by Kyle Harris
The real assembly didn’t quite have the same blood-pumping gusto. Alysia Fowler droned on with verses from the Bible, and at that point the whole thing seemed more like a congregation. Chaz considered which part of the brain she’d have to hit to knock herself into a coma for thirty minutes. Then the middle-aged Troll doll passed the mic to a chubster with a pencil mustache and a case of the wheezes. He apologized that the website was down for maintenance and promised it would be up as soon as possible; then he branched off into announcing that his boyfriend had proposed a few days ago and that they were getting married. Cue a sound bite of lukewarm applause.
Yawn.
Chaz missed a transition somewhere, and now there was a Korean woman who looked a hell of a lot like Jade Jung-sook. She brought the group up to speed on the search for Jake Wurman—no new developments—and encouraged everyone here tonight to team up with a “battle buddy” when walking home and to immediately, immediately call the police if they saw anything not right.
Next, Alysia Fowler reclaimed the mic.
“As you all know,” she said, “our little group doesn’t get much attention, but I am grateful and humbled by those of you who do come every week and give your love and support. It is by the grace and love of God that we have come to know each other.” She revealed a plaque that she’d been hiding behind her backside. “As you also all know—and I know for a few of you, the secret’s been spoiled—the Methodist LGBT Club hands out the Langenheim Award for Excellence to the heroes in our community who go above and beyond with their charitable contributions and service to our growing family. They only give out this award once a year. Tonight, I will be presenting it to one of our own.”
Chaz didn’t know when Libby had grabbed her hand, but she was squeezing it hard.
“I know she doesn’t wish for any spotlight upon her, but tonight she’s going to have it. Ms. Lilibeth Pruitt, come on up here. For donating one million dollars to the Love Conquers All Foundation, I present to you the Langenheim Award for Excellence.”
And the whole room thundered with applause when she walked up there. Fifty sets of hands sounded more like five hundred. It must’ve gone on for a full minute, falling and then spurring up again when no one wanted to quit. Chaz herself threw in a few claps.
“Thank you,” said Libby, after the ceremonial passing of the award and handshake. She cleared her throat. “It was John who wrote that our love comes from God, that we love because He first loved us. And I never doubted that this was true. But for so long I was torn between this love that I felt—my love for God—and another love that so many people called a perversion. And I would ask God why He would fill me with a love that was sinful, a love that I repeatedly tried to bury to only feel it well up inside me again. A love that I wanted gone.”
Chaz found herself sitting forward, the room and everyone except Libby lost outside the narrowing aperture.
“But it is not a punishment.” Her eyes found Chaz, and they didn’t move. “I have met the most amazing person, and I know, with this boundless love that I have stopped trying to ignore, that it was not circumstance that brought us together. God has shown me that it is okay, because God is love. In all its forms. And I know this special someone must be a little uncomfortable, so I won’t embarrass her.” She looked down and wiped her eyes. “Thank you for this award, and thank you for all the love.”
More cheers. Alysia Fowler took the mic again, and Libby came back to her seat.
“Was it okay?” she asked. She was shaking a little.
Chaz kissed her on the cheek. “You killed it.”
The assembly ended not long after. Libby lingered for another ten minutes with the herd, receiving praise and thanks from just about everyone, the plaque tucked under her arm. Chaz could get along just fine without having met any of these people or knowing their names, but something tickled in her chest from seeing Libby’s huge smile.
Nah, can’t be pride. But even as Chaz considered this, that tickle in her chest became a warm, racing flutter.
Leaving the church arm in arm, Chaz popped the question: “Wanna come back to my place? This feels like it needs a celebration.”
“And what would your idea of a celebration be?” Libby’s smile had not worn off.
“Well—”
There came a loud snap. A woman shrieked; she was joined by several others as the noise seemed to spread across the crowd. In the panic, a few people tripped and fell. They spread in a circular retreat, the screams falling away to commotion and sobbing.
Libby gripped Chaz’s hand tightly, painfully.
Swaying back and forth in front of them was a naked, dead body hung by the neck. The name moved through the group until everyone knew.
Jake Wurman.
There was a bloody inscription on the abdomen: YOU’RE ALL NEXT.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Under better circumstances, Chaz would’ve looked forward to bringing Libby back to her apartment.
This, though. It was just refuge.
Libby had been crying. The tears stopped coming somewhere along the Metro ride, but she hadn’t wiped her face. Her eyes were puffy, and there were long, gleaming streaks down to her chin. She kept her head down, as if in looking up she might see Jake Wurman again, swinging from the rope.
“He was dead,” muttered Libby, while Chaz dabbed the girl’s face with a tissue. They were the first words out of her mouth since the church.
“Yeah,” said Chaz.
“Did you see him? Did you see him hanging?”
“Yeah. I did.”
Libby sniffled. “Who would do such a horrible thing?”
Chaz’s gut reaction was to say, I don’t know. But she did know. So why keep the answer to herself? What the fuck was she gaining from that? Libby had just seen someone she knew lynched—she deserved to know what was going on.
In Chaz’s head, there was an image of that brick wall again, taunting her.
She ignored it and said, “The Begotten Sons.”
