Jack M. Dann

WHIRL CAGE

“I’M GOIN’TA tell it, I’m goin’ta tell it now,” screamed the roly-poly, middle-aged ragamuffin. For an instant the crowd cowered around him, a mangy lion bemused by a snake, then rippled, roared, climbed the ragamuffin and strangled him before he remembered what he had to tell.

An old woman rose from the crowd instead, wisps of gray hair swimming behind her. She rode atop the crowd, neatly balanced and erect. “Yes, yes, it’s all true,” she said. “They come in … yes yes, Sadaday they were here. Everything was fine ‘fore they come; now we got to run from them and their things.”

The crowd was heavy beneath her, but friable, and it crumpled, swallowing first her arm, then face, cotton hair, paste shoulders, and yellowed buttocks. She drowned silently, overwhelmed by flesh.

Raymond Mantle stood before the undulating mass of faces, all screaming at once, now that Cassandra had disappeared. He knew they were wary of the gleaming camera plate that covered his forehead and eyes. The threads of metal and the surface-perfect plastiglass reflected the mid-afternoon sun like a mirror.

The crowd filled the streets as far back as he could see, and it was also behind him, out of sight, but pushing toward him, closing in. He felt it, he sensed it, yet he could not let them know or he would lose control and they would bolt and trample him. He concentrated, as he had been told, and thought of things soft and warm. He was in a glass canoe on a rolling lake, drenched with sun, eating, and dreaming, and sleeping.

The crowd accepted the spell he tossed at them and hushed, but it was not enough. He waited until he could only hear their whispers and breathing. “All right,” he said. “I am still ready. Tell me, tell us what it is like to be in this hell on Earth.” (That was for the hometown audience.) “Tell me more—I will help you.” He had to believe what he said or they would sense his disbelief and make it their own. The recording mechanism buzzed comfortably, vibrating slightly against his temples.

Mantle remained visibly calm, but inside, in the pulp, anxiety festered. Beginning as a mental chill, it turned to claustrophobia, then to mindless fear. He wanted to help them; he had to help them, yet he knew he could not help them. His mind raced away with this revelation, screeching, and screaming, and laughing. He assumed a more relaxed position, shifted his weight to one leg, tried to control the sudden stiffness in his neck, tried to forget the bubbling screams of panic in his head.

The recorder chuckled. The crowd quickened its pace, pushed across the street, crossed the invisible boundary line.

They sensed his fear, his uncertainty, his loss of control, and they fed upon it. He was an outsider; he was not a part of them, but he had cast such a soft shadow that they had listened; he had reached out and they had replied. But they had also massed behind him, one mind, ubiquitous, patient, waiting for him to slip into an outsider, an outsider without spells or shadows—something they would have to swallow and digest.

Mantle could not contain his fear; they were too close. He panicked and ran toward Smith Street. Remembering another time, he tried to stop, to regain control. He raced back through the years to a dark beach under the water where he had screamed into his faceplate to his friend dying in the curdling sand. It was the same sensation, the same cramped howling.

He rushed through a dim alley. He could not stop, every thought only strengthened the blank tidal wave inches behind him.

They marched from Jay Street in clumps, supporting lovers who lay atop their human beds and screamed peace and follow us as they passed their brothers welling into shape on Fulton Street. The older ones ran screaming down Schermerhorn Street, less reserved and without slogans. There were no leaders, only magnetized pieces of a puzzle being drawn into place.

Mantle crouched in a narrow, dusty alleyway twelve blocks from the crowded intersection where he had spoken to the crowd. He could hear screaming all around him, but it was not very close yet; he still had time. Careful, he told himself. If you keep your head you may still get out of this. He swallowed some of the pounding in his throat. He pushed the camera mount back into place and took a small ovoid microphone from his pocket. Holding it to his mouth, he called his field tank, repeating his location every few seconds.

A broken segment of the crowd found him and grew; slowly at first, two by two, four by four, sixteen by sixteen; they smelled his fear. He repeated his location while they silently converged upon him.

They shouted as they filed into the alley, toy soldiers wound up and aimed in his direction.

He froze and the scene turned white as he dropped to his knees and reclined into a shock position. “No, you fool,” he said to hear his voice, his familiar, raspy, commanding voice.

