A Perfect Machine(10)

Henry: Yeah! I'd go "Oh, look at the nice kitty" and it would be, like, a werewolf.

Faye: A werewolf!

Henry: No! I meant, like, a really big wolf. A wolf-wolf.



* * *



Faye pulled away, smacked his butt again, said, “We’re adorable. Let’s go eat.”

They went downstairs together, decided they were both too tired to cook, ordered pizza, drank wine, watched some TV, and generally had a night like any other.

Neither of them with the slightest inkling of what was to come.





F I V E





Henry stumbled out of his apartment and into the hallway, a dark blot well over six feet tall, still shifting, changing shape. In flux. Milo stayed well back from Henry, but kept him in sight. The ghost of a man following the ghost of something perhaps more than a man. Perhaps nothing like a man at all.

Henry crashed down the stairs, bumping into a woman, knocking her flat. The man the woman was with narrowly sidestepped Henry’s blundering descent, turning and opening his mouth, thinking about saying something. But the man had no way of rationalizing what he’d just witnessed, so he closed his mouth, bent to help his girlfriend off the ground.

Milo floated past the couple, unseen.

When Henry reached the bottom of the staircase, he flung his massive arms at a door with an “Exit Only” sign hanging over it. The door crashed open, knocked against the cement wall behind it. He emerged into the parking garage of his apartment building, immediately fell to his knees, then rolled over onto his back. He let out a strangled cry from between steel, blackened lips. One of his legs kicked out convulsively, knocking out a low section of a nearby concrete pillar. Pieces sprinkled the front-left tire of a car parked in the closest stall. His other leg shot out, denting the same car’s driver-side door. He’d grown about half a foot overnight and, in places on his body where muscle and bone used to be, now metal existed, or at least something becoming metal.

Milo told Henry to calm down. Told him to take it easy. Relax. It’ll be alright. Just settle, man. It’ll pass. No worries.

But Henry couldn’t hear Milo – not that Milo knew if this convulsion would pass, anyway; they were just words of comfort for comfort’s sake – so Henry thrashed some more, took another small chunk out of the pillar, this time a little higher up.

Milo watched, fascinated as Henry took shape. His new shape.

When he rose again, his knees shook, clattered together. He reached one part-metal/part-flesh palm out to steady himself against the pillar he’d kicked.

Henry breathed in, breathed out. Slowly. Like great bellows. Chunks of shot poked from his ribs; tips of bullets littered one side of his face, both arms, most of his left leg; strips of smooth steel ran down both sides of his torso, glinting in the dim underground light.

Another breath, slow. The expansion of Henry’s chest caused a few bullets to dislodge from his body, clatter to the ground.

He turned his head a little. Eyes gray, nearly solid metal. Ball bearings set deep in his skull. Somehow seeing, collecting information.

Milo shivered as his friend’s eyes settled on him. But they did not see him – rather saw through him, behind him. Milo turned around.

A small boy and his mother stood at one of the exits. The mother’s keys rattled in one hand. Neither she nor the boy had yet looked up to see Henry. They held each other’s hands as they walked, the mother looking down at her son, the boy prattling on about some video game he’d been playing. The mother’s boots shattered the previous quiet; the boy filled the spaces between each heel’s connection with excited patter.

They passed very near to Milo; he smelled – or perhaps imagined he could smell – the woman’s perfume. Henry’s head tracked them as they strolled by, still not noticing him. Milo wondered what this new Henry would do if the mother and the boy looked up and saw him.

The mother’s car was opposite Henry and Milo, two rows over. She opened the passenger side for her son, sweeping her arm in front of her. “After you, m’dear,” she said, and laughed a little.

The boy giggled, got in the car. The mother closed the door. Crossed to the driver’s side, head still down, digging for something in her purse, smiling. Opened her own door, slipped inside. Slammed it shut.

Started the engine. Backed out.

And drove away.

Henry watched the car turn up a ramp, the engine sounds drifting farther and farther away. His neck relaxed, head drooping. A dandelion too heavy for its stalk.

“Henry,” Milo said. “Henry.”

But Henry just stared at his heavy, gray-black hand, still plastered against the pillar. And breathed.

Waiting for whatever came next.



* * *



Milo hovered nearby, of two minds about watching his friend go through another change. On the one hand, he wanted to be here for Henry – as physically ineffectual as he was; on the other, he didn’t want to witness again what he’d just seen: the mad thrashing, the roaring, the pained look on his face of a kind Milo could scarcely imagine – his face that was now beginning to look like something else’s face. What made it Henry was the way the body moved. Milo had run enough with his friend that they knew each other’s physical movements inside out. Henry had always been fluid, sleek. Even changing into whatever he was becoming, Milo saw that he had not lost that.