Amortals

by Matt Forbeck

  That didn't mean, though, that men and women actually in the building with me couldn't keep an eye on me. While the cathedral's security system may have been archaic, that didn't mean it wasn't effective. At least they didn't have the all-too common problem of over-reliance on technology. I'd seen more than one place stripped to the walls when the owners had placed too much faith in their automated security systems.

  I strolled through the transept and stepped up to the choir box. Gothic arches of polished wood surrounded it on all four sides, smaller versions of the stone ones that topped the cathedral's exterior. A rope of burgundy velvet blocked off the choir box's front entrance.

  Rather than attract attention by hopping the rope, I turned left and headed into the north transept. A beautiful rose window called "Last Judgment" hung high before me, the northern daylight bringing its blues, reds, and yellows to glowing life.

  I wound my way past a tiny chapel to my right. A small altar sat inside it, backed by a trio of wooden arches under which had been painted an image of a risen Christ surrounded by doves and winged angels. It stood empty, and I disturbed no one in it as I passed.

  I found the stairs to the lower level just beyond that, hidden behind a stone screen, and I took them down. As I emerged into the crypt level, I almost ran into Five.

  "What are you doing here?" he hissed, his face a mask of rage and frustration. "You shouldn't be here."

  "It's a public place in a free country," I said stepping backward.

  "America hasn't been free for a long time," said a voice behind me. I knew who it was before I turned around to confront him, but before I could say a word to Father G he shot me in the chest.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Fortunately or not, Father G's weapon of choice had been a taser. The darts stuck right in my shirt, and the jolt of electricity that shot between them made all of my muscles flex as hard as they could at once. I fell over on my back, fighting my muscles to relax just enough to let me writhe in pain.

  While this was happening, the law enforcement part of my brain noted that the taser used a dischargeable set of darts that featured their own disposable shock battery. That meant that the priest's taser likely had several more sets of darts ready to fire at me should I try to get up and move.

  I didn't think, though, that it was going to take more than that first set to keep me down. My body might only have been a few days old, but at that moment I felt like I was ready to die.

  "What the hell did you do that for?" Five said.

  "Just step back, son," Father G said with a growl. "And don't blaspheme. You've done quite enough damage here already, I think."

  "I did the damage? You just shot a federal agent. How long do you think it'll take for them to figure that out and get here?"

  Father G knelt down, turned me over onto my front, and pulled my arms behind my back. Then he clasped a pair of cold metal cylinders around my wrists. Stunned as I was, it took me a while to realize they were chained together. He'd fitted me with a pair of manacles that had to be older than I was.

  "Shut your mouth, son," Father G said. "Accept the blame that's rightfully yours and beg the Lord for penance."

  "What are you saying?"

  "If you hadn't led the man right to our door, I wouldn't have had to tase him."

  Five grunted in anger. "No one followed me here. I guarantee it."

  Father G rolled me over on to my back. The numbness from the jolt was starting to wear off, which made everything hurt worse than ever, but at least I could move again.

  I tested the manacles. They were solid, and they kept me from moving my hands more than a foot from each other.

  I was in serious trouble. I didn't want to call in Patrón, but I wasn't sure I had a choice. I checked my connection to the net and found it wasn't there.

  The thought that the tasing might have fried my nanoserver sent a shiver through me. I'd come to rely on my implanted net connection over the decades, and the procedure to replace it wasn't simple. Plus, there was the fact that I'd been cut off from any backup while in the hands of a mad priest who'd already shown his willingness to attack me. And my only help was a descendent who'd long since proven how much he hated me.

  "He's going to have the entire Secret Service knocking on our door in a matter of minutes," Five said. "We should evacuate now."

  "Don't be silly," Father G scoffed. "The man's lying here under a yard of stone. His communication signal can't possibly reach him down here."

  That bit of news relieved me more than I wished it had. I ran a routine diagnostic on my nanoserver, and it came back online. The tasing had disrupted it for a moment, but now it seemed to be running fine. The priest had been right though. My link to the net was blocked. I had no way of calling for help.

  "Help me get him on his feet," Father G said. He grabbed me under one shoulder, and Five grabbed me under the other. Then they leveraged me up until I was standing.

  I let my knees buckle under me. I might not be able to call for the cavalry to save me, but I didn't need to make it any easier for them to shove me around.

  They hauled me along anyhow, my knees just off the ground and my feet dragging behind me on the old stone floor that had been worn down over the years by countless feet. I wondered if a tourist might spot them carrying me away in chains and say something, but no one else was around. They must have cleared the crypt for whatever they were doing down here. Maybe they routinely turned any curious people away one by one, and I just happened to walk straight into their security detail.

  Father G leaned close and hissed in my ear. "Keep quiet, and I won't have to tase you again."

