by Ryan Schow
Then someone discovers my secret. They find out I am the killer, the assassin, the vigilante.
Alice.
Looking nineteen, still, Alice finds future me in what used to be Washington D.C. (now it’s just Region 10). She explains that, like me, she was given the Fountain of Youth serum.
“So you’re immortal, so what?” I glower, still working relentlessly to mask my surprise. “What have you done with it?”
“You need to stop,” she says to the future me, softly. “Killing all those people, it’s not right. It’s enough already.”
“You don’t understand,” I tell her.
“I do,” Alice replies. That she could be the spawn of Satan and still appear so congenial is, in itself, deeply upsetting. “Focus your energy elsewhere. Please.”
“Desperate pleas from the girl who melts people’s insides.” The way I feel is snide, pessimistic, always primed for battle. When I’m in this state, there’s no such thing as peace, patience, or relaxation. I’m the cocked hammer of a loaded gun. Even on Alice.
Alice frowns. “You can’t continue doing this. Please, Raven, stop.”
“No, thank you.”
Even now, steeped in this moment, fully immersed in the thoughts and complex emotions of my hundreds-of-years-old self, I know future me knows she is too far gone. I’m too entangled in righting the wrongs of the world to heed her warning, this warning from a girl I know to be extremely proficient in turning others into gut soup if she so chooses.
Alice stopped trying after I/she kept killing. She just went away, for decades.
After thirty or forty political assassinations on that particular charge, I come to realize—just like in the twenty-first century—Presidents and Prime Ministers are puppets to a deeper agenda. Rather than going after a seemingly endless supply of puppets, I set my sights on the puppet masters. Everyone who has a hand in oppressing humanity gets their life cut short. By me. By the righteous power of my mind. When I’m done with their kind, I root out shady members of the military, the churches, CEO’s of Forbes Top 50 companies and so on. I just keep going.
The future Raven, she’s practically possessed. As a voyeur into her life, I admit, I have become freaking scary. Terrifying, actually.
The bought and paid for media label her/me a “political assassin” with “conspiracy theories and “discriminatory tendencies.” Fringe groups, freedom fighters, they deem me “an ender of corruption.” And they think I’m a man. Ha! With so many dead, I decide to end the lunacy on a high point. From my efforts, the lines of malfeasance are broken once more, and a new more honest regime takes charge.
Thankfully.
My future self relaxes again. My inner nomad resumes her wanderlust and I end up working my way through the fifteen Regions of New Europe for the better part of a decade when Holland finds me. That donkey’s dick. I’m in what used to be Italy visiting a place known simply as Colosseum enjoying myself when he shows his stupid face.
I feel him before he makes his presence known. It’s the way my skin crawls that gives him away. In my ear, he says, “The way people hated the serial killers of our time, that’s how much they hate and fear you. This beautiful thing you became then ever so sadly abandoned.”
“I’m not that person anymore,” future me says, turning to the sound of his voice.
“You always thought of me as a monster,” Holland replies, “but child, you are the monster now. You have become me no matter the lies you spin for yourself.” The way he says it, he sounds so proud. Like he’s finally been vindicated.
After a long time, I look away, draw a cautious breath and say, “They were right to fear me. And I’m nothing like you.”
Somehow, through the majesty of old Italy, the beast inside me aches to rise again. My eyes, they turn coal black, draping the luscious landscape in shadow. For the thousandth time in my life, I want to pull that son of a bitch’s head clean off his shoulders and soccer-ball kick it into the gutter.
But I don’t.
I leave before he does; he doesn’t follow.
At this point in my quest, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish me from her. Swallowed up inside my future self, I’m feeling more one-and-the-same than might be healthy. Still I forge on, put myself deeper still inside her memories.
The years following my murderous binging are met with me looking at everything good in the world. I become the best liar ever. That’s the truth. The way I sell myself on the manner in which my violent ways pave the way for peace, it’s downright delusional. Holland was right. I’m lying to myself. My truths are merely justifications for me doing what I do, for me being who I am.
A vigilante. A killer by way of righting so many wrongs.
Against my better judgment that day, I let Holland live. Looking back, I should have killed him. Not that it would matter much. He wouldn’t die anyway.
Years after I ditch that sanctimonious prick in Italy, I receive a visit from the creepy doctor from Dulce. Who I’ve become over the years, how much I have developed, it’s more powerful than either of us could imagine. Without thought, I use my might to fully strip away the doctor’s holographic ruse of a human body. What appears to me for the first time is a strange creature in reptilian/human hybrid form. I remember catching glimpses of him over the decades, but never a full view.
“Finally I see you for who I always knew you were,” I say.
“You are not the same helpless girl.”
“How old are you, really, Doctor?”
“Hundreds of years old. Thousands, maybe. Numbers for this reason are trivial. We don’t do birthdays.”
“When will you die?” my hateful future self inquires.
“I keep waiting for you to kill yourself,” he says, ignoring my question, “but this is not in your future, is it?”
“As long as tyrants are able to enslave entire populations with self-serving laws and nonsensical propaganda, with permits and punishments, with false flag terror used to advance policies of fraudulent governments who want only to further cull an already reduced population, then I will neither kill myself nor will I die.”
