I tell my story not in an attempt to garner sympathy or even empathy. It is a purely selfish endeavor. Remembering will strengthen the bond, long since stretched beyond capability, and pull me closer, closing the gap between myself and those I loved. My heart desires a reunion with them all, but my brain tells me that outcome is unlikely.

My daughter Dawn died a few short years after my son. I killed her. I have killed all those closest to me. There is no one to blame but myself. Early on, I came to know that I was the monster under my own bed. It is only after so long without even Sally as company, that another certainty became an ever-present bitterness in the back of my throat.

I am the monster under every bed.

In order to keep the monster there in the darkness, I must stay awake. I have not slept since the day I lost them. I cannot. To sleep is to lose consciousness. And, with consciousness, control.

If I lose control, who possesses it?

This body, my body, is too powerful for anyone else to wield. It—I—must stay confined under that proverbial bed until this body is destroyed. So I remain awake. The human body, to say nothing of the human mind, needs sleep to survive. As you know by now, I am not human. I was a Carrier until I learned to be an Incola, a rider, inhabitant, resident, wagon driver, one who has transferred his domicile to any other place, a cultivator.

That last one isn’t me, but it describes every Incola I’ve ever known. They are all greedy. Searching, planting seeds, waiting for the harvest of a lifetime. I was supposed to be that harvest to the men I knew as Paetus and Julian. I married Julian and my first-born daughter was promised to Paetus. With us, they planned to populate the world with, well, themselves.

“One who has transferred his domicile to any other place” does not describe me either. In this circumstance, “place” means body. Incolas, historically, transfer by a variety of methods, their souls, for a lack of a better term, from body to body. Their Carriers serve as chattel, to be used, abused, bred, discarded. I do not use Carriers. My soul has but one place. I am trapped.

I am the last remaining member of my family, the last Incola. There is but one creature left on earth that carries the same blood as I. If I were religious, I would pray that this is not the end. As I am not, I can only hope.

 

Last week I killed the last man alive with the knowledge I sought to purge from earth for so many years. I knew him. I should have felt remorse, sadness, guilt, joy. Anything really. My senses continued to increase in sensitivity throughout my long life because I never left my original body. My emotions are another thing entirely. They went with Sally and the others, who I always feared meant I wasn’t natural, and were what made me human. Without them, I am death.

So confident in their own abilities were they that no guard stood outside. Removing my night-vision goggles for fear that the lights would be on inside, I simply twisted the knob and pulled the door open. Through a hallway made of metal I walked unmolested. Money had never been a worry, even less so in the last fifty years. Underneath my corset and bloomers, I wore the best armor that could be bought. Thin and breathable, my undergarments were impregnable. I feared no bullet nor blade. The silk feeling bodysuit couldn’t even be crushed. My conceit won only in one way. I wore no head covering other than my usual fascinator. My face bore not even makeup.

They must have thought I could not find this undisclosed location where they brought Ed. No longer did I require the devices Ed created for me so long ago in Victorian England. My very body became the means with which I could locate and identify Carriers of the Incola gene. The door at the end of the hall held them all.

Inward the door flew with scarcely any effort on my part. Five men, human by the smell of them, stood around Ed, who sat strapped to an odd-looking chair. His face was much the same as I remembered, though his goggles had been replaced by more natural looking but still mechanical eyes. They turned to me and widened. Recognition washed over his face and it went slack. The lines disappeared, replaced by a smirk. His fingers ended in bloody bulbous tips. Pliers and ten fingernails with trailing torn flesh lay on a small metal table beside. Tortured for information.

Ed complimented my dress. “That color of blue is lovely, Ra…” He must have thought better than to say my name aloud within the hearing range of these men.

As if I had any intention of allowing them to live.

The man closest to the door turned an automatic gun on me. So swift were my movements that he only got off three rounds before my fingers went through his ocular cavity and into his brain. Lifting, I removed his head from his body. I have found that to be the quickest and easiest way to kill. Sometimes, like this time, I was at the wrong angle to twist the neck and, failing to break it, the spine came with the head. His bullets ricocheted off me. They could have hit other room occupants. The commotion grew enough.

“I told them nothing,” Ed yelled.

I cared not. Even if these men did not yet hold the secrets, they knew what Ed was. They saw my visage. They died. A further recollection and description of the manner was unnecessary.

I crossed to Ed, slipping one glove from my right pocket onto my right hand and one glove from my left pocket onto my left hand. Right first, I put my hand on his face. First that blank mask of deep relaxation covered his face. Then my left joined. The gift of touch that forced truth was the one needed here.

