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Biohazard Symbol The Scattered Biohazard Symbol


I woke from dreams of pouring rain to the sound of distant screaming.

I lay there for a few seconds, eyes still closed, trying to decide whether or not I had imagined the ragged cries. They didn't come again...but I knew I wouldn't be getting back to sleep. The yellow-gray light of dawn crept under my shelter. I stretched and sat up.

My bed that night lay beneath the down-turned scoop of an earth-moving machine, long dead, long rusted. I crawled out from under it, my knees disrupting the heavy circle of herbs I had sprinkled on the earth to keep the scorpions and creepers away. My camp fire had grown cold. Presently I climbed up on top of the machine and dug into my pack for a chunk of jerky.

It was my last piece. I gnawed the tough, stringy meat slowly and contemplated the source of my next meal while my stomach growled and complained.

The Grainway stretched out before me in the dawning light, vast and golden and harboring far more death than life. Grain silos dotted the horizon here and there, testaments to an era that no longer held sway.

For long minutes I heard nothing except the sigh of the wind...

...and then my head snapped around. There. From the farmhouse to the west, the sound carried across the plain, so faint it barely registered-but so filled with pain that even the tiny, distant voice pulled at me.

Jumping down from the machine, I tightened the straps on the twin sheaths at my waist and the rifle scabbard across my back. Whatever trouble stirred at that farmhouse, I wanted nothing to do with it, and I took off to the east, determined to put as much distance as possible between me and the farm.

Half an hour later the sight of a single tree stopped me.

It seemed out of place, a tall, lone sentinel amid the fields of grain, probably growing beside an old well. But the way the branches spread out, the way the leaves caught the sunlight...it reminded me of the symbol on the tattered scrap of cloth that had cost me so dearly.

My name is Leon Nasden, and at one time I was proud to call myself an Enforcer. That was before I met Araelia, the refugee Vista I fell in love with. If she hadn't had the jacket with the Vista patch sewn onto it...if my fellow Enforcers hadn't found that patch... I wouldn't have had to give up everything I'd ever had, and spend my life on the run.

Those cries held such pain...

I wasn't able to help Araelia. But maybe, maybe I could help someone else.

I turned around and headed west. Toward the farmhouse. Toward the screams.

I could have turned myself in, back when my former brethren were hot on our trail. I could have given myself over to them and let them sentence and punish me. But the thing I realized, the thing that surprised me, was that I wasn't ready to give up. Even without Araelia, I told myself deep down, there was still life to be lived...and somewhere, somehow, there still had to be justice in the world. If only I could find it.

I couldn't just quit. Not yet.

By the time I got to the farm I had begun to doubt my hearing. The tiny, battered house had the silence of abandonment draped over it. I thought the sounds might have come from the ancient, rotting barn nearby, but even from where I stood near the house's front porch I could see the barn was empty. One of its doors was missing entirely, and the other swung open by one hinge. I slid one of my blades free, stepped up onto the house's porch and pushed open the door.

An odd scene greeted me.

The house couldn't have had more than three rooms, maybe even just two. I was looking at the biggest of those rooms: an almost completely bare box, essentially, nothing more than a plank floor and decayed sheetrock falling off the walls.

Not far inside the door, sitting motionless in a rocking chair, was a frail, elderly woman in a housecoat that was more patches than original cloth. Her gray hair had crept out of its bun and stuck out all around her head in crazed spikes. She lifted her head and stared at me as I stood in the doorway, and gazing into her soft, aged eyes was like gazing into the eyes of a child.

"All apart," the old woman said, her voice quavering. She sounded scared. "All together, all apart." She started rocking the chair back and forth. The floor joist beneath her squealed rhythmically.

I wasn't paying much attention to the crone, though, because I couldn't take my eyes off the beautiful girl kneeling in the middle of the floor. She wore clothes almost as ragged as the old woman's, I was pretty sure she'd cut her hair herself, and her face was smeared with grime.

She still looked like an angel. Not like Araelia-not perfect. But her face was so sweet...

I took a step closer, and realized the grime had tear-tracks cut through it.

I crouched down in front of her. "Are you all right?" My voice echoed hollowly. The girl didn't move, didn't acknowledge my presence in any way. I don't think I ever saw her blink.

"Leera," the old woman whispered. "That's her name. Leera."

I glanced back and forth between them. "I thought I heard screaming."

"Did." The crone's deeply creased face screwed up into a mask of terror. "Screamed till she couldn't scream no more. Husband all together! All apart!" As I watched, a thin string of saliva escaped the old woman's lower lip and ran down her chin. I had seen this kind of illness before, when the mind of an elder reverted to that of an infant.

Leera still made no move at all. She must have been in shock. Turning back to the old woman, I asked, "And what's your name?"

She took a moment to remember. "Granny," she finally said. Then her eyes lit up with innocent delight as the rest of it came back to her. "Granny Switch! Switch, Switch, Switch."

I imagined how she got the name, envisioning her using a long, flexible cane to deliver red welts to disobedient backsides in her younger days. I gestured at Leera. "What about her husband? Where is he? What happened here?"

Granny Switch rocked back and forth, hugging herself, and tears welled up in her addled eyes. "Other barn! Other barn to the north! Allll apart."

I should have left. Should have just walked out of the house and away. But the senile old woman and the shell-shocked girl were so pitiful...and part of me wanted to know. Wanted to know why Leera had screamed. And what had happened to her husband. And exactly what the hell was going on at this farm. "Do the doors here lock?" I asked, hoping the question would get through to her. "Can you lock them, or at least wedge a chair under them or something?" Granny Switch nodded readily enough. "Good. Lock yourselves in. Don't let anyone in till I come back."

She nodded again. "Not till you come back."

