by Bobby Adair
Kirby nodded sadly.
"You don't look old," said Oliver. "I think you still look eighteen."
Kirby smiled sweetly at Oliver.
"That's why you believed me when I told you I was three hundred," said Jingo.
"Yes." Kirby nodded. "I'm not aging."
"And that frightens you?" Beck observed.
"Fright?" Kirby asked. "No. It makes me sad." She looked at Jingo. "The thirty-five years I've lived have hurt too much. Everybody I've ever loved is dead. I couldn't stand to live another three centuries."
It was Jingo's turn to hide his melancholy behind a plastic smile. "Don't the spore-infected people live longer than normal lives where you come from?"
Kirby laughed so darkly that Oliver thought at first she was sobbing. "Things are different where I come from. People who show signs of infection don't live more than a few years."
"Years?" Oliver was surprised as he shot an accusing look at Beck. "You don't burn them immediately?"
Kirby looked at Beck, too, and for a moment, her face showed her disgust.
"No," Beck defended himself. "I don't… Brighton's laws are… I'm trying to… I want to change Brighton."
"So you burn the infected?" asked Kirby. "In Brighton? Is that the name of the city you're from?"
"Yes," Oliver answered. "They burn them alive."
Kirby labored through a weighty sigh. "It always comes to the killing. Always the suffering." Her eyes grew distant as they stared through the fire, past the squirrels, through the stones behind it, and out across the vast tempestuous ocean.
No one spoke. Oliver felt bad for what he'd said. Beck seemed embarrassed, Jingo patient.
Tears traced solo trails down Kirby's cheeks that otherwise betrayed no grief at all. Finally, she spoke again. "If you went to the place where I came from, it would seem like the most alien place on the face of the world. We have machines and weapons, guns and bombs, concrete fortresses and bunkers, but not many of the wild infected like you have here. We slaughter them like rats, and we're good at it."
"I'm amazed," said Jingo.
"Most of us get infected too, and when we do, we're forced into the arena by the non-infected to fight for sport," Kirby said. "Or they put us in the army, and we go to wage the wars."
"War with the demons?" Beck asked.
"Wars with barbarians, wars with pirates, wars with bandit tribes, wars with other cities and territories. Always war. Always. It never ends. Everyone where I come from eventually dies in the wars. That's our fate. Our leaders tell us tales of glory and sacrifice. They tell us of heaven and golden palaces in the clouds, but all I've seen is war. I saw no golden palaces. All I saw were tears and blood." She looked at Jingo, Oliver, and then Beck, pausing for second to make eye contact. "Have you seen someone you love suffer and die?"
Oliver nodded, thinking of his parents. But he said nothing, fearing a word might turn into tears if he dared utter it.
"You said you were infected three years before your people came here," said Jingo, changing the subject. "Were you in the wars for three years?"
"I was in the wars for two," Kirby confirmed, "and I was in the arena for one. Three years of killing people just like me, corrupted by the spore and waiting for death."
Oliver gulped as he put thoughts of his burned parents out of his mind, only to replace them with vivid memories of the slaughter he'd seen in Blackthorn's army. "You must be a good soldier to have lived through so much," he said to Kirby.
Kirby didn't accept the compliment. Instead, she emptily responded with, "People corrupted by the spore want to die. I helped them."
"You don't sound like you believe that," observed Beck.
"I was a slave," Kirby shot back, as though the truth was so obvious it offended her to have to say it. "I made people suffer. I murdered them so that I could have food in my stomach and a warm place to sleep. I hated what they made me into."
"Why did your people come here?" asked Jingo.
Kirby looked at Jingo for a long time while she thought about her response. "Hope. That's the simple answer. We were all corrupted. We were all tired of killing. We came here in search of a quiet place to live out the few years we thought we had left. We came here in search of that golden palace in the clouds, hoping it might be on Earth."
"But that's not what you found," Jingo concluded for her. "I'm so sorry."
