by Gen Griffin
“No. It hasn't.” Gauge's hazel eyes were patient and kind. “Think this out, Pilar.”
“I've been thinking non-stop about all of this for months.”
Gauge held his hand up to me. “Think with a different perspective, then.”
“How?”
“Did you tell Bud Moon to take your parents from the Cube?”
“What?” I was baffled. “No. Absolutely not. I'd never even spoken to Bud Moon. Heck, I didn't even know it was possible to take people from the Cube.”
Gauge smiled thinly at me. “Because you were pretty much a nobody, right?”
“Right. Before my parents were taken, there was nothing special about me. I was downright boring. I worked every day in the hospital ward and spent most nights hanging out in our apartment with my parents.”
“And yet, Bud Moon took your folks to sell at the meat market.”
I nodded.
“You didn't cause that, did you?”
“No. But everything after...”
Gauge shushed me with a single hard look. “You didn't know that the Powers That Be wanted you dead, did you?”
“No. But I did speak out against them.”
“But that was after they took your parents. Not before.”
“So?”
“You reacted, Pilar. And when Drake offered to let you join the Scavengers, you joined them in good faith, right?”
“I don't know-.”
“You didn't actually think you would find your parents. You were planning on looking for them while you were outside the Cube doing your job. Your primary goal was to become a Scavenger. To gather cans. To do what you thought the Scavengers did.”
I nodded. “I was hoping to find some clues as to what had happened to my parents, but you're right. I was a Scavenger first.”
“And then Drake betrayed you.”
“Yes.”
“Did you betray him first?”
“What?” I shook my head so hard that my brain ached. “No. I didn't do anything against Drake. Ever, actually. I ran away from him when I realized what he was, but I never fought him. I never tried to hurt him. At least, not until Seth killed him.”
“Seth killed Drake because Drake asked him to. I remember. I was there. Those two had their own history and you were only a small part of that history. The bad blood between the Scavengers and the Church of Chaos was a hell of a lot older than your relationship with Seth.”
“My relationship with Seth.” I rolled the words over in my mouth. “I betrayed him.”
“Debatable,” Gauge said.
“I ran when I should have stayed to fight.”
“You ran because you were looking for your father. It may have been a dumb decision, but Seth knew that finding your Dad was your primary goal. Besides, fighting to escape didn't work out very well for any of us. We all got separated, Pilar. Liam died and Seth was taken by Bud's zombies. There's no guarantee that staying with us would have kept you safe. In fact, you might have been killed. In a lot of ways, I think you fared better on your own than we did as a group.”
“I got bitten by a zombie.”
“So did I.”
He had a point.
I swallowed the excess saliva that seemed to keep accumulating in my mouth. “I've never been able to make myself trust him.”
“Seth, you mean?” Gauge didn't look remotely surprised.
I nodded and tried to explain. “I should trust him. He's been good to me. He's taken care of me. He's kept me safe. He's rescued me when I needed to be rescued. He's-.”
“Displayed a stunning lack of morals,” Gauge cut in. “He plays entirely by his own rules. You'd have been an idiot to put your full trust in Seth.”
I blinked at him. “You put your trust in Seth.”
“Pilar, you're beating yourself up. My situation was a hell of a lot different than yours. I grew up knowing about the Meat Market, the flesh brokers and that the Cube was really nothing more than a farm that supplied the city with uninfected human meat. I know that the king of Ra Shet is a bad guy, but that he's the lesser evil when compared to the Powers That Be.”
“But-.”
“Shush and listen. I'm really not feeling too great and this may be the last chance we have to have this talk.” Gauge smiled faintly at me.
“Don't say that.”
“Have to. My chest feels like it's on fire and its getting progressively harder to breathe.”
Truth be told, I was starting to feel the same way but I didn't want to admit it. Acknowledging the pain that was burning through my bones would make it real. I was either dying or turning into a zombie.
“Maybe we shouldn't talk,” I whispered.
