Ourselves

by S. G. Redling

  Tomas felt a cold stone turn in his stomach at the sight of Grave’s ugly grin. Sylva had told him that dozens had left the complex after Hess had been removed. They probably assumed the drivers had been among them.

  Graves held out his free hand. “Let’s go, Storyteller. You come back inside and let us clean up this mess. We’ll call Mr. Vartan and he’ll find someplace nice and safe to stick your buddies.” Hess drifted forward. “Come on, that’s right. You be good and I’ll give you a nice treat. Be a good little Storyteller now.”

  Hess stepped away from Adlai, his hand outstretched toward Graves. Before their fingers made contact, he looked over his shoulder at Tomas. Tomas met his gaze, the icy fear in his stomach giving way to something colder, harder. Hess held his gaze.

  The low ringing in his ears, an aftermath of the drone, grew louder as he looked into the dark Nahan eyes he had seen in his induction vision. The ringing became a buzzing, the sound of a thousand bees telling him a story.

  Felson. That’s who held the shotgun, Grave’s partner. Tomas knew him in that instant, knew his pain, knew his madness. Death—he’d lost someone, someone he loved. An accident. An explosion. The thousand invisible bees told Tomas about the pain.

  Felson’s wife had died during the construction of the Council complex.

  He blamed the Storytellers.

  Hatred and pain has twisted him, infecting him, drawing into his orbit a kindred spirit. Graves. Graves wasn’t in pain; Graves was just mad. Together they had sunk to the bottom of the cesspool that was Vartan’s ambition.

  “Can you hear it?” Tomas asked. “The shrieking of the dead in your ears? You will.” He sniffed the air, drawing deep breaths through his nose. “I can smell it too. Can you?”

  “I can smell it,” Hess said. “It smells like sour earth. Like rusted metal buried in rotting vegetables that somebody has set on fire then pissed on.”

  “You’re never the same afterwards, after you taste the death of Nahan.”

  Back and forth Hess and Tomas spoke, telling the lessons they had learned at the hands of the Storytellers. Felson and Graves swung their guns, ordering them to be quiet but they kept speaking, kept drawing closer to the gunmen.

  “It freezes inside your veins.”

  “You become paralyzed.”

  “Abomination.”

  “Abomination.” Hess’ voice grew soft.

  “Get in the goddam house.” Graves grabbed Hess’s arm.

  Hess glanced down at the hand that gripped his arm. “Do you feel how cold your hands are? You’re going to be that cold forever.”

  Tomas continued. “You’ll never be able to purge yourself of that cold, of that death. That’s mud in your veins and the hottest fires on earth will never burn it out of you.”

  Graves yanked Hess toward the porch.

  “This superstitious shit is the whole reason you Storytellers have to be put down.”

  “You think it’s superstition?” Tomas asked. “You think the training we receive from the hands of our predecessors is just fairy tales and ghost stories?”

  “Yeah, I do. That’s the difference between you and me, between the future and the past. I don’t have the luxury of sitting on my ass and dreaming dreams. I not afraid to do what has to be done to achieve my goals.”

  “Your goals?” Hess jerked his arm free and laughed out loud. “This is your plan, Graves? I don’t think so. You’re Vartan’s trained monkey. You always have been.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Graves. Don’t let him get into your head.” Felson pointed his gun at Tomas’s forehead. “Shut your mouth, Hess. You talk too much, you know that? I never did meet a Storyteller who knew how to keep his mouth shut.”

  “You still haven’t.” Tomas stepped up to Felson, pressing his forehead against the muzzle of the gun. “I’m a Storyteller too. Are you going to kill me?”

  “Yes I am.” Felson smiled an ugly smile. Tomas tipped his head forward, Felson’s gun pressing harder into his skin. He felt sluggish and heavy and he resisted a sudden urge to yawn. Around him the forest grew darker and quieter. He could smell the adrenaline in the air but it had none of its usual allure. Tonight it smelled sour and stale, like old smoke.

