Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  The fire launched out across the room like a creature escaping from hell. It billowed and gobbled up the oxygen as it grew and stretched and pulsed—a hot, fanged serpent of flame, consumed by a hunger for destruction as much as berserkers were consumed by rage.

  The long snake of burning gas snapped at the girls’ heels as they leaped blindly for one of the shattered windows and burst through it into the morning air. The curtains exploded into flames around them as they seemed to hang for a split second two stories above the ground. But the fire would only singe the girls—it was the fall that was going to be dangerous.

  Time sped back up, gravity kicked in, and down they dropped.

  The hotel room overlooked one of the narrow little alleyways off Fairfield’s main square. Below the window was a green plastic-lidded dumpster that was still half-full of garbage from years ago. The last vestige of humanity, throwing out the trash, had apparently lasted longer in Fairfield than the last vestige of civilization, picking the trash up. This turned out to be a lucky break for the girls. They smashed through the plastic lid of the dumpster into a much softer mess of dusty long-lost refuse, and ended up relatively unhurt aside from the superficial, though stinging, cuts from the glass. The landing wasn’t the part of the fall that was the problem, though.

  Adrenaline exploded into Jennifer’s system. It exploded into Bobby-Leigh’s as well, but the little girl didn’t have a history of turning into a monster because of it, so she wasn’t the issue. Shaking off the fall as fast as she could, the little sister grabbed the bigger one and locked eyes with her. Jennifer’s pupils dilated to the size of nickels.

  Fuck, the little girl thought. Berserking out again so soon without eating might actually kill her sister right here and now. But if it didn’t, then being trapped with her in such a confined space was definitely going to end up getting Bobby-Leigh herself killed.

  “Breathe. Breathe. In. Out. Close your eyes. Just listen to my voice. You’re safe. We’re safe. Find your mantra, Jen,” Bobby-Leigh whispered as calmly as she could manage to her sister.

  Bang! Pachink!

  A gunshot bounced off the side of the dumpster.

  Fucking hell! Bobby-Leigh thought as she looked up at the burning hole above them where the window used to be and saw Brennachecke standing in the billowing flames, pistol outstretched, recalibrating his aim. She closed her eyes, expecting to die, but the man was forced back inside before he could get the shot off. The fire was spreading fast. Bobby-Leigh heard wood inside the building pop and opened her eyes in time to see a puff of ash and flame explode out the hole. She hoped that was the end of Brennachecke. Not that she didn’t understand why he was trying to kill them, or that she even disliked him for it; she just needed to focus and the motherfucking gunshots were extremely distracting.

  In her arms, Jen twitched. Her big sister was obviously doing all she could to fight the change, but it seemed unlikely she would be winning the battle.

  No, goddamn it! the little girl screamed in her own head while she slipped behind her sister, wrapped her in her arms, and held a karambit blade—a small curved knife that resembled the claw of a bear and which she had seemingly pulled out of thin air—to the bigger girl’s throat.

  The convulsions started.

  “We’re okay,” she soothed. “Jen. We are okay. Find your mantra. It’s so easy. Effortless. Remember? Just like breathing. Just like a heartbeat.”

  When she spoke her voice was calm, in stark contrast to the rest of her, and full of authority she didn’t actually feel. She sounded like one of the Transcendental Meditation dudes her uncle used to have over for dinner, not like a little girl in a dumpster holding a knife against her sister’s jugular.

  Then, by the grace of a god neither girl really believed in (or simply due to the fact that Jen just didn’t have the fuel in her to berserk out again), Jennifer’s body calmed. Her pupils contracted back to normal. She blinked. Blood ran from yet another superficial wound, this one caused by the razor-sharp blade her sister was holding against her throat, but that was the extent of the damage inflicted.

  Almost.

  Jen spit blood into her hand, then reached up and probed inside her mouth for a second and pulled out another tooth. She looked at it without emotion, then touched the knife against her throat, signaling to Bobby-Leigh that she could lower her blade.

  Clink.

  Jen flicked the tooth against the side of the dumpster.

  “Are you kidding me?” she whispered to her sister, as if the little girl was somehow responsible for all this, and tried very hard not cry.

  “We gotta find Dad,” Bobby-Leigh said, putting the smaller knife away and grabbing her ax from the rubble.

  “Fuck that shit, dude. I have to eat.” The words came out stronger than she thought they would, so she added, “Besides, there’s no way he’s still alive anyway,” as if that made anything better.

  She was sure he was dead. Pretty sure, that was. The only way he’d have been able to survive would have been if he’d broken out of jail. Or if somebody had let him out, which she supposed might have happened.

  Well so what if he is alive somewhere? she thought to herself as she climbed shakily out of the trash. He was dead to her.

  “They’re going to come after us, Jen. We’ve got nobody now. If you don’t want to try to find Dad, then what do you think we should do?”

  “I don’t know! I’m fucking naked, standing here in an alley, Bobby-Leigh! I, I just killed my . . . Jesus, fucking Mary and Joseph, I just killed— I’ve got blood all over me. I’m fucking starving. What the hell do you want from me? I do not have a plan!”

