The Book of Apex: Volume 2 of Apex Magazine Read online

  R persists. “Does it?”

  I look away. “Sometimes.”

  “Well, it’s called an erection, and it’s going to do it more, a lot more even. Only you’ll control it.” He sniggers. “Or it’ll control you.”

  My cheeks burn. I find the rafters of the belfry very interesting, anything till he quits talking about this.

  “It’s connected with what’s going on here.”

  I snap back on that. “You knew this was going to happen?”

  He puts out a hand. “Not exactly. It just makes sense. Mommy’s a woman.”

  “She’s Mommy!”

  “But not our mommy. Not biologically. So it’s okay.”

  I know the words he’s using. I even understand the subject matter. But I just can’t quite get it, what R means. I just can’t make sense out of it, apply it to myself.

  So I start to actually hate R, right then and there. Not sure why, but I do. Which is why I lie to him.

  “Do you know the way to Mommy’s room?” R asks.

  “Sure,” I crack. “We all do. Twice a week… before. “Before G went to live with her.

  “No, not her sitting room, her bedroom.”

  That sickens me. R sickens me. The belfry sickens me. I hold it off long enough to tell him, “Mommy doesn’t have a bedroom! I don’t know where it is.”

  Then I fling myself at the ladder, ride its rails down, the rungs flashing by an inch away, and hit the bottom too hard—but I like that. I stagger away, limping.

  R calls after me. The ladder rattles with his steps. I swerve toward the nearest vent for the return-air plenum. Flick and flick and it opens. I bend, thrust, then wriggle, escaping where he can no longer go because he’s gotten too big. Him and his stiff penis.

  I drop into a cul-de-sac on the third floor, out of sight of anybody who might be wandering Mommy’s wing of the Manor. Three ways into Mommy’s bedroom. A door from her sitting room, hidden behind a bookcase. A servant’s access up a tightly wound staircase. A nondescript, locked door in the big hall, twenty paces past the archway into her sitting room. I pull out a key to that door, a key I copied from the housekeeper’s master ring that always hangs in the pantry downstairs at night. That tool room next to the garage makes life so much easier.

  No sneaking around. I trot to the door, but unlock it quietly and slip into…

  Mommy’s room spreads out before me. Frills and lace. Thick carpet and blond wood. Mommy and G.

  Mommy… I’ve never seen her like this. So… I think the word is demure. She sits in a frilly robe at the foot of her four-poster bed, her ankles crossed, her knees clasped and positioned to one side, her hands clasped to her chest, and her full, smiling attention on G.

  He poses in the middle of the room with his back to me, also in a robe, only thick and dark green and tied tightly around him. One hand holds the fuzzy brown book—the one I read from! Only I read to Mommy from that book. The other hand weaves through the air in time to his words.

  So he can read poetry. Did Mommy teach him too? Aww, Mommy!

  But can he write poetry? Can he create as Romeo did beneath that balcony?

  “Smiles, tears, of all my life—and, if God choose,” he says. “I shall but love thee better after death.”

  Mommy claps, a light patting of her fingers. “Nice,” she says huskily, as she stands. With a shrug, her robe falls open, then off. She stands naked! Gorgeous! Ugly! I’m not sure which. She sets her feet apart, her legs braced as they come together in an odd patch of dark… hair? Her gaze wanders over his head, shoulders, chest, then lower… and lower. “You’re ready again? Wonderful! So like my Gregory, only more so.”

  She lays her hands on her hips and spreads her fingers over them and tucks her elbows back. Her—breasts, bulbous and pouting, point straight at G. “Come to me,” she says, “my sweet G. “

  G flings open his robe and darts forward. His robe crumples to the floor. He grabs her. She catches him. They tumble onto the bed. Her legs bounce up, then wrap around him. And he—he starts pumping his hips, pumping against her.

  Then I know! He’s pumping his stiff penis into her again and again. And she likes it!

