The Envoy

The creature stalked into the light only a few seconds later. Michelle hadn’t known what to expect. She knew the legends about dragons, had been told that it resembled the creatures of old Earth mythology. But seeing it in reality was something completely different.

It was blue, almost the color of the ice around it, and easily forty meters long from head to tail. It walked on four legs with its wings folded against its torso and small leathery ears tucked back against its skull. Its eyes were the color of night, and it glared at her with pure venomous hatred.

The dragon moved forward with a sinuous, side to side motion on its short legs. It sniffed twice and clicked its jaws. Two glands on either side of the mouth flared open.

Six ear-shattering cracks echoed through the cavern. The dragon flinched and looked up. The Envoy had gained higher ground on an ice shelf. His silhouette, gun in hand, could be seen against the backdrop of white light through the ice above. The dragon leapt, wings flapping to gain altitude.

Warren made an inhuman jump. He landed on its head, firing again and again. The dragon shook its snout furiously, throwing him to and fro like a doll as they slammed into the ice. He held onto a nostril with one hand fired with the other.

The dragon reared onto two legs and slapped him against the ice. The Envoy was finally thrown, his weapon spiraling into the darkness. He hit a wall and didn’t move. It hissed at his limp body and darted forward.

Michelle lashed out with her telepathy. She didn’t have time to think, to remember the warnings against trying to Read an animal. She was inside the dragon’s mind in an instant and she pulled. It stopped stock still above the Envoy and turned toward her. Its eyes were almost human.

They were a threat to her home.

Michelle barely had time to realize that the thought had been the dragon’s before it dove toward her. It was a flash of blue with a raging hiss as Warren pushed her to the side. Pain lit up the side of her face as she slid across the ice.

He was standing between her and the dragon, barehanded, crouched in a fighting stance. The ice behind Michelle crackled as acid ate through it.

The dragon moved forward cautiously, its eyes scanning up and down Warren with frightening intelligence. A few silent moments passed.

It leapt into the air, roaring, and pounced on Warren, jaws first. Michelle screamed as he disappeared beneath a flare of scales and leathery wings. The dragon’s tail slashed at the air and beat against the ice. Michelle barely had the sense to scramble out of the way.

It fell down onto its legs and was strangely quiet. It whined.

Warren was lying under its mouth, a spiral web of cracked ice where his back was jammed against it. One hand held the beast’s lower jaw, the other the top, by the teeth. His black scarf had fallen and revealed a strong chin with three day’s stubble. He was grinning.

The Last Son

I’m the last one, the last little soldier left on the playing field. The last one of me left alive.

I suppose it’s my fault, and who would argue?

Wasn’t it my job to make sure that they were all untraceable, that their words wouldn’t come back to haunt them? That their alligations against the greatest man to ever have lived wouldn’t punch them an early ticket to Hell? Wasn’t that my job?

It was right, what we did. It was the only thing left that we could have done. After he took our lives, our sanities, and our families from us? It’s not like he was going to dispute our claims; how can any dead man do that? None of this was our fault, none of it. You’d have done the same if you’d been born in one of our communities, if you’d been called Adam; if you’d grown up believing you were the son of God.

If you’d grown up believing God was the man who impregnated your mother.

Should we be punished for the lives we were dealt; should we be hunted down and murdered like we weren’t deserving of the life our father tried so hard to give us? The father you people worship and defend as if he were the very thing it took me so long to learn he wasn’t?

The answers, if you’ve forgotten, are no. Yet all of my other selves are dead, and I’m left alone.

By rights, I should have been first. All of this was my idea. I found them all, preached to them all, had them write their stories, and put them in this book. All of this was my doing. They should have been safe, my brothers, my selves.

I was the one who should have died. Me, with my name on the cover. How hard was I to find?

Are you coming now, to finish the job I started?

Is that you in the hall?

Is this it?

I am Adam, last son of Gildrick, and it was only the truth. It was only ever the truth.

