Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  “Eric,” Eric said and held out his hand.

  “I know that, silly,” she said, but shook his hand just the same.

  “I used to know another little girl like you,” Eric said. “Well, not like you, but your age.”

  “Yeah, I know. Bobby-Leigh.”

  “Of course you do,” Eric said, still confounded by the reach of Anoona’s people’s technology and surveillance. Behind them, the door opened, but Eric didn’t hear anybody come out.

  “Your dad’s alive. So are the Kessler girls, at least for now, though it seems your dad actually beat the ladies to Vedic City,” Tiny said from behind him. Eric looked up at him, wondering how such a big guy could move so quietly, but grateful for the information just the same—though he was so emotionally drained from the last twenty-four hours that his face hardly showed it.

  “Just thought you’d wanna know,” Tiny said with a twinge of disappointment in his voice. He’d at least thought the man would ask how he knew what he knew.

  Tiny was very good at what he did, but that didn’t mean he didn’t still crave affirmation. The fact was that Tiny’s self-esteem was almost entirely dependent on the approval of others—approval he hardly ever seemed to get, it felt like. He found himself trying to remember if there were any Little Debbie snacks (Star Crunches, preferably) left in his secret stash, but he didn’t think so. He’d already pilfered the various cases of snacks Sarah and Rachel had brought in years ago to the point that he dared not take anything else, lest somebody notice that he was hoarding food. Anoona and Hamm wouldn’t really care, he thought. It’s not like they’d try to punish him, or banish him, or anything like that. He was irreplaceable and he knew it. It was just the potential disapproval he’d have to face if they found out . . . They’d want to sit down and talk about it, and he just couldn’t take that kind of humiliation. But—

  “We got a couple cases of Little Debbies in the pantry if—”

  “Tiny!” Marinda said, cutting him off with a tone that wonderfully imitated adult disappointment. “Remember that Mom said sugar turns you into a snapping turtle? Remember?”

  Eric smiled in spite of his private dark thoughts.

  Tiny said, “You ever hear the expression ‘Feed the pain,’ Mari? It’s what Americans do. And, it’s not for me, okay? Our boy Eric here looks like he needs some cheering up, and—”

  “I heard Mom and Hamm joking about feeding the candida. Is that the same thing?”

  Tiny snorted and rubbed his forehead.

  “Look, little girl, everybody knows sweets are comforting when you’re sad. Do you want him to be sad?”

  “No.”

  “It’s okay, I’m fine,” Eric started to say, but Tiny cut him off to continue his argument with the twelve-year-old.

  “His brother just died like two days ago. We have snack cakes. What’s the problem?”

  She looked up at him disapprovingly. Tiny stared her down right back. What kind of kid is against eating snack cakes?

  “Tiny, if you eat a Little Debbie, I’m going have to tell Mom.”

  “Or,” Tiny said with a huge smile, “you could just have one too.”

  “No,” the little girl said, hopping to her feet and heading inside. “I don’t think that’d be right.”

  Tiny made an exaggerated whatever gesture with his arms that shook his whole body. In his mind, he was already forming the various responses he could give if Anoona, or Hamm, or anybody gave him shit about offering one of their new friends a little piece of individually wrapped sugary goodness. Fucking food Nazis.

  Eric didn’t even know what a Little Debbie was, but the insight into the power dynamics of the group was fascinating. Anoona’s crew seemed like a big, though slightly dysfunctional, family. He supposed he and his group were lucky to have been adopted by them, especially considering the alternative, but the sloppiness of the hierarchy and chain of command just made him miss his father more. If his father said you couldn’t have a snack cake, then you didn’t eat a snack cake. But at the same time, Brennachecke would never have bothered to dictate what you should or should not eat, except maybe indirectly through the fact that he set the priorities for scavenging and snack cakes would have never made it onto the get list. Maybe there was more merit to the whole military chain of command, iron fist of authority thing than he’d thought.

