The Suicide King Volume 1 (The Fallocaust Series Book 3)

by Quil Carter

  The narrow concrete path took us to another section of raised beds and tall green trees busting with fruit, but this one was full of black-hooded men and alive with their murmuring.

  They were everywhere, at least fifty of them, and not a woman or a child in sight. The Blood Crows were gathered around an empty raised bed talking in hushed voices, a floodlight shining on the bed which was only about seven feet away from the concrete wall. This wall appeared to be backing the no-go radiation zone that was the north area of Melchai, which was interesting.

  And there were buildings still beyond this wall. I spotted one tall enough to peek over the rough concrete; it was dark, with a collapsed roof that was crushed against the structure like a god had put their palm on top of it and pressed down.

  “Behind that wall… just radiation?” I asked.

  Zach nodded. “Yes, everything beyond this wall is coated in lethal radiation.”

  We weaved through the crowd until we found a good spot and a good view. I was content beside a gnarled cherry tree that was covered in beautiful red cherries. It was funny though because my boot kept getting untied, so I kept on having to crouch down to tie it.

  And weirdly, I was chewing every time I stood back up.

  Killian elbowed me. “I got us a grocery bag full of cherries,” he whispered. “And I rolled the quad in further into the garage, but I didn’t see anyone when the guys that helped me load the generator onto the quad’s trailer.”

  I reached down for another cherry and placed it into my mouth. Then, when I righted myself, I slid my arm around Killian’s neck and kissed him. I pushed the cherry into his mouth and, thankfully, he got the idea as to what I was doing and didn’t choke.

  He chewed it and spit out the pit, then put it into a pocket in his satchel.

  “You know we won’t be able to grow anything in the plaguelands, right?” I whispered to him.

  “Yeah,” he said, but then he looked at me with hopeful eyes. “But I thought since you can make radiation, it means you can clear it too, right?”

  I hadn’t even given it any thought, but I guess he was right.

  “I guess I can give it an attempt,” I said. “I don’t think I can do it on demand though but since Silas can… eventually I’ll learn to do it better.”

  The gathering of the cloaked weirdoes suddenly fell quiet. Killian and I both looked up to see the black figures, packed tight and shoulder to shoulder, looking behind them towards another entrance in this concrete room.

  We turned and watched as well. Everything was quiet, but I could hear a pulse in the far corners of my brain. It was their heartbeats, but they would remain just a faint noise unless I tuned my hearing to amplify it.

  Then an old man with glasses emerged, he had to be the oldest person I’d ever seen. His face was just made up of wrinkles, and he was bald except for a strip of white that went from ear to ear. The old man was leaning heavily on a cane, and was being escorted by Zach and two other men about middle age. He must’ve slipped away after helping us find a perch.

  Zach and the other two helped the old man to the front, and then with a bow, the three disappeared back into the dark corridor. The concrete path looked to be heading west but what was west was anyone’s guess. How big this concrete wall was, and how much of Melchai it covered, I didn’t know and it was hard to tell. Killian and I had stuck to the main street and had only branched off for the mini home. For all I knew this wall could have half of the town enclosed in it.

  A scream suddenly ripped through the air. Killian’s heart jumped but everyone else around us seemed completely unfazed. I sighed internally when Killian started giving the entrances to this place stricken looks, and when I didn’t pay attention to his hinting, he started looking at me.

  Another scream, this one pleading in a strangled, shrieking tone.

  “These people are monsters,” Killian whispered. I squeezed his hand but said nothing, and like I was saved by the bell, the old man began rapping his cane against the side of the wooden crate, and all attention was turned to him.

  “Sanguine bless you all,” the old man said, his voice rather loud for being so ancient.

  “Sanguine bless you too,” the Blood Crows all murmured back, and they were saying this as yet another scream broke the darkening night sky.

  “It has been six months since Brother Jenkin required verbal purification,” the old man said. He put both hands on his crow’s head cane and looked ahead. “Brother Jenkin, come up here.”

