After the Red Rain

by Lyga, Barry

  The vines were as tight as ever. Deedra took shallow breaths. Her diaphragm was constricted by the vine around her middle.

  “They? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s interesting: Actual roses—the extinct plants—don’t form vines. They form canes, which cannot wrap around structures on their own. I suppose Rose’s combination of rose DNA and human DNA has allowed him to manipulate—”

  “Get me down!” She regretted shouting as soon as she’d done it; the breath that whooshed out of her would be difficult to reclaim.

  Dr. Dimbali stroked his chin. “Get you down? Perhaps. If I can trust you. Can I trust you, Ms. Ward?”

  Could he trust her?

  Rose was dead and then Rose was alive. And Dr. Dimbali seemed to be responsible for the resurrection. But he had just abandoned her after their plan failed. And how could he let her believe Rose was dead all this time?

  And the holes in the walls. That time she’d caught him drilling one. That had been a while ago. The whole time they’d been planning Rose’s escape, Dr. Dimbali had been planning something else entirely and had never spoken a word.

  Could he trust her? Possibly.

  Could she trust him?

  “How is he still alive?” she asked, avoiding the answer.

  Dr. Dimbali glanced over at Rose. “What’s that? How is who still… Oh, I see. I see!” He chuckled indulgently. “Rose is not still alive. That’s absurd. Rose died. Rose was shot through the chest with an explosive ballistic round. You don’t survive that, not even with Rose’s rather unique anatomy.”

  He walked over to the tank and adjusted some knobs. One of the hoses surged for a moment. On the table, Rose shifted for an instant, then settled.

  “Our first plan failed, Ms. Ward. I don’t blame you. You played your part quite admirably. But Rose was impatient and couldn’t wait for us to rescue him. It’s not your fault he died, and I hope you don’t blame yourself.”

  “I don’t,” she said defiantly. “What are you doing? Since when can you control—”

  Oh no.

  Dr. Dimbali turned from the tank and faced her, hands clasped behind his back.

  “You killed Jaron.” She realized it in the instant before she said it, and it was so strong and true that she couldn’t stop herself from vocalizing it, even though some part of her understood that it was unwise to tell him she knew.

  Dr. Dimbali said nothing. He flicked a switch and a light hummed to life overhead. Deedra blinked against the sudden brightness.

  Sunlamp. That’s what he called it.

  Deedra thought of the evidence at the crime scene: the vines. She thought of the vine she’d found at Lissa’s.

  Found it, Lissa had said. On the way to work.

  I’ve been learning to control it, Dr. Dimbali had just said.

  So he’d been practicing. And maybe he’d left some of his practice vines around the Territory…

  “You killed Jaron,” she said again, “and made it look like Rose did it.”

  Dr. Dimbali shook his head. “No, my dear. You’re assuming causality where none exists. I did, indeed, kill young Mr. Ludo. Would you like to know why?”

  Did it matter? She wouldn’t waste a precious breath either way.

  “It goes back to the Red Rain, Ms. Ward. And the truth of its origins. Not God. Not aliens. Not the planet rebelling against us, though we richly deserved it. No.” He leaned in close enough that his breath warmed her face. “It was us,” he hissed. “Us, all along.”

  He stepped back and clenched his fists in outrage. “It was us! We did this! We people. The government planned it. They built death machines, Ms. Ward, and used them to murder half the world in secret. I’ve seen the designs. The spinning blades. The grasping claw-arms. The great chambers with mechanics to process the bodies, stripping them of clothing and jewelry and anything valuable, shuttling the bodies off to be crushed, compacted, reduced to nothing but pulp. Fifty billion, gone. It took a hundred years, but they killed all those people, and their liquefied remains were the Red Rain.”

  “Don’t believe you,” she managed.

  He laughed, actually doubled over, clutching his gut. When he stood upright again, tears streaked his face. “Oh, your belief hardly matters, but let me assure you: I’m telling the truth. The only problem with the Red Rain was this: It wasn’t enough! Fifty billion on the planet is still too many. So you know what, Ms. Ward?” He came close again, whispering in her ear. “They’re going to do it again.”

