by Quil Carter
The mark of the empath. An empath who could do terrible things without the aftereffects that I suffered from.
And I think I’d just made him our enemy.
Chapter 33
Elish
The sounds of sharpening steel filled the air and Elish tested the blade on his fingernail. He gently shaved it against the flat edge and smiled to himself when he could see white flake off like he was shaving a candle. Nero had taught him how to test to see if a knife was sharp when he was younger, and that had always stuck with him.
“Big sharp,” a raver who was passing by said. He walked up to Elish and nodded his approval. “Big sharp. Stab, stab, stab!”
Elish glanced at him. “You would say, very sharp, not big sharp,” he said to the raver as the man, with a floppy fisherman’s hat on to cover a completely scalped head, continued walking to wherever his destination was.
“Very sharp,” the raver called, his voice fading as he disappeared behind a building. “Very sharp, Quiet Man. Beast asked for you. Go to Beast.” And then he was gone.
Elish shook his head and continued sharpening the blade. When he was pleased with it, he sheathed it into a scabbard on his belt, and drew his dirty and stained grey long coat over his torso and tied it off. He got up from the electrical box he had been sitting on and started walking towards the center of town. On the way, he unscrewed a bottle of wine he kept in his coat pocket, and after a long drink, he popped a cigarette into his mouth.
When he got to the center of town he spotted Beast, who was standing guard over two captured arians. The scared looking couple, a man and a woman, were chained to the metal frame of a tipped over payphone box. They were huddled together, looking terrified and trembling in their shoes, wild eyes going in all directions before focusing on Elish.
The man held up both of his hands as Elish approached, and there was a mark of relief on his face. “You’re not one of them…” he said. And, sure enough, there was relief in his tone. “We’re just travelling to Garnertown, that’s all. We weren’t here to cause any trouble.” When he took the female’s hand and squeezed it, Elish’s eyes narrowed. “Let us go. Please, we’re just trying to survive here like you.”
Elish looked to Beast. The raver was standing several feet away, with his arms crossed over a chest holding two ammo belts and an assault rifle. The leader of Jade’s ravers had started putting vertebraes into his long dreadlocks and was also sporting fresh, and rather ripe, ears and penises on his necklace.
“Are you not going to remove their Geigerchips and have them join us?” Elish asked Beast.
Beast shook his head. “Not strong enough, too weak, would die from radiation. We’re going to eat them. You brought us much meat, honour goes to you, Quiet Man.” Beast thumped his chest and laid a hand on Elish’s head. Elish knew the custom and lowered his head as well in acceptance.
“No, no!” the woman suddenly sobbed. “Please. What do you want? We’ll give you anything just don’t fucking eat us!”
Elish was unfazed. He pulled the knife out and tested the blade against his finger. “You would have more luck bargaining with the raver,” he said casually. “I have come to enjoy taking the lives of arians, especially ones who beg.” His violet eyes flickered up to the couple. The woman, with short blond hair and pale eyes currently red from her wailing, was young, possibly twenty but not much more. The man had a short beard and black hair which was flattened from being hidden under a hat. “So any more whining from you and it will only feed my thirst even more.”
“Come on…” the man said, his voice cracking. “The world is fucked up enough as it is. We’ll never go back to being civilized people, like before the Fallocaust, if we keep doing shit like this to each other. Have some compassion.”
This drew a chuckle from Elish. “Compassion?” He tilted the knife to catch the sunrays. It was hot out today. He was now wearing a cowboy hat he’d found on most days, but today he had nothing to cover his short blond hair, twisted in greasy locks and unbrushed. “The world is dead, love is dead, compassion is dead. Stop trying to force breath into a world that took its last strangled gasp years ago.”
This made the man pause, though the female still cried into his shoulder. “You don’t talk like a greywaster…” His forehead wrinkled. “Your eyes… you’re a chim-”
Elish’s jaw clenched, and his body tightened under the greywaster’s words. He advanced on the man before changing his mind at the last second. Wanting to make the man suffer a little bit more, he turned to the woman and grabbed her by her short hair, just long enough to get a tuft of it.
