My arms were almost vertical. My legs had been joined into one trunk, encased in bark. My sight was dimming, but I focused it, I focused it, and then I opened my eyes. The Toyota and Buick mirrors, the plate-glass window, the driver’s window of the Toyota, all cracked with sounds like pistol shots. But as they went, the beam of my fury reached Rush where he hid, sliced into him like a harpoon, yanked him into the air, and flung him to the ground at my feet.
How they howled, that skyful of gnats! How their faint cries rose into the night, crackling like static electricity across the surface of high thin cloud layers. How they fled, fading into wisps of gas. And how their master squirmed inside his borrowed husk, trying to escape the agonized body of Rush.
Oh, no, not this time. I couldn’t kill him, I knew that, not unless I was fast enough or lucky enough to convert all his matter to energy at once, which would be just about impossible, but I could give him a memory so searing he would never dare to confront me again. Pain so violent that the very thought of me, eons from now, would make him curl up like a shrimp. He was Rush now, he would feel what Rush felt, and he would stay Rush until I had taught him his lesson.
I boiled the blood within his veins. I turned his eyebrows to needles and embedded them in his eyes. I knotted his intestines, placed a living ferret in his stomach, turned his tongue into a piranha with its tail still attached to his pharynx.
He squirmed, that devil, he snarled, he shrieked in a range inaudible to any ear on Earth. He tried everything, tried to counterattack, to resist, to fight off the plagues I put upon him, strangling the ferret with his own guts, burning the piranha as it ate his mouth, but always and ever distracted by the pain I kept on inflicting and by the new horrors I thrust into his mouth and his nose and his ass and his eyes. Humans escape such torment by fainting or dying, but neither avenue was available to him. And he knew better than to beg for mercy. Mercy? To a foul fiend?
He first tried to escape as a worm, out Rush’s ear, but I charred that worm to ash and less than ash, and he barely got back inside before I did for him completely. Feel my punishment, demon!
Then he tried, frantically, repeatedly, to kill Rush, to end the onslaught by robbing me of the field of play, but I resuscitated the body every time, and every time I blessed it with more plagues, more stabs, more clenchings, twistings, rippings, rendings.
Then I stopped. It cowered, still in the burning center of all the anguish of the Brother Rush persona, afraid to make another run for it, while I undid the damage it had done, severing the roots beyond my feet, reverting back to flesh, sap to blood, fiber to sinew.
When I could move I did so, stepping away from that thing that shivered and keened on the lawn. I looked into the dining room, where my five remained as before, and they had noticed nothing of the events outside. Good.
I directed my attention back to the former Rush. He would never be Rush again. He would never trouble me again. “I’m finished with you,” I told him. “You may go.”
At once, the body ceased to tremble, and grew slack. After a brief interval, a cockroach crept cautiously from its dead nostril. I broke one of the creature’s legs, just as a reminder, but otherwise left it alone, and it hobbled away through the grass.
So there was no need for Brad Wilson here after all, no need to look in on my people. Rush was dealt with. I permitted Brad to discorporate, then carried the body of Brother Rush back with me to New York, leaving it in a neighborhood where it wouldn’t excite particular comment, and made it back to Andy Harbinger just before the end of the movie.
“That was really good,” Susan said, as we shuffled out of the theater with the rest of the audience.
“Yes, it was.”
X
Oh, no, no, no, no more, no more...
No more, no more, no more...
Hate hate hate hate hate hate—
No more!
No, no, not even thoughts, can’t— Brain doesn’t work, can’t think, can’t stop running, can’t stop—
No more, no more...
Have to do it. Have to do it! But—
No more, no more...
But—
I must.
34
By the end of the newscast at eleven-thirty, it seemed pretty clear that Rush wouldn’t be coming back, but no one wanted to go to bed just yet, in case something happened after all. Had Rush seen the police, and were they after him, and had he fled! Something like that, probably, which meant he still might come back when the coast was clear. In any event, everybody felt wide awake.
And besides, there was a program about to come on that interested at least two of the people in the house. Both Grigor and Maria Elena wanted to watch Nightline, on which Ted Koppel’s guests would be a Dr. Marlon Philpott, the physicist who was conducting the experiments at Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant that had caused all the demonstrations and more recently the strike by better than two-thirds of the plant’s workers, and in opposition to him another physicist, Dr. Robert Delantero.
“Our program might be considered somewhat strange tonight,” Ted Koppel told his audience, with his small smile, “because the matter is strange. Our subject is a peculiar kind of thing known to physicists as strange matter. Some scientists, like Unitronic Laboratories’ Dr. Marlon Philpott, believe that strange matter, once harnessed in the laboratory, can become the cleanest, safest, and cheapest power source in the history of the world. Other physicists of equal standing in the scientific world, such as Harvard’s Dr. Robert Delantero, believe that strange matter, if found, and if carelessly handled, could be more destructive than anything we’ve ever imagined. Still other scientists believe that no such thing as strange matter exists at all. Dr. Philpott, have you ever seen strange matter? And could you describe it?”
Dr. Philpott was a heavy man with a spade goatee and dark-rimmed glasses. He looked more like a restaurant critic than a scientist, as though he’d be more interested in the ingredients of a French sauce than the contents of a Leyden jar. His manner was avuncular in a heavily condescending way. He said, “If we ever got enough strange matter together to see it, Ted, a chunk that big, why, we’d be in business right now. But I can describe it, all right, because we know it’s there. It has to be there, the math says so.”
“And what does this math say strange matter is?”
“A different way of combining the building blocks of matter,” Dr. Philpott told him, forgetting to call him “Ted.” “As we now know, the basic building block of matter is the quark.”
“Not the atom.”
“No, Ted, the atom is composed of protons and neutrons. If you imagine protons and neutrons as little bags, what each bag contains is quarks, two up quarks and one down quark in each proton, two down and one up in each neutron. These bags are surrounded by a cloud of electrons, and the whole package goes to make up one atom.”