The Anathema

by Rawlins, Zachary

  “Ew,” she said, frowning. “Tone it down a little there, big guy.”

  His desire disintegrated like smoke in the wind, here and then gone, leaving behind only a small, confused memory. He still adored Rebecca, but now there was something almost familial about it, like she was his mother, or his sister. When she reached for his forehead he closed his eyes automatically, instantly soothed by the feel of her cool hand on his brow.

  “Okay. Here’s how it’s going to go. I want to go back to cell 8B, Todd, and you want to take me there. Now, now – don’t get worried. If anybody stops us, I’ll explain things to them, and then they’ll understand. Like you understand me. Okay?”

  Todd nodded his agreement, pleased that Rebecca would take responsibility for the situation. He always felt better when somebody else was holding the bag.

  “This is important, Todd. This is a big deal to you. On the way, I might need you to do things. I also have some questions for you, and I want you to answer them quickly and honestly. Can you do that for me?”

  Again, Todd nodded, as content as a clam in its shell, his eyes closed, waiting for instructions. The part of his mind that was still thinking wondered when he had last felt this secure or confident.

  “Alright, then. Lean the way, Todd.”

  Todd opened his eyes, smiled at her, and then led her to the sole door that provided entrance to the facility for people who did not have bags tied over their heads. He used his own entrance code, something he almost never did. When he went back, in the evenings, he always used the dummy code that the techs had doped up years ago, so that it would not go on record. He knew that the system would log him opening the door in violation of procedure, but he was certain that Rebecca could fix that, too. He just needed to remember to ask her about it before she left. First, he knew, his priority was to get Rebecca to the cell as efficiently as possible. She was obviously important, and who knew, maybe there was the possibility of a promotion in all of this, even for someone as unimportant as himself, if he was helpful enough. He led her down the short hallway to the elevator, walking purposefully, trying to act as if he did this every day, hoping to make a good impression.

  “Hey, Todd?” Rebecca asked, dropping her cigarette casually on the floor and then grinding it out with the toe of her sneaker. “How come you know about the tattoo? You don’t check the prisoners in, right?”

  “Uh, no,” Todd said, sweat breaking out on his brow. He pushed the call button for the elevator again, to have something to do. “No, they bring prisoners in through the secured area downstairs.”

  “So, what’s up with that?”

  Todd continued to hem and haw until the elevator arrived. Once inside, she put a finger on his forehead, and asked him again, and this time, Todd came clean. After all, if he could not trust Rebecca, whom could he trust?

  It had all started five years ago, on a cigarette break with a couple of the guards who worked in the back, Miguel and Reggie. They were scary guys, ex-military types with hard faces and curt, ugly laughs, but they had warmed up to Todd over time, particularly after he revealed that he could cover for them when they clocked out early. After a while, they started talking about what went on in the back.

  There were rumors, of course, and everyone who worked there knew it was a holding facility for some corporate, quasi-governmental group called Terrie. Todd wasn’t exactly shocked when he found out that Miguel and Reggie were part of a team of interrogators who worked at the facility, or that their job amounted to torture. Initially he was bothered by the way their eyes lit up when they told him stories in hushed voices, descriptions of beatings and water boarding, starvation and humiliation. However, after a short while, he found himself looking forward to the little talks, and imagining the stories while he sat, watching endless hours of ESPN on a jumpy camera monitor. Eventually, he had an opportunity to fix something for Miguel, an unfortunate incident where he had clocked in late and faced termination. Todd saw to it that the report filed that day was incomplete, and suffered a demerit of his own as a result, but earned the gratitude and respect of the entire back room staff. The next day, Miguel invited him down after work, and told him about the dummy code.

  No one who was put in one of those cells ever left the facility again. Instead, they ended up in the high-temperature furnace that operated on the facility’s lowest level. The prisoners were there to be interrogated, and some of the women were sort of pretty, behind the bruises and terrified expressions. A small circle of guards took advantage of this. The first time, the whole elevator ride down, Todd had thought he would be sick. However, in that claustrophobic cell, stinking of piss and despair, he had felt something else entirely…

  Todd was torn from his reverie by a feeling of dread. He knew that Rebecca was glaring at him furiously before he turned to face her. He wanted to explain, but he could not find the words. He felt as if he had been caught masturbating by his mother; shame, fear, and desperate belief that this could not actually be happening.