  “Seriously, though, we do have snack cakes if you’re interested,” Tiny said once Mari was out of earshot.

  “Are they that good?”

  “Oh my goodness, man. Have you never had anything by Little Debbie?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Tiny clamped him on the shoulder with one of his fat-fingered hands and squeezed. The big man’s conspiratorial grin was infectious already, but it was the way he nodded his head, somehow both saddened by Eric’s lack of experience with the power of high-fructose corn syrup–infused sweets and ecstatic at the possibility of sharing something he desired so much with somebody who may just appreciate it as much as he did, that made Eric actually laugh.

  “Eric, my new friend, I’m about to show you what civilization actually tasted like before . . .” He paused, looking for just the right word.

  “The flavor apocalypse?” Eric suggested.

  “Oh, I like you, buddy.” Tiny squealed like an excited schoolboy. “I fucking like you, man!”

  Chapter Eight

  The Blood Queen in the Cashmere Robe

  Bobby-Leigh looked at her sister and smiled with a sad but overwhelming sense of pride. Jennifer had not berserked out (yet). Things were steadily snowballing from worst to whatever was worse than worst, but her sister was still in control. Sure, she was now huddled in the corner of the cage, still caught up in the now loose netting that had been used to drag them into the van for transport to Vedic City. Sure, she was mumbling what Bobby-Leigh assumed was her TM mantra like a crazy person. Sure, her eyes were squeezed shut, as if she believed that what she couldn’t see couldn’t hurt her—something both of them knew was absolutely not true. Sure, she was sweating even though it was cold enough to be snowing outside. But none of that mattered; she was still in control and that was amazing. More than amazing, it was a testament to how much Jennifer loved her sister, because if she did lose it while tangled in the cable net inside this homemade reinforced and barred metal crate, Bobby-Leigh was sure to die.

  When they arrived in Vedic City and the van’s rear doors opened, the sisters found themselves in a small field looking out at a large pond. The Raj was directly behind them, though they couldn’t see it yet. One of the pirates smiled hungrily at Jen as he waited for the big forklift, its poorly maintained gasoline engine roaring and smoking, to pull the cage from the van and drop it onto the grass. The two pirates who’d driven in with them started to pull the metal net off the girls right through the bars and repacked it in the van with the efficiency and well-practiced skill of men who’d done it enough times to leave most of the task to muscle memory.

  “There’s no way you’re going to get to,” one of the netting pirates, a man with a long beard and black hair, said, continuing a conversation they’d obviously started earlier as they worked.

  “Oh, there’s a way,” the beardless one replied.

  “How?”

  “Maybe I’ll just ask.”

  “You’ll just ask?”

  “Yeah, why not?

  “You don’t think they’ve already got their own plan for who gets to and who doesn’t?”

  “Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t.”

  “Maybe you’re an idiot.”

  “Are you saying you don’t want to do it?”

  “Of course I want to do it. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to get to do it.”

  “We’ve been here for three years. If anybody is going to get to do it, it should be the people who’ve been here the longest.”

  “Maybe it should be, but it never works that way.”

  “I know! That’s why I’m going to ask.”


  “Mmm, I think there’s a reason they’re not asking for volunteers.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe there’s some kind of physical requirement or something.”

  “To fly? I don’t think so, except maybe eyesight or weight, which wouldn’t matter for me.”

  “What, you’ve got some kind of perfect vision?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, man. I got 20/20 in both eyes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I got tested in school, man.”

  “What if it’s changed since then?” the long-bearded pirate said, slamming the rear doors of the van and moving to get into the driver’s seat.

  “It hasn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do,” Beardless said as he jumped into the passenger seat and closed the door, ending their conversation, or at least the girls’ ability to overhear it. When the van sped off, only the forklift driver and the pirate lecherously staring at Jen were left.

  The girls now had a much better view of where they were. Theirs was not the only cage out there on the grass. There were rows and rows of them. Some were stacked two high. Some were broken open and dragged haphazardly out of the ordered lines and off to a pile on the side. Some were empty. But some of them were occupied with folks snatched off Highway 1 just like them.

