Borderlands 5 Read online

  Oh, please, please, help me.

  Still, no movement in the shadows, no answer.

  You squint, hold back the tears. Maybe there is no Lady, no numbers, no Land of Shadows.

  Could that be?

  The sirens whine shrilly, but they are off in the distance now, and seem to be moving away from you and the alley.

  Could the talking doctor be right? you ask yourself.

  Maybe you are nothing more than a weird little man, sitting naked in an alley, all alone. No numbers, no lady, nothing.

  A footstep crunches nearby.

  You bite your lip, steel yourself, and peek around the dumpster; then you gasp aloud.

  There, just beyond the light, hovering in the air, are two orbs, glittering like green fire in the dim alley.

  A fog creature!

  “No,” you whisper hoarsely, trying to convince yourself, “it’s a clear night. No fog, no fog creature.”

  Your logical denial quickly disappears from consciousness, like a dream the next morning, and you begin to panic as the green ovals slowly move closer, closer … stopping only a few feet away from the dumpster.

  You begin to hyperventilate. A giggle.

  And a face appears in the alley dimness, like an apparition, but a familiar face.

  It is Kris!

  She is smiling and giggling at you.

  Still confused, you blurt out a question, “What—?”

  The question breaks off, as more of her body becomes visible. And it eventually dawns on you, the whole thing clear.

  She is slipping the cloak from her shoulders—the special cloak of shadows. She had been wearing it, the cowl shielding her face, only her beautiful green eyes visible as she followed you here and down the alley.

  Puzzled, you whisper, “I don’t understand, Kris?”

  She slips from the rest of the cloak, and only then do you realize that she, too, is completely nude. She steps forward, her arms beckoning, her eyes burning expectantly, and she replies, “Today, the number is one.”

  You take her hand and slip back behind the dumpster, facing the brick wall. The shadows deepen, part slightly, and now you see the Lady of the Numbers—tiny, elegant, and so pale, as if carved from alabaster. Robert…and Kris. You are ready to come to me? No, not yet. You must shed your otherness. And her pale hand reaches out from the shadowed wall, something glittering in the dimness.

  A straight razor. Drain the otherness, Robert.

  You understand, taking the shiny instrument in your free hand. With a frightened expression on her face, Kris tries to jerk away; but you tighten the grip on her hand, smile calmly, and tug her closer…

  As you grow colder the otherness runs from your hands joining the crimson pool at Kris’s feet.

  Then the Lady speaks again, but her voice is only a gentle whisper. Come, my children. Weakly clutching Kris’s hand, you stumble forward into the icy Land of Shadows, into the Lady’s arms.

  You, Kris, and the Lady are now one.

  Head Music

  LON PRATER

  “Head Music” was one of the very first submissions we read for this volume. Its cover letter mentioned Lon Prater had written it while serving on a Naval vessel. We liked the story very much, but because of our patriotism, we couldn’t be sure if our approval stemmed from the quality of the writing, or because its author was out there protecting us. However, we eventually came to realize our judgment had not been clouded; this story is weird and wonderful.

  At 1:02 AM, Diego snapped awake. The haunting, tuneless music was in his head again. Mournful tones rose and fell, reverberating between his temples. Throughout his eighteen years he had heard it: an occasional faint and inviting whisper that tugged at his innards. Now the deep, echoing hornsong was louder, more insistent; it had control of his body.

  Barechested and shoeless, he burst through the flaking screen door. The cool autumn night welcomed him with a clammy marshsalt embrace.

  A squeal and a slam: the flimsy wood frame swung shut behind him. The keys to his father’s work truck jangled in one hand.

  On the horizon, a prowler moon crouched fat and yellow behind a low fence of backlit clouds. His naked back pressed against the chilled vinyl seat. Diego shivered. He was glad that he slept in sweatpants.

  His bare feet, wet with dew and grass clippings, pumped the gas pedal and pressed in the clutch. He watched—calmly, serenely—as his right hand twisted the key. The stubborn engine roared in protest.

