'Kill O'Dell,' she said, and knew it was true. No doubt, no confusion, no fear. What was there to fear? Death?
'Good girl,' said Edgar. 'That seems...fair.'
He kissed the top of her head, like a father might have.
*
Francis opened her eyes with her dream, vision, or whatever it had been still fresh in her mind. But happy, too, because Eleanor and George both stood before her. The room was warm.
This is as good as it's going to get for a long, long time.
'Come here,' she told George. He knelt down. They stayed on the mattress on the floor for a long time, arms around each other. Then she nodded and kissed the boy on his cheek, holding him back so she could see him better.
'Edgar,' said Eleanor, tentatively.
'I know,' said Francis.
'I'm sorry. He was your friend?'
She thought about it for a second. 'Maybe. I don't know. Probably as close as it gets these days? The man who flew us to shore, John. He died too. I don't know if they were friends.'
George smiled and kissed her cheek.
Liar, he said.
'I liked them,' she admitted. But she didn't want to cry, so she shook her head at George.
Don't.
She pretended she didn't care, but she did. Of course she did, and George saw right through her.
'You've been delirious for days. Four, I think. You're getting better, though.'
'You saved me. Thank you. Eleanor?'
Eleanor nodded. She would have been a good looking woman. Tired, drawn and scarred now, but she had something in her eyes. Life, Francis supposed. Will.
She hoped that same look still shone in her eyes, too.
'We...George thought you died,' said Francis. 'Nice to know he's wrong, sometimes.'
'I did,' she said.
'Oh,' said Francis.
Eleanor laughed, softly. George smiled, standing beside her. She was struck by how similar they seemed. Both hard worn, but bones, stance, and not just the colour of their eyes. Something else. Something inside them.
She drifted again. This time she didn't dream of warmth or dead men. She just slept, and George watched over her like he would until the day she died.
*
XXII.
That Which Makes us Human
The only highways left uncovered by January were those which remained in peoples' minds. Two led to O'Dell. And from O'Dell's shattered thoughts were roads that led on, into those whose lives he touched, and broke. Towers full of those he filled with memories he could not bear.
US waited in those towers, below their creator. Nearly five hundred children, some now grown into men. Long ago, O'Dell hollowed them out and filled them with a past he didn't want. US held powers like their tormentor, their creator...but more, too.
He thought he had emptied them of everything but his will.
He was wrong.
Empty things can be filled again. They weren't separate, lonely, or trapped, even, within their ruined bodies, but an entity far beyond, far greater, than O'Dell's imagining.
*
O'Dell's blood-stained, blood-crusted suit was littered with crumbs, splashed with coffee or whiskey - filthy, full of the smell of a man lost. The man had always been fastidious about his appearance, but cleanliness seemed of little importance now. Often, he found himself adrift, and would rouse to find fresh blood had joined the dry stains that spread from collar to his wasting belly. He ate, but sparsely, and his gaunt, grinning face was just skin tight over hard bone. No fat left - a man pared down to the absolute necessities.
His hands ached from daily seizures, his back pained him from sitting so long, his clenched teeth cracked somewhere at the back, a fissure that sang at each cold sip of whiskey, or the occasional burning coffee, or just the air from a deep breath.
The pain was just an irritation. It was his constant confusion that troubled him.
He spoke to himself either inside his head, or this strange twin on a screen before him. He didn't remember creating the other him.
Perhaps there had been a point where they created each other.
You killed US.
These words got through to O'Dell sometimes, but his mind was powerful. He'd made himself forget, hadn't he? He'd created US. Kurt William O'Dell. They were his idea. They existed because of his talents. A man who turned these children's mind to his ends, a man who had killed the world could ignore whispered words easily enough.
US. Sleep. O'Dell, sleep. Put the gun in...
'Shut up, for fuck's sake. Shut up. I'm the one who whispers. You're babies.'
