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No Real Creatures
By J. M. J. Brewer
From his lookout tower, Daniel watched the tourists gather for the Pearlfish feeding. They filed into the pit or the assigned seating or the VIP section. Too few hats and not enough sunscreen. Lost popcorn kernels and shiny bits of trash in their wake.
On the other side of the enclosure was another tower and in it sat Daniel’s coworker, Glory, loading Telies into her rifle. You could tell the cartridges by their mint-green shade, exactly that of 1950s era appliances. Telies had been used since the Park’s inception, ten years ago, when the first Pearlfish were discovered. The ammunition had since become vogue in prisoner and animal rights circles. Daniel had no idea how the cartridges worked. But he did not know how his TV worked, nor his car, so this was no big thing.
Glory’s voice sounded in his ear. “Full house, looks like.”
“More people, more pay,” said Daniel. They both laughed because this was bullshit. Daniel suspected Glory hated the crowds even more than he did. She was from rural Iowa or Ohio or something and every show constituted double the population of her hometown.
“Imagine sticking a Telie onto a firecracker and just chucking it in there,” Glory said. She sounded wistful. “You ever wonder where it takes ‘em?”
“You were at that meeting. They go to labs. Zoos. Those sorts of places.”
He glassed the VIP section—a paddock at the forefront of the action. Daniel didn’t even know how much you had to pay to get in there. Affluent daredevils jostled for closer position. A pair of black-hooded mourners among them. Even more mourners than usual, today.
Glory theorized. “I don’t care what they say. The Telies zap ‘em to the abattoir. Or if, like, cat food companies are at surplus, then the ocean floor. That way the pressure keeps the body down.”
“That’s actually a pretty good idea,” said Daniel.
“Actually? As in, you’re surprised?”
“You never surprise me, Glory,” he said.
“Hey,” she said.
The show would start soon: Lure-attendants waded through the swamp so they could load hunks of meat into the Lures. Daniel had never had to set a Lure, and he was glad for it, what with all the shoving and molding and even, sometimes, stitching.
The Lure closest to Daniel had weathered five shows. Three more and it would break the record, scored with chalk on a blackboard in the Shop. Still elegant—some submissive combination of deer and rabbit—though it had been battered to deformity. How could it stand, not to mention flee?
It made you wonder if what they said on Orientation Week was true: that a Lure was no real creature.
“That thing is dying today, hombre,” said Glory. She knew well of his affection for the Lure.
“For the first few years they used real live goats,” Daniel said.
“You are so full of it. Control—tell me he’s blowing smoke.”
“We’re on in ten seconds,” said Control, who was their manager, quilt-wrapped in the AC of her nerve center and rumored to devote several of her screens to Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show reruns.
Daniel checked his magazine and his action and the safety.
“Locked and loaded,” said Glory.
“Ditto,” he said.
The Lures shifted to sudden life; Control must have flipped their switch. Two Lures got right to chasing one another. The other five simulated grazing.
Then, the buzzer rang. Simultaneously, an automatic gate swung open at the far end of the enclosure.
Scattered cheers from the crowd. A few wails—mourners, probably.
The Pearlfish arrived.
He watched them through his scope. As always, they came from downriver, their heads emerging from the froth as if they’d been waiting there.
They glided through water that a human could only wade through. Sleek and silver, their tails immersed, their upper bodies cold and gorgeous like renaissance statues brought to piscine life.
Their enclosure outlined a three-acre swamp. A submerged railway, abandoned after Hurricane Charlene, ran down the center. Scattered trees of unknown provenance created spots of grey shade in the gray water. The light here was always dim—he did not like to think why this might be. Go a few miles in any direction and you’d be back under the relentless Acadian sun.
The crowd buzzed. Mourners in the pit pushed hard to the fore. In the VIP section the two hooded mourners had finagled their way to the rail. They pushed back their hoods and revealed themselves to be a youngish couple.
Glory had seen them too. “That’s so sad.”
“Yeah.”
“But like, what makes you think your child would come back as a Pearlfish? Like, what is that?”
The Pearlfish cast long shadows over the swamp. Today, there were twenty-five. Mostly adults, with the younger Pearlfish staying close to the older creatures.
He tried to recognize any of them and, as usual, could not.
A grazing Lure lifted its head. It began to piss—a programmed response to tempt the Pearlfish.
Daniel glassed the lead Pearlfish.
And, as if it could feel his gaze, it looked right back. Jagged oval pupils. No proper face, like the rest, but instead the scalded, naked visage of the burn victim
And—he’d never seen this before—the Pearlfish wore a necklace. What else could he call it? A talisman hanging from a leather strip. Shaped almost like a lollypop.
The implications of this made him nauseous.
“Glory, check that lead Pearlfish for me.” He kept his voice steady so as not to poison her observation.
“What about it?”
A pause.
