(Re-read Part 1 here: Stitches, Part 1 of 2)
After several kilometers of riding at breakneck speeds away from the junkyard, the adrenaline began to die down for both of us — enough that he thought to check on how I was doing, and enough that I could no longer block him from seeing the truth. Motion sickness, sympathetic or parasympathetic acute stress disorder, psychological trauma… or, at least, that was how Taz interpreted it when looking inside my brain. To me, it only felt like I was dying from the inside. I couldn’t swallow or breathe.
The motorbike slowed, and the moment it stopped I found myself stumbling onto my feet again and running away from the bike, from the exhaust, from the smell… I think I was trying to escape the memory. But it was continually in front of my eyes. I pressed my fingers against my face and tried to stop seeing it. The sticky gauze was hanging off of my cheek near my stitches; it had hardly done its job before it unstuck itself. I tore it off and tried to get it to stop sticking to my hands.
My hair was filthy. My fingers and my face were dirty, but with more than just dirt. I wondered if his… if that… beast’s blood was still on my face somewhere.
I stopped suddenly, involuntarily, and fell to my hands. My stomach retched, and I didn’t have the strength to fight it. I stood on my hands and knees for a miserable moment, trying not to buckle into a puddle of sick, and wondered if I would ever forget this feeling.
Back, said a voice from inside of me. Back; sit back; sit up. There we go. And the voice also had hands, guiding me backwards and helping me brush my hair away from my mouth.
Oh… It was Taz. I remembered that I wasn’t alone.
I got back to my feet, or I tried to. He helped me, and would not let go of my arms until my weight was steadied on my own feet instead of on him.
You’re not ready to move yet, are you?
I shook my head in denial. It’s fine, I said to him. Let’s just…
I closed my eyes and took a breath. It tasted like stomach acid when I exhaled. Can we just walk, for a moment? I asked. So I can breathe?
He agreed, and I took one step back towards the road.
And then I passed out.
I must have. I woke up on a dusty leather couch inside some building I’d never seen, and my lip was split from landing on it. Or was that from my attackers, just a few hours ago? I shuddered. It wasn’t from cold.
Taz slept nearby on the floor; I could feel him with my stitches. I listened, and then I could hear him breathing, too. I tried to focus my mind on him to distract myself. I couldn’t bear to relive what had happened.
Somehow, it relaxed me to experience it both ways: my stitches could discern individual heartbeats, and then I could hear how his breathing matched up with them. It was therapeutic. Not an obsessive focus — just my personal habit. Apparently, it was rare for stitches to be as sensitive as mine. The most that others could do was concentrate their stitches to tell the difference between animal or human, living or dead. Without really trying, I could tell male from female and calm from panic in any creature within a few meters of myself. I supposed I was proud of that.
I began putting together the story of what must have happened, since I didn’t want to wake him. We were in Old Town, right now. Some abandoned apartment block that he had found for the night, I gathered. I could see a bit of early morning sunlight through the dust-grimed window, but I didn’t want to get close to it, just to be safe. It looked like we were near the ground floor, not too high up. Maybe the second level. Moths had eaten the furniture here. The smell was unsettling. But I was used to such discomforts, after exploring the ruins of the city for months on my own.
Which was what had led me here, or… had led us both here.
God, it was my fault that this had happened, wasn’t it? I had wanted to be independent. So I acted like I was. Like I was invincible. Except I wasn’t; no one with stitches was safe in these areas, and we all knew which parts were safe. I had been beyond stupid. And Taz, well… He came looking for me voluntarily. But there would never have been a need, if I hadn’t pushed the envelope so far. Months of aimless wandering by myself, and I had thought nothing at all would happen? I guess I had never believed I might be in any danger. Not really.
Stupid. Stupid, of course, but worse: guilty. I’m sorry, Taz.
If you didn’t explore…
I started. He was awake! I hadn’t even noticed. Too focused on myself, as usual…
Hush, his thoughts pulsed at me. If we didn’t explore, as a species, we would never be where we are today. We would have made no inventions. No progress. You understand.
No progress? I replied in my mind. Taz, if this is ‘progress’, then… I’m surprised that progress is still considered a good thing. I gestured, with my mind, to all the surrounding city. Sent him images in memory of places burned and torn to shreds by the last year’s war.
He shrugged an acknowledgement, mentally. But he disagreed. War isn’t part of progress. But since some of us were for progress, and others were against, there had to be a division. Division never has to be violent; we wanted to be separate in our own, peaceful way. There were never enough stitches for everyone to be implanted all at once, anyway.
