by Jacob Gowans
He turned back to meet Toad halfway. Toad’s breaths came in desperate gasps. Sammy helped him get the pack off. For about two seconds he considered swimming with both packs, but as soon as the weight hit him, he realized what had to be done. He let Toad’s pack go, allowing it to sink to the bottom of the lake. The rest of the swim passed slowly. Every stroke sapped the last bits of his strength. Toad swam behind him doing a lazy breaststroke. The pack on Sammy’s back grew heavier until he felt like Atlas with the whole world on his shoulders.
Just a little farther, he kept telling himself. Just a little farther.
Then, forty meters from shore, Sammy’s body gave out, and he dropped like a rock. The only thing that saved him was his height.
His feet touched the bottom while his nose stayed above water. A sigh of relief escaped his entire body. The rush of adrenaline that flooded his body in the wake of having been moments away from drowning allowed him to push on to the shore. There, he fell down to the beach and closed his eyes. The sounds of a wet and tired Toad dragging his feet through the sand came from behind.
“I can’t go on anymore today,” Sammy said.
He didn’t care that it wasn’t even noon yet; he needed rest. When he finally felt able, he sat up and pulled the pack off his shoulders. The fatigue in his arms and hands made them quake as he tried to pull open the zipper. Everything inside was wet. He dumped the contents onto the ground. Three large cans of peaches—still edible. Two cans of mandarin oranges—also good. An almost full bag of apple chips—all mush. A large sealed bag of rolled oats—saved. Matches—all but ruined. Toilet paper—now pulp. Toothbrushes. Toothpaste. Floss. Hand sanitizer. A flashlight—probably ruined. No gun. No ammo.
Somehow, he’d switched packs with Toad. In doing so, he had left the gun and most of the food in the lake.
Sammy dropped the bag and covered his face. If he hadn’t, he might’ve killed Toad right then. Instead of food or something useful, Toad had filled half his pack full of worthless crap. With hundreds of kilometers still to go, all they had in their possession was five cans of fruit, oats, a wet map, and oral hygiene products.
The next morning, Toad and Sammy started the long walk north to Wichita. The map dried out pretty well over the night, and was mostly legible. If his measurements were accurate, they were roughly five hundred kilometers from their destination. If they kept a good pace, they might make it in nine or ten days. However, he didn’t know what the terrain would be like, and he didn’t know how far they’d be able to walk on such little food.
The first few days went smoothly. Water was never difficult to find, and as long as they drank it whenever they found it, they managed all right. The food, on the other hand, was rapidly disappearing. They went through a can of fruit a day, and had some oats as well. Despite this, Sammy was almost constantly hungry, and could not stop thinking about the food he’d abandoned in the lake.
They also had occasional bumps: like Toad throwing a rock at a beehive and getting stung six times, and Toad eating green berries off a tree during lunch and vomiting twice, and Toad insisting that he climb a particular tree and then falling out of it. Had it not been for Sammy’s blasts, the fall may have been deadly.
He couldn’t figure out where Toad got his energy from. Unlike Sammy, Toad seemed to be in a pleasant mood more often than not and always had to be doing something while they walked. Sometimes it was chatting, sometimes it was kicking rocks or throwing them.
Toad often boasted about what great aim he had. “I can hit anything—even better than my dad,” he told Sammy as they walked passed an overgrown orchard. “My dad played in the minor league for two years until he was called up to pitch for the Jaguars.”
“I don’t know baseball very well,” Sammy said. “Who are the Jaguars?”
Toad fixed Sammy with a confused look. “They’re the best team south of the Rio Grande. Okay? They won the World Series two years in a row against the Dodgers. Anyway, my dad played for them a few games, but got injured. That’s when he started working as an engineer for the air rail hub in Rio.”
“And you throw better than your dad?” Sammy asked.
“Yeah. Not kidding. He said I’d for sure make it to the majors some day.”