His glands opened up, flushing him with flashes of will and vitality. He got up and ran.

They rushed after him screaming, Outsider, Outsider, where’s your shadow, got no shadow, gotta get a shadow, shadow, shadow, we gonna kill you, better find a shadow, better find a shadow. Pushing into the alleyway like a storm wave, they sang of victory and dogcatchers. Kill the dogcatcher, pull off his head, pull off the wires, the wires, from the wirehead.

He ran to the end of the alley. A metal door was barely visible behind a mountain of garbage, newspapers, rotted wood crates, heaps of shattered window glass, and broken furniture. Five feet above the door was a window large enough for a thin man to squeeze through, its broken glass clinging to the frame.

He climbed the broken furniture and pushed his fingers into the garbage. As he rose, it sank below him, fell on top of him, but not before he grabbed the windowsill. He pulled, bones cracking at the shoulders, and lifted himself through the window in a splash of blood and glass.

The crowd mounted the heap and fell down upon itself, mashing the litter into the ground, crushing the wood, grinding the glass. Finally they climbed on top of each other, substituting their bodies for the garbage handholds of furniture and crates, reaching for the red-rimmed window.

Streets away, the field tank, Mantle’s base, zigzagged through the streets, its electrical web promising a heavy shock to anyone in its path. The tank’s front panel was tightly shut.

The tank stopped across the street and the mob cracked under the window, falling upon itself, leaving a fat, beetle-skinned woman dangling from the window-ledge. The crowd hushed, trembled, and scattered out of the alleyway, tiny spiders crawling over each other, into the streets, the holes in the ground, the buildings above.

Mantle had found his way out of the building through an inconspicuous side door. His camera was still on as he ran in the direction of the Manhattan Bridge.

As he ran he heard his name boomed from a loudspeaker.

Mantle. Give us your location.

Mantle felt for the ovoid microphone, his tiny communicator, but his pocket had been ripped away. In its place he felt crusted blood. He ran toward the sound.

Mantle. Our location is the corner of Jay and Fulton. Can you reach us?

Yes, he thought, I’m going to reach you. I’m going to get out of this hellhole and breathe, feel salt breezes, step on grass, see a natural horizon. He drew mental pictures of Josiane, his blond Belgian wife, standing in front of their thatched house in Bougainville before the present became reality. He sketched his twin daughters, oval-eyed and pale-skinned, somersaulting into his arms.

They are here, he thought. I’m walking on their graves. I killed them. He slowed down to rest, to clear them from his mind. They refused to go. They followed him, skin cracking from their faces, pale eyes turned brittle, hunched over, knuckles dragging on the ground. He had brought them here, back to the greatest city in the world, and had left them. And now he had returned, only to fail again, and leave again, taking only their ghosts in his memory.

As he turned a corner, nearer now to the tank, an intense white flash transformed the buildings, rubble, screaming clumps of people, crashed automobiles, crashed twin jets, rumpled dolls, and twisted cables into a two-dimensional line drawing, lighthanded and bleached, its lifelikeness compressed into a few deft strokes. A deafening blast of sound followed. And another flash-blast took its turn, and then another. He pressed himself against a building wall and waited while the blasts echoed against the rotted buildings.

He could wait no longer. Shielding his eyes from the blasts, he ran toward the tank. There was no precedent for a tank to fire into a crowd, Mantle told himself. The crowds could not help themselves, could not help what they were, what they had become.

The crowds could not harm a field tank, Mantle thought. Not even with their numbers. The crowds were, at most, an annoyance to the tanks: they would press around the tanks, shouting, pounding, making passage impossible without crushing hundreds; but the electric webs had disposed of that problem.

Yet when Mantle arrived, the tank was crippled, a gaping hole parted fore from aft, and a green-helmeted sergeant lay sprawled beside it, his arm tucked under his back, his mouth a lake of blood. From the buildings rising into pinpoints, reflecting the setting sun, the tiny bombs dropped, now that the larger ones had been used up. The area around the tank was dotted with puddles of fire, sizzling, hissing, exploding into clouds of blue sparks.

The crowd cheered each burst. It was Christmas and New Year’s and Easter all at once.

