by Jack Lothian
“I’m sorry,” He said, dropping his eyes. “Didn’t mean to lose my head. It’s just so hot in here. Could I please get some water?”
Herring ignored the request.
“You think those men deserved to die because of what they did as the Third Council?”
“You don’t, Detective?”
Again, silence. Pratt worried Herring was going to go berserk. He hated Highers to begin with and Pratt was worried to see him face to face with one, one who would have the audacity to ask such a question. Luckily, Herring didn’t react as expected.
“No. I don’t.”
“Oh.” Vincent cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, but would you mind fetching me that water I asked for? I can’t go any further without it.”
Again, Pratt waited for Herring to explode, but was pleasantly surprised when he simply stood up and stormed out of the room. Pratt turned in his chair, hearing the detective’s footsteps before he even entered.
“You got all that?”
“Yeah. Pretty crazy stuff.”
“It’ll make the news,” Herring grunted, filling a cup with water at the dispenser in the corner. “I’m going to go back in and get more details. You just keep that thing recording.”
“Yes, sir.”
Nodding, Herring spat into the cup of water he’d just filled and left the room.
* * *
Detective Herring re-entered the interview room. Vincent Virgo didn’t turn around. Herring placed the cup in front of him and sat back down at the opposite side of the table.
“There’s your water.”
Vincent smiled.
“Thank you. I was getting ready to black out in here.”
Pratt busted out into laughter watching the Higher drink his spit water. He didn’t understand how Herring was able to refrain from smiling, even the slightest.
“Why Abigail Watson?”
“Excuse me?”
“You told me why you killed Derek Bell, Jason Moore, and Robert Burkhart. But, why Abigail Watson? She wasn’t on the Third Council. She’s never been involved in politics. So, why did you kill her?”
Vincent averted his eyes downward, as if shameful of what he was going to say.
I’d actually never seen her until that night. I’d only heard of her, the infamous Oliver Watson’s daughter, heir to a technological fortune that Bill Gates would’ve envied. I was disappointed when I noticed her father wasn’t with her.”
“Why?”
“Because I was going to kill him. He was the whole reason I volunteered my home for this year’s masquerade ball. He was corrupted by his family’s success in the A.I. industry. Being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, made him a very cold man with colder intentions.”
“So, you’re saying you were trying to kill Oliver Watson for the same reason you killed the Highers from the Third Council? You felt he deserved to die, too? I have to say that motive seems like a bit of a stretch to me.”
“As if you actually know these people!” Vincent replied angrily, his sweaty face twisted into a condescending smile. “You might have heard of them, seen their name in print somewhere, but you don’t know them. I know them, Detective. I’ve eaten brunches with them. I’ve golfed with them, made deals with them. Men that will eat you alive if it means they can have a full belly! Sharks!”
“Was Abigail Watson a shark?”
Again, Vincent dropped his eyes. The mention of her name seemed to calm him, possibly even depress him instantly. Herring could see something change in the Higher’s eyes, as if something were taking place in his head. It was like a switch flipped, something not visible but very real.
Lightly tracing the rim of his now empty water cup, he began, “She was glowing that night. I think it was her first ball because she seemed almost breath taken by the extravagance of the festivities going on around her. She tried to keep her composure as a woman of class, but her eyes were large like a child’s.
“She awed at the extravagance of my home. There was a twinkle in her eye as she admired the weaving lines of gold that ran up the walls, the white marble floors, the swirling kingdom of angels painted on the ceiling, the twinkling of the diamond chandeliers. I watched her marvel at the long oak tables, all covered in silver platters of the finest cuisine and crystal bowls filled with spirits. She was admiring one of the ice-sculpted angels when I first approached her. She wasn’t the only one wearing a little black dress, but she definitely owned hers the best. Every curl of her sunny blonde hair seemed perfectly placed, no matter how much she moved or how strong a draft blew by. She was like Aphrodite, herself.
