Humanity continued, but only in its most basic form.
The savages hid when they heard the familiar hum of the glowing craft, expressing their fear with grunts and hand signals, pulling their children closer, seeking protection. Hearing the mutantoids’ footsteps approaching their hiding places, holding each other tighter.
Gray mutant faces scanned with night vision until they found the human stock huddled in their holes. The human children screamed, pried from their fathers and mothers by black-gloved hands, the parents paralyzed with a purple spark from a chrome wand if they or the child resisted. The child was then carried off by the mutantoid handlers, uniformed in black rubber suits, into the night sky.
Leaving a goat with its three eyes and six horns to feed the human stock with its flesh, for without the extra meat, there would be nothing to eat but prairie dog, dead crow, and the dead fish that washed up on shore. The frightened humans would slowly emerge from their holes, protected from their tormentors by daylight—trying to forget the nocturnal round up.
They would rip open the goat’s throat with their own hands, knowing that they had exchanged with their handlers one animal for another.
The human stock, taken back to the mountain, were shackled and chained.
Jailers armed with chrome submission-wands were not the goggled faces of those that had rounded them up in the night. These were their own kind—shaven clean with small devices and cords attached to the back of their heads—herding their savage cousins into the hold—preparing them for experimentation, repopulation, consumption …
Three
Another solstice had passed. The miner continued to heal in the sanctum of the old woman’s shack. His heavy eyes filled with long sleep. Waking, he twisted to move and felt the deep ache where the bullet had gone in. He looked up at a ceiling made of wood and mud, hearing the rodents scurrying over the roof and down the mud wall.
Dust dropped over his face, and the flies collided headlong into walls, seeking passage to space somewhere between the mud cracks of the old woman’s shack.
He struggled to his feet and stumbled to the bright opening, where the birds waited in the warm light, flapping the last of the evening frost from their feathers. The patches of snow under the shade of the pine trees and on the northern slopes of the mountains that surrounded them.
Looking out from the doorway, he saw the girl with long hair, remembering that only the Manager had hair, and it was dark like his was becoming as it continued to grow out, but not nearly as light as the girls, almost yellow in the sunlight. He walked towards her, the birds shuffling and leaping from their perches. Eden’s back was turned away from him, and she appeared to be looking out at the forest, across the field where the transmorphin had appeared from the tree line with her eyes.
“You hear the birds?” Eden said.
Miner watched the birds pull away.
“Yes.”
“They talk,” Eden said.
“Where is the old woman?” he asked, remembering her as he had slipped in and out of consciousness.
“She is gone,” Eden said.
It was only when Eden turned around that he was reminded of the cloth around her face and the long scars down the sides of her cheeks.
She cannot see. He remembered the last time he saw her, he had barely woken from the long healing sleep. She came towards him, returning from the field, walking past him into the shack. He could have reached out and taken her, as he had before with some of the prostitutes of the company town, but he did not. He could not. This was different; he was not a prisoner anymore. He wasn’t just labor.
She stepped through the doorway of the shack and felt for the edges of a table next to the straw bed where he had just woken. The surface of the table was covered with pieces of bone and colored stone, the incense’s green smoke rose.
Miner watched her pick up an object from the table.
Turning, she held the glass jar out to him.
“What’s in here?” She asked.
Miner stepped closer and looked into the jar.
“Eyes, I …” Miner said.
“What color?” Eden asked.
“What?” He said.
“The eyes. What color?”
“I …” he said, looking closer.
“Are they blue?” Eden asked.
“Blue? I don’t …”
“Like the sky,” she said.
“Like the sky?”
Miner looked at her face and thought of the morning sky when he broke free from the mine. He looked into the murky liquid, the eyes floating within. He looked out the door, at the clear blue sky.
“Like the sky,” he said. “Yes, yes, blue.”
He watched her covered face while she held the jar tightly.
“The old woman said they could put my eyes back.”
“How?” Miner said.
“In Utopia.”
You will go to Utopia, the old woman had told him, breathing over him, her tears falling into his mouth, he could taste them still.
Eden had been having dreams of a monastic figure in brown vestments, underground, sitting at a table, scribbling into a large ledger bound by thick leather. In her dream, Eden approached the monastic figure, who was hunched over writing in the pages by candlelight. Just when she was about to see the face under the hood, it was as if a sun had been stuffed into the ground with her, consuming her, and a blast of wind poured over her like it was going to kill her.
Waking, she felt herself still lying on the straw bed, her heart bursting with bright light and the wind still caressing her arms and legs, until she could hear the calmness once again outside. The dreams had gotten stronger, and she felt that they were sent to guide her.
“Is there food?” He asked.
“There’s a sack of dried meat and biscuits. The old woman said she would be back, but we need to get ready to leave when she does.”
“Leave? To where?”
“To Utopia.”