But division led to war, Taz.
Chell, you are female, and I am male. Your skin is paler than mine, and I am taller. Are we not technically divided into different categories because of these things?
I smiled and looked towards window, trying to think of something else and trying not to agree with his reasoning. But of course it’s not the same, I reasoned. Our differences are genetic, but the stitches were a choice.
I knew where his argument would go next, naturally. Do you choose to be alone more frequently or to remain with others for company? Because, judging from your habits, you choose the former. I choose the latter, usually. Thus, we are separated because of our choices. Are we at war?
I was silent, but rolled my eyes, so he could feel through me how obnoxious his little spiel was getting. But I also had to fight to not smile. He could sense both feelings.
Chell, people go to war only if they want to. And you and I both know that our side did not want war. We only fought because they sought to exterminate us.
I was silent again. Taz was right. I resented him — a little bit — for it. He always knew how to cut right to the heart of an issue; that was his gift. He was terrible at social gatherings, if ever something beyond casual banter took place. He couldn’t help himself. No one enjoyed an argument against Taz; they could never win.
I tried stretching my legs on the couch. They felt sore, but the blood was flowing. I swung my legs to the floor and rose slowly to my feet. The window was only a few paces away; I felt safer now that Taz was awake — which he could read through our stitches. I approached the glass and cautiously peered through to see the world outside. Old Town hadn’t changed much in the last few years. Lots of resources and space; not enough survivors of the war to staff it all. It had fallen into disrepair and stayed that way ever since the fighting began. The sun was rising, though, and golden-orange light painted the gray stone buildings… a little less gray.
I appreciated that Taz had such a handle on the truth, despite the annoyance. It was reassuring, I supposed. To look at the world through someone else’s lens and to learn truth. Not just another perspective, but a truth that I myself had not considered properly before. And it was nearly instant, because of the stitches. There was no possible way to miscommunicate. His choice of words had nothing to do with my interpretation of his ideas, because the truth was that there were no words transferred through the stitches. His raw ideas, inside his own mind, were exactly the way I saw them in my own. Undiluted.
Words, after all, were only a pigeonhole system of “Which word in your language most closely fits the idea you currently have in your head?” — and whenever there wasn’t such a word to describe an exact idea, humans had to invent paragraphs of descriptors to try and communicate this complex, esoteric idea. But it never worked as perfect as telepathy could. It sometimes seemed like the best that you could do with words was explain everything that your idea was not, so the listener might understand that this was some unique, new concept that existed in the gaps between words. If you can’t describe something, circumscribe it.
But the sad thing was that, immediately after receiving our stitches, we each discovered that those gaps between words were far vaster than we had ever realized. Entire universes of meaning, of nuance, had been locked away from our view… and the stitches were — virtually — an instant cure to human ignorance.
It was as if communicating with words — written or verbal — was having nothing to drink but dirty water… and telepathy through the stitches was free access to a feast of fruits and milk and honey, of myriad flavors and textures. One was sufficient to keep you alive, even if sometimes causing major problems. The other was everything that the human mind could possibly want.
Taz got to his feet. I could feel him behind me, but also that he wasn’t looking at me. He was processing the facts, and our to-do list — how many hours we had needed to sleep; how far away we were from the scene of the… of last night. How likely it might be that more like them might have tracked us. The firearm was useless without more bullets. He still had it behind his belt.
He also hated the gun, I discovered in that moment. Not feared; simply hated. Or detested. Detestation; disgust; resentment; one of those feelings.
I laughed at myself. I suddenly realized that I, talking to myself within my own mind, still struggled with words — with choosing the right word for the exact meaning I wanted. Which meant that another stitched person, looking inside my mind, could understand me and what I wanted to say better than I could understand myself. Or maybe it was a leftover artifact from the time before stitches, when I would have to put things into words for anyone outside of myself to understand — and my brain still did it internally, by reflex.
Taz came to the rescue, then. I don’t hate the gun, exactly. Although maybe you already understand that.
I nodded in my mind and replied: You hate what it does.
Or what it has to do; yes. People like us only use it when we have to. But we still hate the necessity.
I probed, then, gently — almost like a physical gesture, as if I were brushing away his hair to see if he was hurt — at the place in his mind that was as silent as a tomb. The memory of the killing.
And again, almost like a physical touch, I felt resistance as if his hand were reaching up to stop mine from advancing further. Politely acknowledging, and declining to reveal any more. It’s there, he said. The trauma I was searching for. And you don’t have to see it. But it’s okay.
