by Martin Kee
Victoria seemed unfazed by the revelation. “I’ll take that torch now.” She gestured with the revolver.
Skyla hesitated. Against the wall, Dona’s shadow appeared as a complicated house of cards. There were secrets to protect secrets, motives to protect friendships, friendships to protect other secrets. It all formed a complex tapestry of lies and strange desires, foreign to Skyla. Did Dona actually want to be with Victoria? Or was she simply protecting Julian? And who was this fiancé? Why wasn’t he here?
I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know! The words echoed in the back of Skyla’s head. She felt herself being pulled into Dona’s shadow, into its complexity, wanting to study it, unravel it.
“Hey!” Victoria shouted. “Are you paying attention? Get us home.”
“Give me Dona first,” Skyla said. “Give me her and Julian and you can have the torch. I’ll even lead you all to the citadel.”
Victoria laughed. “You’re in no position to make demands.” She waved the gun again. “Put the torch on the ground and roll it over here.”
Skyla knelt and placed the brass cylinder on the damp concrete. She pulled back and rolled it. All three of them watched it rattle along the ground.
At that same moment, Julian woke up.
He roused in Dona’s arms, his confused eyes blinking. It was only a few seconds of lucidity, but it was enough that Victoria looked down at him. Skyla lunged to the side. The gun spat sparks into the night, and Skyla felt pain explode inside her shoulder. She cried out, lurching into the shadows. With her other hand she pulled the goggles down. But they wouldn’t move. They were stuck.
“Vicky what are you doing?” she heard Dona scream.
Throbbing fire burned through her shoulder and into her chest. Warmth seeped into her clothing, sticky and viscous. Every step introduced a new and intimate pain. She pulled again at the goggles. Still nothing. Over a shoulder she could see Vicky running toward the hand torch on the ground. She scooped it up, wound it, then flashed it in Skyla’s direction.
The gun went off again and Skyla heard the bullet bounce off a nearby wall with a whine. Dust kissed her cheek as she raced through the schoolyard, watching shadows close in. She couldn’t tell if they were from the blood loss, from the pain, or if they were real.
Skyla ducked around a corner. She gripped the lenses again and pulled. Come on you piece of junk. Just do it this one last time for me. One more time and you can rest in a cabinet somewhere.
Another bullet pinged off the cobble near her feet. Dust scratched her ankle. Footsteps drew nearer and Dona’s voice called out.
“Vicky, stop being an idiot for once and let it go! For God’s sake, Vicky! Let’s just go.”
Something whizzed by her ear. Skyla realized it was another bullet, missing everything. She didn’t even hear the gun until an instant after. Would the next one be silent as well?
She ducked instinctively and probed the catch on the goggles with her finger. Every breath hurt. Every muscle in her body protested as she fingered the contraption, forcing it, pressing it, feeling for obstruction. The casing was warped, a small sharp shard of glass wedged in the hinge. It cut into her finger—a tickle compared to the pain in her chest and shoulder. The pain seeped everywhere as she flicked the shard of glass away.
As the next gunshot rang out again, Skyla pulled on the goggles one last time. She felt them click. They sounded tired to her, the wheeze of a dying old man. She felt new pain in her arm as the bullet found a home.
Crying out, Skyla turned to face the darkest wall she could and jumped into the shadows. Behind her she saw Vicky fire the gun again, her torch painting a solid wall where it struck the surface. Skyla watched as the girl holstered the gun and turned.
Her shoulder throbbed, her arm limp. Cool air hit blood. Clothing stuck to skin. Skyla spun around, looking for something familiar, something she could lock on to, some scenery not in the land of the dead. Below her, through a million quantum layers, the asylum spread out across its beach. A mile away, along the opposite shore, the army of Lyle Summers stood awaiting orders, smaller now that so many had leaked through to Bollingbrook.
Victoria vanished, the wall vanished. Skyla was in freefall, a ghost in the afterlife as she stumbled through the shifting landscape towards the only beacon she could see, a gleaming coin a hundred miles away.
