by S J Taylor
One of them raised their pole like a spear, hefting the weight of it back and preparing to throw it.
I pulled the trigger on the stun pistol.
The blast struck the first of our attackers in the chest, a red beam of energy that spread through the tissues of his flesh and locked his muscles in place. He pitched forward and fell like a broken tree. The others in the group looked down at their fallen companion for all of two seconds.
Then they set on him like carrion eaters. They tore off what little clothing he had on, fought over the weapon in his hand, stripped off his goggles. They tore out his hair. One of them produced a knife from a rope belt and tugged at his ear.
A woman with tiny pointed breasts bent over his legs, and her yellow teeth bit in deep. She tore out a chunk of his flesh. Blood drooled from her mouth.
I gagged. Not quietly, either.
“They think he’s dead,” Jadran explained.
“And that makes it all right how? They’re cannibals!”
I went to fire the stun pistol again, but the thought of sending another one of them to that same fate, being torn apart alive by his own people… I couldn’t do it.
“Get behind me,” Jadran said. Hastily he bent and scooped up a huge handful of the chemically infused ground.
“What are you doing?”
“Get behind me!”
He rushed the savages, screaming at the top of his lungs. The group of them stopped eating. They looked in his direction. They hissed and howled at Jadran. I had just enough time to decide he’d gone insane when he threw the tainted soil up in the air to let it fall in a misting curtain.
Still screaming, he raised the flame of his ignitor.
The air around him flared with the sudden intensity of a sun. The group of cannibals threw up their arms and shrank from the flash, especially the ones with the goggles on. That kind of sudden bright light, that close to vision enhancing gear, would leave them blinded for a long time. It came damned close to blinding me.
When the flare happened I saw details about those people I hadn’t seen before. There were stitches running across their skin in different places, under the paint. Heavy stitches that didn’t seem to be there for any reason other than… decoration. It made designs on their thighs, their forearms, the breasts of the women. Their faces were stitched, too. Their cheeks. Around the rims of their ears. Up the bridge of the nose. It was different for each one.
It was grotesque, and I could not look away.
“Run!” I heard Jadran yelling. “I am right behind you, Era Rae. Run!”
No doubt which way he expected me to run. Away from the group of savages. Away from the people who lived under the ruined surface of the Outlands and stalked other humans to eat them for food.
This is what the Restored Society told us the world was like beyond the safety of the Colonies. This was what the Enforcers existed for, to eradicate this kind of savagery. For just a moment, I had to wonder if the Society might not be right after all. How could it be wrong to exterminate people who lived like this?
I wanted to kill them myself.
Then I reminded myself of the villagers in Refuge. Of the Freemen at New Merica. Of Saskia. All of those lives, ruined by the Restored Society. Death. Destruction.
Those bastards back there, eating one of their own, didn’t make the Restored Society right. It certainly did not justify destroying the world to remake it in their image.
Right or wrong don’t mean as much as you might think, when there are cannibals at your heels.
I ran, and then Jadran was right there with me to light our way. He had stripped out of his shirt and fashioned a torch out of it by wrapping it around the end of the stunstick and setting it ablaze. Now I understood why he’d charged our attackers. He hadn’t only picked up the stunstick. He had one of the pulse rifles slung across his back again, too.
“Nice work,” I panted, still sprinting ahead. “Any idea where this tunnel leads?”
He shook his head, frantically looking both ways along the tunnel. I knew he was trying to orient himself, trying to figure where Laria would have dropped through the earth and if we were anywhere near…
The other hole loomed in front of us around the next curve in the tunnel. It had to be the one that had opened up under Laria. Our packs weren’t there, but we found the foil wrappers from two food bars.
Blood marked the edges of two stones.
Jadran held his torch aloft while he took the pulse rifle off his shoulder in a firm grip, staring at the spots of Laria’s blood.
“It’s all right,” I tried to tell him. “She’s not here. That means she’s still alive.”
What I meant was there wasn’t enough blood for Laria to have been eaten here. No bones, either. I didn’t say those words out loud, though. I didn’t have to.
Behind us, growls echoed down the tunnel. The cannibals had gotten over their fright. Possibly, they’d finished gnawing on their fallen friend.
Now they were coming our way.
“We have to keep moving.” Jadran lifted the torch down the tunnel. It shone off his sculpted chest, his hard abs, and there in the middle of a nightmare, my thoughts went sideways to ideas that made me blush.
When he started moving again so did I, and we followed a winding path that had been carved out by hand. We didn’t run this time, but we looked over our shoulders repeatedly. The tunnel seemed to go on forever. How long had something like this taken to construct? Here was something else that didn’t make sense. Those people were absolute savages. Yet, they used an advanced chemical to lay traps for anyone crossing the Outlands. They carved secret tunnels under the earth. Both of those facts spoke of a higher intelligence than these people possessed.
As if someone else was directing them.
I thought again of the Enforcers, but it still didn’t fit. Like I said, the Enforcers would sooner kill than capture. People like these weren’t human. The Enforcers wouldn’t take the time to teach these bastards how to hunt with vision enhancing goggles. They would have simply put them down like rabid animals.
