Prophet of the Badlands (The Awakened Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  Althea’s heels skidded over the sandy truck bed as she pulled. Carlos could not watch, and cringed away. Grunting, she hauled at the foot until the jagged white slid back beneath the soft brown skin. The squish caused a cringe from most of the men. Althea was faintly aware of Father assuring them Corinne could not feel a thing. The formless mass of red shades changed as little shreds and free-floating scraps reintegrated into a whole. By the time she opened her eyes, the leg had mended.

  Althea shifted to set her hands on Corinne’s abdomen. The yellow presence of sick writhed in the non-space of her thoughts. Strand by strand, the ethereal tendrils it sent into the woman’s body withdrew into a central mass as Althea purged the poison of infection from her blood. With a final grunt of exertion, she forced the entirety of it apart from the rest of the shapes.

  The aroma of death assaulted the air as a slimy purulent discharge pooled below the now-unconscious woman. Some of the men staggered away to avoid the smell, but Althea wrinkled her nose; there had been worse things.

  “Fekshun.” She looked up at the men, remembering what she once heard someone call the fragrance.

  Men brought buckets of water from the stream to purge the truck.

  She clung to Father on the ride back into Querq, jumping at every strange shadow or noise, waiting for the raiders. His hand on her back held her close, calloused fingers absentmindedly stroking her back. Confusion surrounded him; Althea looked up. His confusion at her trembling was plain on his face, but she could find no voice to tell him why. When at long last the truck rolled through the yawning patchwork of old cars that comprised the gates of Querq, she set her cheek on his shoulder and relaxed.

  It had just been insecurity.

  lthea again roamed Querq once Karina had gone off to her “job.” Today, people kept approaching to thank her for what she had done for Corrine. Doctor Ruiz had been telling everyone how Althea had saved her life. He rambled on about something called a UTI, and how the delirium had sent her out in the middle of the night to wash an empty basket she thought was full of clothes. Father had been upset that the girl made it out of the city without being stopped by the Watch.

  She wondered what the Ravens would give her when the time came for her to have one of those “job” things, too. Granted, her gifts had already done much good for the town. Perhaps then, she already had a job. With that thought, she squinted at the sun peeking through the leaning skeletons of the before-time buildings. Buzzard-like, they loomed over Querq, waiting for it to die.

  Most people she passed waved and smiled. Several stopped to bow or beg for a blessing. Four women the same age as Father, plus a man far older, came out of nowhere and surrounded her. Hands touched her everywhere, not grabbing, just wanting to be in contact with the Prophet.

  “Please, bless my baby!” One pulled her shirt up to reveal a bulge.

  Another had fallen to her knees, hugging her cheek against Althea’s knee. “Please, watch over my husband. He’s on the wall.”

  The third came nose to nose with her, almost in tears. “Please, I cannot bear children…”

  Overwhelmed and having no escape route, Althea tried in vain to push the pawing hands away. When she gathered herself, the one seeking a blessing for her husband got a telempathic lift of her mood with an overacted touch and backed away bowing in thanks. She put a hand on the pregnant belly, opening her mind to their combined life essence.

  Sensing no corruption within the forms, she smiled. “Your baby is healthy.”

  The woman who could not conceive was a bit more involved. Althea sensed a withering blackness within, hovering like evil wings over the space where babies grow. Bizarre life-shapes existed without pattern or symmetry where they did not belong.

  Having never seen such a thing before, it took her a moment to figure out how to urge the body to repair itself. The extra life-shapes needed to go away, and the flesh around them forced back to the way it should be. She isolated the rogue growths, and forced the woman’s body to divest itself of the badness. The woman made a low groan, and sank to the ground. When Althea stopped concentrating, she opened her eyes to find a puddle of blood with a few irregular acorn-sized fleshy lumps spread out on the sidewalk. The shuddering woman collapsed onto her, squeezing the air from Althea’s lungs.

  She gasped, breathless. “What… did you do to me?”