  I don’t think we’re building air scrubbers, Rose had said.

  Oh no.

  “What do you think you build every day at Ludo Territory Pride Facility Number Twelve? I’ll tell you, Ms. Ward: You are assembling the motorized chopping mechanism for a murder machine, designed to reduce a human body into easily pulped segments in less than ten seconds. And you are very, very good at your job.”

  “You’re going to kill people,” she managed. Now tears glimmered in her own eyes. Dimbali would kill people, yes, but he would do it with a weapon she helped build.

  Dimbali shook his head. “I have no desire to kill anyone. Well, anyone else. It’s not up to me. The machines are built. They lack only a key! One of the activation keys to the ignition and control consoles. In the possession, I believe, of one—or perhaps many—of the City higher-ups. A key, Ms. Ward, and the proper hand holding it: These are all that stand between us and a second Red Rain. You want to know why I killed Jaron? I will tell you: Jaron had one of those keys. I don’t even know how he knew what he had, at first. He must have been paying more attention to the factory specs than I’d thought. Can you imagine such power in such callow, untrustworthy hands?”

  She could. She could also imagine it in Dr. Dimbali’s. Neither one sounded any good to her.

  “He could not be trusted. Obviously. He had to be reasoned with. I brought a… pet in case he proved obstinate. But the vines are difficult to control even now—they were more so at the time. I nearly died myself as they thrashed and whipped through the room. I fled before I could uncover his key.

  “The Red Rain is coming. It’s coming back. And I have no intention of being one of its victims! I will do whatever I must to save myself.” He turned to the table and leaned on it, staring down at the body in repose. “I want you to hear this, Ms. Ward, and I want you to believe it—I am terribly, terribly sorry for all this. I truly am. Do you believe me?”

  “I’ll never believe a word out of your mouth again. As long as I live.”

  He sighed. “The entitlement of youth, I suppose. I had no choice in this matter. None at all. Do you know what the world used to be like?”

  Saving her breath, she managed a shrug instead.

  “It was something quite like that old book Rose gave you, I suppose. According to everything I’ve been able to piece together. And for that, Ms. Ward? For that, yes, I would kill a thousand Jaron Ludos, resurrect a thousand Roses.”

  “You’re willing to kill people to keep people from being killed,” she gasped out. “Makes a lot of sense.”

  He tsk-tsked. “Think of the scale! Killing thousands or even millions to save billions!”

  She remembered what Rose had told her. About every life mattering.

  “You don’t get to decide,” she managed to say. “Not… doing it for the world, anyway. For yourself.”

  “Does it matter?” he asked.

  She gathered her breath. It mattered, she knew. Because he would make the world good for only some people and not for others, and that wasn’t just not fair—it was manipulative and evil and greedy.

  “Save your breath,” he told her. “I have no desire to debate philosophy with you. There’s no point.”

  She thought of the massive hole in the wall, of the dirt spilling from it. She thought of Rose, standing on the small patch of dirt outside her apartment, face tilted to the sun.

  “You brought him back to life. You remade him.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”
He leaned back against the table, arms crossed over his chest. “I… repaired him. I daresay not another man on the planet could accomplish the same thing. I have managed—in a week’s time!—to reassemble and rejuvenate an entire corpus of a singular species. I suppose there’s a chance that some residual trace memory—perhaps language or basic cognition—will remain, depending on the way his unique physiology encodes engrams. But, really, I don’t care about that. I don’t need Rose’s memories, only his conscious ability to control his own biology.”

  Her breath was coming in shallower and shallower gasps. The vine around her midsection was cutting off most of her air; it was beginning to compress her rib cage from below. And the ones around her hands wouldn’t budge.

  “With a brain that has mastered the finely tuned control over Rose’s abilities—ah, Ms. Ward, with that in my possession—I will be unstoppable!”

  “Don’t understand… Thought you wanted to save the world.”