A Package Diverted at Mercy Station

The little man stood there, wriggling exta-dimensional burden clasped between his hands. He looked at Gray, and his mouth positioned itself into a questioning pout. Gray looked back, and his mouth opened impulsively, vocal chords forming the guttural sounds his lips would change into words.

“You’re late.”

The little man, still pouting at Gray, heard this, and his eyes widened. His lips pulled back in what Gray first thought was a snarl before he realized it was an expression of fear. As the words further sunk in to the little bright-colored thing’s mind, the whiter he grew. His clothes paled, somehow, hot oranges and yellows dripping off, leaving only a bleached gray image of a little haggard demon. The little thing shook its head, blinking and swallowing with great rapidity. Then it spoke.

“My… My lord…” Its voice was like the grating of coarse sandpaper on metal. Gray winced. But the little man said no more. Its eyes rolled up into its head and it fell back, dropping to the floor in a heap. The package slithered out of its hands.

Gray stood staring at the pile of flesh and clothing for a long moment, mouth open, hands placed in front of him in a position that might, at another time, be used to communicate the idea of calm, and caution. It was the first time he’d come close to feeling anything like shock in, well, further back than he could remember. For a moment his subconscious held on with incredible fervor, wanting nothing more than blank-eyed incomprehension, but then the rational mind in Gray forced that desire down, beating it wearily back into whatever dwelling it had crawled out of. He would not refuse to see, to understand.

The little man (if that’s what he’d been; Gray was somehow resistant to the idea that the thing was human, had ever been human) was dead. The color of its flesh dripped off the way it had dripped from it’s clothing, the way its flesh was dripping from its bones even now. Dripping not like the steady, fluid drops from the tip of an icicle during the last days of winter, but like pine sap from a severed limb. It was too slow to see if he looked for it, but from the corner of his eye it happened fast enough. The bulges and hollows that formed the horrible sea of migrating flesh made Gray want to close his eyes, close them now; if he didn’t he felt he would go blind.

But Gray didn’t close his eyes. He simply passed his gaze over the dead heap on the train station floor; a heap his inner mind knew would eventually disappear completely, leaving no trace of the being and whatever it had brought with it from whatever world it had come from. He passed his gaze over the dead thing and rested it on the package.

It lay on the cool concrete, all sides facing up. Gray squinted at it, trying to trace its outline. He couldn’t. All at once, the package was every possible shape. A line, a flat square, a box, a cylinder, a sphere. All at once, all of its sides were inside out, edges facing this way and that, vertices vibrating and undulating in and out of existence. He wondered, briefly, if he would be able to pick it up. Then, scolding himself (You can’t pick that up, it ain’t yours, it ain’t right. Belongs to the man in the wall, you leave that thing alone), he swallowed and looked back toward the dead thing.

He had been right, it seemed. The mangled mess of clothes and flesh and whatever passed for bone in its homeworld was indeed disappearing, but not in any way he had been expecting. It seemed to ooze directly into the concrete, the whole mass squeezing itself through microscopic pores in the rocky surface. And already it was getting smaller. Apparently what magic the thing held when it delivered its daily package, the magic that allowed it to go unnoticed as it did its duty, continued working after its death, because Gray heard no unfamiliar sounds in the station. He saw no one break step, no one shooting any curious glances at him or his dead thing. No one else could see. No one else would see.

And even so near the swirling masses of people filling Mercy Station at that moment, Ken Grayson knew that for once, he was completely alone.

The Bell Tower Suicide

The details of this event are vague, separated into tiny nuggets. Like all good stories, it leaves more to be desired. I know four things. One, this happened twenty years or so ago, and it was a young woman. Second is that I saw the window she did it out of, it was right above the stair, small, and seemingly difficult to access. Third is that she was sitting in a chair. Lastly, is that my professor said he was attending school here, making his way to class when he saw her blood flowing in the cracks of the sidewalk.

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I couldn’t stand him.

