Prospero's Half-Life (24 page)

“
They’re quite belligerent about this,” she said, her voice
tight. “They fully expect that many people will be worked to the
point of exhaustion and then left where they dropped. They don’t
think that they’ll be able to harvest enough to feed everyone, and
they want to keep as much of the canned food hidden away as they
can. They don’t need all of us, and their more than willing to just
let us starve if it comes down to it”.

Richard turned
this over in his head, several times. Finally he looked to
Chris.

“
What can be done?” he asked, his voice level and grim. Chris
grinned.

“
I was hoping you would say that,” Chris replied. “Carolyn said
that you were ready for some real, serious rebellion, but I was
hoping to hear it from you. You’re a very important piece in this
puzzle”.

“
Bentley has quite the thing for you,” Carolyn said. “He seems
to think you are a highly spiritual person whose soul is, if not
quite the equivalent of his, very close to it. The white robes fall
in with what he says on everything – even they’re scared of him –
and he makes all of the final decisions on everything”.

“
What does that have to do with me?” Richard asked. “What
influence could I have over Bentley that the white robes wouldn’t
be able to negate?”

Chris and
James shared a look that Richard was unable to read. The look
lingered and when Chris looked back at Richard there was a wary
expression in his eyes.

“
Let’s just say that things can change,” he said carefully.
Richard threw his hands in the air.

“
This is some conspiracy,” he complained sourly. “You can’t
even tell me how I’m important to you”. James chuckled gloomily but
Chris simply shook his head.

“
It’s easier to actually be surprised than it is to fake it.
When you see what we’re talking about, it’s imperative that you
look as though you are seeing what they want you to think is
happening. Just trust us on this”.

“
Can I?” Richard asked softly. Chris seemed hurt by
this.

“
We’ve brought you this far, haven’t we?” he asked, impatience
and anger rising up in his voice. “We’ve bared almost everything
for you. All we’re asking is for you to be patient”.

“
Sorry,” Richard apologized quickly. “It’s hard to adjust to
trusting people again”.

“
I hear that,” Jacob said from across the room, and they all
turned to stare at him, shocked at his sudden entrance into the
conversation. Then, everyone laughed. It seemed to radically lower
the tension in the room.

“
We should get some rest,” James said. “We’ll talk more
tomorrow, and we should also actually destroy some things. We have
to keep up the appearance, if nothing else”.

“
Yes,” Chris said, rising. “we should all get some rest”. He
turned to Richard. “Feel free to browse the collection if you
aren’t tired. We have some real classics in here. Also some stuff
that people probably would have considered absolute crap before the
plague. Now, it’s the greatest stuff you’ll ever read”.

Richard
laughed, and then felt a tug on his arm. He looked to his left and
saw Carolyn looking down on him, a salacious grin on her face.

“
I can think of something more interesting for you to be
doing,” she whispered, and nodded her head towards one of the
bedrooms. “Perhaps you could join me for a more, er,
private
discussion?”

The grin on
Richard’s face matched Carolyn’s to a tee. He found that he was up
for more discussion, after all.

EIGHT

They stayed at
the tower for three days, just long enough to have been plausibly
on a expedition. During that time Richard read voraciously; he
discovered any number of books that people had recommended to him
over the years that he had set aside from lack of time. Chris
mentioned at one point on the second day that Richard reminded him
of the man from the old episode of the Twilight Zone, where the end
of the world meant that he finally had the time to read everything
he wanted.

“
Except that, instead of losing your glasses, you could be
formally hung from a nearby tree,” Chris delivered with a straight
face. Richard wasn’t sure what to think about that.

He made his way through three Vonnegut novels in a row before
he even realized what he was doing, and his combo was only broken
by virtue of Carolyn putting an omnibus of Philip K Dick in his
hands. That particularly thick, unnaturally heavy book had paper
that felt slicker and glossier than the others, and it left him
feeling like he needed to touch solid objects to prove their
veracity. One of the other women, a weathered old social worker
named Veronica, pointed out the Bret Easton Ellis novels; Richard
read through
The Rules of
Attraction
and wound up feeling sorry for
everyone in the novel.

When he wasn’t
reading he was talking with Carolyn. Sometimes this was just a
euphemism, and they would be rutting behind closed doors, feeding
off of each other in positions of increasing complexity. Most of
the time, however, they were actually talking; as it turned out,
she was an absolute joy to talk to. He was able to see past her
simple indicators of bravery and sexuality and see an actual,
complicated human. He felt a connection to her that he had rarely
felt with friends and lovers.

She had been a
corporate trainer, in that long ago time before the plague. She had
worked for a telecommunications company and had split her time
between their head office in Toronto and upper-scale hotels in
Edmonton, Vancouver, Calgary, and Halifax. She had an excellent
sense of timing and could make dry subject matter come alive with
the spark she had in her voice. She conceded that the fact that she
looked stunning in business wear might have helped quite a bit as
well. The job had had its pros and cons, although she weighted it
more towards pros. She liked travelling, especially the feeling
that she got when staying in nice rooms in glitzy urban centers.
Some nights she would go out, see the town, have some drinks; on a
lot of another nights, she would curl up into those cool, fresh
sheets, sip at something light and watch old movies on demand.

“
Really?” Richard asked upon learning this. “I love older
cinema. What’s your favourite, quick. No stopping to
think”.

“
The Apartment
,” she said without
hesitation. “Jack Lemmon. Something about him just gets me, every
time”.

“
I know exactly what you mean,” Richard replied, and meant
it.

