Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  “Did I tell you he worked with Josef Mengele in Brazil in the fifties? Mengele’s a fucking Nazi war criminal. Just because the world’s gone to shit, that doesn’t mean nobody can be held responsible anymore.”

  “Look who you’re talking to, inmate. And how could you possibly know that anyway?”

  Emmett smiled.

  “Internet. Found an old photo of them together on a site documenting Nazi war crimes. Josef Mengele was a monster, man. He did thousands of human experiments on Jews in concentration camps. But, you know what? My guy, Weiss? Weiss is actually worse. It’s one thing to experiment on folks, but at least the results of Mengele’s work didn’t fuck up the human genome and get passed on for generations and generations to new victims he never even met. Weiss took innocent, unsuspecting families and turned their children into monsters.”

  Black Jesus sighed and shook his head. He was surprised a Nazi-related site, even one just documenting war crimes, hadn’t been flagged and scrubbed by the Department of Justice filters, but just a little—it’s not like this was the first time he’d ever heard of an inmate getting access to questionable content after the DOJ switched over to managed access from the near-absolute ban.

  “That’s not exactly the conclusion I’d draw from what you’ve told me.” He wondered why the man couldn’t just let it go, and then, not for the first time, why he himself couldn’t let go of his not letting go. Why did he care so much about what Emmett thought? Why did he keep engaging? Why didn’t he just walk away like he wanted to?

  “Well, then I must have not told you enough, Captain. Because I learned a lot in the years I’ve been researching this and let me assure you: Weiss is one evil Nazi prick.”

  “Kessler,” Black Jesus began, but considering the cat had steadfastly refused to see the point he was trying to make (again), he decided to attempt a straight-up honest approach, but hoped to soften him up by using the convict’s first name.

  “Emmett. I understand you’re angry at the man, but you came to him. You paid a lot of money and went through a lot of effort to be able to have the two children you have. So even if you’re right about everything, how is Weiss any more responsible for the world than you are yourself? You were the one so desperate for a child of your own that you refused to accept the biological facts of your infertility. Couples like you and Susan were the ones who sought out, paid for, and ensured the evolutionary process was going to be corrupted by technology. You and Susan, her mother and father, the hundreds of thousands of other couples over the years who refused to accept that they could not have children—at the end of the day, it was you cats who created and raised the monsters that laid waste to the world. Quite literally, brother.”

  This honest approach did seem to keep Emmett from getting angry with the captain over what he was saying, but he was past the point of being able to be influenced by such talk—straight up, sideways, or otherwise.

  “Now you’re just being an asshole.”

  “No, brother,” Black Jesus said. “I’m just speaking truth. If you kill that cat when your sentence is up, then by your own logic, don’t you have to kill yourself too? You really think Weiss knew any more than you did? That somehow he was aware you fools were maligning the whole human race’s evolution? I never met the dude, but I’m sure this wasn’t the future he wanted any more than you did. Nobody in his right mind, or even not in his right mind, would have wanted this. So if you’re really some kind of victim here for having been forced to kill your wife, then isn’t he just as much a victim for having inadvertently, accidently, unintentionally made her a berserker?”

  “First of all, he is not a victim. Not in any way, shape, or form. And just to be clear, sir, I am not a victim because I put down my wife. I am a victim because when Susan and I, and everybody else who was part of this, when we were dying of thirst in the desert for a child of our own, Weiss poisoned the fucking water in the well and then told all of us we could drink it. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Captain, somebody has to hold the man accountable,” Emmett said, then added, “I would have thought you’d understand, you holding me accountable in here and all.”

  “Apples and oranges, convict,” Black Jesus said, finally able to pull himself away from the conversation. He’d tried to be softer this time, but he’d still probably been harsher than he should have if he really wanted to get through to the fool. The inmate was clearly dealing with a huge amount of guilt over what he’d done to his wife. He was just trying to help the man. But he could have been gentler. Should have been gentler.

