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jwargod . A young man and his wife are forced to take desperate measures in an apocalyptic world where even one’s own body may betray them.
This story is a side-quell to Shattered Realities, Altered Bodies 1. It takes place in a dimension to the left of that tale. The introduction speech is (almost) the same, but then things start to slide into a mess all its own. For this version of Morris and his wife will find themselves affected by the breakdown of reality in completely different ways. (Other stories in the series can be found on the Shattered Realities, Altered Bodies Series Index Page)
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Shattered Realities, Altered Bodies 6
By: DankeDonuts
https://www.furaffinity.net/user/dankedonuts/
Reality is broken. I don’t mean that in a nihilistic way, even if it is a shitty world we live in now. I mean one day the rainbows touch the ground, and burn everything and everyone they touch into a blackened husk. The next, your lover converts into a gaseous form burps themselves to death. A week later, the flowers grow mouths and start telling your most incriminating secrets to the word. Until the rainbows kill them. Rumor is, every female of childbearing age in Syracuse gave birth to a full-size Winnebago, and now there’s a fleet of gore-covered RV’s hunting the land for captives to take kicking and screaming to the Grand Canyon. Did I mention the Grand Canyon has teeth now?
Physics, the laws of conservation of mass, you-being-you; they’re all facts you can rely upon anymore.
How’d it happen? Fuck if I know. The TVs and internet were the first things to go. After the first waves of panic and looting, the survivors started circulating horrific stories. Tales of battles being waged across a crumbling civilization. Soldiers in gear covered in bright, glowing lines vs all kinds of crazy shit. Saber-toothed barbarians. Living thunderstorms. Fish-men with skin so poisonous most folk go blind before they can shoot one. Nameless horrors from other dimensions.
And the worst bit? The only part of the reports that stayed consistent? It wasn’t even our war. This Earth is just a place that some Kaiju stomped all over on their way to their actual target.
. . .
The SilverShape Distribution center -- situated in what had once been Queens, New York -- had been the site of America’s last riot. Torn to the ground in the wake of America’s collapse, its ruined hulk lay stretched out across a half mile of twisted terrain. The site had been conquered, looted, covered in gang-signs and epithets a dozen times over since the last gasp of the New York Junta. A scavenger would have to be desperate or foolish to try combing it for anything of use. Morris Fletcher and his wife were perhaps a bit of both.
Morris’ hirsute hand reached out from a dark burrow set below a pitted section of concrete wall. Something hard, cool and coiled met his palm. Steel rebar! Morris clasped on with all his might, and was pulled upwards into the open air. His dirty-blonde hair was caked in filth, but that was hardly anything new. He was far more concerned about his exposed skin, which he thoroughly checked over for any scrapes or scratches. In the New World, these were vectors of entry for all kinds of mutative nastiness. Staying alive meant finding food, water and shelter. Staying yourself meant taking far more precaution.
The woman who helped him back onto his feet was bright-eyed and dark-skinned. Much -- but not all -- of the tension in Morris’ shoulders drained away just for seeing her alive and safe. Like him, she was dressed in a motley collection of scrap in desperate need of re-sewing. He had to admit, she looked pretty good in half a tux.
“Did you find anything?” he whispered. Reflexively checking the horizon for any sign that his words might have been overheard. The sky above the clouds was practically indistinguishable from an ocean; blue-green and turbulent. The noontime sunlight filtered through this firmament in yellow-white swatches.
“Yes, I did! Something you’ll want!” Bianca smiled. Her voice low but exited. He hadn’t seen her so happy in a long time. Not since before the third member of their union had died. She reached into the large purse strapped over one shoulder. Producing a single metallic cylinder, not much larger than an Old World asthma inhaler. It was embossed with a large, many-pointed star surrounded by smaller siblings.
He greedily scooped it out of her hands that he could read the words for himself under the dim light:
WARNING: SilverShape nanogenes are a treatment for mutogenesis only, NOT A CURE! Upon injection, proprietary nanotecnology will analyze the subject’s DNA and physical attributes, and will work to counter any and all spontaneous changes to either via selective counter-changes. These microscopic machines are self-sufficient, harmlessly absorbing heat and nutrients from the user’s bloodstream and building replacement units as needed. Under optimal conditions, they should continue to function throughout the user’s lifespan. DO NOT USE IF ALREADY UNDERGOING MUTOGENESIS! A legal disclaimer and instructions for use instructions for use followed this descriptive text.
Morris’ grin in triumph was mitigated by the memory of all that had been lost on the path to this moment. A bitter sigh escaped the man’s mouth. “If only they’d had more time…”
“... They could have made enough to keep everyone stable,” Bianca finished.
He shook his head. “To think, they used to use these things for recreational shapeshifting.”
“Back when they had recreation,” she mused darkly. “I wonder what that was like.”
“I wonder if a half-dose will do for us both.” Morris was looking over the injector. The device came to a flattened point at one end, and a faded red button resided at the other.
“We don’t have to share! There’s plenty more!” She jerked a hand towards the way she’d come. “For us, and everyone we love! Come on, I’ll show you!”
