by Elisa Hansen
He loved her.
Well, he loved the Jade he knew she could be. “I just…don’t want to.”
“So then don’t.” Nick’s attention returned to Carol.
“Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
Scott pushed away from the table. He shouldn’t have said anything. Nick and her wall of robots wasn’t going to get it. Her last serious relationship was with her AI software designer who was as obsessed with machines as Nick. Scott was pretty sure it involved more geeking out together than any actual romance. The only way Scott even heard about her was when Nick gushed over the AI. He wondered if she even knew how to mourn.
He made his way out the lab door but almost walked into some guy coming in.
The guy stepped back. “Sorry, bro. Didn’t see you there.” He had shoulders like two soccer balls and a head like Mr. Clean’s, a few shades darker.
Scott nodded and moved to go around him, but the guy held out a hand. “Colin.”
Well, isn’t that just super. Scott shook it as firmly as he could, but Colin’s grip still hurt.
“Call me Nick’s brother,” Scott said. “Everyone else does.”
Colin glanced into the room, but Nick ignored them both.
“Scott,” Scott acquiesced.
Colin grinned. Good teeth too. Of course. “Any bro of Nick’s is a bro of mine.”
Joy.
“Sup, Nicki?” he called into the lab.
“At least three more hours,” she said. How did she allow this guy to live calling her Nicki?
“Right.” Colin shot her finger guns. “I will…come back later then.”
Scott made it into the hall, but Colin caught up before he could escape.
“Want a beer?” he asked. “We still have real beer. Only the best at Curisa.”
“No thanks.” What Scott wanted was to find a book with dragons on the cover and a quiet corner, or anything to get his mind off real people. But Colin waved him into a left turn leading to a break room. He got himself a beer from the fridge, glancing at Scott over his shoulder. “You sure? Soda?”
“Mountain Dew?” Scott asked.
Colin laughed and tossed him a bottle of Cherry Coke.
How long would Scott have to stand there making inane small talk before he could leave? “What do you do here?” he asked to fill the space. “Security?”
Slurping a mouthful of beer, Colin shook his shiny, bald head. “I transferred from Frisco to work with Midori. Calibration and stuff. But since lockdown, been focusing on keeping the systems operational. And keeping the hackers off our servers, of course. Call me Jack of all trades.”
Of course. Scott took a sip of Coke to avoid having to answer.
“Couldn’t help overhearing,” Colin said between swigs. “About your girlfriend. That Jade chick, right? Sorry, man. Bitches.”
“She’s not a bitch.”
“Course not.” He grinned at Scott again with his perfect teeth.
“She’s not.”
“Got it. Sorry, bro.” Colin shook his head all sympathetic-like. “My girl took off the second everything went down. I know how you feel.”
“I doubt that.” Scott kept his eyes on his bottle.
“What about your sister? She with anyone?”
His head shot up, and he almost choked on Coke. “My sister? Have you even met her?”
“She’s a pretty cool chick.”
“You’re, uh, not her type.”
Colin chuckled. “I get it. Gotta be the protective brother.”
This time Scott did choke. Sticky cherry fizz burned up the back of his nose. He coughed and shook his head. “You can try.” In fact, he kind of hoped he would. “Call her Nicki more. She loves that.” Seeing Colin get squished under Nick’s disinterest would be pretty amusing. The last thing Nick wanted were muscly bros who used the word “Frisco.”
In the weeks after that day, once Carol became operational and the combat testing resumed, Scott saw even less of his sister. And Jade… Things with Jade got worse and worse.
Scott set his brain against thinking any more about Jade, pulled himself back to the present, and scowled at the desert beyond the car’s window. He’d spent almost a year plotting what he would say when he caught up to Jade in New York, and if he hadn’t figured it out yet, he wasn’t going to know until he saw her. It would come to him. And it would be brilliant and heartbreaking, and then he would eat more sushi and…
Yeah.
