The explosion of memories, coupled with the overwhelming emotions of hundreds of thousands of Dread cut down by human ingenuity and warfare, tears me apart.
It’s no wonder the Dread would see us as a threat. We’ve been waging war on them since 1945. While test sites might be empty in our world, in the mirror world we’re wiping out entire colonies.
Like I did.
The deaths I’ve caused, even in the past hour, weigh more heavily now. But they still killed my son and still have Maya, which means I would make the same choices. That Dread bull would have done the same for his son. But would the matriarchs do the same?
The matriarchs … I only have a vague sense of what they are, and I think the word is really just a loose translation enabling me to make sense of an alien memory. I suspect the Dread mole whose tendrils now embrace my still-senseless body is one of them.
Three new memories that belong to me begin to surface. They hit me all at once, snapping back into my mind. And they change everything.
54.
Darkness resolves slowly, giving way to dim red light, both from my surroundings and the ruby-colored flashlights attached to the sides of my head, allowing me to see without killing my night vision. I’m crouched inside an alcove near the bottom of a small Dread colony.
But it’s not me. It’s someone else. This is a recording. I’m watching it on a large flat screen from within Neuro. I’m overflowing with raw emotion, not only from what I’m seeing but also because it’s been two weeks since the deaths of Simon, Hugh, and my parents. After two weeks of heartbreaking agony, funerals, and the commitment of my wife to a violent-offender psyche ward, all I was left with was a single question: Why? A thin trail of suspicion led me here, to Neuro’s field-ops monitoring center.
The name of the man, whose voice I recognize, slams back into my memory—Colby … Rob Colby. He is hunched over a small black device, pressing a button. Colby is like me, born fearless and recruited to Dread Squad straight out of boot camp. He’s just twenty years old and has no business inside a colony. I never met him, but I knew he’d been vetted by Winters and was being trained by Katzman. When he was ready for active duty, I would have finished his training, in both worlds. The device’s black domed top begins to hum. Colby toggles his throat mic and whispers. “DS Home, this is DS Active, over.”
“I hear you DS Active. You are on with DS Home and Bossman. Over.” It’s Katzman’s voice on the other end.
“Copy,” he says. “The TV dinner is cooking. Over.”
“Copy that, DS Active. Let us know when you’re out of the kitchen and clear, but be aware: if we do not hear from you in twenty minutes, we’ll assume you’re not coming to dinner and cook it without you. Understood? Over.”
“Solid copy. Beginning exfil now. Out.” Leaving the device behind, Colby makes his way through the colony, undetected, using a mix of traditional stealth—hiding his scent by smearing his body in Dread waste and ducking behind natural or Dread-made elements. And when that fails, he slips out of the mirror world, calmly waiting in solid earth while various dangers pass. Moving efficiently and without conflict, he exits the colony and then the mirror world, strolling away through an old cemetery. He even pauses for a moment, pretending to mourn by a gravestone. The kid is good. A natural. The kind of calm ability that can only come from someone born without fear.
“DS Home, this is DS Active. Over.”
“We hear you DS Active. Over.”
Colby stands and walks out of the cemetery, stopping by a black car. “I am out of the kitchen. Feel free to cook when you’re hungry. Over.”
Colby slides behind the steering wheel of the already-running car, the hiss of air-conditioning audible.
“Stand by, DS Active. Over.”
“Copy that.” Colby waits, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.
“DS Active, this is DS Home. Bossman is requesting visual confirmation that dinner is cooked. Over.”
Colby turns his attention to the empty cemetery, the camera mounted on his head revealing what he sees. There are fifty-odd gravestones spread out among tall pines and oaks. He shifts into the Dread world, taking the camera with him. In the dim purple light, a papery domed colony is surrounded by strange-looking trees, all of it covered by green veins. “Copy. Watching the oven now. Over.”
“Stand by…”
It’s just fifteen seconds before wisps of smoke seep through the top of the colony. Then the roof bursts into flame. Dread spill from the exits, stumbling, falling, grasping as their bodies are cooked and cracking, seeping bright fluids.
A microwave bomb, my present mind realizes, despite the weapon being unknown to my past self.
They fall into the swampy water, but there are no flames to extinguish. No amount of water can stop the microwaves blasting the area. In fact, the water around the colony has begun to boil. Inside sixty seconds, the colony has imploded. Not one of the writhing Dread has escaped alive. And then, the colony rises up again, shattering outward. A massive creature resembling a giant mole rises from the colony. It spasms hard, its back arching, and then spills forward, into the boiling swamp, as still and motionless as the rest of the now-dead colony.
“DS Home, this is DS Active. I have visual confirmation. Dinner is cooked, goose and all. Over.”
“Copy that, DS Active. Come on home. Over.”
Colby shifts back to the real world to find the cemetery in flames. The blaze is violent, swirling high in the sky and already leaping to nearby trees. “DS Home, this is DS Active, cooking also burnt the crust. I repeat, the crust is burning.”
“Crust is burning,” Katzman says. “Understood. Bossman wants to know if you were ID’d.”
