Flare (36 page)

“Indeed,” said Metatron. “There is no other way, and I promise you that we tried to find one.”

Metatron paused for a moment, and then nodded towards the projection of Gabriel to speak.

“We don’t know what’s causing the sun to behave this way,” said Gabriel. “Our leader only projected that it would do so. We don’t know how long it will last, though we have a broad variety of guesses.”

“And what are they?” asked Ash.

Gabriel paused, and Metatron gestured towards him, giving him permission to reveal the truth.

“It may last a year, it may last forty,” said Gabriel. “It may last a millennium, it may last forever.”

“It may end tomorrow,” said Ash.

“Yes,” said Gabriel. “All of these things are possible, and we’ve prepared for every scenario.”

There was a moment of silence while Ash absorbed the information, and then he spoke.

“I understand what you’re saying, and I appreciate the fact that you’ve made a system that works,” said Ash. “This place is perhaps more of a testament to mankind than both the pyramids and our trip to the moon.”

“But …?” asked Metatron.

“But I have a hard time believing that keeping the rest of the world ignorant was the right decision. Most of the citizens here would probably agree if they found themselves on the other side of these walls.”

Metatron nodded at Adriel to field this query.

“Metatron’s team performed the analyses,” said Adriel. “Even factoring in technological advances, we wouldn’t survive this flare if the world had full knowledge.”

“Even if we prepared for it?” asked Ash.

“
Especially
if we prepared for it,” said Adriel. “It’s human nature to seek comparative advantage, and in a closed system with dwindling resources, that desire for an edge on your fellow man leads to grotesque and depraved violence, every single time.”

“Not every single time,” said Ash. “Surely you can’t think this is true.”

“We’ve thought about it,” said Metatron. “We ran every analysis, every scenario, and enlisted friends, computers and dispassionate observers to help us come to any conclusion that our species could live through an event such as this. Some scenarios held up longer than others, but they all turned to chaos in time. Eventually, even the most well-thought-out places ended up like an African civil war, with limbs taken off and mothers assaulted in front of their own children. It’s a failing of our DNA perhaps, or perhaps an indication of the inherent unnatural nature of
society
, but in any analysis, 9,999 scenarios out of 10,000 ended in flames.”

Ash thought about this for a moment.

“And this society was the ten thousandth,” said Ash.

“It was and
is
,” said Metatron.

“Your Salvation is the
only
way for us to survive,” said Ash.

“That’s not a precise way of wording it,” said Metatron, before nodding at Jophiel.

“There are ways to
survive
this flare in those 9,999 systems that failed,” said Jophiel. “But they all end with us emerging in chaos. Women beaten and illiterate, men’s teeth stained with the blood of children. We didn’t see the point in surviving at the cost of humanity’s progress being
reset
. If the cost of life was the elimination of human history, it was a price we were not willing to pay, so we made this place.”

There was silence, and then Metatron spoke.

“Extinction events have occurred in the past,” he said. “Ice ages, asteroids hitting the earth and so on. Half of the world is wiped out, and a small, small fraction of the surviving half grows into the void that has been left, and dominates the world for eternity. Tell me, Ash, how is this lucky group determined? By chance? By design?”

Ash had no words.

“Survival of the fittest,” said Metatron. “That’s all it is, Ash, and that’s all it will ever be. Most people mistake that for survival of the
strongest
, which is a complete aberration of the truth. The mammals were weak in comparison with the dinosaurs, and the average insect that now thrives could be crushed between your thumb and forefinger like
that
.”

Metatron snapped his fingers and grinned.

“
Survival of the fittest
doesn’t sufficiently describe what’s needed to outlast the flare either,” said Metatron. “I would describe it thusly: Right now, the fit have a
chance
. That’s it. The species of insects that have risen from the ground to take over the sunburnt earth could all die tomorrow of starvation. And we could live a hundred generations in the Salvation and emerge to find a new, deadly world that wipes us out completely for any number of reasons.”

Metatron paused to gather his thoughts.

“It’s not just the sun that threatens us, Ash,” said Metatron. “It’s also the hard, unforgiving hand of evolution that has turned against us, imploring us to come to the surface with our weak skin and soft eyes, to be burned alive en masse. It also begs us to find fault with one another down here, to collapse into depraved genocide until this place becomes our grave, and humanity is extinct just the same.”

