From the Ashes

by Chris Kennedy

  Something screeched in the dark. It caused Monday to jerk in surprise, until he realized he knew that sound—the whine of nails being pried loose from wooden planks. It came again and again, until his maddened brain thought it might go on forever. When at last it ceased, there came a groan of wood and the blessed scent of fresh air.

  Monday squinted against a blazing light that threatened to sear his eyes.

  “Sorry.” Laney withdrew the lantern in her hand from Monday’s sight so that he stared up at a blanket of stars in the heavens and her alluring outline towering above him. Driscoll’s thin silhouette loomed next to hers, a hammer in his hand.

  “What happened?” Monday tried to firm his voice but couldn’t raise it above a hoarse whisper.

  Laney crouched next to him, setting aside a long-handled shovel. “The CEO thought he had killed you. Your heart stopped, but that happens sometimes when the blood takes hold. Managers always come back.”

  Monday struggled up to a sitting position. His limbs might as well have been made of moss for all their strength. He tried to stand, but couldn’t.

  “Don’t.” Laney pressed him back into the coffin. “You’re bound to be weak. Here, eat this.” She handed him a strip of beef jerky.

  The scent of it made Monday’s head swim, and though he hadn’t noticed it in the darkness, he now recognized the gnawing hunger in his belly. No, not hunger. This feeling went beyond a mere desire for food, it bordered on an insane desperation, a ravening. Hands shaking, breath ragged in his throat, he snatched the morsel and scarfed it down, barely taking the time to chew, so urgent was his appetite.

  Laney handed him a canteen filled with tepid water. He guzzled from it for several seconds, but the need for food outweighed his thirst. “Have you got more?”

  “Lots.” She handed him several more strips along with a hunk of cheese she had brought, wrapped in oilcloth.

  Monday ate them, washing the meal down with gulps of water to slake his thirst between bites. He had never known a meal as satisfying as that first one upon waking in his coffin under the stars.

  “The blood demands sustenance when we’re injured.” Laney took the canteen from Monday and wiped his chin with the edge of her skirt.

  Her words reminded him of the shots he had taken to the chest and stomach. In wonder, he explored those areas with his fingers. The council hadn’t bothered to change his clothes before burying him. He felt the fabric around his former wounds, stiff with his dried blood, and though his shirt evinced the holes left by CEO Hansen’s bullets, his flesh bore no damage he could find. The pain he remembered from his encounter with the town’s leaders had fled, replaced by a mostly quenched hunger.

  He looked at Laney and Driscoll in wonder. “I’m whole.”

  “You’re a corporate officer.” Laney made no attempt to hide the awe in her voice. “Like us.”

  Monday blinked in the darkness, realization bleeding slowly into his thoughts. “You passed your nanites to me...you heal fast.”

  Laney took his hand in both of her own. “And now, so do you.”

  “Help me out of this thing.”

  Together, Driscoll and Laney pulled Monday to his feet. The cool night air filled him with vigor, that and the calories imparted from the food she had given him. He felt new and shiny under the night sky, like a kid who has had enough to eat for the first time in months.

  Monday bounded out of the earth—out of his would be grave—and landed on the dewy grass. Granted, it wasn’t much of a leap. The council had buried him only three feet down, but considering how he had felt on first waking, such a jump astounded him. He reached back and gave Laney a hand out of the grave. Scant moonlight revealed the dirt stains on her dress, under her fingernails, and even on her cheeks. She had tied her hair back, and it shone silver in the night.

  “That’s strange.” Monday spun in a slow circle, his gaze flicking from the ground to the trees to the sky. “I see...”

  “What?” Laney tilted her head, eyeing him quizzically.

  “Everything.” Monday searched the contours of her exquisite face limned in moon and starlight. “It’s not daylight vision, but I see details I shouldn’t. I see the stars in your eyes.”

  She smiled prettily, her dimples creasing under the patina of dirt on her face. “The blood works differently in each of us. Some get strength, some healing, and some get the vision—what you’re describing. I didn’t get that. Sounds like you got them all.”

