Prophet of the Badlands (The Awakened Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “What’s wrong?” Karina leaned over.

  Althea bowed her head. “You are nice.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “People aren’t nice to me.” She spoke between sobs. “When I was little, a man kept me in a cage.”

  Karina pulled her into a hug, soapy hair and all, and consoled her. “Why would anyone do such a horrible thing?”

  Althea sniffled. “I’m the Prophet.”

  “You?” Karina sounded surprised. “I always pictured the Prophet as a man in a white robe with a beard.” She laughed. “Esteban thinks it’s a pretty woman with big boobs.”

  The sobbing sputtered into a giggle, but levity was short. “He had a cart, and took me all over the Badlands. He would make people give him things so I would help them. If they didn’t pay him, he would not let me help.” Tears bored holes through the foam upon the opaque water. “Some died right in front of me.”

  “Aww.” Karina cuddled her over the tub wall.

  Althea stared at the thick layer of soap and dirt. “One day men with guns refused to pay. They killed him and took me. People always take me away.”

  Karina’s fingers resumed working their way through Althea’s hair. “You’re in Querq now. There are a lot of us here. We have an army. We will ask the council to let you stay if you like; you can be safe here.”

  Althea slid down into the water, resting her head against the porcelain and almost falling asleep. She looked at her toes poking up through the muck, and curled them over the far end of the tub. “I have to find Den.”

  “Who’s that?” Karina scooped water into one of the pails. “Sit up, please, and keep your eyes shut.”

  Althea complied. Water fell over her, taking the soap out of her hair. “A boy. We were to be joined.”

  Karina worked the washcloth over her back. “Wed? How old are you, ten, maybe eleven?”

  Althea leaned forward and hugged her knees. “Twelve, I think.”

  “If that’s true, you aren’t eating enough. You’re a stick.” She smirked. “Sorry, I guess that’s kind of mean, if you were kidnapped.”

  “He is the son of Braga, the chief. The only boy who wasn’t afraid of me.” She closed her eyes, adoring the feeling of being cared for.

  Karina stroked her hair. “I see. Well, the Badlands are a big place. We can ask the council, but I think you will be happier here with us.”

  Althea shivered. “Am I…”

  Karina’s hand offered a gentle squeeze to her shoulder. “No, Althea. You are free to leave if you wish, but you should stay. You’re too little to be out there on your own.”

  She poured another bucket of water over Althea’s head, sending the last bits of soap from her hair sliding down her back, and went to leave.

  Althea sat up, reaching. “Don’t stop…”

  Karina could not resist the desperation in her tone, and repeated the hair-washing process. Althea’s need for tender contact was obvious to anyone with a heart.

  “If you’d like to stay, we could be sisters. Would you like to be my sister?”

  Althea picked at her fingernails under the water. “We don’t have the same mother.”

  “That does not matter. You need a family, and we have room.”

  Althea looked up into the girl’s brown eyes, sensing genuine warmth. Her hand rose out of the muck, clasping Karina’s as she leaned almost nose to nose with her. “I would like that… to have a sister.”

  She stood. “Come on, dry off now and let’s go get something to eat.”

  Althea climbed out of the tub and started for the door, but a hand on her arm arrested her nymph walk.

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “Outside to dry off.” She blinked at Karina, confused.

  Another lesson followed; how to use a towel. Air-drying was strictly for Scrags who lived out in the weeds. This was civilization, and people did not do such things here. Althea thought it silly to be ashamed of one’s own body, but offered no protest.

  Once she had dried herself, she dressed and followed Karina out into the hallway.

  “We’ll need to get you some proper clothes.”

  “I like it.” She clung to the leather tatters. “I made it.”

  Karina shook her head. “You’re too old for a security blanket.”

  Althea stopped walking and smirked at Karina as if she were dumb. “This is a skirt, not a blanket.”