  Dr. Dimbali gazed at her curiously, then clucked his tongue. A teacher disappointed in a pet student.

  “Of course I do. Unlike the mass of humanity, which prefers to simply live in the world, I seek to better it. And do you know how such people—people such as myself—are treated, Ms. Ward? Do you know what our society does with them? To them? I will tell you. At NatSci, when I learned the truth, as I told you before… when I found those documents, so old and so buried in the bureaucracy that I was lucky to have stumbled upon them. Predating the Red Rain. When I went to my coworkers, my superiors… ‘Look! The world wasn’t always this way! It wasn’t always an abject struggle! We can return to those days.’”

  He shrugged and came closer to her. Pinned several inches above the ground, she matched his height and their gazes locked. No intervening SmartSpex. Nothing to blunt the sheer, insane intensity of his eyes.

  “They rejected me,” he whispered. “Cast me out. Disgraced me and sent me here, to this pit of…” His language—for the first time since she’d known him—failed him and he trailed off, staring at her, unblinking for long moments before finally saying, “I will make those who mocked me beg.”

  “And what about…” She had to stop to breathe. “… the people who never hurt you?”

  He shrugged. “Well, I imagine—” He broke off, his eyes dipping below her chin. A momentary chill shivered Deedra. It wasn’t quite a Jaron look, but she was completely helpless, and Dr. Dimbali could do whatever he wanted to her.

  But he did not touch her. He only—quite carefully—lifted her necklace with one hand, hoisting the pendant from under her shirt.

  “I…” He gaped as he stared at it. “Where did you… how in the world did you…”

  Nothing. She would say nothing to him.

  “This is astonishing! To see it here, now…” He smiled with genuine warmth and pleasure. “Ms. Ward! How extraordinary! You—”

  He screamed, his eyes and mouth widening in shock and pain. Spittle flecked Deedra’s face and she blinked. In the instant it took for her to reopen her eyes, Dr. Dimbali leapt away from her, releasing his hold on her necklace.

  No. He didn’t leap. He wasn’t doing anything at all. He was pulled.

  By vines.

  They enfolded him from behind and jerked him away from her with a breathless, terrifying ferocity. Dr. Dimbali screamed again, a high, shrill sound that drove into Deedra’s head like a nail. He flipped feet over head, and the vines let go, sending him careering across the lab to crash against another wall and collapse into a heap on the floor.

  Deedra hardly had a moment to appreciate the luck. A movement on the table caught her attention. The vines were retracting back to that spot, tucking themselves into Rose’s body with a slurping sound.

  Rose sat up on the table, his eyes flashing with a fury Deedra had never before witnessed. She knew Rose—the old Rose—hadn’t killed Jaron or anyone else.

  But this one? This new Rose?

  He could do it. Her eyes flicked to the heap of Dr. Dimbali. If he hasn’t already.

  “Please…” she whispered.

  Rose cocked his head, as though tilting his ear that way would help the sound of her voice fall in. He was expressionless. Did he even understand her words? Or was he a blank, as Dr. Dimbali had said?

  A sound. From across the workshop. Dr. Dimbali groaned and pushed himself to his feet.

  Rose’s head snapped in that direction. Vines whipped out from his back and wavered, casting snaky shadows on the floor. Dr. Dimbali gasped and ran in the direction Deedra had entered from, fleeing the lab. Rose growled deep in his throat and made as though to give chase, but the hoses connecting him to the nutrient tank tugged back at him.

  Pain flashed across his face. Deedra felt it—sympathetically and for real. The vines holding her were tightening, and soon she would black out.

  As she watched, Rose slowly, carefully unhooked the hoses. He drew them out one at a time, acting with unhurried precision. One by one, three large spikes emerged from him, slick with red blood and greenish plant matter, each one so long that she couldn’t imagine how they could have been implanted in him without meeting in the middle.

  As the final spike was withdrawn, she saw the flesh around each wound weep for a moment, then close on its own.

