“Like I said on the phone, I can’t control myself anymore. There’s not much of me left. The rest might fight back. But you have to know that’s not me.”
Telling Finch in a candid moment months ago, “I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to lose control but still be there, knowing what I am doing.”
“I know, Wyte,” Finch said. Grinding his teeth. Biting his cheek until the blood came. A soundless scream building inside of him. “It’s going to be okay.”
But it wasn’t.
Finch closed the door behind him.
Drew his sword, tears streaming down his face.
* * *
What it took to kill a man transformed that way was almost what it took to kill a gray cap. Finch had killed a gray cap once. Before the Rising. When he was James Crossley. When it was just House Hoegbotton against House Frankwrithe & Lewden. Just poorly trained Irregulars patrolling neighborhoods. Making sure the enemy didn’t take hold in the cracks. Weeding them out from derelict, firebombed houses. Abandoned theaters. Courtyards that still held memories of massacres. Official Hoegbotton policy called gray caps “noncombatants” unless a unit felt under threat. Unofficial policy encouraged patrols to engage and drive off, “damage,” or kill. Back then, the gray caps supplied arms and ammo to Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Crossley was in charge of the patrol that night. They’d emerged from a warren of streets into a junkyard, surrounded by burnt-out buildings, that had once been a playground. Right after detaining and then releasing three youths without papers. The three had done enough to convince Crossley they belonged. Or enough for him to not want to arrest them and have them wind up in a holding cell where they might not last until morning.
They had only the light of a half-moon and the reluctant streetlamps burning a hundred feet away. But Crossley caught sight of something moving herky-jerky through the junkyard.
Seven in the patrol. Exposed. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing at first, because gray caps rarely came out into the open. It was like seeing a dolphin in a public pond. So he’d given the signal to spread out without knowing what they faced. Circle round. Converge.
He crept up, over broken girders and garbage, to find: a gray cap. Wandering in a circle. Talking to itself. No obvious injury. But something wrong. Like it was drunk.
When the gray cap saw them, it broke off its wandering dance. Tried to escape. But they had it hemmed in by then. Its teeth, needle sharp. Claws on its fingers. It expelled a fungal mist, but they were already wearing gas masks.
Crossley was the first to shoot it. It lurched. Righted itself. Ran toward another point of the compass. Two bullets. Another lurch. But absorbed. A cry. A leap like a dancer, then. As if finally realizing the danger. Crossley-Finch would never forget. It whirled past one man and then another. But instead of escaping, it turned to close the distance. As if enraged. Or sick. The light in its eyes green and everlasting. Tore into one man with its claws, slapping away his rifle. Took another bullet for its efforts, but scooped out the Irregular’s throat. The man crumpled to the ground. Crossley, scrambling to aim and fire, thought he saw a glint of a smile from the creature.
Darted. Flitted. Was gone. Then back again. Far then close. Each of them struggling to keep up with that speed. Grunting and cursing and sweating, as if it were something normal. Like digging a ditch or a grave. Too invested now. Knowing they couldn’t retreat, and that the gray cap had decided to fight.
Wherever the thing stepped, a golden dust rose up from its tread. Clouds of red-and-green spores radiated out from it like steam. Their gas masks protected them.
Low on ammo. They kept shooting it, and it kept taking the bullets.
Knives out. Finch shouted the order to fix bayonets. Down to four. Against one. Reminded them not to let the bayonets get stuck in gray cap flesh. It would reel them in, finish each of them off. But, still—one man’s rifle got stuck. Forgot to let it go. The gray cap jerked him forward, disemboweled him, then turned, stung by fresh cuts from all sides. Down to three men. Flesh sloughed off its body, but no blood. It did not wince. Kept shouting in its language. Sometimes mixing in human words. In a hissing, sibilant voice.
They kept at their task. Too busy to be afraid. Too busy to scream. Inside, its flesh was black, accordioned. Crossley saw as he came in close at its back. As it bit and kept biting another man. Finch brought his hunter’s knife down across the back of the gray cap’s leg. Felt the blade cut through something hard and thick. He pulled it out, taking a wedge of black flesh with it. The gray cap limped away. No longer as agile. A snarl. Finch and the others shot it in the face, the chest, the arms, the legs.
Still, it kept coming. Dancing in and out, its face a discolored mess. Eyes peeking out from the ruined flesh. Crossley lunging, driving his blade deeper into the leg as it turned to face one of his men. Dashed out as the creature tried to turn.
There was a give, and a wash of purple blood.
He stood back. Saw the gray cap standing on one leg.
“Murderers,” the gray cap crooned. “Murderers. In our city.”
Crossley wanted it dead in that moment. To shut it up. Caught in a bloodlust so primal that the enemy looked fey and beautiful in the moonlight. Distant and removed from what they were doing to it.
Now they converged, the three of them. It couldn’t evade them. Did it weep as they tore it to pieces? Did it make any human sound to make them stop? No. All it did was stare up at the hard stars as if they were but an extension of its eyes. Arms hacked and pulled off. Cut at. Peeled away. Tossed to the side. The red of its leg. While still it stared. While a cloud of spores erupted from the top of its head, puffing away, disappearing. Hacked, too, at the torso until there was just a head attached to a wreckage of neck. Still the thing smiled. Still it seemed to live. The reflexive life of a gecko’s tail.
Now they cursed and sobbed. Unable, as the bloodlust left them, to understand how they had been brought to this. How they could have done this. Even as they still wanted to kill it. Screaming. Shouting. Not caring if an enemy could hear them. Just wanting to keep on killing it until it was dead.
Finally, they burnt it, until it was just dead eyes laughing, asking if it had been worth it.
Soon even that burst into spores.
4
Nothing remained of Finch when he was done with Wyte. Not really. Blood or something like blood drenched him. His left hand gripped the sword tightly, the guard thick with gore. Wyte wouldn’t get a funeral. Wouldn’t get much of anything. He’d already begun the short, sharp process of becoming one of the forgotten. Nothing anybody could’ve done to save him from that.
Finch’s left shoulder sang with pain from the blow Wyte had given it. Left knee unsteady from having his legs taken out from under him. Toward the end. One last reflexive lunge from a creature that didn’t want to die. The whole time it had felt like it was happening to him. His steps were heavy from the weight.
The sounds had been horrific. Something had lived inside of Wyte. When it came out, Finch shot it. Then sliced it apart as it squealed. Was it part of Wyte? Was it the remnants of Otto? Finch didn’t care. He had just wanted it dead. Wanted to make sure Wyte wasn’t coming back.
No relation to the family man and husband Wyte had once been, before the Rising. No correlation between his life then and his death now. Something crazy. Something beyond prediction. Never sat on the stoop of Wyte’s former house, drinking out of his silver flask, and said, casually, “You’re going to turn into a monster, Wyte, and I’m going to kill you with a ceremonial sword forged by the Kalif’s empire.”