We didn’t say anything for a while, just waited out the last of the night stars as dawn twilight smothered them in reds and oranges. I stopped breathing until she glared at me, and I heard the unspoken admonishment clear as day—that amateur-hour shit will get you caught.
At last she spoke, but not to yell at me.
“So what about that girl? And the wolf she’s with?”
“I don’t know, Ma. I think maybe we should skip town. I could become a cop again, you could run another shop, the Szymanskis would fade into memory while we get some ground under us a while. We come back after three or five decades, maybe, and one or both of them’ll be dead, and we’ll have less to worry about. Everything ties up in a neat little bow. We can keep your house in a dummy holding, pay someone to upkeep it.”
“Oh, you think you know what’s good for your mother? You think I haven’t done enough waiting, Mikey, after Cordoba, after Vilna? Prague? All I ever do is wait, Mikey, wait and wait. Those kids didn’t make you for nothing, my darling Son. They made you to save them.”
My eyes closed on the encroaching dawn, dark but not dark enough behind heavy lids.
“I know, Ma, I know. It’s been eighty years, and all I can taste is paper. And those kids, they got to be dead by now.” I took another pull off the cigar. “All of ’em. Who’s left to save?”
“There’s always more kids, Mikey. And that broad of yours, she’s up to no good.”
Another puff, another dark thought, and I almost put my feet up just to spite her.
I hated when she was right, but she was right, and there wasn’t no running from it. Born with a mission in my mouth, I couldn’t walk away from it no matter what I believed, no matter what it cost me, no matter if those who gave it to me lived on through their children’s children but rested in the ground themselves.
And yeah, I didn’t know what craziness Murray and his pack dreamed they had on me, and had no idea what I’d do about Naomi, but I literally don’t have it in me to run away.
So when the clock hit eight I called up Tony Wheels for a new van, still on the house for saving his great-grandfather from the camps. The sixth van he’d given me, and every one a gift I didn’t deserve. Still, it paid to have friends.
The extermination business ain’t glamorous, but it keeps the lights on.
A TASTE FOR LIFE
“And how old were you when you died, Mister Beauchamp?” Joan Rothman asked, leaning back in her chair. The scientists watched her behind the one-way mirror, hands clasped behind their backs.
“Twenty-seven,” the corpse replied, more gurgle than speech, as it gazed idly around the interview room.
Joan jotted down the response, then chewed pensively on the tip of her red pen. The lights flickered as the air circulators shuddered to life in the depths of the bunker, filling the observation room with a faint scent of bleach and formaldehyde.
She crossed her legs and rested the clipboard between her knee and the folding table, unknowingly flashing her slip to the men behind the mirror.
Bhim Raychaudhuri smiled appreciatively at the view and spoke into the microphone wired to her ear bead. “Math, Miss Rothman.”
“Thank you,” she said to the creature, making no sign that she’d heard the command. “And how old are you now?” She poised the pen above the clipboard.
The corpse scowled, the pallid flesh of its forehead wrinkling in concentration under the single naked bulb. “What year is it?”
“It’s twenty sixty-seven, Mister Beauchamp.”
“What month?” it asked.
“April, Mr. Beauchamp. On the surface it’s springtime.”
“And I died in two thousand twelve?” it asked, wheezing.
“As near as we can tell, Mister Beauchamp.”
It grunted, a flatulent gasp of rotten breath, and scowled down at its manacled hands. It shifted its weight in the folding chair, and its good eye lolled up to look at her face.
“I’m hungry.”
She nodded. “Food is coming. Please be patient, Mr. Beauchamp.”
“Real food?” the corpse asked, leaning forward in anticipation.
Joan didn’t answer. Her eyes flicked toward the mirror.
Behind the glass, Bhim took off his spectacles and polished them as he turned to his partner. “Well, it looks like the memory recovery works.”
