by Quil Carter
“You fucking bastard!”
Elish turned around and saw two women running towards him, a younger one and an adult. The two sprinted with tears streaming down their faces, and further past, he saw another man and a small boy.
“That was my daddy!” the little girl screamed. Elish winced at the sound, little girl’s had the worst voices. “You bastard.”
Elish gritted his teeth and leaned against the railing of the house. He reached into his pocket again and grabbed the handgun.
“Your foolish daddy… tried to kill me,” Elish said through laboured gasps, though his mind was racing. He was going to die soon and he needed to die in peace. Greywasters let no meat go to waste and he stood to a real danger of being consumed. If that happened it could be half a year before his eaten body could fully have a chance to heal.
“What the fuck did you expect!” the little girl with brown hair in a ponytail pushed his side with small hands. “You came to our town! You shithead!” She let out a wail and smacked one of the bullet wounds on his side. “I’m glad you’re dying.”
“Chelsea, get away from him!” the woman screamed, obviously seeing the handgun. Elish managed to turn around, his vision getting distorted.
“Let me die in peace,” Elish managed to gasp. He fell to his knees and spat out the blood that was collecting in his mouth. “Legion… are there legion here?”
“Why should I help you? You just killed my brother!” the woman shouted, holding the noisy brat far away from him.
“I am a prince from Skyfall.” Elish turned around and pointed to his eyes. Her own widened. “If you can get me to a legionary – they will pay you for me. I will make you rich.”
The gun slipped from his hand and landed with a thunk onto the ground; Elish clutched his chest and stifled a groan. “Get me a legionary.”
“Fuck you!” the girl sobbed.
I really hate screaming little girls.
Elish could hear more voices around him. He looked up to see that the woman and the little girl were surrounded by more people. It seemed to be a family or a small community living together here. At least six of them, all greasy and dirty and with the same look to them. They were probably inbred, which would explain the moronic attitudes of the three he had just killed.
“He has purple eyes… he might be telling the truth,” the woman said to another one. “The last time I was in Mantis there were legionaries over there.”
Mantis… how far away is that? Elish felt a flicker of hope but the blood dripping from his wounds extinguished it.
“He just fucking killed Bobby!” an old man protested. “Why are we helping a man who just killed–”
“Because he could be more valuable to us than just food!” another voice said. Elish felt a hand on his shoulder and another one wrench him to his feet. “He’s our prisoner now, and if he dies we have dinner for the next week. Come on… let’s get him inside.”
Elish wrenched his shoulder away as the man tried to pull him to standing. He steadied himself with two hands on the porch and took in a sharp but gurgling breath. He was dying and he knew it. The fact that he was about to die, surrounded by half-starved greywasters, was filling him with feelings he had been pushing down since Kiki abandoned them with the Falconer.
Anxiety, desperation… fear.
They were feelings that had once been banned from being felt by the cold chimera. A man who had tempered his emotions, and had smoothed out almost all the imperfections he had seen in himself. Elish Dekker was well-known for being cruel, for being emotionless and uncaring for the needs of others. He went through life like a god on a pedestal, peering down at his subjects with disinterest as he ordered them around with a mere wave of his hand.
Where did that man go? Who was this person with short blond hair, filthy clothing, and fatal wounds about to allow himself to be imprisoned by parasitic greywasters not worth soiling his gaze? How had he let this happen and why was he continuing to let it happen? He was a god; he was better than every man breathing in this world today.
Stop this weakness, Elish Dekker. Stop this desperation. You have already set fire to half of your garden stop setting fire to yourself.
“Come on, asshole. You’re our fucking prisoner, if you want to live… get up and walk.”
No.
I will not delay returning to Skyfall. I will not wait for these idiots to travel miles and miles to Mantis to find me a legionary who won’t even have a remote phone. I will deal with no subhumans not worthy of gazing upon my face. I will do what must be done to ensure I am beside my husband as quickly as possible, and to hell with whoever stands in my way.
I may have taught the Reaper.
But the Reaper taught me as well.
Elish snatched the fallen handgun and whirled around. He pointed the silver gun to the little girl and shot her in the neck. She let out a sharp but short cry, before stumbling backwards onto the ground; a fountain of blood squirting up into the air and falling like crimson rain to the already red ground below.
As predicted, the others screamed and ran to her. Any other one Elish injured would call for guns and knives and attention towards killing him, but not the little girl. They would go to her.
Elish shot the man in the back of the head and threw the now empty gun at the woman kneeling over the dying girl. She cried out just as Elish raised a clenched fist and punched her with as much force as he could muster in the back of the head. The woman fell forward and Elish raised his boot and slammed it hard against her skull, twice.
He looked around and spotted the boy who had been standing underneath the awning of building. When they made eye contact he turned and ran into the house. Elish quickly scanned the area and focused his hearing, but all he could hear was the boy’s little feet running up the stairs. He listened until he heard a bedroom door slam, followed by a closet. The young one was not running for help, he was hiding. It seemed like there was no one else in this small community.
