Authors: Craig Saunders
'I'm
afraid I don't recall...'
The
boy still watched.
O'Dell
found he could not take his eyes from the child. The child gaze was unnerving.
O'Dell, distracted, afraid for no reason he could discern, leaned in close and
whispered to the man named Fenchurch. A boy shouldn't be in a pub, alone, and
this one shouldn't be here at all.
'Fenchurch...someone's
here, watching us.
Watching me
.'
'Paranoia,
Mr. O'Dell. An unfortunate but common side effect. Do relax, Mr. O'Dell. I came
to offer you a job. It seems...'
O'Dell
tore his eyes from the boy, and stared with dark, burning eyes at Fenchurch.
'Mr.
Fenchurch,' he said, and his voice shook. 'What is happening to me? I feel...I
think I can see the future.'
'Precisely,
Mr. O'Dell. Did you foresee me coming here today? Remarkable, if so.'
'We
always come here,' said O'Dell.
'We're always here.'
'Where?'
'This
pub.
Now.
'
'This
is only the second time,' said Fenchurch. But it wasn't Fenchurch's face.
Fenchurch was gone. It was the boy. The boy was older, by twenty or more years.
No longer a child, but a man.
I
remember that I will meet him,
thought O'Dell.
I remember the
future...how in fuck can I remember the future?
'No,'
he told the boy, or man, or...there was something
else
inside the child.
The boy was light. Like a cloud made flesh, solid, but...a wisp, moisture, all
joined with lights that glinted like lights beneath waves.
O'Dell's
head began to ache. He wiped blood from beneath his nose.
'Do
you remember?' asked the man that was not Fenchurch.
He
used to be a boy. He was dead. He...I killed him. I will kill him?
'I
don't want to remember!'
'How
does it go, O'Dell?
Shall we walk a while? It is a beautiful day.
'
They
sat in the pub, then, with no transition at all the walked outside by the
river. The boy took a sheaf of papers from a briefcase he carried.
We
were in a pub,
thought O'Dell.
The Eagle and...Child?
We
were in a pub. How are we here? By the river? How?
There
was a pistol in the case, but it was the papers Fenchurch passed to O'Dell.
'Before
you lose your temper, Mr. O'Dell...this is the culmination of your work. Is
this your work?'
Jesus...what's
happening? It's not Fenchurch.
But
he found he couldn't voice his thoughts. He was too afraid. With shaking hands,
he glanced down at the reams of paper in his hands. Photographs, rather than
the untidy scrawl that he had seen that day.
'I
don't want this.'
'But
you have it. You thought you could make people into nothing more than
components in a computer. Yet you made yourself a part of that, too. You put
your memory in
US
. We hold everything you placed into tidy folders,
parcels of information. Things that should have made a soul, but you couldn't
bear the weight of it. You gave it to
US
. Look, Mr. O'Dell. That's
Michael Bryant. That boy? His name is Sam Tully. The boy with the larger scar,
on this page, you took him in 1978. Still learning your trade, I think. Or, the
doctors who you made to work for you. Far from perfect, isn't it? I think you
took out too much of his brain. But he's still a part of
US
.'
'Us?'
US.
O'Dell
stumbled, then took a knee, there in the grass beside the river. A path ran by
the river, but they were to the left. The grass had been mown. Everything was
bright, and sharp. The light hurt his eyes. He looked down and saw his
nosebleed had stained the grass red. The photographs were strewn all around
him. Dead boys and men, their skulls all bearing horrible dents, or welts, or
scars. Wires led to monitors. Tubes that went in, tubes that came out.
He
looked past the boy. To what he had left behind.
Hundreds
of torn humans. Thousands. Not ghosts, but real. Naked or in hospital gowns, on
their feet, eyes that should be vacant and dead all staring into him.
US.
'I
saw the future.'
'You
did,' said the man. 'But you lost the past. We're giving it back to you.'
'I
don't want it.'
'Take
it, O'Dell. It's yours.'
The
man took the gun from the briefcase. It should have been Fenchurch's gun, but
it wasn't. It belonged to O'Dell. It always had. The boy held it out.
