Flare (42 page)

As he walked through the halls, Zeke ascertained that this building had been a school, but the rooms were empty. He didn’t know what it was used for now, or if it had any use at all. He was safe, but considered that this might not be the place of which Legion had spoken.

Or perhaps I’m in the right place but it’s been all dried up.
Perhaps this school’s resources have been picked clean by the group who had wandered here first.

The fox trotted forward, and Zeke noticed that there was a sharp, putrid scent in the air, and as he followed the fox the odor got worse. It was getting darker too, because as they walked down the hallway the sealing on the windows became tighter and tighter until there was no light at all, only the fetid odor, which was now overpowering.

Zeke couldn’t see, but he felt the fox against his leg as he knelt down. The stench was beginning to make him ill. He decided to turn back and wait until nightfall so he could open the windows and inspect this place from the outside. He would use the light of the moon to see what this school held, and he would walk through the other buildings and see what else this town had to offer.

He turned around to leave and was blinded by a bright light. He immediately thought that something had torn open the lining on one of the windows, but Zeke soon realized that it was only a small flash of light, and his skin didn’t hurt. There was a man in front of him shining a policeman’s flashlight in his eyes, and from the faint metallic click, Zeke could tell that the man also had a gun.

“Make a move and I’ll kill you,” said a deep voice from behind the flashlight.

Zeke held up his hands and turned away from light. The flashlight shone past him, and Zeke discovered the source of the odor as he turned his head. There were dead bodies behind him, all tied in ghastly positions. Zeke only caught a glimpse, but he saw men strapped to the floor with their abdomens hollowed out, a decapitated woman on the ground and another dead man tied to the door in front of him in the position of a cross. They still had flesh on their bones and weren’t victims dried up by the flare, but people murdered and then left to rot slowly inside this dimly lit building.

The man frisked Zeke thoroughly and then pointed the flashlight at the fox. Zeke thought the creature would have run away, but the fox stayed by his side calmly.

“Is that your dog?” asked the man.

Zeke nodded
yes
.

“All right,” said the man. “Get up slowly and walk through that door in front of you. Try anything and you’ll join those that you see all around.”

Zeke did as he was told and opened the door in front of him. The door was heavy because the decapitated woman was at its base and the dead man hung from it, but as the door opened Zeke could see that the crucified man had been held up with a child’s jump rope.

Zeke thought that the jump rope might have come from a teacher’s supply closet, and wondered how it held the man so firmly. He looked closely at the body to see that it had been hollowed out so that the thin rope could handle the weight.

/***/

The man took Zeke up to the third floor and into a darkened room. Though it was the top floor, the third floor was the darkest, and the room that held them was even darker because it had no windows. The man had Zeke sit behind a table in the room and locked him and the fox inside, and then left for ten minutes. The man returned with a shotgun and two lanterns, and neither Zeke nor the fox had changed positions.

The two lanterns illuminated the room surprisingly well, and Zeke saw that the man was in his forties and in good shape, with long, stringy hair and a slightly asymmetrical jaw that looked like it had been placed in a position of mournful regret. The man had small, narrow, dark eyes, and though Zeke knew the man was dangerous, he could tell the man was lonely too.

Zeke felt that this man might be comfortable committing violence, but unlike Malphas, Scox and Lilith, this man seemed like he’d feel bad about it later.
He doesn’t smell like burnt cedar either.
He smells like dead bodies, gunpowder and sweat, but he doesn’t smell like EverRed.

The man spoke to Zeke and soon realized that Zeke didn’t speak in return. He asked Zeke yes-or-no questions, and Zeke nodded in response. The man eventually figured out Zeke’s back story, and that Zeke had come from Legion’s dockyards to map out a path to this place. The man then asked Zeke to take off his shirt. Zeke did so, and the man inspected Zeke’s body with his flashlight.

“You got skin that hides scars well,” said the man. “But I don’t see any scalpel wounds, and you don’t have Golgotha’s scent on you.”

The man sat back behind the desk and looked at the fox and then back at Zeke again.

“There’s something about you that I trust,” said the man. “I don’t know what it is, but I do. I don’t think you’re one of them, but I gotta be sure, so I’m gonna give you one more test. You ready?”

Zeke nodded. The man smiled and took his shotgun and placed it on the table in front of him, close enough for Zeke to grab. Zeke stared at the shotgun, not quite knowing what he was supposed to do. They sat in silence for a moment, and then Zeke put his right hand face down on the table and gently slid the shotgun back towards the man.

The man took the weapon and smiled.

“You passed the test,” said the man. “Let’s talk.”

/***/

The man brought a lukewarm pile of white-yellow mush that he said had been dehydrated mashed potatoes and eggs. They had both come from a can of powder downstairs, and he apologized ahead of time for their taste. He’d been experimenting with how to make them palatable in the absence of a real oven, but hadn’t yet been successful. Still, Zeke found them edible and smiled as he ate them. The man brought an extra bowl for the fox, who ate its contents quickly and then laid down at Zeke’s feet and took a nap. The man ate too, and said his name was
Barabbas
.

“I got a real name, of course, like all those guys back at the dockyards, but after the things I’ve done, I don’t deserve to have my real name,” said Barabbas. “I want everyone who meets me to know what I’ve become. Even if they end up killing me because I wear the name the Devil gave me, I want the world to know.”

Barabbas explained that he had been a normal man before the flare. Though he’d had a rough upbringing filled with violence, he’d come out the other end and renounced his ways, becoming a good, kind citizen. He had even gotten a job as teacher. The flare hit, he had fallen in with the gang at the dockyards, they had given him EverRed, and he’d immediately slid back to his old ways of violence.

