Upright Beasts Page 13

  “But what about Roberta?” Anne said.

  Arthur fingered the strap of her dress. He touched his forehead lightly to hers.

  “Right now, there’s only you and me. The only two people in the world.”

  Arthur brought his teeth down gently on Anne’s lower lip. She closed her eyes and pushed against him. This is how it had been in the beginning, the two of them hidden, alone, and groping.

  Anne opened her eyes and saw the other Arthur standing in the doorway. His eyes were tight with anger, and he had something dark and heavy in his hands. Then there was a loud clap of thunder.

  “Oh!” Anne said.

  Arthur pulled away. His face was startled. He slowly turned around. “Ah, right, the toast,” he said, reaching for the bottle of champagne. “Is it already ten? You’ll have to excuse me.”

  The two Arthurs walked back to the main room. Anne tried to decide if she wanted to follow.

  Roberta had her dress hiked up around her waist. Her stream hissed into Arthur’s large toilet. Her skin looked very tan pressed against the porcelain.

  “You just had to get at him. You’re insatiable! The party isn’t even half over yet.”

  Roberta ripped off some toilet paper and folded it neatly three times.

  “I’m not going to say sorry, and anyway, he came on to me.”

  “Ho ho!” Roberta said. “All’s fair in love and war, is that it?” She clicked out of the bathroom on her heels.

  Anne stayed, looking at her tired face in the mirror for a bit.

  The party was teeming now. Anne’s shoulders bounced back and forth as she tried to get a drink.

  She thought she saw Arthur and Roberta head off for one of the back rooms. “Well doesn’t that just beat all,” she whispered to herself.

  Anne finished the rest of her drink and placed it on the stereo speaker. It was the third martini glass she had placed on the stereo speaker. She thought it was about time to tell Arthur and Roberta a thing or two in a loud voice.

  She moved her way through the crowd saying “hello” and “excuse me” to the people she knew. As she moved through the hallway, someone grabbed her elbow and yanked her into the study.

  “I’ve been waiting to get you alone.”

  “Help!” Anne yelled, trying to break his grip. “This mutant is attacking me.”

  “I’m not attacking you,” the Arthur in the butler suit said. “And I’m not a mutant.”

  The party was very loud outside, and no one came to rattle the door.

  “Then what do you want?”

  He shushed her with his finger, even though she was using a normal volume. He leaned in close, holding her forearm with his white glove.

  “I have a horrible secret to tell you,” he whispered. He paused, his heavy breath heating Anne’s left ear. “I’m Arthur.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, waving her hand. “Arthur explained the whole process. You are him, he is you, yada yada.”

  Anne realized they were in the coatroom. There was a large, furry hump of them on the table. Finally, she could just grab her things and go.

  “No, I’m the real Arthur. The other one is the clone and masquerading as me.”

  This was all getting to be too much for Anne. She sat down in a leather wing chair and crossed her legs.

  The Arthur in the butler suit knelt down beside her. He made his voice low and grave.

  “Something must have gone wrong in the lab. He looks just like me, but he isn’t the same. He overpowered me when I took him home and locked me in the closet, feeding me nothing except scones and tonic water for days.”

  Anne felt goose bumps rise along her arms.

  “There is an evil in him.” Arthur’s eyes started to tear up. He rubbed them with his knuckles. “I suppose it’s in me too. I was nasty to my brother and used to throw rocks at small animals as a child. I’ve struggled my whole life to contain it.”

  Anne put a comforting hand on his shoulder. She didn’t know what else to do.

  “I should never have paid those doctors to play God. What have I unleashed on the world?”

  Arthur was weeping into one hand. With his other, Arthur slid a thin vial of green liquid from his inside coat pocket and slipped it into Anne’s hand.

  “Anne, you know I love you. I would never hurt you. That wasn’t me who slept with Roberta, it was the clone! He only threw this party to torture me.” Arthur was still holding her hand. He rubbed his thumb around her palm.

