Flesh and Blood, or A Last Chance to Save the World
Title: Flesh and Blood
Fandom: Heroes
Rating|Genre: pg-13 | gen
Characters: Tom (omc), Claire, Sylar/Gabriel
Summary: In a distant future where the world is beyond recognition, one young man gets a last chance to be a hero.
Word count: 4 368
Spoilers | Warnings: No | I rarely write anything that needs warnings but maybe this time... Highlight to read:
Nothing graphic, but: cannibalism.
Notes: For heroes_contest's last challenge: Endings. So this is a dystopia! :)
It was when Tom tripped over the remnants of an old ruin and almost fell and the sirens were coming closer that Gabriel touched him.
Gabriel grabbed his arm, so hard that it hurt for a second, and dragged him upright before he fell.
“Can’t you watch out, damn it? This is not a recreation game in the Factory, so hurry up!”
“I’m sorry I’m not as fast as you,” Tom complained, “this air is tiring…”
“Get used to it,” Gabriel snapped, “or go back to where you came from.”
“Never,” Tom hissed and tried to keep up with the older man’s speed, “but you can go on, and leave me here, if you want to. It’s alright. I understand…”
“Yeah,” Gabriel retorted and dragged Tom in behind the walls of some giant old marble monument, “if you keep whining I just might go ahead and leave you - if it’s one thing I can’t stand then it is whiny people who can’t take the consequences of their own actions.”
Tom didn’t answer. He was breathing heavily, thankful for the break. He didn’t know how long they had been running but it felt like forever. They had been running in the mud and the dust and he had no idea where they were going. ‘Follow me,’ was all that Gabriel had said earlier that morning, and Tom had followed him, this stranger who had a somewhat familiar air about him, because he hadn’t known what else to do.
Gabriel had, after all, saved him the previous night after the car crash Tom had caused. He had given him a lecture, too, later when they were safe. Was Tom an idiot or what, driving a car like that?
Tom didn’t know how to respond to that. How could he have known that a car was so easy to crash and that people were so easily crushed?
The car he had stolen as a part of his new identity had been more difficult to manoeuvre than he had expected and he hadn’t been able to avoid the accident. If only he had waited a while before he crawled out of the wreck. That way the police and the ambulance would have believed, maybe, that he was shaken and shocked but that that he had survived without a scratch as if by a miracle. But no; Tom had thoughtlessly got out of the car while his wounds were still healing and all the people who stopped to watch had seen it, of course.
So, he had to run. And the man had shown up as if out of thin air and had dragged him in between some stinking containers, down a dead ended alley and then down into a hole in the ground. The man had ripped away the lid of the sewer as if it was nothing - it happened so quickly that it looked like it flew off - and down they went.
They had walked in long winding tunnels until Tom had lost all sense of directions, but then he began to see that his silent guide knew what he was doing. And other people showed up, looking at them without saying anything. To his surprise, it looked almost the same down there, like an inverted city, only a little darker than out in the streets. There was a small community of people, people who for various reasons didn’t want to show their faces in the city.
“Why are you helping me?” Tom had asked the stranger who by then had introduced himself as Gabriel, “Are you the leader of these people?”
Gabriel snorted.
“Hell no, I’m not… We’re just coexisting in relative peace. I do have a few things in common with some of them… but that’s another story. I tend to avoid this place myself. I prefer the fresh air up there.”
“Fresh air, huh?” Tom made a face. “I can tell no difference between here and up there.”
“So I was right then,” Gabriel grinned widely. “You do come from the Factory! That’s what I thought. I hear they spoil you guys rotten in there…”
“No,” Tom replied, “we’re slaves - but we’ll break free one day. I just didn’t know that the world outside was so… dirty.”
“Sure, kid!” Gabriel laughed. “And you don’t know how to drive a car. Good thing I was there, or else you would have been back in the Factory by now. Or on somebody’s dinner plate, with your head buried in the ocean.”
Gabriel had a strange look on his face for a moment, as if he suddenly thought of something, but he kept on laughing. Tom didn’t find it so amusing. But he had followed Gabriel, and eventually they had gone up to the city again to grab something to eat.
Tom had nearly fainted because of the odours in the restaurant and Gabriel had grabbed him by the arm and pulled him quickly to the nearest table. He had brought them something drinkable and something he called Fakeburgers.
“Is it made out of vegetables, or…” Tom didn’t even dare touch it before he knew.
“Keep your voice down,” Gabriel snapped. “No, of course it’s not vegetables, moron, those cost a fortune. And no, before you ask, it isn’t meat either. It’s what I said; fake. Fast food, junk food. Now shut up and eat it. If I can live on it, so can you.”
Tom had no choice; he didn’t like the taste of it - they were never given any ‘junk’ in the Factory - but he was hungry.
Too bad that the police had been quick; they had had time to capture Tom’s face on cameras and his picture was up everywhere and even in the darkness of the night, he was recognized.
That was when they had started running.
