by Sabina Green
“This decoration of yours reminds me of the video from the news. The one about people being the cancer of the planet, just destroying it, leaving behind devastation and pain,” I said and felt my hand involuntarily rise to cover my chest when I mentioned cancer.
He came towards me and handed me one of the cups. “What do you think about that?”
“You have to ask?” I said lightly and looked up again at the dry landscape with a merciless sun and cracked soil. If bees died out, it would be a total catastrophe for the planet. But without people? It would be a paradise. “I’ve been working for the police for six years exactly for this reason. People are bad and need to be controlled, otherwise they’d destroy the world completely. The analogy with cancer now seems kind of poetic, although also a bit morbid, since…”
I thought about the cancerous growth, expanding in my body right now.
“Cancer must be eradicated,” he said quietly.
I looked at him and felt my throat tightening again.
“Connie,” he started and stepped closer. Not like he wanted to kiss me, although I was so touch-starved I wouldn’t have protested. His face was so passionate, so urgent, he must have wanted to tell me something important. He took a deep breath.
Suddenly the door opened and a man came in. He was holding a briefcase, one of those old-fashioned ones, used for documents, that opens up like a harmonica. He started walking towards one of the desks, but stopped in surprise when he saw us. “What are you doing here?”
“Andrew,” Mark blurted out and it sounded like this man was the last person he wanted to see. “We’re just talking. Actually, we were just discussing The Collective’s video.”
Was it his boss? Was I even allowed to be here?
Andrew’s expression turned disapproving, his eyes narrowed and he barked: “Can I have a word?”
They went to the kitchenette together and I heard a defiant: “Why did you bring her here?” But then Andrew closed the door and their conversation became so muted, I couldn’t pick out any individual words. One thing was clear though, judging by the angry tone of Mark’s colleague, it was a heated argument.
I was getting the impression that Andrew somehow knows me, but it seemed ridiculous. From where?
The kitchenette door flew open so unexpectedly that it made me jump and spill tea all over myself. Andrew hurried to his desk, still holding the briefcase. He took some folders out, locked them in a cupboard and threw one last angry face at us before disappearing in the corridor.
Mark smiled, clearly feeling self-satisfied.
“He doesn’t agree,” he explained. “With you being here. With me telling you about…”
“About what?” I encouraged him.
He shrugged. “About us.”
I didn’t know what to make of that, so I just raised my eyebrows.
He rubbed his forehead for a while, like he wanted to organise his thoughts first. “The Association and The Collective belong together, they’re sisters,” he said slowly. “They both aim to create some order in the world, but each does it slightly differently. The Association fixes the damage already done, The Collective wants to fix the cause. Until today, the rule was that you can only belong to The Collective if you’ve been a member of the Association for a while. And The Collective will accept you only if you fulfil certain… requirements.
“I’ve been a member of both for quite a few years now and had my fair share of events. Believe me, some things I wish I’d never laid my eyes on… I’ve gone through all the same stages as my predecessors and colleagues who’ve been in The Collective longer than me. At first it was a desire to help the world. Young people with a traumatic past, tortured animals, nature destroyed by man. Then I was thinking about how to prevent all this suffering happening in the first place, and together with others did research into how to change people’s mentality. We started various programmes, then ended them because their effect on people and the feedback was… well, it wasn’t great. We barely made a dent.
“People will only give up their own comfort and bad habits if you hold a knife to their throat. Only when their life is at stake do they start thinking about how much they’re hurting others, and that they are willing to change. Unless you do something drastic, everyone is just gonna turn their back on you and forget about any changes, no matter how selfless, because it’s just too much work. And if they don’t get any quick, tangible results, they’ll give up on making a difference and go back to their destructive behaviour.”
My pulse quickened while listening to Mark’s speech, and after a while I realised that I was wiping my sweaty palms into my trousers. Why did his words make me nervous, and even a bit shaken? I almost wished he wouldn’t continue.
“And that’s why we’re going to do it.”
My stomach flipped. “Do what?”
He looked straight into my eyes and took a deep breath. “Eradicate the cancer.”
I must have misheard. “I’m sorry, what was that?”
“Mankind will never change, no matter what we do.” His face hardened. “Just fixing the damage and setting up new rules and habits won’t make one fucking bit of difference. The planet will be better off if people just disappear.”
My ears rang and my heart beat loudly. Is Mark really telling me what I think he is? As inconspicuous as I could manage, I measured the distance between me and the office door, but the trouble was that Mark was standing in the way of my escape route. A strong tall man who could easily clasp me in his arms like in iron pincers.
“Do you have a specific plan?” I asked ironically and my voice betrayed me. It broke on the last word and revealed fear.
“We do,” he confirmed, looking serious. There wasn’t even a hint of a joke in his face. “It won’t be long now and we’ll initiate it.”