  Verbal purification? I watched intently, curiousity creating many dead cats around me, and was fascinated when this Jenkin person made his way through the parting crowd to the front, where the old man was.

  His lips were sewn shut, just like the pregnant chick’s eyes. This made me look more closely at the other Blood Crows and, sure enough, I could see some of them had, not just their mouths shut, but their eyes, as well as some had coverings on their ears. I even saw a man who had his hands bound in barbwire.

  So that was how purification was achieved? It made me wonder what the ‘ultimate purification’ was.

  Jenkin bowed in front of the old man and everyone murmured their ‘bless you’ bullshit, and then he was ushered into a dark corner by a hunched over dude holding pliers. I couldn’t see what was going on, the floodlight buggered my night vision, but I could guess he was getting the stitches removed.

  “We have visitors today as well,” the old man looked towards me and Killian, and so did everyone else. “Zachariah has been your chaperone. He tells me you’ve shown great interest in the Blood Crows and our Lord and saviour. During our tribute tonight and while this fortunate slave reaches our highest levels of purification… I shall tell you the origins of our blessed Sanguine.” There was a sea of bobbing heads and while this was going on, the old man tapped his cane against the wooden box.

  That must’ve been the signal because another scream broke up the quiet head nodding. This one was really close too. I looked to my right and saw a glow of a lamp becoming brighter and brighter in the corridor; and then Zach appeared, a chain in his hand.

  At first I thought they were pulling a rat, but what was forcefully dragged into the clearing wasn’t a rat at all, but an arian slave – and he was fucked up.

  The man was naked, and his skin was this sickening off-green colour. He was on the extreme side of skinny but his stomach was bulging. The same kind of bulging I had seen last year when I’d pulled Killian from one of the fois ras pods.

  The crowd parted as he was dragged through, a low and desperate moaning coming from lips that seemed… disfigured. It wasn’t until he was brought to the light that I saw that his lips were split open on the corners, also not unlike Killian’s, except this man’s cuts were a good inch and a half on each side, and they hadn’t been closed.

  “Please…” the man rasped. Killian tensed beside me. “Please… arian… I’m a damn arian!” The splits on his mouth made him look like he was a Muppet, and inside of that mouth was a black teeth and tongue.

  No, not just black… it looked like it was coated in fur.

  “You are not an arian now, blessed one,” the old man said calmly. The two men who were with Zach pulled the man’s head back, allowing the old man to rest a hand on top of his head.

  Everyone else bowed their heads too and began to mumble a prayer.

  “No… no! Please…” The man looked around desperately and unfortunately made eye contact with the two people who weren’t praying. “Please… fucking get me out of here. I’m not even a fucking slave, I was sold by my fucking ex-boyfriend.” His eyes began to fill with tears. “Come on, dude, three months ago I was fucking just like you. My… my name’s Matthew McCowell, I’m from a settlement near Mariano.”

  Killian’s hand gripped mine and his jaw locked. That asshole just had to humanize himself, didn’t he?

  “No,” I hissed to Killian.

  “No, what?” he whispered back. “No saving them? Of course not, you don’t save
people because you have no soul.”

  I squeezed his hand hard, really hard, until Killian hissed and started to shrink down from the pain, and when I loosened my grip I heard him mumble. “I’m clawing off your face in my mind.”

  A shriek and a series of No! No! No! brought both of our attentions back to the front of the gathering. Killian took my hand again and scrunched close to me. Then we both saw a cloaked figure coming towards the slave with a long metal tube, but cut length wise so it was like a half pipe, and a plastic bucket full of something heavy.

  “First off,” the old man said, loudly over the man’s screams, “let me tell you the story of Sanguine.” One of the men holding the slave grabbed his jaw, and while the slave struggled and screamed he forced it open. The Blood Crow with the metal half-tube shoved it into his mouth, and another one took a blue scoop out of the bucket. The smell of shit, dirt, and chemical reached my nose.

  “Come on…” My brow knitted when I heard this whisper come from Killian. “Come on,” he said again.

  I stared at him, but he refused to make eye contact.

