by Peter Clines
“If what Max says is true,” said the cloaked woman, “the odds are it will kill you.”
Twin streamers of smoke curled up from his nostrils. “Probably, yeah.”
Max cleared his throat and killed the moment. “Not probably,” he said. “You’ll be going to your death.”
Stealth glared at him. They could all sense it, even through the mask. “If you continue to speak in such a demoralizing manner,” she said, “I will paralyze your larynx.”
Two fingers on each of his hands curled back. He met her glare through the blank planes of the mask. Max didn’t back down, but was aware Stealth was two inches taller than him, not counting her cowl. After a moment his face calmed and she turned away.
St. George looked at Max. “Symbols are important, right? I’m the guy who beat him before, so maybe it’ll remember me and be a little scared or something. It might give me an edge.”
“It will,” said Max. “Not much, but it’ll help.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” said St. George. “We’ll get the best sword we can and I’ll go out to find Josh and face the demon. Maybe I can slow it down and give the rest of you time to figure out another plan. If I’m really lucky, I’ll get Josh back here somehow.”
Max let out a long sigh and closed his eyes. “I’ll go with you,” he said.
Billie raised an eyebrow. Stealth crossed her arms.
“Give it a rest,” he said. “You’re right, okay? George is right, I’m a cowardly pessimist, let’s move on while there’s still time to save the world.”
“What are you thinking?” asked St. George.
Max shrugged. “I’m the only other person remotely protected from Cairax. I can draw some of his attention, maybe. Give us a little more time.”
“You don’t sound too confident,” said Billie.
“Honestly, two of us aren’t going to confuse him much more than one.”
“Well,” said St. George, “then I guess we hope the guys find a good sword.”
Max nodded. “Maybe I can make something up for you. A simple shield spell or a glamour. Something so he can’t lunge right into you.”
St. George felt smoke trickle out of his nose. “If you can do that, I could’ve gone to get the other sword.”
“No, you couldn’t,” said Max. “This’ll be a one-time-only trick, and I’m not even sure it’ll work the one time.”
“This should have been mentioned before,” said Stealth with another glare.
“Yeah, real sorry about that,” Max said. “I was going under the stupid assumption we didn’t want anyone marching out to a horrible death.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Then Billie gathered an armload of blades from the table and headed back into the Mount. “I’ll check on the guys,” she told St. George.
He gave her a nod and looked at the sorcerer. “How soon do you want to head out, then?”
Max looked up at the sun, then traced a few paths across the sky with his eyes. “We’ve got a little over seven hours, if all goes well. Odds will be slightly in our favor if we go earlier and maybe catch one of them before they start to bond. We should go see what your guys have found for weapons so far.” He stopped and looked around. “Do you hear something?”
“There is a crowd approaching,” said Stealth. Inside her hood, her head turned to the west. “I would estimate between thirty and forty people.”
As she spoke, the crowd flowed around the south corner of Gower Street. St. George guessed there were three dozen of them, and spotted a few children holding hands with parents. At the front of the crowd was Christian Nguyen. She was talking with a few people around her, and every few steps she’d raise the Bible in her hand a little higher for emphasis. When she saw the heroes she waved.
“They are all members of the After Death movement,” Stealth said.
“Great,” said St. George. “Any idea what they want?”
“With Ms. Nguyen’s aggressive nature, I have been expecting them to make some list of demands under the grounds of religious freedom. There are several possible things they could be prepared to ask for.”
“Or maybe they’re just all out for an after-lunch stroll?”
Stealth looked at him. “I find that unlikely.”
“At least they’re not carrying torches and pitchforks,” said Max. “That’s always a plus in my book.”
The crowd got closer and St. George took a few steps toward them. “Christian,” he called out. “Always a pleasure. What can we do for you After Death folks?”
“We don’t use that name,” she said, closing the gap between them. “It’s a term others have applied to us. We just think of ourselves as Christians.” She held her Bible with both hands and gave a thin smile. “No pun intended.”
“Of course not.” It occurred to St. George that he kind of missed the old Christian, the one who just hated the heroes and fought against anything they suggested or any action they took. She was troublesome, but she was predictable. Since she’d found religion, talking to her always gave him the sensation of walking in a minefield.
“We have a request,” she said.
Stealth shifted her posture enough to make her cloak ripple. “This cannot wait until the district meeting next Tuesday?”
“I plan on bringing it up there as well,” she said, “but many of us felt this was a matter of extreme urgency.” There were nods and echoes of agreement from the crowd.
“George,” said Max, “we’re on a tight schedule here.”
“Mr. Hale,” said Christian, “you of all people should appreciate our worries. This is a matter of immortal souls.”
He blinked. “What?”
“You’re living proof the dead can come back,” she said. “You can lead the way for all our loved ones. The girl, Madelyn, is a flawed creature, but you’ve returned unharmed.”
“I’m two inches shorter and I’m missing a tooth,” said Max.
Christian let her gaze slide back and forth between St. George and Stealth. “We’d like you to stop shooting the exes outside the Big Wall.”
