Alive

by Scott Sigler

  Another boy pops into my thoughts. Yong this time—the look on his face when I stabbed him, and what he said right before he attacked me.

  You tried, Em, but you failed.

  Maybe he was right.

  I open my hand and let the spear fall away. It drops like a cut tree, slowly at first, then picking up speed before smacking into the aisle and kicking up a long puff of dust.

  “I had my turn,” I say. “Let someone else have theirs.”

  O’Malley shakes his head. “You can’t quit now. We need you. I’ll help. When you’re in doubt about something, anything, you pull me aside and we’ll figure it out together.”

  He should hate me right now. I’m sure the others do. I somehow led us in a circle, yet he says that’s not my fault. Maybe there is a good reason he didn’t come to help me in the woods. Maybe he thought someone had to stay with the group, keep them together, keep them safe. The things he’s saying right now, the intensity of his quiet voice…O’Malley believes in me.

  Maybe he’s the only one who does.

  He’s so close I can smell him. I shut my eyes, feel heat pouring off his body.

  I have never felt like this before. I can’t remember much, but I know that I have never been kissed.

  I want O’Malley to kiss me.

  Someone rushes into the coffin room. It’s Spingate. I quickly lean away from O’Malley, like I’ve been caught doing something wrong.

  “Em, I know what happened!” Tears still gleam on her cheeks, yet she is wild-eyed with excitement. “I know how we wound up back here! Raise the spear, Em. Bring everyone in and I’ll explain.”

  She finds an area with undisturbed dust, kneels and starts drawing lines with her finger.

  What is she doing? What is she going to say to everyone?

  I look at O’Malley.

  He picks up the spear. He brushes dust off of it, then offers the spear to me.

  “We don’t just need a leader, Em,” he says. “We need you.”

  I have no faith in myself, but for now, maybe I can rely on his faith in me.

  My fingers curl around the spear. I lift it slightly. It feels heavier than it did before.

  I walk into the hall. All heads turn my way. Some people glare with open anger. Some look at me with hope, with expectation…they still think I can guide them out of this place.

  I raise the spear.

  “Come into the coffin room,” I say. “We’ll figure out what to do next. El-Saffani, stay out in the hall, yell if anyone comes.”

  El-Saffani nods. People filter into the room, but Bishop lags behind. He walks to a skeleton. He reaches down and picks up a thick thighbone. He grips it in both hands, gives it an experimental swing.

  Then he raises it above his head and he whips it down. It smashes against the skull with the triangular hole, shattering it, sending shards of bone skittering across the hall.

  A piece of what used to be a person is now a weapon.

  Bishop shows the thighbone to El-Saffani, gives a single, firm nod. The twins nod in return. They grab thighbones of their own. Without a word, they take up positions on either side of our coffin-room door.

  Bishop has changed. Killing the monster affected him. He looks so solemn, so serious. That little-boy smile is nowhere to be seen.

  And on his face, for the first time, I see a faint hint of stubble.

  Bishop isn’t a kid anymore.

  I enter the coffin room.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Spingate draws pictures in the dust.

  She uses her fingertip to make a line or a curve, then stops to think. When she does, she touches her face, leaving smudges and broken lines on her skin.

  We all stand and watch. No one knows what to say about the magic that brought us back to where we started.

  We went straight. We didn’t turn left, we didn’t turn right. There were no bends in either direction, not even subtle ones. We would have seen them when we looked far down the hallway. Even when we were walking in the dark, it was still straight.

  Minutes pass. There are twenty people in this room, sitting on the floor, leaning on coffins. Everyone waits. Spingate stares into space. She doesn’t seem to realize that we’re there.

  Bishop leans toward her, over her, but he’s not looking at the drawings—he’s looking at her face.

  A blast of anger wrinkles my nose and narrows my eyes. Does Bishop think Spingate is pretty? Her red hair, her long legs, her shirt tight against her woman’s body…there’s no way I’m as pretty as she is.