Bitches.
17
Brethren
Over the course of the afternoon, Emily and Death came across several open spaces, and she worried one would suit his needs enough to negate their deal. But he kept on leading her through the winding rock alleys toward the destination she suggested.
When he halted abruptly at the summit of an inclined path, she walked right into his back. It felt like walking into a tree. She stumbled, but he ignored her.
“Oof. What is it?” The echo of the texture of his cloak’s fabric lingered against her face. It was softer than she expected.
“What I need.”
She rubbed her cheek and leaned to look around him over the cliff. “Oh, yup. That’s it.” Little Salt Basin. Even vaster than she remembered.
“It will do,” said Death.
Together, they surveyed the sun-swept plain. Tumbleweeds far outnumbered the few low boulders scattered across its brown flatness. Holes pockmarked the ground, but they were ancient. Half a mile from where they stood, the craggy hills extended in a crescent up to the plain’s north end. To the south, the horizon flatlined. The late afternoon sun at their backs stretched their shadows far over the valley. Emily noticed Death’s settled more than a shade darker than her own.
He pointed a skeletal finger into the middle distance. “I must go farther.” He glanced aside at her, hesitated. “You should stay here.”
She looked up at him and nodded, but for the first time wondered what kind of “brethren” Death could possibly have. “Are they like other versions of death?”
“Other…?” He shook his head. “No.”
“Oh. So…”
“You should stay here.”
She nodded again, and he moved to the edge.
“Wait.” She squinted at the northern cliff. “The road runs along up there.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What if someone comes?”
“I imagine they will be extremely confused.”
She rolled her eyes and looked to the opposite direction. “Wait—”
“Just vultures,” said Death with a sigh. He was right. Four of them circled something out over the clear horizon.
Emily rushed to the edge. “Is someone dying out there?”
“I’m not there, am I?”
She frowned up at him. It couldn’t be an animal, could it? The whole point of coming to the Basin was nothing lived there.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Stay here.”
“Okay, okay.” She pointed to the vultures. “But what are they circling?”
“I don’t care.” He jabbed a finger at the ground under her feet, and then he turned away. Without another word, he glided like a shadow down the rocks and proceeded out across the plain.
Emily waited where she stood. For about a minute. They had a deal, but now that her part was up, she wasn’t going to let him get far from her. Even though she kept as quiet as possible when she climbed after him, she was sure he would turn around and tell her to stop. But he made no sign he noticed.
She didn’t have to follow him far. A couple hundred yards past the hill shadows, the open space gaped stark and lifeless on all sides. Two more vultures joined the sky circle in the distance. Emily crouched behind a boulder as she watched Death move to a spot beyond a clump of snaggly tumbleweeds. He faced the south.
Emily stayed low and crept into the dead bushes. Linked like the arms of terrified survivors, their twigs hid her while offering a clear view of Death’s every action t
hrough the tangles.
He stared at the birds, and then he took out his screen thing and tapped at it. After another minute or so, he drooped and put it away. She could hear the air rustle through him as if the cloak itself sighed. Super black, super soft cloak. Emily rubbed at her cheek again.
Death lifted his arms to the south. For the first time, she could see the complete fullness of his sleeves, hanging almost to his sides, but with so many folds of fabric, his arms remained concealed. The cloth fluttered, and a moment later, a breeze caressed Emily as a roll of thunder broke the lifeless silence. She waited for it to stop, but instead, it crescendoed, drumlike, heralding dark clouds. They boiled up too fast for her to see where they came from, piling into a bulbous tower before spilling across the sky toward Death in crashing waves. Lightning-speckled their crests, like phosphorescence in the foam. In all directions from where Death stood, the day became a dark one, blotting the vultures from view. The wind sharpened, shrieked up the Basin, and the tumbleweeds around Emily chattered and groaned.
