Poison Princess (17 page)

Somehow Evie stems her tears. What a brave little girl. It will be all the more rewarding when I bring her to sobs.

“Did you lose all of your family to the Flash?” she asks, again surprising me with her interest.

“Yes, in the Flash.” I muster a grieving look.

She offers me one of compassion. “This was your childhood home?”

I nod, though this is my sixth home since the apocalypse. I've moved like a hermit crab, from shell to shell. In the past, I would exhaust all the resources in a given place, then abandon it.

But I like this crossroads town, like that resources come directly to me.

I plan to stay for some time.

Another knock sounds in the basement. Evie tenses, cocks her head. My hands clench.
Those little bitches . . .

I reach for the recorder, turning off the tape. Barely containing my rage, I rise, saying, “I'll go check my mousetraps really quick.” I'm so incensed that I fear I'll do murder and get blood on my corduroys. “You stay put.” As if she could possibly escape. “I'll be right back.”

I pull out my key ring on the way to the cellar door, quietly unlocking it. As I descend the darkened stairwell, I hear the hushed voices of my test subjects. They know they're supposed to be silent unless I address them.

Disobeying me?
Mindful of my spotless corduroys, I grapple for patience.

When I enter my dimly lit lab, the familiar scent calms me to a degree. All along the workbenches are bubbling vials and distilleries, flasks simmering on Bunsen burners. Myriad body parts are preserved in jars of formaldehyde.

The loose eyeballs in one jar always seem to follow my movements, which amuses me.

In one crystal vial, I've distilled a new potion that will spike my adrenaline, giving me a concentration of strength and speed. Another flask holds the key to accelerated healing.

I've weaponized other formulations. Bagmen—rumored to be allergic to salt—will stand no chance against my sodium chloride spray.

If any of the numerous militias roll through this town, they'll be in for a surprise when I launch my stoppered vials of acid at them. . . .

The other half of the cellar is screened by heavy plastic curtains. I call it the dungeon. This is where the dirty work gets done. There's an oversize butcher block, a stainless-steel operating table, drain fields, and anatomical tools.

I keep my stable of girls shackled in there as well. I currently own three of them, each between the ages of fourteen and twenty, each collared and chained to a wall.

Healthy young females like Evie have become rarities,
resources
. Like everyone else alive, I hoard resources.

It makes no difference that I'd begun doing this before the apocalypse. I
need
them, using them to test my concoctions.

Some might say I torture simply because I myself was tortured by my father, a tyrant who'd tried to “beat the evil” out of me. I'd been a mass of healing fractures and repeated contusions for all of my childhood—up until the day I chloroformed him, chained him in a storage tub, then leisurely dissolved him in hydrochloric acid.

He'd awakened in time to meet the evil up close.

And my mother, the woman who'd done nothing to stop him, even blaming me for triggering his ire?

She fared worse.

But my past experience is irrelevant. I use these girls only to further my research. This is my life's work. I don't set out to harm them, per se. The fact that I enjoy inflicting pain on them is incidental.

No, the research is all that matters.

When I head toward the dungeon, the trio falls silent behind the plastic curtain, their chains rattling as they scurry back toward the wall.

I push past the plastic, turning up the battery-powered lantern on the wall. As they shield their eyes from the light, I stare down at them one by one.

Clad in soiled garments, they cower on the packed earthen floor, their hands caked with dirt. They've been digging into the ground, making little nests in which to keep warm when they sleep.

A maggot-ridden corpse lies curled up in one nest, still attached to her chain. That one succumbed to my last experiment: a potion I'd designed to lessen the body's need for fluids.

For weeks, it'd worked faultlessly. Then it . . . didn't.

I view her remains dispassionately. The congealing blood, tissue, and organs used to be a
person
—a former Merit Scholar at an Ivy League college. That pile of meat used to embody a soul.

Now it's just a collection of elements.

Evie will take the scholar's place. Perhaps she'll live longer than a month. Perhaps my newest elixir—immortality in a bottle—will finally cheat death.

