Marked

“What do you want with me?” Rachel asked. She wrapped her arms around her body, her fear and hopelessness stealing the warmth from the room.

“I want to have a conversation with you. That is all. Maybe explain myself to you, have you see the truth.”

Rachel spun on him so quick she nearly tripped. She approached his form, seemingly tangible but not really there. She pushed her hand through his chest, wishing she could rip his heart out. The pixels scattered, interrupting the illusion of perfection.

“I will never believe anything you have to say.” She met his eyes. “No matter what you say to try and justify yourself, you will never have my support.”

Nicolas broke eye contact, wound around the bed and sat down. His intangible presence did nothing to disturb the sheets. Instead, he seemed to hover over it like some twisted apparition, straight out of her worst nightmares.

Rachel stood against the door, her arms crossed over her chest. The ghost sensation of pain flited through her shoulder but when she moved, it was gone. How had they fixed her so perfectly?

“Your tests tell me you were infected with E-91.” Nicolas observed.

“Yes, so?”

He shifted on the bed while he fingered something in his hand. “That means you know exactly how deadly and terrible the disease is.”

She thought this over for a few moments. “There are worse things in this world than E-91.” She finally replied. “Like you and this entire city for starters.”

“That’s where you are wrong, Rachel. Everything you have been taught about our world is incorrect. But that is not your fault, no one is blaming you. It’s not your fault you were forced to grow up like a wild animal instead of the proper life you were meant to live.”

“I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

“You say that because you don’t know any better.”

Rachel remained silent. She watched Nicolas twiddle something between his hands again—it looked like a feather.

“Do you know what happened after E-91 spread through the world, Rachel? You were much too young but did anyone ever tell you the terrible history of our planet?”

She glared at him, not wanting to play into whatever twisted game he was playing. The corner of her mouth twitched.

“I’ll take that as a no.” He stood and went to one of the walls. He drew his finger in the shape of a rectangle and an image of a world map appeared. Red flags covered nearly every country; The United States, Canada and Mexico held the fewest. Europe and Asia were so deeply covered by red dots that it was difficult to see anything else.

“Do you know where China is located?”

She glanced at the map, trying to recall the old geography books she’d studied back in the compound.

“In Asia,” she replied. Despite her best efforts and though she did hate him, she found herself leaning closer to the map to study it with a morbid curiosity. What had humans done to their planet?

“That’s right.” Nicolas dragged his finger from China, across the expanse of Eurasia. “They had too many people. So many people, in fact, that I think out of all of us, they might have just been the most desperate.”

He spun on his heels, hands clasped behind his back, looking like a scholar preparing to give a lecture. “Because they had a huge military, China did good during the Great War. They swept through most of Eurasia, conquering, ravaging, taking resources for themselves. They seemed unstoppable, until they reached Eastern Europe.”

Rachel disengaged herself from her perch on the wall, her feet carrying her closer and closer to the holographic map. Nicolas smiled at her and she grimaced, unwilling to see him as anything other than a monster.

“It was England that developed E-91 and though I’d like to hate them for it, I don’t really blame them. They were a small nation; there was no way they could fend off the Chinese military so they unleashed a deadly virus on them instead, in the hopes that it would be enough to stop them. I would have done the same had I been in their position, if I’m being honest. Anything to ensure the survival of my people.”

“That every man for himself mentality is what brought us to this point, don’t you think?” She asked him.

“Perhaps, but the world I came from, there was no other choice than every man for himself. You of all people should understand-you come from a hole in the mountain where food and commodities were scarce.”

“Yes and I can guarantee you that even though we were in need, we would’ve never abandoned one another. In fact, we worked together every day of our lives to insure no one went without food. Maybe if your generation had done the same, the world wouldn’t have gone to hell the way it did.”

“You underestimate the power of human selfishness. We are selfish creatures. We are creatures that,” He swept his arm around the room. “When given the choice between the well-being of our loved ones and the well-being of strangers, we will, without a doubt, every single time choose the people we love. Love and selfishness go hand in hand, you see.”

Rachel remained quiet as images began to play out on the screen where the map had once been. Men and women clad in military attire fought, their bullets spraying everywhere, their aircrafts crashing into the earth, lighting up the sky with flames. Shouts and screams, all the sounds of war, compiled perfectly into a quickly moving picture.

The land shook during an earthquake, picture after picture of bare fields, with farmers staring up morosely into the scorching sun. Riverbeds gone dry and dormant. Starving children, so thin they resembled moving skeletons.

Then came the worst of the images. Dead bodies lined up outside hospitals, on roads, in ditches—so many bodies that the morgues could no longer contain them. Instead of crops, dry fields were now flourishing with corpses.

Rachel looked away, her fist pressed tightly against her mouth.

“That was the reality of our world. That is what we were facing.” Nicolas sighed and took a seat once more, this time in an adjacent chair.

