by Perrin Briar
Anne, beyond exhausted from their exertions, bunched her fists and flew at the baseball cap-wearing Lurcher. He caught her arm and pushed her away. Anne attacked again, but was easily pacified. Anne embraced Jessie, bone weary and exhausted.
“Close your eyes, Jess,” Anne said.
Jessie shook her head, tears rolling down her face. “No.”
“Close them.”
Jessie did. Anne kissed her on the forehead, tasting dirt and sweat.
The Lurchers drew up before them.
“You do well… but now…” the baseball cap wearer said.
“…you must join us… ” the grandfather said.
“This will only hurt… a little,” the Korean woman said.
The Lurchers stepped forward, mouths opening wide and hands crooked into claws.
Blam! Blam! Blam!
There was the sound of bodies hitting the floor, and the putrid pus smell of a fallen Lurcher. Anne opened her eyes with hesitancy. The Lurchers lay crumpled on the ground. The metal door was open. A heavy black boot stepped forward, crushing the grandfather’s head, taking no more notice of the pus and congealed blood than if it were dog poo.
The figure crouched down beside them. The man had dark hair and eyes that bore no wrinkles because they never smiled nor frowned. The white stripes of the flag on his arm were dirty.
“I take it you never found the ocean?” the man said.
Anne peered closer at the man’s face. “Baxter?”
169.
His eyelids opened like heavy shutters. For a moment he wondered if he really had opened his eyes it was so dark. A thin crack of light escaped the door’s massive outline, spilling across the floor. Something dripped on his cheek, smelling of stale water. His eyes stung with the stench of decay, flies buzzing, feasting on something in the far corner. A pained scream echoed off hard stonewalls on the other side of the door, and then silence.
His head pounded like someone was hammering nails into his forehead. He paused, waiting for the pain to subside, then crawled to the door and pressed an eye to the crack. It was so thin and slight he couldn’t make anything out. His fingers brushed against the door’s rough wood surface, finding notches of what were probably words, but he ignored them and continued his search for the doorknob.
His blind fingers clinked against something cold and hard. He felt at it. A hoop. He gripped it and pulled. The door didn’t move. He twisted and pushed, but still it did not budge. Someone grunted in pain, closer this time.
“Hey,” Jordan whispered, mouth to the crack.
No reply.
“Hey. Is someone out there?”
A shadow moved in front of the door, blocking out the light. Jordan froze, daring not to speak. The shadow grunted and withdrew.
Jordan emptied his pockets, relieved to find Queenie hadn’t emptied them, and found a short length of twine and a few mismatched buttons.
“Great. I can mend my jacket.”
He reached into his back pocket and took out the remaining chill pill. He felt it between his fingers. He shut his eyes and hesitated only a moment.
He put the pill on his tongue. It tasted sweet. He worked up the saliva and swallowed it.
Jordan breathed a sigh of relief. His eyelids felt heavy. They drifted closed. The darkness took him. It wasn’t painful at all.
170.
“Get… up,” a gruff staccato voice said, adding a vicious kick to his ribs as punctuation.
His surroundings were no less shocking than the first time, his senses no less choked by the cloying smells. The door stood open, letting in damp light from flickering candles in the corridor, illuminating the hole he was in. Darkness was better.
“I’m alive?” Jordan said, eyes wide with incredulity.
“Alive… not for… long…” Queenie said, smacking him hard over the head, causing his skull to ring with pain. “Get… up!”
Jordan got to his feet, dazed, and stumbled toward the door. “What did you do?” Jordan shouted at Queenie. “What the hell did you do?”
Queenie’s face curled with rage. He lashed out, smacking Jordan in the face, a flurry of blows from his one good arm, hefting it like a cudgel.
“You… move now! You… die… later!”
He shoved Jordan forward, impacting with the solid oak door opposite. A beaten voice from inside screamed, “I don’t know anymore! I don’t… Please! Just let me go! Please!” Then it reverted to deep, weeping sobs and words without vowels.