Now, inside the monument, they waited until the sound of sirens and car wheels had passed them by before they went out again, carefully.
Gabriel looked at him for a long time, as if he was mentally putting him on a scale to see if he was too heavy or too light.
“I’m not sure why I’m doing this,” he said, “but I think it is the only way. Okay, are you ready for a ride?”
Before Tom had a chance to understand the question, much less to answer, the man took him in his arms and swept up in the air.
Tom squealed loudly before he could stop himself. The ground was already far beneath them.
“Oh my god, you can fly!”
“Of course,” Gabriel replied with his mouth close to Tom’s ear, “have you never seen a flying man before? Oh, of course not… you have only seen other ‘special’ people with your ability.”
“My… ability?”
“Ability,” Gabriel repeated. “Yes, that’s what they used to call it. And I have them all.”
***
A few months earlier, Claire had told Tom that he was different, special. Tom had smiled at her, nodding, hardly listening to what the old woman was going on about.
But Claire had insisted, tossing her blonde hair over her shoulder. She was the oldest one in there, and she had odd moments of clarity, and Tom liked her even if she was weird.
“You’re right,” he mumbled to her when they were alone. “I’m determined that I will get out of here.”
“It’s important that you do,” Claire agreed. “Do you still feel pain?”
Claire giggled and for a moment she seemed to be the young girl she looked like, before her old soul looked out of her eyes again.
Then she bit him.
“Ouch!” Tom stared at her, the crazy old bitch - she had very sharp teeth and apparently they could draw blood. But her teeth marks on his left arm were already contracting and disappearing before his eyes.
He sighed, “Okay, what was that for?”
“Did it hurt?” Claire sighed deeply. “You’re lucky. You know, the last time I felt anything even remotely like pain…”
“I know, I know… It was a long, long time ago when the world was different and people would never dream of eating human flesh. That was the time when people like us were still considered human and we walked the earth freely.”
Tom knew by heart all the speeches she used to make, all the legends she told.
“Freely,” Claire said. “Relatively speaking, yes, because even when I was free, I didn’t know it, and I was always looking for something, wanting something more or better, something ‘normal’… Anyway, that time is long gone. I only hope that I will not go crazy before that time comes back. The time of freedom for people like you and me.”
Claire was old, so old. She was afraid of going crazy and while most people thought she was already far along, she was still considered sane enough to stay among them. Nobody knew what happened to the people who went crazy and nobody wanted to find out. They guessed that it meant some kind of ‘death’ although they were being taught from childhood that they could never die and that was why they had to live in the Factory to serve the weaker and more fragile humans who couldn’t survive without them.
They were very, very old, the people who were going into the final vegetative state and were taken away forever. Tom, being only seventeen, had only seen it happen once. Nobody knew how old Claire really was.
She told them, every once in a while, but it couldn’t be true now, could it, that she was that old?
Some people, maybe most people, didn’t even believe her when she said that a long time ago, she had seen what the outside world looked like and that in comparison to that, their life inside the Factory was perhaps not that bad after all. She said that before the world turned ‘bad’, she had also seen the prison cells of the Company; now that was what a real prison looked like and they could be glad that their home wasn’t anything like that. Nobody knew what she meant by ‘the Company’, of course. Nobody knew the names she sometimes mumbled in her sleep.
Still, most of them enjoyed her legends, her fairytales. Her history lessons? They weren’t really sure if they could use that word.
All they knew was that their home had thick walls. All of them - except Claire? - were born there. All of them, except the people in white lab rocks who tested and investigated them, who took the old and crazy ones away, and who fed them.
They only fed them vegetarian food; the food they were, in fact, growing inside the Factory. Rumours had it that the scientists were trying, without success, to make the plants be like them - with rapid cell regeneration. If they finally did it one day, Tom figured, the people in the Factory would be set free.
Claire laughed mockingly when she heard such theories.
“Oh no, that won’t happen. Not in a million years. You see, people like to eat meat and even if they had vegetables and stuff they wouldn’t give it up. They do make ‘fake’ meat, you know. Just not enough to feed the entire population. The scientists are all idealists; they can’t or don’t want to see that people in the real world will always want to hunt us down and eat us even if we were free. There are no animals anymore, you see. There aren’t even any traces of them left on the face of the earth. We are the last animals.”
“What’s ‘animals’?” the young ones asked, and Claire began to draw and paint. They watched with fascination. Watching and listening to Claire was a popular pastime after all. She seemed to enjoy making them, those little sketches of four-legged creatures with ‘fur’, or ‘horns’, and ‘tails’… Claire explained everything, what people used to eat when she was young, and it was only fairytales.
The older people pretended not to believe in the fairytales but they were fascinated, too. They just couldn’t understand it, no matter how much Claire tried to explain.
