down as they entered Ware. Like a lot of places in the area, it was an old mill town that had seen better days. Just when exactly those fabled better days had been no one seemed to recall. The car drifted through empty streets and vacant lots; buildings elbowed for space perched above the Ware River. Some of them had been converted into retail and residential space since the textile industry had parted ways overseas, but most remained untenanted and abandoned. The Toyota crossed a bridge over a spillway and turned into the lot of one such building.
Hidden in the shadows of the tin roof overhang was the ambulance.
"You sent a helicopter?"
Yes. As you're aware, time is crucial. What'd you think I was sending?
He'd been expecting a typical ambulance, a van, although in hindsight he realized the Director had never specified.
A pair of EMTs rolled a gurney over to the car. The technicians opened the passenger-side door of the Camry and gingerly placed the woman on the stretcher. They looked disapprovingly from her bound wrists to Nathan. Nathan glowered back through the cowl and dared them to say anything. Perhaps from a sense of self-preservation they chose to remain silent, wheeling her up a short ramp into the clamshell doors of the helicopter. As soon as they were out of sight the car's wheels kicked up a fan of gravel. Levine steered the car onto the road and headed north, back they way they'd come while avoiding the same streets.
Let's hope that's the last I ever see of her, Nathan thought to himself.
Part One


The Duvet Queen, Kit came to realise after being stuck in his home with ‘flu, wasn't all that bad.
She wasn't big, or scary, or unexpectedly angry. She didn't have the paws like a lion, a face like a rat's, and teeth as sharp as daggers. She had an image that flickered like a VHS on pause – a short, ageless figure, always covered from shoulders to feet in blankets - and sometimes she just hid as a big lump under her duvets in the hallway, not emerging for hours. Mostly, though, she pulled cats out of portals, but none really stuck around, apart from Peaches, who had decided that Kit's home was as good as any.
She was a weird cat, really.
And the Duvet Queen was a weird person. She proudly announced she could go ‘anywhere in the world' but, when Kit challenged why she was in a council flat in Brighton, she went very quiet and hid in her duvets for a day and a half until Kit said sorry from his bedroom, tucked in his own duvet, sweating out a fever (he was pretty sure that was what you were meant to do with a fever).
The Duvet Queen couldn't do much for him, but she was nice to have around, once Kit had learnt not to ask why she was here and not anywhere else in the world. She seemed to feed on stories, explaining that she couldn't read things properly anymore, and she missed that. So, she perched on the end of the bed and listened to Kit ramble, a deep wheeze in his chest, whilst her flickering head rested on what he assumed was her knees.
When Kit was feeling a little better and could sit up without the world spinning, she found him looking out of the window one day, looking unusually thoughtful. With none of the tact in the world, she asked what he was thinking about, and settled in for a story, because there was always a story behind Kit's thoughts, even if it was disordered.
“It's an anniversary, of sorts. Not a particularly big one. I think it's been over ten years now. I think. But, if I don't think about it, I may forget it forever.”
He paused to cough chestily and pop a pill into his mouth, swallowing dry.
“However long ago, there was this… girl, Maria. She was dumb. Well, not really dumb. But she was too pig-headed, goddamn stubborn, to realise that people cared if she lived or died.”
The Duvet Queen looked at him, watching a bead of sweat trail down his face. “…And what happened to her in the end?”
“The same thing that always happens. She –“
Live happily forever after?
“…Died.”
“Oh.” The Duvet Queen said, with just the right amount of sadness in her voice. She had learnt from Kit, learnt how to display just the right amount of any emotion for any situation – she had learnt by looking at the way he reacted to everything, and toning it down by at least fifty percent. She hadn't really had a chance to study these hu-man things up close, not in their own territory, so every day was an interesting one when she was stuck here, with him. “So… If that was the end, what was the beginning?”
Kit furrowed his brow, tapping his packet of cigarettes gently against the windowsill. “Some stories start at the end. Maria was gone by the time I realised her story.
So, firstly, to correct her misconception - people did care. About the living/dying thing. I knew before her funeral, because I cared, but it really hit me at the funeral, proper. All the flowers, spelling out things. ‘Friend'. ‘Daughter'. ‘Mum'. People crying. Guys I had known to never get out of their PJs, even for court, wearing suits. Goth girls with dreadlocks wearing bright yellow, just for her. But after that day, her name sorta fell out of use like it was cursed.”
Kit shifted, flickered his lighter on and off. He knew it would stay lit forever if he bothered to press the button that long, but his hand was absently shaking, and second-degree burns hurt.
“Every day, we forgot her a little bit more, even if none of us liked talking about it. Forgetting about her, or suicide, or death, or all three. No-one realises what suicide really does to a group of people until it happens to them. In less than a year, we drifted apart like a wet cake.”
An odd idiom, and Kit wasn't sure where it had come from, but he found himself using it – well, when he had need to.
“And, even now, every day, I forget a little more of her. How her hair looked the last time I saw her. Why yellow was her favourite colour. The name of her little girl. Why she got so sad. How it all went wrong.
Then I realised I didn't even have a photo of her, not really. Just those… sideways on ones at parties, in a group, the kind where she had red eye and she was always looking embarrassed and not like her, not even when she was drunk.
After she left us alone, I would go to town. I would go to town alone, and I would feel lonely. Everyone in the city feels lonely, because cities are hollow and empty and cold, really. They eat you up and you get stuck in their stomach with tons of other people, but no-one really talks to each other.”
“I know cities are lonely. I've lived in loads.” There was that pride again in her voice, tilting her head up, challenging him to ask why she wasn't living somewhere better now, but it didn't come. Kit was still somewhat lost in thought, half-listening and not-listening. “Paris, Rome, New York… they all feel the same, after a while. I would walk a lot. What would you do?”
“Oh. I would go to as many of those little photo booths as I could. The kind where you get your photo taken for passports. I would set up to take four photos, and I would pull four, different, silly faces. Sometimes, I would try and get a real photo of myself, looking like I saw myself, and like I would like people to remember me, because… I don't want to be a cursed name, when I die. And no-one likes being forgotten.
But I didn't have many friends, then. The whole ‘wet cake' issue. Instead, I would leave the photos in the little dispensing part for people to find. Probably most of them got chucked away by the next customer or disinterested staff at shut-up.”
You mean ‘close-up.'
“Maybe some of them made people curious about who would spend that money, but not take these photos with them. Maybe some of them made people curious about who I was. …It was pretentious as shit.” He laughed, awkwardly, the sound unfamiliar even to himself.
“You gotta know, I was only… something not-old-enough-yet to understand that I was acting like a pretentious asshole. Point is, I was young, and I had lost too many people close to me that I felt like I shouldn't have lost, and I had to do something to control my own destiny. And taking those photos, every couple of weeks, made me feel like maybe someone would remember me when I was gone, even if it was just in a way that I was a shitty customer, or a weird kid.”
He finally lit a cigarette, even though smoking would leave him chesty and uncomfortable for hours. He just couldn't seem to give it up. It was almost like it was a painfully addictive habit, taking years off his life (or something).
“She left a letter. Maybe more than one, but she left at least one, addressed to her friends. She asked if anyone saw that woman smile. No idea what she was talking about until I was in North Laine one day, and there was this…”
Kit absently spread his hand out, as if he could still see it in front of him, which maybe he could. His cigarette-holding hand had gone limp next to him, tip mostly ash, as lost in the memory as he was.
“…Graffiti, of a woman, I think it was a woman, and she was, she was smiling, and she had never smiled before. I had seen her before, almost every time I went into the city, but she had never smiled before. Not in as far as I could remember.”
Kit let his hand drop, and his head drop too, musing quietly.
“It was an ad, sorta, for a suicide awareness app. I know Maria had been using it, ‘cos, man, she tried to get me to use it too. Said it saved her life. But then she got tired. Or she said she was tired, anyway. Started cancelling stuff all the time. Coffee? No, tired. Grab a beer? No, tired. Just… hang out? No, tired.”
He sighed heavily, sounding like a man beyond his years, if even for just a moment.
“She wasn't tired, not really. I know now she was despondent. I've been told survivors of suicide – that is, friends of friends who offed themselves – use that word a lot, to describe the attitude of the dead. I hope I never have to use that word again, not for someone I know. Not in fear or memoriam.”
He finally remembered to suck on the cigarette, tapping ash out into the overfilling ashtray. It spilled onto his bedding and he absently rubbed it in, alongside the other stains on the duvet covet.
“I didn't know what to do. I knew it was… insane, to accuse this advert or the app for her killing herself. Misplaced blame because I couldn't bring myself to blame her. Still can't. Not after… well, it doesn't matter. But many years of experience later, many years of seeing things, going places that aren't really here or there, seeing people like you…”
He looked over to the flickering VHS Duvet Queen, who had summoned Peaches into her lap, where the cat had curled up, purring happily.
“And now I think maybe it wasn't as insane as I thought. To think maybe the advert, the app, the smile – they did something to her. Hypnotised her into thinking this was the best idea. But I'm not stupid, even now. I know if she hadn't committed suicide back then, she would have done a month later. A year. Ten years. Today. Some people just don't get over the idea; some people don't get the right help. And an app is never going to put a chair under swinging feet or staunch bleeding wrists – not like friends can. Could. If they knew. But we never knew. She was just… tired.”
He turned to look out of the window again, seeing a leaf still stuck to a tree lose its fight and go spiralling into the wind.
“So, I guess now Maria's story is part of my story, because she chose not to continue it, and I choose, for now, to stay here. Every time someone I know dies, it's another story to carry, and grasping memories of them before they drift apart like…”
“Wet cake,” the Duvet Queen finished, softly, gently picking Peaches up as she stood, replacing the cat at the end of the bed, where she happily curled up in the warm spot left by her owner creator.
“I have to go again, Kit. You know I can't stay here forever, and you wouldn't want me to, not really, even if all your fears were, as you found, unfounded.” She stood and watched him. Based on how she had heard, even in his own stories, how he coped with abandonment, she expected yelling and tears. Dramatics.
She wasn't expecting Kit to slowly raise and lower his shoulders in a slow shrug. “Of course you do. That's okay. Thanks for staying here whilst you could. If you don't come back… well, you're another story under my belt.”
He looked over at her, managing a small smile.
“A story no-one would ever believe, but aren't the best stories totally unbelievable?”
The Duvet Queen gave him an equally small smile, then went into the hallway, where Kit observed her opening a portal that led to a light so blinding he had to look away. And, when he looked back, she was gone.
“Just you and me again Peaches, huh?”
The cat sleepily chirped and rolled onto her other side, and Kit gently moved himself so as not to disturb her, before curling on his own side.
“Good idea, buddy. Good night.”