Bianca turned and walked quickly but quietly around the scattered debris. Soon, she was climbing over an incline of ruin. The tails of her tuxedo jacket bounced and bobbed over her shapely rear. Drawing his eyes almost hypnotically. While she remained focused solely on delivering her man to the summit of this mound. Morris’ heavy boots made the trek rather more difficult than she in her sneakers. But he managed to keep up. What he saw at the top was a marvel. He was standing at the rim of a vast crate made up of debris. It’s bowed heart curved clean through the building’s foundation and multiple levels of basement. Severed jags of steel frame, copper and PVC piping, and rusted duct-work framed every circle cut through the floors. Each of these diminishing in size until all the lowermost point, at the very center of the crater, lay a single, heavily shadowed room. The space in between had been jammed full with all manner of detritus. Many of which he only recognized from his mother’s tales, told round a campfire. A ‘photocopier’ two floors down to his left. A ‘telephone booth’ clockwise of that. And so on.
The man felt a wobble underneath his foot, and planted the other one all the firmer to keep from stumbling into the crater. “The building must have been bombed,” Morris surmised. “Mom used to say that she saw jets flying over the city when the troubles started. But not bombers. I wonder what was in this place that was so important someone decided to do… all this… to it?”
Bianca offered no suggestions. Only a long, pointed finger. Directed at the lower-most room. “I found it in there. I need your strong, manly arms to help me get the rest.”
He grinned at her jest. He hadn’t eaten any better than her these past few weeks, and his arms were the poorer for it. But his eyes remained on the prize. “How did you get all the way down there without help?” He asked. Wishing forlornly that they’d still had the telescope. But that, along with so many other things, had been lost with Charlie. Trying to puzzle out her route down the mess, he bought a hand up to block the light of a drowned sun and squinted in study. Silent in his search until... “Wait!” Something was moving in the shadowed space. A hand? An arm? He turned to his wife. “There’s someone down-”
“We’re so glad we found you!” Bianca said with great cheer. “We haven't fed this well in weeks!” Then she punched him. A solid haymaker than sent him tumbling down the inward of the incline.
“Nyyyhaaaa-ahaaaaaa!” He somersaulted over a slab of concrete. Skinned his knee on a girder. Rebounded off a toilet-stall door. Ragdolled helplessly over a cluster of broken delivery drones. Caught a flash of the crater’s rim, as he continued to circle mid-air; seeing not Bianca looking back, but a vaguely woman-shaped collection of rebar. His vision streaked white an instant later; he’d collided with an upturned filing cabinet. The impact slowed him enough that he was able to grasp on to the edge of a drafting desk, and hold on tight. He came to a stop just above the first level of basement. The shorn scraps of floor marking the hole reminded him very much of teeth.
He clambered up on top of the desk to wipe his bruised brow. “Ha… ha… hahahahaha!” Relief turned back to terror when he felt weight underneath himself shift and slide. Sending him toboggan-fast to his doom. Any hopes of slowing down as the crater leveled out were dashed by the wave of trash that came up from behind him to throw him the rest of the way into the exposed room. The maw of the beast!
He took to the air where an inky stink assaulted his nose. There was more than shadow to the chamber. There was something dark and stagnant and still. Something was floating in it. The doomed man’s skin began tingling the moment he splashed down. And continued to go down, down, down, into deeper brown brew that bordered on black lower still. He did not float upward at all, for this was not water. It tasted of vomit and motor oil.
Taken by instinct, he tried to fight his way upward. Hands curled to sweep more of the stinging substance downward, down, bring himself up. His lungs burned. His vision sparkled for lack of air. His muscles cramped up fiercely. Weighed down by his boots, or drawn down by the fluid, he could not breach the surface no matter how hard he tried. But he managed to get high enough to see from below form that had caught his attention from far above: Bianca! The real Bianca! She’d succumbed to this trap, and was no longer trying to fight her way out. Loose-limbed she drifted in total submersion. Her tux-tails bobbing about like another pair of limbs. Bubbles were coming from every pore, and out her ears and nose and mouth and the corners of her eyes. None of these reached the surface; rather, they took on a red tinge before dissipating into the alien medium.
Bubbles were coming from him, too. He could feel them navigating their way along his arms and legs and everywhere else where clothes met numbing skin. He heard the rush of them coming out his ears. He lost sight of Bianca through the torrent that emerged from his nose and skin.
He put up one last, great struggle to move against his fate. Not for his own sake, but for Bianca’s. To hold her one last time before succumbing to slow-motion digestion. And failed. Her foot just out of reach of his hand. Too anguished to resist a scream, he opened his mouth. Loosing a threesome of bubbles that held with them the last of his air. These alone reached the surface to release its spent gasses to the outside world. The rest fell to pieces all around him, their numbers growing and fading with every awful instant.
But Morris saw none of that as the fluid filled the vacuum in his lungs. Only a growing darkness that had nothing to do with the liquid’s color.
The blackness didn’t clear so much as twinkle into new light. Spark upon spark building upon one another until at last he realized he was looking at a campfire. At the opposite end was his freckle-faced mother, blue eyes glinting in the fire light as she smiled back at him. Her hair strawberry-blonde hair was short again; she’d been growing it and cutting it at its longest to make rope. She had denim dungarees on, and Dad’s fishing vest. A scrap of a baby’s blanket made do for neckerchief.
She was sitting up on a plastic milk-crate, seated next to a propane travel stove. To her left, a wavy-bodied radio played fuzzy static. Behind her was the camper-trailer they’d been living in since they’d fled Boston. Which was hooked to an antique sport utility vehicle, brownish-black, that had seen them well off of roads that were no longer safe.
