The storm had passed, and Prague was calm.
There were gaps in the stone paving where the insurgents had salvaged rocks and hurled them at the police. Underneath the old paving there was synthetic flesh: exposed, red-raw, veins throbbing in a lattice.
I wandered through the deserted streets in a daze. The nanolayer ads that had once coated the historical buildings had been ripped off by the mob and burnt. Plumes of black smoke still emanated from all corners of the city, even though the insurgents that had caused the fires had long since melted away. Just like that pied piper who had disappeared from Hamelin without a trace.
The blood-red flesh of the streets gave the cityscape some blotches of color. I stepped onto it—it was hard, but elastic enough that it felt like I really was on top of a living organism.
I headed for the outskirts of the town, careful not to trip on the stone paving that now stood a couple of inches above the flesh. I felt like the only person left in the entire city after the riots. I was the last bastion of civilization. Maybe even the last person still alive in Europe.
I reached the outskirts of Prague and was confronted with fields of scarlet meadows, as far as the eye could see.
“What’s the matter, O son of mine?”
A sound from above. I looked up to find a giant object looming over the fields. The wing of a jumbo jet. Its white coating had peeled off and fallen to the earth, where it had formed a giant tower. I looked back at the wing: where there had been the white protective coating, there was now more exposed red flesh.
“Here! Over here!”
I turned to face the voice. It was my mother, although I couldn’t make her out at first, as her skin had been flayed just like the jumbo jet’s, and she too was a mass of exposed crimson.
It was then that I realized that the red fields that stretched out to the horizon were dotted with Intruder Pods. I hadn’t noticed earlier because these, too, were stripped bare, their black Stealth Coating removed to reveal the red muscle and blood beneath. Sinewy threads were dangling off them, fluttering in the breeze: blood-red seaweed floating in a blood-red ocean.
“Mom, you know you’re kind of … exposed?”
“Uh-huh. Atomic bomb, you know?”
“But Mom, you died back in Washington! I was the one who killed you!”
“Now who’s getting all melodramatic, O son of mine? It was the car that killed me, really, and the doctors who ended it all. You’re not to blame.”
“But I could have chosen to keep you on that machine. You’d still be alive …”
“Huh! Call that living, being plugged into that machine like a vegetable? You must be joking.”
“But your heart … your heart was still beating,” I said, on the verge of tears. “Call me old-fashioned, but as long as your heart and other vital organs are still working, you’re alive.”
“Okay. Mr. Old-Fashioned. You’re so twentieth century.” Mom gave a wan smile. Looking at her now was a glimpse into the inner workings of the human musculature—I could see clearly which muscles were at play in constructing her facial expressions. “But come clean, O son of mine—it’s not really the boundary between life and death that’s troubling you right now, is it?”
I shook my head. “I just want to know. If I was the one who killed you. Did you die when I gave the order? Won’t you tell me, Mom?”
“Ah, so we’re talking about guilt and sin.” Mom nodded. “You did the right thing. You made a difficult decision, and you did it for me. You pulled the plug on your own mother’s life-support machine. You called off the life-sustaining nanomachines. You placed your mother in her coffin. It must have been hard for you, so hard, but you did the right thing because you were only doing the right thing.”
“Really, Mom? Is that the truth?”
“Of course not.” My mother’s voice was suddenly cold. “I’m just telling you what you want to hear, right? How can anyone say for sure what the truth is? How can you know what I feel? I’m dead, remember?”
I was afraid now. Mom’s voice had taken on a harsh edge. “I know how you think, how you rationalize your life,” she continued. “You’re just following orders, right? When you kill people in your line of duty, you’re just doing so in order to prevent a greater tragedy? You’re just the messenger, the tool, the loaded gun, and it’s someone else who pulls the trigger. As if that somehow absolves you from responsibility for your own actions.”
“Mom, stop it!” I begged, tears streaming down my face.
“Well, guess what? When you killed your own mother that was your own choice. You told yourself that she was in pain, and that she would suffer more alive than dead? Fine. But I was lying there on that bed, and I didn’t tell you that, did I? You were projecting your own thoughts onto me. So when the doctors pressed you for an answer, you had to make the judgment call on your own. You shouldered the responsibility. No Pentagon or SOCOM to make your decisions for you. You made your own bed—man up and lie in it.”