Sammy stopped in his tracks. He didn’t buy it. Toad was reminding him an awful lot of his old friend Chuckles, who was known for making up some ridiculous lies. They stood a few meters from an apple tree with lots of unripe apples. Scouting around, Sammy found a couple dozen walnut sized rocks. He gave half of them to Toad.
“If you can hit more apples than me, I’ll give you a quarter of my oats.”
Toad grinned and sniffed. “Okay.”
Sammy went first, knocking down six apples with twelve shots. He felt pretty good about himself, especially since he’d gotten lucky on a couple throws. Toad took his spot on the ground and made his first throw.
An apple hit the ground.
Toad threw again with the same result. And again. And again. With just twelve throws, Toad knocked fifteen apples out of the tree.
17. Queen
March 9, 2086
IN THE EMPRESS’ SUITE OF THE ROYAL HOTEL in Rio de Janeiro, the Queen stood in front of her bedroom mirror, a tall looking-glass adorned in ornate gold, hand-crafted and painted by Julio Strangewall, and one of only five in the world made by his hand. It stood exactly three meters tall and two wide. The glass itself was spotless and couldn’t be touched.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? she silently asked her reflection.
The Queen loved mirrors. They were the purest way of mocking the most powerful force in the world: time. At nearly forty-seven years of age, she looked to be about twenty-five. Her porcelain skin was flawless, bearing no moles, scars, or blemishes of any kind. Her dark, rich hair was styled to perfection. Her unnaturally white teeth were straight and perfect. Of course, she had help. Beauty had a price. She let only the best cosmeticians touch her.
As far back as she could remember she’d taken pride in her looks. Her mother had once said that even when the Queen was two and three, she’d had particular tastes in fashions. Her father had told her the story of Snow White and every night before turning out her bedroom light, he would say: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”
The Queen, just a little girl, raised her hand each night. As she got older, instead of getting mad at her for spending too much time primping before school, he would announce: “Here comes the Queen! The fairest of them all!”
He hadn’t been wrong. She knew from her reflection that her looks were superior to almost anyone’s. Confirming her belief, she had been endowed the regal title Queen three times. The first by her teasing parents at age five. Second, in high school, voted as prom queen her freshman, sophomore, and junior years. The third and final time was in the Wyoming facility by the guards and her fellow Thirteens because of her prowess. None of them matched her skill in fighting. The title was their sign of respect. And she’d earned it.
She arrived in Rio on the ninth of March. Her first order of business was to scout the house and store of Floyd Hernandes. She also kept an eye on Floyd’s nephew, Fernando. After three days of careful surveillance, she’d learned two things. First, the Hernandes family was gone. Second, Fernando wasn’t. She broke into the Hernandes’ home and searched through records, photos, notes, anything that might tell her where they’d gone. She compiled a list of family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors who the family might know well enough to seek out for refuge.
One by one, she checked names off her list. For those she had to speak to directly, she assumed the persona of an interested buyer of Floyd’s business. Every last person claimed to have no knowledge of their whereabouts. Floyd’s brother, who was running the shop in his brother’s absence, claimed Floyd had decided to take his family on a badly needed vacation, an absurdly transparent lie.
She dug deeper.
A breakthrough came when the Q
ueen discovered that Karéna Hernandes had kept in contact with a college roommate for more than fifteen years. The ex-roommate now lived in Sao Paulo. Something about it felt right to the Queen. A few hours’ travel away, a close but not obvious friend, somewhere they could take off to in a hurry. Someone the wife trusted.
Yes, this is the one.
She hit the house at night. It was a large single-level home in the middle of a colorful, well-designed suburban block. Alarms were on the doors and windows. Idiots. A portable EMP took care of those. The pulse lasted only twenty seconds, but she jimmied the door and entered in less than twelve. Wearing a gas mask, she took a small remote-controlled car out from her duffle bag and set it down in the entryway. Taped to the top of the car was a canister. She drove the car at a pace that let her walk behind it. To the trained eye, a fine spray of white mist plumed out from the back of the canister while the car rolled silently along the carpeting.
