Shadow looks at me in the eerie light from the projector. “The days when there was an opposition party at all.”
“Before they were all assassinated by Bloods.”
A picture flashes up on the sheet, a photo of Shay’s young wife. She is beautiful and strikingly like Josephine, when you look for the similarities. One part of the news report is true: Olivia was far too young to have died. The rest seems to be a completely bastardized version of events.
“How do you know Josi’s yours?” I ask.
“Olivia and I had been together for years before she got pregnant. She was unable to leave Shay but they were estranged.”
“Why couldn’t she leave?”
“He’s a violent monster with an army to protect him.” Shadow hesitates, then admits, “I did plan to get her out. It consumed me for years but before I got the chance she was dead. Along with our daughter.” He looks me full in the face now. “There’s no way Olivia died of the plague. Shay killed her when he discovered her plan to leave him.”
“Have you spoken to Josi about this?”
He doesn’t reply.
“Have you spoken to her about anything since she got back?”
“She doesn’t want to talk.”
“Shadow, what the fuck?” I snap, losing patience. “All she cared about was getting you back. She didn’t sleep, she hardly ate, she was desperate at the thought of you suffering. And what have you fucking done? Huh? Ignored her?”
“I was out there every day, searching the plains for her.”
“And yet you can’t even talk to her now. Grow a spine, mate. She’s your daughter and she’s drowning and you’re doing nothing to help her.”
He doesn’t reply, surprise surprise.
“We don’t get much anymore, but we get each other,” I say. I look him up and down and can’t help the disgust that fills my voice. “You’re not even cured.”
I turn and walk across the big silo.
“You’re all twisted up, kid,” he says, not bothering to raise his voice. “Come and have a spar. Settle down.”
“I don’t have the stomach for it tonight,” I reply. “I don’t have the stomach for you.”
I don’t know where to go after that. I can’t face my bed without Josephine, and everywhere else down here seems suddenly so oppressive I might suffocate in my sleep. So I walk to the cliff, and I climb down even though it’s dangerous with a hand I can’t rely on, one that hurts so bad by the time I get to the bottom that I think I might pass out. I walk onto the sand and straight to the water, wading out and out in the dark. There’s a moon above, but it’s a baby and hardly sheds any light.
I don’t know what I’m fighting for anymore. Ghosts who’ll never come back to life. People who don’t care that they’re able to feel. A loveless, childless future.
I suppose there’s one thing I can rely on. Killing the man who’s responsible for all of this will feel good.
*
April 5th, 2068
Dave
I’m in a group returning from the farm when it happens. We’ve just climbed down into the first tunnel. Josi and Zach are up ahead with a group of kids. Luke and Will are bringing up the rear, and not one of them is paying attention. They’ve spent too much time in these tunnels without anything happening and they’ve forgotten. Not intellectually, but physically. They’ve forgotten inside their guts how dangerous the belly of the world is. But I haven’t – I can’t seem to think about much else.
So it’s me who’s uncomfortable when Lawrence plays his usual game of “poke the sleeping bear”. Except he’s not poking sleeping bears, he’s poking very much awake cannibals. The rest of us pass the Fury gate with nothing more than a few loathsome glances their way, but Lawrence hangs back to tease them. He lives deep in the delusion of his own invincibility: the privilege and curse of the young.
I pause, watching him. I’m nervous, so I catalog it. There seem to be a lot of Furies today, and they grow more and more savage the longer he stands there, prodding at them with his knife.
Luke reaches me and follows my gaze. “Lawrence,” he barks. “Get moving, idiot.”
“Coming,” Lawrence assures him cheerfully, but doesn’t come anywhere, and to my consternation Luke continues on without waiting for the kid.
I hesitate, unsure what to do. My hands are vibrating.
“Leave the loser,” Henrietta tells me as she walks past, flashing me a beaming smile that could rival a floodlight for intensity. “Lawrence, you muppet,” she shouts.
