by Daryl Banner
I stand in the line next to John, who seems as casual as a cucumber in the garden. I resist rolling my eyes. Doesn’t he know the seriousness of this situation? I wish I had had time to better brief him. Further down the line, Ann and Marigold stand side by side. I notice there’s only twenty of us standing before the crowd. Who’s missing?
“Should any of you protest this display of trust,” says Megan, “please, do speak your piece now and you will be dismissed back to your post. You are not required to take part and there will be no questions asked.”
A ‘display of trust’ she calls this, to make it seem less like the witch hunt it is. I suspect, among the line of Undead, they would like just as well to know who among them is “Deathless” … whether they know or not what that means. Perhaps Megan is a bit smarter … and more manipulative … than I ever gave her credit for.
John smiles at me, shrugging. I sigh and face the crowd, anxious as ever for what may or may not soon be revealed.
“No objections then? Please, first in line, to the chair.”
One by one, each Undead citizen is sat in a chair before the crowd and, gently, the steel sword is plunged through their belly. When the crowd observes that no smoke or steam is made, the sword is then removed and the Undead excused. I’m surprised and equally disturbed by the creepy formality of this procession. As each patient Undead is ceremoniously skewered, then unskewered, they take their place back in line and the next makes their way to the chair.
I experience a sudden pang of doubt. Is John’s ring some strange exception, or do I still carry any sensitivity to steel at all? If I’m outed before the crowd, there’s no telling what might happen. I certainly wasn’t the one who mistook a child for a snack, but would the crowd judge me any differently even if my innocence in that specific crime was somehow proven?
The next one goes. The next one’s stabbed. The next one’s returned to the world. “Next, please,” Megan calls. And the crowd watches, watches, watches. Everyone is waiting for the Deathless smoke, whomever among them is old enough to know what to look for.
Why are we doing this at all?—That’s what they all must be wondering, Living and Dead both. Is it possible that word of the boy’s death has reached others’ ears by now, or is Dan still grieving over his brother in the room of that hospital, his tragic news not yet shared?
I clench shut my eyes. I play with John’s ring on my finger. Time seems to crawl as though to mock me.
The one to my left mutters under his breath. I don’t know him; must be an Undead from Trenton I never personally met, or perhaps someone who happened on the Necropolis within the twelve years I was at John’s buried side. Either way, I’m unable to hear what the hell he’s griping about for a while until finally I pick out the word: “Ridiculous.” Then: “Dumb. So useless. Pointless.” He’s not happy about the proceeding, clearly.
“Don’t worry,” I whisper to him. “It’ll be over soon.”
It’s Marigold’s turn. She sits in the chair as if she were about to be served a nine-layer birthday cake. When the sword enters her, she giggles. When the sword’s pulled out, she says, “Ooh! Can we do that again?” Marigold is gently excused into the crowd.
The man to my left is next. I’m wringing my hands, staring at the crowd of onlookers and worrying the worst: What if I’m still affected? What if I’m Deathless? The thoughts torment me as my eyes scan the Humans that watch us with sick, dark fascination.
Just then, I find a girl in the crowd. She’s about ten years old, same age Megan was when I first met her, long ago. The girl’s face reminds me so much of someone, yet I can’t put my finger on it. The girl seems sweet, curiously watching as if she were at the zoo, curious what the baboon will do, or whether or not the giraffe will bend its neck for a sip of water. I know that girl. Who is she?
When the screaming happens, I’m still so distracted with figuring out who the girl is that I hardly notice it. I spin my head just in time to see the man—sword still impaled in him—tearing through the crowd of Humans, a trail of smoke following him. He’s screaming. He is quick, but the Humans are quicker, and within seconds he is captured and dragged back to the front of the stage where, less ceremoniously than the others, the sword is yanked out of him … and the steam rises from his wound like wiggly fingers of smoke reaching up, up, up.
The cries of dissent and shouting from the crowd are met by Megan’s guardsmen, who try desperately to regain balance. The man, still steaming, is curled up by the chair now, groaning and crying like a baby. The line of Undead standing before the crowd has broken considerably, all of us moving to get a better look at this man who, quite clearly, just proved himself Deathless.