Heavy doors lined the long tunnel on both sides as far as Jordan could see. There had to be forty cells, fifty maybe. The tunnel was circular and long like an oversized cigar. The doors were built into recesses in the curved walls, cloaking them in shadow. Queenie kicked Jordan up the backside. He landed on his face in the sludge. He got up and walked down the tunnel.
They passed shuffling Lurchers, grouped together into squads of three by ten. They watched Jordan with hollow sockets as he passed.
After what felt like hours of walking down identical tunnels, taking seemingly random turns, Jordan said, “Is this it? You’re going to walk me to death?”
“You… got… appointment,” Queenie grunted.
Lurchers lined every tunnel, and though Jordan often considered making a break for it, he knew he would never get far. Mournful classical music reverberated off the walls from down the passage. As they walked, the music got louder. Jordan recognised it as Mozart. They followed the notes like breadcrumbs until the tunnel opened out into a large domed room.
Most of the tiny mosaic tiles on the roof had fallen and smashed on the floor, crunching beneath their feet. The remaining tiles caught the dim candlelight like stars in a cloudless sky. Corridors led off in a dozen directions, each leading to an imperceptible darkness. The music blared from an antique record player, operated by a handle on the side. Presently, a blond Lurcher worked it, never once looking up. But Jordan’s attention was focused entirely on something else.
In the centre of the room sat an intimidating iron chair with straps on the arms and legs. Large maps adorned the room’s uneven surface like bubbled wallpaper. Notes had been scribbled on them in a red ink scrawl Jordan couldn’t make out.
Queenie gestured to the chair and said, “Sit.”
“I’d prefer to stand.”
Queenie squared off against him. “I say sit.”
It was now or never. Jordan ran for a random tunnel. Queenie didn’t give chase, and only smiled, giving a deep-throated laugh, deafening in the acoustic dome. The moment Jordan got close to the exit a dozen Lurchers stepped into the light. Without breaking stride, Jordan changed direction and ran for another tunnel, and met another group of Lurchers. Queenie made a lazy lunge, but Jordan ducked under his arms easily, and ran for the tunnel they had come in from – no Lurchers had been there a moment before. No dice. It too was packed with Lurchers. He was surrounded.
Powerful arms enveloped him and carried him kicking and screaming to the iron chair. Four pairs of rotten hands held him in place while Queenie employed the straps. Jordan pulled an arm free and punched Queenie in the face. Jordan was restrained again. Queenie pulled the straps so tight it cut off Jordan’s circulation.
“Not too tight,” a voice said from somewhere behind Jordan. “We want our guest to be comfortable.” The voice was sleek, educated and young.
Queenie slackened the straps – a little – and moved beside a short row of half a dozen other Lurchers that stood to attention. They bowed their heads in respectful deference.
Something slithered on the edge of the shadows like snake scales, keeping itself cloaked in darkness.
“They didn’t overtax you too much, I trust? You are comfortable?” There was no hesitancy in his speech. No course edge. He sounded human.
“A cushion would be nice,” Jordan said. He strained against the straps, but they didn’t budge.
“Sarcasm.” Jordan thought he could hear the smile. “That’s good. Of all the things to learn about your g
enus, humour is the hardest. Maybe you can teach me.”
“I’m funnier when I can stand up. Preferably with an AK47.”
Jordan watched as the figure approached the line of Lurchers, the hem of a black cape drifted lazily into the light. A hand – stark white as snow, fingers too long with swollen arthritic knuckles – reached out from the darkness and gently stroked Queenie.
Queenie met the hand accommodatingly. There was affection in his eyes. But when the hand brought Queenie’s head up, Jordan saw the real emotion. Fear, with the thinnest veneer of affection.
“You did well, my pet,” the figure said to Queenie in a revoltingly high-pitched voice. He could have been speaking to a dog. “He was difficult to find, but you found him, didn’t you? And as promised, I will give you your reward.” He clicked his disfigured fingers and a boy was brought into the room.