What had it been like, once? How did it start? A long, long time ago, there used to be a nuclear disaster maybe once every ten years… Then more often than that, maybe once every second year. And oil leaked out in the oceans, and chemicals, and the factories belched out their waste products, the air became more and more polluted, the rainforests and all the other forests died or were cut down, and the leaders of the world just couldn’t agree on anything. There were wars. They still didn’t stop. The entire world changed and after a couple of centuries it was beyond recognition and repair. The nature cried and peopled died. There were more meltdowns. And bombs. They didn’t stop, Claire said, until the whole world was ruined, and that’s when they began eating human beings.
“I don’t understand why,” someone said. “I’ve tasted myself. I’ve tasted my sister, too. We both taste like… eww… blood is so gross! I don’t understand why they want to eat us.”
“Because,” Claire explained, “they have almost nothing else to eat and they cook us. They boil and fry us and add all kinds of artificial flavors to make us taste better. The art of cooking hasn’t died.”
“But it is our duty to provide them with meat, because we are not human beings,” someone always piped up. “That’s what they say…”
“That’s because they are liars,” Claire said, “or because they don’t remember anymore. They say that if we don’t feel pain but live ‘forever’ we’re not humans, but they are wrong.”
Tom believed that she was right.
They had tested him again; cut him, burnt him, done terrible things to him, just to see that he was healing properly and with the help of the electrodes on his head, they had monitored his brain activity to see that he was feeling pain. As long as he did feel pain, they weren’t going to cut off his limbs. They said they weren’t cruel. They had to wait until he was matured but they also had to know exactly when he was ready. His kind wasn’t very fertile and new specimens were born with long gaps between them. The demand out there was high.
Tom was raised to meet that demand; like everyone else there he was raised to serve. But he also wanted to see the real world, the one Claire came from.
When she realized this, that one boy, one boy out of many and after so many years, was ready to finally do something, she told him that she knew a thing or two about rebellion. She said that she was going to create a revolution and if he was very quick, and smart, and brave, he was going to be able to get out and become the new ‘Rebel’: unstoppable.
“The time is coming now that I have been waiting for,” she said dreamily and her eyes went murky and childlike. “The time when the world is going to get back to something more like normal. You will help. You’re going to be a hero and you will find the Other one.”
“Which other one?”
This was beginning to sound like fairytales and crazy talk again but at the same time something made him want to believe that there was some truth beneath the craziness in old Claire’s voice.
“The other one who is like me,” she explained with a secretive smile. “The one I once hated more than anyone. The only one who still remembers what the world used to be like, and he is still out there, I know it! I know that he is, and you will find him.”
“Who is he?”
Claire leaned closer to him and whispered into his ear:
“He is Sylar. And when you find him, tell him the Cheerleader says it’s time to save the world.”
***
Claire had been right. More so than she even knew; Tom realized this as soon as he was out and saw the real world in daylight.
According to her, there should still be a few parks and public gardens around. Dandelions in the ruins; poor children were picking them to bring them home to their mothers who boiled them in detoxifying fluids, then dried them and made tea. That’s what she had said.
But there were no parks. Only a few old trees, surrounded by fences, with almost dry leaves in the end of some of the branches. There were no sunny dandelions, only small, yellow blades of grass here and there.
To Tom’s horror, he discovered that the Factory was warmer than the outside world, the air was fresher there, and they had grass and flowers and fruits.
Apparently, Claire had been right. Green things were considered a luxury in the outside world. It was easier to breed people, because their limbs grew back quicker than any fruit could grow on a tree, than any potato in the earth. And the earth was polluted; Tom could see it with his own eyes now. It was easier, Claire said, to only grow as much vegetable that the ‘livestock’ needed than to feed the entire population with vegetarian food from factories.
Not that the entire population was as big as it used to be, she said.
But now that Tom was out, what was he supposed to do? How to find this Sylar guy Claire believed existed somewhere?
He had no idea, but he saw the vehicles on the roads and he decided that it would save him lots of time if he had one of those.
Was the accident really an accident? Or was it destiny?
From the car crash to the sewers to the air, towards an unknown destination.
This man, Gabriel, who had showed up in the exact right moment to save him from the police, this flying man, he could only be…
“Are you Sylar?” he said.
The man who was holding him didn’t answer at first.
“If you are,” Tom went on, relieved to be able to pass the message on to someone, “Claire told me to say something to you: ‘The Cheerleader says it’s time to save the world.’ Is it a code?”
“No,” the voice above his head was amused, “it is not. Not really. The Cheerleader is Claire; she was a cheerleader once upon a time. And Sylar… Yes, that’s me.”
“That’s what I thought”, Tom said, and dared a quick glance down at the dark earth. “But why didn’t you say so? Why did you say your name was Gabriel?”
“That’s not for you to understand”, the flying man said. “Although I have to say it feels oddly comforting to be called that after all this time… Anyway. I’m glad she finally sent me that message. This world is getting boring - here is no hunger or satisfaction and no true companionships, only hiding. I have been bored for centuries, but there is no way to stop what is happening because this Earth is ruined. Not even I can end it all by myself, you know.”