  “Did you hurt her?”

  “What? Who?”

  “8B,” Rebecca said, through gritted teeth. “Was she one of the ones you ‘visited’?”

  “It’s not... It’s not what you think!”

  Seeing her face, he raised his hands defensively and pleaded for the opportunity to explain, feeling such tremendous fear and shame that he wet his pants without even realizing it, only noticing that his damp crotch moments later.

  They had visited the woman in 8B. She hadn’t spoken a word since she arrived at the facility, and according to the guards who watched her, she lay on the floor of her cell all day without moving. She was a bit freaky looking, with the tattoos and all, tall and too muscular for Todd’s tastes. They hadn’t gotten a new girl in a while, so there was no way he was going to pass up Miguel’s invitation. She had been complacent, even apathetic, when Reggie ordered her to strip.

  Then Reggie tried to touch her, and she’d gone after his eyes with her thumbs. The only reason she didn’t blind him was that her fingernails had been removed a few days earlier for exactly that reason. Miguel had stepped in with his baton, and managed to knock her away before she killed Reggie, but in the process, she pinned Miguel’s arm to the wall and then hammered it with her knee, fracturing it at the elbow. Todd intervened in time to prevent them from beating her to death, but it was a near thing. They could have forced the issue, but they all realized that any further struggle might lead to the prisoner’s premature death, and would cause serious consequences. They’d left to take Miguel to the hospital (written up as a classic trip-and-fall, probably the first time this had happened to a member of the staff), pausing on the way out to instruct the guards on duty to deny her food or water until she felt more compliant.

  That had been two days ago, and Todd hadn’t been back downstairs since.

  He waited for a moment, eyes closed, while the elevator chime dinged to indicate that they had arrived at the holding level. When nothing happened, he cracked his eyes, stealing a glance at Rebecca. She looked impatient and disgusted, but not nearly as threatening as before. She waved him to his feet curtly, and he stood back up quickly, grateful and eager to please.

  Todd followed her down the halls, giving occasional directions. They passed through two security checkpoints where the guards were too busy screaming and crying to challenge their passing. He wondered about that, what could have been happening to create such panic in the facility, but keeping up with Rebecca was clearly more important. Occasionally, curious functionaries and roving guards tried to stop them, but Rebecca turned them aside with a few brisk words, at which point they fled down the halls, sobbing hysterically. It took only a few minutes to reach the holding cells.

  They were twelve dull metal doors arranged in a rough circle around the chamber. An interrogation platform, strewn with the tools of the trade, sat in the middle of the room, where it could be seen from every cell. They didn’t do any actual work there, Todd explained nervously, but it was effe
ctive psychologically as a reminder of the prisoners’ eventual fate.

  “Never mind that,” Rebecca snapped, striding past him, walking around the perimeter of the room. He noticed that she trailed her hand along the cell doors as she passed, touching each one, but he could not imagine why. She glanced inside the little observation window inset in the metal door labeled ‘8B’, and then snarled at Todd.

  “How do I open this?”

  Todd rushed forward, glad to be of use. He keyed the code into the terminal mounted flush with the concrete wall next to the cell, and the magnetic locks clicked open with a sigh. Rebecca stepped inside, wrinkling her nose at the smell, while Todd watched through the partially open door.

  Prisoner 8B was lying on the concrete in the corner of the cell, as far as she could get from the hole in the floor that served as the toilet. The sheet draped across her shoulders was torn and dirty, her clothes underneath little more than rags. Rebecca crouched down, brushing the woman’s tangled hair back from her face, revealing black eyes and a bloody nose. For the first time, Todd noticed that the prisoner’s hair was not actually black – there was a half-inch of pure white at the roots, and he stared at it, trying to wrap his mind around it. The woman didn’t look much more than thirty, but her hair was as white as the paint on the walls.