“Come here.” Gauge gestured for me to go to him. I stood and nearly fell. My legs had lost almost all feeling without me even noticing. Terror gripped me, but I fought it back and focused on moving my feet. I could still move my legs, if I tried hard enough. I crossed the room with shaky steps. Gauge caught me by the waist and pulled me onto the thick, padded arm of the chair he was sitting in. His skin was as cold as ice against mine.
“You're freezing,” I said.
“And yet, I'm sweating. I feel like I'm burning up.” Gauge frowned at his own arm and then let out a deep breath. “What I want to say to you, Pi, is that you didn't understand any of the situations you walked into when you left the Cube. I knew what the Church of Chaos was long before I actually met Seth. Sure, he plays the boogeyman well, but he's also responsible for significantly reducing the number of human beings sold for their flesh in the meat market. He likes to frighten people, but his actions aren't normally the actions of a monster.”
“I-.”
Gauge shushed me by putting his finger across my lips. “You didn't know anything about him other than what he presented you with. He played the monster for you and you bought his act, because you had nothing else to judge him by. Don't blame yourself for not trusting him. He didn't give you any reason to.”
“He saved me.”
“And then he hurt you by executing your mother,” Gauge said.
I hesitated and then nodded to acknowledge that he was right. “You're right. I might understand why Seth did what he did. I might even agree that he made the right choice, but he shattered the part of me that felt I could trust his decisions without question.”
“I almost respect him more for it,” Gauge said softly.
“What?” My hands were going numb now.
“He could have taken the cowards way out, Pilar. He could have left her to suffer. He could have asked me to kill her so that you wouldn't blame him. He could have skirted the blame and avoided your anger, but he didn't. He took action and he took responsibility, even knowing that it made you hate him.”
“I don't hate him. I can't hate him. Whatever the truth is about his prophecies and the Church and who is or isn't supposed to be the High Priest and High Priestess, there's something in my blood that seems to tie me to him.” I blinked tears back from my eyes. “I'm tired, Gauge. Like, really tired. Like I can't keep my eyes open.”
Gauge used the arm he had around my waist to pull me closer to him. “Close your eyes, Pilar. Go sleep. When you wake up, this will all be over. One way or another.”
I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to say that, if this really was the last night of my life, the last thing I wanted to do was quietly go to sleep. I should be fighting. Fighting to stay awake. Fighting to make my numb, painful limbs obey me. Fighting to stay human even as the zombie virus bled its way through my veins.
I meant to tell Gauge that I was going to fight, but my eyes closed against my will and the last thing I felt was my cheek pressing against his shoulder as I lost consciousness.
Chapter 16
My hands were on fire and yet so cold that I felt like they might shatter with a touch. My fingernails fell out and then grew back, crawling out of my skin like little knives. My skin cracked and bled and then cracked some more. I could feel nothing and
yet everything was painful. The air on my skin made me scream and cry. I wept for hours, maybe days, and my tears were blood. The world spun around me, once, twice and disappeared completely.
I was alone in the void. Hurt, scared, huddled against the sound of thunder shaking walls I could not see. I wanted my Mommy. I screamed for her but she didn't come. I begged for my Daddy. The void stayed silent.
I called out for Seth and there was only blackness.
My feet fell off the ends of my legs, leaving me with stubs where my ankles had once been. I couldn't walk on them. I was immobile. I was trapped. I was raw, and bleeding and screaming. The pain was too much to bear.
My body was burning. I could see the flames rippling just underneath my skin. I clawed my arms open with my fingernails just to let that fire out. Maybe if it left my body, it wouldn't hurt so bad.
I burned and burned until I turned to ash. Unlike the phoenix, I wasn't reborn. I tried to move my arm and my hand fell off. It dissolved into the air and flew away. I tried to scream and my lips blew away.
Finally I died. I was so grateful for death.
Or maybe not.
