The Book of M

by Peng Shepherd

  The woman cried again as they reached her, and Ory scooted back for more cover, deeper into the tangled maze of wood and books.

  “Baby,” he heard Imanuel say, to see if even though they could no longer speak, perhaps they understood.

  The word seemed to do nothing. The Red King roared.

  Find the book, Max told Ory. He turned around and peered into the nightmarish forest of shelves. Find the book for Imanuel and then save him, while there’s still time. Before the woman dies.

  He crept deeper into the library. The stacks twisted, some dead-ending, some spiraling back on themselves, some too tightly packed to squeeze through. He tried to work his way toward signs still hanging on the walls, hoping for directions to different sections and genres, but every time he heard a Red, he had to divert behind another overturned bookcase or sideways shelf to hide, getting more and more lost.

  Hurry, Max’s voice whispered to him. Find the book before it’s too late.

  Ory glanced back, and through two half-empty shelves glimpsed Imanuel, his lab coat already stained with blood, his tools emptied out all around him, trying desperately to hold the woman still so he could try something, anything. She wailed, delirious, clawing at her bare belly. Blood was smeared on the floor all around her.

  Then there it was—the sign near the back, on the wall—POETRY.

  Ory scrambled faster, heart racing, as the Red woman’s scream shattered the room again—but this time it was different. There was death in the scream. Turn back! Max whispered suddenly. There’s no time. He ignored her, and threw himself against the shelf, nose pressed against hundreds of musty spines, searching for the W names. Paul Jeremiah West. Paul Jeremiah West. Paul Jeremiah West.

  Ory, Max begged in his head.

  He found the Ws all near the bottom. Wallace, Walter, Webb, Wepford, White—

  “No,” he breathed. The seconds were racing by. He checked again, but there was nothing. Nothing in the space between Wepford and White.

  It wasn’t there.

  Ory leaned closer. On the spines of the books on either side of where Paul’s should have been, there were old stains, the streaks long dried, as if someone had come to this exact place and sorted through, looking for something in particular. Someone covered in red.

  “Yes!” Imanuel shouted then, from far across the library.

  Ory jerked back toward the sound and peered through the fractured shelves. The Red King had pulled something small and rectangular out of the jagged angles of his armor, and held it toward Imanuel as a last, desperate offering to stop the woman’s pain and save her life. A book.

  No, Ory thought.

  The cover came into view as the Red King reached down to hand it over.

  No.

  But it was. Paul’s poetry.

  Ory stared, transfixed, as Imanuel reached for it and the Red King roared back at him.

  It was impossible. How could the Red King have known the exact book they had been looking for all this time, without being able to read it?

  But he didn’t have time to consider it further. The Red woman’s breath shuddered weakly. Run, Ory, Max urged again. Get out.

  Then the whole room collapsed into a deafening roar.

  Too late, Max whispered. “No,” he tried to argue, but he knew. The woman is dead.

  The Reds’ screams became a war call. Something bright and hot whizzed by Ory’s head and smashed into the bookshelf beside him. Fire. They were setting everything on fire. They were going to burn it all down.

  “Imanuel!” Ory yelled as he came careening around the shelves. Everywhere, Reds were running wildly. The woman was still on the floor, unmoving. He couldn’t see Imanuel or the Red King through the chaos. “Imanuel!”

  He spotted them through the gathering crowd. He shoved between the vicious, crazed Reds, running for the far end of the room, where the Red King and Imanuel were sliding on the blood-soaked floor, strangling each other, both scrambling for a weapon. Ory was so close he could almost touch them when the Red King’s crimson hand wrapped around a shard of broken glass. He was so close he could see the Red King in all his horrifying glory for the first time. So close he could see his face as the serrated tool sang through the air.

  “No!” Imanuel screamed. Everything froze.

  Ory didn’t know if it was because Imanuel knew he couldn’t stop the blade or because he suddenly realized that Ory was there, where Imanuel had begged him not to be.

