The Dead Boy

by Saunders, Craig

Points on your licence, he thought as he fumbled at the handle for his door, but his hand was clumsy and helpless. He had to shuffle across the seat until he could hop down from the driver's side.

  'You're the boy...'

  Edgar got no further. Close enough to see the kid (everything blurred, but close enough) he saw how badly the kid was messed up. His head was horrifically scarred, his eyes blank. He looked like death. He smelled like death.

  He couldn't speak. Of course not.

  Because he's the better part of dead.

  Lobotomised. A corpse in a chair. A Halloween mannequin for a fire...who could never have spoken to Francis. How could he have told Francis to come for him?

  Because...he's special. That's what Francis said, wasn't it?

  But not just that. Edgar knew the kid was special. He could feel it, like heat that rose straight from the kid's skin to his.

  Edgar moved his disjointed left hand to take the boy's hand from Francis. At that touch, he lost himself and fell to the tarmac right there alongside Francis.

  Edgar, said George, directly into the old man's mind. Pleased to meet you.

  'You're George,' mumbled Edgar.

  Why does he need me? he wondered, thinking his thoughts careless, like human's do because they think no one listens. But George listened.

  It's not me that needs you, said the boy, Francis will.

  Sometime later, George released Edgar and told him the same thing he told Francis: It was fine to sleep.

  She was right. You're something, alright, thought Edgar, but lazily, as he slid toward welcome sleep. George wasn't sure about that, but a ghost of a smile flickered on a face he couldn't yet control, and he watched over them both.

  *

  Part Three

  Cold Waits in Embers

  IX.

  Retirement

  In the weeks Edgar and Francis and George hid, and healed, the world turned.

  The seasons of the apocalypse hadn't, yet, begun. Nuclear winters and ultraviolet summers that would last decades were a bad sunrise yet to break the horizon.

  O'Dell ate, slept, drank.

  Dormant, almost.

  He watched the world begin to fall. Earth, an undignified drunk who staggered with his hands out to stop a fall he knew he could not avoid.

  O'Dell wore his crazed, yellow-toothed grin all the while and thought he was content enough - maybe even happy - to be a mere passenger now, just a last observer to the end.

  The first of many heavy rains to come hit England during the fourth week after that first crown of fire. For now, the weather was just a foreshadow. When the reign of fire ended, snow and storms of ice would succeed to the throne.

  In Norway, the lead singer from a death metal band named 'Jotunheimr' emerged at the head a cult of lunatic wanna-be Vikings, seeking to appease the frost giants that ravaged the world. They and their exulted ruler began with murder and finished only when he and his followers surrounded The Storting and detonated themselves. If this was Ragnarok come, if Fenris' cold, stinking breath filled the abyssal skies, then at least they died believing they had been right.

  Many believed they were right. Either they were all right in their beliefs and there always had been room for a thousand gods, or all but one, or none at all.

  O'Dell, warm, ensconced with his concrete walls, watched and grinned while fire danced in cities. Reporters yelled and the world went mad as O'Dell's money (he was never short of money - he had whatever he needed and whenever he needed it) paid nearly twenty thousand people across the world a handsome fee to pour vials of U+03BF into city water supplies. Madness even before the compound took hold - paid in coin to kill the world where greed might have been worth something.

  The Boss watched, O'Dell knew, but mostly left O'Dell to manage his own affairs. The first call after the first missile:

  'Let the madness take hold, and they'll burn themselves, like a man might set a match against a leech on his skin - the only sure cure.'

  'Sir,' replied O'Dell.

  The call O'Dell waited on wouldn't be for another three weeks. He was just as impatient as ever, but he'd waited nearly sixty years for that call, hadn't he?

  But the world was burning itself to cure the madness...his boss right on that count. Mostly, he was right. So O'Dell waited, itchy, but he watched night and day, sleepless as ever, as riots lit the night around the globe, in places U+03BF touched, but places it did not reach, too, as hatreds old and new spread. Mosques or Synagogues or Churches were attacked, first. Immigrants - first, second, third generation, illegal and legal, native born or otherwise.

