Distortion Offensive. James Axler
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here, building a shantytown on its outskirts, and bringing with them overcrowding, disease and crime. What had once been an idyllic community had turned into a place where it was every man for himself. That was until the tidal wave had pummelled most of those temporary favela dwellings to the ground and, curiously, from that destruction a strange new sense of community had emerged.
Pam recalled her wonderful apartment in the residential Enclaves of Beausoleil, where life was regimented and she had had to wear a uniform to go to school. By contrast, Hope was dirty and cluttered and her classroom was a converted basement where she wasn’t expected to wear a uniform. Indeed, some of her classmates didn’t even wear shoes, and not through choice, either. But for all its grime and lack of sophistication, Hope was where Pam could sneak off to the beach and watch the waves, and where she and Tony could make out under the wreckage of the pier. After two months, Hope felt like home.
The ocean crashed once more against the shore and, as she chewed, Pam perceived something within those waves, the way the atoms clung together and broke apart like partners at a formal dance. And she saw, just for a moment, the way the whole dancing ocean was dragged to and fro by the pull of its bullying best friend, the moon, watching from above with its crescent sliver of cat’s eye.
Smiling, Pam turned away from the crashing waves and saw Tony jab at the flames with his length of driftwood. Sparks spit from the fire as Tony hooked at the food that he had been cooking there, submerged deep in the popping flames. She and Tony had come across a clutch of little mollusks that had been washed up by the tide as they walked along the beach earlier that evening, and Pam had suggested cooking them here while they watched the sun disappear beneath the swell of the Pacific.
“Go on,” she had said. “It’ll be dead romantic and that.”
Tony pulled a face. He didn’t go much for romance, unless it involved having a fumble under her shirt while no one was looking. “Won’t your mom be worried?” he asked.
“Nah,” Pamela assured him. “There’s never any food at home. She’s probably out partying with someone even now.”
Tony nodded. He liked Pam’s mom; she was all right. But after the tidal wave had hit Hope, the whole ville had been turned upside down and everyone was scrabbling to find enough to feed themselves, even more than they had before. So when Pam said “partying,” Tony knew that she really meant her mom was trading sex for food.
The weird mollusks they found washed ashore had hard shells the color of oil on water, and ranged in size from the very small to ones almost as big as Tony’s clenched fist—the same fist that had knocked out Tim Brin’s front tooth—but they tasted all right once you cooked them for a bit. The flesh was kind of salty, tasting like the ocean, and they could be a bit chewy, but Tony and Pam didn’t mind. It was good to smell them cooking, a brackish, sharp kind of tang drifting within the charcoal smoke of the fire. After they had eaten the first few, they had just become used to the texture and the taste, and it hadn’t really mattered after that.
Using his stick, Tony pulled the last of the dead creatures from the fire, licking his lips as he caught the aroma of the cooking flesh where it lay on the shale before his resting knees. Then he cast the stick aside and, wrapping his hands in the tails of his shirt to protect them, picked up the flame-hot creature and cracked open its now-brittle shell. A hunk of jellylike meat flopped about inside, its color a pink so dull that it looked almost gray, the flesh still bubbling as a smoky white trail plumed from it.
Tony offered the mollusk to his girl. “Last one,” he said. “You want some?”
Pam looked at Tony and smiled. To her eyes, his face seemed so beautiful, his fourteen-year-old skin smooth and taut, the fluffy dusting of his first beard cluttering his jaw. And she saw that the multicolored stars were reflected in his eyes, all those wonderful colors that she had never noticed before. “Half each,” she told him, holding her hand out for the cooked flesh as it was cooled by the sea breeze.
Tony tore the pink-gray meat apart and handed Pam half. As he leaned close, he kissed Pam next to her lips, a slobbering touch that included his tongue licking at the side of her face like a dog. Then, gazing into each other’s eyes, they brought the flesh to their mouths and, giggling, sucked the juices before chewing and swallowing.
The meat left a salty taste on their tongues, as though they were eating the ocean itself. Tony looked at Pam as he felt that delicious flesh slide down his throat, and he saw how she seemed to glow beneath the multifaceted light of the moon. Above, up in the sky, he, too, saw the multicolored display that seemed to emanate from the stars. Like gods, he thought. Gods in the sky.
KANE RUBBED THE BACK of his neck, feeling the tension there subside as he gazed out across the streets of Hope from the summit of the church steps. It was still busy out here despite day having given way to night, and a line of locals shuffled past on the steps as Kane tried to clear his whirring mind.
“Everything okay?” asked a familiar woman’s voice from behind him.
Kane turned to see Brigid Baptiste pushing out of the rotting wooden doors of the old church to join him where he sat on the topmost stone step. Brigid was a beautiful woman, svelte of form with an athlete’s musculature and a ballet dancer’s grace. Her hair was a vibrant red-gold, the color of sunset, and she had painted her full lips to match. Her bright green eyes stared back at Kane from her pale face, like twin emeralds glinting from the snow. Where her full lips spoke of sensuality, Brigid’s high forehead suggested intellect, and in reality she was both of those aspects and many more besides. Brigid had been Kane’s colleague in the Cerberus operation for several years, and though their relationship was strictly platonic, their closeness was often akin to that of siblings. They shared the mystical bond of anam-charas, soul-friends destined to meet over and over through eternal reincarnation stretching along the flowing stream of time itself.
Brigid had dressed in scuffed but durable leathers over her shadow suit. The shadow suit itself was a waferthin bodysuit that was able to deflect knife attacks, offer protection from contaminated environments and also had other remarkable properties including the ability to regulate its wearer’s body temperature.
Kane nodded at Brigid’s question as she took a place beside him on the cool stone step, crouching so that her face was close to his while the refugees shuffled past them in a slow-moving line. The pair had been cooped up in the church for over fourteen hours, working nonstop as they distributed reconstituted rations to the local population. Elsewhere in the sprawling shantytown that surrounded the ville, another field team was distributing medicines where they were most needed. Theirs was a mission of mercy, and something that the Cerberus people seemed to have had very little time for over the recent months thanks to a litany of problems, both within their home base and across the globe.
Kane was a well-built man, with cropped, dark hair and steely blue-gray eyes. Tall with a lean frame and muscular arms, Kane’s physique was similar to that of a wolf, a machine built for hunting. His temperament was similar to that of a wolf, as well, both pack leader and loner as the situation demanded. Like Brigid, Kane was a member of Cerberus, an operation headquartered in Montana and dedicated to the uncovering of and resistance to a deep-rooted alien conspiracy that had threatened to overpower and subjugate humankind since the dawn of recorded time. That alien threat came from a race called the Annunaki, who had been mistaken for gods from the stars but were in fact a bored alien race who considered humans as nothing more than playthings, idle diversions along the bland, tiresome road of their millennia-long lifespans. Kane had accidentally uncovered inklings of that conspiracy when he had worked as a Magistrate in Cobaltville, learning to his disgust that the system he was tasked to uphold was in fact corrupt to its core. Kane had left Cobaltville, along with Grant, a fellow magistrate, and Brigid, an archivist with remarkable flair and the unusual ability of total memory recall. Together the three of them formed the energetic nucleus around which the sixty-strong facility of so-called Cerberus exiles based their operations.
Like Brigid, Kane had dressed in a shadow suit over which he had worn a tired-looking denim jacket, jeans and boots. Dressed as such, he could pass among Hope’s locals with relative anonymity, although perhaps a perceptive individual might notice the proud way in which