Vox Mentis

Fuck it, run him over. You'll blend right in.

The orderly breaks into a run at you. You contemplate running but instead opt for waiting for the orderly to get close enough to punch in the face and disarm. This is an option because the orderly is a thin teenager who plays a lot of video games, while you are not. You look at the bone saw, but you can’t fathom a use for it, and the orderly starts to get up, so you punch him in the jaw hard enough to keep him down. Then you do run, because more people are emerging from the hospital’s rear, nurses with whom you had frequently shared coffee, and, in one case, a bed, and you don't want to face them.

Not die, hopefully

When you return to the traffic bridge, Elise has vanished. You turn in a circle, cursing. You don’t know what to do. Ahead, the street looks clear. To the left, a small group wanders in your direction, one limping. To the right, not far, a woman lies motionless in the gutter. In the streetlights, her hair looks yellow. She is the only thing in this landscape you can understand, so you go to her. You kneel and check her vitals. Beth McClintock, the town librarian. Her hair is sticky with dark fluid. Your fingers find a depression in her skull about the size of a tennis ball. You sit back on your haunches and exhale.

The group approaches you. You recognize the local math teacher, his two daughters, and a woman who runs a little grocery store. Two teenage boys support the limper, who is a broad-shouldered guy you know as Derek Woodhouse. You've pumped Derek’s stomach twice in the past six months. Both times, he looked better than this. You can tell without touching him that Derek has a shattered pelvis.

“Thank Christ,” says the schoolteacher. “Danny, you have to help us.”

“What’s happening?” says the grocery store owner. She's clutching her necklace, a crucifix. “Oh God, is that Beth?”

“We have to get Derek to the hospital.”

“Car came out of fucking nowhere,” says one of the teenage males. “Fucking took aim. Then it reversed over him.”

“Hnk,” says Derek.

“We’ve gotta get him to the hospital, Danny.”

“You can’t take him to the hospital,” you say. “It’s not safe.”

“Then where? What should we do?” One of the schoolteacher’s daughters tries to push Derek’s hair out of his eyes. Derek coughs and spits meatily.

“Find a place you can lay him still and barricade yourself in until this is over.”

“Until what is over?” says the girl. You can see she's looking for a reason to give in to complete hysteria, and this could be it. “Until what?”

“He plays footy,” says one of Derek’s friends. You don’t know what possible reason the kid has for volunteering this, then realize he's saying it's a tragedy. Derek plays football and now will probably never be the same again. It's the worst thing the kid can imagine.

“He’s got internal bleeding, I think,” says the math teacher. “What do you think, Danny?”

“Is that Beth?”

“Yes,” you say. “She’s dead, and I’m sorry, Derek, but nobody can go near the hospital. They’re killing people.”

They begin to argue with you. You look for Elise. You're becoming increasingly nervous about where she is.

“Police!” says the girl. She breaks from the group and runs down the road, waving her arms, the sleeves of her dress flapping. A cop car is sailing toward the group, its lights dark, covered in dents. “Over here! Help!”

You call out to her and there's a hard, flat sound and the girl folds up and lies on the road. The cruiser continues toward you.

“What?” says the kid.

“Go,” you say. “Move. Run.”

The girl’s father, the schoolteacher, stares at her with his lips apart. In the streetlight, tiny visible hairs all over his face stand on end. You've seen this reaction once before, when a fellow paramedic helped you peel open a wrecked car to find her husband inside. You’d had to wrap her in a space blanket, because she froze. She literally froze. Like she’d fallen into ice. It had been the strangest thing you’d ever seen.

“Jess?” says the kid. He's not calling. It's a question for the group. The cop car draws closer.

“Run,” you say, and shove the schoolteacher. You pull the other girl, the dark-haired one, by her wrist. There's another flat retort. You're tempted to see who that was, the father or possibly Derek Woodhouse, but it makes no difference. The girl screams and twists in your grip in a way that means it could be either, and then you do turn, and see the cop with one hand on the steering wheel, the other resting his service revolver on the crook of his arm, his eyes moving between the road and the people he's shooting.