It must.

Why does everyone assume we've seen the worst of the apocalypse? I will be ready.

I clench the chain of the oldest girl, yanking her to her feet. “Why has there been noise?” I demand, spittle spraying.

The ring of blisters circling her neck runs with watery blood. All of them get neck wounds from the rusty iron collars. This one needs more of my salve. I won't give it to her now.

She considers answering, then thinks better of it. She'd been rebellious at first,
sassy
. Now she's hollow-eyed and quaking.

“If I hear another sound, I'll make you drink the gold elixir.” It's a pain potion that rips through their intestines. I relish their stricken looks. “Understood?”

They mumble, “Yes, Arthur. . . .”

When I return upstairs to Evie, I find her relaxed in her chair, staring at the fire. Her heavy-lidded gaze follows the flames.

The last fire she'll ever see.
Enjoy it for now.

“Sorry about that,” I tell her. “A pack of rats seems to have moved in over the winter.” I hope that my statement doesn't sound conceited. A rat infestation these days is a bounty. “If only they'd stop knocking over empty paint buckets. Now, where were we?” I turn the recorder back on, taking a seat. “Tell me what those first few weeks were like.”

“My hometown used to have a few thousand people. Almost all of them watched the Flash—less than a handful lived. Directly after, they holed up in what was left of the still-smoldering church, but not Mom and me,” Evie says. “When none of the cars worked, we took our one surviving horse, hooked up a cart, and went raiding.”

She leans forward, growing a bit more animated. “Half of the grocery store had burned by the time we got there. So we hit the remaining aisles. Mom tossed back my graham crackers and potato chips, teaching me to go for calorie-dense food, like peanut butter. The pharmacy had burned down completely, so we ransacked the vet's supply of antibiotics. We looted guns and ammo from Flash victims' homes. We were like locusts.”

Evie says this with pride. She should. If it wasn't for enterprising souls like her, I'd have no supplies to appropriate.

“Though Mom was convinced that the army would ride into Sterling and save the day—government and the rule of law returning, or whatever—we prepared like we were on our own. We worked ourselves to the bone, until our basement was stockpiled. Then we stood arm in arm, surveying the thousands of cans, the bags of beans, the canisters of weight-gain powder.”

Shaking her head ruefully, she says, “I remember thinking our supply would last us
years
. As soon as Mom had prepared us as best as she could, she . . . broke down.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was eaten up with guilt that she'd sent her mother away, that she'd sent
me
to that awful place in Atlanta. Can you imagine it? Her mother had been right all along, and her daughter's visions had proved pretty much spot-on. My ‘bogeymen' were
Bagmen
, pale-eyed and slimy. Not to mention the details of the Flash. . . . Well, Mom's entire concept of the world got a violent reboot. Her confidence was obliterated.”

“Did your grandmother impart anything to her that she could pass on to you?”

“Mom had blocked out Gran's doomsday preachings—like
aggressively
blocked them out. So she didn't know a lot. And anytime I pressed her to try to remember more, she'd cry. She was no longer the steel magnolia I'd always known.”

“There must have been something?”

“Mom knew only three things. My clairvoyance had to do with Tarot cards somehow. My call sign, of sorts, was the Empress. And I might be destined to”—Evie mumbles the next—“save humanity.”

I inwardly laugh at this. This girl is weak in body and in mind, as defenseless as she is gullible; if the fate of mankind rests in her hands, we are all utterly doomed. “That's a lot to put on a sixteen-year-old girl's shoulders, isn't it?”

“I know! It was so frustrating. If Gran was right and I actually was some empress, then what was the freaking point? Could I have saved my friends? Was that what the visions had been for? I had guilt of my own to haunt me.”

“Did the visions”—
hallucinations
—“continue after the Flash?”

