by James, Guy
Now, he was the closer. And people like Senna, regardless of how beautiful some might be, were the opposite. They’d run away to the settlements, putting their hands over their eyes as they refused to see the world for what it had really become, daring not even to peek through their fingers.
He almost added, ‘And I’m the best motherfucking closer of all time.’ But he held back. He did say, “I’m going to let you join us, and once you give to the cause, that black gold will flow free from the spigot, and you’ll be able to drink from it too.”
Senna spat. The idea of following this man in his mission was beyond revolting, but as soon as the saliva was out of her mouth and before it had reached the floor, she wanted to take it back. She’d been given a hand to play, and she’d muddled it up already. Fuck. How did she keep screwing everything up? she wondered.
“You’ll regret that,” he said, “dried out and hollow as you are. That was probably the last of what was in you keeping you together.” He licked his lips. “That’s all we are, after all, flesh and bone held together by spit. Some prettier than others, but all the same gummy tack in the end.”
“The children aren’t tack,” she said. “You’re sick. You’re all sick. The virus isn’t a god. You’re out of your mind. You’ve betrayed the human race.”
The unadulterated hatred in her tone was so plain that Brother Mardu could taste the vitriol in the air. He could really fucking taste the stuff, and he found it quite pleasing.
This won’t do, he thought. Not at all. His face grew dark with anger, and his eyes narrowed to crusty slits.
“How stupid you sound,” he said. “Look around you. Of course the virus is a god, the only god, the one god. And you worship the virus just as much as we do. The way you lock yourselves away from it, you devote your lives to the virus. But while you run from it, we embrace it. You have to respect the virus to survive in the world, and we do more than respect it, we give to it, we love it, and in return we’re given more than just survival. We thrive. We live damn fucking well, while you live harvest to harvest and the virus picks off more and more of your number. It takes for itself, and it gives to us, so we can eat and push it forward, advance its soldiers.”
He grinned. Now he wanted coffee. Now he wanted to go and drink all of the Order’s stockpile. Because it was his. Because he’d earned it. Because he was the greatest motherfucking closer of all time!
“Seventy-cups! Seventy-cups!” Tyrone would’ve yelled had he been in the Order and had he and Mardu both been familiar with the great ‘Coffee’s for closers’ speech. He would’ve bellowed it with his bass trombone-like wind pipes, the two words mashed together and made into one, just like he’d done in his patented Voltaire II speech, before the zombies tore his vocal cords out.
“Seventy-cups! Seventy-cups!”
“Seventy-cups!”
“Seventy-cups!”
And Mardu would’ve knocked back and slurped down all seventy. Because he could close that, too. He could close anything, and this woman would be no exception.
This was enough for now, however. It was time to send these un-seers back to their cage, where they could think things over, and, if they were wise, come to terms with the Order’s reality.
Brother Mardu called for Acrisius, and the right-hand man—who was literally that because that was the only side of his body that could be made to do much at all—came back to take the prisoners away. With the last of the dope of the Sultan other than what Acrisius had allotted for his own revelry with Saul, Senna and Rosemary were loaded up with one more weak shot each and returned—half-dragged—to their cell.
27
The boy with the unkempt red hair and the questions that hadn’t been a torment but a pleasure, mostly at least, except when they’d forced Alan to confront those parts of his past that he’d always worked so hard to avoid, was not a boy at all anymore. He was just the virus’s pet, his master abominable and set on one task and one task only: to spread copies of itself to those who are alive and to use their corpses as virus factories.
Frost bloomed at the junctures of Alan’s vertebrae. The cold blossomed in his chest, and some of it must have spread upward because his mind didn’t so much slow as it stopped processing entirely.
Jack was standing in place, barely moving except for tremors in his fingers and ankles. Then a serrated bolt of lightning that was lined with the rust of ages cracked like a whip through the sky, and the boy began to move away from Alan, obeying the electric master that was capable of so displaying his might.
Without hesitation, but with a seeping chill that was now spreading to every part of him, Alan drew his pistol and shot twice.
Each bullet smashed the raindrops in its path, which relative to the bullets’ paths were lazy, floating mirages.
Coffee’s for closers, each of the bullets thought, and cut through the airborne water in pursuit of their prize.
The first hit Jack in the small of his back—too low, and an uncharacteristically bad shot, even for Alan. The second hit Jack in the back of the head.
The boy fell face first into the mud. The fingers of his right hand twitched, like they were trying to grasp something, but all they managed to do was grab some wet earth and fling it slightly backward in Alan’s direction. To Alan, Jack’s corpse seemed to deflate, but it was only sinking into the mud. Then the boy was still.
Alan put the gun away. He no longer felt like a man, but like a predator, cold, mechanical, and without feeling.
Except that wasn’t quite right, either. Not just a killer, he was on a course to save Senna if that could still be done, or to give out vengeance liberally, like a dealing of cards. He was the dealer now.
He worked for the house, and, on balance, the house always won. But what in all of hell did that mean?
All he knew was that he had to move toward Senna and the Tackers, and he was sure he’d reach them now.