As soon as he saw that car, Morris knew something was wrong.[i] This isn’t real, he told himself. There hadn’t been cars for years. Decades! Cars ran on gasoline. Gasoline had a shelf-life. There’s hasn’t been a gas station worth spit for… how long? He tried to count it down. Couldn’t. He looked to his hands to count on his fingers –
They were a child’s hands. And he couldn’t remember how to count.
He started crying. And that brought his mother to his side. She rubbed the tears again and asked him, “What’s wrong, my little survivor?”
He buried his face in her hands. “Tell me another story!” he begged, the tears only growing in number. “Tell me what the world was like! Tell me so I won’t forget them! I want to tell my own kids about how we lived! Like I’ll tell them about Dad and Crissy and eating ice cream together at Bunker Hill Park! I’m starting to forget! I don’t want to! I don’t want to” He could remember saying those words ages ago. He’d meant every one.
She smiled, and patted his head. Held him close. “Alright.” Rocking softly, she told him of the wonders in the world lost to them. Of cars that ran on magnets and 3D-printed organs that had saved countless lives including her own. Of sitting around a holographic telescreen with her family to watch the first manned rocket to Europa taking off. Of meeting the man she would one day marry in a virtual playground. Of the fun they’d have as newlyweds, using nanites to shapeshift into countless beings from their imaginations.
Her voice slowed. She was holding back her own tears now. “Your father and I couldn’t wait until you and your sister were old enough to get them. But that won’t happen now.”
“Get what?” He asked. Unable to recall what she’d just said.”
She stared back at him. “I… don’t remember. What we talking about?” There was a haziness about her eyes. She got up to pace. She always liked to walk when she thought. She moved back to her side of the fire. There had been something to either side of her seat, hadn’t there? Now there was only a grill. Had there been a sound in his ear? He cocked his head, concentrated, and heard a sort of fizzing.
Behind Mom, the camper was sitting by itself. There was a hole in the middle, rimmed by a metal frame. Had something been filling the hole? “I’ll figure it out soon, promise.” She disappeared to the right, still talking. But the fizzing was getting louder, too loud to make out her words.
He looked back to the lonely fire, assuming that was the source. Bubbles were forming a red froth at the edges of the flames. The flame popped and crackled, but there was nothing nearby to catch it.
There was nothing there but the trees and grass of the clearing he and his mother had chosen to camp at. “Mother!” He could remember [/i]her, but couldn’t begin to imagine where she had gone. Into something? A cave? A burrow? A cold emptiness gnawed its way into the child’s stomach. The whole of his body. “Mom!!! Where are you?!” The child reached a hand towards the emptiness where she had been.
It wasn’t a human hand. It was scaled. Clawed. Primitive.
He screamed, “What’s happening to me?!” Morris couldn’t hear his own question over the thunderous noise.
. . .
Morris screamed, and felt the weight of the world on his back, head, shoulders, every part of him. Or at least the weight of a small building. The crushing pressure permeated with a dank, greasy stink. A smell that spoke of waste and used-up things. He groaned against both, and summoned the will to fight them. Balling his hands to fists, he found something firm to clasp one around. With all his might, he pulled the rest of himself towards it. Then bullied his other arm through the debris that was smothering him, until he found another handhold. And another. And another. He shoveled scrap away from his shoulders with forceful turns of his head as he made his way up and up and up. He knew something was off about these pieces of himself he was using, but didn’t have time to think about it. He could feel, and almost control, a fifth limb that was slinking about between his rhythmically paddling legs, but he didn’t want to think about that!
One of hands touched cool, nightly air. Only this time there was no one to help him up. He made all the way out by sheer will. Breaching the surface and pulling his legs out with a final flurry of effort. Standing once more, he let out mighty roar of triumph. It was a roar he never would have made before. Delivered through a head that was so large and so long that he could now see a reptilian muzzle that had extended well past his eyes. It was scaled to the sides, a rusty reddish-brown. And feathered up the middle, with short, thin shafts of pinkish purple.
The sound of his own screaming was an alien thing. A warbling staccato that carried far and wide. Echoing off a familiar pile-up of to the east. Morris brought up and they were the same as same as he’d seen in the nightmare. His claws were black and long. The rust-scaled hands were bare from the wrists up. From behind, longer and more elaborately colored feathers reigned. A panicked look downward could not reveal the shape of his chest, not through the muzzle. But he could see that his feathered knees had moved significantly higher up on his body. His ankles well above the ground. The remaining feet were huge and scaly and clawed. Both ‘big toes’ dominated by exceptionally long, sickle-like blades.
Velociraptor. Utahraptor. Deinonychus. All these possibilities and more flashed through the mind of someone who had been old enough catch a youthful obsession with dinosaurs before the world went to Hell.
“No! No! No! Me not want!” A tail he wasn’t used to thrashed wildly about, driven by his panic. Striking multiple pieces of junk propped up atop the junkpile upon which he stood. The surprise, the pain, only inspired more rage. With hands and feet both, he tore into it all. Every box, every beam, every strange and half-ruined device that he could find no names for.
