Chapter 6 – Chap 6

It was around 10 PM on Wednesday night and Stephanie and I felt pretty stupid. We’d been walking around that particular public park for about an hour and a half when we finally decided to call it quits and move on to the next one.

That was how we had spent the last 4 days, and how we were planning on spending the rest of our night: going from public place to public space until a strange man approached us…until The Removal Doctor approached us.

“Why do you want to find him?” I asked Stephanie. She just rolled her eyes in response. A common reaction from her, something that meant something along the lines of ‘I knew you’d ask that and it confirms how stupid you are.’

“You read the Removal Doctor’s article, right? Remember the last part? The stupid woman who lost her smile thought she saw something on a stretcher, covered with a sheet. She also thought-“

“She heard the Doctor mutter about something being ‘almost finished,’” I interrupted. Stephanie narrowed her eyes. Okay. Lesson learned. She doesn’t like to be interrupted. She likes being interrupted by someone who steals her thunder even less.

“Yeah. You’re not as stupid as you look. So the ‘Perfect Being’ is what he was making, see? People came to him, idiots I should say, and wanted something about themselves removed. The Doctor would take that unwanted quality and then also take something he chose as payment. I think he took the best attributes these people had, the very best, and made the ‘Perfect Being’ out of what he chose. He was the kook in the Perfect Being article.”

I nodded, then frowned, “why’s it in the sky then?”

Stephanie rolled her eyes again, “if I knew that, then we wouldn’t be out here walking and sweating like idiots. We’ve gotta find him, tie him to a stretcher, and stop him from making the Perfect Being.”

“Stop him? Why?”

“Wow, you really are a moron. The Hunger is going to become real tonight at midnight. What’s next is the Perfect Being. I think they’re all tied somehow. Everything. Even me. Maybe the Doctor hasn’t finished the Being yet. Maybe we can stop it. Remember the last girl in The Ledge Game article? The one who jumped and tried to take a friend with her? She was pointing at the sky and screaming. What else do we know is going to appear in the sky?” She held her hands out to me like I was supposed to give her the last piece of the puzzle, one that she was being generous enough for me to hold.

“The Perfect Being,” I said.

“Bingo.”

We decided to mix it up a little. The article had said that any public space was ripe for a Removal Doctor appearance. We were also hungry, so that influenced our choice of locale. There was a pair of vending machines in a public parking lot. Fine dining. We lowered our face masks and ate next to them.

“So,” I started, feeling like I should make small talk with this girl, a girl who had existed for less than 24 hours…and who had become real because of a strange, magical newspaper. “Your Aren’ts, um, aren’t following us?”

“Nope,” Stephanie said, “they listen to me. I told them to get rid of Bailey’s body and watch the house. They’ll probably run some errands for my asshole parents too.”

“Errands? What kind of errands?”

“They gather ingredients. For new versions of me. And no, I don’t know what they are or where they get them. They don’t do it if I follow them and they only bring frozen Petri dishes and DNA in test tubes to the house. For storage.”

“So your parents don’t work at your house?”

“Sometimes. It depends. Look, I don’t know much about the fuckers, alright? They don’t want me to.”

“Alright,” I said. “We don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to,” she said, “would you like to talk about your dad? About how the Midnight Paper probably killed him?”

I winced a little. I tried to hide it by taking a sip of my soda, but it was a pathetic attempt.

“I don’t know if-“

“Oh come on! The mirrors and TV were covered, right? Probably because of an article in the Paper about mirror and TV monsters or some shit. They probably killed your mother too.”

“That’s enough,” I said. “I get it. I’m thinking about it too. You don’t have to be nasty like that.”

“Sorry. Fine. You should finish up your Snickers anyway.”

“Why?”

“The Doctor’s in,” Stephanie said, pointing at something across the lot.

There, half-hidden by what looked like the only tree in miles, was a man wearing black scrubs and a black face mask.

Before we could even get up, the Removal Doctor was already almost in front of us. He moved quickly and quietly. Scarily so.

“It appears that you were both already familiar with my services,” the Doctor said. He took out a small, black business card. On it, printed in white ink, was an address. It looked eerily like the Midnight Paper. His voice was calm, warm, patient. Somehow, I got the impression that it was a therapist’s voice. Maybe it had been, once.

Stephanie swatted the Doctor’s arm away. “I don’t need your fucking card because you’re taking us to your weird-ass clinic. Right now.”

The Removal Doctor nodded, “if you insist.”

On the outside, the building looked like some sort of abandoned factory. It was made mostly out of brick, with several long chimneys that were currently not pumping out smoke…they probably hadn’t done that in decades. The windows were smothered with soot, not giving anyone who looked through them the courtesy of looking in, or out…I didn’t need to think hard about why.

The Doctor led us up a ramp and through a massive loading door. It was open, unlocked as if he was expecting guests.

We walked through the back door…and into what looked like a brand-new hospital. The floors were spotless epoxy, the walls were freshly-painted white, there were LED strips lining the walls and floors.

I looked at Stephanie. She seemed to be analyzing every square inch of the place. Her eyes were cold and distant. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to find structural weaknesses or if she was memorizing the place to recreate it later.

