Startled at the touch of Steve.
“Hey, you okay?”
Alan nodded.
“I think we got third in combat skits. We're on-stage next.”
Alan shook his head, trying to get the stars out of his eyes. “How long was I out?”
“Dunno, man,” Steve said, smacking his shoulder. “Twenty minutes? Just follow me and it'll all be good, okay?”
Alan winced. If he bit his lip just right, he'd keep on his feet.
Those thoughts were the majority of his brain for the next couple minutes – or seconds, he couldn't really tell at this point. He hit a spike of wakefulness, and stared.
He was on the stage.
It hadn't really hit him before. Maybe it was because he had a set of prescribed moves, maybe it was because he was incredibly tired, but now, he could see the audience. So many fellow nerds looking to him for entertainment. It was fear married with intoxicating power. He could do… well, he could fill his role. He could stand there, be awarded or rejected from whatever category they were up there for, or… Well, he could do literally anything else. That was something funny about the world, wasn't it? There were so many situations where we were expected to do rather specific things, to follow certain guidelines, and by not doing them, by not sticking to the script, you'd become instantly recognizable.
That, Alan realized, was the logic of a serial killer.
You could just, you know, live life normally. Even if you failed, you didn't have to kill anyone.
But if you did…
You were someone. You mattered.
Against every better instinct Alan had left, he smiled. He felt it tug on his cheeks, dragging them upwards like fishhooks driven into his flesh. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. This was it, wasn't it? What he needed?
Across the stage, someone else was grinning, just as wide.
She couldn't have been more than 5'6”. In combat boots and thigh-high stockings, a knee-length black skirt and a mauve t-shirt, accented by a white-and-purple striped undershirt that ran from her collar to her wrists, topped off with short, messy black hair and eyeliner that could have been stolen from a raccoon, Sawyer smiled.
Alan smiled back.
Fuck it. He thought. I don't know what's what anymore. She's cute. Why not?
His eyes fell to her prop chainsaw.
It was so well-made…
Her character was a side bit from a popular gritty action show. The whole story took place in a Southeast Asian city of ill repute, full of gangsters from Russia, Japan, China, and the whole rest of the world, fighting for control of the drug trade, of human trafficking, of pornography publishing, just about anything that fell outside the purview of local laws. A Japanese businessman found himself stranded there, a carefully calculated sacrifice play by the incomprehensibly huge corporation he worked for for barely a living wage. And given the circumstances, given his circumstances, he makes the obvious choice of completely rejecting his life, and becoming part of the criminal underworld.
This premise gave the author plenty of room to come up with unique and interesting characters, and among them was Sawyer the Cleaner. She was, by trade, a mortician. Sawyer was a goth girl, caught up in this criminal world, with an obsession with the macabre, a knowledge of the human body and how it decayed, and, as logic would dictate, she ended up in the employ of numerous criminal organizations as someone who could dispose of dead bodies for them.
This would afford her a background cameo, perhaps, but the character demanded a bit more. As a twist, she'd been attacked in the past. Her vocal chords had been cut, and she could only communicate with a voicebox held to her neck. This gave her character flavor, but not an excuse to spend some time in the center stage of the plot.
She was tired of being a bit character in other people's stories. Always the necessary outlier, never the main character – the Wolf, but never the Bride. So, in the middle of a conflict, she shows up, waving about a chainsaw – her tool for careful dismemberment of corpses – as a battle-axe, and attacks the main character, before being dispatched in what can best be described as a comedy bit where she loses her voicebox, and with it, her confidence. She doesn't die for this mistake – she's merely relegated back to the status of window dressing that she began with.
It felt like a choice to cosplay her. She was never important. She was never worthy of notice. But by choosing her, by dressing as her, by embodying her, she was being made worthy of notice. That pathway had been walked before – A character who'd fallen by the wayside, portrayed by a famous cosplayer, brought back into the mainstream of discussion, like a forgotten song covered by a mainstream artist.
Sawyer smiled at him, and pulled the cord on her chainsaw.
That was a nice detail, giving it a pull-cord. Plenty of weapons in cosplay were given the barest minimum of support. With a bit of foam rubber, sculpting with X-Acto knives, and a combination of liberally-applied spray-paint and carefully-applied model paint, you could make just about any unrealistic cartoon weapon “real”, so long as no one asked you to do anything with it. That was, usually, fine. Most anime character designers looked for “cool” weapon designs without much regard for how they worked.
