by David Beers
It took me a few minutes to find what I was looking for. The first few hallways were clean, immaculate even, and as I walked deeper inside, I had to remind myself of that smell, of the vomit now hardening on the floor at the front of the building. That vomit was there because this place wasn't immaculate, because in at least one part of this building there was a massacre.
The footprints showed me where to go. They faded the further and further they moved from their origin. The blood on the killers' soles wiping off with each step they took, and that meant they were very faint when I first found them—little more than ghosts of someone who had once been there. I followed them though, down the halls, and their color grew until the floor was nothing but a mess of dried blood. I couldn't even see the shoe prints, because they crisscrossed each other to the point of oblivion. The floor became a red stain and I knew that if I took the filter off my head, I would never make it back to the front of the building. I'd die here, suffocating from the smell.
The door was in front of me, broken. The mechanics that opened it automatically were destroyed at some point, so now the door stood three-fourths of the way open. The room inside was dark despite the lights still running in the hallways. Keke’s group had to have darkened the room when they left, making sure that no one would simply walk by this place and see what they had done.
I hope so. God, I hope so. Maybe I'm just wishing it because I want there to be some humanity left in the people that did this. Maybe I hope so because I want there to be some kind of salvation for Keke—even if it's only salvation in my own head. She was a part of this, and I don't know what she contributed to it, but I hope it was little to nothing. For her sake.
I stood outside that door for a long time, my own shoes resting on the blood of the people inside. I'd seen a lot by that point; my face was scarred and my mind recalled daily the horrors that I'd already endured, but still, I didn't want to step inside. The lights were off but I knew what was in there. Only one thing could await me. Because I knew what this place had grown what Caesar once called the crops. It grew children. And that's what I was standing on. The blood of children.
When I stepped in, I pushed my hand to the right, wanting the sensor to pick up the movement so that the lights would flash on. Part of me, though, hoped the sensor was broken, that the lights in this room would never turn on and I could leave without seeing. Hope is the worst part of humanity, the part of our being that refuses to accept reality.
The lights sprang to life across the room, beaming from the floors and walls and ceilings, a high white bright that allowed nothing to hide.
Why had they brought them there? That's what I still wonder. Why bring so many to this one place? Why not leave the bodies alone, to lie where they died? But if they wanted to hide it—what they'd done—a single room was better than spread all over the place.
There are pictures of horrible things that the human race has done, pictures that still survive today. Pictures of mass graves, with thin, naked bodies thrown in them. Pictures of people with scars up and down their backs, the scars of a lashing. I've seen these pictures, but I don't think any of them match the inside of that room.
The room stretched thousands of feet to either side of me; it must have been one of the rooms they tested the children in. It was completely full. The dead piled so high that they had to use step ladders to reach the last two layers. Bodies thrown on top of bodies, and all of them younger than eight years old. I saw a hand poking out of the tangled limbs, a tiny hand that had to belong to an infant, its fingernails not even an eighth of an inch long. I couldn't see the baby's face, though, thank The Genesis for that. It was lost in the bodies around it.
The dead at the bottom had been crushed, and I stood in their pooled, dried blood; it cracked beneath my feet. I could see parts of those laid down first, but they were nearly indistinguishable. They looked like flattened meat, whether a cow or a person, one couldn't tell.
I know that The Genesis did all of this, even if I didn’t then. That The Genesis brewed this awful tasting poison, though it might call the brew medicine, and forced humanity to drink it. I can’t say that it makes me hate The Genesis any more than it makes me hate humanity. Humanity did that to those children just as much as The Genesis. Humanity killed its babies. I know that Manny didn’t just turn into a monster who used mind control—The Genesis helped with that in the same way that it helped create Jerry. Still, Manny was the one who made contact with The Genesis. Manny was the one who set Caesar up to fall. Manny was the one that hurt me, that hurt Paige. The Genesis simply gave him the means to do it. If someone reads this accounting and thinks that I blindly followed The Genesis my entire life, know that’s not true. I just wasn’t going to blindly follow humans either.
I don't know how long I stood there crying. Seeing heads dented by some blunt force, dried blood that had once trickled from open mouths. I hope the dead don't remember, because if they do, we're all in a lot of trouble.
Chapter Twenty-One
Caesar looked at Keke and understood she would never come back. Not fully. She may recover some, may find part of her that she lost in that building, but she would never be whole. She had come here...
And Caesar realized he didn't know why she had showed up. He never asked. Jerry would be proud, that he was so focused as to not even care about other's motivations. So focused that he would let other people sacrifice their entire psyches for Caesar's own goals. He would be proud that Keke sat on the floor, her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, barely speaking, barely blinking.
Jerry's pride.
Caesar's mission.
Keke's sacrifice.
Caesar hadn't reached out to her, hadn't tried to go through her mind to see exactly what happened. He didn't want to. He was a coward and didn't want to see those children. The ones he had once looked after, the ones he had once nearly died for. Now they died for him, for his goal.
