by Scott Hale
“Can’t say I like being out in the open like this,” Warren rumbled.
Benjamin walked towards Atticus, hand outstretched. “You’re safe, I give you my word.”
Atticus took his hand and shook it.
“Let’s go inside, sir.”
“Gravedigger’s fine,” Atticus said. He flinched as he heard the crowd clamor at the confirmation. In his periphery, he saw more joining in. “Let’s go inside, Benjamin.”
Benjamin shuffled the Marrow Cabal through the front of the suffer center, locked the doors behind them, and led them through the building, until they emerged into a small gathering place. Several long benches stretched across the room. There wasn’t enough space to hold Hex’s supposed one hundred to one hundred and fifty loyalists. But there were enough nooks to cram together those that counted most.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Benjamin was a young man, but to Atticus, it seemed following Geharra’s goals had aged him. The twenty-something enthusiasm was there, but so, too, were the dark circles of thirty and the creeping wrinkles of forty.
“We are the Marrow Cabal,” Hex said. She nodded at Warren, and he bolted the door. “And now you are, too.”
Benjamin smiled so hard his teeth looked as though they’d blow out his skull.
“This is James, Warren, Elizabeth, and Miranda,” Hex said, gesturing to each. “That’s Gary. He’s a ghoul. He has his shit together, though, so don’t worry.”
Gary nodded innocently and said, “I ate on my way here.”
Benjamin, star-struck, waved him off and said, “No, no. No, you’re fine. Hi.”
“This…” Hex scowled at Mr. Haemo, but he was too busy fighting with his skin suit to pay her much mind. “Just come to us if he gives you any problems.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Again, Benjamin was shaking Atticus’ hand. “Gravedigger.”
“Yeah, we met about ten seconds ago.”
“I hadn’t heard anything. I thought maybe Geharra gave up.”
“You didn’t receive any correspondence?” Hex asked.
Benjamin shook his head. “No, but Eldrus might’ve got to them first. We’ve been preparing, though. Everyone knows what’s coming. We’ve just been waiting for the orders. You saw the soldiers out front? They’ve been here for a while. I’m friends with a lot of them. Most of us are. There’s some jackasses, sure, but a lot of them are decent people.”
“Sounds like you’re having a change of heart,” Atticus said.
“No, not at all.” Benjamin sounded scared, as though he feared the Gravedigger was questioning his loyalty. “What I’m saying… what I’m saying is that it doesn’t need to be a bloodbath.”
“Whoa, hold on. Pump the brakes,” Mr. Haemo said.
Atticus held up his hand.
“The soldiers don’t want to be here, either,” Benjamin continued. “But it’s their job. But… they don’t want to die for it, you know? I think most will leave without a fight, but we have to fight. Otherwise, they won’t leave. Does that make sense?”
Atticus and Hex nodded.
“People in Islaos are worried that we’ll push these soldiers out and then worse ones will replace them. I don’t blame them. Eldrus definitely has to go, don’t get me wrong. We’ve dug up a lot of the bodies they’ve buried and I don’t even know what they’re doing.”
Hex lied and said, “We’re not sure, either.”
“Exactly. They’ve got to go. We realize this. But the people need to feel confident that this is worth fighting for. There’s been a malaise of apathy lately in Islaos. I’m sorry if I sound scattered. We’ve worked and worked to get people this far. But they need a shove in the right direction. If they fall back to their old ways, then at that point, I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to convince them.”
“You can say it.” Atticus cleared his throat. He didn’t want his next sentence to sound as nervous as he now felt. “You want me to give them a speech.”
Benjamin nodded, put his hands together. “Please. That’s all they need. I figured you would, but I wasn’t certain. If you tell them what you’ve been through, what you’ve done.”
Atticus glanced back at Hex. “What’s that exactly?”
“The plantation in Cathedra,” Benjamin said. “The riots in Bedlam. You broke the supply lines in the lowlands. Raided the ports along the Divide. You’ve been digging up all the tainted corpses and putting them to rest in consecrated ground.”
