This Is How You Die

by Matthew Bennardo

  His stage set, Luther, his wiry friend Lily, and a handful of nameless, brutally efficient assistants wrangled the captive horde from their cage one at a time, bound their mouths so they couldn’t bite, held their grasping fingers to the predictor’s needle, and made a clownish show of pretending they didn’t know what would be printed on each and every ticker-tape result slip.

  Everyone knew the result, every time. Luther, Lily, the assistants, everyone watching in the relative safety of their bunkers. The very first time Ben ever saw the show—three months after Joseph, standing against the back wall with Louisa sitting on his shoulders because everyone at Castor’s wanted to watch and the common room had only so much floor space—he knew. Everyone knew; of course they did. Horde died violently.

  Of course they did.

  And when Lily made the inevitable pronouncement, Luther pushed the pronounced toward the bare, blood-drenched space and, accompanied by the cheers of the audience both in studio and at home, fulfilled the machine’s prediction.

  Violently.

  Every episode, exactly the same.

  Until it wasn’t.

  Ben didn’t make a habit of watching the show. The only reason he caught it that day was because he’d sprained his ankle in a skirmish the day before; he was laid up, in a bad mood, and desperate for distraction from the pain in his leg. How Do They Die?! seemed like just the solution.

  For the first twenty minutes or so, it was. Luther and Lily processed their batch of horde as they always did—with guns and machetes and wide, hard grins—and Ben let himself share in the buzzing current of retributive viciousness that hummed out from the TV’s grainy picture, through the crowd of people watching with him. By the time the stocky horde-woman with blood-matted blond hair was wrestled out of the cage and dragged to the predictor, everyone was into the rhythm: tape over her mouth, assistants holding her legs, Luther’s two hands pulling one of hers to the needle. Banter between Luther and Lily as the machine pricked and retracted, whirred and analyzed. The printing noise; Lily’s little flourish as she snapped the slip free.

  But instead of holding the slip aloft and crowing a victorious, “Violently!” Lily stared at it in silence while joy leached from her face.

  Luther, distracted by trying to keep the horde-woman’s arms pinioned behind her back, didn’t notice right away; when he finally glanced up, it was with more annoyance than worry. “This bitch is making me tired, Lily, c’mon—”

  “Peacefully.” The first time Lily said it, it was little more than a shape of her mouth; her voice, hearty and ringing short minutes earlier, was barely audible. It slammed silence like a sledgehammer through Ben’s crowd of spectators, and they heard her perfectly when she repeated, “It says ‘peacefully.’ ”

  “What?” Luther’s eyes narrowed; he fought the woman’s wrists close enough together that he could hold them one-handed and reached out to snatch the paper from Lily. “Let me see—”

  But his hold on the woman wasn’t as solid as it should have been. Before anyone could react, she wrenched her body, and Luther lost his grip. Her arms now free, the woman raised her hands to the tape over her mouth; the assistants grabbed at her, but their angles were wrong; she ripped off the tape with enough force to knock Luther off balance. The half second he stumbled was just long enough for her to catch his arm and drag it to her mouth and sink her teeth in all the way.

  The stage drowned in panic. The assistants fell back, their fear of being bitten overriding whatever loyalty they might have had for their leader. Luther howled, his face twisting with pain and fury and terror, the sight of it broadcast live to his transfixed audience. Only Lily kept her senses: within seconds she was behind the horde-woman, raising her gun to the back of her head, pulling the trigger. And as the woman fell, Lily pressed the gun to Luther’s temple and pulled the trigger again.

  And then the feed cut out, and Ben was staring at static.

  “She was supposed to die peacefully,” he mused for the fourth time later that night, as Louisa helped him rewrap his ankle. His mind was stuck on the incident, circled it restlessly, replayed those few seconds—less than a minute, really—over and over and over. No one who’d seen it had been able to talk about anything else all evening.

  “The machine was probably just wrong,” Louisa said again, more of her attention seemingly on her work with his bandage than the conversation.

