One of Us

by Craig DiLouie

  He sighed. “Okay.”

  “Okay what.”

  “Okay,” Jake said. “Goodbye, Pa. I’m sorry.”

  He and Amy walked back down the aisle hand in hand.

  “Recant,” Pa shouted.

  Glaring faces. Michelle and Troy gaping at him.

  “Recant!”

  Jake took one last look over his shoulder at his father.

  “Please, son,” Pa said.

  “I love you, Pa,” Jake said.

  The doors closed behind him.

  The sky had begun to pale. Dawn had finally broken the endless night.

  “You all right?” Amy said.

  “I don’t know how to answer that.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m proud of you for standing up to him. No matter how it turned out, you tried when nobody else would.”

  “Nobody likes getting pushed around, but the truth is we spend our whole lives getting pushed,” Jake said. “Getting pushed ain’t the hard part. The hard part is figuring when to make a stand and push back.”

  “From the mouths of babes,” Mrs. Green said. “What now?”

  He took Archie’s shotgun back from her and gave one last longing look at the church. “We’ll go back to the house. Lay low and be ready to run if we—”

  The doors cracked open.

  Not his pa, though. It was Mr. Benson and his girlfriend.

  “Where are you going?” Mr. Benson said.

  “Home,” Jake said. “Mrs. Green’s house.”

  “Mind if we come along with you?”

  “It’s all right with me if it is with Mrs. Green. It’s her house.”

  “Mr. Benson is my teacher,” Amy told her mama. “This lady is his girlfriend.”

  “I’m Amelia Oliver,” the woman said.

  “You taught them plague kids,” Mama said.

  “That’s right.”

  “They don’t seem to like their teachers much.”

  “I know the boy who started the whole thing. I don’t think he’d hurt me. I was kind to him.”

  Mrs. Green mulled this over. “I got plenty of room.”

  “The Army National Guard is mobilizing,” said Mr. Benson. “All we have to do is lie low until they come.”

  “We’d better get moving then,” Jake said. “The sun’s coming up.”

  They tramped to their cars.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Amy said.

  “I hope it weren’t the last time,” Jake answered. “When I told Pa I loved him.”

  “The church is outside of town. They should be all right. I was wishing at least Michelle and Troy would have come out with us, though.”

  “They don’t have the same convictions. They was right to stick by their folks.”

  “Thank you, Jake Coombs.”

  “For what?”

  “For sticking by me.”

  He smiled. “You’re my girl. You and me, we’re a tribe now.”

  Forty-Six

  The plague children waited in the trees as dawn burned away night’s edges. They watched the group walk to their cars in the crowded dirt lot.

  “What about them?” Tiny said in his rumbling voice.

  “Let them go,” Brain said.

  “You are going soft already.”

  “I made a promise to Ms. Oliver. And the normal children are not to be harmed. They will serve us when the world is ours.”

  The cars disappeared down the road. Triumphant singing emanated from the church. An organ playing. The giant boy jerked his horned head toward the sound.

  “Bigger fish to fry,” he growled.

  In all her history, Ms. Oliver never taught the plague children one simple fact, which was nobody ever handed anybody their rights. Brain grasped that truth intuitively by reading between the lines. You wanted your rights, you had to take them. Sometimes, you had to be willing to fight and die for them.

  All this time, he’d believed the only way the plague generation would ever be free was to cleanse the world of the generation that fathered it. A great war between those with everything and nothing to lose. Between the old and new.

  He’d gotten his war. The children had won the Battle of Huntsville. Tomorrow or the day after, however, they’d face the U.S. Army. The normals would never give up. They’d fight to hold onto their world to the last bomb and bullet.

  Still, the terrible vengeance he’d inflicted on Pa Albod had shaken him. If he couldn’t control his hatred, how could the kids whom he led? They were strong, they had amazing abilities, but in the end they were just abused children. Children with a lifetime of suffering in their heads and an Old Testament sense of justice.

  Goof did not want the act of fighting monsters to turn him into one. He wanted to stay a kid forever. He refused to commit to anything. Perhaps he was right about one thing, though. Maybe it did not have to be total war.

  “I’ll talk to them,” Brain said.

  “Talking again,” Tiny spat. “You want to have it both ways.”

  “We won just one town,” Brain said. “And already we’re up to our necks in blood.”

  Tiny said, “Fine. Have it your way. You go up there. They hand over their weapons and go back to their homes.”

  “They’ll agree,” Brain said. “They have no choice.”

  “We’ll see about that. They even look at you funny, we’re coming.”

  Brain walked toward the church doors with a white pillowcase tied to a broom handle. He doubted they’d respect a flag of truce if they wanted to shoot, but at least they knew his intentions.

  The church doors opened. Faces crammed the entrance, terrified, revolted, angry. A man in black emerged and challenged him from the steps.

  “This is a house of God,” the man called out.

  “And we are God’s children,” Brain said.

  “I see those children skulking out in yonder trees. Are you in charge of them?”

  “My name is George Hurst. The kids call me Brain. Who would you be, sir?”

  “Reverend Jeremiah Coombs.”

  “I am not in charge, Reverend. But I speak for the mutagenic children of the Stark County Home for the Teratogenic.”