“We hit it off instantly. She seemed to be infatuated with me, my luxurious lifestyle the epitome of everything she loved, everything she was used to. It was more than the wealth that attracted her, though. It was the infamy. She’d seen my name on billboards her whole life. She’d heard her father and her friends talk about me. Sure, she had her own wealth, but under the shadow of her family name, she’d never have true fame. And she needed that. She needed the fame, the superiority. She needed to be the Highest of Highers. That was clear to me.
“It was almost Midnight when I asked her join me upstairs and bring in the New Year in a more intimate setting. Her face lit up at the idea. I could hear the curious whispers of my guests as I led Watson’s daughter up the curving staircase and through the double doors. When we were alone, I tried to tell her about the antique paintings I had hanging around my room. She pretended to be interested, but she didn’t seem genuinely impressed. So, I showed her my closet. Its massive expanse was enough to amaze her, but I took her hand and led her past my extensive wardrobe, back, back, until we reached my collection. Shelved on this back wall were lines of mannequin heads, their plastic faces masked by the skin of the fallen and forgotten. Over a hundred lifeless faces of all sorts stared at us. White, tan, black, young, old, hairy, beautiful, ugly. Each one was carefully skinned off the skull of a savage from the Bottom.”
Herring looked away, his fist clinching beneath the table. He wasn’t shocked to hear of Virgo’s collection. It had become a common practice amongst the Highers in recent years. Upper class people no longer displayed deer heads on their walls or laid down bear skin rugs. No, now their homes were decorated with an even more precious commodity. An entire business was emerging, where workers would risk venturing the Bottom to hunt survivors, or as the Highers called them: “savages.” They would hunt the savages, skin them, and sell their hides to the Highers. The faces were especially lucrative.
“She asked me if she could try one on,” Virgo continued, a faint smirk on his face. He enjoyed seeing Herring’s agitation. “I insisted. She kissed me on my cheek and reached for the face of a young Hispanic. A surprising choice. Hand in hand, we walked out across my room and out onto my balcony. I’m not sure if you know this, Detective, but I live on the edge of the city. So, that night, the view from my balcony was quite breathtaking, the full moon illuminating the sea of savages below. Abigail trembled seeing such a thing, the horrible illness that has overtaken the Bottom. It was a whirlpool of mindless cannibalism, a feeding frenzy of a fallen people. We could see them down there, tearing each other apart, desperately clawing at the pillars that support the ground beneath our feet now. Have you ever seen that, Detective? Do you know what it really looks like on the Bottom?”
Herring took a deep breath. “Get on with it. What happened?”
Pratt sat on the other side of the glass, chewing his thumb nail like he always did when he got nervous. He could almost feel Herring preparing to spring across the table. Vincent acquiesced and continued, slowly unbuttoning the top few buttons of his dress shirt.
“Voices from inside my home counted down the New Year. Five! Four! Three! She quickly put on her mask while I put on mine.” Again, Vincent dropped his eyes, some sort of pain in his face. “It was in that moment I knew she had to die, like the others. But, she wasn’t like the others and that’s what made me sad. She was merely cut from
the same fabric, a fabric that had been sewn over the many generations before her. She showed me that there is no such thing as 'innocence' anymore. She showed me with those pretty brown eyes of hers… Through the holes of some strange man’s face.
“I leaned into her, our lips joining in a passionate kiss for the New Year. And even in the heat of our kiss, in my mourning of the death of virtue, I couldn’t help but laugh. She asked me what was so funny and wiping tears from the corner of my eyes, I told her, ‘Why, my dear, you’ve got something on your face!’”
Vincent Virgo’s voice trailed off into a somber laugh, as if his joke was as bitter as it was sweet.
