Melancholy: Episode 2

by Charlotte McConaghy

  I slam my fist into his face and feel his nose break. He doesn’t react, instead lifting his knee and extending his foot in a beautiful kick that cracks straight into my broken ribs; I must have been favoring my right side. Pain splinters through me and I let him punch me once, twice in the cheek. Letting someone hit you does a couple of things. It can be an insult to mess with his head. Or it can be a trap. Because when he hits with his right you can hammer a heavy left into his unprotected kidney and drop him to the ground. Like I do now.

  I turn in time to see that the train is rushing past. Josi and Will are already on and I catch a glimpse of the others all jumping or being hoisted on in a tangle of limbs.

  They’re going to make it.

  But so is the first Blood, the Red I shot in the neck. He has his hand held to the wound, staunching bright spurts of blood, and he’s launching himself onto the train.

  I sprint after him, leaping onto the very end of the last carriage. As the train whooshes into the tunnel I stumble into the aisle and run after the Blood. I spot him up ahead, so with two fingers I whistle loudly and he turns. He’s young, probably only about twenty or so. A new recruit.

  “If I were you,” I say, “I’d throw myself off this train right now.”

  “You can kill me,” he replies, “but they’re going to find you, one way or another.”

  “Not if I find them first.”

  I meet him in the section between the cars. The doors are still open and the noise of the tunnel is intense. He punches, a quick left jab. I dodge once, then again for his follow-up blow. Can feel myself smiling. “Who taught you to box?”

  Instead of replying he comes at me again, right, left, right. I haven’t yet raised my hands – it’s rude of me.

  “You try to hit me with your right, you’re pretty much giving me a whole lot of time to dodge,” I point out.

  I swerve out of the way of another blow. He’s trying to angle me toward the open doors, but it’s simple enough to maneuver him around again.

  “If I punch with my right it’s a different story.”

  “Why’s that?” he breathes.

  “It’s an insult, see? ’Cause I’m gonna hit you even with the extra warning.”

  And with that I swing a huge right, hammering it into his jaw, and even with all my words of caution it’s still too fast for him to block. Blood spills from his mouth, along with several teeth. He’s tough – he shakes it off and faces me once more, still bleeding from the bullet through the side of his neck. His blood loss will hit him in a second and he won’t be able to keep fighting.

  But I’ve lost all focus. My mind feels abruptly as though it’s underwater; everything has become agonizingly slow. Because the smell … the scent of his blood has caused something to erupt inside me. I can feel the smell on my skin, it’s an electric prickling. My teeth ache and my mouth floods with saliva.

  What the fuck is going on?

  The boy hits me, a body blow to my chest and another to my shattered ribs. I don’t feel the pain because I’m swimming and tingling and I can see the smell now, making thick heavy shapes in my head. It’s dark and smooth, draping me in a veil or coating me like paint sinking through the levels of my brain.

  I am on the ground, I realize abruptly. The sound of the train roaring through the tunnel is a drill in my skull and I can still smell the blood as the boy rolls me toward the opening. The blood smells so strong I think I’m going to gag it’s taking up every inch of my body and permeating every one of my pores and I can’t get rid of it I can’t and it’s trickling down my spine –

  And just like that the world drops out from under me.

  *

  Josephine

  “Where is he?” I demand. “Where’s Luke?”

  Everyone in their various states of dishevelment looks around. There is no Luke.

  “The Bloods,” Shadow wheezes. “He was fighting two.”

  I turn and sprint down the train. I saw him fighting, but I also saw him run toward the train and jump. He must have made it. I will find him down the end. I will.

  But what I find instead is a black-clad man between the carriages, his back to me. I draw my gun and aim at him. “Hey!”

  He twists quickly, spots me and raises his hands. My feet carry me closer, but I can’t get too close in case he has any ideas about snatching the gun from me.

  A merciless creature lurks in my chest. She is graceless. My mind is an ocean of roaring hungry teeth and all I can think is where where where where.

  “Where’s Luke?” I try to keep the trembling from my voice.

  The Blood is young. He has a baby face, and no hair in sight on his chin. His lips are split and swollen, and there is blood trickling from his mouth and neck.

  “Where?”

  “He’s dead,” the guy says tonelessly.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Rolled him right out the door.”

  The creature in my chest screams, wild and abruptly free. I take two steps closer, raise the gun and shoot the boy in the head.

  Turns out I can hit a man three feet in front of me. His skull splatters over the wall behind him and he drops.

  My ears ring painfully and all other sound warps into a rushing hiss. Lowering the gun, I am no longer trembling. I walk forward and stand over the body. His eyes stare sightlessly at the ceiling; they are cold and empty but they are not as cold as my body and they are not as empty as my soul.

  I don’t know what makes me turn my head. But I do, and so I see four fingers clutching onto the edge of the train carriage.

  In an instant I’m at the side and there I see him. Hanging from the exterior door handle with one hand. His grip is like iron when I reach for his wrist.

  “Luke!” I scream.

