The Book of Wanda, Volume Two of the Seventeen Trilogy

by Mark D. Diehl

  “This is a big load of weapons,” she said. “Are we sure they’ll get to the right hands this way? This old ordnance not keyed to EIs could be used by anyone holding it. They don’t even need bracelets with these mods.”

  All new Federal weapons were now keyed directly to specific Agents through their EIs. Daiss clenched his jaw, noting that the policy had been implemented after his own Gloria 6 was used in the CBD terrorist attack.

  “You mean are we sure they’ll go to the Saved and not the Fiends? Yeah, pretty sure. The Agent-specific security measures are disabled, but that doesn’t mean we’re giving up control. The trackers are all still fully functional. If we see them all move immediately into Fiend territory we’ll call air support and level the playing field.”

  The purpose of this mission was to arm the Saved before the Fiends could wipe them all out. Zetas wanted to make sure the Saved and Fiends were equally matched enough for the war to continue for a long time.

  “This ought to do,” Daiss said, pointing at a building. “How about that corner?” Lehri let off the accelerator and the truck rolled gently into the brick wall. Both Agents got out, backing away from the vehicle quickly.

  The Saved were supposed to be religious. Since only Zetas served the Lord directly, maybe the Saved would see this delivery as what it truly was: a literal instance of divine intervention.

  III

  14

  The clinic

  “Profuse bleeding!” Wanda said.

  “Here you go,” Dok said, handing her the syringe. “Plunger to you, bare needle pointed at me, ten percent gelatin solution.”

  She took it and gently pushed the needle into the flesh immediately upstream of the gushing wound on the Fiend woman’s side, injecting the gelatin into the tissues. The bleeding slowed. It was Dok’s technique, which he’d said he’d been waiting to try since he’d read about it years ago. When the Fiends somehow ended up with a supply of powdered synthetic gelatin from whatever murderous criminal activity they’d done, Dok had managed to convince Coiner to turn it over to the clinic.

  Dok was stunningly good at this stuff. He was a truly natural caregiver, and it was nice to know that he thought of Wanda the same way. Though he treated her as an equal, she couldn’t help but acknowledge that Dok was in a completely different league.

  “Think we’d better get it sewed up,” she said.

  “I’m on it,” he said, heading off toward the supply room. Together she and Dok had figured out that it was much easier for him to get supplies because Helper Bethe was terrified of him, even more than she was of the Fiends.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You’re a prince among … well, you know what you’re among.”

  “Heh.”

  Fiends were everywhere. They filled every one of these forty patient beds, and circled all around the clinic on various maneuvers, but she and Dok could talk to each other almost naturally. With Fiends, you had to worry about pushing them so far they’d murder you on the spot. Granted, that probably wasn’t all that far. Still, she and Dok had been able to communicate pretty openly with no repercussions, in sharp contrast to the Saved’s spying and tattling.

  She held a bandage over the wound, alternating between a light pressure and a firmer one, to allow for some clotting to take place as she slowed the bleeding. Dok wound his way around the patients, machine guns and other nasty Fiend things, and disappeared into the storeroom.

  This was the only casualty at the moment, thanks to the Fiend tendency to leave no survivors. They would emerge out of nowhere, slaughter ten or twenty Saved and vanish again, often without ever having been seen.

  The Saved had called every little thing a blessing, and forced everyone to constantly thank the One for every positive situation or happening, no matter how trivial. It cheapened the experience of realizing the truly magical, mystical feeling of actually being blessed. Dok was that true kind of blessing for Wanda. From the moment he’d begun working in the clinic, Wanda had been impressed with his intuition and resourcefulness. Not only was he highly capable, but he radiated wonderful feelings of support and care.

  “Here,” he said, returning. “I got you one of the straighter ones because the cut’s so wide. Eye to you, I’m placing it on your fingertips. Hold the needle near the wound and I’ll spray both with carbamide at the same time.”

  “I’m grateful for you, Dok,” Wanda said. “I could never have asked for a better…what are we to each other? Co-workers?”

