As Dean was shoved forward, his feet working very hard not to trip over each other, desperately trying to keep Brandy from certain death, he silently cursed the effete bastard talking into his ear while concurrently hating that he agreed with him. If he was going to be blown to atoms, taking as many of the things as he could with him was definitely a more satisfying thought. “Okay, but when I say shoot, I fucking mean shoot! It’ll be obvious. If they take our helmets, shoot no matter what.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Captive
The boy watched the religious men being escorted toward the village. He immediately recognized their clerical collars. A team of two Chosen walked ahead of the men who followed obediently, almost serenely. Even the fat one seemed to step as though he was walking on air. The boy felt the mental anesthetic that was being applied to the men as the escort’s thoughts brushed past and mixed with the version being applied to him and the others who worked in the fields. Something deep and warm filled his mind. It had an almost physical presence: a warmth that then spread through his whole body. He was aware of the other workers around him as they all came to a stop and watched the pastors walk by. Tears welled up in the boy’s eyes as a feeling of something much greater then himself or even this whole horrid world seemed to fill him. He suddenly experienced a never-ending blackness that was conversely filled with light. He and the others around him fell to the ground as their sense of place and physical orientation simply vanished. A feeling of wholeness filled him beyond any notion of anything he had ever felt. His weight seemed to diminish to that of a feather. Just as quickly it was gone and the heft of his physical self felt greater than his muscles could ever possibly hope to move and the weight of his tears seemed to carve tracks through his face as he found himself on the ground again in the steamy corn field. He desperately wanted to go back, to be in that place, to be done with this terrible existence. Countless times, over what seemed like countless days, he had regretted ever leaving home. Regretted crossing the Terminus and swimming that frigid river. As he lay in the dirt, his vision slowly came back into focus. Inches from his eyes, two armies of ants fought over the writhing twisting body of a fat blue and green caterpillar. As the armored insects robotically waged war for the prize, the bodiless heads of several others tenaciously clung to their enemy’s legs with unyielding pincers. From his peripheral vision he saw a big hairy male Chosen step past and step over one of the other field hands. The Chosen looked down at the prone woman. Like the boy’s, her eyes were only just refocusing. The Chosen licked the sharp angles between his teeth and the woman moaned out a “No. Please, no.” The sharp-eared naked creature reached out with his long fingers and plucked her up from the ground like she was an old withered cat. He dragged her off toward the other two Chosen overseers, who continued to sit under the shade smiling, their eyes wet with anticipation. The woman found the strength of her voice and screamed for mercy as she was heaved up and slammed down onto a table. The scream was cut off with a yip as the big hairy one snapped her neck with no more regard than as if he was killing a chicken. Then the Chosen chuckled as they bit into the corpse, pulling away thick chunks of bloody meat. The boy and the other surviving pickers gagged as the mental grip that the Chosen still maintained on their senses filled their human mouths with the taste of their freshly dead sister.
It was perhaps only an hour later when the boy, once more picking corn, still wishing away the taste of raw human flesh that wasn’t in his mouth, but might as well have been, looked up to see more strangers being escorted in by a large group of Chosen. These people were different. They walked at their own pace. They wore military kit and had odd looking helmets. There were two Chosen dressed as humans among them. The boy felt nothing of their thoughts. This was different too. What a very strange day: An out of body experience that he desperately wished to go back to and now this; people who seemed to have control over their own bodies. He saw a man, who was keeping a girl protectively close, turn and look in his direction. The man stared for a long moment. Then the tilt of his head angled toward the gore-covered Watcher’s table until the trees at the edge of the trampled portion of the cornfield obscured the view.
The twins were beside themselves with excitement; to be surround by their own kind; to effortlessly communicate in their own style; to absorb a world of individual sensations distilled into one pure connection, was nothing less than astonishing. So it was to their profound surprise and dismay that they also found themselves in front of the church, strapped to the poles with the humans. Then they noticed Eliza, her filthy body hanging limp against the straps. MOTHER.
