Chapter 16
1
It turned out, way too many idiots had chosen the painful death. John descended the stairs with anticipation as the many hushed voices below silenced at the sound of his approach. There was an inordinate amount of blood adorning the stairwell, and John made sure to announce himself before he got close to the bottom.
“Liz! It’s me. Don’t disembowel me!” He shouted down.
A moment later, Liz appeared at the base of the stairs. She was in human form, but the amount of blood on her already tattered clothes made her look like the survivor of a massacre. Lucky for her, she was only the orchestrator of the slaughter.
“It took you long enough,” she said.
“Sorry about that. We had to flush out the cowards. I see you’ve been having fun.”
“But it’s done now?” She asked earnestly.
“It’s done. All that’s left now is to stake the base out for any stragglers that might have been on earth tonight. First, let’s get everyone back home.”
“Agreed,” Liz said.
The three of them went about organizing everything for the next several minutes. This time, it was harder to find ways to cover all the women. Most of them chose to simply go without. They had all been through much more than a little public indecency.
It took some time, but eventually they were ready to depart. Liz moved to stand next to the woman she had recognized before, and John knew by the way the woman stared blankly at the ground that it would be a while before any of these girls recovered from their ordeal, if ever they could. John’s rage tried to rekindle itself at the disheartening sight.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, looking away.
The group moved up the stairs and into the street with cautious optimism. None of them had expected to be free ever again, and more than one outburst of emotion was heard. John led the women through the streets without contest until they made it to the transition pad.
John immediately noticed the additional three bodies on the ground by the transition pad. They looked like they had come to the garden to help before Jane took care of them. Even as John watched, the transition pad flared to life.
A man materialized on the platform already in armor. He had an axe in hand and immediately sprinted towards their group. His eyes registered the freed slaves as he approached. His urgency was replaced by anger and perhaps fear as the javelin appeared in John’s hand.
Before he could deal with the man however, a blur of motion caught John’s eye. Jane leapt down from the roof of a house to land directly on top of the man as he ran. With a quick and violent shake of her head, the man’s neck was snapped, and he was still.
“Good girl,” John said.
They all moved past the many dead men that now littered the area. John and Liz set about getting everyone sent back to earth one at a time. It wasn’t always easy to get the message across, as many of the women were from places John didn’t recognize. But, with the help of his translator, they were eventually able to see the task completed.
One by one, the abused and malnourished girls made their way back home. With every additional body that passed through the transition station, a small piece of the blinding rage John had been feeling was stripped away. It didn’t subside entirely, and John knew that a part of him would never be the same after the events of the night.
Nevertheless, he felt good about what they had accomplished there. It would still be days or weeks before the job was done. But that was a concern for later. John helped usher each of the girls to the pad and thence to wherever it was they had come from.
“What about you?” Liz said when it was only her, her mother, and Reign who had not gone.
“I’m going to stay here for the night. You get some rest and come back when everything is settled at home. Take your time. We can talk about how to proceed when you come back.”
“Okay,” she said, but John could tell that she wanted to say something else.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
Liz turned to him and wrapped her arms tightly around him. John took a step back in surprise. The girl was a mess of blood, sweat and grime, but John paid it no mind.
“Thank you,” he heard her whisper into his shoulder.
He could feel the instability in her voice. It was finally clear to John how much stress the situation had put the girl under. She was, as she had always been, very closed off with her emotions.
Now though, John felt all the stress melt out of her and down his shoulder as she let the tears fall. Soon great racking sobs escaped her as they remained locked to each other. John didn’t know what to say, so he just held her.
The embrace lasted for minutes, whereupon John released her to look at her face. It was a mess of tears and other fluids, her eyes red. He stared into them until she met his eye.
“Don’t worry about it,” he told her softly.
“I was so scared, John. I thought I would never see her again. I thought she was dead. I thought they were going to kill her before I could make it back to her. I thought-” she cut off abruptly as John put a finger on her lips.
“Shhh. It’s all over now. You’re safe. She’s safe. Take her home and get some rest,” he said.
