Divided We Fall

by Adam Bender

  Eve pulled her hair back. “It’s cooler in the Capital,” she muttered.

  “This station’s got history, as a matter of fact,” the old man went on. “Dates back to the Great War, yes sir! You know what they used this place for?”

  Rodriguez shrugged. “What?”

  “Ammo-nition!” he replied excitedly. “This where our good men in the Guard stashed their weaponry, yes sir, they did. When the war ended–when we won–they were thinkin’ about tearing the old girl down, on account of how torn up with bullets she got. But our good townspeople came together, fixed the place up nice and tidy, and I reckon we’ve been using it as police headquarters ever since!”

  The Loganville man took a gulp from a clear plastic bottle. He hadn’t offered any water to the Elites. “All this, of course, is just a long way of explaining why we got no A/C. But as much as I hate to cut through this de-light-ful treacle, would you mind telling me what two Elites are doing in my town? We ain’t got no Watched here. Just real good patriots. Real good.”

  “I’m actually not an Elite yet,” Rodriguez piped up. “Just training.”

  The sheriff responded with a vacant stare. Rodriguez turned to the window and busied himself by squinting at the morning sun.

  “We’re looking for someone, an out-of-towner,” said Eve. “He goes by ‘Seven,’ and was last seen traveling with a Watched named Talia. They broke through the blockade yesterday and came here.”

  The old man cracked a smile. “I’ll need more than that.”

  She pulled out her phone and scrolled through the photos. Two pics past Jon and Eve’s day at the beach was an image of Jon giving a double thumbs up. Sighing slightly, she leaned over the desk and showed the sheriff.

  The sheriff gazed at Eve’s chest, and then the picture. “Oh,” he said.

  “Familiar?”

  “I reckon that’s the one gave us some fine trouble last night. In fact, I’m sure of it. This is the reprobate that last night took to fightin’ in the tavern!”

  A large glass mug clapped down on the bar, jerking Seven’s attention from the buxom gal with the jogging shorts and gunslinger hat. For a split second he watched the black-and-tan fluid foam over the top. Then reflexes took over. He caught the pint, pulled it to his lips, and cleaned off the suds.

  “Put that one on my tab, too,” called Talia, who was sitting next to him.

  She had been buying him drinks all night. “Why are you paying for me?” Seven asked suspiciously.

  “To celebrate!” she exclaimed, taking a sip from the red potion in her hand. “It’s not every day you get chased by the Guard and live to tell about it.”

  Seven thought it was somewhat remarkable they could actually hear each other above the drunken din. A smarmy band in the corner played some noisy old ditty that half the tavern’s patrons knew well enough to sing along with.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “you don’t have any money, so it’s not like you were going to buy your own drinks.”

  “How do you know I’m broke?”

  “Your pockets aren’t exactly bulging. Do you even have a wallet?”

  He smiled slightly. “I lost it during the attack.”

  She scoffed. “Yeah…right.”

  Seven picked up his mug and studied the throw-away coaster. The bright red background now featured a circular brown stain. His eyes floated back to the cowgirl who was now bouncing to the country music.

  He was feeling a bit more himself. Seven was still wearing the same clothes from the previous night but at least he’d finally had a chance to shave at Shaan’s house.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” asked Talia.

  He gaped alternately at his companion and the coaster. How could he explain his relationship with Eve, exactly? Not even Seven was quite sure what was going on there. She had told him they were engaged to be married, but he didn’t remember any of that. Something about it felt true– and well, she was hot–but Eve had also deceived him about a lot of other things.

  “It’s complicated,” Seven concluded.

  “Well I could have found out that much from your Internet profile,” replied Talia. “What, did she dump you or something?”

  Seven squinted hard at his pint, as if the answer might be floating within. “No, not exactly. Look, um, no offense, but I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  “At least tell me if she’s pretty.” Talia pronounced the last word like she was talking to a baby.

  “Um…”

  “What, she’s ugly?”