My name doesn’t matter to you. In that it won’t change the fact that you will feel a jolt when you look up at my window. As if trying this end on like a dress. Could you do it? And what might drive you? The biggest question I hear resounding in the minds of students as they come to the point in the tour of Barton Tower tour as someone points out my window is why? Why did she jump? What made her so desperate? School? Work? Weight? No. It wasn’t school. I wasn’t a perfectionist. I went through my window, because, at that point it was the only door open to me. And yes, it’s my window, because I’m the only one who could possibly climb up there, and with a chair in my left hand no less. The reason is that sometimes professors get that way because of the control. Imagine impacting a hundred students’ academic record.
You stand up and talk, and then require them to notate every word that passes your lips, you threaten that it could be on the test. They could be tested on what you said. They are your pawns. Maybe you need something printed and collated, and that poor chap needs an A.. Or that girl who’s always ten minutes late….maybe there’s a way you can strike a deal where it won’t affect her grade. I’m talking after hours. And it gets more and more complex, and everything you are, everything you need is precariously balanced on his little finger, and if you’re not there, if you don’t do it, if you look at anyone else…oh what am I saying. All you care about is the fall. The plummet. The chair. Why a chair? Is another question. By this time I have decided that my only opening out of this life and his world is through that little window. It would be like a birth. And what better way to soar into your new life but seated on your throne. His throne. He had this beautiful ornate chair in his office, an antique. Matched his desk. It’s balancing on the windowsill. The air reeks of spring. Warm and dark, the sun just stretching its first rays up over the edge of world. The thing about falling is the euphoria. Pure joy. For only that long. Say ‘pure joy’ and that’s all the time you have to think about it. By the time you would have begun to wonder if it’s really joy or terror, your blood is already flowing in straight lines. Reddening the cracks in the sidewalk.

A Night In Sassa Hin

A blanket of darkness smothered Sassa Hin in the summer eve’s heat, thick fog obscuring torches less than twenty yards away. Silence rested over the city like a Sworn Sister’s shroud and Lieutenant Kaelic could tell the full effects of it on his men.

“Darby!” Kaelic kicked his second in command once with a growl that threatened to stick in his throat. The sergeant started and wiped his eyes, peering through the night as Kaelic crouched down beside him in the stairwell.

“No sign of him yet, sir,” he grunted.

“You were sleeping,” Kaelic said. He whispered, though on a night like this sounds were swallowed as easily as the light. They should have all been deep in sleep behind the walls of the barracks or lying drunk on a tavern floor. “Keep your eyes on the main road. Style and Jack are checking everyone that comes by?”

“Yeah, yeah, not much of those anyhow. No one wants to be out.”

“Is the woman inside?”

“The wench and her younger brother. They’re both asleep, didn’t know that we tracked the wielder here three nights running.”

“Think they’re lovers?”

The sergeant grinned. “Does a cow have teats?”

“Silly question,” Kaelic agreed.

Sassa Hin, City of Stars. He grabbed a handful of his jerkin to wipe the sweat from his brow. Bad luck when the clouds blotted out the stars at night and worse luck when they descended to the ground. Anyone who knew what was good for them stayed in. The yelping croak of a bunyip echoed through the night, sending a shiver down his spine.

“A bad omen,” Darby said in an eerie whisper. “The bunyip cry when they crawl from the river to feed.”

Kaelic struck Darby across the back of the neck and the sergeant gave a low chuckle. The humor was forced, and Kaelic shook his head. If Darby was nervous then any man had the right. Plump and short as he was, the sergeant was as tough as a Nightwalker’s cane.

“Joke if you like, but don’t let the men hear you,” Kaelic said. “Style’s spooked enough. If you say it, he might believe it.”

“I’ll keep mum. Do you think the wielder will show?”

Kaelic squinted into the darkness, silently cursing the fog. Benji and Dawn held the roofs but wouldn’t be able to hit shit with their crossbows through this murk. “Let’s hope not. If he doesn’t, we’ll all go home alive.”