  “But the machine isn’t wrong. Ever. That’s why it’s the machine.” Ben shifted uneasily, anxious to his fingertips, almost afraid to think too much about the other possibility. The one that people already acknowledged, at least a little, when they believed that Peacefuls could be blown to bits in their sleep. The one that meant that maybe—maybe—what he’d done for Joseph—

  Louisa misjudged her angle as she pinned his bandage, jabbing him sharply. “Sorry,” she said to his wince, and smoothed her hands over the hurt. Her palms were warm. “The machine predates the infection,” she added, and she sounded eminently reasonable, as if the explanation was so self-evident it was scarcely worth her time to speak it. “I doubt it can read horde blood properly.” And that, Ben could tell by the set of her jaw, answered that, so he didn’t argue and didn’t bring it up again.

  But the look on the horde-woman’s face in the second before she died stayed behind his eyes: her teeth deep in the meat of her meal, the taste of it flooding her tongue, the corners of her lips curved up. Her eyes closed, but smiling. In the second Lily had pulled the trigger, the woman had what she wanted out of life and was content.

  At peace.

  It’s a relief when they join up with a road. After hiking for so long through the scrubby terrain of the lowlands, walking on hard-packed dirt feels amazingly easy, and they make better time than they have in days.

  They know they’re getting close when they find the pit.

  The stench hits them first: woodsmoke, gasoline, and burning flesh wafting over them with the gentle summer breeze. It’s nothing Ben hasn’t smelled before, but never at such strength; he coughs unstoppably, the smell cloying, practically physical in his throat, and he and Louisa quicken their pace, stumbling, anxious to get upwind.

  The pit itself is an irregular ditch dug a short distance from the road. Smoke billows sullenly from its depths, obscuring their view of its contents. They pass by without trying to see.

  Less than twenty minutes later, a fence begins to rise out of the ground in the distance: chain link, at least fifteen feet high, with barbed wire stretched and coiled at the top. Behind it, a collection of low, sheet-sided buildings and long reaches of pavement; the place looks like an airstrip, or maybe the outer edge of what used to be a small town.

  There are people walking inside the fence line. Ben knows when they’ve been spotted; he can hear shouting, emphatic but indistinct, and sees the patrollers start jogging toward the gate that bars the road.

  Beside him, Louisa tucks her pendant under her shirt and holsters her gun.

  By the time they get within easy speaking distance of the gate—really just a smaller, movable fence, built into the space between two of the girders anchoring the big, immovable one—a welcoming committee has gathered. Five people, armed to the teeth, watch them approach with wary eyes and tense shoulders. “You can stop there,” one of them calls out, and they do.

  Louisa holds up her empty hands. “We’re Castor’s friends,” she says. “Louisa and Ben. Is Jeannie here?”

  The people inside the fence exchange looks. A lean Aboriginal woman with her hair in a thick plait down her back raises her chin, her assessing gaze darting from Louisa to Ben and back again. “How is Castor?”

  Louisa shrugs. “Alive, last we saw him.”

  “Well, then.” Jeannie’s mouth curves sharply. “Welcome to heaven,” she says, gesturing at the dirty buildings and cracked pavement and all-encompassing cage. “Where the peaceful people go,” she adds, with the same tone Castor uses when he’s mocking his own cleverness. Then, almost an afterthought: �
��Weapons on the ground, then step forward one at a time for testing.”

  Ben goes first. A nebbishy, balding man wearing latex gloves pokes a plastic-wrapped swab through the chain link; Ben takes it, unwraps it, and swipes it inside his mouth before wrapping it again and handing it back. The man dunks the saliva-coated swab into a vial of clear liquid and stirs steadily for a full minute, and when the liquid remains clear, nods.

  Beside the man, a middle-aged woman with short, curly hair pushes a trolley with a predictor machine on it right up to the fence. “You know how this goes,” she says brusquely, and Ben sticks his index finger through the chain link and into the little alcove housing the machine’s needle.