  The matter-of-fact stare was too much; Karina continued laughing when they got to the kitchen where a man sat at a battered table with three place settings laid out. Karina had traces of his features; Althea could tell the relation just by looking at them.

  A thick black moustache spanned his wide face, and his flannel shirt resembled the sleeping bag guts she had slept in at the raider camp. As she sat in the chair Karina pulled out for her, she got a glimpse of his leg and went wide-eyed at the sight of blue cloth.

  His scent was familiar; he had found her in the woods. Sensing no malice in his thoughts, just a raised eyebrow at her glowing eyes, Althea smiled at him.

  “Thank you for helping me.”

  “You look like a different person, without all the dirt.” He grinned.

  She stared, bewildered by the presence of a man who did not look at her as some kind of prize. The genuine kindness that lingered in the tiny wrinkles around his eyes stole the words from her mouth.

  They ate eggs and some meat cut into thin strips. Karina sent odd looks her way as she ate with her hands, but said nothing about it. Her hosts conversed in Spanish here and there over the meal, Althea picked out just enough to understand Karina asked her father if she could stay with them. After the meal, they left the house together and walked along a white stone path. The area resembled the Lost Place, but was less run down. Karina told a story of how this was once a massive city, and only a small fragment of it remained. Their people had found it and built it up, creating a wall around the inner parts.

  On the way to the center of Querq, Father introduced her to passing people. They paused by a garage where several men covered in grease set about keeping cars working. The fuel the machines ate was made in small quantities, so they were only used for emergencies. Karina’s father knew one of the men, and wanted to bring Althea to see him. He had been with the group that found her, and was curious about her health.

  Continuing, they passed under a large hanging sign where two roads crossed. The greater part of it was plain, shiny metal where the paint had shattered away around ancient bullet holes, and the entire left end had cracked off. A little right of center, a strip of green remained with white symbols on it. Karina explained it read as the name of the city, “Querq,” but Althea thought the scrap of metal was far too long for such a short sound.

  She held her new sister’s hand as they walked, stepping on dirt or grass whenever possible to evade the hot white path. Other citizens came out of homes ranging from houses like Karina’s to dwellings that looked like they used to be cars or trucks no longer able to move.

  Querq was an island of life in an ocean of destruction; to the north and east, the skeletal remains of ancient towers loomed, covered in nature’s attempt to reclaim the Earth. A foreboding evil wafted about the crumbling mass of steel and concrete, as if the decay itself stared into her heart. The sight struck Althea with a sudden, somber quiet, hiding her face against Karina’s side.

  “What’s wrong?” The older girl patted her on the back.

  Althea pointed at the crumbling blight.

  “She can feel the death upon the old buildings.” Father spoke, English this time, and offered her a comforting glance. “Such sadness in your eyes, child.”

  Althea looked up at him. “Yours are sad, too.”

  He straightened and gazed off over the horizon. Karina leaned forward and whispered with her cheek against Althea’s head.

  “My mother died trying to have my brother. We lost them both. He never talks of it.”

  Althea nodded. When she reached
out and grasped his hand, he twitched as if startled, then looked down at her with a melancholy smile. A minute passed in silence as they stood at the corner of an old street.

  “Well.” Father took in a breath. “The council is waiting. We should go.”

  hey brought her to a white building where she met a man they called Doctor Ruiz. He gasped at her glowing eyes, astonished, and wanted to see her right away. Althea sat in obedient quiet as he poked and prodded her with various bits of cold metal, asked her to take deep breaths, shone lights in her ears and mouth, and bonked her in the knee with a little hammer. She did not much care for the thing that went around her arm, hissing in puffs as it tightened, but he took it off before she could complain.

  She giggled when he ran a finger over her spine and tapped her back. After asking her to touch her toes and stand up slow, he guided her to step onto a wobbly slab and played with some little weights on a sliding bar. Clucking his tongue, he indicated the exam table again and she climbed onto it once more with her legs hung over the edge.

