by Oliver Atlas
Forgiveness
“She’s dying.”
Skiss’s voice fills the dimly lit cargo hold as I return from the cabin. We’re at altitude and nothing seems to be pursuing, but it can only be a matter of time before either the Duchess or the Mymar come after us. The other two blimps looked sky-worthy. And I don’t even want to guess what other means of flight are available to our foes. For all I know, Mymar can fly on their own. They could be clinging to the side of the blimp already. But that’s all out of my hands. I’m not concerned with forecasting future threats. What I care about is handling our present demise—which is captured well in the fact that when Skiss announces ‘she’s dying,’ I don’t know who ‘she’ is.
But then I see.
It’s Milly. She’s cradled in Skiss’s lap, her eyes closed, her shoulder black and sopping, her mouth moving soundlessly.
“She’s burning up,” adds Skiss. Her voice, normally so calm, is charged with fear. And I know why: there’s no telling what is happening to Milly. On the surface she may be dying, just like those bitten by zombies. But internally she may be changing, morphing into whatever monstrosity inhabits the Duchess. Apparently, the Cure did her no good.
And Zoe? She lies face down a few feet away. When I feel her neck for a pulse, her skin may as well be wet tissue paper, sloughing at the lightest touch. I can make out the faintest heartbeat. In the half-light, I bend close to inspect her neck, seeking the bite marks I spotted in the hangar. They’re already darkish and putrified. The reek from them makes me gag.
Feeling as frigid as Zoe looks, I lock eyes with Skiss. “She’s alive. But she doesn’t have long.”
The dark-eyed woman shakes her head, her face full of grief. “Milly doesn’t either. We need help soon.”
I brush a bit of straw-colored hair from Zoe’s pale forehead. There’s no way we’ll get help in time. We could try for Charonville, hope to find Sheriff Sanchez. I don’t know. Even if he was able to help, my guess is that he’s being watched. My better guess is that he’s already dead. “What we really need,” I tell Skiss, “is your father.”
She lowers her eyes and nods.
“Skiss,” I press. “Where is your father?”
When she doesn’t respond, I repeat my question with more force.
“Blake?” It’s Milly. Her voice is a reedy moan. Rising, I go to kneel beside her, taking her hand in mine.
“Blake,” she repeats, as though fighting to remember my name. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for. It’s going to be okay.”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head almost imperceptibly. “I lied. I knew.”
Now my head is shaking. I don’t know what she’s talking about. Maybe she’s already feverish.
“You need to know,” she continues. “It’s all about her. It’s always been about her.”
I squeeze her hand. “Zoe is going to be okay. You’re going to be okay, too, Milly.”
“No,” she exclaims, opening her eyes and squeezing my hand in return. “Not Zoe. It’s . . . it’s Jenny.”
Puzzled, I frown. “Jenny? I don’t know what you mean.”
“Jenny is . . . I’m sorry, Blake.” Without blinking, her eyes begin to run with tears. “I thought it was the right thing. I thought it was the only thing. I was certain it was justified.” She swallows hard, fighting for breath. “But I’m not sure. I used to think authority meant results, that love meant strong—” She groans in pain—“meant strong decisions, choices that others would be afraid to make. But I was wrong. I stole . . . I stole other people’s choices. I stole your choice. Please forgive me, Blake?”
A thrill fills me as she talks—a mingled thrill of hope and horror. My hope, on the rational surface, is that Milly will be okay. She sounds so present, so convicted, so ready to fight for life. But beneath that impression, I can feel a horror unfolding, an intuition I’m afraid to face. All I can think to say is, “What are you saying about Jenny?”
Milly whispers, so faintly I can barely hear. “She’s the one.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“She’s . . . ” Milly’s eyes close and she shakes her head again while Skiss gently daubs the flowing wound at her shoulder.
“What she wants to say,” says Skiss, with equal gentleness, “is that Jenny is now the Nameless One.”
My hope feels the thrill of horror wrap around it and throttle it. My throat tightens. “What?”
At the tension in my tone, Skiss arches an admonishing eyebrow. “Blake. She asked if you would forgive her.”
