by Logan Keys
“Is that why you got into it then, for the girls?” I smirk as best my face will let me.
The wolf eyes narrow. “Oh yes. Especially one's drowning in sweat and vomit.”
I motion at him with my good arm. “Ditto.”
“But I will say this. The Crystal in my mind, and the leader I’ve heard so much about… it all painted a picture of someone more ambitious than good-looking.”
“Well, I’m happy to disappoint. On both accounts.”
“Fifty-fifty, actually.”
“And you? I never picture the wolf chained to a wall telling me to be quiet because he’s afraid of the guards.”
“It’s not fear.”
“Then what is it?”
“Call it… chivalry. Seeing your pretty head busted open before I lose my senses is not something I’d enjoy.”
Jaw pain or no, my mouth drops open at his use of “pretty”. The girls inside of the parties on the north side, they were pretty. I haven’t been pretty in a long long time.
I can’t stop the question pouring out, now. “How did your eyes get like that?”
He goes silent as the grave. We both have our secrets then.
“So, what’s next?” I ask with a sigh, head leaning back onto the wall.
“The blood exchange,” he answers with a hollow sound.
I thought so…
“Crystal?” The doctor breaks me from my memories. “Jeremy’s awake.”
“Yeah, I’ll uh…. be right there.” I straighten, shake my head loose from the hard past, and turn to face the hard future. With long strides, more confident than I feel, I walk to Jeremy’s room. I find him sweaty, but lucid.
“No more writing,” he whispers, pleading.
His eyes are blazing red, and I touch his head: Fever.
Glad no one can see us, I lean over him, put a hand to his cheek and whisper, “No more.”
I take his hand, and instantly, I’m the other Crystal. I even put down my weapons, and slide onto the bed, letting the voice of the uprising cradle his head in my lap, while I toy with his hair.
We hadn’t always been rebel leaders, we’d been kids once, just a couple of jerks who hated everything the world was turning into.
But I fell… hard. And Jeremy became a lot more of my motivation than I ever let on… at first.
Later though, later, it was Anthem that I bled for. I’m proud to know when it came time, I stood for one thing and one alone: Freedom.
Jeremy was the one that taught me what I was made of.
For that, I have him to thank.
In our warm pocket, we stay and pretend we don’t have to save the world for a minute or two longer. It’s like I set down my gun and take up my feelings every time we talk about something other than the uprising. Every time we share space and that’s it, just sharing it to share it. Somewhere in the back of my brain I wonder if I should question this part of me that so easily sheds like scales. I compartmentalize as if I’m a robot, I have to. But it’s possible issues will arise over the dam that my emotions are swelling behind.
“You’ve been out there this whole time, waiting?” Jeremy asks.
“You know I have.”
I think he’ll pull away, but instead, he grips me hard, and sit-ups further, his body weak, his brain as sharp as always. “I want to see her.”
My stomach falls.
“My sister,” he says. “I know she’s here.”
I sigh. I want to lie to him. I want everyone he loves dead and gone already, so he doesn’t have to see what they’ve become, and then watch them die, anyway.
I nod. And we rise, but he keeps my hand.
I steady him. He’s more powerful than before but also less so for it. His body is two sided, a biological weapon from purging, but a shell of a person who’s fading away from us every day too.
I take him to the hospice area of the prison once I establish we won’t be seen. The nurses don’t care what we do. They listen to the doctor and him alone. They are not evil, but they are not not evil either.
We’ve been staying in an empty wing near the ocean, one not guarded, but this is dangerous coming over here.
Jeremy’s having a bad day, and it’s a liability. He’s barely able to move above a shuffle.
When he sees Mimi through the glass, he makes a sound, stifles it, then rushes to her side, limping and dragging one leg.
I flinch at the sight of her even though I’d been prepared. She’s asleep hooked up to machines, a mask over her delicate face.
He takes her small hand, grips it tightly.
I stand outside to give them privacy. The doctor moves to my side.
“You shouldn’t have told him,” I say.
“Is it better for him to think they are all dead?”
“Soon, they might all be. And now he’ll watch her die. How is that better?”
We turn to face one another. He motions for us to move further down the corridor. I follow.
“He might make peace,” the doctor says.
“Peace? There is no peace to be had. No rest for those that want change. We will have peace when we are dead.”
“Crystal.” The doctor sounds disappointed.
Why does that bother me so? Him seeming disappointed. Probably because I owe him my life.
We all do.
He asks, “Have you truly grown so cold?”
I grit my teeth. “Cold? Cold is the purge. Cold is the citizens one by one becoming zombies. What do you want me to do? Be soft when it’s hard as hell right now? The Underground makes monsters, you, Karma, everybody is making fucking monsters! I’m trying to stop the world from being one empty shell of shuffling monsters. Don’t you understand?”
I break down. I fight and lose. I slump against the wall, and put my head into my knees hard enough to leave a mark, no doubt.
“Who was the monster in your life, Crystal?”