  “You are undernourished and small for your age.” He glanced at his papers.

  Althea smirked at him. “I know that, and I’m not a doctor.”

  “Have they always been like this?” He shone the little light right in her eyes.

  She squinted, trying to blink away the dancing firefly that lingered in her vision. “Yes.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this. Do you have any problems seeing?”

  “When it’s dark, there is no color.” She kicked her feet back and forth, staring at him.

  He drew the blinds, making the room dim. “Can you still see color?”

  “Yes. Not dark like this. Dark like dark.”

  “Darker than this?”

  “Yes.” She slid off the exam table and walked into a small closet, pulling the door closed behind her. “Dark like this.”

  “You can see in there?” Dr. Ruiz sounded amazed.

  “Yes. No color.”

  He opened the door long enough to hand her a dingy piece of laminated paper with funny marks on it, and pushed it closed. “Read the first line please. I’d like a little proof.”

  There was a long pause. “I can’t.”

  He smiled. “Okay, Althea. It’s fine. You don’t need to make up stories. We will welcome you anyway.”

  “I don’t know how to read. I can see a picture of a baby in a circle on this bucket, with a line through it.” Althea was quiet for a few seconds. “Why would someone put a baby in a bucket?”

  Karina, her father, and the doctor exchanged glances as she peeked around the opening door at them. The doctor almost fainted when she spoke to him telepathically.

  Someone told me I’m sighmonic.

  “Uhhm.” He struggled to regain his composure. “Aside from malnutrition, she’s perfectly healthy. I will not object to letting her stay. I’d love to do a blood analysis, but the machines we have here are too old.”

  Althea stood in silence, her head going back and forth as the adults talked. They had gone to Spanish and words came too fast for her to bother trying to listen. She paced about the room, touching the strange drawings of people with no skin and all those things called words, wondering if this was how doctors saw the life-shapes.

  A loud, wet cough drew her attention to a door and she wandered out into a stagnant hallway, away from the meaningless din between the grown-ups. Tracing her fingers along the wall as she walked, she passed a woman in white who smiled at her and almost dropped a tray full of small paper cups when she noticed the blue light.

  The sound of the coughing pulled her along a corridor the color of sand, the floor shiny, smooth, and cold. Windows on her left flooded the area with daylight, creating large squares of warmth through which she walked. The woman in white had abandoned whatever she had been doing to follow her, but remained back a short distance. Althea peeked around the wall, staring at a silver-haired man lying in a bed. The tiny room reeked of sick, despite the billowing curtains waving in the breeze from the open window.

  “Don’t go in there, child. He has TB.” The woman reached for her.

  Althea ducked the grasping hand, and darted over to him.

  “Doctor Ruiz!” the nurse yelled.

  The man wheezed and lifted his sweat-covered face to smile at her. “I suppose that’s it, then. Sure as hell took you long enough. Let’s get it over wi―” He struggled to speak but succumbed to a coughing fit.

  Althea clasped his hairy arm with both hands, pulling it against her body with his fingers brushing her cheek. The nurse’s shouts grew blurry in her consciousness as the indistinct shapes of the man’s essence filled her thoughts. Something black and evil shifted in the center, orbiting his heart like a buzzard waiting for its meal to die. Her fingers dug into his arm as she focused, screaming in her mind at the blackness to get out. It recoiled from her, flying up and away from the beating life-shape. When it tore loose from where it lurked, she felt a hurt inside him; it was not leaving easy. Blood pooled in his air-bags, and she commanded his body to repair itself.

  When she opened her eyes, the man rolled to his side and vomited a vile mass of glistening grey slime, tinged with venous streaks of indigo and blood. The Doctor ran in and seized her by the forearms, ready to drag her out of the room. He froze at the sight of the slime on the floor and the man’s color returning.

  Althea looked up at Dr. Ruiz. “Put that in fire. It will make others sick.” She pointed at the pulsating, gooey thing. “He will need food now.”