The grocery store woman trills like a bird and sits heavily. The father is already spread out, arms folded, as if he’s carefully laid down. One of the kids has fled but the other is dragging Derek, the one who said he plays footy, and you shout at him to run but of course the kid doesn’t. You trip on the curb, which is a handy reminder to keep an eye on where the fuck you're going, losing your grip on the dark-haired girl. She begins to walk back toward the cop car, her arms out, in order to accomplish what, you don’t know. You spit a curse and go back for her. Then you see Elise.

She's walking down the center of the road. You can’t see her face because the streetlight is behind her. There is an appeal in her posture, which you first think is directed at you, then realized it isn’t, because she's angling toward the police cruiser.

The dark-haired girl spins in a half circle. You run by her falling body. You leap onto the hood of the police cruiser, skid across, and hit the tarmac on the other side. You reach Elise and throw her over your shoulder. You hear the whine of the cop’s power window behind you. The closest shelter is a bakery, a squat weatherboard much too far away. You jag, to put a degree of difficulty into it for the cop.

“Put me down,” says Elise.

Ten feet from the bakery door, something bites your ear. The glass door shatters. You keep going and crash through it, tripping and sprawling onto the tiled floor, feeling bullets everywhere, losing Elise. The interior is lit by a refrigerated drinks cabinet. “El.” You crawl toward her in the corpse light. “Elise.” You find her hand and get to your feet and haul her up.

“I want to die.”

Leave, lock a door if you must, just don't even give them the time of day.

“No,” you say. You drag her into the back room. Your hip clips a table; a stack of baking trays clatters to the ground. You find the rear door and discover it's bolted in several different ways, some of which require keys. You release Elise and shake it. “Fuck,” you say. You abandon the door for a smaller, metallic one, with a horizontal handle like a refrigerator’s. Chill air spills around your ankles. You pull Elise inside and close the door and grope in darkness for a lock. But there isn’t one, of course. You don’t put a lock on the inside of a cool room. The door doesn’t even open the right way - that is, in a way you can block. You grip the handle and plant your feet and curse. Maybe the cop won’t chase you. There are plenty of other targets. You listen, straining for sound. The door is so thick, the cop could be right outside. You relax your muscles, for the moment when you'll need them. There's a snuffling. Elise is crying. “El,” you say. “Be quiet.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Quiet.”

She keeps crying. “I did something really bad.”

“I know. Shut up.” You think you hear something outside. But it could be anything. It's incredibly cold. Too cold for a permanent hiding place.

“I should have been able to stop it.”

The handle turns in your hands. You resist. After a moment, the opposing force vanishes. You wait in the dark. Something hits the door, hard and sharp. A bullet. Then two more. You hold the handle with one hand and flail in the dark with the other, trying to push Elise down. A sizzling smell reaches you. Light bleeds through three holes in the door. You didn’t think a steel-lined refrigerator door would be bulletproof, but the confirmation is still disappointing. You find Elise’s arm and yank it. She squawks but then you have her wrapped in one arm while you hold the handle with the other, hoping the cop will please not shoot off your hand. For a while there is only your breathing. You hear the cop moving around, doing who knows what.

“Does it wear off?” you say. “The word?”

“Not until they complete the command.”

“Jesus fuck.”

“Why are you trying to save me?” You ignore this because it's a stupid question. Something outside goes: fwick. “I thought you didn’t love me.”

“Quiet.” You see a flicker. Only a glimmer through the holes in the door, but it's enough to recognize: The cop is setting the bakery on fire.

“I got everything wrong.” In the dark, she cries brokenly.

You can see it in your mind: the cop hanging back, leaning against a door frame, gun aimed at the cool room. The second you pop open this door, the cop will shoot you. Maybe the fire won’t catch. Maybe the cop will give up and go away. Or maybe not. Because it isn’t KILL A BUNCH OF PEOPLE, is it? It isn’t KILL AS MANY AS IS CONVENIENT.

“There’s something in my eye,” Elise says.