“DESTROY HIM!” someone shouts from the crowd. Others cut in, men and women and frightened children: “BURN HIM! PULL HIM APART AND BURN HIM!”
Silly Humans. Don’t they know the Dead can’t burn?
Over the Dead man’s wails of agony, Megan addresses the crowd in as loud a voice as she can manage: “Silence! Order! We have the culprit and your minds can be at ease now! The culprit’s been found! The culprit’s been found!”
I notice the Undead sharing uneasy glances at one another, as I assume they’re just now discovering this wasn’t, in fact, simply a ‘display of trust’, but rather a setup to out the wrongdoer among them. John’s casualness has been traded for a look of bewilderment as he stares at the Dead man writhing on the ground, still wailing and wailing and wailing. I imagine one’s sensitivity to steel may, in fact, be quite proportionate to the amount of Human one’s consumed. From this man’s display of pain, he’s consumed quite a lot.
“He will be questioned and the matter of his crimes will be investigated thoroughly,” Megan declares to the crowd, promising the sweetest justice them. “Take him to the tower,” she tells her guardsmen. The Dead one, who still moans pitifully with smoke whirring out of his belly like little ghosts, is dragged off by the armored men. The smoke at his abdomen never stops hissing.
John turns to me, a smirk on his lips. “I guess we’ve been spared the fun of having a sword through us.”
“Actually, I’ve had it before,” I remark, feeling smart. “My red dress did not appreciate it one bit.”
The Undead are dismissed back to their posts and the Human crowd begins to dissipate. As I survey the looks on their faces, I can’t help but feel that trust is not the thing that was gained today, regardless of Megan’s ploy. Even the Undead seem slighted, turning to one another and wondering whether this display of trust was, rather, a display of mistrust. About the only happy one among us is Marigold who, I’m quite sure, would happily accept a blade through her bowels at any given point of the day.
Ann rushes up to me almost immediately afterwards, her eyes burning with thoughts. “Did you know about this? Did you—Did you know what Megan was doing?”
“Ann, I can’t discuss it just yet. We’ll talk about it on our next shift together, alright?”
“We’ll talk about it now, actually.”
Our tiny exchange is interrupted when the Chief approaches us. He folds his arms, a smirk creasing his leathery face in half, and says: “The Deathless are among us. The hunger is alive.”
“Not anymore.” I glance at the chair by which a man only a moment ago was screaming and writhing on the ground.
“Winter,” Ann whines at my side, her eyes flashing.
“Soon, Ann. I promise you. But not here, not now.” I dismiss myself from the pair of them, insisting to get as far away from that haunting chair as possible. The more distance I put between myself and the horror of today, the better I feel.
It isn’t until I’m well away from the scene that I realize what the Chief—Brock—was getting at: we ended the ‘display of trust’ right after finding the man—but didn’t bother to try the rest of the line, myself included. The man may not have acted alone.
There may be other Deathless among us.
This notion that Brock has now planted in my mind haunts
me while John and I spend the evening sitting in a metal gazebo-thing. He’s talking to me about a couple that came into the bar the other day and how they were so nice and made all these jokes that had him laughing so hard he was afraid he’d literally bust in half. He starts telling me the jokes one by one, struggling to remember them and messing up all the punch lines, and I can’t shake my head away from the event at the courtyard of the Cyclops tower and what Brock hinted at. The Deathless are among us, he said. The hunger is alive. And the look that spread through the crowd on those Humans’ faces … The hurt of a sort of betrayal in the eyes of the Dead. I still hear the man’s screams as he was dragged off …
John’s laughing at his own last punch line, which he apparently nailed, but I wasn’t paying attention at all.