  The truck lurched onto the empty road, headlights darkened. Diego was completely out of control: a passenger within the truck as well as within his own body.

  The rusty old heap hurtled down the empty blacktop, landscaping tools clattering madly in the bed. Diego was content. He rode the ebb and swell of a forlorn internal music; he was not afraid.

  The beach was part of a state park and nature preserve. Red and white signs threatened after-hours trespassers with fines and jail time. The penalties were even steeper for those foolish enough to bring animals, glass, or vehicles out onto the sand.

  The music changed when the renegade truck bounced over the benighted dunes. The plaintive wailing receded; a cacophony of lesser tones gained in strength. He realized with a start that his body was his own again.

  Diego squinted through the dirty windshield. A curtain of dense gray clouds blocked most of the moon’s reflected light. This far from town the stars shone with rare brilliance. Their light was mirrored in the phosphorescent foam and sparkle of the cresting waves. Wet sand glimmered at the water’s edge.

  A shadowed hump lay in the blackness, just yards from the lapping waves. Leaning closer, Diego flipped on the headlights.

  The head music erupted into skull-splitting shrieks. His hand shot out automatically, killing the lights. It stifled the blood-curdling screeches as well—but it was too late. He had already glimpsed that unearthly mass hulking on the beach.

  Diego wiped the sudden cold sweat from his face and took several calming breaths. Steeling himself, he opened the door and stepped trembling onto the sand.

  He shivered. The night had grown mute and windless. Even the tuneless music had faded to a soft mewling; his brain was full of newborn kittens.

  Sand and bits of dune grass scrunched beneath him as he approached the creature. It had the length and girth of a small killer whale, but that was where the resemblance ended.

  Diego walked around it, unable to fathom what he was seeing. It had slick, warty gray-green skin, flecked all over with lambent orange jewel-like scales. There were no eyes to speak of. Either end of its tube-like body presented a fleshy pucker surrounded by a forest of supple whips and barbed tendrils. Near the center of its girth there were three great vein-lined fans pressed close against its body. Diego suspected a fourth lay unseen beneath it.

  The creature stank of window cleaner.

  Whatever it was, it had called him here to this beach with its hornsong. The same sounds he had heard over the years, only stronger. A lonely cry sang inside him. He was engulfed in waterlogged sadness; it drowned out the soft whining chorus completely, but only for a moment. He felt a strange kinship with this thing, one that he could not explain.

  Ancient intuition clawed its way into his awareness. The creature—no, she—was stranded, beached here in the alien air. Unable to return to the murky depths, she knew she was dying.

  Tears scorched his eyes. He rushed her, vainly throwing his weight into an attempt to roll the immense cylinder of her body back into the sea. As reward, Diego’s bare chest, arms, and back were scored with tiny nicks from the scattered orange scales. His torso was smeared with a gritty, viscous film that made the open cuts swell and burn like bee stings. He cried out in frustration, looking around for a way to save this bizarre and wondrous creature.

  His eyes came to rest on the abandoned truck. He strode toward it, aware of but ignoring the piteous lament in his head. A search of the truck revealed a lawnmower and gas can, hand tools and pruning shears, shovels and
rakes, a wheelbarrow and some clear bags—but nothing that would help him return this behemoth safely to the sea.

  Despair filled him like freshly poured concrete. He returned to her side. The inky waves were almost washing up against one puckered end.

  The kitten-like mewling started up again in earnest. He put a hand on her, careful not to let the sharp orange speckles cut him. On some primitive level he felt the squirming fluted mass of life within her.

  It could have been her brains as easily as it was her young. It didn’t matter to Diego; he knew that they needed to come out of her.

  He gulped, approaching her ocean-side sphincter again. The dank smell of salt and rotting seaweed mixed with her ammonia odor, an unsettling combination. He carefully pushed the waving tendrils away from the opening. This would not be easy.

  Diego plunged his arm into the unearthly creature, straining to keep down his gorge. His heart beat fast and loud in his ears. Something skittered across his foot and he jumped: a tiny crab.

