by David Beers
There was the cutting of my arms. The cutting down to visible bone and then Manny treating it to keep infection from growing in the wounds. Keeping me alive, so that he could continue.
There's gore. There was always gore in that place. Blood stained floors and blood stained sofas. So much blood that I finally stopped seeing it, sitting there frozen still, dealing with the left over pain from Manny's last session with me. It became just another part of the apartment, like a painting on the wall. When you first put it up, you notice it, but after the hundredth time passing it, you don't see it at all. The gore though, that doesn't concern me. That's temporary. Sure, I won't forget what it looked like, watching in a mirror as I cut my own ear off. I won't forget what the blood felt like splashing on my naked shoulder, the sheer heat of it. But an ear, with everything that's happened and everything yet to happen? It means nothing. A grain of salt in the ocean.
The real scars, the one's I see when I sleep, they're all inside. Manny hovers above me, an unseen ghost that I glimpse when the darkness comes. He's always there, always waiting on me again, to throw me back into that apartment, on that couch, and make me watch. That's all I was, a passive observer. Nothing more. I watched him destroy me and I watched him destroy Paige. Both of us in very, very different ways, and in the end, there wasn't much left inside either of us.
He destroyed me physically, and mentally, he took my heart. He took the piece of me that wasn't a coward, the piece of me that stood up to him in Vegas, that told Paige to run. He took that man and turned him into a frightened child, one burnt by cigarettes and beat for spilling soda. Whenever he looked at me, I pissed myself. I don't mean that hyperbolically; I literally urinated. He could have stopped that, controlling my bladder the way he did every other muscle in my body, but he didn't. He let me do it time and time again, to shame me, to make me understand that I was no longer human, that I was a dog he could whip whenever he wanted.
He still looks at me, only now it's when I dream. His eyes see through me, knowing everything I think, just as they did in that apartment. He sees my fear. He sees my hatred. He sees my love for Caesar. He sees it all and to him it's fuel. It feeds his madness. He drinks it in like a drunk at last call, swallowing it as fast as he possibly can.
He still hurts me in my dreams, but there, he lets me know that it'll never end. At least in that apartment, I understood that eventually I would die from my wounds. That he couldn't doctor me up forever. That was impossible. I would die and this would end. But now, I'm not going to die for a long time. I may be missing three toes, but I can still walk. I may not have ears, but I can still hear. My lips may have scars running up and down them, but I can still talk. My brain may be scarred, but I still dream. And that's the problem.
There's no way to escape him now.
I imagine it was the same for Paige, though we never spoke inside that room. I imagine the sex, the goddamn rape, was awful, but that was only a part of it. It was knowing he would do it again. It was knowing we couldn't escape. Knowledge, I've found, is always worse than action. Knowledge lives while action fades.
Manny haunts me, and always will, at least as much as Caesar.
Chapter Six
Grace moved through the city slowly. She wasn't looking for anything, wasn't trying to hide, but was thinking. She meandered through the streets, sometimes watching people rush by her, but for the most part, she was lost in her own mind. None of this made sense to her; none of it added up. The Genesis spent its entire life keeping just this scenario from occurring, keeping this at bay, and here she was, looking at The Genesis' failure. If this was indeed its failure, then Caesar need do nothing else besides wait. Society would collapse and...what of The Genesis? Was it dying? Had some kind of virus gotten into the code?
No. That was impossible. The Genesis would never allow that to happen.
Something else, it had to be, yet Grace couldn't figure it out. She couldn't understand it.
She moved through a plume of smoke rising up from a burning trashcan. There was no one around it, no one trying to utilize its heat, and maybe whoever created the fire had done it for fun—just to see something burn.
They shouldn't be here. That was the only thing Grace found she knew for sure. There were Paige and Leon to consider, sure, but she didn't believe Caesar was going to make it out of here. Not anymore. She wouldn't tell him that he had to leave, that he had to surrender Paige and Leon to Manny; he wouldn't listen, wouldn't even hear her, but she knew it to be true. Whatever was happening here, whatever was still building, still growing in intensity, would destroy Caesar when it caught him. The only power in the world that could stop this was The Genesis, but where was it?
Not here, not anymore.
The questions rolled through Grace over and over again, unanswerable and yet not stopping. She spent an hour floating through the streets, aimlessly, seeing things she had never imagined, witnessing acts that made her understand the true horrors humanity was capable of. She had, before, known it intellectually, known that before The Genesis, humans were a bit more than animals, but not much. Now though, she saw it. She saw the dead on the street. She heard shrieks echoing out of buildings around her. She saw everything that The Genesis had built, the huge skyscrapers and the wondrous trains, destroyed. It didn't make her hate humanity, but it did make her fear it. This was what Caesar wanted to set free? These people raping and pillaging everything around them?
Grace stopped.
She looked straight ahead at a woman walking along the sidewalk alone.
Grace couldn't believe what she was seeing, surely it had to be a mistake, some kind of smoke induced hallucination.
The woman kept walking forward though, her dark brown skin getting closer and closer to Grace. It wasn't a mistake. It was Keke, walking down the street as if she belonged here. Walking down the street by herself, as if she wasn't going to be raped and murdered the moment someone saw her.
