current

Warden

by Kjell Williams

“Even with higher readings, no Warden has ever been successful,” the real Brother Lucas had said, interrupting Klaus's pre-trial meditation. Lucas’s face had seemed unusually pale that morning, almost shining, as though he’d oiled his head without shaving.

“Encephalographs aren’t everything,” Klaus answered, trying to keep the resentment from his voice. He was part of the first team sent to the monastery, had charted the Viewers’ brainwave patterns himself. One way or another, the greatest Viewers had all been exceptions to the typical chart.

“Of course,” Lucas said, smiling politely. “But evolution is a gradual process.”

Klaus closed his eyes, took a deep breath. He’s the Harvester of Doubt right now, he reminded himself. Lucas was testing his faith and will, trying to save his life without jeopardizing the Order.

“A gradual build-up,” Klaus said, opening his eyes, “but with sudden manifestations.”

Lucas nodded, adding, “Under the right conditions.”

Silent, Klaus stared at the starburst-shaped scar on the inside of his left wrist. Plankton, he knew. Like the rest of the Order, he didn’t know its proper name, only its story—how introducing fish into its tank provoked a flip in genetic switches, and the once-smooth plankton grew spines.

Lucas shook his head. “Awareness compels evolution,” he said, “but we’re more complex than plankton and spines.”

“Of course, but the principle is the same. And it is what the last Viewer foretold, is it not?”

“More or less,” Lucas agreed. “Though she was the most cryptic. `Spines growing in the desert’ isn’t precise.”

“I know,” Klaus admitted. “But Ragnarök swims in the air around us. It has ever since the war. It has turned us into a fragmented species, patches of refugees holed up in caves—”

“Isolated but for the occasional, wandering refugee,” Lucas interrupted. “I know the creed, just as I know the phrase seems tailored to our Order, implicating us, making us responsible.” He sighed. “But none of this mentions you. Why you?”

Why not? Klaus thought. He had no idea why, only that he had to try, that he wouldn’t fail—couldn't fail—and that Life had chosen to flow through his own life, and he had no choice. Finally, he shrugged, looked up at Lucas, and shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “But I trust the fundamental principle of creation.”

“Life happens?”

“Life happens.”

Brother Lucas had sighed as he stood up to leave. “Just don’t make me carve that on your tombstone,” he had said.

Brother Lucas was a good Harvester of Doubt.

Klaus turned to the Specter of Lucas walking beside him. It began appearing now and then ever since he left the caves just outside of TempleLab. It had Brother Lucas’s face--the same as it had been before the start of the trial—but its body was little more than a colored shadow with arms and legs.

“You’re not real,” Klaus insisted. From his peripheral vision, Lucas shook his head, disappearing before Klaus could command him to vanish again.

Klaus looked down at the emergency radio in his left hand. For days, it had been the timer and background locus for his formal meditation sittings. Fully wound, it provided fifteen minutes of white noise. It was all the radios had been useful for after the war, when the Ragnarök nano-virus was unleashed.

For two days—as long as it took to kill the average, unendured person—the Order had huddled in the monastery’s basement, listening to the reports of the world’s first “intelligent microbial weapon” as it wiped out every animal larger than an insect. With nobody alive at the stations, the radios had nothing to offer outside of meditation.

Until now, Klaus thought. Every step was agonizing. Walking had become limping and stumbling shortly after he’d left the caves just north of TempleLab, but it was worth it. Just as long as I find some shelter. As he stumbled along toward the forest ahead—green and promising—he smiled.

“Life happens,” he muttered.

“As does death,” Lucas said, appearing beside him again. Klaus glared at it, but said nothing. As he stumbled toward the sunrise and hills ahead, he wondered if its body had become more defined, solid.

Lucas sighed, shaking his head. “Nobody quotes the fundamental corollary any more.”

“No need,” Klaus said, his voice bitter. “Death is everywhere.”

“No desire,” Lucas corrected, “but your reason is right.”

It shrugged in Klaus’s peripheral vision. He started to argue, but it dropped back a few meters, ending the discussion.

“They’re still clear,” Lucas said.

Staring at the tears in his hand, Klaus grunted. He wiped his hand on his knee as he forced himself to his feet. He barely remembered stumbling; falling was less than a blur.

“Nine days.” Specter whistled, impressed. “Six was the previous record, no?”

“Life happens,” Klaus said, rubbing his left wrist.