I’m expecting a negative reply, but Colby says, “Affirmative. I let one of those snake-handed bastards get a look at my face and gave it time to spread the word before putting three between its four eyes.”
Why would he let the Dread ID him? my present self wonders, while the me in this memory seethes with anger. He’s expecting something I don’t yet remember.
Just then, Colby turns and looks into the rearview mirror. Instead of a young man with close-cropped hair and a killer’s eyes, I see a more familiar reflection—my own. Colby pushes his hands into the perfectly molded mask of my face and starts peeling it away. “Think this will keep him on board?”
“The Dread will seek retribution.” The voice is new. Lyons. Bossman. He speaks more openly, unaccustomed to the cloak-and-dagger speak used by Katzman and Colby. “My daughter and grandson are safe here. But the others … Their loss will force a change of heart. I will mourn them, but perhaps it’s for the best. After all, a wounded predator is far more dangerous.”
As the memory starts to fade, I ask myself, When did this happen? When! I see the video’s time stamp. This was the day before Simon died. Before Maya killed him. Before the Dread … avenged what Colby, what Lyons, did that day, in my name. The blood of my son, my parents, and Uncle Hugh, along with Maya’s sanity, is on his hands.
The memory comes clear again, just for a flash, which is long enough to see Colby turn to the left and see a steaming, cracked-open, and bleeding mammoth charge between frequencies for just a moment and crush the young soldier. The mammoth is just a blur really, but I recognize it, and that Colby died for his actions that day.
A fresh memory replaces the last.
I’m in an office. Lyons’s. He’s ranting about the attack on our family. Fuming about how the Dread have just declared war. How he will do everything in his power to destroy them. He doesn’t know that I know the truth. He doesn’t know I’m seconds away from using the handgun tucked behind my back. But he quickly figures it out when I raise the weapon toward his head. “The Dread are not to blame for what happened. You brought this on our family. You killed my son.”
Lyons stops his tirade and looks at me. I can see he’s about to play dumb.
“I saw the video. Colby wearing my face. You killed him, too, you know.” My
finger slides around the silenced weapon’s trigger.
He slumps and sits, the ruse up. His feigned anger melts away, replaced by honest despair and tears. “They weren’t supposed to be there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maya and Simon. They were supposed to be here. I thought they were here! They would have been safe.”
“But they weren’t,” I say, but it comes out closer to a growl. “Because of you.” I’m not sure if he thought this information would quell my anger, because while he might not have meant to get Maya and Simon killed, my parents, along with Hugh and Allenby, whom he knew would not be at Neuro, since he’d insisted they all take vacations, were clearly his intended victims.
Instead of begging for mercy, he digs his grave a little deeper. “The Dread have been waging a war against mankind from the very beginning, frightening us, keeping us afraid of the dark, of the unknown. You know what they did to me. All those years. And it’s not just me. They’ve held us back and influenced history in tragic, murderous ways. Despite all this, you were going to walk away. The fearless killer who lost his taste for blood.”
The gun in my hand raises from his chest to his head. “I was trying to protect our family. There are other paths to peace than war.”
“My daughter made you soft.”
I nearly pull the trigger, but am not yet done trying to understand. “You and I both know that their world has been—”
“I don’t care about their world.” He leans forward, fists pressing into his desk, face red. “I don’t care how much they’ve suffered.”
“You should,” I say, and squeeze the trigger.
A pinch in the back of my neck stops me. As I slump to the ground and lose consciousness, I see Katzman standing above me, looking sullen. “Sorry, Josef.”
The memory fades, picking back up a day later.
“Stephen, I swear to God, if you don’t let me go—”
Lyons leans in close. “I am no longer Stephen to you, and you are no longer my son-in-law.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
He works the wedding ring off my finger, nearly breaking the digit as I resist.
I try to slip into the mirror world, preparing myself for a drop. But it never happens.
He looks down at me, a mix of sorrow and anger in his eyes. “You don’t think I would overlook your abilities, do you?”
“What did you do?” I ask. “Am I—”
“The DNA is dormant.” He stands up straighter, as much as his hunch allows him to. “You no longer have the ability to move between worlds.”
“I won’t need Dread DNA to—”
“You won’t remember. You’re too important to actually kill, but Josef Shiloh is dead.” He steps away from the table. “I sincerely hope that whoever it is you become will someday see me as a partner once more. Perhaps even a friend.”
“Stephen…” I speak his name as a warning. Whatever he’s about to do will have consequences.
“I’m going to forget you, Josef … and so are you. You’ve left me no choice.” He walks away. “Good-bye, Josef.” A drill spins loudly behind my head. A door opens and closes. I can sense the medical team around me but can’t see anyone. A mask slides over my nose and mouth. Ten seconds later, the memory ends and Josef Shiloh is erased.
Realization takes the memory’s place. I never chose to forget. The e-mail to Winters was fake. Lyons erased my memories. Erased my son. And Maya. My entire life … because I opposed conflict with the Dread.
I wake up in the mirror world. I’m on the floor. Two Medusa-hands stand above me. They no longer look threatening or concern me. I look from one to the other and ask, “What do you need me to do?”
55.