There were what looked like dozens of beds encased in white tents, each with several LED strips lining the floor around them. Through the white canvas, I could see the shadows of several men and women, each with IV tubes, each with arms, legs, sometimes stumps, in slings hanging over the bed.

We followed the Removal Doctor to the back of the room. It was exactly as the woman in the article had described, a series of examination rooms tailor-made for every medical field: orthodontist, neurologist, osteology, cardiology, there were even rooms labeled with ‘psychiatry’ and ‘psychology.’

The Doctor ushered us into his office, which sat exactly at the midpoint where all the doors to all the examination rooms converged.

There was a desk there, charcoal-black wood, with a black leather chair and two black leather chairs in front of it for guests…and nothing else. Nothing on the walls, nothing on the desk itself, nothing but his desk and the chairs where we would soon be sitting.

The Removal Doctor sat and motioned for us to sit. Stephanie beat him to the punch, she practically hopped into her chair.

“Okay,” she said, “you’ve got a nice office. Congrats. Now you’re gonna tell us about the Perfect Being.”

I could tell that The Removal Doctor was smiling under his mask. “You seem to know a lot about me. Understandable.”

“‘Understandable?’ Why?” Stephanie asked, leaning so close to the Doctor’s desk that her chin was practically touching the wood.

“Because you’ve been my patient. A few versions of you, in fact.”

Stephanie’s eyes widened. Her mouth opened, then shut, then opened again. She was speechless. So was I.

“Wait,” I said, “in what way? Did you make Stephanie too?”

The Doctor chuckled. “No. She’s not my creation. She’s not perfect, contrary to what she or her parents might think.”

“You know my parents? Do they work for you? Did they-“ Stephanie began, but the doctor held up a hand.

“No. I don’t know them, nor have I worked with them. But I’m familiar with their work. Pointless. Limited. Lots of wasted potential. Though, I suppose I should thank them. After all, without them, I would have never finished my creation.”

Stephanie charged at the Doctor, vaulting over the desk and grabbing him by the collar of his black scrubs. “Talk. Now. From the beginning,” she said.

“Alright. I don’t mind telling you. There’s no need for you to demand anything. Harvard. Yale. Stanford. Good places to find good materials. I met you there. There were many versions of you who took me up on my offer. Some of them wanted to be a little less like you, a little less like what your parents decided was perfect. I was too happy to oblige. I took what made them special and I added it to my creation. Bit by bit. So you see, I know you. I know you better than even your parents do.”

Stephanie had heard enough. She slammed her fist into the Doctor’s jaw. He didn’t even wince, didn’t even recoil in the slightest.

“Where’s the thing you made now?”

“It’s done. It’s not like anyone, not even like you. When I put the final piece in place, it took flight. Beautiful to witness. It’ll be back soon. You’ll see it and you’ll thank me.”

Stephanie collapsed back into her chair. I’d never seen her look so…defeated, like she wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t strong enough, for the first time in her life.

“Do you know about the Midnight Paper?” I asked.

The Doctor shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“Okay. You’re coming with us,” Stephanie said, “I’m keeping my eye on you till this is all over.”

The Doctor nodded. “My work is done here anyway.”

It was after midnight by the time we were on our way back to the motel. Stephanie was quiet the rest of the way, as was the Doctor. It was weird seeing both of them staring out through the windows of my car, like two fictional beings come to life and judging the world around them for the first time.

When we arrived, we found what I already knew was going to be there. There, on the filthy rug in front of our room…was a bundle of black pages.

“Ah,” the Doctor said. “The Midnight Paper.”

Stephanie and I locked the Doctor in our motel room and sat underneath one of the hall lights. She had an eager, almost scared look on her face as she waited for me to unroll the paper and begin reading it aloud. I was beyond not reading it. It was too late now, anyway. I soon came to regret that idea.

I began reading it to Stephanie:

———————————————————————————————————————

“END TIMES:” CONDITIONS IN UPSTATE NEW YORK WORSEN

It’s now a little after midnight, but the sky is far from dark. It appears that the locals were right, ”the sky is broken.” There are streaks of white light in the sky, running as far and wide as the eye can see.

“They look like cracks,” said one resident, “like cracks in the sky itself, and something’s coming through.” We can’t help but agree.

It seems like a nightmare, but it isn’t, and one question keeps running through the mind of everyone who’s witnessing something that should be impossible: “how did we get here?”

The answer lies in the story we printed just last Friday. Back then it seemed almost cute, a piece about a strange aerial phenomenon in a small town in upstate New York. How wrong we were…

The object labeled as “The Perfect Being,” appeared to be a man-shaped thing floating in the sky. It roughly resembled Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, with what appeared to be regular human arms and legs making an “X” shape.

Since that Friday, it descended slowly, falling to the Earth at a steady pace, not picking up speed, as it should’ve. The closer it got, the more people started to realize that it wasn’t something as innocuous as a person-shaped balloon or kite or drone. It wasn’t a prank. Something was very, very wrong.

While its exact measurements are unknown, the thing in the sky appeared to be about 15 feet in length, from its head to its toes. And it did indeed have toes, and fingers…and a face. That much could easily be seen with binoculars or a telescope.

