by Quil Carter
Fucking little bitch can’t even get hard to fuck your boyfriend. Too fucked up in the brain from being raped. Fucking coward, you’re far away from Nero and safe but you’re still being a bitch about it.
“No need for worrying, blessed one.” The man’s voice snatched me from my inner thoughts. I looked up and saw him hold his palms together as if he was praying, then he bowed his head. “Unless you have committed the most horrible of sin, you have nothing to worry about.”
I raised an eyebrow. I hope he wasn’t expecting us to be virgins or anything like that. “What is the most horrible of sin?” I asked. At least I was packing my M16, so if we had committed this sin, we could open fire and ‘purify’ all of them.
Two more men, one on each side, walked over and stood on the wall beside him. They bowed as well and I observed that they also had the red-dyed eyes and long black hair. It seemed to be their thing… which was strange.
“What are your names?” the weird one in the middle asked.
Obviously we wouldn’t be using our real names. “I’m Chance,” I said, and I put a hand on Killian’s shoulder. “This is my partner, his name is Jeff.”
All three of them nodded their heads in unison. “And Chance, have you ever raped a child.”
Wha…?
Before I could stop it, my mouth dropped open. “What? No, of course not. What kind of fucked up question is that?”
The three exchanged nods before nodding at us as well. “And Jeff, have you ever raped a child?”
“No!” Killian exclaimed.
The nods continued, they looked like bobbing birds with how they did that.
And I believe from the black birds we saw flying around behind them, that’s exactly what they wanted to look like.
They said nothing more to us. The three turned around and left the top of the wall and I heard them murmuring to one another as they climbed down to the ground.
“They’re fucking crazy!” Killian hissed at me, but I raised a hand to shut him up. I heard his teeth grind together but he said nothing more, and a moment later, the sounds of rusted metal could be heard as they opened the iron gate.
I gave an impressed whistle when I saw the inside of Melchai.
Fucking everyone in front of me was dressed in a black cloak, and as these men looked at us curiously, I saw a sea of washed-out red eyes, their irises the colour of whatever their natural colour was mixed with red. They stood in the middle of a single-lane road that cut right through this town, with buildings on either side of them that were a mixture of residential and commercial houses. Every house was painted either black or red, and… there were stakes in front of a lot of these houses with dirty looking rats, the subhuman kind, tied to them – a couple arians as well but it was hard to tell if their skin was dark from the radiation, or just really filthy.
And to top off this strange town, there were those black birds everywhere. Fucking perched on streetlights, the awnings and roofs of houses, and… trees…
They had trees here!
But before I could check out the green leaves I could see poking out from behind these houses, the three cloaked figures walked into my line of sight. I could smell on them a strange aroma that reminded me of cherry gum.
“We already have several blessed ones here,” one of them said kindly. “We are always happy to receive visitors and you are welcome to buy supplies and buy our produce. You will be coming to our worship this evening as well?”
Killian’s heartbeat gave an enthusiastic jolt and I knew he’d skin me alive if I said yes. But from what they were saying before, I had a feeling that if we said no, we’d be out the gate and on our own. I wanted to buy supplies, no, I needed to buy supplies.
The rotten smell from that bottomless pit inside of me made my insides curl into themselves. It was a reminder that I needed a distraction from these thoughts currently driving me insane, from my mind that was hell-bent on ruining the peace and quiet that I had worked so hard to get for me and my boyfriend.
A boyfriend I couldn’t even be intimate with anymore.
My face felt hot and that heat spread down and enveloped my body.
“Yeah, we will,” I said, and the heart of my boyfriend began to thrash.
The man looked incredibly pleased with this, he did that squinting smile again, and the two others followed suit.
“Wonderful,” the man said. “Our shops are clearly marked, please respect our community and stay on the main street, all others are off limits unless accompanied by a Blood Crow.” He bowed again before reaching down and taking my hand into his, another one doing the same for Killian.
Then at once, all three of them said, “May Sanguine bless you.”