She gives her head a clearing shake, blinking for focus. “The ones of different characters were rare, but I did see Matthew about once a week. Each visit, he seemed even more incoherent. Still, I was desperate to see someone my age, so I welcomed him, migraines, nosebleeds, and all. But I had a whole new symptom to deal with. I was hearing voices in my head. The Flash brought me a perfect storm of crazy—nightmares of gruesome deaths, visions, voices.”

Voices? That would correspond with her pathology. “What did they say?”

“For months, I heard only whispers and gibberish. Nothing that made sense. They grew clearer each day, but that also meant they got louder. Everything bad kept building on itself.” She rocked faster. “Stress, hunger, nightmares, voices. Always
building
.”

Evie was alone on that farm with only her mother, as good as stranded on a deserted island. It's no wonder she conjured voices, to give her a sense of belonging. Like imaginary friends.

And naturally, she fabricated those superpowers for herself. In a world filled with peril, where girls like her are targeted at every turn, she
needs
to feel powerful.

I would diagnose her as a paranoid schizophrenic with delusional features. It's because of my own madness that I can so readily identify it in others. But mine is a divine madness, a spark that flared to godhood.

With my elixirs coursing through my blood, I
am
a god. Soon Evie will kneel, awestruck, as I reveal my true nature.

In comparison, her madness grows tedious. A garden-variety schizo won't hold my interest for long. “So what did you make of those voices?”

“Again, I didn't know!” She frets one of her delicate, shell-pink nails—hardly the
thorn claws
she described. “They started the day after the Flash. Eventually, they grew into warnings.” She raises her head, meeting my eyes.

Seeing if I'm buying this? I cast her a sympathetic expression—or as close to one as I can manage.

“And with those warnings came the feeling that I was supposed to be out in the world doing
something
. Both Death and Matthew had said, ‘It begins with the End.' Something had begun, but I couldn't say what.”

“What about your other . . . abilities? Did you retain them?”

“There were no plants around for me to control. My skin regeneration was hit or miss. But sometimes when I had a scary vision, my nails would turn.”

I raise my brows at her hands, a silent request for her to demonstrate this.

“Oh, I have to be really emotional. I can't just make them appear.” She splays her pale fingers for me. “You don't believe me, do you?”

“Honestly? I'm not certain.” I am 100 percent certain that she is either lying or delusional. The spontaneous plant movement she described is biomechanically impossible—not to mention the morphing of her fingernails into a plant's attribute.

Science can explain all the other events of the apocalypse—but not Evie's “powers.”

Which have conveniently vanished. Since the earth has gone barren, and she isn't “emotional,” there is no way to prove or disprove her tale.

I begin to wonder if I'm not being played, if perhaps the girl isn't spinning a tale on the fly, picking up cues from my home, from my personality. The boredom I'd felt dissipates as I consider the prospect.

Will she talk about fires—because of the flames she was just regarding—or stew, like the one she ate earlier?

“I feared you'd tell me that you believed me, even if you didn't,” Evie says. “I appreciate your honesty, Arthur.” She holds my gaze, as if to really make me understand how serious she is. “Lying is the worst, you know?”

So says the girl whose lips spill untruths.
But I have to wonder who lied to her.
Who hurt you, Evie?
“I'll always be honest with you.”

She bestows a sweet smile upon me. A sixteen-year-old blonde. So easily duped.

When I wave her on, she grows somber. “A little more than a month ago, everything got worse. Much worse.”

“How so?”

“I discovered a new talent of sorts, Jackson Deveaux rode back into my life, and my mom . . . she got hurt.”

Her voice breaks when she speaks of her mother, but the mention of that boy puts my back up. Something about the way Evie has described him—as if the Cajun is larger than life to her—makes me feel murderous.

So not only had he lived, he'd returned for her? I see the odds of her being my helpmeet dwindling.

Why did bad boys like Jackson Deveaux always attract girls like Evie? It'd been that way at my high school. The only attention
I
had received from pretty girls was their laughter when I'd shown up for class with a busted lip or an awkward new cast.