The Serpent League

by Brendan Walsh

  A friendly jingle on the door greeted them as they entered. No one looked at them, as the patrons were too busy stuffing their mouths with greasy meat.

  “Hello.” a waitress greeted them with a smile. “Two for, well, whatever meal you eat at one in the morning?”

  “That’s right.” Laura answered. Elder was too busy looking around. He didn’t even hear her ask a question.

  The waitress ushered them to the furthest table along the corner, where it was hardest to see them. Much of the diner lights didn’t even shine there. They both seated themselves amicably, eyeing the menu choices. She left to give them time to decide what to order.

  Laura slapped down her menu and looked at Samuel with an inert stare. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “Do you think it’s safe for me to be here?” Elder was watching a small TV set that was set up along the counter. Based on the series of photographs ABC news was montaging for the last few minutes, it looked like they were talking about the Raven Gang.

  “Don’t worry about it. Just order your coffee. Did you hear what I asked?”

  Elder tucked his hands under his breast and sighed. “Did I ever tell you about my daughter?”

  Laura’s lip hung dumbly from her mouth. “BJ? Who died of cancer?”

  He nodded. “Half correct. Her name was BJ, but she didn’t die of cancer.”

  “How did she die then?”

  “I severed her spine with a butcher knife.”

  Laura’s arms retreated to her sides as she stared at him in awe. She could barely stop herself from whispering. “You’re telling me you brutally murdered your five-year-old daughter? What in God’s name would drive you to that?”

  “I’m going to tell you a story.” he replied, ignoring her astonishment. “My scientific career at Elder Inc. hasn’t been forthright by any standards, or even very scientific. Hell, I didn’t even come up with most of my most impressive devices. I stole them from a much, much darker source.”

  “You’re beginning to terrify me.”

  “Wait until I finish the story. So, as the story goes, I was visited by a bird flying through my window one night, then it turned into this terrifying two-legged crocodile. The beast was wise to my ambitions: the way I wanted to change the world, and it knew that my daughter was suffering. It told me that my daughter could be the key to new life.

  “But what the monster also said was that life as we know it would come to an end.” he started to hush himself, as he was getting strange looks from the staff. “I was so scared that I agreed to whatever the thing wanted me to do. It gave me a substance to treat her with that would take her cancer away.” Elder pinched out a tarnished photo from his wallet. It was the one with BJ supinated on a lab table. “See this?”

  Laura’s posture became static, and she covered her gaping mouth with a palm. “Oh dear, Samuel. She…she…”

  Elder slapped a grieving hand on the base of his seat. “She didn’t have control of her powers and I couldn’t stop her from transforming into horrible things! I became convinced that the prophecy the crocodile told was true, and if the future of mankind looked anything like her I had to stop it. Unfortunately, I didn’t come to that conclusion before she killed her mother.”

  “Christ! What makes you need to tell me all this now?” she tried to cup his hands in sympathy, but he drew them back. “What are you planning now?”

  “Right now,” he sluggishly rose from his seat. “I need to shove personal ambitions aside. My plan last week with overthrowing the government was my own. It was the alternative I was hoping for to avoid facing what will surely come now. My daughter might be dead, but there is another threat that can make that horrible nightmare come true.”

  “What would that be?” her eyes were still almost dripping from the photograph.

  Elder surveyed his surroundings, as if making sure no one far away was spying on him. “It’s the Serpent League. The nightmarish group that the humanoid crocodile was in charge of. Not only do I believe my goals are for the greater good, but I wanted to help solidify life on earth. But now, after my failure, I suspect the League will come back.”

  Laura started up. They were starting to receive too many eavesdroppers. But she didn’t care. “My son needs to get out of this. You need to do something!”