  Monday nodded, his mind whirling. “Nanites were designed for specific people—specific genetics. But we’re all human, we all share genes. It makes sense they would work in only a handful of people, and then express only certain abilities. Whatever genes you and I share with the original Agent must unlock the bots’ potential for us.”

  Laney frowned in the dark. “I know what you’re saying makes sense to you, but it’s mostly gibberish to my ears.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Monday shrugged one shoulder. “It’s not like we have any means of controlling or changing the nanites or our genes—not like the old days. They might as well be magic to us.”

  “They are.” Driscoll shrugged as only a teenager can, as if to say it was all out of their hands, so why worry about it. With the fluid grace of a cat, he leaped from the grave to stand with them.

  Monday took Laney’s hands. “Thank you for saving me.” He kissed her, paying no attention to the gritty feel of dirt on their lips. “I worried you might not care what happened to me after I fought your dad.”

  “I love my papa. Nothing will ever change that, but he’s a pig-headed man sometimes. He won’t listen; he’s too stuck in his ways. I never doubted the blood would take in you. The council didn’t believe.” Laney twisted her lips to one side. “Papa didn’t, that’s for sure. But I do listen, Monday. I think what you said about the blood must be true, and the council knows it. They’ve lied to me my entire life. And when you came here preaching the truth about the old-world blood, CEO Hansen shot you for it. That’s not the reaction of a man who has the Truth with a capital T.”

  Monday nodded and squeezed her hands. “Thank you for believing me, even if you don’t know what all the words mean.”

  Laney grinned.

  “You know I can’t stay here, right?” Monday brushed some of the grave dust off his pants and shirt. “If the council—if your father—finds me breathing, they’ll kill me, and this time they’ll make it stick.”

  “That’s why we’re here.” Laney threw an arm around Driscoll’s narrow shoulders. “We’re going with you.”

  Though he had harbored a secret desire to hear Laney say something like this from the moment he heard her voice in the darkness, Monday grew solemn. “You’ve lived in Prosperity all your lives. You don’t know any other place.”

  “Are you saying no?” Driscoll looked as heartbroken at Monday’s words as his sister.

  Monday shook his head. “Not outright. I’m simply warning you, the world out there isn’t nice. Warlords rule the land, especially as you travel north into the old cities. People there have guns and ammunition and borders you can’t cross. And even if you stay clear of those, there are people on the road who will kill you for a coat or some food or for the thrill of doing it, and there’s no one to stop them. What you’re asking for is dangerous.”

  “It’s better than a life of lies.” Laney firmed her jaw, her brown eyes transformed into silver agates by the reflected moonlight.

  Monday nodded, his heart filled with joy. “In that case, let’s go. We’ll pick up my travel pack on the way past Mr. Elmar’s house and put some miles between us and Prosperity before sunup.”

  They started away from the lonely graveyard. From this view, it became clear that CEO Hansen and his ilk hadn’t had the decency to bury Monday with the town folk. His makeshift grave lay several hundred feet from the uniform stones that marked the pre-Fall cemetery. The view, and the thought of death, sparked a thought in Monday.

  “You said people’s he
arts sometimes stop for a time when the blood takes.” Monday held Laney’s hand as they picked their way along an overgrown path leading away from the gravesites.

  She nodded. “Most don’t come back from that. Only the strongest of us.”

  “Don’t CEO Hansen, your father, and all the other council members know that? Wouldn’t they think I might come back?”

  “I told you, they don’t believe in you—they never thought you’d become a manager in the Corporation of God.”

  “Not even enough to hedge their bets?”

  “What do you mean?” Laney slowed, probably sensing the change in Monday’s voice.

  He drew up short, obliging her and Driscoll to stop with him. They had reached a broken, two-lane access road, leading away from the graveyard, toward the town’s main street. Across it stood a copse of trees shrouded in darkness. No doubt impenetrable to natural eyesight, Monday’s newly enhanced vision showed him four figures dressed in dark colors beneath the trees. As one, they slinked forward into the moonlight, and Laney caught her breath.

