The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Page 12

  They come to a halt. There is a clearing in the forest, and in the clearing a house. It is a shocking thing to see in the midst of this place. It has a red tiled roof and light shines in the windows, and outside there is a small garden and a vegetable patch. There is a scarecrow positioned between two rows of plants. The hatch of the steamroller opens. The hafmek step out and Dak follows them. It is a place from a picture-book. A place that should no longer exist.

  They walk up to the house through the vegetable patch. Dak brushes past the scarecrow and the moonlight falls down and the scarecrow’s hand falls onto Dak’s shoulder and holds him, and the scarecrow screams. Dak fights for release. The scarecrow looks like a mockery of a human body, moulded in some dark-green, pliable gunk. Its features run as it fights Dak. Its eyes are smeared across its face. Its mouth melts as it screams. Dak screams too. The hafmek watch impassively.

  At last someone says, “Enough.” The scarecrow freezes. Dak tears away. His palms are covered in green slime, like foul-smelling resin. The speaking voice is cool and calm and pleasant. “Please,” the voice says. “Come in.”

  Dak looks up. The man standing in the doorway is of medium height and has brown hair and a mild, pleasant face. He extends his hand toward Dak. “Hey, man. Great to see you. Come in.” A little dazed, Dak shakes his hand. “Dak, right?”

  Dak nods. Dak follows the man into the house. Dak is scared shitless. The house is warm and well-lit and pleasant. There are two couches and a desk and a desk-lamp and a sturdy wooden cabinet and a low table and two chairs made of the same honey-coloured wood as the cabinet. “Hey, sit down, man. Make yourself comfortable.” The man closes the door. The hafmek stay outside.

  Dak sits down on one couch. The man takes the one opposite. “So glad to meet you, Dak. Pit Stop Namba Six, right?”

  Dak nods. “And before that, Stenchtown?” The man gets up and walks over to Dak. He bends over the boy. His face comes close to Dak’s. The man trails his nose along Dak’s cheekbones, down to his neck. Dak can feel the man’s soft breath on his skin.

  “Remarkable,” the man says. He stands up and returns to his couch. “Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee? A beer? Are you hungry?”

  Dak shakes his head. The man smiles. “Oraet, Dak,” he says, switching to Pidgin. The smile melts away. “Yu-mi gat wan problem. Yu gat wan samting bilong mi.”

  What? Dak says, “I took nothing—” And the man shakes his head. “You gat savvy bilong mi,” he says. “Let’s not yu-mi plaeplae, Dak. The knowledge you have is mine. I’m an 0wner. The 0wner of Pit Stop Namba Six, as it happens. So what you have in your possession—” he shrugs “—belongs to me. It’s a fair trade, don’t you think? They feed us knowledge. We feed them poisoned fish and clean them and keep them alive. I think that’s more than fair. I think that’s fucking generous.”

  Dak says, “I—”

  The man says, “Are you an 0wner, Dak?”

  Dak says, “I—”

  The man says, “No. You’re not. Are we agreed on that?”

  Dak nods.

  The man smiles. “Oraet,” he says. “So we have a problem. So what do we do?”

  Dak shakes his head. The man’s smile grows larger. “I could kill you,” he says. “I could torture you to see if you remember any more stuff the Growths may have divulged to you. Even their scraps have value. You know what this is? This is an information-scarcity environment we live in, Dak. Information is God, Dak. How to build certain machines. How to manufacture certain pills. How to do things you didn’t even know you wanted to do until you found out you could do them. You following me?”

  Dak shakes his head, then nods. The man says, “I won’t kill you, Dak. Why should I? I’m not a bad guy. I’m into knowledge for its own sake. Do you know what I am, Dak?”

  Dak nods. He knows. He wishes very hard to be away.

  He says, “You’re Open Sore.”

  Blakenjel bilong mi stalks through the darkness like an avenging angel. He is not calm. He goes and he comes. In the early hours of the morning someone calls for him, a skull-head from Golgotha, coming down hard from Plateau. He begs for the power of the drug to be taken away from him. My blakenjel complies. As he leaves, I hear the screams of the skull-head. The drug can no longer affect him. But the wild craving remains, and it could never now be satisfied.