  “And I am.” He assured. He gripped her shoulder, attempting to calm her down. “I’m working to counter that plan with one of my own. But before I make another move, I must tell you that what I am about to do will profoundly change the world as we know it. Humanity will all but return to a state of nature, survival of the fittest, but after the chaos is over, we will have created a society that will last until the end of the universe. Tell me, will you join me, thus likely keeping your son and friends out of the Serpent League’s reach?”

  Her head fell and the pressure on her neck from her anxiety only worsened. Sometime during his speech, she ended up pulling out some of her hair. She remembered one of the things that Gordon would tell her when he would go visit Elder in his lab. ‘We’re changing the world’ he would declare. ‘There might be pain, but it’s worth it for everyone’. But what good would that world be if her son was condemned to be a martyr for a cause that was only his father’s?

  “Fine.” the word barely slipped out of her tired, jittering teeth. “But first, you need to tell me everything you know about what happened to my son years ago. I want to know exactly what he’s going through now.”

  7

  Uncoiled

  “This is the most inactive we’ve been in a while.” Slate sat down up against the couch, which was occupied by Lindsey, Johnny and Gary.

  Johnny cooled down his coffee with his breath. “Since BJ is out going for a run as a wolf and Edgar is still going all emo on us, we don’t have means to get more Elder information.”

  A chill swept the room as a basement exit door opened. Patrick scurried in, momentarily basking himself in the pleasant temperature change in the room.

  “Well?” Gary perked up.

  “Nothing.” He sighed. Patrick shed off his heavy coat and hung it up against the door. “Edgar still doesn’t want any company.”

  “His encounter with Sam Elder must have done something to spook him.” Lindsey commented. “According to BJ, Edgar temporarily had the ability to talk. They must have had themselves one surreal conversation.”

  Gary placidly held his chin in his palm. “I would love to be able to talk to him. Not only would it make things easier for us, but many animal psychologists’ dreams would be fulfilled.”

  Jane spontaneously came stumbling into the room with a comically large metal box in her arms. She couldn’t see where she was going, as indicated by her consistent bumping against walls and nearly popping out a light fixture like a balloon.

  “Please, not all at once.” There was a milk stain on the tiling right before the carpeted main room. She nearly slipped on it more than once.

  Everyone instinctually rose up to help her. Patrick and Slate helped her maintain the front of the square box while the rest of them took hold from the bottom. When the hefty object was securely in everyone else’s grip Jane let go. Everyone else could take the lifting from there.

  “What’s this thing?” Patrick asked. His cheek was nuzzled tight against its side from gripping.

  “It’s a TV.” Jane replied. “We talked about how having one would make our time here more enjoyable. Lucky for us, I found one right there in the utility closet. Just there, up for grabs.”

  Slate grunted as everyone eased its base onto the open table against the wall. “You realize that this thing is probably older than all of us?”

  “Combined.” Johnny added.

  “It probably doesn’t even function anymore. I doubt it’s been used since the Truman administration.”

  But it did end up working. Once the gang finished spending thirty minutes figuring out what cord plugged into what hole and what button made that thingy make a sound, they had a TV that could
get a slim number of stations, with below average quality.

  They didn’t have a long discussion on what channel to keep it on. None of them wanted to hear the news because they had enough of that for the last four weeks. They settled on channel five where they were showing a Friends marathon. For an hour they laughed at the series of one-liners and hapless misadventures of some of the characters, and then got into an in-depth discussion on who among them was which character. Slate ended up having to make a surprisingly compelling case in which he had to defend himself against allegations that he was Phoebe. After everyone was as satisfied as they would ever be with their own character analyses a long silence took over the room. It wasn’t until after several commercial breaks that Lindsey broke the silence.

  “I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was a kid.” she said.

  “Where is that coming from?” Patrick looked up at her from his floor seat.

  “I’m not sure. A while ago Gary mentioned how animal psychology people would revel at the idea of talking to Edgar. I’ve just been thinking about that.” she twirled her hair loosely in her fingers as she spoke. “It made me remember my dream of working with animals.”

