“You’re late.”
Harmony shrugged, snagged the cigarette from his hand, and took a drag. It was more ritual than necessity. The first night she’d killed one of them, this was how they met. She clung to those little details, like they would save her. Maybe she’s right. He didn’t try to understand the whole ritual or faith thing. All he knew was that a few drags on a cigarette wouldn’t deaden her sense of smell nearly as much as either of them would like. He smoked more often. The childhood warnings about cancer weren’t relevant anymore, not to them. If they stayed here, kept fighting, they’d die before there was any time for the carcinogens to have an impact, and the cigarettes helped. Even a slight deadening of scent and taste was a benefit in their line of work. Corpse-feeders stank.
Chris took the cigarette back. “Trouble?”
“Not really. Drunk earlier than usual. Sometimes, I think he hates me.” Harmony shrugged and looked away, but not before he saw the flicker of sadness she would deny if he asked about it. For all of her strengths, she still wanted a life that they’d never know again.
When the god awakened, society changed, and short of killing Nidhogg, the odds of finding the sort of society they’d once known were exceedingly slim. Of course, the odds of killing a god were slimmer still. Nidhogg was here, was real, and was staying. To those who questioned, it was pretty obvious that he wasn’t as omnipotent as he claimed. If he were all-powerful, they wouldn’t be resisting, killing his devoted Nidos, and refusing to obey him.
However, the faith that strengthened him was impossible to negate: he was real. Denying his existence was hard to do when he lived, breathed, and consumed them. The more they believed, the stronger he grew. Even those who wanted his death strengthened him with their thoughts of him. It didn’t matter whether they loathed or loved him. They thought of him, and that was enough.
How do you deny what is undeniably here?
The answer to that question was one the philosophers in the resistance pondered at length. Chris wasn’t a philosopher; even now that a god had come to earth, he wasn’t prone to a lot of metaphysical contemplation. His skills were far more practical: he killed monsters.
“Which area did we draw tonight?” Harmony walked close enough to his side that she appeared to be with him. Together they looked like a couple undaunted by the regulations that had spread up most of the eastern part of the country.
“Old Downtown.” He draped an arm around her shoulders, reminding himself that they had agreed that it wasn’t personal for either of them. Even though that’s a lie. The illusion required acting like a couple often enough that a good team had to be able to appear completely at ease. They had to look like they were together; teams were a harder target if they were convincing. The challenge, of course, was remembering that it was to be an act.
He and Chastity had allowed themselves to forget, and when she died, he hadn’t been sure he wanted to keep living. Of course, loving her was the only thing that had made living matter in the first place. He had no religion, no family, nothing but the fight and his partner. When he lost his first partner, he had tried to lose himself in a drunken haze he’d had absolutely no intention of coming out of.
He lifted bottle after bottle, shook them, and tossed them aside. “Empty. Every damn bottle is empty, Chas.”
Saying her name wasn’t enough though. He’d kept on talking to her like she was there, but she never answered.
Three more bottles were rejected. The fourth had a good inch of liquid—hopefully gin—in it. Unfortunately, it also had a cigarette butt floating in it. He paused, shrugged, and lifted the bottle to his lips.
“That’s disgusting, Chris.”
He turned. “Chas?” He lowered the bottle, holding it loosely in his hand. “You’re dead.”
She didn’t say anything, but her head bowed momentarily. After what sounded like a sob, she crossed the room and took the bottle from him. “It’s not your fault.”
“I was late. If I hadn’t been late—”
“You’d be dead too,” she interrupted.
“I’d rather be dead.”
She slapped him. “You’d rather let them kill you? Let him eat your corpse? What happened to fighting?”
“I can’t fight without you.” He pulled her to him. He knew now that it was a dream. It had to be a dream because dead girls don’t slap people, but he would rather sleep than wake if that meant Chastity was with him. “I need you, Chas. I love you.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but he kissed her before she spoke. Her kisses were different, but he couldn’t expect a dream to be the same as the real thing.
