by T. J. Klune
Cavalo was not sane. He hadn’t been for a very long time.
He felt no fear. There was something else there in its place.
He met Lucas’s eyes as he passed in front of him just out of reach. The steps Lucas took were slow and deliberate, his knees bent, his back slightly hunched. The shadows danced along the walls, making Lucas look bigger than he really was. Cavalo knew what this was for.
Lucas was hunting him.
The bees told him to end this, to throw the knife into one of those eyes. He could do it. It’d be very easy. A quick flip of his wrist and this would be over.
His hand twitched. That was all.
Lucas passed out of sight. And it was then that he took steps forward behind Cavalo. He could hear the footsteps coming closer. Could feel the anger radiating off Lucas. Felt the Dead Rabbit’s breaths on the back of his neck.
It wouldn’t take much, Cavalo knew. He’d recently seen what damage teeth could do to a throat.
Lucas crossed into his vision again. His nose scraped against Cavalo’s cheek. His lips pressed against his jawline. He stopped when he crouched in front of Cavalo, pressing their faces together. His nostrils flared.
He stood up. Took a step back.
And Cavalo could hear his accusation as if he’d spoken the words aloud. I can smell her on you.
“Can you?”
I’ll kill her.
“You’ll leave her alone,” he said sharply.
Lucas snarled at him. I fucking told you what would happen if she touched you! She’s already dead.
“Lucas.”
Fuck you. You did this. He gripped the sides of his head. You made the bees come out when you walked away from me. Why did you walk away?
And only then did Cavalo realize his own bees had boiled over the moment he’d left Lucas. So much so that they’d turned into Jamie. Jamie, who had come to him with a warning. “I didn’t mean to,” Cavalo said quietly.
You did! You did! You think I’m like them. You think like they do. Like sheep. He paced back and forth, wincing, his hands shaking. He looked as if he was breaking apart.
But still Cavalo did not move. He thought it the wiser choice. “I’m like you,” he said instead, marveling out how easily the words came out now.
Her smell is on your skin. You stink of her.
“She’s gone now,” he said. This he knew. She’d left the night he’d heard her sing. Good-bye, good-bye, we all say good-bye. The kiss had been nothing more than a ghost.
Lucas stepped forward suddenly, a hand around Cavalo’s neck, fingers digging in. Cavalo did nothing to stop him. The knife stayed in his hand, unmoving. You make promises with your mouth, Lucas said, inches away. You speak pretty words, you scrape a kiss against my lips, and then you smell of her. You walked away from me. You turned your back on me. You let them see what you thought of me. The people here. The ones you say we are trying to help.
“No.”
No?
“I didn’t leave you. I left them because of their sadness. Because of their anguish. Over the girl at the dam. Like they hadn’t agreed to sacrifice someone every time the Dead Rabbits came.”
I don’t believe you. I saw the look on your face. When you heard about her.
“Have you ever done that?”
Defensive. What?
“Hurt someone like that. Like they did to her. Someone who didn’t deserve it.”
No. There was a stutter in his eyes. He looked away. A lie, though maybe not a complete one.
“Have you been near them when the others did?”
There it was. The scowl returned. Lucas backed away from him warily.
“And you didn’t stop them.”
Lucas shuddered.
“No. That’s not right, is it?”
Lucas gripped the sides of his head.
“It’s not that you didn’t. It’s that you couldn’t.”
Lucas screamed. Covered his ears. Shook his head. All done in silence.
“They wouldn’t let you.”
Lucas fell to his knees. Pressed his forehead to the floor. Pounded the hard wood with a fist. Cavalo thought it hard enough that his hand should break. This was like the time before when Cavalo pushed. And he had to push, because it was the only way to break through. Why he felt the need to do this was not something Cavalo could focus on. He was dimly aware of how neatly he’d deflected Lucas. His jealousy. His anger over something as inconsequential as a kiss. Especially one that meant good-bye.
But to his surprise, Lucas stopped. He took in deep breaths and let them out slowly. He did not pound the floor. His mouth was not twisted open. His eyes were closed.
