Veniversum
Chapter 2.
The lie couldn't go on much longer, of course.
"You recovered unusually fast," Ms. Carson told him the first day he was able to walk through the house fully dressed.
"I seem to have a knack for it," he said, turning his salami-patterned hand over once. It was then that he spotted the remote for the television, though it looked like it hadn't been touched in years.
"What are you doing?" she asked sharply. Her voice was small and distant coming through the phone.
"Nothing," he lied like a disobedient school boy
He turned on the television and quickly switched to the BTN.
"I swear, you're like a child some days!"
There was a long, unsettling silence. At the hospital, Ms. Carson stood with a mask and plastic goggles covering her face and an ear to the phone. She could hear talking on the other line, but couldn't distinguish any words.
"What is that?"
There was no reply for a few more moments. Then, finally.
"Speaking of children," he said slowly in his deep, somewhat eerie tone, "how's work been lately?"
"God, I knew I should have thrown that thing out!" She cursed herself for keeping a television she never watched. With the cat out of the bag, so to speak, she released an exasperated sigh. "Well, you'd have to find out sooner or later. Don't worry, it won't affect us. You're the cure and we were all immunized…"
There was another long silence. She knew he was just watching, unblinking, putting the pieces together in his head.
"Look," she said after a few more moments, "try not to-" But she was cut off before she could finish.
Ms. Carson's first reaction was to return to the flat immediately and put a stop to whatever he was undoubtedly going to do. That is until the hospital doors flew open and two new patients were rushed in. The building was over-crowded as it was and many of the staff had fallen ill. Ms. Carson's soul sometimes felt like a bloated tick, burdened with the cries of dying children, the grasping fingers of mothers-no-longer, and the sight of this incurable disease.
The phone line was already dead, but for just a moment she wanted to neglect her duty.
"I have to get back to work," she said to the dial tone. "You know, I know how this all started, too. I was there, too. You think you have some right because you think you're alone, but I was there. I was just on the other side of the glass." She paused and looked around the room at the bone white walls. "It's not the death that gets to me so much: It's that I know there's already a cure. Does knowing that hurt more? I've never been burned badly, but I think my hell is just as dark as yours sometimes…but maybe that's just me."
One recently disconnected phone call away, in a flat with a box of sterile hand wipes in every other room, the man from room five realized he'd crushed the phone in his hand. He'd been wearing an oven mitt so the plastic shards didn't cut his palm.
The television continued its montage of dead children and spreading plague. It hadn't taken him long to put the puzzle together, and in an equal amount of time he once more reassembled the list of names in his head.
"Prothero, Lilliman, Sutler, Creedy. Prothero, Lilliman, Sutler, Creedy."
Over and over again the names of four horsemen ran through his head and one by one he began to add new names. He added the names of doctors and technicians, of security guards and politicians. Everyone who had been involved, everyone who had sat by and let the atrocities rage on like an unchecked wildfire, no matter their motivation or intentions, he added them to his list.
He didn't remember his parents or any of his family, nor his home town or birthday. He remembered none of his life before. If he tried to remember his mother's name, all he could hear was Creedy, and if he tried to recall where he went to school, all he could think of was Prothero. It was a bizarre state of existence, and he half wondered if obliterating those names wouldn't make room for what used to be there.
The television showed the hospital where he knew Ms. Carson worked and that she currently spent most of her time at.
And in an hour he was there, walking through the front doors with a mask over his face, his collar pulled up, a hat over his head and sunglasses at night. He'd overheard her on the phone a few days earlier, so he knew where to look for her. Security was tight in the hospital, but nothing running along side a gurney couldn't get a man past. She was easy to spot on account of her height. She was nearly as tall as him, if not equal.
"You made a proactive effort to save us," he said clearly, walking up behind her.
She jumped visibly, shocked to encounter him here, at this strange hour of the morning.
"Dear God you scared me!" she hissed, walking up to him quickly.
"You didn't stand by idly and I know you did everything you could with placebos and morphine, and I know I couldn't have escaped on my own, much less survived…"
"What?" she snapped, glancing left and right. He had recovered long before he admitted to it, she realized. She wouldn't have left him alone if she thought he was so able. "You shouldn't be here, how did you even get in? Someone here might recognize your… your voice."
"Why, is there anyone here I know?"
"I-" Ms. Carson cut herself off instantly. She could hear his intentions in his voice. She then realized with a stab of horror that she'd subconsciously looked directly at one of the technicians who'd worked at Larkhill. Many of them who survived the fire were sent to work at this hospital on account of their immunity to St. Mary's.
And he saw the technician, too. And recognized him.
"You've done so much for me," he said quickly in his most eloquent voice. "But I'm afraid our paths part here and I doubt I will ever be able to repay you. Good bye, Ms. Carson."
On that he turned sharply and walked right up behind the technician. There people nurses and patients in the hall, families gathered around dying children under plastic tents, and electronic witnesses, too.
This technician was the first name he crossed of his list. For the poison this person helped to create and the evil he willingly partook in, his body slumped to the floor in a pool of red and a glistening scalpel. The energy of the hall way shifted at the sound of Ms. Carson's cry of outrage, but he, the villain, was gone. It was like they had shone a light on a shadow in their attempts to catch it.
Ms. Carson watched him vanish down the hallway, whipping between standing bodies with the fluid movements of smoke. She remembered how he'd sworn his vengeance against every soul at Larkhill, but she never actually believed he'd follow through. And yet, it had already begun.
And it would continue, for twenty more years, until all but a handful of names had been scratched off the list that was burned into his brain. In that time he would one by one pick out those he held accountable.
"But, I knew it wouldn't be limited to those names alone," Ms. Carson would admit years later. "It would be anyone who stood in his way, too. That's why I had to follow him."
