Netherkind

by Greg Chapman

  Thomas smirked, secretly revelling in their banter. “That’s not what the King said.”

  “My father…” Malik said with a hint of contempt in his voice. “My father is showing you a great courtesy. If I were you, I would tread very carefully.” Malik looked him over again, sneering. “Before long you will either leave of your own accord or you will be driven out. We’ll soon see.”

  Thomas watched Malik leave, his eyes burning holes in his back. He wanted to hurt Malik—make him beg for mercy, but he knew that would only grant the King’s son permission to exile or execute him. Instead, Thomas decided, it would continue their battle of wills.

  Thomas moved to put on his tunic when another figure slinked around the door—Nero.

  “You’re going to have to do something about your hide before you put that on,” Nero told him.

  Nero entered, looking uncomfortable, nervous. Thomas knew there was a lot riding on their new companionship, even if it was a forced one.

  “Well, it has been some time since I last fed,” Thomas said.

  “Yeah—and I suppose that is partially my doing,” Nero replied. “But hey, a Phagun’s got to eat—even a loser like me.”

  Thomas could see Nero was still wearing his tattered filthy clothes—obviously the uniform of an outcast.

  “How did you manage to get kicked out of here?” Thomas said.

  Nero scratched his head. “Look, maybe for another time, okay? Right now, we have to get you fed and acquainted with the city and its limits. Otherwise, I’m going to be in a world of hurt. So can you please just come with me so we can get this show on the road?”

  The city was almost devoid of Phaguns when Thomas and Nero began to walk its cobblestone streets, but the newcomer paid them no heed, instead choosing to revel in his surroundings.

  Thomas was amazed at their ingenuity. They’d fashioned rock into remarkable homes. While some were comprised of simple portholes into the stone itself, others were more ornate, with pillars and embellishments carved into the rock surface. Thomas could just make out the glow of morning fires from within some of the homes. The Phaguns seemed to prefer the darkness, live cave dwellers and women of ancient times. How long had they lived this way, he wondered. Thousands, millions of years? How did they master the ability to stay undetected all that time?

  As the pair rounded one corner, they encountered some of the residents and immediately attracted curious gazes. They were dressed in little more than robes and nightgowns. One swore as he tossed a bucket of filth on the road. It was almost a medieval way of life, Thomas realized.

  The attention drew other gazes from above, weary faces peering out from their termite holes. Others chattering and pointing. Thomas couldn’t make out what they were saying, but one thing was clear: there was a stranger in their midst, and they didn’t like it.

  A group of Phaguns began to gather, following Thomas and Nero in a pack from a distance, sniffing the air at them and chattering about them. The Phaguns were a mix of male and female, some old, some young. The young Phaguns were in couples and appeared fit and strong, but the elderly ones walked alone, their faces, creased like scraps of discarded leather. Thomas saw one old man, leaning on a cane, but there was still a latent fire in his eyes. One thing Thomas noticed was the absence of children. He felt the urge to voice the anomaly but thought better of it. Right now, he was trying to observe, to make sense of this new world, not pass judgement upon it. The Phaguns could have passed for human, with their physiques and mannerisms, but the sallow quality of their flesh and the thickness of it told otherwise.

  Thomas could hear them whispering words like “stranger,” “zealot,” “freak” and “untamed.” He did his best to ignore their skulking and tried to absorb the sights and smells of the city—Nero too, especially when they spat the words “outcast” and “heathen” in his direction. Yet Thomas’ escort couldn’t hide the hurt.

  The street, illuminated by a long line of flame torches, stretched for about a mile. The lights gave the cold, dark mauve stone an almost golden quality. “Most Phagus live on this street,” Nero told him, his eyes on the ground.

  “We live like humans?” Thomas said.

  “In a way, yeah—I guess,” Nero replied, non-committal. He stopped walking to glance at the crowd of Phaguns behind them.

  Thomas tried to study one of the onlookers in the window, an old woman but as their eyes met. She retreated into the darkness.

  “So I’m not much different then?” he said.