  He understood now—why his friend had been so afraid for him to join the Iowa’s missions, and why all of the shadowless were so obsessed with books. Because if it was true that every shadowless got to keep one thing to cling to until the very end—one thing that would eventually be all there was left of them, until everything was gone—and that being together under a powerful leader helped them remember longer what little they still had, then only one thing made sense. Ory did not want to believe it, but he was there, and it was too late. He saw.

  The Red King was Paul.

  “No!” Imanuel cried again. The jagged shard plunged into him, and the sound snapped off into a horrible gasp. Blood spurted everywhere in a surging river until both he and the Red King looked the same.

  Ory ran at them, his voice echoing off the walls as he lunged. “Paul!” he screamed.

  The Red King let go of Imanuel’s body and turned. It was impossible to tell if it was simply because of the sound, or if that word was the last word that could catch fire in his mind. Ory wanted to see the answer in his eyes as he descended upon him, but he searched, searched—even as he pulled the D.C. police-issue Glock 13 that Malik had given him out of the belt of his pants and aimed, he searched—and saw nothing. There was only red.

  Ory had heard their soldiers tell one another legends that the Red King was unkillable, that he’d forgotten he wasn’t immortal, so he was. But it wasn’t true. He had forgotten his name, that he had written poetry, that he was not the size of a rhinoceros. That Imanuel was a person he once loved, not feared and hated. But he had not yet forgotten that he could die.

  “Is it done?” Imanuel asked him as Ory crouched down to him. The gun smoked in his hand, emptied of the same fatal storm that had possessed his lost shotgun. Thunder moaned softly, fading in time with the last shuddering beats of the Red King’s life. All around them, the shocked, disbelieving screams began.

  “It’s done,” Ory said.

  “I told you not to come,” he repeated faintly. His eyes were glazed.

  “I know,” Ory said softly. He put a hand gently under Imanuel’s head.

  “I didn’t want . . . ,” Imanuel rasped, “you to know.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ory said. “You got the book.” The book was Paul. Not that. That had never been.

  “Book,” he repeated.

  Ory took it from where it lay beside Imanuel, still wrapped in a tattered plastic bag he must have brought from the Iowa to protect it. There was so much blood Ory could barely see. He pressed his hand to Imanuel’s neck to try to stanch the place he thought the enraged, throbbing flood was leaving his body, but it didn’t help. The wounds were too deep. He tried to pick Imanuel up, but Imanuel was too weak to help him lift. They sank back to the floor as the Reds began to crowd around them.

  “Go,” Imanuel said, but Ory shook his head. The Reds converged. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t leave Imanuel.

  Suddenly Ahmadi was there, slapping his face, trying to bring him out of his shock. Ory looked up to see Malik hoisting up the other side of Imanuel’s limp, pallid body. They’d broken the General’s order, too. They had come.

  “Retreat!” The world snapped back into focus as Malik shouted the command at him, over and over. “Retreat!” Ory’s feet were somehow already obeying before he’d even understood the words, running as they carried Imanuel together toward the open doors. Behind, he could hear the blunt punch of arrow shafts through flesh as Ahmadi killed the Reds that followed, one after another.

  “I can’t stop the bl
eeding!” Ory yelled to Malik. His fingers scrambled at Imanuel’s neck. He could feel Imanuel feebly trying to guide him with his own hands, to show him where to push to stop the blood from pouring out of him. He’s so calm, Ory thought hysterically as he tried to choke the hot, syrupy liquid without cutting off Imanuel’s air. How can he be so calm?

  Most of the walls were on fire then, cracking in the sweltering heat. Rocks split against the floor around their feet as the Reds hurled them. Ory wanted to cover his head, but there was no way. He just kept running as fast as he could without dropping Imanuel, praying that nothing would land on them.

  “Ory . . .” Imanuel coughed. “The book—”

  “I still have it,” Ory yelled, to make sure Imanuel could hear him. “I have it, don’t worry!”

  He did have it, just barely, pinched between his biceps and rib as he tried to keep it there and support Imanuel’s slackening weight. If Ory dropped him, the Reds would be on them before they could pick him up again. If he dropped the book, they’d lose it forever. Malik would never let them stop for it.