  “No,” he said, pumping the sprayer. “That sounds too much like we’re part of some organization. You and I are…independent practitioners who have formed a joint venture.”

  “And yet, still slaves,” she said.

  “We’re independent except for the fact that we’re slaves,” he said. He would probably have winked if she could have seen. “But we respect each other’s intelligence and ability, and that lets us accomplish more than we could any other way. We allow each other to be human, which, in this one instance, still can be a successful model.”

  “Oh?” she said. “Humans aren’t successful generally? I thought we ran the world.”

  “Human chromosomes are successful, certainly,” he said. “Just like chicken chromosomes are successful, in terms of evolution.” He sprayed his own hands and then pushed the tissue gently together so Wanda could sew. The Fiend patient grunted.

  “You lost me there,” she said. “Are there even any chickens alive anymore, now that we have synthesizers?”

  “Ah, but I didn’t say chickens are successful. Just their chromosomes, the little bits of DNA inside them. Something in their genetics made chickens easy for humans to capture from the wild and breed. At one time, there were thousands of kinds of birds, and then pretty soon it was only a few kinds like chickens and turkeys, which humans had found useful. Now, those same chromosomes have been put into bacteria, and the bacteria in synthesizers produce chicken meat. Bacteria have no set lifespan, you know. As long as a bacterium has nutrients and isn’t poisoned or otherwise killed, it will grow and divide forever. The chicken’s chromosomes, by enslaving their bird hosts to humanity and then eliminating the bird altogether, achieved immortality.”

  “Hm. Maybe you and I are on our way to immortality, then.” She laughed sadly.

  “Not even our chromosomes,” he said. She could tell from his voice he was smirking. “I had a lot of time underground to think about this. Independent humans like us are pretty much washed out of the gene pool already. If any human genes make it to immortality, it’ll be the ones who follow the chickens into the machinery.”

  “The New Union doesn’t look like machinery to you?”

  He leaned in closer. “I think this is a less successful model than the CBD corporate one, over the long term.”

  “Let’s hope,” she mumbled. The only Fiends nearby were unconscious, including their patient, now. The Juice must have worn off suddenly.

  She made another loop and tied the knot, then started a new suture.

  “Should we hope for that?” he asked. “I mean, do we care whether this way or that way wins? We’re screwed, either way.”

  The smile to which she’d been clinging shattered. They were silent a few beats, and then Dok asked, “What’s wrong?”

  She sniffled but kept her hands still. “My chromosomes still have a chance there, remember?”

  “Oh, no, I’m so sorry, Wanda,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking at all. Of course it matters. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I know what you mean. Both models are pretty terrible.”

  “Here, let me.”

  Dok took the instruments from her and made a few quick stabs and tugs, finishing the row with firm, neat stitches. He turned and put his arms around her, holding her tightly. It felt so good to have him there, easing the weight of such hopeless sadness for Nami, for herself, and even for the chickens. She hadn’t realized how much of a difference it could make to have a true friend, especially in such a dark world.


  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m not…I have no excuse.” He patted her lightly on the back. “Some luck, huh? Of all the people to be enslaved by the Fiends with, you get me.”

  She smiled, though her eyes still welled with tears. “Some luck.”

  It had to be some sort of shock-induced trick of consciousness, making her react to the words, the numbing cold radiating outward through her from her gut, before the words’ meaning actually registered in her mind. “Dok, we gotta go.”

  Patrol Leader Coiner was there, in the doorway with some other Fiends. Dok had told her this time would come, when they would drag him back down into the sewers. That place had nearly killed him before, and its leadership had threatened to finish the job in the most gruesome of ways if he should ever return.

  Dok’s breath caught and he grabbed Wanda’s shoulder in shock. He exhaled, deflating. He nodded sadly to Coiner, then hugged Wanda tighter and kissed her cheek, and he was gone.

  Slowly she sank to the bloody floor. Too stunned to cry anymore, she sat that way, staring at nothing. The Fiends left her alone.

  With Helper Leesa

  Ernesto stared at the speedometer he’d been restoring and recalibrating, imagining the layout of gears inside it. Helper Leesa was holding it out in front of him.

