Last call for KND Free Thriller excerpt:
The Last Supper
by Allison M. Dickson
And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:
Chapter 1
My Last Supper has a salad. I’ve always hated salad. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate a good vegetable now and then, but I can’t think of anything I’d less like to eat in my final moments than a bowl of limp lettuce leaves with a few pale shreds of carrot mixed in. You can ask any condemned man what he’d like his last meal to be, and if he says salad, there probably was something wrong with him to begin with. But maybe, it’s what I deserve.
I learned early in life to avoid most of the food that came out of the ground, unless it was from a Divine Rite Farm, one of only a handful of areas left not affected by the weeds. You can take your chances on what grows outside those areas, but you would probably live to regret it. Even so, not even the “safe” food is safe. Cancer’s the biggie—that’s what took my wife—but birth defects were common not so long ago and most folks only needed to have a few kids born looking like a Cyclops before they realized maybe there was something to all those crop warnings.
But the Last Supper is a whole other breed of food. Like any other standard-issue death kit, it’s supposed to kill you.
Like the McDonald’s signs of old used to say, billions have been served. I earned my meal ticket, though, and I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t want it. I didn’t know a whole lot about this world before leaving the homestead, where everything was green and safe and nobody knew any different, but I’ve seen enough things now to realize how very doomed we are. People haven’t lived anywhere in a long time; they’ve merely survived. Yeah, I’d say we screwed it up big time.
The box my Last Supper came in even has a facsimile of Da Vinci’s painting on the front. The irony is enough to kill me all on its own. Take of my body and eat; take of my blood and drink, it says in flowing script. I never did enjoy that particular sacrament, my knowledge of it only sufficient enough to pass the yearly Justification exam.
Oh yeah, that reminds me. Justification. I suppose that’s the reason I’m here in the first place, and why millions have been before me. It’s a simple enough test for those who don’t know better, impossible for those who do. Then there are those, like my devout and now deceased wife, who fall through the cracks. All you have to do is prove your worth to this crippled but highly regimented society, and you can continue breathing. Fail, and your final gift is a poisoned repast. More irony for you, I suppose. Poisoned repasts have been a specialty of the human race for some time, long before the weeds came and destroyed everything. The weeds were ours too, by the way, but I’ll get to those. I recall John 3:16. “For God so loved the world He gave His only begotten son, that whoever believes in Him shall have everlasting life.” I guess God decided we weren’t much worth saving this time. He probably gave up on His creation the way you give up a piece of burnt toast when you can’t scrape off enough of the black stuff.
I just discovered a packet of oil and vinegar in the bottom of the box. It pads the blow of the salad, but only a little. At least there’s dessert: a big, thick wedge of chocolate cake. I can’t even remember the last time I saw chocolate. Had to be when I was barely big enough to see over the table. The God-fearing pricks would probably say they prayed extra hard to make the cocoa beans grow, but I think most of the good stuff, like chocolate and sugar and all the things we used to think of as “sinful,” comes from the Divine Rite labs nowadays. It’s much easier to control it for the masses that way. There may be a lone plant or two in the tropics still doing nature’s work, but I wouldn’t know. I can only hope with the naivety of a child still wishing for the existence of the tooth fairy that the Blight didn’t destroy everything. It’s a big planet after all, and even after everything that’s happened, I can’t quite become a full-blown cynic.
I believe I will start my meal with the cake. If there was ever a time to buck tradition and have dessert first, it’s now.
The other parts of the Supper include a hunk of charred meat (species indeterminate), and a small loaf of bread that feels like it’s at least a few days old. There’s also a small bottle of the fermented grape juice the Rite calls red wine, enough for a single glass. That’s plenty for me, since I’d like to be able to write everything I have to say with a clear head.
It might not sound like much, but all this food would be a marvel for most. Meat is a luxury because livestock requires grass and grain to feed, and what little is left has to go to feed the humans. The ones that roam the wild and eat what grows out there … well, I’ll get to some of them in a bit. Wouldn’t want to spoil my appetite.
