Scavenger of Souls

by Joshua David Bellin

  “You sound like,” I began, but changed my mind in mid-sentence. He might not want to hear me tell him how much he sounded like his older son. “You make it sound like the Skaldi aren’t from this planet.”

  He stared at me as if I wasn’t from this planet. But he answered.

  “It began in the years before the wars of destruction,” he said. “Military scientists working in the desert found the remains of the creatures that would come to be known as Skaldi. With the advantage of hindsight, we believe they arrived through a rift in space-time opened by the weapons of that era. The first specimens were thought to be dead, until the scientists discovered—to their ruin—the creatures’ ability to reawaken when life-energy was near.”

  “So they’re not really alive?”

  “Nor are they truly dead,” he said. “The Skaldi are parasites—vampires, the superstitious used to call them. I prefer the clinical term biophages. Life eaters. They feed off energy—in our case, organic energy. Similar to bacteria we’ve discovered, such as Shewanella and Geobacter, that consume electrons directly, without the intervening medium of sugars. In another respect they resemble conventional viruses, in that their structures are metabolically inert. They mimic life only by appropriating the metabolic activity of their victims.”

  I tried not to look as lost as I felt. “So when they attack someone . . .”

  “They use his own cellular energy to overwhelm his body,” he clarified. “They drain their victim, then deploy that stolen power to colonize the host’s cells. It happens, as you know, with incredible speed. In essence, they convert human cells to Skaldi cells within seconds. Absorb our life force and turn it against us, making our bodies do their bidding.”

  “What about our minds?” I said. “When they take over, do they turn our minds to—I guess—Skaldi minds?”

  He looked at me strangely, but nodded. “One would assume so.”

  I mulled that over. It made sense, fit with what I’d already begun to figure out on my own. It explained not only how they mimicked us so perfectly but how the one that had attacked me seven months ago had stolen my memory. “How much did Laman know about this?”

  “He preferred not to know,” Udain said, the bitterness returning to his voice.

  “So he wouldn’t have known why the Skaldi fail when they attack me.”

  “It’s doubtful,” he said. “We know that a significant enough ‘burst’ of energy—from fire, say, or an atomic blast—can overwhelm them, outstripping their capacity to absorb it. The human body doesn’t generate that kind of concentrated power, so there’s nothing to stop them from feeding on us. What makes the beam that powers this compound unique is that, rather than destroying them outright, it holds them in a sort of stasis. Returns their bodies to an inert state, incapable of further energy absorption. You may have noticed they resist fire far longer than a human being would.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d noticed, but I nodded anyway.

  “That’s because of their innate ability to absorb energy,” he said. “In the case of the beam, to render it effective against Skaldi we had to set it at a high enough intensity that it burns human beings on contact. Were we to ratchet the signal down to make it less hazardous to our own kind, the Skaldi would be free to feed. Were we to turn it up,” he concluded darkly, “they’d burn too.”

  I searched his eyes, looking for the thing he wasn’t willing to say. “So you think I’m . . . You think I have the power to . . .”

  He returned my inspection with a piercing gaze I hadn’t seen since my last conversation with his older son. But then the deep, mirthless chuckle issued from his chest, and he laid a hand on my shoulder.

  “One thing at a time,” he said. “I always have to remind Mercy of that. One thing at a time.”

  He walked to the room’s single window, which covered nearly half an entire wall. It surprised me to see the light of day pouring through, turning the window a solid gray white. How long had I been out? Then he beckoned for me, and I slipped from the bed, testing my legs in my sturdy new boots to make sure they’d hold me before joining him.

  I peered outside, only to discover there was no outside.

  The rectangle wasn’t a window. Instead, it was an opaque screen of some shiny off-white material. I couldn’t see my reflection, only the play of wavy colors across its ten-foot length. To the side of the screen sat another keypad, this one containing not only numbers but buttons imprinted with arrows, boxes, dots, and other symbols.

