Prospero's Half-Life

by Trevor Zaple

  The stranger threw the whiskey bag onto the table and it bounced slightly, with a wet, heavy thud. The apostles glared at it with no small discomfort, and none of them reached out to touch it.

  “Open the bag,” the stranger ordered. None of them moved to do so, their lips quivering and their eyes growing moist. Richard waited to see if any of them would screw their courage at the last minute; when none of them did, he reached forward and did it himself. When he revealed the contents he recoiled with disgust. There was a greying severed head inside, boiling with maggots. The eyes were gone, but Richard knew who it was without even looking at it. His secret emissary had returned.

  “This is our answer to you,” the stranger continued, his voice urbane, amused, and bone-chillingly devoid of emotion. “You thought that you could treat with us as equals, that you were somehow on the same level as the Republic. You are wrong. You are merely an obstacle to the glorious will of the people. You are of the least concern to the House. You will be given the same choice that all people in the Dominion are given: you will adhere to the legal auspices of the Republic, or you will be branded enemies and shot in the street. You have one week to decide. If you do not send word of your surrender within one week, you will be assaulted and everything that you have built will be torn down”. He smiled that shark’s smile again, and clasped his hands together. “I trust you will make the right choice”.

  The stranger looked to the black robes guarding him and nodded. They turned around and began to escort him out of the lounge. Brother Bentley rose from his seat, his eyes bulging wildly, spittle flying from his aged lips.

  “We will make the righteous choice!” he screamed at the departing ambassador. “We will side with the Almighty Lord, who will shepherd us from tyranny of the forces of darkness! YOU WILL BOW TO HIS WILL!”

  The stranger did not turn back to argue, defend himself, or reply in any way. He left without even acknowledging that he had heard Bentley in any way. Bentley collapsed back into his chair, breathing heavily and clutching at the table. Richard eyed him coolly; if the man had a heart attack and died, he was not likely to live out the night. Although, he realized, it didn’t quite matter; Bentley had seemingly made the choice for them, and none of them were likely to live beyond the next week anyway. As the apostles gibbered with fright amongst themselves, he affixed his sardonic smile to his lips and traced random designs on the table with the tip of his index finger. None of what they had to say mattered in the slightest anyway.

  The mood at the house of the conspiracy was just as grim. Richard avoided looking at Carolyn, detesting the smug look on her face that screamed I told you so in the loudest possible voice. He knew that she was right, but he didn’t feel the need to admit it. The others were arguing loudly, throwing increasingly ridiculous scenarios and ideas back and forth with the intensity of Olympic tennis players. Richard was ignoring all of it; he was in a black funk and he hadn’t heard one idea that he considered workable. He abandoned them to their discussions and went upstairs, to the dingy little room on the right hand side of the hallway.

  A few minutes later Carolyn came into the room, her movements soft and her face concerned. Richard’s irritation crumbled when he saw her and she gathered him into a deep embrace.

  “There’s no chance,” he whispered, “no chance at all. Bentley will never budge. This Republic will never give up. We’re going to be crushed between them”.

  “There is a chance,” she whispered softly. “We can leave”.

  Richard pulled away from her and stared at her incredulously.

  “We’ve already discussed this,” he said sharply. “The black robes will never let us leave. You know Bentley’s plan. Every single last one of us will be rounded up and told to fight these men from the Republic. They’ll never let us go because they need all of us to die for their madness. We either die escaping or die fighting”.

  “There’s a third way,” Carolyn said firmly, and caught him by the chin. “What have we been doing up until now?”

  “Precious little,” Richard sneered, but when he tried to move away from Carolyn’s grasp he found that he could not. Her grip on his chin seemed to be forged from steel.

  “One of the plans that was floated by the apostles was to try to rig the bridge across the river with explosives and then blow it before the invaders could cross it. The black robes would cross the bridge, fight the invaders, and then pull back to the other side and pull the trigger”.

  “That just sounds like a delay,” Richard said doubtfully. Carolyn let go of his chin and smiled mysteriously.

  “It is,” she replied, and her voice seemed a trifle smug to him. “It will take them forever to find another way across the river, and by that time the apostles hope to finish the fortifications on the Keep”.

  “Those fortifications will never hold. None of them have a clue as to what they’re doing. I’ve never set up defences before and even I can see that they’re just wasting their time”.

  Carolyn shook her head sadly. “Let me finish,” she admonished him. He held his hand out and put on an expression that said go on, then. Carolyn drew herself up to her full height.

  “What I propose, if you can be patient enough to listen, is that we blow the bridge early”.

  Richard blinked for a moment, temporarily uncomprehending. Then it hit him.

  “While the black robes are on the other side warming them up”.

  “Exactly”.

  “And we take everyone and get away in the ensuing chaos”.

  “You got it”.

  “That’s...I’m not sure how to describe it”.

  “Devious?”

  “Close enough, I guess”. He rubbed his chin gingerly. He thought that she might have bruised it. “Where would we go?” he mused. Carolyn shrugged.

  “Who cares? East? South? Away from here. I have a feeling that, whatever happens, this Republic will be tied up here for quite some time. I think we’ll have more than enough time to get away and find somewhere safe”.