  At that point Johnny muted the television volume. “Does that mean you gave up on your pre-med track at Weller?”

  “I did last semester.” she said. “I was starting to fall behind on my English classes. Then we had to declare majors. At that point I was in love with the Brontes and Dickens, so I know I made the right choice with English.”

  Slate scooted closer to her on the couch. The feeling that there was hidden meaning in her words was the popular consensus. “Are you saying you might rethink that choice? That’s fine for sure, we have time.”

  “Speaking as someone who completed a pre-med track,” Jane started. “It would have been best to get the harder stuff out of the way. Believe me, organic chemistry is not something you want to take your senior year.”

  Lindsey looked about as if she were coming out of a trance. “What? No no! That wasn’t what I meant.”

  “If I can take a stab at this,” Gary flopped himself over to face them from a corner seat. Now no one was watching the TV. “it sounds to me that you might be feeling that a major in literature isn’t as utilitarian as something you might prefer.”

  “I think so.” she conceded. “Having our current experiences, I can’t imagine a scenario in which I dutifully return to classwork. I don’t think I want to be a vet either, but I want to continue living as someone who could make a difference for both humans and animals.”

  Slate wrapped his arm around her. “Here here! I still want to be a comic book writer/illustrator, but that’s starting to feel not as fulfilling as I hoped. We’ll think of something together.”

  Their words opened another door into a long conversation that made the middle of the night slip right by. Patrick spoke for a while about his consistently aimless academic career in the sciences. He’d been maintaining over a 3.0 GPA in chemistry and math classes, but he didn’t feel a connection to them as he did with stories. Perhaps it was his father’s influence filtered through his genes, but Patrick couldn’t brush the feeling that the last few weeks were trying to tell him something.

  He didn’t have the same scientific ambition as Gary did, who was a Biology major. Gary spoke about going into some kind of biological science. He was skeptical though, because he felt that a number of branches of the field were immoral. He was pessimistic, as were some of them, about the way the world was going, so he thought if things were going to end up awfully, he could at least enjoy some of the good that he did along the way.

  Jane still wanted to be a doctor. Since her involvement in the Raven Gang was the most concealed, she could return to her life without as much of a problem, except for the project of having to concoct a believable excuse for her three-week absence.

  “I’m hoping to get several gigs as a musician.” Johnny said when they got to him. “My most recent one was pretty great.” He pointed at Jane proudly. “Didn’t we rock that one?”

  “Yeah we did!” she beamed, air guitaring a song in her head. “Although it would have been great to finish. I guess having a gryphon smash through the roof of a building isn’t something the rock community is ready for.”

  He chuckled. “Say, I wonder where all the gryphons and wolves went after the battle. They just disappeared by using the watches.”

  “They haven’t made the news for anything bad.” Patrick with a resigned smile. “That’s good for now.”

  Johnny was silent for some moments. His eyes drooped as the rest of his face grew sullen. “Have you guys kept in contact with your family?”

  Patrick inhaled. “I tried my mother a couple times, but stopped out of fear of tapped phone lines.”

  “Same here.” sighed Slate.

  “I haven’t even tried.” Jane confessed. “Of course, my parents aren’t expecting me until Christmas anyway, and my name isn’t on any wanted list.”

  The look on Johnny’s face showed that he liked everyone else’s answers better than his own. “I have a few siblings that are terrified for me. It kills me that I can’t talk to any of them right now, or my parents.”

  There wasn’t much conversation after that. Once the silence was no longer uncomfortable Gary turned the television volume back up, but all that was on was the early morning news. Patrick slowly slipped farther away as everyone drew tired and started to think about falling asleep until night time. His stomach grumbled, reminding him that there were a few boxes of crackers left in the kitchen cabinet.

