by wildbow
Jamie and I changed as quickly as we were able, which meant I was done before Jamie had his shirt off. I went out of my way to avoid looking, though I’d seen many times before.
When he pulled his pants off, though, I turned my back altogether.
We all had our burdens, we all needed support in our own ways. This was one of Jamie’s ways.
He put a hand on my shoulder, signaling it was okay for me to turn around. He had pyjamas that buttoned down the front. My own was only a sleeveless and undersized workman’s shirt that showed how horribly skinny my shoulders and arms were, along with pyjama bottoms. I hated being confined in clothes while I slept, but Jamie tended to wake me up by swatting me with his book if I slept without anything at all. It didn’t help that I kicked my sheets off, most nights.
“I’m so tired,” Jamie admitted. “And I have so much to write in my book before bed.”
“Let me,” I said.
He gave me a look.
“No mischief, I promise. I’ll write down everything as I remember it.”
“I don’t think I can read your handwriting.”
“I’ll try, for real,” I said. “You can add stuff after, fill in blanks as you need to.”
He frowned. “Maybe.”
“Okay. Maybe. That thing with the names, starting the riot? That was incredible,” I said.
“I was terrified.”
“It was incredible,” I said, again.
We reached the kitchen and began to dine on salty crackers with slices of cheese and meat. I went for the cheese first.
Gordon joined us, but he went for the meat, naturally.
And then there were the two girls. Helen and Mary. Both wore long nightgowns, white and riddled with lace, though Mary’s had a ribbon at the collar.
I drew in a deep breath. I felt a horrible pressure on my chest.
The others didn’t push, and Mary seemed to be following the others’ lead.
“Helen,” I said. “I have to ask…”
“Yes?” Unlike Gordon, who was eating about three pieces of meat to every piece of cheese and every cracker, she was eating exclusively meat slices, gathered together and rolled up into tubes.
“What’s with this new you? You’ve been different.”
“Oh! Oh. I had my thing with Professor Ibbot last month, and a check-up just a couple of days ago,” she said, smiling. “He got upset with me. He hit me a few times. Not hard enough to do any damage, but, just because.”
I was silent. I had a lump in my throat already, and I didn’t like hearing this.
Her smile widened a bit. “He said I shouldn’t slack off. That I couldn’t just stop acting. It was something I had to practice. So I’m practicing. I’m trying to figure out who Helen Ibbot should be when she’s not acting for someone else.”
“Oh,” I said. “You’re a perfect actor already. You don’t really need to practice.”
“He told me to, so I will,” she said, very firmly.
“I liked the old Helen,” I said. “The one who didn’t feel like she had to smile.”
There were nods from Jamie and Gordon.
“That’s too bad,” Helen said, in a very matter of fact way. “You’re going to have to get used to the new me.”
I nodded, feeling a touch more lost than before.
I didn’t like that. I wanted to hurt Ibbot for it, but I wasn’t sure how, or if it was even possible, or right.
“What’s going on, Sy? Does that have anything to do with the file?”
“No,” I said. I ran my fingers through my hair again. “No. I’m just… not wanting to dwell on it.”
“What is it?” Jamie asked.
I drew in a deep breath.
“There were provisions. Things Briggs was giving Hayle, things Hayle wanted. The first was money, funding. The second was manpower, extra space.”
“We knew that much,” Gordon said.
“The third, it’s not fun to hear, but I already talked to you guys about this. About the expiration dates.”
“You brought it up,” Gordon said, his tone suddenly different, very careful. “And I told you that if you ever dare to tell me or hint to me what my date is, I will never forgive you.”
“And I believe you,” I said, very quiet. “I’ll never tell you, and since the others aren’t asking, I won’t tell them.”
Gordon nodded.
Even though you’re supposed to die first, I thought.
My expression didn’t betray a thing. I sighed. “Briggs authorized replacements. When we die, when we break, according to Briggs’ terminology, then there will be new, better Lambs.”
“Not so surprising,” Jamie said. “I’ve heard hints of that before, from my caretakers.”
I nodded. “But it’s not fun to hear.”
“No,” Gordon said. Mary nodded.
“That’s not it, is it?” Jamie asked. “What got to you this badly?”
“I… I almost fucked it up,” I said. “I… uh. Ugh. I can’t get over the fact that I almost fucked it up.”
“They’re reviving the other projects?” Helen guessed. “Evette or Ashton? They’re going to take another try, start over from scratch?”
She was clever enough to connect the dots. Head in my hands, I nodded.
The silence that followed only added to the weight on my chest.
“One project,” I said. “Hayle wanted to revive one project, and in my dicking around with the badges, I almost took that away.”
“That’s not surprising at all,” Gordon said, leaning back in his chair. “We always knew you were a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Wow,” I said, sitting straighter. “Wow.”
But the words lifted the burden, in a small way.
“You’ve almost gotten any one of us killed a half dozen times already,” Jamie said. “Why does this matter?”
“Because I trust you guys to handle yourselves. But these two…”
“Yeah,” Gordon said. “I get it.”
“Our little siblings,” Helen said. “We’re going to get one of them back.”
