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  To the memory of L. P. Davies, whoever you were

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE HISTORY OF World War I is peppered with tragic and fascinating stories. There are, no doubt, many men who died just after the declaration of Armistice on November 11, 1918. George Lawrence Price, a Canadian, and George Edwin Ellison, a Brit, have both been recognized as the last British soldiers to be killed on the muddy battlefields of the First World War. Their stories are devastating, their deaths even more so. I have combined aspects of both men’s lives and demises in the following novel.

  1

  10:39 A.M.

  NOVEMBER 11, 1918

  OUTSKIRTS OF MONS, BELGIUM

  THE WORLD IS a wasteland.

  And Private George Edwin Ellison is on patrol.

  Fingers numb, body battered, he pushes his way through a blackened field that was once a school yard. The wind is fierce. He pulls up the collar on his jacket to block it out but it finds the holes, the tears, and worries at his skin the way the biting gnats did on the rust-colored banks of a nameless Belgian canal. Bites he still scratches; bites he suspects will never heal.

  George counts his steps, a time-killing habit. A distraction.

  Each footfall a crunch on ruined earth.

  A solitary beat in the nothingness.

  Behind the village school building, he finds the charred body of a horse. Its forelegs fused with the blackened pile of the school’s chimney. Beelzebub’s chariot, he thinks with a chuckle before moving on. He’s seen worse. Smelled worse. Truth is, he’s been lucky. It is day 1,566 of the war to end all wars and he still walks, still has the use of his hands, and the ability to remember home. Not like Richards from A Company. Not like the limbless American he found in an alfalfa field. The war was supposed to be the last spasm of hatred, the last night before a dawn of reason. Only instead of a spasm, it’d become a cancer.

  Surely, the world couldn’t handle another day.

  As he counts out his steps, George thinks he hears the chanting of the villagers who’d welcomed them into the devastated hamlet.

  But likely it is just the ceaseless rush of the wind through the naked trees.

  George rounds the school building and waves the all clear to the rest of his platoon. As they move toward the canal, he picks up his step. The cold has seeped into his bones, and he recalls fondly how he warmed his fingers beside an oil-drum fire that morning. He wishes he could hold that heat like water, rub it like a salve on the numbness overtaking his body. Thinking of the fire conjures up images of home and of his grandmother’s butter tarts. He sees his son, James, smiling as he waves goodbye in the doorway of their Edmund Street house. And he sees his wife, Hannah, on the night before he’d left: her cherubic face glowing over their last rationed candle, tears sparkling on her cheeks.

  George had carved her image on the back of his pocket watch.

  A smiling, cherubic face done in a simple, amateurish style.

  Folded and worn, the watch has survived the worst of Ypres, Loos, and Cambrai; a scrap of metal that dodged bullets and survived mortar rounds. George knows that bodies are the weakest link. He’s watched so many men die. So many men suffer. Yet he is still here. Still marching, still counting out steps. Sensing his brief surge in optimism, the exhausted sky breaks open further and lets loose a deluge.

  George slows, head hung low under the battery of cold rain.

  Behind him, the platoon falls into formation. The guys who have faith—the ones who believe in something more than mud, fog, rain, and fire—they follow closely. For them, George is the lucky one. Their rabbit's foot. Their dream catcher. He is the one who always keeps walking, pushing forward ceaselessly, on automatic, when they all would gladly crumble.

  Sixty-five feet from the canal, Major Ross halts the Fifth Royal Irish Lancers’ approach. In the middle of the road, rain spattering their faces, George kneels down in the muck beside Private Frank Price.

  George points to several cottages across the canal.

  “What do you think?”

  “Don’t like it,” Price says. “We’re sitting ducks here.”

  Eyeing the loose bricks on the house’s façade, George says, “Good spot to stick a rifle.” After a minute of watching through the rain and mist, he stands and squeezes Price’s shoulder. “I think we should check those houses. Let’s get some guys.”

  With three machine gunners in tow, they cross the bridge.

  Major Ross yells after them: “Hold there, boys. We’ll be across in five minutes.”

  Every step across the bridge is slicker than the last, and the water churns beneath them, festooned with tree limbs, trash, and the bloated bodies of what once were sheep. On the other side, they approach the house carefully, each holding his breath, each as close to George as they can possibly be.

  Reaching the first house, the machine gunners push their way through a broken door to the dark interior. One of the gunners, Robinson, shouts out a warning, “Ne tirez pas! Ne tirez pas!” Robinson has shouted the phrase in every village, every town. Even though they all knew the French rarely had weapons, it had become Robinson’s mantra, his way of staying sane.

  It works.

  In the kitchen they find three elderly Belgian men with broken smiles and blackened hands. George checks the back room, while Frank and the gunners talk to the old men. There are Germans near, the old men say. Just outside.

  That’s when the roof comes apart.

  At first George thinks it is a building collapse. He ducks down, ready for the spine-breaking timbers to hit, but when they don’t, when all that falls is a fine mist of brick dust, he knows they are under fire. An angry buzzing comes next, as slugs careen around the house, ricocheting off the walls. Dodging bullets, ducking low, George scrambles into the kitchen, where the gunners fire through the windows.

