Lies and Legends

by Logan Keys

  “Yes mother. Come look at your creation.”

  Joelle bares her teeth and her mother’s eyes widen. “They’ve gotten longer, I see.”

  Joelle frowns at the strange looking woman. “Have you become a special?” she asks.

  Her mother nods.

  “Did Simon change you? Where is he?”

  “They fear me now as they should.”

  She motions to a statue near where I am standing, they look so lifelike and that is when I realize…

  I move and Joelle gazes at me in question. I jerk my chin over to the statues.

  She approaches one quizzically.

  Her mother watches Joelle, and I can see she is waiting to see her daughter’s reaction. She’s anxious

  “Did you do this?” Joelle asks.

  “They were trying to take control.”

  Joelle touches the smooth stone. It’s obvious there was a man that had stood there once. He is no more. Pure marble instead of flesh and bone. And it was painful.

  “Your father,” Adrian starts then seems to realize her slip of the tongue as Joelle spins around to face her.

  Joelle’s eyes narrow. “Father? You said my father was dead.”

  “He is.”

  Joelle stiffens and comes closer to her life giver. The woman is obviously fascinated by what her daughter has become. Or rather, Joelle’s power, more like.

  Joelle seems unsatisfied by what she finds. “Is he?” she asks, and only I catch the hint of warning because Adrian half-hazardly replies far too soon, “Yes.”

  Joelle smiles. “Liar. I’m not the little girl I once was.” Her mother opens her mouth and Joelle snaps, “Shut up.”

  Adrian freezes. “Excuse me?”

  “I said shut your lying mouth before I shut it for you.”

  Our vampires peel away from the walls where they had entered and hidden. Many of them rise from the darkness and webs, all to come to Joelle’s aid, should she need.

  “Lie to me again,” Joelle says, her people surrounding us in warning, “and I’ll cut your tongue from your throat.”

  “I only meant to…”

  Joelle is inches from her mother in an instant. “You used to beat me. I know you probably hoped I’d forget. But I remember. You’d slap me around. Use me for your experiments. I would love to pay it back, so just say the word. Go ahead. Give me a reason.”

  The room becomes dead silent.

  “Now. I’m going to ask you again. Is my father dead?”

  Adrian decides not to press. Wise lady. “Not exactly.”

  Joelle waits.

  “He’s locked in a machine, a thing that made you and me. Do you remember it, Joelle?”

  “Where is the machine? With the men, I presume?”

  “Yes.”

  Joelle does a mental sigh. "Did you put him there?”

  “No.”

  I can sense Joelle piecing together something new, and she turns to face her mother, chin up, eyes showing her soul as a regal, but lethal thing. “Simon.”

  I’m not sure who Simon is, but in my mind, images of a man in a long jacket and hat spring to mind. And now, Joelle gives him a second name mentally: Father.

  Joelle is stunned, but you’d never know it. Finding out she’s his child is not a boon or blessing.

  Her mother looks near tears. She reaches for Joelle, who hisses and moves out of reach.

  Adrian accepts the dismissal with grace, but I see a raw ache inside her beautiful face. “You despise me, my child? Do my eyes---my spiders make you think I’m strange? Do you not realize your drinking blood, and your love of the night was by design? Your father and I wanted you to be the most powerful, but, even more so, able to defend yourself from this world.”

  Joelle’s voice is a whisper. “I’d never choose to be like this.”

  “But Joelle, my sweet, sweet girl, don’t you see that circumstances made you? The world demanded us to become stronger, powerful, to survive… to become the fittest. In the web of life, lest it ensnare us, we became the spiders, the hunters. How could I leave you unprotected? A child of mine would never be easy prey.”

  “A mother’s love?” Joelle spits.

  “A mother’s ambition, my sweet.”

  I sense the emotions at war within our teenaged leader. Despite her mother and her past, she feels a grounding begin, a commonality, and in a girl that has been floating since all of this began, wild and alone for so very long, a warborn-wartorn being, she has a home now with two parents here in this crazy fortress.

