Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  But it really wasn’t a question, was it? The old soldier laughed to himself. He was dead either way in the end, so there was no way he was going to teach these degenerates how to fly. This too went totally understood between him and the MIC without either one of them speaking a word.

  The old soldier slowly brought his weapon to bear on the Man-in-Charge and mentally prepared himself for death.

  “Brennachecke?” the MIC asked, stunned the man would choose death at this point in the game.

  * * *

  The Kessler girls opened the door to their room expecting to be confronted immediately by armed men, but instead found just over a dozen of them standing with their backs to them, completely preoccupied by whatever was happening down the hall.

  Bam!

  The single gunshot after such a pregnant silence made everybody, the sisters included, jump. Then suddenly somebody stumbled out of the library and into the hallway. The dozen or so men with their backs to the girls raised their weapons as though they were all arms of the same organism, but nobody fired.

  The moment stretched out. The girls were not sure what to do. If nobody turned around, they could get to the emergency stairs at the end of the hall and get out without anybody being the wiser, but that was a big if. Still, it was a better option than just turning back to their room and trapping themselves inside. So, as the silent standoff went on behind them, they softly slinked down the hall one secretive step after another. Jen had her hand on the stairwell door when suddenly one of the men spoke. His words fell out of his mouth the way a man would say the name of a dog he knew was about to snatch food from the table, right in front of his eyes.

  “Brennachecke?”

  Fuck. Jen turned and looked back. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  Bobby-Leigh read her sister’s mind—well, not really, not in any kind of mystical sense, but in the way all sisters who are close do—and swallowed, unable to believe that Jen was even thinking about doing what she was thinking about doing.

  “No fucking way,” she whispered. “Let him die.”

  “I can’t,” Jen whispered back.

  “You have to,” Bobby-Leigh pleaded. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  Jen smiled.

  “No,” Bobby-Leigh said, the blood draining from her face as she realized what her big sister was about to do.

  “Wait in the stairwell for it to be over.”

  “Jen!” Bobby-Leigh hissed, but it was too late. Her older sister was already turning away and running down the hall toward the small army of men who were seconds away from killing the man who had every intention of murdering her. In her head, Jen grabbed the mental image of the lens and switched off the autofocus control she had thus far so successfully used to keep the berserker inside subdued.

  A heartbeat later the monster awoke.

  Chapter Ten

  The Old Man Staring into the Abyss

  Brennachecke didn’t have mixed feelings about dying. He was tired. Too many people he loved had died. Eric was more than capable of carrying on without him. He probably should have told him more often that he was proud of the man he’d become, but he had told him, and more importantly he’d shown him. At least, he was pretty sure he had. Eric knows, he thought. He has to know. Leaving his only remaining son was pretty much the only thing that would hurt. Not the impending hail of bullets. He knew he wouldn’t feel those.

  Leaving Jimmy’s death unavenged stung his ego a little, but in Brennachecke’s mind, the universe’s scales would be equally balanced with the weight of his soul in lieu of Jennifer’s, maybe even more so. At the end of the day, he was responsible for his son. Jen may have been the weapon that killed him, but as far as Brennachecke was concerned he had allowed the boy to play with that weapon unsupervised. He was all too aware of the potential dangers that came with allowing the boy to spend so much time with Jen. Dangers that were significantly worse than the girl’s potty mouth. A berserker could be lying in wait inside anybody. Anybody. Jen was just a kid, and obviously both Kessler girls had known Jen had the demon inside her, but he could hardly blame them for not wanting to tell anybody. He didn’t understand the biological mechanics of how the whole berserking thing worked. He didn’t know what triggered it. He didn’t know what, if anything, could stop the demon or whatever it was from taking over and destroying all it touched. In light of that, it was hard to really be angry at the girl. But you didn’t need to be angry to hold a person responsible for the consequences of something they did. It was complicated.