St. George coughed in amazement. It came out as a puff of smoke threaded with yellow flames. “I’m sorry?”
“Perhaps explore some nondamaging way to stop them,” said the former councilwoman. “We’re concerned you may be injuring them spiritually, and perhaps ruining their chances of returning to this world.”
Max snorted. “They aren’t coming back.”
His words threw Christian for a moment, but she recovered. “You can bring them back,” she said. “With enough time and help, you could bring all of them back and restore the world.”
Max glanced at St. George. The hero gave a faint shrug.
“Look,” the sorcerer said, raising his voice, “I get that you need to cling to something. But those things out there aren’t your loved ones, and I can’t turn them into your loved ones. They’re just meat. The people you knew are dead. They’ve moved on.”
“Like you did?” A faint glimmer of something familiar crossed Christian’s eyes. It was her old haughty, confident look, the one she used to give in council meetings. The one that showed up when she thought someone had made a mistake she could exploit.
“Maxwell was a special case,” said Stealth. “He should be considered the rare exception, not the rule.”
“But there could be other exceptions,” said someone in the crowd.
“No,” said Max, “There aren’t.”
“The Bible talks about all this,” said another man. “The end of days, the dead coming back as zombies. It’s all true.”
“There’s dozens of resurrections predicted in the Bible,” agreed Max, “but even the ones in Revelation aren’t about zombies rising up to attack mankind. They’re just saying when the end comes, the dead get to enter Heaven first because they’ve been waiting the longest.” He waved his arm out at the Big Wall, at the distant sound of teeth. “I know it’s comforting to believe this stuff, but it’s just
not true. I’ve got suits with more personality left in them than your average ex. Everything you loved about them is long gone.”
“But I’ve seen my sister,” said one man. “She’s still wearing her favorite shirt.”
“She’s wearing clothes, Mr. Diamint,” said St. George. “It’s just what she died in, like a lot of other exes. Captain Freedom can tell you just because they’re still wearing a uniform doesn’t mean they’re thinking like soldiers. Last time we were over in Burbank there was one wearing a cell phone costume. It doesn’t mean he’s still thinking about his phone contract.”
“How do you know?” shouted one man. Harry, one of the part-time drivers for the scavengers. He tended to follow Christian around. His nose was still crooked from being broken a year and a half ago. “How can you know what’s happened to their souls?”
“I know,” said Max. “I was there, remember?”
Again, his words tripped them up. Harry glanced at Christian. Doubt flickered on her face.
“When it comes to cheating death,” the sorcerer told the crowd, “I’m the only guy who brought a parachute. Everyone else fell the whole way. And believe me, having been dead, they were the lucky ones. The last thing you should be wishing for is that they’ve spent the past three years in the purgatory I did. I was ready for it and it almost drove me insane.”
A woman in the back sniffled. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Christian said. “You’re just confused because of your journey.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” said Max, raising his voice a little more. “You want to believe I’m the way to bring your families back? That’s great, but if you believe me, then I’m telling you it can’t happen. Your friends and loved ones are not outside the Big Wall waiting for someone to flip a switch so they can be alive and hug you again. The real world doesn’t work that way. Real problems don’t get solved with a snap of a finger. The exes are just walking corpses. They’re dead. That’s it.”
Diamint’s shoulders slumped. It was a gesture of resignation, but St. George saw a little relief in it, too. Another man looked up at the sky and pressed his eyes shut. The sniffling woman started to sob. A man put his arm around her. Christian clutched her Bible in a death grip.
“Don’t you get it?” said Max. “You’re not praying, you’re just … wishing. And wishes don’t come true.”
Someone else started to cry. Diamint drifted away and led a woman with him. Another man slumped against one of the oversized potted plants flanking the gateway into the Mount.
“I’m sorry,” said St. George.
“You’re just saying this to make us look foolish because of our faith,” Christian said. “That’s why people believe in me just as much as you. People can depend on me when things get tough.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you … you have to ruin everything, don’t you,” she snarled. “Keep all the good things for yourselves. You can’t even let people have hope, you have to ruin it.”
“This is a false hope,” Stealth said. “Nothing good can come of it.”
“It lets people cope,” snapped Harry.
“It allows people to deny the reality of our situation,” said the cloaked woman. “That is a luxury none of us can afford.”
“We have to look forward,” said St. George. “If we just cling to what the world was—what our lives were—we’re never going to accomplish anything.”
“Speaking of looking forward,” said Max with another glance at the sky, “there are some things we need to do here if we want there to be a future.”
Christian looked ready to tear her Bible in half. St. George was sure the woman would’ve if she’d been strong enough. She glared at him for a moment.
Then the anger went out of her and she tucked the book under her arm. “We’ll discuss this more soon,” she said. “Believe it.”
She turned and marched through the crowd. Some of them followed her. Others seemed confused and drifted in the streets.
Stealth took St. George’s arm. “Ilya has tried to reach you,” she said, gesturing at the dangling earbud. “He has found three swords he believes may suit our needs.”