  He can’t talk, hammered as he is by the oncoming rush of wind and the gravity dragging him backwards. I have no choice but to offer him my left hand, the one with the broken wrist, as I need my right to grab hold of the railing inside the carriage.

  “Reach for me!” I shout.

  He swings his free hand toward my outstretched one, misses once, twice, three times. His arm drops and I can see his fingers slipping on the handle.

  “Keep trying!”

  With one mighty effort he hauls his arm forward and grabs my hand. It snaps my wrist instantly, the bones too brittle from only just having healed. Pain eclipses all else and I feel nausea roar through my guts. A shriek is torn from me and I cut it off by biting down on my tongue so hard that I taste blood.

  He starts to let go – I can feel him.

  “Don’t you dare!” I yell. “Hold on!”

  I am woozily trying to work out how I can pull his weight inside when I feel hands take hold of me and wrench me backwards. Luke is hauled inside and crumples on top of me.

  Spots dance before my eyelids. There’s a howling in my wrist and a flood of darkness.

  “Josi?” Hal and Pace are staring down at me. I don’t know how long I have been lying here.

  They help me to sit up and I look at Luke, sprawled against the wall. He’s holding his side uncomfortably and the second I meet his eyes I get a fright. “There’s something wrong with me,” he says.

  It sends a chill over my skin because I have never seen him look so scared.

  In the corner of my vision I can see the body of a dead boy.

  *

  We are quiet on the train ride home. Claire has set and bandaged my wrist, which hurt so much that I vomited and we had to move carriages to get away from the smell. Now we’re all sprawled together in the one carriage, nursing our wounds and injuries, and sinking into an exhausted stupor.

  Luke is staring vacantly out the window, and I can see how spooked he is by whatever happened at the end of the train.

  I’m too numb to be spooked.

  When Dr Shaw finally stirs I realize we haven’t discussed what we’re going to do with her. She’s tied at wrists and feet, and she struggles groggily. “What … Where am I?”
>
  Luke’s still off in his own world so I guess it falls to me to explain, since I was the one who wanted to kidnap her in the first place. I move to crouch beside her. Claire is giving her water and trying to soothe her.

  “You’re on a train going west,” I tell her.

  “West? Then you’re …”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been kidnapped by the resistance?”

  “Yes.”

  She slumps back down, looking a bit defeated. That’s when she clocks Ben lying not far from her. Dr Shaw lurches up, her eyes widening in terror. “What’s he doing here? Why did you bring him?”

  I glance at the others, but they look as confused as I feel. “We rescued him from you,” I say, thinking it obvious.

  “Tie him up!” she cries, scrambling away from him. “Quickly!”

  “He’our friend,” I point out. “Not to mention a sickly old man.”

  Ben starts to wake. He moves a little, groans feebly.

  Dr Shaw looks straight at me and whispers, “You stupid girl. You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  And it hits me the second before he opens his eyes: the bleeding gums and fingernails I noticed when we found him. The paper-white skin. The nagging fact that he was in a research facility.

  Ben Collingsworth looks at me, and his eyes are the deep, blood red of a Fury. I know it in the moment before he lunges at me with a rabid snarl of hunger.

  Chapter 13

  February 12th, 2066

  Josephine

  I have never been to a zoo. They don’t exist anymore; most animals are dead, and all the birds extinct. But I have imagined them, seen them on television, read about them. Which is how I know that what we have in the dark science lab on the very east edge of the settlement is a caged animal.

  I stand on the other side of the glass and I watch him in there. Pacing his cage back and forth, gazing pitilessly out at me. There doesn’t seem to be any humanity left in his red eyes. Is Ben Collingsworth still inside that body somewhere? If we have souls, then what has happened to his? Did it flicker out when this was done to him? Or did it shift into something else entirely?

  Quinn, Raven and Dodge all arrive to join me at the glass. Last to enter is Luke, who’s had his superficial gunshot wounds tended to at the infirmary; I had to have my wrist re-set and cast this morning too, despite the fact that I can feel it healing on its own. We gaze in at the beast, who is really just a very old man dying of heart failure.

  “I’d like to study it,” Dodge says. He sounds excited. “The implications are many.”

  “The implications are – ” Luke starts.

  “We don’t discuss implications,” Quinn interrupts him. “We discuss facts.”

  There is a long silence as we watch Ben’s lips curl to reveal his sharp teeth and bleeding gums.

  “We’ll have to feed it,” Raven points out. “If you want to study it.”

  “It eats human flesh,” Quinn points out.

  “He’s not an ‘it’,” I snap. “He’s a man.”

  “He was a man,” Raven replies.

  Ben screams abruptly, throwing himself against the glass as if to break it with his body. I flinch and try not to look away but it’s too awful.

  “That’s no man,” Raven murmurs.

  I wish I could disagree with her, but I can’t. The creature in that cage is an animal or a monster, or something in between.

  And when I look at him there is an all too familiar reflection gazing back at me.