  The old soldier felt his son’s death was on his own shoulders as much as anybody else’s. But, on some level, he knew it was all just a part of an impossibly complicated cosmic equation that for reasons he’d never understand had needed Jen to take his son’s life before it could be solved. The universe wasn’t malicious. Brutal and cruel at times, sure, but never malevolent, and in turn he’d never had malice in his heart for the girl. Years of violence before and after Fairfield went dark had numbed him to the point that very little emotion made it through anymore, and malice was a hard emotion to maintain. It had to be nurtured and fed regularly or it would shrivel up and die.

  As his mind danced with these thoughts, the coldly efficient automation that was now a part of his body moved of its own accord. The AR-15 he’d just killed his friend Dan Patterson with swung up in his hands. That murder, which was done more or less in self-defense, Brennachecke had not had time to process yet. Its aftermath was hanging just out of reach of his consciousness like a sword on a string. And as he pulled the trigger and bullets popped out of the submachine gun, it seemed pretty unlikely that he’d ever get a chance to process it.

  Bam!

  The Man-in-Charge took the first bullet, but the arrow piercing Brennachecke’s chest threw off the effectiveness of his aim, and the wound was only superficial.

  Bam!

  Bam-bam!

  The two pirates to the MIC’s right were not so lucky and died before their bodies hit the ground.

  The others returned fire and Brennachecke instinctively dodged left, evading the shots, but the move put him on his side and he felt the arrow tear at his chest in a way that set alarm bells off somewhere deep inside. Thankfully, he was pretty sure he’d be shot to death long before whatever had just torn inside him had a chance to turn into a life-threatening development. As his body gave out and toppled to the ground, trapping his gun underneath his own weight, he knew this was it.

  Bam!

  The shot took a sizable chunk out of the wall. A couple inches to the right and the chunk would have been out of his head. Close, but a miss. Brennachecke was surprised to find himself more than a little frustrated by the ineptitude of the adversaries who were going to lay claim to his life. The only thing more pathetic than not being able to put a bullet in a man’s head when he’s prone on the floor, stuck through and through with an arrow, and less than fifteen feet away was being the man who was prone on the floor, stuck through with the arrow, and waiting for a bunch of brute idiots who couldn’t hit the side of a barn, much less his incapacitated bulk, to finish him off.

  “Do not kill that motherfucker!” the Man-in-Charge shrieked from where he was lying, bleeding, on the floor. “He gots work to do!”

  As his pirates started to lower their weapons in compliance with his orders, the MIC caught a glimpse of Jen out of the corner of his eye just as she reached them. He almost managed to get out the word what, before all hell broke loose.

  * * *

  With each contact her feet made against the floor as she ran toward the armed men, Jennifer Kessler felt the undertow of the fugue state that blocked out all her senses, pulling her deeper and deeper into its murky blackness. She heard Brennachecke fire his weapon, but the sound was muffled and faraway. Her vision was so clouded she couldn’t even make out individuals anymore; everything was just a single fuzzy shifting mass of light, colors, and dark. In her mind’s eye, she reached for the lens and tried to adjust the aperture to let more informat
ion in, but the ring was stiff and hard to move. Her success at keeping the demon asleep by controlling the focus of her experience didn’t seem to work nearly as well when her and the monster’s roles were in reverse.

  Bobby-Leigh was out of sight, and thus out of Jen’s berserker mind (or what mind existed in the berserk state anyway). So . . . my sister . . . is . . . safe, she thought, feeling the fugue digging its fingernails into her and dragging her further and further down. She tried to grasp the mental image of the lens for one last desperate attempt at making an adjustment, but it was too late. As she saw herself reaching for it, it was suddenly just gone. Then, a split second later, so was she.

  * * *

  The pirates had a lot of experience with berserkers, but their experience almost universally came from situations where they were in control. Like duck and deer hunters of old, they’d sit in their blinds and reap the advantages of surprise and superior technology, only picking their prey off when circumstances were most favorable to them. A loose berserker catching them by surprise was outside of their realm of expertise. Armed and used to dictating the terms of engagement, the pirates attempted to fight back, but failed spectacularly.

