Unknown

by Jane

  “Gordon, how are you? What’s with the drama? What are you doing to our friend Jacob here?”

  Lost in Gordon’s blue eyes is a cold, distant sheen of ice that gives me pause. I shiver for a moment, although the sun beats down upon us with no hesitation. I glance to my left at Madison, and as pale as she was, she now quivers translucent. She licks her lips and swallows her fears. Good. I nod my head in agreement.

  “Fuck you, X,” he says, spittle flying, the gun shoved into the back of Jacob’s head again. Jacob winces, his arms at his sides, dangling as he sweats for his life.

  “That little bit of cosmetic surgery you had, the lenses in your eyes, they never hid you from me, my friend. You know that don’t you?”

  “I know one thing X, my Judas in sheep’s clothing. I know you sold me down the river and I know that I had to do what I had to do. It got me hired and it got me here. Basking in the glory of the end of the world.”

  “Gordon, nobody is left back there. They’re all gone now. There is no payday, money has no meaning anymore. It’s all gone. We are what is left. Us and maybe a thousand more like us, who remain immune against all odds. With God’s will, and a mix of modern medicine and ancient remedies, we are here. Dawn of a new day. You can do this with us.”

  “God’s will. Is that what put you here, trapped on this island, on this parcel of land? We messed with some things we shouldn’t have. And they woke up and smacked us down. I’m not putting my money on you guys, that’s for sure.”

  “But Gordon, you’ve changed,” X continues. “I know you have.”

  A crooked grin works its way across his face as he lowers the gun to Jacob’s right knee and pulls the trigger. For a moment I see more in his face, a twitch of unease, and bits of data swim through my head, the sounds of a keyboard clicking. Gordon tilts his head a bit, and I can see some sort of cable leading out the back of his skull. It runs down to a small metal box attached to his hip.

  Jacob’s scream drowns out all thought, empties our heads as we jump back, arms raised out of instinct and self-preservation. Jacob falls to the ground, grasping his knee, as blood spurts across the lawn. Rolling back and forth, his eyes are clenched shut, teeth bared in anger and pain.

  “That’s what I’ve become, X. Nothing but a hired hand.”

  He raises the gun at X now, a gleam in his eye, as his hand shakes back and forth.

  “X,” I whisper, “Do you see...”

  “I know,” he mumbles out the left side of his mouth.

  4. X

  It’s what I’d hoped for. They finally merged. It was up to Gordon now, but whether his finger pulled the trigger, or Assigned made it happen, either way, it was what I wanted.

  “Can I speak to Assigned for a moment please?”

  Gordon’s eyes widen, and the gun lowers an inch.

  “What? You’re not making any sense, brother.”

  At his feet Jacob still rolls back and forth, holding his knee, tears pushing from his eyes.

  “Would you get him away from me, I can’t think with him bleeding at my feet and whining like a little bitch. Marcy and the dark haired cunt. Grab him and take him over to that chair and then back in line.”

  The girls don't move, only glance at me. A quick little nod.

  “MOVE you fucking whores. NOW!” Gordon yells, his face mottled red, as his right eye wanders a bit up into the socket, and his left leg shoots out as if loosening up for a race. A tear of blood seeps out of his left eye, but he is oblivious to such things. His body and senses are not his own anymore.

  They run over and pull Jacob back to the house, and up into a chair. Kneeling in front of Jacob, Marcy quickly lays her hands on his knees, her back to Gordon.

  “No Marcy, not now,” I whisper, but she doesn’t listen. I can see the pain ease out of his face, as Jacob stares into my eyes, uncertain. A barely visible glow emanates from her hands and then she is up, standing again, a quick glance back at Gordon. She asks Jacob a question, louder than needed.

  “You okay NOW Jacob?”

  I stare at him, pushing thoughts into his head, willing him to understand. He gets the message.

  “Awwwwwwwww, fuck it hurts. Don’t touch it. Get away from me.”

  Back in line she goes.

  “I said, Gordon, let me talk to the man behind the curtain. Don’t you know what’s going on? You’re not a killer anymore, you’re a pawn. This is a game he and I have been playing for millennia, and he finds it amusing and entertaining. He is very petty for such an enlightened creature.”

  “What the...listen X, it’s time for you to go away,” he chokes out, raising his left hand to his head, wincing. His fingers run over the back of his skull, tracing the outline of the cable. He pulls his hand back and stares at the bloody fingertips. He glances up, twitches, and raises the gun.

  In quick succession he fires the gun at Jimmy and Madison before they can even move. Two bulls eyes directly over their hearts and they fly backward into the brick of the house and fall into a heap of tangled arms and legs, as if embracing. Blood splatters the ground and seeps down their shirts.

  Jacob leaps to his feet forgetting that he is supposed to be hurt. He is rewarded with a shot to the chest and he tumbles back over the chair, metal scraping tile as he grunts and lies still. No sounds or motion from Jimmy and Madison.

  The rest stand still, trembling in place as Gordon tilts his head and coughs, blood spraying out of his mouth, and gurgling down his chin.

  “Gordon, wait,” I shout. “It doesn’t have to be this way. We can work something out.”