You can hear crackling. The cool room is growing brighter. “El, I need to open the door.” She has her head in her hands. “Elise. Listen to me. Wait here until I call for you. Understand? Do not move until I call your name.” Is there anything out there you can use as cover? Something you can throw? Yes. Yes, you'll hurl a baking tray at the cop, and it will deflect the bullets, and dazzle him with its reflection of the flames, which of course you'll have to run through, and then you'll disarm the cop with your superior hand-to-hand combat training. “Are you fucking listening to me?” You resist the urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

“Please just leave me, Danny.”

You can feel the heat through the walls. The cop must have moved by now. Retreated to the storefront, at least, maybe right out to the street. The greatest danger now is waiting too long, until there's nowhere to go except into an inferno. You release the handle and pry Elise’s hands from her face. For a moment, you think you really do see something in her eye, but it's only the dancing reflection of flames. “El. You are pissing me off. But I will never leave you. Ever. So stop talking. We’re getting out of here.” You wind your fingers into hers. “Ready?” She stares at you. “Sure you are,” you say. You scoop her up. Her arms around your neck are stiff as poles. You take a breath, watching the door, the flames flickering behind it. You kiss her, because fuck it, you're probably about to die. Then you kick open the door and the fire roars like a living thing and you run into it.

~

You wake in a bed. No. Wrong. On a stretcher. Something portable. You're in a room full of stretchers and it smells bad. Burned. Wait. That's you. You're singed. You put your hand to your hair and it feels very wrong.

The room is very bright. Beyond wide windows, sunlight leaps from the chrome of half a dozen muscular vehicles, Humvees and trucks and Jeeps. Beyond those is endless rolling earth. You're encircled by a colorful strip of paper on which are letters and numbers and puppies and dinosaurs and elephants. The walls are lined with posters about Brazil and global warming. Beneath the windows are desks, all pushed together. It's a classroom. You're burned, on a stretcher, in a classroom.
“Oh,” says a woman. “You’re awake.”

You don’t know this woman. Which is odd, because you know everyone in Broken Hill. Also, the woman is wearing fatigues, like a soldier. She comes closer and checks your tubes. You have tubes. They run from the insides of your elbows to plastic bags on a trolley beside the bed.

“How do you feel?” Before you can stop her, the woman peels up one of your eyelids with her thumb. “You’re in Menindee. It’s a little town outside Broken Hill.” A patch on her khakis said: NIELSEN, J. “We’re using the school as a hospital. Are you in pain?”

Your hands were wrapped in bandages. Like big mittens. There are three other stretcher beds in the room but none are occupied. You try to sit up. You remember fire, smoke. Danny carrying you through it. You passed out. Then you were flying, skimming across the earth, and bouncing, being held by Danny on a dirt bike. You saw kangaroos fleeing flames. “Where’s Danny?”

“The man who brought you in?”

“Yes,” you say. “Yes, yes.”

“He’s up the hall. They’re working on him.”

“Is he all right?”

“Just relax,” says Nielsen.

You almost ask, Are you a dog person or a cat person? Because you really want to know if Nielsen is telling the truth. “Who else?”

“Who else what?”

“Made it,” you say. “Out.” You're a little freaked out by the empty stretcher beds.

Nielsen doesn’t answer. You feel ice in your heart, a thin sliver, like a stiletto. You put your face in your mitten-hands. Your eye hurts. “I’ll tell them you’re conscious,” says Nielsen. “For now, rest.”

Once Nielsen leaves, you climb off of your stretcher. There are tubes to take care of, which you do with your teeth, because your mitten-hands are useless. You're in a green smock, which flaps at your ankles and admits a a breeze at the back. Beneath this you suspect underpants and bandages. You feel padded. You peer out of a glass panel on the classroom door and see nobody so you open it. A passing soldier points at you and says, “Get back inside,” not slowing, and you say, “Okay,” and close the door and wait until he's gone. The hallway floor is warm. The adjoining classrooms are empty. Farther down the hall, behind a window almost completely obscured by posters, you see soldiers wearing face masks around a gurney. On the gurney lies someone wrapped in odd gray packages and bandages. The person’s face isn’t visible but you can see a forearm, blackened and blistered, and know it as Danny’s. You cover your mouth.