Still looking at Hex, he said, “Yeah, seems I’ve been busy.”
“And… and—” Benjamin swallowed hard, “–and you can’t die. At least, not until you’ve avenged your wife and son.”
“Yeah, one day that day will come.” He shook his head at Hex, and then at Warren, whom he was sure was also propagating these rumors.
“You… you really can’t die?”
Atticus unfastened the straps of his armor. His chest piece cracked against the ground. He lifted his shirt.
Benjamin gasped. The neck slit, the kunai gouge, the red ravines of rot leading to his lungs—they were all there. He loosened his tassets and his greaves, and then, with his pants, let them drop around his ankles. The skin on his legs was pale and stiff, like petrified wood. Across them, the hundreds of tiny fang holes left him looking porous, spongey. The necrosis had returned, but as Hex had predicted, his body had absorbed it. What other pieces of filth were floating around inside him? he wondered. If someone cut him open, really cut him open deep, would they find a dam of decay built up inside? And what would be held back? A great deluge of insanity? Or just the dredges of his poor excuse for humanity?
Atticus came to his senses. “I really can’t die? No.” Taking a page from Elizabeth’s book, he said, “Couldn’t even if I could.”
If Atticus was going to give a speech to inspire people to get off their asses and attempt something other than look for an excuse to sit back down on them, then he was going to do it right. He had the benches hauled out of the gathering place, to the front of the suffer center. He was only going to say what he had to say once, and he wasn’t about to say it only to the so-called leaders who wouldn’t do much fighting to begin with. People would stand, and people would sit, and everyone would know what they were getting into.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Benjamin said as he, Atticus, Miranda, and Gary worked the last bench through the suffer center’s hall. “If we’re out in the open, then they will have to respond.”
“Let them,” Atticus said. For a moment, he worried about pulling a muscle, and then he realized it didn’t matter. “Hopefully, they’ll try to assassinate me.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Miranda said snidely.
“Hey, you looking for a boyfriend?” Gary asked. “You and Mr. Haemo both have the same shitty attitude. I can put in a good word for you, if you’d like.”
Miranda smiled her first smile since meeting Atticus, and put her guard back up.
Atticus returned to the gathering place a few hours later and started to pace the length of the room.
“Feeling about as far from my comfort zone as I can get,” he said to James, who stood in the doorway. “Feels like we rode out of Gallows yesterday.”
“I don’t know a man better than you.” James came into the room, hands in his pockets. “You’ve put yourself through almost everything to get them back. No hesitation, no complaints.”
“None that I voiced.” He sighed. “Please tell me I didn’t get myself elected to be leader of some half-assed rebellion.”
“No,” James said, laughing. “You’re a convenient figure is all. I’m sure they have several ‘Gravediggers’ lined up if things go south at some point. As soon as Hex brought you back to her place in Bedlam, she went to work on your story. She has a good eye for people. I think she was going to offer you a lot of money to work for them, before she found out what happened to Clementine and Will.”
“Yeah, I guess money don’t mean much to me anymore.”
> “What are you going to say tonight?”
Atticus’ mouth hung open. “Still working on that. Waiting for divine inspiration, I suppose.”
“You’re a holy man now, Atticus?” He winced as his butchered hand begged to be amputated.
“Comes and goes. All this dying I’ve done, can’t say I’ve seen god in any of it.”
“Well, I don’t know if you’re looking in the right place. The Membrane sounds like an in-between.”
Atticus stroked his chin. “Guess I got to find the correct keyhole to look through. Might be god’s not what we expected.”
James shrugged and said, “Might be that, for heretics like yourself, you can’t recognize god, even if god kicked you square in the ass. God will never live up to your expectations.”
“I suppose, little priest.”
“Hey, uh,” James rubbed the back of his head, “You know, I tried to find my family after I left the farm a few years back.”
“I figured that was part of it.” It’s time, Atticus thought. “How’d Elijah fit into all that?”
“He told me where they were. He told me a lot of things. I guess I just… I couldn’t help myself. That’s why I ran.”