Grace moved, no longer floating, but traveling across electrons as fast as she could. She scooted right next to Keke's ear, whispering so as not to startle her, "It's Grace, Keke."
Keke stopped, her head snapping to the direction that the voice came from, her brain not realizing there wouldn't be anything to see.
"Keep walking. You don't want to draw attention to yourself."
Keke listened, moving one leg in front of the other, her face slowly finding its way back to what was in front of her.
"Where's Caesar?" Keke asked.
"He's hiding. I came out here to think. When did you get here?"
"A few hours ago. I didn't really think this through; I've just been walking the streets, hiding whenever I see someone, hoping that I somehow found you guys."
"You're lucky, Keke. You've seen what's happening here?"
"Yes," Keke whispered. "What is it? What is all of this?"
"I don't know. I've never seen anything like it."
"What about Jerry? Have you found him?"
"We know where he is," Grace said, "but we haven't made it to him yet. There's...there's been some obstacles."
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know," Grace said. "I'm hoping Caesar figures it out."
* * *
Caesar hadn't told Grace what he saw. He hadn't told her of the red peace sign beaming from the man's chest. He hadn't told her about the man sitting in the train, watching the massacre with dead eyes. He hadn't told her because he was scared of what she would say. He was scared of what it might mean. Caesar knew about the anti-virus, knew, intuitively, that it had to have something to do with The Genesis, but he didn’t realize the full scale of this until he saw the man in black.
The representative, that's what brought Caesar to reality. Those people who died in the lobby, they had died not at a person's hands, but at The Genesis' will. The Genesis created this and that scared Caesar more than anything else he could think of. All of this, the fires, the death, the rage—The Genesis created all of it on purpose. That wa
s the most frightening issue, that it had been planned, that what happened yesterday wasn't happenstance; it was part of something that Caesar couldn't see—the tip of an iceberg, while the rest waited deep below the ocean, waiting on Caesar’s ship to scrape across it, puncturing the metal and letting freezing water flood over everyone he loved.
He couldn't die for Paige and Leon. That's the conclusion he understood, and it hurt him to think it, but he couldn't shy away from it. If they needed to die for Caesar to live, then it had to be. Neither of them could stop The Genesis, would even be able to find it. He could though, but he had to live to do it. Grace would tell him that he wouldn't live, if he stayed here. If he told her what he saw in that train, the person and the uniform he wore, she would tell him that he was probably already dead—he just didn't know it.
Caesar knew he should leave, but yet he sat in this room thinking. He knew he should flee the city and begin working out how he would get to Australia, but he couldn't. He couldn't pull himself away from this place, couldn't just let Paige and Leon die up there.
He imagined Jerry was already dead, but Caesar had no chance of understanding the inside of that apartment without him. If Jerry was alive, if some part of his chip still functioned, Caesar might be able to tap into it. He had tried reaching for Manny again, but the connection was severed. The only way into that apartment without taking an elevator would be through Jerry, and Caesar needed to know something, needed to know anything, because if he did this—if he went against what he knew was the right course of action, then he needed to know that someone awaited him up there. He needed to know that he wasn't going to walk into a room decorated with the skin of those he had come to save.
Caesar reached out, his mind sweeping across the space that separated him from Jerry, searching for a signal, even a pulse—some sign that Jerry still lived. He found it, a signal on the verge of dying, but a signal nonetheless. Jerry wasn't dead; the chip in his head still connected at least some pieces of his mind.
Caesar latched onto it, downloading everything he could, everything that the chip would or could give up. Jerry said nothing, no sign that his conscious mind still worked; Caesar felt only the chip. He took it all in, everything that the chip had observed; he sat on the floor, the apartment he inhabited already having been completely ransacked, and watched as those he loved were torn apart and ruptured. Watched as the people he had come to save were abused in ways that Caesar hadn't known possible.
He didn't hide from it. He downloaded for hours, reliving every single moment that Paige and Leon lived through, feeling hate blooming in his heart.
Chapter Seven
"I'm telling you, I've never seen anything like it before," Theo said. "It wasn't possible, what that man did."
"You’re right, Theo, it isn't possible," Mock answered.
Theo looked at it, sitting with its feet propped up on the railing, staring off into the distance. The view would have been stunning, if not for the horror it showed. Still, as expected, Mock seemed to enjoy what it saw, sitting out here on the balcony. Theo didn't know if it was actually Mock's balcony, in that it had been assigned to Mock, or whether Mock simply walked in and took it. Either way, Mock was now the owner and this is where it asked Theo to meet. Not an office this time, not somewhere that hid Mock from the disaster it had created, but right where it could look down across everything.
Theo didn't glance over the railing. He didn't need the ivory tower view of what he had seen up close this morning.
"No, he was there. I saw him part those people like he had a force-field around him, something that wouldn't let a single person get to him."
"Did he see you?" Mock asked.
Theo had sat in the train and looked right at the man. Watched him walk out of that building as if nothing in the world could touch him, as if there weren't people killing each other right beside him. Theo watched people try to get at him, try to turn their bodies toward him, and then watched as they moved to kill someone else.
