by Rio Youers
Closer.
A thin man sat on a concrete step playing a guitar with three strings, finding a melody even though his fingers, out of habit, touched empty places on the fretboard. He didn’t notice Fernando, who flitted by, as light as an insect’s wing. A woman danced barefoot in the gutter, holding her skirt above her knees, like a little girl paddling. She didn’t lose a step as Fernando swept around her. He followed a pack of stray dogs to the end of the street, where a faulty traffic signal buzzed indecisively between stop and go. Mosquitoes flicked between colors, like living glitter.
Fernando paused in the doorway of an exhausted building, where the wind whistled in the gaps between bricks and the windows rattled like old toys. He closed his eyes and cast his instinct into the night. He was rewarded with a feeling—as light, yet real, as the beat of his pulse—from the northwest, further up the hill, where Rocinha’s streets were more jaded, but where its lights burned brighter.
“Avô Vinícius …” He caught another wave of instinct and his promise trailed away. This was deep and cold, rushing to him from the south, bringing dread, whistling and rattling, like the wind through the tired building. His mind danced with terrible images. Clown faces leered at him. Endless rainbow legs bounded through the cramped streets.
Closer. But now the word was terrifying.
Fernando peeled out of the doorway and dared a glance over one shoulder. He couldn’t see them, but they were coming…they were close. He turned back to the lights towering in the streets above him.
The signal stuttered. Only green. Only go.
TRANSLATION TAKEN FROM THE JOURNAL OF VINÍCIUS ARAÚJO VALENTIM
(September 19th 2032.)
This must end.
I have torn through civilization, bringing pain and death and disease. I have burned with devastation, and seen cities—countries—spill countless infected to the streets, and then fall crippled to their knees. I am the cloud over the sun. I am the falling rain. I am the disease.
They cannot catch me. I am too quick, too strong, and always one move ahead. They come for me in São Paulo, yet I am in Florianópolis. They are weeks, months, cities behind. I drink to stay alive. I spread the infection. All I can hear is screaming.
They come for me—an army: one thousand strong. They batter down doors in Brasilia. I am in Teresina.
I drink. I live. I grow stronger.
How long before the world is beaten? How long before the continents are ravaged and buckled and slide screaming into the oceans? Because of me. I am the grandfather of ruin.
It must end.
I could take my own life, but I lack the courage. I could return to the caves in Amazonia, where I was saved—reborn—and be with my kindred, but the thought of being back there, with their cold, leathery bodies so close to mine, fills me with terror. I can do that no more than I could throw myself from the highest building in Brazil.
I want to be normal.
I will find a place where all hope is fragile, and where prayers are always spoken. I will blend in with the desperation—lose myself there. I will surround myself with darkness and live by meager means, until I grow old and weak. Until I die.
And if they find me…it will all be over. Leave it to fate. Let God decide.
I am the cause. The most virulent strain. But my part in this horror is done.
Let me find darkness.
Please, God.
THE LIGHT INSIDE
Fernando’s body ached and boomed and he pressed on, doubled over, heaving up steep, uneven streets. His jacket caught the wind and flowered behind him, and he shook it off so that it wouldn’t slow him down. It flapped and tumbled down the streets, followed by a stream of excited children with naked, polished skin. He held the butterfly to his face. Tears flashed behind its delicate wings. His instinct shimmered, but he couldn’t tell if it was because he was close to Avô Vinícius, or because the Psycho Cowboys were closing in.
Graffiti bled on the walls. Faded colors. Doors and shutters applauded in the breeze. The buildings leaned above him, time-washed greens and reds and blues, stacked like boxes. He ascended a corkscrew of crumbling steps, gasped the name of his savior, and fell to his knees. He closed his eyes for a second and saw rainbows. The image terrified him—pushed him to his feet. He pressed onward. Rocinha glittered below him: a puddle on the earth, reflecting stars.
