Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

In Emmett’s memory of the incident, time had slowed down.

  “Fuck,” both he and the CO trainer assigned to Beast said at the same time, the word elongated and its pitch lowered by the time shift. Emmett then watched in excruciating detail as the CO trainer lunged with his pole-like PharmaJet weapon and dosed the berserker in the shoulder. Beast didn’t even notice the injection going in, his focus had been so sharp on getting a hold on Borman.

  Time jumped back into gear and in the next blink of Emmett’s dreaming eye, Beast had swung the Nazi up into the ceiling and jerked him back down like a towel being snapped in a boys’ locker room. Then the monster had turned and charged at the next closest person, which of course had been Emmett.

  He’d tried to leap out of the way behind the desk with the computer, but his merely mortal speed had just not been enough to escape being swatted down by one of Beast’s huge, overly muscular hands.

  Emmett went crashing to the floor, his head hitting the ground hard, his mind shifting to an old memory like a 45 skipping to a new song.

  * * *

  “What do we do?!” Susan screamed at him.

  It was over a decade earlier, in the old farmhouse on the High Road in Cornish, Maine, and everything was going wrong. Emmett, a cell phone to his ear, had been on the phone with Dr. Weiss trying to figure out exactly that. The doctor had asked if Susan was bleeding, which she was.

  “But there’s not . . . I mean there’s . . . there is some blood, but not a lot,” he said as he watched his wife groaning and twisting next to the toilet with one hand on the sink and the other on the lid. She wore a man’s undershirt (Emmett’s), and the reddest blood Emmett had ever seen was trickling down her leg in a long thin line.

  “We’re losing it . . .” Susan said between breaths. Defeated. Exhausted.

  “Not necessarily. Some folks get cramps. You’ve spotted before—” Emmett started to say, but a huge racking half sob, half sigh came out of Susan’s mouth, cutting him off, as she’d dropped heavily to the floor.

  “Can we see him tomorrow?” she breathed.

  “Can we see you tomorrow?” he asked Dr. Weiss on the other end of the line. And of course they were able to, first thing. “Nine?” Emmett had asked.

  Susan nodded. Then, suddenly, she flung the toilet seat up and vomited into it.

  “Morning sickness. That’s a good sign,” Emmett said, trying to comfort her.

  Susan breathed heavily and just looked at him. She wanted to believe him. Dr. Weiss, still on the other end of the line, remained silent.

  “I feel better . . .” Susan said. She slowly stood, leaving a bloody mess on the tile beneath her.

  Emmett was listening to Dr. Weiss’s reply and relaying the message to his wife. “Dr. Weiss says it could still be okay, he—”

  But then something had caught Emmett’s eye in the blood on the floor. In his heart he knew what it was, though he couldn’t understand it. As his vision tunneled, he’d put the phone on the counter and reached for it.

  “Is that . . . the baby?” Susan asked in horror, as her husband delicately scooped up a chunk of jelly-like human tissue from the floor.

  It was.

  Emmett turned to the sink and caught his eyes in his reflection. On the other side of the bathroom mirror he could see the prison library, and Beast flinging a computer monitor through the glass separating his dreams, shattering it to pieces. His home in Cornish vanished down the abyss of his mind once again—at least for now.

  * * *

  His notebooks lay open on the old carpeted floor next to him, their ripped pages strewn about like leaves hit by the first winds of winter. Emerging from one nightmare right back into the other, he scampered to gather them. Beast had been subdued by the dose his trainer had hit him with in the shoulder, and Black Jesus was now busy pulling the female CO, as well as a couple additional officers who’d shown up for the fun, off the unconscious Beast, as they continued to stab him with their PharmaJets.

  The angry hiss of the heavy-duty tranquilizers being injected into Beast over and over again—even after he had been clearly put down—was testament to how little Black Jesus had actually been able to stop the abuse he witnessed on a daily basis.

