by David Beers
“That thing,” he said, pointing to the chip lying on the table—the tiny sliver of metal. “You’ve looked into it, right? There’s nothing in it that’s going to mess me up? When I come out the other side, I’ll be mostly the same?”
“There’s nothing in there that isn’t in mine, but I’m not going to sit here and say you’ll be mostly the same. You know that.”
“I can’t do anything else,” he whispered. He didn’t know if Jerry heard and didn’t really care. It was to Grace and himself. “I’ve come this far, I can’t turn around.”
“There’s nothing for you if you do,” Grace answered. She wasn’t happy, wasn’t anywhere near happy about what he was about to do, but she couldn’t skirt the truth. “This is what you wanted. This is why you came. Right here.”
Bless her and murder her at the same time. She was right. That chip lying there and everything it meant, that’s why he was here. Standing here looking at it, talking about it, was just wasting time. He’d already wasted thirty-three years.
“Okay,” Caesar said. “Let’s get started.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Life of Caesar Wells
By Leon Bastille
No one knew The Genesis was coming.
We knew Caesar was under the knife, knew that Jerry was down there performing the same surgery that had once been performed on him.
I was in the playground beneath the surface. I took some turns down there watching after the kids. It was really just a room with some makeshift equipment. Balls and things of that nature. I enjoyed the kids and, more than anything else, that’s why I went there—not so much the need to earn my keep. Those bastards brought me here and kept me here, so I figured they owed me a keep.
I remember worrying about Caesar.
The surgery was unlike anything I’d ever heard of. Jerry was going to place a chip in his brain, a piece of metal that supposedly would do quite a few things. One, it’d allow him more access to his brain tissue. Two, it’d allow him to transform other pieces of his body, to make himself into a machine, which everyone said would be important when the battles started. I didn’t know back then, and I didn’t really care. I wanted him to make it out because if he didn’t, what did I have left? I wanted him to make it out because I loved him.
So I was watching the kids and thinking about Caesar when it came, or sent something in its place—I don’t know which. Manny sent it, even if he didn’t know. Hell, it was a while before we knew he did it. Manny sent it when he synced. He wasn’t Caesar; that’s what he didn’t understand. Caesar could keep the sync out of his head but Manny wasn’t able to. It found out where we were and sent them, death that the world hadn’t seen before. An application that was meant, at least we thought at the time, to kill us all. Now I know that wasn’t the truth, but then? How could we have thought any differently?
Plaster fell from the roof, shaking down like tiny snowflakes. The entire room shook, and the only thing I thought was earthquake. The cities were strategically built off fault lines, so I’d never experienced something even resembling an earthquake, but I didn’t know what else was possible. The kids started crying, grabbing onto each other and pieces of playground equipment, trying to balance themselves. Some fell down, unable to hold on.
I picked up two of the smallest, putting one in each arm, and then screamed for everyone to—
“Get in the hall! Come on, in the hall!”
We rushed out, only wanting to get to the surface. Under here, if everything collapsed, we were all dead. Get them to the surface, that’s all I thought. I didn’t know. I couldn’t have.
The walls shook and the plaster kept floating down, but I drove upward, trying to get to the sunlight, hoping that standing out there on the sand would be better than standing down here underneath the thousands of pounds of concrete.
We made it to the top, pushing forward with the rest of the crowd. Parents were grabbing their kids and running outside, all of us certain that safety waited. That danger rested inside.
The sun blinded me at first, casting down its brightness across all of us. I brought my hand to shield my eyes, to try to see what was out here because something wasn’t right. The ground still shook, but the noises, what were those? Earthquakes didn’t sound like that. Earthquakes didn’t sound like crackling flames.
And then I saw it.
Fire burning in the air. Not flames attached to anything, but flames that burnt on nothing but oxygen, flames that moved through the air particles the same as any application. I don’t know where it started; I wasn’t out there in time to see it. I understood immediately, though, why the plaster fell from the ceilings beneath the ground, why the walls shook. The pressure. The flames were everywhere, burning on invisible straw, but not on the ground. The flames stretched up a mile into the sky, bright orange and blue licking at the air, all of the air, everywhere. I couldn’t see anything else. Just the fire, like it had rained down from the sky, and I imagine that’s exactly where it came from. Some application dispersed a mile into the air, and when the fire started, it caught and spread down and out.
It was moving closer to the compound. Moving fast, like fire from a blowtorch, except the torch was the sky itself.
I turned around and looked at the doors to the compound, open with people streaming out, thinking safety would be found outside. We had to get back in, all of us, and immediately. Because in a few more seconds we would be little more than charred pieces of dying flesh. The fire was coming from all directions and no water would put this out. No water would douse it or save us.
“GET BACK IN! BACK INSIDE!” I screamed.
But people only stopped and stared, caught in the beauty of what burned before them, caught in the fear of what it meant. Only a few turned, like me, looking at the door and most likely wondering if there was any chance that they would make it back inside before they burnt alive. I started running, no one in my arms now because the parents had claimed their children. Running for safety, running to be inside the walls that might have a chance of protecting me from the inferno sweeping down.
