“You don’t know anything about me,” Lucy said. “I don’t know anything about me either. Someone could say a magic word and I might go off on one.”
“That’s true,” Jamie said. “I might say, Chicken, and you’ll decapitate all of us one by one.”
“With a spoon handle,” Lucy said with a girlish giggle.
It was a beautiful, twinkling sound, not often heard inside these walls. A giggle of innocence from someone before the Fall, perhaps. Jamie had been born after the Fall. He had no first-hand experience of it but he did know there were no Rages back then. And no Reavers. Life was easier, with no need to forage for food or water. It sounded like the kind of place that would encourage people to laugh in a jovial way. Not like now. Everyone and everything was so serious.
“Would you like to see the people you’ll decapitate later?” Jamie said.
“Sure,” Lucy said.
“Do you feel strong enough?” Jamie said.
Lucy put her feet on the floor and felt the wood with her toes. It was rough and sometimes gave Jamie nasty splinters. Jamie stood poised to dive to Lucy’s rescue in case she collapsed again. He needn’t have worried. She stood very well by herself.
“Yes,” Lucy said. “I think I’ll be okay.”
Her head wasn’t bald because someone had shaved it, but because the hair follicles didn’t have the will to spout. Her face was extremely pretty, with big eyes and a small pointed chin. She was cute and could have passed for a boy if it wasn’t for her mannerisms. Her skin was white and clean, without a single blemish. The gown she’d been wearing when they found her had once been white but had become stained with blood and dirt. The cleaners never bothered washing whites.
“I brought you some new clothes,” Jamie said. “They’re my old ones. I think they’ll fit you.”
“Thank you,” Lucy said, sorting through them.
Her hands were small and delicate, her nails finely trimmed. No hard skin on her hands. Jamie had never seen someone so beautiful his whole life. She seemed to glow, white and pure, somehow not of this world.
Lucy hissed through her teeth and looked at her finger. It was red. Sunburn. Not too bad. Her robe had been long with a broad hood, preventing the worst of the sun’s rays to miss her but here and there she’d burned.
“I have some ointment that will help you,” Jamie said. “I’ve been putting it on every day.”
He dabbed his finger in the ointment and moved to apply it to Lucy’s finger. She backed away, eyes wide and fearful.
“It’s okay,” Jamie said. “I won’t hurt you.”
Her eyes were still wide and fearful. They moved to the gel on his fingers. He dabbed some on the skin on the back of his hand and rubbed it in.
“See?” he said. “It doesn’t hurt. Actually, it feels quite nice.”
Lucy watched him, not blinking, just staring. Then she began to move. She leaned forward and dabbed a finger at the gel on his fingertips, hesitant. She scooped up a little and then applied it to her burnt finger.
“How does it feel?” Jamie said.
“It feels. . . cool,” Lucy said. “Feels nice.”
“What is this place?” Lucy said.
“You’re at the Mountain’s Peak commune,” Jamie said. “You’re safe.”
Lucy smiled at the word safe. Although, Jamie reasoned, he wasn’t entirely sure anywhere was really safe.
32.
IT WAS A normal, busy day in the commune, with everyone going about their business. The commune was a living organism, with each person carrying out a small, but important, aspect of ensuring the commune ran as a healthy whole.
People carried dishes and boxes, others carried hoes and pickaxes. Guards were on duty on every wall and at all times. They remained vigilant. They moved every fifteen minutes, in a clockwise direction to keep their eyes and their wits sharp.
“If you decide to stay here you’ll have to pick a job and stick with it for a whole year,” Jamie said. “Then you can do something else. I once got stuck being the manure shoveller. We have a school, church, and hospital. All the basics required for survival. But nothing’s more important than maintaining the wall.”
“Can I pick anything I want?” Lucy said.
“Within reason, yes,” Jamie said. “If you want to specialize in something, you’ll have to get agreement from whoever’s in charge of that division.”
“Cool,” Lucy said.
“Everyone works hard here,” Jamie said. “Not like before the Fall.”
“The Fall?” Lucy said. “What’s that?”
Jamie looked at Lucy narrowly. “The Fall? You’ve never heard of the Fall?”
Lucy shook her head. She looked down. He was making her feel uncomfortable.
“Sorry,” Jamie said. “It’s just, I’ve never met anyone who didn’t know about the Fall before.”
“Maybe I did know about it,” Lucy said. “But I can’t remember it now.”
“Right,” Jamie said.
He kept forgetting Lucy had a problem with her memory. What must it be like, he wondered, forgetting everything you’d ever known? Not knowing if it would ever come back to you? Sad, he thought. All those lost memories, everything wiped clean. And then he thought about Nester. Would it have been better to forget what had happened to her? To erase her from his memory completely? No. She deserved better than that. Better to remember, even if it was painful.
“The Fall is when meteorites fell from the sky,” Jamie said. “There were thousands of them, glowing bright green. They landed all over the world. Some in the ice, some in the ocean, and some on the land. And everywhere they landed, people started to act strange.”
“Strange how?” Lucy said.
“Strange like the Rages,” Jamie said.
“They came from space?” Lucy said, peering up at the sky. It was still daylight and there were no stars to be seen yet.
