by Quil Carter
Gage, still staring at the body, considered this. “As long as I am back within a month… I believe that will work. Sanguine is too weak now anyway and… I’d like to meet this Elish, this… powerful man I’ve heard so much about.” He sighed and nodded. “Yes. I will go with you.”
I was so full of hope and excitement I felt like I was going to burst, but in those happy feelings was the dark underbelly, one that held doubt, anxiety, and even apprehension. What if Elish wasn’t there? For all I knew he could be in Irontowers, or the outlands. I could be way off.
But when I thought of Elish’s last words, the hope returned. Mantis was a friend of his and it was entirely possible he’d be staying with him. If my master was in mourning over me and his failed plans, if he had left the family, he wouldn’t be in any of the family’s hidden apartments. He’d be nowhere where they’d be able to locate him.
I knew my master inside and out, and my knowledge of him was pulling me back to the area of the greywastes where our adventures had taken place. The last location we had been together before my brain had failed me. In a lot of ways, it was the last place where we’d been happy.
I just knew he was here, my heart told me he was close and we shared a bond, an invisible string, that would always draw us to each other.
In a matter of days, I would come back from the dead, and take my place beside my master… where I belonged.
The plane landed a mile from a modest settlement, with a wall surrounding it made out of sheet metal and bricks. I jumped off with Gage and two backpacks full of supplies. Thankfully in these backpacks, that were always kept in the crates, were a couple hundred bucks as well. It would be enough to live off of for the month, but barely.
Theo bid us goodbye and remained in the Falconer with the resurrecting body of Sanguine. It was just me and this strange new guy now, and I hoped that he didn’t have any secrets he was keeping from me. So far he seemed nice, easily spooked and kind of timid, but I could tell he had a good heart on him and his aura reflected that opinion.
Gage was standing stiff and with his jaw set; he was looking around the area we’d been dropped off in. We were standing on a two-lane road, covered with gravel and dust that had been blown in throughout the years. Around us, the road framed blackened remains of houses. They were in all directions and stood out like we were in the middle of a freshly dug graveyard. None of them had been spared of the fire, but when my eyes focused on each individual one, I saw that they were in different stages of being claimed by the dead world. Some of them, the closest ones to us, appeared to have been burned during the last winter. The charcoal was fresh, and when I walked to a thick beam standing like a greywastes tree, the black rubbed off easily to stain my hands. But looking past the dark bones of the house’s frame and burned contents within it, I saw other houses now covered in a cloak of dirt and dust.
Out of curiosity, I walked to it and started kicking away rusted cans, now brittle as paper and covering my shoes in flakes of brown, and nudged a couch that had been reduced to springs.
“I think they have been harvesting the houses for firewood and whatever they can salvage,” I said to Gage. I bent down and picked up a children’s book, its pages swelling the colourful book to three times its size. I put it back and walked out of the frame. Then I noticed that there were no trees in the vicinity, it was all flat and rocky; the only thing erupting from the ground were the burned frames that would eventually fall too. “I wonder what they’ll do when the wood is gone.”
Gage watched me walk by, then I heard him start to follow me. “Why don’t they just grow more trees?” he asked.
Inside I just shook my head, amazed at just how little this man knew of our world. “Some do grow but it’s really rare,” I said. “The radiation is still strong. It’s just survivable to humans if they’re Geigerchipped. It gets rid of the radiation. We chip domestic animals too, but there isn’t a way for us to keep it from the plants, plus…” I glanced up at the sky. “Even though we get blue skies and sunshine, the sun is still cloaked and it’s not as strong as it used to be. So everything grows stunted unless you have a lot of human intervention. So we have it in Skyfall but in a place like this, literally on the fringes of the habitable greywastes… they can barely grow anything.”
“Why would they live so far out here then?” Gage asked. He was now walking side by side with me as we walked to the town. “So far from Skyfall?”