« An Arm and a Leg | Hub | No Racing by Horse-Drawn Vehicles »


Alright Mark, this is your, uh, forty-seventh debrief and coghaz decontamination procedure. You remember them, yes?

There comes a time and a place where all things end, and it may not seem so, but the lucky ones are those who know when that day will come. Maybe you'll learn via phone call, that blunted, sterile affect of a voice on the other line revealing that your life has a definite expiry. Maybe you'll take the easier option and set the date yourself, fearful of the Real and the suffering we tend to incur within its walls. If not, give it time. You were born to meet your Maker, but the anticipation never killed anyone. Wouldn't you want to be informed?
Most people are aware of the fact that everything dies, eventually. Some are more in tune with the certainty and finality of that fact than others, the rest having a fleeting thought now and again, only to be stifled by the various things they do to distract from their slow crawl into the grave.
People like Mcclanahan, however, had seen death so many times it mattered less and less as the days passed. By the time he had lost track of the body count, death became another pointless fact in a pointless universe. Something that just happens to everyone, even to himself, one day. Sure, there were still unpleasant ones, the bad times, with people turned inside out, eyeballs popped from their heads as their hollow shells lay broken on the ground. Those things were wiped clean with time and extensive therapy, not to mention the occasional forget-me-now.
Through all those gruesome shows, those brilliant bloodbaths, Markus Mcclanahan had seen it all and took it in stride. It was the only option, burning bridges and moving forward. Bridges being mounds of the dead, the once-friends. Those familiar faces, gone but for their bits of carbon that would go on to grace the lungs of some emphysematic somewhere, sometime. Legacy immortalized in a fit of wracking coughs, an unpleasant but apt way to honor the ephemeral and meaningless existence of Foundation personnel.
None of it mattered, because it all had to be done. Not only that, it was routine.
Routine. That's the life of a Foundation operative. Put aside all the administrative bureaucracy, all the paperwork and the psych tests and you'll see thousands of faceless suits that struggle every day to keep the world from falling to pieces. Cogs in the machine of Consensus Reality, sculpted from fear and the quintessential worldview introduced by the Founder mere centuries ago. Only now, the gears were in perpetual disrepair, and the machine actively resisted the will of its operators.
Markus had just returned from his nth foray into what they call the field; real life. Real, real life. The gritty shit, the things people don't need to see, save for a select few. Mcclanahan was one of those few.
Yesterday, it had been a thing about three meters tall, with a head like a bison and reciprocating saws for teeth. Watching it bisect civilians for sport had made the seasoned agent wince for the first time in years. None of them died immediately, but they all eventually died. Even while ankle deep in displaced organs and lifeless, glassy-eyed stares, Mcclanahan still took it all in stride. When their caravan had returned onsite, the fucker was crammed in the back of an armored vehicle with a canvas bag over its enlarged head, a rejection of nature and reason, wrapped in blood-matted fur. The beast was no threat anymore, having been sedated and bound by state-of-the-art carbide nanotube cuffs—those multi-million-dollar necessities that kept the monster and many, many others like it from doing much else other than existing. Still, when Markus heard that thing chuckle through the reinforced steel behind him, it made his skin crawl.
Again, he brushed those feelings away, knowing what the wretched creature didn't know; the padded cell that awaited, windowless and empty, just like the black of its insidious, unblinking eyes.
Today, the world was threatened by some dark, floating orb that rendered minds to useless mush. It warped its victims, slowly or quickly, toying with their lives around its mass of unidentified matter. Cognitohazards were the bane of the human mind; deceptive by design, they found their way into your head using back roads that only the well-trained could patrol.
This time, Markus was in luck; the featureless sphere hated electromagnets, and EMPs were easily acquirable by Foundation field agents. The altercation proceeded to fizzle out quickly once a few charges had been let off, and soon the man was outbound, surrounded by idle bantering and the stroking of ego the entire ride back. Minimal casualty, record containment time—a welcome change from the viscera-soaked streets of the day prior.
Arrival onsite was as routine as any other day, filled with silent nods and the shuffle of paperwork, while the Foundation planned their next move with that one mind-bending sphere locked in a storage unit that doubled as a Faraday cage.
Mcclanahan's keepers had other plans in store for him than dealing with that, however, as he was soon escorted away from the commotion by security personnel and none-too-gently shoved into one of the Foundation's patented Reintegration Chambers. The room was a glorified coffin, furnished with the organization's most uncomfortable folding chair, but at least it was only temporary. As SOP for potentially-hazardous interactions goes, this cold welcome was not much of a surprise; it happened every time he returned from dealing with something that could manipulate the thoughts of others. Safety was the name of the game at the Foundation.
He sat down at the only seat and waited in silence for it to begin.