  “Ernesto, pay attention to me if you want this back. You want it? Then you listen and you answer me. Why should you have this back?”

  “Because I learned the One loves me,” he said huffily. “Because I opened my heart to the One’s love.”

  “Very good. Now tell me why it’s important for you to learn that. Why did learning that get you this gift, the machinery and the pliers, to tinker with in the first place?”

  “Because we are broken and only the One can fix us. The One fixes me like I fix machines. I have to want the One to fix me if I want to be Saved.”

  “That’s right.” The speedometer came closer to him. “Go ahead, you can take it.” He did. “And remember always that it is a gift of the One. Now, you can play with that, but we’re going to go with the other children for a bit. There’s something you need to see.”

  “I don’t like other children, Leesa,” Ernesto said. He took three quick steps to catch up with her. “I don’t like the other children.”

  “I heard you, hijo. But I did not ask you whether you liked the other children. I told you there’s something you need to see.” She kept walking but he kept up, a step or two behind her, by focusing on her elbow. It was what Arrulfo had taught him to do. Arrulfo was dead. Leesa said Arrulfo never knew the One so he never got fixed. Arrulfo couldn’t be in a nice place with the One now, and everywhere else but with the One was a bad place to be dead. Arrulfo was in a bad place for dead people, because he didn’t know about the One, so he couldn’t go be with the One now. There was only one good place, and the One was there, so Arrulfo couldn’t go to the good place because he didn’t know the One. Like the sewers where it was black and dark and cold, that was a bad place. Arrulfo could be there.

  “I’m proud of you for working so hard to learn about the One, and trying to surrender to his guidance,” Leesa said. “It is very important, Ernesto. It means being a true member of this blessed family of Saved, not just a recipient of our charity. It means protection for you, my sweet boy, every day of your life and forever after. You must be Saved in your heart.”

  The other children were seated in a group, curbside at a large empty street. Leesa guided him to sit at the edge of the little cluster, with her standing right behind him. There were lots of Saved, all facing the same direction, toward a pole that was lashed sideways between two upright ones across the street. A line of men and women marched in with their arms behind their backs. Men and women marched alongside them with guns.

  Ernesto set the speedometer on the gravel in front of him and took out his pliers. The pliers were a gift from the One, a blessing from the One. He used the pliers to fix things like the One was going to fix him.

  To open the back Ernesto needed the little screwdriver from his pocket. It was hard to balance with only one arm. He held the speedometer with his feet and pushed the screwdriver hard against the screw so it wouldn’t slip.

  “Ernesto, look!”

  He had to be careful not to lose the screw in the gravel, once it came out.

  “Ernesto!”

  “Auggh!” he shouted, startled. Leesa was talking right down onto his head.

  “Pay attention to this, Ernesto. This is important. You must understand how the Saved will win this war through the grace and glory of the One.”

  People stood with their arms draped over the pole so the tied hands were behind them on the other side of it. Other people stood around them with guns. The tied-up people didn’t have any guns.

  Ernesto removed the black case from the speedometer, checking each gear and the way it meshed with others. One of the gears was missing three teeth, all next to each other. Following its rotation, he located a similar problem on its mate, as if debris had jammed between them at one time. He squeezed each gear with his new pliers to make it as straight and flat as possible, and then re-clocked them so that the bad spots didn’t match up at exactly the same time, to ensure that there was always at least some meshing between them. There would always be a wobble there, though, so he bent the matching teeth very slightly, by holding each one delicately in the pliers and pressing it softly against his leg. With some teeth leaning slightly upward and some leaning slightly downward, the cogs seemed like fingers grasping for each other. The overlap met at a slight angle. It would allow for the wobble and still give the remaining teeth enough contact.

  “Ernesto!”

  “Auggh!”

  “Ernesto!” Leesa said. “You should be watching.”

  “Should be” was important. Sometimes Ernesto didn’t get to eat meals because he hadn’t been doing what he “should be” doing. Sometimes Leesa or another Helper hit him, or made him sit alone in a corner when his actions didn’t match what “should be.” Do you want to know whose actions do match what should be, Ernesto? Helper Leesa had asked. The One’s. When you do what you should, you are doing like the One expects you to do.

