“Sixty-five percent,” the voice corrected. “Slightly more than that, but I am rounding down in deference to your deteriorated intellect.”
William was shaking his head. “What happened to you?”
“I won. I took control of this city and brought order to it.”
“This isn’t order. We wanted to make the city safe. You’ve turned it into a petri dish.”
One of the six Eyes dropped down a dozen feet to hover between the two Hands. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Too weak to stay and fight. Too weak to do anything but run from me.”
William sighed, his shoulders sagging. “I didn’t run because I was weak, Lincoln. I ran because I was getting stronger. I didn’t want to kill you.”
Several of the Eyes settled into a semi-circle behind William.
“And now you can run again,” said Legion. “Go waste what little life you have remaining. You have six hours to reach the border. After that, you will see just what my monstrosities are capable of.”
“I’m not leaving without—”
Crouched far behind the old man, forgotten by everyone involved, CJ was the only one who saw it coming. “William, look out!”
The old man ducked to the side, but the Eye behind him had already fired. The single shot struck him in the shoulder instead of dead-center, but even that was enough to toss him face first to the ground. He clutched that wounded arm, his muttered words too low to be heard.
It didn’t matter whether those words were curses or prayers. Cornelius James knew it was already over. In the pre-Break days, bullets had supposedly been simple projectiles. They traveled through you or ricocheted off a bone inside of you, and that was all.
Automatons weren’t the only things Lord Legion had improved upon.
From its point of impact, the bullet wound spread outward, like fire eating through paper, going from a pinprick to a hole the size of CJ’s thumb in the span of a second. The leader of Pod 7 had died to a bullet just like that; a single shot that devoured his entire body before he could take three steps. William had a second or two at most before it ate through his arm, a handful of additional seconds before…
CJ frowned. Impossibly, the wound had stopped spreading, leaving little more than a small hole through the old man’s shoulder. Even more astonishingly, William was moving.
It wasn’t until William lifted his head off of the street that CJ realized one last thing. The old man wasn’t cursing and he wasn’t praying.
He was singing.
CHAPTER 12
Years later, when asked to tell the story of the Singer’s song, Cornelius James would fall back on a half-dozen well-worn adjectives; mournful, distant, and overpowering. He’d say the song sounded like it came from the sky and the earth at the same time, that the trees wove their melody and the stars sang with the old man as one universe gave way to another. He would weave his tale for the children, his own and others, and when he sent them away afterward, every one of them would be wide-eyed and excited, thrilled to again hear the story of the last day of Old Baltimore.
None of them would know that every word he’d told them was a lie.
The truth was CJ couldn’t remember the song. He could remember the dry rasp of William’s voice, could remember the first deep notes that echoed through the air… but every moment after that was a still-frame in his mind, a slice of memory loosely connected to that which came before and that which came after.
The six Eyes spewed forth bullets and fire issued from the open mouth of the first Hand but nothing reached the old man, standing in the center of his song. Bullets passed through the song and simply disappeared. White-hot flames went colorless, then translucent, before finally fading entirely. Even the wind stopped tugging at William’s old and worn clothing.
His song swelled around him like an expanding bubble of music, reaching upwards, reaching outwards. The widening perimeter caught the nearest Eye, and just like the bullets it had fired, that Eye shimmered and faded and then was gone entirely. The other Eyes followed, and then William was stepping forward, and the Hands were moving ponderously, seeking to move aside even as they brought their heavy weaponry to bear.
The song grew, and both Hands were gone like they had never existed.
The portcullis slammed down to the asphalt, but the sound of its impact was lost in the song like everything else. William paused at the gate and looked back over at CJ, and for one moment, his song was a quiet murmur; a lullaby from a universe only one person had ever seen. The old man’s eyes were empty scars of shadow, his mouth moving in ways biology didn’t allow, his face a bleak tapestry of endless desolation.
Somewhere beneath his fear, beneath the song that warped the world around them like a black wind tearing through the trees, Cornelius James found the courage to meet those mad, sad eyes, to look into a face that bore no resemblance to his wrinkled friend’s, and nod.
William returned the nod, and turned back to the gate.
The song rose in volume again.
The gate fell away, taking pieces of wall with it.