Only after he was thoroughly exhausted could he even begin to think about anything else. Like the fact that he was in a valley, or long pit of some sort. Filled nearly to the top with things that were more than junk. They had been useful once. But somehow, he couldn’t recall how. At the top of the pit were beings that might know, however. Beings of dark, coiled metal. With mangled pieces snaking out from central masses to play at being heads, arms and legs. They paid the dinosaur in their midst no mind at all. Too busy looking over other selections of debris, sharing silent conversations about same, and then tossing them down into the sea of refuse.
Morris realized things about himself, as well. First, that there were scraps of hide clinging to his wrists and around his neck. And a strip of hardened skin around his waist. It had a shrinking knot of something hard in the middle, keeping it bound to his body. ‘Metal,’ it might have named. The word was almost too far away to be recalled. Second, that he was not standing like a Velociraptor or Deinonychus should. Leaning their head forward and tail back. Rather they were standing like a man. No, he wasn’t... a man anymore? The predator sniffed the air, sniffed their body. The clues were flitting about in the sky, and embedded in feathers that also retained the greasy smell of something earlier. Something unpleasant. An almost bird-like body, didn’t offer much else in the way of clues, even after a thorough pat-down.
She didn’t have time to ponder the matter, however. Her rages had alerted someone else to her presence. A someone with very heavy feet, who was stampede their way across the midden-yard with thunderous fury. A dune of debris burst outward, revealing bulky form that had smashed through it rather than climb over. It was two-legged, brute-fisted version of an Ankylosaurus. All spikes and armored plates and attitude. Whipping behind them was a brutal, boney club that devastated anything it came into contact with. Their beakesh mouth screeched mighty when they caught sight of the Rapor. They charged, arms raised to destroy.
Morisiraptor backed away, stumbling along the way, arms raised in surrender that was not accepted. It was only a hunter’s instincts and a quick duck to the right that kept her face from getting punched through the back of her skull. “Why you want hurt me?” she begged as she continued to evade. Rather poorly given the uneven terrain.
The enemy punctuated each word of their answer with another blow. “You! Do! This! To! Me!” Only the last if these connected. But it was with the tail-club, so it was more than enough to launch Morisiraptor into the air.
“Heeaaarrgghhhh!” She landed on her back, momentum using her body to grind a lengthy trench in the garbage. The enemy was upon them before she could right herself. She threw up both forearms to protect her face. Very much expecting to lose one. “Not me! Was place!” She slapped the jumbled pile beneath. “It do! It swallow me! Spit me out like this!” A buried pain, once dredged up, crushed her heart and brought her to tears. “Kill wife! Bee-ank-ah!”
“Me Bee-ank-ah,” the other whispered, dropping his hands. Yes, he smelled like a ‘he’ somehow. “You Morris?”
The prone dino nodded. Attempted a smile. Which probably came off more like a threat, given her very thin lips and countless daggers in her mouth.
But it wasn’t a dagger grin that had the larger dino trembling. “Me was Bee-ank-ah. What am I now?” The once-monstrous opponent began to cry.
“Ankle-o-sarr,” the feathered one was quick to answer. Though their flattened tongue stumbled over a word she could see clearly in her mind. “Read it in a… in a…” The effort to recall where the information had come nearly split her head in half. “I forgot.”
“Not forgot,” whispered the herbivore. “It was taken. It… I dreamed… There was a place with many things to read. Grandparents took me there when I was little. Hid there from the fighting. The place had glowing boxes that... Aaarrruuuggghhh!” Thinking too hard on these things hurt him too, it seemed. “There was a sound, and things went away.”
“I had that dream too!” Morris insisted, rising to her feet. “I was with Mother! Then Mother gone. Was with other things, maybe. They went away too. I heard… something. It was coming from… from...” Sure words trailed off into an uncertain void.
There was a light of understanding in the spiny one’s eyes. “It come from the pit. It took…”
“It ate…” corrected Morisiraptor, bitten by the same thought.
“Cee-vee-lee-sashun!” concluded Bianklyosaur. He looked around. Kicked a little black rectangle with a small white circle at the bottom of its face. “I can’t think of what any of this stuff does. But I know I used to know.”
“I think they know now,” Morisiraptor pointed to the strange, metal beings. “Or their master.”
There was hatred in Bianklyosaur’s yellow eyes when he looked upon. Had the former woman been lured to into the dark water trap with the promise of a false cure, too? “Let’s go bust their asses.” He slammed one fist into the flat of his other hand. Creating a forceful boom of fleeing air that ruffled the other’s feathers.
Morisiraptor’s smile was now very much like a threat. Full of fang and vengeance. She tore loose the remains of clothing around herself, very easily. It felt good, and natural, to rip something apart. Hunter’s eyes pierced the stone wall’s shadows realty. “There. We can climb out way using that part of the cliff.”
“First the metal-men. Then the pit,” the bigger dino bellowed as he followed after his ate. “Then we smash everything!”
“Yes.” A line of drool collected on Morisiraptor’s jaw, and dropped to the jumbled surface below. This would be the Raptor’s first hunt! First kills! Her big toes tingle with excitement. “We will end them all and make this place our territory.”
The metal-men were still ignoring them. But not for long.
. . .
The World is broken.
We were broken.
One of the broken things made a mistake.
Now, my mate and I have the power to fight back.