Whoa, what?
Sanguine?
Killian and I exchanged shocked looks, before we both turned our heads back to the cloaked weirdoes who were clasping our hands with their cold, skinny talons.
It made sense. Fuck me, it made sense.
The red eyes, fucking pointed teeth – why hadn’t I seen it before? Of course these dumbshits were imitating Sanguine. But how the hell did he become their, what, their god?
I found myself cocking an eyebrow. “Who’s Sanguine and why do I want him to bless me?”
The cloaked man who had been talking to us the most, seemed pleased at this question. He clasped his hands together and a loving look appeared on his face. “Sanguine is our blessed saviour and the immortal god who cleared away our radiation after cleansing our community of the unworthy almost forty years ago. You will be hearing more about him tonight at our worship and a grand feast will follow.”
I knew these people were obviously nuts, but… not this fucking out there.
But I had to fucking hear this shit.
So with Killian’s heart threatening to rip out of his chest to beat me to death, I smirked and nodded. “We’d love to attend!”
This fucking made him happy. The man’s pointed-tooth grin was a mile wide and he even bowed to us. “Another follower of Lord Sanguine will make Man on the Hill most happy. Come down for worship and dinner and we will tell you all about our community, and about our prophet Man on the Hill.”
I put on a fake smile, and just to be a dick, I forced a great deal of mock enthusiasm into my voice. “That sounds great!” I exclaimed. Then I grabbed Killian’s hand and we left the wing-nuts to do whatever wing-nuts did.
“Please be respectful of our crows as well,” the man called. “Do not feed them. Our crows are on a strict diet.”
“Okay,” I called back. And because I’d always be a dick I debated finding a way to poison the crows, but I tried to refrain from tempting myself with something so hilarious.
But all amused thoughts were chased from my head when I felt how hard Killian’s hands were trembling in mine. I looked at him and saw that he was staring, bug-eyes, at a staked rat. The dirty subhuman was chained to a stake in the front yard and when he saw us he started growling. Killi the weenie whimpered and clung to my arm as we passed him. I knew he was scared of everything and not just a dumb subhuman, but it was still kind of pathetic.
Unfortunately, me directing him away from the rat just reminded him of what I’d done. “What the hell are you thinking!?” His voice was so high-pitched I was expecting dogs to start to bark. “Reaver! They’re insane, we need to leave!”
“Shh… we’re fine,” I hissed. I looked around the town to get a feel for it but my eyes kept travelling back to the trees I had originally seen. There was a big one I could see in someone’s yard about half a block up. It was covered in what I guess were crows; they were perched on the branches and they reminded me again of the cloaked weirdoes.
“So I gotta assume that Sanguine had a thing for crows,” I mumbled. “They might be weird but they have stores and places to stay. You can’t expect every settlement to be full of normal greywasters, especially this far north.” I opened my mouth to say more, but I saw a glimpse of the tree I had been eyeing in someone’s back yard.
Killian gasped when I broke away from my protective hand-holding and tried to grab my arm, but I was already sprinting towards the first real, non-black tree, I’d ever seen.
I ran along the house it was behind and when I got to the person’s backyard I stared in fascinated awe.
It was so beautiful!
It was a real tree surrounded by grass so green the contrast to the greys hurt my eyes. The tree had brown bark and emerald leaves in the shapes of the clubs on a deck of playing cards. It was just standing there, about twenty feet tall, with its thick branches splayed out and its leaves shining in the grey sun. I felt like I could like… I don’t know, write a fucking song about this tree. It was just godly. Fuck Sanguine, I was going to worship this tree for the rest of my life.
I ran my hand along its bark and I turned to Killian with a wide smile. “It’s so real!” I exclaimed.
And though Killian looked uneasy and terrified by this place, when he saw the happiness on my face he calmed down a bit, and even managed to smile at my discovery.
“But baby… we don’t know if we’re allowed,” Killian said in a hushed voice. “We don’t know their rules, and this is someone’s backyard.”
