Withered + Sere (Immemorial Year Book 1) (19 page)

“What?”

“His name. Is it really Psycho?”

“No,” Cavalo admitted. “That’s….” He stopped.

“Surely he has one. He’s not just the
Dead Rabbit
. He’s not just the
boy
. He’s not
just
a psycho.” SIRS looked strangely pleased at this.

“Does it matter?” Cavalo tried to keep the irritation out of his voice.

SIRS looked over at him and clicked. “Of course it does. We are nothing without the names we are given. It’s how we know who we are.” He clicked again. “I am Sentient Integrated Response System. SIRS.” He pointed at the dog, who huffed at the spider fingers. “That slobbering beast is Bad Dog.” He looked back at Cavalo, and if it was possible for a robot to look shrewd, SIRS did right then. “And you are just Cavalo. Right?”

“I don’t know his name,” Cavalo said. “I don’t know if even
he
knows.”

“Have you asked him?”

Didn’t have time
, Bad Dog grumbled.
Too busy playing Hide-In-The-Bushes, getting chased by monsters, getting laid, and getting shot at.

Cavalo felt affronted. “That’s… exactly what happened.”

Bad Dog’s tail thumped.

SIRS glanced between them. “One day, I’ll figure out how to hear the four-legged freak like you do.”

I want to pee on your leg to make you rust
, Bad Dog said.

Cavalo snorted.

“What did he say?” SIRS asked.

“He hopes you find that too,” Cavalo told him.

Bad Dog sighed.

“We need to go talk to him,” the man said. “The boy. The Dead Rabbit. SIRS?”

“Yes, Cavalo.”

“Patrick.”

“Patrick?”

“Patrick. I heard the other Dead Rabbits talking. The ones the boy was traveling with. Patrick seems to be their leader.”

“Is that so?” The robot’s eyes glowed. “Funny how even monsters can form a democracy.”

“Or a dictatorship.”

Cavalo would have sworn the robot smiled, even though it was physically impossible. “There is that, yes. I suppose, though, it was only a matter of time.”

“Why?”

“From chaos and anarchy rise the strong to lord over the weak. It is how it’s always been. It happened time and time again Before. Why shouldn’t it happen now?”

“They killed Warren.”

“Oh dear. That poor, poor man.” SIRS sounded honestly upset. “He was very nice to me the few times I met him, even if he did ask to see my insides. Alma?”

Cavalo shrugged. “As best as you can expect.”

“And you suspect our prisoner had something to do with it?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. The government men. The ones from the UFSA. United Federated States of America. They were going to kill him. I… intervened.”

You did a bit more than that
, the bees said, sounding like the robot.

“Do they live?” SIRS leaned forward, his metal hands resting on the table top.

“No.”

SIRS beeped and whirred. “And that is how you got shot?”

“Ah. No. That was Deke.”

SIRS shook his head disapprovingly. “That boy. How he has been allowed to have a gun, I’ll never know. Did you kill him too?”

Cavalo looked sharply at SIRS. “Of course not! He’s just a kid. It was an accident.”

“Of course not,” SIRS echoed. “Will you kill that Dead Rabbit in there?”

“If need be.”

“But why?” The robot tilted his head. “He’s just a kid.”

“It’s different.”

“How? He’s not much older than Deke. The Dead Rabbit is twenty-three years, four months, and approximately six days old.”

“You scanned him?” Cavalo should have remembered that.

“Yes. To make sure there was no evidence of infection or disease. I will not allow such things to enter my facility.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Aside from the scarring? No. I did a more in-depth scan of him while you slept and found that his vocal cords have been severed. It’s why he cannot speak. It’s likely he never will.”

“It can’t be fixed?”

“Maybe it could have. Before. But not now. Much was lost.”

Cavalo grunted in response.

“And if you won’t kill him,” the robot said, “what then? Let him go?”

“He would lead the rest back here. His people.”

“This Patrick you speak of.”

“Yes.”

“So if you can’t find the reason to kill him and you can’t let him go, what shall you do with him?”

“I don’t know.” Cavalo was growing tired again. “Leave him in the cage, I guess. Has he eaten?”

“A little. The bare minimum.”

“Slept?”