<-- PREV | INDEX | NEXT -->
jwargod . A young man and his wife are forced to take desperate measures in an apocalyptic world where even one’s own body may betray them.This story is a side-quell to Shattered Realities, Altered Bodies 1. It takes place in a dimension to the left of that tale. The introduction speech is (almost) the same, but then things start to slide into a mess all its own. For this version of Morris and his wife will find themselves affected by the breakdown of reality in completely different ways. (Other stories in the series can be found on the Shattered Realities, Altered Bodies Series Index Page)
<-- PREV | INDEX | NEXT -->
Shattered Realities, Altered Bodies 6
By: DankeDonuts
https://www.furaffinity.net/user/dankedonuts/
Reality is broken. I don’t mean that in a nihilistic way, even if it is a shitty world we live in now. I mean one day the rainbows touch the ground, and burn everything and everyone they touch into a blackened husk. The next, your lover converts into a gaseous form burps themselves to death. A week later, the flowers grow mouths and start telling your most incriminating secrets to the word. Until the rainbows kill them. Rumor is, every female of childbearing age in Syracuse gave birth to a full-size Winnebago, and now there’s a fleet of gore-covered RV’s hunting the land for captives to take kicking and screaming to the Grand Canyon. Did I mention the Grand Canyon has teeth now?
Physics, the laws of conservation of mass, you-being-you; they’re all facts you can rely upon anymore.
How’d it happen? Fuck if I know. The TVs and internet were the first things to go. After the first waves of panic and looting, the survivors started circulating horrific stories. Tales of battles being waged across a crumbling civilization. Soldiers in gear covered in bright, glowing lines vs all kinds of crazy shit. Saber-toothed barbarians. Living thunderstorms. Fish-men with skin so poisonous most folk go blind before they can shoot one. Nameless horrors from other dimensions.
And the worst bit? The only part of the reports that stayed consistent? It wasn’t even our war. This Earth is just a place that some Kaiju stomped all over on their way to their actual target.
. . .
The SilverShape Distribution center -- situated in what had once been Queens, New York -- had been the site of America’s last riot. Torn to the ground in the wake of America’s collapse, its ruined hulk lay stretched out across a half mile of twisted terrain. The site had been conquered, looted, covered in gang-signs and epithets a dozen times over since the last gasp of the New York Junta. A scavenger would have to be desperate or foolish to try combing it for anything of use. Morris Fletcher and his wife were perhaps a bit of both.
Morris’ hirsute hand reached out from a dark burrow set below a pitted section of concrete wall. Something hard, cool and coiled met his palm. Steel rebar! Morris clasped on with all his might, and was pulled upwards into the open air. His dirty-blonde hair was caked in filth, but that was hardly anything new. He was far more concerned about his exposed skin, which he thoroughly checked over for any scrapes or scratches. In the New World, these were vectors of entry for all kinds of mutative nastiness. Staying alive meant finding food, water and shelter. Staying yourself meant taking far more precaution.
The woman who helped him back onto his feet was bright-eyed and dark-skinned. Much -- but not all -- of the tension in Morris’ shoulders drained away just for seeing her alive and safe. Like him, she was dressed in a motley collection of scrap in desperate need of re-sewing. He had to admit, she looked pretty good in half a tux.
“Did you find anything?” he whispered. Reflexively checking the horizon for any sign that his words might have been overheard. The sky above the clouds was practically indistinguishable from an ocean; blue-green and turbulent. The noontime sunlight filtered through this firmament in yellow-white swatches.
“Yes, I did! Something you’ll want!” Bianca smiled. Her voice low but exited. He hadn’t seen her so happy in a long time. Not since before the third member of their union had died. She reached into the large purse strapped over one shoulder. Producing a single metallic cylinder, not much larger than an Old World asthma inhaler. It was embossed with a large, many-pointed star surrounded by smaller siblings.
He greedily scooped it out of her hands that he could read the words for himself under the dim light:
WARNING: SilverShape nanogenes are a treatment for mutogenesis only, NOT A CURE! Upon injection, proprietary nanotecnology will analyze the subject’s DNA and physical attributes, and will work to counter any and all spontaneous changes to either via selective counter-changes. These microscopic machines are self-sufficient, harmlessly absorbing heat and nutrients from the user’s bloodstream and building replacement units as needed. Under optimal conditions, they should continue to function throughout the user’s lifespan. DO NOT USE IF ALREADY UNDERGOING MUTOGENESIS! A legal disclaimer and instructions for use instructions for use followed this descriptive text.
Morris’ grin in triumph was mitigated by the memory of all that had been lost on the path to this moment. A bitter sigh escaped the man’s mouth. “If only they’d had more time…”
“... They could have made enough to keep everyone stable,” Bianca finished.
He shook his head. “To think, they used to use these things for recreational shapeshifting.”
“Back when they had recreation,” she mused darkly. “I wonder what that was like.”
“I wonder if a half-dose will do for us both.” Morris was looking over the injector. The device came to a flattened point at one end, and a faded red button resided at the other.
“We don’t have to share! There’s plenty more!” She jerked a hand towards the way she’d come. “For us, and everyone we love! Come on, I’ll show you!”
