Chapter 9: Threnody

 

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Gabriel says, his gaze distant, fingers still locked around Jarod’s wrist. “Shouldn’t have told Danny.”

“Not your fault,” Jarod says in a drone, almost automatically. They’ve spent all these months passing the blame. He and Gabriel didn’t initiate the outbreak. Robbie didn’t choose to take Paragon’s crueler outcomes. Then who’s at fault? Vertex? Daniel running out to alert the Hive, is that directly the corporation’s doing? This mob calling for blood, that one hunter dragging Robbie along by his hair, is that Vertex’s doing, too? The buck has to stop somewhere.

It definitely wasn’t hers. Not Nessa’s, not the closest thing to a friend Jarod had back when he still worked for the grandest evil on the planet. Jonathan Hargrove admitted as much, that he had a hand in turning Paragon into the perverted vision of healing and human perfection that it’s become. Vanessa Wong only wanted to help, to create a formula that would wipe out biological defects and disease forever. She never meant to make this, this plague that has wracked an entire city, maybe the entire world.

Jarod breathes through his mouth as he tails the mob, like his nostrils somehow aren’t enough to do the job of filling his lungs with air. It’s like there’s something huge and heavy there, a swirling ball of guilt and regret. Could Robbie have been telling the truth? Did he know how to help after all? And what he said – is Nessa really alive?

He grimaces as he watches Robbie thrash against the ground, the grubby tile of the mall floor becoming marked with splotches of red, splattered with stray drops of blood his body isn’t quick enough to suppress from spilling. If she is alive, she’ll be just like him, some bare semblance of humanity. But what really separates them now, the people of the Hive, and this near-perfect creature that Paragon has created? Isn’t it more inhuman to treat them this way, to see them as less, as beasts? As monsters?

“Jarod.” Gabriel’s voice is shaking. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know,” Jarod says, straining to keep the strength in his voice. The two of them had armed themselves on instinct, Gabriel taking his bat along, and Jarod swiping up the old golf club he once used as a weapon. And the gun, that stays hidden in his waistband. Just – just in case.

More and more residents stream out of their apartments, out of the wings and workshops as the mob moves through the mall, coalescing and slipping in and out of the mass until it’s less an unruly gaggle of half-starved people, and more a collective, some many-limbed engine of retribution. Nearly all are in an eerie, unanimous understanding, tapped into the hive-mind’s conclusion that the bloodied young man they’re scraping down the stairs and into the atrium is the enemy.

The chatter that spreads among them is enough to inform and educate all the same. “He started it,” some say, “patient zero,” the others mutter. Jarod sees the intense fear and vengeance in each of them, all they’ve lost, all their sorrows and frustrations focused on the thing they blame for their condition.

Yet even without speaking, it’s clear on all their faces that there’s a singular objective in this: to make the source of all their pain suffer, to nip this evil in the bud whether or not it fixes their situation. Jarod already knows the answer. Harming Robbie, killing him solves nothing, but that’s not what the colony sees or understands now. Six long months they’ve been hurting, and now they want to hurt something else in return.

Jarod pats at his waist again, just to be sure, not even certain how, or where he would use it. The bullets chambered there, maybe they’re meant to save Robbie from this frothing, maddened crowd. Or maybe they’re meant to save the colony from itself. Robbie’s mouth doesn’t drip with the same ichor, the same black venom that spreads Paragon’s infection, but that’s how it all started, and somehow the mechanism for the plague must still exist in his body somehow.

All it would take is for him to turn his head, then clamp his teeth down around the nearest, softest patch of bare skin. Then it would be like the outbreak at Vertex all over again, the night when the facility’s corridors ran red with blood.

From out of the crowd Esther stalks straight for Jarod, grabbing him by the front of his shirt. Her hair is disheveled, her glasses in disarray, her eyes hard, angry.

“What the hell is going on, Samuels?”