  With Beast subdued and his precious notes now gathered up, Emmett took a second and surveyed the damage. It looked like a bomb had gone off in the library. Borman and one of his Hitler-wannabe provokers had looked pretty dead. Emmett surmised that prison Nazis tend not to be a particularly emotionally bonded group, because the one who remained alive and whole looked, at best, merely disappointed by the demise of his captain and presumptive friend.

  Emmett wanted to punch the guy in the face, but he didn’t. Instead he said, lamely, “I needed that computer, you fucking asshole.”

  “Why, Kessler? Nobody’s gettin’ outta here. Ain’t you watchin’ the news? Staff’s just gonna stop showin’ up soon ’nuf. We all gonna rot. Whatever ya stupid project is, it ain’t gonna do ya no fuckin’ good.”

  Emmett turned and looked at the officers standing around Beast, like big-game hunters still high from their kill. Sure, he’d seen what was happening at other prisons on the news just like the Nazi had, but those had felt like isolated incidents. Of course, the future would ride in on such isolated incidents—he could still remember when berserkers had been considered just isolated incidents—but the idea that the prison would shut down and they would just be left there to die seemed too outrageous at the time to be creditable.

  Emmett had missed the fact that over six hundred inmates had been left in filthy chest-high water for four days at the Parish Prison Compound in New Orleans after the staff fled for safety during Hurricane Katrina. And he’d missed the controversy over the fact that Riker’s Island in New York, which held more than twelve thousand prisoners, some of whom were just awaiting trial and had not even been convicted of a crime yet, didn’t have an evacuation plan in place in the event of an emergency.

  Had Emmett been aware of the long history of correctional institutions’ abandoning inmates to their deaths during natural disasters, he might have reconsidered his stance on what was creditable and what was bullshit. He might even have changed his mind and filed for a last-minute appeal, if it wasn’t already too late. (It was.) But he wasn’t aware.

  He was going to find out the hard way soon enough.

  “Don’t eyeball me, convict. Pick Mr. DuPont up with your friend there and get him back to the pod,” Black Jesus told him.

  “You provoke him again and I’ll shoot both of you stupid pieces of shit in the head,” the female CO added, pulling her service weapon and pointing it at Emmett. Black Jesus seemed visibly dismayed by her threat, but his insistence that such language and posturing was unnecessary had been met only with ridicule.

  “I didn’t—” Emmett had started to say.

  “Don’t talk back to the lady, inmate,” the woman’s would-be co-adulterer shot back at him before he could finish, not about to miss an opportunity to get himself into her good graces—and by extension, into her pants as well. From the way her smile beamed back at him, Emmett had been pretty sure it had worked.

  Not that it mattered.

  The CO trainer, whose name Emmett’s dream-state mind now couldn’t recall, must have not liked the smirk on Emmett’s face, because he’d smacked him in the head with a vicious swing of his now empty eight-foot PharmaJet pole.

  The blow transcended the dream, and knocked Emmett awake with a start and a cry.

  * * *

  Captain Waters was exhausted. His clientele were now all accounted for in their new living arrangements. All safe. All healthy. And he was confident he could keep them that way.

  He had decided to move into C Block himself. The small town of Warren, Maine, was still probably safe enough to scavenge in, but the chaos of the cities had been spreading. Every second exposed would be another chance for some asshole to show up and try to take what he had. Black Jesus had no interest in looking for trouble, or in making it
easier for trouble to find him.

  It was now a few months since the nukes had gone off, and everything had gone to hell in a handbasket faster than he’d have thought possible—a fact he had no intention of telling any of his clients. He figured the prison was probably the safest place to be at the moment. It seemed secure and defendable. He had an industrial pantry still half-full of food, and, now that only C Block was using power, enough diesel to keep the emergency generator going for weeks, so long as he rationed the electricity like he had been rationing food.

  Although he was acutely aware that the obligation to perform his duty as a corrections officer was pretty much only in his head now that the world had ended, and that he was probably crazy not to just walk away like all those other cats, he’d never felt better about anything he’d done in his life than he had about his commitment to seeing that his men finished their sentences.