One of the soldiers in a face mask sees you and gestures, and Nielsen turns and frowns at you. You go to the door and try to open it with your elbows. Nielsen pushes it open. “Back to bed,” Nielsen says in a low, no-nonsense voice, almost poet-like, which gives you a small start. “Bloody hell, did you remove your drip?”

“Let me sit with him,” you say, but without the baritone or the persuasiveness, and Nielsen takes your arm and marches you down the hall. “Please,” you say. But Nielsen does not engage. She takes you back to your classroom and deposits you on the bed. “I want to sit with him.”

“He’ll be okay,” Nielsen says. “Stop worrying.”

For some reason this catches you unawares and you begin to shake. You can’t even say thank you.

“You love him?”

“Yes,” you say. “Yes, yes.”

“He was half-dead when he made it to the perimeter. Hard to believe he kept going. He wanted to save you very much.” Nielsen gently forces you to recline. “Rest. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”

You let yourself be forced. “Okay.”

“Everything will be fine,” Nielsen says, and sunlight flashes from a car outside the windows. It's a low black sedan, very different from the other vehicles, its windows tinted dark. It pulls alongside a truck and stops.

You sit up. “How long have I been here?”

“About four hours.”

“I need to see Danny.” The sedan’s door opens and a woman in a suit emerges, pushing back her hair. You've seen this woman once before, years ago. Her name is Plath. “Are you a dog person or a cat person?”

“Excuse me?”

“Dogs or cats? Which do you like more?”

“Dogs.” Nielsen rises. “Now sleep.”

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Mauve,” said Nielsen, one hand on the door, and there is no time for further questions. You've spent a grand total of about five minutes with Nielsen, and there are twenty-odd sets to which she could feasibly belong, but you've spent time piecing together psychographics from first principles and have a strong feeling about fifty-nine.

“Tecto rillia gasom tav,” you say. “Come back here.”

Nielsen swivels in mid-step. “Thank you,” you say. “Thank you, thank you; take me to Danny.”

~

You follow Nielsen back to the other classroom and approach the gurney while Nielsen invents convenient excuses for why the doctors or medics or whoever these face-masked people are to leave. Nielsen says Danny will be fine, but he's swathed in layers and layers and the only parts you can see are swollen and red. His eyes are beneath soft white circles and you want these off. “Wake him up,” you tell Nielsen. “But please be careful.”

You reach for his fingers, which are poking out from gauze, but of course your hands are encased as well. “Danny, can you hear me? We’re going to get out of here.” Nielsen finishes pushing fluid into Danny’s drip and you set her to unwrapping your mitten-hands. They look worse than you expected: Your fingers are cracked and blackened, the crevices between them oozing pink fluid. You take Danny’s hand and it hurts but it feels better, too. “When he’s awake, help me get him to a car. We don’t want anyone to see us. You have to get us out of here and not let anyone stop us, understand?”

“Yes,” says Nielsen.

He makes a noise. You peel one of the white circles from his eyes and then the other. His eyes move beneath the lids. “Danny, wake up.”

The door opens. You turn. In the doorway stands a soldier you haven’t seen before, a young guy with a buzz cut. His eyes are focused and intent.

“Oh, shit,” you say. “Tecto rillia gasom tav, don’t let the guy near us.”

The soldier runs at you and Nielsen moves to intercept. They exchange flat, wordless blows and fall to the floor and Nielsen gets him in a headlock and begins to wind surgical tubing around his throat. You're surprised and impressed by Nielsen’s badassery. You return your attention to Danny. He's swimming somewhere beneath consciousness like he's under glass. “Danny, please wake up. You have to wake up. I can’t get you out of here by myself.”

