Piotr turned to my remaining guard and said, “It’s time to open the roof. Go outside and tell the others to begin pulling the chains.” Without any response, the thing turned and stepped off of the catwalk, dropping twenty feet into the darkness below. I heard it hit the ground far more lightly and gracefully than its bulk would suggest.
Piotr relaxed, apparently content to wait for his orders to be carried out, and Anne spoke in her damaged voice. “Why are you doing this? You keep talking about justice and vengeance but if that were true, you’d have already killed us. Abe and Henry are the last ones alive who interfered with you, and you have them, but they’re still alive. Why?”
Piotr kept his gaze on the ceiling as he replied. “It’s not justice for Abe and Henry that I’m concerned with, although they’ll receive their measure as well. It’s all of us. All of humanity in its corrupt, hateful, self-serving glory. We praise ourselves for wholesale slaughter and call it glorious because we have labeled them the enemy. We blow up children to make a point, create anguish and destroy lives to preserve dogma, and commit genocide on a daily basis. Even now, somewhere in the world men are hacking women’s breasts off with a machete so they can’t feed their children in an attempt to wipe their ethnic group from the face of the Earth. And they feel justified in doing it. Proud, even. We need to be destroyed. That’s justice.”
“Even you?”
“Just because I can see clearly doesn’t mean I’m any better. There was a time, before I received guidance, when I thought I was righteous, that I was going to punish the wrong in the name of the right. But Abe gave me the gift of time. I came to understand that the problem wasn’t the men who killed my family, or the nation that spawned them, or their allies. It was just their nature. Our nature. They did what they did because they were in a position to do so, not because they were special in any way. They did it because they could, and given the chance, any one of us would have done the same. All it takes is the tiniest reassurance that we’ll be praised for doing the right thing, the acceptance of those around us. And we’re able to kill and mutilate with the worst of them.”
Harsh squealing echoed down to us from the ceiling as a sliver of the night sky became visible overhead. A rectangle of sheet metal as long as the roof and forty feet wide began to slide away, grinding harshly across the top of the building.
The sky that was revealed was wrong. The relentless cloud cover was still overhead, but now the faint corpse-light illuminating it was laced with vast shadows that curled and writhed so slowly you had to look away and back again to see it. The lower surface of the cloud cover was uneven, like the surface of the sea, and roiling in slow motion.
Anne was still trying to talk Piotr off the proverbial ledge, something that I knew was futile, just as I knew she had to try. “But what about the innocent? Even if it were possible to kill everyone, you’d be killing the victims of humanity’s crimes at the same time.”
He shrugged. “Innocent just means you haven’t had a chance to express yourself yet. We’re all monsters here.”
The roof section came away from the building and landed on the ground outside with a crashing racket. Light stronger than a full moon flooded the gym, revealing what the camp lanterns on the floor could not. The bleachers on the left and right walls were packed with worm-filled townspeople, sitting shoulder to shoulder the length of the building on both sides. Their hands were clenching and unclenching and their jaws were working and chewing on nothing as they stared upwards, towards the sky.
I felt despair so sharp that it could reach me even through my rage as I looked out into that vast crowd of lunatic husbands and wives, schoolteachers and shop clerks, all straining and shuddering in their seats. I wondered if Mazie’s father was in there somewhere.
Piotr gave us a moment to appreciate his accomplishment, and then climbed up the ladder. After everyone had followed him up and onto the catwalk, Piotr took Anne’s leash and pulled her away from the others. Chuck and Henry were left at the top of the stairs with their keepers.
Piotr led Anne and myself across the outer catwalk, which thrummed under our feet as we moved. Now that there was more light, we could clearly see the blood pit through the steel mesh of the catwalk’s floor, at least two stories below us. Being able to see through the floor, combined with the narrow three-foot width and a complete lack of handrails, made it a harrowing, dizzying experience.
The three of us walked down the right side of the outer perimeter without speaking. Anne glanced back at me repeatedly, but I didn’t know what to say to her. I was still unable to touch Piotr, and running away didn’t appear to be an option. Even if I could somehow get her free of the cord before Piotr could crush her windpipe, below us was a sea of hundreds of bags under Piotr’s control. I just met her eyes helplessly and kept walking. Being Anne, of course, she was having none of that.
“You know,” she said loudly to Piotr’s back. “It seems to me that you need Abe’s cooperation to pull this off for some reason, and you’re only getting that because you have hostages. Guess where you fucked up?” My heart stopped as she calmly turned and stepped off of the platform, cord still tied firmly around her neck.
56
Her face showed no fear and no regret as she stepped off the platform to her death, her courage and her spirit expressed in one magnificent frozen moment.
I want to say that as she stepped into open space, I weighed her life against all others, against the world itself. I want to say that I set her aside for the greater good and that I watched the cord slice through her flesh until it met bone, jerking her to a stop in mid-air, savior of us all.
But the truth is that I didn’t. It never even occurred to me. I ran for her, arms outstretched in front of me, while her hair floated in place around her face as she began to fall. The world could go straight to hell for all that it crossed my mind. But I wasn’t going to make it. Not even close. Her head dropped below the level of the walkway even as I threw myself down onto the catwalk, my hands grasping empty air.
But Piotr wasn’t going to be beaten like that. That same wispy, foggy tendril that protected him and snatched bullets out of the air snapped out and arrested her fall just before the cord pulled taut.
He laughed and clapped his hands together in delight. “It appears that Abe doesn’t share your views on self-sacrifice, but he certainly shares mine on sacrificing the rest of the world.” Anne floated gracefully up over the catwalk, and then gently down again. “Don’t worry, there will be plenty of sacrifice to go around soon enough, and I promise that I won’t save you when it’s time.”
Tears were running down Anne’s face as she balled her fists up and screamed, “What do you want from me? You won’t let me die, but you say that you’re going to kill me. You won’t say what this is all about except for some bullshit about justice and revenge and whatever the fuck else. What. Do. You. Want?”
Her head rocked back and blood flew from her mouth as Piotr’s hand smashed across her face. His voice, when he spoke, was dinner-party calm and reasonable. “I want you to remain alive until it’s time for you not to be alive, and to be quiet until then. Is that so much to ask?”
Her knees went slack and her eyes glazed over, but instead of hitting the ground she rose up a few inches instead, floating in place. Piotr turned around without another word and began walking, towing her behind him on a misty tether.
I stormed past her and slammed my fist with all my strength into the back of his eighty-year-old neck in a killing blow. My fist stopped, halted by my own arm, inches before it touched him. I tried again. And again. I knew before the first swing that things would be no different than the last time I tried attacking Piotr, but I couldn’t stop myself. I hammered down with both fists, breath hissing out from between my clenched teeth and spittle flying with every forced exhalation.