Cronix

by James Hider

  “Don’t look,” he said. “Make sure you are holding on to me, and close your eyes. I’ll lead you through, just trust me.”

  Wet faces pressed his skin. He turned and looked back: the castle walls were still thick with people, watching to see if a miracle or a massacre was afoot, the spectator’s morbid inability to look away.

  Twenty yards. He could hear odd noises from the subspecies, growls and groans, the occasional shove of one creature against another. But none broke ranks or turned away its intense, vacant stare from them. Oriente took courage from the fact that they had not yet moved, told himself if they were intent on killing then they would already be steaming piles of meat on the grassy plain.

  Ten yards. He found himself praying, inside his head. Oh dear Lord, keep us safe this day. I don’t know who you are or what you want but please protect these innocents from harm. Thank you dear Lord, thank you, thank you and bless you…

  The tiny phalanx was almost upon the front rank. Oriente’s mind was numbed by prayers which had morphed into a litany of gratitude that nothing had yet happened. Thank you, thank you, please keep us safe thank you…

  They were almost upon them, just feet away. His gaze fixed on a male Cronix, with blonde hair and a thick beard a much darker shade, almost black, but the face clearly recognizable as … he was amazed that he was even trying to name the long-dead movie star whose face he was now looking into. The creature opened its mouth, ran its tongue over its front teeth.

  Robert Redford. The name sprang from nowhere, even as the creature abruptly, inexplicably, pushed back. As it did so, all the others behind it started shuffling in reverse, yielding a path that opened up deep into the mass of naked Cronix. As the crowd parted, a hiss arose from the throng.

  “What’s happening?” It was Lola, too scared, or perhaps too smart, to open her eyes, yet hearing the noise of thousands of feet shuffling.

  “They’re letting us through,” whispered Oriente. “They’re letting us through! I was right. Thank you, dear Lord, thank you,” he added, suddenly unselfconscious about uttering his devotions out loud.

  “You mean we’re gonna have to walk through them?” It was Shareen, the panic in her voice muffled because her face was pressed into Uxmith’s thick hair.

  “Yes Shareen, we’re gonna have to walk through them. Hold tight and keep your eyes shut.”

  The space was not wide, only a few feet at most. Still the eyes of the hellish creatures were fixed upon them. They could simply reach out and grab them now, and there would nothing he could do. Oriente could smell their unwashed, sweaty bodies, the ripe odor of dirt and sex and blood. He tried not to catch their gaze, but every so often would be unable to avoid looking straight into the empty eyes of some monster and feel his nerve about to give.

  One of them lurched forwards. Oh god this is it and could feel his knees weaken. But the creature had only moved into their path because another behind had pushed it, some feud between the tightly pressed killers.

  They carried on.

  They were at least two hundred yards into the throng now. Being taller than most of the Cronix, Oriente could see their heads stretching away in every direction. About a hundred feet to his right, another head reared above the crowd – a fellow Ranger. He forced himself to ignore it and look straight ahead instead. They still had hundreds of yards to go before making it to the woods. Keep going, it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay he muttered to the shivering wretches pressed blindly against him.

  Something caught the corner of his eye and he looked behind him. A female Cronix, for some reason, reached out and touched Shareen’s back. It wasn’t a grab, just a hand extended, and there seemed, from what he could tell, to be no aggression involved.

  Shareen shrieked and looked up, her eyes bulging with terror.

  “Not…you,” the Cronix said in a croaky little voice that still managed to carry across the mute masses.

  All the color had drained from Shareen’s face and she looked as though she was going to try to run for it.

  “Shareen!” Oriente hissed, as soon as he had recovered from the shock of the Cronix actually talking. “Shareen! Put your head down. Do it. Now!”

  But Shareen was transfixed by the sea of eyes around her, the wall of bodies pressing in like some nightmare of the apocalypse. Oriente stopped. The shuffling group ground to a halt like a twelve-legged insect running into a rock.

  Shareen’s lips were moving, but no sound came out. Her grip on Oriente's kilt had gone, she was no longer clasping hold of Ux. Like a drowning sailor, she was being pulled away in a current of sheer terror, set adrift on this sea of unholy beings. She began staggering back the way they had just come.

  “Shareen! Grab hold of Ux. Do it now!” he hissed, afraid that anything louder might break the spell that held the Cronix in its thrall. But Shareen’s fear had possessed her. She looked round and saw, in the distance, the walls of the castle. She stumbled back.