Five minutes later, she put the car away and went to work. Using night vision, she went through the house and killed anyone who wasn’t a member of the Hernandes family. Nothing fancy for these folks, just a knife. Into her duffle bag, she stuffed anything of value. Once she’d made it look like a robbery/murder, she dragged the Hernandes’ drugged bodies into the living room. She bound their ankles and wrists, placed duct tape over their mouths, then woke them up.
The terror in their eyes was a real treat.
“You harbored a spy,” she told them, standing above their prostrated and bound forms lined up neatly like graves in a cemetery. “He told you his name was Albert. In fact, it was Samuel. He is an operative in training for the New World Government. You have information on where he was headed. You will give it to me now.”
Since the day her mind had been opened, she’d learned to savor the moments when people gave her power over them. Generally, that happened in the instant they realized she could and might kill them. And since she was smart enough to know that most people never get to relish in such a delicious exchange, she never lost her hunger for it. Fear, sadness, anger—those things she saw as cheap and common. Honest, vibrant, pulsing terror—that was a precious gem of human emotion.
Right now, she saw it in the eyes of every member of the Hernandes family.
“One of you is sixteen,” she stated. A glance at each of them told her who it was. The sixteen-year-old paled and began to cry. “You are very pretty—the fairest of the family.”
The Queen killed her first. Mom, Dad, and kids all screamed through the duct tape.
Now she had everyone’s attention. The feast was just beginning.
“Sixteen is a special age, you know,” she said to them.
Sixteen-year-old Katie Carpenter had her bedroom all to herself, and she decorated it very fashionably. She had a four poster bed with transparent curtains, a wooden vanity on the opposite wall, framed posters of Buster Keaton (her favorite actor), and a closet bursting with enough clothes to satisfy any mood she might be in on any given morning.
The Carpenter family wasn’t rich, but with only one child, the parents could certainly dote and spoil.
It was a Friday morning in October of 2056. The bright fall sun shined brightly through her windows, illuminating her room and spilling several bright rainbows onto her west wall with the aid of the prisms hanging in front of the glass panes. The room looked the same, smelled the same, and the voices and movement of her parents hustling and bustling about sounded exactly the same as any other day before school. But Katie did not feel the same.
This new feeling seemed to have been sparked by the dreams she’d been having lately. Like, in last night’s vision, the one still fresh in her memory, she had beaten her school teacher to death with a wooden ruler while her ex-boyfriend watched. Then she turned on him.
It was just one version of the same theme. For the last few weeks, blood, violence, and overwhelming pleasure had ruled her dreams in an unprecedented manner, more recently spilling over into her daydreams. At first she had been disturbed by them. She’d even considered going to her parents, but she didn’t want them to think their “queen” was a freak. Besides, they were just dreams. And as she began to comprehend the endowment of power the dreams offered her, her self-disgust eroded.
Today the transformation was complete. What exactly that meant, she wasn’t sure. Liberated. She tried the word on for size. Is that what I feel? She rose from bed and sat on the chair at her vanity, inspecting herself with a scrutinizing eye.
“Katie!” her mother called from the kitchen. “Get ready for school or you’ll miss first period again!”
“Come on, Queen,” her father added. “Listen to your mom.”
But Katie stayed at her mirror, grinning with a bigger smile than she’d ever had before. She reveled in new sensations and ideas that blossomed like sunflowers in her mind.
I’m free.
She basked in some unknown sense of joy. Why should she have to get up? Why should she do what they asked? Not now and not anymore.
“I’m free,” she whispered as she got back into bed. “Shut up, Mom and Dad. I’m free!”
“What was that, Queen?” her dad called from below. “I couldn’t hear.”
Her smile grew a little more. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”
Fifteen minutes later, her mother’s voice repeated her call with more fervor.
