by David Beers
Why, why, why did he pick that time to remember the person that he used to be? Why didn't he search for that train and hop on it and ride it down to that old island and try to fight The Genesis? These questions will never be answered. Or they already have been, and I just don't want to face it.
The world no longer believes in an afterlife. Whether or not The Genesis survives, we'll never go back to that place, one where we were all trying to live decently so that we could reach some heaven. No, like slavery, that has passed from the social consciousness. Even so, I like to think that there may be an afterlife. Not necessarily for everyone. I'm not talking about a heaven, not somewhere that the good go when they've opened enough doors for the elderly and finally stopped arguing with their spouse. I'm talking about a place that only the evil go. A place where punishment is doled out continuously and there's no chance to escape. I'm talking about an iron maiden that opens and closes, opens and closes, ripping flesh and rending bones, but an iron maiden that never kills. Because what we do here, there should be some penance for it. There should be some accountability for the people we are while here. I'm not saying anyone needs to have eternal life or walk on streets of gold, heavens no, but for those that bring pain, for those that set out to hurt? Something should await them. Something horrible.
I don't know where Caesar fits in that paradigm, whether he deserves an afterlife filled forever with pain. To be honest, I don't even know if Manny does. Did he cause pain? Yes. But the reasons why, those have to matter, don't they? And if so, then Manny had his reasons, disturbed and wrong—yes—but there was more to him than the need to hurt others. At least there had been.
Bradley though? I know he's not human, but something needs to await him. Whenever the electrons finally stop moving through him, finally give up the ghost as the saying goes, he needs to meet that never-ending iron maiden. He needs to hurt for a long time.
No.
He needs to hurt forever.
Chapter Sixteen
The anti-virus.
That's what Allencine called it.
In Brockington, a name wasn’t necessary. No need to package anything up and sell it to the masses. Theo heard that long ago they used to bottle up water, put it in plastic and sell it in stores for up to three bucks. He thought that might have been the highlight of human idiocy. That in itself, when The Genesis came to be, might have spurred it to believe these humans didn't really need to dominate the world. That perhaps, if they continued, there might not have been a whole lot left for anything else.
Water. It gave life to everything on this planet. Had the ruling class wanted to seriously hurt the masses, all they had to do was put a poison in those bottles and let the proletariat die off in a matter of days. Theo didn't need bottles to do it, though. All he had to do was stand over the largest tank he'd ever seen in his life. The water boiled beneath him, two hundred feet below, and still he could feel the heat reaching up to his face. Above him, machines would take the steam released from the boiling water and do packaging of its own, reforming the gas into a liquid—a clean liquid that wouldn't be sullied by anything once it went out of this power plant. The water could pump through poison-lined pipes, and whoever drank it would feel like they were drinking from the fountain of youth.
Only when it was repackaged by the gatherer machines above him, though. Only when it pumped out of this plant. Before that, down there in the cauldron where the bubbles rose to the surface and then exploded, sending scalding water into the air where it fell back down to meet its brothers, anything could be done to the water. That same poison could be dropped in and when it rolled out to the masses...everyone would die.
Theo dropped his own kind of poison into the tank. He put what he had once packaged as an anti-virus in there. Not even a huge amount. He took five bags of those pills and flung them from the ledge he stood on, watching them fall before they disappeared in the rising steam. Melted down to their component parts, they eventually fled up past Theo into the gatherers above him. Then those pills made their way into the water supply.
Theo stood there for a long time, watching that water boil, wondering how long it would take for the first person to take a sip of tainted water. For the first person, maybe a young kid, to get angry with his mother. The first time the kid had probably felt anger like that, and Theo imagined he would go to his room and grab something hard—maybe a baseball—and then come back and brain his mother with it. Just bash her head in until bits of flesh and skull smothered his arm up to the elbow.
It doesn't have to happen like that, he thought. There will be rage, but maybe not like that. Maybe it won't be a kid and maybe he won't kill his mother.
Theo could have left then, after he dropped the packages into the tank, but he didn't. He waited around, sitting in a high rise that Mock had arranged for him. He sat out on the balcony, the glassed in porch much like the tower he had seen back in Allencine, the tower of monitoring videos. Here, those same screens covered the glass walls, and Theo watched the city below him, waiting for it to start, waiting for the people to drink the water and begin their descent into madness.
It took two days, and for the most part, Theo sat outside on that balcony and watched the videos. They showed different pieces of the city, showed people walking the streets, taking trains, coming and going from work. It looked like Allencine had a month ago. It looked like the city he grew up in. All those people so normal, so happy, so unsuspecting of what was to come. They were drinking the water, of course. How could they not? Because they didn't know. Because Theo hadn't told a soul what he was up to.
It started innocently, not how Theo thought it would. He was lucky, really, to be watching the screen that it all took place on. Or maybe unlucky, but either way he saw it. It happened inside a train, between a black woman and a white man. Once he saw something happening, Theo turned up the volume from that train, listening to the conversation between the two people.
"Excuse me?" The man said.
"You stepped on my shoe," the woman answered.