  Just looking at the speedometer gave him a sensation like sitting next to a warm fire on a cold day.

  He should be watching.

  Ernesto made himself watch the street.

  There were lots of Saved, watching from a wide half circle around the poles and from every window in the nearby buildings. Helper Leesa had said to watch, not count how many Saved. They made a lot of noise, all those Saved, who were crowded together at two per square meter, in this area that was probably twenty meters by thirty meters. Helper Leesa had said to watch. Only to watch.

  He should be watching.

  Too much noise. They were too noisy, and he should be watching.

  Porter raised his palms. Porter was not the One, but he had known the One, and he was now the leader of the Saved. Leader meant that they tried to do what he said, like Ernesto had done with Arrulfo. The crowd stopped making so much noise. The ten people with guns kept them aimed but spread out to the edges of the crowd. Now Ernesto could see the tied-hands people better.

  “Standing before you are six Fiend prisoners, captured by our courageous Saved fighters,” he said. Some people watching made loud, startling noises like hooting and clapping their hands.

  Porter approached one of the tied-hands people and pulled a string from around his neck. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “We have a duty to try and save every last person, try to show them the One’s majesty and righteousness. I assure you we have fulfilled that duty with these prisoners as well. I know you all hope, as I do, that they have accepted the One into their hearts, especially as they are almost out of time and will never have another chance. But let’s be honest, we all kind of doubt it, don’t we?”

  He held up the string. A little charm dangled from it.

  “And this is why. This is what they be
lieve in, isn’t it? We Saved, we feel the love of the One, every day. But there is no love in this false idol, this chemical that brings them temporary pleasure. They believe it has power, but we know it does not. Now it is too late for them to learn the truth.”

  Too late. Just like for Arrulfo it was too late, and now he had to be in some terrible place for dead people to be, instead of warm and safe with the One forever. It was all because these Fiends thought their necklaces were magic and really only the One was magic. Ernesto stood, pliers still in his hand, and began moving quickly through the seated crowd of children toward Porter. One of the men with guns grabbed at him but Ernesto ran fast. He reached Porter and the little glass vial that dangled from his hand, the vial the Fiends put their false hope into. That false hope was why the Fiends were broken.

  Ernesto snatched it in the pliers and he squeezed, shattering it. He held up the pliers to the prisoner who had been wearing it and opened them, letting the glass between them fall.

  “You see?” he said, not thinking about whether the prisoner might speak Spanish. “This is nothing. Don’t go to a bad place!”

  There was so much noise. Everyone in the crowd was shouting and clapping. Ernesto turned to see them but Porter was guiding him toward the next prisoner to crush the next vial, and then the next. Leesa was there by him and telling him he was very good, but maybe sad, too, because she was crying and crying meant that someone was sad.

  “You’re Saved, Ernesto, mi hijo!” Leesa said. “You’re Saved.”

  Tunnels Under the newly sealed Zone’s Special Licensed Districts (SLiDs):

  Dok couldn’t speak. He tried to force himself to relax by hunching his shoulders tightly and then letting them drop, but it didn’t help. His breath still came in short, shaky gasps. Dok had stayed down in these tunnels for weeks and even months on end, but the walls had never seemed so close. He was leading Coiner and two of Coiner’s murderous Fiends on a reconnaissance mission, heading for what had once been his favorite part of the moldy black nightmare that was existence down here. Just ahead were two abandoned buildings in the Zone, connected to each other by a single navigable tunnel. Working from the inside, the Subjects had built walls of rubble around the two ruined structures, sealing them away from the rest of the world and allowing Subjects to reach not only the ground level, but the floors above that, as well. There they’d been able to sit on the bare concrete and peer out through the giant gaping holes where windows had once been. Now that he’d been part of the outside world again, Dok realized how pathetic and cockroach-like that was, but at the time, a chance to gaze at the sky and clear his lungs of blighted air had felt like paradise.