HUMAN’S RESOURCE FILE

Name: CALAMITY GANON

Current Location: FIFTH FLOOR

Calamity Ganon, human name redacted, got her taste for blood the first time one of her brothers beat another to death in front of her. To be fair, her brothers had all been given time to prepare. They trained for this. If one couldn’t survive, he was meant to carry on the battle in the afterlife. And clearly, Cal thought as she yanked the warm soda tab from around the defeated boy’s neck, this one was destined for that side of the fight.

It wasn’t until she was older that she understood “brother” wasn’t exactly the right word. The boys the General brought home and fed and trained alongside her weren’t technically her brothers, despite what he called them. The Pigs showed her their “missing” posters—the ones who had people missing them, at least—in the station the day they stormed the barracks and carried her out, kicking and screaming, wrapped in a gray blanket meant to put out fires.

When the Pigs approached her, with their quiet words and new crayons, she did as her father taught her. She spat in their faces and said nothing. No matter what they told her about his record, about his mental health issues and pattern of paranoia and violence, she said nothing. When they pointed out her brothers and called them names she didn’t recognize, names their first fathers gave them, she said nothing. When they asked after their bodies, where their families could at least find their bones: nothing.

“Brother” might have been the wrong word, but “father” was not.

No matter what the Pigs and the social workers and the foster parents said about him, she had a father. No matter how few people wanted her, how few people would even meet her after reading her file, at one point, she had belonged to someone.

And thanks to him, Cal was a fighter.

The first person Cal killed on her own was her fourth foster mother. She had an idea of how Cal could pay her own expenses, and it involved belts strapped to bedposts and a revolving door of houseguests. Over the days she was held there Cal worked one of the posts loose, twisting her wrist raw until she felt the wood give. When the woman came to collect her for her bathroom break, Cal pulled the wood free and cracked her straight across the face. She didn’t even bother to bury her. She just took the sharpest kitchen knife that fit in her jacket pocket and all the cash the woman had and set out on her own.

She was twelve.

She spent her next three years on the road, looking for the Farm.

He told them stories about the Farm. About the fresh vegetables and meat grown and harvested right there, so that everything tasted like the wide-open Arkansas sky. About the schoolhouse with enough books for everyone and the bunks with real mattresses, one per person. The way everyone worked together to keep it safely hidden from the Pigs, an Eden for the worthy. Cal’s favorite stories, besides those about what comes after the Almighty War, were the ones about the Farm’s weapons caches, which the General said were wider and deeper than they could possibly imagine. Much bigger than their meager stockpile in the unplugged fridge at the barracks.

Cal knew her way around a knife, but nothing made her giddy quite like a gun.

The General said he was sent out to find an army, fighters strong and true enough to be deserving of such a place, and they would go there once he could march them home with pride. And in those rare moments when the General was feeling sentimental, he would make quiet promises just to Cal: if they ever got separated, he would wait for her there.

She was fifteen when she finally found the Farm, and it was just as beautiful as the General had promised. It was no sparkling fortress—it had been hard to find for a reason—but after years of gas station bathrooms and nameless cities’ corner blocks, Cal had forgotten the earth could be clean until she saw it under that much sky.

At first, the leaders humored her, the wiry girl in the tattered camouflage jacket who slept with her knife so tight in her fist, her fingerprints took on the pattern of wood grain. They gave her soup and a cot, even let her sit in the back of the classroom during the children’s lessons on US history and the upcoming Almighty End. But after a couple of days, once she had slowed enough to chew her food, they decided to tell her the truth.

None of them had ever heard of her father. They had never been moved by the prophetic power in him, never sent him out to recruit their army. There was, as far as they knew, no special-ops mission handed down from Heaven itself. Not that they were willing to share with an outsider, at least.

Right up until then, Calamity Ganon’s afterlife forecast was golden. The kind reserved for those who have already been through Hell once, without the fun of sinning. But when she threw the grenade into that little schoolhouse, she forfeited her right to call any future suffering unjust.

She didn’t care, she thought as she squeezed through a gap in the Farm’s chain-link fence, the grenade pin clinking against the soda tabs hanging from her neck. She was still a soldier, even if she had nothing left for which to fight.

A couple of times, she thought she found him. She would recognize the back of his head as he dipped around the corner past the local bar, or the loping gait of a passerby who limped the same way he did ever since one brother shot him in the leg. But it was never him. So she went on searching, killing as she searched. She would’ve gone on killing everyone until there was nobody but him left, but she didn’t have the chance. The police shot her dead when she was twenty-six, and she went straight to the Downstairs.