Flare (28 page)

Ash worked quickly and adjusted each local room as best he could. Whenever he adjusted one room, three others would report problems, and he was having a hard time keeping everything in balance. He didn’t panic and stayed the course of adjusting each room while he thought about what he could do to solve the problem as a whole.

Water started pouring out of the walls, and Ash laughed when he felt it hit his feet. The simulated flood had reached him, and they had made the water quite cold.

But I have to admire their system of projectors instead of monitors.
It makes it easier to keep everything here waterproof.

He started to shiver and knew he had to work quickly. He couldn’t spend any more time fixing each room individually and putting up stopgaps against the problem. He took a step back and thought for a minute, even in the cold, rushing water. He saw an opportunity to solve the problem, and he took it. He opened the doors in the surrounding rooms to allow the water to drain, and then turned off the power so there would be no chance of fire. He put power back into the intercom system and spoke into his microphone, sending a clear message throughout the rooms that the flood was contained and that everyone should go to a central room that was dry. He routed the power to that room, and placed the camera on it so that he could account for all missing people.

The lights turned on again, the projected computer screens disappeared and the cold water started to drain. A set of towels came down from the ceiling, and Ash grabbed one. It was warm, and the voice spoke to him.

“The test is over,” she said. “You may go to the next room.”

“It’s the final room,” said Ash.

“You may go to the next room.”

“It’s the final room,” repeated Ash. “There are only seven rooms, and this is the sixth. I counted.”

/***/

Ash strode into the seventh room, and there was a projection on the wall and a button in front of it that pulsed a soft white. The projection showed a large, open doorway peering out into the desert night. Ash could tell it was evening because the camera had the sharp black-and-green hues of night vision. He saw a silver sack lying on the ground outside, and it looked like it had a person inside of it.

“This is your last test,” said the female voice from above. “In order to pass this test, you must press the button. This will close the gate and deny entry to the person you see in the monitor.”

“You mean kick this person out,” stated Ash. “Out of the Salvation.”

“Yes.”

“And if I don’t press this button?”

“Then we will deny entry to this person ourselves, and you will be the next to wait in the doorway, while another candidate decides to deny entry to you.”

Ash stared at the monitor and wondered what he should do. Was this a trick? Almost as if on cue, the female voice spoke.

“I assure you, this is not a trap or a false premise,” said the voice. “We need to excise this candidate from our society, and we need to know if you can do it. Press the button and the door closes, and you pass this test. Leave the button unpressed, and you fail.”

“Who is this person?” asked Ash.

“This person was not a good fit for our society,” said the woman.

“Have they done anything wrong?”

“No,” said the woman. “This person came to our gates and wasn’t a good fit, so we couldn’t let them in. We aren’t going to harm them, and we have given them a tent and enough provisions to find a surface settlement on their own.”

“There are no surface settlements,” said Ash. “Are there?”

“We will not discuss these details, nor argue with you in any way,” said the voice. “The time for that is over. Now in front of you there is a button. Press it and the door will shut this person out, and you will pass this test. If you choose not to press it, you’ll fail the test.”

The woman stopped talking and left Ash with the glowing white button. Ash peered once more at the monitor and the scene looked real. It could have been faked, but there was no way of telling that it was. The only logical supposition was that it was real, and that pressing the button would lock this stranger out of the Salvation forever.

Logic also told him that he should press the button. If he walked away he wouldn’t save this stranger, and in fact would only join them. He wasn’t killing the person either, just locking them out and allowing them to walk the land with a silver tent. He had but one choice.

But what if it was Heather? What if the person inside was Courtney? He couldn’t tell anything by the body shape of the bag. It was too far off to gauge the size or sex of the inhabitant, though by the subtle movements Ash could tell someone was inside.

Ash knew he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if it was Heather or Courtney inside that bag. He mulled this over for a moment, and he realized it went deeper than that. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if
anyone
was inside that bag. It would be one thing if the person had committed a heinous crime, but the voice had told him that this person was
unfit
, and that suggested the stranger inside the silver bag had merely failed one of these tests.

This isn’t your path.
You can do what it takes to survive, but you don’t have to do it by being the one to swing the axe. It’s just not your path.

“I’m not going to press the button,” said Ash. “Find someone else to do it.”