Like he was controlling himself. Controlling the bees.
He took another breath. And then stood. Opened his eyes. They were as clear as Cavalo had ever seen them.
He shook his head. No, that’s not it.
“Then what?” Cavalo heard himself say.
Lucas pointed to his scar. Cavalo knew now who put it there, but never the why. And wasn’t it the why that mattered? Wasn’t it the why of it that was the most important. Most people are not born with bees. They’re put there because of hard life and unfair death. Because of things seen that cannot be unseen. Because of a father who slices the throat of his son because his son had tried to stop him from hurting another.
Cavalo could see that now. Could see it even though Lucas could not speak a single word aloud. He didn’t have to. They both had hives in their heads. It made it easier to talk to one another.
I tried to help her, Lucas said, motioning with his hands, pacing back and forth. I don’t know why. Things had happened before that I did nothing to stop. People that had come in, begging for my help. Saying they had families. Homes. That they just wanted to go home. They knew who we were. What we were. They knew what was going to happen to them.
And she did too. She knew. There was something in her eyes that didn’t allow her to beg. A spark. A flame. She knew she was already dead, and she did not beg for her life. She didn’t scream. And when she spoke, it was but a few words.
The shadows flickered behind him, and Cavalo could see them taking shape, becoming a clearing in the woods far into the Deadlands. The trees were black and stunted, almost as if burned by a forgotten fire. The ground was sparse, the earth beneath their feet dead. In the distance there was the outline of huts. Houses. Shacks. Homes. In the shadows on the wall of a vacant house in Cottonwood, Cavalo knew he was seeing the beating heart of the Dead Rabbits. Where they lived. What they did.
In the middle of the clearing, there was a fire. It rose high into the sky, fed by the dead wood that surrounded it. People moved around it, laughing and scowling, screaming and wrestling. He could not make out their words, but they wore the bands on their arms. The spikes around their necks. Knives at their sides. Rough tunics, splattered and dirty. Some of them were sick, blood leaking from their eyes and mouths. They leaned over and spat large red and brown globs to the ground that smelled of rot. Some had skin that looked eaten away. Teeth falling from their heads. Tumors growing on their skin, hanging low, heavy, and fat. He wondered what would happen if they just burst, if the black death that grew inside of them would pour onto the ground in a noxious pile.
Lucas was there. Cavalo could see him standing off to the side, the black mask across his eyes. He was shirtless, and his skin was free of tattoos. At least, tattoos of schematics of power and water. Instead there were lines down his back and chest, crisscrossing scars that Cavalo recognized as being from a whip. He wondered why he never saw them before, even hidden under the black lines that covered his chest and back and arms. He had tasted some of that skin, had touched it, but never thought of the raised bumps under his tongue and fingers until that moment. He had only been focused on the one scar, the large one around Lucas’s neck.
The scar that wasn’t there now. This was Before.
Cavalo shuddered in his chair in the vacant house in Cottonwood.
Cavalo
shuddered as he stood next to a bonfire in the Deadlands.
“Lucas,” he said.
But Lucas didn’t respond. Cavalo wasn’t really there.
Except he was. He could smell the fire and something sweet above it. Could feel the heat of the air around him. The roaring jumble of words spoken and spat around him. It was chaos, and the bees were screaming. The Dead Rabbits were unaware of his presence. They didn’t bump him. They didn’t walk through him. They walked around him, as if he took up space and that was all.
He took a few steps and stopped when he found what the sweet smell was above the smoke and fire. Meat. Cooking meat. Except this was torsos. Arms. Legs. Tongues. Eyes. His stomach clenched, and he thought the bees were trying to crawl out his ears.
He saw her then. The woman Lucas had told him about. She’d been beaten, her clothes ripped from her body. Her arms were bound above her head to a long wooden post that sat across her shoulders. Her dirty hair hung in clumps around her face. There were bloody teeth marks on her thighs. Her neck.