  His arm was buried to the shoulder. The keening in his head was louder, more frantic. He grasped the end of a slippery fat hose and pulled. It came out with a slurping noise and a geyser of foul liquid.

  He dropped the greasy pus-thing and vomited all over it. It writhed there as if celebrating the glorious emptying of Diego’s stomach. Then, like a slow but enormous blond worm, it inched its way into the waves. The mother-thing’s song was all but gone now; the chaotic internal cries of her young continued to gnaw desperately at him.

  He jabbed an arm into her again, feeling nothing but the pain of his burning cuts and the squish of her organs. He removed his arm and went to the opposite end. This time it was easier. Diego eased two of the worm-things from the orifice, each over six feet long. He deposited them gingerly into the lapping water.

  They were motionless. Diego could suddenly smell their corruption, even over the ammonia and beach scents. Stillborn. As were the others rotting within the duneside womb.

  He had saved one of the disgusting things. Wasn’t that enough? The wailing chorus of those still in the seaside womb begged for release. One day, they could grow into creatures as beautiful and alien as the one dying here before him. But not if he left them inside her to die. He went to the back of the truck and returned with the pruning shears. Sticking the bottom blade into the sphincter at the water’s edge, he crossed himself, preparing for what he had to do.

  Diego squeezed the rubber coated handles together with all his might. The blades weren’t as sharp as he had hoped. They did not so much cut as chew slits into her, widening the puckered hole. She did not bleed, at least not so he could tell it, but the ammonia smell nearly made him pass out. What kept him awake was the failing tones of her pain—her fear—echoing within his head.

  He finished carving a second slit out of the rough, rubbery flesh. He was sure that he would be able to do what was required. Nonetheless, he was thankful that his stomach was already empty. Diego took one last look around.

  The moon had escaped from the clouds, leaning closer now to cast a pallid eye on the boy and the primeval sea thing on the beach. His father’s truck stood lonely watch from atop the dunes.

  Diego pulled off his sweatpants and boxer shorts, leaving them in a heap on the sand. He grunted, drawing in one last breath before he burrowed naked and unflinching into the womb of the beast.

  Coarse slimy tissue like pus-soaked leprous scabs pressed all around him. He was waist deep in her, and clawing his way closer to the maggoty nest of her tender young. The vapors were rank, infectious. Every one of the cuts on his body screamed as they were filled with her vile inner fluids. Diego gagged on bile, worming himself farther into her.

  He could feel the wind kick up, tickling his feet and ankles. Every other part of him was embalmed in the gelatinous tract to her inner organs.

  Diego heard her wordless voice again, softer but richer, a soft ululating lullaby. From within her the music embraced him, made him a part of her. She sang to him of the deep black ocean floor, of submarine cityscapes chiseled from stone and shell: wonders never touched by the sun’s warmth. He rode harpoon-fast currents through majestic saltwater caverns. He gazed upon a great and terrible species beyond man’s imagination. She crooned to him of an age long past—and yet to come; those who had once reigned would awaken. They would sweep the planet clean of humanity, sloughing man’s frail advances from its face like dead skin.

  His stinging hands dug into a torn membrane, ripping it farther.

  Diego reached into the howling coils of her knotted young, dragging them back with him through her awful stickiness in one armful. He collapsed to the sand. The writhing blond creatures squirmed free of each other, and of him, before crawling blindly into the waves.

  Finally, the last one slipped beneath the surface, leaving Diego with only the moon and the gorgeous stinking carcass for company. He felt grief wash over him even as he saw the tide drawing his pants and his vomit out to sea.

  Scientists would come in the morning, and reporters. They’d take their pictures and measurements, scratching their chins in wonder and speaking earnestly of evolution and the coelacanth. They would cut her up in their laboratories, trying to unravel the secret of her genes. In time, someone would realize the horrible truth; they would warn the world of man’s short leash.

  Diego rose, his nude body sticky with foul juices and pockmarked by swollen cuts. He dug in his toes, resolutely kicking wet sand across the beach. Not if he could help it.