Metatron stared at Ash.

“We are no longer
fit
for this world, Ash,” he said. “So tell me, how do we
become fit
, so that we may have a chance?”

Ash had several potential answers to this, and weighed them all in his head.

“We evolve,” said Ash.

“Precisely,” said Metatron. “I’m not speaking of growing thick scales, or anything like that. But if humanity is to
have a chance
, we must evolve.”

“How do we evolve?”

“Our society, our way of life and our values must evolve,” said Metatron, gesturing all around himself. “Do you believe this?”

“Not entirely,” said Ash. “But I do understand your reasoning.”

“Then do you
understand
why the unforgiving rules of the Salvation are necessary in this context?”

Ash considered this and then shook his head
no
.

“I don’t understand what evolution has to do with keeping Courtney out of the Salvation,” said Ash. “She doesn’t have cystic fibrosis.”

Metatron shook his head and nodded towards the tanned man with Asian features.

“We have strict standards for entry into the Salvation,” said the Asian man. “One of the requirements is that we must be genetically pure, with no aberrations that could lead to problems later on.”

Ash considered this.

“I understand that this is your way,” said Ash. “But don’t you see the unethical nature of what you’re doing? Looking deep within someone’s DNA, finding an inconsequential error and then leaving them outside to die because of it?”

Metatron smiled and nodded at the fair-skinned black woman.

“In order for humanity to survive this flare, we must evolve in the genetic sense as well,” she said. “Once again, we’re not speaking of growing thick scales, or anything of that nature. We’re speaking of evolving
out
of the aberrations that held us back as a species. Our system can hold only a select few, and we have no room for any sort of genetic disorders, even slight ones.”

Ash frowned, and the fair-skinned black woman spoke again.

“It may sound cruel, but think of it this way,” she said. “From this point forward, cystic fibrosis will never afflict us again. Neither will Tay-Sachs, congenital heart defects or sickle-cell anemia. Our strict rules may seem callous at this moment, and as of right now they are. But keep in mind that we are curing these syndromes
forever
. We need to do this because our species is on a razor’s edge, and we have no other choice.”

“It smacks of eugenics,” said Ash. “Genetic imperfection is part of humanity. It makes us who we are. A perfect society can’t exist with genetic discrimination as its foundation.”

“It’s not eugenics,” said the woman.

“How so?” asked Ash.

“What have you seen so far?” asked Metatron. “If you look around at this place, you’ll see balding men and overweight women, the short of stature, hooked noses and misshapen heads. Have you seen these people?”

Ash nodded. He thought about the own scars on his face and how the angels here had all but ignored them. He smiled to himself and thought how odd it was to be on the other side of life, where his physical self was desirable while others had been cast out.

“I’m loath to use crude descriptors like
bald
and
overweight
,” said Metatron. “In our haven, these minor differences are no longer considered handicaps. I use these boorish terms to speak to you in your own language, the petty vernacular of our previous world. But you do recognize that not all our citizens fit the bill of our old standards of physical beauty?”

“I do,” said Ash.

“Perhaps none moreso than myself,” said Metatron. “But I digress. What I’m trying to say is that though you may find people with an abundance of fat deposits here, they won’t develop diabetes or get high cholesterol. Though you might run into an old man, he won’t get multiple sclerosis, early-onset Alzheimer’s or even arthritis.”

Ash had nothing to say in response.

“The flare is not a game, Ash,” said Metatron. “It is trying to wipe the human race off the map, and if we fail to act correctly,
it
will do just that.
We have to make hard choices, choices that leave others outside to die. But we will
all
die unless we re-imagine humanity, so much so that we will one day re-emerge not just healthy and whole, but stronger and more refined.”

Metatron paused for a moment.

“Humanity was fated to go extinct under the sun,” said Metatron. “But look around you, Ash. Look at our Salvation. Do you have confidence that we can survive this flare?”

“I do.”

“Do you have confidence that we’ll not only survive the flare, but that we’ll survive it with ourselves intact?”

“Perhaps.”

Metatron smiled.

“That’s good enough for now,” said Metatron. “But let me finally assure you that the hard choices we make today will be erased within a generation, because the young will not know those who have been locked out. They’ll only know this society and its tolerance for those already
in
. Though we have strict rules, once you are in you cannot be rejected, and our children will know only this.

