Ran (Book 1): Apocalyptica

by Joshua Guess

  I played over the events again and again, an exercise with two purposes. The first was to glean any new insight I could come up with, anything at all that might help us deal not just with this group, but any future ones as well. I had written those three words at the end of my trip, and felt a desperate need to add to them. Anything to keep people safe and make our job easier.

  “Not always human,” I muttered, almost inaudibly. It was both a description and an indictment. The Reavers were smart like people, could speak, retained the memories and personalities of the people they had been. But it was a lie to say they still were those people. The effect Nero had on them was permanent and profound, harrying them toward terrible acts through sheer biochemical need. The gentle probably died soon and badly. The rest, no matter their original selves, were rendered merciless killing machines. Twitchy, tense, powerful, and without scruples.

  The other reason I played those memories on a loop was to confront my fear. Repetition of a thing took it from unknown to known, the first step in reducing the terror it created. This was a lesson I’d learned when I was a girl. Maybe the first real life lesson I ever took to heart.

  30

  I dreamed of the first time I killed a man. I was fourteen.

  Most of the trips I’d taken to the white cells had been after that day. The cult—I refused to think of it as anything else—was led by a trio, two men and one woman. The obligatory leader was a predictable and utterly forgettable Jim Jones copy, a neatly presentable older man who called himself Brother Josiah. Josiah was the figurehead, the thinker whose bizarrely evolving ideas on spirituality and religion would have surely led us to the inevitable group suicide or group marriages had I not stepped in.

  His two direct underlings were the real power. A married couple, Brother Philip and Sister Allison were in their late thirties. Had they been in charge, things would have probably been much worse, much faster. She was a rigid woman, sharp-featured and with the sort of distant beauty that must have spawned fables about ice queens. Allison was never cruel or even mean. Just disconnected, as if the world around her was a uniform set of numbers to be watched and recorded.

  How she married Philip, I still don’t know. He was a large man with a deep belly, a bushy black beard, and rosy cheeks that would have surely made him a dead ringer for Santa later on had he not the misfortune of meeting me.

  The dream didn’t have the kind of definitive beginning we expect in stories, but the fuzzy edges of memory. I was in the fellowship hall doing some chore or another as punishment while everyone else sat across our compound in the small park we used for gatherings. It was the fourth of July. Everyone else was enjoying a cookout beneath the dimming sun, eager for Josiah to set off the fireworks.

  Dishes. I found myself doing dishes.

  I didn’t mind the punishment. Weird that I can’t recall why I was in trouble in the first place, though admittedly anyone who has known me for longer than five minutes probably wouldn’t be surprised by that. I was disobedient often and proudly. My collection of mutinies blended together into one long protest of the status quo.

  As such I was humming to myself, an off-key and happy rendition of The Beatles’ Revolution. I didn’t hear the door behind me open.

  There are certain tropes so rooted in truth that the two are inescapably bound. You often roll your eyes at the phrase ‘he seemed so normal’ until the guy next door you’ve had over for steaks is arrested and they find a dozen murdered hookers buried in his crawl space. The reason people say it is because it is almost universally true. Human beings are smart animals, and that intelligence allows even the worst sociopath to hang believable emotions on their face and pass unseen within the crowd. The terrible are also invisible because they try very, very hard to fit in. To be normal.

  We roll our eyes because it’s easy, as an outsider, to say it’s obvious and that surely we would have known. But we almost never know. I certainly didn’t know about Philip. For years after I wondered if he’d married Allison as that same sort of cover. To appear as one of the herd.

  There was no warning. No subtle months of testing the water. Philip was not that kind of monster.

  Strong hands wrapped around me and yanked me away from the sink. One massive paw covered my mouth and immobilized my head. The other yanked with chilling expertness at my comfortable—and loose—summer clothes.

