The Zero Patient Trilogy (Book Two): (A Dystopian Science Fiction Series)

by Harmon Cooper

  ‘Thanks for that,’ she says. ‘You sure know the Book well.’

  ‘Is there anything else to know?’

  ‘There are many things happening in this Canyon regardless of what the Book says.’

  (BLASPH?)

  ‘What… do you mean?’

  ‘I mean exactly what I said. There are many who use the Book only for their benefit. One day they follow, but as soon as it suits them not to, they don’t.’

  ‘They will be deathborn. I’m not concerned with these fools.’

  (Faceless fucks.)

  ‘Quiet you,’ I snarl.

  Relax, Hunter.

  ‘You know, my brother Clay used to talk to himself sometimes.’

  I shake my head; chew my lip for a moment. Finally the words escape. ‘I’m not talking to myself.’

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  ‘Something… ’ I grunt.

  (Don’t tell her.)

  ‘Something talks to me. Tells me… things.’ My voice swells inside my throat. ‘IT IS BLASPH, and I usually ignore it.’

  ‘What… does it say?’

  ‘The voice in my head just says… things. I shouldn’t tell you this. I never, never talk about it. It is blasph to speak of such… mental impurities.’

  It is fine, Hunter, tell her what you must.

  I almost respond to the Goddess, but I stop just in time.

  ‘What does the voice tell you?’

  ‘Things, just… everything. Sometimes I listen, sometimes I don’t.’ I slam my fist against the ground and she shifts away. ‘I can’t talk about this anymore. I’m… deeply flawed. But the Goddess cares for me, takes care of me, looks after me; I place my faith in her grace. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Greene says softly, ‘it’s fine. Don’t feel bad. I’m going to rest… over there. Wake me up when you’re ready to go.’

  .7.

  There are two colors in my head and they’re connected by sinewy muscles and predatory dread. They are bones, mingled, mangled and gnawed, evidence of my fraud, my sins, those who I haven’t been able to liberate, to save. My sins are them; my dirties surface with another streak, blue eye green eye behind and I feel a dip in time. Wavy feelings tingle tingle and a flat plane emerges; spreads the wrinkles in the flesh bound copy of the Book which sits upon a pedestal beneath the fall and above the gutted masses. Gasps and laughs suture the blasph to the walls of the Canyon and the beat-dead hearts of the Stayed.

  (Awake.)

  I wish it were that easy to open my eyes, to separate the truth from the lies, the mog from the sky, the veins from the heart, the bones from the spine. The Book says we are strings tied together by loose knots no better than organ rot. Our iniquity unites us, our guilt is ever present.

  (Awake.)

  ‘I am… ’

  Eyes blink and let in the dark. My ears twitch at the sound of sleeping Greene.

  (Check her.)

  ‘She isn’t faceless.’

  Hunter, come now.

  ‘Halo?’

  Now. I need you now.

  ‘What about… Greene?’

  If you care about her safety, leave her here.

  ‘Where are you?’

  I am close.

  ‘And I should leave her here?’ I side glance over to the area where I sense the sleeping warrior maiden.

  Yes.

  ‘They’ll kill her! She can’t protect herself. She is… beautiful. They will unpurify her!’

  I will protect her for you.

  ‘You will?’

  (DON’T LISTEN TO HER!)

  Ignore that voice, Hunter.

  --The voices must be quelled.

  Ignore Father Miscavige as well.

  ‘Halo!’ I hiss. Greene blinks her eyes open, casts a bleary gaze upon me, smiles wild, falls back asleep.

  You must leave Greene and come for me. Now is the time. I need you. This is the moment you were born for, the accumulation of your life’s triumphs and absolution for your mistakes. You will stop the man who stole me from the South, who has started this war.

  ‘The bastard!’ I whisper, quieter this time.

  This cleanses you of all your mistakes.

  Tears come as I remember what I did the previous night. ‘So… so many mistakes.’ I touch my face to check for facelessness. Nose intact, peepers blinky, mouth parched, lips cracked.