“Suit yourself,” the thing says.
“I will.”
By then I’d kicked the legs out from underneath the entire world-government structure. In my haste to impose justice, however, I left the citizens of the globe without suitable leaders. I left them in a state of fear. From this lawless, leaderless continent of mine, a new future emerges, one just as immoral as before. This future is unruly and chaotic, the kind of future where man turns on man, where no one is safe from their friends, their neighbors, their own treasonous families.
For all our technology, for all our most brilliant leaders, for my need to save people and preserve peace, what I did was drag civilization kicking and screaming back into the dark ages.
This begs the question: am I ever going to get anything right?!
4
What can I do with my indignity but go into hiding for two hundred years? That’s the plan. But then, wait, no…forget that! With much consideration, I finally do the one thing I have yet to do right: I let myself fall in love.
Like really fall in love.
The voyeur in me is dying at how my future love life turns out. I seek out and find true love, which causes the girl in me to both sigh and relax once more.
My first husband is a beautiful man who loves me immensely, right up until the day he dies. He is sixty-three years old. I mourn him for decades, then I take another lover. And another.
And yet another.
Then, after the death of my fourth husband, what seems like a noble plan of distraction no longer appeals to me. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t raise another boy into a man. No longer have I got it in me to fight to keep him and love him as he ages and I never age a day.
I get tired of lying, tired of explaining myself.
And I get tired of watching the people I love die while I forge on, unaffected by the ravages of ti
me. So I wander the earth again, my inner nomad all cheerful and shit. Instead of aimlessly wandering the continents, I dedicate the better part of twenty years to cleaning up nuclear waste in the hope that future generations will be healthier than those who’ve come before us. Again, my efforts are virtuous, but after two decades, I grow tired of being around the nuclear decay of past civilizations and I have to move on.
Forty five years after I quit cleaning up nuclear waste, a new world leader emerges. One who takes the country by storm. I want to let him live, I really do—if anything because the world is aching for a savior and this man looks to fill those shoes—but I can see inside the shadows of his heart and I know, sadly, corruption will abound.
He is a man for sale. Another future puppet. Willing to do whatever it takes to further his and his benefactors’ means.
The old parts of me are stirring again. Telling me he can’t be allowed to repeat the over-repeated cycles of government. After decades of not killing anyone, my gut tells me it’s time again. Time to end him in his sleep.
Stop his heart.
So I lean on the darker, more malevolent parts of myself only to realize I am so gosh damn tired of this never-ending struggle, I can’t do it anymore. I’m done. I need to stop the cycle of madness. So in my mind, I conjure an image of him: Enzo Holland.
He did this to me. Made me unkillable.
With every fiber of my being, the very thought of him has my stomach in knots. I should be dead by now. A corpse! Not left to survive my friends, my family, my husbands, nuclear wars, entire civilizations. He once told me this was a gift.
This is no gift at all. Gosh dammit, it’s a curse!
For the first time in hundreds of years, since the death of my first husband, I weep for what I’ve lost. For who I’ve become. Then I realize I don’t really have the fortitude necessary to flush the world of all its political turds again.
This life of mine, it’s all Holland’s fault.
Forget the future corruptible President, I tell myself. He is just another minion. There will be more. Countless more. I’m aching to dump my anxieties somewhere though, on someone. I have to. At this, point, I just need these ever-restless emotions out of me!
It takes three weeks to track him down. I finally find him in Vienna, and even though he looks different and he has a family of five and a new identity, I know it’s Holland because I can feel the age and bad energy of him.
“What do you want?” he asks, angry that I found him. We are standing on his front porch. He has a daughter of six or seven playing in the front yard and his wife is out back with the other kids. The little girl, she’s cute. Okay, she’s freaking adorable. But I don’t care. I can’t. Why? Because I’m his child, too. Not the way this girl is, but I am his creation never-the-less.
He wants to know what I want. I look over my shoulder at his daughter, and when she isn’t looking, I grab him, pull him into a bear hug from which he cannot escape, then use my powers to launch us straight into the sky.
He is screaming in my face to let him down. Thrashing beneath my grip. The air thins, grows cold, then frigid. He surrenders. Resigns himself to this fate. To me. We reach thirty-eight thousand feet and I give up the fight, too. I don’t care what happens now.
In his shaky, scared voice made thin and raw from altitude, he says, “When did you learn to fly?”
It doesn’t even matter.
Moments before I launch us through the atmosphere and into space, I stall my trajectory and look him dead in his eyes. My mouth says nothing; my dark and hateful gaze goes black. It says everything my mouth cannot. How he ruined me. How I devastated this world. How I’m dead inside, save for the animosity I harbor for him and this life of mine that will never end. He makes hard sucking sounds and bulging eyes at this altitude, shivering in my arms and turning blue. I relish his discomfort.
I eat his fear like it’s apple pie.
For the first time in centuries, this man is scared. He’s freezing. Dying. But we can’t die yet, I remind myself. Not where we can fall back to earth and heal. No, I look into the blackness of space and resume my course, pushing ever further, ever higher, forcing my waning mind through the miasma that is fast becoming unconsciousness.