  My blakenjel stalks away. He cannot stand still. I feel the passing of other blakenjels in the dark. It is a dance of blakenjels. I think they are speaking, and I wonder what they say.

  “Open Sore,” the man says with amusement. “Yes, well. That’s what they call us, isn’t it?” He stands up and stretches. “Etymologically interesting. But what we are—what 0wnerz are all about, Dak—is open source. Do you know what open source is, Dak?”

  Dak knows. It’s in the jungle all around them. It’s in the scarecrow frozen in undeath outside. It’s in the swamp-things. Open Sore. He wishes the man would stop calling him by his name. It is making him very nervous.

  “Open source,” the man says. “Information wants to be free. Not free to everyone, of course—that would be madness—but free to the people who matter, Dak. People who make a difference. We work to save the world. We’re the fucking heroes, Dak!”

  The man is no longer smiling. He is pacing around the room. There is the slightest sound of whizzing motors and Dak realises the man has mek inside him. Mek and the blakenjels know what else. The man says, “Why did the Growths want you to summon a blakenjel?”

  And now, Dak realises, they are coming to it. The reason he is not, at this precise moment, a smear of blood on a ceiling in Gaslight.

  He says, “I don’t know.”

  The man backhands him. The impact throws Dak across the room. He groans, and thinks, with a savagery that surprises him, You fucking freak.

  The man stands above him, looking down. “Stand up,” he says quietly. Dak gets up.

  Suddenly the light dims and changes. Around the man others appear: men, and women. They seem to materialise out of the air itself, a blakenwaet rainbow forming around him. Some of them are hafmek. Some of them have growths coming out—one woman has tentacles emerging from her nostrils as if a shell-creature lived inside her skull. The man who was speaking to Dak begins to change then. His features run, just as the scarecrow’s did; he seems to melt in place. His skin turns a darker shade, and wings unfurl from his shoulder blades and open with a snap. The 0wnerz look at Dak. They are chanting.

  “We are the open source,” they say, “We are the 0wnerz. We protect you, we employ you, we give you life. We are open source.”

  Other things crawl and slither into the room. Jungle-things. Wild things. Open Sore things. There is a swamp-man with a lizard’s tongue hissing out of the gap that is his mouth. There is an armoured crocodile with human eyes and grafted metal blades for the ridge on its back. They form a perfect circle around Dak. Their chanting rises in pitch and intensity. “We are Open Source. We defend you. We save you. We are the 0wnerz and we 0wn you!”

  And Dak, terrified, prays to his blakenjel.

  And only then does he see the triumph in the 0wnerz’ eyes.

  5. Blakenjel

  For the length of a heartbeat, nothing happens. The 0wnerz close on Dak. Then the room is plunged into darkness.

  Blakenjel bilong mi. blakenjel bilong mi. The words are swallowed in the velvety darkness. The words are cushioned by the absence of light. Blakenjel bilong mi. Blakenjel bilong mi.

  Somewhere in the last hours my blakenjel acquired a voice. A singer from the opera-pits of Cancer Ward, begging to be released. He left her voiceless, and for once, in peace.

  In the darkness he croons. In the darkness he sings. In the darkness he whispers words of love and of grief. I trot behind him. I am always there.

  My blakenjel stops. My blakenjel snaps open his wings. My blakenjel turns, and I follow him.

  The darkness expands across the room. Outside a howl sounds, of something feral moving around the perimeter of the hous
e, and it is echoed inside by the 0wnerz. Something wet flops to the ground and someone screams, and the scream is cut short.

  In the inky blackness Dak imagines he can hear voices.

  Why should I let you live?

  “Grab him!”

  Laughter. A warm thick wetness sprays Dak’s face. There is another scream.

  “Wait!”

  An amused, expectant silence.

  “What are you?”

  Is that all you wanted to know?

  “Yes!”

  We are blakenjel. We suffer you to stay. We protect you. We are your shepherds.

  “I don’t understand.”

  This is our place. Enough.

  The sound of a body falling to the ground. The smell is suffocating.

  “Wait!”

  Silence.

  “What do the Growths want with you? Why did they summon you?”

  They do not belong here. Like you, small human. We let them in like we let you in. But now they want to leave. The dark is no place for the quick.

