Other Voices, Other Tombs Read online

  This is How it Goes

  Gemma Files

  Last night I had that dream where I was washing my face, and after I ran the cloth over my shut lids I opened them again, and one of my eyes fell out—my left eye. Right eye? No, it was definitely the left; the sinister one, with all that that implies. And underneath where my eye used to be there was another eye, someone else's eye. So, there I was, standing there like an asshole, and there it was, looking out at me from the bathroom mirror. And the worst part was, it could see me. And I didn't want it to see me.

  I'll tell you this much: I really want not to have that dream anymore, or any of my other recurring dreams. Or not to have to dream at all—that would be good, too. Better, actually.

  This is how it goes, these days. Stand by.

  #

  This fucking city, man, this one, right here. I don't know about any other, not for sure; whole rest of the world could be a lie made from stock footage, for all I know. For all any of us really ever knew.

  Ah, but that's not true, is it? Because—

  I was on the phone with my Dad when it started to happen, FaceTiming long distance, from Toronto, Canada to Hobart, Tasmania. Three in the morning my time, seven at night his time; they're fourteen hours ahead, which makes stuff weird. It was his birthday, or it had been, and I kind of felt like I owed him more than an e-card, given he was turning eighty. But his girlfriend came in halfway through our usual once-a-year mutual update, frowning at her iPad, and when he heard the note in her voice he rang off, saying he'd get back to me—which he didn't, but I don't blame him for it.

  Sometimes I wonder what I would have seen, if I'd been able to keep watching. Something pretty much like what it probably turned out she was watching at the time, no doubt. I couldn't have known that, though.

  Not yet.

  #

  It was roughly twenty-four hours before the Split hit Toronto, and I was back online, where I spent most of my days, then. I worked from home, my Mom's basement—a virtual telemarketing job, Skype-routed from my home number through a call centre in New Delhi and back again, amusingly enough. Half my calls required being fluent in Hindi and Urdu, the other half being fluent in accent-less English, so I was set for life, if I wanted to be; don’t think I would have really stayed with it much more than two years, though, since the burn-out rate was amazing. I was processing one call roughly every minute and a half, and even my completed calls took less than five minutes, tops. In all the time I worked “there,” I don’t think I made more than fifty legitimate sales—the rest were all hang-ups or carry-through on previous calls made by other operators entirely.

  The content? Offering regular Marriott Hotel customers the chance at a “free” cruise, which required them to travel to Mississauga, listen to a presentation on time-shared beach-front cabins, then take part in a draw. One winner per draw, out of twenty to thirty applicants. It’s truly amazing, the amount of time we used to waste trying to get something for nothing, isn’t it?

  The job suited me, because at that time I was still suffering from fairly extreme episodes of anxiety, bad enough I’d been forced to drop out of university halfway through the second semester of my five-year Biology program. I took it because I had immediate bills to pay, but also to save enough money to try again, probably not the next semester but the one after that. Since my initial breakdown, however, I’d gone on a cocktail of prescribed drugs which made me both agoraphobic and overweight, a bad combination in terms of socializing, even after I felt well enough to want to, so the Internet had become my only friend—my enabler, as well as my employer. I “knew” a lot of people online, people I spoke to and interacted with every day, but in most cases, I’d never even seen their photos, let alone met them in person.

  Telemarketing can be mind-numbing work, literally, so I distracted myself as much as I could while still being able to keep up to standard. Which is how I happened to have three screens open that day, one of them being a continually refreshed view of my favourite General Weird Shit thread on CreepTracker.org, and how, in turn—simply by clicking on a seemingly random link, posted without any sort of explanation—I became one of the first wave of people to view the initial upload of what would eventually become known as the Snowtown Dupe Vid.

  Snowtown, a small village outside of Adelaide, South Australia, had up to that point garnered a slight amount of global infamy as the location of a series of homicides committed between 1992 and 1999, culminating in one of the longest, most publicized criminal trials in Australian history. I’d never been there, but the video certainly made it look familiar: Just one more bus-stop in the Bush, a big slice of wide open street with the horizon showing if you squinted, plus an exposed brick wall under a dripping awning—possibly that of a convenience store, given the large glass window and the faintly visible reflection from a neon sign above. Winter for them and their rainiest month, so the street itself was one big puddle, sky above full of lowering, thunderhead clouds. A shit day to be out, but whoever took the video—low-res, probably done on a cellphone—seemed to be enjoying themselves, just like the kid they had their lens pointed at. Some young dude in jeans and a t-shirt, both equally soaked, drinking a Coke and complaining about the downpour, until...

  Until.

  Unless you’ve seen someone doing it, or done it yourself, you’ll never know how bad being Duped looks, when it happens. One second you’re fine, bodily integrity at one hundred percent, totally normal. The next—

  “Mate,” a voice says offscreen, sounding worried. “You all right? Said, y’all right, mate? Gaz? C’mon, stop it. Stop arsin’ around. Mate?”

