*
Luke
Getting flayed hurts like a bitch. At first it feels fine and delicate, an intimate kind of pain. By the end it’s heavy, brutal, a dull hammer.
“Can we hurry this along?” I growl.
“Quiet,” Ranya chides me as she cleans and dresses my back.
I’m sitting backwards on a chair in the infirmary while she tends to my wounds. We’ve gone through an impressive amount of whisky, as she pours it over my wounds and I drink it in equal measure. I’m having trouble holding my head up, woozy from pain or alcohol or both.
Hal hurries in. “You okay, man?”
“Peachy.”
“That was brutal. What’d you do?”
I shake my head, barely able to string a sentence together. I’m drunk and in excruciating pain.
“Brought you more supplies,” he says, offering me another bottle of booze.
I take a few gulps and feel it make its warm path through my body. It’s dulling the fire needles jabbing through my raw skin nicely.
“Have you seen Dual?” I ask him.
“She’s outside yelling at Quinn.”
“Oh god,” I groan. “Get out there and stop her, will you?”
“No way.” He smiles. “I’m not getting in the firing line.”
“Stop moving!” Ranya orders me and I try to hold still.
When she’s finally finished bandaging she helps me to lie face down on one of the beds for a sleep. Lying down is nice. Quite … squishy. My eyes fall closed and I struggle to get them open again. The lids are extremely heavy. And my back … Ah, my back. Sleep might be a nice way to make it stop burning.
Time passes, I think. I dream of cellos. And my brother.
Voices interrupt like softly floating leaves on the wind. I don’t open my eyes because I’m not sure that I can, but I think there are two people somewhere nearby, speaking in low tones.
“… don’t believe that do you?”
“It’s not about that.”
“Why did you do it then?”
“Because I was ordered to. And if I hadn’t, someone else would have.”
“That’s the kind of attitude that winds up causing genocide.”
A silence. It’s Josi and Shadow.
“Lazy, weak soldiers doing as their masters command them to, even when they know it’s wrong.”
“You are very comfortable passing judgments.”
“Yep. You shouldn’t have done it.” She sounds so stubborn in the quiet night. It makes me smile, or at least think about smiling.
“You think him incapable of enduring it?”
“That’s not even close to the point and you know it.”
Another silence.
“What did you whisper to him at the start?”
“I told him that pain isn’t real.”
She pauses, maybe thinking about that for a while. “Why does Quinn have more power than you anyway?”
“Someone has to be at the top.”
“He hasn’t built an army,” Josi points out. “There’s no need for military law if he won’t even fight. Instead he’s made a community of people. It should be a democracy.”
The conversation goes on like this while I drift in and out of consciousness.
I wake again and it’s still night. This time I feel a little more lucid, which means the pain has returned. Groaning, I slowly realize that once again I’m not alone. This time it’s a solitary figure standing by the window.
Josi turns and in the moonlight I can see how bleak her expression is. One of her eyes seems to glow, the pale one. The dark one looks almost too black to see. Like a demon eye in the night. She brings me more painkillers, helps me to swallow them and then returns to the window.
“Go back to sleep,” she tells me.
“You okay?”
I can see a storm within her. “Don’t ever do that again,” Josephine tells me softly.
I close my eyes. My neck is sore from sleeping on my stomach, so I turn my head the other way.
“Don’t ever take something that belongs to me.”
“Not even pain?”
“Not even that.”
I’ve ruined her, I realize. I’ve taken all her softness and left her with mistrust and anger. Her heart is impenetrable. She thinks she has to do everything alone again.
“This is why I didn’t tell you the truth straight away,” I murmur. “Because I knew it would make you like this.”
“Like what?”
“Cold.”
There’s a long silence.
Eventually she says, “Guess you were right.” And I hear her walk out.
It hurts more than the whipping.
*
February 1st, 2066
Luke
I’ve been putting off visiting Dodge for weeks now. Mostly because I’ve been in the infirmary, partly because I know what he’s going to say. I’m also reminded of Harley each time I see him. But in the end I just grit my teeth and go in for testing. I explain that I have the same thing in my blood that Dual was injected with, and that I need him to come up with a way to block it. He knows who Josi is, apparently, but I tell him I don’t want him using her – he’ll just have to start from scratch.
He shakes his head as he gazes into the microscope at the tiny pieces of me. “It’ll be a miracle if I come up with anything. Honestly. The man you need is the one who developed this in the first place.”
“Yeah, well, he’s in a city surrounded by walls and Bloods with guns who have orders to kill me.”
I head out into the night; above me is a crescent moon that hardly sheds any light. As I walk slowly toward my little house, I consider Ben Collingsworth and where he’s likely to be right now. Josi and I apparently left him in the lab, waiting for Jean and the Bloods to break in and find him. Which means there’s every possibility that he was killed for his crimes.
Someone’s sitting on my front doorstep. “What have you been sneaking out to do?” she asks me.
“I wasn’t aware there’s a curfew.”
“No curfew, surprisingly. Nothing interesting to do either.”