"Good afternoon. CIT Proctor number four, I'll be the observing agent for your integration test under standard hazard protocol in accordance with—oh, Markus. Hello again. I'm sure you know the drill by this point."
"Don't I ever", said the man to the blank wall, with about as much enthusiasm as one would expect.
"Cheery today, aren't we?"
The box was small, cramped and featureless. Mark Mcclanahan stared at the panel in front of him and tried to act like he wasn't about to be interrogated by a co-worker and something of a friend. It was the drill, after all.
"Alright Mark, this is your, uh, forty-seventh debrief and coghaz decontamination procedure. You remember them, yes?"
"Each and every one."
"Good. Preface—"
The voice cleared its throat and rattled off in a rushed but disinterested tone that implied recital of pre-written documentation.
"Commencing with agent's mandatory cognition test, number forty-seven, executed on the fifteenth of May. Subject is a level-two field agent, may or may not have had unwanted contact with thought-manipulating entity. Entity's mode of infection was preemptively described as formant in nature, duplicitous, and write-only. These descriptors were determined using preliminary observations and are subject to change with further study, in which case additional testing may be required. Based on these descriptors it has been deemed necessary to submit the agent in question for review of adherence to previous mental state, including but not limited to embedded recall, Foundation loyalty, and subjective personal views or observations. Say 'Yes' if you understand."
"Yes." Markus understood a little too much perhaps, gleaming information about his spherical adversary either not known or not told to him at the time when he probably could have used it the most. Formant in nature, duplicitous and write-only, meaning that the infection vectors through sound waves, hides within the psyche to avoid detection and can override parts of the host's mind but couldn't recall the bits it erased nor read the victim's unaffected thoughts. It's an all-or-nothing type, either dormant in the mind or rewriting it completely. Markus had witnessed the effects of a cognitohazard with F-D-W/O infection capabilities before, during damage assessment of an entity that could fill your mind with black ink and empty, endless redactions, though that man did not know what it was at the time, he only saw the path of nothing it left behind.
Markus knew himself and his mind like the back of his hand, and as far as he was concerned, there wasn't room for another passenger. Not that he had heard anything unusual from the sphere anyway; there was too much commotion to discern noise at that distance. Even with sound reassurance, the rhythmic beating in his sternum only seemed to accelerate, reaching a peak moments later as the speaker interrupted his internal debate with the harmless sound of leafing papers. A small dose of silence followed and diffused, permeating the tight space as the man in the chair listened to his tinnitus swell to uncomfortable levels.
"State your full name and identification for the record."
"Level Two Field Agent Markus Mcclanahan. Seven-four-alpha-nine-six-delta, erm, thirty-three."
"Good. And now, your phrase."
"In the twilight, the black and white goes gray."
What a stupid line. Still, taking a half second to think about the responses could easily throw off his metrics and create undue suspicion, so Markus took a deep breath, letting go of his thoughts. He tried to answer automatically, using those canned responses that administration burned into his brain when he first became a field agent.
"Correct. Alright, onto boilerplate loyalty, embedded recall and personality tests. Say 'Yes' if you understand."
"Yes."
"Good. What is the Foundation?"
"The salvation of mankind."
"Do you work for the Foundation?"
"Always, as far back as I can remember, thanks to you guys."
"Let's keep it professional, Mark."
"Right, professional. My bad."
All the conditioning in the world couldn't keep the ice from his veins. They were only checking for inconsistencies and sincerity anyway. He gave the same answer every time, in essence, although perhaps he had added a little more bite this time around.
"Do you have doubts about the Foundation?"
"No."
"Do you have plans against the Foundation?"
"No."
"Do you dream of leaving the Foundation?"
"No."
"Count to seven for me, 74A96D-33."
The simple question always evoked a certain feeling within Markus, as if he was being treated like a child, or less than that, even. Losing his name to a series of letters and numbers, for some reason, failed to ease that sensation. Still, the agent persisted.
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven."
"How many numbers are between four and seven?"
"Two."
"How many numbers are between five and six?"
"None."
"You hear about that thing down in Samothrace?"
"No."
"Feel your skin. Is it yours?"
"Irrelevant. My skin belongs to the Foundation."
"Is the vessel a vessel without the flesh?"
"They are one in the same."
"Do you prefer flesh or metal?"
"I prefer life."
"Good. Do you recognize the bodies in the water?"
"I do not."
"Where do you go when you are alone?"
"I'm never alone."
"Are you real or are you fiction?"
"Real, of course. Can we speed this along?"
Another pause, more shuffling of papers. The disembodied voice hated giving these exams almost as much as Markus hated taking them. At the end of the day, that voice belonged to its own person, with their own dreams and aspirations, fears and hopes, blindly and often unwillingly carrying out the interests of the O5 Council. That's what they all were, under the lab coats and orange jumpsuits and Kevlar vests, just vulnerable heaps of flesh and bone with little control over their actions and no escape clause. When the wall spoke again, its voice was softer than before.
"Can you tell me what they told you?"
"I work to serve in the dark, so others may live in the light."
"Who is your superior?"
"I serve the oh-five."
"Do you question the Overseers?"
"No."
"Recite your phrase."
"In the twilight, the black and white goes gray."
"Where do you go when you go to sleep?"
"Inside myself."
"Where do you go when you look away?"
"Inside myself."
"Where is Site-104?"
"Site-104 does not exist."
"Do you hear the voices of the Overseers?"
"When they speak, I listen."
"Do you hear the voice of the Founder?"
"The Founder speaks through our actions."
"What other voices guide you?"
"My own."
"Take a drink from the glass in front of you."
"There is no glass."
"Good. Continuing further. What does the key look like?"
"I don't know."
"Does it open a lock?"
"No."
"Does it open yourself?"
"No."
"How many stars are in the sky?"
"Too many to count."
"How many stars have died?"
"I don't know."
"Does the black moon howl?"
"When the twilight turns gray."
"Are you unclean?"
"I certainly hope not."
"Professional, Mark."
"Sorry, no, I'm not."
"Next question. Does the name 'Ruhar' mean anything to you?"
"No."
"Have you ever dreamt of being on a carousel with a close friend?"
"No."
"Where do you go when you are not here?"
"I'm never not here."
"What does this image mean to you?"
A symbol manifested on the white wall to Mcclanahan's left. He gave it a good look and turned to face the camera once more.
"It means nothing."
"Recite your phrase."
"In the twilight, the black and white goes gray."
More silence. The man sat on the hard, metal chair for moments that felt like eternity.
"Alright, Agent Mcclanahan, that is enough. We're done here."
Slightly relieved, the body of Markus McClanahan grabbed its coat off the back of the chair and moved to the door in victorious hurry. On the other side, two guards greeted him with dour expressions on their faces.
"What? What is it now?"
The voice from the wall answered as the door slid shut behind the guards.
"Markus, are you real or are you fiction?" The voice of his once-friend was distorted through the small speaker with gravitas that did not match the absurdity of such a question.
"What—? I-of course I'm real! That's the easiest fucking question on the exam!"
"Real or not, your answer was wrong, Mark. I'm sorry."
Then, it all went black for the agent, who, as he was, was never seen again. The few that were present at the time noticed something in the man's eyes had changed—a deep nothingness, well-hidden prior to being ousted, rapidly boiling to the surface of increasingly dark irises. Markus was not present, and how long he had truly been absent would never be known.
Seeing the guards reach for the metal attached to their waistbands brought further change in Markus and Company, catalyzing the process out of need for survival. The unseen pilot of his form lunged at the guards in desperation and received a .22 caliber bullet to the forehead for the trouble. The offering passed through his skull and cleanly exited the back of his neck, leaving behind a cylindrical hole through his brain stem that would have definitely killed the same man just hours prior. Instead, he stumbled and righted himself, a thin stream of black tar running between his eyes. There was no humanity in the agent's face, no life in the traditional sense.
That Thing that Occupied Markus Mcclanahan was something else entirely—the imprint of a certain dark sphere with strange intentions beyond understanding. Mcclanahan's form wrenched back and emitted a foul roar, and as he did so, his flesh began to split at the hole in his forehead, curling back in segments like the peeling of a banana. The two guards continued to watch in abject horror as the coil of a man-turned-anomaly sloughed off in chunks, bleeding a viscous black liquid before them, somehow alive but not quite.
Another orb, fledgling in size, rose from the featureless pile of pale flesh and black oil, dripping strands of puréed tissue left over from converting Markus' body cavity into a walking gestation pod. The sphere began to ripple and spasm with undulating movements and a low, pulsating tone—a deep, almost inaudible hum, embedded with hazardous information which altered the minds and bodies of those around it.
None would leave that chamber alive, and yet, none would notice a difference. There would be no one to blink an eye at the lost, nor anyone to question their passing. The world would continue to turn, oblivious to the unseen suffering that the Foundation has assigned upon themselves. Life would march forever onward, persisting still as it always does, and in those last moments before the Reintegration Chamber filled with neurotoxins, one of the guards—a bird enthusiast named Jerry with thirty grueling years of Foundation service—would have a transient thought; he'd ponder whether or not he had made the right career choice, that perhaps he should have pursued an innate love of theatre instead of listening to his parents and getting mixed up in this nonsense. That moment would come, linger with the man, and when he died, just mere seconds later, he would still be unsure of the answer.
Soon after, he wouldn't really care.