“A few hours, at least. He sleeps lightly, though. Always seems to be alert and at the ready.”

“That right.”

“And in case you’re wondering, he’s shit and pissed as well.” The robot clicked and whirred.

“SIRS,” Cavalo barked sharply.

The robot’s insanity came through: “Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist and string theorist, classified nine types of parallel universes: quilted, inflationary, brane, cyclic, landscape, quantum, holographic, simulated, and the ultimate. It is in the quilted multiverse that every possible event will occur an infinite number of times. The speed of light prevents us from being aware of these identical areas.”

Cavalo waited. He thought he could faintly smell something burning.

The robot leaned forward, his voice going normal again as if nothing had happened. Cavalo didn’t know if he was even aware of these episodes. “One day, before the End, there was a prisoner here,” SIRS said. “He was, by all accounts, a changed man from the evil who had first walked into the prison. He’d raped and murdered five men and two women over the course of ten years. Eventually he was caught and sentenced to life in prison.”

“Not death?” Cavalo asked, in spite of himself. He didn’t understand how times worked Before. Not completely. If this man had been alive now, had been caught doing what he’d done, he would have been torn apart in the streets before he could even be arrested.

The robot clicked his fingers on the table. They echoed above the storm howling outside. “Not death. They tried, of course, but in exchange for a guilty plea and no possibility of parole, they let him live. It was thought better for the families of the survivors. So they could get answers to the question of what their loved ones’ last moments were like. So they could look into the man’s eyes and see what their sons and daughters, their brothers and sisters, saw before they died.”

“A kindness,” Cavalo murmured.

“Maybe, but that’s not the point. This terrible man was here for many years. A change overcame him after a time, and he took up religion as these men sometimes do. He seemed to have found such peace within himself, almost an enviable serenity, even here in this cage. He didn’t necessarily ask for forgiveness from the prison’s priest, but he did attempt to seek an understanding as to why he’d done what he’d done, how he could be capable of such things, and to make right what life he had left.”

“And did he?” Cavalo asked. “Did he find his understanding?”

The robot’s eyes lit up further. “One could say he did. He used the end of a wooden spoon carved into a sharp point to slice the throat of the priest and the other end to gouge out his eyes, all in the space of forty-three seconds. It was said the poor priest was alive when the bad man excised his eyes. They found him covered in the priest’s blood, laughing. When asked why he did what he did, the bad man said that he realized that he did the things that he did because he was a monster. That his insides had rotted and that would never change, no matter the cage of man or God he was kept in. And that one day, he would be free, regardless of the cost.”

Cavalo closed his eyes. “And did he get free?”

“Oh yes. They were all freed, I think, when the fire came, for what is the body but another cage?” The robot reached out and touched the scar on the side of Cavalo’s head. Cavalo did not flinch.

“Why are you telling me this?”

SIRS pulled his hand away. “The capacity for change is a rare thing indeed. And once your insides are spoiled and rotten, well… usually that is how they remain.”

“The boy.” Cavalo didn’t know if he was asking a question.

“Who knows?” SIRS said. “Unfortunately, we’re fresh out of priests to find out.”

“That’s not funny,” Cavalo said.

“It is,” the robot said as he laughed his mechanical laugh. “You just don’t know it yet. Remember, no cage of man or God. But he may still be in a cage yet. Like you.” He stopped laughing abruptly and his eyes flashed once. Twice. Three times. “Regardless, I do know one thing about your Psycho.”

“What?” Cavalo was unnerved and wished the conversation over.

“He’s awake and banging on the bars, motioning to one of my panels. It seems as if he’s trying to get our attention.”

the cage of man or god

SIRS TRIED
to get Cavalo back into bed, telling him that he was nowhere near ready to cross a storm-filled courtyard to get to the cells. Cavalo brushed this aside. He was tired, yes, and growing more so by the minute, but that uneasiness at having lost the last ten days began to creep up on him again, and he worried about going back to sleep. What if he woke up and days had passed? Weeks?

“Besides,” he reminded SIRS as Bad Dog brushed against his legs, “we’ll take the tunnels. You know this.”

