Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  “How you doing?” she asked him, painfully aware of how stupid the question was.

  “Still . . . alive,” he croaked.

  “Let’s go! Bobby-Leigh!” she yelled up the stairs.

  Bobby-Leigh came down a changed girl. In the ten minutes she’d been upstairs, she’d found a Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment (the primary and secondary school attached to MUM) plaid uniform skirt. She’d folded it up at the top, making it scandalously short. She’d then added a girl’s dress shirt that was too small in a perfect way and a plaid tie, which she wore just under her ever-present dog collars. Then she’d gone to the bathroom and rimmed her eyes with heavy eyeliner and thick mascara. Blood-red lipstick now lined her mouth. Her red-streaked raven-black hair was now up in pigtails, Pippi Longstocking style. Her legs were clad in knee-high stockings, and her feet were blessed with the pièce de résistance—a pair of neon-blue Doc Martins. Her Lolita-goth image was restored and her confidence had clearly been restored with it. As she pranced down the stairs, she held a huge nickel-plated Colt .45 in one hand and carried three boxes of ammo and her new ax pressed against her chest with the other.

  “Holy shit, dude!” Jen squealed.

  “I know, right?”

  “Brennachecke is fading pretty fast. We better go. I found a sled, though, so we should have a fucking easier time of it.”

  “Can I try the swing before we go?”

  “What?”

  “I want to try the swing.” This was the first time, since Walmart at least, that Bobby-Leigh had ever expressed a desire to do a normal kid thing. Jen smiled. Dog collars notwithstanding, maybe her little sister wasn’t a lost cause after all.

  “Sorry, dude.” The words broke her heart to say, but they just didn’t have time to waste. By now the blood pirates would be up, and the three of them would be pretty easy to track through the snow. Plus Brennachecke was, like, fucking dying.

  “Just five minutes.”

  Jen shook her head, no.

  Bobby-Leigh nodded, her bright smile dampening into a disappointed one. She knew the pirates would probably be coming after them. She knew Brennachecke was literally dying in front of them. This just wasn’t a good time to catch up on her childhood innocence. She understood.

  Brennachecke grunted and cleared his throat, trying to speak but failing at first. Jen and Bobby-Leigh moved to his side so all he would have to do was whisper if he did manage to get the words out.

  “Let her . . . swing,” he croaked at last. “Give me . . . the AR-15. Stand . . . watch with the . . . Colt.”

  “But—” Jen began, then changed her mind and simply nodded to her sister to go ahead. “Five minutes!” she said, and as the next couple hundred seconds passed, Jen stood watch in the snow, Brennachecke bled on the couch, and Bobby-Leigh pumped her legs and transcended it all on the swing.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Army Marching through the Snow

  From the broken balcony doors of the library on the second floor of the Raj, the Man-in-Charge watched the two Kessler twats support his flight instructor as the three of them struggled out through the snow. He stood there in silence, favoring the leg that did not have a bullet in it. The regenerative power of the berserker blood in his system was already working its magic, but he’d need to find the doc anyway just to be safe, because even through the intoxicating fog of berserker blood, he knew the pain from the wound would be intense when he finally felt it. As he stood there alone, the cold morning air rubbing up against him like an annoying cat he’d forgotten to feed, he smiled.

  All the kidnapping, rape, and murder, while certainly entertaining to him and the pirates he ruled over, just didn’t have any real purpose behind it. Sure, they were harvesting blood, but milking monsters was actually pretty fucking boring once you got them penned. The constant blood high for the most part distracted him from the transient pointlessness of his army’s endeavors, but like the missing dull, steady ache that should have been in his leg, he was still aware there was something absent from his experience. Something important.