Elish slid the knife over her throat, opening it up with ease. The woman’s hands rose to her neck, her mouth open and sucking the air, and the blood began to flow. Elish then pushed her bound body onto the man as she struggled, no screams able to sound from the depth of the wound. And as the man looked down, gaping in shock but unable to bring voice to the horror he was witnessing, Elish stabbed him in the side of the neck and jerked the knife towards himself. The blood immediately shot from the wound like a main pipe had burst, and for no other reason than because he was curious, he put his hand in front of the flow to test the pressure.
As he felt the hot blood shoot against his palms, he heard Beast call the others. Elish retracted his hand after that and shoved the man to the ground. He held up a hand, hearing the thumping of feet against the pavement that were the other ravers running towards their meal time, and pulled the man’s pants and underwear off of him. He sliced off a piece of cheek, one of the best cuts, and turned around with the meat in hand.
Over two dozen ravers were behind him. Elish could hear the orchestra of their quickened heartbeats, thumping with excitement over their dying meal. They stared at Elish with their mouths open like hungry dogs, their bodies twitching and pulling towards the food, but they wouldn’t move without Beast’s signal.
Elish turned to the leader and nodded to him. “I will be in my house for the evening,” he said.
Beast nodded and with a loud Kah! the ravers ran past Elish, the sounds of growling and snapping filling the air to mix in with the heavy scent of blood.
He had decided on a rancher that was as far away from the center of town as he could possibly get. Only on windy days did the heavy stench of rot reach this place, and for the most part, once he was inside of the house he could pretend that the ravers didn’t even exist.
The house had belonged to someone of a higher class, and it had been stocked with food and wired for electricity. The ravers had no use for gasoline, even with their healing brains they knew that explosive liquid was best left to the arians, so Elish had an endless supply for himself. The drugs were also something he had an abundance; once he’d told Beast what to look out for he’d been given bags and prescription bottles full of opiates, methamphetamines, benzoids, and baggies full of mysterious powders which he sometimes tested when he was feeling particularly low. The only thing he had to share was the alcohol, and after he’d shown several of the smarter ravers how to make mead from scavenged honey and a supply of yeast they’d found, the wine and hard liquors were mostly left to him.
Elish turned on the generator and sat down on a blue couch. He looked down at the white powder sitting in a small white dish, formerly for soy sauce when one ate sushi. He had no idea what they had used it for, obviously not the Japanese dish, but now it was for ground up Dilaudids.
He felt an affinity for those drugs. Just saying the word ‘Dilaudid’ had Reaver looking up from whatever he was doing like a gopher popping out of his hole. Jade had loved them as well, he said they gave him energy whereas the oxycodone had made him more loving and content, yet sluggish and tired. Jade had told him in detail what every opiate did; in truth Elish had already known, living with brothers who had a taste for drugs, and at one point being quite the consumer himself, he was educated on their effects and side effects.
Elish’s shoulders slumped, and he looked down at his blood-stained hands. They were
now dry and the blood was starting to flake off and fall to the ground like dust. His jacket was also showing dark stains and the smell had begun to saturate the room. He took the jacket off and dropped it into a bathtub full of water and soaking clothes, before indulging himself in a generous amount of opiates. Then, before they kicked in, he washed the cheek of meat and put it into a pot, dashed some onion soup mix on top of it and placed it into the oven. After waking up to a house full of smoke several days before, he’d scavenged himself a timer; so he wound it for an hour and placed it on the cluttered counter.
Around his kitchen were half-eaten meals, or ones not consumed at all. On the kitchen table there was barely any table left to see, just pots full of untouched macaroni and cheese, Bush’s beans, or Chef Boyardee, dirty dishes, garbage, and fly traps. He always cooked, just to give himself something to do, but by the time the food was ready he was usually too drugged up and depressed to touch it.
