Errata: Twenty-Second Episode - For Jenkins' Sake

Here is who I am:

My name is Jenkins.

I was one of the few Errata citizens who could see the Slow Bomb. The authorities got wise and I was called in for questioning. Over the course of a week, questioning transitioned into invasive cranial surgery sans anaesthetic. Curious neurosurgeons investigated my sub-par denial reflex. Steroid injections into five major centres of critical discernment stimulated massive cell growth. Dimensions cracked open for me like chestnut shells. I could tilt my head and peer down time, spying on the past unspooled and the future like an oncoming locomotive. Social contracts crumbled in the light of my epiphanies. Power structures seemed at once silly and terrifyingly fragile. I looked down at my hands and saw blood circuits under whorls and bits of bone soaked in water. They flexed and I did not know who or what had made them move.

Horror-drenched I spotted secret ways, stepped sideways into Underspace and slipped past the guards outside my laboratory cell. It was easy not to be seen. People’s thoughts hung above their heads in bright comic bubbles and all I had to do was read off their prejudices then shift my spectrum till I became whatever they refused to believe in. Thus I appeared respectively as a compassionate conservative, a woman both attractive and intelligent, a kind of skulking ogre built from fruit and a tiny plane piloted by a begoggled weasel towing a flapping banner that read: LOVE WILL SAVE THE WORLD. Dreary staff blinked and saw no one.

Escaping into Errata’s slums I drew followers like lice. Malcontents flocked to the frothing sewer madman hungry for anything but this, by God, by Jenkins, point us towards the exits. Scriptures were compiled. I enjoyed the attention I suppose. Indolence accumulated like barnacles. I’d lose myself watching hyperdimensional pyrotechnics until my eyes turned to oil rainbows. Weird days, but I was hardly there, riding back and forth along cables of time, dunking my mind in mutually exclusive philosophies then listening to the fizz-crack as ideas duked it out in my motley skull.

Then the hit. Klaus Firework burst in on me clad in anti-psionics. I’d glimpsed a thousand different variations on possible assassination attempts but I didn’t foresee the resurgence of my will to live – I fought back and blew Firework’s cortical chip, managed to lodge most of my consciousness inside his head.

But he was right. I had lost things. I could remember my name and chunks of my past but there was plenty missing. My interphase perception was blurred too, impurities in the transfer no doubt.

Firework dangled me over the void, shook me like a jangle-puppet. ‘So you see, Jenkins – I really have no choice but to condemn you to protracted, gratuitous damnation. You deserve the absolute worst. I want you to know that before you die.’

I twisted at the waist and mule-kicked him in the crotch. The blow was weak but accurate. I guess he was still getting used to being in control of his body again. He buckled, shocked, and lost his grip on my collar. I fell through poison air.

It was not so bad. I wasn’t keen on mulching amongst City Hall’s hot slag debris but straight death was better than the carnival of zesty tortures Firework had lined up. The Soliciting qualifications had been his, not mine, and now I was back in my own body I couldn’t call on Hell for so much as a cup of sugar. My main disappointment was that now I remembered the place I needed to go – shame I’d be too dead to sniff down the lead.

Wind rushed up my trouser legs and my velocity was perfect. The smoke thickened then a gnarled shape cannoned up and out of the murk. On reflex I swipe-clutched, caught a pair of scaly ankles and the sharp deceleration was like mallet-blows to my wrists and shoulders.

A parakeet screech from the beast above me. Acrid smoke licked at my eye-cuffs as I blinked up through smutty tears. The creature – a wedge-headed Painsmith, stone-blue – pumped his tatty wings like galley oars. I recognised this bastard too.

‘B-b-bugger off!’ squealed Benson. ‘Unhand me!’ He gurned and strained against the extra weight like he’d been shackled to a baby grand then tossed into the ocean. ‘Do I look like I’m having a lovely time? I mean, do I?’ We were losing altitude. Our erratic flight path took us out of the churning smoke column and down towards early morning streets. ‘For Jenkins’ sake, let go!’

I said: ‘Jenkins would prefer to stay clingy, thanks Benson.’

‘What? How do you know my name?’

My fingers were wet and I could feel my grip failing. ‘This isn’t the time or the place for Epistemology 101. Set me down on the roof of the Greenhill Infirmary – it’s on the corner of Grindheim and Lox. My destiny awaits like dinner in the oven.’

Benson didn’t answer but complied all the same, reorienting us south-by-southwest, a tubby parascender.

‘I’m not supposed to b-b-be here,’ he sighed at last. ‘None of us is. Killing the Governor was meant to b-b-bring the universe to an end.’

‘Maybe he’s not dead.’

‘Perhaps.’ Benson’s head and arms lolled slack. ‘B-b-but it’s more than that. I’m not given to trusting intuitions b-b-but I think I made a b-b-big b-b-blunder. I assumed the Governor was Errata’s Key. I thought we could b-b-bleach him out like a rug stain and the world would unravel. Now we’re still here, glum and jaded in the aftermath, and I’m thinking I’ve got absolutely no right to b-b-be surprised. Escapology’s harder than it looks – ladies and gentlemen, watch as I attempt to free myself from this jacket of meat, no hidden zips, no trapdoors. A tragic waste of everyone’s time. Existence is so vindictive and partial – I don’t know how I could have b-b-believed that my dream was the exception, that I of all b-b-beings might get what he wanted, and that I might b-b-be content when I did.’ Another sigh broke surface like a swamp bubble. ‘I even miss my b-b-boss.’