  “Stop her,” croaked Oriente. Without looking up, Ux groped the air behind him, feeling for the former nurse’s hand. He was raising his head when Oriente grabbed it and pressed it down again. Shareen was tripping through the narrow channel they had come through, but Oriente could see it was already closing behind them.

  He wanted to chase after her, but he couldn’t jeopardize the others. As she stumbled away, and the gap grew wider between them, he noticed the passage through the Cronix had almost closed. She shrieked as a hand reached out and touched her again, threw her arms up in a defensive gesture. A female hissed at her, then another hand shot out and grabbed at her hair, more aggressive this time. She screamed again, then was jerked abruptly off her feet and into the crowd. Oriente could see the mass close around her, and though she was no longer visible, he could hear her screams turning to a gurgled wheeze, before stopping altogether. Lola was crying hard, almost hysterical, against his ribs and held her head tight so she could not look. The kids were pressed so hard against him it felt as though they were trying to burrow inside him, whining and grizzling. Oriente started moving again, issuing murmured reassurances, begging them not to raise their heads. No one did.

  In a trance, they spilled from the far side of the crowd. It could have been a matter of minutes or hours, but when they reached the tree line, the Cronix abruptly thinned out. He kept the kids’ heads pinned down as he picked up the pace and they stumbled into the woods. Lola finally looked up and saw they were under the leafy canopy.

  “Oh my god, we made it, we made it,” she gasped.

  “We’re not clear yet,” Oriente cautioned, but he was glad she was now walking upright, guiding her daughter and moving almost at a run. Their labored breathing was the only thing he could hear now, panting through tears and snot as they jolted through the forest, putting as much distance between themselves and the Cronix as possible. They tripped and stumbled on roots and gulleys. He had no idea how long they ran for.

  After what seemed like hours, they emerged into a clearing where a huge horse chestnut tree reared in splendid isolation. Oriente decided they must rest, find somewhere safe to recuperate. He pulled the kids, then Lola, up into the tree's lofty boughs, cutting branches to create a platform for the kids to stretch out on. Almost as soon as they did, Pris and Ux were asleep. Lola cradled little Boo in her arms, while Oriente slipped a few feet further down, his knife drawn, to stand watch.

  Through the thick leaves, he heard the child talking to Lola, the first time he had ever heard the boy speak.

  “Is the old lady dead?”

  “I don’t know, Boo” cooed Lola, trying to calm the boy. “Maybe she made it back to the castle.”

  “Why aren’t we dead?” Boo asked.

  Lola was silent for a moment. She grabbed the kid’s face and kissed his forehead, then pulled him close.

  “I don’t know Boo. Maybe god wants us alive.”

  Epilogue

  The Heresy

  On her deathbed, many years later, Pris would remember the da
y they blocked the door to heaven.

  It had been sunset on the fifth day after their escape from Arundel. Long shadows crept up the grassy slopes of Glastonbury Tor to the ruin of the tower, many of whose stones Oriente had used to jam the entrance at the foot of the hill.

  The autumn air was cool, drying their sweat and sharpening their appetites. Pris had stomped down the rough edges of the cut turf, hiding the fact that there had ever been a passage into the bowels of the hill. The Emergency Reanimation Station, Oriente had called it: the maintenance door to paradise.

  Never remove these stones, he had told her and Ux and Boo.

  But why, if it leads to heaven? she asked.

  If you hear any noises from the inside of the hill, run and tell me or Lola, he said.

  If we are gone, and you see anyone emerge from the hill, take what you can carry and run for the woods. Don't come back.

  If they ever come back, our grandchildren will be savages to them she overheard him tell her mother. You know what advanced civilizations do to primitives.

  Pris hadn't understood. It had been a game to her.

  The light was fading now. Or was it her own life that was ebbing at last?

  Through the incense smoke and the drone of the priest reading the last rites, Pris looked at her granddaughter Liesel. She smiled as best she could, though the left half of her face was a frozen mask. The girl stared back for a moment, her eyes uncomprehending, then returned the smile.

  “And the Lord Diyoos smiled upon his blessed subjects,” intoned the High Priest, “and He told his Prophet Urruntay that his children would prosper and rule the land ...”