Mantle could see a twisted shape hanging out an eleventh-story window, its arm outstretched, dangling a needle-bomb over the tank. So they’re finally fighting back, he thought. How many armories were there in the city? A shiver grew from the base of his spine and spent itself below his neck.

The crowd raised the bleeding body and chanted, Dogcatcher’s dying, dying, dying. The tank was a melted gray clot of metal. It bubbled and rivulets of silver lava flowed across the street, filling the gaping craters, snuffing out the glowing embers inside.

A family skittered past Mantle, half human, half dressed - a blond Belgian with two children, dirty, swollen, fair-skinned. Mantle turned from the phantasm and ran. He ran from himself, he ran from a crowd that was all around him, he ran from his children who begged him. The crowd, pushing toward the tank, thinned out as Mantle ran the other way. Behind him the explosions began again, melting foundations, cracking skyscrapers, rupturing the ground.

Mantle did not slow down until he became lightheaded from exhaustion. Then he walked aimlessly, keeping to the main thoroughfares; there was no place to go. The settling evening was calm: the wind softly whistled between the buildings, the heat rose from the cement, a blue-white star winked above him, and the full moon shimmered as a trail of cirrus passed across its face.

The wheeze of the wind unnerved him; shadows seemed to spring from every corner, from every doorway, yet he could not see anyone in the streets. Block after block, building after building, it was the same cardboard desolation. Unconsciously, he yearned to hear something besides the clatter of his heels and the wheezing of the wind, to fear something alive.

He heard something stir ahead. He stopped, listened, strained his eyes.

He heard a soft whisper. You killed them, you killed them. We saw you. We watched you. You left them, you left them and ran, ran. Another small voice joined the first. Run away ‘cause they’re dead, dead, dying, dying.

Mantle ran from the voices. I came back, he said to himself, then out loud, “I came back.” The whisper followed him. It screamed, it railed, it rose through the dead buildings.

You left them, you ran, runner. We were watching, we were waiting. Watching, waiting, watching, waiting. Runrun, now runrun that way, run this way runrun into the subway run; we’re in the tunnels, in the elevators, in the bank vaults, in the candy stores, in the cracks in the cement. So runrun; we’re waiting: running-waiting, running-waiting.

As Mantle ran he raised his head toward the infected moon, his eyes focused on the bleeding image shrouded in captured clouds. Three gnarled figures ran beside him, pale in the moonlight, yellow teeth snapping at the air.

They had begun to move into the streets, crashing into the stillness, pouring, merging with themselves, splitting, sucking flesh-soft debris into their vortex. Pressing, bloated figures flooded around Mantle, running with him, trapping him in a cage of movement.

You-them, you-them, you-them, you left, you left them. Floorsucker. We are waiting, we are waiting. Waiting for the floorsucker, waiting for, waiting for.

Mantle stumbled. The crowd poured over him, scratching at his eyes, snapping his bones, stripping his skin. Mantle huddled into a ball, his arms over his gaping eyes, legs against his chin. He opened his mouth, forcing the decayed, putrescent shout out of his bleeding throat. And he screamed, exhaling thick streamers of sound until he became only an instrument for his scream.

The diggers, the scratchers, the gougers shrank away from him, clots of his flesh warm in their hands. They shouted, magnifying Mantle’s lone strident scream. Unable to contain themselves, mouths open like hungry birdlings, the spectators joined the deafening chorus.

The scream Mantle created was continuous, only the instruments, the individuals ran out of breath, to inhale, and slowly exhale, filling the spaces left by their breathless companions. Ooooommmm was the latent singsong-the Ooooo rising on the sound curve until it reached the mmmm which fell away into a grumble.

The pieces, the groups, the instruments converging, pushing into each other, raised Mantle above them. Mantle, his palms pressed against his drained orbits, convulsed and gagged on his distended tongue. He was the missing fragment forced into place: the newly coronated directing force. With sudden purpose he outstretched his arm, watching it fossilize before him, willing his weakened joints into stiffness.

From his vantage point atop the crowd, Mantle could see the vastness of his legions milling past the pincushions of dark-windowed spires reaching into the night sky. Mantle, the petrified god, the hollow king, drew their energy, swam in their ecstasy, and drowned as he took his position in the natural order. Before him, out of sight, the sun readied itself to eclipse the evening.

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