Bianca turned and walked quickly but quietly around the scattered debris. Soon, she was climbing over an incline of ruin. The tails of her tuxedo jacket bounced and bobbed over her shapely rear. Drawing his eyes almost hypnotically. While she remained focused solely on delivering her man to the summit of this mound. Morris’ heavy boots made the trek rather more difficult than she in her sneakers. But he managed to keep up. What he saw at the top was a marvel. He was standing at the rim of a vast crate made up of debris. It’s bowed heart curved clean through the building’s foundation and multiple levels of basement. Severed jags of steel frame, copper and PVC piping, and rusted duct-work framed every circle cut through the floors. Each of these diminishing in size until all the lowermost point, at the very center of the crater, lay a single, heavily shadowed room. The space in between had been jammed full with all manner of detritus. Many of which he only recognized from his mother’s tales, told round a campfire. A ‘photocopier’ two floors down to his left. A ‘telephone booth’ clockwise of that. And so on.
The man felt a wobble underneath his foot, and planted the other one all the firmer to keep from stumbling into the crater. “The building must have been bombed,” Morris surmised. “Mom used to say that she saw jets flying over the city when the troubles started. But not bombers. I wonder what was in this place that was so important someone decided to do… all this… to it?”
Bianca offered no suggestions. Only a long, pointed finger. Directed at the lower-most room. “I found it in there. I need your strong, manly arms to help me get the rest.”
He grinned at her jest. He hadn’t eaten any better than her these past few weeks, and his arms were the poorer for it. But his eyes remained on the prize. “How did you get all the way down there without help?” He asked. Wishing forlornly that they’d still had the telescope. But that, along with so many other things, had been lost with Charlie. Trying to puzzle out her route down the mess, he bought a hand up to block the light of a drowned sun and squinted in study. Silent in his search until... “Wait!” Something was moving in the shadowed space. A hand? An arm? He turned to his wife. “There’s someone down-”
“We’re so glad we found you!” Bianca said with great cheer. “We haven't fed this well in weeks!” Then she punched him. A solid haymaker than sent him tumbling down the inward of the incline.
“Nyyyhaaaa-ahaaaaaa!” He somersaulted over a slab of concrete. Skinned his knee on a girder. Rebounded off a toilet-stall door. Ragdolled helplessly over a cluster of broken delivery drones. Caught a flash of the crater’s rim, as he continued to circle mid-air; seeing not Bianca looking back, but a vaguely woman-shaped collection of rebar. His vision streaked white an instant later; he’d collided with an upturned filing cabinet. The impact slowed him enough that he was able to grasp on to the edge of a drafting desk, and hold on tight. He came to a stop just above the first level of basement. The shorn scraps of floor marking the hole reminded him very much of teeth.
He clambered up on top of the desk to wipe his bruised brow. “Ha… ha… hahahahaha!” Relief turned back to terror when he felt weight underneath himself shift and slide. Sending him toboggan-fast to his doom. Any hopes of slowing down as the crater leveled out were dashed by the wave of trash that came up from behind him to throw him the rest of the way into the exposed room. The maw of the beast!
He took to the air where an inky stink assaulted his nose. There was more than shadow to the chamber. There was something dark and stagnant and still. Something was floating in it. The doomed man’s skin began tingling the moment he splashed down. And continued to go down, down, down, into deeper brown brew that bordered on black lower still. He did not float upward at all, for this was not water. It tasted of vomit and motor oil.
Taken by instinct, he tried to fight his way upward. Hands curled to sweep more of the stinging substance downward, down, bring himself up. His lungs burned. His vision sparkled for lack of air. His muscles cramped up fiercely. Weighed down by his boots, or drawn down by the fluid, he could not breach the surface no matter how hard he tried. But he managed to get high enough to see from below form that had caught his attention from far above: Bianca! The real Bianca! She’d succumbed to this trap, and was no longer trying to fight her way out. Loose-limbed she drifted in total submersion. Her tux-tails bobbing about like another pair of limbs. Bubbles were coming from every pore, and out her ears and nose and mouth and the corners of her eyes. None of these reached the surface; rather, they took on a red tinge before dissipating into the alien medium.
Bubbles were coming from him, too. He could feel them navigating their way along his arms and legs and everywhere else where clothes met numbing skin. He heard the rush of them coming out his ears. He lost sight of Bianca through the torrent that emerged from his nose and skin.
He put up one last, great struggle to move against his fate. Not for his own sake, but for Bianca’s. To hold her one last time before succumbing to slow-motion digestion. And failed. Her foot just out of reach of his hand. Too anguished to resist a scream, he opened his mouth. Loosing a threesome of bubbles that held with them the last of his air. These alone reached the surface to release its spent gasses to the outside world. The rest fell to pieces all around him, their numbers growing and fading with every awful instant.
But Morris saw none of that as the fluid filled the vacuum in his lungs. Only a growing darkness that had nothing to do with the liquid’s color.
The blackness didn’t clear so much as twinkle into new light. Spark upon spark building upon one another until at last he realized he was looking at a campfire. At the opposite end was his freckle-faced mother, blue eyes glinting in the fire light as she smiled back at him. Her hair strawberry-blonde hair was short again; she’d been growing it and cutting it at its longest to make rope. She had denim dungarees on, and Dad’s fishing vest. A scrap of a baby’s blanket made do for neckerchief.
She was sitting up on a plastic milk-crate, seated next to a propane travel stove. To her left, a wavy-bodied radio played fuzzy static. Behind her was the camper-trailer they’d been living in since they’d fled Boston. Which was hooked to an antique sport utility vehicle, brownish-black, that had seen them well off of roads that were no longer safe.
