Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  Jen had just pulled the leg of their little pug—Emmett couldn’t remember the dog’s name at the moment—but his daughter had yanked so hard that the dog’s shoulder had been dislocated. Now, she’d had no intention of hurting the little animal, she had just wanted to play, and when the dog suddenly starting yelping and frantically limping around her, trying to get away, his little girl had burst into tears and screamed for hours, utterly distraught over the realization that she’d hurt this creature she loved so much.

  That same innocence was hiding behind the eyes of Beast, and just like it would have been ridiculous for Emmett and Susan to have punished their daughter for hurting the dog—Bobo, that was what she’d named it, Emmett suddenly remembered—it seemed equally ridiculous to ever punish Wiley for any of the deaths he’d caused. But at the same time, he supposed he wouldn’t want the ticking time bomb that was entangled in the psyche of all berserkers to go off again in public. If the government hadn’t collapsed and society hadn’t cannibalized itself, he wondered if they’d have eventually figured this out and created a separate facility for berserkers, one that wasn’t a prison, per se, but that still separated them from the general population.

  “Berserkers don’t belong in prison . . .” Emmett muttered to himself as he wiped the big creature’s tears. “They should have a special place for them.”

  “Like a camp somewhere?” Black Jesus asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Like a camp where you could concentrate them all in one place.”

  Emmett looked at Black Jesus, suddenly realizing what the man was saying. “That’s not . . . I don’t mean a fucking concentration camp, boss.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably exactly what the Nazis said when they first started rounding up Jews.”

  “You’re a fucking asshole, Captain.” A day ago, Emmett would have been nervous about the consequences of calling Black Jesus an asshole to his face, but the etiquette felt like it was looser now. Still, Emmett waited for Waters’s reaction. There was a long pause, or at least what felt like a long pause to him. But Captain Waters was acutely aware the circumstances had changed and was okay with a little friendly banter between him and Emmett. In fact, as the seconds ticked by without a response on his end, Waters decided that the decorum from inside the concrete walls that now only housed smoke and flames wouldn’t serve them so well out here in the wild. He looked Kessler in the eye, held him there for a second longer, and then finally spoke.

  “Says the white male suggesting to an African American that internment camps are a humane solution.”

  The tension broke. Emmett could have laughed out loud, but he didn’t. “Do you really think prison is the right place for these guys?” Emmett asked, breathing a huge sigh of relief inside.

  “I don’t think it matters anymore. But, you know, they actually did stop sending them to prison. They didn’t put them in camps, though. They just put them down.”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  Black Jesus shook his head.

  “How’d I miss that?” Emmett asked, but they both knew the answer. “I guess I’m not surprised.”

  “Suppose we’ve all kind of been in the wild for a while now.”

  “I in the wild?” Wiley half asked, half screamed in terror.

  Emmett sighed. Black Jesus’s shoulders slumped and he covered his face with his hands. Both men knew the conversation with Wiley was going to go another round.

  Fuck.

  “You’re not in the wild, inmate,” Black Jesus said.

  “No?”

  “No, man,” Emmett seconded.

  “Officer-bossifer doodlie-do?”

  “Doodlie-do, my brother.”

  Beast breathed a huge sigh of relief. Maybe they’d finally gotten through to him after all.

  “Captain, do you know if there is any kind of paint anywhere nearby?” Emmett asked. “I need to leave my girls a message if we’re going to leave, just in case they come here looking for me.”

  “Maybe in the maintenance building over there.”

  Black Jesus nodded to the only building not on fire: a small cinder-block structure with no windows.

  “Are the keys . . . ?”

  Black Jesus looked at Emmett like he was a crazy person. “Stay with DuPont. I’ll see what I can find for you.”