With tears threatening to fall anew, Liz nodded her head. Her chin quivered with repressed emotion, and John could tell she had a lot more to expel before she could put the night behind her. He smiled reassuringly at her, and she gave a feeble smile in return.
Then, before he could prepare himself, her lips were pressed to his. They were soft, and the abundant moisture on her face was shared with his as they let the moment extend for several seconds. John was flummoxed at the kiss, but he didn’t let his surprise stop him from enjoying the moment.
They parted seconds later, and the stunned silence they shared let John know that Liz was as surprised as he was that she had just done that. He smiled at her again before letting her hand go with a gentle squeeze. Without another word, Liz turned away.
She and her mom moved to the transition pad, and John watched Liz fade out of existence as she was shifted back to earth. When her mom stepped up to transition next, she turned to John. He held her gaze as kindly as his turmoil of emotion would allow for his face to look.
“You are something else, John,” she said.
It was the first time he had heard her speak. Her voice was rough from disuse, but John could hear the confidence in it. It was clear to him that all of the powerful personality Liz displayed had come from her mother.
“It was nothing,” John tried to say, but even he knew the words sounded empty.
“It was not nothing. I know my daughter. Strong, independent, and too proud for her own good. She’s never asked anyone for anything. What you helped to do here tonight is more than my family can ever repay.”
“Not at all. Please, go and be with your family. You’ve been through a lot. Tell Liz that I’ll be here cleaning things up until she comes back. But don’t let her come back too soon, okay? She has a lot to process. We all do,” John said.
Then he bid her farewell as the transition pad stirred with life. She melted out of existence, leaving the courtyard quiet in her wake. After only a few seconds of this, Reign spoke up from behind him.
“So, you mean to tell me that you didn’t do all of this just to get that kiss?”
2
John ignored the jest from Reign and moved to the bodies of everyone that had fallen in the courtyard. He found nothing of value, but many of the men had something interesting on them. They were all the same. Each carried a small stack of business cards.
They were written in various languages, and since none of them were English, John had no way of knowing what they said. To the best of his knowledge, it was supposed to be the name of the organization. He tucked one away for later inspection.
“So, what happens now John?” Reign asked.
“Now I comb the entire base for anything valuable. Dimitri went down easy, but he had some fairly advanced genes. With the prices I seen, that probably means he has some kind of stash somewhere that he used to incentivize this whole mess. I intend to make it my own.”
“Sounds like you have a lot of work to do. Aren’t you tired after all of this?”
“I couldn’t sleep if I wanted to,” John said with a shake of his head.
“Well, all this excitement has me ready for a nice long bath. See you,” Reign said as she turned away and began walking to the transition pad.
“Wait,” John said.
He instinctively reached out a hand to stop the girl. Halfway to her, however, he realized how invasive it might have been to the girl after what she had been through. So, before she noticed, he let his hand fall. She turned to him with a raised eyebrow.
“You were really helpful tonight. I know you probably won’t want to come back to The Garden anytime soon, but if you do, find me at Emerald Base,” John said, giving the girl his room number.
“You’re right. I don’t ever want to come back here. Unfortunately, we don’t all get that luxury do we?”
“No,” John said sadly.
“Thanks for freeing me. And everyone else, I guess.”
“Goodbye Reign,” John said.
The girl went to the transition pad and faded away without another word. John watched her go with a contented sigh. The knot of tension in his chest had finally settled to something more manageable.
That didn’t mean he was at ease by any means. Every time he looked upon the still faces of the men they had killed; thick bile rose in his stomach until an acidic taste coated his tongue. He had murdered these men.
It wasn’t a question of if he had done the right thing. He knew every single body laying at his feet was there because they had chosen villainy. But as he beheld the sheer amount of death he had caused, he felt sick to his stomach.
Suddenly, John doubled over, falling to his knees. With an immense heave, the contents of his stomach spilled out onto the ruined ground. His entire body shook with the regurgitation, and soon John lay on his side as dry heaves continued to torment him for several minutes.
“Am I the one that’s evil?” He asked himself as he looked around at the untold carnage.