Later, when I’m looking through the clothing that a lady in the textiles area sells, I feel the stares of Humans pressing in all around me. I meet some of their gazes, curious, and find suspicion burning in their eyes. I wonder if they look at all us Undead that way now—the nineteen or so of us that remain. Their watery, totally-capable-of-crying eyeballs are full of questions, full of fears, full of apprehension … as if they wonder if any of us were an accomplice to the man who was dragged off that day, the man who’d tasted blood, the Deathless man.
Even some of the Humans who are staring at me now aren’t old enough to have known the first Deathless onslaught. Their stares are the worst. Their looks of fright are only fueled by the stories they’ve been told as a child, their resulting nightmares being the only source of truth they’ll ever know.
I’m a walking nightmare. I peer over my shoulder, catching a group of girls staring worriedly at me as I innocently browse the dresses. The girls don’t disperse. Power in numbers, I guess. Even the Living lady selling the dresses, who used to regard me with warm smiles and bright eyes, only watches with a blank stare today, as though I were a giant dog that might cross the street to take a mouthful out of her ankle. With a frustrated sigh, I let the dresses out of my fingers and dismiss myself from the store. I’m all too familiar with the wary way Humans look at me. It’s the same way they used to look at me.
And I hope it’s my imagination, but I feel a collective sigh of relief as I leave. The Humans are no longer in danger … Winter has left the vicinity.
We don’t have to look any different than they. We can wear their same clothes, appear with as much or as little makeup as they do, speak the way they do, laugh the way they do … They still tell us apart. They look into our eyes and they see the death. They smell it. “Yes, John,” I mutter to myself, feeling bitter. “They can sniff us out, apparently.” We don’t fit in any more than a blackbird among blue jays.
I pass a can on the street. I kick it so hard, it bends against the brick wall of a building and lands in a puddle by the curb. I keep walking, my boots stamping in every pool I see, disturbing each bit of peace they can find.
A day and hundreds of stares later, I’ve had enough. I walk myself to the Mayor’s tower, sure to keep my face as calm and sweet and unthreatening as possible. I know Megan and the others are certainly interrogating the man with blood and Human flesh and whatever else in his system, questioning the whys and the hows, the whats and the whens. Just as hungrily as she’s getting her answers, I want them too. I want to know what’s driven him to commit such an act and permanently stain the already impermanent peace of our kind.
And I want to know who told him the secret of blood.
Wasn’t the reality that we’re all falling apart enough of a burden to bear? Now, our peaceful place here in the Necropolis has been slain overnight by the selfish mistake of one stupid, horrible person …
Instantly an image of that ten-year-old in the crowd that day comes to mind. The girl with the sweet and familiar face, and now I realize quite suddenly how I know her: it’s Laura’s daughter. Laura, the pregnant woman whose husband shared the name of my prom date from my First Life: Gill. She died giving birth to a sweet little girl that day twelve years ago, and that sweet little girl, who was later named Laura after her dead mother, is now twelve years old … and she’s orphaned and …
And my hands were covered in her father’s blood after he’d been wounded by a fall and …
And when I was in the bathroom to wash my hands off, I opted, instead, for a different means: I licked them clean.
Is that what truly upsets me about this? Am I just as criminal as the man? Did Benjamin deserve a quiver of steel arrows in his face? Do I?
The Humans watch me warily as I cross the courtyard of the Mayor’s tower … the same courtyard where only a few days ago, a notion was birthed in all their Living, wetted eyes that we Undead can, in fact, do horrible things. The nightmare of the Deathless is one that is possible, one that is probable, one that is just as alive now as it was twelve years ago. We Undead are, just as the Living are, corruptible and perfectly able to do wrong. We are not the stuff of perfection and idols. We are not, all of us, sweet and giving and safe.
Some of us do, in fact, bite.
C H A P T E R – N I N E
M I N D O F M A L O R Y
“I want to know.”
Megan shrugs. “None of it is good. None of it will be good.” She peers out the Cyclops window, studies the view, whatever it is she sees. “I think we’ve learned all we can from the man. He’s in our prison. He’ll likely remain there until he, himself, turns to dust.”
“The Living don’t trust us anymore,” I complain, feeling like a child who’s been kicked off the playground by bullies and here I am complaining to the principal.
