Prospero's Half-Life (23 page)

Chris cut him
off with a gesture, his expression unchanging, and he went deeply
cold with fear.

“
Cut the God shit, man,” Chris said, and all at once Richard
was very confused. A wide grin split the man’s dusky black face.
“You’re here because we know damn well you don’t think like that.
Now would you like to know what’s going on, or would you like to
spend the rest of your life on your knees?”

Richard began
to speak, realized that he had no idea of what he was about to say,
and then shut his mouth. He rose slowly, carefully to his feet. The
choice, it seemed, was obvious.

SEVEN

It was Chris
that did most of the talking; Chris, who had known all along that
Richard was nowhere near as devout as he espoused. As he listened
to Chris tell him, he realized that he had not been as careful as
he thought he had been.

Brother
Bentley, it turned out, had been plain old Reverend Michael Bentley
once upon a time. When the plague had fallen on the world, Bentley
had opened the doors of his church, First Methodist, and welcomed
in all who needed aid. As the disease had progressed, it had become
increasingly clear that this was not the sort of epidemic that
would sweep through and leave a slightly reduced population
grateful to be alive. As more people had died, Reverend Bentley had
begun to grow strange. One of the men in the apartment, a grizzled
old ex-firefighter named James, had spat at that.

“
Old Bentley lost his fuckin’ mind, is what,” James growled.
Chris nodded, accepting it without comment.

Bentley had
begun preaching with much more fire and brimstone than he had ever
used in the past. He had gathered his flock around him and had
drilled into them, for hours at a time, the idea that the outside
world, drowning in sin and dripping with decay, was responsible for
the mass deaths haunting the world.

“
He used to go on worsen’ a politician,” James remarked, his
voice flat. “God this and hell that and the modern world is
responsible for it’s own demise”.

There had been
several voices in the community that had objected to the things
that Bentley had been preaching, mainly from the students at the
university. Near the end, as the few remaining survivors wandered
the haunted streets in shock, someone had firebombed First
Methodist. That had been the tipping point; after that, Bentley had
taken the fanatical core of his flock and had rounded up the
remaining people of Brantford. He had gathered them in the broad
courtyard of the university and delivered a three-hour sermon that
had culminated in a warning that deviance from the word of God
would not be tolerated. To prove his seriousness in this matter, he
had taken five of the survivors from the university and had
crucified them in the courtyard. Their crucifixes had been made out
of the burned wooden beams that had been pulled from the wreckage
of Bentley’s church.

“
They’re still there, too,” one of the women said, breaking in
with a jarring suddenness. “At least, they were. No one’s been
allowed there in a while. But he had them there. They’d hammered
them in pretty deeply, they’d stand there for a while”. Richard
swallowed thickly and tried not to think about what a lingering,
agonizing death that would have been.

After that,
Bentley had taken the entire group of survivors in Brantford and
had brought them to the downtown high school. He had ordered them
to clear every last book, poster, computer, etc. out of the
building, and had burned all of them in a bonfire which had
smouldered on the school’s front lawn for a week. After that, he
had chosen twelve men from within the community and imposed the
hierarchy of robes upon them. Bentley and his chosen rulers would
wear pure white, to set themselves apart from the others. The
fanatics were robed in black and used as a disciplinary stick
against the rest of the community, who were robed in grey.

Life had
turned into a living hell for most of the survivors of Brantford
after that. Bentley had insisted upon a course of destroying every
bit of the old world, by covering up, breaking, or burning anything
that would have held information. The signs were painted over,
sculptures were pulled down and smashed, books were torn apart and
burned. At first, Bentley and his cohorts had joined in the orgy of
destruction, but every week they pulled back a little more.
Finally, they had entrusted the day-to-day supervision of the
survivors to the black robes, and had retreated into secret
councils in lonely areas of the building.

