by James, Guy
There wasn’t supposed to be any handle there. No, he was pretty sure there wasn’t.
Raindrops fell and gathered on it, dripping off and running down his clothes. Blood cells were beginning to have a meeting at the tear in his shirt where the blade had gone in. What was the meeting about? A promotion, a hiring or firing, or was it a restructuring? Liquidation and bankruptcy, perhaps? Whatever it was, Alan would concern himself with that later.
Right now, he took the handle firmly with both hands, and pulled. The pain was indescribable, and he had no desire to try to describe it, he wanted to share it, with Saul, so he’d know what it felt like. So he’d know and feel it too.
You never know until you try it, isn’t that what they said…isn’t that how Brother Mardu had peddled horse, heroin, the big H, in his former life? That drug that was Krok’s no-one-knew-how-great-grandfather. Mardu had been there when New York was the hub of the surging heroin trade, when the drug flowed like sewer water through the streets, and he’d taken a dip or two here and there, but mostly he’d just directed the current so it reached every reachable human crevice.
The knife moved swiftly like a man trying to get through the closing doors of a commuter train during rush hour.
Stand clear of the closing doors please.
He was dashing, his suitcase flopping behind him, tethered to the larger mass by no more than a floppy arm.
The next stop will be DeKalb Avenue.
The man made it, jostle two other commuters though he did, and his suitcase was only nipped by the rubber door seals of the train. He’d make it to DeKalb Avenue on time after all. There was still a transfer or two after that, but that was for later worrying.
This time, the blade did more damage, burying itself in Saul’s sternum and piercing his heart. A shocked breath floated from his lips, and he sat down in the mud.
His enormous hands went to the knife. He knew, no, he could feel that if he moved it, he’d die at once.
Taking the knife out would be like pulling out the bottom floor of a house of cards, made up entirely of hearts, and doing it too slowly for the structure to stay in place. The bleeding inside him would hasten, and it would be curtains. Like this, with it in place, he could have a few more moments in this world, and with this man who’d taken him out of it.
He tried to ask where again, but his voice had left him. He’d just been about to stand and drag the intruder to his feet. But then the knife had come, and fast.
The rain was now falling into his open mouth. Calling on the fading light of his eyes, Saul looked at Alan’s cheek, where the broken side of his face was sagging unhappily.
Saul squinted and drew his eyes into even sharper focus—he’d always had eagle eyes, and now he would take in the last sights of his life in perfect, almost otherworldly clarity. His gaze drifted, guided gently by his slowing brain, until it was set on Alan’s eyes.
His attention began to go back and forth between Alan’s eyes and skin, moving in stops and starts, back and forth, back and forth, and, as the rain pounded away, growing quieter and quieter, he saw something that he’d never seen before, although it wasn’t quite seeing, not really.
It was a combination of what all his senses were taking in, and as he inhaled Alan’s scent, he was filled with a sadness that was as happy as it was morose, like a wound flirting with infection but caked in the antibiotics of optimism; it would leave a scar to be remembered by, but the body would heal and live.
Tears quickly bloomed in Saul’s eyes and sprang outward into the night, joining the rain and rolling down his mud-caked face to blaze the faintest of trails in the thick coat of dirt that he was now wearing as a mask.
How could a man of such stature, clearly with above average strength but wiry and small-muscled, project such formidable power? How could he have done what he’d just done?
Saul didn’t know. He’d never encountered anyone like this before, and, of course, it was unlikely that in his scant time left on Earth, he ever would again.
As he faded, Alan’s eyes were burning through him, and setting flames to things hidden away in his mind, to beliefs that had sat moldering but stolid for many years, like moth-ridden sweaters that were too thick to give up their frames to the flitting critters.
In the mud with this seemingly ordinary settlement dweller, Saul found himself questioning his path in life, his devotion to Brother Acrisius, his past deeds, his faith in the virus, and in God—if God was in fact separate from the virus.
The thin man whose face he’d broken was more than an ordinary man. He was the purveyor of something that to Saul felt supernatural.
But perhaps all dying men felt this way if they were lucid in their final moments. Perhaps everything was called into doubt, into question, and half-forgotten regrets were relived.
Alan got up, using Saul’s shoulder to balance himself, not quite standing on the shoulders of this dying giant, but leaning on them. He should’ve kept his hands to himself to be safe, and an Alan who’d lost less blood would have, but rationality was in short supply, and, in this case, there was no penalty for the risk taken. Saul didn’t grab at him, but only stared as Alan went off.
When the pressure of Alan’s weight was gone, Saul Byron Jeffries II felt truly alone for the first time in his life. Unable to move and examining this lonely feeling that was curling up beside him, he lay in the mud and watched, his eyes turned upward to the limit and the expression on his face just a tad uncertain, if involuntarily so, as Alan disappeared behind him, moving deeper into the Order’s campground, leaving a trail not of breadcrumbs but of the red wine of his body, which was flowing from his gored belly. The wine had been aged just shy of forty-two years, and the mud liked that very much indeed.
