“What am I,” Deidre demanded. “What am I?!!”
Dr. Edam paused a moment, regarding her with the smug satisfaction of someone admiring their own accomplishment. “You are a breed apart, Deidre. Quite literally, you are the first of your kind. A true homo novus. Naturally, further study is required, to fully identify and understand your mutations. Eventually, we’ll take our findings public, but in the meantime every precaution has been taken to protect your privacy. And of course, we’ll make your time here as comfortable as possible.”
“This is insane.” Deidre almost laughed out loud. “You don’t really think you can keep me here. I’m a human being with a life, you asshole.”
“But that’s the problem now, isn’t it,” he said, so calm and disconnected from the anguish she was experiencing. “You aren’t human. Not anymore.”
The logic centers in her left hemisphere were working to override the emotional cascade taking place in her limbic system. Deidre could not help but be a little awestruck by her heightened self-awareness, even as she was horrified by what she saw. Skin deep, she was still the Deidre she had always been. Her physical form and basic anatomy were essentially the same. But underneath it all, her cellular matrix had been restructured. Her neural network had expanded. Her DNA had literally rewritten itself. And Dr. Edam was right. She was a freak. A truly incredible freak, but a freak all the same.
Deidre detected movement in the reflection. Dr. Edam was pulling something out of the right hip pocket of his lab coat. In her momentary state of shock, Deidre had failed to detect the chemical odor of the vecuronium in the syringe he was carrying.
A fierce and feral survival instinct flared. Before the syringe in his grip could clear the pocket flap, she knocked it out of his grip and sent it flying down the hall behind him with a single swift swipe of her left hand. With a jutting jab of her right, she sent Dr. Edam flying across the corridor and against the opposite wall.
This was her chance. Deidre turned and sprinted for the double doors. The multi-dimensional effect that her visual cortex was creating made everything ahead look kaleidoscopic, but she knew how to interpret the images now. Beyond the doors was the waiting room, and beyond the waiting room, freedom.
Seconds later, she was street side, in broad daylight. Her mind instantly calculated the light level and traffic and concluded that it was late morning on a business day. The bus stop was a few blocks west.
Although she knew exactly where she was and where she wanted to go, Deidre felt disoriented. She was more sensitive to light and sound than she had been from the migraines. Although she wasn’t incapacitated by the pain she had always experienced before, the sensory overload was uncomfortable. It was difficult to sort through the stimulus and focus on anything.
Twice she accidentally collided with people on the sidewalk, before she had even reached the corner. Deidre stopped and stepped aside, trying to reorient herself. Why did she feel so lost?
Her backpack slipped off her shoulder, and she remembered her phone. She could call for help. She dug the cell out of the side pocket. Her roommate would pick her up, take her home.
And then what?
Deidre’s mind began to assess and project the potential outcomes. She could go home, go back to her life. Or could she, really?
Surely Extragen would come looking for her. Deidre realized she had no idea who she was really dealing with or what they were capable of doing. She didn’t even know who or what she was, or might still become. The only thing she knew for sure was that she was terrified.
Her logical left hemisphere was telling her that she didn’t have enough information to devise a strategy. The best action, for now, was to take no action at all. Her emotional centers were firing impulses like bottle rockets, driving her to run in any direction at all. Deidre felt more paralyzed standing on the street than she had on that gurney pumped full of vecuronium.
She couldn’t stay here, alone and in the open, vulnerable to anything and anyone, including herself. As counterintuitive as is was, there was only one option that made any sense. At least, for now.
Deidre hitched her backpack back over her shoulder, and took a deep breath. She glanced ahead at the intersection and then turned back. She retraced her steps to the three-story concrete slab building with two-foot-high raised brass numbers next to a set of reinforced steel double doors with no window, and pushed the call button.