I almost cried, then. What, psychologically, might I have done by requiring his assistance? By needing to be rescued, had I caused his mind to become broken forever?
Only indirectly, he jested. And only to a certain depth. The smile through his stitches and on his lips meant that the consolation was supposed to make me laugh, which it did. But there was actual truth behind some jokes.
And that, too, was a part of his answer.
I release you from guilt, was the sentiment I felt from him as I severed the link between us and retreated into myself.
It didn’t matter what he wanted. His suffering was another sliver of the trauma that fell on me to bear. His forgiveness wouldn’t change the fact that I was responsible.
I felt myself about to drown in the memory again, until something from that memory caught my attention. “He called me Melissa,” I suddenly found myself saying out loud.
Odd. I was using my voice, instead of my thoughts. Why had I done that?
Taz was looking at me, and I did not hide my thoughts from his view.
Maybe, he said, it’s because of how it makes you feel.
Like I want to keep the name distant from my own mind? So I say it out loud instead?
Yeah. Although that’s not really rational. But you’re allowed a bit of irrationality, given what you’ve just been through.
I nodded absentmindedly. There was still the question on my mind — but again, it came out through my mouth. “…Why?”
“Why did he call you Melissa,” Taz stated as if to confirm.
“Or who is Melissa? And… do I look like her? Why am I supposedly her? What does any of it even mean?”
Calm, I felt him pulse at me through our stitches. But he answered verbally. “Well, one, he was crazy.”
Easy answer, I thought in reply. Too easy. “That could easily be the only real reason. But.”
“But,” Taz conceded. It wasn’t enough to just leave it at that. That would be mentally lazy. When something this serious happened, it wasn’t smart to take the easiest and simplest answer and just… ignore all other possibilities.
Taz gazed at me then, and I felt him probing to see inside my mind. I let him in. Full access; anything in my memory that could help us figure out a clue would be worth sharing with him.
I felt him suddenly stop and blink. Surprised at something. “You’re sure that he used to have stitches?” he asked.
“You’re looking at the same memories as I am.”
“Hm,” he acknowledged. And then: “He might have hallucinated her.”
“Hallucinated an entire person?” I countered. “And a history between them?”
“They tore out his stitches. Mentally, that never works. However it was that he survived, his sanity probably didn’t. What if poor Melissa doesn’t exist? What if she is a phantom that his mind invented?”
I didn’t like that answer. But not because the theory didn’t make any sense; it did.
“Okay. But then, why me?”
“You were just the first person he saw.”
“The first person with stitches.”
Taz hesitated, and then looked away before answering. “…I’m beginning to think that the only people who are people,” he said, “are the people with stitches.”
That’s not a healthy thought, I pulsed at him.
That’s why I’m trying to fight it, he answered.
And there was something I felt like asking him, but I didn’t know whether I should. Our stitches spoiled the secret before I could make up my mind. Ask me, he insisted.
I was just wondering something. Do you remember how you felt before you got your stitches?
Taz’s mind was silent for a moment. Right before?
I nodded.
He pursed his lips and thought. I… can’t remember. Vaguely, maybe. I think I remember a lot of anxiety.
He brushed the stitches on his cheekbone with his fingertips, as if noticing them for the first time. Maybe I wasn’t sure how they would change me, or something about how it would make others see me. But I don’t really remember much about that time. Come to think of it, I don’t feel like I have any reason to think about what life was like before.
He looked at me. Your turn. Do you remember anything?
I realized that I hadn’t even asked myself that question. I tried to remember. I really tried. But there were only blurry images and feelings.
I do remember the world being dark, I said at last. It was a very dark place, to me — that must have been at the start of the war. I remember always being scared, every day.
But not anymore?
Well, scared right now.
Because they want to take your stitches away.
Because they want me to go back to the old way.
He understood. That would the scariest thing about losing your stitches. Going back to the dark world. Back to a darkened mind.
I suddenly realized what I wanted, and before I even knew what to do about it, Taz was right in front of me and pulling me into an embrace. I clasped my arms to the small of his back and leaned my weight into his. Just breathe, he instructed. I complied, gladly.
A minute passed like that, and at last my mind began to be clear again. The memories of the past were wiped out. I felt safe.
Do you think you’re ready to go? he asked. I could feel that Taz was getting anxious. He didn’t think that anyone had followed us, but he didn’t like being isolated out here. His motorcycle was still waiting for us outside.