The heat fell across me like a sandstorm, almost blinding me from the intensity of it, my skin feeling it from everywhere, unable to escape. I didn’t have to turn around to see the fire, all I had to do was look in front of me. It came from everywhere. From all places. Surrounding the entire compound.
I glimpsed what it came from, for only a second. Tiny red particles, like seeds almost but smaller and looking spongy. Right before each one exploded into flames, they birthed two more of the same particle, thus intensifying the flames while making sure it spread at an ever increasing rate.
People were in my way and at first I tried to drag them with me, screaming at them to come on, to get out of the way, to “STOP GODDAMN STARING AND MOVE!” Some listened and started running in front of me. Most didn’t. And then I did the only other thing I could, I pushed those that wouldn’t move out of my way.
Now, looking back, it was all I could do—but that’s the logical, detached part of my mind describing it. I was also sentencing people to death so that I could find life. I threw them from me, my legs continually pumping forward, continually trying to get to those doors as the heat bared down.
I made it and I didn’t stop there. I kept running. Deeper and deeper into the compound, the fire sweeping over everyone behind me as I moved forward. Windows burst in all around me, the heat from the fires finally reaching them and shattering every piece of glass it found. Still, I ran. The fire lept in through the windows, and whoever wasn’t already inside, The Genesis bless them because nothing else would.
I made it back downstairs, hiding in one of the rooms. A windowless room. I didn’t hear any screams down here. I felt the rumblings though, the shaking as the fire rolled through the first level, burning everything it touched, killing everyone I knew.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jerry stepped out of the compound.
The sand beneath his feet crunche
d just as normal, unchanging no matter what happened to it.
Nothing else in front of him could say the same.
He looked out on his home, on the land that he found and made his own. On the land he had brought The Eight to, brought them here because it was so desolate, so remote, so unknown that they would never be found. They could grow here. They could assemble. They could build and when the time came they could attack. This place allowed them that opportunity, or rather, it was supposed to.
Jerry’s world lay in ashes before him.
And when not ashes, then grotesque, burnt beings.
Blackened bodies lay everywhere; the smell of spoiling meat assaulting his senses. He doubled over as he realized those were his friends, his people, lying out here in the sand, their bodies turning rancid under the afternoon heat. The fire killed them, then disappeared, and now the heat would finish destroying their carcasses. Jerry’s vision blurred and he felt saliva building in his mouth, signaling that vomit would come next. He closed his eyes and focused on holding his stomach together, on keeping everything inside, on not puking out here in the sand.
He heard others coming outside after him; survivors coming to see what he had come to see. The fire over, to see their group broken. Burnt. Dead.
There were things to do, he knew. The Genesis would send more and quickly. He might already be too late. This was the first attack, the first wave to take out as many people as it could in one sweep, but more applications would come. More that would pick off the stragglers, more that would finish off the wounded. By the end of today The Named would be no more; that was The Genesis’ goal.
Jerry straightened up, not completely confident his stomach would hold, but needing to look and then move. Needing to see this first, to see what his people had become, to see what The Genesis did to them, and then to move. To get out of here. To take anyone who still lived and find them somewhere else to live.
Christ, where would they find that? In this place? In this desert?
The dead lay everywhere. Their bodies lying down like they had decided to take a nap right under the desert sun, except before napping they had lay across a grill and allowed flames to lick at them until their skin was little more than charcoal. He walked by the bodies, seeing pink tongues lolling out of mouths, the only pink visible on most people. Eyes remained open but only because the fire had burnt off their eyelids, discarding those tiny flaps of skin as if they were paper.
Jerry listened as people vomited behind him, unable to take the smell or the sight or the combination.
Fine.
This is where he was now. The leader of a dying group, with children and mothers lying before him, their bodies unrecognizable. He couldn’t dwell on this. He couldn’t stand here and stare anymore or the rest of his group would die next. Caesar too. Caesar was what mattered here, when he took out all the emotion and fear. Caesar, down there still trying to recover from surgery, and quite possibly not going to make it.
He had to make it. Everyone else in The Named could burn out here and then rot under the sun, but Caesar had to make it.
Jerry turned around and looked at those crying. A few people had cast themselves on the dead bodies, loved ones that Jerry didn’t have the time to make out right now. He saw Paige standing at the door, not having stepped far out into the sand, looking at him with tears streaming down her face.
No one else would move them right now. No one else would take care of The Named. Jerry had to.
* * *
“Will it find us here?” Keke asked.
The Eight now reduced to four, five if Manny could ever be found and six if someone counted Caesar. But the original? The people that Paige grew to love and care about? Only four of them were here. Her, Keke, Jerry, and Tim.
“I don’t know,” Jerry said. “I don’t think so, but I can’t know for sure.”
A day had passed since their world exploded. No one knew what had become of the bodies of their loved ones, whether vultures were picking at their bones or The Genesis came in some other fashion, looking for survivors. Jerry swept everyone living out of there like a broom across dust, moving them fast and without real care of who was tossed in the process. They had to move, and people could sob as they did, but their feet best keep moving. Most made it out. Some refused. Some hugged those rotting bodies, dealing with the smell and nausea and pus seeping from wounds, saying they wouldn’t leave. Saying they couldn’t leave. So Jerry had left them and Paige still saw their faces. Shock. Terror. Their faith destroyed.