  Jen expected Bobby-Leigh to burst into tears, but she should have known better. Bobby-Leigh hadn’t cried since she’d survived being snatched at a Walmart, and that was years ago. Besides, a little screaming from her big sister was pretty insignificant when it came to the long list of things that were actually worth shedding tears over these days. So Bobby-Leigh’s eyes just stared back at her, like their father’s used to when Jen would throw a temper tantrum. Back before he’d started really drinking. Back when mom had still been alive. Back when everything that went wrong hadn’t ended up being her fault, and when her fucking sister didn’t dress like she’d just stepped out of some Japanese anime program. Her little sister was as immune to her ranting as her father used to be before everything Jen loved decided to start dying on her.

  But somebody needed to cry over this shit, so if Bobby-Leigh wasn’t going to do it, she would. Jen sobbed quietly while Bobby-Leigh watched indifferently and waited, until she heard men shouting in the distance.

  “They’re coming,” she said quietly.

  “I have to eat,” Jen said, but didn’t move.

  Her heart going out to her teary-eyed big sister, Bobby-Leigh firmly took Jen’s hand and dragged her away. They slipped unseen around the corner and across the street to the bookshop café their murdered uncle used to love, now long out of business. A place that was once called Revelations.

  Chapter Two

  The Last Guard in Maine State Prison

  As much as Jennifer wanted him to be—or at least thought she wanted him to be—Emmett Kessler was not dead. Nor had he been freed or been able to escape. He was right where they’d left him: 1,700 miles away in Maine State Prison.

  If there had ever been a bad time to be sent to prison, the end of the world was certainly it. Had Emmett been a little more thoughtful in the middle of his guilt and grief, he may very well have reconsidered his refusal to appeal. The moral high ground of punishing yourself for not saving your wife’s life and instead blowing her face off—even if it was in self-defense—crumbled a little bit when the guards stopped showing up for work and you got left there to rot.

  The logic behind Jennifer’s thinking Emmett should be dead was sound. He should have been and in fact would have been if it had not been for one man, a fifty-two-year-old veteran corrections officer by the name of Captain Bill P. Waters.


  Captain Waters had worked Maine State ever since it was moved from Thomaston to Warren. For decades he’d tried to just “do his eight and hit the gate” like everybody told him to, but the man was cursed with a conscience.

  Even before folks figured out the world was ending and started abandoning their short-sighted, self-centered, consumerist ways for equally short-sighted and self-centered survivalist ones, the prison was a place where psychopaths and sadists walked on both sides of the bars. But Captain Waters steadfastly refused to partake in beating the inmates or falsifying reports. He even asked the prison staff that he shared his shifts with to refrain from being verbally abusive. Sure, the worst offending COs just got their shifts changed and went on doing what they did. Sure, most of the cats he worked with thought he was just going easy on the black inmates because he was black himself. Sure, he spent most hours on the job waiting for the assistant warden to come up with a justification to fire him. And sure, he drank himself stupid most nights after work to keep himself from breaking down in tears of frustration and humiliation. But in spite of all that, he woke up every day, ironed his uniform, polished his shoes, showered, brushed his teeth, and arrived fifteen minutes earlier for his shift than he needed to.

  Captain Waters believed in rehabilitation, and, despite the systematic failure of his superiors and colleagues to stop the rampant abuse of the clientele, he’d worn his uniform with pride. Besides, the uniform was ninety percent of the job; looking the part was how he earned the respect that kept him alive among rapists, thieves, and murderers. He was a stern, honorable man who stuck by the rule book more religiously than the pope stuck by the Bible. He was a man who did what he could when he could as long as it didn’t end up risking his job, and in the US criminal corrections system that was doing a lot. For that, cats called him “Black Jesus” behind his back.

  The apocalypse slowly eroded normal life for everybody. Prison was no exception. Eventually, the whole facility was on twenty-four-hour lockdown seven days a week, mostly because the COs one by one stopped showing up for work, until there was only a handful of staff left to manage the 950 inmates, give or take. Then the paychecks stopped coming and the supply deliveries stopped coming, and that handful quickly dwindled down to one.

  Black Jesus could have just released all the men and walked away. Actually, he could have just walked away and left all those cats there to die. That was pretty much what everybody had told him to do, and what they had all done themselves. Even the inmates couldn’t understand why he was hanging around, enforcing rules that clearly didn’t mean shit anymore. But he did. He single-handedly kept the prison functioning, or at least kept the inmates alive, for ninety-three days.

  Then riots started and black and white turned gray and red. Amid the smoke and chaos, Black Jesus kept the doors locked tight and let the fury and flames burn themselves out, as if the prison itself were a berserker. Hundreds and hundreds died at the hands of their cellmates. Hundreds more from the fires themselves. Captain Waters had done what he could to mitigate the carnage, but short of releasing everybody, there was simply not much one man could do once the ball got rolling. By the end of the hundredth day, only seventy-seven inmates were still alive.

  Black Jesus had slowly and methodically cleared C Block of the dead and burned them in the staff parking lot. Then he had one by one moved the survivors in. It had taken almost a week to do—the man just wasn’t as young as he used to be.

