I hopped in the little minivan I’d found a few days earlier and started for St. Cloud a handful of miles to the north. The warn-down vehicle handled the many inches of snow on the ground very kindly. If only the drive were longer, maybe I would have had time to rethink the venture of chaos I was about to undertake. It would have benefited me and possibly the world if I had.
The pub was dark, scary, and hardly recognizable as a pub anymore. It now seemed nothing more than an establishment buried between five or six other establishments on the same row, only with a bar in its structure and no people around to enjoy it. Ghost towns would cringe at its sight.
I walked to a very dusty, very broken table toward the rear of the pub. The only light in the building came from a street lamp outside—why that one power pole still had electricity after twenty years of abandonment would remain a tedious mystery. I sat upright on the rickety wooden chair at the table without touching the pistol currently in my pocket.
My tension was already at its peak. Nothing of the coming moments would be good. Not a goddamn thing. My best friend, my companion who I’d shared everything with and vice versa, was going to die at my hands. Every inch of my body trembled and ached in anticipation of the creature I prepped inside. I cried a little, then borrowed down in gumption, and cried once more. The cycle would go this way for another twenty minutes.
I saw headlights approaching from outside. All common sense told me it would have to be Gene, as this part of St. Cloud hadn’t seemed occupied by a soul in a decade at best. The car stopped and quickly exiting its driver-side door was Gene, his face embraced with a smile. Why did he have to smile?
“Wallace?” his voice echoed through the empty pub as he came through the door. “You here?”
I’m right here, Gene. And I’m going to shoot you before your kindness toward me makes me back out of it. No, I said nothing. I was stone in fear and preemptive sorrow.
“He’s not here,” Gene whispered. He turned and began to walk out the door.
“Over here,” I feebly muttered from the darkened table before he could reach the door. “I’m in this direction Gene.” I put my hand on the gun.
“Oh. Hi, Wallace. What is it about this place you wanted to show me?”
“Um—”
“I was last in here 2028. Me and Jack came here. I don’t even remember if I was old enough to legally drink. There was a song board over on that wall toward the back. We sang that Howard Baymond song ‘The Hand We Share’ together. That was our favorite.”
Again, it was devolving into the mourning of Jack. And this time it was my heart breaking, not his.
“Gene, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, it’s fine, Wallace. I’ve been trying to think of things other than Jack. But when I do, he comes right back into my head. It’s like he’s still around or something. I’m trying.”
“I’m not sorry about that.”
“Then what?”
I stood from my chair, its legs almost breaking on me as I did. “I went to your cabin yesterday.”
“I thought I saw tracks of mud and water in the living room that weren’t mine. You must have come when I was out hunting deer.”
“Deer?”
“Yes, like the one hanging in my pantry. Oh, that reminds me.”
Gene tossed a sandwich bag on the table. It contained jerky.
“Go on, Wallace. Give it a bite. I think it’s very good. Who said you need a smoker to make jerky? Idiots.”
I couldn’t fathom eating Gene’s gift for me then killing him. The contrast would have been too incredible to stand. However, I wasn’t ready to destroy him just yet. I stepped outside of myself, honestly kind of seeing my standing body from the ceiling of the structure picking up the jerky and putting it in my mouth. I do not recall how it tasted, as every motion I did was misery enough to attempt to forget the entire hour.
“Good, no?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What is with you, Wallace? You are not yourself.”
It was an epically long moment of silence. I could not bring myself to say a word. My tongue was frozen.
“Talk,” Gene insisted.
Finally. “I searched for you.”
“Yes? And?”
“Outside, Gene.”
“Okay, you’re walking me to something. Speed it up.”
“Under your house,” I very faintly whispered.
“Speak up, Wallace.”
“Under your house, Gene! I found the area in the carved-out crawl space under your house!”
Gene instantly went quiet while losing a large amount of blood in his face. I saw it turn white even in the dim light coming from the street lamp outside the pub. The shift had begun. He fell on his butt to let his back lean against the bar.
I positioned the rickety chair directly in front of Gene and sat down, my nerves apparently momentarily gone. “A surplus. A supply. Extras. I don’t care what you are calling it, but I found the secret you’ve kept from me, Gene. I found it. I found your death.” Thinking of the sisters again made me tear up badly.
“It was my secret,” Gene said under his breath, his eyes unable to look into mine. “The lives, I took them. I wanted nobody to know.”
“How could you kill so many people, Gene?”
“Wallace, I’ve known of my desires for a long time. I killed when the Ire hit. But killing wasn’t enough. I needed more. I needed the dead to become me. Become me. The people I killed needed to live on in me. Just like you heard the universe telling you the person before you needed to die the six times you killed someone, Wallace, the universe was telling me to make the dead me. To eat them.”
“When did it start?”
“About eight months after the Ire hit. My first victim, a young woman from the next development over. She was settling into her new cabin and I killed her and brought her body to my cabin where I removed her limbs and ate her flesh and muscles raw.” His lack of tears told me his remorse was so ingrained that he could not bring out the relative emotions. “Her skeleton is at the bottom of the pile under my cabin.”