I knew he was right but… I had never seen a real life tree before. One that wasn’t half-dead from the radiation and crappy sun. This might be a once in a life time opportunity, at least until I eventually travelled to Skyfall.
Then something else caught my eye. All along the backyard of the house were flowers, purple ones, blue, red, and yellow. They had three big petals and black in the center and a little bit of white so they looked like they had faces. Their colours were so bright it was incredible. I gravitated towards them.
Killian stopped me again but I couldn’t help it. I walked to the flowers and kneeled down in front of them in awe. I gently ran my fingers over the delicate petals and leaned down to smell them.
Killian giggled behind me. I gave him a glare but said nothing. I didn’t care if I looked like an idiot, this was blowing my mind. I wanted to dig up all of them and bring them to our house. I fucking wanted these everywhere; the blue ones were so blue they reminded me of Killian’s eyes.
“Mama…”
I looked up when I heard a soft but high octave voice whisper. I was surprised to see a little boy with black hair and also dyed red eyes, look at us nervously in the back door’s entrance. Strangely, he had a pair of what looked like the bear ears of a stuffed animal on his head, I guess on a headband or something.
When he saw me, he paled and ran away. I shrugged and went back to smelling the flowers, but Killian started pulling me away.
“Hello?” a female voice rang out, followed by the sounds of chains being dragged. I sighed, knowing my flower examining was over, and stood up.
Killian gasped when he saw her, but I only raised my eyebrows, though it looked like I could’ve done a lot more…
… since her eyes had been sewn shut.
Yeah.
The woman was being led to the back door by the boy. On top of having her eyes sewn shut, by thin black strings that left the puncture holes crusty and red, she had a slave collar around her neck with a long chain that led back inside of the house. Her limbs were skinny and her face gaunt, but she was heavily pregnant, and was wearing a faded green sundress and stockings that looked to be covering dime-sized sores. Kind of looked like radiation sores.
“Sorry, Ma’am,” Killian said hastily. “My boyfriend has never seen flowers before. He… he was excited. We didn’t mean to disturb you.” The look on his face told me he was done with this place, flat out done, but unfortunately I wasn’t. He needed to understand that not every community of people was like Aras. Aras was a block so it was controlled by Skyfall, and Skyfall would never allow shit like this to go on.
We were a long ways from Aras, and a longer ways from Skyfall. I wasn’t going to not get us supplies just because some whackjobs lived differently than us. We weren’t fucking super heroes and Killian had to accept that.
“Please… please leave my yard,” the woman said, her face scrunching in fear. She put a hand on her stomach and took a step back. “I can’t be seen speaking to you.” The woman pulled the boy back and shut the door with a loud slam.
I heard a male voice yell from inside of the house, followed by desperate and fearful stammering.
Then a loud smack, and a scream… and then a thud.
Killian put a hand over his mouth, his eyes full of shock over what he’d just seen and heard.
I shrugged and picked one of the flowers, a blue one. “It matches your eyes. Look.” I held it up to Killian’s face, and as the boy stared at me in undeluded terror, I compared his blue eyes, as wide as they could go, with the pretty flower.
“Sometimes I hate you so much I picture myself clawing off your face with my bare hands,” Killian said in a hushed whisper; his eyes blank and staring, suggesting that was exactly what he was doing.
I rolled my eyes and began walking back to the street, the sounds of female crying coming from the house. Killian kept looking over his shoulder, his face crumpling in sadness, but he didn’t leave my side.
“Please, Reaver, we need to leave,” he whimpered, and when he saw that I was ignoring him he gave out a small choking whine. “They worship a chimera. What if Sanguine is Man on the Hill?”
I shh’d him and gave him a warning look to keep his voice down. “I saw Sanguine, Killian.” That made his eyes widen but I continued. “He’s in Skyfall. Silas ordered him and Jack to go back to Skyfall before he left with me. Just tone it down, alright? Different settlements have different customs. These people have obviously never even heard of a chimera, they’ve been completely isolated. We can’t judge people for living their lives weirdly; shit like this happens when you don’t have teachers to teach you better.”