Now smiling, the Higher continued, “I thrusted her over the balcony and watched her get swallowed by the sea of savages below. She was beautiful in her final moments, even as they ripped the flesh from her bones.”
erring shot out of his chair. His face red with fury, he flipped the steel table and lunged at the Higher. He lifted the Higher out of his seat by the collar of his shirt. On the other side of the glass, Pratt cursed under his breath. Detective Herring had lost it. It was time to intervene.
“Is this some sort of joke to you?” Herring spat. “Why did you really kill these people?”
“I told you why.”
“Oh, because you’re so self-righteous, right? You’re some sort of hero who cares for the little guys. Just why would you care about the little guys, huh, Mr. Virgo? Why would you care what people like you did to people like me?”
Struggling, Vincent separated himself from Herring's clutches. His coolness had given way to a passion as unabridged and shameless as his adversary.
“Don’t be so blind, Detective! People like me, people like you, us, them. In the end it doesn’t matter, we’re all just people. People who hurt and hate each other not out of reason, but out of some sort of animalistic instinct. That’s what it is, Detective. Why I hated people like Oliver Watson, why I hate people like you. Because at our roots, we are no better than the diseased savages feeding on each other on the Bottom.”
“So, you have no remorse for killing, for what you did to Abigail? Because she was a savage.”
I am wiping the face of the earth of all its blemishes, so it can be beautiful again.”
Swiftly reclaiming Vincent’s collar, Herring cocked his fist back and unloaded. Repeatedly, he struck Vincent’s face, drawing blood by the second blow. He dropped to the floor by the time Pratt entered the room.
“What…what are you doing?”
Herring didn’t face his comrade. He kept his eyes on the beaten mess writhing on the ground.
“Some hands-on justice. This piece of shit is probably going to walk anyway and he knows it. So, why not? Why not just punish him now? While we have him.”
Vincent Virgo hollered from the floor, his laugh echoing through the room.
“Justice. Punishment. You sound like me, Detective, before I actually grew up and took action. Before I saw man for what he is. Come on. See me for what I am! Snuff me out from this world! Do it! Do it!”
Herring pulled his pistol and aimed it at Virgo’s face. Before Pratt could stop him, he pulled the trigger. Herring was indifferent to the splatter of scarlet on his face. It seemed almost therapeutic to him, to see that the Higher’s blood was as red as his. No more. No less.
Prat fled, as much out of fear as shock, and Herring was left alone with the body, left in silence to realize that Vincent Virgo was right all along.
In the end, through scars and masks, they were the same.
Vortex
Gregory L. Norris
The mother—she could have been their biological mother, though in recent days, it was impossible to be sure who belonged to the real family units and which people had simply bonded together in the chaos following the invasion—clutched the youngest girl protectively against her. She and the two older girls held hands in a chain and walked in formation along the side of the highway. With so many people crowding together onto the fresh two-lane flattop, the last shiny trace of government stimulus funds, it grew increasingly more difficult to breathe. They’d walked for days, which added to the burden, and it had rained; a cloying, hot May rain that clung unpleasantly to the skin.
The family exited the shadow of an overpass that sat in pieces on the other side of the highway, the metal there showing burn marks around the places where it had liquefied to slag. The mother, holding the youngest girl’s weight on her hip and head on her shoulder, turned away from the flyblown remains visible at the edges of the rubble. The view on their side of the highway wasn’t much better. The rain had run into an area of deadfall precipitously close to the pavement. People bathed in that stagnant pool. Some, she noted, wrapping her free arm around the nearest of the two girls marching in step beside her and calling the other close, floated face down.
This was what life had become after the first vortexes formed over major cities, she thought, and the brief war was unofficially lost to a merciless enemy who’d claimed victory without so much as showing its face to the conquered.
* * *
The two girls. One was sixteen. The other wasn’t quite a teenager yet, trapped in that awkward physical state when the body has experienced a growth spurt but the face hasn’t quite caught up. The older gripped the younger by the sleeve of her brightly colored T-shirt. The youngest, cradled against the mother, slipped free and down to her feet, the mother no longer able to shoulder her weight. That girl’s face was scrunched into worry lines that might never straighten out, even if given an entire lifetime.