“The wet and cold tunnels,” SIRS said. “You could catch a chill and die a horribly painful death due to pneumonia. And while you are gasping for your final breaths through your fluid-filled lungs, I will stand above you and say, ‘Now, don’t you think you should have listened to me?’”

I won’t let you die,
MasterBossLord
, Bad Dog said, growling at the robot.
Maybe the tin man shouldn’t go because he’ll rust.

“We won’t tell him that, though, will we?” Cavalo said.

The robot looked between the two of them. “What did he say?”

“That you are the most amazing thing in creation.” The man shrugged into a coat SIRS handed him, trying to keep from wincing as his chest pulled.

I did not!

“He did, did he?” The robot leaned over and pinched the dog’s ears gently. “Glad you finally figured that out, you disgusting creature.”

Bad Dog glared at SIRS and Cavalo.

“I can’t dissuade you?” SIRS asked.

“No.”

“I could just kill the Dead Rabbit. Force all the oxygen out of the room.”

“But you won’t.”

The robot sighed. “No. Not yet at least. But if I feel he is interfering with my patient, don’t think I won’t consider it.”

“I’m fine.”

“Yes, and that’s why you keep grimacing and trying to hide it from me. Because you’re fine.”

“Open the tunnel, SIRS.”

For a moment Cavalo thought he wouldn’t. There was something about the way the robot stood, a tenseness he didn’t think he’d seen before (or thought was even possible in a machine). But then it passed. Or maybe it had never been there at all.

The robot turned and walked to the far wall, placing his hand against one of the panels. It glowed briefly and there was the sound of a machine winding up deep below them. The concrete vibrated against their feet. A yawning black mouth appeared in the floor as a four-foot section of concrete pulled back, revealing the entrance to the tunnels underneath the prison. They connected each of the barracks and had done so for the entire prison in the Before. Now many of the tunnels had collapsed and were blocked off. SIRS had cleared out the ones leading to the still-standing buildings. It’d taken him almost seven years, he’d said once quite proudly.

Why did you do it?
Cavalo had asked.

I needed
something
to do
, came the reply.
Years take longer when you are alone.

And no one else ever came here?

They did. But they always left.
And on that subject, the robot would say no more.

FIFTEEN FEET
overhead, water dripped down through cracks in the concrete. The raging wind above sounded like faraway screaming from under the earth. It was cold. Cavalo could see his breath as they moved through the tunnels.

Lights embedded into the floors on either side of the walls dimly lit the tunnel. Bad Dog sniffed the floor and watered the cement. SIRS walked in front of them, leading the way through the cold gloom.

Cavalo moved slowly, the pain in his chest getting worse with every step he took. He was cold. He was sweating. He felt slightly out of breath. The bees in his head buzzed loudly, wondering just what he was
DOING
, and he should be in
BED
, and did he want to catch his death?
Did he
?

Maybe he did, they reasoned. After all, he’d tried to kill himself once before. He’d tried his damnedest. And he could have fallen into that great sleep if he’d just chosen the right goddamn
door
. He could have been
happy
. He could have been finally and completely
happy
. He was given a chance, and just like everything else he’d done in his life, he’d fucked that one up too.

Cavalo tried to push the bees away. He really did. He knew they weren’t real, much like he knew he couldn’t hear Bad Dog’s voice, much like he knew there had been no doors, and much like he knew this world, this crazy, cruel, dark world, was possibly just a dream.

“Everything okay back there?” SIRS asked mildly, as if he knew exactly what was going on in Cavalo’s head. For all the man knew, the robot did. Cavalo saw a flash of orange as the robot turned his head to glance back at him.

“Fine,” Cavalo said, keeping his voice even.

“We could go back.”

“No.”

“I almost came looking for you, you know. When you were out hunting and didn’t come back when you said you would. I was about to leave.”

This surprised Cavalo. The robot had an almost unnatural fear (though the fact that a robot could have a fear about anything at all didn’t weigh as heavily on Cavalo’s mind as much as he thought it should have) about stepping outside the prison. He would do fine on the prison grounds during the summer, but anything beyond the barracks caused the robot to lapse into his insane babble even quicker. SIRS said it was because his operating system was integrated into the prison grounds and walls. Cavalo didn’t think that was the only reason. “You did?” he said.