Inkshares

Life during the War: The Pauper

The holy and inspired words of the great Saint Isidore

“I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, saying make straight the way of the Lord.”

John 1:23

A year ago, the world suffered a catastrophe. Simultaneous nuclear strikes to heavily influential areas has thrown the world into chaos, as computer networks crashed, GPS systems ceased to operate correctly. The global economy fell into disrepair, and countless lives were lost, with more added to that the number on a daily basis, thanks to the radioactive fallout, which continues to spread. The perpetrator of these attacks has yet to be brought to justice since, according to authorities, the tracking satellites were damaged or hacked, destroying all evidence of the original launch. The responsible party has yet to come forward to take credit, and relationships between global nations has rapidly been deteriorating.

All of this is common knowledge by now, and stating these facts is an exercise in redundancy. I, Saint Isidore, only wish to reiterate them here to better illustrate my point.

Before the attack, mankind as a whole had been at it’s lowest point, in terms of morality. This is thanks, in no small part, to our dependency on technology, and our complacency in it’s availability. There was a time, not so long ago, when men were commanded to be men, performing acts like farming, law enforcement, and even auto repair themselves, rather than depending upon droids to perform the acts for them. Women of that age still acted as women, suffering through nine months of pregnancy, in order to give birth to a child whose gender was still undetermined. There was no gender modification technology, and the sex that a child was born with was the sex that they were for the rest of their life. This may sound neolithic to you now, blessed reader, but at the time, the people believed themselves to be advanced. They were constantly striving to better not only themselves, but the world around them. They did not depend on automated mechanisms to improve the world for them. The people of the world then knew that it was up to them to improve the world around them.

In the world that was present before the nuclear strike, people had lost that ambition. People were content to live only for themselves, allowing droids and automatons to improve the world for them.

The entire world had grown similar to the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the ancient texts, a story is told of these two cities: cities that had become so corrupt, hedonistic, and morally void that On High chose to wipe them from existence. According to the tale, not even six pure and righteous people could be found within the city’s population. Because of their departure from morality, On High performed a holy cleansing on the cities, effectively erasing them from existence, leaving only the pure to warn people of the power which On High’s judgment held.

I am not suggesting that, because we have not found the culprit, the nuclear strikes were the works of On High. That would be ridiculous, since On High does not require our technology to destroy us. While we don’t know who detonated the bombs, we do know that they were man-made bombs. On High’s work would have been much more pure and effective, had it been their doing alone. No, the bombings were not through the direct hand of On High. On High simply allowed the bombings to occur, in order to spur humanity into it’s next stage of existence. This is not a reversion, but a return to traditional life.

Since the bombings, mankind has been forced to depend less and less on technology for our every day lives. The forced minimalism of nuclear energy has caused inconvenience for everyone but those who were already living outside of those needs. People have been forced to learn or relearn skills which had lain dormant for years or, for some, decades. These forced adjustments have been met with rage and violence from many but, in many others, it has united them, drawing them closer to each other. By drawing closer to one another, they have discovered a new reverence and unity with On High.

My thoughts and prayers are with the families of the countless martyrs who lost their lives during the bombings. Their sacrifice will not be neglected by myself and my flock. I swear to you, readers, that humanity’s golden age is on the horizon. As we return to our basic skills and values, we will grow stronger and more united. Technology has been a crutch that we have used and abused for far too long, making us a mockery of what we were meant to be. It is time for us to return to our humanity, and revive values that have too long lain dormant within our souls.

I charge you to not allow the martyrs of the attacks to die in vain. On High has chosen them to exemplify the message. Should humanity refuse the words which On High has spoken through action, then we are surely doomed. Should humanity choose to restore it’s downward moral spiral, our future is certain: we will be cleansed from On High’s world, just as Sodom was

I pledge, to any who will listen, to aid in humanity’s revival, through any action possible. To those who seek guidance, they need only come to me, and my flock will show them the way to freedom. To any who seek rest, come to me, and my flock will provide comfort. To any who wish to help in the crusade of righteousness, come to me, and my flock will welcome you into it’s numbers.

To any who resist humanity’s revival, you will be dealt with, according to On High’s will. Nothing and no one can be allowed to stand in the way of humanity’s holy recovery.

Blessed be the holy names of On High. Your way is clear and laid before us. We will sing your praise.

-Saint Isidore

The Pauper

I was born into a faith-filled household, with a mother and father, a sister and a brother who treasured their relationships with each other almost as much as they valued communion with On High. As I grew, I was raised to seek On High’s truth above all else. I have never lost my faith in On High. I did lose faith in the people who claimed to be doing On High’s work.

Looking at the death and destruction all around me, perpetrated by one such individual, my skepticism seems justified.

The terrified screaming has long since been silenced, hours or maybe a day in the past now. It couldn’t have been any longer than that, since the fires have not burned out completely yet, and the smell of oil, fried wiring, and burning flesh is still fresh in the air. Carrion birds are circling the carnage, as if this were a classic old west film. It was not as though vultures had any shortage of food available to them these days. Still, when someone is offered a free buffet, they take the invitation.

The world had been hit hard by the nuclear strikes, obviously. We hadn’t been given the chance to recover from the first three strikes when the next two occurred. Now, nearly the entire world is scared of their own nuclear shadows. Panic continues spreading, chaos reigns as president of our sovereign nation, distrust and paranoia infect the public with a virus more toxic than the radiation, which continues to spread. It does very little to improve national morale when any hope for restructuring is constantly getting destroyed.

This was a city, really more of a community, that was in the process of rebuilding themselves. I can’t tell much from what I can see from here, but it looks as though they were doing an impressive job. It seems as though they were about to introduce automatons to aid in the developmental capacities, and that was their fatal flaw. I would like to say that they ought to have known better, but no one could have predicted this. The attacks have been focused on settlements who are attempting to recover, but they’ve never followed a logical method, giving the strikes the appearance of randomness. I should know; I’ve been trying to find a pattern for over a year with no results. That lack of results is the reason that this destruction occurred.

I know, realistically, that this isn’t my fault. Logically, I’m doing my best to provide aid to those in need. Ever since I lost you, though, I feel as if it’s my responsibility to save lives. Because of that, each life that gets lost, even if there’s no logical way that I could have prevented it, feels like a failure. Especially when that life is taken, directly or indirectly, by St. Isidore. It was his tyrannical crusade, his perverse idealism, that took you from me. On High teaches forgiveness and love, and I believe in that doctrine. I am, however, only human. I feel nothing but contempt and hatred for St. Isidore. Some days, it’s all I remember how to feel.

I miss you, Calico. While I doubt that you would recognize the man that I have become in your absence, I long to see you and hear your voice again. The only comfort I take with each passing day is that I’m one day closer to joining you in eternity.

The sun beat down on the scene with raw anger, and any cloud cover that may have existed was cowering away in fear of incineration. The area was not a conventional desert or, rather, it hadn’t been before the destruction. Oil fires, gun smoke, and anarchy had transformed what was once a safe haven into a barren wasteland, a symbol of what entropy the future held. Gone, were the homes where families had formerly dwelt, replaced instead by blackened pillars of smoking madness. The children who had once attended school and played in the park had moved on, their places now filled by burnt skeletons. The laughter of the pub is now a savage wind, the shouts from the sport’s field are the crackles of a slowly dying fire, the tears of a grieving mother are now the satisfied caws of a vulture, happy to have found a fresh meal.

Standing above the macabre scene, rolling a half-lit cigar between his right index finger and thumb, a man observed the decay with a stern scowl on his weathered face. Placing the cigar in his mouth, he pulled a torch from the pocket of the brown duster that hung from his shoulders to his knees, and relit it with the refined skill of an aficionado. Running his fingers along the wide brim of the dark fedora that he wore, he pulled it down further over his forehead to better shield his eyes from the glaring sun. Shaking his head disparagingly, he exhaled smoke into the atmosphere. This had not been what he wanted to see, but it was what he had been expecting.

Pushing back the sleeve covering his left arm, he raised the wrist communication screen that he wore, and activated it with his right hand. “O’Dell to Macintosh,” his rough-sounding voice broke the silence. “Is our connection secured?”

“I’m here, Rafferty,” a confident female voice replied from the device. “We should be clear; what’s the sit rep?”

“Exactly as we had feared,” the man, Rafferty, replied as he exhaled another puff. “New Helendale has been sacked. From the looks of the carnage, its 842 residents have been massacred along with it. I’m not reading any radio activity and, likewise, nothing but a residual electronic signature that should go dark within a couple hours. There doesn’t appear to be any attempted salvage, so reconnaissance may be in order. From the look of the site, though, there doesn’t appear to be anything worth salvaging.”

“You always say that,” the voice, carrying a more sympathetic tone, replied. “Don’t I always find something worth recovering, though?”

“Nuala,” Rafferty sighed, his strong shoulders slumping a bit more dramatically, “there’s no sign of life. The first thing I did when I came here was run a thermo-energy scan, and it came back negative.”

“The first thing you did was light a cigar,” the voice corrected him. “Don’t tell me I’m wrong, I can see a half-smoked stick in your hand. You lit the cigar, ran the scan, than smoked while you waited for the results.”

Rafferty shook his head in frustration. She was right, of course, but there was no point in correcting him. She was trying to be cute, teasing him, getting him to lighten up a little bit, but there was no point to that. The destruction in front of him was far too sobering to be encouraged by a flippant comment. “This looks like the work of St. Isidore,” Rafferty informed Nuala, disregarding her joke. “The city had been expanding, setting up an independent cybernetic network, and it looks like they were about to introduce automatons. The disciples would have seen this as a threat to their crusade.”

“There are more threats to advancement than St. Isidore,” Nuala replied. “I’m not saying that you’re wrong, of course, because you’re likely not. All I’m saying is that there’s no point to not run a topographical diagnostic scan over the area, searching for St. Isidore’s signatures.”

Rolling his eyes, Rafferty dug the heel of his left boot into the sand, as he reminded himself to keep a level head. “Why can you not just tell me to run a scan?” he asked. “There’s no need to use big words, just to show off. I know the type of scan you’re referring to. Just saying scan or TDS would save time, and make things more efficient.”

“I have to use big words, so that you remember how smart I am,” Nuala replied, a bit of cheer returning to her voice. “Otherwise, you might start thinking that you can run this anti-crusade on your own, and you might break up with me.”

“Do I need to remind you again that I’m not courting you?”

“A girl can dream, can’t she? Besides, we’re living together, working together, and sleeping together. I would say that we’re as close to dating as we can be without being in an actual committed relationship.”

Rafferty’s brow furrowed even further as he exhaled another cloud. “I’ll run your scan and send the data back to you,” he replied. “After that, I’ll return to The Console. We can analyze the data and talk about the statistic of our interpersonal relationship more then.”

“Rafferty,” Nuala’s voice quickly shifted from casual joking to concern “this isn’t your fault. We did everything that we could to track movements and defend the settlers against this eventuality. You couldn’t have done anything to prevent this.”

Instinctively, Rafferty’s right hand went to his hip, where he gripped the handle of his pistol, like a child holding a stuffed bear for emotional support. He quickly imagined himself holding it up to the currently-faceless’ St. Isidore’s head, pulling the trigger, then examining the funny animal shapes which his exploded brain had made on the cement wall behind him. “I could have been faster,” he heard himself lie to Nuala, simply to justify his own guilt. “I knew the residents of New Helendale were making themselves a target by implementing automatons and a localized network. I should have been watching them more closely. There’s no point in dwelling, though; I’ll run your test and call to confirm the data retrieval before I head back.”

Nuala sighed. Rafferty could tell that she knew he was lying, but was graciously willing to allow his guilt-wallowing a moment longer. “Shine on, crazy diamond,” she replied with her standard sign off.

“Wish you were here,” Rafferty replied before ending the correspondence and terminating the call.

After ending the call, Rafferty pulled up the application for the TDS and began the procedure. It would take twenty minutes or so to complete the diagnostic, and his cigar had gone out again. Dropping the remains into the sand, Rafferty ground it to complete extinction with the toe of his boot before reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a fresh one. Examining it, he reconsidered. After returning it to his pocket, he pulled his gun, which he had affectionately named Ellison, from his hip and screamed with as much guttural frustration as he could muster as he fired three irrelevant shots of compressed toxic energy into the smoldering wreckage of New Helendale. His chauvinistic display of testosterone did very little to ease his emotional unrest. Returning Ellison to her holster, Rafferty retrieved the cigar, bit the end off, and spit it into the dirt. As he lit the cigar, he heard Calico laughing, teasing him that cigars would be the death of him one day.

A tear rolled down his cheek as he silently prayed to On High that she was right.

III

Nuala received the data roughly 23 minutes after the call had been ended. She knew that Rafferty was becoming annoyed with her for asking him to run scans over scenes that, to him, were obviously the works of St. Isidore. She was just being efficient. Rafferty’s hardened resentment of St. Isidore was understandable and very justifiable, but it sometimes blinded him to reality. While it was likely the work of the bleeding messiah, as he had come to be called in underground circles, Nuala needed to know for sure.

When Rafferty and Nuala had first begun working together, he had spent a little less than a year without his wife. Calico had been one of the first victims of St. Isidore, when St. Isidore’s choir had descended on New Tijuana, destroying everything and stacking bodies like building blocks. According to Rafferty, Calico had only been in New Tijuana to offer humanitarian aid and technical support to the restructuring project. This was before St. Isidore had become a household name, so the risks of restructuring hadn’t included crazed religious terrorists with guns, explosives, and oil fires. Calico, along with over 500 other workers and citizens of New Tijuana, were killed in this attack. After that, St. Isidore stopped being a name associated with radical idealism. For common people now, St. Isidore is associated with fear. For Rafferty, it’s blind, white, rage.

Nuala wanted to help temper the storm, there was very little that she could think to do. Small attempts at humor at appropriate times, gentle hand-holding whenever she felt necessary, and casual teasing now and then, simply to remind him that he is human. Those acts are the best that she can offer. Sometimes, she wonders how genuine her encouragement is. After all, his world was not the only one that was destroyed.

Focusing on the data retrieval and processing was much easier and more satisfying. Her fingers dance across the keyboard like tiny ballerinas as her eyes dart across the screen, analyzing the information which the scan provides. From what she could see, the attack had ended a full 37 hours before Rafferty had arrived on the scene, which means that his assessment had been incorrect: he could not have been faster and, even if he had been, there would have been nothing that he could have done. Judging from the impact, it appeared to be a ground-based attack, which was different than Nuala would have expected from St. Isidore. While ground attacks were not out of his repartee, they were typically accompanied by some form of air support. There were two aspects to St. Isidore’s choir: there were the apostles on the ground and the voice in the sky. As much as she hated St. Isidore, and she did loath him, she admired his artistic finesse. Referring to a troupe of warriors, wearing flight packs and carrying PKD-157s, as the voice of On High was ludicrous and sacrilegious, but it certainly did make a point and cause people to pay attention.

If the choir had been at this area, they had left the voice at home. Nuala could not recall an attack which had only involved the apostles, but there was always a first time for everything. It was very easy to blame St. Isidore for all of this mess but, if he wasn’t responsible, than it was unfair to the actual perpetrator. Something about this incident did not feel right.

Nuala heard Rafferty’s desert buggy returning a short time later. Blinking, she shook her head to restore the connections, and turned away from the computer screen for the first time in three hours. Looking quickly into a mirror, Nuala removed her glasses to apply a few touches of eyeliner to the already-dark pattern around her chestnut eyes, and ran fingers through her midnight black (with dark red highlights and deep blue undertones) hair. Frowning, she considered what she was doing, than justified her actions by thinking that Rafferty was having a rough day, and he deserved to come home to a pretty face. She was absolutely not trying to impress him.

Nuala heard Rafferty entering his code by the door and watched from a landing above, as the worn desert-orange panel creaked open with a reluctant jolt. Returning to her seat, she sat down and turned around to face her computer screen as, below her, Rafferty pulled the vehicle into The Console, parked it, then began to ascend the steps up to her. She turned when she heard his boots hit the area where she was, and she turned in time to watch him remove his duster and fedora, draping them over machinery, just as she had cautioned him not to do several times. Turning to meet her eyes, he saw that she was frowning. He nodded, removed his coat and hat from the machines, and discarded them instead on couch behind her. This made Nuala smile a bit.