  After digging a hand for some dry treats, he caught the gaze of yellow eyes from outside. His flying friend was unassumingly hanging from a sturdy tree branch watching him. Patrick didn’t turn away. He maintained eye contact for several seconds, letting the bat know that he was aware of him. After a hearty day’s sleep, if Edgar still wasn’t willing to rejoin them and be social, he would do everything he could to get him out of his sour routine.

  With a friendly wave of his fingers Patrick swaddled out of Edgar’s vision, stuffed the snack box away and left for the main room to put on his cozy sweat pants and prepare for sleep.

  He tucked his wings tighter against his chest. The chill of being outside in below freezing air was something that his species should not have been able to adapt to so easily. Since Edgar was an evolutionary marvel, with warm enough fur and insulating wings, the idea of freezing to death was not something he needed to worry about. But since his encounter with his creator he knew exactly what was going to kill him.

  And there was no cure.

  The bat didn’t just take Elder’s word blindly. Since then, without the gang’s notice, he snuck around to all of the scientist’s bases of operation and even back to the cabin in San Francisco where he once spent a majority of his time. In the hurried researching that kept him running on little sleep, like a college student nearing the end of a semester, he had to accept that Elder was telling him the truth.

  Any adjustments to the broken chip in his brain could cause an even more unpleasant death than the one already coming for him. He didn’t have the means to do any of it himself, anyway. He was competent enough to understand the science that went into each option he could take. All of it was dangerous. And if he wasn’t careful with some of them he could end up fixing the whole thing all by himself. But even though he would be saved, that was exactly what Samuel Elder wanted.

  He couldn’t bring himself to tell his friends about it. What would he say? He wouldn’t say anything. He couldn’t speak, now that the connections with his brain died down, so the best he could do would be to write it all out. And once they all understood, what would that accomplish? He would just be like a doomed soldier who couldn’t be taken prisoner. Nothing they could do could help him, and surely none of them would recommend that he give himself over to Elder. No. If there was an answer, he could only do it without the humans’ help.

  Somewhere in the snowy field below him, hi
s ears caught movement. There were two small animals scurrying across the crisp frozen grass. He turned an upside-down eye over to the noisy clumps. A squirrel, that looked plump to prepare for hibernation, was digging its paws frantically around. But the ground was too frozen. Its tiny claws weren’t making much of an impression.

  Over by the far end, by the curled bushes that marked the end of the property, a snow-white rabbit was jittering nervously. Its eyes flickered back and forth and its pink nose wiggled. It was trying to get back to its home, Edgar presumed, but its hole was cut off by the stiff bush branches the sunk during the wind storm. Now there was no way for it to have access to warmth.

  In a moment the world turned on its side and Edgar was upright on his feet and using his winged digits to assist his motion. The rabbit sensed him now. It paused, tucking in its feet and preparing to leap out after a confirmation of a threat. Before the bat got any closer he made some twitching noises with his jaws. They were high pitched and friendly, and the rabbit stayed put even as he stood less that ten meters away from it.

  Edgar bent down. He didn’t want to get close enough to touch it, lest it get frightened and run off someplace where it would die. Steadily with his wings he lifted the bottom of the bush and dug his head under it, raising most of the stubborn branches off the ground. He felt the thick thorns dig into his back like giant bees, but he didn’t mind. When the angry stretching sounds of the bush reached their height, the rabbit’s hole was presented with easy access. With what almost seemed like a friendly bop of its nose, the rabbit hopped back into the hole.

  Helping the squirrel was much less painful. The approach and greeting were just as simple and non-threatening. Edgar jabbed the thumb of his wing several times until the ice broke away. Underneath there was still clumpy dirt, and the small rodent happily hugged what was still a heaping pile of nuts buried under the dirt. The bat carried what the squirrel couldn’t back to its home in a hole inside the base of a tree. When he was satisfied that no one else needed his help, he stretched his wings like an angel, trying to get out the rest of the thorns that stuck to him. He healed quickly, so the pain was nothing to stress about. But what was little pain when he could nearly feel the sand seeping in the hourglass?