FIVE DOWN DEAD
Sneak peek of Red
EJ Koh
FIVE DOWN DEAD
After Lili awakened, the Spirits rounded her up with five others and dropped them on an island in the eastern hemisphere. The ground there was wet from the passing rain, and eggshells rimmed the hedges of newly farmed soil. The line of the ocean was as thin as Lili’s blued lips. The sky was gray and empty like the pupilless eyes that watched her skin turn with bruises.
The Spirits shackled her to a pike in the ground. The other four captives were dragged past her—their ash-colored ankles scraping the rock—and staked down on either side of her, a foot apart.
“Do you think you have rights?” Baru, the Spirit head, crouched over the ground next to her, brought his knees up to his chin and sat on his skeleton. Surprised everyone by dirtying his white robes. He smelled of salt.
“Humans have rights as citizens. I have rights as a Spirit.”
Lili grinned and spit out the gap between her front teeth. One of her blood-molars landed somewhere by her feet. “I have rights because I’m alive.”
“Just because you breathe? The universe doesn’t owe you anything.” He pointed at her torso, where black smoke began to crawl up and shroud her, lick out, twist in netted shocks. “You’re not the same as us. Not anymore.”
Her black hair stuck to the sweat on her forehead.
A dozen foot soldiers in masks painted with thick brows and open mouths stood behind Baru. He tucked his silver shoulder-length strands behind his ear and turned to them.
“Mercy,” he ordered.
The soldiers marched to the first of the five pikes. They raised their staffs and speared the skull of the captive that wore the same robe and mask as them. The sound of it was unnatural. As if the soldiers speared through a crop stalk, not a body. The captive stiffened at the spine, blackness leaving his pale skin.
The soldiers marched to the second pike. Two down. Three down.
“Let me fight.” Lili’s voice trembled. The ocean foamed white puss as soft as the boils breaking open on her feet. “This isn’t Justice.” She looked at the expanse of Baru’s back between her lashes. His back was the mountain in her life. The first time she felt his back was during fieldwork, in this same hemisphere. It was their first mission on Earth in a small town on the southeast continent. Baru had said, Death is my companion. He meant, our.
Spirits were not angels but they protected humans from Wakes, or creatures with dark energy that curled like black smoke out their bones. Lili had fisted the back of a Wake’s head, thrown him into a moist pit, and collapsed on top of the corpse, panting. He was the forty-seventh kill that morning. Standing, she watched the humans move about their days in the nearby town. The humans moved like short breaths, sucked in and out of tiled buildings. Lili straightened her spine. She touched Baru’s back with her red hand. He looked at her. Then he looked again at the purple mountains.
Not a week later, during a mission in the deep autumn flux, Lili derailed orders and killed a human. The human had slugged a propeller at Baru when he was spotted trespassing in an abandoned field off the artic strait. Lili dove into the water with the human in her grip and held him until he drowned. She thought: this human is a convict, better his life than Baru’s. But Baru thought differently. He chased Lili down cold sewages and frozen pipes as if seeking revenge for the convict, gone. Lili awakened beside a sewage tank, up to her head in feces and her own bile, Baru not a block behind her. She closed her eyes and imagined his back rupturing into an asylum of black ironed prongs. She thought Earth was like her—as suicidal as the water climbing up shore to hold onto something before being pulled away. She realized Baru was wrong about humans. They didn’t need saving.
Sometimes Lili didn’t believe in the truth. She believed in what she needed.
It was then, knowing fear and anger, she turned Wake.
Now whorls of black energy amassed around her.
“Justice,” Baru said, “has nothing to do with fairness. Justice simply carries out what needs to be done. You are never too young to die and start another life. This one, for you, has been corrupted. Go to sleep. Find peace like the rest of your comrades.” He touched the top of her head. Her hair stuck to his fingers.
Four down.
The soldiers surrounded her.
Lili realized then she was useless.
One masked soldier raised his pulped staff, and the second he bent his elbows, Lili thought she was nobody. She was supposed to be a killer at the other end of that staff. The staff she cut from wood thick-as-wrists with her own blades and gave to her squadron when they were still companions in slaughter. The second he bent his elbows, inky energy thundered and shot up through her spine. Lili shucked her hands out the braces and jumped. She snapped that soldier’s elbows in the wrong direction, terrified. Yes, she was nobody.