I just took my first bite of the cake. It’s greasy and thick and it coats my tongue against another flavor that reminds me of gasoline. That’s probably the poison. Suddenly, the generous slice doesn’t seem like such a gift. The salad is the only thing that might taste even remotely clean in all this, so maybe I should be a little thankful it’s here.
I just read the short letter accompanying the meal, the standard message, I think. My wife received its twin with her own Supper:
To ensure a painless and dignified passing, we present you with a meal handcrafted by our expert chefs to your exact tastes as specified on your Justification Exam.
Except maybe the salad.
The Divine Rite will place your earthly remains in a planter with a beautiful tree to be placed in one of our scenic Memorial Gardens designed with the comfort of your eternal rest in mind. The Holy Uniter would like to thank you for your service to our nation and to the world.
You may be wondering why they use us for tree fertilizer, but that’s not too weird when you think about it. The disposal of bodies posed a challenge in the beginning. Burial wasn’t just inefficient with the number of dead involved. The roots of the serpent weeds make digging next to impossible. It’s a network stretching far beneath the ground, so thick and hard it takes enormous earth movers to break through them. And if you do, well, they start growing back before you get more than a few loads of dirt out. It’s almost like they’re intelligent.
Let me rephrase that. They are intelligent.
But crematoriums were a poor solution to the problem. The skies were black with the smoke. Even worse, the weeds seemed to thrive off the acidic rain the emissions produced, so the Rite came up with a real bright idea. They used a caustic powder to dissolve the bodies instead. It didn’t work on the weeds, but that was a good question if you were already thinking it. It worked like gangbusters on human flesh and bone, though, and there was just enough residue left to make fertilizer for a potted plant (Divine Rite Certified, of course), which the departed’s family could then plant in a Memorial Forest, one of those hallowed patches of ground the weeds hadn’t taken over for some reason. The Rite would say it was God’s providence, but it was just a simple game of evolutionary luck in our favor.
I think I’ve rambled on long enough, though. There is a much longer tale beyond all this, and I have only a little while to tell it if the Supper works the way I think it does. Things happen too fast to allow for even the smallest amounts of self-indulgence or cathartic blathering. Nonetheless, it’s a tale that needs telling, even if no one else ever reads it, because maybe if I know it and hear it deep down in my heart, I’ll be able to move on to the doing that needs done, even if it hurts my heart more than words could ever say. Even if it will never bring back the ones I’ve lost.
At any rate, I’d better continue before my steak gets cold.
Chapter 2
It wasn’t like the world didn’t see it coming. The devil was in the pollen, and it took decades for people to start connecting the dots. Reports of increased asthma, skin diseases, cancer, and anaphylactic shock made a little murmur in the newswires from time to time, but it was when the birth defects started popping up in clusters too big to ignore that folks started to panic. And the Blight, of course. Can’t forget those. There was a whole host of new “super weeds” out there, and industry people couldn’t just cover up the tidal wave of pictures and videos and anecdotes normal folks were passing among themselves, even if the media was largely ignoring it. In the old world, where people were accustomed to sharing everything from what they ate for breakfast to the last time they had sex, it was natural that word about our agriculture problems would spread like the weeds themselves. And be just as hard to lie about.
The companies involved weren’t complacent. They expunged data, silenced whistleblowers, and spun lies into gold. Denial and ignorance reigned among groups who disagreed on who had spliced what gene into what that caused the Blight, or whose Super Weed Killer eventually gave way to the species that we came to call Serpent Weeds. There were big suits out there still insisting on the safety of genetic modification in light of the atrocities, their lies becoming so robust and defiant they even attempted to make the weeds sound like a good thing. Not long ago, I even found old literature advertising a big annual festival called Salad Days, where supporters of these big agro companies would gather and “Eat the Future!” as they called it. That not only included the contaminated plant life, but the animals that fed upon it.
Naturally enough, many of those participants were the first to go, and when the founder of the Salad Days events died of a particularly aggressive form of flesh-eating cancer, the festivals stopped altogether and the chorus of dread became a lot more monotone.