  “And what does the Stark County Home for the Teratogenic want to tell us?”

  “They have a message for you,” Brain said. “Me, I have just one question.”

  “I got a question for you, boy. Why don’t I just have you shot where you stand after all you done?”

  “Because if you do, every man and woman in that church will die. For all that you’ve done.”

  Coombs’s glare softened. “Ask what you want.”

  Brain had in mind a simple question that for him was the crux of everything wrong in the world since his birth. “Why couldn’t you love us?”

  “You ask me that after today,” the reverend said. “After what you’ve proven yourself to be.”

  “We were born innocent. You owed us a chance to be something else.”

  “We owed you nothing,” Coombs said, “and there weren’t anything else you could have become other than what you are. If it were up to me, we would never have suffered you to live. We should have let you all die after you was born.”

  Brain winced. His mind flashed to the wonder of his birth turning to horror. His mother screaming, her mouth moving to make strange sounds. His tiny hands reaching to offer love and help. Howling as the doctor swept him from the room.

  He’d spent the first years of his life wondering why they had to be separated. Loving a terrified woman who eternally screamed in his mind. Worrying about her while believing that if he was a good boy, one day they’d be reunited.

  Sitting on the dirty floor at the Home, he listened to the normals talk. He watched their lips move and learned language until finally he understood what his mother had screamed.

  No! Get that fucking thing away from me! Get rid of it!

  “Did I answer your question?” Coombs said.

  “You did,” Brain said.

&n
bsp; “Now what’s this message you got for me?”

  Brain stared at him.

  “Well?” the man said.

  “No message, Reverend.”

  “Stop this killing. Go back to the Home and await your judgment.”

  “We can only be what we are, Reverend. What you made us.”

  Brain turned and started walking back to the tree line.

  “My boy,” Coombs called after him.

  He paused. “I know your son.”

  “Don’t you hurt him.”

  They locked eyes across the distance separating them. Brain nodded.

  The children waited for him in the trees. They crowded around, waiting for him to speak. He dropped the broom handle in the weeds. Across the dirt lot, the church doors slammed shut.

  It was hard to hate when what you hated became a who. A father who loved his son.

  “What did he say to you?” Tiny asked him.

  Brain said nothing.

  “What do you want to do?” the giant boy growled.

  Brain shook his head. Words failed him for the first time. He wanted it both ways, understanding each carried a terrible price he didn’t want to pay. Finally, an equation he couldn’t solve.

  “My way, then,” Tiny said.

  He stomped toward the church flexing his big hands.

  The plague children rushed forward on pounding feet. Brain watched them stream through the parked vehicles. Too late to stop them, always too late. It had been too late his whole life.

  The doors shattered open. Tiny disappeared inside, followed by the clawed flood.

  Perhaps fighting monsters made one a monster. But maybe it took a monster to kill a monster. If the path to Heaven’s gate crossed a vast river of fire and blood, then all who would enter paradise must be ready to swim in it.

  Or stay in Hell.

  The congregation’s screams poured out of the church. Screams of terror, anguish, and pain. Brain clapped his hands over his ears to block them out, though he’d never be able to rid himself of them. He had a perfect memory. The sounds of those people dying were forever imprinted on it.

  He closed his eyes and pictured the world he wanted. Teaching the children to create instead of destroy. Working together to build a new world on the ashes of the old.

  A world of wonders.

  Forty-Seven

  The long night was over.

  Sheriff Burton wandered the wilderness at the edge of town, searching.

  You have a son, the plague girl had told him. She had somehow known.

  He and Anne had so badly wanted to bring another life into this world. He remembered the joy he’d felt when she finally conceived. The Burton name would carry on. Jesus promised immortality to the soul, children to the flesh. He would live forever through his children and theirs, on and on into the future.

  The germ gave him a monster and a lifetime of shame.

  There came a point in middle age when the search for meaning switched its focal point from life to death. When you truly grasped the fact that everything ends, including you. Cursed by infection, his name would die with him. After he was dead and gone, all that would be left of him would be a monster. If the plague children were sons of Cain, then he was Cain.

  Burton staggered along the hill on the north side of town as dawn’s creeping light revealed a scenic view of the destruction. He paused to gaze upon the blasted wreckage of the roadblocks, overrun in the howling twilight melee. Rubble and cars and bodies marked a score of last stands. He’d lost his deputies down there, and when all seemed lost he’d fled to save Anne.

  Now his wife was dead, devoured by a plague girl who looked like an angel. He still held Anne’s dress, all that was left of her, in his hand. He let it fall and released that part of his past. Her suffering was over, her soul departed to a better place.

  The world had misjudged the plague children every step of the way. The extent to which they could be controlled. The powers they displayed. They wanted their birthright, but the fact remained they didn’t belong in this world. They wanted the same things, asked the same questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Is there a reason things happen? Still, angels and demons had no business being on the earth.

  The town sprawled below. A dog slouched across a street. Turkey vultures circled overhead. Otherwise, Huntsville appeared emptied of life. Behind, a short walk to a major road offered a clear path out of this hell. Huntsville was his home, but whatever made it home had been swept away. He could go anywhere. Join up with the authorities and get back in the fight. Put an end to the whole business.

