by Laken Cane
How could that be true?
“Collectors,” another man said, thumping his chest. “That’s us.”
The mutants were all scouts, though I thought I caught a glimpse of an orphan hanging back behind them. The orphans were easy to spot. Their movements were slower and there was just something off about them. They were like…dead mutants who’d been brought back from the grave with part of their brains missing, and it showed. They held themselves a certain way. Even their walk was different.
The scouts spread out, surrounding the humans. They were dressed in regular human clothing—jeans, jackets, tee-shirts, boots. Some of them wore baseball caps. Some of them were bald. They didn’t look that different from humans.
But there were differences. Their yellow eyes, their sharp fangs, their insanely pale skin. Yes, they were different.
“Murdering bastards,” I whispered, but only to myself.
They completely ignored the woman.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
Then something happened that shocked me so much I nearly lost my grip on the tree.
A mutant spoke.
Even though Sage had informed me they could speak, that they learned from us, it hadn’t really sunk in. Even though I’d heard rumbles of their voices as they’d marched down the street, even though I’d heard one of them singing…
I somehow hadn’t imagined them standing around conversing with humans.
The mutant’s voice was rough and raw and gravely, and it took me a moment to comprehend his words. I understood why immediately. Their mouths were crowded with too many teeth and sharp fangs.
“Find more,” he ordered. “More.”
“Yeah,” the human replied. “We’ll find more, and we’ll hand them over when we run into a cluster. We know the rules, dude.”
Human men had a deal with the mutants. Find women, and the men—the collectors—could live. It didn’t explain why I’d seen male prisoners with the cluster in my town…though I guessed those men had refused to “work” for the mutants. Maybe they’d fought the gods.
I felt myself pale as I considered the other reason the mutants would have male prisoners. Food.
And the human collectors…
Those men were turning on their own kind. They made me sick. They made me furious.
But I was a helpless human stuck in a tree, just trying to stay alive. I couldn’t fight the bastards on the ground. I couldn’t save the woman.
I’d been sheltered for two years in my tiny town. I’d had no idea what was really going on out there in the world. That blissful ignorance was over, and the town was no longer mine.
I glanced up at Sage. She pressed the side of her face against the bark and stared down at me, but her eyes were empty and unseeing. When things got too scary, she found a way to shut down. To escape somewhere inside her mind.
Maybe she’d teach me how to do that.
If I lived long enough to learn.
Below, one of the mutants beckoned to the human who’d spoken—the leader of the little group, it appeared. “Come here,” he said.
The man didn’t move. “You have the lady. We need to get back to our search.”
“Come,” the mutant insisted. “You can go back with us to get your reward.” He gave a very human-like shrug. “Or you can die.”
“Fuck,” the human muttered, but he walked toward the mutants.
The other five humans drew closer to each other but said nothing. Their fear was almost a physical thing, and seemed to waft up from the ground to surround me.
When the human was beside him, the lead mutant spoke again. “We do not need so many humans.”
“Kroog says we do,” another mutant argued. “Food for our masters.”
So I was right.
We’re food and baby growers.
I shuddered and tightened my grip on the tree.
The leader snorted. “The gods shouldn’t have first choice with them all. We do all the work and I am hungry.”
“The gods will die without them,” one of the scouts muttered.
“There are plenty of humans to go around,” the leader scoffed.
“Mischa said—” another mutant started.
“I’m leader of this group,” the first mutant said. “Are you challenging me?”
The second scout backed up a step. “Not challenging. But I’m not a rule breaker. Our masters—”
The first scout stared at his argumentative friend. “You’re a coward.”
He rushed the mutant who’d sassed him, and he was fast. The second mutant turned to run, but one of the others shoved him so hard he flew backward and collided with the leader.
The leader didn’t budge—didn’t take a step back or stumble or so much as grunt with the impact. He stood like a stone wall and when the other man slammed into him, he tore out the other man’s throat.
With no fanfare, no words, no hesitation.
The injured mutant stumbled backward, his hands to his throat, and the leader followed him. He rode him to the ground, and then he pulled a blade from his side and with excruciating, purposeful slowness, he sawed the mutant’s head off.
He jumped to his feet, spattered with milky mutant blood. He shook the blade at the group, who stood watching in absolute silence.
“Someday I will be like a god,” he shouted, “and I will not need a blade to relieve you of your heads. Are there other challengers?”
No one said a word.
I felt a warm, spreading wetness between my thighs and realized I’d peed my pants—at least a little. That was a secret I’d carry to my grave.
And then, while the humans milled in terror, the leader spoke once more. “Feast,” he said, softly.
Just that one word, but the tiny knot of humans immediately broke apart, lifted their guns, and began to shoot. Wildly, though. So wildly a bullet tore off a chunk of bark not two inches from my leg.
They didn’t care that the sound of their guns would bring mutants. The mutants were already there.
The man who’d led the humans turned away.