  After the prick, as they wait for the machine to render its judgment, she gives him a Band-Aid through the fence. It’s patterned, ridiculously, with monkeys.

  “Peacefully,” the woman reads from his slip, and it’s like clouds parting: everyone on the other side of the fence smiles at him, mixing relief and acceptance. The change from the impersonal threat they’d projected moments before feels like whiplash.

  Jeannie turns to reach for the lock on the gate. “Okay, Ben, come on in—”

  But he takes a step backward. “Actually, I’m going to wait for my friend.”

  Jeannie glances back at him sharply before her expression goes carefully blank. “Your choice,” she says, her tone neutral, and Ben wonders, his gut hollowing out, how much Castor told her about them.

  Louisa doesn’t seem to share his dread. But Ben’s seen her mask any number of things with swaggering confidence; he decides to follow her lead and tries not to spoil her bluff with his worry.

  She winks at the nebbish while swabbing her cheek and smiles sweetly as the predictor draws her blood.

  “What did you get?” she asks him, peering at his hand after she’s applied her own Band-Aid. “Monkeys? Sucker. Mine’s dinosaurs.”

  On the other side of the fence, the machine spools out her slip. Ben meets Louisa’s bright eyes, his mind racing with the arguments he’s been formulating for days—all the things he can think of to tell these people about Louisa, about who she is and what she can do and why she should be allowed to stay.

  Even if she is a Violent.

  The curly-haired woman tears Louisa’s result free and peers at it and reads, “Peacefully.”

  It was supposed to be a simple salvage.

  Joseph, Castor’s resident gearhead, had been grumbling about the list he was keeping of useful items they didn’t have. When a patrol returned with news of an abandoned house that had belonged to a serious electronics hoarder—and, more important, that hadn’t been ransacked by anyone else—a foraging crew was put together. Joseph, Ben, and a handful of death wishers set out one sunny morning with good spirits, lots of weapons, and a long shopping list.

  Three hours later, with shouting and gunshots still echoing through the rest of the sprawling house, Ben turned his back on a room strewn with dead horde to kneel beside Joseph, who wasn’t dying fast enough.

  “Hey. Hey, Joseph, no—” He dropped his gun on the slick, gritty floor and put his hands on Joseph’s shoulders, under his jaw, up into his sweaty, matted hair. Everywhere he could. “God, Joseph, I wish—You should’ve told me. I could’ve—If I’d known you were—” He ran out of words, choked off.

  Countless times, Ben had seen people infected and had done what was necessary to end the process for them as mercifully as possible. That’s just what you did, if you could, if you were any kind of good person. This time, he thought—as he looked at the ragged-crescent tears all over Joseph’s body, smelled the blood and sour horde saliva soaking through his clothes, felt the way he twitched and shook under Ben’s hands—this time should really, if there was any kind of god or balance or scrap of fairness left in the universe, be the last.

  He made himself breathe and smiled at Joseph as much as he could. “You know,” he said, because this was no time to be anything but honest, and because he knew Joseph would understand, “you Violents have this way of making me feel anything but peaceful.”

  Joseph’s eyes rolled, showed white for long enough that Ben told himself to let him go and pick up his gun. But then they closed, and when they opened there was the brown again, warm and steady through the growing cloud of pain and infection. Focused on Ben like there was nothing else to look at in the world. “That’s a—hell of an assumption to make,” he said weakly, struggling for every handful of words. “Although—granted—the evidence is—strong.” Ben’s confusion must have showed on his face; after a second, Joseph huffed out a chuckle. “I don’t know—which I am. Never got tested.”

  Ben stared. It seemed impossible. Everybody got tested. Before the bombs, it had been commonplace for parents to schedule predictor machine tests for their children; after, society’s brush with violent mortality made survivors desperate to find out if they had something nicer to look forward to, or if they should resign themselves early to more of the same. He’d never asked Joseph whether he was slated to die peacefully or violently, and Joseph had never volunteered to tell him; Ben had always just assumed it was something that, for whatever reason, Joseph wanted to keep to himself.