  This is probably why they weren’t supposed to talk to the inmates in the first place, he thought, a split second before—

  KA-boom!

  The explosion shook the building to the very foundation and caught them all completely by surprise. There was a long ear-ringing second of stunned silence throughout B Block, and then the screaming started.

  Instantly Waters regretted pairing berserker inmates with the regular convicts. What had been a precaution to keep those he couldn’t trust in line quickly turned into a bloodbath when the block was breached and started filling with smoke. Before Black Jesus could see any of the men attacking the prison from the outside, he had twenty convicts beaten to death by their berserker cellmates, their horrible screams for help rattling almost as loud as the sounds of their bodies being smashed, ripped, and thrown, until one by one they were cut short.

  Those deaths are on me, he thought as he raced to his makeshift armory, past the carnage and rattling cells being destroyed by the out-of-control raging demons inside.

  The air was colder outside than in. The warm air pushed the smoke out of the hole made by the explosion and cleared the visibility inside enough for him to just barely make things out. Finally, he got his first look at the men breaking into his prison. They seemed to be in uniforms of some kind.

  Army? he wondered. Probably not, up here in Maine. Private security was more like it. Rent-a-Cops turned rogue militia.

  Captain Waters saw five men advancing in a standard cover formation through the haze, past the burning Ford cargo van they must have use as an IED for their breach. Slowly the fire inside the building overtook the physics of the vacuum drawing the smoke outside, and the fumes started to lazily shift direction. He smelled ammonium, which meant it was a homemade bomb, most likely.

  Definitely not military, he thought. The Rent-a-Cops had automatic shotguns, not machine guns, and, well, the military didn’t really do shotguns.

  They still knew what they were doing enough to be dangerous, for sure. But if they didn’t have access to the resources of professional soldiers, maybe he had a chance, even though he’d been caught with his metaphoric pants down. Waters’s brain was working quickly.

  Assessing. The smoke was more dangerous than the cats with guns.

  Strategizing. Escaping the smoke was going to require getting past the cats with guns.

  Implementing. He needed to deputize some cats of his own and give them guns.

  He grabbed the milk crate with the gear and weapons he’d set aside for his potential deputies. Deputizing the inmates he felt he could trust was his catchall disaster plan in a nutshell, but there were only four of them in total. Now in the moment, he was suddenly far from convinced this plan was actually a good one. Trusting an inmate not to kill you while he’s locked up is one thing, but letting him out, putting a gun in his hand, and asking him to assist you in defending the prison you and he both knew you were just going to lock him back up in when all was over was asking a lot, to say the least. Yet that was exactly what he was about to do. Black Jesus believed that men would rise to higher expectations if they were given a chance. Maybe not all men, but his chosen four would. Emmett might even rise to the occasion as well, but Waters wasn’t confident enough of that assessment to make him his fifth man. With four deputies and a little (or perhaps a lot of) luck, he’d be able to evacuate the prison and still retain control of it—or so he hoped.

  The milk crate ha
d seven Glock 9mm handguns, stacks of pre-loaded ammo clips, five gas masks, and ten tear gas grenades. The box was heavy. But heavier still were the ever-growing doubts that clouded his vision worse than the smoke now thickening all around him. Pushing the bad thoughts aside as best he could, he headed for the cells of his most trustworthy clients. With each step he tried to convince himself he was prepared (at least on paper) for this exact situation. He’d put his “trusted” men in the cells closest to his so he could arm them quickly if he needed to. But as he unlocked the doors and passed out the weapons and gear, he couldn’t help but chide himself for being a fucking idiot and not factoring in the berserkers’ response to the breach.

  Goddamn it! He should have known better. Kessler had known.

  The man was right when he suggested all the berserkers be housed together. All those convicts are dead because I just—

  Before he could finish the thought a sound drew his attention.

  Crash! Clack-Crash! Clack!