“Some people don’t like laws and authority,” I replied. I led him off of the road, which would take us northeast and away from Garnertown, and we started walking around more charred houses. “If you want benefits from Skyfall, you live in what’s called a block. For the residents of a block, you get Ratmeal to grow rats for consumption, those are subhumans not actual rodents. You also get Geigerchips for a reduced cost, and protection from the Legion but only for big things like invasions or something, the block has separate law enforcement. You also get grants, like you get a certain amount of money for each stray cat you have and for each pet cat, but you also get penalties if more than normal die. Fucking Silas loves cats.” Then I laughed. “That’s actually a quality we all share. I guess you might not, since you’re an entirely different type of born immortal, right?”
Gage lowered his gaze. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I don’t remember that much. I just remember walking for a long time. I died a lot. The world that is uninhabitable is a terrifying place with terrifying things. I don’t want to go back there. I cannot go back to that place. There were terrible creatures out there… are there ones here?”
His eyes widened when I nodded my head. “I mean, it’s safer than where the radiation is too lethal for humans but it’s still dangerous out here. We have ravers, which are arians whose Geigerchips either broke, or they stumbled into an area with too high of concentration. It doesn’t kill them, it just drives them insane, makes them unable to get infections so they have grotesquely deformed bodies and faces. They differ in intelligence but…” I smirked and decided to not tell him about what I had done to my ravers. “… but some of them can be pretty smart. We also have centipods, giant centipedes that eat humans, deacons, those are giant wolves, celldwellers, those are humans with horribly long limbs that are like nine feet tall, and the worst of all… the greywasters.” I chuckled at my own joke, but Gage’s already wide eyes bugged out at this. “Some are nice, but a majority of them are so starved, desperate for food and safety, they’ll kill you if you so much as cough. My friend Reaver, he hunted and ate legionaries for sport, he was quite the murderer, but that’s just what you have to be to survive here. It’s a rough and unforgiving existence.”
“Yes… you’re all cannibals. I remember that,” Gage said in a tone that I just knew was judging me.
“Cannibalism is a way of life here. The taboo of it went out the window during the Fallocaust,” I said. “We don’t have a choice, not with how skinny and stringy the animals are. We farm the subhumans, and eat convicts or the elderly who have finished their retirement time. We eat the ravers too.”
I saw Gage turn a bit green, but he nodded. “I could have as well. I don’t remember. I just know we didn’t do that before the Fallocaust.”
I had to laugh at that. “There were a lot of things we didn’t do before the Fallocaust, but then the world ended, and in order to survive… we had to adapt. And we did.” My laughter faded though and I started to get a prickle of doubt in my heart. “Gage… you’re going to have to toughen up if you want to live in this world. This isn’t dog-eat-dog, this is human-eat-human. Only the tough ones survive.”
“I’m immortal,” Gage said simply. “We survive anyway.”
True… “Yeah, but if you don’t toughen up, Silas will eventually find you and encase you again, right? You have that to worry about.”
Right in front of me the nauseas expression on Gage’s face faded, and it was replaced by a glint that I could only describe as both fear and solemn resolve. “He will not take us
,” he replied simply. “No matter what I have to do… Silas will not put us back in there.”
The conversation died after that, and we both continued on our way towards Garnertown.
It looked like this place hadn’t been taken by my ravers. The walls were intact and the buildings looked decrepit but in a greywastes way, not so much as a ‘ravers came in and burned everything and ate everyone’ sort of way. There weren’t any crucifixions either, and that had really become our thing when we had taken over Velstoke.
While we walked towards the town, my imagination went wild thinking of what my ravers could be doing now and what would eventually come of them. The Legion was supposed to be swarming this place looking for Kessler’s head, so that might spell bad news for my subjects. I hoped they would be able to fight them. I owed my life to the ravers, without them I would’ve died cold inside of an abandoned shack. Plus Elish might’ve never found me.