He laughs and gives a last stab.
But it seems today is the day he learns what comes after pride.
The gate gives a lurching creak. I freeze.
The world slooo o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o ows.
Dreamlike, I watch.
As the volume of bodies behind the iron gate becomes too much for the hinges, even fortified as they are. As the gate slams down on top of Lawrence and the Furies flood over him, trying to reach him through the metal. I listen as the boy screams under the crushing hungry weight.
I’m closer than the others, but I don’t move.
It’s Henrietta who flashes past me, her blond hair streaking out like a horse’s tail. It glitters, almost. She has a knife but it’s too small for the number of opponents. Still she attacks them, trying to force them off the gate. Luke and Will blaze past, weapons raised. The others barrel into the fray too, hacking and slashing at Furies in a throbbing bleeding mess. I see Josi cleave a machete through a head, despite her pact, despite everything. I watch Luke drag Lawrence out from under the gate and fling the smaller boy over his shoulder. He is a ragdoll to my brother’s mighty form, the one forcing its way out through the hungry snarling bodies as the others try to make a path for them. But Henrietta is too deep. I can see her in there, a flash of her face here, a flicker of her hair there, obstructed by the pale veined shapes of monsters. A sound is drawn from my mouth – do the others know she can’t get free? They’re all falling back now, unaware.
All except Will. I watch the boy plunge through, teeth and nails tearing at him as he fights his way to the girl. I lose sight of him in the madness – Luke is sprinting past with an unconscious Lawrence and shouts at me to run – but after a few seconds I see Will surge back into view, this time dragging Hen beneath his body so the Furies won’t reach her. I don’t hear it but I can see his blood-drenched face cry out in pain and fury and the fight of it all and he isn’t stopping, he won’t stop, I can see it in his body as he drags her through.
I slam my eyes shut.
I don’t feel stress. I solve problems.
So where is the solution to this problem? Why am I not finding it? Or even searching for it? Why am I standing here, stolen away by the sudden alarming existence of beauty within this horror?
Around me the noise is a screech of violent music. Voices raised in fear and pain and hunger and rage rage rage. Metal grating on concrete. The thunder of footsteps and heartbeats and blood in my ears. The throbbing swell of it all, like the crescendo of a movement, like all the instruments in the world have come to join the trembling rise.
Open your eyes. Open them.
I open my eyes. Josi is there now, fighting to reach Will, and I give a choked gasp of relief (swiftly cataloged) before I see the ocean of limbs crash upon her and force her under.
Gunshots ring out, cutting through the cacophony as nothing else can. They are so swift they must be coming from an automatic weapon. Which means … Yes, there’s Shadow – he’s the only one who carries a machine gun. He’s on the other side of it all, having just come in from the farm, and he’s hailing bullets into the mess. Bodies drop, reduced to the meat they are. Josi surges free – she’s lost her machete but now carries dual knives. They twirl and slice with a life of their own, a dance of their own, and oh, how she moves, how she moves through it all to reach Will and help him drag Henrietta free.
“Shadow! Go back up!” Josi shouts, but I see the olde
r man remain where he is, firing and reloading and firing and reloading. How many of the creatures are there? From which bowel of hell have they crawled?
“Dave! Get moving!” Will roars as he tears past. Henrietta is lolling woozily between him and Josi, who grabs me by the wrist and wrenches me along with them. My feet kick slowly into action, moving as if underwater. I’m humiliated by whatever it is that I am; the feel and stench of it is hot.
I’m unable to keep up but Josi turns back often, cutting down any of the beasts that get too close and then tugging me along. We make it to another gate and slam it shut behind us, blocking off any access to the farm. The Furies surge at the gate and I think for a terrifying moment that they will break through this one too, I’m sure of it. The hinges will creak the same, the metal will fall the same, the monsters will flood the same.