I want to be as gentle as Skiss, but my voice comes out hard and flat. “All right, but I need to know what I’m forgiving. Jenny’s the Nameless One? Milly, that doesn’t make sense! Unless Maplenut had her shipped to Oregon in order to . . . ” One glance at Zoe’s pale, bruised form and my words catch in my throat.
“It means Zoe was getting too old,” whispers Milly. “Her period of stasis was ending. The Faction needed a replacement.”
“A replacement?” I stand up, rigid from my knees to my heart. My mind races so quickly I have to grab the sides of my head. “But . . . Milly . . . you knew? You had me take her to Bentlam? To the orphanage?” I begin to pace in the cramped hold, brushing past stacked boxes. My limbs don’t know if they’re charged with pain or fury. “You had me deliver her to the Something Something Eternal Agnostics. But—ha!—Eternal Agnostics! Very clever. That’s just overblown code for those without any allegiance—monks who will sell girls to vampires with one hand and trade entry passes to desperadoes like Yaverts with the other.” I stop and kneel, seizing Milly’s hand. Her eyes open, bright with tears. “Tell me you didn’t know. You couldn’t have known.”
Her lips quaver as she struggles not to weep. She tries to speak and fails, then again. At last she sucks in a long breath, exhaling three quick words: “Blake, I knew.”
I laugh.
I don’t know what else to do. “Milly, I don’t believe you. What good would that do? It doesn’t make any sense that you’d know about Jenny. You loved her. You wanted the Cure. You could have taken her straight to Portland.” I shake my head, grinning without an iota of amusement in my heart. “I don’t believe you.”
Her tears flow freely now. “At first I didn’t know. I meant to get Jenny to Malcolm. But . . . but in Union Powder Yaverts revealed himself as a member of the Museum. He told me the plan. He asked me to be a decoy to East and South. He wanted them divided about whether to go after the girl or stick with me for fear of any knowledge I had to give Malcolm.”
I don’t know what to say. I stare at her, speechless.
Weakly, Milly raises a hand toward my face. “If the Faction had a viable replacement candidate, the Nameless One would become expendable, disposable. By giving them Jenny on our own time, we made them relax their grip on Zoe. For the first time in years, we had a chance to get hold of the key to the Cure.”
“But we had Jenny!” I shout. “We could have taken her to Schlozfield!”
Milly shakes her head, flinging tears. “Blake, we couldn’t turn Jenny into . . . ”
“Into what?” I kneel down beside the broken little girl and lightly touch her hair. “Into this? This is a girl, Milly. This is Zoe. She’s just like Jenny. This is not the Nameless One. This is not ‘the source.’ I’ll tell you what this girl is. She’s your doom. And she’s mine. Do you want to see the evidence of our need for a Cure of more than the Infection? Do you want to see proof? Here she is, Milly—here she is: proof that we’re caught in webs of our own weaving, bumbling through illusions of our own high morality and good intentions.”
Milly tries to speak but I cut her off with a new, bitter laugh. My heart is pounding in my eyes. “You—or Schlozfield—or somebody—thought we were too good to do our own dirty work. We were too moral to turn Jenny outright into the experiment we needed. And if I understand you—and I’m hoping I don’t—since we didn’t want to torture Jenny ourselves, we gave her over t
o be tortured so that her torturers would drop their guard and we could rescue a girl they’d already brutalized—without any intention of healing her! Is that morality? Is that nobility? Is that humanity? Is it such fine-tuned frontal lobe cogitations that make us so much better than the dead-heads or the Mymar? Is that what Pastor Jon ought to mean when he says we’re made in God’s image?—that everything exists for us to consume if we can only figure out how to pretend we deserve it? Or is it simply that our lives and dreams demand bloodshed but our hypocritical minds can’t stand the sight of the stuff? Well, I’ll tell you what,” I say, almost gasping, fighting to get ahold of my tone and volume. “I’d rather die than be infected by such high and mighty morality.”
The quaver in Milly’s lip has won. She’s weeping freely, pouring out the remainder of strength left in her body.