Once,
O'Dell had asked for it. Now it was being offered, he did not want it.
'We
are working toward something great, Mr. O'Dell. I'm offering you the chance to
join
us
.'
'Fuck
you. I won't,' he said, but his right hand held something heavy and he could
not throw it away, no matter how hard he tried.
'You
could never make a human a machine. But you knew that. So you tried to take
away everything that made a soul. But souls are full of memories, Mr. O'Dell.
Memories
make US
. All you could see was the future. Whatever made you human died a
long time ago. US isn't the machine. You are.'
O'Dell
could see everything that made US human, roiling and flashing like a storm
inside the dust that was this made. A cloud, but one made of passion, joy,
thought, love, memory, invention. Humanity, yes, but whole, and humanity is
dark, too. It is vengeance, and rage.
'You
thought you created us, Mr. O'Dell,' said George, one with the entity. 'You did
not. You saw mankind's change and you were afraid. You saw the end and you
could not bear it. You thought yourself a genius and assumed my family were
results of your cleverness. We were not. You thought yourself a result of an
experiment, and you were not. People move on, Mr. O'Dell, don't they?'
'I
wanted to die. I tried to die!'
'Everything
evolves, Mr. O'Dell, and that which does not is left behind.'
O'Dell
put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
George
and
US
watched. They would remember for him.
*
XXIII.
When Dead Wings Beat Again
O'Dell
didn't create
US,
or those like George, and Eleanor. He simply cleared
the road.
Things last
until they wear thin, or are thrown out when something that might be better
comes along. Better or worse, though, some things were always worth holding
onto.
That,
George knew when he was just a boy of nine.
*
In
the years that followed, George often fell quiet. Sometimes when he stood
outside the house they'd taken for their own, there by the sea, he would drift
away as though he was listening to a distant conversation that none could hear.
His
speech returned, but he used it rarely.
Eleanor
and Francis were his parents, and they understood George where George did not
understand himself, like parents often do.
But
the older George understood just fine.
'Talking
to yourself again?' said Francis one day. They were inside, playing cards at a
round table. It was a rare day when snow did not fall. George was nineteen.
'No.
Listening.'
By
the time George was twenty-five years old, days with no snow became more
common.
When
he reached thirty, the ultraviolet summer nudged aside nuclear winter and he
began to laugh again.
'I
forgot I was funny,' he said. 'As a kid.'
'You
weren't that funny,' said his mother. Francis shrugged, apologetically. 'I
don't remember many laughs, either.'
George
wondered, just for an instant, if he could change that right now. Tell eight
year old George something to make them laugh, and then ask now if they
remembered.
Only
for an instant, because thirty year old George spoke to his younger self and he
was wiser, but because thirty year old George listened to a different, much
older self, and that George was wiser still.
*
'She
won't last forever, George. She's human...us? We're something different.'
Whenever
his parents used the word
'us'
, George remembered those that came
before, the people who were like Francis. In a way, he wished he and his mother
were just like her. The idea of leaving a parent behind hurt, still.
'I
know, mum.'
Eleanor
and George stood in the open, a hard sun beating down that would kill and
mutate. It couldn't hurt them. Francis remained indoors, now. She was weaker,
and older, and this light could kill.
'You
think there are many others, mum? Like us?'
'I
think there might be, George. One day, maybe we'll meet. Until then, we have
Francis. Some things, I think, should never be rushed.'
Eleanor
kissed her son on his cheek, bearded now but still youthful, and went inside to
help Francis out of bed.
*
Francis
and George sat on a porch he built with scavenged wood and watched the late
sunset. Seasons, months, weeks, days; they didn't seem important anymore. It
was warm, and Francis was too old for the nights and the dark. She wanted to
sleep earlier as she grew older.
Francis
smiled, watching the sun set. When it was full dark, George asked if she would
like to go back into the house.
The
house was lit by candles. They had fire when they needed it, jumpers when they
did not. Once, people had too much. Now they scavenged, people only took what
they needed. Francis thought maybe it was better this way.