I slam my head back into the wall. I do it again. “You want a sob story, is that it? Some meager beginnings song and dance? We’ll you won’t find it here.” I laugh a sad sound. “What if I told you there wasn’t one? That’s right. I’m like Jeremy. Silver spoon firmly planted between my teeth. Family had money, they live in the rich part of Anthem. What if I told you, but instead of being jerks like the Cromwells, my mother gives every cent they get their hands on to help people in section and my father tries to help hide children when they have cancer?” The doctor doesn’t answer. “And they don’t even know that I’m alive.”
I moan a sob, then bite my lip until I regain control. “I didn’t even tell them I was okay for fear that the Cromwells would hurt them to get to me.” I glance up finally, and the doctor’s unfathomable gaze stays rooted to my face but is unchanged. “So there. I’m a monster, too. Monsters didn’t come for me as a kid. They went to this house and that house but skipped mine. When my friends did drugs or when my friends got raped or abused, or had problems, and later when the zombies ate them, and their family, it was like I was untouchable. Life never did that to me. Not to mine.”
I sigh and lean my head back, the emotions leaked out of me enough to find myself only weary. “So, I did it to myself. I started to demand that the world come after me. Because I had beef with it. Sure as hell did.”
I get to my feet, shoulder my gun. I point a finger in the doctor’s face. “The monsters took and took but not from me, so I’ll fight back, for the weak ones, for those who can’t.” I point at the room knowing now, I’m just ranting and getting it all out, more for me than him. “And Jeremy does too, or did, and you shouldn’t have told him! He’ll be in one of his phases for a long time now, and one more person is getting purged, or ten, or thousands---all because we can’t get them to revolt like we need! All because of you!”
I breathe hard, fighting to keep from hitting something or someone.
Are these stages of grief? Because, already I mourn Mimi for Jeremy---more for Jeremy than Mimi herself because I can’t get close to little girls th
at die. If I did, for every one of her, there are thousands, maybe millions more.
I fist my hands at the futility. “We almost had Anthem last time and now it’s right on the brink. One more time and she’ll be ours. If you sabotage---”
“Ours or the Skull’s?” he asks.
I punch a fist into the palm of my other hand. “The peoples.”
He finally does give a shadow of a smile. “And that’s why you should be the one to have it. You’ll give it right back.”
Chapter 12
Dallas
The playback ends with the sharp sound of emptiness. Joelle and I have walled each other out of our thoughts. Mine, because seeing Tommy again, alive and well, doesn’t bring only friendly memories. I’m in love with him anew. This isn’t just a crush. He’s quite loveable. A hero.
Heart in hand, I’d watched him be torn away from the podium and arrested.
If he were here right now, I’d be ten years old again kicking his chair. Bugging him. I may tell myself I’ve moved on from Thomas Ripley Hatter, but my heart is utterly broken.
Joelle’s walled me off, too. Probably for the same reason, she saw him as a brother, I know that already, and she probably has things she’d wished she could unsay.
“He was then killed, my darling,” Joelle’s mother says, not without sympathy. Adrian turns off the screen.
“How?” Joelle’s voice is a sliver of sound, a ghost of noise.
“Simon called your friend treasonous,” Adrian mutters. “Do you see how these men end one another with barely a thought?”
“Where is he?” Joelle asks.
“The machine. With the men.”
I can almost sense her mother’s glee. Having turned her daughter quite easily against her own newly found father.
Joelle moves to leave.
I take her cue.
We’d mourned him the night she told me she thought he was dead. We’d mourned many days. And now it feels fresh once again, a confirmation of a tragedy.
And his face… his handsome hope-filled face of such…
Now we know the truth. Tommy is dead. Murdered by the people her mother hates and who fear her stone-like gaze. The people on the other side of the barrier.
Things echo inside Joelle’s thoughts. “Turn them all to stone. Kill them all.” but that fades into an empty pattern of deep regret.
I fear this little “queen” might be an off with their heads sort.
We pass back outside. No men allowed, Joelle was wise enough to send ours across the water to hide. From her very own mother.
We find more stone statues of soldiers, men, those who’d defied the Medusa. They call this place La La Land, like we’re in a fairytale and then I suppose that would make Joelle’s mother the wicked queen.
I feel a pang because I want to talk to Cara about it. She always loved a good story. She’d be so awed at the spiders crawling along the walls, freely roaming the chambers in Adrian’s rooms.
We’re immune to things like spiders and snakes, all creepy-crawlies of the nocturnal kind. They know us as we know ourselves, we are one and the same, together scratching across the belly of the night as we both hunt prey. But Joelle most of all, she’s as if a moon-child was born of darkness and all the brighter for it, does she shine. Her skin even glows in the absence of light.
And her mother, a woman of such great vengeance, shouldn’t I agree with her hatred? Wouldn’t it make sense that I should also want to rule all men?
Unhindered by mind barriers, Joelle’s and my thoughts do swarm all but one topic: Tommy.
His death is like a cloud following us around the city. My heart is broken. Joelle’s heart is too young to break. Still flexible rather than brittle, it’s folded up inside her chest.
Her thoughts are swiftly becoming too much chaos to focus or track.
She longs to be with her people. She longs to decide what we must do. She focuses on that.