  As if he could read Ory’s mind, Imanuel’s hands grew tighter around his wrist. “If you can’t—carry both,” he managed to choke out. “Take. Book.”

  The One Who Gathers

  TWO MONTHS AFTER DR. ZADEH WAS KILLED, SOMEONE IN New Orleans forgot that the electrical grid had been destroyed in the initial, panicked riots, and the power in the city suddenly came back—although the system wasn’t quite the same as before. This time, instead of a generator in a factory, the wires just met and shot off in a tangle into the sky, to retrieve energy from passing storms, so no one had to service them. Inconsistent, but at least functional. Apparently far more than most cities had. According to the old man the amnesiac rescued from the abandoned bus station he’d chosen to die in, both San Diego and Oklahoma City now hopped—portions of the cities from single buildings, roads, neighborhoods, to entire zip codes rose between inches and several stories into the air at random times, then settled again. It was probably someone’s terror of earthquakes that brought it about. The old man had left California after his son slipped during a hop and fell to his death. If only the shadowless could have forgotten that seismic movement existed, instead of that cities couldn’t jump in defense.

  “Are you the leader here?” the old man asked him, lifting his bald, leathered head from the pillow. He coughed weakly.

  “Of New Orleans, or of this facility?”

  “You should think about the hurricanes,” the old man continued, ignoring the question. “Something should be done about the hurricanes before the season hits. Don’t wait until one is already here.”

  The amnesiac watched him shiver through his fever as he slept in one of the many empty beds, trying to imagine all the fantastical iterations a hurricane could evolve into, all the twisted interpretations of human desire to stop a deadly storm that there were, both possible and impossible. The old man’s breath was fluttering, uneven.

  “Is he going to die?” Buddy asked.

  The amnesiac turned and looked at the young shadowless in the doorway from his place beside the old man. “I think so,” he said. “Probably before morning. He’s very weak.”

  Buddy pushed an unruly shock of hair off his forehead. The amnesiac had found him a month ago—it was more dangerous now, but he still tried to continue Dr. Zadeh’s work, when he could. “Such a shame.” He sighed. “Still has his shadow and everything.”

  “You’re doing well, though.”

  “Yeah,” Buddy said. But it wasn’t really an answer—just a noncommittal sound one would make to fill their turn in a conversation they weren’t really listening to. He was still staring longingly at the thin, dark copy of the old man’s bony arm where it lay, draped over the sheet.

  It had been a long time since they’d had another shadow in the assisted-living facility besides the amnesiac’s own. Everyone but him had either died or lost theirs. It was strange, to share all the blank space on the walls with the old man’s withered silhouette.

  “Such a shame,” Buddy murmured again absently.

  “Buddy,” the amnesiac said. “Buddy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Where are the others?”

  For a moment, the amnesiac thought he was going to say, What others? But Buddy finally blinked, pulling himself out of his trance. “The rain. Marie said from the clouds that she thinks a storm isn’t far off. She said we can’t wait any longer. We have to go into the storage basement now.”

  THEY STOOD IN THE SMALL CENTER COURTYARD, LOOKING UP into the roiling, sinking sky.

  “See? When they look like that, a hurricane is a day out, maybe less,” Marie said as she lowered the finger she’d been pointing. They no longer called her Nurse Marie—just Marie—because she was not a nurse. Not since she had forgotten she was one, when her shadow left, too. She was chewing on the corner of her lip as she pointed, because she was proud she still remembered how to read the clouds, and was trying not to smile.

  The rest of the shadowless stood behind them, all twenty. “Can you tell how bad it’ll be?” the amnesiac asked her.

  “Bad, I think,” she said. “Maybe not quite Katrina bad, but bad.”

  “Who’s Katrina?” Buddy asked.

  Marie flexed her wrist so her palm flashed at him, as if to gently scoot away the question. The shadowless at the facility had started to do that among themselves when one had forgotten something that wasn’t worth explaining. A kind of gentle shorthand to mean, Don’t worry about it, it doesn’t matter.

  “How much time do we have?” the amnesiac asked.