It took everything Atticus had from going off. He saw Elijah in his mind’s eye and regretted every day he hadn’t dismembered him. “Did you see your family?”
“Oh, yeah.” James took out his mangled hand. With the other, he took out a vial and poured something into the bandages. “It didn’t go well. Not at all.”
“Well, having sex with your brother will do that. Hard thing to forgive.” Atticus cringed and said, “I know you didn’t know.”
James looked surprised, as though he hadn’t expected him to be so blunt about the issue. “I didn’t know. Not when we were little. But, Atticus, I have no excuse for after that, when we were caught. When Mom and Dad told us.”
“Elijah manipulated you for years.”
James’ cheek quivered. He looked away, eyes gone red. “I hate talking about it. There’s no good way to put it. I feel so fucking disgusting having done it. When were kids, okay, fine. Kids play games. They don’t know any better. I looked… up to him.”
Atticus said, “You do something long enough, and if no one says otherwise, it’s going to seem normal.”
“But how do you explain after my parents found us? They beat the hell out of me. Not him. Me. And then we kept doing it, anyways. We were teenagers. We knew better, but we did it, anyways. How can you possibly explain that?”
Atticus couldn’t, so he didn’t say anything.
“I wish someone else got it. What it’s like. I knew all this time he was using me. But I didn’t look at him like he was my brother. Dad wouldn’t talk to me. Mom wouldn’t look at me. This was before they even found out. There was only Elijah. And I knew it was sick, our secret, but he listened, he looked at me. The trade-off seemed all right.”
James sighed, pulled down on his cheeks. “I know you and Clementine and Will poured a lot into me. All your love and compassion. I can’t believe after all that running away I ran into people like you.”
“So why’d you answer when Elijah came calling?” Atticus asked. “You knew all these things, how wrong and sick it was.”
“It was like someone flipped a switch in my head. All you guys did for me… it was like none of it happened. Seeing him took me back. Caught me off-guard. And he made promises. Said we could be a family again. I did miss it, us together.”
“Do you still miss it?”
James hesitated and said, “Yeah, sometimes. It’s like it’s tainted. Sex, that is. I’ve been with other men, but even then I found myself missing him. I’m sorry, I know it’s disgusting to say that. Years of it. God. Fucked me in the head so bad.”
“Was it his idea to sell yourself for money?”
“It was both our idea. After a year of it, we weren’t intimate with each other anymore. Didn’t want nothing to do with me.”
Atticus took a deep breath. He didn’t want to hear these things, but for James’ sake, he had to.
“I did want to leave him, Atticus, about six months ago. But I couldn’t. What if I couldn’t do any better? What if someone found out? I mean, some people knew, but it was mostly a joke they really didn’t think was all that true. Him, the whoring—it became routine. My family disowned me. I disowned you. He was all I had. My body was all I had. All it seemed I was good for.”
“You turned on him, though,” Atticus said, stepping closer to James. “Why’d you do that?”
“After we broke into Brinton’s casket, it hit me. That feeling you get when you know you’ve done something just… wrong. We were breaking into your place. Your place. Being back there, brought it all back. You, Clementine. Will. Dinners and going to school and working in the fields. Everything caught up with me. And looking at Brinton, I think I saw myself in him. That’s what I had in store for me. Some asshole in a casket who no one really liked and never did much for himself. I didn’t want to die like that, be remembered like that. The whore who fucks his b-brother and robs his friends. No, I’m not that. Never was supposed to be that. I know that now.
“I struggle with it, though. I do. Did I make a mistake? Was I wrong? Maybe he’ll… forgive me for leaving him? I try to ignore my doubts.” He sighed. “Thank you for listening to me.”
Atticus nodded, pulled James into a hug.
“Thank you,” he said, holding him there. “Thank you for not giving up on us. Holy Child knows I deserve it. We’ve both been through enough.”
James smiled and said with tears in his eyes, “Isn’t that the god damn truth. I think they’re ready for you.”
“I doubt it,” Atticus said, smoothing out his shirt. “But we’ll see.”
