She heard him whimpering in her head, even through the wall of the shack. Begging her to go, to stay, to listen to him. They were in constant communication now, attached to one another by a mental link she didn’t understand. He had important things to tell her, he claimed, but she kept fighting him off. He kept prattling on about his guilty man and some place up in the mountains—probably a hallucination he’d had from being out in the desert too long. She didn’t give it much credence since he was obviously crazy. Her presence was terrorizing him but she knew she couldn’t just leave. Not without getting something first.
Nilla, the guilty man… you are the one he’s looking for… please, it’s all up to you… he moaned. The fire… it will burn up the world.
Rage spiked up inside of her and she felt him curl like a moth in the middle of a bonfire. Her emotions pained him, excruciated him, she had discovered. Normally she tried to get control of herself, to consciously calm down when he screamed like that. This time was different—she had run out of patience. She fed her rage, stoked it until it blazed.
“I’m not working for anybody!” she shouted out loud. Her words rolled around the canyon, echoing like rippling explosions but they were far louder in her head. “Nobody but myself.” “I am my own…” she struggled for the right word. Boss? Master? “My own… woman!”
The word you’re looking for is ‘weapon,’ she thought. No, somebody else thought that. It didn’t sound like something Singletary would have said, though. The voice was loud, almost deafening. When Singletary spoke into her mind it was always in a soft whisper.
It wasn’t me! he howled. Nilla! Don’t—don’t go up there! You have to listen to me first!
Images unfolded in her head. A landscape of rugged mountains topped with snow. A herd of huge animals—enormous beasts, lumbering across lichen-ringed rock. A ring of fire that spread outwards, rippling, engulfing the entire world.
It made no sense.
Singletary had been sending her those pictures for days but he didn’t have an explanation for them. He had received them in what he claimed was a prophetic dream and somehow, never mind how, he knew he was supposed to pass them on to her. Because she had some duty, some sacred mission to perform relating to those mountains, those animals, that fire. Nilla had no idea what they meant. She lacked even a frame of reference to begin to piece together their significance, if they had any.
“Stop that! You tell me what I want to know and then we can play any game you want. Stop mucking about in my head and concentrate on finding my name!”
His suffering leached into her and she felt her body shiver in the eighty degree heat. He was twisted on his plank floor, one arm constricted under his body, the circulation cut off. His back arched, drool spilled from between his lips. The pain was awful. She couldn’t watch it, couldn’t stand it at all.
Then stop it, lass. Stop it forever if you find it so distasteful.
“Singletary, shut the fuck up already!” she screamed. The psychic was beyond understanding her, though. In his pain he didn’t even hear her. “Listen to me,” she shouted. “I’m talking to you!”
I hear you just fine, love. Look up here.
She turned, slowly, beginning to understand, and shaded her eyes. On top of a ridge, not two hundred yards away, Mael Mag Och sat with his long hair blowing in a breeze she couldn’t feel. He raised one hand and waggled his fingers at her.
Nilla crossed the bottom of the canyon and clambered up the rock face beyond. She kicked off her shoes and used her bare toes to dig for footholds, clawed at the weathered sandstone. She didn’t sweat, nor did she pant for breath as she climbed upwards, always upwards, but she felt the strain in her dead muscles, the pull in her back as she hoisted herself bodily to where the naked man sat waiting for her, not moving an inch to close the distance between them.
When he spoke she actually heard the words, the only audible sound she’d heard in hours. The strangeness of an actual human voice struck her and she flinched. “So brutal you can be.” He tsked her, looking like he had just dropped by for a social chat. She clambered up to him on her stomach, crawling like an insect, and just collapsed. “So angry. I suppose it’s understandable. The living have been so cruel to you, haven’t they? And now you’re willing to torture them just to find out a name that doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
She stared at him for a moment, unsure what to think. She was pretty sure that Mael was not at all what he appeared to be. “You have a better plan?”
“I do, lass. Would you like to hear it?”
She rolled over onto her back and lay staring up at the intensely blue sky, so rich in color it nearly turned to black at the zenith. “Your English has improved,” she told him.
He took it as a yes. “End all the anguish, finish all the sadness. Wipe out the violence and the depravity and the suffering in one fell swoop. It is a tall order, I’ll admit. Perhaps we can go one better: get them to do it for themselves.”
She hadn’t cared for Singletary’s nebulous refusals. She liked even less when Mael talked in riddles. “What are you?” she asked, sitting up, facing away from him. He wasn’t really there, of course. He was still a more pleasing illusion than Singletary’s reality. It was pleasant to be away from the madman for a while.
“I was a musician, once upon a time. And a politician. I was a sorcerer and a hunter, too. I wrestled with monsters in my day. I conversed with what you would call gods.”
She smiled weakly. Great. A Jesus freak. Or no, he had said gods, plural. Maybe he was a Hare Krishna. “Oh, I see. And what did the gods tell you?”