  “You two shouldn’t have come here.” Willis Berckman made no attempt at disguising his voice, though he had taken the precaution of wearing a hooded mask with slits for his eyes.

  “What are you doing, Papa?” Laney asked, breathless.

  “They weren’t satisfied with burying me.” Monday edged forward, ahead of Laney and Driscoll. “If I died in the ground, fine, but they wanted to be here in case I somehow escaped, so they could finish the job.”

  “That’s not true.” Driscoll’s voice came out high-pitched, more the boy he had been than the man he was becoming. “Papa, tell Monday you didn’t come here to kill him.”

  “He can’t,” Monday said. “Because that’s precisely what they all came here for.”

  “You’re no blessed soul.” CEO Hansen hadn’t brought his rifle this time, which meant he had probably wasted his only ammunition on Monday earlier.

  Good.

  “Nope, I’m not. I know that, because your church is a lie, just like your disgusting ritual. You’re all old enough to know the truth, but you’ve hidden it from your children. You’ve tricked them into believing your nonsense, all in some misguided plan to bring back the institutions that destroyed the old world.”

  “The church is true,” said a woman standing next to the CEO. “So is the blood. It doesn’t matter if there are nanites in it causing the miracle. God’s work progresses. That is the true miracle.”

  “The tiny machines are true?” Laney asked.

  “Laney, Driscoll, get back to the house, and I’ll forget you were ever here tonight.” Willis stepped forward, his visage made fearsome by the black cloth covering his head and eyes.

  “No.” Laney drew herself up, chin held high. “I won’t let you hurt Monday. He’s done nothing wrong other than tell me the truth, something you’ve never done.”

  “I’m not leaving either, Papa.” Driscoll stood next to Monday, the thin cords of his muscles standing out on his arms.

  “Try not to harm my children,” Willis said over his shoulder to his fellow councilors. “But if they stand in your way…” He turned back to gaze at Laney and Driscoll. “Don’t hold back.”

  Metal glinted in the moonlight as each of the councilors drew knives from their dark clothes, making it seem as if they materialized from nowhere. The female carried the longest one, a blade the length of Monday’s arm. The three men held hunting knives.

  Blood rushed in Monday’s ears as the four of them advanced. The woman moved with a preternatural smoothness the men couldn’t match, though CEO Hansen carried himself well. Willis and the other man, whom Monday recognized as Crank, the door guard, walked forward with natural gaits.

  All this, Monday observed in the first half second of their attack. Whereas he had experienced what his father used to call the “fugue of battle”—a state in which all other concerns fell away except one’s opponent—that feeling couldn’t touch what he felt now. He watched his opponents approaching, not as if time stood still, but as if the quality of time and his experience of it had ratcheted up a thousand fold.

  He knew instantly that Willis Berckman favored his right side; he must have taken an injury in that leg at some point in the last decade. And though he was strong—Monday had already experienced the man’s punches—the nanites coursing through his veins did nothing to enhance that strength from its natural state. They instead gave him incredible speed. CEO Hansen, by contrast, possessed unmatched power in his limbs. Plodding and slow, he might not move as fast as Monday, but if a fight with him came to wrestling, it would be over in seconds. The woman lacked strength, but more than made up for it with sheer adroitness. Her agility would make her a formidable opponent in a melee. Crank shared Hansen’s plodding movements, but something about his scent told Monday he could heal quickly as well, like Laney.

  Fighting all four of these people at once wouldn’t end well, even with Laney and Driscoll on his side. Monday needed some way to even the odds.

  Without taking his eyes off Willis, who had assumed the lead, Monday scooped up a rock from the broken asphalt as fast as he could, which was mighty fast, to his astonishment, and hurled it at Crank.

  The guy never stood a chance. Unused to his newfound strength and speed, Monday put his all into the throw. When the rock hit Crank’s head, it made a sound like an aluminum bat striking a tree trunk. The short man toppled over backward in a spray of blood.