14
Senna stepped out of the butchering truck and into the pouring rain, pulling the children along with her. Trembling and wide-eyed, Sasha and Jenny were gripping Senna’s hands firmly. They were young, much too young for this, but they were alive, and Senna hoped that their survival instincts would push them to work past the fear, and if their instincts weren’t enough, Senna resolved, she would do the pushing.
The nightcaps she’d taken with the Sultan were still tugging her into sleep, but after killing Rad, their pull didn’t have quite the previous effect. Nothing like killing a half-cannibalized youngster to give you a hard slap of sobriety.
The Sultan didn’t just want her, however. He wanted for all of them to sleep, and he would take all of the world down into dreamless slumber if he could only have his way.
Come with me, he’d say, into the snuggled sleep of the numb and the dead, into the cushioned world inside the Sultan’s palace. There’s no pain there, because there are no senses with which to feel anything, and there are no broken dreams, because there aren’t any dreams at all.
There’s only slumber and the ecstasy of mothballed stillness.
Come with us. Leave your world of disappointments behind.
The Sultan’s sucking vortex wanted her, and damn wasn’t it good to be wanted?
Opening her eyes wider and focusing on the feeling of the cold rain on her skin, Senna shook the Sufentanil mist from her, if only temporarily.
Only a short distance away but obscured by the rain and dark, Saul was living out his final moments. He was enjoying watching the rain pelt the ground, leaving indentations in the earth that weren’t able to recover before being struck again and again by the rainwater’s endless barrage.
A small moving something entered his field of vision. It was scurrying along and pausing, then starting up in its fitful movements again, then stopping once more. About a decade ago, just before the virus jumped from humans to the rest of the mammals, it had been a squirrel nearing the end of its nut-burying and not-remembering-where-said-nuts-were-buried days. It had been taken on as an agent of the virus then, and had been denied the completion of its cycle, which its increasingly arthritic body had begun to crave.
Saul stared at it, unblinking
, at the bones peeking through the scant remains of flesh, and into one eyehole that was empty, and another that was closed by dirt and a torn flap of squirrel lid. He reached with a hand that was made of ice. Though he could feel no movement or sensation in it besides a deepening coldness, he found that his hand was now moving in front of his face.
It was awkward, as if the hand and its dangling fingers were a marionette with most of its wires missing, but he kept guiding it along as he could.
There was one more cold planing. The virus had graded the human world, and now he sensed that the virus itself had to be filed down and out of existence for the new road to be built.
His fingers found the squirrel’s tail just as it turned and went for him, its mouth agape and displaying black fragments of teeth. He twisted his forearm, and, with the tail between his fingers, flipped the squirrel on its back.
He moved his hand again, and his fingers caught the back of the squirrel’s head. He made a vice with his thumb and forefinger, and, with the fading traces of his focus, clamped it shut, and, pop goes the weasel, or more precisely, its skull.
The squirrel’s brain case collapsed in on itself, and there really was a pop that had a lot of poof to it, like an exhalation of stagnant air from a tiny balloon. Saul’s fingers unfurled, a rodent leg twitched once, and some shriveled rodent brain oozed briefly from one small ear, and then man and rodent were lying still in the mud, riddled by rain in their first moments of rest.
The water’s pestering wouldn’t wake either of them, and that was okay. The giant had finally given the squirrel the release for which it had once, in a time long forgotten by its squirrel brain, yearned.
15
Moments before Saul granted the squirrel its long-awaited exit, Jenny and Sasha turned their faces skyward and let the rainwater fill their parched mouths.
There was that to be thankful for. And the downpour was thick enough to give them good cover.
So we’d better leave now, Senna thought, before it lets up.
New Crozet’s best spotter gave the children one more hopeless look. They knew nothing about where Rosemary was, that much they’d made clear.
If she kept looking for Rosemary, she would now be risking not only her life, but the lives of Sasha and Jenny. She’d once had good instincts about this sort of thing, and if it weren’t for the Sultan banging around dully in her veins, she thought that perhaps she’d know what to do. But that was just a thought, and maybe she still wouldn’t.
This wasn’t like sensing zombies and commanding the rec-crew to stop while the threat passed. This was weighing lives of children against one another, an impossible task that was no less heart-rending for the sober knowledge that it was something that couldn’t be done in the first place.
Just push forward, Senna told herself. But what the fuck did that even mean here?
She let her tongue slide out over her lips and take in some of the rainwater that was running down her face. It was hard to take it in at first, but after several sandpaper-like swallows, the tension in her throat eased, and the water helped.
There was still a chance she’d find Rosemary, but if it didn’t happen very, very soon, she would take the birds in hand and cash out. So what if that was a decision that would haunt her for the rest of her life? All of this experience would, and this particular fork in the road, regardless of which direction she picked, would only be a curlicue at the horrific calligraphy’s edge.
A movement on the ground caught Sasha’s eye.
It looked like the mud itself had formed into some small crawling thing and was moving itself in spurts toward them. She half-yelped and clapped a hand to her mouth.
Senna was already moving, having heard the girl’s stifled cry. She stepped in front of Sasha, putting herself between the child and the mud creature, which, even if the mud weren’t covering the broken zombie chipmunk, Sasha would have no reference point for identifying.