“Oh, shit, is that a necklace?”
“I guess so,” he said. “What do you say, Control?”
“Stay focused,” said Control.
The Pearlfish were moving faster, now. The Lures, smelling them, terminated their faux-play and faux-grazing. They scattered.
But the Pearlfish formation swung out wide, water surging in their shepherd’s dance, and in no time the Lures were corralled against the plexiglass divider.
Tourists took selfies with the bunched Lures. Rolling eyes, snorts of manufactured breath. Two guys in Panama hats flexed. The members of a bachelorette party licked the plexiglass. A child cried in her mother’s arms. She was too big to be held; Mom set her down.
The smaller Pearlfish were learning to hunt, perhaps. They surged in, nipping. Red water. Red mouths. It was certainly a frenzy. Daniel tried to find his Lure in the pitch but had no hope of it because right at that moment the plexiglass burst.
He fumbled his rifle. Barely caught it. Control’s monotone in his ear: “Emergency protocol. Emergency protocol.”
Daniel had no idea what protocol she could possibly mean. Had they gone over that, ever, in training? He peered back through the scope. The fence was shattered sure enough—an impossibility, considering that the park’s existence depended largely on the unbreakable polycarbonate sheets that composed the enclosure.
The crowd shrieked their fear. All that remained between spectator and Pearlfish was a thin metal fence: the polycarbonate’s skeleton.
Control’s voice came over the loudspeakers:
“Good afternoon! We’ve had a minor incident. Please remain calm and step away from the fence. Again, step away from the fence.”
The tourists obeyed readily. A great tide of retreat. It was the mourners who refused to budge. In fact, the parents in the VIP section were right up on the fence.
Glory in his ear: “Hey, man, they’re pushing the Lures away.”
He stood on his chair to find a better vantage. Sure enough. Their entire arms sticking through the bars. And worse: they were waving. Beckoning the Pearlfish.
The Pearlfish with the necklace noticed right away—it rushed toward the couple.
“Baby!” cried the mother, her black veil falling loose. “Baby, its mom! Mommy’s here.”
And Daniel had to wonder: where did she find her child in that stretched face? In those constellated pupils? He could see no trace of reincarnated humanity…or, just then, could he? A strange depth of thought in those eyes. Nostalgia. A sadness that could only come from wonder.
The Pearlfish towered a yard above the couple. Its necklace knocked against the fence.
Daniel felt near to touch and yet at infinite distance—it was as if he witnessed himself from on high, no real man but only a figurine in a simulation of life.
The mourning mother brushed the Pearlfish’s pale flesh. The Pearlfish stared at the proffered hand…and Daniel felt a burr in his stomach and he flicked off his safety just as the Pearlfish hit her outstretched arm the way a largemouth hits a flicking lure.
Daniel squeezed the trigger and his rifle bucked and the Pearlfish disappeared.
“I’m hot,” he said. “Mark one. Medic to the rail.”
The mother-mourner did not have an arm from the elbow down. Her husband was trying to stem the flow of blood with his black scarf. Other mourners ignored this completely, jumping onto the rail, climbing it, a few attempting to burrow beneath.
“Holy smokes,” said Control. “One Marked. Medic on the way.”
Four more Pearlfish at the fence. The furthest lunged and dragged over a short, squat mourner. The Pearlfish disappeared and he heard the shot a second later.
“Mark two,” said Glory, as another Pearlfish struck the downed mourner. Its bite removed the mourner’s spinal cord, distinctly red and white against the stone-gray sky. The next bite exposed her brain and then the Pearlfish was gone and Daniel worked his bolt and he didn’t have time to Mark, anymore, because two more mourners had fallen over the fence and through his earpiece Control muttered “Oh my god oh my god oh my god” and overtop Glory kept clinical count of her shots and Daniel popped a magazine out and slammed in the next while a severed head still wearing black sunglasses spiraled up up up above the crowd, fell back down, and he squeezed the trigger, worked the bolt, squeezed the trigger, worked the bolt—
thwack.
His action stuck. The bolt, arrested.
The cartridge poked at an odd angle to the chamber. He stabbed beneath the shell and flicked up. The Telie did not budge. He flicked up, again, and this time the Telie dislodged and the action slammed and to his immense surprise a shot rang out.
He was falling.
Not over, either. He was falling down. Plummeting. And in those few giddy seconds, he figured he must have tumbled off his lookout tower.
Finally, he hit the ground.
The pain was immense. Awful, ludicrous, pain, worse than he’d ever felt, and it took him a second to figure out it wasn’t coming from his back or ass but his leg. Ah, yes, the culprit: his right leg, stuck out straight ahead of him and absolutely gushing blood. Oh God. He reached beneath the calf and found a big runnel of it gone. Just, like, not there.
It occurred to him dimly that this wound had not come from falling.