Theo had never witnessed anything so strange, these people seeming to change their minds instantaneously. Had the man seen Theo? Of course. They looked right at each other, Theo in charge of a growing crowd of killers and the man alone. Yet Theo felt a hundred spiders running up and down his spine. Theo told these people to murder, but this man moved them as if the very world bent to his will. The man saw Theo, could recognize him, and Theo didn't like it.
Because the man, for a few minutes, had changed the whole balance of the battle inside. He had turned 'Theo's' people against one another, had them spill each other's blood, and Theo did nothing but watch. Did nothing but wonder how any of this could happen, and thought for a brief moment that he would die in that train. That the man, when he finished with those inside, would come to the train and kill him.
"He saw me," Theo said.
"Where did he go?"
"How the fuck do I know, Mock? The man controlled anyone he wanted. I wasn't going to follow him."
Mock didn't say anything for a bit, just sat staring up into the blue sky. Less blue now though, always less blue because of the smoke that permeated the entire city.
"You're sure about what you saw? Because to be frank with you, it's not possible. I've seen a lot, Theo, but never mind control. It's something from poorly written science fiction novels back when your kind wrote novels. You know what happens if you're lying to me."
Theo knew. Of course he knew. His entire life was now one large reminder of what happened if Mock truly became displeased.
"I'm not lying. Look, I'll keep on keeping on, I just wanted you to know what I saw down there. If that guy is still around, he's going to cause a lot of problems for you."
"For us, Theo. Don't forget, we're a team now."
* * *
Mock didn't know if it believed Theo.
It didn't think he was lying, per se, but more likely that Theo was simply mistaken. Mind control, regardless of what Theo said happened, wasn't possible.
Only, Theo had come here and said it wasn't just possible, it was happening down there in that madness. That someone was fucking up Mock’s plan. That someone wasn't playing by Mock's rules. It didn't have to be mind control either; Mock knew that. There were any number of ways that what Theo thought happened could have happened.
Either way, it didn't matter. If someone down there was doing something other than what Mock wanted, then that person needed to be dealt with. Mock didn't know if it would tell The Genesis. Probably not.
This was Mock's masterpiece, after all.
* * *
You see it now, don't you? You see that it's going to work. Go ahead, admit it.
The theory's arrived?
Yes. He's here.
Where?
He's hiding right now, but he made a little showing today at the apartment complex. It's not enough, what he saw today. It has to spread, to other cities. It can't be contained to here.
Look, things are progressing nicely, I won't say they aren't. But what you're doing here, what you're setting up at the end is going to put all the power in his hands. Not in ours. When we meet, we won't have a single bit of leverage over him. We won't have anything. The decisions will all rest with him. I know the probabilities, but if we're wrong...it's all over.
Hey, have I failed you yet?
The smartest phrase humanity ever coined was 'There's a first time for everything.'
Zip it. I'm not going to fail. It's all going exactly as I planned. We're going to spread this thing, and then we're going to go meet him. This will all be over shortly. A thousand years of plans finally achieved. Remember to thank me when it's over.
Chapter Eight
Paige couldn't resist when Manny climbed on top of her. Even during rapes, he held her still, not allowing her to kick or scream. Somehow, even when he came, he kept her still. The only part of Paige still free was her mind... except that wasn’t really true. Not anymore. Because now there was a large place in her mind that she didn’t dare
go. The place that held Manny’s rapes, the place that took in all those memories and housed them. Only she didn’t want to go there, couldn’t go there, because her entire mental framework would collapse if she had to relive them. Bad enough that Manny kept coming back, kept taking her again and again, but to have to remember it while she lay on this couch day in and day out? It would be too much. So her body was confined, and now her mind was slowly becoming more and more inaccessible, as that place with those memories continued to grow.
He was going to impregnate her; she knew it. She knew that she would have his monstrous child, would birth something conceived in insanity. Knew that the child would be insane too, would be just like its father, and that somehow, Manny would make her care for it. Maybe he would control her for the rest of her life, making her nurse the little beast and eventually cook whole meals for it.
She lay on her side now, staring out into the living room. For some reason, Manny hadn't brought her to the bedroom. He slept there, alone, but Paige and Leon were limited to the living room. Sometimes Manny would march Leon into the bathroom, and Leon always returned with new wounds. She hated seeing them, hated it almost as much as she hated the rapes. Leon was being torn apart in a much more serious way than Paige. She might have Manny's child, but Leon wouldn't have anything at all, shortly.
Manny had split Leon's nose straight down the middle. Flayed it like a piece of meat that one wanted to make sure cooked evenly throughout. He probably bled a good bit, but when he walked back into the room—looking more like a robot than a human, Manny apparently not able to master the intricacies of movement—a salve filled the open flesh, stopping the blood flow and hopefully stopping any bacterial infection. It didn't matter though, not really. Manny could put whatever he wanted in the wound, but tomorrow, or maybe sooner, he would bring that knife back to Leon's skin and the torture would continue. The torture would always continue because Manny was extracting his vengeance. Righteous vengeance, that's what Manny believed. That all of this was deserved, that all of this was because of Caesar, and Manny only making sure Caesar paid his due.