  Althea tried to answer, accomplishing only a whining wheeze as she squirmed. The old man intervened, grasping the woman’s arms and pulling her vice-like grip open. Althea fell to her knees searching for breath.

  “There was strange growing inside you. It is gone.”

  “Can I have a child now?” She clutched Althea’s shoulders.

  Althea gathered the woman’s hands and held them. “I think so, but I cannot help you with that. You will need a man to plant the baby seeds.”

  The woman hugged her once more before running down the street shouting the name of her husband. The old man had just come to pay his respects; he ambled off after patting her atop the head. She gathered the odd nuggets of flesh in a scrap of cloth and threw them in a burn-barrel a few blocks away. After washing her hands in a puddle, she continued her exploration, and eventually found herself in the shadow of the far west wall. Along the top, men with rifles watched out over the desert from a perch of concrete and steel.

  The fortification was far different from Den’s village. It was not made of old flattened cars stacked on top of each other. Giant metal struts held up slabs of the strange grey stone that ancient people could shape to their want. Placing her steps carefully, she avoided debris in the road, pieces knocked loose from the occasional raider attack, and climbed up a blue-painted metal staircase.

  Querq’s soldiers drifted over to greet her when they noticed the little girl on their guard-walk. Some wore strange blue vests while others had pale green ones; they said these things could stop bullets. Peering over the edge, she frowned at the coils of razor wire tacked to the concrete; it looked like what one would see if pain were a tangible thing. A gentle touch encouraged her away from the edge, and an older man took her hand and walked her around on a tour of their defenses. More of those large guns sat on pegs, as well as “magic eyes” that let them see raiders from far away. What she liked most about them is how they treated her just like any curious child. They did not feel it safe for her to be there long, and when it came time for her to leave, she thanked them for protecting everyone and continued down the same street.

  A few blocks over, she found a front yard littered with children half her age. They swarmed around her, drawing her into their play. She grinned, frolicking and acting silly, reveling in the innocence of it until the minders called them away for their midday meal.

  There was much to learn in this place; she thought of the fork, the pipes giving water on command, and toilets. These people must be powerful if they can afford to waste clean water. She still felt guilty about ruining drinkable water each time she had to go. Father had said their life was similar to what things had been before some great war, lacking only something called electricity. Some small places, like the water purifier, had it, but the tiny machine could not make enough for the entire town.

  A sharp crack followed by intermittent clicking noises startled her from her musings and drew her to a rectangle of dimness in the side of a lime-painted building. A doorway without a door, it led into a dark and cool place full of older men and two women. Three rough steps of frigid concrete brought her into the room, and she folded her arms across her chest at the shift in temperature.

  Two men stood by a table full of strange, perfectly round rocks. They prodded them every so often with long sticks, knocking them into each other and into small nets at the corners. She watched for a few minutes, grinning as the older of the two yelled at the other for being a lucky bastard.

  To her left, a row of people sat on things resembling giant nails driven into the ground by a tall counter. The top was just at the level of her nose; its once-shiny b
lack surface struggled to reflect the light from her eyes. A glass of dull orange liquid landed nearby, arriving with a pungent scent. A large man, pudgy and shaved bald, smiled at her as he set a glass of dull, orange liquid near her. A sweet pungent scent with the tang of fermentation wafted from it.

  “Yer old ‘nuff ta see over the bar, kiddo. ‘Ave one on the house. Name’s Tumbleweed, and this is mah place.”

  Althea grasped the metal rail along the counter and pulled herself up to take a seat on one of the padded nail-things. Her feet could not reach the floor or even the ring around the bottom where the men hooked their boots. The drink smelled like fruit, citrus especially, and despite a strange sour aftertaste, was not wholly unpleasant despite the random pulpy bits floating in it.

  “S’wered ya come from?” A man to her left leaned to look at her.

  It seemed everyone in here, except Tumbleweed, was too old for one of those “job” things.