But there was that spark. That flame. It burned so brightly in its defiance. There was fear in her, yes. Her skin practically thrummed with it. But she was not bent over, begging for this to end. No. Her back was rigid and straight, her teeth bared at anyone who attempted to come near her. They laughed at her and tugged on her naked skin. She reached for them, but they knocked her down. She pushed herself back up. It took time. She used the wooden post, and her arms shook with exhaustion. But every time she was knocked down, she pushed herself back up.
Cavalo looked toward Lucas. He watched the woman closely. He never touched her. He never stopped anyone from touching her. But Cavalo could see the tense, coiling posture, his feet digging into the black soil. It wouldn’t be much longer before he lashed out.
And then Patrick came. He moved like smoke.
Something flickered in Lucas’s eyes, a complex thing Cavalo couldn’t even begin to understand. Patrick was dressed as he’d been when Cavalo had seen him. Simply. Elegantly. He was not sick as most of the others were. There were no sores on his face. No blood leaking from his body. He moved quickly and quietly, and when he passed the Dead Rabbits, they stopped talking until all eyes were trained on him. Patrick stopped in front of the nude woman.
“Hello,” he said to her. His voice was kind. Cavalo knew it as lies.
The woman looked up at him but did not speak. Her breasts heaved as she struggled to hold on to her composure.
“Do you know why you’re here?” Patrick asked her in that same level voice.
She didn’t answer him, but she didn’t look away. Though Cavalo didn’t know who she was, he felt fiercely protective of her, like he would of any cornered animal that showed no fear. She knew what was going to happen to her. She knew there was no chance. She’d accepted her fate.
“Hmm,” Patrick said. He looked down at his hands. “They’re usually screaming by now.”
The Dead Rabbits around him laughed.
“I like you,” Patrick told the woman. “Very much. You might be what I’ve been waiting for. For a while now. Lucas, if you please.”
The Dead Rabbits turned toward Lucas. Cavalo did too, unable to help himself.
He did not miss the rage that flashed in his eyes. The fear. The anguish and sadness. It all rolled into one, but then it was gone.
“What do you want me to do?” Lucas said, his voice hard. And it was the first time Cavalo heard him speak aloud (though the bees reminded him he hadn’t really heard his voice, because he was sitting in a chair in a vacant house while watching Lucas create shadows on the wall behind him). He sounded exactly how Cavalo thought he would. Angry. Deep. And young. So impossibly young that it caused Cavalo to choke on his breath. His heart hurt, and he wanted nothing more than to take him from here. He knew what was coming. And he knew there was nothing he could do.
But most of all, he wondered when Lucas had gotten so under his skin, like a shard of glass now breaking into pieces. He wondered if he could have stopped it if he’d even tried.
“You know what I want,” Patrick said. There was a small smile on his face.
Lucas took a step toward the woman. Patrick looked surprised when Lucas drew his knife from his side. The other Dead Rabbits parted as he walked, cries and jeers rising up from the crowd. His black mask reflected the firelight. Every step he took was deliberate and cautious.
He stopped when he stood next to his father, facing the woman on her knees. She stared up at him. Cavalo moved until he stood at their sides. He’d forgotten he couldn’t be heard. He’d forgotten that none of this was real. All he could focus on were the shards of glass embedded in his skin and the voice of the one he had only ever heard in his head.
“Don’t do this,” he whispered harshly. “Don’t.”
Lucas didn’t acknowledge him.
Cavalo reached out. But his hand was stopped as if a wall separated them.
Lucas’s eyes narrowed as he stared down at the woman. His lips twitched down. Cavalo knew that look. It was the bees. Even now. Lucas couldn’t be more than sixteen years old, and even then the bees were in his head.
“Come with me,” Cavalo said, hearing how desperate he sounded. “Please. I’ll take you away from here.”
But Lucas did not look at him because this Lucas no longer existed.
Shadows, flickering on a wall.
Cavalo was in a house.
Cavalo was in a field.
His bees were confused. They didn’t know what was happening. This scared them. They wanted him to run as fast as he could. Down the stairs. Or into the forest of the Deadlands. They weren’t sure which because they didn’t know where he was.