I nodded. I smiled a little, even. “But that’s a year off. We already have one new Lamb.”
“Hear hear,” Helen said. She would be second last to go.
We raised our mugs and clunked them together.
“Hear hear,” Jamie said. He wouldn’t die, but he would expire a year after Gordon, if the files were right. I suspected he already knew, and that knowledge defined him on a level.
Mary smiled, and it was genuine. She was one of us, and it was the sort of thing she’d craved for a very long time. It was like a warmth was flowing out from within her. Our little killer, and I had no idea when she would expire, there was no way to find out, and there was something safe in that.
She met my eyes, and I smiled at her.
Me, who would outlast the rest, and who would wish I hadn’t.
Previous Next
Enemy (Arc 2)
The machine guns fired in set bursts, joining the irregular sounds of the bolt-action rifles. Each bullet or burst of bullets was an initial crack, followed by an echo that seemed to reach out forever. When a bullet struck dirt that was close enough, it prompted a spray of dirt and dust, touching on those in the trench.
More machine gun fire. Hollered words were cut to pieces by the sound of the guns, rendered incoherent.
In the trench, Mauer sat with his back to the wall of packed earth. Both of his hands clenched the rifle, the fingernails seemingly too clean, the grit at the edges too dark. The ground was dry, but the air was humid, and the grime and sweat were mingling and gathering minute by minute. If he thought too hard about it, he felt like the grime was so concentrated on his face, neck and hands that it was finding a way to spread beneath his collar and into his sleeves.
A day ago he’d been splattered with blood, and with the water rationing, he hadn’t been able to wipe it off. He’d made a mental note of which splatters on his arm were And
rew’s, a signature, remembering the boy who’d bartered so enthusiastically for new books and dime novels to read during his downtime. At some point, in all the chaos and the mess, the streaks had dried into a deep, dark brown, joining the dirt and the mud that formed when dust and sweat mingled. Andrew’s demise had been washed away and overshadowed by everything that had followed.
He only had to look at the others who were sitting by the wall to know how he probably looked. Exhaustion and the burden of emotions wore away at the man, and accumulated dirt and blood masked the face and identity. Here and there, there was a pair of eyes that seemed too blue for the dingy palette of their surroundings.
It wasn’t the people he stared at, as he waited for the dreaded order. That was too much like looking at himself; it forced introspection, and introspection wasn’t good for the heart or the soul.
Instead, oddly enough, he stared at the stitched. Those who weren’t actively digging or fixing existing trenches were kneeling in the middle of the trench. Most barely moved, they didn’t flinch, and they didn’t sweat. The dirt on them was dry. One was caught in an obsessive loop of dismantling a gun, cleaning the pieces, and putting it back together. The handler was holding on to Andrew’s spare gun, ready to hand it to the stitched in case a situation called for it.
The things were oblivious, sad, and not entirely sound. The stitches were ugly, utilitarian, opening up pathways for the wires to sit within, some crossing the face. Two of the things had flesh from multiple people. One of them was put together with a mix of white and black flesh. The others called him ‘Bull’. The second had pieces that might have been from a woman. It was the look of its eye. The lashes were too long, the eye large, the surrounding brow not deep enough.
A woman or a child. An innocent eye, he told himself.
The machine guns continued their fire. The bullets raked over the top of the trench, causing dirt to spit up at the corners on both sides. Just when he relaxed, an explosion went off about thirty feet away.
It was almost what some of the others called a pants-shitter. The sheer impact of some of the shelling, even if it didn’t touch anyone, could ripple past and through the men, the shock of it loosening muscles that were supposed to keep the shit in.
He was lucky he’d managed to retain his dignity and avoid that thus far.
The stitched with the innocent’s eye stared into space. Mauer stared at the eye, stared past and through it.
He couldn’t say why, but it ate away at him, and yet he couldn’t keep his eyes away. He inevitably found his gaze wandering back each time he tried.
The captain, bent low to the ground, moved along the line. He had two containers of water. He offered one to each person.
Mauer wanted more than anything to wash, to feel more human again, but when the captain came, he reached for his own water bottle, giving it a slosh.
The captain said something, but it was badly timed. The cracks of guns going off drowned him out. He tried again, “Drink. Fill yours, just in case.”
Mauer could see the boys to either side of him flinching at those last three words. He didn’t. He took the heavy water bottle from the captain, holding it with both hands, and drank until he felt like he might be sick, then tipped a portion into his own bottle.
The captain had a look on his face when he took the bottle back. A deep concern.
“What?” Mauer asked.
More bullets touched the edges of the trench.
“You here with us?”
There was more meaning to the question than it initially seemed. There were a hundred hidden comments, ideas, and observations tied to that four-word question. Mauer was almost certain he could have said ‘no’, and his captain would have sent him back, away from the front line.
“I’m here,” Mauer said.
The man didn’t argue, but in a very soft voice, as he handed the water bottle to the next man, he said, “You look more like one of them than one of us, right now, Mauer.”
The day was hot, and the heat was worse because some of the guns on the Academy side were venting hot air into the trench, but he still felt a bit of a chill.