In a last fit of desperation, the government ordered planes to drop loads of specially developed herbicide from the skies to kill the invaders. It poisoned what good crops remained and contaminated the groundwater, but the weeds grew bigger and hardier. Fire was another option, but that beast was difficult to control. It wiped out as many homes and towns as it did people, and new weeds sprouted up right through the ash. Freezing with liquid nitrogen seemed to hold them at bay for awhile, but there weren’t enough resources to keep it going, and as soon as the weeds thawed, they bounced back twice as hard.
As for the few crazies who survived that initial glut of Salad Days stupidity, well, a lot of them gave rise to what we know as Divine Rite today. It takes crazy to make crazy, after all, and you have to be a particular brand of lunatic to come up with ideas like Justification and The Last Supper.
But I don’t really need to go into the rest, do I? There isn’t enough time, for one thing. More importantly, the “how” of it doesn’t really matter anymore. That’s because after things really turned south, we can only guess what happened. Histories of the rise of the Divine Rite were wiped clean of all their warts, and the truth only lives on in those brave enough to share it. I received the barest glimpse of it before I arrived where I am now, and I can tell you there is a whole hell of a lot more involved here than a simple gene splice gone wrong. It was a cataclysm far beyond Biblical, and I’m not sure anyone will ever really know the facts, or if the facts at this point would even make a difference. They couldn’t undo what’s been done.
It might surprise some people to know there were still thriving and established communities in this country, even at the height of the Blight. They were small and heavily quarantined, of course. The Rite designed these electrified domed nets to hang over the residential areas and farms that trapped most of the serpent weed pollen and allowed for a sustainable amount of subsistence farming.
Most of the people who lived under those nets were asleep. I know, because I was one of them. Our news was every bit as filtered as the air, and we were blissfully ignorant, “doing God’s Work” and passing Justification accordingly. Well, most of us were, anyway. There were a few who knew it was all an illusion, that the Rite was just another group of tyrants from a long line of them stretching back to the time of Jesus himself. I got to know some of those good people very well, and so will you.
Under the net, most people had to follow some basic rules. Stay free of drugs and alcohol, make your productivity quotas (that’s hold a job, in plain speak), procreate according to the mandate of the local Divine Rite poobah and, of course, go to church three days a week.
Our little patch of fertile land was called God’s Hope. Not too imaginative, but creativity is rarely a valued commodity among the pious. If you ever needed an example of how well Justification worked, you could look to my hometown. The grass grew green and tender, the people were smiling and content, and there was always enough food to keep their bellies full as long as nobody bred out of turn.
I lived in God’s Hope until I lost my wife. After that, I just sort of floated along like a dead leaf on a stagnant pond.
Tumors invaded Linny’s pancreas, and two years later, she died. But it wasn’t from the cancer. When it was her yearly trip to the Exam center in the center of town, she drew the short straw. Months of illness had made her too weak to attend church. She also lacked the strength to care for the home or perform any of her required civic duties. In the cold, impartial eyes of the Divine Rite, her continued existence was no longer Justified.
They took no appeals. There wasn’t even a department for such a thing. Linny had violated the algorithm, and if they made an exception for her, they would risk a possible revolt. Later that evening, there was a knock on our door and sitting there on the welcome mat Linny had stitched herself with the ladies from the Fellowship was a box bearing the same Da Vinci painting I’m looking at right now. We sent our twin daughters, Beth and Kaya, to spend the night at friends’ houses, and once they were gone I yelled and screamed. I begged her to throw the goddamn thing away, not caring who was in earshot of that particular forbidden blasphemy. But it didn’t matter. She started to eat, even as I gathered our meager possessions and shoved them into bags. Escape was my first resort, giving up was hers. I still want to hate her for that, but what’s the point? She was dying anyway.
Her dessert had been lemon pudding, and she started with that, just as I did with my chocolate cake.
“We all have to go at some point, John,” she’d said between small spoonfuls of the yellow stuff that looked a bit like something you’d squeeze out of a nasty pimple. Apart from her red-rimmed eyes, her face was a sheet of white. “We’d be just as dead when they caught us, and I don’t have the strength to run anyway. We both knew when the cancer came this might happen.” Her face brightened for a second. “Perhaps they’re doing me a mercy! That must be it, after all of my devotions and tithes. You can’t be mad at them, dear. This is better than the cancer.”