I hold what little breath I have left, then push us through the last layers of the atmosphere where breathing and living are now officially impossible.
Here, in orbit with all kinds of waste and space junk, Holland and I both freeze to death and roast to death over and over again, never waking in between. After hundreds of years, I am finally in a place where immortality means nothing.
Deep space is death.
Yet I’m here, a voyeur looking in my future self as if studying the past, and I’m doing it in 2015. So I lived? Yes. I’m alive. Conscious inside future Raven’s mind. How is this possible? I’m inside of her mind, my body standing before her body back on earth.
Again, how is this possible?
Still, my mind so entangled with hers they feel as one, I relish the bliss of being her, feeling this sugary sweet taste of nothing as this part of my life is shrouded in a welcomed death. As a voyeur, for so long I savor this vast emptiness, an emptiness so dark and silent, so deeply peaceful it’s heavenly.
No, it’s Heaven.
But it’s not mine. It’s hers. And at some point, it comes to an end. At some point, I end up as her on a gurney in the past with me inside of her brain digging through the debris of a frivolous, awful life. Shouldn’t the space/time continuum fracture and end all humanity right now?
Apparently not.
5
In space, for what seems like forever, I cease to exist. Then, after three hundred twenty six years, two hundred forty six days in orbit, the new version of Holland and me get picked up by a scavenger ship that returns us to earth. Once thawed, our bodies quickly heal. When we wake up in front of the ship’s crew that saved us, it is to a dozen horrified faces. Yes, it’s impossible that we’re alive. But we are.
We were.
Back on an earth I fail to recognize, Holland and I are returned to a civilization with no civil authorities, no government and no God. This is a civilization ruled by something like a giant glowing stone called The Patriarch, which makes decisions for the community it presides over.
I’m held in a holding cell separate from Holland. I don’t know what’s happening to him, and I refuse to care. All I know is I’m in a windowless, doorless room, too unsettled and uncomfortable in my own skin to speak, or complain, or even cry. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe I’m alive. All I wanted was to no longer exist, yet here I am, back on earth. Not dead.
This cycle of madness settles over me like the pallor of an unavailable death. I have fallen from Heaven; now I am back in Hell.
Something cracks open in my mind, like a niggling, or a tickle. After a moment, I realize that The Patriarch is wanting in. The stone. It wants to know who I am, so using telepathy, I show it my life. Moments later, a man arrives through a door I never saw (and still cannot see) and says I should walk with him down a hallway. In the stark white, doorless hallway lit by bright lights I can’t see, a door suddenly appears.
My host holds out a hand, directing me into the room. I do as asked because, what the f*ck else am I going to do? The door seals shut behind me. Inside the crisp white room the door disappears. I’m inside this room with no windows, no exits and bright lights which have no obvious source. Where the hell did the door just go? Tricks, I tell myself. Still, there’s nothing to tell me why I’m here or how I’ll escape. The technology of this future frightens me, but I remain calm, strangely detached.
Submissive.
Sub-sonic sound waves crash into me all at once, lengthening their arc, emanating from the walls for no reason. My nose spouts blood, as do my eyes and ears. I am brought to my knees, hands clapped over my ears, though it’s not helping. Within moments, I crawl to a corner and curl in it where I lay in this torturous state for days, weeks—God
knows how long—without food, water or comfort.
I should be dead.
But again, this has become the story of my life.
In the room, first there is no one, just me. Then are people inside the room with me. Two non-human, non-alien looking things cloaked in holographic, armor-clad identities that are ominous looking even to me.
The sub-sonic soundwaves draw to a stop. I feel obliterated by the silence.
“You are the killer of Presidents, the ender of governments, are you not?” one of them asks. He looks like something out of the Roman Empire. Like some freaking Colosseum-style gladiator.
“Yes,” I say, “I am.”
The truth is, I’m drained, too broken to lie.
Stupid me, I should’ve lied.
6
The two things, these metallic looking heathens, they rush me in a blur, like they were somehow sparked into war mode and I was the enemy. One of these things rips off my arm while the other yanks and tugs and tears at my leg until it, too, is liberated from my torso. The pain is unlike anything I’ve ever known or felt before. Worse than any transformation. Worse than the time Heim dumped gasoline directly into the chambers of my heart and tried to burn me to death.
As I’m screaming my lungs raw, clawed metal fingers jam something sharp and metal into my eyeball. My eye just pops open and vomits itself out of the socket, creeping slow and gooey down my cheek, like a punched quail egg spitting out its pulp.
Sucking in the deepest breath to mount the mother of all screams, my pain measures colossal. I squirm, fight, struggle to shove these creatures off me, but I’m ruined. Pulled apart. Then earbuds are shoved into my ears. The devices, they penetrate my skin, drill down into it, dig their little tentacle legs like wiggling, piercing needles into my head. They root themselves into the skin and bones of my skull and the noise that erupts from them is icy sharp and shrill. So deafening not even my most unstoppable screams were heard to me. It is a veritable madness loud enough to turn my eardrums inside out.