Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

They found Vince at his shop, red and breathing heavily. He’d just finished laying out a fresh grave, surrounded with rocks. He’d laboriously chiseled Becky’s name, and the name of their child, onto the rock along with her dates. He’d reverently laid out some of her possessions on the rock and across the fresh-turned earth.

“She didn’t make it, then,” Caleb said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Vince wheezed. “She wasn’t.” He drove his rusty shovel point-first into the rocky ground and let it hang there. “Sorry you missed the service. Celia said some lovely words. But it’s good to see you up and about. We all told Tobe he was crazy trying to get you patched up, but here we are.”

“I wish I could have done more for Becky,” said Tobe. “You know that the old pills don’t do much anymore.”

“No, they don’t,” said Vince, bitterly. “You know what else doesn’t do much anymore? Standing up to the harvesters, getting shot up, and taking all the tender ministrations our only doctor has to offer while other people are dying.”

Caleb shucked in a sharp breath. “If I could have stayed there on the ground and bled out, I would have, if it meant Becky was still alive.”

“Easy enough to say, now that there’s no chance it’ll happen,” Vince said. “What do you need, hmm? Can’t even help me with the grave now. I suppose you could trade for something, keep me in business for a few more weeks until a miracle happens and we see another caravan?”

“We’re going,” said Caleb. “Following the harvesters. We want you to come with us. You, and Celia, and anyone else we can round up.”

“Oh, well that changes everything,” spat Vince. “Let me just abandon my home, my wife’s grave, and everything I’ve spent half a lifetime building out here just to go chasing phantoms with you.”

“Vince,” Tobe said. “I don’t want to leave either. But we’ll die if we stay.”

“And we’ll die if we go, too. Only there’ll be nothing out there to say we were even here at all.”

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“My folks, we made a mess of this whole thing,” said Tobe. “But I have an idea. Just a glimmer of one, but an idea all the same.”

“A glimmer of an idea is more than most folks have, anymore,” said Caleb.

“Town’s about dead, Caleb. You can see what a state I’m in. Vince has got a cancer that’ll kill him inside of six months, Becky delivered another stillborn while you were out and is probably about to cash out as well. Haven’t heard from any of the outer farms in nearly a year. Writing’s on the wall: this time next year, there’ll be no one left.”

“No one but me,” said Caleb tapping gingerly at his augmented torso.

“You’ll last a bit longer, yeah, but you also didn’t see all the little cancers I took out while I was in there,” said Tobe. “This thing we’re trying here, that the other folks were trying back when the caravans were still coming through? Dying embers, my friend. And I’m in no fit state to fan the flames.”

Caleb looked at the old man, at his piles of junk, and at the various harvester drones scattered about the workshop. “You mean to follow those damn things, don’t you?” he said.

“Look, they are the only things I’ve seen that’re acting with vision and purpose. Someone’s behind them. And I think whatever it is may be just the fan these old embers need.”

“What if you’re wrong?” asked Caleb. “They might just be fixing to put us both down for good.”

“We’re both on death row, Caleb,” Tobe said with a grim smile. “All I’m asking is that you help me plan an escape. Might be worthless, sure, but at least we’ll be trying.”

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“It’s a chassis of thoroughly disinfected carbon fibers over a partial cardiac implant scavenged from a dead man, and some arterial clamps as well,” said Tobe. “It will require the occasional charge, but you’ll live despite the harvester drone’s best efforts to plant you like a daisy seed.”

Caleb ran his hand over the stitchwork on his chest twinging at the pain even as he marveled at the steady, even hand that had wrought it. “Why would you do this for me?” he said. “I barely even know you.”

“You fix a man up, and the first thing he wants to know is why. Truly, no good deed goes unpunished.” Tobe laughed, which quickly turned into a racking cough; he pressed a dirty rag to his mouth and turned away until it subsided, and then threw the now-crimson cloth into a bin overflowing with them.

“Sorry,” Caleb muttered. “Not always the best with words, but…thank you. I just like to know where I stand with folks, that’s all.”

