by James, Guy
After almost two minutes of full-body convulsions, which the men who were holding her captive seemed to enjoy, or, if not enjoy, wonder at, because they certainly didn’t offer to help, she was proved wrong when her breaths began to connect again, and her body’s defective flow meters and transport systems seemed to clear completely.
It was a rare feeling, and she wanted more of it, to get to know it and live with it, but she had a sense that she wouldn’t get the chance. Per the universe’s irony, she’d been scheduled to finally outgrow her asthma today.
3
“Wait, wait,” Rosemary said, no longer able to quell the panic in her voice. “What about you? You should be infecting yourself if you really think spreading the virus is what God wants.”
“You really are a smart girl,” Brother Acrisius said, “very smart. But if we infect ourselves, there’ll be no one left to spread the virus. The humans outside the Order sure aren’t doing it. We serve the virus, and we do so best by remaining uninfected. However, if it is God’s will that I should be infected, I will readily submit.”
“Please,” she said, squeezing the words between the tears, “will you tell me something, anything, about the rest of the world, the things that you’ve seen? I want to know. Please. I need to know.”
It was a senseless thing to ask for now, but no more senseless than what the Order was doing to her. She began, ever so faintly, to wail.
Brother Mardu, who suddenly felt like he was Maris, or whoever the fuck he’d been before he was Yooooo Maurice of The Destroyaz, stared at the girl. His mouth dropped open, and for the first time since his own childhood, he felt the separation from his family, and a longing for his parents, his real family, none of whom he’d known, but all of whom were for certain long dead.
There was a flash, an instant when he wanted to scoop Rosemary up and tell her that everything was going to be okay, that he would take her away from this and she would grow up and find love and be at peace in the world. He opened his mouth, but no words came.
He took half a step forward, then stopped and turned his back on her. There came a gurgling from deep inside him, followed by a feeling of breathlessness: Mardu’s palm touched down on the wick of Maris’s candle, and Maris was gone. Finally gone. And now that the weakling was out of the picture, it was time for Brother Mardu to get the rest of his power back.
“I’ll do this myself,” he said, and snatched the knife from Brother Acrisius, who Mardu now found even more loathsome than usual, unfit to be a right-hand man. The too-weak walking pustule nodded and stepped backward—no, crawled backward—retreating into a corner.
Not a man at all, Mardu thought, but a column of bile that needs to be thrown up. First things first. Give the child to the virus, then clean up the ranks.
He pressed the flat part of the blade against Rosemary’s skin and ran the knife up and down her arm. Red lines that were slightly raised were cropping up on her skin and spotting with blood at points.
More of the color left Rosemary’s face. Was he actually enjoying this, or just trying to? She searched Brother Mardu’s chiseled features for a sign of human emotion, but there was nothing there.
She went into her head and began to grasp at straws. At first she couldn’t think of anything, but then she grabbed hold of a straw, an infected one as it were, and asked, “What about Krokodil?”
Mardu frowned, and the pressure of the blade on Rosemary’s skin lessened. It lingered there, indecisive, as if it had suddenly forgotten what it was supposed to do next. Mardu glanced up from Rosemary at the standing pimple in the corner and saw Brother Acrisius’s eyes darken. He wanted to put his thumbs in those eyes and force all the pus out the other holes. Acrisius must have seen something in Brother Mardu’s glare, because he raised his eyebrows fearfully, pushing a grey pustule on his forehead upward, and looked away quickly.
I’m going to kill him, Mardu decided. That was the way to get more of the mojo back—killing his number one dude, his favorite, his confidante. That would overflow the Order’s fear bucket with all the required bodily expulsions.
The idea of eating the half-paralytic disgusted him, but killing him he could do. Brother Saul would have to get over it, or he too would die. The killing mood had struck him, and taken him fully into its fleshy folds.