  But now he had a game afoot. A hunt. A mission of reprisal. A reason to get out of bed in the morning. He looked at Beverly’s body lying almost naked and grotesquely exposed on the library floor. He looked at the arrow sticking out of her like a flagpole staking Brennachecke’s claim on her. He didn’t really care that she was dead. But he did care that the old soldier had had the audacity to think he could get away with killing her. It would have made no difference to him at all that Dan had actually been the one who put the arrow into his whore’s heart. To the MIC, that man was just an extension of Brennachecke. Likewise, it didn’t matter to him that it had been the older of the two bitches who’d slaughtered his men in the hallway. The little cunt was just an extension of the soldier as well. His only interest in Jen was for her blood, and maybe for her body if he was feeling adventurous. He’d fucked a couple of berserkers since he’d taken control of Vedic City, but the amount of preparation and manpower needed to not be hurt in the process took most of the fun out of it. Bragging rights had motivated him, but he’d earned those rights already, so he’d just bleed the bitch, and if he wanted to fuck something he’d just take her little sister instead. He’d be sure to make Brennachecke watch it too, he thought, his cruel smile widening as he finally shut the door against the cold.

  He really needed to put a stop to the running and hiding his men did whenever there was a shooting. He’d been alone now for almost an hour, maybe even longer. He’d have thought the jackals would have been all over the place. Not to help, of course—he knew it wasn’t loyalty that kept them here, only fear and greed—but he’d have thought his men would have been aching to confirm his death and begin the infighting over who would take control. Beverly would have already had the whole lot of them under her thumb by now if it had been his body lying on the ground with an arrow to the chest and her with just the superficial bullet wound to the leg. With that thought, he came as close as he’d ever come to mourning her death. Her treacherousness was part of what had made her so attractive to him in the first place. Unpredictable, cruel, vicious, and utterly driven by her desire for power—she’d been like that from day one. It had been seriously fucking hot.

  Not that it mattered now.

  Not that he really cared about her.

  The Man-in-Charge had cowered with his eyes closed under the oozing, dripping, twitching corpses of his men, trying not to make a sound or even breathe, the entire time Jen had tended to Brennachecke’s arrow wound and waited for Bobby-Leigh to return with food. He’d heard every word of their reconciliation, their planning—that bitch berserker’s pathetic little tears. Stuck there playing dead, not daring for one second to reveal himself until the coast was indisputably clear, he had just waited, willing himself not to move. The lengths he’d have gone to to avoid losing his precious flight instructor were endless in his mind, but actually putting himself in danger was always where he drew the line. So, as he listened to Jennifer’s lips smacking as she crammed peanut butter down her cunt throat, he’d made a plan B.

  The plan was simple. As soon as they were gone, he’d find Beverly, who was undoubtedly dead—she’d been a fighter, not a pragmatist like him, which had certainly sealed her fate—then he would take her to the doc, run blood lines to her veins, hook her up to a battery, cut her chest open, and manually stimulate her heart until enough of the curative berserker blood circulated through her brain to wake her up. He’d seen the procedure done a number of times while he was still in the army, before he’d gone AWOL and come to Fairfield. His platoon leader used it for intelligence extraction. It was super messy, but it had always gotten the interrogator almost five extra minutes with the man in question after he’d been pushed too far and died on them.

  But it’d turned out he didn’t need to resurrect the whore after all. It didn’t matter that she knew where the Kessler farm was. God was smiling on him today. The storm had passed. The snow had stopped. The s
ky was blue. And Brennachecke’s stupid treasonous threesome was now leaving enough tracks behind them in the snow for a blind man to follow.

  * * *

  Tiny looked at the video screen and wondered how far down he could get the drone before the folks with the sled noticed it. In broad daylight he liked to fly at least eight hundred feet above the ground. The angry wasp-like hum of the little electric motors was almost imperceptible at that altitude. Although, most people these days wouldn’t be able to recognize a drone for what it was if they saw one. It’d been years and years since they’d been used commercially or recreationally. The military factions still had some, of course, but those were mostly old Predators and Blackjacks, which were so far beyond what his little JPLs could do specs wise that he always made the distinction of calling them UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and not drones. But just because folks didn’t really know they were out there anymore wouldn’t stop them from taking a shot at one if they saw it hovering above them. Folks who wasted the time it took to wonder what something was before blowing it to hell had died out pretty fast in the US. Tiny couldn’t speak for the rest of the world, but he was pretty sure that nugget was just as true wherever you were.

  So why the hell do we always have to risk identifying folks before we do anything? he wondered with his usual level of internal frustration at everything he wasn’t directly involved in. With a flick of his finger, he sent the imagery to Anoona and Hamm’s glasses.