  I rub at my eyes. Why would I worry about that now? My thoughts keep running away from me. Bello is gone and there are monsters—I don’t care who Bishop looks at.

  He spits on his index and middle fingers. He kneels, dips them into the dust. He drags his fingertips first down one side of his face, then the other.

  Bishop stands. He has two lines of wet, dark-gray dust running down each cheek. His eyes are cold and hard.

  He walks to the archway, bone clutched in his hand like a club. He leans out and quietly says something to El-Saffani. I know Bishop saved me from the monsters, but right now he’s making me nervous. The look on his face, the sharpness of his movements…

  He is scary.

  Spingate draws another line. She had me call everyone in here because she said she knew how we wound up at the same pile of bones. Her silence makes the room heavy and awkward.

  A few heads turn my way. Then a few more. People are waiting for me to speak.

  But it is Aramovsky who finally breaks the silence.

  “Tell us what happened, Em,” he says. “Tell us what happened to Bello. Tell us about the monsters.”

  Now everyone is looking at me. Everyone except Spingate, who seems to have forgotten that any of us exist.

  I take a breath. I didn’t tell them before because I didn’t want them to panic. They did what I asked them to do. Now these people—my people—deserve to know what happened.

  I start talking. I tell as much of it as I can recall. The whole thing was a blur of movement and noise, of shapes and emotions. I tell them how Bello and I walked into the woods. I tell them why we went, no longer caring that I’m supposed to be embarrassed at how my body works. I tell them how she was taken, dragged through the underbrush. I tell them how I went after her.

  Then I describe the monsters. Two of them, one tall, one about my height. Wrinkled and black. Not dark brown, not white or tan or pink or any of the skin colors in this room, but black like my hair.

  As black as rot.

  Spindly arms and legs. Hands like skinny spiders. Red things that might be eyes. Hissing voices, voices that made my nerves shudder—but I don’t tell everyone how the woman’s voice sounded strangely familiar. That part I keep to myself. I’m not sure why.

  I tell them about the bracelet that might have been a weapon, and when I do, my stomach flops: dammit, whatever that thing was, we should have taken it off the corpse. Now it’s too late.

  As I tell the people what I saw, I see their fear swell. Our bodies are grown, but our hearts and minds are still those of twelve-year-old kids. I’m telling them that not only is the bogeyman real, he took one of our own.

  But…those bogeymen can die. I tell them how Bishop killed one. Brave Bishop drove the spear into a monster’s heart. The intensity of my words hides neither my admiration for Bishop nor my hatred for the creatures.

  Gaston raises a hand—he has a question.

  I almost laugh. I’m standing here lecturing while wide-eyed children wearing adult masks listen to me like I am their teacher.

  I nod to him.

  “You said the monsters talked,” he says. “Tell us what they said.”

  I try to remember. So much happened all at once. I was furious and terrified.

  “The little one said, Take her. I remember that part, but the rest…I’m sorry, I’m not sure.”

  Gaston scratches at his ear, thinking.

  “I don’t doubt what you tell us,”
he says. “I don’t know that they were monsters, but whatever they are, they’re down here with us. If we can learn something about them, it could be important. So try and remember, did they say anything else? Anything at all?”

  He wants me to remember more, but I don’t want to remember any of it. It was such a blur. That cold hand on my wrist, pulling me. They got Bello. They almost got me. My body starts to shiver. I don’t want to think about that anymore, I don’t, and yet…I do recall something else.

  “The one Bishop killed. After Bishop stabbed it, it said, I gave up everything.”

  A murmur rolls through the crowd.

  Gaston waits for me to say more. When I don’t, he holds up his hands, annoyed.

  “That’s it? What does that mean, Em?”

  I shake my head. How would I know what that thing meant? Wait…the tall one said something else…what was it?

  My shivering stops. My breathing stops. Maybe my heart stops.

  I know what it said.

  You always were a bitch, Savage.

  It knew my name.

  If it thought I was a bitch, it knew more than just my name—it knew me. That monster knew the person I was before the coffin stripped away my memories, before it erased my life.

  And now that monster is dead.