  He made one last trip to his father’s truck, rummaging in the cab first before grabbing the metal can from the bed.

  With remorse like he had never felt before, Diego splattered gasoline all over the she-carcass and her rotting stillborn young. He stood there feeling the loss of the music for a long time before he set fire to a wad of napkins and papers. Mouthing a silent and unintelligible prayer, he threw the flaming papers upon her.

  She went up in a quick blue whoosh that in other cases might have made Diego jump. Instead, he danced a frenzied ring around her until he collapsed, dazed and giddy from the fumes. He was naked to the moon and sand and wind. Diego stared into the stars, making dirge noises not sounded upon the earth in millennia.

  The pyre burned itself out about an hour before dawn. Diego sat watching the last smoking embers. She had no bones; the flame left nothing behind but a sprinkling of orange scales. He poked at the blackened sand with the shovel before turning the scorched sand over and over upon itself, hiding even this evidence from the advancing waves. He was sweating, coated with sand and sticky filth. When Diego was certain that no man would be able to find out about her kind or their eventual return, he swam as far and as deep into the frigid black sea as he could.

  The last thing he heard was the music of an underwater orchestra.

  It reminded him of home.

  Around It Still the Sumac Grows

  TOM PICCIRILLI

  A recurring theme in American popular culture is the absolute, living hell that four years of high school can often be. In the next story, Colorado writer Tom Piccirilli employs his trademark lean prose to take the reader on a journey to a time and place which may seem frighteningly familiar to many of you … and then, maybe not.

  Somehow, you never made peace with ordinary, familiar dread. The many everyday weaknesses continue to prod at your conscience. How you can’t hit a curve ball and flubbed every layup shot. How you can’t hammer a nail in straight or spackle a hole properly. Your father’s toolbox is a well of shame and remorse. You’re nearly forty and have never figured out how to change a tire.

  There are things you can’t let slide anymore. Life is a desperate undertaking now, and it doesn’t allow for naiveté once you’ve turned twelve. After that you’re just inept and absurd.

  It’s the working of the world. You can’t sit back and enjoy the day while there are kids nearby. Not in the park, and definitely not on school grounds. This is the modern age. Security guards buck up and give you the
killer glare as if daring you to make a play for one of the children. Jesus, you’re not doing anything except sitting here. Everybody wants an easy excuse for murder. You can imagine them hauling one of the teenage girls off the bus and waving her at you like bait. Here, you want to try for it? Come on, come get some candy. With the safety off, hands at their gun belts.

  The lunacy of ninth grade never leaves. Overwhelming delight, guilt, duty, the bitter embrace of adulthood. It’s set the tone for the rest of your life, and you judge everything based on what you knew at that time. No cars have the same muscle or style as a ’79 Mustang. No laughter as ugly as that of Mr. Vulatore, sophomore biology. No dog as friendly or smart as Hercules, who followed you to the bus stop every morning until your father backed over him. Twice. No smile as perfect as Linda Abutti’s, with her eyes crinkling at the corners, the grin igniting every nerve ending in your pudgy, pale, underdeveloped flesh. Maybe you’ve committed a crime by surviving this long, and that’s why you feel the need to return to the scene over and over. Or perhaps the crime has been perpetuated against you, and it’s grown too hazy to understand anymore. Did somebody tug on your tinkle in the boys’ shower room? Did you get your nose shoved down into dog shit at recess? One tiny torture is as good as another.

  Anyway, you’re here, and you’ve got to get back in, take a look around.

  You are fairly certain that you left your soul in the utilities closet of seventh period study hall.

  Busloads of kids are arriving, and the noise is much louder than you remember. Near deafening, ear-splitting. Christ, you drop your forehead to the steering wheel and hug your arms over your ears. So much talking, the blaring of ghastly music, and boys skateboarding in the lot, grinding down the curbs and sidewalks. Sparks splash and skitter. One bad oil leak under any of the cars and the whole lot will go up in an inferno. The skaters fall and tumble with a stuntman’s coordination, boards scudding wildly and spinning on until they weakly bump into a tire.