  News outlets fuelled panic because fear sold. Later, they tried for a quieter, calmer approach: Fear sells, but if everyone's dead, there's no one left to sell it to.

  News, as O'Dell knew very well, was an unruly and wilful child.

  U+03BF - invisible and insidious - just like O'Dell and his boss. Like US, too.

  'They'll all burn, and they can't touch us,' he whispered once, bloated on glee at his victory, and didn't know he spoke. There was no 'US' in his room. Just him.

  Madness caught like a disease. People assumed contagion. Panic ruled and people fled. They crossed bridges and then, later, they crossed states or provinces and mountain ranges, only to find there was nowhere left to run.

  China, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Japan, the Philippines. Parts of Australia, as far as New Zealand. In Eastern Africa, from Asmara, south to Nairobi, war erupted and escalated. Cairo burned from incendiary bombs, but by then, no one was sure who was dropping what on whom. Power stations failed. Institutions fell. Men and women were dragged from expensive offices high above cities and murdered savagely beside those who cleaned those offices and made the wealthy their sandwiches.

  Madness catches and like disease, it did not discriminate.

  Then, the future O'Dell saw so many years ago arrived.

  NATO recalled soldiers from foreign fields, as did the US, the British, the Australians, the Canadians. Ships headed for home.

  But beneath the sea, submarines full of hidden fire lurked and hunted and planes that fly at high altitudes headed elsewhere.

  *

  O'Dell felt it, like he understood and sensed so many things - a tingling, a strange sensation of turning inward and seeing things happen inside his head. Not imagined, but a foreshadow. He reached a hand toward the telephone on his desk before it rang.

  'Sir,' he said.

  'Okay, O'Dell. It's time. The children are yours.'

  'Thank you, Sir,' he said. He thought it was maybe the only time he'd ever said those words to his boss. Probably the last, too.

  Smiling, or grinning - there was no real difference - his body shaking in anticipation and seizing, too, he closed his eyes and called his children, so that he would no longer be just one man, but all of them.

  'All of US,' they said together.

  O'Dell alone was nothing. But he was not alone. The children, the work of decades...these were his tools. His army of children against the world. They were US and together, they pushed. A war of mind against matter in a world that worshipped steel and stone and atoms.

  *

  Sensible, erudite men and women shook hands across airwaves and via satellites as their governments began to understand the extent, and danger, of these worldwide acts. Not viral, but chemical. Yet while the United States denied any involvement in the terror of Vladivostok or Hangzhou, the Russian and the Chinese looked away as Philadelphia rioted. Cameras captured bodies burning and eviscerated, hanging from city windows. It would soon be Christmas. This year people were the decorations.

  Even so, even pushed so hard, for a beat, the sane held sway. Then, confusion.

  Retaliation is the only recourse, said so many while their minds bled and red stained blouses and shirts in bunkers and seats of power around the globe.

  Sudden, explicit anger, the kind that lashed out with angry fists. Panicked chatter across secure channels that covered the wo
rld like a thin skein of silk, or a web spun by paranoid spiders, followed by blindly stabbing fingers on buttons with no clear enemy in mind.

  Nothing inside their minds except US.

  *

  That night, while bombs rained down, O'Dell closed his eyes and released US.

  Returning to himself was a relief and like a tearing of his soul.

  Moments later, the phone rang. Blissful, tearful, but sated at last, O'Dell let his moment last a while longer before he took the receiver in his right hand. His left hand was spastic and useless, his lip and white shirt blood-soaked and him unaware of either thing. He was full of fire. The fires he'd seen so long ago, fires that had burned in his black eyes since that first flame.

  'O'Dell?'

  'Sir,' replied O'Dell.

  'Congratulations.'

  'Sir,' said O'Dell and laid the receiver down slowly.

  Rare praise.

  But deserved.

  He pulled a single malt from a drawer in his desk. A retirement party, of sorts. A very short one, attended by one, thrown for himself.