“So she was wrong?” Tom’s heart sank in his chest. He knew it; Claire was only telling fairytales from the make-believe world inside her head. “The world can not be saved, can it?”
“Of course it can be saved,” Gabriel said as they continued flying through the night. “If you are willing to give it a try. A time traveller will come and take you back in time.”
“Back in time?”
“Yes, kiddo. To the time before people were eating each other.”
Tom’s brain was spinning. Time travel? How was that even possible? But if it was, it was a wonderful thing. Tom was already dreaming of seeing the green earth with Claire’s animals in it, when Gabriel, or Sylar, continued to describe his mission.
“You will have to go back in time, and only you, because we need someone who has actually seen Claire. The time traveller has never met her and I haven’t seen her since long before the Factory was built, you see. I have been back, but I was never able to find her at the crucial time. And she would never trust me in the past anyway, not during that particular time. I wouldn’t get close enough, and neither would the time traveller. We need someone who knows her, but someone she does not know in the past.”
“So what am I supposed to?”
“Oh,” Gabriel said, “it’s easy, really. You could start with trying to talk to her, to tell her that you have seen the future Claire and the world that she created.”
“That she created?” Tom was feeling dizzy, but not because he was flying. “Did Claire do this to the world?”
Gabriel/Sylar sighed and it sounded almost sad.
“Well, she didn’t do it on purpose and she didn’t start any of the great wars or anything, but Claire was the first one, you see, who thought it was a good idea to offer a piece of her own body to feed a starving person, because her body parts grow back. It was an emergency, she said… God knows I have done my share of despicable things over the years, but I have never eaten human flesh and I have never let myself be eaten! I didn’t want her to do it; I tried to talk her out of it.”
Tom gulped and tried to imagine what it must have been like, but he just couldn’t. He could easily imagine Claire, because she wouldn’t have looked any different, except maybe her hair color or something, and he knew that she could talk and be agitated and stubborn, but what had it actually been like to try to talk her out of the idea that now the whole world took for granted?
“When was it? How long time ago?”
“Hm”, Gabriel said as if he had to think hard to remember, “what year is it now? It must have been about 700 years ago.”
Tom gasped. The oldest person he knew, more than Claire, was almost 600 years old.
“Back then”, the man continued, “she and I used to hang out sometimes. We were the only ones who still remembered what the world used to be like. There was a time when I believed in a ‘brave new world’ - what a joke - and I had been struggling and looking for… change, among other things, and with time, she and I both learned to leave the past behind us. We weren’t friends exactly but we got along. But when she got her stupidest idea ever, we had this huge fight. She thought she was only saving one life, the life of someone she cared about, and that would be it… She thought she was doing the right thing, but the wrong people found out, of course! Long story short; the world went downhill after that. And yet it still exists, in this sick and twisted way.”
“So,” Tom gulped and found it hard to believe that this was actually happening to him. “I’ll have to tell her not to do it, and… everything will be okay?”
“Yes. But of course, she will probably still believe she’s doing the right thing. Because that’s what people do, you know, especially misguided philanthropist who are too obsessed with their ideals. She was one of the most stubborn people I ever knew. So you will have to kill her.”
Tom gasped in horror, “I can’t kill Claire!”
“Of course you can,” Gabriel said softly and touched the back of Tom’s head, “if you put a bullet in her head, right here… and then burn her body, to be safe. Just watch your own head, Peter.”
Silence. The man’s grip around him tightened, he squirmed, and Tom, although he knew he would survive it, was afraid he was going to be dropped to the ground.
He decided not to comment on the name and they descended to the ground in silence.
Gabriel put him down. They were on a mountain top and dawn was breaking. A waste land was all they could see before their eyes. Rocks and dust and deep cracks in the ground.
Tom thought that maybe he could just pretend to go along with the plan. He could just go back in time and stay there, go back to a time that had animals and green plants…
“Don’t even think about it”, the man by his side said. “Because I can tell if you do.”
Tom’s jaws dropped. Could this man read his mind? Tom remembered Claire’s stories about other ‘special’ people, people that could do all sorts of crazy things…
“I can’t betray Claire like that!” he blurted out, “she trusts me!” Tom clenched his fists as if he could fight himself out of it. But if he fought the only man who could help him, perhaps the only man who wouldn’t eat him, then what would he do?
“Yes”, his mysterious companion said, “she does. And she trusts me, too. Now, finally, she does. That’s why she sent you to find me, Sylar - she trusts that I’ll know what to do.”
“But… what will happen if I do it? How will it save the world?”
“If you kill her,” Gabriel explained, “the world will end before it comes to this. There will never be a Factory and there will be no more persecutions of us specials. The world will end, people will starve, but the last people on this earth will die while there is still something green, warm and living on it. There will be no more pointless suffering, no more pointless existence in this terrible void, this gap between life and death, this insufferable boredom.”
Tom looked at the cold earth and the tired light of the sun, and nodded. He was going to see what the world look like when it was alive, even if it was the last thing he ever did.