  The nurse made the sign of the cross and backed into the corridor, muttering. Karina’s jaw hung open; Father, stoic as ever, took it all in stride. Althea stood in place, moving her head around to watch the doctor scramble to destroy the sick. The nurse returned with food, and the man looked markedly better in minutes. The now-healthy elder muttered something in Spanish and smiled at Althea.

  Doctor Eduardo Ruiz had seen many things in his life, but this had left him speechless. Althea tried to answer his questions about what she did. The look on his face said her descriptions of red and black shadows and a “sick” living in his air-bags would have left him patting her on the head with a patronizing smile if what she did had not actually worked.

  Karina took her hand, guiding her out of the room, leaving the stunned doctor to tend to the man.

  “Karina?” Althea looked up as they went outside.

  “Yes?”

  “What did that man say right before we left?”

  The older girl shrugged. “He apologized for thinking you were someone else.”

  By that time, word had spread and a crowd waited outside the clinic. More than a hundred formed a line, which included numerous children. Most of the men had rifles, but none at the ready. Althea clung to Karina’s side at the sight of so many faces. A protective arm went around her, and she smiled up at her new sister.

  The gathering fell in around them as they took her into the center of town where more armed men walked patrols. Althea glanced at two trucks that looked as if they could still drive, parked in front of an imposing building at the center of a square. Huge guns sat upon posts in the back, the men behind them waved at her and smiled. Beyond the trucks, a stone pedestal crumbled into a heap of ivory bits. A statue had been there long ago, but all that remained of it aside from rubble was one stony leg from boot to knee.

  Past stairs and down a hallway, they took her to a large chamber with a vault ceiling covered in flaking plaster. Small sculptured babies posed around the edge of where the ceiling met the wall, most with broken wings, and some headless. Althea walked through rows of old, red-cushioned chairs, down a narrow path to a hollow space of bare floor in front of a tall counter.

  Five people sat above the level of the crowd, two women and three men. Their figures obscured by billowy black robes, they cast shadows upon the wall behind them like gargantuan crows perched along a fence. Little blocks of dented wood in front of each one had scrawled words, and every noise made in here
echoed.

  They looked down at her, and she shrank into Karina, feeling small; a tiny savage among an army of civilized men. She managed a weak smile, sensing they were curious, not angry. The crowd flowed liquid through the aisle-veins, soaked up by the waiting chairs.

  “We are here in the matter of Fernando Guererro’s petition to accept a foundling Scrag into the community.” The man in the center appraised her. “Is this said foundling?”

  Father nodded. “Yes, your honors.”

  “Hello, child. What is your name?” The man smiled with grandfatherly charm.

  “Althea.” She looked down, shying away from the blackbirds. “Some call me the Prophet, but I don’t like it.”

  A murmur spread through the crowd behind her.

  When asked where she came from and where her parents were, she recounted her tale of being stolen at the age of six from a village long forgotten, and how she had been abducted over and over again ever since. The traveling salesman who spent years dragging her around in a cage had made sure all of the Badlands knew her and what she could do, and now she paid for it. She was not sure exactly her age; twelve was her best guess.

  Raiders did not care about things like birthdays.

  The council made faces at each other; she sensed pity and anger, as well as the predictable anticipatory glee. Althea felt grateful Karina had remained at her back with a hand on each shoulder, and leaned into her as she stared at the globs of reflected light that swam across the shiny floor. Glittering specks fanned out in a radial pattern under the gloss, frozen in material the color of rust. Stone, she assumed, from how cold it was.

  “Karina is nice. I don’t want your people to get hurt because of me.”

  A judge with a nose like a bird’s beak smiled, thin lips curling back in an attempt to be friendly. “Raiders are not much of a threat to us, child. Our army is four hundred strong and growing with each generation.” The man rambled on about things like tactics, strategy, and technology, but most of it was lost on her.