Mauer had always known that he was better than most when it came to communicating. He had known some people who were similar, in school, working, getting to know others while training to be a soldier, just months ago. The others had had excuses. An abusive father they’d had to learn to manipulate, heavy pressure from a businessman parent to follow in footsteps.
It wasn’t like that for Mauer. When he thought seriously about the way people interacted, certain ideas were so clear as to be obvious. ‘Us versus them’ was a pervasive one, defining virtually every interaction across cultural, class, religious, and national lines. One of the ones he’d grasped very early on.
But his captain wasn’t crouched here in the trench, telling Mauer that he was like one of the men with guns on the other side of no man’s land. The captain was saying that Mauer was like one of the stitched.
How very odd, that in the midst of this, the captain had phrased things in a way that made ‘them’ the stitched. Not the men that were trying to kill them, not the men with brown skin, not the Mexican forces, but the stitched.
Mauer nodded slowly. Though the captain had already moved on from his neighbor to the next man, the man was looking over one shoulder, still watching and waiting for a response.
The stitched are dead.
Dead, but they still walk.
I’m more like them than like you?
An exploding shell nearby answered his thoughts. He didn’t flinch as quickly or dramatically as some of the others.
Somewhere along the line, when he’d been too heartsick and tired to care, he’d started acting a little, to match the others as they’d cringed and cried out, or swore. Now he wasn’t sure how much of his reaction was real.
His entire body hurt, but nothing had actually touched him yet. No bullet, no explosion. Only dirt.
But where the stitched were so hot that it could be uncomfortable to make sustained contact with their skin, he felt very cold in this hot, humid weather.
The captain glanced back at him one last time, then relocated, moving over to a little notch in the wall where he could confer with the captain of a squad further down the same long trench.
Mauer’s eyes settled on the stitched with the woman’s eye. She blinked slowly.
As her eye opened, the ground started to rumble.
There were shouts of alarm. Mauer was silent as he rose, stepping away from the wall. Sections began to crumble from the edges. Further down, the rumbles made the bottom of one portion of wall give out, crashing into a man’s lower legs. He was pulled out and out of the way before the unsupported top tipped over to join the rest.
The rumble didn’t stop, but increased. A distant sound joined the rumble. It was too deep, momentous and dull to be the crackling of a fire, but it was a crackling nonetheless.
All of it came to a stop, even the sounds of the guns. Mauer’s ears rang, and he felt dazed as he was pushed aside, the stitched who had been in reserve now hurrying to fix the damage to the wall. A slew of bullets fired, and hit the one in the lead, but it didn’t even slow down.
He made eye contact with the stitched he’d been staring at, and took an inadvertent step to follow it.
Someone grabbed him, held him back.
He realized why. Where the wall had collapsed, there was no longer any cover. He might have stepped out and taken a bullet for his trouble. He couldn’t bring himself to care about the near-death experience.
Now that he’d advanced closer, however, he could see out past the hole. They’d dug into a gently sloping hill, so they’d have the benefit of high ground and so that enemy fire would have a harder time reaching them, and now he could look over, out, and down to the distance. The coast. Undrinkable salt water.
Two ships. Titanic boats, ungainly in size, loaded down with weapons. They’d cut deep enough into the beach that it would take a m
onumental strength to free them.
Strength, perhaps, that was provided by the lashing, boneless limbs at the back of each boat. These ships were partially alive.
The fronts of the boats moved, yawning open like great metal-plated jaws. From each emerged beasts that must have taken the entire hold. Larger than buildings, taller than the hills that the trenches had been cut into. They were blunt-featured, thick-skinned, with eyes far too small for their great frames. They walked on all fours, not dissimilar to hippos or rhinos in general frame, but had lumpier heads, and chests that were both taller and deeper, possessed of a massive capacity.
Far from being Noah’s ark, this. There were only two beasts to each ark; the one that pushed the boat and the one that was birthed.
One beast roared, and it was a nasal, mooing bray that was just as pronounced and vast as the arrival of the boats had been. It made the air shake with the sound, made heartbeats skip with each heavy footfall.
Its fellow beast picked up the cry.
In answer, the machine guns started again. The time between bursts was shorter, and both the cracks and the bullets had different sounds to them.
No longer directed at Mauer’s regiment.
The beasts had moved to a position he couldn’t see through the gap in the trench wall. He chanced a look beyond.
One beast opened its mouth, lowering his head closer to the ground.
A red-yellow fog flowed out, the thing’s chest heaving and pumping as if to drive the gas out. It clung low to the ground, spreading. The chest was pockmarked with little spatters of red, where the massed bullets had bit deep enough into skin to leave tracks, gouges, and punctures. Not enough to stop the thing.
The captain walked over, looked out and beyond, following Mauer’s gaze. The man ducked back behind safety. Mauer remained where he was.
“They’ve lost,” the captain said.
Mauer nodded.
Now the enemy soldiers were the other.
Mauer had to step back and out of the way as the stitched started shoveling dirt back up toward the gap in the trench wall. The one with the eye wasn’t there.