33 Degrees of Separation (Legacy)

by Rain Carrington

  “Yeah, some, exactly. See, it’s encouraged for the members to have more than one son. My father, though, he had an accident a couple years after I was born. He was riding a horse and was thrown into a fence. Tore him up…you know…there,” Ian said, pointing to his crotch. “He couldn’t have more kids, and it’s not okay to adopt or anything, from what I’ve seen.”

  “I see. Go on, please.”

  “Well, he was staring at me, and he growled, real low, telling me to get it through my head that the good of the few outweighs the good of the many. That is the only way the strong survive.”

  Ian got quiet for a long time. Pat didn’t disturb him. Gathering the strength to continue with that kind of tale, he didn’t think he had it. To see that Ian did, it gave him a great respect for the man.

  “We were taken back to that room, the big one and we all took a seat at the table. We were given a test. A written fucking test. I don’t know what would have happened to us if we failed.

  “On it were these crazy questions, like you’d take for a psycho ethics class or something. If two kids were in the middle of heavy traffic, and you were the only one that could save them, would you risk your life to get them out of the road? My first instinct was, fuck yes, I would! Of course, I would. Who wouldn’t? But then, as I’m reading this over and over, trying to find the catch, the trick of the question, my father’s words came back to me. The good of the few outweigh the good of the many. The few, well, that was obvious who that would be. Us, the Grail. We are the few that counted, that mattered, and everyone else was fodder. So, I marked it that I wouldn’t risk my life for them. I marked the others similarly, wherever I thought of what I would really do, I’d mark it the opposite. My father, for the first time in years, actually smiled at me once they told him I had passed with flying colors.”

  “Jesus. A test that is in itself a lesson. They wanted you to think about it after, knowing you did well, and left to wonder how you’d be treated if you’d failed.”

  “Yeah. I got that, loud and clear.”

  “Did everyone pass it?”

  Ian shrugged a shoulder and answered, “I don’t know. I don’t think we’re supposed to know. Then again, maybe the next part wasn’t as random as they let on.”

  “The next part?”

  A visible shiver went through Ian as Pat watched. His eyes got dark again, filling with tears. The next part, whatever it was, hurt him so badly, Pat thought he’d vomit from the memory alone.

  “Ugh, shit. I thought I was getting past it a little, but man, it hurts. It fucking hurts.”

  “Ian, take your time. Don’t push yourself so hard into getting this out or even remembering. Sometimes your mind shuts down for a reason, to heal, to build up the strength to deal with it, once it comes back into your memory. If you push it, Ian…”

  “I haven’t forgotten a bit of it, Pat. I’m dealing with it, I promise. I came here to try to wrap my mind around all of it.”

  Holding up his hand in surrender, Pat whispered, “Okay, Ian. I understand.”

  Still looking sick, Ian was clenching both fists, having pulled from Pat’s grasp. “It was insane. It was fucking biblical, like Abraham needing to kill Isaac to prove to God he was loyal. Except…except different.

  “They told us the importance of loyalty again. How this was our family. The Grail was our family, and our blood relatives were simply a means to an end, how we got born into our true family. We were the few, we were the ones who mattered. Others were trying to use our tactics, take pages from our playbook, and we needed to be stronger than ever, more united in our cause.”

  “They sound like they’re at war.”

  Ian turned to him, honestly shocked. “Yeah. They are, Pat. Don’t you see, they think they are? They’re at war with the world, all the time. They must have control, they have to rule, even if they are never seen or known. That, they say, is the only way to win, not being the one in the spotlight. Those in the spotlight are those who will be taken down, hung, burned, or shit, just voted out. Behind them, in the shadows, that is where the power lies, and that’s where we are.”

  “I understand why you’re so scared, Ian, if that means anything. I don’t scare easily, but I’m terrified.”

  “You should be, Pat. See, the last test, the last initiation, it proves to us members beyond a doubt, that even one of us is expendable compared to the group. One means nothing compared to the other families, the world means nothing compared to the group, the Grail. As we all sat around that table, our fathers next to us, the other members, I assume the higher degreed members, all there watching, they told us what was next.