Thankfully, Alan thought, this trend was being bucked. Recently, an American CGI animation that he frankly couldn't not call “anime”, by the name of RWBY, had an inherent focus on the mechanism of the main character's unrealistic cartoon weapon – a gun-scythe, for the record – and it made him smile to see an appreciation for these details on par with 1980s mecha anime making a comeback.
The chainsaw rumbled to life, spitting black smoke into the air.
“And for second place, in the cosplay combat category, we have a tie!”
The announcer spoke through a wide smile, pacing across the center of the stage.
That was a hell of a costume, Alan thought. His fear screamed for attention.
“The Pioneer College Anime Club and the Convention Nightclub Players both get second honors!”
Well, Alan thought, I guess I'll just follow wherever Henry goes. No idea what the stage direction for this is.
She smiled wider at Alan, her cheeks pulling taut.
The tips of the chainsaw's teeth were orange – The color of peacebinding. It denoted that something was not, nor could ever be, a lethal weapon. The practice originated with toy weapons in the 1980s. After several kids wielding toy guns were shot by police due to paranoia and more than a bit of racism leading to cops assuming that black kids had real guns, Nintendo, along with several other companies, stepped in, changing the color of their toy weapons from black to orange. Thankfully, Armalite, Colt, and the other arms manufacturers had never gotten a penchant for orange dye, and the practice worked. It didn't solve racism, but it was an effective band-aid. At least two deaths were prevented. Maybe more. Negative numbers are very difficult to measure. This continued on at anime conventions: While no-one had yet sliced at their ex with a katana, conventions were acutely aware of the possibility. As such, all cosplay “weapons” were inspected by convention staff, no matter how implausible, and given peacebinding markings – usually an orange ribbon tied through what would, normally, be the working mechanism of the weapon.
The orange ribbon fluttered in the exhaust fumes of Sawyer's chainsaw.
It really was an incredible prop, Alan thought. Whatever fan was running in there had to be running on an interrupter geartrain, like a World War One airplane's machine guns, in order to create that kind of pulsed air output. On top of that, he had to wonder if she was running lithium-ion batteries or nickel-cadmiums. Li-Ions were lighter and more efficient, but Ni-Cads were cheaper, and with a cosplay like Sawyer the Cleaner, where you had the option of buying actual, normal clothes to match the costume, rather than having to sew something yourself, it was possible to keep costs pretty low.
Sawyer raised the chainsaw over her head.
There was even an orange zip-tie between the top hand-hold and the rear handguard. It was a little excessive, but, Alan supposed, with such a realistic prop, it was necessary, for the more paranoid people in the audience.
The smell of gasoline hit Alan, and Sawyer lunged.
“Oh!” The announcer exclaimed. “It looks like we've got some improv on our hands!”
Alan didn't register what was happening fast enough to dodge. All he had time to do was raise his costume cane over his head, brace it with his other hand, and hope.
The chainsaw rebounded off Alan's cane, kicking back towards Sawyer's face. She doubled down, forcing the chainsaw back onto Alan's cane with all of her weight. It sparked, shooting molten flecks and shards of paint into the air, as she rode him into the ground, perched on that cane.
The only thing he could hear above the sputtering two-stroke engine was her laughter.
Alan fought every bit of the way with the few muscles he had left under his command, but within moments he was on his back, bracing the cane against his elbows, using every bit of the laws of physics to keep that very, very real chainsaw away from his face. He had no idea why his costume cane was working. All it mattered was that it did.
Sawyer snarled, and pushed harder. Her toes and calves flexed, almost all of her weight on that tiny point of interaction between the chainsaw and Alan's costume cane. It was stunning the amount of computational work the human brain could do in an emergency. It was, for example, enough for Alan to recognize that whatever strength he could muster would only last another second or so, if he kept purely to the defensive. He took his right hand, the dominant one, the one whose elbow was best braced against the stage, and shoved upwards.
Sawyer slid down off him, chainsaw carving into the wooden stage beside him.
The crowd cheered.
Sawdust flew.
Unfortunately, Sawyer's chainsaw had been deflected left, by Alan's reckoning – towards backstage, towards the exits. All he could do was to roll right.
Sawyer yanked the blade out of the wood, and brought it crashing down on where Alan should have been.
He'd stopped his roll just short, and the teeth of the chainsaw bit into the floor of the stage again, and this time, caught on one of the nails that held the wooden boards together. The chainsaw jammed.
Sawyer stared, dumbfounded, at him, for just a moment.
Then, she cackled.
“Oh, I knew you could be fun, if you just tried!”
Alan scrambled, on all fours, to the back of the stage.