“He was stealing blood from the hospital … at first,” Megan explains. “When Doctor Collin became aware of the missing supply, he moved the blood elsewhere and locked it up more securely.”
“Oh.” I can piece it together now. “So naturally when he couldn’t get to the supply of blood, he had to find … other means.” Other means, like, an innocent boy on the streets. “But how’d he even know about what blood does to us?”
“Two-part answer, he gave me. First part will anger you, second part will hurt you. The first is, he was a prisoner here long ago under the Deathless King’s rule. He saw them feed on the Living but never learned why.” Megan sighed, rubbing her temple. “The second part is, he knew two others who’d fed on Human flesh before—both forced to by the Deathless—and learned through them its effects. One’s a man you don’t know, turned to dust years ago. The other is a man you … used to know.”
“Benjamin,” I blurt right away, putting it together. Megan’s stony stare confirms it. “Wow. That does hurt.”
“It’s not a nice story, no matter how you tell it.” Megan drums her fingers along the window, sighing long and hard. “Deathless forever be, right?”
“That explains why Benjamin had the vulnerability to steel, just like the Deathless,” I say, pained to hear myself say it aloud. I can see Gunner shooting the silver bolts into Benjamin’s face, ending his Second Life in an instant. No one could revive him thereafter; not even the super-expert, Marigold. “They made him taste blood and … and he didn’t know what it’d done to him.”
“You’d tasted it too,” Megan points out, her Human eye flicking to me. “The Deathless King—your mother—fed you a piece of flesh, didn’t she? Obviously it doesn’t take just one bite to … change you. It takes a substantial amount more. We can’t be sure how much the Deathless fed Benjamin … or how much he fed himself.”
“And now we’ll never know,” I say, ending the topic with more of a bite in my tone than I intend. “He’s gone and can never for all the rest of eternity defend himself.”
“He can’t,” Megan agrees, drumming on the window some more, leaning against the glass despondently. “If the people ever learn who Julianne the Jubilant really is … If they learn that their ‘hero’ is none other than the former Deathless King herself …” Megan sighs, shakes her head. “I’m doomed. I always was, ever since the day I was born. I’m sorry, Winter.
I’m not proud of all the decisions I made over the years, but I can’t imagine how I’d do any of it differently. I regret that Gunner took his life. I regret that you weren’t around. I regret many things.” She blinks. “Hasn’t rained in a week. The sirens are quiet …”
“Don’t jinx us, now,” I mutter. “Last thing we need is one final storm to wash away all us Dead.”
“This won’t end well, Winter. I’m not going to mince my words here.” Megan comes around the desk quite suddenly, parks herself right in front of me, her eyes level with mine. “I wanted peace for us all. I’ve worked—for years—to build this place into a home for all of us, Living and Unliving. We all deserve the eternal peace. But it isn’t this bloodthirsty, misguided young man who’s undone the peace here, Winter.”
I narrow my eyes. “What do you mean?”
“It was Shee.” Megan’s blue eye shimmers faintly. “Ever since Shee found that giant Warlock stone and lost her mind, the peace of the city has been broken. All year I’ve worked to mend fences, but as you can tell, the Humans now far outnumber the Dead, and until Shee is found, until that stone is recovered, there is no hope for your kind.” Megan smirks and clasps her bony fingers together, I guess to prevent herself from wringing them. “The Living will win, Winter, no matter what. And … I’m not certain I want them to. Not like this.”
“But Shee is lost,” I say, ignoring her meaning in that last sentence she dared utter. “My mother is lost. They could be on opposite ends of the planet by now, Megan, a whole year has passed.”
“Things might change here. Things might not. But I think … and I may be wrong, I’ve been wrong before … but I think it best that you take up a band of Undead and seek out Shee and your mother. I’ve no other probable solutions, Winter, unless it’s your dream to live out the rest of your Undead days here in a false peace until one day you and John and everyone you love just suddenly turn into—into—” She clenches shut her eyes, unable to finish that thought.