Libby looked up at her. “The Begotten Sons? What is that?”
“A gang of psychos.” Chaz pulled out her tasker and sat on the bed next to Libby. “Short version: I know a Simon Dodders—he’s one of these freaks. The Begotten Sons all believe they’re descendants of Jesus Christ, and it’s their duty to kill all the gays. Jake Wurman isn’t the first.”
Libby was shaking her head. “But Jesus didn’t have a…a—”
“Well, they have a different opinion.” Chaz pulled up the documents from Dodders’s computer, including the photo galleries. Her finger hesitated above the icon. “I’m sorry I have to show you this. But the Begotten Sons have been murdering people like you and me for a while. You need to see what they do.”
Libby barely moved her head, but it was close enough to a nod.
Chaz set the photo gallery to a slideshow with a two-second timer. Libby watched maybe the first fifteen or twenty images before she shut her eyes—when it went beyond just disgracing the body and became progressive steps of mutilation. When it wasn’t their misguided idea of justice anymore and started being sadistic.
“And they have a list,” added Chaz, pulling up the decrypted file. “It has ninety-seven thousand names. All gay people. I don’t know how they know, but they do. They call it The Unrighteous. It’s their…hit list. Their targets.”
Libby was back to shaking her head again like she wanted to wake up from a terrible nightmare. The tears made their return, seeping through her eyelids.
“I’m sorry.” Chaz held her. “I promise they won’t come near us.”
“But how do they have a list? How do they know? I don’t understand…”
Yeah, you and me both.
“We have to go to the police about this, Chaz. We have to tell them what’s going on. With this list, and the pictures, and—”
“Didn’t Alysia call the police?”
“She said they were busy. They couldn’t send anyone. But we should try again.”
&nbs
p; “Did she say that Jake Wurman had been hanged?”
“Of course.” Libby looked at her. “What else would she tell them?”
Something clicked on in Chaz’s brain. No one could hang up a dead body in public without attracting the police, and yet none of the sixteen victims—now seventeen—had ever made it to a news story. The police were turning their backs to the murders. Why?
There was one particular elite scumbag who might have a fucking idea why. The man whose own daughter was mysteriously not on the fucking list.
Libby emitted a noise like a sigh, but it was deeper and longer. The sound of defeat. “If the police won’t help…”
“Here.” Chaz handed her the tasker. “Find everyone that was at that assembly and bookmark their names. Just highlight the text and it’s there in the options menu.”
Libby tried to hold the device as still as possible, but her hands were noticeably shaking. “Okay. But I don’t know all of them. If the website was working…” She looked up when Chaz stood. “What are you doing?”
Chaz kept Libby in suspense until she lit a cigarette. Then: “Making sure those whackjobs don’t pull any surprises.”
The Renell surveillance cameras were stashed in a box next to her desk. Flipping open the cardboard and pulling out the foam-padded equipment stirred Don Quillxote, who waddled across the substrate bedding and thrust his snout between the vertical bars.
Chaz bent down and tapped his nose. “Did you see who showed up?” she whispered. “Remember our little agreement? Now get on that wheel, mister. Chop-chop.”
At the news of a guest, Donny squeezed into his fleece shelter and rolled into a spiny ball.
“Coward.”
Taking one of the hemispherical cameras, Chaz rolled her swivel chair out into the hallway adjacent to her door, climbed onto the seat, and stuck the camera next to an LED striplight. The vantage point would allow her to see both directions—and her door, of course. While the placement wasn’t as judicious as she would have liked, it was hard to tell that the camera wasn’t part of the fixture once the capsule shifted to a glossy white color.
“I think that’s all,” said Libby, when Chaz returned inside with the chair. “The ones I can remember. I wish I could recall all of them.”
“It’s better than nothing.” Chaz took her tasker back and sat down beside Libby. First she checked that the Renell camera was broadcasting to her private server just fine, which it was. Then she pulled up the list of names and copied the bookmarks Libby had made. Together they totaled thirty-one. “Okay,” she said. “Now we have to tether them all.”
“Tether them? What are we tethering them to?”
“Over here. It’ll be quicker.”
Chaz went back to her desk and dropped into the seat. Her tasker was fully capable of doing the job, but having an actual fucking keyboard made the process a hell of a lot easier for thirty-one names. While waiting for the authentication to go through, she pulled the clipboard of names off her tasker and pasted them into the search bar.
Libby appeared at her side. “Trident United Benefits?” she asked, reading the header image. “What do they have to do with those names?”
Chaz took a long drag on her cigarette. “Because welfare databases are the quickest way to get facial-rec datafiles. I load in, download them, and I’m set. Once I have those, I run them through surveillance. Then I’ve got all the cameras around the city watching for the person I’m looking for.” She sat back in her chair. “It’s like having a million little friends.”
“This is how you do what you do, isn’t it? As a watcher? Wasn’t that it?”
“Looker. And yep.”
Libby lowered her voice a smidgen. “Is it legal for you to look at that stuff?”
“Well…” Chaz seesawed her hand. If any brain-dead cybersecurity dudes checked the activity logs, they’d only see an administrator, Michael Coffers, perusing through the recipients of the government’s dole. “Let’s just say I operate in the gray areas.”
