by Logan Keys
I scoff. “Let’s? ‘Let’s’ implies that we did this together, as a team. You did this. And her. You all schemed while I was forced into a coma.”
Nolan shifts. “The only — ”
“Shut your lying mouth, old man.” My voice quavers beyond my control. “You and your sawbones doctor have cut off my arm … my … my leg.” I swallow, fist up to my mouth. “If you think for one second I won’t rip your head off as soon as I’m well — ”
My teeth grind until my jaw aches. No one says a word. They know at any moment I’ll spin off into a dark place, and why the hell not? I was already half-man, half-monster before — a beast, really. And now I’m half-machine, too.
Chalberg presses forward to check my sutures. He’s had to resew me after I’d almost transitioned. Says he’d rather not find out if these will hold a second time.
If I transition before the machines’ organic parts have connected with my nerves and tendons — it hasn’t yet fully adapted to my mixed genetics — then it’s not capable of transitioning along with me, and I’ll leave the smaller pieces behind, be limbless once again. Oh yeah, and also dead.
Chalberg explained to all of us that, at a later date, he’ll need me to transition while under observation, wants to see me do it after he’s certain my body can handle the new additions.
Right now, none of this matters. The machine limbs aren’t working whatsoever; they refuse to obey me.
The lack of organic, even fake organic, material makes me shudder. Doesn’t even bother to look like flesh; it’s a flexible metal, shiny and incredibly limber, but to the eye, it’s straight robotic, alien.
Pieces within the joints are faking my arteries and veins, as well, and eventually my blood will flow through the machine parts. The idea that I’m not whole anymore, that pieces of my body are decomposing or being incinerated somewhere is making my head crack in half.
“I want to be alone.”
“Hatter — ”
“Haven’t you all done enough?” I make sure to look right at Liza.
She’s the most dangerous one, after all.
-49-
My mind reels at the incredible sight, and I gape. So does Doctor Chalberg. Tommy stands in the center of the cafeteria, one arm over a crutch, and his other, the new one, very carefully holding a can of soda, slightly crushed in the middle. The nurse he’s with giggles, and helps him bring the can slowly up to his lips. “Nice!” she says, and the few people around him clap their hands. Orderlies stop to join in, while Chalberg and I share a small grin.
Tommy sets down the drink without issue, his arm moving stiffly, though it’s the best we’ve seen yet, and his face opens up with a brilliant smile that’s been missing as of late.
This lifts my heart, until he glances up at us. His face darkens, and he heads over.
His leg’s working less than the hand. Still, he looks healthy and non-feverish for once. He’s dressed in clothes and not a bed-gown, and he’s approaching with only deep pain lines across his face from the strain of moving instead of the usual sweat and obvious nausea.
Progress.
He stares at me, displeased, but addresses Chalberg. “When can we practice my transition?”
“Uh…”
Tommy finally looks away from me, and I can breathe again. “When?” he asks.
“We best give it time, Hatter.”
“Today. I want to get out of here today.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“I don’t care.”
Tommy heads off, without waiting for a reply.
Chalberg meets me outside of Tommy’s room, and after we both enter, he glances between Tommy and myself. Although our physical distance isn’t very far, our mental distance is east and west. Chalberg pulls out a dark vial of liquid, sucks it up with a thickness into a syringe. His hands shake, and he clears his throat.
“I want to stay,” I say.
“No.” Tommy shoots me a glare.
“Well…” Chalberg says.
He plans to shoot up Tommy, which will transition him in a controlled environment without the confusion this time. But he’s worried, I can tell.
“I want to stay inside,” I say, ignoring Tommy’s angry frown.
He snatches the needle from Chalberg, then points in my face. “You, and you. Get out. Now.”
No one moves, and I sigh out a long hiss of air.
Looking at Chalberg, I nod toward the door. “Can you give us a moment?”
Chalberg hurriedly fixes his glasses and rushes out, relieved. I can see all of the bottles inside of the cabinet — the black one with the stuff that brings out Tommy’s monster, and the purple one that calmed him once before.
Tommy’s practically breathing fire. “I don’t want any more apologies, Liza.”
“Well, you’re not getting one from me.” I cross my arms.
He stiffens, ready for a battle.
“Look, Tommy, I’ll admit I did a terrible thing.”
“Terrible?” He barks out a laugh and rubs a hand through his hair so fast, it looks electric. The robotic arm lifts, too, then thuds down beside him as if he refuses to use it. “I was already living terrible. A car accident is terrible. Being taken by the Authority as a POW was terrible! Staying in a bubble for an entire year was terrible. But losing my arm and my leg, and finding out that you, someone who’s known me all of a few weeks, has signed papers for me, signed away my life and my flesh without my permission, is more than terrible. There are no words for what you did, Liza, and ‘terrible’ hardly covers it.”
“Are you finished?”
His eyes darken in warning. “Nowhere near.”
“Let’s talk about the bubble, Tommy.”
“Excuse me?”
“You,” I say, pointing at his chest. “This bubble, for a year. You were in it, and so was I. The way you put it, you took me from there, brought me along, almost drowned me, but couldn’t leave me behind.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So? You could have left me, but you didn’t. You could have locked me back into my bubble and I would have lived, but you risked your life, and mine. Why? Because you felt responsible for me.”