  “Oh, poor thing,” Rebecca clucked, cradling the prisoner like a child. She reached into her sweatshirt pocket and came up with a black bandana that she tied around the unconscious woman’s head. “That should protect your little secret, you conceited bitch,” she said, with obvious fondness.

  The prisoner’s eyes fluttered open, and Todd felt a sense of genuine shame for a moment. Then fear reasserted itself.

  “Alice? Do you recognize me?”

  The prisoner stared blankly for a long while, and then she gave a slow, hesitant nod.

  Rebecca smiled and patted her forehead.

  “You don’t have to talk, sweetie, I can hear your thoughts just fine. You don’t have to remember anything. My name is Rebecca Levy, and I am your friend. I have been your best friend for years and years, and I am here to take you back to your home, where I can help you get better,” she said softly, her voice so soothing that even Todd felt lulled by it, suppressing an urge to yawn. “Everything is going to be alright, and nothing is going to hurt, I promise. Now, I’m going to put you to sleep, and you aren’t going to dream at all, and when you wake up, you will feel better, okay?”

  She didn’t get a response, because the prisoner was already asleep. Rebecca dragged her carefully out of the cell, laying her down on the cleaner floor of the hallway. Todd made a motion to help, but she batted his hand away with a glare so fierce that he shrunk back into the corner, crouched with his hands up protectively.

  “You don’t touch her, you bastard,” she hissed, advancing on him with a cold and cruel expression twisting her face. “You should have run away, I might have forgotten about you. Since you didn’t, I have something for you. A gift for what you’ve done to my friend, and all the others.”

  Rebecca paused to light another cigarette from her pack. She coughed once, cleared her throat, and then continued in the same sharp, angry tone.

  “You see, Todd, this is what I really do. My other job, my day job as it were, is working as a councilor at a school. I even have a degree in psychology for all the good it does me. Over the years, I have seen many lonely, hurt kids. A lot. Some of them I can help, and, some of them,” Rebecca said, with a failed attempt at an indifferent shrug, “I can’t.”

  She loomed over him, her shadow seeming to fall down on him from high above. Todd felt as if he were nailed to the ground, his limbs moving in a bizarre pantomime of swimming as he sought enough purchase on the concrete floor to crawl, to scamper away from this terrible woman and her blazing, unforgiving anger. He muttered apologies that were incoherent even to him, begging for mercy that he knew with certainty he would not receive.

  “Kids feel things more, you know? And I can’t forget all of it. I wish I could, let me tell you. I would sleep better. What I can do, though, is share them,” Rebecca sneered at him, and he felt as if he were the vilest, smallest thing on Earth. He wished he had not left his .38 revolver back at the security desk, because then he could have used it to kill himself. “All I needed was someone who deserved it.”

  Rebecca pitched her cigarette and it bounced off Todd’s forehead, causing him to cry out in surprise.

  “Sometimes it’s overwhelming to live with all of it, even for me. Years worth of trauma, abuse, rejection and despair, extracted from the minds of too many children to count. You’d be surprised what people will do to kids. It’s a sick world. But it amazes me, how tough children are, what they can learn to live with.” Rebecca smiled, and it was the least pleasant smile Todd had ever seen. “I doubt you are as resilient. You can scream, if you want. It turns out that no one ever comes to save you.”

  Todd flinched away from her hand, but Rebecca moved faster than he did, and caught him by the wrist, her fingers knotting around his arm. Then he was assailed by emotions, by the echoes of memories that were not his own and yet were firmly embedded in his mind. It was like a yawning void of despair placed directly in his heart, a sense of betrayal and guilt and disappointment so profound that he could not even cry out against it. He could feel the inescapable weight, the violation of trust and confusion and repulsion, and his mind recoiled in the face of it. He felt tiny and naked, shattered in the wake of fear and self-hatred that ate away at the very foundation of his being, eroding his mind away as inevitably as a cliff disintegrating into the sea.