Then another question crowded in on my thoughts. I began to wonder why this tunnel only went in one direction. No branches. No side tunnels. Just this one way to go.
My mind tried to tell me something was wrong.
I should have listened.
Beside us, on our right, the wall flared. The explosion showered us with hot ash and the concussive blast of it threw me up against the other side of the tunnel. Jadran slammed into me a second later and I lost all the air in my lungs. Trying to breathe, I sucked in a mouthful of dust and ash instead.
I fell to my knees, dropping the stun pistol, desperate to catch a breath. I was going to die. I was going to die right here, in this tunnel, and then I was going to be eaten by a group of cannibals.
Oh, hellfire.
Jadran took hold of me by my waist, lifting me up, making me move even though my body just wanted to curl up and wait for the burning in my lungs to go away. He held his torch in one hand and in its light I could see the gash across his side where a chunk of rock must have caught him. The pulse rifle dangled from his shoulder.
I’d lost my weapon. There was no time to go back and search for it.
We stumbled maybe a dozen steps before the voice stopped us.
“Leaving so soon?”
It was a man’s voice, deep but muffled, and when we shambled to a stop and turned back, we saw someone standing in the newly created hole in the tunnel wall. He was a tall man, dressed in black leather from neck to foot, his face hidden behind a gas mask with large oval lenses. Tubes trailed away from the extended mouthpiece to a bottle strapped at his right hip. Oxygen. He’d been ready to blow that wall out, prepared for the ash and dust that would follow.
In his right hand he held a glowing orb that shed a lot more light than Jadran’s torch. With all that light, the cannibals walking up the tunnel toward us were easy to see.
The man in his mask was no cannibal
. He looked back at the group of white-painted savages and spoke words I didn’t understand. It wasn’t just that the mask distorted what he said. It was some language I did not recognize.
The group of our attackers understood it, though. They bowed from the waist, raising their arms up to cover their heads as if they expected the masked man to strike them. Then they backed a short distance away, down the tunnel.
This man was controlling them. He was their leader.
How did that work?
“Don’t mind my children,” the masked man said to us with a wave of his gloved hand. “They are eager to please me.”
“That voice…” Jadran whispered.
“Children?” I couldn’t help but ask. I had my voice back, even if every breath I took still burned.”
The man shrugged and answered me through his mask. “Loosely speaking. I’ve helped raise them, so I suppose that makes me their father, and them my children.”
“I know that voice,” Jadran insisted.
Alarm bells rang in my ears. I spoke two simple words. “Shoot him.”
Jadran ignored me, but the masked man laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “There’s no need for that. We’re all friends here.” The blank eye lenses of his mask seemed to bore right through us. “Isn’t that right, Jadran?”
The world shrank down to this one moment in time. “Jadran?” I asked him. “How does the creepy man in the mask know you?”
Jadran took a shaky step. “It can not be,” was all he said.
“Oh, but it can.” The man lifted his free hand to his mask and undid several fasteners before taking hold of the air filter in the front and pulling it away. “I’m surprised to see you, too, old friend. Must be fate.”
His face was scarred. That was the first thing I noticed. Where it was scarred, stitches had done a poor job of pulling the flesh back together. The skin was a mix of healthy skin and red splotches, the texture mottled by burns. His eyes were oddly off-center, one higher than the other, like whatever had injured his face had tried to rearrange his features and nearly succeeded. His hair was thin and falling out in places, filthy with the same white greasepaint the cannibals had painted themselves with.
He smiled at us, but one side of his mouth didn’t respond, and the effect was ghastly.
“Remember me, Jadran?”
I wanted to ask what was going on. I wanted to demand to know who this person was, and why he was acting like the king of the cannibals. I wanted to ask a dozen different questions that needed answers all at the same time.
Jadran answered them all with a single name. “Callesco.”
“Ah, you do remember me.” His voice was sweet and false and full of hidden emotions. He dropped his mask to let it dangle against one leg. “I was afraid you had forgotten all about your old friend.”
“How could I forget you?” Jadran said in return. “How could I forget the man who killed my son?”
I felt like the air had been knocked out of me all over again.
Killed his… son?
Part II
Chapter 3 - Fire, Fire
Callesco fingered one of his scars, a long jagged line down his jaw. “Well, to be fair, the boy wasn’t really your son.”
“Close enough, he was,” Jadran answered, an edge creeping into his voice. “Which you knew.”
“Citizens of the Restored Society are above such things.” Callesco sounded like he had recited that speech more than once. “We live to serve the Society. We hold the future in our hands. We strive against the darkness. We carry the hopes of all.”
I felt my jaw drop. This scarred maniac had just quoted the three principles of the Colonies.
Who was this man?
“Jadran?” I asked, uncertainly, keeping one eye on Callesco and the other on the shifting horde of painted, mutilated humans. “What’s going on?”
He squinted at me before turning back to Callesco, like he’d forgotten I was even here. “I told you, Era Rae, that I was raised on Colony 16. The people there were all sentenced to death. Diseased, we were told.”
“I remember.”