Encouraged by the effect her words had had on the men, Rosemary went on, barely able to control the shaking of her voice. “Isn’t that where the virus comes from? Not from God, but from that drug? It’s not God, it’s a disease, from Krokodil?”
Brother Mardu snarled. “Clever girl,” he said, the disgust in his tone plain. But who or what was he disgusted with? Everything, nothing, it didn’t matter. All he knew was that the viral sprite who was supposed to live on his shoulder was gone, and all her wonderful urging too, snapped shut into the folding chair she’d carried off when she left.
And now it was all left up to him. He felt like he was on his own, and probably for good. Had his failure to persuade Senna been the final straw? Perhaps, and no matter. He could do it on his own, he told himself, and, virus damn it, he would.
4
It felt—to all of them at the same time—as if they were in a space capsule hurtling toward something cataclysmic, some sort of collision, with an asteroid perhaps, or a meteor, or the sun itself. They all looked at one another: Mardu at Acrisius, Acrisius at Rosemary, Rosemary at Mardu, and back around again.
They could all feel that it was out of control, this, all they were doing, everything was suddenly out of reach. Their microcosm of the universe had undergone an abrupt expansion and had gone past the point of no return.
They kept looking at one another in the same sequence, as if they were stuck on repeat, until Brother Mardu broke the spell, and, when he spoke, the room seemed to shrink all at once, like an aluminum can being crumpled in a giant’s fist. Each of them felt it some, but Rosemary most of all.
“You’ve heard the grownups talk about it, right?” He shook his head and smiled ruefully. “I’ll answer your question, briefly. It is your last request.”
At the utterance of the word ‘last,’ Rosemary’s skin grew very, very cold.
“Everything moves in a sort of order,” Brother Mardu began. “And a certain series of events had to happen before the virus could make its move. It needed time to sow its seeds and to grow, to change, until it was strong enough to attack and take everything. It was an all-or-nothing strike, no prisoners, and no chance of a truce. So it waited until it had everything it needed.”
He looked at Rosemary. She said nothing.
Ginny Lloyd, the recluse and ill-fated journalist, would have had a great time talking to Rosemary, and would have found her own anxiety at epically low levels if she’d had a chance to be around the girl. Rosemary could’ve charmed the pants off a rattlesnake—not that Ginny was a serpent, just shy—but she couldn’t reach Brothers Mardu and Acrisius. They were more than dangerous, they were wicked puppets suspended by foul strings, the virus holding their manipulator, because what they’d preached for all these years had become true over time: they did belong to the virus, and it was their ultimate master.
Then the wooden rod holding them moved, and they responded with delayed and clumsy movements that would have made the most inept marionette’s cheeks redden with shame.
5
Mardu went on. “Everything has to grow up, to evolve. Just like children.” He gazed at her. “The cheap drug you talk about, it was like fuel to the fire. The virus was already out there, and Krok gave it bodies to work with, human labs, playgrounds. The virus liked the way Krok changed people, the landscape it created in them, and so the virus played with these people, in them, and it figured out how to grow, and so it did.”
In fact, this was very close to the truth, and Mardu sensed it the same way he intuited meaning in what the virus did. It was this same talent of perception that was at the root of his great spotting ability, and the reason he’d never dared to try Krok himself when he
was peddling it, though he’d never had a qualm about sampling a drug before.
The germ in question, the great ancestor of the outbreak’s architect, had been engineered, its modified workings made such that it targeted the same people that drug dealers did, those whose DNA was twisted up just right to make them perfect slaves to addiction. The mutations that followed after Krok and the genetically-altered virus met, however, were not in anyone’s plans. And so, from randomness and destructive acts of science, the outbreak had been born.
Now, within the mobile kingdom that he’d built out of thin air from the viral whisperings he heard there and the sheer force of his will, Mardu’s eyes gave one brilliant sparkle, and, for a moment, he felt like his old self again. The velvety roll of his voice was back. He went deeper into his old spiel, virus as god, Equilibrium Day, and so on, and he was starting to feel the belief in it coming back, even stronger than he had when he was explaining the Order to Senna and Rosemary earlier that day.