As soon as he saw that car, Morris knew something was wrong.[i] This isn’t real, he told himself. There hadn’t been cars for years. Decades! Cars ran on gasoline. Gasoline had a shelf-life. There’s hasn’t been a gas station worth spit for… how long? He tried to count it down. Couldn’t. He looked to his hands to count on his fingers –
They were a child’s hands. And he couldn’t remember how to count.
He started crying. And that brought his mother to his side. She rubbed the tears again and asked him, “What’s wrong, my little survivor?”
He buried his face in her hands. “Tell me another story!” he begged, the tears only growing in number. “Tell me what the world was like! Tell me so I won’t forget them! I want to tell my own kids about how we lived! Like I’ll tell them about Dad and Crissy and eating ice cream together at Bunker Hill Park! I’m starting to forget! I don’t want to! I don’t want to” He could remember saying those words ages ago. He’d meant every one.
She smiled, and patted his head. Held him close. “Alright.” Rocking softly, she told him of the wonders in the world lost to them. Of cars that ran on magnets and 3D-printed organs that had saved countless lives including her own. Of sitting around a holographic telescreen with her family to watch the first manned rocket to Europa taking off. Of meeting the man she would one day marry in a virtual playground. Of the fun they’d have as newlyweds, using nanites to shapeshift into countless beings from their imaginations.
Her voice slowed. She was holding back her own tears now. “Your father and I couldn’t wait until you and your sister were old enough to get them. But that won’t happen now.”
“Get what?” He asked. Unable to recall what she’d just said.”
She stared back at him. “I… don’t remember. What we talking about?” There was a haziness about her eyes. She got up to pace. She always liked to walk when she thought. She moved back to her side of the fire. There had been something to either side of her seat, hadn’t there? Now there was only a grill. Had there been a sound in his ear? He cocked his head, concentrated, and heard a sort of fizzing.
Behind Mom, the camper was sitting by itself. There was a hole in the middle, rimmed by a metal frame. Had something been filling the hole? “I’ll figure it out soon, promise.” She disappeared to the right, still talking. But the fizzing was getting louder, too loud to make out her words.
He looked back to the lonely fire, assuming that was the source. Bubbles were forming a red froth at the edges of the flames. The flame popped and crackled, but there was nothing nearby to catch it.
There was nothing there but the trees and grass of the clearing he and his mother had chosen to camp at. “Mother!” He could remember [/i]her, but couldn’t begin to imagine where she had gone. Into something? A cave? A burrow? A cold emptiness gnawed its way into the child’s stomach. The whole of his body. “Mom!!! Where are you?!” The child reached a hand towards the emptiness where she had been.
It wasn’t a human hand. It was scaled. Clawed. Primitive.
He screamed, “What’s happening to me?!” Morris couldn’t hear his own question over the thunderous noise.
. . .
Morris screamed, and felt the weight of the world on his back, head, shoulders, every part of him. Or at least the weight of a small building. The crushing pressure permeated with a dank, greasy stink. A smell that spoke of waste and used-up things. He groaned against both, and summoned the will to fight them. Balling his hands to fists, he found something firm to clasp one around. With all his might, he pulled the rest of himself towards it. Then bullied his other arm through the debris that was smothering him, until he found another handhold. And another. And another. He shoveled scrap away from his shoulders with forceful turns of his head as he made his way up and up and up. He knew something was off about these pieces of himself he was using, but didn’t have time to think about it. He could feel, and almost control, a fifth limb that was slinking about between his rhythmically paddling legs, but he didn’t want to think about that!
One of hands touched cool, nightly air. Only this time there was no one to help him up. He made all the way out by sheer will. Breaching the surface and pulling his legs out with a final flurry of effort. Standing once more, he let out mighty roar of triumph. It was a roar he never would have made before. Delivered through a head that was so large and so long that he could now see a reptilian muzzle that had extended well past his eyes. It was scaled to the sides, a rusty reddish-brown. And feathered up the middle, with short, thin shafts of pinkish purple.
The sound of his own screaming was an alien thing. A warbling staccato that carried far and wide. Echoing off a familiar pile-up of to the east. Morris brought up and they were the same as same as he’d seen in the nightmare. His claws were black and long. The rust-scaled hands were bare from the wrists up. From behind, longer and more elaborately colored feathers reigned. A panicked look downward could not reveal the shape of his chest, not through the muzzle. But he could see that his feathered knees had moved significantly higher up on his body. His ankles well above the ground. The remaining feet were huge and scaly and clawed. Both ‘big toes’ dominated by exceptionally long, sickle-like blades.
Velociraptor. Utahraptor. Deinonychus. All these possibilities and more flashed through the mind of someone who had been old enough catch a youthful obsession with dinosaurs before the world went to Hell.
“No! No! No! Me not want!” A tail he wasn’t used to thrashed wildly about, driven by his panic. Striking multiple pieces of junk propped up atop the junkpile upon which he stood. The surprise, the pain, only inspired more rage. With hands and feet both, he tore into it all. Every box, every beam, every strange and half-ruined device that he could find no names for.