I’m better now, I promised him. And it was true.
We left through the door to the street — a door with a shattered window pane, I noted, which was how Taz had let himself into the locked building. The motorcycle was conveniently stashed close to the entrance, inside of an empty delivery van on the street. As I wondered, his mind replayed the scene from last night for me to view. There had been a rear-door ramp already attached to the van when he carried my limp body in, so all he had had to do was come back downstairs and drive the bike directly into the cargo bay to conceal it. (Part of why he had chosen this street in particular, his mind told me.)
The motorcycle thrummed to life, well-maintained — without needing anyone to forage for extra parts in dangerous places, I felt as another bludgeon of guilt, which made me realize the most condescending irony of all: my motorcycle was still at the junkyard, far behind us. That’s what I deserved, I guessed, for breaking the rules of safety just to hunt for a better muffler. I sighed, and tucked my arms under his shoulders as we started to ride again.
We weren’t racing away, anymore. If no one had followed us in the night, then we were safe. Or close enough to it. Our commune was a mere thirteen kilometers away.
For the first minute, we didn’t say anything to each other. I kept my arms loosely around his midsection and let the wind beat my ears until they were cold; neither of us had a helmet to wear. Only then it occurred to me:
Taz, what made you think to look for me? You left in a rush — how did you know?
For the first time, I did not detect a confident answer from Taz. His mind churned in confusion, and then I felt him say, …I’ve been wondering that myself. I don’t know how to explain.
Explain what?
The truth.
The truth? I puzzled. Now he had me worried.
What is the truth? I queried.
I was just sitting. I vaguely knew that you had left recently, but I wasn’t thinking about you at all. And then suddenly, I was. You were all I could think about, and it made me worried. It got so strong that I grabbed the gun and my bike and… I went looking for you. I asked someone what direction you went, and then I followed my instinct.
And… that’s how you found me?
He nodded in his mind. And that’s how I knew to get off my motorcycle in advance.
I had no idea what to say. I could do nothing then but stare at the road as we surfed by. My ears were freezing, now, but I hardly noticed.
I tried not to broadcast what I was thinking, but, well… if Taz had been able to sense that I was in danger — or would be in danger, in the near future — then was it even possible to hide anything from him?
It’s got to be the stitches, right? he asked.
I nodded, but couldn’t bring myself to think of it as anything but speculation. That doesn’t make sense, but it’s a better theory than anything else, I thought back at him. But that would completely annihilate our understanding of how they work. Range, distance, and…
And time, he finished.
Taz, if what you say is true —
— and I could tell, through our stitches, that it was —
— then this would border on precognition.
Exactly. That’s what’s got me worried.
Worried, I scoffed. More like… amazed.
Under different circumstances, I would be amazed. This time, I’m simply bewildered. And grateful.
Yeah. Grateful is right, I decided.
Three kilometers away, now. I glanced to my left and knew exactly where we were. A guard tower had been erected on the roof of a disused convenience store on this corner, but it was vacant. It had only been built to serve as a decoy; the real guard post was in the sewers below. It didn’t smell great down there, so they said, but the sewer tunnel was the only effective way to approach the commune concealed. If ever anything tried to attack us from underground, our guards there would see the enemy before they saw us.
Taz pulsed out a greeting with his stitches, and the guard post underground responded cheerfully. Good to hear from you guys. And with the stitches, getting past security was that easy.
I sent them a quick taunt: Does it still smell terrible down there?
I felt their response like a burst of laughter. Not at all! It smells great, in fact. You should come on down!
It made me smile. Yeah, bring some food when you come! another piped in.
There’s no place like home.
It was a straight road from then on to the gates of the commune, which were open. The property itself was, ironically, a low-security prison. Or it had been, before the war. The danger from the unstitched cultists, even during this time of supposed peace, had led us to choose a place like this to settle until our population grew sufficiently. Already built for security, and easy to convert into a minor fortress for protection from outsiders. It had most of everything it needed built-in, in terms of facilities. Laundries, kitchens, rooms and beds and living spaces. Lots of homegrown animal pens and farming, as well, since we had expanded the outer fences. The only thing that was actually bad about it was how plain it looked, and to that end some people had begun drawing ambitious murals on the unpainted concrete walls. Some areas were quite beautiful, now. It was like a live-in art gallery.
But within the hour, it was like like living in a war zone all over again.