  A terrible loneliness has eaten a hole in Joelle’s heart and made her weak where she’d be otherwise hard-hearted.

  Dark eyes dart to mine and away. They seek her mother’s approval, even now.

  If she thinks I’ll judge her for that, she’s got another thing coming. I am the one who’s mis-loved so many times. At my own peril. A boy who didn’t want me, a man who was already taken…

  She’s in great company for loving the wrong person. And Joelle does love her mother after all, it seems.

  A fact that seems to devastate her.

  That may be the very nature of love… devastating on all accounts.

  “The men,” Joelle says touching a statue, “Are you murdering them for simply being men?”

  Adrian comes over and pets the stone with a loving caress. “They called me the Medusa, and you know what? My power is beyond turning men into stone. I can see the future as well, but who cares about their future when it may be doom and death. When I wanted to lead, they disagreed. Fearing my power, they refused and let that mad-dog of a man take over. Bradford is a raving lunatic, and I told him his future, for hanging that innocent girl, for torturing that poor one, and I told him he’d hang because of it himself.”

  Adrian smiles and I get a chill.

  “And he didn’t like that future.”

  Adrian turns with a confused expression on to me. “But that isn’t the right ending, is it? My sight has been blind to you two, you avenging angels of the darkness. Yes, I think the future is changing already?”

  “What is my future then?” Joelle asks, but drily as if she doesn’t believe.

  Adrian sighs, smiles softly at us both, and motions toward the balcony doors. “Come.”

  That swiftly she is in the good graces of our leader. Blood being thicker than water after all.

  The cool night embraces me and I feel as though I can breathe again. The dark gift is many things, but the human that wants to live in a cave, an abode, is well and gone. We enjoy the outside more than we did alive. It might be why we bury most people in the earth. Perhaps it is peace for those of us no longer living the living life.

  From here we can see half the city in ruins, the water, a moat, and across from that, vast wilds of what is left of America.

  From here we see the future and past all in one desolate viewing.

  “The men would lead us to war with the Authority,” Adrian says. “I mean to make peace with Cromwell’s widow, but with one exception, a new day, a sanitation of men. We’ll call it a glorious new beginning.”

  “Mother—Adrian, why do you hate men so?”

  And I worry at the pupil like ring to Joelle’s voice, and I see in her head, the messy tangle of loose ends all winding into one ball of confusion. Is her mother right?... she is wondering.

  I’m no champion of men, having been brutalized and abused by them as long as I remember, but a good portion of the men in my life were not only kind, but heroes to me. I push an image to Joelle that I can tell snaps her gaze to mine. Tommy.

  But Adrian is distracting, now in full motherly or educational mode. She must have been a professor or like Joelle had said she’d performed experiments on her, and so she falls easily into the role of teacher for us young girls.

  With a grand motion, Adrian takes in all that we survey, swiping a hand across the vast destruction and mayhem that has corroded the landscape. “The power of women has long since been edified. From the Mother Eve to Baths
heba. From Delilah to the daughters who wed the sons of God causing angels to fall, women have been tempting men out of grace and into hell long enough to know who is the real strength of sex. But this... the desolate earth, look upon it, my darling. Because this is the wrath of man.”

  I don’t flinch at her words, not because she is right, but because she is not wrong.

  I have felt man’s wrath on my cheek. In my body.

  I have felt bruises and pain until I’ve lost consciousness.

  Like the earth, I have shared my desolateness and still have parts of me that will never regrow or return anew.

  Like the world, we both have scars that may never heal.

  But I have felt a woman’s complacency, as well. My mother knew what my father was. She’d say she was afraid to leave him. I’d say she was afraid of change. My mother’s patterns in life were set, much like Joelle’s mother’s appear to be now, and I’d been more afraid to follow my own’s footsteps than to be knocked flat by my father.

  If we are not careful, we simply continue their cycle.

  I send Joelle the image of her mother abusing her as a reminder. Was it man that did that?