Out of the flashing clouds, three figures emerged. At first, they subsisted of mere colors, one white, one black, one red, distorted blurs galloping over the air, their ephemeral forms only hinting at shapes. The shapes of horses and riders. The sounds of world’s end clamored about them, hooves beating an iron sky, but as they descended through the storm, their bodies solidified. When they landed upon the barren waste before Death, their swirling shapes took on distinct proportions and definition, settling into the time and space of the moment.
Death lowered his arms and folded them across his chest. He looked between the three of them. The wind carried his voice to where Emily hid. He said, “Hi.”
“Greetings.”
“Hello, hello!”
“Brother.”
Emily’s dismayed hands pressed her face so tightly she was hurting herself. But she couldn’t look away.
Horsemen.
Horsewomen? The first two looked and sounded like women. None of their voices were as deep as Death’s, but they resonated with that same cavernous quality, like they belonged to much larger beings.
Is the apocalypse really a thing? Emily could kick herself. Who else would Death’s brethren be?
The three riders all wore comfortable smiles even as their horses pawed the ground and sniffed the air as if unsure what to do with their newfound solidness. The leftmost one on the white horse was swathed in a gown the color of cobwebs. She held a silver crossbow aloft, aimed at nothing. The middle rider was sausage-stuffed into a black leather bodysuit, and her black horse’s gnarled knees quivered under her weight. Her empty hands stroked the creature’s sparse mane. The man on the third horse contemplated the length of an upraised sword. Its surface, laser-like and liquid at once, glistened red and reflected the robotic body armor covering him and his sorrel stallion.
If Emily hadn’t been so close, had seen them in any other circumstance, she might have mistaken them for human, or maybe vampires with their white skin and creepily fluid movements. But their eyes gave them away. No whites or pupils, just shadowy globes and light within burning the same color as their horses.
The wind calmed, and the cataclysmic noise stilled, but the dark cover remained above. Death took a step forward.
“Where is your horse?” the red rider asked. Armor, sword, what did that make him? War? Emily needled her brain. Who were the other two Horsemen supposed to be? War leaned to the side in his silicone saddle to look Death over, as if he expected to spot his horse hidden behind his robes.
“I require your aid,” said Death.
“Ah, now I understand,” the woman in white said with a sniff of her high, beaky nose. She gave her own horse an affectionate rub between its gnarled ears. “That’s how he did it.”
The woman in the middle jiggled with laughter and pressed her dimpled hands together in delight. “Oh no.”
“Oh. Yes.” Death unfolded his arms.
“What are you doing without it?” War asked.
“Walking.”
The three of them glanced at one another and then shook their heads in obvious sympathy.
As Emily watched the figures before her, she better understood the glare Death gave her that morning when she asked why his horse mattered. They moved with ease, at-one with their steeds. Death looked stiff and adrift, as if the wind might claw him by the cloak and drag him away.
Could that actually happen? Apparently anything was possible.
Emily tried to tell herself that if she walked through the desert with Death himself for almost twenty-four hours, what she beheld now had to be real. The four of them, really real. She bit down on her hand to keep from laughing. Her eyes burned, but no tears came. The creaking tumbleweeds muffled her dry sob.
“You must help me reach Time,” said Death. “My work is behind schedule, and I must restore life’s balance. Before it’s too late for the world.”
The three riders glanced to one another again and then shook their heads, this time with no sympathy at all.
“Brother.” The white rider moved her seriously sick-looking horse forward. “This is for the best.” She put a hand against her waspy waist and regarded the other two with a regal air. They nodded. She looked back down at Death. “The world has changed.”
Death snatched the reins of her pearly bridle. “What are you saying?”
Her horse’s bloodshot eyes rolled, and it made a soft groaning sound.
“I know it’s difficult to accept,” she said. “No one foresaw this.”
A rivulet of drool spilled from the horse’s scaly lips. Death stepped back to evade it. His gaze followed its progress to the cracked earth below, then he pressed the horse’s mouth closed with a bony fingertip.