  But there are more of them. The little one, at least, and I didn’t see how many actually took Bello. The monsters might know who I am. If I can find them, I can make them tell me.

  This is important information. I should share it but I stay silent, like I did about the familiarity of the little monster’s voice. There is something lurking in the muddy parts of my brain, something beyond a simple memory or two. When I think of discovering my past, an emotion overwhelms me.

  Horror.

  Who am I, really? What have I done? And do I actually want to find out?

  Spingate finally stands. Her face is so smudged she looks ridiculous.

  “A circle,” she says, satisfied and proud. “We walked in a circle.”

  Her comment is random and jarring. A circle? What is she talking about? We walked straight.

  Aramovsky steps toward Spingate. He smooths his hands down his white shirt before he speaks, as if wrinkles might get in the way of words.

  “We didn’t turn,” he says. “To walk in a circle, we would have to turn right or left. Don’t you know that?”

  Spingate points to the ceiling. “Remember how it felt like we were constantly walking uphill?”

  She scans the floor, looking for an untouched patch of dust among the hundreds of footprints. She finds a spot next to a coffin that holds the dried-up corpse of someone who was once named N. Okadigbo. Spingate kneels, draws a new circle. Inside that circle, on the bottom, she draws something I recognize instantly—a stick figure of a person.

  Spingate puts her finger to the left of that figure, then slowly slides it through the dust, following the circle’s inner curve.

  “We did walk in a circle,” she says. “That circle was beneath our feet. The floor kept curving up, but the circle is big—really big. We didn’t understand what was going on.”

  She makes a new drawing: an oval. From the top and bottom of the oval, she draws two straight, parallel lines leading off to the right. She then connects the ends of those lines with a curve that itself runs parallel to the oval.

  It’s a cylinder.

  Inside the cylinder, she draws another tiny stick figure, this one standing on the bottom line.

  I realize what she’s saying. I hear people murmuring to each other as they realize it, too—Spingate thinks we walked up that curve, gradually looping around until we returned to where we began.

  We did walk straight, and we are here, so the picture makes sense. Kind of. But if we walked up the cylinder wall, why didn’t we fall back down? I start to ask her, then stop myself: I’ve made enough mistakes already. If I ask a stupid question, everyone might think I’m too dumb to lead.

  Spingate wipes her sleeve across her face, removing some of the dust and smearing the rest into long, gray streaks.

  “The scale is wrong, though,” she says. “The stick figure is way too big for what I drew. I think I could figure out how big the cylinder is. I need to do the math, do some…ah, what’s it called? Oh! I remember now—I need to do some geometry.”

  This word pleases her, or perhaps she’s just thrilled that she remembers something. Maybe our past isn’t erased. Maybe it’s just hidden away from us.

  Gaston steps forward, pushing people out of the way more than sliding around them as he usually does. Stunned, he stares down at the image in the dust. He then looks up at Spingate.

  “Amazing,” he says. “You are amazing.”

  Spingate’s proud smile blazes.

  O’Malley shakes his head, trying to understand. “But how come when we got to the top we didn’t fall on our heads?”

  I smile a little. I kept that question to myself, yet he has no problem asking it out loud.

  Spingate stares at the cylinder. She seems frustrated, as if she knows all the parts of the answer but can’t quite put them together.

  Aramovsky fills the silence.

  “It’s obvious,” he says. “The gods don’t want us to fall down, so they make our feet stick.”

  My smile fades. He’s going to talk about this nonsense again? Now?

  I’m surprised to see many heads nodding, agreeing with him. To them, it isn’t nonsense at all. The word gods made eyes widen, made people stand up straight.

  But why should I dismiss what he says without considering it? We didn’t think monsters existed: Then I saw one. I didn’t think gods existed, either—how can I say they don’t?

  Gaston starts to laugh.

  Everyone stares at him. He looks around, surprised no one else finds it funny. His laugh dies.

  “There are no gods,” he says. He doesn’t sound very convinced.