The blade still in my hand, I backed away, out the door and onto the porch.

The other barn, Granny Switch said. North of here. I squinted, the sun to my right, and thought I could make out another dilapidated structure, at least a mile away. My feet were heavy with caution and fear, but I sent them north regardless.

The cool of morning had swiftly given way to the day's escalating heat, but it wasn't as bad as the day before. A few high, thin clouds drifted overhead.

Details became clear as I approached the "other barn." It too had once accompanied a farmhouse, but all that remained of the house was an old, burned-out foundation and a rock chimney. The barn itself looked to be in surprisingly good repair. I wondered if Leera and her family had made do, the best they could, between the two locations, living in the decent house and using the decent barn. It seemed awfully exposed, though. Hard to defend.

I walked up to the barn and listened from a short distance. Again, the only sound I heard was the wind, which had picked up a little. Winter would come in a few short months. I'd have to find better shelter, get some warmer clothes. I walked around the barn, silently drawing my other blade, but still I saw no one, heard nothing out of place. Having made a full circuit, I stopped at the big front doors. I used one blade to lever the door open and pushed it wide.

It took a moment for my brain to process what I was seeing.

In the center of the barn was another machine, a big farm implement-the kind people used to call a "combine." Except...that wasn't what this machine was anymore. I took a step closer, staring.

Someone, or something, had taken the machine apart and re-assembled it into a different shape. Now it was some kind of...beast. The metal plates and screws and blades formed its limbs and body and teeth and long, razor-sharp, scythe-like claws. The metal monster crouched there, in the middle of the floor, as if ready to spring forward in a senseless, shrieking, grinding attack.

The wind shifted slightly, and I brought a hand to my face as the odor hit me. That's when I noticed the flies buzzing about the huge metal construct. I moved forward, covering my mouth and nose, still staring, unable to stop staring. I looked through the blades and tines and strips of metal, and I saw-what was that? Something red. Red and wet. I coughed, almost gagged, but still couldn't stop staring.

Nestled in the center of the enormous sculpture was a human heart, impaled on a metal spike. Similarly affixed below the heart were two lungs and a coil of intestines, and I realized with mounting horror and revulsion that muscle fibers had been stretched out along each of the monstrosity's limbs.

"All apart," Granny Switch had said.

I knew with dead certainty that this was what remained of Leera's husband. My hands tightened on the grips of my blades until all the blood was forced out, leaving them stark and white...

...and ready to move, to slash and stab, when the first of the wild-eyed men screamed and jumped out of the hay loft on top of me, a sharpened pool cue in his hands. "Infidel!" he shouted in my face, blasting me with horrid, rotten breath. "Unclean! You cannot approach the God! You-"

He would have said more, but I lopped off one of his arms between the wrist and the elbow, then buried a blade in his neck. Three more men dropped out of the loft as soon as this happened, and I barely had time to get the first one's blood out of my eyes before they were on me.

Say what you will about the Enforcers, but they know how to train their fighters. I didn't know who these people were, what they wanted, nothing, but I could tell just from the way they moved that they didn't stand a chance against me. Their only weapons were scavenged garbage, not a firearm among them, not even a zip gun. They came at me with tire irons and meat cleavers, and I drew blood again and again before putting them down, one after another.

I heard rapid footsteps from outside the barn after the last man fell, and I ran outside, breathing hard. One of them was trying to get away-scrambling pell-mell through the grain, his arms flailing.

I pulled my rifle.

The bullet took him through the right calf, punched out through his shinbone. He screamed and fell and screamed again, but he didn't try to get away anymore. I took my time getting to him, cleaning my blades as I went on a shirt I had taken off one of the bodies in the barn.

When I reached him, he glared up at me with wide, mad-glittering eyes. "Infidel!" he shrieked. "Unholy! You dare to profane the God!"

I set the butt of my rifle on the ground and leaned on the weapon, watching the bastard carefully. "Who are you people?"

"We are the Scattered!" he hissed. "We fulfill the mission! The mission Cetralalt cannot achieve! We understand the truth, the truth of Life, the truth of MAISNET!"

I had only the barest clue what he was talking about. I knew of a group of people called CoGs, who were supposed to worship technology, and one of them had mentioned a "High Priest Cetralalt" once. But I'd never heard of anyone doing anything like this before. "Okay, you're a bunch of crazy people, and you roam around, making idols and decorating them with people's guts?"

Through the pain, through the mania, a flash of true pride flickered across his face. "Only the right Gods!" he whispered. "Send the emissary! Send the Switch! She knows. She tells us where to go!"

I shook my head. "Send the-"

Oh no.

Granny Switch.

I shoved the rifle back in its scabbard as I ran, full-out, breath hot in my lungs. I had assumed the senile old woman was the girl's mother, or maybe her husband's. Not once did I ever think she didn't belong there. I ran and ran, the minutes stretching out far too long.

Far too long.

I smashed the front door completely off its hinges as I exploded into the farmhouse, then let out a scream of my own. There was no fear in it. Only rage and shame and guilt and fury.

Granny Switch knelt on the floor next to Leera's headless body, both her wrinkled hands smeared with blood and wrapped around a huge butcher knife. She grinned up at me, and gone was the lost, child-like softness. Now her eyes gleamed with the same insane light I had seen in the eyes of the man I shot. "Still alive!" she screeched. "Ha! All together! All together, all of us! Put it all together and take it all apart!" She raised the knife, about to bring it down into Leera's torso. "Just getting started!"

I had come to this place with tiny, meager slivers of hope in my heart...and the dream that one day I might discover the justice that had been lost from the world.

Now I understood. For Araelia...for Leera...maybe even for others.

Justice lived.

In me.

I screamed again and drew my blades.


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