  “I think it’s the Kessler girls,” he added, and though he spoke the words, the message was sent as text superimposed over the video feed.

  “What’s the ETA?”

  “I can’t get close enough to do facial rec, but just look at it. It’s got to be them.”

  “ETA, Tiny.”

  “I don’t know. Whatever’s in the sled is heavy and slowing them down. I’d say we have at least thirty before they hit the perimeter. Want me to take it down and confirm?”

  “No. Let the perimeter cams do that. Let’s bring everybody in and get a welcome party ready.”

  Tiny took a bite of his Star Crunch patty and sent the alert out over the network. Across the farm, various devices buzzed and chimed. It only took a few minutes for everybody to wrap up what they were doing and gather around Tiny’s control station. Eric imagined this was more or less exactly what Anoona’s people had done when Tiny’s drones had spotted them coming up Mahogany Avenue in the middle of the night, except that then there had been an entire discussion about whether or not Hamm and Rodney should just put bullets in each of their heads. A serious discussion. Eric secretly wished he’d been able to listen in on it.

  Anoona’s people were nothing but gracious to his people’s faces. In fact they’d gone out of their way to make them feel at home, but nothing they could ever say or do would ever change the fact that they’d all stood here, just like he was right now, and made a choice to let them all live. He had no idea why, but it bothered him—a lot. If he could just hear what they’d said and how they’d said it, if he were just able to watch them make the decision, he thought he’d be able to put it behind him. He wasn’t sure why he needed to know so badly, but he did have an idea of how he might be able to be the fly on the wall he so wished to be.

  “They made it,” Eric said.

  “It’s not confirmed,” Tiny responded.

  “That’s them. Who’s in the sled?”

  “I think it’s your dad.”

  “Are you recording these video feeds?” Eric asked.

  “Yeah, but the archives get recorded over as they fill up the drive,” Tiny said, not at all thrown by the non sequitur. Any chance to show off what his tech could do made him happy. Plus he was really excited about being Eric’s friend. The kid was spunky and made him laugh.

  “How hard is it to get access to the archives?” Eric asked, but before Tiny had a chance to tell him the answer, Anoona and the rest of the folks showed up.

  * * *

  Jen was so hungry she was shaking, or maybe she was just shaking from fatigue, she couldn’t tell anymore. She couldn’t understand why each time, the aftermath of berserking out got exponentially harder to physically deal with than the last time. The rapid and massive increase in muscle mass from all the hormone-enhanced exertion that accompanied tearing into people and smashing things apart had seemed like a blessing when it had left her more and more beautifully toned and allowed her to eat anything she ever wanted, twice over. But after this last episode, she was pretty sure she didn’t just have a ripped physique anymore. The fact was she was now probably past the point of making an eighties East German Olympic swimmer look scrawny. If the demon got out again, she was pretty sure she’d have to relocate to the land of the freaks, if there was such a place. Plus, there was that little detail of her teeth starting to fall out, which was just fucking creepy.

  Can you even get dentures anymore? she wondered absently, as she pulled the sled side by side with her sister, consumed by the arbitrary vain and self-indulgent thoughts of an American teenager that even the end of the world couldn’t stop.

  The sun reflected off the snow in a blinding glare. An odd, very subtle vaguely mechanical buzzing sound seemed to be drifting down from somewhere above them, but Jennifer wasn’t completely sure that the buzz wasn’t just in her head. She should have meditated when they’d stopped at that house. Her mind was bouncing all over the place, making her feel crazy.

  How long have we been pulling the sled? she wondered without really caring what the answer was because it didn’t matter anyway. Jimmy would have known how long it’s been, though, she thought, but before the now familiar sadness could fill her heart up, she realized Brennachecke had been awfully quiet back there for an awfully long time.

  Fuck, she thought. Did the dude die on us? What the hell should we do if he has? Stop and bury him? No, we’re too exposed out here for that. So, what? We just keep pulling a corpse? That’s just stupid. Leave him? That’s just cruel. Fuck . . . Maybe the blood pirates aren’t even coming after us. But she knew better. Her intuition was screaming at her to keep moving.

  “You still alive back there, dude?” she yelled over her shoulder.

