David Nickle - Eutopia

“There’s a thousand folk yonder. You open that jar, they’re all going to die.”

“That they are,” he said. “But you saw what those things—that Mister Juke—what it can do. Just one of them, not too old… drives a fellow to think he’s seen God. And then it gets bigger—and what do you think happens then?”

“I expect…”

“Everyone thinks they’ve seen God. Everyone ,” said Green. “They’ll do anything for that monster. Their souls—the ones entrusted to the True God. And eventually—they’ll run like a plague themselves over the land, mad with that thing.” He drew a ragged breath. “The Devil will rule the Earth.”

“Mr. Green,” said Ruth. She’d come up while they spoke, slowly, teetering in the mud. “What’s happened to you?”

Sam Green squinted at her. The gun faltered. “Miss Harper,” he said. “There’s been a fire… and a fight. I’m sorry to tell you—your father, your mother… They all died in it.”

“And yet you did not.” Ruth’s voice took a brittle quality. “You survived.”

“I fought them off. Best I could. Miss Harper—men from up the hill. Burned the place down—murdered as many as—”

Jason didn’t let him finish. He pivoted on his hip, and kicked out and Green shouted out as his knee buckled to one side. The gun flew from his hand, and landed quietly in the mud.

Jason dove at Sam Green’s middle. “I’m sorry,” he said as he connected, sending the bigger man sprawling under him. The stink of cooked flesh was overpowering, and Green was slippery underneath his shirt, like he’d been skinned. “I know you’re hurt.”

Jason grabbed for the jar, but Green moved it out of his reach with one hand, grabbed Jason by the hair with the other and yanked him back. Jason cried out, and he felt ashamed: Green hadn’t so much as whimpered.

Jason pulled away hard enough that he left a fistful of his hair with Green, and drove his fist crosswise into the other man’s gut. Green coughed and bent, and Jason got the upper hand for an instant—just enough to get high and come down hard on Green’s shoulders, so he pinned him in the mud. He reached up to where Green’s burned-up fist held the jar. He closed his own hand around it and tugged. But Green wouldn’t let go.

“You can’t kill a thousand folk,” said Jason. “I seen less than that killed and it was awful. You can’t kill a thousand. Not like that.” He yanked again at the jar, but Green’s fist tightened.

“Boy, that jar’s a gift from God. If what your aunt says’s true, it’ll be enough to stop this.”

“You can’t kill a thousand.”

Jason realized he was crying, his eyes soaking up with tears. His voice was weak, a child’s voice. Some damn hero he was being for Ruth Harper and his mama and everyone else.

And Green—that bastard—he saw it too.

“No, Jason. You can’t kill a thousand. You might’ve. If you’d killed your aunt… you might’ve been able to. But you can’t and you shouldn’t. Leave it to one with blood enough on his hands already. You run on and—oh Jesus—look after that girl.”

Green glanced over to where Ruth stood, and perhaps trying to distract Jason, shifted in the muck, and pushed up hard. But Jason had the leverage and pushed back harder.

Green glared up at him. “God damn it, boy. She’s got my gun .”

“It’s all right, Ruth,” said Jason, not taking his eye off Green. “I got him.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ruth move into view. There was the sound of a hammer drawing back.

“ She wants to make sure, ” she said, in a strange, strangled but supremely confident voice; it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

Green struggled and motioned to her. “God damn it, boy. Look at her!”

Jason spared a glance, then looked again. Ruth stood like a lost child, feet close together, eyes darting here and there… one arm up over her breast—the other holding up Sam Green’s Russian, pointed at them both. Her eyes were wide, and the lids trembled—like there was a scream inside her that couldn’t get around that strange talk.

“ She wants to make sure you don’t turn on Me too ,” said Ruth, in a voice like a chorus.

“Jason,” whispered Sam, “you got to let me up. She’s gone like old Bergstrom went.”

“Like Bergstrom?”

“Thought the Juke was talkin’ through him. Before he died.”

Ruth’s lips parted—and between them, wasn’t there the hint of teeth, sharp and ready to tear at him?

Jason looked back at Green.

“What’s happened to her?”

“Juke’s in her, I’m guessin’. You two got taken away—didn’t you now? Bergstrom said it, before he died. She was in a safe place. Somethin’s made her like Maryanne Leonard.”

“Raped her, you mean.”

“Raped her.”

Jason let up on Green.

“And it’ll kill her.”

“Might just.”

Ruth spoke, but this time nothing like words came out—rather a trilling, high song that Jason now understood was not entirely or even mostly coming from her. The trees around the hospital were filled with it—the whistling that he’d heard from the creatures, the Jukes, that filled this town… the quarantine.

They were the things that had tried to prick him, and put those eggs inside him, under the skin like a fly lays… they were the things whose call Ruth had heard, as they crept around the quarantine last night… the things that had drawn her in, to lie with Mister Juke.

The gun moved as though at the end of a tree bough, and settled on them. Jason felt transfixed—like he was when he stepped up to Mister Juke himself, in the quarantine, and only a cut hand broke the spell.

Now, Ruth Harper herself held his gaze, as she aimed the gun at the two of them.

“ She will hide herself, ” said Ruth, “ while I make manifest .”

And then, the world became brilliant, as the voices—Ruth’s included—coalesced, and one solo voice rang out across the Kootenai river valley. Jason swallowed, and felt himself swept in it.

“There are not ghosts,” said Andrew Waggoner.

He stood on the highest steps of Heaven, and looked down on the multitudes before him. At his side, the Dauphin’s woman—black-haired Oracle girl—stood, and whispered to him, in the fast and unmistakable tongue of the Dauphin… and she whispered: Worship nothing but him .

“There are not ghosts—there are not Devils from Hell,” said Andrew, and the people before him nodded, agreeing. “There’s no point in trying to impersonate them. You won’t fool anybody—any more than you will live well, coming here and sawing up wood for a rich man.”

The Oracle whispered to him, and he nodded, and went on:

“You won’t live well following those priests—your pastors. Because they talk about God far removed, who promises things later that might not be as fine as you’d heard. Not the one you see, right here in front of you.”

As he spoke, Andrew found he could also see farther, and that made a certain kind of sense. This place was high up—a mountain-top. The Oracle whispered at him, and he craned his neck and looked down the great river—all the way down, where men toiled in darkness and made up ways to hate, to elevate themselves above one another. He thought he might be able to see all the way to New York, where his father and his horses toiled too, hauling barrels of beer from a brewer to a tavern—thinking that well, at least he’d sent his son, his boy, to Paris.

“And you’ll live as poorly,” shouted Andrew to the multitude here, “following your reason. Why, reason misleads us. Same as those false priests, those frightening ghosts. It takes us to places where we can say such is so, and such else is so, and then—without knowing it—this further thing must be so. But it’s an error. A fellow could think himself away from—” from the Juke “—from this here…” the Dauphin “… this Son.”