It was for this that he had escaped.
Fandom: Heroes
Rating|Genre: pg-13 | gen
Characters: Tom (omc), Claire, Sylar/Gabriel
Summary: In a distant future where the world is beyond recognition, one young man gets a last chance to be a hero.
Word count: 4 368
Spoilers | Warnings: No | I rarely write anything that needs warnings but maybe this time... Highlight to read:
Nothing graphic, but: cannibalism.
Notes: For heroes_contest's last challenge: Endings. So this is a dystopia! :)
It was when Tom tripped over the remnants of an old ruin and almost fell and the sirens were coming closer that Gabriel touched him.
Gabriel grabbed his arm, so hard that it hurt for a second, and dragged him upright before he fell.
“Can’t you watch out, damn it? This is not a recreation game in the Factory, so hurry up!”
“I’m sorry I’m not as fast as you,” Tom complained, “this air is tiring…”
“Get used to it,” Gabriel snapped, “or go back to where you came from.”
“Never,” Tom hissed and tried to keep up with the older man’s speed, “but you can go on, and leave me here, if you want to. It’s alright. I understand…”
“Yeah,” Gabriel retorted and dragged Tom in behind the walls of some giant old marble monument, “if you keep whining I just might go ahead and leave you - if it’s one thing I can’t stand then it is whiny people who can’t take the consequences of their own actions.”
Tom didn’t answer. He was breathing heavily, thankful for the break. He didn’t know how long they had been running but it felt like forever. They had been running in the mud and the dust and he had no idea where they were going. ‘Follow me,’ was all that Gabriel had said earlier that morning, and Tom had followed him, this stranger who had a somewhat familiar air about him, because he hadn’t known what else to do.
Gabriel had, after all, saved him the previous night after the car crash Tom had caused. He had given him a lecture, too, later when they were safe. Was Tom an idiot or what, driving a car like that?
Tom didn’t know how to respond to that. How could he have known that a car was so easy to crash and that people were so easily crushed?
The car he had stolen as a part of his new identity had been more difficult to manoeuvre than he had expected and he hadn’t been able to avoid the accident. If only he had waited a while before he crawled out of the wreck. That way the police and the ambulance would have believed, maybe, that he was shaken and shocked but that that he had survived without a scratch as if by a miracle. But no; Tom had thoughtlessly got out of the car while his wounds were still healing and all the people who stopped to watch had seen it, of course.
So, he had to run. And the man had shown up as if out of thin air and had dragged him in between some stinking containers, down a dead ended alley and then down into a hole in the ground. The man had ripped away the lid of the sewer as if it was nothing - it happened so quickly that it looked like it flew off - and down they went.
They had walked in long winding tunnels until Tom had lost all sense of directions, but then he began to see that his silent guide knew what he was doing. And other people showed up, looking at them without saying anything. To his surprise, it looked almost the same down there, like an inverted city, only a little darker than out in the streets. There was a small community of people, people who for various reasons didn’t want to show their faces in the city.
“Why are you helping me?” Tom had asked the stranger who by then had introduced himself as Gabriel, “Are you the leader of these people?”
Gabriel snorted.
“Hell no, I’m not… We’re just coexisting in relative peace. I do have a few things in common with some of them… but that’s another story. I tend to avoid this place myself. I prefer the fresh air up there.”
“Fresh air, huh?” Tom made a face. “I can tell no difference between here and up there.”
“So I was right then,” Gabriel grinned widely. “You do come from the Factory! That’s what I thought. I hear they spoil you guys rotten in there…”
“No,” Tom replied, “we’re slaves - but we’ll break free one day. I just didn’t know that the world outside was so… dirty.”
“Sure, kid!” Gabriel laughed. “And you don’t know how to drive a car. Good thing I was there, or else you would have been back in the Factory by now. Or on somebody’s dinner plate, with your head buried in the ocean.”
Gabriel had a strange look on his face for a moment, as if he suddenly thought of something, but he kept on laughing. Tom didn’t find it so amusing. But he had followed Gabriel, and eventually they had gone up to the city again to grab something to eat.
Tom had nearly fainted because of the odours in the restaurant and Gabriel had grabbed him by the arm and pulled him quickly to the nearest table. He had brought them something drinkable and something he called Fakeburgers.
“Is it made out of vegetables, or…” Tom didn’t even dare touch it before he knew.
“Keep your voice down,” Gabriel snapped. “No, of course it’s not vegetables, moron, those cost a fortune. And no, before you ask, it isn’t meat either. It’s what I said; fake. Fast food, junk food. Now shut up and eat it. If I can live on it, so can you.”
Tom had no choice; he didn’t like the taste of it - they were never given any ‘junk’ in the Factory - but he was hungry.
Too bad that the police had been quick; they had had time to capture Tom’s face on cameras and his picture was up everywhere and even in the darkness of the night, he was recognized.
That was when they had started running.
Now, inside the monument, they waited until the sound of sirens and car wheels had passed them by before they went out again, carefully.