Her father had
been a civil engineer and her mother had been a professional
student, working towards a doctorate in medieval history. She’d
grown up in the suburbs ringing Toronto, popular and well-liked but
bored. Staying in one place had never been something she’d been
keen on. As soon as she was able to she left home and gave
university a try. She lasted two years before she got bored and
applied to work at a call center. After a few years she had managed
to rise up through a series of promotions to her job as a trainer.
As she reminisced about it she grew more passionate; Richard, for
his part, could only muster the barest sort of enthusiasm for
describing his former job. He’d dredged up some humorous old
stories about crazy customers, the kind he saved for when someone
wanted to know what working in retail was really like. At the end,
he threw in the story of Troy, the last customer he’d ever
served.

“
What an odd idea,” Carolyn remarked once he finished. “I
wonder if he ever managed to do it?”

“
I don’t know,” Richard mused. “It wouldn’t do him much good
now, without any electricity to access it”.

“
I suppose not,” Carolyn said, and then reached for him with
fierce need.

They would
talk about movies, childhood stories, anything that came to mind.
They would talk so long that by the time they finally drifted off
to sleep the sun would be starting to peek through the horizon.
Eventually, of course, they were forced to part; those three days
together seemed magical, but they would soon seem like a brief,
dreamlike interlude in grim drudgery. The group in the tower split
back into their three component squadrons and made their separate,
staggered way back to the Brother’s Keep. The ruse seemed to work,
as it had every previous time they had attempted it.

Shortly after
life resumed its regular, dreary routine, an edict had gone out
that every squadron was to have a personal escort of a black robe.
The official reasoning was that some squads had come under attack
from lawless elements drifting through the area. It was true to the
extent that one or two squads had simply vanished; they had left on
an expedition and failed to return after a few days. Richard was
privately undecided as to whether they had been assaulted and
killed by ‘lawless elements’ or by someone much closer to home.
Jacob and Carolyn reported that the real reason for the enforced
escort was that the white robes were getting paranoid; they
believed that some of the expeditioners were plotting against them,
and that there was a silent rebellion mounting.

“
They’re right, of course,” Chris had replied to this news,
“but the question is, how do they know about it? Someone must have
seen something that didn’t sit right with them. Maybe some person
who we haven’t taken into account has been putting things
together”.

“
It’s hard to say,” James had said to him, “but I
can
say for certainty
that we need to be more careful. Less people at the base. Maybe
take a much more roundabout route to get there”. They had all
nodded and agreed. They continued to have meetings, once a month
and only when the schedule worked out that the five squad members
were in on the conspiracy and that Jacob was the escort. There was
no way a female squad could meet them there; the eyes of Bentley’s
men were on the women much more so than the men, and the close
watch that was kept on them ensured that any participation in their
conspiracy, no matter how seemingly minor, had a high percentage
chance of a painful death. Richard ached to be with Carolyn, to lie
with her and talk in relaxed, loving whispers, but there was
nothing that could be done. She was the creature of the white
robes, and the white robes were turning insular.

Three weeks
passed and without any warning James disappeared. It took Richard a
further two weeks to realize that he had disappeared; he only found
out the timeline of it afterwards, in urgent warnings from Chris.
He was supposed to have been on an expedition with Chris, but when
the time came to leave the squad was one man short. Chris had
looked at the schedule and realized that it was James that was
missing. Chilled, he had inquired into the matter with the black
robe that was to have escorted them; the black robe had replied
that James would not be accompanying them, and that had been the
end of the conversation. The conspirators found out in piecemeal
fashion; here and there, as safety and scheduling permitted.

“
Something bad is coming,” Chris said darkly, when he finished
relating this news to Richard. “Keep an eye out for
yourself”.

A few days
later the general population was rounded up and brought out to the
square parcel of land that had once been known as Victoria Park.
The black robes went room to room, gesturing silently and lashing
out with violence when people did not move fast enough. The river
of human bodies moving through the hallway and out into the street
was impressive; Richard had not fully realized how many people were
part of Bentley’s mad scheme until he saw them all piled
together.

They were
marched silently down the overgrown side streets and brought into
the weed-choked ruins of Victoria Park. Richard saw what the others
had been talking about when they had mentioned the remains of the
statue; the square stone base remained, although the inscriptions
that had once spidered along the side of it were painted over with
dull white paint. Here and there through the layer of grass that
had grown up around it Richard could see remnants of the crumbled
statue that had once sat atop the base. In front of the base a
rough wooden gallows had been erected; in front of that, bizarrely,
a long wooden dining table with a complete place setting for
thirteen people had been set up.

The mass of
the grey robed population was herded into place so that they had a
direct line of sight of both the gallows and the table. They were
made to wait for an hour, standing uncomfortably amongst tall grass
and Canadian thistle. The spring weather was relatively warm,
although there was a chill to the wind that had everyone shivering
slightly and looking around. The black robes stood impassively
between them and the table, their arms crossed and their eyes hard
and blank.

Finally a
third group made their way into the park, fourteen in all: Bentley,
his twelve closest men, and finally James, tied with nylon rope at
the wrists and ankles and being led like a slave. The thirteen men
in white robes took seats at the table; the ropes that guided James
were handed to a black robe and he was made to kneel in front of
the table, facing the awkward, grey crowd. Richard observed this
all in complete horror, convinced that he and the others would be
taken out of the crowd to join him. He felt a nudge at his side and
nearly screamed; when he saw that it was Chris he managed to keep
himself under control.

“
Keep calm and watch carefully,” Chris said in a whisper that
Richard could only barely hear. “Don’t say anything and don’t react
too strongly”. Richard made what he hoped was a perceptible nod;
Chris did not respond, and so he was not sure whether his nod had
been seen.