He didn’t want to consider the possibility, but there was no denying what had happened. His blind rage led him to sentence these men to death with no chance of redemption. Was that any better than the evil things that they did? Was he the real villain?
His internal turmoil was interrupted at that moment by the activation of the transition pad. At first, he thought Liz or Reign had returned for some reason. But when he saw the mostly naked and terrified girl fall to the ground a second later, his fist clenched in renewed fury.
John moved closer to the girl, but was hesitant to get too close, lest he be seen as a threat. What he did instead was summon his bow and immediately draw Lunar essence from within himself. The arrow materialized on the string even before the transition pad hummed to life again.
John didn’t put much energy into the arrow, worried to hurt the girl. That didn’t lessen the deadliness of the arrow that left the string a second later. A man appeared on the pad, already reaching to grab the fallen girl.
He didn’t even see John, nor the judgement that streaked toward him. Before his fingers had even brushed the girl, his entire body was knocked back into the walls surrounding the transition pad. The shining essence arrow pinned him to the stone by his chest.
Blood fountained from the man’s mouth as he looked up at John in surprise. Before he could make a sound though, the arrow in his chest detonated. Like a bomb made of light, the man was blasted apart with a ground shaking report.
John’s earlier reservation about his actions had disappeared in an instant. He had been trying to come to terms with his own actions when the girl had appeared. The idea that there were still agents out there rounding up innocent people wiped away any doubt he had. Was he evil?
“No,” he told himself, “They are the problem. I’ll be the solution.”
“Are you okay?” John asked, moving slowly to the girl.
She looked up at him with fear, clearly not understanding anything that had just happened. John crouched low, bringing himself to a less threatening posture. Then he held out a hand to help the girl up.
“What is happening?” She asked in accented English.
“The men that run this place are dead. As you can see, they won’t be a problem anymore. You can go back home.”
“I cannot,” she said with disparity.
“You can. It’s okay. No one is going to hurt you anymore.”
“No. I do not have a home. I have been a captive to these men for over a year. They move me around the different locations every few weeks. If I go back to earth, I will be living on the streets.”
The information made John stop. The term “other locations” made a giant pit sink into his stomach. With forced calm, he asked the girl about it.
“What do you mean by other locations?”
“They have a whole network. There are at least a dozen different places they move us between.”
“Do they do this with everyone?” John asked.
“No. Just us young girls. The older women stay put because there isn’t as much demand for them. It isn’t worth the bother of moving them.”
“So, you can’t go back to earth?” John asked, forcing himself to stay on the task at hand.
“No. Ever since the takeover, they’ve had me here moving between bases. I don’t even know what country I was in before that. I would be lost in a strange land if I went back now.”
“How can they move between bases so efficiently? Surely not all of them are so well traveled.”
“What do you mean?” The girl asked, clearly confused.
“Without using the aliens to choose a base, how did they get you here?” John asked.
“They do not need the aliens. If one person has access to a base, he can send others to it through his transition pad. That’s how they move us.” She explained.
John hadn’t known such a thing was possible. He had even made Liz use the Kumani at the transition station to get to Thunder Fox Sanctuary. If he had known there was a simpler method, it could have saved some time.
“And you have been here moving back and forth between bases for months?”
“Yes,” she said.
The reality of her situation finally donned on John. She had been a slave long before The Garden. The men who had her clearly saw a massive opportunity after the takeover. They could move their entire business to The Garden to ensure its continued success.
John hated everything about the situation, and more so because he had no solution to give the woman. Eventually, he resigned himself to keeping her safe while he worked through the base. He had Jane guard the pad as she had been and he and the girl, Mila he learned, began combing through every building and street.
3
John spent the entire day going through everything he could find in the base. Most of the houses were unused, which he discerned from the layer of dust coating everything inside. Some were clearly the dwelling of some dead or absent resident, but few if any had anything of value inside.
There were a few notable exceptions though. One building contained various works of art, like a museum. John didn’t recognize any of them, but he could tell by the artistry that they were all extremely valuable. John left them be and moved on.
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Another building seemed to be used as a kind of mess hall. There was a horrible smell of old food throughout the building, and several abandoned dishes on a long table. John didn’t know why he was so surprised to see such squalor.