  Joelle’s gaze falls, as she knows that we cannot listen to all of this rhetoric without remembering the source.

  Is it strength and weakness that truly polarizes the genders? Or is it those that do and those that stand by no matter which parts they have?

  “A woman rules Anthem,” Joelle says. “The widow you mentioned. Does she not add to… all of this?”

  Adrian whirls around on us, anger pulling her face tight. “You think Karma truly rules? She’s only following the legacy of her dead husband. Reginald wore the mantle of power, Simon, your father, worships the supernatural, and the scientist who’s hidden himself among the weak on that island. That man I refuse to even name, he’s the worst of them all! He’s held a personal vendetta against your father ever since he left, and the world paid for his pride dearly! And all of this is the result of their feud, their precious child: war. A colliding of their egos, and their sin is the root, the weed strangling the new beginning. It’s passed a long time that we’ve cleaned our garden. A woman’s work as it were. I say we begin a new era, one of majesty rising from the ashes. We'll call it the decade of deliverance. A sweet rain cometh to wash away the sins of fallen Kings as it should be.”

  Joelle looks incredulous, but, if I’m honest, a little bit in awe of her mother’s ability for the grandiose.

  "You would have me join you?” Joelle asks. “Long live you, the Queen, alongside your subjects.”

  "No, my darling.” Adrian reaches out to touch her daughter’s cheek. “Long live the Queens."

  Chapter 8

  Liza

  I’m in Anthem. Not the Anthem. I know that now, but as time goes on, I will have forgotten. Most often, I’m lost to the fabrication too soon to truly study the differences, and I sense Cory’s glee when that happens after the fact.

  I used to panic when I realized I was inside of a fake reality and that I would eventually capitulate and be lost to the pretend, but now I embrace the transition with a new driving need to feel like I chose to. Like I control something. Anything.

  This version from my memory is perfection, almost. He’s gotten the gist of Anthem down by now. The earlier renditions were much dirtier, closer to the post-apocalyptic feel of outside in the wilds rather than the new feel of a rebuilt Anthem.

  Anthem’s not in shambles. Despite being called Ash City and L.A. being nicknamed La la land, it was the latter that was patched together on the west coast out of utilitarian fashion, while Anthem is a prize pig of cities. The only one rebuilt not only to its former glory, but further.

  Even I have to admit, she is far from ugly. She’s beautiful and worth all of the fighting.

  Right now I’m in the center of the city which holds buildings so high they seem to go to scrape the smoky clouds. They seem to crookedly reach for one other and are conjoined by skywalks that let you cross an aisle that hovers hundreds of stories high. Glass, all of it.

  The medical plaza. Floridian.

  There used to be three buildings, that is, until Jeremy and Crystal blew up the middle building. It had been the largest, and now it’s gone both in real life and here in my mind.

  A woman appears next to me, perfectly still. She turns her head on a robotic glide and says, “Here, at Floridian Medical Center, we host a number of physicians using the latest in technology and medicinal advancements to keep our city the healthiest place in the world. Press the display, and the information for each section of our hospital will be given in a virtual tour.”

  There’s no display. Pieces of this rendition are missing.

  It’s obvious Cory has never been to Anthem. But he’s gone over it like a painter, how the artist layers each time making something closer to reality. That’s what this is, a final painting of Anthem that even smells like Anthem City, but still, if I scratch at it, the other layers are there, not quite perfect.

  However, the final stand for humanity in all of its glory is something to behold. Impressively, it’s even got the correct amount of hopelessness.

  I leave the woman and step onto the street instead. This is the Anthem I remember, but perhaps I have it wrong as well. A sort of evolution since the uprising had to have occurred since I killed Reginald, some sort of knee jerking would have been done by the remaining Cromwell, i.e.: More guards and less freedom. Perhaps less upkeep on the south side.

  I keep walking until I’m close to section. It would have remained clean because no one would dare litter in Anthem. You wouldn’t even find an errant gum wrapper.