“Hm? Oh, you’re waiting for the bill, is that it?” Another wheezy cough-laugh from Tobe. “It’s all right,” he continued. “I’m sure your insurance is good. You can work out all the details with my nurse.” He gestured at the corner, where a blasted-out harvester drone was slumped, with a crude nurse’s wimple on its sensor dome and a red cross painted on its chassis.

Seeing Caleb’s strange look, Tobe snickered joyfully. “Please forgive an old man his amusements,” he said. “I want to cram in as much laughter as I can before the clock runs out. Let me be square and plain with you, Caleb: you owe me nothing but to hear me out.”

“I’m listening.”

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Syd kept on following the worker in their guise, trying to get a look at every facet of the man’s appearance. He was well-built, stout, going to seed a bit around the middle, but still clearly powerful, and his hair had grown out flared as if it was resigned to life spent under a hard hat on the Richemont Dairies production floor. The bristly mustache was a nice touch, but Syd simply could not get a good look at the man’s eyes.

Brown would do. Nine times out of ten, no one noticed.

The Richemont worker entered the dairy by swiping a keycard; Syd slipped in behind him in a brand new form and nodded a curt thanks. The guy didn’t seem aware that he’d just let his doppelganger into the plant, but Syd found this to be another curious fact of their existence. People were really bad at recognizing themselves, especially since they were used to looking in a mirror and had no reason to be on the lookout for imposters.

Cutting the opposite way, Syd began their search for ley lines to break. It wouldn’t be difficult to find them; Richemont was crisscrossed by dozens. The builders had unintentionally built it on a nexus, as people so often did, and its importance to Higbee meant that still more had migrated there over time. Syd would have to break as many as possible.

“Hey, Carl.” Another Richemont worker, Earl if his nametag was any indication, had come up behind Syd, absently stirring a styrofoam cup willed with coffee so strong and so wretched that Syd’s eyes watered a little just to be near it.

“Heya, Earl,” said Syd. “I see you went with the weak mud this morning.”

Earl laughed. “I know, I know, but they’re already down to the dregs in the break room and Sherry hasn’t made a new pot yet. You ready to go try and get #2 forklift working? If we can get the dock up and running today it’ll be less to move over the weekend.”

“Uh, I was going to try and scare up some spare parts first,” Syd said. “Sherry told me she remembered seeing some upstairs in a closet. You know how it goes–they go up there and then everyone forgets about them.”

“Sure thing, just meet me on #2 dock.” Earl paused. “Hey, Carl? Something wrong with your eyes?”

“Huh?” Syd said. “What do you mean?”

“Well, they’re…they’re not normally brown. We don’t call you ol’ blue eyes for nothing on karaoke night.”

“Oh,” said Syd. “Contacts. It’s contact lenses.”

Earl frowned. “Contacts?”

“Yeah, I thought I’d try some colored ones. Mix things up, you know? I have 30 days to get some clear ones if I get sick of it, but for now, I kind of like looking at life through a brown lens, you know?”

“No, I can’t say as I do.” Earl’s brow knitted, and then he shrugged. “Looks good though. Suits you. Maybe I’ll have to try that sometime. I always wanted blue eyes…”

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“I remember these halls. I mean, the lockers were painted a different color, and the trophies in the case were different, and that hallway definitely wasn’t there, but it’s close enough to fall right into that uncanny valley of memory,” Gnat said.

Charlie, beside him, glanced up and down the deserted hallway of Higbee Middle and High school. “Bad memories,” she said. “Kids are jerks, especially here.”

“I’ve told you about where I spent most of my time, right?” Gnat gestured to the computer lab. “In there! Mecca for milquetoasts, nirvana for nerds. Don’t you think?”

“If you were a dinosaur, you’d be a thesaurus,” said Charlie. “I just always used my phone.”

“W-well, yeah, but you’ve got to have a phone to use it,” Gnat said. “Poor geeks like me always got the rough end of it there. No phone, no internet at home, so it was always the computer lab at school or the library for me.” He paused. “Of course, that meant the assholes knew exactly where to find you.”

