Truth of the Divine by Best Selling HotDog Girl. Lindsay Ellis
Chapter 11: Field of Memes
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by Fair Use, bitch
We open with the worst paragraph yet. Look at this shit.
The tiny sliver of her mind still capable of thought wondered if this was Enola Gay, or if this monstrosity might be the much-demonized transient sister species. That this might not be amygdaline at all but physeterine, and she was about to get killed and eaten. Perhaps Ampersand had been right and physeterines had been on Earth all along, and Cora was about to discover that in the most gruesome way imaginable. Its movements were animalistic, nothing like the way she had seen Similars move in the past. Its gaze didn’t belie intelligence any more than a machine did, half–wild animal, half-algorithm.
Alien levitates Murderguy, looks him over them drops him like a bag of potatoes. He dead. It gropes Cora, she screeches. It then notices Cora's earbuds. Uh... I don't know. How she contacts & maybe? I don't remember these. What does it matter.
So it wants her to contact &. She protests. It insists, She protests etc etc etc
She has a flashback. *eyes rolling
She was in a field again, Obelus was on top of her, his meat hooks inside her, extracting her viscera, the meat that made up her being, for that was all she was, meat to be butchered. She was begging Obelus, No, no, no, please stop, please stop!
“CALL YOUR MASTER !”
Then the alien squeezes the shit out of her. No really.
The hand holding her midsection tightened, and she felt the fingers burrowing into her skin, the arms of the spider stabbing, clawing, ripping her in half. Blood pooling on the forest floor, her intestines spilling out. Blood, copper, shit, the smell of shit from her guts, ripped open, on the ground, on his fingers, everything, everything. She screamed, it was almost a word, but it wasn’t quite a word, just a scream, a primal scream, the last sound she would ever make as the fingers wrapped around her head like vines, preparing to snap it off at the root.
“W HERE IS YOUR MASTER ?”
& comes to the rescue. Then the most awesome writing from Lindsay I have ever seen! I'm not kidding!
Then a telekinetic blow struck the creature, jerking her off the ground before the monster lost its grip, dropping her onto her side. On instinct, she grabbed her stomach to shove her intestines back inside her, tried to stem the bleeding. She heard a struggle, screeching in Pequod-phonemic. Ampersand’s tinny voice, the other one’s voice a strange, garbled heap of sounds. She grabbed her intestines from off the forest floor, shoved them back in, curled into a ball.
But that was awesome, and this is Lindsay, so you've probably already guessed that it was just a mind trick.
She looked at her hands, looked for the blood, but there was none. Her guts had not been ripped out, there were no viscera all over the ground, no hole in her torso.
Damn. Almost had something good there.
Enola easily overpowering Ampersand, standing over him, the mass of a grizzly bear that moved with the speed of a grasshopper. Ampersand was on the ground on his back, writhing, struggling against whatever force Enola had placed on him.
& is kind of a pussy isn't he? Bitches, broods, gets his ass kicked. Emo space raptor.
She shoots the kidney bean and Murderguy's flashlight goes dark. Cora finds it, and... swapped the batteries around and gets it to work. Because that's how electronics work after an EMP pulse. Also, doesn't EMPs only work on micro circuitry, not on a basic flashlight? Whatever, the two aliens are knocked the fuck out. Cora tries to move & but he weighs 400 pounds. And then she goes a little nutty.
She got them a couple of feet apart before she decided, Fuck it. She turned the flashlight off to prevent it from shorting again, and shot Enola point-blank in the back with the pulse emitter. And then again. She kept shooting him until the pulse emitter had no energy left to shoot. Then she kept firing.
She keeps firing until it's empty, the dumb bitch. She looks around for a pointy stick to try and kill it with. But then...
Now crashing from her high of terror, she was starting to feel nauseous, the thrumming of blood through her skull turning into a headache. What a barbaric thing to think. Her memory drifted back to a moment she had last year with Ampersand, one in which he had expressed confusion over why she hadn’t killed him the first time an opportunity had presented itself. He was an alien, was he not? An unknown thing, a terror, a threat. And she had told him, I wouldn’t attack you when you’re helpless. Even if I had known exactly how to kill you, I wouldn’t have done it. Why would she not extend the same grace to Enola?
Gay,
So the plan is to steal Murderguy's SUV and get the pill bug thing to revive &. That's the stupidest sentence I have ever written. While rummaging in Murderguy's pockets, she finds his press badge.
Kaveh Mazandarani, The New Yorker.
Oh no.
Oh no.
I know Lindsay mentioned this Kevah before, but I can't remember. And I'm a little irritated she doesn't remind us who this is now. Her last book was half rehash of the shit we had just read.
But enough of that shit, she takes his SUV.
She gets back to the lair, grabs the pill bug EMP, but Obelus wants to go.
Cora: No.
Obelus:
Your kind cannot fathom him ,” said Obelus. “ My dear symphyle needs his own kind. He will only do harm to yours. Take me to him, simple creature. You are beneath all of this.
Super gay.
Cora has a page of fee fees. Obelus may not remember but he's still a jerk! Wah! Cora waves the EMP at him and tells him to fuck off.
”Why do you do this? ”
She stood up, shoving the pill bug into her jacket pocket, images flashing in her mind as answers to his question. Obelus disintegrating the blast door at NORAD. Obelus digging his claws into her body, ripping her to shreds. Vincent Park giving her the Yamaha guitar. Vincent Park half-conscious in the back of a van after an accident Obelus had caused. Vincent Park turned to dust.
“Because you killed my friend.”
She fired, and the flashlight shorted, plunging her into darkness, and it was only here that she realized how poorly she had thought this through. That rage plume was immediately doused by terror. She heard something, perhaps Obelus stumbling. In a panic, she pushed the trigger, but nothing happened.
She switches the batteries around to get the flashlight working again. Sigh.
Anyway, the EMP causes Obelus to remember everything, and he psychically knocks her on her ass, then disappears.
End of chapter.