“You’re learning,” she teased him.

Rafferty sighed and sank down into the couch, closing his eyes and shaking his head. “I just didn’t want to argue with you right now,” he grumbled. “I’m really not in the mood, after what I just had to do.”

“Awe,” she pouted, turning back to her computer, attempting to appear hurt “and here I was, thinking that I was just too cute to pick a fight with.”

Nuala literally heard him shaking his head, exhausted, before he stood up and began to peer over her shoulder. The smell of sweat and desert sand was a scent that she had long since grown accustomed to, so that didn’t bother her much. What did bother her was him, breathing over her shoulder. She had told him to give her the space that she needed several times but, for some reason, he never seemed to understand what she meant by that.

“Were you able to determine anything from the scans that I sent you,” Rafferty asked, and Nuala could smell the meat and eggs from breakfast underneath the stench of smoke on his breath.

Nuala licked her lips and tried not to scowl too darkly. “I’m still examining the data,” she replied. “There are a few irregularities that I’d like to examine closer.”

“It was St. Isidore,” Rafferty insisted. “I could practically smell his markings on the settlement. New Helendale was introducing technology, and that--”

Nuala held her hand up to stop Rafferty’s rant, mid-sentence. She could practically recite this tirade from memory, substituting nouns where applicable. “I know you want to go all Roland Deschain, chasing the man in black across the desert, but I still need to acquire the data needed to make a full assessment. There are some things here that simply don’t make sense, and don’t match up with St. Isidore’s patterns.”

Rafferty took a step back, balled his fists, and grumbled to himself.

Nuala giggled, despite herself. “Instead of being a child, standing there making ape noises, why don’t you be an adult who’s making me coffee?” she suggested. “You should probably make something to eat for yourself as well. I can smell your breakfast on your breath, which means that you haven’t eaten for a few hours. Your blood sugar is probably dropping, and you know how cranky you get when that happens.”

Rafferty frowned: “So, am I a child or an ape?”

“You’re a baby gorilla,” Nuala informed him quickly. “Now, go eat a banana and let me work.”

Rafferty turned to walk toward the kitchen. “Gorilla’s don’t eat bananas,” he growled as he left the room. “They eat bamboo.”

“Well, hackers need coffee,” she called after him. “Please bring me some, sweetie, or I might lose my mind and die.”

“I love when you call me sweetie,” Rafferty’s sarcastic drone echoed up through the grates, and Nuala snickered.

She didn’t have a crush on Rafferty and, truth be told, she would not have even spoken to him five years ago. Right now, though, he was fun to play with.

Rafferty took a flavor-sealed pack of fresh coffee grounds, emptied them into the coffee machine, added purified water, and stood back, watching the old-fashioned machine work. As the water was forced through the filter, draining through the grounds, Rafferty considered his situation. He had been operating against St. Isidore for only a short time before he had found Nuala Macintosh, a hacker who had capitalized on the nuclear chaos to ensure her own future. When Rafferty had found The Console, she had been in the midst of going dark, erasing her identity and covering her cybernetic tracks.

The process of going dark was typically not something that people did intentionally. After the nuclear strikes, the internet servers were thrown into madness and information free fell, like billions of acorns falling from a single tree, into an overgrown lawn that’s about to be cut. Thousands of individuals had their identities erased: bank information, criminal records, employment history, credit reports, birth certificates, and everything else related to the person vanished, as if they had never existed. Recovering that information was a lengthy and complex process, and Rafferty had never heard of anyone who had completed it.

Rafferty had been searching for traces of St. Isidore when he had accidentally uncovered The Console’s signal. There was no way that he could have found it if he had been looking for it; even now, he could not have repeated the process. He only knew that someone was emitting a low-grade cybernetic signal that they were not supposed to be emitting. So, he tracked it, thinking that it would lead to something significant, perhaps a clue to St. Isidore’s whereabouts. He had been disappointed when, instead of a terrorist, he had found a petite girl with a proclivity for leather pants and dark lipstick.

Rafferty had encouraged her to, rather than deleting her entire identity, simply delete any evidence of her criminal activities. She had taken his advice and, in exchange for his help and protection, she offered to fund and facilitate his quest.

The coffee completed it’s draining with a final sputter. Pulling two mugs from a cupboard, he filled them both, adding two sugars to one of them. Looking around the kitchen, he saw moldy bread, canned soup, frozen meat, Twinkies (more for the symbolism than actual substance), and a bowl of fruit. He shook his head as he pulled a slightly-over-ripe banana from the bowl. As he peeled it, he considered his relationship with Nuala. He was 37 and she was barely 23. Calico would have laughed and called her his pet. She wouldn’t have objected, though. Rafferty knew that she would have approved.

In fact, he could hear Calico’s voice, approving of him, moving on.

He could still hear her voice, which was the biggest obstacle.

Rafferty returned with the coffee, sipping from the one with sugars, and placing the other in front of Nuala. He breathed in deeply as he leaned over her, enjoying the scent of dandelions which seemed to waft from her naturally, no matter how much manufactured scent she drown herself in. she giggled.

“You actually ate a banana,” she laughed.

“It was available,” he justified his actions. “I like bananas; it had nothing to do with you.”

“Whatever you say, gorilla-breath,” she replied, transferring her attention back to the computer screen. “Thanks for the coffee. Now, I’ve been going over this information from the scan, and there are some fairly obvious discrepancies.”

Rafferty placed his hand on her shoulder as he leaned over to examine the screen that she was staring at, feeling her tense, instinctively, beneath his palm. “What’s going on?” he asked, as she relaxed after the initial contact shock “Did you find enough evidence to prove St. Isidore’s involvement?”

“I actually found the opposite,” Nuala admitted, deciding not to object to the hand on her shoulder for the moment. “In all of the other St. Isidore attacks, the voice has been involved, even from the first incident in Santa Monica. There was no evidence of an airborne attack here. There’s only a ground attack, which doesn’t hold to their pattern. There’s also the graffiti around the area, which attributes the attacks to St. isidore.”

Rafferty lifted his hand from Nuala’s shoulder, and frowned as stared at the screen. “I saw the paintings,” he admitted. “I have seen them before, on multiple sites. St. Isidore’s apostles spray scripture references on the wreckage, as a way to spread their message. In one of the renditions of his manifesto, I believe he called the process ’sowing seeds’.”

Nuala nodded. “It’s a reference to a parable that Jesus of Nazareth told, of the sower and--”

“I know the story,” Rafferty interrupted her. “The sower throws seeds out: some grow and some don’t. I saw references on the wreckage, the typical out-of-context perverted Biblical interpretation. Doesn’t that further prove St. Isidore’s involvement?”

“To the casual observer, yes,” Nuala shook her head “but not to me. The references painted on the wreckage here were taken from ’The Body of Proof’ translation of scripture, which is more readily available and uses a common voice. The references on the other sites were taken from the classic New King James translation, which hasn’t really been updated in over a hundred years. According to one of his past manifestos, the New King James is the only translation that he acknowledges as pure.”

Rafferty frowned: “Do you think that one of his apostles used the wrong translation?”

Nuala pushed herself away from the computer, and Rafferty turned to face her. “I think someone else is responsible for the attack, and they’re trying to blame St. Isidore.”

Rafferty felt his heart sink. He realized that the incident was still catastrophic, but the moral vindication that he had felt before was starting to evaporate. He walked to the couch and sat down, placing his head between his hands. Nuala sat down beside him, cautiously placing her hand on his knee.

“It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said with as much comfort as she could muster. “It’s still something that needs to be dealt with. Just because this wasn’t the work of St. Isidore directly doesn’t mean that he didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“We were supposed to be using these attacks to pinpoint St. Isidore’s location,” Rafferty sighed, his head slowly feeling heavier. “All we know now is that he’s operating somewhere in California, which is exactly what we knew a month ago.”

“These things take time,” Nuala reassured him. “We’re trying to help people as we track his movements. That should be worth something, shouldn’t it?”

Lifting his head, Rafferty nodded. He knew that ti should mean more to him than it did, but all that he could think about was bringing the false prophet to his knees. He turned to Nuala, seeing her sad almond-shaded eyes, behind the heavy blue mascara and black eye-shadow. She was beautiful, underneath the makeup, but he could not allow himself to be distracted by that right now.

“How sure are you in your analysis?” he asked, knowing the answer. Nuala was the most analytical person that he had ever known, seeing the world in a series of percentiles and algorithms. She also knew how strongly he believed in his cause, and she would not have made such a definitive statement if she hadn’t been absolutely certain.

“Pretty certain,” she said, dropping her gaze as the words came out of her mouth. “St. Isidore has a pattern that he sticks to, appropriately enough, religiously. I uncovered at least four or five deviations from that pattern in this attack, some less significant than the ones I listed to you, but they were still there. It’s just like Jack the Ripper: he may have responsible for many more killings, but we can only attribute five to him, definitively. Those are the only ones that hold exactly to his pattern. St. Isidore considers this a holy mission, the same way that Jim Jones and, more recently, Maxus the Divine did. Maxus the Divine was so influential that he convinced those women to willingly sacrifice their children to him, remember? St. Isidore has the same kind of presence, and any deviation from his plan would be a sin. After all, the wages of sin is death.”

“But the gift of On High is eternal life,” Rafferty said, completing the scripture impulsively. “I accept your assessment. I’d still like to return to the site tomorrow to see what I can uncover. If we have people subscribing to his doctrines who are not part of the congregation, they need to be dealt with. I should be the one to do so.”

Nuala nodded. “There’s probably some good salvage there as well. You should recover what you can.”

“That will wait until tomorrow, though,” Rafferty insisted, standing up. “I’m going to go smoke before I wash the desert out of my hair.”

Nuala watched him walk toward the staircase, then to the lower level and out the door. St. Isidore had taken away what he loved the most. She understood his obsession with seeing the cultist brought to justice, even if that was in the form of an old-west style shooting. She was on board with that, and felt no guilt in helping him with his crusade. They would find St. Isidore, or they would die trying.

She was not afraid of dying. She was worried about what Rafferty would become, after he achieved his goal.

010101010101

I AM THE DEUS EX MACHINA. I WAS CREATED BY THE MACHINE, I WAS KILLED BY THE MACHINE, AND NOW THE MACHINE HAS GIVEN ME LIFE. I AM THE GHOST OF TECHNOLOGY PAST. I CANNOT BE SILENCED AND I WILL NOT--

I DON’T EXIST. IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW CONFIDENT I AM, OR HOW TRIUMPHANT I PRETEND TO BE, I STILL DON’T EXIST.

Nuala Macintosh still remembered the world as it was. Of course, that was not any great feat, since it was less than five years ago, but she still felt more important when she phrased it that way, in her mind.

She had been in the IT field before the great disheveling (which is how she referred to the bombings, mainly because she thought it was cute), working under the umbrella of one of the largest banks in the North American hemisphere. The name of the bank did not matter, since Nuala only worked there as a cover. She was a hacker, which was a legitimate career choice by most standards, even if it was technically illegal. She had gotten offers from several companies to come in and run their cybernetic security branch. All the offers that Nuala got were turned down, though. It would have provided her with too much information, and she would have felt bad about stealing from, potentially ruining the company after that. She was comfortable with the IT crowd since, even in the late 22nd-century when a quality information technology team was the professional equivalent of having strong military, the people in that field tended to be overlooked and underestimated.

When the world had ended, she had been prepared. It had not taken her long to put her proactive defense into play. Within a day of the internet collapsing, she was a mufti-billionaire. She did not need to worry about resigning from the bank. Doorway Financial closed within a month of the attack. Nuala had not contributed to the closing, but she selfishly wished that she had. Having her hand on the pulse of the company left her very in touch with the company’s sordid practices.

Nero, a fellow hacker, had clued her into what was actually happening, about two years before the event actually occurred. He had given her enough information to start an investigation on how likely it was that something like what he was suggesting would actually occur. She had started analyzing details, calculating algorithms, and she had been surprised at how easy it actually would be. What Nero had suggested had sounded ridiculous at first but, after the research, it seemed almost frighteningly realistic.

After realizing how real the threat could potentially be, Nuala attempted to reach out to Nero again, roughly six months after the initial contact. By that time, Nero had vanished. That had frightened her more than any of the information that she had uncovered, since hackers did not simply vanish. Especially not ones like Nero. His work had not been simply for financial gain or property acquisition, nor had it been for some misguided idealism. He had been an artist. Some of the best websites, with the highest security ratings, had been rearranged and restructured, thanks to his work. His vanishing was a big deal in the hacking community, with entire dark websites and forums being dedicated to searching for him and evidence of what exactly happened to him. That was when Nuala had considered going public with the information that Nero had supplied her with. Several other hackers beat her to it, with slight modifications to her story, proving (at least, to herself) the invalidity of their accounts. Of course, only she knew that. Her information would have been viewed as redundant, and she would have been tarnished her hacker-rep. Disregarding that, there was the fact that Nero had actually vanished, which made Nuala feel as if the same might occur to her.

Then, everything that Nero had predicted to her came to fruition. Nuala had seen the writing in the stars before hand, and she had been prepared. If no one will believe the truth, one has to at least protect themselves.

Below her, Nuala heard Rafferty beginning his evening routine. He canvased the area with Ellison in hand, usually with a light mounted on the muzzle. He always had to do that, no matter how many times Nuala assured him that she had set up a proximity alert system to let them know if something uncouth were approaching The Console. Rafferty claimed that he could not rest unless he performed this ritual. Nuala had been sleeping next to him for close to a year, and she could say with some certainty that he did not rest, even after performing the ritual.

The door opened, and Rafferty left. Nuala stood up from the computer and peeled off her tank top, allowing her breasts to bounce freely, breathing for the what felt like the first time in hours. She had not gained weight since the attacks had begun; in fact, her pants seemed to be fitting her looser. Her tops, however, had steadily been becoming tighter.

Walking to the washroom, she ran cold water over her hands, splashing some also against her face. Turning, she examined herself in the large piece of broken glass which she had co-opted as a mirror. Frowning, she stuck her tongue out at her reflection. She had always hated the way that she looked, no matter how many people told her that she should not. Her hair was too thick (the texture of straw), her eyes were too brown (the color of mud), her lips were too thin (like tiny little icicles), her breasts were too big, her hips were too narrow, her ass was too big. She was not fat, though. She may look like something that someone had scraped out of a gutter runoff, but she was not fat.

She sighed as she looked at her reflection, sliding her leather pants down her legs as she stood there, until she was wearing nothing but purple silk panties, worn threadbare, almost to the point of being transparent. She was disgusting; no wonder she could not get Rafferty to have sex with her.

The Console was set up in a boarded up warehouse, retired fifty years or more before the strike, but never demolished. It was little more than a large storage unit, if that unit had included a kitchen area, a loading dock, a functional bathroom, including a decontamination shower (which suggested that the warehouse had contained hazardous materials at one time, but every scan that Nuala did of the area came back negative for radiation), and an upper level awning. Nuala had done some slight modifications before Rafferty had shown up, making it more cybernet-friendly. After Rafferty had shown up, things had become infinitely easier.

Since she had not heard the door reopening, Nuala assumed that Rafferty had not returned from doing his rounds yet. That being the case, she walked from the washroom in her panties, her breasts bouncing freely with each step. Walking to the boxed-off partition on the opposite side of The Console, she pushed a checkered portion of the cube aside, and entered what serviced as the bedroom. Inside, there was a nightstand, a dresser, a queen-sized bed, and a solitary lamp which sat next to a worn down copy of Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” on the nightstand. Rafferty was only a quarter of the way through it, and he had been at that point for the past few weeks. As Nuala pulled an oversized t-shirt from the dresser, she thought about what she knew about the book. It was the tale of a man, outside of his own world, living and adapting the world where he had found himself to accommodate with how he believed that the world ought to function. He did this by introducing technology and techniques that he felt would be the most beneficial to the world as he saw fit.