“Are you coming in?”
Josi shakes her head. “I want to go back to the city.”
“What?”
“Not to live. Just to get Ben.”
“Oh.” I clutch a hand to my heart. That really scared me for a second.
I study her – it’s bizarre that I have just been thinking about Ben and here she is, bringing him up. “He’s … Jose, I’d say he’s probably dead.”
She nods. “Yeah. But maybe not.”
I consider her outline; I can’t see much else of her. Her scrawny legs are drawn up to her chest and she’s resting her chin on her knees. We’ve barely spoken since the whipping. I haven’t been in much of a state to talk to anyone really, dosed up on pain meds and alcohol. My back’s healing slowly, but I’ll always have brutal scars: the result of only having access to medical treatment that belongs in the Medieval Ages.
“It’ll be like walking straight back into the lion’s den,” I warn her.
She nods again.
“If it’s because you want him to help me – ”
“It is. But it’s also because I owe Ben my life, and he doesn’t deserve to be left there, and because he might be able to help us reverse the cure.”
The last thing I want is for Josi to be anywhere near that city. But I’m not her boyfriend; it’s not my decision what she does with her life, and I learned the hard way that she doesn’t want me protecting her.
So I just say, “Okay.”
*
February 5th, 2066
Josephine
Luke is given permission for the op. Ostensibly it’s to retrieve Ben and the blood of the dead immune chick, aka me. But aside from that Luke and I are in agreement that what we really need to do is reconnaissance on the sadness cures. Where the government is manufacturing the drug, how they’re distributing it, what their plans for inj
ection are, how they’re advertising it, what the date for administering it is, and so on. He says the more information we have, the more it will help us to make a proper hit later this year.
He was allowed to choose his team, and he wanted to keep it small so he picked Hal, Pace and Will – explaining that they work so well together they’re like having six people – plus Shadow. And … me. Because I gave him no choice in the matter. It was then a case of convincing Quinn and Raven that I should be allowed to go, given how useless I am, but Luke gave them a whole song and dance about how I know the asylum inside out, which is where we’ll be starting our search for Ben, and how I still have retinas and prints that might not have been updated in the security system. This sounds far-fetched to me, but they bought it.
So now the six of us are spread out in the fifth carriage of the train, watching the tunnel walls flash by.
Why did I insist on coming? I can’t be of any real help. I’ll probably be a liability. But I guess I just can’t stand hanging around at the settlement, farming and running around the wall. It feels so utterly useless. And wasn’t the whole reason I came here so that I could try to make some kind of difference to the messed-up world? That’s probably overestimating my capacity as a person, but I have to at least try. And regardless, I’m starting to feel excited just to be doing something.
Luke has me dismantling, cleaning and refitting guns of all different sizes. He says the only time my hands shouldn’t be loading and unloading weapons is when I eat. It’s dull as hell, and I don’t get to be included in any of the card games the rest of them are raucously enjoying, but I definitely feel more comfortable holding and aiming guns now that I know how they’re built and how they function.
“How’s it going?” he asks, sliding into the seat opposite.
“Like a children’s sweatshop!” I reply. “Why can’t I just take this little one here? These ones seem fit to annihilate whole towns.”
He has a whole array of semi-automatic rifles and machine guns laid out for me to practice with and most of them are intimidatingly large.
“Giving you a pistol would be like giving you nothing.”
“Why?”
“You’d never be able to hit anything with it.”
“Why?”
“They have terrible scope and they kick all around the place. You’d struggle to hit a wall directly in front of you.”
I frown, lifting the pistol to my eye and pointing it at his face. “Reckon I could probably hit you if I tried.”
He grabs the gun and wrenches it out of my hand. “Don’t joke around with weapons!”
“It’s not even loaded!”
“I don’t care. They’re not toys. You need to respect the damage they do.”
“Fine. Sor-ry.”
He sits back, looking out the window. A long, awkward moment passes before he mutters, “I hate guns.”
I wonder how many people he has shot. “I think I hate them too.”
“You’ll be fine as long as you try not to fire yours.”
“What if someone’s shooting at me?”
“Take cover.”
“What if there is no cover?”
“I’ll cover you.”
“What if you’re not there?”
“I will be.”
“But what if you’re not?”
“Well then you can return fire. But if someone’s shooting at you and there’s nothing between you and them, and you’re alone … then you’re in trouble, girl.”
I’m suddenly not so excited about this mission.
“Are we really going to the asylum?” I ask.
Luke shakes his head. “No point. We’ll start at Ben’s house. He might have a computer system I can hack into.”
“Wouldn’t it have been disabled when he was taken in?”
“Probably.”
“What’s the likelihood that he’s not in custody? Or dead?”
Luke breathes out, shaking his head. “If they believe he helped us of his own free will he would have been either executed or incarcerated. We’ll hope for the latter. We’ll then tackle how to get him out of a high security prison. If he managed to convince Jean he helped us under duress there’s a slim possibility she might have put him under house arrest, expecting that I’d return for him at some point.”
“So we could be walking straight into a trap.”
