Children Of Fiends

by C. Chase Harwood

  Gallagher decided to chance it, whispering, “Sir, we are overrun. I can only assume that the councilman and Hanson are dead. I am currently hiding in the ship.”

  Dean looked at his fellow prisoners. He could see their posture change from stiff with anticipation to defeat and then stiff again as twenty or so male pucks came out of the church and walked toward them. Dean finally said, “Good luck, Gallagher.”

  The approaching pucks were naked, except five who wore various elements of ornate priestly Roman Catholic garb. The bits and pieces of religious trappings looked almost comical on the tall creatures as they walked on their long hock jointed legs and Dean realized that Hansel and Gretel were comparatively small. The five kept to the center of the group, their movements precisely the same; almost like they were one creature.

  Eliza said, “The kids are right. They want your helmets. They will immediately kill one of you if you don’t hand them over.”

  Gretel stiffened. “You don’t want to know how they will kill that person.”

  If it bothered Gretel, thought Dean, best to hand them over and hope for some other salvation. None of his crew was particularly religious, but he heard Alice Pike whispering a prayer as she removed her helmet. As they followed her lead, the now familiar sensation of sharing a consciousness with another took hold, this time expanding in a seemingly infinite way. Alice’s prayer was heard by countless souls and the five mentally spoke to her as one.

  YOU ARE OF THE LAMB.

  The humans suddenly saw a vision of the vicar and his deacons resting and eating fruit in a large anti-room within the church. Alice would be joining them. Bishop blurted out, “I am of the lamb too! Please, the lamb too.” Alice, then Bishop, were simply untied and gently escorted, mostly under their own power, toward the big stone church.

  Nothing happened after that. The commons remained empty and stayed that way. They quietly spoke amongst themselves, acknowledging their fears, wasting breath on guessing what might come next. Dean found himself looking into Eliza’s eyes and she held his gaze without breaking it, the connection offering a feeble but helpful sense of place. Maggie Tender watched this and unconsciously hugged herself. Cookie smiled at her and held her gaze, which left Sanders the job of comforting Brandy with uncharacteristic cooings of how everything was going to be alright. Despite the mugginess, the girl was shivering and Dean very much hopped that is was shock and not The Infection. The last thing they needed was to be strapped next to a Fiend (no matter that it was a small girl - an infected person would break the bonds and slaughter them all in moments). Not wishing such a fate for the poor thing, he decided that it was shock.

  A row of three crosses stood erect in front of the entrance to the church, each perhaps fifteen-feet or so high. Dean observed that they had been recently erected, that the ground at their bases was raised and with fresh turned dirt, and two thoughts occurred to him: that these feral pucks were somehow very taken with some twisted interpretation of Christianity and that they seemed to be both highly organized and capable of creativity. Altogether, it suggested a level of intellect that he found deeply disturbing. He quietly said to Eliza, “I hate to think it, but if these fuckers decide to head north, there is no Terminus that is going to keep them out.”

  Eliza smiled with tired knowledge and nodded toward Hansel and Gretel. “That became obvious to us when they were two years old. The American and Canadian people may be getting by on Virtutrips, 3-D printers and greenhouse living, but the government is well aware of the potential danger.”

  “Maybe so, but this,” He nodded at the surroundings, “is more than they could be bargaining for. They have no idea.”

  “Wasn’t that our mission? To get an idea?” Dean suddenly felt very impotent and it showed on his face. Eliza saw it and said, “Sorry.”

  Hansel broke into their moment with a mental knock on the door. You must keep your thoughts in. They are observing all. Even if you don’t feel it.

  Gretel continued, Become nothing. Try to think nothing. We are letting our own thoughts mix with yours and it makes it harder for them to interpret.

  Hansel spoke, “But if we keep doing it they will take us away.”

  Dean looked at the children with sudden newfound respect. Until that very moment he had considered them to be troublesome adolescents whose usefulness was obvious if not burdensome. He smiled in return and in his mind, said, Thank you. Do you know why are they keeping us here? Why they haven’t just killed us or eaten us or whatever?

  Both of the children’s voices filled his head at once. We are witnesses.

  Meaning?

  Try to be nothing, Stewart Dean.

  The day passed with little more than a constant assault by mosquitoes. They were all very hungry and thirst grew ever more uncomfortable. Two humans - an adolescent boy and a girl, both dressed in rags - walked across the great clearing, bearing trays of fruit and jugs of water. Cookie was the first to take notice and he stood licking his lips in deep anticipation.

  Dean instantly recognized the boy from the fields. They had shared a long look, and upon seeing him again he was immediately reminded of the feeling that was more subconscious hours before: a feeling of familiarity. He’d forgotten about it since, but when he saw the boy up close he felt his heart constrict. He had never been able to stop himself from staring at the photos. Two years of photos. Two years old when he’d seen his boy last. Two years old. The child had never faded in his memory. The face at two not that different from twelve. He found himself trying desperately to catch the boy’s eye. Both children were keeping their gaze averted; their mission clearly to deliver the food and leave.