  Besides, he thought, he probably stood a better chance of surviving by just continuing to carry out his duties here in the prison than his colleagues did out there in the shit.

  But of course, he was wrong.

  Chapter Three

  The Pedophiles at Walmart

  Bobby-Leigh and Jennifer fled up Iowa Highway 1 toward their dead uncle’s farm, figuring it was empty and would provide them a safe place to regroup. The idea that the land and farm and all the promise it held no longer belonged to them hadn’t so much as crossed their minds.

  While possession had been nine-tenths of the law back when the rule of law still had some sway over folks, now, that nine-tenths belonged not to possession, or deeds, or proof of purchase, or anything else to do with owning something. Now it came down to just firepower. Possession, paperwork, and legalese were things of the past, as was the girls’ time on the farm. Even if they’d stayed there, they wouldn’t have had a means to keep it; the fact that their uncle Allen had built the house from the ground up, cultivated the land, and owned a piece of paper in a safety deposit box somewhere in town that said it was still his meant nothing.

  They’d been sheltered, first by their uncle and then by Brennachecke’s group, for so long that they’d missed a fundamental shift in the landscape of what used to be called society—a landscape that was now made up of whatever was left over after folks lost what remained of their collective humanity.

  The yogi and the old soldier had been like fathers to the girls, and in this new world of horrors, the men had done what all fathers of little girls have done since the beginning of all this: they kept them from knowing the full extent of the depravity that was sweeping across land and sea as much as they possibly could. Traveling rape camps and small bands of cannibals were the least of the plagues to be avoided—and the least of the things both men had kept the existence of as secret as they could.

  The girls just didn’t need to know how bad the world had gotten. They didn’t need to constantly live in fear of their fellow man. It was enough that anybody you saw—stranger, friend, enemy, lover, sister—any of them could be a berserker and be triggered into a deadly violent rage so powerful it would obliterate any connection you had and get you killed just for being nearby.

  So when the rumors and whisperings of something being out there that even berserkers were afraid of started floating in on the breeze, they’d kept the girls in the dark, for their own good. Or at least that’s what both men had told themselves at the time.

  Unfortunately those sentiments were just sexism in disguise. Ignorance was not bliss. Ignorance was dangerous. Thanks to the girl’s uncle and Brennachecke, they were now out in the wild completely ignorant and utterly unprepared for what they were about to face. All because their benefactors had failed to warn them about blood pirates.

  A transfusion gone wrong—or right, depending on how you looked at it—had revealed the secret not long after the nukes had shut civilization down like cops showing up at a high school party. Who was giving blood to whom, why and where, had been lost to the wind, but word of mouth about the effects of injecting berserker blood into a non-berserker’s bloodstream traveled far and wide, and fast.

  The metamorphosis from human to berserker was still not very well understood. HGF was really just a generic term for something in the blood that made people radically stronger and faster. The truth was that nobody understood why or how this worked. Not that it mattered, because nobody really cared about the whys and hows of much of anything anymore. Maybe folks never really had. They had data. They had results. During an apocalypse, that was more than most folk felt they could hope for.

  It wasn’t even clear that it was the HGF in the berserker blood that basically turned it into a PCP-laced drink from the Fountain of Youth when swapped out for human blood in a normal person. And there was no satisfactory scientific explanation for how it restored and rejuvenated regular human flesh like a touch from God, and sent normal brains on a rocket ride up into the higher realms of perception. (At least, that’s how folks described it—not that there were any rockets being launched anymore to compare the experience to.) Yet a pint of O-negative berserker blood was worth more than just killing for. (Just about anything was worth that—a Twinkie, a shower, two AA batteries; things that were worth killing for were a dime a dozen.) For men and women who bought, sold, or swapped it, O-negative berserker blood was worth cutting your own leg off for—maybe even your arm too—especially if the blood had been taken during an episode, which for some reason made the effects even stronger.