/***/

There was no response from above, just silence. The quiet lasted a minute, and then another minute. The monitor shut off, and the pulsing white button faded. The room became completely dark, so dark that Ash couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Then some faint track lighting started up and Ash could see again, but just barely. There was no sound, even less than before.

“Hello?”

Nothing. Ash called again and again, hoping to hear the woman’s crisp voice, but heard nothing. He turned around and saw that the door had shut behind him, but when he walked to it, it opened with effort, as if it was locked but lacked the power to stay locked.

It was dark in the main room, which was barely lit by the backup track lighting on the floor and the ceiling. Ash yelled once again, but there was no response. Ash sat down in the middle of the room and laughed to himself.

If these people are out to save humanity
,
they sure have an odd way of showing it.

/***/

Ash waited an hour, maybe two, and then he had to go to the bathroom. He pried open the shower room and used the bathroom next to it. The toilet flushed and the water in the sink ran, but it was cold.

He waited another hour, then waited some more. He spoke to the walls again, but to no avail. He pried opened the door that had contained the projection of Gabriel, but Gabriel was no longer there. None of the other rooms held anyone anymore, as if the place had been abandoned for a year. He thought about Courtney and wished she was there. He wanted to tell her what he had seen, and hear what she’d seen. He worried about Heather. He assumed she was on the inside and had passed all the tests they had thrown at her. He couldn’t see Heather going to the last room and closing the door on another person, but he felt that somehow she was inside the Salvation right now, wondering where he was.

A dreadful thought occurred to him:
What if I’ve failed the test, and they’re leaving me here to die?

Ash thought of how odd it would be to die in the darkness after the flare hit. He then thought of the irony that his memories of the flare were mostly just that: darkness. The darkness when he first awoke, the darkness of the tent and sky, and the darkness here, in this unknown box in a hidden underground location.

He fell asleep after a while but awoke to hear some commotion coming from the seventh room. He saw white light coming from behind it and held his hands to his eyes because it was so bright, even when it only came through the cracks.

The door opened to reveal more brightness and the shape of a woman. He could barely make out her features because she was so strongly backlit, but he could tell that she was tall, thin and had long, platinum-white hair. She walked towards him imperiously, and he saw that she was holding a chair. She sat in the chair, still towering over Ash’s form on the floor, and her features were still obscured by the bright light coming from the room behind her. Ash’s eyes had adjusted though, and he saw that she was beautiful, almost flawlessly so.

“Hello, Ash,” she said. “My name is Adriel.”

Ash realized that this was the female voice that had been speaking to him all along.

“Hello,” said Ash.

Adriel sat staring at Ash for a moment, as if she was waiting for him to rise. He eventually sat up, his arms around his legs and his back upright. It somehow didn’t feel right to stand, as if Adriel were a queen and it would be wrong to do anything more than kneel in her presence.

“Needless to say,” said Adriel, “you didn’t pass the last test, a test that we needed you to pass in order for us to allow you into the Salvation.”

“I understand,” said Ash. “But what—”

“We’re not cruel here, nor do we enjoy denying people entry into our halls,” said Adriel, interrupting as if she hadn’t heard him. “But humanity currently lives on the edge of a razor, and straying from our directives, even slightly, might mean that humanity doesn’t survive the next century.”

“I see,” said Ash.

“Do you?” said Adriel. “Do you really see?”

“Completely,” said Ash. “But in my defense, before I started the test your friend Gabriel told me to
be myself, and nothing else
. I acted as myself, as requested.”

“We also told you to
do exactly as we tell you to
.”

“Then you asked me to choose between two of your directives, diametrically opposed,” said Ash. “I was forced to choose one at the expense of the other, and I chose what I thought was right.”

Adriel nodded, disarmed by the argument. She thought about his words, and then knelt in closer to Ash. He could see her clearly now: she had a thin, royal nose, flawless pale skin with just a hint of color, and ocean-blue eyes that sparkled like sapphires above her sharp cheekbones. Her eyes shone brightly, even in the faint track lighting of the room.

“I see your point,” she said. “But you have made your choice, a choice that showed you aren’t a good fit for our society. And a thousand times out of a thousand, those that don’t press the button are sent away.”

“Yes,” said Ash, honestly.

“I’m glad you understand,” said Adriel. “But in this …
exceptional
… case, we’ve had to give pause before we sent you away.”

“Why?” asked Ash.

“Because,” said Adriel. “You did very well on our tests—on all of them. Very, very well.”