  “Why am I supposed to believe you?” she said. Her breath was short, and she gripped the arms of the chair. She looked at the vial of green liquid in her free hand. There was a small skull and crossbones sticker affixed to it.

  “You must decide for yourself,” he said, hanging his head. “But his genes are unstable. He is growing more powerful and erratic every minute.”

  “What does this have to do with me?” Anne said.

  “You’re the only one who can get close enough to him. He trusts you. Because I trust you.”

  Anne decided she didn’t care who was the real Arthur and who was the fake. What if the cloning process had made the new Arthur possess a higher concentration of essential Arthurness? Could he be even more Arthur than Arthur? And in that case, how could you say which Arthur was real? It wasn’t a question she was ready to handle.

  And yet, despite everything, she didn’t want Roberta to get hurt.

  “I’ve always said it’s the clothes that make the man,” Arthur was saying to Roberta as Anne walked into the room. She was walking slowly, but her heart was beating very fast.

  Arthur had Roberta’s hand in his, and he slid one of her fingers into his mouth and bit down.

  “Ouch!” Roberta said with a giggle. Her finger was bleeding a little bit. “You scoundrel.”

  When Arthur saw Anne, his eyes narrowed. “Where have you been?” he demanded.

  Anne waved one hand toward another part of the apartment. In the other, she hid the vial in a fist. “I need to talk to Roberta,” she said.

  Anne and Arthur exchanged looks and laughed together, but Roberta came anyway. Anne took Roberta out onto the balcony and slid the glass door shut.

  “Did you see Jerome and Chiara Dopp?” Roberta said. “I told you that simply everybody who’s anybody would be here. Aren’t you glad we came?”

  Roberta’s words were slurred, and her eyes seemed to be swimming around in her skull. Anne’s head was swimming too.

  “Listen, have you noticed anything strange about Arthur? He doesn’t seem quite like his usual self, right?”

  Roberta groaned.

  “Can’t we talk about something else? Arthur is a free man. He can do whatever he wants.”

  “But doesn’t he seem more, I don’t know, aggressive?”

  “That’s it,” Roberta said, “I’m getting another drink.”

  Anne could see the Arthur in the butler suit looking at her from across the room. His eyes were pleading, and he was making frantic gestures. The other Arthur had his arms around both Roberta and Anne now.

  Why was this Anne’s decision to make? She was drunk and tired and sick of everyone and everything. She just wanted to go home and sleep a peaceful sleep in her own bed.

  “If only I could keep both of you here for myself!” Arthur in the blue suit said.

  Anne pretended to laugh. Roberta was laughing too, but shot Anne a nasty look.

  “Maybe Anne can go freshen your drink,” Roberta offered. “So we can talk alone.”

  Anne took the empty glass and huffed off to the bar.

  Arthur’s body twitched on the Oriental rug for quite some time.

  It was late in the night, and the few remaining guests were standing aghast around the foyer. Anne was starting to sober up.

  “Oh god. Oh god,” she muttered. The empty vial slipped out of her hand and clinked on the tiles. How would she know if she killed the right one?

  Roberta came bolting in from the kitchen.

  “If you couldn�
��t have him, nobody could. Is that it? You’ve never been happy for me, not once in my whole life!” Roberta started to cry. “There were two of them. We could have worked something out.”

  The remaining Arthur knelt down beside the body and solemnly slid down the eyelids.

  He stood up and looked at Anne. Roberta stared at Anne and pulled out her cell phone, threatening to call the police. The thunder rumbled softly in the distance. The three of them stood over the body, the seconds doubling and doubling as they tried to anticipate what would happen next.

  MEGAFAUNA

  WHAT WE HAVE SURMISED ABOUT THE JOHN ADAMS INCARNATION

  Although much remains unclear about John Adams (alternatively referred to in recovered documents as Jon Adam, John Adems, and the Adams Abomination), recent drone expeditions into the Charred Continent have unearthed new artifacts that lead us closer to understanding this mysterious entity.