  “This is a protograph,” Udain said. “One of my son Athan’s inventions. Loosely translated, it means ‘past recording.’ He felt that ‘video screen’ or ‘television’ were too mundane. He wanted something with flair. Something for the new world we were building.”

  He touched the cuff on his wrist, and the surface of the protograph swam like an image blurred by a rainstorm. From its depths emerged light, motion, and sound, but no color: everything was a grainy white or gray, giving the figures that formed there the appearance of faded charcoal sketches. But the figures moved as if they were alive, and when their mouths opened I heard their voices. I leaned close to hear, when unexpectedly the scene froze, the people stopping in the midst of an action, their words ending as abruptly as if they’d been cut off by a slammed door. Udain smiled again and removed his finger from the cuff, and the figures jumped to life once more.

  “The past,” he said. “Preserved like a specimen in a jar, like dry bones stirred and risen from the grave.”

  “This really happened?”

  “Exactly as you see it.”

  “How many times have you watched?”

  “More than I can count,” he said. “But I can’t seem to get it to change.”

  I turned my attention to the monitor. It revealed a room that was little more than a bombed-out shell, skeletal frame visible beneath crumbling walls. I shivered, remembering the compound where Survival Colony 9 had hidden from the Skaldi, only to lose Korah and five others in a single night, Laman’s leadership the next day. On the screen, a group of people sat in a ring of canvas chairs, all of them wearing the spotless uniforms of Udain’s camp. Udain himself presided in the center, his size and long braids unmistakable though his hair and beard were dark. To each side of him sat a much smaller man, one of them looking like a child beside his huge commander. This one’s hair was long and wavy, and though his face was free of scars I had no trouble recognizing him as a younger version of the man they called Athan, the man who called himself Asunder.

  The man on the other side of Udain was small too, though not as small as his younger brother. His dark hair was cropped short, and no trace of the tangled beard that would sprout in later life hid his cheeks. But his gaunt face, hooked nose, and brooding eyes, set deep beneath a prominent brow, hadn’t changed. When he spoke, it was like hearing the voice of a ghost, one we’d buried little more than a week ago, who’d hurried back into the past to reappear in a body not yet ravaged by time and loss.

  Laman Genn.

  “It’s foolishness,” this younger Laman said. “And pride. We don’t have anywhere near the resources we’d need to build your device. Much less the time to ensure its safety.”

  “The beam will keep the Skaldi at bay,” Athan responded. “And construction will be completed in six months at most.”

  “Six months!” Laman scoffed. “Is that another of your miracle gadgets, brother? A time machine? If you’ve got one of those, why not send us all back to the time before?”

  The words of the dead man chilled me, but I kept my eyes focused on the screen.

  “We need a permanent settlement if we’re to continue our work,” his younger brother replied. “Father”—and he gestured at the silent, hulking man between them—“agrees with me. You would too, if you weren’t too stubborn to see the truth.”

  Laman gritted his teeth and spoke in the low voice I now knew he’d inherited from his father. “The truth,” he said, “is that the past is gone. It’s not stubbornness to
admit that.”

  “The past,” Athan said, “but not the future.”

  Again Laman laughed. “I’ve had my say. We can cling to an impossible dream, or face the ugly reality. The Skaldi don’t care either way. But which way will save us, Athan? The human race has tried your way before. It’s what brought us here.”

  The Athan figure raised an arm in protest, but Udain silenced him with a wave of his powerful hand.

  “Your brother has spoken, Athan,” he said. “He hasn’t changed his position since our work began, and I don’t expect him to change it now. I might ask what his alternative is, what hope he thinks there is in wandering the desert until the Skaldi destroy us all. But luckily”—and his teeth gleamed white beneath his dark mustache—“I don’t have to ask, and he doesn’t have to answer. This is no democracy, Laman. We will build according to your brother’s design. All that remains in doubt is whether you’ll be here when we’re finished.”