Now Katie was annoyed. Her mother’s infringement upon her newfound sense of liberty needed to be addressed. She had a choice to make. Give in to the fantasies in her head or not?
Throwing back her covers in a huff, she climbed out of bed, still in her underwear, and marched downstairs. The images and emotions from her dream still hadn’t faded, blurring her sense of reality and imagination.
In the dining room, her father had his back to her. He held his favorite coffee mug with a Greek symbol for pi. Her mother flitted between the stove and the fridge, preparing Katie a hasty breakfast.
Katie saw the knife sitting on the counter next to a cantaloupe wobbling precariously close to the edge. As she picked it up, her mother turned and shrieked at the sight of Katie in her underwear, holding the knife. With the blade clutched in her fist, Katie rushed at her mother and stabbed her twice. The sense of freedom flooded her entire being, transfiguring her into something else—something greater.
Her father howled at her as he jumped up from his seat and yanked back Katie’s arm.
“What have you done?” he screamed.
Katie’s mom slumped to the floor with two red stains spreading on her blouse. A wheezing sound escaped her lips just before died.
Her father tried to pry the knife out of Katie’s hand. When his efforts to get the weapon from his daughter proved vain, he landed a blow to the back of her head. Katie hardly felt it and answered his punch with a kick to his groin. As he doubled over, he looked at his daughter with a grimace that expressed more than physical pain. Tears and confusion were on his face.
Katie stared back with withdrawn interest. No sooner had he bent over in front of her and exposed his back, she put the knife into it.
“Queen . . .” he grumbled and joined his wife on the linoleum tile of the kitchen.
Satisfied, she went about making more of her dreams a reality.
When she happened to glance at the clock much later, she realized she was already over an hour late for school. She showered and dressed, deciding during that time to take her dad’s car to school. Despite having her license, she’d always been too scared to drive on the roads. That wasn’t a problem anymore.
Never in her life had freedom been so tangible. It made her giddy. But she still had to go to school. An absence would be noticed. Her parents would be contacted. If they didn’t answer, consequences would follow. School wanted to take her freedom away.
Today’s my last day of school. I should make it fun.
Her father had thought of himself as a handyman, and kept many tools in the garage. Katie emptied her backpack and filled it with the mos
t interesting tools and hopped in the car.
School kept her very busy. Unfortunately, the police caught her setting fire to the building and put it out before the flames really got going. It was her own fault. She’d wasted too much time killing girls in the bathrooms.
“You shouldn’t have taken in that boy.” She addressed the Hernandes family like a lecturer. “He was a very bad boy. And I have to find him.”
Mrs. Hernandes’ eyes darted back and forth between the Queen, her husband, and her dead daughter. Tears leaked steadily from her eyes.
The children don’t know, the Queen thought. From there she realized the order she needed to kill the rest. Mr. Hernandes was keeping his wife from spilling the information. So he died next. Mrs. Hernandes began to howl.
“You know where that young man was headed,” the Queen said. “How many children do you want to have left when you wake up from this nightmare?”
She killed another daughter next. Mrs. Hernandes closed her eyes and screamed.
“Topeka!”
Thirty minutes later, the Queen stood in the master bathroom washing herself of the Hernandes’ blood. The terror had been a plentiful meal for her ego.
That reminds me . . . She dug into her bag and removed her com.
“Call Diego,” she stated into it. When the familiar voice answered the call, she spoke quickly and clearly, “Send a cleaning crew to my coordinates. Multiple bodies, very messy. Better be a good crew.”
“You get what you needed?” Diego asked.
“Yes. He’s going north. Deploy the night drones for initial sweeps between Dallas and Topeka. I don’t want him to know we’re watching. Meanwhile, see what satellites are available over the next few days. We’ll use those, too.”
She stowed the com and went back to the mirror. The blood spots on her face were gone. She took three bottles of cream from her bag and applied them to her skin. As she gently rubbed them in, she daydreamed about what she might be able to do when she caught little Sammy.