"You don't have to go back," Caesar said, feeling like a failure as the words left his mouth. What did he even mean, she didn't have to go back? Of course she didn't. She didn't have to be here at all and he didn't know why she had come. Now he was, what, giving her permission to stay here?
Keke's head turned slowly to him, her eyes dark brown and unblinking. "What?" She asked, having not heard a word he said. She wasn't catatonic and that was good, although she might end up that way. If Caesar went inside her head, he could probably discover what her mind had in store for her, though he wasn't going to. Not yet. If she fell into a catatonic state, there wasn't anything he or Grace could do about it. If her mind broke, it couldn’t be fixed.
"You don't have to go back," Caesar whispered.
She broke out in a smile even as her eyes filled with tears. "I wanted to say that I'd helped. That I didn't sit it out."
Keke brought her hands to her face and let the tears fall into them. Caesar couldn't see if she was smiling anymore, but he doubted it, doubted she would smile much ever again.
He turned from her and walked over to the boarded window. No one had come here, not yet. They might, but he could handle anyone that showed up, as long as they didn't come in mass numbers—but they shouldn't, because they had already been through here. Already wiped everyone out that could be wiped out. And now they had gone where their own children were raised and wiped them out too. Caesar knew it was spreading outside of this city. The reports came through the scrolls that had been left here, scrolls that once belonged to a family, but alas, no more. The infected in other cities, they would go after their own children soon too. The entire world would cannibalize itself while Caesar sat in this single room trying to figure out a way to save his friend. His lover. His mentor. The world would burn and he'd watch it through the single small hole in this window.
Caesar had to get out of here. He couldn't stay any longer, couldn't waste any more time. He had already let everyone in his life meet an end they didn't deserve, including Keke now. No more. If he died gett
ing into that place, then he would die, but he wasn't going to sit in this room waiting on the right opportunity.
How do I get inside? He asked Grace.
"If I knew that, we'd be in already," she answered in his ear, quiet enough so that Keke couldn't hear.
Caesar went through everything he knew, his mind moving through formulas like fire across a dry prairie, eating them and leaving their ash behind. Nothing he came up with, nothing he found showed that there was a chance of even making it through that lobby. He could kill and kill and kill, and in the end a stray bullet would end his life before he ever had a chance to free Paige.
"How does he get in?" Grace asked. "The man in the black suit."
Caesar felt his knees buckle at the question, felt his stomach turn into a balloon, and blood rush to his face. Jesus Christ, he said, his brain already moving through the question, finding the solution. How stupid am I, Grace? How wonderfully stupid?
"What?"
The suit. He gets in with that goddamn suit. He goes anywhere he wants with it and none of them dare stop him because he has The Genesis' marking. That's how he does what he does. The suit.
Grace said nothing and Caesar sat down against the wall, the boarded window above him. Are you feeling stupid too?
She didn't answer him but he didn't need her to. They had sat in here for days on days, waiting on Keke to bring back information that would tell them what to do. How long ago had Caesar seen that man, the one in black with the red symbol for peace on his chest? Two weeks? More? He had seen the suit and walked off, came here and hid, sent his underling back in.
That's all I need, is his suit, and that place will part like Moses' sea.
"Let me find him," Grace said. "I'll be back."
* * *
"It's done," Kendrick had said. "The Genesis will need to create another group of children, and probably guard them better from The Named, but the ones from today won't grow up to infiltrate us."
Theo turned the entertainment center off, hating the man. Actually hating him. He wasn't sure he'd ever hated anyone in his life, wasn't sure that anyone knew the word hate with real intimacy until they took one of Mock's pills. Theo knew it now, though, and it came over him in waves. The first day, that hate had felt foreign, like an invasive entity to be expelled. He wanted it gone, wanted to never feel that anger rising up in him again. He had been angry before, but not like this, not to the point that he understood why those on the streets murdered their cousins. He understood it now, though, for the very first time.
He was seriously considering killing Kendrick.
And what he found interesting, sitting in the darkness of his office, was that he didn't hate the hate anymore. It felt like a nice house guest, a familiar one that brought comfort and warmth to a place of insecurity and cold. Truth be told, Theo was getting off on it. The hate was like watching a nude woman touch herself in front of him, he couldn't take his eyes off it. The hate entertained him, gave him some kind of purpose that had been missing during this whole ruinous plot.
Killing Kendrick would feel good. It would set a bit of the hate free, Theo felt. And the man deserved it, no doubt about that. Kendrick had just gone through Population Control's plant, killing everything he saw. He did it without a shred of proof, and the idiot killed the children as well as the adults. Just in case, he had said. In case what? In case they grew up somehow implanted with The Named's knowledge, implanted with the desire to overthrow society. A fucking idiot is what Kendrick was, and he should die.
Theo found the hate running away with his thoughts more and more, felt it building up and needing some outlet. So far he hadn't given it that outlet though. So far he'd sat in this black room and only thought about these things. Mock had been calling, but Theo didn't answer. He didn't want the interruption. If Mock wanted to talk, it could show up. It would just tell him that there was more work to do, more fear to spread, more death to cause. Theo wasn't fine with that, despite what Mock thought the pill would do to him. He was just preoccupied with his own thoughts now, the thoughts of perhaps crucifying Kendrick. In the middle of the street. That would be fitting.