But even if he knew that’s how the night was going to go, he still did it. Elish exchanged his warm bottle of wine for a cold one and sat down on the couch and turned on the DVD he was watching. He settled in for another night of loneliness and drinking, only The Lord of the Rings trilogy, extended edition, to keeping him company. He’d just started the marathon last night but he was starting from the middle, since the last half was a blur to him now.
And it looked like tonight wasn’t going to be any better. The drugs, with the liquor as fuel, started to do their work on his body. He felt himself slip into the half-conscious, half-lethargic state Reaver had called ‘zombieland’, and soon his head was nodding until it hit the back of the couch. He let himself be taken by it, and the lucid dreams that would eventually find him.
His heart retracted like a touched sea anemone when the first thing he saw was Jade. The boy’s face was as vivid as ever, and the smile that appeared on it when he spotted Elish, just as full of love.
But Elish didn’t smile back. He looked and saw that his hand was outstretched towards the boy and immediately retracted it. Elish turned from the boy; his eyes inside of this dream trying to close so he didn’t have to look at him.
“Why don’t you look at me anymore?”
His voice… Elish bit down on the inside of his cheek and his hands clenched into fists. I will never hear that voice with clarity. The closest that I will ever get is on VHS tapes, most of them showing him egging on Sanguine to fuck him harder. Or the half-dead creature that I held up when we had been married.
Never to hear him say I love you, something that used to make me sigh and shake my head, disliking it when he’d force me to show him my own feelings. ‘Why does he have to hear it when he knows it?’ I’d say to myself.
I would say it every day now, if only I’d been given the chance.
“Well?” Jade said. “Why don’t you look at me anymore?”
Elish looked into the darkness, feeling a physical pain inside of his chest. He tried to push it down but he knew it was no use.
“Master?” Jade said, more forceful this time. “At least look at what you’ve done.”
What I’ve done? Elish turned towards Jade, confused by his words.
Elish’s face twisted in despair when he saw what was standing in front of him, and took a step back.
Jade’s naked body was covered from head to toe in bright red burns and patches so burnt they had charred to black. His hair had been seared off and was now resting like a destroyed nest on top of his head, and his ears and nose were missing, only blackened nubs remaining like the wing tips of a roasted bird. Strips of his skin were coming off of him too, like how the walls of the abandoned buildings shed wallpaper, and underneath that skin was dull brown meat, to which the taste would be little different than the very meat that was cooking in Elish’s oven.
Elish shook his head back and forth. The boy raised a hand to him and an accusing finger was pointed at Elish’s chest. He could see blisters on the tips of Jade’s fingers, and as he looked closer, he saw that his arms were covered in them, raised opaque nodules bulging with fluid, some already burst and coating the area around it in glistening liquid.
“This is what I get for trusting you,” Jade said bitterly. His lips were two slabs of raw steak, with pus dripping and trickling down his chin. “I was burned alive as I fucking called for you.” He took a step towards Elish, his bright yellow eyes solar flares that threatened to melt Elish in his place. “You remember me calling for you? Before you ran to chase that man? You knew I was healed enough to call for you but, once again, it wasn’t enough for you. Just like how you didn’t make me immortal. It was never enough until you had exactly what you wanted.”
Elish couldn’t speak, the only movements his still body could make was to continue shaking his head back and forth.
“You wouldn’t accept me as your husband until I was old enough to not be a boy to you. You refused to let the family acknowledge our marriage. You were embarrassed of me!” Jade snarled. As he stepped closer to Elish he could smell, with clarity, the aroma of Jade’s cooked flesh. “You were humiliated to have an eighteen-year-old gutter rat as your fucking husband!”
“You? Don’t give him all the credit.”
