Saul of Sodom: The Last Prophet

by Jinn, Bo

  He shone the light over the cover: no title on the front, nothing on the back or on the spine. He opened it, and in the middle of the very first page was written the following:

  Since I am certain that any record of us and our cause shall be erased from the pages of history should we fail at what we have here set out to achieve, in that event my only hope is that this record finds its way to the world, so that people may know our struggle and the cause to which we have commended our fate.

  Our memory is in your hands.

  – NOVUM MUNDI RESURGENT –

  - Captain Maxwell Wallace of the Phoenix Brigades,

  Dolinovka, Kamchatka, (soon to be former) New Eastern Republic of Russian States.

  He flicked through the pages and found that the little book contained a series of dated entries in the same handwriting. The insignia on the doors must have marked the lodgings of the faction leaders. He propped his gun up against the desk and pulled the chair up off the floor, sat down, turned the page to the first entry:

  Russian Winter: Day 1

  It has begun. Our cells have infiltrated the cities of Petropavlovsk, Yelisovo, Sedanka and Tigil. We have already spread our seed throughout Dolinovka. The municipalities were built recently to house exiles from the Mongolian warzones in the southwest. Our seed bed is small, but ripe. We lurk in the shadows for now, until we have garnered enough support from the people.

  Our comrades back home in the U.S. will make us known among our countrymen when our mission is fulfilled. Our reputation will spread throughout Russia on the mouths of their people as well. Before long, the whole world will know. The Phoenix will rise from the ashes of all of the world’s loss. Martial order must fall. At any cost, it must fall…

  He stopped reading and turned the pages, stopping from time to time to skim through the entries. Every step leading up to the coup of the city was catalogued in detail, interspersed with increasingly vitriolic references to the “martial devils,” “peons of the PMCs.” “pigs of the martial economy” and he developed a strange connection with the rebel the further he read, as the entries slowly became more personal, relating facts about the man behind the chronicle. About one-third through the journal, he stopped flipping the pages when three words at the top of an entry caught his attention:

  Russian Winter: Day 52

  We strike tomorrow.

  I may not live through the assault, but I am not as fearful of my own death as I am for Aaliyah’s. As much as I want to, I cannot stop her from fighting. She came here to fight…

  He skimmed through the entry.

  …I have contemplated her death. I can’t say whether I would feel the same way about our cause. At the same time, I know this is the way of the world: To gain all one must lose all. I suppose we shall know what we will have gained and lost after tomorrow. I love her so much…

  The entry carried on in a long monologue. He could read the fear in his very pen-strokes, the sort of fear that was the first thing eradicated when one crossed over to the martial world, unadulterated by neural programs and martial conditioning. A pure fear – a human fear, the fear of a man torn between something to die for and someone to live for.

  He turned the page. As he began to read again, the first thing he noticed is that the handwriting of the entry had altered. It was more irregular, more twisted. The second thing he noticed was that a long period between the next entry and the last went unrecorded:

  Russian Winter; Day 76:

  It has been two weeks since the uprising. The whole region has been taken over by the Phoenix. Our sun has risen, but inside I feel only darkness and the cold breath of empty space…

  Aaliyah is dead. Others have lost their whole families, many of whom were not even for our cause. I wonder, now, as I had thought I would, whether it was all worth it – to know that we have caused so many the sort of pain that I feel now. I do not know…

  At any rate, we are the enemies of the world. I doubt that I will live to see the end of our blood and efforts but as long as I am able to fight, I must. The cause must come before our pain. Always. It is what separates us from the martial dogs…

  A none-too-far-flung spurt of gunshots broke his concentration, and the echoes faded into the dying wind with no follow-up. There was no time to waste. He had to know what happened to the people of the city. He would not be able to live with knowledge that there had been a chance that Naomi’s family was still alive. He had to know. He flicked through to the later entries in the journal and continued to read:

  Russian Winter; Day 221

  UMC forces have landed on our shores.

  They have already begun setting up an outpost to the southwest. As we understand it, they are here on a mandate from the United States government. We could not even win the support of our own people…

  It is official. Our blood … Aaliyah’s blood … It was all for nothing. This world runs on war, and war will wear it out to naught. We were fools to think that we could change it … to change humanity. I see clearly now what I did not see before. The problem lies far deeper than any bullet can pierce. Fear, pride, greed, power, progress … no amount of fighting – no amount of pleading to man’s conscience can ever destroy these forces. They will go on until they consume the world. The meme has taken over…

  He turned over the page:

  …The PMCs … devils… they keep the fear alive… the wars continue… the martial dogs are their slaves…

  He turned the page again:

  …I regret for the people of this city. Most of them have no idea what fate awaits them. Many of them have taken measures to hide their children. Others have fled. Where they will go, I have no idea. There is no escape now. We led them to believe in our cause. Now they must watch everything we promised crumble to ashes along with their homes and their futures…

  The Phoenix Brigades will fight to the end, even if the blood we shed will make no difference in the long run. Perhaps something new will rise from our ashes. Though I have not the slightest faith in Providence, I have no hope apart from it. I have lost too much to possibly see death as anything less than a reprieve…

  He dropped the journal, drew a sidearm and turned when he heard the sound of footsteps from behind. With the abruptness of the turn, the chair was thrown across the floor with a clatter. Through the window, a motionless figure cast its long shadow on the outside walls. Someone was just outside the door.

