Tomorrow's Gone Season 2, page 4
“The cancer is coming back,” The Darkness informed him.
“No,” McTaggart grunted as he went into the bathroom and coughed blood into the sink.
“We need to find the vessels. I’m not sure how long I can keep you from feeling its effects, otherwise.”
“Damn it. We’re trying. You said I’d have more time.”
“That was before you got shot. It weakened me significantly, making it harder to fight the disease.”
“You’re an advanced species that invades people’s bodies, and you healed me before; you can’t get rid of a few more cancer cells?”
The Darkness did not answer. McTaggart wondered if the sickness had also spread into it.
He coughed harder and harder as if doing so might dislodge whatever felt stuck in his throat, but he only made more blood, and hurt his ribs even worse.
A knock at the door.
“Shit.” McTaggart looked down at the blood-spattered sink, and quickly splashed some water around to wash it down. Then he cupped handfuls of water into his mouth, gargled, and swallowed.
He stifled a cough, hoping he could make it through the meeting without appearing frail and ill. “You’ve gotta do whatever you can to keep me going.”
“Feed me afterwards.”
McTaggart sighed. “Fine.”
An overwhelming calm settled over his body, soothing his mind and offering balm to this throat.
The Darkness was better than any medicine, the alien mainlining his body’s natural healing mechanisms.
Another knock at the door.
“Come in,” McTaggart said, already headed to his chair.
Five
Arthur
Though it was only mid-afternoon, it felt more like a false twilight with the blending of bruised storm clouds raining down on them and the purple wall that was The Ruins’ new eastern border, swallowing most of the shanty town.
Arthur reached the gates of The Slums to see several hundred refugees lined up outside the front gates, in the cold pouring rain, desperate for entrance after having been driven from the shanty town, with another several hundred huddled in tents and under makeshift lean-tos made of canvas, scrap metal, and wood that had cropped up on either side of the street outside The Slums.
The suffering was immeasurable, overwhelming, children and grownups, wrecked and sobbing. These poor people may not have had much more than scrap and metal makeshift homes in a suburbia of landfills, but it had still been something. Unlikely as it was, Arthur had seen it for himself. A sense of home and happiness could be found even among the waste.
But now these people had been displaced by The Ruins and cast into the unknown.
The families with young kids were the hardest to see. Children, so rare in this world, had it hard enough already. Now where would they go? It wasn’t as if The Slums had a ton of room to take everyone in. There might have been space in the city’s old buildings — a fact Arthur was only guessing at — but there certainly weren’t enough resources for everyone.
As he looked around at the people, he felt their pain, palpable as the wetness from rain.
Where will they go?
Shanty town was the last resort for people who had nowhere else. There were small villages like the one Arthur had been living in recently, scattered throughout the tri-county areas, but none that would, or could, absorb all these people.
Somewhere in the throng, Arthur heard a dog’s whine. He sought it out and fount a mud-covered yellow lab, seeming to look for its owner. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some dried beef strips, then approached the dog in offering.
The lab looked up at him, fearfully at first, then sniffing the food and eagerly licking Arthur’s hand. He dropped the food into the dog’s mouth.
A young boy, around twelve or so, called out as he approached. “There you are!”
The dog went to him, tail wagging, rubbing against his owner, happily whining as the boy got to his knees and embraced him. The dog licked his face. The boy looked over at Arthur, saw the strips of food in his hand, and thanked him before returning to his family.
Arthur inched forward as the line moved, grumbles growing louder as he got closer to the gate. Only a handful of people so far had been granted entrance.
He was surprised there hadn’t been a revolt, people storming the only two guards on duty. Perhaps the truly broken couldn’t imagine getting in. Or maybe there were more guards beyond the gates, the kind that wouldn’t think twice about killing intruders.
The sheer number of starving and wet, cold and unfortunate, reminded Arthur of old war films where refugees fled on foot.
But this invasion wasn’t human, and its plans were indecipherable.
Were The Ruins finished moving? Or would they keep spreading until there was nothing left of the world, and everybody that wasn’t Touched like Arthur wandered the lavender wasteland as a mindless zombie?
He hadn’t heard from The Messenger in some time.
Why hadn’t he — or it — warned him?
Arthur thought of the flowers in his backpack. He hoped that they would help him to channel whatever occasionally communicated with him. But when Arthur thought of the flowers, his mind immediately went to Seth.
The kid he’d been forced to kill.
The monks saw the world as a neutral place, one that cared for neither the individual nor the group. Everything went according to the Ancient Gods’ will, and the best a person could do was try to divine their will and anticipate where the next wave of Fate might crash.
Arthur refused to accept that questioning destiny was a ticket to misery and doom. He refused to be a sheep, especially when he did not — could not — trust the shepherds.
Surely there was a way to reverse this. Something had always guided him, and now it was leading him toward an answer. He felt this with a certainty that bordered — or so his former brothers in the Order felt — on delusion.
He needed to get inside the city and talk to his old mentor, Brother Anger, who had left the Order of the Ancients shortly before him to open a temple in The Slums. Arthur needed to tell him about the girl in his dreams. She was real, and everything in his life seemed to be pointing toward her.