Mike Reed nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, I suppose, if you remind it who it is all the time. But they still can’t do simple arithmetic.” He stretched one crooked finger toward the mirror. “Look at it, our most promising subject, fidgeting and hiding behind the hunger to avoid answering the question. That’s pretty disappointing.”
“Baby steps, Mike. Last time he couldn’t even remember his name.”
Mike shoved his finger under Bhim’s nose. “Don’t you ‘baby step’ me, Bhim. The time before it remembered its name and calculated its age! Is two-digit subtraction too much to ask?”
Bhim chuckled. “No, but that time he also tried to feed on Joan after three minutes of questioning. Look!” He pointed at the analog clock hanging on the wall. “It’s been nearly twenty minutes, and he’s only now beginning to show the signs. The serum works.”
They turned their attention back to the room, where Joan kept nervously glancing in their direction. The men sighed in unison.
“Okay,” Mike said. “Feed it and get it back to its cage. We’ll try Mister Lamandola.”
~
Four months later, Mister Beauchamp sat at the same table, staring uninterestedly at the voluptuous form of Joan Rothman. Bhim’s grin was infectious, but Mike possessed strong antibodies to good humor.
Mike grabbed the microphone and barked, “Tell it to stop stalling and tell us!”
Joan cringed at the volume, then composed herself. She reached across the table and supportively squeezed the dead thing’s hand. “Please, Mister Beauchamp. It’s been nine weeks since you’ve fed. How often do you think about it?”
It lifted its dead eye and regarded her flatly. It licked its lips, an all-too-human gesture with no biological purpose.
“All the time, Miss Rothman. All the time. It’s hard to think about anything else.”
Behind the mirror, Mike grunted. “You see? It’s like a child molester. All we’ve done is suppress it.”
“Hush,” Bhim said.
“Really?” Joan asked. “Even now, when I was reading to you? After all this time we’ve spent together?”
Beauchamp’s lips peeled back, revealing black, rotten teeth; a smile. “It consumes me.”
“But you control it,” she said, slowly retracting her hand. “Why?”
“It makes me human,” he replied. “Your serum. It makes the urge … Not less, but somehow controllable. I don’t need it anymore. I just want it.”
Bhim didn’t need to look at Mike to feel the ‘I told you so’ eyes boring into his skull.
“What about the food we give you, Mister Beauchamp? Meat? Bread? Water?” Joan asked.
“Call me Jason.” It wasn’t a request.
“Ok, Jason, what about the food we give you? Doesn’t it satisfy you?”
Jason shook his head. A clump of hair tumbled to the floor.
“Increased physical degeneration,” Mike said.
“Shut up!” Bhim replied. “I’m trying to listen.”
“… like it. Do you like steak?” it asked.
Joan nodded.
The zombie gurgled. “I used to love steak. All food, really. I was a chef …” It stared at her longingly.
Joan tapped the intercom twice. She was getting nervous.
“But now?” she asked. Outwardly, she was cool as ice.
“Now it all tastes like nothing.” It continued to leer at her with its good eye, its bad eye drifting lazily around the room. “I move, but I don’t live. I
don’t taste anything. I can’t feel anything. But that’s not the worst of it …”
She tapped the intercom again. “What’s the worst of it, Jason?”
“Shouldn’t we—” Mike started.
“Shush! ” Bhim’s eyes didn’t twitch from the scene in front of him.
It hesitated. “The worst of it …” It froze.
Joan waited.
“The worst is that I don’t want anything. Anything at all.”
The intercom clicked again, twice. “So the serum works, Jason?” she asked. “You said you don’t need to feed now.”
“I don’t need to. Haven’t for weeks. I’m not mindless, you know.”
She smiled at him.
Here it is, Bhim thought.
“What would you do if we set you free, Jason?”
“That’s simple,” it said. “I’d kill you all. And then I’d eat your brains.”
Mike screamed in frustration.
Bhim chuckled despondently. “We’re never getting out of this bunker, are we?”