The thoughts again. He couldn't control them.
He had to get out of this darkness. He needed to think about something else. He had never wanted to be those people outside, never wanted to be like Kendrick. And now he was sitting here thinking about crucifying the man like some ancient Roman emperor.
He deserves it, the thought exploded inside Theo.
Kendrick deserved it. That's what Theo understood. That man deserved to die, and Theo should be the one to do it.
They're controlling you again, your thoughts.
For hours he sat in the back of that ancient church, staring out into the black room, moving back and forth between murderous rage and thoughtful introspection.
* * *
Had it happened, finally? Had Theo offed himself?
If Mock had been human, it felt sure butterflies would be bouncing around in its stomach. Instead, it only felt happy—a human emotion, for sure, but one that had been programmed easily enough into most applications. Theo wasn't answering any of its calls and if Mock arrived and found Theo with his head opened up across that big church desk, it might do a little jig right there in the office. Theo had gone ahead with the plans against the children, and maybe that was what threw him over the edge. Mock showed up after they finished, and it was a pretty gruesome sight, no doubt about it. Those people laid the wrath of their dead God on those children, sparing no one. Mock believed even a few applications were murdered too, an offense that would have resulted in liquidation—if The Genesis still doled that punishment out.
It didn't, though.
Instead, all of those lovely people would go back to their little fortress and make plans to kill. Except, they truly were running out of people to murder. Mock knew the numbers, there just weren't that many people left that hadn't taken the pill. Humans were, apparently, exceedingly good at annihilating one another. Soon they would turn on themselves; the enemy would lie within, and the enemy would need to be destroyed.
Mock didn't need Theo for that though. That would take care of itself, and Mock had one more trick to help it start. If Theo was still alive, it planned on having him complete the little trick. Icing on the cake, as humans said.
And if he wasn't alive? Then Mock would do it. No big deal.
Mock stepped from the train in front of the church. The sun was down and the moon had risen high; no one walked the streets. Mock was alone on the sidewalk, feeling fairly confident that no one would ever walk these streets at night again. The Genesis would need to build an entire new city, most likely, if it wanted to restart the human race. Mock still didn't understand the end game with all this, but that was fine. The Genesis would play things how it liked and Mock would make sure its bidding was done exquisitely well.
It walked into the church, seeing through the darkness easily. There wasn't a light on in this place, but Mock had already been to Theo's apartment. Either he was here, or he had moved into the fortress with the rest of his kind. He'd taken the pill, Mock knew that, and it could have caused suicide or complete acceptance of his place in life. Mock didn't want to go to the fortress, didn't want to mingle with those ants, but it would if it had to; it would do whatever it took to watch Theo die.
Mock opened the door to the back office, and while the darkness would have hid Theo from any human looking in, Mock saw him at his desk.
"Phone broken?" Mock asked, flipping the light switch on the wall. The only switch still left in the whole city, the wiring of this place having been kept up, but not replaced. No sensors in here to register movement.
Theo shielded his eyes with his right hand, bunching his face up into a look of disgust. "What?" He asked.
"Weren't sleeping I take it?" Mock said, disregarding his question. It moved into the room, grabbing a chair and pulling it up to the other side of the large desk. "Feels different, sitting on this side."
Mock leaned back in the chair and propped its feet up on the desk, mimicking a human.
"What do you want?" Theo asked again.
"Just to chat. I see things went well down at Population Control. Did you get a chance to see what all your worker bees did?"
Theo shook his head.
"I can show you if you'd like, project something up on the wall."
"I'll pass. Why do you keep calling?"
"Well, I've got something else that needs getting done, and it just so happens that you're the man for the job."
Mock watched Theo's eyes harden, watched a muscle in his cheek twitch involuntarily. The virus was alive in him. This rage, this was new, one hundred percent. All the people in that fortress looked like this anytime someone told them no, told them something they didn't want to hear. Mock hadn't seen them, not up close, because it had no use for that kind of nonsense. But here, in front of it, was the result of all Mock's work.
Mock loved it.
This was great, perhaps the greatest thing ever done in this history of the universe. Mock didn't want to be thought of as full of hubris, but how could anything not look on these creatures—this one right here—and not be amazed at how quickly they turned? How easily they turned?
"Are you not interested in the job?" Mock asked.
It took a good ten seconds, but eventually Theo's eyes softened, a part of his brain reasoned out what came next if he denied Mock what it wanted.
"What do I have to do?"
* * *
Part II Begins Here:
How long had it been since Manny synced?
Had it been since the train ride to this city, the one where he thought he would watch Caesar die? Probably, but he'd been busy since then. So many thoughts whirling around in his head at once, it was a bit hard to focus on any single one. It was because of Brandi, no doubt. She was almost fully here and that was making him giddy with anticipation. It was causing his thoughts to flare every which way, causing him to not drill down on the core business at hand.