Ash nodded.

“We have high standards at the last step to our kingdom, because humanity’s future depends on us,” interrupted Adriel. “Do you understand this?”

“Yes,” said Ash.

“We make no exceptions, because we cannot,” said Adriel. “Too much is at stake. However, your talents are beyond compare. You aren’t merely a genius, you’re a …
treasure.
Do you understand this?”

“Not entirely.”

“You are the exception in a place where there are no exceptions. We have set our threshold high and you passed, and if we had set it ten orders of magnitude higher you still would have passed, and we can’t ignore this just because you refused to close the gate in the last room. We
need
you to stay with us, for both our survival and for the sake of humanity’s existence. Is this clear?”

He wasn’t flattered by Adriel’s words. Heather cared for him and he hoped that Courtney did too, but he knew the world too well to believe that this place truly cared for him, no matter how talented they told him he was. He knew that if they could take only his skills and send his body to die in the desert, they’d do so without a second thought.

“Do you understand this, Ash?” asked Adriel.

“I understand you perfectly,” said Ash. “And I accept. I would like to join your …
collective
.”

Adriel smiled and then snapped her fingers. The lights in the room turned on again, and Ash saw her full form. Her features were no longer obscured by the shadows, and she looked absolutely regal. Her eyes were iridescently blue, her skin shimmered like soft cream, and her sharp Teutonic features cut through the air. Her whole presence told Ash to stay seated, to stay at her feet and accept whatever she said as truth.

“Then you are one of us,” said Adriel. “Welcome to the Salvation.”

SCOX

Zeke woke up in a cage to the sharp smell of human waste and the faint sound of moaning. His skull was pounding and he tried to remember what had happened, and why he was now in a cage. He felt his head and there was a bump, then looked around the enclosure and saw other men, ragged and hollow-eyed. Zeke could tell just by their posture that these were men who had resigned themselves to a place here, who sat compliant and defeated because they had lost any other options long ago.

I was walking towards the dockyards.
I became surrounded by armed men, and they hit me over the head with a shovel … I think.

Zeke panicked and thought of the tent that the people at the Salvation had given him before they let him on his way. He had buried the tent that had brought him to its gates, and they had given him another silver shelter after they closed their doors. He walked away with two and didn’t want his captors to have either, because whoever they were they would use these tents badly, perhaps to venture further out and hit more people in the head with shovels.

Zeke breathed easily when he remembered that he had buried his supplies about a mile from the dockyards. He remembered it all now … As he had approached the dockyards, there was something that disturbed him about the hulking ships in the distance and the trail of hollow-eyed, defeated men who walked towards him as if by instinct. The tone felt gloomy and fatalistic, as if the men were walking to their deaths and wanted just that. So Zeke had buried his supplies and then approached the dockyards nonetheless, because he had felt drawn to them too. Some men had come from the dockyards, not the defeated men walking towards the ships, but men coming
from
the ships, angry men who feared little and took things.

And these men had a smell.
They smelled like burning leaves.

The angry men had gotten out and attacked the hollow-eyed men walking towards the dockyards. They had also attacked Zeke, and now he was here.

He looked around and saw that he was in a strong iron cage, and counted twenty other men incarcerated alongside him. The cage was in a large hangar, perhaps the size of a small indoor stadium. Surprisingly, it was day. Though it was dark in the hangar, the structure was solidly built and had only a few windows, and those had been boarded up. The few beams of light that shone through were so distant that they lit the place well, but they wouldn’t harm anyone inside.

Zeke took another look at his surroundings, unaccustomed to seeing things in daylight, let alone in a place this large. Though the place was dreary and he was incarcerated in a cage that smelled strongly of human waste, he forgot how strong colors were in the day’s light. The cage was the dull black of wrought iron, but the hangar that housed them had a deep rusted tint, and it seemed to envelop them all in a dull red.

The men that attacked me were also red, as if covered by dust.
But it wasn’t the soft ochre that surrounds me now. It was deep red, the color of blood.

He concentrated on the men in the cage with him and saw them much clearer now than when he had trudged alongside them in the night, marching unwittingly towards the dockyard fate that now imprisoned them. He saw that most of the captives were emaciated and covered in open sores, and some had bodily burns. Their injuries resembled the flare’s burns, but the wounds were localized to only one body part or another. No one in the cage with him was completely covered in scars. There were men with a forearm now just sinew, or a single leg burnt, or even a hobbled foot turned to ooze.