The story of what had happened to us spread like wildfire. Faster than wildfire. At the speed of thought, the unembellished memory of my kidnapping — and the voices and faces of everyone involved — had been shared with the entire commune. The first five minutes after our return was the most sober silence I ever remember hearing in my life.
Everyone had only one thought on their minds.
The cease-fire has been violated.
And no matter what I had to say, a consensus began to brew. A call to action which made me sick to my stomach all over again.
I couldn’t fault them for their emotions. But I felt desperate for life to simply go back to the way it had been. It had been my own fault, after all, that I had been targeted.
Had it not?
Of course it had. Everyone else simply did not want to admit the hard truth that I was responsible for what had happened. Escalating the violence was not the solution to my mistake.
After the first hour of listening to the thoughts of everyone discussing war in serious terms, I wanted to escape from my own brain. I had gotten a shower. They had given me fresh clothes and food. And none of it mattered. Things were worse than ever before.
Taz found me. I was sitting alone on a hard chair and staring at a wall. I wouldn’t look at him. I was ashamed of myself. And of him. It seemed we were on opposite sides, now.
He stared at me, unmoving. He wanted me to say something first, but I wouldn’t.
Tell me how you feel about it.
I stared at the blank wall. You know the answer, Taz.
Not fully.
No, Taz. Fully. You know full well what is going on.
Allow me to explain what I think is going on, he offered. And then you can confirm my perspective, or correct it.
That sounds marvelous, I intoned sarcastically.
In very brief, the news of your abduction is being used as ammunition.
He paused, but I had nothing to correct. He went on.
Ammunition to incite — or, justify — a war. And since war is evil, you would do anything to stop it.
I wanted to catch him on something, because I knew that he had a plan to convince me, but there was nothing of substance I could disagree with so far. Merely semantics. I held my peace.
Your idea — contrary to the proposal of fighting fire with fire — would be to let it go. You know that it was your own fault for being caught outside of the commune. You made a dumb mistake, and you suffered for it. You feel that the consequences have already been served, and that now we are back to the status quo.
I swallowed. So far, so correct.
So the best solution is for us to acknowledge that we are safe if we remain at home, and unsafe if and when we leave.
I closed my eyes. Squinted them shut. Is that so hard to accept, Taz…?
No, he confessed. …Except that the long-term consequences would be unacceptable.
He paused a moment to let me think, which I used to try to come up with something sarcastic to say. But he continued before I could reply.
It means that we, and our grandchildren’s children, must accept that this home will forever be a prison.
…And with that one sentence, I had to accept that he was right.
I looked at him, and I knew that tears were near to brimming in my eyes. He gazed into them and felt my feelings with me, in our shared mind. Felt my agony.
Then I have one request.
Tell it to me.
Take me with you when you go.
Taz couldn’t fully suppress his uncensored feelings from me, at that. It was as if his insides winced, worried for my sake.
Where we’re going, Chell, he cautioned me, there will be much more blood.
I blinked, and he could feel the defiance in my mind. Then I will be there to make sure that no one falls in love with it.
We stared at each other a little longer, and then… he nodded once.
We walked out of the dormitory together, and inside of twenty seconds, the group that was preparing for battle had learned of my intention to join them and unilaterally accepted me as part of the team. They offered me a handgun, and I took it under the condition that I would not be depended on for combat. They gave their assent.
The next few hours passed me by in a blur. Or, actually, they passed us all by in a blur. Through the stitches, I knew that none of us were emotionally prepared for what we were planning. But our bodies and equipment prepared themselves independent of our feelings. The facts were the only thing that mattered on this night — or so we compartmentalized things, in our heads.
And the facts were that, collectively, we knew where the enemy was, and we knew that they had not disbanded nor retreated after the confrontation last night.
And we knew, from a motorbike scout who had gone to reconnoiter immediately after Taz and I relayed our story, that the enemy was now collecting canisters from a chemical plant near their camp.
Chemical weapons? was the first thought on nearly everyone’s mind.
Are we going to wait around to find out? came the logical reply.
Logical. It was always logical. Tactical. Black or white. It was the environment we had to inhabit, psychologically. Feelings, and the second thoughts that came with them, were eliminated from the group psyche.
It was obviously a more efficient mode of thinking. Independent of what our feelings might tell us, we were maximizing our chances of winning.
And that was exactly what terrified me deep inside. Morality be damned. Victory was the greatest moral good, here.