Gabriel looked at him for a long time, as if he was mentally putting him on a scale to see if he was too heavy or too light.
“I’m not sure why I’m doing this,” he said, “but I think it is the only way. Okay, are you ready for a ride?”
Before Tom had a chance to understand the question, much less to answer, the man took him in his arms and swept up in the air.
Tom squealed loudly before he could stop himself. The ground was already far beneath them.
“Oh my god, you can fly!”
“Of course,” Gabriel replied with his mouth close to Tom’s ear, “have you never seen a flying man before? Oh, of course not… you have only seen other ‘special’ people with your ability.”
“My… ability?”
“Ability,” Gabriel repeated. “Yes, that’s what they used to call it. And I have them all.”
***
A few months earlier, Claire had told Tom that he was different, special. Tom had smiled at her, nodding, hardly listening to what the old woman was going on about.
But Claire had insisted, tossing her blonde hair over her shoulder. She was the oldest one in there, and she had odd moments of clarity, and Tom liked her even if she was weird.
“You’re right,” he mumbled to her when they were alone. “I’m determined that I will get out of here.”
“It’s important that you do,” Claire agreed. “Do you still feel pain?”
Claire giggled and for a moment she seemed to be the young girl she looked like, before her old soul looked out of her eyes again.
Then she bit him.
“Ouch!” Tom stared at her, the crazy old bitch - she had very sharp teeth and apparently they could draw blood. But her teeth marks on his left arm were already contracting and disappearing before his eyes.
He sighed, “Okay, what was that for?”
“Did it hurt?” Claire sighed deeply. “You’re lucky. You know, the last time I felt anything even remotely like pain…”
“I know, I know… It was a long, long time ago when the world was different and people would never dream of eating human flesh. That was the time when people like us were still considered human and we walked the earth freely.”
Tom knew by heart all the speeches she used to make, all the legends she told.
“Freely,” Claire said. “Relatively speaking, yes, because even when I was free, I didn’t know it, and I was always looking for something, wanting something more or better, something ‘normal’… Anyway, that time is long gone. I only hope that I will not go crazy before that time comes back. The time of freedom for people like you and me.”
Claire was old, so old. She was afraid of going crazy and while most people thought she was already far along, she was still considered sane enough to stay among them. Nobody knew what happened to the people who went crazy and nobody wanted to find out. They guessed that it meant some kind of ‘death’ although they were being taught from childhood that they could never die and that was why they had to live in the Factory to serve the weaker and more fragile humans who couldn’t survive without them.
They were very, very old, the people who were going into the final vegetative state and were taken away forever. Tom, being only seventeen, had only seen it happen once. Nobody knew how old Claire really was.
She told them, every once in a while, but it couldn’t be true now, could it, that she was that old?
Some people, maybe most people, didn’t even believe her when she said that a long time ago, she had seen what the outside world looked like and that in comparison to that, their life inside the Factory was perhaps not that bad after all. She said that before the world turned ‘bad’, she had also seen the prison cells of the Company; now that was what a real prison looked like and they could be glad that their home wasn’t anything like that. Nobody knew what she meant by ‘the Company’, of course. Nobody knew the names she sometimes mumbled in her sleep.
Still, most of them enjoyed her legends, her fairytales. Her history lessons? They weren’t really sure if they could use that word.
All they knew was that their home had thick walls. All of them - except Claire? - were born there. All of them, except the people in white lab rocks who tested and investigated them, who took the old and crazy ones away, and who fed them.
They only fed them vegetarian food; the food they were, in fact, growing inside the Factory. Rumours had it that the scientists were trying, without success, to make the plants be like them - with rapid cell regeneration. If they finally did it one day, Tom figured, the people in the Factory would be set free.
Claire laughed mockingly when she heard such theories.
“Oh no, that won’t happen. Not in a million years. You see, people like to eat meat and even if they had vegetables and stuff they wouldn’t give it up. They do make ‘fake’ meat, you know. Just not enough to feed the entire population. The scientists are all idealists; they can’t or don’t want to see that people in the real world will always want to hunt us down and eat us even if we were free. There are no animals anymore, you see. There aren’t even any traces of them left on the face of the earth. We are the last animals.”
“What’s ‘animals’?” the young ones asked, and Claire began to draw and paint. They watched with fascination. Watching and listening to Claire was a popular pastime after all. She seemed to enjoy making them, those little sketches of four-legged creatures with ‘fur’, or ‘horns’, and ‘tails’… Claire explained everything, what people used to eat when she was young, and it was only fairytales.
The older people pretended not to believe in the fairytales but they were fascinated, too. They just couldn’t understand it, no matter how much Claire tried to explain.