Dean looked at the woman and the protective hand he had been stretching out to hold onto Brandy fell to his side. Eliza’s eyes stared unblinking. Only the dried tracks of her tears offered a glimpse of the pink skin beneath the grime. The stench of her was shocking. He dared not take off his helmet, but he needed to make eye contact with her. He carefully lifted the visor while keeping his hand on the top, hoping for gravity’s help should his mind be grabbed. “Eliza? Do you hear me?”
Her gaze shifted to his for the briefest of moments. That she recognized him was undetectable.
“Close your visor, Captain,” said Gretel. “They are trying to enter your mind through her’s. She is resisting and it is causing her great pain.”
Dean slapped his visor back down. Eliza closed her eyes and allowed herself to be mentally embraced by the children. The constant barrage of questioning that had surrounded her since being tied to the pole ceased as the twins shut it out.
Isn’t it exciting, Mother?
We are with the Chosen, Mother.
We are not alone, Mother.
As her surroundings came back into focus, Eliza realized that she had nearly fallen into a pool of insanity. For twenty-four hours she had been assaulted by questions and visions and demands until she had felt herself slowly disappear, her body folding into a catatonic state. You must leave here if you can, she said.
Why, Mother?
Eliza licked her lips as though to speak but continued in her mind, These children know nothing of good. They are simply highly intelligent predators. They are born of madmen and they are merciless in their love of causing agony. They have kept their infected parents alive. The humans here are slaves. This is a place without hope. We will die here. You will die here.
Why will we die here, Mother?
Because you are not them, my children. You are more us than you wish to be. She found herself reaching out a hand to grasp at Dean’s. They couldn’t touch, but she held her arm out with reassuring strength.
Dean felt a lump growing in his throat. For a moment, it was just he and Eliza and he desperately wanted to live - desperately wanted to save her.
Eliza licked her lips again and looked at Dean. She tried several times to speak, only to croak on unused and stressed out vocal cords. Finally she said, “We are only alive and not slaving in their fields because they are curious. We came with the power to kill them. They appreciate that power and want to know more. They are also obsessed with some warped idea of Jesus that I can’t begin to understand. I can’t say more because they are blasting me with thoughts and I don’t want to betray us. I will speak through the twins who can shield us better.”
Dean said, “I’m just glad to find you alive.”
“You won’t be.”
Arthur Camp was long dead and - eaten - but his legacy had bloomed in full. He had been a mostly unsuccessful, overtly earnest and pushy American missionary working to convert disgruntled Nicaraguan Catholics to the Evangelical way of thinking. As he had wandered the countryside as an emissary for The Billingsley Baptist Church of Greenwood, Indiana, most of the people that he reached out to chose to ignore him or, as was the way of the locals, they listened politely and then ignored him. Nicaragua had been one of the very last places in the Americas to fall victim to FNDz or Enfermedad de Cain. When the onslaught finally came, everyone was looking for a co
nduit to God to save them. Arthur had never been so popular.
Just days before Omega, he had found a large group of potential converts in the little startup town of Paraiso. Most of the residents were transient, having come to the town as the canal had been built, expanding the town as the need for basic services increased. Many of these people were either without a church or were looking for a new one. The big Catholic church at the center of the village was having its troubles, embroiled in a decades-long battle with child abuse claims, so Arthur Camp was having some mild success with a good old fashioned revival tent. His small but growing flock suddenly vanished when the Fiends came marching through Central America. The religion, which the locals had known since birth, was more familiar and their old faith was quickly reignited. The town’s Catholic Church became the refuge for all.
Arthur considered it a miracle that he had survived the sacking of the town and the slaying and consumption and/or infection, of all the residents. He had been in plain sight when the raging hoard of Fiends swept through; had been offering himself up to God and desperately wanting to know why he had been left behind. He didn’t know it, but he was a one-in-a-million human who carried a defective gene that caused the killers to mostly ignore him, passing him by as one of their own. Perhaps it was a miracle. Arthur took it as such.