Outside the suffer center, Islaos waited. The benches were packed, with everyone sitting so close they were almost in each other’s laps. Looking through the front doorway, Atticus saw even more behind the fifty or sixty that were seated. They shuffled back and forth, murmuring to themselves and pointing when they probably thought they caught a glimpse of the infamous Gravedigger.
Behind them, stationed along the street and atop the nearby roofs, were Eldrus’ soldiers, each armed to the gums. Out in the open as they were, it was clear they weren’t trying to hide themselves for the demonstration. Like the suffer center itself, they wanted people to know they were there, and to remember what they were capable of.
“Everyone is in place,” Hex said, coming up behind Atticus. She put her hand on his shoulder. “They’ll fall for it. Remember, don’t mention the Nameless Forest.”
“Yeah, don’t want to overdo it,” Warren said, coming from the gathering place. He stood at the threshold with Atticus and added, “Glad it’s you going out there and getting them all rowdy. Public speaking makes me want to puke.”
Atticus cocked his head and glared at the big man. “Why’d you agree to help with the rebellion in the first place? Don’t seem all that passionate about it.”
Warren shrugged. “Sounded good at the time. But then you showed up and did your undead thing. I know when I’ve been upstaged, and when I need to follow rather than lead.”
“Did you pay him off, to let me take over instead?” Atticus asked Hex.
She nodded. “Of course. He’s a greedy son of a bitch.”
Warren smiled and bobbed his eyebrows up and down.
“Put a lot of faith in me, Hex,” Atticus said.
“You haven’t let me down yet.” She paused as the crowd started to grow louder outside the suffer center. “We can make a hero out of anyone.”
Atticus put his finger to her chest. “What’s that mean?”
“Means you’re not the only one we’re hedging our bets on. Means when you get your wife and son back, I’ll do everything I can to get you out of this.”
Atticus looked back outside. People had begun chanting “Gravedigger,” each syllable slow and deep, like a hand thudding against the skin of a drum.
Hex punched his chest and said, “You’re on.”
Atticus nodded and, without hesitation, walked outside to greet those who knew him better than he did them. The crowd stopped it’s chanting. Again, there were whispers, but they were quickly snuffed out by harsh shushes. Benjamin had built a small platform in front of the suffer center, so he stepped onto that. Standing there, exposed and more or less unprepared, Atticus felt like the fool he surely seemed.
What do I say? He looked to those sitting, to those standing, and those farther off, disinterested. What have I done? He looked up, to the top of the valley, where torches burned brightly against the darkening sky.
Clementine, this isn’t me. He looked inward, to the memory of the Membrane. I can feel you laughing at me, Will. Your father’s an idiot.
“Do… you… know who I am?” Atticus mumbled, each word louder than the last. It was a start, even if it was a shitty one.
The crowd gave the only response he deserved: silence.
He swallowed hard. With a shaking hand—This is worse than dying—he pointed to the soldiers of Eldrus. “They know who I am. They know better. That is why they keep their distance and hide in the shadows.”
Those sitting whispered to themselves. Some glanced over their shoulders at the soldiers, to see how they were taking it.
When he was eight or nine, a man by the name of Anthony Proust came to Gallows once. He claimed to be the descendant of Marcus Proust, a religious zealot who tried to wipe out the Night Terrors in the south. Before reaching Gallows, Anthony had marched across the Heartland, giving speeches and gaining followers to help him take up his family’s genocidal dreams.
Atticus could still remember when Anthony came to town and gave the speech he gave. He sounded confident to the point of delusional, and though he spoke clearly, he spoke like a madman. Others would’ve been booed off stage, but when he came to Gallows that day, people listened, because Anthony himself believed he was worth listening to.
Atticus took a deep breath. He worked his words over in his head, until they lost most of his accent and took on another tone entirely. “I know that you all did not come out here to seek an easier life. These lands are hard lands, like the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. You came out here to get away, like the rest of us across the Heartland. If Penance came into your valley, would you put up with their being here?”
