Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  Seeing that he was alone, but not feeling like he was, he shrugged off his heebie-jeebies enough to loosen his bladder. As he listened to the sound of his piss hitting the porcelain change to the sound of it hitting liquid as he filled the bowl up, he fought the urge to look over his shoulder again. A second later, he lost that fight.

  Clicky-clack.

  He choked the stream of urine off so he could listen. But there was only silence. He couldn’t even hear Jen making any noise, which didn’t do anything to ease his anxiety. He thought about calling out to her, but he didn’t want to look stupid, especially after the dumb thing he’d said about her watching her mouth, so he placated himself to just slowly turning and looking over his shoulder.

  Nobody was there.

  Of course he felt like he wasn’t alone, he told himself, Jen was, like, twenty-five feet away. But somewhere in his heart he knew that she wasn’t the presence he was sensing. He unleashed his urine again, but didn’t turn back to aim and heard his piss hit the tile floor. Crap. He twisted back to the toilet and guided his stream to the place it belonged.

  Creak.

  The floorboards groaned and this time he was positive he’d actually heard it. His head twisted back around like it was spring-loaded as he prepared himself to look his would-be killer straight in the eyes—but he was alone in the bathroom. The closet hallway was empty. What’s freaking wrong with me? he wondered, shaking his head.

  “Dang, babe, you’ve got me spooked now,” he called out as he let the rest of his urine loose.

  On the bed around the corner, Jen smiled at him, then she too heard the sound of claws on the hardwood, or at least she thought she did. Slowly and nervously she turned her head toward the far side of the bed, but nothing was there. She listened hard for a second, but all she heard was Jimmy peeing.

  I need a fucking drink, she thought and flopped onto her stomach, poked her head over the edge of the bed to where the bottle of booze was, and reached for it.

  Movement in the darkness of the far corner under the bed caught her attention. Her hand froze, fingertips just touching the glass of the bottle. Did she really see something back there or was it just—

  Suddenly a huge opossum darted out of the blackness, its sharp, pointy rodent teeth bared to the gums as it lunged at her from under the bed, hissing like a rabid cat.

  Jen screamed and launched herself back onto the relative safety of the bed. Jimmy rushed to her, his flaccid penis flopping about, dripping pee everywhere. The opossum, hissing and snapping its teeth at them, scampered into the middle of the room with absolutely no intention of playing dead.

  Jimmy reached the bed and pulled the naked, shaking Jennifer into his arms. The adrenaline pumping through his veins triggered his autonomic threat assessment system and allowed him to immediately recognize that the giant rodent, while extremely pissed off, was not really particularly dangerous.

  “It’s okay, babe.” He laughed in relief. “It’s just a possum. It’s okay.” He turned to Jen and pulled her face to his. Her pupils were as big as nickels. “It’s okay.”

  But even as he was saying the words, part of him knew it wasn’t true. Part of him knew he wouldn’t live another minute. His brain twisted, trying to unknot the certainty of his doom with the situation as he saw it, but he couldn’t figure out where death was hiding.

  Unseen from the shadows in the far corner of the room, the little girl with the ax stepped out and rushed toward them.

  Swack! The ax sunk into the head of the opossum, almost splitting it in half.

  The sound of the blow and the sudden silence that followed it drew Jimmy’s attention away from Jen. He saw that the opossum was now inexplicably dead—very dead. Blood gushed from its head like from a burst pipe and pooled on the floor around it. But there was no sign of the opossum’s killer. Jimmy’s brain just gave up trying to understand what was happening, which was probably for the best, because in another thirty seconds Jimmy was going to be as dead as the opossum was. But it wasn’t an ax that would do him in. It was the naked girl in his arms.

  Jennifer felt it coming while Jimmy was locked with her eye to eye, but she couldn’t get the words out of her throat. The warning to run. Her mouth opened, but her vocal cords had seized shut. It might have been part of the change that was about to take her over, but she didn’t think so. She thought it was despair that had silenced her. Grief. The certainty that Jimmy was already dead but just didn’t know it yet, that no warning could save him, that she was going to be the one to kill him. She felt her lip quiver as sobs tried to get out of mouth ahead of the words, but those wouldn’t make it out her either. By the time sound exited her throat, Jennifer was gone and what escaped her was not a warning, not a sob, but a snarl.