***
Roberta Trahan is a former journalist and marketing professional who is now the author of THE DREAM STEWARDS quasi-historical fantasy series (THE WELL OF TEARS, THE KEYS TO THE REALMS), the near-future post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure novella AFTERSHOCK, and other fantastic tales. A Pacific Northwest native, Roberta currently lives near Seattle, Washington, with her family and an ever-changing assortment of pets. She admits to a mild obsession with hummingbirds, a not-so-mild addiction to caffeinated substances, and an antique jewelry hoard. Most hours of any given day, however, you will find her immersed in a world of her own making. Connect with Roberta at www.robertatrahan.com.
PRO PATRIA MORI
by Jodi McIsaac
Author’s Insights:
I’ve never been a happy endings kind of girl. Sure, I like the occasional rom-com and always cry at Pixar movies. But the stories that have the biggest impact on me are those that remind us of the aspects of life we’d most like to forget. Betrayal. Suffering. The deep, deep sadness. The injustice of it all.
I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s the redeeming beauty of sacrifice. Maybe it’s the resilience, the determination to survive. Or maybe it’s because I can read a story and know that the author gets it. He or she knows what it means to live life as it is—not as we wish it to be.
Hence, “Pro Patria Mori.” The title is a reference to William Owen’s devastating World War I poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” in which he exposes the lie dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: it is sweet and right to die for your country.
In “Pro Patria Mori,” that country is Ireland—and there’s nothing sweet and right about it. Ireland may be a picturesque country of pastoral landscapes, brooding castles, and quaint pubs, but it’s also a land baptized in blood. Most outside the country don’t realize the brutality that accompanied Ireland’s struggle for freedom in the War of Independence, or the tragedy of the civil war that followed. I sure didn’t, until I started researching my forthcoming novel, Revolutionary, which takes place during the Irish Civil War. My research for both the novel and this short story has been sobering—and sometimes shocking.
And yet it’s real. War and loss are an inextricable part of the human experience (and, if we believe the faery stories, of the non-human experience as well). To not write about it would be to deny that part of ourselves. Life is beautiful and rich and overwhelming and glorious. It just doesn’t always have a happy ending.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Canadian spelling and punctuation standards have been retained in Ms. McIsaac’s story.
***
Padraig Murphy lay sprawled in the grass, his rifle idle at his side, counting the crows nervously pacing back and forth on the branches above him. He wondered if they, too, were waiting for death.
“Murphy!” Lt. Tom Quinn glowered from the far edge of the hedgerow separating the men from the road. “Get your sorry arse to the line. You want the Tans to find us lying down?”
Padraig dutifully rolled to his knees, then crept along the hedgerow to squat beside his fellow soldiers. There were fifteen of them in total—one of the finest flying columns in the West Cork Brigade of the Irish Republican Army.
“Look sharp, lads,” Tom said. “We’re going to get these bastards.”
Padraig grimaced in satisfaction. If all went well, it would be the last journey over Irish soil for at least a dozen British soldiers. In the three months he’d been with this column, they’d lost only two men to the Brits, but had killed at least twenty.
His leg cramped and he shifted position, his gaze falling on the small
mud-walled house in the field behind them beside a dense cluster of alder trees. The family who lived there had fed and sheltered them last night, then left to stay with relatives in the next town, saying they’d rather face the devil himself than step into the path of the Black and Tans. Padraig didn’t blame them.
“Feckin’ Brits,” he muttered, massaging the cramp in his leg. This war would be the last. They’d put an end to British rule, once and for all.
Then he could go home.
He touched the inner pocket of his jacket. There was the envelope, worn soft with touch. Inside was a grainy photograph of his Kathleen, her red hair piled atop her head, as was the fashion for all married women. But in his memory, it hung long and loose, flowing over her freckled shoulders, tickling the small of her back. He would beg her to wear it down whenever they were alone in the house, then bury his face in it, inhale its heady scent, feel it trail over his bare skin. Kathleen, his beautiful bride.
