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 need them, using them to test my concoctions.
Some might say I torture 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 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 all that 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 past the plastic, turning up the battery-powered lantern on the wall. As they shield their eyes from the light, I stare down 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 I’d 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 worst 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 it for now.
“Sorry about that,” I tell her. “A pack of rats seems to have moved in over the winter.” I hope that my 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. Almost all of them watched the Flash—less than a handful lived. Directly after, they holed up in what was left of the still-smoldering church, but not Mom and me,” Evie says. “When none of the cars worked, we took our one surviving horse, hooked up a cart, and went raiding.”
She leans forward, growing a bit more animated. “Half of the grocery store had burned by the time we got there. So we hit the remaining aisles. Mom tossed back my graham crackers and potato chips, teaching me to go for calorie-dense food, like peanut butter. The pharmacy had burned down completely, so we ransacked the vet’s supply of antibiotics. We looted guns and ammo from Flash victims’ homes. We were like locusts.”
Evie says this with pride. She should. If it wasn’t for enterprising souls like her, I’d have no supplies to appropriate.
“Though Mom was convinced that the army would ride into Sterling and save the day—government and the rule of law returning, or whatever—we prepared like we were on our own. We worked ourselves to the bone, until our basement was stockpiled. Then we stood arm in arm, surveying the thousands of cans, the bags of beans, the canisters of weight-gain powder.”
Shaking her head ruefully, she says, “I remember thinking our supply would last us years. As soon as Mom had prepared us as best as she could, she . . . broke down.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was eaten up with guilt that she’d sent her mother away, that she’d sent me to that awful place in Atlanta. Can you imagine it? Her mother had been right all along, and her daughter’s visions had proved pretty much spot-on. My ‘bogeymen’ were Bagmen, pale-eyed and slimy. Not to mention the details of the Flash. . . . Well, Mom’s entire concept of the world got a violent reboot. Her confidence was obliterated.”
“Did your grandmother impart anything to her that she could pass on to you?”
“Mom had blocked out Gran’s doomsday preachings—like aggressively blocked them out. So she didn’t know a lot. And anytime I pressed her to try to remember more, she’d cry. She was no longer the steel magnolia I’d always known.”
“There must have been something?”
“Mom knew only three things. My clairvoyance had to do with Tarot cards somehow. My call sign, of sorts, was the Empress. And I might be destined to”—Evie mumbles the next—“save humanity.”
I inwardly laugh at this. This girl is weak in body and in mind, as defenseless as she is gullible; if the fate of mankind rests in her hands, we are all utterly doomed. “That’s a lot to put on a sixteen-year-old girl’s shoulders, isn’t it?”
“I know! It was so frustrating. If Gran was right and I actually was some empress, then what was the freaking point? Could I have saved my friends? Was that what the visions had been for? I had guilt of my own to haunt me.”
“Did the visions”—hallucinations—“continue after the Flash?”
She gives her head a clearing shake, blinking for focus. “The ones of different characters were rare, but I did see Matthew about once a week. Each visit, he seemed even more incoherent. Still, I was desperate to see someone my age, so I welcomed him, migraines, nosebleeds, and all. But I had a whole new symptom to deal with. I was hearing voices in my head. The Flash brought me a perfect storm of crazy—nightmares of gruesome deaths, visions, voices.”
Voices? That would correspond with her pathology. “What did they say?”
“For months, I heard only whispers and gibberish. Nothing that made sense. They grew clearer each day, but that also meant they got louder. Everything bad kept building on itself.” She rocked faster. “Stress, hunger, nightmares, voices. Always building.”
Evie was alone on that farm with only her mother, as good as stranded on a deserted island. It’s no wonder she conjured voices, to give her a sense of belonging. Like imaginary friends.