  Violent convulsions racked her naked body as the veins under her pale, almost translucent, skin bulged up with rushing HGF-filled blood, which was not so much being pumped as blasted through her body with each beat of her heart. She felt like she was burning from the inside out, but the feeling vanished with the rest of her so fast the pain barely even registered. Her muscles engorged with the loaded blood, giving her strength and speed no human being could match. The transformation was impossibly fast. So fast that she was already attacking him before Jimmy could do anything beyond simply flinch reflexively.

  His face twisted into a bloody mask, half terror and half realization, as Jennifer grabbed his head with one hand and her nails sank into his skin like knives. She tossed him like a rag doll across the room and commenced with blindly tearing the room to shreds before he’d even made contact with the wall.

  Smash!

  Jimmy’s body crumpled against the wall and dropped like an anchor to the ground. It was a hard blow, but not the deathblow that was coming. He still had the longest ten seconds of his life to get through before he would be granted that grace. Painfully he raised his bleeding face from the dusty floor, and for the first time he saw the little girl with the ax, hiding under the bed. He knew her, but the blow to his head had knocked his memory all out of whack. He wouldn’t have been able to tell you his own name, much less hers. But he did know she was Jennifer’s sister.

  Bobby-Leigh looked at Jimmy from under the bed and hoped he was smart enough to survive this. She liked him enough, but more importantly, she knew Jen would be a disaster if she ended up killing him, because her older sister was in love with the dude. Jen had never been in love before (or if she had, she’d never said it) so if she killed him, well, that would just suck for her on all kinds of levels. Unfortunately, Bobby-Leigh knew Jimmy well enough to know that smart would never be an adjective folks would use to describe him.

  Though dead will probably be one soon, she thought.

  Hoping he’d just follow her lead and keep his head down and play dead, like that stupid-ass opossum should have, she raised a finger to her lips and shushed him. The berserker-demon that had possessed her sister for the moment was crushing and smashing and grinding her way through the furniture in the room. She smashed her fists into the walls and ripped and trashed the wires, pipes, and whatever else caught her attention.

  “Don’t move a muscle. Don’t make a—” she tried to whisper to him, but, just like she’d thought, he was not one of the smart ones.

  “Dad!” Jimmy screamed at the top of his lungs over and over again as he tried to get to his feet. The berserker immediately stopped demolishing the wall and turned her attention on her boyfriend, whose time was finally up.

  Bobby-Leigh watched as her sister tore the naked boy to pieces. “Fuck,” the little girl said quietly to herself. “Jimmy, you goddamn idiot.”

  The berserker tossed the bed, exposing Bobby-Leigh, but the little girl didn’t move and, sure enough, instead of grabbing her next, the monster was drawn by the sound of the bed she’d just tossed smashing through the closet wall and into the door. The little girl waited until the creature’s back was to her and then scurried into a corner to wait the destruction out, painfully aware that the
doorway out of the room was now blocked. But that was okay, because the demon’s rage was already starting to dissipate. Jen was wearing herself out. Her final act of violence was throwing the nightstand through the windows and flooding the room with dusty rays of the morning light.

  The berserker collapsed.

  In the calm that came directly after the thud of her sister’s fall to the debris-covered floor, Bobby-Leigh heard voices and banging from the hallway.

  “Jimmy!” a male voice cried.

  Brennachecke senior, most likely, Bobby-Leigh thought.

  “Jen! Jimmy!”

  “The door’s blocked,” somebody with him yelled, Ace or maybe Roger.

  “I don’t give a rat’s uncle if it’s blocked or not! Get us inside. Now.”

  That was definitely Brennachecke, Bobby-Leigh thought, as she counted out the mental stopwatch running in her brain.

  “One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand.”

  She surveyed the devastation in the room as she counted. Come on, she thought. Think! They’re going to be inside this room any minute. What are you going to do? What are you going to say? What can you say?

  “Four one-thousand. Five one-thousand.”

  Jen had collapsed behind a pile of rubble. Only her still-veiny bare foot was visible to her sister. Come on, Bobby-Leigh thought, continuing to count. Outside, the “rescuers” had managed to get the door cracked and were hard at work assessing the wreckage barricading it. Bobby-Leigh ignored them.