  The room fell silent, and I felt myself holding my breath as my eyes traveled the circle looking for someone to come to Laman’s support. No one did. Athan’s smile turned smug. His older brother stood, his uniform as immaculate in the protograph as his father’s still was. By the time I knew Laman Genn, his uniform would be ragged, soiled, no less than the man who wore it. But his face showed no compromise as he spoke across his father to the boy who’d defeated him.

  “You’ll build your settlement,” he said. “And your machine. But it won’t save you. The power to kill can’t save. Remember that, brother, when I’m gone.”

  In the unsparing lens of the protograph, he started for the missing door of the room, until his father stopped him with a touch of the button on his cuff.

  “Did you ever see him again?” I said.

  Udain shook his head. He touched another button, and the Laman on the screen wobbled unnaturally and began to walk backward, his mouth movements producing no sound, sitting down as he’d stood, the brothers and their father wordlessly speaking their parts in reverse. Udain’s thick finger moved to the first button, and I watched Laman stand again, heard him pronounce his final words. Back and forth, the buttons were pushed, the figures moved through time, flexible but fixed. And always the father stopped the image before his son exited the room, before he lost him forever.

  “You built your camp here,” I said.

  “Twenty-eight years ago,” he answered. “We’d found the remains of a military base, and we used it as the foundation of our own compound. It took three years to rebuild, another ten to perfect Athan’s device. We lost some few to Skaldi, but the beam held. In the meantime we heard rumors of a smaller survival colony in the vicinity, one numbered nine. I knew my son must have joined them, either that or perished in the desert. In time our scouts reported that he’d taken command of the camp, married, fathered a son. But he never returned, and I never saw his boy. My grandchild.”

  “His name was Matay,” I said. Then, as gently as I could: “He died.”

  Udain nodded, and touched a new button on the wrist cuff. The screen went blank, and though I could see nothing, I heard a whirr like vehicles passing at top speed in the distance. I watched Udain’s impassive face, his black eyes fixed on the protograph screen as if he could plumb its white emptiness.

  “My sons,” he said softly, “have not been fortunate men.”

  Then he released the button.

  A new scene rose from the protograph. A huddle of at least a hundred soldiers stood outside the perimeter fence, the compound visible behind them, Udain as always towering above his followers. His hair had grayed in the time that had passed. The energy field that kept the camp safe from Skaldi radiated along the fence posts, shimmering like desert heat. The ground that stretched before the encampment was desert dust, gray in the protograph’s colorless slate. But the world that lay beyond the valley bore no resemblance to the plateau I’d walked with Mercy only a day before. The gleaming volcanic rock was missing, as were the man-size formations of sharp-edged stone. The land I saw was all desert, a continuous expanse of flat, sandy terrain. Whatever had produced the impact zone, the protograph didn’t know it yet.

  And neither did the people who stood watching.

  My eyes scanned the crowd. Most of the onlookers were strangers to me, soldiers in identical uniforms, grown men and women instead of the boys I’d met in Udain’s camp. Beside Udain stood his remaining son, more than ten years older than he’d been when he’d bested his older brother, his dark hair falling to his shoulders, his face showing the calm confidence he’d displayed in the meeting room. By his side, a woman with rich dark skin and a proud lift to her head gripped a little girl’s hand. Two other children stood behind Athan and the woman, a boy and a girl. Both were lighter skinned than the woman, darker than the pale Athan. But the remarkable thing about the boy was his size: though he had the face of a child, he stood a foot taller than the diminutive man.

  Taller, I realized, than his own father.

  “Archangel,” I murmured.

  “Ardan was his name,” the old man returned. “They say gigantism sometimes skips a generation.” He froze the image and gestured at the other children. “Ardan came first, then Beryl, and of course you know Mercy”—pointing at the little girl holding the woman’s hand. I squinted to see her face, but I saw none of the anger that would settle over it as she grew. The screen of the protograph seemed to crackle, and I held my breath, waiting to learn what had put the anger there.

  Udain’s finger moved to his wrist cuff’s motion button.

  “Wait—” I said.