“The people living there were slaughtered.” He choked on his next words. “Burned alive, is what they were. Those of us who did not make it out, like me.”
“And me,” Callesco said cheerfully, taking a step closer to us. “Although, I guess I didn’t get out quickly enough. Did I, Jadran?”
While I tried to process what they were saying I thought back to Colony 41, where I was raised. I remembered the doctors sending people to Quarantine for everything from a cold to mononucleosis, to worse. Any disease could get you separated from everyone else, for the good of everyone. In an age when disease could spread through the remaining population on Earth like wildfire in dry tinder, caution was the rule. Every disease was treated as a potential epidemic.
Including a disease like curiosity.
That was what had wiped out Colony 16. Jadran had told me the story, and I believed it. People there had started asking questions, led by Jadran Rill and others like him. It was the same thing that had ended my time at Colony 41 and opened my eyes to what the Restored Society was really like.
The Restored Society killed people who threatened their perfect world.
Except me. They wanted me alive, for reconditioning.
Like Hell.
“Meet the man,” Jadran told me, “who was responsible for sending those in Quarantine to their deaths in the incinerators.”
Callesco’s warped smile melted into a scowl. “Someone had to stamp out your little rebellion. If it had been left unchecked it would have spread to the other Colonies, like a disease. You were ruining what we had built. You and the others at Colony 16 were bringing chaos to the order. There was no choice but to end it all, with Quarantine.”
“Murder, is what you mean!” Jadran punctuated his words by thrusting the torch at the scarred man, the flickering light reflecting off his bare skin and off the leather outfit Callesco wore.
The group of brutes snarled at us and raised their simple weapons until Callesco lifted his hand, and they backed off again. “Someone had to end it all,” he repeated. “If that meant some of you had to die, I won’t apologize for it.”
“You killed my son,” Jadran said with icy hatred.
“And you left me for dead!” was the heated reply. “Come now, Jadran. The boy was no relation to you. Any more than my children over there are related to me! But you and I, we were friends. Or so I thought.”
I watched them, hearing more about Jadran’s early years than I had ever heard from him directly. The seconds ticked past. We still had Enforcers following us into the Outlands. We still had to find and destroy a genetics facility. We still had to find Laria.
And nothing was more important to me in that moment than hearing the rest of Jadran’s story.
“I was the only family he knew,” Jadran said, looking at me as he said it, his eyes holding a desperate need to explain himself. “He had lost his real parents during the Event. I wasn’t more than ten years older than him but that did not matter. Not to Frisco. Looked up to me like I was his real father, is what he did. I raised him in Colony 16. I taught him what I knew. He came to depend on me, and I depended on him.”
Callesco laughed. It was an ugly sound, full of phlegm and spite. “Should have left him alone. You got the boy killed, Jadran. You taught him to question those of us in authority. He stepped too far over the line. Not even you had been that daring!” He took a moment to tap a finger against his lips, at the side that didn’t move. “He was one of the first to be pulled into Quarantine, you know. One of the first for the fires. The rest of you would follow, but I will always remember his screams. They were… special.”
Jadran was moving before I could stop him. He swung the torch wide, and the remains of his flaming shirt flew off towards the painted savages, scaring them back a few steps, giving him the space he needed to get at Callesco.
The rod that had held the bur
ning wad of fabric lanced forward. Until that moment, I’d forgotten what Jadran had made the torch from.
Our stun stick.
It jabbed Callesco in his chest, and the man let out an explosive whoof of air just before yellow arcs of static discharge leapt from the weapon and spilled out across him, skittering over his shoulders, around his middle, and down his legs.
Then he stood up straight again, collecting his breath, sneering at Jadran with his ruined face. “Sorry, old friend.” He slapped the palm of his empty hand against himself. “Stunsticks don’t work through leather.”
He was just a bit taller than Jadran, but as he raised his orb of light up high he seemed to tower over everything. “Take them,” he commanded his children.
With screams and words spoken in the same garbled language I’d heard Callesco use, the cannibals sprang toward us.
I stared death in the face, and not for the first time.
My blood chilled, but then a warmth swept through me to replace it an instant later. A familiar sense of calm spilled through my veins, burning away my emotions and leaving only an absolute certainty of purpose.
I saw everything around me with startling clarity. Everything was clear. I had no fear, no doubt, only the cold logic of what I would do next.
This was what the Restored Society had bred me to become. I used to struggle with it. Used to try to control it.
No more.
It is who I am. Who I was meant to be, certainly, but more importantly it’s who I accept myself to be. My opinion of myself is the only one that matters.
One of the men reached me first, the one with stitching that went through his rib cage. He carried a long piece of metal that had several heavy nails piercing the end and he raised it now, meaning to club me down.
In the calm, I moved to my right, swept my leg around and up and caught him in the groin. The club rattled to the ground. As my momentum carried me around I bent low and grabbed for it and now his weapon was mine. With two hands I jabbed it sideways, taking a female in her solar plexus, whacking the tip up into her chin as she doubled over in pain. I felt bone crack. I saw the stitches around her mouth snag on the club’s metal spikes and rip out of her flesh.