“What you saw in the video, that all happened within a matter of years, Rachel. That whole time, the United States was desperately working to find a vaccine, a cure.”

He rubbed his temples, the lines of his face more prominent, as if the telling of this story had somehow aged him.

“It took a few years to develop and by then the disease had already killed a good chunk of our people and a third of the world population at that. The process was lengthy and the supplies weren’t many. We found that we could only make a certain amount before we had exhausted our resources.”

He ran his fingers gently over the object he held in his hands—was it a lock of hair? Something about the way he sat deep in thought reminded Rachel of someone she knew but she couldn’t quite place it.

“That left us with a very difficult decision to make. We had no choice but to seal our borders and put our own people first.”

Rachel’s mouth fell open. “So you had a way to save the world and you chose to be selfish? You kept the vaccine all to yourselves?”

“We had a formula for the vaccine, not a means to produce it in large quantities. I don’t think you understand the dire conditions of our depleted resources at that time.”

“So we left everyone else out there to die...”

“The CN was doing what they thought was best for us. Once we could fix our country, we’d help out the rest, that was always their plan. They never anticipated that things would not go accordingly. No one could see that, but I could. I knew as soon as we began healing our people we’d have the biggest target on our back but they would not listen.”

“So what did you do? Got rid of them all to do things your way?”

His eyes snapped up to her face, his mouth twisting with a grimace. “No, that is not how it happened. I was the next in the line of succession.” He explained. His calm and patience made her want to strangle him. “The president was dead, so was the vice president. Everyone was succumbing to E-91 but somehow I survived. I was secretary of defense before I ascended to the presidency, in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t. And look, I don’t really care who you were. All I want to know is whose bright idea it was to Mark everyone and make monsters of the people they claimed to be trying to save.”

“It was mine.” He admitted. “And perhaps you think me evil because you don’t understand the difficult choices I had to make in order to get us to where we are now. By the time I became president the rest of the world wanted us dead. The CN was struggling to keep our attackers out; the people were reluctant to receive the Mark.” He shook his head.

“I had to crack down and do it by force, for the greater good, for the survival of our nation. The Mark was for their own good. Herd immunity would help us get back on track, help us heal and with most of our military dead, we needed a quick and efficient way to build soldiers that could defend our country not if but when what was left of the world came looking for us.”

“You make it sound so pretty.” Rachel seethed. “The whole thing, like you were some type of god sent to rescue the people when in reality all you did was take their free will and turn them into killing machines.”

“I gave them a life-saving vaccine and in return all they had to do was defend their country. I’d say it was an even exchange. Nothing in this world is free, Rachel.”

“You’re delusional if you think what you did was right.”

“I am realistic. We needed an army and there was no way every able-bodied person would go to war otherwise. What good did it do us to be disease free if we were just going to be slaughtered by the world’s remaining population? I saved this country. I gave my kid a fighting chance.”

He held up the thing he’d been holding. Rachel could finally see that it was indeed a lock of hair that looked reddish-blonde in the light.

“This belonged to my kid.” He said. “Everything I did was because I loved my child. Because I wanted my child to be healthy, to have a fighting chance in life.”

“So you thought this was the best way to do it? By turning people into unfeeling, uncaring machines? The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Nicolas. I doubt your kid would thank you for what you did unless they are as twisted in the head as you are.”

His mouth pulled up at the corner. “Children. You’ll do everything to protect them and they’ll still rip your heart out.”

“You might have given your kid a fighting chance but do you know what happened to our kids? Do you?”

She shook her head, her chest rising and falling rapidly. “We were hunted, like animals, like worthless trophies, even cruelly killed when we were not strong enough or young enough or healthy enough. And it was all because of you. Even my own brother couldn’t take it anymore and ran away here to this terrible place to be Marked!”

For the first time, Rachel noticed hurt on Nicolas’s face. “No, that was not because of me!” His voice rose. “That would have never been your life had your mother not taken you and your brother out into the wild.”

His words shocked her, sending her stumbling backwards over the night stand she’d tried to use to break out. She couldn’t regain her balance in time and fell hard onto her hands and knees. A gash opened up on her palm, red blood bloomed shockingly over her pale skin.

Of course she’d figured he’d know a lot of her medical history, but how did he know about her past life? There was no way he could.

“How do you know that?”

Nicolas rose and took a few strides forward so that his entire frame hovered in front of her. She stood hastily, rubbing the blood from her hands. Something about his proximity and the way he was looking at her made her feel trapped, suffocated.

“What did Ruth tell you about me?”

“I—I don’t understand. How do you know my mother?”

“Nicolas. That is my name. You are Rachel Nicole Wilson. Nicole, Nicolas. Where do you think you got your middle name from?”

A cold sweat broke out on the back of her neck. She stammered for words but nothing came out. Was Nicolas insinuating...was he insinuating that he was her father?