“That woman… her eyes…”
I shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t really care, to be honest. It’s not like we’re going to liberate all the women, rats, and kids.” I looked to another staked rat, this one with matted and stringy hair and eyes unworldly white compared to his dark skin. He was growling at us, baring yellowed teeth as we walked by while holding what looked like a brown nut. I mock advanced on him; I hated when those retarded fucks tried to act tough. “We just need supplies.”
“What about Man on the Hill?” Killian pressed.
“We’ll be gone by tonight,” I said. “And he can’t be a chimera because Elish never told me there was one here. The only greywaster immortal I know of out here is Mantis and he isn’t even a real chimera and Elish hasn’t talked to him in forever.”
Strangely Killian’s heart jumped at this. I gave him a look and saw an uncomfortable expression come to his face.
“Perish… Perish mentioned Mantis a lot. Perish wanted me to shoot a flare into the air to signal him to come get me…” Killian said. He dropped his tone even lower; he was starting to be able to do the trick that only my brothers and I could do. The whisper that only chimera hearing could pick up on. “What… what did Elish tell you about Mantis?”
I looked around the double-lane street but there wasn’t any cloaked weirdoes in earshot, just crows, and the concrete wall to our right looked thick. Still though, I spoke as quietly as I could. “Elish says he was an arian made immortal by the family but he took off for some reason,” I said. Then, in that moment, I remembered Elish’s parting words to me.
Our meeting point will be the town Mantis.
I’m sorry, my friend. You think Killian is dead and that I’m burning… and it has to stay that way.
I felt the pit of decay inside of me churn, exposing rot that had been buried underneath the more direct things that had been bothering me.
And this rot was my guilt over having Elish think I was burning and Killian dead. I’d had a fun time with Elish, even though the both of us had been stressed out and worried during our time together. In all respects, I considered Elish a part of my family now, and to
a lesser extent the little ankle biter Jade too.
There was so many bad feelings inside of me it felt overwhelming. I… I think I had to rent a room and just do some drugs. Yeah, I needed drugs.
Did Jade know what happened to me with Nero?
Fuck. Silas knew. Silas knew so everyone will know.
Everyone will know what Nero did to you.
I took in a deep breath and was horrified when my chest gave a shaking shudder. I ended up choking, as if directly breathing in the putrid aroma of my own rotting feelings, and found myself grasping my chest when my breathing began to shorten.
I looked up and saw two cloaked men watching us, their eyes narrow slits. To further my humiliation I suddenly felt an overwhelming fear that they knew too.
Everyone knows you were Nero’s screaming little bitch.
KILLIAN KNOWS TOO!
“Baby…?” Killian said lightly.
I jumped and immediately felt flustered. I knew that tone; I knew he’d noticed.
“Yeah?” I said quickly, and ran my hand down my face.
Fuck, I hated myself. I was a chimera, I was the Reaper… but right now I fucking felt like a wussy piece of shit. I couldn’t even get hard to have sex with my fucking boyfriend. What the hell was wrong with me? What the fuck was wrong with my body?
It was a physical act, nothing different from the physical torture I’d endured with Kessler. So just… fucking stop it, stop feeling this way.
The heat travelled from my face, to my ears, and the back of my neck; they smouldered like there was a pool of lava under the surface. Inside I felt such an intense hatred it made me feel physically sick.
I had been feeling like this since I realized I couldn’t perform for Killian. And when it was quiet, which it was a lot of the time since we had no electricity, the feelings came back. They were loud and echoing, and they just kept coming; flying in circles inside of my head like vultures.
Vultures circling this pit of rot.
“Don’t think dark thoughts,” I heard Killian say in a sweet and loving voice, but the tone did nothing but flood me with more humiliation. He knew I wasn’t able to get hard, there had been no avoiding it. He’d just been nice enough to not mention it.