After that it wouldn’t be up to him, because the world and its mutating cancer would sort out the rest.
28
“It’s all unspoken,” Rosemary said.
The words sent a chill running up Senna’s spine. She and Rosemary were alone in the holding cell again, to which they’d been returned after their meeting with the great Brother Mardu. They were sitting side by side with their backs against the wall.
“What is?” Senna said, turning to look at the girl.
Had you been sitting beside Rosemary in Senna’s place, you would’ve tried to jump out of your skin when you saw the child’s haunted eyes. Her pupils were dilated and glazed with something that told of her loss, her lack of something she’d never had in the first place, but was now sure she never would.
You would have wanted two things then: to help Rosemary, and to run away. The second desire wasn’t an option, but the first wasn’t exactly easy, either.
It was the sort of thing you knew you had to do, to be there for the girl, to try to make her feel better. But it would feel like if you got closer, or, God forbid, dared to put an arm around her, you’d be sucked into those too-dark pupils into that inescapable place we all fear, where nightmares are the only reality and dreams—the nice ones—never, ever, ever come true.
“Between you and Alan,” Rosemary said. “It’s unspoken, like, you look at each other and just understand.”
“Yes,” Senna said. She knew exactly what Rosemary meant. “Yes, I think you’re right.”
“I’m never going to have that,” Rosemary said flatly.
“Rosemary, don’t say that. You will have that. You will…one day.”
“No. Even if I get out of here, I’ll never have that. You two are, like, stupid or something when you’re together. Like dumb, happy children. I’ve never seen anyone like that, not that I’ve seen much of anything, I guess. Still, it’s not normal. I mean, I don’t think it’s normal.” She took a deep breath. “Where does it come from? Why is it there?”
Senna looked at her for a long time before speaking. “To
be honest, I don’t know. Alan and I…we just… I really don’t know. It’s just something that happened.”
Senna’s heart sank as her mind turned to Alan. She thought of the way he made her feel: young and foolish again, doe-eyed. And she knew, from the silly twinkle in his eyes when he was around her, that she made him feel the same way. It was a clean feeling that she didn’t have to convince herself of because the love was there, and it was real.
There was a magnetism between them that the other townspeople saw and spoke about. They stoked the fires of some kind of carnal but also love-filled madness in each other.
That was something that couldn’t be denied. Even after the apocalypse, they’d found ways to be stupid and wild together.
What if Rosemary was right and she never would have that herself? Other than being a shame, did it matter in the grand scheme of the world? Did it even begin to matter?
Sadness crept into Senna’s belly and made a nest. She put an arm around Rosemary, and the child wrapped her arms around Senna’s waist.
Rosemary was breathing evenly again.
Thank God at least for that, Senna thought. As for Alan…I’ll never be stupid for him again, because I’ll never see him again. Her breath caught in her throat. And Rosemary…poor Rosemary.
The Sultan—muscular and dressed in no more than an oily loincloth—was tugging Senna back into sleep.
Rosemary, Senna thought, we have to get her out. We have to make sure she has a chance at… At love, Senna’s mind reaffirmed. Love. That did matter. Of course it did. It might have been the only thing that still mattered.
Senna took hold of the taffy strings streaming out from the Sultan’s wrists—like Spiderman’s webs—and leaned backward with all her weight, trying to remove herself from their clutches. But they were so sticky, and she was so, so tired, and they just clung more tightly the more she struggled, and the more she struggled, the more tired it all made her.
The room dimmed. Apparently, someone was cutting their power.
The shadows clinging to the walls grew longer and were pulled apart until they became a spider’s web, ensnaring two people who hours earlier had thought themselves safe within the confines of New Crozet.
One was the second greatest spotter of all time. The other was the smartest child born after the apocalypse, whose life, until this day, had been set on a course to revolutionize the way that trade was done among the settlements.
Sorrow settled over Rosemary, who was feeling the Sultan’s presence to a lesser degree than Senna was. With the feeling came a literal heartache. She was sad not just for the obvious reasons—they were captured and would probably die, that much was clear—but because she’d only now realized something about the dreams she’d been having.
They all rushed back at her at once like a door flung open by a gale-force wind in her brain, and she knew that the lowing of the cows and the singing of the birds and all their movements were wrong. They’d always been wrong. Not necessarily wrong-bad, but more like wrong-incorrect.
She reconsidered this. Maybe it was wrong-bad.
There were no more cows, but she really wanted to see one and hear one…and touch one, maybe just through an enclosure. She wanted to touch a baby cow or baby goat or…or a puppy.
The adults rarely spoke of dogs they’d had, but sometimes they did when they thought the children weren’t listening, and it seemed absolutely wonderful.
She wanted something small and alive to take care of besides herself and besides the other townspeople. She wanted that thing that animals had that humans didn’t. She was certain that animals did have something on people, and she needed to feel it, but there was no way she could.
The Sultan pulled at her until he’d tugged her into a rubbery sleep in which she dreamt she was walking through a moonlit desert. There were dimly-lit, town-shaped mirages over every sand dune, but they were as unreachable to her as the happy feeling that only an animal could impart to its human pal.