The plan was created by common consent. Like a rapid-fire voting congress, but with all ideas communicated and visualized perfectly from one person to another, until the best strategy and contingencies had been selected and combined in the best way our collective intelligence knew how. I had only one suggestion to bring to the entire discussion, which they all considered for a moment and then decided to accept. Someone went inside the nearby medical office and brought back a trauma kit and a small biohazard bag to include in our load-out.
Fifty of us, in ten vehicles. Roughly forty of them, holed up in an industrial park twenty-five kilometers from here. Too close for comfort, and too far gone to reason with.
That was what we all told ourselves. We kept repeating it to ourselves as we loaded the equipment — including weapons — into the vehicles. And as we drove away from home.
And as the sun went down on our innocence, we repeated the same things to ourself.
Or, at least, I could feel everyone around me doing so.
Taz, I noticed, remained silent within himself. What I didn’t know was whether he secretly harbored the same misgivings as I did, or if he — by virtue of having already confronted and killed six of them — no longer needed to reassure himself of anything. And I couldn’t know. He wouldn’t open up that part of his mind for me to see.
Eight vehicles stopped about nine hundred meters away from the entrance to the industrial park and turned off their engines and lights. The ambient light of dusk was just enough to navigate by but still dark enough to obscure our movements. While the occupants of those vehicles disembarked and approached the enemy’s camp from the north, the last two vehicles — which included me and Taz — drove in a steady, straight line past the chemical plant. Lights on, speed high, impossible to miss. But we didn’t stop.
And then, while every head in the camp was turned to track our decoy vehicles, gunfire from their rear began to cut them down like weeds.
…Weeds that screamed human words and bled red blood when they fell.
The distraction had served its purpose. The truck that Taz and I were in, along with the last one, flipped around and drove in closer to deploy the last of our fighters. The element of surprise was over. The only element now was overwhelming and superior firepower.
The battle was over within two minutes.
Thirty-seven, our collective mind reported in to itself. And zero. Thirty-seven hostile bodies on the ground, and zero friendly. A perfect ratio, by any tactical standard.
Never mind the fact, or the feeling, that thirty-seven breathing souls were now forever dead because of our actions. Never mind that we had carefully engineered two minutes of slaughter. Never mind that we were, most of us, congratulating each other for it.
And one neutralized survivor, came one final voice. News that made us all pause; news that no one had really expected.
A moment later, the image of the last survivor’s face passed itself around to all of us through our telepathic chain. Two of us froze immediately at the sight. Me, and Taz.
We had met this survivor twenty-four hours ago, exactly.
I didn’t know why, but I ran to see it for myself. Everything that I could possibly want to see I could have seen remotely, through the stitches of the man who had found him. But my body acted on instinct, without logic. Perhaps that would be the only thing that could make any of this redeemable.
I arrived at the scene. A fighter named Roth, the one who had first seen the final survivor, stood there at the ready with his weapon. In front of him were a low-slung army-green tent with the red cross symbol stitched into its canvas and a cot with a bedroll. And on it, trying very obviously to keep calm, the young man who had called himself Peter.
Taz contacted me silently through our stitches. I’m just around the corner. I’ll watch with you through your eyes, if you wish. But you’ll get more out of him if he doesn’t see me.
I nodded in my mind. And then he — Peter — saw me. And instantly recognized me.
His eyes darted from Roth on his right, who had the barrel of a rifle trained on his chest, to me, and then back again. His chest rose and fell with a kind of near-panic. He lay on his back with a thin blanket over his legs and midsection, and I noticed that there was a dark red stain over his stomach. Approximately where Taz had shot him. When he finally turned back to me, he began to breathe more slowly. He didn’t look away this time.
I carried a gun in a holster on my thigh. It felt wrong to even have one on me, but it was important that it be there for this moment at least. I decided to walk around him in a circle, slowly, while staring at him. It felt as if I was casually asserting dominance, but I was actually checking him from all angles for any kind of concealed weapon. The only thing easily within his reach was a plastic water bottle on a chair next to his bed.
Target is unarmed, I pulsed towards anyone who might be listening. And then, uncomfortably, I realized that perhaps everyone in our strike team was paying attention to this moment of us now. I tried not to think about that.
I cleared my throat. Peter’s eyes were riveted on me. He looked me up and down, but his eyes always returned to mine. Always just… gazing at me. Into me. I hated it.
“Why did you target me?”
He said nothing. His lips parted, as if he wanted to answer… but nothing came out.
This isn’t working, I told Taz through my stitches, but then Peter spoke.
“I’m very sorry, Melissa.” His voice was nasal. I realized that his nose was swollen, still.