“The Rage virus came from space,” Jamie said. “At least, that’s the theory.”
“You don’t believe it?” Lucy said.
“I believe it,” Jamie said. “But why did it have to happen then? Why not millions of years ago?”
“Maybe it did,” Lucy said. “But no one was around to catch the virus.”
“Stephen reckons it’s unlikely a virus could have come from outside space and infect us,” Jamie said. “Unless it came from the same place we did.”
Lucy frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I at first,” Jamie said. “Maybe I can show you. Are you hungry?”
Lucy nodded, licking her lips. Jamie led Lucy down the stairs to the main area, where the dining tables were set up. Lucy got more than a few looks as she followed Jamie to the front table where the food was being doled out by grumpy chefs.
“What’s on the menu today, Maude?” Jamie said.
Maude fixed Jamie with her squinting eye. She ladled a healthy dose of something onto Jamie and Lucy’s trays. A large gelatinous mass.
“What is it?” Lucy said, poking it with her finger.
“The same thing we eat every day,” Jamie said. “Potatoes. That’s why I like asking her.”
Lucy laughed. That same high tinkling sound like wind chimes in a cool summer breeze. More looks from the others eating.
“What were you saying about the Rage virus?” Lucy said.
“Oh yeah,” Jamie said, taking a seat at one of the benches. Lucy sat opposite him. “So, there’s your bowl of slop and my bowl of slop. My bowl is Earth. Yours is some other planet. Earth is young and doesn’t have any life yet. Your planet is already old and has lots of life. With me so far?”
“Yes,” Lucy said, munching on half a sausage.
Jamie stared at her, mouth agape. “I cannot believe you got a sausage. That’s the best part. Anyway. Your planet dies for some reason. Could be volcanoes or earthquakes or a big asteroid hits it. It doesn’t matter why it gets destroyed, but it does, and most of the life on your planet dies. But. . .”
“Hey!” Lucy said.
“Stay calm,” Jamie said. “I’m educating. The sausage—I mean, rock from your planet—still has some life on it.”
“Like animals?” Lucy said.
“Like bacteria or a virus,” Jamie said. “These hardy little things can survive the radiation in space and crazy ass temperatures. So, this asteroid flies off into space. Only, there isn’t only one of them but billions of them, all hurtling through space in every direction.”
“And one of them. . .” Lucy said, jumping to the end of the story.
“Wait,” Jamie said. “I’m getting to the best part. And one of them comes and lands on our planet, seeding our planet with life. Isn’t that cool?”
“Very,” Lucy said. “Can I have my sausage back now?”
“It’s not a sausage,” Jamie said. “It’s an education tool. It’s for the teacher to use whenever and wherever he sees fit.”
Lucy made an unhappy face. The sausage was tasty.
“And the teacher has decided to give it to you because you’re such a good student,” Jamie said, giving the sausage back.
Lucy clapped her hands with glee as she tore into it.
“So why does this not make sense with the Rage virus theory?” she said.
“Stephen says the chances of the asteroid seeding our planet with life in the first place is tiny,” Jamie said. “Almost impossible. The universe is so big, and the Earth so small. But it’s possible. But then the Rage virus, from the same planet, on a different asteroid, would have to hit the very same planet another rock had already seeded with life? The odds are virtually zero. If the virus came from another destroyed planet its DNA might not match up with ours. It would be harmless.”
“But if the virus was out there, floating around, then it could have bumped into the Earth at any time,” Lucy said.
“I guess that follows,” Jamie said. “So?”
“So, maybe we were lucky the virus didn’t come much earlier,” Lucy said. “We managed to survive because we’re smart. Maybe we wouldn’t have been able to if the virus hit us much earlier in our evolution.”
Jamie bit into a lump of potato. It was hot, and when he breathed out, a thin curtain of steam poured out of his mouth. Maybe they were lucky the virus struck as late as it did? He shook his head. These glass half-full people befuddled him.
“It’s just a theory,” Jamie said. “And you don’t need to worry. You’re safe here with us. No one can hurt you.”
Lucy gave him one of her cute smiles, and he knew right there and then that he would do everything he could to protect her, no matter what.
Things happen for a reason.
33.
THE MEN were already beginning to get antsy. Usually, it took a little time for them to get bored, needing something to distract themselves with. That was what happened when you didn’t properly manage your supplies.
“Excuse me, sir,” the Worm said. “If I may interrupt you but for a moment.”
“What is it, Worm?” the Mantis said. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
Food stock levels were beginning to get low, not so bad as the levels the Worm had reported but then it always did take some time before his words of warning filtered into the Mantis’s mind. Right now, his full attention was taken up with balancing his favorite girl on his knee.
She was a tall, strong beauty. Powerfully built, she could have challenged any regular man and come out on top. But the Reavers weren’t anything like regular men. The Mantis was a good example of that.
The Reavers had long since grown tired of their old world names. This was the new world and they had restyled themselves. They were the swarm of locusts that descended upon the innocent and hardworking alike. The weary traveller was naught but a short reprieve. A temporary snack on the roads to greater harvests.