“Patient zero,” he says, hating the sound of it, the hollow number, how it pulverizes all that’s left of Robbie’s humanity. “He was the first trial, the one they used to test Paragon.”

Eyes wide, Esther’s head whips about as she stares over her shoulder, mouth agape. “That kid? How is that possible? He’s not like the others. He isn’t fighting back or trying to hurt anyone. Almost like he’s – ”

Human, Jarod thinks, finishing her sentence in his mind. As human as any of them, except for how his wounds keep closing themselves, how his body seems to act of its own accord, a structure designed to repair itself and stay functional at all costs.

“Shouldn’t we help him?” For the first time since he’s met her, Esther sounds confused, her voice trailing off.

“Bad idea.” Magpie slips in step with the rest of them. “They’re not going to give him up that easy. They want blood, they won’t stop until they’ve spilled enough of it. And we could have learned so much. We could have learned how to stop all this.” She grits her teeth, shakes her head. “How did the rest of them even find out he was responsible for Paragon?”

Jarod stares hard ahead of him, to avoid switching his gaze to Gabriel and giving the answer cleanly away. The fingers around his wrist grip tighter anyway, but Gabriel doesn’t do or say anything that might incriminate himself. Jarod adjusts his arm, finding a way to clasp Gabriel’s fingers and squeeze his hand in return. Acceptance. That’s all he can give, not even comfort. Maybe he needs comfort himself, and maybe he’s trying to draw strength out of the boy’s hand.

But then Gabriel speaks.

“We need to help him.”

How quickly the tides turn, but Jarod knows he’s right. The mob will tear him apart at this rate, and knowing what they do of how Robbie has changed, pain and injury seem to summon back the feral part of him, the destructive, cannibalistic half of Paragon that he seems to have suppressed. If this keeps up, there’s no telling whether the boy will flip into a rage. And when that happens –

“They’re bringing out tools,” Esther says.

Six men, that’s how many it takes to restrain Robbie, and he isn’t even fighting back as hard as he can, or should. They slam him against the wall by the staircase, his wounds streaking the white of it with red. The crowd’s mounting chatter has attracted all that’s left of the mall, enough that practically the entire colony is gathered in the atrium. Jarod fingers his gun, watching the panic around them, how everyone is packed so tightly together. Like dried leaves in a pile, like kindling. All it’ll take is a spark. One bite, one that’s hard enough to break skin, and all hell breaks loose.

Chains rattle from somewhere in the atrium, and soon Robbie’s feet are bound together. Jarod wonders if that could even slow him down if he really chose to fight back. And some part of him wishes Robbie would. It’s impossible to look at the boy struggling against the wall, with those same blue eyes and the same shag of hair, and truly, genuinely wish him dead.

Then they bring out the hammers. Raucous cheering goes up from the crowd, as if they’re all in on some secret Jarod isn’t privy to. But Magpie, it seems, knows what’s happening, and she pushes through the mass of people to try and reach the wall, only in vain. Like on reflex the residents can tell that she wants to help, and they form a barrier against her, enough of a show of force that Jarod spots Magpie reaching for her weapon, groping at her waist, then cursing when she realizes she shouldn’t even consider killing her own people.

“Don’t do this,” she shouts.

Do what?

The first spike falls. Robbie screams.

That’s what the hammers are for. One of the engineers is banging on a metal spike, pushing it straight into the wall – and straight through the center of Robbie’s palm.

Madness. They’re staking him to the wall. They’re crucifying him.

Every slam, every fall of the hammer wrenches another cry out of the boy’s throat. Whatever resistance Paragon once gave him to pain is well and gone now, perhaps more now that he’s learned to swallow his rage. But if this keeps up, his fury won’t be the worst of it. He could die. He might very well die.

Robbie shudders and sobs. Any glimmer of a chance he had to react or escape has flitted away. The men lift Robbie’s other arm up, and he wails as he struggles, but either the terror is enough to overwhelm him, or his strength is finally flagging.

