Quandary Aminu vs the Butterfly Man: a Tor.Com Original by Rich Larson

Author:Rich Larson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

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Hiding under the bed, biting her hand, watching a shadow move around—that’s horror flick shit. This is horror life, so the butterfly man has already smelled her sweat and sanispray, seen her go bag and fone, and knows exactly where she is. She pulls out her fragger, fires for its approaching shins. Her explosive darts punch the air, cough-cough-cough, only find the opposite wall, but that’s fine, gives her time to roll out the other side—

A distended hand comes scything down; she cancels the roll, realizes in a small shocked neuron bundle that the butterfly man vaulted the entire fucking bed in the time it took her to squeeze a trigger. An angular upside-down face appears inches from hers, unsmiling.

“Welcome to my house,” the butterfly man caws.

Gone before she can get the fragger aimed. She hears a sharp crack, and one corner of the bed lurches downward. It’s kicking out the stubby legs. It’s going to bring the bedframe down on top of her, crush her here like a pressed flower.

It’s fucking toying with her. That makes her furious, how she is furious with Jokić, how she was furious with Timo and still sort of is even now he’s dead. The feeling boils over and scalds away her fear. Leaves a fact behind: she is going to fuck up a butterfly man. She fires the fragger again, peppering darts all along the far wall, sowing seeds.

Another crack, another lurch; the bottom end of the bed slams down and narrowly misses her foot. She scoots up toward the head, taking the metal box with her. She reverses her fragger and uses the heavy metal grip as a club. The impact vibrates the bones in her hand, sends sparks flying. The shoddy soldering between genelock and old lock gives way.

She feels the butterfly man moving for the third leg of the bedframe. She flips open the box, finds acid tabs, keta tabs, shoves everything she can into the sleek little grinder. The third leg crunches inward, and the bedframe crunches down on her back. She wails, wriggles free, moving toward the last corner.

The butterfly man meets her there. She can see its bony hand reaching for the fabbed black leg.

“Hey,” she says, fumbling from grinder to injector. “Hey!”

The hand pauses. “Hello.”

“Boom,” she says.

Her fragger darts are programmed to go off on voice trigger—less collateral damage means less cleanup—and now all the tiny explosive slivers all around the edges of the room, stuck in the plaster and wood, detonate at once.

As the world goes up in flames, as superheated debris leaps from all sides, the butterfly man finds the closest cover. It slides under the bedframe like mercury, so smooth, so graceful, and right into Quandary’s raised injector. She plugs its jugular with enough drugs to drop a clone-grown woolly mammoth.

This was not the plan, of course. Her baba had something way more elaborate in mind: luring the butterfly man into a tight ventless space, using its flexy skeleton against it, vaporizing a ton of keta and giggling behind her gas mask while its porous skin sucked it all down.

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