  I have always been older than my years. Even in that moment, amid the shock and pain and terror, I knew what was about to happen. I felt bare flesh against my exposed backside and knew what was about to happen to me. I didn’t know who it was, just what was about to happen. Unfortunately, my attacker chose exactly the wrong moment.

  I had been cleaning a knife, which was still in my hand. I won’t tell you that I planned it out, or that my defense was intentional. Neither is true. I was years and years away from the exhaustive training giving me that edge. It was because of that day, more than almost any other factor, that I sought out those kinds of classes. The later attacks were reminders at best.

  The knife went down and back, flipping in my hand as my arm swept behind me. I wasn’t strong, then. I had no years of workouts to toughen my thin adolescent muscles. But I didn’t need to be. The blade was sharp—another of my punishments was sharpening the knives—and didn’t need much encouragement from me to do its job.

  I stabbed back into the parts of him I could reach, once, twice, three times before he dropped me. I was shocked at how fast and total that part was. One second I was a victim on the verge of the sort of horrors the young are warned about but incapable of understanding, the next he was utterly disengaged.

  Turning, I saw Philip writhing on the ground, teeth clenched and shining through the gap in his dark beard. His hands clasped at the wide wounds on his thigh, from which squirted a volume of blood I couldn’t immediate understand. He was paling quickly.

  “G-go get help,” he hissed, eyes wide as saucers.

  I stood there, knife in hand, and watched in horrified fascination.

  Philip bled fiercely, crimson soaking everything in sight. My eyes were drawn to his waist, to his lowered pants and the sad, shriveled thing he’d meant to rape me with. His belly, the vast keg he liked to slap when someone told a joke, quivered with his death throes. A third of it poked out from beneath his shirt.

  I didn’t go get help. I didn’t move an inch. Instead I waited and made sure he was dead before shuffling off like someone in a dream, knife clutched in white-knuckled fist the whole time.

  I came awake furious and struggling with the arms locked around my chest like a vise. My hand, the hard, toughened fist strong with years of work, lashed back. Someone grunted.

  “Son of a bitch,” Jem said, half out of breath. “Calm down.”

  I froze, the last dregs of sleep burning away. Jem’s arms released and pulled away.

  “You were freaking out,” he said. “I thought you were having a seizure at first, and then you started hitting yourself in the head. I had to stop you. Sorry.”

  I shook my head in the darkness. “No, I am. I…”

  Philip loomed in front of my eyes, a ghost ten thousand dollars of therapy had mostly eradicated. I sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on knees and head bowed as I slowly regained control of my breathing.

  Jem watched me. I could feel it, like a weight pushing against the silver outline of my body made by the weak moonlight. He could have asked, then, and probably should have considering his investigator’s curiosity, but he didn’t. Most people are who they are. They rarely change. Jem wasn’t one of them. In the brief time I’d known him, he had learned to curb his questions when it came to me no matter how much he wanted to ask them.

  It was a small gesture, but isn’t that what showing someone respect is all about? Caring? Isn’t the definition of good, a word thrown around so easily it loses most of its meaning, that we take the time to check our own impulses to spare the feelings of other people?

  So I told him.

&nbs
p; I didn’t embellish or paint a vivid picture. I just related the dream as I remembered it, which was exactly how it happened in real life. I’m proud of the fact that my voice didn’t waver through it, and no tears fell.

  I felt him shift on the bed, and had a flash of Jem reaching out to lay a comforting hand on me, or worse, hugging me. I steeled myself for it, determined not to flinch at the contact. It would be meant well, even if my body and mind felt like an exposed nerve.

  But he didn’t.

  “I’m sorry that happened to you,” he said, and I pushed down a laugh. It was cop voice, the gentle but authoritative tone police use when they want you to feel safe. As if nothing bad in the world can get past them.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I mean, it wasn’t then. I was a kid. But he didn’t get what he wanted. I think at least one of the other girls got worse. After the police hauled away his body and got done talking to me, I saw Jasmine crying in the worship hall, praying. At first I thought it was for Philip’s soul, but then I heard her thanking God he was gone.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Jem breathed, angry. “How do you get over something like that?”