  “… and the townspeople, the unworthy as we called them, threw rocks at young Sami and chased him from our town. All because Sanguine was born with a special and unique gift of having eyes like blood and dangerously beautiful pointed teeth.”

  What the hell was Killian up to?

  “Now I will tell you about The Putrid One,” the old man wheezed on. The Blood Crow poured the blue scoop, containing a thick black liquid, down the cylinder and into the man’s mouth. He immediately began to choke and gag; his body starting to shudder and shake from either fear or tremors.

  And the other Blood Crows began to murmur.

  “Bless him. Bless him.”

  “The Putrid One was a man who exchanged meth for little boys to rape and abuse. The townspeople knew this was happening but they turned a blind eye to it. Why? Because they wanted their drugs. They gave him these children knowing what fates awaited them.” The old man shook his head in sadness, and right beside him the slave’s screamings had become gurgling gags. The bright light on him was illuminating his bulbous stomach; his veins, snares of red and blue, some varicose, bulging out of his descended abdomen.

  Bless him. Bless him.

  “It so happened that when Sanguine was chased from this town The Putrid One followed him and imprisoned him in his basement. He spent eleven years raping and abusing him until Sanguine grew strong and killed the Putrid One with an inferno of fire he could make come out of his hands. Then Sanguine left but his heart was dark and soured from his time imprisoned.”

  They withdrew the metal half-cylinder from the slave’s mouth, and the one holding him clamped it shut. A needle flashed in the floodlight, connected to a thick suture, and as the slave moaned, his eyes bugged out, absolutely terrified, they began to stitch his mouth shut. It didn’t take long; they seemed like pros.

  “Then… almost forty years ago, on August 2nd, 192 A.F, Sanguine came back to Melchai. Melchai was full of the unworthy. It was full of rapists, murderers, drug users; it was full of the worst people of the greywastes. And since it was so close to the plaguelands, their madness from the radiation only made it worse. Sanguine saw the evils that ran rampant in this town, and he started coming at night and sacrificing all who gave in to evil.”

  The slave was picked up, he wasn’t thrashing that much anymore, and was laid down inside of the empty raised bed. It was then I realized just what they were doing… they were force-feeding the slaves fertilizer before they buried them in the raised beds. I guess to make the soil more nutritious for the plants.

  Smart.

  “Come on…” Killian whispered.

  The old man raised his hands into the air and looked to the dark sky, the night clear and the moon shining down on us. “But then… Sanguine got caught!”

  Bless our Lord Sanguine. Bless our Lord Sanguine.

  “The townspeople paraded Sanguine around like a monster, crucified on boards like he had crucified them; all led by an evil man who had known Sanguine before. That man hung Sanguine up in front of the Holi Inn and everyone threw rocks at him, until he died.”

  Then the five who had been controlling the slave reached to their belts and pulled out knives.

  Bless him. Bless him. The murmuring got louder, and their voices closer together, until it was a rhythmic beat. Bless him. Bless him. Bless him.

  They didn’t stab him like I thought they would, instead the men wearing their black cloaks, the hoods drawn over their heads, stood on four corners, and one on the front. They lowered their knives onto the slaver’s skin, both arms, both legs, and his head, and slid the blades down, leaving a thin, but not fatal, laceration.

  And that’s when I heard the first crow. I looked up and, yep, the fucking cherry tree was full of them.

  Dinner time? Not just fertilizer for the plants, but food for the crows.

  They were on a special diet after all.

  “Sanguine was dead on the crucifixion and they left him there to rot. The stories say crows from all around landed on him, crows with eyes as red as his.” The old man looked above me, and I knew he saw them too. Right on cue. “They cawed and called his name and grieved for him, even when the people threw rocks at the crows they did not leave. And it was because the crows knew something that mere humans did not…” The old man smile came back and I knew what was coming. “… they knew Lord Sanguine was no man at all, but a god. At twelve-thirty that night, Sanguine’s eyes flew open and he woke… Sanguine rose from the dead. He pulled his arms free from the nails driven into his hands, and stepped down from the crucifixion to everyone’s shock. He stood in front of the astonished crowd, his crimson eyes shining like hellfire, and demanded–”

  Suddenly gunshots rang, sharp cracks but not from automatics, these ones were from a handgun.

