Interlude 2: Requiem, Tennessee
A/N There are some slight differences here than in the book. Again, the scene here is in the free half of Poison Princess that is available on . So I'm hoping no one will think this is a problem.
Requiem, Tennessee
"Arthur, what was that?" Evie asks.
I blink. And again. I'd been utterly caught up in her tale of the flash. "What waswhat?"
She shakes her head hard – as if to throw off her drug-fueled fog.
Good luck with that. I am a master of concoctions, unparalleled in chemistry; the only reason she is still awake is because I want her to be. I had added one spoon full of white powder, not sugar, to her first cup of hot chocolate.
Everything is moving along according to my schedule. I am utterly content in how things have progressed.
She followed me through town earlier just as I'd expected. I'd whistled a jaunty tune as I'd trimmed away the wasted plant life from the town's welcome sign. There may have been 1212 inhabitants once. The flash whittled those numbers down to single digits. Now there's only me and mine, my little lab rats in the basement, wearing their collars, just like Evie soon will.
I'd guided her home to my lair, the lantern and smells of food, and the welcoming sign luring her in. She'll never leave here, just like the others. When she'd stepped in I could barely stifle a groan. The gorgeous blonde haired, blue eyed waif whose eyes had known betrayal and loss was now mine!
The windows have all been replaced with plastic sheeting, unbreakable. Every door has been nailed down, except the front door. That one is missing the inner knob and can only be opened with the pair of pliers in my back pocket.
My home appears warm, safe, grandmotherly. It should; an old woman lived here before I slaughtered her and made it my home.
I tape my subjects first, to get a baseline on them before I begin my experiments. As she first reveals that she was mentally ill I can barely contain my excitement. This girl is perfect for me! Heaven sent! I can take the merest spark of insanity and flare it to life. I begin sweating with barely harnessed aggression…and desire.
I frown; I'm not usually so…lustful…of my subjects. Mixing business with pleasure is…messy. But her allure is intoxicating. Added to that, that she seems to be more delusional than I once was before I used my powders and concoctions to stabilize myself.
"I thought I heard a thud downstairs."
She likely had. I use the spacious cellar as my lab and containment facility. One of my little lab rats down there was probably straining to reach the waste bucket. I'd left it just close enough to give them hope.
I never miss an opportunity to demonstrate the godlike power I wield over my subjects. They all assure me I'm the most handsome boy they've ever seen. I have no reason not to believe them. Evie seems to look at me with casual friendliness, sure we're just having a friendly chat over cocoa. Soon she'll be wearing a collar, just like my little bitches downstairs.
"Probably rats," I tell this one, inwardly laughing at my joke. "Just ignore it. Please go on." I'm eager to hear more of Evie's story.
Even though I believe little of it.
She tilts her head and gives me an appraising glance. "Arthur, what were youdoing before the Flash?"
I'm taken aback. None of my visitors has ever asked me this before, and for a moment I grope for an answer before settling on a lie. "I was preparing to go to college in the spring. Majoring in chemistry at MIT."
Ever since I can remember, I've been interested in chemical concoctions, in the transmuting of one substance into another. A chemistry degree would've given me a good base for what I truly wanted to study.
Alchemy—the ancient occult art of potions and elixirs.
I look older than I am; a wise man in the guise of a boy. In reality, I'm about her age. My skin has been weathered by the flash, and my potions have taken their toll as well.
"I'd intended to be a chemist." An alchemist. But MIT wouldn't have me. Apparently, my entrance essay on the criticality of human testing had "raised red flags."
"Wow." Evie is genuinely impressed. Her expression is so telling. "You must be really smart."
"I prepared all my life," I say with false modesty. My intelligence is off the scales, unquantifiable by even the most sophisticated measurements. "So now I study on my own, still working toward the dream." My own independent research—conducted in the cellar of my stolen lair.
Oh, but I love to …. learn. I can hardly wait until Evie is helping me gather data. But first we must continue to gather the baseline data. I don't want to talk about myself any longer. Evie will have plenty of time to discover exactly what I am…and what I do. "On the side, I compile these histories. Are you ready to recount more?" When she nods, I press record. "What happened to you and your mother after the Flash?"
"Mom, Mel and I waited for hours in the cellar, afraid to leave, afraid of what we might see. We slept some, but at early dawn we peeked out. You can imagine what we saw."
I could. Laser-like shafts of sunlight had blasted the earth for the course of one entire global night. Those fields of green cane she remembered dreamily would've been charred to ash. Anything organic—any living thing caught outside shelter—was incinerated.
And so many people, transfixed by the pretty lights, had wandered from their homes, drawn like moths to flame.
As if by design.
All the travelers who have visited me at these crossroads—those who've involuntarily surrendered to me their clothing, food, and even a rare daughter on occasion—brought tales from their regions. Before I slew them.
Certain details remain uniform.
Bodies of water flash-evaporated, but no rain has fallen in eight months. All plant life has been permanently destroyed; nothing will grow anew. And only a small percentage of humans and animals lived through the first night.