He didn’t have a choice, she thought as she looked across the other three people in this room. He had to do it and you know that. If he waited, even for one person, you wouldn’t be standing here right now.
She knew it to be true, understood it logically, but couldn’t get the eyes of those people left behind out of her head.
“And Caesar?” Tim asked. “Is he going to make it?”
Jerry looked at his feet. Had she ever seen him cast his eyes down like that? Not avoiding the question but his confidence so clearly shaken that he didn’t know what to do with himself. His confidence, his certainty in himself, in their mission, that was what kept them all going. That had changed the original Eight from their wish of perpetual hiding. And here he was, now, casting his eyes to the ground at a question.
“He’s resting. I thought the surgery was finished when we left, but it wasn’t. His brain isn’t taking to the chip like it needs to. He’s rejecting it, thinking of it as some kind of foreign body rather than bringing it in. In the next hour, I’m going to try again, and we’ll see. That’s all I can do.”
“What if he dies?” Tim again, and Paige could tell his own faith was shaken. This had been Jerry’s movement, despite Jerry’s belief in Caesar, and now his captains were all looking for someone else, looking for something to believe in.
“He’ll make it,” Paige said. “He’s going to be fine.”
Paige couldn’t know if that was true, but she only knew that’s what people needed to hear right now.
When she left the room, she made sure not to show anyone her back. She could feel the blood causing her shirt to stick to her skin, knew that her wound was getting worse. This wasn’t the time, though. Caesar had to pull through first.
* * *
The wreckage was all consuming. Manny couldn’t pull away and couldn’t bear to look either. Not at first. His eyes wouldn’t close and yet he fell to the ground, sobbing. This was him. All of it. The people here weren’t breathing because of what he’d done in the city. Because he synced. Because he talked to The Genesis.
That was the only possibly.
The dead were everywhere. The majority burnt, but not all of them. Some lay prostate across others, holes in their head, drilled clear through by some kind of weapon, but the rest of their body unharmed. Those people were the second pass-through. The ones that the fire didn’t get.
He stared at it for a few minutes, crying and screaming and pounding his fist against his legs, looking like a child unable to get a toy that he desperately wanted. And then a deeper realization came over, one that moved past the shock, past the knowledge that he had somehow contributed to this, that these people’s deaths rested on him. The realization that moved through this paralyzing state was that his wife and son lived in this compound too. That it wasn’t just himself or his friends. It wasn’t just The Named and The Eight. Brandi and Dustin had lived here too and he left them when he went to the city. Left them alone. Left them for this.
He started running, searching bodies, looking for anyone resembling his wife. The eyes of most people he looked at were open, but charred over, revealing nothing of the colors that could help identify them. He checked children and adults the same, but hair was missing, and outside of sex organs, there wasn’t anything to help him know.
Where was his son? Where was his wife? Were they here amongst the dead, where the birds feasted like perhaps never before? Or had they made it out?
Oh, Dear
Heaven, let them have made it out.
* * *
Manny sat in the sun for an hour, his ass in the sand, looking at the dead. Sweat poured off him like tiny rivers searching for the ocean. He had looked through everyone twice and couldn’t find Brandi or Dustin. Couldn’t know for sure if his wife lay out here with the rest of the dead. It took his brain a while to make the conclusion that people might be inside, that perhaps survivors waited in there. The fact that he had already identified a second group of killings in that some of the dead weren’t burned, but simply killed by a hole in their head, fell through this logic; his own raging emotions kept him from seeing it.
He searched the compound. Room by room. He found a few more dead people, all of them with holes the size of a dime going straight through their head. He could see completely through in some cases, looking at the floor beneath them. Manny didn’t find his wife inside, though; he didn’t find his child.
Jerry wasn’t here either, that he was sure of. If Jerry’s flesh burnt off, if he died here, then there would be some kind of metal skeleton littering this place, but there wasn’t. Jerry had left, and while the death count was high, it wasn’t everyone. Nearly one hundred and fifty people lived in this compound, and there weren’t that many lying about. They had left. There were survivors and if his wife and child weren’t here, then they were with Jerry, wherever he had gone.
Manny found a chair and sat down. A small one, finding himself sitting in the room they used for the children’s school. He sat and he thought.
Where could Jerry have gone? Where would he have taken everyone?
He knew how to find out, but he knew never to do it either. All of The Eight knew. They were the only ones though, because activating it could get Jerry killed. Did Manny want to risk that? Were the surroundings not enough for him? Had he not had his fill on murder?
Brandi and Dustin. They were what mattered right now. Not Jerry. Not The Named. Only those two, and if he had to activate the chip in Jerry’s head to know what happened to them, then he would. Dialing in created an alert to anything listening, it let the airwaves know something was active, something that wasn’t human, something that The Genesis created. The same signal an application would give if it were to come into a given area. If Jerry wasn’t safe, if he was anywhere that could be monitored, then alarms could ring all the way up to The Genesis, and he would die moments after hearing Manny’s voice.