6th Horseman, Extremist Edge Series: Part 1 (42 page)

“What the hell?” Ian asks.

Hana says, “Markus had three vaccines in red
syringes and just dosed Rice with one.”

Ian raises his hands. “Everyone up top. I
think there’s a discussion we need to have.” The boat is anchored
to a mooring ball in a much wider area of the inter-coastal
waterway. He stands by the helm, his voice calm. “No one gets the
anti-virus. Not until you show signs of infection. That’s the way
it should be.”

“But!” Josh yelps. “I want to know why he’s
got three vaccines! It doesn’t make any sense. If. . .if there was
a cure out there then why did everyone die? Where was the CDC? The
government?!”

My shotgun is still pointed at Markus. “You
got that right, Josh. This is some fucked up shit here. That red
syringe is inside stuff. You got to be close to Zilla to get one of
those. Maybe you got to be the boogie man himself to have three.”
My trigger finger feels tight on the cold steel. “Ben, get the
Bible.” Ben goes down into the boat and returns with Markus’ Bible.
“I wasn’t sure before, but now I am. I watched Markus writing a few
days back. It reminded me of something. Ben, flip the book open to
any page with notes in the margins and show it to Ian.”

Ian inspects Markus’ writing. “Hmm.”

“Fucking familiar, isn’t it?”

Tanis takes the Bible and Hana looks over his
shoulder and so does Ben.

Ian folds his arms across his chest. “So,
you’re Zilla?” he asks Markus.

Markus laughs and wipes blue crap off his
bald head. He takes a turn looking at everyone on board. “I am
God’s humble servant.” I bash the butt of my shotgun on his head, a
glancing blow that splits his skin. He falls to his knees.

Tanis leaps on me like a cat. “Stop,
Isa!”

I grab Tanis’ neck and kick at his knee.
Tanis falls.

Ben comes at me, but when my eyes fix on him,
he stops. I turn and point my shotgun at Markus. “You’re dead, old
man!”

Hana kicks my gun and I lose grip. The gun
clatters and slides in the slick blue muck. I turn, but she’s fast.
Her elbow bashes my head. I pull back and bring up my hands. I hear
Ian yelling for us to stop, but I don’t. I step twice toward Hana
and fake a kick, then punch. My fist cracks her nose. As I punch
again my fist is grabbed. She twists my arm around my back and
holds me there.

“Hana! Isabella!” Ian pulls us apart.

I twist around and sock Hana in the stomach.
Ian falls on me but my head snaps back and butts his nose. I step
back, fists up. “Fucking get me off this boat!” I scream. I slip on
the blue blood but maintain my stance.

Hana has her gun pointed at me. “I will shoot
you, Isabella.”

Great, the fucking cop is on her throne.
“You’re gonna have to.”

Ian approaches with his hands up. Red blood
spills from his nose and mixes purple down his neck. “Ben has
Markus at gun point. He’s not going anywhere. If you would calm the
fuck down for a minute we can figure this out.”

My blood pumps hot. I can throw off all these
assholes and take this boat to Cuba by myself. I should. I see
Tanis sitting on his knees, crying, and holding his neck. I feel
bad for grabbing him so hard.

“We have to survive
ourselves
,” Ian
says. He gets closer, within range of my fury, but I’ve cooled
without even knowing it. Ian puts his hands on my shoulders. “This
has always been about surviving ourselves.”

“Markus is Zilla. I know it.” I lower my
fists. I feel like crying again, but I hold it in. “He deserves to
die.”

“I agree.” Ian turns to Markus. “I know
you’re Zilla.”

Markus stands tall and points at me. “And who
art thou? To cast the first stone? You, Isabella, firing off the
EMP for money?” He points to Ian. “How about the virus you spread?
It wasn’t a coincidence that the nurses, doctors, and police and
the Guard got sick first? Tanis? I love how you installed the virus
on your father’s computer. You see? We are all Zilla. We are but
humble servants of God.”