Joelle is too young for so much sadness and responsibility. But you’d never know it
Long live the queen, indeed.
Chapter 13
Dallas
It seems as though after watching the video that I should cry. My face should be wet with tears that constantly flow over what is lost in my short lifetime. Yet, I embrace the new numbness like a friend.
I no longer feel things like I should. It might worry another, but it does not worry me. The city of L.A. is split between two sides. Women and men. We go to the women’s side but the male vampires seem to take offense to this hiding we’ve made them do.
They won’t argue with Joelle; however, a loyal bunch is the vampire. But if she doesn’t decide, we might test the constraints of such a thing much too far.
Why I feel responsible for our little hive of blood and darkness and death is beyond me, but we are tethered together now, and a sense of loyalty does prevail.
However, our ranks grow more tense. That is true.
Luckily, Lotte has been the one who’s decided to stay behind with the men. She’s going to keep them in line, I believe, and if I had to trust another to do it, it’d be her.
But the line through the city is a peculiar thing to me.
I don’t sense that my gender represents me anymore. I never wanted to be a man in a man’s world either, though. No one has it truly and honestly fair. For every fist that fell on my face, for every hammering blow that rained down on me, I never blamed it on being a girl. There were plenty of boys at school hiding bruises. One in particular would give me that little chin-nod, his eyes behind dark glasses, his teeth bared in an angry smile, never a normal one, because those shades covered another black eye.
But he’d seen mine too.
He knew the madness.
And then in turn he’d beat on anyone in the halls who’d mentioned it until they never mentioned much to him at all ever again.
Violence begets violence.
But sometimes it stops it too.
My thoughts turn to Tommy again. He stood up to my dad like no one in my life ever had. And he was a guy…
Gender vs. gender was bound to happen in a time like this. Women were not just finding an equality gifted by some government, no, they were given a cinder gaze of fire and brimstone by geneticists and they were burning their coparts to the ground.
Payback has always been the bitch of bitches.
In male-dominated wars, then male-dominated rings of rebellions, then lastly, male-dominated wilds, the tide has not just changed, it’s filled with an X chromosome set to drown everyone who’s been in the driver seat thus far.
Can a person blame them?
I long to quiz Tommy about it. Daughter of Eve type things come to mind. She’s not tempting Adam with an apple anymore, she’s shoving that thing down his throat for bringing the entire planet to its knees over a toxic masculinity gone awry.
The proof is at my feet. The maturity of the situation is the line drawn through the center of the city between two towers. It’s done in red paint, thick, and straight. I wonder who drew it? I wonder if they are an artist and hated wasting such a gift on this great divide?
“Dallas,” Joelle says, and beckons me into her room. “Well?” she asks once I’m inside.
“We could leave,” I say but she shoots me a glare.
“You saw the video, Dallas.”
I bite back a shudder. The picture of Tommy at the podium, a desperate but firm look upon his face. Shouting to the crowd to fight for peace…
“Yeah.”
“We have to try. Don’t you think?”
I sigh. I knew that might be what she got out of it. The thing about Joelle is we are drawn together for good reason, sleepwalking in the coma of our parent’s mistakes. We have no identity.
Tommy reflected to us something more. He has enough purpose to share it.
Had…
I try the elephant in the room. “Joelle, your mother…”
“Is a monster.”
“I was going to say has
pretty much put herself into a war we can avoid.”
The silence speaks volumes.
“So, you want to involve us in this then?”
Joelle nods but crosses her arms, a stubborn jut to her chin.
The thing about teenagers is, we never hear much, we talk a lot, and no matter how mature we seem, we have a naïve ability to pretend that everything, everything, is gonna work out all right. Even if an elder would be telling us right now this won’t end well, we both would shrug them off.
Like she shrugs me off.
Even as we stand here as vampires who’ve lost everything we hold dear. Even if we had no purpose.
Now we have one.
It’s not a good one. As the statistics have shown. Vampirism is the new result of bad parenting.
“What do you think we should do?”
“Me?” I shrug.
It’s an acerbic shrug. A “You’re the one with all the ideas, kid.” type of shrug.
“My mother, she says there is a headstone…”
I swallow.
Neither of us really wants to talk about it, like speaking will motivate the reality to rear its ugly head and eat us alive.
I close my eyes, say a prayer, and the tears I’ve been holding since the moment her mother had said, “Your friend is dead, Joelle. He was a hero.” They come in a rush. Finally.
Hero. It seems to Adrian that the dead men get a pass from her hatred.
I want to scream at myself: Wake up! That I’ve been spending time in a dream I can’t escape.
Can he truly be gone?
Are we not indestructible?
Inhuman?
No.
Inhuman doesn't begin to cover what we are. It's not strong enough a word. We've become shadows of shadows.
But this.
The tremendous pain in my chest, the building pressure behind my eyes, and the heat on my face… This feels human.
Tears slip silently over my cheeks, and without looking I know Joelle’s crying, too. We mourned loudly before, now quietly we cry, over an empty bed, but soon, we will cry over a headstone where our very warm friend is cold beneath the dirt.
I hiccup and softly moan.