  I grunted in agreement with this. I wanted to say something sharp, but my tongue felt too dull to pull it off.

  The two men hauled me deeper into the crypt level, taking a right and then a quick left. This brought us into the Chapel of St Joseph of Arimathea, dedicated to the man who donated his own pre-purchased tomb for the burial of Christ.

  I'd been in here long ago with Colleen, playing the tourist family with Cal. It hadn't changed much over the years. When we entered the room, the men dragged me down a short set of stairs into the center of the sunken chamber, the lowest point in the entire cathedral. They sat me down in a chair after struggling to get my bound arms to fit around the back of it.

  There were others here too, men and women, well-dressed and clean-cut folks who all gaped at me with a mixture of shock and contempt. There were ten of them in all, including Five and Father G, and they'd clearly been in the middle of a discussion when I arrived.

  In the center of the room, someone had set up a thrid display that showed the central part of DC. The image centered on the White House but also included everything from the National Cathedral down through to the Congressional Cemetery. Everyone in the room was wearing polarized glasses to be able to see it properly, which told me that they were just as much Luddites as my captors. When Five and Father G brought me in, someone pressed a button on the display, and it flickered into nothingness before I could study it in detail.

  "What in God's name do we have here?" a woman said as she spotted me. She had deep chocolate skin and short, kinked hair pasted against her scalp. Her eyes and lips were wide and soft and could have been kind and friendly under other circumstances. Instead, they showed nothing but a hint of well-buried cruelty.

  "Do you really need an introduction, Ruby?" said Father G. He reached down and pulled my head back by my hair, exposing my face.

  The others in the room gasped, but Ruby kept her cool. A ghost of a smile reached the corners of her lips as she regarded me. She gestured to a pair of people to head out the door, and they left the way we came in, presumably to take up the guard post that Five and Father G had abandoned. Then she strode over to me and crouched down so that she could peer into my eyes.

  "To what do we owe the pleasure of your company, Mr Dooley?"

  I shook my hair free of Father G's grasp with a snarl.

  "Yo
u're all under arrest," I said. I glared at Ruby and then gazed at everyone else, my nanoserver recording their faces as I took in the room. The walls here were made of cut limestone at least a foot thick. The arched ceiling above me had to be far thicker than that. With the guards at the stairs keeping everyone out, I could scream at the top of my lungs here, and no one above would ever hear even the faintest echo.

  Ruby stared at me with those round, brown eyes of hers and then opened her mouth and laughed. "I'd been told you were a brave man, Mr Dooley, but I had no idea you were so funny as well. It's a real privilege to meet you."

  "Assaulting a federal officer is a serious crime. Those that manage to survive the arrest usually get handed a one-way ticket to the Moon to work in the Darkside Penal Colony."

  Ruby wasn't about to crack, I could tell, but the others weren't likely to be so immune to the threat of prosecution. I'd listened to the rants from the One Resurrection before. They called for nothing less than the overthrow of the government and the ending of the Amortals Project. Still, it was one thing to call for revolution and another thing entirely to have the guts to fight for it.

  When I looked at them, though, none of them turned away, which meant I was in serious trouble. Only Five refused to meet my eyes.

  "Do you really think we can be intimidated by a shackled man?" Ruby asked. "If anyone should be afraid here, it's you, Mr Dooley."

  "I didn't think you believed I really am Ronan Dooley," I said.

  Ruby gave me a smile that never came close to touching her eyes. "I don't, but if you do, I will call you that for the sake of convenience. After all, these days no one else is proud to carry that name."

  Five groaned at that. "Let's cut the drama and just figure out what we're going to do with him," he said. "We can't keep him down here forever."

  Ruby nodded, granting Five that point. "We only have to manage it for another couple of days at most," she said. "After that, his life will be moot."

  "And who's going to guard him for that long?" Five asked. "We should just leave him here and scatter. Someone will find him, but by that time we'll all be long gone."

  Ruby shook her head. "He's gotten too close to us already. He's seen too many of us. If he gets out of here with the data in his head, the Feds will be able to chase us all down."

  When she turned her head to gaze at me, I felt like she was a hungry panther sizing me up for a meal. "Unless, of course," she said, "we kill him now."

  Five took a step back from me. "I– I don't think that's a good idea. This isn't about killing people. It's about forcing them to stick to one life."

  Ruby frowned. "No great changes ever came without bloodshed, Ron," she said. "I thought you understood that. Now I'm not so sure."

  That angered Five. "I've been with the movement longer than you, Ruby. I understand it just fine. It's never been about taking out our aggravations directly. It's not his fault he's amortal, right? Especially not him."

  Ruby reached behind her back and pulled a pistol from a hidden holster. It was plastic, designed to be able to evade magnetometers and most other easy detection methods. Even the bullets would be made of a special metal-plastic alloy.