His fingernails flexed as they caught on the edges of the planks that made up the stage, getting the fuck out of there far more important than the health of any nail-bed. Whatever the fuck was up with his cane, he needed that, too, and had tucked it under his arm. With enough momentum, he could-
On that thought, he ran out of stage, and flew, hard, into the concrete floor six feet beneath him.
Between seeing it, and impacting it, he managed to throw up a hand in front of his face, and it may have only been through the grace of that action that the crack that came from his chin bouncing off the concrete wasn't the sound of his jaw breaking in half. He slid, skidded, and eventually rolled, coming to rest against a rack of unplugged speakers, a steel edge digging into his back.
He balled up from the pain.
When the world came back into focus, Alan realized several things at once.
One: He was wrapped up in his own cape. He couldn't move until that was resolved.
Two: He had no idea where his top hat had made its way off to. That probably wasn't important.
Three: He could hear the revving of a chainsaw. It was getting louder. That was probably important.
Four: He had no idea where his cane was. Considering #3, and the fact that it had, somehow, held up to said chainsaw, this was extremely important.
Alan tried to pull his arms free of the wrapped cape, and failed.
The chainsaw sounds were getting closer.
Well, he reasoned, with surprising clarity given the moment, if I rolled myself into this position, I should be able to roll myself out of it. He shifted his weight, and with a few rotations back the way he'd came, the cape was out of his face, and his arms were free from it. His eyes scrambled for purchase.
His cane lay fifteen feet away, under the toe of Sawyer's right boot.
She kicked it to him.
Alan wasn't expecting this, and so, it rebounded off him before he could grab for it. She pouted at him. “Come on, Alan. You're better than that.”
He lunged for the cane, grabbing it by the handle, and -
She'd closed the distance.
Sawyer was holding on to the foot of the cane, holding her chainsaw behind her, as it jumped and sparked against the floor. Alan yanked it away from her, and it pulled loose… only -
She was still holding the cane?
But Alan was holding the cane-
White steel gleamed in Alan's hand.
Sawyer tossed the scabbard of the sword-cane away, and Alan stumbled to his feet. He flipped the blade upwards, in front of his face. Well, shit. He could fight back with this.
But…
“Sawyer?”
She snorted. “Yeah?”
He braced an arm against his knee, and forced himself fully upright. It was finally hitting him just how fucking tired he was.
“Why?”
Her shoulders drooped, and her fingers loosened their grip on the handle of the chainsaw. “Why?” Her voice took on the character of a fast food clerk who'd just been asked, for the fiftieth time today, why they charged a quarter for a third sauce with their chicken nuggets. “I thought you knew. Are you that fucking out of it?”
Alan threw up the hand that wasn't feverishly gripping the hilt of his sword. “No, that's-” He winced. He couldn't say it.
Alan nodded towards the sword. “Why'd you give me this?”
Sawyer sighed in relief. “Oh, thank fuck that's your question.” She grabbed the chainsaw with both hands, whipping the blade upwards, like a fencing partner. “Because I actually want to have a little fun killing pieces of shit like you.”
She lunged for him.
Where the fuck was everyone- Alan thought, before ducking sideways and swinging wildly. The hungering edge of the chainsaw swept just past him, but the tip of his sword nicked Sawyer's arm. The chainsaw came up again, ready to block, before she took a closer look at her wound. It was shallow, barely enough to draw a line of blood.
“See what I mean?”
She started walking towards him.
With each step she took forwards, Alan took a step backwards. He didn't dare take his eyes off the flashing teeth of that chainsaw.
Sawyer flashed her own teeth to match, and Alan bumped into the concrete block wall behind him. There was nowhere he could run, all he could do was raise that sword and hope to absolute fuck that, oh god, would he just have to go for a stab? Killing one person was enough for one weekend – No, no, that wasn't-
His train of thought shattered.
The tip of Alan's blade froze in the air.
Sawyer raised the chainsaw over her head. “Shame you suck at this, though.”
“I TOLD YOU SHE WAS INTO YOU, BRO!”
Steve's voice rang out across the backstage, and both Sawyer's and Alan's head whipped around towards Steve. This had two immediate impacts.
One, Alan nearly fell over, transitioning from bracing himself for an imminent strike to being perplexed by a friend. And two, Sawyer's whole body twisted, ever so slightly, as she brought the chainsaw down on Alan.
The carry-on effect was that the chainsaw, against all of Sawyer's intention, merely grazed Alan's shoulder, tearing off a non-essential chunk of flesh, and then came down on Alan's cape, ripping it off his shoulders, and more importantly, wrapping around its teeth, jamming the whole mechanism in the handguard. The motor sputtered to a stop.