Hungry Tuesday

It was darker and smelled a little musty on the south side of the market stalls, despite the drizzle of raindrops that leaked from the canvas tenting. Zin picked her way across the wet cobbles and runnels of mud to the apple seller. The fruit that wasn't wormy was hard, and the old woman's muttered under her breath, counting each fruit that Zin touched. It felt wrong to be on the 'dirty' side of the market, instead of strolling down pathways sprinkled with sawdust and sand, looking over ribbons and glassware and fresh oranges, as Zin always used to do. It felt humiliating and shameful. Especially when her younger sister was honeymooning with silken sheets and rose-petal baths and moonlight suppers in crystal dishes. Zin's only consolation on the dirty side of the market was that no one she knew should see her here, bargaining over sour apples and wrinkled potatoes.

A wet splat struck Zin on the shoulder. She spun, startled, and the second tomato caught her on the cheekbone.

A russet-haired woman stood just inside the tenting on the far side of the stalls, tears and smeared makeup making trails down her sallow face. "I'll kill you, Zin! You whoremonger! You thieving bitch!" she shrieked, and started down the maze of crooked stalls, throwing anything she could reach, her frenzy leaving as much damage in her wake as before her.

"I didn't do anything wrong, Milla!" Zin yelled, ducking a barrage of potatoes. She groped for apples to throw. The old woman's wooden cane smashed Zin's fingers. "Not til you paid for it! Thief! Thief!"

Zin turned and ran, slipping on the wet cobbles, seeking the safest exit, or even a place to hide. Milla's hysterical shrieks rose in pitch and volume, and soon complete strangers were throwing things, fighting amongst themselves, or trying to steal anything they could. Bruised, battered, breathless, Zin ducked around a stack of wooden kegs and sagged to the ground.

A slim, leather-gauntleted hand snaked out of the shadows and seized Zin's arm, pulling her off balance. "They'll find you here. Come this way."

"Let me go!" Zin struggled, kicking and writhing against the hidden stranger. She glimpsed a flash of pale skin against the darkness, felt leather skid under her flailing hands and feet. The woman pulled her farther into the uncanny pool of darkness. Taking a desperate gamble, Zin let herself fall to the ground limply. As Zin's assailant shifted her grasp and started to crouch down to pick Zin up, Zin kicked her off balance and wrenched her arm free. Panting, Zin burst into the chaos of the markeplace again, cradling her chafed wrist.

"There she is!"a farmer in the next aisle yelled, pointing. Heads turned her way. The crowd surged.

The strange woman pulled her back into the darkness, and Zin sucked in a gasp as the world shifted and her lungs filled with the scent of honeysuckle and roses.

Travelling Man

More time passed as happens when travelling; the man’s legs began to ache and still he went on. His brow was creased and sweaty, his sack of foodstuffs heavy on both shoulders. The dirt road eventually changed to a wide path, and the wide path to the narrow one. Still no crossroads had arisen, and foliage rose up out of the sides of the path, blocking the poor traveller in. They sheilded the cold light from him and their gray, wet leaves were warm with dew, yet they taunted him with his own claustrophobia.

The old man didn’t dare pulling out his pack in a place such as this; the plants might eat him. He would not sit on the ground here, for fear that the warmth would tempt him to sleep and he might never wake up. So on he went. Once he looked behind him and saw the trail he’d been walking had branched into many, and knew that there would be no finding his way back to the simple brick house he’d called home for so long. The idea sort of saddened him, and sort of didn’t. It wasn’t his home any longer, just a cold place that brought back false memories. Anyway, the old man kept walking, one foot in front of the other and vice versa and all that. He wouldn’t stop until he reached his destination, and not just because he was afraid of the deadly dreams he might have.

The real reason, the secret reason, was this: though exhausted to the bone, and hungry to boot, he felt great. He felt the best he’d felt in years, not counting the time he’d last made love to his wife (what are you thinking about? there was no wife) and his legs were filled with strength. As much as he’d like to deny it, he was enjoying this little trek; enraptured with the strength of his body this close the grave.