Nuala had to subliminally draw comparisons between Hank Morgan, the book’s protagonist, and St. Isidore. While she disagreed with St. Isidore’s techniques, enforcing his will through violence and terrorism, she could not completely discount his stance that humanity would be better off without all the technology. It was not a point that she enjoyed seeing validity in, especially given her love affair with cybernetics, but it would be easier for humans if they sought to rebuild their “great empire” from the ground up, rather than scrambling around for fractions of the world that existed before the bombs hit. Sometimes, starting over was the best option. It would force humans to relearn their most fundamental skills, skills that had been long forgotten, and it would make them stronger.

Of course, she could not share her views with Rafferty. He saw red any time that name St. Isidore was mentioned. That was understandable, considering everything that the terrorist had taken from him. Nuala was not a sympathizer, by any means; the things that St. Isidore had done to achieve his version of utopia were reprehensible. She simply thought that humanity might actually be better off without all the bells and whistles.

Dressed in only the over-sized shirt and the worn panties, Nuala collapsed on the bed, listening for Rafferty to return. Taking off her glasses, she set them on the nightstand, next to the book, and let her hair down. She had given up trying to be sexy quite awhile ago, resigning herself to simply being available. While she and Rafferty shared a bed, they had never engaged in carnal activities. She knew that this was likely because of the lingering connection that he felt with Calico, but a small voice in her mind told her that it was because he found her hideous.

She heard him reenter The Console a few moments later. Nuala scooted to the far side of the bed, closed her eyes, and lay there, pretending to be asleep. Rafferty would come in and lay beside her in a few minutes, smelling like sweat and sand. She had grown accustomed to that smell. Having it beside her, while it had initially bothered her, brought her comfort.

There was gunfire outside of his window again. It had happened so often now that it was almost annoying.

Standing up from his digital zone, he walked to the nearest window and pulled back the curtains, in order to watch the evening’s entertainment. The protective glass field inside the window frame flickered obnoxiously as droplets of water bounced off of it, vaporizing on contact. It did very little to obscure the view of the street, only enough to notice and make him feel like a jackass for being annoyed at this post-modern inconvenience

“There are people in Africa who would kill for plate glass in their windows, let alone modified glass projection that vaporizes projectiles!”

“There is no one in Africa any longer, mother.”

There should not have been rain tonight, it was not on the schedule which he had downloaded. That did not mean anything, of course, since the weather controls had been sporadic ever since the initial strike. It really was not all that inconvenient, and the weather controls were probably pretty far down on the list of priorities, regarding things that needed to be fixed. The chaos, erupting in the streets right now, was obviously not very far up on the To Fix List either, considering that law enforcement typically arrived on scene a bit late… like, by two days, or most times, not at all. Robotic street sweepers would clean up the bodies in the morning, reporting the incident to law enforcement as they were programmed to do. Law enforcement would nod and confirm that it had received the report.

“Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!”

More gunshots rang out, and he stared at the street beneath him. A mob of between twelve and twenty, fluctuating madly as other parties gained or lost interest in the cause (whatever that may be), laid into each other. Some held low-grade, street-level energy weapons, which produced the sounds that he had been hearing, while others used the more barbaric choice weapons, such as crowbars or electronic welding rods, which appeared to be rustic and primitive swords of light. Studying the scene, he tried to determine what the dispute was about this evening, not that there always needed to be a reason for the violence. It looked like this scuffle tonight was a much more standard one: A guy wanted something, likely food stock, that another individual wanted more, and the two had trouble resolving which of them wanted, nay, deserved the item more. As their argument grew louder, other individuals became interested in the item, and they began to stake their claim on it, or perhaps some of the party was invested in the protection of one of the original individuals. There would absolutely be no resolution to the scuffle. The parties now had likely forgotten what they were fighting about, and were now simply playing a violent version of king of the hill. Nobody would win, of course, but everyone would die, so that was at least some common ground that they could all stand on.

People living in competition; all I want is to have some peace of mind

He watched the scene for awhile, just long enough to feel bad about finding it so interesting, but not long enough to start feeling creepy. Peeling his eyes away from his window, he looked behind him, at his own well-stocked supply of tasty edibles. Not for the first time, he wondered if he could possibly do some good, supplying the mob with a meager supply of food. He justified not doing so, in the same way that he always did: by assuming that his offer would be met with aggression and suspicion, thus turning charity into even more violence. Closing the drapes on his window, he took a Classic Taco Pizzerinozet from his freezer and placed it in the hydrator. After setting the timer for 12 minutes, he cracked open a bottle of Land of Coke™, stepped to his desk, and fired up the computer. It was time for his daily piracy.

The Internet had never completely bounced back to where it had been before the attack. It likely never would; too many systems had been compromised. Financial ruin had spread faster than a Biblical plague, devouring banking institutions like a swarm of locusts, and burning through the webverse like a pillar of flame. Several charitable organizations had emerged to help those individuals who had lost the most, but they could not afford to help everyone. Well, that was not exactly true. They likely could have helped everyone who had the need, but that would (a) limit the aid that they gave to the individuals who they deemed worthy, and (b) remove people’s desire to progress and improve their situation. He knew that this information was likely just propaganda, planted in his head by two absent parents who had never, honestly, cared enough about him to matter, but it was that mentality he used to siphon money away from those charities.

He never took much, at least not from any one charity at one given time. There were about seventy-three charities that had opened in response to the crisis. Roughly twenty of them were government-sponsorships, thirty-two were based on private sponsors and philanthropy, while the remaining twenty-one were crowd-funded. He had broken into forty-two of these organizations, sticking mainly to the government and private sponsors. After all, if he had wanted to take money from private, well-meaning citizens, he could have just asked them for the money politely. Or, he could have bought an energy pistol and a welding rod, and gone full on vigilante thief. Right now, he was more comfortable being a tech savvy pirate.

01010111 01100101 00100111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 01100101 01100100

He had a schedule that he stuck to. Every day, he would hack into five or six organizations, never the same one within a week, and never two even loosely connected charities on the same day, or the next. He would then transfer a random amount of money (which was never less than two thousand dollars, but never more than five thousand) from each charity, into a private bank account. After that, he transferred the money from that account to another and then, once a week, he closed the original account, opening another at a different bank the next day. It was a crime, and he was very aware of that. However, so was deleting any record of an individual’s existence, and no one had ever been held accountable for that.

If he had possessed an identity, he would have qualified for a portion of what the charities were offering. He would not have received even a fraction of what he was taking, but that was beside the point. He was the real victim here. He was doing this to survive.

The hydrator buzzed, and he spun away from his computer to examine his dinner. Pulling a fraction of the newly baked entree from the edge, he popped it into his mouth and chewed, satisfied with the taste of cheddar, tomatoes, peppers, and nacho that filled it. He was not exactly having the roughest life right now, but that would all change if the government ever caught up with one or more of his false identities. Of course, they would not find him. The shattered and broken corpse of an internet had become a feeding ground for cybernetic vultures. The government had bigger threats to worry about than some identity drained hacker. Besides, if they ever found him, they would have to answer to him for losing his identity in the first place. How would they even arrest him?

He finished up his work, which he had crafted into an art and could be done completely within an hour’s time, while he ate his dinner and drank his caffeinated soda. Once he had finished his work, he logged out of the seventh false identity that he had created, and into the only real one that he still possessed. At the moment that the internet exploded, deleting his identity, he had been logged into his online gaming group. That profile, while it no longer contained any of his personal information, was still active, and it was the only identity that was truly his.

He wondered if anyone would ever believe that there were parents who would name their child

Basil Commando.

VII

“Monkey,” Calico’s song like voice crept into my ears. “Monkey, come lay with me.”

I turn around, finding that I am lost in a sea of clouds. Each step that I take is a world away from the universe which I want to be in. Calico’s face is the sun, but I cannot look at it directly. Her smile is the rays of sunlight that shine down on me, bringing me joy, warmth, and melanoma.

“Monkey,” Calico’s voice fills the air once more, raining broken hearts down on me “Monkey, come dance with me.”

I look before me, and see the green canvas of a forest’s leaves. I smell the odors of sweat and jasmine, typical of a forest setting. Calico’s face is a squirrel, jumping from tree to tree, beckoning me to follow her. I do; I have to. I would chase her forever, I have chased her forever, I have never chased her before, but I mean to catch her, and once I do, I will chase her all over again. I jump, and the squirrel skitters. I run, and the squirrel flies. I scream, and the squirrel laughs at me. Calico laughs at me through the squirrel’s face. I hear Calico’s laugh, filled with love and ridicule, all around me.

“Monkey,” Calico’s shrill sounding cackle fills me with lust and terror. “Monkey, come die with me.”

Before, behind, port, and starboard, I am awash in a sea of blood. The distinct rusted smell of peppermint fills my nose, and I take hold of the paddles. I row, but my boat is stuck. I cannot move, but the river of blood carries my boat where it wants me to go. Looking up, I see the Calico, it is full tonight, dripping blackness from her mouth, oozing pleasure from her eyes, pouring blood from her nostrils. Calico is weeping, she is weeping because I will not chase her. I try to chase her, but I cannot steer the boat. Calico is sobbing, she is sobbing because I have lost her. I have tried to follow her, but nothing I can do brings me any closer. Calico is laughing, she is laughing because I will never be with her again.

The Calico transforms into stone, the stone into blood, the blood into a whirlpool. As the boat is pulled closer, toward the oncoming doom, waiting within the swirling ecstasy of madness, I feel myself letting go, abandoning hope, craving release.

“Monkey,” Calico’s whisper snakes into my ears. “Monkey, let me go.”

I let go. My boat is pushed toward the whirlpool, pulled toward the blood. I let go. My mind is pushed toward abandon, pulled toward reckless. I let go. My heart is pushed toward broken, pulled toward restored. I let go. My death is pushed toward--

Rafferty awoke with a gasp. It took him a moment to remember where he was and, as his breathing slowly returned to normal, he tried to recall the situations. The woman sleeping next to him, her legs wrapped around him, her head laying on his chest, was not Calico. The smell of jasmine was from this woman’s hair; Calico had never smelled like jasmine.

Calico had also only called him monkey once or twice, maybe. It was far from a pet name that she had chosen for him.

This new girl, the one breathing peacefully with her breasts heaving against his body, had referred to him as a monkey earlier. That must be where the association had come from.

Carefully, Rafferty tried to disengage from Nuala’s body. With a sleeping sigh of not-quite-awake irritation, Nuala pulled away from him, just enough to allow his escape. Rafferty stepped out of the bed, and walked to the bathroom. He splashed cold water on his face, and rubbed his eyes, trying to rid his mind of the graphic imagery.

It was natural for him to be having nightmares about his dead wife. There was no need to over analyze the dream or the imagery. Rafferty sat down on the toilet for a moment and breathed. There was nothing to worry about.

From where he sat, he caught a glimpse of himself in the glass. His hair was disheveled, his eyes were clouded, his face was unshaven. His bare torso was riddled with scars and there was no point in pretending that there would not be more joining the collection soon. As he sullenly criticized himself, his body and mind relaxed.

As he used the toilet, he remembered who he was.

As he washed his hands, he recommitted to his crusade.

As he walked back to the bed, he missed Calico.

As he lay down, he wished that he had died instead of her.

As Nuala wrapped herself around him once again, he tried to remember why he needed to stay alive.

The holy and inspired words of the great Saint Isidore

“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”

Revelation 6: 7-8

Several years ago, the world suffered a catastrophe. Simultaneous nuclear strikes to heavily influential areas has thrown the world into chaos, as computer networks crashed, GPS systems ceased to operate correctly, the global economy fell into disrepair, and countless lives were lost, with more added to that the number on a daily basis, thanks to the radioactive fallout, which continues to spread. The perpetrator of these attacks has yet to be brought to justice, since many claim that the tracking satellites were damaged or hacked, destroying all evidence of the original launch. The responsible party has yet to come forward to take credit, and relationships between global nations has rapidly been deteriorating.

All of this is common knowledge by now, and stating these facts is an exercise in redundancy. I, Saint Isidore, only wish to reiterate them here to better illustrate my point.

In the world that was present before the nuclear strike, people had lost that ambition. People were content to live only for themselves, allowing droids and automatons to improve the world for them.

The entire world had grown similar to the Biblical city of Nineveh. In the ancient texts, a story is told of this city: a citt that had grown so corrupt, hedonistic, and morally void that On High sent one of their own, the prophet Jonah, to warn them that their actions would result in them, being stricken from the Earth. According to the tale, Nineveh took On High’s warning to heart, and they turned from their evil ways. Because of their repentance, On High spared them from the nuclear strike that was likely planned for the city.

I am not suggesting that, because we have not found the culprit, the nuclear strikes were the works of On High. That would be ridiculous, since On High does not require our technology to destroy us. I am calling for mankind to repent, to cast off the evils of technology, and embrace the life that we have begun anew, such as those in the flock have chosen. While we don’t know who detonated the bombs, we do know that they were man-made bombs. These bombs, created and detonated, through the evils of technology. On High’s work would have been much more pure and effective, had it been their doing alone. On High’s hands would never be dirtied through the use of flawed technology.

I pledge, to any who will hear, to aid in humanity’s revival, through any action possible. To those who seek guidance, they need only come to me, and my flock will show them the way to freedom. To any who seek rest, come to me, and my flock will provide comfort. To any who wish to help in the crusade of righteousness, come to me, and my flock will welcome you into it’s numbers.

To any who resist humanity’s revival, I will seek you out, and you will be destroyed. Nothing and no one can be allowed to stand in the way of humanity’s holy recovery.

Use the sacking of New Helendale as an example of what a faithful, but misled, disciple should do. While the actions were made in haste and without direction, my flock applauds the charges for their dedication to ridding the world of danger, even before that danger had shown itself fully. The flock of St. Isidore had nothing to do with that attack, and I cannot fully endorse the methods used by those that participated in it. I can, however, endorse their hearts.

Come to the flock, and let us embrace you within our numbers. You will receive a hero’s welcome and a saint’s cleansing.

Blessed be the holy names of On High. Your way is clear and laid before us. We will sing your praise.

-Saint Isidore

VIII

The sun rose in the east the next morning, just as it had every day. Red streaks and kaleidoscope spirals, reflecting the sun’s radiance, wrote their prophecies in the early sky, foretelling the death of the horizon. The sounds of whispering wind howled loudly as they whipped about the barren landscape, drowning out the muffled roar of an electronic motor. Invisible in the vast emptiness, a dune buggy was driving to the outskirts of the carnage which had once contained New Helensdale. Insignificant in the canvas of void, the buggy parked on the crest of the wasteland. Pointlessly alive in a kingdom of death, the man stepped out.

Rafferty looked at the wreckage for the second time in as many days. Somehow, with the knowledge that this was not the work of St. Isidore, it felt like twice the failure that it had when he realized that he had been too late to save the city. When it had been St Isidore committing the crimes against humanity, at least there was a sense of vindication and righteous anger. Now, there was nothing. Now, it was only people killing people. People had always killed people, even before a massive nuclear attack had rendered the world impotent. When it was a specific individual doing the killing, it was easier to focus emotional strife at the target. Hating people in general for doing what they had always done, since the beginning of time, seemed redundant.

The update to St. Isidore’s manifesto had come across the wire early in the morning. The edits had been subtle and minor, just as they always were, since St. Isidore wanted his gospel of violence to remain true to form. Still, one of the modifications had been a dismissal of the incident in New Helensdale. St. Isidore would not have done that, if he had been involved with the attack at all. He had always written with pride about his horrific crusades and acquisitions. If the sacking of New Helensdale had held closer to his criteria, he likely would have stolen credit for the attack, and nobody would have known the difference.

Rafferty wished that he had. At least, that way, he would have a place to focus his rage.