  Jen tore into them. Grabbing the first body she came into contact with—a seasoned felon who had earned his vicious and violent death many times over—she twisted and yanked so savagely at his arm that she tore it off at the shoulder. As he screamed in shock and sprayed blood all over the walls, she used the dismembered arm as a flesh-and-blood club to beat the two men standing nearest to her to death. Her impossible strength and savagery was only surpassed by her speed and agility.

  Bam!

  One of the pirates got a shot off, but true to Brennachecke’s assessment of the blood pirates in general, his aim was wild. His AR-15 was shoved through his eye for his trouble, splitting his head in half.

  The Man-in-Charge’s cowardly true nature is what saved him in the end. He squeezed his eyes shut and lay frozen in fear, pressed so tightly against the floor and the adjoining wall that berserker Jen didn’t even know he was there. The rest of his men were not so predisposed to playing dead, which was really the only effective strategy for dealing with a berserker under the circumstances, so they continued to die for real.

  The demon wearing Jennifier Kessler’s skin leaped onto one man’s back and kicked off of him, sending him stumbling down and allowing her to launch herself into the air. She landed on the head of another man who was trying to get up, her knee crushing his face and breaking his jaw. Reaching down between her legs and into the mess that used to be his mouth and nose, she grabbed his head and twisted, snapping his neck.

  A heartbeat later, she bit into a new adversary’s forearm as she absorbed the punch he’d tried to land. She tore a chunk out of it before grabbing his other arm and leaping over him, catapulting his body like a rag doll into the wall.

  Jen moved so fast that blood sprayed off her like water off a wet dog. A head was snapped back so hard it was almost torn completely off. Two skulls were crushed against each other, sending brains and viscera all over the scrambling remaining men.

  Bam! Bam-bam-bam!

  Bam! Bam-bam!

  As effective a weapon as an AR-15 was, in close quarters it was easier to use it as a club than as a machine gun. As two more men were torn apart and not a single bullet found its way into the intended target, this fact became painfully apparent, but the two remaining pirates didn’t bother trying to use the guns that way—they just turned and ran as fast as they could for the main stairs, almost tripping over Brennachecke as they fled.

  Berserker Jen didn’t pursue the runners. Her attention was drawn to the man with the arrow stuck through him as he desperately tried to drag himself out of harm’s way. Panting heavily and quickly losing steam now that nobody was actively trying to hurt her, she dropped to a squat and snarled at Brennachecke, then grabbed him, whipped him up like he was made of paper, and pinned him to the wall.

  The old soldier didn’t move, he just met her eyes and looked deep into the abyss behind her green-rimmed, extremely dilated pupils. He saw the reflection of his own face staring back, but nothing more. No recognition. No consciousness. Not even rage. And certainly not Jen. Just emptiness.

  A second passed.

  Then another.

  Jen’s breathing was now becoming painfully labored. Her whole body was heaving. Her muscles, taunt with overexertion, twitched and spasmed, the way a horse’s skin does when it’s trying to shake off flies. She took one last deep breath in and used it to scream. Then she dropped to her knees, leaving the old soldier to half slide, half fall off the wall and land beside her. In a last burst of violence, berserker Jen put two holes in the wall with her fists where Brennachecke had been only moments ago, and then tore angrily at the drywall until she collapsed from exhaustion in the blood-soaked hall of horrors.

  Movement at the far end of the hall caught Brennachecke’s attention out of the corner of his eye, and he looked up from Jen’s blood-covered unconscious form to see a little girl slowly approaching.

  “Six one-thousand. Seven one-thousand. Eight one-thousand . . .”

  Suddenly, he realized the little girl was Bobby-Leigh, just without her usual makeup and costume—though he did notice, to his dismay, that she still had the dog collars on. It’d been so long since he’d seen her look like a little girl that it somehow now felt inappropriate, like watching her shower or undress herself.

  “Eleven one-thousand.”