  “No! I mean, she’s not–you know–she’s very–” He rowed his hand out from his chest in a circular motion.

  Talia squinted at the gesture. “Large breasted?”

  He looked mortified and emitted a series of short, incoherent gasps.

  Grinning, Talia threw up her hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, I’ll stop!”

  Seven took another gulp of beer and tried to segue into a new subject. “Shaan seems nice…”

  Now it was Talia who took a vigorous sip of her booze. “My brother is a fool.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well for one thing, he lives in this shit hole town.”

  “I dunno,” he said, marveling at the rough-and-tumble gal by the entrance. “It’s not all bad.”

  “He moved here because of that girl, Joanna,” Talia continued, sprinkling a little contempt over the name. “You may remember her from his weird dream about the subway.”

  Seven was confused. “Couldn’t they just commute? This place isn’t that far from the city.”

  “What?” she yelped in outrage. “No, I said he moved here because of a girl, not to pursue one. Joanna was dropped.”

  His eyes widened. “What, they hanged her? Why?”

  Talia seemed alarmed by Seven’s sudden focus on the conversation. “Promise you won’t tell Shaan I told you?”

  He nodded.

  “She’d been on the Watched list from the start of their relationship. Years ago she was like this famous journalist, but her career was destroyed when she tried breaking a story the Guard didn’t like.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Um,” she struggled. “I read it, but it was a while ago so I don’t exactly remember. But the Guard said it threatened national security, so they put her on the Watched list. She was dating my brother when all this happened. And they continued to go out long after that, and like everything was fine, until one day she started writing something else on the newspaper blog that the Guard really didn’t like. A week later, they dropped her for heresy and treason.”

  “God,” he managed.

  “But like the worst part for Shaan was how he found out. He had this whole date planned out, where he was going to propose and everything. When she didn’t show, he thought she’d stood him up. Then of course he goes home and turns on the TV, and there she is waiting to be dropped. I…I think he may have seen the telecast.”

  Seven shuddered. He remembered the first time he’d stumbled upon a live TV execution of an alleged Heretic. It was like a game show with smiley hosts and brass fanfare. But rather than dunk the contestant in a pool of water, or slime him with green goo, they put a rope around his neck and dropped him through a trap door.

  “So Shaan left the Capital?”

  “More or less,” she said cryptically. “Point is, he ended up in this shit hole. The really sad thing, though, is he still talks about her like she’s alive.”

  “So why are you on the Watched list?” Seven asked out of the blue.

  “Racial profiling,” Talia replied without hesitation.

  “What? That can’t be true.”

  She shrugged. “It certainly didn’t help.”

  A shadow fell over Talia. She gaped at the hulking bartender whose eyes now burned into hers. The man’s choice in clothing–red short-sleeved shirt, faded jeans, and big, thick glasses–only served to accentuate his size.

  “Are you Shaan’s sister?” the beast rumbled.
r />   Talia breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes…how did you know?”

  “Um,” he said dumbly.

  Talia glanced around the room, and shook her head knowingly. “See? This town is so white,” she muttered. Then, speaking up, she said, “Never mind. How do you know my brother? Regular customer I expect?”

  A heavy hand landed on Seven’s shoulder, jerking his attention to the boar in the stool next to his. Yellow stains spread from the man’s armpits down the sides of his white T-shirt, which depicted a scantily clad woman draped over the hood of a red pickup truck. “Hey you,” the stranger grunted.

  Seven cringed. “Hi?”

  The pig licked some BBQ sauce off his chops. “Where you from?”

  “The city.”

  “You there when it all went to Hell?” the stranger prodded.

  Seven looked at his beer.

  “Well?”

  “No.”

  The pig downed a shot of something that smelled like rub-bing alcohol. “Goddamned Heretics,” he whined.

  Seven turned. “Who, the Enemy?”

  “No, the Heretics,” he emphasized. “There is no Enemy,” he replied gravely. “The attack was just God’s vengeance against the Heretics.”

