Elektra's Revenge, Chapter 33

Cathedral

Many, many footsteps later, they found a ruined building. Though he was nearly too tired to stand, Cook tried not to wake Elektra. He would ever let anyone know he was tired.

Complaining didn’t help anything. No matter how entertainingly Diana whined. He didn’t understand why they did it, yet he accepted it as something humans did. Like they were Anihils clanking, or watercats swimming. But he was indeed too fatigued to think to turn the crackle-handed criminal he was carrying away from the rising sun. It glinted in her eye and she awoke.

Elektra needed to piss like she never had before. She wasn’t about to get up and do it, though. She lay bent across her coworker’s back, wondering how long her pants would stay wet if she pissed herself. Would wet pants hasten the process of hypothermia by a little, or by enough to make her dead before they got anywhere useful?

Then she realized she was already wet, and shrugged: Once you’d pissed on yourself in front of cackling guards in a prison, a lot of new vistas were suddenly open. Damp vistas. What’s more humiliation? Look out, Heaven: I’ve always got options. Then again, I probably shouldn’t pee on Cook. That would be rude.

“What do you think, Mop Bitch?”

“Huh?”

Cook took the chance to unload her, gently. “What do you think we’re looking at, here?” He pointed at the wreck of a long, rectangular pioneer redbrick.

“Uh… human? Probably? I don’t know, I ain’t looking at much.” The ruin offered no shelter from the slow wind that poured in through its absent fourth wall. Being in it, as opposed to lying flat out on the land, only meant that from three of the compass directions, no pursuers or wandering Anihils could see them while they rested.

Clearly Cook and Diana were tired enough to gamble on the fourth. They were both moaning faintly (Diana less faintly) as they sprawled where they had dropped.

The kids were getting frisky again, though; the ones who had stolen Lyfe packets from the GOs in particular felt well. It was good stuff, government issue, strong and uncut. And Elektra was fast becoming a sort of celebrity—she had been on TV, the riots were in her name, and now she was even being rescued—so they weren’t uneager to share. She had only been languishing there a few minutes before someone offered her a needle.

Diana roused herself to grunt at that. “Once a junkie, always a junkie.”

“Says the dry drunk,” Elektra said, and let the kid poke her arm above the crust. She smirked and sat up, suddenly mobile; apparently there was still enough Thyme in her bloodstream to keep the Lyfe from doing that… from… 

She shuddered violently at the memory and tried to ignore the slight edge that she already felt on the high. At least it was making her plastic arms feel better. Ah, the magic regenerative powers of mortal miners suffering for us on the rocks below. And whatever the hell is in Thyme.

Gods, I need some Thyme soon… that shit is the most evil drug this side of reality. These kids aren’t going to think I’m cool for long. She figured she had a couple of hours before she was due to start withdrawals again, those long fingers of death waggling around in her soul.

She focused her eyes and began to look around for a place to urinate—first things first. This building was the first of a loose, straggling line of ruins, stretching for a football field toward the rising red planet on the horizon, across endless fields of grey, cold sand. The rebrick was nondescript, probably a large shack; by the build of the walls, though, it looked like it had been put up around the time of the Classy Bunny. So … pioneer architecture for sure. Did people really live down here once? Where were the Anihils, then?

But then Elektra was too distracted to follow the question: She squinted toward the sun, but her eyes widened again when the other buildings came into focus.

Thirty yards from the shelter was a ruin as long as a cathedral, but wider, almost square. She had seen pictures of cathedrals from ancient Earth, but to her knowledge, on this celestial sphere, humanity had never worshipped anything except Lyfe, Thyme, and… itself. Very odd.

The back wall of the pseudo-cathedral went up a hundred and fifty yards into the sky, all hand-masoned stone. The stone was blackened in irregular dome shapes up the walls, as though there had been a fire; in places the char and parts of the broken flooring seemed to take on an evil yellow glow—it looked like a flourescent slime mold.

In the center of the rear wall was a black tower, octagonal and thick. It ended around the fourth story in a sinister ring of soot and ragged stones, as though a drunken god had reached down and tried to root it out like a carrot. 

A bit of looking around revealed the tower’s crown; it lay where it had fallen after an apparent bounce or two, some 25 yards beyond the cathedral. The long black spike at the top of it was so heavy-looking it seemed the structure should have never stood aloft at all; the crown was cracked in pieces and grown through with the unpleasantly angular foliage that was characteristic of Syd.