Sawyer's eyes flashed with… fear? No, that wasn't right. One arm shot to her thigh, pulling a hooked dagger out of a fold in her stocking. She didn't brandish it against Alan, though – it was held up, defensively, bracing to deflect a thrust from his sword.
Alan's nerves screamed, and it took everything he had not to fall to his knees. He looked at her, at his sword, at the people backstage still not reacting to any of this, to Steve, shooting him a thumbs-up, to the remnants of two-stroke smoke in the air, and panicked. He threw the sword at her. There was no way he could block her again, not with the state his shoulder was in now.
Sawyer swung her arm across her body impossibly fast, catching the sword with her dagger, and cast it aside.
Alan needed another projectile.
He grabbed his phone out of his pocket, and prayed to whatever gods the CEO of Samsung prayed to, and hurled his texting brick at her.
It caught her right in the back of the palm of the hand that held her dagger, and in a miracle of miracles, she dropped it, cursing. She turned her eyes back to her chainsaw, and started to pick the tangled cloth out of its working parts.
Alan saw opportunity, and bolted.
He crashed through the swinging door to the backrooms and hallways of the convention, bumping into staff member after staff member.
“Hey, are you okay?” one asked, and Alan punched him in the face, trying to keep any forward momentum he could. He took a right, down another hallway, throwing himself through more doors, elbowing his way past staff and guests, before, eventually, his ankles failed to sync up in their motions.
Alan sailed through the air, tripping over his own feet, and crashed into a waiter holding a towering platter of stacked plastic cups of ice water. A necessity for public speakers of any convention, of course, and in any other circumstance, Alan would be delighted to be in such close proximity to such a bounty of hydration in the middle of a convention. Even in this strange situation, he felt so, so relieved to be doused in cool, cleansing water.
As he pulled himself upright, grabbing onto a stainless steel prep table to do so, he saw that he was in a staging room. Staging room was a vague term, but it covered the myriad rooms throughout the convention hall that existed purely to support operations throughout the hall. This one in particular was food-related. Not just giant jugs of ice-water, but catered platters of food, stacked and arrayed on the counters that wrapped around the room, and the island in the middle carried what, at least on short notice, appeared to be tiramisu. Caterers and staff-members alike, differentiated only by the colors and branding of their hats and aprons, scattered, racing for the exits.
Alan frowned. Why would they-
Down the hall, a chainsaw roared.
Oh fuck, Alan thought. It was a food staging area, he'd have options, wouldn't he? Knives, maybe?
There were none.
Uh, pots and pans?
Catered food didn't need anything other than platters and staff delivering it, unfortunately.
What about those platters?
They were plastic, of the same consistency of cafeteria trays.
Alan's eyes widened. He might, in fact, be entirely fucked.
And then, he saw it.
Across the room from him, running from belt-height to the top of his chest, a cavity in the wall, with steel double doors and an array of buttons to the side.
Alan dashed for the dumbwaiter.
Dumbwaiters, were, despite the name, a pretty smart thing to have around. When you wanted to transport food across a large venue, while maintaining floor-specific staff rounds, it was not just efficient, but necessary to install food elevators, otherwise known as dumbwaiters. Alan's first, and until this moment, last experience with a dumbwaiter, had been in the tertiary library of Pioneer College.
The library situation takes a little explaining. The current main library of Pioneer College, both during Alan's years as a student, and now, was a steel-framed, brick-faced tower, nearly thirty stories tall, capable of holding not just a massive repository of books, but of academic papers, unpublished novels, rare and valuable texts, and an incredible wealth of cute little alcoves to study in. Even now, Alan could recall, like it was only a few seconds ago, the nighttime view out the twenty-first floor of the tower, looking out over the snow-covered campus turned orange by the high-pressure sodium lamps hanging over every street and path, seeing his fellow students huddled together, meandering towards their dorms, the dining halls, or the Campus Center, home to innumerable clubs through its halls, basements, and the tower above. He missed that moment.
The secondary library, well, was. Its entire existence as a library was in the past-tense. Now, its stacks were cordoned off into offices by poorly-adapted cubicle walls, made into the home for the history department, the only remnants of its existence as a library being its architecture, the presence of an “internet cafe” – a thing whose existence was tenuous by Alan's day – and memories. Once, its ten floors could harbor most of the college's academic reference resources.