Where am I?
And who would ever make such a—

“Don’t look so lost, Black, it brings attention,” said a voice from behind him.

Zeke turned around and saw another hollow-eyed man. He was whole and unburnt, like Zeke, but he looked severely malnourished, as if he had been trapped in this hangar for a year before the flare started.

“Best to blend in,” said the man. “Don’t stand around looking lost, is what I’m telling you. These folks are liable to teach you a lesson just for looking lost.”

Who?
Who are these folks, and why would they—

“They’re probably gonna get us all, anyway,” said the defeated man. “No use for us. Most of us weren’t no good to begin with, and they crippled many of the folks in this cage to boot. It’s like they’re waiting to pull the rope …”

The man looked up at the ceiling and Zeke soon got the reference. The top of the hangar had a broad metal panel attached to a rope, which stretched across the ceiling and down the wall by a series of pulleys. The end was attached to a small metal enclosure. Zeke had no doubt that it was designed so that a man could stay inside the enclosure, open the panel to kill the prisoners with light, and then use the pulleys to close the roof back up again. Their cage was situated directly under the panel, and Zeke had no doubt that the rope had been pulled before.

“They open it up at night, you know,” said the man. “Leave it there until the morning, just so we know who’s boss. Not that they need to tell us that. They got a room in back with holes in the wall, so if they don’t like you, Black, they’re gonna take you back there, stick your foot outside to teach you a lesson.”

Zeke started to panic, but he wasn’t exactly frightened. He didn’t fear his captors, whoever
they
were. If they killed him, that would be that, and if they brought him to one of their back rooms with holes in the walls, they would do what they wanted to do. But he just couldn’t get past the dreadful feeling that he had entered a place so wrong and foul that it was an affront to the natural order of things. This place was an abomination, a stain on humanity, and now he was a part of it.

Zeke heard the faint moaning grow louder and then realized that this place was much worse than he had previously thought. He looked with horror towards the sound of the moans, and the hollow-eyed man looked too.

“That man did something, bad, Black,” said the man. “He tried to escape, so they burnt him and gave him to Scox. Put ’em both in full view to give us
all
a lesson.”

Zeke now remembered who had surrounded him and hit him on the head with a shovel, the men who smelled like burning leaves and covered themselves with red dust. Scox hadn’t hit Zeke in the head with a shovel, but he was one of the men who had attacked him.

Zeke had heard the angry men yelling their names at each other as they attacked, and they all had names as dark-sounding as
Scox
. The men had names like Phenex, Alastor and Sabnock. They called each other Furfur, Gremory and Astaroth. Names they took after the flare, harsh, frightening names that hit your ears like a thrown brick and scarred your tongue each time you said one aloud.

The men who attacked me are all half-men, humans who have lost all compassion.
But Scox had been the worst of the lot.
The captors had taunted Zeke and told him about the bad things they were going to do to him, but Scox didn’t speak and instead had grunted as he ran towards Zeke, baring his teeth. The group had laughed as they yanked Scox back by a rope tied to his neck, but Zeke saw Scox’s eyes before they knocked Zeke out with the shovel. Scox acted like an animal, but he had just enough of a human glint in his stare to show that he wanted to give Zeke pain and would enjoy it.

And now Zeke saw Scox in an adjoining cage, tormenting a man who had been severely burnt by the flare. The victim wasn’t like the men in the cage alongside Zeke, with simply a foot melted or a hand burnt. The victim was cooked from head to toe, just enough so that he was immobilized, but not so much that it would kill him. The man was alive, and it was clear that he could still feel pain.

Scox, bald, fat and grunting, had taken several bites out of the prostrate man’s body, and had a pile of sharp tools at his feet that he was playing with. Scox took one of the tools, jabbed it into his own arm, took a pinch of red powder from a bowl next to him and looked like he was about to rub it on the wound. Something compelled Zeke to bang the bars of his own cage, and he did just that. Scox looked up at the sound, put the powder back down on the ground, and seeing that the noise was nothing, brought his attention back to the man beneath him.

