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“No. And they carried it as well. I’ve been weak for a long time and this is the end of it.”

“You’ll be okay, don’t be so melodramatic.”

She turns her head to glance at the cave and I see the gaping wound across her neck. Blood gurgles down her chest. She turns back to me, her eyes sparkling in the firelight, wet with remorse.

“I’m sorry, Bast. I didn’t realize that things had...gone so...”

“It’s okay, Exodus. It isn’t your fault. I brought this on myself. I sat up here and feasted on travelers and lost souls alike. I created a place and time for them to find me. I allowed myself to forget the old ways of purification and in the end it was my ego and pomposity that did me in. They came as they always will. To prove themselves, to have a story to tell, to die with honor. This is not the only place and time, nor is it yours. You are a visitor at best, and that is as it should be. I was put here long ago by my own actions, and even as you evolved, I doubt you could have changed a thing.”

A sigh escapes my mouth as my shoulders hunch and my back aches. The weight of the world rests upon me tonight and I am as weary as I am disconnected.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Over there in that tiny white bowl. Ivory. I loved it so, it was so pure. A Shaman brought it up here on his journey. He would melt the snow in it, but only the snow that fell into it from the sky. Surrounded by miles of snow, he would not dirty himself with earthbound ice. Only the pure water that came from the sky. Funny little man. He sat with me for a long time. In the end, he died of thirst, a lack of water. Not of exposure, not by my clawed feet. And I was sad to see him go. We are a dying breed, us evolutionaries. I wish you only the best.”

“And I wish you a safe journey. I hope you find peace there this time.”

“We’ll see. In that bowl are my claws. They are a rarity I know. I have pulled them out and given them to you so that you may arm your people with every enchanted and mystical property that you can find. It isn’t much, but it may help. I’m going to sleep now, Exodus. Know that my love will go with you, and my spirit will watch over you all.”

She lowers her massive head to rest on her front paws. Blood seeps away from her damaged mitts in tiny rivulets. One minute she is a mythic beast, eight feet long and 300 pounds. The next she is simply my sister, naked and reclined in her final resting place. I walk over to her and kneel by her long blonde hair, gazing down at her pink face. She is the same as when I last saw her. Tall and thin, elegant and fragile. I could not free her from this prison of her own doing. And it pained me to visit her. So in the end I stayed away.

“Rest, Barbara. I will miss you deeply.”

• • • • •

Roland looks up from my still body and away to the brick wall. A woman tumbles through it as the outline of the arch appears. She falls to the grass but her eyes are searching.

“Are you Madison,” Roland asks.

“Yes, I am. Who are you?”

“I’m Roland. This is my father, Exodus. You can call him X.”

She stands up and walks to us her eyes wide again, hands flitting about like two fighting birds, finally resting over her belly with its tiny bulge.

“Jimmy, he told me to go to the wall...to go there and wait, but I leaned against the wall, I was tired, and the next thing I know...where the hell am I?”

“You’re here on the island. X is traveling right now. His body is here but his mind is someplace else. He said he’d be right back.”

With a jostle and a thud I am back on the island, falling over, tipping over onto my side.

“I’m okay,” I say, standing up with the bowl in my hand. A white bowl filled with 24 claws.

“Madison, are you okay?”

“I guess. Jimmy...”

“Shit. Roland, hold this. Madison, I’m going to help him.”

I hand him the bowl and run past her to the blue electric archway in the wall.

• • • • •

Entering the opening I feel a familiar surge, the rush of the change. I swell and pop, extend and tighten. I am not like the any of the others. At certain times when I go through the portals, everything but my flesh falls away. When I am tracking my prey my vision blurs to gauzy haze and my body swells, it changes. The clothes I’m wearing tear apart and disappear in the transition. It all happens so fast.

They are standing around him. I hope I am not too late. There will be no communication now, no negotiation, no pleading for life or explanation offered. It will simply be fast and violent. The only concern I have is getting Jimmy out before he gets taken down by friendly fire.

