The fresh wave of hate Vern felt for the fiend wrenched her from her fugue state. “Let’s move,” she said, pulling from Gogo’s hold. She still had time to punish these murderers.
Cameras turned toward her as flocking crowds noticed her presence. Gape-mouthed, they stared at her unsheathed exoskeleton.
The police were ready to release a rain of bullets, but civilians stood between them and Vern.
An army of the dead in the form of fresh hauntings marched behind Vern, and she let their presence embolden her rather than make her afraid. “Follow me if you will, but try and interfere, and you will die. This ends tonight,” she said to cop and civilian alike, prepared to release the spores if they did not obey.
They did obey. Crews of news reporters followed, cameras turned to Vern’s alien body, but they kept their distance. Citizens filmed. The cops held their guns but did not shoot.
Was it only fear that made them hold their fire? Or was it wild-eyed marvel? Was their instinct upon seeing this new thing to question and gaze rather than subdue and kill?
“We are filming live at the infamous Cainland compound. A young woman is leading us onto the grounds and appears to be wearing intensely advanced armor,” said one reporter in front of a camera.
Vern closed her eyes and listened to the fungus. It led her along even as it disabled her with pulses of fresh memories. Vern’s mam was there beside her calling out to the woods, looking for Vern, screaming, sobbing. Brother Jerome played football with a group of boys whose uniform trousers were rolled up in the summer heat. A teenager picked dandelion greens for the night’s supper. A little girl threw rocks at a wasp’s nest. Sister Alice, Sister Ella, Sister Sonya, and Sister Araminta played spades at a fold-out picnic table, betting each other chores, using peach pits as chips.
Vern walked on, the world behind her. She only stopped once she’d reached the old well, the one she and Lucy had called down to how many thousands of times, certain they’d heard voices calling back. Vern briefly gripped the stone rim of the well to collect herself, then proceeded toward the temple where her family lay dead.
“They’re in there,” said Vern, pointing to the structure where Carmichael and her mam had spent their final moments. “Be ready to take cover. I don’t know how many there are.”
Gogo squeezed her hand.
Vern ripped the door that opened into the temple from its hinges. The soldiers who’d carried out the massacre had to know that she was coming for them and were prepared, but she was not afraid. They’d already let loose loss on an unspeakable scale. What more could they do to her? She alternated between fits of rage and a blank numbness as her legs carried her forward by rote, not will, through the temple’s entry hall. She could smell smoke and metal. Maybe the fungus was truly divine after all and had made her into a demigod; she already had the indifference that came with being a deity.
At the end of the entry hall was another door. It opened into the sanctuary. “Fuck,” said Gogo as she took in the sight before them. Bodies. On instinct, Gogo ran toward them to check for signs of life. “Somebody get the paramedics.”
But it was over, and there was no one here to pay back. The jig up, the attackers had fled as quickly as they’d arrived; an elite SEAL team, perhaps, or a private military company.
Vern half laughed, half sobbed. She’d been ready to block bullets, to dodge barbed darts, but those in charge of the Cainland project had denied her the satisfaction of a fight they knew she would win. Running away was their final fuck you to her. They must’ve known how she longed to be the cause of each of their last breaths. Instead, she was left with knowing they were all alive somewhere, and she might well not ever find them. Like the Nazis that the United States had brought here in the forties and fifties to live their lives with their crimes unanswered-for, those who’d carried out the final stage of the Cainland project would be free.
All but Ollie.
At least the fiction of Cainland would die tonight. They wouldn’t be able to pass this off as a mass suicide. Vern had ruined that plan.
Perhaps this was the better end. No amount of bloodbath could cleanse this land of sorrow. The deaths of those involved would’ve felt like a victory, but it wouldn’t have been, not as long as the country that’d authorized and carried out the experimentation existed.
“Damn,” said Lucy, appearing at Vern’s side.
Vern turned toward her dead friend. “Is this how you died?” she asked. “A military op? Did they find you in the end? Assassinate you?”