Though he felt things were still too fragile to turn Rosemary in front of everyone and deny them her meat right to their faces—he was intending to parade the zombie version of her around later, going around to each brother and sister one by one, with Saul, who would be armed, and who would weed out the unbelievers, to be eaten, and the blood of the weak would fuel the strong, and the order of the Order would be restored.
He talked for a little while longer, his speech gaining speed and the persuasive notes deepening, until he thought the practice enough. He’d thought on the Krokodil theory long and hard in the past, and in this case he really did believe and always had believed that the drug had somehow cultivated the zombie disease in people, as if creating fertile ground from which the virus could sprout.
When he’d said it all, he proceeded, and Rosemary felt the pressure of the knife’s blade against her skin again. The knife twisted sharply, opening up a flap of skin, and Mardu had done this as if he were turning a key in a lock, forcing the door open with unnecessary roughness.
Rosemary screamed and tears began a renewed assault down her cheeks. Then Acrisius’s face drew closer to hers, almost touching it, and she could smell his foul breath on her face, the odor of rotting teeth constantly poking its head out of the generalized stench. He was moving in to finish the job.
Brother Mardu moved backward, like he was trying to recede into the shadows. In fact, he was. He’d done his part and he didn’t want to be there anymore.
He’d felt the world shift with the cutting of Rosemary’s skin. One minute he’d been on top of the highest mountain again, and now the globe had turned and left him amiss, with no ground to stand on and plummeting downward lower and lower and...
If spotting could be compared to having a Spidey Sense, then Mardu’s Spidey Sense was tingling out of control right now, the shifting pins and needles somersaulting through his flesh and making it difficult to move, difficult to think, difficult to…to anything at all. It was practically all he could do not to start shooting web from his wrists. Something big was about to go down, but what?
He now had a very bad feeling about all of this, and wished that he’d run off yesterday. They should’ve moved off then and gone to the next settlement.
There wasn’t anything wrong with that. Fuck power. Survival came first. He’d had the power long enough, and now he realized that he’d held onto it too long, and there was no way he could let go of it gracefully anymore. Thinking on this, feeling the epic hurt and confusion welling up in him, he pulled the cowl of his robe over his head, then tugged its sides forward to cover the sides of his face.
“Do it already,” Brother Mardu blurted. He could now feel the panic sweat springing up on his cheeks and brow, on his neck, and at his armpits and the small of his back. Nausea came, and not of the regular kind. This was the sort that came when something real fucking big was about to happen. And big meant life-changing, and life-changing meant life-threatening.
The girl shrieked.
“Now!” Mardu yelled, almost choking on the word. “Now!”
Brother Acrisius advanced the gloved snarl of his hand toward the girl. In it was a piece of the Embodiment, tightly curled in the tangle of bony, barely controllable fingers.
Rosemary strained with all her remaining might against the ropes that bound her arms and legs. She screamed and tried to kick and snap at Acrisius’s disgusting face with her teeth. It had come to that. She wasn’t one to succumb without a fight, but she didn’t stand a chance, tied up as she was.
Brother Acrisius slapped her face with his good hand. The force of the blow turned her head sideways and stars of pain lit up a bright, nauseating green in her head. She slumped against her bonds.
“Hold still,” he said. “We’re almost done here.”
Clumsily, he pressed the morsel of zombie flesh against Rosemary’s open wound. He pushed again and again until the fingers unfurled and the Embodiment’s legacy was kissing the blood of the girl from New Crozet—born and raised.
The piece of flesh being pressed into her was like a crayon filling the outlines in the coloring books that she owned, the ones that Alan had given her. But that wasn’t right, because there were no more lines to be filled, and this crayon was rotten and full of the worst poison the world had ever seen. The semi-conscious Rosemary whimpered. Then the brave child didn’t so much surrender as she was taken, the stuffing pulled out of her and replaced with filler of the virus’s own making.
