Ramez Naam - Nexus

"Almost everyone. It only barely worked on me. It didn't work at all on my sister. We couldn't understand what was happening to everyone else. It was crazy. I tried to run away when I was eleven. They caught me – beat me. My mom and dad just watched. I tried again, and the prophet and his disciples beat me within an inch of my life. I tried to stab one of them with a fork, once, and they whipped me half to death, left me tied to a fencepost all night, burnt me with cigarettes." The memories were brutal and painful. Kade lived them with her. Sam was numb to it. Tears streamed down his face.

"After that they kept a close eye on me. They didn't let me near any phones, any terminals, any knives. They used those people as cattle. Took their money. Took whatever women they wanted. Beat up the men for sport." She remembered it. Living in hell. In a prison camp. She knew it wasn't supposed to be this way.

"They started using me when I was twelve."

Kade moaned with the memory of it. Sam just stared off into space.

"I fought the first few times." She'd clawed them, bitten at them, lashed out like a wild animal. "But they always won. It hurt less if I just let them." The pain and humiliation of surrender – of submission. The disgust of it. The self-loathing.

"After that… I just gave in. I just started pretending that the virus worked on me. I told Ana to do the same." The act of dewy innocence. The complete submission to any request, any authority, the feigned enthusiasm at the Sunday night rallies. It killed Kade. The tears kept flowing. He was sending Sam love and compassion, not for the adult her, but for that twelve year-old child, helpless and alone and abused, utterly abandoned by the world.

"I went two years that way. I thought about killing myself every day. I thought about killing one of them every day. What kept me going was Ana." Her sweet sister, also unaffected by the virus, confused, hurt, scared. How Sam had tried to comfort her, hold her, raise her, shield her, protect her, show her some small bit of joy in this godforsaken place.

"It changed when I was fourteen. I'd gotten used to the abuse. I only got hurt when one of them was in a bad mood. Then one day, I was taking a walk with Ana, and one of them saw us, and he had this look, this leer on his face, and I was so used to that, and I didn't care anymore what they did to me. But then I realized he wasn't leering at me. He was leering at my little sister. And I thought, oh my god, if any of them touch you I'm going to kill them all, every one of them, with my own bare hands."

She was crying again. The numbness was gone. Old rage and fear and impotence replaced it. She could be numb about the pain she'd endured. Not about her fears for her sister, for the one innocent human being she'd tried to protect in those years.

"So I did what I should have done a long time earlier. One of them took me to his room. He used me hard. And after he'd spent himself, and he'd fallen asleep, I did the bravest thing I could imagine. I slid out from under him… I went out into the other room, where his phone was, and I picked it up. I hadn't touched a phone since I was nine. It beeped when I pressed the keys. I was so terrified he was going to hear me…"

Kade felt her memory, that childhood terror. They would kill her for this. They would beat her. They would rape her sister. She would never escape…

"…but I pushed 9-1-1 and it went through. And I told them where I was, and that the prophet and his disciples had made us slaves, and that they were about to hurt my sister, and that my parents had become zombies, and I didn't listen to any of their questions, and I hung up." Adrenaline was coursing through both their veins now, the memory of danger, of courage, of pushing her luck.

"And then I put the phone back and snuck back into his room. And when I crawled back into bed with him, he started to wake up. And so I fucked him, told him I wanted him so bad, did anything I could to distract him." Kade remembered it, remembered it through Sam. The fear. The shame. The way she'd hated him as she did it. The way she'd imagined him bleeding and broken and dying as he'd taken her, the way he'd mistaken her hatred for passion.

"A little while later there was shooting. A sheriff's deputy had rushed out to the site, and one of the disciples had shot him, killed him." My fault, she'd thought. I killed him.

"No, Sam, no! That wasn't your fault!" Kade told her.

She smiled sadly at him, put her finger to his lips. "I know, Kade. I know that now. I thought I knew that already. Now I do. Finally.

"After that it was a siege. All the slaves… my parents, the other parents, even the kids. They all worshipped that man, the prophet. Every family had guns. He'd made sure of it. He told us all that Satan's forces were coming to take us to hell, and we had to protect ourselves. The feds arrived. The FBI's Bioterror Division. Someone had picked up on the word 'zombie'. It wasn't the first Communion virus outbreak. Just the worst.

"The prophet told the feds that we'd rather die than go with them. That if they invaded we'd blow ourselves up, burn ourselves alive, all of us, including the kids.

"The siege lasted three days. The FBI played loud music. They brought in preachers. They brought in shrinks. I'd never seen Ana so frightened.

"On the fourth day I woke up in the middle of the night. It was 2.28am. I remember that on the clock. I'd slept maybe an hour with all the music and all the people running around. And I just knew what I had to do. My dad had a gun, like all the rest. I snuck into their bedroom. He was asleep. It wasn't his shift to be on guard. His pistol was on the nightstand. I took it, and I put on a pretty dress, the white one, the dress that the worst one, the prophet, liked to dress me up in when he fucked me. I hid the pistol under that dress, and I went to see him. People just chuckled when they saw me. They knew what that dress meant.

"There was a guard at his door, one of the other parents, a fat one, not one of the disciples. The light was on underneath. I told the guard that he'd sent for me, that he wanted me to come to him in the middle of the night, that he had a 'blessing' for me." She spat the word out in disgust.

"The guard understood. He didn't have any sympathy for me. He just saw me, and wanted me, and wanted to serve God and the prophet. He let me in.

"The prophet was behind his desk, looking at his terminal. He looked up, saw me in that dress, looked me up and down. 'Sarita,' he said. 'What do you want?'

"And I pulled out the gun. It was huge. The guard was already turning away to go back into the hallway. The prophet saw the gun, and he yelled." The memory was so fresh in her mind. She remembered every instant of it, the position of every piece of furniture, every sound, every moment frozen forever as a still image. "He tried to come at me, but his desk was in the way. I pulled the trigger and my first shot missed completely. The gun jerked up towards the ceiling. The guard was turning around, coming at me. The prophet was most of the way around his desk, coming at me to slap the gun away. " Sam remembered the huge boom of the pistol, the smell of it, how the gun's kick had shaken her whole body. She remembered the fear, the way he was growing larger in her sight, the knowledge that she was about to die and fail – and be beaten and be killed – and have her sister raped in front of her.

"I panicked. I tried to jerk the gun down to level it and pulled the trigger again. I fired wild. The guard hit me at the same time.

"He knocked me to the ground. He tried to kick me. Somehow I still had the gun. I pulled the trigger again and the guard fell on top of me. He was fat and huge. There was blood everywhere, all over my dress. I tried to pull myself out from under him. I got part of the way but my legs were still stuck. I looked up and I saw the prophet. He was getting up on his feet. I'd shot him. There was blood on his shirt, his left arm. I'd shot him and knocked him down and now he was getting up. He had a knife in his right hand. He started coming for me and I pulled the trigger again, took him in the stomach, and he fell down to his knees."