In the ensuing days, hundreds of millions more people perished, unable to survive the new toxic landscape.
For some reason, most females sickened and died.
An unknown number of humans mutated into "Bagment" —contagious zombie-like creatures, cursed with an unending thirst and an aversion to the sun.
Some call them hemophagics—blood drinkers. I believe they are anything drinkers, but without water to be found, they've turned to people, walking bags of liquid.
They drink and drink but can never be slaked. Like my quest for knowledge. "Why do you think it happened, Evie?"
She shrugs, and curling golden locks tumble over her slim shoulders. Again I am spellbound.
For a moment, I truly consider keeping her as my helpmeet, my companion. Though I am devoid of compassion, I do have some emotional needs.
Loneliness preys on me. Perhaps I have at last found a girl who can understand my genius, the importance of my work.
Maybe she will excuse my eccentricities, since she herself has tasted of sweet madness.
Or perhaps, I muse darkly, she will try to distract me from my studies.
I ruthlessly eliminate distractions.
"All the theories I've heard of make sense in a way," she says. "I guess it was a solar flare."
Yes, but we'd had them before, often. What made this one so catastrophic? Why has the entire planet gone barren? Some say the very tilt of the earth's axis wobbled, disturbing the balance of our world, lowering its defenses. Others claim that the depleted ozone layer—already a peeling scab—ripped open, leaving us vulnerable to heat and radiation.
Basically, we know as much about the Flash as medieval quacks knew about the black death. Will the answer turn out to be something as simple as disease-carrying fleas spread by rats?
"I really don't know what to think," Evie says. "I try not to dwell on things I can't control."
Smart girl.
"What's your theory, Arthur?"
"I'm in your camp. Best not to obsess over it," I say, though I obsess over it continually, fixated with how perfectly organic matter was destroyed, while at least some homes and buildings were spared. My theory would only frighten her; and I'm not ready to put her on edge. Yet. "Did any of your friends survive aside from Mel? Did the flier prank work?"
Tears fall down her face in contrast to her next words. "It worked like a dream. Maybe half our town was saved. The same with the folks from the Bayou. At least two dozen families in a neighboring town. The ones in Sterling and in the town next door even went so far as to prank to the max." She gives a laugh. "Some of them went all out, filling up their cars with gas, storing twenty five gallons of gas, stocking their basements high with bulk products of food and water and the most unusual seeds. Cans of peanut butter, boxes of bullets. I found out later that Jack hadn't lied. He really had held a food drive in his parish. He and his friends had managed to pull together gas, food, water, and even livestock. There were goats and dairy cows, dozens of chickens. It was incredible, beyond amazing!
She looks at me, her face wet with tears. "We'd done it, we'd saved over three hundred people." She grins at me huge.
I allow my lips to give her a smile back, but it's without feeling. She's lying, though she may not know it. My lack of empathy is a boon for a scientist like myself. It allows me to experiment without hesitation. I experience only joy when my scalpel divides flesh—like two curtains, revealing secrets to my probing gaze.
The poor girl's mind has broken. She couldn't allow herself to deal with the loss of all the people that died in the flash, the loss of all her family and friends, so she's created an alternate reality where she was able to save them all. Delusions of grandeur.
"Where are they now?"
"I had to leave them. It wasn't…safe…for me to stay with them any more."
Convenient way to explain why she's no longer with them. I wonder what other clever tricks her mind has played on her to soften the toll the flash has taken. How will she have dealt with the lack of food, with the bagmen, with the harsh world we live in now.
For that matter, how has she traveled all the way here from Louisiana? Surely a girl as soft and pretty as this must have had a protector. Where is he now? The militia or slavers would have claimed her otherwise, if the bagmen hadn't gotten her first.
"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 the 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 the dimly lit lab, the familiar scent calms me to a degree. All along the work benches 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 hoods 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 needthem, using them to test my concoctions.
Some might say I torture them 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 own 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 what 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 back the plastic, turning up the battery-powered lantern on the wall. As they shield their eyes from the light, I stare 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 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 worse 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 if for now.
"Sorry about that," I tell her. "A pack of rats seems to have moved in over the winter." I hope that 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. Most of them watched the flash, only a few hundred lived. Directly after they met up at the church or the school, trying to figure out what to do. Some stayed in their homes. No cars worked of course. A few of the smart ones went to the stores. Mom, Mel and I hitched up two of our four surviving horses to a cart and went raiding."
Evie talks about what they took and where they went, but my mind is focused on how fascinating her mind is. To her, the people she saved were her friends. Those unsaved were those she didn't know anyway. Truly delusions of grandeur. As her story continues I add to my diagnosis. Hallucinations. More grandeur. She saves the day, saving everyone she cares about.
Perhaps, I think, I can charm her into caring about me. I have needs too. I need her to test my elixirs. If she truly believes she has the powers she says she does, my potions wouldn't really hurt her. Covering a grin with my hand, though she's still looking at the ceiling, I plot how I can increase the spark of her insanity to benefit myself. She really is heaven sent.