I glared back at him. “Who is Melissa?”
Peter’s mouth went slack again. Contemplating his next move, his next words. “Oh, she’s…” he started. And then he smiled wryly. “She’s just someone that we used to know.”
“Who’s we?”
In a flash, the smile disappeared again. “You. You and me.” Peter looked over at Roth again, and then at the gun on my thigh. “Chell, or whatever you think your name is.”
“I know no Melissa.”
“Not anymore,” he said.
I was about to retort, but he suddenly got a strange look in his eyes. He looked me directly in the eyes and said, “You must forgive yourself if she kills me, Melissa.”
“…What? What the devil are you saying?”
He had an energy of his own, again. Like I was no longer there and he was having a different conversation with someone else entirely that no one but he could see.
“Melissa. It’s not your fault. None of this is.”
I checked in with Taz. You have any idea what this could mean? I asked him.
Same theory as before. Looking into the mind of a crazed man doesn’t usually make much sense, I imagine. He lost his stitches, remember?
Out of curiosity, I strode forward to inspect his face more closely. I stopped suddenly, and then drew my gun and laid the barrel next to his head. “If you bite, I shoot.”
Peter looked at me with bemused eyes, but then began to laugh like I had said something funny. I hoped that meant he understood. I reached out with my other hand and gingerly stretched the skin on his cheek. A sad, misshapen scar where he had once obviously had stitches. I could only imagine the horror of losing one’s stitches, violently or no. And then I felt a pang of deep pity for the boy. Was this — any of this — really his fault?
“Biting…” he laughed. “I missed you.”
I withdrew my hand sharply. Taz, who’s with you? Is Pax there?
Taz confirmed, and I could suddenly feel Pax inside my mind as well. Pax, you have that package that I asked for ready?
Got it with me, was the reply.
I cleared my throat again. My heart was knocking against the inside of my chest, even though I knew I was physically safe. It was just being this close to this kind of creature… But I had to try. I needed to find some kind of answer.
I poked his head again with the end of the gun. “I want to give you mercy. But first, tell me who is Melissa? And who am I, to you?” Why me, dammit?? was what I wanted to shout at him.
He looked at me, and his brow furrowed. As if in sorrow. “The last time I kissed you, Melissa…” he suddenly started.
I kept my face still, as a scowl. No reaction, I thought to myself. This interrogation was going nowhere.
“The last time our lips met, you broke my nose. That thing inside of you was trying to escape from me.” He laughed weakly, and I noticed that his eyes were beginning to wet. “I still count it as a kiss.”
Without thinking, my tongue ran itself over the split in my top lip.
So that’s where that came from.
To my chagrin, he saw my reaction and nodded. “I know you were there, Melissa.” Tears pooled on his cheeks, now. “Hey. It’s not your fault that this happened. I’m sorry.”
“Taz,” I called behind me. I had had enough. I no longer wanted this creature to exist. Taz heard me — either through the stitches or audibly — and jogged towards us. Pax and two others followed him. They were carrying exactly what we needed.
“I still love you, Melissa. I love you more than the whole world.”
I looked my attacker in the eye and answered him. “Shut up.”
I holstered the gun — which I hoped I would never have to unholster ever again — just as Taz and the others appeared in view. Peter’s eyes scanned them quickly and flinched when they got to Taz. His breathing, once again, became panicked. I could feel his heart begin to pound inside his chest.
“You know that I love you —”
“She said shut up, boy,” interrupted Taz. Peter shut up.
Pax turned to me and gestured with his head. You’ll likely not want to be here for this next part; it can sometimes be disturbing.
No, actually, I answered. This one, specifically, I’m ready for.
Taz reached for my hand, and I squeezed it. Pax shrugged and then pulled out the small case from inside the biohazard bag. Subtly, the other two men flanked the two sides of the cot, and then suddenly grabbed Peter’s limbs and held them tight. He froze, then — and it seemed as if I could feel the visceral terror inside of him, despite only one of us having stitches. Peter glanced up and saw Pax opening the small box.
“NO!!” the boy suddenly screamed. “Kill me!!”
He looked at me, then at Taz, and then at each of us in our circle. Those wild eyes, again. “NO, you HAVE to kill me!!”
“Stop talking like you’re possessed,” Pax murmured distractedly. Small talk with a disturbed patient; it was how medical professionals coped with an insane world.
Peter turned to me again and began screaming words almost faster than I could process them. “I know you’re in there, Melissa! I had it in me and I could hear everything; I KNOW THAT YOU CAN HEAR ME!!”