  Maybe I’ll have a chance if I just curl up in the corner and play dead, Bobby-Leigh thought. If it came to it this was exactly what she planned on doing, but a chance was just that: one chance in maybe a hundred. Maybe a thousand. She didn’t like those odds very much, but the only other alternative she really had would be to murder her sister with the karambit before she berserked out.

  Jen had made Bobby-Leigh promise to do just that if a situation like this ever came up, and to the little girl’s credit she’d almost done it less than seventy-two hours ago in the dumpster, after Jennifer had thrashed the boy she loved to death. But in that dumpster, Bobby-Leigh now realized, she’d learned something very important about herself: she simply didn’t have what it took to slit her own sister’s throat to save herself. She’d had the chance to open her sister’s jugular and had hesitated. If Jen had berserked out then, Bobby-Leigh would have missed her opportunity to put her down and save herself. But the fact was that Jen hadn’t berserked out. So if Bobby-Leigh had drawn her blade across her sister’s throat, ending her life, she’d have killed her for nothing.

  So if things did escalate, her only real option was going to be to play dead, and then most likely become dead for real, which just sucked. What sucked even worse was knowing that she would be leaving the aftermath of her broken promise behind with her body for Jen to deal with. Bobby-Leigh hated that part of the plan significantly more than the part where she more than likely died.

  The two men guarding them laughed in the way men who are about to do something evil laugh, drawing Bobby-Leigh out of her deliberations. The little girl watched helplessly as the perverted-looking one leaned into the bars behind Jennifer, suddenly grabbed her breasts, and used them as handholds to pull her back against the bars. Squeezing them roughly, the man then stuck out his big fat tongue and sloppily licked Jen’s ear.

  “You wanna watch what I’m going to do to your sister?” he hissed.

  Jen’s eyes flashed open and her pupils suddenly dilated until the pretty green of her eyes was almost completely gone. Her body twitched as she struggled against her instincts and the sweet oblivion of berserker rage that threatened to overwhelm her, the coping and management strategies that had gotten her this far breaking down and falling apart around her head.

  This was about the time Bobby-Leigh would need to slip in and position her blade against her sister’s throat if she was going to do it. But the little sister didn’t move, not only because she didn’t have it in her to fulfill her promise, but because she also didn’t want to reveal to the motherfuckers threatening to rape them that she had a knife hidden away with her.

  But she had to do something.

  Bobby-Leigh launched herself at the man assaulting her sister through the bars of their cage, convinced it would be the last thing she would ever do. As her mouth opened and her teeth sank into the meat of his exposed arm, she stole a sideways glance up at Jen’s eyes and was amazed to see her pupils had contracted back to normal size. She was regaining control. She didn’t know how Jen was doing it, but the results spoke for themselves.

  While Bobby-Leigh’s teeth were clamped down on her assaulter’s flesh with all the strength she had in her, Jen suddenly thrust herself forward and twisted around. The man’s grip, loosened by pain, was broken and Jen rocketed free from his lecherous touch, retreating to the center of the cage, out of reach.

  Taking her sister’s lead, Bobby-Leigh lunged for the middle of the cage too, but she didn’t release her jaw’s vicelike grip on the man’s arm when she moved. The flesh tore with a wet, tacky sound and by the time the would-be rapist had a chance to process what was happening, a seven-inch strip of flesh from his forearm had been ripped off. He fell back onto his ass and just stared at the two girls in barely comprehending horror as he held his bloody limb against his body. It was several seconds before the shock wore off enough for him to even scream.

  But scream he did. It was shrill and loud and sad, not that the girls had any pity for the bastard. It also drew a crowd. In what felt like seconds, their cage was surrounded by men laughing and jeering as much at their fallen comrade as they were at the girls huddled together just out of arm’s reach on the other side of the bars. Nobody helped the injured man up. Nobody saw to his wound. In this broken society of jackals, there was no place for sympathy, no place for mercy, and certainly no place for weakness.