  “I don’t remember.” She took a sip of the fruity substance, winced, and still couldn’t make up her mind if she liked or hated it. “Pastest thing I know is the wagon.”

  “Wagon?” A man to the other side glanced over.

  Althea explained the small cage, the wagon that roamed the Badlands, and a man smelling of paraffin and whiskey who had taken coins and trades from people for her to mend them. A dozen sips of the orange drink left her tongue numb and made her hate the cage more now than when she had been in it. She tolerated it at the time. What else could she do? Her fate was to help people, and she had not much cared what they did to her in return. Another sip brought back the first week, when she still tried to escape and go home to her parents. With it came the memory of the ill-scented man laughing at her attempts to break the cage.

  “Awful thing, that.” The man to the right grumbled to murmurs of assent from everyone else. “Someone should’a killed ‘im.”

  “They did.” Althea blinked at the glass, fuller than she remembered it.

  The bartender gestured at it. “Hooch. Make it mah-self.”

  She held the glass to her face, beneath her nose, sniffing at the faint fruity fizz that tickled her nostrils and made her giggle. Memories took away her smile, and she sipped more. “We went from where it was too cold to sleep to where it was too hot to move. He wanted everyone to know what I could do so people would want to give him pay-things. Some men came looking for me, and they didn’t wanna give him trades.”

  She took a long sip as she shuddered through the memory of his hot blood splattering through the bars of the cage. A giant man with dark skin and one eye bashed him to death with a spiked metal rod. Just like when Vakkar died, she wanted to help him, but could not reach.

  The barflies crowded around her, one old woman rubbed her back as she described the killing.

  “They didn’t let me out. They carried me in the cage to their camp.”

  Slurp.

  Althea rambled on in a meandering story of how they forced her to tend to their raiding parties, men who attacked the innocent. It was not long before stronger raiders wiped them out and she changed hands. By then, she had grown and barely fit in the cage. The second group had taken pity on her and let her out, but they locked a metal ring about her leg instead.

  Consoling hands squeezed her shoulder. She drank more of the concoction, lost in the liberty of her pain flowing freely. Aside from the leash, those bandits had been rather nice to her. They gave her anything she asked for except the ability to leave, but where would she go?

  “They all died,” she half muttered into the cup, teasing it back and forth across her bottom lip. “They attacked a Scrag camp a lot bigger than they thought it was. They chased small boys into a hollow, and the men surprised them from behind.” In her memory, a flash of machetes and spear tips flung crimson into the sky. “The Scrags cut me loose, and took me with them…”

  She rambled on through many iterations of abduction by raiders or Badland gangs, looked back fondly on her time with Reed, and recounted up to when Father found her exhausted. The men seemed nervous at her mention of the machine-man stuck in the water, and two left in haste. The cup was empty; gravity felt weird, and the walls moved. Between the drink and her time in Querq, her indifference to captivity had shattered.

  “Why are people so cruel?” she wailed, falling into sniffles. “All I want is to help.”

  “The sands are a deadly place, little lady.” The bartender took the empty glass. “Someone what kin do what you kin do… They all want it for themselves.”

  She tried to look at the four Tumbleweeds that danced in front of her; she was not sure which one of them spoke. The crowd had merged into a multi-faced entity of comforting words and reassuring hands. Such indignation radiated from them at her story, she started to wonder if Aurora was right. The way people treated her was evil. Even if she helped others along the way, she did not deserve it. Thoughts of contentment and safety filled her mind and she wanted to be with Karina.

  Bracing herself against the bar and her seat, she looked past the hazy, flesh-toned blotch of her foot toward the floor. The grimy tiles seemed to move away from her as she tried to extend her toes to make first contact. The next thing she knew, they leapt up and smacked her in the chin and there was laughter.

  “Ow.” Her hand slid along the floor, spreading out across her face.