  “Well, we don’t live amongst our food—we can’t really let on that we exist.”

  “Why not?”

  Nero frowned, his frustration showing again. “Because they’d be down here to kill us—that’s why!”

  “But we kill them.”

  “We hunt them,” Nero corrected him. “In secret—that’s the key to the Phagus’ survival and it’s been that way for a very long time.”

  Thomas stood and turned three-sixty degrees on his toes, trying to take in the entire street. All he could really see were the hundreds of oculus windows.

  “So how long have the Phagus been around for?” Thomas said.

  “Millions of years—humans practically came from us, but that didn’t happen until after the Divergence.”

  Thomas noticed the crowd had stopped too—everything but their mouths. Now they were laughing, most likely at his skin, Thomas supposed.

  “What’s the Divergence?’” he said, feeling powerless amidst Nero’s influx of information. The outcast’s patience was wearing thin too.

  “Shit—you’re like one of those annoying human kids!”

  “I can’t help it and besides, you’re the one who’s been ordered to teach me, remember?”

  Nero spat on the ground and bared his teeth in consternation. “Don’t I know it.” he said, before sighing. “The Divergence happened a long time ago, as I said—basically before ancient times there were three Flesher tribes—”

  “Three tribes?” Thomas said, astounded. “I thought—”

  Nero held up a finger to silence him. “Just let me finish for Christ’s sake!” When Thomas agreed to be silent, Nero continued. “So, there are three tribes living together in the wilds, right? The Phagus—which is us—the Stygma and the Skiift. Well, they were all getting along until a Phagus male was caught in the sack with a Skiift female.”

  “What happened then?” Thomas asked, his enthusiasm for the story building.

  “All hell broke loose—full scale war—and the fact that their offspring was a Leper made peace a non-event. The Skiift declared the Lepers a sacrilege against the Flesh god and therefore all Phagus and Stygma were blasphemers so they decided to stage a war against the other tribes—and that war is still raging away as we speak.”

  Thomas tried to comprehend the magnitude of Nero’s history lesson and all of its spiralling tangents; not only was he a member of a tribe of flesh-eating hunters, but he was a member of one of three tribes—and worse still, none of them got along. He gazed out at the city and realized how Neolithic it appeared and how insignificant he was.

  “It must be hard for you,” Nero said.

  “What must be?”

  “Being totally new to all this…” he swept his arms through the air. “…shit. I mean, I still can’t understand how you just woke up among the humans. You must have been shit-scared.”

  “I adapted quickly, just like I’ll learn to adapt to this new…reality.” Thomas mused.

  “So you’re gonna stay then?”

  Thomas shrugged. “I need to know more; tell me about these other tribes—the Skygma and the Stift?”

  Nero chuckled. “No, man, the Stygma and the Skiift. Listen, sit here and I’ll explain.” They sat on a pair of boulders, their tops sliced flat to make two crude chairs. “The Stygma are like…high priests. They worship Okin.”

  “Oh-kin?” Thomas said, struggling to pronounce the name.

  “Yeah, Okin. All Fleshers believe Okin lay down on th
e night sky and never woke up. He just died and, as the story goes, his flesh became the earth, his blood became the sea and his bones the seeds from which life—the Flesher tribes sprouted.”

  Thomas tried to picture Okin—a giant Flesher decomposing in a starless sky. The urge flickered inside him, but he ignored it and concentrated on Nero’s words.

  “Okin’s powers and nature transferred to the tribes,” Nero continued. “The Phagus were the hunter-gatherers, the Stygma were the worshippers and the Skiift were made the law makers—you with me?”

  “I think so, he said, running a hand through his hair. “So, how do the humans fit into this?”

  Nero rubbed his chin as he chose his next words. “Well, this is where it all gets a little too fucking technical for me. Although the Flesher tribes don’t want to acknowledge it, the humans are essentially the fourth tribe. But they had no gifts from Okin, so the other tribes just made them slaves and eventually cattle, or food. We raised them and ate them. Simple.”

  “And then this Divergence happened?”