The girl had never been outside New Crozet, and she’d never paid much attention to the picture books with the animals in them, preferring Faith Crabtree’s drawings to everything else. Briefly, the image of the toy crocodile came to her, and she thought that maybe it was a wriggling come-to-life toy that she was looking at, but that didn’t seem right, and where had the toy gone, anyway?
Maybe Jack still had it…
Oh my God…Jack!
Her mind reeled as the memory of his turn broke the surface of her current fright. She began to lose her balance, the world around her growing dark with grief. She fell backward, not seeing Senna stab the mud creature through its skull, and then she was lifted to her feet…but by whom?
“Sasha,” Senna said, “come on. You have to walk. Now.”
Sasha was up on her feet again following Senna. Faith Crabtree’s drawing of the bridge fluttered in her memory, and she turned upward to drink some more of the rain while Senna led her along. They were coming to the middle of the bridge, Sasha knew, just past the middle, actually, where it disappeared from sight. They were about to walk through the looking glass. There were just a few more moments to be spent here and then they’d be on the other side, seeing whatever was to be seen there.
Okay, Senna thought, they had some water in their systems now, and the Sultan’s veil had lifted slightly—no, not really lifted, but become more transparent, and that was better than nothing.
Then Senna saw her, the girl she’d helped raise and train to live and survive, the girl she’d hoped would one day grow into a woman with love and kindness in her heart. That wasn’t to be.
Senna bolted, tearing up the mud, Brother Mardu framed in her glare of death. She’d half-forgotten that Sasha and Jenny were there, depending on her to lead them back to New Crozet. It was useless, of course, a pathetic display of her helplessness.
Rosemary was already dead, and worse, she was a zombie. Mardu was leading her toward the place where they’d set Jack, or what had once been Jack, loose into the forest. Her arms were bound behind her back and Brother Mardu was holding a leather bag over her head to keep himself from being bitten.
She was struggling, a fully active zombie, but Mardu had a way of keeping her at arms-length and under control while he guided her toward the edge of the camp. He did have a way with those who’d turned. He was a better spotter than Senna, she could see that.
There was something else about him too, in the way he was moving with Rosemary and in the way that he’d moved when he was leading Jack out. It was as if he really could commune with the virus, as if he could talk to it and keep it from attacking him, because he was its servant.
Senna came to her senses and tried to stop, but she was moving too fast and began to slide. Brother Mardu would hear her, and then all would be lost. This wasn’t the time to confront him, not now. She bailed sideways, fell on her side in the mud, sprang to her feet, and reversed course.
Just as she turned, Mardu whirled, for he’d sensed her, and then he saw her through the storm’s black rain clear as if it were the brightest, most cloudless of days. He saw her, and the two young girls, and in a moment, when he was done leading the zombie Rosemary out of the camp into the woods where she was to play for what was left of eternity, he’d go into the worship truck and gather those still loyal to him, and he would go after Senna and her little ones.
This time, if Senna refused him, she would die. And the girls would become his, and those who were no longer on his side—his senses had clarified beyond belief in the moments that followed Rosemary’s turn—he knew exactly who they were and he was going to root all of them out tonight. No longer would they be allowed to bide their time in his presence. He could taste the blood in his mouth already, and the pixie, who was leaning over and lapping at the blood collecting on his lips, wanted more.
She craved murder, and tonight he would tend to this hankering, he’d make fucking sure of that. The only true love of his life had come back to him, and now it was only her guiding his path. But first, she reminded him as she bit playful
ly at his upper lip, put Rosemary into the woods…for me…I want to play with her, through her, but outside…in the forest.
While Mardu was still trying to regain the favor of his god, Senna took the children’s cold and trembling hands with her own muddy ones, and led them quickly to the edge of the camp, away from the brothers and sisters of the Order. As she pulled them after her, the rain pelted her face with great globs of cold that seemed thicker than rain had any right to be, and she sensed something that she’d never sensed before.
She couldn’t tell the quality of it—if it was good or bad or dangerous—but it felt like she was approaching the end of a cliff and there was no way to get off the ride. She would have to jump, and take Jenny and Sasha with her.
From this angle, there was no way to tell how far they would fall, but it didn’t matter. It could be five feet or five thousand, and Senna would make sure she was the one to take the impact. It was their only chance. And she was right, because anyone who was still in the camp in two minutes was going to wish they were anywhere else in the world.
16
The world spun around Alan like a top filled with trees and darkness and falling water, lit only by the meager lights escaping from the trucks in the campsite, their dim emissions rotating around him at the speed of encroaching madness.
Or was it an ornamental globe in which he found himself? If so, who’d shaken it? And if someone had taken it and moved it up and down rapidly enough to cause everything inside to move as erratically as it was now moving, why was Alan still standing on the ground, as if glued to it?
What was the glue? Was it blood, dirt, a blood-dirt mixture, or the decaying, severed root of a plant, or of many plants, which had found something new—his weary legs—to tie to the surface of the forest while the rest of the landscape quavered?
Glue fraught with decay, he thought, crumbling in the rain, coming undone.