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The other three were just a foot or two away.
“What the fuck … ,” I cried, scrambling backward. I stepped outside of the gate and tried to pull it closed, but the kids grabbed at it, preventing this. Ben was already out and making his strange, unsteady way toward me. I ran for the door and slammed it behind me. There was no lock on it. Instinctively I grabbed one of the chairs and propped it under the knob. That’s what people did in movies. It was supposed to do something.
I ran for the kitchen and switched on the light with a shaking hand, fumbling around on the wall until I got it. Then I saw my wound for the first time. The pain truly came with the visual. There was a full bite profile. The blood was dripping down my arm, down to the floor. There was something cold running through my veins, starting from the bite and running up the arm. And the area around the bite was starting to go black. I grabbed a kitchen towel hanging from a hook on the wall and wound it tight around the wound. I was woozy, suddenly exhausted. I needed to get in bed for a little while. All the horrible weeks I’d been here, and now this… . Rest. I needed to rest.
I shuffled back down the hall, pausing just for a second by the door to the playroom. I could hear gentle shuffling inside. The children were still in there, moving around, playing. There was a faint, light moaning. Alex was still crying. The door rattled lightly.
For a moment I was flooded with guilt. These were just children … small, very confused children who had led weird lives. They couldn’t communicate with anyone.
They ate raw food that came off a conveyer belt, like they lived in a sushi place. No wonder they bit me when they had the chance. They had no sense of normal.
Maybe the bite hadn’t even been intentional, just an overenthusiastic attempt to make and keep contact. Stay with me. That’s what it had probably meant.
I still wasn’t opening that door.
I kept right on going, falling headfirst into the bed. I didn’t even have the energy to get under the covers. I just folded the duvet over myself and closed my eyes. Just a minute of rest …
When I woke up, there was light. Soft, diffused light. Birds were cooing.
I felt heavy, truly heavy, like my body had been cast in concrete and the supremely soft bed shouldn’t have been able to support my weight. But there was no pain anywhere. In fact, aside from feeling heavy, I had pretty much no sensation at all.
It took some effort, but I managed to turn my head on the pillow. I was under the blankets now. It appeared that I was wearing pajamas. I didn’t recognize them, but they were very nice. When I turned my head the other direction, I saw the actress standing in the doorway. She came and sat on the edge of the bed.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, reaching over and kindly stroking a stray hair back from my forehead.
“Kind of weird,” I said. “Tired. ”
“You had a bad bite. But you’ll be okay now. I did say not to go in—but I understand. You were drawn to them. I know the feeling. ”
She stroked my hair for a moment. It felt so nice. Ever have anyone stroke your hair? It’s amazing.
“I need to talk to you about your friend,” she said.
“My … friend?”
“Franklin. He was at the farm with you? I think he’s your boyfriend. ”
“Was,” I said.
“Don’t think of it that way. There’s no ending, okay?”
I had no idea what to say to that, so I just let her continue to pet me. God, I was tired.
“It wasn’t his fault,” she said quietly. “It was just so dark. ”
“Dark?”
The actress sighed deeply.
“He was just … in the road. Walking. It was dark. There aren’t any lights out here.
I didn’t see him until he bounced off my hood. ”
That woke me up—a little, anyway.
“Bounced off … You hit him?”
“He’s doing fine,” the actress said quickly. “That’s why I wanted to help you. I knew he must have come from the farm. I asked around, and George told me about you. He said you came together. You must have been worried sick when he went out and didn’t come back… . ”
“I managed,” I said.
“He really wants to see you. I told him you were here, and he’s just been asking for you over and over. ”
“Really?” I said. “He’s asking for me? Where is he?”
“He’s here. And he asks about you all the time! I’ll go and get him and bring him. ”
I shouldn’t have cared about this, but a part of me was glad that Franklin was sucking it a bit, getting bounced off car hoods. That he was sorry that he’d left me.
But how was he here? I’d been here all night and hadn’t seen him.
A few minutes later she helped him in. It was Franklin, all right. He looked like hell —his skin ashen, his eyes glassy, his lips dry. He was wearing some yoga outfit that I’d never seen before—probably one that belonged to the famous actor. And bizarrely, he was wearing a surgical mask tied snugly around his mouth.
“Sooofie … ,” he mumbled. There was a drag in his voice, a slurring distortion that wasn’t caused by the mask.
“Franklin?”
“Soooofie …”
He moved toward me, almost falling over. The actress was practically holding him up. She was strong.
“He’s still recovering,” the actress said, straightening him up. “I had to give him a little something to calm him down because at first he was a little … disoriented.
Sometimes he seems agitated. But he’s okay now. ”
I’d seen Franklin very righteously stoned, but never quite like this.
“Soooooofie … ,” he said, almost in a moan. There was real longing behind it, like he wanted nothing more in the world than to be near me.
“I think he needs to go back and rest,” the actress said. “I just wanted you to see him. ”
“Soooooooooofie …”
Franklin strained to keep looking at me, even as he was negotiated out of the room, banging against the doorway in the process.
I decided it was time to have a look at my own injury.
It took all the effort I had to pull my arm from beneath the thick duvet, and as soon as I did, I wished I hadn’t. While it didn’t hurt, my arm was clearly not well. It was whitish-gray from the tips of my fingers to just above my elbow. The wound itself had become engorged and pus-filled, green and purple and blue-black and angry red and every color of the rainbow that my hand could be except its usual one. You didn’t need a degree in medicine to know that that kind of a wound was seriously fucking bad, and that whatever herbal teas I had been given, or whatever magical rocks had been placed on my sleeping body to aid my recovery, hadn’t worked and were never going to work.