He had no picture of wee Daisy. But he could still smell her sweet newborn fragrance, feel the softness of the blanket Kathleen had knit. His gift for their young daughter would be a free Ireland.
“Steady on,” Tom Quinn called down the line. “Here they come. Stay low.”
The grass stabbed at Padraig’s chin. He clutched his rifle beneath him, drawing strength from the hardened wood and steel. He wanted to watch, to see the lorry spiral through the air when it drove over their land mine, burst into flame when it plummeted into the ground or, if they were lucky, landed on the lorry behind it. But his father had taught him better than that, before His Majesty’s Government had pinned a patch of white cloth over his father’s heart and filled him chock-a-block with bullets. Padraig pressed his hands against his ears and prayed the hedgerow would protect them from the explosion.
He turned his head slightly so he could see Tom and wait for the order to attack the survivors. Tom had a vantage point in a gap in the hedgerow, whereas Padraig could see nothing of the road. Tom’s face was pinched so tight Padraig wondered he could see at all.
“Jaysus feckin’ Christ!” Tom hissed, his eyes suddenly bulging. “They’ve some of our lads running before them—they’ll hit the mine!”
Padraig ripped a hole in the hedge with his hands, ignoring Tom’s remonstrations. Approaching their position were indeed two British army lorries, just as the Intelligence men had said. But marching out in front of them were at least a dozen Republican prisoners, tied together like a team of horses. Their faces were slack as they stumbled and slipped beside their comrades, marionettes of war.
“What do we do?” Padraig called quietly. The others were watching Tom, their panic barely subdued.
“Abort,” Tom said, his lips thin and white. “If we run now—”
“But the mine,” Padraig protested.
“Too late. Run!”
The lads sprinted for the farmhouse, bent low, guns clutched to their chests. Tom waved them on, one eye on the approaching soldiers. Padraig remained immobile, still crouched beneath sight of the road.
“Get on with ye!” Tom breathed.
“They’re our own men,” Padraig hissed back. Ten feet away from the mine now . . . five feet . . . three feet . . .
Padraig pressed his face into the hole in the hedgerow and yelled, “MINE AHEAD!” then flattened himself on the ground. Men yelled and the hedgerow splintered around him. Then an almighty blast. His eardrums throbbed, nostrils burned.
His face was still pressed into the grass when someone landed on top of him—no, they were grabbing at his coat, pulling him. He forced his eyes open and saw a torn hunk of metal—a lorry door—stuck in the ground like a headstone. Tom Quinn was shaking him.
“Christ on the cross, you’re a mad eejit! Now put that rifle to use, will ye?” Tom lifted himself to one knee and fired toward the road.
The other soldiers in the column tore from the farmhouse, screaming, “Up the Republic!” and firing their weapons over Padraig’s head. He scrambled to a crouch and raised his own firearm. The Republican prisoners had leapt off the road at his warning and were now cutting their bonds with hastily tossed knives while men from Padraig’s column covered them. The tangled wreck of an army lorry and a mess of bodies littered the road.
Padraig soaked in the carnage.
A bullet seared through his shoulder. “Jaysus!” He clutched at it. Grit his teeth and hoisted the rifle back into the air, ignoring the pain blazing in his arm.
There was the bastard, crouched behind the wheel of the second lorry. He took aim. Fired. The soldier dropped. Reload.
A force like a hurling bat slammed into his back. His leg shattered beneath him. Driving him to the ground. He tasted dirt.
At first he felt nothing, then the pain blossomed through him. Dimly, through the agony, he gasped, unable to breathe. Kathleen . . .
***
Padraig woke to the screaming of crows. With effort, he opened his eyes. The black shapes stalked the branches of the trees above him. It was almost dark; the air swirled gray and purple. A light glowed beyond the tangled branches. The moon, perhaps. He tried to turn his head but it would not obey.
“Be still. The healing’s not complete.” The voice came from above his head, out of sight. It was a woman’s voice, low-slung and smooth and steady.