“That’s great,” said St. George.
“We have also received an urgent summons from Dr. Connolly. She says it cannot wait.”
“Okay. I’ll catch up with you la—”
“We, George. She wishes to speak with both of us.”
Max nodded. “Go,” he said. “I need some time to figure out a good shield spell I can paint on you instead of tattooing.”
St. George held out his hand and Stealth grabbed his wrist. They shot into the sky.
ST. GEORGE AND Stealth landed outside the hospital. The receptionist told them Connolly was in one of the small labs on the fourth floor. They walked across the lobby to the stairwell.
They were on the second landing when Stealth spoke. “In some religions,” she said, “your willingness to sacrifice yourself could be seen as making you more honorable and holy.”
He tried to smile. “That’s good. I think I’m going to need every edge I can get.”
“I would not put much trust in Maxwell’s offer to assist you.”
“Why not?”
“Despite his bravado and professed expertise, I believe he is far more an amateur than he would like to admit.”
“Ahhh.”
They passed the door for the third floor.
“Also,” she said, “he is lying to us.”
“You could’ve led with that,” said St. George. He stopped on the landing and turned to her. “Why do you think so?”
Her cloak settled around her. “I cannot say,” she admitted. “I am positive something he has said is a lie, yet I cannot confirm why. The uncertainty is frustrating.”
“What did he say?”
Stealth went up the next flight of stairs without a word.
“Well?”
“He knows Billie Carter has a dolphin tattoo.”
“Is that …” He looked up at her and cleared his throat. “Is that wrong? I mean, besides the obvious way it’s wrong he knows that?”
Stealth’s head shifted inside her hood. “No. I performed her screening when we first took survivors into the Mount. The tattoo is on her left pelvic where it would be hidden by most items of clothing or underwear. From the color bleed, I would estimate she received it close to her seventeenth birthday.”
St. George followed her up the stairs. “So what’s the problem?”
“As I said, I am unsure. Yet I am convinced Maxwell has lied to us and it ties back to that statement.”
He pulled open the fourth-floor door and held it for her. The guard in the hallway directed them a few doors down to the pathology lab. Connolly was sitting in front of a microscope attached to a battered laptop computer. She glanced up as they entered, then back at the screen, as if she was worried what she’d been looking at would vanish. Her face was a mix of emotions.
“This had best be important, doctor,” Stealth said. “We do not have much time.”
“It’s important,” said Connolly. She waved them over to the counter and tapped a few keys on the laptop. She turned it so St. George and Stealth could see better.
On the screen St. George saw a trio of delicate shapes. They looked like silver spiderwebs, or maybe simple snowflakes, set against a white background. Each arm or branch looked like it was made of short segments. They drifted in the image, like underwater plants. One of the shapes shifted and St. George realized the arms extended out in several directions, like a Christmas tree ornament.
“Are they some kind of bacteria or something?” asked St. George. “Is it the ex-virus?”
Connolly shook her head. “They’re macromolecular complexes. Those arms are nanotubes, like flagella, but they’re all composed of different chemical compounds. The center mass is a mix of proteins and DNA, like you’d find in a virus. This whole structure’s approximately forty micro
ns across.”
St. George blinked a few times and his mouth twisted up. “None of that means anything to me.”
“They’re nanites,” she said.
“A what?”
“A piece of nanotechnology,” Stealth said. “Machinery built or grown on a cellular level. Where did you find them?”
“They came from Madelyn.”
St. George looked up from the screen. “What?”
“Yesterday morning I decided to do a straight visual inspection of her blood at a higher magnification. Since the ex-virus mimics white blood cells, I thought it might be a way to spot a possible variation. I know it’s not supposed to mutate, but it was the only thing I could think of. That’s when I realized none of her blood cells were actually blood cells.”
She tapped her keyboard and a new image came up. The nanite webs had rolled their arms into coils and wrapped themselves into double-layered discs that were thicker at the edges. “These are from another one of her blood samples.”
Stealth’s head tilted inside her hood. “Their form now resembles erythrocytes. You are certain they are the same structures?”
Connolly nodded. “That’s why I didn’t notice them before. They were shaped like red blood cells and acting like them.” She hit a key and called up another picture. In this one dozens of webs were stretched out long and thin. The arms were gathered in parallel bundles. “These are from a tissue sample we took. Hundreds of them linked together to form bone muscle fibers.”
The doctor cycled the pictures back to the extended spiderweb and took in a controlled breath. “These things reshape themselves to mimic different cells, depending on where in the body they are. Blood cells, muscle cells, skin cells. They can even work together to imitate nerve cells.” She paused for a moment. “Do you have any idea what that means? An artificial neuron? That’s past Nobel Prize, that’s just … It’s impossible.”
“Clearly it is not,” said Stealth.
St. George tipped his head at the microscope image. “So these are in Maddy? They have something to do with her … condition?”
“They’re not in her, George,” Connolly said. “It’s all she is.”