I clenched my fists. To hell with that, I wanted to say, but she wasn’t listening anymore. The food was already doing its job.
She gazed at the steaming, deadly entrees before her. It had come out of the box hot, as if someone had baked it right on our front porch. That was the creepiest part. “Have you ever seen anything like this? I haven’t seen such food since I was a little girl.”
It was so unnatural looking, so … manufactured. I wondered where it came from.
She held out her hand to me as I plopped down across from her in resignation. I watched her eat the plain omelet and the flat biscuit that accompanied it and I dug furrows into my leg with my other hand to keep from slapping the fork away.
We started talking about the girls and how we thought they would turn out. They had both been coming up on their fifteenth birthdays and their first Justification exams. We agreed that Beth was a cinch, but Kaya, a natural rebel forever with a question in her mouth, would bear watching. Tears and the Lord’s Prayer accompanied Linny’s last bite, and I carried her unconscious body to bed, where her shallow breaths slowed and eventually stopped. I wrapped her body in a sheet and left her there. Then I walked out back, where I fell asleep on our picnic table under the cold and uncaring stars.
When I awoke at the chilly crack of dawn, she was gone, along with all her possessions and the remnants of her Supper. Not even a picture of her remained. It was as if my wife of twenty years had never existed. This was all standard Divine Rite custom. They sent their goons out like thieves in the night to collect their victims. I never even heard them come. The Rite claims they do this “for the expediency of the grieving process.” In other words, out of sight, out of mind. Eventually, with no personal effects to remind you of the one you lost, you start to question whether he or she was in your life to begin with, and you forget. Or at least, that’s what they hope, and for a few days I lived in that foggy space between memory and reality. Then I received a second delivery: a little fir sapling in a crude clay planter, with a neatly printed note attached. Every word of it has since been branded into my head.
On behalf of the Divine Rite, and by extension Holy Uniter, Urban IV, we present to you this remembrance gift. You are free to plant it in your nearest designated Memorial Forest, or if space and local ordinance permits, allow it to grace your own yard, where it will eventually provide you shade as well as comfort. Please note the pot is designed to be planted with the tree, as it serves as a source of additional fertilizer for the growing specimen.
In Grace,
Clarence Wolf
Senior Spokesperson, Divine Rite, Kansas Parish
And there it was. The tree. The “specimen.” They took Linny and everything that was hers and then they brought her back. I suppose if they hadn’t, I would have continued my quiet, unquestioning life in God’s Hope, eventually forgetting I even had a wife. I wondered why the Rite would do this, why they would prod someone’s grief this way, but I eventually figured out it was like everything else they do. It was a test. If I could endure this cruelty, I could endure anything they threw at me. But I failed that test. Seeing my wife reduced to nothing more than white specks in dirt, plant food in a world consumed by rogue plants, ignited a white-hot rage that’s driven me ever since.
That evening, the girls and I planted their mother in our backyard, pot and all as instructed. I think it was the last thing I ever did by Divine Rite code. Beth wept openly, but Kaya was uncharacteristically silent, stonily looking off to the horizon as I dug the small hole and placed the fir and its pot inside. Beth helped push in the dirt and kissed its branches. One of the tree’s sharp needles poked her in the lip and that only made her cry harder. Kaya refused to touch the tree. After I filled the hole, she said, “So I guess we’re done then,” and strode off toward the open prairies where she spent most of her time those days.
Beth curled up next to the tree and held one of its delicate boughs as if it was her mother’s hand. She was fifteen years old, but at that moment she was five all over again with golden pigtails, ready to poke her thumb back in her mouth. Lost in my own grief and anger, I had no idea how to comfort her, so I didn’t, and every horrible thing that happened afterward was made worse by that inaction. If I had held her close and shared my grief with hers, maybe …
But what’s the point of maybes?
A couple hours later, after Beth had fallen asleep next to the tree, Kaya’s angry footsteps thudded on the porch. I was sitting in the small, newly emptied parlor, gazing at the spot where Linny’s rocker and needlepoint supplies once sat. Kaya’s slender figure darkened the doorway. With her short haircut and big blue eyes reddened from crying, she looked like an angry pixie.