“Finally, did you hear the strange language we had been speaking so clumsily amongst ourselves? We call it
Malachian
, and our children will know it well. This sacred tongue will guide them away from violence, cruelty and deceit, and when this flare ends our descendants will emerge both stronger
and
kinder.”

Ash had nothing to say in response.

“And now this comes to you, Ash,” said Metatron. “And why we need you so desperately.”

Ash noticed that every one of the angels was staring at him now, and they appeared to be smiling.

“The world has turned on its axis,” said Metatron. “With Hell above and now Heaven below. We don’t have a perfect society, but we’re close, and it will take a new citizen of your brilliance to bring us even closer. One day a sector three thousand miles away will have an accidental fire, and you’ll find a way to stamp it out. This will save ten lives, and those ten lives will become ten thousand over the generations. When our descendants emerge to see the earth anew, there will be ten thousand poets, architects and thinkers in this new world, all because you were here to put out that fire.

“We will have you write music and literature. We will have you teach our children philosophy. We will have you come up with ideas that will help foster a more compassionate, accepting society. We will open the book on everything we know and believe, and give it to you. You will take our knowledge and add to it.

“Yes, Ash, we made some hard choices to get here, just as I’m sure you’ve made some difficult decisions to arrive at this selfsame place. But the past is the past, and you’re here in front of us now. All we ask is that you stay with us, so that your gifts will not be silenced by the sun’s rays. Give yourself to our Salvation and your voice will not only survive the flare, but will reverberate through humanity forever after.”

LEGION

Zeke woke up with two women nestled into him on both sides. One of them was Lilith, petite and tattooed, and the other one was as large as a house. Lilith had recently shaved her head, so closely that it didn’t even have stubble. The large one had thick, dyed-blonde hair wrapped into a dense bun.

Zeke gently pushed them off, and they both made a face to show that they were saddened by his rejection.

They’re just pretending to be hurt.
They can’t be here for the money, because money no longer exists. But women like these always have an agenda, and if not, they’re being used to accomplish another’s goals. Perhaps they’re here to lure me into a state of trust, to show me how life can be on the other side of the cage.

Zeke ignored their hurt looks, just as he had ignored the others that had been sent over the course of the past three evenings. His captors had locked him in this room but had opened it periodically to send in food, drink and drugs. They had also sent in five beautiful girls, a boy and a man, all sneaking into his bed without him noticing, and all prepared to both give and receive sexual pleasure. A snickering guard had even sent in a German shepherd, and Zeke had given the animal food and water before sending the canine back out. 

Zeke had taken only water and refused all else, and he had collapsed earlier in the evening out of sheer exhaustion. Lilith and her partner had come in while he was asleep, and they had apparently crawled all over him, because their scent of burning cedar now stuck to his body like sweat.

EverRed.
They both smell of EverRed, and now I do too.

He had heard them calling the drug by multiple names:
Numb
because of how it made them feel, and
Scalpel
because of how it was administered. These people cut into their skin, rubbed the red powder over the open wound, and the drug did the rest. Lilith and her partner had various x-shaped scars on their bodies, and Lilith had a fresh wound on her forehead, right between her eyes.

Of all the names the inhabitants had given the drug though, Zeke preferred
Golgotha’s Breath
. He thought of this drug as
breath
because it was all around them, and it seemed to fuel the dockyards’ harsh existence.

The fifth person sent into his room had been a muscular, brown-skinned man with dyed-blue hair, sharpened teeth, and a body covered in scabs. Zeke had rejected his advances and the blue-haired man stayed to talk, but he only wanted to talk about EverRed.

“When you take it, pleasure is magnified by a hundred, maybe a thousand,” the blue-haired man had said. “But I take it because it does away with the hurt too. You’re all there, in your right mind and everything, but you don’t feel pain, and not just the physical kind. You don’t feel the pain of consequence, and you don’t feel the agony of another’s suffering. You could watch your own sister disemboweled in front of you and not give a shit. If you take enough, you might even enjoy it.”