  After that first drink, his first in many years, O'Dell decided it wouldn't hurt at all to have another. Or two. He placed the bottle on his console before him and he drank, slowly but steadily.

  Nearly sixty years.

  No pension. No garden to tend 'til I die.

  Just this.

  He smiled, or grinned. The alcohol and his unique brain ticked all the while, his eyes jittered and his left hand shook. The glass in his right was steady enough, though. After a while, he noticed his tie, and his jacket - stained with cool and cracking blood.

  He sniffed.

  'Fuck it,' he said and downed another glass of good scotch. As the seventeenth missile hit near the Chinese border, O'Dell was somewhat tipsy. Drunk, even.

  Drunk and full of power - he could feel it, still - the echo of US. Like adrenaline that needed to be burned before he could rest.

  He pushed a button and waited for the man the other end to wake. Middle of the night. He didn't begrudge people sleeping. Ten second later, his fingers tapped. Drunk or not, he was ever impatient.

  Eventually a groggy and confused Dr. Boyle answered him.

  'Mr. O'Dell? It's...'

  'I know what time it is, Boyle. Come to my office, would you? Congratulatory drink.'

  'Three O'Clock in the morning?'

  'Oh yes.'

  'Sir, I'd rather...'

  'It's not optional, Boyle. And stop by the lab on the way. Good man. Bring my some of that fine U+03BF. If we're to celebrate in style, we'll need more than this half a bottle of scotch.'

  'Sir?'

  'Not optional, either,' said O'Dell, and used just a tiny bit of that residue to push Boyle, and those guarding the lab, to do precisely what he wanted. Thirty minutes later Boyle, bleeding from ears and nose came by for that drink. O'Dell didn't mind sharing at all. After, he shot Boyle through the forehead and finished the rest himself while gunshots, screams, roaring anger began to fill the bunker. That was nearly an hour before the first missile hit U.S. soil. Two hours later, seven Russian cities were nothing but ash. By then, O'Dell was so drunk he couldn't see straight or even speak.

  But then he didn't need to speak. The only person who called him wouldn't begrudge him this. Even the man who killed the world needed a night off once in a over half a century.

  'Wouldn't begrudge US a night off, would he?'

  Not me, but US.

  Had he even realised, he'd never know why. Just as some men are made to push, there will always be others who will push back and sometimes there are other forces which push harder than us all.

  Around seven O'clock in the morning, O'Dell fell into his first sleep for over a year and dreamed of his children, all inside him, listening to the many deaths US had called.

  'You are US, too,' they whispered in his dreams.

  It was a fine sleep, and so long overdue that it lasted an entire day.

  *

  Rested at last, O'Dell picked himself up from the cold office floor where he slept. Despite the hard bed, he found his old bones hardly ached at all. He straightened his suit jacket and ran his shaking, palsied palms over his hair.

  Bit of blood, here and there, he thought, but good to go.

  What did that matter if he looked slightly dishevelled? After over close to sixty years work, and never a single day's rest.

  He checked, but the phone had not rung in the night.

  The boss had a heart after all.

  O'Dell was the one who'd done all the work, wasn't he? He'd pushed and pulled both the great and the meek to his will. Decades spent thinking, travelling, planning, moving people and events the way he needed. Decades with no respite, waiting on technology to progress, with his eyes and mind always on the future. Waiting for this moment.

  In September, the world's population was estimated at somewhere in excess of seven billion people. Before he left the office, O'Dell glanced at his screen at the decrypted message from a small enclave beneath Whitehall. That missive would fly through airwaves and wires to secure locations in places as diverse as Hong Kong, Osaka, Auckland and hidden facilities deep beneath the Nevada Desert and mountain ranges flung wide across the earth - the Rockies, the Urals, the Kunlun.

  A reduction in the world's population of around 30%. Attrition of up to a minimum of an additional 25% expected to within three months.

  More, O'Dell knew, would follow. Because he had seen it, and he had made it happen.