His voice softened. “Shall I be plain? They whispered to me in the dark and the stillness at the bottom of a pond. They told me that humanity is wicked. That men are evil in their hearts, and must expiate their sins by deeds. By sacrifice. Blood sacrifice. The longer we went unredeemed, the more drastic the payment must become. They told me that should the necessary rituals go unfulfilled and the good works left undone for too long it might eventually be necessary to wipe out the human race altogether. For the good of the world.”
“That’s…” Nilla started, but she knew better than to finish.
“Crazy? I know you think it so. Your generation knows better. Your land doesn’t believe in gods. You believe everything just sort of happens for no reason, isn’t that right? You call that belief science. In my day we knew better. When the old ones spoke, especially when the Fathers of Clans spoke, we listened.”
Nilla stood up on the top of the rock and stared down at him. “Did you start the Epidemic?” she demanded. “Did you? That’s what I’m feeling here. You brought the dead back to life so they could kill all the living for you. I swear—”
“Lass, you’re confusing the author with the agent. I didn’t make this apocalypse. I serve it. As will you.”
She shook her head violently and started away from him, moving as fast as she could, walking flat-footed on the uneven rock. The sun’s heat, stored up all day in the rock, burned her feet but she kept moving. She wanted to get away from him, away from—
“You might as well as not have existed before the moment you woke to find yourself thus. You were created to be the sword in my hand. My weapon.” He stood before her. She hadn’t seen him move, hadn’t even seen him blink into existence there, he just… was there. She stopped short before she collided with him. “Why do you think your name was taken away from you?”
“That’s easy. Brain damage. There was no oxygen going to my brain so part of it died.”
He grinned at her. “That sounds crazy to me. Why would the Father of Clans bring you back only to leave you damaged? He had their reasons for taking your memory away, I can assure you. He wanted to make this task easy for you. You have no attachments to any human. The living hate you—you may safely hate them because you don’t remember what it is like to be one of them. You can do violence without guilt. You don’t ever need to question your own motives. What a gift you have been given!”
<
br /> “Christ! I’m not some kind of evil undead warrior! I don’t want to hurt anyone!”
“Except Jason Singletary.” Mael place a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. The touch felt good despite what he was saying—it had been a long time since anyone had touched her—but she shrugged it away. “I’ve seen through you, Nilla. You would have shaken him till his teeth rattled in his mouth if it would have gotten you a name. And what about those children in the car? You lead them right to their deaths, even after I warned you to stay apart from them.”
She took a swing at Mael, her hard fist tight as a muscle cramp, but her arm met no resistance. She felt a clamminess in the air but there was no connection. She reached out and grabbed for his throat but her fingers just disappeared into his flesh as if she had stuck her hand into a column of smoke.
Nilla threw her hands up in disgust and turned around, heading back the way she’d come.
“Singletary’s life has been one of torture. He’s been in pain since he was a child. Your heart didn’t go out to him, though. You were willing to use his pain. You wanted to make him hurt more.”
“And that’s a good thing?” she demanded. She was not surprised when she found him standing in front of her again. She tried walking right through him but he grabbed her shoulders and stopped her dead in her tracks. “You want me to do that, to hurt him?”
“Lass, you haven’t been listening. I want to stop his pain.” Mael glanced down into the canyon, toward the weathered shack. “I want to take it all away.”
Nilla looked too and her eyes nearly bugged out of her head. A dead man stood on the doorstep of Singletary’s little home. The dead man with no arms. With his head the corpse butted open the door and stepped inside.
She nearly broke her neck racing down the side of the rock.
Virgin desperately seeking help before world ends, T/Th 5:00, tap foot [Graffiti in a bathroom stall, O’Hare International Airport, 4/18/05]
Dick stumbled through the door into cool air and just swayed there for a moment, glad to be out of the punishing sun, glad to have a soft wooden floor under his bare foot. For a moment, just a moment he felt the comfort of being in a place with square corners again. There were no memories in his head to be awakened, no thoughts of any kind but this perfectly simple, perfectly harmless pleasure.
It was a game. Dick’s universe had become a sort of game. It had prizes to be won like this moment of comfort. It also had rules that had to be followed.
“No—no, not now,” someone said from below him and his moment was over. The hunger raced up his spine and into his brain and he swung his head around, sniffing out whatever had made that noise. He stumbled against a table and metal crashed to the floor, bright sounds banging and crashing in staccato rhythm, turned and spun, he stepped forward and nearly trod on the very thing he sought.
Rule One: Dick will eat what Dick finds.
In a heap on the floor a nearly-naked man lay curled around one leg of the table, his head in his hands. “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said, a sad, gentle smile in his voice.
Dick didn’t understand the words—words as a whole were lost to him. It was a relief more than anything. When people spoke to him he knew that they were trying to get his attention, that they were trying to communicate. That was pointless, however—no amount of pleading would get through. Dick felt no frustration when he failed to understand the people. There were rules in this world to be followed, but no decisions to be made.
Dick sank to his knees. The food in front of him whimpered quietly but didn’t try to get away. Dick felt no pangs of conscience. Sometimes food ran and you had to chase it all day, the hunger dogging every footstep, every moment that passed an agony of want. When the food just laid there perfectly still that was best.