“You’re crazy. You’ve completely lost your mind!” The words flew out of my mouth like a stone from a sling. I agreed to help establish harder punishments, not to genocide!
He got a hold of my hand as I tried to run to the door. “Connie, wait. I need to explain it all to you!”
“Let go of me!”
He immediately did and that shocked me enough to slow my steps. Before I managed to get to the door, Mark pushed me aside with his shoulder, closed the door and leaned against it.
Tears of despair rushed to my eyes and I was only too aware that I’d been made a prisoner. What on earth is he planning to do?
Mark raised his palms up in a familiar gesture of surrender. “I don’t want to hurt you! I just need you to listen!”
I took a few steps back, just to be further away from him, and my thighs hit a desk. I couldn’t react verbally and he used this opportunity.
“It’s not just the Perth branch, the whole company is involved and it’ll be a world-wide expedition. We want to put an end to all this suffering. Think about all those twisted people. The greedy, selfish, cruel people who don’t ever help anything or anybody…”
“And what about the innocent? The peaceful and considerate?” I barked, shaking. “This is clearly some kind of joke. Pretty crazy and pathetic if you ask me!”
“It’s not a joke,” retorted Mark and my stomach twisted. “I’m sorry about the innocent people, but… They have to die too, for the greater good. There are almost eight billion people on the planet. Do you want to check them all and decide how innocent each of them is? Separate the good from the bad?”
“The police are already doing that!”
“So you know it doesn’t work! Even if every single person was really good, there are just too many of them on the planet! At the rate the human race is multiplying, the planet will never be able to support and feed that many people.”
“I’m leaving,” I said sharply, walked up to him and tried to push his hand away. “Move!”
“No,” he refused, and then added more s
oftly: “Not yet. Let’s sit down and talk about this. Then I’ll let you leave.”
I blinked to chase away new tears. “It’s a haphazardly put together nonsense, nothing like that will ever happen. Why would I want to talk about something as absurd as this?”
“To find out what’s gonna happen to František and Ruby.”
There was a charged, bubbling silence. He finally got me…
“According to what you’re saying, they’re gonna die in some crazy apocalypse,” I dared another ironic answer and only just managed to squeeze it out through my tensed throat.
What if I did what he was asking me to do? I’d sit down and listen to all the crazy talk, then leave and go straight to the police? I was just about to agree to Mark’s proposal, when I realised something… He had the upper hand now. Didn’t I just bring him a work folder full of material compromising my loyalty to the police…? My fear from the situation now mixed with anger at myself. How could I have been so stupid?
“They won’t…” he said so quietly I almost didn’t hear him.
“Why the hell not? A moment ago you were telling me that separating good people from the bad is like looking for a needle in a haystack, and suddenly it’s possible?” I screamed, suddenly feeling crazy too.
“So how about it? Will you sit with me?”
I thought about the police folder with confidential material and about the fact that I’d never told Mark Dad’s Czech first name. He only knew the anglicised version, so how did he get to this information?
It all seemed like a stupid absurd dream. So inconceivable. But what if there was some truth to what Mark was talking about?
In the end I nodded, and it felt like I’d just tied a noose around my neck.
Mark
Connie’s eyes kept returning to the door and whenever I moved closer to her she took a step back. I made sure that the armchair I offered her was the furthest one from the sofa I was sitting on so she felt less threatened. I was telling the truth when I said I didn’t want to hurt her, but naturally she wasn’t inclined to believe that.
She sat at the very edge of the seat, her back straight as an arrow, and didn’t make a sound. She was pale and absent-minded and I wished I could somehow calm her down. How was I supposed to do that, when we were talking about the end of the world?
I remembered the day Andrew told me. I’d been in such a shock that even breathing was difficult; my reactions weren’t much different from Connie’s. I’d thought that it was absurd for The Collective to even try to get rid of the entire human population. I myself had called Andrew crazy… But soon after that, a thought had come to me: If only it was true! Unwillingly, I’d thought about my parents and knew with absolute clarity that the world would be a better place without them. I’d admitted that I liked the idea, and my colleague introduced me to the full plan.
“This event has been in the making for a long time,” I emphasised to Connie. “I get that it’s hard to believe it all and understand it at first.”
Her eyes pierced through me. She was oozing coldness and… disgust. I could only hope that she’d change her mind once I got to certain details.
“The Collective takes inspiration from human nature. When something’s dangerous, we kill it. When something’s in the way, we destroy it. When something’s broken, we get rid of it. We’ve always been trying to upgrade our homes and keep them safe from predators and pests. Over the centuries and millennia this has somehow morphed into us voluntarily destroying the places we live, the nature which gives us food and water. And destroying ourselves and others in the process. There is no planet B, we can’t just pack up and move when the environment we’ve destroyed with our own hands isn’t up to it anymore. People have now become the predators and pests we’ve always been fighting, that we wanted to exterminate so that we’d feel safe.
