Chapter Two
“Why do you want me to write this down, boss?”
“Because it’s cool, asshole! Thinking about life and shit is part of what makes a rezzer whole. In fact, let’s start with that!”
–Hades, “Some Philosophical Shit”. 4 Years After.
* * *
Just another day in paradise.
Rain pelted down from thick, darkened clouds, shrouding Pandemonium’s otherwise brightened colors in a shade of grey. It didn’t usually get this intense. Most bad weather died out minutes after starting, especially this time of year. But lately, days like this were becoming more common, as if the Earth itself had come to renounce those who still walked its surface, hell-bent on finishing what the Hollowing had only started. An act of divinity levied against its rejects.
Leah marched on, her steel-toed boots leaving rippled in the puddles at her feet. Why couldn’t this guy have picked a better day to kill his friend?
The prisoner sat in front. Water struck his scalp, dribbling through the apertures in his rotted face before dripping down into the wisps of a beard and the torn clothes beneath. A worker by his looks, though he kept his head held high. Then again, there wasn’t much else he could do, not when his arms and legs were tied behind.
Leah drew close, keeping her face blank beneath her burgundy scarf. She had an inkling over where this would go based on what she’d heard before now, but it never helped to tip her hand. Not without talking to him first.
“Heard you’ve had a bit of a day…” she started before pausing, then turned to the guards nearby. “What the hell is this guy’s name?”
“Socrates,” Dwayne said before handing her the prisoner’s identification card.
“Are you shitting me?” She stared at the card and blinked. “Wasn’t the guy he Hunted named ‘Arimedes’ or some other Greek shit?”
“Aristotle,” Socrates corrected.
“Even better. Where the hell did they come up with that one?”
“Turns out they’re from the same Enclave,” Dwayne explained, his own red eyes apathetic from behind the ballistic mask that he never removed. “Did a little digging before you showed up, boss. They set themselves up in a museum, all with different philosopher names like that. Couldn’t tell you much more. The others died out for one reason or other. He’s the only survivor left.”
Leah stared into the rain as she considered the thought. “So you offed the last of your friends and ate his brain to keep your own going. That about it, Socrates?”
The prisoner nodded.
“Not even going to deny it, then?”
He hmph’d. “What if I told you that our group had an arrangement when we came to this city? If any of our reservoirs weakened enough to become dregs again, the others would consume them to strengthen our own. This ensured that their mind would not go to waste. However, events occurred too fast when it came to Plato, Pythagoras, and Thales, but Aristotle and I made the choice to act now before it was too late. Would you believe me, were I to share this version of events?”
“I’d ask for some proof,” Leah countered. “Easy thing to say that this Hunt was consensual when the other guy isn’t around to disprove it.”
“We did not plan this many steps in advance.”
“Some intellectuals you were.”
Socrates laughed hard despite the rain. “You’re not wrong. Back at the museum, we used to debate endlessly to keep our reservoirs stable, but it wasn’t until I tasted Aristotle’s brain that I achieved true enlightenment. Now, I see the truth for what it is. It doesn’t matter what you do to me next.”
We’ll see about that. Leah waved her hand, and the guards dispersed. She’d seen this act before. Play tough for the crowd, but beg for mercy the moment they were alone. The only way to get to the truth was to look into his eyes for herself.
“Alright, my man,” Leah said, “just you and me now. Got anything else to say, or are we going straight to a trial?”
“What difference would that make?” Socrates asked.
“Never know. Might be that you caught me in a good mood. Maybe your brain won’t be ground into fodder and fed into this neighborhood’s distribution supply come tomorrow. Deal with me and we might work out another way to keep anyone else from dying. But only if you tell me what happened. Every ounce of it. Good, bad, and fucking horrific.”
The muscles in his face remained still. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Leah narrowed her gaze. “I beg your pardon.”
“What difference would it make?” Socrates repeated, his eyes locked with hers. “Whether I live or die, it won’t matter in the slightest.”
Something about how this guy looked at her was starting to get under her skin. A sort of blasé confidence that bordered disinterest. Did he really not give a shit?
“Let me get this straight,” Leah said. “You killed your only friend in this world and consumed his brain just to keep your Rez going, and now that you’ve gotten what you wanted, you don’t care if you live to see tomorrow?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“Sounds like you should’ve swapped spots with Aristotle or just killed yourself a long time ago. Would’ve saved me a walk in the rain.”
“I suppose that dilemma will soon be rectified, regardless.”
She shook her head. “Two dead workers, all over nothing. What a fucking waste.”
Socrates simply sat and stared. “I feel sorry for you.”
That elicited a raise from her eyebrow. “Oh?”
“I have only become this intelligent recently, but I can see in your eyes that you have been shouldering this burden for years. I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised. You are the oldest Hunter, after all. You’ve seen more in a year than I could debate in a lifetime, so you know the same truth as me.”
“And what truth is that?” Leah wondered.
“That our kind is defined by our solitude. When our minds were hollowed and our bodies reincarnated, there was a severance to the continuity of reality itself. This was more than mere memory loss. We were removed from our past, our families, our cultures, our nations. Now, we are merely lost souls set adrift through an uncaring universe. Alone.”
Leah shrugged. “Seems like there’s a lot of us set adrift together.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Don’t I?”
He scoffed. “Plato used to make the same argument, but he did not see the world from the lens we do. The impermanence of our memories crafts a separate reality that we each experience, and it is within this divergence that we’re only separated further. Were I to survive, then a year from now, our memory – no, our reality – of this event would have differed, perhaps drastically. In spite of us sharing this very moment, we will inevitably one day find ourselves somewhere completely different. That is solitude, and no one is safe from this absolute truth.” He stared deep. “Not even you.”