  I leaned close to the protograph, staring at a woman’s face I’d glimpsed at the back of the crowd, beside a man who might have been the doctor from Udain’s compound. I almost didn’t recognize her, she was so much younger than the last time I’d seen her. Her hair was long, not the cropped, silvering cut I knew. But the face the long hair framed was sharp and lean, carrying an intensity I’d never forget. Beside that face floated the face of a small boy, blond like his mother, his little hands caught in the act of playing with the strands of her hair.

  For the first time since we’d started watching, I wanted to tell Udain not to advance the protograph, not to let the fate it captured play itself out. I almost believed, for that frozen second, that if he let the image linger forever on the screen, none of them would have to die.

  But I also knew that if time stopped right there, I would never have a chance to live.

  I was looking at the face of my mother.

  “Aleka Reza came to us two years before Athan’s device was ready,” Udain said, following my eyes. “Her colony, numbered fifteen, had been destroyed by Skaldi, and her husband—that little boy’s father—had died. She gave birth to the boy just days after she joined us. He and Mercy were playmates for a time, until my granddaughter scared him off.” He smiled again, though the smile looked more like a scowl. “And then, a couple of months after the day you’re watching, Aleka vanished, she and her little one. We never heard word of them again, not until you showed up yesterday.”

  “He’s dead,” I said. “Her son. Yov.” And then, because I couldn’t bear to go into the details: “Skaldi.”

  He nodded, sighed. “I always thought she spoiled that boy. Though I understood. He was all she had left.”

  All, I thought, until she had me.

  But that meant Yov and I didn’t share the same father. We were half brothers. And my own father was still a complete mystery.

  I couldn’t understand why Aleka hadn’t told me. Why she’d led me to believe Yov’s father was mine. Why she’d lied to Laman when she and her two sons joined Survival Colony 9, telling him Yov’s father had died when Yov was a child. There was so much she hadn’t told me, so much I’d longed to learn. Important things. Little things. Her last name. My last name. The conversation we were supposed to have when we reached the canyon held even more secrets than I’d imagined.

  And now she was lying in the infirmary, her body broken and her m
ind missing, and she might never come back to me.

  “Shall I continue?” Udain said.

  I shook myself from my thoughts. “What was the device?” I said. “The one Athan was trying to build?”

  “It was a variation on the beam,” he said. “We had known for some time that the Skaldi couldn’t withstand the beam’s energy. Our firearms first proved that, and the compound confirmed its power. Athan’s hypothesis was that a strong enough signal, applied at the proper coordinates, could neutralize the Skaldi on a regional scale. And, if successful at that level, additional devices of the same kind could be utilized around the globe, immobilizing Skaldi for survival teams to hunt down and eradicate.”

  “Which would mean . . .”

  “The end of our persecution,” he said. “The recovery of our planet. A new world, if not a paradise then at least a chance to wipe the slate clean. Laman, as you saw, believed the project was too ambitious. Aleka, on the other hand, was taken by the idea, and she teamed with Athan to complete the device, learning as she worked.”

  Yet another secret. “She never told me.”

  “She must have had her reasons,” he said. “But it wouldn’t have mattered in any event. Your colony had no means to utilize such knowledge.”

  “But you did.”

  “We’d found a way,” he said evasively. “Laman, though he barely understood our work, warned us that any such attempt was perilous. But Athan didn’t listen, and by the time Aleka joined us, Laman was long gone. My younger son was a brilliant man, a genius really, when you consider what he had to work with. We were all blinded by”—and he laughed, a harsh laugh like a shout of pain—“the light.”

  His finger flexed on the wrist cuff, and I had a moment to study the faces in the crowd: Udain’s commanding and remorseless, his son’s enflamed with enthusiasm, Aleka’s stern and composed, Mercy’s unhardened by the events that were about to unfold. Yov played with our mother’s hair, clutching the long strands in his fists and pulling, laughing as she held him in her arms. Mercy’s face turned upward as if to feel the sun.