Previous: The Long Goodbye

Lakewood is a long stretch of nothing leading no where. The resort town got hit hard by the Spanish Influenza in 1916; all that's left now is a few empty homes and a whole lot of graves. It's got a cemetery twice the size of the whole city.
Couldn't ask for a better place to finish this.
I flip my coat collar up against the brisk morning chill and fish around in my pockets for another foil-wrapped stick of gum. The .45 is a reassuring lump against the back of my knuckles. It doesn't count for much — not against what's coming. But it's something.
The first automobiles show up early. Too early. Two topless Buicks; dark burgundy. Their engines growl with irritation as they approach the cemetery's gates. I don't need a crystal ball to know who sent them.

"Mr. Capone is not taking visitors at this time."
Twenty-four hours before I'll be standing in the middle of a cemetery, I'm sitting in a ridiculously expensive leather chair worth more green than I'll see in the span of my career. The rest of the office is just as fancy. Full of things I want to grab and smash just on goddamn principle.
The lawyer is one of the Outfit's front-men; a freshly shaven baby-face plopped between Capone and his illicit dealings. Between him and men like me. I eye him up while chewing on a fresh stick.
"That's fine." I pull the gum-wad out of my cheek and flatten it down on the chair's fancy upholstery with my thumb. "I thought he might want to know about the meat-monger helping Weiss muscle in on his territory. But if he's not concerned about some Sarkite hocking miracles to the Northsiders, I guess you're right. Ain't got a thing to chat about." I turn to go.
I just lobbed three or four key-words right into his face. For a moment, he just stares at me — slack-jawed — as his brain tries its hardest not to fry itself inside his skull.
"Wait. Ah, wait," he finally manages, voice trembling. "Just, um, wait a moment, and let me —"
I stop and fold my arms around my chest. When I turn, I 'accidentally' bump an expensive looking vase with my elbow.
The sound of it shattering on the floor is the third best thing I'll hear all day.

The Buicks circle like vultures around a carcass. They finally slip through the cemetery gate and settle on a spot about ten yards ahead. Five suits step out. The man in front is the lead; he's large and burly, with a dark coat and a painfully bright red tie.
They approach as one, weaving their way through the maze of crooked, tilted headstones. Ol' Red-Tie gives me a solid once-over.
"Mr. Hartliss, I presume."
I unwrap the stick of gum and pop it into my mouth. "That's me."
"I was told you had some information that might be of use to my employer."
"Yep."
Silence follows. I can feel Red-Tie's patience wearing thin. But I've got to stall — the timing on this is critical. If I get it wrong, I'll be joining the bones under our feet.
"And?"
"Weiss is working with a meat-monger. He's the reason you've been having so much trouble with the North Side Gang — the Sarkites have been giving him support."
Red-Tie scowls. "Yeah? And what're the meat-mongers getting out of this deal?"
I hold my breath and lift my eyes toward the distant horizon. When I see what's coming, I start to smile.
Two cream-white Cadillacs. Both of them coming in fast.
"Why don't you ask them yourself?"

The assistant's face is perfect. Too perfect. Everything about it makes me want to rearrange it with my fists — from that chiseled jaw to those baby-blue eyes, all the way up to that ridiculously well-coiffed hair.
"Dr. Reinhardt sees no one without an appointment," he informs me, lifting that square jaw up into the air. Like he's just daring me to take my shot.
Twelve hours before I'll be standing in the middle of a cemetery, I'm in front of a door in a ritzy office building tucked away in Chicago's bustling Loop district. I've been waiting two hours to have a face-to-face with Reinhardt; after three secretaries and four referrals, I've finally managed to track him down. The only thing between him and me is this 6-foot-5 slab of beef.
"I just want to give him a message." I pull out the letter.
He holds out his palm.
"It's a three-parter. The letter gives him a time and a place. Part two is a name: Aaron Lisowski. Can you remember that?"
He snorts.
"Repeat it for me."
"'Aaron Lisowski'. Now hand it over."
I hand him the letter. He slides it into his pocket.
"Ready for part three?"
He rolls his eyes. "Yeah, sure. Whatever."
I reel my arm back and take my shot. When it connects to that solid jaw, a jolt of pain stabs down through my shoulder and straight into the socket. The sound of his skull cracking against back of that door is worth it, though. Second best thing I'll hear all day.
"Tell him Volodya says hello."