“There was nothing you could do, was there?” she asked, her voice trembling like a dam fit to burst.
I shook my head, feeling weak and without the answer she so clearly wanted. “I suppose not.”
“She was going to die anyway, you know. From the cancer.” Her voice cracked on the last word, but she remained dry-eyed. She had more courage and strength than anyone I’d ever known, and I saw a lot more of it in the events that soon unfolded, but right then I was struck by how different she was from everybody in God’s Hope, and it wasn’t just the boyish haircut that made the long-haired ladies in town turn their heads. There was a fire in her, a vitality that reminded me of my mother, or what little I could remember of her.
I wanted to open my arms to Kaya, but that wasn’t how she operated. She had to be the one to break down first. One wrong move and she could clam up for good, or make me lose my hand in one of the many booby traps that guarded her heart.
“Yes, the cancer would have gotten her eventually. Probably by Christmas,” I said. “She’d been getting weaker every day. This was what your mother wanted.”
“But why did they take her?” she screamed in the darkening room. “She was almost dead anyway and they took her from us! They had no right! They had no fucking right!” She burst into great, heaving sobs, and that was my cue. I went to her and let her melt into my chest, but as I stroked her head and held her close, my arms felt numb.
Chapter 3
Grief is a cruel captor, and you never know what kind of warden you’ll have until you’re locked inside its prison. I waited in my cell for the ultimate catharsis, something that would come crashing through the bars and carry me away like a flash flood sweeping away debris from a forgotten riverbed in the wilderness. I waited for salvation, or the “Voice of God” that so many desperate souls insist visits them in their greatest time of need to deliver them from the darkness. But there was no cleansing deluge, and I grew more and more certain there was no God. Not the God I’d grown up envisioning, anyway.
In the weeks following Linny’s death, I started going into work less, and eventually stopped going in at all. That alone was grounds for Justification failure, but the linchpin was when I stopped attending church. Without Linny, I felt like I’d been cast out from the herd. The eyes of people I once considered friends regarded me as if I were a strange bird carrying a contagious disease. It wasn’t that I stopped believing in a higher power altogether. After everything I’ve seen, I like to think I have somewhere greater to go when I die. But I couldn’t do my sort of believing next to people who were beholden to the Rite’s idea of righteousness.
Kaya and Beth drifted further away as well. They both passed their first Justification exams, but my relief was bittersweet at what was only to be a year-long reprieve from the inevitable. Eventually, one of us would fail. The deck was stacked.
The only thing that did come to rescue me from that prison of grief was my rage. Its waters were dirty and cold, but they motivated me. I eventually came to see the Divine Rite’s true nature: cold-blooded murderers disguised in holy-rolling benevolence. The fires of hatred burning in me by that point could only be quenched by acts of subversion.
Writing seemed a natural place to begin. I purchased a red leather-bound journal, a luxurious item in such lean times (I can’t say now what became of it), and I began a journey of self-expression forty years in the making. It was slow going at first. I felt like a kid tempting rebellion by sneaking out of the house only to stop at the end of the driveway. One night, I took my chair out back and opened my journal next to Linny’s tree. With her by my side, the anti-establishment floodgates opened and out spilled a river of hate near impossible to dam back up again. I was trembling by the time I finished, and a little sick to my stomach. My thoughts were no longer in my head. They were physically “out there” now. I could have burned the pages, sure, but I could no more do that than deface my own child.
After that, it became ritual.
I focused my writing mostly on immoral acts because they provided immediate payoffs. I detailed a fantasy in which I drowned Stanley Robbins, the supervisor on my line at the textile mill who docked an hour of pay for even one minute of tardiness, regardless of the excuse. But it wasn’t just the pay that took a bite out of your ass. It was the points that would be deducted at Justification. Not a lot for one instance, but a chronic problem of showing up late could prove lethal.
In the story, I held his fat, screaming head in a steaming vat of indigo dye until it was puffy and black. Petty and juvenile maybe, but then again, I’d never had much of a childhood.