Healing?
The ambush came back to him in a rush of cold reality. The prisoners, the explosion, Tom Quinn shouting orders, the bullets piecing him.
“Am I in hospital?”
“No.”
“Where am I? Where’s Tom?”
He waited for the pain, searched for it. Nothing. Only that strange, melancholy warmth.
“Is he alive?” a new voice asked, high and bright.
“Barely,” the woman answered. “But he’ll survive.”
He was warm and comfortable, as though he were lying on his own bed, wrapped in one of his mother’s thick hand-sewn quilts. The questions that had seemed so pressing moments ago were drifting away, dandelion fluff on a summer breeze. He’d been upset—but why? Wasn’t he where he was supposed to be? Soft hands caressed his forehead, running over his shoulder and over his chest—
Wait.
“What happened? Where am I?” he asked again. He tried again to move his head and this time it obeyed. He was no longer in the field beside the hedgerow. He was in a clearing in a small wood. All around him stood thick alder branches, full with leaves. The moonlight bounced off them as though they were covered in dew, but Padraig felt perfectly dry. He looked for the source of the voices.
A third voice answered, this one low, with the timbre of gravel and stone. “You were mortally wounded.”
Padraig tried to sit up, failed, restrained by some invisible force. Sweat broke out on his brow. His saliva fled his mouth.
The warmth returned. The grass welcomed him, drew him in.
“That’s better,” the woman’s voice cooed.
“How do you feel?” asked the high, bright voice.
“Strange,” he answered. “Why can’t I see you?” Was this purgatory? Were these phantom voices his judges? His heart squeezed. He tried to cross himself, but his arm remained one with the ground. “Hail Mary, full of grace, Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death . . .” His voice faltered and he fell to weeping.
“Mary is not here,” the gravelly voice said. “But we are. Pray to us, if you must pray. We are the ones who will save you.”
“Who are you?”
A gust of wind swept through the clearing. Leaves rose and fell around him in a pantomime he did not understand. Then the high voice spoke.
“We are whatever you wish us to be. Some call us gods; others call us the Good People, faeries, even. Some believe we are the spirit of the woods, the lakes, the rivers. Your church would call us devils and try to cast us out. We are this land you call Ireland, Éireann, Éire. And so canno
t be driven out.”
“The Good People,” Padraig whispered. “My nan used to tell stories, but I thought . . . I thought—”
“You thought we were only for children,” the woman phantom said, a slight reproach in her voice.
“My ma didn’t like it; said they were just stories.”
“They are stories,” she said. “But there is truth in all stories, especially those as old as ours.”
“And the truth,” the voice of stone and gravel said, “is you and your comrades are not the only warriors in this fight.”
Padraig knew then he must be dead. Perhaps still in the field where he’d been shot, clinging to some small remnant of life. As though hearing his thoughts, the unseen voices said in unison, “You are not dead, Padraig Murphy.”
“Then I’m dreaming.”
“Can you feel this?” the low voice asked, and there was a sudden flare of agony where the bullet had ripped through skin and muscle.
“Stop! Jaysus! Please!” he cried, and as the words left his mouth the pain ebbed, and he felt whole and well again.
“I do not think your dreams feel quite so vivid,” the voice said.
“Then what—?”
“We watched today—we are always watching. You saved seven lives. Seven men of Ireland whose blood will not stain the earth. At least, not today.”
“You . . . saw . . . ?”
“We always see,” the woman answered. “And sometimes, not often, we intervene. Your comrades ran. They assumed you were dead. But we could feel your life still beating, weakly, through the earth. We chose to save you.”
Padraig concentrated with all his might on his legs. They would not move. Was he paralyzed?
“You don’t believe us,” she said.
“I don’t . . . I don’t know. If you really are the Good People, if you have magic, why not use it against the British? Why waste it on me?”
Phantasma: Stories Page 3