  “For each year there are initiates, and it’s not every year, they do it, the initiations. They wait until there is a small collective, at least four. Cameron, for example, is four years younger than me. Two were younger than him. They wait, because of this last initiation. They finished their lecture, and then went into this hours-long listing of all the benefits of being a Grail. The money and power, sure, they go on about that constantly, but other things. How our families will survive the next culling.”

  “Culling? Getting rid of, what? People?”

  “Yeah. It was hinted at that the pandemic of the early 1900s was their work. That it could have been stopped early on, with science the Grail already had, and their members were helped from that science to live.

  “It was further hinted that the fucking holocaust was somehow orchestrated from the Grail, and hell, all the wars were. They are supposedly in on all the wars. Keeping the population low, meeting uprisings when those civilians are starving, or sick or whatever. They watch the population grow, make as much money on that as they can, and then they sweep in and cull it down, so that way their money is safe, their power. They put the people in power that sweep in at the last minute and save the world. It’s like a bunch of bad novels and conspiracy theories come to life.”

  The word reverberated in his mind, culling, culling.

  “Anyway, like I said, each year there are initiates, they are given an assignment. The same assignment. They’re to be taken out by their fathers, that part is important, unless their father is deceased. They’re to go to a place they care about, someplace peaceful and solitary. They don’t use the same method two times in a row, to better hide what happened.”

  Pat wasn’t understanding, but he didn’t want to push.

  Clenching and releasing his fists, he struggled to get the rest out, and when he did, Pat understood why. “Each year it’s different,” he repeated. “One year it’s poison, another it’s a razor over the wrist. One razor was real, one pill, the rest are duds. This year…this year it was guns.”

  Like a puzzle missing a hundred pieces a second before, they were found and placed, the picture forming in his mind. “Ian…Ian they make you attempt suicide?”

  He nodded hard, cutting his eyes away. “Yeah, uh, we go off with our fathers, and they hand us the means to off ourselves. We are proving that we would give our life to the Grail. Our fathers are to watch, I guess another test of loyalty from them. Giving up their son for their love of the Grail.”

  “Like Abraham and Isaac.”

  “Yeah. They must do whatever it takes to get us to see that this is the only way. No matter what, if we don’t take the pill, run the razor over our arteries, whatever, then we’ll pay in another way. Me? My father had someone following Denny around. He handed me a tablet when we got to this place some woods where he too me. I watched Denny kiss Cara goodbye and walk out of the coffee shop they’d been in and take off down the street to his car. He told the man holding the camera to show me the gun, and said that if I didn’t hold the gun he’d handed me to my head and pull the trigger, that he was to shoot Denny in the head.”

  “How the hell is that loyalty to the Grail then? That’s loyalty to another person outside the Grail.”

  “I don’t think that’s how everyone does it. I think it’s more like, if they don’t do it, the father must do it for t
hem. My father is evil and a coward, so he threatened my best friend, knowing that Denny was the first and only person that I felt so close to in my life.”

  Pat was sick, like he saw Ian was too, in the retelling. What was worse, though, was seeing him telling the rest, reliving every small detail. Pat was walking beside him in the journey, feeling what he felt, seeing and smelling along with each step.

  “I grabbed it in my hand, and it was so cold, so heavy. Or maybe I was just weak. I didn’t think I could lift it to my head. I kept my eyes on the tablet, thinking of all the times with Denny, again wishing he was gay, because I’d have fallen in love with him years ago. How…how he was the best friend I’ve ever thought I could have, and I did lift the damn thing, I brought the barrel to my temple. Again, it felt like it had been in a freezer, it was so cold. I thought about it, if the bullet did come out, if I had the one gun that had the live ammunition and it went into my brain, if I would feel the cold there too. Would I feel that freezing bullet puncturing my skin, shattering my skull and piercing my brain before I died?”

  “Jesus, Ian. I can’t imagine.”