Zeke focused on this victim and noticed that the cuts already inflicted upon his body were carefully placed, too shallow to cause heavy bleeding and avoiding the penetration of any vital organs that would bring a premature death. Zeke also saw many of the man’s teeth on the ground, and blood-stained pliers on the floor by his waist. The man was too weak to fight back, but still chained so that he couldn’t move. The flare had taken his sight, and he wouldn’t be able to know when Scox was going to attack next.

Zeke felt a deep ball of fear grow in his stomach, fear for the man who lay moaning, sightless and helpless, while Scox took him apart piece by piece, and fear for the world because it could produce such an atrocity.
I would end humanity if I could,
right now.
I would destroy myself and every other person alive, if only it meant that this man would no longer suffer.

But Zeke knew that he couldn’t end the world. He was in a cage, while a man in another cage was experiencing unbearable and unnatural torment at the hands of another. All of Zeke’s sympathy and anguish wouldn’t stop this. Zeke needed a plan.

He forced himself to look at Scox in the adjoining cage ten feet away. Scox was still playing with the sharp tools, and was gripping a rod with a rusty hook at the end. Zeke reached his hand out through the bars, but the cage was too far away to grab Scox and prevent him from doing any more harm.
Men like Scox don’t feel pain, whether they inflict it or receive it.
It’s a game to him, and he’ll play it as long as he can.

Zeke scanned his own cage. He saw twenty men, most of them mentally broken and physically hobbled. There were no weapons in their enclosure, just a barrel in the middle where they all went to the bathroom.

Zeke contemplated this, and then got an idea.
Scox doesn’t respond to pain,
but he might respond to …

Zeke grabbed the hollow-eyed man and stared at him with anger and then pointed at the man in the adjoining cage with Scox.

“Sorry, Black,” said the man, “that’s the way it is, and there’s nothing we can—”

Zeke shook the defeated man.
This is not the way it is.
This is not right, and we need to make it right. We can somehow make it right.

The man looked back at Zeke in shock, and the shock faded into understanding.

“Yeah,” said the man. “I see it … I do.”

The hollow-eyed man walked to another prisoner, shook him, and pointed at Zeke and then at Scox’s cage. The other prisoner nodded and sat in thought as to what they could do. The man continued to talk to the rest of the prisoners until all of them were staring at Scox, trying to figure out how to save the victim, or at least end his suffering.

They chattered amongst themselves and then Zeke saw them nodding in agreement. They spoke in low tones, too low for Zeke to understand, but they all seemed in accordance with one another. The biggest one of them, a rotund man with a burnt left foot, hobbled over to the bucket where they had gone to the bathroom, and scooped out a handful of human waste. It smelled atrocious, but the man held firm and walked over to face the adjoining cage, excrement in his hands.

“Hey, Scox,” said the man.

Scox turned around, and the man hurled the waste at him. The waste wasn’t built for hurling, so only a little bit spattered on Scox. The bestial man was horrified nonetheless, and shrank back.

The other men in the cage seized upon this and they all went to the waste bucket and started doing the same thing. Scox squealed and cowered back in his own cage, but the enclosure was shallow and he had nothing to hide behind. Scox shook the bars in anguish as the prisoners continued their assault, smothering him until he put his hands up in supplication and started to cry.

The prisoners also threw insults at Scox, telling him how bad he smelled. They told him that he deserved to have this happen to him because he was worthless. Scox cried at this too, but it only served to encourage the men in Zeke’s cage. The rotund prisoner even relieved himself into his own hand and threw it at Scox, and the fresh waste hit Scox directly in the face.

Scox continued to cry, and Zeke marveled at how the bestial man could take this degradation so badly.
He can’t understand physical pain,
but he feels emotional pain twice as deep.

Scox cowered in the corner and yelled as if someone was skewering him with a hot poker, then put his bald head in his hands and started to shake. The men saw this and started to deride him more, jeering and taunting as if he were the one imprisoned and they were his master.

Scox kept himself tucked in a ball, curling up so that they couldn’t hurt him. He tried to cover his ears, but it didn’t help things. The men were yelling his name and laughing, and they had enough excrement in the bucket to continue the assault for hours.

“Enough!”

A large, dark-eyed man, lightly coated with red dust, came from a large box that was attached to the wall. Many of their captors slept in these enclosures, and Zeke recognized the man as the one who had led the group that had attacked him. The man called himself Malphas, and though he was as brutish and cruel as Scox, he wasn’t the same. Malphas wasn’t cruel out of animal instinct, he was cruel because he chose to be.