  I gave him a dark laugh. “You don’t. You get through it, and that’s a perfect way of putting it. Getting over something sounds like you climb the hill and roll down the other side. This? It’s a thing you push your way through. It scratches at you, tears you up, and leaves a mark that never goes away. But eventually, if you’re lucky, you step back into open air and you can breathe again.”

  I wondered how I looked to him, as his eyes adjusted to the dim light. My light brown skin showed all over, only sports bra and shorts to cover me. I imagined Jem making out the thin scars on my back from an especially severe punishment. Or taking in the drawn thinness wrapped over hard muscles. On a good day I lacked much body fat, and in the carefully rationed weeks any extra had melted away. I was, I liked to think, a distillation of myself. Reduced to the pure elements. It left me raw and sharp and wounded, but still a survivor.

  Instead of following that train of thought to its inevitable conclusion—the sort of critical self-assessment that would leave me feeling low-grade shitty about myself for days—I stood up and went to the bathroom. My bandage had come off in the struggle.

  When I clicked on the little battery-powered lamp and looked at my shoulder, I audibly gasped. As I leaned in toward the mirror to get a better view, I said, “Whaaaaaaaat.”

  “Everything okay?” Jem asked, approaching the open door.

  “Yo, look at this,” I said, moving over to make room. I lifted the light in my right hand and jutted my shoulder forward.

  His face was lit up like a kid doing a scary face with a flashlight, the image spoiled by the confused frown he wore on it. “Isn’t that where you were shot?”

  “It was,” I said, emphasizing the word. I poked at where the shrinking wound should have been. It hurt—more than it had recently—but the skin was closed with a thin, dark scab. There was no give in it, no evidence a deeper hole behind it was working itself shut. Just solid flesh. “I hadn’t really looked at it much lately, and Dolly told me not to mess with it.”

  Jem grabbed the lamp and turned me, lowering his face to look at it very closely. “I don’t see any of the black veins. It took a few weeks, so you’re not in Wolverine territory or anything, but that’s some fast healing. Could be useful.”

  I raised my hands, pretending to weigh his words. “Eh. Is it worth healing twice as fast if I have to go through occasional seizures, muscle cramps, and have a virus in my system that makes dead people turn into zombies and some living people turn into assholes? I’m not sure.”

  He snorted. “Jeez, look for the upside. Besides, you haven’t really put much thought into the rest of us. What are the chances that everyone else here, none of whom have the Shivers, just happen to be immune? I think Radio Lovecraft is keeping some cards close to the chest about how this thing works.”

  “Or they just don’t know,” I said. “Maybe infection rates among people who survived the first outbreak are different, or they develop a resistance to it.” I started dredging up what I remembered from epidemiology and microbiology projects, but it was late and they had been peripheral subjects at best. Then I snapped back to reality and considered that I was standing nearly naked in front of a man stooped down and staring intently at my chest.

  I won’t be coy. I’ve thought about it. But now was not the time. Especially with the dangers we’d face in the coming days.

  “Let’s get dressed,” I said, glancing at my watch. “It’ll be dawn in an hour or so, and we need to get to work.”

  31

  Life, even life at the end of the world, is rarely the action-packed struggle with a convenient countdown timer to give everyone a reason to hurry. Though if we’re being honest about it, everyone wanted to deal with the Reavers as quickly as possible. Not only because they made every jaunt away from home insanely risky, but also because each of us understood that the chances they’d find other pockets of survivors nearby increased every day we waited.

  Three days after my awkward sleepover, Jem called it. That was how I found myself astride an idling motorcycle, sitting in the middle of the road looking at the house where all those Reavers lived.