Snakes were slithering over the sand, hissing along the dunes as Rosemary walked, but their chatter and slinking too, were imagined and wrong.
29
“No!” Rosemary cried.
Senna was being dragged from the cell by her hair. Her shackled hands gripped the wrists of her assailant, easing the strain on her scalp.
The cords of muscle in Brother Saul’s forearms were taut, but he was holding back. He could have tossed Senna across the room and through the doorway, and he wanted to, because it would’ve been more efficient, but he didn’t because he knew that Brother Acrisius wouldn’t like that.
He paused momentarily and thought on the pain he was inflicting on the woman prisoner. Acrisius wouldn’t like it if she was hurt, but wasn’t Acrisius’s intent also to hurt her?
He wants to hurt her first, Saul thought. He nodded. Yes, that must be it.
If I hurt her now and put marks on her, he thought, then Brother Acrisius will be unhappy with me, and maybe Mardu will be too, with both of us, and I can’t let that happen.
The giant of a man had to keep reminding himself to be gentle. It wasn’t necessarily that he wanted to hurt her, or that he didn’t either, that was what they were going to do soon anyway, but he was supposed to get her to the other room first, and he often was too rough with people when he didn’t mean to be. He had to be firm, but not leave bruises on her, so that meant being even more soft-handed than he was with Brother Acrisius on the extremely rare occasions when Acrisius let him be the dominant one.
“It’s okay,” Senna mouthed. “It’s going to be okay.”
“No!” Rosemary screamed again, and when she drew in breath her lungs rattled. Tears stood up in the corners of her eyes and fell. She screamed again and again and again until there was no more scream left, and then she was trying to breathe, struggling for air like a fish out of water.
It felt like the last time, like the final attack. Horror drained the blood from her face, and the dread stirring in her heart told her that this was the last time she would see Senna. She wanted to say goodbye or that she loved her, or something, but she couldn’t manage anything through her pall of tears and the seizing up of her chest and those damned breathing devices in it.
Her face crumpled as she fought for air and the feeling that she’d lost Senna for good grew stronger, as if it was stealing her air for its own good. She couldn’t catch her breath, and now it was running away from her and it was so fast and she tried to get it back in but that only made it go farther and her body was sinking into the choking and there just wasn’t enough air and the little there was wouldn’t connect in the right place and the panic was coming and then it was there tugging at her with its anxious tentacles, pulling her into the depths.
Panic. That was the worst thing you could do when your body needed air that it couldn’t get right then. And panic was exactly what Rosemary did.
The need became too great, but there was still no way to get the air in. This, she realized, was what it felt like to drown, fully aware as you sank, struggling, into a suffocating darkness.
But how long could it last? No more than a minute, maybe two. It was agony, but a few moments could be traded for peace. That thought offered her no comfort, and the nearing reality of her death made her more scared than she’d ever been in her life.
The water was filling her lungs.
No air.
She wanted to stay strong for Senna, but she didn’t know how to get the air back.
Maybe now was the giving up time.
The surface was far away, and the water was cold, numbing. She kicked her legs to try to propel her body upward, but it was no use.
Then the currents snapped taut and pulled her lower. It was darker there, and things hurt less, and the absence of breath didn’t seem quite as bad as it had moments before. She was seizing now, and the dark water into which she was sinking had become blackness.
“Rosemary,” Senna yelled, “calm down. I’m going to come back for you. Calm down!
Breathe. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
The convulsing girl heard nothing.
Was it really going to be okay? Was it ever going to be okay again? Senna’s mind did a loop de loop—just how much had they drugged her, or had someone hit her?—and she began to think that maybe it was already okay. How could a world that felt so soft and fuzzy be bad, even if she was being dragged through it?
The vinyl floor tried to pull a layer of skin from her face—and the slick spots were making a ripping sound at her skin that was worse than nails on a chalkboard, probably because it was vinyl on face—but it didn’t feel bad at all, none of it did, it was like being brushed by a soft pillow.
Even the stiffness in her chest loosened its grip. Maybe the man was taking her away to somewhere good, with more pillows—maybe even pillows for sitting—and maybe they’d sit and sip chicory coffee and talk and listen to the sounds of the insects in the forest and think on them and eat...meat.
30
Acrisius’s room smelled of sweat and fecal matter, their odors set to mingling by the urging of the acts that had been done there, over, and over, and over again. The overhead fluorescents were out, in a state of mildew-infested disrepair, and the only light in the room was coming from two Coleman lanterns set in neighboring corners of the room.
Senna’s wrists were chained to one wall. Brother Acrisius and Brother Saul were watching her. She was facing them on her knees, and if she tried she could sit, stand, and move about somewhat freely until the chains became taut, keeping her a safe distance from her captors. Safe for them.
Acrisius could’ve tied her down to something, or chained her by her ankles as well, but he’d found with time and experience that he preferred a moving target. It was more satisfying when the thing they were hurting could recoil, and run just a little, and try, if in vain, to get away. Yes, it was a lot more fun that way.
Now they were waiting for her to sober up just a tiny bit more, because what was the point if she was too doped up to feel what they were doing?