The real gem of the base was, as he had expected, the large building where Dimitri had been staying. Several of the rooms had interesting things in them, including a room full of earth weapons. John had no interest in them, as even a masterfully crafted weapon from earth couldn’t match his soul weapons.
Another room had probably the most useful find of the entire base. It was a massive swath of fabric similar to a tapestry. Instead of some trippy drug inspired mandala though, the cloth was marked by several stars in various places, with small indications of landscapes in between each.
John had trouble figuring out what he was looking at for several seconds. It was a confused mess of scribblings and facsimiles. It wasn’t until he noticed the inordinately boldened star with a small demarcation next to it that he understood what he had found. It read “Teal”.
“This is a rudimentary map of The Garden,” John said to himself.
Indeed, few if any stars had a name next to them, probably because no one had actually visited them. Nevertheless, it was helpful to learn everything he could about the surrounding area. No less than fifty bases had been found, and a helpful legend in the corner gave him a sense of scale.
According to the key, a hand’s-breadth of space was equivalent to about ten miles. With the size of the tapestry, that told John that Dimitri had people exploring more than a hundred miles in every direction. That seemed implausible to John, but he had no way of knowing the truth.
The edges of the tapestry were still bare, with teal base being the center of geological exploration. There was a decent amount of space to expand upon. Looking over the map, John noticed something interesting.
All of the stars were the same, save for Teal base which was dark and centered on the fabric. There were a few anomalies that John found though. More specifically, he found that a few of the stars were accompanied by a very dark and clearly emphasized skull.
“Advanced bases? Or maybe Wizened? I can’t imagine they’d even be marked on the map if any were Divine,” John speculated.
John studied the tapestry for a while, but eventually he rolled it carefully up and placed it in the small but growing pile of spoils he had found. He was sure Jules could make excellent use of the intel later. It would be especially fruitful if he could send people to independently verify the information on the map.
John moved through the building methodically, making note of anything useful. The most exciting find was the entire room full of lesser genes. There were only two Advanced genes sitting apart from the lower ranks. But in addition to that was hundreds of each of the smaller tiered genes.
“Blood money,” he thought with disgust.
John’s eyes roamed over the room with a sense of dawning horror. Each individual gene here had paid for the abuse of at least one innocent life. As he looked upon the innumerable genes, John had half a notion to destroy the whole pile.
He wasn’t even sure he could destroy a gene without simply absorbing it. But the bile in his stomach that he had fought so hard to master over the last day started to broil at the thought of how much damage the genes had done, simply by changing hands. In the end, John resigned himself to making sure they were never used for such a purpose again.
The last room John searched was the private quarters of Dimitri, where he and Liz had first met the man. His desk was organized but full, having several important looking papers in various positions across it. John ignored it for the moment and instead moved his attention to the door behind it.
Finding it locked, John took only a few seconds to cut the door open using the Tail of the Kitsune. Splinters and chunks fell away as John shoved the door inward. Beyond the door was exactly what John had expected to find.
A single bed, adorned with the softest silk sheets John had ever seen sat in the corner of a small room. John had known a scumbag like Dimitri would have a special place to go when he wanted to exert himself on a woman. What he hadn’t known about, or even thought to suspect, was that there would be a naked and bound dark skinned teenage girl to leap to awareness with all the terror of a wild animal as John stepped into the room.
John was at his whit’s end. He had been on the emotional edge from the start of the whole operation. He had thought he mastered the rage for what these awful men were doing. But after all he had done to end things, after everything he and Liz had gone through, seeing the exposed and underage girl trying in vain to put any kind of distance between herself and him, John knew he had failed.
Something broke inside of John at the sight. It was the death of his innocence. It was the disillusionment of a world too horrific for any child to bear it. It was the threat of violence drawn so easily from his deepest being. It was the tiny voice of psychotic lividity in his mind that had always been so easy to deny growing louder and louder until it drowned everything in his mind with a single determined thought: “they will all die for this.”