Now, the tertiary library – that was something Alan had never quite gotten to the bottom of. By its high ceilings and grandiosity, with stairwells and architectural voids that belonged on an ocean liner, it had to predate the austerity of the seventies, and with its traditional stylistic accents, it had to date to at least the 1950s. Now, given that this was the United States of America, pretty much every major campus structure made from the beginning to the end of the Cold War had been put together with a fallout shelter in the basement, helpfully denoted by a radioactivity symbol on the exterior wall by the main entrance.
The tertiary library didn't have this. What it did have was wide hallways, ostentatious architecture, and rooms large enough to house an entire graduation ceremony for… well, not Pioneer College's classes of five thousand, but maybe for the classes of a thousand it had ten decades ago. Its halls were now divided up by incongruous black polymer bookshelves, blocked off by chain-link fences and security gates. Alan had never found out just what it held – its inventory wasn't accessible through the main library system, nor the vestigial remnant of the system of the secondary library that remained on its neglected Windows 95 computers with the latest, hottest version of Netscape Navigator in its ground-floor cafes.
But he'd been curious, and he watched. He had plenty of excuses to be there. The top floor held the advisory offices for undergraduates with undeclared majors, which he was for two and a half years. And from the basement, all the way up to the third floor Grand Hall, locked off but unguarded, there were dumbwaiters. Books would go in one floor, and come out another, and Alan had thought of it as a ridiculous expense until he found out that, no, this was a thing, and probably hadn't been implemented specifically to improve efficiency in a disused library. Instead, as he eventually realized, they ran food routes. From the former kitchens in the basement, denoted by smoke outlets for ovens and drains in the floors, up through conference rooms and an abandoned dining hall on the second floor and the Ballroom of the third, it was a whole network of quick food prep and delivery that had been, at once point, important enough for this infrastructure.
Alan, in those moments, felt like he'd missed out on a world of academia that was more prestigious, more glamorous, more viable, more… home.
He only returned to that building when he had to.
The reminder of what could have been just… stung.
Right now, though, the source of the knowledge didn't matter. Alan jabbed his thumb into the aluminum “Call” button, the little green incandescent bulb at its center lighting up on the first press, despite which Alan pressed it at least twenty-six times.
Somewhere around press #19, Sawyer kicked the swinging door into the prep room so hard it fell off its hinges.
At #21, she strode in, chainsaw spitting exhaust once more, dragging against the ground, chewing up linoleum.
At #22, she shrugged. “You dropped your weapon and ran into a clean room? Do you want to die?”
Alan declined to respond.
At #24, she had closed half the distance.
At #25, Alan heard the ding of a bell behind him.
“So,” Sawyer said, “I'm a gracious executioner. Would you prefer to be bisected vertically or horizontally?”
#26.
“Think of it this way. Vertically, you're done with it as soon as possible. Your brains are on the wall before you know what's happening.” She brandished her chainsaw less as a threat and more as punctuation. “But horizontally? Oh man, the romance!”
While the average human blinks involuntarily about ten times a minute, Sawyer recognized the very first one that wasn't involuntary on Alan's face.
“Not that kind, dumbass.”
Alan flushed.
She waved her chainsaw in frustration. “You know, like Casper David Friedrich, or, fuck, I don't know, Tennyson?”
Alan just looked confused. Mainly, because he was.
“Okay, there's a certain beauty in committing extreme emotions or intense feeling to some kind of permanent existence, right?”
Alan nodded fearfully, as Sawyer's advance slowed.
“Do you know traditional death poems?”
Alan couldn't think. “Uh, maybe?”
Sawyer took a deep breath. “Fuck, you're worse than I gave you credit for. There's a tradition of Japanese poets, artists, famous personages in general, I don't fucking know, taking some time to record their final thoughts in the form of a beautiful bit of poetry as they die. Do you understand the connection? Please fucking tell me you understand.”
The dumbwaiter door opened behind Alan, but Sawyer didn't seem to notice.
Alan, against every screaming cell in his body, felt the need to respond.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?” she said.
Alan nodded. “You bisect me at the waist, if you do it right, I have enough time for some final words. Maybe even like…” he winced – “repentance?”
She rolled her eyes, but Sawyer was smiling. “Repentance? Fuck that, I just want to see some art come out of you while you bleed out. So…”
“So?” Alan said.
“What's your answer? Horizontal, or vertical?”
Alan slapped the button to send the dumbwaiter to the third floor, and dove inside, the brushed steel doors closing behind him. On the other side, he could still hear Sawyer's chainsaw idling, as he began to ascend.
“I'll take that as vertical. Hope you don't mind.”