What had it been like, once? How did it start? A long, long time ago, there used to be a nuclear disaster maybe once every ten years… Then more often than that, maybe once every second year. And oil leaked out in the oceans, and chemicals, and the factories belched out their waste products, the air became more and more polluted, the rainforests and all the other forests died or were cut down, and the leaders of the world just couldn’t agree on anything. There were wars. They still didn’t stop. The entire world changed and after a couple of centuries it was beyond recognition and repair. The nature cried and peopled died. There were more meltdowns. And bombs. They didn’t stop, Claire said, until the whole world was ruined, and that’s when they began eating human beings.
“I don’t understand why,” someone said. “I’ve tasted myself. I’ve tasted my sister, too. We both taste like… eww… blood is so gross! I don’t understand why they want to eat us.”
“Because,” Claire explained, “they have almost nothing else to eat and they cook us. They boil and fry us and add all kinds of artificial flavors to make us taste better. The art of cooking hasn’t died.”
“But it is our duty to provide them with meat, because we are not human beings,” someone always piped up. “That’s what they say…”
“That’s because they are liars,” Claire said, “or because they don’t remember anymore. They say that if we don’t feel pain but live ‘forever’ we’re not humans, but they are wrong.”
Tom believed that she was right.
They had tested him again; cut him, burnt him, done terrible things to him, just to see that he was healing properly and with the help of the electrodes on his head, they had monitored his brain activity to see that he was feeling pain. As long as he did feel pain, they weren’t going to cut off his limbs. They said they weren’t cruel. They had to wait until he was matured but they also had to know exactly when he was ready. His kind wasn’t very fertile and new specimens were born with long gaps between them. The demand out there was high.
Tom was raised to meet that demand; like everyone else there he was raised to serve. But he also wanted to see the real world, the one Claire came from.
When she realized this, that one boy, one boy out of many and after so many years, was ready to finally do something, she told him that she knew a thing or two about rebellion. She said that she was going to create a revolution and if he was very quick, and smart, and brave, he was going to be able to get out and become the new ‘Rebel’: unstoppable.
“The time is coming now that I have been waiting for,” she said dreamily and her eyes went murky and childlike. “The time when the world is going to get back to something more like normal. You will help. You’re going to be a hero and you will find the Other one.”
“Which other one?”
This was beginning to sound like fairytales and crazy talk again but at the same time something made him want to believe that there was some truth beneath the craziness in old Claire’s voice.
“The other one who is like me,” she explained with a secretive smile. “The one I once hated more than anyone. The only one who still remembers what the world used to be like, and he is still out there, I know it! I know that he is, and you will find him.”
“Who is he?”
Claire leaned closer to him and whispered into his ear:
“He is Sylar. And when you find him, tell him the Cheerleader says it’s time to save the world.”
***
Claire had been right. More so than she even knew; Tom realized this as soon as he was out and saw the real world in daylight.
According to her, there should still be a few parks and public gardens around. Dandelions in the ruins; poor children were picking them to bring them home to their mothers who boiled them in detoxifying fluids, then dried them and made tea. That’s what she had said.
But there were no parks. Only a few old trees, surrounded by fences, with almost dry leaves in the end of some of the branches. There were no sunny dandelions, only small, yellow blades of grass here and there.
To Tom’s horror, he discovered that the Factory was warmer than the outside world, the air was fresher there, and they had grass and flowers and fruits.
Apparently, Claire had been right. Green things were considered a luxury in the outside world. It was easier to breed people, because their limbs grew back quicker than any fruit could grow on a tree, than any potato in the earth. And the earth was polluted; Tom could see it with his own eyes now. It was easier, Claire said, to only grow as much vegetable that the ‘livestock’ needed than to feed the entire population with vegetarian food from factories.
Not that the entire population was as big as it used to be, she said.
But now that Tom was out, what was he supposed to do? How to find this Sylar guy Claire believed existed somewhere?
He had no idea, but he saw the vehicles on the roads and he decided that it would save him lots of time if he had one of those.
Was the accident really an accident? Or was it destiny?
From the car crash to the sewers to the air, towards an unknown destination.
This man, Gabriel, who had showed up in the exact right moment to save him from the police, this flying man, he could only be…
“Are you Sylar?” he said.
The man who was holding him didn’t answer at first.
“If you are,” Tom went on, relieved to be able to pass the message on to someone, “Claire told me to say something to you: ‘The Cheerleader says it’s time to save the world.’ Is it a code?”
“No,” the voice above his head was amused, “it is not. Not really. The Cheerleader is Claire; she was a cheerleader once upon a time. And Sylar… Yes, that’s me.”
“That’s what I thought”, Tom said, and dared a quick glance down at the dark earth. “But why didn’t you say so? Why did you say your name was Gabriel?”
“That’s not for you to understand”, the flying man said. “Although I have to say it feels oddly comforting to be called that after all this time… Anyway. I’m glad she finally sent me that message. This world is getting boring - here is no hunger or satisfaction and no true companionships, only hiding. I have been bored for centuries, but there is no way to stop what is happening because this Earth is ruined. Not even I can end it all by myself, you know.”