  The men and women (though mostly men) who hunted berserkers for their blood tended to be the worst of what was left of us. Blood pirates generally didn’t bother testing blood for HGF. That took too much time and required at least a little knowledge of hematology—plus it was a lot less fun. Instead, what most of the pirate outfits did was capture potential stock and torture them. Any berserkers in the mix would inevitably berserk out and would then be separated to be bled, and anybody who didn’t turn out to be a berserker got to provide some entertainment. Either way the pirates won. The whole operation was savage, dangerous, and bloody.

  Obviously it would have been easier to hunt only the berserkers who had changed physically enough to be visually identified—and those poor bastards did certainly get hunted. But for the evil motherfuckers who were drawn to this particular trade, the satisfaction of torturing, raping, and slaughtering their own kind as part of their search was more than enough compensation for the dangers inherent in pursuing less obvious targets to harvest blood.

  Jennifer and Bobby-Leigh didn’t know any of this as they headed up 2nd Street, under the railroad bridge and past the old all-natural and organic foods grocery once called Everybody’s, whose shelves had long since been looted. They had no idea where Brennachecke’s group was, but both girls knew they were still out there looking for them. Folks had time for things like hunting down women and children these days. In fact, most days, life during the apocalypse was pretty boring for scavenger groups like Brennachecke’s. The world wasn’t so far gone yet. Food, gas, ammo: these could still be found without too much effort—maybe not in stores like Everybody’s so much anymore, but certainly in the stockpiles left inside folks’ homes. Scavenging was the most popular of activities. But there were also groups out there that were farming. There was trade. But mostly there was violence. Groups of marauders roamed like packs of rabid dogs from town to town. Farmers protected their crops with automatic weapons and booby traps. Scavengers stayed on the move.

  Farmer.

  Scavenger.

  Marauder.

  Dead.

  Those were the options. All folks were one or another. There was no gray area. No in between. No exceptions. At least that’s how it had felt to Jen and Bobby-Leigh’s uncle, Allen Grant Kessler, who had he lived would have been forty-two, a decade younger than Emmett.

  He had been a farmer of organic, sustainably produced, and overpriced non-GMO crops before the power permanently failed in town. He’d then moved with the girls off his own land to join forces with some
of his better-armed neighbors once nukes got set off and the locals’ remaining hope ran dry.

  But lawlessness swept across the county like a storm, and “better-armed” had turned out to really just mean you were more likely to get noticed. Realizing this, Allen gave up farming altogether and moved on with the girls, though it didn’t save him in the end. On his first official scavenge he’d been murdered trying to protect a pack of Twinkies and a single can of Diet Coke he’d found and intended to surprise Jen with for her birthday. With nowhere else to go, the girls found themselves passed unceremoniously into Brennachecke’s care.

  Meanwhile, in a stand so short it hardly counted, the farming collective they’d joined was burned to the ground and its people scattered or killed. Even though the girls had not witnessed the latter event with their own eyes, they’d certainly heard all about it. A small town is still a small town, even after the end of the world has driven most of the people elsewhere. News traveled and secrets were hard to keep.

  Allen’s old farm was still standing. The problem was that it was almost ten miles outside of town. Jennifer had found enough food in a back pantry of Revelations to sustain her, but she was still basically naked. Even though it was summer, an odd cold front had moved in overnight and now lingered suspiciously, sucking away at the usual heat this time of year and making it feel like winter.

  Jen was shivering uncontrollably by the time they came up on the apartment dorms of the Maharishi University of Management, off 4th Street, where the girls took their chance to get out of the open and find Jen some clothes and maybe some more food. Across from them, on the north side of the campus, the golden men’s meditation dome still stood relatively untouched. Although, without the thousand or so residents and student practitioners who once worked, studied, and participated in the Transcendental Meditation movement centered around the campus, the huge structure, as well as the women’s dome behind it, was now just an empty shell.