  Fingers closed around her arms, lifting her to her feet and steadying her. Someone had replaced the muscles in her legs with rubber, and she swayed into the bar. A man reeking of machinery walked her to a bench, and eased her into the embrace of chilly old leather cushions. The murmuring voices grew indistinct, and she felt as though more time passed than she remembered.

  When she sat up, the world remained weird and shaky, but her legs worked a little better. She made her way back to the bar, holding onto the seat-nails to steady herself.

  “Thank you for the drink.”

  Tumbleweed nodded. “S’okay, kid. Look’d like ya needed it.”

  Althea stopped at the concrete stairs out of the place, and lifted her foot toward the first step. Standing crane-like on one leg, she stared at the grey block which seemed to fade toward and away from her, making her wobble back. Her second attempt drew more laughs, and a cheer. After a glance back at the crowd, she defeated the obstacle with an all-fours crawl and sprawled on the ground outside with closed eyes to enjoy the warm breeze.

  Straight lines were elusive things as she tottered past a row of buildings that, judging by the signs, had once been shops now repurposed into homes. The townies glanced at her drunken gait, some laughing and others coming over to check on her.

  Four buildings later, a voice called out, “Girl.”

  An ancient man sat on the porch steps of a run-down white building, staring at her with a look of intense curiosity. Drawn to him, she staggered until one hand on the wall arrested her sway. Hand over hand along the bricks, she crept until she was near enough to talk, and looked at him. He waved at her to come closer. She blinked at a rugged face, wrinkled and brown with age and weather. Trying not to trip over her own feet as she approached, she loped forward until her hip touched his leg. He reached out to hold her hand, straining to get a good look at her face.

  “I think you’re the one.” His voice, dry and deep, covered her in the fragrance of smoke.

  She tilted her head, not saying anything.

  “Yes, you are.” Stringy white hair shook with a series of coughs. “The last time I saw those eyes, you were just a baby.”

  Althea sank onto the steps, and tugged at his arm. Querq spun less after she sat down. “You knew my parents?”

  He looked up and away at the sky, squinting at the clouds, leaving Althea wondering how so much hair could grow inside someone’s nose. “Your mother, but I only saw her for a few hours. She was running from someone. Strange men with strange weapons.”

  Focusing on him, Althea looked into his thoughts. The face of a young woman with pale skin and blonde hair, wild with fear, filled his v
iew. Her sky-blue jumpsuit was smudged and ripped, but still looked like nothing a person from the Badlands would have. Strange tan blankets with a repeating geometric pattern too precise for human hands to produce shrouded an infant in her arms.

  Her voice blurred in his memories. Men were after her. They wanted to kill her to take the child away. Within the bundled cloth, two points of intense blue light shone. The sight shocked Althea out of the vision, leaving the lingering memory of her mother’s voice begging this man to save her child’s life.

  Face frozen in astonished sorrow, quiet tears streaked her cheek as she stared at him. He had been talking the whole time, though she saw the images his words attempted to describe. This man felt himself too old to take care of an infant, and had left her with a young couple in a small, peaceful village.

  She stared down past the twisted tatters of leather covering her lap at the dirt. That entire settlement at the side of the turquoise lake had been wiped out because of her. The wrong man saw her mend a wounded stranger. All she had wanted to do was help someone who was hurt, and he killed everyone to get her. Althea’s gaze lifted away from the ground, to the giggles of distant children down the street. No, a greedy man with a cart wiped it out―not her.

  The elder was astonished to see her after all these years, but had no idea what had become of her mother. She ran off the same day she arrived in an attempt to draw her pursuers away from her daughter.

  A blonde woman alone in the Badlands; Althea felt sick to think it would have been a kindness if the strange men had found her―all they would have done was kill her.

  lack strands wavered through a square of dull blue-purple, the only color in the room. Althea lay on her side, staring at the window through the skirt she left draped over the back of a chair. The chill air had made the nightgown more appealing; velvety and warm, even if it made her feel vulnerable because she could not run or climb. The little sanctum she shared with Karina felt safe; she wondered if Querq would as well.