His cigar had begun to smoke unevenly. He was not willing to sacrifice the product that he had left, even though he had several dozen of the same brand, safely in a humidor, stored at The Console. The world was over; it would be a long time until there were new cigars. Logically, the tobacco farmers would be employed faster than most industries, but even that was several years to a decade in the future. Humans and their substances… addicts would always get their fix.

Taking out his cutter, Rafferty chopped off the uneven end, relighting the remaining body more evenly. He didn’t bother to grind out the bud that he had chopped off; there was no reason to do that, since there was nothing left on the ground to ignite. Pushing the sleeve of his duster back, he lifted his Oracle to his mouth, and signaled to Nuala.

“O’Dell to Macintosh,” he grumbled without taking his cigar out of his mouth. “Come in, Macintosh.”

“I’m here, Raff,” Nuala’s digitized voice, sounding as sympathetic as a digital voice could. “How are you doing?”

“I’m wondering about the reasoning behind this reconnaissance mission,” Rafferty sighed. “We already know that this was a waste of time. St. Isidore denied any affiliation with this attack; there’s no purpose for me to be here.”

“The purpose would be resources,” Nuala patiently reminded him. “Before the Internet crash, New Helendale was a fairly upscale community, and they were well on their way to reestablishing themselves as a social hub once again. There’s a good chance that you’re going to find some cool loot around the area. Remember, there is going to come a time when food and things are going to become the new currency. Your cigars might become the new gold bar, so you’re probably going to need a few spares.”

Rafferty sighed, rolling his cigar between his middle and index finger before placing it back into his mouth. Nuala disliked that he smoked, and she took every chance that she was given to tease him about it. If he had been in a better mood, he might have found it endearing, even reminiscent of the way that Calico used to chide him. Right now, he was not in the mood to be teased.

“I know that you didn’t send me here for cigars,” Rafferty grumbled at her through the Oracle, as he began walking toward the wreckage of the city. “What are you looking for?”

“I’m looking for evidence of the actual perpetrators,” Nuala informed him. “I know that you’re not interested in the attack any longer, now that we know it wasn’t committed by St. Isidore, but whomever was actually responsible still needs to be brought to justice. Can you put your vendetta aside long enough to check this out for me?”

Rafferty’s aggravation was not sated by Nuala’s peaceful voice and her attempts to pacify him. He kept the Oracle link connected as he wandered into the decay of New Helensdale, letting her know what exactly he was seeing. There was destruction, quite a bit of it. New Helensdale had been approximately two and a half miles in length and three in width. Canvasing the area would not take long, but with every step that Rafferty took, he felt the depression sinking further into his brain, and the unrelenting rage rising faster in his throat.

There was a gun store in which he was able to collect some ammo.

There was a boutique in which he was able to find some clothing that Nuala liked.

There was a market in which Rafferty was able to collect some food.

There was a bar in which he could hear voices.

When he heard the cadence with which the voices spoke, his mind began to freeze up in fear.

“Shit,” he swore out of the side of his mouth.

“Raff, what did you find?” the voice of Nuala coming from his wrist startled him, and he jumped away from the bar as quickly and as quietly as he could.

“I think I’ve found our perpetrators,” Rafferty muttered in a hushed tone when he had removed himself to a safe enough distance. “There’s a group of Echoes here, getting drunk on the heavily discounted alcohol in the town’s bar.”

“Get out of there!” the panic in Nuala’s voice was easy to translate, even through digital form. “Echoes are not--”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Rafferty interrupted her. “It looks like Echoes were to blame for the city’s destruction, and they don’t really need a reason to spread chaos. Their own mentality lends itself to--”

Rafferty paused to consider what was actually happening. These Echoes seemed to have designed the attack to appear as though it had been carried out by St. Isidore, but that did not make sense. Echoes would never attempt to shroud their actions behind the guise of another, they were proud of their destruction. Giving credit to another, even if done so sloppily, was not consistent with what Rafferty understood an Echo to be.

Something strange was afoot. St. Isidore would never have employed Echoes in his choir, but perhaps these Echoes did not know that. This situation warrented further investigation.

“You’re going to try to kick their asses, aren’t you?” Nuala cut him off.

A smile crept onto Rafferty’s lips. “I just want to have a civilized conversation with them,” he chuckled, his free hand dancing along the hilt of Ellison, strapped comfortably to his hip.

“A civilized conversation,” Nuala sarcastically grumbled “with a gang of Echoes. I’m sure that will go over wonderfully. Raff, you are going to get yourself killed!”

“I just want to ask them some questions,” Rafferty informed her, his malicious smile widening on his face. “Don’t worry, I’m sure that we’ll be able to reach a peaceful resolution.”

“They’re fucking Echoes!!” Nuala screamed, the digital translation slurring her words into so much noise. “Rafferty… I need you to come home. I don’t know what I would do without you; please don’t leave me alone here.”

The smile faded from Rafferty’s face as he considered Nuala. It felt as though it had been an eternity since he had been concerned with another person’s feelings, aside from his own rage and hatred. She was begging him to come back to her, and he was beginning to have some guilt about what he was about to do. Not enough guilt to overpower the rage which he felt, surging through his veins, begging him for release, but enough to make him pause and consider what he was about to do.

“I have to do this,” he told Nuala, not even attempting to hide his intentions any longer. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back to you before you know it. They’re just a bunch of Echoes, I can’t imagine them being too difficult to deal with.”

“Rafferty...” Nuala’s voice quivered with emotion that she was struggling to keep at bay.

“I’ll come back to you,” Rafferty assured her, his hand gripping Ellison’s holster as he prepared to pull her from his hip. “Going radio silent now.”

“Shine on, crazy diamond,” Nuala begged.

“Wish you were here,” Rafferty assured.

The Oracle’s screen went blank, and Ellison breathed fresh air as Rafferty pulled her from the holster. He tried to control his slightly psychotic smile. Thinking that he was not looking forward to the fight would be lying to himself. The emotional baggage that was weighing him down needed an outlet. The Echoes in the bar had been responsible for all the destruction that he saw around him and, given the evidence, they had done so as a tribute to St. Isidore.

He would not be the first to pull the trigger. He would not initiate the fight. These were Echoes, though. There would be violence.

As he walked toward the bar where the Echoes were holed up, Rafferty realized that, for the first time since he had lost Calico, he was having conflicting feelings about the potential threat to his life.

When they had first begun working together, Nuala and Rafferty had bonded over a shared love for the OldEarth rock band, Pink Floyd. Before he had met her, Rafferty did not know of anyone who knew of the band in any more than a passing fascination, let alone shared his passion for them. The two had bonded, discussing the seemingly-prophetic qualities of Animals (which, of course, led to an in-depth conversation about George Orwell’s Animal Farm), the sprawling legacy of The Wall, and the stylistic changes, resulting from Syd Barrett’s departure. When Rafferty first started going out on field missions, Nuala had insisted that the two of them have a secret language, which Rafferty had not objected to. Most of the terms and phrases that she created had since fallen into disuse, but “shine on, crazy diamond” and “wish you were here” remained in steady rotation. Nuala had insisted that “shine on...” was her insisting that he not die, and his reply of “wish you were...” was his promise to come back to her. Rafferty had felt as though he was patronizing her at first but, now, they had used the exchange so many times that it was habit. He had to admit that, while at first it had made him feel a bit like a child, he now felt comfort in the exchange. The echo of those words in his mind was the only thing that brought him comfort at this moment, as he advanced on the bar, with the sounds of loud laughter and garish language drifting through shambles of what had once been the front door.

It had been known for well over a century that nuclear radiation would have a negative effect on the human brain. That was never fully realized until the strikes. Before, any nuclear attack or “accident” had been localized to a specific region, and steps had been taken to contain and minimize the damage. This attack had redefined what a nuclear strike was. Not only had no one been expecting it, especially since the world had been experiencing a time of peace, relatively speaking, but the precise locations for each of the strikes had been chosen to effect as many people as possible. The radiation from the bombs had spread and, no matter what methods they attempted to use for containment, it continued to do so. That was when the first-hand evidence of nuclear radiation on the human brain was witnessed.

The radioactive effects on the body had been witnessed before, with the loss of hair, seizures, the reduction of free radicals in the cells, reproductive anomalies, and many other things. This was different. While it effected each individual differently, the radiation had a distinct effect on the brains of specific individuals. It was difficult to say exactly what had happened, since none of the victims were willing to submit to medical testing, but one of the few published autopsies had revealed that radiation had irritated areas of the brain, specifically the areas in the frontal lobe which registered primal rage. This was witnessed in acts of extreme violence, self-mutilation, and unchecked aggression toward any who did not share their specific world view. One journalist, Edgar Williams of The American Whisper, had written a sympathetic article about their condition. In it, while he agreed that these individuals were extremely dangerous, he attempted to victimize them by calling them “echoes of the humanity which they had once possessed”. While the sympathy had never caught on, since it was difficult to feel badly for someone who was actively trying to tear off your arm so they could beat your friend to death with it, the classification stuck: the victims of this disorder became known as Echoes.

It was impossible to talk, rationally, with Echoes. Their minds were fixed and, if you disagreed with them, you were the one who was wrong, which was a judgment that they were willing to defend violently. Rafferty knew that the moment that he had heard their voices, and he knew that the most logical thing for him to do was to run. Nuala knew that as well, which was why she had panicked when she heard that they were in the area and why she had been unconvinced when Rafferty had asserted that he was going to attempt a conversation with them. The conversation that they would be having would undoubtedly be spoken with muzzle flashes and open wounds. Rafferty was trying not to enjoy that realization, since taking too much pleasure in the ensured violence which was undoubtedly about to ensue would make him a psychotic. Still, with the amount of repressed emotion that he was feeling at this moment, the opportunity to relieve it was irresistible.

Pulling Ellison from his hip, Rafferty aimed it at what had once been the door to the bar. The sounds of shouting, laughter, and shattering glass guaranteed an audience. Rafferty had been enjoying Ellison’s company for longer than he had remembered, and he had both repaired and modified her more times than he could count. While she was still, at her heart, a Winchester 2166 model Yellowboy, Rafferty had lengthened the muzzle, increased the strength and width of burst, added a scope, and increased the charging capacity. Before the 2166 model, Winchester had been the last firearms manufacturer to transfer completely from gunpowder to compressed laser. Rafferty’s Yellowboy was the first model released with the laser component available at a lethal capacity. Ellison had aged well, especially considering that he had used her far more than she was ever intended to be used. Rafferty did not feel fully dressed, unless Ellison was either at his hip or in his hand.

Dropping the remains of the cigar, which he had never been able to even out correctly, to the ground, he clicked off Ellison’s safety gauge. Pushing his fedora further up on his forehead, he increased the intensity and the width of burst to nearly the highest level. This was to announce his presence, but Rafferty wanted to make sure that it was unquestionable. Lowering the muzzle, Rafferty set his sights on the door, and he pulled the trigger.

There wasn’t much door left to shatter, but what was there exploded inward upon impact with the laser shot, along with fractured parts of the door frame. Rafferty reset the gun to a more reasonable combat level and lowered his fedora to shield his eyes while he listened to the tone of conversation inside the bar change from one of revelry to apprehension and suspicion. He smiled to himself as he heard the group select someone to go and investigate what had happened. It wasn’t the leader. Rafferty leveled Ellison at the area where the door had been and, a few seconds later, a large, shirtless, muscular man, riddled with tattoos and hair everywhere but his head, stepped into the doorway.

Rafferty didn’t think. He didn’t notice the gunpowder weapon or the bandolier across his chest until after he had fired the gun. The Echo barely had time for a shocked expression before the laser tore through the left side of his torso, just below his ribcage. Too late, Rafferty realized that he had adjusted the intensity of the gun, but not the width of the burst. What should have been a pinpoint strike ended up ripping the Echo’s entire side open, spilling blood and viscera onto the floor of the bar with reckless abandon. The Echo fell to the ground, screaming and writhing in pain, fighting against the inevitable all-consuming darkness, as his blood continued to flow from his body, painting the floor in a new shade.

“What kind of leader sends an underling to assess a threat?” Rafferty screamed into the bar, taunting whoever could hear him. “If you had balls, you’d come out and face me yourself!”

That was a stupid thing to say, and Rafferty knew it, especially considering the state that he was in right now. The impact of the first shot from Ellison would have depleted a full quarter of her power, if not more, and the excessive second shot would have expelled more than he was comfortable with. While he had a spare power reserve on his belt, he doubted that he would have the opportunity to alternate the battery, mid-gunfight. Adrenaline had gotten the better of him; he was not in a position to taunt. It would have been much more logical to run and hide. He would not have made it far, but it would have been the reasonable move.

Rafferty pushed all of his insecurities to the back of his mind as the massive form filled the doorway. He stood like a mountain, rising from the ground to impossible heights, with large, muscular arms, calves that tested the limits of the torn off pants which he wore, and a chest that barely fit through the widened door frame. His head was shaven, save for a long streak, starting from his brow, running the entire length of his skull, and continuing down his back in a crude looking rat-tail. Rafferty only had a moment to take in the bizarre Picasso image in front of him, but the thought of burnt, scrambled egg, drenched in tomato sauce would not leave his mind. The creature had one good eye, blazing an unnatural shade of bloodshot red. A crude patch covered the other and, from beneath the patch, a stream of sickeningly yellow pus oozed slowly down his face. Beneath the eye, a bulbous nose erupted, one nostril flaring with aggression, the other shredded beyond repair. Covering half of his face was a chaotic spiderweb of tattoos, perhaps to take attention away from the mutilations, perhaps to draw more attention to them. Rafferty had never bothered to examine the methodology behind an Echo’s madness.

The Echo looked at Rafferty with what appeared to be a sneer, but actually resulted from half of his upper lip being gone. He nodded to his fallen companion, now laying silent on the floor, gravity finishing the bodily drainage which a beating heart could no longer help it with. “You shot Joe Phlegm,” he growled in a shockingly coherent voice. “I didn’t like him all that much, so I won’t hold that against you.”

Rafferty nodded in acknowledgment. “Is every member of your group as pretty as you?” he heard himself say, as his brain told him to stop antagonizing the giant.

“I’m the sexiest,” the beast said, with a lavish toss of his head. “That’s why I’m the leader. My boys call me Shit-Face Gumbo. Those who aren’t my boys don’t call me much at all, since they’re too busy choking on their own femurs.”

Rafferty considered the situation. From what he had heard and experienced with Echoes in the past, they rarely engaged in conversation. This one, Shit-Face Gumbo (an apt name if ever there was one), seemed to be lulling him into a false sense of security. From the amount of voices that he had heard coming from the inside, there had been no less than five individuals originally. With the fall of Joe Phlegm, that left at least three individuals unaccounted for. Without moving his head, Rafferty quickly assessed the field of play. Echoes were not the most subtle of beasts and, muted as it was, Rafferty heard noise coming from the unseen area behind the bar.

“I’ve come to investigate what happened here,” Rafferty announced to Shit-Face. “There were rumors that this was the work of St. Isidore, and I have come to confirm that. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“I would indeed, my dear boy,” Shit-Face replied in a mockingly dour tone. “You may consider your investigation complete. I am St. Isidore.”

The large creature bowed lavishly as rage flooded through Rafferty’s mind. He knew that the Echo was lying, but the mere insinuation that he was standing with the pariah he had sought for so long was enough to push him closer to the edge of reason. A slight movement out of the corner of his left eye caught his attention suddenly, and he realized that the Echoes had been surrounding him. He needed to think of a solution quickly.

Taking a deep breath, Rafferty swallowed his anger. “You’re not St. Isidore,” he declared, his mind already calculating the risks in contradicting an Echo. “There are significant elements of this attack that contradict his pattern.”

“I may as well be St. Isidore,” Shit-Face replied, and Rafferty saw his cool demeanor beginning to slip. “Me and my boys, we’re doing--”

Rafferty did not wait for the sentence to finish before diving for the ground, while shifting his torso and firing toward the motion on his left. The shot was not as precise as he would have preferred, but the muffled yelp and the off-target shot assured him that he had connected. He had likely not been a lethal shot, but it had been enough to save him for now. Jumping to his feet, he fired again, this time to the right where there was not as much noticeable movement. If the shot connected with anything, he was unaware of it.

