Melancholy: Episode 1

by Charlotte McConaghy

  A striking Indian woman is fussing over him, saying his name a lot. He’s hooked up to tubes and wires, and connected to a small machine that monitors his vitals. The woman doesn’t even glance at me, so intent is she on Luke.

  They all know him. It scares me because I can’t fathom it. But then again, there’s so much about Luke I never knew, an entire life he never even whispered about.

  I sink onto the bed next to his and let my head hit the pillow.

  There’s a kind of fear in the Indian woman’s voice, and it’s a fear that only exists when you care deeply about a person and you think they’re going to die. With this understanding, something inside me switches off and I fall into a deep sleep.

  *

  September 19th, 2065

  Josephine

  The heat wakes me. I am sticky with it, and the light sheet on my legs feels as though it’s burning my skin. Kicking it off, I blink awake and slowly remember the bizarre and foreign place around me. The infirmary I lie in has a dozen beds, some rudimentary supplies and tools laid out on trays that have obviously been stolen from the city, plus a locked cabinet of medicine and a couple of blinking monitors. It feels spare and cool with the windows open.

  She’s watching me take it in, the Indian woman. Her eyes have tragedy in them. She wears nose rings too, but not a bolt like Pace’s – a small red gem in each nostril. It’s hard to tell her age – I think she might be in her forties, her skin still flawless, shape fit and slim.

  “I’m Ranya,” she tells me.

  I stare at her, not wanting to turn my head and see that his bed has become empty. If I look and he’s gone, and they have stripped off the sheets like they do in movies when someone dies, I will give up right now.

  “I’m Dual, I guess.”

  She seems to find this amusing. “You’re going to be fine.”

  “How is that?”

  “Your injuries weren’t too bad. You have a fractured elbow, some lacerations on your feet, a small amount of brain swelling, severe dehydration and a bad case of exhaustion, but that’s all.”

  “Oh, that’s all. Good.”

  She cracks a smile, flashing white teeth. “I’ve dealt with it all. You’ll be fine if you take it easy.” She pauses, sees that I don’t seem inclined to relax, and adds, “Honestly. You’re alright.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Then try to relax.”

  She’s not getting it. “Is he … ?” I swallow, clearing my throat. My hands clench.

  Ranya frowns, then realizes. “He’s alive,” she assures me.

  So I turn my head. He’s there, looking for all the world like he’s sleeping peacefully. The relief is so immense that I lean over and vomit onto the floor.

  Ranya is by my side in an instant, holding my long black hair. “It’s alright. Shock and exhaustion, that’s all.”

  I spit and sag back against the bed. “Sorry.”

  “Gross!” Sashaying into the hospital room is Pace, looking fresh in clean clothes. “Are you serious, Dual? Get a hold of yourself.”

  “I’ll clean it up,” I say quickly. I stand, but a wave of dizziness hits me so hard that I fall back onto the mattress.

  “Weakling,” Pace declares. “She’ll be worth nothing to us.”

  “Nice, Pace,” Hal mutters, entering with a mop and bucket.

  “How’s Luke?” I ask Ranya.

  “Bad. In some sort of coma,” she says, not bothering to sugarcoat it, for which I love her. “I don’t know how to wake him out of it, and I don’t know if he has much chance of survival.”

  They all look at Luke, and then at me.

  “She’s green again,” Pace warns. “Stand by for more chunks!”

  “I’m fine.”

  “How do you know him?” Ranya asks me.

  My eyes stray to his hand, lying on the bed at his side. It is as large and square as I remember it, a hand with big knuckles, a strong hand, made for hitting and breaking things. Not a hand for music, not delicate or slender. I know that hand as intimately as I know my own. I know how it fits with mine, and all the differences between the two.

  “I don’t,” I admit finally.

  *

  I sleep and wake again once the sun has gone down. The windows are still open but now there is a beautifully cool breeze ruffling the curtains. Luke and I are alone in the dark. I feel remarkably better now that the heat is gone from the air and I’ve slept properly. Sliding out of bed, I gingerly take one barefooted step to his side and gaze at him for a long, stretched moment.

  Something brushes against my hand and I jerk in fright.

  “Only me,” Will says softly. He is so silent I didn’t even hear him come in. “Time for your tour.”

  *

  We stand atop the enormous wall, beneath only the silver smattering of stars, and here is what I now know.

  This is a camp for the resistance, established and built twenty years ago in the remains of an abandoned prison – hence the wall. It’s called The Inferno, not because of how hot it is, but because to the Ancient Romans this was the name of the Underworld, and in Quinn’s settlement, this is where the city’s dead come to be reborn. The metaphor’s a bit belabored for my taste, but in any case The Inferno holds two-hundred-and-sixty-eight souls, each of whom works hard to keep the community running. Powered by several generators, the camp has only enough electricity for the important things – the medical machines, emergency lighting, food storage and the heating of just enough water for washing, cleaning and cooking. Most people live in the old cells, which I find disturbing, but Will assures me they’re really homely, and not cell-like at all. There are also a bunch of newer mud brick houses for anyone too squeamish for the old prison building, and anyone with children.