When he pulled away, he told her all the things he had told her since they’d first fallen into bed. “I love you. I can’t do this alone. I need you here. Now.”
“You’ll fight?” She stepped away. “Promise me, Chris. You’ll fight. No giving up. . . . They killed Chastity. You have to fight. Help me fight them.”
“I will,” he agreed. Something in her words was wrong. He paused, but then she kissed him.
Chastity let him undress her, and they made love.
Later, when he sobered up, he realized that it wasn’t a dream at all—nor was it Chastity.
“I need you to train me,” Harmony said. “My sister wouldn’t want you—or me—to die.”
“You’re not . . .” He put an arm over his eyes. “I didn’t mean . . . Tell me I didn’t force—”
“I said yes, Chris. You needed to think I was her, and it’s probably for the best. Partners need to be at ease with each other. Now, you . . . you should be at ease with me, right? It’ll help.”
“Partners?” He moved his arm and stared up at her.
“I’m not interested in replacing her”—she made a vague waving gesture toward the mattress on his floor where she’d just been—“there. I want to be your partner on the streets, though. You trained her. Train me. I’ll fight.”
“No.”
Ten months later, she was every bit as good a fighter as Chastity had been. A year after that, she was more lethal and still looked enough like Chastity that more than a few people mistakenly called her by her dead sister’s name, but there was no way he’d ever mistake them for one another now that he’d gotten to know Harmony.
The elder Davis sister had been a good soldier, devoted to the fight; up until the day she died, Chastity had done her job and done it well, too. She killed any of the creatures—human and other—that served Nidhogg. She was still soft though; she wept when she killed humans, not in the moment, but afterward when they were home. Harmony, on the other hand, didn’t cry. She also didn’t laugh the way Chastity had. Sometimes, when she’d won in a fight where she been outnumbered or overpowered initially, she smiled with the sort of relaxed joy that Chastity often took in little things. But the only things that seemed to make Harmony that happy were victories in the almost-lost fights. Getting close to the edge of death and winning, that was where Harmony found her joy.
Chris stuffed the extinguished cigarette butt into his pocket. The nicotine-stained filters would be recycled again and again until they were so noxious that they were of no use as cigarettes. Some fighters tore little bits of them off to use as nose plugs, but he hadn’t yet gotten to that point. If he survived long enough, he would, but counting on surviving was foolish. Maybe if they lived farther north, they’d have better odds, but if they stayed this close to the god’s lair, they were just biding time. In the days before the god’s arrival, people stayed in dead-end towns, in dead-end jobs, in dead-end relationships rather than take the risk of something new. He’d sworn he would be different, but here he was, staying in a town where dying young was inevitable. Because Harmony won’t leave. If he could convince her to move, they could try to find a safer place, but she only cared about the fight. And I only care about her.
He hadn’t meant to fall in love with his dead girlfriend’s sister, but he had—not that he’d be foolish enough to tell her: Harmony didn’t be
lieve in love. She’d told him early on, “Two of the three people I’ve loved are dead. The third is a drunk. Love’s a bad idea.” So Chris kept the words to himself and did his best to keep them both alive.
As usual with Chris, Harmony didn’t feel the need to distract either of them with unnecessary chatter. As he did that first night, he kept his arm around her as they walked. Silently, she checked that item off her mental list, too, and he didn’t comment on her insistence of replicating so many small details every night they went hunting. All he ever said was that it provided an excuse to keep their voices low as well as presenting a unified front against any watching devotees of the New Faith. Sometimes, in the thoughts she never shared, she thought of her fellow fighters as devotees of a faith, too. They were devoted to a god who hadn’t yet appeared, who maybe never would, but she believed he or she had to be out there in the universe. It was a quiet belief, with the sort of small rituals and whispered prayers that wouldn’t draw attention—or maybe it was a fantasy as much as Chastity’s dreams of a different future. Either way, it was better than the New Faith.