  Three of the berserker cell doors broke open in rapid succession and the monsters came scurrying like rabid bulls toward the smoky light of day that spilled in through the hole in the wall on the north end of the block.

  “Fuck,” Black Jesus breathed. The explosion must have knocked the doors loose.

  Suddenly he was extremely thankful he hadn’t listened to Emmett after all. If all the berserkers had been housed together, he’d probably have more than two dozen monsters smashing everything in their path. And everything would have surely included him.

  He slipped down behind a wall, motioning for his trusted, now-armed deputies to do the same. This new realization didn’t do anything to lessen his responsibility for the deaths of his wards or his guilt about it; that was still on him.

  They waited, trying to be as unnoticeable as they could as they watched the three escaped berserkers move toward the intruding assault team, smashing everything in their path as they crashed forward in a tidal wave of rage. Captain Waters and his band of merry little deputized convicts went unnoticed, but when the Rent-a-Cops with shotguns opened fire without realizing what they were up against, the trio of berserkers certainly noticed them. It only took a few seconds for the squad of assailants Waters had identified to be torn to pieces. Black Jesus wondered if the Rent-a-Cops had even known that there were berserkers incarcerated here. It certainly didn’t seem like it.

  The fire continued to billow and thicken the inside of the large cellblock with its smoky, deadly poison. Black Jesus slipped his gas mask on and motioned for the others to do the same. He’d intended to use the masks in combination with the tear gas he had, but at this point, popping the tear gas would be a waste. Nobody could breathe with all the smoke as it was. Visibility was shit and getting shittier. His whole plan, which had seemed so foolproof on paper, felt like it was falling apart as he pivoted it from a defense plan to an evacuation plan. He estimated they now had only a few minutes left before his entire clientele still behind bars died from asphyxiation. He was already responsible for the deaths of at least twenty of the inmates, plus the berserkers he could hear now being cut down outside. He wasn’t about to be responsible for losing the rest of them.

  Gunfire and screams echoed through the smoke. He heard men on radios and the sound of trucks. The Rent-a-Cop militia was apparently a sizable force.

  This is not going to end well, he thought. Not a chance.

  He turned to the squad of men he’d decided he could trust and handed one of them the keys to the cells. He didn’t know who he’d given them to—everybody looked the same wearing gas masks in the haze—but it didn’t matter, he told himself.

  “Unlock as many of the doors as you can,” he said to the man now holding the keys, but the man just stood there staring at him. “Fuck,” Black Jesus said, snatching the keys back. “Really?”

  The convict raised the gun and pointed it at the CO, the man who had had enough faith in human nature to have put the gun in his hand in the first place—faith that, Black Jesus realized now, was an absolute fucking terrible mistake. Humanity was dead.

  “Really?” Waters said again, still dumbstruck by his disappointment in them. If I get killed by an inmate I put a gun in the hand of, he thought to himself, I’ll fucking kill myself.

  But the inmate didn’t kill him. He just slipped quietly away. The other “trusted” deputies followed the first’s lead without missing a beat. So much for my ability to judge character, Waters thought, not sure if he was happy to still be alive or not.

  Time was ticking. He could decide if he was happy to be alive or not later.

  He ran the opposite way his deputies (now traitors) had gone, toward the occupied solitary cells on the far end of the block, where he’d placed the worst of his human offenders. One by one he opened the concrete and steel cells.

  “Listen to me carefully, convict,” he told them each in turn. “You’re not being released. But this block has been compromised and I cannot keep you safe here. There are armed men coming in from the north side. Avoid them as best you can, but get outside before the smoke gets you. I expect you to meet me in the east yard in one hour. I’ll find you if you don’t.”

  Each convict nodded, not really listening to a word the CO was saying. As soon as the old guard stepped aside, they each made a run for it. Black Jesus didn’t expect to see anybody on the east lawn in an hour, but he still felt obligated to say it. Whether or not he’d hunt anybody down later was not something he was prepared to decide one way or the other at the moment.