“Dave!” Josi shouts near my ear. The suddenness of the sound catches hold of my attention and I remember to run. I’m not sure how long it takes us to get home. I’ve stopped marking the passing of time in this dream, this nightmare. Gates shut behind us, all of them seeming so flimsy to me now, so pitiable. What is metal and fusion when faced with the unquenchable rage of humanity?
The infirmary appears suddenly: I’ve forgotten where we’re running, or why.
I watch Josi and Will place Henrietta gently on a bed. Luke is already here with Lawrence, bidding Zach to hurry. All look wan with fatigue but in my eyes there is a glow to their skin, a glow made entirely of the spirits inside them, the wailing courage of the impossible battle they fight against mortality.
I move toward them and see that Zachariah is fitting a drip into Lawrence’s vein. The boy’s chest looks … caved in. I reel back in shock, involuntarily lifting a hand to cover my mouth. Somehow he’s still awake through the mess of his body.
“You better bloody well fix this,” he says to Zach.
“Shut your mouth,” Zach snaps. “It’s what got you into this mess in the first place, idiot.”
“I’m not ready to go,” Lawrence says, looking at Luke now.
Luke reaches for his hand. “You’re not going anywhere, mate.”
“Good, because I’m not ready. Is Hen okay?”
“She’s fine.”
We see the moment the morphine or whatever it is hits him because he goes droopy and delirious. “Do you want to know a secret?”
“Sure, mate.”
“I love it down here. Everyone hates it but I love it because a place isn’t home unless it’s filled with people to love and that’s us, you know? I really fucking love you all. There’s a roof to the world and you found a way to break it open and now we’re all flying … We’re flying …” He loses consciousness.
“That shut him up,” Zach mutters, but I can hear the tremor in his voice, see the sheen in my brother’s eyes. I, too, feel something at the boy’s carelessly generous words. I feel … something. But as I try to catalog it I realize I haven’t the faintest hope of identifying it. Josi is here now and I think she might feel it too. She’s watching Lawrence very closely. As though she has recognized the words, or the opening in the sky described by a delirious boy.
“What have you gotta do, man?” Luke asks Zach.
“I can’t see anything without an X-ray or a CT so I have to open him up and repair any of the organs that got crushed and reset the broken bones. This level of bruising has to mean internal bleeding.”
“Yeah, plus his chest is, like, angling the wrong way.”
“Yeah, plus that.”
“Well, get to it then.”
“I am!” Zach hisses. “Back off, Townsend!”
Luke raises his hands and quickly moves back.
“Take a breath,” Josi orders Zach and I watch him do so.
“I can do this,” he says to himself. “This is something that I can do.” He takes another breath and then uses a scalpel to open Lawrence’s chest. Blood spurts and trickles. What remains of the chest plate must be pulled open so he can reach inside and feel through the gruesome meat to find what’s wrong. The sight makes me lightheaded.
That’s when we hear, “Help!” and spin to see that Henrietta is pointing at Will’s unconscious body on the ground.
“Will!” Josi flings herself to the floor beside him. She shakes him but he doesn’t wake.
Luke scoops him up and places him on a third bed. “He’s not breathing and I can’t feel a pulse.”
“Start CPR,” Zach orders with his hands wrist deep in another boy’s chest cavity. “I’m tied up here.”
“Where the fuck is Claire?” Josi roars. “Dave – get your mother!”
I am disoriented as I watch Luke pump Will’s chest. Josi leans to breathe air into his blue lips. He looks like a wax figure. A doll made to resemble a boy. Something has gone from him. But still they work.
Luke’s putting his whole body into pumping. I realize with a start that he’s looking straight at me as he does so. His eyes are calm and I think: this is his superpower. Being able to find true calm, not the manufactured kind. Facing disaster with his steel green eyes and shaping it to his will.
“Dave,” he says. “Pinch the inside of your wrist as hard as you can.”
I don’t understand but I do as he says. It’s all so dreamlike. Who am I to deny him anything?
The pain is sudden and sharpens everything in my mind to a knife-edge.