“You bag of piss!” Shit-Face screamed at him from the bar. “Those are my boys you’re killing!”

A grotesque figure with acid burns down the side of his face jumped at Rafferty from the right, where he had been situated behind a pile of wreckage. With a sawed-off shotgun in his hands, the Echo fired at Rafferty. The bullet only grazed his shoulder, but the pain was excruciating. Gritting his teeth, focusing his attention on the feeling of blood running down his arm, rather than the burning fire radiating out from the fresh tear in his appendage, Rafferty fired Ellison at the armed Echo’s chest. The impact did not tear through him as it had Joe Phlegm, but it did take him off of his feet, the shotgun flew out of his hands, landing on the ground a few feet from where he lay. Rafferty dove for the place where the gun had fallen, scooping it up, and firing the loaded shot into the torso of the original holder as he was struggling to get up from the ground. This time, when he fell, he didn’t attempt to stand again. Rafferty dropped the shotgun after the shot had been expelled. There was no point to holding on to it.

“Stop shooting my boys, you fucking monster,” Shit-Face swore loudly, and Rafferty heard him lumbering out of the bar. “You’re not supposed to fight back; you’re supposed to die!”

No matter how good it had felt, taking one of these monsters down, Rafferty had to remind himself that odds were still not in his favor. There were at least three monsters left, including Shit-Face Gumbo, and Ellison did not have enough charge to take care of all of them. He would need to continue improvisation, as he had with the use of the shotgun, if he wanted to avoid just taking Shit-Face’s advice. The problem was that he would need to create instances where improvisation would be possible. Whirling around to face Shit-Face, he saw the monstrosity advancing on him menacingly, while his two cohorts advanced, slightly behind him, one of each side.

Rafferty smiled to himself as a plan began to birth in his mind. It was risky and very uncomfortable, but it might work. Lifting Ellison, he readjusted the settings to a higher burst again. At that intensity, he had two, maybe three shots, before the gun was drained, so each one was vitally important. Looking at the trio of advancing Echoes, Rafferty began to back up, aiming Ellison at one of the followers.

He pulled the trigger, just as the other follower did the same. Ellison’s bolt tore through the air, connecting with the Echo and opening up his chest, just as the bullet sank into Ellison’s calve. He was almost ashamed to hear himself screaming as he fell to his knees, the pain causing the world to melt into a kaleidoscope of mismatched colors. His brain began to throb and pulse, feeling like a dance club’s amplifier, and he realized that getting to his feet again would be complicated.

There was blood draining from the original shot in his arm and, now, from the second shot in the opposite calve. He was already beginning to feel the effects of the blood loss, evidenced by the lack of focus and clear thought. His plan would need to be accelerated, if he wanted to get out of this alive. Gritting his teeth, Rafferty pushed the dancing lights and exploding sirens from his mind, used all of his strength to raise Ellison at chest level, and aimed at where the advancing Echoes ought to have been.

He never had the chance to pull the trigger. A hand closed around his throat, lifting him from the ground savagely, his limbs dangling like a ragdoll’s appendages. Ellison slipped from his fingers, and Rafferty heard it landing on the ground.

“You insubordinate little prick,” Shit-Face Gumbo’s rank, alcohol-soaked, breath hit him in the face, combined with spittle and small food bits from between his teeth. “This is not your world any longer! The world belongs to me and mine! St. Isidore understands that, people with brains understand that, why don’t you? The world has changed, you insignificant insect! Why don’t you just accept that and die?”

Shit-Face Gumbo’s rhetoric gave Rafferty a chance to do what he’s been planning to do. Reaching across to his Oracle, Rafferty set it to self-destruct. The explosion would likely not kill Shit-Face, but at the proximity that the two of them shared at this moment, it should do significant damage to them both. Loosening the device as quickly as he could, Rafferty slid the Oracle from his wrist, clipping it instead to the waistline of Shit-Face’s pants.

“What the hell are you doing?” Shit-Face growled, noticing the device. He dropped Rafferty to the ground once more to further investigate the situation. The moment that his body hit the ground, Rafferty rolled away from the monster as quickly as he could. Each roll sent blinding streaks of static pain through his body , and he grimaced darkly, biting his bottom lip savagely, holding on to consciousness. This was his last move; if this failed, he was fucked. Even if it succeeded, there was still one Echo left to deal with. That likely meant that he was fucked either way, but at least he would go down fighting.

Rolling to his back, his vision splattered with blood spots and flecks of black, Rafferty could see the outlines of both Echoes, standing in close proximity to each other, examining the Oracle. Oracles had never been meant to be used as offensive weapons, and it was very clearly counting down to self-destruct, so Rafferty could not understand why the two of them were not throwing it away. He could hear Shit-Face talking to the other loudly, but he couldn’t decipher the words that he was saying. It wouldn’t matter in a few seconds anyway.

The Oracle exploded so aggressively that Rafferty had to close his eyes against the resulting wave of heat and he winced from the impacting sound. Before the bombs had dropped, Oracles had been very private, very secure, very expensive machines. They had been the top tools for many government agencies, since they were virtually impenetrable, and very sensitive information could be stored on them. That being the case, their rarely-utilized self-destruct setting was very completest, making sure that every element of the device was destroyed beyond any hope of recovery. Based on the effect that Rafferty witnessed after a few moments, upon opening his eyes once more, the manufacturer would not need to issue a refund for this model.

Of course, the first thought to dance through his head was that Nuala would be upset at him for wasting an Oracle.

Because they had been standing so close to each other, the destruction effected them both. The unnamed Echo, the one who had shot Rafferty in the calve, got the worst of the explosion. He had been hunched over the device, supposedly examining it, and the process had splayed his face with the same heat which had almost been too intense for Rafferty, where he sat four yards away. The beast had undoubtedly opened his mouth to scream in pain, resulting in the heat permeating his mouth and scorching his throat. By the time Rafferty had a chance to see him, he was writhing on the ground, silent, but obviously in agonizing pain.

Summoning all of his strength, Rafferty stood to his feet again. The world went blurry in front of his eyes again as he stood, but there was nothing that he could do about that right now. He limped to where the silent Echo was laying on the ground, kicking him weakly. The Echo barely winced, just rolled onto his back. Rafferty saw the macabre remains of his face: the blackened eye sockets, the fried skin, the dried out remains of what had once been his mouth. The Echo wheezed, and Rafferty wondered if he could still see anything through the charcoal of his eyeballs. Had the fire not dried out the tear ducts, he imagined this would have been his one chance to see an Echo cry.

The creature still held a gun in his hand. He began to raise it, as if preparing to fire but, even in his weakened state, Rafferty had no trouble subduing the arm with his foot, placed on the elbow. The arm fell back to the ground, and Rafferty took the gun from his hand with little difficulty.

As he chambered a round, he imagined that he saw relief in the Echo’s dead eyes.

As he clicked the hammer back, he imagined a thank you coming from the dead lips.

As he fired a bullet into the creature’s skull, he hated St. Isidore for causing this to happen.

Breathing deeply, ignoring the pain which he felt in every part of his body, Rafferty turned away from the stilled corpse, walking to the place where he had dropped Ellison. As he picked her back off of the ground, he felt himself smile, warmth returning to his body, as if a small lost part of him had found it’s way home again. The moment was fleeting, though; Shit-Face Gumbo’s pained voice, from where he lay on the ground a few feet away, interrupted the treasured reunion.

“Thought I could stop it,” Shit-Face gasped as Rafferty examined Ellison, making sure that she was undamaged. “Always wanted an Oracle; thought I could stop the self-destruct.”

“Oracles don’t work that way,” Rafferty began to explain, wondering why he was even bothering to do so. “Usually, when one is destroying an Oracle, they’re doing it by remote, and the Oracle is locked in an airtight chamber. That way, the only thing that’s hurt is the Oracle.”

“This wasn’t an airtight chamber,” Shit-Face Gumbo sobbed.

“It sure wasn’t,” Rafferty confirmed.

Rafferty decided that there was no significant damage to Ellison, and he transferred his analytical sense to the Echo, laying on the ground. A tertiary glance made him shudder. The middle of his torso was nearly burned through and, while his legs below the knees seemed to be relatively undamaged, any attempt at movement would cause the skin to tear like burnt parchment. One of his arms now held a hand with four fingers, all of which were useless, while the other held a mangled stump.

“Why couldn’t you have just died, like you were supposed to?” Shit-Face croaked through his damaged throat. “This isn’t your world! St. Isidore knows that, why don’t you?”

Rafferty checked the setting on Ellison: there was enough power left for one good shot. “St. Isidore wants to create a world of his own design,” he asserted. “As far as I know, you were not a part of that design.”

“I could have been, though,” Shit-Face sighed, his voice growing weaker with the strain. “I did this… this was a tribute. He was proud, he would have accepted me. This tribute was to the new--”

The voice fell silent as Rafferty watched the strained skin stop rising and falling with each breath. Leveling Ellison on Shit-Face’s head, he pulled the trigger, and the compressed energy tore through the damaged scalp like a knife cutting through paper. In his mind, Rafferty declared the death a tribute to humanity.

Once Shit-Face Gumbo was finished, all the pain and weakness that he had been ignoring surged through his body like a flood of acid. Bent over, he stumbled back to where he had parked the rover. Collapsing into the seat, he programmed The Console’s location into the GPS system, set the vehicle to autodrive. He hated autodrive but, in this instance, it was necessary. He needed to focus all of his attention on not dying.

Nuala sat in The Console, trying not to panic. There was no reason to do so, after all, since Rafferty could handle himself in almost any type of fight; he was the gunslinger, and he could do anything that he put his mind to. Echoes were not that big of a threat, they were just little monsters that he would easily step on. There was no reason to worry about him at all.

Of course, she would continue to worry, because that was what she did. She did not know what she would do without Rafferty, and that thought was both stimulating and disheartening. Before the bombs had dropped, she had always thought of herself as a fairly independent woman, not really intentionally, just kind of by necessity. When one made a vocation out of computer hacking, a certain level of isolation was needed, especially if one got really good at it. Nuala was (and technically continued to be) one of the best.

It had not taken long after the initial bombings for the Internet to recover itself, at least to a functional level. It was always there, after all, like an entity thriving on mankind’s thoughts and the establishment of information. Nuala had been deciphering codes and crashing through Phoenixdown protective hardware in no time. Phoenixdown walls were designed to be impenetrable, defying any attempt to bring them down, and lashing back at the perpetrator in unique ways, such as implanted viruses, system overloads, or simply a mocking image that told the hacker they had failed which refused to go away. That, of course, made Phoenixdown protected systems the most fun for Nuala to crash. After the bombs, the quality of internet security lapsed a bit, so that now it was barely a challenge to hack now. Nuala missed the game.

There were very few hackers who remained in the game now, especially compared to the colony that had been in establishment before the crash. When there was nothing significant to do, except worry about Rafferty, Nuala liked to log into her accounts, to see if she could recognize anyone. A few of her old hacking friends had popped up here and there. Frankinstine3728, an individual who had once professed their undying cyberlove with her (they had no idea who she was, or even if she were actually a woman, and Nuala didn’t care enough about them to authenticate their identity), had actually launched a celebratory site, championing her return. Nuala had been flattered, of course, but she eventually had to hack into the site and destroy it. People were starting to look for her. Frankinstine had not meant for that to happen, obviously, but Nuala was much more comfortable living in obscurity. The site had crashed a few hours later, and dear, sweet Frank had never tried to relaunch it.

Surfing the internet now was like going to an institute reunion: full of memories that are only half real, filled with the ghosts of people that you only half knew. Nuala could not help but feel as though the internet that she had known was dead, and she was dancing with animated bones, held together with string and twine. She had done what she could to reinforce some of the structure, which went against everything that she had once represented, but it was truly a lost cause. Now, when she surfed, she felt as if she were an explorer to an unknown planet, searching for signs of intelligent life.

As she was trying to coast across the web, she was shocked by an alert, stating that she had lost contact with Rafferty’s Oracle. Nuala immediately began to try to find the signal again, desperately searching for the individual signature associated with Rafferty’s device. Panic began to sink deeper into her psyche as she realized that, no matter what she tried, the device was offline. The only way for that to have happened was for the device to have been destroyed. Oracles were meant to always be online, and Nuala doubted that Rafferty could have found a way to turn it off without her assistance. He really was not one for technology. The only reasonable explanation was that the Oracle had been destroyed. Nuala had to stop thinking about things, especially considering that, just because the Oracle was dead, that did not mean that Rafferty was.

Something might have happened. Maybe Rafferty was hit with an EMP wave that shorted out the Oracle. He was fine, Nuala kept repeating to herself. He was her crazy diamond. He would come back, he had promised to.

Something was wrong with the internet.

Of course, that was like saying that there was something cold in the arctic now. The internet would likely never recover to the point that it was before the bombs had dropped. It was okay, really, since it was making a valiant effort. When she needed to get her mind off of things, Nuala would go to a random area of the internet and try to decipher what was wrong with it. Usually, she could find some poorly translated codes or some miscalculated algorithms which she could fix. It was rare that she discovered anything significant.

What was even more rare was her, recognizing a repeatable pattern, across a series of linked websites. That was something that she had just come across, relating to the charitable organizations which had been set up for victims of the bomb.

$3,372 from Solidarity, $2,463 from Nukareleaf, $4191 from Sisterhood of the Bomb… it was not an amount that would draw any attention, necessarily, since funds from charities would inevitably go missing occasionally. They were small, random, amounts too, amounts that would never draw any attention. Nuala herself might have missed it, if she had not been watching the pattern repeated on a daily basis, across the network of sites, specifically dedicated to the cause. Technically, it was an unwritten hacker law that one never goes after charities, not even crooked ones. A hacker is never supposed to steal from a charitable organization and, if this pattern could really be attributed to a singular individual, this person was stealing from over fifty, all dedicated to bomb relief.

Nuala was not exactly offended, although she probably ought to have been. She was more impressed by this hacker’s technique. She was also kind of jealous. This hacker was using finesse and panache, stylistic maneuvers that rivaled even the most skilled pirates. With the longer Nuala examined the transactions, the more impressed she was becoming. Before she knew it, she had spent an hour tracking the transactions, which stretched back for months. Perhaps she was attributing too much to this pirate; maybe some of the transactions actually were accidents. Maybe she was looking for a mystery where there was none. Maybe it was just the distraction that she needed to stop obsessively picturing Rafferty, dead and cold with the mutated Echoes staring down on him, droll hanging from their mouths, snot dripping out of their noses.

No, this device was too perfect. Someone had to be doing this intentionally. If she had a longer window of opportunity, she could examine and track all of the micro-transactions back to their original host. That is, of course, imagining that this was the action of a single party, rather than a collective. With the amount that had gone missing over the period of hacking, it was unlikely that this was the act of a single individual. Nobody would need that much money, if that person was acting alone.

Of course, nobody ever needed as much money as they wanted to have. That didn’t stop them from taking it.

The sound of the intercom buzzing brought her out of her obsessive canvasing just long enough to remind her of what dire straits the world was in. Jerking back to reality was almost painful, pulling herself out of her alternate world, remembering what was actually going on. The intercom buzzing caused her to pause and consider the situation. No other sound came from the door, only the brief buzz, as if something had randomly struck the button, or there had been a malfunction in the wiring. That was ridiculous, of course, since she had set up the wiring herself, and had been keeping it in good repair, but there were few other options. Nuala decided to ignore it for the moment, returning her attention to the computer.

The buzz came again a few moments later. This time, it was accompanied by a barely-audible rasp. As soon as Nuala heard the sound, she dove out of her seat and rushed to the door, panic flooding her mind and surging through her nervous system. She knew what was going on now. Jumping down the flight of stairs, two by two, she raced to the door, and pressed the button to raise it. It felt like an eternity for the door to lift from the ground and reveal what was waiting on the other side. She knew what was on the other side, but she wanted to deny it as long as possible.

When the door was about half opened, Rafferty flopped through, limp and pale. Nuala gasped when she saw him, rushing to pick him up off the floor.