I woke up cold, shivering on a hardwood floor. My fingernails were ripped and torn. I'd clawed divots into the floor. My head felt like it should have been throbbing, but oddly enough, it wasn't. In fact, I felt calm. Incredibly calm. Almost peaceful. It would be easy to go back to sleep. Comfortable. Warm and safe.
I was safe. I felt fine. For the first time in months, nothing hurt. My hands should have hurt. I'd damaged my fingernails badly enough that the nail beds and fingertips should have been sore and painful when I flexed my hands.
I was cold, but it didn't really bother me. I could see goosebumps on my arms, but I couldn't remember why I should care.
Something big moved on my right. I could just barely see its shadow with my peripheral vision. It took an amazing amount of effort to lift my head, but I found that I could lift my head. In fact, I could sit up. It didn't even hurt.
I turned to face the only other occupant of the room.
Gauge was kneeling on the hardwood floor next to a fire he'd stoked in the ancient fire place. His broad shoulders were thick with healthy muscle, but his skin was just a hair too pale. His dirty blonde had changed colors in the night. It was so blonde that it was nearly white now. His eyes stood out starkly against his skin. Their color was a deep, deep gold that I'd never seen before.
“Your eyes changed colors.” I barely recognized my own voice.
“So did yours,” he replied. A slow smile crept across his face and the worried look in his eyes faded slightly.
“Really?” I frowned at that.
Gauge stood up, stretching slowly. He moved as if he thought that moving too fast might be painful. He picked up a small glass square and carried it to me. He placed it into my hands. It was a mirror.
I stared into the glass, unsure of what I would see. The girl in the mirror was staring back at me through the bright yellow eyes of a cat. My eyelashes seemed to be miles long. My face was thinner than I recalled it being. My cheekbones higher and my chin smaller. My hair had grown by more than a foot in length. It hung all the way down my back in ringlet curls that I could never have tamed it into before. It had also changed colors, though not as noticeably as Gauge's had. The red undertones had simply been brought more to the surface. It now appeared to be a true auburn rather than a muddy, brassy brown. It all would have been very nice, if I hadn't had a strange scar-like wound running on a parallel to my right cheekbone. I vaguely recalled getting the cut in the incinerator chute. It had healed. Sort of. It looked just like the zombified wounds that marred Seth's face and torso. “Oh,” I breathed. “Shit. I'm a zombie.”
Gauge smiled then. It was wicked smile, full of power and promise. “We lived, Pi.”
“Yes, but we're zombies?” I traced the wound on my face and then looked down. The shoulder the zombie had bitten into was scarred the same way my face was.
“I don't know. Maybe.” He shrugged. His shoulders were even bigger than they had been before. He'd grown, physically. A big man before the zombie bite, Gauge now towered over me by more than a foot. He had several of the scarred wounds crossing his back, as if he'd been clawed by one of the zombies. His chest was bare and whole, the shreds of the shirt he had been wearing were barely hanging on.
And speaking of clothes, I was suddenly very much aware of why I was so cold. “Where are my clothes?”
“You tore them off,” Gauge explained. “You were screaming that you were burning and you ripped them off. It was all I could do to keep you from clawing your own veins out with your fingernails.”
“Hmph.” I glanced down at my bare arms. I'd scratched them, but not too badly. They were wounded but not scarred by the wounds. “Do we have any other clothes?”
“There's a bedroom through that door.” Gauge pointed towards the rear of the cabin. “None of the clothes fit me, but you might be able to find something.”
I swallowed and then nodded. I still wasn't entirely sure if I would be able to stand up, but I decided to try. Naked on the floor in front of Gauge just wasn't a look that was going to be comfortable long-term.
My legs were surprisingly steady underneath me as I stood. I'd expected to have trouble with my balance, but I felt pretty agile as I began to make my way across the cabin and into the bedroom Gauge had directed me to. I wasn't dead. I wasn't mindless. I didn't appear to be rotting.
I glanced down at my own body again, unsure about that last realization. I didn't have any large, gnarly infected or decaying wounds. None. “I'm not rotting.”
