Anthony DeCosmo - Empire

Ashley asked, “What about my boy?”

George said to her, “Let me bet you a dollar that you were starting to get sick and whatnot before all hell broke loose.”

Trevor remembered how Ashley felt nauseous at about the same time people started disappearing and monsters started creeping around in shadows. He remembered waiting for her on the porch with her father while Ashley got sick upstairs. At the time, he dismissed it to nerves. However, more than a year later when they pulled her out of a green gooey cocoon with the initial batch of ark-riders, they realized she carried a child.

The doctors calculated she conceived not long before disappearing, but it was hard to tell exactly when given that they had been having sex almost every night. Richard loved it at the time. He attributed Ashley’s eagerness to her nerves about the wedding, too.

Ashley unconvincingly insisted, “You are crazy.”

“Think about it, honey,” the man enjoyed horrifying her. As he did, a nasty edge built in his voice. “Think about when the creatures started appearing. If you go back and check them old newspaper clippings, you’ll see. Not The New York Times or something. Check out The National Enquirer. Shit like that. Sometimes the tabloids get it right. Hell, they were ahead of everyone this time around. They got the last, best scoop.”

Trevor said, “What does that have to do with anything? We were planning for our wedding, that’s all. I was a nobody.”

“We both were, bro, but we weren’t destined to stay that way, were we? You and Ashley here, like gasoline and fire, baby. Put the two of them together and you get a big boom. That boom was Armageddon.”

Trevor’s mind raced. Since the day he first met the Old Man in the woods, he wondered why he had been chosen. Why had the estate been prepared and stocked for him? Why did he receive the library of memories? Why could he communicate with dogs and why did they follow his every command as if they were an extension of his body?

He saw George-this warped man that claimed to be his half-brother-stare at him, savoring the torment that came with each revelation. Trevor also saw that whatever trauma had deformed and starved his body had also robbed George of his sanity.

“Wait…wait a second…” Ashley’s hand wavered in the air. “You’re saying…you’re saying that when I…when we…I got-”

“C’mon honey, spit it out. You can do it but you can’t say it? Maybe you should’ve been a little more shy when Richie here wanted to go poking around between those nice legs of yours.”

“Our son,” Trevor jumped in. “When we… when he was conceived…”

“Yeah! Now you got it! Bingo!”

“Wh-what?” Ashley stuttered. “Because I got pregnant..?”

“No, honey,” George explained. “Because you got pregnant with this thing…”

George shook JB by the back of the neck.

“Thing? That’s my son!” Trevor snarled.

George spat back, “Too bad I can’t just slit his throat and undo what happened to the world. No, I guess the cat is out of the bag on that one.”

Trevor said, “He was meant to be. You were the mistake. You don’t belong.”

His half-brother curled his lips like a coyote warning off a badger.

“Yeah, I was a mistake. Sort of the fly in the ointment; the monkey wrench in the works. But I was first.”

“And you failed. I saw your cave. You failed. What happened, did you actually think you were the one chosen for all this?”

“When it all started, I felt the strength in me,” he curled his free arm as if making a muscle. “I felt confident, sure of myself, nothing could stop me. This was all…all my time.”

“So you gathered survivors,” Trevor said. “You found yourself a quiet little mansion in the woods. Somewhere secluded.”

“Yeah…yeah,” George agreed. “I could see a picture in my mind, isn’t that funny? I found a place like that picture.”

Trevor told him, “It wasn’t quite right, was it? Not exactly like the picture in your mind.”

George shook his head. “No. Not exactly. But close enough.”

“You saw this place. You saw the place given to me. “

George clenched his teeth, “This should’ve been my place. Mistake or no, I was first. It should have been mine.”

“You didn’t have the right, what? Combination of genes? You were an offshoot. A second thought. The wrong mix. But you had a little, a taste of what I got, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” George conceded.

Trevor told him, “The people came to you when they saw your confidence. Hell, you felt like you could save the world, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah,” George said. “And I could hear the dogs in my head. I would call to them and they came running.”

Stone told him what he already knew: “But you only had half of it. When they came to you, something happened. It wasn’t right. Your thoughts in their head…the wrong frequency or something.”

George bit on his lip.

Trevor paused and considered the implication. All these years he believed the Old Man granted him the ability to communicate with the K9s. The entity had said, “Now, as to the second gift. Well you already got that one but you’re too shell-shocked to know it. When you get to the house that’s when you’ll realize that one. I guess I kind of lied when I said you don’t have no friends no more.”

Yes, Trevor thought as he stood across from George. I did already have it. At the house, after my parents were killed…I could hear the dogs then. I just thought I was going crazy or something. But they warned me to get going.

“You awake over there, brother?”

“All these years I thought the K9 thing was a gift,” Trevor finally spoke.

“It was,” George agreed. “It was a gift revealed in your genetic code; half coming from your dad, the other half from your mom. Like brown eyes and black hair, or maybe a pre-disposition to diabetes. All activated at the right time and the right place.”

“I thought it was a gift from the Old Man,” Stone mumbled to himself.

“The what?” George asked.

“Nothing,” Trevor said. “So the dogs came to you, but they went nuts. Started ripping each other apart.”

George confessed, “That’s right, yeah. Still, even without the dogs I knew I could do it. I knew I could be the savior. I just needed time; that was all.”

“No, you couldn’t,” Trevor corrected. “You weren’t meant to! You weren’t meant to be! It had to be me. I was the next link in the chain. A chain of genetics going back-what? — to the dawn of man? Some code mixed in the primordial soup.”

“It could’ve been me!”

“Maybe a pre-determined plan. Maybe just a fluke. But it had to be me. I was the only one who could be JB’s father.”

That’s why I couldn’t be with Nina. He could not say some things aloud.

George grumbled, “I had the people with me, they trusted me. I was a great leader. They’d do whatever I asked! They pledged their loyalty to me! They followed without question!”

Ashley snapped, “And you led them to what? Death?”

George’s face twisted like angry storm clouds on the verge of spawning a tornado. First, it looked like rage…then agony.

“I…didn’t…do…any…thing,” he flexed the fingers on his free hand as if trying to crush away the memories. “We hid…to gather our strength. We had food, guns, water.”

Trevor understood. He said, “You hid too long. They came to get you. They wiped you out like trapped rats. No one told you,” Trevor paused, considered, and said, “no one told you it was time to fight.”

George’s lip quivered. “There were so many. I never thought there could be so many. What you call Ghouls and Red Hands by the thousands, Hivvans, and more. Wave after wave.”