Nobody had recorded how well-vegetated the place was before human inhabitation. This part of the southern hemisphere was a cool desert climate now, almost tundra; beyond the ruined town, all you could see for miles around were alternating grey, red, and yellow sand patches punctuated by sparse wads of grey scruffy brush. 

The kids were gawking at the buildings, so Elektra did too. It took her mind off her hands.

The soothing sound of needles clicking into dirty little mixing vials took the edge off the sights, too, and off the feeling of the Thyme that wasn’t coming. But maybe she should think of her bladder. At least she could do something about that, if only her legs would lift her.

It took a couple of tries. It also took a bit more Lyfe. “Hey, I’m Maria,” said the girl who gave it to her.

“Good for you,” Elektra said. She had always wanted to be a celebrity asshole, just once. Well, there’s your once. How did you enjoy it? Think about how good that felt when an Anihil finds us all and it’s chewing on your celebrity leg.

She commanded herself to shut up and finally got on her feet. Don’t piss yourself! 

“And don’t follow me!” she shouted at the kids behind her. She wobbled toward the cathedral-thing. Nobody followed her. Good, they think I’m crazy. My old M.O. is still operational.

The cathedral looked both worse and better close up. It once had huge rosicrux stained glass windows; the few shreds of glass that were left here and there were all red, further reddened by the morning light. The rays they cast on the broken stone slab floor looked like Anihil eyes.

For a moment they mesmerized Elektra, but then a bank of clouds crawled across the sun and the color winked out, swallowed by grey. She looked up again, shaking her head. All of the windows, even the highest, were smeared by soot which had never been cleaned, as though the place had been abandoned in a conflagration. She felt increasingly uneasy.

Those patches of “slime mold” were in fact a homely but fast-moving pseudo-bacterium—close enough—that glowed fluorescent yellow where it was shaded from the sun and shriveled where it wasn’t. It was a night creature, half animal and half plant, trying to sneak into the day, pulsing and swelling before her eyes—then desiccating with a slight hiss as the sun crept to meet it around the edges of the stones. 

It took a few minutes of bleary, mindless staring before it occurred to Elektra to wonder: How the hell did this church thing get here?

I’ve never heard of anything but garbage dumping and prisons in the Syd District.

She stared down at the carved stone flooring, triangles of alternating grey and black, some of them displaced by massive fissures. But in the center of the floor there was a glass mosaic of a Lionhead. It gave her a pang of nausea, suddenly guilty, like she could sense a Government Officer creeping up behind her. 

She snorted at herself. Fucking Lionheads. So what the fuck is this? Maybe before they sent the “mortal” slaves to the planet to mine, they made them build a bunch of… whatever the hell this is. It’s Anihil land still… so I guess it must have been a fortress?

So they built fortresses. The Gods thought they could use the whole moon. And then they got chased out and moved north, I suppose. They must have used the river to help pen the Anihils down here; clearly the bastards can survive in the North if you let them. Hell, better than we can, even on the cold side… seems like they’re trying to move up there now, after all, so why not?... Hermes! Was this whole moon full of Anihils when we got here? Jesus and baby Chronos. The old Gods were fiercer than I thought.

Then she hissed under her breath: “Gods! Gods, my ass!” 

She drifted to the fallen spire tower, with its 40-yard crowning spike. She was momentarily struck by awe again. A feat of engineering.

Not as great as the feat of building a craft that could limp its way from one star system to another—escaping destiny, faster than light—but greater than anything they could do now.

Aside from the tacky mansions in Valhalla, the mighty guild of architecture had been reduced to adding walls inside pioneer buildings to make them into more and more nearly doll-sized apartments. It seemed that people felt some cell-level need to shoot civilization in the foot and force each other to start all over again, like a game they felt compelled to restart, even if they had almost won...

Blah, blah. After what you just went through, do you seriously want to tell me you believe you’ll ever understand people? The same animal that wanted to bury you in shit almost died rescuing you. Don’t try to make it make sense. I’m sick of you doing that. Maybe, have you ever thought MAYBE that’s our whole PROBLEM, bitch?

She strolled testily back for a closer look at the floor. Here, before the central rosicrux, was where the altar would have been, if it were an ancient temple for the cult of Jesus or Zeus. Instead of a stone altar, however, she found a graceless structure of metal and plastic: a curved, half-melted bank of old computers and a joystick, set in front of what looked like the cracked front windscreen of an old guinea carriage. 