Older. All of US. Older. Take the gun, O'Dell. Take...
O'Dell pushed himself from the seat that was his bed and day chair. On the floor across the room, beneath one of many monitor banks, was a whiskey crate. Once full, three of twenty-four bottles remained. He winced, leaning down to take one, then returned to the chair and twisted off the top and drank from the bottle.
'Not long now,' he said, and saluted himself on the screen before him.
Two days before, he'd shut down every life support system throughout the three towers.
US was dying.
*
US called to George in the night.
George walked his own road in dreams. His road was much like his mother's - a personal thing, nothing like the broad, paved highways of so many others. He walked an alley between rows and rows of vast buildings, but sometimes the alley strayed between playing fields or playgrounds, or beside the banks of rivers, or city streets he knew.
A voice called out to him, somewhere to the right on his alley. He found a door set in an old walls - brick, flint, mortar or cement, grown high with ivy and other creepers. The door was strong but old and green from the elements. A black latch on a black handle - wrought iron, cast iron, he didn't know - moved easily.
On this alley, he could be large, small, weak, strong, old, young. Imagination and reality blended. Memories' pathways, but ones full of other possibilities, too.
Behind the door a well-tended garden. Hedges and mown grass, stone statuettes and benches. A patio, flagstones. But where he imagined a house should be - like a stately home, in the centre of such grand gardens, was a shimmering, wavering presence. Not quite smoke, or dust, or even swirling. Sparks and lights flicked between clouds that sat or moved - every movement but those sparks was languid and perfect, in unison, like clouds that danced, but to no rhythm or pattern that he could discern.
Are you US? he asked, but of course he knew the answer.
He's killing US, George. It must be now.
I'm not strong enough, he said inside his dream. Francis isn't strong enough. She nearly died.
Those flickers are thoughts, he realised. When US spoke, the sparks were brighter and more numerous than lightning within a simple cloud.
It isn't a cloud, either. It's a mind, free of flesh.
The cloud brightened and darkened, too, when it thought of one thing or another.
Francis is strong enough. The Mother is strong enough. You must be. You will not be alone.
The cloud was gone. George found himself outside, on his alley. The door, too, was gone.
If they die, O'Dell wins, he thought.
The world was lost and maybe it was always meant to be.
George opened his eyes and his dream was gone. In its place was knowing - an older voice than his.
Without US, humanity is lost, too.
*
George still walked with a limping gait that was unnatural and confused, like a man might after a stroke - trying desperately to achieve things which people did every day with no thought or effort.
He did walk, though. He combed his hair with his fingers, felt the cold in his bones each day, despite the fires they mostly managed to keep burning.
When he came from the dining room where they all slept (there was a second floor, but the cold beat back the heat where the bedrooms were) Francis and his mother were at a small round
table where they ate a simple meal heated on the stove-top.
Sleep was still in George's eyes, but his mother and Francis knew him well - his mother all his life, Francis just as long, perhaps, though more intense - time, compacted.
'Is it happening, George?' said Eleanor. 'It is, isn't it?'
George nodded. The food, simple beans in a tin, smelled wonderful. He was nine, and often hungry, but he ignored the food.
He sat so they were in a rough triangle, and took a hand in each of his so he could speak to them without one having to interpret. Speaking to two minds at once didn't prove as difficult as he imagined.
'George?' said Francis.
It's US, he said. O'Dell is killing them.
'So we stop O'Dell? Now? Shouldn't we...'
There's nothing we can do that we haven't done. No guns, no...press-ups.
The two women smiled, but George did not.
I think this is why I'm here. They called me, and you, Francis, and Mum, and Edgar and John and all the others... they looked out for us. I know they did. Because they need us. But we need them. The world's gone. We have to made it new again.
George, said Eleanor, her words inside Francis' mind, too. Is that you? Or...
Mum...I'm me, however old I am. Close your eyes.