  It wasn’t like slipping into a trance. It felt like the opposite of meditation. The air, the light, the people around him, nothing had that vibrant allure of transcendental thought. Everything was suddenly dull. Everything was ugly. He turned his head, the gun grazing his temple, to look at Stell. Her normally luminous face was blotchy with anger and fear. Cool, tough Adlai looked small and skittish. He could see the white faces of Aricelli and Louis staring in horror from inside the car. So much fear hung in the air, so much anger wafted over him, yet none of it touched him.

  Nahan didn’t kill Nahan. It was one of those truths he had never questioned. Now that that pillar had been shattered, all he could think to do was yawn.

  “Are we boring you, Storyteller?” Felson pressed the gun harder into his forehead.

  “A little bit, yeah.”

  “Well, maybe a bullet tearing through your skull will liven things up, huh?”

  Felson had every intention of killing him and Stell and everyone with them. In Felson’s mind, it was already done and for just a moment Tomas wondered what it would be like to be dead, to not feel the warmth under his skin or the fluidity of his muscles as they moved him through the air. He rolled his shoulders back, releasing the tension that lay there, and tipped his head from side to side, loosening his neck.

  Felson waved the gun before his face. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Tomas ignored him and turned instead to Hess, who stood beside Graves like a prom date. “Do you think it’s true? About the mud and cold?”

  Graves had gone pale. Funny how Tomas hadn’t noticed that. “That’s what the Storytellers told me.”

  Tomas sighed and pressed Felson’s gun once more against his forehead.

  “It’s time.”

  Felson hesitated for only a minute, scanning for signs of a trick. When nothing came, he tightened his grip on the gun.

  “You’re goddam right it’s ti”—

  Before the words were out of his mouth, Tomas slapped the gun away from his forehead, using it to jerk the man forward. He lunged into Felson. His mouth clamped down on the guard’s throat, tearing away skin and muscles, silencing the scream that shone in Felson’s eyes. Grabbing him by the back of the head, Tomas ripped the man away from what remained of his throat and let the body drop to the ground in a spray of arterial blood. Felson pawed blindly at his ruined throat, shock and pain crippling him as his life puddled beneath him. The last thing Edmund Felson saw was the young Storyteller leaning over him, his face black with blood, spitting out the meat of his throat.

  Nobody screamed. No one cried out. Graves moaned as he dropped to his knees before Hess and began to cry. Hess pried the weapon from his fingers. Graves rocked on his knees, his cries pitiful as Hess stroked his head. After several minutes, Graves lifted his tear-stained face up to see him, struggling through his tears and terror to utter one word.

  “Mercy.”

  Hess gently wiped the wash of tears from Graves’s face and cupped his cheek in his palm.

  “No.”

  He leveled the gun at his captor’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

  “I don’t know what to do now.”

  Tomas swayed on his feet. He could feel bile rising in his throat and had to swallow hard several times. The blood on his lips was beyond foul but he couldn’t bring himself to spit it on the ground. Before him, Stell and Adlai stood white-faced and slack-jawed, for once unnerved at the sight of carnage. They both staggered as Louis pushed his way between them and ran up to grab Tomas by the shoulders.

  “Hold still.” Louis wiped the gore from his cousin’s chin with a soft cloth. “Whatever happens, bro, it happens to us both, okay? Just like the old days.”

  “I don’t think this is going to be like getting grounded.”
>
  “Aricelli,” Louis shouted toward the car. “Get out and help me with this. You two,” he pointed to Stell and Adlai, “you get that one. We’ll drag them into the bushes to hide the bodies. We don’t know who else might come by here. Tomas, Hess, you two sit down. You both look like you’re going to faint.” When only Aricelli moved, Louis shouted louder. “What are you waiting for?”

  “We can’t touch them.” Stell’s eyes were enormous. “They’re dead. They’re Nahan. If we . . . they . . . we can’t touch . . . that.”

  He marched up to Stell. “You listen to me very carefully. These men are dead. Two Nahan are dead because Tomas killed one of them.” He stuck a finger into Adlai’s face. “Your friend killed the other. They killed them and now we are going to take care of it because that is what Nahan do. That is what friends do. And I don’t care if every ancestor that ever breathed howls in and tears the eyes from our heads; I don’t care if we have to strap these bodies to our backs and walk them back to Chicago, we are taking care of this. Do you understand me?”