She could be the key to ending this nightmare occupation and, Arthur hoped, returning the vanished.
Maybe the monks were right. Maybe he was delusional. But if anyone could help him untangle the dream’s meaning, or know anything about the girl, it would be Brother Anger.
The man was a believer, but never blind.
After a couple of hours, Arthur finally found himself at the gate, pleading his case to a surly-looking guard dressed all in black.
“State your business.” He barely looked Arthur’s way.
“I’m here to see Brother Anger.” How many temples could The Slums possibly have?
The guard looked him up and down. “You seeking refuge?”
“No, I’m here to help him stop this thing.” Arthur pointed at The Ruins, close enough to fill his bones with dread.
“Yeah? How are you going to help him with that?”
Arthur raised his sleeves. “I have information.”
The guard’s eyes widened. Even a hardened gatekeeper was superstitious enough to respect the symbols on Arthur’s arm. He nodded, then walked him to the gate. Knocked twice and said, “Open, it’s Daniels.”
The gate opened.
Grumbling behind him. Hey, why you letting him in? and other such perfectly understandable complaints from his fellow refugees.
“Shut the fuck up or you’ll go to the back of the line!”
The anger died down, but did not go away.
Another guard, an Indian woman in the same leather uniform, waved Arthur through.
“Bring him to Brother Anger,” said the guard that had granted Arthur’s entrance. “If he is not known, drag him back out here.”
She nodded at the guard, then looked at Arthur. “Follow me.”
Walking through The Slums, he saw more of the refugees inside, mostly gathered round a tiny neighborhood of makeshift tents. Families huddled around fires blazing from tall metal trash cans as volunteers cooked meals in kettles over roaring fires. A woman breastfed her baby, sitting close to the edge of the encampment while her other child, a dirty-faced toddler, used bread to sop up soup from a battered tin bowl.
“It’s a damned shame,” said the guard, catching his expression.
“Indeed.” Arthur nodded.
“Do you know Brother Anger?”
“We were once in the same order.”
“Ah.” A knowing laugh. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“So, he’s still a giant pain in the ass?”
“You can’t imagine half the shit we’ve bailed him out of.”
“Drunken bar fights?”
“And more than a few irate husbands.”
Arthur smiled knowingly.
“I thought monks take a vow of celibacy?”
“We do. But … he’s no longer a monk. And not exactly a model of restraint even when he was.”
She smiled. “Should’ve taken the name Brother Celibacy.”
Arthur shook his head. “Don’t tell me you and …?”
She pursed her lips. “Just once.”
“Now I’m sorry.”
“I just had to know if the rumors were true.”
“What rumors?”
“Never mind.” She looked away.
And Arthur didn’t press.
They walked north until they reached the temple, nestled between a restaurant and a seven-story tenement. It was an unassuming two-story brick building that might have been a bank before the world went to yesterday.
She led Arthur through the red door, then a vestibule before they reached the praying chamber, a dark candlelit room with red and gold designs painted in handsome brushstrokes on the walls. He looked up. Saw a ceiling depicting a night sky flooded with stars, a cluster of God Stars in the center.
Several mats lay on the ground, but only a few of them occupied, people sitting cross-legged with closed eyes.
Brother Anger sat at the front of the room on his own mat, eyes closed, chanting in the Ancient Language. The dwarf looked much older than when Arthur had last seen him, his full beard now gray instead of brown, same for his ponytail. His robes were red, instead of the Order’s usual blue. His face was full of tattoos, the most dramatic being that God Star like an eye on his forehead.
Arthur wondered how many people in the room understood what Brother Anger was saying, a treatise on souls being reborn time and again for all eternity. Maybe it was enough to find comfort in a religious man speaking with perfect calm as the world closed in around them. A lone teenager had her eyes open, sitting next to an older woman near the front of the room, eyeing him skeptically.
The guard cleared her throat and approached the monk.
Brother Anger opened his eyes, brows furrowed by the interruption. He started at the sight of Arthur. “What is he doing here?”
“I think we can figure out how to stop The Ruins,” Arthur said.
“No.” Anger stood, shaking his head as he approached. “Away with you!”
The guard looked uncertain.
Arthur said, “I know we didn’t part on the best of terms, but I’m not wrong.”
“I don’t care.”
“Bullshit. You do care or you’d be off getting drunk like you used to do, instead of helping people here.”
Brother Anger stared for a long moment, as if deciding whether to hear him out. Arthur wasn’t sure if pleading his case would help or hurt him.
“I had a vision,” Arthur told him. “With a girl. A kid.”
Recognition was a sudden light in his eyes. “What girl?”
“Dark hair, blue eyes. And … very powerful.”
Brother Anger shook his head. “Let’s talk. But I swear to the Gods if you pull any bullshit, I’ll have you hanging in the square by sunrise.”
“So … we’re all good here?” asked the guard with an uncertain smile.
Brother Anger sighed. “Yes, Julietta.”