  *

  Quinn asks Raven and Luke to go and question Dr Shaw and find us some of those facts he’s so keen on. He stands with me for a while after they’ve gone, and we watch Ben in silence. For the first time I feel curious about what this man thinks. It seems odd to me, suddenly. Quinn is the leader of the resistance and I don’t know what he believes about anything. Except corporal punishment.

  “When did you leave the city?” I ask.

  “Twenty years ago.”

  “Why?”

  He takes a moment to consider the question, arms folded over his thick chest. “I was grieving,” he shrugs. “Sixteen years old when my parents died in the first wave of sickness. The second wave took my four younger sisters. The wall was built but I didn’t know how it was supposed to fix anything. You can’t build a wall against death.”

  He turns to face me, his blue eyes sharp.

  “I came out here to die,” he admits simply. “Instead I found Shadow, and then we found a prison, and we both decided to just … live a little longer.” Quinn pauses, remembering. “It was a graveyard out here. So many dead. An Underworld.”

  “How did the others come?”

  “I went back for them,” he replies, “when the cure was first announced.”

  It strikes me as incredibly brave, being the first of a kind. The first to save himself, and then to go back to save more. And at only sixteen years old.

  “And the resistance?” I ask. “When did the fighting start?”

  “Do you know who gets named ‘resistance’? Those who disagree.” Quinn shakes his head. “I never chose that name for us. I never wanted to fight. I wanted to escape. I wanted the fury I deserved when life took everyone I’d ever loved from me. It was Shadow who wanted to fight. He had a different kind of grief in his heart, a different kind of fury.”

  “But he never went back.”

  “He couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Too many ghosts there. So I went for him, and I looked for people we’d known. Then I just looked for anyone at all who wanted to be freed.”

  “Wanted to be freed?” I repeat. “Didn’t they all?”

  “Most people don’t want to be angry, Dual. They don’t want to be sad.”

  “Then what do they want?”

  “To surrender.”

  *

  Raven

  Luke and I look through the small window. Dr Shaw is quietly staring at the wall of the interrogation room, as though her thoughts are a million miles away. She looks exhausted.

  I reach for the handle.

  “You ever questioned a drone?” Luke asks me.

  “No. You?”

  “You can’t assume they’ll respond like a normal person would,” he counsels.

  “So what do you do then?”

  “Well, for starters, don’t try to make her angry.”

  I roll my eyes. “You’re a fount of wisdom.”

  “When you question people you always use the same tactic, Raven.”

  “I do not!”

  “You do.”

  “Fine, which tactic should I be using?”

  He shrugs, looking back at Dr Shaw. “She’s a scientist, and she’s cured. So reason with her.”

  “Why don’t you show me how it’s done?” I hand him a tablet and Luke enters the room to sit opposite the doctor.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Dr Shaw. I’m Luke Townsend. Do you need some water?”

  She shakes her head.

  Luke flashes her a smile – his painfully gorgeous one – and says, “You must be tough if you can stand this heat without a drop. I was panting like a dog the day I arrived.”

  No response, but I can see her shifting in her seat as though to re-evaluate what’s about to happen. She was not expecting warmth.

  “We’ve taken you in order to retrieve certain information,” he begins. “So I’ll be asking you some questions and if you could answer them that would really make my day. Can I call you Meredith?”

  She nods.

  “Cool. You work as the lead scientist in the Collingsworth research facility, right?”

  Another nod.

  “Which project are you currently working on?”

  “The sadness cures. But you already know that.”

  “I do, yeah.” He is watching her closely, the expression in his eyes intimate somehow. “How long have you been working for the facility, Meredith?”

  “Four years. Since it was started.”

/>   “And the government? When did they recruit you?”

  “Twenty-five years ago.”

  “Were you in any way involved in the development of the cure for anger?”

  She says nothing, and that’s how Luke knows where her marker is. She’s hiding something.

  “It’s okay, I know you’re legally obliged not to discuss employment with anyone,” he says gently. “I signed all the same contracts when I was working for the government. I won’t make you talk about that if you don’t want to.”

  Her hands fidget in her lap.

  “It’d help me out a lot if you could give me some professional opinions, though,” Luke goes on. “What’s the measure of success for the anger cure? For example, when it’s administered, how do you know if it’s worked correctly?”

  “Side effects,” she says simply.

  “Which are?”

  “We measure heart rate, response and reaction time, sensory reactions to light, olfactory stimulations, temperature regulation, organ function, blood cell count, blood clotting – I could go on, but it’s all been published, and the fact remains that any physical side effects are very rare.”

  Luke nods. “I’ve read the papers.”

  “Then why ask?”

  “There are some side effects that haven’t been published. Those are the ones I’d like you to talk about.”

  “I don’t know of any.”

  “Really. You’ve spoken about physical effects and tests, Meredith, but you haven’t mentioned the rate of psychiatric testing. How do you judge if the cure has effectively erased a brain’s ability to trigger an anger response?”

  “That’s exactly what it was designed to do, Mr Townsend. And it was designed by a mind far superior to any left in this world.”

  “Sure, but how do you know?”

  She says nothing.

  “You don’t, do you? You give people the cure and then send them home with no real way to know if it’s responded correctly.”