“Neither one of us is,” Gauge acknowledged. “My cross even healed.” He held up the arm that he'd carved the Church of Chaos's cross into. The scar was thick, knotted and impossibly healed.
I opened my mouth and closed it again. I needed to get to a real mirror. I walked into the bedroom and found that the closet doors had a mirror hanging from them.
My reflection was me, and yet, it wasn't. I had several more of the scarred wounds from where I had been injured. One on my back. One on my knee. Nothing major. Nothing oozing pus or bleeding. Truth be told, I felt better than I had in months. Maybe years.
“Gauge?” I called out for him even though I was still naked.
“Hmm?” He came into the room behind me, as if he'd been waiting for me to call him.
“Why aren't we rotting?” I asked.
He hesitated and then joined me in front of the mirror. He'd been decent looking before, but not handsome. He was almost handsome now. Vera was going to be ecstatic.
“Survival of the fittest?” He suggested.
I wrinkled my nose at him. “I'm being serious, the least you could do is try to answer honestly.”
“I'm not sure I have a good answer.”
“Then guess,” I told him. “I saw Drake, my mother and the zombies inside the Cube. They were rotting. They were decaying. We're not.”
“Not yet anyways.”
“Are we Changed?” I gestured to my shoulder where the original zombie bite had been. The skin was damaged but whole. It was difficult for me to grasp the idea of being wounded and yet not really injured. I could see bone and muscle through my skin, but it didn't hurt and I wasn't bleeding. “Being Changed isn't supposed to change your eye color or hair color, is it?”
Gauge smiled then. It was a good smile. Warm, almost cheerful. “We were already infected with the old zombie virus when we were bitten by zombies carrying Bud's modified virus. I'm not going to say the two canceled one another out, because clearly they didn't, but I do think that they combined somehow. Maybe evolved is a better word.”
I thought his suggestion over for a minute. “That would make sense, except I wasn't contaminated with the old zombie virus. I'm from the Cube. I spent 15 years eating canned food.”
A strange and slightly guilty expression rolled through Gauge's eyes. He covered it quickly with a blink, but not quickly enough.
“What?” I demanded. “I've never eaten zombie meat. I'm not one of the Changed.”
“Ah, well, about that.” Gauge chewed on the inside of his cheek, clearly searching for the right words.
“Gauge, whatever you're thinking, tell me.”
He had a small smile on his face as he met my eyes dead on. “Seth tricked you.”
“What?!”
“He said you'd never agree to becoming Changed if you knew what it really entailed. That's why he wouldn't talk to you about it.”
“Okay, but?”
“He fed you zombie meat and didn't tell you what it was.”
I was momentarily stunned speechless.
Gauge held out one hand to me. “He had the best of intentions, Pilar. He was trying to protect you.”
“That bastard. That lying, manipulative bastard. I'm going to kill him.” I put my hands on my hips.
“If it makes you feel any better, he probably saved your life.”
“He intentionally infected me with the zombie virus!”
“If you hadn't already been infected, I think the zombie bite really would have killed you,” Gauge said. “You were sick a lot longer than I was. I was really afraid you were going to die. It took you a long damn time to come around.”
I hesitated. I wanted to stay angry but the fear that flickered in Gauge's eyes was real. He'd thought I was going to die. “How long was I...changing?”
“Three days,” he said. “Best I can tell anyways. I was out for about a day and a half myself. Judging by where the sun was in the sky and how much of the rain had dried up. For all I know, it could have been a month.”
“Oh.” I didn't know what to say to that.
“The real question is how do you feel?” Gauge looked down at me with a mixture of worry and pride.
“I feel fine,” I said. “Good as ever. Maybe better. You?”
“Never felt better in my life,” he admitted. “It's almost scary.”
“It's more than almost scary. It is scary.” I was pretty sure that I wasn't the only one who remember Drake talking about feeling invincible before he had started to rot. “We could still rot. We don't know if we'll stay healthy.”