  “Wait, what?” Seven laughed. “You’re saying that, if more people went to church, we wouldn’t have been attacked?”

  He felt a sudden, sharp nudge from Talia, whose conversation was apparently over. “Hey, Seven?” she said.

  The stranger bore his teeth. “Everyone goes to church,” he growled. “But some don’t believe.”

  “Right…” said Seven, continuing to ignore Talia’s tapping.

  “You go to church, don’t you?” said the barfly.

  “Everyone goes to church,” mimicked Seven, taking another gulp of his beer. He shifted his languid stare to the TV which was now showing the attack on the Capitol Tower from an exclusive new angle. “So does that mean that the Enemy is in cahoots with God? That God got mad at us for not believing, so he sent his henchmen to rough us up?”

  The pig blinked.

  Talia whispered harshly into Seven’s ear, “Are you trying to get killed?”

  “My theory,” Seven continued, undeterred, “is that people like you are so worried about deviation within the country that you’ve forgotten that there’s a dangerous world outside our borders. We’re not being punished, we just weren’t ready.”

  The pig’s mouth fell open. “You’re one of the god-damned Heretics!”

  “He’s really not,” Talia pitched in. “He’s just had a rough couple of days. He, um, lost a good friend in the attack.”

  “Stay out of this, bitch,” the pig growled.

  “Hey that’s not nice,” said Seven. “Simmer down.”

  “I don’t believe this guy,” the boar laughed. “The Heretic’s trying to get me to shaddap.” He slapped Seven’s beer off the counter, and it smashed into several large pieces on the floor.

  Talia glanced the bartender’s way. “Can I close out?”

  The pig threw a punch. Seven caught his attacker by the wrist and, redirecting his momentum, tossed him downward into the shards of broken glass. The pig squealed and the band stopped. A few skittish men darted out the exit, while some heavies lumbered toward Seven.

  Talia pocketed her credit card and signed the receipt. “Seven?” she said. “I think it’s time to go.”

  “Naturally, we intervened,” said the sheriff. He popped a thick wad of chewing tobacco into his mouth.

  “So this Talia has a brother in Loganville?” prodded Eve.

  “Yessum. Man’s name is Shaan–Shaan Williams, I think.” He spun around and pulled open a dusty filing cabinet.

  Coughing, Rodriguez whispered to Eve, “Kidding me? Don’t they even have computers in this town?”

  The old man slapped a file down on the table. Eve pulled it toward her and opened to the photograph. She scrutinized it for a few seconds, and then gasped. “I know this man,” she said. “He was one of my Watched a few years ago. I thought he was dead!”

  The sheriff laughed. “What? He’s been living here for the past two years. I’m sure of it. You don’t forget a man with a face like that and who spells his God-given name all wrong.”

  “He had a different last name back then. We have him on tape jumping his motorcycle off the Luna Coast.”

  The sheriff raised his eyebrows. “Did you find the body?”

  “Just the bike at the bottom of the sea. But no one could have survived that fall.”

  The sheriff guffawed. “I guess sometimes them fish get away, don’t they?”

  Eve scowled. “Speaking of escapes, I don’t suppose you’ve got Seven in your holding cell, do you?”

  Frowning, the Loganville man bent over to spit some black juice into a stained bucket. “We chased him to the church,” he grumbled.

  A police siren rang out. Seven followed Talia into the shadows of an empty alleyway. It hadn’t rained all day, but the narrow street was filled with puddles, dimly reflecting the yellow apartment windows above.

  He shook off a shiver. Only a few hours ago Loganville felt relentlessly hot. But the air here was too dry to hold the warmth. The temperature dropped with the sun.

  “Could you please stop being a stupid idiot?” demanded Talia. “Why would you start a fight? It’s not even been twenty-four hours since our little adventure at the blockade. Don’t the words ‘lying low’ mean anything to you?”

  “Hey, going to a pub was your idea, not–ack!” Seven yanked his neck back, and began wiping frantically at the top of his head.