"Say you’re sorry," Theo mumbled, hoping that it wasn't starting, but knowing that hope had disappeared for him and the rest of the people in this city. "Just say you're sorry."
"No I didn't," the man said, turning away from the woman and looking back across the train. He stood while she sat, and clearly dismissed her with how he looked away.
The woman stood up and Theo felt his stomach drop. It was happening and had he thought that it wouldn't? Had he actually sat here thinking that maybe the pills wouldn't take hold?
They stood in each other's face now and Theo wasn't listening to their words. He only knew they were getting louder as the anger rose. This was the end of society, not bombs but rudeness.
The man reached out and grabbed the woman's face, throwing her back into the chair she had stood from. She tried to regain her feet, but the man was on her, hitting, biting, doing everything he could to make sure she wouldn't have a chance to attack him. The people around him on the train only stared. No one dared stand up and intervene.
No applications arrived.
No one broke it up.
When the man stood, the woman was either unconscious or dead, Theo didn't know which. The man's eyes were full, although Theo couldn't place his finger on exactly what they contained. Hate? Some. Anger? Some. But it was more than both of those.
Power. That's what Theo saw in those eyes. The man finally felt powerful, maybe for the first time in his life. He finally felt in control of everything, like he was a god. The woman bleeding from her head had given him that power, because he was able to do what he wanted with her.
Theo turned the screens off, revealing the sky surrounding him. The man wasn't a god. He was a child. Theo was the god here, and not one he wanted to be. He was the god of destruction, coming down from on high to throw those beneath him into frenzy, to burn the world. He didn't need to stay here anymore; the deed was finished. Smoke would rise soon and Theo didn't want to see it. Smoke w
ould rise in this place just as it had in Allencine, and people would die, and in the end...
Except Theo didn't know what happened in the end. He was only the beginning of the end. He didn't think he'd be around to see the actual end though. He didn't want to be around for it either. He wanted it all over. He wanted to be the woman sitting in that train, blood leaking from his ears instead of hers.
No you don't, because you're a coward. If that's what you really wanted, you could go down there and make it happen right now.
The truth. He couldn't escape it. He couldn't even quiet it. It always spoke to him, flooding his brain as if it were a typhoon. And he couldn't deny it. He was up here, not down there, and in a few minutes a train would arrive to pick him up—an empty train, without any danger waiting for him. He would go back to Allencine and then do whatever Mock told him.
Coward.
The word echoed inside the trappings of his skull, refusing to disappear. He hadn't always been a coward. He hadn't always been this frightened, of death, of life, of everything. He once knew who he was, what he was.
But you still do. You're the god of destruction, the god of cowardice.
Theo saw the train a thousand yards off, coming to get him. It was time to go. There were other lives to destroy.
* * *
It's over the line.
Maybe.
No, I am right. Mock is going too far. That would put us back years. A hundred, maybe.
Why's Mock recommending it? We told it we wanted revolution, and now it's giving us that. Why is this too far?
Mock's given us revolution. What it wants to give now is eradication. It wants to kill all of them.
One group won't destroy the whole of civilization.
And it ends there? After Mock takes out that one, it'll stop? How do you know? How do you know it won't continue, going to the next and the next and the next, until there aren't any others to kill? We're two cities down. Brockington is going to be in flames by tomorrow morning. The Theory's friends are as good as dead. That beast Manny is making sure of that. We don't need to do this next thing, not to complete the circle. It's too far.
Maybe. But maybe it's exactly what we need. His friends will be dead, sure, but is war enough?
And if not, genocide will be? If what we've created isn't enough, then nothing will be. If all of this doesn't sway him, then nothing will.
Nothing is a strong word. Let Mock try. Only one group. We won't allow it to go after another.
There won't be anything left when The Theory arrives. Everything will be ashes.
Now, now—let's not get melancholy about this whole thing.
Chapter Seventeen
Jerry’s jaw twitched—the first movement since seeing Manny. His body felt like an anchor, something cold, hard, and unmovable, holding him down on the floor, which might as well have been the bottom of the ocean.
It had twitched though, a muscle inside him moving involuntarily, and that meant there had to be electrons moving through it. Through him. The chip was still working, still trying to recreate the severed connections. Did the twitch mean it was succeeding?
Jerry had nothing to lose anymore. He wasn't making it out of this apartment complex and he accepted that fully. He didn't know exactly what was happening to Paige and Leon. He saw Leon sometimes, when he zombie walked from the bathroom back to the living room, blood dripping off his various body parts. That was all Jerry saw though. It didn't look good for Leon, but then it didn't look good for any of them.
Jerry focused on his jaw, directing all his thoughts to trying to move it. He would never walk again. He would never reconnect his head to his shoulders, but maybe he could move his jaw. Maybe he could open and close his mouth. And that would be something. That would be better than lying here and dying an unmoving death.
He felt his teeth connect with each other. His jaw flexing enough to close his mouth.
What could he do with that? What could he do with his mouth?
