Paul Hughes - Broken - A Plague Journal

His lips hovered inches from her. He frowned and

Maire smiled, bent to help Richter to his feet. He coughed another glut of phase to the floor. Tendrils and thick loops of the sludge slicked his chin and chest. He rocked against her, still solidifying, and she altered her form to match his memories of Benton. He was blinking away the birth blindness; she couldn’t rely on a stolen voice alone. She cut into the remnants of Benton’s pattern and searched for convincing.

“Hope?” he repeated, his hands now surveying Maire’s face, which molded to the memories she pulled from him, the histories stored within herself. His hands traced down her sides, came to rest on hips that hadn’t been hers for long. “Where are we? I thought—That light—”

“Shh, baby.” Maire smiled with Hope’s face. “It’s going to be okay now. You were right. About everything. I knew you’d come for me.”

“Baby—” He looked at the metallish expanse, the uplink chamber swaying at the top of a tower city jutting from a dead future. “Where are we?”

She stood on tip-toes, wrapping her arms securely around him. Richter tabled the question and responded, burying his face in her hair, dragging lips along her cheek, coming to rest in the angle of her neck. “I thought you were gone.”

“I’m right here.”

“I needed to see what was in the light.”

“It’s heaven, James.”

“I thought—I needed to see. To find you.”

“You did.” Maire tugged with Hope’s colorless eyes, and for an instant, a deeper blackness existed.

Richter’s grasp on her weakened.

Maire lashed out with her claws, Hope’s shape and form dissolving into nothing. Richter’s neck hung in tatters; his look of surprise was endearing. Maire sneered with delight as she grabbed his head and bit the rest of his neck through. The assembly of blood and meat flopped to the floor. She took her time excising his projector.

“Too easy.” She licked her lips and sucked wads of his viscera from the marble.

One step closer to Jud. Another piece of Paul fell into

the place was empty, just a scatter of overturned tables and splintered chairs. Napkins dispensing lazily from dented stainless bricks. The door shut the city out behind him, squeezing down and crimping off the sound of wind and the staccato vibrations of war.

A sign sat on the neglected counter: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.

Richter walked to the counter, was drawn to the sign. His hand, finding purchase, marred clean paths into the veil of dust. There was an empty cigarette pack on the floor. There was the flapping cellophane skin of a Zinger, the bottom residue of cream and unnaturally red coconut slowly yellowing across one plane of it. The tip jar was empty except for a small blue marble, clouded.

His hand went to his throat, found it intact. Confusions blossomed.

He heard movement from the back room. Something falling, something dragged. A female grunt of a nameless emotion.

The windows shivered with the sudden onset of rain.

An overturned cylinder of red plastic stir sticks. An eared copy of Demian , the pages crisp and cracking. A single black leather glove, glittering with something beautiful and heartbreaking.

Richter walked slowly to the back of the shop, wondered at his boots, the clothing from so far ago. He remembered a desert and the Styx. A spire. New memories dislodge. Timesweep. His jaw worked over new bends in history. He felt his neck again; it was whole. He walked through coffee grounds and crumbled ceramic, the green, furry remnants of pastry. He reached the door to the back room and jumped at a crash of something heavy and fragile.

The doorknob was cold. Its turn was rusted and audible. Hinges cracked ancient resistance, and the door pushed away from him.

Benton kneeled on the floor, flopping thick manila file folders from a cardboard box.

She looked up at his gasp and the quick backward retreat of his boots. “James?” A folder fell from her grasp, spilling an inch of photographs, postcards, love letters to the linoleum.

“Stay away from me.” His hands shifted to silver.

She stood. “James? How did you—”

“Stay back!” His eyes flared white.

Benton halted her advance.

“You touch me again, I’ll fucking kill you.” The silver crawled up Richter’s arms, consumed his form, leaving him a shadow, an implication.

Realizations slammed into place deep in the works of Benton’s mind. “James—It wasn’t me.” She tested a step toward him. “I wouldn’t—”

He lunged forward and lashed out with both hands, which passed ineffectually through the image of her. She bent toward his shimmer where he touched her, but her projection swam back into a solid, sparkling with her own shift. His fingertips dragged a merge out with that contact. New truths metastasized across lines of resistance.

“It wasn’t me, baby. Please…Believe me.”

The wind screamed through the collapsing city.

Her slurp was a cute annoyance. She was a loud eater. She smacked her lips. He couldn’t remember ever having heard her chew gum, but he could forgive the cracking he suspected she would have allowed herself to ignore. Every brilliant mind controls an eccentric body, a collection of actions that set it apart.

She wiped aside a windrow of dust and put the teacup down on a laminated menu used as a coaster. “You were right.”

His eyes asked.

“The signals were getting through, not bouncing back. Someone was listening, out there. They talked back.”

He remembered an expensive restaurant lifetimes ago, a conversation broken off because of an unexpected flight to Wyoming.

“Who?”

“Maire. The Alpha Centauri system. Just one of infinite possibilities. The first to respond, because of the relative proximity.”

“I don’t—”

“We traded signals for thousands of years, neither civilization understanding that someone was listening. Someone was out there. And when the Sol system finally died, when Michael Balfour’s probe finally reached Proxima Centauri, the aliens there—people with two hearts, black blood, but people —they considered it an act of war. Things bend out there in the empty spaces between galaxies. Things splinter into spectrums of possibility. Time thins out and doesn’t mean much.”

Richter broadcast his lack of understanding with a long draw of coffee.

“Life isn’t a straight line. This time, Maire was there to catch you. Another time, Michael pulled you out, and you led the resistance against the Enemy. Another, Maire’s forces got to Earth before Michael ever had a chance to build the probe. Sometimes life curves out and back again, intersecting places it’s already been. This place—this ridiculous coffee shop dream—it’s the place where everything collapses. It’s the Delta merge, the place where the two most probable timelines collide. It’s the place where a war between two solar systems begins and ends.”

“What does that make Maire?” Richter couldn’t look at Benton’s eyes. “Or us?”

“She’s the eraser at the other end of the pencil. The backspace key. The counterpoint to everything the author’s written into existence. She’s the unraveling. Revenge. And us? We’re a part of her, now. She’s torn us from him, and she’ll use everything we know to win her war against Paul.”

He opened one of the folders on the table. There was a photograph of the author in London. A postcard shaped like a sea monster. A tiny slip of paper on which a left hand had written a three-word note.

“There’s boxes of this stuff stored here. Maire’s built quite a collection. She’s pulling things from him, storing them away in this construct, using each innocent little memory to destroy him. The whole back room, shelves and stacks. She’s breaking him down.”