The pair of Cadillacs settle some distance away from the Buicks. Two men emerge, each flanking the third.
Reinhardt. He's a short, handsome looking fellow with an easy smile. Light-skinned, light-haired. Perfect nose. Looks a lot like the muscle-head I clocked in his office.
He shows no fear. Reinhardt's not the sort of man who's afraid to come to a meeting like this in person. It's no wonder why; I can smell the magic on him. He's the real deal — a regular Harry Houdini. Just like Volodya.
Capone's men aren't panicking — not yet. Still, they're none too happy about this new development. All their guns are out. They keep their distance, watching Reinhardt as he approaches with his two flunkies.
"The hell is this?" Red-Tie asks.
Reinhardt stops a few yards away. Capone's boys have guns; Reinhardt has magic. And me?
I've got a fast mouth. Time to use it.
"This is Doctor Reinhardt, born Aaron Lisowski." I keep one hand in my pocket, squeezing the grip of my .45. "He immigrated here in 1918, right after the war. Part of a wave of Sarkites who came over from Europe, stealing people's identities."
Reinhardt's expression is cold, but there's a hint of amusement. Capone's men can't decide which one of us to point their pistols at.
"But he hit a snag. Sarkite magic can steal your looks, but it can't steal your past. That's where Weiss comes in. He uses his criminal connections to falsify documents and clean up the details. Reinhardt brings them over and gives them a new face; Weiss gives them a paper-trail. In exchange, Reinhardt helps Weiss with his little war."
"Very good, Mr. Hartliss." Reinhardt's smile is thin and sharp; it exposes both rows of teeth. All of them perfectly white, straight, and tiny. Just like his pecker, I wager.
Red-Tie takes a step back. I don't blame him. Capone's not a fan of magic — can't imagine any of his boys signed up to deal with face-stealing flesh sorcerers.
"One thing I don't get, though. Volodya. What you did to her — it was personal. Why?"
Reinhardt lifts one immacutely plucked eyebrow. "Personal?"
"You locked her away in a dingey apartment, carved out her tongue, then spilled her guts — all without so much as giving her a stiff drink. There's ruthless, then there's cruel."
Reinhardt laughs. "I suppose you could phrase it that way."
"So why? Fill me in."
Reinhardt tilts his head. "Do you know who she was, Mr. Hartliss? What she was?"
"A Sarkite. Like you."
For one moment — just one moment — that perfect face of his is twisted up with something fierce and baleful. It's gone as fast as it comes; a brief ripple across a tranquil pond. A pond filled with piranhas.
"Not like me." Flat and hard. "Nothing at all like me."
Looks like I touched a nerve. "So, what. You're not a Sarkite, now? Could have fooled me." I sniff the air. There's magic on Reinhardt's flunkies, too. They're just as steeped in the art as Reinhardt is. Both of them are big, rough looking bastards — probably just as hard to kill as Volodya.
"Her kind is a dying breed — stagnant and obsessed with the old ways. We represent the new ways, Mr. Hartliss. A new Sarkite for a new century. We apply scientific rigor to rote and ritual, separating truth from superstition. We cull the weak from the herd."
"Alright," Red-Tie interrupts. "Look, boys, you've clearly got some issues to work out, so we'll just leave you —"
Reinhardt laughs. "None of you are going anywhere." He and his men smile. Those teeth are no longer white, small, and straight. There's also a lot more of them than there ought to be.
The ground under my feet stirs.
"That's right," I tell them. "No one's going anywhere. Not until everyone's had a chance to speak their peace."
Everything that's happened up until this point — everything — is worth it. Just for that one moment. That one moment when Reinhardt's expression goes from smug condescension to puzzlement, followed by confusion — followed by dawning horror.
Reinhardt's used to being the monster. He's used to being the thing in the shadows; he's used to being the thing that terrifies you.
But Wilhelm Reinhardt has never met Richard Chappell.

Three hours before I'll be standing in the middle of a cemetery waiting to die, I'm staring across the bar at a man with a mouth full of rusted nails, razor-blades, and broken glass. Each jagged piece replaces a tooth; when his mouth closes, their edges lock together to form a splintered, horrible whole.
Another man sits next to me, nursing his drink. Neither he nor his companion are armed. For them, carrying a gun would be like throwing matches at a forest fire.
The man ahead grinds his jaw. Sparks flash. The screech is not unlike that of a train's brakes squealing across steel. I try not to grimace.
Blood dribbles from his mouth.
"He's asking what you want to say to Chappell."
I take a long breath and close my eyes. "Weiss and Capone are having a meeting."
Corroded iron clashes against glass. I can feel the sound in my molars. My fingers squeeze the edge of that bar so hard that I expect to leave divots.
"Regarding?"
When it comes to men like this, you choose your words very carefully. You keep your head down; you play it straight. And you never, ever tell a lie. Not to men like this. Not to men who work for Chappell. Not to the Chicago Spirit.
Not unless you know precisely what lie to weave.
Something in my throat slides up and seizes hold of my tongue. When I speak, the words are not my own — but someone else's.
"They're joining forces," Volodya tells them. "Capone and Weiss want to work with Reinhardt to take down the Chicago Spirit."

The ground erupts beneath us.
Hands — wet, red hands, glistening like the moistened skin of a beached whale — tear their way out from the earth below. Capone's men start firing wildly; they scream as the hands grasp and clutch at them. I feel a brief pang of pity.
They might be bastards, but they're not magic bastards. They deserve to go out the way they expected. I slide the .45 out of my pocket and stride toward them, unloading five shots; one for each temple. As their screams are silenced, Red-Tie's slackened face looks up at me with something between gratitude and fury. The hands drag their corpses down into the splintered, cracked earth.
One bullet left. I turn to Reinhardt and his men. His flunkies are just screaming, but Reinhardt's trying to spit out some sort of spell. Won't do him any good — all the magic in the world couldn't stop what's coming. His chant is interrupted by viscera-glazed claws gouging deep into his flesh. Strip by strip, his outer shell is torn away — the expensive suit, the stylish hair, the perfect skin. Until all that's left is something wet, pink, and screaming.
The smell of rancid meat fills the cemetery.
Wisps of smoke rise from the graves. Several tombstones creak and list to the side. As Reinhardt's men go under, the doctor lunges forward to grab fistfuls of dirt. He paws frantically at the soil, trying to pull himself out. I step forward and aim the pistol at his forehead. For just a moment, our eyes meet.
I see his terror — his desperation — his fear. Silently, he begs me for the one thing he's probably never shown a single living soul in his long, miserable life. Mercy. Please.
I point the pistol away and fire.
He sinks — shrieking — into the spoiled bowels of the earth.
That final howl is the best goddamn thing I've heard all day.
The hole closes. The cemetery stills. I can still hear Reinhardt's muffled, anguished screams. Five minutes later, the screams are just whispers.
Twenty minutes later, I stop listening. In pace requiescat.
I pocket my pistol, spit out my finished wad of gum, then help myself to the brand new Cadillac waiting for me at the cemetery's gates.