Zeke knew enough about the drug now, and knew that these girls couldn’t be hurt by his rejection, so he took a glass of water and looked away. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that they dropped their ruse and started to laugh. The big one got up and walked towards Zeke, completely nude. She was rather beautiful, nearly as tall as Zeke and wider in the hips. Her body curved in all the right places and she had an ocean of young skin, flawless and glowing in between the lacerations that crisscrossed her body like stitches on a doll.

“They say you’re a challenge,” said the big one. “You don’t like girls, you don’t like boys. You don’t like anything. You don’t even talk.”

She walked towards him, and her heavy breasts swayed gently as she approached. She rubbed her right hand across her own body, feeling her bosom and then tracing her fingers across the curve of the side of her stomach, and then bringing them across her pubis, grazing it gently before she brought her hand back up behind her head to pull her hair down. It fell gently, like water cascading out of a pitcher, and her blonde hair was thick and long enough to frame her wide body on both sides.

“I’m not a boy, and I’m not a girl,” she said. “I’m a woman, and I want your body like a hungry wolf wants a gutted sheep. I want to taste every inch of you, I want to take your black skin in my mouth until it becomes part of me. I want to sink my teeth into your shoulder until I feel your salt on my tongue. I want to devour your skin, and keep on consuming you until I can taste the tissue beneath, until your body flows into mine, and you become a part of me.

“Like it or not, I’m going to take you for myself, like the wolf takes the sheep. I’ll catch you and take pleasure from you. Perhaps the pleasure I take from your body will flow back into you in return, perhaps not. This isn’t my concern. I want you for me, and I won’t be denied.”

Lilith started to laugh and jumped onto the floor. She pirouetted and then reached under the bed to take out a small razor and a sack of red dust. She deftly cut the scar tissue on her forehead with her left hand and smeared the red drug into her wound, making the hue of her blood even deeper, and then she pranced over to Zeke.

“You talk a big game, Delilah, but you can’t
force
him to do anything,” said Lilith. “He’s bigger and stronger than you, though he’s just the right size for me.”

Lilith reached between Zeke’s legs, but he shrunk back.

“He doesn’t like you,” said Delilah.

“He will,” said Lilith, pretending to pout like a little girl. “They all give in to me eventually, even the ones who like boys. One day when he’s sleeping I’ll cut his wrist and rub this EverRed into him, and Golgotha’s Breath will do the rest.”

“Last boy you did that to ended up with too much,” said Delilah. “Golgotha’s Breath choked the life out of him.”

“And I got him afterwards, didn’t I?” asked Lilith. “I got him
all night
. The Scalpel always brings them to me in the end, always.”

/***/

Zeke stayed up while the girls slept in his bed. He was tired, but too unnerved to close his eyes in front of these women. He worried that he might never go to sleep, even after the girls left. He knew that these young women were ultimately victims, snatched out of their innocence at one point in their lives to serve another’s agenda, but he still feared them. They were once victims but had been turned into perpetrators, and he knew they would do every last thing that they had promised.

A victim turned into a perpetrator has been raised in Hell.
And that means they’ll commit every level of depravity, because they know nothing else.

He could live here a year without giving in to the abominations around him, and one of the girls could still come in and cut his veins while he slept. He would wake up a monster, with the EverRed coursing through his system, dissolving in his blood and weaving itself into his thoughts until he became a different person. He didn’t fear death so much as waking up as one of them, a man who could watch someone disemboweled and
not give a shit
, or
even enjoy it.
That’s what disturbed him the most throughout the evening, so he sat in the corner hour after hour, mostly nude and alert, watching the girls dream their emotionless dreams of pleasure, magnified by a thousand.

A man carrying a bag and a billy club unlocked the door from the outside and burst into the room just as Zeke was nodding off. He was almost as big as Malphas and twice as mean-looking. It was clear from his angry face that he wasn’t there for sexual favors, and that made Zeke feel relieved.

He started beating Lilith and Delilah with the billy club, and they laughed even though he was striking them with his full strength. He eventually pushed them out, bruised, naked and giggling. Lilith blew a kiss and winked at Zeke before mouthing the words
see you soon
.

“Time to leave,” said the man to Zeke.

Zeke got up slowly, and headed out the door.

“Get dressed first,” said the man, taking some oversized pants and a shirt from his bag, and throwing them at Zeke. “We’re going to church.”