  “Who goes there?” he called.

  When no answer came, he soundlessly approached the door.

  The shadow zipped away.

  “Wait!”

  He rushed out of the door. A silhouette disappeared into the side street and he turned the corner just in time to see the edge of a shadow stop at the top of a stairway under a small incline of little favela-like blocks. He heard the sound of beating against a door and a voice shouting something undecipherable through the wind. Just before he reached the top of the stairs, he heard a door open and shut.

  He lurked past each of the little huts, listening intently and stopping when he heard hushed and panicked voices, bringing his ear close to the door. He waited. When the voices stopped and distinct, rapid movements like the fretting for a weapon sounded soon after, he stood back at once and drove the sole of his boot into the door.

  “Stoy!” he yelled, bursting over the threshold.

  Strobe lights flashed, and between him and the wall stood a man, frozen. The man slowly turned a grimace of anger into the light, showing the raised palms of his hands. His head rose and a brutally scored and sun-beaten face surfaced: scars curling all around his features, and his dark, vexing eyes, unblinking in the face of the flashing strobes.

  “Are you one of them?” he demanded. “The Phoenix Brigades…? Answer me!”

  The muscles in the rebel’s jaw beat and his teeth trembled rabidly.

  “Martial dog…” he snarled through clenched teeth and spat. “You will all burn in your own hell.”

  Saul’s sights darted around
the small room. There were large closets and cabinets all around, presumably filled with munitions and supplies. The place looked like a storehouse.

  “Where is the other one?” he demanded. “I heard voices. There is someone else.”

  “Just kill me and go,” growled the rebel. “GO!”

  He stared directly into the rebel’s eyes. The strobe lights stopped. He lowered the gun by a slight angle, sufficient to show that he meant no harm.

  “What happened to this place?” he asked, his voice low.

  The rebel maintained his sideways glower and a steady flow of breath, deep, quick and furious.

  He approached, slowly, easing his grip on the gun.

  “I am not going to hurt you,” he assured.

  The rebel leered and cackled.

  “Hear me,” he said, lowering the gun farther. “I saved a little girl from this place. She has a mother and father who may still be alive. I need to know where the people of this city fled to.”

  At these words, the rebel’s rabid breaths stopped.

  “Alive…” he muttered.

  A silence followed. Then, short, terse exhales like something between a laugh and a sob proceeded from him and he started to shake his head in hopelessness.

  “Please … I must know what happened.”

  The rebel turned up a look of woeful resignation and his hands slowly begun to lower.

  “Do not do it,” he pleaded.

  But the rebel reached behind his back and when the hand came out it bore a pistol.

  “I am sorry.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I cannot die on my knees.”

  “NO!”

  The rebel’s gun rose not three inches before three shots rang out. Four in rapid succession tore across his chest, each shot knocked him back to the wall and he collapsed in a slew of his own blood. His dying eyes fixed their stare on him until the instant life left them. And for his last dying seconds, he looked as though he was trying to mouth something of dire importance. The words were choked off by blood. His head hung.

  Saul stood staring at the collapsed rebel, trying to decrypt the words from the last movements of his lips, but the rapid sound of movement caused him to twist around again. The noise came from inside one of the cabinets. He pinpointed the exact one and lined his sights.

  “Come out,” he commanded, “slowly.”

  He approached the cabinet from the side.

  “Hands where I can see them”

  He waited.

  Another sound of movement came from the same cabinet, but no answer.

  “Vykhodi!” he shouted.

  No answer. He expected, at any moment, for shots to come from inside, or for the cabinet doors to break open. He heard movement again and was convinced it was the drawing of a gun. His nerves still brimming with the last kill, he aimed the pistol low and fired two quick shots at where the legs would have been.

  Silence.

  He expected to hear some kind of groan or yelp, but no sound came except for a short slump like a dropping sack.

  He waited.

  A second later, he heard something. Something very, very distinct.

  He opened the cabinet doors, looked down and the gun slipped from his grip.

  A young boy cowered at the bottom of the cabinet clutching the middle of his abdomen, and a steady-growing stain of red began beneath the small hands where one of the rounds has passed through him. The boy looked up, his face contorted, his tear-filled hazel eyes gaping. The small breaths started to shudder.

  “No…” He bent down at once and lifted the boy out of the cabinet. “No, no, no,” he repeated with dreadful whispers. He cradled the small figure in his arms, held the back of his small head and looked into the wide, perplexed eyes. Small squeaks of panic shot from the boy’s lips like arrows. The young boy shook and wretched. Blood issued from his lips. The little face went blank and the little head drooped in his hands, blood pouring out the side of his mouth.

  He went on mouthing frenzied nothings, gaping at the small, dead face in horror. His hands shook loose and the boy slipped from his arms and fell lifeless on his side.

  He stood up and recoiled.

