by Bobby Adair
William was surprised when Phillip waved him over, pointing at the white horse next to him.
“Get on, Rowan,” he called.
William’s mouth fell open, but he didn’t let his surprise stop him. He moved as quickly as he could, climbing onto the beast. He could feel the animal breathing heavily beneath him, but it didn’t move, and it didn’t shake him off. William clutched the reins and looked around, recalling the things the cavalry member had told him when he’d ridden several years ago.
Sit tall.
Be gentle with the reins.
William clenched his boots against the horse’s sides. The horse fell into a trot.
And then they were marching behind the army on horseback, ten priests, Winthrop, and William, clopping over bent grass, boot prints, and the discarded pieces of demons, the only things that would be left behind of Winthrop’s army in the Ancient City.
Chapter 25: Oliver
“All of us were marked by the spore,” said Kirby as she pulled her coat back over her shoulders.
“You mean the people outside?” Beck asked, tactfully not calling them the dead people outside. “Or the ones where you came from?”
“The ones outside,” answered Kirby. “I’m the only left still alive. I’m the last survivor.”
“I’ve got questions.” Jingo almost sounded like a pleading merchant’s child.
“I’ve barely eaten since you people came.” Kirby looked around at the eyes all staring at her. “I’ve been hiding from you instead of hunting. Do you have food?”
“We do,” Jingo told her. He pointed to the chairs by the fireplace. “Let’s sit and take off the night’s chill.” Jingo turned to Oliver. “Fetch us some of those squirrels Ivory killed yesterday. We can roast them over the fire while we talk.”
The squirrels, the last of their meager stores, were hanging on a hook in a larder built into a corner of the cavernous space. Oliver hurried, not wanting to miss any question that Beck and Jingo would ask or any answer Kirby was going to give.
Jingo turned to Ivory. “With all the noise of Kirby’s hand grenade, would you please go up and keep watch?”
Ivory looked at Kirby, and it was clear that he wanted to stay and hear every interesting thing she had to say.
“You know we need to keep safe,” added Jingo.
Melora grudgingly tugged at Ivory’s hand, pulling him toward the stairs. The two were becoming nearly inseparable.
“I assure you,” said Jingo with a smile, “there’ll be plenty of time for your questions as we each take our turns at the watch.”
Ivory and Melora went upstairs.
When Oliver brought the skinned and cleaned squirrels over to the fire, Jingo, Beck, and Kirby were already sitting down.
“Do you mind cooking them?” Jingo asked.
“I will,” answered Oliver as he busied himself skewering each animal with a stick to lean it over the flames.
Kirby took a long hard look at Jingo, and said, “You’re really three hundred years old?”
“Yes,” answered Jingo.
Kirby continued to stare at him, but didn’t say any more about it.
Sensing her skepticism, Jingo said, “You’re trying to decide whether I’m lying or not.”
“No.” Kirby slowly shook her head as her eyes drifted toward the fire. “It’s hard to accept.”
“Perhaps the spore mutated differently where you’re from,” said Jingo. “Did you come from across the ocean?”
Kirby nodded. “On those ships, yes.”
“From another continent?”
“Yes.”
Jingo said, “I figured the strain that infected me and every person on this continent cursed them with immortality.”
Oliver looked back and forth between Jingo and Kirby, bewildered by the strange terminology.
Jingo stopped and thought about Kirby’s answer. “No, the people on our continent are not immortal; we can be killed. We age very, very slowly, though. In all my years, I haven’t seen any of my kind die of old age.”
Kirby looked down as she opened her hands. She turned them over and examined the backs.
To Oliver, it looked like she was worrying that she’d turn out like Jingo, an ugly monster.
Jingo said, “I believe the spore causes a mutation in telomerase, a protein that keeps telomeres from fraying, hence keeping DNA from degrading as it reproduces, hence slowing aging.”
Looking up at Jingo blankly, Kirby said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your culture has lost its knowledge of molecular biology?” Jingo asked.
Still confused, Kirby said, “You use words that I don’t know.”
Beck smiled and injected himself into the conversation. “He does that to all of us.”
Kirby smiled weakly at Beck and then refocused on Jingo. “Do you know how old I am?”
“How old were you when the spore infected you?” asked Jingo.
“Eighteen,” answered Kirby.
“I’d guess you’re twenty now,” said Beck, looking her up and down and letting his eyes linger on her hips and breasts. “Maybe twenty-two.”
Kirby shook her head.
“You got infected long ago?” Jingo guessed.
Kirby nodded. “Three years before we came here.”
“Before you sailed here in those ships?” Jingo asked.
“We landed here fourteen years ago.” Kirby looked at both Jingo and Beck, ready for them to challenge her count. Neither did. “We’ve been at war with what you call twisted men, or demons—and what I call mutants—ever since.”
“You’re thirty-five?” Oliver said, as he turned away from his cooking squirrels. “That’s old.”
Kirby nodded sadly.
“You don’t look old,” said Oliver. “I think you still look eighteen.”
Kirby smiled sweetly at Oliver.