Kirby buried her face in her hands, rubbing as though to mash away all the evil her eyes had seen in her life. "Where I came from, people die on a scale you can't imagine. Victory only comes from annihilating our enemies. We don't kill only their spore-corrupted mutants, we kill the uninfected people, too, the men, the women, the children, and the babies."
Beck stopped looking at Kirby. Oliver guessed he was embarrassed for not feeling the shame Kirby felt for what sounded to Oliver like the same kind of killing that happened regularly in Brighton.
"Most of the land is scarred from war," said Kirby. "We steal our enemy's food stores when we can, and burn what we can't take with us. We torch their fields and kill their livestock. We poison their wells with the bodies of their dead. They do the same to us, and we all starve. We hoped this place would be different, but it isn't. We hoped this place would be the part of the ancient world that survived." Kirby slowly shook her head, and then she focused on Jingo. "I think there are no more Ancients, no more glittering cities, full of electric lights. Only one thing in the world is true anymore: war. Whatever light lived in the world in the ancient times and inspired men to build glass towers into the clouds, create flying machines, and build rockets to the moon died a long time ago. Humans only exist for one purpose now, to drag each other deeper and deeper into the brutality of the darkest age of our existence and to murder ourselves into extinction."
"It doesn't have to be that way," Beck said with a grim smile, glancing at Oliver. "I think we can change our path back toward the light."
Chapter 26: Bray
Bray snuck through an area of demolished buildings on the outskirts of the Ancient City. Some of the buildings were little more than foundations, while others had one wall, or two, or three. Rarely did he find a building that had four. Mounds of rubble had collected in the center of most of them, the only remnants of the Ancient buildings that had once stood at the edge of town. Pathways were worn next to each of the walls, where animals, men, or demons had sought respite or a quick trail to the next street or building.
Bray used those paths now as he crunched softly over the debris, keeping to the interiors of the buildings, listening for Winthrop's army a few streets away. Every so often, he had to run through an open section of street to get to the next neighborhood of houses. When he looked left, he caught glimpses of the army. The men and women chanted loudly, drawing the demons in the area. They were either brave or stupid. In Bray's experience, making noise like that was an easy way to get killed.
At the same time, the demon activity seemed to have lessened since the army arrived. During most of Bray's trips to the Ancient City, he'd found a few carcasses—remnants of scuffles between demons and metal smugglers, mostly. But now he found piles, scattered haphazardly across one another with jagged slice marks across their stomachs, probably from when the army had entered the city.
Now the army was headed back to Brighton, leaving a new trail of violence. Or at least that's what it looked like.
Bray stopped short as he heard something on the other side of a wall. He lingered for a moment, sword drawn, listening to the hiss of what sounded like a demon. Bray crept toward the wall's edge, moving quietly out so he could get the jump on it.
A demon with a large gash in its gut lay on the other side, its fingers wrapped around the wound, holding its innards in place. It must've survived a skirmish long enough to flee and take its last breaths. The creature was propped against a piece of cracked stone. Bray ran and caught it by surprise, putting a quick end to it. He couldn't have the thing howling upon seeing him.
He cont
inued through the maze of foundations and walls.
Bray followed the chanting army until the empty, crumbled walls and foundations ran out and became towers again. He was forced to sneak in the alleyways between intact buildings. Reaching the edge of an alley, he peered around, catching sight of the army crossing a large intersection.
Several soldiers dragged their swords through the streets, or hoisted them in the air as they chanted in unison. A few brave demons raced at them, providing a momentary skirmish, but the men disposed of them easily. Those that could be carried were hoisted on men's shoulders. Others were thrust back into the streets. A line of women toted swords, sticks, and gear. They sang loudly as they surveyed the streets for more demons.
Ahead, the buildings ended and the dense woods took over, encasing the final towers of the Ancient City in brown weeds. The army would run out of road soon. Then they'd be back in the wild.