“And that’s why The Collective wants to do it. Get rid of people so that nature can recover, so that animals can be free with only the natural threat of the cycle of life to worry about, so that there’s finally peace on this planet.”
I couldn’t tell if Connie’d started to trust me yet. She was still looking at me in that damning way, but it was clear that she was hanging on my every word.
“The Collective has branches all around the world, there’s at least one in each country, but often there are more. Our event will take place in synchronization, the time and date are set. And soon it’ll all be over.”
She shook her head and laughed sarcastically. “And how do you plan to do it? Line them all up against a wall and shoot them?”
“That would take too long,” I shook my head. “We’ll release a plague. It’s a highly contagious viral pneumonic plague, created in a lab for exactly this purpose. Once we release it, it’ll all be over in half a year.”
“If you release it, you’ll die too,” she said, as if she thought that I’d missed that important detail.
“That’s the point. We started the plans, and we’ll start the epidemic.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you saying this is a suicide mission?”
“Exactly.”
“This cannot be real,” she mumbled and rubbed her forehead. “It’s an insane nightmare and I’ll wake up any minute now.”
“It doesn’t seem that insane to me. It makes sense. Everyone,” I started, and then had to correct myself, “well, almost everyone wants to save the planet and protect it from the worst kinds of pests, but nobody wants to start with themselves. So we will. We’ll get infected by the plague and then infect others, it will essentially be a spontaneous process, we won’t even have to try that hard. Human extinction is inevitable.”
“What if they develop a vaccine?” Connie objected. “Every virus has its antidotes.”
“There won’t be time. People will die well before they get a chance to put together a half-decent vaccine.”
Our eyes met. Time for the big finale…
“But there already is a vaccine against this plague,” I admitted. “Effective, a hundred percent successful.”
She sighed impatiently. “You just said that people won’t have time to protect themselves by developing a vaccine. And yet there already is one? You are contradicting yourself.”
“Not really,” I shook my head. “You still don’t get it because I haven’t told you everything yet… I was talking about The Collective being inspired by human nature, and so it wants to exterminate the biggest pest on the planet. But there is one aspect of human nature we’ll deviate from. They don’t care which type of organism they destroy, be it a plant or an animal. They’re happily watching the complete extinction of one species after another. We won’t stoop to that. We’ll get rid of the majority.”
Her eyes narrowed and she held her breath.
“The Collective has selected several individuals all around the world who will be allowed to live. They’ll be given an antidote–they and nobody else–and they’ll be brought together to start a new community. It’s a new chance for people to learn and get better, learn to live in balance with nature, not in conflict with it.”
Her nostrils flared and her breath grew uneven. I assumed she still wanted to run away, so that she wouldn’t have to have this conversation, but she was also too scared not to find answers.
There were so many things she could have asked about, but she didn’t. She just kept sitting down in silence so I decided to give her some of the answers right away.
“There is only a certain amount of the vaccine available. Our chemists have already made enough to cover the chosen ones. The recipe was destroyed so that no one could abuse it.”
She took a deep breath. “If you’ve found the recipe, who’s to say that other specialists won’t?”
“Time,” I said simply. “It took The Collective years to develop the necessary type of virus, and even longer to create a vaccine. The general publ
ic including specialists just won’t have enough time to develop anything effective.”
“Will you get it too?”
“The vaccine? No.”
“So you’ll die? Just like that?”
“Most definitely not just like that. For the greater good!”
She had a face full of thunder. “Someone’s brainwashed you. Just like all the other suicide terrorists.”
“You’re wrong. It was a free choice.” She snorted but I continued. “The Collective gave me a choice, be a part of the project, or walk away. I wanted to stay.”
“You want to die?” she asked incredulously.
I hesitated. How should I say it, so that she finally believes me? “I’m not afraid to die. I’m more afraid of what would happen to the planet if this didn’t take place.”
“And what the hell do you want from me? To join your cult too and get infected with the plague?” she hissed like a snake.
“If that’s what you decide to do, it would help our cause. But it won’t change anything.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I want you to know what will happen to your family…”
She started shaking. She shook her head, but her expression seemed to say: I’m listening.
“Frank and Ruby will be among the survivors. They’ll get the vaccine.”
Connie blinked and two big tears ran down her face. She must have believed my statement, because this reaction was clearly a sign of relief. “Why them?”
“Each for a different reason.” I stood up from the sofa. Connie looked worried and flinched, but I wasn’t getting closer to her. I took a thick folder out of a drawer by my desk and handed it to her.
“Frank Fiala?” she read the inscription on the folder and looked up in surprise.
“Open it.” I nodded and she did as I said.
She flipped through the papers quickly, her eyes darting this way and that, as she read passages from various records, personal details and psychological studies. She was looking at photos of her father, obviously taken by someone he wasn’t aware of.