Schooling his emotions to the frightened girl in front of him, John tried to present a calm energy to the girl. He could tell in an instant that he was failing, and quickly tried another approach. Since Mila was elsewhere searching through the ruins of her previous captors, he had no one to convince the girl that he wasn’t one of the monsters.
So, with his hands up, John took a step back from the girl. He wasn’t sure how else to convey that he meant no harm than to keep himself as far from her as possible. He tried again to project soothing energy as he spoke calmly to the girl.
“You’re okay now. I’m not going to hurt you.”
The girl’s face changed, but not how he had hoped. Instead of relief or suspicion, he saw only confusion in her expression. John looked back at her, equally confused until it came to him.
“English?” He said as a question.
The girl shook her head. John smiled reassuringly at her, now understanding her issue. It wasn’t an issue of trust, at least not only. It was an issue of comprehension.
Pulling his trusty orb from a pouch, John rolled it between them. While he waited for it to perform its function, John made the decision to dismiss his armor. He figured, it was probably better if she knew she was talking to a fellow teenager rather than some new and unfamiliar man promising her safety.
She watched this with a mixture of fear and confusion on her face. When his armor melted away to leave a smiling teenager behind, her eyes widened in shock. It was clear that he was not who she had been expecting.
“My name is John,” he said calmly when the orb was ready.
The words were projected by the orb in a language John had never even heard before. The girl looked in amazement at the ball before looking back at him. She did not respond otherwise.
“The men who have brought you here, as well as the man who tied you to this bed, are all dead.”
This drew an even more surprised expression from the girl. She still didn’t speak, but her eyes darted to the door behind John as if she were skeptical. John stepped aside to give the girl a glimpse of the empty desk beyond.
“Would you like to go home?” He asked.
“Yes,” the girl said, finally speaking.
“I would like to help you with that. I don’t want to scare you, but I’ll need to come closer to untie you.”
The girl looked at him with renewed suspicion. She tried impotently to preserve some modesty by curling up. Unfortunately, her limbs were tied too far apart to allow such an action.
“What should I call you?” John asked, averting his gaze.
“Claudia,” she said.
John was able to hear something in the syllables that he couldn’t place. It was a dialect that he was wholly unfamiliar with, yet, it seemed oddly similar to an accent he had heard before, but it was unique in ways he couldn’t comprehend. He decided it wasn’t important for the moment.
“Please hold still Claudia. I’m going to get you untied.”
John approached with caution, making it clear he wasn’t trying to ogle her naked form. He kept his eyes on her closest bound wrist, which he went directly to and quickly cut it loose with a summoned knife.
Claudia flinched at his use of a weapon, but before she could begin to fear his intention, her hand was freed. Then John turned the blade around in his hand and presented it to Claudia handle first.
“I’ll let you do the rest, unless you can’t manage. Just let me know if you need some help. Oh and uh…”
John made only a cursory glance around the room without seeing anything before impulsively taking off his shirt and pants. He folded them neatly, ignoring the venomous gaze of Claudia as a man took his clothes off in front of her. Then he put them on the bed before turning for the door.
“You can have my clothes until you find something better to wear.”
John waited beyond the ruined door for several minutes while Claudia made noises of agitation and vindication in equal measure. It was almost ten minutes before she came out. When she did, she was dressed in men’s clothes far nicer than those that John had been wearing. He looked incredulously at his shirt and pants that were being presented to him like he was the one in need.
“Where did you find clothes?” John demanded, suddenly conscious of his exposure.
A thumb jabbed over her shoulder was the only response from Claudia. John stormed past her, furious at his own embarrassed stupidity. There. In the corner opposite the bed was a large wardrobe which Claudia had clearly ransacked to find clothes to wear.
John had been so occupied with the girl that he hadn’t even looked at anything else in the room. Besides the wardrobe, there was also a dresser, a shoe rack, and a chest at the foot of the bed.
“Well shit,” John said.
4
After shamefully reclothing himself, John moved back into the private quarters to do a more thorough inspection. He was surprised at how much personal accouterment there was. It looked like the man had lived in The Garden. John supposed that if your entire organization took place away from earth, there would be little reason to return.