  On the way out, and on to the cafeteria, he stepped over Boyle. Boyle didn't move. O'Dell vaguely remembered shooting the chief of his science team in the head.

  Outside, his actions were clear enough, bad memory or drunk. The walk toward the elevator was like a game of hurdles in the Olympics.

  A game, is that? he wondered idly. Or is that a kind of race?

  Blood splatter here, spray there. Gunshot men and women, some still moving, or people broken by hands or teeth driven by the madness Boyle put in the air filtration system.

  In the elevator he found a lone woman who'd pulled her cheeks away. She grinned at him while he pushed the button to travel down three floors and eat his breakfast.

  'Morning,' he said.

  He whistled and she picked up the tune. He shot her before the elevator opened, and was forced to shoot one of the cooks (he remembered, vaguely, that he'd always thought of her as a dinner lady) who roared and ran at him with a serving spoon. Not an especially deadly weapon, but it was the look of the thing.

  I might be going slightly insane myself, he thought. The hot counter was still filled with the night's food, because everyone caught a case of the crazies after U+03BF hit their lungs. He found this more disappointing than the fact of his entire staff's demise. He hated cooking.

  'I don't think I know how to cook,' he said to a man masturbating into beef stroganoff with someone else's hand. 'Do you?'

  'Lend us a hand, boss,' said the man.

  'Rather not,' said O'Dell, and shot the man. He figured making his own bacon probably wouldn't be that hard at all, but damned if he'd embarrass himself in front of a man wanking with a borrowed hand.

  *

  A short retirement, but earned.

  Those left behind, though, in towns and villages of the world? Of England?

  When madness and nuclear war both ran their course, the world was darker; souls and skies.

  Men and women searched for those they loved, or settle for someone, at least, for comfort or consolation until then. Survivors travelled together, or alone. Some were fighters, some ran when they could. Food emptied, taken by the car load. People took more than they could eat, then died and the food went to rot or simply lay forgotten and lost in one of the millions of homes throughout the country.

  Others stayed where they were. Those people went about their business as they always had, either because they were insane, or because they felt such a sense of duty or place that they would not give up. Like a policeman w
ho died trying to disarm a murderer with a machete in some Northern town. A woman who wept over her dead Red Setter dog and refused to follow her husband when he and her daughter fled their town died three days later with her blood pooling around her, on her shining tile floor she'd been so proud of, her wrists slit by her own hand. Her daughter and husband both were raped, partially skinned and impaled beside the motorway that ran north-to-south, south-to-north. A man cut himself with a simple thorn while trying to dig out his rosebushes to save them from the awful rain. The wound festered. He squeezed the pus from it for a while, and then, later, just sat in a deckchair in the deluge and let himself slip away. Three teenagers ran riot across Sussex for a fortnight, until an elder farmer shot two of them dead with his shotgun. The shotgun was more accustomed to partridge, but it turned out it worked just fine on the little bastards on his property. Two nights later, the third boy snuck in while the man slept and stuck a knife in his chest. The old man never even woke.

  Those that survived the initial insanity fought through hate or need. Sweet old folk and thoughtful younger people, people who were kind enough, but bastards and psychopaths, too who preferred this world, and the voices of the angry and the mean were always the loudest, the most shrill. The good fell quiet, the bad shouted.

  When the end of the world came, people didn't change. They polarised, perhaps. But people don't change, not really. It's just that they stand out more when the background noise falls away.

  *

  X.

  The Underpass

  It was three days after Francis left Kssh-Ksash man's van until she could face moving, but bare the outside world, too. The maintenance room small and mean, but it was her refuge from the growing storm that had begun already and this deluge - madness, not wind and rain - came in hard and fast.

  Cars sped by full of fleeing, terrified people after that first crazy day when the bomb tore the heart from England, and the world, too. That constant hum of sound over the country soon quieted. The rumble of cars someplace in the middle of field and city, but the drone of planes overhead, and people talking or arguing or kids yelling and screaming.