“Good luck,” she said to Arthur, then offered Anger a wink.
Arthur looked from Julietta to Brother Anger with a wink.
“Fuck you.” Then, to the worshippers, “I’ll be back in about thirty minutes. Feel free to … whatever. Just don’t steal my wine.”
He led Arthur through a door in the rear of the chamber, then to the stairway. “You have ten minutes to convince me of why I shouldn’t just kill you.”
Arthur followed, hoping ten minutes would be enough.
Six
Boricio Wolfe
Boricio stood in the pouring rain atop the guard tower with Slum Lord, some kid from shanty town named Yugo, and Solomon, looking down at the misery, a crossbow propped against the wall.
Several hundred people were standing in a line outside the gate, while the men up top debated whether they should open the gates to more refugees.
“This is bullshit,” Yugo said. “Those are my people out there. You can’t just leave them out in the rain like ‘dat.”
“What’s the difference, man?” Solomon looked at him. “Most of them would’ve been in the rain in that dump you all called home.”
Boricio had been through shanty town enough to know that was true. The structures were clap traps, houses of cards and bailing twine just waiting to fall. But still, it was hard to see your own people looking like extras in Schindler’s List with aliens.
But at the same time, it wasn’t like Slum Lord could just open the gates to one and all. A leader had to protect their people first. A truth that Yugo was too young or stupid to understand.
Slum Lord stared down at the people, then back up at the wall of purple, lights still dancing on gossamer but for now unmoving. “Do we know what other places are affected?”
Solomon said, “Our riders are still scoping out the other areas, but from what I understand we’ve only seen movement from the east and inward.”
“Yeah, conveniently stopping over my damned town.”
“You prefer it to stop over ours?” Solomon snapped at Yugo.
“You promised to open your city,” Yugo said.
“We still plan to honor that,” Slum Lord nodded, “as we can accommodate them over time.”
“And where do you propose they all stay?” Solomon asked. “You got a whole apartment building for you and those families you brought over. How many more buildings you want us to give you? We’re not a charity.”
Yugo looked like he wanted to stab Solomon in his eye. “That building was being used by one of the people I helped you get rid of. Way I see it, nothing was given, that shit was earned.”
These two probably couldn’t hold hands in front of a rainbow.
Best Boricio could figure from his eavesdropping down in the bar, the two cities had recently brokered a peace deal, just after Slum Lord eliminated some of his rivals in The Slums. Yugo had helped, thus earning him a seat in the new leadership. Solomon, one of Slum Lord’s top men, had wanted the drug trade for himself. But Yugo controlled the traffic while Solomon worked as a glorified bodyguard and leader of The Defenders — Slum Lord’s bootleg version of the Rangers.
He watched the men argue, sizing up each of their strengths and weaknesses, determining which of the fuckers he’d side with once the fans were smeared with shit. He wouldn’t usually allow a snot-nosed brat on Team Boricio, but this one had a sharp enough edge.
“Enough!” Slum Lord shouted above their bickering. “We must ensure the safety of everybody in here, including our new residents from shanty town. There’s no point in me letting more people inside if it creates an untenable situation or triggers another coup attempt.”
Yugo shook his head and stomped toward the ladder — brushing by Boricio with enough force that Boricio did the kid an admirable solid by not knocking him off his motherfucking block — then descended it like a teenybopper halfway through his tantrum.
“Sorry for that,” Slum Lord apologized to Boricio. “He’s still a kid.”
“A rotten little brat that needs to be taught a lesson,” Solomon added, glaring at the ladder.
Slum Lord ordered them back to business, thanking Solomon for staying in the tower with a crossbow, then leading Boricio down the ladder and back toward his hotel.
They took the elevator to the third floor, then walked down the hallway to Number 11.
Slum Lord knocked, then the door opened to a familiar-looking black man in his mid to late thirties. Slim and handsome. Refined; three-fourths Carlton and one-quarter Lando Calrissian.
The man looked from Slum Lord to Boricio, then back to Slum Lord. A look of familiarity between them. These men weren’t just fucking, they were an item. He wondered if Sasha knew.
Slum Lord closed the door and introduced them. “Boricio Wolfe, this is the mayor of Hope Springs, Richmond Freeman.”
“Former mayor,” said the man with a politician’s smile, already offering his hand. “But you can call me Richmond.”
“Okay,” Boricio said, offering his firmest shake.
The man’s hands had never seen a single day’s work.
Richmond brought them to the kitchenette and offered them drinks. “What’ll you have?”
“Got whisky?” Boricio asked as he sat.
Richmond brought a bottle to the table along with three glasses, then poured one for each of them.
Boricio took a drink. Better than the swill he was used to. He emptied his glass and passed it back to Richmond, who quickly poured him a second one.
He sipped as Richmond spun his yarn, telling Boricio all about how he’d been the mayor of Hope Springs, before getting run out of town by McTaggart and his coup. Now his wife was dead and his son, Elijah, an Alt, was taken. Boricio wasn’t clear on where his fucking Slum Lord fit into the story, but figured now wasn’t the right time to ask.