  “Billy?” asked Dean in a breathless whisper.

  The boy’s shoulders stiffened and then he looked up. A man he knew, but couldn't place was staring at him. “Billy?” the man asked again. The uniform made the familiarity click. The man from the pictures in his father’s trunk was looking right at him. Days of beard growth only made it clearer.

  “Is your name William Dean?” asked his father.

  The boy could only stare. The girl dropped the food at her feet and scurried away, the crew groaning at the loss. Eliza asked, “Stewart?”

  Dean glanced at her then focused again on the boy, asking, “Is your name William Dean?”

  “Yes,” the boy finally said.

  Dean felt his throat constrict and tears glazed over his eyes. He swallowed hard in order to speak. “Billy. My name is Stewart. Stewart Dean. Does that sound familiar?” He was slightly aware of Eliza’s standing up straighter against her pole. She remembered the boy as well. He had talked to her with his mind from the doorway of a hut.

  The boy stared, then set the fruit down. He looked at Dean and nodded. Suddenly, his body stiffened. “Billy. Billy?” said Dean. The boy began to stiffly walk away. Then Dean and Eliza both heard the boy’s voice in their heads, faint, but certain. Please. Please stop talking to me. They are hurting me. Feels like fire in my guts.

  Dean heaved at the straps that held him and stifled a call for the boy to come back. He turned and looked toward the church and screamed “LET HIM ALONE!”

  For Billy, his father’s cry added an extra twist in his guts. His body was in utter conflict with itself and his mind. He could hear and feel The Five in particular as mirth spread out from them to the collective Chosen. He wanted to run, but they made him walk. He wanted to vomit, but they held it in. He wanted to cry, but no tears came forth. He wanted to scream - and he wanted to be able to think about what had just happened. His father was here, tied to a post. His father, who he had been certain was dead, had spoken to him. He wanted to think about it. Take it in. Instead the fog came. He hated the fog more than anything else that they did to him, for it took away his ability to daydream as he labored. The fog was for the disobedient. The fog took away everything but the toil. His thoughts were swept away from him, the last being the realization that they had made him sit outside, away from any torch
es, in the night outside, alone at the edge of the common, facing the crosses and fully vulnerable to the wild things.

  Dean watched his son walk away and then simply sit down and stare. Then, as the last of the sun faded beyond the hilltops, a sensation of numbness began to flow through him that slowly turned to paralysis and he found himself falling over against the restraints. In his peripheral vision he watched his crew do the same. Only Hansel and Gretel remained standing, reaching out to Eliza and gently relieving her of the agony of her own weight as she hung limply against the leather straps.

  More ragged human slaves, carrying shovels and torches, marched like zombies to the three crosses. They dug out the crosses and laid them down, then dug four more holes. Then more humans came bearing four more crosses and laid them next to the fresh holes before walking away. Dean, horrified and astonished by his paralysis, watched it all as mosquitoes assaulted his exposed face and hands. A little while later, more humans came and laid bundle after bundle of small sticks and brush around their feet. Then, but for the sounds of the jungle, all was quiet. His head was tilted in a way that offered him only a view of the ground to the base of the church. His son was sitting behind him out of sight. It was the most mentally excruciating moment in his life. Even banishment as a modern day leper couldn’t compare.

  Billy could never get used to the mosquito assault. It seemed his whole life boiled down to toil and induced paralysis, always with bites and itching, itching, itching, itching. He’d seen many people go mad as a result, but the Chosen didn’t tolerate the insane. A crazy person was not easily controlled. A crazy person fouled up the way that they controlled everyone. Despite the horrors of daily life, most people did all they could not to go mad. A crazy person was quickly fed to the ancestors. They had all been made to witness and feel the ancestors eating the insane.

  When he heard the local troop of capuchin monkeys, Billy’s heart rate went from higher than normal to ear pounding, throat pulsing irregularity. There were at least forty of the white headed creatures and the Chosen let them have the freedom to move about the population as they liked; the beasts providing amusement and a certain kinship with the new species of man. The monkeys wisely stayed clear of the ancestors on the other side of the hill, but made much hay out of messing with humans who could not defend themselves or their food. The beasts had even been known to bite unfortunate people who had been paralyzed at night and could not get inside. He recalled one young woman dying from a horrible infection when she had lost an ear to the increasingly aggressive creatures. Billy found himself both relieved from the shock and growing acceptance that his father stood tied up perhaps a hundred feet away, and in mortal fear of being unable to raise a finger against an assault by monkeys that had been slowly gaining a taste for human flesh in addition to their normal diet of fruit, insects and the occasional bird or small mammal.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Gallagher