TWELVE KILOS
Bright red blood squirted between blazing orange polyfiber strips, and Darren’s stomach growled. He twisted the mop again and cursed every droplet that escaped the bucket, destined for the rusted metal grate in the floor. Two, maybe three milliliters spilled per job. Sixteen jobs a day, seven days a week didn’t add up to much, but it did add up. A liter a month might move his family to a higher level, farther from the heat of the core. But this month he wouldn’t even keep his family from the tithe, and he had no one to blame but himself.
Jacelyn heaved the last body onto the autoloader and wiped her red-stained hands on its shirt. He hid his envy. Damned meaters never had to worry about spillage. Meat wouldn’t flop down the drain, wouldn’t soak into clothes and mops and hair. One, maybe two meaters a month didn’t buy out their tithe. A life of luxury.
The body flopped over onto its back, and Darren sighed as he recognized its face. Hal couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and he and Darren’s daughter Felicity had been friends of a sort. A kid that sloppy never should have been a harvester in the first place; lost a kidney last week, a good six feet of intestines the month before, and that’s no way to buy out. A matter of time, this.
His stomach rumbled again.
Jacelyn’s smile distracted him from his reverie, rotted teeth behind pale lips in a face that might once have been pretty. It held more pity than scorn, and he didn’t need a meater’s sympathies, no matter how well intentioned. Sure, blooding came hard, harder still to those with mouths to feed, but an honest day’s work took effort, and let it never be said he didn’t try his best. To break her gaze he pulled his lunch from his pocket, tore open the pouch, and squeezed the gelatinous contents into his mouth. The vegetal, hydroponic slime drowned out the iron tang of blood-stench for two gulps.
His muscles strained as he lifted the bucket onto the hover lift, and he held his breath in anticipation as he swiped his finger across the bar code. He knew, but he didn’t want to.
“Thirty-nine point four kilograms,” the mechanical voice read, dispassionate in its pronouncement. The lift disappeared into the ceiling and he turned around, shoulders slumped. The priest emerged from the wall, a tangle of wires and tubes in a parody of humanoid form, three yellow glass eyes glowing too bright from clusters of internal LEDs.
He bowed his head in fear and shame, and shivered as the cold metal fingers ran through his hair. It took his mother’s voice, as it always did, but none of her tone. “Blooder Darren, your monthly tithe is fourteen thousand four hundred kilograms. The counters tally fourteen thousand three hundred eighty-eight kilograms. Do you acknowledge the discrepancy?”
He licked his chapped lips. “There weren’t enough bodies brought—”
“Do you acknowledge the discrepancy?”
“I do,” he blurted.
“And you accept the responsibility of failure?”
“I do.”
“Then pray.”
They said it together, his exhausted rasp mingling with his long-dead mother’s dulcet monotone. “May the World-Machine forgive my inadequacies. As we sacrifice, so does It, that in Its eternal hunger and torment it might keep us from the Pit Eternal. Amen.”
The priest continued. “In reflection of Its pain, return to your home and prepare.”
He kept his eyes closed as the priest withdrew. He opened them to Jacelyn’s, bright and blue and centimeters from his face. She kneeled in front of him, work suit soaked with sweat.
“How bad?” Her warm breath reeked of onion and rot.
“Twelve kilograms.”
She hissed in a breath. “The tithe, then?” It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t respond. After a moment she stood, and the bloody smears on her knees mocked him. “Maybe they’ll—”
“Just don’t.” He took her offered hand and let her drag him to his feet. “I’ve missed quota three times in five years, but never by more than five. Twelve? They won’t forgive that.”
“They might. You’re a good worker, one of the best blooders I’ve ever seen. They have to see that—”
“No, they don’t. The World-Machine knows no compassion or love or virtue or vice—”
“—only hunger and sacrifice, that it might keep us from the Pit Eternal,” she finished. “Amen.” Her hand on his shoulder left a red-brown streak. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
He left her there, frowning after him, as he punched out and showered before the trip home. Hot water cascaded down his face when the claxon sounded the arrival of another trainload. He’d toweled off before the gunfire began, and wondered which lucky blooder had taken his place.