He struggled his shirt off and wrapped the blooming gore. Tied the shirtsleeves. Tried to orient himself. Where was his tower? And when had this fog rolled in? He couldn’t even hear the crowd.
In fact, all Daniel could hear was the wind and a faint trickle of water and an electronic buzzing—his earbud.
“Glory? Control?”
His voice was obscene in the quiet.
And then he understood.
The silence. The wound. The falling.
He’d shot himself in the leg.
And the Telie, as was its purpose, had taken him…here.
#
Glory was right. He couldn’t wait to tell her. This was no research laboratory, no zoo. He didn’t know where he was, exactly, because he couldn’t see more than a few yards in any direction. At a forest’s edge, perhaps, or against a rocky, root struck riverbank, for he lay not on dirt but on sticks, yellowish and white, slick.
The air was chilly and foggy and there came a faint mist of rain. As ubiquitous as the fog was an awful stench, like sulfur or—he took a long whiff—microwaved fish and wet leather.
All of a sudden, he very much did not want to be here. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and, not yet trusting his leg, grabbed ahold of sticks and dragged himself in the direction of the trickling water sound.
The tree roots shined like ivory. They swayed and bunched below him, an uncertain ground, and with one more yank he found himself tumbling.
Not again! But he only rolled a few feet, slid a few more, and found himself lying on what was, without a doubt, solid earth.
Six feet away a Pearlfish blinked into existence. It was missing a fin but nonetheless slithered quickly, necklace swinging, not toward him but in the opposite direction, and, without thinking, Daniel raised his rifle and blew its head off. Or he supposed he did, for the body blipped away. He worked the bolt. Waited. Waited.
Things were popping off, back there.
He sat up against the root pile. The fog was less oppressive down here. He could see, in the distance, gargantuan pillars, or spires, obscured by the fog.
“Glory?” he tried again, whispering. “Control?” But his earpiece only hissed static. He popped it into his pocket.
No one to help. In defiance of his mounting panic, he set to the task at hand: locomotion. He yanked at the root pile until he came away with a stick long enough to serve as a cane. Its bulbous end fit his hand almost as if it were designed that way.
Before he could psych himself out, he lurched to his feet. The pain wasn’t quite bad enough to knock him back down. He waited until the world stopped swaying. Then he aimed himself at what seemed to be the nearest of the distant spires.
The breeze picked up as he hobbled along. And, as his path split away from the roots, the fog decomposed.
And oh, how he wished it hadn’t.
No pile of wet branches, there. No root system of an absent tree. This had been a marvel of wishful thinking. It was amazing that he’d ever believed it.
Rather, his fall into this strange land had been arrested by the mass of Pearlfish corpses. Mounds, or hillocks, lined like silo bags.
Their bones had served as handholds for his escape. Which had he shot, and which had Glory? When? At the top of one pile lay a Lure. Next to it was a Pearlfish with a woman’s hand in its mouth. Her fingernails were painted Kelly green. Below, having slid down the pile, a tourist in a Panama hat with a hole in his neck.
Daniel hobbled along this corpse wall. The stationary dead appeared to writhe. The sky was dead gray but for bronze clouds and a cloud peeled and behind it the moon was no moon he knew: twin rings of amber around a black pit.
He felt, dimly, that some important cord, which had been fashioned of him and secured cleverly to the rest of him, had begun to fray. Was, in fact, ripping him apart from the inside.
Eventually, he left the bodies behind. He did not look back. Before him was a scrub-grassed field dotted in debris. A river ran a stone’s throw away. The water glowed dimly as if beset with algae. The spire he’d been walking toward was no closer.
He leaned on a boulder and checked his calf. It hurt like a bitch, but the bleeding was mostly done. And the pain localized. The rock was cool on his cheek. He stuck his tongue to it—ran down a line cut in the rock.
No cut, that, but a joining. Evidence of masonry. The rubble took on a new resonance. There weren’t boulders; they were remnants of a castle. Broken battlements surrounding him, perhaps, judging by their rounded shape. Behind him was the roof of a guard tower. And, straight ahead, no tree stripped of leaves but maybe a massive ballista bolt sticking head-up. The shape struck him as somehow familiar.
As he neared, his perspective of the pole adjusted. The shadow at the top seemed more the tattered flag of some extinct kingdom. It wasn’t until he was at the root of it that he realized the flag was really a bundle. Twice as large as he was. Bigger, even, if unfolded along its curves and hollows.
Tired, leg aching, he leaned against the pole. Wood once, now petrified. Tracing its surface was the time-carve of water filigree…no, for could water carve such angles? These were deliberate. Symbols, or letters, or else intricate drawings. Perhaps a mural. Or—and this seemed especially awful, for some reason—a list.
And the bundle shifted.
Daniel froze.
The bundle moved again.