His visions had been of ice and snow, an endless expanse of a white landscape that he could never have imagined before. He thought he was seeing visions of the Nighttime World, and the Midnight Queen, being sent to him as dreams to remind him that he had a murderous soul that would be trapped in a white void, unable to get out, or be free.
“Miner?” She turned towards him.
Miner, yes, he had remembered being called that. The old woman had called him that name, before that he was called something else, but he could not remember. They were all named the same. Labor, called either “Red,” “White,” or “Green.” Or they were called by their functions: “Prostitute,” “Miner”—
“Can you take me?”
The eyes were the key, whether or not the girl would actually see with them again. She needed to leave, the dream had said so.
He could not remember the specific features of old woman’s face, as if it didn’t exist—the tears that came from her, the potions that had revived him.
Miner looked at Eden’s scars, the light-colored hair that he had never seen before was bright in the sun. In the company town, all the heads were shaven except for the grease-black locks of the Manager.
In the warmth of the fire, she heard Miner breaking the tinder. They waited for the old woman to return, and a season of daylight came and went.
You will take her to Utopia.
He could barely remember the command, he just knew that he would obey the order. The heat of the season would never last, and soon enough there would be snow again, and Miner could not think beyond the visions that he had gotten of a city on the ice, with a world underneath it, with faces in the jungle. He did not know how they would get across the forest, and then the sea that they would need to cross to reach the ice somewhere on the other side. He had no idea how their bodies would survive. The wound the bullet made in his side was deep, his legs were weak, pain radiating from his side.
“Yes,” he said, “I will take you to Utopia.”
The transm
orphin was a jaundiced creature, bound by the old woman’s manipulation of nature, treated with a formula that kept it from death. Like an ancient junky, the aberrant creature needed the syrupy remnants of the old woman’s distillation. It did what the old woman required: It burrowed beneath the bunkhouse with claws made for digging, smelling its way until reaching the floorboards, slithering into the deputy’s barracks. Removing one of the planks, it found the deputy’s footlocker exactly where the old woman had said it would be. The transmorphin unlocked the footlocker’s rusty lock with a key given to it by the old crone—a key that would open any lock—taking the jar with the eyes still inside from among the few belongings the deputy kept, along with a torn blanket and a tin can of bullets.
The deputy’s conditioning had failed, and the deputy had pursued his own personal glory. After the girl had escaped, he tracked her on horseback, he’d taken her eyes, plucked them from her face. Desiring the power of the Juggernaut and the power of the Midnight Queen and her Nighttime World the deputy had rebelled.
The old woman had known this. The tree had told her.
The witch’s servant slithered away with the jar, robbing the deputy of his promise of an afterlife.
At the edge of the company town was a courthouse.
The rotted framework had let in all manner of animals—insects spinning their hives, rats nesting in rafters, blackbirds hopping down to fetid floors, squawking across the pews where false trials led to hangings in the street.
Outside, the deputies’ horses grazed on sparse tufts of weeds that tunneled up through the mud and rotted wood, the stench and sound of the flies tapping at the walls.
“The eyes?” The Manager commanded of the bloodied figure tied to a chair in the corner of the cell. The tortured deputy’s bloodied head rolled in agony from side to side.
“The eyes?” The Manager commanded again.
As an agent of the Midnight Queen, supposedly loyal to the Baron and his cult, the deputy could not admit to his crime against the authority.
“Hit it again,” said the Manager.
The interrogator struck the prisoner across his chest with an axe handle.
“Where are the eyes?” The Manager snarled.
The deputy’s blood was pooling on the wood floor.
“I do not know,” he said, groaning with pain.
“Hit it again,” the Manager said.
The tortured deputy’s head reared forward as the axe handle swung, bloodying his knees.
“They are gone, taken …” The deputy finally cried.
“You were to bring the eyes. Instead, you took them and hid them,” the Manager said.
“Yes,” the deputy said, his face bleeding.
“But we did not find them in your possession.”
“I do not know where they went …”
“We shall see.” The Manager signaled for the door. “You will be sacrificed to the Midnight Queen after all. You will finally be free.”
“Yes,” said the deputy.
They wheeled in a chrome box and placed it beside the bloodied body in the torture chair.
Within the box was a human skull, fitted with cables and a glass tube that glowed purple. The cable from the skull machine was like a strand of metal braids with a drill tip at its end. The tortured deputy’s eyes lifted, dully watching the skull machine powering up, the purple light in the glass flashing on and off.
“For the Juggernaut,” the deputy mumbled.
“For the Juggernaut,” the Manager said.
The switch was tripped and the interrogator placed the drill tip against the back of the deputy’s head. It pierced flesh and bone, searching out the connections needed to receive and transmit.
Company stock were all infested with the micro machines, sprinkled in the sky and water over the company town, injected into the food, and laced in the birthing supplement fed to the hatchlings in the incubator.
The eyes of the skull glowed brighter with purple light, and the steel wire buzzed.