  I will watch over Greene for you and you can return to her once you’ve saved me.

  ‘She doesn’t judge me.’

  I know, Hunter, but you must help me first. I am your Goddess, the reason for your life. Come to me now and free me from my captor.

  STERLING

  .1.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten the fact that you lied to me yet again,’ Sterling says, glaring at Halo.

  I didn’t expect you to forget.

  ‘What are you two talking about?’ his sister asks. Her face still puffy from crying, Beige busies herself by cutting Sterling’s hair with their mother’s good scissors. She’s already sponged off the blood from his arms and the dirt from his face. He’ll still need to shave to complete his OL Officer disguise, but that can wait for a little bit yet.

  ‘She knows.’

  Would you have helped me if you knew my intention?

  ‘Dammit, Halo, you know I didn’t have a choice! You might as well be honest with me; it’s not like you don’t control everything I do anyway.’ He glances up at his sister. ‘Don’t cut it too short.’

  ‘You’re trying to look like an OL Officer, remember?’ She cracks a sly grin. ‘At least you have a job now.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘They have short hair.’

  ‘Aware of that.’

  Beige bows her head slightly, glowers at her waist.

  ‘Hey… ’ Sterling clears his throat, not knowing exactly how to phrase what he’s sensing from his younger sister. ‘Does it… um… hurt?’ he finally asks.

  She sniffs, clears her throat. ‘Of course it hurts – do you think it doesn’t?’

  I can ease the pain.

  Sterling looks to Halo, realizing yet again that she’s communicating with him exclusively. Apparently, she can turn it on and off.

  ‘Please do, but not too much. Don’t wipe her memory or anything. I just don’t want to see her suffer.’

  ‘What are you two talking about?’ his sister asks. Expression leaches from her face; the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth and the creases in her forehead disappear.

  ‘Nothing. Thank you, Halo.’

  His sister resumes cutting his hair.

  ‘I still don’t see how this is going to work,’ he says, returning his attention to Halo. ‘You said they have an eye in the sky back at the servers.’

  We will use the chaos at the Off Limits to our advantage.

  ‘And if we run into any of them?’

  Hopefully, we won’t run into any metal men.

  ***

  Zander Damien. Just the thought of the man who continues to cast such a giant shadow over his life only deepens Sterling’s black mood. His mother murdered, his sister’s purity stripped from her, mayhem radiating out from the Off Limits – this is all Zander Damien’s doing. The man has been a recurring abscess on the buttocks of his life forever.

  Are you ready?

  ‘The shirt is tight,’ he complains. Even in the other room, he knows Halo can hear him.

  Endeavor to persevere. Button it all the way up, you have to look the part.

  The OL Officer they took the uniform from was narrower through the shoulders and broader through the hips than Sterling. The shirt’s tight and uncomfortable; the trousers are loose and awkward. He had to make a new hole in the belt to get it tight enough, and trim some off the end to make it look right.

  The mirror in his sister’s room shows him a tired-looking man with cold, dead eyes, clad in an ill-fitting, sand-colored uniform with a GDSF – Great Demarcator Security Forces – patch on the shoulder. He ruefully shakes his head at
the reflection as he rubs his stubbled chin and sighs at the thought of having to shave.

  ‘At least you finally got a job,’ he mumbles to mirror Sterling.

  Most men in the Canyon wear a beard, as shaving is no giggle – not when the best depilatory instrument available is a makeshift shiv. Sterling keeps his facial hair scissor-trimmed close – too easy for an opponent to grab your beard in a fight, and Sterling finds them too itchy anyway – but the OL Officers are always closely shaved, and a man’s gotta do what the Goddess wants him to.

  A small amount of water in the basin, Sterling rubs the soap until it’s foamy. He spreads the foam across his cheek, his upper lip and his neck. He lets the lather soak in and hopefully soften his whiskers while he puts a quick sharpen on his shiv and strops it on the OL Officer’s genuine leather belt.

