The tangled threads of Fate

We headed off Grissom and his Ka-Tet a day or so outside of Zepath. We planned it out as best we could, but they turned out to be more disciplined than we counted on. But lead and Darks flew and, at least in this small battle, the White came out on top.

I rounded up their horses after the battle, shaken. Carrie’d taken a bullet to the gut. Eden was sure that there was no internal bleeding and she got the bullet out, but even now I still couldn’t entirely shake my fear. I was worried about Penny, too. At first I thought she’d been hit, she was covered in blood. The truth was almost worse.

She was so worried about my vampiric needs that while I was worrying about Carrie, she and Ashleigh went to Grissom and his tet and cut them open to siphon out their blood. Jesus Christ.

When I came back, I knew I had to do something, but I didn’t know what. There wasn’t a line I wouldn’t cross for Penny, and it was the same with her. But how could I teach when to cross those lines? I wished my dad was still around so I could call him and get his help figuring out this parenting thing.

But I had Carrie, and as much as it hurt she gave me the kick in the ass I needed. I listened with my head down to her. She was right. I hated myself so much that I put myself at risk every chance I could. And if I wasn’t going to take care of myself, that meant that Penny was trying to. No nine year old girl should have to do that. Not for a parent, and certainly not to meet the neglected needs of an undead man.

What was I doing to her? I refused to drink Penny’s blood because I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting her. But she’s a tough girl. Tougher than most adults in our soft world. She’d been hurt in battle! How many fucking nine year olds have scars like her? She can take a puncture mark. How much more damage was I doing with my self loathing?

…There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Penny. I’ve thought it and said it, and I’ve felt the truth of it. …For her I might have to learn to accept what I am…. Which was stronger? My love for Penny, or my hatred of myself?

My talk with her went well. She sat in my lap and I held her and we cried. I fumbled around explanations and questions and answers, trying to teach her what she needed to know. What she should know. I said the right thing almost by accident.

We were te-ka, destiny’s friends, and there was nothing we wouldn’t do for each other, no pain we wouldn’t give anything to spare the other. But there are pains other than those of the flesh. There are things worse than dying. And seeing Penny desecrate the dead for me… seeing her do those things just to save my life hurt more than dying. Penny saved my soul once…I guess I needed to tell her that. To remind her that saving my soul was more important than saving my life.

At Penny’s request, I didn’t talk to Ashleigh. I wanted to confront him about the whole mess, though I had my head on straighter this time, I didn’t plan on doing any yelling or hitting him or anything. But Penny thought that he was taking it hard on himself and if I talked to him it’d make it worse. Turns out he wanted to talk to me. We stood shoulder to shoulder next to the road to Zepath. There were fresh mounds where the dead were buried. Ashleigh looked drawn and pale, the worst I’ve seen him since he nearly fell into the Todash darkness.

He realized too late that he was slowly spiraling out of control. I wished I could do something for him, something to bring him back to us. Too bad my cards had been burned up when Carrie’s powers flared up. It was Thursday. But then, maybe it wouldn’t have helped. Ashleigh had always been on the edge of the tet, first to go home for the day, silent about his feelings and thoughts. Thank God Eden wanted to call a conference. She was dinh, she saw the tet’s need.

Ashleigh agreed to talk it out with all of us, and so I went back and we waited until he followed. I looked around the fire and thought with Roland’s words. “We’re a wheel and we roll as we do.” And then following that came a saying from our world. “It’s only flat on one side.”

We spoke about Penny first, but that crisis had already passed thanks largely to Carrie. She sat on the other side of Penny, the girl between us and I felt the bond that was growing there as an almost physical thing, more than just the love I’d found with Carrie, and more than the special bond between me and Penny. But we had to make sure that this problem wouldn’t raise its head again. Penny and I had solemnly poured out the blood she had gathered, but she had an idea. If everyone donated, we could store enough in the Tet Corporation’s special refrigerated thermos to have a reserve, and to make sure that if it was too dangerous to donate, that there was already blood to keep me going.

It was getting easier to talk about my vampiric needs.

But as much as I felt that tightening of threads between Penny, Carrie and I, there was still a sense of the ka-tet unraveling. And Ashleigh was the loose thread.

It wasn’t ka-shume thank God. We would have felt it, would have known, especially with the question mark of Zepath coming up on us. But all the same, something was wrong. Ashleigh spoke hesitantly, his usually smooth southern voice trembling. He claimed that this place was getting to him, that he couldn’t handle it. It was true that Mid-World felt different. It was more…real…than most of the alternate America’s we’d traveled through. And it was true that you could almost feel the gears that kept this world spinning slipping teeth. But I didn’t think that was it.