In the still of their shock, the soldiers threw themselves on top of her. Lili hit the ground. She slammed her skinny forearms into the shells and forced herself back on to her feet. She hoisted one soldier over her head and dropped him on her knee. There was a crack and splinter. Another soldier used his flat blade to slice through her cheek. Lili pivoted, bit down on the blade, and ripped it from his grip with her teeth. Holding the soldier in place, the blade in her mouth, she thrashed her head from side to side, cutting his face to pieces. Lili raised her fists. The other soldiers retreated to Baru’s side.
She thought: Father. The sound of the word in her mind was senseless.
“You,” Baru said, brows raised. “You are a demon.”
Black energy churned and swirled up above Lili in a column of haze.
She spit the blade out. “You’re scared of me.”
Baru uncrossed his arms, let them fall by his sides. “I barely saw you move. You little thing.” He laughed. “You’re faster than ever.” He motioned at his subordinates to drop their weapons, and they did.
Standing, Baru locked his legs across from her.
Lili reached him in three steps. She flattened one hand like a spear. It pulsed with indigo waves and sharpened for his throat. She stared at his reflective washed-out eyes. In them, she saw her own. Her pupils fanned out; the whites of her own eyes, gone.
“I like how the air smells here. Like seaweed and soft fruit,” Baru said.
Lili lowered her hand. She breathed: salt, salt, salt.
“I can’t do it,” she said to him.
“I can.” And Baru seized her neck and lifted her so her feet dangled off the ground. “Because I learned that by letting you live, I’m letting you die. By killing you, I am letting you live. The law of the universe is that life follows death and death follows life. The rule is regeneration. That is the only thing we can depend on: change. How can you participate in this change if you resist? You cannot resist reality by perceiving your own.”
Baru stabbed Lili in the gut.
Blood, bright and molecular, trickled down her robe and dripped off her toes. The soil underneath her shifted. Soaked her up.
A bird skittered by, chatted alone, and shucked its face into the dirt.
Steam from a far off sea boat pushed up against the sky.
He dropped Lili, and she landed on her stomach.
With his red-slick hand, he bent to brush her hair. Then he pitched his heel into the joints of her wrists and the backs of her knees. Lili’s scream echoed over the Pacific island.
She turned around and saw bone arching out of the skin of her knee.
“If you survive this,” Baru said to her, “go find Azel.”
Lili stared ahead at the wide eyes of her dead counterparts, slouched over their single pikes. Their lips were thick a
nd purple. She grew up with these soldiers but to see them dead was to see strangers. She thought she saw their creased lips twitch. They sat in red pools and only now did she notice how their heads were all turned in her direction. Could they see her, even when dead? Could the dead think? The metallic scent of blood mixed with the ooze of opened flesh and the fishiness of the silvering fields.
“Don’t leave me here,” Lili said to Baru. Her wet black eyes. “Don’t leave me with them.”
When Baru left, she knew the dead looked at her.
Nothing separated her from the inanimate.
They looked at her as if she had killed them, and after hours, she began to believe she had.
Lili knew death was not the worst as being alone was not the worst. The worst was the silence. Her lips contorted into the O shape of her comrades unscreaming mouths. Their eyeballs didn’t shift from puffs of air. The yellow wind scattered shells over their cheeks and foreheads. Her kin. In her mind, she imagined that they wanted her to live. Night came slowly like cracks in the cliffs, steadily and steadily. The sky drew its color from the ground. Blackness, above or below, inverted and her consciousness fell away.
The dead would have the worst of her:
Empty, dark, immediate, they would have her survive.
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ABOUT EJ KOH
EJ KOH is a poet and an author. Her work has been published in TriQuarterly, Southeast Review, The Journal, La Petite Zine, Susquehanna Review, Gulf Stream, and elsewhere. She was a finalist of the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize in Poetry. EJ Koh completed her Masters of Fine Arts at Columbia University. She blogs at thisisEJKoh.com. Red is her first novel.
Don't forget to like EJ on www.facebook.com/thisisejkoh and tweet her @ThisisEJkoh. She loves to hear from the Red Army--almost as much as she loves eating her chocolate cake.