Only after he was thoroughly exhausted could he even begin to think about anything else. Like the fact that he was in a valley, or long pit of some sort. Filled nearly to the top with things that were more than junk. They had been useful once. But somehow, he couldn’t recall how. At the top of the pit were beings that might know, however. Beings of dark, coiled metal. With mangled pieces snaking out from central masses to play at being heads, arms and legs. They paid the dinosaur in their midst no mind at all. Too busy looking over other selections of debris, sharing silent conversations about same, and then tossing them down into the sea of refuse.
Morris realized things about himself, as well. First, that there were scraps of hide clinging to his wrists and around his neck. And a strip of hardened skin around his waist. It had a shrinking knot of something hard in the middle, keeping it bound to his body. ‘Metal,’ it might have named. The word was almost too far away to be recalled. Second, that he was not standing like a Velociraptor or Deinonychus should. Leaning their head forward and tail back. Rather they were standing like a man. No, he wasn’t... a man anymore? The predator sniffed the air, sniffed their body. The clues were flitting about in the sky, and embedded in feathers that also retained the greasy smell of something earlier. Something unpleasant. An almost bird-like body, didn’t offer much else in the way of clues, even after a thorough pat-down.
She didn’t have time to ponder the matter, however. Her rages had alerted someone else to her presence. A someone with very heavy feet, who was stampede their way across the midden-yard with thunderous fury. A dune of debris burst outward, revealing bulky form that had smashed through it rather than climb over. It was two-legged, brute-fisted version of an Ankylosaurus. All spikes and armored plates and attitude. Whipping behind them was a brutal, boney club that devastated anything it came into contact with. Their beakesh mouth screeched mighty when they caught sight of the Rapor. They charged, arms raised to destroy.
Morisiraptor backed away, stumbling along the way, arms raised in surrender that was not accepted. It was only a hunter’s instincts and a quick duck to the right that kept her face from getting punched through the back of her skull. “Why you want hurt me?” she begged as she continued to evade. Rather poorly given the uneven terrain.
The enemy punctuated each word of their answer with another blow. “You! Do! This! To! Me!” Only the last if these connected. But it was with the tail-club, so it was more than enough to launch Morisiraptor into the air.
“Heeaaarrgghhhh!” She landed on her back, momentum using her body to grind a lengthy trench in the garbage. The enemy was upon them before she could right herself. She threw up both forearms to protect her face. Very much expecting to lose one. “Not me! Was place!” She slapped the jumbled pile beneath. “It do! It swallow me! Spit me out like this!” A buried pain, once dredged up, crushed her heart and brought her to tears. “Kill wife! Bee-ank-ah!”
“Me Bee-ank-ah,” the other whispered, dropping his hands. Yes, he smelled like a ‘he’ somehow. “You Morris?”
The prone dino nodded. Attempted a smile. Which probably came off more like a threat, given her very thin lips and countless daggers in her mouth.
But it wasn’t a dagger grin that had the larger dino trembling. “Me was Bee-ank-ah. What am I now?” The once-monstrous opponent began to cry.
“Ankle-o-sarr,” the feathered one was quick to answer. Though their flattened tongue stumbled over a word she could see clearly in her mind. “Read it in a… in a…” The effort to recall where the information had come nearly split her head in half. “I forgot.”
“Not forgot,” whispered the herbivore. “It was taken. It… I dreamed… There was a place with many things to read. Grandparents took me there when I was little. Hid there from the fighting. The place had glowing boxes that... Aaarrruuuggghhh!” Thinking too hard on these things hurt him too, it seemed. “There was a sound, and things went away.”
“I had that dream too!” Morris insisted, rising to her feet. “I was with Mother! Then Mother gone. Was with other things, maybe. They went away too. I heard… something. It was coming from… from...” Sure words trailed off into an uncertain void.
There was a light of understanding in the spiny one’s eyes. “It come from the pit. It took…”
“It ate…” corrected Morisiraptor, bitten by the same thought.
“Cee-vee-lee-sashun!” concluded Bianklyosaur. He looked around. Kicked a little black rectangle with a small white circle at the bottom of its face. “I can’t think of what any of this stuff does. But I know I used to know.”
“I think they know now,” Morisiraptor pointed to the strange, metal beings. “Or their master.”
There was hatred in Bianklyosaur’s yellow eyes when he looked upon. Had the former woman been lured to into the dark water trap with the promise of a false cure, too? “Let’s go bust their asses.” He slammed one fist into the flat of his other hand. Creating a forceful boom of fleeing air that ruffled the other’s feathers.
Morisiraptor’s smile was now very much like a threat. Full of fang and vengeance. She tore loose the remains of clothing around herself, very easily. It felt good, and natural, to rip something apart. Hunter’s eyes pierced the stone wall’s shadows realty. “There. We can climb out way using that part of the cliff.”
“First the metal-men. Then the pit,” the bigger dino bellowed as he followed after his ate. “Then we smash everything!”
“Yes.” A line of drool collected on Morisiraptor’s jaw, and dropped to the jumbled surface below. This would be the Raptor’s first hunt! First kills! Her big toes tingle with excitement. “We will end them all and make this place our territory.”
The metal-men were still ignoring them. But not for long.
. . .
The World is broken.
We were broken.
One of the broken things made a mistake.
Now, my mate and I have the power to fight back.
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Category Story / Fantasy
Species Dinosaur
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 135.3 kB
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