Lucas shook his head reproachfully and frowned. “Three days in a cave didn't hurt. How is it?” He pointed at Klaus’s left wrist, where a background of dark bruises had taken shape behind the white scar. “Once they start on the dense connective tissues—"

“Shut up,” Klaus spat. He turned back to the forest, shook his head, and glanced back at the caves two days back.

“Too far,” Lucas said, reading his thoughts. “What’re we going to do?”

“We?” Klaus laughed, exasperated. He pulled out the emergency radio, wound it up, and held it out like a divining rod. “I use the key,” he said, closing his eyes and turning slowly. He cocked his head slightly as he tried to make out the subtle pattern within the static—the Ragnarök signal—barely recognizable in the ultra-high frequencies. When he found it, he began walking in a widening circle.

“Well?” Lucas asked once he stopped.

“Northeast is where it’s weakest,” Klaus said and began stumbling toward the hills. Lucas bowed slightly as he passed, extending a pale hand like an usher.

“So what are you, anyway?” Klaus asked.

Lucas shrugged. “I’m your hallucination, aren’t I?”

“Maybe I’m syntrophy.”

Klaus shook his head and crawled up against a large rock. He’s worse than the endless hills, he thought, rolling over to look up at Lucas.

“Syntrophy?”

“Of faith and doubt.”

“Hardly.” Klaus laughed bitterly, until he coughed blood.

“It’s not so impossible,” Lucas mused. “More likely than the first eukaryote, you know, when the methanogenic and anaerobic came together in a changing—"

“I know the story!” Klaus spat. He wiped the blood from his eyes before he settled an angry glare on Lucas and staggered to his feet.

“Of course,” Lucas said. He bowed mockingly, his hands firm at his sides, before walking beside Klaus in silence.

“It makes sense,” Lucas said.

Klaus wiped the blood from his eyes, wondering how long ago he’d fallen.

“I’m your response to Life’s last, cruel joke,” Lucas continued. “Your attempt to assimilate and evolve in death.”

“Hell,” Klaus wheezed. His lungs burned as he forced the air through his swollen throat. He coughed as he struggled to his knees. Glaring at Lucas he wheezed again, “Go.”

Lucas shook his head. “I can’t do that. You need me, somehow, to help you figure out why you could finally find the key—or the next step to getting it, at least—and yet it’s still too late to matter.” He knelt down next to Klaus, resting his forearm on his knee. “We’re dying.”

“Says who?” Klaus struggled to one knee, swayed, and caught himself with his right hand.

“Me,” Lucas said. He frowned, watching as Klaus forced himself up and left a tiny pool of blood where his palm had been. “And I’m you.”

“Only a part,” Klaus said, forced his legs to keep climbing the hill by promising to roll down the other side.

Lucas shrugged. “Whatever.”

It took Klaus ten more falls to crest the next hill. He stopped at the top, noting the patches of wheat growing near the bottom, the blurred lines of the rows from before the war. He followed the lines into the valley, where random animal carcasses lay bloated near a stream. It’s not too late, he thought, noting the presence of a fresh vulture carcass.

“But it is,” Lucas said, stepping between Klaus and his view of the hilltop ahead. “Everything’s built up, waiting for the time of manifestation. Death is like Life. It evolves too, you know.”

Klaus tried to scream for Lucas to move, and instead collapsed, coughing his words in blood and bits of his throat. He watched as Lucas’s feet stepped within an inch of him, noticing for the first time that Lucas never cast a shadow.

“I heard you back in the cave,” Lucas said softly, “righteously declaring the need to go beyond the hope of return to force Life’s hand.” He leaned in closer, so that his voice came from just outside Klaus’s left ear. “But why? You must have known it would come to this.”

“Faith,” Klaus croaked, his body clenching from the pain of forcing the words through his body.

“Faith?”

Klaus nodded.

“Faith in what?” Lucas asked. He stood up and began pacing in thought. After a minute, he stopped and turned toward Klaus. “In Life,” he said, admiration tinting his voice, “but not in your own.” He barked a laugh and knelt back down in front of Klaus. “Even if Life kills you?”

Nodding, Klaus opened his eyes and wiped away the blood and tears, the pink blur of the ground beneath him. He struggled to push himself up, erupted in a fit of coughing, and collapsed. He stared at Brother Lucas’s boots, for the first time noticing the worn soles, the small holes in the cracked and faded leather. It was almost enough to fool him.
Almost, he thought. But still no shadow.