/***/

The man had chained Zeke and taken him outside under the night sky, where four men with oars were waiting for them in two boats. The man brought Zeke into one vessel, and ten others from the shore joined them as well, hooting and hollering as if they were headed towards a football game.

Zeke smelled burnt cedar from the men, but he also smelled alcohol. He noticed that some of the men were drinking dusty cans of beer, and a few were drinking unlabeled bottles of hard liquor. Most were drinking a cloudy brown substance from round jars, and Zeke reasoned that it was a homemade alcohol. Two more men pushed the boats off and they glided into the choppy water and headed towards the nearest stranded tanker, moored on the horizon.

As they approached the ship, Zeke turned around and took one last look at the coast. He figured that the sun had just set because he saw the dockyards slowly lighting up their torches, and he could hear men from inside the hangar being awakened with yells and shrieked threats. He looked into the distance and saw a group of captors driving a vehicle outwards, looking for more survivors to lure back to the dockyards’ cages.

/***/

The room on the ship was large, and it perhaps had once been four or five rooms that had been turned into a makeshift amphitheater. Zeke knew that rooms on ships were generally small, but the captors here had taken out roofs and walls until it was gutted into one giant area, high-ceilinged and wide, with detritus piled up around the central stage to simulate makeshift chairs for the surrounding audience. They locked Zeke’s chain to a pipe and had him sit on a discarded and rusty piece of a propeller, and then pointed down towards the stage, which had been lit with candles and a generator’s power. He wished that they had only lit the room with candles, because the generator was old and decrepit, hastily reconstructed and running on dirty gasoline. The room filled with particulated smoke, and Zeke was the only one who seemed to notice how oppressively foul the place had become.

That’s because I’m the only one in my right mind.
Zeke looked over the men and women laughing, drinking and drugging themselves into oblivion.

An overweight and sour-faced man came to the forefront of the theater, and Zeke heard the audience shout his name in response:
Cain
. He was of average height, and his sour face seemed flat and dead to most emotions, perhaps none so much as
fear
. Zeke knew this man’s type: you could put a man like Cain on a guillotine and he wouldn’t even blink. Zeke knew that men like this often met their end prematurely, but until they did they remained as emotionless as Cain as he stood now in front of his audience of fifty drunken sociopaths.

“Before we hold the evening’s festivities,” said Cain in a deep, gravelly voice, “I’d like to give a short sermon.”

The crowd stopped jeering and leaned back, quieting themselves and looking forward intently.

Cain took out a thick, dusty old book and held it to the sky. Zeke noticed that others in the audience also had their own books. A few were the same shape and size as Cain’s old book, but most were bits and pieces of smudged pages, some that had been most likely made by a copier powered by a generator but running out of ink, and some messily and chaotically mimeographed. One man had a thin binder filled with words written by hand.

“
God hates us all
,” said Cain. “Would anyone care to disagree?”

No one answered. Even with the EverRed and alcohol coursing through their veins, Cain’s gravitas and the weight of the question silenced the room.

“
I
disagree,” said Cain. “Even though God hasn’t valued our individual well-being since the beginning of time, I disagree. Our history has been one of torture and rape, war and disease, and
your
personal
history has been the same. Go back far enough and you’ll see a great-great uncle tied to a chair and scalded with burning knives because he chose to worship the God who made him instead of the God of the man holding a blade at his throat. Go back far enough and you’ll find an ancestral woman raped by ten men in front of her dying husband, her tears the last thing he sees, and you’ll be glad it happened, because that rape resulted in your next ancestor, a built-in depravity that still lives within you to this day.

“Our history has been nothing but pain, nothing but competition for resources, which are never enough to make us stop fighting. Our history has been a constant battle against disease, a battle against death. All of these battles we will inevitably lose, and just when we get a foothold on living a life moderately free of degeneracy, our God sends a natural disaster to erase everything we’ve accomplished, until we have no recourse but to become like animals. Wherever we go, this is the ultimate stick that our ‘good’ God wields whenever we start gaining an advantage over His obstacles. Perhaps nothing is so evident of this as the overpowered sun that He brought, which may abolish our species once and for all. We did great things, got too big for ourselves, and God cast us down like so many fallen angels, whose only sin was that they thought for themselves. Look around you, and the evidence that God hates us is indeed so overwhelming that it threatens to crush you with every daybreak.”