~
Ona’s heart broke when she met him at the door, eighty minutes early from a ten-hour shift. She didn’t say anything, but he saw it as he brushed black ringlets from her pale face, wrinkled and tight but still beautiful even with tears she couldn’t afford to shed filling her eyes. And then she said nothing, and neither did he, even when Felicity broke down in tears and ran to hide in her room.
He kissed his wife, first her cheek, and then the stub of each hand as she brought them to his lips, the daily gesture a reminder of his unbroken promise those many years ago. As the World-Machine protects us, I will protect you, to the end of all days, to the edges of the Pit, forever and always.
A lesser man would have abandoned her after the accident sixteen years prior. A man of his talents could have had anything; an apartment near the surface where the air came fresh through the purifiers, where shimmers of sunlight might reflect down the shafts to warm his face. He did the work of three, and could have anything that would pay for.
But he wanted only her, and their daughter, and that meant buying out three tithes. Three tithes at thirty kilograms a day, seven days a week. Fourteen thousand four hundred kilograms a month, fourteen thousand forty-eight liters of blood—depending on iron content. His mother told him he couldn’t do it, right up until the moment she stumbled naked and crying from the train car. His father told him he couldn’t do it, but loved him for trying.
But he did it. For sixteen years he’d bought out three tithes, twice or more what any other blooder could manage. He’d killed seven men and four women in fights for the largest puddles, and even with the forfeiture of their blood he earned the right to live, the right for his family to live. His daughter, the spitting image of her mother decades past, his loving wife, and himself. Now one of them had to die.
He never should have picked up that bucket. Flush with morning’s energy, he’d filled it too full, and in his haste he’d slipped. It hit the ground in a geyser, showering him, showering Amy, who laughed and licked it from her lips. She never saw the energy beam that vaporized half her head for her blasphemy, and they’d docked Darren’s tithe as if he’d killed her, five-point-three kilograms on top of the fourteen he�
��d spilled. His appeal had fallen on deaf ears, and though he’d worked as hard as he could those last few hours, he just couldn’t make up the difference.
“My love?”
He shook off his thoughts and tried to smile. Ona hugged him, and whispered in his ear.
“We knew this day would come. You’ve given me so much time, so much I wouldn’t have had. It’s time to let go.”
He shook his head. No, no, no, never.
Behind him Felicity echoed his defiance, amplified it. “No. We can run. We don’t have to do this.”
They turned together, mouths open in shock.
“Honey,” Darren said, “you can’t defy the World-Machine. It protects us from—”
“No. It doesn’t protect anybody. It feeds on us, uses us. It’s nothing but a—”
He slapped her, and slapped her again when she opened her mouth to continue. “Where did you hear these blasphemies?”
She shook her head. “No, I won’t say.”
“But you’ll repeat them.” Ona’s soft rebuke did what his slaps could not.
Felicity’s eyes blazed, but she cast them downward. “I will repeat them. And repeat them and repeat them, until you understand. There is no Pit, or if there is we live in it. The resistance—”
Darren grabbed her shoulders. “The World-Machine is all that stands between us and the Pit. It can’t survive without us, so we do as we must to feed it. If we fail, all is lost. The resistance is work of the Enemy.”
A hint of a sneer crept to her lips. “You feed the Enemy.”
He stepped back. “What?”
“The surface is clean, pure. Anyone can live there.”
Ona shook her head. “Sweet daughter, they’ve fed you lies.”
“I’ve been there.”
His hand stung as he backhanded her to the floor, and he cried out as he kicked her. “You will not blaspheme in my presence, daughter.”
Huddled on the floor, arms wrapped around her legs, she whimpered. “I’ve been there, and it’s beautiful.”
He reared back, and Ona stopped him with a touch. He closed his eyes and fought to compose himself, and dropped to his knees.
In the Garden of Rusting Gods Page 11