  The human voice, the 0wner’s whose house this is, is excited. “Leave? Go where? How did they come here? How did people come here?”

  The blakenjel says, There is always a price.

  There are no more sounds. Dak blinks. His eyes are wet. The house is quiet. There is no life inside. The darkness compresses around him. Light coagulates at its edges, tracing, like an artist’s brush, the outlines of the carnage, corpses like chalk-figures sprawled on the floor, the light picking out small details, a smeared eyeball there, a puddle of green goo there, a surprised expression in a dead crocodile’s curiously human eyes, and there—

  There is a man standing in a corner of the room, where the walls and ceiling meet in a pyramid of shades. The man is small and bald and white and his skin is flabby and hangs loosely from his frame. The man looks at Dak hungrily. He has nervous eyes and he blinks a lot.

  The darkness coalescences before Dak. He bows his head.

  His blakenjel is there.

  Blakenjel bilong mi. Blakenjel bilong mi! I hate him. I hate to share him. I hate to follow him. I want to be free of him. I look at the boy and know that my blakenjel loves him. He does not love me. He came to me as he always comes when he is called. And he granted my wish, as I knew he would. He let me follow him. In my case, the wish and the price paid were the same.

  The boy bows his head to my blakenjel. And my blakenjel embraces him.

  The blakenjel feels like old leather and metal wires. The blakenjel has no smell. The blakenjel doesn’t speak. But the way he touches Dak is familiar: it is the way Naet once touched him.

  The blakenjel caresses him.

  Then something happens. The blakenjel pulls away. The sudden light nearly blinds Dak, but then his eyes adjust, and he can see.

  All around him, the bodies on the floor, like darkness, coalesce. They re-form. They reassemble in hideous forms. They manufacture pseudopodia, eyeballs and naked mouths hanging on grisly stalks, and they speak as they ooze closer. “We are the source. We are open source. We are the 0wnerz—” and a familiar voice, the first 0wner, Dak thinks, shouts, “Grab him!”

  The blakenjel turns and whirls. The re-formed 0wnerz ooze light. Dak wants to run, but there is nowhere to go. “Grab him!”

  But it isn’t to him that they go.

  The mutilated corpses assemble into crawling, grabbing things, and they approach the corner of the room where a small bald white man with loose skin is standing kneading his hands. “Enjelvaljer!” the cry goes. “Grab him! Take the vulture!”

  In the centre of the room there is inhuman laughter. The blakenjel comes to Dak. He wraps his form around him, and light and sound fade. Come be with me, the blakenjel says, and be my love, and we shall all the darkness prove.

  Behind them Dak imagines he can hear a faint scream, but he can’t be sure. He follows the blakenjel into the corridors of night.

  6. Codicil

  You measure out the days in sunsets

  And months in moons

  And dread the darkness.

  Dak follows his blakenjel and he loves, which is a rare thing. He follows him through the corridors of night.

  Once they return to Open Sore. They emerge from the darkness in a clearing and Dak sees the things that call themselves the source, and they are hideous yet still alive. They are tenacious. But the blakenjel pays them no attention. In the centre of the clearing is a shrunken wasted man, with skin grey-white and ill, and he is hanging upside-down from a gnarled and twisted tree. The man’s thin lips move silently in prayer. It seems that he is saying, over and over, Blakenjel bilong mi. Blakenjel bilong mi.

  Dak looks at the 0wnerz. They clamour and they try to speak, they ask questions—they beseech. But the blakenjel pays them no heed.

  He kills the hanging man with one sweep of his great sharp wings, and Dak follows him back through the darkness. There is always a price to pay.

  And once, Dak follows his blakenjel to the high mountains that rise away from the towns, beyond Open Sore, where the air is clean and cold and it is quiet; and Dak’s blakenjel lays a great obsidian egg in the fine-grained black sand.

  Behold: Skowt!

  Jason Heller

  My eyes are dinosaur eggs. My tongue cracks like lightning. I been there, done that, drunk it, fucked it, lived it. I am the hole in the roof where the brains leak in. I eat jerks like you for breakfast. Behold: me! Behold: Skowt!

  I slink through the street with my dick in my fist and fireworks up my ass. It’s Friday night on the Protein Delta, and the cold cuts are queuing up for inspection. Can’t sleep on this shit, son. When you’re an old ho of fourteen like Skowt, you gotta work it.