No, Ashleigh had suffered before we came here the first time. He’d fallen into the Todash darkness and had barely been saved. A friend hadn’t been so lucky. He’d been mercilessly attacked by the Thinny, his mind battered away, only to come out the other side and suffer a possession that nearly killed him. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Thinny seeped into him again on our second journey through Mid-World and had taken control over him and with his hand, had nearly killed Eden.

I wasn’t going to chalk up our fight over Penny’s education to all that trauma, but something was definitely wrong. We were supposed to be fighting for the White, and we were in danger of loosing that. I think that Penny and I got ourselves back onto the Beam if you will, but none of us were sure how to help Ashleigh, or even why it was happening.

I was worried for my friend. I tossed out the idea hesitantly, but we were ka-tet and friends, and if it wasn’t already hovering there in khef, I’d have said it anyways, on the off chance it would help. Ashleigh told us that when he found out about his powers, he just sort of went on with his life. He didn’t freak out and think he was possessed or hallucinating, he didn’t search to see if there were others like him in the world, he didn’t abuse his powers, or even really use them. He went to college to study computers, when it would have been easier for him to become a jeweler or glass blower and make a killing. Even after finding the Tet Corporation, he seemed almost more interested in designing their software than his work as a field agent. And after joining the Tet of the Turtle, he spent more time alone in his cube or at his little apartment than with us, despite the gifts he turned out. Even his apartment was an odd choice. The Tet Corp provided cheap housing that was nicer than his ratty little apartment, and his salary would have been enough to go up from there if he wanted.

It seemed like Ashleigh couldn’t accept his life. Not his powers, not his real job, even to the point of basically refusing to spend the money he earned doing it. I felt my skin prickle with goosebumps, and I had to wonder if maybe he and I had more in common than I thought. Maybe Ashleigh hated what he was too. It was a bitter pang of kinship, even more so as I began to come to terms with what I was.

He went into his tent silently, his long face the canvas for a painting of misery. Our lanky friend was too stubborn to give up now, but when we got back to New York… it was there on the table. Eden could erase his memories, alter his past so that he didn’t know about his powers, about the Crimson King or Mid World, or even us. He could cry off.

There was no ka-shume looming in our khef, but ka-tet’s are not eternal. People come and go, and only those bound most tightly to ka go on. Despite my reservations about knowing the outcomes of things before hand, I was tempted to ask Carrie if Ashleigh’s ka parted ways with ours. Except I think that this crossroads is too muddy for prophesy. And if we could see ahead and know if Ashleigh was meant to go on with us or stay behind, was there anything we could do?

It pained me to see a friend struggle with himself like this, wrestle with his destiny. But this was between Ashleigh and Ka.

Ka like a wind

They already knew I was a vampire, but it felt like they were just finding out. I could taste their blood on my lips, even distinguish the flavors. The slightly greasy spice of Alistair’s blood – I guess all the pizza hadn’t worked its way out of his system yet. I could taste a cleaner copper tang of Eden’s blood, the thicker texture of Ashleigh’s. And the slightly sweet taste of Carrie on my lips.

That they’d all bled themselves for me was a gesture whose meaning I wouldn’t ever have been able to explain to them. After what they did for me, I couldn’t go on starving myself. Pushing myself to the point of collapse for fear of drinking blood would be an insult to their sacrifices and their love.

So I began to take, sparingly, from Carrie. It was hard for both of us, and I still didn’t enjoy it, but it seemed to ease some of the tension around me. Penny relaxed and no one had to worry about me falling over at the wrong moment.

I think it was a step closer for Carrie and I. We’d separated ourselves from the company so she could look ahead with her powers. Penny was taking advantage of the privacy, at Carrie’s suggestion, to teleport to her heart’s content. I know she’d been itching to be able to jump around like that for weeks. No kid should have to have that kind of self control. It made me smile to see her blinking around the woods, giggling and laughing. She doesn’t laugh enough.

Carrie took the chance to berate me for being over protective. But of her, not Penny. I was taking blood from her and I know what that does to a body and I wanted her resting afterwards, not seeking visions, no matter how important. We’d delayed coming out here for her to prophesize until today, but now I was getting an earful for it. And I guess I deserved it.