  “Why are you counting?” he asked.

  Bobby-Leigh put her finger to her lips to tell him to shut the fuck up.

  He got the message.

  Once she’d gotten through the requisite count to sixty, she dropped to her knees beside her sister and started trying to bring her around. Brennachecke watched and bled in silence on the floor as patiently as he could.

  “Why the counting?”

  “They’re not always really out when they first collapse in exhaustion. You want to make sure they’re really down and the person inside is coming back before you . . . get too close.”

  The old soldier nodded.

  “She’s going to be really hungry when she wakes up. Any ideas on a safe place we can find some serious calories?”

  “There’s a kitchen downstairs, but I wouldn’t call it a safe place.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Language, missy.”

  “Are you being serious?”

  Brennachecke smiled. He was being serious, but he’d let it go for once, at least for a while. Jen’s eyes opened and she quickly took in the damage she’d caused and that Brennachecke had survived. Tears welled up almost instantly as she met his tired old gaze. She opened her mouth to say something, but ended up coughing instead. Jen hacked and hacked until two of her back teeth came up from where they’d slipped down her throat. She spit them into her hands and looked at them, disgusted, then back to the father figure who had spent the last three days hell-bent on killing her. The teeth dropped out of her hands as she raised them to cover her face as she sobbed.

  “I’m sorry,” she managed to get out between her tears. “I didn’t . . .” She tried to continue, but there wasn’t really anything she could say. She was exhausted. Her whole body ached from extreme exertion. Her stomach growled long and loud. She met Brennachecke’s eyes again and smiled the most pathetic, humiliated, and miserable smile the old man had ever seen.

  Then suddenly, to everybody’s surprise, Jen’s hands wrapped around one of the blood-covered AR-15s strewn about with the bodies, and she tossed it to Brennachecke.

  “I can’t bring him back, so . . . I know you need to balance the scales, or whatever.”

  Brennachecke picked up the assault weapon she’d tossed to him and used it as a crutch to get himself painfully up onto his feet. Bobby-Leigh’s eyes widened, but before she could protest, the old man spoke.

  “You just balanced the scales, sweetheart. That monster inside you that took . . . Jimmy away . . .”
It was hard for him to speak, but he knew she needed to hear the absolution in its entirety, so he choked on. “You saved my life. You didn’t have to, but you did. My life for my son’s balances things just as well as yours would.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Plus there is the fact that I’d have to fucking kill you—with my bare hands, if it came to that—if you ever actually tried to hurt her,” Bobby-Leigh said. She was not joking, but all three of them laughed just the same.

  “What can we do for you?” Jen asked.

  “Nothing, until we get to a safe place.”

  Jen’s stomach growled again even louder than it had before. She closed her eyes and looked like she might faint.

  “I need to eat. I’m sorry . . .”

  “Restaurant is on the lower level.”

  “This place is going to be crawling with dudes any minute. I don’t think we’re going to have time to get—”

  “I’ll go. You stay here and play dead if anybody comes,” Bobby-Leigh said.

  “That’s never going to—” Jen started to say, but then changed her mind. They didn’t have much of a viable alternative.

  “You’d be surprised how effective a survival strategy playing dead is,” the little girl said quietly, the fact that she knew this from personal experience painfully evident in her tone. Then before anybody could say or do anything else, she jumped to her feet, grabbed an AR-15 in each hand, and ran for the stairwell.

  Neither Jen nor Brennachecke could have stopped her if they wanted to.

  * * *

  The Raj was eerily quiet now that the majority of the people in it were dead. The lights were off downstairs to conserve what power they had, which was fine by her, but it slowed her down. The distance between the second-floor hall and the lower-floor dining area, which would have taken thirty seconds during the day under normal conditions to traverse, took her almost two minutes to get through. As she moved through the darkness as quickly as she dared, she realized she wasn’t even sure if she knew how to fire the guns in her hands. Was it as simple as just pointing the barrel and pulling the trigger? Or was there a safety or something she had to switch off first?