There wasn’t anything of interest, though many of disgust. John tried to pay as little attention to the specifics as possible in those cases. In the end, the whole room was left alone until such a time as John could incinerate the place.
Returning to the outer room, John found that Dimitri’s desk was the real prize. In and on it was all of the information John had been hoping and also dreading to find. With no small amount of confusion, as the information was largely written in one or more foreign languages, John gathered everything useful.
In truth, he just took everything. He couldn’t make sense of it; so, until someone could it was all valuable as far as he was concerned. Claudia, who had stood awkwardly staring at him since his reemergence, told him that one of the languages used was Polish.
“Polish? Is that where you’re from? Poland?”
“Yes. Why do you sound so surprised?”
“Well it’s just that… gosh this is going to sound so racist, but are there a lot of black people in Poland? I thought it was mostly pale vampire looking people with white hair.”
Claudia was quiet for several seconds following John’s words. The silence grew so long that John actually looked up from the pile of information to check on her. She looked at him like he was the most insane person she had ever met.
“What?” He asked defensively.
“Are there black people in Poland? Why wouldn’t there be black people?” Claudia asked not in offense but sheer exasperation.
“I don’t know, I guess I’ve never thought about other countries like that before. So..?” John said, trying not to sound too eager.
“No,” Claudia said with clear annoyance, “there aren’t a lot of black people in Poland. I mean there are plenty of us, but your preconceptions are not entirely wrong.”
“Aha! So then you can understand my surprise?”
“I guess so,” she begrudgingly admitted.
With the subject of average Polish complexion taken care of, John finished gathering all of the documents to have them translated later. Once that was finished, he and Claudia moved out of the building and into the streets.
As they walked, John casually leading her to the transition pad, Claudia started looking around as if she were expecting to see something. Her eyes widened the closer they came to the transition pad, especially as they passed the bloody remains of several men. She stopped walking and John was forced to get his translation orb back out to hear her question.
“Where is everyone?” She asked
“I told you, their all dead. You don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
“No, I mean where are all of your men? Where are all of the people that did this?”
“Right here, honey,” John said with a smile.
Claudia narrowed her eyes in annoyance. Clearly, she wasn’t inclined to believe a kid had taken down the entire base. But as she looked in John’s eyes for the joke he was telling and found none, her own eyes widened anew.
“You did all of this yourself?” She said in utter disbelief.
“Not all of it. And not alone. A friend of mine asked me to help, so here I am.”
“A friend? One friend? You just came here with a friend and dismantled the entire base?”
“Yeah, pretty much. Should have seen the shit she was doing to these guys,” John said, shaking his head in detached pity.
“Forgive me for being skeptical, but how is that even possible?” Claudia asked in exasperation.
“Simple. These aren’t men. They aren’t even worms. Preying upon defenseless girls because it made them feel powerful. Not a single one of them would risk themselves to grow stronger. They’ve been here for how long? Just comfortable and confident in the knowledge that no one would ever stand up to them. Well, look around Claudia.”
She did so, and as she beheld the carnage that had taken place for her freedom, her face transformed once more. It was a constant motion of thought, like she had suddenly dared to ask a question she was scared to know the answer to. When she finally spoke again though, it was not with challenge or question.
“Thank you,” she simply said.
“Thank my friend Liz,” John said.
“No, John. I’m thanking you.”
John’s head rocked back in surprise. He wasn’t expecting the conviction he heard in her voice. It made him stop walking again and look at the girl.
“I am sure that your friend, whoever they are, did plenty to help. But I’m not thanking her. Because she’s not here. Because she’s not the one who broke into the back room to find me. If it wasn’t for you, how long would have passed before someone found me? Would I even be alive by then?”
John considered the words. He hadn’t thought of himself as the direct savior to any of these people. He was simply hired help, or a useful tool to accomplish the goal. Liz surely would have accomplished the same without him, albeit much less cleanly.
But after Claudia’s words, he was unable to obfuscate his importance. The truth was, he had found her there. The truth was, he had no idea how long Liz would be home with her reunited family before even considering returning to the base if ever she wanted to. If it hadn’t been for John…
“You’re welcome,” he finally said.