Still no sign of William.
Bray was about to dash to the next building when he noticed a line of horses marching between several clusters of guarding men. He stopped and watched. The horseback riders were men, but a few women walked alongside them, bellowing melodic chants into the wind. A large man rode in the middle of the procession, his robes billowing underneath him, his hands waving in the air as he guided them. His enormous girth gave him away.
Winthrop.
Sitting directly next to Winthrop, looking uncomfortably small in the saddle of a large, white horse, was William.
Chapter 27: Bray
Bray gritted his teeth as he watched William swallowed by a procession of blood-printed men and women. He wanted to charge out and take the boy. He wanted to hack these deranged men and women to bits.
Instead, he settled for getting closer, weaving between buildings so he could get a better view. His best option would be to catch them at night when they were resting, so he'd have a chance at luring—or stealing—the boy away. But he needed more information. He needed to know how carefully William was being guarded.
William didn't appear to be fighting to get away. He seemed resigned to his fate, as if these strange men had beaten him into submission. Or maybe they'd threatened him with some fate worse than what they were doing to the demons. Infected or not, the boy didn't deserve to end up in some soldier's stomach.
He considered the words William had yelled when Bray had inadvertently killed Ella.
Kill him! Kill him!
Would William be stable enough to realize he was being rescued? Bray wasn't certain, but he needed to know before he made any moves.
Stopping at a large, multi-story building with numerous windows, one of the last towers before the Ancient City gave way to forest, Bray crept inside and up the stairs. He paused when he reached a window high enough to glimpse the army, watching them travel down the last of the cracked roads. The front rows of people disappeared between the thick trees, as if the forest was swallowing them up. When Bray followed them, he wouldn't have any buildings to hide behind.
He'd need to leave a healthy gap.
Chapter 28: William
William clutched the horse's reigns, keeping his legs tight against the animal's flanks as it clopped across the landscape. He followed a group of singing, chanting men and women. He felt like a powerful deity, coming to claim some Ancient land, riding high above the heads of men. He looked next to him, watching Winthrop bellow commands. The men and women heeded his orders. When Winthrop asked them to slow down, they did. When Winthrop led a new chant, they changed their tune. William recalled having a similar power over the demons. A part of him missed it, but he was glad to be following Winthrop.
William looked around him. They were climbing a large, grassy hill. The hillsides swooped broadly into the distance, fading into the wilderness and trees, but William was no longer afraid of anything in those woods. He had conquered the demons. He was riding with the strongest army. Winthrop hadn't promised him anything, but maybe he'd even get his own building when they returned to Brighton.
Maybe one day he'd even have his own men, who would die for him like they'd die for Winthrop, like William's demons had died for him.
He rode with that vision in his head for several hours, until the sun rose high into the sky, spearing the army with its rays and driving back some of the cold. William was grateful. He was returning to Brighton on the back of a horse, instead of on the blistered soles of his feet. He had a sword, a belly with some food in it, and the camaraderie of thousands of men who would fight shoulder to shoulder with him. It was a lot safer than running through the woods with Ella, Bray, and Melora.
A flock of birds scattered from a nearby patch of forest.
"What was that?"
Several men stopped singing and looked up at the fleeing, noisy birds. They peered down the hill and into the woods. William followed their gaze.
The men turned to Winthrop, awaiting his guidance while Winthrop halted his horse and prompted the others to follow suit. He turned his attention to the hill, appraising their surroundings.
"Do you think they were startled by demons?" one of the priests asked.
"No." Winthrop shook his head confidently. "It is a sign from the other gods. An omen that we are on the path to righteousness." He hit his horse's side and started it moving.
"The path to righteousness!" the priest repeated.
"The path to righteousness!" someone echoed.
The priests cheered. A few women took up the chant, spreading it to the army in front and the army behind, thousands of voices echoing into the woods in unison as they marched, unafraid. William smiled and lifted his voice with the others.