“So she was wrong?” Tom’s heart sank in his chest. He knew it; Claire was only telling fairytales from the make-believe world inside her head. “The world can not be saved, can it?”
“Of course it can be saved,” Gabriel said as they continued flying through the night. “If you are willing to give it a try. A time traveller will come and take you back in time.”
“Back in time?”
“Yes, kiddo. To the time before people were eating each other.”
Tom’s brain was spinning. Time travel? How was that even possible? But if it was, it was a wonderful thing. Tom was already dreaming of seeing the green earth with Claire’s animals in it, when Gabriel, or Sylar, continued to describe his mission.
“You will have to go back in time, and only you, because we need someone who has actually seen Claire. The time traveller has never met her and I haven’t seen her since long before the Factory was built, you see. I have been back, but I was never able to find her at the crucial time. And she would never trust me in the past anyway, not during that particular time. I wouldn’t get close enough, and neither would the time traveller. We need someone who knows her, but someone she does not know in the past.”
“So what am I supposed to?”
“Oh,” Gabriel said, “it’s easy, really. You could start with trying to talk to her, to tell her that you have seen the future Claire and the world that she created.”
“That she created?” Tom was feeling dizzy, but not because he was flying. “Did Claire do this to the world?”
Gabriel/Sylar sighed and it sounded almost sad.
“Well, she didn’t do it on purpose and she didn’t start any of the great wars or anything, but Claire was the first one, you see, who thought it was a good idea to offer a piece of her own body to feed a starving person, because her body parts grow back. It was an emergency, she said… God knows I have done my share of despicable things over the years, but I have never eaten human flesh and I have never let myself be eaten! I didn’t want her to do it; I tried to talk her out of it.”
Tom gulped and tried to imagine what it must have been like, but he just couldn’t. He could easily imagine Claire, because she wouldn’t have looked any different, except maybe her hair color or something, and he knew that she could talk and be agitated and stubborn, but what had it actually been like to try to talk her out of the idea that now the whole world took for granted?
“When was it? How long time ago?”
“Hm”, Gabriel said as if he had to think hard to remember, “what year is it now? It must have been about 700 years ago.”
Tom gasped. The oldest person he knew, more than Claire, was almost 600 years old.
“Back then”, the man continued, “she and I used to hang out sometimes. We were the only ones who still remembered what the world used to be like. There was a time when I believed in a ‘brave new world’ - what a joke - and I had been struggling and looking for… change, among other things, and with time, she and I both learned to leave the past behind us. We weren’t friends exactly but we got along. But when she got her stupidest idea ever, we had this huge fight. She thought she was only saving one life, the life of someone she cared about, and that would be it… She thought she was doing the right thing, but the wrong people found out, of course! Long story short; the world went downhill after that. And yet it still exists, in this sick and twisted way.”
“So,” Tom gulped and found it hard to believe that this was actually happening to him. “I’ll have to tell her not to do it, and… everything will be okay?”
“Yes. But of course, she will probably still believe she’s doing the right thing. Because that’s what people do, you know, especially misguided philanthropist who are too obsessed with their ideals. She was one of the most stubborn people I ever knew. So you will have to kill her.”
Tom gasped in horror, “I can’t kill Claire!”
“Of course you can,” Gabriel said softly and touched the back of Tom’s head, “if you put a bullet in her head, right here… and then burn her body, to be safe. Just watch your own head, Peter.”
Silence. The man’s grip around him tightened, he squirmed, and Tom, although he knew he would survive it, was afraid he was going to be dropped to the ground.
He decided not to comment on the name and they descended to the ground in silence.
Gabriel put him down. They were on a mountain top and dawn was breaking. A waste land was all they could see before their eyes. Rocks and dust and deep cracks in the ground.
Tom thought that maybe he could just pretend to go along with the plan. He could just go back in time and stay there, go back to a time that had animals and green plants…
“Don’t even think about it”, the man by his side said. “Because I can tell if you do.”
Tom’s jaws dropped. Could this man read his mind? Tom remembered Claire’s stories about other ‘special’ people, people that could do all sorts of crazy things…
“I can’t betray Claire like that!” he blurted out, “she trusts me!” Tom clenched his fists as if he could fight himself out of it. But if he fought the only man who could help him, perhaps the only man who wouldn’t eat him, then what would he do?
“Yes”, his mysterious companion said, “she does. And she trusts me, too. Now, finally, she does. That’s why she sent you to find me, Sylar - she trusts that I’ll know what to do.”
“But… what will happen if I do it? How will it save the world?”
“If you kill her,” Gabriel explained, “the world will end before it comes to this. There will never be a Factory and there will be no more persecutions of us specials. The world will end, people will starve, but the last people on this earth will die while there is still something green, warm and living on it. There will be no more pointless suffering, no more pointless existence in this terrible void, this gap between life and death, this insufferable boredom.”
Tom looked at the cold earth and the tired light of the sun, and nodded. He was going to see what the world look like when it was alive, even if it was the last thing he ever did.
It was for this that he had escaped.