The boy was no more than eight years old. He wore tattered soiled rags and a dirty bandage over his right hand. Tears formed tracks down his filthy face. He whimpered.
“Well?” the figure in shadow said. “Don’t you like him?”
Queenie nodded, eyes returning to the floor.
“Is there something else you want?”
The most imperceptible of movements as Queenie’s eye met Jordan’s.
“You want him? Our guest? Very well. But it all rests on his decision. You might get him, or he might go free. Understood?”
Queenie nodded.
The hand waved the boy away.
“Can I go home now?” the boy asked in a tremulous voice.
“You will join my pets for dinner, then rest.”
The boy smiled. “Thank you, sir. Thank you.” The boy was led away.
“It looks like you are very popular, Jordan. I must admit, you gave us quite the run around.”
The figure stepped into the light. He was no more than twelve or thirteen years old. His skin was pallid and tough-looking, thick like that of a honey badger. His small pigeon chest was exposed to the air, ribs straining against his skin, threatening to stab through with every movement. He wore a black vinyl costume with a high collar that stretched higher than his head.
“Do you like my costume? I often get remarks about it. I was bitten at a birthday party, you see. Halloween theme. I woke up wearing it and thought,” he shrugged, “kinda cool. It suits me, don’t you think?”
Jordan could barely keep the smile off his face. “It’s nice,” Jordan said. “But you have me at a loss. You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
“Tim,” the boy said. “My friends call me Timmy.”
“May I call you Timmy?” Jordan asked. He kept his voice light.
Tim beamed with undisguised joy. “Of course you can! I have so many friends now, but you can never have too many friends. That’s what my mum used to say.”
“She was right.”
Tim frowned. “Oh no, I just realised.”
“What?”
“We can’t be friends.”
“Why not?”
“Friends don’t cause each other pain. But that’s what I have to do to you.”
Jordan consciously kept the smile on his face. “You don’t have to do those things, do you?”
The boy’s tiny shoulders shrugged. “I don’t see any other way.”
Jordan frowned, trying to appear sad for Tim. “Let me out of this chair, and we’ll figure something out.”
“You won’t run?”
“I won’t run.”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” Jordan said. “Friends always keep their promises.”
“Yes, they do.” Tim moved to the straps and began to unfasten them.
“Quickly. The sooner I get out of this chair, the sooner we can come up with a new idea.”
Tim looked up into Jordan’s face, and Jordan’s breath caught in his throat. The boy’s eyes were big and black. They were bottomless pits of despair, a shark’s eyes. Unrelenting, undaunted, and without a fibre of humanity. They shone with an intelligence far beyond his years. He took his hands off the straps, which were still knotted tight.
The smile on Tim’s face was small and mirthless. “Do you take me for a fool, Jordan? You have something I want, and you’re not leaving until I have it.”
171.
There was a screech from one of the tunnels. Tim pressed a finger to his right temple, closed his eyes and focused. The screeching stopped.
“Apologies. They can be a handful at times. Or rather, a headful.”
“You control them?” Jordan said.
“Most of the time.”
“How?”
Tim shrugged.
“How does the wind know how to blow? The sun how to shine? The virus destroyed cognitive thinking in most, enhanced it in others. It was a lottery, our birth. Those fortunate enough to have received mental development were flung into the upper echelons of the new order.” He walked around Jordan, inspecting him. “Fate hit the reset button and when I woke up, I was no longer human. I could hear them, speak to them. Though of course they had very little to say.
“No one really knows what happened during the Incident, of course, but I think that when the virus wiped the pathways in the mind clean, it was replaced with a kind of receptor – like a computer unable to connect to its hard disk – and it started asking for input. I am that input. Without me they are animals with no consciousness.”
“How many do you control?”
Tim closed his eyes again, focusing. “As of this moment in time… ten thousand, five hundred and fifty-three… fifty-four.” A young throat screamed somewhere down the corridor. “Fifty five.” He opened his eyes and smiled. “New recruits.”