Leah said nothing, her resolve grated. It would be a lie to pretend this had never occurred to her, but she couldn’t allow herself to dwell too much. Not now. Not while others were around to see. What a fucking irony.
So Leah drew her pistol instead. The same M1911 she always used, with a suppressor the size of a twelve-ounce can of soda and a hair trigger installed for ease. Rain continued to flow as she pressed the barrel between her prisoner’s eyes. This conversation had dragged on enough as is.
“Any last words?” Leah asked.
Socrates didn’t even blink. “How do you do it, Leah? How do you survive this existence, year after year, knowing what we know now?”
“Same as everyone else. I go one day at a time.”
She pulled the trigger. Undead ichor splattered against her face as the impact of the .45 burst through at such close range. Her fingers graced the areas that had been affected, dabbing her dark leather gloves in a different tint of black.
She made her leave. Dwayne watched on with the other guards, arms crossed.
“No trial?” he asked.
Leah yawned. “You heard the guy. He admitted to the crime right off the bat. Figured I’d not waste anyone’s time.” She turned to face Socrates one last time. His body was still slouched where it had been left, with blood spilling out from the ruins of his scalp. “At least some of us still have lives to live.”
* * *
What had driven her back here?
Leah wondered again as she stared out from her balcony, into the night sky, with a silver goblet of warmed bison blood in hand and Mozart’s Lacrimosa growing in tempo in the backdrop. Something about the weight and finality of this classical piece had been moving to her speed lately.
Pandemonium stood as it always had in front, a chaos only loosely bound. Asphodel overflowed with its ever-shifting deluge of neon lights and commerce. Tartarus sprawled out in its shadow, its denizens barely visible as they scurried from one alley to the next. Mother’s Grace glowed in a veneer of protection, while Elysium stood as a beacon of sin. Nothing had changed, and yet everything had, for with each passing month, more buildings would get toppled or erected depending on the whims of the city. Like the rest of her undead race, Pandemonium lived as an extemporaneous, myopic organism, seldom staying still for more than a few days lest the Hollowing reduce its form to nothing. But despite the city’s frequent changes, it always found a way to enter the same loops. Forward, backward, and nowhere. All at the same time.
Leah took a sip from her goblet. She had once considered abandoning this place for good. Just drive off into the sunset and not think about what would come next. So long as she was willing to embrace her own mortality, who cared where it would go.
And yet, she had found herself back at Pandemonium in the end. Her responsibilities had only grown since her exodus, and now, it was hard to remember how things had ever been different. Just shy of three years came and went since she’d fled this place with Liam. Three long years since she’d been trapped in a war between Hades and Mother that left them both dead, along with all her other friends. Three long years since that bloody mission over survival.
The one that left Leah alone in the end.
Her sight fell below. Not just me who’s alone, I guess.
A guy hung around the boundary between Asphodel and Tartarus, shouting atop a plywood box. Where the rest of the area could be defined as a sea of shadowed silhouettes drifting about, the light hit this one’s brown cloak at just the right angle to make him pop. A bulwark obstinately standing against the storm.
Leah knew his deal. She had driven by him a couple times now. The guy spent every day begging anyone else to read a book he’d found. He was so desperate for shared attention that he hadn’t left that plywood box for weeks and kept insisting that he didn’t need to eat brains so long as he had his book on hand. Everyone else just kept walking by, barely paying him mind.
It was pathetic to see, but as Leah watched the guy in the brown cloak, she wondered how different her circumstances were. Here she stood, at the top of her castle, with nothing more to give her company but endless luxury and the harsh melody of a dead man’s tune. She had her own plywood box, just bigger and brighter. No one else was here.
She pulled her bellflower out, its lilac petals a stark contradiction to the darkness of the world beyond. The light spilling out from her room formed a sheen across its reflective surface, reminding her that this was a mere replica of what she’d once had, given to her by Liam when at her lowest. The first had long since rotted away, and this replacement was a bitch to come by, but she’d finally found one that matched her memory and encased it in plastic. Now that moment would forever be captured inside its artificial petals. Could she say the same?
Leah stared deep, examining every nuance of the bellflower. There was something else here that she had never been able to see. A power hidden inside this memento. What was it that made her always so drawn?
Socrates was right. Her life could be defined by this isolation. Death was a foregone conclusion behind these walls, and Leah never had to feel vulnerable again, so long as she chose to remain right in the heart of her race’s capital, with all the bodies and protection to boot. There was no better place in this world to spend the rest of her days.
But still, that could never be enough by itself, for in spite of having so many others around, she’d never felt more alone than now. What the hell was she missing?
Leah thought of Liam again. About his new family and the shape their lives would be in. She closed her eyes and tried to will his image to the front of her mind.
All for nothing. It had been too long since they’d seen each other, so all that came to mind was a mix of greys and beige surrounded by unkempt hair. Even hollows were more recognizable compared to the specter in her mind.
Leah swallowed the last of her blood, set the goblet on the marble nightstand beside, then clasped her black-gloved hands onto the railing.
To think that this was supposed to have been a happily-ever-after ending for the two of them. Give me a break. Life never was so simple. Leah could see that now. It never ended until it did for good.
Her sight fell on the guy in the brown cloak one last time. He still shouted from atop his box, even as his mind continued to empty out. Like the rest of their cursed race, the Hollowing pressed on without mercy, and would never be satisfied until there were no rezzers left.
Leah wrapped her scarf back around her face and stepped inside. On her own or surrounded by an army of her kindred, it did not matter. The forces of the world might try to steal her soul, but she would continue to fight for her life until the bitter end and then some.
No matter what.