  So many rules…

  But it would have probably been less kept up compared to the center and north-most parts of the city. And voila: The image before me corrects to fit my thoughts instantly. The world tilts, and Anthem changes right before my eyes. This visible shifting is new.

  Sloppy.

  I smile. Cory is tired of running my fake world. He’s growing weary, swiftly slapping Band-Aids over cracks in the dam. Meanwhile water trickles through, corroding, eating away at his control.

  He’s added more guards too. They are on every corner now.

  They surround me. Watch me.

  I remember the time I’d fought one my first day in Anthem. He’d tried to arrest me for breaking a curfew I never knew existed. They broke me in that place, in Bodega, but here, here they never got the chance.

  People of section are now rushing away from the guards toward home, their movements jerky, like poorly developed animatronics. They slow, like their batteries are low.

  Cory’s trying to fix things as we go and the world I’m inside of is a mess as if it’s under construction. I wonder what’s going on outside to distract him so.

  I approach a wall and press. Nothing happens at first. Then it appears. The giant gaping skull.

  “Jeremy,” I whisper, closing my eyes, hand to the glowing image. “I miss you.”

  With a deep breath, I leave the picture that I created. The drawn sign of rebellion that I drew with my mind. A newfound strength emboldens me to risk trying to change something else.

  Section too has become something different. Before, when I’d been in Anthem the housing was newer, but still basic and little warehouses squared boxes for people to live: Coffins essentially for the poor that they did not want to have to see uptown. But this idea of them worn and ugly makes more sense. Is more fitting. Because truly, what would have happened over time? Karma would have let them go into disrepair out of spite. After all, this is where the rebellion sprang from. This is where her son made his way to a new family: us. Crystal, his Skulls, all of them the people who truly loved him in the end, and this is where he’d found me. Loved me.

  And I was the one who’d murdered her husband.

  So, she’d hate section. Abandon it. If she let it become undesirable, maybe the people would give up hope. Be easier to control. Give people just enough to kee
p them living under your thumb. Hasn’t that always been the Authority’s way?

  Each direction I turn is blocked off. I wait to see what this will mean. Will they attack me? Will I have to fight?

  But instead they part ways down one alleyway, and between them I see him coming toward me. I tell my fake heart not to beat faster. I tell my fake lungs not to suck in and shudder out fake air.

  “This is a dream. This is a dream. This is a dream,” I chant, but my eyes fill with tears.

  All this time. All of it. And Cory has never dared to make me face him. Nor Tommy.

  “Jeremy,” I say as he comes closer.

  Cory is wise enough to make him not quite the same. Hair a little longer, dusting his collar, eyes dim from his last purging, the purple deeper, and the face is older, more haggard.

  And he’s a man now. He smiles, and it’s not charming or blinding, it is a weak and forced. But it’s him. I grab ahold of Jeremy when he’s close enough.

  “Liza,” he says like a prayer, and my traitorous body reacts with a jolt.

  He folds me up into his long, stronger, harder but tired arms. Arms that have cradled the rebellion into the grave.

  “I have missed you. I have dreamt of you all this time. I didn’t know you were alive. I swear it.”

  “You either,” I say, slowly capitulating to this madness.

  The fiddler is playing me so well and Jeremy seems solid and real. I search his face. One day I might wake up and not even know it anymore.

  Jeremy opens his mouth but I shush him. “Just hold me. Just be here a little longer as you.”

  “Okay,” he says with a laugh. “Okay.”

  But when he draws away again, one side of his mouth quirked, I bring my lips to his and eagerly kiss him. When he pulls away, his face twists from joy to anger.

  And I smile.

  “Hello, Cory,” I say.

  He’s not dressed as Jeremy, or wearing a Jeremy mask. It’s not as though he is physically here, but he’s monitoring the scene. Perhaps voyeuristically seeing me through Jeremy’s eyes. Either way, I am sure Cory’s watching closely since he brought such an important person to face me, when other times I sense that my world is on a steadily repeated loop.