Peter Watts - Maelstrom

She laughed: a staccato bark, the sound of something snapping. "That's what I am in all this? A victim ?"

Desjardins shook his head. " They're the victims. You're just the gun they used to fight back with."

She glared down at him. He looked back, helpless.

She hit him in the face.

Desjardins toppled backward; the back of his head hit the floor with a crack. He lay there, tied to the overturned chair, moaning.

She turned. Lubin was blocking her exit.

She faced him for a few seconds, unmoving. "If you're going to kill me," she said at last, "just do it. Either that or get out of my way."

He considered a moment. He stepped aside. Lenie Clarke brushed past him and went upstairs.

She really had spent her childhood here, of course. The sets were real enough; it was only the supporting roles that had been imaginary. Lubin knew exactly where she was going.

He found her in the undarkness of her old bedroom. It had been stripped and sprayed, like the rest of the house. Clarke turned at his entrance, looked around tiredly at the bare walls: "So is it abandoned? On the market?"

"We did this before you arrived," he said. "Just in case. To simplify clean-up."

"Ah. Well, it doesn't matter. Still seems like yesterday, in fact." She aimed her capped eyes at one wall. "That's where my bed was. That was where— Dad —used to play bedtime stories for me. Foreplay, I guess you'd call it. And there's the air duct—" gesturing at a grille set into the baseboard—"that connects right down to the living room. I could hear Mom playing with her favorite shows. I always thought those shows were really stupid, but looking back maybe she didn't like them much either. They were just alibis."

"It didn't happen," Lubin reminded her. "None of it."

"I know that, Ken. I get the point." She took a breath. "And you know, right now I think I'd give anything if it had ."

Lubin blinked, surprised. "What?"

She turned to face him. "Do you have any idea what it's like to be—to be haunted by happiness ?" She managed a bitter laugh. "All those months I kept denying it, chalking it up to stroke and hallucination because shit, Ken, I couldn't have had a happy childhood. My parents couldn't be anything but monsters, you see? The monsters made me what I am. They're the only reason I survived all the shit that came later, they're the only thing that kept me going . I was not gonna let those stumpfucks win. Everything that drove me, every time I didn't quit, every time I beat the odds, it was a slap in their big smug all-powerful monster faces. Everything I ever did I did against them . Everything I am is against them. And now you stand there and tell me the monsters never even existed…"

Her eyes were hard, empty spots of rage. She glared up at him, her shoulders shaking. But finally she turned away, and when she spoke again her voice came out soft and broken.

"They do exist though, Ken. Honest-to-God flesh-and-blood monsters, the old fashioned kind. They hide from the daylight and they sneak out of the swamps at night and they go on rampages just like you'd expect. They kill and maim anyone they can get their hands on …" A long, shuddering breath. "And all these monsters could ever say in their own defense is it happened to them first , the world fucked them long before they started fucking it back, and if anyone out there wasn't guilty, well, they hadn't stopped all the others who were , right? So everybody's got it coming. But the monsters can't plead self-defense, they can't even plead righteous revenge. Nothing happened to them."

"Something happened," Lubin said. "Even if your parents didn't do it."

She didn't speak for a while. Then: "I wonder what he was like, really."

"From what I've heard," Lubin said, "he was just—a typical dad."

"Do you know where he is? Where they are?"

"They died twelve years ago. Tularemia."

"Of course." A soft laugh. "I guess that was one of my qualifications, right? No loose ends."

He stepped around her, watched her face come into view.

It was wet. Lubin paused, taken aback. He'd never known Lenie Clarke to cry before.

Her capped eyes met his; a corner of her mouth twitched in something like a rueful grin. "At least, if you were right about ßehemoth, the real culprits are in for it along with everyone else." She shook her head. "It's the weirdest thing I've ever heard. I'm some killer asteroid in the sky, and the dinosaurs are actually cheering for me."

"Just the little ones."

She looked at him. "Ken…I think maybe I've destroyed the world."

"It wasn't you."

"Right. Anemone. I was just the mule for a—an Artificial Stupidity , I guess you'd call it." She shook her head. "If you believe that guy downstairs."

"It's an old story," Lubin reflected. "Body snatchers. Things that get inside you and make you do things you'd never do, given the—"

He stopped. Clarke was watching him with a strange expression.

"Like your conditioned reflex ," she said quietly. "Your—security breaches…"

He swallowed.

"Does it ever haunt you, Ken? All the people you've killed?"

"There's—an antidote," he admitted. "Sort of a chaser for Guilt Trip. Makes things easier to live with."

" Absolution ," she whispered.

"You've heard of it?" In fact, he'd never found it necessary.

"Saw some graffiti down in the Dust Belt," Clarke said. "They were trying to wash it off, but there must've been something in the ink…"

She stepped toward the hallway. Lubin turned to follow. Faint machine sounds and the soft hissing of fluids drifted in from outdoors.

"What's going on out there, Ken?"

"Decontamination. We evacuated the area before you arrived."

"Gonna fry the neighborhood?" Another step. Clarke was in the doorway.

"No. We know your route. ßehemoth hasn't had a chance to spread from there even if you left any behind."

"That's not likely, I take it."

"You're not bleeding. You didn't piss or shit anywhere since you came ashore."

She was in the hall, at the top of the stairs. Lubin moved to her side.

"You're just being extra careful," Clarke said.

"That's right."

"It's kind of pointless though, isn't it?"

"What?"

She turned to face him. "I've crossed a continent, Ken. I was on the Strip for weeks. I hung out in the Belt. I just spent a week swimming through the drinking water for half a billion people. I bled and fucked and shat and pissed more times than you can count, in oceans and toilets and half the ditches in between. Maybe you did too, although I'd guess they've cleaned you up since then. So really, what's the point?"

He shrugged. "It's all we can do. Watch for brush fires, hope to put them out before they get too big."

"And keep me from starting new ones."

He nodded.

"You can't sterilize an ocean," she said. "You can't sterilize a whole continent."

Maybe we can , he thought.

The sounds of decontamination were louder here, but not much. Even the occasional voice was hushed. Almost as if the neighborhood was still infested with innocents, as though the crews feared sleeping citizens who could wake at any moment and catch them red-handed…

"You never answered me before, Ken." Lenie Clarke took a step down the stairs. "About whether you were going to kill me."

She's not going to run , he told himself. You know her. She's already taken her best shot, she's not—

You don't have to—

"Well. I guess we'll find out," she said. And started calmly down the stairs.