The rebellion also had a considerable effect on my libido. I won’t lie and say I didn’t feel guilty about it. I did. But I think my urges were more about “going against the grain,” and less about “cheating on Linny.” In the confines of our small garage, where I kept our bikes and a work bench for unfinished projects, (and well out of sight of Linny’s tree) I wrote about the younger redhead with the shapely hips and tilted green eyes who ran the general store with her father Harry. Genevieve. She and Harry came to God’s Hope not long after I proposed to Linny. I remember her being small for her age, and frail, but she eventually blossomed into something almost unnaturally beautiful, and was the only other woman in all of God’s Hope who occasionally made my thoughts stray to forbidden places. And I was sure I wasn’t the only husband in town who felt that way, given the number of sharp glances I saw from their wives at the Fellowship if their eyes lingered a bit too long as she passed by. Linny was a little less disapproving that way, and was probably more gracious to the girl than most of the other women had been.
In more recent weeks, however, my thoughts about Genevieve became a little less occasional and a little more regular. The material I wrote about her was pretty light, and honestly too ridiculous to share here. But after those particular writing sessions, I found the only source of relief was to masturbate, which of course was very frowned upon by Divine Rite, and something I hadn’t even dared try until then. I soon found it contributed more to my awakening as a hot-blooded rebel than anything else, and I learned that the release of one’s libido after decades of keeping it tightly regulated can be a bit hazardous, with excessive preoccupation leading to carelessness, as I soon learned.
My acts of sedition might have begun with pen and paper, but they definitely didn’t end there. I grew restless with the pages after awhile. I wanted to move beyond the security of my home and my trusty journal and start seeing if I could spread my little disease of awareness to a few other members of the town.
I began by taking late night strolls and ripping down Divine Rite propaganda posters from the trees and bulletin boards, but eventually I decided it was best to leave them up, after performing a little “corrective artwork.” One night, I decided the Holy Uniter would look better wearing a crown of dicks, and I hastily made the alteration with a red paint pen while looking over my shoulder every millisecond or so. After finishing the masterpiece, I scrawled “Crowned Dick of the Divine Rite” across the top and crept home, shaking with manic giggles I later screamed into a pillow with my bedroom door shut behind me.
The next morning, after hours of tossing and turning, certain the Hand of God, the Rite’s most elite police force, was going to pound down my door any minute, I swung my legs out of bed at first light and dressed. When I arrived at the Pavilion, a small crowd had already assembled around the bulletin board. A few (mostly kids) smiled and laughed openly, but most appeared somber and afraid.
A young man in official patrol robes walked up to the board and ripped the poster down without ceremony. “Everybody move along here, before I decide to start asking questions,” he shouted at the already dispersing crowd. I lingered for a moment, though. The officer, who didn’t appear much older than my teenage girls, locked eyes with me. I suddenly felt naked, as if he knew I was the perpetrator, as if there was a gob of betraying red paint on my face that told the whole story. I turned on my heels and walked away, breaking into a full run the closer I got to the house.
When I walked in, the girls were just sitting down to breakfast. Both looked startled by my sweaty face and sloppy clothes, but Beth’s expression was particularly suspicious. She raised her eyebrow in an expression that looked so much like her mother that it hurt my heart. “What are you doing leaving the house looking like that, Daddy?”
My mind fumbled for a few seconds. Why the hell would I leave the house so early in the morning, anyway? “Just … felt like a little jog, I guess,” I said. She didn’t seem convinced.
“I was hoping to hear you’d visited the Fellowship. Reverend Blackwell has been asking after you.”
“Screw Reverend Blackwell,” Kaya muttered. She was stirring a bowl of porridge without much interest. “He’s probably grubbing after more money, anyway.”
Beth gaped at her sister and crossed herself. “Where did you even hear that language?”
“There are other books than the Bible, you know. And stop talking to me like I’m your kid. Seriously, you’re worse than mom.”
“That’s enough from both of you,” I said, taking a seat at the table. It was the first time in awhile we’d all sat together, but I might as well have been sitting on the moon for how distant I felt from them.
“I plan to pray for you, Daddy,” Beth murmured. “For you both.”