I should not have been all that shocked, as I’d known of Gene’s unfortunate habits long enough. Nevertheless, I was mortified, more than when I found the supply. “Why couldn’t you tell me?” I wept.
“You already saw me as a monster. No, that’s bullshit. Bullshit, Wallace. The real reason is because if I admitted to myself that I have been eating people for nineteen years, the ghost of Jack would hear it and he would no longer love me. Illogical and superstitious and dumb, I know, but that’s the honest truth. I’ve told you many times I can’t shake Jack. I can’t. And the more I try, the more I realize I just don’t want to shake him. I want him with me at all times, even if it’s just a memory. And every goddamn person I’ve killed and eaten, I’ve hoped to any God above that Jack was somehow not watching when I did it. Probably was watching, but I hang on to that doubt. Make sense?”
“Yes.” No, Gene.
“What were you doing at my house anyway, Wallace?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“The hell it doesn’t! Tell me!”
I sighed. “I was coming to take you to Renee Island.”
“Louisiana?”
“Indeed. I wanted to get you away from here and from those hunting you because I saw what they did to that DuBoine guy and I couldn’t let that happen to you. I was going to force you to come with me.”
“Can we still go?”
The question whose answer I’d dreaded like knives to the eyes all day. “No.”
Gene began to lightly cry as he remained sitting on the floor, his legs stretched out before him. “I’m crying again, Wallace.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I know why. I’m about to die. What is that in your pocket, Wallace?”
“The gun...” I broke down in a colossal cry. “The gun I brought to remove you, Gene. It has three bullets, and one will end your life.”
“I see. It would eit
her be you or the hunters that followed me. I would prefer you. My chair has sympathy.”
“What?”
“Yes, I was followed. I saw them park a ways back without headlights. They aren’t good at hiding.”
“Oh, Gene.”
“I don’t want to die, Wallace. I really don’t. I know I deserve it, that the world needs me gone. But I want to live. Can we go to Renee Island? Is it not too late?”
Tears fell on the barrel of the gun as I removed it from my pants pocket and halfheartedly pointed it in my best friend’s direction. “It is. I’m so sorry, Gene.”
“Such is the fate we fabricate.”
Fate. It was a familiar term. It made me remember the jacket I was wearing, that I’d worn it nearly two decades earlier when I found Haydon’s body after the explosion. I reached in the pocket and removed the tiny sheet of paper, its surface crumpled and stiff as a used coffee filter.
“On the sad wings of destiny,” I accidentally read aloud.
“What does that mean, Wallace?” Gene sincerely asked me.
I had a friend before you that died and wrote this, and that is why it was so hard to be your friend. “Means nothing.”
“There is another thing I wanted to tell you.”
“No, Gene, there is no need for any more admissions.”
“You need to hear this, so you need to shut up and listen the fuck up.”
I was so scared and nervous, my hands shaking at a very noticeable level. I sat back and let Gene say what needed said.
“Your special circumstance, the one that’s allowed you to be free of the Ire for a while, it’s not what you think.”
“How do you mean?”
“What I will say will make it easier for you to kill me.”
He now had my full attention.
“I gave you Flegtide on our way to Oklahoma, Wallace.”
I went silent and perfectly still. The rage I’d replaced with sorrow very swiftly began to reemerge beneath my skin. “Come again?”
“In Tracy, at the Catholic church. I gave you a bottle of water after my little sojourn out to meet the Blip Blip people. And eat them. I found their stash. They had all kinds of experimental versions of Flegtide in their stash. Most came with notes, very detailed notes of the known success of each one. One pill, a big orange one, had XVX scrawled on its surface. The note said ‘Lasts indefinitely’. After eating Blip Blip, I crushed the pill and put it in a bottle of water. That water, Wallace, I gave to you.”
How dare you, you sick son of a bitch! All I did for you and you stick me with the drug against my will! “Cold and contemptible, Gene,” I softly responded.
“It was all I could do. I was losing myself, Wallace. I needed to talk to somebody soon and I knew I wanted it to be you. When the wall came crashing on you, I knew it was my chance to see if it worked. A gamble, but it paid off. We talked without the Ire.”
“But you still had the Ire, Gene. How were you able to talk to me?”
“This secret comes with more secrets. I haven’t felt Ired, or at least the way you feel Ired, in eighteen years, I believe. It changed in me. I think I was able to control it, which is why I chose not to target you for my rage.”
“No, no! In that second town we came across at the beginning of our trip you said you had to back away from me for two nights because the Ire was approaching due to my proximity.”
“Wallace, I was hungry. I couldn’t tell you. I needed to find food. When I say food I mean people. I lied to you. I never felt the Ire around you. Never once. Never fucking once.”
“The entire reason for our trip to Oklahoma was to stop your goddamn sister from taking the goddamn drug, Gene! And you go ahead and practically shove it down my throat without telling me? You goddamn...it’s hard to like you right now, Gene.”
“It’s fine,” Gene said amidst a new stream of tears. “You are about to kill me anyhow. At the very least, I’ll be able to see Jack again soon.”
