Immortality is a Disease

Monsters

Russian.

What a horrid language.

Strange alphabet, ridiculous pronunciation, stupid grammar…

Maybe she was biased.

But needless to doubt, Elizabeta Héderváry was sick and tired of Russian. It made sense – she wasn't Russian by a long stretch, but eight years of it had made her fluent enough. Russian had been part of the school curriculum ever since she was thirteen, one year after the Northern army had invaded Hungary and shot straight towards their heart.

Budapest.

A beautiful metropolitan that had stood proudly on the two sides of the Danube River: two regions long united into one majestic city.

Elizabeta was born and grew up in Pest, on the east side of the river, but perhaps her family should have crossed the bridge when rumour of Russian invasion came whispering. Their army had put up a good fight, and although Elizabeta had spent a month with her parents digging through the rubble of their small house, she was grateful for the efforts.

She vividly remembered the burning bridges, the strung up electrical wires that formed fences and walls on both sides of the Danube, and the marching soldiers down the street, lining up along the wall and preventing anyone from sneaking across. Then came the reconstruction, the purges, the cultural invasion. The first few years had been hectic, disconcerting, terrifying, but by the time she was eighteen, despite losing her father to the war at fifteen and then her mother to grief one year after, she felt the fire inside her calm—but it remained just as deadly, deadly enough that she had been eighteen when she first killed a man.

A typical Northern soldier, a lieutenant who had gone out drinking with his friends, and it had felt… good.

Better than good, in fact.

No one had known it was her, and no one would ever know, courtesy to the Rebels. In Hungarian they called themselves 'Az Embereknek', which made sense, although it wasn't a particularly good or creative name.

For the people, they had made her vow at the bitter age of sixteen, and then they taught her to kill.

It was easier than one would have thought; a man thought he was so invincible, but there were a thousand spots on his body that could bring him to an end, whether it was instantly or slowly, and it was easy enough to pull the trigger or twist the knife or let slip a bit of poison that Elizabeta was almost… good at it.

Of course, it wasn't anything to be proud of, but that didn't stop that drug-like twinge of satisfaction from coursing through her blood each time she slipped away unnoticed with no more evidence than the victim. She was fighting for her country, she would tell herself if she had ever looked back and wondered after her actions. For the people.

For her people.

That was what had fuelled her. Years later, the fire had become smouldering coals, but those two simple words – Az Embereknek – kept her iron will from breaking or bending. This was what glory tasted like: sweet and bitter and sour and wondrous all rolled into one. This was what a true hero would do, this was honour.

She just never thought that it'd be so quiet, so humble, so… ineffective.

The rebel groups supplied for her living, but it was at that moment, as she forced her suitcase up several flights of rickety stairs to a small flat in an indistinct, nameless Russian city, she realised just how endless, how aimless, how seemingly useless her mission was.

The doorknob nearly snapped under her vicious yanks, and she slammed the door hard enough to shake the entire building.

Sometimes, she just couldn't figure out what exactly she had done to feel like a thin piece of paper being tugged in two opposite directions. She didn't understand why she was being ripped into pieces.


He knew he should be pleased with a promotion, and it would be a lie to say that he wasn't. But the longer he walked with his grandfather, the less pride he was able to muster up to straighten his spine and lever his chin.

It wasn't as terrible as the stories he had heard of the Holocaust nearly a thousand years ago, but it was still ugly. There were no mass shootings, no gas chambers, no rows and rows of shrivelled corpses, yet he watched as two children shovelled at the frozen ground alongside several elderly citizens. He saw a man dragging a pile of logs with a baby strapped to his back. He noticed several old men and women with bent spines and gnarled hands slowly mixing some kind of mixture of mud and stones that was then taken by a boy not much older than eighteen, probably around the same age as him, who passed it to a crowd of younger children who began pasting the substance onto the walls of a gigantic structure that he knew was going either become another factory or a second dormitory building, which the people in the labour camp direly needed. Judging by the towering chimneys shooting from the top however, it was the former.

"Why don't they just use concrete?" he asked suddenly, interrupting his grandfather's lecture about the significance and different parts of a prison labour camp. "Wouldn't it be faster and easier and, well, better?"

His grandfather rolled his eyes. "The point isn't to make their lives easier, Gilbert."

He knew that, and he also knew that he was pushing the line, but he asked anyway, "So making old people and children work in the cold and build stuff that looks like something cavemen would make and could collapse any moment is?"

"No." There was a trace of irritation in the older man's voice, and Gilbert felt a twinge of a strange mixture between guilt and satisfaction. "The camps are created in the name of science."

"Science," he repeated slowly, eyeing the crude architecture and primal tools and methods. "Yeah, I can see that."

There was another exasperated sigh behind him, and he didn't need to look to know that his grandfather was scowling in his direction. But his voice was as unmoved and controlled as ever. "Follow me."

As they strolled through the camps, murmured conversations amongst the prisoners silenced. Old men turned their faces away, bones creaking as they laboured; young boys dared a glance but quickly looked away, small bodies trembling as they hurried on with their work. Gilbert felt sick, as if he could hear the thoughts of these suppressed people, accusing and disgusted. 'Monsters.'

The silent voices nipped at his heels as he caught up with his grandfather, who marched on ahead without even looking at the prisoners to at least acknowledge their existence, as if they were too far below him to be considered more than a straying thought.