“Thank you, sweetheart,” I said. My heart wasn’t in it, but if it pacified her suspicion even a little, I was all for it.
Kaya snorted. “Sure, Beth. Pray your face off. While you’re at it, maybe you can ask the Big Man Upstairs to put some extra dessert in Daddy’s Supper, since he has one coming any day now.”
Beth stood up fast and glared at us both. “It’s like both of you are trying to fail Justification now. Mom didn’t have a choice, but you do. You’re both being so selfish. She would be ashamed if she could see you right now.” She stormed out of the house, leaving Kaya and I to endure the pregnant silence Beth left in her wake.
Finally, my other daughter sighed and stood up. “She was right about that, Dad. About Justification. I probably won’t pass my next one at the rate I’m going, and I’m pretty sure you won’t, either. This family is fucked.” She walked off in the direction of her room, and I didn’t bother to call her on the obscenities. What right did I have after all of mine? Besides, she was right. I pulled her porridge to me and ate a few bites before putting my head down on the table.
If I’d known that would be the last time the three of us would ever sit in the same room together, I might have tried harder, but hindsight is a cruel mistress and she spins one hell of an illusion out of our regrets.
Of course, no good rebellion against the establishment is complete without the consumption of illicit substances, and with the way things had deteriorated at home I needed the kind of escape that could only be had in a bottle. Drinking and drugs, of course, were not part of the regimen of anyone who planned on passing Justification, and it was difficult to get any in large quantities outside a Sin Bin, facilities where people surrendered their last year of life so they could live in complete debauchery. But liquor was easier to get than one might think. Like most “forbidden” things in God’s Hope, it wasn’t exactly illegal. It was just another tempting piece of fruit the Rite liked to have lying around for the weak of will, and the price for succumbing to such things was deadly.
The lack of large agriculture wasn’t much of a hindrance for the making of potables either. Nearly any grain is distillable, any fruit or starchy vegetable fermentable. You could lay hands on some liquid lightning for a small price and little effort, and you barely had to leave your own backyard if you knew a few techniques, or the right person. For me, that person was James L. Turpin.
Turpin had been in God’s Hope for as long as I could remember, though for most of my life people simply referred to him as “the old fella.” He escaped Justification by being just over fifty when it became law, which made him part of a very rare Exempt Class. It should also be noted that the average minimum age of the high ranking Divine Rite officials at the time coincided with the age of exemption. No man should be hoisted by his own petard, after all. Turpin lived the sort of life that incited fear and loathing in most people, but envy in a select few who were courageous enough to admit it. I was the former for many years, but now I was one of the latter.
His place was a massive stretch of land the locals referred to as “The Bunker,” one of many military posts left behind after the Blight, where a combination of disease, weeds, and ensuing civil skirmishes decimated too many people to fill a proper army. The Rite reclaimed some of these sites to build Cradles, which were outposts where they trained and housed the Hand of God agents, but most were left to the weeds or the simple reclamation of time and the elements. Turpin apparently had some ancestral claim to the land, though most of those details were a little murky in an age where most pre-Blight deeds and records were destroyed. He was allowed to keep it so long as he agreed to remain on it and stay away from the regular townsfolk. As I later found out, that’s exactly how Turpin preferred things anyway.
I gazed at the rusted remains of an M1 tank with a bird’s nest tucked inside the gun turret on my way up the long driveway. Signs posted around the perimeter of the property warned of the presence of mines, and this probably kept most intruders away, but the legend of Turpin frightened more people than the possibility of obliteration by landmine. You didn’t associate with him unless you were determined to flunk Justification. It was as simple as that.
Though older than dirt, he was hale enough to subsist off his land with little help, and he made most of his money through the sale of his homegrown ethanol fuel to neighborhood farms and businesses. Depending on who you were speaking to, Turpin was an “evil atheist” who performed abortions and put hexes on local missionaries. Others claimed he shot intruders with devilish pre-Blight weaponry hidden in an underground cache somewhere on his property. But the most popular anecdote, and the one that was actually true, was that he ran a “poison factory.” That was God’s Hope lingo for booze.