  The camp is hierarchical, and to get to the top you have to be strong. My new best pal Quinn is the leader, and according to Will everyone loves him because he’s strong, kind and fair.

  Every single person here spends time cooking, cleaning, building, repairing, gardening, tilling and, most importantly, hunting. I haven’t asked what they hunt, but I assume it’s food. Only injury or old age can exempt you from these tasks, and even then you have to find some other way to contribute. There are children, but only a few.

  All two-hundred-and-sixty-eight are, without exception, uncured.

  In the dark I look at the view. We are so far west that we have reached the coastline. Half an hour ago, Will brought me up here and I turned to behold what lay beyond, and I burst into tears. Because there before me was the ocean – a mighty expanse of it, so wild and unknowable, and I had never seen it before. The smell filled me up and the sound worked its way into the rhythm of my blood.

  Now I watch it, having listened to Will speak for as long and in as much detail as he could about this new world I’ve stumbled into. Behind me is a different view. A forest of dead trees and scorched earth, skeletal fingers of wood that curl into the sky and obscure the moon. I can’t see much down there, but I can see the faint shape of moving shadows.

  “Why the wall?” I ask softly.

  Will gazes down at the forest with a hard expression. “Because the only living creatures out there are Furies, and they’re drawn to our scent.”

  I am no longer plagued by a virus that transforms me. I have found the resistance, as I’ve longed to for years. But the world of the beyond is more dangerous than I’d imagined. The man I loved betrayed me and now he is dying. I am broken and mended all at the same time.

  Those are my facts. I’ll hold onto them for as long as I can, because there’s not much else that I know anymore.

  *

  September 19th, 2065

  Raven

  I wake from dreams I could never admit to with a hand on my cheek. It is Quinn, looking at me in the dim light. I blink, disoriented as the pleasant images slip from my mind.

  “What?” I ask. Quinn’s sandy hair and pale eyes make him seem angelic; it’s the existence of his two halves living along
side each other that make me love him. Well, an approximation of love, at the very least.

  I’ve always found myself drawn like a moth to a flame to those with cunning in their hearts.

  “He’s back.”

  And like that, a jackhammer in my chest.

  “When?”

  “Today.”

  “And you only just told me?” I fling the covers off and reach for some clothes.

  “He’s in a coma he might not wake from.”

  “Then how did he get here?”

  “A girl.”

  We look at each other. “His girl?”

  “She says she’s not. But it’s hard to imagine otherwise. She’s uncured.”

  “She could be the one, then.”

  “She could be. She’s weak, and a child.”

  I feel a slow, cold smile curl the edges of my lips. “The better to use her, my dear.”

  Quinn’s smile appears innocently amused. But swift plans are forming behind his eyes; they look like shadows passing through his soul. I can’t help it. I take the hem of his shirt and lift it over his chest. His teeth flash white with his grin and his hands go to my hips, lifting me onto the dresser. “The devil’s got a hold of you, girl.”

  “He’s got a hold of us all,” I whisper as he moves inside me and I gasp aloud. My dream crashes back into my mind, the dream I dream every night, the dream of Luke, my Luke, of him kissing every inch of my body and of his girl, the one he left me for, watching us as the moon grows full and explodes over each one of us.

  Chapter 2

  January 20th, 2065

  Luke

  Harley hands me a can of baked beans and then goes back to his computer. I sigh, watching him in exasperation, although I can’t complain because he’s working this madly for me. “Anything?”

  “I’ll tell you when I have something,” he snaps.

  I head to his small kitchen and use the can-opener to attack my eighteenth meal of baked beans in four days. It tastes like ass.

  “Dude, I know you’re hard at it, but I need some real fucking food.”

  “While you’re in hiding, you don’t get to be a foodie.”

  “It’s not being a foodie! I’m being a living human who needs more than baked beans to survive. I’m getting malnourished as we speak. These muscles don’t get to be so big without a little help.”

  He rolls his eyes. “I’ll go shopping tomorrow, beauty queen.”

  I nosedive onto the couch and cover my head with a pillow. I’m going slowly insane. It’s been four months since I dropped Josi off at the asylum on the hill, and I haven’t spoken a single word to her since. It feels anatomically wrong, like the make-up of my body no longer works without her nearness.

  I have Harley looking for something, and he tells me every day that he’s close, that he’s nearly hacked her system. He tells me every day, but every day he doesn’t hack anything.

  It isn’t until eleven o’clock that he wakes me, looking wide-eyed and crazy. “I got it! I fucking got it!”

  And I damn well love the man.

  *

  Being in charge of the Bloods and in the back pocket of the Minister, Jean Gueye – my ex-boss – has the highest level of security clearance in the world, and hidden within about ‘a thousand mother-fucking firewalls’, as Harley put it, is all her information on the whereabouts of the resistance.

  *

  January 21st, 2065

  Luke

  Harley and I stay up all night looking at the contents of Jean’s illegally hacked hard drive. As morning rises my stomach can’t take it anymore and I yell at Harley to go and get me some food, since I can’t risk leaving the safety of his protected apartment.