Skiss, her eyes more beautifully haunting than ever, looks at me with a deep sadness.
I shrug.
Yes, to my horror, I shrug—and cooly at that, as if I don’t care. The gesture says I don’t care if Milly is heartbroken and unforgiven. It says I don’t care if Skiss is shocked and disappointed in me. It says I’m done with Oregon. It says I’m done with the Cure. It says I’m done with trying to look out for anyone but myself. A power comes over me—a terrible, childish, hellish power—and I turn my back on them. A small part of me screams for my feet to stop as I head for the cabin. One step. Two steps. It’s a short, short, fearfully short walk. A few more steps and I won’t be able to turn back.
And I won’t turn back—
The larger part of me resounds with the power of the steely declaration:
I won’t turn back.
For all the challenges I’ve faced since arriving out west, I know I’m about to fail the most important. I’m about to give in to the worst infection of all.
But then I hear Milly whisper my name. I shouldn’t be able to hear her, not over the whine of the zeppelin’s engines and the whipping of the wind outside, not over the war drum of my own heart. But I do. I hear her say, “Blake Samuel Prose . . . ” And then I hear her say three more words:
“I love you.”
And then I’m saved. The war drums quiet and my eyes turn blurry. I spin, I reel, I go to her, kneeling and taking her from Skiss, cradling her in my arms and kissing her forehead. All I can say is “I’m sorry.” Over and over again. It’s all I can say. All other words have abandoned me.
I’m sorry for my pride. I’m sorry for my weakness. I’m sorry for the way of the world. Most of all, I ache with sorrow that I could actually refuse forgiveness to a friend in need, that in sudden, self-righteous anger I could deny to another—even a dear friend—the mercy and grace that has saved my life and soul so many countless times, so many times more than I know.
And yet I ache with joy as well. I ache because grace, in its irrepressible magic, has found its way to me through the one I was about to forsake. Grace, in its irresistible kindness, has fought through at just the right time to save me from a damning moment and deliver me into the possibilities of hope.
Full of sorrow, I can only keep repeating, “I’m sorry.” But full of joy as well, the words are charged with a strange and ecstatic, Thank you.
When my tears are drained and my throat is sore, Milly finally opens her eyes. She smiles, and there is a hint of familiar impish mystery in the creases around her morning blue eyes. “I forgive you,” she says, reaching up to touch my lips with her fingertips. “Do you forgive me?”
I take her hand and squeeze it. “I do.”
“Good,” she whispers, squeezing back. “Because I think I know how to save Jenny.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
The Apocalypse Comes to Paradise
The lights of Bentlam rise to view an hour before dawn, sparkling across the zombie-littered plains. Even from five thousand feet, I can see the dead stumbling about, roaming patches of shadow, crowding the invisible perimeter of the outer pylons. From the air, it’s more clear than ever that they hunger for Bentlam, for something inside it. It’s clear the city is why they come to Oregon. That’s why the zombies wander west. They’ve come out of an unearthly need. Mindless as they may be, something in them knows their doom lies within the city wall. Something in them sensed Zoe from afar . . .
Something in them must now sense Jenny.
A glance at my GPS indicates that, as I’d expect, the city is clear of zombies. There isn’t a single red dot beyond its pylons’ unseen fence, let alone within its giant walls.
But that is all about to change.
My back is sore. For the last hour I’ve been unloading tightly sealed thirty pound bags from the boxes in the cargo hold and heaving them into a vault-like device built into the back of the ship. The boxes were all marked MinF-q36. According to Milly, MinF-q36 is an experimental compound able to induce a temporary zombie state. The moment she told me her plan, I thought it was insane. And brilliant.
Turn the population into zombies for a day. Get in. Get out.
The best part of the plan was that it gave me the chance to rescue Jenny without killing anyone. The worst part was that it required killing everyone. In a manner of speaking. But I immediately figured it was our best chance at making things right.
After an hour mulling the plan while slinging bags, I finally add things up. My mind flashes back to Marks Lake, to the four seemingly dead hunters who woke up claiming to have seen a balloon on Tuesday only to wake up on Thursday. It flashes further back to all the strangely fresh zombies on the road out of Sumpter Dredge. My hands curl into fists.