  Frank grabs George’s sleeve.

  “We have to get out of here!”

  George says, “We need to hold this position till the rest get here.”

  Frank drags George out a side door and, crouched low, the rain suddenly renewing its attack on their already drenched clothes, they zigzag to a low brick wall at the rear of the house. The narrow cobbled streets look clear, the houses around them empty. George points to a hill three hundred feet to the north. There, a German machine gunner reloads his Maschinengewehr.

  Price says, “I don’t think we can take him. We should turn back.”

  “We have two minutes to hold here.”

  George looks down at his pocket watch to see that the hands have stopped.

  He’s confused; he’d just recently wound the watch. It should be working. But he is even more confused by the tiny red droplets that lie in a line on the glass surface of the watch, like red rain as crimson as blood.

  The time is stuck at 10:55 a.m.

  George hears the clatter of gunfire but it is a world away. Like thunder a few villages over. It doesn’t last long. He turns to see Price hit the muddy earth, a bloom of mud and debris flying overhead. And then George falls backward, only very slowly. The watch in his hand remains as still as its arms. The rain has stopped. The air thick, heavy like a blanket. A heartbeat later and George finds himself staring up at the sky.

  Robinson leans over him with a look of terror.
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  It is 9:29 a.m. and the numbness starts to move across George’s body.

  It crawls from his fingers, up his arms, and from his toes to his thighs. It is not the stinging numbness of the cold. Not the impersonal numbness of the rain. It is like falling asleep. Like being a child, sinking into a place of enveloping comfort. It is like falling asleep with Hannah in his arms. With that thought, George’s breathing slows. And an overwhelming, almost suffocating peace comes over him.

  Robinson reappears.

  “You’re gonna be okay, mate,” he says, but the expression on his face says something else. “Doc’ll fix you up. You’ll see. We’ll get you home right quick.”

  The sun comes out.

  George hears distorted shouting. More of the guys in his platoon appear; they stand over him, helmets off. Robinson leans down again, close to George’s face.

  “God damn. It’s over, George,” Robinson says, the tears on his face running lines through the caked-on dirt. “The war is over. It’s fucking armistice.”

  It is 9:30 a.m. and George Edwin Ellison is dead.

  The very last British casualty of the First World War.

  The sun throbs overhead.

  The rabbit foot, the dream catcher—his luck has run out. And as George’s body settles into death, his pupils dilate, becoming two black pools that widen until they consume the whole world. All that is left is darkness.

  And in that darkness, a small voice screams.

  2

  3:33 A.M.

  NOVEMBER 11, 2018

  MARCY-LANSING APARTMENTS

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  THE SCREAM WOKE Ashanique Walters before she realized it was coming from her own mouth.

  Two days ago, she’d turned eleven, and the balloons from her party had deflated and lined her small bedroom floor like dark stones. The door to her bedroom was half-open and out in the living room of her mother’s small apartment she could see the television flickering. An infomercial for a blender ran on mute; white people with cosmetic smiles mugged for the camera as they pretended to enjoy a smoothie that looked like it was dredged from the bottom of Lake Michigan.

  Ashanique had never felt her heart beat so quickly.

  A week ago, she’d gone over to a friend’s house and played with her pet bunny. With her heart racing, Ashanique remembered how the bunny squirmed when she’d held it. How her friend’s mom had told her that if the rabbit got too scared its heart would beat so fast it would burst. Ashanique’s face was slick with sweat, her skin cold despite the blankets, and she worried her heart might burst.

  Reaching down to adjust her sheets, her fingers came away wet.

  Sticky.

  Ashanique pulled down her blankets. There was a dark stain on her pajama bottoms between her legs. Blood. She ignored it and climbed out of bed and headed to the pile of books in a corner. There she found a pencil box filled with crayons beneath a tattered hardcover copy of Goodman & Gilman’s Manual of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. She carefully peeled the wrappers off the sticks of colored wax and then, in the half-light, began drawing on the walls. . . .

  • • •

  Ashanique’s mother, Janice, found her standing on her bed thirteen minutes later.

  Confused, still half-asleep, Janice turned on the lights.

  Ashanique blinked in the instant brightness as Janice looked over the drawings that covered the walls, even the corners of the ceilings.

  “Did . . . did you see this, baby?”

  Ashanique nodded.

  Janice took Ashanique’s wax-covered hands and squeezed them. Then, leaning down, she locked eyes with her daughter. Only, they weren’t the same eyes she’d tucked into bed a few hours earlier—something had changed. There was a maturity behind them, a knowing that went beyond the girl’s years.

  “Ashanique, everything’s going to be okay. . . .”

  “That’s not my name.”

  Janice took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “What’s your name?”

  “It’s George. What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong, baby girl.”

  Janice held Ashanique tight, but Ashanique pulled away.

  “I don’t want this. . . . I’m scared. . . . I’m scared I don’t know who I am. . . .”