“You weren’t alone. I couldn’t just lock you back up. There were people.”
“Who would have harmed me?”
He looks away with an under-the-breath curse. “I wasn’t sure. They could have been friends.”
My arms drop to my sides, and immediately our moods have swapped.
Tommy shakes his head with a guilty look. “The people who caused the outbreak had unhooked you from the machine. I’d seen the girl before, Crystal. She seemed like she knew you, was maybe there to try to save you but … I wasn’t sure. I felt like I had some mission, and I couldn’t risk that they’d lock me back up and … take you.”
“You mean, these people might have been able to tell me who I am?”
He nods slowly, eyes betraying the concern I’ve had this entire time — that he was wrong, selfish. He, too, had made a wrong choice for another human being he wasn’t supposed to be making decisions for.
I don’t say that to him; the implications are obvious.
Instead, I bite my lip until it hurts, and after a deep breath, I try to speak without sounding as furious as Tommy had at the start.
“So, you made near-fatal decisions for me, and because of you, I might never know who I am. What if I wake up one day to realize I’m not supposed to be here, but there, with them, and then I hate you?”
I let this sink in before continuing, “I made the same decisions for you, but … I, too, felt responsible for your life, for no other reason than I did. And yes, I took a risk I shouldn’t have, but can you say you haven’t done the same?”
When he stays in stubborn muteness, I turn to walk away.
Tommy’s metal hand grips my shoulder. I stop with my back facing him.
I reach up, cover the smooth surface with my own hand.
When I turn around,
he looks embarrassed by his new appendage. I give a half-smile, and feel the arm before letting it go. “Is it super strong?”
He gives a soft laugh, then flexes it, looking it over without hate for the first time. “Yeah, I guess so. I haven’t been able to try it out all the way.”
We stare at one another, all of our anger melting away. “You ready?” I ask.
“I suppose.”
“You want me to leave.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not.”
With his eyes boring into mine, he lifts the needle, then plunges it into his neck.
“Liza,” he says, voice shaking as his eyes turn black.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, too…”
-50-
“Don’t you dare let him in, Lotte.”
Cara pushes forward. “I second that.”
Lotte watches us for a long moment as we all stand with our torches at the gate. “I don’t like this any more than you two do,” she says. “But he’s dealt with the things, he’s killed one.”
“I don’t believe him!” I say.
“You don’t have to.” She points at me and Cara, then at herself. “Only I do.”
We pale at the thought. If she lets Toby in, all of those lies we’ve been telling ourselves, all of those times we’d closed that door — on memories, on pain — won’t matter, because it’ll come busting out to eat me and Cara alive.
“If you do this, Lotte. I’m leaving.”
“That’s up to you, but we need more who can fight, especially now. He’s promised to stay only until we kill the monsters. We’ll work together — fight the enemy of my enemy — and then he’ll leave. He’s lost some of his ranks, as well.”
I spit out my breath.
“Good! Let the monsters kill them all!” Cara’s shaking, she’s so furious.
The dream. The dream from before, the one Pike had made in my head. He said, “You know me,” like he’d known they were coming.
Is Pike out there, watching? I’d probably find red eyes in the woods, but I turn on my heels to go pack my things.
If Toby’s inside the walls of Ironwood, if the brutal youths come in here and I have to see all of those faces again, I’ll fall apart.
Cara’s right there with me, packing, when Lotte enters our room.
“Dallas, Cara, we need you.”
I know how hard it is for Lotte to plead. I know her pride.
“Too bad,” I say.
“Listen.” Lotte puts a hand onto my shoulder. “We won’t make it through this without your help. I know I haven’t always … well…” She lets her hand fall.
Could I just leave them all, maybe to be destroyed?
Yes. Yes, I could.
Cara pinches the bridge of her nose, having a harder time than I am at saying no. Such a softy. “Lotte, you don’t understand what they — what we went through.”
“I do, child, I do. But this isn’t about that. It’s about survival. Do you know anyone tougher than those things? Other monsters might do the trick, but” — Lotte pulls out a wooden arrow — “this is what Toby said worked. Simple. One of his guys uses arrows, and the thing took a shot in the heart and never rose again. Morning came and it burned all by itself.”
I walk up and take the arrow. Just basic wood filed into a point.
“Like a stake?” I ask.
“I guess. But who’d get close enough to stab one?” Me. “That’s probably why they made arrows.”
“But wood works?” I say.
“That’s what they claim,” Lotte answers.
The girl in me is wobbly kneed at facing Toby and his crew again, remembering the dirty hands grabbing on to my skin…
But the hunter in me rears its head. I could kill these things?
Hunt them?
Cara knows me well, and she sighs. “Let’s make some arrows.”
-51-
Tommy passed the test. He’d transitioned into something much larger than before. In fact, he was no longer even recognizable. It stretched Tommy beyond belief, but the metal had held; it had grown with him, unfolding into a prosthetic that worked for the monster just as it had for Tommy.
