Max Collins - After the Dark

“You know, I always knew you snake-cult kids were a wacky bunch.” She edged another few inches. “But maybe you can explain why the death of a mutant like me could be so important to a movement that dates back thousands and thousands of years...”

His laugh had a hint of hysteria in it. “You’ve really never figured it out?... And Sandeman never told you?”

“Never met the guy. He was kind of a deadbeat dad, ya get right down to it.” With each exchange now, she was narrowing the distance between them.

“A pity,” Bostock said. “He might’ve had some fatherly advice for you. He might have told you to be more careful.”

She squinted at him. “Am I in the same conversation? ’Cause I am definitely not following you, Franklin.”

His arm straightened, the gun aimed squarely at her forehead. “You’re going to die, that’s a given... but considering all the grief you’ve given us, perhaps you do deserve to know just how badly you failed.”

She moved another half step.

“That’s far enough,” he said, punctuating the sentence with a gesture of the pistol.

She halted. “ How did I fail?”

He smiled, almost fondly. “Max, Max... you were the one... the one!”

“The... one.”

“The chosen one, the new messiah!”

“Me. I’m Jesus.”

“Yes. And how sad to die so close to one’s birthday.”

The guy was raving; even for a snake-cult practitioner, Bostock was ’round the bend. Max wasn’t sure how much longer she could stall...

“Then maybe after you kill me,” she said, “I’ll be back in seven days...”

“I don’t think so. This is a Christmas tale, Max... not Easter. So here’s a gift: your ‘father,’ White’s real father, the fabled Sandeman, he got Manticore pulled out from under him by a clandestine organization inside the government.”

“That much I know.”

Bostock went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “But before he left, before Colonel Lydecker and the others took over, he made one special child. You, Max.”

“Well. Maybe my daddy did love me.”

“In his way I’m sure he did. He did something very special for you, Max — he spared you any junk DNA... You’re the only person — ordinary or transgenic or even Familiar — on this entire planet who is like that. Even all the other Manticore freaks, like pretty boy here, and Jo Jo the dog-face boy... they have some flawed DNA. But not yours.”

“And this makes me the Messiah how?”

Bostock frowned at her, as if he was dealing with an imbecile. “You still don’t see the bigger picture? A pity Sandeman didn’t put a few more grains of IQ into that test tube.”

She just looked at him. With a Christmas fruitcake like this, what was there to say?

Bostock, his voice hushed, asked, “Do you know about the Coming?”

Oh boy.

“... The Coming?” she said. “Y’know, considering I’m the Messiah and all, you’d think I would... but why don’t you fill me in.”

Bostock’s eyes showed white all around. “The Coming is the end for most... but the beginning for our people. Thousands of years of breeding have gone into preparing us for survival from the Coming.”

“You still haven’t told me what the Coming is .”

He raised his chin and the eyes had a wild cast. “When the comet comes, it will signify the end of the old... and the beginning of a brand new world.”

Ames White’s words echoed in her mind: I want Ray to wake up Christmas morning in a brand new world.

“This comet,” Max said, “when...”

Bostock gestured to the ceiling... the sky... with his free hand. “It’s visible once every 2021 years — that means this year. The last time was—”

Abruptly, Alec entered the conversation: “The Christmas star of Bethlehem...”

Bostock bowed, just a little. “Very good, young man.”

Max swallowed. “And, uh... how exactly do I become the new messiah, out of a comet passing over the planet... two thousand years after the last messiah was born?”

He held the pistol steady on her, his gaze as steady as it was crazed. “Hard for me to believe you’ve had no signs... that Sandeman didn’t find a way to tell you.”

The markings!

Over the last year, runes that had started popping up on her flesh — new, instant tattoos unwantedly decorating her body, markings Logan had tried to translate, with no luck.

Bostock was wrong — Sandeman had found a way to let her know! She just hadn’t figured it out, till this moment...

“With the coming of the comet,” Bostock was saying, in a hushed voice worthy of church, “there will be a release of a biotoxin. It will wipe out the ordinaries — all those too weak to fight, too weak to be part of the new, pure order.”

No need to stall him, she thought. Bostock was a zealot — he loved the sound of his own voice expressing the “sacred” beliefs of his cult.

“Only luck has prevented the catastrophe from repeating itself,” he went on, using the bully pulpit that was the gun in his hand. “The comet is on an elliptical orbit that has brought it close enough for the biotoxin to reach Earth only once before — what do you think wiped out the dinosaurs? That time around, the ice age destroyed the toxin.”

Max asked, “And this time around?”

“Christmas Eve — midnight, when the twenty-fourth becomes the twenty-fifth... that will be the next time the comet passes this close to the planet.”

Alec said, “Close enough to drop off the biotoxin.”

“Yes,” Bostock said. “Death to the dinosaurs that walk the earth today — the ordinaries. The weak. Life to the Familiars. The strong.”

Alec asked, “Which makes Max the Messiah how?”

“She is the only person on Earth completely immune to the virus.”

Max said, “Because of Sandeman.”

“Yes,” Bostock said. “Even those of us with our special breeding face a small risk, as do the transgenics, but all of us — Familiars and test-tube mutants alike — should emerge unscathed. You, on the other hand, Max — there’s no ‘should’ about it.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Because I’m the ‘Messiah’?”

“Because your unique DNA assures you that you will suffer no side-effects, no illness. Sandeman found a way to defeat the toxin, using frozen samples recovered from the polar ice cap. Your blood offers the ordinaries the same sort of vaccine potential that we have obtained through thousands of years of selective breeding.”

“My blood,” she said, not knowing whether to laugh or cry or do Daffy Ducks around the room, “could save the world?”

Bostock nodded, as if what she’d said was eminently reasonable. “Those ordinaries who don’t die immediately upon exposure to the biotoxin might overcome it, given a vaccine developed from your blood. But when I kill you, Max, that possibility evaporates — the dream ends for humanity, and ours succeeds.”

She held her palms out. “Sure you don’t wanna drag me back to Snake Cult Central, and be the big man, for bagging lady Jesus?”

“It’s tempting,” he said with a tiny smile. “But you’re a gifted young woman... and making the journey with you might be too great a risk.”

Bostock’s finger was poised on the trigger, and starting to squeeze.

Behind the Familiar, a window shattered...

... and Mole flew through, rolling once and popping up next to the stunned secretary; the pistol Mole had lifted from the Gulliver house was now scant inches from Bostock’s skull, minus the silencer. They all stood frozen for a second, then Bostock, realizing the futility of his position, dropped his gun.

“What the hell took you so long?” Max asked Mole. “If this crazy son of a bitch wasn’t so chatty, I might be dead by now!”