The black
robes, for their part, had ensured the pacification of the
community in two ways: first, through direct threat of physical
violence; second, through the encouragement of the concept of
neighbour spying upon neighbour.

“
For a bunch of crazy fanatics,” James noted, “they would have
done the Stasi proud”.

Such a culture of paranoia had become entrenched over the
months largely due to the second strategy. The survivors,
shell-shocked by the plague and then cowed by the crucifixions, had
been all too eager to report each other for perceived crimes of
morality. Most of these crimes, it seemed, had a sexual nature.
This person had been harbouring sexual thoughts of that person.
This person had been caught
in
flagrante
with that person. It was the same
sort of tiresome, petty moralising that they had engaged in before
the plague, only now there was serious consequences at the end.
Many people, however, seemed to be perfectly alright with this as
long as the crimes of another meant that their own would be
concealed.

“
People got scared,” Carolyn said quietly. “They didn’t want to
die. We knew it would happen. People disappeared. There were – are
– rumours of mass graves on the edge of town. I’m sure you’ve heard
them”. Richard nodded, remembering the discussion he’d had in sharp
whispers with Chris. “Well, they’re true. Dozens of us have been
killed over the last few months, and they’re getting buried out by
the old Mohawk church. People get reported, tortured, murdered. It
happens every day”.

As the plague
wound down, the community’s numbers had been bolstered by the large
numbers of refugees going to and from various areas, trying to find
safe lands free from lawlessness, disaster, and death. A great
number of those fleeing other places were caught up in Brantford,
rounded up by Bentley’s black robed soldiers and given the choice
between joining up and dying. Everyone would inevitably choose
joining up, although death was still the outcome for some of them.
The unlucky ones were chosen at random, and put to death as a
warning to the others.

“
They made everyone watch, too,” a middle-aged man named Jack
commented. He was broad of shoulder and face, although he appeared
as though he had lost a fair amount of weight not all that long
ago. “Brought us all to Victoria Park and hung them in front of the
broken rock where the statue used to stand. We were told that they
were sinners, blasphemers. What were we going to say to
that?”

You could have tried something
,
Richard thought.
You didn’t have to just
watch as they died
. He felt angry and then
stopped as the import of what he had just thought was driven home.
He swallowed slowly and said nothing.

After a while
the flood of refugees had slowed to a trickle, and then to only one
or two in a given week. It was then that Bentley had decided to set
up his test for people who passed through the city. Chris had been
caught in it first, as it turned out, and Richard was only the
latest in a line that stretched back over a dozen people.

“
It seems like a great trick to convert people,” Chris
observed. “Kidnap them, throw them in a weird, supernatural cage,
and then tempt them with company and sex. If they pass the test,
drag them out and convince them that God has chosen them for some
greater work”.

Carolyn spoke
up then, adding in details about that particular trap. She had been
chosen by four of the white robes; Bentley had outlined his vision
for the “Test of Self-Denial” (as he had called it) and had left
the details of the implementation up to them. They had chosen her
out of a list of ten other women who had been culled from the
general population through a number of filtering criteria, most of
which had revolved around the physical qualities that they had held
that would be attractive to the broadest spectrum of men. She had
been the winner, although it had seemed like anything but at the
time.

“
I was invited into the basement to meet in spiritual seclusion
with them,” she related dully. “They held me down and gang-raped
me, and when they were done they offered me the choice: they would
either denounce me to the community as a faithless whore, meaning I
would be put to death, or I would work for them as their temptress.
I chose being the Jezebel. How could I refuse?”

Richard nodded
thoughtfully. He looked at her and imagined how it might have been
for her, and then shook his head.

“
That must have been awful,” he said gently. “I would think
that Bentley’s hand-picked apostles wouldn’t have acted like
that”.

Carolyn spat
disgustedly. “They’re all hypocrites, every one of them. They drink
like fishes, and all of the women in the community have been
through their personal sleeping room at some point. They have them
brought there by the black robes, and tell them that anything they
say about it will mean their death. They don’t care at all for the
morality that Bentley goes on about. They keep a secret cache of
books in their room, and sequester all the best food stores for
themselves”.