  Rebecca shook her head in disgust and walked away from the drooling, whimpering shell of a man. She composed a narrative of the events that had occurred, from the moment she had received the tip about Christopher Feld’s last whereabouts from the remnants of the Society three weeks ago until now, and then thought hard in Alistair’s direction. He must have been looking for her, because the response was almost immediate.

  Rebecca? Where the hell have you been?

  You’ll have to read it off me. I’m too beat to manage an explanation.

  There was a moment of silence, then a brief stinging sensation while Alistair probed her thoughts, absorbing the record of her experiences, and then another delay while he processed the data. Normally, the lag in communication between two telepaths would have been virtually unnoticeable, but she had expended most of her power in the last day and a half of hunting, and had exhausted her reserves implanting terrible memories and emotions in Todd’s shithole of a mind.

  I understand. What do you need?

  I need an apport. I need a medical team waiting for Alice on arrival. Then I need Xia to come down here and burn this whole fucking place and everyone inside it to ashes.

  Are you… certain, Rebecca? What about the other prisoners?

  It’s too late, Alistair. There is no one in the building that both deserves and wants to live.

  2.

  Vivik wasn’t the kind of person to have many bad days. Nevertheless, today had been exceptionally good, even by his sunny standards.

  At breakfast, for example, the cafeteria had French toast, which normally only happened on Tuesdays. He had two pieces himself, and then he finished one from Emily’s plate when she could not. Vivik loved French toast; plus, well, breakfast with Emily, right?

  Even if Alex was there.

  It wasn't as if he disliked Alex – actually, he considered him something of a friend. He was weirdly appealing, in a sleepy, distracted way. He had bouts of depression and bad moods, and he was particularly clueless about what not to say aloud, but Alex’s tendency to instantly, loudly despair in the face of adversity was actually somewhat endearing.

  Then, of course, there was the whole thing with Emily. The situation wasn't strictly Alex's fault, but it remained a point of subtle contention between them.

  Vivik had chemistry in the early afternoon, but the lecture was based on work with acids and bases
that he had already done, so he was able to devote the two hours to his private scheme, all the while diligently taking notes on automatic pilot, in case. He spent an hour in the library, running down references for his pet project, and then returned to the cafeteria for lunch, where he settled for pasta and salad with Renton, who was, as always, funny in a mean way.

  Vivik had enough time left to go back to the dorms and take a nap before calculus, which was exactly what he did. He couldn’t always sleep during the day, but this afternoon he got a solid forty-five minutes and went to class feeling energized and cheerful. The lecture was new to him, and he liked the teacher, Mr. Chan, a squat Taiwanese patriot with a heavy accent who often interrupted his class to denounce the mainland, so the time flew by. After class, he stayed late with his study group, going over equations and cracking jokes about comic books and Star Wars and Internet parody videos related to comic books and Star Wars. He left the classroom around six, satisfied that he had made it through an entire day, the third in a row, in fact, without anyone asking him about his sullen new friend. He practically skipped all the way to the dorm, dropped off his books, washed his face and rewrapped his hair, and changed out of his uniform and into jeans and a polo shirt. Vivik whistled tunelessly to himself as he walked to the cafeteria, hoping for spinach ravioli.

  Instead, three lurkers waylaid him the moment he stepped out into the quad.

  They smiled as they called him over, and they were friendly enough for Hegemony kids, but he already knew what they wanted before they had a chance to ask. It was a minute or two before they politely worked their way around to the question, breaking the longest streak he had run since winter break, and souring his day.

  Of course, they wanted to know about Alex.

  * * *

  Renton was out-of-breath, but he tried to deliver his news anyway. Svetlana flitted annoyingly around him; patting him on the back, cooing, looking concerned, and generally making a spectacle of herself. Anastasia waved her away tersely, and then waited for Renton to stop wheezing long enough to explain what had him so excited. She popped up out of her chair when she heard his news, and even with heels and her hair up, she barely made it to Renton’s chest. When she started pacing, the black Weir in the heavy silver collar that had been dozing beneath her chair whined, sat up, and then followed her at a discreet distance.