They were alive.
I can see them all again, the spotless zombie, marching dumbly out of the mists of memory. I can see myself shooting them, reluctant but deadly. They were alive. That explains their unripped clothing and unmarked bodies. They were people infected temporarily—temporarily!—by this damned MinF-q36.
I stop slinging the bags and ruffle my hair. “I’m a killer.” I stand there in a daze. “I killed people.”
Skiss sits with her back against a box, cradling our two unconscious companions in her lap. “Blake! There’s no time for guilt. And there is no cause. If you mean you killed people infected by this compound, you didn’t know. You couldn’t have known.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I whisper, on the verge of screaming. “I. Killed. Them.”
“Blake,” she says, her gentle voice filled with its own strange ferocity. “If there’s one thing that’s clear to me about this mess, it’s that we can’t pretend to be any better or smarter than we are. We’re messy. We’re messed up. But we have to hope there’s a grace in our desire to get better, a power sufficient to work through our mess.” Skiss must catch that I’m trying to shut her out because she snaps her fingers and voice, all at once. “Blake! Wake up! Is there absurdity in the world? Is there pointless tragedy? There is as far as we can see. Trust me, I know. I grew up in a brothel. My body and heart learned to live in absurdity. I even learned to re-see the world so that tragedy disappeared, even though that made hope for a better life nearly disappear too. But am I a waste now? Is hope not real or good because of how my life was? Do my scars mean I can’t heal? Do my scars define me?” Skiss holds out a hand to me. Numbly, I step out and take it. “We can’t get out of the mess,” she soothes, smiling faintly, “but maybe together we can find the strength to stay in it and help put things right. Left to ourselves, we’ll break for sure. But together . . . Blake, our scars don’t define us anymore.”
I don’t normally respond well to pep talks, no matter how sincere or insightful. I’m too proud. I’m too addicted to the illusion of my own self-possession. But something in Skiss—in her tone, her eyes, her story—is a grace to me and I see my pride for what it is: small, shriveled, clutching, petty.
Exhaling a mighty breath, I nod in agreement. “Okay. Then let’s do this.”
Using the cargo straps on the side of the hold, we fasten Milly and Zoe to the walls. Once they’re secure, we don gas mas
ks found in the cabin.
“Are you sure about this?” asks Madame Rogger, ducking back from the cockpit, already in her gas mask.
I raise empty hands. “Any better ideas?”
She snorts. “Probably. Just give me an hour.”
“And there’s the rub,” I say, bending down so Skiss can help me put on my parachute. “We don’t have an hour.”
Madame Rogger nods. “You want me to start circling?”
“Yes. In about two minutes. Start at the center of the city and circle outwards. Keep a good elevation at all times. Who knows what kind of defenses they have. You’ll want time to react if they launch anything at us. And besides, the higher we are, the more distribution we’ll get.”
“How fast do you think the stuff goes to work?”
“We’re about to find out.”
With my boot knife, I slit open a leftover bag of the MinF-q36. Skiss dips her gloved fingers into the greenish liquid and sprinkles it in the faces of our dying friends.
In that instant, Milly’s eyes snap open. They’re opaque. A moment later, her mouth does too. It’s contorted in a snarl. Zoe is next. Her eyes bulge and her waif-like features ripple with the strain of infection. The two of them begin wailing and writhing.
“It looks like zombification is fairly prompt,” I remark dryly, trying not to shiver at the sight of the little girl turning into a monster. “Maybe that bit of the Cure got them each well enough to respond to the infection, but who knows how long it can last.” I turn to Madame Rogger. “Once you’ve sprayed the whole city, get them to Portland. If we’re lucky, this state should buy them about a day of stasis. That’s just enough time to get them to Schlozfield, if he’s still alive. I don’t trust him, but I can’t think of anyone else who might be able to help.”
Madame Rogger shoots me a mock salute and returns to the helm.
Skiss doffs her gloves and takes my hands. “It’s going to be madness down there.”