  While he is out buying me a celebratory meal, my best friend Harley is murdered by Bloods who traced the hack on Jean’s computer. And I only discover this when I turn on the television and see his brutalized corpse plastered over the news, proclaimed a traitor to his people.

  *

  January 30th, 2065

  Luke

  I’ve waited nine days to move. Nine days of sleeping and scraping through the bottoms of empty tins for food. Nine days of I want to die I want to die I want to fucking die. Nine days of trying to drum up the courage and the energy to do this. To go.

  There is a train line at the very bottom of one of the old, unused subway tunnels. This tunnel supposedly leads all the way out west, to the resistance camp. There’s no running train, of course, but the line itself is like a direct path.

  The Bloods don’t follow it straight to the resistance because the one rule we obey above any in this city is the rule of never going beyond the wall.

  Nine days, I tell myself, is long enough. I immediately feel nauseous at the thought of a time limitation on grief, but I forbid myself to sink down that black-hole again. Enough. I have something left to fight for, so I must fight.

  With a last look at Harley’s computer monitors all aglow with shimmering wasp wings, I say simply, “I’m sorry, I love you, I will make this right.”

  And then I set off. West.

  *

  The problem is going to be food and water. Wearing a pair of Harley’s heavy-duty microscopic lenses, I head for the supermarkets. I can’t see for shit, but at least no random retinal scanners will pick me up. Gathering enough to supply me for a month, I pile it all into a shopping trolley and walk straight out without paying. No one stops me – they don’t care. No drone would steal. It wouldn’t occur to them.

  I’ve already stolen and reprogrammed the smallest and most manoeuvrable car I could find so that it won’t send any alerts of my fingerprints back to the Blood base. I pack the mini tight, adding extra canisters of mind-numbingly expensive petrol, and away I go.

  It isn’t quite that easy, actually. The Bloods pick me up before I reach the subway. I see them before they expect me to, which gives me the tiniest advantage. Gunning the engine, I steer into a one-way street. The cars approaching are all fitted with motion sensors that steer them smoothly out of my way, so I just shoot straight down the middle of the road.

  Up ahead I can see the gated entrance to the old train station. Accelerating as fast as the car will go, I am about to bust through the chains when shots are fired and my back right tire explodes.

  The car skids sideways, hits the gate at an angle, bursts through the flimsy chains and tilts down the wide concrete steps. A grunt of shock leaves me as the car flips over and rolls down into the subway, miraculously landing upright with a bone-shuddering impact.

  My teeth hurt. Every joint in my body aches. My head feels like it might rupture.

  I turn the key and listen to the engine groan and splutter and then – amazingly – whir to life. “Holy shit,” I breathe. “You are one hell of a car.”

  Behind me the Blood vehicles, which are practically tanks, can’t fit down the staircase. I speed forward, bracing myself as I launch the tiny car onto the train tracks. My windscreen shatters over me and I feel glass slice a thousand miniature cuts into my face. But I keep driving straight down the train tunnel.

  *

  February 3rd, 2065

  Luke

  I’ve been driving only a few days when it happens.

  I’ve burned through two full tanks of petrol and I’m starting to get seriously worried that I’ll be walking most of the way, which means running out of food. Every eight hours or so I stop to get an hour’s sleep. I look forward to these hours like a maniac, because this trip is, without exaggeration, one of the worst experiences of my life. It’s bloody freezing with the windscreen smashed open, I can hardly see two yards in front of the car, the engine is noisy as hell and driving on the tracks means the mini bounces and skids over every single piece of rock, causing my spine to jar and my head to crack the roof. The suspension is shot, and I’m astonished the car’s still driving at all.

  So it’s with a pretty solid dose of trepidation that I feel the vibrations in the ground. Which can mean only one, ludicrous thing
.

  There’s a train coming.

  What. The. Hell.

  Sure enough, behind me approaches a soft, distant thrum of noise, and just the faintest hint of light.

  Think, my mind screams at me. Right. Every mile or so there’s a safety alcove to the side of the tracks. I have no idea if the car will fit in one, but it’s my only hope. If that train is going to the resistance camp, I need to get on it. And I need to get the car out of the way.

  I roar the engine and speed the mini forward as quickly as it’ll go. The train is getting steadily closer; it’s bearing down on me. I have to get out and jump for it. I’m not going to make it. The car’s done for.

  The light blinds me.

  The swell of noise envelops the mini.

  My spine is shattering.

  But I don’t get out, I –

  – yank the wheel sideways and plough the car straight into the safety alcove. I hit the wall nose-first and feel the impact pummel the mini like it’s made of tinfoil and has just been compacted in a rubbish heap.

  Whoosh goes the train, taking a chunk of the car’s tail with it.

  Wind slams me sideways, but I don’t have time to hesitate. Swinging out my window, I scramble on top of the smashed car. The train’s moving too damn fast. I have to time it perfectly.

  Peering sideways, there’s just enough room for me to see the end of the train approach. Taking a deep breath, I throw myself out just as the silver metal flashes past and grab hold of something – anything. It’s the ladder, and as my hands clench around the steel pole I feel the velocity of the train’s momentum wrench me into space and yank my shoulder out of its socket.