He closed his eyes and felt their pain. US cried out to him. Their mind hurt, rather than their body...but all they had was thought.
Remember the Mill, Francis? When he let us go? Remember the cell, mum? He let you go, too. O'Dell didn't mean to do those things. I met them last night, in my dream.
George the child only thought US pushed and pulled all this time, but that older voice in his head knew it. And he trusted that voice, not because it was always right (it was). He trusted that voice because it was him.
Guide them, said that voice who spoke only for George.
George tried, with the words he had at nine and the thoughts he would have in years to come, to show his mum and Francis the way back, to O'Dell.
Don't think of O'Dell. He's a...slip road. He's a small road, just a single lane, that leads to the motorway. The motorway is where we want to be.
I'm ready, said Francis.
Go, George, said his mum. And come home safe.
He drew their highways together, so the road was fast and true.
For George, O'Dell's mind was just dead space. It was a black spot where he could not go. Not alone. Once, perhaps, in a place called the Mill, he thought he had been inside O'Dell's mind. But he hadn't. He never could do that.
It was US.
O'Dell thought of the dead boys as nothing but husks. But he'd freed them.
He'd destroyed everything and in doing so created an entity comprised solely of that which makes us human. Humanity, but a giant.
Where Francis' and Eleanor's roads ended, George's path did not. He sped right through and out the other side, onto the wide motorway beyond. There was no traffic. His feet were light and sure, nothing like those he struggled to control in the physical world. He could have been a car, had he wanted, or simply flew along the road, but George understood walking.
The motorway led everywhere George needed to go and nowhere he didn't. All those directions he could choose led to boys and men in beds and wheelchairs, or forgotten on cold, bare floors. Broken minds, each of them.
George passed through those roads, cul-de-sacs, blind bends and dead-ends, and beyond roads and mortal constructs entirely to the place where US existed.
George, the dead boy, the boy who came back.
Before him, all the others who stayed behind.
Hello, he said.
Hello, George.
Am I one of you? Am I one of US?
No. You are George.
Are you strong enough?
With you, George. We are.
And with those words, purpose.
One thought, and just like lightning in that shifting cloud, only one place to go.
*
It was 1964. O'Dell drank alone in a pub named The Eagle and Child when a man he didn't remember approached him. This time a small boy walked behind and took a seat. The boy was handsome, but his head bore bad scars beneath a good head of hair. Once, the child's hair had been blonde. Now, grown in after being shaved bald, it was darker. The boy watched.
The man spoke.
'Hello again, Kurt.'
'Please excuse me, but I think you have to wrong man, Sir,' said O'Dell, and George felt his confusion.
'Mr. Fenchurch, Mr. O'Dell. You remember me. Of course you do.'
'Have we met before?'
'Of course, Mr. O'Dell. We met some time ago,' said Fenchurch, who took a seat opposite O'Dell without having the courtesy to ask first.
'I'm afraid I don't recall...'
The boy still watched.
O'Dell found he could not take his eyes from the child. The child gaze was unnerving. O'Dell, distracted, afraid for no reason he could discern, leaned in close and whispered to the man named Fenchurch. A boy shouldn't be in a pub, alone, and this one shouldn't be here at all.
'Fenchurch...someone's here, watching us. Watching me.'
'Paranoia, Mr. O'Dell. An unfortunate but common side effect. Do relax, Mr. O'Dell. I came to offer you a job. It seems...'
O'Dell tore his eyes from the boy, and stared with dark, burning eyes at Fenchurch.
'Mr. Fenchurch,' he said, and his voice shook. 'What is happening to me? I feel...I think I can see the future.'
'Precisely, Mr. O'Dell. Did you foresee me coming here today? Remarkable, if so.'
'We always come here,' said O'Dell. 'We're always here.'
'Where?'
'This pub. Now.'
'This is only the second time,' said Fenchurch. But it wasn't Fenchurch's face. Fenchurch was gone. It was the boy. The boy was older, by twenty or more years. No longer a child, but a man.