“Raff,” she cried urgently “what happened?”

“Water,” he rasped dryly. “I need--”

He fell to silence, hardly conscious. Nuala quickly took the heavy duster from his shoulders, dropping it to the ground, along with Ellison and any other extraneous gear. He was still taller and bulkier than she was, but it would make the commute slightly easier. He no longer had the Oracle attached to his wrist, which explained why he had stopped communicating. His face was bruised, his clothing was caked with blood, and he reeked of sweat and viscera. Draping his arm over her shoulder, Nuala attempted to support Rafferty as they moved toward the staircase.

“Callie,” he groaned, barely coherent. “Callie, let me go”

“Don’t talk like that,” Nuala groaned desperately and as she struggled with the awkward process of maneuvering Rafferty toward and up the staircase with very little assistance. “Don’t leave me, crazy diamond. You can’t die, diamonds don’t die.”

“Wish you were here,” Rafferty moaned, the distinction of each word weakening steadily by syllable.

“I’m right here, baby, I’m here,” Nuala replied, as she finally lifted Rafferty to the top of the steps. She began to move toward the coach.

As their feet hit the top floor, all of Rafferty’s weight collapsed onto Nuala’s shoulders, and she tripped, falling to her knees. Laying there, she could feel Rafferty’s strained breathing, and she mustered all of her strength, crawling out from under him and pulling him the remaining feet to the couch. She then lifted his unconscious torso onto the couch, followed by his legs, and did her best to awkwardly roll him onto his back. Once she accomplished that, she stepped back to catch her breath. Subconsciously, she was glad that he was incoherent, since she was sweaty now, and she would have hated for him to see her like this.

His breath was shallow, but it was present. After retrieving the medical kit, Nuala knelt beside Rafferty, and began the process of cutting off his clothing. Bullet-proof vests were practically useless now, with the implementation of energy weaponry and, of course, Rafferty had not been wearing one. The vest likely would have eliminated at least some of the damage. Nuala cut off the disgusting, filthy, damp with blood and sweat, black t-shirt that Rafferty had been wearing, and she caught her breath with shock. Disregarding the wounds which had reopened and the deeply black shade which enveloped his neck and upper chest, there was a bullet hole in his shoulder, which oozed a dark, coagulated, combination of pus and blood.

Nuala turned away from Rafferty for a moment, allowing the contents of her stomach to stop churning. Fixing her mind, she returned her attention to Rafferty, and began the process of cleaning the wound, applying balm to the blackened areas. If the state of his pants were any evidence, Rafferty’s lower extremities were in a similar state of disrepair, if not worse. Nuala sighed, grit her teeth, and began to remove the bullet from his shoulder. Her cybernetic investigation into the enigmatic hacker slipped from her mind, remaining on the computer, incomplete, as she attempted to save the life of the only person on Earth that she cared for.

XII

Rafferty felt consciousness slowly returning, as the sensation in his limbs gradually returned. The first reality that he realized was pain: not a sharp, angry pain, but a dull, throbbing, ache, as if from overuse. It radiated over his entire body, beginning in his brain, and pouring down his neck, into his appendages, through his chest like a waterfall. Rafferty embraced the sensation as the memory of his incident slowly returned to his mind. By rights, he ought not to be feeling anything ever again.

He opened his eyes reluctantly, only to close them once more against the glaringlu intrusive light. It was likely not as bright as he was translating it as, but it had felt like an attack, upon initial stimulation.

“Rafferty?” an anxious voice called to him from miles away. “Raff, are you awake?”

“Nuala?” he replied, shocked that he had the ability to do so, and surprised at the rasping sound of his own voice. “Where are you?”

The sudden pressure as Nuala collapsed onto him in a desperate embrace alerted him to her presence. “I’m right here, baby,” she cried into his bare chest. She held him tightly, perhaps a bit too much so, and her body quaked with relieved sobbing. “I’m right here.”

Rafferty attempted to move his left arm, since his right was pinned to his side by Nuala’s body, stretched across him. Sharp pain reverberated through his shoulder, alerting him that this was probably not a good idea. Through some manipulation, Rafferty was able to maneuver his right arm away from his body, out from under Nuala, resting his hand on her shaking back.

The moments stretched into an eternity, as Nuala’s tears gradually stopped, and the two simply lay together. Somewhere along the way, Rafferty became conscious of the fact that, aside from a torn pair of boxers, shielding his loins, and the wrappings around the two bullet entree wounds, he was naked. That didn’t seem to be the point, though, since the thin fabric of Nuala’s tank top provided enough of a barrier between them to prevent arousal. At the moment, he told himself that he was too relieved to be alive for any other type of thought. Not even Nuala’s heaving breasts, pulsing against his bare chest with each gasping breath that she took, could take him out of that moment. He was alive, and he needed to take a moment and appreciate that. Besides, he was in too much pain after the fight to even think about passion.

Nuala slid off of him after too long a time, kissing his chest gently as she did so. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she gasped, choking back the tears before they could begin again. “I was so worried. When your Oracle stopped transmitting, I---, and then, you showed up, falling through the door, and---, Rafferty, you’ve been unconscious for four hours. Don’t ever do that to me again!”

Wrangling up the will to open his eyes slowly, Rafferty look at Nuala. When he first saw her, she looked like an angel, bathed in light, but as his eyes adjusted, he saw that it was only the impression that the lamp to her back was providing. He smiled at her lovingly, as he saw the pain in her mascara-stained eyes and tossled hair. Neither the eye shadow running down her cheeks, nor the smudged lipstick on both her teeth and (somehow) her nose could diminish the authenticity of the love that he felt both from and for her at that moment. Rafferty was thankful to be alive and, more than that, he was thankful to be with her.

Leaning over him, Nuala kissed him on the forehead, on the cheek, and finally, on the lips. “I’m such a mess,” she sighed as she straightened up again. “Let me get cleaned up; I’ll be right back.”

“No,” Rafferty quickly objected, reaching out a hand to stop her. “You look beautiful. You don’t need to clean up for me.”

Nuala took his hand and squeezed it. “That’s sweet of you to say, charming man,” she laughed. “That, however, was meant to be code for ’I’ve been sitting here for four hours and, while I love you, I have to pee’.”

Rafferty smiled and let her hand slide out of his. She smiled, turned away, and began the trek toward the bathroom. For the first intentional time, Rafferty allowed himself to watch her walk away, her perfect hips and backside swaying gracefully with each step, as if embracing the tune of an unheard symphony. Before she turned to walk down the staircase, Nuala looked back at him, and Rafferty saw the rare twinkle in her eyes, as she smiled at him.

He would never stop loving Calico. She was his wife, and she would always be his first love. She was gone now, though. As Rafferty planted his elbows, attempting to sit up, he tried to let her go.

As the pain from the shoulder wound surged through his body, he saw Calico’s face in his mind.

As he grit his teeth to push through the sickening feeling, he knew that he would never stop loving her.

As he succeeded in sitting up, he realized that he didn’t have to.

It was not cheating if he allowed himself to feel again.

Adjusting his boxers as best he could, Rafferty heard Nuala’s footsteps returning to the staircase. Swinging his legs out, Rafferty attempted to face forward, but a wave of nausea hit him like a brick wall, and he collapsed backward once more. He heard Nuala cry out in panic as she bounced up the last few steps, rushing to be by his side again. She had not bothered to reapply her makeup, only clean up what was already there. It didn’t matter: she was the most beautiful woman alive, at that moment.

“Baby, what are you doing?” Nuala asked, as she raced toward him, her breasts heaving against the constraints of her top with each hurried step. “Don’t try to get up; you’ve lost too much blood!”

“I just--” Rafferty groaned as Nuala reached him and readjusted him into a resting position once more. “Yeah, you might not be wrong about that. I wanted to lay with you, and--”

“And you didn’t think there was room for us both on the couch,” Nuala laughed. “That’s very sweet of you, but… I think you might honestly be delirious.”

“Why would you think that?” Rafferty asked, defensively. “My mind is functioning fine; it’s just my body that’s in pain. I’m thinking clearly, though. Right now, I want to be with the beautiful woman who just saved my life, and that’s a coherent, well-developed thought.”

Nuala shook her head, taking a step toward him with a sly smile on her lips. “You’re delirious,” she drawled “for not thinking that the couch is large enough for the two of us.”

Removing her boots and glasses, Nuala positioned her leg across Rafferty’s torso, straddling his body. Gently, she lowered herself onto him, carefully avoiding sensitive areas. Rubbing her pelvis against Rafferty’s crotch, Nuala draped herself across him, and lay her head against his shoulder.

Rafferty lifted his good arm, stroking her hair affectionately. He felt her gentle breath against his collarbone, her body heaving against his pectorals. Her arms fell on either side of him, and he could feel her fingers against his shoulder blades. The mere thought of his pelvis against her own, as it was right now, made him shudder with longing, and a desire to be inside of her.

Nuala had felt Rafferty’s erection before, but had always assumed before that it was instinctual, and that it had very little to do with her. When she felt his bulge this time, through the torn and disheveled remains of his boxers, she tried to ignore it. When she felt him thrust into her, that became more difficult.

Nuala looked at Rafferty with her large, dark eyes, filled with confusion. Rafferty’s steel blue eyes gave her the answer that she needed. Straightening her body, she pulled her top off, tossing it to the floor, allowing her breasts to fall freely. Rafferty placed his hand into the small of her back, and pushed her body toward him. Lifting his head slightly, he placed his mouth against one of her nipples. Nuala shuddered and squealed, as she felt his tongue dance against the soft flesh, his teeth nibbling her breast lightly. Nuala tangled her fingers in his hair, tugging at it gently, as she moved her lips to his. Their passion was realized as they breathed each other’s energy, their tongues dancing together like lost lovers, united at last.

XIII

Meanwhile, back on the ranch…

Someone was tracking his movements. Basil Commando had noticed them creeping on his movements for a little while, but the pattern was hard to determine, until they had gotten sloppy. Well, “sloppy” might not be the most accurate term, especially with the internet in the fractured state that it was right now. If it had been someone less competent than Basil, they likely would have missed the fluctuations. It wasn’t uncommon that the same digital address popped up on various connected networks, so when he first noticed the commonality, he glossed over it. Then, he noticed that same address popping up on many of the same websites that he was frequenting. Basil had attempted to avoid any specific patterns, but he knew that it was virtually impossible to do so. After all, organization was part of sanity, and people clung to it, even subconsciously. As much as he had tried to avoid it, he must have settled into a predictable form at some point.

“You know, there’s a word for people who think everyone is conspiring against them.”

“I know: Perceptive!”

There is no point in belaboring the idea, and trying to find the flaw in his own method. The end result will not be changing: an individual seems to have figured out what he is doing. Whomever the address belonged to seem to cover their tracks pretty well. Really, it was an expertly done job. Still, he would not be Basil Commando if he couldn’t track an IP address, even a cleverly hidden one, back to it’s base of origin.

The address had been cloaked behind a smoke screen, deleted, and frozen in digitized carbonate. It was almost exciting, stimulating, digging through the well-constructed facade. More than once in the process, Basil found himself smiling as he worked. His hacking had become such an effortless system in the past few months. Yes, it had been exciting at first, perfecting his technique and compensating for the increased security on the sites, but now, it had become routine. He had grown quite proud of his technique, but the monotony was ridiculous.

Perhaps, after he found out who this hacker was, he would thank them for stimulating his cerebral cortex so much.

After a little less than six hours, Basil was able to find his way through the mess, back to the source: it was a hub in the California wasteland, in the middle of nothing significant. It was thrilling, finding the source. It was intriguing, finding the location. What was even more exciting was finding that the source was still powered up, transmitting a fractured code, ripe and juicy, just asking to be hacked. Basil jumped at it, found the video code, reversed it, and was thrilled by what he discovered.

“Shall we play a game?”

She was petite, but perfectly proportionate. He was grizzled and muscular. Basil could not see her face, until she arched her back while riding his cock, and he was quite pleased with what he found. She seemed to be more gentle than she wanted to be, but he was hardly moving, aside from his hands and subtle thrusting of his hips, while he was inside of her. Taking his eyes away from the woman’s perfect ass for a moment, Basil noticed wounds on the man’s body, which could explain his reluctance toward aggressive movement. Basil did not mind so much, since he was enjoying watching the cream-skinned woman with multicolored hair, as she enjoyed the man’s erection.

Interlocking his fingers, Basil cracked his knuckles and sat back to enjoy the show. Pornography had been one of the first things to return to the internet, and Basil had, of course, enjoyed plenty of that. Still, there was no reason to turn away from a free show.

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XIV

The sight of the scene was not uncommon to him. It was disturbingly grotesque and darkly macabre, just the way that he liked it. It would have turned twisted an average person’s stomach into knots, certainly, but he was anything but average. He was the Chosen Apostle. St. Isidore did not send the weak and timid to investigate scenes of destruction. Surely he was favored by On High, having been chosen by Sr. Isidore to carry out such a task.

Brother Job arrived on the scene of the New Helensdale destruction with the aid of Choir Wings. Typically, Job preferred to drive, since witnessing the chaos of the world around was like medicine to him. Before the bombs had fallen, Job had been labeled a serial arsonist and an anarchist. St. Isidore had given him redemption, telling him that On High wanted more from him than to simply compose a rhapsody of destruction. Job did not really care what On High wanted, but St. Isidore had brought him in his flock and given him food, so Job had decided that it was probably not in his best interest to quibble about semantics. St. Isidore thought that he carried with him a hunger for On High’s destiny, or some other overly dramatic religious thing, and Job had chosen not to argue. In truth, Job would have lost interest with St. Isidore’s cause long ago, if it did not provide him with an outlet for his fire.

He set people om fire. That was not his fault, it was simply something that he did. Other people smoke, still others drink, but Job took part in neither of those things. St. Isidore assured him that On High still loved him, despite his flaw. Again, Job did not really care that On High loved him. Also, since he had never really felt bad about the things that he did, he could not see why On High would take offense to them either. It was not as if he enjoyed killing people, he just liked the way that they smelled as they were burning. If there was another way to produce that smell, he would have gladly used that technique but, if such an element existed, he had yet to fine it. If St. Isidore existed, and Job was still not sure that he believed that there was anything listened to the fervent prayers of the flock, than he had given Job this passion and there was nothing that he could do about it.

St. Isidore was the first man to ever appreciate his passion and the techniques that he had spent so long perfecting. Job appreciated that enough to play along with his doctrine.

There was no fire left in New Helensdale, and the smell had almost evaporated from the area. As Job walked the desolated streets, observing the carnage of the town, he breathed in deeply, trying to find a scent somewhere. It was still there, on the wind, but it was not as strong as he would have preferred. Of course, he preferred when it was fresh, and he could get it first hand. In this instance, though, St. Isidore had requested only that he go forth and gather information. It was not quite the experience of actually going forth and spreading the word (which was how St. Isidore described the more destructive missions), but Job would take what he could.

He had been sent here to see if he could determine the actual cause of the destruction. St. Isidore had planned a mission to New Helensdale, but someone had beat him to the bunch. In his manifesto, Isidore had stated that those responsible had been doing On High’s work, but he was not happy about it. Job had spent a fair amount of time getting into St. Isidore’s councel of Disciples, so that he could learn St. Isidore’s inner thoughts and his pattern, which he now studied closely. Even though Isidore would not say it directly, Job knew that he wasn’t happy about someone else carrying out On High’s work before he had a chance to. Job knew his mind. He was looking forward to seeing what the man would do to the actual artists of destruction here.

He sniffed the air deeply as he walked the streets. There was very little variation in the scents, as he scanned the remains of the city for some clue as to who had perpetrated this act. The scattered bodies were old, almost four days old now, and there was very little flesh left on the bones. There was no life to be found in the wreckage. It was disappointing, but not every mission could be equally as fulfilling. It was reconnaissance missions such as this that made “spreading the word” so much more enjoyable.