"Last night, Capone left Chicago in a hurry. Nobody knows why." September doesn't bother to mask her annoyance on the other end of the phone line. "I'm guessing it might have something to do with how twenty six people disappeared in the space of a few hours, though. A few doctors, a few public officials, some business owners, seven police officers —"
"Sarkites," I tell her. "Or, I don't know. 'New Sarkites'."
"'New Sarkites'?"
"Reinhardt was babbling about it right before the end. I didn't stop to take notes or see if he had a pamphlet. Anyway, he and Volodya had some sort of falling out — I imagine she didn't take kindly to her grandson abandoning the old ways. Giving up his face, his accent, his culture —"
"His own grandmother? Are you sure?"
The lump in the back of my throat throbs.
"Yeah. Pretty sure."
"So what happened?"
"I told them to go to hell."
"And?"
"They did."
"Hartliss —"
"Look, September. You wanted me to figure out how Weiss was pulling off his magic tricks, so I did. Now Reinhardt and his meat-mongers are gone. What's left to talk about? Besides where you ought to be mailing my check."
She pauses. "Mr. Gallant would prefer it if you didn't —"
"Tell Michael Gallant he can go sit on a flagpole and spin."
She sighs. "Alright, Mr. Hartliss. Thank you for your services."
I hang up the phone, flip up my collar, and fish around for another stick of gum.
Capone will be back, probably. I doubt the Outfit is done with the Windy City. As for Weiss? Without Reinhardt's help, he'll be easy pickings for men like Capone. And Chappell?
Well. The less said about him, the better.
All in all, not a bad way to make 350. Ought to keep the landlady happy for another month. I make my way down the street, chewing away at my gum — trying to ignore the burning lump that lingers in the back of my throat.


PeppersGhost

A Diminished Thing by PeppersGhost

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Deep breaths.
Deeeeep breaths.
Focus. Gotta focus. Gotta stay calm.
You've been trained in memetics, Harry.
You can do this.
You can break through.
You just have to concentrate.
The cell is six feet tall with a square meter of floorspace and a tree in the middle. Barely enough room to stand, but not enough room to lie down comfortably. Especially with the tree. I do push-ups against the wall to get myself pumped up for the big moment. Today I'm getting out of here. I have to get out of here.
I hear a soft hydraulic hiss from the speakers—the telltale sound of someone entering the containment antechamber. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. The mics are on. For the next few minutes, I'll be able to talk to them. I have to make it count.
A panel in the wall is pulled back and I see Valente smiling at me through reinforced glass. His beard is noticeably longer than before.
Deep breaths. Deep fucking breaths.
"Good morning," Valente says. "Good to see you up and active."
I don't reply. The opening formalities are almost never transcribed. Better to save myself for the real thing.
Valente's eyes shift downward and his arms shuffle slightly. I can only see him from the chest up, but I know he's looking at a prepared interview outline, if not an outright script. If I pull this off, he's going to need to improvise.
"Please state your name for the record."
Moment of truth.
"Hello," I begin. It's familiar. Universal. Makes it easier to hear through whatever preterlinguistic bullshit I'm dealing with. "My name is Doctor Heerad Sangha. I am designated SCP two-three-three-seven, as you told me previously."
I hold my breath.
“Thank you,” says Valente. His expression hasn't changed.
I feel my heart drop to the floor.
"Fuck!"
"Listen, SCP two-three-three-seven—"
"I'm Harry fucking Sangha, Val!"
"—you seem to have a pre-established relationship of sorts with several of the more dangerous creatures in our custody."
I pound my fists on the glass. Valente has no reaction. I scream.
"Fuck!"
"Yes. Please elaborate on the exact nature of this relationship."
"Oh, I'll fucking elaborate, Val! I played the game of cosmic fucking Russian roulette, just like you, except there was a bullet in my chamber. I poked at one too many soft points in reality and someday you will too, my friend. That's probably where it all fucking comes from, over and over, we all just keep ending up on the other side of the glass. Fuck!"
Valente looks confused and slightly annoyed. My hands are sore from pounding on the glass. I'm breathing heavily now. So much for calm. So much for focus.
I have to get out of here.
I have to get—
"Please repeat that statement in the dialect used by the Foundation."
"Go to hell, Val!"
The floor rushes up to meet me. I'm on my knees, sobbing, forehead pressing into the base of the tree. All the months I'd been here I'd kept it cool. And here I am, grown-ass man with a PhD, crying his fucking eyes out into the last stupid fucking tree he'll see until the day he dies.
"Please discontinue yodeling."
I wipe my eyes on my naked arms to clear off the tears and snot. The fluids mix with the bits of bark and grit on my face, and I begin to seriously regret my meltdown.
"I'm not making any sense to you, am I?"
"We need you to cooperate and explain your answer in a coherent way."
"What's the fucking point? I've tried everything I can and nothing gets through! You can ask anything you want, it's pointless!"
I turn to face him. He's got that look of a long-suffering scientist who spent decades of his life earning degrees. A man who left every relationship he had to join a shadow organization, only to end up bored, frustrated, and confused. I had that look once. I envy it.
"You're not hearing me, are you?" he asks me.
"No, you're not fucking hearing me, asshole. Fuck you!"
He stares at me blankly for a second, and I swear I see him roll his fucking eyes.
"… cack?" he says. He's looking at me the way a teenage babysitter looks at a toddler that just shat its pants.
I slam the glass again. In the distance, I hear laughter.
"Is that what I fucking sound like?! Motherfucking shit fuck fuck!"
Valente heaves a big, weary sigh. He tucks his hands in at his sides and makes this shiteating, condescending, motherfucking face. My hands shake. Everything disappears except his fucking face and that fucking, fucking laughter.
"Snackutations Doctor Spanko, cack!" he squeaks. "You am authoritater? Explainerate."
Time seems to stand still and move in fast forward all at once. I'm beating against the glass with a thick branch I don't remember breaking off. Valente is alarmed. He's reacting. I beat at the glass with everything I have, barely registering the spots of blood flying off my hands.
The glass cracks. It shouldn't be possible. None of this should be possible. None of this should be happening. The laughter is so loud I can hardly see.
The glass breaks.
Valente covers his eyes to shield them from errant shards. The branch in my hands is different. It is my hands. Glass is growing from the end of it. Why not? I smile my first genuine smile in months. None of this should be happening to me. None of it is going to happen to you, Val.
He's on the floor. I reach into the antechamber. There's a sting on my ass.
The laughter fades.
The world goes dark.
Dude, oh my god, oh my god. It's just the gift that keeps on giving. They shot him in the ass, dude!
Yeah, we're totally going to hell for this.