  “You fucking idiot!”

  A large red-bearded pirate howled at the wounded pervert as he kicked him brutally over and over again in the legs and back until the suffering man managed to scuttle back and up to his feet. The crowd laughed and jeered at the indignation while they shoved, punched, and pushed the bleeding pirate as he attempted to flee to safety. Once he was gone, however, there was nothing to occupy the evil bastards’ attention except for Bobby-Leigh and her sister.

  Jen looked at Bobby-Leigh and smiled as if there was not a mad, depraved mob of rapists and murderers surrounding them.

  “You’re amazing,” she said.

  Bobby-Leigh didn’t know how to respond. It was impossible to focus with all the catcalls and violent threats being hurled at them. She didn’t know how Jen was doing it, but she did know that whatever it was she was doing to keep calm in the middle of this was the reason she was not berserking out. You’re the one who’s amazing, she thought, seconds before a man’s hand found one of the rings on Bobby-Leigh’s dog collar choker and snapped a chain on her.

  Is that a fucking leash? was all she had time to think before it was yanked and back she tumbled toward the bars. In the next seconds, the leash got help. First one strong hand grabbed her. Then the one became two, then three, then four, until there were so many hands pawing at her she couldn’t isolate them individually anymore. They pinned her hands up against the bars before she could get her secret weapon out. They pinched and squeezed. They poked. Her jumper-skirt was ripping. Fingers were staring to push their way toward places she did not want fingers to go.

  Jennifer’s eerie, almost creepy calmness no longer seemed so amazing to Bobby-Leigh. Suddenly that calm smile seemed more dangerous to her than if her sister had lost control and berserked out right then and there. As the hands of the men tore at her, intent on violating anything of the little girl’s they could get inside of, Jennifer watched from her happy place as if she had no intention of helping. Humiliated and seconds away from being violated right there through the bars, Bobby-Leigh thought she understood the horrible truth behind those brilliant-green eyes—there was simply nothing her sister could do for her at this time. She felt erect penises brush and bump into her now expos
ed skin from behind. Her panties were ripped away. Bobby-Leigh closed her eyes and screamed.

  * * *

  It had taken Jennifer a long time to finally find her way to a place of transcendence above the physical brutality she and her sister were up against. She’d stepped outside herself as the cable netting closed around them back out on Highway 1, but it wasn’t enough to keep the monster inside her in check for long. She could feel the chemistry of her body shifting and stirring, trying to wake up the blinding rage that would wash out all other experiences for her until it had run its course.

  The part of her mind that was still connected to her body was meditating like she had been for years. That was the easy part, the familiar part, the part she knew the limits of. But there was more to what she’d been learning than basic Transcendental Meditation, and this was the first time she’d really had a chance to test the out-of-body self-projection strategies Uncle Allen had suggested she study up on. She’d spent thousands of hours training herself to self-project and could at times certainly achieve something like an out-of-body experience. Unfortunately, every one of those successes had been in a private, calm space. Not under duress. Not tangled in metal cabling. Not en route to Blood City.

  The experience was much like manually focusing a camera lens with a very shallow depth of field. Micro-adjustments of less than a single millimeter would throw the whole image out of focus. Shaky hands. Uncontrolled breathing. A pounding heart. Everything joggled the focus ring. As the net snapped tight and pulled them into the van, Jennifer realized that she’d never achieve and maintain the focus she needed for her self-projection to be successful if she continued to try to do it manually. It was just impossible.

  What she needed to do was find a way to switch this metaphoric camera into autofocus. But there had been nothing that explained how to do that in the books she’d been studying. Nobody she knew of had ever even described the split-body experience she had going for herself right now. Her guidebooks were all like photography books that walked you through how to use a camera and then explained the elements that made a good picture, but never actually described how you connected those two to produce a good picture yourself. Now she was left wondering if maybe good pictures were just accidents.