  Bullshit, thought Pris. The creature had forced Oriente to write the scripture. The giant had refused at first, but a bright dot of flame had appeared on Lola's body and written the very first words of its scripture on her flesh: You will obey no other but me.

  “... and for their multitude sins, the Lord Diyoos decreed the gates to paradise would remain barred to his people for one hundred generations ...”

  Should she tell the girl? Pris barely had the strength to speak any more, could feel the night coming on fast. And the girl was so young, barely a teenager. Would she even understand what Pris was trying to impart to her? And would the knowledge set her free, or forever condemn her to be an outsider from this society, with its rigid beliefs and its frenzied, unforgiving deity?

  At this final hour, the knowledge that she would be buried with her mother comforted Pris. The Tomb of the Holy Mother, they called it. As if the malignant creature hadn't killed Lola itself, to force its reluctant Prophet to write down its absurd story, the story that everyone now believed so fervently.

  After her mother died, screaming in the flames sent from the skies, Oriente had raged against this god, but the dangerous golden spark had immediately leapt to Pris and hovered on her chest. The little girl had screamed in terror, cheeks wet with tears. Oriente fell to his knees. He agreed to write whatever he was told.

  And when he had finished transcribing its grandiose tale, the deity had severed his right hand to ensure Oriente, the only one among them who could know the truth, would never alter a word.

  Then it sent him into exile for all time.

  The only trace they retained of their Prophet, aside from the invented tales, was a rusty stain of blood on the holy scripture that was kept in the new temple.

  “And you Pris, being the child of the Holy Mother, are exalted among women, and your name will live on as a matriarch of the four tribes ...” The priest's homily seemed interminable: she felt sure she would die before he got to the end. That might be a blessing, she thought.

  Pris reached out and squeezed her grand-daughter's hand: the girl looked so like Lola, though Pris could see Ux's smile, despite the tears, when she looked up at the dying old woman.

  The bastard child of the Holy Mother. The creature had waited until Lola and Oriente had children of their own, two sturdy sons, before revealing its intentions. Years had gone by, and they had dared to hope the thing had been stillborn, an ectopic deity rusting in the atrophied bowels of the Orbiter.

  No. It had simply been biding its time. When it spoke, only Oriente could hear it. Not having chips implanted, the natural-born were deaf to its entreaties, though it had any number of ways of making its will known. It had ordered the Cronix to bring their children here, hundreds of feral kids, to be raised by Lola and Oriente's own boys, to marry and breed with them, forming a new nation under its watchful eye. The four tribes, it had decreed: one each for Oriente's boys Jonas and Felipe, one for Pris and Ux's offspring and the fourth springing from the loins of Boo and the daughter of a Cronix.

  “... and the gates of paradise will open then to the children of the four tribes, and we will all, finally, live in peace for all time at Diyoos’ side,” the high priest finally concluded.

  The assembled guests and dignitaries rose to their feet, preparing to shuffle past, paying their last respects before leaving Pris forever. She knew there was a heaven out there somewhere, knew that none of these forlorn people would ever see it. Her mother had told her the stories. That was probably why it had killed her. Perhaps it thought the little girl had forgotten, or never understood. She and Ux had spoken of it in secret, at night after their own children were in bed and the candles were out. Since he died twenty years back, Pris had spoken of it to no one.

  The last of the mourners were leaving the room. Quintus, son of Jonas, son of the Prophet and the Holy Mother, kissed her hand, muttered some platitude. A slow boy who believed everything the creature told him. But then, why wouldn't he? It was a god, of sorts. It had enslaved the mighty Cronix for the tribes, forced them to build their temples and towers: it conjured fearsome monsters from thin air, and burned the unbelievers with its holy fire.

  “We will see each other again when the gates of Heaven open once more,” Quintus muttered. He took Liesel's hand and led her through the smoky room to the door.

  Should she tell her?

  The girl paused for one last look at her grandmother. She was crying now, and took her hand from Quintus' grip to bid the old lady farewell.

  Pris raised her hand to wave goodbye, but found she was beckoning to the girl.

  “Liesel,” she whispered as the girl leaned over her. “Come here. I have something to tell you ...”

  The End

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following people for their support and advice during the writing of this book: Rob Hider, Rebecca Strong, Roger Ruiz-Carrillo, Carolina Garcia Navarro and of course my wife, Lulu. I’d also like thank Ethan Ellenberg for his energy and enthusiasm in making sure it saw the light of day.