  I should run away, but no, spiky curiosity whips that impulse away. Mommy moans and G picks up his pace. Embarrassment pricks me: be gone! But I have something to show Mommy, something that will stop all this, put things back until I can win her for me alone. I have something, but what?

  The poem, yearning in my pocket. I scrabble after it, then rip its pliant stiffness loose. Thrusting it forward, I step toward the bed.

  Unheeding, engrossed, G slows his pumping and bends his head down from Mommy’s neck to suck on something. She opens her eyes wide and rocks her head and—notices me. She smiles while G works.

  “Which one are you?”she says absently.

  “E.”

  She lifts a hand in slow greeting, then flips it over and waves me away. “You’ll get your turn,” she exults, then closes her eyes again as she runs a fingernail up G’s rippling back, leaving a welt.

  The floor wobbles. The door jam brushes my shoulder.

  Unsteady—me? Or the world around me? I edge back, slip out to the hallway, and—I give way to my fear and horror and sadness and hatred and—and I run. Along the hall, down the servant’s stair.

  A stiff penis he has and I don’t—yet. Why couldn’t she have waited? I am the same boy as G was. I will be the same man as he is now. If she’d just waited for me, her only sweetie, she’d’ve gotten the same thing—and more: she would’ve had me, the only E, the only me.

  But no, she hasn’t waited. And when G uses up his stiff penis—how long can it last—there will be R. His penis can get stiff already when he wants it to. Not like me. I can’t—yet. Then, following me, The Rest, year after year—G, O, R, Y, and so on—The Rest will get their stiff penises, and Mommy will get them.

  The Rest crowd in on me, crushing me like a wave of maggots. I hate them all!

  A step wiggles under my foot, tripping me. I crash into a wall. Crying, gasping, nose clogging and running, I stare around, kitchen through one door, summer room through another, more steps going down.

  Where to go? I can’t forget what I’ve seen, G pumping, Mommy moaning. There is only one way to forget that—stop it from happening again. I race down those steps, then wind through the basement to her wing’s furnace. We’re all good at engineering; we breeze through Mr. Sir’s workshops, machines, electricity, fuels. All the Manor’s furnaces burn natural gas, electronic ignition, no pilot lights. A few whacks with a hammer will bypass their safeguards and make an explosion inevitable. And I know where to get that hammer.

  Make us all the same again? All the same?

  No!

  I head toward our wing. The Rest huddle there, including R by now, many sleeping, the rest playing those silly games of ours. They have no idea what Mommy and G are doing. Well, maybe R does, but he can’t guess what I’m up to. He doesn’t explore; he doesn’t know the basement; and furnaces exist only in Mr. Sir’s textbooks. Along the way, I pick up a monkey wrench left behind by the regular maintenance crew. Oh, they never see us, but I watch them, learn from them. Too bad A will never get that chance.

  What did Richard III say? Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead. And he made it happen. I can, too.

  Staring at our furnace, I think about ignition. Wait on a thermostat to spark the explosion? Chance it’ll come before I can rescue Mommy? No. I reach for those wires, going to rip them out, but hold off. I like electricity, pure, primitive, powerful. I just need to control its flow, delay that ignition till I’m done with my doing. On a shelf, a discarded doorbell push and extra 18-gauge wire give that to me. I add them to the thermostat circuit. Now for a timer. I fill a bucket with water, set it on a lever over a fulcrum, and tape the doorbell to the other end. Add a brick to give it weight, then punch a small hole in the bucket. In time, the brick will lie on the doorbell, heavier and heavier, until—

  Gr
inning, I scoot back through the basement, pausing only to whack those furnaces with the monkey wrench and let loose their gases too, then climb that narrow stairway. I let up then to catch my breath, looking forward to leading Mommy down to the garage so she can drive us away. She holds my hand and flinches only slightly as the Manor erupts behind us. She says, At least I’ve got you, sweetie, and that’s all I need.