  Burton shifted his gaze and spotted plague kids dancing around Reverend Coombs’s church outside of town. The church started to burn. He checked his revolver. Two bullets left. He hoped it was enough for what he had to do.

  The plague girl had instructed him to find his son and correct his sin. He didn’t know what she meant and didn’t particularly care. He didn’t stay because of some notion of redemption she’d planted in his mind. He’d failed Enoch and the kids, failed his wife and the town. Nothing could change that. He stayed because he had unfinished business to attend. A good town policed itself.

  His last chance to make it right.

  The sheriff walked down the hill, skirting the town’s edge across dead ground. A distant field was on fire, pouring black smoke into the sky. Clouds of insects swarmed away from the moving wall of flame. The church stood on the other side of a hedgerow, smoking in the morning sunlight.

  Sheriff, a voice carried on the heat.

  The plague child materialized from the brown cotton, lumbering toward him on a bed of writhing tentacles. The thing looked like a big bowling pin made of rubber, eyes bulging and blinking. Large wet mouth stretched into a wide clay smile. The plague boy stopped a short distance away, bouncing on his roots.

  “Look-ing for you,” the boy said.

  Burton remembered seeing him swaddled under the heat lamp at the clinic, squirming like a slug and crying like a normal baby did for his mama’s breast.

  He said, “As it happens, I been looking for you as well.”

  “For me?”

  “For Edward. Your real name is Edward Thomas Burton.”

  “Bur-ton?”

  “That’s right,” the sheriff said. “I been watching over you a long time.”

  The boy smiled and closed his eyes, which leaked tears. “Knew it.”

  “I wanted to find you and tell you I’m sorry, son. Sorry I left you and couldn’t be your daddy. Sorry I couldn’t love you the way you needed.”

  The eyes popped open. “Love me now?”

  “I always did,” Burton said. “Just not the way you deserved.”

  “Al-ways knew it was you.”

  The sheriff drew his gun from its holster and extended his arm to point the weapon at his son. “I’m real sorry, Edward. I got to put you down now.”

  “Al-ways want-ed to be you,” the boy said.

  Tears flowed down Burton’s stubbled cheeks. “Close your eyes like you were. It’s time for you to go to sleep.”

  He didn’t want to shoot. He wasn’t sure he could. But he had to end it.

  Angels and demons had no place on this earth.

  “Goodbye, son,” he said.

  Barbed tentacles shot out from under Edward Thomas and latched onto him. The big gun banged in his hand, sending the bullet flying into the sky.

  The tentacles flexed and pulled. The sheriff landed hard on his back, flailing at the barbed roots that held him fast. His hat rolled away. He howled at the ripping pain in his arms.

  “Stop,” he cried. “Wait.”

  The tentacles dragged him forward.

  The gun fired again, kicking up dirt. The rising sun was in his eyes. The gun clicked empty. His back scraped along the ground, leaving a furrow in the soil.

  Edward bobbed on his roots. Eyes closed, still leaking tears. And smiling.

  “I love you too, Dad-dy.”

  “No,” Burton roared. “D
on’t do this. Edward.”

  He struggled, caught in the web of tentacled flesh that drew him toward his son. His boy began to consume him in throbbing gulps. No pain now, not anymore. He couldn’t feel the disappearing parts of him. Like returning to the womb. He stopped fighting and let go.

  Forty-Eight

  Dark shapes in the fields, pouring through the hedgerow veiling the smoking Methodist church. The plague children on the march. A horde of creatures born from mankind’s worst nightmares. Monsters of myth in bloodstained overalls.

  Horned, winged, gilled, hoofed. Deformed limbs, protruding stalks, misshapen bones. They trotted and shambled, slithered and loped through the dying cotton. A boy with bat wings traced lazy circles in the sky.

  The children tramped across the endless fields, dwindling from sight until they disappeared in the hill country. Migrating north toward the world that birthed and rejected them to gaze upon its wonders. See everything it had to offer.

  And claim it for their own.

  Forty-Nine

  Goof pedaled his bike while Mary walked by his side. The plague boy and the fire girl. Gods but also children. Children but grown up now. Broken but now whole.

  “There were this girl at Special Facility who really got under my skin,” Goof said. “I hope she’s all right.”

  “She sounds real nice,” Mary said.

  “She’s got these whiskers. Cuter than a speckled pup on a shiny red wagon. If I told you her name, which she got on account of her whiskers, you’d die laughing.”

  “You’ll see her again, Big Brother.”

  “You know that for sure?”

  “You will.”

  “When?”

  “When you want it to happen bad enough you start looking.”

  “I thought you might know for sure. Thought you was a fortune teller now.”

  “My prophecy is based on wisdom,” Mary said. “A wise woman is always honest with herself about what she doesn’t know.”

  “Guess that makes me the most honest man alive,” Goof said. “Cuz I don’t know shit.”

  She laughed, which sounded like music. “Big Brother always made me laugh. Big Brother has become what he hates to destroy what he hates. Big Brother has met his destiny. Big Brother is dead.”