Excerpted from the 2004 novel "Endless"

Son of Gildrick

You knew Ivan Gildrick as a saint. As more than a man; one of the few who walked among humanity while seeming at the same time to glide above it. A legend, a living myth. Every word he spoke was written down by someone, sold off to someone else, and at some point relayed to you from tiny speakers inside a car or adjacent to flashing screens of loudly colored lights. A true Man, someone said; Gildrick was just that. A model for the rest of us. God’s first truly great gift to humanity, Jesus set aside.

It’s been twenty-two years since Ivan Gildrick died. Twenty-two years to the day. My birthday.

You knew him as a philanthropist; a man who gave half of every paycheck he’d ever earned to those worse off, as the billionaire who single-handedly furnished ninety percent of all the hospitals in Africa. You knew him as the philosopher who wrote logic into the meaning of your life, the inventor of the only diet pill that ever worked. You knew him as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize; the only man ever to win two different categories the same year. You knew him as the best loved man alive, a man greater in stature than any in history. You worshipped him, his celebrity. You licked your lips every time you heard his name, saw his face on the television screen. You remember where you were, what you were doing, when you learned of his passing. You wept.

As did I. The midwives pulled my from my mother’s belly and one stuck her finger down my throat to make sure I would breathe. My mother’s body quivered and I squalled; a small bundle of flesh, alien in my premature surroundings. It’s easy to imagine. She, the one whose breast should have fed me, drowned in grief while I hung in another’s arms, oblivious to any tragedy; oblivious to everything but the light and the cold. It’s easy to see. That as my mother took her last breath, the woman who so wished I was hers whispered in my ear.

“Adam.”

You knew Ivan Gildrick as a god. In this way, you and I, we are almost similar. My life began in the shadow of his death. And I grew, a boy alone among his companions, friendless and envied.

You knew him as many things. To me, he was two.

Secondly, he was my father.

Firstly, he was God.

The Seven Adams

I’m staring at two other versions of myself. One of me is shorter, with dark hair and glasses. He sips at a cup of coffee and looks around without moving his head. The other one of me is a taller, bulkier version whose arms are tattooed and whose fingers rattle like bones against the table as he taps. Metal hangs off the second me’s face in balls, little spheres of silver that jut from lip, nose, and eyebrow. I speak to them, vaguely aware that I’m not telling them anything they don’t know. They are me, after all, after a fashion.

We’ve all been through the same thing, each living a life symmetric to each other’s, making choices that while different, still led us here: three of me at the same table in the same pub in Chicago. It’s not our first time together, not hardly, but this time I know it’s the last. After tomorrow, we’ll be scattered to the wind. The shorter me will be returning to his home in Massachussetts, and my tattooed self will be taking a trip across the world, to destinations as vague as his ambition. Now that our task is over, neither of them have any reason to acknowledge our past, neither of them care to be a part of what we’ve created. I don’t either, not really, but I’m responsible for this.

In eighty minutes I’ll be on a plane to New York City.

We speak; the words we say don’t matter. We’re all thinking the same thing. That after tomorrow, everyone will know the truth. The murders of over two thousand people will be acknowledged. The largest cover-up in human history will be revealed. The identity of the greatest man to have ever lived will be challenged.

I’m standing up. I’m shaking my hands, both the bulky and the smaller. I’m turning, and letting the pub door swing shut behind me. After tomorrow, I don’t have many plans. I have no home to go to, no place to hide. After tomorrow, my life expectancy will drop radically. If they haven’t found me within a day or two I’ll be surprised.

Me and the other Adams, we want to tell our story. After tomorrow, you’ll know. All of this, and all of what we’ve already written. It was close; we almost didn’t finish in time. In less than eight hours it’ll be twenty-five years. The world will be alive in celebration, in mourning. Ivan Gildrick, God’s first truly great gift to humanity (Jesus aside), dead a quarter of a century.

Tomorrow, our twenty-fifth birthday. The day we give the world the truth about the man we grew up thinking of as our father.

As our God.