The scouts didn’t seem to notice they were being shot--the bullets didn’t slow them. When humans shot mutants, it was simply force of habit. Habit and panic.
The humans fell quickly beneath the force of the mutants and their own desperation.
I pressed my forehead against the bark and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t shut out the shrieks of the humans. I couldn’t shut out the sounds of flesh tearing and bones snapping as the mutants fell upon the men in a frenzy of unstoppable rage and hunger. They did as their leader had ordered.
They feasted.
And high in the tree, I wondered if this were really a world in which I wanted to exist. I should have listened to my mother.
I should have killed myself.
I concentrated on the comforting thought that I still had that option.
It wasn’t too late to die.
Better I should do it myself than to wait for a mutant or a god to do it for me.
Chapter Eight
We stood on the ground with the dead spread out around us in bits of discarded flesh and splintered bone. The air was tight with despair and darkness and heavily scented with metallic blood and freshly gutted carcasses.
For me, the world had changed once again.
The mutants had disappeared with their full bellies, their human collector, and the tormented female prisoner, on to meet up with the cluster from which they’d splintered.
I didn’t know what the lead scout had done with the woman. Or to her. I hadn’t taken my face away from the hard, rough bark until long after the mutants had sated their hunger and stomped away.
Maybe I should have watched. I could have stayed with her in her anguish, but that wouldn’t have helped her and would only have hurt me. Perhaps they’d simply led her away, back to the camp. Perhaps they’d raped her as I sat high in the tree, trying to lose myself in my mind the way Sage did.
“We’re lucky,�
�� Sage said.
I took my stare off the gleaming white leg bone of one of the men. I’d fixated on the bits of meat still clinging to it, and tried to reconcile that bone with the living, breathing human who’d stood there less than an hour ago.
“Lucky,” I said, scornful and angry and afraid. “We’re lucky.”
She pointed at the bone. “That’s not my bone. It’s not your bone. That makes us lucky.”
“We’re not lucky, Sage. We’re stupid for clinging to this awful place. We need to give the world to the gods and see if we’ll be lucky in the afterlife.”
She said nothing, but she stared at me. Her eyes, dark and sunken in her pale, skinny face, were accusing.
I looked away. “Let’s get home before the assholes decide to come back.”
“They won’t come back. Once they return to the cluster, their masters will keep them there, celebrating, maybe birthing a baby, getting drunk.”
I stared, bemused. “They get drunk?”
“The love to get drunk. They do it a lot.”
“Alcoholic mutants,” I muttered. “I don’t know why I’m surprised.”
“They get drunk on milk.”
I just shook my head.
“They’re like humans, only…” She paused.
“Only what?” I walked a few yards away, my stare on the ground. I couldn’t find my machete. It didn’t matter. I had others.
“Only worse,” she said.
“How they hell do they pack supplies with them, Sage? And what do they do with them? They eat us. Why do they want our crackers and beans and medicine?”
“There are wagons,” Sage said, falling into step beside me. “And Mother said the longer the mutants are here, the stronger they become. And more like humans. Sort of.”
For some reason, she seemed more relaxed than I’d ever seen her. Almost…cheerful. I stared at her, my mouth open. “Are you serious?”
She nodded. “They absorb.”
“Alcoholic killer mutant sponges,” I said. “This is unreal.”
“The wagons carry the supplies and some of the humans. If you’d kept watching, you’d have seen them at the end of the line. They don’t just eat people. They…”
She stared into her memories, and seemed to forget she’d been speaking. For a second, she was lost somewhere in her past, and was no longer there with me.
“What?” I pressed. I squeezed her arm, gently. “Come back.”
She looked at me blankly, but she looked at me.
“They don’t just eat people,” I reminded her. “Go on.”
“Okay.” She paused for a moment, as though trying to remember what she’d been about to say, then finally continued. “Humans are a…” She frowned hard, searching for a word she’d been told and forgotten.
“Delicacy?”
“No…mutants have to have humans to survive.”
“A necessity?”
“Yes! That. The hunters aren’t supposed to eat humans they find. They’re supposed to take them to the cluster where the gods do their tests, get their picks, and decide what to do with the rest.”
“Tests?”
“The gods figure out what the humans are. I don’t know more. I’m too young.”
I swallowed past the dryness in my throat. “And what do they do with the rest?”
She shrugged. “Lots of stuff.”
I stepped over a rotted log and glanced at her. “So the group just now, they went against their own rules?”
She nodded. “If he finds out, he’ll torture them.”
I swallowed. “He?”
She didn’t look at me. “The leader of this cluster. His name sounds like Kroog.”
The same name the scouts had mentioned.
“How long did they have you, Sage? How long?”
She didn’t say anything.
I opened my mouth to repeat the question when she finally answered me. Sort of.
“A long, long time,” she replied. “Just about forever.”
It was the first time she’d spoken with such…deadness.