  Stell nodded, shock draining from her face. She turned toward the mess that was Felson.

  Aricelli joined Louis, who was waiting at the splayed feet of Graves. She wouldn’t meet his eyes as she jerked the dead man from the ground by his wrists. It was so horrible, the pallor of death on a Nahan face. He understood now why the dead had their faces covered immediately by the closest family member. Aricelli’s feet slipped on a spongy mass in the blood and she fought back a gag.

  “On three . . .” They slung the body into the underbrush beside the house. Aricelli’s hands were covered in blood and Louis could see them tremble. From his back pocket, he pulled the t-shirt he had used to wipe Tomas’s face and rushed to wrap her hands in it, both to clean the blood and help her keep it together. “You’re doing great.” He whispered.

  “I’m so scared, Louis.”

  “I know. Me too. We just have to do what needs to be done.”

  From the porch, Tomas and Hess watched the silent endeavor. Tomas flexed his fingers, testing them to see if they felt any colder than they should. “Why did you kill that man?”

  “Why did you?”

  “He was going to kill us. He already had it in his mind. There was no other way. But Graves, he was down. He had surrendered.”

  “Are you telling me I should have shown him mercy?”

  “No.” Tomas watched a puddle of blood glowing in the light from the porch. “I’m telling you you should have let me kill him. I would have killed him for you, for all of us. You didn’t have to put yourself in line for whatever is coming.”

  “Whatever’s coming is already here,” Hess said. “Those men killed my drivers almost four years ago. They never heard howling or felt the cold shrieks of the dead. They never went insane. They were already insane.” He clasped his hands between his knees. “When I was training, the Storytellers told me about the mud and the cold but Lucien told me that the real abomination is not the killing; it’s what you become afterwards.”

  “And what is that?”

  Hess shrugged. “I guess it depends on who you were before.”

  “What are we going to become?”

  “You are going to become a Storyteller who was willing to lose his own sanity for the lives of the people he loves. Think you can live with that?”

  Tomas sighed. “You make it sound noble. It doesn’t feel that way.”

  “Really heroic things never do. Or so I’m told.”

  “Is that why you killed Graves? To be a hero?”

  He laughed. “Man, do I strike you as a hero? Would I be running with Anton if I was a noble beast? No, I’m going to become someone who gets as far away from Chicago as humanly possible for the rest of my life.”

  Tomas had nothing to say to that so they watched the end of the cleanup in silence. Aricelli and Louis covered the bodies with branches while Stell and Adlai threw mud and pine needles over the blood and tissue on the road.

  “We need to figure out what to do now.”

  “Anything coming to you, kid?”

  Tomas shook his head. “You?”

  “Not a freaking thing. You know what we could really use right now?” He looked at Tomas. “A Storyteller.”

  “We need everything—cash, ID, a car.”

  Adlai’s father, Ivan, surveyed the bloody group gathered in his cramped Detroit apartment. “Got a Jeep that’s clean.” He studied Hess, who had collapsed in a battered recliner. “I don’t know if it’ll get you far enough away from whatever did that.”

  Adlai sighed. “Yeah, it’s a bad scene. Gonna head to the Reaches. Maybe crash with Mom for a while.”

  “Good,” Ivan said, rising and moving toward a pile of cardboard boxes in the corner. “You can take some of this crap back to her.”

  “What is all this?”

  “Aw, we lost a storage unit. Gotta find a place for all this.” He rummaged through a box and pulled out a photo album. “Remember these?”

  Adlai grinned and took the book, settling on the floor next to Stell in front of Shelan. On the couch beside them, Tomas, Louis, and Aricelli sat wide eyed and silent. Tomas hadn’t spoken a word since Westin.

  “Look at these, Stell. These are pictures my mom took from her days with the Reachers. She’s got some great stories.”

  “Who are the Reachers?” Stell asked.

  “I guess you could say they were our Beat Generation,” Ivan said, as the others moved to look over Adlai’s shoulder. “They got together right after the war, the first one. The Council was just getting their act together and started cracking down on the arts scene. Nothing like a little power to create a rebellion.”