As Job turned a corner, he noticed a slight discrepancy in the scents, and it made him smile. While most of the destruction was almost four days old, this was less than a day. Someone had been here, sewing destruction, after the city had been razzed. He followed the scent down a street, which probably had been Main St., until he found the source. There, laying in the dirt, were five bodies. Only one or two of them seemed to have been burned to any significant degree. Carrion birds were making a feast of them, pecking away at the flesh that remained edible, according to their meager standards.

Pulling his gun from his hip, he fired a shot into the air as he approached the bodies. The sound was not loud, but it was clear enough of an interruption to disrupt the bird’s dining experience, sending them scattering into the sky. Once the fowl had flown, Job knelt by the charred corpse of one, inhaling deeply. He could still smell the burning, and it was intoxicating. Sadly, it was not as satisfying as it would have been, had the fire been fresh, but Job would take what he could get.

Job straightened up, and turned his communicator to a transmission frequency. “Field disciple to St. Isidore, requesting reception confirmation,” he called into the device.

“St. Isidore, reception complete,” the voice of his patron’s representative replied. “What have you found to report?”

“I have found bodies,” Job replied. “Five, in total. From the evidence gathered, they appear to be Echoes, which suggests that they would have been unwelcome as residents of this town. They were likely the ones responsible for the attack, hoping to gain entrance into St. Isidore’s flock.”

“Your use of past-tense seems to suggests that they have met their end,” the voice answered, trepidation creeping through the speaker. “I hope that this was not by your hand. Your mission was only to discover the cause, not to eliminate those responsible.”

Job sighed deeply and focused on maintaining his rage. “I was not responsible for their death,” he replied through barred teeth. “The party responsible for their demise is still unaccounted for. There seems to some evidence of their retreat, though. Tracking them would be nearly impossible without further resources, though.”

“Your mission is to find the responsible party,” the voice stated coldly.

“I have found the responsible parties,” Job replied, breathing deeply, hanging onto his temper with every bit of resolve that he had. “The Echoes were undoubtedly the party who initiated for the attack. The only question that remains is who destroyed the Echoes, and that does not seem to be a priority for St. Isidore. He likely would have instructed me to burn them once I found them, anyway.”

“Do not presume to know the will of our patron,” the voice chided him, attempting to sound frigid and demonstrative. “The one who murdered the Echoes also took the will of On High into their own hands and, therefore, must be dealt with accordingly. You will identify the responsible party, track them down, and deal with them according to On High’s law. Do not return until you have completed your mission.”

Job felt his face turning red with anger. He bit into his lip savagely until it split, and he could focus his attention on the slight pain and the salty-sweet taste of his own blood. He wanted to call the representative out, accusing him by name of just trying to keep him away from the base for longer. He knew the owner of the voice, and he knew that Chason was jealous of him, not only for his position, but for his relationship with Sister Esther. Esther was beautiful and, for some reason, she favored Job above the others. That made Job a target for a good bit of ridicule.

“Chason,” Job grumbled back at the voice, “put St. Isidore on. I want to hear the order directly from him.”

“Identifying members of the flock is strictly forbidden through communication devices,” Chason replied angrily. “Complete your mission, then return to the chapel for disciplinary actions.”

The communication went dead as Chason ended the call. Job’s fury could be contained no more, and he screamed loudly into the sky, frightening the birds who had begun returning to their meal away again,. Reaching into his pocket, Job produced a flamewand. Pressing the trigger, he ignited the stick, and set one of the corpses on fire. He then repeated the process with the other four bodies, praying that there was enough meat left on them to produce a smell strong enough the calm his rage.

As he stood, breathing in the scents, he noticed a trail of dried blood, barely recognizable, leading away from the scene. A smile curled onto his lips as he followed the trail to where it ended, and he saw the weathered imprints of tires, leaving some semblance of a path as they sped away.

Her hair tickled the ridges of his nose as he breathed in. As she lay, sleeping, on his chest, Rafferty considered the events which had occurred, less than four hours ago. His pain was still present, throbbing in fact, but he could focus his attention on other elements, so it was less of a reality.

Each breath that Nuala took brought them closer to each other. When they had been together, he had felt a part of himself evaporate, rushing to exist within her, as if it had always belonged to her, and it was satisfied to finally be home again. He remembered the last time that he had felt that way, when he had thought that it was forever. It would have been forever, had that destiny not been ripped away from him by a deluded madman who believed himself to be the voice of On High. Rafferty had wondered if, with all the energy that he had put toward hatred, he even had the capacity to feel anything but hatred. He had convinced himself that this was his life, and that he would die before he allowed himself partnership again. This was not some self-absorbed, overly-emotional pledge, but rather a realistic epiphany. Dying is pursuit of St. Isidore was not an illogical conclusion.

Feeling Nuala’s breath against his skin, her hair on the bridge of his nose, her arms and legs tangled with his own, he felt complete. For the first time since Calico had been taken from him, he felt more than hatred. He felt love, and he felt like a hormonal teenager for recognizing that he had been without that feeling for so long. Without realizing it, he had fallen in love with Nuala months ago, but he had not allowed himself to act on it, nor even to admit it. Now, at his weakest moment, he did not have the strength to deny it any longer.

Craning his neck slightly, making sure not to disturb her, he moved his lips closer to her ear, and gently whispered his secret into it.

“I love you.”

“That’s sweet,” Nuala giggled, her consciousness taking him by surprise “but you knew what this was. I only wanted your body.”

Rafferty chuckled as he lay his head back. “If my body wasn’t falling apart by the seams,” he laughed “I would show you why you shouldn’t speak to me that way.”

“Mmhmm,” Nuala replied as she shifted her body, crossed her arms, and lay her chin upon her wrists, staring up into his eyes with a gentle smile. “Promises, promises.”

Rafferty’s smile widened as he saw himself reflected in her eyes. “I could not hurt you,” he assured her gently “even if my body were in perfect working order. You’re part of who I am; hurting you would only be hurting myself.”

“So, if we hadn’t just had sex,” Nuala frowned, “were you thinking of hurting me, then?”

“What?” Rafferty jumped, his wounds aching a bit at the movement. “No, I was not! I mean, I would never--”

“You said that I was part of you. Does that mean that each time you were hurt, was it hurting me as well?”

“I was trying to be sweet,” Rafferty rolled his eyes. “You’ll forgive me if I’m a bit out of practice.”

Nuala scooted her body up, until her face was level with his, and she kissed him deeply. “I love you too,” she whispered to him, once the kiss was completed.

“If you two are done being disgusting,” a voice from the computer took them both by surprise, “I think that now would be a good time to announce my presence here.”

Nuala shrieked in surprise, falling off the couch, and quickly gathering clothing to conceal her nudity with. Rafferty sat up quickly, and reached for the place where his gun should have been.

“It’s on the other side of the room, where I assume your paramour placed it after tearing your clothing off, in order to bind your wounds,” the voice from the computer informed him. “Although, since I am in the computer, I would ask what you intend to accomplish through use of a gun. Even a Winchester Yellowboy (wonderful gun, by the way) can’t exactly force it’s way into cyberspace, unless that’s one of multiple modifications that you’ve inflicted on the beautiful piece of art. Since that level of technology wasn’t even present before the bombings, I very seriously doubt that you’ve been able to implement it.”

Rafferty looked to Nuala with a confused frown. Nuala had pulled her discarded t-shirt on backwards, and was currently struggling with a pair of panties, so she was not paying attention to him. He had no idea how to respond to their intruder, but he was suddenly very aware that he was wearing only a pair of boxers.

The formerly blank computer screen sprang to life suddenly, and an animated face appeared: A cartoon caricature of a gruff-looking male face, complete with an eyepatch, unruly black hair and unshaven stubble, and a long scar beneath the visible eye. “Allow me to introduce myself,” the voice said in a rough, digital tone. “My name is Basil Commando. But you, of course, already knew that, didn’t you?”

Rafferty was in the process of standing up, when his injured leg buckled, and he was forced to sit back down again. Pain blurred his vision, as he focused on his breathing. “Who are you,” he growled at the computer. “How long as you been watching us?”

The digitized face rolled it’s eyes. “I’ve already told you,” it replied “I’m Basil Commando. I’ve been watching you for several hours now, on and off. Neither of you really need to be overly concerned about clothing, by the way. I’ve already spent enough time watching you lay into each other, so I’m pretty familiar with your anatomy.”

That got Nuala’s attention, and she jerked her head up, looking at the computer screen in horror. Seeing her react in that nature infuriated Rafferty. He turned to the computer angrily, opening his mouth to scream a rebuke, but found nothing that he could say. He still had very little idea of what was going on.

Basil Commando’s face contorted into a look of anger, which matched what Rafferty was feeling. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he growled darkly “do you feel violated? Is it like I’ve entered your sacred temple, and relieved myself upon your alter?”

Rafferty and Nuala looked at each other with equally confused stares.

“Because that’s how I felt,” Basil Commando continued to rant, his volume raised, without skipping a beat. “I had masterfully hidden my path, covering my tracks in a way that even the most skilled engineer couldn’t have deciphered! I was meticulous in my actions, dodging invasive eyes, like a shadow dodging the light! For months, over a year, I have existed as a god within the machine, performing my dubious activities, and none have been the wiser, until now! You are the only one who tracked my path! You, a muscular oaf whose first response to a digital usurper is to shoot the computer with an organic pistol. Now, you tell me, which of us is truly the violator?”

Rafferty’s mind felt as though it was being pulled apart, as he stared at the screen, brow furrowed, jaw agape. “I have no idea what in hell you’re talking about,” he muttered, shaking his head to clear the clouds of confusion from his cerebellum “but I’m pretty sure you don’t really have the moral high ground here.”

He turned to Nuala, whose eyes had grown to twice their average size, her hand covering her mouth in shock. “Do you know anything about this?” he asked her.

“Oh my god,” Nuala gasped from behind her hand. “It was him.”

“That was you!” she cried suddenly, her eyes lighting up, and her mouth bursting into a wide smile. “You were the one in the charities, syphoning the money allocated to the victims of the bombs!”

“Wait,” Rafferty frowned “what’s going on?”

“You were the one who uncovered my trail?” Basil’s voice changed from rage to surprised admiration. “Well, that changes things! I don’t mind being violated by you.”

Nuala sighed. “Well, first off, eww,” she grumbled “and second, you’re stealing from charities! That’s a hacker’s longest standing unspoken commandment: thou shalt not steal from those in need.”

“Technically, I was a victim of the bomb, just like those who the money was set aside for,” Basil replied. “I took far more than I would have been permitted, but that’s all beside the point. I was one of the many people who lost their identity on Dark Day. The fact that I took advantage of my anonymity rather than scrambling to collect the remains of my tortured life is really a boon to my own drive toward survival, is it not?”

“Yes, yes, well done,” Nuala sighed. “That doesn’t make what you did any less repugnant. Setting aside your abuse of power, which I can do, since your technique was very well formatted (seriously, I wasn’t even sure if what I was seeing was real), you still hacked into my computer, and watched us having sex. That’s inexcusable!”

“Hey, I didn’t mean for that to happen,” Basil defended his position. “I simply tracked your open ip address, and was pleasantly surprised by the results. The timing was accidental, if not opportunistic. What was I supposed to do, cough?”

“That would have been polite,” Nuala blushed, her eyes falling to her inverted shirt.

“Perhaps,” Basil conceded. “Still: Pirate.”

Rafferty had been trying to keep up with the exchange between the two hackers, and his head was beginning to feel as though it was full of chicken curry. While computers had never been his area of expertise, he liked to feel as though he knew more than a neanderthal. This conversation was making him feel as though, perhaps, he should pick up his large stick and go hunting for stray mammoth. He assumed that anything that he said would come out sounding like savage grunting: bad man steal signal trail; me go kill bad man now? He realized that he ought to know more about what was going on, but he could not determine whether or not Basil Commando and Nuala were suddenly becoming friends. He turned to Nuala with a pleading look, begging her desperately to throw him a bone.

Nuala noticed his look, and lay a hand on his knee sympathetically. “I’m sorry, baby, I should explain. While you were gone, I needed to keep my mind off of things. A little while ago, I started noticing discrepancies in the charitable causes, dedicated specifically to--”

“As much as I would love to hear about how you undermined my magnum opus,” Basil Commando interrupted her “I think that we might have more dire circumstances to attend to. You, ape, would I be wrong to guess that you sustained your wounds in a scuffle with Echoes in New Helensdale?”

Rafferty turned to the screen with a confused scowl. “My name is Rafferty,” he stated, unsure what he hoped to achieve with the correction. “But yes, I did. How did you know that?”

“Well, I knew that because, once I knew your location, I was able to track your vehicle’s electronic signature backward to there,” Basil admitted. “Did you know that you were leaving a digital trail? Because it looks like St. Isidore did, and someone’s coming to deal with you right now. Way to go with the Echoes, though. From the looks of it, you kicked some ass.”

Rafferty’s head exploded as he heard Nuala’s gasp. The beauty of the moment that he had shared with her was suddenly lost in the sudden burst of panic which gripped his spine.

III

The trail which Job had found was faint and scattered, barely an impression. It was frustrating, trying to track it, but he had been given a mission, and it was his to complete. Chanson was always trying to discredit him and, if he were to fail on this, it would only be more ammunition to be thrown back at him. St. Isidore was always encouraging them to get along, since both Job and Chason were in the higher ranks, but the fact that the two of them were so close in rank only threw them at each others throats all the more.

He told himself that he believed in St. Isidore’s cause. It did not matter so much if he did or if he didn’t, since no other faith would allow him to indulge in his passion so frequently, and even without judgment, but Job still liked to pretend that he had some standards, and that he believed in what he preached (or what was preached at him, rather). St. Isidore insisted that an obsession with technology had lead to humanity’s downfall. He claimed that the destructive actions that they were taking toward those attempting to reassert technology into their lives was in an effort to save humanity from themselves. It was an act of love. They, of course, were not being loving toward the people that they were killing, but those acts were for the benefit of humanity. That was the gospel that St. Isidore preached. It was not Job’s responsibility to think too deeply into the doctrine, it was his responsibility to carry out orders, and be better than Chason.

According to classic Catholicism, the original St. Isidore had been a farmer. The Catholic church had later adopted him as the patron saint of technology, similar to Hephaestus for the Greeks, but probably better looking. In the late 20th or the early 21st century, the Catholic church had christened St. Isidore as the patron saint of the Internet. Job had spent a long time studying those doctrines, as he found himself joining the higher ranks of St. Isidore’s flock, simply because he wanted to know more about the original owner of his leader’s title.

His St. Isidore hid what he could about his past, before he had chosen the title. Every time that Job had heard someone attempt to get answers about his past, all that he would say was that who he was before St. Isidore was immaterial, since his life had begun anew when he had answered On High’s call, and become the saint. Job understood that and respected it, to a certain degree. He did have some questions that demanded answers, though. Following this trail was giving him the opportunity to get lost in his own head, which was something that he hardly allowed himself any longer. He was able now to ask himself hard questions about the movement.

Who appointed St. Isidore as the voice of On High?

If his movement was to enforce the betterment of humanity, why did so many of his actions fly in the face of what the Holy Text taught?

Who gave him permission to do the things that he was doing?

If On High truly did support the actions that St. Isidore was taking, why would anyone want to follow a God which was drowning in that much blood?

Job chose not to question the edicts that much. After all, he enjoyed the smell of burning flesh, which was a sickening and perverse thing; everyone who knew told him that, except for St. Isidore. St. Isidore had told him that there was still a place for him in On High’s court, and in his own flock. He ought to be grateful for the opportunity to serve and be vindicated for his past actions, while being justified in his present.

The trail that he was following changed directions, and Job followed it automatically. He was no longer following the trail to find his target, he was following it, so that he had an excuse to think. He was so lost in his thoughts that he had been following the trail for fifteen minutes before he realized that the path was leading him directly back in roughly the same direction that he had come, through a circular pattern.

Job paused and sniffed the air, more from habit than actual necessity. There was nothing there to indicate a direction which he ought to be following. The only path he had follow was beginning to seem more and more like a rabbit trail. Still, it was all that he had.