This woman had hit Franklin with a car and brought him back here to recover, and to cover up what she had done, and now he looked deranged. He was probably infected, delirious. She had weird children penned in the living room. And now I was going to get some hideous old-school infection if I didn’t get the hell out of here.
Just outside the window I could see the actress’s car. I had to go outside, and take it and drive to town, somewhere with a hospital. I wasn’t worried about driving on the other side of the road, or that I was stealing. How could she report me when she’d mowed Franklin down with a car and not told anyone?
Get the car. Drive. Before I got any sicker.
The act of pushing back the duvet felt like pushing a piano up the stairs with one hand, but somehow I did it. I got out of bed. All my movements were unsteady. My feet couldn’t be relied upon to move as I wanted them to, not with a normal gait, but I could get forward and out of the room, to the hall, to the door. Slowly. So slowly. I was walking like I was tangled up in nets.
The actress caught me as I was just a few shambling steps away from the door.
&nbs
p; “There’s something I need to explain to you,” she said, her voice pleading, urgent. “And it’s really good news. See, death doesn’t really exist. That’s why we don’t call it death. We call it sleep. ”
She smiled and nodded and took it as read that I had any idea what the hell she was talking about.
“My kids,” she went on. “They’re very special. They were all asleep. I woke them up using the mech. I’m not supposed to have the mech. But … one of the lab heads … I met him at Star Center… . That’s the special center for, you know, famous people… . He gave me a little bit. But it works! It’s true re-an …”
This was all a jumble in my mind, but I can honestly say I wouldn’t have understood it any better even under ideal conditions. It was a bunch of Lazarus crap.
“Re-an?” I repeated.
“Reanimation. True Health. My kids were asleep. I woke them. ”
Piece by piece I clicked this all together. The picture I was assembling was very odd.
“You’re telling me that your kids were … dead? And you brought them back?”
“There is no death,” she said. “Remember? Just sleep. ”
I wanted to point out that there are in fact a number of differences between death and sleep, like breathing and generally being alive. But then she added something that made me drop the nit-picking.
“Just like your boyfriend. ”
There was a faint ringing noise in my ears.
“Franklin’s dead?”
“Not dead! You just saw him. Did he seem dead?”
I had no answer to that question. Thinking in general … It was getting harder by the moment. I just had to keep going. Get to the door. Get to the door.
“The mech is the answer,” she said, following me. “The end of death. He’s better now! Everyone will be better! It’s a revolution, Sofie. Against death itself. And my children are the start, and Franklin … and you. You’ll be with your boyfriend. You two will be together! You’ll always be together!”
With Franklin. Forever. Forever with that idiot. The idea was so horrible that I lunged forward, smacking myself against the door as I reached it. Moving was so difficult.
“I think it’s in you,” she said, coming toward me. “The mech. It transferred to you in the bite. Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand how wonderful this is?”
The famous actress got between me and the door and wrapped those famously tattooed and toned arms of hers around me in the warmest, most motherly hug imaginable.
God, she was warm. People are so warm. And her pulse. It’s so weird, that pulsing. It was like a drumbeat, a drumbeat that made me outrageously angry. I opened my mouth to scream but lost my balance and found myself pulled into the actress’s neck, bare and exposed.
It was like I hadn’t eaten in days and then someone had shoved a perfect, juicy burger under my nose, fresh from the grill, still running with those delicious juices that you get right as the meat comes off the flames … and I knew it was a neck and not a burger, but it had become one and the same, and there was only one thing to do … one thing … so I bit. I bit so hard! I was so strong! I clamped down, and then … delight, blind delight … a happiness I had never known! I didn’t even mind the screaming. And my face was all wet. I guess blood, but that was right. It was all right. It was right, it was right, it was right, it was …
Excited. Don’t know why just happy now. Machine on wall with pictures comes on. Is television. Right, is television. Why so hard remember? To remember. Ugh, so hard thinking. Would think is sick but feel so good so must not be sick.
“Sponnnn?” Franklin say.
Franklin happy too. And so pretty lady. She say “Spooonnnn” too. Little ones happy too. Everyone like sponge.
Not always here. Remember other place. Hard remember but try. Like room and machine with sponge … television … and tree. Nice room. But know other place.
Car outside. Car is outside. Can go places! Like drive. Maybe when no more sponge we drive. Remember big place wanted to go to. Big city. Yes. Nice there.
Can take car to big city. London is called!
But when sponge done. Sponge first. Then car to big city. To London.
Franklin touch hand, smile.
“Spoonnnnn,” he say again. Franklin so pretty.
We happy.
“The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn”
Holly: Although few people believe in unicorns today, there was a time they were referred to by naturalists as casually as you might refer to cats. Researchers looking back on those writings often try to identify what might have been “misrepresented” as a unicorn. A rhinoceros is one possibility, an antelope seen from the side, so that both its long horns were perceived as one single horn is another, and of course, narwhal horns are thought to be the material with which kings inlaid their thrones and their cups.
But the possibility remains, as Diana postulates in her marvelous “The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn,” that unicorns have been here all along, hunted into near extinction, but now ready to come back and make themselves known.
Justine: I suspect that some of the Team Unicorn partisans are currently muttering under their breath about my unfairness to their team. Utter rubbish, of course, but in case you think I am entirely one-eyed on this subject, I will confess that I like Diana Peterfreund’s killer unicorns. Frankly, they’re the only interesting unicorns in the entire book. I can trust an animal that’s out to kill us. It’s the rainbow defecators I don’t hold with.
Of course, the unicorn obsession with virginity remains a concern. Some of us nonvirgins are quite lovely, you know. Why do they shun us? Of course, it should be pointed out that the Peterfreund’s killer unicorns are even fussier: You also have to be a descendant of Alexander the Great. Yeah, I’ll get right on that.