Nielsen and the soldier crash into a trolley, scattering surgical equipment. The soldier gets free of Nielsen and his eyes fall on you. You abruptly see that this isn’t going to work, your whole escape plan; this guy is going to knock out Nielsen and throttle you and Danny, or not even that - the noise alone will bring more people than you can handle, people and soldiers and Plath. You feel panic. “Kill him!” you say, because maybe Nielsen isn’t going full throttle. It seems to make a difference, because Nielsen picks herself up and punches the soldier in the throat in a way that drops him immediately. “Kill everyone who tries to stop us,” you say, and something in your mind leaps, and you realize what you said.

You feel undone. You feel the realization sinking into you: that you've finally done it, found a way to screw up so badly there's no way back. You've gotten a star in your eye. There are who knows how many people dead in Broken Hill and Thoreau put instructions in your head and you carried them out. You can’t believe, in your core, that you aren’t responsible. You killed people and now there is a star in your eye that wants you to kill more.

“I’m sorry,” you tell Danny. You begin to cry, partly for yourself and partly for Danny, who tried so hard. Nielsen and the soldier grunt and gasp. You lean over and kiss Danny on each eye. “I love you.”

His eyes move rapidly, as if in REM sleep. You hesitate. “Danny,” you say. You see a response, a tiny neuroelectrical spark. It reminds you of DC, when you sought out examples of psychographic sets and tested word fragments on them. Back then you had reverse-engineered entire words.

Danny is immune. But maybe he's only immune to the words you know about. Maybe he's nothing more than a slightly different kind of machine, a psychographic set of one, which the Organization hasn’t targeted only because they don’t know about it.

“Ko,” you say. You watch his eyelids. “Ka. Toh.” You know him very well. You understand which movements are his. “Kik.” A muscle above his lip jumps. You almost gasp. Your mind moves with possibilities, sifting conjugations. “Kik,” you say again, to be sure.

The soldier gargles. You glance down and see that his face is purple. Nielsen is choking the life from him. You return your attention to Danny, ignoring everything except the forty-eight muscles around his eyes. You feed him sounds. You build your way to an attention word and that is a good start but not enough. You don’t know how much time is passing. You focus on the words.

None of this is going to save you. You know that. It's too late for you, and has been from the moment the door to the paramedic van bounced open and reflected the bareword. But it's not too late for Danny.

When you're done, you touch his face. “Danny,” you whisper. “Kikkfhk ktaffkx kfhixu tzzkcu.”

He changes. You've seen people fall under compromise a hundred times but never him and a part of you dies when you see it, his face slack, his mind open and waiting for instruction, his soul reduced to machinery. You could say run away with me and do everything I ever tell you and love me forever and he would. You'd be loved by the thing you made him into.

“Forget all of this,” you tell him. “Get away from here, forget me, forget you ever lived in Broken Hill. Become someone else. Kikkfhk ktaffkx kfhixu tzzkcu., forget me.”

You stumble away from the gurney. You can’t bear to look at him. Nielsen is standing there like a statue, which surprises you. The buzz-cut soldier is on the floor, not moving.

“Nielsen,” you say. “Thank you.”

Nielsen waits.

“Take him away,” you say. “Keep him safe.”

~

Once Nielsen has put Danny into a Jeep and you've watched it speed away into the dust, you return to the classroom in which you awoke and search around for a marker. Classrooms always have markers. You find a drawer full of colorful ones and take a fistful and go looking for a bathroom. There are many people running around and shouting, but they're mostly outside, drawn by Nielsen’s departure. You don't see Plath and are concerned about that, because the worst thing that can happen right now is Plath finding you.

You find a girls’ restroom with a long counter and low sinks, for children. You grip a blue marker in your fist, like a toddler, and begin to scrawl on the mirror. The first word is vartix. This left you slack-jawed in your dormitory room once, but you were a good student and did your exercises and are not seventeen anymore, so you manage to get through it, pausing between letters to blink at the ceiling and clear your mind. You complete vartix and keep your eyes averted from it while you write the second word, and the third, and fourth, and then you have to gag into the sink for a while. But you did it. You pick up the marker again, and, keeping your head down, add: DIE.

You close your eyes. You take two steps backward. You breathe. It will only work if you lower your defenses. I am cared for, you tell yourself. I am safe. You feel your muscles loosen. You swallow. Open your eyes. Open your eyes. You begin to do it and squeeze them shut again. Do it, you tell yourself. Do it, you bitch - you know if they find you they’ll make you tell them about Danny! Do it! You deserve it! Then you begin to cry.