  “Yeah, and all the tribes, including the humans went their separate ways. The human race multiplied and conquered the surface, which was fine with us, because over time, we became a myth and that allowed us to still feed on them, without them all knowing. The only problem was that the Stygma and the Skiift don’t believe we should eat them, and we need to be destroyed.”

  “So, do we have an army or something?” Thomas said.

  Nero shook his head. “It’s not a war as the humans would know war, we fight in secret. Sometimes there are attacks, whole packs of Phagus hunters turned to ash or torn to pieces.”

  “The other tribes—these other Fleshers—how are they different to us?”

  “They’re very different—the Stygma cover themselves in tattoos—magic spells that allow them to harness the powers of Okin. These bastards can literally split open their skins and let their souls escape. They’re very nasty and hard to kill.

  “The Skiift are whole different kind of crazy—they can transform their flesh into any type of beast—fucking lizard, bear, spider—you name it. You don’t want to cross one of them on your own.”

  Thomas tried to imagine creatures more hideous than himself, the Stygma and the Skiift seemed implausible, but then again so did the idea of creatures that can only eat human flesh.

  “What can we do against them—what weapons do we have?’” Thomas said.

  Nero stood and made to walk down towards a turn in the street. Thomas followed him and so did the crowd.

  “Our skins are our weapons,” Nero told him. “The more we eat, the stronger our bodies get. We can also blend in with humans, making it harder for us to find when those Stygma assholes come looking for us.”

  “Blend in?”

  “Yeah, you know how you can take on a few of their features of your prey right when you eat them—eyebrows, nose, even love handles? Well, if you really concentrate you can change your whole skin to look like a human. Shit, you can even absorb some of their memories. We’ve done it for centuries, mingling with the humans, fucking up the economy, their infrastructure—”

  “Really?”

  “Well, we can’t have the fuckers breeding out of control—there’s six billion of them now and only about half a million Fleshers across the world. It’ll have to be time for a mass cull soon.”

  Thomas shook his head. “It’s just so…unbelievable.”

  “That’s nothing man, you know I told you how you can steal your meal’s body and mind?”

  Thomas nodded.

  “Well, guess what? Nero said, smiling wildly. “Each time you do it you’re extending your life.”

  7

  Thomas chased Nero through the streets, his entire body burning. He watched Nero running like a mad man, laughing and leaping from stone to stone. He had left Thomas trailing behind, his revelations toying with his senses. Thomas broke into a sprint to try to keep up with his guide, but his body was struggling to comply. He was famished, at the point of starvation now, his skin dry and flaking away in the breeze.

  The crowd too gave chase, continuing to pursue Thomas, taunting him from afar with jeers and pointing. They truly were animals, brutal and uncompromising, so much so that Thomas could scarcely believe they followed Gavenko’s orders.

  Thomas kept running after Nero, his leg muscles burning, his chest stretched to its limit, the urge pounding in time with his heart. As he kept his eyes on Nero, he remembered the fool’s skin in his mouth; the sweet taste of its oils, the plumpness of the fat and the viscosity of his blood all mingling together. The urge pushed him harder and to Thomas’ astonishment, he started to close the gap between them.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me how eating human flesh prolongs your life?” Nero said as he cartwheeled up the wall and back down again.

  Eating flesh—that was Thomas’ only thought. He wanted to taste Nero’s flesh.

  Nero turned his back on Thomas and leapt, lifting himself off the ground, six, twelve feet into the air, scaling the wall until he reached a ledge. The effort seemed impossible to Thomas, who couldn’t keep running any longer, let alone jump off the ground.

  Yet the urge, like adrenalin, had miraculous qualities—if only Thomas could harness them correctly. His potential seemed so far out of reach and the distance dropped him to his knees and left him heaving for breath.

  “What’s your problem now?” Nero called from his vantage point.

  “I can’t…” Thomas gasped. “I…need to eat.”

  Nero jumped down and landed with cat-like grace. He stood over Thomas’ weakening frame. From the grimace on Nero’s face, Thomas feared he would kick him to death, but then he saw his expression change to one of hesitation. A moment passed then the fool simply smiled down on him.