“Why do I feel like that apology was harder for you to accept than it was for me to give you?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” John said.
“I have been a sexual slave to more men than I can count since I got here a month ago. Yet to a man is who I owe my freedom. Do you think I have no reservations with those facts?”
“I’m not sure I get what you’re trying to say,” John said.
“I’m saying if I can thank a man despite what men have done to me then why is it so hard for you to receive praise? Surely you believe you’ve done something good here?”
“It’s not that I don’t recognize my own contribution, I just wasn’t raised to seek validation and praise for my accomplishments. I mean, if you spend too much time on what others think you should be, how will you ever learn what you want to be for yourself?”
“Is the gratitude of another really the same as praise for your accomplishments?”
“I guess not,” he relented.
“So then next time just accept my gratitude without trying to prove you haven’t earned it,” Claudia said.
John opened his mouth to respond, but then he shut it again. He hadn’t expected the girl to present such a logical and emotionless rebuttal. He recognized that he had just been verbally bested. Whatever else the girl was, she had a sharp mind.
John wasn’t the only one who knew she had beaten him though. A challenging eyebrow and a half smile met his gaze when he looked at her. With a failed attempt at suppression, John smiled too.
“Checkmate,” he said.
5
John saw that Claudia was returned safely to Earth, giving her the same invitation as Reign to find him at Emerald base if she needed anything. She thanked him again, and this time John accepted it graciously. When she had disappeared, and it was just John and Jane, with a distant Mila still combing over the buildings, he finally collapsed to the ground.
He was so exhausted from the events of the last day and night that he would have been asleep on his feet if he went much further. So, like an oddly well adorned homeless man, John resummoned his armor to himself and fell asleep right there in the street. The hard cobblestones were as soft as silk to his overtaxed system.
When John woke up, it was to someone’s foot tapping him lightly but persistently on his armored head. They were standing over him, but not helpfully blocking out the blaring sun above. He was so disoriented that it took him a few seconds to hear the words the person was saying.
“How long have you just been laying there? I know I’ve only been gone for two days but I thought you would have down something with all the corpses by now.” Liz was saying.
“What day is it?” John asked.
“I don’t know dude; we don’t really have days of the week anymore.”
“Oh yeah,” John said.
He sat up like a man returned from the dead. That is to say, a lot of groaning and a cramp in his shoulder that made him look like a zombie until he eased it. Apparently, the cobblestone hadn’t been as silky to his body has his exhausted mind.
“What’s going on?” John said, still mostly asleep.
“What do you mean what’s going on? Hello? You told me to come back and I’m back.”
“Why didn’t you stay with your family? You deserve to rest after everything.”
“No, my mom deserves to rest. And that’s what she’s doing. You think I’m going to leave this mess for you to cleanup? Clearly that would have been a mistake.”
“I’ve been really busy,” John tried to say in defense.
“Oh yeah, busy squirming around on the ground like a starving fish for the last hour.”
“You’ve been here for an hour? And you only tried to wake me now?”
“I’ve been here for six hours. I didn’t know when you got down on the ground to sleep, but I figured you couldn’t take that long to wake up. Boy was I wrong!”
“You should have woken me sooner. We have a lot to take care of still,” John chastised her.
“Cool your jets, John. I told you I’ve been here for six hours. First of all, I met Mila. Cool girl, she’s got good taste in music. Also, I’ve been working on cleaning the whole place up. I’ve got most of the bodies piled up near the gate, but I wasn’t sure if you wanted to burn them or just throw them out for the scavengers.”
“Woah woah, back up.” John said.
“What?” Liz asked.
“How do you know about Mika’s taste in music?” John asked.
“Because I asked her, John. You should try actually interacting with the people around you. You might learn something.”
“Okay, asshole.”
“Come on, let’s get this over with,” Liz said.
John got to his feet with some additional groaning, but a good stretch served to loosen the stiffness. With a good look around, John saw that Liz had indeed cleaned up the majority of the corpses. John could tell by a few bloodstains that were newer than the rest that Jane had continued to carry out justice in his absence.