Chapter 29: Oliver
In the tower's observation platform, Oliver leaned on the rail and looked at the compound and the bodies of the dead. The sun was behind the mountains in the west, but the sky still glowed blue. The evening chill was starting to set in. No demons were moving about. The few who'd been scavenging the flesh of the dead had filled their bellies some time ago and had disappeared to the far side of the settlement. Oliver didn't know in which tower they were making their home.
From below, the sound of labored breathing and feet on the wooden rungs let him know that his replacement was coming. Being the youngest of the group, none of the rest of them trusted Oliver to keep watch at night, so he usually got the afternoon shift, relieved by Beck when the sun went down.
Oliver looked west to gauge the time. Beck was coming early for a change.
Oliver stood up straight and walked the perimeter of the platform, looking for anything on the move in all directions. There was nothing. After the morning's grenade explosion, it had been a slow day for wandering demons.
Turning as the sound of his replacement reached the top of the ladder, Oliver was surprised to see that it wasn't Beck, but Kirby. "Are you taking my watch?" he asked.
"No." Kirby emerged from the hole in the floor and stood up straight, taking a moment to catch her breath after the climb. "I've been down there all day asking and answering questions." She drew another deep breath. "I don't like being indoors. I need fresh air."
Oliver leaned over the hole in the floor to look down the ladder, checking for Beck, but he saw no one else coming.
"It's only me," Kirby confirmed as she walked to the rail and looked toward the mountains.
Oliver walked over and stood beside her. "Thank you for coming this morning."
"I said I would." Kirby pointed west. "Beck told me your home is on the other side of the mountains."
"Yes," Oliver confirmed.
"Brighton and some smaller towns, all close together?"
"Close?" Oliver had never thought of them as close. They always seemed far away, that was, until he'd journeyed out with the army and realized his perception of distance was inadequate for the world he lived in. "I suppose a person could walk to Coventry or Ashford in a few days."
"Are there other towns?"
"Some smaller villages," Oliver answered. "Nothing more."
> "Nothing?" Kirby seemed surprised.
"Maybe Jingo or Minister Beck knows—"
"No," Kirby interrupted. "They don't. Both said there is only Brighton, Coventry, Ashford, and the villages you mentioned."
"If you knew," Oliver asked, "Why did you—" Oliver stopped himself when he guessed the answer to the question he was asking. "You wanted to check to see if they were lying."
Kirby nodded.
Oliver smiled devilishly. "How do you know I'm not lying, too?"
Kirby smiled through her permanent sadness in a way that didn't help make her look happy. "I trust you, Oliver."
"Really?"
"If I didn't," she said, "I wouldn't have come this morning."
"I trust you, too," said Oliver. "If I didn't, I wouldn't have told you about my friends here in the tower."
"Your friends?" Kirby asked. "Is that what they are?"
Oliver thought about it for a moment. "I haven't known any of them for long, but yes, I think they're my friends."
"Beck talks as if you and he have known each other a long time," said Kirby. "You didn't know him in Brighton?"
"I knew who he was," said Oliver. "He knew who I was, too. I was a novice for Father Winthrop, who was on the Council with Minister Beck, but I was of no importance. I never spoke with Minister Beck until the expedition."
"Beck told me about the army," said Kirby. "He told me about this Winthrop character, and he told me about the slaughter. He said you two escaped together."
Oliver nodded. "We've been together ever since. In a way, we were together on the march from Brighton to the Ancient City, too. He was kind to me."
"Is that why you think he's your friend now?"
"I don't know," answered Oliver. "I haven't thought about it exactly. We help one another. He saved my life. I was drowning in the river, and he pulled me out. I guess he could have left me and run away, but he didn't. I don't know what will happen when we get back to Brighton, if I go back there, but for now, I think we're friends." Oliver looked Kirby in the eye and asked. "Is that a mistake? Am I foolish to think that?"