Most of the faithful were zealots, and like all zealots, they focused on some facts to the exclusion of all others. They had proof that their faith was true: their god was here on Earth. They didn’t want to discuss the fact that their god required human sacrifice, that he ate corpses, that a great destroyer wasn’t doing any favors to the civilization on Earth.
Within months after Nidhogg’s devotees revealed the presence of their corpse-eating god, all flights and ships from North America were refused docking or runway access across the globe. Any flights attempting access to foreign nations were summarily shot down; boats were sunk. Humans helped the Nidos—the reptilian creatures that had appeared and served Nidhogg—and the New Faith spread to South America within months. Within two years, most of North and South America was reduced to sporadic internet and telephone access with the outside world.
All of that had happened when she was still a kid. She’d never been outside the country, that she could remember. There were pictures of a trip to Europe when she was in elementary school, but by the time she was nine, everything had changed. There were vague memories of a life before the New Faith, but most of what she’d known was after Nidhogg. At seventeen, she’d lived half of her life under the pall of the New Religion. Sometimes, Harmony thought it was for the best: she didn’t want to remember a life that would never be again.
Since Nidos, despite their mostly human appearance, were—like Nidhogg itself—reptilian, they were unable to flourish in the upper reaches of North America. They could also be killed, and that was the chief victory of the resistance so far: they killed monster after monster. No one knew if it had any real impact. Killing the creatures, and the humans who supported them, had led to a few reclaimed towns—and the scant bit of useful intel that they had.
Despite some small victories, the exodus north had continued, but that was as far away from the corpse-eating new god that one could get. Although the access point between Alaska and Asia had not yet been breached by the Nidos, the fear of it was enough that humans weren’t allowed to cross into Asia either. People still tried, and stories circulated online of people claiming to have succeeded, but the truth was that anyone who tried to cross that barrier ended up dead for their efforts. The world that Harmony had been born into was long gone, and unless they could kill a god, it wouldn’t be returning to the relative safety they’d once known.
Chris finally asked, “Did you hear about Taylor?”
“He was a good guy. At least he got a clean death.” Harmony respected Taylor’s partner, Jess, a little bit more for putting the bullet in Taylor. Bullets attracted attention, but Jess had risked it to assure that he wasn’t thrown into one of the Nidos’ vats while still alive. Everyone who knew about the urns filled with decaying corpses was terrified of drowning in one.
When she’d first seen the photographs of the stew of dead bodies that the Nidos lived off of, she’d retched. That image was one of the ones that never stopped haunting her. She still woke from nightmare images of her mother’s face in the rot-filled water, from cold sweats in dreams that she was drowning in the decay of people she knew.
“I’d shoot you, you know,” Chris assured her; his words filled in the silence that had stretched out while horrors filled her mind. “I’d kill you before I’d let them throw you in one of those things.”
“I know.” She looked up at him, and he kissed her forehead. For one of those perfect quiet moments, she wondered what life would’ve been like if she’d been born only a decade earlier. “Is it weird to be comforted by promises to be killed?”
“Not if it’s a choice between quick death and something horrible,” Chris said.
“I’d kill you, too,” she added.
“I know.”
They lapsed back into silence then, and Harmony debated asking him about the differences in the world. He was three years older than her; it didn’t seem like a big difference now, but he’d known a world she could only try to imagine, been old enough to truly see the change. For as long as she remembered, this was the only world.
Chastity leaned against the wall. Her knees were bent, and she looked shakier than Harmony had ever seen her.
“You’re lucky,” she whispered. “If we hadn’t seen you . . .”
“You did.” Harmony listened to the sound of yelling outside their room. Their father had thrown something. Since Mom died, he was drunk more days than not. After what Harmony had seen tonight, she’d thought about stealing one of his bottles of vodka. Bodies floated in various stages of decomposition, arms and legs tangled together, eyes wide open and staring lifelessly. She’d stood silently looking into the giant cistern of corpses, too disgusted to even scream.
