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 Kane had a moment of understanding what being shredded to a million pieces felt like. His gasp of pain changed as he was suddenly back together and whole. The fibers of his uniform began to squirm against him, shrieking like a chorus of cicadas. Patches of fabric began to unravel and reknit, here as chitin, there as glass. The communicator embedded in his collar began to keen like a dying animal before it tore free and, writhing with agony, tried to plunge itself into the side of his neck. "Fucking-" Kane grabbed for it but without his powers, it stabbed deep into his neck. "I eat your reality sandwich!" The beast twittered at him. Above him a flock of pigeons, swallowed by the sphere, began to rain around him. Their breastbones split with peals of laughter, spraying loops of intestines like canned snakes. The tiny bodies shed feathers in flakes of gold leaf and gristle that hung in the air to bloom like arboreals. Kane twisted, tearing the creature from his neck and throwing him away in a shower of purple glitter. Now facing the sky, he pivoted, trying to get back into control. But the world around him suddenly froze for a moment. The cold crept up his arms and legs, frost covering his body. As the last of the ice encased his face, he had time for one last breath. And then exploded into a million shards of music. The choir of his body spiraled down in a gust of fresh-baked bread and fur in winter. A handful of notes crashed into the side of a building with a sound like a car alarm and enough force to knock loose bricks that softened into a shower of tropical fish. The color blue turned to gelatin, stop signs suspended within it like sliced fruit. The street lamps began to conspire. In the moment, Kane flickered back into view, suspended in the ether as it changed, luminousing as it turned clear and hard; the first few cracks halting and spread out. Quickly, they turned into a rush, running together and expanding in every direction, delineating the sky into a billion tiny pieces and then, with a thunderous crash, exploding, inflicting a thousand cuts as he fell through the sharp and terrible cloud. A strata of bitter recriminations and dead rats battered him like a human speedbag. Snatches of profanity peeled away to ignite against his skin only to twist into a string of Christmas lights that constricted like a snake, burning all the while. Broken umbrellas crawled from the gutters and rose like a swarm, buffeting him with their broken ribs and the taste of Neil Diamond. Reality bled. The scatterscope of broken worlds pinwheeled around him as the world spasmed and cracked trying to thread through the impossible worlds in when Kane wasn't immediately torn apart by the death field. He groaned, groping at consciousness in the madness, holding to the flicker edge of sanity as each world was more improbable as the last. Death was just below him, dripping Marmite and ancient speeches, stretched out to greet the coming morn. He reached out with an arm both flesh and steel and marshmallow and tentacle porn and Ruth Zuchter from the third grade who once spit in his hair. He reached out and slapped the neural emitter on Death's head as a billion possibilities of him smashed into the ground next. Some current in the air warned Death something was coming. At Garrison’s approach his head began to tilt upward, and an instant before the inhibitor hit him his left eye flared like the sun. Then roiling chaos slammed into anti-life, and Death unravelled. The Horseman's body exploded into ropes of meat and blood only to reknit with near instantaneous speed, like video footage played in reverse. Worms of muscle twisted and reformed within the shattered armour in a spray of blood and sputtering plasma. remaking, unmaking, remaking again. Chaos churned against probability, battling for some sort of equilibrium. A coin spinning in the air. Both the sphere of death and storm of chaos vanished. All that remained behind was a figure that was somehow diminished, the grey pallor of armoured skin now softened to olive. Kane was flung off to one side, tumbling over and over on the concrete until he hit the grass and stopped. Smoke rose from his body, and blood seeped from a thousand cuts. He tried to get his hands under him and then collapsed, spent. Meanwhile, the neural interrupter was scything energy up and down Marius' nervous system. The Horseman was still for a few heartbeats, stunned or unconscious. And then, suddenly, he started to thrash. He began to tear at himself, but not at the inhibitor. Instead it was his own chest he clawed for, opening bloody tracks across the brand of Akkaba that had been cut there. He screamed, and in his screams were anguish, and despair, and what might have been a word. It might have been "no". |