The Worm had been assigned his new name not by choice but general consensus. He was much smaller than the other men but it wasn’t for his stature—or otherwise, lack thereof—that he got his friendly moniker. It was for the way he behaved around their leader. And what other choice did the Worm have? When his contemporaries towered over him with sinister intent, he’d had to make himself indispensable to the Mantis or else risk being used as a toothpick.
The girl perched on the Mantis’s knee—the Worm believed she’d been dubbed the Amazon due to her build—was already half asleep. And for good reason. She hardly got a moment’s rest between the Mantis’s libido and that of the men smart enough to slip in and get a piece of her while the Mantis was out hunting. No harm, no foul.
That is, so long as the Mantis didn’t notice anything untoward going on. The Amazon had struggled and fought with admirable vigour but what chance did a single Amazon—exquisite specimen though she was—compared several hundred Reavers?
“There’s a little matter we need to discuss,” the Worm said.
“What now?” the Mantis growled.
“We’re extremely low on supplies,” the Worm said. “We won’t last much longer if we don’t do a substantial Reaving.”
“Heavy is the head that bears the crown,” the Mantis said to the girl in his lap.
The Amazon smiled her most dazzling smile, but there was no disguising her exhaustion. She put up a good show and dug up hidden reserves of energy the Worm thought she was already depleted of. A most exquisite specimen, the Worm thought. His tongue flicked out, wetting his lips. If the men know his real nature, they would have chosen a far more dangerous and sinister creature to name him after.
The Amazon was smart, and brightened up, looking the Mantis in the eye. How she managed to do that without her stomach turning, the Worm didn’t know. What the girl failed to realize was that being overly eager to please would ultimately seal their fate. The Mantis liked a challenge. It was when the girls failed to provide that challenge that their days were numbered.
The Worm could have warned the girls but why should he when they always looked at him with such disdain? He always got his revenge on them eventually. The Worm often got the last turn with the girls after the clan was finished with them. That was the way the Worm liked them. Beaten down, souls destroyed. That was when he could really have fun with them.
“I know what you need,” the Amazon said to the Mantis.
Pitiful as it was, it was understandable. The Mantis was the only thing between her and the rest of the clan. Given the choice between one man and a hundred, the choice was obvious. The Amazon slid down the Mantis, to her knees, between his legs. She opened his fly—a master now—and took him in her mouth. She got to work.
“Uh?” the Mantis said, struggling to focus.
The girl’s skills had improved quickly. She listened to the Mantis’s grunts and groans of delight, locking eyes with him when the angle permitted. He didn’t always look back at her, eyes closed as he sailed toward the land of ecstasy.
“You were talking about food?” the Mantis said.
“We’re running low,” the Worm said.
“How low?” the Mantis murmured. “How long do we have?”
The Amazon used her tongue now. Excellent technique.
“About three days,” the Worm said, clearing his throat.
“How about the reserves?” the Mantis said.
“The reserves are what we’ve been subsisting on,” the Worm said.
He was a patient man. He’d been telling the Mantis about the situation for a week already. He’d learned to give warnings a full three to four days before they were desperately warranted. Best for him to always look competent and discover an extra sack of food at the last moment than to run out completely. If he did, his flesh would line the stew, his bones used as toothpicks.
A pair of Reavers moved out the corner of the Worm’s eye. This was the moment the Mantis was in the most danger. The men could easily slip up behind him and slit his throat. They wanted what the Mantis was getting all day long. The girl.
/> The Worm’s senses were now at their most heightened. There was no way he could overpower the other men, he was far too scrawny, but he could throw himself in their path and delay them. The men were glaring at the Amazonian servicing the Mantis with covetousness bordering on murder. Hungry for what he was receiving.
The truth was, the Worm had no loyalty to the Mantis. He had no better options either. He would have happily betrayed him in an instant if there was a better alternative. There wasn’t. Not right now.
The Reavers, thankfully, turned to stare back at the fire. The Mantis tensed in that delicious moment of release, momentarily leaving the world behind and going somewhere better. Fleeting and never quite within reach. The Mantis relaxed and stroked the girl’s head. The Amazon licked her lips, cleaning up. It was about the only thing she’d had to eat today. The Mantis gave her a small smile. Yes, he really was bored with her. Very bored.
“And how are the men?” the Mantis said.
“Coping,” the Worm said.
It was an understatement, as all things needed to be with the Mantis. Any suggestion he was a poor or ineffective leader and the critic had signed his own death warrant. In truth, the men were on the very brink of mutiny.
“If I might make a suggestion,” the Worm said.
“Go ahead,” the Mantis said.
“We need to gather as many supplies as possible in as short a time as possible,” the Worm said. “We might want to perform a little. . .”
“Reaving,” the Mantis said.
“An excellent suggestion,” the Worm said.
“Of course it was,” the Mantis said.
He came up short.
“Any ideas where?” he said.
“According to my records, there are two communes that ought to have developed enough for us to harvest a superior load,” the Worm said. “The Oasis and Mountain’s Peak.”
“My girl just harvested her own load, didn’t you?” the Mantis said to the Amazon, who did her best not to appear repulsed.
After the Fall- The Complete series Box Set Page 8