It appeared, however, that the longer you looked, the more it damaged your eyes. “It has a strange light,” said a local man who describes himself as an ‘astronomy hobbyist.’ “I looked at it for around half an hour and it blinded me in my right eye. Burned right through my cornea. At least that’s what the doctor said.”

No footage of any kind showing the being has been captured. It appears that that ‘strange light’ has the same effect on electronic lenses as it does on human corneas. “It f—— broke our camera,” said a field reporter from the local news station. Any type of camera was affected in a similar way, with lenses breaking and the inner workings of electronic devices pointed at it short-circuiting.

The closer the thing in the sky got to the ground, the more it started to affect people in other ways too. Residents of the small town of ————- fells to their knees upon seeing the thing (creature? person?) up close. It wasn’t uncommon, in those early afternoon hours, to hear people praying, to see people praising the strange phenomenon as some sort of divine being.

Then it dipped beyond a hill in the horizon, toward another town. One that was currently under law enforcement lockdown. “Ammonia leak,” said a man stationed at one of the many roadblocks surrounding the town. “Buildup in the sewage system. The pipes underneath the whole town exploded and hurt residents. Can’t say more. Cleanup is ongoing. Clear the way.”

As more and more onlookers from the neighboring towns attempted to breach the roadblocks and military checkpoints, the personnel stationed there were forced to use tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds.

“They’re barbarians,” said a woman who was hit in the leg with a rubber bullet, fracturing her shin, “they just opened fire without warning. There were gunshots on the other side of the barrier too. A lot of us heard screams and moans too, over there in ————. I don’t buy the ammonia thing. I worry about the residents.”

After a little research, we were able to confirm that the town that is blocked off by what appears to be the military, is the same town that was written about in a previous article…a town that was afflicted by a strange case of contagious, insatiable hunger.

It seemed that this would be the end of the story, that the military personnel would never let us catch a glimpse of the being descending upon the town afflicted with hunger…but that wasn’t the case.

A group of riled-up onlookers decided to destroy the barricade by ramming it with their cars. It worked. Even under the hail of real bullets, the cars served as unstoppable battering rams, cleaving through metal and wood and sandbags and creating several openings large enough for people to crawl through. And we were right behind them.

It appeared that, the deeper we got into the town of —————, the military personnel stopped following us. Like they were really afraid of catching something. Suddenly, our face masks seemed woefully inadequate to deal with whatever was really going on in the town.

It was disturbing beyond belief. There were splotches of blood and bodily fluids here and there on the asphalt, extending at least ten feet in diameter in all directions. There must have been hundreds of these blotches. We soon realized that they signified the places where people had collapsed…and had been subsequently torn apart.

We discovered the culprits soon enough. Men, women, even children, literally bursting out of their clothes. Their stomachs were swollen and distended to the point that their very skin was bruised and bleeding, as if ripping under the pressure of whatever they had consumed. Their faces were the worst part: their mouths were open wide and constantly expelling a steady stream of drool, like broken faucets. Their teeth were chipped and fractured, the spaces in between them so crammed with what looked like strips of jerky and fragments of bone that they were literally cracking under the pressure.

It wasn’t long before these people began attacking the new arrivals. They got them on the ground…we’d rather not describe the rest.

A few people managed to get away and hide in the houses. It was there that we witnessed what happened next.

The being in the sky descended upon the town. It was massive, 15, maybe 20 feet tall. It had no genitals, and it was impossibly to discern its gender from the shape of the body or the features in the face. The face…was beautiful. Angelic. Like something Michelangelo would have painted. Masterfully crafted. Weeping and falling to one’s knees seemed to be a common reaction to looking upon it.

Even the bloated people fell to their knees, only looking up when the being’s feet touched the asphalt. Then it smiled. A loving, welcoming, forgiving smile. And the people charged it. They ripped at it with their bloody fingers, chewed with their broken teeth. Hundreds and hundreds of them, spilling out of the houses like rabid rats, crawling over each other and pulling and pushing and biting so they could get a piece of the golden, shining, blinding flesh of the being.

Then, all at once, the air began to ripple, to crackle, as if under some strange electricity. We saw cars begin to lift up into the sky. We saw leaves turning brown then green then falling then growing once more. The grass seemed to be in a constant state of flux, growing and withering in the blink of an eye, moving as constantly as the waves of the ocean.

Then the first “crack” appeared in the sky, a blinding white line that seemed to signify the shattering of reality itself.

Now, a little after midnight, things have gotten worse. There’s nothing left of the being, and the people who consumed it have started to change. Some have aged rapidly in seconds, their hair growing into manes that trailed behind them like bridal veils…then they broke down, withered away…and were reborn from their own ashes. First as fetuses, then as babies, then as children, and finally as adults once more.

Some people simply blinked out of existence, leaving a crack of white light in the air. It didn’t take long before things started to break down. Houses crumbled and collapsed into themselves as if being sucked into miniature black holes.

Reality itself was breaking down. People were right, there’s something coming through on the other side. Something is pulsing and beginning to spill out of the white light of the cracks in the sky. Something big.