K Jeter: Farewell Horizontal

He reached out and gripped the edge of the metal curling up alongside the Norton. The chill inside him died, fell away into a hole under his gut.

The metal was warm, hot at its core. The retained heat of the violence that had torn the wall open passed into his palm.

He jerked his hand back, the fright finally penetrating through his surprise. “Jee… zuss.” No more than a whisper. When he breathed again, he smelt the trace of smoke drifting out of the darkness ringed by the ripped wall sections.

If they were still here – the ones ( and you know who , he told himself) who had blown open the building’s skin, and had put that sickening smell into the wind, sickening with the knowledge of what it was even if you had never smelled it before – if they’re still here, thought Axxter, inside there , it’s no use pouring on the throttle and splitting on out of here. Because they don’t work that way. How far would he get before he felt the same heat that had charred and twisted the metal wall on his own back? Not far enough – Christ, he thought, sick with dismay. What happened to all that good luck?

Of course, they might not still be here. Watching him from inside the gaping hole, with their hard little eyes, or whatever they might have instead of eyes. In which case, by their absence, he would be allowed to scurry away with his deeply treasured little life.

In which case, also – the thought rose unbidden, an automatic mercantile reflex – you might as well see what’s in there. In as in information . Which can be peddled; that’s what being out here on the vertical does to you, thought Axxter, amazed at the track of his mind

Greed beats fear anytime. Axxter slung one leg over the Norton’s tank and let his boot pithons snap onto the wall’s surface.

Cautiously – though he knew there was no point – he gripped the torn edge of the metal and peered around it. The heat inside the metal soaked through his jacket to the skin of his stomach. Lying on the curved shelf the wall segment formed, he could look across the gaping hole torn into the building. Or out of – the explosion, or whatever it had been, had come bursting from inside. That alone proved it hadn’t been the work of any military tribe rampaging around on Cylinder’s exterior, but something else.

Through the viewfinder, Axxter estimated the jag-rimmed hole at over a kilometer across, a gaping cavity in the building’s side. Turning the camera to the interior, he taped the twisted girders of a horizontal flooring level jutting out. Farther inside, only blackness, the walls of the broken corridors blackened with smoke.

He reattached the camera to his belt, right behind where the gun’s handle protruded. A lot of footage, more than he needed. If he was going to sell this – and there was no question of that; he needed all the cash into which other people’s misfortunes might translate – it wouldn’t be on the basis of aesthetic appeal. The thought of what had done this would be, as for him, just a little too much for people to bear. That thing that everybody’s afraid of, back in the darkness, way inside the building – Axxter shivered. Maybe that’s why I like it out here, one way or another. At least it’s out here. Away from that. He craned his neck and looked back inside the charred hole.

Something looked at him. He felt it before he caught sight of it. A white face, right at the edge of what had been a floor. He lifted the camera and zoomed in on it.

He lost it in the viewfinder, panned across the black metal, and found it again. He felt no surprise, nausea more than fear.

Empty eye sockets gazed toward the camera. Flame-scabbed remnants of another stuff, the odor the outside winds hadn’t yet cleansed from the atmosphere, blackened the withered neck and cage of ribs behind the skull. A hand, unmarked, clutched the broken edge of steel.

You too . The skull grinned as it spoke inside Axxter’s head. Watch out . The smile licked out and relished the knot in the still-living gut. Watch out, watch out, watch out …

He’d fallen asleep among corpses. His fatigue had caught up with him, in the burnt-out sector. Dreaming of bad things; Axxter cradled his head on his wrist, back of hand against ashes and concrete. The familiar comfort of sleeping on a horizontal floor, no matter how torn where it ended in air. An even more comforting weight of metal on his chest, finger curled against sickle trigger. A space cleared among the grinning things, so they wouldn’t whisper in his ear. But he was dreaming of them nonetheless.

“You too!” Dancing in a circle around him “Even as we are! You too will be!” From their white faces and spider ribs the charred-tissue remnants flutter, black rags. (In sleep, Axxter moaned, clutched the gun tighter.) A skull squared off with a mortarboard cap turns to its audience, hand rattling like dice, the thin end of the pointer tapping on Axxter’s breastbone. The lecture-hall lights come up, blinding him, standing naked on the podium.

The pointer flicks his nose, then draws a line down to his navel. “We see the front side.” The skull’s voice is Guyer’s, oddly, but no longer kind. “The sun comes up on this side. We see this side, we know this side.”

“We see! We are! Will be!” White grins swaying in the seats. (The crosshatched handle sweats in Axxter’s grip.) “You too!”

“The sun goes up and over -” The pointer traces vertical between Axxter’s eyes, bisects his forehead. He strains to hear the skull’s words; some analogy here, but he can’t make it out. “Then it’s on the other side, the rear side. We don’t see that side, we don’t know what’s on it – we don’t even care!”

“Don’t care!”

“But ah! The center! The core!” A flourish, and an overhead mirror lights up. Axxter rolls his eyes brow-ward, to see what the pointer stabs at. And observes, with sick surprise, the reflection of a circular hole at the top of his own head. A flat hat of darkness that drops away into a hole parallel to his spine. The reflected light falls into it, with only a few glimmers as echoes. “ That we know – something about!”

“We know!”

(Sleeps and draws a bead, but all the grinning things outside the dream stay prudently quiet.)

Skull, Guyer’s voice: “Something we don’t want to know! Something inside – where it’s dark!”

“Dark! Dark! You too! Dark!”

(Twitches and mumbles, sweating.)

Dream-Axxter stares at the hole revealed in the mirror, the darkness running down inside him, the hollow core.

The lecture goes on. “ Something – it’s where they are! The -”

He shouts at the voice, just a grin behind the glare of the lights, warning it to shut up. But it doesn’t, he knows with dream-certainty that it won’t. It’s going to say the name .

Chorus: “You too! You too!”

“… the -”

Then the gun is right there in the dream – you’re never completely naked with one – and he squeezes it with both hands as the white face screams in triumph.

“ – the Dead Centers! ”

In the corridor of ruins the gunshot slapped against the wall and bounced back into Axxter’s ears. He jerked awake, the gun in his hand scraping across the floor as he scrambled upright, just in time to hear the bullet’s clanging echo against the wall.

“Shit!” He ducked instinctively, head down between shoulders. “God- damn .” The bullet clattered into silence somewhere along the corridor. Gun warmth seeped into his palm; he dropped it with a start, as if seeing the weapon for the first time. Looking down, he saw a burn mark across the front of his jacket. Prodding his ribs, he found nothing amiss. A mutter, as he shook his head: “Fuckin’ dreams.” Could’ve killed myself. What I get for falling asleep, down here, of all places. His hand still shook as he reached for the terminal jack he’d found when first looking about the place.