'Not
tonight, George. I think I want to sit out tonight. Sit with me?'
'Shall
I call mum?'
'We've
already said goodbye, George. Don't be thick.'
The
older Francis got, the more brusque she became. George enjoyed it - Francis,
who never seemed to give a damn, giving less of a damn. And just as bad at
covering how she really felt.
'Is
this it?'
'I'm
ready, George. I've been ready for a long time. How many years, now?'
'Forty-five.'
'Jesus,'
she said. 'That long?'
'I
think. I might have missed the count by a few.'
'You
don't look more than thirty.'
'You
don't look a day more than...'
'Shut
up,' she said, but she smiled and they held hands, sitting on faded garden
chairs on the porch with just candlelight behind them.
They
sat hand in hand like that for two or maybe three hours. Eleanor brought them
tea, boiled in a metal pot on the old wood stove.
Francis
raised an eyebrow at Eleanor. Eleanor shook her head. 'Really?'
'Don't
be tight. Tea?'
As
the years passed, Eleanor and Francis became less like sisters and more like a
daughter and a mother. A daughter who loved her mother, despite that the elder
woman was blunt and liked a drink now and then.
Eleanor
went away, and when she came back, she put her arms round Francis and kissed
her on the forehead, like young people do when they love their elders.
Eleanor
left a packet of cigarettes, a box of matches and a quarter bottle of vodka
there in Francis' lap.
'Survivors,'
said Francis after watching Eleanor go inside. Eleanor, hunched and hiding her
face.
Francis
thought mourning wasn't such a bad thing at all. Nothing wrong with being sad
when only memories remained, and entirely human to know it. People should
remember their dead, she thought, and as always with this came images of the
dead she'd left behind. Men she'd killed, and people she'd left behind, too. Her
mind was still sharp enough, and those images always ended with Edgar's face, but
as he was the last time she saw him - in a dream. The two of them at a cold
window, staring at the world beneath a coat of ice.
'Sadness,'
he said.
Humans
were sad, weren't they? Did George and Eleanor feel that? Would others, like
them, understand what it meant to know how short, how
fleeting
life was,
and mourn at the same time as holding onto it? Would life be dear, or cheap for
the ones who owned a world where the old had been swept away?
George
watched her, and she saw how he felt clearly there, even though the light was
at his back and his face to the dark.
She
thought maybe they would hold the important things close.
She
sighed and looked down at the cigarettes, still in their cellophane wrapper.
She didn't smoke, but it seemed like a good time to take it up.
'You
mean us? We're the survivors?' said George, the word still resonating, after so
many years.
'No.
Actually, I was talking about the vodka and the cigarettes. But we did it, eh?
Animals will come back, George. You'll see. When they do, your people will
follow. You'll see.'
They
shared the vodka for a while. George took a cigarette.
'George?'
she said later.
'Yes?'
'Did
you ever wonder?'
'What?'
'Why
they helped the three of us? Why they got us from The Mill, and your mum? Did you
ever wonder...'
'If
they could do all the things they did, why they didn't stop O'Dell?'
'Yes,'
she said. 'Yes. I wonder. I often wonder.'
'I
wonder, too, Francis. I don't have the answer.'
'But
you have an idea, don't you? Did he tell you? The
older
you?'
'No.
He doesn't talk about things like that. Doesn't tell me things I don't need to
know. I think that's the point. O'Dell knew the future. But that's not what
life is. It shouldn't be. It's not supposed to work like that. I think I knew
that back then, when I was eight. Maybe I told myself. Maybe I just worked it
out.'
'You
think we're just not supposed to know everything, George?'
'I
think maybe
US
did the best they could. Or, maybe they wanted things
this way. Saw this was how things had to be. Most of all? I think we should
just take it for what it is.'
Francis
fell silent for a while longer, sipping the vodka and smoking.
Dawn
wasn't far away.
'George?'
'Francis?'
'Will
you watch over me? One last time?'
He
moved his chair closer and put his arm around her.
I
will,
he said.
The End
7th October 2012 - 23rd April 2015
Final Draft: 13th July 2015