  But I can hardly wake her, sprawled in her bed, sheet tugged over her chest. G snores on the other side, hard asleep and covering any sounds I make, going through Mommy’s closet for traveling clothes. Enough to handle the summer night’s chill. I’ll get by, dressed as I am, though I lost my tie somewhere down below. I’m sure we can buy more clothes and anything else we need.

  “Mommy!” I call again quietly, this time right into her ear. No answer. So I put a thumb to her left eyeball and press hard once. “Mommy!”

  She lurches awake. Her eyes bobble, then track me down. “You again. “Not happy to see me.

  “Come away with me.” A romantic phrase. I pray it works.

  Mommy frowns, then glances over to check on G. He doesn’t stir. I’ll never sleep that solidly again, now that I know why not. She turns the frown on me.

  Desperate, I quote, “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!”

  Now she smiles. I’ve won her! But she doesn’t get out of bed. Instead, she says, “Silly E. You’re not ready yet.” She lifts that same hand, waves it with the same dismissal! “You’ll get your chance, believe me.” She leers right at me. “I look forward to it.” And she rolls over, bare back a pale wall of rejection.

  A bed post wavers. The drape above her flaps. I tip over but catch myself with a hand on the sheet where she’d lain. Her damp sheet. Damp with what? I jerk away, overcorrect, and stagger back, hitting the open closet door. Her clothes hang there. Her words come back to me: “At least I’ve got you, sweetie. “No, not her words, mine. My pretend words, my hopeful words, when this woman was still Mommy and I was still her sweetie.

  Who needs her anyway?

  Not me. Not E. The last clone left walking. Just me and the stream, leading me to the outside world, through a forest blurred with night.

  As R said, same genome, same environment, how can we be different? Geometry talks about intersections where two lines cross. Genome crosses environment. Otherwise identical lines make unique intersections each time. Perhaps it depends on how well the particular genome listens to the environment. I, for instance, learned specific things from Mommy, poetry for one, obsession for another. Neither worked out. In the end, it’s just me and the universe, one on one. No matter how many other times Mommy, Mrs. Ma’am, and Mr. Sir tried, I’m the one who counts.

  An explosion slashes through the dark, floods the forest with tangerine light, then another catches up, then one more. In a moment, it drains away, leaving me alone—at last.

  What should I call myself? Richard? Ah, yes, Richard, Richard Gregory.

  Remember that name—you’ll see it again.

  ...THAT HAS SUCH PEOPLE IN IT

  Jennifer Pelland

  When you voluntarily walked underground, you had no idea how long you’d be there.

  People said you were crazy for doing it, but you’d been called crazy, and worse, for years.

  Besides, the government said they were doing it for a good reason. When the aliens intercepted our Voyager 1 probe and told us they were on their way to Earth to evaluate us for membership in their confederation, the planet collectively decided to put its best foot forward. If the aliens knew just how many humans were poor, or homeless, or uneducated, or just flat-out broken, Earth’s membership application might be denied.

  And that meant sweeping people like you under the rug, at least for a little while.

  So you got in the very short voluntary line to drive out to live in a massive warren of old underground bunkers left over from Cold War days. It had to beat living on the street, begging for change and leftovers, and scrounging cigarette butts from the trash to get whatever nicotine buzz was left in them. All the voices in your head were in agreement—they wanted a bed, and three square meals a day, and a roof over that head of yours that they lived in.

  It wasn’t bad underground. Sure, you didn’t get to see the sun, and they wouldn’t bring you any alcohol or cigarettes, but it was clean, and dry, and warm, and your clothes weren’t stiff and itchy. And a doctor brought you pills every day that made the voices in your head quiet down enough that your voice was now always the one in charge.

  The rest of the planet commended you for your sacrifice. Told you the aliens were sure to share all sorts of marvelous technology with us, and that you’d get to see it soon enough. That Earth would finally eliminate poverty, disease, pollution, illiteracy, and all sorts of ills, so long as you stayed down there and didn’t queer the deal.

  You carved out a little corner for yourself, near one of the Plexiglas-covered televisions, and invited two aging hookers and a toothless junkie to share it with you. It was more of a home and a family than you’d ever had. It was almost nice.