  Aramovsky points to the dust-drawing. “No gods? Look at that. What else could keep us from falling, Gaston? I can’t jump up and stand on the ceiling, can I? No, I would fall back down. It has to be magic, it has to be the work of the gods.”

  Gaston shakes his head. “You’re wrong. It’s got something to do with the size of the cylinder.” He looks down at the drawing. “I…I can’t quite remember, but I think the reason you don’t fall is that you’re not actually standing on the ceiling.”

  Aramovsky shrugs. “According to Spingate’s drawing, standing on the ceiling is exactly what we did. Are you saying Spingate is a liar?”

  Gaston’s head snaps up like someone slapped him. “No, of course not.”

  “So we did walk on the ceiling,” Aramovsky says. “If it wasn’t the gods that kept us from falling, how could such a thing be possible?”

  Gaston glares. He doesn’t like Bishop, he doesn’t like O’Malley, but he despises Aramovsky.

  The taller boy crosses his arms. “Well, Gaston? We’re waiting.”

  Gaston glances at the drawing, then back again.

  “Just because I can’t answer your question doesn’t mean gods are real,” he says.

  Aramovsky’s smug smile shows he doesn’t feel the same.

  “You should watch your mouth, Gaston,” he says. “You shouldn’t say the gods aren’t real.”

  Gaston’s eyes narrow in anger. “And why is that?”

  Aramovsky looks around the room as he answers, making sure that everyone sees his face, feels his confidence.

  “Because saying the gods aren’t real makes them angry. And when the gods are angry, the gods punish us. They send pigs to kill Latu. They send monsters to take Bello.”

  Fury wells up within me. I told him not to talk about that, I warned him.

  “Aramovsky,” I say, “you need to shut—”

  A booming voice cuts me off.

  “The gods aren’t angry, they are testing us.”

  Everyone looks to the door. Bishop stands there, his face completely covered with wet, dark-gray dust. He
doesn’t look like a person anymore, he looks…he looks like a monster himself. The whites of his wide eyes blaze brightly.

  “Maybe we did something wrong,” he says. “Maybe the gods are testing us to see if we’re worthy. We will show them that we are by going to the Garden and taking Bello back.”

  That stops Aramovsky cold. When he speaks again, his voice is calm, soft. He’s being careful of what he says to the hulking man with a face covered in dust and spit, and I can’t blame him.

  “The gods wanted Bello, the gods took Bello,” Aramovsky says. “It is not our place to try and get her back. Do you want more of us to be taken?”

  Bishop’s upper lip twists into a fluttering snarl.

  “I killed one of them,” he says. “Maybe the gods sent the monsters, but the gods don’t protect them. We are stronger than the monsters. We’re faster. If they try to take more of us, then we will kill more of them. We need to go after Bello right now.”

  Farrar bangs a fist against his solid chest. Bawden lets out a bark of support for Bishop’s words. The circle-stars adore Bishop, are ready to follow him to the Garden.

  I thought the circle-stars accepted me as the leader, but maybe that was only because Bishop did.

  O’Malley stands on a closed coffin. He holds the knife at his side.

  “Strength and speed don’t matter,” he says, loud enough to be heard over the circle-stars’ grunts of excitement.

  Bishop sneers. “What do you know, coward? You haven’t even seen one.”

  The insult hits home. O’Malley’s jaw clenches tight. He points the knife at Bishop.

  “You think I’m a coward? Come and find out if you’re right.”

  Bishop doesn’t hesitate. He raises his thighbone and strides toward O’Malley.

  I slam my spear shaft against a coffin lid. The sound echoes sharply off the stone walls, makes everyone jump, makes Bishop stop. These boys are going to tear each other apart if I don’t do something.

  “That’s enough! You”—I point the spear at Gaston—“will stop insulting everyone, and you”—I point it at Bishop—“will stop puffing up your chest every time someone says something you don’t like, and you”—I point the spear at O’Malley—“will stop pulling that knife, or I will take it away, and you”—I point it at Aramovsky—“will stop talking about gods and magic and other such foolishness.”