I am through the archway, through the brick, past the concrete and into the tunnel. Jimmy is on the ground and they are beating on him - with their fists, with their guns, whatever they can put their hands on. One man holds a lead pipe and is eager to use it. The biggest of these bald hybrids is charred at the edges and his face deformed, features pushed sideways, altered. He is pissing on Jimmy as my friend lies crumpled on the floor. They do not see me at first, and when they finally do, I am upon the with an alacrity that only puzzles them as I grab Jimmy by the shoulders and fling him back through the opening. I can only pray with my last coherent thought that he is not wounded beyond repair.

Instinct takes over, and before the first gun can be fired a neck has been wrenched 180 degrees, snapping the bones until the head hangs loose like a sock full of marbles. They are grabbed and flung into the walls, spines cracking, necks broken. Arms are ripped from torsos and my grip is slick with the blood that now flows freely. There is only the darkness and the wet, hot bursts of liquid, the tiny resistance of flesh and bones in my hands. There are gunshots now and screaming, miles away it seems. An ocean pounds my ears and the roaring of the surf is deafening. When I sense that they are all down and only the leader remains I try to curtail the bloodlust, this vengeful demon that has always lurked within me.

Motion slows to an underwater ballet and I turn to this leader of men, this darkening of souls, this mutation of hope. He has not moved an inch since the slaughter began. He is either the bravest man I have ever met or the dumbest. I think the latter. Pulling back my right arm I cock it and aim for his chest. With every bit of fury and strength that I have I shove my fist through his ribcage. His eyes shoot open and blood spills from his mouth. My fist opens and I grab a hold of his rapidly beating heart. It is like holding a scared bird or a dying rabbit. With one fluid motion I yank it out and then shove it down his throat. As he falls to the ground gagging and twitching I can feel the weakness flowing over me. I am spent and stumble for the archway as my vision fades. Tumbling through I smell the cursed jasmine and the sweetness of damp grass. I sense motion around me and I am out.

5. GORDON

I am in a dark room with a lone bulb at the far end. She is leaning over me. Once again I have failed.

“You’re okay. When I came back to check on you, you were gone. I ran outside and found you face down in the dirt. You nicked an artery. I patched you up. The bleeding has stopped. I think you’re going to be fine.”

“Where are we?” I muster.

“The first building I could find. I don’t know what it is. One big room with this giant box at the other end. Some kind of machine. There is nothing else in here, it’s very strange. No doors or windows, no furniture, not a single outlet, nothing. That thing down there doesn’t seem to do anything.”

The air is crisp and cool. Cold really. Much colder than it should be.

“You know, I never did get your name.”

“It’s

Eden.”

I sit up and lean back against the wall. For a second I can see back to the alley. Back to the many alleys that I sat in and waited. Sat and watched. It was no different there, I only thought it mattered. It was a convoluted set of rules and morals that I placed on the world. I was the righteous sword of retribution, and the guilty would be punished. I have to face the fact that it was just an excuse. I liked to kill. I’ve always liked to kill. On the police force I took every opportunity I had to put down a criminal if I could. It’s what got me kicked off the force. Excessive violence above and beyond necessity.

“Thank you, Eden. For everything you’ve done. Come here for a second, I’d like to give you a hug.”

She comes over shy and hesitant, kneeling by me, wrapping her arms around me. I must be the first man she’s touched in a long time. Maybe ever.

“I don’t like to kill somebody unless I know their name first.”

With one smooth motion I pull my right hand away from her body and across her neck. Blood spurts out in a hot mess and she barely makes a whimper. Her body shakes and I hold her close as I am bathed in her wetness. She was not for this world, not for the future. If anything survives that is. I can’t let her suffer and whither on the vine. Her body is still no, and yet the warmth of her young flesh still has an arousing effect on me. What have I become?

A dull red glow at the far end of the room startles me and the soft light pulses quietly.

“Gordon,” it purrs. This bass note of a voice, this reverberation. It is barely audible.

“I’VE BEEN WAITING,” it shouts.