The engineer lifts the hammer again, lets it fall. Robbie throws his head back, teeth clenched so tight that he bites through his lip. Blood streams from his mouth, and when he can’t stand the pain any longer, he lifts his head and slams it into the wall, again and again, until the concrete is traced in a halo of blood, streaks of it dripping from his hair.

And the worst of it all is when the mob notices the way Robbie’s flesh is knitting around the spikes hammered through his palms, his skin mending and tearing over and over, the blood frozen in his veins like it’s afraid to drip, afraid to flee his body.

“Kill him,” someone shouts.

Esther shouts even harder to bring her voice booming above all the others, but to no avail. The air is thick with vengeance, and even now the woman they all once saw as leader, mother, and general is of so little importance to them that she may as well be invisible.

“He’s a monster,” one man says.

The brutal, hideous irony. The crowd slavers and claws, baying for Robbie’s blood, and the boy slumps against the wall, too tired, too broken to fight, but as soon as he slides down, when the spikes tug at the holes in his palms, they rip his flesh anew, and he howls again. Cheers go up from the crowd as he does.

“Just end it,” someone cries.

A man steps forward, a huge knife in hand. He poises it at Robbie’s throat. The boy’s eyes are huge as they take in the length of the blade. His cheeks are wet with tears, his chin slick with blood. All Robbie ever wanted was to live, and that’s being taken away from him again today. The man presses the knife to his skin. Crimson wells up from Robbie’s neck.

Jarod makes a decision.

He lifts his gun, aiming for the back of the man’s head, his gaze locking with Robbie’s eyes. The blue of them is blurry with tears, but even then they glimmer with recognition. He gapes at first, searching for words, for air, then he shouts a warning.

“Jarod. Don’t.”

Dozens of heads whip around, eyes searching, then landing on Jarod’s face – then his gun. A number of them break off and head for him, hands outstretched, their faces nearly as gaunt and as terrifying as the dead walking outside the walls. Gabriel puts his body between them, as does Esther, and from somewhere in the atrium Jarod hears Tyler’s voice soaring above the noise.

“Stop. He’s one of us. No.”

Yet the crowd keeps closing in, like an angry mob, a gaggle of zealots.

The knife goes deeper into Robbie’s neck, more of his flesh splitting and showing from the gash, but the blood doesn’t flow. Monsters. Jarod hears his heart drumming in his ears, until he realizes that it’s the sound of the residents rushing to attack him. No, it’s louder than that, and it’s coming from all around them. From outside.

A loud banging, as of dozens, scores of hands. It sounds like a hundred, like hailstones raining and falling against the barricade. Gabriel turns his head, drawn by the noise, his ears pricked up, and his features distorted by worry, then fear. Jarod watches as the man with the knife saws deeper, as Robbie winces, wails, and thrashes.

Thrashes. The crashing against the barricade, it almost matches the pace at which his body is writhing against the wall. A hideous baying accompanies the crashes, a horrid, familiar noise that matches each of Robbie’s pained ululations. It grows into a horrific crescendo, the atrium filling with the pounding of war drums, with the song of dead predators lurking outside the walls.

The residents look around them in fear, trepidation, and the man with the knife stops long enough to glance over his shoulder. Robbie gasps, heaving for air, each breath labored and ragged. The atrium is silent. Somewhere in the courtyard, a child whimpers.

And then the skittering starts. The barricades shudder like trees in a monsoon, their shaking growing more violent and erratic by the second. Robbie’s head lolls about as his eyes focus across the top of the barricades, like he’s looking for something. What did he say, about the horde being linked to him, about it knowing his pain?

“What if he wasn’t bluffing?” Gabriel mutters, drawing back, pulling on Jarod’s arm.

The barricades sway and stutter.

“No,” Esther moans, as if in understanding.

A rotted hand appears at the top of the barricade, ragged nails seeking purchase in the wood, skin dead and gray. Another hand surfaces, and another, until dozens of them appear over the wall, heralding their coming.

The dead. They’ve learned to climb.