“Do you have any children?” I asked.

His eyes closed but he spoke, as if the effects of the two gloves struggled against each other. “I did.” He took a deep shuddering breath and I removed my calming right glove from his cheek. It would take some time for the effects to wear off, whereas the power of truth relied on continued touch to work. “They died along with my wife while I was in your service.”

“Were they Incola? Did they have their own offspring?”

“I do not know.”

That truth was his only answer.

“Have you ever shared with any person, anyone, the secret to immortality?”

He shook his head no.

“Have you taught anyone to heal themselves, to end aging?”

His mechanical eyes remained closed. Again, he indicated no silently.

“Are there any of your inventions that I do not already possess?”

“When you killed Lady Dawn, we fled in fear. My own eyesight is the only invention I worked on or improved. I did not want to locate Incola after that, only to hide from them, and you.” His eyes opened then, searching my face. The calming effect of Julian’s touch began to wear off. “Please release me, Ramillia.”

“How is it they have captured and held you? Surely your strength matches my own, as we are roughly the same age.”

Had he been free of the gift of touch, he would have lied. I could feel that. As he was not, he indicated the shackles on his arms, legs, and torso and said, “These bindings.”

“Made from the same metal that you…” I did not finish my question before he confirmed that they were the very same material that he had invented to hold me in my madness. I picked up a set of manacles matching those on his legs and slipped them into a hidden pocket in my skirt.

“Her Majesty’s government, perhaps every government, knows of me.” He looked toward one corner behind me.

I followed his gaze. A small red light gave away the location of a transmitting camera. Jumping up, I pummeled the camera, destroying it.

Though I had removed my gloved hand from him, I recognized the truth of his next words. “Knows of us.”

I knew the answer to my next question but I asked it anyway, “Are there any more?”

“No. You and I are the last.” I heard the accusation in his voice. He had not wanted to believe what he knew to be true. I had killed them all.

I killed him too. I burned his body. Narrowly escaping the federal agents, I grabbed a red-hot bone fragment and ran. Even if he could heal himself from such destruction, Ed could not do it without every part of himself. It burned my palm so badly that my ability to feel the pain disappeared. When that happened, I slipped it into the pouch at my waist.

 

Decades before that, in the late 1900s, I neared Pripyat, in the northern Ukraine, on foot. The Incola locater, a compass of sorts, said that the wind had blown me off course yet again. I snapped it in half and discarded it. It was unnecessary now. I didn’t know if snow currently fell from the sky because gusts moved the drifts to and fro so quickly and drastically that I was near blind. My night-vision goggles could do me no good here. It was the opposite problem. The white snow reflected light in every direction. I adjusted my course based on my internal locator and set off again.

That same wind that stung my cheeks and any exposed flesh was also a blessing, for it had cleared and hardened my path, giving my snowshoes grip. How far down to solid soil, I did not know. Perhaps there was no land, only snow, ice. The cold was as extreme as any I’d experienced. Yet it did not trouble me much. At my age, any Incola has mastered the ability of repairing one’s own body. It was how I survived without sleep. My body remained the same, un-aged, undamaged. I did not know about my mind. Maybe it was like this snow. Maybe it was temporary, unsupported by anything real. No longer did I bother with the lie of what I was. Incola, that which I had always hated, was the nomenclature I accepted.

After that night I would be the only one left in all the world.

I could decide the definition of Incola. The definition I had already decided: final. Finis. Dead.

The frozen pure fat tasted terrible as I walked, but I knew I would need much fuel to keep my metabolism chugging. A train needs coal. The further or faster it must go, the more coal it consumes. After a night spent in the northernmost village, I had loaded up on breakfast and took the seal oil cakes they made and began the walk.

The residents there recognized me for what I was: unnatural. Unlike in many modern places where humans lived removed from the ebb and flow of life, here where death played a key role in life, no one bothered me for my secret. None attempted to buy, bribe, blackmail or beg me for eternal life. They gave me food, shelter, supplies, and directions, happy to see me go.

The fur from the white bear that roamed this longitude graced my shoulders, keeping me safe and warm from the bitter cold. I relished it. Had I been of the current era, worried with the rights of the polar bear and every other such fur-bearing creature, I could not have enjoyed its comfort. Never was my money invested in the fur trade. Call it what you will; I knew fur would become the enemy of modern thinkers. Killing is out of style. Much more will follow in my tale, popular or not.