The deputy screamed while pieces of bone in his skull were drilled away. When the screaming stopped, the deputy’s head lolled to a rest.
The Manager and deputies waited for a sign of animation, a sign that a connection had been made to the living technology in the dead deputy’s brain.
The expressionless face lifted, eyes still closed, still bloody, except some new force controlled the head’s rapid twitches and jerks.
Connection established, the corpse’s metallic voice said.
The skull machine went to work, the pulsing purple instrument of bone and chrome agitating the dead deputy’s brain, connecting with the bugs transmitting and receiving with the power of the stream. Penetrating the unknown plane of the third eye, tapping into the power of the black-mass harnessed a thousand years earlier. In the underground labs, in the catacombs harvested from a wave of green sky that trapped the mutantoids inside.
The Manager stared deeper into the blinking purple eyes of the skull machine tripping through the mind with the black-mass in its silver container.
Slithering through night, wet sinewy flesh slipping from a thick duster and hat, shedding its skin, coming up through loose floorboards sniffing out the prize. The witch had demanded that the dead find the eyes in the deputy’s belongings. The living dead found twin blue jewels in a jar in the locked box of the deputy who sought to defy its lordship.
“The witch?” The Manager asked the skull.
The dead face of the deputy spoke: Searching—searching—the eyes are in the mountains. The living dead are its protector. Bring the lord its eyes—winter passed, spring’s runoff flowed fresh, the animal is still there.
The Manager turned from the dead deputy. The deputy’s psychic transmissions fluctuating wildly on another plane, beyond the world they had perceived. The interrogator disconnected the cables and wiring. The flashing of the skull’s purple eyes stopped. The dead deputy’s head dropped back down at rest.
The Manager was relieved that the tortured deputy had not lied.
The posse was getting close, wandering through the wilderness, pushing towards the borders, spending nights slaughtering old labor in the forest. Not knowing where the witch could be—transmitter in the dead deputy’s head, messages only received in death. The Manager seeking the legend, searching for the uncommon eyes, the only eyes known to possess the psychic bomb, the dream contained in a blue jewel, found in the face of labor grown in the conditioning camp. Eden’s grief a result of fantasy. The witch mother beneath the tree moving among the chair and table in candle light, going through the ledger of the Earth Machine.
“Wake!” The old woman said. “You must run.”
Miner pulled himself up from where he slept next to the dying fire.
“It’s me they want,” Miner said, seeing the old woman moving quickly across the floor in the flickering light. An amorphous face, half buried in shadow.
“Hurry. They want you both,” the old lady croaked in an ancient voice, handing Eden a satchel full of dried meat and biscuits, quickly rolling their blankets, preparing them to flee.
“You must run!” She said.
“Where?” Eden asked.
“Go towards a falling sun till you reach the sea,” she said. “Turn towards the snow, to Utopia!”
“The sea?” Miner said.
“Water the color of Eden’s eyes.”
Eden felt the cold glass of the jar in the sling around her chest, with one of her hands protecting it.
The woman had told them that they would have to go, and he had prepared as much as he could. Packed as much food as they could in the satchel. Miner never thinking that they would have enough, but only knew that they would have to go, regardless, that they would never be able to stay there for long.
Eden was moving to the door, feeling the cold glass of the jar in the satchel to take to Utopia, while outside, hooves stomped the forest floor, and the demon queen’s offspring were wielding torches, and bobbing through the forest l
ike orange spectral heads being held high. Like an offering or a blessing, there would be no more waiting, no more seasons in the old women’s shack.
Explosions of gunfire roared while the witch’s transmorphin slaves, shedded any remnant of human form, and fell from the trees like forest moths in flashing sulfur.
Bullets ripped through them.
The dead fought hard, hoping to finally be granted rest, hoping the witch would finally set them free as promised.
Bullets tore through yellow flesh, blades swung at their necks, their dying bodies were trampled over by the living.
Shots rang out, round after round. Amid shouts of pain and glory, torchlight and explosions lit up the field.
“Their heads, take their heads!” The Manager called out to the deputies—
Eden and Miner heard gunshots in the thick pitch.
Eden was leading Miner away from the horses and screams on the trail she had memorized in the heat of day, and even though she could not feel the sunlight, she felt the change of slope beneath her, and knew the way out of the canyon, away from the sounds of battle.
The Manager thought he saw the old crone in the doorway of the shack in the red glow of the fire, charging at her, raising his revolver, a weapon designed long before the green sky ever appeared. He fired.
But the witch’s magic was older and stronger.
The trees and night consumed her, as if a portal had opened, and her decrepit figure had stepped in, escaping the battlefield. And the Manager was uncertain whether the witch had ever been there, or if she was an apparition fading in the gun smoke and feral light.
Still, the horsemen charged through the yellowish dead that attacked them.
The disembodied heads watched the black riders galloping past, driving the other witch slaves back.
Snow Over Utopia Page 3