Elish walked to the area where all of this had originally happened, where three dead male greywasters lay beside their dirt bikes. Elish analysed each one and decided on a bike with chipped red paint. Then he put on one of the dead greywaster’s assault rifles and harvested the clips and ammo from the other two… then went to find the boy.
He made no attempt to mask his movements as he walked up the stairs, and when he opened the bedroom door, he even tapped the barrel of the assault rifle against the ground.
“If you wish for me to let you live, you will come out of that room and tell me where the gas cans are being kept,” Elish said curtly.
There was silence but the boy’s heartbeat was racing and Elish could hear short gasps as he struggled to get breath into his tight chest.
“I don’t suggest you dawdle,” Elish said loudly. “I am pressed for time and have no patience for little greywaster boys. Come out now and show me where the fuel is being kept. If I had an intention of killing you, I’d be littering the closet door with bullets.”
Just as Elish’s patience was wearing thin, he heard movement and the door open. A boy perhaps seven or eight pushed the door open and stepped out. He was huddled in on himself and trembling as he stared down at the ground.
“Where are the gas cans being kept?” Elish asked again. He stepped away from the door and motioned for the boy to go first. “Show me where they are.”
The boy started walking towards the exit to the bedroom, and when he had to walk past Elish, his pace quickened. Elish followed him down the stairs and outside.
When the boy saw the massacre in full view in the middle of the street, his face twisted and he looked away. He let out a sob and started stumbling down the street towards what looked like a garage to a now crumbled home.
The boy pointed to it, and wiped his snotty nose with his sleeve. Elish walked past him and stood in front of the metal door. He looked it from top to bottom and grabbed onto a blue rope tied to a metal handle and, with an assaultingly loud sound of sc
reeching rusted metal, he pulled the garage door up.
Elish let out a breath of relief when he saw a full jug of fuel. He wished for more but it would do. He had no way of carrying more than that anyway. So he went inside and grabbed the can and turned around to exit the garage.
And in his stealth the little boy had managed to grab a gun.
“Put that away,” Elish said bitterly. “I have no time for–”
The boy fired it at Elish, the sound deafening inside of the garage. It missed Elish but by only inches.
Though what it ended up hitting was much worse.
The explosion knocked Elish off of his feet and for a moment his mind escaped him. He didn’t know what the bullet had hit, all he knew was that it was combustible.
Elish’s teeth clenched and he forced his senses back into him. He opened his eyes and saw that his overcoat was on fire, and there was liquid around him consumed in flames as well.
He got to his feet with the gas can and looked behind him. The entire north wall was on fire and everything that had been hung up on it, from coils of ropes, to tools, and oddly, a fishing net, was engulfed in yellow and orange flames. The fire was filling the garage with toxic smoke that made Elish’s already swimming head pound, and his lungs burn like he was inhaling the flames themselves.
He ran out, took his smouldering overcoat off and discarded it, and as he sped down the street towards the dirt bike, he saw the boy running from him, gun in hand.
Elish put the can down and got out the assault rifle… then shot the boy in the back without hesitation. He then quickly topped off the dirt bike with gasoline and got on it, and put the gas can between his legs to steady it as well as he could.
With his eyes hard granite and his mouth pursed tight, he turned on the dirt bike and revved it. Then he turned it in the direction he’d been heading, and started driving back down the cracked double-lane road, not a glance spared for the boy he left behind in a pool of blood.
Chapter 8
Reaver
“Your heart is about to burst out of your chest like that thing from Alien,” I said to him with a laugh. I squeezed Killian’s hand firmly in my own and gave him a smile. A smile that I injected as much confidence into as I could.
Killian’s eyes were huge, and his pupils a small black life raft being consumed by a blue ocean. He looked behind him to the unassuming garage where we’d parked the quad and I saw him bite down on his lip. He had a look on him that screamed terror and I understood why.
Melchai was approaching and I could now see each individual structure and the colours of their roofs. It was a large town and I remember Hopper saying that half of it was uninhabitable because it was ass-to-ass with the plaguelands and the radiation was too strong. Before the Fallocaust, Melchai was a huge town but now the parts of it actually occupied were clustered to the south area and the other unoccupied areas had been harvested for firewood or farmland.
And that was something else that was unique and interesting to Melchai. Hopper had told us all stories about the farmland and how portions of Melchai had been cleared from the radiation.
How they had done it was a mystery, but Elish had mentioned Sanguine having a connection to this place, so perhaps he’d brought Silas in to clear it off to be nice.
Fucked if I knew the reason, I just knew none of them would be here now and we could get ourselves some actual food. Perish’s money was burning a hole in my pocket and there was a lot of shit I wanted to bring back to our place.
Yesterday we had spent all day clearing out what we’d decided would be our new house. It backed the river and was nice inside. The entire top floor was two bedrooms which we could easily tear down to make one big master bedroom, and there were two smaller main floor bedrooms for storage and Perish’s stuff. In the excitement of it, I had gotten a kind-of-looking-forward-to-going-to-Melchai from Killian.
Okay, maybe not looking forward to it, but he didn’t have an anxiety attack over it.