  "What's the harm?" she said. "They'll just send out another one tomorrow – one without the memories of all our faces."

  "That's not how it works," said Ron, "and you know it."

  She slid back the action on the pistol, chambering a bullet. Then she pointed it right at my head.

  "Go ahead," I said. "I'm not afraid of people who shoot prisoners. I'll come back, hunt you down, and blow your head off myself."

  "Oh," Ruby said, "I'm not going to do it."

  She reversed her grip on the gun and held it out for Five. "He is."

  Five blanched. At that moment, he reminded me of Cal. I'd taken him to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, to ride the roller coasters on a blustery day. He had just been tall enough to get past the signs that said, "You must be this tall to ride this ride," and he'd been so excited to finally tackle the big-kid coasters. When he finally got into the front car of the Top Thrill Dragster, though, he looked up at that 420foot peak and turned the same color as the whitecaps blowing in at us on Lake Erie. It was the utter fear of getting exactly what he'd been asking for and realizing just what that meant.

  "No," Five said. "You can't ask me to do that."

  Ruby stuck out her bottom lip. "I don't know, Ron. Some of our members have come to me about you, asking me if I think we can really trust someone who's a direct descendent of the most notorious amortal around. I always tell them, 'Sure. Ron's good people.' Plus, there's the irony of having Ronan Dooley's great-great-great-grandson taking up our cause. If that doesn't get people's attention, what can?"

  Ruby lowered the gun and stepped closer to Five, speaking in a low voice. "But they keep coming to me with these questions. They keep voicing their doubts. And I keep allaying their fears. But some days, Ron – some days I find myself wondering the same thing. How could a man with such close ties to the federal poster boy for amortals be ready to stand with us when the revolution comes?"

  Five didn't say a word. He didn't look at Ruby or me or anyone else. He just kept his eyes on that plastic gun. He stared at it as if it were a wild animal that might bite him if he made any sudden moves.

  "You know what I do when I get those thoughts in my head?" Ruby said. Her voice was barely more than a whisper now, but it echoed in the stone-lined chamber as if she were standing in front of a microphone in an empty arena.

  Five shook his head, but his eyes never left that gun.

  Ruby took Five's hand, lifted his fingers between them, and pressed the pistol into his palm. She held it there until his fingers closed around it.

  "I pray, Ron," she said. "I pray long and hard and hope that God will help me find an answer, a way of ridding myself of these doubts. And so He has."

  She leaned in close now and spoke in Five's ear. "Shoot him," she said. "Kill him, and kill all doubts about yourself with him. Then you'll be one of us. With God, body and soul."

  Five shuddered at her words. He stared at the gun. He hefted it and felt its weight in his hand. He held it up before himself and examined it in the light, his hand around the grip, his finger on the trigger.

  "All right, Grandpa." He said my name, but he was talking to himself. "All right. If I have to, I will."

  He turned to look me in the eyes. I could see tears welling up in him – and hate. This time, though, the hate wasn't just for me, but for everyone in the room. Everyone in the world. For his whole life that had brought him inevitably and inexorably to this moment, which he hadn't even known to try to avoid. He could barely stand any of it.

  For a moment, I worried he might turn the gun on himself. That wouldn't have saved me though. Ruby would have just picked it up – or drawn one of the other guns I was sure they had – and murdered me herself.

  Instead, he brought the pistol up and pointed it right between my eyes. I braced myself for the shot, but it did not come.

  Five's gaze darted all around the room, and I wondered if he might try to shoot Ruby and the others instead. He couldn't possibly kill them all, though, and we'd both die in a bloodbath if he tried.

  He had to shoot me. It was the only way.

  "Do it," I said to Five. "Kill me."

  I caught his eyes and held them in my gaze. Then I spoke to him slowly and carefully. "Do what you have to do."

  He wiped his eyes with his free hand, then gritted his teeth and got ready to squeeze that trigger.

  I closed my eyes to make it easier for him, and I waited for death to take me once again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The gunshots echoed so loud they hurt my ears and set them ringing. For a second I thought I'd been killed and just hadn't realized it yet. I might have died eight times already, but with the exception of the first death, I didn't remember any of them.

  Maybe this was how it worked. The bullet hit you, but death removed the pain. />
  I wondered what might happen next. Would I find my soul pulled up out of my body and drawn up to heaven – or down to hell? Would it hover around for a bit and then get yanked over to the Amortals Project to slip into my new body instead? Or, worst of all, would I just lie here trapped in my lifeless body, unable to say or do a thing as they scooped me up and put me in the ground?

  I opened my eyes then and saw that I was not dead.

  Five stood there before me, his eyes wide with shock and pain. Blood stained the front of his shirt, and I knew it was not mine. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words escaped it, only more blood. Then he pitched forward and fell on top of my lap.