“
They’re like any other group in power throughout history,”
James grumbled. “They get a little taste of authority and it goes
right to their head. We all have to slave and starve so that we can
maintain the illusion with Bentley that keeps them in
charge”.

“
Which brings us to why you’re here,” Chris said, cutting off
any further discussion authoritatively. “Which means explaining
what
this
is”. He
swept his hands around the apartment, taking in the mass of
forbidden materials.

James and
Chris had gone out on a number of expeditions; they’d gotten to
talking and had discovered that neither of them believed in the
slightest in what they were doing. Neither of them had any use for
God, especially the sort of God that Bentley seemed to think was
appropriate for general worship. At first that was all it had been
– hastily whispered denouncing, vague affirmations that they needed
to do something. Then, a few more had fallen into their orbit –
other squad mates whose dams of silence had burst at the
opportunity to rail against their lives. With additional members
joining in, the hushed conversations began to take on the tone of a
more fleshed-out conspiracy. They took to meeting in out-of-the-way
places, and only when they could manage to draw a squad that was
comprised entirely of conspirators. This would sometimes take a
very long time to accomplish, but it became easier with the
addition of Jacob, a whippet-thin Jamaican man who had sat by the
window during the entire story, keeping a careful and constant
watch on the outside. Jacob was a black robe, a position that had
proved to be invaluable on any number of occasions. Jacob had been
brought into the conspiracy when he had stumbled upon three of the
others holding a secret, impromptu meeting in a little-used study
room on the top floor of the Keep. The three conspirators had
braced themselves to be denounced and put to death; instead, Jacob
had uttered the bitterest, crudest condemnation of the state of
affairs that any of them had ever heard. It seemed that it was not
just the grey robes who would mouth words of piety to maintain
their lives.

Jacob, as a black robe, had influence over the scheduling and
formation of the destruction squads; consequently, arranging
meetings in far-off areas of the city became quite a bit easier. He
was also able to alert them to times when the black robes seemed
more alert than normal; the conspirators would disperse for several
days until Jacob gave the all-clear. The real
coup de grace
, however, was the
addition of Carolyn. It had been Chris that had managed
that.

Chris had
discovered Carolyn several weeks after his own naming ceremony;
like Richard, he had been shocked to discover his temptress in the
flesh outside of that endless purgatory. He’d made a concerted
effort to track her down, becoming nearly obsessed with it at one
point. Finally he had cornered her in the basement and convinced
her to try to figure out a way to come to one of the meetings. To
accomplish this, she had picked a group of women that she knew
would be amenable to plotting against the white robes. This was,
Carolyn related, a very easy task; there were virtually no women
whom thought that the current state of affairs was tenable. After
picking her squadron, Jacob had quietly put them onto the
expedition schedule, at the same time as two squadrons of the men.
They’d settled on the apartment tower for several reasons; amongst
them, it was central to a number of other locations that were
slated for purging, and it had a rather excellent view of the
bridge and the approach from the downtown area. Once they all met
for the first time, their conspiracy became much more intense.

Carolyn had a
unique position, in that she was confidant to many of the white
robes. She served them as their temptress and much more often as
their servant and whore. To avoid arousing the suspicions of
Bentley they made her live, much of the time, like the other grey
robes (which was how she was able to get away for meetings of the
conspiracy) but the rest of the time she was expected to wait on
them and service any desire they might have. While this was
degrading and sometimes painful, it also afforded a great wealth of
information. Like all powerful men in history, they had an inflated
sense of their own worth and a need to share it; after the relaxing
post-coital glow set in, they would often share it with her. She
was privy to a shocking amount of information, not the least of
which was that once the ground thawed the grey robes would be
forced en masse into farming the areas that Bentley had ordered
torn up.