“That’s why you believed me when I told you I was three hundred,” said Jingo.
“Yes.” Kirby nodded. “I’m not aging.”
“And that frightens you?” Beck observed.
“Fright?” Kirby asked. “No. It makes me sad.” She looked at Jingo. “The thirty-five years I’ve lived have hurt too much. Everybody I’ve ever loved is dead. I couldn’t stand to live another three centuries.”
It was Jingo’s turn to hide his melancholy behind a plastic smile. “Don’t the spore-infected people live longer than normal lives where you come from?”
Kirby laughed so darkly that Oliver thought at first she was sobbing. “Things are different where I come from. People who show signs of infection don’t live more than a few years.”
“Years?” Oliver was surprised as he shot an accusing look at Beck. “You don’t burn them immediately?”
Kirby looked at Beck, too, and for a moment, her face showed her disgust.
“No,” Beck defended himself. “I don’t… Brighton’s laws are… I’m trying to… I want to change Brighton.”
“So you burn the infected?” asked Kirby. “In Brighton? Is that the name of the city you’re from?”
“Yes,” Oliver answered. “They burn them alive.”
Kirby labored through a weighty sigh. “It always comes to the killing. Always the suffering.” Her eyes grew distant as they stared through the fire, past the squirrels, through the stones behind it, and out across the vast tempestuous ocean.
No one spoke. Oliver felt bad for what he’d said. Beck seemed embarrassed, Jingo patient.
Tears traced solo trails down Kirby’s cheeks that otherwise betrayed no grief at all. Finally, she spoke again. “If you went to the place where I came from, it would seem like the most alien place on the face of the world. We have machines and weapons, guns an
d bombs, concrete fortresses and bunkers, but not many of the wild infected like you have here. We slaughter them like rats, and we’re good at it.”
“I’m amazed,” said Jingo.
“Most of us get infected too, and when we do, we’re forced into the arena by the non-infected to fight for sport,” Kirby said. “Or they put us in the army, and we go to wage the wars.”
“War with the demons?” Beck asked.
“Wars with barbarians, wars with pirates, wars with bandit tribes, wars with other cities and territories. Always war. Always. It never ends. Everyone where I come from eventually dies in the wars. That’s our fate. Our leaders tell us tales of glory and sacrifice. They tell us of heaven and golden palaces in the clouds, but all I’ve seen is war. I saw no golden palaces. All I saw were tears and blood.” She looked at Jingo, Oliver, and then Beck, pausing for second to make eye contact. “Have you seen someone you love suffer and die?”
Oliver nodded, thinking of his parents. But he said nothing, fearing a word might turn into tears if he dared utter it.
“You said you were infected three years before your people came here,” said Jingo, changing the subject. “Were you in the wars for three years?”
“I was in the wars for two,” Kirby confirmed, “and I was in the arena for one. Three years of killing people just like me, corrupted by the spore and waiting for death.”
Oliver gulped as he put thoughts of his burned parents out of his mind, only to replace them with vivid memories of the slaughter he’d seen in Blackthorn’s army. “You must be a good soldier to have lived through so much,” he said to Kirby.
Kirby didn’t accept the compliment. Instead, she emptily responded with, “People corrupted by the spore want to die. I helped them.”
“You don’t sound like you believe that,” observed Beck.
“I was a slave,” Kirby shot back, as though the truth was so obvious it offended her to have to say it. “I made people suffer. I murdered them so that I could have food in my stomach and a warm place to sleep. I hated what they made me into.”
“Why did your people come here?” asked Jingo.
Kirby looked at Jingo for a long time while she thought about her response. “Hope. That’s the simple answer. We were all corrupted. We were all tired of killing. We came here in search of a quiet place to live out the few years we thought we had left. We came here in search of that golden palace in the clouds, hoping it might be on Earth.”
“But that’s not what you found,” Jingo concluded for her. “I’m so sorry.”
Kirby buried her face in her hands, rubbing as though to mash away all the evil her eyes had seen in her life. “Where I came from, people die on a scale you can’t imagine. Victory only comes from annihilating our enemies. We don’t kill only their spore-corrupted mutants, we kill the uninfected people, too, the men, the women, the children, and the babies.”
Beck stopped looking at Kirby. Oliver guessed he was embarrassed for not feeling the shame Kirby felt for what sounded to Oliver like the same kind of killing that happened regularly in Brighton.
“Most of the land is scarred from war,” said Kirby. “We steal our enemy’s food stores when we can, and burn what we can’t take with us. We torch their fields and kill their livestock. We poison their wells with the bodies of their dead. They do the same to us, and we all starve. We hoped this place would be different, but it isn’t. We hoped this place would be the part of the ancient world that survived.” Kirby slowly shook her head, and then she focused on Jingo. “I think there are no more Ancients, no more glittering cities, full of electric lights. Only one thing in the world is true anymore: war. Whatever light lived in the world in the ancient times and inspired men to build glass towers into the clouds, create flying machines, and build rockets to the moon died a long time ago. Humans only exist for one purpose now, to drag each other deeper and deeper into the brutality of the darkest age of our existence and to murder ourselves into extinction.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Beck said with a grim smile, glancing at Oliver. “I think we can change our path back toward the light.”