  “I can go . . .” Emmett began, but then realized that to the captain, handing over the keys to the facilities to an inmate was just not something he was willing to do. He didn’t bother reminding the boss man that he’d actually already given Emmett keys when they were opening the cells of the prison on fire. Nor did he mention that since they were leaving anyway, there really wasn’t much value in locked doors and keys at all anymore. He knew it was just one of those reflexive habitual rules the man had internalized over the years, not really a reflection on how much the man trusted Emmett—not that Black Jesus would ever admit trusting him. Or that Emmett actually deserved that kind of trust.

  Apples and oranges, inmate. Emmett impersonated Waters in his head and smiled. The truth was, he was happy to stay with Wiley while the man looked for him. It would allow him to put a little insurance policy in place while the captain’s back was turned. Emmett didn’t have a formalized plan yet, but he knew that once they got to Austin he was going to do more than just confront Dr. Weiss. He was going to kill the bastard. The truth in his heart weighed on him a little. Not the intended murder—that he’d been comfortable with for years—but the fact that he’d lied right to Black Jesus’s face. Just because his eventual betrayal once they got to Austin was premeditated, strategic, and inevitable didn’t mean Emmett got to feel good about it.

  Ninety minutes later they were climbing into one of the Rent-a-Cops’ armored vans and pulling out of the double rows of barbed-wire fencing that surrounded the still-burning remains of Maine State Prison. As they headed out into the wild, toward Texas, Emmett was in the driver’s seat, Black Jesus was beside him, and Wiley was in the back with as much food, gas, and ammo as they could carry.

  On the rock sign next to the first checkpoint folks saw when they entered the facility from the street, right in front of the main entrance gate to the still-smoking concrete prison block they used to call home, and over the now meaningless words “Maine State Prison,” was the message, crudely drawn in neon-blue paint:

  JENNIFER AND BOBBY-LEIGH

  HI GIRLS! I AM ALIVE AND GOING

  TO YOUR UNCLE'S FARM IN FAIRFIELD

  I HOPE TO MEET YOU THERE

  LOVE, DAD

  Chapter Six

  The Man in the Pilot’s Seat

  The girls began the day with their twenty-minute morning meditation just like they’d been taught to. Technically, Bobby-Leigh hadn’t been supposed to learn the sitting version of TM until she was ten, but Allen Kessler had taught it to her early, almost as if he had known he’d not be around to do it when she was of the proper age.

  Up to this point in Jennifer and Bobby-Leigh’s lives, the girls had more or less gotten by just on doing what they were told, going where they were told, and thinking what they were told (for the most part). Emmett had sent them off to Iowa to live with their uncle Allen. Uncle Allen in turn had told them (with his dying breath) to find Brennachecke’s group. And until two days ago, Brennachecke had managed their lives from morning to night—except for the moments where Jen was fucking his son and swearing like a sailor. But now they were on their own. As they prepared to head out up Highway 1 toward Allen’s place, the magnitude of that change was slowly starting to sink in.

  Little decisions like what to eat for breakfast were suddenly complicated. No longer was it a choice of potatoes or cornmeal like it had been with Brennachecke. It wasn’t even a choice anymore. They didn’t have any potatoes, nor did they have any cornmeal. All they had was what was left of the small pile of junk food they’d found stashed in a shoebox in some closeted overeater’s crap. The girls loved the sweet goodies, but cookies, candies, and snack cakes just made them w
ant to eat more cookies, candies, and snack cakes. So they’d ended up eating the entire stash before they had finished packing up for the long walk ahead of them. Had they had more experience being on their own, they’d probably have taken an extra hour and scavenged up at least enough food for the day. Had they had more experience, they might have decided on an alternate route to their uncle Allen’s place—one that was less exposed and offered more cover, for example. Had they had more experience, they probably would have left the CD player and the Chinese CDs behind. Had they had more experience, Jen certainly would have tried to camouflage the fact that she was an extremely attractive teenage girl.

  None of these things would have made a difference, of course—except maybe taking that alternate route—because what was waiting for them on Highway 1 didn’t give a shit if they were hungry, or how they were dressed, or what kind of music they were listening to as they walked. And while the standard blood pirate torture protocol tended to have a sexual bent when it came to pushing folks into berserking out, being ugly (or trying to fake that you were) wasn’t going to ameliorate the nature or severity of the violence. The only thing that would matter if they discovered Jennifer Kessler was a berserker was that she would bleed.