Chapter 48
The Wilds
JOHN WHISTLED AS he strolled through the forest. On his back he wore a wooden trellis, fashioned from James’s bed, a ladder, several chair legs, and a coat rack. More than a dozen lanterns dangled from the framework, throwing dancing squares of light through the trees. It was heavy, and made the journey slow going, but John knew he was being watched. He could see them out of the corner of his eye, strange shapes, alien landscapes. Every blink of his eyes brought a new afterimage, objects and people that were not there with his eyes open. The trail itself faded in places as well, sometimes buried beneath thick pine needles, other times paved with sand. He blinked. It was a beach. John blinked again.
Hardened lava.
Blink.
Entrails and bone.
Blink.
Crushed infant skulls.
Blink.
Eyes.
Blink. The night sky filled with ravens calling Skyla’s name.
John stood still and took a breath, eyes closed. Not real, not real, not real.
He turned in a slow circle, squinting like a child afraid of monsters in the closet as pine trees loomed overhead. The pink and copper wall of Bollingbrook appeared at times, the first rays of sunlight glinting from its surface. The city seemed forever distant, obscured by fog, black smoke rising from behind those great walls.
Pursing his lips, John resumed his whistling, in time with his shuffling feet as the lanterns jangled all around him. As daylight settled along the road, John picked up his pace. It wasn’t until he heard voices that he ceased his shambling jog. It could have been the Wilds. Or it might have been his own slipping sanity. He cocked his head to listen.
The voices drifted down from the road ahead. Flames blinked in and out between the trees, campfires. But who camped this close to the Wilds? He approached, fingers spearing his grimy clothes.
“Hello?” he said, wincing at the strangeness of his own voice.
The trees opened to a group of people huddled around the fire, at the base of the wall, some of them covered in blankets under the lamplight. A few looked up at him from beneath makeshift tents. Dark eyes shifted from behind barrels and from beneath thick hoods. He approached, clanking and rocking under the framework of lanterns, their frightened eyes staring at him as if he were crazy for going inside, and as John passed through the opened Bollingbrook gates, he realized why.
At first he blinked. It simply wasn’t real.
Bodies covered the streets in parts and in whole.
John blinked again.
Bodies, halved and quartered, laying against one another, over one another, draped from walls and fences, limp like ragdolls. Ravens picked at stripped skin. John blinked and held his eyes closed, counted to ten, to twenty, to a hundred. He opened them and felt a ball of grief well up in his stomach.
It was the floor of a slaughterhouse. Blood painted nearly every street, every sidewalk, coated in some places with thick swarms of flies. Empty suits and dresses lay deflated on the ground. Arms, legs, feet, lay strewn along the cobble as if the people had simply come apart while running away, falling into pieces like clay men and women in human clothing. It reminded him of the golems of fable, men made of dirt, crumbling as soon as the spell wore off. John crossed himself.
Men lifted bodies and parts of bodies, tossing them onto a bonfire at one end of a street, the source of the smoke John had seen from outside. They lifted the pieces of people and tossed them onto a pyre that stretched two or three stories into the air. It was much larger than John had imagined. The smell was nauseating, burnt hair, burnt skin. He covered his face with the neck of his shir
t.
“You,” one of the soldiers said. “It still isn’t light enough. Stay outside for another hour.”
“What happened here?” John asked.
The soldier paused and pulled up his visor. He exchanged a confused glance with his partner and then turned and walked up to John. “You aren’t from Bollingbrook?”
“I am… I was…” John said. “I’ve been away. I only just arrived… returned, I mean.”
The guard blinked. “You’d have been better off staying away. There’s nothing here but death.” He swept an arm along the red landscape. “It isn’t Bollingbrook anymore. I don’t even know what to call this city now. But you’d best be going.”
“Please,” John said. “I worked here as a priest years ago. This was my home. Can you just tell me what happened?”