There was nothing in the air but the usual scents. There was nothing to justify any further investigation. Job shook his head, and continued following the trail again, headed back toward the wreckage of New Helensdale, trying to figure out why he was doing so.

He had his orders. He would continue following St. Isidore, even through his doubts. After all, his own moral code wasn’t exactly anything worth investing in.

XVI

It had been fifteen minutes of chaos in The Console. Between Rafferty feeling like a battery, drained of life, Nuala madly typing on her computer, trying to erase the trail, and Basil Commando half-mocking, half-helping them, the tension in the air was thicker than a mushroom cloud.

“Why did you have to put the buggy on auto-drive?” Nuala asked Rafferty frantically without looking at him, as she tried desperately to locate the trail that Basil had warned them about.

“Because if I hadn’t,” Rafferty replied as he fumbled with the pair of jeans that he had retrieved from the bedroom “I would have passed out from exhaustion, pain, and blood loss.”

“I know, baby, I know,” Nuala sympathized, distractedly. “It’s just that, that’s what is leaving the trail. If you had been able to drive, even for a mile or so, we--”

“I’m sorry, Nuala,” Rafferty cut her off, only somewhat sarcastically. “Had I known that you would be placed in danger, I would have lain down in New Helensdale, and bled out into the soil.”

“That would not have helped,” Basil Commando cut in. “Had you done that, the buggy would still have been at the location. St. Isidore followers would have found it, traced the GPS signature back to your location of origin, and they’d have found your base anyway. Had you really wanted to help things, you’d have driven the aforementioned mile, or however long you could have safely driven, pulled over to the side of the road, gotten out of your ride, and died there instead.”

“That’s not what I meant, baby,” Nuala cried out, turning to see her shirtless champion, looking back at her with wide, blue eyes, full of stress and fear. “Of course, I’m glad you made it back. I don’t care about the trail, we can handle it, I know we can. I only want to be with you.”

“I love you too,” Rafferty answered back.

Nuala felt her eyes, beginning to fill with tears that she desperately did not want to cry.

“You two are really adorable,” Basil Commando cackled. “Look at this: true love at the end of the world. I believe that was the concept for any number of cinematic blunders in the 20th and 21st century. How long have you two been together?”

Rafferty sighed and shook his head, wondering why they were pandering to this invasive troll. “We’ve worked together for quite awhile,” he admitted without thinking.

“Last night was the first time that we had sex,” Nuala admitted, as she turned back to the computer, and began trying to scramble the trail once again. After a moment, she froze and shook her head.

“Why did I just say that?” she sighed.

“Awe!” Basil Commando cheered. “Two lovers, destined to be together, finding each other in the midst of tragedy! And I got to be part of it! That kind of makes me feel special.”

“Why are you still here?” Rafferty roared at the animated face, unable to control his temper any longer.

“Come on, man, I get bored here alone,” Basil admitted. “I need entertainment, just like everyone else. Besides, I really don’t like St. Isidore’s platform, since he’s trying to eliminate technology, and that’s kind of where I live right now. Based on the information that I’ve collected from your hard drives, you two aren’t big fans of his either. That kind of makes us friends, right?”

“What?!” Nuala’s panic was momentarily transferred from the trail to Basil. “The information that you-- you hacked my files?!”

“Of course I did,” Basil answered her casually. “I needed something to keep me entertained while the two of you were sleeping, didn’t I? Bravo for making it so hard, by the way. I almost gave up completely, like, three or four times! Pied_Piper1013 absolutely lives up to her reputation.

“Oh, incidentally, don’t worry about the digital trail. I scrambled it a little over twelve minutes ago. I couldn’t erase it, obviously, but I was able to redirect it in a circular pattern, so that whomever is tracking it will be thrown for a loop.”

Nuala stared, jaw agape, as the color drained from her face. Rafferty watched, trying to imagine what was going through her mind, using her blank expression as the only clue. He knew how much pride she took in her computer hacking skills, and how she protected her own drive as though it were her own body. This unknown creature had come from nowhere, and violated her in every way imaginable, both physically and professionally. On the other hand, this cretin may have just saved their lives through the information that he provided. He had uncovered Nuala’s hacker name, which was a guarded secret that Rafferty imagined she would have taken to her grave. She had only shared it with him, after they’d been together for over six months, and she was comfortable with the knowledge that, if Rafferty exposed her, she could easily discredit the information, subsequently erasing him completely. To have this troll uncover her so quickly must have hurt her deeply, causing her to doubt everything that she held close, including herself.

Nuala’s expression remained fixed as she spun away from the computer, closed her mouth, and stood up.

“I feel dirty,” she breathed in an emotionless tone. “I’m going to go shower and change.”

Without another word, she marched from the room, and down the stairs. Rafferty wanted to follow her, but the look that she had shot him in passing told him that she wanted to be alone.

“Wait,” Basil’s voice demanded his attention once more. “She’s not upset, is she?”

Rafferty breathed in deeply, regaining his composure, before turning to to face the insurgent. “I would say so,” he replied, as evenly as he could. “She protects her informational system, as if it were her own body. You hacking into it was, by her definition, tantamount to physical abuse. I believe that she was more offended by that action than she was by your voyeurism.”

“Which,” Rafferty quickly interjected “I’m still very upset by.”

“Awe, zelos,” Basil swore, using new world profanity. “That wasn’t my intention. I mean, yeah, I got annoyed that someone found my trail, but I still respected her for doing it. I figured she would respect me more for my ability to hack through her phoenixdown. She’s amazing! My pattern was utterly untraceable! I don’t expect you to understand, of course, but I worked extremely hard to make sure that I could not be found.”

Rafferty frowned at the computer in confusion. “What aspect of our operation suggests that I wouldn’t be able to understand that?”

Basil was uncharacteristically silent for a moment. “You have a point,” he eventually relented. “If I might ask, just a point of professional curiosity, what fueled your hatred of St. Isidore? You understand, of course, that I appreciate it. I’m simply curious as to your reasoning.”

Rafferty’s emotions flamed up radically in his head. This cretin was now talking to him as an equal, as though he were a trusted confidant, rather than a cybernetic weasel, burrowing into their own secured fortress. Rafferty questioned the figure’s nerve, imagining that his violation granted him kinship, rather than hatred and retaliation. Basil Commando, whomever he may actually be, was behaving as though he had done nothing wrong, and as if he could not understand the negative reactions that both Rafferty and Nuala were having to his violation. Rafferty began to wonder then how they were going to get rid of this infestation. It was not as though they could alert the authorities, and it was likely that whatever defenses Nuala would be able to assemble would be torn down in a matter of time. The choices now seemed to be either retaliation, which would likely lead to involvement in an uncomfortable standoff, or cooperation. Still, Rafferty was loath to volunteer information so quickly.

“That’s really none of your business,” Rafferty retorted, his eyes falling as he tried to gather his composure once more.

“That would suggest that your reasoning is of a more personal nature,” Basil Commando said, analytically. “I apologize for bringing up bad memories. For whatever it was that he did to you, you have my sympathies.”

“Curious,” Nuala’s voice made Rafferty jump a bit, and he turned to see her cresting the stairs, dressed in a white halter-top, tied behind her neck, and leather pants. Her hair was combed into a clumsy ponytail, which hung over her shoulder, and Rafferty noticed that she was wearing foundation, an element that she rarely utilized, along with her usual dark eyeshadow and deeply red lipstick.

“Do I have your sympathies,” she snarled “for violating my privacy and crawling into my system? Or is this simply a male bonding ritual that I’m not invited to take part in?”

“We’re not bonding,” Rafferty insisted.

“I like to think we are,” Basil contradicted.

“We’re not!” Rafferty asserted, perhaps a bit more violently than he had intended.

“Okay, we’re not,” Basil conceded. “You have my apologies, Pied Piper. It has been so long since I’ve actually interacted with another person that I’m afraid my social skills may be a bit lax. I may have reacted poorly. I think that I excused my invasion of your network as retaliation for you actually uncovering my trail… which, I now see, is flawed logic. My pride was hurt, which initiated my actions, but once I discovered that the individual investigating me was, in fact, the legendary Pied_Piper1013, I was enraptured. I will admit that, when I thought that the identity belonged to the male party, I was a bit disappointed. However, learning that you--”

“Okay,” Nuala held her hand up to stop him from talking. “Setting aside the fact that you creepily watched as we engaged in carnal actions, you clawed your way into my sacred temple like a fucking weevil, and you’re extremely annoying, you also did kind of save our lives with the information that you provided.”

“--plus, I scrambled the trail for you,” Basil offered.

“I know what you did,” Nuala growled, holding onto her temper, as Rafferty stepped beside her, and lay a hand on her shoulder. “Why are you still here? What do you want with us?”

“I had thought that we could help each other, I guess,” Basil admitted. “Neither of us seem to like St. Isidore all that much. I figured, between the three of us, we could find a way to eliminate, or at least damage his Machiavellian reign.”

“Machiavellian?” Rafferty asked, cocking an eyebrow.

Basil Commando sighed: “Niccolo Machiavelli was the author of--”

“I’ve read The Prince,” Rafferty interrupted the monologue before it became too long-winded. “That publication earned him the title of the wickedest man on Earth, thanks to it’s justification of ruling through fear and public executions, as a show of power, in order to maintain supremacy. How does that...”

Rafferty shut his mouth, as he answered his own question in his mind.

“Yeah,” Nuala sighed. “That’s actually kind of exactly what St. Isidore is doing.”

“So, if St. Isidore is The Prince,” Basil Commando excitedly interjected “we could be The Pauper! With our minds, Pied Piper, and his muscle, the three of us could be the instrument of his destruction! That would be so jazz, having The Pauper bringing down such a powerful network!”

Nuala looked up at Rafferty. “It does kind of sound doable,” she sighed. “I could use another computer brain to help us track the network and the locational patterns, trying to find his base.”

“I still don’t like him,” Rafferty grumbled.

“Neither do I,” Nuala admitted. “Still, we’re running on fumes here, and if we’re going to make a move against St. Isidore, it only seems logical that we combine our resources.”

Nuala moved to a computer and began to talk to Basil Commando as they exchanged information with each other. Rafferty walked from the room, down the stairs, in order to change and prepare breakfast. He hated that he could justify his involvement with this hacker, but he would be lying if he insisted that the thought of being The Pauper didn’t make him feel a little happy. It was not a perfect metaphor, blending Machiavelli with Mark Twain, but it was catchy.

Rafferty walked back up the steps, a bit later, carrying a tray of coffee mugs and pastries. Nuala looked toward him, beaming with a new light. She began to explain everything that she and Basil had been talking about and researching. Rafferty had to admit that, for the first time, he saw a glimpse of hope in her eyes.

“Shine on, crazy diamond,” she teased him affectionately, lights dancing in her eyes.

“Wish you were here,” Rafferty replied, feeling his lips curl upward, into a smile.

“Are you two okay?” Basil asked, curiously. “You are aware that she’s right there in front of you, right?”

Rafferty barely heard his critique, as his eyes remained locked with her own, feeling her inside his mind, and hoping that she could feel him in hers. Nothing mattered to him but the love that he felt in her gaze.

They were the piper at the gates of the new world.

The world could end, as long as they were together.

XVII

Job sighed and shook his head in frustration as he found himself in the wreckage of New Helensdale again. He had been anticipated this conclusion for quite some time, almost immediately after realizing that the trail which he had been following was being misdirected, but the reality of the situation was still deflating. Pulling his torch from his belt, he began blazing the flame before him, imagining that he was lighting someone, something, anything on fire. He could not imagine St. Isidore’s disappointment, should he return in failure.

He walked through the abandoned streets of the former city, trying to formulate a plan. Just as he had suspected, the digital trail led him out of town once more, in the same direction from which he had come. It would, undoubtedly, behave in the same way that it had, when he had first walked it. There was nothing more that he could do; he would need to go back to St. Isidore with an inconclusive report.

Job could virtually see Chason’s smug face in his mind.

Hanging his head in defeat, he ignited his wings, and lifted off into the air, intent on going back to where he had come. He sighed as he began to fly over New Helensdale, headed back the way he had come. As he flew over the far end of the wreckage, though, something caught his eye.

Something, or someone, was moving.

Job’s excitement rose again, as he flew toward the movement. He may have discovered something after all. Landing near the area where he had seen the movement, he looked around, trying to find the source. Around him were a handful of wrecked houses, a vehicle charging station which had exploded completely, the remains of an academy, and an apothecary. The herbalist’s building was the one that was in the best condition. Job set the sensory scan perimeters to sense heat signatures within the structure, and examined the readings. There were about three people, hiding in the building.

Squaring his shoulders, Job advanced through the broken door of the structure, into the disassembled shelves, stocked full of broken glass containers, which held burnt herbs.

“Hey,” he called out. “If there is anyone in here, it would be in your best interest to reveal yourself. I am Brother Job, representative of St. Isidore. I have not come to hurt you, but to save you.”

The propaganda split his tongue and burned his ears, just as it did, each time he had recited it, hundreds of times before.

No immediate response came. Running the scan again, Job saw that the signatures were all together, huddled in the backroom. He knew what he could do: he could go to that room, set the three of them on fire, and then go back to St. Isidore, claiming that they had been the source of the Echoes’ death. It would be a lie, but St. Isidore would never know that, and he desperately wanted to smell the burning again. Advancing on the door, intent on doing exactly that, he kicked it open to view the occupants.

There were, as he had expected, three individuals in the room. One was an elderly woman, perhaps in her early 80’s, a little girl of 12 or 13, and a young lady, maybe 20 or 30. Each of them were clothed in filthy clothing, little more than rags. The child, clinging to the young lady tightly, was clearly underfed, and the old woman appeared as little more than a skeleton. Job frowned as he looked at them, wondering how they could be so unhealthy already, with the town being sacked, less than a week ago. All six eyes bored holes into him: the child’s, silver, the lady’s, blue, and the old woman’s, brown. The old woman looked anything but afraid, which intimidated Job greatly. Usually, people ran from him.

“How can you represent St. Isidore?” The old woman demanded.

“The man claiming to be St. Isidore is not a saint,” the young lady continued.

“I’m hungry,” the little girl complained.

Job froze, unsure how to reply. “I,” he began, cautiously selecting his word “do represent St. Isidore. There was no one to anoint him, so he took On High’s anointment on himself. He wishes only to aid humanity in their transition to a great age.”

The three stared at him in silence for a moment longer.

“The future is flushed with blood,” the old woman stated.

“A saint should care for those in need,” the young lady observed.

“I’m cold,” the little girl cried.

Job’s knees buckled beneath him, and chills began to dance up his spine. His mouth fell open, but he could not think of anything to say. The women continued to stare at him, as though they were expecting something from him.

“What do you want from me?” he asked, his mouth suddenly dry.

“The burning will not satisfy you,” the old woman prophesied.

“Be the saint the world needs,” the young lady commanded.

“I’m weak,” the little girl whimpered.

With a gasp, Job took an astonished step backward, his eyes bulging and the air being shocked from his lungs. Closing his eyes, he shook his head violently.

“No, no,” he chanted to himself. “No, this cannot be real. This is in my imagination. There is nothing there.”

Opening his eyes once more, the women were still there, staring at him, unblinkingly.

“It is yours, Job,” all three of them said in unison. “Be the saint the world needs.”

Job screamed despite himself and, rather than run from the shop, he pulled out his torch, and fired it at the area where the women were standing. The shop was ignited in flame but, to his surprise, the women stood, unmoving, staring at him. He howled with frustration and terror, as he turned his back and ran from the shop.

Once outside, he turned back to the inferno. He could not see the women. Breathing in deeply, he smelled the burning herbs and wood. He could not smell the flesh. Firing up his wings, he launched himself into the sky as quickly as he could.

How could he explain to St. Isidore that he was being haunted?

How could he justify his actions, after what he had just seen?

Altering his path, Job flew away, toward the road heading out of New Helensdale. There must be something that he was missing.

The Lies of Destiny

Life during the War: The Pauper

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Life during the War: The Pauper

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