  Two quick shots and Marcy and Roland collapse in a pile, clutching out for each other as their chests explode, bits of shirt and blood, with a tiny curl of smoke drifting to the heavens.

  I raise my hands and walk towards him, keeping my arms spread wide, allowing him ample room to empty his clip. He does not deny me. Or I should say, Assigned is so predictable.

  There are twelve rounds in the gun, and he empties them into my chest. All but one. I feel the impact and jolt backwards as my chest is riddled with bullets, eyes wide, still standing but only for a moment. I want to watch the finale, and I can’t do that if I’m lying on my stomach. I lurch back, and fall sideways to the ground. Blood pours out of me, and the rivers of deceit paint the patio with the hopes of our wayward souls.

  He’s falling apart. It was a mistake for Assigned to enter him. It’s too much for one man.

  5. GORDON

  It comes and goes in waves. But the last thing I remember is the dark room, the pitch black, the reverberation of bass and the cold slick surface of the machine against the wall.

  I can see bits and pieces, distorted and out of focus, like glancing up at the sun from the bottom of a pool. I don’t know what he has done to me, but I’m barely here. My body is immersed in waves of pain, a throbbing from the base of my skull. But it runs deeper. It runs deep into my head and down throughout my spine. The pain is so much that I keep passing out, and yet I am still standing, as his computer hard drive at my waist overrides my nerves, my body’s own sense of what is right and wrong, what should be done to fix it. Bursts of electricity surge through me now and then, and something is not right. Well, a lot isn’t right, but something is not working. He is not 100% in control, and I am not 100% gone. Yet.

  Words come from me, and yet I don’t remember thinking or saying them. I feel my jaw move and my tongue and lips do a dance that must be talking. My limbs twitch intermittently, the nerve endings hyper sensitive, and out of my control.

  It is like trying to do long division in your head while somebody beats you with a lead pipe. Like running down the street in shoes filled with bits of broken glass while you recite the presidents of the United States of ...OHMYFUCKING GOD that hurts.

  //

  Black

  //

  REBOOT

  Spinning. Black circles wind around and

  around. One bullet left.


  //

  SYSTEM

  FAILURE

  Circuits overloaded, must find

  alternative source

  //

  the time has come the walruse....heim

  iejlai fuch maw haw

  Am I still standing? I must be. I can’t feel anything. For a second there is jasmine in my nose and the cry of a seagull so very far away. Salt. There are bodies, five I think.

  //

  this is not for you

  Black

  blue

  black

  white

  black

  gray

  white

  green

  black

  oh im goingto puke, there it goes, my spine, if i bend over again my head is oging to fall off, oh jesus what is that drilling, there is liquid running out of me, wheere is it coming from, it hurst ot bend oh god what have i done

  strwaberr fields forever

  the white daisies float in the breeze and i can hear mom calling fro mthe back of the farmhouse

  the factory belches filth into the sky and the third shift is coming home now

  and she’s upset aobut somethinme but it waasn’t me it wasnt my fault it was an accidnet, i told him to stop it, that if he kep on doing that ot me that i was going to come fafter him one day and that day was today

  i raise the gun and put it into my mouth biting down hard on the metal, one last sensation, flesh burning

  6. ASSIGNED

  //

  reboot

  maintaini^ng override

  systm failure

  imm*ediate thresta illeiminated

  check mate exodus

  sysfem failure

  24

  23

  22

  21

  power d^rain low running lowe

  assset= failing fm#jst find new

  dea, nodeal...listen mr., deal...

  20

  19

  18

  17

  16

  dam nit

  must find new host

  visual search for ilfe c@ommencing ian

  .....................insectlief too

  small.......................................

  ............................................

  ............................................

  ............

  ............................................

  ......SEAGul, lDISTANCE 500 ’too

  far.........................................

  ............................................

  ........

  ............................................

  ............................................

  ...................!..nothi ng

  15

  14

  13

  12

  11

  in my haste to

  ..........................................al

  ert

  lifesource located

  possibly big enough mobdy mass

  tmporary prpocess must

  must msut summon

  coming, hurry you fucker mve it fastr

  10

  9

  8

  7

  system failrue, shutting downin

  6

  5

  4

  contact

  3

  2

  1

  ////

  ///

  //

  /

  end

  7. ROLAND

  My chest hurts, but I was told it would be like this. Lying on my side I open one eye and watch Gordon as he lurches around the grass yard, body failing him, waiting for that moment, the one second of hope that X has spoon fed us for 24 hours.

  “Wait for it,” his voice drifts to me. “Nobody move,” X

  whispers.

  Finally Gordon stands still, his body trembling. He raises the gun and shoves it into his mouth. I can see him bite down on the barrel, his eyes wide, and for a moment, one fraction of a second he sees us, five pairs of eyes watching his every move. Ten slits of white his final act of vigilance. Five chests that rise and fall with the tiniest of movement, the most shallow of breaths. And the corners of his mouth raise up.

  One tiny little pop and it’s over. It could have been a plastic bag, or a chewing gum bubble. One quick pull of the trigger and the back of his head flies off. Bits of metal and cable splinter into the blue sky. He slumps to his knees, a cloud of gray billowing out of his head and then he’s tipping over face first into the grass. A blur of brown skitters into the forest.