Carrie’s spent enough of her life being coddled. Hell, she had to be. But she was off the heroin, she was filling out and getting stronger. I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to be made to feel weak. I tried to explain that I couldn’t stand it if she collapsed or something because I’d drained her of blood and she insisted on running around. I guess that’s not fair, though. I’m not very good with apologies, but I tried.

“What’s keeping us from moving forward on this road?” She said after describing her vision. I could tell that she wasn’t talking about it, though. She was talking about us. There were a lot of reasons. Her break-up with Ashleigh was still only a little more than a month old. She was just twenty, and I was just tipping over forty, whether I looked it or not. And of course….we both knew I was going to die, and probably before Carrie could drink legally.

But even as that stuff went through my head, I had to admit that it wasn’t really keeping us apart. I tried to explain it to Penny as we walked back to camp. I wanted….needed…to be romantic for her. She’d had a damned hard life, and she deserved something good. She deserved to be treated with tenderness and passion. Carrie was always vague about her life after the prom but before being taken in by the Tet Corporation, but she probably lost her virginity in the back of some dealer’s car, putting out for a fix. Surrounded by anarchistic barbarians in a patched and dirty tent was not how I wanted to be with her for the first time.

Penny was sweet, she offered me candles she’d brought for her birthday cake. I got Carrie busy helping Penny set her tent up so I could hide hers. She saw what I was doing, it wasn’t like I could really hide it. Hell, everyone could see, even if they didn’t just know in the way we do about each other.

For a moment, I wondered what Ashleigh thought about it. We’d butted heads on more than one occasion, and I don’t think it was always about Penny. They hadn’t been apart that long, and it hadn’t been his idea to end it. He’d kissed her the first time we went through the thinny, something I was jealous of him for. Was he jealous of me now? Would he be suggesting some bare-knuckle sparring soon? I didn’t pick up on any resentment from him, but my telepathic abilities are next to non-existent.

Ashleigh wasn’t exactly in the front of my mind, though. I dug the bases of the candles into the dirt at the far end of the tent. They were meant for cakes, just tiny things, probably brightly colored, though I couldn’t tell. I lit them one by one and they started to melt right away. Carrie came in as I was lighting the last one. I snapped my zippo closed and looked at her. My face felt hot and it took me a while to realize I was blushing. I don’t blush a lot.

But when I looked at her face, Carrie was blushing too. I could only imagine the rosy color, but I could see her pale cheeks flushing and her large, dark eyes were wide. She looked over the tent, saw the tiny candles glowing, our bedrolls laid out one on top of the other to make a more comfortable bed. I was embarrassed, but by the look in her eyes I’d have almost sworn she was seeing the scene I’d imagined laying for her. A silk sheets and rose petals.

The build up was coming on quickly, a mounting tension that we were no longer trying to resist. I knew then what Roland must have felt when he first took Susan into his arms. Ka like a wind. At that point, if the tank had come roaring towards us, I don’t think it could have stopped us.

I pulled her into my arms and we fell into the blankets, kissing, exploring. She arched her back, pressing her breasts into my hands. Her legs wrapped around me. I tangled my fingers in her long, dark hair, my mouth on hers, on her neck. When I finally entered her, it was with a deep sigh, matched by Carrie. An exhalation of satisfaction, of completion. It left us pleasantly drained and exhausted. We were still surrounded by enemies, heading towards a bloody battle, and a trap beyond that, but it seemed like things were actually going right.

Ka. Love.

Degeneration

We took every chance we got to pick off a few of Grissom’s horde. And that’s about all that was left of Farson’s last fighting force. I’m not sure if only the crazed killers were the ones to survive the thinny, or if surviving the thinny just drove them mad, but we were now marching with the barbarian army we’d come to expect.

Killing a handful of them in whatever ways we had wasn’t going to change the outcome of the battle, we knew. And as much as we wanted to, we also didn’t want to. If we changed things, who’s to say it wouldn’t actually make things worse down the line? It makes my head hurt, I’ll leave the, what did they call it in Terminator? temporal mechanics, to Carrie.

But we did it because we were for the White, and it galled us every day to mingle with these servants of the Crimson King. It didn’t matter that they didn’t know they were his pawns, they willingly served the cause of anarchy.

And then we crossed the tribe of slow mutants. We could do nothing but succeed, or else Carrie’s vision would come to pass and I’d be dead, executed by Grissom. So we took command of a leaderless platoon and set out for their cave. It’s a good thing Eden had military experience. I was dinh of my old corporation for sure, but that doesn’t exactly educate you in how to organize troops for battle. In a fight, all I know are me and my tet. But she did a damn fine job. We all did. Maybe too well.