  But that wasn’t it at all. He didn’t know.

  And if he didn’t know, Ben thought, anything could be true.

  He kissed Joseph. His mouth, close lipped and careful. His cheek, his temple, his eyelids. The tip of his nose. Light, precise, tender. And, gradually, Joseph’s labored breathing eased; his shaking quieted until he barely trembled. And when Ben pulled away, there was the hint of a smile pulling at the corners of Joseph’s mouth, and something like tranquillity on his tear- and grime- and sweat-streaked face.

  And Ben picked up his gun and shot him once between the eyes.

  The quiet afterward was painful. Ben stayed crouched next to Joseph’s body as the absence rang in his ears, as it filled his head, as it crowded out everything until he thought nothing at all.

  He reacted automatically to the sound of shuffling feet: Ben turned, raising his gun.

  One of the death wishers stood just inside the door, a shotgun held casually at her side. She was a member of Castor’s inner circle, Ben remembered dully, although not one of the more inspiring specimens. When Ben had met her that morning, he’d thought she was a kid, she was so small, her shoulder about level with his elbow, her ammunition belt and holster cinched as tight as they’d go and still hanging loose. But she’d survived the charnel house. There was a solidity to her, a steadiness despite the gore spattering her clothes, and the look in her eyes seemed as old as time. Ben realized she hadn’t just arrived; she’d likely been there all along, watching, waiting for him to do what was necessary. Ready to do it for him if he couldn’t.

  The V hanging dully from a chain around her neck looked like she’d made it herself from scrap metal.

  She cleared her throat. “Sorry.”

  Ben pushed himself to his feet, the stretch of his legs a distant relief after crouching for so long. He felt bone weary. When he turned back to Joseph, he saw the tiny smile still curving his lips, now bisected by the trail of blood wending slowly down from his forehead. “He looks peaceful, right?”

  She made a disbelieving noise. “You shot him in the head while he was turning horde. You think that was peaceful?”

  “I hope it was.”

  She didn’t say anything else; the silence stretched, and Ben thought she’d left. But when he turned away, finally finished with looking, she was still standing in the doorway, in thoughtful study of the scattered horde. As Ben crossed the room toward her, picking his way through the corpses he and Joseph had made, she slid him a sideways, appraising glance.

  “I’m Louisa,” she said, as casual as anything, as if they weren’t surrounded by contagious death, as if the floor under their boots wasn’t sticky with unspeakable bodily fluids. “I’d just graduated culinary school. Before. I was gonna open my own bakery. You?”

  He came to a stop besi
de her. She looked up at him frankly, seemingly unaware of the non sequitur that was her choice of conversation. “Ben. I was a music major.” He almost left it at that, then remembered that, as of five minutes ago, no one else in the world knew what he’d wanted to be when he grew up. The knowledge hitched his breath in his throat; he forced himself to swallow it and added, roughly, “Opera singer.”

  Louisa’s eyes shone, then crinkled merrily at the corners, and then she was grinning, her face split with mirth. “Oh my God,” she said, gesturing dismissively at the carnage they’d wrought, the blood on their clothes, the fit of their weapons in their hands. “We’re useless!” The laughter in her voice was so unexpected, so ridiculous, so genuine that Ben felt himself half smile in reflex; in response, the sharp edges of Louisa’s humor softened. “I like Gilbert and Sullivan,” she said.

  His smile grew, somehow, an unstoppable counterweight to the heavy emptiness spreading through his chest. “I like cupcakes.”

  She reached out and took his hand, lacing her warm, damp fingers with his, thoroughly unself-conscious. She held his hand like she held her gun, comfortable and firm; Ben found himself returning her grip. Her wrist bumped against his pendant where it dangled, tarnished and blood speckled, from its leather tie. “Come on, Ben,” she said, and turned her back on the room strewn with dead horde. “Let’s see if anyone else is still alive.”