  Whack! Bam! Whack!

  The rescuers had found a fire ax. Or somebody had just had one; these were the days when folks did carry those things around—it was like the iPhone of the apocalypse. Wood splintered. They were making progress, which meant Bobby-Leigh was running out of time to get her and her sister out of this.

  “Twelve one-thousand. Thirteen one-thousand. Fourteen one-thousand. Fifteen . . .” Bobby-Leigh stopped. “Fuck it,” she said to the empty room as she got to her feet. Her eyes involuntarily went to the bloody pile that was Jimmy’s shredded body. No part of her wanted to look, but she found herself looking just the same. A huge sigh escaped her throat.

  What number am I on? she thought as she slowly approached the monster her sister was trapped inside.

  “Nineteen one-thousand? Twenty one-thousand. Twenty-one one-thousand.”

  At thirty-one one-thousand, Bobby-Leigh was standing over the hulking demon, trying to decide what to do. A dark part of her thought it might be for the best if she just killed her sister right there where she lay. But she didn’t think she could do that, even if it would have been a mercy killing if ever there was one. After all, her sister was going to be all kinds of fucked up over what she’d just done, just like Bobby-Leigh thought her dad must have been after he’d murdered their mom. But the ten-year-old didn’t want to be alone. In fact, she’d rather be dead.

  Bobby-Leigh nudged the demon’s arm with her foot.

  Nothing.

  Come the fuck on, Jennifer! the little girl thought and kicked the monster lying on the ground in front of her as hard as she could.

  But still nothing happened.

  She’d lost count in her head. She knew from experience that it took at least a minute before an unconscious berserker was safe to approach. She would have needed both hands to count the number of people she’d personally seen torn apart because they’d thought that one was dead, or that the episode had ended, and been wrong.

  CRASH!

  The doorway would be breached any minute. Bobby-Leigh knelt down by her sister’s head. She didn’t have any more time.

  Phlack!

  She slapped her sister as hard as she could across the face.

  Nothing.

  Maybe she’s died somehow. Maybe she’s just berserked out too many times to survive. That does happen to folks, Bobby-Leigh thought. Fuck.

  She lowered her head, put her ear inches away from her sister’s mouth, and listened for breath. For a long moment, the little girl couldn’t tell if her sister was breathing or not. All she could hear was her own breath and the idiots outside the door breaking in. But it didn’t end up mattering.

  Jennifer’s berserker eyes opened suddenly, and Bobby-Leigh found herself in a staring contest with death incarnate. Jen didn’t move. But Bobby-Leigh did. She leaped to her feet and raised the ax over her head, but held fast.

  Waiting.

  Watching.

  Wondering.

  A shudder passed through Jen’s naked body. As her eyes blinked erratically, Jennifer’s pupils constricted to pinpoints and her overloaded body started to seize. A second later the seizure was over and Jen just lay there, eyes open and unblinking, her body frozen and rigid on the floor.

  Bobby-Leigh waited. Knowing all too well that it wasn’t over yet. Then Jennifer took a huge gasping breath and sat straight up. A human breath. Bobby-Leigh wouldn’t have been able to tell you the difference between the inhalation of a human and a berserker, but she knew it when she saw it.

  “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” Bobby-Leigh told the room.

  She set the ax down and wiped a strand of bloody hair from Jennifer’s face. Suddenly Jennifer convulsed again, hacking and coughing. Bobby-Leigh instinctively rocketed back from her like she was dodging a striking rattlesnake, and raised the ax high to strike back if she needed to. But Jennifer was done for now. Gagging, she spit up several teeth into her hand. Both girls stared at them.

  “Are those mine?” Jennifer asked weakly, knowing the answer, but not wanting to.

  Bobby-Leigh lowered her ax and looked across the room to Jimmy’s crushed skull. None of his teeth appeared to be missing. She answered her sister’s question with a nod and looked away as Jen connected the dots in her head.

  Like all berserkers, Jennifer had no memory of what she’d done while possessed. But this wasn’t her first rodeo ride with the devil inside her, so, as she took in the destruction and chaos around her, including the body of the boy she loved, whom she had obviously and violently dismembered and crushed like an empty soda can, she wasn’t surprised by what she saw, just sad.