“And what is this ‘tether’ you talked about?”
“That’s the short way of saying that I’m ordering all these cameras around the city to find this person. If they do, this nifty program I have will track him. The surveillance is tethered.” She air-quoted the word.
Of the thirty-one names that Libby could recall, nineteen had entries in the welfare database. When Chaz uploaded the datafiles into the tether program, the count was once more reduced to only nine—everyone else was not within an active sightline of a camera, but they could always pop in or out. She arrayed the live feeds on the monitor.
“You’re like a magician,” said Libby. “A computer magician.”
Chaz shrugged.
“Could you do the same to that gang? If you knew who they were, could you find their faces and see where they are?”
“I can.” She had pulled three IDs from Dodders’s photo galleries. She downloaded the facial-rec datafiles and added them to the tether. No bites, though.
They watched the video streams for half an hour. Windows blinked out and others popped up as the people on the list escaped camera sightlines or appeared in them. Nobody was attacked, at least not out in the open. And that was the thing: the Begotten Sons would be fucking smooth to do their business where anyone could see, even with their apparent impunity from law enforcement. If Chaz were one of them, she would wait until the target was isolated. Indoors. But it made Libby feel better to see that these people were all right, even the few of them they could watch.
“Thanks, Chaz,” she said, giving Chaz the familiar kiss on the cheek. “Thank you for doing this. I only wish you could see yourself as how I see you, and how much God shines through you right now.”
With a smirk, Chaz looked over at her. “Am I radiant?”
Libby smiled. “Very.” Then she was fumbling for her tasker. “Oh, good grief. I should let my parents know where I’m at. It didn’t even cross my mind until I saw how late it was.” She looked up at Chaz halfway through her message. “You don’t mind if I stay tonight, do you?”
“Can a jill fit a submarine up her ass?”
Libby demonstrated her sideways look again. “Jills and submarines? What are you talking about?”
Chaz shook her head, laughing. “It’s rhetorical. Yes, you can stay. Be warned, though. The heater likes to crap out, and the furry little rodent thing behind you often decides 2:00 A.M. is the best time to burrow around in his cage.” She sucked on her cigarette one last time before stubbing it out. Then: “It probably ain’t me you should be worried about, right?”
“I don’t have to name any names.”
“But they’ll assume it’s me.”
Libby nodded. “They might. And if they’re angry, they’ll be angry. Their resentment does not change my feelings.”
It didn’t quite have the same oomph as a nice FUCK OFF, but for Libby it was progress. Standing up to her parents—even politely on a tasker chat feed—was a step to escaping that fascist hellhole. And maybe that was just the start. Next, lose the Gucci shit, get some leather and piercings, throw on a few tattoos, and Pruitt’s golden child might be the next lesbian lady-killer.
That’s one sheltered rich girl brought into the light.
That feeling was back in her chest cavity. Like the warmth of a sunrise imprisoned in her rib cage. She was proud of Libby, and it came easier to admit it to herself from watching each stage of the girl’s metamorphosis.
And there was a different feeling in her lower abdomen, this one not so warm and cheery as the one parked next to her heart. Her stomach seemed to have had a sudden and violent revelation about its captivity inside a crowded meat cocoon, and it was trying to spring for the exit.
Chaz tore ass to her bathroom. She dropped to her knees in front of the toilet and retched once; then came the emergency ejection of today’s supper of ravioli. Chunks blew out so hard that she got toilet-water splashback.
Once her stomach’s revolt had come to an end, s
he swatted the lever and snatched the towel off the sink counter to wipe her face.
Libby appeared in the doorway. “Everything all right?”
“Yeah,” panted Chaz, getting a whiff of her own vomit breath. Trying to get up only brought back the waves of nausea. She sat back, her head touching the shower enclosure. “Actually, I’m gonna take a load off for a while.”
Libby stepped over Chaz’s spread-eagle legs and opened the cabinet above the sink. “Is this where you keep your medicine?” she asked, combing through the shelves. “Do you have anything for an upset stomach?”
Chaz was struck with another cramp. She honestly couldn’t remember if she had medicine for an upset stomach or even the last time she had puked her guts out. Maybe when she was eight or nine? Once, the whole residence tunnel on the Nova Atlas had caught a bad stomach bug—some kind of germ cruising through the air-recycling system, taking hostages one by one. The smell of barf didn’t leave the corridor for an entire fucking week.
“You don’t even have aspirin,” said Libby, sounding astonished. She knelt and put her hand on Chaz’s forehead. “Well, you’re not terribly warm, but you are looking a bit pale. Is there a pharmacy anywhere close? I can run down and get you something.”
“Libby—”
“I know you’re going to say you’re fine, but I won’t let you, because you’re clearly not.”
Chaz spit a wad of bile-flavored saliva into the toilet bowl. “There’s a kiosk a couple blocks to the west, right around the corner behind the Metro station. That’s where I hit if I need anything.”
“Okay.”
“And if you see an old lady who looks like a mutated raisin asking for charity, slip her a few bucks. She’s cool.”
Libby smiled, promised she’d be right back, and left the apartment.