“Go get Mom.”
And I’m running.
*
Josephine
I breathe all of my will into his lips, all of my fury and determination and I think to him, to the universe, I will not let this happen. You are not dying, Will.
To Luke I say, “Not Will.”
He nods once, still pumping hard and fast and calm. “We’re not getting anything from him, Zach.”
“Whack him on the chest.”
“I thought you weren’t meant to do that because of the ribs—”
“Broken ribs are better than being dead. Whack him hard!”
Luke balls his fist and slams it into Will’s heart.
“Again!”
He does it again, and as I hold my breath Will takes one.
I clutch at my heart.
“He’s not out of the woods,” Zach warns us. “Monitor his breathing and pulse. He could slip away at any moment. How are you doing, Henrietta?”
“Fine,” she says through the tears that are making steady tracks down her face. “Help them.”
Dave careens back in with Claire in tow. She takes in the scene and comes to help us with Will. “Step back now, love,” she tells me. “It’s alright, he’ll be alright.”
But I have a terrible feeling as I step back and let her take over. I have this sick dread in my guts that someone is dying tonight. That Will is dying. And I’m not sure I’ll survive it.
*
Claire’s assistants arrive to help and Luke and I are sent outside to wait. We pace the tunnel for a few minutes and then I’ve had enough. I stride away from him with my mind awhirl at the realization that I can’t get out of here – I can’t leave through any of the safe tunnels, as they’re now filled with Furies and if I open them I don’t know if I’ll be able to get them closed again. I don’t know where to go. I can’t handle the walls as I careen down the steps to the south Fury gate. I fling myself at the metal, clutching at it as though I can press myself through it and into them. It occurs to me that I can, really, and so I unlock the gate, open it a crack and step through into their midst. They’re not my Furies, but they know me just as the others did. They smell me; I smell as they do. Their bodies brush mine and I feel their warmth and it helps a little with the squeezing roof. It helps with the broken heart, as it’s always done.
I stay with them a long time, listening to the sounds of their breathing and pleading with my pulse to calm and pleading with whatever forces choose our death to leave Will and Lawrence a little longer, just leave them to our care a little longer. We’ll protect them better, I promise.
>
It’s Dave who finds me in the end. The Furies smell him and surge hungrily for the cage. I am pressed in with them and at first he doesn’t see. But when his eyes alight on me in their midst I see a look of vindication flood him.
He doesn’t say anything about the Furies. He says, “Zach wanted me to come and tell you. He slipped away.”
*
Dave
I knew there was something wrong with her but I never imagined this. I follow her again, unsure what else to do. I can’t get the image of her standing among their bloody eyes and bloody teeth from my mind. Her beauty within their ugliness is a haunting thing seared into my eyelids; I’m not sure I’ll ever leave the sight behind.
She moves as though looking for something, tearing through the tunnels in a haze of grief. She goes to her old bedroom but finds nothing there, and that’s when I realize what she’s looking for.
She finds him in the dining hall, looking at Will’s wedding painting. I stop at the door and peer in, something sick forcing me to stay. I’ve become a voyeur of other people’s lives. She makes a sound and he turns from the mural to see her. Then they’re crossing the space and connecting fiercely. Their bodies melt and fuse; they unfurl like time-lapse footage of flowers blooming and vines twining intrinsically together. They are glorious and destructive: I can see the evidence of it in the way they clutch at each other, trembling and desperate and fearful of what this will reap. They are the figures in the painting, dissolving into one another, dissolving from two people into one.
I watch for far too long, my body and thoughts on pause. I search their seeking bodies as I search my own heart. And what I find makes me turn from their love, ashen.
My feet take me to my father. He is alone in the workshop, even so late at night. He’s whittling something small, his hands having found a rare moment of peace from the tremors. He looks up at me. Rises to his feet.
I am blank. Everything about me is blank.
“I’m a useless human being,” I say with perfect clarity.