  ‘Fuck,’ he whispers, catching a groove on the underside of his chin. He nicks himself again. Two cuts in, Sterling takes a deep breath and continues, the washcloth spotted with his blood and the water in the basin pinkish-gray when he finishes. He returns to the kitchen looking more like a stabbing post and less like a man.

  ‘You look like you’ve been dragged face-first through a cactus patch!’ his sister declares, and immediately moves towards him. She takes a small rag from a pocket sewn into a fold of her coverings, licks it to moisten it, and stands on her tippy toes to clean Sterling up. Their mother used to do the same thing when he was a boy, and the memory stabs at his heart.

  ‘Leave it be,’ he growls, waves her off.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘you can’t go out looking like this.’

  Their mother used to say that, too.

  Beige’s no longer in her veil, meaning that Halo didn’t completely wipe his sister’s memory, only diminished the physical discomfort. Still, it’s sad to see his sister so quickly adapt to her new role, casting away her badge of honor as soon as it’s trampled upon. If it were him, he’d wear the veil, Northern customs be damned.

  ‘How do I look as an OL Officer? Official enough?’

  Beige sighs. ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Yeah, honestly.’

  ‘You don’t look too impressive,’ she says with a shrug. ‘I mean, I’m not afraid of you.’

  Nor am I.

  ‘Both of you are about as helpful as a pair of legless lizards.’

  I would like to be bathed before we depart.

  ‘Would you?’ Sterling glances from the Southern Goddess to his sister. ‘Well, see if she’ll do it for you then.’

  With that, he goes outside, turns towards the Off Limits. The Blackout from earlier in the day has finished, and the dust has nearly settled. Still, there’s enough wind to carry the sounds of sirens, shouts and screams. Sterling can only imagine the pandemonium that lies ahead. The gates have never before all been open at the same time, and entry has always been tightly controlled and heavily policed. Were people already inside the six vesta swath of land that separates the northern wall from the southern wall?

  On War Days, the main gates open only long enough to meet the War Zone attendance quota and no longer. They are massive, tremendous, monolithic slabs the same height as the walls of the Off Limits. Only their own internal motors have sufficient power to open or close them; until power is restored, they will remain open.

  ‘It’s gonna be a shitshow,’ he says as he advances towards the gravesite on his property, where his wife Lily, Bolt and now his mother rest. He hasn’t even bothered to return the digging equipment to its usual place. What’s the point? The way things are stacking up, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to dig his own grave, just in case.

  The wind picks up and he pulls the neck cover past the bridge of his nose. It smells like the other man, and the sharp, musky odor carries him back to when he was no more than Bolt’s age and his father first started teaching him to fight. Even though he was almost his father’s size, his father would routinely best him, especially when he’d get angry.

  ‘Control, son,’ his father would say. ‘The man who loses his temper loses the fight and loses his life.’

  Sterling snorts; sage advice from the man who got himself killed stone-dead in the War Zone before the start siren sounded and he ever got a lick in. But thinking of ‘control’ and its consequences does get Sterling thinking about Halo’s role in all this. While she’s distracted – and he hopes she isn’t listening to his thoughts – he knows it’s time to get out whatever it is he needs to say to her, to connect a few dots and try to get a sense of what is actually happening.

  He’s earned it.

  Sterling sits on the ground in front of his mother’s grave, glares at the mound of freshly turned earth. Could it have been prevented?

  ‘Yes,’ Sterling says. ‘She must have known.’

  Halo seems to always get the scent of something before it happens – how could she have not foreseen his mother’s death? She has clearly been controlling Sterling from afar, clearly aware of events before they transpire, events… like Bolt’s death.

  His moment of epiphany is most unpleasant in its implications.

  There he was, lying in the South with his ass thoroughly kicked and with about as much hope as a three-legged, stepped-on, stinger-less scorpion when Halo manipulated him into finding Bolt. He didn’t even have to look – Bolt was right there. Halo said that the kid would help and… the kid helped by getting killed.

  ‘No… ’ He shifts his gaze to Bolt’s grave. ‘No… just not possible.’