  It was a long time before he went on, and Pat knew why. It was on a loop in his mind, and Pat wasn’t there, but he was picturing it too, over and over, Ian’s shaking hand, holding the freezing gun, his own father standing there, making him do it.

  Pat’s father was a good man, who’d worked hard and raised him with love and support. There wasn’t enough imagination in him to imagine his doing the same thing, handing him a gun and forcing him to put it to his head.

  “It was Cameron. Cameron Kent, he, uh. He’s the one who got the bullet. He…it could have been me. It should have been me…”

  Ian broke then, doubling over with his sobs. Pat didn’t care about anything else, if it was appropriate, if it was crossing a line, he rose from his chair, scooped the man into his arms and carried him back into the cabin. On the floor, on the sleeping bag, Pat held him, cradled, letting him get the emotions out on the edges of long wails that came from the deepest, darkest part of him. He felt it, the last bit of innocence Ian had had left, it was gone on those tears. Hope and dignity and trust of one’s family were no longer inside of the man in his arms, and Pat vowed then and there to give as much of those back to him as he could.

  Chapter Six

  Back, years and years before, when he was a little boy and he’d had a nightmare, he woke up to that, being cradled in arms that were bigger and stronger than his own. It wasn’t either of his parents, it was his nanny. She held him, cooing at him, telling him a nice story, one that took his mind from the nightmare. He couldn’t remember it later she’d done such a good job of taking his mind from it.

  Pat holding him, it brought that back to him. That feeling of being safe and secure, being cared for and loved. He’d chased it his entire adult life, like an addict chasing that first high. BDSM had been a part of that, seeking someone who would tie him up and keep him safe, even from himself.

  The smell of Pat surrounded him, male, a fading cologne he couldn’t name, soap, and more male. It was intoxicating. The feeling of his arms, the scent, the slow, steady movement of Pat’s chest as he breathed. That big, barrel chest that pushed into him. It was solid, good, with a heart that beat so hard, Ian could feel it, and it was in perfect sync with his own.

  Then he felt it, Pat’s lips on him. It was nothing romantic, two lips pressed to his temple, where the barrel of the gun had been. Where that had been cold, Pat’s lips were warm, loving, and he felt his world do yet another flip around, but it wasn’t a bad thing.

  Ian lifted his face, staring into Pat’s eyes, seeing there everything he needed right then in his life. It was something he’d never forget, like he’d remembered the nanny and her arms.

  It didn’t last, how could it? Eventually, Ian had to piss, and Pat had to search through the supplies to feed them. Eating from a can, he’d never done that before. Even Denny preferred fresh and organic food. He didn’t have a lot of money, so he’d buy less just to assure the food he was eating was natural and unprocessed.

  It wasn’t as horrific as he’d thought it would be, the chili from a can. Pat watched his reaction to it, trying to hide his smile. “What’s the verdict?”

  “It’s terrible, and delicious all at once. How the hell can that be?”

  “Fast food, junk food, canned food, that is the thing they all have in common.”

  They got a laugh from that, and the mood had changed, so much. Talking about what had happened, as generic and cliché as it sounded, it had worked. Talking it out had helped so much.

  He cleaned up after dinner with some of the water that Pat had heated. The stove, what he’d pushed across the floor to block the door, and Pat had fixed it. Pat got it to work again. That was the little he knew of the man already. That Pat fixed things or tried to.

  He was a god, tall, broad, built as solid as the boulders down the road. Laying on his chest, when Ian wasn’t crying, or thinking of the bad things that had happened, he’d languished on that hard chest.

  “When, uh, are we going back?”

  Pat looked up from the bedding he was straightening out for them to sleep on and didn’t answer right away. When he did, it was noncommittal. “When you’re ready. That could be a while. Do you need to…I don’t know, go somewhere else?”

  While he loved the cabin for its solitude, a place to spend an afternoon in contemplation, to stay there had been hell. No soft bed or running water to shower made life less than worth living. “I’m afraid to go anywhere else. They’ll know the minute I use a credit card.”