Run, they begged him. Down (through) the stairs (the forest). Hide behind the house (the trees). Don’t let him (them) see you.
But Cavalo could not run.
Lucas did not run.
“A piece of her,” Patrick said, briefly touching his son on the arm. “I should like her hand.” As if it were nothing at all.
“Listen to me,” Cavalo said.
Lucas pointed the knife down at the woman.
“Lucas.”
And didn’t Lucas twitch then? As if he’d heard a voice? He had because Cavalo was in a house in a town at the end of the world, and there were shadows along the walls that told a story he no longer wanted to hear. He tried to leave. Tried to stand. He couldn’t because he was already standing in the middle of a forest, surrounded by those clever monsters, those clever cannibals.
“Lucas,” Patrick said. “Do it now.”
Lucas didn’t. He didn’t. The bees had gotten so loud in his head, and he ground his teeth together. Cavalo could hear them, roaring things like DEATH and BLOOD and KILL HER KILL HER KILL HER, but in all those bees, in the great storm that was the mind of Lucas, Cavalo heard a small voice say no.
Lucas stepped back. The knife went to his side.
Patrick sighed.
The Dead Rabbits around them were silent.
“One day,” Patrick said, “you’ll tire of the whip.” He sounded resigned. Regretful. Like a father who has just caught his son doing something disappointing. Cavalo had used the same voice on Jamie.
Cavalo saw a tremor roll through Lucas. It was brief. It never touched his eyes. But Cavalo understood what it was.
Lucas was afraid. Afraid of the whip.
Of Patrick.
But even as the tremor passed up his legs and arms, Cavalo saw him steel himself, beginning to coil down. To spring forward. Cavalo knew. Lucas was going to kill the woman, but not in the way his father wanted. A stab to the heart and it would be over. She would not suffer. She would not fall under the teeth of the Dead Rabbits.
He lashed out and—
Patrick caught his wrist. The tip of the knife had barely pressed against the woman’s breast. It dimpled the skin. A drop of blood beaded over the blade and dripped onto the ground. She grimaced but nothing more.
Gone was Patrick’s fat
herly mask. His face had twisted into something dark and monstrous. It was then that Cavalo realized Patrick must have his own bees, because he could see their stingers poking out around his eyes. It made sense. Cavalo knew bees could follow from father to son. His own father had been drowning in them, using alcohol to chase his away for as long as he could. Or his fists against Cavalo’s young face. They always had them, darkly amassing in their heads, but it took something extraordinary to let them take control. For Cavalo’s father, it had been the death of Cavalo’s mother. For Cavalo, it’d been the destruction of Elko and everything he’d loved. He didn’t know what it’d been for Patrick, but Cavalo was sure he could see what had caused it for Lucas in the lined scars on his back. And he knew he was about to see the final act that made Lucas so lost in his own swarm.
“Mercy,” Patrick said. His voice was no longer kind. “You would show mercy.”
Lucas struggled in his grip but could not get free.
Cavalo screamed and cursed at Patrick. Tried to reach both of them, but that invisible wall kept him away. It did not stop him from trying. He banged his fists on the barrier. He hit it with his shoulder. He kicked it.
No one ever noticed him.
Because we’re not really here! the bees cried.
But what if we are? they answered themselves.
Cavalo thought his head would split. “You fucking bastard,” he snarled at Patrick as he smashed his shoulder into the unseen wall again. “Look at me! Look at me!”
But Patrick never looked at him.
The other Dead Rabbits did not move. They seemed to breathe as one.
And Lucas. Cavalo saw him the most out of all of them. Could see the contempt in his eyes that did nothing to hide his fear. He was trembling, and Cavalo knew he was about to witness the birth of the hive in his head. Lucas had the bravado of a man but the heart of a child, and there would be no coming back from this.
“I’ve given you much,” Patrick said. “I’ve given you leeway, even when you went against my word.”
“Lucas!” Cavalo shouted.