“This isn’t an excuse,” said Barabbas. “I killed some innocent people, and I deserve Hell for that, because when you throw another to the wolves, it doesn’t matter whether you’re high or not. Intentions don’t matter. All that matters is what you do.”

Barabbas asked Zeke if he had taken the drug. Zeke shook his head
no
.

“Be glad you haven’t,” said Barabbas, showing Zeke the scars on his arm. “It changes who you are. You’re still there, you know, seeing the world with normal eyes, but you feel invincible, and you don’t care. You
really
don’t care. You could see the whole world shot in front of you, and you wouldn’t feel a thing. You could be the one pulling the trigger, and you
still
wouldn’t feel a thing.”

Barabbas paused to think about his own words.

“That’s how we ended up like this, you know,” he said. “The stuff you saw back there, it’s not right, but it’s strange to think that a short time ago all of us were just normal folks. Think back to the most depraved thing you saw in the dockyards, and know that this time last year, everyone involved were office workers, bus drivers, dads, kids, regular people who were worried about paying rent, or working up the nerve to ask a girl out. They spent their days thinking about mortgages, TV shows, high blood pressure, or their local sports team, and here they are now in this brutal reality, either in a cage whimpering, or outside the bars and sticking someone with a red-hot pincer while praying to a God that hadn’t even
existed
last winter. Why is that? How did we fall so fast? Do you understand what I’m asking, I mean
really
understand it?”

Zeke understood the question completely, but didn’t know the answer.

“The speed of our descent is owed solely to the drug that Legion made,” said Barabbas. “Make no mistake about that. We’re here because of the Scalpel.”

“Legion’s a smart guy, a tough guy, and a complete sociopath,” said Barabbas. “He had all the elements to take power when something like the flare happened. He was a drug dealer before this, and the world saw him as just a run-of-the-mill thug, but he was smart and knew both chemistry and horticulture. He could make his own stuff, and he could
grow
his own stuff. Golgotha’s Breath comes from a fungus, you know. You can grow it in a barrel of shit.”

Zeke thought about that. He recalled the strange dreams he’d had after eating his own mushrooms, and wondered what it would be like if the mushroom had taken away his conscience and then told him to do bad things.

“From the chaos, Legion had all the tools necessary to grow a new culture, to bring a structured abomination to this world,” said Barabbas. “But make no mistake, neither Legion nor the Scalpel made these atrocities happen. The corruption was already built into us, and the EverRed just brought it out
quicker
. If Legion had been outside to burn alive when the flare hit, we would have still ended up in the same spot. It might have taken a few years or even a few generations, but everything you saw in the dockyards would have eventually come into being. Golgotha’s Breath just abetted the evil deep inside us and brought it out sooner. The chemistry of our brains is built for this, and the drug only served as a catalyst.”

Zeke tried to think of a world without EverRed, whole and functional before the flare. He tried to picture Malphas and Lilith working in an office
this time last year
, and he thought of them concerning themselves with
mortgages, TV shows, high blood pressure, or their local sports team
.

Zeke couldn’t imagine them doing that. He just couldn’t imagine them as normal people, with compassion and rational thoughts. He couldn’t imagine Scox as he once might have been, a normal human being who refrained from cannibalizing others while they still lived.

The EverRed served as a catalyst.
But there’s something more to what’s happened here. I know it.

Barabbas was frowning. He took one bite of the white-yellow mush and then smiled.

“There’s a flip side to this, though,” said Barabbas. “We’re also wired to be
individuals
, and no matter how far down society falls, there will always be
individuals
who recognize that things aren’t right. A society might become corrupt beyond redemption, but its
individuals
have choices, and there’s always going to be someone who recognizes that everyone else is wrong. Always.”

Zeke thought about this idea, and agreed with it.

“I’m not the one to lead us out of this, because I’ve done too many bad things,” said Barabbas. “But I did
awaken
to see that we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing. We can survive the sun, but not at this cost.”

Barabbas knelt down and petted Zeke’s fox. Zeke was worried that the still-wild creature might bite him, but the fox was asleep and didn’t move while Barabbas stroked the animal’s gray-orange fur. Barabbas returned to his seat and stared at Zeke.

“I was part of the group that disappeared, the group whose path you were supposed to follow,” said Barabbas. “Legion sent us to explore this place, claiming that it had resources that we needed. It had resources all right, but I exhausted my reserves of EverRed along the way and arrived here with a clear head. They had food and school supplies and even a working vehicle, but those weren’t the
resources
that Legion had sent us to find. The real promise of this place is more valuable than food, than water or even shelter. And with my clear eyes, I saw that Legion had tricked us into coming here, much as he has most likely tricked you. I was the only one who realized what we were about to do, and I was the only one who cared.”

Barabbas shook his head and then clenched his jaw.

“I saw what Legion was really after, and saw that we were about to turn his wishes into reality. So I took my gun and killed everyone in my group. I shot them, slit their throats and beat them to death. I killed them while they slept, and then let their bodies decay indoors to serve as a warning to all those who came after.”

Barabbas frowned.

“Legion told us the parable of the siege, and how the criminals, the thieves and assassins were the only ones who could stop the madness. I was an assassin all right, but I stopped the insanity by killing my own comrades.”

Barabbas shook his head in disgust, and then laughed bitterly to himself.

“Wasn’t the madness of the flare that I stopped,” he said. “It was Legion’s
own
madness. His troops came here to steal the most precious materials of all, resources that would become the cornerstone of his growing empire. I was the only one to see the terrible wrongness behind what we were about to do, so I acted. I’m a sinner through and through, but in that moment I did what was right and killed my comrades in their sleep.”