  He felt a cautious feeling bubble up from somewhere near his solar plexus. He wondered if it was hope. It had been a long time since he had felt it.

  “Is that a plan, then?” he asked slowly. She nodded her head.

  “The part about mining the bridge is already underway, or so the apostles tell me”. She grinned wickedly. “They don’t seem to realize how dangerous pillow talk is”.

  Richard scowled at this. He did not like to be reminded of the role that Carolyn played officially. He was able to swallow his pride and realize that it was the perfect position for her to be in, but it didn’t mean that he had to like it. Carolyn caught his expression and laughed ruefully.

  “My poor, jealous Richard,” she said soothingly. “You know that there are many that love me. You also know that there is only one person that I give my love to”.

  She put her hand to his lips with a much gentler touch than before; he tried to maintain the scowl, failed, and kissed her fingertips with passion. She smiled and it seemed to Richard that all of creation might be bound up within the curve of those two lips. He nibbled at a fingertip and she snatched it away, a playful expression on her face. A wave of pure feeling came up inside of him like a volcano and the words tumbled out of his mouth seemingly without any thought on his part at all.

  “I love you,” he said, and felt only mild shock at the fact that he’d said it. She smiled broadly and her eyes lit up. There was something knowing on her face that Richard could not quite read.

  “That’s an awfully good thing,” she replied teasingly, “since I love you too”. She entwined her hand into his, and it felt as though it had always been there. “Let’s go up on the roof and hold each other while the moon comes up,” she said imploringly. Richard considered it.

  “I don’t know,” he replied, “what if the black robes happen to see us?”

  “Fuck the black robes,” she replied, with considerable heat. “One way or another, they aren’t going to matte
r one bit”.

  Richard considered this, chewed it over, and realized that she was right. The breaking point had arrived. Once the moon rose, the endgame would begin. He felt an awed terror at the prospect, but swallowed it and led Carolyn up to the roof, where a gigantic orange moon rose up from the horizon to light their embrace with its own ancient blessing.

  TWELVE

  It was a matter of no difficulty for Richard to convince Brother Bentley that he, Brother Isaiah, should be an integral part of the defence of their community. Richard delved into his deepest studies and convinced the old man that the most favoured of God should be the ones to lead in the battle, to ensure the certainty of victory. The leader’s response had been confused, and from the look in his eyes Richard was unsure of whether he understood anything that Richard had said. He felt somewhat ashamed at his callous manipulation of what was obviously a man suffering from a quickly advancing case of dementia. The feeling was mitigated by the looks on the faces of his fellow apostles when Bentley announced who would be in charge of the planned manoeuvres at the bridge. Many of them looked shocked, and at least one rose up and asked how Richard even knew of the plans. Richard leaned back in his chair and grinned viciously at the man, and Bentley lectured them all back into silence.

  Richard and Carolyn spent the grace period granted by the Republic’s ambassador engaged in carefully filtering instructions out into the general community. To this end they utilized the remainder of the conspiracy, issuing instructions as to how to efficiently and silently get the plan out to everyone that mattered. The idea itself was simple, but the community had grown quite large over the last few months. Getting the word out to everyone was a much harder thing to do in reality than their discussions had lead them to believe. Many of the recent refugees were still shell-shocked from their encounters with the Republic; the idea of picking up and running from them again sent them into a spiral of shock. Richard and Carolyn instructed their messengers to be gentle, but in private they discussed the idea that there were going to be some members of the community that simply wouldn’t be coming along with them. Some of the refugees would be too exhausted to flee along with them. Some of the original community would be too loyal to Bentley to flee; after all of the time he’d been there it still deeply surprised Richard that anyone believed in the madman’s vision.

  “The people who don’t come along can cover while the rest of us run,” Carolyn said, one night after the moon had gone down. “They’ll be in complete chaos and once anyone realizes what’s going on we’ll be well on our way”.

  “That’s a terrible thought,” Richard admonished her. He was somewhat more vehement than he normally was with her, since he’d been having dark thoughts of his own that ran along the same paths.

  “It’s a true one, though,” Carolyn replied levelly. Richard tried to think of something to say to prove them both wrong, but in the dead of night there were no such words coming to his mind. It was as she intimated; the milling about of the confused would aid in the escape of the rest. Its veracity did nothing to alleviate the sinking feeling he felt in his stomach when he considered it.

  Another problem that Richard was having was the fact that he’d never even considered how to command an armed conflict before, even in simulated video game form. He’d played chess (and Risk) from time to time in the past, but such abstractions were nothing like the task that lay before him now. When he wasn’t subtly feeling out threads of secret communication with the community, he was meeting with senior members of the black robes and discussing the plans of battle with them. Richard felt like a child thrown into a construction site with a hammer and told to build things. He tried his best to sound as though he knew what he was talking about, but he knew from their faces that the black-robe leaders were well aware of the limitations of his knowledge. In the end he decided to leave the meat of the details up to them. He was only leading the endeavour in order to sabotage it, after all, and the more complacent the black robes were about their own leadership in the matter, the easier it would be to pull off their plot.