Should I silence him? Taz queried.
Privately, I wondered at what the creature was saying. …No, I finally answered, let him scream. But someone will have to hold his head down. Taz nodded and took the position near Peter’s head.
“None of you understand!” the boy continued, faster and more desperate than before. “Once the stitches are in, they don’t let you out!! Out of your own mind; it becomes — GET THAT DAMNED THING AWAY FROM ME!!” his voice screeched.
From a small incubator tube, Pax had removed with a pair of tweezers what looked like a long and writhing worm. It was about the length and width of a toothpick, and completely blind until inserted — bonded — with a human host. He pricked it with a sterile needle, and it came to life with much more energy than before. It was primed for insertion.
Peter struggled so hard against his handlers that he nearly fell off the cot, but their firm hands pushed him back in place. His words had become hardly more than incoherent babbling. How does it feel, I wondered at him. But he couldn’t hear my thoughts.
Not yet.
“Please, I beg of you; Melissa — Chell — you don’t understand; please don’t do this!!”
Hold him firm, pulsed Pax. This is the delicate part.
Peter heaved all of his body weight, as much as he could muster, against the weight of our men. With more energy than I thought a man with a gunshot wound could possibly have. “GOD IN HEAVEN, STO—”
— and then the most inhuman noises I had ever heard in my life erupted from his throat as the stitches punctured the soft tissue inside his eyelid and stretched themselves inward towards his brain.
I winced, then. Taz was busy trying to pin the creature’s head to the bedroll, but I suddenly wished I had kept him by my side. This was… harder to watch than I had thought. Hard to listen to.
Beneath his skin, the stitches began building their primeval neural interface with the subject’s frontal lobe. Soon a paralyzing agent would deploy itself into his blood, and once it reached the brain stem, the struggling would stop. A few more hours after that, the conversion would be fully done.
As I watched, his muscles suddenly seized — and then the energy went out of them, and the screaming stopped abruptly. The paralyzer had reached the brain. The process would be self-sustaining from here.
Roth furrowed his brow playfully as the boy finally ceased struggling. “Drama queen,” he muttered.
It was a pity that a paralyzer was even necessary. I had no recollection of the insertion itself, for me, but I imagined that I must have been more than a bit nervous to have something crawling around behind my eyeball at first. It had long since stopped moving, for me and all the others. Now, the stitches didn’t feel invasive at all to me. They were soft on the inside of my skull and calcified on the outside, where they were exposed to the air. Almost like keratin — but still hyper-sensitive to temperature and touch.
Taz left the body alone with the others and returned to see me. He could already tell that it had been harder for me than I had anticipated. He took me by the shoulder and walked me away from the scene.
We walked for a bit, without either of us saying anything. The men around us began cleaning up the detritus of war and collecting bodies to be disposed of humanely. We walked away from all of it.
“What he said…” I started. Out loud again, for some reason.
“Yeah,” Taz answered. “It’s bothering me, too.”
“I mean, it bothers me even though it cannot be true.”
Taz nodded and scratched the stubble on his jaw. “It doesn’t need to be true, actually, to be effective. The man we just gave stitches to — or, the unstitched thing that we just turned into a man — was a leader of his tribe before tonight. The leader of this sick… sadism. Zealotry. Whatever it really was. He was probably a master manipulator, no?”
I thought about it. “…Go on,” I prompted.
“He could convince himself, he could convince others, of things that weren’t true. What he couldn’t do was evolve. He couldn’t stop trying to manipulate.”
“So that was his only weapon.”
“So that was his only weapon. When the chips were down, all he could think to do was resort to what he had practiced for so long. Manipulate. Obfuscate. Throw names around; call freedom slavery. He was scared because he was realizing that his own best ally had abandoned him. His ability to rationalize genocide wasn’t going to work on us. And then he knew that he was powerless, and he became afraid.”
I shook my head. Not in disbelief, but… It was just so difficult to imagine being so mentally broken. What must it be like, living inside that brain? Having no other reality than what your twisted mind feeds you?
“It just doesn’t seem… right. How could a god create something that’s just inherently evil? Or — how could any kind of god allow it to exist?”
Taz opened his mouth to answer me, but then swallowed. He looked out and away from us, away from the city, as if he might find an answer in the sky. The stars were just beginning to appear in the distant blackness.
“…I don’t know,” he said at last. “I don’t know.”
(Happy Halloween. Thanks for reading.)
The Science of Good Sci-Fi 