  And work it I do.

  The sun comes up, blue on chrome, pushing away the moon and its huge blinking billboard hawking vaccines and tooth creams. Could use some of those myself. My gums taste like rust. I had this one jerk around four a.m., into blood. Fucking pervert, all of seventeen. Give me a tired old jerk any day. I’ll pop him like a balloon and send him on his way, twenty bills and a teaspoon lighter.

  My head screams for naptime, but I know I can’t. Naps cost paysa—paysa for a room, paysa you’ll get rolled for, paysa you’re not out making.

  Plus, I got a mission to complete. It started the day I was born. It ends the day I die.

  I have to tell the world about Skowt.

  My old name is Oso, but you’d better call me Skowt now, bitches. If you need a reminder, I’ll burn it on your ass. Or you can just check for my tag. You won’t have to look hard. My paint’s everywhere. I’m nationwide, coast to coast. Or at least I’m working on it.

  I take last night’s paysa and head east of the Delta, across the crap swamp and blacktop frizzy with waist-high weeds. I make it to Wowoyo Market before noon. I stop by the Datra’s and make arrangements for later. Then it’s time to stock up on the regular supplies: krosi, plague shots, and chem-drops to purify my piss for drinking water.

  Oh, yeah, and paints. Gotta have my paints.

  You’ll never know what it’s like to shake them cans of paint and feel the ball bearings clang around like planets. I rip my tag across brick walls and bed sheets drying on the line. “Behold: Skowt!” Then again. And again. Andagainandagainandagain. “BEHOLD: SKOWT!” My tag is bright like a peacock, crazy like a spider web. Honed by centuries of sharpening it against the skulls of dumbfucks. No cop ever caught me. I suck and spray, suck and spray, and they don’t get the time of day.

  “Fo waka, Skowt!” It’s Erl.

  “Fo waka, Erl.”

  Erl is all right.

  “You tagging today?”

  “The fuck you think?”

  “I dunno, man, I thought you might be down for a dunk in the canal.”

  I laugh my ass off right in Erl’s fat face. “The canal? Are you real? You’ll catch more crud in that canal than you will in some old jerk’s olo.”

  Erl sniffs. I forgot to take it easy on him. He’s pretty big fo
r eleven, but still, he’s just a baby.

  “Hey, Erl! It’s good, it’s good. We’ll hit up that canal. But let’s go tag some first, huh? You with me?”

  Erl’s face lights up. “I’m with you, Skowt.”

  I’ll be straight: It was no accident I ran into Erl. I knew where he was gonna be, when he was gonna be there. Erl’s predictable. Not like me. You never know which way my dick is gonna be coming at you. Ha!

  Mostly I tag alone. That’s kind of the whole point. It’s just me, my paints, and an empty space crying out to get filled. Sometimes the vids in Wowoyo show old stories, ones about fucking for love. Fucking for love! I don’t get it. But I bet it feels like tagging.

  Today, though, I need Erl. I need a sidekick, a pack mule. A lookout.

  Some big shit, you understand, is about to go down.

  You’d think hustling on the Delta, busting ass, dodging cops and pimps would be plenty of ambition for a young businessman like myself. But I got something no one else around here does: the tonton of a cheetah. I came into this world with no one. None of that mama and papa crap, as far as I can scope. I had a little brada once, Imi, but he didn’t last on the Delta too long.

  That’s when I knew I had to make it. Not just make it: fucking triumph.

  Babies like Erl, they’re good kids. Strong kids. But they don’t have vision. That’s where Skowt comes in.

  It squats there like a castle in the dark. See, I’m smart. I can read. I seen books and lifted handhelds. Castles used to look just like this: big and blank and beautiful.

  Oh, the fucking tagging I’d give this place. I can see it now: “Behold: Skowt!” Each letter as tough and sharp and tall as me. But I got bigger jerks to fry.

  This particular castle has razor wire instead of a moat and some skinny old fuck in a blue suit for a knight. Me and Erl sit scoping it out in the bushes, eating crispy roach and using the red-specs I got when I went back to the Datra earlier. That woman can rig anything, fix anything, for the right price.