  “None,” Curly said. He pulled his namesake into a stumpy ponytail and bound it to keep the strands away from his face. “By the time we finish moving all the food and supplies into the storage basement to wait this out, it’ll practically be here.”

  “Wait it out,” Marie sighed. “If it’s a hurricane, fine. But it might not be a hurricane, once it reaches us. It might be the memory of one.”

  “I know,” the amnesiac said quietly. “But what else can we do?”

  “Will it be . . . It?” Buddy asked. “The end?”

  “We survived the riots,” he replied. He put a hand on Buddy’s shoulder. “And the exterminators. And starvation. A lot of things.”

  “Yeah, but those—” Buddy frowned, struggling for words. The amnesiac tried to judge whether it was fear or shadowlessness that was making it difficult, but he couldn’t tell. He wished Dr. Zadeh was still with them. “Those things were new. No one could forget them because they hadn’t existed before. A hurricane is different.”

  “Okay, enough. It’s bad. But it’s still coming. We need to take care of what we can do before we sit around and worry about what we can’t,” Downtown said. Not her real name, of course—only where they had found her. She thought the nickname would tell her more about herself than whatever her real name had been, and so it stuck. More and more of the shadowless had started renaming themselves like that, to remind themselves of the most important things.

  “Okay,” the amnesiac said. “Let’s do this quickly. Food, water, blankets, clothes, medicine. I’ll get our patient files. Go in groups. Everyone remind everyone what you’re all doing. Like we practiced—keep reminding!”

  “Keep reminding!” Buddy crowed. Everyone splintered into small groups of three or four, darting off down different hallways. “Food, main hall!” Marie called as her group scrambled toward the cafeteria—the items they needed to retrieve, and the place to take them. “Food, main hall!” the person behind her repeated.

  “Blankets, main hall!” Downtown’s voice echoed from another corridor. Each person repeated their team’s phrase after the one in front of them said it, a circular chorus. As they all vanished into the assisted-living facility’s other wings, the words blurred until it sounded more like a song being played from far away.

  In Dr. Zadeh’s darkened office, his research lay in neat stacks on his desk. The amnesiac took his
leather bag from the hook on the back of the door and began to file the folders into it. DOWNTOWN (F), NURSE MARIE (F), CURLY (M), BUDDY (M). The handwritten labels flicked past as he slid each bundle into place. Some of the files were thicker than others; some had only one sheet. It depended on at what point they had found each shadowless—how much they had left that he or Dr. Zadeh could record as potential data. Research for a cure that would never be finished now, but at least they could use them as a record of who each of them had once been. They’d never be able to recover what Downtown’s real name was, but at least her file could tell her that she hated carrots and was forty-three years old.

  At the bottom, the oldest file, far thicker than the rest. The amnesiac’s eyes caught on the label. It had once said one thing, then been scratched out and rewritten, then scratched out and rewritten again, until there was almost no room. He smiled and shook his head. Dr. Zadeh had tried earnestly to keep up with whatever nickname for the amnesiac had come into fashion among the Alzheimer’s residents, and then later the shadowless patients, until finally he’d run out of white space on his tiny label, and given up in an exasperated sputter of tiny capital letters. The amnesiac read his cramped scrawl and smiled, but it was not a happy smile. He felt his shoulders slump. He put the file into the leather bag and sat down in the doctor’s dusty chair.

  GAJARAJAN (M).

  For a few minutes, it felt like Dr. Zadeh might walk through the door again at any moment. Then it felt like the amnesiac had been sitting there wishing he could see him one more time for years.

  Finally he stood up and went to the far corner, where a much smaller table sat by a window. A heavy binder rested atop it. The amnesiac had kept working on his own research at least, even if he couldn’t complete Dr. Zadeh’s. His copy of Hemu’s notebook was probably four times as thick now as when Hemu’s doctor had first gifted it to him.

  He didn’t mean to, but it was hard to resist. He found his fingers flipping through the familiar pages, articles and snippets he knew backward and forward. In the middle, he stopped on a torn-out scene from an old play. Peter Pan, written in 1904 by a man named J. M. Barrie.