  Talia took a step back. “What are you, some kind of crazy obsessive-compulsive invalid?”

  Seven scowled. “You know, you’ve been asking me a lot of pretty insulting questions tonight.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said insincerely, “did they sound like questions?”

  “I jumped because something dripped on me,” he ex-plained, craning his neck to find the source. “Probably just an air conditioner.”

  “Too bad it wasn’t hair conditioner,” returned Talia, laughing at her own joke. “You could use some. Not to mention shampoo.”

  This time he ignored her. “Which way to Shaan’s place again?”

  Talia pointed down the alley. “Through here, across the church grounds, and then a few zigs and zags. But we should probably chill here for a little while longer.”

  She crouched behind a metal trash can. Seven started to speak but Talia shushed him. She mouthed something resembling “Did you hear that?”

  Seven closed his eyes and listened. Somewhere a radio crackled. Then it spoke. “–proceed on foot.” There was a methodical tapping from around the corner, and its volume was increasing. Someone was coming.

  Suddenly, Talia gasped and reached for the back of her neck. As she did, her knee shot forward into the can, knocking it noisily onto the pavement. Several bottles of beer clattered out onto the street.

  Collectively, the fugitives’ jaws dropped. The slapping of soldier boots grew heavy.

  “Run!” said Talia in a whisper that seemed only a few decibels short of a scream.

  The stone cathedral seemed to bounce and expand as they approached. It looked far older than the high-technology monstrosities Seven had seen in the Capital. Those newer buildings were built like stadiums and even used jumbo screens to engage the parish. Of course, the comparison was no longer current, he realized. The Enemy had reduced all the Capital cathedrals to piles of rocks, accented here and there by shards of red and blue glass.

  Talia darted around a conifer tree, avoiding a bright spot of light on the grassy grounds. Seven followed, looking back as he went. They hurdled into a dark patch beneath a stairwell in the back of the church. The low vibrations of an organ droned through an emergency exit at the top of the steps.

  Seven looked thoughtfully up the stairs. Suddenly, he bounded upward and tore open the door. Talia cursed and scuttled after him.

  There were more sta
irs inside, but these were steep and tightly coiled. The organ music reverberated off the heavy stone walls, drowning the fugitives in sound. Talia said something; Seven failed to respond.

  “Well?” she yelled.

  He pointed at his ear. “What?”

  She clutched his shoulders and leaned in close. “I said these stairs probably lead up to the main hall!”

  He nodded, and they climbed. And climbed. Finally, the stairs opened up into a long mezzanine running left and right to each end of the cathedral. Seven pressed up against the railing and ventured a look at the pews several hundred feet below. White candles all around bounced golden light up off cantilevers into a great painted dome.

  “It’s beautiful, in a ‘fun with vertigo’ kind of way,” said Talia as she approached the ledge. “But where are all the big TV screens?”

  Before Seven could respond, the organ stopped. The intruders froze.

  There was a slight creaking and the soft shuffle of feet. Seven traced the patter to a bald priest walking up the aisle toward the entrance. He tugged open one of the tall, wooden doors, and three policemen stomped in.

  “Is there a problem?” boomed the priest. His syrupy voice echoed around the cathedral.

  “There was a fight at the tavern,” explained a mustachioed old Guard in the center. “We’re looking for the damned Heretics that started it.”

  “This is a House of God,” answered the priest. “There are no Heretics here.”

  “We should still have a look around.”

  “You may not. The Great One will not have you dragging dirt into his church. You have no authority here.”

  “But–” the cop protested.

  “Go,” the churchman interrupted. “I still have much to prepare for tomorrow’s sermon.”

  “Okay, sure,” said Eve, gasping to find the words. “You lost him in the church. Fine. But they had to have been staying with Shaan, right? Please tell me you went there.”

  “We checked all right,” said the sheriff, “but the guy said he didn’t even know his sister was in town.”

  “And you just believed him?!”