  So there's poor Gazza, looking out at the rain, laughing and shooting the shit with his friend, who probably must’ve been standing almost right next to the store’s front entrance, because when he saw what was starting to happen he steps back far enough to set the automatic doors off and just stays there, frozen. So, there's this Starship Enterprise-type sound of glass and rubber swiping back and forth for the entire rest of the whole vid: Whoosh-THUNK, whoosh-THUNK, whoosh-THUNK. Not that the friend really notices, riveted as he is on what's happening right in front of him—like me, that first time, or anybody else who’s ever seen it, since. Like everybody was, ‘til the Split finally ended up moving far enough around the world to hit them, too.

  My man Gaz, totally happy and nonchalant, just one more bro spending bro-time with his best bud, rain and all. But then he suddenly jack-knifes, folded up, vibrating all over—makes this weird face like he’s been punched from the inside, again and again, just not stopping. And this . . . ripple, would be the best way to describe it . . . passing over him from head to toe, deforming his outline. Just seemed like a glitch at first, some bad pixelation, like the recording was sticking and jumping, or something—

  —but no, that wasn’t it, not really. It was him, you saw next: His flesh, his skin, puffing and peeling, bulging and ripping; tumours breeding everywhere, fast as popcorn. Collarbone skewing, a bump detaching from his neck, yawning open and growing eyes; ribs cracking apart like a hinged box-lid, to let a slimy copy of his torso shoulder its way out from inside; a damn third hand coming straight up through his back, even, ripping right through his shirt. Something else—somebody else—tearing himself free, shedding Gaz like a spasming skin, with no regards whatsoever to the ruin he left in his wake.

  Yeah, and blood, too—plenty of that, by the end. Blood spraying up everywhere, even faster than the screams.

  “Oh my God,” the guy keeps on yelling, camera-phone waving back and forth like he was trying to semaphore. “Holy Christing fuck, who IS that, who? Who is that, mate? Mate? Gaz?”

  And Gaz, grabbing his own newly-Duped throat with both hands, snarling in atavistic pain and hatred; Dupe-Gaz, grabbing back, just as committed to killing the person it's pulling itself out of. There can be only one! The two of them hanging on for dear life, tearing and snapping at each other like some horrible flesh cartoon, even as the nameless guy with the p
hone starts to cough and groan himself, starts to crack and squish and roar. Even as his blood splashes up (or down?) across the phone's skewed screen, as the phone slips from his hand and cracks against the ground, face down. Yet still, somehow, recording. Still streaming.

  No reply and no more images either, just those terrible sounds. And that just goes on ‘til it's gone in turn, ‘til he is. Both of them, or all three, or all four. 'Til somebody involved survives that particular body horror melée, or doesn't.

  And that was it.

  #

  I hung up, cashed out, told my supervisor I was sick, that I was going to puke—food poisoning, whatever, I couldn’t stick around. He wasn’t happy, to say the least. Suggested strongly how I might not have a job by tomorrow, but I was fine with that, surprisingly; maybe I sensed which way the wind was blowing, so to speak. Then I DMed a friend of mine, instead—this guy in L.A., claimed he did Second Unit work on TV. I cut and pasted, shared the link, asked him what he thought.

  See that there man?

  yah ridic, as if

  Soooo a hoax, is what your sayin

  course its a haox man what else? rlly think sm guy split down th/middle like a fukcng amoeba beat himself up run off? cmon dude check urself i do that shit daily, cgi out the ass

  I sat there for the next . . . six hours maybe, tracking the vid as it made its way round the world, passing through time-zone after time-zone, drawing comments like flies; ate in front of the screen, barely got up to piss, then fell sideways and rolled into bed. It was time I should have been spending upstairs with my Mom, with my stepsiblings, her dead second husband's kids. But I wasn’t to know, any more than it would’ve occurred to me to think I’d wake up next morning feeling like somebody’d pulled my guts out through my throat while trying to kill myself with my own bare hands, not at all metaphorically.

  #

  Here's what happened over here, meanwhile, when it all started to fall apart—it got hot, real hot. And still, too, the light outside all grey except for some kind of flicker along the horizon, heat lightning maybe, like just before a storm breaks. Then the power went out, then the WiFi, then the rest of the amenities. Subway trains crashed into each other, all up and down both lines; planes coming into the Billy Bishop Toronto Island airport crashed instead of landing, skipping off the coast of Port George VI Island like stones, right into Lake Ontario. One apparently went so deep it broke through the roof of the channel tunnel between check-in and arrivals/departures, drowning a bunch of potential passengers who'd opted to walk instead of taking the ferry across.

  All this while I was asleep, obviously. I've picked the details up from various other survivors, the ones I trade with or pay tribute to, the ones I sometimes have to hide from. The mad, the broken and the desperate wreckage-sifters, just like me.

  TTC streetcars went dead in the middle of the road, creating convenient breaks for pileups that probably would have happened anyhow. The underground PATHs beneath the main buildings of Toronto's downtown business and shopping district all went dark at the same time, sparking panic, a wild upward rush for fresh air and sun that soon broke into site-specific riots, leaving the previously pristine tiled floors covered in bodies, some walls splashed with blood up to their ceilings. Not that the sidewalks above looked any better, by the end of the day—or my own condo's hallways, for that matter.