  Still, the idea of leading men into battle gave him great consternation, and he lay awake for several nights before, staring at the ceiling while all around him his estranged fellow apostles snored softly. It would be a simple matter, he tried telling himself. Black robes in front, grey robes behind, so that the enemy would think they were coming out to engage in a full battle. The black robes would cross the bridge, the grey robes would stay behind. The black robes would engage with the enemy for a time, and then, at a pre-arranged signal, they would retreat across the bridge. Once they were across, the trigger would be pulled and the bridge would come collapsing down, hopefully drowning some of the enemy in the process. That was the official plan, anyway, which Richard had solemnly agreed to in the presence of Bentley and the other apostles. The real plan would be much more truncated, of course, and would involve the drowning of both black robes and the men of this strange Republic. Then, freedom – at least, so Richard fervently hoped. As he’d lain awake, he’d counted his days in a rudimentary fashion; he had been shocked and deeply appalled to realize that he’d been a member of Bentley’s cult for just under a year. His past yawned behind him, and when he did sleep he dreamt that it was an abyss trailing him, one that he would fall into and scream endlessly through for a long time before he would finally awaken, sweating and shaking.

  The deadline passed at the end of the week without a visit from the Republic’s ambassador. The white robes crowed and preened about their prowess and the cowardice of the enemy. Bentley berated them for their arrogance, reminding them viciously that pride was a deadlier sin than any of the others. Chastened, they turned to Richard and demanded that he set their plan into motion. Richard, leaning against the wall by the lounge’s dirty window, plastered on his sarcastic grin for what he hoped would be the final time and agreed to get everything moving. As he left the room one of the white robes muttered something derisive about him – at least, he assumed it was derisive from the tone of the man’s voice. He did not bother to respond. If anything, his grin grew even wider.

  That night he found himself on Colborne Street once again, flanked on each side by what seemed like a massive crowd of dangerous-seeming men in thick black robes. All of them carried weapons of some sort; there were hunting implements, baseball bats, machetes looted from outdoor-life emporiums, handguns taken from the collections of plague victims, and assault weaponry taken from the deserted police station nestled away in the core of the city. Richard himself carried the .40 calibre police-issue he’d been forced to execute Chris with; Bentley had given it to him with great pomp and ceremony, claiming that God Himself had come down to the man in a dream and foretold great victory coming from the barrel of the gun. Richard didn’t particularly care if it was anointed in the blood of every deity in the known universe; he felt much better leading this group with a gun in his hand.

  Behind them, the vast majority of the community spread out, walking in near-unison with stragglers forming a rough border around the area. All of them looked scared, and Richard admitted that they had every right to feel that way. He felt it himself, right down into the very core of his being. It took every ounce of effort he had not to shake uncontrollably as he walked.

  He also resisted the urge to turn his head continuously and check the sea of people behind them for Carolyn. She had convinced the white robes that she needed to accompany the community on this endeavour; with no small amount of glee she had related to Richard the silver-tongued lies that she’d spun to convince them that they needed a person in the rear army to keep an eye on Richard.

  “They don’t trust each other,” she had giggled, “but they really don’t trust you. I think they’re scared of how highly Bentley thinks of you. A lot of them think you’re aiming to replace all of them. None of them tried to argue with me when I suggested spying on you for them”. She had found it inordinately funny but it had added to his unease, and his unrest. Now that he could
not see here – she was at least a block behind him on the street – that unease tripled. He felt closed in, trapped; they had a plan but in the moment it felt as though they had been play-acting.

  The late August night was redolent of the jungle of weeds that had sprung up in the uninhabited parts of the city. There was a bit of a breeze that was multiplied by the speed of their march. It caressed Richard’s face, cooling the heat that was rising there from the fury of his thoughts. They passed the last few decaying stores that lined the street and emerged into open territory. The Lorne Bridge lay ahead of them, silent and deserted in the shadows. Richard tugged at his white robe, adjusting it uncomfortably. He considered his appearance amongst all of the black robes, and his skin crawled when he realized how much of a target that made him.

  As they drew closer to the edge of the bridge he peered into the darkness, trying to spot movement.

  “Advance the men slowly across the bridge,” he said to the black-robe to his left, a grizzled-looking middle-aged man named Hodges who had informed Richard that he would be acting just under him and would carry out his commands. Hodges nodded and began barking orders to the men around him. The black robes picked up the pace and Richard slowed his; they seemed to flow around him like water, and he soon emerged from the rear of them alone. He watched them cross the bridge in a slow, steady rhythm, and crossed the street to one of the large posts that stood at the rightmost corner of the bridge. The mass of grey-robed men and women were still a block or so to his rear, slowly making their way up the street, but there was already a group of four crouched near this corner post. He grimaced as he approached. He had hoped to see Carolyn there, but it was four men.

  “Gentlemen,” Richard greeted them with an urbanity he did not feel, “is the trigger in place?”

  One of the men, a grinning fox named Dupriss, handed him a small aluminum box with the lid flipped open. Several thick cables ran out of the bewildering panel inside the box; there was a black switch marked “Armed/Off” and a red button marked “Fire”. Richard looked at Dupriss with a quizzical expression on his face. Dupriss laughed.