Thank God the shadows obscured the details of this ungathering. But he could hear the wet sounds which accompanied. And he wanted to run except he must have immediately tripped, for he found himself on his knees, face smarting on the pole’s root, rifle clanking against the back of his head. He needed his cane! He reached back for it and, finding nothing, felt that cord inside his head fray to snapping. Was he ripping down a new seam, in there? And could it even be relief which flooded him—
“Hello,” it said.
He could not manage an answer.
“Let me see you,” the voice said, feminine in tone, and deeply accented, all rolling consonants.
He did not move. It seemed much safer to keep his face in the pole. He thought, maybe, that he was in shock.
“Do not fret, child. We may neither look upon the other, yet. Tell me, though, who you are.”
Despite his fear, he found that it was a relief to hear another person. He looked up at her: a shroud silhouetted against the sky.
“Daniel,” he said.
She told him her name, but he could not understand it.
“Welcome to my home,” she said. She rustled, or else gestured at the land around her. A clear ichor dripped down the pole and glazed the hieroglyphs.
“Where are we?”
“Not where you were,” she said. Her face was barely visible in the nestled folds, but it was just like a person’s face. She unbloomed, further, or else opened like a palm, and her edges were fastened to the pole by iron spikes.
“Yes. Like you, Daniel, I know pain.”
Daniel wanted to ask how to get home. But words felt far too large for his mouth. If he opened his mouth, he knew he would vomit.
“Shall I tell you a story? That is what children crave.” Daniel got the distinct feeling that she was barely concealing excitement.
Still, he nodded. The clouds seemed to nod along with him. The river’s glow bobbed, too, twice as bright, now, its light illuminating one of the distant spires. A tower, sure enough, with square flanks and a curved crown. A mausoleum. Or else an altar, for now that he was studying it, he perceived on the steps a broken body and a gory run of red from a small door in the tower’s base.
“Listen well,” she said, and she began to speak. Later, Daniel could never recall the story’s exact sequence. Nor the details, except certain impressions which, though vague, were bottomless.
It was something like: two lovers gave birth. Later, forced by tragedy, one lover gobbled the other, and also the child. Then, somehow, a war had come, and the Lover, three-in-one, had been defeated, and captured, and rehung in that very spot.
“You see,” she said to him, when she was finished. And Daniel did see. Her words had afforded him a vision—of bonfire lights flickering atop the distant towers. Of flat, burned faces and rollicking smudges of shadow.
She cradled his face. Was he crying? Did she wipe his tears? Her hands were much like his own except for the webbing and the small, sharp fins.
“What have you to offer me, then?”
He didn’t understand, at first. And then, slowly, it occurred to him that he did not like the sound of that. Not at all.
“What?” He stepped away from her hands.
“An offering. That weapon? Those magic bullets? And what more?”
Now that he had a bit of space, he understood her as he hadn’t before. How she stretched into stratums of perception that he could not appreciate; bent in alignments he could not comprehend. If he were a straw on the haybale of existence, then she was an arrow driving through that bale.
“I will not force you,” she said. “But you should atone, child. Atone with an offering.” She stroked his hair. Helped him forward, so he could lean against her crucifix. Plucked a magazine of the Telies from his breast pocket. Gripped his rifle, long fingers peeling at the sling around his chest.
His rifle. The Telies.
Before he could second guess himself, he swung the rifle down so the muzzle pointed at his foot.
“Daniel?”
He thought about how he’d shot that Pearlfish in the face and how it had blipped away from this bizarre world.
He worked the bolt. He hoped, desperately, that this would work.
“Come to me, Daniel.”
“No thanks,” he managed.
And he pulled the trigger.
#
He was born into the end of bedlam. Twisted bleachers and trampled bodies and a curious calm. Tourists milled among the shattered Lures, among the bodies of Pearlfish who had been killed with normal rounds.
He made himself look at his foot. It wasn’t there, mostly.
But he’d never been so relieved. He stared into the sun and wept at its lack of blacklight or concentric rings. He was home.
Where was his earbud? He found it in his left front pocket and popped it in with shaking hands.
“Glory? Control?” Static. No answer. “Glory? I need help.”
A mourner in a black crewneck sweatshirt and black baseball cap approached him.
“Are you okay, guy? Your leg…”
“Yeah,” said Daniel. “No. Yeah. I’m hurt.”
“Holy Jesus,” said the mourner, kneeling down, pressing against the blood.
And then Daniel spotted Glory. She stood on the other side of the enclosure with her rifle trained on a group of Pearlfish. He didn’t understand until she motioned with the rifle barrel. The Pearlfish slid low. They bowed their heads. Their faces were identical and without expression. From their necks hung talismans of the crucified Lover.
Glory’s rifle rang out. She worked the bolt. Her rifle rang out. She worked the bolt. Her rifle rang out. She worked the bolt.
There were no bodies. Not here.
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