“Do you want me to start with the assassination or the fairies?” The man shifted uncomfortably in his armor and John decided that he must have been wearing it for days on end.
“Fairies?” John said, his tongue feeling thick in his mouth. “Start with the fairies?”
“Shortly after the mayor died, we got a few reports of lights. People called them fairies. They appeared in houses, alleys, street corners. That was about the time people started dying.” He gestured to the pile of bodies.
“But how?” John asked. “How did they die?”
A soft bark of a laugh escaped the man. It was a cold, bitter sound. “You’ve got eyes.”
“No,” said John. “I mean… what did that to people?” He thought he knew, but John wanted—no, needed to hear someone else say it.
“If you find out,” said the man, “I’d love to know as well. The only ones of us who survived were people under street lamps, in lit halls. A few kids showed up at the citadel with hand torches. God only knows how they survived it.”
“Is it over?” John asked.
The man’s face was grim and for a moment his lip quivered. “They come back every night, roaming the streets and alleys. We’ve tried boarding up the windows and barricading the streets, but it doesn’t do any good. They just go around it or through it. Sometimes I think that the archbishop was right and maybe this is the end of days.”
“If this was the apocalypse, I’d think it would be a little more widespread,” John said. “I haven’t heard of this happening in other cities.”
The man shook his head. “No you’re right. It’s just us. Lord knows what we did to bring it upon ourselves.”
“The archbishop,” John said. “He’s up there?” He turned to face the citadel.
The man nodded. “He comes out every now and again, looks around. Gives some orders, then slinks back into his tower. I’m not sure if he thinks there’s nothing he can do, or if there are things he just isn’t willing to do.”
“Maybe I can talk to him,” said John.
“Good luck,” the man said and turned away. “That citadel’s locked up tighter than a tomb.” He watched the man go speak to one of the soldiers. They then began piling limbs onto the fire again.
*
Where there weren’t people, there were crows, hundred of thousands of them. They perched on the bodies, picking away at them with black beaks. John didn’t think he had ever seen so many. Ravens stood amidst the flocks as well, their heads rising above the smaller birds like royalty. A few watched him with wary eyes, but didn’t leave even as he passed within a few feet. He expected them to speak, but they only stared, uttering low croaks as he walked.
And over the crows he heard crying.
It drifted in from the nearby town square. He followed the sobs as they echoed through the streets and against the blood-spattered walls. It took John a moment to differentiate the girl from the crows and corpses. She wept with her knees curled up against her chin, sitting beneath a statue of the city founder. Behind her, the citadel stretched to the sky. A sea of crows, jays, magpies, jackdaws, and ravens stood around her in a circle. They turned their heads in jerky, curious movements as she wept. It wasn’t until John got closer that the scavengers scattered, and recognition struck him.
“Dona?” he said, shading his eyes with a hand. “Is that you, Donatella Barkley?”
Her head snapped up as she blinked away the tears in surprise and embarrassment. A pair of corpses lay at her feet, barely recognizable. Dona wiped her cheek.
“Yes?”
“It’s… it’s John,” he said, realizing he looked nothing like he had three years before. “Father Thomas. I ran the Millstone Parish years ago. You were in my congregation.”
Her face was drawn, dirty, and sad. She looked as though she hadn’t eaten in a while and her skin seemed soft and loose. Her entire being seemed to sag, tired and resigned. Recognition slowly formed like a rising sun.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
Her eyes held curiosity, but no joy at the reunion. John looked down at himself, at his beard, at his dirty clothes, his makeshift rack of swinging lanterns. I look less like a priest and more like a lamp vendor.
John undid the straps and stepped out of the lanterns, letting the contraption clatter to the ground behind him. Walking up the steps towards the girl, he paused at the bodies. One lay face down, both inside and outside a suit, now black with dried blood, the other a dress. Dona didn’t look up at him; her eyes remained fixed on the dissected corpses. A wristwatch hung loosely from her fingers, and she fondled it with her thumb. A spot gleamed where she had worn the dried blood from the shiny gold wristband.