They marched together, one holding onto another in a line, like elephants in a circus parade.
“There’s the next exit,” somebody, a woman, said. A woman, because most of the refugees were women, the men and boys above a certain age drafted into service for a war that had, by all measures that mattered, already ended.
The highway sign pulled free of the horizon and hovered in a shade of green brighter than the lime-colored new leaves undulating at the sides of the pavement. The Bedford exit didn’t offer much in terms of hope; it wasn’t the germs that killed the sinister Martians inside their tripods or the computer virus that deactivated the shields so the jet fighters could take down the colossal alien motherships in those other, fictional invasions. Had it been days or weeks since they’d seen a jet in the sky? And that one was disintegrating high overhead, in pieces at the tip of a sonic boom.
But the Bedford exit offered a break from the walk. A place to relax and rest and, most importantly, learn the latest information from what remained of the world’s governments. At last report, the Canadians were coordinating the global response. How far down the line had things fallen so that the military in Montreal was making the key strategic decisions, the mother absently wondered.
Parched and sore in a way she’d never known, every joint feeling exposed and swollen, she cycled through the information for the umpteenth time, no longer sure what was real or the result of her frazzled imagination. Purple-black vortexes, over three hundred of them in the sky, and then…silence, darkness, on the heels of a terrible, destructive thunderclap.
Another sound, one equally terrible, jolted her out of the fog and back to the moment.
“Do not attempt to exit—keep moving! Bedford is sealed to all non-residents at this time per order of the mayor’s office and the board of selectmen. I repeat—”
The baritone bullhorn voice boomed the same announcement, this time louder. Not really louder, the mother realized. Closer. They passed underneath the green traffic sign. A cacophony of angry shouts and expletives laced the air.
“What do you mean, closed?” somebody shrieked, swears lobbed with the question at whoever held the bullhorn.
In another time, another life, the mother’s instinct would have been to shield ears with hands, to spare the young ones the vulgarities launched at the voice—and, among the colorful insults, the voice’s parents.
“They’ve paid off the military,” said the
woman plodding at the family’s left.
The mother recognized the woman. She was younger, in her twenties if the mother had to hazard a guess, though recent time had aged her considerably.
Paid off the military? With what, she could only imagine. Not money. People were using hundred dollar bills to wipe themselves behind trees at the roadside. Money wasn’t an effective incentive any longer. Food, shelter…flesh, perhaps.
“What do you mean, go back?” another voice shouted. “Back to what? Concord isn’t there anymore, and they’ll be swarming all over the suburbs by now!”
The procession briefly logjammed and the mother felt a rush of lightheadedness after being on the move for so long. A swarm of imaginary black flies buzzed around her head. Sweat, bitter and powerful, filled her next desperate breath.
“Per order of Mayor Stanislaus Sherwood, you will not be allowed access to the town of Bedford, so move along!”
The mother caught sight of the exit through breaks in the crowd. Military vehicles lined the curve, blocking the ramp at a diagonal angle. Men dressed in sand camouflage lurked behind the vehicles, with guns aimed at the highway. The mother imagined snipers in the trees, their scopes trained on the mostly women and children, focused on their fellow humans during the worst time in the world’s history. Rage ignited in her blood.
But it quickly cooled in the madness of a deafening thunderclap and the panic the pop of the bullet unleashed. Another followed, and the head of the young woman made old beside her blew apart, there one instant, gone from her shoulders the next. The mother screamed, as did her small brood, though the cacophony of cries that rose up into the unsympathetic heavens swallowed their voices.
Bullets raced at them. The mother felt the displaced air molecules and a rush of heat as one ripped to within inches of her face. They couldn’t go forward, because the war mongers at the Bedford exit were now firing at anything that moved. They certainly couldn’t risk going back.