  “I wish we could have a dog,” Bobby-Leigh said as they put the dorms behind them.

  Jen looked at her, stung but trying to hide it. There didn’t seem to be any malice in her little sister’s voice, but Jen still wanted to smack her in the face. Jimmy was enough to feel bad about at the moment, thank you very much. She didn’t need fucking Bobo added on top like a goddamn cherry on her self-loathing ice cream sundae.

  “I know we can’t. But still . . . you know?”

  Jen did know. When she looked past her guilt, she missed having a dog too. Unfortunately, she also knew that blindly loyal, misguidedly selfless four-legged companions didn’t understand how to lie low when they were faced with a berserker, and didn’t fare too well in the encounter.

  “We had a dog,” she reminded her sister.

  “Yeah. But Bobo was fucking stupid. If we could get a smart dog and train it . . .”

  “Bobo wasn’t stupid,” Jen said, suddenly realizing that her sister might not know what had actually happened to Bobo after they’d arrived at Uncle Allen’s.

  “He picked a fight with you when you were berserking out,” Bobby-Leigh said.

  Okay, Jen thought. I guess you do know what happened to the damn dog. She didn’t know why, but it really bothered her that Bobby-Leigh thought the dog was stupid. That somehow it was the dog’s fault for getting killed, not Jen’s fault for tearing it to bloody pieces.

  “That doesn’t make him stupid,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Ah, I love the smell of an emo twelve-year-old’s sarcasm in the morning,” Jen said, badly impersonating a young Robert Duvall.

  “What?”

  Instantly the joy of being witty was crushed, as she was hit in the chest by the truth that Jimmy was not around anymore to appreciate her clever old-school movie references. He was not around, because just like Bobo the fucking pug, he’d been too stupid to take cover when she berserked out.

  “Nothing. You’re right. Bobo was fucking stupid. Just like Jimmy. They’re all fucking fuckhead motherfucking idiots.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Uh . . . I think it might matter a little bit,” Bobby-Leigh said.

  “Robert Duvall said he liked the smell of napalm in the morning.”

  “Who is Robert Duvall?”

  “A dead actor.”

  “I am so confused right now.”

  “In the movie Apocalypse Now. He said— It’s a famous line from the movie.”

  “Oh, is that the one with the zombies that—”

  “No.”

  “Aliens from—”

  “No.”

  “Is it the one where that virus—”

  “No, it’s the one— Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

  The girls walked for a while in silence up Highway 1. Just as they were passing the Fairfield city limit sign at the edge of the MUM campus, Bobby-Leigh couldn’t help herself and blurted out, “It was one of Jimmy’s favorites, then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry, Jen.”

  “Why? I’m the one that fucking killed him.”

  “That’s not your . . .” But Bobby-Leigh knew it didn’t matter what she said, so she went back to the topic of conversation she’d started before. “I read this book about a dog named Chance—or Chase, or Choice, or something—and that dog was so smart he knew like over three thousand words. I bet you could train a dog that smart to do the right thing when you berserked out.”

  “I’m not going to berserk out anymore, Bobby-Leigh.”

  Bobby-Leigh knew her sister couldn’t promise something like that, no matter how much she wanted to. But the wishful-thinking center of her brain reasoned that if she really didn’t think she’d ever do it again, then maybe, maybe, they could get a dog after all. Jen turned and looked at her, reading her mind.

  “That doesn’t mean we’re going to get a dog.”

  Bobby-Leigh sighed.

  “We need to find Dad,” the little girl said out of nowhere.

  “Why?”

  “I miss him.”

  “You hardly even knew him.”

  “I still miss him.”

  Jen was about to say something cruel to nip this conversation topic in the bud, but before she could, she was distracted by a glint of the sun in the distance and the sound of a convoy of cars coming toward them.