“Yep. But cured folks ain’t too good at lying, so he’s probably dead.”
“He wasn’t cured,” I say.
Luke frowns. “Yes he was.”
“Trust me. He wasn’t. He was cleared of having to be because of his contribution to society. He was one of the inner circle.”
Luke scratches his jaw, where stubble is growing. “Why didn’t I know about that?”
“They covered it up, obviously. Not good for business if the guy who makes the cure doesn’t have to take it.”
“Yeah but how do you know?”
“He told me.” I clip a magazine into the loading mechanism of a huge semi-automatic rifle. It hurts my palm.
“Get your finger away from the trigger,” Luke snaps.
“Can you stop talking to me like you’re my drill sergeant?”
“Can you stop handling deadly weapons like you’re a child?”
“Not all of us were trained for combat when we were fifteen.”
“That’s becoming painfully obvious.”
“You were not this much of a jerk when we lived together.”
“I was just pretending not to be.”
“Enough of the bickering!” Pace hollers back at us from a few rows ahead. “I’m about to blow my own brains out just so I don’t have to hear it.”
Luke and I stare at each other and our lips twitch at the same time. I look away from him so I don’t laugh. I’m over the whipping debacle. I was angry with him for weeks, especially watching him in so much pain, but I don’t have the energy for it anymore. I also don’t want to look beneath the anger to what’s really there.
The trip feels a lot shorter than it did on the way out west. But I’d been nearly catatonic with exhaustion and blood loss then. And now I feel fit as a fiddle. Apart from the shiner Pace gave me yesterday in training.
She keeps shooting me dour looks and I know she’s pissed I’m here. I put the guns down and stand up.
“You’d better be going to the toilet and coming straight back,” Luke warns.
“Bite me.”
I go and sit next to Pace and Hal. Will is jogging up and down the aisle.
“Are you going to say it?” I ask Pace eventually.
Her eyes narrow and she peers sideways at me. “Okay. You should be at home having your nappy changed.”
“Pace,” Hal admonishes.
“It’s fine, Hal,” I tell him. “Let her get it out of her system.”
“You’ll endanger the rest of us. He knows that, and the only reason he let you come along is because you batted your pretty dual eyes at him.”
Actually, I’m fairly sure it’s because of his guilt. “I’ll stay out of the way,” I promise.
“And that’s half the problem! You don’t get it! On an op you have to be able to trust your team. You have to know they’re strong enough to have your back. You’re not strong enough to have shit.”
“You said I was tough,” I reply feebly.
“Once. And it musta been one hell of a fluke, ’cause before and since that day you’ve spent about ninety percent of your time in bed.” She leans in close, her purplish eyes holding mine fiercely. Her voice drops, and she goes in for the kill. “It’s not just the world that’s too difficult for you, Dual. It’s existing itself. And that’s too pathetic for words.”
I remain forcibly expressionless. I don’t look at Hal, whose eyes are burning holes in the side of my face. Carefully I stand and walk down the aisle to the next carriage. I sit by myself and watch the black walls flash by.
Will speeds past, a never-ending ball of energy. He hesitates b
y me, considering stopping.
“Keep moving,” I tell him, so he does. I am not sulking. I’m not. I’m just trying to work out if what she said is true.
An hour or two later it’s Shadow who comes to find me, and I’m grateful it isn’t Luke – I don’t want him to see me feeling vulnerable and take advantage of it.
The older man stalks toward me, his legs lanky and graceful. Silently he sinks into the seat across the aisle from mine and copies my stare out the window. Twenty minutes – I count them – pass before I can’t stand the quiet any longer. “How long has it been since you’ve been back to the city?”
A pause. Don’t ever try to have a quick conversation with Shadow.
“Twenty years.”
Jesus. Before the cure. He must have been one of those who built The Inferno. “It’s changed a lot since then.”
He doesn’t reply. There’s nothing to say.
“Did you have a family?” I ask.
No answer. I surreptitiously watch the side of his face. It is severe and blank as always. “Yes,” he says at last.
I lick my lips, an old habit left over from when they used to get dry and cracked after the blood moon. “They’re dead, aren’t they?” I say softly.
No answer.
I lean my face on the glass and feel the cool of it against my cheek. He is an orphan just like me. A loner. I know now why he spends his days and nights alone, stalking the dead forest. It is because he had people, and he lost them, and he doesn’t want new ones. You can’t want new ones.
I wonder if I ever had people. If, in those two short years before I was dumped on the side of a highway, I had people who loved me. It is a particular kind of sweetness, being loved. A very rare thing that combines both complete safety with absolute risk.
But then again, I don’t even know how it feels to be loved, do I? Not honestly, if at all. I can’t believe that love could exist in someone’s heart when everything else is a lie. I can’t. Every single thing I know about love is truth.
“She’s right,” Shadow grunts.
“Who?”
“Skinhead.”
I blink. “Right, thanks. I know how useless I am. You can piss off now.”
Melancholy: Book Two of The Cure (Omnibus Edition) Page 12