I shuddered. I shouldn’t have forced her to think about such bad times. But really, would she ever not be thinking of those times?
I wondered what they’d done to her. What she’d seen.
Why she continued to fight for survival.
I didn’t ask.
We walked out of the woods, jumped a ditch, then climbed a slight incline to the highway. We both kept watch for sneaking mutants, but all was quiet.
The woods continued on the other side of the highway, and we hurried into them. The house was close now.
“We’ll be home in ten minutes,” I said. I had to keep reassuring myself.
She took my hand. “We’ll get there.”
“Yeah.” And then what?
Really. Then what?
I wanted to cry, but I didn’t dare. If I started crying, I’d never stop.
Besides. Crying took too much effort.
We slipped toward my house, stopping every few minutes to listen. The fact that we’d taken a circuitous route home and a more cautious approach made the trek a lengthy one. But we’d made it.
Then just before we stepped out of the dark woods, Sage grabbed my wrist. “Wait,” she whispered.
I dropped to the ground, and Sage immediately followed suit.
Together, we crept to the edge of the woods and peered out. I could see the back of my familiar house.
I could also see the three humans who stood before it.
So close. We were so close.
Three males, I thought, though the shorter one in the knit cap and bulky coat could have been a girl. She carried a baseball bat, of all things.
They appeared to be young, but I couldn’t really see their faces well enough to be sure.
One of them leaned against the building, his head swiveling as he kept watch, and two others studied the path that led to the screened back porch.
One of them said something to the others, but his voice was quiet and I was too far away to pick up his words.
They had weapons—normal weapons—but each one of them also had what appeared to be tanks strapped to their backs with hoses that led to large water guns.
I looked at Sage and frowned. “Are those squirt guns?” I whispered.
She wrinkled her nose.
Even as I watched, one of them stopped squinting at the ground and with his hand on his weapon—a long, wide sword of some sort—he slowly opened the porch door, and he and his friends disappeared inside.
They wouldn’t be able to get into my house easily—the back door was reinforced and I’d secured it with about a million locks, but if they wanted in badly enough, they’d find a way.
They knew someone lived in that house. The mutants wouldn’t have taken time to study the ground or check the back for extra locks or look for signs that a house was inhabited.
But humans…humans would.
I bit my bottom lip, abruptly furious. I wanted to leap from the ground and blast them to hell with my gun. I wanted to beat them to bloody pulps and scream as loud as I could while I hurt them.
I pushed my face against my folded arms, panting, full of hatred. Full of rage. I realized only when I felt the itching wetness that I’d chewed a little too deeply into my lip.
I wanted to explode.
I was losing my mind.
I honestly wasn’t planning to do anything. It was dangerous, foolish, and I knew doing anything because of my feelings was a bad idea.
I knew that.
But it was as though someone lifted me and launched me at the intruders. The trespassers. The snooping human assholes I wanted so badly to hurt.
Sage screamed, but by then I was already halfway to the strangers. I rushed them, realizing a little too late that I was missing my machete.
I clawed for the revolver in my pocket.
I had five bullets in the gun. Surely I could kill them with that many chances.
Unfortun
ately I hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to practice, and my aim was not great.
But my determination and my rage, those were everything.
I felt like I could kill them from sheer will alone.
I could think them dead.
And if I couldn’t and they killed me…
Well, wasn’t that what I wanted? Wasn’t that what I wanted as I ran toward my house, snarling, clenching my gun, full of death and rage and such a huge amount of sadness and pain and unending, black despair?
And terror. Always, the terror.
Yes.
Kill me.
Kill me.
An image of Robin’s face was in my mind, but that image wavered and the pregnant women were there instead. The women in the grip of the gods. The woman I’d slashed to death.
I was in hell, and I wanted out.
I couldn’t do it myself, but I wouldn’t have to.
And then…
My heart stuttered as I saw something much worse than the three humans trying to gain entry to my home.
“Mutants,” I screamed.
The world slowed down—or maybe my thoughts sped up—and I saw everything. I felt everything.
Sage’s shout echoed mine, her high voice that of a child but loud and commanding anyway. “Mutants!”
They poured from the shadows and around the house, at least a dozen of them.
But they weren’t the mutants I’d fought. They weren’t the orphans, as Sage called them.
The scouting mutants had found us.
Maybe they’d tracked Sage and me through the woods.
Maybe they’d tracked the three people who even now were leaping from my porch, yanking their enormous water guns from their holsters.
I pulled the trigger three times before I hit a mutant—shot him in his eye. An accident—or lucky shot—but it didn’t matter. Guns weren’t that big a deterrent to the mutants.
Still, it made him hesitate, and as he reeled backward, his hand to his eye, one of the humans hit him with a stream of water.
I caught a familiar scent and realized immediately what the humans were shooting from their water guns. It wasn’t water.
It was alcohol.
The kind of alcohol a nurse rubbed on your arm before she stuck a needle through your skin.