The fox trotted up to John at that very moment, and the soul companion was so exuberant that he would have believed she was a real animal. He gave her a grateful pat on the head and turned to the matter at hand. Jane bounded away once more to guard the transition pad.
“What do you think? Take them outside the gates or burn them?” Liz asked again.
“I think we should do both. The more of this mess that gets burned up, the better.”
“If we’re going to burn everything like you said, why bother moving them?” Liz asked.
“Because I don’t know if burning the whole base is possible. If it is, we burn it. Let no record of this place exist. And if not, at least we disposed of the trash.”
“Well, okay,” Liz said, unconvinced.
So, the two of them set about the gruesome task of removing the filth from the base. It was a much more hands on and time-consuming process than either of them would have wanted. Still, neither of them hesitated to do what needed to be done.
Over an hour later, a time which two more bodies were added to the number by Jane, they had the base clean. The next problem became what they would use to burn the pyre. All sources of combustion such as gasoline and oil had been replaced with an alternative power source, and John wasn’t sure how he would even get ahold of any at that point.
In the end, it was Liz who came up with a solution. She led him to the cellar where the youngest girls had been held. Once there, John saw that the three men he had taken out had been removed, but Dimitri’s dismembered body remained. It had been neatly collected and piled on top of a broken and rough stacked bed frame.
“Conducting your own ritual, are you?” John asked.
“Let this place where so many innocent girls suffered be his coffin.” Liz said, nodding.
“So be it,” John agreed.
The two of them spent an inordinate amount of time dismantling as many of the wooden bed frames as possible before moving them to the streets above. When they had a pile too large to easily transport, they stopped. Before leaving the cellar behind, Liz pulled a box of matches from her pocket.
They were one of the few rare ways to easily start a fire that was still available to humans. Since lighting matches was a simple chemical reaction with a small piece of wood to sustain it, matches had not been considered in the acquisition of combustion materials. At least, that’s what John assumed, as he hadn’t known they still existed until that moment.
Liz also pulled a tea candle from another pocket and moved to place it under the thickest part of the pyre she had made. John watched her with confused fascination. He had never seen a candle used to light a fire before.
“Is that going to work?” He asked.
“Is what going to work?”
“The candle,” John said.
“Is the candle going to work? Yeah, I’m sure it’ll light just fine.”
“That’s not what I meant. Can you really start a whole fire with a small candle like that?”
“Are you asking me if a candle will work better than a tiny little match that will burn my fingers before it ever catches anything on fire? Yes, I’d imagine so.” Liz said as condescendingly as possible.
“Oh. I guess that’s a good point,” he conceded.
“Really? I’m smarter than you? Shocker,” Liz said.
Then she took out a match and struck it on the box. It flared with life before mellowing out into a small flame. Liz expertly shared the flame with the tiny candle under the tinder. Once it was alight, she quickly started moving the smallest of the splinters over the flame.
It wasn’t long before the first piece caught fire. More quickly followed, and Liz continued to feed the flames until they were big enough to start licking the underside of the larger pieces. Smoke quickly spread through the chamber, searching along the ceiling for the path upward.
Liz continued rearranging the pieces of wood until the flames grew big enough that she was sure they would continue to burn. They took their leave before the heat and flames began cooking more than the wood. Without a backward glance, Liz and John left the man on the pyre to burn or just rot as fate wished.
Once back to the much larger pile of wood in the street, they once again set about the laborious task of transporting materials. Another half an hour later, they had all the scavenged wood collected next to the pile of dead men. With a sigh of inevitability, they set about rearranging the two piles once more.
When they had finished, the wood and the bodies had merged into one massive pile of trash. Liz set about repeating the same process she had before, pulling a series of additional tea candles from her pockets before positioning them at numerous places around the stack. John had watched the process and was able to help get all the candles lit and stoked.
Soon their second bonfire was well lit and rolling with smoke. The pungent stench of death made them both gag. The bountiful plant life beneath the large inferno served as even more impressive tinder. It wasn’t long before they had to step back from the heat.
“And good riddance,” John said.
“Glad it’s finally done,” Liz agreed.
“No. Not quite,” John said, turning his gaze back to the base.