The excitement building up in him, crowding out the pain and depression that filled this place, dove to the bottom of the ocean where his anchor of a body waited. He could do nothing with his mouth. He couldn't get close enough to Manny to bite him, and even if he could, what then? He'd take a chunk out of him and then Manny would crack his skull like a fat man does a crab's shell. He couldn't use his mouth to pull him across the floor, to try to find an exit to this hell. His mouth moved, but so fucking what? It meant nothing.
"Did I just see what I think I did?"
Jerry would have jumped if he'd been able to, jumped completely out of his skin, such was the shock at hearing Manny's voice. He'd been so lost in his own thoughts, so lost in what he could and couldn't do, that he had no idea Manny stood above him. Watching him.
"Did you just move, Jerry?"
He couldn't see Manny, but heard him just fine, standing probably a few feet away from Jerry's legs, still in the living room, not quite in the hallway yet.
"Man, that chip in your head is something else isn't it?" Manny asked. "It doesn't know how to quit." He laughed then, a high, shrill thing that sounded like it had escaped from Manny rather than been pushed out.
Jerry watched as Manny's foot stepped in front of his face, inches from his nose, and then saw the man's leg extending upwards to what might as well have been heaven. "Is that all you can do?" Manny asked. "Or are there other tricks you're holding out on me?"
No tricks, Jerry thought, although he wished there were. He wished he had whatever trick it would take to flay Manny alive, peeling back his skin and sitting him outside where vultures could feast on his innards.
Jerry did want to try something though. He didn't know if it would work, didn't know if he was capable of doing it, if his chip had somehow reconnected his vocal chords. He didn't know where to begin, really. His voice...it had always just been there. The ability to speak coming innately, hardwired into him the same as breathing. The body knows how to breathe and the body knows how to make noise, and yet he knew that he wouldn’t be able to do it if he didn't focus. It wasn't innate anymore. If he could do it, it was because a foreign entity—a computer—had somehow rewired his body, and the new wiring wouldn't run the same as the past.
"Noooo...triiiiiiccckssssss."
It was hard for him to stop the second word; the 's' wanted to trail on forever. He finally got a hold of it and ended the brief two words. He sounded like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing across each other, like his vocal chords had no humanity to them, were only electricity moving through wires. And he supposed that's what it was now, the chip using the only thing it could to reconnect the broken ties.
"Oh my goodness!" Manny shouted, his own voice booming out across the hallway. "It speaks!"
Manny sat down, his back against the wall. Jerry looked at him for the first time in a long, long time. He hadn't seen anything the night he attacked him, had fought in the dark, feeling only Manny's strength. He saw him now though.
The person that Jerry mentored, the person he had sheltered as a teenager and built something with, something powerful, something world changing—that person didn't sit in front of Jerry. That person was dead. Had died, most likely, in the fire at the compound, consumed the same as his wife and child. This person here might call himself Manny, but it wasn't him.
His physical presence alone was different. Larger. Stronger. The metal lining his body different from what they had given Caesar, different from Jerry's own body. But his physical presence didn't account for Manny's face. For his eyes. For his smile.
So happy, so gleefully fucking happy. That's what Jerry saw in him.
"How are you feeling, Jerry?"
And now he was expected to have a conversation with this thing. Jerry didn't feel sadness, didn't feel anger. He didn’t know this person—someone who lived on his own planet, spinning out in space, cold and alone—the only warmth coming from a molten core inside, untouched by any sort of star's rays.
"Greeaatttt, andyou?"
He had almost no control over how the words exited his mouth, both stretching out for endless seconds and then cramming together, almost creating new words out of ancient ones.
"Ha!" Manny laughed, clapping his hands over and over as if he was sitting in front of an orchestra instead of a broken man. "Good to see your humor is still intact even if the rest of you has seen better days. Since you asked, though, I'm doing great. Just absolutely great."
The child screamed from the back bedroom, loud and piercing. Manny's face snapped toward the noise, a look of anger crossing it just as quickly as the child's voice had cracked the relative silence of the hallway.
"Damn it," Manny said, his chest moving up and down as his lungs sucked in air harder than before. "He never shuts up. He's always crying. Just always goddamn wanting something."
His caregiver, you goddamn idiot, Jerry thought. He wanted to say it, but knew how long it would take to get all of those words out. Knew that if anything would make this creature laugh, him struggling to force out a sentence would be it.
Jerry watched as Manny turned back to look at him, ignoring the screams from the bedroom. "We might need to get another child. I'm not sure this is the Dustin I was looking for. The other two never cried like this."
"Paaaaiiigeee?" Jerry said, the rough papery sound of his voice filling the hallway.
"Paige?" Manny asked, his eyes focusing back on Jerry, moving away from the thoughts inside his head, the thoughts of a dead child and what might end up being another dead child if the poor thing couldn't stop crying. "Oh. Her. She's not herself anymore, Jerry. Would you like to see her?"
No. No. No. He didn't want to see her. Jerry didn't want to see what she had become if it resembled anything like Leon. It was bad enough, seeing him, but he couldn't handle seeing Paige like that. And yet, was he to say no? Was he to deny her given that he caused all of this? Given that his lack of leadership, his poor planning, his failure brought her here? He wouldn't. He couldn't.