6
Senna woke. She was back in the cell, lying face down on the floor. The pain came alive, like a computer booting up, and it was hot, stinging, and everywhere.
She pushed herself up into a sitting position, moving slowly, then tested each of her limbs in turn, feeling out the extent of the damage the brothers had inflicted. The pain was chewing at her, but as far as she could tell, nothing was broken. And she was no longer tied up, which she thought odd.
Maybe they thought what they’d done was enough to immobilize her. Maybe they thought she was theirs now.
They’d beaten her to within twelve inches of her life, and that’s a whole foot away. And that was a right good distance for their sakes, because Brother Mardu had told them that if they killed her, they should do themselves next, and quickly, because if he got to them, he’d make the pain last.
He’d even suggested, in an off-color remark that had become rare for him of late, that they could take each other’s lives while in the throes of a final coitus of certainly not Old Testament variety, and that still assumed that one of them convincingly played the female. He’d even thought it necessary to add that Brother Saul could try putting on some women’s clothing for foreplay purposes, if they could find anything so large in the camp.
Coitus interruptus by death, not that they needed birth control, of course. What they needed, if you asked Brother Mardu at least, what the Order needed, was the exact opposite. They needed to grow, get larger, not self-select out of the gene pool like they were doing.
What the hell was in the post-outbreak water, Brother Mardu often wondered, or in the food, that was making everyone, at least his followers, voluntarily take themselves out of the breeding pool? If you asked Acrisius and Saul on the other hand, the last thing Acrisius wanted was another woman in their ranks, especially an outsider like Senna, who, it was clear to him, would be a troublemaker from the start.
Saul didn’t share Acrisius’s basic dislike for women, and he would’ve been okay with Senna coming on board, though he was always nervous about a possible new distraction for his master. Who knew when Acrisius’s tastes might turn, assuming they could, and Senna was just pretty enough to tempt someone into trying new things, though Saul suspected that Acrisius was—at least probably—beyond such fair-skinned lures.
What neither of them, nor, for that matter, anyone else in the Order could have expected, was that rather than weaken her resolve, the beating would strengthen it. Alan might have suspected such a thing, but that was because he knew what was in her soul.
She looked around, the turning of her head sending fresh starbursts of pain shooting through her neck, and that was a motivation, too, because she could keep this pain from the children. There was a way. It was just a matter of taking all the right forks in the road, in the correct sequence. The path was there, and now she had to choose it, and wisely.
Sasha and Jenny were there, sitting in the corner of the cell. Jenny, the fourteen year old, had Sasha’s head in her lap.
Senna bit back her rage.
They would be next to be turned. Or, how had Mardu put it? Given.
Sasha was whimpering while Jenny cried quietly and stroked the younger girl’s hair. They had scratches on them and their clothes were dirty and torn, but they appeared to be relatively unharmed. Jenny’s eyes met Senna’s, and shame colored the girl’s face.
I must look like hell, Senna thought.
There was an untouched bowl of gruel sitting by the cell entrance. In the mixture was a spot of something that looked like phlegm, and Senna didn’t doubt that was what it was. They were surrounded by demented sadists, who she didn’t doubt would get off from a gesture such as spitting into their prisoners’ food.
“Where’s Rosemary?” Senna asked.
Sasha shook her head.
“I don’t know,” Jenny said.
“When did you last see her?” Senna asked, her despair growing.
“When you were here,” Jenny said.
“We have to go,” Senna said, “now. How do you feel? Are you okay? Are you awake enough to move?”
The children nodded and got up. They did it as if there actually was a way out, as if they weren’t locked up in a cell.
They were blurry-eyed and drowsy, but the Sultan was starting to wear off. The Order was all out of his highness’s good graces for now.