  I had a friend once who happened to get caught in New Orleans during Katrina. “First time you turn on the tap and nothing comes out, things go downhill pretty fast,” he told me. And he was right.

  I don't know where he is now—lived out near Niagara Falls, last I heard, with his husband, and their kids. They were okay the day before, far as I could tell, at least from Facebook.

  But a whole lot of things have changed, since then.

  #

  No one left to clean up, afterwards—no one who gave enough of a shit to try, anyhow. Which is why downtown seems to be so full of birds now, more than I ever remember seeing in what none of us knew was our last decade of civilization: pigeons flocking and seagulls swooping everywhere, sparrows and starlings and red-winged blackbirds, even hawks and crows. Not to mention former pets gone feral and the so-called vermin nobody bothers to cull, some rabid, most extremely well-fed—raccoons, skunks, rats, squirrels, foxes. Insects too, which can be surprisingly beautiful, in their season.

  I walked through what used to be David Crombie Park yesterday, foraging for edible weeds near where the lavender was once merely planted to edge banks of cultivated flowers. The flowers have grown wild into a blossoming tangle almost four-foot square, and the buzzing so loud with bees I could hear it down the block—they were absolutely covered in a fluttering black-and-orange cloud of Monarch butterflies. Those were declared extinct, back before the Split; nice to see we were wrong about that, in the end. Along with so much else.

  I hardly ever see any corpses, to speak of. Bones, yes, here and there; scraps and leavings, dried to a fine brown leather. Most of the worst of it covered with grass, vines, greenery, though—and garbage too, of course, its toxic-bright colours sun-faded, covered in dust.

  Human beings are full of garbage, like any other type of vermin; if animals eat us, they eat our filth, our madness. They go mad, in turn.

  Birds and bats and butterflies, drunk on so much carrion, so many suddenly opulent food-sources. Ghosts of the towers of silence, of the vultures who are used to eating corpses, to being allowed to eat corpses. Of having them prepared for them. Some downtown people really have started exposing their dead on the tops of buildings, disjointed: Sky burial. I've seen it. Like they're trying to appease the mad birds' ghosts.

  #

  I remember looking down at that fat brown girl, the one who would've looked so much more like me if she'd been wearing both halves of the pyjama set I went to bed in instead of just the one, torn haphazardly down the middle—or if she'd only had my face to go along with my hair, the purple streaks I'd just put in it still intact, a single earring dangling from one torn lobe. But she was dead, her head caved in. Her eyes were inside her mouth. And my hands were gloved with blood, up to the elbows. Not all of it that poor dead girl's, either; surprise surprise, beating someone to death with your bare hands hurts.

  I had to pick a molar out of one my knuckles, later on—the shattered remains of one. Worst infection I've ever had. The human mouth is a disgusting thing; my nail turned black. Eventually, I had to get a doctor who lives in my building to cut the finger off, along with the one next to it, so I didn't lose my whole hand.

  Adrenaline could have explained not noticing the pain while it was happening. Nobody's ever explained why the Split itself blots out most of your memory and all your volition; nobody's ever remembered thinking clearly enough to try to stop, or flee instead of fight, or even just yell something like, Hey, you're me!, or Where did you come from?, or Why are we doing this? Just agony, nightmare fugue, and then a corpse. If you don't have a handy artificial marker somewhere—piercings, tattoos, whatever—most people can't even take a guess whether the survivor is dupe or original. Because memory's duplicated too, you see. So not even the survivors know who they really are.

  I heard stories about people who killed the dupes of their loved ones, before everyone realized that. Some of those people killed themselves, after.

  I didn't face that decision. I went upstairs and found the house trashed but empty, except for the bodies: my stepsiblings Maggie and Phil (or their copies)—Phil with a kitchen knife in his chest and Maggie smothered in a plastic bag—and...something grey, warped and bloody that looked more like a John Carpenter film prop than anything once human. I fled, but more in blind terror than grief, not even really understanding what I'd seen.

  Halfway down the block, I suddenly realized the grey thing with too many limbs must've been my Mom. She'd died mid-Split like most of the elderly or the sick, or the children too young to survive the trauma. Which was everything I'd need or want to know about my Dad and his girlfriend, as w
ell, in the end. Not that I'll ever be able to find out now.

  For a century or so, the world was small enough not to be afraid of. It got smaller and faster and faster and smaller, 'til you could hold it in your hand. 'Til you could watch it from morning to night without ever having to go anywhere.

  That's never going to be true again.

  #

  At any given point during the Split, as the initial wave passed through Canada, scientists have determined (to the best of their ability, given present circumstances) that as much as one third of the population must have been either duping, already duped, or entering the full-bore throes of dupe-on-dupe death-combat. No one was immune, not even twins, who you’d assume came sort of pre-duped already. The blows to our infrastructure were so hard and immediate, we’ve hardly begun yet to clean up that first mess, let alone the messes which followed. It was a full-bore ecological landslide, a global tsunami...and the very funniest part of it all, in context, is that even though the only thing that changed was us, that was more than enough, because we infested this planet, like any other virus; we were already literally everywhere, doing everything.