“They find you no matter where you go,” Charlie said. “When I was down in the weight room trying to pack it on, they still found me. Maybe different assholes, but probably pretty similar.”

“I KNOW RIGHT?” Gnat cried. “How do they do it?”

“They can smell blood in the water. Like the shark-sensei in Great White Densetsu Oh No!.”

“Oh yeah, a classic,” Gnat said. “I don’t think they have it in this universe. Their loss.”

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The Margrave stalked the empty, sunlit corridor like a shadow. “The Royal Tecumseh Hotel. The very name says so much, doesn’t it? She wondered, perhaps idly, what that name told Lewy.”

Lewy, walking beside her, tapped his forehead in a mocking parody of Winnie-the-Pooh. “Think-think-think-think. Hmm. It’s a parody of a hotel, where nobody who can help it has stayed since the 50s. It’s a bar with a vestigial hotel attached for easier liquor license renewal.”

Smiling, the Margrave went on: “It is all of these things, she admitted, but it does go deeper than that.”

Reaching out, Lewy tore a long, thin strip of badly pasted 1970s wallpaper from the baseboard in a shower of dessicated glue. “I have trouble believing that there’s anything deeper in this wreck.”

“She saw where Lewy’s perspective came from,” the Margrave responded, “but she nevertheless cajoled him to look deeper. To look at the very name itself.”

“Royal. There hasn’t been a king that had anything to do with this place since 1783,” Lewy said. “I can’t believe anyone more royal than a Burger King ever spent a night here.”

“A name chosen for its connotations, its connection to golden external appearance with no thought given to those who suffer and toil. She agreed with Lewy, but pressed him to dig deeper.”

“Tecumseh,” Lewy said. “He tried to unite the Indian tribes together to resist the settlers, and he died for it. And as soon as they were done killing him, they started naming things after him.”

“She agreed. Tecumseh was never here, never traveled here, but his name has a pungent whiff of the exotic to townsfolk’s ears. He is a romantic hero, but only when he is dead and no longer a threat. Were he ever to return, he would be met with the same lack of mercy.”

The Margrave made another nod, another ghostly smile. “This is the essence of Higbee, Lewy. We see it everywhere. It puffs itself up even as it destroys others and itself.”

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Sheriff Decker’s hand was on his pistol. It was one of his favorite tactics, to lightly rest his palm on the handle as if to coyly say “Maybe I’ll draw steel on you, maybe I won’t. We’ll see. But either way, it’ll be because I want to.”

The Margrave stood stock-still in the face of that implied challenge. The few Richemont Dairy night-shift workers that hadn’t run away stuck to the periphery, flattening them behind idled machinery.

“You deaf?” Decker snapped. “Get out here with your hands where I can see them.”

“Or else?” The words had a playful, mocking tone. “Mayhap the lady likes her hands where they are.”

Decker lingered there a moment, hand still on the oiled leather of his gun belt, now stinging a bit from sweat. He could feel the workers’ eyes boring into him, their quiet laughter–it was always quiet but always there–about the soft boy born with a silver stick up his ass. He didn’t know how to use the gun, other than what he’d seen in the movies, but that didn’t matter now. He had to show them, those snickering sons-of-bitches, that Theodore Decker Jr. wasn’t soft.

The revolver popped easily free of its holster, and Decker brought it to bear on the Margrave, supporting his shooting hand with the other in a weak cup-and-saucer grip. “Put young hands in the air, or these boys will see some fancy shooting,” said Decker.

“Show them, then,” the Margrave said. “It would be a shame for them to miss such fanciness.”

Decker pulled the trigger, the heavy double-action jerking his aim upwards. The shot, when it came, was so loud that the sheriffs eyes widened in surprise, and he nearly let the thing spin out of his hand. Everyone dropped like a stone, fearful of ricochets. Without a moment’s hesitation, the Margrave darted forward. By the time Decker had overcome his shock, she was chest-to-chest with him. The gun was easily batted aside.

“The sheriff has had his shot,” she said. “Now let’s see what he has for an encore.”

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