Dark Confession

Logan Cale started. Max had entered his apartment with her usual grace—breaking in silently. He hadn’t seen her since she had taken care of the Ben situation… since he had received those pictures from Lydecker. It was probably for the best, she needed her space after dealing with Ben; he had a good idea what she’d had to do, and there were no words of comfort for situations like that. Not that he knew what to say… Lydecker’s words kept echoing through his mind… They were trained to kill… coldly… efficiently… and happily. Logan had trouble seeing Max as a cold-blooded killer, but the thought was there at the back of his mind: if Ben could snap and turn into a serial killer, why not Max?

“What are you doing here, Max?”

She shrugged. “Been doing some thinking. Decided I needed to come clean about a few things. To you… and to myself.”

Logan had a sinking feeling he knew what was coming, and he really wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it. “Max, you don’t have to…”

“Logan, I need to!” But even after the outburst, it was hard for Max to begin. Logan just sat in his wheelchair, seemingly impassive, but she knew there was something going on there. Something else behind his eyes, going on in his mind. That was why this was so hard… she almost knew what he would think when she finally told him. When she could find the words.

She took a deep breath. “Let me tell you a story. A story about a group of transgenic kids in a government facility…”

It was not a pleasant story, but one that made a certain amount of sick sense when one thought about it, given what Max was and what she had been trained to do. It had been a simple training exercise, she said. A criminal that Manticore had somehow gotten their hands on was released into the woods. He had been told that if he could make it to the fence he could go free. But he never had a chance, and Lydecker knew it. The exercise was for Max’s unit to track him though the woods and capture him.

It was a simple training exercise—but one with unforseen complications. For along with Ben’s stories about the Blue Lady (or the Blessed Virgin, as Father Destry called her), came stories about ‘Nomlies’; monsters that lived in Manticore’s basements. Looking back, Max supposed that the ‘Nomlies’ were just failed Manticore experiments that were locked up down there for some reason or other; but they were kids making up their own stories, with no real comfort ever given to them. Nomlies took on a sinister meaning to the young X5s, and they came to believe that if they were bad they would be given to the Nomlies. The best soldiers went to the Good Place. Bad soldiers, ones who failed, were sent to the Bad Place where they were opened up, drained of their blood and given to the Nomlies. They were only children, brought up in a place where misbehaviour and disobeying orders meant punishment.

Logan was confused at this point. “What do the Nomlies have to do with Ben or this mission?”

“A lot, though we didn’t know it at the time.” Max was wan, hunched into herself. The next part she really did not want to tell him, but she knew she had to. For the sake of her own mind as well as their friendship.

“When we caught up with the man, he drew the knife that Lydecker gave him, but Ben kicked him, he was disarmed and that was that. When we gathered around the man, Ben ripped his shirt open, and we saw a tattoo on his chest. It… it was a bleeding heart, pierced by a knife. We had never seen anything like that before, and we backed away. That was when Ben said he was a Nomlie.”

She gave a half-laugh, half-sob. “I don’t know about the others, but all I could think of were all the stories Ben would tell us about, how the Nomlies were waiting to come get the bad soldiers. I guess the others were thinking the same thing, because we all went for the man. We… we beat him, strangled him… we brutalised him. We did everything to that man that Ben said that the Nomlies would do to us.

“I’ve never been able to forget that day. I’ve tried and tried, but I just can’t forget it. It scared me; it scared all of us I guess, to find out just what we were capable of. And it disgusts me. I never want to be that out of control again.”

“And you’re saying that this is the reason that Ben killed all those people,” Logan’s voice was even, unemotional.

Max shrugged, and then nodded hesitantly. “I think it was part of the reason. Ben was a little different from the rest of us. He really believed the stuff he told us about the Blue Lady and the Nomlies. He woke us up one night to climb up to the roof—the High Place, he called it. There we pulled out our teeth to give to the Blue Lady, Ben said it made her stronger, helped her fight the Nomlies. But it didn’t save Jack, and Ben grew confused. When we escaped, I don’t think he knew how to cope. He wanted so much for the Blue Lady to help him, but it never happened. That’s why he pulled the teeth out of his victims—to give to the Blue Lady so she would be pleased with him.”

“That doesn’t excuse him killing those people, Max,” Logan’s tone of voice was almost cold.

“I never said it did. He was just confused and believed that he needed to be what we were trained to be to make sense of the world. But it didn’t work, and he kept on killing, recreating that exercise, trying to find the answer. He thought that Father Destry would be a worthy opponent, but the Father was no match for Ben. I stopped Ben from killing Father Destry. I fought him, matched him blow for blow. Then I broke his leg, and we noticed Manticore’s helicopters were closing in on us. Ben… he begged me not to leave him there for them to take. I knew I couldn’t carry him out of the woods; we’d both get caught.”

“Max…”

She was sobbing in earnest now. “I didn’t want to but he begged me! He didn’t want to be put in with the Nomlies, and though I knew that that was just a story, I also knew what they would do to him. I didn’t want to, but…”

“You killed him,” Logan finished flatly. It about tore his heart out to hear Max sobbing like her heart was breaking, but he really didn’t know what to think. Max’s story certainly put a lot of things into perspective as far as he was concerned, but he just could not get Lydecker’s words out of his mind.