WHAT HAPPENED UP ON THE ROOF
We didn’t see the intruders at first because they were seething up from the underground. I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from for this reason, too: The inside of the factory threw the sounds off. But soon enough from our vantage on the roof, looking down to the factory floor through a couple of loose slats, I saw who it was: more poisoned half-changed children, like the ones who had attacked me. Spilling out of a culvert. An explosion of colors and textures and such a variety of limbs. Some had iridescent carapaces. Some had gossamer wings. Some had fangs like cleavers that half destroyed their mouths. Soft and exposed and pink or hardened and helmeted, they spilled out. A carnivalesque parade of killers. Some, if I were looking through Wick’s eyes, would’ve registered as “mods” and others as “homegrowns.”
Borne’s intake of breath matched mine. He didn’t need binoculars, apparently, to zero in on them. He’d gone rough and prickly beside me, and a faint snuffed-match/grain-alcohol smell wafted over.
“More,” he whispered. “More. Many more. Of the same.”
“Hush,” I said. “Hush.”
Yes, more, and they looked like they had purpose, like they were on patrol. They had spears and bats and knives and machetes and a smattering of shotguns that might have been loaded or, from the way carried, used as clubs. They spread out across the factory floor, searching for something. A coldness colonized me seeing them so small, from above, their footprints and paw prints and hoofprints and boot prints leaving such a dance of marks in the dust, and our own not betraying us only because the children had frothed up like flames to obscure all that had come before, so that seeking, they had only the evidence of their own lives all around. The stairs to the roof didn’t leave such traces. Yet they clearly sought us, had heard us or been tracking us from below.
The patterns of those footprints are what I focused on for a moment, unable to look directly at the children. I let the splinters of wood and tar pebbles from the roof cut into my palm. I wanted to be so still and so silent and so not-there that those children would never think to come up to where we were. Never even think to look up and perhaps catch a glint off my binoculars. Every scar on my body seemed to pulse, to burn. But pulsing there too was a need for revenge, and that I had to tamp down. I was with Borne. I knew he’d killed four of them, but this was more than twenty.
But Borne had no intention of going down there. Something else was coming in across his superior senses—senses that might outnumber mine. Borne became hard, rigid, and his eyes became blowholes that pushed out curls of pink mist.
“Other creatures are coming, Rachel,” he hissed at me like steam. “Other things are coming—now!”
Other things?
“Not nice,” Borne was breathing, “not nice not nice,” and what scared me was Borne being scared.
Borne turned the drab color of the roof and went pancake-flat and spread out, and tried to curl over me like a carpet was rolling me inside of it. Or like he was a giant harsh tongue.
“Stop it!” I whispered, losing my grip, binoculars jangling at my throat. “Stop it, I don’t need your help,” pushing back, pulling back the edge of Borne. “I need to see this. I need to see this.”
I managed to free myself from enough Borne to lie half in and half out of his protective embrace, put the binoculars to my eyes once more.
Down below, the roaring and screaming and bleeding had already begun, the wet, flopping sounds of people being taken apart. Mord proxies. Pouring in from the doorway where Borne and I had entered. Smashing through the windows.
“Don’t look,” I told Borne. “Don’t look.”
But how could I stop him? His entire skin was full of eyes, full of other receptors I couldn’t even name.
*
How to describe what I saw? It was a terrible, swift slaughter, possessed of an awful precision that made it hard to look away. Worse, the Mord proxies were enacting a revenge I’d played out in my mind a thousand times—sped up and preternatural.
The speed shocked me the most. For they were all golden bears, all huge in their hideous beauty, much taller than a man, with thick muscles that, in their stride and bounding, came at times to the surface of their fur like the hardness of a vine-wreathed tree trunk wrung and stretched taut. Yet they moved so lithe and sinuous they could’ve been snakes or otters or flowing water pushed along in a strong current.
Monstrous gold-brown blurs, they took apart the feral children with a gruff, ballet-like ease, the footprints on that dusty floor splattered with blood and offal. The arterial spray. Heads swatted from necks. Gouts of dark blood from deep gouges in thighs. A kind of communal baying or shrieking from the ferals as a last half dozen formed a semicircle soon rendered down into a chaos of viscera and exposed bone, the Mord proxies lunging forward from either side in hugs that burst, through fang and claw, the flesh that separated them.
The sharp, bitter smell of blood carried even to the roof. The smell of piss and shit, too.
There were pleadings and rough refusals to submit, although the Mord proxies never asked for surrender. You could not surrender to a proxy except through your death.
When they were done, the factory floor had been transformed into a violent canvas of body parts and fluids. A rough raw circle that pushed a broom or mop of reds and yellows and darker tones across its surface to create swaths and paths that almost had meaning. Here too were swirls and outcroppings of thicker paint that had not been smoothed out. I felt as if I were looking at a cross-section of Mord’s brain.
When they were done, the hummingbird quality to their movements, the blurring effect, faded, and the Mord proxies became just bears again—bears who, unlike Mord, could not fly. Fur matted with blood, the bears examined the evidence of their own battle lust, waded through it, and all the while huffed and bellowed and coughed deep in their throats, went from all fours to standing on two legs, to all fours again. Sniffing the air and finding it smelled good. Batted into the center the heads that hadn’t been crushed flat. As they panted and hummed and mumbled their contentment.
Now that the Mord proxies had come to rest, I could count their numbers. Five had slaughtered twenty-five ferals, with hardly any effort.
Yet, even with no proxy casualties, I could calculate the cost, for once the initial battle lust faded, some animating impulse fled with it, and these bears moved not in normal time but much slower, and shakes rippled through their fur and at times amongst the roaring and snarling came a whimper or a moan. Something about their speed before had been unnatural. Something about it cost them now, almost like the human body coming down from amphetamines. Which meant they might be vulnerable, if only you could catch them after a slaughter.