Kit lay on his back, staring up at the ever-changing clouds of a British Summer afternoon. Maybe it would rain, later, but right now he couldn't smell it – couldn't sense anything of the weather other than the clouds so far above him.
‘I'm looking at the shape of tiredness,' he thought, languidly.
That uneven, rarely repeating pattern of clouds was a herd of tiredness threatening to trample the city.
Well, that would suck. But then again, insomnia for one person alone was the very centre of a suckpool. Despite his dragging weariness and the sploshed bruise across his face – interestingly, itself the colour of tiredness – Kit had a house on fire, that day.
As he stood, he absently brushed mown grass from his rumpled clothing. Upon looking around, he was slightly surprised to find that the grassy area had become infested with picnickers – families, couples, friends. The smell of BBQs was tangy in the air.
Kit ignored squealing children and parents protesting as he stepped and tripped over picnic blankets, having to make his own pathway out of the chaos because the small section in the middle of the city wasn't really designed for such things as people trying to enjoy the broken summer day.
Once he was through the maze of picnic-havers, he checked the deep pockets of his coat and gently stroked what he found within them. Good. They were still there, waiting.
Stepping into the city proper, Kit took the twisty-turny roads, trying to avoid tourist traffic and the more well-trodden streets. A hidden and barren junction of alleyways and then exhausting climbs (well, for an insomniac, pack-a-day smoker) took him to Muesli Mountain. From there, he walked through an old graveyard and into an even older park that was overgrown and smelt musty, of damp wood and churned soil.
He took himself off the pathway and walked towards the back of the area, taking a deep breath as he found the correct tree, marked with a nearly indeterminable infinity loop near its base. He used to be self-conscious fulfilling this ritual, but the things rattled mercilessly in his pocket and the sweat on his palms reminded him of his task.
He just had to get in, find his target, and get out. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.
Reminding himself of this, he put his hand on the trunk of the tree and closed his eyes tight. A middle-aged couple walking their dog nearby gaped and then hurried along, muttering about ‘damn stoners'.
Kit let the breeze ruffle through his hair and matched his breathing with the faint life pulse of the tree, once the world was silent enough around him that he could hear it, though it always seemed to be more with his head than with his ears.
The chant, at least, was only in his head for sure.
‘Imagine a market here. Imagine people yelling their wares. Imagine the man who wants preemie pies. Imagine why someone not made of tin may want a heart. Imagine why someone with a brain of their own may want the still-pink brain of a young woman who had killed herself. Imagine how courage may look, feel, and smell, if you could bottle it. Imagine yourself there, and sell them your sacrifice.
I, Kit, willingly wish to visit the Meat Market. I accept my fate and do not hold the Market libel for any maiming, crushing, murdering, dismemberment or defenestration that may happen to my person whilst visiting. I have your sacrifice and I wish for…'
What did he wish for? He could ask for anything. Didn't mean he would get it, but he could ask. But his outstretched hand was trembling, and he was sweating buckets. The bruise on his face ached with every distant heartbeat.
‘And I wish for Bloom.'
The world went silent around him. No breezes, no birds, no strangers' footsteps. Then it span and he lost grip on the tree, slamming into the ground which had gone from grass to cobblestone paths. His ribs ached as he struggled to catch his breath whilst waiting out the dizziness.
He put out his hands to lever himself up, and they were nearly trodden on by someone with very big feet that had no toes. The owner of the feet grumbled about ‘outside trash' and Kit waited until they had moved on before scrambling to his own feet.
Regardless of how many times he had been here before, the change always amazed him. The park was gone, instead replaced with an area with stalls as far as the eye could see, and probably further than that. Manning these stalls – and they were always men, Kit had noticed – were beings that called out their wares. They all spoke in English to him, with a variety of accents, but, from what Kit understood of this place, English was not what everyone else heard.
The clouds in the sky were gone, replaced with a domed roof that seemed to go on and on, carrying the acoustics of the market. Entities jostled for space and for attention, with some stalls serving more as pop-up stores, whilst others were little more than folded tables with a few items spread on them.
Some had banners – some didn't have as much as black marker on a piece of card. Kit squeezed into a space he could find between ‘Pied Piper's Preemie Pies' and ‘Bob's Meat and Two Veg' whilst he found himself still recovering from the dizzying sensation. A voice nearby called out in an East London accent, identical to his mother's, causing profound nostalgia and a flinching pain in equal measures.
Those who didn't know the way to the Market still saw the illusion of the park (or was it the Market that was the illusion?), with Kit's human body slumped in front of the tree, as if sleeping – or collapsed. It hadn't taken him long to figure out he had limited time in this place, if only for the fact that some Good Samaritan would eventually rush to his side and try to rouse him. If that happened, he would be dragged from this place, whether a deal was struck or not.
So, Kit doggedly got to the business of moving towards one of the more unassuming stalls that he knew offered Bloom in exchange for anything of a human, with the quality dipping based on what one had to exchange.
He slipped past ‘Vincent's (slightly used) Vulvas!' and ‘Here's Lookin' at You, Kid!' before reaching his destination, mumbling the occasional ‘excuse me' and ‘sorry' to the variety of creatures that had followed their own unique rituals to come into this world.
He was glad to find the queue wasn't really a queue at all – someone stood at the table, with just one very tall bipedal creature with huge, hunched shoulders ahead of him, waiting for the last transaction to finish up. When the being turned around to see what the tiny human behind him was doing, Kit saw they had no face, yet they still managed to grunt, though if it was in greeting or disgust, Kit couldn't be sure.
When the tall thing reached the front, they took a machete from the pocket of their long, dark coat. No-one seemed shocked or even surprised at the action, not even when the being bent himself down and began to chop at their ankle. Only the noise of the blade slicing flesh, cutting tendons, smashing through bone, was present, rather than the screams of anguish and noises of panic that would be displayed within the world of humans.
Even Kit was becoming somewhat immune to the sight of extreme self-mutilation, although words flashing through his mind such as ‘sinew' and ‘throbbing gristle' still offered an element of disgust.
Kit's own shin ached in sympathy, then he realised the being was literally radiating pain – sharing it out amongst creatures within a certain radius, as some now walked with a slightly uncomfortable limp whilst others shot daggers at the thing, clearly not impressed by their technique at dealing with the pain.
It seemed like a wise idea, really – rather than absorbing all that pain on ones' own, share it out in small doses to those around you. Still, it all seemed rather invasive without asking permission, first.
Job done, the tall being dumped its butchered foot on the table. Kit wondered if he would ever be so addicted that he would willingly cripple himself, and, in a sudden moment of realisation, he figured out why exactly the creature in front of him didn't have a face. He would never get that desperate, right?
The sale in front of him concluded, and the tender was doing a poor job of cleaning up the blood that had pooled on the table, and had apparently pooled there many times before, if the stains were to go by. Maybe that was why he didn't exactly seem to care, and why this table wasn't as busy as some.
Beckoned forward by the seller, a squat man who seemed human enough, with a bald, greasy head and tiny eyes, Kit grabbed his ‘sacrifice' from his pocket and approached, spreading them out onto the table. The man eyed them with disinterest. He got countless numbers of this cheap tat every day, but no-one could afford to turn down a customer who may one day be desperate enough to sacrifice an arm and a leg, so he dealt with these piddly offers the best way he could.
Picking them up one at a time, making a big deal about checking their cut-marks, how decomposed they were, even their temperature. Kit knew there was a market for everything here, from the fresh to the totally mummified, but fresh tended to sell better – so did the ones with neater cut marks, and lighter skin tones.
He looked down at the table as there was a series of clattering noises.
“We don't take the ring-things here. Take back to human world, maybe they give you money, cash.”
The man spoke in a definite Russian accent, sharp and blunt, but with slang he had probably picked up from working here. They used the slang that the alleyway world did too, which Kit was slowly getting the hang of, for the good it did him.
“That's fine, fine.” He muttered, simply, collecting up the rings that had been removed from the fingers and slipping them into his pocket. Two plain gold bands – or maybe just gold-plated – and a silver ring with a low-quality diamond. Cash wasn't really forefront in his mind right now, but he was sure it would be next time he needed tobacco.
“Okay, kitlet. That's a lock.” The man said, and Kit let out a breath that he didn't know he had been holding. So far, he hadn't had a no to anything he had brought in as a sacrifice, but Lady Luck wasn't exactly known to be a friend of his, so he expected that to be challenged, one day.
The Russian reached inside his trenchcoat and got out a tiny vial, letting Kit see the goods inside – Kit examining it just as closely as the seller had done with the fingers, looking at its quality. The colour of the petals – purple, with a hint of blue at the end. Good stuff then. Not top of the line, but good. They curled in slightly, so he knew it was freshly produced – however it was produced – and it would last him a while. An increasingly short amount of time, but he didn't really want to think about that just then.
“No touch, no smell,” the seller recited, as if Kit was going to ask, when he knew better than that by now. Kit was entranced by the flower as he had been so many times before, but snapped out of it when he paused to actually count the petals.
“…Four? Only four?! I gave you…” His shaking hands spread the dismembered fingers across the seller's filthy table. “…Six. Six perfectly good fingers!”
The seller smirked, Kit's shaking hands speaking volumes, telling him he could have offered him less and Kit would have been convinced to take it. Still, he wanted his prey customer to keep coming back for more.
“Supply and demand, kitlet. Come back, an arm, a leg? Maybe we talk.” The man shrugged.
“Fine.” Kit muttered, curtly. “That's a lock, you…” He thought better of cursing the man out, knowing it wouldn't do anything worthwhile anyway. Instead, he snatched the small vial before any more deals could be discussed – and before he could change his mind and storm off to get a quote from the stars elsewhere.
Kit disappeared into the crowd, little more than a speck on most people's radar, apart from a set of dark blue eyes watching from in between two stores.
“Oh Kit… What have you got yourself into now?” The voice whispered, forlornly, before the eyes – and their owner – sunk back into the darkness to watch the rest of the Market from the shadows.