  The blood had poured from the exit wound and drenched his hands, and he looked down at the bloodied hands, washed over by a most familiar terror. Images started to blaze past his mind’s eye, images he had never seen in his vilest nightmares -- shrieks and wails rising unrelentingly like banshees. He gripped his own skull and the child’s blood smeared him. It would not stop.

  Stop… stop…

  At that moment, the door swung open again and slammed back against the wall.

  “In here!” a voice yelled from behind.

  The hawk-eyed brigadier burst through the door, followed by a three-man squad. The shadows danced about the wall in front of him. He slowly came off his knees and onto his feet, staring down at the child’s corpse.

  “We heard the gunshots,” said the brigadier coming up beside him. “You have blood on you. Were you hit?”

  The words “you have blood on you” repeated in his head. He remained with his head hung, eyes gaping at the floor.

  “What’s wrong…?”

  He said nothing.

  The brigadier turned to his subordinates.

  “Get the bodies out,” he commanded. “Keep searching the area. There’s probably more of them around. Move.”

  The rebel soldier was hauled out of the room first and the child was dragged away from his sight afterward, slung over the shoulder like a gunny sack and carried away.

  “Let’s go,” said the brigadier, turning to the door. “The convoy will be here any minute.”

  Finally, he spoke: “These people had families … children.”

  The brigadier stopped and turned back with a guarded glower.

  “A lot of them did,” he replied. “Now, let’s go…”

  “You were here?”

  “What?”

  He slowly turned around, his eyes bulging, aflame.

  “Were you here – when this happened?”

  The brigadier stopped and approached him, as though he were squaring up. His jutting brow knotted and his grin was baleful.

  “I was here.”

  “Where are the people of this city?”

  The brigadier snorted and started to snigger.

  “Where are they?” he demanded again.

  “You didn’t see it? It was pretty hard to miss.”

  “…See what?”

  The brigadier looked momentarily out the door, as though he were considering something. Then he looked back.

  “It is close by,” he said. “We’ll get a better vantage point up top.” He marched out of the room, treading over the trails of blood from the corpses.

  He followed the brigadier up the flights of stairs until the very top from whence they attained a full view of the ruined city. They stopped outside a large, warehouse double-door and the brigadier slipped the butt of his gun in the narrow gap and levered on the frame like a crowbar to pry the door wider.

  “This way,” said the brigadier, slipping through the gap.

  He followed the brigadier’s light through a long, dark tunnel, at the end of which the red, red sky blazed through the black like the mouth of an incinerator. He emerged, and the wind whipped against his face.

  The brigadier stood waiting at the edge of a precipice, overlooking the city limits.

  “Worth a thousand words,” he said, gesturing out over the scene.

  As Saul drew nearer to the edge of the precipice, his pace slowed and his eyes flared again with a vision of fresh hell. He was standing at the head of the same black dune he had seen as they’d entered the city. Now, in proximity, he beheld what he had previously thought a long stretch of jagged ridges and saw that it was formed not of sand or stone… but a hundred thousand mortared, blackened, burned and decomposed corpses.

  The cycles of the sun had scorched the bodies black. A mist of ash blew off the cre
st of carcasses like snow off a mountain peak and the spray ignited red as Saharan sands, carrying the smell of purification into the city. He stared into the hell. His heart beat the fire through his body.

  “The orders were to purge eighty percent of the populace,” said the brigadier. “Send a clear message out to all the other cities in the region supporting the uprising. No mercy for revolutionaries.”

  “Dead,” he muttered, breathless. “They are – all – dead.”

  The cries of the past began to swirl in his mind again as the memories came flooding back. Suddenly, it all became clear: why he had wanted the past to be dead – that scalding he felt every time he looked into Naomi’s eyes. He had taken everything from her before he ever knew her. He was the one who killed her parents.

  “All the other cities surrendered a few days later,” said the brigadier. “Saved a lot of blood in the long run. Pity … All that good blood gone to waste.” The brigadier began to snigger.

  Brief though it was, the snigger resounded and rose into a laugh through the tumult in his mind. The laugh became a demonic screech and cackle getting louder and louder, flaring up his blood until every muscle in his body juddered and, finally, it all broke.

  That fire-filled sky rising off the dead was all he could see as he turned with a savage roar and hurled himself forward, driving the edge of blade straight in the side of the brigadier’s neck, pulled out and stabbed again, and again, and again, and again. With each gore of the blade through flesh and bone he bawled and hollered and sobbed and gnashed his teeth, even as he tasted the slimes of blood dash against his face, even as the body was dead and limp beneath him; he slashed, yelled, hacked, wept, dashed, until the corpse was split down the middle and the blood drenched him from the face down so that his shouts blew blood drops into the flaming sky and echoed across the land and to the ends of the earth.

  He stood up and came to the edge of the precipice.

  The candle on the bedside snuffed out. Naomi started and fell against the bedstead with a gasp. Her large eyes gaped with fear and brimmed with frightened tears, shimmering. At that moment, the door opened. She looked up. The hermit stopped with his hand on the door, staring at her, pressed up against the bedstead with the tears streaming down her frightened face.