  And hungry. Painfully, nauseatingly hungry.

  It was quite possible for a person to die of starvation in the middle of berserking out. The physical demands on the body burned so many calories so fast that most of the time it was physical exhaustion that knocked the monsters out at the end of their episodes. Jen would need to consume thousands of calories in the next hour or so, or she’d likely go into a coma.

  They didn’t have time for a coma.

  As tears dripped out of the naked girl’s eyes and she choked her sadness down like it was something to eat, her lizard brain, not to be confused with the berserker one, started spinning and flipping switches. Survival mode was activated.

  What was the situation?

  She was naked. Jimmy was dead. Bobby-Leigh was not. People were outside. They were trying to get inside. Jimmy’s dad was one of the people. Jimmy was dead. The folks outside would realize that either she or her sister was a berserker. No, they would realize that she was the berserker. She was the one covered in blood, so it was going to be pretty obvious Bobby-Leigh hadn’t done this to the room, or to Jimmy.

  Brennachecke was a reasonable man. He was more than aware that berserkers had no control over what they did when they lost it. But Jimmy wasn’t just some kid who’d come in off the street. He was the man’s youngest son. And even if he hadn’t been, Brennachecke was like a fucking accountant when it came to shit like this. Debiting one son from column A would require crediting column B with Jen’s life. It was just math. It wasn’t personal. The equation simply had to balance.

  Bobby-Leigh dropped a pile of clothes at Jen’s feet. She was saying something, but Jen wasn’t listening. She was too hungry to focus. Without thinking, the blood-covered teenager pulled on her dead boyfriend’s shirt and then her panties from the pile of clothing. Only her lizard brain was currently operational. And it was panicking. They were g
oing to kill her, and then they’d kill Bobby-Leigh, because what the fuck else would they do with her? That was how it worked these days. There was no talking about shit, no trying to come to terms and understand each other. You just committed murder and moved the fuck on.

  The threat assessment came in loud and clear: they were fucked.

  “Jen, we gotta go,” Bobby-Leigh was saying.

  But there was nowhere to go. The door suddenly broke open. The busted bed that had been pinning it shut still barred entry into the room, but that was more of a nuisance at this point and wouldn’t hold anybody back for long. Through the opening in the broken door the girls could make out Brennachecke, fire ax in hand, and a small, faceless crowd behind him standing in the decrepit hotel hallway.

  Brennachecke had been a staff sergeant in the Marines and was a veteran of several of the retaliatory “wars” against the Al Qaeda and ISIS terror networks in the Afghanistan mountains and other hot spots in the Middle East. This was of course back when there was a United States and an Afghanistan, and radical Islamic extremists felt like the worst enemy Americans would ever face. He had been a good soldier then and was a good man now. Not that any of that mattered anymore. Good men did bad things. Evil men did good things. Post-apocalypse, right and wrong were about as arbitrary as which Twinkie you ate first when you were lucky enough to find a pack of them somewhere.

  “Jimmy? Jen?!” he called out, squinting against the light flooding in from the broken windows. Bobby-Leigh and Jen didn’t answer him. They didn’t have to.

  A single look at the half-naked girl covered in blood, her strange little sister, and the crushed skull of his youngest son was all it took for the brain in his clean-shaven head to accurately assess what had happened.

  Brennachecke blinked once—that was all the time he needed to know what the right thing was to do. He felt no guilt or shame or pity about it.

  “Eric,” he called over his shoulder.

  Reluctantly both Jen and Bobby-Leigh met the eyes of the man who had taken them in. The man who had promised them protection against the horrors of the world, fed them, taught them, and had never asked for anything in exchange for that protection. They both expected his eyes to now stare back at them cold as ice, but they weren’t cold at all—just disappointed and sad. They continued to watch as Eric Brennachecke, the spitting image of his father, shaved head and all, pushed his way forward and stepped into the shattered doorway with a homemade flamethrower strapped to his back. Then they stopped watching, turned, and ran for the light streaming in through the broken windows behind them. The elder Brennachecke son (now the only Brennachecke son) opened the valve on his weapon and unleashed a long jet of flame.