Set before the computers were three and a half old iron chairs, of all things. The skeletons of chairs, anyway; bits of plastic upholstery and foam stuffing still clung in places to the backs and seats. The fourth chair had been melted into a grotesque, human-like lump. 

The whole works was attached with rusty bolts to a platform of titanium, to which still clung a few scraps of ancient carpeting. Suddenly it dawned on her: 

I’ve seen a drawing of the shuttles from Earth II. That’s the cockpit of a spaceship! That’s the cockpit of theeee spaceship! This is how we got here.

She took a step back and giggled, suddenly awed.

Oh my Ganges, this IS a church, sort of. Oh my god, we, like, FLEW here. People like us made these spaceships. And flew here. All the way here. From… what does “Earth” even mean?

“You ego fuckin’ maniacs!” she cried aloud, to absent Gods. They built a monument to themselves… out of someone else’s invention. Out of the knowledge that they threw away. That is, like… LEGENDARY laziness! We should know how to MAKE this thing!

Some of the kids who hadn’t heard her talking to herself were ambling toward the great building—and her. So with a pang in her bladder, she turned to shuffle off toward the next, less spectacular, crumbling edifices.

The nearest one was jarringly different. It could have been a ranger’s station in one of the big parks back on Ancient Earth, if she had known what a real park was. Instead, the squat brick square reminded her of the Classy Bunny. 

It was a classier color, though, a dark terracotta instead of depressive red-dirt-grey. Made darker by the blackened soot of windows that had apparently coughed out even more fire than the rosicrux. Perhaps it was the same conflagration that had scarred those soaring Gothic arches.

Some of the windows were half-covered by plastic plywood. Other windows gaped empty; nobody had boarded over them, or the plyboards had been removed, a strange possibility in this otherwise empty landscape. It raised the reluctantly half-thought question “by whom or by what?”; you could see the blackened walls inside them, see snow on the ground through the doors behind them. It reminded Elektra that she had to pee and she was freezing cold.

She suddenly imagined the windows coughing gouts of blood. 

She shook her head but the absurd grisliness stuck to her inner eye like clay on glass. So vivid it was almost pretty… red. She felt her heart flutter, as though the gouts were shooting out from her own aorta, losing pressure… She tried not to feel her heart, so her hands hurt more. She got dizzier and had to sit on the charred stones.

I was born in a storm… I will die in a storm...

What storm? 

Her thoughts dissolved before she could make sense of them.

…

When she opened her eyes again the sky was growing dark, although a scrap of the local star could be seen burning through the occasional hole in the tissue of low clouds. Stormclouds scudded rapidly up from the horizon, straight at her.

Suddenly a lightning strike lit up a mottled patch of mossy sand less than a mile away, and the temperature fluctuated as the winds that drove the clouds arrived at the ruins. A mile-wide wall of hail swept in from the lightning. Thunder rolled slowly in from another strike over the horizon. The sound waves were slow and surreal.

Elektra only roused herself to move when a sheet of rain passed overhead and the freezing water began to seep into the cracks on her arms. That stung, but the weird nightmares that were now her own familiar limbs had begun to ache as well, in a way that worried her. You’re just worried now, junkie? The only thing that’s holding your arms together is melted plastic. What’s holding your brain together is… ohgod… how is it possible that I haven’t pissed myself yet? 

Sudden panic overcame her torpor, and she finally ran the twenty yards to another square building in front of her, this one even squatter, its only windows tiny and near the roof. The urine was all but running down her leg.

Inside, her hands throbbed and she began to shiver. She had sat there like an idiot getting soaked. Maybe she was, deep down, hoping to die of hypothermia before the Thyme withdrawals got to her again. Better the devil you don’t know than the one you know for sure is a motherfucker… If the Anihils are too lazy to finish me off, the cold will have to do. Anything would be better than withdrawing from Thyme in the middle of a caravan of whores with a heart of gold. They’ll Mom-fetish me to death.

She shook her head like there was water in her ears: She had to find a corner to piss in, before the kids found her again. Maybe she had already urinated in front of every other soul in the universe today, but she wanted that last scrap of dignity, to keep her company as she waited around for Death. The rude bastard.

She looked around and headed to a likely corner at the back of the ruin. To her surprise, there was a door there. There was a half-smashed Lionhead on the door.

“No way,” she said. The sick rise of junkie glee in her chest had never felt so good.