He bent lower, bringing his mouth down toward the glowing energy of the food. It looked a little thready, a little dulled as if this food was already wounded but that made no difference. Dick bared his teeth and aimed for the food’s throat.
Stop now. Wait for my command.
The voice did not startle Dick even though he understood it perfectly. The message was not made of words at all but of pure neural voltage. It slotted into his nervous system like a computer program loading from a disk.
Dick could more easily have stopped a moving bull dozer with his face than he could disobey that command.
Rule Two: Dick obeys the Voice. The Voice is the Voice of the Source. No further explanation is required.
The door opened again and an other came in. A shadow like himself, different in some way that didn’t matter. In every way that counted they were one and the same and that meant she was competition for the food. Dick had seen her before but he was incapable of creating new memories and uninterested in connecting the dots of any old ones. He stayed where he was.
The competitor moved around the tiny room in a flurry of action, faster than Dick could move, much more agile. She picked up something heavy and metallic from a shelf and came at Dick, her hand held high, her weapon ready to smash in his head.
You want to destroy him now? A perfect innocent? The words were not meant for Dick. He ignored them.
The competitor snarled and held her hand in place, ready to bring the weight down on Dick’s skull. Dick felt no fear, though he understood what was happening in his own dim way and that he might die in a second. That was okay.
Rule Three: Dick and death are old friends.
“He’s a killer! A monster with no mind left!”
You have more in common with him than you do with that sick, living thing on the floor. The only difference is that my friend here can’t be held responsible for his actions.
The other said nothing but she lowered her arm.
This is a test, lass. A test for you. No one will leave this dwelling until Jason Singletary is dead. You have some choices to make now, and I’m so sorry to force your hand but I have my duty. You can let my friend tear out the psychic’s throat. Or you can do it yourself.
“No,” the competitor sobbed, a blurred sound like a shake of the head, like the sound of an avalanche starting to let go. “No.”
Nilla, someone said. It sounded like the Voice but even Dick knew it wasn’t. Did it come from the food? That made no sense. Luckily for Dick’s sake it didn’t matter. Only the rules mattered. That place, the fire in the mountains. Don’t get distracted now!
“No—I won’t,” the other demanded.
You have to go there—you are the only one who can!
Ignore him, the Voice said. You have to understand this, lass. I would turn away if I could. I cannot. My friend and I have done some things… some terrible things. Together we poisoned the waters, lass. We have sown a savage crop. But it’s not over yet, and we can’t rest. You are one of us. We need you for what comes next.
“The end of the world,” the other breathed.
We are that end. You, myself, and my friends. It has been decided by powers I am compelled to serve. You must serve them as well. Can’t you see it now? We’ve been given this work by forces larger than ourselves.
“No, not me…” The other sounded pained. What could be bothering her so? There was food. She would be hungry, as Dick knew all too well. Why would she not eat? Even the Voice agreed. She should eat!
Rule Four: Questions run from Dick like the ripples on a pond.
They were gone before anyone had a chance to speak again.
Nilla! The snow-peaked mountains! The fire!
Everything happens for a reason. You were made for a reason. You were allowed to keep some portion of your wits in your head. That makes you special. It does not make you free. The Father of Clans has judged mankind and mankind has been found wanting. Someone must carry out this decree. Someone must wipe the slate clean. When it is done, Nilla, the world will be healthy again. It will be clean and as beautiful as it once was. Do the humans deserve to remain in a world they have polluted? Do the powerful have a right to despoil, simply because t
hey are powerful? There must be limits, lass. There must be a vengeance. A justice. Without the threat of a penalty why would a man not commit a crime? This burden is ours. We died so that others may be purified.
“This isn’t my purpose. It’s not… it’s not mine.”
Lass. It is. But the elders are gentle, even as they are horrible. They’ve given us a gift, too. You and I, we aren’t like the others. We retain the ability to think and make some choices. And we are allowed, within some small latitude, to choose mercy. My friend here will kill this man in a painful and bloody way. Or you can do it yourself, instead.
“…no, I… no.” Her voice was tiny.
She made herself small, falling to her knees, bending low over the food. Her face came very close to Dick’s and their eyes met. Dick had no idea what she might have found in his gaze. He saw only her dark energy.
The ever-burning fire!
We can wait for as long as you like. But that will just prolong Singletary’s fear, won’t it?
Her head moved, lowering her mouth to nearly touch the food. So slow. Dick understood being slow. It didn’t matter—you got there in the end.
Nilla!
Rule Five: Everyone follows Dick’s rules, eventually.
Q: I’ve heard there’s a vaccine available but the government refuses to release it until it’s been thoroughly tested. But we need it now!
A: In any time crisis there will be rumors that defy easy debunking but you have to assume that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is. There is no vaccine. If someone tries to sell you vaccine, report them to the authorities immediately.
Q: My mother/brother/sister/lawyer was in California, in one of the relocation camps, on 4/8, the day they announced CA was overrun. How long will it be before we get some news out of the camps?
A: At the present time, we just don’t know. Every effort is being made to resecure California but for now all we can do is wait and pray.
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