The two of us stepped onto the road that would lead us to Garnertown. This road had several vehicles on it, some pushed off of the road and others left where they’d died. I even spotted a camper, and amusingly enough, there was a clothesline attached to it and a rust-streaked white van. It looked to be occupied, so I decided to give them a wide berth, no need to talk to anyone who could be hostile. I wanted to check out the town, not have a conversation with a greywaster.
As we approached I started to hear the rumbling sounds of a generator but it was faint. I looked around the burned out frames, and found a detached garage hiding behind a two-level house that still had the upper level intact. When we got close enough, I could see an extension cord which laid on the ground like a large snake, and eventually disappeared into one of the camper’s windows.
Then I saw the door of the camper open. We kept walking, but my fingers drummed against the pistol I’d borrowed from Theo.
When I saw a rifle in the man’s hand, his eyes watching us as we walked along the road, I decided since we’d already been spotted, to give him a wave so he knew we weren’t hostile. He nodded at us and by his legs a medium-sized black and white dog poked its head out and gave us a low woof.
“If you’re going to Garnertown, I’d think twice about it,” the man suddenly called, pushing the dog’s head back inside with his foot. “They’re on lockdown from a raver attack several weeks ago. They’re not taking in anyone new.”
Well shit. “Do you know which direction Mantis is in?” I called to him. “That’s where we want to end up.”
The man waved his hand in a beckoning fashion. “That’s west,” he called and pointed behind him. “Several days walk, two since you two look young and capable.” He then motioned to me and his chapped lips disappeared into his mouth. “I can tell you a good place to camp for the night, but I want water for that information. Just a bottle.”
If I could avoid a confrontation I’d take it. Plus we needed a place to sleep for the evening and night was going to be on us before we knew it. “Okay,” I called. “But we’re leaving it here and then going west. No offense but we’re not in Skyfall, so we’re not going to visit.”
The man nodded and rested his rifle on his shoulders. “Do you want to trade smoked meat for more water? I have arian.”
I paused. In my pack were just energy bars and a couple cans of fois ras and flaked rat meat. I wouldn’t mind some fresher meat, and if Mantis was only two days away we’d have extra.
“Okay, but you leave your gun there.”
Another nod. I heard Gage make a nervous noise in his throat, but I ignored it, and started jogging towards the man waiting for us in front of his rusty camper.
The man had the usual gaunt and half-starved look of any greywaster, with short curly dark hair and dark eyes. He had glasses on too that were being kept together with duct tape, and the rifle he left behind was so rusted I wasn’t sure it would actually work.
I had learned enough from Reaver to not turn my back to him. I motioned for him to go ahead of us. He nodded, walked along the side of his camper, and disappeared around the corner.
We followed, and when I turned the corner I saw a small smoke house that had been hiding behind the camper. It looked to have been converted from an old shed, and there was smoke, faint and almost invisible from the heat, coming out of a tin-wrapped chimney.
“Smells good,” I commented. I took off my backpack and started rummaging around. “So what’s the trade? Two pounds for two bottles?”
“Sounds fair,” I heard him say. “As for the location I spoke about. You’re going to want to spend the night in Junction subdivision. You’ll hit it in about three hours. The houses are intact, new builds that haven’t had people in it. Good place to spend the night.”
I nodded, looked up with the two bottles in hand, and watched him open up the shed door.
My eyes widened when I saw three small bodies hung up by their legs. Their skin was baked to a golden brown, in some areas holding small bubbles filled with grease, and their heads, genitals, and hands had been removed. Their feet remained however, to tether them easily to rusted hooks on the ceiling, shrivelled things that glistened with grease, with small toes that resembled little raisins. One of them was a toddler, the other two perhaps six or seven, but who knows how much their bodies had shrunk from the continuous heat.
The man brought out a knife he had resting on a stump and spun one of the older kid corpses so its back was to the front. I saw several chunks had already been carved out of its backside and the meat showing through had already started hardening to a dark red. The smell was alluring, however; and even though these were arian kids, my mouth started to water.
“T-those are kids?” Gage said faintly.