The rapid wind of the tundra blew the ice sideways across my path but snow did not fall nor accumulate. I marched forward. Though it obscured my vision, my path lay clear. I must end the last enemy.

I issued the same to him as I had to all others. “Invite me to your home, accept the infection, or die resisting.” He chose to die. He would have said he chose to fight but I knew there would be no fighting, only ending. Can you battle a tornado? Or combat the tide? No. Such struggles are futile. I wished the last might have been peaceful but it was not mine to choose.

The gaping hole in the ground came into view. It was an unnatural crater untouched by the snow. It was almost as if the snow was as frightened of the dark hole as humans were. I continued on what had been the maintenance road passing in front of reactor four. Climbing over rubble, I stumbled. A hand caught my elbow, steadying me.

Not jerking away was difficult as the hand was dry, flaking, and slick with oozing at the same time. He spoke in Ukrainian, which I understand as well as any of the three dozen languages I am familiar with. Addressing me formally, he said, “Ledi Khvoroby, our Incola hides within the most radioactive area, hoping you will not venture that far. We will bring him to you.” He paused and smiled. The genuine smile aged him, spreading cracks along his face as an earthquake does to land. “Though it will cost some of us everything.” His second upper incisor fell out. He clapped his palm over his mouth and embarrassment shone in his eyes.

He started stuttering apologies. I stopped him with my hand, gloved of course, on his. The glove, made from the skin of Julian, contained my dead husband’s power of touch. The exact opposite of my own. Calm is too small a word to describe it. I’d experienced it hundreds of times during my first husband’s life. It was now a tool, instead of a drug. This man’s eyes rolled back and around. The smile returned but this time held less pleasure, more peace. This time it made him appear younger.

A change passed over his face and I knew that the Incola now looked out at me from behind his Carrier’s eyes. The gift of touch was still strong on his body, no matter who sat in the driver’s seat. He was drunk on the touch. It took a few seconds for the cloud of tranquility to clear. A snarl curled his lip but before he could speak the left side of his face exploded.

The man fell to his knees and collapsed in front of my feet. Another man appeared to take his place. He held out his hand and helped me step over his comrade’s body. “He knew of the risks; as do we all. Our Incola wants to use us to keep you from infecting him but we will die to end his tyranny.” The wind blew his hood from his head long enough to catch a glimpse of his patchy hair. Radiation made it fall out in chunks. “He heals us only enough to keep us alive. Another method of control that keeps us from leaving. If we allow you to him, he says he will let us die.” He gazed at me, expectantly. “I told the others that you would not let us die.”

I reached up and secured his hood. Taking his offered arm, I neither confirmed nor denied his assumption.

Carriers rose from their hiding places and formed a corridor as I advanced. I walked down that aisle, men flanking me. Here or there a nose was blackened by the prolonged exposure to the extreme cold. I passed many a cheek covered with the blue network of burst capillaries. Bulbous growths graced hand and face. Many reached out to touch my skirts as I passed, as one might do with a living saint. Twice men rose and ran toward me with weapons drawn, only to be shot and drop at my feet. When the man with the rifle who’d been doing the killing was ridden, another rose from the snow and executed him, taking up his weapon and his duty.

They brought their Incola to me bound in chains. He spit at me and cursed the men holding him. When his body went limp and the man to my right stiffened, several guns appeared and pointed at the Carrier. I held up my hand.

“Wait,” I commanded in Ukrainian. “Point your weapons at your Incola’s body.” When they had, I turned to the Carrier who housed the Incola. “Your Carriers are now all infected. There is nowhere for you except your own body.”

He smiled through bleeding gums and blood-stained teeth.

There was a time when his defiance would have angered me, made me sad, given rise to any emotion. That time was past and now all I felt was tired. I had won. All by myself, Ramillia, a Victorian peeress twice widowed, defeated an ancient secret bloodthirsty society, hellbent on global domination. I wanted, nay expected, to feel victorious. Alas, only weariness caressed my bones.

I spent a month with those men. That is, those who remained alive that long. Their Incola was able to heal a handful of them before the infection took hold and locked him in his own body. The rest died of radiation poisoning. We burned their bodies and scattered the ashes.

We drank vodka to their memory. We toasted their lives and mourned their passing. Songs were sung, widows tended, orphans cared and prepared for.

The Incola hated me until the last. He saw in the second before I cleaved his head in half that I meant to end not only his reign but his life. I didn’t hesitate. Once his skull and brain split, I separated the two hemispheres from his neck. His body was burned in three separate fires. Once the last ember faded, I took a small handful of ash and added it to the pouch on my hip.