And all at once he was there. The shack was small and dark, with rotted slats of wood and flaps of tarpaulin filling the gaps in the brickwork. Simple light flickered inside. It was weak, decrepit, but for Fernando, it was everything he ever hoped to see.
“I am here,” he said.
The Psycho Cowboys were close now. Fernando staggered to the shack. His heart was the light inside, flickering and bleeding through the gaps in the weakened frame.
WE’RE NOT NORMALLY SO KIND
“What have you become?”
“Less than a shadow.”
“I thought you’d be…more.”
“I am nothing.”
The thing on the bed was barely human, and barely alive—a broken creature with pale eyes and sallow skin. Fernando could define the bow of his ribcage and the buckled knots of his spine. Thin lips receded from endless teeth. Purple veins jumped with uncertain rhythm, wrapped around loose muscle.
“Avô Vinícius, I have—”
The thing spat: “I am not your grandfather.”
Fernando shook his head. Hope scattered from his heart. The strength moved from his legs and he collapsed—as frail as the monster on the bed. He had traveled so long, and risked certain death, to be here…to find salvation.
The creature pulled this thought from his mind and responded, “I am not your savior. I am the disease. I am death.”
“We can be strong again.”
“Everything dies.” A syrupy yellow substance leaked from his eyes, into the shallows of his face. “Find your own destiny, and leave me alone.”
“You are my destiny.” Fernando crawled toward Avô Vinícius. He grasped his meager body and pulled him close. So light. A devastated, useless thing. His head lolled pathetically on his stick neck.
Sounds from outside: doors thrown open, raised voices, people crying out.
“They are here,” Fernando said.
“Let them take you,” Avô Vinícius hissed. He shifted in Fernando’s arms, twisting his skeletal frame, the stump of his left arm twitching. “Look at me, and tell me…is this really what you want? I am the pestilence that runs through your blood. I have nothing good to give. And neither do you.”
“I have to survive.”
“That’s not a reason to live.”
The sounds outside were louder. Closer.
“I was born into this,” Fernando said. “It’s all I know.”
A grotesque smile touched his lips. Fernando, aghast, threw him back onto the bed. A stuttering tangle of bones.
“A good reason to die, then,” the creature said. The door crashed open. The Psycho Cowboys were there. Six of them. Tall, ungainly men with stretched faces. One of them pulled a handgun and fired three times. Fernando felt the heat of the bullets. They missed him by inches.
The first bullet tore through Avô Vinícius’s chest. The second entered his right eye and exited the rear left portion of his skull, splashing thick pink matter onto the wall. The third bullet ripped through his throat with terrible force, severing what remained of his head and sending it tumbling into the corner.
The Cowboys stepped into the shack. The one with the gun (he was at least seven feet tall) looked at Fernando and grinned.
“Why do you think we let you run?”
Fernando sneered. “You couldn’t catch me.”
“Wrong.” The Psycho Cowboy pointed the gun at the broken, bleeding shape on the bed. Tendrils of smoke eased from the barrel. “We wanted you to lead us to him. The Pathogen. The root of all evil. Now he is dead, and the war is over.”
Fernando got to his feet. The Butterfly trembled on his
face.
“What happens to me?” he asked.
Their grins were identical: yellow teeth set in gray faces.
“We killed him quickly,” the one with the gun said, holstering his weapon. “We’re not normally so kind.”
WE ARE THE REVENGE
With the first wave of pain he knew he was not dreaming. No dream could bring such agony, although everything else …
Naked, his thin body colored with bruises. Blood raced from his shattered nose and mouth. It was thick in his throat. His eyelids flickered. He could hear laughter—a chattering, bubbling sound that pulled him to full alertness, and yet made him want to faint away forever.
He could see wild color.
“No one will cry for you.”