I tried to tell him he would, that all would be well, that all bad things would end. I tried to explain how his death would bring nice things about. But I could say nothing.
“Jack. Open your arms for me, honey. We’re about to be one again. I can show you how much I love you for eternity now.”
I heard the sounds of walking nearby with an overt shout from one of them to another. The hunters were at the doorstep.
“Wallace, you need to pull the trigger on your little gun. You need to do it right now.”
The men outside would not kill Gene. They would make him an example just like Gerhardt DuBoine.
“Gene del Gregory...I love you, sir. I never wanted anything in this little party to happen. You deserve better.” For a very brief moment I considered changing all the plans and taking him down to Renee Island, away from the death that circled us. But logistics got in the way. Also, killing him was far more humane than watching him like a child as he slowly devolved into a mess of a man until his eventual death anyway.
“You’re my brother, Wallace. No person has done for me what you have. I’m glad you finally answered my call. Your seventh kill will be your best.”
I put the barrel of the gun against Gene’s forehead.
“Now, Wallace, make right what I’ve made wrong. Because on the sad wings of destiny, we are our own gods.”
The men rushed me and tackled me as I exited the Atadulc Water House, pinning me to the badly overgrown street blanketed with snow. I didn’t resist. No reason anymore.
“He’s dead,” the tall man in the group of four said to the others. “Bullet in his head. Asshole’s brains are everywhere. I’d say this sucker got to him first, but—”
“Doesn’t matter,” the short one said. “Del Gregory is no longer a threat. It would have been nice to have taken him into the CA for his condition, but this is just as good in my opinion. You.”
“Me?” I said apathetically, looking up from my forced prone position on the ground.
“Yes, you. How long have you been hunting that one?”
“As long as you’ve been sucking my dick.” My sarcasm earned me five sharp kicks in my ribs and one in my head, not quite knocking me unconscious but getting a good point of pain and dizziness across nonetheless.
I simply did not care what they did. They could have killed me right there on that snowy street. The worst moment of my life was only three minutes old. The grief was immediate and paralyzing. And as the men drove off in their badly broken car, I remained on my stomach, breathing in the flakes of snow that fell while enjoying the bits of blood peppered on my face. They belonged to Gene. A flash of time ago he was a living, walking, thinking, doing human being. Now his life was no more. I remained there all night. It was the worst night.
~~~~
Chapter 43
The End of Ignorance
The time was about eight in the morning. I’d found myself in my bed, somehow transported there by my feet and possibly the minivan I was driving. All of it, however, was completely lost on me as to how I was able to do it. I don’t remember a single thing after being thrown to the ground after Gene died.
No alcohol, no drugs, no inebriant resided in my body whatsoever. And yet, I felt as hungover as ever that morning. Stress from the previous day, plus the grief I carried with me at all hours now, wore on my mind like sandpaper on ice cream. I didn’t want to think of a damn thing, especially the events of last night. I did, and it made me hurt worse. Then an alert came across my cell screen. ‘Research Victory, SPMS Cause Tentatively Discovered.’
To say this was big news would be to compare D-Day to the M.A.S.H. finale. It was huge. Beyond huge. We knew what turned our existence upside down now, or at least we now had a grasp on it.
It started with ions. A charge in the sun, or a solar wave, was strong, but not too strong to destroy us. Instead, ions were suddenly mutated on the spot that day in 2030. The mutated ions attached to oxygen, which then immediately altered our brain functions as we breathed it in. It corrupted
our neurological feed to alter our brain activity, its greatest effect being our rage capacity toward other humans. And it only affected humans because our brains are incredibly more complex than those of all other species.
This effect had a lifespan of twenty years on our brains before normal cognitive function resumed, meaning SPMS went dead almost on the spot. It was pure irony that Flegtide wasn’t ready for the public until the Ire had lived almost all of its life. Tragic irony, as it were. For this, nobody knew if in fact Flegtide actually worked as previously deemed. Gene covertly gave me the drug and I was able to speak with him, but at the same time the Ire was going away in almost everybody. With that in mind, it’s hard to tell whether or not it worked on me. I tend to sway toward the direction that yes, it had some effect on me, much in the way booze aids the high of a narcotic.
Even so, Gene’s situation, with his super-Ire, was also explained through the announcement. When the Ire started to wane, there was a small percentage of people whose Ire only strengthened and made them walking time bombs. Such was the case with Gene. Their brain chemistry caused the mutated ions inhaled to remain and breed within them, ultimately enhancing the Ire while gradually allowing the host to lose touch with reality and many specific common-sense activities. It explained why Gene was able to ingest other humans without his conscience superseding progress.
We knew. I knew. Knowledge was the key to fixing everything. Unfortunately, the end of the Ire was when we found that knowledge, and by then the damage was done. And that damage, it was scattered upon every inch of ground on our planet. Humans ruled the earth. But when humans could no longer assemble, interact, and even touch each other, the system instantly fell apart. Society was ruined in a split second.
The task was left upon us, we who had chosen to remain alive after committing terrible acts of murder, to piece it back together. Giving us this very informative piece of data was the Centralized Authority’s first act in making us a civilization once more.
The Populace Page 24