  Letting the berserkers out was a whole different ball game. No speeches. No appeals to civil obligations. Just unlocking the cells and letting the raging creatures figure out on their own that the door was open, all while trying to be invisible. That was until he got to Emmett’s cell.

  Wiley was no longer berserk. The cell was trashed, so obviously he had been, but now the big creature was lying in the middle of the floor, snoring. At first Waters didn’t see Emmett at all, but then he spotted him hiding under the iron bed frame, which was half-ripped from its bolts in the wall. It only took a couple seconds to get the door open and Emmett out.

  Bam! Bam-bam-bam!

  The two men looked at each other for longer than they had time for as more gunshots echoed around them, followed by unintelligible shouts.

  Screaming.

  A second explosion.

  Emmett was coughing fiercely in the smoke, but managed to wheeze out the words that would change his relationship with Captain Waters forever.

  “We. Can’t leave. Wiley,” the convict said. Waters had not intended to leave him. In fact, he was actually just about to tell Emmett the exact same thing. Thank God I’m not trying to survive on my ability to judge character, he thought and grinned ironically, because that was exactly what he was trying to do at that moment.

  “Help me get him up,” the CO said, the tone of his voice changed with newfound respect.

  They pulled the big creature up and half carried, half dragged him toward the only exit they had, the hole made from the breach. If Wiley woke and berserked out on them, they’d both be dead before either one could crack corn, so on the list of stupid things that Waters had done today, this would have to be right up there at the top. But it was the right thing to do, and for the first time since everybody had stopped showing up for work and he’d had to run things himself, he was not alone in his conviction of what was right and what was wrong. Black Jesus had been so alone for so long without even realizing it that he was shocked to feel his throat closing and actually had to fight back tears.

  “Wait,” he told Emmett as they were about to pass the cell the CO had turned into his own housing. Waters slipped out from under Wiley and grabbed two more gas masks, a machine gun, two large backpacks and all the PharmaJet doses he had. After quickly injecting Wiley (just to be safe), he squeezed a gas mask onto Beast’s face, then handed the other one to Emmett, plus a backpack, though he did not give the man a gun. He’d already made that mistake toda
y and he wasn’t about to make it again. Emmett didn’t miss a beat. He donned the mask and the pack, then slipped back under Beast. Waters nodded and the men continued toward the exit, unlocking the remaining cells as they went.

  For most folk under the circumstances there wouldn’t have been time for speeches and orders to meet in the east yard in an hour, but Captain Waters was not like most folk. Every convict under his care was explicitly told they were not being released from their debt to society and that they were required to rendezvous with him once it was safe. Emmett could have made things difficult. But the convict just held the bulk of Wiley’s weight on his shoulders and smiled encouragingly as the captain went about doing the closest thing to right he could under the circumstances. Waters wished his deputies had been half as honorable as Emmett had turned out to be. Not for the first time, he wondered what the fuck he was doing.

  * * *

  The Rent-a-Cop army had been a solid fifty or so men strong fifteen minutes ago. But they’d obviously been totally unprepared for the number of raging-out berserkers Black Jesus had locked up in the block. By the time the old CO and Emmett made it outside with Wiley, there was no one left to shoot at them. There were also no convicts standing around waiting to be locked up again. No surprise there. Outside, there were just dead bodies, blood, viscera, abandoned vehicles, and small fires to greet them as they lowered Wiley’s still-unconscious body down to the pavement.

  Emmett counted fourteen berserker corpses, which meant a bunch of them had actually escaped. Good for them! he thought. The purely human convicts didn’t fair quite as well, but he was still pretty sure a lot of them had survived and escaped too. All in all, Black Jesus’s plan to see out the sentences of each and every one of us has to be over, Emmett thought as he took it all in. But then he saw Waters take a logbook out of his pack and start going over the bodies, making notes.

  “What ya doing, CO?” he asked.