He was chained between two posts, his arms pulled wide, cruciform, so like the famous statue. The tips of his toes scuffed the concrete floor. He blinked tears from his eyes and rattled the chains. There was no give in them. Heavy breaths worked from his lungs. He snapped his head around and could see that he was in a large room—it looked like an abandoned warehouse—with a row of dusty windows along one side and loading doors at the far end. Ultraviolet lights glared like wide eyes, making strange shadows.
The Psycho Cowboys formed a semi-circle around him. They had changed out of their drab suits and into the regalia of cruelty: not quite the rainbows and clown faces he had seen in his dreams, but close. They wore fluorescent costumes—flamboyant colors amplified by the ultraviolet lights. Their faces were alive with luminescent paint. Nightmarish designs. They glowed like a child’s Halloween joke.
They brandished their torture implements. Three of them carried batons. Two wielded picanas that were wired into car batteries. The sixth Cowboy (the tallest of them—the one who had shot Avô Vinícius) had an oily chainsaw hoisted on one shoulder.
“Let me tell you what happened to me,” he said. The chainsaw looked heavy, judging from the way he adjusted his body to support the weight. “My family was killed in front of my eyes. I was seven years old at the time. Two of your kind broke into my house and slaughtered them all. My mother, father, and my two sisters. I hid in the closet and watched. Terrified, but vowing revenge. My associates …” he gestured at the Cowboys gathered around him, “… have similar stories. So do many hundreds of thousands of people in this country—in this continent. Innocent people torn to pieces by your disease. That’s why we’re here. We are not the cure. We are the revenge.”
Fernando opened his mouth, and then closed it again. He had nothing to say. He knew his fate, and would accept it silently. His heart ached with the failure, but it ached more with the knowledge—even though he had always expected it—that he would never see his beautiful Giovanna again. Her face burgeoned in his mind for a second. A beautiful flower, with petals so bright they threw the Psycho Cowboys’ color into shade.
I’m so sorry, Giovanna, he thought. He glimpsed his mask, lying on the floor behind the Psycho Cowboys. Its wings were crushed. The pieces shimmered in the ultraviolet light, like rare minerals. He closed his eyes. She faded from his mind.
“You were strong once,” the Cowboy said. His voice creaked like wet leather. The colors of his face were orange and pink. Sunrise colors. They accentuated the blackness of his eyes. “You were virulent. You killed millions. But you’re not strong anymore.”
Another Cowboy stepped forward. His face was obscenely bright—painted with red, tribal whorls that reached to the back of his bald head. His baton was happy-yellow. He raised it…brought it forward in a sunshine arc…smashed it against Fernando’s ribcage. The pain was alive and furious. It writhed and kicked. Fernando heard his ribs shatter. He felt them break loose inside his body.
“Not strong,” the Cowboy said. He nodded to his soldiers and they stepped forward. The picanas sent tens of thousands of volts through his body. The batons broke his bones. They came in waves, beating, and then retreating. The air was filled with the music of laughter and the percussion of weapons. Fernando swayed from the chains. When he passed out, they revived him with icy water, and then beat him again.
A ghost in his mind: Avô Vinícius, a dreadful, perished creature who could give him nothing except a promise of damnation. Fernando held that ruined face in his mind. I thought you could save us. He recalled how light the crippled body had been in his arms, like a bag of loose sticks. I traveled so far for you. I thought…I thought …
All for nothing.
They came at him, laughing maniacally. They shattered his legs. They smashed his ribs. The picanas were pressed to the most sensitive areas of his body: his armpits, his genitals, his bleeding, open wounds. The voltage roared through his body in blackening, crackling storms. Ribbons of smoke peeled from his scorched skin.
Fernando floated on the brink of an abyss. Endless and black. It was heaven. He floated in a thousand pieces: the debris of hurt, like a meteor shower. He trailed and blazed and prepared to offer himself to nothingness—that long sea of death. He experienced a moment of euphoria. He thought it was his soul departing.
No more pain.
I am nothing.
One moment. That was all.
And then he heard the roar of the chainsaw.