  “Okay, up get up,” X shouts, flying to his feet.

  I ease to a sitting position, the dull ache of my chest making it hard to breath. Mom moans and shoves her hand inside her shirt, under the vest.

  “Oh man that hurt. Damn, my left boob will never be the same,” she smirks. She unbuttons her blouse and drops it on the ground, dripping with blood. The velcro tears through the silence and she peels the bulletproof vest off, and drops it on the tile with a dull thud.

  X is already across the lawn, his shirt off, the vest peeled off like tin foil, six dents in the shell, his massive chest riddled with swollen circles and red splotches. Jimmy and Madison are moving as slow as we are, quick flashes of hesitant grins coming up for air now and then. Their vests join ours on the ground as we stand and start to walk towards X. Jacob hasn’t moved.

  “Mom, wait. Jacob.”

  I glance up towards X who is over Gordon’s body. His hands are on Gordon’s chest, at his neck, leaning over checking for life.

  Mom is over Jacob, moving the chairs out of the way. He still isn’t moving.

  “X, get over here,” she screams. She looks up, her face a ghost. “It got through, his neck,” she yells, ripping off Jacob’s shirt, and peeling the vest off. “Goddamnit, it got through,” her hands at his neck, blood still surging out in waves. “We’re too late, I can’t save him,” she sputters, as we gather around her, our shadows casting long silence over her hands. A dull yellow pulses from her fingers as her eyes shift to almonds and her face goes pale.

  I can see X running across the yard, but I can’t hear him speaking. I can’t hear anything. In my head I hear a clock running, a countdown. Mom holds her hands to Jacob’s neck, his eyes open wide, staring off into the sky. They focus on nothing but eternity, and I am surprised to see my mother weeping, tears coursing down her face. Yellow tears. Her eyes start to go opaque, a sheen of plastic covering it all, as the last of the captured medicine seeps out into the sieve that is Jacob.

  As I pass out and feel the world shift sideways, his hands are on me, gently guiding me to the ground.

  “Stop, Marcy...STOP!” he screams.

  EPILOGUE

  ROLAND

  You’ve heard the story of Achilles, right? It was the first thing that X told us when we gathered in the house the night before Gordon was to arrive. He was a Greek hero in the Trojan war. His greatest weakness was pride, we were told. He thought that he could not be defeated, that he had in fact no weaknesses. He was killed in battle by an arrow to the heel, the one spot that he was vulnerable. As a child, the story goes, his mother dipped his body in the river Styx, and held onto him by his heel, the one spot that would later be his demise.

  Gordon, or Assigned I should say, had an Achilles heel too. It was centered around his pride as well. Once he left the observation post of his mainframe, he lost most of his ability to monitor us. To monitor everyone. The world, some say. X won’t tell us everything. He says it isn’t important what or who Assigned was, only that he was a vengeful spirit, hell bent on emptying this planet of its people.

  I don’t know where X got the vests, but he had them. He and Gordon went way back, beyond the meeting where we all first met them. They started out at as recruits at the same academy. But somewhere
along the way their paths split. Exodus pursued the spiritual, while Gordon chased after the pleasures of the flesh. We sent Gordon out to sea on a Viking funeral pyre. Whatever he was in the real world, and whatever he’d become after his life fell apart, in the end he saved our lives by ridding Assigned of its host. He wasn’t always a bad seed, X said. He’d become that with the gentle nudging of bad men with an eye on world domination and a need to eliminate anything that wasn’t them.

  Mom is pregnant, and it looks like I’ll have a little sister soon enough. It worries me, but I’m also glad to have a kindred spirit of my own flesh and blood. Times I feel like I’m much older than I am, my nineteen years of life, with a deeper history that I don’t quite understand.

  Jimmy and Madison are okay too, and are going to have a son. The newborns will have each other to play with, and a part of us wonders if they’ll become the new beginning we all hope for, a modern day Adam and Eve here in our garden of Eden at the end of the world. Doing God’s work.

  Jacob is another story. When X pulled mom off of him she was fading fast. Whatever she’d built up over the years, things that they alluded to, but never explained, she was about empty. She collapsed, her body surrounded in a halo of golden light that both frightened and comforted me. She came around fast enough, but not before Jacob sat up, sputtering and coughing, his eyelids fluttering. The blood flowing from his neck finally stopped. For awhile we didn’t say anything.

  Most days when we’re doing things around the house, he’s fine. There are a lot of projects involving water and wind. Things that can help us to survive. I don’t understand it all, but I can dig a hole and carry wood as good as the next guy. Now and then I catch Jacob staring at mom. And once they took a walk and were gone for a long time. They came back in his Mustang and didn’t say much.

  X says he isn’t going to do any more traveling. That’s what got us in trouble the first time, he says. He made six trips to the mainland. Something about radio stations. The portal at the cave is the only one that is still open. X closed the rest, destroyed them. If they are going to come, that is how they’ll get here, he tells me. One way in, one way out. Not that we want out.

  Most days it’s pretty nice here. I can’t complain.