  The photos were beautiful. In one, a petite Nahan woman straddled a steamer trunk wearing nothing but a wispy feathered boa. The photo captured the exact moment she bit into a ripe plum and the juice glowed on her chin. The image was incredibly erotic.

  “These are amazing.” Aricelli said as Adlai thumbed through photos of Nahan men and women, alone, in pairs, or in groups of three and more, engaging in many levels of sensual delight. Some were artistic, some were outright pornographic. “I notice the same models keep appearing. Were these all taken at the same time?”

  “No.” Ivan shook his head. “The Reachers tended to run together in waves. They were a tight-knit group but they were always moving. They’d descend on an area, grift the hell out of it and leave, usually with the law on their tail. These pictures span over ten, fifteen years.”

  Stell turned a page in the album. Adlai whistled.

  “Look at her.” In the photo, a voluptuous woman reclined on a tangled length of velvet, wearing nothing but a dazzling smile and an endearing dimple on her left cheek. Her long hair tumbled over her shoulders as she spread her legs for the camera and was caught mid-laugh. In the next photo, the woman still reclined, her head thrown back as a man in a tuxedo buried his face between her thighs. The photos progressed with the man, his back to the camera, moving his way up the laughing woman’s body. Something in her face made the erotic encounter seem natural and friendly, not lurid or invasive. Ivan looked over and recognized the photo.

  “Oh yeah,” Ivan laughed. “I remember her; she was a hell of a dancer. Ran with your mom for a long time. She shows up in a lot of the pictures. That guy too. Keep turning the pages and you’ll see why the Council kept trying to shut your mom down.”

  Tomas looked away from the book like it had burned his eyes. The woman in the photo, still naked, still sprawled on the velvet, now reclined against the man in the tuxedo. He had his face buried in the woman’s neck, biting into her skin, blood running freely down the white expanse of her bare breast.

  “It’s something, ain’t it?”

  None of them had ever seen a photograph of that most intimate Nahan act. It was never photographed, never drawn, never described in anything but the most intimate settings. To see it photographed so boldly, so beautifully, was both exciting and disturbing.

  Adlai
turned the page of the album since Stell’s hands had gone slack at her side. In the next photo, the man in the tuxedo finally showed his face. The woman still wore her brilliant smile, softened somewhat with satisfaction, but the man’s face was hard, predatory, a strange contrast to the voluptuous softness of his partner. Adlai whistled again and moved to close the book but Stell stopped him.

  “That woman.” She ran her finger over the photo. “You knew her?”

  Ivan grinned. “Oh yeah. She was a wild one.”

  “Was she?” Stell stared at her. “That’s my mother.”

  Ivan was the only one who laughed. “That’s your mom?” He eyed Stell’s slim figure. “Wouldn’t have seen that coming.”

  Stell traced her finger over the man in the tuxedo, the hard line of his eyebrows, the narrow lips, and the impossibly pale eyes. Without asking permission, she peeled the photo from the album. “Are there more photos?”

  “Yeah, sure, but they could be anywhere.” Ivan said. “This isn’t even all the boxes. You’re welcome to go through all of them. Hell, you’re welcome to pack them up and haul them out west to your mom’s place. Save me the trouble of—”

  Before he could finish, Adlai cut him off with a shout.

  “Shelan?”

  Hess’s back was arched, his eyes rolled far back in his head and his hands convulsed into tight fists. Tomas scrambled onto the chair and straddled him, pinning him down.

  “Hold his arms. Hold him down!”

  Adlai and Ivan each took an arm and Stell threw herself across his flailing feet. Tomas gripped the sides of Hess’s skull, his palms pressing into his cheekbones, his thumbs meeting in the center of his forehead at the same spot on his own forehead that Dalle had touched hours earlier. The terror of the man beneath him shot through his body like a current and Tomas struggled to maintain his grip. Reacting on instinct, he pressed his lips to Hess’s forehead and began to whisper one word over and over again. Epatu. Open.

  The pain in his hands and arms was excruciating and Tomas’s teeth clenched together so hard he feared they might crack but still he whispered again and again. Ivan and Anton struggled to hold Hess down until finally he sucked in a gasping breath and let out a pitiful cry. His body slumped beneath Tomas, who had gripped his face so hard he had to peel his hands away.