  Gallagher had not moved for hours. The missile bays had their own series of noises that kept his mind filled with certainty that the devils had found him. The whole ship was alive with the sounds of its various systems going online and offline, charging various batteries, filtering water, refrigerating long ago spoiled food. The warship didn’t know it was dead, and like a vegetative person, it continued to go about its most basic programming. Eventually the redundant systems designed to keep things running while the boat ran silent would fail mechanically, but in the meantime, the bowels kept producing the sounds of automated digestion and rejuvenation. Gallagher was becoming exhausted holding vigil. He finally psyched himself up, counted silently to ten and stood, groaning aloud as his constricted leg muscles came back online. Blood gushed to cut off muscles, painfully restoring sustenance to where it had been denied. He told himself to keep working his way to the stern. He would find a hatch somewhere at the back of the ship and quietly slip overboard. After so much time not moving, the rustle of his cargo pants scraping together and the light echo of his first footfalls made him stop short again. His strained bladder demanded relief. He was painfully thirsty. Hungry too. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and that had just been a stale energy bar. Deciding that this place was as good as any, he unzipped and relieved himself at the base of a missile launch tube while directing the stream for as little splash and therefore as little noise as possible.

  Gallagher had been thirteen when the world went to hell. He had just been a regular kid in the eighth grade who happened to be a brilliant gamer. The You Tube hits on his best games had been in the hundreds of thousands. It had been chance that he lived on the relatively safe Delmarva Peninsula. Because of his skills, he had been swept up almost immediately by the military, Plimpton, and his drone army. It occurred to him as he zipped up and took his first tentative steps, that the bulk of his existence had been in front of one type of screen or another and that he had always had someone to watch where he walked; first his parents and then later the officers above him. For the first time in his life he was truly responsible for his own path. His alone.

  He walked fast. The darkness behind him was like a propellant, his fear of pursuit driving his legs to move faster than he wished, the sense that something was going to reach out and grab him by the neck, putting an extra arch in his back. He would stop at a hatch and open it as quickly and quietly as he could and pull it shut just as fast. He found himself along a hallway that routed around the engine room and ended at another hatch with a sign stating, Special Ops Only. He entered the space and found a room that seemed designed for self-sufficiency. His active night vision began to fade and a low battery warning began to flash. The tool either needed to be plugged in or allowed a day of sunshine to recharge fully. Still, he could make out his surroundings well enough. There was a lounge of sorts, a galley with a long, bolted-down stainless steel table surrounded by steel chairs, a ping-pong table and an armory with heavy weapons on display. The doors were wide open, the lock smashed. There were empty slots were gear had been removed, but there was still more firepower than Gallagher could ever hope to use. He quickly armed himself with a Sig Saur 9mm pistol and strapped on a webbed belt, filling it with full magazines for the gun. Feeling a little more confident, he walked further into the room, past narrow bunks and found four rigid hull inflatable boats strapped to the walls. The boats were mostly deflated, but their general shape still held. There was a shop of sorts and benches with several types of outboard motors attached. Finally, there was a large hatch at the very stern that was clearly designed to be lowered like a drawbridge; a launch platform to the sea beyond. He couldn’t have hoped to find a better setup. Then he heard the sound of the wheel turning on the hatch back at the entrance.

  Billy could feel his blood pool in his buttocks as gravity slowly crushed his skin into the dewy grass, soaking his pants, only to have that mild misery whisked away as his attention shifted to the three monkeys descending from a tree in his periphery. The capuchins weren’t particularly big. He’d seen a movie once that showed one playing an accordion and lifting its hat for tips. He recognized the alpha male. The other two were enforcers: smaller males that helped protect the troop and had privileges with the alpha’s daughters. They approached slowly, the three of them vectoring in from slightly different angles until they stopped roughly five feet away. The alpha cocked its head at Billy and then in a flash charged forward with teeth on full display and just as quickly leapt back to its starting point. Billy of course didn’t move. He was grateful that he could still blink. It meant he could close his eyes when the moment came. The monkeys cautiously stepped forward and sat in a semicircle directly in front of him. Until that moment the rest of the troop had stayed mostly quiet, only their movements in the trees above giving them away. The alpha looked up at them. As a whole they began to screech. Billy couldn’t imagine how his heart could pound any harder as the alpha reached out and touched his leg, then quickly pulled it back. With no seeming threat, the monkey climbed onto the boy’s shoulders, tugged at
his hair and slapped his head, showing off for the approval of his subjects. The two other males got close as well and began sniffing and taking tentative licks around his ears. Billy closed his eyes.

  There was no time for Gallagher to get back to the hatch. He cursed himself as he remembered noting the lock on the inside of the door. He had been so taken with the space and had heard nothing in the way of pursuit that he had stupidly dropped his guard. He could see the door begin to swing open and he quickly took refuge behind one of the partially inflated boats. As his heads-up display flashed an empty shape of a battery, he noted how much the display reminded him of a full immersion first shooter game so he psyched himself up with the thought. He had killed countless monsters in such games, and he lied to himself that this wasn’t that different. With the battery almost gone, he switched off the helmet, sending himself into total darkness and gave himself a pat on the shoulder for having the wits left to think of it. He would wait until he absolutely needed to turn it back on. He felt his bowels loosen as he listened to the footfalls and he squeezed his buttocks tight while counting until he was certain that there were only two of them. He heard sniffing and then one of them laughed knowingly. The other joined - followed by a third.