Chapter 26: Bray
Bray snuck through an area of demolished buildings on the outskirts of the Ancient City. Some of the buildings were little more than foundations, while others had one wall, or two, or three. Rarely did he find a building that had four. Mounds of rubble had collected in the center of most of them, the only remnants of the Ancient buildings that had once stood at the edge of town. Pathways were worn next to each of the walls, where animals, men, or demons had sought respite or a quick trail to the next street or building.
Bray used those paths now as he crunched softly over the debris, keeping to the interiors of the buildings, listening for Winthrop’s army a few streets away. Every so often, he had to run through an open section of street to get to the next neighborhood of houses. When he looked left, he caught glimpses of the army. The men and women chanted loudly, drawing the demons in the area. They were either brave or stupid. In Bray’s experience, making noise like that was an easy way to get killed.
At the same time, the demon activity seemed to have lessened since the army arrived. During most of Bray’s trips to the Ancient City, he’d found a few carcasses—remnants of scuffles between demons and metal smugglers, mostly. But now he found piles, scattered haphazardly across one another with jagged slice marks across their stomachs, probably from when the army had entered the city.
Now the army was headed back to Brighton, leaving a new trail of violence. Or at least that’s what it looked like.
Bray stopped short as he heard something on the other side of a wall. He lingered for a moment, sword drawn, listening to the hiss of what sounded like a demon. Bray crept toward the wall’s edge, moving quietly out so he could get the jump on it.
A demon with a large gash in its gut lay on the other side, its fingers wrapped around the wound, holding its innards in place. It must’ve survived a skirmish long enough to flee and take its last breaths. The creature was propped against a piece of cracked stone. Bray ran and caught it by surprise, putting a quick end to it. He couldn’t have the thing howling upon seeing him.
He continued through the maze of foundations and walls.
Bray followed the chanting army until the empty, crumbled walls and foundations ran out and became towers again. He was forced to sneak in the alleyways between intact buildings. Reaching the edge of an alley, he peered around, catching sight of the army crossing a large intersection.
Several soldiers dragged their swords through the streets, or hoisted them in the air as they chanted in unison. A few brave demons raced at them, providing a momentary skirmish, but the men disposed of them easily. Those that could be carried were hoisted on men’s shoulders. Others were thrust back into the streets. A line of women toted swords, sticks, and gear. They sang loudly as they surveyed the streets for more demons.
Ahead, the buildings ended and the dense woods took over, encasing the final towers of the Ancient City in brown weeds. The army would run out of road soon. Then they’d be back in the wild.
Still no sign of William.
Bray was about to dash to the next building when he noticed a line of horses marching between several clusters of guarding men. He stopped and watched. The horseback riders were men, but a few women walked alongside them, bellowing melodic chants into the wind. A large man rode in the middle of the procession, his robes billowing underneath him, his hands waving in the air as he guided them. His enormous girth gave him away.
Winthrop.
Sitting directly next to Winthrop, looking uncomfortably small in the saddle of a large, white horse, was William.
Chapter 27: Bray
Bray gritted his teeth as he watched William swallowed by a procession of blood-printed men and women. He wanted to charge out and take the b
oy. He wanted to hack these deranged men and women to bits.
Instead, he settled for getting closer, weaving between buildings so he could get a better view. His best option would be to catch them at night when they were resting, so he’d have a chance at luring—or stealing—the boy away. But he needed more information. He needed to know how carefully William was being guarded.
William didn’t appear to be fighting to get away. He seemed resigned to his fate, as if these strange men had beaten him into submission. Or maybe they’d threatened him with some fate worse than what they were doing to the demons. Infected or not, the boy didn’t deserve to end up in some soldier’s stomach.
He considered the words William had yelled when Bray had inadvertently killed Ella.
Kill him! Kill him!
Would William be stable enough to realize he was being rescued? Bray wasn’t certain, but he needed to know before he made any moves.
Stopping at a large, multi-story building with numerous windows, one of the last towers before the Ancient City gave way to forest, Bray crept inside and up the stairs. He paused when he reached a window high enough to glimpse the army, watching them travel down the last of the cracked roads. The front rows of people disappeared between the thick trees, as if the forest was swallowing them up. When Bray followed them, he wouldn’t have any buildings to hide behind.
He’d need to leave a healthy gap.
Chapter 28: William
William clutched the horse’s reins, keeping his legs tight against the animal’s flanks as it clopped across the landscape. He followed a group of singing, chanting men and women. He felt like a powerful deity, coming to claim some Ancient land, riding high above the heads of men. He looked next to him, watching Winthrop bellow commands. The men and women heeded his orders. When Winthrop asked them to slow down, they did. When Winthrop led a new chant, they changed their tune. William recalled having a similar power over the demons. A part of him missed it, but he was glad to be following Winthrop.