  Cars were luxury items now, at least ones that worked. The networked, self-driving electric vehicle revolution had saved tens of thousands of lives and reduced air pollution all over the US before everything fell apart. These new vehicles had slowly replaced gas-powered ones, until more than half the cars and trucks on the road were both self-driving and electric powered. Companies like Uber then turned the whole auto industry on its head by combining their on-demand car service with the self-driving vehicles. It became so convenient, at least in the cities, to just push a button and have your autopiloted Uber show up at your doorstep two minutes later that city folk quickly stopped buying cars of their own altogether. A whole generation of kids grew up without knowing how to drive, much less wanting to own a car.

  But then the power grids had failed. For a while the solar-fed charging stations carried some of the weight, but overuse and lack of maintenance eventually killed most of those too. There were still plenty of gas stations, and most of them still had gas, but the electronics of the pumps didn’t work without power, so even if you had a car that you could drive, you still had to know how to hack the circuitry of the gas pump to make it go. So when Jen saw a half dozen vehicles racing straight for them, she quickly pulled her sister to a stop as alarm bells went off in her head.

  But it was too late.

  From the strip of woods on either side of the highway, men exploded from the brush like jackals flushing game and rushed toward them. The men didn’t yell. They didn’t call out to one another. They just sprinted toward them silently, coldly, rehearsed, like they’d done it a thousand times before. The steel cable net that exploded from some kind of custom-fitted gun took the girls completely by surprise as it tangled them up. They still hadn’t recovered seconds later, when the men started dragging the girls toward the vehicles now in front of them.

  Jen closed her eyes, brought her mantra to the forefront of her mind, and focused on it. Her breathing steadied. She felt the blood pumping through her with each beat of her heart. The cycle of thoughts rolling up and her mantra taking her back down washed through her like waves rolling through the deep ocean, far away from land. For the moment she was still in control of the berserker within.

  Tangled in the net as they were, Bobby-Leigh wouldn’t last five seconds if she lost it.

  Mantra.

  Bobby-Leigh
had to be doing the same math in her head.

  Mantra.

  She could feel Bobby-Leigh moving around frantically, no doubt trying to get to her ax, but she knew the little girl’s ax had been ripped out of her hands by the thick wire net.

  Mantra.

  It was tangled up and completely out of reach. Bobby-Leigh was not going to be able to sacrifice her older sister to save herself like Jen had made her promise she would hundreds of times each day in the weeks after the pug Bobo lost his life at her hands.

  Mantra.

  She wouldn’t let something like that happen again to anyone. Not this time.

  Mantra.

  Not ever again. Jimmy would be the last. Her mantra came and went effortlessly.

  “Breathe,” she heard her sister whispering. “It will be okay. Just close your eyes and step away.”

  When Bobby-Leigh saw her sister’s eyes open again, she knew that Jen was not just meditating anymore. In addition to her TM practice, Allen Kessler had trained Jen to mentally detach herself from her body and mind—to quite literally step outside of herself and become a simple observer, as if she were watching a movie of her life instead of being an actively emotional, feeling participant in it. It was for times exactly like this. After Bobo had died, and he’d witnessed Jen’s big deadly secret for himself, Allen had spent a lot of time with her. Bobby-Leigh remembered very clearly that at the time, she’d been extremely jealous of all the extra attention her big sister was getting, but now that it might just save her life, she was only grateful. For now, it was working, but the worst was yet to come and she knew it.

  More men jumped out of the vehicles. For a few more seconds everything continued to happen in eerie silence. Through the tangled wire, Bobby-Leigh managed to slip the earbuds into her sister’s ears, attempting to dull her sense of the real world with Chinese pop music. The pirates formed a ring around the girls in the net. Several carried eight-foot-long razor-tipped pikes. They approached, grinning. It was a look Bobby-Leigh knew, and it made her shudder. She’d not seen anybody look at her in that way since Walmart, and in the superstore there had only been two of them. Now there were two dozen at least.