  “If you’re hungry, then you need to come with me,” Nero finally said.

  Thomas craned his neck to look, drool falling from his lip in a long string.

  “I’m so weak…” he said, wheezing.

  “Stop your damned whingeing.” Nero said, bending to run his hands underneath Thomas’ arms and haul him up. Thomas caught a whiff of Nero’s flesh, but his infirmity diminished the urge. He let Nero support him and Thomas felt himself leave the ground. They were soaring through the air, like an arrow. Seconds later Nero and Thomas were standing on a ledge of one of the caverns, high above the street.

  “You see that?” Nero said, pointing out to the horizon.

  Thomas strained his eyes to focus and he saw a great orb of light in the distance, a spheroid of dazzling fire surrounded by silhouettes of Fleshers, dancing and cheering.

  “What’s that?” Thomas said.

  “The Valedia—or the human word for it might be…the dining hall.”

  Thomas’ eyes widened. “There’s food there?”

  Nero smiled that wily grin. “Oh, yeah!”

  Now Thomas knew why there were few Fleshers on the streets—they had gathered at the Valedia, waiting, chanting and begging for something. Thousands of faces, male and female, all seated side by side in a grandstand of stone, their teeth exposed, brows shimmering with sweat in the firelight from dozens of sconces.

  Nero dragged Thomas through the gates, the King’s minions letting them pass, but not without bestowing the pair with glares of disdain. The noise inside the Valedia was deafening; stomping feet and the gnashing of teeth, like the tick of a gargantuan timepiece. The clicking sounded like the urge had transformed into a mechanism instead of a simple orchestration of instincts and desires.

  In the centre of the Valedia was the arena, an oval patch of dirt roughly the size of two football fields. A pack of Phaguns gathered in the middle of this arena, bare-chested, heaving, salivating—as though expecting something to happen.

  Or appear.

  Nero pulled Thomas through the crowd of onlookers, down a flight of stairs and right out into the arena itself.

  “What…are you doing?” Thomas begged him.

&nb
sp; Nero shoved Thomas into the dirt.

  “It’s dinner time, my friend,” he said. “So get ready to eat—or get ready to die!”

  Thomas scrambled to his knees and saw the pack of muscled Phagun males staring at him. The males snarled and pushed at each other like boys in a schoolyard, vying for supremacy as if they were competing for the best position, but for what, Thomas could only guess.

  Thomas’ body felt like jelly from the waist down. He kept his distance, daring not to get in the way of the other Phaguns, while trying to figure out what was happening.

  Then the ground began to tremble, with the vibrations of great cogs turning beneath their feet. The Flesher pack scattered, parting like the Red Sea, their eyes locked on a widening gate at the southern end of the arena. A smell soaked the air, so thick that all the Phaguns, including Thomas, stood to attention. Thomas’ tongue flooded with saliva, his pupils dilated, and his nostrils flared.

  Humans—at least one hundred of them—came running and screaming out of the gate, desperate for escape. All sorts of humans united in terror. Thomas glimpsed a man, about forty-years-old, his skin slick with fear, tearing out of the gate. A woman, naked and eyes wide, tried to follow him, but the man had only concerns for himself.

  A Phagun to Thomas’ right latched onto the woman with blistering speed and tore off her head with one bite. The spray of blood seemed to hang in the air. The crowd cheered. They wanted a piece of the action and the Phagun gladly provided it; he ripped the woman’s left leg from its socket and hurled it into the crowd. Half a dozen of them went at it like vultures.

  The humans didn’t stand a chance as wave after wave of Phaguns tackled them and clawed the meaty flesh from their chests and backs, leaving guts to fall on the ground and hearts to beat their last in solitude.

  It was a competition to the death, Thomas realized, and he was just standing still.

  Let the best Phagun win.

  Thomas saw another human male, thin-boned, wailing for mercy from the crowd as the monsters ate his fellow captives alive around him. He was fair game.