  But he knows in his heart that it’s true, that it is possible, more – it’s probable and highly likely. After all, why would he need Bolt in the first place? He wouldn’t have been any good in a fight. No, Halo wanted Sterling to bring him along so the kid could get his neck snapped by the metal man, so Sterling could survive. After all, how could he have taken on two metal men by himself? Just one is damn near impossible to take down.

  ‘Bitch… ’ he growls, as he gets back to his feet. He kicks a rock, listens as it rattles away. She’s using her powers to decide who lives and who dies, like she’s some kind of Goddess or something. How long until she uses up Sterling, or even worse, Beige?

  He’s sure of it now – she expended Bolt’s life to save his, because he’s the more useful tool – and that’s just the start of her malfeasance. She used Bolt and Sterling to escape from the Church of the South; she used Bolt to save Sterling’s life and then she used Sterling to take her to the Northern Servers, where she used up the Forehead Driller and lied about what shutting down the servers down would do, claiming that it would simply cause some confusion.

  ‘Confusion my ass,’ he says, imagining the slaughter and chaos at the Great Demarcator that was going on right now.

  A Blackout came – not her doing, probably – and they took shelter at the Forehead Driller’s place, where she made him fall asleep until well after the Blackout lifted. He could have easily navigated what was left of the storm and been home in time to save his mother and sister if Halo hadn’t delayed him.

  Why would she do that?

  Sterling turns back to his home, stops, tries to collect and order his thoughts. The notion that his mother’s death and his sister’s rape could have been prevented boils in his brain. Surely Halo knew; surely something could have been done. And Bolt’s life could have been spared as well.

  And what about their current plan – her current plan? How much of this is his own choice anyway – to dress up in an OL Officer uniform that doesn’t fit and deliver Halo and his sister to the Off Limits as prisoners? The more he thinks about it, the more it appears to be nothing more than an elaborate and inconvenient suicide. Since the moment he came home, everything has been cloudy and opaque, dream-like and surreal. Does that fact that he’s figuring this out mean that she doesn’t completely control him, or is this just an illusion of free choice?

  ‘Well, are you?’ he asks aloud. ‘Are you controlling me?’

  He gives her a moment to respond, gets the overwhelming sense that Halo is fucking with h
im.

  ‘Damn you… ’ Sterling unslings the clubbing stick, hefts it in his left hand and squeezes the grip.

  He storms back into his home and beelines to his sister’s bedroom. Halo sits on the bed, naked, while Beige runs a sponge over her shoulders. As soon as he enters, his sister stops sponging and obediently sits next to Halo and places her head on the Southern Goddess’ shoulder.

  She smiles up at Sterling, eyes vacant and unblinking.

  ‘Get out,’ he tells her. ‘And… get away from her!’

  Beige doesn’t respond, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that she’s under Halo’s control.

  ‘Halo, I’m fucking warning you here,’ he says with his clubbing stick pointed at her. ‘I’m not going to let you manipulate ME OR MY FAMILY any longer! Got that? Leave, Beige.’

  ‘You can say whatever you’d like with her here,’ Beige says in a voice not her own.

  Sterling gulps; icy fingers prickle his scalp as his sister’s mouth moves and another’s voice issues from her. He recovers and steps towards Halo only to run into the invisible wall.

  ‘Dammit!’ he strikes with his clubbing stick and it stops in mid-air. The impact makes no sound, but it’s just as if he’d swung full force into the canyon wall. The stinging, tingling pain that shoots up both arms only makes him angrier.

  .2.

  Sterling bellows and roars and smashes the invisible wall again and again. Halo waits for him to work through his tantrum.

  ‘Why are you so angry?’ his sister asks in that strange voice.

  He leans on his clubbing stick and gasps for breath. ‘Don’t… don’t do that,’ he mumbles at Halo. ‘Don’t use my sister to talk to me!’

  ‘I’m practicing.’

  ‘Leave Beige out of this, dammit!’

  His sister nuzzles her head further onto Halo’s shoulder. He’s still too angry to even glance at her breasts or the thin bit of cloth tucked between her legs. Normally, his eyes would be all over both places uniquely woman – but not now.