  And unlike the ignored screams, every single Blood Crow turned towards the noise and I saw the old man’s face drop from shock.

  A man burst through the concrete corridor. “The slaves are escaping!” he yelled frantically. “They got knives. One has a gun! They shot Brother Bertand.” He looked behind him and gasped. Then there was a loud crack; the bottom of his jaw flew off of his face and he was thrown backwards from the force.

  “How!” Zach demanded. His eyes scanned the black-hooded cultists before they fell on me and Killian. I swore in my head, thinking they were going to pin this shit on us, but instead of that he ran up to us, frantic.

  “You have guns, we don’t carry guns to our worship. Please, help us get them back. We need them for our festival we’re already short slaves!” His tone was shrill and panicked, and even though it was night his pupils were tiny.

  “We will,” Killian said, a little too enthusiastic if you ask me; and before I even got a word in, Killian was pulling me down the corridor, flickers of fire flashing and shining on the concrete walls.

  We ran out into a room inside of these concrete walls that had, what I’d assume, were slave pens: shanty houses coated in tar, dirty and smelling intensely like piss and shit. Blood Crows were fleeing down another maze-like corridor, and I heard one of them yelling to grab as many guns as they could.

  “Follow me,” Killian said hastily. He ran along the wall and down a northern corridor, opening up to yet another section of raised beds all in rows, and further on, trees, but the dirt in these beds smelled heavily of rot. I assumed other slaves had been buried here.

  “There it is!” Killian sounded excited. I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, or what the hell he’d been up to while I was sleeping, but he took me to a thick gnarled tree with limbs as big as my arm, and he started to climb.

  “No!” Zach yelled at us. “There’s lethal radiation! It’ll kill you!”

  “We won’t be out in there long,” Killian yelled back. “We’ll get you those slaves!” He jumped onto the concrete wall and slid off and into the darkness below.

  I got onto the wall and glare
d down at him. “What the hell are you up to?” I hissed.

  My night vision adjusted itself and I saw a sheepish grin from him. “Balancing you out and being your voice or morality. Come on and jump, the quad isn’t far.”

  I growled but jumped down onto the ground. I looked around but didn’t see anything but a couple crumbled structures in the distance and the big building I’d spotted from the ceremony.

  “What did you do?” I snatched his hand and began dragging him west, near where we’d entered Melchai. The concrete wall, a white glow against the darkness, looked to turn into the wall we’d seen covering Melchai. If I wasn’t mistaken the quad wasn’t far.

  Killian seemed really proud of himself, but I was fuming that he hadn’t tipped me off to what he’d been doing under my nose.

  When he saw the anger on my face he looked away, but that didn’t wipe the smirk from his face. “I just… Charles took me to the store and he accidently took a bag of our food. I was given a good excuse to follow him behind the wall and got lost…” The smirk turned into a grin, and even though I was glaring at him, oddly he hadn’t burst into flames yet. “I stumbled upon the slave pens and I simply slipped a handgun and two butterfly knives I had in my bag… under a gap in the slave pen’s walls… then I ran and found Charles.”

  I shook my head, my teeth still locked. “That was pretty fucking dangerous,” I hissed. “What if they catch them and interrogate them?”

  “They didn’t see me,” Killian replied simply.

  “I don’t give a shit. They could’ve fucking caught you. It’s dangerous.”

  “Kind of like remaining in a town full of chimera worshipping cultists?” Killian said, his tone annoyingly cocky. “But hey, I’m immortal.” He smiled at me. “It means we can take risks and have some fun right?”

  I stared at him. “One day I’m going to start beating on you.”

  “One day, right to the moon?” he giggled.

  “One day right in the face,” I growled. I looked ahead, we were nearing the end of the wall. “Hurry up, we might as well fucking go home.” This kid was getting a little too daring for his own good. He did all of this behind my back and had kept it hidden from me.