A coldness hit Elish’s body as the deep voice of Reaver sounded in the darkness. He saw the man he’d known since before he was born, step into the dim lighting around him, and beside him was Killian. Both of them just as seared and burnt as Jade, if not more so. Reaver’s skin had almost entirely carbonized, and from head to toe there were deep fissures in the hardened skin where red and pink flesh peeked through every time the boy moved.
“He still has to answer for what he did to me,” Reaver growled. As his mouth moved it widened two cracks in the thick blackened skin that had appeared on both sides of his face, clear liquid leaked from it, and when the boy smiled, two more large splits appeared. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Well?” Killian snapped, his tenor voice ringing, the accusatory tone making it all the more piercing. “Was it worth it?”
“WAS IT WORTH IT?”
“WAS IT WORTH IT?” Suddenly Elish could hear the ringing of a fire alarm, and the smell of the three’s cooked flesh intensified. Then, all at once, he was hit with an overwhelming rush of anxiousness and despair. It made his chest tighten in on itself like a piece of paper being crumpled in a fist.
“It wasn’t. I SAID IT WASN’T!” Elish yelled. He closed his eyes and let out a bellow filled with anguish. “IT WASN’T!” When he opened his eyes, all three of them were nose-to-nose with him, and with glaring eyes they grabbed Elish and pulled him into the darkness.
Elish’s eyes snapped open as he hit the floor. He looked around, his heart banging and his breathing rapid, and realized he was back in the rancher. The house was now filled with the aroma of meat cooked and done, and the alarm he’d set was ringing.
For a moment Elish was still, the images of Jade, Reaver, and Killian still fresh inside of his mind. Then he rose and turned off the alarm, and took the roast out of the oven.
Elish leaned against the oven and shut his eyes. He drew up the faces of the three men he’d failed, and committed them to memory. Yet another terrible image he didn’t want to forget, for no other reason than to punish himself.
Like he knew he’d eventually do, he left the cooked roast in the pan on top of the stove and went back to the living room; his steps wobbly from the drink and his mind swimming but not nearly as numb as he wished for it to be. With that thought in his head, he gathered his supplies for injecting heroin and started preparing himself a dose, knowing with solemn knowledge, that he would not be stopping for quite a while.
Jade
When I saw that ravers had taken over Mantis, I felt my heart crush like a mallet had been taken to it. I was too crestfallen to cry but my teeth were biting down on my bottom lip so hard I could taste copper.
In front of me were spray-painted buildings, but unlike the usual mosaic of colourful scrawl, like most raver-i
nfested buildings had, these ones actually resembled things. They had shown off their claim of this place with trees, yellow suns, and bloodied corpse stick-figures being eaten by fanged stick figures. It was like a child had been given finger paint and told to paint a scene straight out of a horror movie.
Why I was still approaching this town I didn’t know. I guess deep down I wanted to see a familiar place, and maybe I was stupid enough to believe that Elish might’ve been here. But my heart was now filled with doubt, and not only that, the knowledge that I had many lonely days ahead of me as I walked from town to town looking for my master.
I felt so disappointed in myself as I continued on this empty road into the grisly, and decimated, town. My gut feeling had been that he’d be in Mantis, but he wasn’t here. There was no way that my Elish would stay in a place like this. Not only did he hate unclean things, but he hated ravers too.
My eyes took me to a pile of chewed bones rotting in the doorway of an old Subway restaurant; the doors and windows boarded up and crossed out with giant red X’s. This place had such a stench to it, it was making my eyes water, and my ears were almost deafened by the loud buzzing of tens of thousands of flies. Both the smell and the sound were amplified by the sweltering summer day, and I could see heat waves coming off of the pavement.
I looked around but only saw more bones, some of them in the middle of the street with scraps of green flesh still clinging to them. The reason for that was spotted when I saw stray dogs and cats lounging around together, their ears flicking occasionally to dismiss a fly that had decided to land upon them.
Drowning in my own sadness, I inhaled a shuddering breath. I wiped my eyes, convincing myself it was from the smell rather than my own disappointment, and continued down the deserted street.