Everyone stared at him.
“I see the boils are gone,” he said as he studied the horse’s scabby neck.
Emily couldn’t tell if that was a good thing. Death sounded uneasy. As far as she could see, the horse looked too diseased to be alive. Hell, it looked undead. Plagued. Pestilence! That’s who the lady in white was.
She smiled. “The fever and leprosy too.” Her protuberant eyes glowed brighter with pride. “But it appears similar enough, doesn’t it? I used to carry around thousands of arrows, but now I need only a few.”
Death’s gaze lifted to the quiver on her back and the two arrows lounging within. She twitched her crossbow with a smirk on her flaking lips, then laid it to rest in the lap of her gauzy gown.
Death took an abrupt step back, turning to the others. “You cannot mean you are on Time’s side in this.”
“We’re not,” said the woman in black. Process of elimination made her starvation or something. Famine. She looked the opposite of hungry on her emaciated horse. “He’s on ours.”
War ran a thick finger down his sword. “Whoever thought it all needed to end with Death in the first place had the wrong idea.” He rubbed his fingers together and sniffed them.
“But that is our way!” Death pointed at them one after the next. “You lead them to each other in turn and then lead them to me.”
Famine’s glossy black hair rippled over her bare shoulders when she shook her head. “Not anymore.”
“And why should we?” Pestilence asked. “Undeath has proven itself superior.”
Death stood before the black horse. “Even you?” he asked Famine. “The undead don’t produce food any more than the dead do. This can’t be any better for you than it is for me. You must help me.”
She pressed her hands against the cleavage spilling over her leather bustier. “I? Are you blind?”
Her horse trembled and wheezed on Death.
“Behold, brother.” Her smirk was nothing short of sumptuous. “The new, modern me. My new hearty helping of starvation. Surely you see it? It is what afflicts them. Food surrounds them, but they cannot eat it. Once changed, they only crave to devour mortals. The more they fall victim to our sister’s plague, the fewer and fewer of them there are to eat. But
they don’t die. They’re still mine. They still hunger. Oh, how they hunger! The undead keep going and going. Craving and craving. I never have to give them to you, and I don’t want to. Sustainability, at last. It’s my turn to keep my victims.”
“But I never keep my victims.”
“Well things are different now,” Pestilence interrupted. “Improved.”
War did not even look up as he spoke. “You’re just sore because you can’t go on without life, but we can.”
Death turned to him. “How will you be satisfied with the mindless battles of the droning undead? What of your glory? All humans do now is hide and desperately cower to stay alive. Peace is precious to them. There are no more grand strategies or fantastic weapons.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” War pulled his eyes from his dripping sword to look down at Death. “I am wherever strife and destruction dwell.” His lips twisted in satisfaction. “And I like this new cycle, this control I keep over it. The undead have their skirmishes. With humans and among their own ranks. And when the humans lose those battles, they become soldiers for the opposite side. I like it quite a lot.”
“And my double plague,” said Pestilence, her pointy chin tilted high, “has achieved perfection.”
Death shook his head. His hands lifted, then fell again.
“My children,” she continued, “they spread it faster than fire, cleaner than any of the old carriers. The humans themselves have become the vermin, and it never fails to catch.”
“Do you not see the significance in that?” Death twisted to her. “Viruses, bacteria, they are natural. This is not.”
“You are being simple,” Famine practically chirped. “None of this is new. I love this backward hunger. There have always been undead, and they have always been favorites of mine.”
“And it has always failed you in the past,” snapped Death.
“Not anymore,” she sing-songed. Batting her luscious eyelashes, she ran voluptuous fingers over her horse’s raised vertebrae. “Before, it was a small, secluded experiment. But now since the plagues have combined and claimed the industrial world, the balance has tipped so far in my favor that even my scales broke.” She threw up her empty hands, wiggling her fingers in the air.