“Stand up,” a voice whispers. I turn, looking for the speaker, but see no one. I’m still in the large chamber, surrounded by Dread. Maya is there, too, but now stands far to the side, still flanked by mammoths, but no longer controlled by a Medusa-hands. She meets my eyes and gives a very lucid nod. Is she urging me to listen?
I obey the voice and stand while two Medusas slide away from me. The thick Dread mole, or matriarch tendrils protruding from the ground, undulate slowly, very nonthreateningly. They’re just ten feet away.
“Do you remember?”
I spin around, looking for the source of the whispered voice. My eyes widen with realization. The whispering is in my head. I can understand it now. I turn and face the tendrils. “Did you do this to me?”
“Your mind has been restored, but it is not you who is understanding our language; it is I using yours.”
“Can all of you communicate in English?”
“Yes.” The tendrils slow. “Do you remember?”
“Remember what?”
“Your life. All of it?”
I think for a moment. For the first time in a long time, my memory feels complete. I know that I’m Josef Shiloh, I remember my decisions, and the true sequence of events that led to the deaths in my family. I also remember my time as Crazy, and living in SafeHaven, where I learned how to be compassionate and patient with broken people, and not just Shotgun and Seymour. Everyone, I realized during my yearlong stint in the loony bin, is broken to some degree, including me. Most people contain it, or drown it, but other people, like Lyons, are masters at hiding it. In the end, Simon’s grandfather is really a man obsessed with war, whose very human fear of the unknown and childhood trauma at the hands of independently acting Dread pushed him to make a horrible mistake. It left him broken and has driven him to seek his own kind of retribution, blaming the Dread for his pain, both externally inflicted and self-inflicted. I’m not convinced the Dread aren’t a threat, but where there are no doubt countless shades of gray, Lyons only sees black and white.
I don’t know if the Dread mole buried beneath my feet can see me through those tentacles, but I nod anyway. “I remember.” My thoughts drift to the Dread bull memory at the Trinity nuclear test. “I remember everything.”
One of the tendrils stretches out toward me in a nonthreatening way. An outer layer of skin peels back, unleashing a mass of smaller tentacles, similar to a Medusa-hands but tipped in glowing purple rather than yellow. The snaking things come right up to my face and stop. I don’t flinch away, despite knowing what they’re capable of. “What do you want me to do?”
“Remember … more.”
“What else is there to remember?”
“History.”
I’m not positive, but I think it means their history. Dread history.
“Why didn’t you do this before?” I ask.
“You were still our enemy.”
“And now?”
“You remember.”
“I remember that you killed my son.” A twinge of anger surfaces, but not enough to propel me toward violence.
“We have known you for a long time, Josef Shiloh. We have watched the man who did not fear. Such a curious person. You understand war. How they’re started. And how they’re prevented. You have been a party to both in the past.”
The matriarch is right. My actions have both started wars and ended them. The … jobs I carried out affected thousands upon thousands of lives, both as a CIA killer and while working with Neuro.
“You are responsible for the deaths of many,” the Dread whispers. “But you now have the opportunity to save even more.”
Distant gunshots echo into the chamber from somewhere far away in the colony. My head snaps toward the chamber entrance, looking for danger and seeing none. The tendrils remain focused on me.
“If I remember…”
“Understanding is fear’s—and hatred’s—most powerful adversary … and it must be accepted willingly, not forced.” The tendrils spread open, awaiting me.
I’m having trouble accepting that this ancient enemy of humanity is being genuine. The Dread are monsters, in every sense of the word, horrible, ugly creatures that have plagued mankind from the shadows. But we are not much different in
their eyes.
“And if I don’t?” I ask.
“You will lack the determination to do what you must, and both of our worlds will burn.”
“You’ll do it, won’t you?” I ask. “Nuke the world?”
I feel the yes more than hear it. “You have felt the network that connects us all,” the matriarch says. “You have seen what happens when a colony loses its matriarch.”
I remember it clearly. All of the Dread connected to it die.
“I am the oldest of the matriarchs. Every colony, as you call them, is connected to me. If my life ends before another ascends…”
“Your world ends.”
“I do not want to destroy your world, but … I will.”
“I get it,” I say. “Mutually assured destruction.” It’s the stalemate that has prevented World War III on multiple occasions. As bad as disagreements and hatred can be, no one wants to end all life on the planet. But the only way that works, is if both sides are actually willing to do it. If the matriarch feels its life—and all the Dread connected to it—is ending, it will, in turn, end humanity.
“I know it doesn’t change anything,” I say, “but I’m sorry. For what I did. For the colony I—”
“These are the harsh realities of the world we share. Conflict. Death. War. We will move beyond them eventually, but for now we must both accept what has happened and move forward.”
“Forgiveness,” I say.
“Yes.”
I see my son. My parents and Hugh. I remember the way they made me feel, and the emptiness their departures left in my soul. But the matriarch shares this pain and more. Without either of us speaking a word, a weight lifts away.
“It is done,” the matriarch says.
I glance at Maya. She’s just watching, still lucid, almost hopeful. She’s still gaunt and weak, but the look in her eyes … I see clarity.
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