When the hoard had moved on, many of their mutant children were left behind. Like random seeds sewn into a vast trail, the not so helpless creatures were populating the paths left by the marching insane. As a man of charity, Arthur found himself in the curious position of helping these orphans who saw him as one of their own and recognized him as a parental figure. Convinced that this was all part of God’s plan, the Right Reverend Arthur Camp decided that he had finally found his flock. He chose five of the oldest youngsters to be his acolytes and as best he could, through the odd medium of thought, taught them the Word of the Lamb.
In those early days, food was a problem. Like locusts, the rampaging Fiends had eaten nearly everything in their path, but again God intervened. A cattle barge, stranded only a day or two before, lay beached at the edge of the canal. With profoundly difficult labor, Arthur managed to make a ramp to the barge and saved nearly three hundred head. He had no experience with beef cattle, but they seemed to feed themselves, and water at the lakes edge was in abundance. Arthur was able to relay some common sense instructions to the Children on how to manage the herd, and the creatures found it simple to control the beasts with their minds. Hunger was abated.
His flock grew as the five acolytes called out to their nearby brothers and sisters and the town began to swell with the children of Fiends. Though he would have been the first to admit that they were too young to really understand the nuances of the Bible, much less its broader concepts, Arthur spent long hours trying to teach his fledgling attendants. That they so quickly picked up his English was astonishing. The last of many misjudgments came on the day that he was trying to teach them about the Body of Christ. As he tried to administer the Eucharist and explain the meaning of the transformation, The five acolytes or The Five as they became known, took it to mean that Arthur himself was the Body of Christ. As he tried to give them their first communion, Arthur said, “Eat. You must eat the Body of Christ.” As they refused the offered wafer that Arthur had worked hard to make, the children looked at him curiously and with a bit of concern. They had had plenty of opportunity to eat humans and frankly missed the taste. “Arthur says eat,” said the preacher. The children understood the sacrifice that their mentor was offering. It would be his final teaching. A grand gesture (if that’s how their immature minds could have defined it). When the man insisted again, “Arthur says eat,” they did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Crosses
It was on the darker side of dusk when a group of human slaves wearing rags walked through the village bearing torches and lighting the larger torches that sat on various posts. Not a puck was to be seen. They hadn’t seen one over the several hours that they were strapped to the posts. Sanders said, “They don’t even look at us.”
Cookie said, “Zombies. Not like infected. Like Voodoo.”
“You think we’ll get fed?” asked Bishop.
Cookie nodded with hope. They all heard his stomach growl in exclamation. He looked at Eliza’s empty water bottle and noted that there were no others.
When it was fully dark, Hansel said, “They are coming for your helmets, Captain. They have been observing us and they understand how they shield you.”
Dean allowed this to sink in then said, “Well, I guess that’s it then.”
“What’s it?” asked a trembling Alice Pike.
Dean nodded in the direction of where the humans had come from. “Without our helmets we will be just like them. Councilman Plimpton has arranged a missile barrage on our location should they take away our helmets.” Dean keyed his mic to reach out to the Lyndon Johnson and left the channel open to all of their helmets.
Hanson had been the one to catch the movement on one of the external camera monitors. He hadn’t really seen anything in particular, just a shadow maybe, but it had been enough for him to speak up. He and Gallagher and Plimpton had then stared at the bank of monitors for at least fifteen minutes without seeing anything further until finally a seabird had flown past, landing on the port rail and flying off again.
They had found a pack of cards and to Plimpton’s general pleasure, had been playing round after round of Gin Rummy. He was fairly certain that his opponents were allowing him to win most of the time, but that did little to reduce his contentment. They had monitored the travails of the surviving group, but had grown bored after watching their confinement for more than an hour or two. They had enjoyed a dinner that included canned vegetables and canned pot roast that was surprisingly good. Plimpton had even found the ship’s stash of wine and was enjoying a glass of California 2016 Cabernet. He drank alone as Gallagher kept sharp and Hanson remained, as ever, a teetotaler. Despite the dire circumstances of the others, the three men were feeling fairly relaxed as they mildly debated their next moves. Why not? They were safe.