“There are so many…”
“A fraction of those out in the New World. The virus was most prolific in the poorer echelons of society, did you know? People were intentionally infecting themselves and their children with the virus. They thought they could strike it lucky. Win the genetic lottery, so to speak. No one believed they wouldn’t win. The same way that old lady in the twenty-four hour mart bought her ticket for the lottery each week. She’d been told that for every bad thing that happened in her life, a good one was on the way. She’d taken that to heart and felt she was due a rebate. Some of them were right. Most weren’t.
“But to be given another chance to be born again – to be born with a silver spoon – was worth the risk. Besides, what was the worst that could happen? To be born into a life where they didn’t understand who they were, or where their future lay? I suppose a lot of people didn’t see the difference to what they were already living.
“But what I was surprised to discover was my pets were not empty at all. Their memories were still there, just below the surface, they just had no access to them, as if the pathways that led to them had grown over and couldn’t be found again. They wander, lost in their own minds, forever. Until I take them by the hand. It’s quite a frightening experience for them at first, giving up their own freewill. But it’s either that or wander forever.”
“What does that mean?” Jordan said. “You could lead them back? All the way? Make them normal again?” The possibility made Jordan’s heart race.
“Yes,” he said. “But I won’t allow them to waste their lives again. We serve a higher purpose now – the unification of our race. So much was lost in the past. So many squandered minds spent merely surviving. We have the chance to maximise the potential of us all.”
Jordan looked over at the Lurchers. “You call that maximising their potential? They don’t even know who they are!”
“I alone have access to my pets’ memories. I know everything they knew. That’s how I remember your past, even if you couldn’t. ‘Jordy. Don’t go.’ It was I who tasted your blood on the dock.”
Jordan shook his head. “That wasn’t you. You weren’t even there.”
“It was me. All those you see around us are me. I control them. They are mine. What they see…” Tim’s eyes rolled back
into his head, eyelids fluttering like he was having some kind of fit.
Queenie stepped forward and said, “…I see. And what they Taste…”
Another Lurcher stepped forward. “…I Taste.”
The boy’s eyes returned to normal. “And so you see, I was with you every step of your journey. I was the one who tasted your blood on the dock, the one who saved you from those marauding fools in Reedham, the one who snatched you en route to the compound. I tasted your blood and knew immediately you were the one I had been waiting for. You alone can light the way and give me what I need.”
“If you read my memories on the dock, why do you need me now?”
“Because not all Tasters are born equal. The one you refer to as Queenie sees but fragments of memories. Therefore, when I channel him, I also only see fragments. My skills are only as strong as my instruments. He has a limited skill, but it is more than most. We share our knowledge. Queenie,” Tim called, “what was your profession before your rebirth?”
“I was… Taxonomist.”
Tim turned back to Jordan. “Taxonomists organise species by type. I often wonder how to categorise our genus beside yours. An off-shoot, perhaps – at a suitably discreet distance from humans as you once placed yourselves from apes. Queenie had a diverse set of specialized skills. Now, we all have them. With time, we shall all write with the proficiency of the New York Times’ best-selling authors. We shall all cook with the ability of multiple Michelin Star chefs. All it takes is time. So long as I live, your species will not be forgotten.
“I am your future, Jordan. Destroy me, and you destroy the memory of your race, your past. I know things no living human remembers. Are you willing to lose what you are? We must consume you all. Blood never forgets. And neither do I.”
Jordan hung his head. “I don’t know what you want to know.”
Tim peered at Jordan with accusing eyes. “Come now. You must know.”
“I don’t. I have my memories now, but I don’t know what value they are to you.”
The boy leaned in close, peering at Jordan with searching eyes. “You really don’t know, do you?” He grinned, touching an oversized finger to Jordan’s head. “You have great knowledge. It’s locked up inside you and we have to figure out a way to get it out.”