  Long assumed to be a prince or demon of a lesser cult, we now know that John Adams was an important figure in the dominant United Statsian mythology. He appears to have originally been conceived as a familiar or minion of George Washington, the first of the hundred tyrants that are said to have ruled the country until its infamous, self-inflicted demise. It was only later that John Adams was celebrated as a deity in his own right. His physical manifestation is a source of debate. Certain scholars suggest he was worshipped as an enormous, goat-like god or perhaps a sentient birch tree—referred to as the Braintree—by the Cults of Puritan that populated the region now known as the Twice-Damned Seaboard. Often he is portrayed as a fat, sullen man, whose lips seem curled in a perpetual frown.

  As the second of the early tyrants—likely monarchs who were worshipped as divine, although possibly purely mythological figures—John Adams can be placed squarely in what may be called the “Constitutional Pantheon” of the United Statsian religion. His chief rivals in this group were Alexander “the Uncrowned” Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, the latter of whom would usurp his throne. It is believed that Adams’s symbols were the split acorn, the horned hair, and the first feather of the newborn eagle.

  The acolytes of Adams do not appear to have had as much influence as the followers of more prominent gods, such as Benjamin Franklin, Lincoln of the Logs, or the Great Traitor Burr (a title that was perhaps ironic given his apparent influence among the Southern lands). Of all the sacred coins and wood pulp currency sheets that have been unearthed from the burnt rubble, none have featured the visage of John Adams—a fact that is rather unusual among the early tyrants.

  Here it must be noted that many scholars now believe these beings were not necessarily viewed as separate by the United Statsians, but rather different incarnations of the one “founding father” deity, also known as George Washington—the first incarnation—Uncle Sam, or the First and the Last, the Truth and the Lie. The Founding Father, in this conception, was a shape-shifting and eternal god believed to have formed the nation by tearing apart fragments of the gigantic Life Tree with his “teeth of wood” and regurgitating fifty large bark chunks into the sea to form the collected states.

  In his fleeting incarnation as John Adams, the Founding Father was pale, bloated, and quick to anger. His commandments were enforced by a set of terrifying minions known only as the Midnight Judges. Scholars agree that this was a tumultuous time for early United Statsian society, as the wars with rival nations such as Imperial France and Britain of the First Decay had taken their tolls on the populace. The newly formed United States was working to define itself and struggling with enemies both within and without. The monstrous John Adams incarnation likely provided a feeling of strength and destiny to the huddled and starving United Statsians.

  Although harsh in demeanor and despised among the citizenry, the John Adams incarnation is given credit for defeating the rival gods of Imperial France—almost certainly symbolic of an actual conflict known mysteriously as the Quasi War—in a grand battle that raged “atop the purple mountains and shining seas” for twelve cycles before John Adams emerged bloodied and tired, yet victorious.

  With the enemies defeated and peace at hand, the need for the brutal John Adams incarnation had passed. He had served his people and maintained the power of the new nation. When he looked on what he had wrought, John Adams is said to have let out a month-long howl from the center of the sacred House in White—a scream so terrible in force it rendered an entire generation deaf and ripped apart the very earth, forming the great canyon of the western desert, a fissure the Adams incarnation disappeared into only to reemerge weeks later as the kindly Jefferson form.

  Hopefully continued archeological expeditions into the continent will uncover more findings to expand our understanding of the ancient United Statsian religion and society. It is important to remember that the early United Statsians were a frightened, but proud, people. Despite the lower levels of spectrum radiation and thinner dust-metal storms, the world was as confusing and painful a place to them as it is to us now. Although their religion may strike us as arcane and barbaric, you must put yourself in their mindset. They were building a new society in a strange and foreign land. The night was dark; the beasts were loud. Death, in all its myriad incarnations, was, as always, right around the corner.

  DARK AIR

  How we ended up in those backwoods hills was Iris said we needed to “get a little air,” and Dolan added, “country air!” and that was that. Iris was my lover, and Dolan was her roommate I’d never liked. All of us were alive, at that point.