He might have been the town’s answer to the urbane wizard with the taboo apothecary, but Turpin’s medicine came from copper kettles and unmarked mason jars rather than bubbling cauldrons. I’d never before taken a drink of any alcohol apart from the thimble of sour grape juice at Sunday Mass, and I had no idea what intoxication actually felt like, but now something within me craved a glut of Turpin’s poison. I guess it was just a part of the natural progression of things that led to me sitting here now.
I followed a sturdy wood fence, which crested a few feet over my head, until I reached a gate into which security cameras and an ancient intercom had been set. I let out a few breaths to ready myself and pressed the call button, not even sure if it would work. A buzzer sounded at the main residence behind the fence. A couple seconds later, a soft and quavering voice sounded from the speaker.
“Yes?”
I should have expected something like this, given the guarded set-up of the place, but I stammered out whatever came to mind first.
“Hello, uh, Mr. Turpin. My name is John, uh, Welland. We’ve never met, but I had, ah, hoped—”
“Ah yes, Welland. The one whose wife just got the Supper.” Though the audio was tinny and laced with static, I could detect notes of sympathy along with a touch of accent that was downright exotic in this part of the country.
“Yes, uh, that’s right, Mr. Turpin.” Although I had written about it plenty, speaking aloud with others about my dead wife was still unfamiliar to me, and I fought the lump that rose in my throat at the mention of her name. There was another buzz and a locking mechanism in the fence clicked. The imposing doors swung open, officially welcoming me into a new era of my life.
Turpin stood just on the other side with a little rectangular clicker in one hand and a cane in the other. For a man considered old by any period’s standards, he stood tall, as if the years had only spared a glance at him before moving on. His frame was thin, but he had a small paunch of a belly, and a weather-beaten face covered in a straggly silver beard. Beyond Turpin, I saw a well-manicured yard filled with cushioned wicker furniture and antique propane heaters, which he must have worked like hell to bring back into operation and polish to a high shine. Brightly colored paper lanterns decorated the fence and added a sense of whimsy to the place. A lush garden stretched away from the side of the house. I could make out carrots, lettuces, beet tops, and a hearty crop of Lazarus, a bland hybridized grain the Rite developed after the Blight that was good for making rough bread and porridge and not much else. In the middle of it all, a modest log cabin sprouted rambling additions to either side making the structure resemble a bird carved by a novice whittler.
I stepped forward and stretched out my hand. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Turpin.”
The old man’s grip was firm, but his smile was soft. “I figured we’d meet at some point after I heard the news ’bout your wife, boyo. Goddamn shame what happened. I ain’t seen that sort of travesty ’round here in many a year. By the way, most of the friendlier persuasion just call me Turpin.”
“Turpin it is,” I said.
He regarded me for a moment, like someone trying to measure me for a task. “Ya do know that just by bein’ here, yer sacrificin’ any standin’ ya might have with the Rite. Not too late to turn back, boyo.”
I tried on a smile that felt a little forced given how anxious I felt. “I walked all the way up here. The least I could do is have a drink.”
“Understood. Well, we can’t let any more time waste away, then.” He led me toward the porch, where two cozy rocking chairs sat. “I have to say, it’s good to see a new face in the place. What sorta tonic tickles yer fancy today?”
“Um. I’m not really sure what I’m looking for.” I felt a little embarrassed to say so, as if I should have had a list of items prepared before I even came up here.
“So, a tastin’ it be. Follow me. We’ll line up some glasses and figure out what kinda man ya are.” He walked with a spry gait up the creaky porch stairs and into the house. I followed, my nervousness slowly melting into amusement. In a few minutes, I’d be passing the ultimate point of no return, worse than writing some cuss words in a book, defacing a poster, or even masturbating. I was going to violate an explicitly written Divine Rite covenant; I was going to Spoil God’s Temple.
The amount of stuff inside Turpin’s place was almost overwhelming. Books lined every wall of the living room, from floor to ceiling, and heaped every other flat surface. I saw both foreign and forbidden tomes—Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Salinger, Rushdie, The Kama Sutra—mixed among even more contraband: colorful comic books featuring costumed heroes of old, and glossy pornography magazines featuring swells of bare breasts and acres of skin.
Continued….
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