“You can’t go back there, Harm,” Chastity warned.
“I needed to know. . . . I just wanted . . .”
“Mom’s not in there, and anyone that is in there is beyond our help.” Chastity reached out, winced, and glanced at her arm. Her sleeve was wet with blood, but she kept her arm outstretched. “Come here.”
Instead of accepting the hug her sister offered, Harmony grabbed the first-aid box on Chastity’s dresser. Once, they’d both had jewelry boxes sitting there. Harmony’s was pink; Chastity had a matching red one. Now, the things that littered the surface of Chastity’s dresser included knives, bandages, and bottles of antiseptic.
Their mother had taught both girls to sew, and every time they did this, Harmony thought of her. Of course, she’d intended for them to sew skirts, not skin. Harmony cleaned her sister’s wound, and then she threaded the needle with the deep-blue fiber that she would have to snip and tug out later. Not getting the disintegrating thread meant going to the hospital, and hospitals were like grocery stores to the Nidos. It wasn’t openly acknowledged, but there had been enough reports of disappearances that anyone who paid attention realized that the claim of “only taking freely offered corpses” was a lie. As the population dwindled, the natural-death rate wasn’t high enough to satisfy Nidhogg’s appetites.
“Promise me, Harmony.” Chastity lifted her gaze from the needle that Harmony held ready. “I want you to be safe. Once we’re able, we’re going to get out of here. We’ll go north, start over somewhere else. You, me, Christian, and Daddy. It’ll be better.”
Harmony bit down on her lip, pinched the sides of her sister’s knife wound closed, and tried to keep her stitches straight and tight.
“Everything will be different when we get out of here. It’ll be better,” Chastity promised.
Neither of them commented on their father’s drunken ranting on the other side of the barred bedroom door. They were all coping with her mother’s death differently. Chastity fought; their father drank; and Harmony tried to ignore the increased number of missing neighbors, the way her sister insisted she stay in after dark, and the stench of her father’s almost nightly descents into oblivion.
Things never got bette
r for Chastity or their father, and none of them believed that they were going to improve. Chastity was wrapped in a sheet and set aflame on a bier to prevent the corpse eaters from consuming her. Their father was rarely sober, and Harmony had no expectation of living too many years longer. Chastity’s hopes for another life had been a fantasy; this was reality.
Would it be worse to think you had a future and lose it?
Harmony had been eight when the new god arrived. She’d never really known a world where there was any doubt that gods could be real. All she could do was kill the monsters and hope that if this god was real, so were other—better—gods.
“Are you going to stay quiet all night?” Chris prodded.
“Sorry.” She leaned her head against him briefly. “Dad was weird; we’re working downtown; the news about Taylor . . . I guess I’m feeling . . . I don’t know.”
“Me too,” he said.
“We’re almost there. Let’s go kill something. Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll get more than one tonight.”
The shift in Harmony’s mood as she pondered the inevitable violence in their night was markedly different from Chris’ reaction. Every time they cornered a Nido, Chris was filled with fear of losing Harmony. Afterward, he was cheered, but until they were past the fighting, he was apprehensive. Harmony was comforted by the prospect of violence—of revenge—in ways he almost envied.
They entered Old Downtown and started to prowl the clubs. There weren’t as many people out this near curfew. Those who were fell into one of four categories: the devoted, the deniers, the deadly, or the dying. Which category a person fell into wasn’t always apparent at first sight. There were cues, of course. The people still denying the hell they were living in were the ones most likely to be wearing shoes not suited for running. Admittedly, though, the dying were prone to such folly on occasion. They weren’t necessarily rushing to their deaths, but sometimes their “what happens, happens” approach meant that they were as likely to flee from the corpse-feeders as not. The devoted wore shoes fit for running down prey. The deadly were clad in boots, easier to load with weapons and still useful for running.