My mother’s words pounded at my mind. I tried to block her out, to shut my ears, but the cruel torrent continued unabated.
“And that’s made you think, hasn’t it? You’ve started to realize that it isn’t just me. All those generals and colonels and self-styled presidents that you’ve killed in the name of your ‘duty.’ You’ve always had choices. And you’ve made your choices. You’ve just stopped thinking about them. When was the last time you actually sat down to think about why you’re doing all this?”
I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry. I turned away and started running back into the empty streets of Prague.
“That’s right. If it was your own choice to kill me, then it was also your own choice to kill every single person you’ve ever assassinated. How is there any real difference? Do you think this is a plea bargain? Are you somehow imagining that by accepting responsibility for your decision to kill me you’re somehow excused from all the rest of your murders?”
I ran farther and farther away, but my mother’s voice still followed me, distinct and clear, like an evil spell.
I covered my head, desperate to block out the whole world.
“You can run, sir, but you can’t hide.” A new voice, young, clear. I looked up to see Alex’s smiling face. My dead colleague tapped his head. “After all, hell is here, inside your mind.”
“Leave me alone!”
“What is a human being?” Alex continued. “A collection of brain cells, water, carbon compounds. A magnificent creation and yet no more than a small clump of DNA. From the moment a person is born, he’s no more than physical matter. Just like that synthetic flesh down there. You can project lofty ideals and morals onto human beings all you want, but in the end you’re just deluding yourself. Sin, hell, whatever you want to call it, only exists insofar as it’s inside us. There is nothing more.”
Then the stone pavement exploded beneath my feet.
The crimson flesh was expanding, penetrating and enveloping the layers of historical Prague. The torrent of flesh spread out toward the heavens, and before long it had enshrouded the entire city.
The tsunami of flesh surged on relentlessly, pushing me farther and farther up into the sky. Forever.
Toward a place where there was no sin, no hell.
“Jesus, buddy. That’s quite a nightmare you were having. Are you okay?”
Williams was doing his best to calm me down. He handed me a cold towel. I must have sweat buckets while I was sleeping.
I felt my cheek. I had been crying.
“The land of the dead again, huh?” Williams asked.
I hesitated, but then decided to answer truthfully. “I’ve been seeing it constantly since Alex died.”
“Me too.”
That was a reply I had not expected.
“Oh, I haven’t given it a fancy name like your land of the dead,” Williams continued. “With me, it’s just a dream. About Alex. I can never remember what happens. All I know is I feel shit when I wake up. Which, I guess, makes it a nightmare, huh?”
“Maybe I should see a counselor.” I sighed. “Like we have to see before we go on a mission to kill children. Alex had his padre to talk to, but I don’t believe in any of that stuff, so I don’t have anyone …”
“I went to counseling once,” Williams said as he fetched me a glass of cold water. “Couples counseling. We were in a rut, the old woman and me. So one day we got a babysitter for our daughter and headed on over to a Forces counselor.”
“And? Any good?”
“Yeah. It helped. Some. I’d recommend it for minor marital problems. Whether the old dude would be much help dealing with something as serious as Alex’s death, I’m not so sure.”
“I don’t think it’s just Alex’s death that’s bothering me.”
“Oh? What else is on your mind?”
I tried to find the words to explain, but they just weren’t there. Williams saw that I was drawing blanks and continued. “Anyhow, even more so, if there’s other stuff you’re worried about. There’s only so much a desk jockey like that can do for people like us. Basically, you’ve got to work it out for yourself, I figure. At least you don’t believe in God, so you’re not about to start blaming yourself by calling it karma or divine retribution or whatever.”
Work it out for myself. Yeah. I know. I’ve known that from the start.
The problem was that I just couldn’t stand being ordered about by my own unconscious, even when it took the shape of Mom or Alex.
“Anyway, thanks, Williams, I’ll take over watch duty for a while. I’m wide awake now and not likely to get back to sleep anytime soon.”
I passed him my sheets. Williams started muttering something about how outrageous it was that we had to share the same sweat-drenched bedclothes, but I knew that he wasn’t really complaining. He was just trying to take my mind off my nightmares.
There were three cemeteries near the station: Olšany, Vinohrady, and Židov.