You grope toward the counter and find the marker. You keep your eyes away from the command words and locate DIE and add a D. Before that, you write DANNY. Before you can change your mind, you walk away and then you look back.

~

You're sitting on tiles. Bathroom tiles. Your mind feels bruised. You have the feeling that someone has just compromised you.

Menindee. Of course. Danny brought you here. He dragged you out of Broken Hill and saved your life. But then-

“Oh, no,” you say. Danny died. They weren't able to save him. You saw him die on the gurney. A wail bursts out of you and you force it down because Plath is out there. The whole Organization is probably looking for you. You close your fist around your grief and make it anger. There will be time for grief later. The point here is that Danny had wanted you to live. You have to survive. You'll flee, and hide, and live, because you're good at that. Then you will find a way to return to Thoreau and make your vengeance terrible.

But first. You get to your feet and try to think how the hell you're going to get out of here.

PART FOUR

You shoulder open the emergency room doors. After the darkness, the sunlight feels like an explosion. You gasp air. You make it to the white paramedic van and lean against it. In one hand you have the thing. It was dark inside, but you didn’t have trouble spotting it. A piece of wood, about the size of a book, with a piece of yellowed paper speared to it. You left the paper in there. The wood is heavier than it looks and frigid to the touch, like it wants to leech the heat from your body. There's a symbol on it that looks like nothing you've seen before, and the more you look at it, the more something in your gut twists, and your eyes water, until you look away. But it doesn't change you. It's true. You're immune.

You head back to the Valiant. Then you stop, because you can’t show this thing to Eliot. Eliot was very clear about that. You glance around for something to wrap it in. The doors of the paramedic van are open. You peer inside and find a small towel and shake the sand out of it.

When you reach the car, Eliot’s eyes are closed. You pull open the door. Eliot’s chest hitches and his eyes peel open. “I did it,” you say. “I got the word.”
Eliot blinks.

“Right here,” you say, raising the towel, but Eliot’s eyes squeeze shut. “It’s okay! I covered it up. It’s a kind of symbol on a-” Eliot’s head jerks left and right. “I’m not telling you details! I’m describing the general kind of object!”

“Ssss,” says Eliot.

“I know what happened here. Why everyone died. There was something stuck to the word that-”

“Ssss!”

“Okay! I’m just saying, if you look at this thing, you won’t die. It’s not fatal anymore.” This doesn’t seem to make any difference to Eliot. “You look terrible. Have you been drinking the water?” You spot a bottle near Eliot’s feet, the lid off. The mat is wet. “Jesus, you haven’t.” You lean over Eliot, looking for the other bottles. The smell in the car is very bad. “Drink.” You twist the bottle’s top and hold it to Eliot’s lips. Eliot’s throat clicks. His Adam’s apple bobs. When water spills down his chin, you lower the bottle and wait until Eliot no longer seems to be drowning. Then you say, “More,” and tip it forward again.

“Gguh,” says Eliot.

“I have an idea. We drive to a hospital. A hospital with living people in it. Then I use this thing to make them help you. Right? I just word them. We tell them to help you but not tell anyone we’re there.” Eliot is leaking water again, so you put away the bottle. “Good plan?”

Eliot’s head turns left then right.

“Oh,” you say. “What’s your plan, then? Because it’s pretty obvious to me that you’re dying. And we both know I don’t have a hope in hell against the people who are after us all by myself, even if I do have a magic word. So it’s either a hospital or I try a little amateur surgery on you myself with whatever I can find lying around. Do you want me to do that?” Eliot says nothing. “I’m not doing that. I’m getting you to a hospital.” You close the door and jog around to the driver’s seat. “Keep drinking the water.”

You tuck the towel and its hidden package between the seats and turn the key. The engine clicks emptily. You blink. You forgot about the gas. You glance at Eliot and see Eliot looking at you with a complete lack of surprise.

What do you do?