I turn to Ian. Without saying a word he nods.
I run across the deck to Markus and grab him. He doesn’t fight
back, but holds his hands clasped at his chest. I spin him around
and push him to the lifeline.

“And Hana! I love that you opened the
quarantine, giving the infection rate a helping hand.” He grabs the
lifeline. “It was Ben that worked the bacteria into the water.
You’re all God’s pawns. We all are!” He cranes his neck around to
face us. “You were all so eager to believe the propaganda I fed
you. You’re like children. Ian, you float between anarchy and
socialism and you don’t really understand either. You can’t have it
both ways, brother! You bought every paranoid conspiracy theory you
ever read.” He turns to me. “And your greed got you far in life,
didn’t it, Isa?”

I punch Markus in the side as hard as I
can.

He coughs but continues. “Ah, Ben. You were
easy weren’t you? Busy blaming everyone else for your failings. Mad
at the world for the actions of the lost souls around you. You all
have no principles to guide you. It keeps you all lost and afraid
and confused. It is why God chose you to do the hard thing. To help
him return his children to Heaven.”

Ian leans close to Markus. “Why did you do
this? Why?” I hear his voice crack. “Why?”

Markus lifts his chin. “It was already done.
In God’s plan, it was always going to be this way. Now we can live
out our lives in his service because we are the chosen ones. We
will be at God’s side for eternity.”

Ian turns away from Markus. “Fucking madness.
Why let people be born in the first place? Why let everyone suffer
like this?”

“Religion is not logical, but ideological.”
Josh says. “Just as fucked up as fascism and communism and any
other idea that justifies one person killing another.”

“What do we do?” Tanis asks.

“Kill the idea. It’s a virus, no less real
than the one this piece of shit used to kill the world,” I suggest.
I look at Hana. She closes her eyes. I know she agrees with me
now.

I punch Markus in the side again. He bends
over holding to the lifeline, waiting out the pain. Like a thief, I
slip my hand into his jack pocket and pull out the case with the
anti-virus syringes. Markus doesn’t stop me. He’s still fighting
the pain. I lift him, turn him so he’s hanging over the lifeline
and then grab his ankles and lift. His body flips over the side and
splashes into the water.

I turn and take my shotgun from Ian. “Anyone
that has a problem with this, speak up.” No one says a word. “You,
Hana?” She stands there with tears streaming down her face, but
says nothing.

Josh runs to the railing and stares down at
Markus, who has started to swim away. The shore is close, but so
are over a thousand puppets. They’re foamin’ at the mouth. “Markus
won’t survive the night,” he mumbles.

“I know.” Ian unhooks us from the mooring
ball and sails further south. We slip past the infested residences,
full of puppets watching us. We’re the parade of the living and
they hate us for it.

I’m not too pissed that I didn’t shoot Zilla
in the face because I know what lies ahead for him. It’s a more
poetic justice. The worms will crawl into his skin and try to take
his body. Though he is immune, he will still die at the hands of
his children, the dead that walk in his image, the dead that are a
reflection of his twisted soul.

Ian pulls out a hose. He washes himself clean
and I take the next turn. With the hose and buckets and sponges we
clean the boat, and purge the sadness from her teak and her tackles
and her lines.

As I scrub the gunk out of the nooks and
crannies I think about Zilla. The master game he played — and won.
I think about my life before the extinction event. I’m not the same
anymore. There’s no part of my mind or body that feels like the old
me. It seems like, before all this, that I was a phantom on the
Earth, a mind in a foreign object that went from place to place.
Now I feel every muscle, every scratch, every wound. My body is
different and so is my consciousness. Yeah, I’m different, and
because of the emptiness around me I feel vulnerable. I feel like a
scared little girl who just can’t seem to wake up from the scariest
nightmare anyone has ever dreamt.

T
he six of us gather
around the helm. Isabella and Ben smoke like steam engines.

I hold up my hand reverently, “What Markus
said was true. I got a syringe. I’m vaccinated.”

