Vicky had been picturing the scene in her mind over and over again during the autocab ride. Mirro would be crying, utterly destroyed; perhaps curled up in a corner somewhere and half out of her senses. Then Vicky would come softly into the room, speak Mirro’s name – Mirro would look up, startled. Vicky would open her arms, tears in her own eyes, and say Mirro’s name again. Mirro would cry out in relief and rush to her, sobbing, grabbing her desperately. Vicky would rock her, gently cooing, holding on tight.
She felt that she should be sorry that Saul was dead, but it was hard. She wasn’t sad at all. Some maniac with a gun had extracted utter vengeance for her. Now Mirro was all her’s. It didn’t make up for the loss of her son, but it helped. Also, with Saul gone, she could probably get her job back at Telcron.
Vicky called out Mirro’s name again. Hearing her, the baby-thing screamed with renewed energy. Vicky paused outside the thing’s door, grimacing. How could Mirro stand it? Vicky peeked inside, saw the baby staring right at her. She quickly withdrew and closed the door. Fear had shown in the baby’s eyes. Terror.
The screams became deafening.
Again Vicky thought, Where is Mirro?
“Hello?” she said loudly, trying to be heard above the screaming. “Mirro?” She wandered down the hall toward the master bedroom, peering into each room she passed. Finally at the bedroom door she paused; aside from the shrieking, there was another noise, a familiar noise … a low whirring sound. It was one of Mirro’s love tools. This struck Vicky as very odd. With the baby crying like this? she thought. No. Something was not right.
In the bedroom she found the love tool, the “Two-headed Snake,” writhing on the carpet beside the bed. Mirro was curled up on the bed in a fetal position, half her clothes undone. There was an expression of pain on her face.
“Mirro?” Vicky said, her voice unsure. She touched Mirro, and Mirro’s skin was cold. Ice cold. “Mirro!” she screamed.
In the background, the baby’s cries seemed to echo her.
Vicky called an ambulance and the police. The police, much to her dismay, said they couldn’t make it out – they were all tied up with several major riots. The ambulance arrived quickly, however, but there was nothing they could do besides take the body away. The paramedics gave Vicky a strong dose of anti-depressant before they left with Mirro; the drug brought her back from hysteria, made it possible to think. The baby-thing, she realized, was still crying.
Vicky walked back into the house after watching the ambulance leave and went to the baby’s room. Hesitantly, she entered. The baby screamed.
“Shut up!” she shouted back, then burst into tears. Mirro was gone, she thought. All gone. First her son, her darling boy, and now the person she loved more than anyone else in her life. But her grief ebbed away after a few seconds, insulated away in a corner by the anti-depressant in her bloodstream. She ended up staring emptily at the baby, watching it cry.
This is part Mirro, she thought.
Vicky pressed her hands to her face, rubbed her red eyes.
Mirro, she remembered, would stroke the child. But it must be hungry by now, stroking it wouldn’t help. It had to be fed.
Vicky wandered around in a haze, preparing food for the thing and then nerving herself up to feed it. The anti-depressant made the world seem colorless, made hard surfaces feel soft. The image of Mirro lying curled up on the bed faded behind the image of the monster before her, taking food from a spoon. After a while it calmed down, grew quiet. Vicky stroked its hair until it fell asleep, and she found herself thinking it wasn’t such a monster after all. Just a great big baby.
#
There was an imposter on JTV. He was dressed hastily in Jesus-like clothes and had obviously fake hair, and really didn’t look like Jesus at all. “Children, do not destroy!” he was saying, and he didn’t sound like Jesus, either. In fact, he looked and sounded like one of the JTV newscasters made up to look like Jesus. “Children, do not destroy. This is not the way of God.
Violence is not the answer.” On Toby’s television system this imposter looked like a parody of the Lord. The halo was struggling to keep up with his head, looking very much like a cheap video effect. “Do not destroy,” the imposter said again, pleading. There was no one at Toby’s house to hear him; the house was empty.
Nobody had been there to see the “real” Jesus being yanked off the TV only to be replaced by this desperate fake. “Violence is not the answer! Children, listen to me … God hath given you a free marketplace where you can overcome evil by not subscribing to it.
You must assert a strong, silent denial. Children, listen to me …”
Toby was among the crowd at the local satellite receiving station that served the neighborhood cable video company. Around him the crowd surged back and forth, pressing, their voices raised in outrage. His wife was lost among it, having been separated from him within moments of their arrival. Toby was not worried; God, he knew, would look out for her. Meanwhile he helped another of his brothers over the steel fence, and watched as the man was shot down by a stun gun before he could reach the satellite dish.
Toby fumed, shouting, “You’ll burn in hell for that!” He tossed a rock at the officer with the weapon, his voice having been lost among the thousands.
“You are being fooled,” Jesus had said. “The church is the people, not the leaders, not the television. The church is a relationship between you and the Lord. It is a holy relationship, holy in its simplicity and holy in its truth. But this relationship has been fouled by a nest of demons that control this very television network. This network and all the others, they are out to fool you, to bring you to them, not to me.” His halo had burned brightly, dazzling Toby. “Listen to the truth, then,” He said, and proceeded to tell it.
“The devil’s work must be crushed!” Toby yelled. Christ’s truth had carried such power, such emotional impact that it sent Toby and his wife – along with a multitude of brothers and sisters – storming out of their homes and churches in fierce, righteous fury. Enemies of the Lord? There will be no enemies of the Lord! The nests of Satan would burn!
Police drones were bobbing overhead, their mechanical voices blaring but their words garbled by all the noise. Rocks and bricks flew like rain at the satellite dish, jarring it and denting it.
People screamed as the drones deployed crowd-control nets and fired stun-bursts at random. Flaming bottles of alcohol crashed at the foundation of the cable company building, setting it afire.
The noise was incredible.
Toby felt the power of the Lord within him – he was being Spoken to! His turn now, it told him. It was his turn. With a yell Toby began climbing the fence, his brothers and sisters helping him over. He dropped among unconscious Christians – they were heaped high on the ground, some of them bleeding, some suffocating at the bottom of the piles. Toby ran forward without noticing; more brothers and sisters were leaping over the fence behind him.
Stun guns lashed out, striking around him. Diving down, Toby landed beside a brother who had been carrying an old axe; Toby took it, pausing a moment for one last prayer, then got up and ran, heading for the antenna. He saw a police officer aiming at him and knew he was about to go down, so he threw the axe with all this strength and then caught the stun blast full in the chest. It knocked him into a coma. The axe bounced off the satellite dish, rocking it wildly but nothing more.
Back at Toby’s house the picture of the bogus Jesus faded from the screen for a moment, but soon reassembled. His voice was becoming more ragged and hysterical. “Children,” he was saying, “I didn’t mean what I’d said …”
#
Bob Recent coughed, then groaned out loud. He found he could barely move. When he opened his eyes he saw dust motes swimming in a bright shaft of sunlight. He was lying at an odd angle on the couch, every muscle in his body stiff and sore. The screen in front of him showed video snow; a grating hiss was issuing forth from the speakers.
“Shit,” he mumbled groggily, then groaned again. He sat up painfully, then looked over at his wife who lay cold and stiff on the couch beside him. “Honey,” he said, shaking her. She didn’t respond.