  And then the people who didn’t come willingly joined you underground.

  Then it wasn’t so nice anymore.

  The new people rioted from the moment they were forced off of the busses. They mobbed the food delivery trucks, taking their share and yours, and threw it at the cameras, the televisions, the doors, the trucks, each other. They ran through the bunkers, tearing up mattresses and screaming that they’d burn the place down if they could only start a fire.

  You scraped as much food from the walls as you could and ran to your little corner to ride it out. But you found a group of people in it, praying to a god that they claimed had deserted them, and you screamed at them to leave. They only prayed louder, and you ran, looking for some new place to hide.

  No more food trucks came that day. Or the next.

  On the televisions, bland faces lectured people to remain calm, told you that they really wanted to feed you, but it was too dangerous to send anyone in when you were all acting so badly. You were exhorted to stop fighting the inevitable, told you were only hurting yourselves and your fellow shut-ins.

  Without your pills, the voices in your head got louder, and you and all those voices begged everyone to please just calm down, please just let things go back to how they were, please let the food and medicine come back. As the hours passed, you weren’t the only one begging.

  As the days passed, the begging got louder than the rioting.

  Soon, the begging won out.

  On the fourth day, the food trucks came back, bringing the doctors with them. The televisions told you to form orderly lines and behave like civilized people or they would go away again.

  It worked. Four days without food had broken them. Apparently, few of them had the experience with hunger that you had. You queued up, took your daily ration of food and pills, and were deliriously happy to have both.

  You reclaimed your little corner from the Jesus freaks, who believed the aliens were the anti-Christ and bemoaned the fact that they’d missed the rapture, and you waited.

  You all waited.

  And whenever anyone got impatient with the wait, the food went away again.

  It was a perfect system for keeping you quiet.

  No children waited with you, though. They’d all been left above-ground. And every baby born down here was taken away the moment it was born. It was for the best, you were told. Children needed sunlight, and schools, and families who were doing well for themselves. If you were only better about using the free condoms, you wouldn’t have to worry about giving up your babies, so really, you had no one to blame but yourselves. They promised to reunite families when everyone was aboveground, provided, of course, that it wouldn’t be too traumatic for the children. You listened to the wails of a new mother lamenting the loss of her baby and wondered why they didn’t worry about how traumatic it was for you.

  Ever
y so often, you’d get news about how well the aliens’ visits were going, along with vague news on the television screens of the incredible changes going on aboveground. And sometimes, you’d even get to see some of this miraculous new technology with your own eyes, like the day that doctor held a device up to your head that took the voices away. You were so grateful, until night came, and you realized that you were lonely without them. And there was the night that the blue glow spread throughout the bunker that restored everyone’s health. Your limp was gone, the junkie’s teeth grew back, and the prostitutes no longer looked twenty years older than they actually were. And as best as everyone could tell, the process sterilized everyone at the same time, because there were no more new pregnancies after that night.

  And after that night, no one came down to visit from aboveground again. The food trucks were replaced by delivery machines that drove themselves. Mechanical doctors tended to you on the few occasions where anyone needed tending anymore. Little robots started carting away the trash and fixing the plumbing. You were completely cut off.

  Any day now, they kept telling you. They just needed to keep you out of sight a little longer. You understood, didn’t you?

  You didn’t understand, so you began to ask questions of the faces on the televisions. Sometimes, they even answered.

  When you asked how bunkers could possibly hide you from species clever enough to travel across the stars, they pointed out just how deep below ground you were. When you asked how they’d managed to hide all the starving people in Africa, they said the aliens were only bothered by starvation in wealthy nations. When you asked what the aliens thought about all the petty wars that had been raging at the time they arrived, they said the aliens valued differences of opinion. When you asked what they were waiting for before bringing you up to join them, they said they were just erring on the side of caution.

  Above your heads, humanity luxuriated in their shiny new world without being troubled by the sight of those like you.

  Only those like you weren’t exactly “like you” anymore.