“I just…” Killian swallowed hard and shifted closer to me. He was wearing a grey beanie with a red stripe on his head to cover his almost entirely bald head, and I myself had a hat on as well. None of our eyes were a weird colour though, so I wasn’t sweating it. We both just looked like greywasters. “I just don’t want to be here… Hopper said they were crazy.”
“We’ll be fine,” I reassured. “You’re my immortal boy. Worst comes to worse, we die and come back. Isn’t that a pretty good worst case scenario?”
Killian let out a slow breath. “The radiation was cleared from certain areas of this place and that had to be from King Silas.”
“And it was done many years ago,” I reminded him. “The only risky thing would be if we were slaves and we’re not slaves. It’s spring now, right? Shouldn’t there be some fruit and stuff in season?”
Killian’s mouth twisted to the side. “It’s the beginning of June so, yeah, there will but… Hopper also commented that they had greenhouses.” He frowned some more, but when I planted a kiss on his cheek. I felt the skin tense, and I saw I’d managed to kiss up a smile. To keep up the reassuring affection, I pinched his chin and kissed him again.
But that was it for the kisses. We were close enough to the town that I could see people standing around the shabby wall that surrounded it. So I went back into greywaster mode and slipped my hand out of Killian’s. I stood up straight and Killian did too and we walked towards what I gathered was their east gate.
As I got closer to the gate though I noticed that the sentries standing guard were all wearing black robes with hoods over their heads – that was kind of weird.
And there was something else too… I was about to point it out to Killian when he elbowed me first.
“There are birds here, Reaver,” Killian whispered. He pointed to the sky just as a black bird flew from one roof top to the other. “I think those are crows, or ravens.”
“Hm…” I glanced at the bird, its black wings flapping as it landed on top of one of the bigger buildings, and when my eyes focused on that building, I realized there were more black birds perched on it… a lot of them. “Interesting.”
“I have a really bad feeling about this place,” Killian whispered, but I shushed him and he said nothing else. We were too close to the gate and these people were no doubt watching and listening to us.
The gate looked to originally be an iron rung gate, one of the ones you would see in front of fancy mansions, but it was covered in sheet metal, several pieces thick, which had been painted red. In specific places the bold red paint was faded, however; and when I saw a bird perched on top of the gate, right on one of the faded streaks, I put two and two together and assumed it was from them scraping off bird shit.
“Ah, blessed visitors!” Killian sprung up into the air like a frightened cat when that voice suddenly sounded from behind the gate. I put a hand on his shoulder as he took in a shocked breath and looked up to address whoever it was that was talking to us.
It was one of the people we had seen on the wall. He was dressed in a black robe with a hood drawn over his head, and he had stringy black hair that framed a ghostly white face.
But wait a fucking second…
The man had red eyes, but not the irises, the entire white of his eye was a washed-out red and the iris a weird purple colour.
I think… I fucking think this dude had put food colouring in his eye or something.
“You are early for our Festival of the Blood Crows, blessed visitors,” the man said with a weird closed-mouth smile. “Or are you here to receive blessing? We welcome visitors as long as you are pure.” The man bowed his head and spread his arms – there were… fucking feathers sewn into his arms.
“I want to go,” Killian whimpered beside me, his voice low enough that the weirdo didn’t hear him. Unfortunately I was a bit too fascinated with what I was seeing.
“We’re here for supplies,” I said to the weirdo. “We need to stock up and if you sell your fruits and vegetables, we’
d like to buy some as well. Do you… accept regular visitors?”
The man’s closed-mouth smile suddenly split into a grin. Killian gasped beside me when we both saw that his teeth had been chiselled into points. “Of course, of course.” The weirdo nodded and clasped his hands together. “Yes, yes, we allow visitors as long as they will agree to be purified.”
“Reaver…” Killian whispered, his voice high and full of terror.
“Shh,” I said to him. “We need supplies. We were originally stopping here with Hopper anyway and he would’ve told us if they were going to murder us all, right?”
The expression of horror on Killian’s face didn’t diminish in the least. Yeah, sure, it was a pretty crappy bit of reasoning but something was stopping me from wanting to turn and leave. Call it morbid curiosity or call it wanting supplies, I didn’t know.
I was kind of enjoying taking risks to be honest. For so long I had been having to be overly cautious to make sure Killian was safe. Before Killian I was running head first into any danger that I came upon, with no fear for my own safety. Reno and I had done so many stupid things during our adventures, and we didn’t need to fucking justify it – we just did it because we wanted to fucking do it.
And I wanted to fucking do this. So fuck what Killian thinks, I… I…
I needed to get out of that plaguelands house… I needed to not be alone with my own thoughts.
My throat went dry as that realization entered my head.
That was it, wasn’t it?
I pushed it down, far, far down into the colourless void. Far down where all my other thoughts were currently rotting on top of each other. At one point in time it was easy to throw those thoughts into that pit and forget about them. But now there were too many and they were decomposing into one big pile of rotten flesh, maggots, and a smell that would make even me want to cut off my nose.