‘Just here ‘ll be fine, thanks.’ Benson flapped low over a bladderwrack oak and I had to tuck my knees up against my chest to avoid its black and puckered branches, then we slowed as we reached the roof. I stuck my legs out, felt concrete under my feet, ran, cantered, strolled, let go. I stooped over, panting. The Painsmith continued for a few more yards then settled on the marble parapet. He swivelled to face me, squatting like a toad.

‘Hmmph. I just failed to destroy the cosmos so you’ll forgive me if I’m a b-b-bit off. Who did you say you were again? Not that it matters, of course. Identity achieves nothing – go tell your friends.’
‘I’m Jenkins. You know – as in “The”.’

The lower portion of Benson’s face shifted into an unfamiliar configuration; he raised a fist to his mouth to hide an expanding smile. ‘Wouldn’t that b-b-be a scrumptious irony? Me all damp with disappointment, standing gargoyle over this fallen world, confronted on a daybreak rooftop by the only man who might possess the power to resurrect my dream. Ah ha. Ah ha ha ha.’ He looked me right in the eyes. ‘You know, for a crazy moment, I almost b-b-believed-’

A bullet launched from the bullseye of his brow in a sneeze-spray of guck and bone shards. Blood ran into his eyes. He glanced up at the hole, irritated. His left nipple blew like a champagne cork. A squib went off just above his breastbone and two more popped red holes in the bag of his belly. Smoke coils dribbled from the ruptures. He tried to speak but all he said was blood. Benson held his arm out in front of him as if reaching for the handle of a door. He stepped backwards, then fell from the parapet like a buckshot-peppered pigeon.

I heard the splotch when he struck the street. There were whoops and the rattle of machine guns pissing ammo. I crouched, hoping no one had spotted me.

My heart was jackhammering in my chest. Not dying leapt up my list of priorities until it stood at the summit decked in fairy lights and pirouetting. I knew where I had to get to. It was obvious. It had always been obvious.

Jenkins Airport. Taciturn amidst its fences.

Detonations rocked the junction. Pistols pap-pap spat antique bullets like olive pips. I no longer had Soliciting powers. The streets were infested with itchy marksmen. I had to get way over to the western city limits and I was just a guy with no friends who’d lost all his lies.

Clomping footsteps behind me. I turned expecting a gun-muzzle standoff but instead there was a double-image – two identical midgets in gas masks and grey hazard suits like little mutant elephants. They looked up at me.

‘Heesh heesh,’ lisped the Jackpots in eerie synchronisation. ‘Morning, Jenkins. Long time no worship – ain’t it so, ain’t it so? We guessed you might appear, what with all these booms and portents. Shapes, shapes – stare long enough and you’ll glimpse a snickering face in the candle-smoke. We live in accelerated times, so we do. Will you messiah us out of this mess? You can use the flame that lights your way to raze this stinking outhouse to the ground. Touch the fire to the fuse, why don’t you? Good as anything else, we think. Rush to the edge, stick your neck out. We’re quietly changing the scene.’

They unclasped their gloved hands and ran past me to the roof cusp. One crouched while the other hopped onto his back then scrambled up onto the parapet. The twin on the parapet lay on his belly and helped pull his brother up, then they turned and beckoned to me, dawn twinking in their masks’ mosquito eyes.

I waited for them to get picked off like beer cans on fenceposts. The twins tittered through their ventilators: ‘Come, come, come! You must, you must, you must!’ I approached slowly, anticipating a practical joke of the hideous and fatal variety. ‘Oh Jenkins! Why so coy? Heesh heesh! You’re navigating by an obsolete map, so you are! Creep closer and check out the territory!’

I strolled the rest of the way and got shot through the shoulder. A gang of bullets perforated my chest in a double horizontal slash. I didn’t even get to see who’d been firing – I just fell back, wet-spined against the cold stone roof.

I could hear the Jackpots shrieking with mirth, apparently unhurt. ‘Here he goes, here he goes! Insight inside your insides, ain’t it so, ain’t it so?’

I tried to inhale and the holes in my chest slurped and farted. It was kind of funny. I had no air for laughing so instead I cried.

‘So what do you make of truth now, Jenkins?’ The twins were creeping closer, I could hear them, and yet somehow their voices were everywhere. ‘Perishing bagpipe style on an infirmary roof – is it all you dreamt of? Are you happy with this? Do you accept your fate?’

My teeth tasted of metal. I couldn’t help trying to inhale, but my chest holes bubbled and a freezing paralysis caged down through my stomach and into my legs. It came as no surprise that dying really sucked. I clutched for revelations that never came. All I knew was that I didn’t want to die. It was a bad time. I had to get to Jenkins Airport and my final thoughts were this isn’t fair, this isn’t fair, this isn’t fucking fair. My throat tightened with rage.

I can’t die.

I refuse to die.

I heard the Jackpots’ gentle applause. The sky rolled up like a fire curtain.