Still singing, the old man disappeared into the castle.
•—•—•
With William gone into the castle, CJ felt exposed standing in front of the gate that no longer was. He retreated to one of the shining steel and glass houses across the street, and found a doorway to hide in.
All around him, Old Baltimore rose to defend its master.
Dozens of Hands rolled, ran, or oozed down every street toward the castle, trailed by the merely human guards whose faces had gone white with fear and confusion. Eyes abandoned their unsleeping watch on the city's border to streak through the air or along the rooftops. They filled the sky like ten thousand ravens, each successive wave dropping down into the castle’s unseen courtyard, firing a vast assortment of weaponry as they did.
William had been gone for twenty minutes and they were still coming, a horde that far outnumbered the entire city's human population.
CJ didn’t go into the castle. He stayed behind and quiet, like William had instructed. Because of that, he couldn’t say for sure how long the old man searched, or where he went, or even what words were said, if any, when the brothers finally met, face to face. He couldn’t even say what Lord Legion looked like, in the end, although he always made up something suitably grotesque for the little ones.
The only thing Cornelius James knew for sure was when it ended.
The first sign was the Hands grinding to a halt in mid-stride. Immediately after, Eyes began to rain from the sky, dropping like hail stones of flesh and metal as their rotors suddenly ceased to spin. Within seconds, the street was full of the broken shells of automatons. Within a minute, the only sounds were CJ’s own breathing, and, too far away to hear, yet too close not to feel, William’s song.
Then the song itself went quiet.
It was another forty minutes before William appeared at the gate. His cane was gone, and his good hand was wrapped around the shoulders of a young woman whose arms and legs were too long for her pod’s springtime uniform, whose hair was, for once, free of its braids, spreading outward like a cloud around her head.
“Samara!”
CJ was ten feet away when his feet slowed of their own accord. He studied William’s face, looking for the true face of the Singer, but found only wrinkles, warm brown eyes, and a mouth twisted into a smile almost too sad to hold its shape.
On seeing that smile, CJ rushed forward to hug them both. “Is she okay?”
“She’s tired,” answered William.
“But alive,” came Samara’s own voice, faint but firm.
“And you?” he asked the old man.
“The same, I guess.”
“Are you still going away, after all of this?”
This time, William’s smile had a trace of genuine warmth. “No, Cornelius James. I plan to stay.”
EPILOGUE
Twenty-seven months later, the people of New Baltimore met for a funeral.
Members from every remaining pod gathered to say goodbye to William Green, a man who had saved the city, doomed it, and then, forty years later, saved it one last time before succumbing to the brain tumor that had brought him home.
The members of the newly-formed council led the eulogy. Samara was the last to speak. She told the crowd a story most of them had already heard, how she and CJ had first met William on the Hill. She told them of the vision the old man had once had for their city, a vision that their collective efforts were slowly transforming into reality. She’d finished with a quote from one of the philosophy books she’d studied with William. At the very end, she looked for CJ, to see if he had anything to add.
Though there were few things he liked better than looking at and listening to Sammie, Cornelius James wasn’t in the crowd. In fact, he wasn't at the funeral at all. He was almost a mile away, lying flat on his back on the roof of a decrepit old library, hands clasped behind his head. He was looking upward, past wisps of clouds disappearing into darkness, to a night sky slowly revealing itself. He was watching for the distant, dancing stars, and looking for the few… the very few… who long ago had learned to sing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris began life as a gleam in someone’s eye, but birth and childhood were quick to follow. He’s been fortunate enough to live in Spain, Germany, and all over the United States of America, and is busy planning a tour of the distilleries of Scotland.
A graduate of The Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars program, he put that degree to ill use for twenty years as a software engineer, but has finally circled back around to the idea of writing for a living.
Chris currently lives in Nevada with his angelic wife and ever-expanding whisky collection and occasionally ventures outside to peer upwards, mutter to himself about ‘day stars’, and then scurry back into the house.
The Stars That Sing is one of several short stories set in the same world as his post-apocalyptic superhero trilogy, The Murder of Crows. Chris frequently shares new content on his author website at christullbane.com.
Stories From A Post-Break World | Book 1 | The Stars That Sing Page 5