Walls of living flesh…
The words of Alain are what bring him back to sanity. His grief transforms gradually into anger. What was it on the Avenue of Copper Lungs that his son touched? What was it that killed him?
Walls of living flesh…
When he speaks calmly again, Attendants summon the Supervisor, who interviews him for an hour, then decides to let him go. He gives the Surgeon back his heart-key, along with heartfelt condolences. He also insists on a six-week leave of absence. The Ministère de Science will pay for Alain’s funeral. (The diseased body, however, has already been disposed of. They will have to use his Beatific body…the unwound one that never housed his brain.)
The Surgeon nods, accepts an impassive face from the Supervisor’s personal collection, and says whatever he needs to say to get out on the street again.
“Go home and be with your wife,” the Supervisor says. “She needs you.”
He nods, shakes the man’s hand.
Now Dr. Wail stands in waistcoat and top hat in front of the Ministère, but he doesn’t call for a carriage. Instead he walks, weaving between the huffing exhausts of Clatterpox and steam-driven lorries. He slides his heart-key into his breast pocket, alongside the key that would have belonged to Alain.
He clutches a scalpel in his right fist (nobody saw him take it from the Ministère), and his booted feet carry him toward the Avenue of Copper Lungs.
The streets grow less crowded but more dangerous as he walks through the lowering sun. Abandoned foundries crumble slowly into rust alongside the paved lanes. Clatterpox rattle in and out of drinking establishments and Doxie houses. Bloaters float above the crowds, siphoning stray thoughts into their spherical bodies through quivering, worm-like tendrils. The few Beatifics to be found on this side of town wear their collars up to meet their hat brims, scarves hiding all but their narrowed opticals. Some hide themselves deep inside hooded cloaks, the handles of clubs or blades visible on their hips. The corroded walls of metal seem to close in about the Surgeon as he walks. The sky has taken on a ruddy color, as if it too has rusted. Gangs of rowdy Clatterpox roam the alleys, exchanging cryptic tweets and hoots of compressed steam. Their hearts are miniature furnaces that burn tiny chunks of anthracite.
Finally he rounds the corner and sees the Avenue of Copper Lungs running east to west before him. Looking back, he can barely see the shimmering steel and glass of the Ministère of Science rising from the metropolis of ancient, tangled metal. Now the wind picks up as he steps out onto the avenue, which is strangely deserted. Shops have closed here, and taverns have nailed their doors. Something has driven everyone away. He walks into the emptiness and a whirlwind of rust blows tattered broadsheets down the sidewalk. One wraps about his foot.
He picks up the crumpled newsrag and reads the headline:
MYSTERIOUS FLESH GROWS ACROSS SOUTHERN QUARTER
Part of the ensuing article is readable, the rest of it having been smeared to illegibility by some acrid puddle.
Foundries 17, 34, and 53 are suspending operations due to an unexplained phenomenon along the eastern flank of the Southern Quarter today, centering on the Avenue of Copper Lungs. Seemingly overnight, a vast blanket of what appears to be Organic flesh has grown rapidly to smother the three factories and surrounding establishments, including a vent shop, two taverns, and a bronzing outlet. Authorities were quick to arrive and cordon off the scene, but not before several Clatterpox investigated personally. Many of those first-hand witnesses claimed the flesh was “alive with muscular tension” when touched. Gendarmes arrested three citizens who refused to flee the cordoned area (all Clatterpox), and traffic has been indefinitely suspended along the Avenue.
Tribune Anteus had no comment when contacted about the spazmal, as some engineers are calling this outbreak of flesh, but in a statement he promised the “swift and immediate execution of anyone foolish enough to
The rest of the piece is a mélange of runny black ink that reminds the Surgeon of Alain’s decaying skin. He casts the paper aside and climbs the new metal fence placed by gendarmes to block the street.
An electricity in the air glides about his face and limbs, a growing pressure that signals the inevitable rise of a rabidity. He half-runs down the street toward the closed factories. They seem hung with great, flapping sheets or tarps of a torn and ragged substance. Red lightnings flare among the dark clouds as he comes to stand before the great wall of rotting flesh. The sound of the manifesting rabidity howls in his ears…the sound of reality splitting like punctured elastic skin.
The wind tears at the huge curtains of necrotic flesh hanging from the walls of the avenue. This place was literally smothered by flesh…a spazmal. He walks against the wind, following the length of the dead flesh walls. They are putrefying exactly as Alain’s own skin had done…withering and drying like his beautiful brain. Standing in the middle of the phenomenon, he takes it all in. These curtains of flesh grew like a rapid fungus over roofs, smokestacks, walls, alleys, pavements, and lamp poles. As if the Rusted Zone was trying to grow its own skin but got the process horribly wrong. He walks upon the putrid, jellied flesh that smothers the surface of the street. It squishes unwholesomely beneath his boots.
Rotten…all rotten.
Where did it come from?
He sees again the stone faces from his weird dream.
Where does the new flesh come from?
Where does the old flesh go?
This is the incident that fascinated Alain so that he had to stop his coach and get out to touch it. His own feeble flesh must have caught the wave of bacteria that causes this rapid decomposition. Now the flesh hangs here, quarantined like a plague virus, and his son is gone.
The rabidity reaches full force and the wind nearly knocks him face-down onto the rotting carpet of flesh. He steadies himself and watches a vacuity open in the air nearby. A split in the fabric of reality tears itself into being above the flesh-drowned street. A saffron glow emanates from within the fissure…some distance away, another vacuity emits a blue-green light, and farther away there are others, each a random portal to some distant reality.
The Surgeon’s green opticals stare through the vacuity nearest him. The world beyond is an alien realm, a broad sweep of sandy plain with obelisks of rock rising into a mauve sky. Nine moons float about the zenith of that wild dimension, and clouds of golden dust move across the wasteland. Colossal creatures lumber between the spires of natural rock…things with horned heads and pendulous jaws. Even on this side of the vacuity he feels the rumbling of that other ground beneath the tread of the shaggy behemoths. Do they recognize this portal into a separate reality? Or are they dumb brutes, ignorant of all thought? Nevertheless, they stampede on through the golden waste. If one of them stumbles into the vacuity, it may burst into the Surgeon’s dimension. If that happens, he will be crushed beneath its awesome weight.
He moves back, away from the sucking pressure of the multiversal fracture before it can draw him tumbling like a grain of sand into that forlorn landscape. The roaring wind flows into the vacuity, and he strains against it, using all the power of his grinding leg gears to reach a safe distance. Finally, the storm subsides and the vacuity snaps shut with a peal of thunder. All about the city, similar thunders roar as dimensional wounds repair themselves. The evening calm returns.