Klaus rolled onto his back, tried to rock himself to a sitting position, but settled back on his elbows and stared at the specter.

It smiled at him, sad and full of condolences, as it turned and began walking away. When Klaus blinked, it was gone, replaced by a stream of smoke rising up from the top of the next hill. Klaus wiped his eyes, squinting the pink world into focus, until he saw the outlines of two people beneath the smoke.

The crawl to the edge of the hill left a trail of spattered blood, uncountable oblong clusters of droplets for every coughing fit. Finally, with one push, the world began spinning against his head; the brush and rocks beneath him became a single, scraping pain.

“I understand you, Warden Klaus,” he heard Lucas say when he reached bottom. “And now, so do you.”

Klaus was sure he was dead. Everything was dark, numb. But not quiet. A low noise hummed all around him while a high-pitched ringing came out of his ears. The was a thudding rhythm, syncopated, pulsing. A heartbeat, he realized, but not.

“Dad!” he heard a voice say, and he felt himself, somewhere, bleeding a warm, steady stream.

Klaus blinked his eyes open. The face of a small boy flashed in front of his face. He had rosy cheeks beneath sunken, malnourished eyes, peach fuzz instead of whiskers. Twelve? Klaus wondered. Maybe thirteen?
In the dark again, the ringing—subtle, distant, and perpetual—faded out and in, came from without and within, as though he was a part of a conversation with a murmuring crowd of distorted voices, just beneath his comprehension.

“How is it?” a man’s voice asked. It grunted, and Klaus felt his armpit explode with pain, his wrist twist in a tight grip.

He blinked again. The boy was standing above him, looking down. “Not good,” the boy said, shaking his head. “He’s loud.”

Loud. Klaus grasped for the emergency radio, flinging his free arm wildly until he collapsed on his back.

First he heard the man curse. Then he saw his face, beaded with sweat, exerted and frustrated. He batted the radio out of Klaus’s hand, sent it skidding through the dirt.

“He’s delusional,” the man grunted and grabbed his arm again, twisting it as he pulled Klaus up.

“No—” Klaus wheezed. It was all he could get out before he erupted into another fit of coughing. As he slipped back into darkness, he felt his own blood on the man’s shirt smear across his face.

Within that darkness, a handful of lights appeared, tiny specks of light clustered in the air like blood spatter on the ground. They revolved around him like leaves caught in the wind, growing brighter and murmuring louder when they came close to each other, as though they were trying to talk over each other. Then separated, spread out, they disappeared into whispers.

Klaus awoke to the crunching of grass and the pain of swollen joints and bruised tissue.

“It’s too late,” the man told the boy. “Even if we get him back to Oasis.”

“I know,” the boy said. He looked at Klaus for a moment, then looked past him, behind him. “But we can’t stay here with him. It’s too loud.”
“I know,” the man sighed. He stopped, jerked Klaus higher up on his shoulder, and began walking again.

Klaus moaned, trying to yell for them to stop, to go back for the radio. It’s the key, he screamed in his head, willing them to hear it. The clusters began to fade away, until Klaus could only hear the memory of the faint static pop in his ears.

When he forced his eyes open again, they were at the top of the hill, moving down into a small valley, where he saw what looked like an abandoned industrial park surrounded by small fields.

It looks like an oasis, he silently agreed, noting the large pocket of green surrounded by a ring of sparse vegetation and more scattered animal carcasses on his side of the border.

The boy was ahead, walking backwards while he looked behind them. “There are other people back there,” the boy said. He had a look in his eye, determined and driven. Klaus imagined his own eyes possessed that look whenever Life had chosen to flow through him, whenever he knew he had no choice but to flow with it.

“Spines growing in the desert,” Brother Lucas said.

Klaus turned his head—it was all he could manage—to see Brother Lucas walking beside them. He smiled and put a warm hand on Klaus’s shoulder, squeezed it gently.

Life happens, Klaus wanted to say, but he couldn't even cough any more. Instead, he smiled back at the Specter of Brother Lucas and let himself slip into darkness.

Kjell Williams is a recent graduate of the University of Central Florida. He currently lives in central Kentucky, where he works all day as a lackey in the Rent-to-Own industry and much of the night with his wife's chinchilla rescue. His story "Life at the Edge of Nowhere" is due to be published in an upcoming issue of Electric Velocipede.