It was with a bit of surprise that they had felt what was clearly a vibration across the steel floor, the waves emanating from the hallway outside. Gallagher again put his eyes on the security monitors and saw the back half of a puck pass through the open hatch that led up to the rear machine guns: the hatch that Timbs had apparently left open before leaping off the boat. A hatch that none of them had considered checking again to see if it was sealed. The door to the command room burst open and a huge naked puck stepped in grabbing Hanson and biting his throat away to the spine before the man could even yelp. Gallagher’s reflexes saved him from the same fate as he dove through the door on the opposite side of the room, his fingers grasping for a helmet and slamming the door shut behind him. Plimpton found himself backing toward the monitors until the tabletop stopped his progress. Two more pucks stepped into the room, huge, smiling, long, pointy teeth. The one that had bitten through Hanson slowly chewed the bloody mess in its mouth while leisurely stepping toward Plimpton and dragging Hanson’s carcass. The councilor noted the impressive erection rising from the creature, and then his mind was not fully his anymore. He could suddenly taste his footman’s blood and noted with mild surprise that he rather liked it.
ARE YOU OF THE LAMB?
Plimpton quickly got the gist of the question and only needed to briefly mull it over. We have our differences.
Later, when his clothes had been shredded off and he had been gang raped for over an hour, they had allowed him to be free of the agonizing pain, his body slowly bleeding out from torn bowels. They applied just enough anesthesia so that he could be fully awake and appreciatively observant as they laid him on a table and slowly ate him alive, making certain to keep his heart beating and the blood flowing to his brain for as long as the organs would function. Plimpton remained oddly curious as his head was propped up for the best view. His own warped mind chu
ckled at the morbid sense of pleasure that he got from watching the efficiency of the feast. He remembered watching a documentary about African lions as a youth. The animals had bagged a huge buffalo and with surgical precision, left nothing but the skin, skull, and offal for the circling scavengers. The devils who ate him while slurping and snickering amongst themselves, took great care to remove his lower musculature first while miraculously leaving much of the critical vascular system in place. It wasn’t dissimilar to being awake while having a tooth pulled; he was aware of the general yanking and ripping of his flesh but only as a distant tug. His last vision was as a simple torso and head: long-nailed fingers reached down and very gently, so as not to burst them, plucked out his eyes. His last thought, as their senses continued to invade his, and as they slit him open to pull out his organs, was that he didn’t much care for the taste of his own flesh, but what a pleasurable sensation it was to feel an eyeball roll around on the tongue and then rupture under crushing teeth.
Gallagher had run through the dark bowels of the ship, so very grateful that he had grabbed the helmet with its night vision capability. To conserve the ship’s battery power that they had built up while running the boat, they had shut down most of the energy sucking systems, including the motion-activated lighting system. Some systems, such as weapons, couldn’t be shut down solely from Command, thus a slow trickle of energy was sucked from the ship’s batteries. Not that it much mattered now, but Gallagher would have liked to have the option to turn on a light or two. When he finally stopped to catch his breath and listen, he noted that he stood amongst the missile bays at the stern of the destroyer. He had no weapon. He had no idea where an exit might be. He was torn between the notion of leaving the ship and just hiding, hoping the monsters would go away. Then he heard Captain Dean. “Councilman, that’s it. They are taking our helmets. It would be appreciated if you dropped one on us right now, before they get here. It is my suggestion that you dump the whole ship’s payload on this place.” There was a pause as he waited for a response. Gallagher was terrified of even speaking. As it was, the sound of his own breathing was setting his heart rate to stroke inducing levels. Dean broke in again. “Plimpton, you got that? Over.” Another pause. “Gallagher?”
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