I shot him a look, and when we made eye contact I gave him a piercing glare. I didn’t care if he had been encased for years, he had to learn the rules out here and I wasn’t going to look a gift corpse in the mouth. Water for two pounds of kidlet was a good trade off. Who cares how they died?
Gage deflected his gaze and turned around. He started walking to the west, and since he was in the right direction, I let him go off to pout.
Then the man got up and gave his chest a funny look. “Weird, my Geigerchip is buzzing. Is yours?” He thumped his collarbone and glanced at me.
I swallowed, hoping that we weren’t about to explode, but since it wasn’t concentrated I think we would be okay. “No, mine’s fine. There’s a bit of a breeze today, maybe it’s being carried on it.” I walked to him with the three bottles in hand, two for the meat and one for the information, and licked my lips in anticipation when he offered me a slice of it on the flat surface of his blade.
It was delicious, sweet and tender and just bursting with flavour. “If you want to double that offer. I wouldn’t mind going thirsty for the rest of the day just for another two pounds.” The greywaster chuckled at this and nodded. He directed me to a sack with grocery bags inside, and with some small talk exchanged, I filled my bag with meat.
“I’d watch your ass going to Mantis,” the man said. We were at the edge of his property under the clothesline now. Gage was still walking, and the man’s Geigerchip was still buzzing. “The Jade Ravers are spreading like cancer. As soon as I get the camper fixed I’m heading as far west as I can before I can’t take it any further.”
Jade Ravers? I tried to hide my reaction, but I needed more information. “I’ve heard that there were a bunch of smart ravers who can shoot guns. Is that what everyone is calling them?”
The man nodded, cracking open one of the bottles and taking a generous drink. He sighed and closed his eyes for a second. I wonder how long it’s been since he had fresh water. “That’s what they call themselves. Apparently their leader was named Jade but I think he either died or has stayed in Velstoke, or Jadetown as they’re calling it now.”
I stood up a bit straighter, pride rushing through me and making me want to run to Velstoke just to say hello to everyone. Was the Beast still in charge? I wouldn’t doubt it, he’d been fierce.
“Wow,” I said with a shake of my head. “Well, keep safe, my friend, and thank you for the information.” I shook his hand and continued on my way, my shopping bag full of aromatic smoked kidlet. It was a good haul, if I say so myself.
I was half-expecting a gunshot to ring, and for me to fall down dead, but none came. I jogged up to Gage who was staring ahead, not looking too happy with things.
“What’s your problem now?” I said, a bit too dickish than I had intended. It was weird having a boy scout in the middle of the greywastes, and it made me wonder if he ever could become an ally to my master.
“I find it disturbing you’re asking that when you have meat in a grocery bag that has been carved from a child,” Gage said. I saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard.
I don’t know if it was because I was just excited to be close to Mantis, or that this guy was starting to grate on my nerves, but I fished into the bag, pulled out a chunk of meat and ripped off a piece. I chewed it and offered him a bit.
Gage recoiled, his nose curling. “That’s disgusting.”
“That’s the greywastes and if everyone thought like you, the human race would’ve died centuries ago,” I said with my mouth full. “Kids have a rough time here. They probably got diseased or something. It doesn’t matter, they’re dead anyway and it’s good food. Just try a bite, it’s really good.”
Gage’s wrinkled nose tucked up further to the bridge. “I’m okay.” He paused and stuffed his hands into his jeans. I was noticing he did that whenever he was stressed out. “My apologies. I know this is normal living for you,” he said with a sigh. “I’m starting to wish they’d advised me to go back to Skyfall. I’ve been out here only several hours and already I’ve seen so much. I feel badly for Sanguine but I believe I can help him. Once he resurrects I will heal him.”
I put the meat away and closed the bag. “Sanguine has some issues but he’s a wonderful guy,” I said. “Unfortunately what Silas did kind of regressed him, I think. The place that Silas put him into was where a man kept him prisoner for eleven years. I’ve never had it confirmed but I think the dude kept him down there as a sex slave. And we’re talking little little, like eight until nineteen.”