  I had no problem with city air. I figured it was the same air out there as in here, but the decision had been made in my presence without my participation.

  “You know what we mean, goofus,” Dolan said. “The noise. The lights.”

  Iris giggled and put her hand on Dolan’s arm. They had their own private definition of humor.

  A few hours later we were rolling through the hills. We’d been in the car the whole time, and we had the windows up, AC blasting. We hadn’t yet felt the country air.

  The roads in these mountains were littered with signs. Caution for this, danger about that. Falling rocks, bobcat crossing, dangerous incline. There must have been a dozen ways for us to be crushed or torn apart.

  “You never see green like this in the city,” Iris was saying. She clicked away with her phone as we rounded a chunk of mountain that had been blown open with dynamite.

  “You live by the park,” I said. “The park is green.”

  “That’s a fake green. I mean real green.”

  “This is the green,” Dolan said, “that’s good for the soul.”

  Dolan was giving out the directions, steering us toward one of the “Top 10 Secluded Spots for Selfies” he’d read about online. There was a basket of turkey sandwiches and seltzer water in the back.

  Dolan wasn’t wearing his seat belt, and as I drove I imagined the door popping open when we went around a sharp turn, then watching him tumble down the cliff and disappear.

  After that, maybe Iris and I could get a fresh start on our own.

  The dinky towns and small shops had died out miles before, and we still hadn’t found Dolan’s spot. Even the danger signs were worn away here, rusted or obscured with splatters of brown goo. The trees were a sickly yellow-green. I rolled down my window, but there was a bad smell in the air.

  Iris and Dolan were in the back talking about books I’d never read.

  “It’s bad air up here,” I said. “Something huge must have died, like a bigfoot.”

  “You’re so negative all the time,” Iris said. She reached up to plug in her phone’s playlist.

  “Yeah, lighten up and soak in this country sun,” Dolan chimed in.

  I shut up and let the landscape roll past me. I had a lot of things to think about anyway, from where things were going with Iris to what the hell I was even doing with my life. I was at that age where it seemed as if everything was still possible but only to someone else. I lived in the city in a small apartment I hated and cr
ashed most nights with a girlfriend who sometimes wasn’t even there.

  At the top of one hill, I saw a white goat standing on a rock. Its horned head twisted to follow our car as we passed.

  He had some wound in the middle of his forehead that looked like a misplaced eye.

  “Maybe it’s time to head back,” I said, but no one responded. Dolan had his headphones on, and Iris was pretending to sleep.

  “Hey, I said—”

  I think that’s around when the creature burst from the bushes on the side of the road. It was black and pink and skittered across the pavement without using its wings. When we hit it, the left front tire popped, and we started fishtailing. Dolan and Iris were both awake now and screaming.

  I swung the wheel to the right and allowed the rock face to stop us. The car filled with dust, and my face was smashed into the dense pillow of an air bag. The screams were muffled now. Slowly the air bags deflated, and we wiped the blood from our bruised noses with our sleeves.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Iris shouted.

  “My car! My fucking car!” Dolan moaned in a continuous loop.

  Sitting there, shirt stained with blood, Iris photographing her face “for the records,” I had the feeling that things between us might be reaching the end.

  When we went over to look at the creature, it was mostly flattened. It looked like a crow, except the feathers had fallen off its back. Underneath, the flesh was scaly and pink. The exposed skin was split in half by a row of translucent spikes. The spikes were moving slightly, pointing first in this direction then in that. The smell made me wrinkle my nose. It was an oddly sweet smell to find outdoors, like an open vat of lollipop flavoring.

  For some reason, bumblebees were hovering above the carcass like buzzards. They made me dizzy. Iris started dry heaving.

  “Bees!” Dolan shrieked. He grabbed Iris and held her in front of him. “First my car, now killer bees.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Iris said. She sounded defeated. “Let’s just go home.”