  I made no effort to hide the noise coming in, which was repaid in kind with a flurry of activity in and around the house. Reavers spilled from it like someone had confused a beehive with a piñata during a drunken moment of supreme bad judgment. There were more of them than even my last visit, and their agitation and curiosity clearly overrode any caution.

  A few of the more eager Reavers who’d spotted me even started to move forward. I raised my rifle and shot at them.

  Okay, I’ll be honest. I didn’t shoot at them. I shot them. I did it with cold, measured pulls of the trigger. I didn’t panic or freak out. There was no little voice in the back of my head wagging a finger at me that these were still human beings. Maybe later the guilt would creep in—though I doubted it given the bloodstains doing their best Jackson Pollock impression all over the clothes and bodies of the Reavers—but at that moment I felt none of it.

  Fact: there are limits to the biological changes any outside force can bring to bear on a human body. Radio Lovecraft had begun to explain many of them when it came to Reavers, but no amount of biochemical alteration could make you ignore a .223 slug impacting your belly at several thousand feet per second. Especially given the particularly nasty type of round I was firing.

  Shooting accurately while sitting upright on the bike wasn’t super easy for me, but my goal wasn’t to kill the beehive. I was just the idiot beating it with a stick.

  An engine roared to life as the scattering bodies retreated. Mission accomplished.

  I couldn’t risk running before making sure they were coming after me, but as it happened this was not a concern I needed to worry myself over. As soon as I paused my shooting, Reavers moved with startling speed and coordination. Other vehicles growled to life, distant shouts ringing out as people called instructions and directions.

  I took a few more shots just to make it believable, then stowed the rifle in its cradle and hauled ass like a limo full of hookers.

  My lead was large but vanished quickly thanks to the fact that I was rational and my pursuers were not. Intelligent? Sure! Absolutely! They had every neuron of sapient capacity available to them. But it was being overridden by rage and hunger and all the bad impulses people normally kept in check. Which resulted in their vehicles, two large pickups overloaded with bodies, moving at a dangerously stupid speed to catch up.

  Without looking back, I pointed a pistol behind me and fired off a few shots. I aimed low on purpose, figuring a catastrophic blowout would be certain death for everyone in the vehicle it happened to. I didn’t get lucky in that respect, though the trucks did drop back a ways.

  There weren’t any gunshots, which worried me. They clearly wanted to take me alive. There were no circumstances where I woul
d let that happen. Bullet to the head first. Worst case scenario, I’d fight them until they were forced to kill me.

  I did everything in my power to make sure it didn’t come to that. As we moved down the dusty, debris-strewn roads, this included a lot of careful maneuvering on the bike. I’d never been a great motorcycle rider, but danger gave me focus. There was none of the casual disassociation that came with an attack of the Shivers. My pulse wasn’t high.

  Instead I felt more present than I ever had before in my entire life. Maybe it was being on the bike, no windows or metal between me and the wind. It could have been an artifact of the incredible risk we were taking. Whatever the cause, my entire body hummed with it. I didn’t feel separate from the rushing air. There was no sense of the distant swaying of the trees being an unimportant data point. Everything—everything—mattered. Every swaying stalk of grass bending beneath the jet wash of my exhaust as I motored past, every stone scattered in the road, every twitch of muscle in the bodies of the men and women chasing me.

  I’m not a sports person, but I can’t help likening it to basketball. More so than almost any other sport, the player must be aware of every other player in a very small space. It’s an awareness made infinitely more complex by the existence of sides, then even more by the need to track who is friend and foe and what their strengths are. All sport is war in miniature, requiring the same presence of mind to manage it all.

  And that’s the secret. No mind can consciously analyze, collate, and act on all that information at once. Instead we rely on the zone, that strange state of zen where small flashes of insight and observation trigger the more powerful mental computer working below the surface.

  We throw the ball to just the right person at just the right moment. We lay the motorcycle down at just the right angle as the engine in the truck behind us changes pitch in a way that signals my sleeping mind that its gears are shifting.