  “Everything will be okay, all right? You have to trust me. I know this is scary. You feel like you’re upside down. But this thing that’s happening to you, in time you’re going to understand it. I’ll tell you what I know in the morning, about the others. But, right now, you know those caterpillars Mrs. Carol got—”

  “Who’s Mrs. Carol? I don’t know that person. . . .”

  Fighting to keep her voice from trembling, Janice ran her fingers along the back of Ashanique’s neck and said, “They were ladybug babies but they didn’t look like ladybugs, did they? No, they looked like little ugly caterpillars with spikes. But then they transform. They curl up and put a little black shell ’round themselves. They don’t know what’s happening. You think they decide when the transformation starts? Nah, it’s programmed in their blood. It happens when it’s time. And when that little black shell opens, what comes out of it?”

  “A ladybug comes out. . . .”

  “That’s exactly right,” Janice said. “A beautiful ladybug.”

  3

  5:16 A.M.

  NOVEMBER 11, 2018

  MARCY-LANSING APARTMENTS

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  WITH HER DAUGHTER passed out in bed, a glass of water and a Tylenol later, Janice sat on the couch with her stopwatch in hand.

  She tried to calm herself, but her heart was doing its own thing.

  Been waiting for this since the girl was born, and now you’re going to freak out? Had a decade to get your ass ready, girl. Don’t fall apart now that it's time.

  The only art Ashanique ever brought home from school were messes of wet paint and blurry ink stamps. Ashanique’s teacher said it wasn’t the girl’s calling. Mrs. Adams had even joked about maybe a career in medicine, since Ashanique clearly had a doctor’s handwriting.

  But what Ashanique had done was . . . impossible.

  She’d transformed her room into a panorama of hell.

  Using crayons and finger paint, Ashanique had painted smoking ruins of buildings that loomed over crushed bodies and rivers of blood; horses, their manes on fire, ran across fields of spent bullet casings; soldiers with machine guns blasted away at faceless crowds. And in one inky corner near the ceiling, there was a realistic pocket watch with red crayon droplets on its glass face. The time on the watch was 10:55 a.m. The watch appeared broken, and Ashanique had carefully drawn a crude smiley face beside it. Janice had no idea what any of it meant, but she had no doubt about what she’d have to do next.

  On the couch in front of the flickering TV, Janice started the stopwatch and then, laying it down on the seat, she reached under the couch to pull out a secondhand laptop from its hiding place. Her hands shook as she opened the laptop. To counter the shaking, she balled her fingers into fists and closed her eyes. Then she gave herself to the count of ten to calm down.

  You’re in control for once, she thought. This is you in control.

  Janice opened her eyes and turned the laptop on. It took forever to boot up and then even longer to connect to the neighbor’s Wi-Fi. But not because it was a slow machine, it was because Janice had to mask her connection via a series of convoluted encryption programs.

  When the stopwatch hit two minutes and thirty-six seconds, Janice opened a Tor browser. It was her access to the “dark web,” the Internet’s perennial boogeyman—its darkest alleyway, its deepest forest. As with most things, the truth was a lot less sensational: Tor was a tool and the dark web merely another side street. Albeit one largely populated by drug dealers, political dissidents, conspiracy theorists, and jaded degenerates.

  Janice clicked her way to a website that consisted of nothing more than a black page with a list of dates and
what appeared to be military operations. The dates went back to the mid-1980s and continued up until the early 2000s. The operations, things like “unconventional warfare” and “direct action,” were marked as “carried out” and designated with qualifiers like “success” or “failure.”

  Moving the cursor to the left-hand corner of the site, Janice clicked on a tiny star. It opened a new window, a live chat room. She typed:

  Biogenesis3: My daughter’s Null. I need to come in.

  As Janice waited for a response, she glanced at the stopwatch.

  Another forty seconds had passed.

  Come on. . . . Come on. . . .

  Then, a digital chime sounded. Someone else had entered the chat room.

  SEATTLE_UNDO: been forever, 51. how can we trust you?

  BIOGENESIS3: You don’t have to. Send someone.

  SEATTLE_UNDO: will have to discuss this with dr. song

  SEATTLE_UNDO: do you have the solution?

  BIOGENESIS3: No. But did you forget who you’re talking to? What I’ve sacrificed? We all moved here. Into the lion’s den.

  BIOGENESIS3: It’s too early. Just now happened.

  SEATTLE_UNDO: is your daughter stable?

  Janice looked up from the laptop at her daughter’s room. The door was shut, the apartment dark. Outside, a car screamed around a corner. Dogs barked. The apartment’s thin walls did little to keep the sounds out, but they faded quickly.

  Janice typed:

  BIOGENESIS3: For now.

  SEATTLE_UNDO: we will be in contact when we have asset there.

  BIOGENESIS3: Hurry. You know what this means.

  SEATTLE_UNDO: we know

  Janice logged out.

  The stopwatch hit four minutes.

  She powered down the laptop and then slid it carefully back under the couch before she headed to the bathroom.

  There, in the brutal glare of an unshielded lightbulb, Janice studied her face. Her brown skin was chapped, cheeks sallow, and her eyes deeply bloodshot. It was nearly five thirty in the morning, but the haggard look on her face wasn’t from exhaustion or worry.