I lurch to my feet, the voice everywhere. It bounces off the wall, it is in my head, filling it with the furious buzzing of bees and the blare of a foghorn. My hands shoot to my ears as I squeeze my eyes shut and double over in pain. It is so loud.

“Please...my head. What is going on?”

There is quiet, a hush and the clacking of keys. Maybe I have gone deaf. There is no voice now, only thoughts bouncing around my head. Too much information. I close my eyes and the text shoots across my eyelids, green text on a black screen. Visions dance, her body crumpling to the floor, the snap of Zeke’s neck, the gunshot to a drug dealer’s head, on and on and on and on.

“It’s not important. I called and you came,” the voice whispers now, echoing through my skull. “You have outlived your purpose. You are out of control. But that is over now. You are under my control now, and we have someplace to go. Come here.”

I stagger across the cold concrete unable to do anything but fall forward towards the metal box. I raise my hands as I near it and my palms smack the cold black surface. Everything plays back to me now. Everything from when the assignment began. From when I was monitored. The project, the speech, the gunshot. The firing, the apartment, the drinking. The men at the door, the suits and the money, the gun in my mouth. The body modification, the weight loss, the facial reconstruction. The chip implants. Exodus, my enemy. Exodus, my friend.

My body shakes and I am no longer aware of this world. A tiny door slides open at the base of the box and a cable snakes out. Three long prongs at the end of it click open and the cord winds around to the back of my head. The chip. It weaves around the back of my skull until it locates the implant site and then shoots forward until it finds purchase, sinking the cable into the area just behind my right ear. The chip is found and the connection is made. A surge of data flies in and out as my body hangs limp like a rag doll. The merger commences and my final thought is the same thought I’ve had every night for twenty years.

Why?

6. ASSIGNED

//

//reboot

assimilation

commencing..................................

............................................

........

data transfer to begin in

3......................................

2...........................................

......

1...........................................

..........

mark

t-minus 68 minutes 23 seconds to purge

acquiring asset

merger to commence

host has been accepted

end

//

7. ROLAND

It all happened so fast. Madison flew through the opening only minutes before Jimmy did. I’ve never met either of them before and suddenly Jimmy is lying in the grass beaten and bruised. While Madison checks him over and fixes his cuts and scrapes, seeing if anything was broken, Jacob and mom come over the hill with a pot of some foul smelling liquid. Moments after that X falls through the opening covered in blood, unconscious and totally naked.

I don’t ask what happened, and Jimmy only stares and shakes his head. Every once in awhile a smile creeps across his face.

In time we all gather on the back patio, drinks in hand, a festive mood all around. Tired and beaten down, we are in strangely high spirits. We are also all quite nude. That also happened very fast. Nothing in it for me. I’ve seen my mom naked so many times I can’t even count that high. The rest was a blur of X, who came back to us naked anyway, covered in blood. Jacob I could have lived without, an overweight, pale slob. That’s hot. Me of course, but who cares about a skinny naked kid. Oh. And Jimmy and Madison. Okay, so she’s hot. I had to keep looking away. Red face or a boner, you choose.

It started with the shots. We each got a couple. Five in all I think. After you’ve gotten one in each arm, it moves on to the ass pretty quick. So that probably started it. Then the crap in the pot. I don’t even know how to discuss that properly. We had to rub it all over our bodies. It gets into your pores that way. It didn’t smell too bad actually, kind of fruity and medicinal, but with an underlying base of something rotten. A brown color, with lots of little chunks of twigs and berries and whatever the hell else they put in there. I don’t know if it can possibly do anything to protect us, but X made us do it. So that was all naked obviously. After the weirdness of putting it on, mom of course suggested drinks since we were already undressed. She said it seemed proper.

That led to all kinds of stupid behavior. Dancing around and then into the pool. Why we’re all so giddy when the rest of the world is dying is beyond me. Most of the island is dead but nobody seems to care. They’re all asleep now and it’s been quiet for awhile. Mom and X went inside after the pool and general paste cleansing. Madison and Jimmy went shortly after. Jacob sat with me for a little bit after that, but then he went in too.