Inside me, something stirred. My own monster was there, though hidden, hungry, and growing, and this was the first time I realized what that meant. I, too, held back something else; a separate part of me, powerful, feeding off my anger. The others didn’t notice, it was invisible to them, but Tommy’s monster? … It saw a kinship — recognized the thing.
Through my eyes, the windows to my soul, a monster had found its mate.
They give us quarters not far from the hospital, and people stare at us like we’re criminals. After a time, I realize the glares are purely for me.
Tommy, on the other hand, is a hero. Whispering girls blush behind lifted hands, and men stand straighter and salute. He’s the reason LA even exists. He limps on, not looking left or right. I’m his eyes, his ears, as I observe this new “Lost Angeles.” And that’s exactly what we are: lost.
“Aren’t you the one?” A lady points a finger at me. “The stranger?”
“Sure,” I say.
“They should have arrested you,” she says, then wanders away.
Words carry on the wind from nearby conversations: “Spy,” and “Guard in disguise.”
They’re all suspicious.
I’ve run through the ways I could be a spy, but I always come up empty. For who? To what purpose?
Tommy takes one look at our bags of food and grabs the cereal, eyeing the rest in disgust. “I don’t eat meat,” he says.
How had I missed that? “What? Aren’t you a farmer?”
“It makes it … I dunno, meat seems to make him stronger, even though that sounds crazy. I stopped and never went back.”
I clutch the meat protectively to my chest. “Steak sounds delicious right now.”
“Well, it’ll have to wait.” Tommy scratches his head, showing me a paper. “We have a dinner party to attend. They also gave us ice chests so you can eat it later, in the middle of the night. You know how you get.”
“Hah,” I bark out dryly.
We only have time to change. They’ve left me more clothes of navy blue, identical to what I’m wearing. Tommy’s dressed in regular clothing. He looked at everything piled inside his room, then shook his head in awe. “It’s all my stuff,” he says. He gingerly touches a box, frowning before he moves on. After that, he avoids it like the plague.
I’m guessing that’s Joelle’s.
After he leaves me alone, I nosily peek inside the partially open one. On top lies a book. A diary. I lift it out, and before I can shove it back inside, Tommy steps out of the bathroom. I cram the diary inside my shirt.
“Ready?”
“Yes.”
Claiming I have to get something in my room, I run to my neighboring apartment and push the diary safely beneath my pillow.
“What are you doing?” I mutter to myself, then: “It’s okay. I’ll put it back later, first thing.”
We leave, following scrawled out directions. “They have my days all scheduled,” Tommy says in apology. “I meet with the council, then I’m getting some award. They’ve made a whole big thing out of it.”
He turns to me with a frown, and I wait for him to go on. But he doesn’t. Instead, he drops his gaze to the ground.
“Thomas, they can’t make you, can they? I mean, stay in, even if I signed…”
He looks up at me and sighs.
“We can leave,” I say.
He laughs. “To where? Back into the Wilds?”
“Yes.”
Tommy shakes his head. “They’d hunt me down. You, too.”
“They’d try,” I say with a grin.
Tommy’s eyes look sad, yet a smile hovers at his lips. “You’d do that.”
It’s not a question.
-52-
We attend the party, reluctantly, and unfit for regular things like dinner and chatt
er — wary wolves amongst the domesticated. Everyone here is a soldier, so that makes it easier; they all seem to be pretty much like Tommy. Still, we’re set apart.
I’m introduced to people offhandedly, like an afterthought, while Tommy’s patted on the back, hailed as the man of the hour. His hand is shaken enough times, he grimaces from the pain when no one’s looking from having to stand on his new leg for so long.
I’m not seated with him; I’m placed down the way. This home’s lovely — an officer’s quarters, they’d said — but it looks like a regular house, and their dining room seats at least fifty in front of a long, worn, wooden table.
At the buffet, I grab a plate and pile it high. I grab another and fill this one with veggies and noodles for Thomas. He’s finally gotten to his seat, and is now rubbing at sore muscles.
A woman soldier eyes my plates like I’m the hungriest thing she’s ever seen. “This one is for Thomas — er, Sergeant Hatter, that is,” I explain, feeling embarrassed by my gargantuan appetite.
She raises an eyebrow. “Really? You bring him his plates? Must be nice.”
I level my stare at her.
She shrugs. “It just looks like — ”
“I know what it looks like.”
Plates in hand, I return to the table, where everyone stares in silence. They must have been discussing me. It’s hard not to take in Tommy’s guilty look and feel like I should be angry. He’s a traitor just by not defending me. He’d feel that way, but he risks our place to stay, and so he’s torn. Here, he can protect me better than out there, at least for now. And I know him so well already, he’d put both things in his head and let them tear at him from each side.
I set his plate down with a loud thud.
At my own seat, I dig into my meal, savoring my meat, sawing off big hunks and pushing them into my mouth. The food has me humming with gladness. If I’m going to be arrested by the military police, I’ll go on a full stomach.
-53-
I’m hiding my grin. Liza’s over there stuffing her face, not worried in the slightest while every angry face in the room is pointed in her direction.
When she’s done, she turns and, into the silence, asks loudly where the bathroom is.