« Twenty Minutes | Hub | Kit, The Storyteller »


“I have known Auden Klose ever since he got expelled from SVA a few years back. I will not go into detail on why we was kicked out, let's just say his artwork had too much Are We Cool Yet? flair. I was the one who first introduced him to the movement, had him meet with artists, showed him galleries. Auden was excited, determined to match the level of edge and risk of some of the pieces. I found it endearing. He often talked to me about his thoughts, always asking for my opinion for every bit of sketch, every word, every idea that occasionally pops out of that odd head of his.
“Was I wrong to deny commentary that one time? Was I wrong to ask him ‘but what do you think?' the last time we spoke?
“Outdoor Object of Ordinance is, for lack of a better word, absurd. For the first time in two decades as an art critic, I cannot find the words to describe how I feel about Auden's submission in 2014. Regardless of my personal feelings towards Outdoor Object of Ordinance and Auden, I believe it to be a reflective thinkpiece. It woke me up, got me thinking of what has become of the essence of Are We Cool Yet? since it was formed in 1874? I worry that it's plummeted into a contest of who can make the most outrageous thing, empty without an idea behind the creative process. To me, Auden has successfully created a raw concept of irony, be it through a sincere submission or a practical joke.”
-Boris Mauclair, Auden Klose: A Biography (2018)

“What is Outdoor Object of Ordinance? Nothing. It is nothing. It is certainly miles away from what Auden Klose's ‘associates' describe it to be. Whatever Klose have said or written about it absolutely cannot convince me that this man did not simply buy a park bench, stare at it for a few minutes, and decide to bullshit his way up to success. That bench is not groundbreaking. It's a bench, for God's sake! Even speaking about it infuriates me. I swear I'm going to shoot something if you force me to say anything more about this.”
-Lucy Baxandall, Are We Cool Yet? Critics' Meet-up Interview (2015)

“I can tell you Auden definitely did not expect the reception he received for Outdoor Object of Ordinance. Based on that reaction, I'm almost certain he submitted the bench as a joke. But I honestly wasn't sure what he'd been thinking at the time, or if he even realised what kind of people make up the Are We Cool Yet? movement.
“Anyway, the critics liked that bench enough for it to draw a lot of attention from the rest of us. While some gazed at him with a wee twinkle in their eye, most were not impressed, and it really was funny for a while. I mean, Auden divided people with a park bench. That had me laughing for days. The word to describe Auden Klose is ‘naive', but I cannot fault him for not seeing the ultimate consequence of his submission. Even I didn't see it coming.”
-Griselda Kimmelman, Anartist Discussion Panel (2015)

“Outdoor Object of Ordinance was a stroke of unconventional genius. What Auden Klose made was an anomaly within context. To create a piece like such would involve the mind of a revolutionist. One would need a good amount of bravery to even think of something like it, especially for Are We Cool Yet? where statement matters most.
“As such a young addition to the movement, this fresh new approach enraged traditionalists. On the other hand, several would see this as the beginning of a postmodernist-esque era in Are We Cool Yet?. Klose's death became a closing statement for his first and only contribution to the movement, a sort of signature for his thought-provoking ideology.”
-Eric Fuller, Underlined Muse: The Modern Cool (2017)

“I don't know the kid, but yeah, I recognised him ‘cause he hung out in the park a lot, talked to me a couple a' times. I reckon he was some sorta hipster art student, the way he dressed and all. Anyway, I found him hanging around his usual spot but it was weird, y'know, no- not ‘cause it was about four in the morning. Sometimes he'd turn up around that time, that ain't the weird part.
“So I saw him. He… He was just sitting there, cup of coffee in his hand. Thought he was just staring into space or he fell asleep or something, I dunno. Thought I'd check on him to see if he's alright. But, um, no. He was dead, officer.
“… I dunno how he died. I found a piece of paper stuck on the bench. It said something fancy like… I can't remember. Something like ‘ordinary'. I dunno, it was weird ass shit…”
-Anonymous, NYPD Interview (2014)

“Auden Gerard Klose was found at Central Park, Manhattan in the state of suspended animation out of anomalous causes. The individual or individuals responsible of this is unknown as of now, however evidence suggests it was done by associates of the underground terrorist group, Are We Cool Yet?, as Klose is known to be affiliated with the group. Klose has been deemed deceased in official documents and a team has been dispatched for cover-up protocol. Containment specialists are currently in the process of safely transporting Klose to Site-28.
“Note: Investigation shows Klose's only contribution to Are We Cool Yet? is an installation titled ‘Outdoor Object of Ordinance'. The object has been terminated under the order of Researchers Kelly and Reynolds shortly after dispatch to Site-28 due to lack of evidence of anomalous properties.”
-Special Agent Deandra Moore, Field Report 132-414 (2014)

“Nothing about Auden Klose is 'normal' by any standard. He is the type of person who cannot fit in any group, too outrageous for ‘regular' artists, too simple for Are We Cool Yet?, et cetera. I admire that about him, how delightfully opposite he is from his recent submission, Outdoor Object of Ordinance. I have been in the movement longer than he has, and I am beyond impressed of how little it took for him to get it.
"I am not afraid to admit that I am obsessed with Auden Klose and his bench. He has inspired me to create an installation piece as an homage for his. I already know what I'm going to call it; ‘Subject of Ordinance'.”
-Hormazd Mullen, Subject of Ordinance Process Journal (2014)