  “Rose!” she wailed with a precious breath. He had hopped down from the table and started moving in the direction in which Dr. Dimbali had disappeared, his vines now longer and more threatening in their lashing back and forth, almost as though they had minds—angry minds—of their own.

  He turned back to her, fixing her with a glare that betrayed no recognition. Standing before her, he came up only to her midriff. Then, his legs extended, lengthened, and his face came even with her own, close enough for a kiss. Or a bite.

  If she hadn’t been holding her breath out of necessity, the sight of him so close would have compelled it anyway. He was Rose and he wasn’t Rose. Those placid, relaxed features were now pressed into the service of a rage she’d never contemplated. No matter all the indignities heaped upon him in the past, she’d never seen him so angry.

  Who knows what does or doesn’t survive what he’s gone through? No one’s ever done anything like this before. He could be anything or anyone.

  “Do you remember me?” she gasped. Spots swarmed the edges of her vision. Unconsciousness wasn’t far off. And death would follow that.

  He stared at her, his head cocked again. Confusion flickered in his eyes. Like Dr. Dimbali, he found himself drawn by the glittering of her pendant as it reflected light from the sunlamp. He touched the pendant with the tip of a finger, then traced his way up the chain itself, under the mass of her hair…

  Where he encountered the knotty flesh of her scar.

  He probed it, ran his finger along it. Lifted her hair to lean in and peer at it, fascinated.

  “Do you—” She couldn’t speak.

  To die like this? With Rose her last sight, her last touch?

  There were, she supposed, worse deaths. She didn’t want to die, but the decision wasn’t in her hands, so she had to make the best of it.

  And then he spoke, haltingly at first, as though learning how.

  “You’re… different,” he said. It was like Rose’s voice, only rougher, less refined. Coarse from disuse.

  “Different,” he said again. “Like me.”

  “Yes.” It would be her last word, perhaps. Tears rolled down her face. The voice had changed, but it was Rose. It was Rose and he would be her last—

  “You are…” He struggled with it for a moment. It seemed to take him forever, but he finally said: “You are Dee. Deeee-dra.”

  “Yes!”

  And with that, recognition erupted across the height and breadth of his face, from the tilt of his lips to the expanding pupils of his eyes. The recognition—the remembering—pounded at her, bursting forth in every line of him, every curve, every angle. Without words, she knew that he knew, and he knew that she knew. He lunged forward, kissing her, locking him
self to her, exhaling into her. She tasted the sweet, sweet oxygen as it filled her lungs, lost in him, with him, connected to him, the seal of their lips inviolate, him giving her oxygen, she giving him carbon dioxide, a virtuous cycle that could go on forever.

  Forever.

  And she would be fine with that. Fine, lost in the heat of his lips and of his breath.

  He broke the kiss and that perfect, perfect mouth twisted into a wry grin. A familiar grin.

  “You probably don’t like being held against the wall, do you?” he asked with solicitous humor.

  “Not really.”

  Rose didn’t want to harm or kill the plants that grew all around him. They were mindless and under the control of another, with no motivation or guilt of their own. He sent his tendrils between the wall and the vines holding Deedra in place. He tugged gently at first, testing their strength. They felt familiar and unfamiliar at once, as though he were grappling with himself.

  “Hold on,” he warned Deedra. She nodded, already losing air again. He would have to hurry.

  Bracing himself with palms pressed against the wall, he wrapped his tendrils around the vines and pulled. Not as hard as he could—a slow, steadily mounting pressure.

  The vines fought back, contracting further. Deedra gasped and made a hiccuping, choking sound. He forced himself to ignore it. He had to concentrate.

  It was difficult. Memories were filtering in. From where, he didn’t know. But he was seeing flashes of Cities and Territories. The graveyard roses flickered and flared at him. His entire life spun within him, out of order.

  He focused on her. The river. The rebar. Her apartment. Her bed. Those memories, too, were coming back, and he plucked them from the whirlwind, using them as anchors against his own history.

  I lost her before. I lost everything. I won’t. Not again.