There was no red haze of battle for me this time. Ashleigh looked like it’d taken hold of him, the way his hands seem to move on their own, throwing knives, or the way his mind threw everything else. But this was a slaughter, not a battle. I hurled knives to keep our guns secret, and I threw as well as I could. We had come here to kill. But this wasn’t something I lost myself to. Rather than springing to that terrible life, I forced my hands to do their work. I was still good at The Kill, always would be, but my hands didn’t want to this time.

I made Penny promise not to attack any non-combatants. She kept asking my why not? Ashleigh understood, all the rest understood. I thought that maybe since she was a child herself that she saw no difference in fighting other children. But later I thought that maybe she was just trying to be like me. I killed, therefore she would kill.

Moments like those are when I knew that I had to die. To get out of her life. She wanted to be like me, and I was a monster, in body if not in mind anymore. I don’t want her to want to be like that.

But she listened to me, even if she didn’t understand. I don’t think she fought at all during the battle, so maybe she was overcompensating. I wish I could have asked the same of Carrie.

The plan was simple. Drive the mutants into their caves to contain them. Smoke them out and cut them down as they emerged. Efficient, very little risk to ourselves, quick. And it worked. The mutants came charging out at us and we shot them all down. It was over in less than sixty seconds, leaving only the cowering elderly and young inside. And Carrie lit the fire. They started to burn.

The men we’d been given went inside and made a quick end of it. It turns out we didn’t need to smoke them out. Damn it.

We organized watches near our new platoon. Those men might have a little soldier left in them, but most of the camp was a mass of depraved degenerates and we weren’t going to take any chances. Alistair had detected some pretty massive amounts of Darks being put off by something up ahead, which Carrie checked out clairvoyantly. She recognized the spirits who’d attacked Jericho hill the night before the battle.

We didn’t think Grissom’s army had much to fear from them, assuming that one of the psychics Alistair detected in the army would be commanding them. We were wrong about their threat, but that came later.

Carrie asked if she could talk to me in my tent. No one winked, or gave us sly glances. It wasn’t like that yet. We sat down on my bedroll and Carrie leaned in to me and put her arms around my neck. I wrapped my own arms around her as her shoulders started to shake.

Of the tet of the Turtle, only she’d had to kill innocents. Mutant or not. I wish I’d planned that fight better… it didn’t have to go down that way, I could have saved her this. But there was no door that could take me back to fix it now. The only thing I could do was hold her and grieve with her. We cried together, for all the innocents we’d killed.

When you’ve cried long and hard, it leaves you feeling drained. The tears were done and we sank down to the bedroll. I might’ve expected that one thing would lead to another then, but that wasn’t how it was. Neither of us felt the desire. We shared our grief and we shared our guilt and we gave each other what comfort we could. It was almost like making love in every sense but the physical.

I don’t know, I don’t tend towards introspection. I get to thinking about what I am and what I’ve done and I start to crave the taste of gunmetal. But it was enough to be with Carrie, and to think that maybe I helped.

I felt something wrong and woke to see that Carrie had already sensed it and sat up. Except that her eyes were half-closed and her breathing was still shallow and even. She was still asleep. I called for Eden and the others and together we all managed to wrestle her back into my tent and hold her down, while Eden looked for the spirit inside her. It’d buried itself deep though, hiding.

Penny found it. Maybe it was the ka that was growing between the three of us - me, the girl I loved as a daughter, and the woman I was in love with. Eden grappled with it in Carrie’s mind, stopping it from turning her fire onto all of us, while Penny and I laid into it with everything we had. Shaking Carrie and yelling at her probably only woke up the rest of our company, but it was my intent I was trying to use to keep the thing off-balance. Just enough for Penny to mentally fuck that thing up. I could feel her love for Carrie join with mine, and our anger at the thing trying to hurt her and she used it to hit that spirit-bitch, hard.

Carrie began to open her eyes. She blinked her long lashes, making me fall a little more in love with her. Everything started to go dark.

I’d pushed myself long and hard on this march, and it’d been almost two weeks since I’d allowed Penny to see me drink blood, the last of my blood. The dead weight of my own body came rushing at me all at once, the strain of adding my will to Penny’s mental attack was too much. My eyelids were too heavy to hold open. I tumbled into darkness.

Later. Something in my mouth…. Hot and alive, sending energy back into my limbs. My body drank it up… I tasted blood…