  “Use cash,” he reasoned.

  Since he was a child, and his maternal grandfather had slipped him twenty-dollar bills for a treat, he’d rarely had cash in his hand. Everything for him had been a signature on a piece of paper or less than that to acquire what he’d needed or wanted. It had driven Denny crazy.

  “Do you…do you have any?”

  Pat chuckled, and like his voice, it was deep and resonating. It reminded Ian of the bells of the Parliament Clock Tower, Big Ben. That vibrating sound that was bass and rang right through him as he’d visited London. “Yes, I have some. But one more night here. Denny will come tomorrow for us, and we’ll have him take us to a little motel somewhere. We can finish figuring out what to do about all this.”

  “There’s nothing to do. Until death, Pat. Again, what part of that is hard for you to understand?”

  Instead of getting angry at the rude question, Pat’s eyes softened. “I get it, Ian, but there’s got to be a way out of it.”

  Ian went to the pallet on the floor Pat had made for him, sitting against the wall. “You know I can’t even be gay anymore? At least not publicly. I can have my affairs, as my father put it, but I’m never again to frequent those faggot bars, he said. I can’t flaunt myself.”

  “Why the hell?”

  Ian was laughing as he said it, but it wasn’t humorous. “Being gay brings attention. It used to be scandalous, but now it’s popular and everyone loves knowing all about the gay couple, placing them in a spotlight. If I was just anyone, it wouldn’t, but a rich heir, the spotlight is on me anyway. If I was to come stumbling out of a club, tore up from drinking in the VIP, it would be headline news in the tabloids. Besides academic achievements, my father always discouraged my standing out in a crowd. I never understood why, until now.”

  Pat sat by him, on the dusty floor. His close presence made Ian feel once again like he was safe, but there was more. He was attracted to the man; it was impossible not to be. His body alone was perfect, and something out of his dirty daydreams. That was not all there was to him, though, that Ian was attracted to.

  “Not standing out, I guess I see why that would be important to them. Never having the finger point at them, sure. Tell me, Ian, you said your father couldn’t have any more heirs. If it had been you…”

  Ian nodded, so he didn’t have to finish. “Our family would have died off from the Grail wh
en my father passed. As it was, Cameron had a little brother.”

  “Does that leave Cameron’s brother out of the next suicide attempt? I mean…when he comes up for induction?”

  Ian didn’t want to think about Cameron, let alone talk about him. Still, Pat needed to know all he did. If something happened to him, he needed others to know, so maybe someone could eventually stop them. “No one going into the Grail order is exempt. He’ll be just as vulnerable. Like I said, there were a lot more families, and it’s dwindled down to sixty. That came mostly from this, the suicides. Families have no more heirs, die out and there is one less the next generation.”

  He felt Pat’s tension over that, and he didn’t understand why that bothered him.

  “What?”

  “I would think the families would fight harder for what they have. For their own kin.”

  “The Grail is what needs to survive, not the individual families. They, we, don’t matter, only the Grail.”

  “The families will eventually die out altogether. Then what?”

  “I don’t think that they consider that far ahead. Sixty is still a big number.”

  More tension, then Pat asked, “These cullings, like you said the flu pandemic was partly their doing. Did they say anything at all that might indicate when the next one could happen?”

  Ian hated thinking of that, but he had done little else. “Every turn of the century, there is a pandemic, a culling of some sort. Some think it’s biblical, something to do with God, others think it is nature’s way of renewing itself, like a forest fire kills the big trees and the small ones have the room to grow. I don’t know if they truly had anything to do with it then, but they did have the means to stop it. Now, with technology, with chemical and biological weapons, they definitely have the means to do something on that great a scale.”

  Again, their eyes met, and he read his own thoughts there. Pat was worried, and he knew what else he was thinking, though he couldn’t bring himself to say it. It didn’t matter, Ian said it for him. “I need to stay in the Grail. At least long enough to find out what the plan could be.”