Simply to break the tense silent that spread in their wake, he decided to ask a question. "Is the camp separated by gender?"

But—that wasn't right, because there was an old woman toiling alongside a middle-age female. A little girl clung onto an older boy, watching with wide eyes as they passed. There were a few more here and there, but that was it. The proportion between men and women was probably eight to ten men to one of the opposite gender, and the thought sent a chill prickling up his spine.

"It is not," his grandfather answered curtly. Then where are all the women? "Come here."

The dirt path beneath their feet was suddenly paved, albeit crudely, like a child's work. Although, judging by the occupants of the camp, it might as well have been. The road swiftly got wider and smoother, while the ragged prisoners and their cavemen structures were slowly abandoned and forgotten behind him as the buildings suddenly became shinier and evidently sturdier. People trickled between the buildings, but they were much better dressed in crisp suits and white coats, often with something in their hands that kept them occupied.

"Those aren't prisoners," Gilbert observed lamely.

"No, they are scientists."

"Scientists?" For one moment, an uncomfortable memory of a gruesome image Mister Laurinaitis had shown in one history class when lecturing about the previous two World Wars popped into mind. His opinion of scientists – especially in prison and labour camps – was not nice to say the least. "What for?"

There was a sudden glint in his grandfather's eyes as he surveyed his surroundings. "As I said before, the camps were created in the name of science. Inside those buildings, wondrous possibilities are being discovered to provide the best for the world."

He nodded slowly, hoping to God or whatever powerful entity that it wasn't what he thought it was. "Such as… new weapons and technology, right?"

His grandfather waved a dismissive hand. "Medicine, genetics, all of the sort."

Gilbert suddenly felt somewhat sick in the stomach. "Does this have to do with the lack of women in the camp? Because I'm really feeling bad for the men right now."

The older man paused before answering in a slow, uncertain tone. "Women… possess a key ingredient to one of the most invested experiment in the North."

Definitely nauseous now, Gilbert dared to ask. "What kind of experiment? What are you trying to do?"

"We're trying to achieve what humans have been craving for thousands of years. Soon, there will be no need for anyone to fear death."

"Some kind of super cure then?"

But his grandfather did not answer. And when he looked up at the older man's unlined face and long golden hair held back in a tight ponytail, not a single strand of gray visible, he felt something feeble and childish and hopeful flicker and die.


There was something wrong. There had always been something wrong with the world in this war, but in the North, it seemed… amplified. As if it was inside the people themselves, and when they opened their mouths it slithered out like some unseen parasite. It was in their voices, their laughter, their mixed emotions that merged into one sense of strange fear and terror.

She had been attracted to a bar from the sheer amount of negative energy that radiated from inside even though it was filled with boisterous and drunken cheer. She slumped down in a seat in the corner, opposite of a silent woman who clutched her cup close but did not drink. She ordered something light, but, like the woman, did not touch it. She was not interested in washing away reality with alcohol, and if the woman had not seemed so dejected, she would have thought that it was the case for her as well.

That was when a man sidled up to her, breath stinking with alcohol and face bright red in the stuffy heat. "Hey, beautiful," he slurred in an unclear Russian dialect. "Shouldn't you be home at this hour?"

Elizabeta scowled fiercely at him and shoved the invading hand away. "Where I am is none of your business."

"Please, back off," a soft voice that she did not recognize called, and the man's drunken grin slipped into a snarl that he directed towards the woman opposite who clenched her cup in a white-knuckled grip, but her light blue eyes were cold and steady. He looked to be on the verge of saying something, but under the intense glare of two women, he faltered, swallowed, and scurried away.

Elizabeta scoffed, unimpressed, after the man, but sudden shuffling movement across her drew her attention to the woman, who was gathering up her coat and purse to leave.

"He's right, you know," the woman murmured to her. "It's best not to stay out too late." Her Russian was slightly accented, but it didn't sound like a dialect. She was probably from another Northern ally or somewhere the North had annexed, like Hungary.

"Why not?" How late was 'late'? It was barely ten o'clock!

"There have been cases." The woman stood, but hovered around and did not leave just yet. "Kidnappings and disappearances, no one knows for sure. The police are investigating, but they haven't found anything yet."

"Kidnappings?"

"No one knows," the woman repeated, shaking her head slightly, short, pale blonde hair rippling with the movement. "You are new around here, yes? Everyone knows, there have been countryside raids and women are the main target for the disappearances." Her voice lost volume while she spoke until she was almost whispering, leaning forward as if sharing a terrible secret. "It is dangerous out at night, especially for women and girls. The gods are displeased with the war, and the people are suffering for it." Then, casting frightened looks around her, the woman hurried away.

Elizabeta was baffled. The gods? The fact that religion was discouraged in the North made it all the more peculiar.

But she wasn't about to take any chances. She may be able to handle herself, but before she could investigate the disappearances in the North, she had a job to do. And it would certainly be very problematic if she disappeared before she could assassinate Wilhelm Beilschmidt.


Apologies if the author's voice tend to vary a lot. As I said before, three people are working on this, two of my sisters are working on this with me as a backup writer, so it might be kind of different. And we update very slowly, as you can probably already see. Thank you for reading, and please leave a comment below.