“When I was little,” she said without looking up. “I asked him if I could have this watch when I grew up. For a long time he just acted like he didn’t hear me. You know dads. I thought he was distracted, doing important Dad-things. One day, when I was older, however, I confronted him. I asked him again. And do you know what he said?”
John shook his head slowly. He could see how she had gotten the watch so easily. Donald Barkley’s wrist had been severed clean. Twin wrist bones reflected the ground like polished marble.
“He said that this watch was passed down from him to his father, and to his father from his grandfather. It was passed down for five generations, from men to men. All I wanted to know was whether or not I would get it as well. He wouldn’t even answer the question. He just sneered at me.”
She looked at the watch a while as it glinted in the sunlight, then tossed it onto the sunken clothes.
“I didn’t even want the stupid watch,” she said. “I just wanted to know that I mattered to him, that I wasn’t just some inconvenience. I just wanted him to want me around.”
John sat next to her on the steps beneath the statue of Emmet Bollingbrook, ancient and rusted from centuries of weathering. He looked up at the statue, then back at her. In his former life, he would have sold her some lie, some kind of shallow story about heaven or forgiveness. But who was she going to forgive now? How would that make any difference?
“He was awful to me,” she continued, gesturing to the corpse of her father. “Those hands… I used to have nightmares about those hands. They were either hitting me or… or…” She took a long breath and straightened her posture. “He was an asshole, and a drunk, and a terrible father. And I’m glad he’s dead. I know you are going to try and tell me to forgive him, or tell me he is in heaven or hell or whatever. But none of that matters. The damage he did to me is done. What does it matter where he is now?”
John took a breath. “I could tell you that there is no heaven or hell, just a space between everything. In the end all that matters is how we treat each other. But I doubt that would matter either.”
“You know,” she said. “The only real regret I have is that I couldn’t have killed him myself.” She looked at her hands. “He wanted me to grow up and be a wife and mother—a legacy to pass on his poison.”
“It’s okay to be relieved,” John said. “It’s okay to hate him, and it’s okay to be glad he’s gone.”
“But I wanted this,” she said. “I used to dream about it.�
� She wiped a tear from her cheek.
“That still doesn’t make it your fault.”
She stared again at the body for a long time, then nodded. She stood up, pressing her skirt down, brushing it off with dirty hands. John stood with her and she looked up at him.
“You’ve seen her, haven’t you?” she asked him. “You’ve seen the twer—Skyla.
John nodded. “You have, too. I can tell.”
“I used to beat her up on the schoolyard, and then she turned around and saved our lives.” She winced. “And Vicky shot her.”
Coldness dropped into John’s stomach. “Shot her?”
Dona nodded. “She got away… I think. I don’t know. It was the same way she vanished from Melissa’s room… just gone… poof.”
She looked into his eyes, and John saw something darker there, some knowledge that no girl her age should possess. “We can’t tell them,” she said. “No matter what, we can’t tell them we saw her. Do you understand?”
“I know,” he said.
She seemed to relax then, a calm settling over her. Maybe it was knowing someone else knew, maybe it was comfort in the knowledge she wasn’t the only one going slowly crazy. Dona changed the subject.
“So why are you here?” she began walking back towards the citadel. John followed.
“I’m trying to find the whereabouts of Reverend Summers. You haven’t seen him wandering around I imagine.”
“Melissa’s kidnapper?”
He almost stumbled. “Just how much have you been talking to Skyla?”
“Enough,” she said, kicking a rock. “I’m a ‘guest’ of the archdiocese now. So, I imagine I won’t be talking to her for a while.”
“You were friends? I thought you used to beat her up.”
“I did, but only because she was the only person who was honest with me. It’s been years. People change. Everyone around me lies, Father. I lied to myself. They lied to me, I lied to them. She was the only one who told the truth, no matter how much it hurt, and I think if I had listened to her, I might not be here now.”