  Brennachecke didn’t answer. Jen and Bobby-Leigh shared a look and waited a second longer for a response, but the only sound was the slushy groan of the snow under the sled and the girls’ laboring breath—and that damn mechanical buzzing coming from above.

  “I’ll check on him,” Bobby-Leigh said. Her sister nodded and stopped pulling.

  Bobby-Leigh jogged around to the sled and looked at Brennachecke. The man smiled at her but didn’t say anything. His smile was sad, as was the one she smiled back with.

  “Hang in there, sir,” she whispered and, without realizing she’d done it until it was done, kissed him on his cheek.

  Brennachecke closed his eyes, so overwhelmed by the amount of emotion the little girl’s simple act of affection stirred in him that he just couldn’t look at her and keep it together—and he had to keep it together, at least for a little while longer, because he simply refused to die without seeing Eric’s face one last time and telling him at least some of the things he should have been telling him all along. He took a deep, painful, shuddering breath and opened his eyes again.

  Thank you, he mouthed.

  Bobby-Leigh winked at him and then looked at her sister, struck by the amount of exhaustion she saw on the young woman’s face, and worse, the emotions she could feel behind Jen’s absinthe-green eyes.

  “He’s alive, but he’s—”

  Bobby-Leigh abruptly stopped talking, her attention suddenly drawn to something in the distance. Jen turned to see what had taken the words from her sister’s mouth. When she saw Eric and a bunch of Brennachecke’s group emerging onto the road from the snow-covered graveyard of corn with a hairless black woman and two especially well-armed commando types, her knees gave out and she collapsed in the snow.

  “Help us!” Bobby-Leigh yelled to them, as she rushed to her sister’s
side. Jen was okay, at least relatively; it was just exhaustion that had knocked her off her feet.

  “Get the Colt,” Jen whispered as she sat heavily up in the snow.

  “It’s Eric and Ace,” Bobby-Leigh whispered back as if to say Jen didn’t need to worry. “And JP and Cooperman . . .” But it quickly became obvious that Jen was fully aware of who was now rushing toward them and that she still did not find any comfort from it.

  “I know who it is.” She panted.

  Last time she’d seen Eric he’d tried to burn them both to a crisp with a flamethrower, so even if she was ninety percent sure they were not coming to kill her, she was not going to let her guard down. Plus, who knew who the fuck this new black chick was? Her guys seemed to be even better equipped than the blood pirates she was sure were hot on their heels, which could be a blessing, or it could be trouble. She was just too exhausted to think straight anymore, and that meant it was going to be up to Bobby-Leigh to defend them if it did turn out Eric had more of a mind for vengeance than assistance, or if this new set of characters in The Tragedy of Jennifer Kessler turned out to be more foe than friend. She had to keep a reserve of strength tucked away for the demon inside her, and that little bit of strength was all she had left. Jen thrust the big handgun into Bobby-Leigh’s hands and passed out face-first in the snow.

  Even though she knew in her gut that nobody coming out of the corn was going to hurt them, the little girl took the gun from her sister, checked that a round was chambered, and clicked the safety off just the same.

  * * *

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d still be here,” Brennachecke croaked. It was not what he wanted to say, but it was what came out of his mouth. He was lying on a twin bed in a makeshift operating theater in one of the back bedrooms of the Kessler house.

  Eric nodded but said nothing. Tentatively, the boy reached out and took his father’s hand. Physical affection was not a very common occurrence between Brennachecke and either of his sons. When they were young (and still alive, in the case of Jimmy), the old man had never bounced either of the boys on his knee, nor had he read stories with them on his lap. He had never kissed them good night. There may have been a mechanical awkward hug here and there, but that was about as far as affection went with him. As their hands touched now, Eric was afraid his dad would pull away from him. But Brennachecke didn’t pull away. Instead, the father’s hand clamped down on his son’s with such emotional ferocity that it was Eric who, just as a reflex, almost jerked his hand back. His heart pounding, the boy quickly matched the strength of his father’s grip and the last two men of the Brennachecke line found themselves clinging on to each other. It was time to get the arrow out of the old man’s chest, and neither of them had any illusions about how dangerous a procedure it was going to be.