  The sudden move surprised CEO Hansen, who stopped in his tracks to gape at the stricken councilor, but Willis and the woman didn’t flinch.

  Willis stabbed at Monday’s heart with his knife, but Monday had already sidestepped the attack. For an instant, he marveled at his own speed. He had just spun away from a blow that would have killed him yesterday. Now it looked as slow as an old hound hobbling past him. With the confidence of a much younger dog, he grinned and drew back a fist to make the old man pay.

  Before he could unload, however, the woman seized Monday’s upraised arm, pivoted like a murderous ballerina, and flung him over her back. He landed with bone-crunching force on the broken asphalt.

  Monday popped back to his feet and immediately felt an electric shock of pain run through his side. He touched it and his fingers came away bloody, the iron smell filling his nostrils. Somehow, the woman had sliced him open along his ribs with her machete as she tossed him away.

  And she was coming for more.

  Monday backpedaled, trying to assess the seriousness of his wound. Breathing brought stinging pain, but he could still draw a full breath, which meant she hadn’t punctured one of his lungs. Still, the slice hurt like fire, and he was having a hard time lifting his right arm.

  He turned to lift his left for defense and, at the same instance, felt a blade sink into his back just above his hips.

  Monday screamed. So did Laney and Driscoll, who had hardly moved. They looked shocked, frozen in fear. Monday couldn’t blame them. It wasn’t every night you saw a man stabbed to death by people you had formerly trusted.

  “The blood won’t serve you,” CEO Hansen hissed in Monday’s ear. He withdrew his knife, only to sink it home a second time in almost the same spot.

  The pain exploding up Monday’s spine and radiating throughout his body threatened to overwhelm him. His vision narrowed, going gray at the edges, and his knees buckled, but Hansen wasn’t about to let him fall. He heaved Monday upright with all the effort of a man lifting a child.

  That gave Monday a perfect view when Laney belted the councilwoman’s head with her shovel, which made a flat metallic sound, but might have been the finest band music he had ever heard. The woman collapsed on her face, unconscious before she hit the ground, and made no attempt to rise.

  “Laney!” Monday shouted despite what it cost him in pain. Hansen’s grip on him had loosened at seeing the girl’s attack. Taking advantage of the lapse, Monday stomped down with all his might on the town leader’s ankle, then dropped, slithering out o
f the man’s clutches.

  Never missing a beat, Laney rushed forward, shovel raised like a shogun with a sword. From the ground, unable to twist about due to the stab wounds in his back, Monday couldn’t see Laney’s blow when it struck home, but there was no mistaking the metal smack the shovel made when it collided with the CEO’s cranium, or the satisfying thunk of his body hitting the ground.

  His cronies strewn at his feet, Willis Berckman stood alone to face Laney. His upper lip curled in disgust. “You’re not the daughter I raised.”

  Laney held the shovel before her as if to ward off a nasty dog. “And you’re not the father you pretend to be.”

  Willis took a small step forward, menacing her, though he left his knife by his side. “What are you going to do with that shovel, Laney?”

  Driscoll bent to retrieve Hansen’s blade and stood by his sister’s side. When he spoke, his voice came out clear and firm. “The same thing I’ll do if you come any closer, Papa. Don’t make us fight you. Please.”

  Willis Berckman stood resolute for nearly half a minute before his shoulders slumped, and he dropped his knife. “You want to throw away your lives to go tramping across God’s creation with some tinker? Fine. Throw your virtue at the gates of hell. Just don’t ever show your faces in Prosperity again.”

  Without another word, Willis turned on his heels and strode away into the dark forest, his boots churning the underbrush beneath his feet.

  “I’m sorry that happened,” Monday whispered. He sat with one hand pressed hard to the wound in his back.

  “I’m not.” Laney dropped the shovel’s head to the ground where it bit into the dirt. “Better we know the truth about him—about this whole town—than live in ignorance. I wish I had seen it before now.” Despite her bravado, Monday couldn’t help but notice the tremor in her voice.

  Driscoll crouched beside Monday, his face wan in the sketchy light. “How bad is it?”