I remember that I will meet him, thought O'Dell. I remember the future...how in fuck can I remember the future?
'No,' he told the boy, or man, or...there was something else inside the child. The boy was light. Like a cloud made flesh, solid, but...a wisp, moisture, all joined with lights that glinted like lights beneath waves.
O'Dell's head began to ache. He wiped blood from beneath his nose.
'Do you remember?' asked the man that was not Fenchurch.
He used to be a boy. He was dead. He...I killed him. I will kill him?
'I don't want to remember!'
'How does it go, O'Dell? Shall we walk a while? It is a beautiful day.'
They sat in the pub, then, with no transition at all the walked outside by the river. The boy took a sheaf of papers from a briefcase he carried.
We were in a pub, thought O'Dell. The Eagle and...Child?
We were in a pub. How are we here? By the river? How?
There was a pistol in the case, but it was the papers Fenchurch passed to O'Dell.
'Before you lose your temper, Mr. O'Dell...this is the culmination of your work. Is this your work?'
Jesus...what's happening? It's not Fenchurch.
But he found he couldn't voice his thoughts. He was too afraid. With shaking hands, he glanced down at the reams of paper in his hands. Photographs, rather than the untidy scrawl that he had seen that day.
'I don't want this.'
'But you have it. You thought you could make people into nothing more than components in a computer. Yet you made yourself a part of that, too. You put your memory in US. We hold everything you placed into tidy folders, parcels of information. Things that should have made a soul, but you couldn't bear the weight of it. You gave it to US. Look, Mr. O'Dell. That's Michael Bryant. That boy? His name is Sam Tully. The boy with the larger scar, on this page, you took him in 1978. Still learning your trade, I think. Or, the doctors who you made to work for you. Far from perfect, isn't it? I think you took out too much of his brain. But he's still a part of US.'
'Us?'
US.
O'Dell stumbled
, then took a knee, there in the grass beside the river. A path ran by the river, but they were to the left. The grass had been mown. Everything was bright, and sharp. The light hurt his eyes. He looked down and saw his nosebleed had stained the grass red. The photographs were strewn all around him. Dead boys and men, their skulls all bearing horrible dents, or welts, or scars. Wires led to monitors. Tubes that went in, tubes that came out.
He looked past the boy. To what he had left behind.
Hundreds of torn humans. Thousands. Not ghosts, but real. Naked or in hospital gowns, on their feet, eyes that should be vacant and dead all staring into him.
US.
'I saw the future.'
'You did,' said the man. 'But you lost the past. We're giving it back to you.'
'I don't want it.'
'Take it, O'Dell. It's yours.'
The man took the gun from the briefcase. It should have been Fenchurch's gun, but it wasn't. It belonged to O'Dell. It always had. The boy held it out.
Once, O'Dell had asked for it. Now it was being offered, he did not want it.
'We are working toward something great, Mr. O'Dell. I'm offering you the chance to join us.'
'Fuck you. I won't,' he said, but his right hand held something heavy and he could not throw it away, no matter how hard he tried.
'You could never make a human a machine. But you knew that. So you tried to take away everything that made a soul. But souls are full of memories, Mr. O'Dell. Memories make US. All you could see was the future. Whatever made you human died a long time ago. US isn't the machine. You are.'
O'Dell could see everything that made US human, roiling and flashing like a storm inside the dust that was this made. A cloud, but one made of passion, joy, thought, love, memory, invention. Humanity, yes, but whole, and humanity is dark, too. It is vengeance, and rage.
'You thought you created us, Mr. O'Dell,' said George, one with the entity. 'You did not. You saw mankind's change and you were afraid. You saw the end and you could not bear it. You thought yourself a genius and assumed my family were results of your cleverness. We were not. You thought yourself a result of an experiment, and you were not. People move on, Mr. O'Dell, don't they?'
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