AS BRIGHT AS HIS MASK
“Our color represents new life,” the Cowboy shouted over the chainsaw’s growl. “From our gray suits to this…like a new dawn, a new era. Soon the world will be painted with amazing light. A world that you will not be a part of.”
He depressed the chainsaw’s trigger and its hooked, oily teeth blazed around the bar. It drowned the sound of laughter. Dirty smoke puffed from the exhaust, hanging in the air, obscuring their fluorescent stripes and swirls. The Psycho Cowboy lifted the chainsaw and took a step toward Fernando. His grin was a deep red groove. His eyes dazzled, even behind the smoke.
He shouted something else, but Fernando did not hear him. Partly because of the chainsaw’s mean growl, but mostly because his attention was diverted to the windows, where he saw movement. Something large, swooping from one window to the next. He flexed and pulled at the chains. His mind screamed impossible images, as bright as his mask, and in as many pieces.
I am nothing.
The chainsaw purred inches from his shallow stomach.
Less than a shadow.
His instinct blazed. A divine rush that scattered all pain and pulled his mouth into a long, bleeding smile. He gazed beyond the chainsaw…beyond the Psycho Cowboys…beyond the smoke and color…to where the wooden loading doors suddenly crashed open.
I am coming.
“Giovanna,” he said.
FALLEN FROM TIME, LIKE RAIN FROM A CLOUD
She came like a tempest. An infernal, chaotic force, leaving the doors in ruins and killing two of the Cowboys before they knew what happened. Their bodies were shattered against the wall: bags of glass. They bled through their fluorescent skins.
The Psycho Cowboy with the chainsaw turned, dragged to one side by the machine’s power. He peered through rags of oily smoke and saw what could not be, but what Fernando knew to be true. She was pure: something part-human but altogether monstrous, a ranging, naked creature sweeping in and out of the shadows. Fernando could not have recognized her without the tattoo: 377822. It was her—his only love: Giovanna. Long black hair flanked her face and splashed across muscular shoulders. Her eyes were keen gold discs. Only their shape was familiar. She breathed—harsh, grunting expulsions. Her wide nostrils flared. Her teeth were haphazard, ivory spikes, projecting from her gums like splayed fingers.
Another Cowboy dropped his (happy-yellow) baton and screamed. Giovanna bore upon him with a furious shriek. One sweep of her arm ripped him in two. His upper body thudded off one of the posts that Fernando was chained to. His legs were sent kicking into the shadows. A fourth Cowboy—his black eyes suddenly very large in the glowing map of his face—tried to run. He didn’t get far; Giovanna pounced. Her thick legs propelled her through the air like a grasshopper. She came down on his shoulder
s and he crumpled beneath her weight, spine broken. His painted face was glow-in-the-dark terror. Fernando watched as she pulled him apart, scattering him in a hundred fluorescent pieces.
She looked at him. Their eyes came together and Fernando saw what used to be: her softness and beauty. He remembered the way the left side of her mouth would lift higher when she smiled. He remembered the way she had touched him, time and time again, throwing his world into easy clouds of calm. His beaten body trembled from the chains. His heart boomed with emotion.
I know how to love you, she had said. But could she love him still? This new creature…every bone reshaped, bent at the waist so that her shoulder blades pressed through her skin like wings. Giovanna Almeida, to whom he had sworn eternity. How much of her soul remained? How much love?
He closed his eyes as she killed the fifth Psycho Cowboy. One moment he was there, living and thinking and afraid. The next he was gone, fallen from time, like rain from a cloud.
Yes, she had always been able to read him. Her gift—her instinct—was incredibly bright. It was the reason she was here, as devastating as a volcano. And this ability, along with everything else about her, must have advanced, because she was able to press her thoughts into his mind. Not words, but images, arranged like a wheel, revolving, drawing long arcs of expression.
So much soul /// I still know how to love you /// I always will.
He opened his eyes. Her mouth was a terrible shape, but the left side was lifted higher.
He threw his own wheel at her: Save me.