Herring looked away, his fist clinching beneath the table. He wasn’t shocked to hear of Virgo’s collection. It had become a common practice amongst the Highers in recent years. Upper class people no longer displayed deer heads on their walls or laid down bear skin rugs. No, now their homes were decorated with an even more precious commodity. An entire business was emerging, where workers would risk venturing the Bottom to hunt survivors, or as the Highers called them: “savages.” They would hunt the savages, skin them, and sell their hides to the Highers. The faces were especially lucrative.
“She asked me if she could try one on,” Virgo continued, a faint smirk on his face. He enjoyed seeing Herring’s agitation. “I insisted. She kissed me on my cheek and reached for the face of a young Hispanic. A surprising choice. Hand in hand, we walked out across my room and out onto my balcony. I’m not sure if you know this, Detective, but I live on the edge of the city. So, that night, the view from my balcony was quite breathtaking, the full moon illuminating the sea of savages below. Abigail trembled seeing such a thing, the horrible illness that has overtaken the Bottom. It was a whirlpool of mindless cannibalism, a feeding frenzy of a fallen people. We could see them down there, tearing each other apart, desperately clawing at the pillars that support the ground beneath our feet now. Have you ever seen that, Detective? Do you know what it really looks like on the Bottom?”
Herring took a deep breath. “Get on with it. What happened?”
Pratt sat on the other side of the glass, chewing his thumb nail like he always did when he got nervous. He could almost feel Herring preparing to spring across the table. Vincent acquiesced and continued, slowly unbuttoning the top few buttons of his dress shirt.
“Voices from inside my home counted down the New Year. Five! Four! Three! She quickly put on her mask while I put on mine.” Again, Vincent dropped his eyes, some sort of pain in his face. “It was in that moment I knew she had to die, like the others. But, she wasn’t like the others and that’s what made me sad. She was merely cut from the same fabric, a fabric that had been sewn over the many generations before her. She showed me that there is no such thing as ‘innocence’ anymore. She showed me with those pretty brown eyes of hers… Through the holes of some strange man’s face.
“I leaned into her, our lips joining in a passionate kiss for the New Year. And even in the heat of our kiss, in my mourning of the death of virtue, I couldn’t help but laugh. She asked me what was so funny and wiping tears from the corner of my eyes, I told her, ‘Why, my dear, you’ve got something on your face!’”
Vincent Virgo’s voice trailed off into a somber laugh, as if his joke was as bitter as it was sweet.
Now smiling, the Higher continued, “I thrusted her over the balcony and watched her get swallowed by the sea of savages below. She was beautiful in her final moments, even as they ripped the flesh from her bones.”
erring shot out of his chair. His face red with fury, he flipped the steel table and lunged at the Higher. He lifted the Higher out of his seat by the collar of his shirt. On the other side of the glass, Pratt cursed under his breath. Detective Herring had lost it. It was time to intervene.
“Is this some sort of joke to you?” Herring spat. “Why did you really kill these people?”
“I told you why.”
“Oh, because you’re so self-righteous, right? You’re some sort of hero who cares for the little guys. Just why would you care about the little guys, huh, Mr. Virgo? Why would you care what people like you did to people like me?”
Struggling, Vincent separated himself from Herring’s clutches. His coolness had given way to a passion as unabridged and shameless as his adversary.
“Don’t be so blind, Detective! People like me, people like you, us, them. In the end it doesn’t matter, we’re all just people. People who hurt and hate each other not out of reason, but out of some sort of animalistic instinct. That’s what it is, Detective. Why I hated people like Oliver Watson, why I hate people like you. Because at our roots, we are no better than the diseased savages feeding on each other on the Bottom.”
“So, you have no remorse for killing, for what you did to Abigail? Because she was a savage.”
I am wiping the face of the earth of all its blemishes, so it can be beautiful again.”
Swiftly reclaiming Vincent’s collar, Herring cocked his fist back and unloaded. Repeatedly, he struck Vincent’s face, drawing blood by the second blow. He dropped to the floor by the time Pratt entered the room.
“What… what are you doing?”
Herring didn’t face his comrade. He kept his eyes on the beaten mess writhing on the ground.
“Some hands-on justice. This piece of shit is probably going to walk anyway and he knows it. So, why not? Why not just punish him now? While we have him.”
Vincent Virgo hollered from the floor, his laugh echoing through the room.
“Justice. Punishment. You sound like me, Detective, before I actually grew up and took action. Before I saw man for what he is. Come on. See me for what I am! Snuff me out from this world! Do it! Do it!”
Herring pulled his pistol and aimed it at Virgo’s face. Before Pratt could stop him, he pulled the trigger. Herring was indifferent to the splatter of scarlet on his face. It seemed almost therapeutic to him, to see that the Higher’s blood was as red as his. No more. No less.
Prat fled, as much out of fear as shock, and Herring was left alone with the body, left in silence to realize that Vincent Virgo was right all along.
In the end, through scars and masks, they were the same.
Vortex
Gregory L. Norris
The mother—she could have been their biological mother, though in recent days, it was impossible to be sure who belonged to the real family units and which people had simply bonded together in the chaos following the invasion—clutched the youngest girl protectively against her. She and the two older girls held hands in a chain and walked in formation along the side of the highway. With so many people crowding together onto the fresh two-lane flattop, the last shiny trace of government stimulus funds, it grew increasingly more difficult to breathe. They’d walked for days, which added to the burden, and it had rained; a cloying, hot May rain that clung unpleasantly to the skin.
The family exited the shadow of an overpass that sat in pieces on the other side of the highway, the metal there showing burn marks around the places where it had liquefied to slag. The mother, holding the youngest girl’s weight on her hip and head on her shoulder, turned away from the flyblown remains visible at the edges of the rubble. The view on their side of the highway wasn’t much better. The rain had run into an area of deadfall precipitously close to the pavement. People bathed in that stagnant pool. Some, she noted, wrapping her free arm around the nearest of the two girls marching in step beside her and calling the other close, floated face down.
This was what life had become after the first vortexes formed over major cities, she thought, and the brief war was unofficially lost to a merciless enemy who’d claimed victory without so much as showing its face to the conquered.