Isabella blows out her smoke. “We all know he
was telling the truth. Except for Rice, Andy and Josh, and a
handful of other fuckers, the main reason we survived is because of
the shots.”

We take turns sharing the finer details of
our roles, and how, collectively, we ended the world. Josh listens,
though he’s in shock, looking small and thin.

I listen to the water lapping off the boat’s
sides. Finally, I say, “So, you get the shot, Josh. You’re saved,”
I mumble. “That leaves one dose for anyone we come across.”

Hana gives Josh the shot. When she’s done
Josh laughs. Josh hadn’t said a word since our confessions.
“Finally,” he mutters, “You guys are like the Four Horseman of the
Apocalypse.”

“There are five of us, you know,” Ben adds.
“Six if you count Zilla.”

“Whatever, you’re the fucking Six Horsemen of
the Apocalypse.”

“I want to know how a minister becomes a mass
murderer,” I say.

Ben pulls out a bottle of whiskey and takes a
drink. He passes it around. “I thought that shit was what the
Muslims wanted to do, hasten the return of the Mahdi, or some
shit.”

“Anyone can twist their mind to justify
whatever they want. He twisted Christianity into a pretzel so he
could make his God however he wanted. I’ve seen every color of
criminal do it.” Hana takes a drink.

“We’ve all twisted ourselves up to justify
what we’ve done,” Isabella says. “I don’t really like people, but I
didn’t want to off them all.”

“I don’t know how he went crazy or why. Maybe
one day we’ll know,” I say. The horizon is calm as the sun sets. It
will be a long night.

The next day I set sail just as the sun
rises. Isabella stares at the shore and I know she’s hoping to see
Markus. She repeatedly checks through her rifle’s scope. Though he
is immune, she wants to see his face in the crowd. I know it. But
it’s clear he’s gone. The shore is so loaded with puppets, if he
didn’t drown in the water, he drowned in the tsunami of biting,
clawing automatons.

The day passes quietly. I see a sign on the
channel marking South Carolina waters. I keep at the wheel. I
insist. It keeps me from freaking out. Everyone else ends up on his
or her own part of the boat. There’s a heavy silence and it feels
shitty.

We keep going. The water we have doesn’t
hydrate us enough and the food doesn’t satisfy. The fact that we
were still breathing hardly changes our moods. We’re stuck in
sadness. Since the moment of the first death I’d been holding it
all in, waiting for the right time to grieve. Now that the truth
stands in front of me like a phantom, one that I just can’t leave
behind, I want to drop the sails, drain the fuel into the ocean,
and float over the horizon to whatever afterlife awaits.

But I don’t. Instead, I hug every last person
on this boat, even Ben. I let myself cry, not caring how the strain
and tears twist my face, or how weak it makes me look.

We work as a team, trimming the sails and
adjusting our course. We continue down this everlasting southern
migration for no other reason than it was what we set out to
do.

Eventually, I feel further away from that
phantom. Is it behind me now, or am I too tired to see the shadow
it casts over my mind? Either way, I start to feel the breeze on my
skin again and it is cooling.

The Florida Keys disappear over the horizon,
but it has minor effect on me. We’re on a course for Cuba and even
though we don’t have enough food or water, I don’t care that we’re
leaving sight of land. I have something else on my mind. I’m stuck
thinking about Markus. How he used his religion to justify his dark
desires. He was the same as us, blinded by our points of view, our
biases, our hubris, hobbled by our inability to use reason and
common sense. I never sought out the opinions of those that tried
to disprove the conspiracies. I never took the time to think. I
just absorbed the lies. They were packaged so nicely.

I’m going to have to do better than this from
now on. I need to rebuild what I helped take down. In Cuba, where
the radio chatter says there are survivors, I will need to find
salvation.

#

The moon is so huge it fills the horizon like
a god. I think it is Nyx, the Greek goddess of night. She pulls on
my chest like she pulls on the tides. I’m not afraid of her power.
Zeus was, supposedly, but Zeus hasn’t just survived the apocalypse,
and gone days without food or water.