  * * *

  As Captain Waters had walked Emmett in shackles from the death stench of B Block to the relative cleanliness of C Block, Emmett had been pretty sure the man had lost his marbles. But he’d been wrong. Mostly.

  “Captain Waters, sir. Why don’t you just let us go? There’s no way you’re going to be able to keep us here, alive anyway.”

  “Did I ask for your opinion, inmate?”

  “No, sir.”

  Black Jesus had stopped and given Emmett a strange look.

  “I don’t have the authority to let inmates out, Kessler. I know that may seem ridiculous to you, all things considered. But it is not ridiculous to me. You will do your time. Everybody here will. And then you’ll be released.”

  “Do you even know how much time I have left?”

  “Five hundred and ninety-six days.”

  Emmett had sighed and then muttered, “Great. So, basically, we’re all going to starve to death.”

  “Not if I can help it. Now shut up and walk.”

  Black Jesus had decided to put Emmett in a cell with a twenty-eight-year-old berserker who was once named Wiley DuPont, but was now known almost exclusively as “Beast.” When they’d arrived at the cell door, the monstrously muscled giant of what used to be a man had looked at Emmett with its simple, confused eyes. This was what became of folks once they’d berserked out too many times. The rage would sleep unless provoked, but whatever had once been DuPont—his personality, his loves and hates, his soul—those were lost inside the hulking muscles of Beast. Emmett had always pitied the poor thing. Whoever DuPont had been, he’d surely had more going on inside his head than he did now. Beast currently had the mental capacity of a toddler. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t write. He couldn’t focus on anything for more than a few minutes. He also didn’t seem to be bothered by it much. In fact, he might have been the happier of the two of them, Emmett had thought that day—but that didn’t mean that he wanted to share a cell with the poor bastard.

  “Can’t you put the berserkers together?” Emmett had said as he’d met the hard eyes of Black Jesus.

  The rationale, to say nothing of the procedure, for transferring the inmates was a complicated one. Captain Waters had thought long and hard about the best way to maintain order, considering he was the only one left to maintain it. The prison was not designed to be run by a single person; in fact, for safety reasons it was designed specifically not to be. And it was also not designed to be run without power for a prolonged period of time. Finding fuel for the generators was already taking a big part of Waters’s day. He also needed time to find and stockpile food for when the kitchen storages eventually ran out. The riot had improved the food situation significantly, but he had cats who had life sentences to serve. No amount of rationing was going to make what they had last long enough. Things were pretty fucked. Frankly, he didn’t really know how he’d managed to keep the place going as long as he had already. Still, he had no intention of walking away or releasing anybody early.

  Of the seventy-seven convicts left, he had twenty-two berserkers and twenty-five basically nonviolent offenders that he more or less trusted not to kill him as soon as an opportunity presented itself, which left him with thirty clients potentially plotting to kill him and escape at any given second. The worst of those he’d put in the isolation cells, but he had decided to bunk the rest with a berserker cellmate in an attempt to keep everybody manageable. Captain Waters had hoped that the fear of provoking a berserker into raging out, which undoubtedly would lead to the non-berserker’s death, might keep a lid on things. But he didn’t tell Emmett any of that when the man questioned the new sleeping arrangements.

  “Arms out, convict” was all he’d answered with. Then he’d cuffed Emmett to the bars and asked DuPont to come forward.

  Berserker management was something the correctional system had had to figure out fast, because you can’t send monsters to prison unless you have a method of controlling them, or at least subduing them. To that effect, all the COs in Maine State Prison had carried military-designed PharmaJet needleless injectors loaded with a mix of propofol and ketamine. Berserkers could usually survive a large number of doses in rapid succession without OD’ing on the stuff, but multiple doses didn’t actually speed up the effect, which was to knock the monster out and make him forget the rage. However, the thirty or so seconds it took for the drugs to get to the brain and do their work was a long time to have a raging berserker in front of you. So, to mitigate abuse, the PharmaJets held only a single dose.

  Ba
ck before everything fell apart and society stopped even bothering to send berserkers through the system, each berserker inmate had been assigned a “trainer” who, in addition to the standard-issue handheld injector, carried an eight-foot-long version of the device. The PharmaJet didn’t hurt, so there wasn’t any danger in administering it to a berserker if you could catch him before an episode started, as long as he was not caught by surprise.

  “I’m going to give you your medicine, DuPont,” Black Jesus had told the looming but docile creature. DuPont had known the drill, and less than a minute later the Beast was out cold and Emmett had been shoved inside with him.

  “It’s this or isolation, Kessler,” Captain Waters had told Emmett. “Be grateful you’ll at least have somebody to talk to.”

  The old black man had looked wearily at him, expecting Emmett to shoot his mouth off, but the cat just smiled at him sadly. Then, just as Waters had turned to go, Emmett called out to him.

  “Captain, you may very well be the last righteous man on Earth, you know that? I can’t say I agree with what you’re doing or understand why the hell you’re doing it, but there’s a part of me that’s glad—no, honored—that you are.”

  Captain Waters knew better than to trust anything that came out of an inmate’s mouth, but he’d smiled just the same.